Traffic

© 1999 Brian Ames
All rights reserved.

Randy is seeing the car for the second time now. It's one of those small, late-model Plymouths, blue, and for the second time in less than an hour, it is passing this spot.
Randy's crew is digging trenches for conduit. The conduit will carry sewage. The locals aren't happy because the county is forcing them to convert from septic to sewer, and they've had to absorb the cost. It means, sometimes, they try to get precipitously close to the workers with their cars.
But this car is not too close, just a repeat. It happens once in a while. Randy will notice the same car driving slowly over the roughened road. It's someone running errands in the neighborhood, or maybe the driver forgot something at home, returned, and re-launched his or her commute.
The electric window slides down as the Plymouth crawls past. Although the sun is shining, its light seems to dim for an instant. The driver stares at Randy—there is no acknowledgement, no half-smile. Just a stare. It strikes Randy as purposeful. Makes him take a step backward, wonder for a second what he's done, whether the driver recognizes him from somewhere. This happens too—people will recognize him, outfitted in a bright orange vest, hardhat, reflective fabric stripes. Usually they will nod a greeting. But this driver's face harbors no familiarity—certainly no friendliness—and passes.
It's hot and dusty. Heat from the asphalt and non-stop parade of engines and exhaust mean Randy breaks a sweat even at 9:30. The sun is already pushing down on him and the rest of the crew. Engine noise from the earth-moving equipment—the trencher, grader, roller—belches into the morning. Randy, in walkie-talkie communication with his partner at the other end of the dig, switches his sign from SLOW to STOP. It's a pattern he repeated hundreds of times yesterday, and will do so, yet today.
He watches the bumper of the Plymouth recede as the driver accelerates past him. "Screw you, too, buddy," he mutters, and blinks back into the sun.
An hour and a half later, the Plymouth shows up again, from the same direction. This time the window's fully down, the driver staring at Randy from a stop. It's the second car in line, waiting for Randy to flip the sign from STOP back to SLOW. From a different angle, the sun casts shadows under the cars, but is it less sharp, less black, under this car? The driver is looking at him again—glaring. What? Randy thinks. What's the deal? The driver's stare is mean, malevolent. His face is red and weirdly contorted, almost like he's at the onset of a stroke or an attack of apoplexy. The lips pull back to reveal sharp, dirty teeth and a swollen tongue. Then the lips purse and mouth an angry "You." Just that one word, but it means You: that's the deal. Maybe the angry driver is an area resident, pissed about shouldering the sewer cost.
Randy forgets where he stands for a second. His walkie-talkie hisses dead space—then his partner's airy voice: "Randy, what's up. What's the deal?" He looks up, down the length of the trench, at his partner in the distance. The road is empty next to the dig, his partner's sign flipped to STOP at the far end. "Oh," he says. Depresses the thumb-key for the walkie-talkie, speaks into it, "Sorry," as he flips the sign. The driver passes him. The man's forehead looks like it's about to explode. He shows his teeth again, champs them together as he passes. His neck swivels so he can eyeball Randy all the way through the sign. Randy has a clear impression the sun dims again, and that somehow this angry man and the momentary onset of wan light are connected. Angry over the sewer or not, this guy blocks—or does he absorb?—the sunlight. Randy wipes a drop of sweat rolling on his temple, glances up at trees. He could swear their branches dangle further, higher over the road crew. Imagines they grow woody fingers, no, claws.
But it's the fourth passing of the Plymouth that really starts to shake him up. The driver is in full bloom, now, or rather his forehead is. The man's pate seems to have ruptured, a bloody crack opened up there like a magma fissure. Blood lava is dripping down the side of the guy's face and still he's staring. Randy is stunned, steps back again as the trees crowd over him with sharp talons. The sun is right overhead, but the Plymouth casts no shadow, and the man clacks those Nosferatu teeth together. Between gnashings, that tongue pokes like a snake, all of this in half-light. Randy experiences a moment of vertigo and lost focus. You you you you the driver says, blood running down his shirt.
Randy collects himself, thinks the man needs help, an ambulance. "Hey buddy," he starts, but the Plymouth moves on in the line, through the site, and disappears down the street.
Randy.
What the hell was that?
"Randy."
I mean what the...
"Randy!"
"What?" Randy nearly screams. He turns around and there's Jack, his foreman."What?" he repeats, calmer.
"Break time, man," Jack says. "Geez."
"Yeah, okay," Randy says. He removes his hardhat, hands the sign to Jack. He's having trouble making his eyes work in tandem, has pain at the core of his stomach he isn't sure his sack lunch will cure.
"You all right?" Jack asks.
"Yeah, I'm tired. It's the traffic—I just got a weird look from this guy, that's all."
"Locals," Jack says.
"Yep." Randy looks up at the talon branches growing.
Randy sits in the bucket seat of the grader and picks at lunch from a brown sack. He wonders about the man in the Plymouth, and his appetite drains. He spreads apart the two halves of his sandwich, peanut butter and strawberry jam. Look at that, he thinks: Blood and guts on white bread. He closes his eyes in the high-noon heat—the temperature is well above eighty now—and sees the man's splitting forehead, knifepoint teeth. He rises from the seat, climbs shakily out of the cab, down over the roadblade. Throws his nearly
full lunch bag into a refuse barrel. Cars wait and pass, raising dust. He breathes it in, dirt and heat, closing his eyes against the sting of sweat.
Back on the line at 1:00, his stomach is turning from lack of food and unease. Ten minutes later he spots the Plymouth at the end of a line of cars. It has returned to the queue from the same direction—he looks twice
down the long snake of automobiles to make sure it's the same one. Yeah, light blue, that's the car all right. The line of vehicles is long, and the Plymouth is way back, thirteen or fourteen cars away.
Randy feels like his guts are being raked by a scythe. Then he has an idea that might stave off... what? He doesn't know. It resolves in his head like the blow of a hammer against skin, makes him giddy for a second. He depresses the talk button on his walkie-talkie—"Hey, Ron."
Ron comes back to him, from the other end of the site. "Go ahead."
"Hey Ron, check out the guy in the blue Plymouth, he's right there in front of you."
"Which one?"
"Behind the big silver car, the sedan—it looks like a Cadillac or a big Olds or something. The Plymouth behind it."
"Yeah, okay."
"Guy in that car look all right to you?"
There's a pause that seems to last longer than it should. Randy hears the limbs over him creak and swell, the impatient friction of branches rubbing in a tiny breeze. The rustling of leaves.
"Affirmative," Ron reports. "He looks fine."
Randy's still not so sure, and the pain in his stomach blossoms, spreads to his upper torso, up the ganglia in his neckpipe, slaps his brainstem and leaches into that hardhat-shelled cortex. "Okay, thanks," he acknowledges, flips his sign. Stares down the line to Ron, who flips also, and the cars gently accelerate like a wakened adder.
And here comes the car. Randy notices the inside of him failing—a despair made tangible. He feels concentrated, like he wants to jump through his skin. He lifts a hand in front of him, notices it shaking. His skin is coated with perspiration, high fat sun blistering down. The driver of the Plymouth gets closer. Randy is able to resolve his shape—its shape, its form—and he, it, is no way in hell fine. No, the being behind the wheel is a ghoul, a shroud of sappy blistered skin wrapped around a gasbag of a head. The crack in its pate has widened, opened up and suppurating. The world goes dark, like twilight, and black ichor runs from its headwound. The being's eyes are milky white, occluded by cataracts. They look like dirty dense eggs, and roll wildly back up into their slips, but then train and focus: there's no question they stare at Randy with rage.
He thinks, no no, and its mouth—a fleshgash of peeling lips—blows words at him like fetid bubbles. They leap off those knife teeth like acetylene flames. It speaks his name, Randy, in an indecipherable, low language. The vocalization escapes like a swarm of hornets. Randy, in a deep place of him that broaches the terror and clearly understands, interprets the being's utterance. He is being called.
No, selected.
Randy has a distinct impression that he has misinterpreted the rage emanating from the bloated head, that, for an instant, it is pure longing. Yes, it is—it's desire. The Plymouth creeps closer. Randy gags on a fuggy wall of putrefaction, greasy meatrot pulling what little of the sandwich he ate up his esophagus. He gulps it back, holding out as his stomach lurches. The trees bunch and counsel, crowd over him in the dark dripping syrup and blood and semen and aphids, lifefluid from those claws, cloying together, and they echo the being's call.
"You're the one, baby," it says. "No," Randy responds, from a vacuum.
"Oh, yessss!"
The gasbag head passes, blowing sputum and a cloud of black air, and Randy's knees crack, sag, liquefy. The world rushes onto him—he collapses like a sack of dead animals. His sign stands upon its pole for a second, balancing on its own, then topples. The walkie-talkie clatters on the pavement, falls over the lip of the trench, Ron's transported voice breaking silence —"Randy! Randy! You okay?"
Randy comes to with the road in his mouth, grit on his tongue, his gums, teeth. His fellow crew members have drizzled cold water on his face, wiping his sweaty hair with damp cloths.
"You okay?" Jack's asking. "You passed out on us, man."
Randy cannot yet speak, the ghoulish impression still burning on the backs of his eyeballs like a cattle brand.
"It wants me it says I'm the one," he mumbles.
"You got the heatstroke," he hears, the voice of Ron.
"No," Randy moans.
They help him up from the freshly turned dirt, assist him to the side of the road. Two or three of them carefully settle him against a tree trunk, keep forcing him to drink water. His head is swimming at first, but clears quickly. Jack is asking whether he wants to go home, whether someone can drive him. Randy can't afford the sick time, not even an afternoon. Nor does he want to leave his rig, or have someone else drive it. He'll stay, he says. He'll be all right in a few minutes.
"It's just the heat," he agrees. Just the heat.

Then it's three in the afternoon. Randy's back at his post, waving cars along, toggling the sign in concert with Ron. The diesel signature of road-work equipment vibrates behind him as the cars slow and stop, then start again. The sun is heavy, but he's drinking plenty of water. He's convinced himself that, yes, it was an episode of heatstroke, or heat exhaustion anyway. He did stay out late last night, after all, maybe drank one or two more beers than he should have. Quitting time nears, and he feels remarkably well.
But his well-being clacks to the deck as he sees, once more, the blue Plymouth approach. Same car, same direction, same oily trees swooning over him. Light is sucked away from the job site like a riptide, a midnight black descends and headlamps snap on, synchronously, a trail of pearl beads up the length of the trench. They blind him. The Plymouth pulls up.
The driver is a bone-man, all cloven cranium and jawbone tilting wildly atop spine links. "Howdy!" the skeleton greets. "I told you you're the one!" Its lilting exuberance flies in the face of the low utterances it emitted as a mouldering gasbag. Randy takes a step back in the darkness while the trees crowd overhead to observe and rain corpulent fluids.
"Huh-uh," Randy gasps, shaking his head. He rejects this, this moment, this bone man.
The mandible hinges open—inside it's a blast furnace. Pointy teeth pop like corks and blast at him like bird-shot. Randy takes another step backward, ignorant of edges, of boundaries. The skull laughs, it's hysterical, the sockets glow like the headlamps only deep, deep red. There are malignant rubies set in them.
"Uh-huh," the skull shrieks. "You're the one. Yessss."
Randy still shakes his head, reaches up to pull off his hardhat, flings it at the Plymouth while backing away. It clatters off the Plymouth's quarter panel, spins on the black roadsurface. The sewer trench, on which lip he has teetered these last few moments, opens like a chasm. Ozone and smoke leap from it, and the odor of impatient fire whirls in a cloud. The trees are singing, a barky, sappy chorus of corrupt heartwood. Limbs grow liquid, snake-like tendrils. They slap at his ankles like viney asps.
Bone man throws its skull back against the headrest and screams laughter, slaps its fingerbones against the steering wheel. "Yessss!"
"Noooo," Randy loses balance, topples, falls and falls as the flames lick his clothes, his orange vest melts like plastic, burns his jeans, smoke, brimstone, he flies through blistering open air and never, ever hits. The bone man rips open the door of the Plymouth, leaps in after him.

Jack is worrying about lawsuits as he stands over the trench, ambulance siren blaring from down the road. But it's too late: Randy's skull is fractured against the concrete conduit seven feet down in the ditch. His blood oozes down across the circumference of the pipe, drops onto dirt in a little drip-metered pool.
Ron's down there with him, pushing gauze into the head wound, fighting tears.
He holds up the saturated compress, hands streaked red. The bandage looks like an excised organ, a heart.
"No, man," Ron says, "there's no pulse. Nothing."

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