The Suicide Motor Club Read Free

but where the fuck is the kid?
    â€œHe’s fine.”
    Feeling his own panic rising up in him, August Lively turned on his internal loop, saw a Vietnamese boy in tap shoes and a top hat singing
this is dinky dau, dinky dinky dinky dau, this is dinky dau, dinky dinky dau
. The kid in his head was like a little god of madness; his holy message conveyed in idiot song was that everything was fucked up and ridiculous and that all you could do was your best. That your best was never going to be enough, that was okay, that was number one, panic was number ten.
    If only somebody could radio in a chopper—an ambulance was going to take a month of Sundays, and if neither of these folks had internal injuries, he’d eat his own shorts.
    Where the fuck is the kid? Probably dead. Don’t let this guy die, too.
    â€œWhere are you from?” he asked the stricken man, stroking his head, gritting his teeth, scanning the very dark land for the little boy he knew he wouldn’t find. Blood bubbled from the inverted man’s nose, a drop running along the side of his nose toward his eye. The hitcher intercepted it with a thumb.
    Finally, flashing red lights coming, a siren. Probably the state police. Thank Christ. Thank Buddha. Thank Bugs Bunny. The college guy had done okay.
    If cops came, he’d stay with the man and make them look for the kid. If paramedics came, he’d look for the kid.
Dinky fucking dau.
    Would he be a suspect? Shirtless, bloody, scruffy, six dollars and aroach in his pocket? Nobody but two semiconscious accident victims and a mildly stoned UNM sophomore to vouch for him?
    Stranger things had happened.
    The semiconscious woman sobbed.
    Then she laughed.
    â€”
    IT SEEMED TO JUDITH THAT THE MOON HAD SHONE IN THE WINDOW AS THE CAR rolled, that she saw it exactly twice as it revolved wildly around the crumpling axis of the Falcon, whose interior was mad with the scrambled gravity of purse and coins and sand and crayons. She would never forget the noise of it, the earsplitting sound of everything breaking, her husband’s shout stomped flat by the composite heel of dashboard, roof, windshield. When everything settled, she had something like an out-of-body experience, only she wasn’t a disembodied spirit—she experienced the scene through the eyes of another person. She saw herself from above and feared she was dead, with her shirt wrenched halfway around and blood in her eye, her black hair matted and plastered to her cheek. She was upside-down, resting on her neck. She knew then that she wasn’t herself but a man; she used hands the color of cocoa to grab her own white limbs, pulling herself free from the impossibly flat, impossibly twisted Falcon. Her new hand cradled the small head that once belonged to her, supporting it in case the neck was broken. A small boulder that should have dashed the brains from her had instead sheared off the door and propped the chassis up to give her the space she needed to live, and the man she was now stooped and shouldered her body past this. You shouldn’t move accident victims, this man she was knew better than most, but the angle at which she had come to rest seemed to put weight on her neck, and he wanted to see the rest of her body, see where all the blood might be coming from. That she saw herself from another human being’s eyesdidn’t surprise her so much—she had dreams that came true sometimes, and this experience, while different, seemed cut somehow from the same cloth of unreality.
    When she came back into her own body, she knew it was for a period of trial and great tragedy. She had the idea that her son was dead, and this seemed cruel to her, or random, and neither cruelty nor happenstance seemed compatible with the idea of a benign and responsible God. She believed in God, she
needed
him. Now was no time to doubt his motives, wrecked in the desert at night. She sobbed. Then she realized how foolish she was being,