Madlands

by K. W. Jeter

  D had one hand around my wrist, the other clamped above my elbow. As I kicked the motorcycle away, he toppled backward, dragging my ribs across the splintering edge of the doorway. For a few seconds, I was half in, half out, the graveled right-of-way streaming dizzily beneath me. Then D dug in with his heels and hauled me the rest of the way. I sprawled facedown on the floor of the freight car.

  I raised my head to look over my shoulder, just in time to see the riderless motorcycle take a flip at the edge of the gravel, tumbling end over end into a drainage ditch choked with high weeds. It wouldn’t be found for a long time in there.

  “Jesus Christ.” D sat with his forearms across his knees, still looking scared around the eyes. “That was the absolute sorriest thing I’ve ever done.”

  I was busy picking splinters out of the front of my jacket. It seemed pretty obvious to me now, if it hadn’t before, that this was a reality based on old movies. In any existence more realistic than this one, a stunt like that wouldn’t have been possible.

  “You boys going far?” A voice spoke out of one of the freight car’s dark corners.

  “Shit!” D scrambled backward, away from the voice.

  A grizzled vagrant slapped his thighs, laughing. I could see now the little nest he’d made for himself, a rope-tied bedroll and a canvas sack with his various necessities. His grey beard and sparse-toothed mouth made him look about eighty, a sun-withered gnome.

  “’Cause if ya weren’t going far before, ya are now! This train’s got a ways to roll!”

  “That suits us fine.” I looked out at the landscape sliding by. “We’re real traveling types.”

  The tramp dug into his beard with a dirty claw of a forefinger, then studied his black nail. “I’m glad you boys came along. Now we can take turns watching out, and I can get some sleep for a change.”

  “Watching out for what?”

  “Yard bulls. Railway cops. They got some mean sonsabitches on this line. Like to knock ya out with their big ol’ saps, then leave you lying on the tracks. If you come to before the next freight, then all you got is a cracked skull. If you don’t, they’ll be pickin’ up pieces of ya with a rake all the way to the next town.”

  This on top of everything else. “All right. We’ll look out for them, then.”

  The tramp nestled back against his bedroll. “You don’t have much to worry about, at least until the train starts to slow down. Then we’d better all move our butts, and jump off. There’s a bridge right before the next yard, where they don’t like to come looking. We’ll be all right there.” He closed his eyes and in a few seconds started to snore.

  D stood at the other side of the doorway, leaning his face out into the wind. “At least we’re still heading west.”

  “There is that.” I sat down with my back against the car’s rough board sides. “Wake me if anything that looks like L.A. comes along.” I folded my arms across my chest and closed my eyes.

  TWENTY-NINE

  FROM under the bridge, we watched the tail end of the train roll off. The noise of its passage gradually faded away in the deepening twilight.

  Jumping out of the freight car, I had hit the ground wrong. I kneaded my ankle, hoping that I hadn’t sprained it. The ache lessened under my hand, and I rotated my foot experimentally. It seemed all right.

  “We’d best be going.” The old tramp lifted his pack onto his shoulder. “Can’t spend the night here.”

  “Why not?” D looked around the low space. “Seems all right to me.”

  The tramp shook his head. “Too close to the freight yards. Sometimes the bulls, if they don’t catch anybody aboard the train, they come down and see if there’s anybody to roust out. You don’t want to wake up to getting your head thumped.” He started walking along the sandy bank of the creek that ran under the bridge. “Come on. I know a good place around here.”

  We followed after the tramp. After a half hour or so of walking, we climbed up from the creek into a thick cluster of trees. A small campfire burned in a clearing a little way in; more ragged shapes of men were huddled near it.

  A couple of the men nodded in recognition to the tramp. They were all obviously of the same wandering breed. Our tramp pointed with his thumb toward us. “These fellas are pretty decent types.”

  They made room for us around the fire. One of the men ladled out watery beans from a blackened can; I dug in, but D wouldn’t touch them.

  “Where you fellas heading?”

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Los Angeles.”

  The tramp nearest me shook his head. “That’s a right mean town.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  He shrugged. “Things have really tightened up there. Tighter’n a mallard’s ass. Something’s got hold of those folks.”

  “You ain’t shittin’ about that.” Another one chimed in. “I just headed outta that burg. Couldn’t take it no more. That whole bunch is weird as white crows. Nervous, jumpy, don’t know what they’ll do next. You ask ’em for a sandwich, they’re as likely to give you a million dollars as a shotgun full of rock salt. Started making me nervous, so I cleared out. I’d just as soon be back in Sioux Falls, where I can at least starve to death with people who know how to act normal like.”

  This was strange news. I picked at the beans left in my tin plate. “Any idea why they’ve started acting that way?”

  The whole circle shook their heads. “Seems like they’re fixin’ for the end of the world.” That was from the tramp who’d been on the train with us. “They all spend too much time listening to some fool stump preacher on the radio. Got their brains all fucked up.” He poked at the fire with a stick. “Course, maybe the world is about to end, in which case they got a call for gettin’ excited. Me, I don’t care much one way or the other.”

  Preacher sounded familiar “Is that Identrope you’re talking about?”

  The tramp nodded. “He’s a big deal in L.A. now. Bigger’n Aimee Semple McPherson ever was. People tune him in every night. They get all fired up, send him all their money. Can’t fathom that, myself. If I had money—and it’d be the first time in my life if I did—I wouldn’t send it off to some oily jabberjaw talkin’ fire and brimstone all night long. Especially if I thought the world was gonna get wrapped up anytime soon. I’d have a better use for the dough.”

  Another tramp nodded vigorously. “Amen to that, brother.”

  “I’d build myself a house outta empty red dog bottles, and I’d wait for Jesus Christ Hisself come knocking on my door. And then I’d say, Mister Jesus, I got two full bottles left, one for you and one for me; why don’t the two of us go on down the line tonight? We can go over to the roadhouse, put our mitts on the asses of other men’s women, and get the holy shit kicked out of us. So why would anybody want to go to Heaven, when they can have that much fun right here?”

  They all went talking on into the night. None of them put much effort into trying to dissuade us from going to L.A.; it was part of their basic tramp credo that every man had the right to screw up in his own way. They unloaded on me—D wasn’t listening, but just went on staring into the dying fire—all their advice on the best routes for getting there, and how to avoid the cops along the way. We weren’t, in fact, far from the city; a good day’s traveling, if we got an early start, would get us there.

  The company of tramps retired to their bedrolls, leaving me and D sitting by the last red embers. D had something on his mind; he kept biting his lip and working the hinge of his jaw, grinding his teeth. His eyes were wild, touched with reflected sparks.

  “That was bad . . .” He wouldn’t look at me, but spoke to the ashes. “That was real bad.”

  I leaned back, watching him “What was?”

  “What happened back there. With those cops.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s never too good an idea to get into trouble with the law.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t mean that. Trouble’s no big deal. There’s always trouble. I mean what I had to do. To th
at one cop fella. The way I made him come apart like that. I did that. I ate up all that stuff inside him, like glue or something, and then he just . . . changed. Like he couldn’t hold on to himself anymore. He couldn’t just be what he used to be. It all let go, and all the little bits went flying like.”

  “Creeping, actually.”

  He shot me an angry look. “This ain’t nothing to joke about. I’m being serious. Whenever I did that before, taking that stuff outta people, I was real careful not to take too much. I didn’t want to hurt ’em. But that cop fella—he made me mad. I tried to warn him, but he just wouldn’t listen. So I had to do it.”

  “Sic semper tyrannis.”

  That went right by him. He was deep into his musing. “I gotta be careful. I can’t let that happen again. There’ll be more trouble if it does.”

  I didn’t see what he was so worried about. After all, I was the one who’d actually shot a cop. I was more likely to get nailed for that; a prosecuting attorney would have a hard time convincing a jury that D had turned the other cop into a collection of bugs and worms, microbes and shit.

  If nothing else, D had solved the perennial murderer’s problem of disposing of the body. You couldn’t dump someone into a vat of acid and get rid of him better than that.

  “Take it easy,” I told him. “We’ve put a pretty good piece of ground between us and where all that happened. As long as we keep moving, and keep our noses clean, there’s not much chance people will be able to hook us up with it. Nobody’s going to find out what you really are. I’m the only one who knows, and I can keep a secret.”

  “It’s not people finding out that’s got me scared. It’s worse’n that. Bigger trouble. If it happens again—if I get mad, and let it come haulin’ outta me, and do that to somebody again—there’ll be hell to pay. Bad things, that I don’t even know what they’ll be. I can just feel it, though. I felt it then, with them cop fellas, building up inside me. Right here.” D laid a hand on his chest. “But if it happens, it won’t be just inside me. It’ll be everywhere.” The hand gestured at the night world around us. “Like them fellas were playing up about, Jesus coming back and all that. Only it won’t be like that. It’ll be something bad.”

  I didn’t say anything, but just leaned back and watched his hunched-over form by the dying fire.

  He turned and looked over his shoulder at me. “That’s why I won’t be able to help you again. Not like that. If there’s trouble with cops or anybody else. I won’t do it. I can’t.”

  “Fair enough.” I nodded. “That kind of thing happens again, it’ll be every man for himself.” I had the cop’s gun; I could create my own kind of trouble, if anybody tried to hassle me.

  I left him still sitting there, and went off to lie down and catch some sleep. If we were going to hit L.A. tomorrow, I wanted to be ready.

  THIRTY

  WE pulled into L.A. just as the sun was going down in smoke. The palm trees nodded behind buildings several stories lower than I remembered them.

  D and I had caught a ride from an old C-cab truck hauling a half load of crated tomatoes out to a canning factory in San Pedro. We’d bounced hardtailed on the truck’s worn-out leaf springs, while the driver had bent our ears about how the load was hardly going to cover his gasoline costs, and then he’d have to deadhead the empty truck back up to the Central Valley for another pile. He wanted somebody to bitch to, more than anything else; I dozed off at least once, and woke to the same complaint going on. The guy could hold the truck steady on the road with his wrists at the top of the steering wheel, his hands busy rolling another cigarette from a pack of Riz La papers and a flat red can of Prince Albert. The truck cab smelled like hell’s ashtray. We could have walked to L.A. as fast—the driver barely got up enough speed to blow away the flies walking around on the squished-open tomatoes—but it felt good to get off our feet.

  The truck driver let us off near the produce district warehouses. For a moment, he looked as if he were about to hit us up for a share of the gas, then decided against it and drove off in a rattling cloud of black exhaust.

  We headed for downtown, picking our way over the rows of rail tracks. The whole ride here, the truck and its driver, had been a piece of D’s shabby Joad world. Now I saw that the city, as I’d been anticipating—or dreading—had been subsumed into that reality as well.

  Not just a matter of the buildings being shorter, sucked down into some earlier stage of urban existence. The miasma of bad economics slunk through the streets, like a cross between greasy low fog and the last quarter inch of brown in a nameless bottle. D and I passed by a shuffling soup line, the watery kettle staffed by Sally Anns with tambourines and the old-style hats with the big ribbon bows on the side. The grey men hunkered down on the sidewalks and ate with heads lowered, as though they were going to dive into the wisps of steam and drown.

  “Looks like hard old times around here.” D walked along with his hands shoved in his empty pockets.

  I nodded. “Hard times everywhere.” At least in the Madlands.

  “Well, that don’t worry me none. I got kinfolk in high places.”

  He meant Identrope. D’s attitude had improved in general since we had reached this bleak L.A. He was obviously anticipating that it wouldn’t be long before Identrope—on whatever family basis D was so sure of—would help him out. Whatever that meant.

  High places—that had me a little concerned. As we’d hit the outskirts of the city, I’d started looking for that familiar sight, the burning dirigible with Identrope’s headquarters suspended beneath it. The L.A. I had known before had always been tinged with the lurid colors of those inexhaustible flames. A big reason why this Joadized city looked so grey was that that fire was missing from the sky. When night fell, it was complete. If Identrope was still around, he’d either changed the nature of his operations or moved them somewhere outside the city. In either case, it was going to be harder than I’d anticipated to track him down. That is, in person; I’d already heard his radio show coming from the speakers of old Atwater-Kent radios near people’s open windows.

  I had one lead. One connection to that other pseudo L.A. I remembered. I fished the matchbook out of my pocket and read the address on it. It was walking distance from where D and I had drifted, if there hadn’t been too much more geographical distortion in this area.

  “Remember that little lady, out on the highway?” I held the matchbook up to D’s gaze before I dropped it back in my pocket. “I think we should go look her up, first thing.”

  D frowned. “Why?”

  “She seemed like a pretty smart cookie.” I pitched it to him in language he could understand. “Kind of girl that hits the ground running. I’d be willing to bet she’s got the local scene pretty well scoped out already. Probably be able to give us some straight advice on what to do next. Besides—” I shrugged. “Have you got any better ideas?”

  He didn’t. We headed for the taxi-dance establishment.

  The place’s only sign, at least on street level, was two hinged boards out on the sidewalk; both sides promised “20 Beautiful Girls—Friendly and Clean.” An arrow pointed to a narrow stairway set into a brick building front.

  “This must be the place.” I nodded toward the stairs. “Come on, let’s go on up and see if we can find her.”

  D hung back, wearing a look of deep distrust. “You go up. I’ll wait for you down here.”

  “Suit yourself.” I figured it was some ingrained shitkicker puritanical streak surfacing in him. Dens of iniquity, fleshpots of the soul, brazen painted harlots. He hadn’t gotten it from me. “Don’t go wandering off, okay?” I started up the stairs.

  Two flights up—there were more arrows painted on the walls to guide me—I found the dance hall. An empty bandstand at one end of the big room, with a rick-a-tick snare drum, string bass laid on its side, and a piano whose keyboard was beginning to sag in the middle. If the musicians were as old and decrepit as the instruments, they could have been the original Muzak o
n Cleopatra’s barge.

  The wood floor had once been polished, but now was scuffed to the point of splinters. Too many sailors with twenty-four-hour passes, farm boys with the egg money stolen from their mothers’ cookie jars. The walls were still vibrating with unrequited hard-ons.

  A girl in a beaded-fringe dress sat backward on a chair, reading a movie magazine. “We’re closed, mister.” She didn’t look around at me in the doorway. “Come back in a couple hours. The band’ll be going then.”

  “Nora—it’s me.”

  She looked up from an article about Deanna Durbin’s love life. For a moment she didn’t recognize me, then her face brightened into the knockout smile she’d always had. “It’s that fellow from out on the road. That’s right, ain’t it? Where’s your buddy?”

  “He’s outside.” I pointed back down the stairs. “Having a shy attack.”

  “Wait a minute.” Her forehead wrinkled. “How’d you know my name? Did I tell you?”

  At this point it wasn’t worth trying to explain everything to her. “You sure did.”

  “I must have really thought you were a nice guy, ’cause I don’t usually do that. Tell men my name, I mean. Not my real name. They don’t even know it here. I’m supposed to tell the customers my name’s Sugar. That’s really stupid, in my opinion.”

  She pulled out another chair from the ones stacked against the wall. “Can I get you something to drink? I mean, there’s some coffee left, behind the bar. All the girls drink a lot of coffee here.”

  “No, I’m fine.” I sat down and looked at her. They’d cut her hair, or she’d done it; she didn’t have the chignon anymore, but more of a Louise Brooks bob. “You getting along all right here in the big city?”

  “Pretty well. You meet a lot of people. Some of them are real nice.”

  She was lying to me. Smiling and sounding sad at the same time. “Yeah, I’ve met some of them, too. Real lot of churchgoers, most of them.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Nora tilted her head. “There’s that radio program they all listen to . . .”