All American Horror of the 21st Century

Driving the Last Spike. Brian Hodge-1

DRIVING THE LAST SPIKE

by Brian Hodge

The last time he’ll see her, Kerry will still be young, about the same as she is now. The last time he’ll see her, she will be reaching for his hand. The last time he’ll see her, there won’t be any tears—tears are for situations where there’s still the hope of turnaround.

Her hair will still be blond, but the roots will be growing out, auburn, nothing to have been ashamed of in the first place. The cut won’t have changed, falling close to her shoulders with her bangs trimmed straight across her brows, west coast Cleopatra with eyes blinking from out of an ash gray blur, painted onto her face or across the horizon. Their Pacific Egypt burning, don’t rule out the possibility of the sand itself baking to brittle glass in a tsunami of fire.

Or maybe it’s only sunset through smog.

Garrett can’t say how he knows this will be the last time he’ll see her, he just does, and he doesn’t need any billboard or neon sign or voices whispering in his ear.

Just because you’re paranoid, we’ve all heard before, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

And just because you’re epileptic doesn’t mean you can’t actually see the future.

* * *

“I don’t want to get into everything on the phone. You’ll understand when you get here,” she told him. Only this morning? Only. Harsh eight AM jangle the culmination of Kerry’s few days’ worth of disappearance and fretting himself sick. Sicker. “Take whatever of mine that has any value, and sell it. Then bring me the cash. Would you do that for me?”

“Where are you now?”

“You mean you really haven’t guessed?”

“It wouldn’t be Skip Ackerman’s house, would it?”

She doesn’t answer, and, well, that says it all, doesn’t it?

* * *

The box in his arms is lighter than it looks, bulky if little more than clothing inside, and maybe it makes him look seedy and pathetic along the blocks of shopfronts on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, not his fault there are no parking places any closer. Today’s forecast, sunny, but you knew that already. It’s September and miserable, the Santa Ana wind searing down from the mountains, full of grit and recrimination.

Ever since moving here, he has always thought of Southern California—Los Angeles especially, a natural epicenter—as a place where great epochs go to die. They arrive on powerful legs but are sore and rotten inside, heaving out lungfuls of corrupted air as they snort and bellow in fury over their lack of future.

Garrett still remembering a time, if just barely, when he had one himself.

He’s in the middle of the block when the warning flag starts to wave in his temporal lobe. Or wherever it hides in his skull—idiopathic, he has his condition but no evident cause, just born that way. Special, blessed. Once upon a more colorful time, didn’t we regard epilepsy as a divine illness, God poking his vast head between those misfiring synapses and chewing on neurons?

Threw away his meds years ago after realizing that he was saner when he allowed himself to go ahead and have the seizures. Phenytoin, carbamazepine, valproic acid—into the trash with them, while he opened arms wide to his petit mal malfunction and began to love it back: you Sybil, you Delphic oracle, you polished obsidian mirror volcanized from my own nervous system. A different story, maybe, if he was prone to swallowing his tongue, but for Garrett it’s just like virtual reality, only wireless.

His stomach knows first, abruptly weightless and frustrated, wanting to fly. A flash of light that is no color in the visible spectrum, and a sense of unstable ground; the snap of gulls’ wings in his ears and a smell like wet limestone in his nose. Long ago they told him his eyelids flicker and his lower jaw jerks. From onset to incapacitation takes about a minute, the reason he avoids driving in heavy traffic but has otherwise learned to live with the gamble.

Weaving, now vertiginous, over to one of the sidewalk tables where couples sit drinking frothy concoctions from glasses that drip with clean, clear sweat, he sets the box down and just before zoning out hears the conversations cease, then resume, now full of loathing. Gone thirty or forty seconds, more than time enough to appall every last one of them—maybe not enough to ruin their day but lunch hour is shot to hell, because he is fingered by chaos and imperfection and for all they know it may be contagious.

Slowly, then, they readjust, studiously ignoring him, wiping him from awareness. Rendering him invisible: can’t see you, can’t hear you, safer for my fragile mind not to know you even exist.

The vintage shop is at the end of the block—inside, a dim museum of mothballed memories and the years, decades, that some people cling to like desperate leeches. Kerry went through a phase last year, wearing the 1930s and ‘40s on her tall, slim frame. The clothing was authentic, hadn’t been cheap, won’t be cheap tomorrow hanging on the racks again.

It’s his first time in here and will be the last. The woman who owns the place ... her hair is a shelf-life shade of blonde, cascading with Godiva waves, and she has a toned body but a little wizened face like a monkey’s, filigreed from chin to hairline with cracks and creases, same as the otherwise taut arms emerging from her sleeveless top.

He doesn’t want to watch those parchment hands as they stroke and paw and reclaim Kerry’s noirish year, so he turns away to find whatever diversions he can on the walls, but there’s no escape—a few framed pictures leaping out at him, the same woman long before her trampling by crows, production stills autographed to her by the people she’s sharing them with, most of them dead but he’s forgotten they’d ever been alive. He can feel her about to look his way so he diverts again, anything better than hearing her story of how thirty years ago she was in two or three pilots for television shows no one but trivia hounds knows about.

Garrett used to be on TV too, just doesn’t feel the need to broadcast old news.

“Now this is lovely,” she says, and he has to face her.

From the bottom of the cardboard box she’s pulled a cameo box handed down from Kerry’s grandmother, a tarnished brass oval with carved ivory set into the lid. The sort of keepsake that’s among the last things anyone ever sells, because it’s one of the first anyone ever owns.

The woman opens the lid to expose the velvety maroon cavity, faded by decades and worn smooth by a hundred thousand moments of jewelry going in, out, chased by groping fingers.

“If they could only talk. Everything they absorb, year after year.” She sniffs the inside, delicately, as though it were a wine cork. “Yours?”

“No.”

Exactly what she wanted to hear. “A woman’s, then? Younger than you? It was a family heirloom?”

He wouldn’t correct her even if she were wrong.

“A pretty young woman. Beautiful ...?”

Garrett telling her sure, you’ve got her number; thinking at least she was beautiful when we came out here and I still think so but what do I know; I don’t make enough to know anything anymore.

Money changes hands, and like anyone he tends to think that’s it, this is both the surface and substance of the transaction. But he’s wrong, and every time he is, it reminds him how little anyone out here really knows about where they live and what goes on under its filthy polished gleam aside from drive-by shootings and the grinding of tectonic plates.

His sunglasses, he realizes out on the sidewalk—he’s left them inside, on the counter.

And when he ducks back in, he finds the woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. Clutching the cameo box in both hands, pushing it to her wadded up, thrown away, unfolded face. She makes eager grunts as she pushes her wet tongue as far into the box as she can. It squirms and glistens; it explores every crevice, every ridge of brass and tiny fold of velvet.

After he watches her long enough to get the idea, her eyes pop open, glaring at him over the lid of the box, then she snarls and turns her back on him, as though he might try to grab it back, and resumes her efforts with a wheeze and a moan, feeding on the leftovers.

Not that there would be much left by now, but she’s welcome to whatever she can find. No reason she should be any different from the rest of them, any day of the year.

* * *

“Garrett? Are you still there?”

“Still here,” he told her. Only this morning? Only just.

“I know how this is going to sound, but could you bring some syringes when you bring the money? Lots and lots of syringes, as many as you can.”

And Kerry was right, it was a strange request, syringes nothing that either of them had ever had need of before, or even any particular interest in. But then wasn’t that just the heart and soul of L.A.—always a new means of expanding your horizons.

* * *

Soon after they had begun the relationship that destroyed his career—so this was years ago—Kerry told him that she’d grown up knowing she would go to California one day and there would never again be any other home for her but what simmered and sighed beneath a west coast sky. She may have been Boston-born and Bostonbred, but migration seethed in her blood, a timebomb of wanderlust sure to detonate as soon as she ripened into adolescence with its disdain of home and anything else too deadeningly familiar.

Garrett understood. At once. Nearly a generation before, he had been young too, suffused with the same itches and burning his face in the sun to summer soundtracks of Beach Boys’ songs that extended cocoa butter promises of immortality and compliant p***y. Garrett thirty-five years old and ostensibly knowing better by then, how to recognize vacant bullshit myths, just no longer caring when Kerry brought it all back fresh again in wistful saltbreeze exultation, and if she was remarkably adult for seventeen, he supposed that even she needed the sham of some far fantasia glittering beside a different ocean.

With Kerry, though, it really was a matter of legacy, a small historical bud far down her family tree. She was descended from the metalsmith, some multiple-great-grandfather, who’d cast the solid gold spike that had been the last one sledgehammered into place on May 10, 1869, in Promontory Point, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad linking east coast with west. How, then, could she do any less than submit to this manifest destiny? How could he, in the end, do any less than follow?

She had always told him that she never saw him as simply one more older man in the neighborhood, nearer her father’s age than her own, who leered at her across the lawn during the summers. No. He couldn’t help but be different because he was, after all, on TV every night. Garrett Keneally At Eleven, at his anchor desk to deliver news of Boston and the tantalizing hinterlands. More than just another neighborhood face. Besides, Garrett, with blue eyes and chiseljaw dynamics, looked like he still had youth on his side, with none of its spotty crudeness.

Linking hands, they plunged into it, and dear god, the revitalization, the sweet musky moss of her, her newness and her fearlessness and all the futures that lay before her smooth arched feet—he wanted them back. He wanted it all to do all over again.

Soon enough. Soon enough. This was exactly the choice forced upon him after they were discovered, the sort of indiscretion that can kill a marriage and topple a career balanced on credibility. He had no choice but to give in, even when he knew that not one of those who ran the network affiliate would’ve passed up the same chance had it been set before their sagging jowls.

Southern California it was. Where else would their age gap raise so few eyebrows? Where else would they blend so well? Where else would anyone care so little—even Roman Polanski could still make money here. Where else might it even be an asset, Garrett now one of those who not only appreciated the aesthetic, but he had reconfigured his entire life just to surrender again to the need and allure and the delicate salty sweetness of unblemished skin only now grown to contain the complete young woman inside.