Strange Itineraries

by Tim Powers

  When he did gun the old car up into the clear lane in the bus’s wake, he leaned forward to tuck the revolver back under the seat, and he gasped at a sudden pain in his stomach. Ulcers? The enchiladas should settle that question, for better or worse.

  I’ll have to make that call, he thought. Crazy old guy, calls himself Swinger Campbell, wandering around in the desert north of the 10, near that phone booth that’s a hundred miles from anywhere. And ideally he’d find a thrift store somewhere, a used bookstore, a yard sale; the Golden Treasury, squat little book issued with a yellow dust jacket, and if the dust jacket was gone the binding was gray cloth with silver stamping on the spine.

  Ten minutes later he saw the figure of another hitchhiker rippling in the heat-waves ahead, and without thinking he lifted his foot from the accelerator – again there was no car in sight on the shoulder – and when he had coasted to within a few hundred feet of the figure, he recognized the denim jacket and the stringy brown hair. It wasn’t another hitchhiker, it was the same one. Albert Erlich again.

  Lyle’s foot had touched the brake pedal before he had even consciously decided to stop. The backs of his hands were chilled on the steering wheel in spite of the hard sunlight through the windshield, and his ribs tingled as if he had soda water for blood.

  Nobody’s even passed me, Lyle thought, since I made the kid get out of the car.

  For a moment he earnestly dredged his memory for some recollection of having turned the car around; but the sun was still in the morning half of the empty sky ahead of him. You didn’t turn around, he told himself. God help you, you didn’t.

  There were no vehicles behind him, so it didn’t matter that he hit the brakes too hard because he was leaning forward again to get the revolver. For a moment after the car rocked to a halt in a cloud of dust, he couldn’t see Erlich at all; then he could see the lean figure standing very close, with one hand spread and raised in a questioning gesture.

  Lyle held the gun out of sight by his left thigh, and nodded; and the door was pulled open and Erlich leaned in, gripping the roof of the car as if to steady it.

  “You drive like you’re mad about something,” he said in the remembered nasal voice. “Let me get my friend.” He straightened up and turned around, and Lyle heard him yell, “Swinger! Hey, Swinger, our ride’s here!” The flat voice didn’t seem to carry at all in the desert air, and there were no echoes.

  “Swinger Campbell,” said Lyle in a careful, conversational tone.

  Erlich crouched beside the open passenger-side door. “Right, that’s the guy,” he said, squinting out at the desert. “He’s gone. He was just here a second ago. He’s looking for a phone booth.”

  “Has to,” Lyle began, but he was out of breath. He inhaled deeply, then said, “Has to call his daughter.”

  “Right. Oh well.” Erlich climbed into the car and pulled the door closed, then fished a pack of Camels out of his jacket pocket and peeled off the wrapper and the foil.

  Lyle sniffed – the young man’s breath reeked of onions and salsa and enchilada sauce.

  Lyle heard himself ask, “Who are you?” He was pleased that his voice was steady, so he ventured to go on. “Last time you said you were me, from the future.”

  “Did I? Last time? Actually –” Erich’s voice was solemn, “ – I’m your father, from the past.”

  “Goddammit –”

  “Whoa, watch your driving! My name’s Albert Erlich!”

  “I know that, you told me that, I meant …”

  “Jesus, you gonna shoot me?”

  Lyle realized that he had raised the gun and pointed it across his lap. “I hope not.”

  “I didn’t catch your name,” said Erlich, apparently not cowed by the sight of the gun.

  “You know it,” said Lyle hoarsely. “Just like you know I’ve never been to Tucson. Just like you know this is a Smith and Wesson .38 Special, loaded with Hydra-Shok hollow-point rounds.”

  “Sounds like they’re full of water, hydra shock,” said Erlich absently, looking out at the desert sweeping past. “Well, Tucson’s no big deal. So remind me?”

  “Remind you of what?”

  “Your name. I can’t just call you Don Juan.”

  Lyle sighed wearily and took his foot off the gas pedal. The car had got up to eighty miles an hour. “Lyle. George Lyle.”

  “We were getting along so well at first, Mr. Lyle. My fault, I’m man enough to admit it.”

  “How did you – get here ahead of me? I dropped you off ten miles back.”

  “Oh.” Erlich shook his head. “Just once more?”

  “How did you get here so fast?”

  “Here?” said Erlich, suddenly angry. “Here from … from there? I didn’t, you –” He was scratching his forehead again. “You should know how I – and what did you do to that old Swinger guy? You get to drive forward, and we – ”

  Erlich thrashed suddenly in the seat, perhaps intending to attack Lyle; and then Lyle’s wrist was twisted painfully as a brief, deafening explosion compressed the air in the car.

  I shot him. Oh my God, Lyle thought, and the car slewed in the lane as he gaped at the figure of the young man beside him.

  But there was a hole in the door panel; and Albert Erlich was sitting stiffly in the seat with no blood visible on him.

  Lyle’s hands were shaking; he dropped the pistol onto the floor, and used both hands to steer the car toward the shoulder. Gunpowder smoke burned in his nose. “I’m sorry,” he was saying, though because of the ringing in his ears he could hear his own voice only in the bones of his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shoot – ”

  “I know, I know!” Erlich said loudly. “Just let me out, and then you can go kill everybody”

  When the car stopped, Erlich got out without a word, and slammed the door; and as Lyle once again steered the old car onto the asphalt, panting with what he supposed was mainly relief, he could hear the young man behind him calling, out toward the desert, “Swinger? Hey, Swinger?”

  Lyle was still shaking, and consciously watching the speedometer; he could imagine coasting to a stop without being aware of it, or distractedly gunning the old vehicle up to impossible speeds.

  After five miles or so he saw another figure ahead to the right, out in the desert. It was an older man, standing beside an aluminum Edison relay shed some distance from the highway down a dirt track. Mercifully, it was clearly not Swinger Campbell. Lyle didn’t even slow down, and anyway the figure stepped behind the shed as he drove past.

  The Colorado River was as incongruous as he remembered it – water flowing in a line from north to south through the desert ahead of him, cold and blue-green under the sky – a true border, truer than any simple demarcation laid out by surveyors. The concrete bridge over it seemed to arch over the blue to a different world.

  The old Ford Fairlane rumbled up the slope of the bridge, and in the moment when the car was barrelling over the crest he glanced around at the river and the land ahead. Though the landscape behind him was barren, on the far side of the river the desert was patched with irrigated fields, squares and disks of green.

  But the irrigated tracts were clustered by the river, and soon he had driven through them and on into deeper desert. He was glad to see the highway sign ahead.

  Quartzsite, the green sign said, Food – Gas – Lodging, and Lyle pulled off the interstate and turned right onto the dusty main street, where the first thing he saw was a Goodwill thrift store in a rundown strip mall.

  He slowed down, assessing it. There were weedy flowerbeds with big lumps of white rock in them, meant for decoration probably, and the stores all had some kind of silver film over the windows to keep out the sun. A big, ragged sheet of it was peeling off one of the thrift store windows, giving it a desolate look, but desolate or not, it might be the place.

  His wife had given him Palgrave’s Golden Treasury on his birthday, in 1960. It had got lost somehow when he had sold the house in Adelanto in ‘88, after the lung
cancer killed her. It was his own carelessness that cost him the book, and he hadn’t even noticed the loss until a year or so ago, but he’d been devoting his time to searching for the Golden Treasury ever since, dropping into thrift stores and bookstores along the highway. Time and chance, he thought again, and sighed heavily. Phyllis had had a hell of a nice voice when he met her, back when they were young. She knew enough show tunes to fill a shoe box, and every now and then he had tried to help out on their old piano, but he wasn’t worth much in that way, and he had left the piano to the new owners when he’d sold the house.

  He would check the book section in this Goodwill – and he’d call the Highway Patrol – but right now he needed several beers to calm him down, along with lunch. The beers would be medicine, to slow his alarming heartbeat, which hadn’t really throttled back since the damned gun had gone off. How the hell had the gun gone off? It had been a case of nerves. He shouldn’t have been holding the thing, let alone had a finger on the trigger, for God’s sake. And he shouldn’t have picked up Erlich the second time and set himself up for something like that.

  There was the Mexican restaurant on the corner past the Goodwill, and he had turned into the parking lot, switched off the engine, and got out of the car before he looked at the sign over the door and noticed the name of the place.

  Don Juan’s.

  He opened the door but didn’t get out, and after a while he pulled his shirt out from under his belt, picked up the revolver from the floor and tucked it into his waistband, right behind his belt buckle. Then he took the last two quarters out of the coin purse in the glove box – tip money, if he needed something other than bills. When he got out of the car he smoothed his now-untucked shirt over the angularity of the gun. It didn’t show.

  He locked the car door and walked across the sun-softened asphalt parking lot to the restaurant. Before he went in he looked back at the car, and from this angle he could see the hole where the bullet had punched through the door. Christ, he had shot his own car. He pulled open the restaurant door, clanging a set of bells hung on the inside of it.

  The restaurant was dark inside, and cool, and it smelled just as it should, like beer and salsa and corn tortillas, and a little like mildewy air circulated through a swamp cooler. A middle-aged waitress motioned him in and waved him to a booth.

  “Budweiser,” he said to her when he had sat down on the side facing the front door and she had laid a menu in front of him. “Make it two, please.”

  “Hot out there?” she asked.

  He exhaled, as if he’d been holding his breath, and smiled at her. “Not bad yet. Give it a couple of hours, though.” She looked a bit like his wife Phyllis. More than a little bit. She had that sparkle in her eye and the same who-gives-a-damn hair.

  “Anything to eat?” she asked, glancing at the menu on the table.

  There it was again on the front of the menu: Don Juan’s. Probably Erlich was familiar with this place, and had pulled the name out of his hat.

  He pushed the menu away. “A couple of cheese enchiladas, please,” he said, “with beans and rice.”

  “Coming up,” she said, picking up the menu and walking away toward the kitchen.

  There were dividers between the booths, wooden slats and potted plants, but he could see enough of the restaurant to know that the place was mostly empty. There was someone, a man, over across the way, just the white hair on the top of his head visible from here, and he heard another man’s voice saying something to someone, probably to the waitress, but he couldn’t see them either. He sat back and stretched his legs out under the table. Here came his beer, right on time, God bless it. The waitress set both bottles down and poured half of one into a small glass. The bottles were sweating heavily, and right now he couldn’t think of anything that looked better.

  He saw that her nametag read Donna. “Thanks, Donna,” he said, toasting her before drinking off half the beer in the glass. He set it down and sat back again, feeling considerably better. The pistol’s hammer pinched the flesh on his stomach, and he wished that he hadn’t brought the damned thing in with him – although if he hadn’t, sure enough that goddamn Erlich would show up and steal it out of the Fairlane.

  He felt another twinge of pain in his gut, deep inside, but just then Donna brought the enchiladas. Ulcer or no ulcer he was going to eat the damned things. Out of habit he tried the beans and rice first, and they were good. You could tell a lot about a Mex restaurant from their side dishes – whether they put any effort into them or not. This was first rate. The enchiladas were hot all through and bursting with cheese and onions, and the sauce didn’t taste like it was out of a can. Someone knew how to cook. When they finally came to hang him, and time was at a premium, this was what he would want to eat – cheese enchiladas, rice and beans, and a cold beer.

  Before he slowed down he was halfway through the food and well into his second beer. He heard Donna’s voice now from over near the register, and he half stood up to wave his emptied Budweiser bottle at her. He could see the man beyond the booth divider now.

  “Swinger,” he said, surprised, and the man looked up. It was him all right, right down to the red suspenders. Lyle wouldn’t have to call the Highway Patrol after all. Campbell had a fork full of tamale halfway to his mouth. Lyle asked impulsively, “You get through to your daughter?”

  Swinger squinted back at him, and not happily. “My daughter’s been dead since before the war,” he said flatly. “What the hell are you talking about?” He set the fork down on his plate. “Do I know you?”

  The poor bastard’s brains are fried, Lyle thought in embarrassment. “Back down the highway,” Lyle said, gesturing vaguely toward the west, “across the river.” But Swinger obviously didn’t know him from a Chinaman, or if he did, he wasn’t going to admit it. First Erlich and now Swinger Campbell, Lyle thought. Fast travellers, both of them.

  “My mistake,” Lyle said. “Sorry to bother you.” He sat back down, remembering suddenly that Erlich had known Swinger, too. Maybe they were up to some kind of incognito thing. That’s just what he needed, to get mixed up in a lot of tomfoolery, or worse. To hell with both of them. Give a man fifty cents and he acts like he doesn’t know you. Maybe that was the deal, Lyle thought, draining the rest of his beer: Swinger was playing stupid to keep Lyle from mentioning the fifty cents. He looked for the waitress again. He hated like hell to have an empty beer glass. She was standing by the register, looking hard at the man facing her. A young man.

  And Lyle’s face was suddenly cold, and his stomach knotted up again. Christ almighty, he thought,_it’s Erlich. He peered at the young man, hoping he was wrong.

  But it had to be. Same blue denim jacket and scraggly hair. Swinger Campbell’s presence suddenly seemed sinister to him, and he hunched over his plate.

  Wait ’em out, he told himself tensely. Give them a minute and they’d be gone, and he could drink another beer in peace. If it came down to it he would show them the gun in his waistband. It would mean plenty to Erlich, anyway. Lyle cut out a piece of enchilada, but he chewed it without tasting it now, and without thinking he picked up his empty beer glass and tilted it up to his mouth, only then remembering that it was empty.

  He sighed, then lifted one of the bottles and waved it toward Donna, but when they made eye contact he saw right away that something was wrong. Her mouth was a tight line, and her face was white – she was obviously scared stiff. Lyle bent forward, watching closely, his heart starting to hammer in his chest.

  He saw that Erlich had something in his fist, and it wasn’t a twenty dollar bill. It was a small automatic pistol, no more than .22 or .25 caliber. Donna started to turn away, putting her hands out, and Lyle stood up, sliding out of the booth and reaching into his waistband for his own gun.

  “Hey!” he shouted, drawing the revolver.

  Peripherally he saw Swinger Campbell stand up, too, but the man staggered sideways out of his booth, sweeping his plate and beer glass off onto the floor and then coll
apsing face down on top of them.

  At the clatter of china and glass Erlich had swiveled around, looking wildly back toward where Swinger was sprawled on the linoleum. The kid was clearly scared, shaking with fear. He saw Lyle and his revolver then, and he waved his own little pistol at Lyle.

  “Keep away, old man!” he shouted. “It’s not worth it! Nobody moves!”

  But then Donna screamed, and Erlich twisted furiously back toward her, and his gun popped loudly.

  Just like that she fell backward, disappearing entirely from Lyle’s view, the whole thing happening in a single long moment. Lyle stood frozen in shocked surprise, as did Erlich, whose shoulders were twitching. Suddenly coming to life, Erlich reached over the counter into the open register and took out a handful of bills.

  “Erlich,” Lyle said, stepping toward him and raising his revolver. Erlich spun around in surprise, pointing his pistol at Lyle, and it popped again in the same instant that Lyle pulled the revolver’s trigger.

  The hard crack battered his eardrums, and he swung the barrel down toward the floor, for he had seen Erlich go down but didn’t know if the shot had hit him or not; then past the spot of muzzle-glare in his vision Lyle saw that Erlich was sitting on the floor, slumped against the cash-register counter, with a black hole in the center of his forehead. His gun had tumbled away somewhere, but the bills were still clutched in his dead hand.

  The restaurant was silent, and reeked of the burnt-metal smell of gunpowder. Lyle heard a back door slam – the cook and busboy getting the hell out, probably – as he started toward the counter to help Donna. He was strangely winded, as if he had run half a mile, and the pain in his stomach nearly doubled him over now.

  Swinger Campbell lay face down on the floor – probably his heart – but one way or another he would have to wait.