As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth (9 page)

R
y opened his eyes. He pulled the warm cocoon of his sleeping bag up to his chin. The other sleeping bag was rolled up. A dream had evaporated, but not before leaving stray scraps of unease in odd places in his brain. His gaze fell, unseeing, on the faded red-and-blue flowery curtains ruched across the windows. Faint reddish light through the curtains illuminated his private capsule to the dimness of a cave or the inside of a tavern. Footfalls crunched purposefully outside, then a sound that must have been the hood of the truck being raised on unwilling hinges. Tinkering sounds—tapping, frictional, scraping, loosening, and tightening sounds.

Ry sat up, pushed open a crack between the two sides of the curtain, and peeked out. Maybe the morning light would reveal that the truck had died not far from a
farmhouse or a gas station or a Burger King. But, no. He checked in three directions, the front being obscured by the raised hood. On the bright side, it looked like they were parked in a very low-crime zone. And it looked like another sunny day.

He tried to recall how they had gotten inside so he could get back out. Oh, yeah, he had to crawl up to the front seat. And there were his new old shoes. He rolled up his bag, put on the shoes and his sweatshirt, crawled over, and let himself out into the cool morning air. His own footfalls crunched purposefully away toward a stand of brush, in case a car went by, he supposed, then back to where Del stood looking at something he held in his hand.

Del reached up and pulled the hood down with a heavy thunk.

“I guess we better start walking,” he said. “I think we’re closer to something ahead than back. Maybe we’ll pick up a ride.”

Ry looked up and down the empty highway.

“It is a highway,” Del said. “People do drive on it.

“Anyway,” he said, a minute or two later, “I don’t think we’re too far from the next little town. I don’t think it can be more than five miles or so.”

“Five miles?” said Ry.

“That’s only a couple hours’ walk,” said Del. “I doubt it’s even that far.”

Ry glanced back at the truck as they headed down the shoulder of the road. It seemed at home there in the timeless earthy expanse. It blended right in. It looked like it was planning to stay. Marry a local rock and put down roots. By the time they got back, there would probably be young tumbleweeds nesting and mating in the cab.

Del showed him the automotive object he was carrying. He had extricated it from under the hood and taken it apart. It was a generator. He explained what it did and showed Ry where the wire that wrapped around it had broken. It would have to be soldered back together. It would just wrap around one less time.

“Couldn’t we sort of twist it together, like a twisty thing on a bread bag?” asked Ry.

“No,” said Del, “it wouldn’t be a good-enough contact. And it would be lumpy. And besides that, it would be shoddy.”

He said the word “shoddy” as if it tasted bad to have it in his mouth. As if Ry had suggested taking food meant for a hungry child.

“Sorr-ree,” said Ry wryly. “It was just an idea.”

Del’s eyes were hidden by the shadow of his sunglasses and his cap from the morning brightness that doused them from the east, but his cheeks and what Ry could see of his mouth seemed to be in the shape of being amused.

Ry didn’t have sunglasses or a cap to shade his eyes, so he looked down or off to the side a lot, to avoid the glare. To the left, the north, he saw the strand of trees that meant water, a stream or a river. He thought of his lost boot. What if it was floating along right beside them? That would be kind of ironic. Maybe they should go look. Although now he didn’t have the other one. He had chucked it into a trash can outside the thrift shop.

Another river thought popped into his mind, and he reached down into the corner of the cargo pocket on his shorts and fished out the little skull. He had forgotten about it. It weighed almost nothing. It was kind of amazing that he had slept in his shorts for two nights without crushing it, or feeling it.

“What kind of animal do you think this was?” he asked, handing it to Del. Del took it and looked it over with interest, but without breaking his stride.

“Where did you find it?” he asked.

Ry told him, and said, “First I wondered what
happened to him, then I wondered, why aren’t there little skulls all over; why is this the only one?”

“I think nature is more efficient than we are at garbage disposal,” said Del. “But it does seem like there would be more of them, like they would take a while to go away, when you think of the really old ones that they find.”

Handing it back to Ry, he said, “It’s not my area of expertise, but it must have been some kind of a rodent. I couldn’t say what kind.”

“Probably the predators chomp them right up, even their skulls,” said Ry. “Probably fifty percent of what we’re walking around on is undigested skull bits.”

Del grinned. “You might be right about that,” he said. “Though I’d prefer to think about it a little less graphically.”

A spattering of cars and trucks had zipped past in one direction or the other as they walked down the road, but no one had stopped. Finally the rasp of a dragging muffler approached from behind and slowed to keep pace alongside them. The muffler trailed from the underside of a road boat, a slab on wheels, an Oldsmobile. The car rolled to a stop. It was white, with a spray of rust speckled thick across the hood where blowing sand had blasted away the paint. The window lowered and the
driver leaned over and said, “You fellas need a lift?”

Del stepped up, rested his hands on top of the door, and peered in.

“Just to the next town, if you’re going that far,” he said. “We’re having a little car trouble.”

“Hop in,” said the man. “You’ll both have to ride up front; the backseat seems to be full.”

They could see that was true; the back was piled high with cardboard cartons.

Ry slid to the middle and Del sat down beside him and pulled the door slab shut. Ry fished surreptitiously behind himself, searching for a seat belt in the crevice, but with no luck. The driver wore no seat belt and Del didn’t seem to have found one either, and Ry guessed that no seat belts had been worn in this car for a long, long time.

They lurched forward and slammed to a halt to let another car fly by, then peeled out onto the highway. In no time they reached their cruising speed of Mach one. Ry was just guessing at this; the speedometer needle lay lifeless at zero. The landscape rattled by. The air-freshening cardboard pine tree jiggled a few inches in front of his nose, intertwined with a Saint Christopher’s medal.

Ry slipped his hands between his knees to take up less space and to conceal his crossed fingers.

T
heir host was Carl. Wooly coils of silvery-white hair forested the back and sides of his head, thinning to a zone of barren scrub at the tree line of the shiny dome of his head. His mustache was waxed into handlebars. He was comfortably rounded, like a small planet, with an atmosphere made up of warmth and good humor and aftershave.

“So,” he asked, “are you from around here, or just passing through?”

He wanted to hear all about their car trouble and where they were headed and where they were from. When they told him, he said, “Is that right.” Or, “Isn’t that something.” As if it was the most interesting thing he had come across yet.

The sediment of dirt deposited evenly across the
windshield, punctuated by the dried fluids of unfortunate insects, glowed incandescent in the sunlight. It was like trying to see through dandelion fluff.

Carl fiddled with the wiper wand until a spit’s worth of fluid came out and the wiper blades did their best to spread it around. This smeared the dirt into a translucent blindfold. Although it did clear off a few small areas to almost-transparency. Ry hoped Carl could see through them.

“It’s all right,” said Carl calmly. “I can look out the sides. We’re okay so long as we stay between the ditches.”

He leaned out the window.

“I can’t see much anyway,” he said, just as cheery. “Cataracts.”

Ry noticed that though they were staying between the ditches, they were drifting from side to side, all the way across the road. He couldn’t see out the front, but he could see that sometimes there was a lane to their left, sometimes to the right. And he felt the physical sensation of veering one way and then the other. There wasn’t a whole lot of oncoming traffic, but still. It made him nervous. He glanced at Del, but Del was leaning out of his window, looking into the distance. Ry wondered
how Carl had seen the two of them in the first place. He had to be able to see pretty decently for that, right?

Carl leaned out his window, too, squinting into the brightness. The moving air lifted clumps of his hair so that he resembled an elderly sheep, face into the wind. Drawing his head back inside, he asked Ry again where they were from, and where they were going. When Ry mentioned the car trouble, his kindly features were gently shaded with concern.

“Is that right,” he said. “Isn’t that something.”

“You’re all clear to get back in the right-hand lane now,” said Del.

They meandered into their own lane in time to dodge an oncoming tractor trailer. The driver blasted his horn as he brushed past.

“That was a little close,” said Del.

“I’ve had a lot of close calls.” Carl smiled. He seemed to be untroubled by their brush with disaster.

“When you’re in the service, you never know what’s going to happen next,” he said. “You get used to it.”

“What branch?” asked Del.

“Marines,” said Carl. “Korea. The infamous winter of 1950. Below-zero temperatures for weeks, in leather shoes. We were on the front lines, so we couldn’t even
have fires. To this day, I have no feeling from the knees down.”

He looked at them, and Ry could tell Carl had just let them in on what had been an unimaginably grueling part of his life: a cold, cold fire that he had passed through, a crucible that had formed him. You had to respect that. At the same time, Ry wished mightily that he were not captive, maybe soon to be a casualty, in a car being hurled headlong down the road by a guy who couldn’t see much, who couldn’t remember what you said two minutes ago, and who had just told you that he had no feeling in the part of his body he was driving the car with.

Ry’s mouth opened and he said, “Huh.”

Carl had to be fibbing, or at least exaggerating. He had to have some feeling in his foot to keep it pressed down on the gas pedal. Especially at the speed they were going. Though maybe a lead foot and a dead-weight foot were about the same. He glanced down at Carl’s senseless foot. It was wearing a bedroom slipper. One of those corduroy ones designed to look like a loafer. Pajama pants peeked out from under his trouser legs.

“So,” said Carl brightly, “are you from around here, or just passing through?”

The car drifted into the westbound lane and continued
there. Maybe it was easier for Carl to go straight if he could see the edge of the road. Up close.

Del was still hanging out the window, peering down the road. Ry guessed that his plan was to be Carl’s eyes and nudge him out of the path of danger. It was a good plan. Except that the three large animals that went bounding majestically across the road materialized on Carl’s side of the car. They seemed to come out of nowhere. Carl saw them just in time to brake into a sideways skid, so Ry got to see them, too, through Del’s window, before the car spun completely backward and came to a halt. He turned and looked again through Carl’s window in time to see the lovely animals bound away, unfazed.

Maybe they were fazed. Ry was fazed. Carl seemed unfazed as he turned the car again and drove on. He seemed to be aiming for the middle of the road now.

He was a really nice old man. He might be somebody’s grandfather. Ry didn’t want to hurt his feelings or be rude. But he also didn’t want to die. He looked at Del. Del’s face was on heightened alert, but he also appeared to be sticking with his look-down-the-road plan.

“What were they?” asked Ry.

“What were who?” asked Carl.

“Those animals that went across the road,” said Ry. “They looked like deer, but different.”

“Could have been,” said Carl. “I can’t say I was really paying attention.”

“They were antelope,” said Del. “Pronghorn antelope.”

The car swerved abruptly back to the right and a couple of cars screamed by. The faces of the drivers of the cars turned toward Carl like sunflowers following the sun. Their mouths formed angry words. They made hand gestures.

“I don’t know where everybody’s going,” said Carl, shaking his head. “Look around,” he said, chuckling. “There’s no place to go!”

Ry wished he could see better through the smeared windshield. He wished the dials on the dashboard worked. All of the needles rested, lifeless, at zero. Zero mph, zero rpm, zero gas. Zero mph sounded really good right now. Zero gas might be a good thing, if it were true. If they ran out of gas, they could get out of the barreling behemoth death trap. Dessicated insects had collected in the crevices both inside and outside the dials. Trying to get in, trying to get out.

Another dark, blurry shape seemed to be materializing
in the distance, growing in size and in loudness of rumbling. It pixelated ahead of them. In their lane. Which was legally its lane. It was time for a new plan. And a brilliantly simple idea formed in Ry’s mind. He would say he was sick and he had to throw up. It was even sort of true. Once he got out of the car, he would not get back in. He would walk forever; he did not care now how far.

He was about to put his plan into action—his lips had parted to speak—when Del said, “Hey, Carl, can you pull over to the right up here? This is our stop.”

“Hm?” said Carl. “Oh. All right. Of course. We’ll just pull right over.”

As he spoke, he somehow relocated his unfeeling, slippered foot onto the brake pedal and gradually slowed the car. He reflexively flipped on his turn signal, steered expertly into the narrow parking area in front of a long, low shedlike building, stopped neatly at the opening onto the porch. A competent driver had stepped forward on the runaway bus that was Carl, a cowboy jumped onto the wild pony and settled it down. A fragment of the real Carl, unfogged by time, had surfaced. Momentarily.

Ahead of them large, bright letters on a giant sign that even Carl’s eyes could make out told them that this
was
CECILE’S TRADING POST
. Underneath it said that Cecile’s had
GAS
*
SNACKS
*
AMMO
*
BAIT
*
SOUVENIRS
*
CRAFTS
.

“Out looking for souvenirs, are you?” asked Carl.

“I need some postcards,” said Del. “I want to write to my friends and tell them about my vacation.” He was out of the car. Ry was right behind him.

“Good for you,” said Carl. “Tell them all I said hello.”

“Thanks for the lift,” said Ry.

“Glad to help out,” said Carl. He winked. “My good deed for the day.”

He threw the car into reverse, cranked the steering wheel, and reared back in a tight arc. But before he could pull out, Del was over at the passenger side window again, his hands resting on the door.

“Listen,” he said. “I noticed your muffler is dragging. I can hook it up so it doesn’t drag till you can get somewhere, if you have a coat hanger in the car. Take me about two seconds.”

“Oh, I don’t have anything like that, I don’t think,” said Carl. Looking over his shoulder into the backseat.

“Let me just ask inside this place then,” said Del. “They probably have something we can use. Can you hang on just a minute while I go in and see?”

“Well, all right,” said Carl.

“I’ll be right back,” said Del. As he passed Ry, he said, “Go talk to him. Don’t let him drive away.”

Ry stepped uncertainly toward the car, his hands in his pockets.

“So…,” he said. He hadn’t had a lot of practice at making conversation with old geezers. Except for his grandfather, but that was different. His grandfather still had all his marbles.

“So, what’s in all those boxes back there?” he asked.

Carl looked over his shoulder again, then back at Ry.

“No idea,” he said. “Looks like someone’s moving, maybe.”

“Aren’t they yours?” asked Ry.

“Nope,” said Carl. “I never saw them before today.”

“How did they get in your car?” asked Ry.

“Oh, this isn’t my car,” said Carl. “I don’t have a car. I used to have cars. I have had many, many a car in my time.” He smiled, a sweet smile. A glimmer of—mischief?—seemed to pass through his eyes. Ry wondered if he had imagined it. He knew Del had only been inside for a couple of minutes, but it seemed like forever. He couldn’t think of any more topics.

He was about to ask, Well, whose car is it then? when
hinges creaked behind him. He turned with relief to see Del come back outside with a coat hanger in his hand.

“Got one,” said Del, holding it up. “This should do it.”

But in the passing instant that the top half of Ry was turned toward Del, the lower half of Carl found a way to let his weight fall hard on the gas pedal. The Oldsmobile spun out of the dirt and clattered up onto the hard road, throwing up a choking curtain of dust into their faces. It roared off.

By the time they could see it again, the Oldsmobile was half a mile away.

“I hope he doesn’t kill anyone,” said Del.

“Should we report him? To the police or something?” asked Ry.

“I reported him to Cecile,” said Del. “She said she would call. I guess we better go ask her to call again.”