Ended up here because I got caught. Which is something we all here have in common, we the crew here at Winged Victory—we who run the ride, the unholy roller coaster, we who feed it.
Turned 18 the summer before my senior year. Party was just me and my dad and my little brother. We drank beer and shot at the empties in the woods. Both said they were happy and thankful I was alive, even if they didn’t always act/operate as such. If I’d’ve had my way, though, I wouldn’t’ve been alive for much longer after that. But I of course didn’t get my way, of course. Which I was already used to by then. Very rarely do I get my way.
I wrote...not a manifesto, exactly, no, it was hardly precise enough to be considered something like that; with the hard weight of time pressed upon me now, these days I’d call it a suicide note, a gay little note: I am grateful, I think is how it went, for the beautiful things I’ve seen/felt/done. But so many of you are not; on and on it went like that. Me sounding like the puppet from Saw.
Wasn’t going to just open fire on a crowd, not my style, no indiscriminate shooting, no. I mean to say that I wrote me a list. But I wasn’t planning on letting anyone get in my way, either, definitely not.
(I think these are all more common refrains than you might suppose; I think—I know—that there’s a lot of people out there like me. [—Wish I’d knew it sooner!])
Made the brutal, cardinal mistake of telling somebody, telling anybody, about these plans of mine. It was the mistake of vulnerability. And there can be no vulnerability for killers. I would learn this. I am still learning this…
Rex handcuffs the girl to the shoulder restraints. Redundancies ensure success. In the second row of the lead car. Girl is more lucid than they usually are. She pleads and pleads. Let me go. Don’t do this. You get it. But she doesn’t know what it is that we’re going to do here. She has some idea. She’s sixteen or seventeen. We’re all wearing gloves. Ben is here, too. ‘Was hoping for some action tonight,’ he’d said earlier. I wanted to pull his guts out his ass, one lengthy string of gore, when he did.
Rex is more circumspect about what we do. (He scares me much more than Ben does.) I tell him not to gag the girl, that I think she’ll vomit, which means she could choke, which means she could choke to her death. Which would be a failure and waste. And we could/would be disciplined...
Girl starts screeching.
‘Quit it, banshee,’ Ben spits at her from the other side of the loading platform. ‘They know what we’re doin’ here—you think they don’t? No one’s comin’. Only ones that hear you are people who know what’s goin’ on.’
‘Save your strength,’ Rex agrees. ‘It’ll be easier.’
‘She’s about to puke,’ I say, and I’m right—gets it all over herself, her skirt and hoodie. She’s in a white skirt and a white hoodie, dressed like a victim, is what I’m thinking and what I don’t want to be thinking. Tan-yellow strings and chunks, exiting her.
Tell Rex to wipe her face off.
Ben asks, ‘What’s the use?’
But Rex does rub the wet crust from her mouth and chin with the back of his glove. She doesn’t bite him. She hardly responds. She’s given up. Cries quietly.
‘You’re lookin’ at her with little boy eyes,’ Ben says to Rex. Rex ignores him. ‘Know what I mean?’ he says to me. I spit at the fiberglass ground.
Rex changes his neck to look out at the gape of the night instead, pure darkness at the end of the length of station track. Coaster pulls an immediate left out the station into the lift, so straight ahead there’s only night a stub of track and then this darkness. The midway lights and the music off for hours by now. The overwhelm of the crickets’ chirping.
The station, by the way: massive complex, 3500 square feet, must be about, with high-vaulted roof, and small portals beneath the eaves open to the elements every ten feet. More bullets of dark through them. Light Greco-Roman motif throughout (‘theming’ seems too strong a notion). Plaster recreation of the titular degraded lady-statue sits in the triangular portico above the track, train passing under it after dispatch. Trains themselves are cream-colored, to further evoke the building materials of the ancients—with orange shoulder restraints, which evoke what? Well, I don’t know.
The station LEDs on full-blast now, migraine-inducers. Makes it even harder to see out into the black night. Air-gates have been removed for our greater convenience and maneuverability.
The girl, crying feebly.
(Ben is like me except five years older and he got slightly further. He was caught at his school in the act. Had two of his dad’s pistols, two USP Machs, like Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider movie, he says sometimes, and he makes finger guns, and I always spit at the fiberglass ground. He shot a cop. The ‘campus safety liaison.’ Not mortally—the woman lived, and is alive.)
(Ben is sort of fat, in horn-rimmed Prada glasses, family pretty rich. Rex tall as a small tree, and bald.)
‘Let’s get this over with,’ I say.
Rex nods, yeah yeah.
Ben rubs his hands together. ‘Dispatch,’ he says. Heads for the control panel beside the maw of the coaster’s path into night. Sticks his thumb up, the smartass. ‘All clear,’ he says, slapping the big button—which, yes, it is red.
Wringing fluid matter out my uniform, onto the back porch cedar. Hose it down later…
I’m 23 years old—young, to be sure—born in 1999. Winged Victory arose from the dirt in ‘91. Designed and built by Arrow Dynamics, who went bust over 20 years ago. Their rides slowly disappearing. The ones left are mostly very rough—a small few have been taken good care of. This one designed by Ron Toomer, whom I’m told is ‘the most famous rollercoaster designer in the history of the medium,’ is how Rex puts it, Rex who can clock a roller coaster’s manufacturer by track gauge and shape, by train restraint.
He’s been dead for a decade, apparently, this Toomer. He knew something was wrong with this one right away, apparently, visited the build site as little as he could, skipped the grand opening, never took a ride even once. Some folks read the energies of our world with their gifts. I am not one of these folks.
Days after they broke ground on WV, a worker was buried in a mound of earth moved to place a cement footer. Dead for a week by the time he was found, discovered only when they began hauling away the dirt. No one saw what happened. He was gone, just steam, vapor, until they found him and he was something again, an item you could again touch. Six more would go before they finished the ride.
Already there were theories. It’s Indian land here. Used to be an Army test range, too, experimental weapons, I’ve heard, whatever it means. But none of the other rides here ever’s had a single thing really go wrong, I’m talking zero casualties. They break like normal machines, get fixed by steady, sound machinists, work again for a while…
It was my girl I told. I mean, she wasn’t my girl. We did sleep together a few times. Four times.
Hosing down the cedar planks, the smell of wet wood, a smell I love.
She lived in a trailer park, and her parents were hardly around, and when they were around they were cruel to her and sometimes they beat her. She dressed in black and dyed her hair black and would cut herself during class, in the back, quietly, she’d make no noise, she’d keep going until she was caught, until she dripped onto the floor.
Loved it, and loved her—I’m a sick puppy, obviously. Thought she was one, too. But really she was crying for help, as is said; really she’s a normal woman who drew a bad hand in life. (She’s a secretary at a bank now, doing well, hair still soaked in black—I see her sometimes on her lunch break and when that happens we both pretend to not exist. [Her name is Lillian.])
Told her I was going to make everyone who ever hurt us pay. Told her we’d run away together after, that it ‘wasn’t a suicide mission,’ although it totally was. Told her we could go to Canada or Mexico—realistically, Mexico (—realistically?). We could hop on a freighter, work our way across an ocean, if that was a thing people still did we could do it. Could start over in Côte d’Ivoire, could start over in Malaysia, wouldn’t matter where so long as we were one there and never parted.
We slept together for our fourth and final time. She took pictures of my list with her phone, passed them onto her scumfuck guidance counselor, who passed them onto our school’s scumfuck school-cop, who passed them onto scumfuck proper detectives.
They expelled me. And put me under house arrest for the time being. They took my plans seriously. And in a sense, I was flattered…
Crew had to lift the torn goddess-replica Nike up into her portico with a carry deck crane: cable snapped the first attempt, de-legging a foreman…
One night a man arrived at our house—my father’s house, I suppose it was by then, all my life I was less and less welcome in there and at that point I don’t think I could call it ‘my house’ anymore, and now I pay my father rent—and this man who looked a lot like the actor Everett McGill, if you know who that is, from The People Under the Stairs. He sat on the fraying leather couch I’d spent about half my days on. He wore a Canadian tuxedo, but he was FBI. Flashed his badge. Said his name was Bobby and that I could call him Agent Bobby. He was there to see me. Made my father leave the room. I don’t know where my brother was.
‘Kid, I think you can help your country,’ Agent Bobby said.
I told him I didn’t know what he meant and that I wasn’t interested anyhow.
He said, ‘Let me put it this way, kid: you’re going to help your country.’
As in: no choice.
He went on: ‘Satan is a terrible force. We got ISIS and Hezbollah and the Houthis to fight, I’m sure you see this in the news—but really we are fighting Satan. Do you know this? What do you think of Satan?’
I said I thought Satan was pretty cool. And Agent Bobby punched me in the face, closed hand whipcracked against cheekskin. We were sitting next to each other on the couch like we were about to play video games. I bled a bit.
He told me he had an assignment for someone of [my] persuasion.
‘And what persuasion is that, are you saying?’
And he said, ‘You’re a killer.’
But was I even?
‘I’ve never killed anybody before,’ was my reply. And this was the truth at that time. I had failed, after all. I didn’t even hurt animals, like some sicker fuckers start out doing. I was pretty normal for a killer, if I was a killer. And I wasn’t even a killer yet, now was I?
‘But you will kill for us, son. Because we need you to, to protect your country. We need you to feed the Great Beast. This is one of many ways we feed Him.’
Told the man I had no idea what he meant.
‘We need about 40ish a year from the site.’
Then he said he’d be back for me two days from now, at 0600. Said I should learn some exercises for my calisthenics, for I’d be on my feet all day.
‘Bigger and brighter,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘Your future, son. Your future, dummy.’ The man punched my shoulder and left without summoning my father, who didn’t figure out that the fed had gone for another two hours, hours he spent cowering in his bedroom.
Me, I spent those hours dazed on the couch there still. Eventually turned on some TV.
I was to replace a man—really a boy—let’s call him Rupert. And Rupert’d been in the news some years back for blowing up his high school gymnasium with a Silverado-bed full of manure.
Miracle nobody got got—save for Rupert himself, they’d said, although that wasn’t actually true, he lived for a good while longer, recuperating in a secretive facility and then working on Winged Victory, living in an Embassy Suites a half mile from the park—until Winged Victory got him…
‘It’ll fit,’ Agent Bobby said, regarding Rupert’s uniform, handing it to me in the locker room below the ride. ‘It’s been mended and bleached.’
They used to have women here, too—babykillers—but they all went too quick. Ride wanted them, is what Rex’d tell me. They all lasted less than a year. None of them had families who cared. Rupert lasted many years. His family cared but thought he was dead, which is what the government told them.
‘You would’ve liked him,’ said Agent Bobby, driving me to the park in his Ford Explorer that first morning, driving through a back gate right up to the rear of the Winged Victory site. (I’d drive my own car to the site after this, my shitty Kia, they’d set me up with the proper credentials today.)
They only opened the ride to the public now on the busiest days, peak days, like the 4th of July. I’d work on the 4th of July and into the 5th. Winged Victory had lived a dual life for 20 years, giving rides to the public, operating every day of the season, feeding late at night. Then someone up top, a fed or a park president, decided it was too risky.
One day they called us in early. Park was way busier than they’d figured and they wanted to open the ride. We sat around waiting for final word to open it. They gave us this Hot Topic-looking, pink-haired woman, her name is Maya, she would stand at the front entrance (big fake-stone sign over it, held up by big fake-stone Corinthians on either side); she’d tell guests the ride was open if it was open, she’d check littles ones’ heights, make sure they were 48 inches or above, answer any other questions if she could. (They didn’t let minors work with us, but she looked real young, must have been nearly exactly my age/a little bit younger.) Rex and I operated the ride, we pushed the buttons. Ben assigned rows. We were shorthanded, so he and I checked restraints, too. But they didn’t call to open the ride that day after all.
So Ben and I get soft serve with Maya, over by the log flume. Maya usually works over at the Sea Serpent King, most popular ride here.
She asks why she doesn’t see us so often and Ben tells her they cut back our hours.
‘That’s not right of them,’ she says.
I play along: ‘It’s whatever. They take good care of us mostly. We’re in the machinists union. We’re saving the world.’
‘IAM? Never heard of ride ops being in IAM. My uncle is. He works for Harley-Davidson. Up in Tomahawk?’
‘It’s a temperamental ride, as I’m sure you’ve heard,’ says Ben. ‘We’re wearin’ a lot of hats over there. Nice of them to let us in the union. Real benefits, guaranteed wage, y’know?‘
Which seems to be enough for her. Ben and I had made it pretty far into our script this time. Union part makes them see we’re different than they are. This is why you do not often see us. This is why we work those funny hours.
I choose the chocolate/vanilla swirl. Ben gets vanilla (hah). Maya picks the chocolate. I pay for us all. Have little use for money now. Ben seems grateful for once.
With his head he motions now to some kids in line for the log flume, a young girl, maybe 10 or 11, and her younger brother, probably 8 years old, both in small blue ponchos.
‘Bet it’s them,’ he says. ‘Bet it’ll be them.’ Can’t tell if he thinks this is funny or no, in them stupid fucking designer shades.
But none of it seems to register with Maya anyway, spooning at her melting brown hill of soft serve. The kids disappear onto the ride. Sound of the log flume’s conveyer belt lift, a pleasant machine-hum with an audible slap of wetness. Takes you up into a fake lumber mill.
We let Maya take off. Ride won’t be opening today at all, at this point. They’ll put her back on her usual, assigning rows at the Sea Serpent King, until the evening shift…
We sit around for a long while on the loading platform. We read books on tall stools, Rex and I. And Ben plays games on his phone on the fiberglass ground. It’s like this most days.
Then dusk, then night, then total dark. Cool enough out for us to chill in the odd little locker room. I pace, Rex writes in his notebook, Ben eats a cantaloupe. Somewhere in its layout, Winged Victory clangs, beating metal. Hooves on steel, Rex always says. But we’re used to it.
About an hour more of all that and now Agent Bobby shows up. ‘Look alive,’ he says.
Rex asks if he’s got one for tonight.
‘Got two,’ says Agent Bobby. ‘Copper River salmon.’
Ben sneers.
We follow Agent Bobby out to the access road. Boots crunching. Ford Explorer, he pops open the back. There they are, just as Ben said. The brother lying on the girl. They’re drugged. Not in ponchos anymore.
Rex burps out an involuntary damn.
‘Not up to the task?’ Agent Bobby wants to know.
Rex says that he didn’t say that; only I can tell how excited he is, I think.
Agent Bobby shines a small beam of bright flashlight in the kids’ faces. They don’t acknowledge it at all. Breath slow, syrupy. ‘Carry them up,’ he says, he orders.
Ben and I take the girl. Rex slings her brother over his shoulder. Agent Bobby stays with the car. He’ll leave in a minute and we’ll tell him nothing. We got a number to call if we fuck anything up.
They don’t tell us how they pick them, but we get the picture: young teens and kids, usually girls, almost always white. ‘Making up for lost time,’ Ben said one day, and I clocked him, and he spit his blood onto the fiberglass ground. Don’t know why I did it. I’m the same as he is, pretty much…
‘Can you believe it?’ Ben says to me now, as we lift the girl up the three flights to the station.
‘Lucky guess.’
Dirt all over her. Under her nails. Was it a struggle? She protecting kid brother?
We strap the kids in together in the front row, handcuff them to the shoulder restraints. Have to wait until they come to or it’s no good. Both small, it’ll be a while. Silence, save for their shallow breath and out in the dark there’s the hooves on steel, that sound, beating metal.
I gag them with torn cloths because we clearly have the time for it and because I know lots of knots. Not supposed to do this but don’t want to bargain with children. Rex returning to his book, The Mars Project by Wernher von Braun, why the fuck would you read that? and Ben doing some quiet sets of sad sit-ups on the fiberglass ground.
I stare into the night, off towards the clangs. Too dark to see most of the layout, only slivers of lift-hill and supports visible.
Girl comes to. She’s a little bigger than her brother so the drugs wear off there a little faster, is what happens. Tries screaming but mostly coughs instead, and spits up, almost and nearly vomit, to such extent possible in the gag.
Her ruckus stirs little brother, wakes him. Ben slaps at his face like an idiot doctor trying at resuscitation.
Girl ugly-crying now, sobbing and snot. Ben laughing, soft enough he thinks he’s hiding it, but I hear it. Boy not understanding anything yet. Drugs too strong.
(Later I’ll find no way into sleep. My eyes will want it, but my neck will say no.)
Rex says, ‘Let’s get them gone.’
The boy never gets his wits back enough to make any stir at all, unlike big sis. Whatever: we work with what we got. Ben and I check their restraints again. The nauseated smell of the cloth in the girl’s mouth. Thumb up from Rex. Clamp down the rest of the shoulder harnesses over empty seats, or the ride won’t go anywhere. Still catching that near-vomit smell all along the train.
Thumbs up from Ben and me. Dispatch. Train rolls off. The night air scent reconvenes, wet dirt and funnel cake-runoff smell.
Clicking up the chainlift, and the hooves I hear too. Girl never quits her wailing, til the clicking and the hooves drown it out.
45 seconds or so. (YouTube POVs for WV go between 42-46 seconds. Runs faster on hot days. [Comments all: why is this one barely open? underrated ride—really all of them.])
Some of the girl returns with the train: her bottom half and her right palm and wrist, half-furled around the thin metal handlebar sticking out from the shoulder restraint to the extent that it can still, still handcuffed. No fingers, no nothing else.
And her brother completely gone. Seat empty, not much blood.
‘Whose turn is it?’ Ben wants to know. We have to make sure. ‘It’s your turn,’ he says to me. We stare off the side of the platform, into the tar of night.
‘Is it?’ but I know he’s right.
‘I think it is,’ says Rex, licking his lips a bit as he says this. Out of character for him, I’d say.
Push through a slit in the tall chain-link. Robins singing. Wouldn’t know it’s this planet I was on if they didn’t. They sing in the night here, all night. They never stop singing here, and clang of the hooves.
For a time tall grasses thrived under Winged Victory, I am told; our predecessors bit by snakes with great frequency, copperheads. But then they salted the earth here, so to speak, with Paraquat or some such shit—nothing’ll grow here anymore, not ever again, just dirt now, now and always.
Darkened, shuffling figures monitoring me, hidden in memories of grasses. They hum. Wear earpods to keep the sounds off me, keep the hooves out too. Makes it easier—or if not easier, simpler.
Rex says whatever you imagine you’re seeing here is what you’re seeing. Turn my mind off as much as I can, turn it toward the few better things I genuinely know, television and waterfalls and turkey dinners.
No sign of nothing other than the dark silhouettes. The singing of birds. We are saving the world. We are the last line between here and Hell. The little girls and boys go to Heaven, I think. I think what we do to them gets them a free pass into Heaven.
I will not go to Heaven; I may never leave this place, if the figures following me, surrounding me, are any indication.
And even when I go home, am I really leaving? Dad don’t look at me much. My brother’s gone. I mean, he’s alive. He’s in school now. Studying. He will live a normal life. Maybe a decent life. Normal life is not necessarily decent. Dad doesn’t know exactly what I do but it doesn’t matter, he knows I’m doing something, knows the blood in my clothes and my shoes, scans for violence in my face. He speaks five or ten words to me in a week…
And there Dad is with the figures. He has more compassion for the figures than he has for me. No words for me tonight here. I follow him through the cold tunnels of steel supports, lines of crooked columns. The hard dirt half flesh.
Still no sign of the boy or the boy’s remains, whichever parts of him weren’t accepted—usually there’s not so much left. Just need to find something, anything—could be teeth, or hair, or chunks of gore and bloody bone—to make sure…
The other week Dad screamed at me for gunking up the shower drain with specks of someone. ‘I tolerate your presence here,’ he kept saying. ‘I tolerate your presence.’ He meant that he does not….
I keep following this specter copy of him, this trick of the Great One the Devil. (There’s a reason only one of us goes out on these runs, His tricks have made our forerunners turn on each other, joining their work in the bloodfield of dirt.)
‘Slow down,’ I tell him or it.
‘Make me,’ Dad says without turning back to me. These phantoms can act oddly childish, it’s discomfiting.
He takes a sharp left down another corridor of night and steel, but I keep pressing straight on toward the fence and the light of the half-moon twinkling through the high chain-link. ‘I tolerate your presence,’ ‘I tolerate your presence—’ he must have said it 20 times.
From far off, much farther than he could have moved so quickly in his corporeal form, I hear him crying. I hear my brother’s cries join his. I hear my mother’s cries now, too: I never knew her, I couldn’t tell you what she sounds like, know her face only from pictures losing their color in plastic sleeves—but I know this is her—I know the sounds she would make somehow.
In my mind I tell them to go away and that I’m sorry. I tell them how sorry I am. I tell them I have never been sorry about anything except for this. Screaming in my head. Tell Mom I’m sorry she’s dead. Tell her I had nothing to do with that. Accident, anyhow. Tell her I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Moonglint catching on something small and hard and shining light brown, lightened against the dead ground. Toenail. And nine more beside, a perfect little line. Gauzy with blood, already dry. Right at the fence, on the ground before it, there in the punished dirt. I barely realize that I’ve made it to the end of my territory—beyond the tall chain-link: coyotes, vagrants, nothing special, everything special’s inside the cordon.
I find these pieces of the boy because I am meant to find them. We are being rewarded for our exploits, troubling though they are.
Things will continue as they are.
Work here more than a year and the park around you largely disappears. Nothing much to me beyond the WV site. Grass and gravel and mist from the fans hanging everywhere. And keep away from the teens. Because we do venture out into the park sometimes, sure, like I said before. But there is a boundary between us and the place. My earbuds drown out their music, by turns Top 40 and carnival music—you know, like circus music, chintzy recordings of waltzes and duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh, you know? so I stick to my own music. Mostly heavy music (surprise!).
And I’ll take a ride on the Sea Serpent King with Rex every month or two. He gets something out of this I’ll never understand. I mean, it’s fun, for sure. Just a few years old, state-of-the-art, enormous, 70mph, smooth as a mirror, built by Vekoma, they built the Tron ride at Disney. Most popular ride here.
Rex is too shy to cut through the exit, even though we’re employees, it’s allowed. Doesn’t know anyone who runs the ride. We only get on on quiet days.
I remind him that that Maya girl works it.
‘Don’t really know her,’ he says.
But she knows him. Always says hi to us both if she’s working.
Talk to her a bit, pretend to be normal because op sec and why not?—but Rex just nods. Maya’s hair green now.
‘Haven’t seen you for a minute,’ she says from the other side of the air gates.
‘You know how it goes,’ I reply. Rex facing perpendicular, leaning against the queue rail, not looking our way at all, nodding automatically.
‘You can cut if I’m here, you know. Or even if I’m not here.’ She’s smiling, too.
‘Rex a bit of an Eagle Scout-type,’ I say. He says nothing, keeps looking at nothing, just nodding automatically.
‘How come Ben never rolls up with you guys?’
The ride shakes, makes noises—but they’re new noises; no hooves here.
‘He doesn’t like roller coasters,’ Rex says finally, still looking off at the puddle of the rest of the people in line. ‘I never made it past Life Scout,’ he adds.
(You enter the queue through gaping serpent mouth, void the size of a two-story home. Line is a surprisingly dark and detailed air-conditioned walk through the King’s innards, lots of decorative junk staged as if swallowed, half a chewed-up motorcycle, mangled fake-bloody dummies of scuba divers and oil derrick engineers. Rubbery path meant to be tongue and then throat and then digestive tract. Trains meant to be small submarines the creature swallowed intact, painted bright-piss-yellow—and you launch [with electro-magnets] out its side to ‘escape,’ complete with tearing sound effects [on-board audio] and supposed rivers of green hemoglobin [tastefully kept off your clothes]; every lap on the ride you’re killing the serpent, you even exit on a platform outside, because you’ve escaped, and Rex claps, most of the riders do every time…)
Agent Bobby sticks around one night, especially clean and quick cycle, makes us look good.
14-year-old girl, unremarkable in all ways except for her role here and for the matter that she puts up no fight at all, even when she comes to, totally eerie about it, some give up but not like this—says nothing but is present, makes no noise and she’s not even gagged, avoids our gaze but follows commands, nods, shakes her head.
Doesn’t sit so well with me, and doesn’t seem to sit well with Ben, but he keeps it together in front of the boss, and so do I. Rex just treats it like anyone else.
Off she goes, calm as can be. The clangs.
Other than this stuff, we all look good in front of Agent Bobby…
In the locker room afterward, he offers to move me into my own place. Government housing. One bedroom tract house. Whole neighborhoods are theirs, turns out. And he says the neighbors will leave me alone.
‘They are compelled to leave you alone,’ he says, ‘just as you are compelled to leave them alone.’
There’s a catch, of course: it’d mean a new identity, fed-concocted. My death faked, like Rupert’s. Family lied to and gone from my life for good—except for those phantoms under the ride.
‘So it’s witness protection?’
‘Something like that,’ he says. Deed in my new name, legit papers and a new car (still an import)—as above board as any forgery so large could possibly be.
I tell him I’ll think about it. Tell him I don’t know.
‘Open offer,’ is his reply.
Close out the year on a ‘high note:’ ten souls gone to the Great Beast in December, an all-time record for us Winged Victory crew. Seven girls, three boys; oldest 19 (girl), youngest seven (boy). Hooves on steel.
Hooves on steel…
Dad and me in the same room, watching movies, like Last Action Hero and The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Last Boy Scout. My brother home for a few days after Christmas. He knows something horrible has happened, is happening, and doesn’t care to ask either of us about it. He is the smartest of us.
Except he does ask if I can get him into the park for free, Or at least a discount, he begs—wants to try out the Sea Serpent King for himself, do the log flume (never cold here anymore) and the bumper cars, maybe bring Carrie, he used to get with her in high school, they’re still close and she never left this place.
‘No,’ Dad says. ‘No.’
We’re all on the couch watching Schwarzenegger in Collateral Damage, we’re all drinking eggnog.
‘What? Why not?’ asks my brother. ‘What you mean?’ asks my brother.
‘Listen to him,’ I say, Zen-like from the middle of the ocean that is myself—‘I’m stuck there so you don’t have to be,’ I say. ‘That’s what he means. And that I’m not the best influence.’
This nonsense shuts them both up, but the détente in this place has burst apart; we’ve returned to our permanent leave from normalcy…
So I’ll take the house, I decide, take the new car and the new me. I’m barely a person this go-round, anyway. Seldom few get the chance to start anew like this…
Well, won’t really be starting over.
I’ll still be killing on behalf of an off-the-books counterintelligence program, federal Satan mitigation, is what Rex called it one time, which sounds about right. (The terms of my employment have never been totally defined, and I don’t care to ask after them.)
I’ll still struggle telling anyone a single thing about my life, let alone the sum of it. Not even allowed to, anyway.
But I’ll be alone for real, instead of alone and with others, exhausted constantly. Could jerk off anywhere. Could cook whatever I want, stink be damned. Take home a woman for once, maybe. Maybe try taking a man.
(Even using the damn word like that—home–sending foam to the mouth...)
We get New Year’s Eve and Day off, and a couple more days after. Guess the Devil goes on a bender around then.
Brother leaves, returns to school, we’ll never speak again; Dad gets back to his work, too—how many words are there left to be said between us? Less than a hundred, is my best guess.
But I’ll see them both under the ride, anyway…
Go get a glimpse of my girl at the bank. Just for a minute. Lillian. She doesn’t see me this time, I don’t think. I don’t exist…
Clock back in on the 4th. A Wednesday. I’ll tell Agent Bobby tonight that we have a deal, if he shows up with one for us. Hooves on steel, metal beating in broad daylight. Mostly a quiet day of reading: Rex reading an Aubrey-Maturin novel, and me reading Lonesome Dove, and Ben doing his exercises on the fiberglass ground that don’t seem to ever carve into any part of his body, don’t seem to do much at all, other than pass the time til the next kill.
And Nike herself, looming above in her portico. Always…
-- Z.H. Gill edits Burial Magazine. He is the co-director/co-producer/co-writer/co-star of the condensed feature film Chongqing Pink.
