Everything Breaks (14 page)

She changed, became sharper-edged so that her face looked snake-like, all scales and bones. I thought I even saw the pupils of her eyes stretch upward to become vertical as she added, in something like a hiss, “Tucker Graysten, what are you greedy for?
Say
it!”

“I'm greedy for . . . for life.” I thought my chest would implode with pure, raw shame.

She smiled and nodded and relaxed back against the truck door. “You look really horrible, worse even than when I first put eyes on you three minutes ago, my time. But your eyes then were frantic, and now they're sad. No, you're not anywhere
near
ready to go where
we're
going, Tucker. You just want to go home, where all the trails begin.”

“But it's not fair for me to . . .”

That's as far as I could get. There was a lump in my throat I couldn't push past.

“. . . to crave life so much when Trey is dead? And Steve and Zero are dead as well? No, it's not fair, you're right. You
were
their designated driver, after all.”

She took another long drag on that home-rolled cigarette. Then she noticed a tiny bug bite on her knee and bent to give that all her attention.

“Remember when Janet said she didn't want to take chances with you?” she murmured, scratching. “But
you
said to yourself that all the chances had already been taken?” She spit on her finger and rubbed that spit into the bite. “Boy, were you wrong.”

She jerked her head up and snapped her fingers and I instantly began seeing a homemade movie flickering against the shiny door of Bud's old truck. It turned out to feature quick little everyday snippets of my life. Me learning to walk, climbing a tree, going off the high dive at the pool, riding the Tilt-A-Whirl in fourth grade four times in a row until I was too dizzy to stand, kissing Jerilyn Brookner in fifth grade, punching Trey when he stole my pocketknife, touching my tongue to a frozen mailbox, buying a crossbow, breaking my arm, breaking my other arm, going out for soccer, getting punched by Trey for losing his harmonica, hugging my dad before I went to bed on the last night I saw him . . .

She snapped her fingers again and the movie vaporized, taking the wind out of me along with it. I bent with my hands on my knees, disoriented and breathless, panting like I'd panted the night I'd been running along the bluff road and had come upon the nightmare sight of those broken white guardrails, those thick knotted wires still bobbing in the hot wind of the Mustang's recent passing on its way to fiery oblivion. . . .

“Just a small sample, Tucker. About one-tenth of a percentage of the big chances you took before the age of thirteen. There are new chances every day. Quit taking them and you start sending out a signal for me to pick you up. There are a thousand things to make you stop taking chances and only one reason not to stop, that reason being life. So. You flunked your designated driver's test. It was a big deal. Now you've smartened up and you'll take the test again. You'll only have to take it every time you get behind the wheel, that's somewhere around seventy thousand to two hundred thousand more times.” She sighed. “Do you think spit works on bug bites? I heard it did, but I'm beginning to doubt it.”

I sucked in air and asked, weakly, hoping my question wouldn't trigger a great reveal by the shaggy thing I'd glimpsed three or four times today, “If you're Charon, why aren't you a dark-haired ugly old guy with a beard and a Greek toga?”

She shrugged, still scratching. “That's how the Greeks saw me, at least the guys who hung around in the Agora writing plays and telling stories while their poor wives stayed home and did the drudge work. They figured I'd look like them—male, bearded, solemn, only not as golden and handsome as they saw themselves and those so-called heroes they were so dazzled by. But let me tell you something, those ‘heroes' they liked to go on and on about were basically a bunch of spoiled little boys with too much leisure time on their hands. That Achilles, for instance, always picking fights, never letting anyone else have a fair turn in any sporting competition.”

She rolled her eyes. “I decided to experiment with fashion because of
them,
frankly. Why should I stay dull and ugly and male all the time just because dull, ugly males imagined me like themselves, only duller and uglier? I can change the look, the voice, even the attitude. It just takes a second. I mean, I'm a good mimic, granted. But the difficult thing is
actual
fashion. Creating your own unique self. Only humans can decide who and what they're going to be or
if
they're going to be.”

“You're supposed to have a
boat,
” I told her.

I was thinking about Zero's uncle's boat and how glad I'd been to have it match the illustration in Mrs. B.'s book. When I tried to picture my friends crossing that mysterious, fog-shrouded dark water, I needed every bit of comfort I could get.

“I keep my boat anchored at the river Acheron. There used to be a full-time guy that brought passengers to me, his name was Hermes? Well, the boss gave him other jobs, and now I have to link people up with connecting transport all by my lonesome. I don't mind. I get a kick out of letting the good guys pick their rides.”

She stood and gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “Like Bud back there?” she whispered. “He's a great guy, a real gentleman, and he deserves to be taken to the river in his own beloved truck.”

I looked up and over her shoulder. Sure enough, a shadowy form now occupied the passenger side of the truck. I turned to look behind me, where I'd just left Bud at the wheel of the Olds. No one was in the Olds. I'd left my door open, so there was no mistaking the long, empty expanse of yellowish vinyl bench seat. As I watched, the keys to the Olds gradually materialized until they lay sprawled on the dashboard.

When I looked back, she was staring at the Bic dangling from my fingers. I hadn't had the gumption to pocket it.

“Uh, listen, I promised Cherry Berry I'd tell you something.” She looked around, chewing her thumbnail, then leaned closer to whisper, “We both signed confidentiality agreements when we got our jobs with the transportation and delivery department, but we both break the rules sometimes, our little protest now that working conditions have gone downhill. We seldom get paid, we have no backup help, et cetera. Anyway, this is confidential and CB and I would both be in trouble if our boss knew I'd . . . blabbed.”

She dropped her cigarette butt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. “Okay. Nearly everybody has some little thing to say when they're crossing the river. Last thoughts, pleas to be spared, mournful songs, angry accusations. It's strictly against the confidentiality rules to divulge a pickup's last words on the trip or upon disembarking, but Cherry Berry has a lot of lapses, lots more than I have, and is always bragging about what they say or scream when they see him, the guardian of the underworld, teeth bared, three heads. Anyway, he wanted you to hear what your friend told him, the red-haired one, Trey.” She leaned even closer. “As Trey got from the boat, he asked Cherry Berry to tell you that he wasn't going to let you drive that last stretch from the zinc mine fields to the bonfire. He said if Cherry Berry took you the green Bic lighter, it would prove it since you'd know he, Trey that is, only bought new cigs and brought along his lighter when he planned to make a grand entrance behind the wheel of his car, smoking. He said you were, let's see . . . something, something, and you would go nuts if CB didn't take you the lighter and give you that message.”

I was frozen, rooted. My eyes burned and I had to struggle to keep my chin from quivering like a small child's. “Did he say I was an ‘innocent wonder'?” I finally croaked out.

She frowned. “Nah, that wasn't it. Oh! I remember. He said you were ‘awesomely loyal,' that was it. ‘Tucker is awesomely loyal and he'll go nuts if he doesn't know.' I remember because Cherry Berry and I didn't think there was such a word as ‘awesomely.'”

I just stood there, my chest on fire and my throat burning, so I couldn't speak.

“Well, time to travel,” she said. She crawled into the driver's seat of the truck. She put her boot to the gas pedal and looked down at me.

“Last chance to come with.” She snorted a laugh. “Just kidding!”

I strained to see Bud, and by letting my eyes go unfocused, I could make out the shadowy contours of his proud chin and his few flyaway head hairs.

I raised my hand to tell him good-bye, but he didn't respond. Bud was never one for sentimental leave-takings.

“You gotta officially sign off with a negative,” the weird hitchhiker, that Charon, called down to me. “The standard gesture will do, just to show headquarters you're officially rescinding the pickup call.”

I solemnly shook my head as Bud must have done on his long-ago battlefield. She gave me a nod and a thumbs-up to show that was acceptable, then she gave it some gas.

I watched them rattle through the wheat, cutting a narrow road as they went. When they were maybe a hundred yards away, the dog, Cerberus, materialized in the truck bed and watched me, eagerly lolling all three tongues like dogs do when they expect you to throw them a treat.

They kept going and going through the long expanse of unbroken, trackless wheat, angling slightly upward until at some point they must have reached the sky. I could see them as a shrinking black speck against the clouds for quite a while.

And then at some point, I couldn't.

I dropped to my knees then with my face tilted toward the sky and my arms stretched open. I let out a howl that went on and on. I felt pain everywhere, inside and out. It was flowing through me like I was a tiny part of a wire connecting all the grief and regret and hope and fear of the right side of the world to all those same things on the left side.

I didn't even notice the farmer who stopped his gigantic combine and came running to help me. It was nearly dark by then, and he told me at first he thought I was praying.

I didn't correct him. I have prayed off and on all my life and none of it felt anything like this. Still, maybe it was supposed to.

XIV

I WAS AT
the Neb
raska Medical Center in Omaha when Officer Stephens came into my room the next morning, settled into a chair beside my bed, and listened to my whole story from the time I'd found Bud unconscious in his troll-surrounded car back in the yard in Clevesdale to . . . well, the whole story. I hadn't planned on ever telling anyone about the hitchhiker girl, the flood, the black truck. But Officer Stephens deserved better than a mouthful of mumbled lies like I'd given him the night of the wreck. When I finished, he didn't say anything.

I wondered if he believed me. I sure wouldn't have.

“So, Mr. Heisterberg was with you when you located the body?” he finally asked.

I guess police get used to saying things like that, but it took me by surprise and I winced. “Yeah, he turned off his combine and we went into the house and found Bud still sitting in his chair by the broken window in that upstairs bedroom. I borrowed Mr. Heisterberg's phone and called you instead of Janet because I figured it'd be good if she heard it in person, from a friend.”

He folded his arms and nodded. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Good thinking.”

Officer Stephens hadn't even asked me on the phone if he should drive Janet up here. He'd just told me that he'd be doing it and they'd be here in three or four hours unless Janet wanted to wait until morning, which he very much doubted she would. They'd arrived last night, while I was being treated. They'd come by the hospital, been told to come back in the morning, then driven out to the Heisterbergs'. Mrs. Heisterberg had invited them to stay overnight so Janet could more easily make funeral arrangements.

“After Mr. Heisterberg called the coroner from the old house and the body was picked up, he brought you in his truck directly here, right? To this hospital?”

I nodded. I hadn't argued when Mr. Heisterberg had strongly suggested it. It was obvious even to me by then that my legs had become infected, big-time. As they prepped me last night, they kept telling me the treatment they'd be doing would hurt a lot, but it hadn't hurt nearly as much as my legs had all on their own for the past couple of days.

Now I was bandaged from thigh to ankle up and down both legs, and I was attached to an IV of antibiotics. One strict nurse had mentioned I'd be lucky if I didn't end up needing skin grafts down the line. No one here was one bit happy with me. It was touch-and-go whether they'd even let me out in time for the graveside funeral, which was this afternoon.

“I guess this was stupid,” I mentioned, dipping my head to indicate my legs.

Officer Stephens grimaced, then gave a small smile. “Pretty much.”

“Is Janet . . . here?” I asked Officer Stephens. “I mean, here at the hospital?”

He crossed his arms. “You boys had her plenty worried,” he said gruffly.

I nodded and looked down at the little hoop house that framed my legs, keeping the blankets from touching my bandages. My eyes began burning and things went blurry.

He walked to the door, and when he opened it, Janet pretty much fell into the room. I guess I expected she'd have plenty to say, but she just eased herself between the bed and the IV cart, then dropped forward to sprawl across the pillows, cradling my head in her strong waitress arms with her ear settled like a suction cup against my forehead.

After a while she kissed my cheek and let me go, then pulled herself up to sit on the edge of the mattress, where for a long time she just looked solemnly down at me, pushing my hair from my face. I closed my eyes and relaxed into her stroke, like I remember doing when I'd come home banged up from stupid bike stunts in fourth grade. I felt tears burning against the backs of my eyelids.

“Oh, Tucker,” she whispered sadly, “you often seem as young and breakable to me as when you were eight years old. You probably don't remember, but sometimes your dad went out by himself at night even back then. And Bud was no good as a babysitter after his bedtime at nine o'clock, so if I had to work the night shift, I used to go talk to your mother's picture. I'd just tell her I was about to leave, and I'd ask her to be there through the night for you. We've always been in cahoots, darling boy, me and Cynthia Anne. It's why I wanted her picture hung higher, so you'd see her and know that even during this awful time, your mother that you loved so dearly is still nearby, protecting you.”

She sat up straight then and grabbed a bunch of hospital tissues. She buried her face in them as Officer Stephens came and took her elbow and eased her back off the high bed and around that wobbling IV cart.

I grabbed her wrist right before she got out of range. “I know my mom is nearby, Janet. I always know that's exactly where you are.”

There was a lot more I wanted to tell her, like that everything in this beautiful treasure house of a world breaks, and sometimes things break so bad all you can do is hope to get your heart to stop bleeding long enough for you to sift through the ashes so you can try to gain some slight understanding. But some things that break real bad can be mended if you're lucky enough to have someone on your side with a ton of glue who won't give up.

I couldn't get any of that said, but from the look on her face, I guess I'd said enough for right then.

• • •

There were folding chairs put up under the ancient oak trees at Bud's family cemetery for the funeral. The preacher at the Heisterbergs' Methodist church read scripture, and then it was nice the way people told funny and interesting stories about Bud, how he'd been as a boy and then a young man. Janet had cousins to sit and cry with, so Officer Stephens and I just sat together a little to the side, pretty much unnecessary.

And then it was over, and Janet wanted time with her relatives, so Officer Stephens and I got into his police cruiser and drove toward Bud's old house along a nearly invisible rough road that Officer Stephens somehow located beneath the blowing wheat. Had that road been there all along, or had it been blazed just yesterday by Bud's great old black truck as it made its final journey from home, the place where Bud's own long and colorful trail had begun?

Officer Stephens parked the Olds in front of the house and we crossed the overgrown yard. He settled himself on the next-to-bottom porch step and, after a bit of hesitation, I managed to drop down onto that step as well. He propped his elbows on his knees. It felt less painful to me to keep my bandaged legs out straight, like I had at Bud's services.

“How ya' doing?” he asked with a half smile.

I gave him one back. “Those painkillers they gave me work great,” I allowed.

We automatically began staring straight ahead, hypnotized by the endlessly moving grain.

It went from being afternoon to being early evening. The air lost most of its warmth, and the purple shadow of the house reached far into the wheat.

I finally heard him draw in a deep breath. “Well, we oughta get back,” he said. “Janet'll be needing us. She was awful upset when I told her about Bud. He was an old guy with a bum heart, but the fact is, it's always a sad shock when it happens.”

I nodded, then instead of getting up to leave as he'd suggested, we both just sat there staring across the fields to where the glint of cars marked the cemetery. He passed his police hat absently from hand to hand, as he'd been doing ever since we'd first sat down.

“Well,” he said, and this time he stood, put on his hat, and began walking toward the police cruiser. Even from the back he looked trustworthy. Something in his shoulders.

“Officer Stephens?” I called. “You go on ahead. I don't think Janet should be driving right now, you know? So I'll drive the Olds back home.”

He knew from my story that I'd failed my designated driver test and had lost my focus and my nerve, so I think I expected him to nix that idea. Maybe I even
hoped
he would. The hospital had only released me on the provision that I check in with the Clevesdale Clinic by tomorrow, so my physical condition for driving a car wasn't that great either.

“Right,” he said, giving Bud's old car a glance. “Got those horse-choker antibiotics the hospital gave you? And the heavy-duty Tylenol?”

I took both bottles from the pocket of the jacket Janet had brought for me to wear to the funeral. I held them up.

He nodded and got into his cruiser, then rolled down the window. “You want to follow us back?”

I shook my head. “I need to go by and thank the Heisterbergs. I'll be along after that, though. Tell Janet not to worry, I won't be more than an hour behind you.”

That was the only untrue thing I told Officer Stephens that day. I'd already thanked the Heisterbergs and told them good-bye. What I needed was to be there at the old house for a little while longer, to say my own good-bye to Bud.

“Well,” said Officer Stephens. And then he just kept looking at me through his open window. “Tucker, I'm not gonna ask if you'll be safe on the road going back to Oklahoma. The drive won't be easy for you, but it's never gonna get easier than it is right now. And I gotta say, the story you told me this morning at the hospital is far-fetched, still . . .” He drummed his fingers on the side of the car door and frowned.

“Thing is, Tucker, that part about the cigarette lighter? We've seen it a thousand times at the station. Some kid that doesn't smoke will buy Saturday night smokes as a pickup device, to make the girls think he's bad boy cool when he drives up. Chances are real good Trey wouldn't have let you drive down to the beach, no matter how drunk he was or if you'd stayed cold sober. He had that car to show off with, and you can't do that unless you're behind the wheel when you arrive at the party.”

I just stared back at him.

“Right,” he said, and started the ignition. “Don't beat yourself up so bad, that's all, Tucker. This past week was likely the worst you'll ever have in your life. Take what you can learn from it, make it a part of the code you go by, then give it the gas and get back in gear again. Janet needs you, you know.”

Then he raised a hand to say good-bye and drove toward Janet, picking his way along that same rutted road he and I had traveled earlier. Actually, from the way the police car was bucking and tossing, I started wondering if that rough track should have been called a road at all. No matter who, or what, had made that passageway through the wheat, it was probably most accurate to just think of it as one of many hardscrabble byways blazed along the Oregon Trail, better known by us mortals as trail number 11,404.

I sat watching Officer Stephens's dust and wondered, what did he mean, make it a part of the code I went by? I didn't
have
a code. Did regular people have one, or just policemen?

Before the bonfire I would have defined myself as being in control of myself, of my thoughts and emotions, but that wasn't what you'd call a code, and it wasn't even accurate, at least if you knew me well, like Trey did. Neither was Trey's “innocent wonder” idea. Not a code, and not accurate, then or now. Trey surely knew that too.

I went slowly to the Olds, not bothering to put on a wellness act like I had during the funeral. I was hunched forward at the waist like I was about a hundred years old, and I moved with both legs stiff like some zombie from a laughably bad movie.

I opened the driver's-side door and was nearly overwhelmed by Bud's smell of Burma-Shave and foot powder. For the first time I noticed that where the driver sat, the sagging beige bench seat was molded to Bud's shape. I slid in beneath the steering wheel, conforming my legs, rear, and back to where Bud's had been for so many thousands of miles. Bud was far wider than me through the hips and shoulders, but that was all to the good. The lumps and ridges Bud had worn into the thin beige plastic held me in place but gave me the room I needed to stretch and shift with those thick bandages.

I reached across and thumbed the button on the glove compartment door. It flipped open and disgorged its contents, much as it had when Bud had opened it, searching for the map. I leaned on my right elbow to stir the pile of small junk now covering the passenger-side floor.

I found an old broken pencil and used my thumbnail to give it a point. I spotted an old wadded up napkin with what looked like ancient mustard staining one corner. I unfolded that napkin, spread it on the dashboard, and worked some of the wrinkles out.

Then I left that paper napkin waiting there, while I sat back and took a long breath. I looked up at the sky and focused on where I'd seen the truck disappear into the distance. I took my time, just sitting there and remembering, smiling as I did.

“I read you loud and clear, Bud,” I finally whispered, and I bent toward the dashboard and began to write.

• • •

Officer Stephens was right. The drive home wasn't easy, and I knew the worst part would come last, so I dreaded it the whole way. When you're heading west into Oklahoma from Missouri, you can't help but see the ring of silver hills rising from the zinc mine fields. Gravel mountains that glow against the sky, a dreamscape, magical.

Six nights ago I'd been drinking with my friends inside the secret ring of those counterfeit mountains.
They'll always loom,
I thought as I drove right toward them, my hands so sweaty they were slipping on the wheel.
You'll always know they're out there.

The inside of the dark car was bathed in eerie green light from the instrument panel. Everything glowed, strangely fluorescent, and blood began to beat painfully in my ears.

I took the rearview mirror and turned it toward myself, then looked into it and sat straighter until the top of my head . . .

I punched the mirror aside just in time. The next day my knuckles were bruised and they stayed bruised for a while, reminding me never to do that again.

• • •

The house was filled with people all that weekend, mostly Janet's friends and fellow waitresses, some old guys Bud had played cards with, the neighbors, including the Brandywines. A couple of police officers came with Officer Stephens on Saturday afternoon and he came alone on Sunday afternoon. The lady at the driver's license office who'd had to give Bud three separate vision tests and tell him three separate times in a row that he'd flunked came and cried and said she'd felt just awful doing that, and Janet told her she was extremely grateful to her because the last thing Bud needed was to be driving. People brought tons of food, so much it wouldn't all fit in the refrigerator.