Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3

When Will rubbed his forehead Erin couldn’t take her eyes from the whites of his nails. They stood out against the black oil that streaked the backs of his hands like little headlights. He sighed. “Look, this thing has been on the road since the 70s. It’s got more than 600,000 miles on it. What do you want me to say?”

“Well,” Erin started, not quite sure what he’d just said, buying time. She knew that any attempt at charm would just make things worse and so she dragged out the silence, watching him tiredly massage the tender membrane of his right eye with an oily finger. She closed her eyes. Not her problem. Not any more. She opened them again and fixed them on the engine compartment lying open between them. Like a baby, she thought, and cleared her throat. “Does it look like it’ll run for a while longer?” 

“I dunno. Maybe?” 

He always did this, he always followed her lead. Didn’t matter if she was fighting her way out of a pit or pointing the nose of the plane directly at the ground. He was never the one who would break, and it had only gotten worse when he realized that she wasn’t coming back. Erin made a soft, frustrated noise and he just shrugged his shoulders, carefully refusing to make eye contact. 

“Look it made it over here, it’ll probably make it home or wherever. The carbs were running little rough so I opened the choke but there isn’t much more that I can do. You want me to look at the belts and hoses? The fans?”

“Does it need that?” she asked hopefully.

He looked down at the engine, and with one hand tugged on one of the hoses snaking out of the engine. “They look fine.” 

Erin frowned, and looked down at the small engine lying placidly in its  blue shell. The hoses did look okay, all glossy black rubber with new metal fittings. “Okay Can you at least tell me how many more miles it has in it?”

“More miles? What, you want an average or something?” He asked.

She nodded

“Man, that’s a hard thing to say.” He squinted at the car for a second, then knelt down to look at the tires, got on the ground and stuck his head under the thing. He repeated the operation on the other side and when he popped his head out from under the car he was right next to her, and she looked down at him for long enough to see the tendons in his neck form the small well that caught his sweat on nights when the air conditioning went out and it was so sticky no one could sleep and they’d spend all night talking and fanning each other, taking turns with the balsawood fan that had hung over her bed until last week, finally falling asleep just before dawn when it was finally cool enough to lie still, with just the edges of their pinkies touching. She looked away before he could notice, pretending to be very interested in one of the silver objects on top of the engine he’d pointed out earlier. Carburetor… I wonder if that’s why we call them cars. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Will get to his feet and make his way back around the car, walking the long way around to avoid brushing up against her.

“I dunno what to say, Er. I think it’s fine. Good, even.” 

He shrugged his shoulders and rubbed his hand over the back of his head. The hair there was freshly cut and Erin’s palms tinged from the memory so strongly she had to put them in her pockets. 

 “Shit, I’ve seen these things go a million miles on the original engine. Not a ton of them, but I’ve seen it. No reason this can’t be one of them.”

“And you’re saying that’s average?”  

“Average? Nah, nah, that’s pretty high. But there’s no real reason why it couldn’t.”  

He crossed his arms in front of his chest and tried his best to look certain, but she saw the slow fidget in the pose.

“So then why aren’t there million mile cars everywhere, then?” 

“Uh. Well. There’s lots of reasons. Most of which is people being dumb, you know? They don’t treat their cars like exquisite machines that are a high point of their civilization’s technological achievement, not just rocks on wheels that get you places. How many times you think the owners of this thing changed their filters?”

The filters, actually, looked pretty good. 

“Fine, if not the filters then they don’t change the oil or they drive it in the salt, or squirrels move in, parts wear out and get forgotten, whatever. It’s a mess and it’s usually the owner who’s at fault.  He paused to take a breath, the color rising in his cheeks slightly. It was better than when he went flat as a cardboard cutout. He kept going.

“You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen roll into the shop. Oil like toothpaste, shredded clutches, wheels, seats, hoses, shattered axels, bent differentials. People will be driving around with some brand new light on every week and they won’t bring it in until something fatal happens where it literally just won’t go any more. Just last week, some lady wanted to get her oil changed. Sticker on the front said she was due at a hundred and forty thousand but she was nearly at two hundred!

“But that wasn’t the insane part, that happens all the time. But her tires were completely bald, like polished rocks. And the struts were rusted out. Whole thing was held together by maybe a half inch of rusted steel, the rest of it was just vaporized.”

“Did you fix it?”

“Fix it? Only thing to do when the cancer gets that bad is just take it to the dump, let it get shredded into a million different pieces, put it out of its misery.”

“You’re telling me that if I just change the oil regularly, I’ll be good for another 400,000 miles?” 20 times around the Earth, not bad.

“Uh…”

“I knew it, you’re just saying stuff!”

He flushed. “Look, some are built better, but none of ‘em are gonna get you a million miles without some basic decency.” With that, he nodded and closed the hood with a satisfying metallic thump, leaving Erin with nowhere to look except at him and his fresh cut hair, the color of sun through buckwheat honey.  

 “Come see me when it breaks?” he finished hopefully.

She didn’t say anything.  

“What, you’re finally going?”

Ah, so close. She glanced back into the shop, hoping that Buddy needed something but Buddy, like he usually was when you needed a solid, was under the lift on the other side of the shop, swearing at a rusted out bolt. 

“For at least a little while, yeah.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know yet,” she replied defensively, old habits taking over. 

The fragile tenderness evaporated from Will’s face. “Sounds about right. You never did talks about wanting to stay.”

Erin was about to say something sharp, about the slow-motion death of ambition that happened in the mountains, about how she didn’t want to spend her life waiting tables and getting her ass grabbed by drunk middle income millionaires on vacation with their frosty, shrill wives, about how he was meant for greater things than being the floor mechanic at some corporate shop, about how there wasn’t a good reason to stay but instead she just sighed, heavily, and looked down at her own hands, and then back up at Will’s tormented face. 

“Hey,” he started, his hand reaching to graze her skin by instinct but she pulled away as if his touch was electric. Will let out a strange, deflated sound that she hadn’t heard before and took a step back, rubbing his jaw as if he’d been hit. 

She couldn’t stand to look at him any more, his hands with long fingers and skin like soot-stained marble, the flashing whites of his nails like searchlights calling her home, always with the little ring of black around the bed.

Hands of an angel, she thought, and closed her eyes to fight a momentary pulse of vertigo drawn up by the smell of him so close - oil, leather, and musk. A lost angel, cast out among the beasts.

“Just keep an eye on those carbs.” he said thickly and walked away, leaving her alone with her ghostly visions. 

——

Roughly a thousand miles later it occurred to her that not only had she failed to keep her eye on the carbs, she didn’t really even know what that meant, despite the fact that she thought of them every time she started the car. 

Starting the engine was a whole dance, one that she’d learned by looking it up online because it was easier than calling Will by that point. To the left of the steering wheel was a little lever, one that had a long time ago said “CHOKE” in carefully designed white letters but was now rubbed completely blank. To start the car she had to pull it out, almost all the way, and then turn the key. When the motor started to turn over, she’d then work the choke until the engine finally caught. Sometimes it would turn over ten, fifteen, twenty times, but it never failed.

As far as she understood, the choke did something to the carbs. Opened, closed them, it didn’t matter too much. It just mattered that the knob needed to be set properly so that when the fuel was pulled up out of the line it was vaporized just enough to hold a spark without blowing itself out. Every time she did it, she wondered how many more times it would manage to start, and it seemed like she had finally answered that question.

She bounced her forehead against the steering wheel a few times. Her phone was dead, it was nearly midnight, and the animals would be out soon. She popped the hood and, with a sigh, got out of the car. 

The wagon had come to a stop on the soft shoulder just as the road flattened out at the floor of the valley. On either side the treeline had receded a mile or two, replaced for a few miles in either direction with low-slung grassland with a few stunted trees growing out of it. A little less than half a mile from the car was the only feature in either direction, a little hillock covered in trees that towered above the scrubby plain. 

A little ways down the highway she could see where the valley walls were painted an orange velvet, right where the pass to Barilof cut through the mountains. On the other side of the junction the road curved up again, winding up into the twilight that by this point had fallen over the Eastern end of the valley. Not a soul from here to the horizon, which was to be expected - there was nothing farther north from here except for the oil fields, and the trucks didn’t run this late at night - not even during the summer. 

Under the hood, everything looked completely normal. Not even any dirtier than when she’d been in the shop, and there was a moment when she wondered if maybe she’d imagined the awful noise of the engine. Maybe it was a dream?

Buoyed by hope she slid back into the drivers seat, grabbed hold of the little lever with her index and middle finger, resting her thumb against the divot on its back. She took a deep breath, mover her lips in perfunctory prayer - a formless breath of wanting something good more than a clear request from a specific god, and paused with her eyes closed. Even the mosquitos bumping their little bodies against the windshield, seemed to stop moving. 

When she breathed out turned the key the engine started to crank and even managed to turn over once but before she could set the choke the grinding noise started to build, the lights on the dash flickered angrily, and then the engine just stopped completely. She turned the key again and just hear the click of the starter motor, but nothing else. The mosquitos shrugged and went about their business. 

It sounded fatal, at least on her budget, but there was nothing she could do about it tonight. She’d have to get to town, see if anyone would come out here and give her a tow, but what about until then? Sleeping in the back of the wagon was an option - it was comfortable with a mattress and little curtains, even some netting to keep the bugs out when the windows were opened, but she’d never slept right on the road like this before. 

Usually she’d just pull off onto a forest road, deep enough into the woods that no one could see from the highway, but even there she slept with the keys in the ignition and the loaded rifle in easy reach. With a dead engine, though, the car was just a millstone around her neck. Conspicuous and helpless. 

Most people out here worried about the wolves, the moose, but it was the clerk from the gas station, the missing couple with the van that was on her mind. No one had been caught yet. The cops up here didn’t seem to have the resources or the will to figure it out, but the whispers Erin heard all pointed to a trucker.

The long haulers up here floated through the world like honored ghosts, granted diplomatic immunity in return for the treasures they brought from the mortal world where the sun didn’t vanish for six months of the year and the wolves didn’t run through the streets. Cast suspicions on them and the silk threads holding the world together, the lines that brought the baby formula, the crispy heads of lettuce, the tomatoes in winter, hard little blueberries every month of the year, pods of everything from coffee to jello to salsa to chocolate and those 12 packs of glazed donuts manufactured by the hundred thousand, all those things that made life at the edge of the world bearable would vanish. 

Even worse, there would be nothing to replace it with - gardens out here had long grown fallow, no one farmed with any fervor, they barely even kept animals. The cities were filled with old people, just waiting around to die.

Walking to the turn was an option - she could keep off the road, find a place to pitch her tent once she got there so that in the morning she could hitch a ride when it wasn’t just trucks on the road - but the mosquitos, the stupid, brutal, endlessly hungry creatures - would eat her alive before she got there. She slapped one flat on he wrist before the little red jewel could swell inside its abdomen. Walking in the dark through the wide-open flatlands with thousands of them chasing her through the night was a murderous thought. 

No, it would need to be something closer. Maybe the little hill with the trees nearby? It was elevated enough that the ground would be dry, enough trees that the tent wouldn’t be obvious behind their branches. As she contemplated, she noticed a faint mechanical hum. The twilight down the road towards Barilof and into the valley was unbroken by headlights, but the noise still grew. It drowned out the whine of the mosquitos and started to fill the valley, echoing from all directions at once. Something big was coming from the East, and she wasn’t going to see who it was until they were right on top of her.

Without thinking about it, she took two quick steps to the back of the car, pulled her pack out, and took off towards the rise. The ground was as soft as it looked, almost decadent. Each step gave off the pungent odor of mountain herbs, as if the ground was soaked in a tincture of arctic medicine, whatever it was they distilled Jaeger from. Around her feet, the tannic water oozed out of the earth at each step and the whine, clearly mechanical, clearly a car, was getting closer. No mistaking it now. 

The wobble in the ground was also getting to be unmistakable, as if she was walking across the surface of an enormous water bed, but it was just 100 more feet to the trees, rising like salvation from the bed of moss and swinging grasses. With every step a small cloud of insects scattered from the soft moss, batting her legs in protest before settling back into their disturbed homes.

Behind her, the noise had started to resolve enough that she could make out the sound of an engine break - it was a truck that had just hit the grade at the mouth of the valley. She took another step forward, her breath growing ragged and loud inside her head, her mouth dry, the mosquitos like a collar around her neck, biting the backs of her hands, the soft corners of her eyes, flying into her nose, undeterred by the DEET she’d doused herself in that morning. She swatted at them, trying to keep them from flying into her ragged, panting mouth and when she took a step without looking something snapped under her foot. 

Instantly, she sank into the ground to her hip and icy water poured over the lip of her boot, soaked her to the bone. She cursed at the pain, the cold, the twisting branches clawing at her submerged leg. She dropped her pack and rocked frantically back and forth trying to wedge herself free, but there was no play, no purchase. When she pushed too hard on the leg that was still on the surface it started to sink and she had to stop and breathe to keep down the panic welling up in the back of her throat. Her heart felt like it was going to explode, and the cold water seeping into her clothes felt like it sizzled when it touched her skin. The more she fought the tighter the ground held and she cursed the lace-up boots she was wearing that kept her from pulling her foot out and running the last hundred feet to the sheltered rise. 

The noise grew stronger, nearer, louder as the rig crested the last undulating hill. It was a brand new cab, painted a glittering orange-red that caught the refracted skylight like liquid wax that dripped seamlessly onto the chrome bumper studded with a full set of halogen running lights. The wheels sang against the pavement, a crown of thorns sticking out from each hubcap, a flesh-eating circle that howled across the valley. Kushtaka Trucking, it said in black paint on the side, lit by a thread of lights embedded into the roof of the trailer.

The cab was one of the big ones, big enough to tow a triple load, one with twin smokestacks that spilled black clouds that spread like an oilslick over the road in it’s wake when the throttle was open. The engine break got louder, out of the corner of her eye she could see the truck coming to a stop, directly behind her but she was so tangled in the broken branches that she couldn’t turn to see who was stepping out of the cab. 

She heard the sound of boots on pavement, the moist sound of them treading across the open field and and her eyes rolled in her head like a panicked cow trying to see the bolt before it comes, smelling the smell of death, of decay, of cold water on her skin, thinking of the couple, last seen eating a meal on the side of the highways, sipping coffee in their camping chairs blind to what was coming.

She thought of the water, so wickedly unbound, and wished that she had found a way to stop to touch it’s waters, to know what it meant to stand on the edge of something so pure and eternal for once in her life. 

“Who’s there?” she called, her voice small and frightened, vanishing into the mosses that swallowed her hip deep. A warm wind sweeps across the plain, as the heavy footsteps approached.

“Who’s there?” she called again and yanked at her leg like an animal in a trap, letting the answer come as two hands that close around her shoulders. 

_____

Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3

_____

Part 5 coming soon