Stephen Graham Jones
YEARS later, at a trivia game in the bar of the hotel Jensen’s company had him at for three days, An Officer and a Gentleman would roll up on every screen. The title and the poster both. The movie was the answer to whatever the obscure question had been— Jensen hadn’t really been interested, was just riding out the cheers and groans, trying to finish his drink without getting jostled too much. The room and meals and cab fares were all expensed, but this drink, all nine dollars of it, was his and his alone.
He left it sitting there, along with two singles for the bartender.
It wasn’t because he could have won that round if he’d been quicker on the draw. Even if he’d been tuned in, he wouldn’t have called that movie out. He’d never even finished it. According to the screens still assaulting him from all sides, it was from 1982, Richard Gere and Debra Winger, but when Jensen, seventeen then, had pushed it into his family’s VCR in 1988, he didn’t know Gere or Winger by name, by face, any of that. He just knew he’d liked Top Gun enough his sophomore year, and according to the back of the box this was another fighter pilot thing, and had been on ninety-nine-cent rental at the grocery store, so why not.
Jensen had just been getting into the movie when Cara called him. The whole time she was telling him where she was, he was staring at An Officer and a Gentleman paused on-screen, the video barely holding on, the tracking lines and static juddering this drill sergeant scene.
It was bad for the tape, but Jensen left it paused like that all the same.
Why Cara needed Jensen to pick her up now now now was that when she’d come home with a tattoo of her dead little brother’s name on the inside of her left wrist, so she could touch it with the fingertips of her right hand, her dad had lost it, called her every name he had coiled up inside, and when Cara finally ran out the front door he’d fired his welding truck up, chased her through all the empty lots on their block, trying to run her down. He only stopped when she stumbled across the railroad tracks and his truck was too long, high-centered on the rails, both the front and back tires spinning in the air.
When Jensen picked her up at the gas station, Cara huddled in, just told him drive, drive, she didn’t want to be here anymore. Her lip was busted. Jensen offered her a tissue from the little pack his mom kept in the center console. He wasn’t supposed to take the Buick out without explicit permission, but this was an emergency. He was already making the argument in his head. But if he got ragged on for taking it, so what. This was Cara, his best friend. She’d been there for him on the playground in fourth grade when he wet his pants, and she’d held his hand once at the mall, to try to make a girl Jensen liked jealous, and when her little brother had overdosed in his bedroom last year, Jensen had held her head to his shoulder for all of one afternoon, and let her hit the side of her fists into his chest and shoulders every few minutes, when it all rose for her again.
They picked Mote up once Cara was calm enough. His parents had decorated the front of their house for Halloween, and the reason Jensen turned the headlights off while Mote was locking his front door was that dads being Halloween decoration-cool like that wasn’t what Cara needed to see right then.
Mote slipped into the back seat like ducking out of a bank he’d just robbed, and that wasn’t all wrong: he had a six of his dad’s beer.
“Where to?” Jensen asked all around. “Just go,” Cara told him.
They made the usual circuit: up the drag, back down the drag, turning around at the auto parts store, but the night was dead. It was Tuesday.
“Let me see,” Mote said, taking Cara by the chin.
He ran the back of his knuckle under her bloodied lip.
“It’s gonna fat up,” he told her, leaning back.
“Thanks, Einstein,” Cara said back, and was just taking his proffered beer when the cop car that they didn’t know had pulled up alongside flashed its light.
“Shit,” Jensen said, both hands finding the wheel.
“Shh, shh,” Mote said.
Cara snaked her bottle down, let it hide alongside her thigh, but the cop hadn’t lit up for them. He was already accelerating away, blasting through the light.
“Go see,” Mote said to Jensen.
“What, are we moths?” Jensen said back. It was what his mom always told him, about being drawn to what she called “episodes of trouble.”
“More like fireflies,” Cara said softly, and Jensen sneaked a look over at her, like her face was going to be as wistful as her voice.
He waited the red light out, followed that cop car, Mote calling out its right turn.
It took them back by the gas station Jensen had picked Cara up at.
“No,” she said, leaning closer to the windshield.
“What?” Jensen asked.
“Where’d he go?” Mote said, leaning over the front seat, his beer dangling from his fingers for all the world to see.
“Left,” Cara said, so certain Jensen could only follow.
They could see the blue and red lights a block and a half before they got there.
It was the train tracks.
Cara’s dad’s welding truck was crumpled, smashed. Jensen knew the trains slowed, coming through town, but even slow was enough to plow through a truck caught up on the tracks.
Jensen turned his headlights off, crept as close as they could get away with.
The firemen were extracting a body from that truck.
“He stayed?” Jensen said, not really believing this.
“He was drinking,” Cara said back flatly, shrugging her left shoulder.
“Shit, your dad, you mean?” Mote said, finally clueing in.
“Serves him right,” Cara said, and before Jensen or Mote could stop her, she was stepping out her side of the car and running forward a few feet to hurl her half-full beer.
She screamed behind it, not words, just anger, and the bottle popped way on the other side of the tracks, drawing all the firemen and cops’ eyes.
They followed the arc that bottle had taken back to Jensen’s mom’s Buick.
“No, no,” Mote said, slumping down as far as he could in the rearview mirror.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Jensen said to Cara, though she was too far to hear him.
She came back all the same, her hands balled at her sides, her gait not nearly urgent enough. The moment she was in, Jensen reversed hard, spun them around in what he hoped wasn’t a guilty manner, and eased away, pulling his headlights back on.
“What were you doing?” he said to Cara.
“I hate him so much,” she said back, reaching to the back seat for another beer.
“Listen, I can just get out—” Mote said, but Jensen turned hard, shutting him up for the moment.
“They’ll all be looking for us now,” he said, and instead of taking them back to the drag, which would be an invitation to get pulled over, he took smaller and less likely streets, all the dead ends and cul-de-sacs finally spitting them up at the city limits.
“Yeah, the sticks,” Mote said. “Great. Wonderful. Nothing bad ever happens out here. Not to people my color.”
“Mine either,” Jensen said.
“But girls are completely safe out here,” Cara said, playing along— almost grinning, even.
Jensen considered her grin: was she even registering what was happening? Her dad was dead. He’d been run over by a train.
Or maybe she was registering it. Maybe that was why she had that grin.
“You good?” he said across to her.
“Excellent,” she said back, looking straight ahead, which kind of put the lie to her words.
Still, “My mom’s going to see the gas gauge,” Jensen said out loud, to break the awkwardness, and for some reason—he’d never figure it out—it was him saying that that made Cara start in crying. Not hard crying, not even letting herself cry, really. But there were tears she couldn’t help slipping down her face, now. She wiped them away, kept her lips pulled in tight, her eyes still so straight ahead.
Jensen knew he should put his hand on her knee, or do something, but the excuse he gave for just driving was that, like his mom said, he was responsible for the lives of everyone in the car, so he couldn’t be distracted, since it only takes a moment of inattention to kill everyone.
“It’s not your fault,” Mote said to Cara, like just stating a fact. “Anyway, he was… I mean, I don’t want to—”
“It’s better this way,” Jensen filled in. “You don’t have to worry about him any more.”
“Yeah,” Mote chimed in, evidently even less sure than Jensen what to say.
“My mom,” Cara said, closing her eyes like for calmness. “First it was my brother, who I was supposed to have been babysitting. And now it’s my dad, who was—”
“He was trying to run you over,” Jensen reminded her.
“Train’s like an act of God,” Mote said. “The world calling in his ticket, yeah? Nothing you did, Care Bear.”
She looked down, sort of grinned again, like trying to fake it until it was real, or real enough. When her head came up, she was drinking long from her bottle, like punishing herself.
“He, he—my little brother, I mean,” she said, having to stop to burp. “My grandma showed me the pictures once. He looked just like my dad at that age.”
It was funny to her. Or, she laughed after saying it, anyway.
“That’s where he grew up,” she said, chucking her chin down a dirt road Jensen had never seen.
“Your brother?” Jensen asked.
“My dad,” she said, something disconnected about the way she said it, like she was really just talking to herself.
“Serious?” Mote asked, looking down that dark road.
Jensen slowed so Cara could take a snapshot with her eyes, and then, because there was only blackness opening up before them, he came to a stop, backed up into that road to turn around.
“No, stop!” Mote said. “Headlights!”
Without asking why, Jensen turned them off.
It was just in time for the red and blue lights already coloring the trees to become a cop car, speeding up the road.
“How’d they find us already?” Jensen said, his heart jackhammering awake.
“It’s me they want,” Cara said, her finger to the door handle on her side, like she was going to step out into the road, await judgment.
The instant the dome light glowed on with her door starting to open, Jensen reached across, pulled it shut again, his body seatbelting her in.
“No, no, I have to—!” she said, but now Mote had his hand over her mouth, and Jensen knew that if this cop managed to smear his dummy light through their windshield, it would be obvious what was happening: two guys were abducting this girl, one of them holding her down, the other keeping her quiet.
The cop car slammed past, tore a hole in the night and drove right through it, the sirens lasting only a moment longer.
When Cara was calm enough, Jensen drew back to his seat, checking Mote in the rearview.
“Clear?” he said, and when Mote nodded, Jensen turned the headlights back on.
At which point a cop car that had been speeding around the curve turned its headlights on, along with its blue and reds.
Even though he was in Park, Jensen still stood on the brakes, washing the darkness behind them red.
This cop car slowed as if expecting them to pull out in front of it, and then, maybe two hundred yards past them, its brake lights flared.
“It’s me they want,” Cara said. “I killed him. I killed both of them.”
“Shut up!” Jensen told her.
“Go go go!” Mote was saying, making everything worse.
Jensen shook his head no, but it was his job to keep everyone in the car safe, wasn’t it? He sucked his headlights back in, dropped his mom’s big Buick into Reverse, and stomped the gas, the rear tire that got the torque having to spin for two or three seconds before finding purchase.
Fifty yards back, he whipped them around again, the nose of the car sliding in the dirt, the car fishtailing when he had it back in Drive.
“We’re gonna dead-end back here, we’re gonna get stuck,” Mote said, practically in the front seat with them now.
“It comes back into town by the refinery,” Cara said blankly. “That’s where my granddad worked when he was alive.”
Jensen registered that “when he was alive” and it caught. Was it really necessary to have added that? So… what, then, did her granddad do when he wasn’t alive? Did dying not mean the same thing to people out here in the sticks?
Jensen didn’t ask.
Driving this narrow dirt road without headlights was enough to deal with.
Mote was sitting up in his open window now to look behind them from a higher vantage point, see if they were being chased down.
“Anything?” Jensen called back.
“Drive, man,” Mote told him.
Jensen accelerated.
Cara was calmer now. Like something inside her had turned off. Was this what shock was? Jensen had never seen it this up-close. What he did know was that she didn’t seem to care if they got caught or not. She kind of even wanted it, maybe.
Not tonight, he said inside, which was when… Cara didn’t so much throw up as vomit just started leaking out her mouth. Frothy beer, with veins of blood shot through it, probably from her lip.
“No, no, the window!” Jensen said, and slid them to a sideways stop.
Cara held as much of the vomit in her cupped hands as she could and Mote slithered the rest of the way out, opened her door for her so she could stumble out, fall to her hands and knees by the three-strand fence, empty the rest of her stomach.
Moving on automatic—Cara needed to see—Jensen turned the headlights on, then realized the beacon they were, switched them off just as fast.
“Watch,” he told Mote, and Mote nodded, his head on a swivel: up the road, back down the road.
Jensen slid across the seat, careful not to spill his beer, and stepped out, knelt by Cara, tried his best to hold her hair up and away. When she finally collapsed against him, shuddering, he reached back for his beer so she could wash her mouth out.
Looking over her head, over the fence, there was a house-shaped empty space where there were no stars.
Slowly, Cara became aware of it too.
She chuckled, then laughed, then stood into whatever this was.
“Of course we’re here,” she said.
“Your dad’s old house?” Mote said—the obvious thing.
It was empty, long-abandoned, it looked like.
“I hated him,” Cara said, looking around to Jensen, her eyes fierce, her hair lifting around her on the breeze.
“It’s not your fault,” Jensen told her. It was all he could think to say.
She took a drink of his beer, swished it, spit it out, and then she ran forward, slung this bottle ahead of her as well.
It disappeared almost instantly, shattering seconds later against the house.
They all watched, Jensen shaking his head no about the chance of a light coming on in there, which would mean her dad had already come home to where he’d grown up.
It was just an empty old house in the country, though. All the windows stayed dark.
“The refinery?” Jensen prompted to both of them.
Cara stared the house down a few more seconds then nodded, turned her back on it, and the three of them piled back in.
“I’m sorry for getting you two involved in my stupid family drama,” she said.
“Best Halloween ever,” Mote said, closing his door.
“Wouldn’t be anywhere else,” Jensen said, and dropped the car into gear.
Mote held the last two beers over the seat for them.
“Your dad’s gonna—” Jensen started, about the stolen beers, but stopped himself before “kick your ass.”
So it just hung there between them, dead.
“It’s okay,” Cara said, and cracked her beer open with the seatbelt tongue—a trick of her dad’s, Jensen knew. But still, it was pretty cool.
Her window was down, the ends of her hair stinging the side of his face, and he could have gone faster, on a straightaway like this, but he didn’t.
This is good, he was telling himself.
It was just the three of them, same as it had always been. Same as it would always be.
He switched hands on the wheel, which gave him a different angle in the rearview.
The first thing he saw was that Mote wasn’t where he’d been. He was pressed all the way to the passenger side of the car.
“What’s—?” Jensen said, adjusting the mirror to see the back seat directly behind him.
Cara’s dead little brother was sitting there.
Jensen let his foot off the gas and swayed his back in, away from this, the car’s momentum carrying them.
“C-C-Ca—” he said, and she looked over at him like she had a hundred times in geometry, like she had a hundred more times on the drag on a Friday night, like she’d been doing for all of the twelve years they’d known each other.
And then she saw the way he was crowding the steering wheel, and—slowly, as if realizing in increments—she looked from Jensen to the back seat, for whatever he was trying to get away from.
Her expression didn’t change.
“Ben,” she said, so calmly. “What are you doing out here?”
Jensen turned around enough to see Cara’s brother shrug his left shoulder like that was the wrong question, and then level his eyes on Mote.
It was the dome light coming on that told Jensen that Mote had opened his door to get away from this.
Ben had already reached across, though, had Mote by the wrist.
Mote coughed from that contact, and thin blood sheeted down over his chin.
Now Ben let him go.
Jensen, not looking ahead anymore, not keeping his passengers safe even a little, all his attention facing the wrong way, locked all four tires.
His mom’s Buick stopped across the road, the caliche dust it had been dragging swallowing the distant silhouette of the refinery Jensen had just registered—all spires and darkness against the dim glow of the city.
If they could just make it there and turn right, he knew, then they’d be home free.
Except Cara was still talking to her dead brother, sitting in the back seat.
“I should have been watching you better,” she was saying, her eyes full now, the window beside her powdery white for the moment.
Jensen leaned forward more, knew Ben was going to touch him next. When that contact came, though, it was Cara.
She was leaning across—she was kissing him softly on the cheek.
“Thank you,” she said, and then had already stepped out, was holding Mote’s door open for her little brother.
Jensen saw Ben cross from one side of the rearview mirror to the other, and then both doors closed at the same time.
“Tell your mom I’m sorry,” Cara leaned down to say through the window.
She was holding Ben’s hand in hers, now. And not coughing blood. Yet.
“No, no, Cara, don’t!” Jensen said.
In reply, Cara looked back down the road, through the settling dust. “Mote,” she said, like just making him out.
Jensen looked too, and when he couldn’t see Mote, he came back to Cara.
She was already gone, fast as that.
He shot up through his window and sat on his door, looked across the top of the car, his hands leaving drag marks in the white dust coating the roof, but all around them it was only the night.
He was breathing hard, couldn’t steady his hands, his heart, and after looking for Mote and not finding him, which didn’t make sense, after sweeping the darkness with his mom’s headlights for Cara and Ben, he finally eased back into town, took that right at the refinery, its fences tall and spiky.
But that too dropped out of the rearview after another mile or two.
His mom was already asleep when he crept in. She’d turned the television off, turned all the lights of the house off.
Jensen sat on the couch where he’d started that night, and he didn't press play on An Officer and a Gentleman, and he didn't understand anything, he was pretty sure.
The next day wouldn’t help.
The fireman hadn’t just pulled Cara’s dad from that welding truck the train had smashed into. Cara and Mote had been there as well, it turned out.
Jensen’s mom hugged him when he couldn’t stop trying to tell her that that’s not how it was, that Mote fell out the back door of the car, that he was never in Cara’s dad’s stupid truck.
“You took the car out?” Jensen’s mom asked.
“And Ben was there, only it wasn’t Ben, it was Cara’s dad when he was a kid, they looked just the same!” Jensen insisted.
“Ben?” Jensen’s mom said, holding him out at arm’s length. “Dear—Ben’s been dead for months, he couldn’t have—”
Jensen didn’t go to school for the rest of the week, and didn’t go to the funerals either, and nothing made sense anymore, but after a few years he was able to tamp it down enough that it didn’t rise behind him every day, anyway.
He got a job, then he got another job, then he hired on somewhere with benefits and business trips, and then he washed up in a hotel bar, a trivia game all around him, and then there he was sitting in front of An Officer and a Gentleman again.
And then he wasn’t.
He was two blocks away from the hotel already, and then a mile, and then, just past where the industrial district of this town petered out, there was a shape out in the darkness where there were no stars.
Jensen stood there and watched it to be sure it was what he was already sure it was: the refinery. Not looming, just distant. What it being there again meant, he knew, was that he was, somehow, still pulled over on the side of Refinery Road that night. He hadn’t so much walked out past the city limits of this town his work had delivered him to, he’d… he’d walked into a memory. No—more than that. The past. He’d found a fissure, a seam, a door left open, and slipped through. Maybe because, in his heart, he’d never really left.
“Hey,” Jensen said aloud to this moment, this night, this part of the road, and tilted the bottle of beer up ahead of him, in greeting— the bottle of beer he hadn’t walked away from the hotel with, but that was the least of the wrong things happening.
A quarter mile behind him, along the ribbon of blacktop he’d drifted away from, a police cruiser flew past, its blue and red lights strobing the yellow grass and trees and fence line.
“Hello,” Jensen said to this officer, lifting his beer that way as well.
When he looked back to the grass swaying in the slight breeze, he could taste the scorched brakes of his mother’s Buick on the air— acrid and oily, but kind of good, too, the kind of pain you sort of like a little, at least at first.
The kind of pain you need, when you know something was your fault.
He was supposed to have kept his passengers safe, wasn’t he?
He nodded to his mom that yes, yes, that had been his main and only job.
And he hadn’t done it.
So he’d had to go out into the world alone, without his two best friends in the world.
But now he could go back, couldn’t he?
That’s what this was: a do-over.
He took a long drink of his beer—it was warm, flat—and then, his bottle dangling by his leg, he slouched down through the ditch and up into the pasture. It was the only place that felt right anymore. Without the silhouette of the refinery stabbing up through the horizon, never any closer no matter how fast he drove, how desperately he ran, he felt he might just fall up into the sky, never stop.
Standing knee-high in the swaying grass about twenty yards out were two shadows he knew.
First the girl lifted her beer to him in greeting, and then the guy, like he was embarrassed to be out here, doing this, and Jensen was smiling now, smiling and swishing faster through the grass, his own bottle falling behind him, his own blood coating his chin now, but that’s just because you can’t go back alive, but you can remember what it was like to punch through the darkness in a great heavy car, your headlights off, everyone you care about there with you, and so what if by the end of that road you’re sitting in the cab of a welding truck, the world bright white from a train’s lone headlight, its air horn screaming loud enough to split the night in two?
The man who just woke behind the steering wheel of that welding truck is struggling to get his door open, is panicked because he thought he was alone, and because the train is almost here, but the three of you packed in beside him are just serene, are just watching up those rails, holding each other’s hands, because this is how forever happens.
It’s going to be wonderful.
It always has been.