Three Miles Past Read online

  Something complicated: William smiled, pulled the skin tight against his jaw, his six-week beard collecting in the drain, then froze, his elbow out like a bat wing.

  A noise, at the door?

  In the mirror, William was distant, his face lathered in the pink soap from the dispenser. Distant but coiled.

  It was nothing. Raccoon nosing the base of the closed door. Blowby from the big trucks.

  William returned to his beard, stopping with just a mustache for a bit—his father’s, silver the farther it got from his mouth—then going fast over it, deep enough that, near the lip on the left side, the razor burn he could already feel welled up into tiny points of blood. Like he was sweating it.

  Outside, a car or truck rolled across the hose attached to the bell.

  Past that, the interstate, its steel-belted hum.

  William closed his eyes, let it wash over him, then slammed his open hand into the side of the sink, told himself he wasn’t alone, that this could have been it—that you can’t do that, close your eyes in public places. Alone, maybe. But even then.

  William rolled the razor back into its pack, tied the string and ran the water until his beard was gone, and then he peed on top of it. Because the urine, leeching through whatever the hair was going to ball up against in the pipes, the urine would corrode the hair into something else.

  After the beard, William took his shirt off, held it up to the light over the mirror. It was clean, so he didn’t burn it, but he didn’t put it back on, either. Just the jacket. Driving at night was better with no shirt. And he was going to make Beaumont by dawn.

  First, though, the clerk.

  William picked up the key and its ATV wheel, his middle finger in the groove where the wheel had been welded together. So it would roll off when he threw it, the key slinging around it on the chain like a fast, tiny moon.

  The car that had pulled up to the gas tanks was a Chevette. Kids, one of them standing at the rear bumper. William looked down, away from any eye contact, then walked far enough around the side of the building to lift the wheel behind him like a bowling ball, like a disc. But then the kid was calling something out to him.

  William turned to him.

  The kid hooked his head into the gas station.

  “He said I’m next.”

  William looked through the unbroken plate glass, to the small image of himself on the security monitor, and nodded, held the key up, showing he was surrendering it. The kid started across the slick concrete to take it. His arm was covered in blue tattoos. William took a half step back then set the wheel with its key down on the curb, and he was already walking away, already disappearing.

  ~

  His truck was a 1981 F-250, and it was legal: stickers, registration, insurance. Each light worked, except the cargo. The wire that fed it was tied into the dome light, inside the cab, just over the back window. To get it to work—the cargo—William just had to take the plastic case off the dome light, pull the bulb, and set the raw wire into the socket, work the bulb in with it like a fuse.

  He was forty-two miles from the gas station when he started working the plastic bubble off. It was cold, stiff, would break easy if he wasn’t careful, then everybody would see the bare bulb, know something was wrong. He couldn’t heat it up with the light though, either; if you were driving with your dome on, the state cops had to assume it was to find another beer, or to see the nudie mag on your passenger seat. So William edged the plastic bubble out one corner at a time with his right hand, his left steady on the wheel, and had been seeing it for maybe two seconds before it registered: a dark lump, stretched out along the shoulder of the interstate.

  He smiled, forgot the dome light. Replayed the dark lump in his head.

  When his rearview was clear he eased over, then turned his lights off and backed up twenty yards at a time, letting the tractor trailers sweep past. If they saw him, none of them blew their horns, though something did move in the grass once, which could have been a bottle, whipped out the passenger side at seventy miles per hour, the way the truckers liked to do it. William knew this from his father, had learned it at ten years old, how to sit perfectly still every few miles, his back pressing into the seat, a wine cooler bottle spinning past his face, connecting with a mile marker, his father watching in the side mirror then slamming the heel of his hand into the top of the wheel in celebration.

  William never thought about it on purpose, but sometimes it came unbidden, all on its own. Not the bottles so much as the high-up seat, how still he had to sit in it, how he had to push on the legs of his jeans to stay like that long enough for the bottle to slice by his face. And how, even though he didn’t want to, he’d listen along with his dad, for the chance of shattering glass behind them.

  Sometimes, ten years old again, he would be in the seat listening, and other times he would be in the ditch, waiting for the bottle to slam into his head.

  He was in the truck now, though. His truck.

  It was important to always remember that.

  He stopped alongside the dark lump and watched it for long minutes. The way none of the people driving by even noticed it.

  He nodded that the world was a good place, a good place for someone like him, then opened his door, the dome light sputtering, the bulb half-out. He reached back in, tapped it into place, the current running through him to the ground for an instant. It was nothing.

  He approached from downwind, to get the smell, know the whole animal, the blood, the feces, the fear if there’d been any, if it had looked up into the headlights. Because of the slant of the ditch he had to go on three points—both feet and one hand, the other shielding his eyes from the traffic.

  Driving by, he’d thought it was a deer, maybe, its coat matted with blood, making it black, but now, now it was a dog, just too big.

  He made himself move slow, just walk.

  From his truck, no barking. Night falling down all around him.

  He stepped up onto the shoulder and already there was blood. Just spatter, like a mist that had settled. He stepped around it as best he could, caught an airhorn for his effort. It straightened his back, took his breath in the best possible way.

  And then he smiled an accidental smile: a bear. A little black, a cub maybe. That was what it was.

  William lowered himself to it, running his hand along its thick coat.

  A bear.

  He had never touched one before.

  Its shoulder and head were shattered, one of its forelegs missing, burned off on the asphalt. But a bear. William could feel himself getting hard in his pants, looked to the interstate just in time for a dummy light to blaze across his face.

  The hand he’d had at his crotch came up to his eyes.

  The cop walked up out of the light, his hand to the butt of his pistol, his flashlight feeling out through the ditch, splashing against William’s truck.

  William stayed with the bear. Just touching it.

  “What you got?” the cop said.

  William shrugged, almost said Billy Pinzer but instead just watched a cab-over like his father’s push past. Pulling silage, it smelled like.

  What he had to do now was breathe evenly. Not run. Remember to swallow.

  The cop eased around the bear so he was facing traffic, played his light across the bear, then up to William again.

  “You hit it?” he asked.

  William shook his head no. “Just saw it, I guess.”

  The cop kind of laughed. “And you—you stopped?”

  William shrugged. “Thought it might be . . . you know. Hurt.”

  The cop didn’t nod but didn’t quite keep his head still either. He trained the light down onto the bear again.

  “Probably endangered,” he said. “You want it, that it? The skin, teeth, that shit?”

  William shook his head no, stood.

  “What’ll—what’ll happen to it?” he said.

  The cop watched a pair of headlights long enough that William turned. They
were bouncing off the yellow line. The cop exhaled through his nose.

  “Can’t leave it here,” he said. “Buzzards’ll come, and—shit. They’re endangered too, yeah?”

  William pretended to suppress a disgusted laugh.

  “I’ll call it in maybe,” the cop said. “Biologists like this kind of shit. Hell if I know why.”

  William nodded, made himself keep not looking to his truck. The cop was, though. His light was already playing on the windows of the camper.

  “What about—about like, dogs and stuff?” William said. “Deer? What do you do with them?”

  “Not endangered,” the cop said, taking advantage of the break in traffic to step back around the bear, towards his car. “Some people eat the shit, I’ve heard, I don’t know.” He hooked the brim of his stiff hat to his car. “We’ve got shovels, y’know. If it’s impeding traffic, we help it into the ditch.”

  William nodded.

  “Him?” he said, about the bear.

  The cop looked down to it too.

  “Was it in your way as a motorist, Mr. . . . ?”

  William looked away.

  “Pinzer,” he said, like he’d been saying it his whole life. Then he shook his head no, it hadn’t been in his way.

  The cop flashed his light down onto the truck again.

  “You’ve got four wheel drive on her?”

  William nodded.

  The cop shrugged. “This is Louisiana,” he said. “I mean, I’d never advise leaving the blacktop unless I had to, know?”

  “I’m careful,” William said.

  The cop nodded, spit.

  “Where to?”

  “My sister. Shreveport.”

  The cop touched something off the right lens of the glasses he had hooked in his pocket.

  “Fucking bear,” he said.

  “I know,” William said back, and they smiled together.

  Two minutes later, the cop was gone.

  William looked at the bear for maybe thirty seconds more, thanking it, then pushed it as far into the road as he could. He hadn’t lied to the cop, though: he didn’t want it. A bear would draw too much attention.

  The first truck that hit it caught it across its hindquarters, forcing all the air and gases in its body up past its throat, past its voice box.

  William screamed with it.

  ~

  Three miles after the next rest stop—Louisiana, still—next to a burned-out trailer house with trees growing all around it, William hung his bubble-gum pink ice cream cone from the rearview, turned the cargo light on.

  Lobo was there, and the Shepherd mix he was supposed to call Max and feed canned food twice a day, and the Golden Retriever with the red handkerchief tied around his neck like a cartoon dog.

  They were dead, of course, lined up against the naked body of the woman as if nursing.

  Her name was M-something, William didn’t know.

  She had been an accident. Not on purpose. From Birmingham.

  William stepped up into the camper with her and laid sideways behind her, stroking the top of her arm, getting hard again.

  But there was no time for that.

  William closed his eyes, told himself that, that there was no time, then let his hand fall to the soft muzzle of one of the dogs, and came anyway five minutes later, his hand against the dog’s dry tongue, the place where the girl’s nipple had been, then he cried into her matted hair, apologized. Hit the side of his hand again and again into the bed of the truck, until that hand was numb. And then the rest of him too. Just cold, nothing.

  He was ready.

  ~

  Twenty miles deeper into Louisiana, at a truck stop, he pulled over, walked back to his passenger side rear tire, and popped the camper shell open.

  In the dead space between trucks pulling out of second gear, building speed for the interstate, he slung Lobo out into the ribbon of shiny asphalt, where the tires ran. He weighed half again as much as he had, was pregnant with the girl now. Pieces of her anyway.

  In the back of the truck, on the tarp, William had laid out her arms, all four pieces of her legs, and the four quarters of her torso. From biggest to smallest. The head he ran over with his truck again and again, until there was nothing left of the teeth or any of it, and then he buried it, peed a circle around it to keep guard.

  Then it was back to the tarp.

  Working in the dim glow of the cargo lamp, he opened the three dogs from sternum to asshole, cleaned them out, and tried to fit what he could into each: an arm, part of a ribcage, a lower leg. When he was done, the dogs sewn up with pig string, William had nodded, stood from his work, and caught the shadow of something in the door of the burned-out trailer behind him.

  He turned the cargo light off—everything calm, no problem—folded the tarp up, pushed the dogs carefully back under the camper, then stood facing the trailer for twelve minutes.

  Nothing moved. He dared it to, but nothing did.

  Finally he nodded, narrowed his eyes, and marked the place in his mind, so he could come back sometime when he could leave what was in his truck in his truck.

  Not tonight, though.

  Four miles back, he’d already been seeing the signs for the truck stop, could feel a flat coming on.

  He didn’t even have to get the jack out this time. Just opened the tailgate, positioned Lobo on the road, then closed the tailgate, pulled away. At first, years ago, he’d always had to wait, to see the trucks come, watch them flatten all the bones at once, human and canine, but now, now he knew it happened whether he was there or not. The only other choice would be someone stopping to autopsy this dog that had already been hit. Or to move it out of the way. But only the state cops did that, and this was a county road, or parish, whatever things were in Louisiana.

  The next dog he left on an exit ramp, in the intersection, where everybody was supposed to yield.

  The Golden Retriever with the red handkerchief he simply stood up with a dry branch in a low spot on the service road, eighteen miles down from Lobo. Stood him up, circled back, then ran him down, leaning into his horn at the last minute, closing his eyes to the thumping from underneath, the crunching—Marissa, that had been it—then downshifting for the hill ahead, for Beaumont.

  2.

  Four months later—Houston—William tried for the third time to balance his empty beer can on the four-wheel-drive shifter of the Chevy he had now. For a moment, maybe, it held, staying there for him, but then fell into the passenger side floorboard with the rest.

  He was sitting in the first visitor row of the downtown hospital.

  The Chevy was because that state cop had caressed the Ford with his flashlight. William had tried to forget it, tried not to feel the heat the flashlight had pulled across the skin of his truck, the sharp-edged shadows the trim and fender flares had cast, but it was too much. Each time since then that he’d walked up on the truck from that angle—after work (stacking transmissions), after the bar, after buying all the newspapers he was in—it had been the same: that night, the bear. And because it was like that for him, it had to be for the cop, too. So the Ford had to go.

  William had sold it to one of the mechanics at his work, Al, who never looked anybody in the eye but had told William once that he’d started out at the shop scraping gaskets too. That if William just stuck around long enough, a sentence he finished by studying the insulation chicken-wired to the metal walls.

  William had shrugged, looked out at the traffic, Al peeling up a line of the seal that had been under the camper shell. Then, William had been saving it, the shell, for his next Ford, but that was what he’d sold the first Ford for, right?

  Now it was in his efficiency apartment, the camper, leaned up over the window.

  He didn’t know what to do with it.

  The Chevy was one the garage across the street had applied for the title for, in lieu of payment for services. The title had come back salvage; the manager let William have it for eight hundred. Alone in the park
ing lot after hours, William sifted through the cab, the gum wrappers, beer caps, and dimes that had settled behind the seat. The stack of magazines by the seat adjustment: Shaved, Bare, Lassie.

  William dropped them into the asphalt, backing away, shaking his head no, he wasn’t like that anymore.

  But then the magazines started opening by themselves, in the wind.

  After three weeks, William made himself throw them away in fourteen separate dumpsters. It was too late, though; his beard was thick again, full. He replaced the magazines under the seat with clippings of himself: a missing girl in Pensacola, another just outside Hattiesburg. Sixteen over the last nine and a half years, the first two still buried in plastic dropcloths, soaked first in ammonia, then pesticide, then gear oil. So none of the gas of decay would work its way up through the soil.

  He’d put them side by side, east and west, face-up.

  The first time he’d gone back to see them, grass was growing everywhere but the two rectangles where they were.

  William had started breathing hard, too hard, and returned with fertilizer, Bermuda grass seeds, finally flowers. They all died, until he understood: the ground was dead, it needed life. William had nodded, unzipped his pants, and, over the course of five weeks, left enough of his seed on the graves that the soil took on a richer color, and then a plant of some sort raised its head. William named it Baby Green, thought about it when he wasn’t there, then watched it stand up straight, establishing itself.

  Once, William reached down to touch it, just once, but then saw something watching him across the field.

  It was a dog, her teats heavy, dragging.

  William stood and she didn’t move, didn’t move. Like she knew.

  Four weeks after that, going back to check on Baby Green, sure that a raccoon was digging the girls up for their silver rings, William’s headlights caught eleven perfect little puppies walking across the road. Their shadows were taller than his headlights could reach.