“What about them?” asked Sally.
“At the end of the run,” the pencilneck said, “you can keep the trucks. They’re amazing trucks.” He hit the word “truck” just a little harder each time, and when he said it the third time, everyone in the room heard it above the ambient bustle. Jim looked up and Sally looked back at him like she knew there was a thing happening, but she didn’t know how to stop it.
“Really amazing, ” the pencilneck repeated.
Sally pointed out that we had trucks; that our possession of and facility in the handling of trucks was central to our professed identity as truckers, which in turn was key in regard to the pencilneck’s presence in our midst, that presence being a consequence of his desire to deploy those talents in the service of the populace and the enterprise for which he was plenipotentiary spokesperson, ambassador and man on the ground, and in whose short-term interest he now sought to bilk, cheat, con and bamboozle us out of due legal and contractual protections in line with industry practice and good solid common sense, but whose shareholders would, like the aforementioned wider population, unquestionably look with disfavour and consequent litigiousness upon the inevitable wranglings and disputations resulting from said rooking, hornswoggling, grifting and humbuggery, should any ill befall in the due exercise of our discretion and judgement in the course of whatever hare-brained adventure the party of the first part (the pencilneck) chose to inflict upon the soft skin and girlish charms of the party of the second part (the naive and open-hearted drivers of the toughest and most competent civil freebooting company in the world).
“We can fix all that,” the pencilneck said. “You have to come,” he leered, “and see the trucks. ” And that time he made it sound like your first orgasm, or maybe your last.
So we did. Sally reluctantly, Jim calmly, Gonzo eagerly, Tobemory Trent sidewise like a crab and all the rest of us according to our lights, we went out of the Nameless Bar and into the Nameless Parking Lot. The pencilneck waved his arms, and forward they came with a grumble and a clatter, with a great white light and the smell of fresh rubber and vinyl and engine, and lo, there were trucks indeed.
But not trucks as we knew them. These were the trucks of legend, the trucks every vehicle with more than six wheels dreams of being. They were black and chrome and they stank of raunchy fuel consumption and throbbing power. If these trucks could have sung, they’d have sung base, deep and slow and full of the Delta. They had leather seats and positioning systems and armoured glass. They were factory new and they had our number plates already on ’em, and there was a hula girl on the dashboard of Baptiste Vasille’s, and a stack of pornographic images in Samuel P.’s, and Gonzo’s truck had flames on the side and Sally Culpepper’s had a red suede dash. Someone out there understood us, our needs, our mad little schticks, the things without which we weren’t the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (CEO Sally J. Culpepper, presiding), we were just guys and girls in pound shop clothes.
In other words, this was a honey trap. If you’re giving guys like us kit like that to do a gig like this, it’s because either 1) you’re going to make a ton of profit or 2) you don’t think we have a rat’s chance of coming back alive. Most like, it’s both.
But then again that was hardly news. If they could have done it themselves—if they hadn’t been too damned scared to take on what needed to be done, for fear of their silk-socked lives—they never would have come to us. The Free Company was on the clock and there were only three commandments: look after your friends; do the job; come out richer. To these the pencilneck was adding an apocrypha of penalties for excessive damage and materials overspend which we fully intended to ignore, because he was the tool of a litigation-wary softass outfit and they were afraid not only of death but also of flesh-eating lawyers and class actions and angry investors and antitrust and whatall, and the first and second commandments forbid stinting during a run. Thus we gazed upon his many provisos and codicils, and we said “bah.”
Basic plan:
1. go to place A (depot) and pick up item X (big box go boomboom)
2. take it to place B (the pumping station), which is undergoing state Q (on fire, v. v. bad)
3. introduce item X to place B (big box go boomboom, burning pumping station; burning pumping station, big box go boomboom. Shake hands. Didn’t we meet once over at van Kottler’s place? Gosh, darn, I believe we did!) and instigate reaction P (boomboom, bang bang-a-diddly, BOOM) and hence state R (oxygen deprival, pseudo-vacuum, schlurrrrrp !) thus extinguishing B (∼Q, ∼P, so sorry, dear old thing, have to go, children have school tomorrow, ciao-ciao mwah-mwah), thus
4. making enough money to buy a small nation-state, farm watawabas and eat mango all day long (boo-yah, sing hallelujah, we didn’t die).
The question I should have been asking all this time—the thing which we all should have been wanting to know, pressingly and insistently—is this: how the hell did part of the Pipe, the all-ways-up most enduring and secure object ever manufactured by human hands and human engineering; the triple-redundant, safe-tastic product of the most profoundly dedicated collaboration in history; how did this invulnerable thing come to catch fire at all? And when you put it like that, the answer is obvious:
Someone made it so.
But hey. We’re not those kindsa people. We are can-do, not what-about—except for me, maybe. The pencilneck smiled at Sally Culpepper, and his victory grin went a bit slack as he realised we’d never had any intention of saying no, and we knew that he knew that we were expected to lose people. Just for a second I thought perhaps he was ashamed. And then he looked down at his feet and caught a glimpse of his messed up year’s-salary shoes, and he hated this stupid, ugly and above all cheap place, and his pencilneckhood rolled back as he found that part of himself which was indifferent, and he slipped gently into the warm water of not giving a damn.
Look at him again: this is not Dick Washburn you’re seeing, not exactly. Dick has vacated possession for this bit of chat. Standing here is not Richard Godspeed Washburn, who sustained a nasty concussion on his fifteenth birthday, the very eve of the Go Away War, and who spent his next weeks in darkness and candlelight as the hospital he had gone to slowly shut down and ran out and fell apart, then grew to manhood in the new, broken world. This is not Quick Dick of the Harley Street Boys, who—before the orphanfinders came and settled him in a home of sorts and things got somewhat normal once again—could open the rear door of an army truck and pinch a pound of chocolate before the soldiers ever knew. This is Jorgmund itself, staring through Dick’s eyes and measuring things as numbers and profit margins. Of course, Jorgmund is nothing more than a shared hallucination, a set of rules which make up Richard Washburn’s job, and every time he does this—slips away from a human situation and lets the pattern use his mind and his mouth because he’d rather not make the decision himself—he edges a little closer to being a type C pencilneck. He loses a bit of his soul. There’s a flicker of pain and anger in him as the animal he is feels the machine he is becoming take another bite, and snarls in its cage, deep down beneath his waxed, buff pectorals and his second-best (or ninth-best) suit. But it’s really a very small animal, and not one of the fiercer ones.
And then it was over. Deal done. Job on. I sidled over to Sally and murmured in her ear.
“So, before Dickwash showed up . . .”
“Hm.”
“Phone call.”
“Yes.”
“Wrong number?”
Sally shook her head. “I lied,” she murmured, just as quiet. “It was a woman. Didn’t know her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said not to take the job.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” Sally said. “She asked for you, in particular.”
And Sally didn’t say “Keep your eyes open” because she knew me, and that was fine. She nodded once and took the keys to her new
truck from the pencilneck’s unresisting fingers.
Sally and Jim in the first rig, me and Gonzo in the second, Tommy Lapland and Roy Roam in the third, and on to the back of the line. Twenty of us, two to a cab, ten trucks of bad hair, denim and spurs, with Tobemory Trent wearing his special-occasions eyepatch bringing up the rear. Trent was from Preston, born and bred in pork pie country with coal dust in his blood. He lost that eye in the Go Away War, had it taken out in a hurry so he wouldn’t die or worse. Trent spat on the road and roared, Captain goddam Ahab of the new highways, harpoon rack over the driver’s seat in case of trouble. He vaulted into the big chair and slammed the door hard enough to make the rig rock, and there was only one really important thing left to do. Sally and the pencilneck shook hands, Sally turned to look at us from the running board of her truck and there we were, proud and wired and dumb with eighteen-wheel delight. And Gonzo William Lubitsch of Cricklewood Cove, five foot eleven and broad like a Swiss Alp, dropped his trousers and pissed on our front right tyre for luck. Annie the Ox and Egon Schlender hollered and hallooed from number six, and Gonzo dropped his shorts too, exposing a muscular arse in their direction, then leaped into the truck and punched the starter. I had my feet on the dash and I was sending up a tiny prayer to the God who ruled my personal heaven.
Lord, I want to come home.
MOSTLY when we left the Nameless Bar, we headed westwards along the Pipe. Exmoor was a mile or so south of the main trunk road, and the mountains kicked up funny weather, so eighty or ninety miles in the other direction was one of the pinch points in the Zone where you paid close attention to the people you saw in case they weren’t really people at all. Every so often, traders came through town, and there was a special guesthouse in the back of the Nameless Bar where Flynn put the ones he wasn’t sure about. It was comfortable and safe, but it was further from his family. Flynn’s a decent man, but a cautious one.
This time, we went east, very fast. Bone Briskett’s tank was the kind with wheels which can do a decent speed, and he was getting everything he could out of it and asking for more. We drove through the night, and either they’d cleared the road or no one was coming the other way. We hurtled through a steep-sided valley and on along the pinch. The wind was blowing in our favour, off the mountains and away, but even so you could see a broad misty curtain to the south, maybe five miles distant, strange shadows twisting and turning. In a few miles, we could turn left, under the Pipe, and there was a loop of road which would bring us north-eastwards fast. I waited. We didn’t take it.
Instead we drove on, and on, and on, and the dawn was building in the sky, and I started to get that feeling which says “Be ready” because there was one route out here which would bring us over towards Haviland City and full onto a big thick section of the main Pipe. It was an old road, and it would get us there damn fast, but we’d never taken it before because it went through Drowned Cross. I nudged Gonzo and he glanced at me, then shrugged. Drowned Cross was bad country, the far edge of the Border. That was why it was empty, and dead.
We rolled out onto a flat meadow, and there was no more desert. A wide green plain stretched into the distance in front of us, cut by a grey line like a dowager’s eyebrow which departed from the main trunk and headed south. Bone Briskett’s tank took the corner without slowing, and Gonzo tutted—whether at this haste or at our destination, I didn’t know, but I could feel him paying more attention, looking at narrow places on the road and measuring them with his eyes, checking the escort and wondering whether they were good enough.
Right after the Reification and the Go Away War, there was a period of what you might call undue optimism. One particular town was built with two fingers up to the recent past, first of a new breed of bright, safe places where we could all get on with real life again, pay tax and worry about our hairlines and middle-aged spread, and is the guy next door flouting the hosepipe ban during the summer heat? They called it Heyerdahl Point, and they sold it as an adventure in neo-suburban frontiersmanship. About five thousand people lived there. It had its own little capillary of the Jorgmund Pipe making it secure, and it perched on a hilltop so the people there could look down on the valleys below, and out into the dangerous mists of the unreal, and know that they were pushing back the boundary just by being here.
“One day,” they could say to one another over decaf, “all this will be fields.”
Now it was called Drowned Cross.
We came around a curve, and there it was, tucked up on its little hill and dark and empty as your dog’s kennel after you take him to the vet and say goodbye. The road went straight to it, and so did Bone Briskett, and so did we. Drowned Cross got bigger but no lighter, jagged and sprawling across the sky. The big broken tooth over the whole place was the church spire, and the rough-edged thing it had fallen against was the town clock, stuck at five fifteen for evermore. The houses were clean and pale, with terracotta roofs. The windows were unbroken. A couple of cars were parked neatly in the main square, and one had the door open; the kind of town where you left the keys in the ignition while you bought your paper. Birds flew up out of the sunroof as we went by, grey and black pigeons with mad pigeon eyes. One of them was too stupid to dodge in the right direction and bounced off the windscreen. Or maybe the others had pushed him—it’s not hard to believe in murder among pigeons. Gonzo swore. The stunned bird tumbled away and lay in the road. If it was still there when Samuel P. came by, he’d drive right over it.
No one really knew what had happened in Drowned Cross. There weren’t any survivors. No one showed up, addled and desperate, at the next town along the way; no lonely shepherd saw the whole thing from an adjoining hill. Whatever it was, it made no noise, in the grand scheme, and left no image of itself. Something came up out of the unreal and swallowed the place. Perhaps the hill under Drowned Cross eats villages. I heard a story once, on the radio, in which a group of sailors cast adrift came at last to an island where they moored for the night. They had not expected land, so far off course and bewildered by foreign stars; they had anticipated thirst and madness. They wept and kissed the ground and lit a fire to cook their supper, and at last fell into a fitful sleep. Of course, in the middle of the night they woke to a dreadful howling, and the isle on which they stood began to shake, and then great, boneless arms reached from the water to snatch at them, and they realised they had sought refuge on the back of some horrid monster of the deep.
I loved cautionary tales like that when I was a child, but sitting with Gonzo and looking down on the clean, vacant houses of Drowned Cross, I kept thinking of clams slurped with garlic sauce, and the shells thrown back into the bowl. What had happened there was nasty, plain and simple, and there’d been others, since. In the still hours of the night-time in houses all around the Pipe, people woke, and listened, and were afraid of things from beyond the Border. Somebody out there ate towns, whole, and went on his way. People said it was the Found Thousand. I hoped that wasn’t true.
The Cross itself—our road and the other one, the east–west road which went through the town and headed out into what they all figured would be the next slice of reclaimed land—was on the far side of the square. We went slowly, partly because the cobbles were slick with dew, and partly because you don’t squeal your tyres in a graveyard, no matter how much you want to leave. Something glimmered in the dust where the roads met: a silvered piece of metal engraved with what could have been a new moon or a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. It looked expensive, and I wondered how long it had sat there. Since the day Drowned Cross got its name, most likely. It could have been a cuff link, or a bracelet. It seemed sad that someone was missing it—maybe it was one of two, and he still had the other one—and then I felt guilty and crass because whoever owned it was almost certainly dead, and his missing watchstrap whojimmy wasn’t bugging him any more.
And then, as swiftly as it had come upon us, it was gone. A small place, after all. Gonzo turned the wheel, bringing the truck in a wide, powerful turn, and the last
empty cottage vanished behind us. Bone Briskett’s tank went roaring out ahead, and Gonzo rapped his hands on the wheel, papapapahhh!
“The open road!” I shouted into the radio.
“Oh, ecstasy!” cried Jim Hepsobah and Sally Culpepper.
“Oh, poop-poop!” yelled Gonzo Lubitsch.
Bone Briskett didn’t say anything, but he said it in a way which made it clear he thought we were mad.
Please, dear Lord.
I want to come home.
Chapter Two
At home with kid Gonzo;
donkeys, girls, and first meetings.
IT’S time to eat,” Ma Lubitsch says, a broad expanse of apron topped by a summit of greasy peanut-coloured hair. Old Man Lubitsch doesn’t hear over the buzzing of his hives, or he doesn’t care to join us, because his baggy white figure remains out in the yard, tottering from one prefab bee house to another with a can of wispy smoke. Ma Lubitsch makes a noise like a whale clearing its blowhole and sets out knives and forks, the delaminating edge of the table pushing into her belly. Gonzo’s mother is big enough that she takes up two seats in church and once near-killed a burglar with a rolled-up colour supplement. Gonzo himself, still able to count his years without resorting to two hands, has his father’s more sparing construction.
One of my first memories, in all the world: Gonzo, only a few months before, staring into my face with a stranger’s concern. He has been playing a game of indescribable complexity, by himself, in the corner of the playground. He has walked from one end of the sandpit to the other and rendered it flat in a particular place, and he has marked borders and bridges and areas of diffusion and lines of demarcation and now he needs another player and cannot find one. And so he turns to look about him and sees a small, lost child: alone in a moment of unfathomable grief. With presence of mind he directs his mother’s attention to the crisis, and she trundles over and asks immediately what is the matter and am I hurt and where are my parents and where is my home? And to these questions I have no answer. All I know is that I am crying.