by Daniel Quinn
“Going west,” David agreed, and pulled back onto the highway. He glanced down at the boy beside him. Although he was three or four years younger than Tim, there was nothing boyish about him; his round, smooth face belonged to someone who had seen the world and wasn’t impressed. He was staring ahead with bored eyes, his hands folded bonelessly in his lap.
Suddenly David was annoyed with himself. He remembered now that half the reason he hated picking up hitchhikers was that he always felt vaguely and irrationally obliged to entertain them, and these two were sitting there like lumps.
“Where are you headed?” he asked, hoping to hear that they’d be getting off at the next town up the road.
“Las Vegas,” the man said tonelessly.
David stared at him, astounded. Las Vegas! What on earth was this grubby pair going to do in Las Vegas? Then he remembered that there’s more than one Las Vegas.
“You mean in New Mexico?”
The man turned to him with a dark, wounded look. “I mean Las Vegas in Nevada.”
“Ah,” David said.
A few minutes later, still looking out of his window, the man said, “You should come too.”
“Me?” David laughed. “Why should I go to Las Vegas?”
Man and boy exchanged an amused look. “Toney says so.”
David blinked from one to the other; since entering the car, the boy hadn’t uttered a single word.
“Why does he say that?”
“ ’Cause you got the nine … strokes. I guess that’d be the word in English: strokes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You got the nine strokes of luck.”
“And what’s that mean?”
The man laughed softly. “It means … for nine times you can’t miss, can’t lose.”
“I see,” David said, smiling. “And Toney told you this?”
He nodded.
“And how does he know?”
The two grinned at each other as if sharing a private joke. Then, still grinning, the man looked up and said, “You married, unh?”
Warily, David said he was.
“Your wife … she ever complain about a certain little thing?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David replied stiffly.
The man lifted a slender brown hand and tapped the side of his nose meaningly.
David flushed.
“Sure. You got a certain smell, unh? Even I noticed it a little when we got in the car.”
“You can get out and walk if it bothers you.”
The man laughed delightedly. “Hey, don’ get mad, man. This a very special smell. It comes out of the nine openings in your body. You can’t help it.”
In childhood, David had gotten used to taking two baths a day. If he didn’t, his mother complained that he smelled like a wet sheepdog. A minor crisis had occurred on the second day of his honeymoon when Ellen, mortified, had asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking a shower before they made love. He’d subsequently asked a few doctors about it, but none had found the problem interesting enough to pursue.
“That’s okay,” the man went on. “It’ll go ‘way when you use up the nine strokes.”
David made a face and went on driving.
“Don’ believe me, unh?” He elbowed the boy in the ribs. “Hey, Toney, he don’ believe me.”
The boy looked up at David with a sort of shy leer. “Juan’s right. When the luck’s gone, the smell’ll be gone.”
His jaw clenched angrily, David said nothing. He was wondering how he was going to get rid of these two, and wishing that he had the nerve to just pull over and put them out. As if sensing his hostility, the man called Juan turned his attention to the increasingly barren landscape outside, and the boy stared without interest at the road ahead.
David’s anger drained away, and he began to relax as the silence continued through Cheyenne Wells, First View, Kit Carson, and Wild Horse. At Aroya he stopped for gas. Inside the station he saw a refrigerator stocked with plastic-wrapped ready-made sandwiches, and, unappetizing as they looked, his mouth was awash with saliva. He bought two and then—cursing himself as a fool—four more, which he shoved at the old man without a word. Juan turned them around in his hand as if unable to make out what they were, then looked up with an amazed grin.
“Hey, man, that’s nice.”
David grunted, knowing there was nothing nice about it. He could abandon his wife and son but was just too goddamned squeamish to eat a sandwich in front of a pair of strangers who hadn’t the slightest claim on his generosity.
Three quarters of an hour later they joined Interstate 70, and Juan pointed out slyly that this was the fastest way to Las Vegas.
“I’m not going to Las Vegas.”
“Unh. Where you goin’ then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe up into the mountains.”
The old man guffawed incredulously. “You wanna go up into the mountains?”
“Why is that so funny?”
“Still winter up there, man. Freeze your ass.”
David shrugged, and his teeth chattered as he tried to stifle a sudden, overwhelming yawn. The man glanced at him and asked if he was getting tired.
“I’m all right.”
“I can drive for a while if you want. I’m a good driver.”
“I’m all right,” David repeated grimly, but his eyelids felt like leaden shutters that were going to slide down millimeter by millimeter no matter how much resistance he offered. Thinking about it, he realized that, except for two brief breaks, he’d been at the wheel for nine hours straight—after only three or four hours of sleep. The idea of a nap on the back seat was almost irresistibly tempting.
He yawned again and, when his jaw snapped shut, saw a laminated card being thrust under his nose.
“Look. I got a driver’s license an’ everything.”
David hesitated, knowing it was insane to turn the car over to this complete stranger. He glanced down at the boy to see what he thought of it. As if on cue, Toney said, “He’s a good driver, mister. Really.” He spoke with such authority that David wondered groggily if he’d underestimated his age.
Gratefully acknowledging defeat, he pulled over, crawled into the back seat, and was asleep so quickly that he didn’t even feel the car turn back onto the highway.
CHAPTER 26
He emerged from unconsciousness by slow degrees, like a body drifting up from the bottom of a deep pool. Feeling immensely heavy and lethargic, he groped for the end of his dream—a weight that would pull him back into the depths where he wanted to be—but it slipped away. As he stretched out with a groan, his feet met an obstacle, and it took him a moment to identify it: the backseat door, of course. Suddenly alarmed, realizing that the car was motionless, he sat up and looked around.
And wondered if he wasn’t still dreaming after all.
The car was sitting in a hollow between three rocky hills dotted with low pines, clumps of brown weeds, and shadowed pockets of decaying snow. Looking through the rear window, he saw no sign of a road—or even a trail; the weeds the car had been driven over had sprung up again behind it.
You wanna go up into the mountains?
His hitchhiking pals had driven him up into the mountains and abandoned him there.
Panicked, he reached for his billfold and found it was in place and still stuffed with bills. The car keys dangled from the ignition; he retrieved them and went out to check the trunk. His suitcase hadn’t been touched. Evidently the old man was only a humorist, not a thief.
But why? Revenge?
Revenge for what?
For buying them food, maybe. Perhaps it seemed a patronizing gesture: Here, eat, since you obviously can’t afford to feed yourselves. Yes, it had to be that, though the punishment seemed excessive for the crime.
Shrugging this away, David checked his watch. Five-thirty—four-thirty mountain time—time enough to get back on the road to civilization before nightfall. He assumed he couldn’
t be more than half a mile from that road—some road. Perhaps even less than that. After all, what price vengeance? The farther in they took him, the farther they’d have to walk out.
The car faced the westering sun; he turned it around and, in second gear, began to feel his way back—searching for the path of least resistance among the boulders and bushes. The ground rose slightly as it approached the saddle between two hills. At the crest of the saddle he paused, frowning. The descent on the other side was too steep—not too steep to be negotiated, too steep to be the right way. He’d be able to get the car down it, but no one would have been able to get the car up it in the first place—not a two-wheel-drive Volvo.
He backed to his original position and thought about it. Clearly his humorous friends hadn’t just driven the car in and switched the engine off; they’d turned it around to mask the direction they’d brought it from. He couldn’t have foreseen such subtlety, but he should have checked for tracks before doing his own turning around; they’d be hopelessly muddled now—if he could read them at all.
He got out and made a circuit of the area at a radius of twenty yards from the car. To the trained eye, he was sure, the back-trail would stand out like a scorch mark on a white sheet. To his own eye, however, it was invisible. There was no conveniently placed patch of smooth clay or sand to catch a tread mark, and if the tough-looking vegetation had been crushed by a car’s passage, it had quickly sprung back to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest.
He assessed the sun and the three hills around him. By the time he’d scaled the hill to the east, the land below might well be in shadow; but if he scaled the hill to the west, the land below would still be in sunlight. Nevertheless, his inclination was toward the eastern slope, maybe because it looked toward home and security.
He changed into jeans, tennis shoes, and wind-breaker and headed west. It was a dusty climb but not an arduous one, though he took it cautiously, not eager to complicate matters with a twisted ankle. The sun was just touching a distant mountain on the horizon when he reached the top. There was nothing in the intervening space to encourage him—no lights, no roads, no houses, no fences—just range after range of barren hills. Behind any one of them could be hidden a superhighway, a village—even a whole city. But from this vantage point it might as well have been a vista on Mars.
Looking to his right, he saw that he was standing on a ridge that led, after what appeared to be a shallow dip, to the crest of the northern hill, perhaps half a mile away. Although the sun would be gone by the time he got there, he judged it would be light enough to make out a road. But ten minutes later he discovered that his eye had been deceived. Hidden in the shallow dip was not an unbroken ridge to the northern crest but the root of still another hill jutting westward and then up to the summit he wanted to reach. He scowled down at the car sitting obscenely useless in the valley below and then up at the hill to his left. Except for perhaps the last two hundred yards, he’d have the car in sight the whole time. He glanced at his watch, set it back an hour to mountain time, knowing as he did it that, whatever the hands said, there was less than an hour of daylight left. Even so, there was no reason why he couldn’t make the ascent and return to this spot in forty minutes.
Still, he looked back wistfully at the Volvo, wishing he’d had the good sense to turn on the hazard lights as a guide.
Staying on the high ground, he reached the northern crest twenty minutes later and found nothing encouraging in the view; empty hills extended to the horizon like a rough cloth carelessly folded. Some fifteen miles away a single light flickered on a hilltop like a dim star, hopelessly beyond reach. Turning around, he was mildly surprised to find that the valley in which the car rested was not so much in front of him as to his left, which meant that retracing his steps would be to take the long way round. He studied the descent thoughtfully. What had appeared from below to be a single hill was in fact two hills; he was looking at his car over the shoulder of the lower hill. He would descend the first and go around the second to the left to reach the valley floor.
By the time he’d completed the first leg of the journey it was fully dark, and he paused, trying to remember when the moon had risen the night before. He seemed to recall seeing it well up on his arrival in Hays. Or had that been on leaving Hays?
Then, looking down, he realized the question was irrelevant. Against expectation, he could dimly make out the shape of the car below him, a glossy roundness against the surrounding rubble. It dropped from sight a few minutes later, however, when he descended into a watercourse cutting through the valley floor. The far side of the arroyo was only some eight feet high, but it was a sheer wall of rock, and, bearing right, he was a few minutes finding a safe way up. The car, he calculated, would be to his left, and it was.
Except that it wasn’t a car; it was a shelf of rock angled up out of the weeds. Looking around bleakly, he understood what every traveler lost in the mountains learns: in the dark, all hills look alike.
Still winter up there, man. Freeze your ass off.
Already shivering, he sat down on the rock to assess his chances of surviving the night. He carried no matches, no cigarette lighter, and dismissed his prospects of redeveloping some ancient fire-making technique from scratch, in the dark. He’d seen nothing like a cave he could block up to conserve body heat. What he had plenty of was weeds. He could trample vast quantities in the hours ahead and use the duff to pack inside his clothes. It wouldn’t be as effective as down (and would be hellishly uncomfortable), but it would probably save his life. He could find a crevice and fill it with weeds that he could crawl under to spend the night. He did this first, figuring that he’d be virtually immobile once he’d stuffed his clothes with insulation.
All these chores were vastly easier to imagine than to accomplish, and it was midnight by the time he squirmed into his nest, completely exhausted. Ten minutes later he squirmed back out, choking on pollen and dust. He tore off another strip of shirt-tail (he’d already used two to tie off his pant legs), found a patch of snow, and froze his hands melting enough to moisten it. Then he crawled back inside and, with the icy mask over his mouth and nose, began to feel a sickening premonition of defeat.
Curiously, he found the situation more humiliating than terrifying. Lying there encased in weeds, every square inch of flesh burning either with irritation or with cold, he felt like a booby, unable to get through even three days outside his petty routine without bungling his life away.
There was a rock burrowing into the right side of his back, just below the kidney.
Naturally there would be. It was moving in on him, making a place for itself as a new organ, alongside spleen and liver—an organ of cold, designed to process heat away. Of course it wasn’t really moving in on him; he was moving in on it—forcing himself on it. But that wasn’t exactly right either. Something about equal and opposite forces there. He was pushing on the rock and the rock was pushing back—had to be or it’d be sinking into the ground. On the other hand … there is no force, however great …
What the devil was that?
There is no force, however great.…
Poetry? Something.
Could he really lie there (there is no force) absorbing that rock (however great) into his body for the next seven hours without going insane? It didn’t seem possible. Seven hours: four hundred minutes, twenty-four thousand seconds. If he could count slowly to twenty-four thousand, the night would be over.
One, two, three, four …
There is no force, however great …
Then the solution to the puzzle came to him, and he smiled blearily. Poor William Whewell of Trinity College—a fellow bungler. He’d wanted to be remembered as a poet but had achieved only derisory fame for a piece of inadvertent doggerel that had slipped into his Elementary Treatise on Mechanics. After hearing it recited for the amusement of his fellow dons in an after-dinner speech, he frantically revised it for later editions but never managed to expunge it from the literature of ine
ptitude.
There is no force, however great,
Can stretch a cord, however fine,
Into a horizontal line
Which is accurately straight.
This anecdote was absolutely true, David knew. If he were at home, in the spare bedroom that had served as his office, he could have gone directly to the bookcase and the volume in which it could be found.
Although he couldn’t sense it, his thoughts were moving with glacial slowness. William Whewell’s unfortunate rhymes hadn’t been recollected (as he imagined) in a minute or two; they’d floated together over a period of three quarters of an hour, like particles suspended in a heavy liquid.
He was interested to discover that he no longer felt unbearably cold. It occurred to him that the loss of any sense of discomfort is a classic symptom of hypothermia, but he discounted that; it was simply that his precautions, after all, were proving more effective than he’d hoped. Of course it was early yet. The real test would come, if it came, in the bitter hour before dawn, when
There is no force, however great,
Can keep a man, however warm,
From abandoning his mortal form
To the comfort of a wooden crate.
His greatest worry had been for his feet, poorly protected in their tennis shoes. But that had been taken care of at some dimly remembered point when he detached them and tucked them up into the hollow between buttocks and thighs, one to each side. He could feel them there quite distinctly. But now something was nagging at him for attention, which seemed unfair just when he was finally becoming comfortably settled at last.
A smell. The smell of the sea.
Absurd.
It was the bells that had put him in mind of the sea.
Six bells and all’s well, cap’n.
Having found the right sense to focus on, he listened. Not bells. A piano. An old rinky-tink piano, playing some ghastly Victorian ditty.
