Aftertaste Read online

  “Screw that. I called in. Have fun.”

  She doesn’t say goodbye, just closes the phone and grinds her teeth. Goddamn it.

  Stomping across the mildew-stained Astroturf carpeting the patio, she dances between the neighbor’s dog’s shit piles and beer cans land-mining the front yard, and hops in her bubblegum pink Cavalier. The dial thermometer hanging on the side of their double-wide says it’s eighty-three outside, but in the car it feels at least three times that. Galavance starts the car up and immediately mashes the switches to drop all four windows—one screams and shudders in its reluctant descent. She tests the wheel with exploratory pats. Cool enough. She backs out of the gravel driveway and drives down and out of the court, never bothering to acknowledge any of the octogenarians in their front yards, watering pathetic flowerbeds, even though they wave at her, denture teeth big as playing cards, too white, too widely presented.

  Happy old people. Fuck ’em.

  The Go-Go’s Greatest Hits has been stuck in her car’s CD player for months. Some days she doesn’t mind. But today the next track is “Skidmarks on My Heart.” She cannot help but shake her head—it’s too potent a coincidence.

  With no time to stop for a coffee, she needs nicotine, ASAP. She feels around blindly for the goddamn lighter. Cup-holders, passenger seat, nope. She knows Kit Mitchell Road like the back of her hand. She’s confident she can look away for one little second.

  Flame blessedly set to cig (the lighter had fallen under her seat), she glances up just long enough to register that there’s a pale man in a brown suit coming up fast, too fast to do anything but realize she’s going to plow into him and there’s no way to avoid it.

  Tires scream. She screams. He screams. We all scream for vehicular manslaughter.

  Thumpa-thump.

  The Go-Go’s continue, trapped in the 80s on a spinning plastic disk, undisturbed by the collision. “Head over heels, no time to think …”

  Hands automatically readjusting to ten and two, Galavance stares through the spiderwebbed windshield at the road ahead, now scattered with broken grille plastic. The headlight bracket rolls along like a coin on its edge. All she can say right now is “Oh,” over and over again. “Oh. Oh. Not good, not good.”

  Then, as if her day couldn’t get any weirder, in the rear-view mirror, as if only suffering a minor ouchy, the man she’s hit (and not just clipped but bulldozed over) rises to his feet. The shoulder of his dark jacket flutters loosely, shredded. Tie askew, flopped over one shoulder. One side of his face is chewed and ribbed with bleeding road rash. Something skitters across his face—or is that the sunlight playing tricks on her?—and makes a beeline for the edge of the wound and either vanishes or … goes inside him?

  “You kids have got to slow down out here,” he says, coming up next to the car, hardly limping.

  “I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”

  “Well, thank God you didn’t do it intentionally.”

  How is this possible? she thinks. I saw him spiral through the air like some kind of deathwish ballerina on malfunctioning spring-heels and now here he is … talking, walking, goddamn alive?

  The man leans down to the window and looks at Galavance, still holding the wheel as if she’s about to edge over the big hill of a rollercoaster. “Are you okay?” he asks with raised eyebrows and chin down, the picture of uncertainty.

  “I’m so sorry, mister. Hey, I mean, do you need a hospital?”

  “Not necessary.” He coughs and frowns into his palm. Wiping whatever he brought up on a pant leg, he says, “Where are we?”

  “Kit Mitchell Road.”

  “But, North Carolina, right?”

  “Yeah,” she says. As gently as if the man’s a shaken bottle of nitroglycerin, she asks, “Say, you sure you don’t wanna see a doctor?”

  “I’m always this pale if that’s what you’re getting at. Even before—” he cuts himself off. He steps back from the car, hands on his hips, squinting into the morning sun. Up close now, she sees his suit isn’t brown, but black, just covered in layers of dirt. He was dirty before she hit him. Why is some filthy suit out here in the sticks?

  She places a hand over the shape her cell phone makes in the pockets of her form-fitting khakis. She could call the cops, sort this thing out legitimately, correctly, but doesn’t want to. She’s seen Orange Is the New Black. She wouldn’t last long in prison.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” he says. Another car passes and he moves way off the road this time. “I’ve got somewhere to be.”

  Oh, God. He’s like some gangster or something. Did he bury someone out here and his buddies left him? Or, fuck, is he all dirty because he was the one buried? Galavance’s hands squeak on the steering wheel, tightening.

  He’s looking over her Pepto Bismol pink vehicle closely. “Your wheels still good to go? Sounds okay.”

  She undoes her seatbelt and sighs. “All right, go ahead.”

  His brow clouds. “Pardon?”

  “I don’t want any trouble. I’ll even give you a few hours headstart before I report it stolen. I’ll have to report it, you understand?” Killing the engine and stepping out, Galavance presents her ring of keys with its rabbit’s foot keychain in matching pink.

  “I meant you drive, me ride.” He points at her and mimes twisting a steering wheel.

  “You want a ride?” She’s still holding the keys out at him.

  He looks around as if he heard something Galavance has not. His eyes track about, past her, his mouth a hard line. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “I think so.” He trains eyes on her the shade of crayon kids always pick to scribble skies. “It feels nearby. Couple miles.”

  “Okay, well, I’m late for work, so let’s get going, all right? If you’re ready that is.” Slowly tucking a swirl of blond behind an ear, she adds, “Don’t wanna rush the guy who just got hit by a car or anything …”

  He smiles. Toothy, genuine. He steps forward, hand out. There are pale scars on almost every finger. A few flat, shiny sections on his palm, old burns. She works in a restaurant, she’s seen plenty of hands like his. A cook’s hands.

  “Saelig Zilch,” he says.

  “Saelig?” she says, nearly recoiling at how cold he is.

  “Go ahead, I’ve heard them all.”

  “I wasn’t …”

  They shake. She waits until he’s walking around the front of the car to the passenger side, then furiously wipes her palm on her pants when she’s sure he won’t see. Crunching through broken plastic strewn across the road, Zilch gets in. “You?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What’s your name?” he says.

  “Galavance.”

  “Huh. I can see why you didn’t give me shit for mine, now.”

  She manages to smile, somehow. The tires slip momentarily, then chew in and dig and they disembark.

  She smells great. Like bubblegum, flowery perfume, and the good menthols.

  Preparing himself for the worst, Zilch summons the courage and folds down the visor on his side to flip open the mirror. He gives himself a reluctant sidelong glance, sees it’s not so bad, and eases into looking at himself full-on. The road rash is already gone, healed, but fuck. What a bad start. Out of the boneyard ten minutes and he gets street-pizzaed.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to ask,” Galavance says, eyes on the road, “but you’re not gonna sue me, are you?”

  “Trust me,” Zilch says with a half-smirk he knows—but cannot help—makes him both more and less trustworthy at the same time, “I’m not going to sue you.” He flexes his hand open and closed and finally rests it on his knee. It aches, like his carpal tunnel used to.

  You only have so many nanobugs per job, he remembers being told, once, to patch things up and keep your borrowed carbon in working order. Getting clobbered by a car probably just exhausted well over half of them. The genuine hurt would come early. Normally, he’s three shots of Jack numb, when fresh to a husk. The bugs do a good job; focus on the
important things like keeping the blood marching through his veins instead of patching up nerve endings. It’s comfortable territory for Zilch, after all. He spent most of his adult years numb by one type of chemical helper or another, so this isn’t something new. Still, having exhausted half his little buggies means he’d just cut his time left to do this job by half. Fun.

  “You might change your mind later,” she says, and it’s clear that she’s still quite worried about getting in trouble for whacking him. “But if you do, can you wait until at least after the first of September? That’s when I get paid next.”

  “What do you do?” he says.

  “What?”

  Zilch notices that she startles every time he speaks, that whoever this girl is, she’s got a truckload on her mind.

  “What do you do?” he says, slower.

  “I’m the wait-staff shift manager at Frenchy’s,” she says, as if giving a bad diagnosis.

  “That some kind a titty bar?” He’s picturing plus-sized women in maid outfits, shining up metal poles with their inner thighs and that long shriek of generous flesh sliding down tarnished brass. It’s a weird thought for a walking corpse to have but hell, rotting flesh or not, he’s still a dude.

  And as if she can see that image in a thought bubble floating over his head, she says: “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry,” Zilch says. She’s giving you a ride, asshole. Be nice. “I guess the polo shirt does kind of go against titty bar. Or is it a yuppie joint where they only play Phil Collins?”

  “Who’s Phil Collins?”

  Zilch draws in a deep breath. “He was big when I was your age. We used to ride around on my friend’s Brontosaurus listening to him. But what’s Frenchy’s—if not a strip club?”

  “Frenchy’s is a sit-down restaurant,” she says.

  “Oh, a sit-down restaurant? Pardon me all to hell.”

  “Kinda hard to be a snob when you’re out in the middle of the road at 9 a.m. looking like you just crawled out of an unholy grave or something. No offense. What were you doing out here, anyway?”

  He chooses not to answer. “I just find that hilarious, when people use that distinction: a sit-down restaurant. Like sitting down for a meal is some kind of big la-ti-da affair.”

  “So you are a snob.”

  “With food, yes. So what do you serve at Frenchy’s?”

  “The shit kind,” she says. “Food sucks, vibe sucks, the decor is like holy shit, but getting a regular paycheck doesn’t suck and it takes care of my bills. Most of the time.”

  Galavance has been slowly increasing her speed over the course of the conversation, which Zilch has only recently noticed, and now she’s barreling at eighty-five down this curvy dirt road like it’s nothing. When she goes around the next corner, Saelig imagines the tires’ grip giving out and the car going side-over-side-over-side-over-side in a roll that doesn’t end until the car folds around a tree like a wad of dough walloped by a nunchaku. It’s not a comforting feeling, given his already-depleted inventory of nanobugs.

  “What kind is the shit kind, exactly?” he asks, almost panting, once they’re on another straightaway.

  “Americanized French cuisine,” she says. Fast, dismissive. “But what about you? The way you were asking me where we were back there, seemed like you’re a long way from home?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Okay,” she says, and he knows it’s a bad answer that only makes more questions, but thankfully she drops that line of questioning. “Then what do you do for a living, Mr. Zilch? Or are you one of those people that gets hit by cars on purpose to do the whole ambulance-chaser thing?”

  “Christ, what is it with you? Did you get attacked by a pack of rabid lawyers as a kid?”

  “Sorry.”

  Zilch grunts and tries to slouch, but the harness looping under both arms and up his crotch like a baby seat prevents it. He’s glad it’s there, though; she’s power-sliding them around every curve. “I don’t know what you’d call what I do,” he says, blurting, like he’s being tortured with homicidal driving for answers. He winces. Shut up.

  “So you’re like, self-employed?” she says.

  “Forget I said anything,” he says, bracing for the next hairpin. “I don’t want to spoil the ending for you.” That last part slips out, accidentally.

  “Spoil what ending?” Too late. She’s interested.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me. You’re getting a free ride here.”

  “After you ran me over, I’d like to point out.”

  “I did run you over, that’s right. And then I watched you get up like nothing had happened, and I watched your face turn from the texture of a seared steak to completely normal, and despite all that, I let you into my car and haven’t really made an issue out of it. So, you could just tell me.”

  Zilch sighs. It’s not an illogical argument, and Galavance has already proven herself to be an unusual encounter. His guts somersault when she tugs on the E brake to glide them around another turn. “Okay. You ever think about what happens at the end of your life?” he squeaks, realizing as he says it that he’s coming off as creepily murderous.

  “All righty, I think I’m going to pull over now.” Again with the E brake.

  “Wait, I don’t mean … No, ha-ha, I’m not going to kill you or anything …” He slaps palms to the dashboard, their speed dropping away so fast he’s being lifted out of his seat. “Listen, you asked.”

  “I know, and now I’m really regretting it. I think if you want to sue me now, that’d be fine,” she says. “I think I might have a case.”

  Zilch sits up and tries to turn to face her but again, the harness has him in a half nelson; he unclicks the buckle and detangles himself. “Look. I was trying to tell you, I’d started to, but you drive this thing like it’s fucking stolen. If you keep it under mach nine for one goddamn second … I’m not supposed to tell you, but I will.” Fuck it, why not. She’s weird. And, aloud by accident: “Can’t turn out any worse than the last time I spilled the beans.”

  “Uh, pardon? What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right, so go on,” she says. “I’m listening.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Listening. I’m dead.”

  “Uh, what?” She glances over at him, lip curled. She snorts. “You’re gonna have to try a little harder than that, I think. And you can stop with the Dad jokes anytime you like.”

  “I wasn’t finished. It’s … I’m not supposed to talk about this, tell anybody what I am or what I do. But I’m dead, I get sent back, and I hunt lusus naturae. Freaks of nature. Not sure why they insist on the Spanish—”

  “I think that’s Latin, actually.”

  “—but that’s what I do. And have been doing for a while now, with no end in sight. Apparently the world never runs dry of weirdos.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Hey, you asked. You asked, so I told you. And there it is, the stone facts of the thing.”

  “So you kill monsters.”

  “Yes.”

  “And these monsters, if I were to see one … would they look like monsters, or just random people you run up on and stab to death?”

  “What? No. They look like monsters, as monsters tend to do.” He pauses, frowns a second. “Most of them. Like 98 percent of the time.”

  “But not all the time.”

  “No, not all the time, but—”

  “So you kill things that look an awful lot like people.”

  “Sometimes.” He groans. “Maybe we should start over. And before I introduce myself, let me preface this conversation by saying: I swear I’m not a psychopath.”

  “Do you have some kind of doctor’s note I could see, to corroborate this?”

  “What’s your deal?”

  “What’s my deal?” She snorts again. “I’ve got a nutcase in my car.”

  “Give me a second. I can explain it better.”

  “Oh?”

 
“Give me a second.”

  “Okay, okay. Go right ahead.”

  They tool along, still halfway on the road, at an above-the-speed-limit-but-still-quite-reasonable-by-comparison speed of forty-five. She notices he’s no longer strapped in, and gives him a devious smirk that a face that adorable shouldn’t be capable of making.

  “You know, if you tried something, I could hit the brakes right now. My boyfriend, he installed these super-good brakes, and you’d go for a fucking ride, mister.”

  “Go ahead,” Zilch says, without worry. “I’m quite sure it won’t have the effect you intended.” Then there was a slight jolt and he felt lusus naturae’s call—that soft thrumming, that foggy arrow in his mind pushing him in the direction of maybe thataway. Fuck, did he just think that out loud? Being dead, you forget there used to be “just for me” words and things other people can hear, too.

  He says: “Look. You’re not in any kind of trouble here. And I’m not threatening you, I swear, I’m kitten harmless. Grandma harmless—”

  “Grandmas can be crazy too.” She nods to herself. “All righty. I think Galavance has had enough. I have a crazy man in my car, a bad morning has gone nuclear, and I should probably just pull over—actually, I probably should have done that a few miles back.”

  “It sounds crazy, I agree, but I’ve had the time to … you know, get used to how crazy this is, and how crazy it sounds. I’m not good at explaining shit, okay? I appreciate the ride, no harm will come to you, and … let’s just get there, all right? Double underline: I’m not a psycho.”

  “But don’t psychos, you know, like to lie about not being psycho?”

  “Exactly. So if I’m addressing it, up front, then that should be a good sign, right?”

  “Unless you’re trying to do that reverse psychology thing. Say you’re not a psycho, when you are—okay, fuck it, you haven’t stabbed me yet. I’m not gonna go out of my way, just say stop when you want me to stop. Okay?”

  He can’t help but grin. “Okay.”

  It’s the sticks, but there’s still a backup at the ramp to get onto US-1. Galavance pictures the Frenchy’s regional manager, Patty, tapping her foot anxiously, checking her watch, adjusting her too-tight blazer she’s always dressed in, prepackaged like the meatloaf Frenchy’s serves, wondering where her wait-staff manager could be, waiting to shit-can Galavance literally as soon as she walks in the door.