Nightwise (29 page)

I leaned against the car and looked up at the glittering night. “And I'd let you,” I said. “I do appreciate it, man, I hope you know that, but you know the Life don't cut anyone a break. I'm right. I may suck at how I said it, but it's time to move on.”

Grinner leaned back too and crossed his arms. “There are people who are alone by choice,” Grinner said, “and then there are the ones who are just naturals at it. After all these years, I still don't know which one you are, man.”

He gestured for me to follow him, and we climbed the porch. He fished out a crumpled pack of smokes and offered me one. I grabbed it like a drowning man clutching at a life preserver. Grinner lit his, then mine.

“How the hell long did you have these?” I asked. Grinner, well, grinned.

“Since I got here. I just liked seeing you twist.”

I uttered a few quaint vulgarities and thanked him for the cig.

“Okay, I got what you asked for,” he said. “I wanted to tell you last night, but everyone, you included, seemed to be having a good time, and I knew you'd fuck that up sooner or later.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“Social engineering and programing have a lot in common,” he said. “It's garbage in, garbage out. I think you finally asked the right question, Ballard, because I did find some very interesting linkages between James Berman, his lover, Trace, and the Life.”

“Talk to me,” I said. “What did you find?”

“Well,” Grinner said, “you ever hear of an occult contract killer called Memitim?”

And then he told me what he had discovered.

“Okay,” I said when he was finished. “If you're willing, here's what I would like you to do…”

*   *   *

I hugged Christine good-bye and thanked her. I apologized for being, well, me and shook Grinner's hand.

“Awww,” Christine said. “I love you, Laytham. Even you can't be an asshole all the time.”

“Take care of that baby and that idiot you married,” I said. “And take extra good care of you, darlin'. The world would be a hell of a lot darker without you.”

Pam stood with me as the Mazda struggled down the rutted gravel road in the darkness, its headlights bobbing crazily as the car bounced and then disappeared from sight. It was dark, and the moon was beginning its decent behind the shadows of the forest. After a few minutes, there were no more car sounds.

“Well,” Pam said, “you got what you asked for. You're alone.”

“How's Bruce?” I asked.

“Fine.” She sighed. “Sleeping. Healing up until he finds another windmill to tilt at.”

“It must be hard taking care of him,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “But he'd die without me.”

“Yeah,” I said, “he would. Can you give me a ride to the truck stop?” I asked. “I'll find my way from there.”

“Sure,” Pam said. “I bet you will.”

The door banged shut behind her. I looked up at the moon. Heavy clouds were chasing her, trying to devour her, caught between the black teeth of the forest and the narrowing sky.

 

TWENTY-ONE

It was the devil's hour by the time I walked into the Pilot Flying J truck stop on North Valley Pike in Harrisonburg. The Flying J was like most major truck stops across the country—an independent city, a freehold just off the interstate, wreathed in sodium light, rows, streets, cabs and trailers rumbling in the darkness. Showers and lockers, public laundries, bins of audio books and spinners of paperback westerns and action series. Walls of driftwood souvenirs and racing memorabilia. And best of all, people—beautiful, living, breathing, traveling, laughing, drunk, exhausted people. Sit in a truck stop long enough and you will see all of human drama and nature unfold before you. Sometimes I think Heaven may resemble a truck stop.

I bought a huge energy drink that I think may have included the distilled soul of the Aztec jaguar god as an ingredient, a large black coffee, and two packs of American Spirits. Oh, and a great big fucking ice-cold Cheerwine. I had a double cheeseburger and fries to accompany my various elixirs. I sat at a booth with my bags and ate, drank, smoked, and watched.

I was sitting next to the truckers' section. Occasionally I'd place my right arm on the table at the elbow, horizontal to my body. I'd place my right index finger on the left side of my face at the eyebrow and slowly run my hand across my face, as if I was rubbing my eyes. I'd scan the restaurant for the appropriate response. About six thirty in the morning, in the raw-eyed dawn, I got an answer to my silent distress call. I stood and headed outside. It was cold, but after the heat of the Flying J, it felt good. People came and went, and numerous eighteen-wheelers and their loads roared to life in the early-morning light, pulling out of the lot and heading back on the highway.

A man in his thirties with blond hair, bright green eyes, and a scraggly beard swaggered out of the Flying J. He was a little over six feet tall and his build was pretty solid, but he was cultivating a solid beer gut over his worn jeans. His teeth were bad—yellow, brown, and a little crooked. He had on a faded black T-shirt with three wolves howling at a bright moon on the chest, over that was an open denim work shirt, and over that a black Air Force–style jacket with an American flag patch on the left arm. He wore a dark gray mesh trucker's baseball cap, which had one of the characters from
Squidbillies
on it. A golf-ball-sized lump of what I hoped was chaw rested in his right cheek. He looked me up and down, spit, and then walked over to me.

“Howdy,” he said. “You lookin' for some help, chief?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I need a ride to Covington, if you are headed that way.”

“I can be,” the trucker said. “You want to tell me why I should?”

“Ego quaero veneficus itinere meo custodiam vias fratrum. Mihi quaesiti iustum est, domine miles,”
I said.

The trucker replied without missing a beat.
“Ad iusta operandum, et viator quaereret bonum fraternitatis rotae praesidio ac tutela. Assumam te, mage,”
he said in heavily corn-pone-accented Latin. Then, “You ready to roll, chief?”

“Yeah, thank you,” I said. “Much obliged.”

“Company makes the road less lonely,” he said. “The name's Jimmie Aussapile. Pleased to make yer acquaintance. Let's ride.”

*   *   *

Jimmie's rig was a beauty, a Peterbilt 379, with all the bells and whistles. The cab was white and black with a red Jerusalem cross pattern on the hood and the doors, and he had added chrome pipes and a grille. The grille was also custom, carrying the mark of the Crusader's cross. We rolled out onto I-81 South and soon were headed toward Covington.

The cab was like a small house combined with the bridge of the USS
Enterprise.
Jimmie had an impressive surround-sound satellite radio and stereo that was currently playing “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams Sr. There was also a police scanner, a massive CB radio, a hidden panel with a suite of radar detectors, a laptop on a swivel mount with full wireless Internet access, a couple of different cell phones, routers, and modems, several navigator systems, and satellite TV on a small flat screen and on a large one in the cabin/bunkroom/galley that was behind the main cab.

A Saint Christopher medallion, an amulet of Hermes, a small clay tablet depicting the Egyptian god Min, and dozens of other charms and talismans representing patrons, gods, and spirits dedicated to the protection of travelers and of roads hung from Jimmie's rearview mirror. This gear shift appeared to be a pistol-grip shotgun partially sheathed in the transmission well. The Crusader's cross was stamped on the pistol grip.

“So how many of you guys are left?” I asked.

“The Brotherhood? More than you might think,” Jimmie said, turning down the stereo. “We keep a low profile. There are initiated members in over thirty countries now. The roads just keep gittin' more dangerous, and we're needed now more than ever.”

In
A.D.
1119, a group of nine crusaders became known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon—a militant monastic order given the commission of protecting pilgrims and caravans traveling along the roads to and from the Holy Land. This order would eventually grow in power, wealth, and fame to become the Knights Templar. In time, the Templars would be laid low, forced underground and into new roles as bankers, Masonic orders, and other agencies of power and influence. However, a small offshoot of the Templars endured and returned to the order's original commission, to defend the roads of civilization and to protect the pilgrims and goods that crossed them. Jessie Aussapile was of this line of Knights: truckers, state troopers, caravan cults, bikers—any of the folks that lived and worked among the asphalt arteries that crossed the land. They called themselves the Brotherhood of the Wheel.

“Historically, the health of a society is linked to the safety of its roads,” I said. “Ask the Romans about that.”

“Well, son, I can tell ya, it's gettin' scarier'n hell out here,” Jimmie said. He shifted and spit into an empty Dr Pepper bottle. “You got possessed biker gangs, those weird black-eyed children-things, interstate serial killer competitions, and haunted rest stops.

“Then you got the evils that ain't so sexy—coyotes smuggling folks across the border, killing half of them in the crossing from neglect, or jist plain killin' all of them and taking their money and selling their organs. Dirty cops shakin' folks down, some of them creating their own little kingdoms between exits. Eighteen-wheeler pirates robbin' cargos and desolating whole little communities, and then there is the child smugglin' routes. I swear, if'n I had enough good folk, we'd burn that whole damn train down to the ground. Not to mention the sumbitch banks and mortgage companies always tryin' to find some way to take away a man's livelihood. You can get robbed with a gun or with fees and charges, late payment penalties and front-loaded interest; a gun seems more honest. It's getting tougher to make a living and help folks out at the same time, harder to keep rolling, to stay alive.”

“Why do you do it?” I said.

“Shouldn't have to explain it to you, a wizard,” he said. “You do the same things. You see all the ugly in the world, and you got eyes and hands and you got to act. Can't help it, like your foot tappin' to a tune—don't even realize you doin' it sometimes till you're ass-deep in it. Man got a means in this world to spit in the badness's eye, an' he don't, well, he's part of the badness, then, ain't he.”

“I reckon so,” I said. “Some days, now, I don't feel I got enough left in me to even spit, Jimmie.”

Aussapile nodded, smiled. “I hear ya,” he said. “Thing 'bout this world, though, is give it a little time and it give all the reason you need to get riled up again.

“My pa, when he was driving and I was on the road with him, would tell me stories, old tales. There's the one about King Arthur—he gets screwed over by everyone he loves, all he fought for goes to hell, and he gets run through by his kin, his own flesh and blood. He's sick and dyin' and wantin' to die, but he still believes, still tryin' to save the future. He has 'em toss Excalibur back in the water till it's needed again, and then he sinks into Avalon, to rest and heal. You fight the world long enough, and sometimes you need an Avalon. Not to quit, just to heal and remember why you keep fightin'.”

“Wisdom,” I said. “Technically, back home they'd call me a Wisdom, not a wizard. Wizards ride giant eagles, got them pimp hats, British accents, stuff like that.”

“Where's back home?” he asked.

“Welch,” I said. “West Virginia, McDowell County. Born and bred.”

“I figured,” he said. “Yew talk funny.”

We both laughed, for what it was worth.

“So,” Jimmie said, “what's waitin' in Covington?”

“Avalon,” I said.

 

TWENTY-TWO

Jimmie arranged for me to meet up with one of his trucker buddies, who was local, and they would get me to Chicago when I was done here. It was late morning and I had time to kill and really only one place I knew I was welcome in this town.

Covington's a little city of about six thousand people, located where the Jackson River and Dunlap Creek bump into each other. It's a mill town—the main employer is a huge paper mill that's been there since 1890. It employs most of the city. You can see the mill pretty much from anywhere in Covington, huge plumes of white smoke rising into the brilliant blue sky. You can smell it too. Paper mills tend to give off a harsh chemical smell, like a massive fart. Some days that smell permeates the whole city and beyond. Folks who live here get tired of hearing about it. They're of a breed that tries to smell the roses and count their blessings. Covington was what I got for a home, and I have to admit, I had missed it.

When I ran away from Welch at thirteen, this is as far as I managed to make it. I stayed here till I was eighteen, more or less, and this became home. The only real home I ever had, after Granny.

Jimmie dropped me off on Durant Road, and I walked a few blocks through a quiet little suburb with rows of pretty little houses, most with porches. Today it felt more like early spring than winter, and that made me smile, like it was a present just for me, and maybe it was. There were lots of new pickups parked in front of houses with old paint. A chocolate-colored Rottweiler barked at me from behind a chain-link fence enclosing a yard.

I walked down Franklin Avenue—another quiet little street lined with huge oaks and tight rows of houses. The birds were singing. I could hear distant dogs barking, talking to the Rottweiler, and a cool wind crossed me and made the trees' bare limbs shudder. The third house on the left had a big tree next to the driveway and an open carport. I remembered splashing in the water hose in the backyard, games of tag, and lying on my back in the itchy grass in the hot, dark summer and watching stars.