The Extinction Event (28 page)

“Why did you say you were hollowed out?” Jack asked. “Dixie said—”

“Have you ever made a jack-o'-lantern?” Caroline said. “Cut off the top of the pumpkin, reach in, and rake out all the seeds and membranes and damp strings? That's what they did to me.”

Jack turned from one Caroline to another.

“So Dixie's wrong?” Jack asked.

Caroline tried to decide which of three Jacks was the real one.

“No,” she said.

Jack walked toward what he thought was the real Caroline and slammed into a wall of glass.

“But they took so much,” she said.

Jack backed up. His nose hurt. His eyes watered.

“It'll be a miracle if I ever have kids,” Caroline said, turning in a circle, surrounded by Jacks.

Jack felt his way along a wall of glass until he found a space.

“Why did you say you were empty?” Jack asked.

He went through the space—into a cul-de-sac.

“It's easier to accept that,” Caroline said.

She put her palms on a glass wall.

“No hopes,” she said. “Fewer complications.”

On the other side of the glass wall, Jack put his palms up to hers—and realized that he was facing a reflection of a reflection.

3

Dixie was orating on the progress of civilization to a young man handing out Distributionist literature—
The Mississippi Delta and the Nile Delta, all those fertile triangles giving birth to commerce and civilization—those seductive, luxurious, lush, damp crotches where water meets land
—when he looked up and noticed something was wrong.

Jack, Caroline, and Nicole sat three abreast in the Whip. Their car was rotating on the end of a mechanical arm that was revolving around the center engine.

Like an old model of the solar system, Dixie thought.

Loudspeakers blared the
bop-de-bop-de-bop-bop-bop
of a Bo Diddley song, covered by Sha Na Na, older but still energetic, which was finishing up its show on the grandstand.

Loud enough for Dixie to feel it inside his body.

On the Whip, braced against the speed of the ride, Jack's mouth was turned down, a mask of tragedy. Caroline's mouth was turned up, a mask of comedy. Nicole's face looked as if it were breaking up into pieces.

Nicole opened her mouth. Wide.

Like Munch's
The Scream
, Dixie absently thought at the same time he knew Nicole was in trouble.

And she vomited. A great, multicolored plume of puke that arced out right in the path of the couple sitting in the next car.

An inexorable collision.

The faces of the young man and woman who were about to splash into the plume of puke shuttled rapidly through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Just as the collision happened.

Pressed back against the car by the speed of the ride, the couple couldn't wipe their faces.

Again, Nicole vomited.

Again, the plume of puke arced into the path of the couple in the oncoming car.

When Nicole vomited a third time, Dixie—up until them horrified and helpless—began to laugh.

Uncontrollably.

He doubled over, grabbed his chest, which hurt, he was laughing so hard, and for a moment thought he was going to lose his balance.

The vomit-covered couple, teenagers on a date, got off the ride. Eyes wide. Stunned.

“I'm so sorry,” Dixie stammered though his laughter. “My niece. So very sorry…”

Jack and Caroline supported Nicole between them. Her chin was covered with drying vomit.

“I'll take her home,” Dixie said. “Jack, I'll have to miss the demolition derby.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

1

“Gentlemen,” the voice over the loud speaker said, “start your engines.”

Jack had been sitting on the roof of his junker—Number 45—smoking a cigar, his legs, crossed at the ankles, dangling in the hole where the car's windshield had been. They had done a good job of stripping off all the glass and chrome, anything that might be jarred loose and under impact become a projectile.

“This year, Jackie,” Bix—Car Number 46—said, “I'm gonna cream you.”

“You do that, Pops,” said a nineteen-year-old girl in bleached jeans and a sequined Bugs Bunny top—Car Number 52—who was slipping through her windshield hole into her driver's seat.

Jack tamped out the tip of his cigar, tucked it into the left flap pocket of his brown leather jacket, and slipped behind his wheel.

Jack heard a metal clamp clang against a flag pole. Then, chaos.

All around him engines were revving. Clouds of exhaust billowed into the air and hung over the junkers like cartoon dialogue balloons.

Jack and Bix were in the first heat. Four cylinders.

Usually, there were three or four four-cylinder heats, but this year the price of scrap metal was so high there were fewer clunkers available.

One by one, as the announcer called their numbers, cars nudged forward from the field where they had been parked, through the gate and into the football field–size arena, where, following the flagmen's instructions, they lined up, fifty cars to the left, fifty cars to the right, rear bumpers facing rear bumpers, across the no-man's land that would become the center of combat.

The trick was to accelerate in reverse, crashing your rear end into everyone else's front, in order to disable their engines.

Out of one hundred cars, the last car running would win.

Some drivers circled on the outside, waiting for the rest of the cars in the tight knot in the center to eliminate each other.

Jack's strategy had always been to stay in the center, where cars had less room to maneuver. It was so crowded, no one could get up any speed. Which benefited drivers who were skillful at targeting other cars' weaknesses.

This car was vulnerable in the front right. If you tapped that car just so, you could cripple its cooling system.…

Flagmen on the field stopped all action if a car's engine blew up or if a car caught fire and they prevented—or tried to prevent—any car from plowing into a car's side. Especially the driver's side. The cars were not reinforced.

If you hit someone broadside, you could kill him.

Jack, his right arm over the back of his seat, turned to get a good look through the empty back window frame and started to back up fast, aiming at a red Chevy coming up, four o'clock, on his right when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Cowboy in a blue-and-rust Pontiac heading straight toward his driver's-side door—clearly intending to crush him.

2

Jack slammed his car into drive and hit the accelerator. His wheels spun in the mud, whined, caught, and he shot ahead through a gap between two other cars.

The Cowboy missed Jack's door, bashed into his rear left quarter panel, and spun Jack around ninety degrees. Just in time for Bix to reverse into Jack's front.

Jack saw Bix's grinning face, looking across his front seat back. He smelled the haze of gasoline that was settling over the field.

Bix lurched forward. Just far enough to give him room to back up again, hard, into Jack's engine.

Jack's wheels couldn't get traction. He was stuck in place.

As Bix again slammed into him in the front, another car crashed into his back.

And the Cowboy, having slewed around 360 degrees, came at Jack from nine o'clock, driving forward, gunning straight at Jack's side door.

Jack's wheels caught. And his car jerked back a few feet—just far enough to keep Jack from being crushed when the Cowboy hit Jack's left front bumper instead of Jack's left front door.

Jack jockeyed forward and back, forward and back, bashing into Bix's car and the car behind him, trying to make enough room to turn his clunker to the right, to get away from the Cowboy's car, which was again circling the crush, ready to make another run at Jack's front left door.

Over the grinding of gears and the ripping of metal, Jack heard the flagmen's whistles, saw two of them running toward him, waving red flags.

Jack shot out in the space that opened up between two cars that were backing away from each other.

He caught Bix's attention and pointed at the Cowboy's car.

Bix's eyes looked blank, then puzzled, finally comprehending—as the Cowboy's car was coming a third time at Jack broadside.

A bashed-up Ford slammed into Jack's rear left, swinging him into a perfect side-on target for the Cowboy.

Hand over hand, Jack turned his steering wheel as he popped the gear shift into drive.

The Cowboy was leaning forward over his steering wheel. His face was composed, revealing neither glee nor anger nor sorrow nor satisfaction.

Jack's wheels spun.

The Cowboy seemed—in that frozen moment—to be sucking on a back tooth.

Jack's wheels kept spinning.

The Cowboy braced himself for the collision.

Jack considered diving away from the driver's side, trying to scramble out the passenger's window—but two cars were about to collide on his right. One was scraping his car, rocking it.

The Cowboy's car seemed huge—like the moon in the haunted house ride.

Jack smelled his spinning tires burning.

He, too, braced himself for the collision—when Bix's car slammed into the side of the Cowboy's car, spinning it ten degrees off target.

Jack's tires caught. Jack's car leapt forward.

Flagmen were all around them, calling a temporary stop. Because the Cowboy had been illegally aiming at Jack's driver's door. Because Bix had illegally hit the Cowboy's side. Because Jack's engine exploded, sending flames thirty feet into the air.

Jack popped his seat belt and scrambled through the front windshield frame, his face and hands scorched by the flames.

He dropped to the ground as a fire engine was already hosing his car's engine, and ran toward the Cowboy's car, which was also burning.

But the car was empty.

The Cowboy was gone.

3

“Must of stolen some poor sap's car,” Bix said.

“Or bought it,” Jack said.

They were walking off the field. Beside them, a tow truck was dragging Jack's clunker into the parking lot. Another tow truck was pulling the Cowboy's clunker. One of the field men was driving Bix's car, which was bucking and rearing like a bronco, past them.

“Demolition derby,” Bix said. “Accidents happen all the time. If you were killed, nobody would of thought nothing.”

Jack reached into the flap pocket of his jacket, took out his cigar, and lit it with a Zippo lighter.

“A truly cool guy would have relit his cigar in the flames from the engine,” Caroline said.

She had come up behind them. From the stands where she'd watched the heat.

“That was exciting,” she said. “For a while, it looked like you were really in trouble.”

“He was,” Bix told Caroline.

“The guy who kept trying to broadside me,” Jack said, “was the Cowboy.”

Caroline said, “Let's find the son of a bitch!”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

1

Jack and Caroline put their cell phones on speed dial to each other's number. Bix didn't have a cell phone that worked, but he said, “Don't worry, Jackie. If I spot the Cowboy, you'll know because of the racket.”

They split up at a stall filled with a hundred bright-orange rubber ducks with beady black eyes floating in a metal tub.

Jack headed past the Ferris wheel and started searching the cow barns. The ammonia smell of the manure tickled Jack's nose. The cows, their rumps facing the aisles, their depleted udders swinging like empty bagpipe bags, chewed and chewed. They switched their tails to brush away flies. Kids, some as young as eight or nine, cared for the animals. A few kids lay asleep or reading or, eyes closed, listening to iPods on cots beside the stalls.

No Cowboy.

In the goat barn, Jack walked along an aisle of wicked-looking animals with black bandit face markings. As Jack passed, one of the goats, a huge hairy brute, stood up on its hind legs, propped its forelegs on the slats of the pen gate and, staring at Jack, bleated accusingly.

Jack worked his way through the sheep barn, past a pile of baled hay taller than he was, some green, some older and tan, past the display of farm equipment, huge machines painted in bright nursery colors as if farming were a child's game, past the small theater where a swing band, all women over sixty, was singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” past the American Legion tent, past the 4-H Building, past the demonstration of antique tools, past the bookbinding exhibit, past the modular house display, and along an aisle of booths selling Harley-Davidson kerchiefs, unicorn tapestries, plastic Star Wars laser swords, and water filters.

No Cowboy.

The Cowboy had probably left the fair as soon as he bolted from the demolition derby, Jack figured. Although, Jack second-guessed himself, maybe Caroline was right. Maybe he hung around, figuring what better place to nail Jack than in such a crowd.

Jack walked through the schoolhouse, his attention snagged on the student art work: self-portraits, watercolors of farms and malls, collages of kids hanging around the renovated outdoor movie theater, a ceramic of suckling pigs in a row, a metal sculpture of a horse hit by lightning, its mouth opened in a scream.

Such talent, Jack thought; where did it all go when the kids graduated and started flipping burgers or working as sales associates at big-box stores?

Past the kiddie rides: the goose boats, the carousel—its horses with wild eyes and frenzied painted faces—the moon walk, the tiny rockets.

At one game, where kids were diving under the multicolored foam balls as if snorkeling, the woman with sunken eyes who ran the ride stopped Jack and said, “You ever sleep on foam balls, Chief? Come back after the fair's over.”