First You Try Everything (22 page)

The Wolf turns around for a second and looks at
them, then turns back to the front.

“You can't judge a lady like that,” says Dracula.
“She'd been through hell. And God can take it! God can take anything, and make
it
nothin
'. This anyone with a nickel's worth of
gray matter will come to know. God can take it!”

T
hey
pull the car off the road, onto a bridge, down another pitch-black road. They
stop before a chipped white bench that sits before a river.

“We're not swimmers, ourselves,” Dracula says. “You
two go on and swim back and forth now. Fitness is important.”

They could swim to freedom! Once on the other bank,
they could run for their lives. They would risk being shot at, but it was the
best chance they had.

“We'll be in a canoe. Just in case. Don't make us
use the paddle. Just swim as fast as you can, side by side, over to the other
bank of the river. When you get to the other bank, stand there, count to fifty,
touch your toes, then dive back in.”

The canoe is leaning against a tree, just yards
from the white bench. It's small, but big enough to hold the two men. And now
they're all out in the cold.

The river is wider than it looks. They swim naked
and the water is freezing cold, as Ben knew it would be, but he hadn't counted
on it being a great release, a deep, exhilarating entrance into another state of
consciousness, where the breath of night that enters him creates a room in his
mind, and then expands to become a wide expanse of country under stars, all of
it inside of him, shimmering. The stars in his mind burn brighter and bolder,
his whole mind filled with the fire of stars, his tears entering the river,
Evvie's body right there, slick as a seal, as she gasps,
Ben, are you making it?
, and he says yeah and wants to tell her of
this world in his mind, where silence is music and deepening and he can think,
think of what to do next, but then a shot is fired and everything collapses into
darkness.

They hadn't hit Evvie, or him, or even the water
surrounding them.
They're shootin' God
, he thinks.
The canoe slides over beside them; he could reach out and touch it. “Go on and
swim to the bank. And do what we said. And do it without complaints,” says the
Wolf.

Under the moon, they stand freezing on the
riverbank and count to fifty. The men in the canoe are a few yards away, with
guns pointed.
“Dance!”
one of them says.
“This is the senior prom and they're playin' your song! ‘You
Belong to Me'!”

The other man—the Wolf, it sounds like—howls with
laughter.

A naked, trembling Evvie is in his arms, and
they're dancing, and she starts to cry.

“No. You can't do this,” he tells her, furious.
“Stop your sobbing or we'll fucking die.”

“I–I–”

“Stop!”

She gulps down air. She stiffens. They dance like
robots until they're told they can stop and swim back to the other side.

T
he
deep pleasure of returning to their clothes, to the embracing warmth of the dark
car, to the motion of the road, to the trembling of his own body, is enough to
make him weep, silently, and for the first time he thinks of Lauren, and Ramona,
and wonders if they'll all ever sit at the table again together. But he can't
remember their faces. Where their faces might be is a dull sound, a small orange
light flashing like a siren. He grabs Evvie's hand and squeezes. She pulls
herself together. She's stopped crying and is now sitting beside him with her
eyes closed and her teeth chattering and her face lifted up to the ceiling of
the car, as if she's praying.

The car pulls up to an ATM machine on the edge of
some small town where houses dot the hillside. “Now we get out and you two empty
your accounts.”

“Gladly,” Ben says.

The night is silent except for small-town oblivion
roiling in the hills like dark laughter. The guns pointed while first he, then
Evvie, empty their accounts to a grand total of $780.

“I have some in the savings account that I'll get
you as soon as the bank opens. I have over ten thousand dollars, and it all
belongs to you. I want you to have it. And I won't say a word about any of this.
And then I can ask a lot of other people for money. I know some really rich
people.”

Dracula and the Wolf do a little dance to these
words, then throw their heads back and laugh. Were they celebrating how rich
they'd be or simply mocking him?

“Maybe we'll be back in the morning. If you're
well-behaved children we might even take you out for ice cream,” says the raspy
Dracula voice. “Give me my headache pills,” he orders the Wolf, and swallows
them down without water, whatever they are.

T
he
car pulls down a dirt road that cuts through some kind of dead harvest. Maybe
it's wheat. It lies down in the moonlight, half frozen, like long bones. It
occurs to Ben that this might be the last landscape of his life. He withdraws
his affection from what he sees now. He looks at it and tries to see it as
ordinary.

But nothing is ordinary. Not the moon, black sky,
trees, road, hand he's holding—he's grabbed Evvie's again—and breath he takes.
Not any breath. All of it extraordinary, now and forever shall be. He will never
be bored again. He will go home and start all over. He will love his life, every
spoon and doorway every face every window every breath, as never before.

L
auren.
He lets his thoughts be subsumed by the name,
lets the name repeat itself in his mind, Lauren, Lauren, Lauren, but still
cannot clearly remember her face. He sees a pair of sandals she'd worn when it
was warm. Red sandals that left stripes on her feet. She'd painted her toenails
red to match. It had taken her hours to do so, she was so meticulous.

He focuses on those small feet, then lets his eyes,
like two desperate hands, travel up her body, but finds Evvie's body, and
Evvie's face, the face he knows best, shining in his mind the way it used to,
when he was away without her, missing her with every cell in his body. His jaw
is trembling and he can't make it stop.

The car slows down to twenty miles an hour or less.
On the dead ground Ben sees abandoned tires and a cracked full-length mirror
that holds the black sky, and farther back, on a knoll, what appears to be a
pair of shoes. You usually only see one shoe, but Ben sees a pair, he's sure of
it, and they're so unlikely—white patent-leather men's loafers, such as an old
man in Florida might wear—that he feels chills shoot through his body. They had
murdered the old man because they felt like it, because they could, because they
were bored, maybe just to see him die, like in the Johnny Cash song. As he
catches sight of two warehouses—large sheds, really—waiting for them in the
middle of this godforsaken field, his eyes fill with tears. The sheds look
alive, hungry even, like they've been patiently waiting here for a long, long
time. They seem to be proud of themselves, proud of taking part in the
historical reality of evil, and Ben understands that, up until now, evil had
been such an abstraction to him that he'd sometimes argued that it didn't exist;
it wasn't a
force
—it was just people gone wrong
.
Looking at the sheds, he understands such a position
can be held only by those who've never confronted it.

“Warehouse X needs a paint job,” sings the Wolf.
The car bounces over rough terrain, then slows down to a stop.

He holds back tears of pity that he and Evvie have
together come to this, tears that he might never get to say good-bye to Lauren,
that she would think he'd disappeared on her. He sees her making calls in her
kitchen, her profile now coming into view. Lauren. She would try to contact his
parents, and they'd know nothing. She would try, then, to contact Evvie, and
she'd be missing too, and Lauren would assume they'd run off together. It would
make sense to her—another abandonment. He couldn't bear that thought.

“Do we get to make any calls before—” He stops
himself.

“Before?” says the Wolf.

“Before shut the fuck up?” sings Dracula.

A
pparently they settled on
WAREHOUSE
WHY
. Those words are spray-painted on the door, which is heavy and metal
and padlocked. The headlights shine upon it now. Chipped green paint makes a
circle on the door, decorated with painted red dots, someone's idea of a wreath.
Very clever
, Ben wants to say. Fucking clever
maniacs! The edge of his fear is barely controlled rage, so much so that he gets
close to making a dive for one of them. He's a killer too right now, he just
doesn't have the gun. His eyes slide over to check on Evvie, but she seems to
have evacuated her body. Her face is white marble. Her eyes are at half mast.
His heart cries out her name, and then, strangely, both of their names together
reverberate inside of him,
Ben
and Evvie. Ben and Evvie.

The men both get out of the car and Dracula opens
Evvie's door. “Both of you exit out this way.”

With guns they point them toward the door. The Wolf
opens the padlock and steps inside. “It's nice enough,” he says.

“Where's the music?” says Dracula.

“I can go get the boom box myself,” the Wolf
offers.

“Is that what you call a good idea? Are you stupid
enough to forget the operation policy of sticking together?”

Dracula says they
all
have to stick together, and they march single file into Warehouse X. The dank
air smells heavily of some kind of wretched chemical. They stand with Dracula in
the doorway, the two of them side by side, in front of him, while the Wolf
disappears into the pitch-black, whistling. Ben wants to ask what the smell is
but controls himself. As long as they don't have to breathe it for long, he
doesn't need to know.

The Wolf emerges from the black with a boom box.
Again Ben feels hope sear through his body. A simple smile explodes on his face.
He has the urge to thank the Wolf man profusely. He wants to break down weeping
and explain how much they both love music and how he would do anything in the
world to go on living in this world, where it was possible to hear music, that
they were both good people who would be
glad
to be
of service of any kind and find as much money as they needed, as long as they
would eventually be released to life.

“Please,” he finally says, childlike. “Please don't
kill us.” And then, a lie that comes out of nowhere. “My wife is three months
pregnant. Don't kill the baby.” For a moment this seems true. “It's our first
child. Please don't kill us.”

Evvie

S
he'd been
trying to pray, bargaining with God, God full of spikes, God with his dark
laughter, God who had made her this freak, this loose-cannon desperate wretch of
a person who had thought a little kidnapping might be good. God the Divine
Madman who had given her too long a leash.

And who was she? Had that person she'd become
always been there, waiting to take over? Or had some spirit entered her,
something she couldn't have controlled? Was a body just a receptacle for various
selves who would never stop coming, never leave her alone? No wonder she saw her
desperate prayers like shreds of wet paper hanging from a skeleton's bones, and
God with his dark laughter, God with his arrows aimed at the head,
oh but God
, oh but if you let Ben
live
, I will die a million times over, reincarnate me as a tortured
animal, I will come back willingly to live in hell if you just let Ben live and
let them do, let them do whatever they want with me.

She is almost happy when they tape her mouth shut
and tie her arms behind her back. Several times she'd been on the verge of
grabbing Rocky, of pleading with him, Rocky who'd seemed so—what had he seemed
like then? A million years ago when they'd first sat in the car that day across
from PPG and she'd been someone else. He'd seemed humane, in his crazy way,
humane with imagination and something
warm
coming
from him and she had liked his eyes! Windows to the soul! They'd been spinning
in her mind like pinwheels at a fair she'd gone to when she was small. He'd made
her weak in the knees that day downtown—the way he looked at her. She'd never
understood that expression, “weak in the knees,” until then. Had she been
falling in love with him? She'd dressed up for him that day. Had she been
drugged? Under a spell? He'd lulled her, because she'd wanted lulling. And thank
you, God, for how he is taping my mouth shut so tightly and thank you, Mr.
Rocky. Mr. Dracula. She looks up at the mask. She had never loved Dracula. But
she reconsiders. Now she thinks she will love Dracula and live with him here
forever until she starves, if he just lets Ben go.

S
he
sits cross-legged beside Ben in the dark. Her arms ache, wrenched back behind
her. They've taped and tied Ben too. Terror is giving rise, in strange, watery
moments, to a great fatigue that is almost a death wish, then suddenly blasted
away by a longing so great she thinks it will break her into pieces.

T
he
Wolf turns up the boom box. The Bee Gees?
The Bee
Gees?
If she hadn't been taped she'd say it out loud. She would
scream it. Next he'd flick a switch and the lights would come on.

But it stays pitch-dark. Much darker than the
night. And the darkness is supremely alive, vibrating, as if a murder of crows
is circling in the air before their eyes, flapping their wings.

“We're going to have some fun now.” Dracula's cool
hand reaches for the back of her neck. She whimpers.

“I'm not sure what game to play,” says Dracula, in
the whining voice of a spoiled child. It's true that he is quite the actor.

“We could play American Idol Meets Survivor
.
Or we could play Tell Me a Story, Asshole. Or we
could get started with something much more fun.”

“Any ideas?” he calls over to the Wolf. “Any
preferences?”

The Wolf just howls into the dark.

“Who wants to sing a song? A song so good, so
pitch-perfect true, it
could
cause a man like me to
throw their gun out the window. A song to change the world is what I'm searching
for. A song that could make me break down and cry!”

Ben makes a noise behind his taped mouth. Then
another, louder noise.

“Are you sitting there telling me you don't have
stage fright?” Dracula asks. “Wolfman Jack, this man wants to sing us a saving
song of succulence. Turn off the Bee Gee brothers.”

Dracula comes over and bends down between Evvie and
Ben. He has a hand on each of them, and presses down. Rips the tape off Ben's
mouth. “You're a brave man. You must know, my friend, that if you get the song
wrong, it's all over. Those are the rules that inspire greatness. Get it right
the first time.
Perfect pitch
. And choose the song
carefully. You have one minute. Imagine that. And if you fail, imagine that I'm
a man who can send your wife special delivery into the arms of her maker. You're
in the hands of a special delivery man.” He stands up straight and fires a shot
at the ceiling.

“Singer, rise!”

Ben stands up.

“What will you sing?”

“Any requests?” Ben manages. This strikes Dracula's
funny bone for a moment. He bends in half. Then shoots back up. “Something
great. Something you can sing as if your life and hers depend upon it.”

Evvie thinks she can feel a silent wind encircle
them. What song? What song could he possibly sing?

He begins. His voice is hoarse: “What's Goin' On,”
a choice that somehow seems inevitable.

He makes it to the word “Brother,” and then Dracula
begs him to stop. “Please, don't do that!”

Ben stops.

“If Marvin Gaye weren't dead, he'd kill himself.
Don't you know another song?”

“I know a lot.”

“I bet you know a lot. I bet you even know an
old-fashioned song from time gone by.”

“I do.”

“And you better sing it now,” Dracula says.

Ben begins without hesitation.

“The water is wide and
I can't cross over

And neither have I wings
to fly

Give me a boat that can
carry two”

Evvie had taught him this one. Her grandmother had
sung it to her in earliest childhood.

“And the boat can row
my love and I

Love is gentle, love is
kind”

“Not hitting the mark, my friend. Not hitting
it.”

Ben sang louder.

“The sweetest flower
when first it blooms

But love grows old and
waxes cold”

“Enough of that!”

Silence.

Dracula doesn't deliver Evvie into the arms of her
maker; he's not keeping his word.

“Maybe I'd rather hear you tell a story,” Dracula
says. “A story about your wife! This woman with stars in her eyes! Maybe one
where Starshine was a kid. And she fucked up royally! Something amusing! We
heard a story last month about a kid who fucked up royally. And it was a good
story, with a monster in it. Tell us a story along those lines. So once upon a
time, your wife here was an innocent child.”

He'd said
chi-old.

“And this chi-old did such and such stupid shit, or
maybe ran into the arms of the wrong person. A chi-old meets a monster and—”

Ben stands there.

“Begin. We're just getting to know you here is all.
Save yourself, partner.”

After a long silence, Ben begins. “She rode this
red bike,” he says.

“Who?” Dracula says.

“Evvie. My wife. When she was a kid.”

He is not a natural storyteller. You had to fish
things out of him; otherwise he'd turn a story into haiku. How was he going to
pull this off? Evvie already knows what story he's trying to tell. Her heart
slams up against her chest. It was his favorite story, one she'd told him when
they were first together, in a bar near his mother's llama farm. She'd told him
the story and he'd listened, then said,
OK, marry
me.

“She thought if she rode the bike fast enough she'd
start flying, like Pegasus. The bike was her horse. She would ride the bike five
blocks to visit a goat. A city goat who looked neglected. She took the goat
presents. Then an old man came and yelled at her to get off the property, so she
got back on the red bike and rode home. The bike had a name but I forget it
right now. It'll come to me.”

Ben's voice was steady and utterly clear.

“An old man with a shotgun?”

Ben pauses. “Sure.”

“Go on.”

“Some kids need to visit goats,” Ben says, an odd
scolding tone having seeped into his voice.

“I beggeth your pardon?” says Dracula.

“This is how God must have felt when creating the
world,” says Ben, his voice strangely calm. “You say words in this pitch-black
darkness and it's like everything comes to life. Like the goat and Evvie on her
bike are right here in front of my eyes.”

“Do you want to die, or tell us an amusing story
without a goat in it?”

Ben's voice is getting stronger. “The goat is dead.
She loved riding on roads where the trees lined up and seemed to be cheering her
on. She felt that trees were cheering her on. I think she still feels that. And
maybe they are. Maybe the whole world is cheering us on.”

“This better get better fast and speak the fuck
up,” Dracula says, but his voice is softer now, more like Rocky's voice in the
car.

“She went on a vacation to this island of ponies
with her family when she was eleven, and they'd allowed her to take her bike.
Blackie was the bike's name, even though it was a red bike. In her mind, it was
a black horse and she found black streamers for the handlebars and that was his
mane in the wind and she rode him all around the town, for the whole week. She
took Blackie to see the ocean, the bay, and the old man on the beach who made
The Last Supper
sand sculpture every year. She
showed Blackie all the sandy apostles and Jesus. She has pictures I could show
you, we could show you, after we give you, after you take us out of here so we
can give you more money. So then, at the end of the week, her parents said they
couldn't take Blackie back home, since they had a packed car, and besides, the
bike was a piece of junk. They suggested they just leave Blackie outside of a
grocery store. She tried with all her might to explain that the bike was her
horse, her friend, but they didn't understand her tears, except as a sign that
she was ridiculous and needed to be sent to her room for the last night of that
vacation, since she was too old for such spoiled carrying-on.”

He stopped. He took a deep breath. Evvie was amazed
that he remembered their exact phrase.
Such spoiled
carrying-on.

“So she snuck out after they slept and rode for
hours out past the town, and some man in a car hit her when she was crossing the
highway. Hit and run. She lay there for an hour before someone came and took her
to the hospital. She was in a coma for five days, and then, when she finally sat
up, the first thing she said was, ‘Where's Blackie?' ”

“Yes! And then what?” says Dracula.

“That's it.”

“No, that
isn't
it.”

Ben waits.

“I said that isn't it. Has to be more.”

“Well, I—”

“What other story can you tell? About her? Your
wife? Because that one wasn't good enough. That one just wasn't good
enough.”

Ben says, “Evvie's third-grade teacher took a poll
of her students as to whether or not she should commit suicide.”

“What? Is that a joke?”

“No.”

Evvie hasn't thought about that in years.

“And what was her name?”

“Her name was Mrs. Finch.” Mrs. Finch, who came to
school in a long blue gown the day of the poll.

“And why'd she want to off herself?”

“I don't know.”

“Nobody ever told you?”

“Nobody ever told me.”

“So we'll figure it out. Was it global warming that
made her want to kill herself? No, it was not, because we didn't have global
fucking anything back then. Was it a monster that made her want to kill herself?
Yes, it was, because we did have monsters back then, did we not?”

“Yes,” says Ben. “We did.”

“And what did the students say?”

“They said no.”

A silence fell.

“And that's all you got? A goddamn bike and a
suicidal teacher?” Dracula laughs and says, “Inside I'm clapping, I'm giving you
a standing ovation,” then shakes his head. “Anything else?”

Ben doesn't hesitate. “She sang in an old-age home
when she was twelve at Christmastime.”

That wasn't true—Ben had done that—had he confused
their memories?

“Uh, uh, uh! Stop there. Stop right there. Sit
down, Christmastime! Sit the fuck down. You can't steal a show to save your
life, can you?”

Ben stood there.

“Can you?”

“Guess not.”

“Some people understand thee-ate-her, some do not.
At least you could have told us a story with a message. Like the humans go to
another planet to escape all their fucking garbage and wars, and then they screw
up the new planet even worse than this one, and then they blow up every planet
in sight. Hear that? Now I'm giving myself a standing ovation on the inside. Sit
down. It's not looking good. God bless you.”

Ben sits back down.

Evvie is up on her feet and running. It's so dark
she isn't sure where she's running. She'd lost a feel for where the door might
be. Dracula chases her; he's telling her this was a very bad idea. But she's
fast. She runs forward, then in a circle, then forward again. And she stops
running and crouches down on the floor and curls into a ball. He runs past her.
But then he's back. He's circling her. He's laughing. He says it's a pleasure to
be in the vicinity. He says he admires her guts. Next thing she knows his hand
is on her neck.
“You're the one for me,”
he says.
“Maybe that's what you're trying to say.”