one seventy eight

This story was originally published in Broken Pencil issue #62

Here in Inyokern, New Year's Eve is a case of Silver Bullet and your handgun outside the city limits. Maybe some Mexican firecrackers. Definitely some tina. What the eve of the new year is most certainly not is the following: champagne, Courvoisier, strippers, hot tubs, dancing, or a big silver ball dropping. They ain't even got champagne at the Lucky Liquor.

Inyokern, California. On the 395, which goes from Inland Empire to Reno. Destinations worthy of the wildest dreams. We got an airport. Airstrip, I guess. We also got a fuckin blacksmith.

I guess some people have horses, or something. I never used the blacksmith. I work at the Mobil. I was working at the goddamn Mobil on this New Year's Eve in question. This was just after they bulldozed downtown.

Nothing around. No one around. I had to work all night the 31st and then again during the day on the first. I was pissed. I think maybe two cars come through. We didn't have the fast pay they got now so every single customer that come through I'd ring up. Even so, talked to two people all night. If people wanted cigarettes, or RC to mix with their SoCo, they were going to the 76 in town. Goddamn Mobil was too far out of town.

I had been born in Inyokern. My parents were dead. My brother was off somewhere, I think homeless. Haven't talked to him in years. I didn't know shit from shit, man. I hadn't hardly ever left Inyokern. I was working at this Mobil on the 395, just by myself all day or all night. January in the high desert is cold as your mother's tits. I was freezing fuckin cold in that Mobil station, just counting down the seconds until I could punch out and go home, wearing ski gloves. I knew all my buddies were at the bar just having a good old time, probably going to get laid too, and here I was stuck working this bullshit gas station. Man.

I powered through the shift on NoDoz and Charleston Chew. At six a.m. I got in the Ranger and headed home. Home was a rat hole apartment, tiny and dark and always smelling like exhaust or fried food. I got to watch the sunrise on the way home, though, and that sunrise was one of those things I knew I'd miss if I left. Not that it kept me there, but it always made me feel a little less stir crazy. Some things just make a place home, and the sunrise in Inyokern made me happy to be there for a few minutes, happy I'd been born there and not somewhere it was foggy in the morning.

I stumbled up the stairs, NoDoz just about wore off. My building was one of those places that looks like a cheap motel — all the apartments connected by a balcony. You walk up the stairs and past all your neighbors' front doors on the thinnest carpet. Everything's dusty and worn. My apartment didn't even have a stove. Shit, maybe it was a motel. I don't know.

So l went up the stairs and sat on my couch for a while. I had to work again in five hours. I spent a little too long deciding if I should try to sleep, and then my body decided for me, and I woke up on my couch with furry teeth and bleary eyes 20 minutes before I had to be at work. I was pissed.

I should have woke up in time to have a beer or a shot or something before I drove out. Instead I took a couple more NoDoz. Thought about breaking into my little stash of cross tops but this was going to be a shorter shift and I didn't want to be up any later than I had to afterwards.

I went back to work. More customers later in the shift, maybe people heading home from Reno or heading up to Reno or heading wherever the fuck. Maybe locals. Sold more cigarettes that day, enough so I actually remember selling them. I didn't smoke, at the time. One of the few people in town who didn't I guess. So it's New Year's Day, a whole brand new year to wallow in, and I'm working at the Mobil selling cigarettes and gasoline and NoDoz and 10W-30. Gum and pop rocks to kids who rolled up on Mongooses, covered in grey desert dust and going crazy from winter break with nothing to do. The kids killed me. I would let them talk at me if they wanted, tell me about their radical jump or how they drove their stepdad's S10 down from Onyx one time, yeah, really! I knew just what it was like.

Sometimes I would sell them smokes if they were like 13 or 14. 1 knew I shouldn't, but shit, I grew up here. I would have killed for a grown up who would listen to me talk about my BMX and let me smoke and not be all shitty about how someday when I'm grown I'll regret it, or whatever.

So I sell some kids some Pall Malls, and then I'm out of there. Clayton comes in and I clock out and throw my work shirt in the back of the cab. It's almost sunset. Another time of day that makes me glad to live in the desert. Almost content with it. And I pull into my parking space at the motel apartment building. And I'm at the base of the outside stairs that go to the second floor, where my unit is, when I see a fuckin' lady's shoe. I stop, I do not to this day know why. It's just an abandoned shoe, like you see anywhere.

But it's not really. It's a high heeled gold shoe. I have never seen a shoe like this in my life. Maybe at first I'm not even certain it's a shoe. Jesus, how do you walk on one of these? Plus, the thing is bloody as hell. It's got blood stains all over.

You know how sometimes there's a spot on like a shirt or in your car and you think oh maybe it's blood, no, it's just really old ketchup? But when there is a real bloodstain you fuckin' know it's blood and not no old ketchup or coffee. And this stuff was not even that old dried up brown deep stain. It was red, and compared to the shiny gold leather it was dull. Dead blood.

I couldn't stop myself, I picked the goddamn thing up. Gold fuckin' shoe. Covered in blood.

I never seen anything like it. Even though my fingers were turning blue I stood outside holding this gold high heeled shoe, with all these like straps coming off it. After a while, maybe just a few seconds, I went up the stairs with the shoe in my hand. I went to bed, the exhaust and cash stink from work still on me.

Woke up a few hours later and took a shower.

Kinda I'd forgot about the shoe at that point.

Went in the kitchen and heated up a tortilla with some Velveeta in it. Popped open a Bud. Sat on the couch and flipped through the Auto Trader.

Remembered the shoe. I got up and got it from by the door where I'd set it down. Looked at it, turning it over and over in my hand. I did not then, nor do I now, know shit about women's shoes. Women look good in them. That is the extent of my understanding. So I was not sure why, but this shoe looked expensive. It did not look like something you could buy at the Payless Shoe Source or at KMart. I wasn't sure where you'd get a shoe like that - not anyplace in Inyokern, probably not anywhere in Kern County. It looked like a Los Angeles kind of shoe.

Maybe some movie people left it here. That was the obvious answer. Every so often movie people would drive out from L.A. to use the downtown strip or the airport. But last that'd happened had been a few months ago, and this was definitely not something that could have sat in front of my apartment for a few months. The blood looked real fresh.

I started to think maybe I should call the cops. What if this girl was dead? What if she was murdered or something? Stupid fuckin' idiot.

Why did I pick up a goddamn blood covered shoe? My prints would be all over it, and now l was involved.

I crushed my can and got up to fetch another.

This shit was spinning me out. I turned on the tube for a while. I couldn't concentrate, though, not on The Price Is Right. My mind kept going back to that fuckin shoe. How much is a blender worth? How much is a high heeled shoe worth?

I tried to think if I'd seen anyone, anyone at all, who might wear that shoe. There were girls who'd like to have the kind of life where they could step out of a Mercedes wearing those things, in a little designer dress. But that's not the kind of life girls have in the high desert, not really. Maybe on prom night they get to dress up like movie stars and rest on the arm of a boy who's just dying to get them to their rented hotel room bed. Maybe if they take a trip somewhere. But even on New Year's Eve, in Inyokern there is no place to go wearing shoes like that. Break your ankle getting out your boyfriend's truck.

Picture Lynnie, the girlfriend I'd screwed around with in high school, who I could still call when I was bored and nostalgic for dusty triumphs. Picture her in her Bond-O-and-primer

Firebird she was so proud of, in these shoes.

Didn't fit. Lynnie had some thick wedge-type ones like Sally Field in Smokey & the Bandit. I distinctly remembered her wrapping legs in tight jeans around my waist so I could carry her from the bleachers to that Firebird, and those wedges were on her big feet. Lynnie who worked at the veterinarian now.

There were other girls, who I drank with, girls who wouldn't give me the time of day and girls who'd give me whatever I wanted. But none of them could I imagine in a shoe like this. They wore boots, dust-covered tennis shoes, wedges

They wore tight Wranglers and flannel shirts, little halter tops in summer with their Wranglers cut off.

I called up Jeron.

"Come over, I got beer."

"Be right there."

Soon I heard Jeron's GTO rumble to a stop outside. I let him in and he went to grab a beer.

He sat down on the couch and reached for the remote.

"Holy shit! What is this?" he asked, snatching the shoe up from the can-strewn coffee table.

"Found it outside this morning."

"Is this blood?" l nodded. "Shit man!" He dropped it like a hot potato.

"What're you gonna do with it?" I shrugged.

He picked the shoe back up.

We watched TV until a commercial came on, his fingers feeling the straps. He was like a goddamn raccoon sometimes - couldn't leave a shiny thing alone.

"Hey, guess what I seen," Jeron demanded, his face getting that amped look I knew to precede a particularly stupid idea on his part.

"What?" I asked, warily clutching my empty can.

"I seen a car go off the road on One Seventy Eight!"

"When?"

"Last night! It was a El Camino."

"You stop?" He didn't answer right away. I rolled my eyes.

"So anyway, you want to go out and have a look at the wreck?"

I shivered. I got up and got another beer, and turned on the space heater.

"A El Camino!"

I rubbed my leg through my jeans. Jeron wouldn't let up until I was in the car with him, heading out to highway 178. Hesitating, l gulped beer.

"Alright. Lemme get my jacket." Jeron jumped up, grabbing the shoe. We took my truck. It was midnight, but it wasn't dark out.

That famous clear Inyokern sky full to the brim with moonlight. It was bone cold. Jeron switched on the radio and turned the knob, flickers of accordion, then preaching, then twangy guitar twitching out of the tinny speakers. I wanted to slap his hand off the thing but I let him fiddle with it, trying to find the rock station. 

He directed me out about 15 miles up on 178.

That highway goes up the mountains, west of town, up and up into stone mountains that climb into the sky and disappear. On one side is a forest of Joshua trees and piñon. A desert forest.

"Here! Stop here man," Jeron shouted when we reached a section of highway next to a steep but short cliff. At the bottom of the cliff was endless black forest, scraggy on the rocky faces of the mountains. We got out of the car, rubbing our hands and slapping them in the dry stiff cold. I was hoping, inside, that the car would be gone, the people in it safe. I hoped Jeron had been mistaken, had seen something else.

"Don't need no flashlight, bright as the moon is," Jeron commented. I coughed, irritated. Why'd I let him drag me out here on this fool errand? I was always letting Jeron get me into fixes.

"Well, where the fuck is it?"

"Down the cliff, man. Come on." He walked across the highway to the cliff's edge. I looked back at my truck, uneasy about leaving it here in the middle of nothing. But then, who was going to come for it? A bobcat? I followed Jeron who was already looking for a foothold to climb down the cliff.

Despite the moonlight, the hillside was dark and the stones were loose under my feet. Jeron was already halfway down as I picked my way in the shattered rocks, my hands groping for hold.

Finally I let go and ran-fell the rest of the way, maybe eight feet.

There it was, as unnatural as a third eye. The massive gold El Camino lay on its belly, broken glass glittering all around it. We stood looking at it. I wanted to ask Jeron what exactly he'd seen, how the car had gone over the edge, why he hadn't stopped.

But I didn't want to hear his nasal voice, his spew of tweaker excuses. The El Camino shimmered, and I felt dread filling my stomach.

How do cars go over cliffs? The people driving them fuck up, fuck up magnificently, fatally.

Jeron wasn't moving any closer. I took a few steps towards it. I thought of the shoe, sitting back in my truck. All at once I went up to the car. 

It was shadowy inside, hard to find anything that made sense amongst the broken glass and twisted metal. I let my eyes wander over the interior for a few seconds, adjusting.

There was so much blood. All over the leather seats - it seemed like too much. My stomach churned like a cement mixer. I swallowed hard, NoDoz and beer revving my pulse. I put my hand on the roof of the car and began to lean in, to look closer inside. Jeron walked around to the other side, mumbling to himself, demonically cavalier.

Even with my head almost inside the broken driver's side window, I could hardly see a thing.

Just the blood. No bodies, that I could tell, although I was not about to open the trunk. I

tried not to wonder whose car this was and where they were.

I backed away, stumbling on the rocky forest floor. My heart throbbed painfully under the residue of the caffeine pills. My head was swimming, the stars and moon swirling above me.

I ran at the cliffside, scrambling at the loose rocks. There was no purchase to be had and I slid down over and over back to the base. Jeron was still poking around at the car. I stopped moving, bent double, put my hands on my knees. Panic enveloped me as l pictured the two of us stuck down here til dawn or longer. Pinpoints of light danced and l breathed through my nose to keep from passing out. Crunching noises over where Jeron was fucking around.

"How the fuck do we get back up there?" I asked, trying to mask my wheezing.

He led me back up the cliff, taking a sideways kind of path that was three times as long as the way down. My hands, my whole body, shook by the time we were standing next to my truck again. I felt old, all of a sudden, my lungs hurting.

Although I never did like being stuck, or climbing. Jeron lit a cigarette and I borrowed one off him. We stood out there for a spell, maybe 20 minutes, not saying much.

Not a single car had passed us. I wondered again why Jeron had been out here, wondered why he didn't stop when he first saw it.

On the way back into town I snatched the shoe up and threw it out the window over the guard rail

Years later, I was at Jeron's place, hunting around for a video game he had borrowed from me. Under all his porno mags, loose pieces of car stereo, and bootleg DVDs, I found the shoe. Its crusted blood had faded to a dull rust. I let go of it and left, telling Jeron fuck the game, call me if you find it. Never did go back out to 178. I take 58 now, if l need to get to Bakersfield.

Don't go too often. Don't go many places at all, nowadays.

copyright Brigid Barry 2014

do not reproduce without permission