Dennis Etchison - The Dark Country

The pulse in his ears muffled and finally blotted out the distant gearing of a truck up on the highway, the death-rattle of the moths against the seductive lights.

He reeled.

He seemed to be hearing again the breaking open of doors and the scurrying of padded feet across paved spaces.

He remembered the first time. He remembered the sound of a second door slamming in a place where no new car but his own had arrived.

Or — had it been the door to his car slamming a second time, after Evvie had gotten back in? If so, how? Why?

And there had been the sight of someone moving, trying to slip away.

And for some reason now he remembered the Indian in the tourist town, slipping out of sight in the doorway of that gift shop. He held his eyelids down until he saw the shop again, the window full of kachinas and tin gods and tapestries woven in a secret language.

At last he remembered it clearly: the Indian had not been entering the store. He had been stealing away.

McClay did not understand what it meant, but he opened his eyes, as if for the first time in centuries, and began to run toward his car.

If I could only catch my goddamn breath, he thought.

He tried to hold on. He tried not to think of her, of what might have happened the first time, of what he may have been carrying in the back seat ever since.

He had to find out.

He fought his way back to the car* against a rising tide of fear he could not stem.

He told himself to think of other things, of things he knew he could control: mileages and motel bills, time zones and weather reports, spare tires and flares and tubeless repair tools, hydraulic jack and Windex and paper towels and tire iron and socket wrench and waffle cushion and traveler's checks and credit cards and Dopp Kit (toothbrush and paste, deodorant, shaver, safety blade, brushless cream) and sunglasses and Sight Savers and teargas pen and fiber-tip pens and portable radio and alkaline batteries and fire extinguisher and desert water bag and tire gauge and motor oil and his moneybelt with identification sealed in plastic —

In the back of his car, under the quilt, nothing moved, not even when he finally lost his control and his mind in a thick, warm scream.

It was one of those bright places you never expect to find in the middle of the night, a place of porcelain and neon lighting and whitewashed walls. I walked in with my old army bag stuffed full of a month's dirty clothes and swung it on top of one of the long line of waiting, open washing machines.

A quarter to three in the morning.

And nobody in sight for miles and miles.

I let out a sigh, which not surprisingly turned into a yawn, and felt for the change in my pocket.

I didn't see her at first. That is to say, I knew she was there without turning around. I think it was the cigarette smoke. It cut a sharp edge through the hot, stifling, humid dryer air that hung so thick in the laundromat you felt you could stick out your finger and jab a hole in it.

"Well, he finally got what he wanted."

I moved along the wall to the corner detergent dispenser. It was very late and I couldn't sleep and I had come here to be alone, just to have something to do and to be left alone to do it, and I was in no mood to try my hand at winning friends and influencing people.

I heard water running in the sink next to me.

"That's what he thought, all right." Her voice came very close to me now, going on as if picking up a running conversation we might have been having.

I turned my head just long enough for a quick glance at her.

She was young but not too, twenty-nine going on forty, and pretty, too, but not really very. She had long hair hanging down to the middle of her thin back, with blond streaks bleached in, tres chic, you know, and one of her phony eyelashes was coming unglued in the warm, wet air.

"A house in the Valley, two cars — no, three — paid vacation in the Virgin Islands, and a son, yeah, a little Vladimir Jr. to carry on his glorious family name. Just like he always wanted. But that was all he wanted — that's the part they never tell you in front."

She dropped the butt of her Pall Mall and lit another at once, pulling long, hard drags down into her lungs.

"Last week the kid took the gun from the closet and walked up to me in the kitchen," she continued, starting to hand-wash a sheet in the sink. "Pointed it right at my head and said, 'Bang, you're dead, Mommy.' 'Well,' I said, 'are you gonna do it or not? Don't ever point one of those things at someone unless you're gonna use it.'

"So he did. The kid pulled the trigger. I didn't think h; had the guts. 'Course it wasn't loaded. That really pissed me off. It was just like Vladimir, not teaching him what it means to be a — but what would his dad know about that? About what it takes to be a man."

She scrubbed at the soiled sheet, pausing to jerk a wet hand up to move a strand of hair away from her face. I couldn't help taking a better look at her face then. It was like the rest of her, young and yet old, drawn and tight, made up expensively even now, in the middle of the night, though obviously in haste, and tired, and blank. For a second then, overpoweringly, I had the belief that she was the same young/old woman I had seen seated in the window of a beauty salon in Beverly Hills once; and later, in a cocktail lounge with another girl, waiting, with long, sharp fingernails the color of blood. French-inhaling a Marlboro and with a look on her face that told you she had a hundred-dollar bill in her purse. And that she was waiting. Just waiting.

She picked up her Pall Mall with a wet thumb and first finger, drawing hard.

I noticed the clock on the wall: three o'clock.

"That was when I got it. All these years, trying to figure a way to teach him and mat God damned kid of his something."

I fed a couple of nickles into the detergent machine.

She paused long enough to take a couple of more lengthy hits from her Pall Mall. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the smoke blowing out into the white light.

"So tonight he comes home and makes the pitcher of martinis, as usual, and goes into his room and closes the door. I go to the door and ask him what the hell's wrong this time. He says he doesn't know. He just wants me to leave him alone."

She laughed startlingly, hoarsely.

"Okay, hot shot, I'll leave you the hell alone, I think. You wanna come home from your fucking office looking like a corpse again tonight and lay around until you fall asleep for the zillionth time? All right, I'll let you!

"We'll find out if that's what you really want.

"Only first you and that little pussy of a son of yours are gonna get a lesson you'll never forget."

She turned on the water full force. It gushed out, flooding the basin faster than it could empty.

"Who ever said if you wash it in cold water it'll come out? Damn. Why the hell did I have to give him the striped sheets, anyway?

"So I wake the kid up. It doesn't matter — he's awake, and the bed's all wet as usual. I ask him if he remembers what I taught him.

"It takes a minute or two, but he finally catches on, the dumb little bastard.

"So I go get the bullets down and tell him to go in there and prove to me that he remembers what it was I beat the shit out of him for last week…"

I started to dump my stuff into a machine at the far end of the room. Then, all of a sudden, the thread of what she had been saying got through to me.

I turned back to look at her.

She was grinding a bar of soap into the sheet now. At the edges the spot was a thick brown, almost black, but at the heart I noticed it was still a deep, gummy shade close to the color of her nails as her fingers flashed violently around the material. The steam was rising up from the basin to surround her.