Broken Monsters (5 page)

“Who's that?”

Clayton stepped toward him, to ruffle his curls. “I'm your—”

“No,” she cut him off. “You and me, we did it once. Barely. Shit, I was so drunk.”

“All it takes,” Clayton said. “Birds and the bees, Daddy puts his penis in Mommy's vagina, and the stork comes calling.”

She covered the kid's ears. “You don't talk that way in front of him. He got
red hair,
you lunk. Like his
dad
. Like Ryan. He's not yours, dummy.”

The lace curtain on the RV twitched and a woman's face peeked out.

“No,” he shook his head, hard. “That's not true.”

“I'm fucking telling you, you lunk. What's wrong with you?” She shoved at him. Just like that little cat.

“Don't push me!” He caught her skinny wrists, and Charlie let out a wail like a siren. It was all going wrong. Like everything always went wrong.

He was blinded by a flashlight in his eyes.

“Everything okay over here?” It was a security guard.

He let go of Lou's wrists and shaded his eyes to be able to see the man. It's got so he can't trust in things to stay the way they're supposed to be.

“Everything's fine, Wayne,” Lou said, putting a flirty little kick in her voice. “But my friend hasn't bought anything yet.”

“I just got here,” Clayton explained. “Five minutes ago.”

“Sorry, sir, overnight parking is at the manager's discretion.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you gotta
buy
something,” Lou said. She sounded sorry. She always had a temper. But it was gone as quick as it came. “It doesn't matter what. It'll take you five minutes. Then Wayne here will be happy and we can sit and talk. I promise.”

“You on a first-name basis with all the security guards around here?”

“Wayne looks after us. You too, if you go buy something.”

“Store policy, sir.” The security guard puffed up.

“All right, all right. I'm going. You want anything, Lou baby?”

“Um…” she said, looking at the bright door across the parking lot.

“Cigarettes?” he offered. “An Energade? A pop or something for Charlie?”

She swiped at her eyes, rubbed the back of her hand off against her sweatshirt. “Yeah, all right. And a lighter. Or matches. Matches are safer for Charlie. I can give you money.”

“Don't worry about it. I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere, okay?”

“Where would I go?”

The guard,
Wayne,
walked with him to the door, as if he just happened to be heading the same way.

“She's a nice lady. I don't want any trouble,” he said. He'd tucked his flashlight into his belt next to his pepper spray.

“Me neither,” Clayton said. He felt terribly tired, and the pinch in his spine was back. “Are you in love with her?”

“What? No!”

“Because she's living out of a car? You think you can judge her? Because she's got a kid? Is she not good enough for you?”

The guard shook his head. “Man, you gotta understand. You are here on my say-so. I don't know what your problem is with your lady, but you need to sort it out peaceable or you're both vacating tonight.”

“Don't take it out on her.”

“Just saying. You got to act civilized.” The glass doors slid open to release a blast of warm air, like an oven door. “Here we go, sir, happy shopping.”

Civilized.
It's the end of civilization, he wanted to shout at the guard. The whole country falling apart, the rich getting richer and the poor camping out in their cars—if they're lucky. And inside here, it's all slick and white with fluorescent lights and colorful packaging on the shelves of plenty—but it's all empty, he wanted to scream. All this shit is nothing. But he kept a hold of himself, steered himself between the aisles and the Halloween decorations and picked up the things he needed: cigarettes, a bottle of water for the truck, Skittles for Charlie, and soda. He found a pair of shoes in the kids' section. Sneakers with superheroes on them, although he wavered between Batman and Spiderman. What did Charlie like? He didn't even know.

It didn't matter, he thought. Even if Charlie was Ryan's kid. He could step up. Every kid needs a father figure, a stable home. Not a car.

“Will that be all, sir?” the cashier said with a smile as automatic as the sliding doors. He managed to say thank you and get out of there.

But the parking space where he'd left them was empty. He closed his eyes. In case this was one of his hallucinations. But the car was still gone when he opened them. He stood there, the plastic bag with his purchases dangling from his hand.

“She took off,” said the woman in the RV, leaning through the lace curtains, as if he couldn't see with his own eyes. Crowing about it.

“I can see that,” Clayton said, trying not to cry. “I'll give you these smokes if you tell me which way she went.”

She eyed the shopping bag and turned Judas quicker than you can change the channel. “Took off east. Back roads, I guess.”

“I guess you'd be right.” He tossed her the pack of cigarettes.

“Menthol,” she said, disgusted.

He might be able to catch her if he hurried. How far could she have got in that rattletrap car?

He roared through the deserted streets, through the suburbs with their neat little houses and manicured lawns, and onto the road out of town. A dull noise filled his head, like static on the TV swallowing up the rest of the picture, the same way fog was coming up from the lake, a white drift lapping at the edge of the tarmac. The needle on his accelerator leapt up to 60, 70. He lost himself in the driving, caught somewhere half-asleep, half-awake, the truck gulping down the miles of dark road.

Until he came around the corner on a road in the woods, and saw her taillights up ahead, between the trees and the fog. He drove up right behind her to make sure, close enough to see the galloping silver horse on the badge on the trunk. He flashed his lights to tell her to slow down. He just wanted to talk.

He saw the silhouette of Charlie's wild curls twist around in the passenger seat. She rolled down the window and stuck out her hand, waving for him to pass, even as the Colt sped up. He accelerated until he was right behind her and then veered out so that he could pull up next to her, winding the window down. He could hear her transmission screaming. No way she could keep this up. The needle nudged up to 80, 85.

“What the hell are you doing? You're gonna trash your
house,
Lou,” he yelled. It was the wind that pricked tears in his eyes.

She gave him the finger, stabbing it into the air. Then she lost control of the car. The Colt swerved violently and her mouth pulled into a perfect O of surprise. He looked back at the road, just in time to see feral eyes glowing in the darkness and then something leapt up like a shadow and punched a hole through the windshield, coming down hard on the canopy above his head.

He ducked instinctively and let go of the wheel, and the truck shot off the road, bounced heavily through the ditch and plunged into the woods with a sound like cheap wallpaper ripping right through.

 Leaves, he realized, not wallpaper, and branches thrashing against the windows. He tried to pump the brakes, to steer a course through the dark foliage, veering away from the big trees that loomed up in the mist, the ones that would crumple the truck like an accordion, obeying the laws of velocity. He didn't want to die like this, alone in the woods.

Branches snapped off against the truck and the thing on top flopped around obscenely, thudding against the roof. He let go, let the truck steer where it wanted, let the woods take him.

He watched in the rear-view mirror for Lou's headlights, because surely she would come back for him, but the road was far behind him now, the trees shrinking his view of it, like a porthole.

The truck slowed and finally came to a stop, kissing up against a huge black willow and rocking back, leaving scrapings of paint on the bark. Clayton felt a sense of terrible calm looking out through the spiderwebbed cracks in the windshield and the gray fog. There are limits, he thought. Something soft and heavy slid off the roof of the truck onto the ground.

He got out of the truck. Gravity felt different. Walking on the moon. Lou was probably making her way toward him right now with a flashlight, picking her way along the trail of devastation his truck had left through the undergrowth, holding Charlie's hand because she wouldn't leave him in the car. Charlie would be sucking his thumb, Clayton thought, trying to be brave for his momma. The thought of that frightened little kid made his heart break. He'd make it up to him, reward him with Skittles and the Spiderman sneakers. Hell, he'd go back and buy the Batman ones too, and it would become a family story they would tell at Thanksgiving. “Remember that time Uncle Clay crashed his truck in the woods and we had to go looking for him in the fog.” (He wouldn't ask the boy to call him Dad, not if he didn't want to.)

“Lou! Hey, Louanne, I'm over here,” he shouted into the gray, the restlessly shifting trees. But there was no flashlight, no answering yell. They're not supposed to be out here, none of them, so far from
civilization
. Strange things can happen if you stray off the road.

He could hear a rasping breath. Shadows moved in the mist, or maybe it was all inside him, his own breath. He kept his hand on the truck because the fog was so thick he didn't know if he would be able to find his way back if he let go. His fingers were numb. The flecks of paint marking the tree started wriggling into the wood like maggots. They burned from inside, spreading to other trees.

“Louanne,” he whispered. “Charlie?” He listened hard, trying to hold his own breath. He felt as if something was walking with him, that if he put his hand out, he would touch its shoulder. He thought about all the things in his toolbox in the back of his truck that he could use as a weapon.

He worked his way around to the front, where the noise was coming from. The pale streamers of the headlights lit up swirls and ripples of bark, and a trembling flank, brown fur with white spots.

He didn't think Lou was coming. He thought maybe she had turned into that vicious little cat, and carried Charlie away by the scruff of his neck.

The deer raised its head and looked at him with black eyes.

“It's all right,” he said, kneeling down, putting his hand on the animal's warm neck. He could feel the life and strength of it under his palm. It panicked at his touch, kicking out, trying to get to its feet. But there was too much wreckage inside.

He felt like he was falling into its eyes. There were doors opening in the trees all around him, a door swinging open in his head.

Not yours, he thought. Nothing's yours.

“It's all right,” he said again, stroking the animal's neck. It shivered at his touch, but it didn't try to kick again. He didn't know why, but he was crying again. Fat tears slid down the side of his nose and onto its hide.

“I know how to do this.”

The window
of Rocket Coffee gives Jonno the perfect view of the hollow shell of Michigan Central Station. The Acropolis of Detroit. Some genius suggested preserving the iconic ruins. That's what everyone's here for, anyway. To gawp at the broken buildings, take their portraits. The only difference between the hipsters breaking into abandoned buildings here and the middle-aged tourists in socks and sandals in the Colosseum is that the former use more filters on their photographs and the latter have audio guides. Not a bad idea, actually. He could do that—write audio tours. The problem, he thinks, is not the obsession with ruin porn, it's that everyone is trying to figure out what it all
means
. It's the human condition, obsessively reading too much into things.

Like the fact that she is forty-six minutes late. And that's thirty-one minutes longer than you should be expected to wait for any girl, unless she's a certified supermodel or the producer on the biopic of your awesome life, according to “10 Rules for the New Gentleman's Guide to Dating” he churned out for some shitty men's site last year. It's all bait to pull in the likes. But eyeballs are more fickle than sharks, and the economy is still in the gutter, and he should be writing a post-postmodern
Moby-Dick,
not trying to come up with smarmy listicles faster than everyone else. But try getting paid for
that
.

Oh, he's been published in obscure literary magazines with a subscriber base of eight, not including the publisher's mother, or the complimentary contributor copies. All the wannabe writers desperately reading each other's stories, as if they could generate enough energy in a magnetic feedback loop that it would draw some of those damn eyeballs over here. But it's all shit. Even his stuff. It's only because he has realized that she's not coming that he can even consider this. Because this is such a disaster, it mitigates his Total Failure As A Writer.

She's not coming.

The despair cuts through the caffeine poisoning. He's already had three cups of coffee, at first because he felt smug, sitting in the window bar, waiting for the hot DJ girl. That was before the Great Wake-Up Call, and then he lost his place when he went back for the third flat white, and now he is wedged in the back, near the bathroom, perched at a little round table that seems specifically designed to be emasculating.

But she
was
beaming. At you. Apparently.

Fuck the beaming. Fuck this depressing ghost town of a city. Fuck his career. He should write a meltdown memoir. An anthem for his generation. Bret Easton Ellis with more man-child ennui. Then she walks in the door, and he swears to fucking God that all the atoms in the room recompose themselves around her. She's wearing jeans and snow boots and a puffy jacket in an electric turquoise that matches her eye shadow, with jangly earrings and her braids tied up in an elaborate croissant twist.

“Hi,” she says, slinging her bag down onto the table, recklessly enough that he has to grab for his cup. “Sorry.”

“You say that a lot.” He's grinning. He can't help it.

“Yes, well,” she shrugs. “What, you didn't get me one?”

“Half an hour ago!”

“You want another?” She indicates his cup, still three-quarters full, and he finds himself nodding, even though a fourth will probably tip him into heart-attack territory, like that kid who died from chugging energy drinks. But coffee is natural.

So is herpes.

“But to go, okay?”

“What about breakfast?”

“We'll get pastries. I want you to show me around town. Show me
your
Detroit.”

“What does that mean?”

“Whatever you want it to. Personal perspectives on the city.”

“All right,” she says, with the same tolerantly amused look she had when he walked in on her with her hand between her legs. Definitely love, he thinks.

Inside her jazzy little blue Hyundai, she clips in the radio face and heavy techno blasts out, a whining buzzsaw with a frenetic beat. He winces. It sounds like the grinding teeth of machines on methamphetamines. Good name for a prog rock band. Machines on Meth.

She notices and laughs at him through a bite of almond croissant. “You were dancing to it on Saturday night.”

“I was drunk!”

“Want me to turn it down?”

“Please.”

“You're a funny guy, Jimmy.” But she flicks the volume knob.

“Jonno,” he corrects.

“I know. I'm messing with you. So, where do you want to go?”

“Back to your place?”

“Not possible.”

“Then mine.” Although the thought of his grubby rental apartment gives him a fresh twist of resentment. And panic. His scattered underwear, the empty pizza boxes, the soggy towels balled up on the floor. He would need an hour, no three, to make it presentable. Actually, probably easier to burn it down.

“Not yet,” she says.

“Then somewhere you like.”

“It'll be cold.”

“I can take it.”

“You going to write about it?”

“Maybe. If it's good.”

“Isn't journalism dead?”

“That's what they tell me.”

“You should start your own video channel. Get advertising.”

“That's what they tell me too. It all keeps changing. I don't know how anyone's supposed to keep up. It's like learning to salsa in the middle of an earthquake.” That's not bad. He should write that down. It would be a good essay. Scratch that, an easy essay. More bait. Maybe she'll open him up to something. He always thought a muse should be sex on legs.

“You're old is the problem,” she says, flicking the turn indicator. She's wearing black-and-yellow-striped fingerless gloves. Her nail polish is chipped.

“Thanks for that.”

“Relax,” she says. “I'm teasing.”

They drive past the yacht club and she points out the old zoo, all shuttered up, the animals long gone. Maybe they joined in the white flight to the suburbs.

They pass the long stretch of the main beach. Dishwater waves with white caps are worrying the gray sand. He remembers being a teenager in Rhode Island, lying on his stomach to hide his semi, watching the girls rub coconut oil into their skin, or run shrieking into the waves. Such an assortment of girls. It seemed then that they were all available to him, that he could work his way through all of them, the same way he was going to be able to travel to all the different countries, try his hand at different jobs, all the branching possibilities. Keep your options open, his parents told him, but they didn't tell him that growing older is about your options shutting down, one by one.

It's baking in the car. He struggles out of his jacket and pushes up the sleeves of his sweater.
Do men get hot flashes?

“You're going to have to put it on again,” she warns him, pulling over into a small parking lot opening onto the grass.

“What, here?”

“You asked me to take you somewhere special to me. Belle Isle is happy childhood memories. What?” she challenges. “You wanted to go urban exploring? Check out the ruins of the American Dream? Maybe you wanted to whack golf balls off the roof of the Packard Plant. Oh wait, I know. You wanted to harvest corn with your
own hands
from an urban farm in the middle of a dirt-poor neighborhood?”

“Could be fun,” he says defensively. But she's right. He's read all that shit. It's
all
been done. The original stories are mined out, and all that's left is fool's gold. Or, more appropriately, Detroit diamonds, which is what locals call the blue glass on the street from broken car windows. He feels anxiety slamming into him like the gray waves on the river.

“You been to secret beach?”

“If I had, would it still be a secret?”

“Come on, grumpy pants.” She swings open the door and the cold snaps like a rubber band against his face. She leans in. “You asked me to take you somewhere I like. Not somewhere you could find a blog post.”

“Maybe that's a blog post in itself.”

“Very Zen of you.” She slams the car door and starts walking out to a wannabe lighthouse in the grass. He scrambles out after her, pulling his jacket on.

“Hey!” he shouts. “I hope you're not luring me out here to kill me!”

She turns, walking backwards so he has to jog to catch up, and gives him the wickedest grin. “Keep up the oral and I won't have to.”

It takes them about twenty minutes of tramping along the path to get there. His jacket is useless against the vicious little wind. They turn off the path to tramp through waist-high weeds and springy bushes, until finally they push through, and the grasses part to reveal a scrubby stretch of beach and a narrow channel of dark water that opens onto the river past the bend.

She spreads her arms like a magician's assistant. “Secret beach,” she says. “Also called hipster beach.”

Also vastly overrated. There's no story here.

“What do you think?”

I think I'll say whatever will get me into your pants again.
Which is the trouble, isn't it, boychick? Talking your way into things?
Like petite Monique. Who had a screw loose. Emphasis on “screw,” which allowed him to overlook the “loose.” She used to crawl under the table at fancy restaurants to blow him. His cock stirs in his pants at the thought. Or Trish, who had a kid. Although he didn't like the kid, and the kid didn't like him. Which is fair enough, because the kid was old enough to see him for what he was, just another tourist stopping off at MILF Island for a cocktail and a picture on the beach before moving on to less complicated destinations. Or Cate, who was everything he wanted.
Until…
Shut up. Stop it.

“It sure
is
secret,” is what he manages. The wind nips and tugs at them, rustling through the grass.

She frowns. “It's hard to get a real sense of it in winter. They don't really like people coming here. There are no lifeguards, and there's a bad rip current just off the point. A kid drowned there a couple of years ago.”

“What's that?” He points at the columns of black stones, improbably stacked on top of one another, adorning some of the bigger rocks.

She shrugs. “Art.”

That's a generous description.
“Are they glued together?”

“No. I think that's the idea, that they're not. The craft is in balancing them.” She frowns at the cairns. “Hey, these are different from the ones I've seen before. Help me.” She grabs on to his hand for purchase and hefts herself up the rock to see.

“Yeah, look. There are faces. Sort of melted together. Neat.”

“I'll take your word for it.” But he can make out the roughest of features hollowed out of the stones, shallow eyes, stretched mouths, as if they're screaming.
How romantic.

“Whoa,” Jen Q says as her boot skids out from under her. Her shoulder slams into the artwork, if that's what it is—if there's a reason it's stacked up out here and not in the Detroit Institute of Arts. The column topples like Jenga and the stones plop-plop-plop into the water. He's still holding her hand, and yanks her back to safety. She comes down on top of him, bringing them both crashing to their knees in the wet sand.

“Jesus. Remind me not to take you into a china shop,” he says. Which sets her off again, shaking with laughter. He holds her, freezing damp soaking into his jeans, warm girl in his arms.

This could be all right, he thinks.
Just don't fuck it up.