The Beard, page 9
“I see you lookin at my pitchers!” he shouted. “You don’t like em well you can get the fuck out! This here ain’t like other towns! We do what we want when we want and everybody else can just fuck off! You hear me!”
“Do you have a pen and paper?” I asked.
He made a braying whining noise and filched a pen and a receipt out of his apron, throwing them at me rather than placing them on the table. They bounced off my chest. I bent to pick them up from the floor.
“You people think you know everything!”
“I was wondering,” I said. “If you could tell me if you’ve seen two men. One looks like me. The other looks like this.” And I drew a horrible sketch of Wrench on the paper.
“Why?” the man said. “They in trouble with the law?”
“No. I’m just looking for them.”
“’Cause there ain’t no laws here.”
“That’s good. No. They’re not in any sort of trouble. They’re my friends and I was just looking for them.”
He crumpled up the piece of paper and put it in his apron. “I think maybe you should get out,” he said. His eyes were glazed over and murderous, as though I had done something to insult him at his deepest level.
“Perhaps I will,” I said. “Your tip.” I threw the crumpled bills he had given me and secretly enjoyed watching his elderly, skeletal frame wincingly stoop to pick them up. Then I said, just because the environment filled me with such hostility, “I’m going to burn this place to the ground.” Then I turned and left.
“You do that!” he shouted. “You just do that! I’ve been tryin to do it for years!”
He continued ranting but the door banged shut on his voice and I was once again on the fluorescent sidewalk. A man with a hat shaped like a lobster came down the sidewalk toward me. Rather than trying to step out of my way, he purposely stepped into it. I’d move to my right and he to his left. Then I stopped, giving him the passage, and he pushed me. I kicked him and he smacked me in the face and laughed. I moved out into the street and he flipped me off before continuing on his way. Maybe everyone here was just a jerk, I thought.
The street proved to be a dangerous place. No one could decide which side of the road they wanted to drive on. In my short walk down the block I witnessed three accidents. Interestingly, whereas the people of this town seemed hostile in almost every other way, when they ran into someone else, each of the drivers would get out of their respective cars, laugh, have a brief conversation with the other driver before swapping cars and whatever was inside (wives, children, friends), and continuing in the direction they were going.
Back on the sidewalk, I saw a horsedrawn carriage with what I assumed were a bride and groom riding in the back. The carriage drew to a stop and the bride hopped off.
“This is the happiest day of my life!” she shouted at me, grabbing me, pulling me into a kiss and thrusting her tongue deep into my mouth. The groom began making out with the carriage driver. “Let’s run away together,” the groom whispered lustily. They both hopped off the carriage and ran, laughing, down the street. The bride pulled me toward the carriage, took hold of the reins and whipped the horses into action. Before I could say anything, we had left the town behind and were racing through the dawn countryside.
Nineteen
The bride drew the carriage to a stop on a treelined road.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get to it.” She stripped her veil off and threw it onto the road and reached behind her wedding dress, trying to undo it. “Do you mind helping?” she asked.
“With what?” I said. I was a little dazed. My mind was still trying to catch up with everything that was happening.
“Taking this damn dress off. We’re going to have sex.”
“I don’t think I’m up for it,” I said.
“You came all the way out here with me and now you’re not up for it?”
“Pretty much. What about your husband? Didn’t you just get married?”
“Well, sure, but... hey, you’re not at all familiar with the way things work in our town, are you?”
“I think I have a pretty good idea.”
“You just don’t understand. The pressure of living there. The pressure of always being expected to do what you’re not expected to do. That’s why my husband ran off with the carriage driver. He’s not even gay. That’s why the lights are on all night and everyone sleeps during the day.”
“But you should do what you want to do. If you want to be with your husband then you should go back.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said.
“Anyway,” I said. “I think I’ll just be going. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “I guess it’s for the best but everyone back in town is going to be very disappointed.”
“Tell them it was my fault.”
“The stranger. They’ll have to believe that.”
I hopped down off the carriage. She whipped the horses into action, turning the carriage around, and headed back for town.
I walked along the narrow dirt road, wondering where I would come to next, expecting it to be just as strange as the places I had been. I wondered where I was. Wrench still had the map and I didn’t think asking anyone for directions would do any good. Currently, there wasn’t even anyone to ask. Walking along the road I began humming discordant tunes that weren’t really tunes at all. It was only a matter of time before I became too tired to walk. Then I would need a nap but I didn’t see anywhere suitable for a nap. I guess I could have ventured out into the woods but I didn’t see why I’d want to do that. Taking a nap on a soft bed of chemically purified lawn was one thing. To take a nap on a bunch of moldy leaves surrounded by snakes and bugs and countless other evils was something different altogether. I would just have to walk and wait. Wait to find Wrench and the imposter or wait to come upon the next town or the next city.
“Yeee-ha!” I heard from behind me. A beer can hit me on the head and I looked up to see the black van speeding away. Perhaps Wrench noticed me. The brake lights lit up and the van backed up. I went to hop in the passenger seat but was met with the dour face of my imposter. He reeked of beer but didn’t seem nearly as happy as only a few moments before. Rather, he now seemed like a child caught doing something he knew very well he was not supposed to be doing.
“You,” I said.
The imposter continued to stare at me. Wrench was in the driver’s seat, trying to look around the imposter.
“David? That you?” he said. “Why are there two of you?”
“The imposter!” I shouted.
“I’ve been driving around an imposter?”
“Unfortunately.”
I swung the door open and said, “Get out.”
The imposter slid off the seat, clutching the flame in his arms.
“No,” I said. “You’ll have to leave this.”
We both tugged at it. The imposter began making wild hand gestures. I took the opportunity to snatch the flame away before leaping into the van. “Let’s go!” I said, placing the flame back on the floorboard.
Wrench hit the accelerator and the van lurched away.
The imposter stood in the middle of the road, hopping up and down.
“Where did you come from?” Wrench asked.
“You left me behind,” I said.
“Left you behind?”
“Yeah. At the lake.”
“No. That’s where I picked you up.”
“That’s where you picked the imposter up. Really, I don’t understand how you fell for that. He’s the worst imposter in the world.”
“He looked just like you. He had a beard and everything.”
“That was the worst fake beard in the world.”
“You’re just being critical.”
“Where to now?”
“Not sure. I’ve just been driving.”
“Let me see the map.”
He handed the map over and I looked at it.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked.
“I think we’re in Kansas.”
“Kansas?”
“Sure.”
I looked at the map but couldn’t find Kansas on it.
“How much longer do you think this is going to take?”
“I don’t really have any idea. Do you?”
“No. That’s why I asked.”
“Probably a couple of days, I’d say. If we can find it at all.”
“We should probably stop off in the next town and get some rest.”
“I agree. I’m exhausted.”
“Me too.”
Twenty
We had been driving for at least an hour when I asked Wrench, “Have you noticed the back of the van is filled with corpses?”
“No, haven’t noticed that.”
“Well, it’s not exactly filled with corpses but there are a number of corpses back there. Five or six, I’d say.”
“That was probably your imposter’s doing.”
“You think he’s a murderer, too?”
“No. I think he’s just a corpse thief. We were at the scene of a crime. He kept trying to get me to go into a store and leave him alone for a few minutes. I guess this is what happens. Leave him alone and come back to find the van filled with corpses.”
“It’s odd though. They seem to be mostly odorless.”
“Maybe he was working on something scientific.”
“I guess we should probably try and get rid of them, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. I’ll pull over when I find someplace good to dump them.”
“Give me the map again.”
He tossed the map over onto my lap. I opened it up but this time it wasn’t anything resembling a territory. It was just a drawing of a dog. A very childish drawing, as all drawings in my life seemed to be, very one dimensional. It was, however, the prototypical drawing of a dog. I guess that made us something like a traveling flea.
“Huh,” I said.
“What’s that?” Wrench asked.
“Nothing to worry yourself about,” I said.
“Up here,” he motioned. “The Flats.”
“That sounds like an excellent place to dump a body.”
I wondered how Wrench knew we were entering The Flats but, as I looked up from the strange map, I noticed a sign that said, ‘The Flats.’ The sign was plywood with black spraypaint dripping down the front of it. It was like we had entered a whole other world. Before, I was accustomed to a somewhat normal world filled with people doing outrageous things. Now the world and the people seemed to be equally outrageous. Everything had an odd, homemade look to it, like we were living in some child’s dream. Or maybe just some not very intelligent adult. Either way, when I looked around the old world, it was easy to convince myself that millions of uninteresting, boring people had gotten together and taken a general consensus that that was how they wanted the world to be. Sort of dull and easily accessible. This new world didn’t seem to have any sort of group thought involved in it at all. In fact, it seemed to be filled with things most people would not want in their world.
The Flats seemed to be several acres of hardpacked, desertlike dirt. Nothing grew there. The road became broken up and, in some places, completely gone.
“We just going to leave them here?” I asked.
“I don’t see why not,” Wrench said. “I don’t think anyone will find them. Besides, we didn’t do anything wrong. I can’t be expected to take these corpses back where we found them. In fact, I’m not even certain where we found them. Your imposter’s a drunk, by the way. He forced me to drink copious amounts of beer and then he made me drive.”
“Did he talk at all?”
“Not that I remember. He made a lot of crazy hand motions. Hops up and down a lot. Grunts a little bit.”
“The only time I’ve ever heard him speak was on the bus but, I think, by that time, it was really the hallucinogenic sandwich doing most of the talking.”
“Maybe he’s mute or something.”
“I think maybe his voice is even farther from mine than his physical appearance. Maybe you can convince yourself he looks like me but maybe his voice is very high pitched or maybe he has like a French accent or something. Who knows?”
“Who knows. Let’s get rid of these corpses.”
Wrench braked the van into a screeching halt. We each climbed out our respective sides and walked to the back of the van. Wrench opened the back doors and we looked in at the corpses. Wrench took the first corpse by the ankles and pulled it out. I took it by the shoulders and walked backwards away from the van. I looked down at the corpse and was startled.
“Jesus,” I said. “It’s Mom.”
“I noticed that,” Wrench said.
“We can’t just leave her out here in the Flats.”
The sun beat down on my shoulders. I imagined her body out here, rotting, getting pecked by vultures and other predatory creatures.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to,” Wrench said.
“How can you be so cold?”
“I’m not being cold... Look, do you want to drive for however much longer we have to drive with a decaying corpse in the back? Maybe we can come back for her or something. I hate leaving her here every bit as much as you do.”
“But she was just your employer. This is my mother.”
“I don’t see that we have much of a choice. Remember, all this stuff is just here to sidetrack us. We have to think about the journey. We can’t get waylaid by all this stuff. If we do then we’ll never make it.”
We laid the corpse of my mother down on the baking ground and went back to the van to retrieve the next corpse. This time it was my grandfather. He no longer looked like the skinny Ernest Hemingway I remembered. His beard was gone and he had some sort of black tribal tattoo on his face but I knew it was him.
“This is my grandfather!” I said, now indignant toward whatever cruel fate had played this trick on me.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Wrench said.
“How can you be so blasé about all this?”
“How else can I be? Like I said, we can either stop here and you can be overcome by grief over people you knew were dead anyway, or we can continue onwards and maybe do something about it. For all we know, the Nefarions will have the power to resurrect people.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely.” We dropped the corpse of my grandfather next to my mother. “Where did you guys pick these corpses up, anyway?”
“I told you, I have no idea. Your imposter sent me into just about every store we passed for beer. I didn’t even notice the corpses until you pointed them out.”
We pulled out the next corpse.
“Dad!” I said.
“I’m afraid you’re wrong about that one,” Wrench said.
At first, I didn’t know what he meant. I studied the corpse. It looked like Dad. No. It didn’t look like Dad. It looked like Gary Wrench. Strange, I had come to think of him as my father.
“This is you,” I said.
“This is my imposter,” he said.
“So, you were my father’s imposter and you had your own imposter?”
“Oh, everyone has an imposter.”
“A doppelganger.”
“No. A doppelganger would be someone who resembles you on a natural level. A doppelganger is usually the cause of meeting people for the first time and having that person think they’ve met you somewhere before. An imposter is one who intentionally tries to look like someone else in order to fool or trick people. I don’t really know why anyone would want to pose as me but I guess a lot of questions just don’t make sense anymore.”
We put the corpse down next to my grandfather.
“Funny,” Wrench said. “I hadn’t seen him in a while. I didn’t know he was dead, though.”
“Are you sad?”
“Well, it has often been said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Now I don’t have anyone out there imitating me.”
We went back to the van and I wondered who we would pull out next. This was the final corpse. We slid him out and, after studying the face, I was relieved to discover that I had no idea who it was.
“Do you know who this is?” I asked.
“No,” Wrench said. “I feel kind of relieved, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
We hurried over to the dumping spot and laid this one down.
“That was exhausting work,” Wrench said, wiping his hands on his shirt. “I think we might just have to take a nap in the van.”
“I could definitely go for a nap.”
We entered the van and reclined our seats.
“Do you ever get the feeling you’re napping your life away?” Wrench asked.
“If you ask me,” I said. “There are few things in life as perfect as a nap. Sleep is such an overlooked part of modern society. Most people fit their sleep around their hectic schedules and I, for one, think it should be the other way around. We should go to sleep when we get tired and wake up when all the sleeping is done. I think that would make for a much healthier society.”
But Wrench was already asleep, his snores filling the cab of the van. A few minutes later, I joined him.
Twenty-one
When I came to the van was moving. Wrench had apparently woken up before me. We were on some kind of super highway. Eight rows of traffic, all moving very fast. Given our sparse, almost apocalyptically empty travels thus far, this was kind of surprising.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked.
“Have no idea.”
“Did you look at the map?”
“I tried but it was blank.”
“Yeah, the last time I looked at it it was just a picture of a dog.”
“I think someone is messing with us.”
“I’ve kind of thought that for a while.”
“It’s most probably the Nefarions. They are the source of much confusion and bewilderment.”
“Bewilderment.”
