Tailed

by Brian M. Wiprud

  Be strong, Angie, I’m with you.

  chapter 23

  The dog trotted ahead of me with a distinct sense of purpose. I wished he’d stayed with Angie to keep her warm. Of course, I’d called his name, but I couldn’t think of anything else to shout to draw the three Tupelca away that wouldn’t sound like I was trying to draw them away.

  So why follow Wilco? I figured the snakes would get him first that way, and if nothing else, maybe he somehow knew where he was going. You hear those stories about Eastern families vacationing out West, losing their dog, and the dog somehow finds his way from Golden Gate Park to Darien, Connecticut. As much as I didn’t like or trust Wilco, I had to assume he was still a dog at heart, complete with the full package of canine instincts and wiles.

  And so we crossed the scrubby terrain dotted with yuccas. The desert night was spectacular—a pellucid sky like the calm surface of a lake through which you could see bright pearls on the dark bottom. Being a city slicker, it had been a long time since I’d seen the stars and constellations so clearly, the coruscant smear of the Milky Way shimmering diagonally across the sky.

  I wasn’t what you’d call a model Boy Scout as a lad. I reached the rank of Star and rested on my laurels, much to the displeasure of the troop leaders. One is supposed to be always advancing, earning more merit badges, striving to be an Eagle Scout. That irked me—attaining the rank of Eagle Scout was touted as a veritable transcendence into a wholly superior being, as though any scout who didn’t attain that rank would have their outdoor skills shrivel up like a dead spider once they moved on from the scouts.

  Even though I hadn’t attained the godly rank of Eagle Scout, I had retained a few outdoor skills. Granted, after thirty-some odd years, they were a little rusty. Navigation without maps can be complex and disastrous, but I’d been taught that a few basic skills can serve one well. Compared to the star of Bethlehem, the North Star is disappointingly ignominious. But using the Big Dipper, it’s a snap to locate the North Star and thus it is easy to get one’s bearings. The main thing when lost—as I effectively was—was to move in a straight line and not go in circles. So I kept the star over my right shoulder.

  I also knew to keep moving during the cool of night, and try not to perspire all my water away in an hour of blazing sun. But how to find water?

  Wilco was following a slight trail that I figured must be a pronghorn antelope or deer trail. I seemed to recall that many game trails eventually led to water. And as it happened, the winding trail led more or less true to the southwest.

  You might think I’d be tired after a couple hours’ hike. I wasn’t. I’d venture to guess New Yorkers walk four or five times as far while commuting and foraging as most suburbanites do in a week of walking only to the driveway or parking lot. So we may not always be the most genial pedestrians you’d ever want to meet, but New Yorkers can walk and then some. I was also keyed up about my predicament. For once I wasn’t too worried about Angie. The talk we’d had about being together and yet apart made me feel better. I felt she was safe and tried not to imagine otherwise. She was a heck of a lot safer back there near the road than out in the middle of the desert, I can tell you that.

  My mental acuity was further sharpened by what I guess you’d have to call survival overdrive. I had to figure my way out of this. At three miles an hour walking speed, that meant I was approaching ten to twelve miles from Dinoland due southwest. I had not reviewed a map of this area, but I knew southwestern New Mexico to be a sparsely populated region—it stood to reason since they used to detonate atomic bombs down this-away. The last town we’d driven through was an hour north, so sixty-some-odd miles, which put me seventy-two or so miles south, southwest of that town. Granted, that didn’t tell me much, but having at least some idea of where I was could be crucial.

  And at least I was warm enough. What with all the exercise, I had actually removed two of my Dinoland T-shirts and tied them around my waist.

  Wilco led me over a rise. Below was a long flat valley. Unlike the rest of the terrain we’d seen, this was scattered with something that looked ominously man-made. As we approached, the shapes became familiar. Trucks. There was a still-life parade of military trucks and craters stretched toward the horizon. As we approached, I realized we were seeing what was left of trucks, personnel carriers, and all manner of military issue vehicles that had been blown up and made into Swiss cheese by machine gun fire. Some of these machines I’d never seen before—wide and stout, sort of like Hummers, but with open backs like a pickup truck, or with a machine gun turret, or with what looked like a tow truck hitch in back. I knew a little about military aircraft and nothing about tanks and trucks and such. But none of that knowledge was required to deduce that we were on a military testing range of some sort. Either planes came in from above, bombing and strafing these targets, or artillery set up on the hills and practiced their mortar fire, or tanks and such flanked the imaginary enemy. Maybe all of the above. Either way, this was a shooting gallery and I was standing right among the ducks. Everything seemed quiet enough now, but what with night-vision technology, I imagined that soldiers might come out here to plink any old time.

  Between the shattered vehicles were blackened craters. I climbed aboard a truck hood and scanned the distance by starlight. The junkyard procession stretched for some distance, maybe ten or fifteen blocks—over a half mile. The junk was arranged in a column leading toward the other end of the valley.

  For whatever danger this place presented, it was also someplace that had been driven to, meaning that there must be some rudimentary road out of the valley leading to a depot where the trucks came from.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Wilco gave me a sardonic look, as if to say “We’ve been out here a few hours and you’re already talking to yourself?”

  The dog was four steps ahead of me, trotting down the line of trucks toward the horizon. He looked back at me nervously from time to time and seemed uncertain of this new route we were taking.

  Some of the trucks we passed were burned-out shells, but others were only partially damaged or flipped over. I imagined each of these vehicles had a story, had people and lives attached to them. These relics were totems to a past of drama, of life and death and heroism. To me they were also a testament to man’s legacy of war, of grave miscalculations on a global scale. A legacy of fear, of imagined solutions through death that we have all inherited. Hey, I’m not a simpleton, I don’t pretend to have the answers. Our planet is an immensely complex orb. But standing in the desert at night among these vehicular tombstones, the world suddenly looked like a sad place where we’re all haunted by our legacy of war, where many of the events of our personal history are unduly influenced by forces outside ourselves.

  Not too unlike me, cursed by the legacy of my grandfather.

  “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings!’” I shouted theatrically, gesticulating toward the great accumulation of wrecks. My bold dictum echoed faintly across the desert. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’” Then there’s the legacy of an English major—literary and remarkably apropos witticisms on demand.

  My audience had taken that opportunity to lick his balls. I guess it was a bit much to expect Wilco to be a Shelley groupie.

  Walking alongside the trucks meant climbing in and out of craters, so I elected to cut through the wrecking yard and get onto even ground on the other side. That’s when I noticed a half-track with a faded white star on its flank. Sort of like the ones the Germans had on Rat Patrol.

  “Wow!” I had to go up and touch it. To the uninitiated, a half-track is more or less like a large pickup truck in front but has treads like a tank in the back. The front bumper looks something like a cow catcher on an old locomotive, but with what seems like a massive steel rolling pin horizontally across it. I imagined this was designed for smashing into and rolling over obstructions. I put my hands on the rear treads and was surprised that they were not giant links of steel like
on a tank but more like a large corrugated fan belt. It felt like a tire, but in a strip with crosswise treads that went around all the rollers and sprockets.

  A machine gun was mounted over the passenger side of the cab, and there was an open back for troops. There was no roof at all, and no divider between the back and the cab. Aside from a few bullet holes, it appeared untouched. I climbed up into the back. How could I resist playing with the machine gun?

  The gun was mounted on a circular ring of iron sort of like an open turret. Rollers on the gun mount allowed the gunner to swing the gun a full 360 degrees around the metal ring. Pushing aside a few heavy metal containers, I ducked under the ring, stepped onto the passenger seat, and into the center of the turret. I grasped the worn handles on either side of the gun and tried to roll it sideways. It wouldn’t budge, but I was able to pivot the heavy gun up and down. The breech atop the gun was closed, but after fiddling with it, I managed to flip it open. I then had the fun of slamming it shut—ah, the sweet sound of war machinery! How often I had seen movies and TV shows where soldiers opened the breech, slapped in a belt of ammo, and slammed the thing closed again, ready to mow down the enemy. I wondered if the half-track had ever seen action, whether the gun had ever been fired against an enemy.

  I know, it was kind of pathetic, but I couldn’t help having a romantic notion of war. That’s how it was sold to me as a kid. Gritty men in desperate circumstances, sticking it out, pushing themselves to the limits of their physical and mental abilities. Heroics. I also believed that somehow men’s fascination with war was genetic. Little wonder if it was. How else to explain how men are so reliably duped into thinking that purposely subjecting themselves to mortal danger—to dying a slow miserable death on a battle-field, their guts hanging out—could be fun?

  I looked around like someone might catch me climbing down into the driver’s seat. The weathered seat cushion crunched under me as I assumed command.

  “Cool.” There were two large dials to my right, centered on the dashboard, and a smaller dial on the left and a huge steel steering wheel in front of me. On the right was a large angled floor shifter, with another one in front of that. Farther right on the dash was a glove compartment, hanging open. How odd, I thought. On a hook on the dash between me and the glove compartment hung goggles.

  Just after passing through the McEscargot in Reims, France, September 1944:

  “Aw, Sarge! They forgot to give us ketchup. How am I supposed to eat my snails without ketchup?”

  “Calm down, Dooley. Check the glove compartment. I think there are some ketchup packs in there under the maps and wet wipes.”

  I glanced to my left and saw Wilco staring up at me from the ground, clearly impatient with my dawdling. But how often do you find yourself able to play with military ordnance?

  I noticed there was no place for a key. Well, I guess that would be kind of stupid.

  “Dooley, you have the keys?”

  “I thought you had them, Sarge.”

  “Darn it, Dooley—they’re on the seat. We’re locked out. Go to that farmhouse and see if you can find a coat hanger.”

  But there was a black button on the dash between the two big dials, a switch below that, and below that a series of plungers—one would be the choke. I flipped the switch, depressed the black starter button and there was a loud grinding sound under the hood.

  “Whoa!” The half-track had obviously been put out there relatively recently, as it hadn’t been blown up, and someone had to start it to get it there. Nobody around to steal the battery. And I couldn’t imagine a soldier charged with driving the half-track out there wouldn’t fill the tank. Why chance running out of gas along the way? Uncle Sam paid for the gas. So maybe there was enough fuel to go somewhere if I could start her—much less drive her.

  I pulled out the plungers and cranked it again. This time the starter caught the flywheel, and instead of a grinding sound the half-track went:

  Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh…

  It was turning over sluggishly. A loud backfire sent Wilco running. Then there was a belch of smoke and the half-track rumbled to life, pretty as you please.

  I cackled with glee.

  “So cool!” Women have their foibles and men have theirs—namely that there’s a ten-year-old inside who still commands the ship at a moment’s notice. The engine jounced and vibrated the whole truck, the rattle of metal all around me.

  Could I figure out how to get the thing in gear? I mean, I knew how to drive a shift, but I knew nothing about driving a truck, much less one that was part tank. Terms like “double-clutching” left me wondering if there shouldn’t be an extra pedal somewhere.

  There were four levers to my right. One was labeled TRANSFER CASE, which I surmised was for the cable winch I spied under the front rolling pit. The other was labeled TRANSMISSION, and another to engage the front-wheel drive. There was also a large hand brake.

  I depressed the clutch, wobbled the transmission gearshift, and felt around the shift plate for the H pattern. Well, it was more like an H with an N to one side where reverse was. I tried front left, let the clutch out slowly, and the machine lurched forward so violently that it stalled. Trial and error followed, but the end result was that I got the thing moving and out to the side of the junkyard. I’d figured out what double-clutching was: you had to depress the clutch to go into neutral, let it out, and then push it in again to put it into gear. Double-clutch: duh! I also wondered again about how much gas it had—I peered closely at the dials and none of the three seemed to be working.

  Only the small left headlight worked, and not very brightly. But the starlight did a fair job of lighting up the pale desert, and I saw Wilco trot up next to the driver’s side, tail wagging. I opened my door. He leapt into my lap and clambered into the passenger seat.

  The noise from the truck was even more horrendous when it moved. The engine valves rattled furiously, and it handled like a mobile bottling plant with four flat tires. First gear was extremely sluggish, and it wasn’t until I ground it into third gear that I felt I wasn’t driving through mud. The vibration from the treads in the rear resonated through all the armor plating so fiercely that Wilco kept skittering down onto the floor no matter how hard he tried to brace himself against the seat. From the way the gas and clutch pedal lurched around, I guessed a lot of the extraneous vibration was due to shot engine mounts. My hands were going numb from the rattle transmitted up into the steering wheel. But all this was a good thing. Anybody within a couple mile radius would definitely hear me coming, which I hoped would obviate anybody shooting at me by accident.

  And let’s face it—come sunup, without water, I’d be in deep trouble out there. I was already thirsty, and if making tracks with this rattletrap could help find civilization or just shelter before sunup, I was ahead of the game.

  The line of junked vehicles ended abruptly as I shifted into fourth gear. The valley was splayed wide before me with the track curving gently to the right toward a gap between two buttes. I stuck my head out the window and tried to look back at the shooting gallery, but all I could see was my contrail of dust. Yup, anybody watching from the air or high ground would easily spot me.

  There was no windshield and the cold air nipped at my eyeballs. I grabbed the swaying goggles from the hook on the dashboard and had a heck of a time putting them on and steering straight.

  Wilco finally found a position from which he couldn’t be vibrated, his front paws on the dashboard and his rear wedged into the corner of the seat. I was secretly pleased, of course, with his discomfort, and that his usual sly glances my way were now replaced by a general look of alarm.

  The sky to the east was brightening ever so slightly as we reached the buttes, and the track passed between them in a slow descent through a narrowing canyon. Larger rocks from the canyon walls lay in my way, and at first I tried to avoid them, but then I tried hitting a few just to see what the old warhorse could handle. The intermittent crash of boulders into the rolling bottling plant
had the added benefit of jolting Wilco from his new stance and onto the floor again. He’d probably bite my fingers off for this, but I was holding out hope that having the upper hand for a while might instill some parity between us.

  Around a curve, the canyon walls plummeted and another valley opened below us—we were spilling from one valley down into another. I killed the headlight, depressed the clutch, and we stopped with a screech of brakes sharp enough to split a coconut. In the combined glow of the moon and the eastern sky, I could make out the pale track winding through the shrubs. But I could also make out something else below, a pattern on a knoll to one side of the track. Another shooting gallery of some sort? A target? There were a series of straight lines on the ground, in what seemed a random geometric pattern.

  I searched the sky for aircraft. Nothing. I would have killed the engine and taken a better look and listen, but I didn’t want to risk the half-track not starting again.

  I was about to proceed but something was bothering me. A sense of foreboding. Like I’d been there before, and something bad had happened. So I did kill the truck’s engine.

  Surprisingly, I got what looked like a sigh of impatience from Wilco.

  I opened the truck door and hopped down onto the ground. The desert seemed impossibly quiet without the rumble of the half-track, and behind the gentle whistle of the breeze through the sage I could still hear the bottling plant echo in my head. I climbed into the back of the truck, shooed Wilco from the passenger seat, and ducked into the machine gun turret. I wanted the higher vantage to study what lay ahead, so I put an ammo box onto the seat to stand on. What was it about this place that was so familiar? This had the feel of a recurring dream, one in which you knew a monster was beyond a door. But in the dream you never opened the door.

  Nothing moved below that I could see, but I felt vulnerable. The machine gun was cold, and as I tried to move it again to one side, I got to wondering whether it worked. A fifty-caliber machine gun would go a long way toward making me feel less vulnerable. Of course, I’d never fired any gun larger than a twenty-two as a kid. Then again, I’d never driven a half-track before.