Debris (6 page)

“Does it hurt him?”

“You're out when they do it. They say you don't feel it. But the anesthetic does a number on you. And like I said, you forget shit for a while and you wake up without that fucking awful shit on your mind. That's why epileptics don't get depressed. Their brain hits a point and just says no more and they seizure. Nobody knows for sure how it works.”

Matthew took a deep breath and let it out slow. He rubbed at his eyes with the palms of his hands, leaned forward and crossed his arms on the dashboard. Then he rested his chin against them.

“I don't know, man,” he said. “Anything with the brain freaks me out. I might rather be depressed than risk it. But you're closer to it than I am. I don't know.”

Paul stared out at the open road. The greying tarmac ran straight for miles and miles and shimmered under the blazing sun, and far off on the horizon a fog of humid heat obscured the country ahead. Not one cloud was above them, and he knew they were still far inland and had a long way to go.

“I'd rather have seizures,” he said.

Matthew raised his head and stared at Paul for a while but Paul didn't look back.

 

 

In the early afternoon they pulled
into a gas station at the edge of town. There were only two pumps and one of them ran diesel for the tractors and trucks that came through. The station sat in the bottom of a valley where a dozen houses had been built maybe a century ago and half were boarded up or left to slow decay whether people lived in them anymore or not. The two-digit sign that stood high above the lot couldn't keep up with the price of gas, and so now it just read a double zero, the going rate guessed at by those passing through. Paul pulled in from the road and came up to the pump and stopped.

“We runnin' low?” Matthew said.

“We don't know where we are,” Paul said. “And yeah, we could use some gas too.”

Matthew sat up straight. He rubbed at his face and exhaled hard. Then he opened his door. “You pump, I'll pay,” he said.

“Okay.”

Matthew went toward the gas station store, his arms stretched out wide, the back of his shirt dark with sweat. Paul waited a second and then got out of the car. He walked around it and stretched his arms as well, blinking under the open sky where the sun sat lonely and ruthless. He took the nozzle out of the pump and flipped the metal switch so that the gas would flow. Then he pulled the nozzle to the rear of the car, the hose tethered to the pump by a line with a rusted metal coil at the end. The gas tank's cap had been lost for years, so he just opened the flap, shoved the nozzle into the hole and squeezed. He thought of something and turned in time to see Matthew open the front door of the station before stepping in.

“Hey,” Paul yelled.

Matthew stopped short in the doorway and turned around. He stood there waiting.

“Get us some drinks for the ride back if you want.”

Matthew nodded and went inside. Paul looked over at the closing door for a few seconds, turned back to the pump and watched the numbers cranking over, the digits distorted by faulty electronics in the display. He got near enough to the amount he wanted and guessed where to stop, then walked the nozzle back to the pump. He saw what looked like twenty-six dollars and eighty-eight cents worth of gas and let out a little laugh, thinking about Matthew's face when the attendant told him what he owed. Paul went over to the back of the car to shut the gas-tank flap. As he did so he saw three men about his age walking into the lot toward the store. Two of them were wearing ball caps and cargo shorts and the other had short, ragged hair and torn jeans and no shirt on. They all had the rough look of a long night, but they were talking and laughing, so Paul called over to them.

“Hey guys,” he said. “How's it going?”

The shirtless man turned as they came by and they slowed up but didn't stop. None of them said anything. They just looked at Paul.

“You guys from around here?” Paul said.

“Yeah,” the shirtless one said. “Why's that?”

“I'm just tryin' to figure out how to get somewhere.”

“Where you goin'?”

Paul studied the three men for a moment. The two men with caps were taller and they seemed uninterested. One took off his cap to wipe his brow and he had a bad haircut with a bald patch at the centre of his head. The shirtless man was shorter and well-built and he had a cross tattooed across his shoulder, the work poorly done.

“We gotta get to Pineridge. You know the place?” Paul said.

The man smiled. “Yeah, I know it.”

“Good.”

“What you gotta go there for? Who you got in there?” the man said.

Paul looked into the man's eyes and then he turned and stared out past the gas station lot at the firs that rose up the valley hillside. He cleared his throat and turned back. The man was still waiting for an answer, still grinning. Paul didn't like the man at all.

“So, how do we get there from here?”

“Nobody wants to go out there,” the man went on. “People go in there for a reason. They don't come back out. You know that old guy that shot that cop in the head in the bar a couple years back. In front of all those people. He's in there. So's the fucker who did all them kids. All kinds of wackos in there. For real.”

“I'm not fuckin' goin' to that part. That's the maximum-security part. He's in the other side. Where you get treated and you get out.”

“Who is?” the shirtless man said.

Paul kept staring at the three men, but he didn't have anything to say to them. Now they wouldn't move along. They just stood there smiling and mumbling things to each other, and then Paul heard the creak of the shop door and he saw Matthew coming out with a plastic bag in his hand. Matthew was looking down. He spat on the ground and when he looked up he saw Paul. He hesitated and then went on. Paul turned back to the men and went around the car to the driver-side door and opened it. The shirtless man watched him go, said something to his friends over his tattooed shoulder and kept staring Paul down. Paul still wouldn't say anything more.

“Who you goin' to see in there?” the shirtless man said, “Ain't nobody from around here, that's for sure. They fuckin' set up shop there and bring all these sickos from everywhere and fuck up our town. That place should be burnt to the fuckin' ground with whoever you're goin' to get in it.”

Paul shut the door and the shirtless man drew himself up big and held his hands out in waiting. But Paul wasn't looking at him. He was looking at Matthew, who had dropped the bag on the ground and had come up behind the three men.

“Hey,” Matthew said.

The shirtless man turned. He was still grinning and didn't see it coming. Matthew dug his feet in and threw a short left hook from the hip and caught the man right on the mouth and the man sat down hard on the sand-strewn asphalt and stared up in utter confusion, blood coming out of his nose in a thin, steady line. Matthew had his right cocked but the shirtless man didn't try to get up and his two friends just stood there. One swore but he didn't move. Matthew looked at each of the two men and back at the downed man. Then he looked over at his brother. Paul had come around the car and stood beside the pump shaking his head.

Matthew raised his eyebrows. “What?” he said.

“Get in the car,” Paul said.

Matthew stayed calm as he picked up the plastic bag and sidestepped the three men, the one he'd punched still sitting on the ground with his hand over his nose, blood between his fingers and hate in his eyes. Matthew went over to the car and Paul opened the passenger door and waved him in. As Matthew sat down the door shut behind him. Then he heard the sound of gravel shifting as the man he had hit scrambled up to holler something at them. Matthew turned to Paul, but Paul was already making his way over to the men with his long deliberate strides. Matthew got out of the car but he wasn't quick enough. Paul had already hit the shirtless man three times before Matthew got to him. The man had only been on his feet long enough to say a few words. Now he was lying on the ground again with his hands pawing at the air. If the other men had thought about doing something they gave it up when Matthew came back. He grabbed Paul around the chest with both arms and pulled him away. Once Paul had been dragged clear he shucked loose and started for the car without looking back and without even looking at Matthew. His face was flushed and his teeth tight together and his knuckles were slathered with blood from the man's ruined nose and mouth. The brothers walked to the car together and Matthew had his right arm over Paul's shoulder. His heavy hand lay flat against Paul's chest and Matthew held him close, patting his palm hard against a fast-beating heart.

 

 

The car crested the north ridge
of the valley by the late afternoon and started down the other side. For a few minutes Paul and Matthew were high above the town, staring out together at the shoreline with its maze of docks and piers and boats coming into their slips and others drifting out into the bay. The water shone green in the sunlight. There were no waves because there was no wind, but the surface shimmered and shifted just so slightly. Far off in the bay were tiny islands of shieldrock and some were topped with dwarf white pines and bowed willow trees. The horizon line lay out in the distant waters and if there was land beyond you couldn't tell it by sight.

“That's a nice place, isn't it,” Matthew said.

“It would be.”

They could have driven straight through the town but Paul took them around it, coasting down on a zigzag route through the streets until the car came out onto a long, level road that took them past parks and marshes and a massive retrofitted power station before leading right to the bay side of the town. Here they merged into sparse traffic on a four-lane shoreline roadway and drove a little more than a mile east around the outskirts of the north end before leaving the winding coastal road. A large promontory rose up toward the water's edge, blanketed by pines and larger deciduous trees with their foliage burnt and dried above the treeline. Farther up the treecover thinned and there were great, smooth boulders jutting out of the hill-face as renegade knobs and joints of the earth's very bones. On the plateau sat an enormous modern building made of grey stone and newly forged metal and heavy slabs of glass set together to form a near-seamless westerly roof.

“That's one hell of a fuckin' building,” Matthew said. “You really need to make it stick out like that, in case anyone would ever forget it was there in the first place. Jesus.”

Paul nodded but he didn't say anything. He had taken to wringing the steering wheel with his hands as he drove and when he saw the sign he was looking for he turned left and took the car up the hillside road. They climbed up to the place under the ever-shifting shadows of the wooded pass and at the top the road flattened out. Paul slowed the car as they came to the front gates. There an old man with a guard's cap and uniform sat in a glassed-in booth and when they pulled up he pushed a button and asked them what they were there for.

“We're going to the northwest wing. To pick somebody up.”

“Okay,” the man said and relaxed somewhat.

Paul gave their surname and the man said it was alright. He opened the gates and waved them through. Paul nodded and drove on.

“Doesn't take much to get in or out of here,” Matthew said.

“That's 'cause people don't care about this part of the place. It's that one there they're worried about.”

Paul cocked his thumb toward the passenger side of the car and Matthew looked out of his window. A fork in the road ran toward another set of gates, solid metal doors sealed fast between barricades that stood twenty feet tall with razor wire fixed between spikes at the top. The building that they had seen from the road sat far away behind the barrier. The car followed the gentle curve of the road until they were driving away from the structure. Now they saw another one ahead. It was older and made of limestone and red brick, with dozens of its windows shut except for a few on the lower level beside the main entryway. There were no gates and no guards. They pulled right up to the front steps and Paul put the car in park but he left it running.

“Can you park here?” Matthew said.

Paul just sat there for a moment and then he took a deep breath before opening his door.

“Hey,” Matthew said.

Paul turned. “You stay here in the car. If somebody tells you to move then move it.”

“I'm coming in there with you. We're gonna get him together.”

“It's not like that in there. It won't make it any better. I been in before so I'll go get him. The sooner we get him outta there and on the road the easier it'll be.”

“What the fuck are you talkin' about?” Matthew said. “I want to go in there and get him with you.”

“Why the hell would you want to do that?”

“What?”

“Listen to me. Stay here. I've seen him in there before. You haven't. He'll remember it that way. Just you being here with him in the car, not in there. It won't make it any better for you to go in.”