Chain Letter Read online

  “Give me another beer, Fran,” Brenda said.

  “Have mine,” Joan said. “I’m full.”

  They hit a bump and Tony’s head hit the ceiling. The road was uneven but straight as an arrow and looked like it could stretch across the state. He decided to accelerate.

  “At first he was out,” Kipp continued, burping. “We practically had the last bolt unscrewed and hadn’t even scratched the blasted sink. Then we heard the garage door opening and we knew we were in trouble. But we didn’t panic, we were cool. We raced upstairs and hid under the bed in the master bedroom. We could have snuck out the back door—that’s how we came in—but we knew we were on to hot stuff when we heard female squeals coming from the garage.”

  “Get off it,” Joan muttered.

  “It’s true! It’s true! Now here comes the good part. When we were lying under the bed, what do we hear but Coachy bringing the young lady upstairs. I tell you, my gut almost split holding back the laughter. Especially when I remembered I had my phone. When I pushed the record button, I knew I was capturing something for posterity.”

  “What did they do?” Fran gasped.

  The white strip disappeared from the center of the road. Tony was bothered at first but then figured he now had the whole road to himself. It was nice not having to stop for lights and pedestrians. All he had to watch out for were the tumbleweeds. A wind must have kicked up outside; the big thorny brown balls kept bouncing across his path, forcing him into an occasional swerve. The dust was also a pain, the headlights straining through it as they would have through filthy fog. But neither the weeds nor sand was a major problem. Joan put a beer in his hand and he sipped it gratefully. They may not have been heading in exactly the right direction but they were making excellent time.

  “Everything,” Kipp said. “They did things I haven’t even done with Brenda.”

  “Kipp!” Brenda said.

  “Brenda!” Fran said.

  “What a crock of B.S.” Joan said.

  “Tony,” Kipp said, “have I or haven’t I spoken the sacred truth?”

  “To the finest detail.” He yawned, checking his watch. It was two-fifteen and it felt like it. He could have closed his eyes this second and gone to sleep. Maybe, he thought, he should let Alison drive.

  “Where’s your phone?” Joan asked.

  “Huh?” Kipp said.

  “If it’s true, I want to hear it.”

  Kipp caught them all off guard. “All right,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “You’ll have the rare and exciting privilege.” After a quick search, he got the recording started. “This is confidential information, you understand.”

  There came a sound of sloppy footsteps, two pair, both anxious to get up the stairs, overlaid with fuzzy male and female voices. As the footsteps got louder, the voices grew clearer. To Tony’s inestimable pleasure, the guy sounded like Coach Sager. The girl, also, seemed familiar.

  “How old are you?” the coach was asking, his voice slurred as if he had been drinking, the lousy no good tyrant. They hit another bump and Tony vaguely wondered if it had been a rabbit.

  “Eighteen,” the girl crooned.

  “I thought you said you were a junior?”

  “So I flunked.”

  Wet kisses and lots of heavy breathing followed. Except for Fran’s heavy breathing, the car was silent.

  “Have you done this before?” Coach Sager muttered.

  “Yeah, this afternoon.”

  “With who?”

  “Some jerk on your team.”

  “All the boys on my team are jerks.”

  The realization hit Tony with a wallop and he almost went off the road. It was Kipp! He was a master at imitations. The others, except perhaps Brenda, didn’t know that. Clothes rustled and stretched through the car’s speakers. Zippers slowly pulled down. This was soo bitchin’!

  “Let me do that.” The girl sighed. “Oh, that’s nice. Oh, I like that.”

  “Ain’t I great?”

  “I’ve heard you’re the best.” The girl groaned. “Ahhh.”

  “You heard right, baby,” the coach whispered. “I love you, Joan.”

  The pandemonium was instantaneous, louder than any of the chords pounded out during the concert. The passionate couple continued their pleasure in relative private; who could hear them? Naturally, Kipp was laughing the hardest, but Joan’s vehement denials—the girl who had played her part could have been a twin sister—pierced through the uproar.

  “I never!” Joan swore. “I hate that bastard! Kipp!”

  “I love you, Joan!” Kipp shouted with glee, knocking Brenda off his lap onto the floor where she sat giggling in a puddle of spilled beer. A tumbleweed somersaulted across the road, and Tony swerved neatly to avoid it. The traction on the tires, he observed, was superb.

  “Wow, that’s neat, do it again, Tony!” Fran cackled, her personality having done a one-eighty. “I knew it was you, Joan!”

  “How was he?” Brenda yelled.

  “Shut up!” Joan snapped. Kipp turned up the volume.

  “We were meant to be lovers,” Coach Sager said.

  “Destiny.” The girl moaned. “Ohhh.”

  “Turn that off, dammit!” Joan shouted. Four tumbleweeds squaredanced in front of the headlights, and Tony dodged them as he would obstacles on the arcade game, Pole Position. Joan fought for the switch on the tape player.

  “You should never wear clothes, Joany,” Coach Sager whispered loudly.

  “Some jerk on your team!” Kipp jeered.

  “Turn it off!” Joan swore, so furious she was unable to do it herself.

  “Turn off the lights!” Fran cheered.

  “Ahhh.”

  “Stop this, Tony!” Joan yelled. “Stop it this second!”

  “I can’t! I’m driving!” Tony yelled back, trying to stop laughing and failing miserably.

  “You’re like me, Joan,” Coach Sager mumbled. “You’re the best.”

  “Ahhh . . . ohhh . . . ”

  “I said stop!!!” Joan screamed. Then she did a very strange thing. She reached over across the steering wheel and punched out the lights.

  Had the circumstances been normal, Tony would have flicked the lights back on, found his way to the freeway, taken everyone home and lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, he had three strikes against him. First, at the instant Joan did what she did, he was in the midst of avoiding still another scraggly tumbleweed and consequently was not driving perfectly straight. Second, no matter how many touchdowns he had thrown last fall, he was not such a tough dude that the forty plus ounces of beer in his bloodstream had not dulled important centers in his brain. Finally, had there been a speed limit in this godforsaken place, he would certainly have been in violation of it. Nevertheless, despite these handicaps, the night might have ended well if he’d had even a microsecond more time. His left hand had actually closed on the light switch and was pulling it out when the front right tire caught on the right edge of the road.

  Tony did not know if he screamed, but if he didn’t he was alone. The sounds of terror erupting from the throats of his friends signaled the beginning of the countdown of the twilight seconds. Time went into a slow-motion warp. When the tearing of the rubber against the asphalt started, he seemed to have all the time he needed to turn a bit to the right to take the car slightly further off the road, where it would be free of the sharp shoulder. But the edge must have had more drop than he realized, for it prevented the front wheel from turning as it should have. He succeeded only in trapping the back wheel. It was like riding a surfboard at midnight through a closing-out twenty-foot wave. He had both hands fastened to the steering wheel and there was no possibility of making another grab at the lights. At the first jolt, Alison’s flashlight had smacked the dashboard and had gone out. Inside and outside, all was deathly black.

  His friends began to scream his name. But so quickly, and so slowly, was everything happening that they were only pronouncing the T and had no
t yet moved on to the rest when he developed an alternative strategy. It was the exact opposite of the first one. He jerked the steering wheel to the left, intending to jump the irritating right edge of the road. And it worked—too well in fact. They tore off the shoulder and plunged right off the other side of the road.

  “Ahhh.”

  That was pseudo-Joan in the arms of Coach Kipp, her sighs of ecstasy miraculously making it through the howls of the others, at least for Tony’s ears. His mind went right on assessing the situation and it was becoming more and more obvious it was time for plan X. When the roller coaster had started, he had immediately removed his foot from the gas, and the subsequent haggling with the shoulder of the road and the current cremation of the shrubs under the front fender had killed a fair percentage of their speed. A spinout now, so he figured, probably wouldn’t tip them over. He slammed his foot on the brake.

  The roar was deafening, made up of many ugly parts: burning rubber, shattering branches, blasting sand, screams and more screams. Tony closed his eyes—they were of no use anyway—and hung on for dear life.

  Twice the car began to spin, but either because of his mastery of the steering wheel or because of blind luck they did not go completely out of control. They were grinding to a halt, heaving precariously in both directions, nevertheless looking as though they would live to tell the tale, when they hit it.

  Soft, Tony thought, too soft.

  The blow was nothing like impacting rock or tumbleweed or cactus. It felt bigger and heavier and, at the same time, more delicate. The shock wave it sent through the frame of the Maverick was one Tony would never forget.

  The car stopped and stalled.

  I hate driving.

  Fran and Brenda were whimpering like small scared children, the rest of them gasping like big scared teenagers. The air stunk with sweat and the buzz had returned to Tony’s head, only now it resembled more of a roar than a ring. He felt limp, the way he did after games against teams with three-hundred-pound defensive linemen, when every muscle in his body would cry not to be disturbed. The group’s collective sigh of relief hung in suspension; it had been too close.

  “Oh, Joan,” Coach Sager whispered, “you were born to be naked.”

  Calmly and quietly, Joan turned off the recording.

  Kipp began to laugh. It was such an outrageous thing to do that it was surprising no one told him to shut up. But then it began to sound, as gaiety often does in the worst of circumstances, strangely appropriate, and they joined in, laughing like maniacs for several minutes, hysterics close to weeping, the tension pouring out of them in loud gobs. When they were done and had caught their breaths and had thoroughly reassured themselves that they were alive, Tony flipped on the headlights. They were only a yard from the edge of the road, lined up parallel to the asphalt. Not too shabby for a drunk, he thought. He turned the key. The car started without a hitch.

  “Anyone hurt?” he asked. No one spoke up. “Good.” He slipped into gear, creeping onto the pavement. The frame was not bent, the wheels were turning free. All he wanted to do was get a couple of miles away before the next person spoke, to where it would make no sense to turn around and go back and look at . . .

  What you might have hit.

  “Don’t you want to check for damage?” Brenda asked, nestling back into her boyfriend’s lap.

  “No,” Kipp and Tony said simultaneously. They looked at each other, Joan sitting straight-faced between them, and Kipp nodded and a thousand unspoken imperative words were in the gesture, all of which could be summed up in a simple phrase: Let’s get the hell out of here!

  “I got to get home,” Joan said quickly. “My dad will be furious. He’ll take your head off, Tony. Let’s go, let’s go now.”

  “Right. Here we go.” Tony nodded, pressing down on the accelerator. Fifty yards. Don’t turn around. One hundred yards. It was just a cactus. One hundred and fifty yards . . .

  “Tony,” Neil said.

  Tony hit the brake, threw the car in park and turned off the engine. His head fell to the steering wheel. Neil was like his conscience: quiet and soft-spoken and impossible to ignore. Tony took a deep breath, clenched his fists and sat upright. “Give me the flashlight.” Brenda slipped it into his hand. “All of you, stay here,” he ordered. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “No,” Kipp protested.

  “Yes,” Tony told him, reaching for the door.

  Outside was a full-fledged dust storm. His eyes stung and he quickly had a dirty taste in his mouth. The flashlight flickered as he hurriedly retraced the deep grooves the tires had eaten into the dirt. A branch flung out of the shadows and slapped him in the face and he jumped twenty feet inside and the soles of his shoes didn’t leave the ground. He was in a state a hairline beyond scared, where shock and dread stood as equals. A part of his mind he did not want to listen to was trying to tell him exactly what he would find.

  Two hundred yards behind the car, he came to the man.

  He lay on his back in a relatively casual position, no limbs bent at radical angles, his tan sports coat flung apart, untorn but filthy with dust. He was not old, thirty perhaps, nor was he tall, having Neil’s slight build. The eyes were wide open, drawn up, focused on the mythical third eye, the gaze unnerving in the trembling light and the haunting wind. It was the mouth, however, that dropped Tony to his knees. A ragged trail of blood spilt out the corner of the slightly parted lips, and still, the guy looked like he was grinning.

  Tony did not know how long he sat there, the flashlight forgotten in the dirt. The next thing he was aware of was Kipp shaking him, seeming to call his name from the other end of a long tunnel. He raised his head with effort, found the others gathered in a half circle at his back.

  “Is he dead?” Kipp asked. He was sober. His eyes had never looked so wide. He knelt by the man and felt for a pulse at the wrist.

  “Looks it,” Tony heard himself say.

  Kipp touched the blood at the mouth. It was not dry. “Looks like he’s been dead awhile.”

  The hope that swelled in Tony’s chest was as bright as it was brief. “I don’t think so,” he said softly.

  “You’re saying we hit him?” Kipp asked, startled. Tony was thankful for the we. Before he could respond, Fran, Brenda, and Joan freaked out.

  “I told you to slow down, Tony!” Fran squealed. “I told you when we were leaving the parking lot. I said, ‘Tony, you’re driving too fast.’ ”

  “You imbecile.” Joan swore. “You told him to turn off his lights.”

  “I never said that! I didn’t mean it!”

  “But it was you, Joan, who turned off the lights!” Brenda shouted. “You were so mad and drunk that you . . . ”

  “If I was drunk, who gave me the beer?” Joan shot back. “You! You brought the beer. You kept shoving it down our throats. No wonder Tony didn’t know where he was going. Which doesn’t leave you out, Ali. You’re the one who told him to come down this damn road.”

  “You’re right,” Alison said. The acceptance of responsibility had a quieting effect on the group. Alison came and knelt beside him, touching his arm. “What should we do, Tony?”

  “I don’t know. Find out who he is, I suppose.” Tony was hoping Kipp would take the initiative. He didn’t want to touch the guy. Kipp understood and began to go through the pockets. He should have closed the eyes first. With each touch of the body, they rolled slightly.

  “He doesn’t have a wallet,” Kipp pronounced a minute later. “How could a guy this well dressed not be carrying a wallet? Someone must have raked him over, already. I tell you, we didn’t kill him.”

  The sand was working its way under Tony’s collar. The wind was warm and dry, a desert wind, uninterested in human affairs, hard to breathe. Like giant web-weaving spiders, dark tumbleweeds scraped the edge of their tiny circle of light. The man stared on, fascinated with what they couldn’t see.

  “It may have fallen out,” Tony said. “Let’s look for it.”


  Kipp was the only one who searched for the wallet. He found nothing. He hiked back to the car to check the fender. That piece of evidence was crucial. Had the man been standing or lying down when they had hit him?

  There was a dent in the fender, Kipp reported when he returned, but he said it was the same dent that had always been there. Tony could have sworn that there had not been a scratch on Kipp’s car when the evening had begun.

  Fran and Brenda began to cry. Joan started to pace. Neil maintained his motionless stance outside the glow of the flashlight and Alison continued to kneel by Tony’s side, her head bowed. Kipp finally closed the guy’s eyes. Not a car came by, not a person spoke. Tony checked his watch. They were running out of night, running out of time to . . .

  Get rid of the body?

  “We’ll put him in the trunk,” he said finally. “The authorities will be able to identify him.” He waited for an objection and he probably would have been willing to wait till tomorrow night to get one. Kipp did not disappoint him.

  “No way, you’re not putting him in my car.”

  “Kipp, we can’t just leave him here.”

  “Sure we can!” Joan cried, stopping her pacing and taking up a defiant stance on the other side of the body. She was no longer a sexy seventeen year old. She was a desperate woman. “My old man’s a cop. I know those jerks. They’ll question us separately. Fran and Alison will blab their mouths off. The cops will put the story together. Look, I admit it, I was the one who turned off the lights. I could be laid with a real heavy rap. Let’s just get out of here. Let’s just forget it.”

  “I agree completely,” Kipp said. “Tony, someone else killed this guy. He was probably killed miles away and dumped here. Listen, there’s no parked car in the vicinity, there’s no wallet, there’s no dent . . . ”

  “There is a dent!” Tony exploded, and perhaps it was a last grasp at sanity. This craziness they were talking about, he knew, would follow them from this spot. But it was so tantalizing, so easy.

  “There already was a dent!” Kipp yelled back. “I should know, it’s my car. Don’t you see, it’s my car. Even if I was too drunk to be driving it, I’m as guilty as you are. We all are.”