Monk Addison rolled off the iron bridge and slowed to a stop on the two-lane blacktop. He sat idling in front of a sign that was mounted fifty feet inside the town limits. His car was a twenty-year-old piece of shit that growled like a sick dog. A Chevy something-or-other with reflector tape on one of the taillights, duct tape holding the seats together, and an ashtray filled with butts. The CD player worked, though, and Tom Waits was growling at him about chasing the devil through the cornfields.
Monk studied the billboard on the right-hand side of the road. It told two stories, one old, one a little less old. Neither new, and he read something into that.
The old sign was an advertisement for the Pine Deep Haunted Hayride—biggest on the East Coast, it claimed. There was some art, but it was so faded that it was impossible to tell what it showed. Looked like shadows in a glaucoma sufferer’s eyes.
It was the new sign that made Monk stop and look.
Someone had gone to some effort to paste a big white banner across the billboard’s face. Glued it down flat, no bubbles or wrinkles. And then used spray paint to write two words. Elaborate, in a mix of old English and cartoon; 3-D, with lots of color. Like one of the better graffiti taggers in New York. The message was just two words.
GO HOME
The message was obscure and it was clear.
Go home … because this isn’t it.
The sign was stained from rain and snow, scraped by stuff blown by wind; torn a bit here and there, maybe by birds looking for something to line a nest. Monk didn’t think anything torn from that sign would ever make it to a nest, though. The smarter birds would have dropped the paper before wrapping it around their eggs. The dimmer ones might have gotten all the way home with it, then their mate would have balked and kicked it away.
“Go home,” said Monk.
There was a U-Haul hitched to the back of his car. Everything he owned was in it.
He slapped his pockets for his smokes, didn’t find them, and remembered he was four days into his hundredth attempt to quit. Cigarettes were a bad habit, and he’d picked it up for the same reasons cops did. Monk spent hours, sometimes days, sitting in cars watching closed houses or apartments for the right person to come through the door. For cops it was someone they wanted to arrest. For Monk it was someone who’d already been arrested, charged, and who’d skipped out on his court appearance. The bail bondsmen who hired Monk to find those people paid him well, but the waiting was a bitch. Smoking gave his hands and mouth something to do. But he needed to stop killing himself one death stick at a time. All that said, he decided to find a store and buy a carton. He wasn’t that far down the shitter that he was going to dig an ashy butt from the tray. Give that a day or two in this place.
Go home.
“Well, fuck me,” he said and put the car into gear, pulled onto the road, and drove toward the sunset. Behind him, across the river on the Jersey side, it was already getting dark. There were moody clouds bullying their way into the sky.
He drove along the blacktop.
He drove to Pine Deep.
He drove home.