by Jack Cady
“That car already cracked a hundred,” Mike whispered. “I bought it special to chase one sumbitch in a Studebaker.” He looked toward Betty Lou’s grave. “The Dog did that.”
The three of us went through that Merc like men panning gold. The trouble was so obvious we missed it for two hours while the engine cooled. Then Jesse caught it. The fuel filter rubbed its underside against the valve cover. When Jesse touched it the filter collapsed. Gasoline spilled on the engine and the sparkplugs. That Merc was getting set to catch on fire.
“I got to wonder if The Dog did it,” Jesse said about Betty Lou after Mike drove away. “I wonder if the Road Dog is the Studebaker type.”
═
Nights started to get serious, but any lonesomeness on that road was only in a man’s head. As summer stretched past its longest days and sunsets started earlier, ghosts rose beside crosses before daylight hardly left the land. We drove to work and back, drove to town and back. My job was steady at a filling station, but it asked day after day of the same old thing. We never did any serious wrenching; no engine rebuilds or transmissions, just tuneups and flat tires. I dearly wanted to meet a nice lady, but no woman in her right mind would mess with a pump jockey.
Nights were different, though. I figured I was going crazy, and Jesse and Mike were worse. Jesse finally got his situation worked out. He claimed Miss Molly was protecting him. Jesse and Mike took the Linc and the Merc on long runs, just wringing the howl out of those cars. Some nights they’d flash past me at speeds no sane man would try in darkness. Jesse was never a real big drinker, and Mike stopped altogether. They were too busy playing road games. It got so the state cop never tried to chase them. He just dropped past Jesse’s place next day and passed out tickets.
The dancing ghost danced in my dreams, both asleep and driving. When daylight left the land I passed metal crosses and remembered some of the wrecks.
Three crosses stood on one side of the railroad track, and four crosses on the other side. The three happened when some Canadian cowboys lost a race with a train. It was too awful to remember, but on most nights those guys stood looking down the tracks with startled eyes.
The four crosses happened when one-third of the senior class of ’59 hit that grade too fast on prom night. They rolled a damned old Chevrolet. More bodies by Fisher. Now the two girls stood in their long dresses looking wistful. The two boys pretended that none of it meant nothin’.
Further out the road things had happened before my time. An Indian ghost most often stood beside the ghost of a deer. In another place a chubby old rancher looked real picky and angry.
The dancing ghost continued unpredictable. All the other ghosts stood beside their crosses, but the dancing ghost showed up anywhere he wanted, anytime he wanted. I’d slow the Desoto as he came into my lights, and he was the spitting image of Jesse.
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Jesse said when I tried to tell him. “I’m on a roll. I’m even gettin’ famous.”
He was right about that. People up and down the line joked about Jesse and his graveyard business.
“It’s the very best kind of advertising,” he told me. “We’ll see more action before snow flies.”
“You won’t see snow fly,” I told him, standing up to him a second time. “Unless you slow down and pay attention.”
“I’ve looked at heaps more road than you,” he told me, “and seeing things is just part of the night. That nighttime road is different.”
“This is starting to happen at last light.”
“I don’t see no ghosts,” he told me, and he was lying. “Except Miss Molly once or twice.” He wouldn’t say anything more.
And Jesse was right. As summer ran on more graves showed up near Miss Molly. A man named Mcguire turned up with a ’41 Cad.
1941–1961
FLEETWOOD COUPE—ANNIE
304,018 MILES ON FLATHEAD V8
SHE WAS THE LUCK OF THE IRISHMAN
PAT MCGUIRE
And Sam Winder buried his ’47 Packard.
1947–1961
PACKARD 2-DOOR—LOIS LANE
SUPER BUDDY OF SAM WINDER
UP UP AND AWAY
And Pete Johansen buried his pickup.
1946–1961
FORD PICKUP — GERTRUDE
211,000 MILES GIVE OR TAKE
NEVER A SCREAMER
BUT A GOOD PULLING TRUCK.
PETE JOHANSEN PUT UP MANY A DAY’S WORK WITH HER.
═
Montana roads are long and lonesome, and along the highline is lonesomest of all. From Saskatchewan to Texas nothing stands tall enough to break the wind which begins to blow cold and clear toward late October. Rains sob away toward the middlewest, and grass turns goldish-amber. Rattlesnakes move to high ground where they will winter. Every creature on God’s plains begins to fat-up against the winter. Soon it’s going to be 30 below and the wind blowing.
Four wheel drive weather. Internationals and Fords, with Dodge crummy-wagons in the hills; cars and trucks will line up beside houses, garages, sheds, with electric wires leading from plugs to radiators and blocks. They look like packs of nursing pups. Work will slow, then stop. New work turns to accounting for the weather. Fuel, emergency generators, hay bale insulation. Horses and cattle and deer look fuzzy beneath thick coats. Check your battery. If your rig won’t start, and you two miles from home, she won’t die—but you might.
School buses creep from stop to stop, and bundled kids look like colorful little bears trotting through late afternoon light. Snowy owls come floating in from northward, while folks go to church on Sunday against the time when there’s some better amusement. Men hang around town, because home is either empty or crowded, depending on if you’re married. Folks sit before television watching the funny, goofy, unreal world where everybody plays at being sexy and naked, even when they’re not.
And 19 years old is lonesome, too. And work is lonesome when nobody much cares for you.
═
Before winter set in, I got it in my head to run the Road Dog’s route. It was September. Winter would close us down pretty quick. The trip would be a luxury. What with room rent, and gas, and eating out, it was payday to payday with me. Still, one payday would account for gas and sandwiches. I could sleep across the seat. I hocked a Marlin 30-30 to Jesse for twenty bucks. He seemed happy with my notion. He even went into the greenhouse and came out with an arctic sleeping bag.
“In case things get vigorous,” he said, and grinned. “Now get on out there and bite The Dog.”
It was a happy time. Dreams of ladies sort of set themselves to one side as I cruised across the eternal land. I came to love the land that autumn, in a way that maybe ranchers do. The land stopped being something that a road ran across. Canadian honkers came winging in vees from the north. The great Montana sky stood easy as eagles. When I’d pull over and cut the engine, sounds of grasshoppers mixed with birdcalls. Once, a wild turkey, as smart as any domestic turkey is dumb, talked to himself and paid me not the least mind.
The Dog showed up right away. In a cafe in Malta:
ROAD DOG
“IT WAS ALL A HIDEOUS MISTAKE.”
—CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
In a bar in Tampico:
ROAD DOG
WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOOF?
In another bar in Culbertson:
ROAD DOG
GO EAST YOUNG MAN, GO EAST
I rolled Williston and dropped south through North Dakota. The Dog’s trail disappeared until Watford City where it showed up in the can of a filling station:
ROAD DOG
ATLANTIS AND SARGASSO
FULL FATHOM FIVE THY BROTHER LIES
And in a joint in Grassy Butte:
ROAD DOG
AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’
That morning in Grassy Butte I woke to a sunrise where the land lay bathed in rose and blue. Silhouettes of grazing deer mixed with silhouettes of cattle. They herded together peaceful as a dream of having your
own place, your own woman, and you working hard; and her glad to see you coming home.
In Bowman The Dog showed up in a nice restaurant:
ROAD DOG
THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS MINUS ONE
Ghosts did not show up along the road, but the road stayed the same. I tangled with a bathtub Hudson, a ’53, outside of Spearfish in South Dakota. I chased him into Wyoming like being dragged on a string. The guy played with me for twenty miles, then got bored. He shoved more coal in the stoker and purely flew out of sight.
Sheridan was a nice town back in those days, just nice and friendly; plus I started to get sick of the way I smelled. In early afternoon I found a five dollar motel with a shower. That gave me the afternoon, the evening, and next morning if it seemed right. I spiffed up, put on a good shirt, slicked down my hair and felt just fine.
The streets lay dusty and lazy. Rancher’s pickups stood all dented and workworn before bars, and an old Indian sat on hay bales in the back of one of them. He wore a flop hat, and he seemed like the eyes and heart of the prairie. He looked at me like I was a splendid puppy that might someday amount to something. It seemed okay when he did it.
I hung around a soda fountain at the five and dime because a girl smiled. She was just beautiful. A little horsey-faced, but with sun-blond hair, and with hands long-fingered and gentle. There wasn’t a chance of talking because she stood behind the counter for lady’s underwear. I pretended to myself that she looked sad when I left.
It got onto late afternoon. Sunlight drifted in between buildings, and shadows overreached the streets. Everything was normal, and then everything got scary.
I was just poking along, looking in store windows, checking the show at the movie house, when ahead of me Jesse walked toward a Golden Hawk. He was maybe a block and a half away, but it was Jesse sure as God made sunshine. It was a Golden Hawk. There was no way of mistaking that car. Hawks were high-priced sets of wheels, and Studebaker never sold that many.
I yelled and ran. Jesse waited beside the car looking sort of puzzled. When I pulled up beside him he grinned.
“It’s happening again,” he said, and his voice sounded amused but not mean. Sunlight made his face reddish, but shadow put his legs and feet in darkness. “You believe me to be a gentleman named Jesse Still.” Behind him shadows of buildings told that night was on its way. Sunset happens quick on the prairies.
And I said, “Jesse, what in the hell are you doing in Sheridan?”
And he said, “Young man, you are not looking at Jesse Still.” He said it quiet and polite, and he thought he had a point. His voice was smooth and cultured, so he sure didn’t sound like Jesse. His hair hung combed-out, and he wore clothes that never came from a drygoods. His jeans were soft looking and expensive. His boots were tooled. They kind of glowed in the dusk. The Golden Hawk didn’t have a dust speck on it, and the interior had never carried a tool, or a car part, or a sack of feed. It just sparkled. I almost believed him, and then I didn’t.
“You’re fooling with me.”
“On the contrary,” he said real soft, “Jesse Still is fooling with me, although he doesn’t mean to. We’ve never met.” He didn’t exactly look nervous, but he looked impatient. He climbed in the Stude and started the engine. It purred like racing tune. “This is a large and awfully complex world,” he said, “and Mr. Still will probably tell you the same. I’ve been told we look like brothers.”
I wanted to say more, but he waved real friendly and pulled away. The flat and racey backend of the Hawk reflected one slash of sunlight, then rolled into shadow. If I’d had a hot car I’d have gone out hunting him. It wouldn’t have done a lick of good, but doing something would be better than doing nothing.
I stood sort of shaking and amazed. Life had just changed somehow, and it wasn’t going to change back. There wasn’t a thing in the world to do, so I went to get some supper.
The Dog had signed in at the cafe:
ROAD DOG
THE BOBBSEY TWINS ATTEND THE MOTOR RACES
And—I sat chewing roast beef and mashed potatoes.
And—I saw how the guy in the Hawk might be lying, and that Jesse was a twin.
And—I finally saw what a chancy, dicey world this was, because without meaning to, exactly; and without even knowing it was happening, I had just run up against the Road Dog.
═
It was a night of dreams. Dreams wouldn’t let me go. The dancing ghost tried to tell me Jesse was triplets. The ghosts among the crosses begged rides into nowhere, rides down the long tunnel of night that ran past lands of dreams but never turned off to those lands. It all came back, the crazy summer, the running, running, running behind the howl of engines. The Road Dog drawled with Jesse’s voice, and then The Dog spoke cultured. The girl at the five and dime held out a gentle hand, then pulled it back. I dreamed of a hundred roadside joints, bars, cafes, old-fashioned filling stations with grease pits. I dreamed of winter wind, and the dark, dark days of winter; and of nights when you hunch in your room because it’s a chore too big to bundle up and go outside.
I woke to an early dawn and slurped coffee at the bakery which kept open because they had to make morning donuts. The land lay all around me, but it had nothing to say. I counted my money and figured miles.
I climbed in the Desoto thinking I had never got around to giving it a name. The road unreeled toward the west. It ended in Seattle where I sold my car. Everybody said there was going to be a war, and I wasn’t doing anything, anyway. I joined the Navy.
III
What with him burying cars and raising hell, Jesse never wrote to me in summer. He was surely faithful in winter, though. He wrote long letters printed in a clumsy hand. He tried to cheer me up, and so did Matt Simons.
The Navy sent me to boot camp and diesel school, then to a motor pool in San Diego. I worked there three and a half years, sometimes even working on ships if the ships weren’t going anywhere. A sunny land and smiling ladies lay all about, but the ladies mostly fell in love by ten at night and got over it by dawn. Women in the bars were younger and prettier than back home. There was enough clap to go around.
“The business is growing like jimson weed,” Jesse wrote toward Christmas of ’62. “I buried fourteen cars this summer, and one of them was a kraut.” He wrote a whole page about his morals. It didn’t seem right to stick a crap crate in the ground beside real cars. At the same time it was bad business not to. He opened a special corner of the cemetery and pretended it was exclusive for foreign iron.
“And Mike Tarbush got to drinking,” he wrote. “I’m sad to say we planted Judith.”
Mike never had a minute’s trouble with that Merc. Judith behaved like a perfect lady until Mike turned upside down. He backed across a parking lot at night, rather hasty, and drove backwards up the guywire of a power pole. It was the only rollover wreck in history that happened at twenty miles an hour.
“Mike can’t stop discussing it,” Jesse wrote. “He’s never caught The Dog, neither, but he ain’t stopped trying. He wheeled in here in a beefed up ’57 Olds called Sally. It goes like stink and looks like a hereford.”
Home seemed far away, though it couldn’t have been more than thirty-six hours by road for a man willing to hang over the wheel. I wanted to take a leave and drive home, but knew it better not happen. Once I got there I’d likely stay.
“George Pierson at the feed store says he’s going to file a paternity suit against Potato,” Jesse wrote. “The pups are cute and there’s a family resemblance.”
It came to me then why I was homesick. I surely missed the land, but even more I missed the people. Back home folks were important enough that you knew their names. When somebody got messed up or killed you felt sorry. In California nobody knew nobody. They just swept up broken glass and moved right along. I should have meshed right in. I had made my rating and was pushing a rich man’s car, a ’57 hemi Chrysler; but never felt it fit.
“Don’t pay it any mind,” Jesse wrote when I told about
meeting Road Dog. “I’ve heard about a guy who looks the same as me. Sometimes stuff like that happens.”
And, that was all he ever did say.
1963 ended happy and hopeful. Matt Simons wrote a letter. Sam Winder bought a big Christmas card and everybody signed it with little messages. Even my old boss at the filling station signed ‘Merry Xmas Jed—Keep It Between The Fenceposts.’ My boss didn’t hold it against me that I left. In Montana a guy is supposed to be free to find out what he’s all about.
Christmas of ’63 saw Jesse pleased as a bee in clover. A lady named Sarah moved in with him. She waitressed at the cafe, and Jesse’s letter ran pretty short. He’d put twenty-three cars under that year, and bought more acreage. He ordered a genuine marble gravestone for Miss Molly. “Sue Ellen is a real darling,” Jesse wrote about the Linc. “That marker like-to weighed a ton. We just about bent a back axle bringing it from the railroad.”
From Christmas of ’63 to January of ’64 was just a few days, but they marked an awful downturn for Jesse. His letter was more real to me than all the diesels in San Diego.
He drew black borders all around the pages. The letter started out okay, but went downhill. “Sarah moved out and into a rented room,” he wrote. “I reckon I was just too much to handle.” He didn’t explain, but I did my own reckoning. I could imagine that it was Jesse, plus two cats and two dogs trying to get into a ten-wide-fifty trailer, that got to Sarah. “I think she misses me,” he wrote, “but I expect she’ll have to bear it.”
Then the letter got just awful.
“A pack of wolves came through from Canada,” Jesse wrote. “They picked off old Potato like a berry from a bush. Me and Mike found tracks, and a little blood in the snow.”
I sat in the summery dayroom surrounded by sailors shooting pool and playing ping pong. I imagined the snow and ice of home. I imagined old Potato nosing around in his dumb and happy way, looking for rabbits, or lifting his leg. Maybe he even wagged his tail when that first wolf came into view. I sat blinking tears, ready to bawl over a dog, and then I did, and to hell with it.
