Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

I got into the car even though it was exactly the kind of car they say to avoid. Doors all dented. A long-haired, bearded driver with a cigarette pinched in his thin lips. This looked like the beginning of a porno or slasher movie and I didn’t want to be slashed or porned, but I did need to get about a hundred miles west of this parking lot and the sun was nearly setting and this car was the only one making an offer and I have always been unable to decline anyone’s offer of almost anything.

Where you edded?

He was shirtless and had a body that suggested he lived on a cliff and the only way to get home was to climb it.

Takaka?

I was never sure how to pronounce it, which ka got the emphasis.

’Swearum edded. Get in.

He moved boxes of beer from the passenger seat to the back, which was piled with duffel bags of I don’t know what. He wore sunglasses, a big, utilitarian pair that wasn’t designed in this decade or even the decade before this one. I ducked into the passenger seat and hugged my backpack like an airplane flotation device. Reggae music loud, windows down, cigarette smoke ribboning around the car, then shooting out the window like it was late for something.

After a few minutes the man started to shout over the music in my general direction. He was saying things in varying tones, maybe telling me a story about the bridge we were driving over or the fields we were driving toward. His voice sounded like vinyl played backward. I understood nothing. I said, Yeah, yeah , and nodded my head and raised my eyebrows when he raised his eyebrows and said, Oh . Sometimes he would laugh and turn his head to see if I was laughing and of course I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed, then I stopped laughing.

He turned the music up, lit another cigarette, and opened a beer as we drove up a mountain, making hairpin turns at unadvisable speeds. My organs let me know how much they disapproved of where I was sitting — I couldn’t remember why I had ever wanted to go anywhere at all.

We reached the top and the view was not spectacular. A curve of unremarkable green under a faint grey fog. He turned down the music and pulled the car over.

At’s Ozzie, terr, see?

He pointed at a man sitting under a tree and eating something out of his hands. A motorbike leaned against the trunk.

Say yer my wife, you keen?

Sorry?

At’s my mate Ozzie there and I’m keen to take the piss out of him. Ya keen? Haven’t got to do much — maybe lemme put my arm round you or something.

All right , I said, hoping I hadn’t agreed to anything disagreeable.

He got out of the car and I got out of the car and we walked over to Ozzie. Ozzie and the man talked fast in grumbles and smacked each other’s back. Ozzie called him Judas.

Who’s ’at here?

’Atsma wife, Annie, here.

Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair.

Aye, Judas, ya crazy fucker , Ozzie said. Aye, ya fucker, ya crazy fucker. D’you go out on the piss and wake up hitched, then? Ya crazy fucker!

I shrugged.

A stubby for the missus? How’d the little wifey like a beer, eh?

Oh, that’s okay , I said, but Ozzie was already handing me a squat, amber bottle and pulling two more out of a small cooler attached to his motorbike.

Let me , Judas said, popping my bottle’s cap with a lighter.

Judas and Ozzie made more noises that seemed to be words about some piece of machinery that Ozzie owned, something that Judas apparently had repaired or broken — their sentences half grumble and all slang. I looked down the neck of my beer and noticed that a dead bee was floating in it but kept drinking. Up the road at an abandoned-looking petrol station a man was dancing in the doorway to staticky music. The dancing man wore overalls and a little hat and moved his arms close to his body like he was running, but he wasn’t going anywhere. A woman was laughing somewhere, but I couldn’t tell if she was being entertained or tortured. A yellow pay-phone box was there, too, so I considered what would happen if I went over there and picked up the phone and called my husband, my actual husband, who, I knew, had supposedly lost any interest in where I was or where I was going or who I was getting married to out here in tomorrow, and just then my fake husband put a thick arm around me and as he pulled me closer, his fingers caught on a flimsy string of beads I was wearing, something one of Dillon’s hippies had strung on me with no uncertain ceremony, and all the beads went scattering into the dirt. Ozzie howled.

Wee cracker of a lad you picked up here, wifey!

Ozzie went down to pinch up the little white and blue beads. Judas stared at me for a moment longer than I thought made sense.

Fuckin’ hell, Annie. Sorry. Then he went to his knees, racing to collect them as if I was keeping time.

I took this moment to go to the pay phone and I called my husband despite all the reasons I had not to do that — I thought hearing him hear my voice would help me become a more accurate version of myself, that I might be able to understand who I was being if my husband could hear what I sounded like right then and reflect it back at me, and I thought I was ready to hear him and I thought he might have been ready to hear me, and I called for other reasons, too. An idle moment. A faked marriage with a stranger. The grey swamp between the day I left and where I was now. But instead of my husband, I just got some stale filler.

The number you have just dialed —

Not even a recorded version of his.

— is not available .

Just those machined words.

Please leave a message —

That metal woman.

Leave.

Please.

The second thing they tell you about hitchhiking is never accept invitations home for tea because tea really means dinner and dinner really means sex and sex really means they’re going to kill you.

What’s for tea, wifey? Ozzie asked as I came back from the pay phone.

Aye, there, she’s my wifey, not yours! I’ve got a freezer to the lid with snappers if you’re keen.

I’m keen , I said, thinking, What else could I be?

While he was frying the snappers, a splash of oil burned Ozzie’s arm, but he just laughed a fat, heavy one and said, Good as gold, goodasgold, goodasgold. He showed me a few scars on his arms and a long, brutal one running down the side of his knee. This one’ll be a beaut , he said, admiring the blister island filling with juice from somewhere deep inside him.

Judas had an old couch on his porch where we ate sitting in a row, but at first the plates were too hot to set on our bare knees, so we had to hold them by the edges, and the fish was too hot to eat so we just stared, a strange meditation, like this was our offering — slain, fried fish for some kind of god. After we ate, Ozzie and Judas went behind the house to deal with the machine they had been talking about earlier.

Be a good wifey , Judas said, kissing the top of my head. We’ll be out in the back with the beast. Judas was still wearing his sunglasses and I realized I still hadn’t seen my temporary husband’s eyes.

Ozzie laughed. Aye, the beast! He punched Judas’s arm.

I sat on the couch mostly asleep with my eyes open, thinking of nighttime ocean, listening to the black mumble of it out there. For a while I heard metal hitting metal, slowly at first then faster and faster, then a kind of sawing noise, then it all went away. Everything got quiet and I couldn’t even hear Ozzie or Judas speaking. I wondered where they’d gone, what their mouths were doing if not filled with beer or barking at each other. The ocean kept mumbling.