Brent Larson

Rest Stop

“Go home.”

I looked up and over the partition at the trucker cap, two urinals down from me. About fifty, one of those skinny, desert-hardened types. Handyman, most likely.

“What’s that?” I asked. I’m on the lean side myself, but I can move fast. I still remember how.

“Go home,” he said, staring straight ahead. His voice was all smoker’s phlegm.

We were the only two in the gray-tiled rest stop. It was almost 10 pm—most sensible travelers were tucked into a hotel somewhere.

 “No,” I said. “I’m not going home.”

His head gave a little shake. He zipped up. His eyes met mine for a split-second as he walked behind me to the exit. He looked skittish.

I washed my hands at a spotless, touch-free sink. Next to it hung a photocopied sign—Arizona welcomes you! Find brochures and coupon books in the Welcome Center! The sign sported a photo of a friendly Gila monster.

I stared at the mirror, willing that wary, hostile gleam to recede back behind my eyes. I hadn’t seen it nearly as much over the last couple years. Julie calls it my ‘throw-down look.’ Apparently, it’s my least-attractive quality.

I had been in Arizona ten minutes.

I ran a finger over the whiskers sprouting off my cheeks. I’d gotten on Interstate 8 directly, after another late night at our offices in San Diego, and my polo and chinos didn’t look particularly fresh. They love me at Kuyber—I’m Brody Purcell, not quite thirty and already their Golden Boy—and they’d have freaked out if they knew where I was going. I’d only told Julie, and she knew better than to talk me out of it. In a way, it was her idea.

No, I wasn’t going home. Home was behind me, back in San Diego. I was driving across the desert to Brisbane, Arizona, my birthplace. But, even as a kid, I never called it home. I’d only begun to grasp the presence of something corrosive and ageless in Brisbane before I turned my back on it eleven years ago. Now I was willing to drive out and face it again, and throw down one last time.

***

My headlights picked out an occasional family of cacti, moldered from all the interstate exhaust. Stars hovered over dark shadows of mountains rising in the distance. I leaned forward, stretched, and tuned in to a ‘90s station on my satellite radio. My Acura RDX came with every bell and whistle. I could afford it. I owe nothing to nobody.

“Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” started up, and I laughed a little. Unlike the other guys his age, who would have taken any such insinuation as worthy of a beat down, Alistair loved those Lilith Fair chicks. Therefore, I did, too. I’d belt out Paula Cole and Sheryl Crow at the top of my lungs every afternoon as I passed the sun-bleached carcasses of dead cars on my walk home from Brisbane Elementary. Alistair insisted I always come straight home after school. There were always photos stapled to telephone poles of new kids gone missing, mostly girls, but some boys, too. If anyone chased me, I was supposed to drop everything and run. I assumed at the time he meant other kids, which, in my case, turned out to be prescient. I was eight the first time I got jumped.

I stumbled up the rickety stairs to our mobile home crying, my nose bloody, shirt torn. This was a big deal—clothes needed preserving. Alistair, who got home from middle school an hour earlier, was in the kitchen smearing peanut butter on one slice of bread. Without a word, he led me to the kitchen sink and dipped a towel under the faucet.

He waited until I calmed down enough to explain. They were schoolmates, bigger and meaner. We didn’t expect Dad to come by with another envelope of cash and a “Stay out of trouble” for another couple weeks, and Mom was strung out in the back bedroom.

Alistair wrung out the towel. “Who were they?”

I took a shuddery breath. It was Randy and Jacob Husk. Their family name was everywhere in Brisbane—on storefronts, moving vans, local TV commercials like Husk and Gentles Law Offices (“We want what you want!”). Brisbane was lousy with Husks.

While Alistair blotted my face, I suggested, haltingly, that one of us should perhaps call the school and lodge a complaint.

“That’s bullcrap, Brody,” Alistair said calmly. We didn’t need grownups. And I didn’t need him to bail me out. Those boys were bigger, but I was smarter.

He finished cleaning me up and grinned that lopsided grin I loved. I threw my arms around him.

He went rigid, then returned the hug. “Don’t be such a baby.”

The next day, I tripped Randy in the playground and kicked him in the belly. Later, I leaned over like a bull, took a running start, and bowled into Jacob from behind, knocking him right off his feet. I knew it’d cause more damage that way. ‘Applied force’ is what we call it now. Alistair smiled as he forged Mom’s signature on the suspension notice.

I hadn’t thought about that in years. Alistair, on the other hand, I’ve thought about almost every day. My brother, who I’d loved and then hated with equal helplessness. And who, as I sped across the length of Arizona, hadn’t answered his phone in five straight days.

***

I pulled into a Circle K outside Gila Bend around a quarter to midnight. The overhead lamps bathed the pumps in lonely orange. I opened the car door and desert air rushed in to steal the A/C.

“Sugar Shack” played overhead. A large Black man in an orange smock was adjusting the cigarette rows behind the counter and didn’t turn as the door pinged my entrance. I headed to the snack aisle and picked out some Corn Nuts, hanging next to the Chips Ahoy and Oreos.

I’d never had Oreos before the day Randy Husk offered me some at lunch.

“They’re better’n Chips Ahoy. Better’n anything,” he’d said loftily, suggesting it would be foolish to question an expert.

I’d been shocked almost into silence. Three years had passed since my dust-up with him and his brother, who had moved on to middle school. Without him, Randy was actually a decent kid.

By then, Alistair had become more withdrawn. He still greeted my papers and test grades with smiles and attaboys, but they were forced. His eyes were often distant. I’d seen something similar in my mother’s face when she wasn’t hiding behind a veil of meth, like she was reliving something too horrible to talk about.

Randy and I started spending a lot of time together—getting cones at the McDonalds in town, cruising on our bikes, or hanging out at Clifford Park with other kids our age after the sun went down. Randy was a VIP in our circles. I didn’t mind playing second banana—kids occasionally disappeared at night, and I saw the wisdom of well-placed company. And I was getting recognized in the hallways at school. It made me incredulous whenever I thought about it.

I’d go to his house after school a couple times a week, where we’d have Oreos and milk and I’d help him with his homework. They had a sunken living room and a huge TV and paintings of wolves and dream catchers on the walls. They also had a pool. Randy never asked me to go swimming, and I would have been too embarrassed anyway, like my poverty might leave a ring around the tile.

Alistair asked me why I kept coming home late. I told him I was helping a friend with homework. He smiled a little, and there was pride there, I think. But it was dueling with something else. I could see it.

Once, Randy and I arrived at his house to find several cars out front. They had a long, white gravel driveway that caught the sun in the early evenings and made it almost glow, like a ruby. They had a footpath of red dirt leading to the house, which I had to meticulously tap off my shoes before entering.

Several men were standing in the kitchen talking in low tones, like a meeting had just ended. Randy busied himself, getting our snack going.

A huge man, whose tanned hairy chest was trying to burst out of his leather shirt, sidled over, smiling big. His teeth seemed to glisten.

“Hey, there, little man. You live here now?”

He put a hand on the counter and leaned over me. He had tattoos on his fingers like skeleton bones. I stared down, frozen, and he giggled. He sounded like some lethal cartoon character.

Then Randy was at my side. “Back off, Rollo.”

The big man laughed and walked away. I was in awe. The scariest man I had ever met, and Randy sent him packing. Until then, my brother had been the only one who ever made me feel safe.

One Saturday a couple weeks later, Randy invited me on a day trip to Tucson with him and his mom. We went to a mall toy store at Randy’s insistence. He wanted a Super Soaker, one of those giant squirt guns. The world’s coolest toy. Randy’s mom, a tall, vivacious woman with a bosom that mesmerized me, insisted on buying me one, too. When I tried to refuse, she bent down to eye level.

“Brody,” she said. “We know what you’ve been doing for Randy. You’re like family.”

At home, I ran in to show Alistair my new gun. Nearly three full feet of pure, orange-molded perfection. “Look what Randy’s mom bought me!” I screeched.

Alistair’s eyes went blank. In one motion, he took the gun and tried to break it over his knee. The plastic cracked but didn’t break. I screamed and tried to grab it. He threw me off. It took him three tries before it broke in two.

I dropped to my knees and gathered up the pieces. He stood over me as I stared down at the broken gun, my mind multiplying a red rage. I’d had other fights with bullies since Jacob and Randy, but now my brother was the bully. He could take me, no doubt, but I wouldn’t back down from anybody. He’d taught me that.

He turned and walked out into the night.

Soon after, Randy started hanging out with a couple other kids. My classmates stopped seeing me, like they’d flipped a switch. But I’d learned my lesson. I didn’t need them. It was better to be alone.

***

I headed to the row of refrigerators at the back of the convenience store. A couple cases down, a 30s-ish woman in scrubs was studying the flavors of Gatorade behind the glass. The scrubs had dinosaurs on them. She looked like she’d just come off the longest shift ever.

I grinned. “Rough night?”

She smiled back. Buddy, you don’t know.

I reached in and grabbed a Starbucks Double Shot. These had saved me the last couple years of college, when the others in the program started dropping like flies.

I smelled something slightly rancid. I closed the cooler door, turned, and jumped. The scrubs lady now stood right in front of me, her face inches from mine. She was breathing harsh, foul air in my face.

I took a step back, almost dropping the can.

Her head tilted slowly to the left. “Go home,” she said. Her voice sounded strong, almost angry, but her face continued to look tired and disinterested.

I walked quickly to the front counter. The counter jockey was still arranging the cigarettes and didn’t turn around.

“Hey,” I said loudly.

He didn’t move, and I realized I’d been wrong earlier. His hand was extended, as if giving the front pack of Camels a high five, but he hadn’t budged since I walked in.

I cleared my throat, which felt very dry. Dimly, I heard “Sugar Shack” give way to “Rockin’ Robin.”

The man’s hand dropped to his side and he turned around. His face, like the scrubs lady, was slack.

He spun and lunged towards the end of the counter. I backed up a step, arms reaching back blindly, and knocked several Hostess Fruit Pies off an end cap.

He rounded the counter. The woman in scrubs was there, apparently waiting to join the party. They stood, facing me.

I licked my lips. “What…?”

They both yelled at once. “Go home!”

I opened my mouth to say something, but they screamed, “Go home! Go home! Go home!” They started marching towards me.

I fell backwards, banging my tailbone painfully on the floor. Not that I felt it immediately. They kept coming, their footfalls left, right, left, right, in lockstep. The counter guy stepped on an apple pie and it squirted out of the box. They took a breath at the same time, their voices perfectly in sync and emotionless. Someone outside could have mistaken them for the vibrations of some large machine.

I scrambled backwards and, mercifully, bumped against the door. I grabbed the handle, pulled myself to my feet, and barreled outside. I ran to my car, the snacks still in my hands. I didn’t pay, I thought dumbly.

I threw the Acura in gear. As I surged forward, I chanced a look back. They stood at the door, heads tilted left, eyes glassy. Still yelling.

***

It took fifteen minutes for my hands to stop shaking. At Casa Grande, I switched from I-8 to I-10 going east, alone on the road except for the occasional big rig, which was good. I wanted to be alone.

It wasn’t until after I passed a truck on my right, “Remington Movers” on the side with a picture of a pelican wearing a coal miner’s helmet, that I rolled the windows down to feel the air on my face. I’d ridden a lot like that in high school around Brisbane, but on a ten-speed, my only means of transport. I didn’t have friends to give me rides. Alistair had a Camaro, but he never let me ride in it. I didn’t know how he afforded it. Dad had stopped his monthly visits—to this day, I don’t know what happened to him. Mom had OD’d two years previously. Her funeral was very short.

By then, Alistair was bringing home armfuls of groceries a couple times a week. When I first asked him where he got them, he grunted, ‘County.’ I didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t bother to explain. He also occasionally would drop twenties on the kitchen table for clothes or school supplies. One day in my freshman year, I wore a Goodwill acquisition I was particularly proud of—a button-down shirt with a collar a mile wide. A popular football player, a junior, I think, made fun of me in class. I waited until school was over. The next day, he showed up in a cast. And I wore the shirt again, on principle. I got a wide berth for four years.

I saw Alistair most nights, when he’d push through the trailer’s plywood front door at 10 or 11 at night, ask me how school was going as he foraged through the fridge, and disappear into his bedroom. I once told him I wanted to get a job to help pay the bills, and he stared at me, eyes not wavering.

“Studying is your job,” he said.

I wondered if I had done something to make my brother hate me.

A few months into my junior year, Mr. McCarty, my physics teacher, asked me to swing by after school. He showed me a few brochures to a couple of the state schools. I tried to brush him off.

“Brody, the world needs what you’ve got up here,” he said, tapping his own forehead.

He started talking scholarships and physics club and career paths. He was painting a picture of a different life, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. His world didn’t need me. It had seen my world of dust brown, harsh sunlight on open metal, a pressed wood dining room table under a naked yellow bulb, and had turned away with a sigh of relief.

Alistair came in, grunted a greeting, and headed for the fridge.

“Go to hell,” I told him.

He stopped but didn’t turn around. “What’d you say?” 

You’re my brother. You’ve abandoned me. Come back. I need you. I had no idea how to say any of it as he strode over, lightning fast, and belted me in the mouth. It rocked me out of my chair, but I was back on my feet, fists balled.

And I found myself staring down the barrel of a gun.

“Get back in your chair,” he said, voice slightly shaky, “and study.”

I stepped forward and pressed my forehead against the barrel. “You think I’m afraid of you?” I looked into his eyes and realized I hadn’t stood that close to him in over a year.

That one moment, with us staring each other down in the kitchenette, has played itself over and over in my mind like a freeze-frame in a movie. The moment I dared him to quit running and be my brother again. To go left instead of right.

Instead, he jerked the gun back and hammered me in the temple. Everything went black.

When I woke up, he’d left a note on the table next to my open Calculus book. “I’m leaving for a few days. Study. Things can get worse. A.”

I stood up on rubbery legs and stumbled into our kitchenette, intent on getting some water on my face and seeing how bad I needed to puke. And I saw, by the front door, a lone boot print.

Alistair’s boot. In red dirt.

Things can always get worse.

***

I’d sworn I would never go back. I’d seen it in the wasted face of my mother, or the winos who averted their eyes as I walked to school. Or the slick walkers with their shiny cars who tried to catch my eye and made me quicken my pace. I’d been scared the day the Husk brothers attacked me, but not surprised. Not the way an eight-year-old should be, confronted for the first time with violence. I’d already sensed it, alive and well in the town of my birth. 

I remember sitting at a library computer and typing “Brisbane, Arizona” into the search bar. It was my senior year, and maybe I’d just realized I couldn’t look away any longer. The first thing that came up was a week-old Arizona Republic article—“Brisbane Business - Cartel Investigation Stalls.” 

The next several dozen headlines went back forty years. Drugs, guns, human trafficking. I didn’t read a single article. I somehow already knew about Brisbane, just like I knew the Husks were partly to blame for it all. Maybe more. 

I remember writing my speech. Valedictorian, to everyone’s heartfelt indifference. An hour later, my paper was covered with savage scrawls, my pencil worn down to a nub. I read over it, realizing with cold clarity it was my parting gift to Brisbane. But Brisbane deserved no gifts from me. At the podium, I talked about embracing the future with open minds, open hearts, etcetera.

 Three months later, I stood in the doorway of the mobile home with two battered suitcases. A cab waited to take me to the bus station. I hadn’t seen Alistair in a week.

I left a note. “Gone to Caltech.” I’d been accepted on full scholarship, with room and board and a living stipend. 

A week later, my student advisor told me I would never experience anything as tough as what I was about to begin. I wondered if she’d ever had a family member point a gun in her face. And in that moment, I felt the first of the tendrils fall away, outlined as if part of some Romanesque tapestry, as I began to leave Brisbane and its dark spirits behind. 

My heart pounded as a road sign appeared: Hwy 75/Brisbane 3 miles Exit 322.

Headlights blazed in my rearview mirror, growing larger impossibly fast. My eyes widened. Within seconds, it would reach me. 

I jerked into the fast lane and slowed down to let him pass, leaning over to give the driver the finger. It was a big eighteen-wheeler, the Remington Movers truck again. Hadn’t it passed me a couple hours ago?

It blew by me like a wildebeest through a cloud of gnats, easily doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour. If I hadn’t swerved, it might well have rolled over me like a tank. I scanned the back of the truck for a ‘How’s my driving?’ number. The only recourse for the Great American Bitch, but at least it’d be something. But it was just the pelican, waving cheerily from the back panel as the truck veered into my lane and filled my car with red brake lights. 

I swerved back into the slow lane and started to pass him. Every axon in my brain screamed Something is wrong here, but the fight was up now, and it always won. I sped halfway up the trailer. I was going to get in front of him, see how he liked riding the brakes. 

But then the eighteen-wheeler pulled ahead, and his rear wheels drifted towards me, filled the entire window. I swerved onto the shoulder, and the seams in the asphalt roared in my ears, kerchunk, kerchunk. He cleared my bumper by inches as he roared forward, and my engine rattled as I floored the gas and flew after him. And I watched in shock as he cut the wheel and the trailer started to jackknife, its frame blocking both lanes of the freeway. In another couple seconds, I’d guillotine myself right below that pelican’s friendly smile. 

I cranked the Acura off the road to the right, not knowing if I was aiming for a family of cacti or maybe a cliff. A green sign with “Exit 321” flashed by me, and the wheels, instead of jolting as if I’d hit sand, maintained their grip on level blacktop. I realized that I had, providentially, turned onto the exit before the one for Brisbane. 

Another sign, blue this time, flashed by me. Rest Stop. Out of the darkness rose a cracked, unlit parking lot and a single, low-roofed building.

The Acura’s engine promptly died.

***

The wind blowing over the open desert at night felt like it was visiting from somewhere far away.

The low block building squatting off the highway was quite the opposite from the chrome and gray tile of the rest stop on the border. I let the Acura coast to a dead stop in front of it. I got out slowly, staring at the building, my arms rigid across my chest. It felt like a cursed spot. Nobody in their right mind would want to be here, daytime or otherwise.

A lone yellow bulb in front buzzed to life.

I pushed open the screeching metal door of the men’s bathroom, my leather soles gritting against the concrete floor. The fluorescent bulb overhead made the shadows longer. The heat had baked the sewer smell into the walls. Moonlight slivered through a small window, high up.

I walked past two grubby sinks, one wrapped in white cloth tape with “Out of Order” written in block letters, to one of the urinals against the far wall. I hesitated, then stuck my hands in my pockets and stared straight ahead. I took a deep breath and waited.

The bulb flickered out.

I fluttered a hand in front of my face. Nothing. The moonlight was, somehow, also gone.

I fought the instinct to throw my hands out and feel my way back to the door. Get back in my car. Wait for roadside assistance. And finish the final leg to Brisbane.

After five days of trying to get my brother on the phone, I found the number for Randy Husk, now listed as the owner of a small building supply company in Brisbane. I called him twelve hours ago.

“Little Brody Purcell,” he said. I could hear the lip curl in his voice. “Alistair’s gone. Forget about him.” Randy hung up.

I tried Alistair’s number again. This time, a pleasant voice told me the number had been disconnected.

The wind blew a sudden gust outside, and the air dropped ten degrees. The flesh on my arms crawled. My heart jackhammered.

I heard a single, grating step behind me. The hair on my head raised in spikes.

“Brody,” a voice whispered, so close I could feel air puff on my left ear. The air was bitter cold. The voice seemed choked with effort, like the speaker was balancing a boulder on his chest. Or like it preferred to use the voice of random strangers.

“You just tried to kill me,” I said through clenched teeth. I didn’t want them to chatter.

That’s bullcrap, Brody. I felt it rather than heard it.

I took a deep, steadying breath. “Randy Husk said you were gone.” When I said Randy’s name, the air dropped another twenty degrees. This time my teeth did chatter. I jammed my hands in my pockets.

Suddenly, I had a vision. I don’t know what else to call it. I was lying on oven-baked sand under a high and heavy sun. Feeling a click in the back of my parched throat. Staring out of eyes not my own at a gash in my side, blood dribbling lazily through my fingers and staining my Hawaiian shirt. Alone.

Stabbed. I’ve been stabbed.

My brother was dead. I’d known when Randy hung up. “I should have come sooner,” I said.

“No.” My ear went numb, like I’d been leaning it against an industrial refrigerator. “Go home.”

“Alistair. You threw in with the Husks when we were still kids. Didn’t you?”

No answer.

He was waiting. And after years, the words finally spilled out. “You were theirs. I didn’t know why. I never knew why. I hated you for that.”

Now I was waiting. Was he angry? I suddenly realized I wasn’t. Not like I thought I’d be if I ever saw my brother again.

I licked my lips. “You knew they had their sights on me. Even when I was a kid. You made them take you instead. You didn’t want them to get me.”

I still heard nothing. Then, finally, a long sigh.

I wanted to speak again but couldn’t. I leaned my forehead against the broken tile.

“Why are you here?” The voice sounded less strained. More like a whisper.

Thinking about Julie gave me strength. “I’m getting married. My fiancée wanted me to make it right with you. And…” I swallowed hard. “And you’re my brother.”

I could feel the connection weaken. I wanted to stop it, grab it with both hands, but it felt like silk, stretching, slipping through my fingers. “Alistair, why are you still here?”

He told me.

***

At Exit 322, I got off the interstate. But instead of turning south towards Brisbane, I crossed the overpass and got back on I-10. I had seven hours of backtracking to do. I got just south of Tucson before I pulled over. I took several shuddery breaths, wrapped my arms around my chest, and just sat a while.

In the end, Alistair told me never to return to Arizona, that this was the end for us. And I’d wanted to scream. To rage against the town that had stolen my family away. I wanted to beat my fists against the walls of that no-name rest stop and punish those who had done this to us. But that was Brisbane all over—stunted anger, bitter restlessness, self-inflicted pain. And in that moment, the near-constant wariness I had felt my whole life dissipated away.

I told my brother I loved him. I felt a pressure on my shoulder. This time, the voice sounded like an eleven-year-old boy.

“Brody. Don’t be a baby.”

An hour after I switched back to I-8, I stopped at another Circle K for another Double Shot. The counter jockey barely glanced at me.

When I crossed the state line back into California, the sun had just cleared the horizon. The dash said it was 87 degrees already. I pulled over, got out, and stared back where I’d come from. The saguaros stood watch, and the brown hills rolled. Arizona is beautiful and wild, open and hot and huge.

But I guess it’s not for everyone.

***

Julie and I now live in Orlando. She co-owns a coffee shop. I still work for Kuyber, but I’m seriously thinking of starting my own firm. I’ve got investors just waiting for me to make the jump. We have twins now, toddlers, and they’re a handful. Our life together is an unruly mess, but I can’t think of it without smiling.

But sometimes I also think about what I left behind. And I get the same feeling that made me drive through the midnight desert all those years ago. Like there’s something I’ve left undone.

I felt that way again last night.

This morning, I got an email from an unknown address. There was nothing but a link to a three-day-old article in the Brisbane Leader.

COUNCILMAN HUSK FOUND DEAD AFTER FIVE DAY SEARCH

The man, just another of the copious Husks, had apparently fallen into a hole hollowed out for a long-abandoned building project on the outskirts of town. Claw marks in the sandy walls indicated he tried to climb out. No one was close enough to hear him. Out in the desert. In the sun. Not a great way to go.

No one knew why he was there. But I do, out here on the opposite coast. Just like I’ve known why, every time I get a notion to go back and find my brother, I get these emails, sent from some dark, hazy place not of this earth. I’ve gotten over a dozen these last few years.

The Husks’ hold on Brisbane goes back generations. But Alistair is patient. And unforgiving. In that way, he and Brisbane were made for each other.

Brent Larson writes and produces short films, taking him to such far flung locations as South Africa, Russia, Ukraine, Spain, and Shreveport, LA. His favorite project is still the zombie web series he shot in his garage in 2009. He is also the creator/writer of Kayless and the upcoming CapeTown, both for Silverline Comics. You can find Brent at BrentTLarson.com and on Instagram at brent.vector. Brent lives in Orlando, Florida with two dogs and a wife who thinks Alien is the best movie ever. In short, Brent has no complaints.