by Kim Newman
"Yes," she said. "Fine thanks."
The shotgun boomed outside. Limey Louie swore extensively, in his original Okie accent.
Penny stood up and walked over to the bar, glass splinters tinkling as they fell off her skirt. "What was all that about, then?" she asked, letting herself in behind the counter and helping herself to a triple Bourbon.
"Old-style commies, I suppose," he said, joining her and looking for a beer glass. "Lots of people are nostalgic for the good old days, when there was law and order and prohibition and the USSA was a superpower. You wouldn't expect them to be mad keen on a place like this."
He found a glass and pulled a pint of frothy, yellow beer.
Louie came back in and began to inspect the damage.
"Louie," said Lowe, putting a five-dollar note down on the counter, 'for goodness' sake have a drink. Break your rule just once. You need it."
"Sure," said Louie, sweeping pieces of glass across the floor with his shoe. "That's the third time this has happened this year. Militia bastards."
The door opened. Louie trained his gun on two men, one tall and thin, the other short and fat. They wore white pads on their legs and arms, and carried cricket bats and stumps.
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"Thought we'd find you here," said Elwood. "We saw your Ladyness's pink car outside. We need to talk about something. Can you buy us a drink, Mr. Lowe?"
"Piss off."
"No harm in asking."
"Is that your Rolls Royce out there?" Limey Louie asked Penny. "Say, are you British? You must be an aristocrat? In my pub, what an honour!"
"Louie," said Lowe, "I'd like you to meet Jake Papageorge and Elwood Delaney. They're not British, but they can probably sell you a few cricketing mementoes. I'm afraid we have to go."
"Mr. Lowe!" pleaded Jake. "We've got a truckload of useless sporting goods."
"Leastways, we think they're sporting goods," said Elwood. "Could be some kind of martial arts implements. Or marital aids for real tight-ass Brits."
"We can't fence them or sell them to anyone," said Jake.
"We can't even live in the truck because it's full of bats and sticks and these white things with straps on," said Elwood
"We were wondering," said Jake, "if your Sir Bob would want to buy them back?"
Amarillo, Tex.
"This just bloody isn't good enough, Lowe," said Maxwell. "How much do I pay you?"
Not enough.
"Twenty-one thousand a year."
"Plus a generous expense account, I expect. Champers all the way, and strawberries out your schnozzle. Bleeding journos. You're worse than gannets."
Maxwell's face contorted. The flesh pouches around his nose and under his chins blew up and went scarlet like haemorrhoids. Malteser-sized droplets of sweat grew on his forehead. Peristaltic movement started in his flabby neck and worked its way down through the rings of fat upon fat that clung to his torso and belly, forcing what must be a large bolus of faecal matter into his lower bowel.
Lowe imagined the shit concentrating into a bullet-shaped turd for expulsion.
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Sir Robert's doughy arse-cheeks overflowed the wooden seat and hung like mottled saddlebags. Veins in his face pulsed like mating earthworms, as if he were defecating a large cactus. He roared relief, and there was a splash in the pan.
Then the process started again.
Getting a dressing-down was one thing. Getting it in the bathroom of Maxwell's hotel suite was altogether another. Sir Robert loved to rant at his minions while stark naked on the bog, moving his considerable bowels.
One of the vans on the Roadshow hauled a load of soft, European toilet paper purely for use on His Master's Arse. Sir Robert insisted there be an armed guard on it at all times. Penny also had a stash of pink Andrex, which she was unwilling to share even with an intimate friend. Everyone else was learning about the joys of scratchy cardboard Yank loo-paper. You had to pay twenty cents a sheet to gouging attendants in any public place.
Lowe said nothing, and tried not to breathe.
The bathroom was brown, with earth-coloured tiles and a Western longhorn motif on all the fittings. It was larger than the room Lowe was sharing with Penny. The shower stall was larger than the single he would have been allocated if he hadn't shacked up with the nobility.
Another epochal clenching of intestine began deep inside Maxwell, as he squeezed a turd the size of the Titanic through his bowels. Sail On, Great Sir Robert, the Shit That Will Never Go Down...
Maxwell held a week-old copy of the Mirror flown in from London. It was the Saturday edition, with a special 16-page colour pull-out featuring all the wonderful things Sir Bob was doing for the benighted peoples of America.
"I grant you you've scrawled a puff piece about Sir Cliff, and tried not to be too sarky about Beverley's sermon. But there's something missing, isn't there?"
"Is there, Sir Robert?"
Another minute in this room and he'd throw up. In Sir Robert's armpits, clusters of pink, worm-like extrusions writhed in with his iron-grey underarm hair.
Lowe was sure the worms were alive, looking at him.
"There's next to nothing about me, you cringing toad! Apart from the pathetic intro. Where's the piece I told you to write about Mirror Group's big deal to buy newsprint from that plant in Joplin?"
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Sir Robert could read about that in Joanna Houseman's next "Letter From America! She was focusing on the two hundred workers back in Dundee who would be put on the dole because, even after shipping costs, American paper was only half the price of British.
Were going to get you, Lowe, whispered the armpit worms. We know all about Joanna.
It was infernally hot in the hotel bathroom. Green squiggles gnawed the edges of his vision.
You're just the absinthe talking, he told the worms.
No, said a new voice, I'm the fucking absinthe talking!
It was a deep voice, like a brutal Arthur Mullard, and echoed in the saxophone-shaped porcelain bowl beneath Maxwell's oversize buttocks.
Yes, me, growled the absinthe. Im talking to you out of Sir Roberts arsehole. Do you have a problem with that.
"Fuck, yes."
"What's that?" snapped Maxwell, momentarily interrupting his harangue. "And where's the piece about the enormous influence I have with top Yank businessmen and politicians? Didn't I tell you to write a big caption for that picture of me with Gordon Gekko and Bob Roberts?"
"In my judgement..."
You re fucking fucked, fuckface, said Sir Robert's arsehole.
"I do not pay you good money to exercise judgement," said Maxwell coldly. "I pay you to do as you're bloody told."
"All I was going to say, Sir Robert," said Lowe, trying to ignore the continual burble-farting of the talking arsehole, "was that I thought the best way to impress the readers with what we're doing here is to find the gossip behind the headlines. Most Mirror readers aren't interested in American businessmen unless they affect their lives."
"Enough! The readers are interested in everything I do. I am a man of power, wealth and influence and I am prepared to make great sacrifices to help the people of America. The Mirrors readers want to know about that. They will be interested. From now on, you'll do exactly as I tell you! If you don't we'll drop you and your P45 off in the desert somewhere. Now get out."
Lowe actually said "thank you". It was involuntary. Like you'd thank the torturer who stopped stretching you on the rack to go off for a tea-break. Now, he wanted to take another gulp of absinthe and go deeper into Chernobyl country, beyond the talking arseholes, into new territory.
Good-bye, Joanna, rumbled the arse-hole. Kissy-kissy.
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Gallup, N.M.
BILL APPARENT FREELANCE. RUMOUR: WORK VERYX2 HUSHX2. NOT MILITARY OR SECURITY. RUMOUR TOP CITY & HOUSE INVOLVE, INCLUDE ERR CART. ASSUME NOTHING. BUT MIGHTX2 BE PLOT VERSUS
MAC SWELL. LOVE, WHACKER.
Lowe looked at his watch. He'd been parked at the side of the highway for fifteen minutes, translating the message from John Lennon that had been waiting for him in an airmail envelope at the Gallup main post office.
He'd told Penny he was borrowing the car to go and look for newspapers and booze, but not to worry if he was away a while. He was going to stooge around and get himself one of his periodic fixes on the real America. Maybe something to fill Joanna's column.
He took the letter and the page of his notepad he'd used to translate its sequence of page, column and paragraph numbers in the 1987 edition of the Shorter OED. He got out of the car, touched his lighter to both and dropped them to the ground.
In the semi-desert light, he couldn't see the flame. The flimsy blue paper and the lined white paper turned brown then black, and disintegrated to little fragments of ash. There were still green squiggles at the edges, but he was used to them now. They didn't stop him thinking.
Second only to a matter of "national security',' this was about as heavy as it got. William Brown, who in his time had almost certainly been an assassin, was working for influential politicos and businessmen. If Sir Francis Urquhart was one of those politicos, anyone who crossed him was in very deep trouble indeed.
And you called him a cunt, said the disembodied arsehole.
Shaking a little, he got back into the car and sat in the driver's seat. He considered getting out his hip-flask for a tot of Chernobyl, but decided against it.
He needed to think.
The Mirror was the only big-selling daily to support the Opposition. Sir Robert would have loved to be a top Tory, would have given anything to be accepted by the British establishment, but they regarded him as an outsider, a foreigner and a buffoon. Buying up aristos like Lady Penelope
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and telling Mirror readers to vote Lib-Lab was his revenge on his tormentors, who only despised him all the more for it.
Some folk would love to get their hands on the hugely-profitable Mirror, others would be happy to see its politics slant rightwards. Maxwell wasn't invulnerable. At least half the stories Lilliput printed about his financial irregularities were true. The Mirror was profitable, but most other businesses the bungling, arrogant tycoon touched—and there were a lot of them—turned to manure on the double. There was even a story going round that Maxwell had come personally on this jaunt to escape problems back home. One little flick of William Brown's finger in precisely the right place, and an empire might go pear-shaped.
"How do we feel about this?" he said out loud.
Good question, replied the arsehole. On the one hand, youd like to see Maxwell get fucked up me with a chainsaw. On the other hand, youd not like to be out of a job. You like your job, don t you? Yes. And for all that the place is falling to bits, you love America and the American people, don't you? Yes. And you have no reason to go back home to Blighty, do you? No. All you have there is an embittered slapper of an ex-wife and a surly lout of a teenaged son who for some reason hates your drunken guts. Furthermore, M'Lud, Vd submit that much as youd love to see Sir Bob roast in hell for all eternity, you re not in the business of doing Sir Francis Urquhart any favours. He is, as I believe you rather famously said on the steam radio, a cunt. Maxwell is just an arsehole. I can vouch for that. Or possibly a prick. Certainly worse than a tit, but not a cunt.
That settles that then.
He heard a distant roar, heavy metal thunder, and glanced into the rear-view mirror. Sunlight glared off something metallic, and clouds of dust rose.
Lowe knew it was Brown, coming for him. The Thought Copper knew what was in his mind, and would clean it out for him with a couple of bullets.
It was two motorcycles, with three riders.
Out here, the roads were ill-maintained, nothing like the motorways Enoch Powell had run up and down and around and across everything green in the UK. There were pot-holes and years-old roadkill skeletons. Flattened old cartridge cases were as common as fag-butts, drifting to the verges or pressed into the soft asphalt.
The bikes were big Detroit machines, like the ones the police outriders used to escort top Party Suits on special occasions, with horn-shaped
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
handlebars and more chrome than an espresso machine in an Old Compton Street cafe. One rider had a Stetson hat and an Old west moustache a size and a half too big for his face; the other wore a crash helmet painted with the Stars and Stripes and Hammer and Scythe; behind him was an unshaven man in an American football helmet.
Lowe didn't relax. There were a lot of these cycle tramps on the People's Roads, now. Ex-USS army types, mostly, living off the land, keeping ahead of the authorities, pitching into local disputes.
Some were scavengers.
The cycles slowed as they neared. Lowe's mouth went dry. The cycles stopped just in front of him. Riders dismounted.
"Howdy," said the cowboy, wandering over to his open window. "I'm Billy, and this is Comrade America."
The other biker touched his helmet.
Comrade America was a comic book character from World War II.
"And this is Hanson. He's a lawyer."
The unshaven man grinned. His eyeballs were flying.
"I'm Lowe," he said.
Billy grinned. "We're lower."
There was no threat in the smile. Lowe relaxed. There might be a Joanna Houseman in these bums. He got out of the car.
They reminded him of the pair Charlie Holley had told him about, the outlaws of the 50s, Howie Hughes and Jack Kerouac.
"I'm a British journalist."
"You want to buy any weed?"
"Weed?"
"What you call bhang. Maryjane."
He didn't use the stuff, but Penny might like some.
"How much?"
"What you got? Burberry?"
"I wish."
All Americans dreamed of owning a Burberry overcoat.
"That's a cream machine," Comrade America commented, looking over Penny's Rolls.
"Wish it were mine," Lowe said.
"You got a lot of wishin' in you," Hanson drawled, eyebrows flexing like pianists' fingers.
"I could cut you a deal," Billy, the businessman, continued.
In the end, Lowe swapped a battered Penguin paperback of Colin
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Wilson's The Outsider for a small brown paper bag of loosely-rolled leaf that looked like green tobacco but smelled sweeter.
He learned a little about the cycle bums. They'd picked up Hanson in a county lock-up a few states back, and he'd left his dying town to come along on their quest.
"We're looking for America," the Comrade said.
"If I see it, I'll tell it you're coming."
"You do that."
Billy had been in the army, but the Comrade—who claimed to have no real name, but allowed that he'd answer to Wyatt—turned out to be a second generation "invisible" one of those who fall through the gaps inefficiency creates in the system. His Daddy before him had been a vagrant.
"Maybe you've heard of him. Tom Joad?"
Lowe thought Tom Joad was a legend, like Robin Hood or John Henry.
"Nope, he was real. Didn't do all they said he did, but he did some of it."
Lowe assumed this was just talking. Like Tommy Atkins or Jimmie Higgins, Tom Joad was a name used when someone small did something big. If Joe Shmoe saved a kid from drowning and hit the road, why then he must have been Tom Joad.
"Have you heard of Howie Hughes? Or a Canadian named Kerouac?"
They hadn't. But they knew Elwood and Jake.
"Bastards still owe us for a couple of keys."
Lowe didn't think Billy meant the kind you need for doors.
Lowe offered them warm Vimto and shots of absinthe. They made a fire and sat around it, watching the rainbow squiggles in the flames.
The sun set. Briefly, before full night, the dese
rt was red and alive and beautiful.
"This used to be a hell of a country," Hanson said. "Whatever happened to it?"
The Roadshow had set up shop in the grounds of the home of Jonas Cord, a local big-shot. Another former Party boss who'd taken to capitalism enthusiastically, Cord now ran most of the local oil and gasoline businesses. One of his big indulgences was grass. He'd spent a fortune bringing in turf from somewhere and employed a small army of gardeners watering, rolling and tending it. It was the nearest thing to a proper cricket pitch in the whole state.
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Lowe parked the car in the VIP enclosure, his clothes still stinking of last night's campfire.
Jake and Elwood came out to greet him, pads and gloves over their black suits. They carried bats under their arms like violin cases.
He'd persuaded the Blues Brothers—the name of their band—to return the truckload of gear in return for no money at all by simply explaining that the Roadshow's head of security was a professional killer. Jake and Elwood thought about this for a few days before showing up one night to say they'd found the van abandoned on the road, and wanted to return it to its rightful owner. Maxwell said the pair of them were splendid examples of all the finest aspirations of the American people. He rewarded them with jobs in the tour's road crew and had his photograph taken hugging them like a proud father. Lowe hoped the Mirrors picture editor knew enough to crop Jake and Elwood's hands out of frame when the shot was printed, but few people in England understood the meaning of that extended middle-finger gesture.
"We're having our first ever cricket-ball game this afternoon," said Elwood. "Mr. Maxwell says we're to tell you that you're playing as well."
"Leave it out," groaned Lowe. All he wanted was a shower and a shave.
"Can't be worse than baseball," said Elwood, slashing dangerously at the air with his bat.
"Bloody can, you know," said Lowe.
"All out for thirty-seven,'" growled Maxwell. Practically incandescent with fury, he was beginning to sound alarmingly like his arsehole.
"I thought it all went rather well, actually," said Blair breezily, polishing a ball against his whites. "We get up a game against a scratch team of our American cousins and they win. Ought to make them more enthusiastic. More new. More energetic."
