All American Horror of the 21st Century

Driving the Last Spike. Brian Hodge-3

Skip is facing this view from across the main room, wrists lashed to his ankles as he kneels, leaning against the back of his leather sofa with his neck tied to the railing of the stairs to the second floor. He can sag a bit, shift some of the weight off his knees and to his rump, but she’s not left him much. His eyes track Garrett when he sees this first new face all day.

“It’s been a couple years, but you remember Garrett, don’t you?” she asks Skip. “Back home, he used to do the news on TV, but nobody out here would hire him after somebody back east leaked his medical records. You wanted to meet him until you found out that last part. Remember?”

Skip says nothing, but then, he can’t. Garrett wishing Skip could ask him what he does instead, and he’d admit it, that the best he can do now is teach others how to read the news at some third-rate broadcast institute. Yeah, Skip would love that a lot.

Garrett has hated him from afar these years but has learned to temper it to a dull red glow, like the rim over the ocean in the last instants of sundown. He’s always known what it takes, some days, for Kerry to keep her job. Skip pays just well enough that losing those checks really would hurt. At least it’s infrequent, Kerry says, and he comes quickly. They’ve consulted a couple of lawyers about suing for s****l harassment, never happy with the results. You want to get realistic about it, that’s for other industries, not this one.

The best Garrett can figure it, some men simply like a brush with scars every now and then, as long as they don’t have to feel them every day.

“I have to pee,” she says. “I’ve been holding it in awhile.”

Garrett steps over to Skip as she leaves, reaches for the gag. She’s improvised, clever, stuffed a big lime into his mouth and forced him to bite down. Garrett tugs it free, watches Skip work his sore jaws.

Be honest, you’re saying: She could’ve quit her job whenever she wanted, or Garrett could’ve forced the issue. So maybe Kerry hasn’t really minded all that much, and maybe he hasn’t either. A safety valve—that’s how he’ll look at it. Can’t call it adultery, not when they never married, just a mandatory c**k on the side to keep them together, because what woman still wants the same man at twenty-nine as she did at seventeen? Sometimes he thinks he stole more from her than she’ll ever realize, more than she could ever forgive him for if she did.

Call it lucky, then, that they have another head on which to heap all this blame.

“How old do you think I am?” Garrett asks.

Skip peers at him, owlish, blinking. Not a good-looking guy, but not bad, either; nondescript. His hair is wild and mussed, exposing a balding patch the size of a silver dollar. A dry wound is caked bloody on the side of his forehead where Kerry must’ve swatted him with something earlier.

“I hate that game, it’s always a loaded question.” Skip sighs. “I don’t know, about like me? Close to forty?”

“I’m pushing fifty.”

Skip shows genuine surprise, hasn’t shaved off years in the interest of playing the game. “Is that with surgery ...?”

Garrett shakes his head.

Now it’s grudging admiration. “Even better. I didn’t know you and Kerry were that far apart.”

“You wouldn’t, would you. Not now. I don’t know how it came about that way, it just did.” Garrett looking at the warm lime in his hand, the curves of teethmarks in its skin. “A lot of good that does me now, though.”

“So what do you want me to say, ‘I’m sorry I gave you both Hepatitis C, I’ll never do it again, now can’t we all just get along?’ Sure, whatever makes you happy, but you and her, you’re not the only ones suffering here, buddy.”

And Garrett’s heard enough already, Skip’s remorse about as convincing as most of the actors he hires. Garrett jams the lime back into his mouth and waits for Kerry, and when she comes back downstairs he can tell that she’s washed her face and straightened her clothing, and when she kisses him he can taste toothpaste, and then he supposes there’s really only one thing left.

Kerry retrieves the first of the boxes, each filled with one hundred Becton-Dickinson five-cc syringes tipped with twenty-five-gauge needles. Skip frowns at first, confused, and after she peels the spike out of its plastic wrapper, he gets nervous. By the time she angles it into a vein along his bound arm, he’s trying to squeal behind the lime.

“Quit squirming, Skip,” she tells him. “It’s just going to hurt more, and if I break a needle off in your arm, does it look like I’m going to run out anytime soon?”

Slowly, as if coaxing the blood, she draws back the syringe’s plunger and the plastic cylinder fills with red bright as a ruby. She withdraws the needle and recaps it and sets it aside on the glass-topped coffee table.

Her hand dips into the box for another syringe, strips away its wrapper—”You love L.A. so much?”—and she pierces it into the wormlike vein squiggling across the back of his fluttering hand—”Then let me give you my perspective on it”—and pulls back the plunger—”not that you ever asked my perspective on anything”—and that’s five more cc’s down—”but now there’s no phone and no day-planner and goddamn you, you’re going to pay attention.”

Another syringe. Another five cc’s drawn from the throbbing vein beside his temple.

“See, this is how L.A. killed me, Skip—”

Garrett, watching her slow, methodical fury, then his stomach knows first, weightless and frustrated, wanting to fly. A flash of light and a sense of unstable ground; the snap of gulls’ wings in his ears and a smell like wet limestone in his nose.

“—a tiny little bit at a time.”

He weaves away from the escalating panic in Skip’s eyes and falls to his knees before Skip’s plate glass window on the world, and whatever there will be for him to see. Past, future, either place he goes there’s no real time, only their intersection with a now that has outlived its usefulness.

And just look at them up there in that sky, circling in their patient hunger like the black blades of giant scythes.

“What do you see, baby?” she’s asking when he comes back. “What is it this time?”

“Condors,” he tells her. “Dozens of them. They smell what’s coming.”

The click of another syringe onto the growing pile.

“Tell them to wait their turn. I got here first.”

* * *

“Do you still love me?” she asked. Only this morning? Only ever. “Can you?”

“Watch,” he said. “Just watch.”

* * *

It’s hours past midnight when they find their way back down out of the Hills, and they’ve tried to sleep after it was finished but neither of them could, so instead they lay holding each other after this longest day either of them could remember, until they felt rested enough to leave.

South to Sunset, then Santa Monica Boulevard, then west, same as before, same as ever. Always west, always and forever.

They leave the car behind so they can walk the last couple of miles to the beach, and while the final hour of the night is cool, the sand still retains a tiny pulse of yesterday’s heat. Thirty yards to their left it’s somebody’s bed, but ignore them and they go away.

For a while they’re content to sit close to the wet boundary where the ocean meets its soft, foaming limit on the shore, as far west as they can go now without drowning. At Kerry’s side, the sack, now bulging and irregular, filled with hundreds of capped syringes no longer empty. Soon she drags them the last few feet, then takes them by the fistful and flings them as far out to sea as she can, where they fall glittering like garnets.

Dawn is starting to break behind them when the needles begin to wash up again, like a surf of hospital waste. A new day rolling westward across the land. Boston’s been up for hours, but they leave it where it belongs, at their backs, looking out over an ocean meeting a sky still black as tar.

Seawater laps at their feet with its loose cargo. Kerry gives in, reaches down to retrieve a pair of syringes.

“Blood rots first,” she says, and he has to ask her what this has to do with anything. “That’s why the people who make bacon are in such a hurry to drain the pigs. Blood always rots first.”

She stirs the damp, clumping sand with her toes. Holds up the pair of syringes.

“They make vaccines out of what’s already dead,” she says.

Kerry uncaps the needles and he accepts the one she offers, and it only takes him a moment to work up enough courage to drive it into his vein and press the plunger home—anything worth a try now, an unconventional cure, or their last chance at belonging out here, truly belonging.

He knows it will not kill them, not today, because the last time he’ll see her, Kerry’s hair will be blond, yes, but the roots will be growing out, auburn, nothing to have been ashamed of in the first place. Where had she ever gotten the idea it was?

They toss the dead spikes back out to sea, and eventually the tide should be going out again, so they can scoot a little farther along, waiting for whatever comes next.

* * *

With Hammett and Chandler doing the principal cartography, California has been established as the state where dreams go to die in the sunshine. Brian Hodge lets us share a sunset or two and brood about our own dreams and endings.