SERIAL UNCUT (15 page)

He cranked open the window to get rid of the
bleach smell, and pulled up next to her under the overpass, feeling
his arousal returning.

-2-

She set the guitar case on the pavement and
stuck out her thumb. The minivan shrieked by. She turned her head,
watched it go--no brakelights. The disappointment blossomed hot and
sharp in her gut, like a shot of iced Stoli. Despite the midmorning
brilliance of the rising sun, she could feel the cold gnawing
through the tips of her gloved fingers, the earflaps of her black
woolen hat.

According to her Internet research, 491
(previously 666) ranked as the third least traveled highway in the
Lower-Forty-Eight, with an average of four cars passing a fixed
point any given hour. Less of course at night. The downside of
hitchhiking these little-known thoroughfares was the waiting, but
the upside paid generous dividends in privacy.

She exhaled a steaming breath and looked
around. Painfully blue sky. Treeless high desert. Mountains thirty
miles east. A further range to the northwest. They stood blanketed
in snow, and on some level she understood that others would find
them dramatic and beautiful, and she wondered what it felt like to
be moved by nature.

Two hours later, she lifted her guitar case
and walked up the shoulder toward the idling Subaru Outback, heard
the front passenger window humming down. She mustered a faint smile
as she reached the door. Two young men in the front seats stared at
her. They seemed roughly her age and friendly enough, if a little
hungover. Open cans of Bud in the center console drink holders had
perfumed the interior with the sour stench of beer--a good omen, she
thought. Might make things easier.

"
Where you headed?" the driver asked.
He had sandy hair and an elaborate goatee. Impressive cords of
bicep strained the cotton fibers of his muscle shirt. The passenger
looked native--dark hair and eyes, brown skin, a thin, implausible
mustache.

"
Salt Lake," she said.

"
We're going to Tahoe. We could take
you at least to I-15."

She surveyed the rear storage
compartment--crammed with two snowboards and the requisite boots,
parkas, snow pants, goggles, and...she suppressed the jolt of
pleasure--helmets. She hadn't thought of that before.

A duffle bag took up the left side of the
backseat. A little tight, but then she stood just five feet in her
pink crocs. She could manage.

"
Comfortable back there?" the driver
asked.

"
Yes."

Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

"
What's your name?"

"
Lucy."

"
Lucy, I'm Matt. This is Kenny. We
were just about to have us a morning toke before we picked you up.
Would it bother you if we did?"

"
Not at all."

"
Pack that pipe, bro."

They got high as they crossed into Utah and
became talkative and philosophically confident. They offered her
some pot, but she declined. It grew hot in the car and she removed
her hat and unbuttoned her black trench coat, breathing the fresh
air coming in through the crack at the top of the window.

"
So where you going?" the Indian asked
her.

"
Salt Lake."

"
I already asked her that,
bro."

"
No, I mean what for?"

"
See some family."

"
We're going to Tahoe. Do some
snowboarding at Heavenly."

"
Already told her that,
bro."

The two men broke up into laughter.

"
So you play guitar, huh?" Kenny
said.

"
Yes."

"
Wanna strum something for
us?"

"
Not just yet."

They stopped at a filling station in Moab.
Matt pumped gas and Kenny went inside the convenience store to
procure the substantial list of snacks they'd been obsessing on for
the last hour. When Matt walked inside to pay, she opened the
guitar case and took out the syringe. The smell wafted out--not
overpowering by any means, but she wondered if the boys would
notice. She hadn't had a chance to properly clean everything in
awhile. Lucy reached up between the seats and tested the weight of
the two Budweisers in the drink holders: each about half-full. She
eyed the entrance to the store--no one coming--and shot a squirt from
the syringe into the mouth of each can.

Kenny cracked a can of Bud and said, "Dude,
was that shit laced?"

"
What are you talking
about?"

They sped through a country of red rock and
buttes and waterless arroyos.

"
What we smoked."

"
I don't think so."

"
Man, I don't feel right. Where'd you
get it?"

"
From Tim. Same as always."

Lucy leaned forward and studied the double
yellow line through the windshield. After Matt drifted across for a
third time, she said, "Would you pull over please?"

"
What's wrong?"

"
I'm going to be sick."

"
Oh God, don't puke on our
shit."

Matt pulled over onto the shoulder and Lucy
opened her door and stumbled out. As she worked her way down a
gentle embankment making fake retching sounds, she heard Matt
saying, "Dude? Dude? Come on, dude! Wake up, dude!"

She waited in the bed of the arroyo for ten
minutes and then started back up the hill toward the car. Matt had
slumped across the center console into Kenny's lap. The man
probably weighed two hundred pounds, and it took Lucy ten minutes
to shove him, millimeter by millimeter, into the passenger seat on
top of Kenny. She climbed in behind the wheel and slid the seat all
the way forward and cranked the engine.

She turned off of I-70 onto 24. According to
her map, this stretch of highway ran forty-four miles to a nothing
town called Hanksville. From her experience, it didn't get much
quieter than this barren, lifeless waste of countryside.

Ten miles south, she veered onto a dirt road
and followed it the length of several football fields, until the
highway was almost lost to sight. She killed the engine, stepped
out. Late afternoon. Windless. Soundless. The boys would be waking
soon, and she was already starting to glow. She opened the guitar
case and retrieved the syringe, gave Kenny and Matt another healthy
dose.

By the time she'd wrangled them out of the
car into the desert, dusk had fallen and she'd drenched herself in
sweat. She rolled the men onto their backs and splayed out their
arms and legs so they appeared to be making snow angels in the
dirt.

Lucy removed their shoes and socks. The pair
of scissors was the kind used to cut raw chicken, with thick,
serrated blades. She trimmed off their shirts and cut away their
pants and underwear.

Kenny and Matt had returned to full, roaring
consciousness by 1:15 a.m. Naked. Ankles and wrists tightly bound
with deeply scuffed handcuffs, heads helmeted, staring at the
small, plain hitchhiker who squatted down facing them at the back
of the car, blinding them with a hand held spotlight.

"
I didn't think you were ever going to
wake up," Lucy said.

"
What the hell are you doing?" Matt
looked angry.

Kenny said, "These cuffs hurt. Get them
off."

She held a locking carabiner attached to a
chain that ran underneath the Subaru. She clipped it onto another
pair of carabiners. A rope fed through each one, and the ends of
the ropes had been tied to the handcuffs on the boys' ankles.

"
Oh my God, she's crazy,
dude."

"
Lucy, please. Don't. We'll give you
anything you want. We won't tell anyone."

She smiled. "That's really sweet of you,
Matt, but this is what I want. Kind of have my heart set on
it."

She stepped over the tangle of chain and
rope and moved toward the driver's door as the boys hollered after
her.

She left the hatch open so she could hear
them. Kept looking back as she drove slowly, so slowly, along the
dirt road. They were still begging her, and occasionally yelling
when they dragged over a rock or a cactus, but she got them to the
shoulder of Highway 24 with only minor injuries.

The moon was up and nearly full. She could
see five miles of the road in either direction, so perfectly empty
and black, and she wondered if the way it touched her in this
moment felt anything like how the beauty of the those mountains
she'd seen this morning touched normal people.

Lucy buckled her seatbelt and glanced in the
rearview mirror. Matt had climbed to his feet, and he hobbled
toward the car.

"
Hey, no fair!" she yelled and gave
the accelerator a little gas, jerking his feet out from under him.
"All right, count of three. We'll start small with half a
mile!"

She grasped the steering wheel, heart
pumping. She'd done this a half dozen times but never with
helmets.

"
One! Two! Three!"

She reset the odometer and eased onto the
accelerator. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty miles per hour, and the
boys already beginning to scream. At four-tenths of a mile, she hit
forty, and in the rearview mirror, Kenny's and Matt's pale and
naked bodies writhed in full-throated agony, both trying to sit up
and grab the rope and failing as they slid across the pavement on
their bare backs, dragged by their cuffed ankles, the chains
throwing gorgeous yellow sparks against the asphalt.

She eased off the gas and pulled over onto
the shoulder. Collected the spray bottle and the artificial leech
from the guitar case, unbuckled, jumped out, and went to the boys.
They lay on their backs, blood pooling beneath them. Bone and
muscle already showing through in many places where the skin had
simply been erased, and Kenny must have rolled briefly onto his
right elbow, because it had been sanded down to a sharp spire of
bone.

"
Please," Matt croaked. "Oh, God,
please."

"
You don't know how beautiful you
look," she said, "but I'm gonna make you even prettier."

She spritzed them with pure, organic lemon
juice, especially their backs, which looked like raw hamburger,
then knelt down with the artificial leech she'd stolen from a
medical museum in Phoenix several years ago. Using it always made
her think fondly of Luther and Orson.

She stuck each of them twenty times with the
artificial leech, and to the heartwarming depth of their new
screams, skipped back to the car and hopped in and stomped the gas,
their cries rising into something like the baying of hounds, Lucy
howling back. She pushed the Subaru past fifty, to sixty, to
seventy-five, and in the illumination of the spotlight, the boys
bounced along the pavement, on their backs, their sides, their
stomachs, and with every passing second looking more and more
lovely, and still making those delicious screams she could almost
taste, Lucy driving with no headlights, doing eighty under the
moon, and the cold winter wind rushing through the windows like the
breath of God.

She made it five miles (no one had ever
lasted five miles and she credited those well-made snowboarding
helmets) before the skeletons finally went quiet.

Lucy ditched what was left of the boys and
drove all night like she'd done six blasts of coke, arriving in
Salt Lake as the sun edged up over the mountains. She checked into
a Red Roof Inn and ran a hot bath and cleaned the new blood and the
old blood out of the ropes and let the carabiners and the chains
and the handcuffs soak in the soapy water.

In the evening she awoke, that dark weight
perched on her chest again. The guitar case items had dried, and
she packed them away and dressed and headed out. The motel stood
along the interstate, and it came down to Applebee's or
Chili's.

She went with the latter, because she loved
their Awesome Blossom.

After dinner, she walked outside and stared
at the Subaru in the parking lot, the black rot flooding back
inside of her, that restless, awful energy that could never be
fully sated, those seconds of release never fully quenching, like
water tinged with salt. She turned away from the Subaru and walked
along the frontage road until she came to a hole in the fence.
Ducked through. Scrambled down to the shoulder of the
interstate.

Traffic was moderate, the night cold and
starry. A line of cars approached, bottled up behind a
Winnebago.

She walked under the bridge, set down her
guitar case, and stuck out her thumb.

-3-

Donaldson pulled over onto the shoulder and
lowered the passenger window. The girl was young and tiny, wearing
a wool cap despite the relative warmth.

"
Where you headed?" He winked before
he said it, his smile genuine.

"
Missoula," Lucy answered.

"
Got a gig up there?" He pointed his
chin at her guitar case.

She shrugged.

"
Well, I'm going north. If you chip in
for gas, and promise not to sing any show tunes, you can hop
in."

The girl seemed to consider it, then nodded.
She opened the rear door and awkwardly fit the guitar case onto the
backseat. Before getting in, she stared at the upholstery on the
front seats.

"
What's with the plastic?" she asked,
indicating Donaldson's clear seat covers.

"
Sometimes I travel with my
dog."

Lucy squinted at the picture taped to the
dashboard--the portly driver holding a long-haired dachshund.

"
What's its name?"