Three Miles Past Read online

[“Interstate Love Affair”] I distinctly remember pulling over to the side of the road out by Shallowater, Texas one day and getting most of the way in the ditch so I could write down the first sentence or two of this story. Like it had just drifted in through the side glass. And then, after scratching down those few words, about a hundred yards down the road there was this big old mangy dog running in the ditch. So I stopped, went out into the cotton fields, chased him down, cornered him some lucky how, carried him back to the cab of my truck and closed the door gently, so as not to spook him. Then I got in behind the wheel, to take us on what I was sure was going to be the first of our many adventures. Except he kept coming across the bench seat and biting me on the arm and the side and the shoulder. So, after about four miles of that I had to pull over again, dive out my side so that dog could explode out past me, go on with whatever his plans had been for that day, before I delivered him far off course. Then, hunting a month or so later with one of my cousins, who’s into medicine, I kept asking him all these oblique, kind of sidelong questions about, you know, like, what if somebody had rabies, say, and they didn’t want to have it anymore, like, what would this hypothetical person this character I was writing maybe do about that whole situation? And, that walk through the trees when I was just completely camouflaging my real intentions, this snowstorm was blowing in hard and blinding, and we weren’t dressed even close for it, but we were Blackfeet, on Blackfeet land, so we weren’t so nervous. Just step, squint, lean into the wind; wash rinse repeat, until some kind of blue light just fizzed into existence right over our heads, enough to cast our shadows in the wrong directions, bright enough that we ducked, didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know what could be happening. And then a few steps later we kind of felt something, and looked back into Glacier Park, to one of those big rock faces that reach into the sky higher than Tolkien ever dreamed, and this snowy face of it that must have been the size of Rhode Island, it just calved off, fell in slow motion, so far away. And that’s related to this, for me. That massiveness. Our smallness in comparison. That combination of mystery and fear that adds up to awe, if you can just not look away. But, that Deridder-lift that gets things going: I’d recently studied that from every angle I had access to, and still couldn’t decide if it was some animal not on the books or if it was just hype. The way my heart was pounding, though, it was real real real. I wanted to go there, lick the asphalt where that animal had been found. So, William, for me, he was how I charted the distance between ‘cryptid’ and ‘Pomeranian.’ Also involved, I guess, was I’d had to bail one of my dogs out from the pound in Lubbock not long before. The tech walked me back to this one black dog they had that didn’t really fit the description I’d given, but what the heck, and sure enough it was her, and her intestines had all fallen out, were hanging down in the newly-loose skin of her left leg, and her front paw was just a skeleton hand she was holding up because it wouldn’t take weight anymore, and she was mostly burn and blood and starvation, and the tech kind of eeked his mouth out, said Why hadn’t the driver just put her down already? I kind of wondered that too. She should have died in the road. Except she had to come home. We were her people. And, because there was nowhere to hold her that didn’t make her cry out, she had to drag herself out to the truck, get up into it herself. And it was a tall truck. And she made it through those next few weeks, her whole body white with gauze, then she limped through the next eight years, and finally only died up here in Colorado, after many more injuries (she cut her neck way too open once, she had some teeth knocked out with a bat, she got chewed by other dogs, but still, I’d trade any ten dogs just to have her again. any ten dogs and most people). So this story, it’s about dogs, yeah. I think most of my stories are, really. Dog and trucks, and fathers, all in some narrative petri dish, just add antifreeze and radiation, let cook overnight. But, the more macro why of this story: I’d told somebody once, and said it like I knew what I was talking about, that we should all, at least once, write the thing we’re most scared of. For me, that’s always been a person with a dog head. My single biggest fear is walking around some corner and into the chest of some solid dude, then looking up, and up, and seeing this Anubis kind of head just starting to tilt down, apprehend this disturbance. It still terrifies me. I thought I could exorcise it with this story, but, man this story just made it so much worse. I wrote it in like three days, I think, and loved it, thought it was perfect, but it wouldn’t let go of me the way most stories will, or know to do. So then I wrote forty or fifty thousand more words of it, turned it into this big violent novel, hoping to get rid of that image. It was an effort that cost me nearly twenty pounds, too. Every time I sat down to write it, to back my way into this particularly dark space, that dog-head guy would stand up just behind me and I couldn’t turn around, couldn’t even think how to, so I’d gag, not be able to eat for that whole day. But I couldn’t let go of the keyboard, either, knew that the only way out was by writing. That’s always the only real way out. So I tried, and I tried, and it completely didn’t work, if what chasing that novel down was supposed to do was make me not scared of dog-headed people. Really, it just gave them names, and trucks. But, anyway, this piece that’s here, it’s the front of that novel. And very much involved with it is how much I always hated getting ticks and ringworms and lice in elementary school. Well, not the lice so much, who cares about lice, but I always hated having a tick on me, latched deep, and always felt like my revulsion was a very specific kind, that I was feeling it deeper than anybody else who was having a tick on them. And, yeah, the title’s completely an STP-steal; that’s one of my favorite of all songs. And, as for why Tomball, it’s that the whole Houston area’s always freaked me out. It’s so hot and humid and muggy, and there’s so many people, and they’re all doing all these things I can’t even guess at, and for reasons I’ll never know. But I can’t write about the city, I never really understand cities, so I wrote about out where one of my good friends lives, because the pastures out that direction, I kind of recognize them. They feel real to me in a way that I can do them on the page. And, I-10 there: I’ve driven ruts in that road, I think, going back and forth from Texas to Florida. You get a lot of ideas, late at night. And sometimes they turn into stories, and you think you can vomit them up through your fingertips, be done with it, have it gone for good. But there’s always more.

  [“No Takebacks”] That elegance you’re always looking for with code? How some red-eyed night you might sneak up on a recursive statement that can make a page or two not matter anymore? How you can luck your way into a simple string_replace trick or a way of passing variables nobody’s thought of yet, but that everybody should have been thinking of all along? That’s exactly the same elegance you’re looking for with fiction. Or, that’s exactly the same elegance I’m always looking for, anyway. I’ll stay awake however long it takes to luck onto it. I’ll do the piece over and over, trying every which way, even ways I know are going to be broke, just on the chance that the right way’ll be shadowing me as I work. And that I can turn my head fast enough to see it. Problem is, I don’t have nearly enough elegance to try to program and write fiction, at least not anymore. Or maybe it’s a patience-thing, or maybe I’m just not smart enough to manage both. Or maybe I’ve just had too many concussions, finally. But I still remember that hazy joy of being awake for three days, peeling through pages of not-really-that-natural syntax, and how it can all be worth it with one magic Return. This story comes directly from that. I’d done it once before, with this story that turned up in Asimov’s, but this story took a dark turn just a whole lot faster. It completely surprised me, too. I went in thinking it was going to be a couple thousand words and done, go see a movie now, you earned that torn stub, but it kept scaring me more and more, and there kept being more layers under the one I thought had already been the last one. That last scene? It still terrifies me. Of everything I’ve written, it’s been the stickiest, at least for me. But I guess that’s just because, like Eli Roth says, t
he best horror, it’s personal. Which is to say, the horror that works best on me, the horror I can make the most real, it’s the horror that just bleeds up through my pores. That’s in my DNA deeper than I can ever get at with anything but story. So. That morning before the afternoon I wrote this story, my wife and I’d hit a garage sale, and she’d bought this huge ancient-old surely-haunted lamp, then put it in the back of our truck such that, every time I checked the rearview, there was that lampshade, sneaking up on me. It was spectacularly creepy. But—it was like this deer head I grew up with, that my granddad I never met had shot before I was born. That deer stalked my whole childhood. It got to where I couldn’t sleep if that deer wasn’t on the wall in my room, so I could watch it, keep it from stepping out of the wall. I dreamed about it so many nights, and then, one night, I woke from a nightmare of that deer and it was in bed with me, had fallen off the wall. That was a bad night. And now this lamp, it was my deer, just all at once, some kind of childhood-horror transference that I’d stupidly assumed I could be immune to. If I could see that lamp in the rearview, then that meant I knew where it was, at least. And that was far better than the alternative. So, as these things go, I came home, wrote this story after lunch, just all at once, like a backcountry amputation, and still had to sneak upstairs when I was done. And that sneaking-upstairs, it was way more complicated than usual that night, because light, that’s supposed to be what saves you, right? Except now it was lamps I was terrified of. And then, to make it all worse, for some reason we put that lamp in the landing outside our bedroom door, so, some nights I’ll still wake up, kind of look out there, and there’s that lamp, just standing there. Waiting. I hate that lamp. In the nighttime, at least. In daytime, it’s pretty all right. But so’s the deer. And, as for the dog stuffed with jewelry, I think that’s from a trip to the vet with a sick dog. She’d been eating rocks, and was looking pretty dead on her feet, and I got to talking to the vet about all the weird things she’s had to cut-and-forceps out of dogs. And there was some pretty insane stuff, and I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it all. And about what if she only thought the dogs had been eating all that on their own. And, that scene early on, where they’re hanging in the kitchen and the dad comes in, for some reason that feels like one of the most real things I’ve ever written. I’m not good at just a whole lot of stuff, I don’t think, but I can do sixteen years old like nobody’s business. No clue why, really. Once Will Christopher Baer said to me that I really had this teen-angst thing all the way down, man. I left thinking yeah, he sees it, he knows, dude’s got an eye. Except then I got to thinking that maybe that wasn’t so much of a compliment. But I can still take it that way, if I squint right. And, as for the title, it’s just—we don’t get any takebacks, right? And I think that’s good. The world would be all messed up if we did. One of my favorite stories, RM Berry’s “Metempsychosis,” that first bit’s always haunted me: “Dougherty dreams of second chances. He doesn’t feel cheated so much as simply baffled by irreversibility. Things happen. They don’t happen again.” For all of my life, I’ve been right there with Dougherty. And many thanks to Laird Barron for picking this one up for the debut issue of Phantasmagorium. I like to think Laird’s one of the smarter people I know—and I know he’s one of the best writers writing—so, that he ran it, it means a lot.

  [“The Coming of Night”] I started this one completely meaning to write a choose-your-own-adventure story. Except then I realized that, if this guy’s the killer he thinks he is, then there’s not really any choice, is there? Of course not. For other, weaker people, maybe. But not for him. For him there’s only ever one bright shining path, and he’s most definitely walking it, never needing to look to either side, or behind. I wrote this one very spur-of-the-moment, too, kind of as a test: I was teaching an on-line workshop for LitReactor, and figured the best way to show how to write a story is to just maybe write a story, let the class watch it happen scene-by-scene. Which is so much more difficult than I’d suspected, especially when people start chiming in after each new bit, especially this one student Derek Palmer, who’s a dangerously intuitive reader, the kind it’s hard to ever get ahead of. Those kinds of readers, though, they make you better. But still, that ‘test’-part: I figured if I was any kind of halfway real writer, then this was a thing I should be able to get done. And so I did. The only way to go into things is with nerve, right? But you can fake it, too. I always fake it. I opened my notebook pretty much at random and pointed to a story premise: kill a guy, find leathery eggs in his gut. take those eggs home. incubate them? That was all I had to go on, and that first public session, I probably crossed two-thousand words or so. Which isn’t much. But for me it was some distance, since it was largely in a bar, and I don’t know the first thing about bars. The real meat, for me, though, it was getting that first vic back to the hotel room, then getting down to the sharp-edged part of the night. I love writing that kind of stuff. Really, I’ve got this other novel, this way violent thing, that’s pretty much just that, over and over. Some days you want to see how far you can go, right? And maybe peer over into where you definitely shouldn’t go. And then sneak across anyway. But this guy, man, he’s one of my all-time favorite characters. I love his efficiency, his sense of purpose. And, those eggs, they about killed me. I had no idea what was going to be in them, where they were from, what they were for, and I wasn’t real sure I was going to have the nerve to figure it out. Even the fake nerve. This is one of those stories where I kept writing dead ends and having to backtrack (publicly). As for where they’re from, those eggs, it’s something I read in . . . maybe Harry Crews’ Childhood? Or maybe some Dorothy Alison? Except those are all seeming halfway wrong—right part of the country, wrong writers. Anyway, somewhere I read that a turtle egg, no matter how long you boil it, the shell either will or won’t go soft. Or hard. It won’t go the opposite of whatever it is in the first place. And that just confuses me. I mean, I guess it means that turtle eggs, they don’t act like other eggs. And I can’t figure why. And I have no real idea how other eggs act, either, but still, turtle eggs, they’re not like those other, boring eggs. Which makes them so, so interesting to me. And, I think I wrote this story after seeing a bunch of turtle heads popping up in the ocean down off Baja California, right about sunset. I thought they were seals at first, but they were turtles, just periscoping up to see if this was a good place to come lay some eggs. I guess. Or maybe they were waiting for me to go to sleep, so they could come gnaw my throat open, I don’t know. Of all the animals, turtles are forever the most scary to me. My great-grandfather, when I was young he told me that, if a turtle ever bit me, then it wouldn’t let go until it thundered. So I grew up being absolutely terrified of turtles. I remember once finding one eating a rat head, and just knowing that rat head was what was left of me, that I was sneaking an accidental peek into the someday future. Another time I got hopelessly marooned out on a rock in a creek, because I thought I saw a turtle. So, anything that comes from a turtle, and possibly holds more turtles, for me that thing’s going to automatically have a high creep factor. Used to, as kind of a ward, I had this page I’d photocopied up from some architecture memoir anthology or something—it was this one architect’s childhood drawings of turtles. Just in margins, on envelopes, wherever. Like they were in him, and were always going to be leaking out through his pencil. But then one day one of his teachers told him turtles were stupid, he needed to stop drawing turtles, and—this is the horror part of this—he listened to her. After that, he never drew another turtle, and finally drifted into a successful career in architecture. I kind of felt like, hanging that photocopy up, it told turtles that we were good, that it was all all right. That I understood. But I don’t. Also related to all this, I guess, is that I’ve never even once driven by a turtle in the road without circling back, carrying it to the ditch it’s pointing at in its slow, deliberate way. And sometimes I end up sitting there after, to be sure that was really the way that turtle meant to be going. I have n
o human feeling for those people who steer over, to clip turtles, flip them across the other lane like a tiddlywink. I’ve found those turtles, bloody and cracked, so confused that their one defense wasn’t enough, when it always had been. And I’ve walked those turtles to the fence, pulled the necessary dirt over them, and lowered my head in apology. Just for being human. And, those strange-nosed folk in this story, who I kind of saw as angels: they’re completely a graft from Star Trek Next Generation. The Traveler’s species. That guy always fascinates me. Whenever I have downtime, I often find myself thinking of him. The original title for this story was “Little Stealers,” too. I think it was ramping off that Bradbury story “Small Assassins.” But I can’t imagine why this story would ever have been called “Little Stealers.” That must have been some dead-end I ran down, backed out of. Also I should cite this one Charles Beaumont story, “The Howling Man,” from (for me) Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s The Weird. It’s kind of just a joke of a story, but the lightness of the delivery, this kind of over-constructed indirectness, this mid-twentieth-century casual ‘worldliness,’ it kept making me think it was on purpose, that it was told like that because it was trying to hide something far, far darker, something that was still going to be there after the punchline. Something Beaumont had seen, and been a part of. And this was as close as he could come to documenting it, as warning for the rest of us. It’s one of the main things stories are for, isn’t it? We shouldn’t let ourselves forget. And, the ending for this one, it took a lot of tries. About a week’s worth of them, hammering away every afternoon. Which is way unusual for me, as far as short stuff goes. But this one, I couldn’t let it go, I couldn’t throw it away. Most of my horror stories, they leave me kind of weirded out, like, I know this is one of those nights I’m not turning the light off. But this one, it hit me a lot deeper, in a much more vital place. Just reduced me to nothing, erased me. Hopefully it touches you a little bit wrong as well.