by John Dunning
At four-thirty I finally took a break and hiked out to my car. The road was now tightly snowpacked and I made good time to the edge of town. There I stopped at the café, got something to take out, and called Denver from the pay phone while they were cooking it.
Erin wasn’t home. I left a message on her machine, told her I was alive and well, apologized, and told her to look for me when she saw me. Then I took my lukewarm sandwich and a bottle of beer and headed back uphill. I had a fresh new commitment and a crazy, growing sense of urgency. I didn’t like being away even for half an hour.
How can I describe the twenty-four hours that followed? To say I ate my food, I sat and I waited: these things have no meaning in a surrealistic world of silence and white flutter. The snow fluttered and the darkness fell, and sometime after that I hiked back out to the road and got my bag from the car. From there the hike to the top was arduous: the snow was deep and I didn’t want to take a chance on it, even with four-wheel drive, and I didn’t want to leave deep furrows showing that a car had been here. So I made the climb, finally reaching the house at nine-thirty by my watch.
I stood on the porch for a time, watching the snow fall, seeing nothing beyond my reach. At some point I let myself in.
I took off my shoes. Followed my light down the hallway to the library. Took a deep breath of relief as my light revealed the tall shelves of books, apparently undisturbed since I had last seen them.
I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor, got out my notebook, propped my flashlight, and started the long job of making a list. I made it in order, as the books were shelved, and after a while I got into a rhythm. I used my own crude shorthand and things went faster after that. Still, it was after midnight when I finished.
A check of Bobby’s office revealed nothing. His desk contained only the insurance policies—life, house, and car.
I walked through the house to the back room, bent down, and looked at the fireplace. The grate looked undisturbed, still full of ash, and I stood there for a full minute looking at it in the soft glow of my light before judgment reared its head and told me to leave it alone.
I was bone-tired now. I put my sleeping bag at the end of the hall and crawled inside it. In less than five minutes I was sound asleep.
The hours blended together: blended, fused, became a single black unit of time.
I don’t remember waking up. Sometime before dawn, I rolled my bag by the dim glow of my flashlight, locked the house, and trudged back down the hill.
I don’t know why, I just felt better from the vantage point across the gulch. I took up the vigil again, sitting in the trees, counting to ten, staring across the way as the land went gray, then pink, and the sun came out.
The sun… what a crazy, happy sight that was. Strangely, it didn’t matter after a while. The sun shone bright but at midmorning clouds blew out of the west and made the world gray again. I remember two thoughts from that second day: This has got to stop and Just a little longer. A little longer and surely I’d be ready to pack it in. Thus did the hours pass: I counted to ten, 10 trillion times I counted, and in the late afternoon a gentle snow-flutter blew down from the mountain.
Again I walked out to the car. Drove into town for my fast-food dinner. Called Erin, got her machine, decided to go back for one last look.
Good thing, too. The two men were there when I got back.
14
They were sitting in a pickup truck. If they had been there awhile, it had been a very little while. They sat in the cab with the motor running—I could see the exhaust even across the gulch—and they appeared to be in earnest conversation at the deserted look of the place. Two guys in a picture of indecision. They hadn’t come up here to steal Laura’s books: they’d had another purpose and now they were stymied at what they had found. This was all speculation on my part, but moments passed and they still didn’t move. What else could have stopped them? Suddenly the horn blew. It echoed across the meadow and down the gulch, and when no one came from the house to greet them, they turned the truck around and got the hell out of there.
I ran now: slipped and slid back along the trail to the road, arriving just in time to get a good look at the truck as it came past. It was a late-model GMC two-seater, green with a black, waterproof tarp covering the open bed, licensed by the state of Oklahoma. It roared by in a blizzard of snow: I was crouched in a ditch and I cursed when I could read only the last three plate numbers. Five-six-three, I thought, five-six-three. I was still committing it to memory as I got my own car and rolled down the mountain behind them. At the juncture of the main highway, I got lucky: I saw their taillights through the trees just before I blundered upon them.
I eased up to the bend, got out, and walked to the edge of the trees. They were parked at the stop sign facing the main road not twenty yards away. I got the rest of the license plate number and committed it to memory.
They were talking earnestly again about something. More indecision, this time perhaps over which way to go. To the left just a few miles away was the town, a warm bed, and supper: to the right, nothing but seventy-five miles of bad road, high mountain passes, and snow.
They turned right. I got back in my car, pulled up to the stop sign, and sat for a moment watching their taillights recede in the distance.
It was five o’clock: night was quickly coming on and I had lived in Colorado long enough to know better. To dare the remote high country in wintertime with a truck was bad enough. To take the same road alone in a car, even with four-wheel drive, was irresponsible and damned dangerous. There are easier ways to commit suicide.
But I knew I was going. I looked at my gas gauge—three-quarters of a tank—and I gave the books a final wave and headed south.
C’est la vie.
I had gone no more than five miles, just past the so-called airport, when I passed an open road barrier. The sign said ROAD CLOSED NOV 15–APR 15. They should’ve closed it last week, not next, I thought grimly… they might’ve just saved three lives by doing that. But a fool will always find some way to kill himself, and I thought other optimistic things as the road began to climb. This is when a book thief will choose to show up at the house, I thought. He’ll empty out that room in a heartbeat and nobody will see him, nobody will know which way he or the books went, or what it was all about. In the spring, when the highway department clears this road, they’ll find Janeway’s leathery corpse perfectly preserved like the two-thousand-year-old man, his car half-buried under a snowdrift. This was not funny: there was too good a chance of something just like that happening. Turn around, kid, I thought, the hell with those guys: go back and babysit the books. But then I could see their taillights again, climbing toward some unseen summit, and that drew me on. Those boys hadn’t just materialized at the house, and I wanted to know what they knew. I could always turn around if it got bad. So I thought. I could always turn around.
They were maybe a quarter mile ahead, rolling along at a pretty good clip. I was able to make good time as well. The snow had been drifting during the day, but there had been no traffic across the pass to pack it down and my tires got good traction on the gravel. The road was dark and getting darker by the minute: the snow seemed suddenly heavier, at last I had to use my lights, and I knew that far ahead the two guys would be well aware of my presence. I imagined them saying, Who is that crazy bastard back there?
Such is life, I thought. Such is life and death.
My mind was a jumble of thoughts, none of them good, as I climbed toward the great Continental Divide. In another week this drive would be impossible. This road should already be closed, I thought again. What are the highway people thinking?
There comes a point on such a journey when final thoughts of turning back are cast aside and forgotten. I had reached a summit, and for a while I rode along at the top of the world with swirling mists on either side. The effect was bizarre, almost grotesque in its dark beauty. There was a dense cloud cover and yet a full moon broke through almost continuously
, lighting up a road that seemed like a silver ribbon around the universe with spiraling galaxies on either side. I couldn’t see the truck at all now, which only increased my paranoia, and ahead was a fearsome-looking storm-thing that almost turned me back even then. That was my point of no return…if I went into that cold hell, I was in effect giving myself up for dead anyway, I was going all the way. The snow hit like some kind of battering ram. I felt the car shiver in a fierce crossing wind. Oh, baby, this was nuts. But then the car pushed through it, the moon broke through, and for that moment I could see forever. Again I could see the road running on and on: I could see another mountain range in the far distance, and down the road, at least a mile away, I saw the truck.
I stopped for a moment and sat watching, idling. Something wasn’t right.
The truck didn’t seem to be moving, that was the strange thing. There was no movement at all to the picture ahead: it was as if the two guys had stopped to talk it over yet again. I knew, having driven these mountain roads for years, that the downslope is the dangerous part. I could feel the ice under my wheels: even at a crawl and with four-wheel drive, if I hit the brakes the car would slip. Suddenly I knew something else. Those guys weren’t moving because they had lost control going down. They had run off the road and got stuck. Here they were, miles from anywhere, and unless they had a radio, I was their only hope.
I sat there and the moon went south, the world went dark, and blowing gusts obliterated everything. There was no question now about what to do: I had to go check on those guys, had to roll up and introduce myself and pretend to be a hail-fellow-damned-well-met, just an unwashed slob as crazy as they were, and see if they bought that. I had an uneasy feeling about it, but I no longer had a choice. I got out of the car and opened the trunk, fished around in the far back, and took out my gun. Made the unnecessary checks (it was always loaded, always ready for some ugly job) and put it under the seat, just a long stretch from my left hand.
“Let’s go get ’em, Danno,” I said out loud.
I took my time getting there. For a few minutes the blizzard was horrendous. I couldn’t see more than a foot of road ahead, and I crawled along at the speed of nothing. I took heart in the occasional pockets of clarity, but it was a long time, at least twenty minutes, before I saw the truck’s lights again. When I did, the effect was startling: I came across a flat spot and the snow whipped past, just before the ground dipped precariously, deeper into the valley. I stopped at the edge. This is where he lost it, I thought, and at the same instant my vision cleared and the truck was there, not fifty yards away. He had slipped easily off the road—I could see his mistake from the distance: he had taken way too much liberty on the flat, and then when the sudden downgrade began, he had not been ready for it. I started down slowly, and as I did one of the men ran frantically into the roadway, waving his arms. Here we go, I thought.
I rolled down the window and a coarsely bearded face filled it.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, almost out of breath. “God bless America, brother, am I glad to see you! Whoever the hell you are, you sure look good to me right now.”
“Run off the road, did you?” I said stupidly.
“Yeah. My goddamn brother and his balls of steel. If he doesn’t kill us yet with his daredevil bullshit, I’ll be one surprised mother.”
“That looks like a pretty ugly crack-up from back here. I got a rope, if you’d like to try pulling it out.”
“No way, pardner. He wrapped it around a tree while he was at it. We’ll have to send a wrecker back after it when we can. Will you give us a lift out of here?”
“Sure. Where you headed?”
“You mean I got a choice?”
I laughed. “Straight ahead seems to be it for the moment.”
“Wherever there’s warm and something to eat. We know a fellow in Monte Vista.”
“I’m going right through there.”
He went back to the truck and I sat idling. So far, so good. I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me. A minute later the other one arrived: a spitting image of the first, except that his beard had a few streaks of gray. “Howdy, stranger,” he said. “I guess Willie already told you, we’re damned glad you came.”
“You guys hop in. With luck, maybe we’ll all survive.”
“That’s fine. If you don’t mind, we’ve got some merchandise we’ve got to carry with us.”
“Sure. Will it fit in the backseat?”
“Oh, yeah, long as the three of us can sit up front.”
That was fine with me: I remembered what Jack McCall had done to Wild Bill Hickok and I wasn’t partial to having either of them at my back the rest of the way down. I asked if they needed any help and the guy said no, they could get it. In fact, what came out of the truck took them each four loads to carry out of there: eight cardboard boxes a foot deep and about two feet square. I turned on the overhead light and saw the name Daedalus printed boldly on the sides of each box. I knew it well: Daedalus Books was one of the better remainder houses of the book trade. I bought remainders myself about twice a year, and I had half a dozen identical boxes in the back room of my store. They were ideal for shipping or for transporting books to book fairs.
I decided not to comment on any of this yet: there would be time enough later, if the situation felt right at some point. The two guys slammed the back doors and got in the front beside me. “You guys must be twins,” I said, offering a hand. “Cliff Janeway.”
If I had earned any kind of name in the book trade, these boys hadn’t heard it. I had been thinking about giving them a phony name: the book world is so small and insular. Sometimes it seems as if everybody knows everybody, but they showed no reaction to my name. This, I thought, was good.
“Wally Keeler,” said the reckless one.
“Willie Keeler,” said the other, from shotgun.
I didn’t recognize their names either. If they were accomplished grafters, I might expect to, again because book people love to talk and word gets around. We shook firmly and I backed out onto the road. “You sure that’s everything?”
“Everything we can carry tonight.”
I started down. “Man, we’ve all got to be a little crazy to be out here tonight.”
I said this in my self-deprecating, no-offense-intended voice and Willie gave a dry, humorless laugh. “You got that right.”
“Don’t start, Will,” said his brother. “It wasn’t just my say-so.”
The tone was far from cordial. Willie gave a derisive grunt and the atmosphere in the car was poisoned by sibling discord.
“So what’re you doing out here?” said Wally.
“Made a hot date with a waitress over in Alamosa,” I said.
Willie laughed. “That must really be a hot date.”
“It ain’t that hot.” I looked at them in the reflection of the odometer. “Never woulda started across that pass if I’d known what was ahead of me.”
“Good thing for us you did, pal.”
“Then it got to a point where it seemed just as easy to keep going as to go back.”
“That’s all I was saying,” Wally said. “Didn’t hear any fuss about it till things turned ugly.”
“Maybe if you tried staying on the goddamn road, things wouldn’t turn ugly. Oh, no, not you. Every fuckin’ highway is the goddamn Indianapolis 500.”
“Listen, you son of a bitch—”
“Hey, fellas,” I said. “You boys wanna fight, at least wait’ll I get us out of here.”
“Yeah,” Willie said sourly. “Show some manners, asshole.”
Nothing more was said for a while, but the air simmered with their anger. We bottomed out in the valley and started up again. I thought about asking them what their business was: nothing too inquisitive, just making-conversation-type conversation, but it didn’t feel right yet. Ahead the road looked better: I could see the moon clearly now, and I had high hopes that the worst was behind us. We wound our way upward and upward, and then, at the peak, another
mountain range loomed ahead.
“Goddamn brand-new truck,” Willie said suddenly.
“I’m not gonna tell you again, Willie—”
“Looks like better weather ahead,” I said in my jolly-boys voice.
“Couldn’t get much worse.”
“Where you boys from?”
Willie said, “Raton,” and Wally said, “Tulsa.”
“He lives in Tulsa,” Willie said quickly. “What about you?”
“Denver.”
“What’re you doing out here?”
“Just a little R and R.”
I let a moment pass, then asked the question. “How about yourselves?”
“Same answer,” Willie said. “We came over to see a fellow we know.”
I took another moment, then: “What line of work you boys in?”
This time the pause gave them time enough to concoct some serious fiction. Apparently Willie was not a stupid man: he figured I had seen the Daedalus imprint on the boxes. So I thought in the ten seconds it took him to answer.
“We’re book wholesalers,” he said.
“You mean like traveling salesmen?”
“Yeah, something like that. We represent a book dealer who sells remainders. We’ve got a five-state region where we market our stuff.”
I knew this was fiction. In fact, remainder-house reps never carried boxes of books: instead they arrived with half a dozen briefcases full of dust jackets. I had spent more than one afternoon sitting across the counter from remainder salesmen, looking at jackets one after another, saying, “Three of these,” “Five of these, please,” and so on. But to Willie I was polite and ignorant. “That sounds interesting.”
“It’s all right. What do you do?”
“I play the ponies,” I said in a masterpiece of my own spontaneous bullshit.