Time passed, Pierce sometimes inhabiting the car and looking out the windows at places he had not seen before, at other times inhabiting other places and days, unaware that his hands turned the wheel the slight degree the road required and his foot pressed down lightly on the pedal. Now the land on either side of the road was deepest country, brown fields rising to pine forests and blue distance. Traffic was thickening, cars and trucks pouring past him on both sides as though he were immobile, a humpbacked rock in midstream. He was, however, his speedometer told him, going nearly at the speed limit. For some time he had been glancing frequently at it and at the other gauges and controls before him, as though ready to do whatever he learned from them was necessary, but in fact mostly just passing his eyes over them in anxious repetition. On one such pass he noticed a control he had not seen before, or had not pondered, a thick lever far down on the left-hand side. What’s that do, he wondered, and the next time he came to it on his tour, and before he could caution himself to wait a second, he had pulled it. Several things then happened at the same time. One was that Pierce regretted he had pulled the lever, was able in that moment not only to reconsider but to prophesy that the consequences weren’t going to be good. Another was that there was a sudden gasp of wind, and a horrendous noise, as something large and dark rushed upon him from nowhere and slammed against his windshield, blinding him and instantly crazing the glass from edge to edge.
And Pierce, not knowing what had happened and looking into blank darkness, pressed hard on the brake—fortunately there was no one close behind him—then twisted the wheel and turned the car off the road onto the shoulder, slowing to a stop as he came to understand what he had done, which was to release the hood, which then had caught the wind of his forward motion, been lifted like an unbraced sail, and banged into his windshield.
For a long time he sat immobile, his heart firing steadily like a gun and his hands still on the wheel. The windshield had actually held, but there was a fine litter of glass crumbs in his lap and across the seat. He thought of Rose in the night, when she had flipped the Terrier; how stupid she had felt, and how afraid of herself.
He got out. The force of the wind, fifty-five miles an hour, had flung the hood back so hard that the hinges had ruptured; it lay now at a terrible arm-busted back-broken angle against the windshield. Pierce took hold of it and tried to force it down again but it wouldn’t move through more than half the arc.
Now what.
You’d better be careful she had said to him on the phone, telling him how her windshield had been smashed as she drove this road, it must have been this one, right along here maybe. Smash Corridor. The Devil’s Hammer.
He turned to the vast road (much vaster when you stood beside it than it seemed as you drove along it) and wondered how to get help. Trucks approached, hurtled past—the air of their passage thudding against him and his car—and receded with a cry that sank fast from whine to growl, Doppler effect. Someone would soon stop, he supposed, a truck or car or farmer’s pickup, and ask what had happened. Or a cop, alerted by some trucker’s CB radio; they all had them, he heard.
And he would explain himself to their puzzled faces, kindly or remote, amused or censorious; maybe one of them, some big-bellied male, would know what to do, would have tools. Or he would be given a ride, or a wrecker might be called. He could not imagine, could not, what would happen next; it was probably evident to every person in every car that passed, and saw him there, but not to him.
The white sky was opening to the south and the west, and a late sun shone as though through prison bars. No he would not wait, would not try to hail help, it was just too embarrassing. I have stood sufficient: what Little Enosh used to say. He looked upward, turning, turning the world.
Beyond the road’s shoulder where he stood the ground rose; tall trees walked along the ridge, their slender trunks leading his eyes upward to solemn crowns, brown but not unleaved. As soon as he began climbing to them he ceased to hear the cars on the freeway. When he reached the ridge he found that a tall chainlink fence arose amid the briars and tangled bracken, marking the limit of the state’s property, maybe; dogs or children had tunnelled beneath it but big Pierce could not. He went along it, unwilling to quit, and for some reason it ended, and let him pass around it and through the screen of trees.
Pastures shorn and bronzed, gentle swells going on upward and down, seamed with streams where willows grew. Sheep country, he thought, and even as he thought it saw sheep in numbers arise over the breast of a far brown hill and clothe it, then hurry away, goaded by busy dogs. Pierce stood for a while, tasting the breeze, and then started downward. Soon he found himself amid more sheep, shepherded by a boy and an old man. They greeted Pierce, the boy’s smile guileless, maybe even foolish, and the old one’s broad; he held the stump of a pipe in his teeth, his cheeks were russet and his hair white and woolly like his sheep’s.
Pierce walked and talked with them. Other shepherds could be seen on the hills, marshalling their sheep like untidy armies. Why were they all gathering here? It was time for the move down from the mountains, he was told, to the warmer valleys to the west and south, where they would spend the winter. Transhumance, Pierce thought: a big change, mountains to valleys, summer to winter; but the same change, one that herders have been making yearly for centuries, millennia even. He noted the ocher identifying marks on the sheep’s wool and how it differed from flock to flock, some marked on the hindquarters, some on the shoulders, and he remembered the name of the stuff they were marked with: it was redding.
And so because night was coming on Pierce stayed with them in their encampment in the yellow willows by the stream. All through the night more shepherds and sheep came in. Pierce wondered if Spofford might be among them. He lay long awake listening to the dogs and to the voices of the excited sheep, needful and silly; but toward dawn they slept. Pierce slept. Before day came they began to move, all as one, and Pierce went with them.
Going down the long passes through the forested hills they kept together, and were careful not to let their lambs stray; they never saw any of the packs that went the same way they did, but they were there. They could be heard sometimes at night, not a howling but a faint yipping, like puppies: the dogs heard, and pricked up their ears. Pierce took his turn walking the perimeter of the flock, sleepy but not weary; no not weary, glad. Glad that he had happened to be wearing good strong boots when he left home; glad, too, to be no longer among those condemned to pursue. What he had once so much wanted or sought, whatever it had been, he would learn to do without. He could remember, now, why he had come out from the City to these solitudes in the first place, and why he had left behind all that he had left behind. He walked on behind the flocks toward the valleys and the west.
Or no he did not, of course he didn’t: didn’t climb up from the highway and pass through those trees, though he did wonder, looking up at their tops, at the clearing sky beyond them, what lay that way, and did think that if he were offered some way to pass on and away from this he might take it. But no, he just got back behind the wheel and started the Steed (no he had not shattered the windshield, at the last moment a fleeting caution had caught up with him and he had not pulled that lever; he had pulled off the road for a moment, though, already exhausted and feeling a worrisome flutter in his bowels, what if he were seized with some dreadful urgency while caught in the midst of a jockeying flotilla or making a tough hill; okay after all, though, it seemed). He rolled along the shoulder for a moment waiting for the traffic to thin, and then tramped down the accelerator, teeth bared and hands tight on the wheel. Be definite and fearless, she had told him, when entering a stream of traffic.
Hardest of all, to do and to tell of, was the going down into the city of Conurbana when at last it was brought before him by the unfolding road; to go off where the signs said “Downtown” and circle down halfconstructed ramps, through temporary concrete chutes barely one car wide, where yellow and even orange signs warned him away, some set
around with little flaming lamps. But he did all that too, gripping his wheel so tightly that he felt his fingertips growing numb; searching the streets for familiar sights, that vast plaza and its monolith maybe. Surely he would remember her corner, where he had stood bewildered and afraid, but once he was out of the downtown city center every corner looked like that one. Until—this never happens—he came to a stop at a red light, and the street was Mechanic, wide and poor, and he remembered it, and turned wholly by chance the right way on it and it soon intersected hers, he caught the street sign out of the corner of his eye and turned the right way down that one too, even odds really but not for Pierce, and after a fearful string of blocks saw her red car, actually saw it parked on the street before a nondescript building, hers. So it really had all happened, here in this city. He parked behind it; when he got out he saw that one of its tires was flat.
Not only that. Its windshield was intact, but the roll-down window on the passenger’s side was gone, replaced by a panel of ragged and milky plastic. The window shattered, she’d said, but only on your side.
Well hell. That window was the one he had compulsively tried to close, jamming its little handle over and over. And all her other passengers too no doubt. And from the tension it just finally.
Not the Devil anyway. Or rather only the devil that is in things, in built things especially, the physics devil who does only what he must, nothing personal. Pierce might have laughed (he had long been troubled himself by that one, after all) but didn’t.
Inside the front door of her building there was a buzzer to press, her last name beside it in peacock-green ink, and a single discreet initial. After a pause long enough to make him think with awful gratitude that there was no one there, it rang back, and the door whose knob he was holding opened. A stair to go up, one flight, and a door to knock on. A woman not Rose opened it, and Pierce, startled, looked behind himself to find the door he apparently should have knocked on, no that wasn’t it, was this one; the woman watched him do that, and then said “Looking for Rose?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“She’s gone.”
Gone. “Oh.”
“I mean not for good. She’ll be back I think, but she’s gone for a while. They didn’t tell her how long.”
The woman’s thin dark hair was partially wrapped around great pink rollers, he could guess from their disposition what kind of a look she was aiming for, and how far she would get toward it.
“She’s let me stay here,” she said. “I lost my place.”
“Oh. Uh-huh.” He stood, wavering like a candle flame.
“Did you want to come in?” the woman said. “Make a phone call or something? I’m sorry she ain’t here. You come a long way?”
“Oh,” he said, and shook his head, and shrugged.
“Was this business?”
“Um no.”
At last she took his arm and drew him in, since it had become evident that he could do nothing definite himself. “Gets cold with the door open.”
“Where,” he said, trying to remember this room and these furnishings, cognates of the ones he had recently seen and touched but not necessarily the same ones. “Where was it she went?”
“West,” the woman said. “Indiana.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry she didn’t tell you. If she knew you was coming.” “She didn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Mexico,” he said. “Mexico, Indiana. Is that right?”
“Well yeah,” she said warily. Pierce realized he was looming and staring in a way that would surely cause her to stop talking, she was one of them herself certainly.
“I’m a, a friend of hers,” he said, and smiled a smile that probably wasn’t reassuring; she smiled back, though. From within the bedroom he heard a child call: Bobby. Bobby Bobby.
“He can’t say Mommy,” the woman said. “Its his ear.”
“Do you mind,” Pierce said, “if I sit down?”
“No sure.”
She watched him sit carefully and tentatively on a kitchen chair, as though unsure it would hold him, or if his legs would bend. Then she went to see her child, who was shaking a playpen’s bars in rage or passion. On the kitchen table Pierce perceived a Testament, not Rose’s white one, this woman’s doubtless, new-looking yet already stuck full of place markers.
“Do you,” he asked when she returned, “know when she’s coming back? What her plans were?”
“Well I guess she’s coming back,” the woman said. “I mean all her stuff is here. She didn’t know just when.”
“Okay well,” Pierce said. “Sorry to bother you.”
She sat down beside him, as though to keep him from rising. “You know her real well?” she asked.
Pierce said nothing.
“You’re not Powerhouse,” she said, sure of that.
“No.”
“And you come from far away?”
“Well. A hundred miles, or actually more, I guess.”
“She was real excited about this chance to go out there. Excited and I guess a little scared. How they kinda sprang it on her.”
With exactly Rose’s gesture, the woman picked up a pack of cigarettes, toyed with it a moment, and put it curtly down.
“Did she go out there alone?” Pierce asked.
“No, no. There was Pitt Thurston, and let’s see. Ray I know was going.” Like a child telling a story she made reference to several people he could not be expected to know.
“Mike Mucho?” Pierce said.
“Yes. They ast me to come too. ‘Cause of his little daughter, poor thing. I couldn’t ‘cause I just got him back.” And she looked toward the playpen.
Pierce hadn’t removed his overcoat, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the heat, why do people like this woman always want it so hot. “Well I guess I,” he said, and rose, and looked at his watch.
She watched him walk the linoleum irresolutely. Then she spoke. “Can you tell me somethn?” she asked. “Why’d you come lookn for her? Does she need you?”
The reasons were not this woman’s business, and he tried to make a face that said that, and knew that he had failed. She continued to regard him, in scrutiny or maybe supplication, something, something that made him look away. “Well she and I were. Have been. Sort of. Well close. And I was worried for her.” He studied the boy in his little jail. “How far is it, do you guess?”
“Don’t know. I never been there.”
“Dr. Walter,” Pierce said. “Retlaw O. Walter.”
“Listen,” the woman said, in a voice that made Pierce turn to her. “You ought to keep agoin. Long as you started, long as you got this far.”
She reached out and put her hand on the sleeve of his coat. “Don’t stop following her,” she said. “Don’t stop. The kind she is. She needs you to keep on.”
“If she needed me,” Pierce said, “she wouldn’t have gone. Not that way. Not so far.”
“You don’t know,” the woman said, and stood up. “Maybe she couldn’t say. Maybe she doesn’t know.”
He stood unmoving, his car key in his hand. He thought of his little house by the river. He thought of Rosie Rasmussen, and Sam lost to her.
“Look,” she said, trying to guide him to sit again. “You need something to eat? Let me get you something.”
“No,” said Pierce. “No no.”
But she had already opened the refrigerator, scaring from its top the greymalkin, who had stayed behind, and starting her son’s wails of desire.
“Ain’t got much,” she said.
“Please,” he begged, but could not for some reason refuse; she gave him Velveeta cheese and Wonder Bread and strawberry pop and even that did not enlighten him as to who she was and why she knew what she knew; but when he had eaten it he felt it strengthen and vivify him. He had been hungry, he guessed. Hungry yes, hungry as hell.
“You cain’t stop now,” she said. “You never did before.”
“But,” he said.
“We??
?ll steal the world if you let us,” she said. “Don’t let us. Don’t.”
She stood then, and quick before he could speak again she pointed. “You go west on 6,” she said. “That’s all. West on 6, then take 66.”
“Six,” he said, “six six.”
“Bobby,” said the child. “Bobby.”
She could see he didn’t really know what he had to do, so she found a pencil and a scrap of paper and drew him a little map, the rights and lefts he must make. She licked the pencil before she started to write. He had not, he thought, ever seen anyone actually do that; but once, long ago, he had.
12
So he went on. The western ramps lifted his car up out of the city center and above the river. He joined the multicolored traffic hurrying home or toward some other destiny or none. By that time the sun was setting, a lurid bloody smear crossed by the white plumes of falling or escaping planes. Such sunsets had once been rare, but they were common now, caused by the clouds of gas and smoke that he and others were making, from here out to where he was headed and far beyond. To the south on the long river island below the city he could see, as he travelled on, the great parabolic towers of the nuclear power plant, the one that Metatron had made to power the whole of this quadrant of the megalopolis; above their tops, formless beings of steam stood up as tall again as they, and gestured slowly.
They were armed, supposedly, the supposed adherents of the supposed cult or religion. Who knew, but out there in the boonies where he had never been anything was possible. Night fell. He thought how there is but one road, one dark wood, one hill to climb, one river to cross; one city to come to, one night, one dawn. Each one is only encountered again and again, apprehended, understood, recounted, forgotten, lost and found again. And yet at the same time and for everyone the universe stretches out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant. He had thought this thought before, not once, more than once, but he had long forgotten all those other instances, and he soon forgot this one too.