Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  Then the Russkies had put the sack over his head and thrown him down on the floorboards, and one kept his feet on him the whole trip out to the Last Chance Garage.

  Orphans. We’re all orphans in one way or another, Gadge thought. His dad was killed in Korea; his mom, Gramps and the robot in the last five years. Bobby’s dad had bought it at Anzio, and his mom got cancer five years ago; Stewart and Roger’s mom and dad were blown up in a lab fifty feet from them, five years ago.

  The Cold War was sure rough on kids.

  Now the radio was playing Neil Sedaka’s “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen.” Yeah right, thought Gadge. Welcome to the future, kid. Fifty megatons, right up your butt. Like the posters people printed, of the toothless old man in the jet helmet—“Sleep Tight Tonight. Your Air National Guard Is On The Job!”

  He turned off the radio and went back to sleep.

  At some point in the night, Hayley Mills climbed down the other side of the fence, real slow.

  SATURDAY. “Midnight in Moscow”

  Things began to happen pretty fast that morning.

  Bobby was staring at the empty space where his car had been in front of the apartments.

  The guy in the house across the street, who had talked to the cops the night before—he told them the wrecker had been “black or blue” and that “it had a big hook on it”—walked over to him.

  “I just remembered something. You know, in the excitement and all. I had been watching TV when I saw the cops over here, after I’d seen the tow truck pull your car off. The TV was showing pictures of little Caroline Ken-nedy playing with her pony Macaroni at the White House. They were near that tree house JFK had built for her, out in the back yard. You could—”

  “What was it you remembered,” asked Bobby. It would probably be something like “The tow truck had wheels on it.”

  “—oh yeah. That wrecker had some pink or lavender paint on the front fender. You think that’s enough we should call the cops back? You think it’ll help get your car back?”

  “Thanks.” said Bobby. “I don’t think we should call the cops about it. But I think it’ll help get my car back.”

  The guy looked at him funny, then scratched his head. “Well, okay.” he said.

  * * *

  From the field up on the side of the hill—a failed subdivision, a few houses further up, roads paved, then gravel, then dirt, then nothing, going nowhere—Bobby could look down over most of the junkyard. Up here, at the back, closest to him was the fence, the bunker, and the dog pens, then nothing but acres of cars; far away the office and the garage.

  All three tow trucks were outside. He looked through Gadge’s 80 x 300 binoculars he’d borrowed before Gadge had to go off to his language lab.

  The back garage doors, facing him, were open. His wagon wasn’t there. And for a Saturday, the junkyard was pretty empty.

  He was listening to his transistor radio. The news was that all the Russian ships had stopped except the Grozny, which came on toward the American quarantine line.

  It was hailed.

  It didn’t stop.

  A Navy destroyer escort fired a shot across its bow.

  The Grozny steamed on toward Cuba.

  The Navy shot off its rudder.

  The news got out about twenty-seven minutes after it happened.

  * * *

  Things really started happening down at the junkyard then.

  People moved around at the office. A few minutes later a couple of cars pulled in, and women and kids got out of the cars that drove into the garage and came out back. They carried boxes and blankets and dolls, and after awhile they came out of the mazes between the cars and went into the bunker.

  The fat guy closed the place up and came back toward the fallout shelter in a ’59 Ford pickup. The back end was full of shotguns, rifles and ammo boxes. He and some other guys carried the stuff inside.

  Then nothing happened in the junkyard for two hours.

  * * *

  Not much happened anyplace. The teletype between Washington and Moscow must have been red-hot. The radio said the Grozny was boarded, and it was full of wheat, tractors and medical supplies. This left the Americans with red faces, and a ship they’d disabled dead in international waters.

  Some Cuban tugs were sent out.

  Meanwhile the rest of the Russian freighters got up good heads of steam and plowed toward that imprisoned isle.

  * * *

  Bobby’s back was killing him. Nothing moved in the junkyard. A couple of cars pulled up out front, saw the place was closed, drove away. The dogs in their big pen figure-eighted back and forth: they knew something was up.

  Then the bleach-blond kid and the fat guy came out of the bunker. They talked. The fat guy handed his son some money. The kid walked out through the junkyard, through the office, got in the big wrecker and left.

  Then for a while nothing happened but the radio. One of the songs it played was “Asia Minor” by Kokomo, and Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea,” a song Bobby had always liked.

  * * *

  A half-hour later the big wrecker came back, pulling Bobby’s wagon. The kid opened the doors and pulled it into the big garage, closed and locked the front garage doors, and walked back out to the bunker. The fat guy met him. The kid handed him a pink slip and some money back. Nice touch.

  The junkyard owner went back inside the fallout shelter. The kid went up on the catwalk—the dogs were banging themselves against the side of the pens and gate. The kid opened the lift-gate like a sluice. Dogs squirted out like water from Grand Coulee Dam.

  The kid jumped down on the outside of the fence—dogs slamming against it and barking and growling all along it. They seemed a little confused being out in the daytime, and the kid walked along the fence to the front of the place and got in one of the cars and drove away.

  The radio said a disc jockey in Cleveland had just been fired on-air for dedicating a record to Nikita Krushchev, and then playing the Cuff-links’ “Guided Missile (Aimed At My Heart).”

  * * *

  Bobby was on the pay phone three blocks over to Stewart.

  “Yeah, well. Get on over here—we gotta work fast.”

  “Everybody here’s upset,” said Stewart. “Sarah’s fluttering around like ZaSu Pitts. It looks like it’s even getting to Roger.”

  “What if I sent Gadge over?”

  “I thought he had class?”

  “They cancelled it. He was already home when I called him by mistake trying to call you. They’re all shook up out at the college, too.”

  “You think this is a good idea? I mean, this is looking like it.”

  “And if the world doesn’t end, I’ve lost my wagon for good. Soon it’ll be purple and pink and the wood’ll be dark teak. And legal-like, too.”

  “Hang tight, then. I’ll be over as soon as Gadge gets here.”

  Bobby called Gadge back. Gadge didn’t want to go, with everything looking serious and all.

  “Look,” said Bobby. “What if WWIII happens? Can you see yourself riding away from the Apocalypse on a Vespa? Come on, Gadge—”

  “Call me Brian. I told you that a thousand times.”

  “Ga—Brian. There’s three or four cars at Stewart’s place. Something happens, you all jump in two or three and take off.”

  “I wanna go with you guys, if I’m going anywhere. I know something’s up.”

  “Look, G—Brian. I do not know how long this is gonna take. Stewart’s worried about everybody there. Roger likes you; you’ll calm him down; he’ll calm Sarah and Miz Jones down; everybody will be calm, including you.”

  “Roger gives me the creeps sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, remember what he went through and what you went through. I’m pret
ty sure everything gives Roger the creeps. Look. Just do it. I’ll give you—I don’t know—money.”

  “Never mind that,” said Gadge. “I’ll do it. What you said about A-bombs and motor-scooters made sense.”

  “You’re a pal,” said Bobby.

  “Yeah, right.”

  * * *

  Stewart showed up with food and blankets. He looked the place over. He was formulating a plan. But first he said:

  “You should call the cops. There’s your wagon. There they are.”

  “Nah. The kid’s gone. There’s dogs all over the place. The cops’ll get their asses eaten getting in there, or they’ll have to shoot all the dogs. What if, say, it’s not mine? I know it is, you know it is. They gotta get a judge to sign a warrant. And the fat guy didn’t do it. It’s the kid.”

  “Call the cops,” said Stewart. “No matter how much trouble it is, no matter how many fallout shelters they gotta look in to get a judge.”

  “No,” said Bobby.

  “Why not?”

  “Because now it’s personal.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” said Stewart.

  * * *

  “Look at the setup,” said Stewart. “How do you think they get the dogs back in the pens in the mornings?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “You climb up on that catwalk there, from outside the fence. You throw food in the pens. You open the gate. They come in. You close the gate. That’ll be my job.”

  “What’s mine?”

  “While I’m doing that, you open the front garage door and you drive your wagon out. You pick me up, two blocks over that way. Or, things still being quiet, I walk back to my car up on the hill and drive myself home. We go to the nearest cops and you tell them you found your car. Someday, when no one’s looking, you back-shoot the kid.”

  “There’s things that can go wrong with your plan, as I see it . . .” said Bobby.

  “Yeah. I can fall in the pens and get eaten up. Or the people in the bunker see what they think is someone stealing a car they think is legally theirs, and they shoot you full of big holes. Other than that, what’s there to worry about?”

  Stewart got up.

  “Where you going?”

  “You think food for the dogs is gonna walk down here? And how are the front garage doors locked?”

  “Slaymakers as big as toolboxes,” said Bobby. “Oh.”

  “Oh is right. Stick tight.”

  “What if the kid comes back and starts doing stuff to the car?”

  “The kid ain’t coming back today or tonight unless bombs start dropping; if they do, he ain’t gonna be thinkin’ about chopping and channeling your rod. If he were coming back, he wouldn’t have let the dogs out, because then he’s gotta put ’em back in again. He’ll be back tomorrow when they usually put the dogs back in. Ever read any Pavlov? I thought not.”

  “Well—”

  “Worst comes to worst, Bob,” said Stewart, “you can always call the cops.”

  He left. While he was gone, Bobby doodled in the sand with his finger the symbols: ♂ ♀ Z = ∞

  * * *

  It was dark. They lay wrapped in their blankets. The lump of ten pounds of raw meat—$2.00 worth—lay over to one side, double wrapped in three yards of cellophane. Hopefully the dogs couldn’t smell it up here. Occasionally a shape moved in the junkyard; one of the dogs looking for something to kill. Sometimes there was a dogfight.

  “Guy in the store said raw meat was the one thing that wasn’t selling. Nobody wants to take fresh meat down in a fallout shelter. Gave me a big-guy discount.”

  The bolt-cutters lay between them, the size of a small lawnmower. Stewart got them from a tool rental place a mile away.

  “See,” said Stewart. “We could be home. We could be playing Scrabble®. We could set our alarm clocks and get out here tomorrow at dawn. But no. You gotta play like Tom and Huck rescuing Jim, when Jim’s just fine.”

  “Shut up,” said Bobby. “I’m just as cold as you are.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Stewart, “but the difference is, you want to be cold, not me.”

  * * *

  At some point in the night Bobby woke up. Stewart was mumbling in his sleep.

  Bobby turned on his radio. It was 4 a.m., Pacific time. Some minutes before, daylight already out over the Atlantic, over central Cuba, either the Russians or the Cubans had shot down an American U-2 spyplane.

  “Wake up!” said Bobby.

  “Huh?” asked Stewart, sitting up.

  “We’re in deep kim-chee. The timetable’s been moved up.”

  SUNDAY. “Monster Mash”

  Just dawn.

  * * *

  They’d put the blankets and stuff in Stewart’s car up on the hill. Then Bobby’d taken the long way around, and stepped out of the weeds and watched till Stewart climbed out on the catwalk. He heard and watched as the dogs made a beeline for the pens.

  He cut the bolt of the lock on the right-hand door. It popped apart like cheap swing-chain. These things must have about six million tons of torque, he thought, admiring the boltcutters. He lifted the garage door—what a racket—then closed it in case anyone was driving by.

  His car was still up on the wrecker hooks. He threw the boltcutters inside.

  He went to the wrecker, cranked it up, tried to figure out which gears and levers did what. He pulled one. Nothing happened. Then another. His car moved an inch.

  He thought he heard yelling. He killed the motor. He heard yelling.

  A blur of a dog shot through the back garage doors and bounced off the wrecker.

  About that time, the front garage door opened. There stood the bleached-blond kid with a pistol in his hand; beyond him a car with its lights on idled.

  The dog went over the kid’s head and lit out for San Pedro.

  The kid fell on his back and started emptying the pistol into the ceiling.

  Bobby cranked up, gunned the wrecker motor and roared out of the garage, missing the kid by a foot with the fishtailing Ford wagon.

  * * *

  “Geez!” said Stewart, when Bobby roared to a stop for him two blocks away. “Now we’re the thieves! Head for my place. We’ll call the cops from there!”

  “What happened?” asked Bobby, grinding the gears.

  “The dogs didn’t all come in. Then they must have seen me from the bunker, ’cause I saw guys with guns. About then I saw the kid pull up out front. I yelled as much as I could running as fast as I could. I think they shot at me—I heard shots anyway. I don’t think I got the gate all the way down, either. The place is probably full of mutts. Geez!”

  They swung out on the road. They didn’t hear any sirens; no one was chasing them yet.

  “Hey!” said Bobby. “This thing doesn’t have a radio!” Stewart turned on his pocket transistor. He had to hold it up against the door handle to get better reception.

  Groovy Ray Poovey was running down the Top Ten of the week: “That was #5, Frank Ifeild’s ‘I Remember You,’ now here’s #4!” and the Crystals’ “He’s Not A Rebel” came on.

  “Great driving music.” said Stewart.

  * * *

  They turned a corner a couple of miles from Stewart’s house. “That was #3 this week,” said the DJ, “The Contours’ ‘Do You Love Me?’ Here’s the #2 record for the week of October 28, 1962, the Four Seasons with ‘Sherry.’”

  Bobby and Stewart wailed along with the falsetto Frankie Valli, nodding their heads back and forth. Stewart looked out the back, over the Ford. No one chasing them still.

  Bobby downshifted, ground the gears. The wrecker rolled to a stop.

  “Damn!” He found first again.

  “Now,” said Groovy Ray Poovey, before we find ou
t what that #1 song is, we’ll play a—” his voice went into echo-chamber bass “—Old One From-m-m-m the-th-th Vault-ault-ault-ault.” And out came the piano notes of Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date” from 1960.

  * * *

  “Swing over on Lattner,” said Stewart. “It’s downhill. Geez, you were doing fine for awhile. What happened?”

  “I must have been running on adrenaline. Hey—what’s this?” He was down in some kind of compound grandma gear. He started over. The rig started moving more than half a mile an hour again.

  “And now,” said the DJ “the number one tune of the week, and you know what it is—”

  There was the sound of a creaking door, bubbles, a dragging chain . . .

  And the mellifluous voice of Bobby “Boris” Pickett doing “Monster Mash.”

  It stopped. There was dead air. Then a weird high warbling tone came over the radio as they got in sight of Stewart’s house.

  “Video portum,” said Stewart, his face ashen.

  * * *