"Driving Around at Night" by Kyle Francis Williams
I always liked it, how the felt roofs of our old cars fell smoke-sodden on our heads, how the seats gave because we lived in them, and especially the light. I would take a lot of pictures of my friends’ hands on their steering wheels, lit by streetlamps as we drove under them or by the lights from the dash: yellow gaslight, red check-engine, or the blinking of the turn signal which I can hear right now just thinking about it, like a clock ticking groups of two or, yeah, okay, like a heartbeat.
I don’t like to do the driving, though. I like to look around, I like to be gone. I almost turned us into the ghosts we chase around too many times. Like Sweet Hollow Road and Mount Misery, I mean, or the Kings Park Psychiatric Center. These forgotten little graveyards, or even just all these crackhouse-condemned foreclosures. Someone’s died everywhere. One night we went to like a dozen of the supposed locations of Mary’s Grave. We want to see something more than what’s in front of us. We want to know what happened to all our friends. We idle on those train tracks to see if the hands of a bus of dead children will push us across to safety, we flash our lights at the Patchogue Hanging Tree to see the shadows of the ropes. My sister and I went to this graveyard behind the liquor store near her old place in Coram and she swears we saw a woman in white. Maybe we did. I don’t have evidence for any of this—I stopped taking pictures out windows at some point, as a rule. Evidence kills the need for faith, and we can’t let faith die. Evidence won’t sustain us. That’s my argument.
Kenny’ll drive all night if we let him. We get off work past midnight but we’ll just load up on 7-11 coffee, Taco Bell, and Adderall, and we’ll just go. He likes to ride out to where it gets real creepy, where we remember that most of the Island is supposed to be swamps. He really loves this one intersection, I think it’s in Sound Beach: one road’s dirt, the other’s getting there, and if there were ever signs to tell us the names of those roads they’re gone now and never coming back. There’s an abandoned flower shop on one corner and empty lots on the other three, a single streetlamp oozing a pissblood color over everything. If feels like we could sell our souls there, and Kenny wants to run that flower shop. He loves flowers.
Not far from there is Whiskey Road. The men paid to clear the path through the pine barrens were paid in barrels put along the route. That’s why the road slaloms so bad. I’ve talked about this before but I can’t get anything out of my head. It’s a fucking rattrap up there. Lately when I look at my cat, who just turned one, I imagine finding her dead somewhere. Like, I imagine her dead body, picking up her dead body, and how she would look more or less like she did when she was alive but would not look at me when I ask her to. I cannot look at this cat without seeing that. Her name is Elizabeth. She is orange, and very small.
I mean, I don’t even like to look at my friends anymore. I have all these fucking pictures and I’m tired of seeing them in the slideshows at the funeral parlors. But I don’t know what else to do with them, so this is another one of those things caught up there, so stuck I know it like a song. You could probably cover this story yourself. If you do, you should tell it like this. It’s how the guy who lived in my mom’s basement told it to me, and how I told it to Kenny. It helps if you are actually on Whiskey Road at night, but you can sub in any dark winding road with a lot of tree cover and not of a lot of lights, if you’re not from where I’m from. And whatever it is about your friend you can’t get out of your head:
A friend of mine used to pull a prank all the time where he’d hang himself by one of these trees over the road. Not actually hang himself, obviously, but like in a movie, there’s a way to do it that looks real but isn’t. He practiced this with the ceiling fan in his room. It would give him these crazy bruises around his neck—more than bruises, I mean, have you ever held a thick rope before? It’s sharp. It cuts you. So you have to imagine this kid with this two-inch thick bruise wrapped around his neck, coated in dried blood that would crack open and drip down if he turned his head too much or too fast. But when anyone asked him about it he’d just give them this shitty grin and say something like, My girl likes a good time. I knew what he was really doing because he told me, and I assumed he’d told some of our other friends because we all played dumb about it. What bruises? What cuts? Not that anyone really asked. We weren’t the kids anyone cared about. I think the teachers figured that, if he ended up going through with anything, it would be one less thing to worry about. Maybe it would pacify the rest of us.
He brought me out here a lot. I would hide in the woods. I mean, try looking out there right now, you wouldn’t know if someone was twenty, thirty feet in watching us. And this isn’t a main road or anything, it’s long but goes from nowhere to nowhere and it’s dark as hell. Hardly anyone is on it this late at night, especially not since they found the bodies Rifkin left out here. What he would do is string himself up by a branch over these curves, near enough to a streetlamp that a car would see him but far enough away that it might convince itself it didn’t. But what he liked better than making a car stop was when a car slowed down a little but decided to just keep going. If they stopped it meant he had to jump down and run into the woods fast enough that the driver might think it was just nerves, but those people who slowed then kept going—those people, he said, have convinced themselves that what they saw wasn’t worth stopping for. We argued about that, about whether that was better, about what it meant, but he said those people proved something to him. Something about the human condition.
I was strictly along for the ride and he made that clear. He told me: No matter what, do not fucking move from this spot. I don’t know why he brought me at all but I didn’t mind staying put. I’d get a little fucked up, whatever, it was fun to watch. He did this a couple years and never got caught. We even watched some of these pulled-over cars call the cops, and watch those cops shine their flashlights right over our heads, but they never really cared enough to find us. Eventually he became another story, like Mary’s Grave or the lady who drowns people in Lake Ronkonkoma: Drive on Whiskey Road—ha, especially around the devil’s hour in autumn—and you might see the ghost of a suicide still hanging, cut down so late the soul stayed up there.
Our junior year, he decided he’d hang himself every night for a week leading up to Halloween. He was always sick at that point, and always tired, but: Give the people what they want! I went out with him every night and, on Halloween, crouched down with a pillowcase full of candy and, you know, other stuff. I told him good luck. I always told him that. I think I always told him that.
The first car slowed down and then kept going, so he stayed up. The next car stopped, so he scrabbled down and we watched the driver walk around under the streetlight and freak out. We ate some milk duds watching that guy. Drank a beer. Then he went back up.
The next few cars didn’t even slow down. Two or three full hours went by like that until this one car not only stopped, it screeched to stop right underneath him. He had no time to get himself down and I’m sitting there thinking, you know, Fuck. I wasn’t in any condition to go get him. I had no idea what to do. What would you have thought if you were me?
This guy, he gets out of the car and starts shouting, Get down from there. Shouting, You fucking idiot. Throwing rocks and yelling, You got me once with this bullshit but not again motherfucker. I’m going to kick your ass, boy, you’ll wish you really were dead. You motherfucking—but then this guy actually hits him. Actually hits my friend with a rock, hard, and you know what my friend does?
Swings. Spins a little.
That’s when this guy calls the cops. I hear him tell his phone: I’m looking at a kid hanging by a tree on Whiskey. For real now, I’m looking at him, I’m pulled over, I’m standing right under him, and he isn’t moving. He isn’t fucking moving!
One squad car comes out and yells at my friend, then another. You know cops, they multiply. It ends up being like five squad cars, so dense the ambulance can’t get near him, and then the fire truck can’t get through. They have to move the squad cars so the fire truck can get under my friend to get him down with the ladder. All those flashing lights, not to mention this guy who’d pulled over, his headlights shining onto my friend laying on the ground with the paramedics on their knees next to him yelling at all these cops standing around looking at him. And then there’s me, just a few yards into the woods, surrounded by empty cans and candy wrappers. I never moved. I kept my head down.
My friend got a writeup in the local paper. The headline was: Teen Inspired by Legend Hangs Self. But they didn’t know that it was him who was the legend in the first place. That he wasn’t imitating himself. He was just himself. The article was like three paragraphs and described him as a very quiet, sad-eyed kid. A quote from his mom asked what she would do now. It wasn’t until after this article came out that I realized no one else knew about the prank. None of our other friends knew. They all thought he really did it, really killed himself on purpose. But, I don’t know, how do I know he didn’t?
I spent so many hours in the woods that night thinking about it. It took forever for the cops to clear out so I just lay there and thought about how I didn’t know when it happened. I’d watched my friend hanging up there the entire night. At some point he stopped being there, and I didn’t know when that happened. Eventually one cop was left behind with his lights on to make cars drive around the cones they’d put down. When I came out of the woods he just asked me what I was doing out so late, but he didn’t really care. I said it was Halloween, and asked him what happened. He shook his head, spat on the ground where my friend’s body had been, and said it was none of my business and a waste of his time.
So I like to drive this road now whenever I’m near it at night. You’ll still hear people say they saw a body hanging on Whiskey Road that wasn’t there when they stopped to check for it. I don’t believe them. I mean, I don’t believe they stopped to check. Even still, I’d like a story like that. I’d like to keep that argument going. So keep your eyes open.
That’s the end of the story. When you’re done telling it, get real quiet. Don’t answer any questions, don’t clarify anything. Just be quiet. If your radio is broken like mine is, all the better. If you’re the one driving, turn around on the road and ride it all the way back. If you have to say something—and I mean if you really, really have to say something—you can say this, but only after a long time saying nothing, staring out the window, up at the trees, into the dark:
He died doing what he loved.
Kyle Francis Williams is a writer from Long Island. He is an MFA candidate at the Michener Center of UT Austin and Interviews Editor at Full Stop. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Southern Humanities Review, and Hobart; and is forthcoming in Southampton Review and Joyland. He is on Twitter at @kylefwill.
