Mile 81 Page 3

  Nor had she ever worried much about being robbed, raped, or murdered by someone who was only pretending to need help. Julie was the sort of woman who would supposedly make a good wife because--in the parlance of the old Maine Yankees, of whom there are still a few--"She'll give ya warmth in the winter and shade in the summer." When asked for her weight by the school nurse when she was in the fifth grade, Julie had replied proudly, "My dad says I'd dress out around one-seventy. Little less if skinned."

  Now, at thirty-five, she would have dressed out closer to two-eighty, and had no interest in making any man a good wife. She was as gay as old Dad's hatband, and proud of it. On the back of her Ram truck were two bumper stickers. One read SUPPORT GENDER EQUALITY. The other, a bright pink, opined that GAY IS A HAPPY WORD!

  The stickers didn't show now because she was hauling what she referred to as the "hoss-trailah." She had bought a two-year-old Spanish jennet mare in the town of Clinton, and was now on her way back to Readfield, where she lived on a farm with her partner just two miles down the road from the house where she'd grown up.

  She was thinking, as she often did, of her five years of touring with The Twinkles, a female mud-wrestling team. Those years had been both bad and good. Bad because The Twinkles were generally regarded as freakshow entertainment (which she supposed they sort of were), good because she had seen so much of the world. Mostly the American world, it was true, but The Twinkles had once spent three months in England, France, and Germany, where they had been treated with a kindness and respect that was almost eerie. Like young ladies, in other words.

  She still had her passport, and had renewed it last year, although she guessed she might never go abroad again. Mostly that was all right. Mostly she was happy on the farm with Amelia and their motley menagerie of livestock, but she sometimes missed those days of touring--the one-night stands, the matches under the lights, the rough camaraderie of the other girls. Sometimes she even missed the push-and-bump with the audience.

  "Grab her by the cunt, she's a dyke, she likes that!" some shitbrained yokel had yelled one night--in Tulsa that had been, if she remembered right.

  She and Melissa, the girl she'd been grappling with in the Mudbowl, had looked at each other, nodded to each other, and stood up facing the section of the audience from which the yell had came. They stood there wearing nothing but their sopping bikini briefs, mud dripping from their hair and breasts, and had flipped the bird at the heckler in unison. The audience had broken into spontaneous applause . . . which became a standing O when first Julianne, then Melissa, turned, bent, dropped trou, and shot the asshole a double moon.

  She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn't get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit--not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet.

  The CD she was listening to came to an end, and she was just about to poke the eject button when she saw a car ahead, parked a little way up the ramp leading to the abandoned Mile 81 service stop. Its four-way flashers were on. There was another car in front of it, a muddy old beat-to-shit station wagon. Probably a Ford or a Chevrolet, it was hard to tell which.

  Julie didn't make a decision, because there was no decision to be made. She flipped her blinker, saw there would be no room for her on the ramp, not with the trailer in tow, and got as far over in the breakdown lane as she could without hooking her wheels in the soft ground beyond. The last thing she wanted to do was overturn the horse for which she had just paid eighteen hundred dollars.

  This was probably nothing, but it didn't hurt to check. You could never tell when some woman had all at once decided to have herself a baby on the interstate, or when some guy who stopped to help got excited and fainted. Julie put on her own four-ways, but they wouldn't show much, not with the hoss-trailer in the way.

  She got out, looked toward the two cars, and saw not a soul. Maybe someone had picked the drivers up, but more likely they'd gone up to the restaurant. Julie doubted if they'd find much there; it had been closed down since the previous September. Julie herself had often stopped at Mile 81 for a TCBY cone, but these days made her snack-stop twenty miles north, at Damon's in Augusta.

  She went around to the trailer and her new horse--DeeDee by name--poked her nose out. Julie stroked it. "Soo, baby, soo. This'll just take a minute."

  She opened the doors so she could get at the locker built into the trailer's left side. DeeDee decided this would be a fine time to exit the vehicle, but Julie restrained her with one beefy shoulder, once again murmuring "Soo, baby, soo."

  She unlatched the locker. Inside, sitting on top of the tools, were a few road flares and two fluorescent-pink mini traffic cones. Julie hooked her fingers into the hollow tops of the cones (no need for flares on an afternoon that was slowly beginning to brighten). She closed the locker and latched it, not wanting DeeDee to step a hoof in and maybe hurt herself. Then she closed the back doors. DeeDee once more poked her head out. Julie didn't really believe a horse could look anxious, but DeeDee sort of did.

  "Not long," she said, then placed the traffic cones behind the trailer and headed for the two cars.

  The Prius was empty but unlocked. Julie didn't particularly care for that, given the fact that there was a suitcase and a fairly expensive-looking briefcase in the backseat. The driver's door of the old station wagon was hanging open. Julie started toward it, then stopped, frowning. Lying on the pavement beside the open door was a cell phone and what just about had to be a wedding ring. There was a big crack zigzagging up the phone's casing, as if it had been dropped. And on the little glass window where the numbers appeared--was that a drop of blood?

  Probably not, probably just mud--the wagon was covered with it--but Julie liked this less and less. She had taken DeeDee for a good canter before loading her, and hadn't changed out of her no-nonsense split riding skirt for the trip home. Now she took her own cell phone out of the righthand pocket and debated punching in 911.

  No, she decided, not yet. But if the mud-splattered wagon was as empty as the little green car, or if that dime-sized spot on the dropped phone really was blood, she'd do it. And wait right here for the State Police cruiser to come instead of walking up to that deserted building. She was brave, and she was kindhearted, but she was not stupid.

  She bent to examine the ring and the dropped phone. The slight flare of her riding skirt brushed against the muddy flank of the station wagon, and appeared to melt into it. Julie was jerked to the right, and hard. One hefty buttock slammed against the side of the wagon. The surface yielded, then enveloped two layers of cloth and the 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?"

  "Yes!" Carla said warmly. "When you're twenty-six!"

  This made Rachel put on her mad-face (puckered brow, puffed cheeks, lips down to a stitch), but when the horse-lady laughed, Rache gave up and laughed, too.

  The big woman bent down to Blakie, her hands on knees covered by her riding skirt. "Can I have my ice cream cone back, young fella?"

  Blake held it out. When she took it, he began to lick his fingers, which were covered with melting pistachio.

  "Thank you," Carla told the horse-lady. "That was very kind of you." Then, to Blake, "Let's get you inside and cleaned up. After that you can have ice cream."

  "I want what she's having," Blake said, and that made the horse-lady laugh some more.

  Johnny insisted that they eat their cones in a booth, because he didn't want them decorating the Expedition with pistachio ice cream. When they finished and went out, the horse-lady was gone.

  Just one of those people you meet--occasionally nasty, more often nice, sometimes even terrific--along the road and never see again.

  Only here she was, or at least here her truck was, parked in the breakdown lane with traffic cones neatly placed behind her trailer. And Carla was right, the horse-lady had been nice to the kids. So thinking, Johnny Lussier made the worst--and last--decision of his life.

  He flipped his blinker and pulled onto the ramp as Carla had suggested, parking ahead of Doug Clayton's Prius, which was still flashing its four-ways, and beside the muddy station wagon. He put the transmission in park but left the engine running.

  "I want to pet the horsie," Blake said.

  "I also want to pet the horsie," Rachel said in the haughty lady-of-the-manor tone of voice she had picked up God knew where. It drove Carla crazy, but she refused to say anything. If she did, Rache would use it all the more.

  "Not without the lady's permission," Johnny said. "You kids sit right where you are for now. You too, Carla."

  "Yes, master," Carla sai
d in the zombie voice that always made the kids laugh.

  "Very funny, Easter bunny."

  "The cab of her truck's empty," Carla said. "They all look empty. Do you think there was an accident?"

  "Don't know, but nothing looks dinged up. Hang on a minute."

  Johnny Lussier got out, went around the back of the Expedition he would never finish paying for, and walked to the cab of the Dodge Ram. Carla hadn't seen the horse-lady, but he wanted to make sure she wasn't lying on the seat, maybe trying to live through a heart attack. (A lifelong jogger, Johnny secretly believed a heart attack was waiting by age forty-five at the latest for anyone who weighed even five pounds over the target weight prescribed by Medicine.Net.)

  She wasn't sprawled on the seat (of course not, a woman that big Carla would have seen even lying down), and she wasn't in the trailer, either. Only the horse, who poked her head out and sniffed Johnny's face.

  "Hello there . . ." For a moment the name didn't come, then it did. " . . . DeeDee. How's the old feedbag hanging?"

  He patted her nose, then headed back up the ramp to investigate the other two vehicles. He saw there had been an accident of sorts, albeit a very tiny one. The station wagon had knocked over a few of the orange barrels blocking the ramp.

  Carla rolled down her window, a thing neither of the kids in back could do because of the lockout feature. "Any sign of her?"

  "Nope."

  "Any sign of anyone?"

  "Carl, give me a ch--" He saw the cell phones and the wedding ring lying beside the partially open door of the station wagon.

  "What?" Carla craned to see.

  "Just a sec." The thought of telling her to lock the doors crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. They were on I-95 in broad daylight, for God's sake. Cars passing every twenty or thirty seconds, sometimes two or three in a line.

  He bent down and picked up the phones, one in each hand. He turned to Carla, and thus did not see the car door opening wider, like a mouth.

  "Carla, I think there's blood on this one." He held up Doug Clayton's cracked phone.

  "Mom?" Rachel asked. "Who's in that dirty car? The door's opening."

  "Come back," Carla said. Her mouth was suddenly dust-dry. She wanted to yell it, but there seemed to be a stone on her chest. It was invisible but very large. "Someone's in that car!"