WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  "We're fine, Princess. I'm just checking a few things out. We're set to go."

  "Too bad," she replied with a regretful smile. "In a funny way, this was nice. I've never camped out before, and I almost wouldn't mind having to stay here for a while."

  "If we did, I'd have to go out and shoot a cow. It's time for breakfast and I'm starving to death."

  "Me, too," Lisette replied, digging my suitcase out of the backseat. Rummaging around in the bag, she procured my last clean T-shirt and, with supreme female self-assurance, pro­ceeded to dry her hair with it.

  "Enjoy your swim?" I asked with a certain degree of irony.

  "It was terrific!" She paused and peered out accusingly from beneath the white cotton. "You didn't peek, did you?"

  I shrugged. "At what?"

  I slid behind the '57's wheel, grinning at the faint feminine snort that sounded behind me.

  I hit the ignition. The 283 turned over and fired, the needles on the Stewart Warner instrument gauges snapping to attention at the first barking growl of the exhausts. Lightly feathering the throttle, I made those needles dance sinuosly to the engine's song.

  I let her warm for a full minute. Then, with the oil pressure in the right range, I leaned into the gas pedal. The decibels grew to match the revs on the tachometer. Thunder filled the grove and Lisette pressed her hands over her ears. As we passed through three thousand RPMs, the secondary barrels of the dual Carter carburetors slammed open. The shrill, rising scream of air through the venturies merged with the roar of the exhausts to form a single composite howl of power.

  I pushed the needle around the tach face until it hovered just short of the 6,000 rev red line, and I held it there for a slow count of ten, feeling the vibration of the hammering pistons resonate through my rib cage. The '57's iron soul whispered to mine over the bellow of her mill, Yeah, boss. It's all here.

  I let her drift down to idle, and she backed off with a final decisive crackle of her twin pipes. Killing the ignition, I gave her a light slap on the dashboard. We were ready.

  "Why is it so much louder?" Lisette asked, curiously peering in through the window.

  "I pulled the header plugs while I was underneath. That bypasses the mufflers and reduces the engine backpressure. It'll mean a lot more noise, but it'll also give us an extra ten or eleven horsepower."

  She nodded with sober understanding. "In case of Mace."

  "You got it. He's up with us now, and he knows that sooner or later we've got to go back to 66. He'll be trolling for us. Last time we were able to outfox him. Next time we might have to run for it."

  I got out and secured my tool roll in the trunk. "That's it," I said, slamming the lid. "We're ready to roll."

  "Not quite yet."

  Lisette handed me my slightly soggy T-shirt and a well-used sliver from one of those miniature bars of hotel soap. "I've made my contribution to general hygiene this morning. Now it's your turn. The river is just over that way, and the water is fine."

  "You have an interesting set of priorities, woman. We're supposed to be running for our lives from the Mob here."

  "I'm fully aware of that, and as special dispensation I'll let you get away with not shaving until we can get to some hot water. However, I'm not going to ride around in the same car all day with a stale male. We're both going to be whiffy enough as is."

  She had a point. That's another area where movies separate from reality. Grace Kelly and Cary Grant never seem to run out of fresh laundry.

  Lisette pointed pointedly. "Go!"

  "How do I know that you won't peek?"

  "At what?"

  We crossed the Canadian on Oklahoma State 33 and cut down to reacquire Route 66 at Clinton. We were getting well out into the short-grass country, and the hills had cured golden and dry after a long, hot summer. There were fewer farms and more ranches, less cultivation and more cattle and oil. Nodding grasshopper pumps shared the pasturage with grazing herds of Hereford cattle.

  66 was changing as well, throwing us longer and longer straightaways as it porpoised west over the low rolling coun­tryside. Towns and traffic were spaced out with more miles of highway for fewer people. Even the paving was different. The concrete took on a pinkish hue, the red rock of the western lands having gone into its composition. The '57 ate it up like candy, the ground covered spinning away behind us.

  Wind roar and engine snarl boiled in through the open win­dows. Battering at first, it became almost hypnotic as you fo­cused past it. With my sunglasses propped on her nose, Lisette drowsed across the front seat, her bare feet propped on the passenger side doorsill and her perspiration-damp back nestled comfortably against my shoulder.

  Foss . . . Elk City . . . Sayre. . . . Small towns roofed by fluffy white clouds and sun-faded blue sky, a water tower rising above each of them like an H. G. Wells Martian on sentry duty. Quiet towns. Nice places to stop for a rest if you didn't have anyone on your tail. My eyes kept flicking to the rear view mir­ror, watching for a glint of polished black behind us.

  Erick . . . Texola and the Oklahoma-Texas line . . . Sham­rock . . .

  At Shamrock, we pulled in under the spire of the U-Drop-Inn cafe and service station for a cold Nehi and a tank of gas. I also made a point of filling both of the one-gallon water bags I carried in the '57. A "just in case" move, since we were now heading into serious dry country.

  As I slung the bags upright in the trunk, the inevitable fi­nally happened.

  "Hey, let me drive for a while?" Lisette asked, beating me around to the driver's side of the '57.

  I winced inwardly. I'm one of those people who'd rather let someone else use his toothbrush than his car. A lot of hot rodders are like that. We have this ingrained suspicion that if we ever let some uninitiated individual lay her eager little hands upon our personal wheels, we'll see that finely tuned piece of racing machin­ery disintegrate into elephant snot right in front of our eyes.

  Only with me, it's not a suspicion. I'm sure of it.

  "Why?" I asked in considerable pain.

  "For a lot of reasons," Lisette replied, sliding in behind the wheel and slamming the door. "Because it's not fair for you to have to do all of the driving. And because it would be a good idea for me to know how to handle this car in case I had to drive it in an emergency. But mostly, because I want to."

  "And if I say no, you'll likely go all girl on me and moan, bitch, whine, sulk, and complain for the rest of the day."

  She gave it a moment's sober consideration and then nodded. "Very probably."

  "Right."

  I tossed the keys on the seat beside her and got in on the passenger side. "I'm not even going to try and fight this. Car, this is Lisette. Lisette, this is Car. Whatever happens next be­tween the two of you is none of my responsibility."

  She actually had at least one pretty good point. She might have to drive herself or us out of somewhere if I stopped being lucky. And it made sense for her to get the feel of the car now, before she had to do it while running away or being shot at. Anyway, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected.

  Lisette had apparently cut her driving teeth on some pretty hot iron. Beyond a mild tire chirp or two while she was getting used to the stiff clutch, she didn't grind any hunks off my transmission. And unlike the growing number of Dynaflos-damaged in the world, she actually knew what a stick shift was all about.

  She also wasn't intimidated or casual about all those horses under the hood. She just put them to work like God and Zora Arkus-Duntov intended. After about the first ten miles, I began to let my weight down a little.

  A little bit beyond Allenreed, we climbed the eroding cap-rock breaks that mark the edge of the real West. Suddenly we were driving across a sea of land. Route 66 arrowed almost die-straight across a great flat ocean of golden grass, speckled with tufts of stunted rabbitbrush. No more hills. No more valleys. No more trees. The next high ground would herald the coming of the Rocky Mountains.

  This vast prairie had so spooked our forest-
raised forefathers that they had called it the Great American Desert. They'd lied to themselves about it being worthless, and they'd cowered at its eastern edge until a new generation could be bred: the plainsmen. Like their close cousins the seamen, these were peo­ple who could tolerate looking out across a little piece of eter­nity.

  On its southern edge, the Conquistadors had another name for it: the Llano Estacado: the Staked Plains. When they ven­tured out into it, they drove stakes into the ground at intervals to mark the trail, fearing that they might just sink into all that emptiness and disappear.

  Our modern-day trail had been staked out as well, although not quite for the same purpose. This stretch of the highway was a roadside advertiser's dream. You had to read the bill­boards just to keep from going stir-crazy.

  Phillips 66, Burma Shave, the black-and-yellow crouching rabbit of Arizona's Jackrabbit Trading Post, the sexy cowgirl of Winslow's Store for Men, and the smiling fat man of Santa Rosa Club Cafe.

  Granddaddy of them all were the siren calls of an entire city: TUCUMCARI TONIGHT in an orange-and-red visual scream, backed by the alluring whispered promise of two thousand mo­tel room beds. Posted at regular intervals, the massive garish billboards bashed at the subconscious with an invasive brain­washing that made North Korea's best look like kindergarten stuff.

  Those were just the big boys, though. The little guys tucked in between where they could. GAS 30 miles! CLEAN REST rooms! sleep off the highway! air cooled! home cooking! free ice! desert zoo! live rattlesnakes! ex­citing! educational!

  "Who in the world ever came up with the idea of a roadside snake pit in the first place?" Lisette asked, her lips curling.

  "The snake pit is a child of the depression, Princess," I re­plied, slouching over on the passenger side with my arms crossed and my eyes half-closed.

  "You mean like with The Grapes of Wrath and the dust bowl refugees and all?"

  "Yeah. That's the way I understand it. When things got really bad back here in the thirties, Route 66 was a way out for a lot of people. Like with the Joads going out to California and all. But the old Mother Road also helped to keep alive a lot of the folks who stayed behind as well. Money was going through on the highway, and if you were smart, you could get ahold of some of it. If you could scrape together a few bucks, you could open an auto court or a cafe or a gas station. If you had absolutely flat-ass nothing, however, you set yourself up a snake pit."

  "Geyuck!"

  "Think about it."

  "I don't want to!"

  "It was the only roadside business you could start with a zero cash investment. Your star attractions could be picked up for free out along the rimrocks. Rattlers, coral snakes, copper­heads, and maybe a few Gila monsters on the side if you wanted to be exotic. Sure, you might lose a slow cousin or two collecting 'em, but hey, that's show business."

  "Kevin! That's awful!" Lisette shuddered.

  "The upkeep was minimal, too. You just ran a trap line out in the barn. Throw them a nice dead rat every couple of weeks, and the majority of your employees were happy. In fact, I'm informed that after a while the snakes even started coming to you. A slot in a good snake pit was considered a pretty plush position if you happened to have been born a dust bowl dia-mondback."

  "Kevin Pulaski! I am warning you!"

  Oh, the simple masculine pleasure of making a squeamish female squeam.

  "Anyhow," I continued. "You knocked down the chicken coop for the wood to build your pens, and you used your left­over barn paint to make your road signs. You leased a Coke cooler to serve up cold drinks, and you charged the rubes from back east a nickel apiece for a good case of the creeps. If your old man had the hands to throw a little three-card monte on the side, you could stay alive."

  "I'd rather have gone west with the Joads!"

  "You don't dig snakes, huh?"

  "Not until they've been made into handbags."

  I chuckled and settled lower on the base of my spine.

  Now that I was used to it, it was kind of nice having some­one else herding the wheels down the highway for a change. The heat of the day and the rhythmic clicking of the tires strik­ing the expansion joints in the pavement sank into me. After a few minutes I found my eyes closing and my head sinking forward on my chest.

  Why not pile up a few Zs while I had the chance? It wasn't as if I'd been getting all the rest in the world these past few nights. And anyhow, what the hell could happen out here in the middle of nowhere?

  I was just fading out when I heard the sound of another engine overriding the steady growl of the '57's mill. Gaining on us, it sounded like. Given the rate of knots Lisette was turning, not many people had been trying to pass.

  That little instinctive card file in the back of my head tried to match the burbling rumble to a specific power-plant type. Sounded like a souped-up flathead. Maybe a Big Merc. A Big Merc? Where had I seen one of those lately?

  My eyes snapped open and my head whipped around.

  "SonofaBITCH!"

  My left foot came over the transmission hump and smashed down on Lisette's right foot and the gas pedal. The '57 surged forward and the shotgun blast that was meant to take our heads off didn't.

  Instead, the fist-sized buckshot pattern from the fully choked Winchester blew in one rear side window and out the other, spraying us with fragments of safety glass. Over in the cab of his '40 Ford pickup, I could see Ira Claster mouthing a curse and fumbling one-handed with the weapon's pump action.

  He'd really meant it back there in Baxter Springs. He didn't want anyone finding his brother.

  "What do I do?" Lisette's voice was taut but steady. There was no panic there, just a request for instructions.

  "Stand on it!"

  She did! Lisette socked the spurs to the 283 horses under the '57's hood, and we pulled away from the pickup. For a few seconds, anyway. A puff of smoke streaked back from the Ford's laker pipes as Claster poured it on and came after us.

  I twisted around in the seat, drawing my gun. My attention was divided, my eyes fixed on our pursuer and my hearing on the rising scream of our own engine.

  "Watch your tach!" I yelled. "Hold her at six thousand revs! Push her over the red line and you'll blow the mill!"

  "Okay!" Lisette was yelling, too, but her voice was almost lost over the sound of the engine and the hurricane's worth of wind blasting in through the open windows.

  My thoughts were racing almost as fast as the car. We had to keep moving. If we stopped, it would be my automatic against Claster's twelve-gauge, and one shotgun outnumbers a whole lot of pistols.

  Out here on the road, though, Claster would have a problem in the confining space of his truck cab. His shotgun looked like a hunting weapon with a full-length tube. The only way he could shoot was one-handed and out of the passenger window, the gun barrel braced against the frame. That gave him only a narrow effective field of fire: his passenger side to our driver's side.

  If we knew what was good for us, we had to have to stay out of that killing zone. It would be a two-dimensional dogfight on an eighteen-foot-wide-strip of concrete. And just now, brother Ira had the position advantage on us.

  The experience advantage, too. The Claster boys had prob­ably been outrunning revenuers in the third grade, while this was likely Lisette's first time at driving at real speed.

  "S curve!" Lisette called out.

  I whipped my attention forward. "She can take it at seventy! Don't brake yet. . . . brake now! Keep your revs up! Accelerate through the turns . . . Now punch it! Go! Go! Go!"

  The '57 didn't like the untrained hand at her wheel. Rubber sobbed where it should have drifted, and she shook her tail fins angrily as we tore a ragged path through the curves. Lisette fought through it, though, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel, her eyes coolly flicking between the wavering tachometer needle and the road ahead.

  Claster cornered more cleanly and went for our flank again; the hoarser bellow of the Ford's engine overrode the higher-toned howl of
the Chevy's mill as he started to pull alongside.

  I tried to line up on the truck's radiator, aiming through the shattered rear window on the driver's side. The .45 would be going off right behind Lisette's head, and I prayed that I wouldn't take out one of her eardrums.

  "Watch it! I'm taking a shot!"

  The Commander roared and a spent shell casing ricocheted around the '57's interior for an instant before flicking out through the window with a brassy glint. I wasn't rewarded with an eruption of steam from the Ford, but Claster slowed abruptly and swerved in behind us.

  Okay, you hick-town asshole. You didn't figure on us shoot­ing back, did you?

  Throwing myself over to the passenger-side window, I leaned out into the slipstream. Aiming back with a deliberate two-handed grip, I laid the front blade of my sights on the silhouette behind the truck's wheel.

  "Watch it!" It was Lisette's turn to yell a warning. The '57 danced sideways and I got a blurred impression of a bronze Pontiac station wagon and a cluster of terrified faces as we blazed past. We drifted over too far and ticked the gravel shoulder of the left lane. Just for a second, we fishtailed wildly, one notch short of losing it all.

  Lisette dragged us back onto the pavement again. That same fighting snarl that I had seen back at Claster's garage was on her face. Her fingernail marks were probably permanently carved into the steering wheel.

  "Bitchin', Princess! You're doing good!"

  She gulped on a dry throat and managed to nod a reply.

  Claster had snaked around the station wagon as well and was closing with us again. I drew a bead once more. But I hesitated. One of the things they teach you as a lawman is that you can't just worry about shooting at the bad guy. You have to worry about shooting at what the bad guy is standing in front of.

  To the left and right there wasn't anything except open de­sert. To the front and rear, though, we were sharing this high­way with other cars. A slug from the military-spec hardball ammunition I was using could carry almost a mile and still have enough velocity to kill. A miss on my part might just blow away some poor damn vacationing dentist from Paducah along with his whole family.