“Hi, there, old squirrel. Want a nip?”
The animal studied him in silence. It showed no sign of fear and Owen thought that a good omen.
“It’s good booze,” he assured the rodent, and sighted through the bottle to admire the golden color. “Made it myself in one of those fancy think-and-do machines. That old bat who kicked me out of the house this morning could take lessons from me ” Owen tilted the bottle to his lips a third time, pleased with what the liquid was doing inside.
To the squirrel: “Are you reconstituted pork, or are you the real thing?”
The animal switched its tail and watched him, and Owen decided it was the real thing. He’d never heard of a zombie squirrel.
He placed the bottle between his knees to prevent spillage and went to his breast pocket for matches and a cigar. The result was less than satisfactory, a sorry reversal of his whiskey-making skills; one or two pulls on the cigar told him the quality of his craftsmanship wasn’t all that good. But make do, make do—there was a war on, and the cigars could have been so rank as to be un-smokable. As poor as they were, they weren’t as bad as Ramses, and most places, Ramses was all a man could find when he wanted a smoke.
“Easily worth a nickel, I’d say—but, then, I don’t think I’d pay a dime for it. It’s not worth a dime.”
Owen decided to smoke it through to the end and search for ways to improve the product. Perhaps later samples would be better—perhaps this one cigar was the first of the batch and his early visualization had been faulty.
He rested easily against the locust tree with the bottle in one hand and the cigar in the other to take stock of a distant life—his first life, the life before this one, when he had been twenty-eight years old and had driven, or at least owned, a 1940 Ford truck. Phantom ideas prowled around inside his skull, mere shadows of ancient memories. He prodded those vague stirrings, teased and poked at the wispy ghosts to force them into shapes he could examine and just perhaps recognize. The shadows were there for his inspection if only he could make them stand and be counted. Odd ideas and old ideas of shapes and things had been recurring all morning while he traveled and worked, and he wanted to see old faces, old scenes, old tools that he knew. That cucumber had turned out nicely in the machine, which proved that the memories were there—somewhere.
There was a war on.
Franklin Roosevelt was the President of the United States. He was serving his third term in the White House, and some Republicans had taken to calling him King Franklin. Henry Wallace was the Vice-President, and those same Republicans were calling him some pretty nasty names. The Republicans had lost a lot of elections.
Because of the war the country was making do with less of everything; butter and sugar and meat and tires and gasoline were rationed—although a person could always find what he wanted on the black market if, say, he was willing to pay fifty cents a gallon for bootleg gasoline. Owen had good tires on his panel truck; there was no immediate worry about rubber, and when he remembered to keep his speed down, the truck consistently delivered more than twenty miles to the gallon, except in Indianapolis. That town was hard on man, beast, and automobile.
Owen nipped at the bottle and considered the facts— those few new memories he accepted as facts.
St. Louis had won the World Series last October, handily beating New York four games to one. Now those were red-letter days! The final game was played in New York on October fifth; therefore it should be winter now, not this blazing summer day in July or August. Because St. Louis won last October—a few months ago—it should be January or February or maybe March, 1943, right now. Today. This timber and the surrounding prairie should be blanketed by snow with an underlayer of ice. He did remember that. The winter was firmly fixed in mind because it followed the St. Louis victory—the first time the St. Louis team had even been in the Series since 1934. During one night of that winter a sleet storm came first, beginning shortly after midnight, and snow started falling a few hours later.
Owen paused to review those new memories, and was satisfied they weren’t false ones. Roosevelt was serving his third term, and Wallace was next in line. Wallace had been an Iowa farm boy before he fell in with politicians, but he hadn’t always been the Vice-President. Somebody named Garner came first—ah, John Garner. Old John was Vice-President during Roosevelt’s first and second terms, but people grumbled about his age and his evil habits, so Roosevelt had sent him home to Texas and picked Wallace in the … the 1940 election. That felt right and sounded right: the 1940 election. And meanwhile there was a war going on in Europe. Hitler was thrashing everybody.
The United States fell into the war the very next year, 1941. Japan. Now there was the other name that had eluded him. The Japanese fleet and air force attacked Pearl Harbor on a Sunday in December and suddenly the United States was into all the wars: in Europe, in Africa, and in the Pacific Ocean. That’s what happened.
He was twenty-eight; he’d been born in 1915.
That automatically made him draft bait, and only a couple of years ago he’d gone down to the schoolhouse in Hartford City along with sixteen million other guys and registered for the draft. Congress had passed a law conscripting just about every male who wasn’t lame or blind or hiding out in the hills, and on some nameless October day in 1940 he’d lined’ up before a teacher’s desk to register. One of his former grammar school teachers had signed him on and pretended to recognize him when he recited his name and address and gave her a friendly hello. The schoolhouse had been packed with bait like himself, and for all he knew, the teacher recognized all of them. She had been there a mighty long time, teaching the same grade.
Well, now, where did all that leave him?
It left him with a cold cigar and a warm bottle. Owen sampled the bottle’s contents, congratulated himself again on his skill, and relit the cigar.
He rather suspected that he’d been a carpenter back there in that fuzzy life behind him. The tools he’d made from instinct or memory had all seemed of a professional quality—unlike the cigar—and they were the kind of tools he’d want to own and use himself. And he owned the kind of panel truck a carpenter might drive. It seemed to him now that the truck was painted a dark green, or maybe black.
Concentrate on that truck: it’s the key.
It wasn’t a new truck, of course, because it had been built in 1940—or perhaps late 1939—and he was driving it during his twenty-eighth year in January or February or maybe March, 1943. Had he bought it new? No answer, no memory. Well, then, a used truck—a convenient panel job for an honest carpenter going about his business. Abruptly, Owen saw himself sitting in the truck and peered closer. A shadowy image crawled from a hole in the depths of his mind and raised itself for inspection. He was driving the truck and there was something on the seat beside him. A passenger? No answer, no memory. Owen poked at the stray memory to see it move and reform to his advantage. The scene became clear.
He was driving the truck, and it was snowing.
He was certain it was snowing because now he could see the snowfall in his headlights, and the headlights were lit because it was still dark outside—not yet sunrise. The image was extraordinarily clear. The sleet storm had come first, beginning around midnight or a little later, and the snow fell on top of it a few hours later. Owen prodded the memory. He studied it from the viewpoint of an interested bystander and realized that he was driving to work on an ice- “and snow-covered road somewhere near Hartford City. He was driving cautiously, knowing what was under his wheels and knowing the treachery of ice.
Another vagrant ghost of an idea squirmed in his mind, and the 1943 Owen turned his head to look down at the box of carpenter’s tools on the seat beside him, a large and heavy box filled with two or three hundred dollars* worth of tools—just about his only asset other than the truck. In his mind’s eye—no, his mind’s ear—he heard again the bleating locomotive horn and the muffled rumbling of a freight train on the Pennsy tracks. The train was shockingly close.<
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Owen Hall sat up straight and took a very long pull on the bourbon. He knew with sudden certainty how, and why, and when he ceased being twenty-eight on a wretched February date in 1943.
The red flashers were working: he could see them blinking in rapid one-two fashion through the snowstorm. His brakes were working and he knew how to use them on snow or ice, but this time the gentle pumping motions didn’t bring the truck to a controlled stop in a straight line. The rear wheels swung from under him, swung the truck sideways despite his efforts to steer in control, while he and it continued traveling forward in the original direction. The icy road thwarted him. Owen caught a frantic glimpse of the red flashing lights coming at him against a side window, then going over his head, over the truck roof—and then the truck slammed broadside against the Pennsy freight. His time sense slowed to near zero.
He didn’t hear a sound of impact and thought that strange. There should have been a thumping smack at the broad point of collision, but he heard only a scraping noise that couldn’t be readily identified. The truck was being carried along with the train, carried pell mell along the right-of-way. The red flashers were down and they, together with the pole, were being dragged along with him. Owen watched the drainage ditch flash by alongside his window and then saw the newly splintered side of a boxcar through the opposite window, on the passenger side. His truck and the boxcar seemed to be joined; they hurtled forward together along the Pennsy tracks. The strange scraping noise sped along with them. He knew that the truck headlights were still on. He held to the wheel.
Owen turned his head again to look down at the box of carpenter’s tools on the seat beside him. The lid was open and the tools were flying about inside his cab. A crosscut saw lay in his lap, and then he remembered that the saw had bumped against his head and fallen to his lap. A hammer rested on the dashboard, above the speedometer. The toolbox left the seat; it appeared to lift itself and leap forward through the gaping hole where the windshield had been. He hadn’t realized the windshield was gone. Snow was coming through the new opening, pelting his face. Owen gripped the wheel tightly, although he had lost steering control, and the snow on his hands was red snow.
The peculiar scraping noise stopped without warning and Owen swung his head to stare at the boxcar. The noise had been coming from the car’s wheels, but now the noise was missing, although the boxcar was still there. The car was toppling toward him, pushing the roof in like collapsing cardboard. Owen watched the roof come to him. The boxcar toppled over and fell into the drainage ditch alongside the Pennsy tracks, burying the Ford truck beneath it. There was no sound at all.
That had happened to him.
The squirrel was gone from the overhanging limb.
Owen Hall blinked at the mildness of the . .. the transition, the experience, and wondered why the experience hadn’t followed the book. Somebody wasn’t playing by the rules, and Pastor Coulson had been dead wrong.
There had been no sharp division of time, no definite and recognizable transition period between that night and this day: snowstorm gave way to heat of summer in the bat of an eye. Panel truck and boxcar gave way to a green door and a thwack on the rump between breaths. There didn’t seem to be as much as a count of one or two between the incident with the freight train and the incident with the boozy broad. There had been no intermission between the acts, and he marveled at that.
Owen had a drink and once again relit the cigar. He’d have to pick up a supply of matches.
This place certainly didn’t resemble any kind of heaven or hell that he’d read or heard about, but if it was hell, it was a most peculiar hell. No devils, no tails. Pastor Coulson would be most disappointed when he woke up and walked through somebody’s door to discover this world. The pastor’s promises and predictions had gone awry, and he wouldn’t take that lightly.
Owen had seen a dozen or so tall women clad in pink coveralls, who seemed to run the town and all its works, and perhaps two or three hundred male zombies, who worked for the women. He’d seen one live gray squirrel and wanted to imagine there were others in the trees. But there wasn’t a pitchfork, a tail, or a pair of angelic wings in the whole lot of them, in all the town.
Well, then, where was he?
The only answer that came to mind was the name of a candy bar: back in the thirties, when he was a kid with no more than a nickel or a dime at a time to spend, there’d been a pretty good candy bar called Damifino, That was the only answer to explain the present situation. The town back yonder certainly wasn’t Hartford City, Indiana, in any shape or form; good old H.C. didn’t have a full quota of paved sidewalks, much less a rolling road. He might still be in Indiana. The prairie and the timber looked like Indiana, but with all the towns and farms and service stations taken away. Yes, and the Pennsylvania tracks were gone, too—-all in the space of a few months. He had stopped being twenty-eight in February and now a few months later, in July or August, say, all was changed.
Owen found time to regret the loss of his panel job. That had been a good truck with good gas mileage and good rubber—-a shame to lose it like that, with little chance of replacing it until the war was over. The President had stopped almost all passenger car production for the duration and only enough trucks were being built to keep the businessmen in business. Detroit was working overtime turning out jeeps and tanks and cannon for half the armies of the world, and a man without a car or truck had to walk or ride the bus—if there were any buses.
Of course, he didn’t need an automobile with the rolling road available to him, but that road only moved around in a circle, and he didn’t really care to travel around and around the same town for the rest of his life. The truck could have hauled him across the prairie to the next town, but lacking a truck he’d just have to walk when he decided to move on. Move where? Damifino. He’d keep his overnight date with the blonde babe and go exploring in the morning. He might find out where he was, or he might find Hartford City just over the hills a piece.
Owen stood up and stretched. He felt good, not counting a certain light-headedness.
His whiskey was proving to be of the best quality. He raised the bottle to his lips to drink, but then paused to reconsider a phenomenon. He drank, but the other men did not. It was a belated realization, but now it struck him that none of the zombies in the factory had made a trip to the drinking fountain all morning. He had not seen a fountain anywhere in the building. And, for that matter, none of them had gone to the men’s room either. It just wasn’t natural.
Owen swallowed the drink and knew that he was natural. He walked around behind the locust tree to be natural, although there was no one in sight to watch him. Good old Indiana boys were just shy.
Owen gouged a shallow hole in the ground with the heel of his shoe and buried the cigar butt; it would be dumb to set fire to such a nice place. He pocketed the second bottle of booze and struck off through the timber, making for the open prairie away from the town. It was much too early to go back there, too early to go back to the nice tall blonde with the freckled nose, and just now he had a hankering to see big prairie. Maybe that was his distant past calling him; maybe he was really a Plains Indian in a paleface body. His grandmother had had high cheekbones and could sit on her haunches.
Owen plodded along through the weedy underbrush, satisfied with himself. Those puzzling questions about his past life had been answered—up to a certain point—and he knew no more reason to probe there. He’d met up with a Pennsy freight train on a snowy night, and that answered that. Perhaps his coming companion of the night could explain to him why there’d been no intermission between that life and this one; perhaps she could tell him what had happened to the months between February and August, and perhaps she could tell him what he was doing here and just where—or what—here was. He was content to wait.
The enormity of the prairie took his breath.
A vast and unending sea of grass. Quite literally, it stretched from one horizon to the other without a visible bre
ak—without a house, bam, silo, or gasoline station. The prairie was empty of roads, rail trackage, billboards, or telegraph poles; it revealed neither humans, horses, cattle, barking dogs, nor the furrows of a plow. There were no windmills. Thousands of empty acres filled the world from one far reach of his sight to the other—a world abounding in the tall grasses that again reminded him of the buffalo grass his grandfather had talked about. There were no junkyards.
The whole world seemed empty but for the town behind him, and that enormous vacuity stirred his sense of wonder. There were no beer signs creaking in the wind.
After a while Owen turned westward and made his way along the timberline, keeping to the shade for comfort. He didn’t need to step out onto that prairie to know that it was hotter than the hinges of hell. The heat of the day and the lush growth around him again suggested July or August—a very far cry from that night a few hours ago when he had stopped being twenty-eight. It was a slow walk because of the tangled undergrowth, but not an unpleasant one; he paused two or three—or maybe four—times to eye the great grassland and to sip at his first bottle, continuing to marvel at the quality. Owen was content.
The old cemetery began where the timber ended.
Those ancient gravediggers had started their work at some distant point on the prairie and dug almost to the tree line before stopping. Fallen monuments were visible from where Owen stood in the shade, looking out at the workmen who’d left the road in the early morning. Unlike the factory workers with the shorter hours, these diggers were still at it, industriously spading the cemetery all unmindful of the hot sun. They didn’t appear to be sweating. He watched them for a while and fell to wondering why they didn’t sweat, didn’t stop to wipe a brow or take a breath.
Ressurection Days Page 5