Highway 24 (2 page)

Red reflectors glowed in the distance, flashing brighter as he passed a hatchback sitting on the shoulder. Her car? Nothing to be done. She had jumped on the road. The moment she launched over the hood was seared in his memory. The clunks rang in his head, louder in retrospect, as her head struck glass and metal. He imagined the skull fracturing like a soft-boiled egg, driving splinters of broken bone into her hemorrhaging brain where her dented head bled out.

He closed his eyes and shook his head to clear the sickening thoughts of the death for which he bore responsibility.
My God, I’m one of those disgusting hit and run drivers. Aren’t they just pathetic cowards?
A dull ache spread across his forehead, warning of an incipient migraine. Think positive, he told himself. Damn, that’s what those inspirational speakers the sales managers always trotted out would say. God, he hated those quacks.

His only comfort was she must have died from the first blow. At least he didn’t make her suffer. No one survived that sort of trauma.

Find a payphone, call it in anonymously. That was the smart thing to do, get out of trouble, but it did nothing to assuage his guilt.

The yellow dashes zipped past him, marking his distance from the accident. A sudden chill shook his innards and inched across his skin, extending its fingers down his back as hoarfrost spreads over a window. The ache across his forehead throbbed.
Now, I’m getting sick.
He figured he deserved some measure of physical pain. A sweet, heavy scent filled the car. Lilacs?
Look back
. The urge crept into his thoughts. You’re spooked, he told himself. He forced his mind elsewhere, anywhere but that bundle on the road behind him. He focused on the dark pavement emerging beneath the headlights, watched for the mile markers, anything to resist the habit of glancing at the mirror.

Burnt rubber fouled the air, mixing with the lilac scent. He glanced at the dash to find the temperature gauge read normal. Ignoring the latest smell, he turned back to the endless stream of yellow marks. The acrid odor intensified. The air seemed to crackle with energy. His attention jerked to the rear-view mirror and stayed there.

Two green eyes, rimmed with eyeliner, stared at him from the backseat. A stray, brown curl hung below the girl’s left eyebrow.

“My shoe!” screamed the girl.

Her cry knocked him breathless with flailing fists of anger to his chest.

Paul had heard the phrase “scared to death” before and thought it a myth, until now. He slammed the brake pedal to the floor. His muscles locked, not only with the abrupt slowing of the car, but from seeing that face again.

He hunched forward. For the second time in less than an hour, his car fishtailed, wheels screeched. Twice it spun, a wounded berserker careening down the highway. It lurched to a stop, flinging Paul toward the passenger seat.

He looked to the mirror but found only the empty darkness out the back window. He gripped the steering wheel so tight his arms shook. He knew he should jump out of the car, flee whatever demon haunted him from the backseat, but his hands wouldn’t let go. Too frightened to move, he waited for her to scream, to grasp his shoulder and drag him to hell. Terror sent his heart into overdrive. His head throbbed in time with his heart, a ticking alarm clock. His lungs strained to catch a breath as he wheezed. Hyperventilation hovered mere gasps away. A cutting chill sliced through his core. He thought he was about to die.

The car sat perpendicular to the road, its wheels straddling the center line. As the engine idled, his strength returned and his stiffened muscles relaxed. When he summoned the courage to look in the backseat, he saw nothing of the green-eyed girl. He slipped the gear into park to do a proper search of the car. The lilac and burnt rubber that had overpowered every other scent had vanished. No trace remained, not a whiff.

He righted himself in the driver’s seat. The object of the girl’s anger lay on the floor, upside down in the shadows beneath the glove compartment. He shuddered as he eyed the shoe, which once held her foot, had once soaked up her scent and heat. He reached for it but stopped before touching it. The thing was an evil talisman, he decided, and touching it might bring the girl storming back from whatever world she inhabited.
Why did I have to pick it up?

If she wanted her shoe back, Paul was determined to give it to her. He turned the car around and barreled toward the accident scene, his gaze flitting between the road, the rear-view mirror, and the shoe. He planned to stop long enough to throw the shoe at the body. He’d never put any stock in ghosts and spirits. A bit of fun, they were. But close encounters made believers.
Damn the forensic evidence
. Who would analyze a shoe anyway?

He slowed when he perceived the outlines of trees along the creek in his headlights. He stopped at the bridge. Somehow he had missed a pink-shrouded corpse sprawled on a slate road. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. He glanced at the shoe laying on the floor, his only solid hold on what had happened. Retracing his earlier path, he inched the car forward while staring at the coarse pavement. He expected to find bold, black streaks from his tires and a dark red patch from the girl’s blood. He found nothing. The road bore no remnants of his encounter. Only the stolen shoe remained.

The tires crunched the gravel as he steered his car onto the shoulder. He didn’t recall passing the pulled-over hatchback, either. Had any of it really happened? He needed to think. He’d seen that shoe before. Maybe it was déjà vu, but he’d seen it. He closed his eyes to replay the events: the girl, the accident, the shoe, the ghost or his hallucination. He racked his addled brain, searching for the path in his memory to the shoe. Relax. Think. He closed his eyes and inhaled slow breaths. Exhaustion took over as his chin nodded toward his chest.

Minutes later, he woke with a start.
Damn, those relaxation techniques I’ve read about actually work.
One look at the white shoe among the shadows on the floor brought all the memories crashing back. He wasn’t in a bad dream. He wasn’t insane; at least he didn’t think so. A glance over his shoulder assured him those green eyes had not returned. Empty fields with black shadows stretched for miles along the deserted road.

On impulse he grabbed the shoe and scrambled out the door. With all his adrenaline-laced strength, he pitched it toward a field. The shoe turned end over end, a brilliant white baton from a relay he did not wish to run. As the shoe descended, the darkness swallowed it. He didn’t hear it strike the ground. Amazing out there in all that silence. Maybe it landed in a soft furrow. He drove away, resuming the trip he had begun hours before.

A sense of victory buoyed his spirits, which rose in proportion to his distance from the shoe. Warily he chanced a glance in the rear-view mirror. No green eyes. No shoe. Nothing but empty road and yellow dashes. He returned his gaze to the highway in front of him.

At the first hint of color, he applied the brakes.
No. No. No!
An amorphous, pink bundle lay across the road. Ten yards from the body, he stopped. Was this insanity, its physical incarnation? The supine figure wore a bloody halo. Horror followed him, sneering and laughing, nipping at his heels. Across his path lay a Cerberus guarding the gates of his guilt-ridden nightmare, beyond which he could not venture.

“What do you want?” he shouted, but he didn’t need to ask. He turned to the passenger seat where he knew the talisman would be. The well-traveled white shoe pointed forward with a tapered toe. It glowed, the white aura brightening the seat. He was beyond fear of touching anything at this point. Desperation to put an end to the business drove his hand toward the shoe, grasping an opportunity to reunite them, but when he turned back to the road, the body had vanished, leaving the pavement unblemished. He dropped the shoe in the seat. Frustration gave way to anger.

“What do you want, bitch?” he shouted. “I’m sorry!”

He slapped the steering wheel three times with both hands. Venting brought a modicum of emotional relief but not physical. He pressed his palm against his forehead. His headache had returned.

Paul turned the car around toward Wailing Creek. Was it braver to push on or to go back? He didn’t know the answer. Without a clue as to what he would do, his conscience drove him back toward the creek where this mess began. He had to return to the beginning, he reasoned, and find the right path out.

Two bright balls of white, tinted with yellow, marked his approach. When Paul drew even with the lights, he saw a sheriff’s seal emblazoned on the door, a five-pointed bronze star enclosing the scales of justice. A broad-shouldered man, with his arms folded across his chest, leaned against the rear door of the cruiser. He wore a beige uniform and a wide black belt cinched at an angle around his waist.

Paul looked the sheriff in the face as he coasted past. He recognized a familiar sadness in the man’s features, a hollowness about the eyes, the same unrelenting remorse that had forged a barrier between Paul and his father. The sheriff stared back, unwavering, questioning. Paul wondered what crime the sheriff suspected of him. Maybe someone reported his erratic driving, but who? The sheriff was the first light or human he’d seen in hours. What would the sheriff make of the purloined shoe? Paul watched in the rearview mirror the cruiser’s taillights fade into the darkness and disappear when he crossed Wailing Creek.

* * * *

At half past three, Paul entered Cawker, the first town he came to, a small dot on an empty space of map. As previous trips had revealed, there was no place to stay here. The last motel was a husk of a building with weathered plywood covering the windows and paint peeling off the once red doors. No one had bothered to knock down the eyesore.

Iced coffee from a gas-and-sip recharged his senses. Paul drove without purpose, following a meandering path through the streets of the small town, a wholly different landscape than the highway. Interlocking branches closed above him, forming a cave, a catacomb to his rattled imagination with each darkened house a recess for the dead. He convinced himself at intervals that the girl on the road had never been there, some sort of hallucination from sleep deprivation and too much alcohol and caffeine. Then he would catch sight of the shoe in the glare of a streetlamp, his pleasant explanation would vanish, and he would have to convince himself all over again. His stunned psyche mirrored the stunted shopping district, a plague of vacant stores. In the corner of a grocer’s parking lot, he stopped beneath the branches of a massive oak. An orange glow on the eastern horizon declared the grip of darkness was slackening, that this strange night would indeed end.

The morning sun blared through the car window into his sleepy face. He rubbed his forehead as he roused, and remembered the nightmare that had brought him here. A black shadow of a heeled shoe cut across the passenger seat. He screamed and slammed his back against the door, instantly alert. The shoe dangled from the rear-view mirror, secured with his tie. He poked it. The shoe bobbed, coming directly at his face. A solid stroke with his hand broke the loose knot and sent the shoe tumbling to the floor.

He looked over his shoulder. The girl wasn’t in the car, but she had left a message. He shuddered, imagining the green-eyed girl crouching over his sleeping form. A sweet, fleeting scent of lilacs teased his nose. He grabbed the necktie and flung it into the backseat, where he had left it the evening before. The speckled band coiled loosely across the upholstery.

The shoe lay upside down in a patch of morning sun. The fresh perspective jolted his memory. In a box in his parents’ garage, that was where he’d seen it. The memory shot to the forefront, clear and vivid as the sunny Saturday afternoon on which he had seen it. The shoe had lain on top of the box, out of place amid the household junk and the earthy scent of sawdust. The worn belt from a vacuum cleaner hugged the heel. A deep scratch extended across the sole starting at the toe. He examined the shoe in front of him and found a similar—no, the same exact—scar marring the sole.

“It can’t be,” he said aloud.

He remembered questioning his father about the shoe. “What are you going to fix with this?” he had asked, holding up the shoe.

“Put it back,” his father had snapped. “It’s one of your mother’s old shoes.”

Paul doubted the story; his mother never wore heels that high. “What’s it doing out here?”

“How should I know? She probably lost the mate.” His father wrenched the box from him. His gaze flitted across his son’s face. The old man—for Paul always remembered his father as an old man, worn out and given up—thrust the box against the wall under a workbench.

Paul never saw the shoe again, nor did he pursue more of an explanation. He had assumed it would lead to an illicit tale, something he didn’t want to know. In the months following his father’s death, his mother had chucked out or donated all of the man’s belongings. He assumed the shoe had ended up in the trash, rotting away in a junkyard.

A yellowish garbage truck in sore need of new paint lumbered down an alley toward Paul’s car. The sound pulled him out of his thoughts and reminded him he was supposed to be at work. He called his manager to plead sickness. They bantered about being stuck out in the sticks. He told a plausible story about a headache from all the driving, partially true. What other words would describe him now except sick? He complained of the poor signal quality when the garbage truck roared past him and thus put an end to the call. His manager had a habit of prattling on.

Paul turned his attention back to the scratch on the shoe’s sole. For twenty years his father had driven the same route that Paul now traveled. One day the old man quit without notice and took a lower-paying job. Paul remembered his mother’s rage. She didn’t speak to the man for a month. More family time his father had claimed, but no one believed him. Paul figured his father had quit because he wasn’t moving up anymore and was on the verge of getting canned anyway.

This was about the same time a rift seemed to come between them. His father’s gaze no longer held his own. When they spoke, however sporadically, a palpable barrier separated them, like the grill in a confessional, only his father refused to confess. Every night and weekend the old man retreated to his workshop behind the garage, where he found sanctuary crafting rocking chairs and tables. That’s where they found him one November morning, collapsed over an unfinished table, with a clamp held in his stiff fingers and yellowish wood glue puddled on the floor.