Set This House in Order (38 page)

Despite the snowy peaks, it's actually warmer here than at the Idaho rest stop. The sky is clear and the sun is almost directly overhead; the midday
wind is gentle and not so cold. Mouse eats standing up beside the car. He leans against the front hood and smokes a cigarette—a Winston, Maledicta's brand.

“Are you going to tell me your name?” Mouse asks between bites.

He shakes his head, exhaling smoke.

“What do I call you, then?”

“Try ‘Andrew.'”

“No,” says Mouse. “I don't think so.”

He scowls at her. “I
am
Andy Gage, you know,” he says. “More than any of those others. They aren't even real, they're just…delusions with egos.”

“What about Xavier?”

“What about him?”

“Well, it seems like the two of you are…working together, sort of. Is
he
a delusion?”

“Xavier is a tool,” he says. “A
useless
tool,” he adds, annoyed. “I mean, you've met him: he was supposed to be clever, but it turns out he's got about as much guile as a hubcap. A housefly could outwit him. And he's also a coward…”

“A coward?” says Mouse.

He puffs on his cigarette.

“Did you,” Mouse tries a different tack, “did you
make
Xavier? Call him out, the way Aaron called out Andrew?”

He chuckles, as if she's just said something amusing, but he doesn't answer the question.

“Finish up,” he tells her a moment later, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and stepping on it. “I want to keep moving.”

“All right…” Mouse pops a last french fry into her mouth and looks around for a place to dump her garbage…but he takes the bag and the half-empty soda can from her and tosses them on the ground beside his cigarette butt. “Come on,” he says.

He hands her the car keys and climbs in the back. Mouse gets into the driver's seat. She doesn't like having him behind her, but it's more discomfort than fear now; she's all but certain he has no intention of harming her. And even if something happened where he did try to hurt her, she can sense Maledicta and Malefica lounging near the cave mouth, ready to step forward to defend her.

A realization hits her then, and she can't help laughing.

“What?” he says. “What's funny?”

“Nothing,” says Mouse. She uses the sound of the engine start to mask
another snort of laughter. No, nothing's funny, except that against all expectation, and without meaning to, she's taken Dr. Grey's advice and started thinking of her Society as
allies.

The realization leads to another: she may have allies, but evidently
he
doesn't. He called Xavier “useless”; and it doesn't sound like there are any other souls he can call on in a crisis. So maybe if Mouse could precipitate a crisis, create a situation that he couldn't handle on his own, maybe that would cause someone else, a
non-ally,
to come out—Andrew, or Andrew's father, or at least someone who could put her in touch with them.

It's something to think about while she's driving. She does think about it, even going so far as to discuss the idea, silently, with Maledicta. But Maledicta's not much help; when Mouse asks what would be a good way to shock their passenger into giving up control of Andrew's body, Maledicta replies: “Why don't you let Malefica tie him to the back bumper and drag him for a few miles?” She says this like she's not kidding.

“I don't want to hurt him,” Mouse says. “At least, I don't want to hurt Andrew.”

“What you need to do,” another Society member speaks up, “is get him talking about himself. Find out what he's afraid of.”

It's a good idea, but he's not interested in talking, particularly not about his fears. “Just keep driving,” he tells her.

She keeps driving; she talks to herself. The Society keeps its collective eyes peeled for an opportunity to fool or force him into switching.

By 2:45 on the dashboard clock they're in Billings, where Mouse stops for more gas. Rather than hunt up Maledicta's Shell card, she insists that
he
pay for it. After the gas station they go to an Arby's to eat—he pays for that too, with one of Andrew's twenty-dollar bills—and use the bathrooms. Once more Mouse tries to hurry her business, but when she comes out of the ladies' he's right there waiting for her. They go back out to the car. He's ready to drive again, but Mouse, unwilling to give up control, says she's good for another few hours.

They cross the state line into Wyoming at 4:52. At 6:39 Mouse notices the sun starting to go down, which seems early, until she remembers: traveling east, almost a thousand miles from Seattle already, they're in a new time zone. She thinks about resetting the dashboard clock, but Maledicta, up in the cave mouth, argues against it: “You
want
it set to the wrong time, to headfuck that fucker in the back seat. If you're going to fucking change it, you should make it
more
wrong. Set it to fucking Tokyo time.” In the end, Mouse leaves the clock as it is.

The Rockies are well behind them now; they are crossing a broad swath of grassland that stretches between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. Traffic is very sparse here, and the rolling sameness of the scenery makes for dull driving. Mouse, who has maintained a conservative sixty-five miles an hour for most of the afternoon, lets the Buick's speed creep up to the posted maximum of seventy-five. Then Malefica, bored and in a mood for mischief, slips out in a moment of distraction and puts some real lead in Penny Driver's right foot.

—and so just as the sun dips below the horizon, flashing lights appear behind them, a siren wails, and Mouse looks to find the speedometer needle edging towards one hundred.

“Oh God,” Mouse says.

“—slow down, you idiot!” he yells from the back seat, has been yelling. “Slow down, slow down, slow down—”

She is slowing down—her foot is off the gas, and the needle swings back, to ninety, eighty, sixty, forty. The patrol car is right on her tail now, its lights still flashing, signaling her to pull over. Mouse steers the Centurion obediently onto the soft shoulder.

In the back seat he's having a meltdown.

“You stupid, stupid…” he sputters, at a loss for an epithet to use on her. “What were you driving so
fast
for?”

“It…” Mouse sputters in turn, “I don't think it was me.”

“Oh great.”

“
I'm
the one who's going to get in trouble, you know,” Mouse points out. “I don't see what you're getting so upset about.”

“You'd just better not try anything,” he warns. “You'd better not say anything, about…”

“Don't worry about it.” In fact Mouse has already considered the possibility, and rejected it. If she was unwilling to dial 911 from the Idaho rest stop, there's no way she's going to try explaining her situation to a cop who's just pulled her over for speeding.

The Wyoming state trooper is out of his car, one hand holding a flashlight, the other resting on the butt of his gun. He walks up, raps a knuckle on Mouse's window. She rolls it down.

“Good evening,” the trooper says. He bends his face down to the window and shines his flashlight around the Centurion's interior. Mouse waits patiently and surprisingly calmly to be asked for her license and registration, but her passenger rocks anxiously in the back seat, sucking in his breath as the light flicks over him.

The trooper's nose twitches.

Oh God,
Mouse thinks, remembering. The car's been aired out some since this morning—she had the front windows cracked through most of Montana—but it still smells like a distillery.

The trooper shines his flashlight in Mouse's face, in her eyes. “Have you consumed any alcohol this evening, ma'am?” he asks.

“No,” Mouse replies, hearing another nervous inhalation behind her. “No, I'm sorry, I know how it smells, but…no, I haven't been drinking.”

The trooper waits, still shining the light on her.

“We…I was at a party last night,” Mouse continues.

“You had a party in your car last night?”

“No!” says Mouse, her voice cracking a little now. “No, I was
at
a party, parked, and there was…an accident. A bottle of vodka got spilled, and I just haven't had a chance to get it cleaned up. I, we, we've been driving all day.”

“I see,” the trooper says. He steps back from her door. “Could you get out of the car please, ma'am?”

“OK,” Mouse says, and does. “I'm sorry, I know I was going pretty fast—”

“Yes ma'am, you were. Could you step over here to the back of your car, please?…That's fine, now what I'm going to ask you to do is hold your arm straight out from your shoulder like this, close your eyes, and touch your nose.”

Mouse does as she's told. Finger on the tip of her nose, eyes still closed, she waits for the next instruction. But when the trooper speaks again, the words are not directed at her: “Sir!” he calls, his voice moving away from Mouse, “Sir, would you stay in the car, please?
Sir!
”

Mouse opens her eyes. In the back seat of the Buick, her anonymous passenger has panicked and wants to get out. But the trooper steps up to the car door and blocks it with his body. Mouse's passenger makes a frightened mewling sound and shoves hard against the door; the trooper, dropping his flashlight, shoves back. “Sir!” he says, his voice straining with the effort it takes to keep the door closed. “I need you to stay in the car, sir!”

“Oh God,” says Mouse. “Please, he's…he's claustrophobic! Please, don't—” She takes a step towards the car; the trooper draws his gun.

—and all is quiet again. Mouse is back in the driver's seat. The Centurion is still parked on the road shoulder, but the patrol car is gone. The dashboard clock reads 7:48.

With a shaking hand, Mouse turns on the Centurion's inside lights. A
speeding ticket is tucked into the sun visor; Mouse pulls it down, glances at it unseeingly, and sets it aside.

“Andrew?” she says, looking behind her. The back seat appears to be empty—but then a head rises into view.

“Why are we stopped?” he asks. “Are we in Michigan yet?”

“Xavier?”

“I'm sorry, I must have fallen asleep.” Xavier looks out the windows at the darkened landscape. “Where are we? Is this Michigan?”

“N-no,” says Mouse, heart hammering in her chest. “No, it's…we're about halfway there.”

“Only halfway? Why are we stopped, then?”

“Uh…car trouble,” Mouse tells him. “I, I think it's OK now, but I'm going to have to make a stop at a garage to get it checked…”

“
Another
stop?” Xavier says.

“It's OK, really,” says Mouse. “We're making great time.” She turns around and reaches for the ignition.

“Mouse,”
he says. “Don't.”

Mouse stops, her hand on the ignition key. She feels like crying.

“Get out,” he tells her. “I'm driving.”

Mouse fights back the tears. “You
can't,
” she says.

“No? You don't think so?”

“What if we get stopped by the police again?”

“
I'm
not going to drive like it's the Indy 500.”

“What if we get stopped again anyway?” Mouse says. “Do you even have a driver's license?”

“Do I—” He pauses. Mouse hears him pull out his wallet and flip through it. “Ah-hah!” he cries triumphantly, but the cry cuts off too soon. “Wait,” he says. “What year is this?”

“1997,” says Mouse.

“Goddamnit!…”

“So you don't have a driver's license,” Mouse says. “And if we do get stopped again, especially with the car smelling like this, you'll probably be arrested.”

“Fine,” he says. He reaches for the door handle. “I'll just get out here, then, and—”

“We're in the middle of nowhere,” Mouse reminds him. “It's getting cold out. You might freeze before you get another ride.”

The look he gives her is withering. “All right,” he says. “You want to drive, then drive—to the next big town. Then I am getting out.”

Mouse hesitates. “Look,” she says, softening her voice, “I really wasn't trying to get us pulled over. If you want to go on traveling together, I promise, I won't—”

He cuts her off. “Just drive…or else.”

She drives.

The next big town is Rapid City, South Dakota—no more than an hour and a half away, even if Mouse keeps the car's speed down. She has ninety minutes to think of something. At first it seems hopeless: every time she checks the rearview mirror he's staring at her, as if he can hear her plotting against him.

But as Mouse herself has learned firsthand, vigilance can be exhausting. Not long after they cross the state border, she looks in the mirror for the umpteenth time and finds him asleep.

Most of him, anyway: his body has slumped down in the seat, and his head is lolling back. But as Mouse continues to watch him, dividing her attention between the mirror and the road ahead, his right arm comes up, like a cobra rising out of a basket, until the back of his hand brushes the roof of the car. His hand recoils from the contact, tenses, and begins striking the roof deliberately, alternating between soft and hard blows.

Thump-THWACK-THWACK-thump…thump…THWACK-thump…THWACK-thump…THWACK-thump-THWACK-THWACK…

“Xavier?” says Mouse. But this isn't one of Xavier's drum solos; it's something else.

…thump-THWACK-THWACK…thump-thump-thump-thump…thump…thump-THWACK-thump…thump…

Code, Mouse realizes. It's a message in code.