Before
TEDDY KICKED HIMSELF.
He’d been kicking himself ever since he’d left the hospital in Charleston four hours ago. He’d spent three hours of it inside his newly painted bus, angry, contemplating where he could have gone wrong. He got so worked up at one point, it took the memories of a woman he’d had in Tampa three weeks prior to calm himself down. A curvy brunette who’d given him such a good night in the bedroom he’d considered, for the first time ever, coming back. Considered, perhaps, even becoming a one-woman man. For a while, reliving that night with her had worked in relieving his anger, but now that he was on hour four of kicking himself, of wondering what in the fuck to do, of waiting for that seashell beside him to give him a free answer or two, he realized where he’d gone wrong.
He’d spent too much time on the bus.
Finding and buying the bus had been in the cards, he was still convinced of that, but perhaps spending three full days painting it had been a bit excessive. He’d cleaned the bus, vacuumed, replaced five of the cushioned benches. He’d washed the windows, put on new wiper blades, and painted the exterior rust-red, not two coats but three, all while Mother had watched from where he’d parked her wheelchair at the living room window, finishing three days later, all because he’d decided, at the last second, and after hearing “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones, to paint the bus’s red door black.
He’d taken that as a sign too, because music mattered. He’d been proud, damn near orgasmic, when he’d taken a step back to view in full the finished product, as majestic as these live oaks towering all around him. But the painting had put him days behind, and his anxiety had grown with every mile he’d sped south toward Charleston, eager to make up lost time, in a near panic to get to the next name on his ever-growing list of dead-heads.
Madeline Boyle. Maddy to her friends and family, a senior at the College of Charleston who moonlighted as an exotic dancer, and the latest victim of the yet-to-be-caught Charleston Strangler, also known as the Horseshoe Rapist. The horseshoe was his weapon of choice. So said the newspapers. So said the voice on the other end of that seashell.
Teddy smacked the oversized steering wheel with the padding of his hand until it hurt. Sometimes if he couldn’t cause pain to others, causing it to himself gave him the necessary fuel, even if only temporarily, to plow onward.
Plus, a bruise could work as a visible reminder for him to never dillydally again.
He started the bus, holding the key in the forward position until the big engine growled to life. Teddy took to the low-country roads, and replayed the shock he felt when he’d entered Maddie Boyle’s hospital room four hours ago as the pretend Dr. Lomax, only to find it full of family members crying and doctors and nurses flabbergasted and smiling, and Maddie Boyle herself, sitting up in bed and sipping from a straw.
When and how did that happen?
Him just knowing it had been during his last coat of paint on that bus. The unnecessary coat. And also that sometimes dead-heads just came back to life.
Life was funny that way. But did it have to happen to the next one on his list?
Teddy supposed he could stay in town and wait it out. Maybe sneak back into the hospital as Dr. Lomax again and smother her with a pillow. Of course, it was harder to kill the fully functional than a dead-head, but he’d done it in the past and could do it again. The bus was a problem. He had no doubt it would soon become useful, but it would only hinder as a getaway vehicle. Plus, Maddy Boyle would be watched and monitored for days, even after she returned home. Getting to her would not be easy.
And he didn’t have time to be idle.
Not too many dead-heads woke up, so it had caught him off guard. Waiting around would only cause more problems. He had bigger fish to fry. It was more important to hit the road and get on with it than to wait around for some emaciated stripper.
You can’t possibly win them all, Teddy.
Just win most.
Ten minutes later, with his mind starting to drift back toward that freak-in-the-bed brunette from Tampa—Brandy had been her name—recalling how knowingly her long, sky-blue fingernails had teased through his thick hair, not flinching or pulling back at all when her fingers traced over the two growths in there, smiling and chuckling even, groaning seductively like what she’d just felt within his hair she’d been searching for. Suddenly, her phone number came back to him, area code and all, and his heart began to pump with lust. Memory like a damn steel vault, he thought, eyes on the road, passing one live oak after the next, all that clinging Spanish moss glistening like magic crystals in the sunlight.
He thought of his childhood as he drove, and it infuriated him.
The awkwardness. The confusion. The numerous trips to the doctor. The tests and check-ups and experts. The ridicule over being different. Having an overbearing mother most thought crazy. A father he never knew yet whose voice he somehow distinctly remembered. The voice he’d heard in his head throughout childhood and adolescence and teenage years, and was only truly beginning to understand now as a man, when he’d become fully matured, fully bloomed.
The late bloomer mother always said he was.
That voice. Mr. Lullaby.
Teddy began to sing as he drove. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you …”—he saw something on the road ahead—“… a diamond ring …”
Not a thing, but a person. A man walking a hundred yards in the distance, first alongside the road, and then, at about fifty yards away now, walking down the center of it, toward him.
Like the man was trying to play chicken with the bus, what Teddy only now decided, in the exact moments when he’d made the choice to slow down and not steamroll the man, to call the Lullaby Express. The burly man didn’t budge. He stood there in the middle of the road, long brown hair tousled down to the shoulders of his plain black tank top, beefy shoulders pinkened by the sun, camo trousers bunched at the ankles atop heavy, mud-crusted boots.
Teddy stopped the bus, let it idle, the grille ten paces from the man. The seashell wind-whistled beside him.
Teddy stared at it—the timing of that thing was uncanny. He let it whistle for a good thirty seconds before picking it up. “Lomax here,” he said, keeping his eyes on the man through the windshield, half expecting that man’s voice to be the one through the seashell. Make the stops, the deep, familiar voice said before going silent.
Teddy carefully placed the seashell on the dashboard, like if he tilted it too much one way water might come out, and sometimes he half expected it to. His hands shook. Not from nerves, he decided, but anxiety. Not a bad anxious, either, but the good kind. The best kind, in fact; so good he felt the tingle of static spread out as warmth across his scalp, a sensation so real it made it feel like his hair was growing.
Something was growing.
He swallowed hard, placed both hands on the wheel.
Finally, the man out on the road moved forward, two methodical steps closer to the bus before pausing again. Ten seconds later he walked the rest of the way, standing right outside the black door of the Lullaby Express.
Mother always told him to steer clear of strangers, especially if they were as odd-looking as this big hoss, but Teddy opened the door for the total stranger anyway. Maybe not total, thought Teddy, feeling an unexplainable connection as he sized the man up.
Up close, the man was more doughy than muscular. More socially awkward than not. Less of a threat than he had seemed out alone on the road.
“Where you heading?” asked Teddy, feeling the power of sitting high and looking down.
“I don’t know.” The man avoided eye contact. His hands were callused and dirty. He flexed and unflexed his fingers, like some nervous tic, and then said, “Wherever you’re going.”
Guess we’ll know when we get there, the voice inside Teddy’s head said.
Teddy jerked the man a nod, not even knowing for sure where he was going—other than tackling more names on his list, more dead-heads—and coaxed the man up and into the bus, thinking, My first stop just might be Tampa. “Watch your step,” he said with a grin. “And welcome to the Lullaby Express.”
Oh, how good that felt, saying it, like melted butter off his tongue.
The strange, large man paused as if something had just registered true, or perhaps in amusement, as the Lullaby Express would, he could tell already, be different than any other bus ride to ever precede it.
The man stepped onto the bus. It rocked slightly under his weight, each heavy step like a slow-motion event.
A butterfly entered the bus’s open door and landed on the man’s left shoulder like a pet. The man looked dead in the eyes, and paid it no attention. Teddy realized now that it was not a butterfly but a moth. A small, ashy moth, right out in the middle of the daylight. And then a second one flew in, but instead of landing on the man, it came to a rest on the Lullaby Express’s dash, right next to the seashell, like it was fixing to crawl inside.
Teddy closed the door so no other moths would get in. The man flinched as the door shut behind him. Teddy said, “Sit where you like.”
The man stared down the narrow lane between the seat rows, and headed slowly, almost wearily—like he hadn’t slept in weeks—toward the rear of the bus, the three blood-crusted horseshoes attached to his waistline jangling like heavy wind chimes.
The moth stayed on the man’s shoulder.
Teddy waited for him to pick his seat, the very last row on the right side of the bus.
“And if that billy goat won’t pull,” Teddy sang softly toward the moth watching him from the wide, recently Armor All’d dashboard. He put the bus in gear. “Mama’s gonna buy you a cart and bull.” He watched through his rearview mirror as the man settled in the last row and rested his head atop the seat back as if utterly exhausted. The man in the back of the bus closed his eyes as the bus picked up speed.
Teddy glanced in the rearview, smiled when he noticed the man snoring.
Kept smiling when he saw the dashboard moth had moved to his steering wheel. Teddy offered it his right index finger and the moth flew to it like a bird on a birdcage bar.
He remembered back to his childhood, to his adolescence, and said, “Hello, old friend.”