So Far Behind I Thought I Was First

Named a Finalist for the 2022 Summer Short Fiction Prize

I FIRST MET JJ AFTER HE BECAME, OF ALL THINGS, A NOTABLE FIGURE. He’d taken a job at the gas-station on Pinehill Avenue and was quickly favorited by the dropouts frequenting that establishment’s parking lot. He commented on their bastardized cars and took bets on certain ruinous overland competitions. The joy of the world, JJ said. Many would drive drunk into trees before this curse ended.

Other mountain places a day out from San Francisco filled up with summer homes. Pinehill never filled up with anything, and I resented the years I’d overstayed. The wife had finally smelled death on me and skipped off with another man, a fresh-faced biker from the low-country. Most of my friends were by then mired in some kind of misery: loneliness, or addiction, or the god-fearing haze of American spiritual collapse – basic cable viewership, family life. What was wrong? You tell me. I thought for a long time about eating a bullet, but ultimately decided I could do something about the youth. In my years of self-loathing, I’d come to revere the stupid young, the way they threw their lives into the void, fearless. Perhaps I could still learn.

Pinehill was founded by fortune seekers, old-timey gold hunters. To no one’s surprise, it became a cynical place. Yosemite was just up the road, and there were always trinkets to sell: tiny plastic Half Domes, Ahwahnechee bobbleheads. Shops that sold healing crystals, jerky, and fudge. A century of history is not enough to provide a future.

When JJ came to town he gazed with such love upon the locals’ rusting muscle cars, of course I wondered where he’d come from. I knew there was a vigorous world down there, a place where people lived passionate lives pursuing relatable goals. JJ was a rare scion, come to bless our weary burg.

One night after his shift I asked if we could talk. I stuttered when I spoke, and his grimace proved my request was strange. But anyone could see I was harmless. He acquiesced, ever the curious traveler, and followed me through the woods toward the embarrassment I called home.

I knew he expected the unkempt yard and dirty siding, but not the sinking bookshelves, dingy art, nor myriad instruments, all the detritus of a shameful and sexless existence. Others may have picked at a spare acoustic, or flipped through some tome detailing world warfare, but not JJ. He’d seen the motorcycle tarped under the car port and wanted to know more.

“It saddens me,” I said, stepping among heaping junk, “the amount of work needed to start this engine.”

“It’s beautiful,” JJ said, sliding the tarp down and pawing at the throttle.

“Would you like to trade for it?” I asked. I wasn’t looking for much.

“How about a bet?” he said. “Something dangerous.”

It was like that with JJ at first. Everything made sense and we would hash out the details another time. I accepted immediately.

He would, eventually, come to tell me things. Nobody ever asked him much. A race he pulled in Baja California, looking upon the Sea of Cortez at low tide when the water receded for miles, disappearing entirely from sight. His family and what brought him up the mountain. He would speak briefly about a boy he’d harmed in the wastelands east of San Diego, and this topic seemed to weigh on him.

One night we walked a country lane. A group of children, probably junior high, passed on bicycles. The beer can they threw missed JJ but grazed my own skull.

“Pedal faster!” JJ shrieked. “They will catch up to you eventually!”

One glanced back, his expression carrying the fear and confusion of a coyote lost in town. JJ sprinted in pursuit, scattering them across the asphalt. I asked myself: does nobody notice the love he carries? How can he sustain a thing so pure among a people so fallen? Here was someone I could learn something from. I’d grown so tired of myself.

***

Before I knew him, Joshua Janacek, called JJ, was a lean and deep-shouldered goon with black hair, born of a nothing family from Fontana, that desert town outside Los Angeles known for its warehouses and methamphetamine. His brother died in a blackout on the road to Las Vegas and his mother, who’d come to California in flight from the Soviets, unaware of the approaching Velvet Revolution, was long ago reckoned among the born again, god bless. His father drove truck for a time, before disappearing back east, and was a man who worshipped speed above all else, the concept, not the drug. These tragedies instilled within JJ an inclination to paranoia, the certainty that his joys would one day evaporate in violence or sudden misfortune.

Eventually he came to worship speed as well, difficult god though it was. He grew up riding motorcycles and by his seventeenth year was a minor contender in the trail riding circuits of Riverside, Kern, and Imperial counties. He had no interest in the acrobatics of the motocross racers and took to burning across long distances in a fugue.

During a grueling race beyond Superstition Mountain, near the bombing fields where Blackhawks illume the Imperial Valley with tracer rounds, JJ crested a low hill and was nearly launched from his bike dodging a pack of snivelling hippies who’d hiked into the Anza Borrego to pick wildflowers. They’d thrown up their hands as if expecting a mugging and howled at his quickly fading silhouette, yelling that anyone had a right to this trail and that all things were sacred.

These enduro races measured the time elapsed traversing vast tracts and were not sprints toward some ribboned line, flags waving, announcers babbling in their hut. Other riders were seldom encountered, so it enraged JJ when another man, or boy, difficult to tell with the helmets, materialized beside him in the sandy depth of a flash-flood wash and stole his line across a graceful bend, cutting our hero off and sending JJ floundering into a stand of catclaw brush. His machine subsequently stalled and flooded before starting fitfully again, a great dishonor. The two riders found each other later, crossing a broad stony flat in the shadow of mountains worn smooth like river rocks. JJ, by then slavering with a vengeful madness, swerved to force their meeting. With his opponent close behind, wheels nearly scraping, JJ dropped from fourth gear to third and torqued his four-stroke motor, releasing from beneath his rear knobby a great spume of dust, stone, and dried clay. One of these rocks, a piece of granite the size and shape of a blood orange, struck the enemy rider directly in the knee, dislodging the kneecap from its regular groove atop the femur and sending the competitor into an agonized heap on the ground.

No longer hearing another engine wailing alongside his own, JJ did not look back, and by the time he returned to camp would have forgotten about the meeting completely, if three men with wrenches hadn’t been breaking the windows of his pickup truck and stabbing holes into his tires with Philips screwdrivers, deflating them like charcoal balloons. JJ assumed these men to be the downed rider’s teammates or meathead brothers and that the other man, or boy, had perhaps been crippled or killed. JJ had gas remaining in his six-gallon tank and sped away.

He was arrested eventually, in a state of delirium, outside the dusty town of Brawley, where he’d been riding at speed across the yards of a suburban street. That country is lousy with sunburnt crazies, so the police were not surprised when JJ began to gibber about being chased by three masked men wielding screwdrivers who would surely kill him. They were somewhere in these houses now, he said, his eyes darting like bugs at a light.

He was charged with misdemeanor vandalism for the damage he’d inflicted on neighborhood lawns but managed to avoid jail time. He sold the dirt bike to pay the fine, and never once returned to the site of the race, nor to his demolished pickup. Some months later, he heard a group of local miscreants had dynamited the rusted frame of this long-windowless vehicle, and some time after that, the wreckage, now brightly painted, became a regular spot for Coachella psychonauts to lust after infinity.

Living again with his zealot mother in Fontana, JJ was jumpy, prone to irrational fears.

He told me this as if it were a bout of something he’d overcome, a former life he disavowed. Often, he said, he considered escape, and believed he was being followed.

Mrs. Janacek, who thought herself a great helper of souls, phoned a Pentacostal exorcist from a pamphlet she found in the lobby of her church. A week later, the minister arrived, disheveled, driving a rusty and once-white El Camino that rattled and groaned. He was of course a drunk and a charlatan and believed every lie he told. He found JJ sitting in his bedroom alone, reading an automotive magazine.

Those afternoons alternated between panic and lethargy, and on this particular day JJ viewed the world as if through a pane of frosted glass. He watched the minister with mild interest as the man of god drew each curtain, tied our hero’s limbs to the bedframe as if he were to be drawn and quartered, and began speaking of spiritual warfare.

“You are oppressed by a demon of fire,” the minister said, brandishing a wooden cross. “It has entered your body.”

“Is it the devil?” a meek JJ asked.

“Hear me, demon,” spoke the holy man, “I will expel thee in the name of god.”

He then straddled the boy, as a lover might, and raised the cross above his head.

“Hey man, can I ask you something?”

“I am a servant of Christ,” bellowed the minister, “and I command you, Lucifer, to get thee from this child, to flee back to Hell.”

“How fast can you get that Camino to run?” JJ asked. “I bet that baby just cranks.”

“Out, demon, out!” the man cried and began blackening JJ’s eyes and face with the cross, striking him as much with his knuckles and wrists as with the hardwood pommel itself.

Later, JJ lay immobile on his bed, his limbs still tethered. From the other room he heard the man collect his pay from Mrs. Janacek and leave out the front door. Our hero shuddered when the El Camino’s crankshaft finally turned over and the old clunker lumbered off.

“Fire,” he whispered, “a demon of fire.”

Uncommonly, for one obsessed with motion, JJ became interested, more and more, with immobility and delay.

The day after the exorcism, he sat icing his black eyes. He’d been exiled from the motorcycle community, that much was clear. He held the bag of ice a foot from his face and examined its form, the cubes inside. Thirty minutes later, the bag held only water. A drop of condensation stung the top of JJ’s foot. The cold soothed him.

A year before, during a long and dangerous race in the Baja California desert, he’d broken down near the Colorado River Delta. There he’d met a beatific poet living in a van on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. This strange wanderer sheltered JJ and spoke of magnificent places, peaks and valleys and perfectly clear lakes, and the noble pursuit their visitation entailed. He was a certain kind of Pacific mystic. There was a transcendence in pristine nature, he explained, smiling with beautiful teeth, a fullness and exaltation of spirit. He was especially fond of glacial ice. A pure beacon, he’d called it. The way things are going now, he said, glaciers will be the final measure of mankind. Best seek them soon.

JJ hadn’t understood and still didn’t, but sitting wounded in his room holding a bag of melted ice these words returned with a force he’d never expected. His mother was beyond help and would doom her son with cures. He could not live in humiliation another day. He vowed that afternoon, as the poet had suggested, to see a glacier with his own eyes.

So, while Mrs. Janacek napped, JJ filled a backpack with his meager life, and left. That night he walked many miles across the begrimed netherworld of Los Angeles, arriving sometime before dawn at the art deco arches of Union Station. He purchased a ticket heading north, along the San Joaquin rail, to the distant town of Merced.

JJ expected the three hundred miles of crackly yellow hills to transmute, upon arrival to the Sierra Nevada, into mountains thickly matted with glacial ice. This did not happen. Merced lay in the center of a vast agricultural flatland smelling of broccoli and pesticides. Standing on a patch of grass beside the railyard in the beating sun, our hero divined he ought to head east, toward the mountains he’d seen from the train car. He began walking.

It happens that the Palisade Glacier, the southernmost glacier in the United States, lies almost due east from Merced. JJ did not make it to the Palisade Glacier. He followed a backwoods trail into the western Sierras until the trail branched and faded into the brush. There he found a cairn, a stack of stones, and fifty yards later found another. This string of markers led JJ deeper into the mountains, and sometime before sunset our hero was deposited by this ragged path onto the desolate shore of a subalpine lake, where he made camp. Bivouacked alone in a remote valley of the John Muir Wilderness, without having found any glacier, nor any snow, JJ was afraid.

He’d heard his mother’s tales of mad prophets wandering the wasteland; Jesus himself had once fought Satan in the desert. Muhammad too. JJ sat beside the lake’s dark water, burning twigs beneath the stars in the manner of ancient astronomers, and considered his own demons.

Was he meant to feel some clarity about his life, some insight alone in this shrieking wilderland? His mind circled while the coals burned low. A great and hideous emptiness welled around him.

His little fire reflected off the lake’s velvet face. A branch snapped; a fish jumped; something scattered in the brush. In the vague penumbra of light, JJ noticed three figures on the water’s flickering surface. Three armed men, he saw, in pursuit. Perhaps they brandished screwdrivers. A familiar sight for our hero. They advanced toward him slowly. JJ stiffened, breathed deeply, then dove into the lake to face his attackers before they could catch him alone, unaware, sitting on his ass thinking cloudy things. He thrashed in the freezing dark, his blistered feet barely scraping bottom. Above him, three jagged peaks were etched into the twilight, backlit by a rising moon. Their outlines flickered across the nameless tarn.

Joshua Janacek emerged from his mountain sojourn a tattered soul. After leaving the lake, he’d never again found the trail of cairns leading back to the world. He’d been lost for days in those empty hills. He stumbled into Pinehill begging for water.

He slept in the woods around town before a local acid casualty offered their busted Airstream for next-to-nothing, at least clean the yard, they asked, referring to the uncleared acre of forest upon which the trailer moldered. That fall, raking pine needles to and fro, JJ decided to stay, perhaps to settle. This was all it took.

***

In those days, when I knew JJ, speed was the only real problem in town. By speed I mean methamphetamine. There was drink, of course, and there always would be. Opiates would come later and take their toll, but it was a simpler time when everyone was just up all night, grinding their teeth instead of killing themselves.

I got mine from some high schoolers who hung around JJ’s parking lot. These two were brothers, fraternal twins in fact. The Lawson boys. One with a walleye and the other with a snaggletooth. I never got the names right. The product they peddled was clean enough; one of their uncles cooked it up in tunnels out in the woods, protected by punji pits and centipedes. Not that I wouldn’t stoop to smoking something rancid, something cut with mysteries from the mineral world, or the pharmaceutical case, or whatever was left in the cleaning bottles under the sink. I was not, not any longer at least, what you would call an addict. Regardless, I’d exhausted most branches of delinquency by then, and Pinehill didn’t have many alternatives. I wasn’t about to start singing in church, if that’s what you’re thinking.

JJ would watch the Lawson twins race. It was the only thing I ever saw him doing, other than work the gas station or talk nonsense with me.

They’d all go out to this stretch of highway in the dead of night. The way it worked, a little service one-lane splintered off from the main road and curled around a solitary hill. Eventually, a few miles off, it connected back to the highway, forming a loop. They’d unlatch the gate to the service road and race it all like a track, five laps, sometimes ten. One of the Lawsons had a radio scanner tuned to the state troopers’ frequencies.

That night it was the four of us: Snaggletooth Lawson, his brother Walleye, JJ, and me. I hadn’t slept in a while. I was pretty far into a good one at that point. I was betting JJ for the motorcycle tarped in my car port and a wad of cash, all this on Snaggletooth, who seemed, at least in those days, to be the nobler brother, more trustworthy. Who knows why I thought this? JJ counted the money, thumbing through it with the quick motions of a cashier, and accepted my gambit.

After a few laps, the race wasn’t looking great. Walleye blasted around the corner in his hoodless ‘72 Plymouth Duster and skittered onto the service road.

“The way he takes that turn,” JJ said, softly. “As if the rest of the world doesn’t matter.”

Snaggletooth Lawson came sliding into view in his blessed hatchback Camaro. He downshifted to hit the turn, but his twin was already out of sight. He wasn’t going to win anything, and neither was I. The brothers gambled against each other worse than anyone else though.

“See how he countersteers when he hits the dirt patch?” JJ said, watching the Camaro. “Otherwise he’d slide out. Except, how can he see something like that on a night this dark? Those headlights won’t do it.”

I glanced around for what felt like the first time. He was right; we couldn’t see anything. No moon, barely any stars. The vague shapes of trees were waiting for us to leave.

“He’s made that turn so many times it’s like a part of his mind.”

“Then he must not know himself very well,” I said. “I’m going to lose this.”

JJ laughed. I’d rarely heard him laugh before. He said, “We’ll see.”

I didn’t know what that meant. I will admit that in those days of groveling and woe I saw him as a sort of prophet savant. His reverence for these two failures was astounding. I think he thought of them as unknown paladins serving a fiery god. Their deity, however, was a grim master, one who enjoyed sacrifice.

I never saw how it happened. Everything was too dark. Had JJ known, ahead of time? Had he known the two brothers would come rocketing up the highway, one immediately following the other, their bumpers scraping, both engines fully engaged? Did JJ, with his maniac love of competitive physics, already understand Snaggletooth would take the turn onto the service road too sharply, hoping to cut his brother off, and lose traction on the same patch of unpaved road he’d negotiated so deftly before? Did JJ know Snagg wasn’t wearing a seat belt? Or that he would spin violently out of control and be flung from the passenger window into the trunk of an uncaring pine? Could he have predicted any of that? Was there some omen he’d already consulted? A certain flutter of birds or a childhood dream suddenly remembered? I’ve wondered about these things.

Whatever JJ guessed, I don’t think he guessed how broken the boy’s leg would be. It was an ugly sight, all that bone coming through the skin. He was already going into shock. There was a shred of meat hanging from the pine bark. He was lucky he hadn’t bonked his head.

Walleye Lawson stopped his car with the motor running.

“There are two state troopers on their way out,” he yelled. “It just came through on the radio.”

That boy was surely holding and had no interest in any of this. He vanished in a hurry, before any responsibilities fell his direction. The nearest town with an ER was forty-five minutes out. JJ insisted on driving. We tossed the shivering Lawson into the backseat, and JJ eased the Camaro down from that wretched hill country. We knew how this worked. Leave the wounded on the doorstep and disappear before anyone can ask questions. They’d patch him up, and our hands would be clean. It was a straightforward thing. But JJ seemed to be running a fever. Once the highway flattened, he opened the throttle as far as it would go. The whole car started shaking.

“It’s clear you’ve won the bet,” I said.

JJ didn’t answer. He was staring into the night. His grip on the steering wheel forced the blood from his knuckles. There were towns out there, somewhere, and cities. Soon we’d see their lights glowing on the horizon like fires. JJ stared without blinking. The mood became somber.

“You saw the way he hit that tree,” JJ said. “You’ll never see anything like that again.”

He spoke these words with a stunning power and clarity. I leaned forward on the seat. There was nobody on the road. The car had no speedometer, and the only way to gauge our pace was by its steady rattle. I glanced at the Lawson boy, shaking and pale behind us.

“Now it will get into his marrow,” JJ said. “It will haunt him. He will run, but it will never stop chasing him. It is not fear and it is not love. It will drive him from himself. He knows, he knows what he’s done, and he knows he never had a choice. Nothing else could have happened. You saw. You watched it all unfold. It couldn’t have happened any other way. You saw that.”

The night was a blur. We passed smudges of light that could have been service stations or billboards but it was hard to say. I heard the younger Lawson mumbling please please please.

“Do you still want to up the stakes?” JJ asked, his voice rising. “We can’t stop now, not with them chasing after us like this. We’ll just have to see…”

The road narrowed and crowned a ridge. I saw before us a great, empty expanse. There were no lights, there was nothing. I heard the wounded child hyperventilating behind me. That was when I realized we’d been going the wrong way for miles.