Eddie saw the chair, right where she said. He had been Sunday-sure she’d lied, that she was just telling stories. He had beat his nerves and knuckles against the steering wheel clear from Philadelphia to St. Louis, but after the city he’d settled into a frozen, stoney-eyed seethe. It had to be a lie, a trick, a dockhumping fraud, but he couldn’t do anything but drive and wait for the big joke to hit him. Last night in the motel room he lay staring at the stucco thinking about all the things he’d say to her in her stupid coffee fountain. Smug, smiling, she knew and he knew and they both knew. She just went and lied, suckered him again. The more he chewed on it the faster the thoughts spun, and then the front-desk-dickwad banged on the door and told him to keep quiet or he was gonna call the cops. He managed to tamp down after that, but he wrenched one of the handles off the sink to show ‘em. Fuckers. The next morning it all came back as he zipped through Atchinson Nowheresville Shittown. “You can’t do this to me. I came in, treating you like an equal human being with honesty and a clean… a clean…” Something between his brain and tongue just couldn’t express how noble and polite and abused he’d been and is and was. He twisted on the wheel ‘cause his knuckles hurt so bad. “Stupid nethaired coffeeshop fountain bitch!” was the compromise. He slammed right onto Route 71, arrowing towards Canada and all the superior eskimo socialist lawyer pricks. He hated going north. It felt like admitting. “I’ll go back, make it up with Marna,” he muttered, then, “Sorry boss, I had to go bury granddad.” Silence. “Sorry boss, I had to bury Aunt Marna. Marra. Aunt Mary.” He grimaced and tried again. “Sorry boss, I had to…” And then he saw the chair. It was a rickety folding thing, like they hauled out for church lunches. Tan paint flaked off to reveal crusted chinesium underneath. Eddie could hear it creak just by looking at it: a rusty complaint that nobody listened to or cared about. The world shouldn’t treat anything like that, yet here we all were. He rolled to a stop. He knew not to. He knew he shouldn’t get out or even look, but he couldn’t help it. He knew enough that certain things required certain ways and certain people with clean, wounded hearts. He knew that probably-certainly the chair’s physical existence meant that this was all just a bigger trick. He knew he had to be careful. Lying coffeefountain bitch. A big pickup casually cruised around Eddie’s car, stopped in the middle of the road like it was. The driver looked at him. He was wearing a fishing hat. Nobody fished in this stupid flat nowhere state. He knew. He probably knew. He probably definitely knew. Eddie peeled out and tried to pretend nothing never happened. He shouldn’t have stopped. A pocked roadsign said the next town was Denton. A little stand of crosses meant a whole family had gotten hit by a drunk driver or some shit maybe last year. He tried to pay attention to every little detail so the chair wouldn’t know it was special. He had to do this right. This was his chance. The next two weeks were hell. He checked into a shitbox motel in shittown Atchinson and the hot water in the bathroom didn’t work ‘cause there was something fucky with the handle. He shouldn’t have come right away. Too early. She had said the place, she had said the time. She had said what and where and how, and probably-maybe wasn’t lying. Now two weeks. Two weeks of listening to the walls and waiting and telling Ma that yeah he was gonna get a new job, yeah he was looking every day. And waiting. Thinking about that chair. It was a trick, it had to be. It wasn’t, though. It finally wasn’t. This was real. He shouldn’t have come so early. “You know anything about that road, the one that goes to Denton?” he asked the girl at the front desk. He had been thinking about it all day again, which was different from thinking about it a little bit always. “I heard it was haunted, you know,” he went on. “The kids know, you know?” “Nnnnnope.” She didn’t look up from her phone. Kids were stupid. Everyone had no brain. “I read a whole carload of people turned up dead in 19-” shit shit shit what was it “-83 or something, like, maybe a little less or later, but the doctors said it was some weird car gas. You believe that? Car gas. Anyway, people go out that way and hear ‘em or see the ocean or snow forever. You ever done that?” “Sir, I’m sorry but I’ve got six other tables,” the waitress replied. “Do you want to order something else or do you need your check?” “What I’m saying, like, it’s still weird. The story is weird. I don’t think the coffeefountain lady was lying. Because um, people just don’t do that.” “It’s a sin,” the young man in the back seat replied. After three days fishing someone finally needed a ride somewhere. The people around here didn’t even eat out, let alone get delivery. Ma was gonna be so mad. “Yeah, yeah that’s right. There’s lots of little sins and bad things you can do, everywhere. Damn, no wonder you got a book.” Eddie cut a glance to the back seat, then another. “You ever gotten anywhere you could only go if you were clean? Like, not like, water and dirt I mean. I mean by taking the right steps and having the right reasons. Is any of that in your book?” “I’m not really…” “What I’m saying is like, you need to be right, really right, right-with-the-world right. Damn it, I heard a word for this once, a lady said it on TV. Everything on TV is just lies and tricks and advertising which does both, but this lady really had it. She said a lot of stuff, like um,” The ride app binged. Eddie lost his train of thought and turned. Sometimes you could drive with half a brain and get where you were going. Other times you needed your whole head and that meant the tongue too. He put out a few words here and there, just to let rideguy know he wasn’t done. “I’ll leave a good review on the app,” the guy smiled as they came to a stop. He swung out and shut the door. He did not leave a good review. Everywhere, ass-out bingefuckers. It was probably good though. He had liked rideguy a little too fast. He had been thinking maybe about telling him about the Slippingstone, but no, much better he didn’t. Big-papered knobhoppers all wear plastic masks, pig-faced on both sides. Just thinking about it made Eddie clutch the keepsake pouch he wore over his heart. “Gotta watch the fuckers,” he muttered. “Gotta watch ‘em.” “Language!” a mom with a whole trio of brats glared at him from the sidewalk. The biggest brat giggled, which made her madder. The littlest brat snored in her stroller, which meant she didn’t count at all. Lady was overreacting. Shusher bitch was gonna make a big deal. If he had been back home and knew all the cops he might have told her lots more words, but out here it was the other way and that was bad. Eddie heaped himself together and hurried off. Had to be careful. Kids knew more than they told. Two weeks. Two. Weeks. Every day he opened his eyes thinking about that chair. Every day he talked a little bit. Everyday more switchway rowheads, coffeefountain nowit normholes. Two. WEEEEEEKS. And then the day arrived. “The day moves around,” the coffeefountain bitch had said, after he made it real clear he was nowhere-goin’. “But I figured it out. You plant your butt on that chair on April 14th, right around 7:45ish in the morning, you’ll see it.” She even gave him a piece of paper to write it down, after he squirmed around and said some more words. He didn’t have any more secrets to trade. She even saw the Slippingstone. She couldn’t touch it though. “Sometimes the day is on the wrong side of daylight savings and it’s late, or early. It isn’t a clock-thing. It’s a Time and Position thing.” She nodded, he nodded. Of course he got that. Who else wouldn’t? Now here he was, still a little bit early. His dad used to say the most important part of life was showing up with your shirt on, and today he made triple-sure. Eddie checked out of shitbox Atchinson entirely, which was a good thing. The cop there had started to know him. Can’t have that. He wasn’t a Slipping-person, after all. The chair was still there, right on the side of Route 71. He pulled up beside it, then caught himself. The last people got eaten by car gas, so he decided not to risk it. He swung around and parked a full quarter-mile back and hiked up, natural like. Like a chair would expect, yanno? The chair. He hovered over it. He couldn’t help thinking about it as a weird useful folding-pretzel of flaking paint and discolored metal. He shifted from foot to foot, then looked out over the fields of calf-high plants growing out to forever on either side of the highway. Wheat, probably. Soybeans, probably. Food, probably. Whatever. Stupid snooty dirt-nailed dirteaters. He spun around and plopped himself down, palms-on-knees, fingertips-white, foot-tapping. A car whooshed behind him and he damn near jumped out of his skin. He grabbed the chair-back and wrenched around, then patted at his heart and tried to breathe. “I’m just looking for a little help,” he panted. He pet the chair leg like a skittish pony. “I’m clean, believe me. I don’t have a book or nothing, but I know I did right by you. So just, so just show me what I need. C’mon. Don’t be like the alley. C’mon.” He waited. The wind blew over the wheatbeans in low, sweeping ripples like those stupid Chinese rock gardens where they put out a rake and then yelled if you used it. White houses pricked up here or there surrounded by huge aluminum beetle-buildings squatting like hogs. Eddit remembered working in one of those. Hot. More cars whooshed by behind him. He didn’t jump or anything this time, ‘cause he had figured out this whole chair thing was all a trick. Again. All a trick. Again. Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. Coffeefountain bitch. Lying hellworld. He hunched over. The chair shouldn’t see him cry, but just, he couldn’t do it. All this way, all this hope, all this being lost and afraid and all tied up. He wanted to chuck the chair clean across the highway. He wanted to put rebar through her eye, twist it ‘round ‘till her head popped off. Hellworld pissworld. Again, again again again. The wind rustled his hair as it swept across the fields. Eddie gripped his skull like to peel his skin right off. Again, again, again. He didn’t have gas. He’d have to go back to Atchinson. Ugh. That was definitely admitting. They’d all know. Another car – a slick new one with the engines you barely heard, probably driven by sunglasses pricks. Pricks saw, pricks knew, they were probably writing it all down. They kept it to wave at you no matter how hard you tried. Couldn’t get no-way. Trapped here, shitbox world… Whoosh! Another weird engine. Eddie looked up. The light was wrong. The waves of wheatbeans glistened green-gold. Shadowless, kinda. Here-and-not, kinda. This wasn’t like the alley at all. Far off, a dim chilly sun hugged the horizon for warmth. He glanced up – it was still 8am in Kansas. Another stiff breeze and a car. His head turned. Ocean. Route 71 was completely gone. In its place a rocky scrub-strewn slope meandered down into tannish sand. Waves swept past and over half-submerged rocks to cascade up the beach and back again. Salt breeze whipped Eddie’s hair. New-morning sun shook off the horizon to bathe the world in friendly dawn. Eddie checked, then checked again. Three suns. One ahead, one uppish, one cold and dim back the other way. Three suns! “Coffeefountain bitch had it right,” he muttered. “Lying bitch.” Eddie jumped up out of the chair. He stared back and forth. He took two steps, turned, pulled his hands against each other. He glanced over at his car. He guessed… he guessed he should have brought a boat. Damn. There was something written in the sand. He missed it at first, what with the suns and all, but down on the Kansas beach a bunch of shells lay in a line making white-on-tan letters. He couldn’t make out what it said, but there were a bunch. They were in verse, kinda. Squiggy wave-words, sorta. More. The clouds were doing it too. Wispy drifty new-morning clouds, curling in drifting stanzas against the bright blue. They hurt to look at. Too much glare. He needed to be that sunglasses prick, but instead Eddie just stuck his hand over his eyes like a no-money asshole. He heard birds – seagulls or some shit. Not pigeons. All the flappy rats could get fucked. Raspy cries echoed over the waves. Their shadows danced over the sands, but he couldn’t find the damn things. They were squawking something, he could almost catch it. English, maybe. Spanish, maybe. Something out the corner of his ear, maybe. In the sky, on the sand, floating in the air. He took a step forward, then another. Beach-scrub brushed at his jeans. He could almost make it out. The ocean stretched out forever, perfect and blue. Letters in white shell glistened on the sand. Another step… The truck hit him at around ninety miles an hour, but later on the driver said it was only eighty so to make it seem like he wasn’t speeding so bad. Eddie’s body flew a good twenty-five feet in that glorious Kansas morning before crashing home to Route 71. What remained of him rolled to a skidding, shredding stop past the Denton road sign right next to the quiet cluster of crosses that meant that a whole family had been killed by a drunk driver or some shit. There he lay until the ambulance came and scootched him into a body bag. It wasn’t quite a spatula-job, but it was close. The driver was Tony Milvern, and he was in trouble for a little while. It helped that he pulled over and called 911 like you’re supposed to, but launching a body like that is not something anyone wants to explain. “He just came out of nowhere,” Tony told the ambulance guy, and the officers, and just about anyone who made eye contact for too long. “He just ran out onto the highway, I couldn’t do anything.” Eddie had messed up Tony's truck a bit, but the insurance eventually agreed to fix it once the Sheriff found out that Eddie had been the nutjob the Atchinson PD was looking for. “Crazy man did a crazy thing” took Tony’s paperwork from Vehicular Homicide down to a miscellaneous jumble of accidental didn’t-matters. They told him to go take a driving course and slow down. Eddie though, they found his people out in New Jersey and shipped his bagged-up body back. They found his car easy enough, and the chair too. They couldn’t figure out either in the fifteen seconds they allowed it, so they sold the car at auction and tossed the chair into an open-backed hauler along with all the other trash from Route 71. They took it to the dump and the heap rose a little higher. The following spring they sealed it all up with dirt, packed it flat, and got ready for the next one. Back in Jersey, the mortician did a pretty good job on Eddie despite the road chewing on him. They dressed him in clothes cut to look good laying down, and put a tie on him and makeup and turned his ring so nobody could see the scuffs. Ma picked out the best casket she could afford. They put his book in with him, and a picture of him wrestling with Dad, and some bagged-up bits of his weird collection that he had loved so much. Then the whole family shuffled in, and even a few people Eddie knew from his better days in High School. Ma’s sister even came in from California with her girls. “They only remember him from before,” she had explained over the phone. “They don’t know how bad it got. We’ll help you clean.” Ma tried to be strong and dry-eyed, but she couldn’t. She could only remember the little boy. Everyone hugged her and whispered “I’m sorry,” and everyone knew they meant “I’m sorry this ALL happened,” bigger than an accident two timezones away. Nobody knew what Ma was going to do now. Ma didn’t know what Ma was going to do now. Eventually her sister and the nieces would go back to California and then… … … She just didn’t know. Everywhere she looked was empty. Lacey wasn’t tall enough to see cousin Eddie. Jane said it was okay, that he was just laying there, but still she wanted to see. Mom wouldn’t pick her up. She was too busy talking to Aunt Elly, and it would be real bad to get her attention right then. She sighed and tried to be patient and good in the sad forever-line. She looked around again, but it was just church people with library voices drooping all over. A little fleck of something shiny caught her eye from under the casket. The next moment she had it scooped up: a little polished glass lump which kind of fizzled like pop-rocks in her hand. Hot-and-cold, with little twitchy pushes. Weird. She had a purse for things like this, just like normal adults. She popped it in and gave Aunt Elly a hug. She said ‘Sorry,’ just like everybody else. After the visitation Ma just wanted to leave. They told her Eddie couldn’t be cremated with his book or his little bags or his ring, but the picture was okay. Ma took the ring and told them to throw away the rest. She didn’t have any good memories of any of it. It was better it just all went. They gave her a little canister with his ashes, and it took her a very long time to work up the energy to pick out a proper urn. The seasons passed. Everyone went on with their business. A war happened somewhere. Politicians yelled at each other. People got sick and got better, got born and got out. The sun pushed up the plants and the farmers brought it all in. It snowed and got warm again. The world came ‘round to its beginning. In the early morning of March 27th a dull blue car rolled to a stop along a stretch of Route 71 between Atchinson and Denton, which is to say from Nowhere heading Nowhere. A middle-aged woman got out and rubbed the kink her shoulder, then tried to stretch out her hip. She stomped like to shake her foot off. She had blue jeans, dull gray sweatshirt, and tired lines from eyes to jowl that made her look older than she was. She opened up the trunk and pulled out a chair: shiny cheap plastic. She eyed the distance to the Denton sign and the stand of memorial crosses the county cleanup people wouldn’t ever touch. She unfolded the chair facing away from the highway. She sat down. The wind blew over the fields. Silos glinted in the distance amidst sparse houses. She closed her eyes and felt all-over. She didn’t look as the cars whooshed by, and when she opened her eyes a second sun hung low and cold out in the distance. If she looked hard she could see the snowfields, but instead she turned around to the sunrise beach. The clouds seemed to curl into words. The white shells seemed to form letters in the sand. The air hummed. She pulled out a notebook, extracted a pen, and clicked it open. She flipped to a page midway through. “... coffeefountain…” “What?” she blinked. “... bitch.” Eddie’s voice slipped in from everywhere. She gave a slight frown. “Oh? Are you still here? You must have read something good, huh?” The air roiled with subdermal pressure. The clouds began swirling in lazy vortices. The waves reached up to the first line of scrub-grass, then over it, farther. “... pissworld,” Eddie commented, all-over-quivery. “Well, what was it? We don’t have forever.” She drew a hard line across the page in her notebook, scribbled furiously for a moment, then paused open-quoted. The wind held its breath. Sea breeze and green fields both went still. The waves drew back like they had knocked at the wrong house. A sudden blast blew surf and spray forward, sputtering incoherent as mile-high winds swept the sky clean. White-on-tan shells flipped and jittered before the wave scattered them meaningless into the beach-grass. A great gust flipped out her hair and whooshed over the fields. Defiance spat on her from all directions. Anger frothed in the sunbeams. “Well. Looks like I should have brought a hat.” She frowned and patted her head. “Fine then, have it your way. We’ll try again next year. Enjoy.” She snapped her notebook shut, turned, and marched back to her car. She pulled a 3-point in the middle of the road and headed back south. Triple suns didn’t shine on over Kansas for long. Star and ocean and snowfield faded into bucolic peace. She left the chair.
