The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (32 page)

The I-20 tape is a put-up job. You can argue that the video was manipulated, or even created from whole cloth, and don't think I haven't heard plenty of speculation along those lines. I've known people who could talk themselves blue in the face when it came to crash trajectories and video grain—and would, too, if you'd let them. But when it comes down to brass tacks, I agree with them. I've been around cars my whole life, and back in my NASCAR days I must have seen half a hundred crashes or more. Simply put, the overcorrection on the video isn't sufficient to cause the Dragon to roll. I know. I built the damn thing. The air dam was low and wide, never mind the weight of the rolled-steel armor. The downforce on that car was tremendous. Even in the skid, those tires would have stuck to that pavement like glue.

But let's assume for a moment that I'm wrong. Let's assume the video
is
real.

The question then is the matter of provenance. It can't be confirmed that the tape came in only half an hour after the crash. We have only New Fed assurances on that score, and the official files remain closed. And what about the cleanup? Where are the investigators and where are the glib network newsfaces doing stand-ups in front of the wreckage, their flawless features sculpted by the strobing blue and red beacons of the emergency lights? The most notorious outlaw of his era had just been killed. Where are the boots on the ground?

As for Lightning Jack, I did for him myself.

I suppose you've figured that out on your own by now, but I don't think any of us—even me—knew that I was capable of such a thing. Tension weighed heavily upon the farm by then. The sense that New Fed agents might any moment sweep down out of the hills was palpable, and we kept our weapons close to hand. After Eileen's revelation, Lola and I continued to share a bed. As long as she didn't leave, we could both—we could all—pretend it hadn't happened. But Eileen put Jack out of her room. Without explanation—he was the wheelman, after all, and he owed no explanations—he took to sleeping in the hammock, in the warm summer air. It was there that I did the thing.

It was nothing I had planned. I was drinking whiskey in the darkened kitchen one sleepless night, that's all, and I caught a glimpse of him through the window, dozing there. The knife lay in the drainer, close to hand. Without thinking about it, I took it and stepped outside. My foot fell upon the squeaky riser of the porch steps, but he didn't wake up. If he had, everything would have been different. We might have talked the thing through. I might have let his charm seduce me yet again. But he merely stirred, murmured something unintelligible, and lapsed back into slumber. He never knew a thing until I slipped the knife between his ribs—I can still remember just how easy it went in—and even then I don't think he believed it. He gazed up at me with a question in his eyes—a kind of wonder, I think, that I could betray him. He opened his mouth to speak, and I laid my hand across his lips. I leaned in close to his ear and began to slowly twist the blade, like a man tightening a lug nut.

“Shhh,” I said. “Be still now, Jack. It's time to sleep.”

A heartbeat passed, and then another, and then he did.

It's the rest of the thing I've never been able to figure to my satisfaction. We're entering the realms of pure speculation here, but I believe New Fed agents really
had
infiltrated Little Rock, and they must have been watching the farm for days, maybe longer. I slipped the noose, that's all. I hoofed it past dawn. Somewhere around eight a.m., I flagged down a bus out of Conway. I changed at the East Washington station in Little Rock, surrendering up a handful of cash for the first stagecoach out of town. It dropped me in Jackson, Mississippi, where I holed up in a cheap motel for weeks, living on vodka and takeout. As best I can figure, sometime during that period New Fed agents must have taken the farm. I can imagine it all too clearly: the stark white flare of muzzle flash in the darkness, the hiccup of automatic weapons, the crew falling one by one, their bodies riddled by New Federal slugs—Joe Hauser, Dean Ford, and the rest, Lola most of all. I can see her lying in the doorway to the farmhouse, her arm flung out toward the still-smoking SAR bullpup she cherished, her body cooling as the sun rises over the Arkansas hills. I can see the blood. Imagination, I know, but sometimes imagination is enough. Sometimes it's too much, and I wonder that a man as practical as I am—an engine man to the core—should be cursed with so much of it.

The New Feds must have been furious at being deprived of their prize. Three months after I landed in Biloxi and nailed down a straight job—hydraulics, again—Buffalo released the tape and Lightning Jack's saga came to an end. But the oil raids weren't over, not yet. Lightning Jack had shown how the thing was done, and the Midwestern Alliance and the New Confederacy both had borrowed the technique, upped the firepower, and started knocking off entire convoys. The Feds—as Lola had put it to me in Birmingham all those months ago—armored up. Military escorts tripled in size, heavy ordnance came into play, and the tankers themselves became rolling dreadnoughts. Cutting one out of the pack was a suicide mission—as Gallant Jim found out in the Oak Park Massacre. Not two months later, Federal agents killed Victor Albertini in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel. Mason, Cholewinski, and Smilin' Susie Samowitz all went down in the months that followed. The Age of the Gasoline Outlaw was officially over.

Me? I kept my head down and waited for the New Feds to come for me. They never did. It's been a lonesome kind of life these last forty years. There've been women now and again, but no one steady. I had too much road behind me to really settle down, and I don't think I ever did get over Lola. Now that I'm an old man, with eighty looming just beyond the horizon, I find myself thinking of her more often—and the truth is, not an hour has passed in all those years past that I didn't think of her already. You probably reckon that I dwell on her betrayal at the end, but the truth is I think mostly of the good days that came before. There were a lot of those good days, more than our fair share, considering the circumstances. We loved each other with a ferocity and desperation that only the hunted can know. And more important still, we had the things we loved in common to bind us together—love of the pavement and the rolling iron that ran across it and the mighty engines that made them go. As for the betrayal, I don't blame her much. As I've said, there wasn't a woman on the planet that Lightning Jack couldn't charm out of her knickers in ten minutes flat. She never had a chance, and neither did I.

If I'm going to be honest about it—and I don't see why I shouldn't be—I don't think Jack did, either. I guess I miss him most of all. I forgave him. I believe he was a prisoner: to his charisma and to his ego, to his skills and to his hunger for victory, and to the fame all those things together bought him. And despite all the harm we did—and we did great harm, I'll be the first to admit it; every night I am borne to sleep on a tide of blood—for all that harm, I believe to this day that Jack didn't have a bone of true malice in him. He just wanted to drive, and like a thousand other gearheads who cruised the night streets on black-market gasoline in those days, he was going to find a way to do it. The only difference is that he was Lightning Jack, had been all his life, and couldn't find a way to stop being Lightning Jack. He was a competitor; he had to have a stage. He never could pit before it was too late, and in the end he got everyone he loved—and he did love us in his way, I'm sure of that—killed. I have many regrets about those days, but I guess what I regret most of all is that I wasn't there to take my final stand with Lola and the rest of them. I betrayed them all. I should have stood by my wheelman to the end. There is something sacred about the work that binds a crew together, and I profaned that bond, and I have lived too long with my regret. I'm glad the finish line is in sight at last. I don't think I could stand another lap.

WILL KAUFMAN

FROM
Lightspeed Magazine

“D
ON'T GO DOWN
to the well,” said Theo to his son. So of course Tim went to the well. He was thirteen, and his father told him not to. There was no magic to it.

To get to the well—and not the well in the center of the village, because everyone knows where that well is, and no one has any stories about it except for whose grandfather dug it and how soon it's going to go dry—you've got to go around behind the butcher's, to the bottom of the muddy slope at the edge of the wood that the butcher says he doesn't throw his offal down. Everybody knows the butcher throws offal down the slope so the wet gentleman will eat that instead of crawling up to eat the butcher's daughter.

At the bottom of the slope, look for the bones of the burnt cottage in among the willows, then look for the moon. You know this only works at night, don't you? The wet gentleman won't come out during the day. Walk toward the point halfway between the moon and the cottage, and eventually you'll come to the well.

Tim sneaked from his father's house with a penny in his hand and his dog at his side, a dog that he loved because it would never lie to him or trick him, that he would play with even when the other children invited him to join their games, because when he told the other children to follow him, or wait for him, they would laugh and run away, but not his dog. When his father tucked him into bed, it was his dog he asked for a last kiss good night, its cold nose snuffling at his cheek, because his dog never told him what to do or sent him to bed without his dinner for not minding, because what do dogs know? Maybe if Tim had been a king or a god, he could have loved the other children, or his father.

What happened to Tim when he went to the well? You must know how the story ends—or rather, that it never ends. Surely you've heard about the others who went to the well, like Ma Tathers.

When Ma Tathers went to the well, she got just what she paid for. She heard about the well because of what happened to Miser Horton, so she knew the wet gentleman lived there and would grant wishes if he was paid a penny. Miser Horton went because he knew the story of Little Susanne, and both of them got just what they paid for, too.

The story says Ma Tathers was so old when she walked the path between the moon and the burned-up cottage that her dugs dragged in the dirt. That's not a kind way to describe a poor old woman, but stories are seldom kind, especially to a poor old woman in a tattered housecoat, which was her only coat, which she wore thinner and thinner as she sat day after day patching up other people's clothes for pennies. Her eyes were milky, and she had to bring the cloth and the needle right up to her mottled nose to see what she was doing. Her grandsons, whom she was raising because their parents had died, would say to her, “Don't stick that needle so close to your eye, Grandma. You'll poke it one day, and it'll fall right out.”

“That's no trouble,” Ma Tathers would say. “I always got the other one.” What she meant was “If my eye were worth a few pennies, I'd sell it right from my head.”

Even though Ma Tathers had heard the stories, the same stories you've heard, and knew better than to think she could trust the wet gentleman, she did not know what else she could do. She would never take charity, even when it was offered, as though some bone in her body, maybe her fourth rib or her left shin, was so stubborn or proud it made her shift her ponderous breast, lift her swollen leg, and turn away from any helping hand. Without charity, and with her eyes going, and her grandsons getting bigger and needing more to eat every day, Ma Tathers didn't see where she could afford to buy what she needed but from the wet gentleman.

The day she decided she would go to the well, Ma Tathers worked as fast as she could, the needle fleet in her crooked fingers. She stitched up every shirt and every pair of pants she could coax from the villagers, but that night she had fewer pennies than she'd earned the day before, just four dull coins sitting on the rough wood of her bare table. Spending one that night would mean three pennies for the next day's meals, and while the boys might not complain, their stomachs would grumble mightily. Of course, their stomachs would never grumble again once Ma Tathers got what she paid for at the well.

So she walked the moonlit path, and she dropped her penny down the dark stone mouth of the crumbling well. Instead of the ringing of a coin hitting stone, or the plop of metal falling into swampy muck, Ma Tathers heard the squelch of wet silk and the pattering of dripping water. The wet gentleman emerged from the well, top hat first, eyes hidden, shadowed from the moonlight by the flat brim. His face was long, home to a wide mouth that turned down at the corners. His suit was fine silk, his shoes shined even in the night, and he leaned on an ivory cane. All his raiment was soaked through, and water ran from all the creases, and a puddle formed at his feet. He was very tall, very thin, and Ma Tathers had not really expected him to exist.

The wet gentleman spoke with a voice deep and cold as his well. He said, “How does this night find you, madam?”

“I am tired,” said Ma Tathers, who always answered plainly.

The wet gentleman said, “
You
are tired? I have been down this well since the first brick of your village was laid, soaking in cold water, waiting for the nights someone drops a penny on my head so I can crawl out and grant them a wish. But I forget myself, a gentleman never complains. Do tell me more about your troubles, miss.”

“Is it true?” asked Ma Tathers. “What they say about Miser Horton and about Little Susanne?”

The top hat bowed as the wet gentleman looked Ma Tathers up and down. “Surely you didn't spend what must be one of your few pennies to hear a story?”

“No,” said Ma Tathers. “I came because my grandsons are hungry, and I will not be able to feed them for much longer.”