“Tom?”
He grunted, deep in his throat. Tom had a spooky way of talking without talking. I just went ahead and asked him anyway. “What’s your most favorite car?”
He considered. “Maybe that cherry red Ford from ‘39.”
“Why?”
“I got my reasons.”
“Because of how it drives?”
“Because of its soul.”
I turned sideways, which made the saddle squeak a bit. “Your people think cars have a soul?”
“Boy, around here the damned ground has a soul.”
“I don’t understand.”
Tom scowled and spat. He spoke with an edge, but not without kindness. “You gonna work, or jaw all day?”
“Sorry.”
“Anybody coming?” Injun Tom’s voice was also sandpaper hoarse, but in an oddly pleasant way. When he laughed, he sounded like Santa.
“Hang on.” I edged my mare forward.
I loved Grandpa Ben, but he was family and prone to using the back of his hand for discipline so I avoided him. Injun Tom was more of a mentor and, truth be told, he was one interesting hombre. He’d come to mean a lot to me. Tom had been born in the slums outside of Dry Wells God knows how many years before. His family had worked for my Grandpa for nearly fifty years, all told; bailing hay in the spring and both herding and slaughtering the cattle when the time came. When there was no work, they moved on. Tom, like them, would come and go with the seasons, as if in accordance with the workings of some inner mechanism. Because he’d never married he was the last of his line.
When working for Grandpa, Tom slept in the bunkhouse, which had an old wooden shit-shack out behind it, and bathed in the freezing cold water of the stream. No electricity or new-fangled radio programs for Tom. He hardly ever went to the picture show on Friday night. He was pretty set in his tribal ways. Some nights we could hear him chanting what sounded like death songs; he’d be sitting by a small fire, down by that bunkhouse, all alone. You’d know when he was gone again by the silence after dark.
He’d lived a hard life, but to the best of my recollection, he never once complained.
Now, Tom had no family left and didn’t seem to have a pot to piss in, but he had an amazing collection of used cars. He must have had thirty of them, every shape and size. My Grandpa let him park them out by the stinky animal graveyard, a bit north, on a hill just above the alfalfa field. Tom tinkered with them whenever he had the spare time.
He seemed to keep those cars running smooth as crap through a goose, but for some reason he never drove them anywhere.
Sometimes late in the afternoon, when the sunset hit them just right, the multi-colored vehicles seemed like a battlefield strewn with the dead and dented bodies of lost medieval knights.
Anyway, on this particular day, I was woozy from thirst, the heat and the glare of the midday sun. We’d already brought the cattle up to the long, bowed wooden gate. Tom stayed mounted, clicking softly. Meanwhile, Blackie instinctively kept the small herd in line as I slid to the ground, opened the huge gate and latched it back. I was a slim kid back then, with a full head of red hair; all in denim, wearing a white straw hat and a red bandana. I was constantly sunburned and peeling. Everybody called me Pinky.
That’s how I got the skin cancer that’s punching my ticket, actually. We didn’t know about such things back then. Anyway, I wiped my face on my sleeve, shaded my eyes and peered down the highway, into the omnipresent, shimmering mirage.
“Well?”
I squinted. “Hang on a second, Tom. I can’t see much of anything.”
“Herd’s gettin’ frisky,” Tom said. He sat up in the saddle, stretched and broke wind. “Gonna cross on their own soon, we don’t get started.”
My job was to spot any oncoming traffic and decide if it was smart to have the cattle plod across the highway. Cows are pretty damned stupid, and they tend to take their time doing something. We didn’t want to lose any cattle—or any drivers, either. Problem was, some folks went a little nutty in the middle of the wide, lonesome nowhere; a lot of tourists started speeding like demons, trying to make some sort of town before sunset. It didn’t help that the speed limit signs in this part of the state just said “be safe and reasonable.” If some dumb son of a bitch struck a prize Hereford going ninety miles an hour, well there’d be one hell of a lot of spare parts and raw hamburger on the blacktop.
“Yeah, somebody coming, Tom,” I hollered. Just the effort of shouting made my head hurt again. I’d already passed out once and I needed some more salt. My eyes were blurry, but I’d seen a small, shiny speck of something metal, gleaming at the end of the highway. It emerged from the mirage like an insect, and seemed to gather speed. My ears caught the vague whine of a straining engine. “I’d say he’s pushing that car pretty hard.”
“Then he don’t deserve it,” Tom said.
“Why?”
“Car’s got magic, boy. They’re special. Any asshole would whip a horse to death don’t deserve to own it, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Same goes for good cars.”
I peered down the road. “Well, then he’s an asshole for sure.”
“Slow him down.”
I waved. “I’m trying.”
“Aw, hell.”
I turned my head and felt dizzy again. One of the calves had stepped out onto the molten hot roadway. Her momma followed, and a few other heads just assumed it was time to go. Blackie tried to nose the little heifer back where she belonged, but the damage had been done. The cattle started milling around and within moments were partially blocking the road.
“Stop that dumb bastard, boy,” Injun Tom called. Then, to the cattle: “Yaw! Get back there, girl. Come on, move.” He made a piercing whistle with his tongue and teeth and kicked at the lead cow.
My stomach rolled, and I bent over to puke but nothing came up. I drank the last of my water and walked my horse maybe twenty yards down the highway; sat up in the saddle and commenced to waving my hat in the air. I felt so dizzy from dehydration and sunburn I almost passed out again. I shaded my eyes. The driver didn’t seem to see us.
“Tom, he ain’t slowing down!”
“He’d damned well better.”
I waved again. The car, which I could now see was a dark 1940 Ford with silver trim and big tits for headlights, came on straight as a bullet. Behind me, I could hear Injun Tom struggling to get the cattle across the road and out of the way.
I waved with both arms. Finally, the driver saw me in the roadway and hit the brakes. The screech was sudden and sharp; high-pitched as a woman giving birth. The ass-end of the Ford swerved from side to side, and behind it were twin black lines of burning rubber. It finally came to a complete stop maybe ten to twelve feet from my spooked horse. I could see him behind the windshield, red-faced and bug-eyed. He rolled the window down.
“Hey, kid! Get those walking steaks the fuck out of my way.”
I licked my parched lips. “Won’t be long, sir.” I wasn’t even certain I’d spoken the words aloud. I wobbled in the saddle and rubbed my dry eyes.
He cocked his porcine head. “You want I should drive right through you?”
That hit me wrong, but my natural tendency to defer to authority won out. “Like I said, we’ll only be a couple of minutes, mister. Cows took off on us.”
Pissed, the driver got out of the car and stepped out onto the blacktop. Now, I was a teenaged kid and this was a large, hulking man with a badly broken nose. His voice had an odd quality to it; a nasal snap. I didn’t know it at the time, but the rumpled suit, shoulder holster and bad attitude screamed of the powerful Italian mob that ten years hence would be running casinos all over the state. He tried to walk, but his leg didn’t work. He cursed softly and looked down.
One of his fancy dress shoes was sticking to a pool of melting tar.
“God fucking damn it!”
“Best wait in your car,” Injun Tom said, softly. “Must be maybe 105, 110 degrees ou
t here, so the blacktop, it gets real sticky.”
The driver leaned against his car. An acidic smile writhed across his face. “I wasn’t talking to you, nigger.”
“My apologies.”
“Accepted.” The man snarled at me. “I said move those fucking cows. Now!”
I swallowed dust. I was weaving like a cobra in the saddle and my mouth tasted foul. “Like I said, we’re working on it.”
“You want I should shoot one?”
“No, sir.”
“You want I should shoot you?”
The air chilled, despite the weather. My stomach felt tight. I had a rifle with me, but knew I’d never get to it in time. I looked back over my shoulder; Old Injun Tom clicked his tongue and kept on moving the cattle, but his right hand drifted south and came to rest at the tip of his holstered 45.
“Hey,” the mobster called, “I changed my mind about that apology. Look at me when I’m talking to you, Tonto. Or are you a nigger?”
I pulled back slightly in the reins and eased the mare away from the Ford. The driver pointed a finger at me. He was shaking with rage. “Kid, stay right where you are.” He looked around, as if to make absolutely certain that he was in the middle of nowhere with no witnesses.
And then he pulled his gun.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a weapon that looked as big. It was like my mind did a motion picture close-up of that Colt. I edged my right hand around, but knew I was good as dead if I went for the carbine tied across the back of my saddle. I leaned forward, my vision going in and out of focus. Time just slid sideways and came to a halt. I was vaguely aware of the mare passing gas and dropping some road apples. I risked a peek back at Tom.
“The boy is sick,” Tom said.
The stranger seethed. “Who gives a shit? Now, get down from there.”
Injun Tom smiled. He kept his hands in plain sight. He spoke gently, firmly. “You’ve had yourself a pretty bad couple of days, haven’t you, mister.” It was not a question. “You lost your job or your woman, or maybe it was both. And now you want to take that out on somebody else.”
“Shut up,” the driver snarled. His voice blended with steam escaping from the strained radiator. His already wide, bloodshot eyes expanded a bit further. He didn’t like feeling naked, or maybe just so obvious.
“That your car?” When the mobster didn’t answer, Tom lightly kicked Blackie and moved a few feet closer, on my left side. His intentions were clear. He was trying to screen me off from the gun. “She’s beautiful.”
The mobster tracked him with the gun. “It’s a car.”
“No, sir, because you see, a man’s car, it’s sacred. Kind of like his horse used to be, back in the old days.”
“The fuck you talking about?”
“You’re not busted, son,” Tom said, soothingly. “You still have the most important thing in the world.”
“A car?” The driver’s eyebrows mated in puzzlement.
“It’s your steed and your prize possession,” Tom said. “And anything that carries a man through the desert deserves food, water and above all a little respect. You shouldn’t push her so hard.”
Blackie twitched his tail, and the mobster cocked his gun. “You know something?”
“No, sir. What?”
“I don’t really like niggers, or red Indians, either.” He looked at me and grinned nervously, like a possum eating red ants. “I also don’t like kids. So I’m gonna do the both of you. Now get down off those horses.”
Injun Tom nodded my way. I dismounted, but put the mare’s body in between me and this homicidal maniac. That allowed my right hand to slide to the butt of my rifle. I was almost too dizzy to stand, and sounds seemed far away. My heart was thumping in an irregular pattern and my stomach tightened into a knot. I wondered if I would have the time, or the balls, to try a sideways shot from such a bad angle and in such poor condition. I knew I’d have maybe one chance. If I blew it, Tom was likely dead.
But then, we seemed likely dead anyway.
The stranger seemed calm and in his element. He tracked us both well. “Come out from behind that horse, kid. Keep your hands in sight. Red man, you come down from there next.”
“Can’t do that, mister,” Tom said, quietly.
The stranger glared, narrowed his eyes. He raised the gun. “Then I’ll shoot you both dead from right here.”
“You don’t really want to do that,” Tom said. But Tom’s voice didn’t seem normal anymore. It felt like I was underwater in a hot spring or something.
The killer chuckled. His eyes narrowed. “Go fuck yourself.”
The man was going to fire. I swear to God. In fact, I’d about say he did, in that there was a spark of light and a puff of smoke, but something stayed his hand, or maybe replayed what happened and made it turn out some other way. I was damned sick from sunstroke, but that’s what I saw and heard. I don’t know what it was Injun Tom said next. The words were strange and so was the cadence, but it all sounded vaguely like the stuff we’d hear him chanting late at night, down by the bunk house. I sank to my knees and fell down sideways in the road. I may have passed out for a second. Someone was shrieking. I came to again.
The gun just…melted. The mobster screamed and dropped what had now become a mass of molten metal. It fell down onto that sticky, festering blacktop and vanished into it. I blinked rapidly, my eyes flickered up and down, trying to make sense of what I was seeing: The driver, staring in horror at his blistered fingers, the gun sinking down into what had now become a molten pocket of hot, black lava; then the mobster babbling again because down there by his ankles was…more blacktop.
He had no feet; they’d both dissolved.
I gagged and shook my head. My temples pounded and the world rolled like liquid. The mobster grabbed at his scorched flesh. His screams grew more frantic as he tried to extricate himself. The horses whinnied in terror and Injun Tom and I let them back away. I closed my eyes, knew I was hallucinating. I opened them again.
Now the man was in the bubbling blacktop up to his knees. I could smell roasting flesh and saw a glimpse or two of exposed bone. I looked at Injun Tom, but he sat impassively on the horse, watching the nightmare rapidly unfold. The Ford still sat firmly on the empty highway, somehow impervious to what was happening, perhaps because it was not cursed, nor flesh and blood. The driver grabbed for the door, hoping to pull himself back into the car. His legs sheared off at the thigh, leaving two raw stumps that were instantly cauterized.
More shrieking followed. I vomited bile near the mare’s right foot and passed out. I couldn’t keep my head up anymore. When things came back into focus, it looked like the man was into the molten black lava up to his chest. I heard an obscene, greedy slurp. The tar was sucking him down. He was pleading with his eyes and trying to use singed vocal chords that no longer had lungs to support them. The blacktop took one last gulp and he went under.
“Tom?”
“Hush,” Injun Tom said. “It’s not over.”
And a split second later the face emerged as the big man made one final attempt to escape. The flesh was pink and blistered and the eyeballs had been poached to a ghastly, empty white. One more hideous sucking sound…and then he was gone.
I passed out again, this time for what might have been minutes. When I woke up, Injun Tom was kneeling next to me in the shade of the mare. He raised his canteen. He drank deeply, handed it to me. “Easy, boy. Wash your mouth out and spit, then drink some.”
I did. “Tom, what the hell was that?”
He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what the living hell just happened?”
He chuckled. “You passed out, that’s what happened.”
I tried to sit up, failed. “What ate that man, Tom?”
“What man? Take it easy, kid. You got yourself a bad case of sunstroke. You’re seeing things, that’s all.” Tom took his canteen back. “Can you handle the herd for a bit by your lonesome?”
�
�Uh, I guess.”
“Take Blackie, too. Lead them up there into the grass and let them all feed for a bit. I’ll catch up with you shortly.”
“But…”
He shot me a look that told me to shut up, just do what I was told. I grabbed Blackie’s reins and kneed my mare across the steaming hot highway, up onto dry land, without turning around. The horse followed without resistance, and so did the cattle. When we got to the edge of the grass below the grove of cherry trees, near the creek, I finally looked back. There was Injun Tom come walking back across that highway like he owned it. I sat in the shade and drank my fill. I had me a pinch of salt and the headache passed. Everything came into focus, and I began to figure I’d gone loco for a bit. Tom finally caught up to me. He buried his face in the cool, clear water. He murmured sweetly to Blackie and mounted up.
“Tom, did I…”
“What?”
“Did I just imagine all that about some man who pulled a gun on us and about how the highway…swallowed him up, somehow?”
He grinned. “I reckon you did. You feeling okay, now? Up to doing some work for a change?”
“I’m fine, Tom. Please, tell me what just happened.”
Tom shook with laughter. Then he looked at me with an odd mixture of pity and determination. “Nothing happened, boy. It was just the heat. You didn’t see anything, we never met anybody. Your mind made it up.”
“It seemed so real…”
“I’m sure it did. Now pull yourself together. Let me hear you say it.”
“It never happened. It was the heat.”
“Damn straight.” He didn’t offer up another word all day. We worked our asses off, got the herd into a wide corral and locked the gate, then ate some jerky and rode back down the mountain. We crossed the hot highway, and I half expected to see a dark Ford with silver trim, but there wasn’t a car in sight for miles in any direction. I knew I’d just gotten loopy from the heat, but to be honest I couldn’t help but watch the horse’s hooves anyhow every step of the way.
A Host of Shadows Page 26
