Purgatory Road Page 3

  Inside she found a little happiness in seeing Jack squirm about the car breaking down. He always portrayed confidence, maybe a little arrogance. He seemed to act like he always had the answers for everything, even when she knew he had no clue what he was talking about. Seeing him in situations that ruffled his feathers brought her a little joy. Sick joy, but joy nonetheless.

  Laura picked up her cell phone again and tapped some buttons. Nothing.

  She threw it back in her purse on the floor. She took some ChapStick from one of the pockets and casually put some on, the wax soothing her drying lips. She dug through the bottom of her bag for anything—a stick of gum, a mint, something to soothe her restlessness. But for all the collection of knickknacks it contained, she couldn’t find anything.

  It was getting hotter in the car, even with the door open.

  Her legs, above the knee and below her shorts, were getting hot, exposed to the sun coming through the windshield. She turned sideways in the seat, gazing back down the highway, the way Jack had wandered off. She could see a faint silhouette in the distance, distorted by the heat waves coming off the asphalt. Jack. His shape appearing as a small speck in a funhouse mirror.

  Life had been in a perpetual holding pattern for her for years now, so she accepted this current state of boredom with veteran experience. They had been married for five long, slow years. Laura thought that she would have a child or two by now, living the suburban dream of playdates and minivans. But as with all things involving her life with Jack, the family timeline fell on his schedule. He had pushed off having kids until he was more established in his career. She had consented. But then that establishment was always moved further down the line. One more raise, one more promotion . . . yes, someday everything would be fine. And so she waited.

  But why? When had she become the clichéd silent wife, the person whom she and her girlfriends raged against in their youth? Had she been born submissive, or just deteriorated into the role, finding the spot of least resistance more comfortable, easy?

  Laura felt the dreams of her life slowly decay as time went on, apathy growing as the rust set in. Numbness. The inability to be sparked to action by desires. The loneliness.

  Suddenly she wanted him back, back in the car with her, as if she became acutely aware of the magnitude of the situation. Seeing him down the road, a tiny shade in an infinite space of rock and shrub, made her feel exposed. Unsettled. Made her realize her own sense of frailty.

  The shadow increased in size, and she could tell he was walking back to the car. As he got closer she could see his shoulders hanging low. Dejected. Worried. A countenance she had not seen very much, and which fit him like an oversized suit. Laura wasn’t sure what to make of it; she was just glad he was coming back.

  6

  “Why do you have to do these things?” Laura asked as he got back into the car.

  “What things?”

  “Always having to push it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We could’ve just gone to Red Rock Canyon.”

  “I know.”

  “Or the dam, we could have done that.”

  “Yes, we could have.”

  “What’s to see out here?”

  “Looks like nothing.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You better think of something.”

  Jack melted back into the seat. “I know.”

  7

  Molly sat in the cave.

  The cave.

  How did she ever come to this?

  With her cracked knuckles, she massaged her torn ankle that chaffed under the metal restraint. The cuff was attached to a chain that ran across the floor and was anchored to the stone wall. Her shoulders were sore from pulling against it. Pulling, pulling, until exhaustion fell upon her. Her spirits dashed, then revived, and she would pull again. The chain held fast. She pulled some more.

  She rubbed her hands together, doing her best to exorcise the stiffness in her fingers. Focusing her mind on the slender digits. Forgetting her surroundings by the momentary sensation of kneading muscle.

  Molly looked at her hand, her right one, the hand that she had dug into the side of her kidnapper’s neck and clawed for vengeance. The nails were broken and the cuticles were stained with remnants of her own blood. Underneath, the raw abrasions glowed pink, bare tissue left on the links of the chain.

  She thought she was tougher, smarter. She thought she was invincible when she set off from home, leaving behind her the dull surroundings and princess bed, the boring life of suburbia. She thought she knew the world. She thought she owned it.

  But now she sat in darkness, staring at her flaking flesh as it slowly fell from her hands. Hands that were softer than she ever admitted they were. Molly brought them to her face and cried. She cried not so much in fear of her situation, of the unknown future dreamt in the mind of her captor. She cried as she mourned the death of who she thought she was. The street-smart, thick-skinned renegade.

  She had fought in the truck, she told herself. Fought hard. The man seemed generally surprised when she drove her fingers at his throat. He had nearly lost control of the truck, swaying between lanes into oncoming traffic. Sending exhaust into a sea of gawkers on the strip. But he had recovered quickly and punched her across the head. She had never been hit before, and the shock of the pain made her lose her grip. He then grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved her face into the dashboard. That was all she remembered, waking up alone in the cave chained to the wall.

  Molly thought about that moment. She isolated it in her mind. The moment her fingers grabbed on to his neck and clenched. His look of shock. The feeling of control over an uncontrollable situation. It had been brief, a split second, but it gave her strength.

  She came out of her recollection and centered herself.

  Wincing as her tender hands gripped the chain again . . . she began to pull.

  8

  Forty-two. That was the number of striped lines Jack counted down the center of the road before they blurred in the distance. Forty-two. Was there some secret code to be deciphered from that number? Seven squared? No, that was forty-nine. Forty-two. Perfect number times imperfect number. Forty-two, the ultimate answer to everything.

  He stared at the charging horse on the steering wheel. Mane and tail blown back, racing west with reckless abandon. Now, all the horses were silent. The Mustang sat grazing on gravel and asphalt.

  Jack checked his watch. 3:13 p.m. Another number. Probably some Scripture verse talking about the end of the world, telling him how he was in this mess by his own hand. No matter how many times he checked his iPhone, it remained dead.

  He would give his left arm for a “get out of the desert” app right now.

  Laura sat in the passenger seat quietly. She was lost in a daydream, staring at the mountains. Her skin glistened in the sun. She hadn’t spoken for a while, and Jack was fine with this. She was upset when he had returned to the car, but now her mood had shifted down several degrees.

  They waited.

  Jack remembered seeing a movie a couple years back where a couple went scuba diving off the coast of Florida. They reemerged to find their boat gone, and they were left to drift in the open ocean, waiting for help to come. It never did. He remembered sitting in the theater, chomping on his popcorn, enjoying the spectacle of other people’s misery from the comfort of his seat. Now he knew what that couple had felt. He wondered if people would watch his story with the same enthused detachment.

  Periodically they would take turns getting out of the car to walk up and down the road, as if by some physical effort they could will a traveler into existence. Their eyes scanned the horizon repeatedly for any sign of life but always came up with the same outcome.

  They were completely alone.

  9

  Laura watched as Jack walked away from the car down the shoulder. He walked deflated. She had not seen this gait in a lon
g time.

  At times during their marriage, she would struggle to remember who he was. He had changed so much in the time they were together. But that is how life rolls itself out. Yes, he had changed, but perhaps the grief arose out of the fact that she had too.

  In her mind she would remember what seemed like simpler days, days when they felt connected. Her mind would do her the service of forgetting the destitution they went through and painted the memory in watercolor, fooling herself into believing that the past was without hardship. But things did used to be different. The man walking down the road was still redeemable, she thought. She hoped. And so she quietly supported him with the belief that he would return when the stresses of modern life unburdened themselves from his shoulders. He would return someday and take her dreams into consideration.

  And besides, the bitterness left her cold, isolated.

  Laura would think of her mother and how she would sit at the table waiting for her father to come home, sometimes with the slight scent of bourbon on his breath, and set his plate down before him as if she had just cooked it. She would sit there waiting for him to talk to her, but he rarely did. Her father’s voice in her childhood home had been as rare as his presence. About ten years ago he had got the cancer and told her mother that he loved her dearly. Her mother wept and held his hand in the hospital as he died. After a lifetime of loneliness, that was all she needed.

  In her youth she had secretly resented her mother for passively supporting her father. Resented her for being the Xeroxed copy of June Cleaver. A woman without her own dreams.

  A woman that she herself had now slowly evolved into.

  The duty that her mother had performed all those quiet years now fell on her. Jack provided the means of living but had become detached from enjoying it. Had pushed her to the edges of his attention. She lived her life like she now sat in the car, watching him drift off, hoping on his return that something would spark his soul into seeing her there and smile. Her heart would rise as he would get back into the car, and then slowly rappel down again when his silence filled the empty spaces.

  10

  Jack would watch Laura walk down the shoulder and back to the car. She would always stop at the same spot. Line twenty-three. Michael Jordan’s number. Why twenty-three? After a while he wanted to scream from his seat in the car for her to go farther just for the sake of doing something different, but he held his tongue. She was habitual that way. Her gait shortened with each passing turn and he could see the exhaustion setting in on her. This silent sufferer.

  After the initial tongue lashing when Jack got back to the car from his first exploration, the couple passed a few hours talking lightly. Conversations flow that way in times of distress. Lightheartedness is the way of the mind to buffer the soul from impending doom, until it can no longer hold back the dam. Then the darkest thoughts flow in, wiping away all hope and courage. Jack held out longer than Laura, but he eventually succumbed to reality.

  At different times he would look over at Laura and see her quietly crying.

  11

  5:27. This time he walked completely out of sight of the car. Past stripe forty-two. They continued on unceasing. From his perch in the car, he had thought the world ended on stripe forty-two, so thoroughly had his mind convinced him of this, but no. The road just continually drifted on. Its termination point now beyond his imagination. He ventured on to eighty-four and stopped. No use going any farther. No significance in counting.

  He turned back to the car and suddenly felt exposed, as if he was being watched. He looked around, but could see nothing. It was the feeling of turning off the basement light and becoming acutely aware of the blackness as a person walks up the stairs. Suddenly he wanted to get back to the safety of the Mustang oven. He walked briskly, almost at a trot, until his heat-wasted muscles halted him.

  What was he doing? Imagining things? There was nothing out here. Complete and absolute nothingness. He felt comforted and courageous when he hit line forty-two.

  Jack walked back toward the car and for a moment thought that Laura wasn’t there, but soon he could make out her face through the windshield. His source of guilt. The gaunt face staring back at him. He got back in the driver’s seat and rested his legs.

  The water was running low and they had finished the bag of stale chips hours ago. His stomach started cramping, and he could not tell if it was hunger pangs or his intestines slowly constricting in knots of dehydration.

  “Jack, how much water do we have left?”

  “One bottle.”

  “That’s not that much.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “Here, have a little bit.”

  “Okay.”

  He watched her as she took a short drink. He wanted to rip the bottle from her hands and chug every last drop. She handed it to him for his turn, but he put the cap back on. He was keeping score in his mind. Preserving his share of the twenty ounces until the end. Hoarding.

  “I’m so hot.”

  “I know.”

  Silence filled the vacuum between them.

  “I’m scared, Jack,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  12

  The police station outside of Goodwell was of modest construction, built on the cheap. Two desks filled the open interior, a small two-drawer by the front door and a larger metal one in the back next to the sole window. Two fans helped circulate the air that struggled through the vents, pushed along by a decrepit air-conditioning unit.

  A vintage cell sat to one side, its swinging door left open. There was hardly ever a reason to close it, even when it was occupied with the occasional drunk. “Best to leave it open and let ’em get to the bathroom” were the words of the police chief who had taken up residence at the big desk several decades ago.

  He went by the name Red, even though he didn’t have red hair, and his skin was a dark, leathery tan rather than of Indian descent. No one really knows why that name stuck to him, it just did.

  He had passed the sixty-year mark awhile back—how long ago was anybody’s guess—but he still had the strength of his youth in his body, which was not fit, yet not all soft.

  The desk where he sat was light of paperwork, as nothing really happened out this way. And that was the way Red liked it best. There were two framed photographs sitting next to the phone: his wife, who had died ten years earlier, and an old black-and-white picture of Red and two of his buddies from the war. Red stood between the two shirtless Marines, wearing a dirty white T-shirt, the modesty his mother taught him following him all the way to Khe Sanh. The pictures were all he had left of the three people in them.

  Across the room sat James, a local kid turned cop, who was decades past a kid. Tall and wiry, James had never fully grown into his body. A bit on the timid side for Red at times, but he was simple and honest, did what he was told, and could be trusted for even the most mundane task.

  Two old farts growing old together in misery’s outpost.

  James looked back at Red. “Sure is hot today, eh, Red?”

  “Just like every day I suppose.”

  “Said it’s supposed to be up past 115 today.”

  “Yup.”

  James stood up and looked out the front door. Same barrenness, same view. “Well, I guess I might as well go make a round. Not much here to do.”

  Red glanced up from the papers he was reading. “Take it easy, James.”

  “I will. Probably swing in and see Gladys, see what she has on tap for today.”

  Gladys ran the local greasy spoon, the only restaurant in Goodwell.

  “Tell her I said hi.”

  “Will do, Red.” James grabbed his hat and opened the front door. The heat from outside slapped his face and took his breath away.

  “Man, that’s hot,” he mumbled as he stepped into the furnace, causing Red to chuckle at his deputy.

  Red had another deputy out on the road, Officer PJ Morey. She was young and pretty and did
not fit in with James and him. Sugar to his overcooked jerky. He didn’t really need another cop out here, but as a favor to PJ’s old man, he took her in so she wouldn’t go looking for a job in Vegas. Officer Morey was the bright spot in Red and James’s day, even though they would never admit it to anyone. She brought a sliver of happiness to the dry desert boredom.

  The radio on James’s desk came to life, and Red got up to answer it.

  “Red, you there?” said a feminine voice, trying to sound harder than was possible.

  “Here, PJ. What you got going on?”

  “Not much. Nobody’s out today. Too hot, I guess.”

  “You’re not going to make your quota then?” Red joked.

  “I guess not. James out?”

  “Yeah, he’s heading over to get some free food. You should join him.”

  “Gladys’s air-conditioning working today?”

  “Yup.”

  “Sounds good. You should join us, Red.”

  Red smiled at himself at the foolish notion that he was getting asked out. “Naw, you two relax over there. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  He strolled back over to his desk and sat back down, staring blankly out the window at the western desert and mountain range.

  Yup, it sure was a hot one today.

  Just like any other day.

  13

  8:31. The heat beat down on the rental car with the rage of the devil himself. The doors were open, the power windows worthless shields against the occasional sand devil. The hot desert air blew through the car, giving no comfort. The only respite was the black ragtop, which at least kept the direct rays from burning the couple’s skin, but it also baked them at a slow roast.

  The setting sun over the western mountains brought both a feeling of gladness that the sauna would ease, and fear that, despite stewing for almost a full day, not a single car had passed by. Jack and Laura were now stripped down to their underwear, sweat rolling off their bodies in slow streams; their life seeping from them with the steady cadence of a dripping faucet.