The River
Of Dancing Gods
The Dancing Gods
Book I
Jack L. Chalker
CONTENT
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
About The Author
Chapter I
Encounter
On A Lonely Road
People taken from other universes should always be near death.
- The Books of Rules, XX, 109, 234(a)
Just because your whole life is going to hell doesn’t mean you have to walk there.
She was walking down a lonely stretch of west Texas freeway in the still dark of the early morning, an area where nobody walked and where there was no place to walk to, anyway. She might have been hitching, or not, but a total lack of traffic gave her very little choice there. So she was just walking, clutching a small overnight bag and a purse that was almost the same size, holding on to them as if they were the only two real things in her life, they and the dark and that endless stretch of west Texas freeway.
Whatever traffic there was seemed to be heading the other way an occasional car, or pickup, or eighteen wheeler with someplace to go and some reason to go there, all heading in the direction she was walking from, and where, she knew too well, there was nothing much at all for anybody. But if their destinations were wrong, their sense of purpose separated the night travelers from the woman on the road; people who had someplace to go and something to do belonged to a different world than she did.
She had started out hitching, all right. She’d made it to the truck stop at Ozona, that huge, garish, ultramodern, and plastic heaven in the middle of nowhere that served up anything and everything twenty four hours a day for those stuck out here, going between here and there. After a time, she’d gotten another ride, this one only twenty miles west and at a cost she was not willing to pay. And so here she was, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere fast. Walk, walk, walk to nowhere, from nowhere in particular, because nowhere was all the where she had to go.
Headlights approached from far off; but even if they had held any interest for her, they were still too far away to be more than abstract, jerky round dots in the distance, a distance that the west Texas desert made even more deceptive. How far off was the oncoming driver? Ten miles? More? Did it matter?
It was at least ten, maybe fifteen minutes before the vehicle grew close enough for the woman to hear the roar of the big diesel and realize that this was, in fact, one of those haunters of the desert dark, a monster tractor trailer truck with a load of furniture for Houston or beef for New Orleans or, perhaps, California oranges for the Nashville markets. Although it had been approaching her from the west for some time, its sudden close up reality was startling against the total stillness of the night, a looming monster that quickly illuminated the night and its empty, vacant walker, then was just as suddenly gone, a mass of diminishing red lights in the distance behind her. But in the few seconds that those gaping headlights had shone on the scene, they had illuminated her form against that desperate dark, illuminated her and, in the cab behind those lights, gave her notice and recognition.
She paid this truck no more attention than any of the others and just kept walking onward into the unseen distance.
The driver had been going much too fast for a practical stop, a pace that would have upset the highway patrol but was required to make his employer’s deadline. Besides, he was on • the wrong side of the median to be of any practical help himself but there were other ways, ways that didn’t even involve slowing down.
“Break one nine, break, break. How ‘bout a westbound?
Anybody in this here Lone Star truckin’ west on this one dark night?” His accent was Texarkana, but he could have been from Maine or Miami or San Francisco or Minneapolis just as well. Something in the CB radio seemed automatically to add the standard accent, even in Brooklyn.
“You got a westbound. Go,” came a reply, only very slightly different in sound or tone from the caller’s.
“What’s your twenty?” Eastbound asked.
“Three thirty was the last I saw,” Westbound responded.
“Clean and green back to the truck ‘em up. Even the bears go to sleep this time o’ night in these parts.”
Eastbound chuckled. “Yeah, you got that right. I got to keep pushin’ it, though. They want me in Shreveport by tonight.”
“Shreveport! You got some haul yet!”
“Yeah, but that’s home sweet home, baby. Get in, get it off, stick this thing in the junkyard, and I’m in bed with the old lady. I’ll make it.”
“All I got is El Paso by ten.”
“Aw, shit, you’ll make that easy. Say caught something your side in my lights about three two seven or so you might check out. Looked like a beaver just walkin’ by the side of the road. Maybe a breakdown, though I ain’t seen no cars on your side and I’m just on you now. Probably nothin’, but you might want to check her out just in case. Ain’t nobody lives within miles o’ here, I don’t think.”
“I’ll back off a little and see if I can eyeball her,” Westbound assured him. “Won’t hurt much. That your Kenworth just passed me?”
“Yeah. Who else? All best to ya, and check on that little gal. Don’t wanna hear she got found dead by the side of the road or something. Spoil my whole day.”
“That’s a four,” Westbound came back with a slight chuckle.
“Keep safe, keep well, that’s the Red Rooster sayin’ that, eastbound and down.”
“Y’all have a safe one. This is the Nighthawk, westbound and backin’ down.”
Nighthawk put his mike into its little holder and backed down to fifty. He wasn’t in any hurry, and he wouldn’t lose much, even if this was nothing at all, not on this flat stretch.
The woman was beginning to falter, occasionally stumbling in the scrub brush by the side of the road. She was starting to think again, and that wasn’t what she wanted at all. Finally she stopped, knowing it was beyond her to take too many more steps, and looked around. It was incredible how dark the desert could be at night, even with more stars than city folk had ever seen beaming down from overhead. No matter what, she knew, she had to get some rest. Maybe just lie down over there in the scrub get stung by a tarantula or a scorpion or whatever else lived around here. Snake, maybe. She considered the idea and was somewhat surprised that she cared about that. Nice and quick, maybe but painfully bitten or poisoned to death by inches? That seemed particularly ugly. With everything else so messed up, at least her exit ought to be clean, neat, and as comfortable as these things could be. One thing in her life should go right, damn it. And for the first time since she’d jumped out of the car, she began to consider living again at least a little bit longer, at least until the sunrise. She stopped and looked up and down the highway for any sign of lights, wondering what she’d do if she saw any. It would just as likely be another Cal Hurder as anybody useful, particularly at this ungodly hour in a place like this.
Lights approaching from the east told her a decision was near, and soon. But she made no decision until the lights were actually on her, and when she did, it was on impulse, without any thought applied to it. She turned, put down her bags, and stuck out her thumb.
Even with that and on the lookout for her, he almost missed her. Spotting her,
he hit the brakes and started gearing to a stop by the side of the road, getting things stopped fully a hundred yards west of her. Knowing this, he put the truck in reverse and slowly backed up, eyeing the shoulder carefully with his right mirror. After all this, he didn’t want to be the one to run her down.
Finally he saw her, or thought he did, just standing there, looking at the huge monster approaching, doing nothing else at all. For her part, she was unsure of just what to do next.
That huge rig was really intimidating, and so she just stood there, trembling slightly.
Nighthawk frowned, realized she wasn’t coming up to the door, and decided to put on his flashers and go to her. He was not without his own suspicions; hijackers would use such bait and such a setting although he could hardly imagine somebody hijacking forty thousand pounds of soap flakes. Still, you never knew and there was always his own money and cards and the truck itself to steal. He took out his small pistol and slipped it into his pocket, then slid over, opened the passenger door, and got out warily.
He was a big man, somewhat intimidating looking himself, perhaps six three, two hundred and twenty five pounds of mostly muscle, wearing faded jeans, boots, and a checkered flannel shirt. His age was hard to measure, but he was at least in his forties with a face maybe ten years older and with very long, graying hair. He was dark, too she took him at first for a black man but there was something not quite of any race and yet of all of them in his face and features. He was used to the look she was giving him and past minding.
“M’am?” he called to her in a calm yet wary baritone. “Don’t worry I don’t bite. A trucker going the other way spotted you and asked me to see if you was all right.”
Oh, what the hell, she decided, resigning herself. I can always jump out again. “I need a ride,” she said simply. “I’m kind of stuck here.”
He walked over to her, seeing her tenseness and pretty much ignoring it. He picked up her bag, letting her get her purse, and went back to the truck. “Come on. I’ll take you for a while if you’re going west.”
She hesitated a moment more, then followed him and permitted him to assist her up into the cab. He slammed her door, walked around the truck, got in on the driver’s side, released the brakes, and put the truck in gear. “How far you going?” he asked her.
She sat almost pressed against the passenger door, trying to look as if she weren’t doing it. For all he knew, she didn’t realize she was doing it.
She sighed. “Any place, I guess. How far you going?”
“El Paso. But I can get you to a phone in Fort Stockton if that’s what you need.”
She shook her head slowly. “No, nobody to call. El Paso’s fine, if it’s okay with you. I don’t have enough money for a motel or anything.”
Up to speed and cruising now, he glanced sideways over at her. At one time she’d been a pretty attractive woman, he decided. It was all still there, but something had happened to it, put a dull, dirty coating over it. Medium height five four or five, maybe with short, greasy looking brown hair with traces of gray. Thirties, probably. Thin and slightly built, she had that hollow, empty look, like somebody who’d been on the booze pretty long and pretty hard.
“None of my business, but how’d you get stuck out here in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning?” he asked casually.
She gave a little sigh and looked out the window for a moment at the black nothingness. Finally she said, “If you really want to know, I jumped out of a car.”
“Huh?”
“I got a ride with a salesman at least he said he was a salesman back at Ozona. We got fifteen, twenty miles down the road and he pulled over. You can guess the rest.”
He nodded.
“I grabbed the bags and ran. He turned out to be a little scared of the dark, I guess. Just stood there yelling for me, then threatened to drive off if I didn’t come back. I didn’t and he did.”
He lighted a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and expelled the smoke with an accompanying sigh. “Yeah, I guess I get the picture.”
“You you’re an Indian, aren’t you?”
He laughed. “Good change of subject. Well, son of. My mom was a full blooded Seminole, my dad was Puerto Rican, which is a little bit of everything.”
“You’re from Florida? You don’t sound like a southerner.”
Again he chuckled. “Oh, I’m from the south, all right. South of Philadelphia, anyway. Long story. Right now what home I have is in a trailer park in a little town south of Baltimore. No Indians or Puerto Ricans around, so they just think of me as something a little bit exotic, I guess.”
“You’re a long way from home,” she noted.
He nodded. “More or less. Don’t matter much, though. I’m on the road so much the only place I really feel at home is in this truck. I own it and I run it, and it’s mine as long as I keep up the payments. They had to let me keep the truck, otherwise they couldn’t get no alimony. What about you? That pretty voice sounds pure Texas to me.”
She nodded idly, still staring distantly into the nothingness.
“Yeah. San Antone, that’s me.”
“Air Force brat?” He was nervous at pushing her too much, maybe upsetting or alienating her she was on a thin edge, that was for sure but he just had the feeling she wanted to talk to somebody.
She did, a little surprised at that herself. “Sort of. Daddy was a flier. Jet pilot.”
“What happened to him?” He guessed by her tone that something had happened.
“Killed in his plane, in the finest traditions of the Air Force.
Sucked a bird into his jets while coming in for a landing and that was it, or so I’m told. I was much too young, really, to remember him any more than as a vague presence. And the pictures, of course. Momma kept all the pictures. The benefits, though, they weren’t all that much. He was only a captain, after all, and a new one at that. So Momma worked like hell at all sorts of jobs to bring me up right. She was solid Oklahoma high school, no marketable skills, that sort of thing.
Supermarket checker was about the highest she got pretty good, really, when you see the benefits they get at the union stores. She did really well, when you think about it except it was all for me. She didn’t have much else to live for. Wanted me to go to college she’d wanted to go, but never did. Well, she and the VA and a bunch of college loans got me there, all right, and got me through, for all the good it did. Ten days after I graduated with a useless degree in English Lit, she dropped dead from a heart attack. I had to sell the trailer we lived in all those years just to make sure she was buried right.
After paying out all the stuff she owed, I had eight hundred dollars, eight pairs of well worn jeans, a massive collection of T shirts, and little else.”
He sighed. “Yeah, that’s rough. I always wanted to go to college, you know, but I never had the money until I didn’t have the time. I read a lot, though. It don’t pay to get hooked on TV when you’re on the road so much.”
She chuckled dryly. “College is all well and good and some of it’s interesting, but if your degree’s not in business, law, medicine, or engineering, the paper’s only good for about thirty-eight hundred that’s what I still owe on those loans, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before they see a penny. They track you down all over, too use collection agents. So you can’t get credit, can’t get a loan, none of that. I got one job teaching junior high English for a year but they cut back and laid me off. Only time I ever really enjoyed life.”
“So you been goin’ around from job to job ever since?”
“For a while. But a couple years of working hamburger joints and all those other minimum wage, minimum life jobs gets to you. I finally sat down one day and decided it was fate, or destiny, or something. I was getting older, and all I could see was myself years later, sitting in a rented slum shared with a couple of other folks just like me, getting quickies from the night manager. So I figured I would find a man, marry him, and let him pay my bills while I got into the cooking
and baby business.”
“Well, it’s a job like any other and has a pretty long history,” he noted. “Somebody’s got to do it otherwise the government will do that, too.”
She managed a wan smile at the remark. “Yeah, well, that’s what I told myself, but there are many ways to go about it.
You can meet a guy, date, fall in love, really commit yourself both of you. That might work. But just to go out in desperation and marry the first guy who comes along who’ll have you that’s disaster.”
“Works the other way, too, honey,” he responded. “That’s why I’m paying five hundred a month in rehabilitation money that’s what they call alimony these days in liberal states that abolished alimony and child support. And she’s living with another guy who owns an auto repair shop and is doing pretty well; she has a kid by him, too. But so long as she don’t marry him, I’m stuck.”
“You have a kid?”
He nodded. “A son. Irving. Lousy name, but it was the one uncle he had on her side who had money. Not that it got us or him anything. I love him, but I almost never see him.”
“Because you’re on the road?”
“Naw. You’d be surprised what you can work. I’m supposed to have visitation rights, but somehow he’s always away when I come visiting. She don’t want him to see me, get to know me instead of her current as his daddy. Uh uh.”
“Couldn’t you go to court on that?”
He laughed. “Honey, them courts will slap me in jail so fast if I miss a payment to her it isn’t funny but tell her to live up to her end of the bargain? Yeah, they’ll tell her, and that’s that. Tell her and tell her and tell her. Until, one day, you realize that the old joke’s true she got the gold mine in the settlement and I got the shaft. Oh, I suppose I could make an unholy mess trying to get custody, but I’d never win. I’d have to give up truckin’, and truckin’s all I know how to do.
And I’d probably lose, anyway nine out of ten men do. Even if I won hell, it’s been near five years.” He sighed. “I guess at this stage he’s better off. I hope so.”
The River Of Dancing Gods Page 1
