Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

6

I don’t like maps. All the lines give me a headache, and half the time I’m so busy trying to interpret the miniscule printing I either miss the exit I’m looking for or almost drive into a guardrail—or sometimes even another car whose driver was so busy trying to read his map that he didn’t see me coming.

Give me landmarks and I’m hell on wheels; give me a map and I turn into Forest Gump in Death Race 2000.

Can you tell that driving is not my favorite thing in the world? Oh, with short distances I’m okay, but the fabled American Road Trip? Inwardly, I shriek in horror. Aside from the monotony, it gives you too long to think about things, and eventually your mind starts either sorting through useless trivia or dusting off memories best left in cold storage. Or, at least, mine does.

I’m good for about four or five hours cooped up inside a car, and then I need open space, food, and a bathroom—and that’s the best case scenario, when I’m traveling with other people who can share the drive and conversation. (The last actual road trip I’d taken with another person was during the summer after high school graduation, when a bunch of us drove to Cleveland to see an Emerson, Lake & Palmer concert as our big pre-college blowout.)

Now imagine driving alone for well over a thousand miles with a corpse your only companion. A Hope & Crosby On The Road movie this was not.

I’d been traveling for almost 14 hours and it was getting seriously dark. I was tired, I was upset, I was hungry, the coffin and its passenger were creeping me out to the nth degree, I needed to stretch my cramping legs, I’d missed the rest-stop entrance a few miles back (I was busy trying to make out the TripTik printing under the dim glow of the dome light), my bladder was grumpy, and I was pretty sure that I’d gotten onto the wrong stretch of highway at the interchange, so I decided, fuck it, I was going to take the next exit and find an all-night gas station and ask for directions.

That’s right—ask for directions: I am not one these guys who feels genetically obligated to never admit that he’s lost. If I’m going somewhere I just want to get there, preferably not too far behind schedule, in one piece and with my sanity intact; if that means I have to endure some twenty-something kid behind the counter of a Sip & Piss laughing at me under his breath as he shows me the best way to get back to where I need to be, well…there are worse humiliations that can be suffered, even if I sometimes do feel like belting that kid one upside the head. (And I swear it seems like it’s always the same kid behind the counter, regardless of where you stop; personally, I think they’re being manufactured in some top-secret government facility dedicated to creating as many aggravations as possible for American drivers so we don’t notice that the gas prices always start to go up on Wednesday night, right about rush hour.)

According to my TripTik, the next exit—happy-happy-joy-joy—was twenty miles farther down the highway. If I was right and it turned out I should’ve taken the I-70 West ramp, then I was almost 25 miles away from where I should have taken the exit, which meant by the time I got back to where I needed to be I’d be about 50 miles in the hole.

I turned up the radio, which was tuned to a “classic rock” station, and was just in time to hear the DJ introduce The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” with the words: “Can you believe this song is older than I am?”

I wanted to reach through the radio waves and strangle the little fucker.

I don’t think of myself as being ancient (I’m only 44), but it still blows my mind that there are people out there who don’t remember when “Baba O’Riley”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven”, and even Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” were brand-new. Hell, half the DJs working these “classic rock” stations probably have no idea that “Smoke On The Water” tanked in the U.S when it was released as a single from the Machine Head album; it was only when it released as a single from Made In Japan that it became the monster smash—not to mention the first riff every kid learns to play once they get a guitar—we all know and pretend to loathe.

Told you my mind starts sorting through useless trivia if I spend too much time on the road, so don’t start bitching about how this has nothing to do with anything.

I cranked up the volume and pressed down on the accelerator—almost anything from Who’s Next turns me into a speed king—and before Roger Daltrey was finished roaring about the teenage wasteland, the exit was in sight.

Or, rather, an exit.

I checked the odometer and saw that it had been just under five miles; there wasn’t supposed to be an exit for a while yet.

You know those moments in life that, when you talk about them later, you always preface with something like, “I should have known because…”? Well, there’s no “because” here; yeah, what happened a few moments later was odd, no question, and I wish to hell I could say that I knew or sensed that something in the world was about to wander off the highway permanently, but the truth is there was nothing that set off any serious alarms. By now, I was so tired and cramped and sore and hungry and all the rest of it that I didn’t care about the shadows that had broken into my apartment, or Miss Driscoll’s morbid hobby, or the two thousand dollars, or my date with redheaded Kimberly—nothing.

On the TripTik map or not, that next exit was mine. If I’d turned down the radio and listened carefully, I bet I could have heard my bladder cheering.

That said, I can tell you now that if I had decided to wait for the following (and TripTik-acknowledged) exit farther down, all of this still would have happened—hell, I could have taken any exit from this point on and it wouldn’t have changed anything.

The sign said, simply: EXIT. Nothing more; no town name, no number, no white arrow pointing in the correct direction. All of this both registered with me and didn’t (like the total number of deaths from the I-71 accident); I saw it, knew something about it was odd, but just didn’t care. I wanted to feel solid ground and not pedals under my feet for a few minutes.

As soon as I merged onto the ramp the light above the EXIT sign blinked twice, made a sputter-buzz kind of noise, then went out completely.

I wasn’t prepared for how damned black it became after that. Nowhere on either side of me was there another light, so all I had to see by were the meat wagon’s headlights. I clicked over to the brights and slowed down, just in case some possum, squirrel, dog, or deer decided to make a break for it and test my reflexes.

The first roadside memorial (a cross made of plastic flowers, sporting several ribbons) barely registered with me when it faded into the glow of the headlights. I drove on. The cross glided past. One of the ribbons snapped backwards and flapped in the breeze as if waving good-bye.

I thought of the miniature monuments Miss Driscoll had erected around her tracks.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find something creepy about these monuments (be they HO-scale or life-size). I understand that those left behind have to do whatever it takes to deal with their grief, but if it was me and someone I’d loved had died in a wreck (probably in bloody pieces and great pain) the last goddamned place I’d want to erect a monument to their memory was the spot where their final agonized breath had been drawn and expelled. And since the maintenance of these things is the responsibility of those who erect them, that means you have to make an at-least quarterly pilgrimage to the place—assuming that you don’t have to drive past it every day on your way to or from work. How can you pay suitable respect to someone’s memory when you’ve got semis and SUVs and busloads of screaming kids roaring by every few seconds? Cemeteries may not be the cheeriest places to visit, but at least it makes sense to mourn there. Grieving by the side of the road in front of a monument no one but you gives a shit about just strikes me as distasteful…but then, I’ve never had to confront that particular kind of grief, so it’s easy for me to pass judgment: Dianne—my ex-wife—always pointed that out to me—that it was easy for me to judgmental about these memorials; she found them to be deeply moving.

Dianne never brought up my shortcomings to try and make me feel small; she did it because they, in her words: “…keep the best of you hidden from me and everyone else. You’re not the cynic you want everyone to think you are.” I never saw it that way, nope; as far as I was concerned, it was her way of proving to me once again that my moral compass was fucked up and wouldn’t I just be the best person if I saw the world just like her.

Yes, I was an asshole. It’s taken all these years of being without her for that to finally sink in.

I looked in the rear-view mirror, saw the lone waving ribbon from the shrine, and felt a brief sting of regret—but for what, I wasn’t sure.

“Baba O’Riley” segued into Grand Funk’s “I’m Your Captain”, and I turned up the volume, forcing myself to not think about the way Dianne detested this song.

The next shrine popped up as suddenly as a slice of bread from a toaster. This one was of the heart-shaped variety, but that isn’t what startled me. It was the sight of the face in the center. It blinked at me. And then smiled.

A sharp movement on the right of the shrine flashed against the windshield and I hit the brakes, thinking that some animal was about to make a mad dash for safety across the road, but instead of a raccoon or cat, what emerged from the side of the shrine was a hand, then a wrist, and then the face in the middle glided upward, leaving a blank space in the center—

—and the girl who was setting up the shrine waved at me.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding and waved back at her, easing off the brake but not yet speeding up again.

Pushing back some of her long strawberry-blonde hair from her face, she looked at me, then at the shrine, and then shrugged, her smile looking more and more like that of a child who’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been. Her clothing was dark—way too dark to be safe at this time of night, in this location.

Checking the dashboard clock, I saw that it was almost two in the morning, and there was no other car in sight. Had she walked here from whatever town lay at the end of the ramp? Why do this in the middle of the night when there was the chance someone might not see you until it was too late? And what the hell was I doing, sitting here wondering about this when I needed to be moving?

That’s when it hit me that she wasn’t trying to erect the shrine, she was trying to take it down, and I‘d surprised her. This was probably some kind of sorority prank—she couldn’t have been more than nineteen—and the look on her face told me that she was embarrassed but not necessarily sorry.

I looked at her, then the shrine, shook my head in disgust, and drove away.

She came out into the middle of the road and stood watching until I rounded the curve that emptied out into the town proper. I half expected her to give me the finger—after all, I’d been the one who had the nerve to interrupt her little practical joke—but she only stood there, arms at her sides, staring at my tail-lights.

Something about her shape seemed off to me, but I couldn’t pin it down, and then decided I didn’t care.

The second after I crested a small hill and she disappeared from view, I saw the stack of memorial wreaths, crosses, and hearts. They were piled up to the side at the traffic light like discarded bags of trash, plastic lace cracking, ribbons waving in the air, and countless photographed faces staring up through the open spaces in the center.

There must have two dozen of the things piled there. I sat staring at them for several moment before turning to look out the rear window. Jesus, had she taken all of these? How far had she been walking, anyway? There was no way all of these had been taken from the small stretch of road along the exit, unless this particular exit was one of the deadliest in existence, which I doubted.

I looked back at the dead pile—that’s how I suddenly thought if it, and had no idea where the hell the phrase had come from—then decided, screw the light, made my turn, and headed toward the service station about a quarter-mile down the street. I didn’t know what the hell she was up to and I didn’t want to know. I’d gas up, take a piss (well, leave one, actually), get my directions, and mind my own business the rest of the way to Miss Driscoll’s home town.

Still, it angered me to think that, sitting in some sorority house somewhere, a bunch of smug sisters were giggling over this prank and not giving one thought to the additional grief it would bring to those whose heartbreak had compelled them to mark the place of their loved one’s death.

And that thought struck me as funny: Hey, Dianne, here’s a question: What is the sound made by a moral compass shifting?

I exhaled, shook my head, and turned down the radio as I pulled into the service station.

It was surprisingly modern for what appeared at first glance to be a very small town; automated pay-here pumps, a diesel docking area, an attached car wash, and one of those seemingly hermitically-sealed booths where the “attendant” sat behind inch-thick glass and you made purchases after midnight through a series of metal drawers.

I swiped my credit card (I was saving the cash for emergencies), waited for the pump to authorize my purchase, and looked over to see the attendant staring right at me and talking into the phone. He looked nervous, maybe even a little scared, and for a crazy moment I thought, He’s calling the cops.

(Help, dear God,, help me—I’ve got an actual customer! What’ll I do? I’m doomed! Doomed, I tell you!)

Then it occurred to me: I was driving a meat wagon, clearly marked CORONER. That’d freak out anyone at this time of night.

The authorization came through and I filled the tank, got my receipt, and decided to give the windshield a quick wash. I was wiping away the last of the cleaner when I asked myself: What would Dianne do if she were here?

Dianne could never, never see a wrong without at least trying to take some kind of action, even if all that action amounted to was pointing out to someone that the wrong was being committed. I made her believe that this annoyed the hell out of me, which in truth it did—not because it was another way of her proving how moral she was, but because I admired the courage it took to always do it, and in my admiration found that same conviction to be sadly lacking in myself, which irritated me, so more often than not I took it out on her in a series of little cruelties that ran the gamut from deliberately ignoring her to going out of my way to be a pain in the ass. I was a real prince of a hubby, me.

So the question: What would Dianne do?

She’d tell someone, that’s what.

I looked at the kid in the booth, then back at my car, then at my feet. Staring at my feet has been the source of many an epiphany over the years.

I was surprised to discover that I was genuinely pissed at what that girl was doing back there.

Next thing I know, I’m standing at the booth and waiting for the kid to look up from the issue of Guitar Player that he’s reading. Steve Morse was on the cover. I like Steve Morse’s music a lot. Perhaps I could use that as an ice-breaker if the little shit ever acknowledged my existence.

Finally I cleared my throat, and without looking up from the page he was reading, the kid reached out and pressed on the intercom button: “Yeah?”

“There’s a girl about a mile back who’s vandalizing some roadside memorials.”

“You don’t say?” He looked at me with the kind of unctuous, smarmy smirk that doesn’t try to mask the wearer’s amused apathy, and instantly makes you want to step on their face and grind your heel.

Keeping a civil tongue, I quickly explained to him what I’d seen, and where, and finished by suggesting that he call the police or sheriff.

That smirk still on his face, he nodded, flipped to a new page in the magazine, and said: “Anything else I can do for you?”

I tried, Dianne; give me that much. I tried.

“Yes,” I said. “Where are your restrooms?”

This got an audible sigh. He closed the magazine, stood up (which seemed to be a source of great physical strain), walked over to a cabinet on the wall, opened the door, and removed a key that was attached to a chain that was soldered to a piece of metal half the length of my forearm. Returning to his stool (I saw now that one of his legs was encased in a metal brace of some kind), he valiantly struggled back into position, tossed the key into a drawer, then shoved it out to me.

Removing the works from the drawer, I waited for him to say something. When he didn’t, I used the end of the key to tap on the glass. Hearing it, he paused in his reading, sighed even more loudly than before, and (still not looking up at me) said : “Yes?”

I couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d last in this job if it actually required him to step outside and work for his paycheck, metal leg brace or no. “This does me no good unless you tell me where the restrooms are.”

He pointed to his left. That’s all the more I was going to get from him as far as directions went; past left, I was on my own.

I nodded, turned away, muttered, “If I don’t return, let it be on your conscience,” and made my way around the left side of the building.

The restrooms, as it turned out, were at the back of the building, which meant I had to go left, walk the length of the place, then turn right. Night vision goggles would have helped me locate the door quicker, since the back of the place—despite the glaring lights from the pump islands—was mostly in shadow, but I’m pleased to say that I didn’t have to add a stop at an all-night department store for a new pair of pants to my travels.

I found the restroom, unlocked the door, and made it inside.

I have been in kitchens in peoples’ homes that weren’t as clean as this restroom. It not only smelled brand-new, it looked brand-new: the floor tile was shiny, the faucets sparkled, the mirrors were streak-free, someone had decorated the wood-paneled walls with framed photographs and old movie posters, there was none of that moist, old-urinal-cake stink that usually permeates service station bathrooms (the urinals and toilets looked as if they’d never been used), and there was no trash in the receptacles—not a paper towel, wad of chewing gum, empty soda can, nothing.

I almost felt like I was defiling the place when I finally stepped up to the urinal, but an aching bladder will diminish the sanctity of even the Sistine Chapel; yes, you may quote me on that.

Standing there, I looked around at the movie posters and photographs. I was expecting stuff like Gone with the Wind and pictures of New York at night—your standard, safe, pleasant, nothing-to-offend-anyone type of public restroom milieu—but instead what I got were posters for Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry, The Driver, and (the one that made me laugh out loud) Death Race 2000. Whoever decorated in here had a thing for racing and car-chase movies.

The photographs were of people standing beside heavily tricked-out or racing cars; a couple looked to have been taken in the winner’s circle at NASCAR or Formula One races (I don’t know the difference between the two, it’s all just roaring engines and squealing tires to me).

Then I turned my attention back to the business at hand and caught a glimpse of the framed photograph hanging over my urinal.

Have you ever heard someone say, It scared the piss out of me? Well, if there’s an expression for the opposite bladder-related physical reaction to being frightened, it pretty much describes what happened when I saw that photograph, because everything south of my personal Mason-Dixon line came to sudden, dribbling halt; it felt like my bladder would have slammed everything into reverse had it been capable.

I was looking at a very striking woman surrounded by dozens of children, all of them smiling the type of forced, could-you-hurry-up-and-take-the-picture-puh-leeeeze smile that we’ve all plastered on our faces at one time or another as suited the occasion.

This wasn’t a copy of the picture from Miss Driscoll’s foyer—it was the same photograph, in the same frame, with the same crack in the glass running down the center of her face.

Of all the thoughts that could have gone through my mind, these are the three things that occurred to me at that moment: 1) the hulking shadows in my apartment had not used any doors or windows to break in or to leave; 2) another shadow had closed the door to Miss Driscoll’s apartment from the inside after Dobbs had made certain it locked behind us; and, 3) if these shadows could just pop in and out when- and wherever they wanted, who was to say they couldn’t bring something along…like, say, this picture? Take a good look: this is me, not realizing I’m screwed. This is me, not realizing I’m screwed while still holding my dick in my hand. And dribbling piss onto my shoes. A moment of great personal dignity that I felt compelled to share. I feel it’s brought us closer.

Backing away from the urinal, zipping up, and wanting to look over my shoulder to see if someone or something were standing behind me, I found I couldn’t take my eyes off that photograph. There were probably, oh, at least one or one-and-a-half very good, logical, reasonable scenarios to explain how this picture had followed me to this place, but at that moment I couldn’t think of any that didn’t involve bulky shadows. And even if I could have, all of them would have shared the same ending, anyway; me getting the hell out of Dodge right now.

Except—as I was about to find out—Dodge had other plans.