Mile 81

meat beneath. The pain was immediate and enormous. She screamed, dropped her phone, and tried to shove herself away, almost as if the car were one of her old mud-wrestling opponents. Her right hand and forearm disappeared through the yielding membrane that looked like a window. What appeared on the other side, vaguely visible through the scrim of mud, wasn’t the hefty arm of a large and healthy horsewoman but a starving bone with flesh hanging from it in tatters.

The station wagon began to pucker.

A car passed southbound, then another. Thanks to the trailer, they didn’t see the woman who was now half in and half out of the deformed station wagon, like Brer Rabbit stuck in the tarbaby. Nor did they hear her screams. One driver was listening to Toby Keith, the other to Led Zeppelin. Both had his particular brand of music turned up loud. In the restaurant, Pete Simmons heard her, but only from a great distance, like a fading echo. His eyelids fluttered. Then the screams stopped.

Pete rolled over on the filthy mattress and went back to sleep.

The thing that looked like a car ate Julianne Vernon clothes, boots, and all. The only thing it missed was her phone, which now lay beside Doug Clayton’s. Then it popped back into its station wagon shape with that same racquet-hitting-ball sound.

In the hoss-trailer, DeeDee nickered and stamped an impatient foot. She was hungry.

4. THE LUSSIER FAMILY (’11 Expedition)

Six-year-old Rachel Lussier shouted, “Look, Mommy! Look, Daddy! It’s the horse-lady! See her trailer? See it?”

Carla wasn’t surprised Rache was the first one to spot the trailer, even though she was sitting in the backseat. Rache had the sharpest eyes in the family; no one else even came close. X-ray vision, her father sometimes said. It was one of those jokes that isn’t quite a joke.

Johnny, Carla, and four-year-old Blake all wore glasses; everyone on both sides of their family wore glasses; even Bingo, the family dog, probably needed them. Bing was apt to run into the screen door when he wanted to go out. Only Rache had escaped the curse of myopia. The last time she’d been to the optometrist, she’d read the whole damn eye chart, bottom line and all. Dr. Stratton had been amazed. “She could qualify for jet fighter training,” he told Johnny and Carla.

Johnny said, “Maybe someday she will. She’s certainly got a killer instinct when it comes to her little brother.”

Carla had thrown him an elbow for that, but it was true. She had heard there was less sibling rivalry when the sibs were of different sexes. If so, Rachel and Blake were the exception that proved the rule. Carla sometimes thought the most common two words she heard these days were started it. Only the gender of the pronoun opening the sentence varied.

The two of them had been pretty good for the first hundred miles of this trip, partially because visiting with Johnny’s parents always put them in a good mood and mostly because Carla had been careful to fill up the no- man’s-land between Rachel’s booster seat and Blake’s car seat with toys and coloring books. But after their snack- and-pee stop in Augusta, the squabbling had begun again. Probably because of the ice cream cones. Giving kids sugar on a long car trip was like squirting gasoline on a campfire, Carla knew this, but you couldn’t refuse them everything.

In desperation, Carla had started a game of Plastic Fantastic, serving as judge and awarding points for lawn gnomes, wishing wells, statues of the Blessed Virgin, etc. The problem was the turnpike, where there were lots of trees but very few vulgar roadside displays. Her sharp-eyed six-year-old daughter and her sharp-tongued four-year- old boy were beginning to renew old grudges when Rachel saw the horse-trailer pulled over just a little shy of the old Mile 81 rest stop.

“Want to pet the horsie again!” Blake shouted. He began thrashing in his car seat, the world’s smallest break-dancer. His legs were now just long enough to kick the back of the driver’s seat, which Johnny found tres annoying.

Somebody tell me again why I wanted to have kids, he thought. Somebody remind me just what I was thinking. I know it made sense at the time.

“Blakie, don’t kick Daddy’s seat,” Johnny said.

“Want to pet the horrrrsie!” Blake yelled. And fetched the back of the driver’s seat an especially good one.

“You are such a babykins,” Rachel said, safe from brother-kicks on her side of the backseat DMZ. She spoke in her most indulgent big-girl tone, the one always guaranteed to infuriate Blakie.

“I AM AIN’T A BABYKINS!”

“Blakie,” Johnny began, “if you don’t stop kicking Daddy’s seat, Daddy will have to take his trusty butcher knife and amputate Blakie’s little feetsies at the ank—”

“She’s broken down,” Carla said. “See the traffic cones? Pull over.”

“Hon, that’d mean the breakdown lane. Not such a good idea.”

“No, just swing around and park beside those other two cars. On the ramp. There’s room and you won’t be blocking anything because the rest area’s closed.”

“If it’s okay with you, I’d like to get back to Falmouth before d—”

“Pull over.” Carla heard herself using the DEFCON-1 tone that brooked no refusal, even though she knew it was a bad idea; how many times lately had she heard Rache using that exact same tone on Blake? Using it until the little guy broke down in tears?

Switching off the she-who-must-be-obeyed voice and speaking more softly, Carla said, “That woman was nice to the kids.”

They had pulled into Damon’s next to the horse-trailer when they stopped for ice cream. The horse-lady (nearly as big as a horse herself) was leaning against the trailer, eating an ice cream cone of her own and feeding something to a very handsome beastie. To Carla the treat looked like a Kashi granola bar.

Johnny had one kid by each hand and tried to walk them past, but Blake was having none of that. “Can I pet your horse?” he asked.

“Cost you a quarter,” the big lady in the brown riding skirt had said, and then grinned at Blakie’s crestfallen expression. “Nah, I’m only kiddin. Here, hold this.” She thrust her drippy ice cream cone at Blake, who was too surprised to do anything but take it. Then she lifted him up to where he could pet the horse’s nose. DeeDee regarded the wide-eyed child calmly, sniffed at the horse-lady’s dripping cone, decided it wasn’t what she wanted, and allowed her nose to be stroked.

“Whoa, soft!” Blake said. Carla had never heard him speak with such simple awe. Why haven’t we ever taken these kids to a petting zoo? she wondered, and immediately put it down on her mental to-do list.

“Me, me, me!” Rachel bugled, dancing around impatiently.

The big lady set Blake down. “Lick that ice cream while I lift your sister,” she told him, “but don’t get cooties on it, okay?”

Carla thought of telling Blake that eating after people, especially strange people, was not okay. Then she saw Johnny’s bemused grin and thought what the hell. You sent your kids to schools that were basically germ factories. You drove them for hundreds of miles on the turnpike, where any drunk maniac or texting teenager could cross the median strip and wipe them out. Then you forbade them a lick on a partially used ice cream? That was taking the car seat and bike-helmet mentality a little too far, maybe.

The horse-lady lifted Rachel so Rachel could pet the horse’s nose. “Wowie! Nice!” Rachel said. “What’s her name?”

“DeeDee.”

“Great name! I love you, DeeDee!”

“I love you, too, DeeDee,” the horse-lady said, and put a big old smackeroo on DeeDee’s nose. That made them all laugh.

“Mom, can we have a horse?”