Spin the Throttle

David James Keaton

To play their games, they used the first bottle of whiskey they’d all drained together, back when the fire truck first rolled out. They’d passed it around their circle and then tossed it into a corner of the pool, forgotten. But now this empty bottle of Jim Beam Devil’s Cut bourbon refused to cease spinning, and though no one was into the party games as much anymore, the clear violation of the laws of physics got to Beth, who couldn’t bear the scrutiny if it stopped to point at her. So she seized it from the waves, and then screwed some sort of tiny message into its neck and tossed it out into the night. Reeves made a half-hearted slap to intercept it, but he was way too far gone by now. They all heard the bottle shatter on the road, message lost.

Their party had been going for at least seven hours, though it was hard to be certain. A dozen of them were crammed and shivering in a hot tub in the back of a 1955 American LaFrance Series 700 pumper that had been haphazardly Dr. Moreau’d into a garish party wagon, one of those ancient fire trucks with a pug nose for a cab and more than a passing resemblance to the hippy buses popularized in the psychedelic ’60s, but now decked out with speakers, Christmas lights, and American flags. They’d started out in good spirits, but sometime around the third hour and the driver’s refusal to pull over, they seriously began to worry the party would never end. Though some of them had become more mentally and physiologically accustomed to their situation.

“What did that say?” Jill asked Beth.

“It was a map.”

“To what?”

“Treasure!”

“Oh my god,” Angie said. “We need you acting crazy like we need a hole in our head.”

“We need a hole in this boat!” someone shouted, half underwater, probably Reeves, by far the drunkest of them all.

Jill shook her head and rubbed Angie’s shoulders, trying to keep her spirits up after the loss of Amy, who had panicked and jumped off into the dark about fifty miles earlier. And, hey, it was still her birthday, Jill tried to remind them all, and she wanted people to make the most of it. Hell, parties were supposed to be dangerous. Away from the others, Jill gently assured Angie that people would know they were missing soon enough.

Reeves surged up between them right then, and maybe it was because they’d been driving in the dark for so long and all their pupils were so dilated, but Angie could have sworn his eyes rolled over black when he smiled and slid backwards under the water again to swim.

***

Their circle constricted for a bit, increasing the heat, but Angie shivered when someone spun another bottle. This was because every time one of the dudes tried to get a game of Spin the Bottle going, the driver seemed to sense it and whipped the red, air-horned beast back to full throttle. So their resulting panic meant any game quickly degenerated into Truth or Dare instead, which was sort of a mob-mentality comfort food, and a welcome distraction. But every time one of the females tried to keep that game going, they just ended up trading injuries stories all over again.

This time it was Holly, Gaddy, and Sherry trading scars, and listening to them. Angie realized why fairy tales always started with the same word.

“Once, I sprained both wrists and ruptured a disc in my back by moving boxes of books at work,” Holly said. “Ended up having surgery on my spine and spent months of rehab in a pool with weights around my ankles. The retired Olympic psycho in charge of my rehabilitation seemed to develop a crush on me, and I started getting worried that she didn’t want to see me get better and kept trying to injure me again. Seriously, who puts weights on someone’s legs in a pool? How dangerous is that? That’s like putting a goddamn pool on a fire truck!” 

The group snickered at that.

“Once, I fell about a hundred feet out of this tree at our family’s first house,” Gaddy said. “It was this huge weeping willow with a broken branch at the top that laid flat across two splits in the trunk. After a week of intense debate, we named it ‘The Bridge,’ and we would climb up there and stand and look out at everyone’s rooftops. And, of course, it finally collapsed when I was on it, dropping me down through about a hundred limbs like someone had just hit the multi-ball reward on a pinball machine. I ended up tangled and hanging upside down over a thick bottom branch, slowly rocking back and forth, trying to cry with the wind knocked out of me. Then I untangled, dropped to the grass, and saw a layer of skin sheered off my left forearm, wrist, and fingertips. I couldn’t touch anything for weeks, it stung so bad. See that right above the elbow? Where I’m the wrong color?”

“Racist!” someone laughed.

“Speaking of pinball machines!” Sherry said, going for the one-up. “Our dad actually got us a pinball machine for Christmas once. It was a weird one, though. You know how pinball machines usually have themes, like movies or musicians? Well, this one’s theme seemed to be ‘pinball,’ as it had pictures of ’70s-looking guys playing pinball on it! Therefore, I can only assume that the machines they were playing also had little dudes playing pinball on them. Turtles all the way down. But me and my brother loved it, and we must have played with it for a whole six to nine minutes. Once, we tried to take it apart. I was reaching up inside to try to get the metal balls out—I had to, had to get them out—and my brother hit the buttons, and something inside blinked, squawked, gave me 500 points, and quickly sliced the top off one of my knuckles. I still have this white line across the bone to this day…”

“I wanna go home,” Beth cried behind them, fingers in her ears. It wasn’t just the chatter. The party music the driver had started their trip with was blasting was even louder now. They instinctually circled the wagons again, around another Devil’s Cut empty nodding in the water. Jill used the opportunity to spin it once, twice, three times, until it finally slowed to point somewhere near her, and they all got the idea at the same time.

“So, do you wanna play or what?” she asked them, already knowing the answer.

“I think everybody’s already kissed everybody,” Reeves said, half under water where he lived now.

“Let’s do a Ouija board,” Angie said, and those who knew her well groaned. She was always keen on this idea, had been all her life really. Besides the fact that Ouija-ing it up was her preferred party game (because it didn’t pair everyone off like Spin the Bottle), she also had the sort of love for the game that automatically came from parents throwing the boards in the trash as fast as she could buy them.

Before her mother regretted finally giving in to buy her an “official” one, Angie had played her own version of the “game” with a variety of other objects, some even alive. Like the time she gently laid her fingers on the back of the turtle she’d found on the Morse code white lines of their street, letting it guide them both to the safety of the gutter, asking the question in her head:

“If he steps on that cigarette, I’ll die before I’m twenty. If he steps on that candy wrapper, I’ll live forever…”

But her favorite early incarnation was modifying a 1975 Milton Bradley board game called The Bermuda Triangle, which handily supplied its own version of a planchette, a blue amoeba-like cloud with a magnet hidden on the bottom. And when you spun the wrong numbers (or the right numbers depending on your recklessness) this dark cloud slid over your tiny, metal-capped ships and plucked them from the game board unseen under your hands, vanishing from their shipping fleets forever. Angie lost the spinner eventually, and she and her friends resorted to a more cooperative form of game play, all of them with their tiny fingertips just brushing the edges of the thundercloud as it swept the entire game triangle free of ships. Because of this modification, most of their games lasted one round, or approximately fifteen minutes. So, except for the delicious sense of doom, sort of the opposite of their predicament, at least when it came to duration.

“How the hell would we play that game, stuck in the back of a hot tub, lost on the back roads of Kentucky?” Lund scoffed, always a problem.

“I don’t think the driver’s lost,” Beth hissed.

“What part is the ‘Ouija’ though?” Jill asked. She seemed game, as usual. “The thing or the board?”

“I think it’s the board?” someone muttered.

“Yeah, all the letters,” someone agreed.

“So even if you could play it without the thing,” Jill said. “You can’t play without the board.”

“Planchette!” someone shouted, probably Lund.

“Sounds like lunch,” Jill laughed.

“It’s shaped like a heart.”

“With a few more splinters.”

“We don’t need a board. The board is the water. And the thing…”

“Planchette!”

“…can be a bottle.”

They remained skeptical.

“No, no, this can work,” Angie said, desperate now. “We can designate one person ‘yes’ and one person ‘no,’ but, wait, what do we do about the letters?”

“Easy, there’s, what, nine of us left?” Lund said. “That’s three letters each, like how you had to text before smart phones! So ‘one’ is ‘A-B-C’…”

“‘Two’ would be ‘A-B-C,’ bro,” Reeves spit from a wave as the fire truck took another unlit turn. “‘One’ didn’t have any letters on it. I know my phone is old as fuck.”

“And four letters were on number ‘seven’.”

“Fine! Forget it. We’ll just do ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

“You can’t play Ouija boards without the board,” someone muttered again, but it was too dark to know who, and they did it anyway.

***

Trapped in the tub, they drank, then drank some more. Then they drank like their lives depended on it. When the alcohol was mostly gone, they found themselves drinking whatever had filled the bottles and cans that bobbed past their faces. When they studied their hands, they found that all their soaking had shriveled their fingertips to tire treads, which gripped the slippery bottles wonderfully now, and, in turn, made their bodies even more conducive to systematic inebriation, even if someone of it was imaginary.

They tried using the Devil’s Cut as their planchette, and realized it was surprisingly effective. There was less resistance in the water than on a table surrounded by skeptics, and their hands moved it easily three times as fast. In no time they were deciphering messages.

“There Is No Fire,” was the first one they translated, which was a head-scratcher. Angie guessed it had something to do with alerting people to a fire truck that refused to stop. But it would have made more sense if the sirens were flashing, or if the message was delivered to anyone except some drunken hostages.

“Most people think Ouija boards are modern-day lie detectors,” Beth said. “Though you can beat both of them the exact same way.”

“Oh no,” Holly laughed. “Watch her butt for bubbles!” and Beth slugged her in the arm.

“Wait, huh?” Dan was baffled and angry. He was a bit of a bully, like a B-side Reeves.

“She’s serious,” Gaddy said. “Like, say, if you answer the question, ‘Have you been to the Moon,’ you just answer, ‘Yes,’ but then finish in your head with ‘Moon Township, Pennsylvania’…”

“Where the heck is that?” Lund asked.

“Have we already started?” Dan asked.

“I think she already lost,” Reeves said, blowing bubbles like a baby.

“Have you ever been to Mars?” Lund asked.

“Mars, Pennsylvania, yes,” she smiled.

“What the heck is going on in Pennsylvania?” Lund laughed.

They all studied his face a moment, then threw up their hands and burst out laughing.

“Whoops, there’s another loophole,” Angie said. “Be an idiot!”

“All right, since we clearly have all night to burn, did we do this yet?” Jill asked. “I’d like to propose a toast. To myself and another successful journey around the sun!”

“Someone already said that,” Lund mumbled, not confident enough to say it was him.

“That is some deep shit,” Dan said.

“Huh?”

“I said, that is some deep shit!” Dan yelled.

“Yes, we are in some deep shit!” Lund yelled back.

“I can’t take much more of this fucking music!” Reeves said, punching the side of the truck hard enough that they felt it in the water around them.

They went back to their games.

At some point, the bottle spelled out “Yield.” Or maybe it was “Wield.” But there was enough of a debate for the bullies to start rummaging the back of the truck for weapons again.

***

Messages in bottles and “yes” and “no” questions became the thing for a little while after that argument, which Angie considered a waste of time as Reeves just asked everyone if they wanted to die, then struggled to point the bottle at himself, who had been designated the “Yes” as long as he wasn’t trying to swim and bump into everyone’s legs. Angie wished they’d hoisted Reeves up on some shoulders to play “Chicken” like they had when the night started. Then someone could flush him over the side instead, to get sucked under those awful wheels in turn, just like Amy, slurped up like a gnat vacuumed in your yawn.

But Reeves just kept getting pats on the back for his jokes, and his vigorous laps, until she saw Jill recoil at something she felt between his shoulder blades.

“What the hell is that!” Jill said, looking at her hand like she’d been bit.

“I don’t know. A scab or something. I musta got cut…”

“Do you see that on his back?” Jill said, almost falling over to move away from him. “What’s growing on his back?”

Angie was convinced it was a fin, but he’d vanished under the waves again. People started talking about their drinks being spiked and all measure of hallucinations, and Angie was colder than she’d ever been in her life.

“I think we’ve been poisoned,” Beth said. “If not by the beers, then by this water.”

Jill snorted at this, and Angie looked her over, noticing her carefully cultivated “Hitchcock” look tonight, the “suicide blonde,” head down and eyes perpetually narrowed, like she was always gazing over an invisible newspaper.

“Maybe we’re on a prison bus right now, headed for jail for our crimes,” Angie said. “And we’re not in a pool at all. This is just a bus filled with urine and sweat, and we’re all handcuffed to each other and pissing all over the floor…”

“Stop!” Beth said, fingers in her ears again.

“Are our crimes really so bad?” Jill asked them all.

The bottle floated towards where Reeves was kicking in the corner, and Jill, Beth, and Angie recoiled from it as if burned.

Finally they were out of all alcohol for good, no bottles or beer cans to warm their bellies or their brains, and Angie closed her eyes with both hands on the rail, feeling the rumble of the road, understanding that she now knew these invisible wheels even more intimately than her own body.

***

They wouldn’t have known it, but it was an uncharacteristically hot night for that time of year anyway. But certainly not too hot for Kentucky, and once they left Bardstown Road, and once she counted the shadows of nineteen overpasses without ever turning, Angie knew the party had to be heading for somewhere even colder for their final destination. True hell on Earth. Indiana.

Few people remembered that the final circle in Dante’s Inferno was actually ice, but she did. And Indiana was hell all right. Or worse, maybe they were headed for the Tenth Circle, that redneck baby-talk-y hybrid of a name, the DMZ where the worst people she’d ever known lived and breathed (but rarely worked), a limbo they referred to as “Kentuckiana,” where she’d been drunkenly assaulted by authority figures at least twice while passing through.

There would be no help there, she decided, and she vowed to end the journey, by any means necessary, before she crossed that line. But she was too tired to plot, and Angie was well on her way to the sweet comfort of hypothermic sleep when she saw Lund using a broken bottle to cut a stretch of fire hose. They’d long since stopped playing their game by then, as too many planchettes floated and clinked in their midst, seemingly desperate for more terrifying questions, but the acceleration of the truck when they played also was a strong deterrent.

Angie watched Lund labor another moment, confused. They’d long since decided climbing off as the driver barreled along at breakneck speed was suicide. Then she finally understood what he was doing.

He wanted to drain the pool.

As she watched, Lund sucked on one end of the hose, and successfully siphoned the green soup from the pool around them to splash out onto the street, but people weren’t feeling the plan like he’d hoped. And once the pool water was down to their ankles and their bodies were even more at the mercy of a wind that whisked the moisture from their swim suits and underwear, no one was looking at Lund like a hero. And just that quickly, his party was over.

Chubby Spencer S. Lundergaard, the only reveler wearing glasses, sometimes referred to as Lord of the Fries while growing up, became the party’s next distraction. And he wasn’t even targeted by the regular assailants, Reeves and Dan, but by everyone else instead. It was Beth who punched him in the mouth first, with a fist full of bottle. It shattered and his eye rode the shards over the rail, a comet trail of optic nerve and white lidless surprise. Beth stepped back in surprise, hands out in surrender. More joined the fight, but so far away from civilization, and so far into the depressing blackened, blasted-out strip-mall void that was Kentuckiana, Angie couldn’t really see who was who anymore. But she heard three or four wet bodies tackle Lund and drag him toward the taillights over his protests.

She tried to cover her eyes with her hand before the ritual was illuminated in red, but she couldn’t help but peek through her wrinkled fingers before it was over, and she saw Lund’s glasses divided as neatly as his head as he was hurled off the truck and headfirst, but with one headlight out, straight into a “Yield” sign. And, agreeable to the end, this was exactly what his skull did to comply under its yellow metal blade.

***

It didn’t seem possible, but the driver sped up even more, and Angie felt her ears pop from a change in air pressure. Angie could sometimes make out the black of Reeves’ eyes and the whites of Jill’s teeth, and she guessed she was smiling at the very real possibility of time travel on her unique leap-day birthday, probably the most memorable birthday party of all time. For the rest of them, though, panic was in full swing, which was its own sort of party.

And in the dark, after battling the rumbles of the road for so long, they’d somehow developed a new form of communication, one that lacked language but was no less clear to them all. At first, she’d assumed there were too many bottles for their game, but now she realized they were all still playing. Hugging their own chests, corralling floating cans and bottles between their legs, periodically holding their breath to stop their chattering teeth, and long, slow blinks, occasionally flicking a bottle and mouthing the letters as it pointed at them all in turn, speaking to them more clearly than anyone could have predicted.

Angie read their bodies, all of them roughly translated as, “We’re in this together,” or maybe “We’re fucked,” which meant the same thing really.

After a silence that felt like five years and five hundred more miles, Jill whispered that she missed her cat, wondering who would feed him.

“A cat’s future is even more limited than our own,” Jill went on. “You know why? Because of one simple fact. If you hold them like toddlers with their feet barely touching the ground, a cat can only walk backwards. Did you know that the only instance of this affliction recorded in human beings is in a swimming pool?”

This all sounded reasonable, and even like something Lund would have said, but he was long gone. Angie tried to get a head count, and she thought about how there were more women than men left in the end. She attributed this to the hidden exercises they could always do under the waves, to tread water forever, those muscles they develop in secret when they were digging half-moons into their palms with their own fingernails under the covers while their fathers over-explain things, all the while smiling, smiling, smiling through their eyeteeth.

Jill grabbed Angie’s face, and she tried real hard to keep listening, but she was captivated by a sleek, slack-jawed visage, somewhat resembling Dan’s grinning, catatonic face, sinking beneath the suds, dragged down to be consumed by an unseen force, never to resurface.

“You see, in a pool it’s almost impossible to walk forward when your body divides the surface of the water between the tips of your toes and your nostrils,” Jill explained like this was the answer to everything. “You have no choice but to never go forward. You will back up forever.”

Angie believed her, ever before her embrace, even before their kiss, and together they discovered the last two warm places in the world.

***

They flew past something huge, some sort of gargantuan illumination on the horizon. And it was moving. Then they saw the rectangle flickering like a massive television through the trees, and they understood it was the drive-in movie again, and they could just make out the end credits scrolling up the screen.

Some of them stopped shivering in the wind, focusing through their shock and haze, and some finally realized that only an hour and a half could have passed if the movie was just ending, a maximum of three hours if it was a typical double-feature, the requisite running time of a motion picture and exactly the amount of time they had paid the driver for.

Then they forgot all this math just as quickly, as if their thoughts drained out their ears and onto the asphalt as freely as the last of their fetid pool water.

Someone sprung up like a porpoise, saluted anyone who remained, and then someone jumped off into the night. It was so dark, and it happened so fast, there was no time for her to ascertain the identity, even illuminated by the occasional lightning flash that she swore originated eleven hundred miles away in Bermuda. But if Angie had to hazard a guess, she would have said it was Reeves. Even after all the death at his hands, she was sorry to see him go. The pool would miss his body heat and manic exercises dearly.

At some point, Beth cracked and never came back, screaming until she was hoarse. And when she hit top volume and some of the bottles shattered in the puddles at their feet, they were suddenly driving past a real-live school bus full of kids’ butts and faces on their way home from some other game, a pink-and-yellow flash of skin heading in the opposite direction, like a snapshot from the yearbook of their former lives, and those kids just screamed back at Beth, thinking it was a party, which it was, of course.

It was the last party, where every party in the world had the potential to end up if it tried hard enough.

***

They all held hands in the glow of the taillights, a red haze that signaled death for most of the ride, but now marked a doorway to possible escape. Their eyes watered, but their blinking was stolid.

They all jumped together.

And they landed not on the road, but on the grass, intact, alive.

The truck had stopped.

For how long, no one knew, with their bodies so numb from the wind and the drink and the time that had long ago been rendered meaningless.

They were deep in the woods, but still in someone’s yard.

At a party.

Colorful streamers and balloons were tangled in the trees, huge “Happy Birthdays!” scrawled in childlike letters and glimmering in the flickering light of a tall bonfire, and the remaining partiers silently circled it to get warm. Or maybe they were circling Jill. Angie couldn’t be sure. Further off on the horizon were some power lines, and a bundle of transformers, possibly a tall fence surrounded by barbed wire. It was tough to see in the dark and her bloodshot eyes had yet to adjust to a world not made of taillights.

The cab door opened, and the driver stepped out. He was a huge man, wearing headphones, unplugged and dangling, and a black eyepatch hovered indecisive between his eyebrows. The bundle of dollars they’d paid him at the beginning of the night fluttered from the chest pocket of his overalls, ends flapping in the wind like a rattlesnake. Then the money flew free from his pocket, one dollar after the other, leaving a wake of cash behind him, and he made no attempt to retrieve it. On the dashboard, a crackling TV monitor was visible, with the now-empty party pool flickering on the screen.

The driver frowned and looked over the group, mouth working as he scanned their bodies, naked and streaked with blood, piss, and beer. Sexless and indistinguishable.

“Goddamn, you kids sure know how to celebrate,” the driver said, sliding the eyepatch over his left eye, then his right. He laughed. “Though some people would argue a surprise party is a form of aggression.”

Though no one could see it happen, they all imperceptively turned to each other, fingertips gently caressing the rough, heart-shaped edges of their worst ideas, and though no one could hear it, a message was both sent, and received.

And everyone who was left fell upon the driver, ripping and piercing, sometimes with broken bottle shards for teeth, tearing him down to the ground, down to their level of understanding to render him recognizable as the perfect asset for any party:

Ribbons.

Once transformed into warm pile of red, streaming party favors, they placed his body on top of the long metal coffin behind the cab, and one of them came from the bonfire with a flaming branch, green end popping and cracking as it blackened.

The fire truck burned like it was born to. But there were other trucks at the party, too. New trucks with gleaming chrome and no rust, not burdened by the embarrassment of a conversion to a bullshit party pool or undergrad dance wagon, and well-muscled men sat in the trailers, coils of hose between their legs, drinking beer and eating popcorn, but making no effort to stop the blaze. Eventually, more vehicles arrived, and faceless men in jumpsuits and fogged-up visors began to douse the flames, the torrents from their hoses filling their pool back up to the brim. Naked and against all instincts, Angie ran through the roar and glare of the sirens to climb aboard the nearest fire truck she could find. And on this truck, black now instead of red, she sat in a seat facing the wrong way, next to more astronauts and anonymous shades, and she squeezed her hands locked behind her back, smoothing valleys back in her fingerprints, dreaming of rolling through bright-lit streets and crowds very soon, speaking silently with those fingers, her breath and the tip of her nose drawing hearts on her window, dreaming of more celebrations, in places teeming with secret highway rites, the wind blowing the blood from her dirty blond hair before it could dry as she breathed in a world she was no longer convinced existed.

Behind her, within the black husk of the smoldering party bus, she saw Reeves reemerge from the trees, slick and gray, striding through the billows of smoke and the bonfire now turned wildfire, to climb back onto their engine. Indifferent to the pyre, he stepped up the chrome stairs, back up into the boiling cauldron, now overflowing with water and flame. She watched the fin on his back and his perfect body cut through the waves like he was claiming the deep end of any pool, and Angie leaned out into the wind as far as she could without falling, still able to sense him through the growing distance and fading distortion and shimmer of heat. She could still feel his cold skin pressed against her own, warming her, then cooling them both, then perfectly acclimating to the world until they were invisible.