You should know all this by your age. You learned it as a girl outside Drumheller, playing kick-the-can by starlight and underestimating the can. But in adulthood you came to know the night only through windows that made it a surface to be rationally touched. Knowing the night through the window of a truck or motel on familiar roads, it’s hard to lose your way.
Not impossible.
• • •
The pale man is just as out of place as you. But he’s a client, one who built his place in an invisible empire through the quiet old tactics. He needs your services — transportation, new ID, a life — but changed his mind halfway to Winnipeg. He would not be the first.
He knows you only as the eraser, knows the back of your head, knows your seventh-hand Dodge, and that’s enough to make you squirm — even you being the professional that you are. Silver-haired child of the sixties, with the placid respectable voice of a man who teaches and believes that contention lets the Devil in, that being upset is a priority sin no matter what the circumstances. He wanted no radio. The only station out this far had swearing mixed in.
He strides purposefully across the prairie in business casual of a certain age, heedless of gopher holes. This is watch-your-dog-run-away-for-three-days territory. He’s a hundred meters ahead of you but tall against the unpolluted stars. That silhouette is a surface, a forbidding just as hard as the one you make of yourself. You know his name, his church rank, his dental practice, and all the allegations; but he’s unknowable the way you hope you are to clients like him.
You turn your ankle and crumple to stave off injury. Sage and wild rose bite your palms and sting through the knee of your jeans. You’re frantically cold, left your jacket in the truck. That and the Dodge are liabilities if searched by anyone with brains. God, you left the new-life folder — ID, and setup for the client’s small apartment — right there in the glovebox.
You take the risk of pausing, somewhere in the boundless prairie, to look back and verify there’s nobody poking around the truck. But Highway One is a distant string of lights, some moving. The truck stop is gone behind some gentle deceptive rise you didn’t notice, or else you went askew and you can only see the wrong part of the highway. Well, either way, the place is gone.
So’s the deposit. Most of the pay is upon delivery, courtesy of some vanilla subsidiary of a subsidiary of something legally distinct from the third wealthiest church in North America. The lawyer who set it up has a long record of arguing no institutional responsibility toward tenants (of course they’re landlords) and Troubled Teen Industry survivors on behalf of the church in question. What are you — a petty criminal with a childhood TTI file replete with kompromat? They could swallow you whole again.
Maybe jettisoning the job would be for the best. You left a comparable church behind twenty years back, and anyway it’s not healthy to have people like that owe you money.
There’s no money out here. No power, not for anyone. You try to take some comfort.
Not so long ago, you saw a series of historical maps of travel times — New York to Duluth, six weeks of wilderness. And that’s the cramped little American east. The Canadian prairie is infinite and eternal, amen, even with a full tank of gas and a two-liter of store brand caffeine. On foot it’s unthinkable. You could walk yourself to death, rise again and die and rise again, before you got somewhere that’s not a truck stop. A few degrees off and you’d miss the little blink-and-miss-it towns that give you the homesick ache. Thank god for the range roads. Thank god you’re still in sight of Highway One, like a ropeline from an Arctic outpost to the outhouse.
When you leave off squinting for the lost truck stop, the client is crouching down to grapple with the horizon. As you get close you hear him praying. The mode of his voice is measured and modulated as if for a congregation’s benefit. You suppose, for him, someone’s always been watching. In a culture of surveillance, where obedience is a virtue and withholding answers is a sin, he managed to find privacy at least some of the time. That’s why he’s kneeling in the thistles five hundred kilometers from home. He got too good at finding privacy.
Never counted as sin enough for excommunication, though. Best to keep all this private, brother, for the church’s sake. For the good name of God.
He’s stating all this in a teaching tone (is he lecturing deity?) while kneeling on a prairie dog hillock. Nighttime prayers were like that at Camp Joseph. You’d pray past the aftertaste of the vomit aversion-therapy. You’d even mean it, because what other way out was there, that you could allow yourself?
Truth be told, you remember what it’s like not having the option to disbelieve. You can almost have sympathy for the client, caught like you were, plus half a century of doubling down.
Ugly, that he can’t shed this part of his life like snakeskin. That all the other parts, and the smiling family you saw in a photo beside a white pitcher and bowl, have to fall by the wayside.
You are no longer Janey Tobias, refusing to come in from kick-the-can the same night your parents signed you over. You are the eraser, and the pale man’s safe delivery is worth a ten-thousandth of a percent of the church’s investment portfolio. Tonight you don’t actually work for the client: you work for the same lawyers who put you in the camp.
With enthusiasm, body blocking the lightning-flash from the distant highway, you put him down and knock him out.
It’s not as final as that, not a discrete event. You wish it was over-and-done and then you don’t. You’re watching him shit his business casual as he twists and rolls in the dry cold grass, cufflinks winking in the starlight. By the fourth or fifth jolt, your ears are going numb from cold and the stun gun thunderclap. The wind bypasses your clothes like a preacher through a penitent’s protest.
You do need the money. You cannot ever have a reputation for anything less than full delivery. That gives you pause. You are the eraser. The eraser has distance.
The pause lets your ears settle and the prairie night sink in, and you know in your gut that something from that night is between you and the road and closer than it should be. Snuck up, about to dash in, like the pair of you are crushed cans eager to be kicked.
You rise from the client in a spin, stun gun ready; you know your business.
Is something there against the highway lights? They’re far enough that if you focus on one light the shape blurs in the hungry old scotoma in the center of your field of vision. You’ve stared down too many bright highways and given that stun gun too much leash.
The sense of the thing — person, whatever — is about to charge, it’s hiding in that fuzzy spot. You glance around and it hops to stay in your blind spot.
As someone who’s slunk through peripheral vision with grace and glee a time or three, you have to respect this. The skill, the intentionality. It’s a majestic stunt.
Your flashlight’s back in your jacket. You squint and trigger the stun gun, not caring now if someone sees it from the far-off highway. Frantic white light jackhammers clack clack clack and soaks into the distance every which way. If there is a thing watching you, it’s of a kind with the emptiness. It may not be a substance either.
You have seen strange things and been them too, in your long years doing this job. Your instinct says to run away from whatever’s where you generally feel it is, between you and the Trans-Canada. But your instinct also said to taser the client past the point of shitlessness, so maybe tonight’s not the night to trust yourself.
There’s nothing out there. No wolves, no gleeful thing in the center of your sight, no vengeful survivors looking for the one who made their nemesis disappear.
You kick the client, who moans. “Told you up front not to run,” you say, and the empty night attenuates your words to nothing. You kick him again and crouch to haul him up by his belt. Down here it smells like sharp sweet diarrhea and torn-up dust.
Down here you’re looking at him, and the thing follows the center of your vision, and it’s there, right there between you and the client. It’s not empty but it’s not a surface or a substance like a person. It plants something like feet on the client’s ankles, and the client sags heavier, hamstrung, and then the thing is gone before you can see what it was.
Shock and impending vomit burn in your nostrils. You lash out with the stun gun and it clacks weakly. Stark light catches retreating movement. You puke up only a dribble, watching the dark. You snort and spit and clear what can be cleared. Your body’s frantic.
You’re strong enough to haul this client; he has no bulk or any strength; he cared only for spiritual might and would have lost an arm-wrestle to any burnout at the truck stop. He is the money. He is the trap. You grip his sleek full-grain leather belt — worth as much as your truck — and get to hauling. The client is bent double and limp. The blood from his heels and puke from his mouth are trails of deeper dark against the colorless scrub.
It’s not that you can’t leave the money, face the risk to your reputation. Can’t is fear talking. It’s that you won’t. There is a difference.
You are the eraser. You have faced worse. You have done worse.
You look up from your task and focus on the dark space between two highway lights and yes, there’s movement in the blur. Just a touch of silhouette like a hole cut from substance, a reversion to emptiness. An eighteen-wheeler thunders along so far away and passes through that emptiness. You imagine driving a truck like that through a wide nothing place, and it sounds pretty good to you.
The impending rush has its own feel. Predator to predator, you understand what’s coming, and now you trust your instinct after all. The next move will be to take a chunk out of you, fast and weakening.
You let it happen.
The emptiness coalesces into edges — not even sure you can call them teeth — that rasp like dry straw, close and appealingly hot, and then the heat is welling from your left forearm, the arm that’s dragging the client by the belt. His body weight makes him a pivot, though. You twist and jam the stun gun against —
Well how about that, there’s substance after all.
Clack clack clack — the clever thing jolts away, catches some part of itself in a gopher hole, sprawls and rushes, but controlled. It’ll circle back. You smell burnt rubber and the kind of curdled rot you’d find inside a cracked bone under prairie hardpack. You got a piece of it.
You’re moving backwards now. The stun gun is dead; you shove it in your pocket, miss, drop it, switch the client’s weight to your right hand. Relaxing tension in your left sends pain to places it shouldn’t extend. You long to probe the wound’s dimensions and estimate loss of function. Whether you can haul your next client with a weapon in your other hand.
You forgot the thing is smart. It’s done with the center-blur game. It hammers you sidelong — your neck whiplashes — and that fancy belt’s clasp breaks free. Your grip doesn’t, and you’re proud of that even as some shapeless fury drives you through a stand of withered sage. Undergrowth and things like claws lacerate your face, back, side. Dust chokes your nose and you’ve sucked it in before you realize it.
You have, what, the belt? A little corporal punishment? Curling back into the sagebrush, you lash out at the dark with a useless whipping motion, then double the belt with fumbling, numb hands and lash out again.
Fuck, wow, it connects — you can’t see with what. The blur in the heart of your vision is spreading. The dark has no detail to offer you, personally.
You tied your boots tight before the drive. They’re still on, at least, and you stomp and flail for the cover to stand.
You don’t connect again.
The client is bent in half still, as far as you can tell from three meters away. Maybe you broke his back while dragging him. A ripping sound, and blur detaches from blur with a little moan and a little slurp.
The can is kicked. The game is done. It’s now that kind of silence.
• • •
The blur has only halfway cleared; driving was a pain in close-to-city traffic, but your body’s lost the power to feel stress. With what you’ve got left, you fireman-carry the client out of your defiled back seat and slump him down against the front door. You slapped all your band-aids on your own arm; you weren’t about to deal with the lacerations on his heels and the tender meat of his thighs. His breath shivers like he wishes it was a death rattle. He ran out of words by Portage la Prairie. Funny words for a churchman to know.
With gloves on, you open a ziplock and fish out his papers. New license, the shit for the house, number for a slaughterhouse that’s always hiring. That’s your little joke a week ago. Tonight it’s a different kind of joke: go get yourself trimmed down to chops and gristle, gently used, it’s all you’re good for.
“Dog food,” you say, and hell, maybe it was a dog out there.
The client drools — implies — invective. He’s still technically alive when you take the photo on your flip burner and send it to the church lawyers:
ERASED ALIVE. ON TIME RIGHT ADDRESS. HAZARD PAY. PLEASURE DOING BUSINESS.
