"… GOING TO HELL…"
Ever seen one of those less-than-expensive car-racing video games where, if you look closely, you can see the road knitting itself together out of blocks of loading graphics as you race along? That was how the road presented itself to me as I walked. Sparkling pools and Rorschach rainblots shimmered into existence, weaving the road into reality some fifty or so metres ahead of me. Trying to catch up to the place where the road oozed out of the darkness was like trying to chase the moon, if you've ever tried that. I felt I might be trekking along nothing more than a tarmac conveyor belt that looped under me, with some higher being watching me as a kid might watch a hamster trying to find the end of his wheel. I went to the verge, found a stone, and placed it carefully in the middle of the road. If I came upon that stone again, I'd know for sure.
I started laughing then. Conveyor belts? Highways to Hell? Whatever Surfer-dude had put in that bloody bottle of gin besides alcohol, it was working some voodoo shit on my head.
I kicked the stone away. That was when I became aware of a sound in the night. I listened. A low rumbling, like an engine. Yes, definitely an engine. But from the sound in relation to the distance (couldn't see any headlights yet), it sounded like a large engine. Maybe belonging to… a Goldwing?
I scuttled to the side of the road and slipped down a slight incline far enough so I could hide, but still see the road. Here the bank was not grassy but consisted of churned soil, as if a vehicle had veered off the road recently. Thus I was not hidden by the knee-high grass along the rest of the verge, but would only be seen by anyone on the road as they passed this little shear in the land. And since I didn't dare move now, that was a risk worth taking. Any bike traveling a typical speed would be past me before its rider could figure out what he'd glimpsed, if anything.
I lay still, silent. I tried holding my breath, but that just made my head throb and my heart beat louder. In such an open space, it was hard to determine exactly which direction the vehicle was coming from. I looked left and right, but still could see nothing. And now the noise was thunderous, all around me, as if the vehicle in question were a jumbo jet rather than a car or bike.
"You're in my way."
I looked round, towards the sound of the voice, which was a little high-pitched - this probably pronounced by the low roar of the engine.
Barely ten feet behind me (how could I have missed it?) was a tractor backhoe loader, but brown instead of yellow, and without identifying marks, which suggested a quick spray job by the owner, maybe so it hid well in the night. The backhoe was extended upwards, some thirty feet into the sky, as if it were being used as a giant aerial to capture obscure satellite TV channels. The front loader bucket was also extended high, the bucket positioned like a cup to hold water - I could see some splashing over the edges. Beyond the hydraulic arms I could see the cabin and the occupant. The cabin had an extra feature: a thick bar jutting out four feet like a handless arm; dangling from the end of this bar was a rope, and below the rope, bolted or hooked to the side of the tractor, was some sort of chair with wheels.
The man in the cabin was young, maybe only sixteen, certainly not old enough to be driving one of these things. He was skinny, too, and didn't mind showing off his toned arms in a sleeveless black T-shirt. Under the dim green glow from an overhead lamp in the cabin, I could see those arms were plastered with tattoos that I couldn't make out, although immediately I thought I'd unluckily run into another member of the Shepherds. This was an open land of fields and valleys, after all.
The petite driver reached out and flicked on a small spotlight, and pinned me under the beam. I put a hand between my eyes and the beam.
"I can't get up on the road while you lie there," the voice said again. "So the maths is simple. You have to move."
I sat up. The guy turned the spotlight away, aimed it up into the sky. I didn't see a batman symbol painted on the canopy of night, and then wondered why on Earth I should have expected to. Bloody gin. But the ring of light around the spotlight gave enough illumination for me to see this guy more clearly.
Yes, he wore black and was tattooed, but yes, he was just a kid. He had some of that bumfluff on his chin, that Brillo-pad of pubic hair that teenagers like to let run amok during that part of life when they finally find they can grow facial hair. He also had a head that wasn't quite the same shape on both sides; it was indented around the right jaw, and there was a coarse mass of scar tissue there. A handsome face had once belonged there, I knew.
"You certainly aren't a protestor. Windall Wood was flattened six weeks ago. Muppets think chaining themselves to a tree will stop million-pound deals. Maybe you're a suicide? Well I'm not running over you. No way. Even Dr. Kevorkian is going to Hell for that. Find a big building, or jump in the river. Drink drain cleaner."
I just sat there and stared at him.
"I can wait you out," he snorted. He held up something: a bunch of bananas, some of which were just empty skins. He'd peeled a couple without removing the fruit from the bunch. He did the same now, carefully opening a banana from the bottom and sliding it out. He bit, and grinned at me as he chewed.
"Don't see you with any food." Now he raised a plastic bottle with a top and a plastic straw, as if proposing a toast.
I got up and moved to one side, stepping off the section of bank that was churned soil. I didn't trust this guy, meek as he seemed. He might be a couple of girls short of a threesome, and he was hovering over me with a heavy piece of machinery. I was going to keep at his flank, making sure he couldn't gun his vehicle and squash me into jam.
But as soon as I was off the churned section of bank, he did gun the engine. He forced the tractor forward and up the bank, and I realized then that this guy had probably scooped out the bank some time previously, then flattened it, so he could get his tractor on and off the road with ease. But why? We were in the middle of nowhere. The little "road" looked well-used, as if over time. Where had he been? As I saw the tractor climb onto the road, jerking enough to splash more water from its front bucket, I also wondered what he'd been up to. Poaching with the world's most awkward-to-manoeuvre fishing "net"?
Once on the road, he turned in the direction I'd been heading. I didn't trust this guy (so far my experience of people in these parts wasn't enjoyable), but for some reason I called out to him. Tattoo-guy, I called him, most probably because he had tattoos. Tattoo-guy, would he mind ever so much giving me a lift?
He heard me, stopped the tractor, which sent another big gloop of water out of the bucket, to smash into a billion molecules when it hit the already-wet road, and turned, mouth open to speak. But as he turned, he must have hit some lever, because there was a whine, and the front bucket tilted forward, dropping its load all over the tarmac. He screamed the word SHIT, but added about fifty I's, and I belched laughter because I couldn't stop myself, though I knew laughing might be a bad move.
"Gold!" he screeched. "Get it, get it, don't lose it." He pointed at what his bucket had dropped. It looked like nothing more than mud, silt, a mouthful of riverbed. Gold?
I wanted to wonder what he meant, I clearly remember that. But I also remember that instead my brain clammed up and sent power to my legs. Barely three seconds later I was standing in front of that tractor and staring down at the diarrhea-like blob in the middle of the road. My brain reactivated an old question: Gold?
When I looked up, Tattoo-guy was no longer in the cab, or at least not completely. He was hanging from the rope that dangled two feet beside the cabin; dangling and trying to shake free his legs, which seemed caught. But from the way he writhed, something became obvious: he wasn't using his legs to help free himself. He was trying to yank his legs free.
He was a paraplegic. A paraplegic driving a tractor backhoe loader, and without using pedals, somehow. And that chair hooked to the side of the tractor was his wheelchair!
I had given up trying to wake from this increasingly strange nightmare.