THIRTY-SEVEN
The Second Hour
She hears the highway before she sees it.
That familiar Doppler rush of cars. The passing growl of a motorcycle.
Miriam staggers to the edge of the seemingly infinite gravel drive, alone. (Louis's future ghost has long left her behind, though from time to time she sees him passing through the trees as she stumbles forth.)
The road ahead is two-lane. Gray macadam. A crusty, broken dividing line like a spattered stripe of golden piss.
She blinks and tucks the gun away in the back of her waistband.
She's been here before. Countless times. Standing on the highway shoulder, thumb out, hoping to catch a ride the way a remora fish wants to cling tight to a swiftly moving shark (a shark swiftly moving toward food, since the remora is like the vulture, which is like the crow, which is like Miriam herself – scavenger, carrion-feeder, and all around lazy fuck).
Once more, she seeks a ride to somebody's death.
The thumb-out hitchhiker trick won't do it this time. It's too slow. Most people know what they're getting when they pick up a highway drifter: an addict, a crazy person, a serial rapist, a big giant question mark that isn't worth answering.
Miriam just doesn't have the time.
She sees a car coming. Subaru Outback station wagon, a couple years past its prime.
Miriam steps out in front of the speeding hunk of Japanese automation. Late, too late, the gray glare on the windshield passes and Miriam can see that the woman is on her cell phone, probably not paying attention to something so insignificant as, say, the road.
Still, Miriam doesn't budge.
The car bears down. Doesn't stop.
Then, last minute, squealing brakes. The car's ass-end starts to wobble like the hips of an old dog, but it's too little, too late.
The car hits Miriam.
Luckily, by the time it does, it's only going a couple miles an hour.
It still hurts (right now, the breeze blowing hurts every micrometer of Miriam's skin; even her hair feels pain), but it's more jarring than anything else.
Still, it gives Miriam a second wind, a boot-kick of adrenalin.
The woman behind the car is dumbstruck. She's an older woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, with a white-blonde drill instructor haircut that suggests she's either a lesbian or just one of those women who no longer gives a shit or the time to fix her hair in the morning.
The phone slides out of her hand, but the hand stays held to her ear. It'd be comical if Miriam had a sense of humor left.
The woman seems to get her bearings and reaches for the steering wheel, and Miriam sees that panicked rabbit look.
Sighing, she pulls the gun, points it at the windshield.
The woman's hands go up.
"Good lesbian," Miriam murmurs, then comes around to the passenger side and eases her screaming bones into the seat.
The woman gapes. Miriam holds the gun in an unsteady hand.
"Barnegat Light," Miriam says.
The woman's mouth moves, but no words come out.
"Sorry," Miriam says. "I meant it as a question. Barnegat Light?"
"Whuh-what about it?" The woman's voice is raspy, like she's talking through a coffee grinder. Obviously a smoker. Miriam wonders if that's what she'll sound like in twenty years.
"Where is it?"
"Luh-Long Beach Island. At the northern tip."
"How do I get there, and how long?"
"You go that way," the woman indicates the direction opposite of the way she was going, "until you reach the Garden State Expressway. Then you take that south – no! North, north, sorry, until you can get onto 72, and 72 will take you east over the causeway to LBI. Only one muh-main road on LBI, so just head north till you see the lighthouse. It's maybe a forty-five minute trip, maybe uh, an hour."
"Last question. You smoke?"
The woman nods, hasty, shaky.
"Give me your cigarettes."
The driver fumbles a box of Virginia Slims from the cupholder in the door.
"Uck. You smoke these?" Miriam asks, then waves it off. "Whatever."
Miriam takes the pack, and her finger touches –
It's twenty-three years from now and the woman steps off her porch. She's a bag of bird bones, and she trembles her way out the driveway as a light snow drifts around her, carried on whorls and corkscrews by a cold wind. The woman goes to the mailbox, gets the mail, and then takes one step on a shoe-sized patch of black ice. Her leg kicks out, her head hits the mailbox, and she lies there. Hours pass. Evening comes. Snow builds up on her face, but she's still not dead, and she manages to pull out a slim little cigarette from her pink robe and light it up before finally succumbing to the slow dragging hands of hypothermia.
– the woman's finger as the pack passes between their grips.
Miriam blinks. Shakes it off, then thumbs in the cigarette lighter, gets it warmed up, and plugs one of the thin little pipe cleaner cigarettes into her mouth.
"Now," Miriam mumbles around the unlit cigarette, "get the fuck out of this car before I hit you in the face with the gun and break all the tiny bones in your ear. Keep on smoking, by the way. Good for you."
The lady throws open the door and scurries out of the car like a cat that just got shot in the ass with a pellet rifle.
Miriam lights her cigarette, slides over the seat divider, and throws the Subaru into drive.
Her lungs fill with magic nicotine. Her foot stomps on the pedal.
Movement. Sweet movement.