The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I barely heard him. I couldn’t take my eyes off the clouds. Then my pocketphone buzzed, and the bane of my existence said, “Kevo, get down to the jump-station. Those vee-eye-pees are definitely on the way. You’ve got just enough time to change into some decent clothes.”

  “They’re coming now?” I was holding on to the rail with one hand and needed two. “There’s a big storm on the way, too.”

  “How’re they supposed to know what they’re jumping into? Twenty minutes, dear heart.”

  I screeched into the speaker and tossed the pocketphone overboard. Then I said, “Oh, hell, I shouldn’t’ve done that. Some rockhound’ll find it.”

  Chamberlain said, “We won’t leave a trace.”

  “Can I have a drink? I’m having a bad day. First—and now suits jumping in.”

  He handed me the flask. “Cheer up. You’re probably going to be treated to the sight of very self-important people puking like cats.”

  “Some treat.”

  He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook out one of the nasty things, braced himself against the rail with his back to the wind to light up. “Hurry on back here when you can. You don’t want to miss this, it’s going to be quite a blow. We can’t outrun it, despite what the Navy may let on. May not even be able to ride it out on the lee shore.”

  I said, “You’d be a much happier person if you’d get yourself a girlfriend,” but the truth was, he looked happier at that moment than I’d ever seen him, as happy as Cardwell with his trilobites, Jank with his eurypterid—

  —King with his ichthyologist.

  I suddenly felt so tired. This was the last time, I thought, I don’t have another good love affair left in me, or even a bad one. I saw the rest of my life. I’d spend my time drinking and listening to people argue whether or not it was a good idea to use the Paleozoic to keep the twenty-first century clanking and sputtering along. Not that argument would stop it from happening. I’d hear Holiday sing another few hundred or thousand times of how she covered the waterfront, be dazzled anew at every playing of the Shaw or the Goodman “Moonglow,” and hum along whenever the morning found me miles away with still a million things to say. The long, quiet Silurian summer would wear on, Laurasia and Gondwanaland would draw inexorably together, and the solar system would continue its circuit of the outer reaches of the Milky Way. I’d do whatever I had to do for Ruth to go on being a hanger-on here, and I wouldn’t write, and if ever I found myself seeing anyone else whom I’d only been looking at before, I’d throw myself overboard.…

  “Feel that wind,” Chamberlain murmured. His long, thin hair whipped about his skull. “I’ve been thinking a lot about fetch today.”

  “Huh? Like with a dog?”

  “Idiot. Fetch is the extent of open water a wind can blow across. Here we’ve got a northern hemisphere that’s almost nothing but fetch. Wind, waves could travel right around the planet. Storm comes along, whips together a bunch of mid-ocean waves traveling at different speeds, piles ’em up into big waves. Big waves. Back in the nineteen-thirties, a Navy ship in the Pacific sighted a wave over thirty-five meters high.”

  I was appalled. “You’re hoping we break that record?”

  “Hm. About time we had some excitement around here.” He regarded me with approximately equal parts of amusement and tenderness. “See how quickly your priorities are getting straightened out?”

  “Okay,” I said, “so there’re things that’re bigger than the things that’re bigger than me.”

  “Hm. Mm hm.” For Chamberlain, that was a gale of laughter.

  THE NIGHT WE BURIED ROAD DOG

  Jack Cady

  Here’s a haunting and evocative piece of modern-day folklore, funny and sad by turns, that sends us hurtling at full throttle down the back roads and blue highways of a nighttime, honkytonk world—and deep into the heart of the American spirit.…

  Jack Cady is at present perhaps better known in the horror/fantasy field than in science fiction, but although he’s published horror novels such as The Well and The Jonah Watch, he has also published one SF novel, The Man Who Could Make Things Vanish … and it won’t take many more stories of the power of “The Night They Buried Road Dog” to establish his name with the SF readership as well. His most recent books are a collection, The Sons of Noah and Other Stories, and a short novel, Inagehi. Coming up soon is a new horror novel entitled Street, and he has a new story collection in the works as well. Cady lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

  I

  Brother Jesse buried his ’47 Hudson back in ’61, and the roads got just that much more lonesome. Highway 2 across north Montana still wailed with engines as reservation cars blew past; and it lay like a tunnel of darkness before headlights of big rigs. Tandems pounded, and the smart crack of downshifts rapped across grassland as trucks swept past the bars at every crossroad. The state put up metal crosses to mark the sites of fatal accidents. Around the bars, those crosses sprouted like thickets.

  That Hudson was named Miss Molly, and it logged 220,000 miles while never burning a clutch. Through the years, it wore into the respectable look that comes to old machinery. It was rough as a cob, cracked glass on one side, and primer over dents. It had the tough-and-ready look of a hunting hound about its business. I was a good deal younger then, but not so young that I was fearless. The burial had something to do with mystery, and Brother Jesse did his burying at midnight.

  Through fluke or foresight, Brother Jesse had got hold of eighty acres of rangeland that wasn’t worth a shake. There wasn’t enough of it to run stock, and you couldn’t raise anything on it except a little hell. Jesse stuck an old house trailer out there, stacked hay around it for insulation in Montana winters, and hauled in just enough water to suit him. By the time his Hudson died, he was ready to go into trade.

  “Jed,” he told me the night of the burial, “I’m gonna make myself some history, despite this damn Democrat administration.” Over beside the house trailer, the Hudson sat looking like it was about ready to get off the mark in a road race, but the poor thing was a goner. Moonlight sprang from between spring clouds, and to the westward the peaks of mountains glowed from snow and moonlight. Along Highway 2, some hot rock wound second gear on an old flathead Ford. You could hear the valves begin to float.

  “Some little darlin’ done stepped on that boy’s balls,” Jesse said about the driver. “I reckon that’s why he’s looking for a ditch.” Jesse sighed and sounded sad. “At least we got a nice night. I couldn’t stand a winter funeral.”

  “Road Dog?” I said about the driver of the Ford, which shows just how young I was at the time.

  “It ain’t The Dog,” Jesse told me. “The Dog’s a damn survivor.”

  * * *

  You never knew where Brother Jesse got his stuff, and you never really knew if he was anybody’s brother. The only time I asked, he said, “I come from a close-knit family such as your own,” and that made no sense. My own father died when I was twelve, and my mother married again when I turned seventeen. She picked up and moved to Wisconsin.

  No one even knew when, or how, Jesse got to Montana territory. We just looked up one day, and there he was, as natural as if he’d always been here, and maybe he always had.

  His eighty acres began to fill up. Old printing presses stood gap-mouthed like spinsters holding conversation. A salvaged greenhouse served for storing dog food, engine parts, chromium hair dryers from 1930’s beauty shops, dime-store pottery, blades for hay cutters, binder twine, an old gas-powered crosscut saw, seats from a school bus, and a bunch of other stuff not near as useful.

  A couple of tabbies lived in that greenhouse, but the Big Cat stood outside. It was an old D6 bulldozer with a shovel, and Jesse stoked it up from time to time. Mostly it just sat there. In summers, it provided shade for Jesse’s dogs: Potato was brown and fat and not too bright, while Chip was little and fuzzy. Sometimes they rode with Jesse, and sometimes stayed home. Me or Mike Tarbush fed them. When anything big hap
pened, you could count on those two dogs to get underfoot. Except for me, they were the only ones who attended the funeral.

  “If we gotta do it,” Jesse said mournfully, “we gotta.” He wound up the Cat, turned on the headlights, and headed for the grave site, which was an embankment overlooking Highway 2. Back in those days, Jesse’s hair still shone black, and it was even blacker in the darkness. It dangled around a face that carried an Indian forehead and a Scotsman’s nose. Denim stretched across most of the six feet of him, and he wasn’t rangy; he was thin. He had feet to match his height, and his hands seemed bigger than his feet; but the man could skin a Cat.

  I stood in moonlight and watched him work. A little puff of flame dwelt in the stack of the bulldozer. It flashed against the darkness of those distant mountains. It burbled hot in the cold spring moonlight. Jesse made rough cuts pretty quick, moved a lot of soil, then started getting delicate. He shaped and reshaped that grave. He carved a little from one side, backed the dozer, found his cut not satisfactory. He took a spoonful of earth to straighten things, then fussed with the grade leading into the grave. You could tell he wanted a slight elevation, so the Hudson’s nose would be sniffing toward the road. Old Potato dog had a hound’s ears, but not a hound’s good sense. He started baying at the moon.

  It came to me that I was scared. Then it came to me that I was scared most of the time anyway. I was nineteen, and folks talked about having a war across the sea. I didn’t want to hear about it. On top of the war talk, women were driving me crazy: the ones who said “no” and the ones who said “yes.” It got downright mystifying just trying to figure out which was worse. At nineteen, it’s hard to know how to act. There were whole weeks when I could pass myself off as a hellion, then something would go sour. I’d get hit by a streak of conscience and start acting like a missionary.

  “Jed,” Jesse told me from the seat of the dozer, “go rig a tow on Miss Molly.” In the headlights the grave now looked like a garage dug into the side of that little slope. Brother Jesse eased the Cat back in there to fuss with the grade. I stepped slow toward the Hudson, wiggled under, and fetched the towing cable around the frame. Potato howled. Chip danced like a fuzzy fury, and started chewing on my boot like he was trying to drag me from under the Hudson. I was on my back trying to kick Chip away and secure the cable. Then I like to died from fright.

  Nothing else in the world sounds anywhere near like a Hudson starter. It’s a combination of whine and clatter and growl. If I’d been dead a thousand years, you could stand me right up with a Hudson starter. There’s threat in that sound. There’s also the promise that things can get pretty rowdy, pretty quick.

  The starter went off. The Hudson jiggled. In the one-half second it took to get from under that car, I thought of every bad thing I ever did in my life. I was headed for Hell, certain sure. By the time I was on my feet, there wasn’t an ounce of blood showing anywhere on me. When the old folks say, “white as a sheet,” they’re talking about a guy under a Hudson.

  Brother Jesse climbed from the Cat and gave me a couple of shakes.

  “She ain’t dead,” I stuttered. “The engine turned over. Miss Molly’s still thinking speedy.” From Highway 2 came the wail of Mike Tarbush’s ’48 Roadmaster. Mike loved and cussed that car. It always flattened out at around eighty.

  “There’s still some sap left in the batt’ry,” Jesse said about the Hudson. “You probably caused a short.” He dropped the cable around the hitch on the dozer. “Steer her,” he said.

  The steering wheel still felt alive, despite what Jesse said. I crouched behind the wheel as the Hudson got dragged toward the grave. Its brakes locked twice, but the towing cable held. The locked brakes caused the car to sideslip. Each time, Jesse cussed. Cold spring moonlight made the shadowed grave look like a cave of darkness.

  The Hudson bided its time. We got it lined up, then pushed it backward into the grave. The hunched front fenders spread beside the snarly grille. The front bumper was the only thing about that car that still showed clean and uncluttered. I could swear Miss Molly moved in the darkness of the grave, about to come charging onto Highway 2. Then she seemed to make some kind of decision, and sort of settled down. Jesse gave the eulogy.

  “This here car never did nothing bad,” he said. “I must have seen a million crap-crates, but this car wasn’t one of them. She had a second gear like Hydramatic, and you could wind to seventy before you dropped to third. There wasn’t no top end to her—at least I never had the guts to find it. This here was a hundred-mile-an-hour car on a bad night, and God knows what on a good’n.” From Highway 2, you could hear the purr of Matt Simons’s ’56 Dodge, five speeds, what with the overdrive, and Matt was scorching.

  Potato howled long and mournful. Chip whined. Jesse scratched his head, trying to figure a way to end the eulogy. It came to him like a blessing. “I can’t prove it,” he said, “’cause no one could. But I expect this car has passed The Road Dog maybe a couple of hundred times.” He made like he was going to cross himself, then remembered he was Methodist. “Rest in peace,” he said, and he said it with eyes full of tears. “There ain’t that many who can comprehend The Dog.” He climbed back on the Cat and began to fill the grave.

  Next day, Jesse mounded the grave with real care. He erected a marker, although the marker was more like a little signboard:

  1947–1961

  Hudson coupe—“Molly”

  220,023 miles on straight eight cylinder

  Died of busted crankshaft

  Beloved in the memory of

  Jesse Still

  Montana roads are long and lonesome, and Highway 2 is lonesomest. You pick it up over on the Idaho border where the land is mountains. Bear and cougar still live pretty good, and beaver still build dams. The highway runs beside some pretty lakes. Canada is no more than a jump away; it hangs at your left shoulder when you’re headed east.

  And can you roll those mountains? Yes, oh yes. It’s two-lane all the way across, and twisty in the hills. From Libby, you ride down to Kalispell, then pop back north. The hills last till the Blackfoot reservation. It’s rangeland into Cut Bank, then to Havre. That’s just about the center of the state.

  Just let the engine howl from town to town. The road goes through a dozen, then swings south. And there you are at Glasgow and the river. By Wolf Point, you’re in cropland, and it’s flat from there until Chicago.

  I almost hate to tell about this road, because easterners may want to come and visit. Then they’ll do something dumb at a blind entry. The state will erect more metal crosses. Enough folks die up here already. And it’s sure no place for rice grinders, or tacky Swedish station wagons, or high-priced German crap-crates. This was always a V-8 road, and V-12 if you had ’em. In the old, old days there were even a few V-16s up here. The top end on those things came when friction stripped the tires from too much speed.

  * * *

  Speed or not, brakes sure sounded as cars passed Miss Molly’s grave. Pickup trucks fishtailed as men snapped them to the shoulder. The men would sit in their trucks for a minute, scratching their heads like they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. Then they’d climb from the truck, walk back to the grave, and read the marker. About half of them would start holding their sides. One guy even rolled around on the ground, he was laughing so much.

  “These old boys are laughing now,” Brother Jesse told me, “but I predict a change in attitude. I reckon they’ll come around before first snowfall.”

  With his car dead, Jesse had to find a set of wheels. He swapped an old hay rake and a gang of discs for a ’49 Chevrolet.

  “It wouldn’t pull the doorknob off a cathouse,” he told me. “It’s just to get around in while I shop.”

  The whole deal was going to take some time. Knowing Jesse, I figured he’d go through half a dozen trades before finding something comfortable. And I was right.

  He first showed up in an old Packard hearse that once belonged to a funeral home in Billings. He’d swapped th
e Chev for the hearse, plus a gilt-covered coffin so gaudy it wouldn’t fit anybody but a radio preacher. He swapped the hearse to Sam Winder, who aimed to use it for hunting trips. Sam’s dogs wouldn’t go anywhere near the thing. Sam opened all the windows and the back door, then took the hearse up to speed trying to blow out all the ghosts. The dogs still wouldn’t go near it. Sam said, “To hell with it,” and pushed it into a ravine. Every rabbit and fox and varmint in that ravine came bailing out, and nobody has gone in there ever since.

  Jesse traded the coffin to Old Man Jefferson, who parked the thing in his woodshed. Jefferson was supposed to be on his last legs, but figured he wasn’t ever, never, going to die if his poor body knew it would be buried in that monstrosity. It worked for several years, too, until a bad winter came along, and he split it up for firewood. But we still remember him.

  Jesse came out of those trades with a ’47 Pontiac and a Model T. He sold the Model T to a collector, then traded the Pontiac and forty bales of hay for a ’53 Studebaker. He swapped the Studebaker for a ratty pickup and all the equipment in a restaurant that went bust. He peddled the equipment to some other poor fellow who was hell-bent to go bust in the restaurant business. Then he traded the pickup for a motorcycle, plus a ’51 Plymouth that would just about get out of its own way. By the time he peddled both of them, he had his pockets full of cash and was riding shanks’ mare.

  “Jed,” he told me, “let’s you and me go to the big city.” He was pretty happy, but I remembered how scared I’d been at the funeral. I admit to being skittish.

  From the center of north Montana, there weren’t a championship lot of big cities. West was Seattle, which was sort of rainy and mythological. North was Winnipeg, a cow town. South was Salt Lake City. To the east.…

  “The hell with it,” Brother Jesse said. “We’ll go to Minneapolis.”

  It was about a thousand miles. Maybe fifteen hours, what with the roads. You could sail Montana and North Dakota, but those Minnesota cops were humorless.