Wildside

by Steven Gould

  “Okay.” I checked my watch again. “That’s two hours and nineteen minutes from my mark.” I waited for the second hand. “Mark. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “See ya.” I crawled back to the gate and dropped down to the wild side along with Clara and Marie. Rick shut it down and we stood.

  I checked my watch. “Two hours and eighteen minutes, guys. Let’s get cracking.”

  First we measured out all the positions we needed, cutting lines in the sod. Then we relashed the gate to the trailer and moved it into horizontal position for the first part. This, however, also called for lifting one end of the gate another four feet into the air.

  We got the first two feet by putting all of us but Marie on the bottom edge of the gate frame, at the back of the trailer. The weight pulled the end slowly to the ground, lifting the front trailer wheels and that end of the gate frame into the air.

  While we sat there, holding it in place, Marie piled two-by-four blocks under the front wheels.

  The next two feet were more tedious, hard inch by hard inch with the four-by-four levers and fulcrums. We had to release the trailer, then the gate propped up by the four-by-fours, then work our way inch by inch until the gate leaned against the timbers from the trailer at a forty-five-degree angle. This barely brought the top inside edge of the gate to the right height. I wanted more clearance, but we were running out of time.

  “It’ll have to do,” I said. “Get the water buckets.”

  I stood on the “acute” side of the gate, crouching clear of the terminus and clear of the field. Joey stood on the “obtuse” side, which was appropriate, and stood on the trailer frame to clear the field. We each had a bucket of water poised in our hands.

  Rick hit the gate switch and there was a flash and a line of flame across the gate opening, two feet from the top. I stood and poured my water down the flickering wood, extinguishing it as quietly as I could. I could hear Joey doing the same thing on the other side.

  I was looking at an opening that went from the lower two feet of the dining room, a cross section of floorboard and floor joists (singed), a stretch of crawl space under the house, and a cross section of the dirt below that.

  In the dining room, Richard, Luis, and Dad were moving across the floor, toward me. I held my finger to my lips and helped them through. Richard hopped down and tried to walk away from the gate, promptly bumping his head on the field. Marie guided him under it and clear. Luis started to say something, and I put my hand against his lips. Dad looked around, his eyes not adjusted to the dark.

  I was listening—listening for something that meant they’d heard us. Or smelled the smoke from the floor. Or heard the water splashing and dripping. But I didn’t hear anybody scrape a chair across the floor or walk closer or cry out.

  Clara was frowning. She didn’t like this next part.

  I tapped my watch and she reluctantly held up her thumb and forefinger in an “OK” sign. Marie tapped Dad on the arm and led him away from the gate. As soon as his back was turned, I dropped low and crawled through the bottom half of the gate into the crawl space under the house.

  The gate flickered shut behind me.

  I had two hours.

  I would’ve preferred to spend the time in my bathtub, perhaps running through three different changes of water and soaking my knee in the hottest water I could stand. Then I would put on fresh pajamas from my bedroom and have a nice sandwich in the kitchen, finished off with cookies and milk, and then sleep in my bed. And not alone.

  Instead I huddled in the dirt against the concrete foundation by the crawl space access door and tried to keep my imagination under control.

  I knew that any minute they’d check on Luis, Richard, and Dad, find they were gone, and, because of the weird cut in the floor, they’d look under the house and find me. Or they’d spread the alarm and put so many soldiers in the barnyard that my next move would be impossible.

  The time crawled.

  Ten minutes before the appointed hour, I slipped the latch of the access hatch open with my pocketknife and eased the door inward. The front end of my little Japanese pickup was two yards to my left, parked with its bumper almost to the house. I eased my head out of the door and looked toward the front of the house. Two guards stood there, at the corner. I looked at the back, past the truck, and thought that for a moment there was no one back there. Then a soldier, apparently pacing back and forth, cleared the corner, turned, then walked back out of sight. I withdrew and began debating the way to go about it.

  In the end, I decided to just do it. No running, no sneaking. I rehearsed it in my head, timing it again and again.

  At one minute I put the pickup key in my hand. At forty seconds I eased the door completely open and blocked it with dirt so it wouldn’t catch me. At thirty seconds I crouched in the little doorway. At twenty seconds I moved.

  First easing through the door, I stood normally and limped four steps to the driver’s door, pulled the door open, and sat inside. The dome light came on and I heard one of the guards say, “What’s that?”

  I put the key in the ignition and eased the emergency brake off. The clock was down to eight seconds. I pumped the gas pedal twice, then cranked it over. Now the guards were doing more than looking my way. They were running. I shut the door and locked it as the engine caught with a roar. I pumped the gas pedal, revving it up. More soldiers were running from the barn. They stopped, surrounding the vehicle on all three sides, their M16As pointed at me. My watch was down to two seconds. I pushed the clutch in and put it in first gear.

  The clock was at zero and I shoved the accelerator down and let the clutch out. The rear tires spun dirt and grass and the truck leapt forward at the side of the house. There was a shot and glass sprinkled over my left shoulder as the windows in both doors shattered. I braced myself for impact, knowing that they hadn’t been able to move the gate in time, and then the wall before me burst into flame and the truck plunged through it, scattering flaming embers around me like an explosion. Then the front end of the truck was dropping and the engine raced madly as the rear wheels also came off the ground. I was airborne.

  Three vertical feet later, the front wheels hit the ground, buffalo grass whispered against the bottom and sides of the car, and I was thrown forward against the steering wheel. The rear wheels, spinning madly, hit right after, and I was thrown back again. In the rearview mirror I caught a glimpse of a large square image of soldiers running across orange-lit ground like some giant projection TV and then the image winked out—station break. We’ll return to Charlie and the Trans-Dimensional Pirates after this commercial message.

  I took my foot off the accelerator and shoved the clutch in. The bright afterimage of the open gate lingered and I blinked my eyes furiously. The truck rolled to a stop, the engine still running. I turned on the headlights and eased it around in a circle, pulling up beside the cluster of people dancing furiously through the grass, beating at small fires with their jackets and stamping at them with their feet. Behind them, the gate stood, braced by timbers, rising out of the tall grass like some lithic monument on the plain of Salisbury.

  With my elbow, I knocked the remnants of the safety glass out of the side mirror and leaned out.

  I tasted blood and I could feel that the inside of my upper lip was cut and one of my top front teeth was loose. Beside me the mad dance slowed as the last of the embers was stomped out and smothered.

  Marie was looking at her sheet of measurements and scratching her head. “Huh. Looks like we were about an inch short. I hope they put out the fire before the house burns down.”

  Dad was staring at me, an angry look on his face. “You okay, Charlie?” Then, without a pause, “What a stupid, dangerous thing to do! That was not a very good landing.”

  I stared at him a moment, baffled, angry. “And the horse you rode in on,” I finally said. “It was no trouble at all to rescue you.”

  Clara was looking at me, an odd look on her face, like incipien
t tears, but she took a deep breath and slapped the side of the truck. “What do you expect, Captain Newell? The glide ratio on this thing sucks. Any landing you can walk away from, though—”

  I closed my eyes and exhaled, then pointed at the back of the truck with my thumb.

  “Anybody need a lift?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “IF I’D HAD MY SHOTGUN IN MY HANDS, I WOULD’VE FIRED.”

  It was almost dawn and none of us had slept. I drove the entire group back to the hangar, then Clara and I used the truck to fetch water from the stream. It was a lot easier than carrying it while walking.

  The water was frigid, but we washed anyway, struggling to get the layers of dirt off. Clara and I gave up a sleeping bag, as did Joey and Marie, so that Luis and Richard might have bedding. We had mattresses, though, courtesy of Lieutenant Thayer’s crazy launch platform. Dad used a space blanket, a mattress, and a collection of jackets.

  When Impossible became restive early in the morning, Clara took him out onto the grass. An hour later she brought him back, then crawled under the sleeping bag and snuggled up against my spine.

  “You,” I whispered, “have very cold hands.”

  She worked them under the edge of my shirt and I jumped. “Leave them there and they’ll warm up,” she whispered in my ear. Then she gently bit my earlobe and slid her hands lower on my stomach.

  That’s when Dad turned the lights on.

  “Tell me why we rescued him,” I muttered. Clara giggled and rolled away. I lay on my back and groaned. Damn, damn, damn.

  There was more groaning, from Rick, Marie, and Joey, and from Luis and Richard, which struck me as funny. After all, they’d been sitting on their duffs while we undertook the seven labors of Hercules, excavating the gate and dragging it all over creation. Still, I suppose they didn’t sleep any more than we did.

  “We’re burning daylight,” said Dad, which sounds incredibly rustic, but he got it from John Wayne in The Cowboys.

  I gritted my teeth and pulled on my clothes.

  We moved the gate a mile and a half, towing it slowly with the truck across buffalo grass. At one point we had to clear a way through a thick stand of mesquite and at another point we shifted rocks to make a rocky stream ford passable.

  In the twilight, we opened the gate while the frame was still on the trailer to “up periscope.” I popped up through the gate to find myself in the middle of a cotton field near Farm-to-Market Road 2818. A half mile down the road there was a thick stand of mesquite, the kind that gets enough water so that it’s really trees instead of brush. Above this stand of trees rose a gas sign, marking a country convenience store I knew well, as it was the closest source of groceries to the ranch.

  I marked the direction and distance and we shut down the gate and secured it. We checked three more times as we moved it, finally unloading the gate and standing it upright so it opened at the edge of the stand of sagebrush, near a gravel drive a hundred yards behind the store.

  I took a quick walk out to the back of the building and looked back. In the dark, it was hard to see the gate against the trees. It was brighter on the tame side, but a mercury vapor light in the front of the store cast a nice dark shadow over the gate and trees. I peeked around the corner—there was only the clerk’s car parked out front—no sign of the military. I went back through the gate.

  “All clear. No sign of the bad guys.” I took off my jacket. “It’s warm, too. Humid, maybe in the seventies.”

  We left the shotguns and our jackets on the wildside, by the gate, protected by a tarp. Dad drove the truck out without headlights and parked it at the pump. Luis and Richard hit the pay phone on the wall outside. The rest of us went inside, surprising the clerk a little and making him look nervously at the cash register. But he didn’t bolt for the phone, so it seemed that his reaction was from being alone in the country and not because he was on the lookout for the Trans-Dimensional Pirates.

  I wonder what his reaction would have been if we had brought the shotguns.

  Joey paused before the beer cooler and stared at it. Marie touched his side and he said, “Don’t worry. What I’m mostly feeling is disgust.” He looked down at his watch. “There’s a meeting in downtown Bryan in an hour.”

  I bought soft drinks for everybody—cold carbonated drinks. The water on the wildside was cold enough, but we didn’t have refrigeration and we hadn’t stocked soft drinks. I mean, just how nutritive is caffeine-free diet cola? It won’t even keep you awake.

  Do without it for over a week and it assumes an unnatural importance.

  I paid for the gas that Dad had pumped, then we took the drinks outside to the others. Rick headed for the phone and the rest of us gathered around the truck.

  “How’d the phone calls go, Luis?”

  Luis smiled. “Fine. I reached Judge Nicoll at home. He doesn’t like me much, but he hates Miranda violations. He’ll see us first thing in the morning. I also reached Marta Rigby from Snodgrass, Messenger & Sons in Houston. She’s joining us. Last, I got hold of Bill Kennedy at Channel 11 and told him that the army was illegally occupying your ranch. I suggested he do a flyover in the news helicopter first thing in the morning since the papers were going to ‘hear’ about it shortly thereafter.” Luis did a quick drumroll on the hood of the truck. “Bill feels buried here in our little town—he’d do anything for a scoop. Something that would get the attention of the networks or a metropolitan news agency.”

  “What’ll you do until morning?”

  “We’ll stay at that sleazy motel near the courthouse—your dad can drop us there.”

  “That’s near where I want to go, too,” Joey said. “The downtown AA meeting is three blocks from there.”

  “I’ll stick with Joey,” said Marie.

  Rick joined us. “I need to be dropped near Northgate,” he said.

  Dad said, “I can drop you. That leaves Clara, right?”

  She blinked. “I’ll be coming right back here, but if you’ll drop me at the stable on your way into town, I can bring my motorcycle and some horse feed back.”

  “Don’t go near the apartment,” I said. “They’ll probably be watching it.”

  She shook her head. “I know, Charlie.”

  “For that matter, Dad, they’ll probably be watching the house.”

  “Let them,” he said. “I’ll get one of our friends to take a note to her—they can’t be tapping every phone in town. We’ll meet away from the house and spend the night at a hotel.” He looked directly into my eyes. “Will you be okay?”

  I laughed. “We call it the wildside, but compared to Agent Bestworst and Captain Moreno, it’s tame, tame, tame. This is the dangerous side.”

  He looked away. “Okay.”

  I looked down at my watch. “After Clara gets back, I’m shutting the gate down. I’ll open it precisely at 2300 tomorrow night. If nobody’s here, I’ll use the pay phone to call Rick’s friend, Chris. Everybody has that number, right?”

  They all nodded.

  “Chris is going to be okay about that?” I asked Rick.

  “He said it was cool, just now,” Rick said. He glanced up the highway. “Let’s get going, before we’re spotted.”

  Dad and Luis climbed in the front—the others climbed in the back. I glanced at the window of the store and saw that the clerk was reading a book, not paying any attention to us. I stepped back to the corner of the building and waved.

  The little truck accelerated uncertainly, as if it didn’t understand this smooth, hard surface under its tires, then the engine roughness faded and the taillights got progressively smaller.

  Headlights appeared down the road in front of the truck, first one set, then two more came over the rise. I tried not to feel nervous. There were a lot of ranches and farms out here. But then the headlights slewed around and pointed off to the side and in the headlights of the truck I saw the other two cars skid sideways, filling the gaps across the road, blocking it.

  Maybe they could
n’t tap every phone in town, but it seemed like they could tap enough of them.

  I turned and limped back to the gate, looking over my shoulder. “Turn around, dammit!” I said, under my breath.

  The little truck did just that, the brake lights glowing, and then it bumped off the side of the road and made a U-turn, coming back toward me. I looked up the road in the other direction. Headlights came over the far rise, but that was two miles away. The truck could get back to the gate before they got here.

  My heart was pounding and there was a roaring in my ears. I tried to slow my breathing, but then I recognized the sound.

  The dark silhouette of a Blackhawk helicopter passed overhead and dropped onto the road before the convenience store, blocking the road completely. As before, soldiers erupted from it, some of them spreading out to block the oncoming truck. The rest ran toward the store.

  I ignored my knee and ran for the gate. I heard the thudding of feet on gravel as I passed into it and I skidded to a stop by the switch and turned, nearly falling as my knee shrieked in protest.

  Beyond the helicopter, my truck was stopped on the road and surrounded by dark figures with rifles. On this side of the helicopter, two soldiers, fifty feet away, were sprinting at me at an amazing rate.

  I shouted, “Stop!” but they just kept running.

  If I’d had my shotgun in my hands, I would’ve fired.

  I threw the switch.

  I don’t know how I got back to the hangar. I walked, of course, but I don’t remember it. I had two shotguns, mine and Clara’s, and my knee was swollen to the size of a small soccer ball. I vaguely remembered passing something with large green eyes that stared at me over a freshly killed deer, but I didn’t bother it and it didn’t bother me.

  Once I was in the hangar, I used the camp lantern instead of firing up the generator. Impossible whinnied in the light and I stumbled over to make sure he had water. There were a few inches left in the bucket that Clara had lashed to the wall so the horse wouldn’t kick the bucket over. I refilled it, but he seemed hungry more than thirsty and I knew that Clara had run out of feed that morning.