The Suicide Motor Club (2 page)

“See what, sir?”

“I forget. I can't feel my legs.”

“You're just rattled, you'll be okay. Help is coming. Be strong for me.”

“I know what it means when you can't feel your legs.”

“Sometimes, yeah, but not always.”

“Can you get me out of here?”

“I don't think so.”

“My head hurts.”

“They're going to need to cut you out,” Lively said. “They're coming.”

“I fucked up, you know?”

“Be strong.”

“I can't.”

“Be strong for her. She needs you.”

“No. She doesn't.”

The hitcher stroked the man's sweaty hair, even kissing his hairline, anything to comfort him, keep him present.

“She does, man. Believe me. You hold on.”

Robert looked at the moon, thinking he was in a dream where a malevolent quarter hung over the desert like a badge of judgment, thinking he was the serpent and that God had taken the use of his legs. Thinking God had also sped up the script and slain Abel.

Not Abel.

Glendon.

Something about Glen going out the window stirred in his memory, made him start to hitch and sob.

“Where's Glen?”

Silence.

“I need to see my son.”

Lively saw a torn coloring book, saw blood on it, probably the mother's.

But maybe not.

Oh shit a kid, a kid got thrown. Or is he in that mess somewhere? I can't leave this guy but where the fuck is the kid?

“He's fine.”

Feeling his own panic rising up in him, August Lively turned on his internal loop, saw a Vietnamese boy in tap shoes and a top hat singing
this is dinky dau, dinky dinky dinky dau, this is dinky dau, dinky dinky dau
. The kid in his head was like a little god of madness; his holy message conveyed in idiot song was that everything was fucked up and ridiculous and that all you could do was your best. That your best was never going to be enough, that was okay, that was number one, panic was number ten.

If only somebody could radio in a chopper—an ambulance was going to take a month of Sundays, and if neither of these folks had internal injuries, he'd eat his own shorts.

Where the fuck is the kid? Probably dead. Don't let this guy die, too.

“Where are you from?” he asked the stricken man, stroking his head, gritting his teeth, scanning the very dark land for the little boy he knew he wouldn't find. Blood bubbled from the inverted man's nose, a drop running along the side of his nose toward his eye. The hitcher intercepted it with a thumb.

Finally, flashing red lights coming, a siren. Probably the state police. Thank Christ. Thank Buddha. Thank Bugs Bunny. The college guy had done okay.

If cops came, he'd stay with the man and make them look for the kid. If paramedics came, he'd look for the kid.
Dinky fucking dau.

Would he be a suspect? Shirtless, bloody, scruffy, six dollars and a
roach in his pocket? Nobody but two semiconscious accident victims and a mildly stoned UNM sophomore to vouch for him?

Stranger things had happened.

The semiconscious woman sobbed.

Then she laughed.

—

IT SEEMED TO JUDITH THAT THE MOON HAD SHONE IN THE WINDOW AS THE CAR
rolled, that she saw it exactly twice as it revolved wildly around the crumpling axis of the Falcon, whose interior was mad with the scrambled gravity of purse and coins and sand and crayons. She would never forget the noise of it, the earsplitting sound of everything breaking, her husband's shout stomped flat by the composite heel of dashboard, roof, windshield. When everything settled, she had something like an out-of-body experience, only she wasn't a disembodied spirit—she experienced the scene through the eyes of another person. She saw herself from above and feared she was dead, with her shirt wrenched halfway around and blood in her eye, her black hair matted and plastered to her cheek. She was upside-down, resting on her neck. She knew then that she wasn't herself but a man; she used hands the color of cocoa to grab her own white limbs, pulling herself free from the impossibly flat, impossibly twisted Falcon. Her new hand cradled the small head that once belonged to her, supporting it in case the neck was broken. A small boulder that should have dashed the brains from her had instead sheared off the door and propped the chassis up to give her the space she needed to live, and the man she was now stooped and shouldered her body past this. You shouldn't move accident victims, this man she was knew better than most, but the angle at which she had come to rest seemed to put weight on her neck, and he wanted to see the rest of her body, see where all the blood might be coming from. That she saw herself from another human being's eyes
didn't surprise her so much—she had dreams that came true sometimes, and this experience, while different, seemed cut somehow from the same cloth of unreality.

When she came back into her own body, she knew it was for a period of trial and great tragedy. She had the idea that her son was dead, and this seemed cruel to her, or random, and neither cruelty nor happenstance seemed compatible with the idea of a benign and responsible God. She believed in God, she
needed
him. Now was no time to doubt his motives, wrecked in the desert at night. She sobbed. Then she realized how foolish she was being, taking a dream so seriously. It had to be a dream, because she thought monsters with shining eyes had taken Glendon. Monsters! It was ridiculous. A black man's broad face loomed down at her, kind and wise. She thought she smelled pot. She laughed.

Then everything went away.

SHE WOKE UP AFTER A LONG DITCH OF NOTHING.

Her eyes wouldn't open all the way.

The lights, the tray with a water pitcher, the curtain, all suggested hospital. The next face she saw staring down at her belonged to her little sister, Patricia. She wore a shirt Judith didn't recognize, a pretty coral-colored shirt with a frilly collar. It took Jude a moment to remember that she didn't live at home anymore, that she wouldn't know when Mom got Patsy a new shirt. Nobody in the Eberhart family had wanted to call her Patsy; it was the kind of name to invite teasing, with its connotations of gullibility, especially for a girl like her, but she had preferred that to Patty or Pat, introducing herself as Patsy from the age of five. She wasn't a little girl anymore, but she lived at home. She would always live at home. How old was she? Twenty? Older? Judith was starting to remember something else, something troubling.

“Um,” the young woman said, looking agitated.

Judith tried to say her name, but it came out
Passy
.

“Um. Jude. Mom's not here.”

Judith just watched her. Something horrible was trying to assert itself in Jude's memory, but she fixed on the bright coral fabric of her sister's shirt.

“Mom's in the bathroom. She'll be right back.”

Patsy looked to the hallway, looking for their mother. There was something Judith needed to know, something Patsy didn't want to tell her. Her mother would say the words. Or the man. What was the man's name? Robert. There was a word for what Robert was to her, a word like
lover
or
buzzer
or
hug
.

It would come to her later.

Patsy looked at her now, then looked down, shifting from side to side. She liked Patsy's face. A little like hers, framed in shoulder-length black hair, but thicker in the jaw, her nose turned up. It was a plain, trusting face, the face of a girl who would never stop liking milkshakes. The eyes heavy-lidded and brown, not blue like hers. Like the boy's.

What boy?

“Um. Mom's coming right back, okay? Okay, Jude?”

“Okay,” she managed.

“Your face is bruised a lot.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I don't like how much your face is bruised. It's green. Except your eyes are black like you been in a fight.”

“I guess it's good I can't see my face.”

“It's bruised bad. And it's cut.”

“It'll get better.”

“I know. Mom said.”

Patsy rested her head on Jude's shoulder, touched her cheek with her fingers. Lightly, so lightly. Was anyone as loving as Patsy? She'd never deserved the ugly words other kids had used about her. Jude had never tolerated those words. Billy Verne had shouted
mongoloid
from his bike just across the street from the Sacred Heart Academy and sat there looking tough with a cigarette, but Jude had pushed him off that bike and kicked him with the hard toes of her polished Mary
Janes. Kicked his shins so hard they bled through his khakis. She got suspended for that, but Billy Verne never shouted anything at Patsy again, not from his bike, not from a school bus, not from a second-story window. When Mother asked Father Grogan to talk to her about what she did to Billy, he said, “I'm sure you know our Lord Jesus, who told us to turn the other cheek in the face of violence and ignorance, never would have done such a thing.” Then added, “But, if I'm honest, I doubt he would have stopped you.”

People who knew Patsy loved her.

Especially the boy.

The boy with the coloring book.

“Oh God,” she said, her eyes welling up. “Oh God.”

Patsy patted her cheek.

That was how their mother found them.

—

JUDITH KNEW HER MOTHER HAD NO GIFT FOR DELIVERING BAD NEWS.

When Judith had been fifteen and Patsy ten, the family dog, an affable little mutt named Chester, was buried in the backyard with great pomp after being “struck by a car.” Actually, Chester had been killed by a neighbor's Bedlington terrier. The truth emerged (for her, not Patsy) when her mother got tipsy one night not long before Jude's wedding. On that September day, the kids were at Sacred Heart, their father working at the watch factory. Janet Eberhart had seen the other dog coming. It had finally worried a second plank out of its fence two doors down and wriggled free, and this escape coincided with one of Chester's smiley, ambling tours around the yard to water the heaps of raked leaves. When Janet saw the Bedlington streaking across the next-door neighbor's lawn, her first thought had been
My, that sheep runs fast
, but then the wretched, curly thing had grabbed poor, screaming Chester by the neck and started shaking him like one of the
knotted socks her dog so enjoyed tugging tugs-of-war with. Janet had fetched a rake from the porch and tried to swat the other dog off Chester, but she hit the victim as often as the aggressor. The Bedlington's owner, a neurotic drama teacher whose wife took long trips away, came bounding across the yard separating their properties and, to Janet's astonishment, ducked under her rake to shield his dog, tugging impotently at the thing's collar. The murderer's name was Brando, and she would dream that name for years. “Brando,” the little man said again and again, “Brando, Brando, please!” as if admonishing a good but stubborn child. When Brando finally let drop his prey and suffered himself to be led home, his owner, receding across the lawn with his captive, babbled a barely punctuated apology at Janet without meeting her eyes, “I really don't know what got into him I'm so,
we're
so sorry, of course I'll compensate you it's just awful I've been meaning to fix that fence but I'm not handy like your husband I should have just paid somebody to do it I guess oh what will the girls think I'm beside myself I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry you bad bad dog I'll never forgive you.” Janet had just held her rake and watched them go, the terrier proud of itself, the man ridiculous with his cheeks, his lime-green shirt, his European scarf all speckled with blood, his own hand bleeding from a bite. And Chester just limp and finished near a pile of poplar leaves.

She took the dog to the vet and left him there. When the girls got home at three, she told them Chester had run off, but not to worry. Their father would take care of things. Patsy believed her, of course, but Judith had been old enough to sort out that Chester wasn't coming home alive. If the dog had run off, Mom would have set the girls making signs to nail up on light poles while she called every shelter in Fresno. Judith knew “Dad's taking care of things” would mean coming up with a story and presenting a body. She had excused herself to cry in her room so Patsy wouldn't know.

—

WHEN HER MOTHER TOLD HER, “GLEN'S NOT DEAD, HONEY, HE CAN'T BE,” AND
“Robert's banged up but the doctors are hopeful,” and “Nobody can believe how lucky you were; aside from the concussion and the cut on your face, you were barely injured,” Judith knew she'd have to wait for a doctor to tell her something like the truth. Her father would talk straight to her, but her father was still in California.

It turned out the last thing her mother said was correct; she really was lightly injured for the violence of that wreck. The worst pain she had came not from her lacerations or bruises, but from a twisted ankle that was expected to heal without future impediment. The paramedic who loaded her onto the ambulance came to see her in the hospital, told her, “There just wasn't room enough for a person to live in that car, but you did. There was only one place on the ground your head could have gone without busting on a rock and you found it. I keep trying to tell myself it's just luck but I can't. I hadn't been to church in ten years but I went after I saw you. You weren't just lucky. You were
spared
.”

He left a pamphlet next to her water pitcher.

She started to read it but then put it in her drawer, next to another religious pamphlet a visiting nun had left her. She liked the nun's pretty Catholic pamphlet better with its illuminated manuscript pictures—the paramedic's was a Protestant cartoon about heaven and hell, and in very poor taste, but she thought she should give it a chance, too.

I'll read them both when I get my son back. That's the deal.

But there was no deal.

Glendon Lamb was declared missing. The Torrance County Sheriff's Department and almost a hundred volunteers, mostly church folks from Albuquerque and Pueblo Indians from Isleta, combed the scrubland near Clines Corners. Paint scrapings confirmed the involvement
of a red car, but Judith's testimony about the people with the shining eyes made the officer who took her statement stop writing. State troopers in New Mexico and their counterparts in west Texas set up roadblocks looking for Glendon, as well as for a black Camaro and a red sports car, possibly traveling together, the latter possibly driven by a bald Caucasian suspect.

Judith had been out for three days.

Her account of the abduction made no sense.

“Their eyes were
shining
. Shining how, Mrs. Lamb?”

“Like a cat. Like cat's eyes in the grass by the side of the road.”

“Shining.”

“Yes.”

The first man on the scene never saw the assailants with the shining cat's eyes.

The trail went hopelessly cold.

—

MEANWHILE, ROBERT LAMB LAY DYING.

His fragile body would never be able to handle the trauma of surgery, nor his split liver the burden of a general anesthetic; even surgery might not stop his brain from swelling. He lingered in a dimly lit room for nine days. Judith came to see him on day five. He had been waking up intermittently, sometimes to cry, sometimes to roll his eye around. When Judith limped into the room and sat down by the bed, she took his remaining hand in hers and he opened his eye. His yellow eye sat mounted in a sunken triangle of yellow flesh where the bandages had been cut to let him see. He fixed that eye on her and she grew cold knowing he was going to say something she didn't want to hear. It is possible to think that she needed to hear the words he slurred around his tube over the next hour, that his brief
lucidity was in itself a sort of rough providence. Without the toxic words he poured into her ears, her hopelessness might not have been complete, and she might not have taken steps to become what she became.

The man with the yellow eye told the bruised woman a story.