Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright (Mobi)

  Dedication

  Riding Shotgun

  Post a Review

  Other Titles

  About the Author

  Riding Shotgun

  By J.B. Reynolds

  Riding Shotgun published by Tsubaki Press

  www.tsubakipress.com

  info@tsubakipress.com

  Copyright © J.B. Reynolds 2016

  All rights reserved

  www.jbreynolds.net

  Cover design by J.B. Reynolds

  Cover & pirate images courtesy of Fotosearch

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-473-37132-6 (Mobi)

  For my son, Darwin.

  The old Honda spluttered to life at the second turn of the key—white steam pouring out from the exhaust and mingling with the thick, smothering fog that had descended over town. Evelyn let the engine idle for a few seconds, blowing warm air on to her fingers. She turned the fan on, pushed the choke back in a couple of notches and reversed down the driveway.

  The reversing light didn’t work and the faint red glow emanating from her taillights did little to illuminate the murk. She would have collected the letterbox if the rasp of the rose bush against her rear guard hadn’t sounded in warning.

  “Shit,” she muttered. Her instincts weren’t what she wished they were. She decided not to tell Hans. He already had enough ammunition in the war against her confidence. She crept forward, adjusted her angle, shifted into reverse again and continued, out the drive and onto the road. Through the rear window, she caught the glare of headlights snaking around the crescent of the street behind her. They moved slow and lazy through the viscous haze, like the beams of a deep-sea submarine. The car they were leading pulled over to the kerb and stopped. It was Liz. Evelyn waited while Liz grabbed her belongings, locked her car and hurried over.

  “Morning,” said Liz as she opened the door. She climbed in the passenger seat, arranging her handbag and coat neatly beside her black leather boots before clipping the seatbelt.

  “Hey Liz,” said Evelyn in greeting, as she crept the shabby Honda forward, melting into the gloom. “Fog’s thick this morning.”

  “I know. It’s fucken horrible! I was doing about fifty all the bloody way from Pisa!”

  Liz lived a few kilometres out of town on the Wanaka road, in a new housing subdivision on the lake shore. She was fine-boned and petite, a stylish dresser, the very picture of elegance—until she opened her mouth. She swore frequently and with relish.

  They pulled over beside another letterbox, a little further down the street. Evelyn tooted the horn. A few seconds later a shadow emerged from the mist and coalesced into a roughly human shape as it neared the car. A tall man in a beanie opened the door, crouched, and slumped into the back seat.

  “Jeez, that bloody fog is thick this morning! I could hardly see m’own feet!”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. I just about took the letterbox out on the way down the driveway. How come I get all the shitty days to drive?”

  “Dunno. Glad it’s you and not me though. I’m bloody knackered.”

  “Late night, was it?”

  “Yeah. Baby kept us up half the night again. His cough’s got worse. Poor little bugger. It’s gone right down into his chest now. Sounds terrible. Ange is taking him to the doctor today.”

  Ben and his fiancee Angela had a nine-month-old son and had just discovered Ange was pregnant again. They weren’t overjoyed. Ben already presented with the symptoms of a man spread too thin—hunched shoulders; occasional, involuntary twitches; a constant, faraway gaze. Traveling home on Friday, Evelyn had glanced in her rear-view mirror to catch him staring out the window at the speeding ground beside them with an intensity she found quite disturbing. She could imagine him flinging open the door and leaping to his death. Why, some young rugby player up north had done exactly that only a few weeks ago. Riding home in the van after the game and then—alright boys, that’s me. I’m outta here. Opened the door and was gone, before any of his mates knew what was happening. Hit the road at a hundred k’s. It was terrifying, and Evelyn couldn’t understand it. She trusted she and Hans would feel differently when they had children.

  The three of them drove in silence for a few minutes, through the suffocated streets to the other side of town. They parked adjacent to a house fronted by a tall, schist-rock wall, with a corrugated iron gate. A pale light from inside the house was just visible through the gate latch. Evelyn tooted the horn again. They waited for a minute but no one appeared. She was about to get out and give Dwayne a hurry-up when the gate swung open and he came ambling out from behind it, a toolbox in one hand and a backpack slung over the other shoulder.

  “Mind popping the boot, Ev?”

  Evelyn did as she was asked and winced as the toolbox collided with the floor of the Honda’s boot. Dwayne slammed the boot shut and then slouched into the back seat, slamming his door. Evelyn cringed. She liked Dwayne, but he was rough as guts. He was a stonemason and a drunk. He’d lost his licence after a drink driving conviction; hence his membership in the carpool.

  “Easy on the door there, Dwayne.”

  “Yeah, sorry ‘bout that. I’m used to the doors on the old Landy. They won’t bloody shut if you don’t slam ‘em.”

  They set off again. Evelyn switched on the radio. It was set to 91.9, Blue Skies FM; the local radio station, broadcasting out of Cromwell. It played a mix of country, classic hits, and advertising, in equal proportion. The inane lyrics of The Cromwell Song (as Evelyn liked to call it), floated light and thin, on a tissue paper melody, from the cheap plastic speakers embedded within the stained vinyl panels of the Honda’s front doors.

  It’s a summer place,

  It’s a winter place.

  It’s a place in Central,

  It’s a central place.

  It’s Cromwell,

  And Cromwell is a great place to be.

  She had heard the jingle on several previous occasions and had been working on some new words of her own. Not having the courage to sing out loud in front of her fellow carpoolers, she sung her own words to the second verse, in her head.

  It’s a freezing place,

  It’s a windswept place.

  The food is bad,

  Of culture there’s no trace.

  It’s Cromwell,

  And Cromwell is a shite place to be.

  Dwayne’s voice interrupted her reverie. “Went possum shooting last night,” he announced.

  “Oh yeah, where?” Ben asked.

  “Just down by the river, off Bannockburn Road. There’s a stand of pines down there they seem to like. I took m’ twenny-two, and m’ mate, Evan—he took his shotgun. I’ll tell ya, there’s not much left once you’ve emptied a shotgun cartridge into ‘em. Great fun. You should come next time, Ev.”

  Evelyn glanced in the rear-view mirror at Dwayne’s cheeky smile. She was no vegetarian, but she hated the idea of killing for entertainment. Possums may have been unwelcome pests, but they were still God’s creatures and deserved their dignity. She rose to the bait. “Pity he didn’t empty a cartridge into you.”

  Dwayne giggled. “He might o’ tried. Not the most accurate shot, old Evan.”

  “Perhaps he should try point-blank next time.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “I’d be keen,” interrupted Ben. “Next time you go. I could do with shooting something.”

  His tone was black and bitter and the banter stopped. Some awful warbling country song came on the radio—all drinkin’ and cheatin’ and banjos—and Evelyn turned it off. They continued in awkward silence, pulling out from McNulty Road and onto the highway. Evelyn wondered whether she should invite Ben and Ange over for dinner. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. He seemed to be a nice enough guy, if a little strange, but they weren’t exactly friends. None of them were.

  Since Dwayne had joined the carpool, they’d been traveling together most weekdays for the past six months, making the commute through the Kawarau Gorge because the jobs were in Queenstown but the accommodation wasn’t. And before Dwayne, there’d been others. Melissa—a tall, fashionable woman of forty-something with a long, sharp face countered by a waving tide of red hair—had spent one day traveling in Evelyn’s car. She drove an immaculate Mazda sedan, and Evelyn’s decrepit Honda—with its cracked dashboard and steering wheel, rusting door sills, and velour seats faded, stained and pockmarked with cigarette burns—hadn’t met her refined standards. She had declined to travel with them the following day and Evelyn hadn’t seen her since.

  Prior to Melissa, there’d been Kirsten. Kirsten was a rectangle—from her rigid black locks and right-angled fringe, through her straight-sided figure clad in geometric coats and boots, and onto her two-dimensional perspective on the world. It was always x or y with Kirsten. She had traveled with Evelyn and Ben and Liz for a few months, until she’d appeared at Ben’s doorstep one evening after work and told him she couldn’t carpool anymore because she found his body odour offensive. Ben hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. Evelyn assumed Kirsten was just being honest, but it was a brutal, unyielding kind of honesty, and foreign to her. Ben did have his own smell, but it was subtle and musky and not altogether unpleasant. Evelyn looked in the rear-view mirror again and caught that same, brooding stare she’d seen last week. She shivered involuntarily. They drove and they talked and they shared, but that didn’t make them friends.

  Through the windscreen, the fog smothered all. A line of poplars flanking an apricot orchard loomed from the gloom like huge, skeletal sentries. Rounding the bend and heading into the gorge, the fog grew heavier. Evelyn had to slow down; first to sixty, then forty. It was oppressive, choking—so thick she could taste it. She wanted to wind down the window and scream at it to go away. They coiled, painfully slow, through the twists and turns of the gorge, squinting into the yellowed haze cast by the headlights. The rocks, trees and bushes that emerged from the shroud were unrecognisable as such—unreal, artificial—like polystyrene props in a low-budget sci-fi flick. They were alone in an alien world.

  Finally, after what felt to Evelyn like an eternity, they turned a sharp bend and the fog lifted, suddenly, as though they had crossed a distinct threshold. The approach of dawn was proclaimed by a lightening of the sky above the dark, jagged ridges to the east, and she caught a glimpse of the Kawarau River snaking through the gorge at the bottom of the cliffs below them. Evelyn saw the familiar red glow of another vehicle’s taillights ahead. She accelerated to close the gap. Seventy, eighty, eighty-five—she entered a sweeping right-hander that curled around a promontory of black rock when a shadow shuffled out from the side of the road and right into her path.

  “Shit! What the hell’s that?” She swerved violently, saw two gleaming eyes peering up at her and heard a tremendous thump. Heading for the river, she hit the brakes and swung the wheel hard right, over-corrected and felt the back of the Honda slide out, tracing a circle… too far… too far…

  They spun and hit the bank with a sickening crunch. Seatbelts snapped tight. Voices screamed. The engine died.

  Dwayne was first out of the car. “Jesus!” He leaned back into the cab. “Everyone okay?”

  “Think so,” answered Ben. He wiped the side of his head with his fingers and held them up to his face. They were wet and dark with blood. “Bit of the red stuff though.”

  Dwayne leaned closer to investigate. “Ah, it’s nothin’ mate. Just a scratch.”

  He grabbed Ben’s hand and helped him out of the back seat. Evelyn staggered out of the car and stood up to survey the wreckage. Liz gingerly brushed shattered glass off her lap and slid across the front seats and out the driver’s door.

  “You girls okay?” asked Dwayne.

  Liz nodded. Evelyn did too, but then burst into tears. Liz gave her a hug. Dwayne looked around. They’d hit the bank hard. The left rear corner of the car had collapsed in spectacular fashion. There’d be no fixing that. They were very, very lucky. He gazed back down the road from where they’d come, still illuminated in the Honda’s headlights. The carcass of the possum they’d hit was strewn across the bitumen, a bloody pulp of fur and guts.

  Evelyn sat down in the straggly grass at the road verge and began to howl. Dwayne knelt beside her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “Cheer up Ev. It’s not so bad. We’re all okay. The car’s a bit worse for wear, but nothin’ a trip to the panelbeaters won’t sort out, ay.”

  “That’s not what I’m crying about!” she wailed.

  “Then what is it?”

  She got the sentence out in staccato syllables, wedged between sobs. “It’s just… I’ve never… well… I’ve never killed a possum before.”

  books2read.com/riding-shotgun

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  Find out more at

  jbreynolds.net

  J.B. Reynolds

  J.B. Reynolds lives in rural Northland, New Zealand, where he raises children and chickens. He writes humorous short fiction in which tragedy meets comedy and character reigns supreme. His first short story was published while he was a university student, and in between that and a return to serious writing in 2016, he has worked as a graphic designer, landscaper, ski and snowboard technician, film critic, librarian, apple picker, and baker of muffins and teacakes.

  Nowadays, when not writing, he’s a husband, father, and high school teacher (not necessarily in that order). He enjoys sailing, cycling, and playing music, really loud, when his wife and kids aren’t at home. He has a big garden where he likes to get his fingernails dirty, and he loves to eat the things that grow in it.

  Find out more at

  jbreynolds.net

 

 

  J.B. Reynolds, Riding Shotgun

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