The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “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 V-8

  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 that begins to blow cold and clear toward late October. Rains sob away toward the Middle West, 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 thirty 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’re 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 nineteen 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 café 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. Ranchers’ pickups stood all dented and work-worn 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 O.K. 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-blonde hair, and with hands long-fingered and gentle. There wasn’t a chance of talking, because she stood behind the counter for ladies’ underwear. I pretended to myself that she looked sad when I left.

  It got on to 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 dry-goods. 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 sa
id 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 back end 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 café:

  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, cafés, 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 doughnuts. 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 Jimsonweed,” 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 backward up the guy wire 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 feedstore 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.

  Nineteen sixty-three 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 Fence Posts.” 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 café, 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 O.K., 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.

  The world was changing, and it wouldn’t change back. I put in for sea duty one more time, and the chief warrant who ramrodded that motor pool turned it down again. He claimed we kept the world safe by wrenching engines.

  * * *

  “The ’62 Dodge is emerging as the car of choice for people in a hurry.” Matt Simons wrote that in February ’64, knowing I’d understand that nobody could tell which cars would be treasured until they had a year or two on them. “It’s an extreme winter,” he wrote, “and it’s taking its toll on many of us. Mike has now learned not to punch a policeman. He’s doing ten days. Sam Winder managed to roll a Jeep, and neither he, nor I, can figure out how a man can roll a Jeep. Sam has a broken arm, and lost two toes to frost. He was trapped under the wreck. It took awhile to pull him out. Brother Jesse is in the darkest sort of mood. He comes and goes in an irregular manner, but the Linc sits outside the pool hall on most days.

  “And for myself,” M
att wrote, “I think, come summer, I’ll drop some revs. My flaming youth seems to be giving way to other interests. A young woman named Nancy started teaching at the school. Until now, I thought I was a confirmed bachelor.”

  A postcard came the end of February. The postmark said “Cheyenne, Wyoming,” way down in the southeast corner of the state. It was written fancy. Nobody could mistake that fine, spidery hand. It read:

  Road Dog

  Run and run as fast as he can,

  He can’t find who is the Gingerbread Man

  The picture on the card had been taken from an airplane. It showed an oval racetrack where cars chased each other round and round. I couldn’t figure why Jesse sent it, but it had to be Jesse. Then it came to me that Jesse was The Road Dog. Then it came to me that he wasn’t. The Road Dog was too slick. He wrote real delicate, and Jesse only printed real clumsy. On the other hand, The Road Dog didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox. Somehow it had to be Jesse.

  “We got snow nut-deep to a tall palm tree,” Jesse wrote at about the same time, “and Chip is failing. He’s off his feed. He don’t even tease the kitties. Chip just can’t seem to stop mourning.”

  I had bad premonitions. Chip was sensitive. I feared he wouldn’t be around by the time I got back home, and my fear proved right. Chip held off until the first warm sun of spring, and then he died while napping in the shade of the bulldozer. When Jesse sent a quick note telling me, I felt pretty bad, but had been expecting it. Chip had a good heart. I figured now he was with Potato, romping in the hills somewhere. I knew that was a bunch of crap, but that’s just the way I chose to figure it.

  * * *

  They say a man can get used to anything, but maybe some can’t. Day after day, and week after week, California weather nagged. Sometimes a puny little dab of weather dribbled in from the Pacific, and people hollered it was storming. Sometimes temperatures dropped toward the fifties, and people trotted around in thick sweaters and coats. It was almost a relief when that happened, because everybody put on their shirts. In three years, I’d seen more woman skin than a normal man sees in a lifetime, and more tattoos on men. The chief warrant at the motor pool had the only tattoo in the world called “worm’s-eye view of a pig’s butt in the moonlight.”