deep red bells

It begins as a faint flirtation with danger, and then a commitment, a marriage. Nadine drops out of Keene State College and takes to the road. She spends wet nights by the side of the highway, with sleep stealing up on her like a hot hand; she learns to drowse standing up, to stand in the rain with her coat pulled up looking pitiful and bedraggled and then to scrub the dampness off her face with her cuffs, how to pop open the passenger side door and drop down to the asphalt.

The white streak in her hair makes her look witchy and road-worn, so she tucks it back or rakes it under, but day by day it seems to grow — a few more silver threads. They make her look older when that’s the last thing she wants people to think about her — well, not the last thing. She tries to look like a college student who’s going places, maybe a young mom, and not like — the kind of women who die by the side of the road, women who die falling from a moving car.

Nadine is twenty years old and a virgin. She doesn’t know whether she is shaking off some heavy destiny, or running faster toward it.

She expects to meet him there by the side of the road, for him to catch her in the tall grass like she was sixteen again, to hear the sound of bootfalls from the litter-strewn underbrush and to be taken by surprise. She expects to see him behind the wheel of every car that passes by, but he’s never there. The dark man, the man of her nightmares, the eyeless face and the never-ending white teeth. Those wiry arms, strong to hold her. She never expects to see him from the vantage point of an eighteen-wheeler’s cab. He should look smaller at this distance, smaller than he looks in the deserts of her dreams, but he doesn’t.

He stands tall, but not remarkably so, lean but not uncommonly lean, stabbing upright as an arrow despite the easiness of his gait — a man bound to cross a substantial distance in no particular hurry. The skin is stretched close across his weather-beaten face — he could be any age. Something inside Nadine clenches. The rain is soaking into his denim jacket, all rubbed raw along the cuffs and collar and seams — turning the blue denim dark, and beading on the surface of a tin-backed button.

He is walking along the rutted road, steady, steady. The dark man sticks up an insolent thumb at her and grins. The trucker speeds a little faster, and the engine grinds, as if both truck and driver are in sympathy with the tightening of her stomach and the crossing of her legs.

*

“Have you seen him?” Her name’s Julie, or maybe it’s Laurie. She’s maybe fourteen or fifteen, and looks every day of it; maybe a man would think she looks older. She looks hard and cheap and angry, but she looks like an underage girl, propped up on the sun-stained vinyl seats with her shoes slipping and sliding on the chromed pole of the table. “Have you seen the walkin’ dude?”

Nadine’s feet hurt, and her knees ache, and she’s been at this lot for hours nursing the same cup of coffee like a bitter wound. “What do you know about the walkin’ dude?”

“This and that. He comes around when he feels like it. He comes into me, and then he goes. " Julie laughs salaciously. Nadine too tired for any of this to register. “He comes in me.”

“Well, that’s great.”

Julie gestures at her — at Nadine’s slumping shoulders and parched face. “You sleep. I’ll keep watch. I’ll tell the waitress you’re just resting your eyes.”

The girl steals Nadine’s radio from her coat pocket which is okay because it was broken anyway, and $15, which is less okay. She is dead before long, but Nadine will not know that until later. They will find her bones in a roadside ravine, noosed in wires.

In her dozing dreams, the dark man twists Nadine’s hair into a rope in his fist. He tells her she is getting closer.

*

There are others who’ve seen him — when she can find it in herself to venture the question, sometimes it’s I’m looking for my friend,, sometimes it’s my boyfriend, he left me, sometimes it’s this guy stole something from me, none of them exactly right. A girl with frizzled brown hair says she saw him at a truck stop, but there’s not a truck stop there anymore because somebody drove their Toyota through the gas pumps. A man with tattoos on his knuckles says he saw that guy when they were passing out papers at a student rally in support of a defrocked professor, only the rally turned into a fight and security broke it up, then that got ugly, so he took off. Then he thrusts his dip-stained tongue into Nadine’s mouth, and she bites him hard enough to draw blood.

Nadine is waiting for something to happen, for one particular thing. If you’re hitching long enough, it has to happen — as surely as you will be robbed or threatened with a knife. Nadine is playing close to the edge, daring it to happen, daring someone to inflict sex on her before the dark man can. It could happen anywhere — a parked car, a bathroom, a dirt road. No man touches her, though they may want to. A hand will linger on the gearshift near her leg, or a car may slow just before the turn down an empty back road, but they never take the turn, they never reach over and do what they want to do. Just lucky, she guesses. Marked.

People like talking to her, though. As she gets older, they do it more and more. Where to go, where not to go. Stretches of road where the cars don’t stop, or where the cops are vicious. Road people are tight-lipped, young and old, but they’ll tell her anything; she must just have one of those faces.

*

People tell her the same story in Billings and Bismark, in Cedar City and the reservations, at Greyhound depots and women’s shelters. It’s just a story, like the guy who flashes his high-beams at you on a deserted road, or the lady at the border crossing with a sleeping baby — they’ve all seen a long-haired man in broke-down cowboy boots, maybe in jeans or a long dark coat or maybe dressed as a state trooper. A long dark state trooper, waving a hapless couple over onto the shoulder, or directing a driver into a wrong turn, the wrong freeway exit, the wrong country road. There seems to be no apparent distance except that the detour is dangerous and the direction unexpected. He could be any age, any race. Long and dark and blazing.

Nadine is tying back her hair in the ladies’ room of a state highway rest stop (welcome to beautiful Maine, vacationland) when she hears the rasp of worn-down boots on the tiles outside, someone dropping dimes into the machine to buy themselves a Coca-Cola. By the time she steels herself to open the door, there’s nobody there. Twice is too close.

*

Nadine gets picked up by a hard-bitten southern dyke with the cab of her big rig stuffed with iced tea bottles and crank magazines — she takes Nadine all the way with her, up the coast, and buys her lunch and dinner to boot. The magazines slip and slop in the footwells when the truck brakes. Parapsychology, haunted houses, precognition, numerology, how to avoid disaster with parasensory warnings — just think, all this time Nadine’s been calling that her gut — and shadow men — incubi — demon lovers.

People reckon with worse things all the time — an alcoholic father, a gambling addict mother, a husband or a lover who hurts women. The man is never there — always coming for her, always in pursuit, and now it’s on hers to pursue.

*

Nadine doesn’t travel the road any longer. She’s older, now, living in a one-room apartment above a sex shop — her stipend would cover a better place, but not with her credit, and why bother? She does not date; she doesn’t even make friends. Nadine goes back to school; she takes on graduate work, and grades papers, and sleeps on a futon. She does not have a roommate. She doesn’t even have a cat. What’s that joke about the tombstone, the old lady who died a virgin? Returned unopened.

Nadine fires up her word processor.

I’m looking for people who were hitchhiking the continental United States between 1970 and 1995. I would like to hear your stories. I want to, backspace key held down, I am collecting information.

The process reminds her of that middle-school science experiment where you lay down a piece of white paper over a magnet and scatter iron filings, little grains of metal beading up into the lines of magnetic force. Take the data and throw it at a map. There are lines, but no patterns — no major shapes that can’t be accounted for by the natural rhythms of the interstate system and the distribution of Nadine’s data. He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere. Meet him by the overpass, meet him on a country road. Meet him where the roads converge. Maybe there just aren’t enough survivors to make good data.

We helped out a guy who fit that description driving our gear down to Tampa but we hadn’t gone halfway there when Buddy started picking a fight with the driver…

Or maybe there are too many nondescript men walking the highways of America, too many who are remarkable purely for being unremarkable. Too many men ready to trade for sex, or to beat and rob.

These are the lines underpinning her dreams — she looks them over like a palm-reader. They go from pen markings on an old road map to pins on a corkboard, from fat yellow-headed pins to markings on a web page, fat red pin-drops. Nadine writes a book, barely better than a pamphlet, then another.

At night her lover worms a fat red tongue into her ear and tells her she is closer than ever. Nadine, my queen—

And where has she heard that before, why did her brain come up with that, why does it rattle in her head with the echoes of a cardboard planchette clattering on linoleum tile —

Nadine, you’re getting warmer. In her dreams, he pins back her legs as a swarm of tongues sweeps her clean, leaves her raw and exhausted and unstrung, and in her dreams she likes it.

*

She is chasing him. Every few years, she packs up her books and her boxes into her old car and moves away. He is chasing her.

These are the symptoms: it is always a man, he is always handsome, he is always dark, he is always cruel. There is always a feeling of clarity, a certainty that is only an aspect of cold panic, fear itself turned inside-out like a rubber Halloween mask.

Nadine, Nadine, what does it mean?

At least she’s not alone. There are plenty of names. One man remembers receiving an unspecified document from one Robert Franks; another woman says she went to bed with a man named Reilly Flannigan, which is so comically Irish-sounding it must be a joke in itself. On the West Coast, he is always Flagg, Flagg, Flagg. People remember him doing favors:

He gave me a ride to my ex-wife’s place. I still don’t know how he knew her address.

Or, he was staying with some girls in this little apartment and he let me stay the night. He said he had to show me something, and he took out a tape — I thought we were going to watch a porno. He put it on the TV and it’s the motorcade in Dallas.

People remember him doing things they themselves were too frightened to do, and for good reason. They remember him commandeering control of a non-violent pot-farming collective, and a men’s self-improvement retreat in rural Arizona, a student union or a racist militia. Escalating and improving, refining and innovating.

Or, the MUFON conference was in Vegas that year, and somebody said there was a killer lecture just down the strip…

Or, the cops were cracking people’s heads, and some guy in a denim jacket handed me a beer bottle…

Cutting a snaky path across the American countryside — when he turns up in a city it’s always in the bosom of some great event, with violence breaking out on all sides of him like Legionnaires’ disease or something – like he puts it out into the air. Nadine is tracking the pathology of a plague, all right — she thinks of plagues when she thinks of her lover. She thinks of supply chains and the circulation of blood.

*

Nadine doesn’t dream anymore. She gets grants decent enough to pay for pills and, though she still wakes with talon-marks speckling her wrists and inner thighs, she does not dream. Nadine is sixty-five years old, and a virgin.

Her flight to the conference in Boulder is canceled. Not enough flight attendants, the desk agent says, must be on strike or something, but that’s not it, that’s not it at all. The news stories have slowed from a gush to a trickle, and the emails roll in steadily — someone needs an extension, someone can’t make it to class — until they don’t. Nadine does not and cannot care whether her students are dead, or simply afraid.

Her research has made a pleasant way of killing time. Nadine is like a sufferer of some arcane disease who patiently measures out pills and divides dosages and records side effects or a fitness nut who jogs and cuts out red meat and looks after her joints and valiantly ignores that this is only ever a one-way ticket.

The world is sick and getting sicker. Somewhere her dark man is striding inexorably onward, like a bullet. This must be how oncologists feel, identifying a rare cancer, or air marshals when the terrorists have seized the plane, or volcanologists when the black smoke belches up on the horizon and the earth begins to tremble. This is what her work has all been for. Now they finally meet.