She had struggled with him, and he had slipped in a smear of melted ice on the linoleum floor, and flailed backward, and smashed his head on the edge of the sink. At that particularly vulnerable juncture of neck and cranium; she had heard the ugly crack, like rotten wood, and he had slid sidewise, onto his back, his eyes wide open and staring, the corkscrew in his hand. And she had rifled his body, taken all the money on him, and fled…
The veil of gray tore away like mist before a storm, and Selena felt her arms hanging straight down on either side of the steering wheel, terribly heavy. She tried to move, to lever herself back into an upright position, but her upper body was without muscular control, lying against the wheel. Her long auburn hair was over her face, and she could not open her eyes.
The sound of the storm was not in her head.
Outside the Packard the mountain night had opened; black rain, thick as lava, thundered down over the silent car. Her window was open. Rain was pattering off the sill, onto her left cheek. She tried to lurch farther to the left, and succeeded in getting her head to loll back and to the side.
Blessed cool wetness cascaded over her hot face, and she opened her eyes. Stringy moist strands of auburn hair hung across her face, and she moved her head idly, shaking them back with difficulty. Then she tried using her arms. They were limp from having been in that bloodless position for so long. But agonizingly…she drew her left hand up onto her lap. Her dress was soaked through, on the left side. The Pucci cocktail dress she had worn to aid her manipulation of the man from the government department. It was cold and flat against her side and her left breast. She wore no underwear.
Selena rolled her body back against the seat, and a surf-crash of sickness broke over her. She pulled the door handle and barely managed to swing the door out and up, realizing the car was tilted. The door was incredibly heavy. But she threw her weight against it, and fell from the car. The slamming door barely missed her legs.
The rain helped.
In a few moments she was able to stand, leaning against the side of the car. Her knees were filthy with road mud. The storm beat against her. Lightning exploded all around the mountains, chain-reacting like lunacy in a cyclotron. Thunder boomed inside the stones of the hills. Bursting outward on waves of muscularity that promised the ground beneath her would shatter in a moment.
Selena looked up into the rain, and it washed over her, plastering the thin silk cocktail dress to the lines of her body. In a short time, a time without duration, she was able to climb into the Packard again and start the engine. She backed it off the incline, and turned on the lights. They cast fitful light across the desolate Carolina nowhere. Rain slanted through the shafts.
She let the clutch out slowly and the car moved forward, as though testing itself: a wounded creature waiting to feel the sting of pain in one of its appendages.
She drove blindly, pain in her chest and the shivering chill of wet clothes against her flesh keeping her alert. The road went up and around, doubling back on itself as it threaded its way through softly-lit passages in the rain-choked darkness.
Somewhere along the way, she took a wrong turn.
In that night, any turn would have been a wrong turn.
It didn’t matter until the Packard began chewing itself to pieces.
At first the sound was a soft ting! as of a paper clip hitting a revolving fan. She did not realize she was hearing it for some time, until the irregularity of its occurence struck her. Selena’s brow drew down, and she bit her lip. As if the machine had been waiting for this reaction from her, the ting!ing sharply changed to a harsh metallic clank that came again and again, then ceased for fifteen minutes till she was lulled that it had cured itself…and then clanked again.
By the time she reached the crest of the mountain, and saw the dim lights below, the noise had changed again: it was now the sound of metal chewing on metal, the sickly diseased sound of a creature eating itself alive.
She started down the twisting nightmare with the rain suddenly slackening its beat and then ceasing entirely as she threaded her way around fallen boulders lying in the oncoming lane.
Forty minutes later she passed the blurred and weatherbeaten sign that said PETRIE, pop. 650. It was decorated with Kiwanis and Moose emblems.
She drove down the last of the mountain slopes, and grinding hideously, pulled onto the main street of Petrie, North Carolina.
Five stores. Three on the left, two on the right. And beyond them, thirty feet beyond, a gas station.
She rolled into the station. It was a brand of gasoline she did not know. There were three men lounging on straight-backed chairs, tilted up against the wall of the slatboard station, under a protective overhang. She pulled past the pumps, the Packard ratcheting and grinding, and stopped directly in front of them. She turned off the engine and stared out at them. They stared back, unmoving.
Selena got out of the car.
They still hung there, feet off the ground, chairs back against the wall, three men of indeterminate age, tanned and lined by life in the mountains. They were alive, she could ascertain that much, for two of them were chewing gum, and the third smoked a battered meerschaum, from which a curling filigree of silver-gray smoke regularly climbed into the suspiciously gentle night breeze. She was able to tell they were alive, additionally, by the looks of malicious lechery that invaded their faces. (In the mountains, far back in the hills of nowhere, the term “cool” had been invented, without having ever been named. These people were cool: they would not acknowledge their own unsettled reactions…to anything. Like mummies they would sit, until the world around them turned to ash, and the sky dripped fire, and then they would slowly turn to one another and nod. Coolly. But Selena, dress plastered to her ripe body, could draw reaction from a lizard, from a stone, from a gallon of sea water. They registered, and their eyes brightened. But cool. They did not speak.)
“I’m having some trouble with my car,” Selena said.
An unspoken chain of command was established, and the youngest of the three men—perhaps thirty-five—nudged himself forward, and the chair legs hit the wooden platform. “What seems to be the trouble?” he asked, bored.
“Something’s broken inside,” she said.
Slowly, almost languorously, the man slid out of the chair. Selena thought he might just settle in a pool of tired flesh, but he came toward her, hands thrust into the back pockets of his limp coveralls. “Like what?”
Selena’s hands went to her hips, and her jaw thrust out. “Friend, if I knew ‘like what,’ I wouldn’t be asking you to look at it, now would I?”
“You ain’t from ’round here,” he said, moving toward the car, chewing his gum furiously.
“No, I’m not.”
“Where y’from?”
“Are you going to take a look at this damned car or aren’t you?”
The gum-chewer seemed startled by her language. He stopped, looked dull. On the front porch of the station, the second man—fortyish, nearly bald, wearing a filthy coverall with the gas station emblem on the breast pocket—hit the boards with his feet. The scene had been turned over to him: the young one had come up against something he couldn’t handle.
“Well, I c’n take a look at ’er,” he said, and got up. The gum moved sluggishly in his mouth, and he matched pace with it toward Selena and the car.
He stood in front of the Packard for a moment, as if trying to decide which end contained the engine. Then he fumbled around the hood, looking for the latch. With exasperation, Selena moved beside him, reaching in through the front grille. “It opens from underneath.”
The older man attained a tone of cool disdain that completely repudiated his obvious unfamiliarity with the business end of an automobile: “Why, thank you, ma’am.” It was a brand of sarcasm honed to perfection by four hundred years of misdirecting the outsiders.
She opened the hood, and the man leaned over the front bumper, carefully not touching the mud-spattered metal with his already-filthy co
verall. He stared down into the guts of the machine for long minutes.
Finally, without looking at Selena, he said, “Why don’t y’all start ’er up.”
Selena felt a rising tide of frustration and fury. She got in and turned the ignition key. The engine coughed to life. The sound of metal grinding and tearing came up solidly. Superimposed as the latest symptom of a disease that had been built in sixteen years before when the car had been new. It was a strange kind of testimony to the excellence of the Packard manufacturers that the car was even able to start sixteen years later; a feat far beyond the capabilities of contemporary Detroit Iron.
The gum-chewing went on apace, the staring into the innards did not change phase, the observers said nothing, the sound of thunder caromed through the mountains.
Selena leaned out through the open door. “Can you do anything…?”
The man slowly looked up at her. His expression was one of mixed lechery and disgust. He did not have to say Lady, shut yore damned face, you’re in awuh part of the woods now, with yore damned long legs and all yore damned pretty skin a-showin’ through that skimpy li’l dress, an whut we want to do is whut we gonna do, so sit back an’ don’t be haranguin’ us whilst we playin’ with puttin’ you in yore place; he didn’t have to say it. There it was, arrogant and infuriating for Selena, in his expression.
The youngest of the three ambled up beside the gum chewer, and they stared down at the machine together.
Nowhere is North Carolina. Nowhere is the land of the Gods. All the Gods. Not only the ancient Gods who have gone to sleep, and the recent Gods who are still worshipped, but the God of Rain, and the God of Lightning, and the God of the Hunt, who have taken on new attributes and new faces. And the newest, youngest, strongest Gods: the God of Neon, the God of Smog, the God of Luck, and the Machine God. People come to worship at strange altars. They place their oblations at the feet of graven images without knowing these are truly Gods they have found. The War God grows fatter each year, gorged on blood. The Love God fornicates with himself, weakening his genes, rebirthing as a thalidomide monstrosity. Paingod does his work and doles out his anguish, paying no attention to the cries of those crushed beneath his millstones. But the Machine God…
The sound had grown more violent. It was an ugly sound. In final frustration, Selena shut the car down, and got out. The tableau was still the same. The little porch on the slat-walled gas station; the old man still tilted against the front wall, smoking his pipe; the two observers still looking down into the engine as though studying a slide under a microscope; the mountains looming huge and dark around the town; the sound of the storm gathering strength to hurl itself against them once more.
“All right!” Selena snapped. “Enough is enough.”
The two looked at her. Then as one, they looked at the old man in the chair. And Selena realized all at once, that neither of these two fools could have done anything, had they wanted to: the old man was the mechanic. The other two were camouflage, the sportsmen who had been given Selena to toy with for a few minutes. It was the old man she should have approached.
He did not move an inch from his comfortable position as he informed her in a doughy, wheezing voice, “Can’t he’p you, ma’am. Trouble you got’s too big. Have t’take it on in to Shelby, or someplace, where they’s ’quipped to make them kinda repairs.”
“But you didn’t even look at it!” Selena yelled.
“Too much. Can’t fix ’er,” the old man said, and closed his eyes. Smoke rose from the meerschaum once more, lazily.
The two fools stood where they were, staring once again down into the engine, as if hoping the show might resume. Selena shoved them aside and slammed the hood closed. She was speechless with fury. She strode back to the front door and started to get in. And realized…she could not go anywhere.
She needed this car in working order.
If they were tracking her, she could not afford to be without transportation.
But these fools would not—or could not—repair the engine.
She was hamstrung.
A wave of such helplessness possessed her that she almost sank down on the car seat.
The old man, without opening his eyes, said, “I s’pose you could call old Ernest…”
And the two fools fell down laughing. The youngest one rolled around on the muddy ground as though possessed by St. Vitus’s Dance. The middle-aged one barked a kind of laughter Selena had not heard since she had been at the Bronx Zoo. The old man was smiling, smugly.
“Who the hell is Ernest? And what’s so funny?”
The old man opened his eyes, and looked at the middle-aged one. His laughter came under control with difficulty, but when he could speak without gasping, he wiped the tears from his eyes and said, with difficulty, “Ernest? Oh, he, uh, he r’pairs things, sometimes…”
And they fell down laughing again.
Selena watched them with incredulity. Something was funny, unquestionably. But what that something was she could not even begin to fathom. The two grown men tumbled back and forth at her feet like an unmatched set of children’s toys, loose-jointed, rubber-armed, totally without control of themselves as the enormity of the joke paralyzed them. Their laughter drowned out the thunder that whipped overhead.
She had to repeat herself three times before they could hear her: “Well, all right then, why don’t you just run and get ‘old Ernest’!”
The youngest one sat up, suddenly. There on the ground. He looked at her. She was serious. Why the hell shouldn’t I be serious, Selena thought, interpreting his look in an instant. The young one looked over at the old one. The old one nodded with a barely perceptible movement of his head. The young one leaped to his feet and, cackling uproariously, dashed off through the town, and was gone in an instant. Selena stood beside the Packard, tapping her foot. Every few seconds, the middle-aged one, now back in his chair on the porch beside the old man, would chuckle deep in his throat, and build it till he was roaring with laughter. Fuck you! thought Selena.
…Ah, He is a special God. He loves his gears and his pumps, his springs and his transistors, his printed circuits and his boilers. He is not a jealous God, like some, but he is an attentive God. He tends to business, and keeps his world of machines functioning. But every now and then, every once in a while, every few centuries in a mind that is Machine and not Man, the Machine God finds one He can care about more than the others. A special machine, or a special man, and they become the beloved of the Machine God. Saint Joan had the power of moving masses of men to religious fervor. Ahmad, who was Mohammed, was able to die of his own volition when he was presented with the keys of eternal life on earth, and those of Paradise. Gandhi saw the sheep being led to the slaughter and worship of Kali, and rejected her tenets, turning to the wisdom of the Gautama Buddha, drawing unto himself the powers of peace. Christ was able to heal the lepers, to walk on water. Samson brought down the temple, and David slew Goliath, and Jonah lived in the belly of the whale. And for the Machine God, the beloved child was…
Loping down the street, the gum-chewing fool leaped high in the air, like a lovesick schoolboy who has grabbed his first thigh in the schoolyard at recess. He came tumbling, gibbering, capering, laughing up to the station, and pointed back in the direction he had come. He broke up completely, slumping down against the porch-post. The other two men laughed with him. Selena looked in the direction their laughter was fleeing.
He was perhaps six feet tall, incredibly thin, with arms that might have been figs. 87 & 88 in a medical text on rickets. He was the compleat Ichabod Crane. His hands hung six inches below the cuffs of his no-color jacket, his knobbed ankles were exposed between the tattered legs of his pants and his highly-polished cordovan shoes. He moved in a long, disjointed manner, more like some whisper-articulated insect, a mantis or a spider, than a man. His hair was lank and as colorless as his clothing: the color of sand, the color of bricks, the color of rain, the color of teak, but none of these: all of them, with the
highlights leached out. Mudpie hair. His face was all angles and planes, eyes big and a little vacant. Mouth as wide as a dog’s. He stumbled and stepped, a coordinated spastic, a colt learning its legs.
Selena stared at the apparition, and realized what the joke was. Ernest was the joke. His totality…his look, his manner, his walk, his presence…was a joke. The three men on the porch had extended the scope of their sport. They had brought her a half-wit to repair the car. The viciousness of it did not escape her.
Ernest came to her, and stopped.
She looked up into his eyes.
He was by no means a half-wit.
There was something living behind those eyes, and from silt-deep in her memory came a quote from Gerald Kersh that fit precisely:…there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.
He stared at her, and she was beautiful. More beautiful than she had ever been before. For the first time in her life, Selena was uncomplicated. Light bathed her. She felt her flow and her pulse. The boy stared at her. He was no more than sixteen years old, possibly seventeen, but he saw her as she was, reduced to her essentials.
“Can you fix my car?”
He did not reply.
“There’s something wrong with it. Can you repair it?”