The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle]

by Jeff Bredenberg

  The old gentleman also was known to have a substantial root cellar. Grammy Baker had once let on that Rutherford Cross had dug clear through the earth and had spent more time in China than Marco Polo. No one gave much credence to Grammy Baker.

  It was in the year 2013 that Lydia got pregnant. She and Rutherford Cross stood solemnly on their front porch in the bone-chilling damp one night—her big-bellied, him permanently stooped. Their eyes took in the sky. It was turned a broiling red by those magnificent bombs that were slapping the landscape with nuclear fire.

  “Lydia, you go on down ta root cellar an’ don’t come up,” Cross said. He settled into a rocking chair on the porch. “Me, I’m gonna rest these ol’ bones now.”

  Lydia did go to the root cellar. She lived by lantern light and subsisted on smoked hams and shelf after shelf of canned vegetables set up by Cross himself. Above, a year-long wind storm was raging, and in the middle of what should have been a steamy summer Lydia delivered her own child. She named the boy Rutherford Cross but later found herself calling him Pec-Pec, baby talk for the youngster’s favorite food, pickles.

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  16

  The Valve Job

  A car horn honked outside and Seth Graham dropped the roasted chicken breast to his plate—”Damn!”—and went to the window, licking grease from his fingers. There were a jeep and a van below. A young fellow in a Government jumpsuit stood in the gravel waving a small clipboard at him in the rain.

  Deedee Graham swallowed a spoonful of baked potato and said, “They can fend for themselves, can’t they Sethy? Can’t they see we’re shut down for the night?”

  “Ya’d think so, Deedee. Ya’d think so. But if it’s an emergency…” Graham took the keys from a nail on the wall. He slipped his feet into his galoshes, not bothering to buckle them, pulled his slicker from the hanger on the door, and went out. The living quarters were raised on stilts well above the flood level of River 011, and the area below the house had been enclosed to form a garage. Graham wearily thumped down the wet wooden steps.

  The man in the jumpsuit had curly blond hair plastered to his forehead. “Is this the East Saint Louis Fuel Depot?” he asked, shouting unnecessarily, as if Graham were deafened by the rain.

  Graham turned to examine the two-foot-high lettering across the garage doors: E. ST. LOUIS FUEL DEPOT. He enjoyed the moment, in a way. “Reckon so,” he said.

  “I’m looking for Seth Graham.”

  “Well, you found him, an’ he’d like to get back to his dinner directly,” Graham said. “What can I do for ya?”

  “My boss is in the jeep—Rosenthal Webb,” the younger man said. He shielded his face with the clipboard.

  Graham’s eyebrows rose. “Can’t place the name. Sorry.”

  “Well, we think we’ve got a cracked cylinder. Not much time to spare, either.”

  “I’ll speak to your Mr. Webb,” Graham said, “but this is mighty peculiar. You folks are Supply drivers, aren’t you? We don’t handle any private business.”

  Graham slogged over to the farther vehicle and opened its canvas and plastic door. A graying man sat in the driver’s seat. It was a weather-worn face bristling with silver beard stubble, and the skin under his chin was beginning to sag. The back compartment of the jeep, Graham noted, was piled high with equipment cases and outdoor gear. The aging man had his hands on the steering wheel, and the four fingers of his right hand were shorn in half.

  “Lot of nerve,” Graham said.

  “I didn’t plan this,” Webb responded.

  “Well, why don’t you just steal a new pig-pokin’ jeep,” Graham said. He pulled at his mustache and looked up and down the dark highway. “Don’t say you don’t know how.”

  “Can’t afford to risk the hoopla. I’ve got a long way to go and I need to go quietly.”

  “Cracked cylinder? Well, hmmm, ya gotta lift the engine, pull off the heads, grind the valves, replace that cylinder…. Ya didn’t say ya was in a hurry did ya?”

  “Matter of fact,” Webb said, grinning, “I’m in a hurry, too.”

  Graham rubbed his forehead, ignoring the rivulets of rain trickling between his fingers. “You know how this depot has built up? There’s never fewer than thirty, forty Government types around. All day and night I drink and piss Government now. And you come roll in, devil-may-care. I was startin’ to think I’d never see you again. Now ya bring this boy around.” He jabbed a finger toward the van. “Now he’ll still be dropping by here twenty years after you die. Damn!”

  Graham unlocked the double garage doors, waved both vehicles in, and disappeared into the blackness outside. It was a roomy garage, with two pits and two hydraulic lifts, designed to serve a high-traffic crossroads of Government supply routes. Five autos could be under repair at the same time. Webb eased his jeep under a block-and-tackle rig and killed the engine, then strode to the van.

  “Where did he go, Gregory?”

  “I don’t know. Kind of cranky, isn’t he?”

  “He was born cranky.”

  A pair of headlights appeared at the garage entrance, spotlighting the two men. Gregory fell flat against the driver’s seat and Webb moved to the shielded side of the van. The headlights crept in, and Webb saw that it was a late model Government jeep, with Graham at the wheel. He parked beside the other jeep, walked to the garage doors, and pulled them closed.

  “Help yourself to the tools, fellas,” Graham said. “Just put ‘em back and put ‘em back clean.”

  Gregory’s pulse was still racing, but he slumped out of the van and made a quick survey of the tools racked against the back wall. “Well, I can do the job,” he said, “but I don’t know that the second jeep is what we need. Just having the new parts would move things along faster. A place this big would have to have a parts house.”

  Graham frowned. He glared at Gregory in disbelief, then at Webb, and back again. “Ya don’t have to fix anything, boy. Like you say, no time. Just switch the engines. Shee! The Government jeep has to be out back again by five A.M., and when it heads out, well”—he shrugged—”so the guy blew a cylinder.”

  Upstairs, Graham returned to his supper. Deedee Graham’s quizzical expression asked the question.

  “Deedee…” He stared down at the cooling chicken breast. “It’s Rosenthal. Rosenthal Webb.”

  “Land-o-gosh, I’ve got to go give him a big kiss!”

  “No!”

  Deedee was hurt by his tone. “You love that man as much as I do, Sethy,” she said, voice quavering.

  “He’s in a hurry,” Seth Graham said, “and the less we act like we know him the better off we’ll be.”

  Deedee’s eyes welled up with tears.

  As day broke, the van and the jeep pulled to the side of a little-used road near the banks of the wide, glistening River 011. Webb ran up to the van, and Gregory already had the map out.

  “We shouldn’t try to cross here,” Webb said. “We’ll find a ferry or bridge, oh, a hunnerd miles up the river, around here.” He poked at the map.

  “Hannibal.”

  Webb smiled. “Just us and our elephants.”

  “Elephants?”

  “An old myth. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

  It was then that Gregory saw over Webb’s shoulder an astoundingly improbable structure. Planted on the opposite riverbank stood a lone arch, hundreds of feet high. It was made of shiny metal, which threw off tiny flashes of the rising sun. Webb noted Gregory’s gape and turned.

  “One of the wonders of the old world,” Webb said. He laughed, and rested an elbow on the van’s window frame.

  “What is it?”

  “An arch. Uh, it’s supposed to be something of a mystery, but it must have been built for some reason.”

  “Ya know,” said Gregory, “looking at it, ya’d think the entire world were a tree ornament and that this is where it’s hung from.”

  “Folks say, mostly, that it was some kind of carnival ride. There’s a little cha
mber inside that took people up and down. Doesn’t work anymore, of course.”

  “So, what was that place over there?”

  “Well, West Saint Louis, I imagine. An amusement park?”

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  17

  Two Government Guests

  Moberly felt ill. One of the two new late arrivals was a double assault on the senses, and the most quickly identifiable offense was that perfume. It angered her; it was as if the fellow had entered the inn’s dining room and had swatted every person present on the nose. This was the reek of New Chicago, of course.

  Visually he was a perversity as well. It was a sickly styling that Moberly considered the product of a frenetic fashionableness. Removed from his urban context the man appeared awkward and clownlike. (Moberly thought, somehow, of a hairless moose wearing a negligee.) That ludicrous hair-handle sprouted from the left side of his head like a wayward antenna, and Moberly, smiling now as she greeted the men, remembered the tale Anton Takk had just told her about the scuffle in his New Chicago hotel room.

  The newcomer humorlessly exhibited his Security credentials, traded in his Government chit, and signed the register, booking separate rooms for himself and the older, more reasonably dressed gentleman who followed obediently in his shadow.

  Takk had asked to hear of any Government arrivals, and Moberly would see to that soon, she told herself. But for now, she must deal with a Supply driver dozing on a dinner table. He was a Supply man of the old school—hard driving, hard-drinking—and at the moment his nose was pressed firmly into a yellowing tablecloth. One inopportune roll of his body could wipe out a dozen empty ale bottles—containers that Moberly had hoped to refill in her brewing operation in the barn. And then there was the kitchen to shut down, the leftovers to pack away for the next night. Moberly sighed and rounded the counter, hoping she wouldn’t have to drag the driver’s dead weight to his room. (She hoped, too, that he wouldn’t start singing again.) Wouldn’t you know that out of seven customers tonight this guy would be the one with a room upstairs?

  She remembered that she had not given the new customers directions to their rooms, but they were gone, apparently willing to find their own way.

  “Couldn’t we leave your detective work till the morning?” complained Gould Papier. There was a ring of dark wetness around the bottom of his tunic. Having learned his lesson, Papier hitched it up clear of the puddles in the Moberly Inn’s parking lot. At least the rain has stopped, he considered. Kerbaugh would have us out here getting drenched.

  “Humor me,” said Kerbaugh, and Papier pondered the irony of the expression. The Inspector had no humor.

  “There’s nothing to see unless we get a lantern. I’ll get the one in our jeep,” Papier said, picking his way across the gravel toward the barn.

  “Your eyes will adjust quickly. If he’s here, I’d rather not draw attention with a light.”

  “Here?” said Papier. “But I checked all of these license plates”—he gestured at the row of vehicles—”and you examined the guest registry….”

  Kerbaugh came to an abrupt halt at the back of one of the Supply trucks. He studied in silence, then marched to the truck’s cab, peered inside, and returned. The muscles in his jaw were alternately flexing and relaxing, like a heartbeat.

  “Mr. Papier, use your powers of perception—still developing, though they may be—and tell me what is unusual about this truck.”

  It was a frustratingly ordinary truck—once white, now dented and rusted and mud-caked to an uneven beige. The tires were the knobby standard issue, the side mirror was cracked but serviceable, the back lock was … was that it?

  “Well, the lock isn’t the normal slide-bolt assembly. I think that’s what they call it. The driver must have lost it and threaded a chain through the handles.”

  Kerbaugh smiled coldly. “Good. But yes, it could be that one of your noble drivers is just improvising. No doubt he was generous enough to buy a lock out of his own wallet to protect a Government shipment. And it was probably that upstanding specimen we just saw in the dining room, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll be sure to get his name,” Papier said.

  Kerbaugh snorted. “Now, what else? How about this license plate you copied the numbers off of—the ones that don’t match those of the stolen truck?” The Security man scraped his foot across a corner of the plate, and there was a short twang of vibrating metal.

  Papier knelt and squinted in the darkness, and the back of his tunic settled into the mud. “Hmn. Looks like a piece of an old plate under the current one.”

  “And why is that odd?” asked Kerbaugh triumphantly.

  “Well, the plates on these trucks are permanent, of course. They’re never removed until the truck is scrapped.”

  Kerbaugh clamped an arm around Papier’s shoulder and walked him to the center of the parking lot. “And now look around you,” the Inspector said in a boyish, confidential tone. “The barn, the trucks, that collapsing clot of shacks this Moberly calls an inn. Do you see it all in a different light now? As if the moon had come from behind the clouds and illuminated the secrets here? All of this from tiny scraps of evidence!”

  Then Kerbaugh laughed aloud, too loud, and Papier decided the man was quite mad.

  Code: A02-33 Kerbaugh

  Destination: Monitor/Eyes only

  Routing: SATline II/Scramble

  Origin: Moberly Inn wireless/Linex 44-E87

  Message: Subject on premises. Continuing site inspection per SOP.

  Moberly’s days were regimented, something essential to the lone proprietor of an inn. The front desk duties, the kitchen work, the guest-room upkeep, and auxiliary projects, such as gardening, ale-making, and raising chickens, demanded order and structure. Fortunately, her body required only five hours of sleep a night, midnight to 5:00 A.M., but she needed the total darkness of her basement living quarters to accomplish satisfactory sleep. Her only discretionary time came in the afternoons—if there were no customers to attend to.

  Moberly had carved the bedroom out of the southwest corner of the original farmhouse’s basement. It had a low ceiling—she had built a new hardwood floor for it two feet above the basement floor concrete as protection from occasional seepage. At 5 feet, 5 inches, Moberly was in no danger of bumping her head; Anton Takk, she told herself, would have a problem down here. From outside the room it looked like, perhaps, a tool shed or a furnace room: walls of bare studs laced with cobwebs.

  Inside, Moberly had lined the walls with rough barn siding and fashioned a closet with sliding doors. The only freestanding furniture was a dresser recently appropriated from a guest room. The bed consisted of a springless mattress on a platform built up from the floor; a shelf nailed to one wall served as a nightstand. An electric lamp with a small, torn shade burned on the nightstand, evidence of the electric wiring in the main house that the newer additions did not have.

  Here was Moberly’s rebellion against regimentation. The blankets and sheets lay in a rolling tangle across the bed, and they were never “made” in the way that Moberly straightened the guest room covers daily. She preferred to have her own bed like this, in the way that some people feel most comfortable with a cluttered desk or kitchen.

  Moberly unlaced her boots and pulled off her sweater and trousers, which she folded perfunctorily and pushed into cubbyholes in the closet. In bed, she drew the chaos of covers over herself like a child hiding in a pile of leaves. She flipped the light off. Would this be a restless night? She feared it would be. First Anton Takk; then two Security men; now the inn was silent and Takk was not in his room. His truck was still here—where could he be?

  She must have been dozing, finally—although it was hard be sure—when she started awake with a sharp fright. There had been a sound, loud, and Moberly had to think frantically in the darkness to identify it—a creaking snap, metal on wood. Then she knew: nails being yanked out of a board.

  Even in absolute darkness, Moberly could study t
he basement—a precise mental image of it, anyway—for the possible sources of the sound. She had barred the door at the top of the stairs with a two-by-four set into brackets, which meant that she was alone in the basement. And the sound could only have come from a floorboard above being pried loose, from one of the high windows she had shuttered over to block out light, or from the door itself.

  And then she heard the two-by-four clatter down the stairs, which settled the matter. Moberly left the bed and found her clothes by feel, instinctively avoiding the spots in the floor that creaked. From the bedroom door she watched the staircase as she dressed. The door at the top opened and closed again. Someone was descending, and Moberly reviewed the possibilities: Takk? But why would he break in the door? The drunken Supply driver? It was doubtful he’d be up and around already. Thieves? The Security men?

  And then Moberly sat on the step-up to her bedroom, knowing the answer. She felt not so much fear as a deep, deep sadness. Violated, raped in an abstract way. She pictured the house, the barn, the grounds—the framework of an independent life suddenly under Government scrutiny. And coming to a terribly swift end. In past years the notion of repentance had passed through her mind—quickly, actually never seriously considered. Who could really live such a gray life? Who could subsist? Moberly waited for the welling up of regret, and it did not come. But her life was ending.

  “Now will you light the lantern?” hissed a male voice.

  A match was struck, a lamp lit, and there in the blinding light were the Security men: Kerbaugh, his pale bald head large and moonlike against the blackness; Papier fidgeting under a fresh tunic, another drab ankle-brushing outfit with a wide belt at the waist.

  “It’s a museum down here,” Papier said, casting his widening eyes over the large open room, “even more than the back room upstairs!” And it was true. The basement floor was an orchard of tired machinery situated in neat rows to allow orderly passage. They were hulking, black contraptions with forgotten uses from forgotten decades, some of them covered with oily sheeting, others heavily greased, and still others hopeless and rusting their way into oblivion.