Three Miles Past (4 page)

The first truck that hit it caught it across its hindquarters, forcing all the air and gases in its body up past its throat, past its voice box.

William screamed with it.

~

Three miles after the next rest stop—Louisiana, still—next to a burned-out trailer house with trees growing all around it, William hung his bubble-gum pink ice cream cone from the rearview, turned the cargo light on.

Lobo was there, and the Shepherd mix he was supposed to call Max and feed canned food twice a day, and the Golden Retriever with the red handkerchief tied around his neck like a cartoon dog.

They were dead, of course, lined up against the naked body of the woman as if nursing.

Her name was
M
-something, William didn’t know.

She had been an accident. Not on purpose. From Birmingham.

William stepped up into the camper with her and laid sideways behind her, stroking the top of her arm, getting hard again.

But there was no time for that.

William closed his eyes, told himself that, that there was no time, then let his hand fall to the soft muzzle of one of the dogs, and came anyway five minutes later, his hand against the dog’s dry tongue, the place where the girl’s nipple had been, then he cried into her matted hair, apologized. Hit the side of his hand again and again into the bed of the truck, until that hand was numb. And then the rest of him too. Just cold, nothing.

He was ready.

~

Twenty miles deeper into Louisiana, at a truck stop, he pulled over, walked back to his passenger side rear tire, and popped the camper shell open.

In the dead space between trucks pulling out of second gear, building speed for the interstate, he slung Lobo out into the ribbon of shiny asphalt, where the tires ran. He weighed half again as much as he had, was pregnant with the girl now. Pieces of her anyway.

In the back of the truck, on the tarp, William had laid out her arms, all four pieces of her legs, and the four quarters of her torso. From biggest to smallest. The head he ran over with his truck again and again, until there was nothing left of the teeth or any of it, and then he buried it, peed a circle around it to keep guard.

Then it was back to the tarp.

Working in the dim glow of the cargo lamp, he opened the three dogs from sternum to asshole, cleaned them out, and tried to fit what he could into each: an arm, part of a ribcage, a lower leg. When he was done, the dogs sewn up with pig string, William had nodded, stood from his work, and caught the shadow of something in the door of the burned-out trailer behind him.

He turned the cargo light off—everything calm, no problem—folded the tarp up, pushed the dogs carefully back under the camper, then stood facing the trailer for twelve minutes.

Nothing moved. He dared it to, but nothing did.

Finally he nodded, narrowed his eyes, and marked the place in his mind, so he could come back sometime when he could leave what was in his truck in his truck.

Not tonight, though.

Four miles back, he’d already been seeing the signs for the truck stop, could feel a flat coming on.

He didn’t even have to get the jack out this time. Just opened the tailgate, positioned Lobo on the road, then closed the tailgate, pulled away. At first, years ago, he’d always had to wait, to see the trucks come, watch them flatten all the bones at once, human and canine, but now, now he knew it happened whether he was there or not. The only other choice would be someone stopping to autopsy this dog that had already been hit. Or to move it out of the way. But only the state cops did that, and this was a county road, or parish, whatever things were in Louisiana.

The next dog he left on an exit ramp, in the intersection, where everybody was supposed to yield.

The Golden Retriever with the red handkerchief he simply stood up with a dry branch in a low spot on the service road, eighteen miles down from Lobo. Stood him up, circled back, then ran him down, leaning into his horn at the last minute, closing his eyes to the thumping from underneath, the crunching—
Marissa
, that had been it—then downshifting for the hill ahead, for Beaumont.

2.

Four months later—Houston—William tried for the third time to balance his empty beer can on the four-wheel-drive shifter of the Chevy he had now. For a moment, maybe, it held, staying there for him, but then fell into the passenger side floorboard with the rest.

He was sitting in the first visitor row of the downtown hospital.

The Chevy was because that state cop had caressed the Ford with his flashlight. William had tried to forget it, tried not to feel the heat the flashlight had pulled across the skin of his truck, the sharp-edged shadows the trim and fender flares had cast, but it was too much. Each time since then that he’d walked up on the truck from that angle—after work (stacking transmissions), after the bar, after buying all the newspapers he was in—it had been the same: that night, the bear. And because it was like that for him, it had to be for the cop, too. So the Ford had to go.

William had sold it to one of the mechanics at his work, Al, who never looked anybody in the eye but had told William once that he’d started out at the shop scraping gaskets too. That if William just stuck around long enough, a sentence he finished by studying the insulation chicken-wired to the metal walls.

William had shrugged, looked out at the traffic, Al peeling up a line of the seal that had been under the camper shell. Then, William had been saving it, the shell, for his next Ford, but that was what he’d sold the
first
Ford for, right?

Now it was in his efficiency apartment, the camper, leaned up over the window.

He didn’t know what to do with it.

The Chevy was one the garage across the street had applied for the title for, in lieu of payment for services. The title had come back salvage; the manager let William have it for eight hundred. Alone in the parking lot after hours, William sifted through the cab, the gum wrappers, beer caps, and dimes that had settled behind the seat. The stack of magazines by the seat adjustment:
Shaved
,
Bare
,
Lassie
.

William dropped them into the asphalt, backing away, shaking his head no, he wasn’t like that anymore.

But then the magazines started opening by themselves, in the wind.

After three weeks, William made himself throw them away in fourteen separate dumpsters. It was too late, though; his beard was thick again, full. He replaced the magazines under the seat with clippings of himself: a missing girl in Pensacola, another just outside Hattiesburg. Sixteen over the last nine and a half years, the first two still buried in plastic dropcloths, soaked first in ammonia, then pesticide, then gear oil. So none of the gas of decay would work its way up through the soil.

He’d put them side by side, east and west, face-up.

The first time he’d gone back to see them, grass was growing everywhere but the two rectangles where they were.

William had started breathing hard, too hard, and returned with fertilizer, Bermuda grass seeds, finally flowers. They all died, until he understood: the ground was dead, it needed life. William had nodded, unzipped his pants, and, over the course of five weeks, left enough of his seed on the graves that the soil took on a richer color, and then a plant of some sort raised its head. William named it Baby Green, thought about it when he wasn’t there, then watched it stand up straight, establishing itself.

Once, William reached down to touch it, just once, but then saw something watching him across the field.

It was a dog, her teats heavy, dragging.

William stood and she didn’t move, didn’t move. Like she knew.

Four weeks after that, going back to check on Baby Green, sure that a raccoon was digging the girls up for their silver rings, William’s headlights caught eleven perfect little puppies walking across the road. Their shadows were taller than his headlights could reach.

William opened his door, stepped down, and the mother dog came for him from the tall grass, and it was all slow motion, overfull with meaning, with detail.

At the last moment he pushed her aside with his boot, stepped back into the truck. Rolled forward carefully, respectfully.

After that, he started noticing all the dead animals along the interstate.

Baby Green was still out there too, William knew. A fairy tale beanstalk he could never see again, because the graves were probably staked out by patient men with mirrored sunglasses.

In the parking lot of the hospital, William opened a fifth beer. Some of it splashed onto the leg of his jeans and he stood up. It made it to the seat of his pants anyway. The crack of his ass.

She would never talk to him now.

Her name was Julia. A caramel-colored nurse.

William had got her name off her nameplate by timing his entrance with her exit a week ago, then done it again, in case she’d just been borrowing somebody’s ID that night.

Julia.

She got off every night at eleven. Wore a series of headbands, probably to keep her hair out of patients’ faces. Or to keep them from falling in love with her.

Tonight, William watched the waist of her aquamarine scrubs for a zip key, a handheld radio. The best forty-five seconds of the night were her, stepping across the crosswalk, dipping her head down for the cell phone, the call she only made once she was outside the magnets and radiation of the hospital.

There was never any blood on her scrubs, never anybody walking with her. Just Julia, Julia.

William smiled, nodded, and turned his truck on just after she’d passed, so his brake lights could turn her red in his side mirror.

She never looked back.

William drank the fifth beer down, eased out of Visitor Parking, past the security booth which pulled the blinds down at five-thirty, and out into the road. For a moment at thirty-five miles per hour, there was a squirrel in the road, flattened to the pavement.

William said it aloud: “Squirrels.”

They didn’t hold anything.

~

What he needed now, and what he knew he didn’t need, was a camper shell for the Chevy. The one in his apartment he had pieced up with a hacksaw and a pair of tin snips, then finally just carried the last four big pieces away in the bed of his truck, left them in four different alleys, upside down to catch rain, become a nuisance, a mosquito pool, the edges sharp enough that only the garbage men with their thick, city-bought gloves would be able to lift them. And garbage men didn’t care about anything. William knew; it was one of the jobs his father had taken, after the Army, before all the wine coolers that didn’t count as drinking, that didn’t break any promises.

Again William remembered building forts with his brother in the living room.

Their father was always the Indian. The one who had taken their mother away.

William slammed his fist into the horn of the Chevy. It honked. The man in the leather vest behind the counter of the pawnshop ratcheted his head around to the sound, then up the hood to William.

William looked away, pursed his lips. Backed out.