by Greg Bear
“I heard about benefits,” he said. “Perks and benefits. Back in that town.” He had a crazy sad look.
I tightened my jaw and stared straight ahead.
“You know,” he said, “They talk a lot in that town. They tell about how they use old trains for Chinese, and in Russia there’s a tramline. In Mexico it’s old buses, always at night—”
“Listen. I don’t use all the benefits,” I said. “Some do but I don’t.”
“I got you,” he said, nodding that exaggerated goddamn young bobble, his whole neck and shoulders moving, it’s all right everything’s cool.
“How you gonna find her?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Hitch the road, ask the drivers.”
“How’d you get in?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m coming here when I die. That’s pretty sure. It’s not so hard for folks like me to get in beforehand. And … my daddy was a driver. He told me the route. By the way, my name’s Bill.”
“Mine’s John,” I said.
“Pleased to meet you.”
We didn’t say much for a while. He stared out the right window and I watched the desert and faraway shacks go by. Soon the mountains loomed up—space seems compressed on the road, especially out of the desert—and I sped up for the approach.
They made some noise in the back. Lost, creepy sounds, like tired old sirens in a factory.
“What’ll you do when you get off work?” Bill asked.
“Go home and sleep.”
“That’s the way it was with Daddy, until just before the end. Look, I didn’t mean to make you mad. I’d just heard about the perks and I thought …” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “You might be able to help. I don’t know how I’ll ever find Sherill. Maybe back in the annex …”
“Nobody in their right minds goes into the yards by choice,” I said. “You’d have to look at everybody that’s died in the last four months. They’re way backed up.”
Bill took that like a smack across the face and I was sorry I’d said it. “She’s only been gone a week,” he said.
“Well,” I said.
“My mom died two years ago, just before Daddy.”
“The High Road,” I said.
“What?”
“Hope they both got the High Road.”
“Mom, maybe. Yeah. She did. But not Daddy. He knew.” Bill hawked and spit out the window. “Sherill, she’s here—but she don’t belong.”
I couldn’t help but smirk.
“No, man, I mean it, I belong but not her. She was in this car wreck couple of months back. Got messed up. I was her dealer. I sold her crystal and heroin at first, and then I fell in love with her, and by the time she landed in the hospital, from the wreck—she was the only one who lived, man, shouldn’t that tell you something?—-but she was, you know, hooked on about four different things.”
My hands gripped the wheel.
“I tried to tell her when I visited her in the hospital, no more dope, it wouldn’t be good, but she begged. What could I do? I loved her.” He looked down at his worn boots and bobbled sadly. “She begged me, man. I brought her stuff. She took it all when they weren’t looking. I mean, she just took it all. They pumped her but her insides were mush. I didn’t hear about her dying until two days ago. That really burned, man. I was the only one who loved her and they didn’t even like inform me. I had to go up to her room and find the empty bed. Jesus. I decided to hang out at Daddy’s union hall. Someone talked to someone else and I found her name on a list. Sherill. They’d put her on the Low Road.”
I hadn’t known it was that easy to find out; but then, I’d never traveled with junkies. Dope can loosen a lot of lips.
“I don’t do those perks,” I said. “Folks in back got enough trouble. I think the union went too far there.”
“Bet they thought you’d get lonely, need company,” Bill said quietly, looking at me. “It don’t hurt the women back there, does it? Maybe gives them another chance to, you know, think things over. Give ‘em relief for a couple of hours, a break from the mash—”
“A couple of hours don’t mean nothing in relation to eternity,” I said, too loud. “I’m not so sure I won’t be joining them someday, and if that’s the way it is I want it smooth, nobody pulling me out of a trailer and—and then putting me back in.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Got you. I know where you’re coming from. But she might be back there right now, and all you’d have to—”
“Bad enough I’m driving this fucking rig in the first place.” I needed to change the subject. Or smash him a good one in the face and shove him out.
Bill stopped bobbling and looked at me. “How’d you get assigned the low road?” he asked.
“Couple of accidents. I took my last rig and raced an old fart in a Triumph. Nearly ran down some joggers. My premiums went up to where I couldn’t afford payments and finally they took my truck away.”
“You coulda gone without insurance.”
“Not me,” I said. “Anyway, word got out. No companies would hire me. I went to the union to see if they could help. They told me I was a dead-ender, either get out of trucking or …” I shrugged. “This. I couldn’t leave trucking. It’s bad out there, getting work. Couldn’t see myself driving a hack in some big city.”
“No way, man,” Bill said, again favoring me with his whole-body rumba. He cackled sympathetically.
I gripped the wheel even tighter. “They gave me an advance,” I said, “enough for a down payment on this rig.” The truck was grinding a bit but maintaining. Over the mountains, through a really impressive pass like from an old engraving, and down in a rugged rocky valley, the City waited. I’d deliver my cargo, grab my slip, and run the rig (with Bill) back to Baker. Let him out someplace in the real. Park the truck in the yard next to my cottage.
Go in, flop back, suck a few beers, get some sleep. As if I can ever sleep. Start over again Monday, two loads a week.
Hell, I never even got into Pahrump any more. I used to be a regular, but after driving the Low Road, the women at the Lizard Ranch all look like prisoners, too dumb to notice their iron bars. I saw too much of Hell in the those air-conditioned trailers.
“I don’t think I’d better go on,” Bill said. “I’ll hitch with some other rig, ask around.”
“I’d feel better if you rode with me back out of here. Want my advice?” Bad habit, giving advice.
“No,” Bill said. “Thanks anyway. I can’t go home. Sherill don’t belong here.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll try to work up a trade with some bosses. I stay, in exchange, and she gets the High Road. That’s the way the game works down here, isn’t it?”
I didn’t say otherwise. I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t right. He’d made it this far. At the top of the pass I pulled the rig over and let him out. He waved, I waved, and we went our different ways.
Poor rotten doping sonofabitch, I thought. I’d screwed up my life half a dozen different ways—three wives, liquor, three years at Tehachapi—but I’d never done dope. I felt self-righteous just listening to the dude. I was glad to be rid of him, truth be told.
As I geared the truck down for the decline, the noise in the trailers got irritating again. They could smell what was coming, I guess, like pigs trotting up to the man with the knife.
The City looks a lot like a dry country full of big white cathedrals. Casting against type. High wall around the perimeter, stretching right and left as far as my eye can see, like a pair of endless highways turned on their sides. No compass. No magnetic fields. No sense of direction but down.
No horizon.
I pulled into the terminal and backed the first trailer up to a holding pen. Employees let down the gates and used their big, ugly prods to offload my herd. The damned do not respond to bodily pain. The prod gets them where we all hurt when
we’re dead.
After the first trailer was empty, employees unhooked it, pulled it away by hand or claw, strong as horses, and I backed in the second.
I got down out of the cab and an employee came up to me, a big fellow with red eyes and brand new coveralls. “Poke any good ones?” he asked. His breath was like the bad end of a bean and garlic dinner. I shook my head, took out the crush-proof box, and held a cigarette up for a light. He pressed his fingernail against the tip. The tip flared and settled to a steady glow. He regarded it with pure lust. There’s no in-between for employees. Lust or nothing.
“Listen,” I said.
“I’m all ears,” he said, and suddenly, he was. I jumped back and he laughed joylessly. “You’re new,” he said, and eyed my cigarette again.
“You had anyone named Sherill through here?”
“Who’s asking?” he grumbled, and started a slow dance. He had to move around or his shoes melted the asphalt and got stuck. He lifted one foot, then the other, twisting a little.
“Just curious. I heard you guys know all the names.”
“So?” He stopped his dance. His shoes made the tar smoke and stink.
“So,” I said, with just as much sense, and held out the cigarette.
“Like Cherry with an L?”
“No. Sherill, like sheriff but with two L’s.”
“Couple of Cheryls. No Sherills,” he said. “Sorry.”
I handed him the cigarette, then pulled another out of the pack. He snapped it away between two thick, horny nails.
“Thanks,” I said.
He popped both of them into his mouth and chewed, bliss rushing over his wrinkled face. Smoke shot out of his nose and he swallowed.
“Think nothing of it,” he said, and walked on.
The road back is shorter than the road in. Don’t ask how. I’d have thought it was the other way around but barriers are what’s important, not distance. Maybe we all get our chances so the road to Hell is long. But once we’re there, there’s no returning. You have to save on the budget somewhere.
I took the empties back to Baker. Didn’t see Bill. Eight hours later I was in bed, beer in hand, paycheck on the bureau, eyes wide open. Shit, I thought. Now my conscience was working. I could have sworn I was past that. But then, I wouldn’t drive without insurance, and I didn’t use the perks. I wasn’t really cut out for the life.
There are no normal days and nights on the road to Hell. No matter how long you drive, it’s always the same time when you arrive as when you left, but it’s not necessarily the same time from trip to trip.
The next trip it was cool dusk and the road didn’t pass through desert and small, empty towns. Instead, it crossed a bleak flatland of skeletal trees, all the same uniform gray as if cut from paper. When I pulled over to catch a nap—never sleeping more than two hours at a stretch—the shouts of the damned in the trailers bothered me even more than usual. Silly things they said, like:
“You can take us back, mister! You really can!”
“Can he?”
“Shit no, mofuck pig.”
“You can let us out! We can’t hurt you!”
That was true enough. Drivers are alive and the dead can’t hurt the living. But I’d heard what happened when you let them out. There were about ninety of them in back, and half were women, and in any load there was always one would make you want to use your perks.
I scratched my itches, looking at the Sierra Club calendar hanging just below the fan. The Devil’s Postpile. The load became quieter as the voices gave up, one after the other. There was one last shout—some obscenity—then silence.
It was then I decided I’d let them out and see if Sherill was there, or if anyone knew her. They mingled in the annex, got in their last socializing before road and the City. Someone might know. Then if I saw Bill again—
What? What could I do to help him? He had screwed Sherill up royally, but then she’d had a hand in it too, and that was what Hell was all about. Poor stupid sons of bitches.
I swung out of the cab, tucking in my shirt and pulling my straw hat down on my crown. “Hey!” I said, walking alongside the trailers. Faces peered at me from the two inches between each white slat. “I’m going to let you out. Just for a while. I need some information.”
“Ask!” someone screamed. “Just ask, goddammit!”
“You know you can’t run away. You can’t hurt me. You’re all dead. Understand?”
“We know that,” said another voice, quieter.
“Maybe we can help,” said another, female, older, motherly.
“I’m going to open the gates on one trailer at a time.” I went to the rear trailer first, took out my keys and undid the Yale padlock. Then I swung the gate open, standing back a little like there was some kind of infected wound about to drain.
They were all naked but they weren’t dirty. I’d seen them in the annex yards and at the City; I knew they weren’t like concentration camp prisoners. The dead can’t really be unhealthy. Each just had some sort of air about him telling why he was in Hell; nothing specific but subliminal. Like three black dudes in the rear trailer, first to step out. Why they were going to Hell was all over their faces. They weren’t in the least sorry for the lives they’d led. They wanted to keep on doing what had brought them here in the first place—scavenging, hurting, hurting me in particular.
“Stupid ass mofuck,” one of them said, staring at me beneath thin, expressive eyebrows. He nodded and swung his fists, trying to pound the side slats from the outside, but the blows hardly made them vibrate.
Then an old white woman climbed down, head first, like a spider—hair silver and neatly coiffed. I couldn’t be certain what she had done but she made me very uneasy. She might have been the worst in the load. And lots of others, young, old, mostly old. Quiet for the most part.
They looked me over, some defiant, most just bewildered.
“I need to know if there’s anyone here named Sherill,” I said, “who happens to know a fellow named Bill.”
“That’s my name,” said a woman hidden by the crowd.
“Let me see her.” I waved my hand at them. The black dudes came forward. A funny look got in their eyes, and they backed away. The others parted and a young woman walked out. “How do you spell your name?” I asked. She got a panicked expression. She spelled it, hesitating, hoping she’d make the grade. I felt horrible already.
She was a Cheryl.
“Not who I’m looking for,” I said.
“Don’t be hasty,” she said, real soft. She wasn’t trying hard to be seductive but she was succeeding. She was very pretty with medium-sized breasts, hips like a teenager’s, legs not terrific but nice. Her black hair was clipped short and her eyes were almost Asian. I figured maybe she was Lebanese or some other kind of Middle Eastern.
I tried to ignore her. “You can walk around a bit,” I told them. “I’m letting out the first trailer now.” I opened the side gate on that one and the people came down. They didn’t smell, didn’t look hungry, they all just looked too pale. I wondered if the torment had already begun, but if so, I decided, it wasn’t the physical kind. One thing I’d learned in my two years was that all the Sunday school and horror movie crap about Hell was wrong.
“I’m looking for a lady named Sherill,” I repeated. No one stepped forward. Then I felt someone close to me and I turned. It was the Cheryl woman. She smiled. “I’d like to sit up front for a while,” she said.
“So would we all, sister,” said the white-haired old woman. The black dudes stood off separate, talking low among themselves.
I swallowed, looking at her. Other drivers said they were real insubstantial except at one activity. That was the perk. And it was said the hottest ones always ended up in Hell. Whatever she was on the Low Road for, it wouldn’t affect her performance in the sack, that was obvious.
> “No,” I said. I motioned for them to get back into the trailers. It had been a dumb idea all around. They climbed back and I returned to the cab, trying to figure what had made me do it. I shook my head and started up the engine.
Thinking on a dead run was no good.
“No,” I said, “goddamn,” I said, “good.”
Cheryl’s face stayed with me.
Cheryl’s body stayed with me longer than the face.
Something always comes up in life to lure a man onto the Low Road, not driving but riding in the back. We all have some weakness. I wondered what reason God had to give us each that little flaw, like a chip in crystal, you press the chip hard enough everything splits up crazy. At least now I knew one thing. My flaw wasn’t sex, not this way. What most struck me about Cheryl was wonder. She was so pretty; how’d she end up on the Low Road?
For that matter, what had Bill’s Sherill done?
I returned hauling empties and found myself this time outside a small town called Shoshone. I pulled my truck into the cafe parking lot. The weather was cold and I left the engine running. It was about eleven in the morning and the cafe was half full. I took a seat at the counter next to an old man with maybe four teeth in his head, attacking French toast with downright solemn dignity. I ordered eggs and hashbrowns and juice, ate quickly, and went back to my truck.
Bill stood next to the cab. Next to him was an enormous young woman with a face like a bulldog. She was wrapped in a filthy piece of plaid fabric that might have been snatched from a trash dump. “Hey,” Bill said. “Remember me?”
“Sure.”
“I saw you pulling up. I thought you’d like to know … This is Sherill. I got her out of there.” The woman stared at me with all the expression of a brick. “We just followed the low road all the way, and nobody stopped us. It’s all screwy, like a power failure or something.”
Sherill could have hid any number of weirdnesses beneath her formidable looks and gone unnoticed by ordinary folks. But I didn’t have any trouble picking out the biggest thing wrong with her: she was dead. Bill had brought her out of Hell, but he could not bring her back to life. I looked around to make sure I was in the World. I was. He wasn’t lying. Something serious had happened on the Low Road.