A Set Of Wheels

by Robert Thurston

  Following the instructions of our briefing, we drivers line our cars up along the side of the tracks. Waiting for the train. With all the colors surrounding us, it’s something like waiting for the showboat. The Mustang winds up between a Camaro and a Mazda. The drivers and passengers in each flanking car smile over at us pleasantly, the dazzle of their Wheeler smiles competing with the outlandish spread of color. For once, the smiles lose out.

  Link hums to himself. Some song from the dark ages, early rock and roll. I try to make conversation, but he’s in a mood, tied up in himself, doesn’t want to talk. Both of us keep glancing nervously at the tracks, watching for the train.

  The sun comes out and makes it impossible to concentrate on the tracks. All the bright colors send rays of pain across my eyes. I shut my eyes for a while. When I open them again, after the sun goes behind a cloud, the colors dim. I can see streaks of dirt now along the station walls, piles of dogshit along the painted tracks.

  Finally the train comes. Around a curve in historical train fashion. I’m glad to see it’s not painted any bright colors. Black engine, dark and dirty. Comforting.

  The engine passes us. Link stops humming, leans forward, squints for a good look. Behind the engine are a couple of passenger cars and a dining car, then what looks like an endless string of freight cars. The train stops. We are right in front of a brown wooden car’s sliding door. The engineer toots his horn one blast, the signal for drivers to start their motors. All along the line we comply, engines growl to life. I look to my left and right. The lineup of cars is impressive. It looks like the longest thinnest used car lot in history, Guinness record-book stuff. The engineer blows two short blasts. All along the train the sliding doors open and ramps slide out. We’re assigned the number one spot for our four-car squad, so I barrel up the ramp at the next signal, the three other cars in our group following close behind.

  The inside of the freight car is dark and damp, smelling faintly of the country. Barn smells, old hay and older cows. After I back the Mustang into its assigned space, come to a stop, shut off the motor, and watch the other cars ease into their spaces, I become quite nauseated as the exhaust fume odor mixes with the barn smells. The engineer gives a few more toots, I’ve lost count now, and after a long pause the train lurches suddenly forward and we’re off on what Chuck so fondly calls The Outlaw Trail.

  There’s a rare smile on Link’s face. He likes all this. I ask him why.

  Thrills and chills, real-life adventure, I guess, he says.

  Then why do I feel like throwing up?

  A few minutes later somebody brings around food. Prepared in the dining car, it’s laid out on trays. Looks something like airplane food. Tastes worse. Tastes like the way this freight car smells. I think I’ll try to go to sleep.

  * * * * *

  Sitting in the passenger car, trying to ignore Link’s and Chuck’s eager chatter, I try to discern details of the night landscape that we’re trudging through so slowly. We’re going gradually uphill, across mountains. I can’t make out much behind the bright reflections of the interior of the brightly lit passenger car. Some of it’s trees, some of it’s rocks, sometimes I see lighted windows in isolated buildings, houses, shacks. A few minutes ago we went through a dark village, apparently abandoned. I saw it in the light of tramps’ fires. I shut my tired eyes, imagine our train climbing the mountainside, a little toy train with magically lighted tiny square windows traveling along fragile plastic tracks, the kind you have to force together by inserting the thin metal prongs of one into the slots of the next with the use of brute force and profanity.

  A tap on my shoulder. I open my eyes, see a plastic cup of beer being offered by Chuck. I take it, even though beer is the last thing I want at this moment. I raise it to my lips, lick off a dab of foam. Chuck smiles approvingly, returns his attention to Link. I set the cup down on a table, intending not to drink any more. The cup slides along the table, almost tips over. I retrieve it before it slips over the edge. I’ll either have to hold it or drink it. My stomach says hold, but I start sipping anyway. Oddly enough, it begins to make me feel better. Helps me to tune in on the conversation.

  That school we built in Carolina, Link is saying, is that still going on?

  Last I heard, Chuck replies. I’m told, can’t say for sure, but I’m told they got so many kids now they built on another wing and’re thinkin’ about petitioning the state for accreditation.

  Accreditation. I don’t go for that. I don’t go for that at all. Thought we built the school in the first place to provide an alternative.

  That’s so, but times change, Link. People who run the school, they figure they’ve made their point, now it’s time to carry their ideas and methods further.

  What do you say about it?

  I got out, that’s what I said.

  Don’t it gall you just a bit?

  A bit. But there’s lots to do. I don’t have time for reflection. Why’d you get out?

  Heat.

  The law?

  You got it.

  Well, I don’t ask questions, you know that.

  I appreciate it.

  I ask questions, I say.

  I know you do, Lee, Link says. Now’s not the time.

  Even though he speaks calmly, I recognize the menace in his voice, so I shrug and take another sip of beer. It tastes good, but the calm in my stomach is offset by the onset of cramps in my intestines. Hell. I’m gonna have diarrhea, I know it. The goddamned food. I try to concentrate, will the cramps away.

  I miss that school, Chuck, Link says.

  I know you do.

  I’d like to get back into a classroom, get a few kids under my wing. I liked teaching there. It was the one time in my life I felt I was really accomplishing something.

  You were very popular. They miss you.

  I imagine they miss you too.

  Could be. But I had to get out.

  I want to ask Chuck about his wandering ways, about how he could manage to be leading supermarket raids with us while he was apparently down in Carolina working with schools and halfway houses. How Emil could have seen him a few days ago back east when it’s clear he’s been with the Wheelers for a while. How he can stand to be with the Wheelers at all. But I can’t ask questions right now. The cramps have taken over. Excusing myself as coolly as possible, I stumble my way toward the claustrophobic bathrooms at the rear of the car. They all have their occupied signs slid into place. Damn. I feel myself turning green as I stand in the narrow corridor between the bathrooms. I try to think of butterflies but can’t stop thinking of cramps. Finally one of the signs switches from occupied to vacant and one of my fellow outlaws emerges from the bathroom, looking as green as I feel. I grab the door handle just as he releases it. We exchange knowing looks, fellow victims of the food plague, and then I enter the welcome darkness of the closetlike bathroom.

  — 5 —

  Three days on the Outlaw Trail and all mountains look alike to me. We chug through pass after pass, slip through pitch-dark tunnels, listen to the raspy grating sounds of tree branches brushing against the side of our freight car. Stones from the roadbed pelt our underside. I try to listen rhythmically, create tunes out of the many noises, but I can’t. They are too uneven, discordant. Too nerve-wracking. I am about to go crazy. Maybe I went crazy yesterday and this is crazy.

  Link’s edgy too. He’$ eager to get at it, do it. I used to think he was unemotional. But, seems the closer he gets to crime, to participating in it, the more animated and excited he becomes.

  He’s been talkative lately. I think I’ll try to draw him out.

  Link?

  Yeah?

  The other day, when you were talking with Chuck—

  Well, what?

  You mentioned being in trouble with the law.

  I been in trouble with the law all over the lot. What particular grief you talking about?

  I was thinking of you and Chuck in Carolina, but any particular crime that comes into your
mind is all right with—

  You’re a leech, you know that?

  That fair?

  Fair enough. You want to draw shit out of me, needle the crap right out of my veins, take pieces of my life, right?

  No, not at all. I’m just—

  You’re just nosy. That’s worse. Well, ain’t everybody nosy when you come right down to it? You’re no better’n anybody else, Lee, that’s what gets you down, right? You’re no better than anybody else. But remember this: you’re no worse than anybody else either.

  Link has said this to me many times but I don’t feel bad about it. It’s about as close to a compliment as he ever gets. He goes silent on me now. I’m afraid to introduce the topic again. I get very cautious when his drawbridge is up.

  You’re entitled, he says suddenly.

  What?

  I’ll tell you about Carolina. I wish I had a good unconventional story for you, but my criminal life is so conventional they couldn’t make a B-movie out of it. Goes something like this: Three counts of armed robbery, coulda been more if they’d been any good at investigating. Actually, one of the counts I had nothing to do with.

  Why robbery?

  Why not robbery? There’s always a good reason for robbery. You’re greedy. You need money. You’re hungry. You’re angry at a society that elevates the worship of money to monumental levels, angry at corporations whose sense of public service is to pay for British programs on TV.

  Which were you? Greedy, money-grubbing, revolutionary?

  Practical. The school needed money, the school that Chuck and I ran. Well, hunger, too. The kids we hid out were starving. But to get back to the crime record: I think four counts of aggravated assault, one of attempted murder or manslaughter, the DA hadn’t decided which.

  Wait. What about the murder?

  Or manslaughter.

  Okay, or manslaughter.

  Well, we coulda plea-bargained out of that one, I guess. But it came about because I went at the arresting officer with a knife. Wounded him good. A couple inches more and it woulda been goodbye fuzzballs. Murder one.

  Or manslaughter.

  Not likely. Do it to a cop and it’s always murder.

  Really?

  I think of myself and Sergeant Allen. What if they ever found out? Murder one. They’d never believe I didn’t mean it, that it was an accident. I wouldn’t even believe it. I don’t like thinking like this.

  Well, I say, there are usually mitigating circumstances…

  Are there? Maybe. Maybe in your life. But I think that’s dangerous thinking. Hey, it was only self-defense. He was coming to shoot me, your honor. We’re just poor Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, and the poor is us.

  Well, Link, there is something to that.

  Yeah, something. A shitload of something. They’re out to get us, so we’re justified in getting them first. Wonderful paranoia, so comfortable and comforting. They did this to us, it’s their fault, it’s all because of them. Pronouns to hide our own failures, maybe. I don’t know.

  Link’s voice has become gentler, lost some of its customary gruffness. He sounds almost professorial, genuinely like a man who had once headed a school.

  Don’t get me wrong. They do exist, I think. But not as a paranoiac conspiracy. They are just sets of values, clay pots of attitudes, disorganized but potent beliefs—all just bars of a prison we design for ourselves. We fail, they just make it easy for us. Easier for us, anyway.

  As he talks, I see myself in a way I’d rather not. I rationalize my killings, I know that, think of them as accident and self-defense. They didn’t deserve to die, Allen and that ugly biker. By seeing both of them as types, as characters who happened to play cameos in my life, I had taken away their humanity, seen them as lifeless hulks when they were around me, not much different than they were when I got through with them. An authority figure and a creep. Yet they weren’t such easy stereotypes, I’m sure. It just protects me to think of them that way. Well, should I think like Link? Be realistic, rip away the illusions? I wonder for a moment what it’d be like to be like him, get inside his skin and feel what he feels. I doubt I’d like it. But I might understand what kicks he gets out of outlaw—no, criminal—acts. Jesus, I got to stop thinking about things like this. Next minute I’ll be pondering the nature of evil.

  It’s the next minute and I’m pondering the nature of evil. The nature of my evil. And our evil, Link’s and mine. If Link is right, we’re criminals, the type (see, I even think of myself as a type) who’d be the bad guys in a children’s game. I’ve seen those old westerns. All the bad guys have either thick moustaches, gaunt mean looks, or are stocky lugs about to go to fat. None of us looks like a bad guy. Not Link or me, not Chuck, not his band, not even Victor. We’re frightening in the way we don’t look like bad guys. Maybe Link is right when he says there is no real system out to get us. Whatever, we could’ve scrabbled around in the cities like anybody else, found a rathole to live in or maybe even done better, maybe even wound up with a car owned legally. But we went outside all that, kidded ourselves into thinking we were escaping all that. Just like outlaws. Just like criminals. No, not just like outlaws and criminals, we are outlaws, we are criminals, we are killers or potential killers, we are evil. We’re not Hitler, but we’re using his ballpark. Any time what you do touches another person, as we intrude on the lives of others, you have to be responsible for what you do. We don’t make lampshades out of human skin, but we do affect lives. We are evil. No big deal, I just never thought of us that way before. Or myself that way.

  Hey, Link says, we got off the subject of my criminal record.

  It’s okay, I can get along without any more.

  But—

  I’ve had enough, Link, all right? Just can it.

  Link laughs.

  You know, he says, you’re getting a real tough edge, Lee. A real tough edge.

  Tell me about it.

  Maybe you’re right, man, Link mutters. I pretty much told you everything anyway. You just missed the accounts of my two attempted jailbreaks, not to mention the later one that did work.

  But I’d like to know about—

  The train lurches to a sudden stop.

  What’s going on? I say.

  Link smiles broadly.

  I think we’re going on the attack, Lee, he says.

  I stare blankly at him.

  It’s a raid, Lee, a raid.

  He says it like he expects me to respond by leading our army in a battle cry.

  — 6 —

  Chuck sends Link and me on ahead for reconnaissance. He says it’s not because of our inherent scouting talents but because the Mustang’s the only car in the whole bunch that won’t draw any suspicion. Our target’s a group of nomads who’re camping in a clearing a few miles away from any normal good roads.

  It’s suppertime and the people in the nomad camp are gathered around fires and Coleman stoves and cute little hibachis, cooking and baking and frying and barbecuing. Each of the appealingly domestic gatherings seems to have a number of children in it. The men are usually dressed in denim outfits, some with jackets, some with patched-up shirts. The women are in sturdy dresses, thick cloth and plain patterns. You wouldn’t write home about most of these women, but they appear to be reliable, the kind who might, in better times, run health food stores or free libraries. In their often-repaired, sometimes frayed clothing, they look better dressed than the Wheelers. Several people are smoking and, judging from the odors drifting up to our hillside hideaway, some of it’s good stuff. Chuck’s gang goes for harsher junk, and I long for a hit of the mildness of the smokes these people are using. I think I’d trade my berth in Chuck’s gang for a couple nights with these folk.

  Link whispers into the walkie-talkie that Chuck assigned to us.

  Everything’s ripe, he says. Ready for picking.

  Harvest is the general code metaphor for this kind of operation. Chuck’s not particularly original when it comes to the practica
l use of language. Link signs off, after receiving a soft crackling response so muddled I can’t make out a word.

  They’ll be here any moment, Link says, we’re not to make a move until the rest start the attack.

  Why don’t we just stay up here and watch the whole operation? I suggest.

  Link doesn’t answer. He needs this raid so bad he can taste it. He doesn’t like riding shotgun in the Mustang, so he wants to come out of this raid with one of the nomad tribe’s cars. Chuck wants Link to be a driver, too. He told Link if he doesn’t come back with a liberated automobile to use he’ll be reassigned to a rest stop to hand out leaflets. Link doesn’t want that. I mean, dispensing paper is no job for a true outlaw. I wouldn’t mind an armful of Find God Now Or Else Damn It pamphlets. I’d give them out to the people below. Who obviously don’t need them. But of course that’s what religion is all about.

  I sense the rest of the gang assembling even though I can’t see them. If I got out of our own idling car and put my ear to the ground, maybe I could hear their engines idling all around us.

  The raid starts suddenly, before I’m ready for it.,Trees seem to part and cars emerge from between them like animals leaping into the small valley.

  Step on it, Link shouts nervously. I slam down on the accelerator mightily and the Mustang plunges forward, down a more or less safe and unobstructed path that I’ve already chosen. We maneuver downwards in a zigzag pattern, narrowly avoiding large rocks and threatening tree trunks, looking like a pinball in search of a flipper lever.