I guess you can call me an angel of vengeance, these days. That and a quarter used to be enough to buy a cup of coffee. Still is, at the Last Dance. Everywhere else...not so much.
The trouble with truth is that it's subjective, depending entirely on where you were standing when you saw the accident happen. Maybe you saw the first car veer to avoid hitting a cat, and maybe you didn't. Maybe you saw the second car try to hit the brakes, and maybe you only saw them go careening into the vehicle ahead of them, making no attempt to slow in the moments before impact. Maybe all you saw was the shadow of the cat as it darted through the underbrush, running away from a tearing roar that sounded like the end of the world. Every splinter of the broken glass of the moment is a genuine part of the whole, but none of them is the whole in and of itself. We carry our own truths tucked away inside us, bright bits of glass blunted by our living flesh, and when they come into the light, we bleed. Honesty is in the eye of the beholder.
It can be hard as hell to tell the truth from broken lies even when all the pieces of the puzzle happen in the daylight. When half the story is buried in shallow graves along the ghostroads, it can turn impossible to tell what's real from what's not...and sometimes, without that knowledge, there's no way to move past grieving into acceptance. Sometimes, the dead aren't the only casualties, especially here. Especially in the dark.
***
It's a beautiful night, all big white moon and the distant gold-silver-glitter of too many stars to count, scattered across this desert sky like dimestore confetti. This is the middle of nowhere, one of those places that manages to exist half a mile outside of every jurisdiction, half an hour away from any sort of safety, real or not. The man--the boy, fuck, he's barely twenty-two, he's too young to be here--behind the wheel of this aging Toyota is practically vibrating as he looks toward the stretch of road ahead of us. He'd be handsome, if he didn't look so scared, if he wasn't so damn close to tumbling into twilight, leaving this road and all the roads like it behind him forever.
"That's the raceway," he says, and he means this empty expanse of nothing, this little slice of nowhere-road that stretches smooth and deserted through the night. He's breathing too fast, just this side of panting, tension filling the car like smoke. He doesn't want to be here. He thinks he does, but he's wrong. "You'll be able to find another ride from here. There's lots of guys here every night. One of them will be going your way."
I seriously doubt that. This is pure daylight road, for all that the sun's gone down, and the only place that edges into the twilight is the driver himself, boy who thinks he's a man, boy teasing things he should know to leave well enough alone. I've been trying to steer him away from this place since I asked him for a ride two hours ago, and he didn't listen then, and he isn't listening now. The smell of ashes and lilies is gathering around him, accident waiting to happen, coming on stronger with every minute that ticks past.
"I don't think this is a good idea, Tommy." He isn't listening. I still have to try. I always have to try, because that's part of how this story goes: part of what keeps me on the edge I walk along. If I start walking away from the ones who might be saved, I'll lose my grasp on the narrow line of the twilight, sink deeper down into the dark, and never find my way back to the levels where the living play spin-the-bottle with the dead. I have to try. "We should go back. We should--"
"My girl deserves better than some crackerjack ring from a greasemonkey." There's a set to his jaw that I know. Gary used to look like that, late nights in the diner when he was telling me how we were going to get out of town someday, how we'd be together forever, and he wouldn't be just a mechanic, and I wouldn't be just the mechanic's girl. I bite my knuckles. The pain helps, a little. Not enough, but it keeps the tears out of my eyes, and right here, right now, I'll settle for what I can get. "You understand, don't you, Rose?"
I understand the way that poverty can turn solid in the middle of the night, pressing down on your chest until it steals your breath away, the way they used to say cats stole the breath from babies in their cradles. I understand watching your father work until all he can do when he gets home is drink to forget how much work's still waiting, and waiting your mother clip coupons and count her pennies, skirting a little closer to the edge every day. I understand hand-me-down skirts and triple-darned socks, cabbage soup and homemade shampoo. I understand better than he thinks I do.
Most of all, I understand that this is not the way.
"Turn back," I whisper, and Tommy starts the engine, and we roll onward, toward the raceway, toward the future, toward the place where the road he's on now comes to its inevitable end.