The Car (11 page)

“Who told you?” Terry looked across to Samuel, who was not moving, seemed impossibly small in the recliner.

“People. People who trucked and came here and learned from him. That's why we brought you—brought ourselves back.”

“How did you know he was still alive?”

“We didn't. But if he'd died we would have heard. Somebody would have said.”

“Here we are.” Terry sighed. “I haven't the slightest idea
where
we are, but here we are. . . .”

“It's like this,” Wayne said. “Be honest. Do you know more now than when we came—know more about America?”

Terry thought about what he'd learned, what Samuel had said. “Well, yes. I do. About the Sioux thing.”

“And do you want to know more?”

He thought again and realized that he did—that he was immensely curious. “Yes.”

“There it is, man.” Wayne turned to Waylon. “I mean there it is—just like before. It still works. Samuel still works.”

Waylon smiled and nodded. “It's a start.”

“H
OW OLD IS HE?
”

It was evening and Samuel was still sleeping in the chair. Waylon had found a blanket in the trailer and covered the old man, tucking him in carefully. Then the three of them had made a fire pit and located their bedrolls near it, made a fire, helped Wayne put up the tent—although it didn't look at all like rain; the sky was clear and the stars seemed so close they could be touched.

They had eaten spaghetti and were lying around the fire, propped on elbows, and Terry was looking to the recliner where Samuel hadn't moved.

“Nobody knows. He was old when we came here before—twenty years ago. A hundred, a hundred and ten, twenty. He's past counting.” Waylon took a long pull of his coffee. “Past aging. He'll just be that way now until . . . well, until he's gone.”

Terry stared at Samuel. It was dark, but in the light from the fire the recliner and the man looked yellow. “He looks . . . gone . . . now.”

Wayne nodded. “Right. But he's not. He'll come up and start talking again. You want to be listening when it comes.”

“Has he been here all the time?”

“Yeah. Some say he's an Indian, but I heard he punched cows for a while back when. Nobody is sure how he started, just how he is now. Back in the sixties, seventies, must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of people came past, talking to him, listening to him.”

Samuel coughed and the three became silent, listening, but he didn't say anything further. Waylon used the silence to lay back and Terry did the same.

He pulled his bag up around his shoulders to keep the cool air out, positioned his windbreaker under his head, and lay looking up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Cat and Baby sitting near each other, the starlight gleaming on the chrome, and he tried to remember his other life, how much time had passed. It simply didn't come. He remembered his parents, that he had parents, but how they looked was fuzzy—he could remember his house, his room better—and he realized with a start that it had only been six, seven days since he'd gone. Since he'd met Waylon in the rain.

And here he was. On the prairie, listening to an old man, camped with a couple of holdovers from the sixties, learning about a world he didn't know existed.

Life
. . . , he thought.
Life rolls funny if you don't watch
it.

He closed his eyes and was asleep before he thought another word.

“. . . voted for the son of a bitch and he let us down. . . .”

Terry wasn't sure how long he had slept but it was still dark when the voice brought him up. He opened his eyes and rolled over. The fire was well out, the ashes cold, and the sound was coming from Samuel.

Terry unzipped the bag and wrapped it around his shoulders and stood—saw that Waylon was up and doing the same, though Wayne was still asleep—and moved to Samuel's side, where they sat against the trailer, bundled in their bags.

“Who?” Terry asked, but Waylon held a hand on his shoulder and pressed him into quiet.

“You don't have to ask,” Waylon whispered. “Just let him talk.”

“. . . there were dreams everywhere, so many dreams you couldn't count them, and Hoover got in and they
all
went to hell. . . .”

He took a breath. Terry thought it must be three or four in the morning. He didn't have a watch. He had one flash of thought:
I'm sitting in the middle of the night listening to this. . . .
But it trailed off and Samuel started again.

“. . . people died. Jumped from buildings and died because of money. Farms died. People went for food, wanted for food, and starved. And then the droughts came, droughts and dust, dust in your lungs, dust in the cracks of your eyes, dust for air, dust for food, dust for death . . .”

He stopped again and Waylon leaned over to whisper, “The depression. He's talking about the depression.”

“What?”

“A bad time. Back in the thirties. When corrupt politicians bled the country dry and a big drought came. Same as the eighties and Reagan . . .”

“. . . women marrying in dust, living in dust, loving in dust, burying their babies in dust . . . the sky gone in dust . . . the sun gone in dust . . .”

And Samuel stopped again, breathing deeply.

Waylon sat silently, thinking, and Terry looked out at the dark sky, trying to see the horizon, and tried to envision what it must have been like sixty years earlier. Once a teacher had talked of the depression but he had just said there were long lines at soup kitchens and something called the dust bowl. Somehow it didn't seem like it happened to people.

Until now.

Now it seemed real. Something in the way Samuel talked, the way his voice worked, made it seem real—the dust, the people, the babies crying. All real.

“He's asleep again,” Waylon said. “I'm not sure for how long. We'll just stay next to him and wait until he wakes up.”

They sat the rest of the night, leaning against the trailer next to the recliner, sleeping, and that's the way Wayne found them in the morning, still dozing with Samuel sound asleep between them and, indeed, Samuel did not awaken until nearly noon.

T
HEY STAYED
all that day and night and left the following morning. They cooked for him and made more coffee, thick with sugar, and sat by the fire when he slept and next to him when he spoke.

Samuel talked four more times at length: about draft riots in New York during the Civil War, about an influenza epidemic in St. Louis at the turn of the century that killed forty percent of the people there, a short bit about one of his wives—he'd had several but nobody was sure how many—and how good she cooked, and a story about two women who took a wagon across during the Oregon Trail days.

Then he stopped and stared at Waylon and said, “It's good you came. Next time bring sugar again. It's good to have friends with sugar.”

Waylon nodded. “It was good to see you again.”

And they packed their bedrolls on the bike and the car and drove away, Terry watching in the rearview mirror until Samuel, the trailer, the junk were all out of sight.

They were well off the gravel, back on the main road before Terry spoke.

“Will he be, you know, all right?”

Waylon smiled. “He's tougher than he looks. When people take care of him he soaks it up, but when he's alone he gets along all right. And I think somebody from the county comes out and checks on him now and then.”

“And all that stuff that he says, that's all true?”

“I don't know about all of it. But the things I checked on, or know myself, are dead right. There were draft riots and a Sioux uprising and a dust bowl and a flu epidemic in St. Louis—all those things happened. I don't know about his wives or the two women who took a wagon to Oregon, but I'd bet it's right.”

They came out to the highway then and Wayne, who had been riding Baby ahead of them, dropped back alongside and signaled them to stop.

“Whose turn?”

“What?” Terry thought Wayne was talking to him, but when he looked he saw that Wayne was looking across, smiling at Waylon.

“I guess mine,” Waylon said. “Then Terry's.”

“What are you guys talking about?”

Wayne laughed. “Trucking—you take turns deciding where to go, when. All of it. So I was the one who decided to visit Samuel. It's somebody else's turn now.”

“Mine,” Waylon said. “Unless you want it.”

Terry shook his head. “No. I don't know for sure what I'm doing yet.”

Wayne laughed, cracking the throttle on Baby, letting the pipes burble. “That's it, man. None of us know what we're doing. Never have, never will. It don't mean nothing.”

Terry looked to Waylon. “So—what do we do?”

Waylon thought a minute, then smiled up at Wayne. “We're in South Dakota, right?”

Wayne nodded.

“Then it has to be Deadwood.” Waylon shrugged. “If it's South Dakota, it has to be Deadwood. That's where the action is.”

“West it is,” Wayne said, kicking Baby into gear and heading onto the road.

Terry shifted—he drove the Cat automatically now, completely without thinking. It had become an extension of him, the steering, the sound of the motor, the feel of the tires on the road—all of it a part of him—and he wondered if Wayne had been right. If he was a natural. Maybe he ought to think about that, about doing something with cars. Motors.

It was still early in the morning and as Wayne found a highway going west, Terry followed, matching the bike's speed—just at sixty. He glanced at Waylon out of the corner of his eye, wanted to ask him how far it was to Deadwood, but Waylon was reading, hunkered down with a paperback volume of Shakespeare, frowning while he read, and Terry didn't want to interrupt him.

There was an atlas behind the seat or in the side pocket, he couldn't remember which, and he could look it up himself. But he decided against it. The morning sun was on the back of his neck, the car running smoothly, the tires hissing on the asphalt—what did it matter how far it was, or if they ever got there at all? What was Deadwood, anyway?

Just a place,
he thought.
Another place.

A meadowlark sang next to the car as it passed and as soon as one did, it seemed dozens of them cut loose. Fence post after fence post had a meadowlark sitting on it, or so it appeared, and as the Cat passed them they all sang.

“It's like a chorus, isn't it?”

Terry jumped at the voice and turned to see Waylon looking at him.

“The meadowlarks,” Waylon said. “Pretty, aren't they?”

Terry nodded and Waylon went back to his book, but the silence had been broken.

“You read that a lot, don't you?”

Waylon looked up again. “Shakespeare? Yeah—all the time.”

“How come?”

“Because he's absolutely, without any doubt, completely and far away the best writer of the English language who ever lived.”

“Really?”

“Totally. If you want to learn, you study winners—you study the best. And I want to learn.”

“You do?” Terry veered slightly around a crack in the road, following Wayne's move ahead of him. “That's hard to believe.”

“Why?”

“I thought, I mean I sort of figured you and Wayne kind of knew it all.”

Waylon snorted, then laughed. “Know it all—hell, we don't know
anything.
We're still trying to figure out the basics—you know, like what we ought to be when we grow up.”

“But you're . . .”

“Old. Yeah, I know. But that's what I mean. We don't have a clue. I know a guy, lives out in Los Angeles, my age plus a little, maybe forty-six, -seven, just decided he wants to be a doctor. So he's going to school, studying, taking all the courses—thing is, by the time he's done he'll be too old to start practicing.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because that's what he wants to be. He finally worked it out.” Waylon laughed. “I haven't even gotten that far. ‘Know it all. . . .' Oh, man, that's good. Wayne will love that.”

He opened the Shakespeare book again and started to read, and Terry went back to driving, wondering if he should decide on what to be when he grew up now so he wouldn't still be thinking of it in thirty, forty years.

Deadwood, Terry found, was on the western end of South Dakota. They had started on the eastern end of South Dakota so they had to drive end to end across the state—which would normally take between six and seven hours, or a bit less if they held the speed up.

That would be normal driving on the highway.

But Waylon signaled Wayne over to the side and insisted that they take back roads, side highways, county roads.

“You'll see more,” he said, as Terry followed Wayne through small towns and farms that gave way to ranches.

It became flat, totally, unbelievably flat and treeless. At first Terry didn't like it. But soon he found himself drawn to the horizon, pulled into going ahead, seeing ahead, being ahead, and he started liking the huge sky, the wide open feel of the country.

Once when they stopped for gas he looked at the atlas and saw a park marked Badlands.

“What does that mean, ‘Badlands'?” he asked Waylon.

“Rough country—like it says, bad land.”

“Worse than this?” Terry waved at the prairie around the gas station.

Waylon smiled. “Nothing there, nothing growing. Nothing but dinosaur bones.”

“Can we go see it?”

“That,” Waylon said, hanging the hose back in the cradle, “is what trucking is all about.”

And even with that, even with stopping at the Badlands they would have made Deadwood that evening, and Terry had come to count on it, was looking forward to it.