Bentley Little: The Burning

Managing a rental-car office had never been his career goal, however. It had been only a way to earn money while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. And since he lived at home and had minimal expenses, he'd been able to save quite a lot over the past few years-enough to get him across country at least. If things didn't work out, he could always come back, but for now he was free, and the feeling was liberating.

He just wished his dad could be here to see this.

And to help him with the packing.

He checked the ropes again.

"Don't forget to keep your cell phone charged," Cathy said from inside the car. "And keep it on\ You always forget to turn it on."

"I will," he promised.

She emerged from the door on the passenger side, having found room for the first aid kit. "Who knows what kind of wackos are out there? We need to be able to get in touch with you, and you need to be able to call the police."

"Don't go!" their mother cried in Cantonese. "Stay here!"

"Mom'll be okay," Cathy promised.

"Thank you," Dennis said sincerely. He and his sister never really spoke seriously, never had the sort of heart-to-hearts that siblings were probably supposed to have, but he thought now that maybe they didn't need to. They understood these things automatically, without saying what the other was thinking, instinctively grasped the real intent behind superficial discussions.

He was going to miss Cathy more than he'd thought.

"If you strike it rich at the Gold Mountain, we're coming to live with you," she said.

Chinese humor.

He pulled on the roof-rack ropes, just for something to do. He was finished packing, there was no real reason for him to remain, and it was already after two. It was time for him to go, but there seemed something small about such a departure. He was completely uprooting his life, seismically disrupting the lives of his mother and sister. Simply saying good-bye, getting into the car and driving away seemed like an anti-climactic way to recognize the event. He couldn't help thinking that his farewell should be more momentous. But he'd said good-bye to his friends yesterday, and his only family was here with him now, in front of the row house.

They were not a family that was demonstrably emotional, that went in for public displays of affection. Nevertheless, he walked over to his mom and gave her a big hug. She was stiff against him and small. He could feel the bones beneath her clothes and skin, and he realized for the first time how fragile she was.

How old.

It shocked him, and the sadness that followed the shock almost made him reconsider. Who knew how much time she had left? Was it really fair of him to abandon her like this? Was it fair to himself to squander the remaining time they had together? He let go of his mom, stepped back.

But then Cathy was hugging him, taking the initiative, and her embrace was excited, exuberant, and he knew once again that he'd made the right decision. He hugged her back tightly, with meaning, and he promised himself that if things did go well for him, he would send for them.

"Drive carefully," Cathy told him. "And keep your cell phone on."

"I know, I know."

His mother made him promise to call them every night at seven, no matter where he was or what he was doing, and he said he would. He was exhilarated to be setting out on his own, but at the same time it seemed good-it seemed right-to maintain the tether.

The time had come, and he got into the car, waving. Tears were rolling down Cathy's face, and to his surprise, his mother was crying as well. His own vision was blurring, so, deciding to speed things up, he

started the engine, shouted out good-bye in Cantonese and with a quick wave was off.

He forced himself to concentrate on the traffic, on the route, on the specific series of steps that would get him to the interstate, purposely not thinking of his mother and his sister and what he was leaving behind.

By the time he was on Route 76, though, heading west, he was thinking about the future rather than the past, and sadness had given way to anticipation. It felt good to be on the highway,

traveling, and he pushed in a mix CD that he'd made just for the occasion, old-school rock songs that dealt with travel and the open road and the lure of new places.

He had no destination, not really, but something seemed to be calling to him out there. He could admit it to himself now that he was alone. Yes, he wanted to travel, and yes, he was using this journey for the cliched objective of "finding himself." But there was something else as well, something more, a purpose to this trip, though he did not yet know what it was. He'd had a dream the other night about driving down a desert road into a wall of smoke. Within the smoke, he could see eyes, hundreds of them, Chinese eyes, staring out at him, filled with a malevolence that scared him. Above the wall of smoke, as tall as the sky, rose a dark figure with a triangular head that beckoned him forward.

Dennis was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a religious person. His mom was Buddhist, as had been his dad, but he and his sister were nothing. They'd grown up amid Christians and Jews, had watched Christmas specials and hunted for Easter eggs at the park with their friends and were steeped in the Western religious traditions of American society, but the two of them had fallen through the cracks, neither fish nor fowl, and as they'd had no formal training in any religion, only this sort of peripheral exposure, nothing had ever taken. They'd never felt the need to explore any of these theories or philosophies in depth, never required an overarching theory of supernatural causation to get along in the world. They'd been perfectly happy to trust in the rational workings of a natural world without anthropomorphizing the laws of science.

But ...

But he had the sense now that there was some sort of ultimate purpose to his journey, that there was an unknown element pulling him on, and while that should have made him feel uncomfortable, it didn't.

It made him anxious to get out there.

Smiling, pushing his old car to seventy-five in order to keep up with the flow of traffic, he headed west.

Dennis tried to run, but the man with the bat swung hard against the back of his legs, bringing him down in a wild explosion of unimaginable agony. The man was screaming at him in English, but it seemed like a foreign language and Dennis couldn't understand a word of what his pursuer was saying. The bat came down again, this time against the small of his back, and Dennis heard something crack, felt something crack, and suddenly his legs no longer worked. His arms were dragging deadweight as he tried to right . himself.

In the distance, he could hear a train, its lonesome whistle sounding ghostly in the moonless night. Above, crows flapped, moving back and forth, forth and back, cawing, their cries like mocking laughter.

The man slammed a booted foot down on his head, grinding cheek and forehead, ear and eye, into the hard dirt. He said something else in his nonsense English, something low and serious, something final, and Dennis tensed up, waiting for the end.

He awoke drenched in sweat, feeling not as though he'd escaped from a nightmare but as though he'd survived an actual attack. His muscles ached, even his bones were sore, and he got out of bed and walked over to the motel window, pushing aside the curtain and looking out. He was in some small city in western Pennsylvania-he didn't even know the name of it- and though he was well aware that his funds were finite, he'd forgone several smaller, dirtier independent motels in favor of the more expensive Holiday Inn because of cleanliness and comfort and habit. He knew he would have to change that attitude if he expected to survive for any length of time out here, but this first night, he wanted to cling to some semblance of normalcy.