...it had the look of a crack house. At night there was an unreal darkness behind its windows. You could tell nobody lived in it.
But the language of “Driving Shades” is tightly limited to simple, everyday words and phrases.
It’s a character narration, so the level of expression must mirror the language of the character-narrator, an ordinary guy from an ordinary home in an ordinary small town. The problem is, the events he lives in this story are beyond ordinary, and well beyond the capabilities of his normal language. I had to make do with a smaller vocabulary, not only of words, but of phrases, expressions, references.
If you enjoy doing beautiful things with language, this kind of challenge might go across your grain. But I find it fun to work with less––kind of like playing golf using only a couple of irons and a putter. Eloquence of effect doesn’t necessarily call for scintillating turns of phrase. Even Shakespeare’s writing, when the action becomes gut-level intense, drops down to words of mostly a single syllable. (Scintillating, by the way, is a word I’d never use in “Driving Shades.”)
Here’s Part 3, Tomorrow I’ll post the concluding part and we’ll move on.
“Driving Shades, Part 3 (Part 1 click here)”
The house had been a vacant wreck for years. I guess it had been a mansion, somebody’s rich-ass home, but in the light of day, it had the look of a crack house. At night, you could tell nobody lived in it. There was an unreal darkness behind its windows. What you’d call ordinary dark had been replaced by something so dark it sucked the night right into itself.
We pulled up to the place and I thought I saw a single flicker of light in one of the upstairs windows. It flared up––a flashlight, or a match––then the window went dark again.
“Did you see that?” I said
“See what?”
“I don’t know about this place, Sis. What’re you gonna do here, anyway?”
“None of your business.”
I looked hard at her face in the rear view mirror, a pale oval hanging in the dark. It showed me nothing.
“Okay,” I said. “But––how about letting me just go in with you?”
“No.”
“Just for a second–”
“No.”
Something icy went shimmering down the back of my neck. I was never a timid guy, but I know fear when I feel it, just like I know hot and cold. Some people say there’s fear and then there’s terror. I don’t know the difference, but this wasn’t just fear. This was like in a horror movie, when you know something’s about to happen, you just don’t know what or when. I wanted so bad just to floor the accelerator and get her the hell out of there. But I did nothing. Like I said, you do not want to tangle with my sister. I had long ago stopped trying to. There were even times when I was sure she was about to clock me. As fucked up as it might have seemed, she made me feel there was no way I could deny her. So I let her go.
They said she died in the kind of pain you could never imagine. I had to identify her body. Burns, cuts, and that pretty face so punched in you didn’t know where to find her eyes, her nose, her mouth. I wonder if Father Mackey ever had to look at a something like that. If you wonder why I can’t put much enthusiasm behind being alive, you could start there. Something happened to me that night. I don’t understand it. I’m a logical guy and I know it doesn’t make sense, but the fact is, that night I died, too, along with anything in the living world that ever meant anything to me.
They never cracked the case, never had a prayer. I asked her once: “Who did it to you?” and, of course, I got nothing. It was like I’d never even said it. I tried again, and added, “You know, whoever took your life, Sis, they got mine too.” What the hell did I expect? Shades never respond to remarks like that, even if they understand them, and why should Sis have been any different?
The first time I picked her up. I had no idea who she was. All I saw was a girl in my headlights, marching down the Ridge Road toward town. A shade, I figured. Shades will usually stop and swing around to wait, casually, like they called you and here you are. Not this girl. She kept walking, so I slowed the cab to her speed and nosed it up beside her. We went a hundred years or so like that till she swung her head sharply toward me and I saw her face. It was Sis, all fierce and gorgeous as always. One thing, when I saw it, chilled the blood in my veins: her face wasn’t bright enough.
“Want a ride, Eloise?” I said, motioning toward the back seat with a jerk of my head.
She stood there, blank, waiting until I had sense enough to pop open the rear door, then she stepped in without a sound.
We rode a few minutes in silence. That’s what they do at first: no greeting, no small talk, nothing. When she spoke, it was only to give me directions. “Start slowing down. Pull over here,” and so on, in a dry, faraway voice that sounded like somebody had installed it in her chest. She didn’t have to tell me. I knew where we were going.
Past the tracks and the grain elevator, we turned sharply and hugged the service road until I could see the house, dark, blacker than black against the night. Sis never once spoke. When I snuck a peek at her in the rear view mirror, her eyes looked back at me like huge dark holes in space.
We slowed to a stop in front of the house. She sat for a minute, as if she was trying to make up her mind about something she couldn’t quite get hold of. Then she was out of the cab and jogging up the walk.
The shriek of the front door tripped open a gush of memories and some bad stuff oozed out, stuff I hadn’t let myself see in a year. I saw her again, battered and ruined, the way she’d been that night, rolled out on a pallet, the bruises, the cuts, but what sickened me was the totality. On that table, I was seeing the destruction of someone who had been my sister, the death of every part of her rolled into this one pitiful mass that made me want to sit down in the floor before I fell down. I was sweating, trembling, and I knew I was going to be sick. Her face, that beautiful face…
The driver’s side window was open, thank God, because I had to lean out of it to wretch without making a mess of the cab. I don’t know how long it took but it seemed like my guts were exploding up out of my stomach.
I sat for a while, breathing hard, waiting, until it occurred to me there was nothing to wait for. She’d gone in. Shades, when you leave them off, you don’t see them again, probably ever. I figured I might as well just get back to work, but that wasn’t about to happen: I was through for the night. I drove straight out to the Turnpike Plaza, a place where nobody knows you and nothing is ever personal, and sat staring into a bowl of soup until I was ready to head back to the garage.
Most shades, like I said, you only see them that one time. You let them off, they merge into the shadow of a tree or drift around the corner of a house and…gone. But once didn’t do it for Sis. Whatever her need was, she needed it again and again. You can get used to anything, they say, and it’s true. After a while, driving her to that house got to be almost routine. I would always see her along the same stretch of the Ridge Road. “Hey, Eloise, want a ride?” We’d drive in without talking. I’d drop her in front of the house. She’d march straight up the walk, disappear inside, and that was it, until the next time. And the time after that, and the time after that…
In this dream I keep having, I’m looking up at the house, the black windows, at the trace of light flickering up in one of them. I’m feeling the same sick horror as I did that night, but there’s another element: in the dream I think it hasn’t happened yet. And I have this desperate urge to just drive on past without stopping. I want to drive home. Feed Sis a hot meal. Take her out for an ice cream with Mom and Dad. But of course, even in my dream I know that’s not the way it’s going to play out.
How many times did I drive her to that place? No idea. It was like an addiction. I was doing it. It was upspeakable, and I didn’t want to stop. It’s that simple. I wouldn’t let myself think about anything that might pull me out of it. I mean, here I was able to see her again. What was the harm? For those few minutes, it felt like I was almost helping her live again. Then something happened that should have should have been a warning sign. This one night I checked in to work at the garage. I shot the shit with Gabe for a few minutes like always, felt just fine. Then I went to get into my cab, and I couldn’t make my hand open the door. No matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work.
Gabe noticed me standing there like an idiot. “Having a problem?” he said.
“No, no problem. I just…can’t open the door is all.”
He stopped what he was doing and took a long look at me. “That’s a problem, buddy. You better go home, get some sleep. Okay?”
I went home, but I couldn’t sleep, so I lay in the dark in my room, in my clothes, listening to Mom and Dad argue about taxes or something. Things were happening inside my head. I got up and paced. Through my bedroom window, I saw the only world I had ever really known, my backyard, gray in the moonlight. Everything was out there, the poplars, the maple that Dad had planted for Mom on their first anniversary, the jungle gym, all gone to rust, that had once belonged to me, then Sis. It was all the same as it ever had been, that green rectangle, our little world. But something caught my eye. Behind the maple, Sis was looking up at me, not moving, just looking.
Later, I was trying to sleep, and it seemed like my room had gotten huge and strange, like the universe. I could see very clearly it had a thousand million moving parts that somehow all meshed together, and I was a tiny gear in this very large, very cruel machine that I didn’t understand, and it was making me do things I couldn’t resist, over and over. A huge sadness broke over me at the thought that this was all I had, it was my life. Was this God’s plan for me, if there was a God? That I should go on delivering my sister up to be beaten to death, over and over forever? That had to be wrong. Otherwise I might’ve stepped in and thrown a rake in the machine. I could have warned her. But how do you warn somebody they’re about to die when they’re already dead? When I think about that one, my head hurts so bad I have to stop. Am I stupid? Maybe the answer’s obvious, right? But if it’s so fucking obvious why can’t I can’t I just deal with it and move on?
True fact: nothing lasts forever. If you wind up a spring as tight as it will go, and you keep winding, it will snap. Every time I left Sis at that house, the spring tightened just a little bit, until one night, the last night I ever saw her, it went. I felt it go, like when a footbridge snaps across a gorge. Imagine a world of black and white firing up in the colors you think of when someone says “hellfire”—that was me on that night. Something awful in me wanted to light up the world.
That night, Sis did something I’d never seen a shade do. As she walked toward the house through the weeds and the broken glass, I saw her stumble. She glanced back, over her shoulder—just a second’s hesitation––and I saw her eyes. They were the eyes I had seen the night she stood in the backyard, looking up at me, the eyes of young girl, suddenly knowing in full how dead she was. I felt my throat begin to swell and my lips started to bobble. Something was happening to me that I didn’t understand. There I was sitting in my cab, in the dark, in the silence of the night, in the mess of my pathetic life, snuffling and choking like a sick baby. I dropped my face into my hands and rocked silently, until my sleeves wet with tears. Then all of a sudden it was like someone threw a switch. I stopped blubbering. I got out of the car and stood rigid, waiting, like a prisoner waits in front of his cell for whatever was coming next. I had no idea what I was about to do.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Enjoying the story, I’m hooked. Well done!