Something Rising (Light and Swift) (13 page)

“I'm driving,” Cassie said, still in custody of the keys.

“You bet you're driving,” Emmy said, standing like a soldier outside the car. “I can't even make my knees move.”

“Are those your real knees?” Puck asked, pointing at them. “Or are those your Lee Press-On legs?” He and Emmy collapsed on the ground, panting with dry-mouthed laughter.

“Ho,” Emmy said, wiping her eyes and struggling to her feet.

Puck sat down heavily in the passenger's seat. “I ate, Jesus Lord, like a lot. Was anyone watching me? I can literally feel my gallbladder at work.”

“Where are we going?” Cassie asked.

“You know what I hate?” Emmy asked from the backseat, where she was trying in vain to locate a seat belt. “Awareness of my tongue.”

“Where to now?” Cassie asked, pulling out on to the dark country road.

“Puck, have you ever been so stoned you started to pee and then couldn't remember whether you were in a bathroom or, like, sitting on the couch?”

“I pee standing up, Emmy, it's an anatomy issue. So I can look around and gather whether I'm in a parlor or whatnot.”

“Where do you want to go now, Puck?”

“One thing I hate is feeling like a great deal of time has passed and then discovering it's been, oh, four minutes. Try listening to a Led Zeppelin song stoned sometime, you'll see what I mean.”

“Ooooh, you know what I hate—”

“Could someone please tell me where we're going?”

“West, dearest.”

“We're already headed west.”

“How convenient, then.”

“Puck,” Cassie said, trying hard to remember the days she'd been on the interesting side of this conversation, “I need a destination.”

“Well, I'm thinking you'll take exception to the destination.”

“You still have to tell me.”

“Cassandra, master of the craft—”

“You know her name's not Cassandra, right? Do you have my lighter?”

“Cassandra, I wish to visit the abandoned, what shall we call it, the institution that formerly served the mad, broken, and neglected of our fair county.”

The old state hospital was tucked away in what passed for a valley in rural Indiana, back a long lane; the spread of buildings had been condemned. It was possible Dante was there; it was possible that Puck's reasons for searching so fervently for a person whose way of life was
missing
were not what he had stated.

“I'm worried about your car, Emmy.”

“I know. But my dad will give me five thousand dollars toward a new one if this one makes it two hundred thousand miles.”

Puck had rolled his window down a few inches and was sticking his nose out like a retriever.

“Why are we really looking for Dante?” Emmy asked. “Why are we not at some party, safe and warm?”

Puck rolled the window up, then tilted his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. “We're looking for him because he is a beautiful child.”

Cassie glanced at Puck, but he didn't say more.

“Do you have my lighter? Cassie, could you put on some music, for the love of God? Is this a holiday or not?”

Cassie pushed the tape in, and Robert Smith began to sing; she could see him in her mind, as she was certain Puck and Emmy were seeing him. A man in shadow, his eyes ringed black as crow, red lipstick smeared across his mouth.
Oh oh oh I want to change it all
, he sang, and Puck and Emmy sang with him.
Oh oh oh I want to change
.

*    *    *

Puck kicked the rear tire of Emmy's car, not like a man who intended to buy it, then stomped on the ground. Kicked the tire again. “Two hundred thousand miles my ass, Emmy. We could have been in my Camaro, the gorgeous Camaro my dear widowed mother bought for me, but no. We always have to ride in this piece of—”

“Puck,” Cassie said, from under the hood, “that's enough.”

“I didn't do it on purpose, doofus.”

“Still, my shrink says—”

“You don't have a shrink, you have a social worker.”

“—my shrink says I need to express myself. Shall we fire up another one against the chill?”

“Emmy, have you had problems with the piston rings? Because look, the radiator isn't leaking, but there's smoke, like maybe from the engine—are you burning a lot of oil? Have you had the catalytic converter replaced?”

“I don't know all that, don't ask me, here—here, Puck, light this, I just want to look at something inside.” Emmy opened the driver's door and sat down. “Okay,” she called out, “the lights still work, so it isn't the battery, and damn! I have six thousand miles to go. Damn.” Emmy slammed the door, stomped her tennis shoe on the ground, then kicked a tire.

Puck blew out a stream of smoke. “How far are we from the hospital, Cassandra?”

Cassie looked around, then down the road. “Two miles? Maybe three.”

“We should push ahead, troops, don't you agree, Miss Emmy? Shouldn't we see this through to the end?”

“Fine with me,” Emmy answered, hopping up and down. “I'm game either way, but I'm freezing.”

Game. In truth Emmy had made her choice long ago, toward becoming the girl of her parents' dreams. She'd done it by picking Brian—her boyfriend since the tenth grade, with his myriad and subtle restraints, the way he controlled her every move, even from a distance—and by leaving earlier in the fall for the nearest state college, the one her parents chose. She was studying to be a middle-school teacher, as her parents had demanded, rather than majoring in journalism, as she'd wanted. Tonight everything Emmy was doing was for show: the leather biker jacket she'd orphaned in her closet but had taken out for this occasion. The quarter bag of dope she'd scored, surely the last time that would ever happen. Even now the hopping, the coolness of saying she'd be willing to walk in the pitch darkness into an abandoned asylum in search of Dante, all were designed to suggest to Puck and Cassie that her story wasn't over. Puck was the real thing; he would lead the stroll into a minefield, he
wanted
to go to the old hospital. He wanted to chase the beautiful child across the freezing landscape of Halloween night.

Cassie lifted the hood off the metal arm supporting it, put the arm down, and dropped the hood from its height. The dense explosion as it landed echoed out across the fields. “All right, then. But we take the first ride offered to us, no matter who it is, right, Emmy?”

Emmy shrugged, casual. “Sounds good.”

“Ahhh!” Puck passed the joint to Emmy, then raised his arms in the air. “By the pricking of my thumbs—”

“Dude,” Cassie said. “Enough.”

“Here, we'll need this, too.” Emmy pulled a pint of Southern Comfort out of her back pocket. “It's getting colder.”

They passed a pig farm squatting on a hillside and began to speak of pigs, an unfortunate topic. The house, under the waning moon, looked like the sort of place Grandpa Jones from
Hee Haw
would pick on his banjo as a bunch of barely dressed white-trash girls sang backup.

“That used to be Cassie's dream house when she was little, wasn't it, Cass,” Emmy said.

“Shut up, Emmy.”

“Oh dear,” Puck said, taking a deep breath. “It is aromatic. I've never taken you much for a hayseed, Cassandra.”

“I like farms.”

“Has a single car passed us
yet
?” Puck asked, looking around as if in disbelief.

Cassie had worked, when nothing else was available, on farms all over the county, sometimes for a day or two, and she'd done work she hated and wished to forget: bailing hay, detasseling corn, not demeaning or cruel work, but abysmally hard. She'd done things she loved: rounding cattle on horseback, delivering lambs; even building fence had a certain joy, although it nearly broke her back. She had ridden all day in an air-conditioned combine, listening to country music, and that had been good, had left her butt sore and her head clear. But there was something that arrived in the end, a kind of information you gathered working on a farm. Every day was a plundering, ripping food from the earth and life out of animals.

“What time is it?” Puck asked, stopping to feel for his watch.

Emmy pushed a button on the side of her watch, and the face lit up. “It's eleven-oh-two, or thereabouts.”

Puck gave a stomp, which caused his heavy belly to ripple. “I have gone and missed trick-or-treat again. This is many years in a row now.”

Emmy set off walking again but made a soft humming sound. “Candy. Candy. Candy.”

Puck joined her in the chant: “Can-dy, can-dy, can-dy.” Cassie heard the van coming up behind them before the others but didn't turn to meet the headlights. She walked straight ahead, scuffing her boots against the gravel of the shoulder. The heavy flashlight was tucked inside her jacket, and the Southern Comfort was curved securely in her pocket. Those who would stop, stopped. Rides were predetermined, like points on a compass: if you started out at A, C was set in motion. The van had been driving toward them a long time. Cassie had felt it, or the air it displaced, all the way back before the day began.

It was a white van, extra long and with no windows in the side or back. If it had been black, Cassie would have thought it belonged to a funeral-home fleet. It was probably used to deliver something, just not the newly dead. It drove past them slowly, then pulled over a hundred feet in front of them.

“This may very well mean candy,” Puck said, winking at Cassie.

She walked up to the driver's window as he was rolling it down. He was a thin man in his late forties with dark hair going gray and an aggressive salt-and-pepper mustache. Cassie thought she'd been in line behind him at the grocery store. Him or someone like him, a man who bought only three things: cigarettes,
ammonia, and honey buns. He blew a stream of smoke at his windshield, smiled at her.

“Where you headed?”

“Where are you headed, kind sir?” Puck asked from somewhere behind Cassie.

“Where are
you
headed?” the driver asked again, looking directly at Cassie.

“We're going to the old state hospital,” she said.

“Climb in on the other side, I'll take you there.”

When the three stranded travelers reached the passenger's side, they were surprised to find a man holding the door open for them. Cassie glanced at him and said thanks as she slipped over the passenger's seat and into the back of the van. He was handsome and cold, with pale blue eyes that seemed to have migrated up from Appalachia and the body of a high school wrestler: dense through the shoulders and small-waisted. Puck made an ooomph as he joined Cassie in the back, and Emmy slipped in silently.

The floor was uncovered, corrugated. There were indistinguishable items pushed against the walls, maybe televisions or microwaves, and a ladder hanging from two hooks. Emmy found a stack of motorcycle helmets and put one on, then handed two over to Puck and Cassie.

“May I wear one of your helmets, sir?”

The driver offered a vague wave. “Knock yourself out.”

“Oh, I can't seem to fit—Emmy, hand me another, this one is too small. Don't fear, sir! I'm not suggesting that your helmets aren't big enough, it's simply that I am quite large through the cranium.”

The cold-eyed passenger found something in the glove box,
then climbed in and closed the door. Cassie sat on her helmet and leaned against one of the metal walls, slowly reaching for the knife she carried on her belt. No belt, no knife. She wrapped her arms around her knees and considered the odds. If the passenger was armed, they were doomed. If it came down to fists and feet, Cassie would be alone with her flashlight, as Emmy and Puck would do nothing but scream and dance around like nine-year-old girls. She leaned over and whispered to Emmy, “Until we're out of the van and the situation is clear, keep your helmet on.”

Emmy nodded like a spaceman, then leaned over and said the same to Puck, who gave Cassie a sage wink. His helmet was propped atop his head, the straps dangling around his face.

The driver pulled out on to Old 7 slowly, as if afraid his cargo might be disturbed, then accelerated gently, so that their passage over the first of the heart-thrilling hills passed without incident. Cassie was still trying to read the passenger's profile (which was chiseled, square-chinned) by the dim light of the dashboard when Emmy screamed and bonked her helmet against the van wall.

“Furry! Something furry touched my hand!” She tried to get up, and fell sideways. “Fur!”

The driver laughed. “Calm down, it's just a rabbit.”

Cassie looked at Puck, who smiled. “There's a rabbit back here?”

“More than one.”

Cassie reached into her jacket and pulled out the flashlight, shining it on the floor of the van. At least six rabbits, a black and white one, a solid black, a beautiful deep brown, and others in combination, were hopping around freely.

Puck laughed aloud. “Isn't this unexpected?”

The floor of the van was marked by large brown spots—rust or
blood. If the passenger had a knife, they continued to be screwed. If he had a blackjack, nunchucks, Chinese fighting sticks, anything like that, they stood a chance. Cassie played it out in numerous ways in her mind: one behind her, the other in front, with a gun, with a knife, with nothing but menace and the unusual strength of the crazy. She repeated to herself the mantra that calmed her, walking out of a pool hall to her truck or down a darkened street: nose, throat, instep, solar plexus, groin. A man's testicles can be removed from his body with eight pounds of pressure, and he will bleed to death in under a minute. A car key delivered swiftly to an eye will stop most assailants. An average man will panic if you sink your teeth into his tongue, but only if you mean it, only if you're willing to bite it off and go on with your life. Walking out of a pool hall, however, she carried a cue in a hard case, and sometimes a .22 pistol in an ankle holster, and it was easier to be sanguine.