4. The Hammer’s Final Throw-Down
The cage was a good idea, Lyle decided. Soph came out of the groomer’s doused in some dog-ass perfume. But with the cage, she was way in the back and he barely knew she was there. He could turn up the music and fly along the Eisenhower in his Escalade, with the traffic moving better than usual today. He was pushing sixty, threading back and forth through the lanes, gunning it and coasting, never tapping the brake. A beat-up trailer full of mowers and rakes loomed ahead, puttering along in the middle of the expressway. He veered to the inside lane just as a red Mercedes was pulling into the outside lane. For a moment they were parallel, splitting around the truck, and when he was past it he glanced over. There she was, zooming ahead and looking at him through the open window, smiling, hair blowing across her mouth. And suddenly he wasn’t seeing her but his own mom, long gone. Forty years ago, and she was next to him in the Scrambler at Peony Park. She was gripping the safety bar for dear life and screaming and laughing, hair blowing across her mouth. And now here she was in this red Merc, speeding along. Like she was back from the dead and trying to tell him something. Which sounded crazy, but who was to say, really? You never knew.
A black Beemer came up on his tail, too close. He sped up and veered into the right lane and started to pass a van in the middle, but then a car was blocking him, an old Impala with Iowa plates, putzing along, drifting toward the shoulder and then jerking back. A kid was bouncing crazy high in the front seat and the driver was clearly distracted. Idiots. Lyle pushed closer, and the Iowa driver looked into his rearview, sped up. Yeah, asshole. It’s not a holiday.
He stayed close on the Impala’s tail and that helped a little, they were moving better now, so he reached for his raspberry tea, the little no-no he allowed himself every day. You had to cheat your own rules every now and then, even if it meant drinking something with high fructose corn syrup, an ingredient he had railed against on his show. He brought on experts to educate people on how bad that shit was. But in his raspberry tea? Delicious. He had forgotten to open it earlier—the thing with Sophie had distracted him. It had been tricky getting her into the cage, and by the time he got her situated he was sweating and shambly in his thinking, so he drove off without fixing that one detail he always took care of before heading home, opening his tea. Now he was trying to drive and at the same time break open the ring of clear plastic surrounding the lid. The fuck was all this plastic? Didn’t they know it was taking over the ocean? Floating islands the size of Texas, but they kept putting it on everything. He steadied the wheel with his elbow, felt for the edge of the plastic seal and tried to snap it loose, but it wouldn’t give, he couldn’t get his nail under the right spot. Because, you know, you had to make this shit like armor with only one point of weakness, a little perforated line that was impossible to find. He looked down for just a second so he could get his nail under the right spot, and he snapped it open, but then he heard tires squealing, and he glanced up to see the Impala veering onto the shoulder so sharp it pitched onto two wheels, and in front of him was the ass-end of a semi, a wall looming, and in that fraction of a second everything slowed down. There was his mom again, hair blowing across her mouth, eyes scared, and there was the truck coming at him Star Wars-like. He couldn’t even touch the brake. He flew into the back end, an explosion of sound and light, and everything went dark.
Something was streaming down his face. The tea, probably. A high-pitched wailing from the back of the car—Yukiko? No, she wasn’t with him. A flash of light, a person coming in close. A wide, strong nose, the same nose in the samurai paintings hanging in their hallway. And Yukiko’s eyes. God, he loved her eyes.
5. The Impala spins
I couldn’t tell if he was alive. One eye was open, looking at me. Or not. Maybe it was just an open eye and he was gone. The other side of his face was covered in blood and I think there was a skull fragment sticking out of his yellow hair, or maybe it was a piece of glass, I don’t know, it was something hard and shiny, stuck there. The dash and steering column had collapsed, with the wheel pressing into his chest, his legs below the knee gone, mashed or severed, I couldn’t tell. Holy Hell, I’d never seen anything like this. I didn’t know a wreck could be that bad, the whole front of an SUV eaten by the back end of a truck.
I felt around on his neck, trying to find a pulse, but it was such a slippery mess, I couldn’t feel anything. What was I even supposed to do? I could call 911, but it felt like I should do something now, something CPRish, but he was clearly beyond CPR, there was a hole in his head. I couldn’t stop staring at him, at that one eye. At the time I thought it was because I was looking at a dead person and I’d never seen a dead person, but in retrospect I know it was more than that. I was looking at my father, and though I didn’t understand that at the time, I had a sense of something familiar in that blue eye, a connection to eternity, like I was looking into the future and the past at the same time.
A terrible crying-yelping came from the back. A dog, from the sound of it. Pill was back there, which shouldn’t be a thing, Pill in all this. I should have just driven away. But it felt wrong to leave the accident, and so we had gotten out and climbed into this wrecked car—the first one in a big pileup—to see if anyone was alive. From the back of the car came more crying-yelping, then a ruckus, claws on metal, and then Pill shouting: “Clam down! You have to trust me!” More ruckus, and then a streak of yellow dog flew over the back seat and out the door, leaving a smear of blood on the cream-colored leather, which Pill slipped in as she scrambled over. “Wait!” she shouted. She jumped out of the car, and I went after her.
Outside it was a mess of smashed cars, glass on pavement, a horn blaring. Pill was running up a grassy embankment, chasing after the dog, who was at the top of the hill, pushing its way under a sagging chain-link fence that bordered a big cemetery.
I ran up the hill, calling Pill’s name, but she wouldn’t stop and she wouldn’t look back, little shit, she kept going. I ran as hard as I could and I got there just as she was climbing the fence, and I grabbed her and swung her clear and set her down hard and got up in her face.
“What in the Hell, Pill! What are you thinking!”
“The dog has these holes in her legs cause the cage was poking them and now she’s bleeding!” She started climbing the fence again, and I pried her off it and carried her down the hill. She flailed her arms and legs, hollering at me to let go, she had to find the dog.
“The dog is fine, the dog is gone—just forget it, Pill!”
“She’s bleeding a lot!”
“I don’t care, we’re going!”
I moved fast, holding her tight because she was flailing violently. The Impala was on the shoulder, pointed the wrong way. I had almost rolled it. I had been driving along, not totally paying attention because Pill was bouncing up and down in the front seat, losing her mind over the looming skyline of downtown Chicago. And suddenly I looked forward and there was the back end of the semi stopped in my lane, and I didn’t even have time to brake—I veered onto the shoulder so sharply we went up on two wheels. I was sure we would flip and roll, but I eased up on the turn the slightest bit and the Impala dropped us back to level and spun around like a figure skater, making a graceful, sweeping arc, and we came to a stop on the shoulder. Headed the wrong way and untouched. We sat there for a minute, both of us breathing hard while around us came the sound of tires screeching and crash after crash after crash. And it was my fault, maybe, because I didn’t see the truck, didn’t stop in time. I had veered onto the shoulder, leaving the guy behind me to fly into the semi, and then someone crashed into him, and on and on it went, at least five or six cars back.
I opened the door of my car and got in, pulling Pill across my lap and pushing her to the other side, racking her knees on the steering wheel. She hollered and flopped back in the seat and started kicking me, knocking my arm as I tried to get the key in the ignition. Finally I got it in and fired the engine, turned the car around and edged along the shoulder, squeezing past the semi until I was out front, accelerating on an empty stretch of freeway. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to drive there but I needed to get away, I needed to be someplace where I could stop and think and clear my head, so I took us up to seventy. An ambulance came from the other direction, siren wailing, and as it passed, the driver glared at me like what-the-fuck, which worried me, I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I got off on the first exit. Slipped away from all that.
We came to a light and stopped. Pill was on the other side, leaning into the door like she wanted to be as far away from me as possible. Her cheek smeared with blood. Cars rolled through the intersection in front of us, one after another. Quiet and orderly, as if everything was fine, as if the universe hadn’t just flipped on its head.
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