Read Online The Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman - Free Book Online

his second mushroom cap and waiting for the main attraction to start in his head, but he made himself not laugh and so avoided his date with the head nurse in charge of stitches at IU Health Methodist.
    Jack seethed. He neither heard the band (a cover band with a fat, coal-black front man who should not have sounded like Smokey Robinson but did) nor tasted his next four Buds. When midnight came around, he drove his cherry-red Nash Rambler home, trimming a few leaves off the hedge near the driveway as he parked. He went to the skillet and pried a disc of sausage from its bed of whitish grease. He turned on the TV and sat down, watching Johnny Carson telling fortunes with a huge turban on his head. Johnny Carson made him chuckle for the first time that night. He lit a cigarette and fell asleep, his cigarette burning a hole in the arm of the sofa but then burning itself out in a curl of smoke. He was dreaming about a girl he’d kissed in eighth grade and how she had strawberries on her dress. He never saw the shadows move into his driveway and up the sidewalk.
    The knock woke him up at 1:15 A.M.
    The television hissed with snow.
    â€”
    BETSY TRAUTMANN KEPT LOOKING AT HER FRONT DOOR. IT WAS AN UNREMARKABLE front door, pine painted white with three little windows you could peep through to see who was knocking. On the outside a plastic wreath hung, bright with plastic flowers. That one would stay up through summer, replaced by plastic autumn leaves in the fall andplastic holly in December. She knew the right wreath was on the door, but she had the impression she had forgotten something.
    She cleared her plate from the table, scraped the fish bones and two shriveled green beans into the wastebasket, and put on her dish gloves. The water heater was set at 130 degrees, as it had been since the kids had grown up, so she scalded the hollandaise sauce off her plate, soaped it, washed it, rinsed it, and set it in the drainer. Outside, the shadow of the poplar tree that stretched long and longer while she cooked had now dissolved into general shadow. The sun had been down perhaps fifteen minutes. The streetlights ticked on. Somewhere a mother called for a boy named Tommy.
    Saturday nights were hard for Betsy since she lost her husband. She taught typing and German at the high school. She liked teaching German even though she knew it was temporary; as soon as Herr Mueller’s hip was healed, she would be back to typing, spending her two free periods smoking and reading in the teachers’ lounge. Herr Mueller had grown up in Germany (although one didn’t talk about what he had done there), so his German was better than hers, of course. Yet the children liked her more, she knew it. Mueller was a harsh, secretive man, and not one person on the faculty approved of his thick, walrussy mustache. Still, no girl from the prairie was going to out-German a native of Düsseldorf, so she tried to enjoy every minute of her time drilling the kids on verbs, helping them pair articles with nouns, sprinkling her lessons with anecdotes about her trips to Switzerland and Austria before the war. Not that children loved the anecdotes of their elders, but they certainly preferred them to drilling. Herr Mueller drilled them like SS soldiers, and, from what she’d heard, he just might know a little something about that. It was wrong to hope his hip healed slowly, but she did. It was so nice to have a break from the clacking of the typewriters, so pleasant to interact with the kids without some fussy old machine between them.
Schreibmaschine.
That was German for “typewriter.” And it was
die
, not
das
or
der
. It was always best to learn the sex of the article the instant you learned the word.
    Tür
was the word for “door.”
    She looked at the door again, but it just stood there, still and serene, as white as cake frosting. What did she expect? She went over to the door,
die Tür
, and peeked out the windows. Nothing out