At the First Court of Hell
MORNING HADN’T COME, though Mr Taylor had driven through the night long enough to come into morning. We watched. The deepest of all colors painted the quiet country and nowhere in the purple distance did orange cut the horizon, but there did glow at the farthest reach a restrained light resembling something like a hidden sun. The black hills there, toward which Mr Taylor drove, loomed no larger than they ever had—they remained distant silhouettes he could smother with his raised thumb, which he did, many times, and more the longer he drove. He leaned into the steering wheel and dropped his jaw slack. His sleepless eyes moved between the road ahead and the instrument panel with a twitch. The low-fuel light stared back. A long plume of gravel dust burst behind the car and dispersed in the dark without a sound. The vague impression of the forest he’d come through would not be left behind, though he felt he’d come through it hours ago. He tried to wipe it from the rear-view mirror.
The valley is for wheat. It spreads blighted and unharvested to the east and west of the solitary road along which he drove. Mr Taylor let down the window and tried to breathe the cold air but against it his yawn broke into a relentless cough. He rolled up the window and, catching his breath, held his thumb to the windshield again to measure the hills against it.
He groaned and brought his fingernails to his lips, finding one by one nothing left to bite. A mile-marker flashed in the headlights. The numbers had weathered unreadable. He ought to have gone back and tried to make out where he was, but the car’s tank was so near empty he didn’t dare go one foot in the wrong direction.
“Now that’s—now God—,” Mr Taylor said to himself, biting his lip and squeezing his fist.
He pressed himself to the wheel again. His phone had died and with it his sense of direction. It lay on the passenger floorboard where he’d thrown it. The clock in the dash displayed 7:30 a.m.
“It’s seven thirty for—God,” said Mr Taylor, his voice risen. He ducked his head closer to the windshield and squinted at the road and the whiteness of the gravel and the dim, smoky motes floating above it. These—and the dark shapes of all things irregular at the skirts of the road and in the distance—these signaled nothing of a nearby town. “There should be lights,” he said. He would not believe that he had missed a turn. He would have noticed. All he noticed was that he should have been somewhere, anywhere by now. He made no wrong turn and he missed no turn because there had been no turns at all.
“There should be some goddamn lights,” he said. This time he slammed his closed fist on the center console.
He squeezed the steering wheel like he meant to choke it to death. Then he rubbed his eyes and slapped his cheeks and leaned forward and looked in the mirror. And, for a reason not known yet to us—yet—he smiled. He blinked, then he smiled wider, then blinked again. When his eyes opened, new shapes flashed in the headlights, a stop sign among them. The sudden change thrust panic into his veins and he threw himself back into the seat and gripped the wheel with both hands and floored the brake pedal. The car screamed and spun from gravel onto blacktop. He sucked air and held it. The car stuttered then jolted to a sidewise stop, throwing his head into the steering wheel and setting the horn loose. He breathed heaving breaths and saw nothing at first but the pandemonium of gravel dust pitched round the car. It was the bridge, of course. He saw finally that the blacktop is the approach to the bridge and the approach is shrouded in trees. An old burned-out pickup truck sat backed into them, just beside the gateway to the bridge. The bridge hides in the fog rising from the valley it spans, so of it he could only see the gateway. He parked the car when his wit returned. They were in the truck, though he couldn’t see them. This was partly because of the darkness, partly because the older and the younger are hard to see.
“Get ahold on yourself,” Mr Taylor said aloud, then he coughed. He coughed so murderous a cough he wrapped his hands round his own throat to stop it. When he had calmed, he peeled his hands from his throat with hesitance and a held breath. He cracked the car door and at the same time, the doors of the truck opened and the older and the younger slipped out either side. Mr Taylor saw them and spun toward his back seat. The armrest dividing the center of the bench seat had fallen open and spilled out the bloodstained Oxford shirt that had been hidden there with the rest of the clothes he should have burned by then. A few long hairs stuck coiled in the blood. Her hairs. He couldn’t reach it though he did stretch. When he turned back, the older and the younger had come toward him a bit, so he jumped out and met them a few paces from the front of his car. The younger stood outside the glow of the headlights, but his face was boyish and limp with sickness and spoiled by pockmarks. The older, fully illuminated, appeared as ancient as the young man did sick. They spoke. We listened:
“Evening,” Mr Taylor said. His voice came weak. He cleared his throat and said it again.
“Who’re you?” said the older. His voice rung the air like tin.
“I'm lost, I'd say,” Mr Taylor said. He faked a smile.
“Your name. I want your name.”
“You call me Mr Taylor.”
“Where’re you coming from, Mr Taylor?” the older said.
“Kansas. I come all the way down from Kansas.”
“Kansas. Whereabouts?"
"Topeka. Leavenworth. Here and there. There and here if you get my meaning," Mr Taylor said. That time he smiled a real smile.
"How far south you going?” said the younger, speaking in a tone that barely escaped the hum of the car engine.
“Depends. You two live out here?”
“No one lives out here,” the younger said. The older nodded in agreement.
“I’m aiming for some place I can sleep and get fuel,” Mr Taylor said. "You don't got a gas can in the back of that truck, do you?"
"Not gas, no," the older said. The younger grinned with his lips tightly closed. “Not gas,” the younger said.
Mr Taylor spat. "I would guess not. Point me on, then. Where should I go to get some? There’s been nothing and I’m almost dry," he said.
“You have to go a long way,” the older said.
“A real long way,” said the younger.
“I’ve come a long way. I take it there is a town on the other side of this bridge. I thought I’d see lights up one of these hills, but I don’t see jack through the fog. And the hills are farther than they look. I’m low on gas. If you live near, I got eight dollars for a meal. I’m hungry too. Maybe you got gas in your garage?”
“There’s no town over there,” the younger said. “If there was a town over there, you wouldn’t be able to see the stars like we do.”
Mr Taylor looked up and the stars were there by the billions but the moon was not and he did not notice, since as soon as he looked up, the younger spoke again and drew his attention.
“You can’t cross anyway. Can’t have two on the bridge at once,” the younger said.
“I don’t see no one else,” said Mr Taylor, looking at the bridge. The trusswork creaked in the wind.
“You didn’t see the stop sign neither," said the younger. He wiped his nose with his arm from elbow to fingertip then flicked his hand and added, "You didn't, did you?”
“He didn’t see us neither,” said the older.
“I saw it well enough. Just not soon enough. And I see you now,” Mr Taylor said impatiently. He looked back at his car. “I’m stopped, ain’t I? Come on, boys. My car’s still running. And I hit my head on the wheel when I hit the brakes. I’m hungry and I come a long way. Those hills must be in Louisiana.”
The younger burst into laughter at that. “Louisiana!” he said, looking at the older, who did not share in the laughter.
“I’m not sure what you want, Mr Taylor,” the older said, dragging his foot back and forth on the gravel.
“Lend me one of your phones, that’s all,” Mr Taylor said.
“What?” the older said. He held his hand to his ear.
“My phone is dead. I need to borrow yours,” said Mr Taylor.
“What for?” said the older.
“Ain’t it obvious? Christ. I'd like to see a map and maybe call a tow if there isn’t gas nearby. Didn’t I tell you that I'm lost and I need gas? The car is running on fumes. If I turn it off, it probably won’t start again. And the clock in the car is wrong, I don’t even know what time it is,” responded Mr Taylor.
“Well, we don’t deal in time, Mr Taylor,” said the older.
“Can you point me where to go after this bridge or am I going to have to break into your truck and find a way to help myself?” said Mr Taylor. He laughed, hardly. The older and the younger weren’t fooled and neither were we.
The older squinted into the headlights. What a performance—as if he had only just noticed them. “We ain’t got no phones. But I know what’s on the other side of the bridge,” he said. He nodded in the bridge’s direction. “It ain’t sleep. You done passed by all that, or else it passed you and you didn’t recognize it. Even if you could find sleep over there, you’d have to get over the bridge first and that just isn’t going to be possible. That bridge is old as I am and with the same constitution. It’s just bones left. If you don’t cross it lightly, you’ll get it swaying and dump yourself off the side. You’ll get dumped off it if you try to cross it, put a coin on that. We can’t cross it in our little truck and I take it coming from Kansas you got more weight with you in yours than we do ours. You can’t cross it.”
“You don’t want to get dumped off the bridge,” added the younger.
“It’s a long bridge. Goes all the way over. All the way, see? I recommend you turn on around and go back,” the older said.
“Piss on that, I can’t go back. I come a long way through a whole lot of nothing,” said Mr Taylor.
“Piss on it then,” said the older. “You still won’t get across it. It sags in the middle. You can’t tell it from here, but it sags and catches a cadence on windy nights like this and it’ll send you off the side unless you’re quick as a hare. The bridge is so long there’s a good chance, really there’s a perfect chance that before you get to the other side, someone else will come up from the other side and at that point you’ve got to back up to this side again anyway. Like my friend said, we certainly can’t have two on the bridge at once.”
“I’ll be all right,” said Mr Taylor. “Push come to shove, I’ll be all right if someone else tries to come across.” Mr Taylor, with the sweat that had beaded on his forehead beginning to drip down his cheeks, started to speak more, but the older interrupted him and continued as if Mr Taylor had said nothing at all.
“Let’s say you make it across the bridge and back on the road. Well, the road doesn’t end the other side. The forest has a radius unfathomable, see, and the road circles round it and through it and round it again. My own self can’t fathom it. The trees, look at them! You can’t count them. If you can’t count them, you can’t get past them, because it’s always another one, see. If you make it past one hundred trees, you’ve still got two hundred trees to pass. And if you make it past two hundred trees, you’ve got five-hundred trees yet still to go. And then a thousand. And a thousand-thousand. And if by grace you make it out of the forest, which just gets thicker the farther you go, so we’re discussing nonsense now, but let’s grant it”—the older glanced at the younger—“even then you would still be only at the beginning, since we sit at its beginning right here, and it just circles round right back to here. If you were to get out of this country, you’d be at the end of it. But you’re at the beginning now, you see, and it circles back around here to right where you’re standing. Beginnings aren’t in the same place as ends, can’t be, elsewise they couldn’t be neither the beginning or the end, they’d be one and the same, and that don’t make sense. And you know beginnings aren’t the same as ends, don’t you? But it comes back right here. So how can you go from here to where you want to go if it’s the same spot? Is this where you want to go?”
The older watched as the younger knelt and picked up a chunk of gravel and chucked it off the side of the bluff and brushed his hands together. Then his eyes returned to Mr Taylor.
“You can’t go anywhere. You’ll never make it through. Not even across the bridge. If by decadence of grace you traveled across the bridge”—the old man trailed off—“If by decadence of grace—” he muttered, then, “But the trees. You’d never find your way into open country except maybe into a valley, and that would just take you up another bluff like this one, where you’d see if the fog lifted more trees around you than stars over our heads. If you ever got to the top of it, you’d see it was not like this one at all but exactly this one. You’d be back quick in so many trees you’d think you’d never come out of these ones here in the first place until you come to know that you hadn’t. And wouldn’t that be the truth? They’re all the same. One is the next and the next is the other. That’s how the whole way goes, Mr Taylor, for a man looking for what you’re looking for, it doesn’t end. Unless you’re looking for trees. You can travel but you can’t go anywhere. By God, not from here.”
“By God, why on Earth would you come down this way?” the younger added.
“What in the hell is wrong with you, old man? Are you palsied like the boy? Tell me where I can catch some rest and fuel up. You’ve wasted your breath,” Mr Taylor said. He coughed. He turned his head and tried to stop it but coughed more. His throat seized on the scratch inside it and he coughed until he nearly vomited. The older and the younger watched him. When it passed, Mr Taylor tried to spit but his mouth was dry. He felt round for his knife, which he hadn't on him, then added, "I've half a mind to take your truck."
The older stood straighter and looked at the younger, who after a moment stepped from the shadow into the headlight beams. His skin, the color of the belly of a fish, lifted at the corners of the mouth and showed his bloodied teeth and swollen gums. It was a smile in the way the younger smiles. He wiped his nose and said, “I ain’t a boy.” Which is true, the younger is younger than the older by a span longer than the bridge, but he’s not a boy.
Mr Taylor had mistaken the younger for a boy but no longer. Silence engulfed them but for the bickering of the insects until Mr Taylor said, “I got somewhere to be. You boys have the night you deserve." He walked unsteadily back to his car.
“Won’t we,” said the older. By the time Mr Taylor was seated, the older and the younger had disappeared into their truck. Mr Taylor beat the steering wheel. He took the car slowly toward the bridge, paused before its decking, then went easily onto it.
Through the windshield at some indeterminable distance two soft-glowing orbs appeared. Mr Taylor jerked as if awaken from sleep. The oscillations in the bridge deck had been subtle at first but soon wavered and moaned with every gust of wind and threatened to collapse altogether unless he stopped. So he did, and he’d lost himself in the empty air beyond the bridge beset with pale fog wafting up from below. He rubbed at this throat and scratched his arms and legs because they were cold and itching. Every time he’d tried to start forward again, he could not get the tires even one time around, because with every infinitesimal movement forward, the bridge uttered its great mechanical moan and forced him to lift his foot from the pedal again. He could see no end of the bridge, neither before him nor the way he’d come. The decrepit steel, the missing crossbeams, the deep corrosion, the missing decking, the fog everywhere—of the bridge, these were all he could see, until the hazy orbs of light. They grew larger in his view until they took the familiar shape of faraway headlights.
“God damnit,” he whispered.
He reversed the car, and in less time than a single breath, he felt it roll over the curb at the bridge’s gateway and was back at its approach. The old pickup truck still sat dead in the trees and the sickly younger leaned there with his elbow against its hood with his head in his hand. The older sat in the driver’s seat with the door open dangling his feet like a child. Seeing them, Mr Taylor’s fear turned to anger and he threw himself from the car and at the two with his hairs standing up and his knuckles white and stiff and his teeth bared and his ears back, but he was no coyote and was arrested by the force of the old man's voice.
"Stop, boy,” the older said. He climbed out from the truck and took a few steps toward the hood where the younger still languished.
Mr Taylor stopped on his heels but said, "Call me a boy and I'll break you like a slut.”
The older remained unaffected. He said, "Didn't I tell you that you would have hell going across the bridge? The boards making up that deck are infinite, didn't I say? Or didn’t I. I should have told you the boards in that decking are infinite. Do you know what that means? It means to count all the boards in that decking, you can never stop counting. And you know, any one of them boards can be divided up an infinite number of times. Basic arithmetic tells you that, don't it Mr Taylor? Or didn't you learn basic arithmetic in Kansas? Or aren’t you just a stupid boy too slow for arithmetic?”
The younger howled and beat the hood with his fist.
Mr Taylor started forward again, but again the old man’s voice stopped him. “Let me explain. You can take one of them boards, just one of them, the first one there, and divide it by two and two again until you die for counting. Even if you lived forever, you could keep dividing until you’d forgotten why you started. Nothing ever goes away when you divide, Mr Taylor. The pieces only get smaller and smaller. Do you know what that means? It means that to cross even one of them boards you got to cross half of it first, but before you can cross half of it, you got to cross a quarter of it, all the way to infinity. To infinity, Mr Taylor. Do you see? I never heard of any man crossing an infinite number of distances, did you? Not by automobile, not by foot, not by anyhow. It’s unfathomable. Hell, that’s true for the ground beneath our feet. I should have said so. I thought I did. You didn't truly expect to cross that bridge, did you? After what I already told you? Never mind the trees. The bridge! It’s impassable. You should have known by what I’d said. Tell an old man the truth of it. Are you just as stupid as you come off?"
Mr Taylor rubbed his hands together. His throat ached and the ache spread to his limbs and he itched all over. He started to cough, but managed to say, “You ever heard anyone say you ought to be careful how you treat strangers because you don’t know who they are or what they’re capable of?” he asked. He coughed and spat and coughed again.
"Oh, you’re not a stranger, Mr Taylor,” the older said. “I’ve got a guess who you are. You're a killer. From Kansas, I take.” He took a few more steps toward Mr Taylor and the younger came off the hood and joined him.
"You’re a quick study," said Mr Taylor.
“I seen the shirt in the car. And hair. Pretty hair it is,” said the older. The younger followed. The younger said, “Pretty hair. Too pretty for you. Better suited to a youngin such as myself.”
Mr Taylor rubbed his wet forehead, nodded at the young man, and said, "Can you run as well as the old man sees?"
The older and the younger barked and laughed the laugh of coyotes as like are thick in this country and the younger barely managed his convulsions enough to point behind Mr Taylor and say in turn, “Can you?”
Two figures emerged from the fog in the direction he pointed, these not old and not sickly but a breed of unyielding mass equal to the darkness that never lifts from here and whose heaving energy became furious the closer they came. Mr Taylor watched them with open, empty eyes until it was too late. Even so, he ran to the car and thrust himself inside. He pressed the pedal to the floor but the gas had gone. The car rolled a moment and the engine died and the car came to rest. In an instant they pulled him wild and thrashing from the car to the blacktop and bound, gagged, and dragged him over the ground to the grass beside the bridge. The approaching headlights from the other side of the bridge were so close as to be bright as two suns, but as the two figures forced Mr Taylor’s head over the edge of the knoll, their light vanished from view and all left to him were the bridge abutments disappearing into the blackness below. The figures flipped him flailing on his back, whereby he faced them and they he and all became stiller yet and quieter except for the rush of the river below, which is always audible whether one listens or doesn’t.
One figure leaned just above Mr Taylor’s face. Oily breath fell from the gaping mouth onto Mr Taylor's nose and dripped down his cheek. The eyes above the gaping mouth judged Mr Taylor hopelessly, though he may not have seen them, we know it to be true. The mouth moved and words spilled out, though he may not have heard them. We did. We heard them. Together the figures threw Mr Taylor from the bluff into the valley below.
Mr Taylor fell, and while falling he woke supine on a gurney with his arms locked at his sides. He shivered uncontrollably. So many downcast eyes from long faces pressed into him. One face came very close, obscured behind the blurry beam of a penlight—now two lights floating before his half-conscious daze. Mr Taylor tried to sit up. From behind the penlight came a voice.
“More. Mr Taylor is not unconscious,” the voice said.
“It’s 7:34. We’re four minutes past,” said another voice with a touch of panic.
“He’s trying to rise,” came yet another voice. “He’s crying,” it said.
“God—he is crying,” said another.
From the viewing room behind a glass window, a crowd gasped. In the execution room, a doctor loaded potassium chloride into another syringe and plunged it into a vein.
“Ten—nine—eight—” a voice said.
Mr Taylor was falling again. The blackness opened to receive him like the pincers of the stag beetle. And we laughed, didn’t we? The coyotes, too. Coyotes laughed hidden among the trees, and we with them, and the bridge shook against our breath.