After Midnight (12 page)

Mind and reflexes lethargic, I was slow to turn away. He must have seen me from the corner of his eye, for he turned his head, regarded me for a moment, and then puckered his lips.

I quickly averted my eyes, cut the sink off, and left, his rich laughter following me.

“I’m just fucking with you, kid!” he shouted as I left the bathroom.

The water didn’t work well enough. My eyes felt okay, but my mind was quickly fogging up again. I needed something with sugar or caffeine.

I stepped into the break room, which was a sardine can with a few tables and chairs, an L-shaped count
er and a ‘fridge, and was shocked to see Nadine Mann sitting at one of the tables facing me, holding head up with one hand, and shocked even more so by her smile.

“Hey, Ed, what’s up?”

For a moment I was too surprised to reply. Johnny had at least spoken to me before, but Nadine
never
had.

“Good. How’re you?”

“Alright,” she said. I moved over to the refrigerator, opened it, and took a can of cola from the shelf before me.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Ed,” she said from behind me. I closed the heavy door, popped open the can and took a long, cold sip.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.
November’s in a couple of months…and I was just wondering who you were going to vote for.”

I should have known. “Mondale,” I said, knowing that if I said Reagan I’d be insulted and lectured, and that if I answered no one I’d be insulted and lectured.

“Yeah, I like him a lot,” Nadine said, “not only is he smarter than Reagan, he’s better looking, too.” She let out girlish giggle.

“Yeah,” I said, perking at that comment. So maybe she wasn’t gay. Joe would be interested in that. That would mean that Johnny was the fruit.

I took another long gulp as I walked hurriedly back out to my chair, not wanting to hear any more about Walter Mondale and his faux bleeding heart.

Settled, I finished the soda and leaned my head back against the wall. Johnny soon came past me without a word, and I was left alone.

Back on the air after a commercial, Hoyt took a call from an old insomniac in upstate New York whining about Ronald Reagan and inflation. Hoyt, in his brutishly charming manner (that is to say rudely and hysterically), told him to take a hike, get stuffed, and tune into some other show that actually gave a damn about politics. That caller’s successor was a young guy who put me in mind of a stereotypical beach bum with big bronze biceps and shaggy blond hair hanging over a rugged face. “Hey, Boomer, can I hear that Men Without Hats song?”

Hoyt sighed long-sufferingly. Boomer worked the late shift at a different radio station, spinning hits from midnight to dawn.

“You like men without hats?” Hoyt asked.

“Hell yeah, man; they rock,” the beach lizard replied.

“Do you like them with handlebar mustaches and leather pants?” Hoyt asked, his tight voice rising like a car motor approaching from the distance.

“Uh…what?”

“Do you like men with AIDS?”

“Nah, B,” the beach boy said, “just Men Without...”

Hoyt screeched, “I’m not Boomer, you idiot! Do I sound like a burnt out hippy to you?”

He terminated the call, and sat in brooding silence for a long moment.

“Do you see what I put up with?” he asked, his voice low, seemingly defeated. “I oughta go home, get my gun, come back here and stick it in my mouth. Would you like that? Driving a man to suicide? I’ll do it, too. What do I have to live for? This show?”

Sighing again, he said, “Next caller.”

The next victim, err, caller, was a guy from Pittsburg phoning in to sympathize with Hoyt’s plight. “This retard at McDonalds the other day screws up my order…”

“Do you eat roadside slop often?”

“Huh?”

“I said,” Hoyt went on slowly, as if speaking to a retarded child, “do you stuff your gullet with heart attack specials of
ten
?”

The guy chuckled
good naturedly. “Sure do. My wife’s cooking tastes like crap, so…”

“Good-bye, Pittsburg.”

Some people can pinpoint the precise moment they fall asleep, but I have never been one of them. I was awake one moment, and the next sinking down through the fuzzy well of slumber, Hoyt’s voice calling after me from somewhere far away.

A few of the actual on-air happenings penetrated my sleep and spun wild dreams for me. I can’t really remember the bulk of them now, only that a commercial with the Grand Funk song “Some Kind of Wonderful” turned into a Scooby-Doo dance routine in my head, Scooby and Shaggy in orange high hats with canes shuffling across screen.

It was sometime long after that (or at least it felt long) when I was shaken awake. I had been floating on dark wings until then, at peace and oblivious to everything. When it started, an explanatory dream tried to form like a screen of smoke, but I burst through it and into wakefulness.

The dazzling lights burned my eyes, confusing me to the point of fright. I felt slightly like, I imagined later, a man waking prematurely during a surgery. But I quickly realized that I was in the chair, and was reassured, kind of, by the looming face of Bob Jones, the short bald producer of The Arthur Hoyt Show; he was about forty-five, wore large round glasses, and already looked as if he
was related to a raisin. He was wearing a blue work shirt tucked into his pants; his face was tight, angry.

“Damn, kid,” he said.
“Like tryin’ to wake a log. You seen Art?”

I sat up fully in the chair, my back screaming,
my mind blurry.

“Huh?” I asked and rubbed my grainy eyes. I tried to stand up, but my legs wouldn
’t support me. Off to my right, Nadine Mann and Johnny Marcus stood side-by-side in front of the break room door.

“I went to the can and when I came back Artie was gone. We go back on-air in two.”

“Maybe he went to get that gun,” I mumbled and stood, towering over Jones. He looked up at me, a humorless smirk on his face.

“Real funny, kid.
Hopefully he takes your punk ass with him.”

“Don’t worry,” said Nadine,
drawing our attention and forestalling my snappy reply. “They say evil never dies; even if he did shoot himself he’d be back in three days.”

“He needs to be back
now
,” Jones said testily, looking at his watch.

But he never came back, and Jon
es was forced to run a pre-recorded tape in place of Hoyt. He was furious and frightening, despite his size. When he cast his clenched red face on Johnny, Nadine and me, and told us to go search the building, we all complied without protest.

They took the upper floors, while I was charged with the lower ones, including the boiler room. I didn’t look there, though; I wasn’t scared, exactly, but…the warm, noisy darkness, like the belly of Satan himself
, struck a pang of unease into the pit of my stomach, and I shut the metal door, telling myself that Hoyt wouldn’t be down there anyway.

The lobby stood dark and empty, lit only with the feeble glow from the Coke machine near the front desk. I looked there, thinking that he had gotten thirsty, come down here, and then
fallen, but he was nowhere. I looked out into the rain-swept parking lot, hazy with harsh orange, through the doors, and saw that Hoyt’s space, nearest the street, was vacant.

Wondering where he could have gone and why, I hurried back up the stairs. Jones was in my former
chair, angrily smoking a cigarette and looking up and down the hall.

“His car’s gone,” I said.

Jones looked at me, his hard face slackening. “What?” he asked, as if I had just told him to go do his sister.

“It’s gone,” I repeated with a shrug.

He seemed to shake, and then pushed himself roughly up. “Okay, he wants to play,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll have that bastard locked up.”

He went off to call the cops, and I quietly slipped away. I was no criminal, but I sure didn’t want to stick around for the police.

I woke at six the next morning, like I always did, and spent a good long time under the hot flow of the shower, my head against the cold tiles and my knees buckling and wakening me each time I dozed off and nearly fell. I dressed in a pair of jeans and a red sweater, throwing a heavy jacket over it.

It was raining again, the early morning streets awash, but that was over by the time I got to work.

The W.E.F.T. building was halfway across the city, but using surface streets I usually got there quickly. That morning, for some reason, I was about ten minutes late and in a flustered panic. I parked in my usual spot when I got there and made a mad rush for the door, nearly tripping over my own feet in my haste.

When I tried one half of the door, it rattled in its frame but didn’t move. The lobby inside was dark, dead, and a typewritten sign hung taped from the inside upon the door: “Due to the death of Arthur Hoyt, W.E.F.T. will be closed today.”

My heart clinched.

There was a payphone to the right of the doors, on the concrete wall. After a few dazed moments, I found myself paging through the attached phonebook, looking for a number.

When I found it, I fished a dime out of my pocket, and placed a call to the
Washington Star
’s office. When a chipper young woman answered, I asked for Johnny Marcus.

After a few long minutes he came on the line, sounding annoyed. “What?”

“Hey, hey it’s me, Eddie, from the radio station. What happened to Mr. Hoyt?”

He was silent for a long time.

“You won’t believe it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hell,
I
don’t believe it.” He tittered nervously.

“What?”

“Well,” he said, “Bob called the police, and after the whole bureaucratic song and dance, turns out
they
know where Art is.”

“Where?
Where was he?”

Johnny chuckled humorlessly. “The morgue at Saint John’s; where he’d been since eleven last night.”

“
What?”

Johnny was grimly silent for a long time, letting the soft background noises of muffled voices and shuffling papers keep me company. Then, as if in a desperate fit to save his sanity, he secretively asked me, “We saw him last night, though, didn’t we, kid? He was
there,
right?”

After a moment of grasping for words, I came back, “Sure, but, I mean, I mean…God, are you
kidding
me?”

“No,” Johnny said darkly, and I could tell that he was serious. “He hit a telephone pole… right outside his building.”

The
sky was a dirty gray, and the gnarled trees upon the barren hills resembled grief-stricken Holocaust survivors bent and twisted in agony. The road was littered with rubbish and junk cars, and several spoiled bodies lay sprawled on the gravel shoulder, staring sightlessly into the cold heavens. Up ahead, the outskirts of the city was dark and desolate, the hollow buildings seemingly a collection of brick tombs.

The man shivered as a bone-chilling breeze swept the land; dust devils made up of ash danced by like pagan worshippers round a bonfire.

He had no idea what day, or even what month it was, any more. He’d been on the road since the end of the Summer War, and had come over a thousand miles since he set out from the shattered remains of Santa Barbara on the desolate freeway. Looking down the road into the city, he was reminded of those dark weeks. Phantoms of National Guardsmen with shoot-to-kill orders, starving and radiation-bathed refuges, looters and road pirates materialized from the abnormal twilight. He could almost believe he was back in Southern California, standing at the threshold of Santa Barbara, going back into the hell from which he escaped. Fear tightened his chest, and he almost turned and fled back down the middle of the turnpike.

But instead, he
shambled onward like a Romero zombie, his shoeless feet toughened like old leather, but split raw by the concrete. Around him, the countryside bled into enshrouding walls of brick and concrete; squat, depressed buildings loomed forward like hungry wolves, window panes shattered into wide grinning mouths. More rusted hunks sat along the curbs, parked at slanted angles, stripped of tires, glass, and all else that one could find useful at one time or another. A few mummified corpses lay sprawled on the cracked sidewalk than ran along the facades of the shops and stores, which had, in brighter times, served gay passersby. A few dead trees sprouted from the concrete; more Auschwitz victims. A dark traffic light swung back and forth in the biting wind. At the three-way intersection, he cautiously looked around and went straight, deeper into the city. His grip tightened on the handle of the .357 under his faded and tattered coat. Roving gangs or highwaymen were sure to be around somewhere; he had nothing for them, save his life, as wretchedly miserable as it was, which they’d gladly take.

Another stiff wind slammed into him like a Mac truck from the west, slapping a moan from his burning throat. A few bits of litter skirted past him; the bare branches on the trees knocked forlornly together.

White clouds of breath pooled from his mouth through chattering teeth. His feet were numb with corpse-cold and exhaustion; he didn’t fear frost bite though; that would give him a good enough reason to…

Punctuating his thought, several distant gunshots rang out and echoed though the felled city, their true location impossible to ascertain. As if in answering pain, the wind gusted with a spine-chilling wail.

A gang war; great. If the bastards had explosives, they were likely to burn the whole city.

The prospect of hiking through the city and out the other side back into the harsh country stabbed his heart and mind, sapping his meager energy. He was already
blasphemously weary; suffering from a touch of what may have been the flu. His legs were jelly, his back was tight, and his gritty eyes thumped exhaustedly in their sockets. He felt like falling down in the street, curling up, and letting what be, just be. He imagined the ground as a giant magnet, pulling his body down, down. What was death now?

But, like a stubborn machine rolling on and on long after its day is done, he stumbled on. The freeway was somewhere ahead; he could be rid of this hellhole graveyard by dark. In the pack upon his back he had an outdated Rand-McNally atlas from 2015 that he had taken from a pillaged filling station, but he was too tired to retrieve it.

He crossed a defunct railroad, rusted by years of disuse. West along the track, hidden on both flanks by tangles of dead growth, a monstrous locomotive sat like a hideous black wall. The gravel on the left side of the beast was littered with broken crates and boxes, dark and soggy with rain. From under one pile of ripped cardboard, a pair of booted feet attached to blue panted legs stuck out, toes pointed accusatorily toward the ashy sky. Up ahead was a happier sight. A blue sign affixed to a steel pole read: I-69.

Most of the interstate rose above the gray buildings and surface streets; trash and
decomposed corpses lay amongst dozens of vehicles abandoned by their owners after the war. From that height, the man had a good panoramic view over the dismal city: dark hulking buildings stood silhouetted against the ashy sky, smaller structures hunkered aglow with warm, glorious fire. He insanely entertained the notion of leaving the interstate, finding a blaze, and hopping in as one might hop into a warm bath.
That
would dispel the frigid ice which formed in his veins and upon his bones. It was rather disturbing how tempting the thought of perishing for a few blissful moments of all-over warmth was.

He trekked from the city once again into the unforgiving rural landscape. Dead trees fanned away from the guardrails. Tangy wood smoke drifted forth from some vagrant camp; he caught the feeble orange glow of a tiny fire through the trees. If he went there seeking warmth, food, and fellowship, he’d be driven away. A picture popped into his mind as he stood in place, gazing at the distant fire, nearly drooling: him blasting the hobos with the last three rounds in his revolver, warming himself by the blessed fire, and roasting the flesh of his victims. The horrible scenes were exciting.

As true dusk descended like an iron curtain, he left the arrow-straight interstate by way of a sloping off ramp which descended down into a night-enshrouded town. The low buildings on Main Street were dark. A police station sat directly across from the off ramp; the doors were unlocked, and he cautiously stepped into the black interior, the .357 held outstretched in his shaky hands. No one waited inside, alive or dead, so he felt comfortable about spending the murderously cold night there. He found an orange jumpsuit behind the massive desk, and replaced his long-suffering jeans with the loud pants. His heart leapt as he discovered a pair of clunky black shoes in a small cubby hole against one wall. They were a bit big, but he stuffed the toes with strips of the prison top.

Next morning, after a bout of cold, fitful sleep, waking every hour shivering, he returned to the interstate and
quit the town. The sky was dark gray, as if the heavens were ready to burst open wide, and again it was bitterly cold. He passed several more towns before noon arrived, but the thought of leaving the interstate to forage tired him out considerably. After several hours, he sat upon the rusted hood of a powder blue Chevy and ate from a tin can of peaches. Behind him a dried corpse hung halfway out of the driver’s side window, but the man kept his back to the horror; there was no stench this late in the game.

Up ahead, the clogged highway bent to the left and disappeared. Both sides of the road were flanked by rocky hills gently ascending
and covered with dead trees. At the summit of one, a crumbling brick Civil War era structure sat covered in vines amongst tall dead grass. On one broad flank of the building, someone had writ in green spray paint: WELLCUM TO HELL.

It saddened the man’s heart to see the ugly truth displayed thus. A desperate kind of ache filled him.

He chucked the empty can behind him, where it clattered to the pavement, and reluctantly stood.

Roughly an hour later he hobbled
into the tiny burg of Hinton, a once picturesque railroad town sat on the rocky banks of the nearly nonexistent Chippewa River. The trees peppering the craggy hillsides enclosing the town were gray and ugly, like everything else.

With the interstate a distant memory, he limped into town on U.S. 12, which ran parallel to the river before entering the dark forest to the east. Hinton’s heart and other vital o
rgans were all placed along 12 Chippewa Drive in town. The giant courthouse, tattered and soiled American flag still flapping lazily in the occasional breeze, offered a good campsite for the night, considering that the hollow marble lobby was filled with still-intact wooden furniture. Using strength he didn’t even know he had, the man smashed flimsy chairs and tables against the hard floor, the promise of a fire sending him into a frenzy. Inside of five minutes, he’d piled wood into a pyre on the floor, and had stoked a huge blaze into existence.

The man collapsed next to the glorious fire in a sore, aching heap. For a time he faced the lobby door, through which he could see the scarred hillside across the
rocky river. He thought of barricading the door against passing highwaymen, but the chances of him getting up were morbidly slim.

His back had become unbearably warm, but he didn’t have the energy to shift his weight. He only stared at the unchanging milky sky, half hoping to see an airplane approaching. What good were those dammed North Koreans if they couldn’t finish the job?

Occasionally he barked from deep in his chest, unable and unwilling to keep the globs of bloody phlegm from flying past his chapped lips and into the gathering gloom. God alone knew what he had. Nothing positive, apparently; but what was new? Even before the war things had been awful. Things had been downhill from the moment of his birth. Then again, back in the old days there had been homeless shelters and charities.

For an insufferable moment,
waves of nostalgic memories washed over him, intensifying the perpetual ache in his heart. He never thought he would, but he desperately missed the days when everybody sagged their pants and wore their hats crooked. He smiled, or rather grimaced fondly, when he thought of Simon Cowell and Miley Cyrus. Rihanna on the radio; Two and a Half Men on Primetime;  Barack Obama in the White House. Had there really been things called X-boxes once? Did plasma screen TVs and Glenn Beck
really
exist? God, had it really been only
three years?

Refusing to delve further into the hazily dubious past, too exhausted to speculate on mythical creatures such as Democrats and Republicans, the man found the power to roll over toward the fire, and closed his aching eyes.

It might have been dawn, or it could have been noon, when he awoke shivering. The fire had burnt down to embers. He set off in search of more fuel, and found a type of law library near the stairwell. He lugged several thick tomes back to the fire and heaped them on like a Gestapo agent. He warmed himself, and broke out into a coughing fit, which terribly pained his raw throat. He nibbled a bit of generic hardtack and drained warm water from his thermos.

He left the blaze burning, half-hoping for wanton destruction. He put the town to his back and hiked up U.S. 12, which ascended into the mountains east of town. Going up, he found a Winnebago on the dusty shoulder of the highway. Inside, save for a pile of small bones in a car seat (which caused an ache in the man’s chest and a revolt in his stomach), and a three-year-old can of Pepsi, it contained nothing remarkable.

Near the summit, feeling pangs of stabbing hunger, he rested upon a large roadside boulder and ate his last can of peas; his last can of food. His knapsack was painfully light.

Continuing, he hacked and barked, producing bloody phlegm which he spat onto the road. At the windy summit, he found a stalled Honda on the gravel shoulder, a skeleton in tattered rags lying on the pavement nearby.

He climbed in with a long grunt, the agony in his feet relenting a bit. For nearly an hour he sat there in silence, hacking and gazing at the bronze crucifix hanging from the rearview mirror.

He staggered down the other side as dusk began to pool in the shallower regions. A roadside rib joint sat in tall grass at the base. Several cars and trucks sat in the dusty parking-lot, but neither they nor the restaurant harbored any corpses.

He built a fire using bits of table and chair, but he couldn’t shake the chill from his bones. He shivered and coughed; more bloody phlegm.
He dragged himself a mile down the road and found an L-shaped motel at a three way country intersection. He painfully searched three rooms along the concrete promenade before he found one with sheets.

He collapsed onto the lumpy bed and forced himself to check the roadmap. He was still dishearteningly close to the city in the hill country. Fifty miles east would bring him to the sandy coast; fifty to the west would take him into yet another city.

He carefully studied the map, looking into both possible directions, before the shocking realization hit him: he was dying; he had tuberculosis and he was dying
.

After that, he cast the map aside and lay on the bed, held in the grip of dark, hopeless depression. He was only slightly frightened; he was going to stride into the unknown shortly, but he didn’t really care about dying. What was there to stick around for? There were no Navy destroyers off the coast in the gray waters of the Atlantic, waiting to unload cargo and give aid. They hadn’t been there for three years if they’d ever been there at all. And in the distant city he would find
nothing but more of the same: refugees, gang members, and death.

If he was to die anyway, why worry about eating or looking for help? Hell, why wait?

The man sedately dug in his knapsack and finally, arm quivering, he withdrew the .357. He weakly pressed the gun to the underside of his chin, closed his watery eyes, and gritted his teeth.