Stay Awake Page 15

  Then they hit it. The thump of the body blow comes almost simultaneously with the shatter of the windshield, the blinding swash of blood across the glass. “Watch out! A deer!” O’Sullivan cries belatedly, and Smokey says, “No kidding, motherfucker,” and he yanks the steering wheel to the left and right. The truck lurches sideways toward the ditch. It seems likely, O’Sullivan thinks, that they will flip over and roll down the embankment and burst into flames.

  So when they don’t—when, instead, they come to a stop at the side of the road and the dust uncoils its slow eddies into the tangle of headlights—it almost doesn’t seem real. The two of them sit there, speechless for a moment, until finally Smokey turns on the windshield wipers. The wipers twitch like the last gasp of an insect leg and smear an arc through the grue.

  “Oh my God,” O’Sullivan says. “Yuck.”

  2

  Things had turned bad for O’Sullivan in Chicago, and he had decided to make a new start of things out west. O’Sullivan liked the sound of this sentence, its muscular clarity. Things went bad for O’Sullivan, he thought, as Smokey’s eighteen-wheeler truck pulled up in front of his apartment. O’Sullivan also liked the idea of people calling him “O’Sullivan,” though for most of his life he had been known by his first name, Donald, or Don, or Donnie, all of which struck him as rather small and petty. To say, “Donnie had decided to make a new start of things out west,” sounded somehow more pathetic.

  He hadn’t yet decided what the “new start” would involve. In actuality, O’Sullivan and Smokey were on their way home for their grandmother’s funeral, and O’Sullivan had not yet told his parents that he planned to stay on indefinitely, that he was hoping that he could live in his old room for a little while, that he was not only broke and without a job and a month past due on his rent, but he had also managed to amass a fairly significant credit card debt.

  It had been their mother’s idea to have Smokey pick O’Sullivan up as he passed through Chicago, because O’Sullivan of course couldn’t afford a plane ticket home for the funeral. She had been nonplussed by this admission, she almost seemed like she didn’t believe him. O’Sullivan was, after all, a college graduate, the first person in his family to reach this pinnacle, and his mother was so far blissfully unaware that her son had no marketable skills whatsoever—yet another liberal-arts major who found himself struggling to hold down a job in the service industry. Waiter: fired. Bartender: fired. Hotel room service: also fired.

  Smokey, meanwhile, had dropped out of high school and had been driving trucks for a good ten years now. Makin’ great money! he said. And there was, O’Sullivan felt, a certain level of aggressiveness in the way that Smokey parked the big semi truck outside O’Sullivan’s apartment building and blew the big foggy lighthouse horn until O’Sullivan came to the fourth-floor window to peer out.

  It would have been nice, he thought, to leave with some dignity. He would like to say: “O’Sullivan swung his duffel bag into the cab of his brother’s semi and they sped away, toward the silver strip of interstate, heading into the horizon.” But the fact was that O’Sullivan had three suitcases and several large plastic garbage bags full of his stuff and one box of books that had to be shoved and argued into the narrow storage area in the back of the semi cab.

  “What the fuck?” Smokey said. “Looks like you’re taking your whole goddamn apartment with you!”

  “Not exactly,” O’Sullivan said.

  There was an awkward silence. The apartment building disappeared in the rearview mirror and the truck crawled out of Evanston and into Skokie, inching, stoplight by stoplight, toward the interstate. The cab of the truck smelled like motor oil and pine air freshener and male body odor. They were suddenly vividly aware of how little they knew of each other, how little they had in common. How long had it been since they had actually spoken to each other? Two years, maybe?

  “So,” O’Sullivan said. “What’s been going on with you?”

  Smokey sighed, and the air brakes sighed too as the traffic light turned green. “Oh, not too much,” he said. “Just workin’.”

  “Yep,” O’Sullivan said. He nodded masculinely.

  Some time went past. O’Sullivan became aware that there was, in addition to the other odors, a very strong smell of diesel fumes, which made his forehead feel like it was slightly expanding.

  “So,” O’Sullivan said. “Too bad about Grandma and everything.”

  “I guess,” Smokey said. “She was pretty old.”

  “Yeah,” O’Sullivan said.

  “And she’d gotten pretty mean, too, in those last months,” Smokey said without taking his sunglassed eyes from the road. “She really gave everybody a hard time.”

  “Huh,” O’Sullivan said. “I guess it had been a while since I talked to her, actually.”

  “Lucky you,” Smokey said.

  He handed O’Sullivan a flask of peppermint schnapps, and O’Sullivan took it and drank without comment.

  3

  Smokey is driving a semi truck whose primary purpose is the transport of medical and other hazardous wastes. This is Smokey’s specialty—he has a particular license and various authorizations to drive such a vehicle, which is somewhat scary, O’Sullivan thinks. “So what is medical waste, exactly?” O’Sullivan had asked after a long stretch of silence had unraveled, and Smokey filled him in with far more detail than he probably cared to know.

  So now O’Sullivan has a pretty good idea. There are probably used needles and tongue depressors and cotton balls; also rubber gloves, empty intravenous bags, bloody bandages, culture dishes, scalpels, swabs, lancets … no doubt a few pieces of people as well, tonsils, placentas, appendixes, malignant tumors—whatever kinds of goop might be contained inside the human body. It grosses O’Sullivan out quite a bit; he thinks of it all stuffed and sloshing in the yellow plastic “hazard” drums that are stacked up in the trailer they are pulling.

  As they sit on the edge of the highway after the deer incident he is faced with the image of the semi jackknifing and the barrels bouncing along the asphalt and cracking open. He pictures amputated human arms flopping like fish down the center of the road; syringes floating on beds of liposuctioned fat; gelatinous human eyeballs wiggling merrily as they roll down the highway; and so on. He could continue to imagine other such grotesque stuff, but chooses not to.

  “Jesus Christ,” O’Sullivan says, and Smokey looks at him, blinking slowly, as if he’s just woken up. “Jesus,” O’Sullivan says. “Did we kill it?”

  “We didn’t even hit the thing, I don’t think,” Smokey says, and then lets forth a colorful string of truck-driver curses. “We must have missed that son of a whore by the most gossamer of hairs.”

  O’Sullivan is silent. Nonplussed. The truck is tilted a little on an embankment, and the headlights illuminate a tangle of oddly slanted trees and shadows.

  “Well,” O’Sullivan says, “we must have hit something. I definitely heard a thump.” But when they get out to look, there is nothing there. No twitching hooves, no rack of antlers, no mangled body. Upon inspection, the gore on the windshield looks like it might be reddish mud. There’s a crack in the glass, but it isn’t shattered, after all.

  4

  “These pills are mostly a mixture,” Smokey said, handing O’Sullivan a plastic Ziploc baggie. “They’re just ordinary pharmaceuticals, but they’ll still get you happy in various ways.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous?” O’Sullivan said.

  “What?”

  “Mixing pills and alcohol. Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Of course,” Smokey said. “But you’re twenty-four years old! Where’s your sense of adventure? You’re supposed to think you’re immortal.”

  “That’s true,” O’Sullivan said, somewhat apologetically. He put a pill carefully into his mouth, then swallowed another drink of the schnapps they’d been passing back and forth. “Brr.” He shivered.

  “You’ll feel better after a time,” Smokey said. “Don’t be a puss
y.”

  “I’m not,” O’Sullivan said.

  “You want to hear a joke?”

  “Okay,” O’Sullivan said.

  “So there’s three guys, right? A Frenchman, an American, and a Russian. And they’re sitting out in the woods, in a cabin, having a drinking competition, which is, first you have to drink a bottle of vodka, and then after you drink every last drop you have to go outside and shake hands with a bear, and then, finally, they have to make mad, passionate love to a beautiful woman.”

  “Wait,” O’Sullivan said. “I thought they were in a cabin. Where’d the beautiful woman come from?”

  “Never mind that,” Smokey said irritably. “She’s just there.”

  “Oh,” O’Sullivan said.

  “So anyways,” Smokey said, “first thing, the Frenchman drinks a half a bottle of vodka, but he passes out before he finishes.”

  “A pussy,” O’Sullivan said.

  “Just like you,” Smokey said. “Now it’s the American’s turn. He drinks the whole bottle of vodka, but before he can get outside to shake hands with the bear, he gets stupefied and passes out, too. Right? Now, finally there’s the Russian. He drinks down the whole bottle of vodka, no problem. Then he marches out into the woods. You hear a lot of roaring and thrashing around out there, but finally he comes back inside. He’s a little messed up, breathing hard, clothes a little ripped, but he’s still standing, and he looks around the cabin.

  “ ‘Where is beautiful woman?’ he says. ‘I have to shake hands with her, and then I am winner!’ ”

  O’Sullivan was silent for a while. He considered.

  “I don’t get it,” O’Sullivan said.

  5

  They had been driving for a long while, and as the afternoon waned it had begun to seem to O’Sullivan that they were traveling along the same identical fifty miles of interstate over and over, the landscape scrolling past the windshield as if it were a film strip looped and repeated—fields and farmhouses, exit signs and fast-food oases. Lots of roadkill. Dogs, cats, deer, raccoons, skunks. Even once a fox, which made him inexplicably sad.

  Things always seemed to go bad when O’Sullivan was around, he thought.

  He had been trying to put this thought out of his mind, or at least to get things into perspective. He hadn’t killed anyone, he reminded himself. He had only stolen a little from his various employers, most of whom deserved it in any case; he had sold drugs, but only briefly, because he was desperate for money; he had lied—a lot, it was true—to nearly everyone he knew, and had taken advantage of friends’ generosity until they ceased to be friends. He had—in the three years since graduating from college—accumulated mountainous debts, not even including his student loans, and there seemed no escape from it, nothing but an endless stream of bad jobs that made him depressed so he charged something on the credit card to make himself feel better or he drank too much at night and couldn’t get up the next day to go to work … clearly it was a bad cycle, something had to be done.

  O’Sullivan had decided to make afresh start out west, O’Sullivan thought. The interstate unreeled beneath the eighteen-wheeler’s rumbling bulk

  Things had gone bad for O’Sullivan in Chicago and as he sat in the cab of his brother’s semi truck he stared fixedly out at

  What now? O’Sullivan thought as he stared moodily out at the unreeling interstate highway

  O’Sullivan didn’t know what lay before him but a vague sense of dread hovered as he stared out at the unreeling

  Shit.

  He would have to throw himself on the mercy of his parents, he thought. He would have to beg them to help him. To save him from the inevitable fuckup from which he couldn’t escape. And they might even find it weirdly satisfying, both of them high school dropouts, they might be secretly pleased to discover that college was nothing but a scam, a big Ponzi scheme being perpetrated on the hopeful youth of the nation.

  He sighed. Out the window, O’Sullivan could see that a motorcycle was passing on the right-hand side, and when the motorcycle rider saw O’Sullivan looking down he gave a big grin and a jokey, two-fingered Boy Scout’s salute. All afternoon they had been leapfrogging each other down the highway, Smokey’s semi and the motorcycle, one passing the other, then slowing and being passed in turn. O’Sullivan watched as the motorcycle advanced past them, swerving around several slower-moving vehicles and skating onward toward the horizon, the silver spokes of its wheels glinting in the sunlight, the rider’s long hair flapping like a pennant.

  O’Sullivan swung onto his motorcycle and gunned the engine. He had nowhere to go, no responsibilities, nothing held him down. The great unreeling expanse of the highway opened before him and he grinned, his long mane of hair unfurling behind him in the wind of velocity and his

  Unfurling?

  Undulating?

  His long hair undulating behind him as he sped toward

  6

  The semi truck has come to rest on the berm on the edge of an embankment. A corrugated metal guard rail runs parallel to the highway, and beyond the guard rail is darkness. Trees. A cliff, perhaps?

  What now? O’Sullivan thought

  Outside of the cab, illuminated by the blinking of the semi’s orange hazard lights, O’Sullivan scratches his head. He is still having a hard time believing that they didn’t hit anything.

  Behind him, Smokey has unzipped his pants and is taking a whiz alongside his truck. O’Sullivan can hear the sound of pee pattering on the tire.

  Up ahead, he can just barely see a thin white shape in the darkness. He thinks maybe it’s a tree, or the skeleton of a road sign. For a second, it might even be the shape of a person standing there.

  “Hello?” he says.

  He takes a couple of steps down the road. The blinking light from the semi has a mild strobing effect, so that the figure appears to move forward and then draw back into the darkness, forward and back in the steady pulsing hazard lights. Is that a scarecrow? O’Sullivan wonders. He squints.

  About fifteen yards down, O’Sullivan sees a white cross.

  It is a little bit shorter than O’Sullivan himself is, and it is wearing a hat. Or—rather—a hat has been attached to the top of the cross, a baseball cap. At the base of the cross is a pile of brightly colored objects. There are some plastic flowers—pink roses, yellow daffodils, white lilies—and a green Christmas wreath, and a cluster of stuffed animals, bunnies and teddy bears and duckies, and ribbons, which wave lethargically in the light breeze. There is something written on a banner, but he can’t make out the words. As they’ve driven across the country, he has been noticing that there are a lot of these little roadside memorials dotted all along the highway. A lot of people die in car accidents, obviously.

  But it seems like there are more of them these days. Or maybe it is just that they are more elaborate. When did people begin to decorate these accident sites as if they were shrines?

  “Hey, Smokey,” he says. “Check this out.”

  And then he notices another one, just a few yards farther down. He can only barely make it out in the darkness. Another cross with a circle of offerings beneath it.

  7

  They were pulling into an interstate oasis, and the sudden reduction in speed slowed the conversation into an ellipsis.

  “… ” O’Sullivan said, and Smokey shook his head silently.

  “I’ve got to get some gas.”

  When they stopped, O’Sullivan got out of the cab and walked quickly toward the bathrooms and vending machines. He was hoping to quickly throw up and then buy himself a Dr Pepper and a candy bar to cut the taste of vomit. It had occurred to him, suddenly, as his feet touched the asphalt, that he might die. His heart was pulsing alarmingly against his rib cage, and as he stumbled woozily toward the restrooms, the distant door frame began to waver. The solid rectangle appeared to quiver gelatinously, and an irregular twitch started up under his left eye.

  Am I having a heart attack? he wondered.

  Then he was in
the stall, holding the metal-gray graffiti-scratched walls as he retched.

  Then he felt a little better. He stood there at the sink, cupping cool water in his palms and pressing his face into it. He looked at himself, drawn and sallow in the mirror, and dipped back down.

  “Are you okay, man?” said Smokey, behind him.

  “Sort of,” O’Sullivan said, but then, when he lifted his head, it wasn’t Smokey. It was actually some other guy who he didn’t quite know, and the guy was now standing at the row of fluorescent-lit sinks beside him. O’Sullivan felt certain that he recognized this person from somewhere. He had the uncomfortable presentiment that it was one of the many people he had wronged in his life.

  “Hey, man,” O’Sullivan said familiarly, as if he completely recognized the person. “What are you doing here?”

  Then he realized: It was the motorcycle guy. They’d passed each other probably a dozen times in the past three hundred miles. Once, he’d seen the guy pumping gas at the same gas station where they were pumping gas. Later, the guy was throwing away his trash at a fast-food place just as O’Sullivan and Smokey were walking in.

  “Dude,” the guy said, “you have a little fleck of puke on your chin.”

  “Oh,” O’Sullivan said. He brushed at the spot with his fingers. “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem,” the guy said. He considered O’Sullivan’s face for a moment, not unkindly. “Get some fresh air, man. I’ve been there before myself.”

  “Yeah,” O’Sullivan said.

  “You’ll be all right,” the guy said. He patted O’Sullivan on the back with his black-gloved hand. “I hope you’re not driving,” he said.

  “I’m not,” O’Sullivan said.

  “That’s good news for the rest of us,” the motorcycle guy said, and gave a grin, the same grin he’d had when they passed on the interstate, the one O’Sullivan would see in his mind a while later, when he thought back to this day, when he thought about the bad things he had done in his life.

  O’Sullivan lowered his face into the cold water. When he raised up, the guy was gone.