“You got a second chance here, boy,” he said out loud. “You don’t have to be a pussy twice in one night.”
He opened the car door and slid inside, leaving the door open. The seat wobbled and a rat screeched and ran out from under it. Harry let out a little yell. The rat bailed through the open door. Harry watched its starlit shape hump across the ground and into the woods.
Maybe that’s what had scared him that long time ago.
A rat. A screeching rat. That could explain things. He was young and hadn’t seen it. It had startled him and made him run.
Yeah. That explained a lot of things.
“I’m not scared,” he said.
He pulled the door shut. Hard.
When the door slammed the sound was like the gate of hell had slammed, and there were other sounds, a whine, and a screech that was near deafening. A scream. Then there were psychedelic lights and flying colors, and the car was new and smelled fresh and clean and the world was bright and full of sunlight and there was a blur of cars out there on the highway and heat waves rippled and he could hear the wind whipping past, and hair, not his own, flicked long and wild in the wind from the open window.
A woman was sitting inside of him.
He didn’t know any other way to understand it. She was inside of him, and suddenly something dark appeared. A car, crossing an intersection, and Harry threw up his hands as they collided, and the woman inside of him, she jumped out of him, her head striking the steering wheel, and when it did a red haze filled his vision and splattered against the windshield.
To his right, a doll was thrown forward.
A large doll.
It hit the window hard, shattering it, making glass shards jump: then the doll twisted into a U shape, ricocheted off the inside of the car, passed through him once, striking the woman, bounced back against the glass, came to rest on the floorboard in a wad.
The doll leaked.
Only it wasn’t a doll.
It was a little girl.
He couldn’t tell much about her looks. She didn’t have any. Just a mess of blond hair with runs of scarlet in it, her face a nest of broken glass and a pool of blood. The blood was coming faster now. The car was coated in it.
He thought: Seat belts. Where are the seat belts?
He fell forward and hit his head against the steering wheel and the car went dark and dull and empty and turned old; the door screeched as he jerked it open and let out a yell.
He yelled more than once.
He yelled a lot.
His parents came out of the house and found him lying in the yard on his back, looking up at the stars, still yelling.
9
There were lots of doctors for the next few years. Doctors with charts and tests and even medicine that made him tired and a little loopy. It was supposed to help him focus. It was supposed to help him with his delusions. It made him feel bad.
A little later, he would think, yeah, I felt bad, but I was numb. And numb, that was good.
But back then he didn’t know that.
So, he quit taking the medicine, thought: Okay, maybe I’m a fruitcake with extra nuts, and maybe I’m not. And if I am a fruitcake, then I probably don’t know it. But I know this: My parents don’t have any money, and I’m costing them a ton because I might be nuts.
So I got to quit being nuts.
Or whatever is wrong with me has got to stop.
I’ll just stop now.
And he did stop.
Sort of.
He was sixteen and had his license. Had his first chance to go out and see the world from behind a steering wheel, and the truth of the matter was, he was frightened.
There had been other episodes.
One night, while riding in a car with Joey, who got his license first, he had “an experience.” It wasn’t the same as before. The car door closing was fine. The ride was fine. Then they hit a bump and the glove box snapped open and the lid dropped down with a reverberation, and it jumped on him.
Different this time. Milder. Just a bumpy ride at midday, a black man yelling as a car came out of nowhere. Just a fender-bender on the right side that knocked the glove box open, that and a high kick start on a rush of adrenaline. The driver even started to smile, happy he hadn’t gotten twisted into the metal. Then the man’s face fell off like melted black wax and the world Harry knew came back and it was all over.
Joey was sitting behind the wheel looking at him when he came out of it. Joey pulled over, said, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Quit jumping. You’re fucking me up, man.”
“What?”
“You’re hopping and screaming. Ain’t even any music on.”
“Shit,” Harry said.
“That’s what I almost did.”
“Is this car used?” Harry asked.
“Yeah. It is. What you think, I get an old model and no one’s ever driven it? Like it’s been sitting on the car lot for a few years till I buy it?”
“Was it ever wrecked?”
“I don’t know. How the fuck would I know? Close the glove box. That fucker’s always popping open.”
“Can we leave it open so it doesn’t do that again?”
“You got more pussy ways than anyone I know. Yeah. Leave it open if it don’t make you hop and yell. Most motherfuckers like to listen to the radio, they’re gonna do that hoppin’ about. But you, you got the silent drummer going on, you know.”
There had been other incidents, not in cars. In houses. When he visited Joey, and Joey’s father closed the door, there had been images of Joey’s mother being shoved up against it, taking a whack. There were places all over that house like that. Memories hidden in the walls where Joey and his mother and siblings had been bounced by Joey’s father. That place was a smorgasbord of fear.
It gave Harry a kind of sick stomach to be there. All that angry business hidden in the walls and furniture, the way Joey and his mom and his brother had to glide by without disturbing the air around Mr. Barnhouse. And the way Barnhouse looked at him, as if he were some interloper there to do him harm or take away his television set, which seemed to be Barnhouse’s lifeline. Without that, he would have had nothing but silence, the life inside his own head.
Harry figured it wasn’t very nice in there, in Mr. Barnhouse’s head, and that noise of any kind, beating the wife and children now and then, was welcome. Anything but silence. Anything but being alone with himself inside his head.
He quit going there, waited on the porch until Joey came out. Found ways to be somewhere else, have Joey meet him somewhere, like his own home.
Home was a sanctuary. There were no horrors hidden in that old house, and his parents weren’t creating anything that might be recorded.
Oh, there was something by the windows. Where he had fallen when he was six. Once when he stomped the
