Bent Highway: Chapter Eight

Ditch

The hum of tires riding asphalt reverberated through my body, my skin buzzed like current running through wires. Chalk girl took another long pull on the bottle of Mezcal, finishing it. Ahead of us, Walt drove on, once in a while peering in the rearview to see if anyone was following – like, for instance a group of hat wearing men, or a Nascar lover with a shotgun.

“You went back, L?”

Sound felt disconnected again. It took a minute to realize it was Walt that asked the question. Damn sure that wolf-dog could talk.

Chalk girl slumped back in the seat.

“Just drive.”

My leg started to throb and a line of blood appeared under my jeans.

“Why does this keep happening?” I asked her.

She stared straight ahead.

“Where does he think you went?”

She turned and stared at me, studying my face.

“You really don’t know, do you?” She looked away again. “I guess that’s why you weren’t there this time.”

“Some things should not be revisited,” Walt said. “They will change but not in a way that you want.”

The line of blood on my leg thickened.

“Wait. The trailer fire – you were running.” A cut scene flashed through my head. Chalk girl in the field, eyes wide, tears streaming down her face, running toward me. I pounded the side of my head with my fists. “Damn. Sorry, it’s just not there.”

“I can make the change, Walt. I can do it.”

“The trying will take it’s toll,” Walt’s voice dipped down and became gutteral. “We’re coming out.”

“What do you mean we’re—”

My voice was lost in the rushing wind that sliced through the car, and somehow, through my body. My veins rippled under the skin, blood being pushed upstream, against the normal flow. I blacked out. I think. Small explosions of light appeared in the darkness and the flash of a face that I recognized, but could not name, floated above me – or what I thought was above. It was if someone threw me in a washing machine and hit the spin button.

* * *

When light returned, I was upright, and walking down a gravel road. Ahead, a figure emerged from the ditch, her black jacket like a drop of ink against the vast wheat field behind her. She stood and waited until I reached her side.

“Where’s Walt? And that dog?”

“I guess we split at the rip. He might be up the road. Or he could be decades away. It happens.” She pointed to a crossroads in the distance. “You recognize that?”

“The road? This place? No, I don’t think so - why would I?”

“Well, it’s not in my memory. Rips sometimes take something from our past, or future… though that almost never happens. That’s where we come out. I am pretty sure I’ve never been around here before.”

She started walking and I followed. The wind picked up, a flashback to what happen before the rip – but this was a warm breeze, washing across the field, ocean-like. The blood on my leg had disappeared again. 

“Where did Walt not want you to go?”

“You’ve been there – more than once. It’ll come back to you.”

“But he said you shouldn’t go there. That it would take its toll. What did—”

“Walt plays the father figure too much. And who would want a guy like that as a father any— shit, look out.”

The cloud of dust, which only seconds ago had appeared on the horizon, was now a white half-ton barrelling toward us. She grabbed my shirt and we both dove towards the ditch. We tumbled together down the side, skin burning against the gravel of the shoulder and then slamming into the soft dirt. Her elbow jammed into my eye, and pinlights filled my vision. She rolled away from me, and I glimpsed a line across the back of her neck, a healed over cut. Freshly healed over.

The ditch was only a few feet below the road. I got onto all fours, pain shooting across my back, and watched the truck skid to a halt. It did a police turn and gunned it. It felt so close, I swore I heard the pistons knocking. I waited to be pinned under the tires. Then, just like watching the pellets from the Nascar guy’s shotgun, bits of gravel hung in the air, then slowly arced away from the truck. It was like watching a ship split the water. The half-ton was only a few hundred yards away, and engine was revving hard - yet, it still hadn’t reached the ditch. My head turned, and I heard frames click, Zapruder-like, until I landed on her face. 

“Who is it?”

The wind had suddenly picked up, and I barely made out her voice.

I clicked back to the truck. It had a decal on the side – it moved slow enough that I could study the letters that hovered above a roughly drawn paintbrush. Lester’s Paint and Repair. What the fuck? Lester? As in my mom’s lazy ass, bourbon drinking, wife-beating brother?

The truck did a slow skid and I ducked as the gravel floated above my head.

A man got out of the truck. He wore paint splattered overalls, a John Deere hat with even larger paint stains and tall shiny black shit-kickers. A mexican lizard was stitched on each one. Whenever he’d come and visit, those cowboy boots were the only clean thing on him.

He towered above me on the edge of the road, slapping a tire-iron in his palm. What’s with all these people that think those are weapons?

He was talking but the words didn’t synch with his mouth.

“City — slicker — faggot.”

“Uncle Lester?”

My voice was small, lost in the now howling wind. He kicked at the road, spraying my face with tiny stones that sped up and slowed down. Something rumbled behind me. I turned, still in the frame-by-frame fashion, to the half-submerged figure behind me. She was sinking into the ground, which had opened up into a too neat, too smooth crevice. I heard the pair of shit-kickers step behind me, and the whish of a tire iron slicing through the air.  

The lips bowed and mouthed a word.

“Rip.”

Then she was gone.

My head made contact with a two-foot long bar of iron.

I leapt, fell, dove, spun into a black pit. 

And I was gone too.