Rubbernecker
You might call a guy paranoid for having a last will and testament at twenty-five with no real possessions or progeny to bequeath them to. Parker Matt Moon drafted his at sixteen.
Originally, the experiment was meant to be run once a year, a sacred ritual meant only for birthdays, but then other issues had come up, provoking further trials, such as tonight, the first part of which had been spent in Christa Bailey’s room, or last month when he’d cheated through half his midterms without being caught, or six weeks ago when he’d framed Benny Shepherds for stealing their gym teacher’s wallet out of his office. The list went on.
Now it’s a Wednesday night, mid-April. The grass is wetting, the street lights flickering, even the horny crickets and frogs growing tired of their night ballads. Parker’s car speeds along the spine of an Alabama highway, nearly on its own—the closest neighboring headlights
forty-nine miles behind him, tail lights thirty-four miles ahead. Parker sees neither of them, which is a sign, though not a good or bad one per say.
The blank black rearview mirror glares at Parker as his foot urges the gas pedal, his car lurching forward without him. He scours the dark highway for sublime, twirling blue and white lights and cranes to hear a siren’s aria. Where are they? Where is anyone? You might think, if he’s serious about this, he’d take his experiment to a less rural area, one with higher stakes and more danger, one where no one knows him as Mayor Moon’s son, but beer-given courage can only take you so far, so he traces the backroads with all his windows down. Besides, when he is caught, he wants them to know who he is, to bring disgrace to the family name. Halfway to eighteen now, his mind is mostly rot from lack of sleep and excess of everything else.
Listen, he remembers his father saying that one time his wife forced him to give Parker a driving lesson. You’re the one driving. The weight of his hand pressed down on Parker’s
shoulder. He clutched the wheel tighter. Your life is in your hands. Be smart about it. The world past the road was so dark then also, and there were no headlights in the rearview to split the blackness, no blinding neon of a sunset or signs of an early sunrise out the back window, no stakes or witnesses.
Christa is probably missing Parker, he thinks as he pulls into the Shell station, which is always his first stop, whether or not he needs gas. His buddy, Luke, works the register on the graveyard shift most weeknights since he can sleep in class fine, and the part-time gig funds his weekend fun. This works great for Parker as it allows him to buy a six-pack even though he’s three and a half years out from being legal and the gas station is meant to stop selling it at 11:00 PM. Parker never tells Luke what he’s doing, though, because that would make him complicit, and that wouldn’t be fair. He lets his friend think there will be a great party later, and maybe there will be. Parker is always dressed for it—Ray Bans, pastel button down shirt, dock shoes, khaki shorts.
When he gets back in the car and downs the first bottle, then second, he thinks of Christa stirring in her twin bed, her freckled arm reaching out to touch empty, sweat-damp sheets, giddiness draining from the cheese-holes in her chest at the question of whether or not she’d dreamt Parker’s coming.
The road behind him is unchanged by this line of thinking, and of course it is. There will be no raging, jealous boyfriend or shotgun-toting father in hot pursuit. Even after he abandoned her, Christa would never tell anyone about this night, for fear of rumors of her virtue being stolen, not to mention disapproving parents and neighbors or the rumors that would ravage the highschool, the ideas the other boys might get. Parker knows this. She and the few other girls
before were provocations to a higher authority, so that on nights such as this, Parker could give it a chance to prove its existence.
“Christa, Christa, Christa,” he says and hears echoed back to him the hard determining cah of the beginning—the first violent contact of his body into her body, followed by that lustrous, tempting risssss of the middle, that good part of waves rippling from her to him, him to her, a seemingly endless exchange of energy and faithless forever promises whose falsehoods were clear by that looming tuh consonant, that t-shaped necklace thumping against his chest, hanging over the girl’s face, swinging between them, until that beautiful feminine end, the
ah-ah-ah.
Enjoy this, his father had said that time he taught Parker to drive. This whole vehicle, this miracle of man, all under your control, bending at the whim of your wrists.
Parker imagines, after he does pass a cop and makes trouble, how his father will have to come bail him out of a jail cell. How much stronger Parker will look behind bars! Wrists and ankles heavy with chains! A black eye, a prison fight, a prison victory flash through his mind along with his father’s shaking head, his father’s flushed cheeks at the embarrassment of it all. And a record! A record with Parker’s full legal name, an action of his own to mark his life record!
He waits for well-timed sirens and is again disappointed.
Then Parker pulls out his phone and puts on Queen because even if his father’s an asshole most of the time, he raised him right—that is, on real music, and if Parker isn’t arrested and rather crashes tonight, and if he doesn’t die right away, he wants to be listening to something decent.
He thinks now of crashing, of his will and those he named in it. After he had to remove Avery, all that remain are friends who are only friends because of what they know they can
someday get from him. If he survives tonight, he will change it, leave everything he owns to Luke. Though they’re not friends really, just boys with a vague understanding of each other, Luke is more deserving than anyone else in Parker’s life who are infected with this trust fund psychology. There are those who believe they are exceptional and those who believe they don’t have to be. Both are dangerous, Parker decides. Both damn themselves to unhappy deaths. He eases into holding the wheel with only one hand, crossing his other hand’s fingers out the window.
If, after an ill-timed hiccup, he is forced off a bridge or into the woods, his mother might have to pull him from a fiery car wreck, tears streaming down her made-up face, her waterproof mascara unsmeared. What could she have done to stop this fiery end? How did this madness start? Was it because she allowed him social media in middle school? Or the hours of violent video games she let slip by? Or the cousin who gave him his first cigarette? Or that his father worked so late and was never home for the weekends? Or that she had allowed herself some small sips of wine during the pregnancy when her husband returned smelling of the wrong perfume?
No, it was none of those things. It started that night after the party and the custom blue-frosted cake and the balloons and congratulations for holding on so long through such an oh-so-difficult life of European family vacations and travel lacrosse and wrinkled prep school uniforms, after the dinner of catered seafood paella and truffle mac and cheese and all the guests—well-dressed family friends, a few classmates, and too many of his parents’ sunsetting colleagues who forgot his name three drinks in—left, after his mother, touching her glass-cold hand to his shirtsleeve, his blazer long ago abandoned, said, “Smile, baby. Sixteen years old is a big deal,” and even she and his father went up to bed and the house became frosted with quiet.
Parker disabled the alarm system, opened the backdoor without a sound into the garage where his gleaming new vehicle awaited him, and then drafted the will on a napkin, which made him think of Avery, who he called and told to meet him at the Shell, and so the tradition started.
This is Parker’s ninth test, and so far he is passing, though he is neither relieved nor exceptionally disappointed about that. The asphalt wavers before him. The street lights fall to his peripheral again and again. Seventy-seven miles per hour. His hands grip the wheel so tight, the bones of his fingers ache, knuckles white and shaking, the rest of him reddening. Nothing marks the side of the road aside from the occasional exit or exit sign Parker pretends not to see. There is only the road before him. Nothing until the first car on its back like an upturned turtle, wheels still spinning, smoke rising toward the moon. Someone needs to help this poor soul, but there is nobody. No birds, no squirrels, no dogs in the yard, no hornets buzzing just beneath the dirt, no other witnesses, no pizza delivery men, no long haul truck drivers, and certainly no cops. Parker should call someone, but then the wreck is minutes behind him, and he is surely not alone in this world, so eventually someone else will come. He really ought to put in a complaint.
Nearly two years of doing this, and he’s never seen the police. Where are they? There are people who need help; there are people who need to be punished, and it is only him and the road before him. Parker and this singular, stable road: graduate high school, attend an elite university, Columbia, maybe, both his parents’ alma mater, though which elite university doesn’t particularly matter, and then take over the Moon Group Enterprises, marry a well-bred, underfed lawyer with bleached hair and a good orthodontist and have two and a half children who will go to prep school, attend an elite university, maybe their father’s alma mater, to whom he will have donated a library or lecture hall, though it won’t particularly matter which elite university, and then take over the Moon Group themselves, and find wives and husbands with exceptional
pedigrees and amicably professional demeanors to run it with them, with whom they’ll procreate, unleashing another brood of artificially blonde Moons, his legacy, a latent plague of aristocratic potential, upon the enervated earth.
The road falters under Parker. He swallows salty bile as another overturned car passes his peripheral. He turns this time and thinks he sees them: two kids, one gasping for air and saying a prayer for the first time in years and the other a corpse already. Parker pushes from his mind that earlier night laying beside her in the bed of Jeb’s parked truck, Jeb apparently making it to third base with his date in the front seat while Avery had already rejected him, a night of fun not worth her blinding future after how hard she’d worked. He tries not to think of the way she had said, “You just couldn’t understand,” because he couldn’t. Their lives were so good then, and he hadn’t realized it as maybe she had, how much it felt like they were trying to outrun the inevitable bad, the inevitable difficulty and trials that came with human life. He hadn’t realized it until that rainy night he turned sixteen and spun out with her riding shotgun, the car turning over and over like a clumsy tumbleweed. No, he hadn’t realized until he attended her closed-casket funeral, and listened to the tears and sad murmurs of Such a shame, conversations about what might have been, and real bargains with God. People saying they would give time, money, morality, if only to know why. But now Parker can feel it: the settling unhappiness, the dissatisfaction, paralyzed by the guilt of this wonderful life he did nothing to deserve, by the guilt of knowing that if one member of their little spoiled friend group warranted a fiery death to remind the rest of them how short life is and how great they have it, to motivate them to do some sliver of good for the world, that it should have been him. It should have been him.
Outside is green with spring through the bird-shit-stained windshield. Patrick turns and notices little white wildflowers on the median, bright as the plastic road reflectors. He turns and
notices the red painted tin roofed barns ready to collapse, the gravel roads leading to shabby wooden houses that must never know winter, the kudzu curtain on rock walls reaching big over the metal guard rail—there’s a richness to it, an extravagance with which he is familiar.
Parker used to believe in God, but now he isn’t sure. If there is a God, a being capable of watching wars and rapes and starvation while looking on simultaneously at Parker’s greed and indulgence and cruelties—and Parker laid himself out for retribution so many times—surely he would be dead by now. Surely any moral immortal with perfect vision and fair judgment would have condemned him to death or jail or societal ruin by now, but the road is quiet. Parker’s hands grip the wheel so tight they ache. He didn’t choose this. He didn’t ask for an easy life, though probably he would have asked for one. This isn’t fair, he knows that, but what is there to be done? What is there to be done except to indulge in this life? What is there to be done except revel in the sickening excess of it and wait for his body’s rejection of it all, the world’s rejection of him, ending in a beautiful silence, the ear-ringing quiet at end of a symphony. Or maybe he will tumble into an afterlife, if there is one, bile coated, and if that’s so, then punishment for his good luck will come soon enough. After all, the universe evens itself out eventually, doesn’t it?
He pushes faster past black and yellow arrows with their backs broke, past arrows warning of intersections, of merging, past the stop, stop, stop signs, the red stop, stop, stop lights. There is no one around. At ninety miles per hour, the world yields to his car, streetlights bending, buildings blurring, trees smearing into indistinguishable masses of limbs.
Parker wants to be held, really. He misses Christa. He misses Avery. He misses the cold touch of his mother even. His heart has split into pieces, thudding in his wrist, stomach, skull, throat. He needs to clip his nails. He needs to cut his hair. The dead parts of him pull at his fingertips, weigh on his damp scalp. He needs to move his own body, stop the car and sprint
down the highway, but he’s also exhausted, wet under the arms, sweating down his ribs. No, he needs to shave his head, shave his cheeks. His developing facial hair itches, and the scratching had left Christa’s face irritated and splotchy when she separated from him. He runs his tongue over teeth, feeling the neglected nubs meant to secure an invisible retainer, which he hated and never wore, thousands of his parents’ dollars down the train, because it restricted his ability to eat, and he was hungry, starving, all the time. His mouth is crowded. His gums ache. He wants to lose all his teeth. He wants to get into a fight and have them knocked out. He wants to get kidnapped and held for ransom and have them removed—root and all—and mailed in little envelopes, white and red dotted as pads of prepubescent girls, to his father, who has been recommending veneers. He wants to be ugly and offensive enough that no one would ever vote him into office, that no one would vote for his father.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he’ll say if there is ever a cop. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he’ll say on the phone with his mother from the jail cell. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he’ll say at God’s feet if He claims him. His mouth waters at the thought of those words, their sweet diluted taste, how they’d melt away all this weight. His eyes burn. His nose stings as he pulls in air, but he will not cry. He will not cry. If there’s one thing he will not do, it’s die with wet eyes.
And then it happens. Golden headlights rise like twin suns over the hill behind him. The red, white, and blue lights pierce the darkness with that angelic screaming, that rising and falling, endlessly and without climax.
Parker’s heart stops. He pulls over. He rolls down all his windows and wipes his eyes.
A squat, uniformed man waddles from his car to Parker’s, bags sagging under his eyes, hands resting on his belt. He sighs before asking, “Do you know why I stopped you, kid?”
Yes, yes, yes, Parker wants to tell him. I know exactly why, but he only shakes his head. “Speed limit’s fifty-five. You were pushing ninety.”
“Yes sir,” Parker says, giddy. “License and registration.” “Yes sir.”
The officer sighs again and then his hardened face melts looking at Parker’s license. “Moon? You’re Nathaniel’s kid.”
Parker swallows. Beer churns in his stomach. “Yes sir.”
“Alright, look, I like your dad, voted for him last election and plan on doing so again. Good man for supporting law enforcement the way he does.” He winks. Parker wants to hurl. “So why don’t I let you off with a warning? Just this once. Our little secret.”
“Yes sir, thank you,” Parker mumbles.
So with all of the windows down, cool spring night filling the car, Parker drives home a coward. The wheels shake. The pavement rumbles, uneven. Hey you, sweet sum of your influences, it seems to say. It’s not your fault.