Storymania - Dexter's Destiny by Matthew Lett

Dexter's Destiny
Matthew Lett

There was a time in Dexter Whitley’s life when he gave a damn. Not just a little damn, either, but a nice, big DAMN! The kind of damn that couldn’t help but tell the world that Dexter loved his beautiful wife and children, that he loved his job at the chemical plant, and that he especially loved his life in the every day boring suburbs of Chicago. And if the world outside didn’t like this, they could kiss his slightly plump ass, thank you very much.
     That was…until Dexter’s accident.
                             *

     Dexter was currently tooling down Interstate 70, heading west, his pale green Chevy Impala hovering around 75 m.p.h. The landscape had been nothing short of constant for the last two hours and Dexter wondered (not for the first time since he’d entered Kansas) how people could live in such a flat and lifeless state.
     Nothing but plains full of wheat and grass, and grass and wheat, acre upon bloody acre, with a few thousand acres of corn or soybean thrown in for good measure.
     Dexter spit out the Chevy’s window in disgust. He’d left Chicago –-his wife, children, job, life-- over 9 hours ago and was beginning to wonder if his wife had reported him missing, yet.
     Did it really matter? he thought. Life, his life, up until last week had been ideal by most standards: a faithful, loving wife, two wonderful and intelligent children, and a cushy job that paid him $60K a year.
     But that’s over now, Dexter thought furiously. All over! He smashed the Impala’s steering wheel with both hands, tears of frustration and shame threatening to spill from his caramel brown eyes.
     “Damn bitch!” he screamed at a field of corn. “Bitch!”


     Dexter continued westward through the Sunshine state, memories of that fateful night –-the “accident”-- like burning embers within the bellows of his heart. He’d replayed the scene a thousand times wondering if he had missed an important detail. Something he could grasp and lay blame on, anything but himself that could take responsibility for the death of a little girl. A girl no older than his own daughter.
                             *
     Dexter had been working late that Monday night. Production numbers at the plant were abysmally low for the month, and as production manager, it was Dexter’s sole responsibility to explain to the corporate office what was being done to resolve the situation.
     The problem was, is that Dexter had no idea why the numbers were suffering. He had checked and rechecked everything that night: man hours, production output, warehouse inventory, machine maintenance, anything that could point him in the right direction to appease corporate.
     But nothing had, and Dexter left the chemical plant that night at 10:15 p.m. more confused than ever. Confused and frustrated, an impotent feeling gnawing at his gut,
that had ultimately led to his decision to stop at “Digby’s Bar & Grill.”
                             *
     A road sign loomed on the horizon of Dexter’s vision, informing him that Salina, Kansas was 110 miles ahead. But the road sign also held the mileage for another city.
     Squinting against the sun’s afternoon glare, Dexter read the reflective name as he sped past:
TERGER -- ???
     Terger? Dexter thought puzzled. He wiped his brow free of sweat, fiddling in vain with the controls of the Impala’s defunct air conditioner. A package of chocolate snack cakes lay in the passenger seat melting, along with a six-pack of grape soda that was by now piss warm.
     “Shit,” Dexter hissed. The road before him continued to unwind in a twisting black ribbon, and Dexter helped himself to a grape soda.
     “Terger,” he said aloud. Where the hell was that? And why had the mileage been marked in question marks? It made no sense, unless someone had been fooling around with the road signs, which Dexter highly doubted out here in the middle of practically nowhere.
     Taking a long slurp of warm soda, Dexter settled back with a heavy sigh, wondering if he’d made the right decision to flee Chicago. And his life.
                             *
     Dexter remembered leaving Digby’s at around 11:00 p.m. The bar had been deserted except for a few regulars. His wife had already left him two messages on his cell phone, and after shooting back his third bourbon and coke, Dexter knew it was time to get home.
     He was beginning to feel better as he made his way across Digby’s dark parking lot. Today had been a ball-buster, for certain, and the slight buzz that had settled itself within his cerebral cortex was more than welcome.
     Dexter slid his ample frame inside the Impala with a grunt, started the car, and left for what he thought would be home-- but would turn out to be his destiny.
     Home was only 3 miles from Digby’s, and Dexter knew the route well enough to drive it in his sleep.
     In fact, when he thought about it, maybe he had that night: thoughts of the chemical plant, questions from upper management, dismal production numbers, all clouding his focus and attention as he mastered the Impala home.
     It was just after 11:00 p.m. when Dexter made a left turn at Denver Avenue. He’d even used his left blinker before the turn, and could see the glow of lights from his living room window at the end of the block.
     Accelerating, in a sudden urge to get home, Dexter never saw the small form materialize out of nowhere in the headlight’s of the Impala. It had happened in a dreadful whisper of time.
     Swerving the Impala hard to the right, Dexter never stood a chance; his eyes registering in slow motion the terrified face of a young black girl in the midst of a soundless scream. A scream that would lead her into eternity by Dexter’s own hand.
                             *
     Dexter adjusted the rear-view mirror, chancing a look at himself in the reflection. His normally broad, fleshy face appeared gaunt and tired. He’d been overweight since childhood –-maybe even birth-- and was tipping the scales now at an even 285 lbs.
     Dexter finished off the grape soda, crunched the empty can in his pudgy fist, and tossed it to the floorboard. He thought about grabbing one of the snack cakes, but decided against it remembering the words of his doctor:
     ‘You need to lose weight, Mr. Whitley,’ Dr. Pernell had told him. ‘Your cholesterol levels are through the roof and your blood pressure is unacceptable. Keep this up and you’ll be looking at a heart attack before you hit your fiftieth birthday.’
     Dexter thought Pernell could’ve used his own advice considering the man waddled when he walked, but had said nothing. Maybe a heart attack is what I need, he thought morosely. If nothing else it’d be ironic justice.
     Dexter saw a Kansas state trooper parked on the edge of the highway. He slowed the Impala down to 65 m.p.h, hoping he hadn’t been reported missing. His wife was
probably more than frantic by now, and had undoubtedly called everyone from his ailing mother in Missouri to Mr. Carlson, Dexter’s direct supervisor at the plant.
     Which is why he’d decided to leave on a Saturday in the wee hours of the morning. Work wouldn’t be missing him, and by the time his wife figured out that Dexter hadn’t just went for an early morning stroll or hit the local bakery for a few dozen donuts, he’d be long gone.
     So far the plan was turning out flawlessly --10 hours out of Chicago now without a hitch-- but the sight of the state trooper still worried him.
     Dexter straightened up behind the steering wheel, checked his speed and his seatbelt, and prayed silently that the trooper was doing nothing more than taking a late afternoon nap.
     Dexter passed the state trooper, unaware he was holding his breath until the trooper’s cruiser was in his rearview mirror, when he let it out in a low, shuddering gasp. His palms were slick with sticky sweat, his heart hammering like an old steam engine badly in need of oil.
     Checking his rearview mirror once more, making certain the state trooper hadn’t decided to tail him, Dexter eased the Impala back up to seventy-five.
     Another road sign came into view on a panoramic backdrop of golden wheat swaying in the wind. Dexter was sick of the sight, envisioning the entire acre caught up in a tornado of swirling fire.
     The road sign read:
     SALINA -- 73 mi.
     TIMDA -- ???
                             *
     There were a few things that Dexter remembered about “the accident,” and few things that he didn’t, or more appropriately, had chosen not to.
     Those things honored by a memory were vivid with deep colors, penetrating into the dark recesses of Dexter’s subconscious where even sleep could not rescue him: the THUD! of the little girl’s fragile body making contact with the Impala’s chrome bumper; Dexter’s own awful scream of terror and realization; the high-pitched squeal of four tires braking; the sickening POP! as one of these tires crushed the child’s head like a rotten gourd.
     These were the memories –-the night terrors-- that woke Dexter up sweating and crying in bed, unable to explain anything to his wife as she tried to console him.
     But what Dexter didn’t remember was of even more importance. Although a part of him knew he’d run over the child, and had effectively
squashed
killed her, Dexter had no recollection of stopping to help. He also had no memory of parking his car in the driveway, or walking through his own front door where his wife had greeted him with a kiss and dinner gone cold.
     Dexter went to bed that night with the conscience of a nun on Sunday morn. And it wasn’t before Tuesday evening, after he’d gotten home from a tiring day at the plant, that he realized something was wrong in the neighborhood.
     Dexter’s wife had been the first to inform him about “the accident.” Terrible tragedy that the entire neighborhood was talking about; clear case of hit-and-run according to the police, but no suspects. Terms like vehicular manslaughter and 2nd degree murder rising to the surface, painting the entire scene into an image of an unknown ruthless killer.
     Then the stares began. It had been subtle at first. His neighbors peeking out their bedroom windows as he left for work in the morning; sideway glances and whispering in the supermarket as he shopped. People who Dexter had known for years now treating him with suspicious eyes.
     A few of them had even been bold enough to stand outside the street running in front of Dexter’s house, pointing and murmuring to one another in conspiratorial conversation.
     And although the police had never shown up to officially question him, Dexter knew he was a prime suspect. The fragmented memories and nightmares plaguing him night after night told him as much, but there were pieces missing from the puzzle, nothing he could put together to form a clear, real picture.
     It was on the eve of Dexter’s final departure when the pieces finally fell together with frightening clarity.
     The Friday night news. A short follow-up report on a hit-and-run victim by the name of Latisha Wilkens --little Latisha Wilkens with all the innocence of a 10 year old-— who had been struck by an unknown assailant late Monday

night and left for dead with a crushed skull in the middle of a dark street; interviews with a devastated family left in an aftermath of unbearable grief and shock. Little Latisha who would have been 11 that coming Sunday.
     The next morning before dawn, with his wife snoring softly, Dexter packed a suitcase and silently kissed his wife and kids goodbye; his life as he had once known it now some part of a horrific dream that he would leave behind to waste away in the sands of time.
     Destination unknown, Dexter locked the front door to his house, and with suitcase in hand, fled Chicago.
                             *
     In the here and now, Kansas continued opening up before Dexter under a relentless sea blue sky. The late afternoon air was warm and breezy, the sun a fiery spot of burnt gold in the blameless heavens.
     Dexter switched on the radio, still thinking about the last road sign he’d passed. Timda, the sign had read. And the miles had once again been listed as…
     “SINNER!” a caustic voice suddenly blared from the radio. Dexter jumped in his seat --the seatbelt digging
painfully into his left armpit-- fumbling for the radio’s volume control.
     “Yes, brothers and sisters,” the deep, brazen voice continued, “that’s what you are in the eyes of the almighty Lord when you let sin into your heart! Sin! Can I get an amen?”
     A joyous chorus of amens filtered from the background. Dexter twisted the volume control, but the radio continued blaring like a stadium speaker:
     “And what is sin?” the voice asked. “Can you see it? Can you touch it? Can you taste it? Sin, my brothers and sisters, is when you allow evil thoughts and deeds to continue on in your life without baptizing yourself in the clear, rapturous waters of salvation! Can I get an amen?”
     More amens from the crowd, as Dexter struck the radio with his fist. But the voice grew bolder, working itself into a dizzying crescendo:
     “Do you think you can hide from sin? Do you think the good Lord is blind? That maybe He’ll just let you slip by with cheating on your wife, or doing drugs and drinking alcohol, or even murder? NO!” the voice raged. “No, I say! The sins of the past will always find you out by…”
     Dexter’s hand finally found the radio’s ON/OFF switch. He snapped it off and grabbed another soda.
     “Jesus,” he whispered. The car was eerily silent without the voice of the radio evangelist. “Only in the Bible Belt. I don’t need this shit.”
     Taking a drink of grape soda, Dexter returned his attention to the highway, reminding himself that it was the lack thereof that had put him into this situation.
     Dexter drove in silence with only his thoughts for company. Time passed as the sun sank lower into the west, giving way to a blush horizon with a few pinpoint stars eager to dot the approaching night sky.
     Dexter suddenly sat straight up, his eyes boring a hole out the Impala’s windshield. The soda between his legs was long finished and he tossed it to the floorboard to join its sibling.
     “What the hell?” he muttered to himself.
     Up ahead, standing in I-70’s breakdown lane, was what Dexter took to be a child --a female child-- out here in the middle of nowhere and alone. Beyond the girl, about thirty yards behind her, was another road sign. It read:
     SALINA -- 9 mi.
     ENOTA -- ???
     Slowing the Impala down, Dexter pulled over to the side of the road, stopping to within a few feet of the little girl. He stepped out of the car, glancing to the left and right for oncoming traffic. The highway was desolate. Silent.
     “Hey there!” he called out. He walked around the Impala’s front end. “You lost or something? Need some help?”
     The girl could have been no more than 12 years old. She wore a plain white dress that stopped just above her grubby knees. Her pale blonde hair was pulled back in a blue clippie, a pair of black flat sandals adorning her petite feet. Her chipped toenails were painted cherry red.
     But what Dexter noticed more than anything was that the child was wearing a pair of glasses. Not prescription glasses or regular sunglasses, but glasses that looked fashioned for a blind person. The lenses were perfect spheres and blacker than the Ace of spades.
     The child hadn’t answered his initial question, so Dexter tried again, squatting down so he was eye level with the girl.
     “Hey there, missy,” Dexter said amiably, “what’s a pretty young lady like yourself doing all the way out here?”
     A gentle breeze, warm and inviting, rustled the stalks of a nearby cornfield. The girl cocked her head at the sound of Dexter’s voice. His voice was comforting, but also terribly lost. She knew this and understood. The man was on a long journey to atonement but had lost his sense of direction; his sense of right and wrong was damaged, his purpose in a vast universe uncertain. She would lead him to salvation.
     Dexter remained squatting, wondering if the girl wasn’t deaf and dumb, also, when she spoke:
     “I’m here for a purpose, mister.”
     Dexter frowned at the child. “And what purpose would that be?” he asked.
     The little girl smiled, showing off a set of rotting, black teeth. Greenish-white mold dangled from her gums as she began to laugh, pointing to the horizon.
     “To show you the way, mister!” she shrilled. “Just beyond that sign. That way, mister. That way!”
     The child was still laughing hysterically, pointing at the road sign, as Dexter stood up. He began backing up slowly until his ass met the Impala’s bumper. Inching around the corner of the car, he found the door handle and opened it.
     Freak, was Dexter’s first thought. Inbred hillbilly his next.
     The girl was showered in a fantail of dust and gravel as Dexter left the shoulder of the highway with a spin of his tires. Roaring past the road sign ignoring the hideous shrieks of laughter behind him, Dexter set his sights on Salina.
     Nine more miles, he thought fighting to control himself. Just nine more miles and then a hotel. A good night’s sleep is what I need. Just a few more miles, that’s all.
     But Dexter’s mind was still racing around the girl. What the hell had that been? Was he going crazy? Had the stress finally gotten to him? But the girl had spoken to him, he realized. Had spoken to him plain as day, some gibberish about ‘showing him the way.’ Spoken to him with a mouth full of…
     Dexter squashed the awful memory with a grimace, scanning the Kansas horizon for the city lights of Salina. He drove on with purpose, the plains around him darkening in the gloom of the falling twilight.
     Twenty minutes passed, and Dexter had yet to witness any signs of life: no oncoming traffic or gas stations, no telephone poles or lighted billboards, not even a damn tumbleweed blowing across the highway.
     There was nothing. Nothing but black road and the impenetrable silence of the dark plains surrounding him.
     Dexter tried the radio again and got a sudden burst of loud static. He ran through several stations, not bothering with the volume, and received more of the same…lifeless white noise. He switched off the radio.
     Did I miss an exit? he wondered. He certainly hadn’t seen one, and he definitely hadn’t taken a wrong turn, because there’d been no turns to take in over 100 miles. Maybe that last road sign had been wrong. Maybe Salina was really 99 miles away instead of only 9.
     Or maybe that freak kid back there had been toying with the sign, Dexter thought. That had to be it. No wonder
she’d been acting like a lunatic. Probably ripped a 9 off the sign and shoved it up her ass.
     Dexter chuckled at the idea, his bleary eyes wide and watchful, waiting for something, anything that would tell him that he wasn’t utterly alone, when a familiar shape appeared out of the darkness.
     “Thank God,” Dexter sighed with relief. It was another road sign, but on the other side of the highway pointing in the opposite direction.
     Dexter braked and made a U-Turn in the middle of the road, intent on finding out just where in the hell he was at. He pulled the car up beside the road sign:
     SALINA -- 9 mi.
     EREHW ON -- ???
     Dexter sat there staring at the sign with his mouth open. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands, reading the sign, again, and then once again with his mind refusing to believe what it was seeing.
     “Impossible,” he uttered. “It’s not possible. I couldn’t have missed it. Not a city that big.”
     Dexter glanced at the car’s fuel gauge. The red needle showed FULL. Which was also impossible since he’d filled up the tank over three hours ago.
     Dexter’s bad feeling was growing worse by the second. Something was horribly wrong. He tried calming himself with a few deep breaths, telling himself there had to be a logical explanation.
     If I turn around and keep going the way I was going, Dexter reasoned, then I’ll be heading to God knows where. But if I follow this sign from where I was just at, who knows what…
     Dexter shook his head in confusion, frustrated and more than a little frightened. Deciding to follow this new road sign, he pulled away from the breakdown lane and prayed silently that Salina would lay only 9 miles ahead.
                             *
     45 minutes later, with no signs of a city, or a road sign, or an animal, or another human being, Dexter began to believe he was part of some elaborate hoax. He wasn’t quite sure how it’d been set up or who had set it up, or even why, but knew that his current situation was rapidly approaching the realms of impossibility.
     Dexter thought about his wife, of whom he’d been married to for twenty years, out searching the city streets of Chicago with the children. A pang of guilt stabbed at his heart, realizing the worry and fear he must be causing them at the moment.
     Not once had he second guessed his plan since he’d left Chicago, confident that is was for the best, that by leaving he would be saving his wife and children ridicule and shame. But Dexter was no longer certain about his decision, or anything else.
     I-70 continued on in darkness and endless miles, time slipping beneath the wheels of the Impala with frightening rapidity.
     I could have gotten myself a lawyer, Dexter mused, staring into the night. A real good lawyer who might have gotten me off with a few years in jail and time served. It wouldn’t have been so bad. And people forget, the whole thing would’ve blown over in time, and life would have gone back to normal.
     When an unbidden image came to Dexter’s mind of Latisha’s parents on the news, crying and holding one another in shock, asking questions that had no answers.
     How normal would their life be? he asked himself. It wasn’t as if he had meant to hit the kid, and he was sorry it had happened, but the brat shouldn’t of been out there in the first place. What in the hell had she been doing out there anyway?
     That one thought, as it always did, angered Dexter. No, it hadn’t been his fault. If anyone was at fault it was the kid’s parents. And it was their fault --a momentary lapse of reason allowing a little girl to play in the street late at night-- that had forced him to flee like a fugitive (which he undoubtedly was); that had forced him to pack his suitcase with all of his hopes, dreams, and desires, and call it quits.
     Dexter glanced in the back seat. His suitcase lay there looking tired and forlorn, out of place in an otherwise normal world that Dexter could sympathize with.
     When a sudden shrill of laughter tore through the night jerking Dexter’s attention back to the road. In a moment that hung in eternity, Dexter could only watch with no way to react, as a small figure darted from the side of the road directly into the oncoming beams of the Impala’s headlights. A road sign stood there in silence, welcoming him.
     Dexter jammed the brakes with both feet, a horrible familiar squeal filling his ears. The Impala swerved to the left, but Dexter knew as he’d known before that it was too late. Always too late.
     A heavy THUD! mixed with Dexter’s own screams echoed through the car. The Impala bounced as if it had hit a vicious speed bump, swerved right, and came to a shuddering halt just beyond the lone road sign.
     Dexter sat there a moment shaking all over, his mind desperately trying to grasp what had just happened. His heart pounding in his throat, Dexter opened the car door and stepped out onto the deserted highway.
     A deer, he thought wildly. It had to be a deer! He was afraid to go around to the front of the car, not knowing but knowing all the same what he would find.
     He put a trembling hand on the side of the Impala, forcing himself forward, insisting that he had hit an animal. That had to be it. Maybe not a deer, Dexter thought, but maybe a coyote…or…or a damn wolf or something. Anything but…
     Dexter’s eyes widened in horror and disgust as the Impala’s taillights let him know that he had indeed not struck an animal.
     It was a child –-a female child-- and Dexter realized it couldn’t, wouldn’t, have been anything else. No, this was par for the course as far as Dexter was concerned. For him to have hit anything but a child would have been ludicrous.
     A warm breeze smelling of ripe corn swirled around Dexter as he knelt down beside the crumpled form. Blood was already beginning to pool around the child’s head full of blonde hair. He had no medical training, but knew how to check for a pulse. There was none, not even a flicker.
     Dexter hung his head dropping the child’s limp wrist, still on his knees, wondering if he had gone truly crazy or entered Hell. At the moment, Hell didn’t sound like a bad place to be.
     “You going to run away again, mister?” a tiny voice asked.
     Dexter fell back on the hard asphalt of the interstate. His mouth dropped open, and found he had no voice.
     The body of the girl began twisting itself with gurgling and gasping sounds, and then sat up turning to Dexter’s bloodless face.
     “Will you be my friend, mister?” the little girl rasped. She giggled. “I have lots of friends out here.”
     Dexter stared at her, the child’s face awash in the hellish red glare from the taillights. The right side of her face had been smashed in, bits of gravel, bone, and dirt still clinging to her shredded cheek.
     “Go away,” Dexter hissed. “Leave me alone. It was an accident.”
     The girl shook her head and then smiled, a thick rope of blood trickling from the corner of her torn lips.
     “I can’t go away, mister,” she answered softly. A blood filled tear fell from her left eye, the right eye all but torn away from its socket. “And neither can you. Don’t you understand?”
     Dexter shook his head in numb silence, sickened by the sight of the girl’s ravaged face but helpless to look away. When his eye caught sight of two items lying on the pavement beside her: a blue clippie, snapped in two, and a pair of dark glasses, the kind a blind person might wear.
     Par for the course, Dexter though distantly, when the child said:
     “Get back in your car, mister. You have a long way to go.”
     Dexter threw his head back staring into the star-filled Kansas night. “Where?” he screamed. “Just where in the hell am I supposed to be going?”
     The little girl giggled again, struggling to her feet; her once white dress stained with splatters of dark blood.
     “Find Latisha,” she answered. “She can tell you. Follow the signs to Regret, Admit, and Atone.”
     Dexter shook his head, having never heard of such places. There were no cities with names like…
     And then it struck him. The road signs…
     Terger…Timda…Enota…
     “Find Latisha, mister,” the girl repeated. “She just got here. She’s scared and lonely and can’t go on. Just like me and a thousand others who died violently. Who died at the hands of an unrepentant soul, now searching for each other on this endless stretch of highway for closure.
     “Find her out there, mister. Find her and you may find your way home. If you don’t, you’re only heading to there…”
     The little girl lifted her arm, its elbow bent at a cruel and unusual angle, pointing at the road sign just behind Dexter.
     Dexter got to his feet and turned around. The sign wobbled in a stiff gust of wind, its reflective lettering winking across Dexter’s eyes:
     EREHW ON -- ???
     “No where,” he whispered to the Kansas night --if he truly were in Kansas-- and began walking back to the Impala. He turned a few feet from the car, meaning to tell the little girl how sorry he was and to thank her for her guidance, but she was gone; a broken clippie and dark glasses the only proof that she’d ever been on the road.
     Dexter wished her well and crawled back inside the Impala. Fastening his seatbelt and adjusting the rearview mirror, he thought about what lay ahead.
     Dexter knew the highway to salvation would be long and dark, many miles would be traveled and isolation would be his companion. But with a little luck, maybe, just maybe, he’d come across little Latisha walking the roadside --alone and frightened, searching for him-- and ask for forgiveness that he didn’t deserve.

                      THE END