Take Me Home

The road hasn’t been touched in a long, long time. But neither has the rest of Rising Star, Jess observes. She’s got her hand out the window and a cigarette pinched between pretty pink-painted fingertips. The 2027 Volkswagen Atlas pushes around the bend at a real raging 60, leaving a blasted drug store in its dust.

The car seats four but, with the help of a questionable seating arrangement involving a baby and a half-closed-but-unfortunately-jammed cup-holder in the backseat, is presently packing five bodies. In the back, there’s the aforementioned Jessie Smith, tasked with piloting the Blutooth and arguably the least invested in this cross-country run for the wild east. She thinks the turn for Texas was an unnecessary matter of sentiment.

Grandpa says New York or bust. Daddy says ‘how high?’ she thinks and laughs to herself.

Her fingers jiggle a little and send bright orange motes careening away from the crumpling, smoking end of a Pall Mall Blue no more than two flicks short of sheer disintegration. She puts it to her lips and eyeballs Baby Brix - house-talk for the one and only Brixby Smith of a fresh one and a half years of age. For a second, the Pall grows a little unwieldy between her digits but, well, kid'll be alright. 

Air’s not gettin’ much better at this rate, anyhow.

Papa disagrees though. He turns down both the roaring AC and the equally roaring AC/DC on the radio to holler back from the driver’s seat, “Your mother’s sick, baby girl. Come on.” His right hand wanders in between the front seats and sort of loosely swats at her as if looking for a head or a leg to pat in some old familiar fatherly way. “Be a little considerate, yeah?”

Jess sighs and lets it hang outside of the window again. The smoke follows its wand of command and dispels in rushing vapors into the vehicle’s tailwind. 

And on the matter of Mrs. Smith, momma’s slumped against the left side with a blanket pinned into the window to keep the sun off her. It’s hard to tell because it’s dark in the corner, but her face is ghostly pale and her skin slumps on her bones and makes her look like she’s a good thirty older than she really is. An afghan striped in warm colors is wrapped around her and tucked behind her back. Her neck is cradled in a robin’s egg blue neck pillow like a stalk of wheat cupped in the hungry throat of a scythe. She’s heavy on the downbeat with her breath, that huuu-hehh cadence of air that’s only a little quieter than everything else in the car. Just enough that you might not notice if you stop thinking about it for a second.

So Dad’s in the driver’s seat and one would suppose, then, that grandpa’s got shotgun but that’d be an incorrect assumption because grandpa stayed behind for god knows why. He told them to hit the road. He said they couldn’t stay at the barn in Colorado no more and that was for a couple reasons. One of them was that it was too cold there. Too cold for anyone, even him. But that house is a home and the old man and home shan't be parted, so that's that.

The cold was the main reason, everyone had been saying. It was just sort of what they went with. But the real reason was that Grandpa Bill didn’t want Clarissa - that’s Mrs. Smith for the uninitiated - around. And he was mad at his son, mad at him for bringing Clarissa around so recklessly.

It’s not safe to have her here, said the echoes in Jess’s mind. She scried the scene in low fidelity within the murky, still-water pools of her conscience.

She craned her neck out the window to suck in another toxic puff on the deathstick, then focused her eyes on the passing road. She couldn’t grab any single particular image. Everything's moving too fast.

The world out of a moving car. It’s like a carousel. You just keep on spinning and never, ever, ever get off.

“Can you turn the radio back up?” she says.

And it's Clay Smith, her 15-year old younger brother that claps that volume dial before Mr. Michael Smith can even get to it. He twists it around until his hand's upside down and the Arctic Monkeys' Arabella's boomin' out of the car speakers, dishing out those thick, thwomping undertones of bass feedback and scratchily rendered rock vocals. Clay’s listening, but he’s not really. His head is in the Gameboy that had replaced his phone when that had run out of battery. It’s nowhere in Rising Star, Texas, the United States, or even 2032. That’s why he doesn’t hear momma wheeze like a dying pig and doesn’t think about how weird it is to have taken the turn all this way south to stop by her hometown when she hasn’t even really been awake or mentally present for something like three days now. Or maybe it’s four? He forgets how long these kinds of things are really supposed to last. There'd been something on CBS a couple years back about the progression of infection but he hasn't so much as seen a working TV since then, save for static.

Thoughts like that are for packing, anyways! He’d taken care of that before they’d even gotten out of Telluride! Pfft! 

We’re in a moving car, he thinks with sing-song smugness. Just keep on ridin’, baby. He smiles and then goes back to his game, wiping the sweat off his palms.

And then, to round out our cast, there’s Michael Goodman Smith of former radio evangelical fame tapping out the rhythm of Mineeyes hathseen theglo-ryof thecom-ingof theLord on the black faux leather steering wheel. He’s a fortunate man, Mr. Smith, for God has in all his grace granted him the glorious gift of copious quantities of dumbfuck ignorance. It’s the blessing of a working radio and a good air conditioner and three splendid little children to love and adore for all his life that allows him to keep his damn eyes on the road and snake-weave his way through the labyrinth of ruined brick-and-mortars all the way to where the road pulls off. That's got his mind, now. Got him nice and distracted so he doesn't have to hear her wheezing.

Huuu-ehhh...

Huuu-ehhh...

Huuu-ehhh...

He drives the SUV onto a gravel path, narrower than the constructed road, and through a bit of a thicket. 

There’s something there he wants to fix on. Or rather, the him inside of him wants to fix on, because everything from the head outward's gotta keep it eyes on the road, eyes on the prize, drive safe, be smart. And it’s that little brown dot on the horizon: a house, taken back by its abandonment to decades of old devil-grass. A real vintage Reconstruction-era chateau of humble air yet impressive stature at a seeming three stories tall.

There’s a magnolia hunch-backed on the lawn like a hollow granite sentinel who’s long since abandoned his post to just lay his head to rest on his knees. Once upon a time, the approaching growl of gravel under rubber may have spooked off a murder of crows from that somber wood into the amber sky like a military fleet in pre-calculated formation. 

Now there is only the faint rustle of leaves to mark any life at all, save for the spirits Michael knows are watching him, no doubt. Watching and judging. Watching and remembering. Watching him and peering into him and digging out the vomit from his gut the way it had dug it out of him when he first saw Clarissa’s wound. Or the way anxiety had dug it out of him then when the implications of that wound had sunk in. 

When he’d realized she was sick.

He kicks the pedal a little harder, and maybe Baby Brix notices because he starts to fuss, but nobody would ever really be sure. And it doesn't matter anyhow. Because we’re in a moving car and that tiny, insignificant moment of tension is behind us. It’s just a speck on the road and if we just keep on moving, keep on driving a little faster, it’ll be gone. 

Won’t it?

That’s the thing about cars though. They can’t move forever. You’ve got to stop for gas somewhere, or stop to grab something to eat, or stop to pop the trunk and pull out the shotgun and then…

One last turn onto the sandy cut-out and now they’re going straight for the house on the hill. And then it’s like they’ve turned right back to Telluride. Right back to tears and packing things haphazardly into the back of the car as fast as they can because maybe if we just… if we just go a little faster then we’ll have more time! Because our time isn’t up! 

She's still here! She's still alive! Take every second you can. Every man for himself.

They’re back on the couch with Grandpa Bill on the grand piano and Cousin Eddie on the guitar and Jess is humming along and bobbing her head and everything’s aaalright. And there’s Clarissa with her arm around Clay, patting his back! Haha! Her arm is clean, free of teeth-marks and blood and scratches. It’s clean and free of infection. It doesn’t pose any risk to the house and neither does she, yet.

They’re back in the barn drive, on a day before Clarissa started getting too sleepy to talk anymore. 

She says,

“Take me home, guys.”

Michael says,

“Honey, that’s…”

“It’s alright.”

…

“It’s alright.”

The day her eyes fluttered shut and the wheezing started.

And it didn’t stop.

At some point, the car won’t be moving anymore and they’re gonna be here instead of there. Nobody, not a damn soul, not even radio Jesus who's still trapped between the steepled fingers of a praying Michael Goodman Smith before Grandpa makes the prognosis on the bite.

I'm sorry, Mikey. It's infected.

At some point after that last turn, Jess snuffs the cig on the side of the car. The music stops abruptly. Clay slowly closes the Gameboy. His hand hovers there, because he’s already turned it off. It’s a black screen, and it’s reflecting back at him. No. It's reflecting back at the boy who just lost his mom, and that's not Clay Smith, no sir, couldn't be! That's some kid in a movie, but not him. He stares at it for a second and then flips it shut. And then they all look at the house coming on. Except for Michael.

Well, his eyes are on the house, but that’s not what he sees.

What Michael sees is a young, bright-haired girl he met here on a vacation. He sees the spot where they sat together on the porch and her shape cross-legged on a rocking bench that’s not there anymore. He sees the Summer rains in which they danced and the Winter chills through which they cuddled and pulled the blankets tight. He sees the sweet love they made and he sees a thousand thousand years pass before him like pages in a flipbook until they stop here. Until the car stops. 

And now we’re here.

They don’t look at each other, just get out of the car in a sort of practiced motion. He pops the trunk and Clay goes around to the back, but Michael runs back and stops him. They share a look that says something like:

“Son, there’s just some hurt a young man like you should never have to take. Let me be the one to break. You’ve still got a life to live.”

Clay doesn't protest. Michael takes the bag out of the car.

Jess has got Brixby in her arms, rocking him and cooing to him, and Clay’s cradling Clarissa now just the same. His expression tells Michael he doesn’t know what to do with her.

He doesn’t know what to do with her.

God, he doesn’t know what to do with her.

Michael looks around and sees the magnolia. Once upon a time, they’d sat up there and kissed until they nearly fell off. It was sunset, and those beautiful rays of sun were blearing through the branches, cutting into thin strips of heat that kissed you and made you tickle all over. They melted together in the tangle of warmth and leaves and in that once upon a time, they really did believe they would never die. They didn’t have to say it. They just knew.

“Set her down nice,” and he points.

Clay does just that.

Michael took it out of the bag. It was heavier than he remembered. Cold, black metal that pricked his finger-tips with its own kind of power. When all's said and done, it's this that did it, not me.

“Stand back,” says Michael.

They all move back a little. 

Clarissa's slumped against the magnolia, still wheezing. There's no sound to cover it now. This pained pleading for oxygen.

Her face, though still technically the component of some sort of living thing, is greening with the touch of decay. Rotten wisps string from upper to lower lip in wet globs as her parted mouth drifts open, shut, open, shut with every rise and fall of her chest. Necrotic fingers twitch. 

She’s home.

She’s home and she’s ready. 

Jess puts a hand over Brixby’s eyes.

Let him believe it’s not so bad here on Planet Earth just a little longer, she thinks. He ain’t gotta wake up yet. 

When they're done at the house, they all get back in the car without a word and once again, they're on the move.

Jess decides to light up the second to last in her pack of Blues.

New York or bust, daddy-o, she thinks with something hot and wet trickling from her eyes down the side of her face. Hit that pedal. Let’s get on that carousel and never look back.