The Rules of the Road, page 12
* * *
“Yuvi, are you almost done? It’s almost one o’clock and we’ve got a big day tomorrow. Gotta pick up the rental,” a man’s voice in the background says.
“Hold on, I’m almost done. I’m to the part where we got our papers,” Yuvi tells him.
“Alright, alright.”
“So, wait. Is that Gabriel?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says with a laugh.
* * *
It was the strangest thing. I was just sobbing into his chest. I thought he was dead. He was as good as dead. Maybe there was a pulse somewhere in there. I mean that makes the most sense. I don’t think this was like a back-from-the-dead type situation.
So, I was just crying there with my face buried and my eyes were closed and I was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, but it never did. I was going to get up to call 911 again, and when I lifted my head up, we were no longer in the living room of that farmhouse.
We were in a freaking hotel room.
I looked down at Gabriel and his shirt was clean and dry and he was breathing, looking like he was just sleeping there. The manila folder was on a desk in the corner and I opened the door and it opened out into a parking lot in the middle of the day, a Motel 6 sign standing tall in the distance.
* * *
“So yeah, is there anything else you need to know? It is really late over here. Different time zones and all.”
“Where is over here?” I ask.
“Reykjavík,” she responds. “Just got here this afternoon. Gonna rent a vehicle and get started on the Ring Road tomorrow. We’ve got so much to see.”
Thackerville Times
A man was killed in the most unlikely of circumstances Wednesday evening. His death has even resulted in the answer to several unsolved mysteries that have plagued the area for years.
Randall Finkman was found deceased and disemboweled on a local rancher’s property. The cause of death? An ostrich by the name of Oscar.
Property owner Ted Shamley has kept ostriches on his property ever since the fad in the early 90s.
“I used to have me a bunch of them,” Shamley says. “You know, it was this big thing going on back then and everyone was getting them. But once all that died down, I liked keeping them around and have always made sure I’ve had a couple. They’re good guard dogs, keep the coyotes away. Even got me a zebra from that exotic animal park up the way that got shut down. They were just giving it away. I feel like I’m out on a safari when I drive around my property. I’ve always heard stories they could kill a man. You know, they’ve got these really sharp claws and they’ll rush up on you sometimes, but I never would’ve said they’re dangerous. I would’ve felt awful about what happened and all, but he was trespassing, and you know there was that other stuff they found out later. I guess he had it coming. Sounds like Oscar was just doing his job, ha.”
The “other stuff” that Mr. Shamley is referring to is the revelation of Randall Finkman’s involvement in several missing persons cases. He was found to have a repurposed Crown Victoria, painted black with his own set of red and blue lights. It is believed that he was impersonating a police officer in the area, pulling over unsuspecting victims. There was a box of cellphones found in his trunk and several items of women’s clothing.
At his property were driver’s licenses belonging to two long-standing missing persons, Gina Bunch of Oklahoma and Sylvia Gardner of Texas. Evidence of human remains has been found on the property as well. Forensic and DNA investigations have been initiated.
Another vehicle was found at the scene, and it is believed that Randall Finkman had found a new set of victims, victims that possibly fled into the field where Mr. Finkman met his demise. Their names have not been released pending contact.
I got to where I was receiving fabricated incidents regularly, and I would have to thoroughly vet each of these before I would proceed with publishing their account. People would email me ridiculous stories that were obviously pranks or send me obscene photos. Some attempted prank calls.
Others were the writings of individuals that weren’t intentionally trying to deceive; rather, they were obviously mentally ill. They claimed Buck Hensley was a part of the CIA, that he contacted them through their dental filling for some PSYOP program In one instance, I received an envelope with an extracted molar.
This sort of thing didn’t do much for my own mental health.
Who’s to say I was any different from these folks?
10
“Cold as Ice”
I received a letter from an individual by the name of Daniel. He detailed a second-hand encounter with the rules, revealing something that had occurred in his childhood, decades ago This was a startling revelation as I had always considered the Buck Hensley broadcast to be a recent phenomenon.
* * *
The air was heavy with cicadas and heat. The old man stooped on his haunches and stared at the faded etchings of the grave, traced them with his finger. He had a lit cigarette in his mouth, ash stretching to infinity. I worried it might fall to the grave. It seemed disrespectful to do that out here, but what did I know?
It had been a long drive, and any time Grandpa was outside on this trip he took it as an opportunity to have a cigarette, making up for the miles he had spent without the smoke swirling in his chest. He hadn’t wanted to expose me to that secondhand smoke as I rode with him in my grandma’s old Mercury Sable.
Mom had seen a commercial on TV and told him that even if the windows were rolled down, I could still inhale the smoke and get cancer someday. It would be like a bullet shot into my lungs that wouldn’t do damage until I was in my fifties, and by then the old man would be long gone. Wasn’t it worth it to sacrifice a little for this hypothetical?
So, while we drove, it was Levi Garrett. He spit into a Styrofoam coffee cup stuffed with paper napkins that helped absorb the splash. I guess accidentally spitting on a grave would be a whole lot worse than ashing on one. Maybe that’s why the meant by that saying, “ashes to ashes”, after all.
“That’s not it,” he muttered to himself, rising from his crouching position.
We crisscrossed the rows of graves in a grid until we found it. The old man squatted once again and a ran his palm over face of the headstone like he could feel some sort of warmth there, a connection to his buried ancestors. After a heavy sigh, he nodded at me. I knew to swing my satchel across my chest and retrieve the materials, delivering them one by one.
He measured a piece of butcher paper from the roll with his eyeballs, sliced it with his pocketknife. The tearing sound it made reminded me of a dying man’s cough. I worried we might wake the dead. He centered the paper over the gravestone, the etched names and dates, taped it up there. Next, he took the disk of black rubbing wax and smeared the paper vigorously. As he did so, it picked up impressions and imperfections in the stone, the engravings that had been made decades ago. The rubbing was mesmerizing, like the wax was a magical reverse eraser.
We had taken a winding road to get to the cemetery which lay in a patch of sun amidst the heavily wooded hills of the Ozarks. It was far from any sort of civilization. Near the cemetery’s entrance, there was a tree with a thick and black-barked trunk. Underneath its gnarled branches were several lichen-covered tombs resembling stone benches. Any sign of who they belonged to had been rubbed off by time’s steady hand.
“Check for ticks,” Grandpa said as we crawled back into the car. He pinched one off of his forearm and smashed it between his thumbnail and fingertip. I caught a black one crawling up my leg and tried to imitate the same technique but failed. Instead, I flicked the live bug out the window where it would go on to crawl and suck another day, perhaps finding a feast on some mourner or more likely, a deer.
He was a quiet man—my grandpa—and this kept me from being closer to him than I ought to have, especially since I was his only grandson. So, when I discovered I’d have to spend an extended stretch of summer with him, I was less than thrilled. He lived three hours away, and I didn’t want to be taken out of my usual summer routine of sleepovers, swimming pools, bicycles, fireworks, and movies with friends.
But I didn’t have much say in the matter. My parents’ relationship had grown rocky, and they were sending me away while they tried to sort things out in one last-ditch effort. They believed I had witnessed too many fights and I believed I had, too. I would return home to a house one person emptier, my dad staying in a studio apartment.
We made our way down the twisted roads of the mountain to stretches of straightaways and level ground where we found a town of sorts, just a church and gas station and a smattering of houses, really. We stopped at the filling station (his words, not mine) and he bought me a glass bottle of Coke and himself another pouch of Levi Garrett.
He laid a roadmap onto the hood of the car, pinning the corners with his leathery hands. There were circles of locations, of places we had been and places we were going. He rotated the map and squinted, got his bearings and I thought about asking him where we were headed next, but I didn’t because none of the names meant anything to me. The only one that had stood out was Toad Suck, and I had already pointed it out after seeing a sign and asked if we would go there and we weren’t.
There was more driving and more George Jones on the cassette deck and more silence.
“Why are we doing all this?” I asked in the way only an almost-eleven-year-old could get away with.
“Just always been a fan of genealogy, I suppose. See the places my people came from, I reckon. It’s interesting.”
“You gonna trace it all the way back to Europe? Rub some graves over there?”
“Maybe one day. I dunno. Maybe if your grandma was still alive. She’d want to see all that. Most of her ancestors are from the Georgia area and had been since before the white folks got here.”
After stopping at a couple more nondescript cemeteries, we found ourselves at the end of the day. We headed back east, the blue evening and the twilight haze and the disappearing sun at our backs.
“Gonna find us a place to stop off for the night.”
It would be our fifth overnight of the trip. I had lucked out once when we found a place with a swimming pool, but it was near the interstate. That perk seemed unlikely out here in the country, running through small towns on two-lane highways.
We pulled up to the Huckleberry Inn, a park-by-the-door motel with a couple strips of single-story rooms all in a row. It looked plenty vacant. I waited in the car while Grandpa went to the front office and paid for a room. He returned to the car with a keychain, and we pulled around to our room, unloaded our luggage.
I belly flopped onto the bed, the stiff comforter and lumpy mattress. I found the remote to the TV and flicked through some channels. I wanted to watch MTV or Nickelodeon or something, but I felt too self-conscious to watch something like that with my grandpa here. Instead, I left it on an episode of Bonanza while I took a comic book to the bathroom for a bit. After I finished, I wandered to where he was smoking outside.
He was just standing in the parking lot, staring out into the dark and taking drags.
It had become a ritual. No matter where we stopped on this trip, there was always a bucket of ice that we filled from the motel ice machines. It didn’t matter if neither of us opened the individually wrapped plastic cups and helped us to a glass of tap water on the rocks. It didn’t matter if we just had dinner and weren’t thirsty. No matter the situation, we had to fill the little plastic tub full of ice and leave it on the plastic tray atop the dresser until morning came, until it was nothing but a flimsy bag of cold water.
I headed to where the ice and vending machines were, in a little alcove between the rooms and the motel office. The Pepsi machine gave off an ethereal glow. I pressed all the buttons and checked the change slot. Such habits could yield treasures like a free soda or fifty cents, but I came up empty that night.
The ice machine whirred and groaned as I tried to get it to dispense. I bumped it with my shoulder, looked up into the little dispenser hole, even snaked my hand up there to see if I could feel the cold. Nothing. I shrugged and went back to the room with an empty bucket.
Grandpa was lying on his back with his shoes off, twitching his toes through his socks. His eyes were half-closed. I set the empty ice bucket down.
“Get ‘er filled up?” he asked.
“Nah. Machine was busted.”
He sat up with a start. “What? So, there’s no ice? Was there another machine?” He swung his legs off the bed and started lacing up his boots.
“I don’t think so.” I didn’t see what the big deal was. I’d never seen him rise above his emotionally flat baseline and here he was getting worried about ice?
“C’mon, let’s go see,” he said.
We did a perimeter sweep of the property, just a boy and his grandpa and a plastic bucket. His pace quickened the further we went. You wouldn’t say his behavior was frantic if you saw him but knowing him that was the word that came to mind. His version of frantic was anybody else’s calm mood.
At the front office, we rang the service bell, rousing the owner from some backroom. The overhead lights glinted off of her glasses as she greeted us with sleepy eyes and a tired smile.
“Excuse me. Y’all’s ice machine’s broke. You got another somewhere?”
“No, I’m sorry. Supposed to have a repairman look at it next week. But I guess that don’t help you now.” There was a sympathetic smile. Fake.
“You got anything in the back?” Grandpa asked, looking over her shoulder.
“No, unfortunately,” she said with a little frown that tried to cover up the fact that she couldn’t care less whether we had ice tonight.
“There a convenience store around here?” Grandpa’s mouth got smaller by a few millimeters.
“Up the road . . . but oh wait. What time is it? Nah, they’re closed. I’m really sorry to inconvenience you folks like this.”
Grandpa made a little clicking noise. “We’re gonna head out. Any way we can get a refund?”
“On account of the ice machine? Geez, you fellas must really like ice. I don’t know if I can do that. Did y’all step foot in the room? Lie on the beds? It’s not like there’s a sign out front that says ice guaranteed.”
“Look, we didn’t even . . . whatever. Forget it. Keep it. C’mon Daniel,” he said halfway out the door. I could only glance back at the front desk lady’s perplexed face. Grandpa was already halfway across the parking lot, marching with purpose.
“Here ya go,” I said, and handed her the plastic ice bucket.
“Look, you guys ever come back through. I promise we’ll have it fixed. We’ve been trying to get the guy in here for weeks.”
I only shrugged and jogged after Grandpa.
“Get your bag. We gotta get out of here. It’s important.”
He had already loaded his small suitcase in the trunk, and I went and grabbed mine. I had a nervous feeling in my stomach. For the life of me, I didn’t know what was going on. I had never seen him the slightest bit rattled, but there he was. Rattled.
But I had forgotten my comic in the restroom. I went back to grab it and pondered taking a leak for the road.
“Goddammit Daniel, hurry up!” Grandpa yelled from the doorway. I had never heard him curse before and he had never yelled at me, either.
My body flushed with shame and anger, and I ducked my head and sat in the front seat of the Sable, comic book in hand. He peeled out of the parking lot, and we drove off in a haste. Whatever he thought was chasing us was still out there in the night.
I didn’t talk, and he didn’t talk. Still feeling like a scolded puppy from him yelling at me, an anger simmered underneath and took over. My wounded pride took precedence over the burning questions I had. Primarily, just what in the hell was going on?
There was close to an hour of driving, the forest around us frightening and imposing in the dark, like it was something that wasn’t meant to be traversed at this hour. It triggered a primal fear. The fear was this: there were things out here that could kill you. Things that could drag you kicking and screaming out into the dark, never to be heard from again. Things that we had largely taken dominion over with guns and fire and electricity and extinction, but the fear remained.
We chanced upon a state rest stop. It was a mere pull-off parallel to the highway with a couple of 55-gallon drums and a picnic table or two. Grandpa pulled over.
“This’ll do just fine,” he said.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Pulling off for the night. You can sleep in the backseat. Could bundle up a towel for a pillow. I’ve got a blanket in the trunk.”
“But why? What was wrong with the motel?”
“They didn’t have any ice,” he said, as if it were obvious. He yawned like a cartoon character, stretched his arms as far as he could. “Look lil’ buddy. We better hit the hay while we can. Got a lot more miles to cover tomorrow. I’ll be fine sleeping up front.”
That was that. I sulked and curled down low in the backseat until sleep took hold.
I awoke to birdsong in the morning, shafts of sunlight shining through the trees. My jeans were balled upon the floor and for a moment I thought I had pissed myself, but it was just my briefs soaked with the sweat from sleeping in a vehicle on a humid summer night.
Grandpa wasn’t in the front seat. I shimmied into my jeans and stepped outside. He was sitting on one of the picnic tables.
“Morning, sunshine,” Grandpa said, acting like I had just emerged in the kitchen on a Sunday morning while he manned the waffle maker, ignoring the fact we were on the side of the road after fleeing into the night.
