Dead Fish Jumping On The Road

Chapter Three

Chapter ThreeI drove out of town trying to shake off those childhood memories but that was like saying time stood still and the sun never rose each morning. My old man used to say that he could feel a big story coming on, that he'd get this tingling feeling in the back of his neck. Jack Simpson. Had a nose for the news, his buddies used to boast. The only times I saw him smile, even whistle under his breath sometimes was when he slapped a copy of The Mercury on the kitchen table and pointed to his byline on the front page. “Best feeling in the world,” he'd crow and my mother and I would smile shyly with him, wondering how long the euphoria would last. Never long enough. Maybe the only good thing I got from him was the same intuition. My neck had been tingling ever since Norma's body washed up on shore. In truth, it was a curse but like my old man, I couldn't leave go of the big one when it came along. I realized, that in my own way, I was competing with him even though he lay in a box below ground, shamefully dead.

On a busy day it took no more than seven minutes to escape Applewood and the countryside opened up like a spring flower. I followed Highway 26 north for six miles, then turned on to Nottawasaga Road 8, heading west, intending to make my way out to the Beatty place and report on the blessed coming of the divine piglets.

The road opened before me empty and infinite, except for a car coming up quickly in my rear view mirror. I glanced at it, then looked ahead. The sun soared. A mild breeze blew. I had begun to relax, slipping into that state of semi-reverie on a pleasant, summer day. The black car raised dust as it fish-tailed around the curves. Guy's going awfully fast, I thought. I gripped the wheel a little harder as the car loomed larger in my sphere of vision. My Chevy was a big, solid car and could move when I wanted it to but the road narrowed and wound around this far out in the country. A solid line split the pitted tarmac. No passing allowed.

The dark car drew nearer, edging up. I knew by its low-riding chassis that it was a Corvette and heard the throaty growl of its engine. The driver pulled up close, just back of my rear bumper. What the hell was he playing at? Guy should be reported but I couldn't make out any details to report. Couldn't make out the driver as the windshield had been blacked over. In fact, the entire car was black from top to bottom. Some kind of joker, I figured, thinking I drove like a knock-kneed tourist or an old-age pensioner. He inched closer, dropped back, then moved up again, boosting the gas. I began to think the guy was nuts. Some psycho road hog having a thrill.

I eased up on the accelerator hoping the Vette would pass but it dropped back. Then, I pumped the brake lightly to warn him off but he hung back for a second then charged up again playing kissy-kissy with my rear bumper. I squared up behind the wheel then trod on the accelerator watching the guy fade in the rear view…but not for long. He swooped up then pulled out beside and slightly behind me as we accelerated around a hair-pin. I felt the Chevy's tires spin on the gravel shoulder. The foghorn blast from a logging truck made me jump out of my skin. The Corvette dropped back quickly tucking itself neatly behind me. I caught a flash of the flushed face and angry, flexed jaw of the driver. He jabbed a rigid thumb up in the air. His obscene words swallowed by another blast of the air horn. Just as the rig blew by, the dark car moved up again inching its way forward. The harder I pushed, the faster he went, matching me effortlessly. We balanced neck and neck charging down the twisted road at 80, 90, then 100 miles an hour, faster than I'd ever gone before. Faster than I thought possible. I felt like the guy was laughing at me. Playing some stupid but dangerous game. What the hell was I doing? My hands locked on the steering wheel. My arms had gone rigid, fused into iron bars.

I heard it before I felt the impact.

A bang erupted behind my head. The car rumbled and shuddered and rocked on its springs. I wrestled the wheel with all my strength lifting my foot off the accelerator…the rear left had exploded. The back end of the Chevy jerked sluicing on loose gravel and sand rabbiting dangerously. The front end swung left. The scream of rubber filled the air or maybe it was me doing the screaming…I wrenched the wheel to the right and felt the car careen toward the shoulder.

The Chevy left the road shooting up a hill where it jounced and bounced in the ruts and gullies of the boggy grassland.

I gripped the wheel with all the strength I could muster as the car dove to a stop in the gully of a lumpy slope where I cracked my head on the dashboard. A creak, then a groan teased out of the metal carcass as The Chevy began to roll backward toward the road. Dizzily, I stomped on the brake forcing some steel into my leg. The car's jerking progress stopped just short of the gravel shoulder before exposing its rear end to the highway. When I finally managed to look up, the Corvette, pristine in its throaty power, vanished around the next bend. I jammed the transmission into park, kicked in the parking brake and switched off the engine letting my head loll back on the seat. I lay like that for a long time panting and moaning although probably only two minutes had lapsed. In the rear view, I could see a nasty lump forming on my forehead where the skin had broken and was rapidly turning green and blue. The Corvette had no license plates. A cipher.

I examined the damage. The right front fender looked banged up pretty good and a long, sickening scrape scythed across the doors where I'd plowed through a stand of prickly scrub and saplings. Now that my head pounded to beat the band to match the damage, it was all just about perfect.

I kept a spare in the trunk. After much huffing and wheezing, I changed the tire. I looked at it in disgust. The blown whitewall seemed beyond repair, shredded into oblivion. And then I wondered what had happened. I shook my head. I really didn't know. I did know that a nice goose egg formed on my head, my hands were covered in grease, my elbow smarted where I'd skinned it on the tire jack and I'd sweated through my short-sleeve, button-down, cotton shirt. And now, I had to see a man about pigs.

I swung the car onto the road feeling a bit numb. The front right tire clanged against the crumpled wheel well.

Turning up a gravel road, I spotted the dented mailbox marking the Beatty place and bumped along their dirt drive, hearing the squeal of extremely animated pigs and worse, smelling the stench of filthy, mud-slopped bodies. They heard my car. No sooner had I cut the engine than Jan Beatty, blonde and apple-cheeked, wiping her large, reddened hands on a calico apron and Evan, stout as a fireplug in his bleached coveralls and a fierce expression shielded by a ratty-looking straw hat pulled low on his dark bearded face, waddled down the steps of their porch.

“'Bout time you got here,” fumed Evan. “We've been waiting on you. Expected you to show up over an hour ago.” Then spat a stream of tobacco in a black arc at my feet splattering my socks.

“Now Evan,” scolded Jan as I wondered what Ozark nightmare they'd crawled out of, “there was no call to do that. Mr. Simpson'll think we're uncivilized. How about some cold lemonade, Mr. Simpson? I make it myself. It is such a warm day.” Her voice resonated with that ever-present nasality that city slickers come to expect in country folk. I wasn't disappointed. You could hitch a hay wagon to it. Jan stood on the porch steps and turned to await my reply before disappearing inside the farmhouse.

“That'd be swell,” I said, resisting the urge to wipe my socks in front of Evan. His eyes formed dark orbs rimmed with white. He had the look of a wild stallion about to rear up and stomp something or someone into a pulpy mess. His thick beard had been trimmed into a round bush by a pair of garden shears but his upper lip remained clean. Surprisingly delicate nostrils pulsated like vibrating flanges as he snorted in anger. He spat again and leaned in close. I smelled his acrid, tobacco-filled breath. He gave me a dead-eyed stare. Spooky. I was still trying to shake off the effects of the near-death experience I'd just had in the car. Evan began to murmur in a muttering, accusatorial tone pointing a stubby finger in my direction. He sniffed the air then shrugged violently as if physically assaulted by some odious shape.

“I smell it, boy and I smell it on you,” he said.

“Smell what?” Had my deodorant let me down?

“Slime. Evil slime. It burns the air around me. I choke. I gag. I want to clear my throat and spit it up. It's here around you and I say, get it gone from me.”

“Well, when you find it, whatever it is, let me know.”

He gathered himself up to blather on when the porch door flew open with a frightening bang. Evan nearly left his boots standing in place. So did I. The resounding knock of wood on wood made me realize that for a working farm, the Beatty place had become uncharacteristically quiet suddenly. Eerily quiet. The grunting undercurrents of the piggies surged through the hazy air. Jan marched down the stairs carrying a broad tray…a wooden tablet embroidered around the edges with a cyrillic-like script…laden with a frosted pitcher and tall glasses. I heard the rattling of spoons as she clumped along. She lay the tray across the flat end of an upturned log. In her best hostess manner, she poured out three glasses handing one to Evan and me where we stood virtually toe-to-toe in mute enmity. She looked at us curiously.

Jan asked, “What's the matter with you two?” Hands on ample hips, scolding us as if we were rapscallions up to no good.

“Oh, it's nothin',” Evan muttered darkly and slurped his lemonade in the manner of a horse watering at a trough. I seemed incapable of moving, morbidly fascinated by what was becoming another episodic moment hashed into the day.

“How do you like it? Is it cold enough for you?” It took me a long moment to realize it was me Jan addressed. I took a sip and she watched me raptly, eagerly awaiting my pronouncement. Jeee—zus and the hepcats! Never in my existence had I tasted anything so sour. My palette had gone dry as the arroyo. I couldn't even swallow let alone talk. I would have dearly loved to spit the noxious beverage into Evan's warthog face. I nodded with false enthusiasm stretching shriveled lips as wide as possible. “Mmm…aahhh…eerrggg…”

Evan stared mightily with his accursed eyes. Even Jan felt his intensity.

“Evan. What's got into you? You're acting most peculiar. Don't mind him, Mr. Simpson. He's in one of his moods. They come and go, just like the seasons. And sometimes just as slow too,” Jan said, dimpling her plump face with a smile.

Perhaps it was the lemonade, perhaps not but while verbally paralyzed, my mind raced on toward some distant intellectual nebula. Maybe I had simply been concussed. And suddenly, silence blanketed the world. The silence permeated the air, drenched it. I felt my ankles and feet melt into the earth, then slowly take root. My hosts stood, shoulders touching then began to merge, while sheer white light emanated from their direction. But it became a benign hue not dazzling and not stinging to the eye. As seconds ticked off, the Beattys formed the light, that is, it came through from behind them and gradually achieved an elevated state of phosphorescence obliterating all else nearby. The radiance then sprang forward as if seeking a new host and moved behind my eyes, probing my ears, my senses, my mind. I couldn't hear anything but a low crackling, wireless hum. Fragments of the landscape zoomed into my foreground, then out again. Zoom. I strained to hear. Dead leaves crunchless underfoot. Zoom. Calves lowing silently in the meadow. Zoom. A crop duster soaring lazily in the mute distance. Zoom. My voice bellowing a dumb scream to the cotton-wadded atmosphere. But the world had been framed and screened and the big knob controlling the volume had been switched to off. Who was watching? And could they hear my thoughts?

Then, I heard it.

Solid, basso-profundo lines…musical notes. Music the like of which I'd never felt before—shattering and powerful. Chords struck for an eternity touching and surrounding my person like an everlasting truth. It was then, in a single, peerless second that the utterly simple significance of nature came to me as if the notes contained a secret hieroglyph meant only for me. It was a pattern. I was to unmake it. An oratorio of voices descended like a fluttering cloud and mingled freely with the music. Its form so powerful that a massive city could rise up on its own underpinnings without fear or concern for physical danger. Each popping molecule pressed in around me but instinct indicated there was no cause for alarm. Clouds lightened then darkened spasmodically like the clench of a heart, moving quickly across the pulsating sky in staccato fashion. The sun winked at each rapid fire uncovering, flickering with the intense pulse of a disco strobe fuelled by juiced up circuitry. As sound and sight melded with my throbbing blood, my worldview tilted dangerously. Somehow, I'd landed on the ground just as the cosmic pandemonia frothed to their collective apex; the voices withered, the sky dissipated and my senses boomeranged back to normal perspective as I stared uncomprehendingly at Evan's manure-splattered boots.

Jan exclaimed, “Oh my goodness! Evan, help Mr. Simpson up. He's had a fainting spell. Let's get him into the shade. Probably a touch of heat stroke, I'm sure.”

Evan glowered some more but complied with his wife's request as I felt myself yanked upright and dragged to a cooler locale under cover of the barn's slanted roof where the world continued to congeal into proper view.

“Wow. Some lemonade,” I rasped, feeling my burning face.

“I expect you got too much sun,” Jan said reassuringly. “Your face is quite bright, you know. And that lump.”

“I'm feeling better, thank you.”

“Well, if you're sufficiently recovered, let's go see the piggie-wiggies, shall we?” Jan cried, desperately hoping the sight of them might restore her moment of glory. She beckoned me to follow her broad back and shoulders—shoulders sloped from fetching slop pails, rolling hay bales, mucking out stalls—around the side of the weather-beaten barn. Evan, stolid as an A-bomb, strode darkly after.

The grunting and snorting sounded menacing as we approached the large pen, all bedecked with ribbons of pink and blue.

“There they are,” declared Jan proudly. I peered in. An obese sow lay on her side as her offspring recreated a rugby scrum pushing and shoving, digging in their little hooves for better traction to get at her swollen teats. A collection of squeals rose up as the victors fought successfully to their prize.

I asked, “What do you call them?”

“Maisie.”

“Maisie? They're all called Maisie?”

“Easier to remember,” Evan said with quiet menace. “We've got a lot of animals here. Can't always remember their names, you know.”

“No, of course not,” I agreed, edging away from Evan and his strangeness. “I guess you're both tinkled pink.”

“Actually,” Evan interjected, “there were thirteen but I strangled one at birth. Thirteen is bad luck, an evil omen.”

“Oh Evan. Don't be so strange. He's so superstitious, Mr. Simpson. There's nothing to it, really. Why, he's always looking out for black cats and ladders and things. Sometimes, he just gets carried away, don't you Evan?” she cried.

“No,” he replied dully.

I desperately wanted to get the hell out of there. “Say, why don't I take a picture for the article, then I'll just beat it.”

“Don't you even want to know their birth weights or how long poor Maisie mommy was in labour?” Jan asked, disappointment etched keenly on her face.

“Sure, sure, okay,” I replied as she promptly began to list each one in turn. “Why don't you just tell me the average birth weight, Mrs. Beatty? I'm not sure how much space we're going to have, you know, including the picture and everything.”

I managed to coax a nice smile out of Maisie mommy and her brood, even composed an orderly tableaux with a proud Jan and a glowering Evan and then tore the hell out of the Beatty place as Jan waved enthusiastically and Evan stared out from under the brim of that ratty hat. I could see the rims of his eyes and their wildness chilled me as I rammed the gear lever into reverse, trod the accelerator shooting shards of gravel and stones into the air as I peeled out of there. Once back on the main road, I relaxed my foot and eased off the gas pedal still shivering. Now the sun shone heatless. Checking the rear view mirror, all the colour had drained from my face except for the pulsating lump. If for a scant millisecond, I'd thought I understood nature, it had been a sad mistake. I saw Norma Jennings' rotted face staring back at me as I tore away and nearly lost control. Control of everything.