The Drive
He didn’t want to go.
It was a bright, warm morning and the rays of dust were wafting through his fingers as Owen looped and pulled tight the knot in his tie, each particle daring him to open his mouth for a fresh breath of lint and dead skin. Why couldn’t I have just stayed in bed? It would be the first time he’d been to church since the Easter when Mom and Dad decided that God was best served from home, owing solely to the embarrassment caused by his father’s insistence that God would condone a little “holiday merriment” in the form of a cheap bottle of whiskey hidden in the pocket of his church-suit jacket. They’re going to want me to speak. Of course now Owen felt as though he would be doing himself a favor by paying homage to this tradition, but talked himself out of a quick drink because it wasn’t even ten in the morning and he still wasn’t dressed. He stood in the mirror fidgeting with the collar of his shirt for what must have seemed like ages to him, but which amounted to only enough procrastination to make him a few minutes late. Dad never did tie his tie straight…bothered me to no end. Should have adopted the bolo sooner. He winced against the knot as it grazed his throat, and the sudden sharp inhale made him dizzy. This constriction was as painful as any noose.
For as long as he could remember, Owen’s throat had been on fire. It didn’t matter how soft or loose or forgiving any fabric or touch might be; he simply could not withstand anything against his neck. It had made his father impatient, and his mother empathetic, but wary, and eventually Owen resorted to doing all he could to allow the constant pain to drone on silently through his gritted teeth. But he barely spoke, and never would have chosen to wrap the tightening coil around his throbbing throat had it not been for this inherent guilt. But after several minutes of labored breathing as he tried to focus on each flip and turn of fabric, he found himself beginning to sweat, and all at once ripped the long thing from around his collar with an exhausted sigh. I can't drive if I can't breathe…I'll just put it on at the church.
It made sense that he was late. Who would really be surprised? He’d spent years without the ritual practice that seemed to have made so many other parents proud of their dutiful little sons and daughters, but Owen’s father, Burt, was a drunk; no amount of prayer on Owen’s part ever protected him from those people so keen to notice their absence. So they hid – Dad in the bottle, Owen with his aching neck under the boot. He knew that today would require more speaking from him than he had done in months, maybe years, and the thought of that gripping pain made him cringe. To arrive this morning in a reasonably punctual manner seemed enough to merit some small clemency. Surely everyone would understand. If I just show up they won’t make me speak. They know, they all know by now. Maybe if I bandage my face…
The truth is that he wouldn’t have been late if he hadn’t, halfway there, turned around and started back home. All that time wasted reluctantly dressing and decidedly undressing had only partially delayed him, much as he wanted to believe the lie that he could have simply stayed in bed that day. Owen didn’t want to go, and nearly didn’t; so the fact that he arrived at all seemed, to him, more than enough to absolve him of the terrible sin of missing the first twenty minutes of a thoroughly awkward two-hour ordeal. Everyone would want to know where he’d been, if he’d gotten stuck in traffic, where he was working now, how long it had been since he’d visited anyone and oh, weren’t they just so proud to see him grow up to look so like his father, and my, hasn’t it been years since they’d heard his voice. He shuddered at the thought of each underhanded “compliment,” their singsong lilt reassuring him that affection, too, could be blunt and calloused.
Owen could imagine the disapproval dripping thickly in masked tones of sympathetic grief from the disgustingly pious faces that would approach to gawk at his misfortune. “Well at least you’re here now.” “We’d thought maybe you’d been kidnapped!” “Better late than never!” “The lord always had a plan for you, son.” “Who knew it would take this much to get you back into Jesus’s arms!” He could imagine the women, in a gesture of feigned consolation, clutching his arm, their fingers bulging with blue, veiny lines, tipped with nails yellowed from years of polish, rarely seeing the sunlight but through a tinted glow, and he wondered if he would be able to hide his suspicious discontent. You haven’t spoken to your daughter in ten years, Mildred, and your voice seems to be working just fine.
These people did not know Owen now any better than they had known him when his father had dragged him to their respective homes for visits, ones Burt spent the better parts of getting drunk and stumbling over himself, various aunts and uncles laughing cheerfully at his “silliness.” Owen had never found it to be anything less than humiliating.
Today, familiar cars lined the curb outside the parking lot that he approached slower than necessary, idling behind some long enough to memorize their tag numbers. Dusty bumper stickers that had once made distant relatives the butts of various jokes over the years (“Honk if you’re Amish!”) were now inimitable marks that brought a new and foreign solemnity to their recognition. But there was no use stalling any longer. He reached over to the passenger seat and withdrew from beneath his jacket the black tie, and looped it loosely around his neck. Carefully, he made a wide knot and gingerly raised it to his collar. Even with nearly two extra inches of space, he could feel it there, crushing his windpipe like a snake wrapping itself around the body of a rat, squeezing and choking him as if he were going into anaphylaxis.
If he did have to speak today, it might well be the death of him.
Owen could feel the intensity of the silence crushing his shoulders as he walked, alone, through the church doors. For once I wish it weren’t so quiet. Aged and vaguely recognizable faces turned to eye him critically, deplorably late for an engagement that they had spent the past few days soberly preparing for. Many had gone to the trouble to spend more than a few dull hours behind the wheel of a car in the early morning, headlights bright against the falling night sky, taillights to the rising sun, to arrive early. I suppose we did all lose something, in a way, even if it was only time. And as they all turned, save for the older few in the front whose poor hearing robbed them of the opportunity to glare coldly in his direction, Owen longed for a narthex.
Uncle Cliff was speaking loudly into a microphone as if he didn’t understand its function when Owen finally sat down next to his mother in the front row. She didn’t say anything as he took his seat. Just held his hand in a desperate sort of way and smiled before swiveling her thin neck, yielding to the raucous echo of a man who never seemed to tire of his own nostalgic jokes. Owen tuned him out because he’d heard them a million times. Everyone had. You could feel it in their laughter: more polite and reminiscent than amused. Gentle smiles echoed the compassion of the crowd Cliff was abusing with his volume. But Owen heard nothing as he searched the room for his father.
His casket was baby blue, the color of his Cadillac Convertible.
When his turn to speak came at last, Owen froze. Nothing in the world seemed more daunting, more physically agonizing, than having to stand in front of all these people, open his mouth, and speak. What do I say? Why didn’t I write anything? His mother, Rachael, coughed softly next to him and gave him a gentle nudge, steering his gaze back to the podium. Sighing as softly as he could manage, he stood and approached the microphone, shaking slightly as he stared out into the audience, desperately trying to formulate some words of comfort, of love, before the vice began to turn…
“Th-thank – ahem! – thank … you … all … for … being … here … today.”
A quiet murmur rushed over the crowd as Owen strained to rasp into the microphone. He could barely breathe, and his weak, rough voice clauted at the empty air. The tightness in his chest was nearly unbearable, the fist around his lungs and throat and voice box clenching like the jaw of a cayman, and he was preparing for the roll. Sweat beaded on his temples as he gasped for breath to continue.
Keep going. Just power through and get it over with before you run out of oxygen.
“Many … of you … knew … my father … as a … loving … dedicated … family man … with a few … interesting … hobbies.” Owen paused to give the stars in his vision a moment to clear and to let the echoes of his choking dissipate from the lofty walls of the church. The crowd coughed and chuckled weakly in response, unsure of whether he meant for it to be funny. “When … I heard … the news … that he … had passed … I … couldn’t help … but … feel … a bit … relieved.”
Every syllable was agony, and he knew he wouldn't be able to last much longer. It was the most he could do to support himself on the podium, but the strain on his arms only made the tightening of his throat more potent, his entire upper third throbbing beneath the invisible weight. He had to hurry through if he didn't want to pass out on the stage.
“In … his later years … my father … ahem – went through a lot … excuse me … and I know … it hasn’t been easy … for anyone.” Owen tried not to pant too audibly, but even he could hear the echoes of his breath against the high, multifaceted glass rainbows of Saint Peter's robes.
“If he could … I know … that he would thank … you all … for everything you did … to ease his suffering … and to make … his final days … peaceful. I would …ahem – personally … like … to thank you all … for your kind support … of our family … especially … my mother … in this time … of loss … and let you … all know … how grateful we are. Ahem – sorry … uh … may … he rest … in peace.”
Owen slouched ever so slightly and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. The room was spinning, and he needed air. He went stiffly back to his seat and started trying to catch his breath. It was always a laborious process to find himself again after these moments. He took slow, deep gasps, and tried to ease the throbbing ache of his chest.
It had hardly been worth it. Owen could sense the general disappointment in such an anti-climactic eulogy. At least Cliff told jokes. But what else did they expect me to do? Rachael understood, a little. She took his hand in hers once more, and Owen could feel her trembling, trying to be as accepting of him as she pretended to be. He was suddenly filled with guilt, knowing that she had tried so hard. It wasn’t her fault. She did her best.
Eventually, the service ended and the people all filed out and the cars made their slow way behind the hearse. Burt’s body was buried and his casket was covered up. And when everyone had finished talking and remembering before beginning the process of tactfully forgetting, after his father had officially become no more than a memory and a few framed snapshots of ancient fishing trips, Owen returned to his apartment.
Any normal person wouldn’t be able to think of sleep at a time like this. Owen supposed that he must not be a normal person, because when he at last turned the lock on his door and flung his jacket and the wretched tie across a chair, his body went limp and his eyes blinked hard against the falling twilight. If he had been paying closer attention, Owen may have held on longer to the brief memory of the last time he’d felt the agony of his voice so acutely, the last time he’d known the full force of his lungs. But he could already barely think through the sharp spasming of his larynx, so he fell asleep still in his dress shoes, shirt half unbuttoned, almost as soon as he reached the couch.
That night, Owen dreamt his father was still alive, offering to take him to school, a bottle in hand and a slur in his voice. Then the car door burst open and Owen was swallowed by a tide of empty beer cans and liquor bottles as they had in so many versions of the dream before. But unlike the dream had been in those years when he would climb through the torrent of refuse to find Burt revving and laughing foolishly at his own terrible wake, that night Owen arose from the debris and saw only his father’s body laid inside his Cadillac as it slowly sank into the ground.
He threw a handful of amber shards onto the hood of the car as Burt was consumed by the rubble, saying nothing in farewell, but honing his silence to address him. Goodbye, Bluebell. Goodbye, Dad. Suddenly his father’s eyes opened wide, pupils as waxen and empty as the mouth of a cave, and he began to shout “Speak, boy! What good is a dog that can’t bark? Say something, dammit! SPEAK!” and with as much vitriol as had ever been felt, he began to bark at Owen like a rabid dog, louder and louder every moment until Owen was cowering in silence against the shattering refrain of his father’s voice.
The screams tore into Owen’s skin and threw him down into the current of glass and aluminum, echoing at the bottom of every broken bottle until the sound of him filled up Owen’s brain and pushed out every note of silence. He awoke with a scream in his throat, his mouth agape. When no sound came he lay back down, his father’s taunts ringing in his ears, his sour breath fresh in the air. Owen didn’t dream anymore that night.
“Daddy?! Daddy, what happened? Is she ok?” Owen was screaming, babbling on and on about the girl and what they were going to do. Burt couldn’t look at him. Everything was spinning, and his eyes wanted to shut. He couldn’t concentrate with all this damn noise; why couldn’t the kid just shut up and let him think a minute? Trying not to fall over, he set the bottle on the floor at his feet, carefully so as not to spill, and wrenched open the car door. Burt was unaware of his own strength, drunk enough to underestimate his movements, and he threw open the door with more speed and force than intended. He stumbled out grasping at the air, only catching the door for support when it swung back to meet him. He slammed the car door shut harder than he’d opened it, toppling over the bottle he’d so gingerly placed, and staggered with small, slow steps into the beam of his headlights. He stared at the ground for a very long time, blinking away the blur of his booze every now and then.
“Daddy? Daddy?”
“Shut up and let me think, dammit!”
Owen sank back into the seat, but could not relax his eyes which had gone wide the moment he saw it: a white dress, a lily opening in the darkness to swallow the headlights of his father’s car as they peeled through the night. Burt ran a hand through his hair and furrowed his pink brow, looking up and down the road in both directions. After a moment, Owen was sure he saw his father kick something lightly, and as he stretched his neck to peer over the hood of the car, he could hear a scraping against the gravel. Burt was wide awake now, and suddenly very much in a hurry. He began to pace in front of the car, mumbling too quietly for Owen to hear. Finally, he seemed to pull himself together and inspected every inch of the car: the bumper, the grill, under the hood, pulled a few strands of red hair from a fan, noted a dent here, a scratch there. Those would have to be gone before morning. And he would need to be gone before anyone else showed up.
Owen wasn’t sure why his father wasn’t doing more, why he wasn’t at all as scared as Owen was. “Daddy, what do we do? What do we do, Daddy, we can’t leave her, put her in the car, we have to help!” But Burt had just cleaned the seats, and all the blood pooling beside her and flowering across her ivory dress as she lay sprawled in the road would stain. He tried to think, tried to come up with some way out. He grabbed the nearly empty bottle of Jack from its puddle on his floorboard and tossed it into the bushes beside the car, having made his decision. If he called the cops he’d go to jail. He had to move her.
Burt was too drunk for this. He knew it, but was left with little choice if he ever wanted to make it home again. He crouched down and tried to get a grip under her arms, but his inebriated knees buckled beneath him, and down he went. Owen saw him fall and quickly hopped from the vehicle to run to his aide. Maybe he could help get the lady into the car. But when he crested the headlight and began to make out the form on the ground, he could feel the pounding of his heart in his ears and his hands and his feet, his stomach rushing up to his chin and back down to his knees with every breath. There was so much blood. He had never seen so much blood before. Where did it come from? There can’t be that much blood in any one thing. Suddenly Burt was on him, grabbing and shaking him by the shoulders and screaming into his face. Owen couldn’t see through his terrified weeping, couldn’t hear over the drone in his head, but could feel the solid smack of a palm across his face, the rough grasp of a hand stifling his breath. The vibrations in his chest died, and he realized he’d been screaming hard enough to taste blood.
“Do you want me to go to jail?! Shut your goddamn mouth! Shut up! I don’t want to hear one more fucking thing out of you!”
With this, Burt threw him roughly to the ground and repositioned himself at the girl’s feet. The grip around Owen’s throat did not fade.
The day after Burt’s funeral, Owen went home. It was then that he was dragged by the meek urgings of his mother and his detached sense of duty to his father back, by bus, to the house he grew up in; a place where he was sure he had spent so many hours of his life breathing in and out, but where he could no longer find the strength nor facility to do so. His knuckles burned white beneath the tight pull of skin as his fists curled and his breath drew ragged and strained, his eyes darting around like he was waiting for his father to come stumbling back to life out of some doorway or around some corner. Why does this house always make me nervous? He isn’t here now. The wooden panels of Owen’s parents’ (now his mother’s) bedroom walls appeared warped and distorted, awkwardly ornamented with poorly hung photographs, some lopsided and caught in mid descent. Memories dangled there as if waiting patiently for time and gravity to close the space between their dark-stained wooden frames and the worn, shag carpet that may have once been stylish, but now seemed eerily old and smelled of mildew and dust.
She’s talking to you, Owen. Don’t be an ass.
Owen smiled wanly, attempting to be compassionate as his mother reminisced of a time when her children were still young and she was beautiful. She was looking for a set of keys, rummaging through a drawer in a way that only mothers can: quickly, but with regulated precision and thoughtless order, a habit shaped by years of prevention and awareness of each miniscule untidiness that must eventually be remedied. If only she could see my closet. Finally withdrawing a jangling mass of metal from the gaping mouth of a wooden desk, her voice grew resolute and relieved, although Owen hadn’t heard a word of what she’d said. She smiled and, reaching for his hand, gave him the keys and closed his fingers firmly around the sharp metal of their angular bodies.
“He always meant for it to be yours,” she said quietly. Owen raised his eyebrows briefly, and looking down to the floor, smiled with reluctant understanding. Perhaps it wasn’t truly his father’s intention, but she would never say that. Just say it, Mom. Just say “it’s yours now”, and that you never want to see it again. Say you hate it. Say you wish he’d never bought the damned thing. Say something so I don’t have to.
When he finally left, it was in the driver’s seat of his father’s livelihood, his most prized possession; the last remaining piece of him. Although Owen could not help but feel a vague jealousy for the inanimate object that had won the affections of his otherwise dispassionate father, he admitted to himself silently the satisfaction of finally sharing with Burt the joy of the magnificent vehicle, even if he wasn’t technically there to share it. This was his true legacy, his son be damned. He could feel him in the white leather seats and in the purr of the engine, a soul escaping through the tailpipe in heated plumes of translucent vapor. But Owen was filled with a feeling of vacancy, as if the wind was not rustling his hair, but pulling at the raveling hem of his consciousness.
He sped down the familiar road and his mind began to wander as he senselessly contemplated apophonic words and the smell of rain.
New…new…now…naw…sing…sang…sung…
It was in this moment, when he had begun to sense the lingering clouds and realized, with regret, that he would have to put the car’s top up, that he saw her. A woman with brilliant red hair in a white dress was standing casually beside the road, wind whipping at her legs and rippling the fabric of her dress, her hair thrashing about the side of her face as if alive, and when Owen craned his neck to look behind as he passed, she was gone. He searched the cloud of dust left by his own rotating tires, but found her nowhere.
Suddenly, from somewhere in front of him, he heard a violent shriek and as his head turned, arms locked, eyes widened, and foot slammed desperately on the brake pedal, he could not pull his mind from the vision of her face. Some apparent thing he could not see, could only feel, pushed its way gracelessly into the front end of his father’s beloved Cadillac.
Screeches pierced the air and cacophonous shudders rattled Owen’s teeth and pounded in his head as his body was flung toward the windshield. He felt the cold glass cracking against the impact of his skull (or perhaps it’s my skull that’s cracking) and a warmth that he thought must have been blood spread slowly down the front of his face. Somewhere deep within the shadows of his subconscious, Owen felt pain. Not just pain, but a terrible agony that consumed his entire being like a rush of fire, burning and melting and scorching his body, gnashing its dull teeth ceaselessly against his brain. It gnawed at his nerves and raked rough nails against the imaginary chalkboards between his ears, deafening him with strident screeches that did not come from outside, but emanated from within. He could not escape these sounds, almost as if he was making them. Am I screaming? His back hit the seat with a momentum that felt as if it had been building for years, for his entire life, waiting to be harnessed and then unleashed upon the fragile marrow of his most critical bones.
But this awareness was trapped deep inside, and even amidst the penetrating resonance of the metal-on-metal crush there was peace. And when the movement had stopped, not more than ten seconds after the faceless, earsplitting screech had wailed Owen back into reality, there was no sound. The traffic of the tiny particles of air seemed to have stopped and there was only the aeolian breath of aftershock and the fluttering leaves in nearby trees anticipating rain.
Owen’s mind grew blank and dark. His consciousness began to slip rapidly away, and before the darkness of sleep could overtake him, he thought of a strange woman standing beside the road, a woman whose face was indistinct and vague in his mind, but which shone more brightly than the most powerful stars in his mind’s galaxies, that stood apart so definitely from even his most cherished memories. He did not see his life flashing before his eyes, did not think of his father or the fact that he was being crushed beneath the body of his legacy, this final curse. He thought neither of the pain nor of the fear that gripped the cavernous recesses of his agnostic doubts. Instead, he thought of a stranger, a woman he may have imagined, and her red hair, and as he closed his eyes and allowed his body to surrender in hopes that the torture would subside, he felt his heart beating and imagined the wind rustling her dress in time to the reverberations in his roughly panting chest.
If Owen did lose consciousness, however, it was not for more than a minute. His eyes heaved open when, somewhere beside him in the impenetrable agony of this fire and percussion, Owen could hear – no, feel – someone pawing their way through the wreckage to reach him. Brief was the moment in which he thought this could be some omen of release, some savior come to reveal themselves in an amalgamation of blood and steel. When finally he managed to turn his throbbing head against the crushing force of the steering wheel he all at once realized had become pinned to his chest, he saw her:
Red hair like dried blood; coarse, unkempt, like the smoke of a tindered match. The dress had perhaps been white when her unknowable journey began, but as she groped at Owen's barely distant face with that sharpened, decaying claw, he saw that the fabric had grayed, and the hem had been muddied and marred. He could remember distinctly the paleness of her, the flowering wet of the pavement behind her porcelain skin, and tried to recall if the freckles had been so purple then. Now, she seemed a siren: a comforting beauty from afar, and blood-curdling upon approach. He strained away, his fear palpable as he took in the rolling pits of her empty eye-sockets, the mummified shreds of skin by which her broken jaw clung loosely to her face, the bony white tips of her fingers peeking grotesquely from her putrefied flesh. She had finally come for him.
If Owen had not been dying before, he knew that he was now. The terror that began to bubble from his throat was not a new one; he recognized this violent laceration against his vocal chords as the very same resonant panic that had silenced him on that oh-so-distant night, the same blood-freezing assurance that things would not, actually, be alright. His mind began to play the image of her there, body distorted against the pavement, knees buckled, pitched the wrong-way-round, the growing halo of ink. He remembered the twitch of her eye, the soft gurgling in her throat as she weakened. It had, indeed, been quite a lot of blood.
Flames crept through the panels of the floor as the engine reached to ignite the plastic carpet, the browning leather seats, the laces on Owen’s shoes. She seemed to be wholly inside the vehicle now, her mangled legs folded against the door behind her as she dragged herself closer to him. How did she get in? It was useless to struggle against the steering wheel that was pinning him down like a patient to a gurney, but Owen was too delirious to care. He thrashed desperately, sweat threading down his temples as he tried to shove or pull or punch the wheel, unable to budge it even the slightest. And all the while, she was still there, rasping and rummaging next to him, obscured only by the far-too-close-now dashboard that had crumpled into the front seat. He could just see her lurch her rotting corpse up to climb through the gap left between them, and Owen’s terrified panting, his hoarse, inaudible screaming, died away to weeping and scratching whimpers as he searched for some escape.
Sobbing wildly, he began to paw at the door beside him, hoping that by some fluke of nature he could force it open and crawl out. He found the latch, and feeling a surge of relieved optimism rush through him, he laughed a short, frightened laugh that brought that bloody copper back to his tongue, and began to tug. But the latch wouldn’t move. There was a definite crackling now, and smoke began to drift up from below his feet as the rubber mats worked to fuse to the soles of his shoes. He furiously shook the handle, croaking and pleading with a desperation and fear he had never thought to hope against, but the door indifferently remained unmoved. The smoke stung his eyes and clouded his vision, but he need not see her again to know she was very nearly on him.
Something scratched at his exposed right hand, but when he tried he found himself unable to move his fingers. He kicked frantically, suddenly feeling the heat curling up around his legs and beginning to cook the bottoms of his feet. His shins flailed madly against the steering column, slamming an erratic, horrible beat until a sharp crack in one knee rendered him immobile with a shock of pain. His limbs had failed him; his exhausted hands, wet with the sweat of his fear and the fire, bloodied from their wild grasping at the surrounding mincemetal, could no longer lift to reach the door handle, couldn’t shimmy past the broken knee to try the window if they wanted to. His legs were spent and utterly useless; burning now. With the only remaining strength he had, Owen moved the only part of himself that he could and turned his head to face her, thinking that perhaps there was some karmic justice in meeting death eye-to-eye.
She was already there, peering emptily into him.
With the steering wheel against his chest, it hadn’t seemed possible to scream. It hadn’t seemed possible that, in the midst of the flame and the blood and the weeping, there could be any relief. But as the heat began to overtake him, as the hissing and squealing of the wreckage threatened to make themselves the last sounds he ever heard, Owen could suddenly feel his lungs and his throat and his chest open, as if the fist that had been curled around them for twenty-five years had finally let go. He could breathe again.
Owen stared at the corpse beside him, the pointing tip of her finger, and knew. He heaved in a deep breath of smoke, the burning chemical taste against his bloodied windpipe almost comforting with its fullness in his lungs, and with tears streaming gratefully down his face, finally began to scream his last. How ironic that here, in the razing tomb his father had so tenderly prepared for him, Owen would find his voice once more – exactly where he'd left it.
The black smoke curled up to fill the sky above the charring robin’s egg shell of his casket, his voice reaching to pierce the empty atmosphere; but he was heard only by the trees.
No comments:
Post a Comment