by Brian Hodge
The Highway King laughed long and loud. “That’s just what I thought you’d say. Son of a bitch, I won the bet.” He laughed again and moved back outside with a clockwork thud of boot heels.
“You up for it?” Tomahawk asked.
Jason nodded. “Who turns down an invitation to dine at the King’s table?”
They struggled to their feet and moved slowly, slowly outside. Jason saw a large circle of truckers crowded around a fire built from trash and wood scraps. A sizable pot bubbled over the fire. The truckers turned to look at him, a mismatched crew if ever he’d seen one. The trucker nearest him was stereotypical…stubby and bearded, with thick black-framed glasses and a gargantuan stomach. Sitting beside him was a man who would’ve looked more at home on an Ivy League campus; he wore Calvin Kleins and an Izod shirt and was painstakingly clean-cut. On the far side sat the woman who’d come close to blowing him away inside. Wearing a fatigue shirt unbuttoned halfway down and a ponytail that coiled over one shoulder like a pet snake, beads of sweat filmed her chest and face, and she struck a perfect balance between danger and enticement. On and on around the circle, they no longer regarded him with amusement or disdain. Instead, he found, as he had sensed inside, a certain sense of respect. As if he’d passed an initiation ceremony.
But for what? Kicking his ass? Or coming back around so he could keep kicking mine?
The Highway King hunkered down before the pot and ladled chili into a bowl. “You know, son, you’re luckier’n you ever dreamed. Good thing Tomahawk took a liking to you. He comes from people who really know how to hold their grudges.”
Tomahawk groaned and rolled his eyes. “You always figure out a way to work this in, don’t you?”
King stood and took a bite and fanned his mouth. “This man is technically still at war with Germany.”
The truckers laughed, and Jason hoped his face didn’t look as blank as he thought it did.
“I might as well be the one to explain,” Tomahawk said. “He always buggers it up somehow or another.” He was the next to stoop for the ladle. “The Iroquois consider themselves a separate nation from the United States. And when the U.S. declared war on Germany in World War One, we sent a runner in full war dress to Washington to inform the president that we too had declared war. When World War Two came around, we didn’t bother sending a runner because we’d never made peace the first time. We just renewed hostilities.” He moved away from the pot, blowing into his bowl, his eyes alight with pride. “To my knowledge, we still haven’t made peace to this day.”
G.I. Jill came forward to bring Jason a bowl and a spoon. He ate slowly, standing because it hurt too much to squat, then wandering about their corner of the lot, moving past trucks that might never roll again, that might stay here until they rusted into red dust. He watched as the sun hovered in the western sky like a swollen orange, dipping into the flat horizon, until it was no more than a fading pink smear over the land.
Temperatures had dropped along with the sun, and Jason slipped a windbreaker over his scabbing shoulders. He returned to his car sometime after dark, sat in the driver’s seat with the door still open and feet resting on the lot. Before him, the fire still crackled with indolent life. Strains of Hank Williams singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” floated across to him, along with a couple of the truckers’ attempts to play along with it.
A gypsy caravan, Jason thought. That’s what they reminded him of. Tightly knit, living by their own code of morals. Instead of Hungarian folk tunes, they had Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette. They played acoustic guitars and harmonicas in place of accordions and balalaikas. But, by God, they traveled.
He wasn’t much different, come to think of it. Only that he was alone. One orenda versus many.
And their music wasn’t much to his liking. He replaced the tape in his cassette player, blindly picking a new one from his case. George Winston’s Autumn. The yearning urgency of the first track brought a sudden plummeting of his heart. The last time he’d heard it was with Erika. In bed, fingers interlocking, the two of them straining as one toward a common goal. Probably why he hadn’t played it since he’d left St. Louis.
He left it in anyway. His shoulders were raw, why not his soul?
For now, at least, he could remember her, in perfect clarity.
Jason was midway through the second side of the cassette when two pairs of footsteps crunched their way across the lot toward him. Tomahawk and the Highway King. By now, most of the others had called it a night and turned in, going off to sleep in the compartments behind the truck cabs.
They stopped before him, listened to his music for several moments.
“That’s all right,” King said. “Never did go much for piano, though.”
“Me either,” Jason said quietly. “But this one’s special.”
“I can tell.” The King was still slugging from the Jack Daniel’s. He slurred some of his words, but was still as steady as a pillar. “You know, we all got our stories as to why we’re out here. Me, I got divorced three years ago. Left an ex-wife and two little girls back in Little Rock, Arkansas. I think I’m out here ’cause I don’t ever want to go back there and find out my babies are dead. I’d rather keep on hoping they made it.” He upended the bottle, and it sounded like a water cooler draining. He held the empty a moment, looking at it as if it were a friend telling him to go ahead, since he was drunk, he might as well bawl his eyes out too. He pitched the bottle into blackness; a moment later it shattered across the Roadrunner’s roof. “And what brings you out here? You may look the part, but you’re not the typical road trash.”
Guess I should take that as a compliment. “I drove out of St. Louis four months ago, been zigzagging across the South ever since. I left a bunch of good people behind, people who need someplace safe to live. Someplace decent.” Suddenly Jason wished he had his own bottle to guzzle from. “St. Louis isn’t safe, not anymore. Never mind why. We just can’t stay there. So I’m out here looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Someplace safe we can fit in and help out, and try to put everything else behind us.” It sounds so simple, putting it like that.
They nodded, appeared to deem his quest worthy. The Highway King looked over at Tomahawk, tugging off his cap for the first time and scratching his head.
“Shit,” he said. “Didn’t we one time talk to someone from some pissant commune once? Help ’em out with a broke-down truck or something? Said they raised their own chickens, and cows, and shit like that?”
Tomahawk shrugged. “That sounds familiar.”
Jason was all ears, his heart doubling its rate. It was the first lead toward anything in four months. “Where?”
King squinted at the night sky, the carpet of stars. He looked askance at Tomahawk. “Texas, was it?”
“I think.”
“Great, that really narrows it down,” Jason said, and the Highway King explained that every place gets to looking pretty much like every other place.
“But,” he added, “you’re welcome to ride along with us if you want. Who knows? Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll stumble on it again. Or another one like it.” The King suddenly wobbled on his feet and clutched at the arm of his companion. “Whoa. Tomahawk. Where’s my truck?”
He spun the Highway King around and sighted down one arm, pointing him in enough of the right direction to get him to someone who could take it from there. King walked a deliberate and exaggerated straight line across the lot.
Tomahawk grinned, shaking his head. Then he turned back to Jason. “How about it? Will you be riding out with us tomorrow?”
“Safety in numbers, isn’t there?”
“No guarantees, you know. We may never find someplace that King and I only half remember.” Tomahawk kicked at a pebble that rapped off one of the Roadrunner’s dirty windows. “And now and again we run across a clan or two that wouldn’t be near as nice as we were
to you today. You mentioned something about blowing you out of your socks? That’s just what they would’ve done, my friend.”
Jason nodded. Doesn’t look like I’ll ever get away from people like that. “I’ll take my chances.”
“Good enough.” Tomahawk raised a parting hand. “Sleep well,” he said before walking stiffly away.
Sleep well. Jason thought he probably would, despite the aches that had settled into every corner of his body. For once, a spark of hope had begun to glow deep within.
He reclined the driver’s seat as far back as it went and drew his jacket around him. For now, he could sleep. It was what he needed most.
Because sleep brings peace to a troubled soul. And time heals all wounds.
5
The closet is lovely, dark, and deep, But
I have promises to keep,
And lives to take before I sleep,
And lives to take before I sleep…
Stopping by the closet on a summer’s evening, that was Peter Solomon. Submerging himself in all that lovely darkness, harder to find now that the electricity had been turned back on.
Their hold on St. Louis was undisputed now. More were coming in under their wings and into their fold all the time, especially since the wall sockets had started humming with life again. It had been like dangling a carrot before the twitching nose of a jackass. And Travis, bless his savage heart, was keeping his head screwed on straight and moving ahead with the steadfastness of a charging rhino.
Undisputed. There remained a few loose ends to tie up here and there, but the city was theirs. And soon it would be time to think about moving onward and upward. So much yet to do. Just as soon as those loose ends had been clipped.
Loose end number one? Erika. Just over three weeks had passed since the Plague Day celebration, since he’d last seen her as she stared down while he’d taken that nameless woman on the stadium field. It could’ve been you, Erika. Has that thought filled your dreams ever since? I know it has mine. He couldn’t say why, exactly. Just something he sensed about her, within her, a rare capacity for empathy, for eventual acceptance of what made him so much higher on the evolutionary ladder than the great grazing mass of men. Erika could see.
Loose end number two clung like a stubborn vine. Logic told him to forget it, because compared to everything else it was trivial. But he considered himself a man of passion as well as precision, and logic held no sway there.
It stemmed from a remark overheard by chance a few days before, from one of the newcomers: Ted Gilliam. Ted was an eager convert, coming over on Plague Day. Ted and his woman were the first of what he was sure would be a mass defection from Brannigan’s, Solomon’s eventual reward for an insistence on seduction rather than extermination. Few in the department store would have the mettle to hold out for much longer.
Or so he’d thought until a few days ago.
“We haven’t seen anything of him since the middle of March,” Ted had said to someone. “Don’t know what became of him. He went south to look for someplace safe to move everybody to, and that’s the last anyone knew of him.”
Ted was talking about Jason. He had to be.
“He’d been gone for months before we cut loose from there,” Ted continued. “He’s probably dead by now.”
Solomon couldn’t accept that, not then, not now. The notion grew more absurd with every passing day. He was the one with the claim on Jason’s life. True, he’d believed that Jason had turned tail and fled, considering the way the young man had suffered. A disappointment, but it was believable.
Now, to discover that it was outright deception…Erika had genuinely pulled the wool over his eyes. The brazen bitch had stared him straight in the eye without revealing one tiny fragment of the truth. He’d thought no one could lie to him.
Fooled me, did you? Well, that’s one for you.
And now, to discover the true motives…
I can’t let you do this, he said to a mental image of Jason projected onto the black screen within the closet. Jason hanging by his wrists while Lucas laid open his back. Jason refusing to scream. I can’t let you do it. Because that means you’d beat me. Not forever, because wherever you’d take them, someday we’ll be there too. But you’d beat me in the short run, and I can’t have that. Because I’m the poorest loser you’ll ever meet.
He wished he could send his mind soaring out to light upon Jason like a black dove. Set his mental sights on him and reel in his location like a dead fish.
Another way would arise soon, though. He was sure of it. He only needed a little more time, some pleasant diversion to keep him from fretting about it, some more deep communion with the dark. And the answer would come.
And so Peter Solomon took the shoulders of the woman he’d bedded earlier in the evening, caressed them gently. It was a sizable closet, with room for two.
“You never would’ve guessed this about me, would you?” he asked her. “But listen to that darkness. Just listen.”
They listened.
“Have you ever heard anything that sounded that sweet?”
He shook her head for her. It wobbled on her bruised neck. Then he pulled her closer. It was time for some shuteye.
* *
They were only a few blocks east of Union Station, still on Market, but Kiel Auditorium felt like no-man’s land. Travis downed the last of another warm beer, then pinched the can in half, sent it flying back onto the steps.
His eighth, Diamond thought, but who’s keeping tabs?
The damp fragrance of rain-to-come hung heavy in the air while clouds massed overhead. The sunset, if it could be called that, was gray and dismal, appropriate for Travis’s mood.
“Listen man, I been watching you kill a six-pack and then some,” Diamond said. “When you gonna tell me what bug’s got up your ass?”
Travis leaned back, arms draped onto the steps behind him, and loosed a wet earthquake of a belch. “When I was a kid, in high school, I guess, I got interested in playing soccer. I got into these teams that were playing pretty regular, and I wasn’t too bad. Had a knack for it.”
Diamond looked blankly at him, then tossed him another Bud. “You lost me somewhere.”
“I’ll get to it in a minute,” Travis said, ripping away the tab and attacking the can as if it were his first. “Soccer…it was okay at first. But then I got really sick of all the practice, and all the other shit we had to put up with. You know, I just wanted to play, put in my time on the field, and that would’ve been fine.” He wiped his mouth on his shoulder, sat forward in a hunch. “I wanted out, but I couldn’t just up and quit. For one thing, I had this asshole brother Galen, and he never gave up on one thing his entire life, and I didn’t need him giving me shit about it. Plus, if I just quit, it would’ve been like saying I was some kind of pussy. And I couldn’t do that.”
“Yeah. Who can?” Diamond said. “So what’d you do?”
“We had this game, and I picked out some kid I didn’t like. I rode his ass up and down the field, and when I got a chance I made it look like he tripped me. And then I got back up and kicked the shit out of him. The refs ejected me from the game, and the coach cut me from the team. So I saved face.”
Diamond had a laugh. “And you think that was easier than just bowing out nice and graceful, huh? You got your own sense of style, man, I give you that.” Diamond chuckled himself out. “So how’s that figure tonight?”
Travis’s cheeks puffed out, flushed with the beer and crawling with heavy stubble. “I’m back in that same old fix again. Solomon came to see me this morning. It doesn’t look like he’s satisfied with what we got here. He wants to move in on Kansas City before too long, so we’re at both sides of the state. From there we’re into Fort Leavenworth and all the hardware they got there.”
“So what’s the problem? We got maybe six hundred, six-fifty guys we can hi
t that town with. So we open ourselves up a branch office. So what?”
Travis rubbed his palms across his face. “Where does it end, huh? That’s what I’m wondering. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going soft. I like the feeling of what we got here, and anybody tries to take that away I’ll be the first to break them in half. It was that way from the beginning. But I never looked at it like it would just keep growing. I don’t even know if I want that. But you can’t tell that to Solomon.”
Diamond pushed himself up and strolled over to one of the two immense stone bears that guarded the auditorium steps. He straddled it like a cowboy mounting a mammoth horse.
“Look here, Travis,” Diamond said. “You talk about the way things’ve been since the beginning. Well, I think we all knew the same thing when we first laid eyes on Peter Solomon in that car lot. We all knew there was something seriously bizarre about that dude. There’s a lot I don’t even come close to understanding about him, and I don’t even want to. I look at you sometimes and I get the feeling you know more than I do, and I say fine, just keep it to yourself. Maybe none of us knew what we was getting into or where he’d take us, but we knew there’d be a price tag.”
Travis nodded. You’ll always be a little man if you never think any bigger. Solomon’s words of this afternoon still hung in his ear.
“He’s got a bug up his own ass, too,” Travis said. “You heard what Ted Gilliam had to say about that Hart kid, didn’t you?”
“About him scouting the southlands? Yeah.”
“That’s stuck in his craw real good. He wants to find him. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know and neither does he, but he’s working on it. Hell, I think it’s one of those things you oughta leave well enough alone. We had our jollies with the kid, but there’s more important things to worry about now. Like getting started growing our own food. Like figuring out how to brew fuel to keep things running when there’s no more gas to siphon. One minor pain in the ass who just wants to get out of our hair in the first place doesn’t stack up against all that.”
