Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine Read online

  His teeth were chattering. His nose wouldn’t stop running. He checked the rearview mirror and noticed the skin under his right eye was starting to swell from where Jackson had punched him. He opened the tarp and stared at the deer’s dead eyes. He rubbed the condensation from its snout. He knew he had to get out of the car, to get the deer out of the car, but he couldn’t do it, not just yet. He sat in his garage, the deer beside him, and tried to catch his breath. He waited for the muscles of his heart to send blood throughout his body, to make him warm again.

  Wildfire Johnny

  Trey was seventeen, smoking weed, his body sprawled across the top of a jungle gym in the playground of the old abandoned elementary school. It was two in the afternoon and he had been delinquent since lunch from the private school where he, according to the guidance counselor, “Resisted Challenges.” Now, taking deep hits from the ill-made joint, he listened to the sound of the world around him, the gnats hovering just beyond the smoke that swirled in front of his face. He heard a bird calling, insistent, and then he heard the sound of cars driving on the highway. And then he heard the sound of a tomcat hissing and he turned to watch the animal, its fur electric, as it zigzagged for a few seconds and then made a beautiful, arcing leap through a window and into the school.

  From Trey’s stoned perspective, it looked like the cat had suddenly been possessed by the devil. It was a satanic cat. He was so high. Had he imagined the cat entirely? He wanted that cat; he thought it would make a good pet. So Trey, grunting as he stripped himself off the playground equipment, strolled over to the window, long ago shattered by idiot kids much like Trey, and stared at the tomcat, orange and black, its left eye missing. “Good kitty,” Trey said and then started clicking his tongue. He took off his jacket to use as a means of capturing the cat, which was now hissing, pacing in a tight circle. Trey pulled himself through the window, landing in a heap, and the cat immediately turned away from him and dove into a closet, disappearing through the cracked opening of the door. Trey tried to imagine a name for it, Beelzebub, maybe just “Bub” for short, and slowly opened the door of the closet to find that the cat had vanished. He checked every creepy cubby that had once held children’s boots and lunch boxes, but there was no sign of the cat. He felt the loss as keenly as if the animal had been his childhood pet and not some disease-ridden hell spawn of his imagination.

  He then noticed a small tin box in the last cubby, dusted with rust. Hoping for rare coins or a handful of uncut diamonds, he reached for the box and clicked it open. Inside was a straight razor, folded up, its handle made of ivory. There was scrimshaw on the handle and Trey took the razor and the box out of the closet and into the light that was pouring in through the window. In curling, ornate script, the words Property of Wildfire Johnny had been etched into the ivory. Framing it on either side were a cutlass and a rifle, crossing to make an X. Wildfire Johnny. If the cat had been real and he had managed to catch it, he would have named it Wildfire Johnny.

  He flipped open the blade, which was dazzlingly polished. He touched the edge and instantly saw a thin line of blood appear on his fingertip. He sucked on his finger, carefully closing the blade. Inside the box, there was a piece of paper, yellowed, brittle. He unfolded the paper and had to squint to make out the tiny writing.

  Whoever possesses this blade will gain access to its particular magic. As long as you have the razor, you will be able to travel through time.

  Holy fucking shit. Trey had a magic razor. He could go back in time. He was too stoned to work out the particulars of what he might do in the past. Still, it seemed like a good power to have. He kept reading.

  You may travel twenty-four hours into the past. To do so, simply take the blade and cut open your throat. With one expertly executed slash, you will find yourself twenty-four hours in the past, bearing no signs of the injury, able to undo any forthcoming misfortune. You may travel as many days into the past as you wish, as long as you cut open your throat for each twenty-four-hour interval.

  Trey felt like maybe it would have been better to find some rare coins. He’d just plunk those coins down at some antique dealer, walk out with a few thousand dollars, and buy a really nice MacBook. He was thinking that even the cat, if he could domesticate it and teach it a few tricks, would be better than some sinister, magical razor blade.

  There was one last paragraph, and Trey reluctantly scanned it.

  The razor blade holds no moral power over you; the magic may be used for good or evil. Use it wisely and you will find yourself at an advantage over any and all humans and spirits.

  Had Wildfire Johnny written this? Was someone with such a fucking badass name to be trusted or was it too good to be true? Was this some weird prank that was popular in the Roaring Twenties, flapper girls getting old assholes to slit their throats in the hopes of staying young forever? He got out his phone and searched for “Wildfire Johnny” but nothing came up that made any sense. He looked up “magic razors that grant time traveling powers if you slash open your throat” and the search results were even more useless. He looked up “Wildfire Johnny urban legend razor blade” and found no news articles about kids in the ’60s dying in grotesque ways.

  He put the razor to his neck. Either it worked or it didn’t. The only way he’d find out was to slash open his throat and gurgle on his blood until he either died or woke up a day earlier. It seemed like maybe not a fair trade-off. He felt that it was better to wait until it was a true emergency, when it was a life-or-death situation that required time travel, and then he would find out the true extent of Wildfire Johnny’s gift. He folded the razor and put it back in the box. Then he climbed out the window and walked back to his car. He looked in the rearview mirror and styled his hair for about ten minutes, almost forgetting about Wildfire Johnny and the razor blade.

  That night at dinner, when his parents asked him about his day, he asked them what the words Wildfire Johnny might mean to them. “Are you high, Trey?” his dad asked. He never mentioned it again.

  Eventually, because he was a teenager and, even more importantly, because he had trouble really maintaining his focus on any single topic of interest, he kind of forgot about the razor blade, kept it in his sock drawer in his bedroom. At the heart of it, having led a charmed and easy life, he could not imagine what would be so bad that the prospect of slashing your own throat was preferable.

  So he didn’t slash his throat. Not when he got caught smoking pot in his car in the parking lot at school and was suspended for ten days. Not when he backed his car into his dad’s new lawn mower and his dad had called him a “major-league disappointment fuckup.” Not when he scored in his team’s own goal during the district championships and lost the game for his high school’s soccer team. A few times, he sat on his bed after these awful moments and held the straight razor to his throat. But he couldn’t do it. He had watched a horror movie where the killer slashes his victim’s throat and the blood had sprayed in such a forceful way that it covered the walls of the room. He figured that this was an exaggeration for the purposes of the movie, but it still filled him with intense dread. He always assumed that the next time something awful happened, he would finally do it. He imagined Wildfire Johnny shaking his head, disappointed in Trey for wasting his gift.

  Then, after the senior prom, he was so damn close to losing his virginity to Donna Frododio, but he couldn’t get his dick hard. He was sitting on the edge of the pullout sofa in the guest room of Donna’s older sister’s apartment. He was tugging on himself furiously while Donna lay back on the bed, waiting for him, smoking a cigarette in a way that later made Trey think of contemporary novels about marriage and ennui. “Just a second more,” he said, frantic, but Donna said she was too drunk to stay awake and she just handled her desire on her own and went to sleep, Trey still looking at his limp dick. After she was snoring, he covered her up with a blanket and all he could think about was Wildfire Johnny’s straight razor, sitting there in his sock drawer, completely ineffectual. Could life ge
t worse than this? How could it be worse? He looked at Donna. He imagined her telling her girlfriends about how he couldn’t get it up. A dick that doesn’t work seemed to Trey at this moment to be just about the saddest thing in the world.

  He knew with certainty that if he had the razor right now, he would drag it slowly across his throat; at that moment, he was willing to gamble on whether or not he would wake up a full day earlier. But what else could he do tonight? Trey simply curled himself around Donna Frododio and promised himself that, from that day forward, he would always have the razor with him, would never again be caught in a moment where he could not slash his throat wide open and be saved from his own stupidity.

  And then, a most marvelous piece of luck, life became easy. Even though his grades had been attained through sheer inattention, he got into a well-respected liberal arts university. He didn’t get any merit scholarships, his grades had not been that good, but his parents could afford to send him, and he settled into life away from them. He made mostly B’s and sometimes A’s when the subject really appealed to him. He started writing silly humor pieces for the student magazine, and it brought him a kind of nerdy fame at the small school. Everyone there seemed to be just like him, curious about the world but not entirely sure what to do with that curiosity, hoping that it would simply be enough to have it at all. He partied right up to the point that he could keep himself from getting sick and then he would stop drinking for the night. The summer after his sophomore year, his father got him an internship with a magazine in New York, and he fact-checked articles that seemed really unimportant to him, but helped him understand that this kind of story could be an asset to the world at large.

  In his junior year, he hit it off with a really drunk freshman who made out with him for thirty minutes on the ratty sofa of some filthy fraternity house. They went back to her dorm room, and they both got naked, and then she said that she was having second thoughts. So he said that was fine and he went back to his own dorm room. He felt the razor in his pocket but didn’t feel any real need to use it. It was just nice to have it, to know it was there.

  Two weeks later, the same girl said that she’d really been impressed that he’d not, how could she phrase it, made her do something that she didn’t want to do, and they ended up having sex that same night and it was really nice, and, lying beside her afterward, he felt the confidence of a life that rewards you for good decisions.

  He graduated with a B average, and he found a good job in Nashville with a website called the Gentleman Caller, a kind of lifestyle magazine that mostly reviewed incredibly expensive clothing and kept its readers abreast of the latest news about men’s grooming. It was slightly ridiculous and sometimes the tone of the website spoke to a kind of affluent white dude that Trey was just slightly below in terms of wealth and status. But the editor, a man the same age as Trey, liked his funny pieces about the difficulty of making a proper mint julep or about how sweatpants were becoming really fashionable or why it was cool to shave with a straight razor. They drew a lot of traffic to the site, and after two years he was given his own column, “Man Manners,” where dudes asked him about issues of navigating the modern world and he made up his answers on the spot. Another website interviewed him. He was Internet famous. It felt both entirely unearned and yet completely his due.

  And then he was driving home from a bar, where he’d had two whiskey smashes but wasn’t nearly drunk, and he tried to turn left across traffic and didn’t see a car coming in the opposite direction. He smashed into the car, totaling both of them. He was stunned from the air bag and he felt like he’d broken his ribs. Trey had to kick the passenger door open by putting both feet against the door and pushing it until it bent enough for him to get out.

  In the other car, a man was staggering from the driver’s side to the backseat, and he pulled a young girl, maybe twelve years old, from the smashed car. She was bleeding profusely from the head and her entire body was limp, her neck at a weird angle.

  “Oh, God,” the man screamed. “Help.”

  “Oh, shit,” Trey said. “Oh . . . oh, shit.”

  “She’s dead,” the man wailed. He placed the girl flat on her back and listened to her chest, put his ear against her mouth. “She’s dead.”

  Trey instinctually moved toward the man, to verify that the girl was indeed dead, and the man jumped up and grabbed Trey’s shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” Trey said.

  “I’m not going to let you go,” the man said. “Not until the cops get here. You’re not going to run away.” He was screaming and crying at the same time.

  “I’m not going to run away,” Trey said.

  “You’re drunk,” the man said. “You drunk-driving son of a bitch.”

  “I’m not,” Trey insisted. A police cruiser pulled up, and a cop ran over to them.

  “He killed my daughter,” the man said, pointing at Trey.

  “It was an accident,” Trey said.

  “I need you to stand over there,” the cop said to Trey, and Trey walked back over to his car. The cop radioed for more help. The man returned to his daughter on the ground.

  Trey felt the razor in his pocket. He imagined what was waiting for him. He’d killed someone. He might go to jail. Possibly for a long time. He’d lose his job. The guilt of it all.

  He pulled out the razor and opened it. He considered the blade, could not quite convince himself to go through with it. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe they would prove that he wasn’t at fault and nothing would happen to him. But he had killed the girl, that was certain. No matter what, he’d have to live with that. His hand tightened on the blade, and then the father shouted, “He’s got a fucking knife!”

  The cop instantly turned to face Trey. “Put that down, sir.”

  “Oh, shit, no. Okay, it’s not a weapon or anything. Wildfire Johnny gave it to me. It’s a kind of magical implement.”

  “Put it down, sir.” The officer now reached for his weapon.

  Two more police cruisers pulled up. The cops had their weapons drawn as they exited the vehicles.

  Trey closed his eyes, brought the razor to his throat, and slashed it in one motion. He heard screams, and a mist of blood sputtered from his neck, covering his hands, and then he passed out, collapsed on the asphalt. People were rushing toward him, but then everything was black and quiet and safe.

  When Trey came to, he was sitting at home, watching a TV show while he held a bag of pork rinds. He slowly came to awareness. He was watching an animated show about really stupid people that he was embarrassed to admit that he liked. He looked around the room. He was alone. He gingerly touched his neck with his fingertip. Nothing. No blood. He checked his phone. It was eleven o’clock at night, the day before the accident.

  He stood up on unsteady legs and walked into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. There was no mark, no evidence of the violence that he had done to himself. In the pocket of his sweatpants was the razor, folded shut, humming with intent. Though there was no mark on his skin, Trey could recall in great detail the extreme pain of the action, the sensation of drowning coming right on the heels of the feeling of his own throat opening up. It made him shudder to remember it. He did not want to experience it again. And yet, here he was, in designer sweatpants, his belly full of artisanal pork rinds, instead of standing over the body of a dead girl. It was a fair trade-off, he decided.

  Trey walked back into the living room of his apartment and turned off the TV. He felt groggy, hungover, and he slipped under the sheets of his bed, interested in and slightly terrified of what would await him in the morning.

  Instead of driving to work the next morning, a morning he had already experienced once in his lifetime, Trey went into the guest bedroom and wheeled out the expensive bicycle that his parents had bought him for his twenty-third birthday and that he had never once ridden. He searched the closet for the helmet they had included, which still had a bow on it. After he had awkwardly carried it down the stairs of his apartment, Tr
ey wobbled his way through traffic for the five miles it took to get to the offices of the Gentleman Caller. He had nearly crashed on three occasions and could not entirely remember the rules of the road and was a full forty-five minutes late for work, but it was all in service of changing the outcome of this day.

  His boss came to his cubicle and said, “You were late today, man, and we’re leaving early for drinks for Trevor’s birthday. So get to it, okay?”

  Trey nodded and got to work on an article about the strange similarities between the characters of a popular fantasy TV show and the characters on Seinfeld. Then he answered some “Man Manners” questions, one of which wanted to know about tipping your weed delivery guy. How was he so good at this? he wondered. Was it embarrassing or worthy of pride?

  He wished that he knew the identity of the father and daughter that he had hit this evening, could look them up online. He tried to remember that, in addition to preserving his own future, he had saved a girl’s life. He thought about how he could become a kind of international time wizard, slashing his throat right after a terrorist event, and then warning officials about it when he woke up a day earlier. It seemed like the best way to use his power, but it also seemed like it could lead to intense scrutiny of his actions, perhaps make him a target of the terrorists. And who would believe him, anyway? If he told the authorities about a horrible event that was going to happen, how would he not also be implicated in their eyes?

  Instead, he started thinking about writing a TV show about a guy who was an international time wizard, but Trey immediately understood that he would have to change the particulars of it, that slicing your own throat would not make for a very cool protagonist. By the time he had outlined the pilot in his head, he was already bored with the idea and the workday was over.