by Sam Winston
They drew near the place where the road was closed off, chained hurricane fence and soggy sandbags and barbed wire, and he slowed the car to a stop. This sleek maroon car straight out of some old dream of the future. Caked with dust and splashed with mud and scraped here and there by passing branches but fantastic nonetheless. Fantastic in the old true sense.
He blew the horn and flashed the headlights. Got the flashers going and climbed out. Approached the barricade and climbed on the sandbags and put out one finger to touch the fence in case it was electrified but it wasn’t. Back in the car, Janey blew the horn again and again. Weller climbing a few feet up the fence to holler through it at a little guard shack standing all alone about fifty yards distant but deciding that climbing on a chain link fence wasn’t something that a man with Carmichael’s money would do. It was undignified. So he climbed down and just stood. Stopped hollering and signaled over at Janey to quit blowing the horn and just waited there beyond the fence with the car’s emergency flashers going. Patient as any other man with money in his pocket.
Someone came out of the guard shack by and by. A kid or not much more than a kid. His uniform didn’t even fit him. It was loose and kind of cockeyed and bunched up around the waist. The belt buckle was off-center, yanked tight. It all looked as if it belonged to someone else. He came out of the guard shack and looked around and drew his pistol from its holster. Came walking toward Weller unhurried. Little clouds of gray dust coming up around his shoes as he walked across the empty pavement. Even his shoes looking new in spite of the dust, smooth and deeply waxed and the color of oxblood. With the dust accumulating they were beginning to resemble the dark maroon car behind Weller. Everything got dirty no matter what.
Weller raised his hand in greeting. Didn’t look away. Didn’t look over his shoulder to have Janey kill the flashers but she killed them anyhow. Their red glow on the wires of the hurricane fence blinking out.
The kid’s uniform looked brand new, perfectly clean out here in the middle of nowhere and pressed sharp. He had the barrel of the pistol pointed right between Weller’s eyes and he kept it there as he approached. Calling out as he drew nearer. “What you want?” He stumbled over a rough spot where the pavement had heaved up. The gun unmoving. Like it was the only steady thing in the universe, the thing holding him up. Like he was following it.
“I want to pay to use your road.”
As the distance closed, the kid’s face began to resolve. He had a pinched and sour look, dull and irritable and mean. He didn’t wear a helmet the way the National Motors security men on Ninety-Five had, and his yellow hair jutted up in the front like he’d been caught napping. Weller didn’t like him and he didn’t like the way he was studying him from behind that gun. He didn’t like the way he wasn’t wearing whatever headgear was required or the way his uniform didn’t fit or the way his belt buckle was off-center. Like he was just an ignorant and ill-tempered kid out here unsupervised at the end of the line. Only the gun in charge of things.
“I want to pay to use your road,” Weller said again. Not louder. Not different in any way. Just stating a fact that the kid might not know.
“No can do,” said the kid.
“I’ve got plenty of money,” said Weller.
The kid came near the fence with the gun steady. Indicating the car by tilting his head a few degrees in that direction, but not moving the gun. “What kind is that.”
“BMW X9. From the plant in Spartanburg.” Saying it flatly, like it was an ordinary thing not worth remarking on other than to inform ignorant people like this kid here.
“Never seen one,” said the kid. “I guess they ain’t making them no more.”
“They’re not. But they had this one. They had a few. You could go down and get one for yourself if you wanted.”
The kid looked at Weller through the chain link as if he were looking at a gorilla in a zoo. A talking gorilla that said words that didn’t make any more sense than a gorilla would make. Just words. “I guess I could,” he said, “but I’m happy right here. I don’t need no car to make me happy.”
“I’ll bet you don’t. You look like a very contented individual.”
The kid narrowed his eyes and held his breath. Holding that pistol even steadier than before. Daring Weller to press his luck.
Weller said, “I’m going to reach into my pocket now if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” said the kid. Not moving the gun. Still daring him.
Weller dug around in his pocket and began to pull something out and the kid smiled. It wasn’t a smile that made a person comfortable. “You’re sure it’s all right?” Weller asked. His hand still in his pocket.
“It’s all right with me,” said the kid.
Weller drew out the chip loaded with Carmichael’s credits. “I don’t know how much you folks might be charging these days—”
“I don’t know either.”
“You could look it up. You could find out.”
The kid didn’t say anything back. He pointed the gun at the car. At Janey in the car. “Who’s the gal?”
“She’s with me.” Which he figured was all that needed saying. A rich man keeping his private life as close as he kept everything else.
“I know she’s with you, shit-head. I got eyes.”
“Whoa.” Hands up in front of him, that little silver chip gleaming between the index finger and thumb of his right hand and the sun glinting on it.
“Just don’t try me,” the kid said.
“I won’t. We’re hoping to use your road is all. We’ll pay our own way. How much do you suppose it would be, from here to New York?”
“Like I said, I don’t know.”
“I figured you might charge by the mile. Or it could be just a flat amount.”
“Like I said, mister, I don’t know.” The gun wobbling a little now. The kid looking back at Janey.
“All right. All right.” Weller put his hands down slow. “I’ll bet you’ve got some kind of manual back there that we could look at. Something we could consult. A price list or something in the shack.”
The kid looked hurt. “That’s where I live.”
“Nice place.”
“That’s where the guard always lives.”
“It’s very nice.”
“Ever since I can remember.”
“I understand.”
“It ain’t no shack.”
“I didn’t mean anything. It’s a common term. A guard shack.”
“All right.”
“Let’s go see if we can find some kind of an operations manual. Maybe call somebody.”
“The phone don’t work.”
“There still might be a manual.” Moving slowly toward a hinged gate in the fence, held shut by chains and a padlock. A man-sized gate inside a bigger gate. Giving the kid the idea.
The kid went toward the gate too. The pistol still in his hand and a keyring in the other. Sorting through the keys. Without looking up he said, “If she wants to get out of that car and come on in too, it’d be all right.” Talking about Janey.
Weller said no, he thought she ought to stay. But if they could leave that chain unlocked just in case, well that would be great.
The kid said no, he thought she’d better come.
Weller said but he’d hate to leave the car all alone. Out here unprotected.
The kid said all right then, he’d come back for her later on if he had to.
* * *
The guard shack was a steel shipping container repurposed. One door cut into the front with a muddy shovel standing beside it and a window cut into each wall. Inside were two rooms with a plywood door between them. An office out front where the guard worked, and what was probably a bedroom behind it. Solar panels on the corrugated roof to power the lights and the refrigerator and the water pump, and behind a curtain something that smelled like a chemical toilet.
“Nice place,” said Weller. “Are you here all alone?”
“Most times
.”
“How far are we from the nearest checkpoint?”
“Fifty miles I guess. They say everything’s fifty miles.” The kid was ill at ease in here. He holstered the pistol and pointed to a little stack of books on a table and said Weller could check those if he wanted to find that manual and figure out how much money to give him. He’d try the phone again in case it had come back on.
The books were old. Paperbacks read and reread dozens of times. A couple of mysteries with the mysteries all gone out of them by now, and three or four thrillers emptied out the same. The book on the top of the stack had a picture on its cover of a woman lying on her back looking toward you with her lips red and wet and Weller thought it was probably dirty and it was. This last one was the one most ruined by use if it was possible to tell such a thing.
The kid slammed the phone down and said, “You find it?”
Weller said yes, he believed he had.
“And?”
“How about you show me around the rest of the facilities first,” he said. “I’d like the grand tour.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to do that.”
“It says right here you can.” Opening one of the books and pointing. “Visitor policies are pretty liberal, according to this.”
“I don’t know,” said the kid. But he showed him into the bedroom anyhow. More dirty books and a lamp on a nightstand and sticky twists of flypaper hanging here and there. A chifforobe in one corner standing open, full of freshly laundered uniforms in plastic. The bed unmade and a pair of filthy boots kicked off under the edge of it. Muddy footprints leading toward them across the tile.
“A person could be very comfortable here,” said Weller.
“That’s what I always thought growing up,” said the kid. “I always wanted this job.”
“How often do you get supplies?”
“First of the month like clockwork. All you can eat.” The kid grinning. Like a person who’d achieved something.
Weller nodded. Coming out of the bedroom and going to the front door and stepping outside into the air. Standing there alongside the shovel that had the same mud on it the boots did. More mud coming this way from a little cut in the wire fence. Weller knowing what the kid had buried out there. “It said a dollar a mile,” he said, “which makes fifty to the next checkpoint.”
The kid brightened.
“Can you read credits or is your scanner down too?”
“I don’t think they give me one.”
“That’s fine,” said Weller. “I’ve got AmeriBank scrip. And a little something extra for you, if management doesn’t mind too much.”
“I guess that’d be all right,” said the kid. “You’re the one’s got the book.” It was almost as if he were onto something. Smiling and coming toward the door and beginning to draw the pistol again. But Weller already had the shovel raised.
* * *
The National Motors road was pure silk compared with what they’d gotten used to, and the kid had been right about one thing. It was fifty miles to the first checkpoint. Money talked there. Weller was surprised at how easily a rough squad of hardcore ex-Black Rose mercenaries could be persuaded that he and Janey and that fancy car had every right to be driving on their road. He didn’t care where the money went in the end. It was just lubrication.
Toward Baltimore they powered the phone back up because why worry about Bainbridge and his Black Rose helicopters now that they were on good National Motors roads and only a few hours from New York. They’d be there by nightfall. The satellite signal was good and Janey raised the hospital in New York. The receptionist couldn’t find Penny and Liz at first and it just about gave Weller heart failure. The system said they’d been checked out, but he persuaded her to try their old room and they hadn’t. They were on their way, though. Any minute now.
They were sitting at the table in the front room. Penny’s backpack with the white cat on the back of it all loaded up and a couple of plastic bags stuffed full of Liz’s things. Apparently they couldn’t even supply her with a backpack of her own or a suitcase or anything substantial. Just a couple of plastic bags. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. And don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.
Penny was studying the screen on the wall, squinting at it with a kind of intensity that she had once used all the time, only instead of trying to coax a clear picture from the fog of her failing vision she was trying now to resolve a picture of her father from a stream of pure and persistent video noise. Weller saw that little face of hers and the earnest expression it wore and it was all he could do to keep driving. He pulled over and the words tumbled out and he said Penny, I’m coming and Liz, I’m coming. Tell them. Tell them I’m almost there and don’t let them put you out on the street. Not yet. I’ll be in New York today.
Penny jumped up and down in her chair. “Today?”
“Today, honey. Hang on.”
“I can’t wait,” said Penny.
“Neither can I,” said Liz. “It’s been too long.”
“It’s almost over.” He could hardly believe it himself. “So the tests went fine, I guess? That’s good news.”
“The tests went fine. More than fine.”
Penny blinked at the noisy screen. Looked over at her mother. “Are you sure he can see us?” Liz nodded. The little girl turned and reached behind her to get the backpack from the table, drew it around and struggled to get it onto her lap, and unzipped it.
“She’s one hundred percent,” said Liz. “Complete recovery. One for the medical books, they said.”
“Thank God,” said Weller.
“And thank you,” said Liz.
“Thanks to you too, Mom,” he said. “It took teamwork.”
She smiled into the camera and he smiled right back. Just from the happy reflex of it. As if she were right there and as if she could see him. He watched Penny searching for something, his heart running over. The mere presence of the little girl on the screen was almost enough for him, and the notion that he would see her very soon was more than enough for him, and the quick way that she sorted through the contents of her backpack—taking papers out and glancing at them and rejecting them one after another with an acuity of vision that she’d never had before—was in the end almost more than he could bear.
“You haven’t seen all of my pictures,” she said.
“I’ve seen some,” her father said.
“You can show him when he gets here,” said her mother. Words she had just about given up on saying.
“Just a couple. Please?”
“All right.”
She found her latest, her best, and she began putting them in some kind of order. Starting with one of her mother that made Weller’s heart leap. There was truth in it and love too. Truth and love that turned out to be the same thing, from the hand of one so small and one whose vision had only just now cleared. Next there was a drawing of him, less sharp and less precise, with something generic about it. She had his hair color right. The nose was about five sizes smaller than his but finely rendered as if she’d been particularly careful about it, and he wondered if the picture were based more on some doctor than on him. That one doctor who looked like a whippet. There would be time now to get those things right, though. Time to fill in all of the blank spots.
“They’re fantastic,” he said, and he meant it.
She had others. A sunset over the tall wire canopy of the park just outside her window. A still life of the flower arrangements that had been on the table every single day. A drawing of her own hand at many times life size. Last of all was one she said she’d done just yesterday as a part of those final tests. A kind of fanciful landscape, a map of some storybook setting, with a maze of black roads and undulant green fields and a little white building off in one corner that looked like somebody’s idea of home. He thought maybe she and Liz had been reading a storybook with map in the front of it, a map showing places like Pooh’s House or Injun Joe’s Cave or the location of Long
John Silver’s treasure, and she’d been inspired to invent something of her own. He asked if that’s what it was. Some imaginary place.
“No,” she said. “It’s Connecticut.” Looking into the camera as if she could see him through it and as if he were crazy. Or half-blind himself.
“Ahh,” he said. “Home sweet home.” The little white building that looked nothing like home whatsoever. A sad reminder, in its way, of how far she’d come.
“Not home, silly. Just Connecticut.” She ducked out of the frame and put the drawing up closer to the camera. One little hand coming in from one side to point out the white building in the corner. “The schoolhouse? Remember?”
But he wasn’t looking at the schoolhouse. He was looking at the places she’d labeled on the map in careful letters—she’d learned something about that, too—and in spite of the misspellings and the backwards bits and the perilous slant of everything he could see exactly what part of Connecticut she had rendered after all. Tunnell. Tobaco feelds. Ninetyfive. It wasn’t accurate but it was accurate enough.
Weller could hardly breathe. Between the hole that he’d cut in the fence a few weeks ago and the direction they’d been traveling back then and this map, it wouldn’t be any problem to locate Patel’s station. “I’m so proud of you,” he said.
“Thanks, Daddy.”
“Did someone ask you to draw these things? These particular things?”
“Mostly” she said. Putting a finger to her head and thinking. “The flowers and Mommy and the map, I guess.”
“Has anybody else seen them?”
“Everybody’s seen them,” Liz put in. “They were part of her therapy.”
“Did anybody keep copies?”
“Why?”
“Just asking. I’ll bet they kept copies is all. They’re really first-rate.” Looking beyond his wife and daughter, at the flower arrangements standing side by side on the table behind them. The little card that he couldn’t make out but that he knew was there all the same. Your friends at PharmAgra.
It had cost them so little to get this information. A month’s worth of cut flowers. Some technician paid off or maybe the therapist or even the person who delivered the arrangements. Either way, they knew where to find Patel. They were probably on their way right now.
