by Sam Winston
Weller was cautious. “What do you want to know?”
Oates smiled at him and maybe he meant it. “How you got that brand of his, for one thing. He sure as hell didn’t give it away.”
“Oh, that.” He waited a beat. “I thought it might come in handy, so I helped myself to it.” He waited another beat. Letting a light come on in his eyes. “The rag full of ether helped.”
That got Oates’s attention. He smiled from behind his big mustache. “I’m sure it did.”
“Besides, I figured he could spare one little brand. He had a whole pile of them. A whole collection he’d cut out of other people.”
Oates erupted. “I knew it.” Slamming a hand against the iron door. “A bounty hunter.”
“Correct.”
“Counting coup like some damn Indian.”
“You could say that.”
“All his training, and he threw it away. For what.” He made a fist and unmade it. “With all due respect, time was a civilian like you could never have gotten the drop on him. But a man gives up the structured life of the service and heads out on his own, next thing you know he’s in trouble. First his training slips and then he loses his moral compass. Everything falls apart.”
Weller said he guessed so.
Oates smiled a tight smile. “Then again,” he said, “you look like you’ve had some experience with things falling apart.”
Weller sat up straight in the chair. Squared his shoulders. “Yes sir, I have.”
Oates nodded.
“That’s how I ended up signing on for this trip.”
Oates shook his head. “After a car.”
“Oh, it’s not just any car.” As if that were the only thing he had to think about. A man with a singleminded and mechanistic mission. Just another mercenary like the rest of them.
Oates chewed his mustache. “You did the right thing taking that bounty hunter,” he said. As if he’d forgotten the old man’s name already. As if he’d willfully set it aside, just like that. “No hard feelings.”
“I appreciate it,” said Weller. Reaching for his things. “Now can go see about that car?”
“I’m sorry, but that’s a few notches above my pay grade. You need to see Marlowe, except nobody sees Marlowe.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody but me.”
“How about that money I’ve got. All that credit. That ought to get his attention.”
“Money’s no good here. Whoever gave you an idea like that wasn’t using his head. It’s not like we’re on the old spice routes to the Orient.”
“I’ve got more than money.” Thinking of the letter from Carmichael. The overarching promise. Still hopeful.
“Not that we found.” Oates consulting the list on his slip of paper. Folding it over and jamming it into his pocket. “Besides, we’ve got a funny belief in pulling your own weight around here. You want something, you work for it. Tell me: What do you do when you’re not counting coup and stealing cars?”
“I wasn’t stealing cars.”
“It’s a manner of speaking.”
“I do a little of this, a little of that.”
“Meaning.”
“Mechanical work mostly. Machinery. Small engines. Repairs and whatnot.”
“What kind of call is there for that out in the wilderness?”
“More than you might think.”
“I wouldn’t think much.”
“You’d be wrong.”
Oates gave him a look that said he didn’t like being wrong and probably wasn’t. “I’ve got a spot in mind for you,” he said. “A couple of little jobs. Do as you’re told, I’ll go see Marlowe and get you that car. For all the good it’ll do you.”
* * *
The factory or compound or village or whatever it had become over the years must have occupied a square mile under roof, maybe more. It sure seemed big to Weller, clomping along with his bandaged feet hurting in those oversized boots. Some parts of it were original and other parts had been expanded and modified far beyond the plans of the engineers who’d built it in the first place. Again and again until it had taken on an organic life of its own, fitted to the people who lived within it and tended it and modified it to suit their lives as their lives changed.
The character of the place shifted with each turn they made, and the more ground they covered the more Weller saw how complex and well-regulated it all was. A city-state in the antique mold. A world unto itself. Oates showed him hospital rooms and schoolrooms. Facilities for power generation and water treatment. In one place a corridor they walked along opened up as wide as a street in some ordinary town. Facades of single houses and double houses and row houses springing up one after another on each side, with a few vehicles parked in front of them. Old cars like the cars he’d seen up north, Toyotas and Subarus. A couple of muddy old American pickup trucks looking hard-used. There were little lawns in front of the houses, a reel mower leaned up against one front stoop, and some porch swings hanging from light gauge chain. The factory ceiling was high here and there was glass overhead that opened for ventilation, letting in the air and the light and the day. The street if you could call it a street reminded Weller of where he’d come from, exactly the way it was meant to.
“Home sweet home,” said Oates.
Weller asked how many people lived here.
“Just over five hundred,” said Oates. Raising a hand in greeting to a middle-aged man who was emerging from behind the screen door of a little bungalow, dressed for farm labor and heading toward one of the pickups. “Running late, Harry?” The man looked abashed and didn’t answer.
They walked on, Weller keeping his eyes open and noting the places where these houses had been knitted together at the seams. There were no yards at all between them. No alleys and no driveways for the cars. Just a solid surface built up from pieces. Fronts of one house butted up against the next and patched together, not so much like a real town as like something made to suggest one. The pickup truck rattled past, and Oates pointed back toward the little bungalow the driver had come from. “For all intents and purposes,” he said, “That’s the house where that fellow grew up.”
“Honest?”
“We dragged them here board by board,” Oates said. Waving his hand to take in the entire street. “Every single one of these houses. Marlowe’s idea was to make things as homey as possible. If America insisted on going to hell, then by God we’d have our own little America right here.”
There was a crossroads up ahead. A commercial district, with a grocery store and a diner and the rest of it. The necessities. Around the corner a public library and a three-story apartment building side by side, each of them made of actual red brick. “Housing for the younger crowd,” Oates said, pointing at the apartment building. “Folks born after we got here. It turns over, of course. There’s still a couple of spare slots where we can put you up.”
“I’m not staying long.” Not to reject a kindness, just to keep things clear.
There was a white marble building across from the library. A cube in some simplified version of the Federal style with a sign out front saying Town Office. It was on the scale of an ordinary two-story house, no doubt far smaller than whatever municipal building old Spartanburg had once had, and with its ghostly face and its blank windows and its sealed door it looked like mausoleum. Weller pointed his thumb toward it and raised his eyebrows, and Oates said that’s where they’d find Marlowe. Except they wouldn’t. He was as secretive as the last president in his secure and undisclosed location. He came and went when you least expected it. Weller stopped and looked at the building. Oates saying Marlowe lived there and worked there both. Lived upstairs and worked downstairs, like an officer on campaign. Like old George Washington himself in his sleeping tent, with a desk in front of the bed and a carpet spread out on the grass. Spartanburg pretty much ran itself, he said, but Marlowe liked to be close to the center of things just in case.
People came and went on the street. Children in baby carriage
s. People smiling at Oates and eyeing Weller with something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Suspicion or admiration or something else. Like they were looking at a giant come to life from a fairy tale. An ogre. A woman walked past with a net bag full of groceries. Fresh vegetables of every description, round and fragrant and brightly colored. She lifted the bag to her chest with both arms and gave Weller a wide berth. He tried not to look at her but he looked anyhow, questions growing in his mind.
“The food,” he said to Oates. “Where does it come from?”
“You’ll see.”
“What do you use for money?”
“Everybody works, everybody eats.”
“This isn’t what I was expecting,” said Weller.
“Good,” said Oates.
They came under an archway into another vast roofed space that must have been an assembly line in days gone by. Long fluorescent fixtures hung on chains at what would have been ceiling level, although the ceiling itself was much higher. Seventy-five feet up and buttressed like a cathedral, only with iron. The lights themselves were either switched off or dead, and in their place big glass panels ringed with razor wire let in the sun. Some of the panels were open to the sky, and birds came and went. Nests up there in the high iron. Back down on the floor, people worked at machines spaced at regular intervals. The hiss of compressed air and the hard flat clack of relays closing. The whisper of steam and the whir of thread over bobbins. People making clothing, not cars.
They angled in between a couple of machines and passed into a roaring hallway that stank of combustion and grease. Getting near the heart of the place.
Oates stopped at a closed door and poked his finger at the scar on Weller’s neck. The faint red spot still angry from the insecticide. “What are you, anyhow? Branded or generic?”
“Generic.”
“I mean for real. Not that crap you fellows put in and take out.”
“Generic. Honest. Bred and born.”
“So what’s with the cut?”
“Nothing. I’ve been empty my whole life long.” Touching the spot himself. “Your friend Patterson was just a little less polite than you about getting information.”
“Cut first and ask questions later, eh?”
“Cut first and ask questions later.”
“That’s Patterson.” Laughing but not because anything was funny. A sound that was rueful and full of accommodation to a hard world. “No wonder you ran out of patience with that old bastard.”
* * *
They pushed through the door into a low place where the factory revealed its origins. A workshop, part garage and part high-tech hospital room. Certain things about it made Weller feel right at home. Impact wrenches and hydraulic lifts and grease guns. Tool carts on wheels and high-pressure hoses coiled like springs and the low pulse of an air compressor working. On the other hand there were plenty of things unfamiliar to him. Video displays mounted flush to the walls and thick gray cables snaking everywhere and bright flat touchscreen surfaces like relics from the elevated past brought back to life. A young woman with her back to them, poking at one of the screens and reading a stream of numbers that meant no more to Weller than birdsong. There was a car behind her with its hood open and a cable running to the screen. Some old Honda. Even though there were a number of cars in here—cars and other machinery too, broken-down tractors and golf carts outfitted for hauling and heavy equipment slung from overhead chains—even though there were plenty of cars, none of them was the one he was after. Not even close. For the most part it looked like New York. All that old Chinese and Japanese iron. All of it on life support.
They went across the shop floor and the young woman turned. Raising her right hand to Oates in a kind of half salute that she turned into a wave for Weller. Just being polite he figured, until he realized that she was the one who’d been in charge of the delousing. She wasn’t a full time soldier after all. A volunteer army. It made sense. They kept going to a dim corner where a tractor stood neglected. A little antique John Deere missing most of its green. Oates climbed up and turned the key and it started up but it didn’t seem to want to. Its upright exhaust throwing off a flurry of sparks and black smoke. Running but just barely.
Weller clucked and shook his head.
Oates shouted over the noise of the engine. “These babies were never meant to run on what we put in them.”
“What would that be?”
“Ethanol. Homemade. We’ve still got a little gas around, but prudence requires that we conserve it.” He cut the engine and waited until it shook itself quiet. Standing there while it coughed away for almost a minute. Tilting his head toward it when it finally died, and saying, “Think you could correct that?”
“I believe I could.”
“Excellent. Do that for me, I’ll do that other thing we were talking about.”
“Deal.”
“Start tomorrow morning.”
“That suits me.”
“How long’ll it take?”
“Not long,” said Weller. “I’m in a hurry.”
ELEVEN:
The Garden of Eden
He ate supper in the diner at the intersection and his money was no good, just the way Oates had said. Everybody was fascinated with him. He was the only stranger they’d seen in forever. The talk of the town and already a legend, already bigger than life, so big they probably would have given him his supper for nothing even if everybody else had had to pay. But nobody paid. Oates had been right about that.
People acted like he’d been through a war and come out fine. Like he’d been through worse than a war. The end of the world and what came after. They weren’t specific. Mainly they were speechless. Weller sitting there at one end of the counter eating a by-God hamburger with a slice of by-God tomato on top of it and by-God fries on the side like it was the most ordinary thing in the universe and people studying him like they couldn’t believe their own eyes. Imagine that. Imagine what he’d passed through in order to eat that hamburger in their presence. Not one of them asked him a single question, though. He had never impressed anyone in the world that much. Not even his own wife or daughter.
Weller looked at the plate in front of him and asked the fellow behind the counter how safe this food was and the fellow laughed. A laugh like Weller must be kidding. He had an old-fashioned paper garrison cap on his head like in a diner in the fifties, the nineteen-fifties, almost a hundred years ago now. That folded wedge of bright white paper cocked forward. Whether someone had found a store of them during the ransacking of old Spartanburg or whether it had been made right here he didn’t know. You could make that kind of thing easily enough yourself. It was just folded paper. Either way the counterman in the creased garrison hat looked like something out of an antique photograph in a magazine. Old. Older than the photograph in Weller’s pocket by what may as well have been a million years.
Weller winked at him and told him he was starving and he wasn’t going to turn down this hamburger if that’s what he was driving at, but a person couldn’t be too careful.
The counterman scoffed. Said there was no safer food in the whole wide world than that hamburger right there. He stood up straight and made a muscle to prove it. He was a few years younger than Weller but not many. Flexing a bicep and saying he was born right here and he’d eaten nothing but homegrown all his life and it hadn’t done him any harm. They’d built this place on homegrown. Grass-fed cattle and open-pollinated vegetables like that tomato right there. Those very spuds. He stopped and put his knuckles flat on the countertop and showed Weller his teeth. Either demonstrating that he was still in possession of them or else just smiling big. Then he turned away to draw a cup of coffee, saying what did it matter to a tough guy like Weller anyhow. He’d eaten what he’d had to out there in the world, right? Before he’d found his way here. Before he’d found the Garden of Eden.
* * *
Weller didn’t volunteer any information about his life up north and how he’d come t
o be here. Word had gotten around that he was a roughshod mercenary on a job for pay and he left it at that. He let them believe it because it served his purpose. The young ones had grown up idolizing old mercs like Oates and Marlowe because they’d saved them from the fate suffered by the rest of the world. They’d set them up like little gods. The older ones felt the same way, even though they knew their leaders’ personal weaknesses from having worked alongside them at the outset. Nonetheless sufficient time had passed that even the oldest of the originals, the toughest and the most resourceful individuals who’d been handpicked by Marlowe for his march to Spartanburg, had forgotten the founders’ weaknesses or at least forgiven them. To each of them, then, young and old, Weller might as well be another little god. That was fine with him.
After he finished the hamburger he went out into the street. A few people were out there on porches talking low in the failing light or standing around jawing on the street corner such as it was. A street corner with an actual working lamppost he saw now. A mercury vapor lamp up there buzzing. There was one familiar face, the young woman from the machine shop. She was just a girl, really. He could see she wasn’t much beyond that. A girl barely into her twenties. Out there smoking all by herself. Grease on her hands under that mercury vapor glare. He went to her and she said she was glad to see he’d recovered from the delousing yesterday. His tormentor then but not without reason. Apologetic now but not entirely. Like he knew how things had to be. Like everybody knew. She said she understood he’d be working in the shop.
He said yes. That tractor. Which he figured must be important since they were eating and all. Eating food grown around here somewhere. Agriculture required a tractor or two and it seemed he’d gotten here just in time. He sounded like this was another reason he ought to be treated like some kind of little god. Not meaning it that way but sounding that way because this was something he knew about and being proud of it came naturally.
