Damnation Alley (13 page)

He sat up, discovered he was naked, looked around for his clothing. It was nowhere in sight.

As he sat there, deciding whether or not to call out, the door opened and Sam walked in. He carried Tanner's clothing, clean and neatly folded, over one arm. In his other hand he carried his boots, and they shone like wet midnight.

"Heard you stirring around," he said. "How you feeling now?"

"A lot better, thanks."

"We've got a bath all drawn. Just have to dump in a couple of buckets of hot, and it's all yours. I'll have the boys carry it in in a minute, and some soap and towels."

Tanner bit his lip, but he didn't want to seem inhospitable to his benefactor, so he nodded and forced a smile then.

"That'll be fine."

". . . And there's a razor and a scissors on the dresser, whichever you might want."

He nodded again. Sam set his clothes down on the rocker and his boots on the floor beside it, then left the room.

Soon Roderick and Caliban brought in the tub, spread some sacks and set it upon them.

"How you feeling?" one of them asked. (Tanner wasn't sure which was which. They both seemed graceful as scarecrows, and their mouths were packed full of white teeth.)

"Real good," he said.

"Bet you're hungry," said the other. "You slep' all afternoon yesterday, and all night, and most of this morning."

"You know it," said Tanner. "How's my partner?"

The nearer one shook his head, and, "Still sleeping and sickly," he said. "The Doc should be here soon. Our kid brother went after him last night."

They turned to leave, and the one who had been speaking added, "Soon as you get cleaned up, Ma'll fix you something to eat. Cal and me are going out now to try and get your rig loose. Dad'!! tell you about the roads while you eat."

"Thanks."

"Good morning to you."

They closed the door behind them as they left.

Tanner got up and moved to the mirror, studied himself.

"Well, just this once," he muttered.

Then he washed his face and trimmed his beard and cut his hair.

Then, gritting his teeth, he lowered himself into the tub, soaped up, and scrubbed. The water grew gray and scummy beneath the suds. He splashed out and toweled himself down and dressed.

He was starched and crinkly and smelled faintly of disinfectant. He smiled at his dark-eyed reflection and lit a cigarette. He combed his hair and studied the stranger. "Damn! I'm beautiful!" he chuckled, and then he opened the door and entered the kitchen.

Sam was sitting at the table drinking a cup of coffee, and his wife, who was short and heavy and wore long gray skirts, was facing in the other direction, leaning over the stove. She turned, and he saw that her face was large, with bulging red cheeks that dimpled and a little white scar in the middle of her forehead. Her hair was brown, shot through with gray, and pulled back into a knot. She bobbed her head and smiled a "Good morning" at him.

"Morning," he replied. "I'm afraid I left kind of a mess in the other room."

"Don't worry about that," said Sam. "Seat yourself, and we'll have you some breakfast in a minute. The boys told you about your friend?"

Tanner nodded.

As she placed a cup of coffee in front of Tanner, Sam said, "Wife's name's Susan."

"How do," she said.

"Hi."

"Now, then, I got your map here. Saw it sticking out of your jacket. That's your gun hanging aside the door, too. Anyhows, I've been figuring, and I think the best way you could head would be up to Albany, and then go along the old Route Nine, which is in pretty good shape." He spread the map and pointed as he talked. "Now, it won't be all of a picnic," he said, "but it looks like the cleanest and fastest way in...”

"Breakfast," said his wife, and pushed the map aside to set a plateful of eggs and bacon and sausages in front of Tanner, and another one, holding four pieces of toast, next to it. There was marmalade, jam, jelly, and butter on the table, and Tanner helped himself to it and sipped the coffee and filled the empty places inside while Sam talked.

He told him about the gangs that ran between Boston and Albany on bikes, hijacking anything they could, and that was the reason most cargo went in convoys with shotgun riders aboard. "But you don't have to worry, with that rig of yours, do you?" he asked, and Tanner said, "Hope not," and wolfed down more food. He wondered, though, if they were anything like his old pack, and he hoped not, again, for both their sakes.

Tanner raised his coffee cup, and he heard a sound outside.

The door opened, and a boy ran into the kitchen. Tanner figured him as between ten and twelve years of age. An older man followed him, carrying the traditional black bag.

"We're here! We're here!" cried the boy, and Sam stood and shook hands with the man, so Tanner figured he should, too. He wiped his mouth and gripped the man's hand and said, "My partner sort of went out of his head. He jumped me, and we had a fight. I shoved him, and he banged his head on the dashboard."

The doctor, a dark-haired man, probably in his late forties, wore a dark suit. His face was heavily lined, and his eyes looked tired. He nodded.

Sam said, "I'll take you to him," and he led him out through the door at the other end of the kitchen.

Tanner reseated himself and picked up the last piece of toast. Susan refilled his coffee cup, and he nodded to her.

"My name's Jerry," said the boy, seating himself in his father's abandoned chair. "Is your name really Hell?"

"Hush, you!" said his mother.

"'Fraid so," said Tanner.

". . . And you drove all the way across the country? Through the Alley?"

"So far."

"What was it like?"

"Mean."

"What all'd you see?"

"Bats as big as this kitchen, some of them even bigger, on the other side of the Missus Hip. Lot of them in Saint Louis."

"What'd you do?"

"Shot 'em. Burned 'em. Drove through 'em."

"What else you see?"

"Gila Monsters. Big, Technicolor lizards, the size of a barn. Dust Devils, big circling winds that sucked up one car. Fire-topped mountains. Real big thorn bushes that we had to burn. Drove through some storms. Drove over places where the ground was like glass. Drove along where the ground was shaking. Drove around big craters, all radioactive."

"Wish I could do that someday."

"Maybe you will, someday."

Tanner finished the food and lit a cigarette and sipped the coffee.

"Real good breakfast," he called out. "Best I've eaten in days. Thanks."

Susan smiled, then said, "Jerry, don't pester the man."

"No bother, missus. He's okay."

"What's that ring on your hand?" said Jerry. "It looks like a snake."

"That's what it is," said Tanner, pulling it off. "It is sterling silver with red-glass eyes, and I got it in a place called Tijuana. Here. You keep it."

"I couldn't take that," said the boy, and he looked at his mother, his eyes asking if he could. She shook her head from left to right, and Tanner saw it and said, "Your folks were good enough to help me out and get a doc for my partner and feed me and give me a place to sleep. I'm sure they won't mind if I want to show my appreciation a little bit and give you this ring," and Jerry looked back at his mother, and Tanner nodded, and she nodded too.

Jerry whistled and jumped up and put it on his finger.

"It's too big," he said.

"Here, let me mash it a bit for you. These spiral kind'll fit anybody if you squeeze them a little."

He squeezed the ring and gave it back to the boy to try on. It was still too big, so he squeezed it again, and then it fit.

Jerry put it on and began to run from the room.

"Wait!" his mother said. "What do you say?"

He turned around and said, "Thank you, Hell."

"Mr. Tanner," she said.

"Mr. Tanner," the boy repeated, and the door banged behind him.

"That was good of you," she said.

Tanner shrugged. "He liked it," he said. "Glad I could turn him on with it."

He finished his coffee and his cigarette, and she gave him another cup, and he lit another cigarette. After a time Sam and the doctor came out of the other room, and Tanner began wondering where the family had slept the night before. Susan poured them both coffee, and they seated themselves at the table to drink it.

"Your friend's got a concussion," the doctor said. "I can't really tell how serious his condition is without getting X rays, and there's no way of getting them here. I wouldn't recommend moving him, though."

Tanner said, "For how long?"

"Maybe a few days, maybe a couple weeks. I've left some medication and told Sam what do do for him. Sam says there's a plague in Boston and you've got to hurry. My advice is that you go on without him. Leave him here with the Potters. He'll be taken care of. He can go up to Albany with them for the Spring Fair and make his way to Boston from there on some commercial carrier. He may be all right."

Tanner thought about it awhile, then nodded. "Okay," he said, "if that's the way it's got to be."

"That's what I recommend."

They drank their coffee.

Hell Tanner and Jerry Potter walked through the chill morning. Wisps of mist drifted along the ground, and the grass shone as if chrome-plated. There was a light haze in the air, and Jerry's breath crystallized as he blew it out before him, and he said, "Look, Hell! I'm smoking!"

"Yeah," said Tanner. "Wonder if my car's free yet."

"Probably," said Jerry. "That's a pretty good team." Then, "What do you do, Hell? I mean in real life, when you're not driving?"

"I'm always driving," said Tanner, "something or other. I'm a driver, that's all."

"You going to do more driving after you get to Boston?"

Tanner cleared his throat and spat against a tree.

"I don't know. Probably. Or else work someplace where they take care of cars and bikes."

"You know what I want to be?"

"No. Tell me."

"A pilot. I want to fly."

Tanner shook his head. "You can't. Do you ever watch the birds? They don't go very high. They're scared to. You get up there in a plane, and those winds'll kill you."

"I could fly real low . . ."

"The terrain is too irregular, and the winds vary in altitude. Hell, there are hills I won't drive on, because I might be swept away. You can tell them by the turbulence, the waves are visible, because of all the crud they carry, and also the fact that there's nothing but bare rock above a certain point."

"I could look out for stuff like that . . ."

"Yeah, but the winds change. They dip and they rise. There's no predicting when or where, either."

"But I _want_ to fly."

Tanner looked at the boy and smiled. "There's an awful lot of things most people want to do, and it turns out for some reason or other they never can. Flying's one of them. You'll have to find something else."

Jerry's lower lip suddenly protruded, and he kicked at stones as he walked.

"Everybody has something special they want to do when they're young," said Tanner. "It never seems to work out that way, though. Either it turns out impossible, or you never get a chance to try it."

"What did you want to do, if it wasn't driving?"

Tanner stopped and turned his back to the wind, shielding the light he struck until he could get a cigarette going. Then he drew on it twice, staring into the smoke, and said, "I want to be the keeper of the machine."

"What machine?"

"_The_ machine, the Big Machine. It's hard to explain . . ."

He closed his eyes a moment, then opened them, and, "I had a teacher," he said, "hack when I was in school, who told us that the world was a big machine, that everything acted on everything else, that everything that happened was a function of all this action and interaction. So I started thinking about it, and I got me a picture of this goddamn big machine, all kinds of gears and pistons and chain belts; all sorts of levers and cams and shafts and pulleys and axles; and I figured it really existed someplace, this machine, I mean, and that according to whether it operated smoothly or not, things would go good or bad in the world. Well, I decided then that it wasn't running any too well and that it needed someone to give it a good going over and to keep an eye on it after that, once it was fixed. And I used to sit in class and have daydreams about it, and think about it every night before I fell asleep. I used to think 'I'm going to go looking for it someday, and I'm going to find it. Then I'm going to be the keeper of the machine, the guy who oils it and tightens a nut here and there, replaces a worn part, polishes it, adjusts its controls. Then everything will work out all right. The weather will be nice, everybody will have enough to eat, there won't be any fighting, any sick people, any drunks, anybody who's got to steal because there's something he wants but can't have.' I used to think about that. I used to want that job. I could see me there, in a factory building or a big old cave, working my ass off to keep the thing in tiptop shape, and everybody happy. And I could see me having fun with it, too. Like, I'd want a vacation, say, so I'd turn it off and shut down the shop. Then everything'd stop, see? Except me. It'd be like you see in a photograph. Everybody'd be frozen, like statues, in whatever they were doing: driving along, eating, working, making love. Everything'd just stop, and I could walk through the city and nobody'd know I was there. I could see everybody at what they were up to. I could take food off their plates, swipe clothes and things from their stores, kiss their girls, read their books, for as long as I wanted. Then, when I got tired of that, I'd go back and turn the machine on, and everything'd start up again like natural, and no one'd be the wiser, and nobody'd care, even if they did know, because I'd keep the maching going real well and everybody'd be happy. That's what I wanted to be: the keeper of the Big Machine. Only I never found it."