The Cat's Pajamas (19 page)

The car puttered up close to me and then sort of ran out of gas. The man behind the wheel looked at me and I looked at him. He was tall, even sitting in his seat, and his face was bony and his hands were bony on the wheel. There was a crumpled hat on his head, and he had a three-day beard. His eyes looked like he'd been in a night storm forever.

He waited for me to speak.

I walked over and all I could say was “You lost?”

He looked at me with his steady gray eyes. His head didn't move, but his lips did. “No, not now. Is this the Dust Bowl?”

I sort of pulled back and then I said, “I haven't heard those words since I was a kid. Yeah, this is it.”

“And this is Route 66?”

I nodded.

“That's how I figured,” he said. “Well, if I go straight on, will I get where I want to go?”

“Where's that?”

He looked at my uniform and his shoulders sort of sagged. “I was looking for, I think, a police station.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because,” he said, “I think I want to give myself up.”

“Well, maybe you can give yourself up to me. But why would you want to do that?”

“Because,” he said, “I think I killed some folks.”

I looked back down the road to where the dust was settling. “Back there?” I said.

He looked over his shoulder very slowly and nodded. “Yup, back there.” The wind went high again and the dust was thick.

“How long ago?” I said.

He closed his eyes. “Some time during the last few weeks.”

“Folks?” I said. “Killed? How many?”

He opened his eyes and his eyelashes quivered. “Four, no, five. Yeah, five people, dead now. Good riddance. Do I give myself up to you?”

I hesitated because something was wrong. “This is too easy. You've got to say more.”

“Well,” he said, “I don't know how to tell you, but I've been driving this road for a long time. Gotta be years.”

Years, I thought. That's how I felt too, that he'd been driving for years.

“And then what?” I said.

“These people sort of got in the way. One of them looked like my pa and the other looked like my ma when she was very young and the third one looked like my brother, but he's long dead. I used to have another brother and sister, and they were there too. It was so damned strange.”

“Five people?” I said. And my mind went back to the days behind and the five people I'd found on the road between Kansas City and Oklahoma. “Five?”

He nodded. “That's it.”

“Well,” I said, “what had they done? Why would you want to kill them?”

“They was just on the road,” he said. “I don't know how they got there, but the way they dressed and the way they looked, I knew something was wrong and I had to stop and fix each one, make them drop forever. I just had to do it.” He looked at his hands on the steering wheel, which were clenched tight.

“Hitchhikers?” I said.

“Not exactly,” he said. “Something worse. Hitchhikers are okay, they're going somewhere. But these folks, they were just poachers I guess. Claim jumpers, criminals, robbers of some sort. It's hard to say.” He looked back down the road again where the dust was beginning to stir up just a bit.

“Do you ever come out of church Sunday noon, feeling clean, like you had another chance for who knows what, and you stand there, reborn, with folks happy unto joy, as the preacher says, and then in the midst of noon folks from across town drive up in their dark suits and undertake you, I mean undertake your happiness with their demon smiles, and you stand there with your folks and feel the joy just melt away like a spring thaw and when they see they've undertook your joy they drive away in their own kind of sinful undertaking of happiness?”

The driver stopped, added up the sums inside his eyelids, and at last let his breath out. “Ain't that a sort of, I don't know, kind of—” He searched and found the word. “Blasphemy?”

I waited, thought, and said, “That's the word.”

“We weren't doing nothing, just standing there, fresh out of the revival, and they just came by and undertook us.”

“Blasphemy,” I said.

“I was only ten, but that was the first time in my life I wanted to grab a hoe and rake their smiles. And you stand there, feeling naked. They've stolen your Sunday best. Don't you think I got a right to just say give back, hand over, I'll take that coat, shuck off those pants and the hat too, yeah, the hat?”

“Five people,” I said. “An older man, a woman, a younger man, and two kids. That sounds familiar.”

“Then you know what I'm saying. They were wearing those clothes. It's funny, the clothes they were wearing, it looked like they had been through the Dust Bowl, stayed there a long time, and maybe lived out in the open and slept at night with the wind blowing and their clothes getting full of dust and their faces sort of getting thin and I looked at each one and I said to the older man, ‘You're not my pa.' And the old man couldn't answer. I looked at the woman and said, ‘You're not my ma,' and she didn't answer either. And I looked at my brother and my other younger brother and sister and said, ‘I
don't know any of you. You look right, but you feel wrong. What are you doing on this road?' Well, they didn't say anything. They was kind of, I don't know, ashamed maybe, but they wouldn't get out of the way. They were standing in front of the car, and I knew if I didn't do something they wouldn't let me go on to Oklahoma City. So you know what I did?”

“Put a stop to them,” I said.

“
Stop
is a good word. Yank off the clothes, I thought to myself. They don't deserve to have those clothes. Take away their skin, I thought, because they don't deserve to look like my mom and dad and brothers and sister. So I sort of edged the car forward, but they didn't move and they couldn't speak because they was ashamed and the wind came up and I moved the car. As I moved, they fell down in front of it and I drove straight on and when I looked back I hoped the bottom of the car had ripped their clothes off, but no, they were still full dressed, which they didn't deserve, and they were lying there on the road, and if they was dead I wasn't sure, but I hoped they was. I got out and went back and one by one I picked them up, put them in the back of the car, and I took off down the road with the dust rising and I laid them out here and there and somewhere else, and by that time they didn't look like any of my folks at all. That's a peculiar story, don't you figure?”

“It's peculiar,” I said.

“Well then,” he said, “that's it. I've told it all. You gonna take me in?”

I looked into his face and looked down the road and I thought of the bodies still lying in the coroner's office in Topeka. “I'll think about it,” I said.

“What do you mean?” he said. “I've told it all. I'm guilty. I did them in.”

I waited. The wind and the dust were rising even more. I said, “No. Strange, I don't think you're guilty. Don't know why, but I don't think you are.”

“Well, it's getting late,” he said. “You want to see my identification?”

“If you want to show it,” I said.

He pulled a battered wallet out of his pocket and handed it over. There was no driver's license, just an old card with a name on it I couldn't quite read, but it looked familiar, something out of the newspapers long before I was born. The back of my neck got real cold and I said, “Where you heading after this?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But I'm feeling better than when I started the trip. What's ahead up there on the road?”

“Same as always,” I said. “California, postcards, oranges, lemons, maybe government camps, bungalow courts.” I handed him back his card and wallet. “There's a police station about ten miles ahead. By the time you get there, if you still feel you've gotta give yourself up, do it there, but I'm not your man.”

“How come?” he said, his eyes quiet and gray and steady.

“All I know is sometimes some people don't deserve to wear the clothes that they wear or wear the faces that they got. Some people,” I said at last, “get in the way.”

“I drove real slow,” he said.

“And they didn't move.”

“Right,” he said. “I just went right over them and that was it and I felt good. Well, I guess I better be gettin' on.”

I stood back and let the car drift. It went down the road, the driver hunched over the wheel, his hands on the steering wheel and the dust following him as he got smaller in the twilight.

I stood watching him for the next five minutes until he was gone. By that time the wind was rising and the dust was filling my eyes. I couldn't tell where I was or if I was crying. I went back to my motorcycle, got on, hit the throttle, and turned around and went the other way.

I
WAS NEAR THE SKY
when the silver ship flew down to us. I drifted through the high trees on the great morning web and all my friends came with me. Our days were always the same and always good and we were happy. But we were also happy to see the silver carrier drop from space. For it meant a new but not unreasonable change in our tapestry, and we felt we could adjust to the pattern, even as we had adjusted to all the ravelings and unravelings of a million years.

We are an old and a wise race. We considered space travel at one time and gave it up, for it meant that the refinement we were seeking in our own lives would be torn like a web in a storm, and a one-hundred-thousand-year philosophy interrupted just when it was bearing the ripest and most agreeable fruit. We decided to stay here on our rain and jungle world and live peacefully at ease.

But now—this silver craft from the heavens gave us a stir of quiet adventure. For here came travelers from some other planet who had chosen a course diametrically opposed to ours. The night, they say, has much to teach the day, and the sun, they continue, may light the moon. So I went happily, my friends went happily, in a glide, in a pleasant dream, down toward the jungle clearing where lay the silver carrier.

I must describe the afternoon: the great web cities glittered with cool rain, the trees freshly rinsed with falling waters, and now the sun bright. I had partaken of an especially succulent meal, the good wine of the humming jungle-bee, and a warm languor tempered and made my excitement all the more enjoyable.

But—a curious thing: while all of us, numbering perhaps a thousand, gathered about the craft in friendly demeanor and attitude, the ship did nothing, it remained firmly unto itself. Its portals did not open. Momentarily, I thought I glimpsed some creature at a small port above, but perhaps I was mistaken.

“For some reason,” I said to my friends, “the inhabitants of this beautiful craft are not venturing forth.”

We discussed this. We decided that perhaps—the reasoning of animals from other worlds being possibly of a divergent nature from our own—that perhaps they felt somewhat outnumbered by our welcoming committee. This seemed doubtful, but nevertheless I transmitted this sentiment to the others about us, and in less than a second the jungle trembled, the great golden webs shivered, and I was left alone by the ship.

I then advanced, in a breath, to the port and said aloud: “We welcome you to our cities and lands!”

I was soon pleased to note that some machinery was working within the ship. After a minute the portway opened.

No one appeared.

I called out in a friendly voice.

Ignoring me, a conversation was in rapid progress inside the ship. I understood none of it, naturally, for it was in a foreign tongue. But the essence of it was bewilderment, some little anger, and a tremendous, and to me strange, fear.

I have a precise memory. I remember that conversation, which meant nothing, which still means nothing to me. The words stand in my mind now. I need only pluck them and give them to you:

“
You
go out, Freeman!”

“No,
you
!”

A bumble of indecision, a mixing of apprehension, followed. I was on the point of repeating my friendly invitation when a single creature picked its way carefully from the ship and stood looking up at me.

Curious. The creature shook in mortal fear.

I was much concerned, immediately. I could not understand this senseless panic. Certainly I am a mild and honorable individual. I bore this visitor no malice; indeed, the machinery of malice last rustled long ago on our world. Yet here the creature was, pointing what I understood to be a metal weapon at me, and trembling. The thought of killing was in the creature's mind.

I immediately soothed him.

“I am your friend,” I said and repeated it, as a thought, as an emotion. I put the warmness in my mind, a love, and a promise of a long and happy life, and this I sent to the visitor.

Well, where it had not responded to my spoken word, it responded, visibly, to my telepathy. It—relaxed.