He was a young man and not in his right mind. Other than that, he wasn’t sure of anything.
The skin on his hands was wrinkle-free, white as no-fat milk, two heads taller than the cars rolling past, and his scratchy beard came down below his Adam’s apple. There was a time he hadn’t been able to grow a beard, but exactly how long ago was that? His memory was vanishing behind him like the road he was walking on.
And that wasn’t right either. He was walking on the shoulder, not the road.
He knew the words for things, but not the word for himself. She’d given him a name, and he’d mislaid it, along with the memory of his face. Back at the cabin, the windows had black contact paper that turned them into mirrors when the lights were on—he could remember staring at his reflection, talking to it, but now couldn’t picture his features or Momma’s face either, or isolate her voice from the TV chatter in his head, and when he tried to see her as anything but a shape in a doorway, or a sleeping body in a bed, his thoughts darkened and a film of sweat bubbled out along his hairline.
Not only that, but none of the billboards made sense. DentWizard Auto Body, Braxton Acura, Glorious Nurseries, nothing rang a bell. The road’s name was I-35, which gave him a feeling he could be from anywhere, and caused another wave of sadness to crash over him. He clenched his fists inside the pockets of his jeans, and felt the scabs on his palms loosen and the blood trickle out.
Where had these cuts come from? He had a vague memory of stumbling out the cabin door, dragging his windbreaker behind him, and scaling the fence that enclosed the backyard. Were the rips in his pants a clue? No money in the pockets, so either you didn’t have time to rifle Momma’s purse or you simply ran out.
If you’ve run out of money, how long since you last ate? Have you been begging? But there was an art to that, you couldn’t learn it from TV. TV was aimed at people with wallets and credit cards and I.D.s. No begging lessons.
So maybe you haven’t eaten at all. You made it to the highway, and all you’ve been doing since then is walking. And if you haven’t been eating you can’t be that far from home—although the absence of woods argued against that. No trees in sight, just two windowless factories with an alley between them and two mud-brown, slope-lidded metal containers along one of the walls. Dumpsters, they were called—sometimes they had food in them.
Well, if you know that, he told himself, maybe that’s how you’ve been scraping by.
He started toward the dumpster, and the moment he broke into a run, a foul-looking dog came barreling around the corner of the factory, as though it had picked up the scent of the blood on his palms. Put a drop of a man’s sweat in a swimming pool, a dog can sniff it out, some breeds—he’d seen that on Animal Planet. But this didn’t look like any TV dog. TV dogs either went for your throat or were super well-behaved, but this dog skidded to a stop and was giving him the evil eye. In his mind, he asked the creature to stay put, then tiptoed around it, thrusting one scabby hand in his pocket, and stuck out his other thumb: people in old movies used to do this, why didn’t I think of it before? And the instant he put out his thumb he heard the screech of car brakes. A Honda, he recognized its logo from TV, and it was waiting for him up the road.
He sprinted toward it—the dog might be in his head, but this car hopefully was no mirage. At the wheel was a woman with bright red lipstick.
“I’m going as far as Trego,” she said. “Does that help you?”
As far as he could tell, the woman was real, so he opened the door and climbed in, slamming it just as the foul-looking dog pulled even with the Honda.
“I don’t usually stop for riders,” said the woman, easing back into traffic. “This must be your lucky day.”
Through the rear window he saw the dog retreating into the alley. When he glanced at the woman again she was giving him a funny look, as though attempting to figure out exactly why she’d stopped. Evidently, she hadn’t seen the dog.
“You’re welcome,” said the woman.
That was just like Momma—to speak without being spoken to. A girl was singing on the stereo, he wasn’t sure who.
“Miranda Lambert,” said the woman. “Where you headed, hon?”
He was supposed to make up something, but that was another thing TV hadn’t taught him.
Anywhere but home.
“So, where’s home?”
I wish I knew.
“Yeah, you look a little lost. My name’s Irma, what’s yours?”
Begins with J. He took off his cap, examining it to see if there was a name stitched anywhere.
“See, I told you my name just now, you’re supposed to tell me yours. I give you a ride, you give me conversation. That’s how this works.”
Nothing on the cap, not even a brand name.
“All right, let’s try another tack. Where are you from originally?”
“All over.”
“You don’t look old enough to be from all over. What’s the matter?”
Trees.
“What about them? They’re just pine trees, nothing special.”
Beyond the trees were pieces of a lake. The glare off the water was making his stomach turn over.
“You’re in a bad way, aren’t you, hon?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said.
“I guess so. What are you running away from?”
“Hard to say.”
“Why is that hard to say?”
“It’s kind of fuzzy.”
“Right. You’re doing some drugs, are you?”
“Drugs?” he said. There were picnickers in the pine grove, and kids playing on the beach, and fingers of fog curling through the reeds. “Just generics,” he said.
“Generics. O-kay.”
The fog fingers looked ready to pluck him from the Honda. “Momma used to take sleeping pills. When I couldn’t sleep,” he added.
“When you couldn’t sleep. Uh-huh. And where’s your momma at now?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Oh, I think you do know,” the woman said and abruptly braked the car, swerving into a small parking lot with vans and trucks and a small log building with GENTS and LADIES over the doors. “I think you want to get out here.”
Yes.
“Yes. I think you’ve ditched your family, and you’re having second thoughts. Thing you don’t want to do, though, is end up in jail or in a hospital.”
But that’s where I belong.
“You belong with your people. So get yourself back there, OK?”
“OK,” he said aloud.
“That’s better,” said the woman. “And try and cheer up, all right?”
“All right,” he said, and got out of the Honda before the fog could grab him. The moment the woman was gone he started loping through the pine grove toward the lakefront. Torn clouds were moving in a pale blue sky, toy boats sputtered along the shore, a Frisbee skittered past his feet. Near an empty lifeguard stand, a sign reading SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK was planted in the dirty gray sand. Beside it a young woman lay sleeping, a straw hat tilted over her face.
He bent down and picked up a rock.
A large beetle crawled out from underneath. The sight of it made him feel in the wrong somehow—for exposing the creature to the noon light. He lifted the beetle by a foreleg, returning it to the bare oval patch left by the rock, then started to replace the rock itself, but realized he was in danger of crushing the beetle, so instead he dropped the rock in his pocket.
The woman sleeping by the lifeguard stand bolted awake, clutching her straw hat; a man guiding a toy boat dropped the joystick he was holding; three small boys looked up from the sand castle they were building and shouted for their mothers.
He began to fill both his pockets with rocks.
And though no one was actually watching him, the whole beach was coming alive with murmurs, as if writing had suddenly appeared in the sky, or a famous person had walked out of the pines. In a minute his pockets were full, and he made his way down to the water’s edge.
A baby began to wail. A couple embracing on the grass broke off a long kiss.
He waded deeper into the lake, toy boats bobbing in his wake.
See, Momma, you were dead wrong. I can’t walk on water after all.
Excerpt from the horror novel The Sender by Tom Baum
Available At
Amazon
The movie The Sender, written by Tom Baum, is out on Blu-Ray 17 June, 2019