NOTE: I’ve opened this page until Feb 15, 2010 to allow those interested to consider it for Nebula Award recommendation.

Hello!

Thanks for making the trek out here to my website and this post I’ve hidden deep in the past.  (OK, not soooo deep.)   Below you’ll find one of my short stories, free for the reading.  It first appeared in issue  #37 of Talebones, the magazine of dark fantasy and science fiction.  The art below is from that same appearance.  The very talented Laura Givens has graciously allowed me to re-post it here.  You can visit her store by clicking here, if you like.

~Lon

PS  Geocachers–Don’t forget to tag the page’s comments at the bottom!

A Road Like This, At Night

(c) 2008 by Lon Prater

I took a bus down to Drummond, where the state college is, to get my daughter Connie’s car a week after the funeral.  I’d bought it for her when she turned sixteen.  Probably shouldn’t have, but it never spoiled her.  She was precious and perfect, and no father should ever have to take a bus to Drummond to pick up their dead daughter’s car.

It was after midnight when I got there, but I’d slept on the bus, as well as anyone ever could sleep on a bus, and I was ready to start the five and a half hour trip back home.  I filled up with gas and coffee and went rattling down the road after adjusting the rear view mirror.  There was a perfume-scented picture of Tweety Bird hanging from it.

Wasn’t too long before there’s flashing lights behind me.  I hadn’t been speeding, and I was wide-awake listening to the usual kooks who call in AM radio shows that late at night.  I edge the car over to the side of the road and a few minutes later there’s a hefty cop standing in the window, sunglasses on at night, just like in the song and he’s leaning down to look at me rather sternly.

“Miss, can I see your driver’s license and registration?”

I raised my eyebrows and looked up at him.  I keep my hair short like it was in the Corps, and I still have more muscle on me than flab.  Once a Marine, always a Marine, you know?  “I’m not exactly a ‘miss’, officer,” I say, handing him the required paperwork.  “This is my daughter’s car.  She was killed by a drunk driver two weeks ago, and I’m just now getting up to Drummond to pick it up.”

“Ummm-hmmm,” the cop said, shifting his belt a little under his belly as he looked at the license.  “This is a brand new license.  You want a ticket on your first night behind the wheel?”

I looked at the rear view mirror.  A string of Mardi Gras beads hung in the place where Tweety had been just a moment ago.  They looked enough like the ones Connie had put there when I first got her the car that it gave me goosebumps.  And a crazy idea along with them.  I snatched the license and registration from the cop’s hands and peeled out of there, gravel spraying behind the car as I darted out onto the empty road.  When I looked back there was no howling mad cop following me, no sirens wailing.  Just the emptiness of Route 412.

I checked the clock on the dash.  Quarter after one.  I pulled into an all night convenience store and rushed to the washroom.  Splashed cold water all over my face with shaking hands.  Connie had never told me about getting pulled over on the very first day she got her license.  I got a fresh cup of coffee and approached the car again, warily, like a rat coming up on a trap.

But there was no sense standing there, as weird as what had happened had been, so I got in.  Adjusted the rear view mirror again, thumped Tweety with my fingers to make sure he was really there, and off I went.  State Route 412 to the interstate.

Round about the time I got on the highway, the air freshener was gone–just not there anymore.  And someone was riding shotgun.  Icicles sunk into my gut as I turned my head sideways to catch a look at the shadowy figure slumped in the passenger seat.

When he spoke, I recognized the voice right off.  That boy, Reggie Troutman’s son.  What was his name?  Clayton, I think.  Connie had dated him a few times senior year, and then they just called it quits.  She had cried and cried over that boy.  Her mama didn’t know what to do with her, ended up they went on a girl’s weekend out vacation to the coast.  Seemed like Connie felt a little better when she got back.

But Clayton Troutman had no business in this car now.  He was supposed to be off at college somewhere in California, not in the car with me on an empty road at 2:11 in the morning.  And he was certainly not supposed to be asking me this:

“Wanna make out?”

Well I definitely didn’t.  But that didn’t stop the boy from putting his filthy paw on my thigh and easing it up toward my crotch.  It felt real, too.  Solid and warm like a piece of steak just beginning to cool down from the grill.

I picked the little creep’s hand up and pushed it away.  He turned the radio over to one of those rock and roll stations and turned the volume way up.  I turned it back down.  He said, “You’re a goddamn frigid bitch, you know that?”

I punched the little fucker then.  Didn’t care if he was really there or off in college.  Didn’t care if I ran us off the road.  I swung with everything I had at him and was surprised when my fist bounced off the vinyl headrest.

I was alone again.  Still on the interstate, little pips of yellow light reflecting at me from the middle of the road.  My breathing calmed down after a few minutes and I began to reconsider whether I should get a room for the night or keep going.  I think it was just knowing that the things I was seeing weren’t real–couldn’t be real–that kept me driving.

I was seeing ghosts maybe, but they were ghosts of the living, and they all thought I was Connie.  It was a little like eavesdropping on her private life, the life that had only got more private once I’d bought her these wheels.

Just outside of Hughesville, I stopped to drain off some of the coffee I’d been drinking.  I thought about calling my wife Nora and talking to her about what was going on with Connie’s car.  I got some coins back with my change from the cigarettes and candy bar, and probably would have called her, if she hadn’t been waiting in the passenger seat, fiddling with the faded yellow pine tree hanging over the dash.

I got in, and looked at Nora, waiting.  She didn’t say a word.  I breathed in the smell ofpina colada and adjusted the rear view mirror before backing out.

After a few minutes, the ghost of my wife, the one who I knew to be alive and well at home, patted my knee.  “Honey, are you sure you want to go through with this?  I could talk to your father.”

I wondered what there could possibly be that Connie wouldn’t feel like she could talk to me about.  We had been pretty close, I thought.  Her mama answered the question for me, in her own way.

“It’s a permanent decision, baby.”  Nora was on the verge of tears, but still kept her back straight.  My wife always was one for good posture, even under the worst of conditions.

I put my hand on hers, keeping my eyes on the road mostly, and just waited.

“You’re probably right not to tell him if you go through with it.  The way that man used to go on about wanting a son.  You know, he had you wearing little red and gold USMC t-shirts all the time when you were still in diapers.”  She took a deep, fast breath, dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.  “You may never be able to have another one.”

My eyes were watering too much to drive and I pulled over to the shoulder of the road and hugged the warm sobbing shade of my wife, even though she was home in bed sleeping on this secret like she’d slept on it for years.  How long now had it been?  She had a map sticking up out of her purse, the route to Myrtle highlighted in hot pink.  Connie’s senior year.

I cried for my daughter, behind the wheel of her car, holding on to nothing and holding nothing back.  It had to have been that Clayton boy, knocked her up then wouldn’t have anything to do with her.  I wanted to strangle him, but more–I wanted my Connie to know I loved her and missed her so much, that I would have understood if only she’d told me.  But part of me knew that probably wasn’t true either.

I’d have blown up at her, and she would have been dirtied in my eyes; and more is the shame I felt knowing that I only come to realize this now that she was dead, and everybody but her that knew about it–Clayton Troutman, Nora, the doctor–was still alive, still sleeping on the secret.  Now that she was gone, it was like Connie’s secret just couldn’t be kept; not on a road like this, at night.

My wife and the pina colada pine tree were gone and it was about 4:40 when I cranked the engine back up and continued on toward home.  I shook my head silently over and over as I drove, wondering how I would ever bring the subject up to Nora, or if I even should.

I woke up some time later to a state trooper pecking on the glass with the business end of an oversized flashlight.  “Everything okay, sir?”

I wiped crust from my eyes and wondered for a moment if the cop was real or not.  He’d called me “sir” so I figured he must be real as raisins.

“I’m fine, officer,” I said, once I got my tongue unstuck from the roof of my mouth.  “Just got a little tired is all.”  I promised to move along and drive safely, and he let me go.

#

Soon the sun is up and I’m getting more coffee and a sausage biscuit from a drive-up window a few miles from home, a place I thought I knew better than I actually did.  I’m lost in thought, and feel the pangs of missed chances more deeply now in the sunlight than I ever did at the funeral or when they first told us she had been killed walking in front of a car full of drunks leaving the same party.  I had always told her not to drive under the influence, and she was a good girl and never did.  I’m sure of that.  She tried too hard to please me.  It was more important to her than I’d been aware of.

Not too far up the road I see a big billboard ad in black and white, the last one before I round the bend and our little town is laid out before me like a poor man’s feast.  There’s a quote on it that I’ve never paid much attention to, until now:

Tell the kids I love them ~God.

“Hey God? You do the same for me, okay?” I say, adjusting the rear view mirror one last time so I can get a good look at the road behind me.  “You let my girl know I love her, no matter what.”

Tweety’s back, this time smelling of honey and vanilla that hangs in the air like the buzz of bees on a summer day.  A light on the dash comes on as I enter the township limits in Connie’s car.  By the time I pull up in front of my house, the gas needle is bobbing somewhere south of E.  Before I climb out and head up the walk, I stop and breathe in the perfumed air.  This old car has been riding on fumes for far too long.  It’s a wonder I ever made it home.

—END—