Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

“Done deal,” the mechanic said, and he tossed him the keys.

Olgo got inside and immediately felt something like oatmeal wet his pants. Then came the smell. Cloying and rancid. He flew out of the car, shut the door. His eyes watered. “What is that?” he said, and pressed his face to the window. The glass was hazy and the lighting dim, but still, he could see inside. An army of fungal spores was encamped in his new car.

“You can’t be serious,” he said, and turned around. But the mechanic was gone.

Olgo circled the car and began to stack reasons for why this wasn’t so bad against a feeling that this was terrible. As if he could show up at Jonathan’s like the Swamp Thing.

He opened the trunk. Luckily: towels and aerosol. He was on the road shortly. The car smelled as though many drag queens had passed through it. Nine hours to go. He was headed to Helix Pack 7, Richmond, Virginia.

According to the radio — which worked, thank God — P7 convened at the Fulton Gas Works factory off Williamsburg Avenue. It was only two hours south of D.C., which meant Kay might have been commuting for months. Months! He could have hurled with the thought, though now, driving down the highway, windows up, then down — the cold was unbearable, but the smell was immortal — he thought he might hurl anyway. Olgo had never known himself to be an angry man or even a man with the stamina to anger for more than a few minutes, so the imprecations launched from his mouth at every car that passed and every one that didn’t; the slamming of his horn, plus coda, “Chingchong, CHING-CHONG!” because half these drivers were Asian and no Asian could drive; the tailgating of family vehicles signed Baby on Board — none of these behaviors, nor the presence of mind to deal with them, was part of his repertoire. It was not long, then, before he veered into the emergency lane and blew a tire. The asphalt was serrous, littered with glass.

He punched the ceiling. His knuckles came back wet. Good thing he could not call AAA. Good thing he’d insisted the expense was lavish when Kay pressed for it; good thing she’d called him a miser cheapskate and turned her back to him in bed that night and for a few nights thereafter. Good thing in the year since, he’d refused to go on vacation, buy a new fridge, pay for Kay’s landscape portraiture classes at Wash U, or even contribute to Tennessee’s college fund. He wasn’t a cheapskate, Kay’s shrieking opinion notwithstanding, but just planning for the long haul. Sixty was the new forty; he’d have to make their savings and income last for another half century of life together. Together! Even now, stalled and shivery and strewn with hives, he smiled. And warmed up from the inside. He would just have to hitchhike.

Five minutes passed before the anxiety of his circumstances returned. He hoisted his thumb, then jammed it in his pocket. There were some evil people on the road. People who might be the last you saw on earth if you got in their car. Oh, this was absurd. He thrust his thumb back in the air.

Success was immediate; a car pulled over. Olgo bent down to look inside. “East,” he said. “Virginia,” and he probed the man’s eyes for murderous intent. He was old. His face was like granite, and the lattice of declensions in his skin was chiselwork. The car was a station wagon. Mutts in the back — a Weimaraner and a medieval-looking dog with no hair — and in the front, where once was a radio and AC console, the dash had been gutted to accommodate a humidifier that plugged into the smoke socket. When Olgo opened the door, a plume of dew came at his face.

The man told him to hop in. “You’re in luck. I’m pointed exactly that way.”

His voice was phlegmy, as if the walls of his nose and throat were slopped in roux. He was missing fingers that mattered for making a good impression.

“The name’s Jerry. You?”

“Jonathan.” Olgo said it deliberately, testing the consonants for what pleasure they gave his tongue in bringing them to life.

“Well then. Hope you don’t mind the dogs. The bald one, you can put one of them pups on your arthritis and the skin is so hot it cures you. Folklore, but I done it. And I got arthritis in places no one but a pup’s gonna go without complaint.”

Olgo looked away. If he had wanted to talk, he also had standards. He thought about retreating to the backseat, claiming fatigue, only between it and the tailgate was a trellis for keeping the dogs put that did not seem so reliable. The bald one already had his snout wedged through.

Olgo said, “Is that okay? Your dog like that? I think he’s stuck.”

“Not really. But just see what happens you go find out.” Jerry laughed, like whatever mauling had befallen him in the past was good times. Olgo thought he even flourished his knuckle stumps, though maybe he was just swatting the air.

“I’m going to see my wife,” Olgo said. “She doesn’t know I’m coming, though.”

“Yeah? I had a wife once. But we don’t talk. When I came back from the services broke, she didn’t like it. Now my son and his family live near, but it still feels like I got nothing.”

“What do you do these days?”

“This and that.” He rolled up his sleeve and began to savage his bicep. When he was done, the patch of skin was candent and striking against the livid ink sealed into his arm.

“Oh Christ,” Olgo said, and he reached for the door handle.

Jerry grinned. “At eighty miles an hour, I’d say you’re not gonna make it.”

The tattoo was bigger than any Olgo had seen on file. It stretched from elbow to shoulder, and the rungs of the double helix were pearled — this version more science, less metaphor.

“Are you taking me back to them?” Olgo said. “How did you even know where I was?”

Jerry pointed at a CB radio bolted to the underside of the steering column. The radio was waterproofed in plastic. “Looks like it’d be in the way, but it doesn’t bother me none.”

Olgo said, “I don’t understand.”

“It’s like this. There’s an APB out for that car you were driving, for one. Ugly business with that car. Someone spotted your plates, said there was some jackass cursing all up and down the highway. Also, the feds put out the word. Found out maybe you wasn’t there when they came a-knockin’.”

“So everyone knows I’m out?”

“Everyone with a CB. Whole world is listening. All that fancy equipment, and some idiot is still using the CB.”

“Are you taking me to the Helix people or not? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not me they want, just anyone. To make a point. I do this for a living, conflict resolution, so, ah, talk to me. There’s no need to be confused about what we each stand to gain.”

“Sure there is. We’re all confused. Let’s call it the human experience.”

Olgo frowned. A preacher man.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Jerry said. “I’m seventy-nine next week. God willing.”

Olgo pressed his head to the glass — how was he even having this conversation? — and began to regret in earnest having left the Helix House. Why couldn’t he have waited for Hostage Rescue? Wherever Jerry was taking him, security would be tighter and the turncoats fewer.

“So let me get this right: You’re a bounty hunter for the Helix? At age seventy-nine?” Sixty might well be the new forty, but seventy-nine was eighty and eighty was nine hundred.

“Seventy-eight, thanks.”

“I have money. I could get money.”

“Oh, don’t talk stupit. I don’t like that kind of talk. I’m principled.”

“You’re above money?” Olgo cowered with the thought. In all his years negotiating, it was always the principled who stood their ground with the least remorse.