by Hob Broun
Without lights, Christo nosed up an asphalt drive, parked by the adjoining garage and cut the motor. He waited a few minutes, alert for any sound or gleam of light from inside, then stepped out and tried the garage door; it was locked. He went over all four sides of the building, feeling with his hands, hunting for signs of alarm wiring in the thin radiance of a cigarette lighter. Satisfied he ran no risk of setting off bells, he took a set of picks from his jacket, sprang the simple pin lock on his first try and eased the door up carefully on its tracks.
A pair of Cadillac hearses were parked inside, two state-of-the-art beauties fresh from Detroit that model year with hand-rubbed gray finishes, understated chrome trimmings and, in the rear, gauzy white curtains behind smoked glass.
“Delicious. Maybe we should just swap,” Christo said. “These babies can do a hundred and ten and you don’t even know you’re moving.”
Tildy yawned. “I don’t think you want to blow your cover that badly.”
“I guess not. But how about that leg room?”
From the webbing under the driver’s seat Christo plucked out a coiled length of transparent rubber tubing. He spun the gas caps off the Fiat and the closer hearse. Inserting one end of the tubing down into the hearse’s gas tank, he took a few deep breaths, moistened his lips and commenced sucking on the other end, pulling away to exhale, bending his knees each time to lower the tubing’s elevation. Gas traveled gradually up the line, reaching his mouth when the tubing was on an even latitude. He spat furiously and guided the flow into the Fiat’s tank.
“Now we let gravity do the work.” Spitting again, swabbing at his lips with his shirt-tail. “This was the first game I ever ran. Couldn’t have been more than nine, scooting around the neighborhood with milk bottles and four feet of garden hose and all I was after then was enough money to buy mud flaps and a side mirror for my bike. Twenty-two years I been at it and still getting gas in my mouth. Now there’s a story with a moral.”
“What is it?”
“Beats the shit outta me. Any rum left? This taste really stays with you.”
HIGH ACCIDENT AREA
Bolted under the dashboard was a 32-channel CB radio assembled at a runaway shop on the Philippine island of Mindanao. Christo explained that the original owner had installed it. Rechette, he said, was fond of cruising the suburbs listening for distress calls: multi-car fatals or simple fender benders, propane leaks, lost children, angina crises. Rechette was a qualified CPR instructor, a collector of drug abuse bulletins, an amateur mechanic who kept his trunk packed with flares, blankets, first-aid supplies including ampules of Thorazine and of epinephrine (for the treatment of anaphylactic shock), boxes of tools and spare parts, fifty feet of yellow nylon rope, and, of course, a Polaroid camera. “Everyone just take it easy,” he would say. “I’m a licensed physician,” and he would move gawkers and sobbing relatives aside with the slightest pressure of his vital hands—the cool professional, the humble altruist. And he was hypnotized by glazed eyes, by faces paled with fear and marbled with blood.
“What a ghoul; he showed me some of those pictures and got excited all over again,” Christo said as they squealed around a curve, headlights slicing through the trees. “Told me once in so many words that this was a great way to meet people.” He seized the handmike, dangled it upside down on its spiraled cord. “Some marketing hero came up with this idea. Expand the machine population, that’s always a plus, right? You got your CB dictionaries and your CB clubs with insignia to sew on your CB windbreakers. You got a whole army of yokels talking at each other in the dark like some damn circle jerk.”
He pressed the button to transmit. “Who’s got their ears on out there? This here is Lonely Lonnie beaming right at you, come on. Hey, nightbirds, do you copy? We pointed north for that Fun City so how’s it look up I-95 through Savannah, come on.”
“Comin’ in strong, Lonely Lonnie.” Frog voice through a curtain of static. “You got Daddy Pigtails out of big Gee Ay, the man with the bacon from Macon, come on.”
“Get your feet on the floor and your hand on the door, Daddy. I understand there’s a real bad infection down your way.”
“Mile high negatory … What you talkin’, boy?”
“Just a random FCC check, sir. I suggest you drive immediately to your nearest emergency room.” Christo flipped the toggle switch, replaced the mike on its hook. “These things are a menace to public safety.”
But this gaudily professed scorn, Tildy noticed, didn’t prevent him from playing along. He couldn’t resist those free airwaves. With the urgency of an intermission smoke, he’d grab that mike and start babbling, a new identity each time, a fresh cover story. Self-parody? Protective coloration? She was making an effort, at least, to get the idea.
But there was no idea as such, no underlying sense or motive. There were only the zigzags of dissimulation that Christo had learned—as a mole learns which roots to eat, as a raccoon learns how and when it is safe to topple garbage cans—in order to make his living.
“This is the Rajah Rat running a load of hot spareribs out of Calcutta, India, that there ebony void.” And twenty miles later he was Little Ore Bucket and after that, Mad River Gramps as he rambled on about the great gone days of the Model-A Ford and real grass in the ballparks; and the loss of his dear wife to the vampirish thirst of the nation’s favorite disease. “Look at your watch. Two minutes from now someone on this planet will die of cancer.”
“You’re pretty good at this,” Tildy said. “You ought to have your own show.”
“It’s occurred to me.”
She opened the vent window, let the wind hit her face full on. Darkness was beginning to erode, a sallow-gray modulation at the edge of the horizon. They had been some ten hours in transit and she felt punchy, a tremolo hum in her ears, a raw spot at the back of her throat. Christo behind the wheel was noisily efficient, in full command. But she’d stayed right with him, hoped this had gained her some leverage. Her steadfast ambition at this stage: to be just one of the guys.
FLASHING LIGHTS MEAN LIFT BRIDGE IN OPERATION
It was nap time in Summerton, South Carolina. Christo was beginning to hallucinate: fallen trees across the road, low-flying aircraft, and finally a scant formation of rocks on his left which he mistook for a jackknifed semitrailer.
“We better stop for a little bit before the road disappears from under me.”
They registered at the Blue Bell Motel as Donnie and Connie Bodanski.
“My kid sister,” Christo offered. “I’m driving her up to Boston for her freshman year at college.”
“Ummm,” the desk clerk grunted, a putty-faced old ratbag in an orange muumuu who couldn’t be bothered to lift her eyes from a back issue of Daytime TV Mirror. “Number twelve. Last door on the left. Coke machine’s busted.”
Altogether pumped out, they tottered inside, exchanged a few instinctive pleasantries and fell asleep with their clothes on. It was late afternoon when they resurfaced with dim headaches and coated tongues. Tildy was so fogged she forgot to remove the crimped sani-bag from the bathroom glass and water glanced off the paper, making cold little shock points on the back of her hand.
She came out rubbing her neck. “I think I should burn these panties.”
She shucked off shoes and socks and did a little running in place, some knee bends, finished up with forty push-ups counted aloud. Christo watched leaves of muscle along her back widen and contract. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Hair fell across her face, exposing the first percolation of sweat on her neck. Thirty-two, thirty-three.
He roused himself, lit a cigarette, got on the wire with a long-distance operator. He read off a credit card number from the back page of his address book, its binding reinforced with Band-Aids. “This number belongs to Dow Chemical. I use it whenever I can…. Hey, Pierce, it’s Mr. Christo, your mule.”
“Where are you?”
“Cotton country somewhere. One of the Carolinas, I don’t know.”
“You comi
ng on horseback or what? I was expecting you today.”
“I know, I know. Got a little sidetracked down around Tampa, picked up an associate.”
“I hope she’s over sixteen. Don’t want you getting busted for statutory rape and blowing my load.”
“No problem. She’s not into mating anyway. You got nothing to worry about. We should be there tomorrow, early P.M.”
“Call me from Looie’s.”
“I’m gonna need some cash when I …”
But Pierce had hung up.
“Who was that?”
“One of the foremost herb brokers in Manhattan. You’re going to like him a lot.”
Replete with chicken-fried steak, home fries, and wedges of chocolate chiffon pie, they were back on the track an hour later, Tildy relegated once more to map reading and gazing out the window at passing greenery.
“Whatsa matter? You don’t trust me to drive?”
“Not at all. But suppose some cracker lawman were to shake this car down? Then I saw you by the side of the road with your thumb in the air and you don’t know a thing about me or what I’m hauling.”
“Wish I could believe you were that kindhearted. I really do.”
They had arrived at some uncertain, intermediate stage, with not a single thing to say. Tildy counted the corpses of animals who had misjudged a sprint across the road; they were all over the place, losers to speed beyond their understanding. Back home, at the tourist information booths where they gave out free orange juice, there were little warnings posted about alligators who liked to sun themselves on the highway.
Christo chainsucked peppermints, steered with his elbows or his teeth, sang bits of advertising jingles and enjoyed a bout of good old nerve-rattling, mind-prodding paranoia. Every passing motorist wearing a tie was an FBI agent. Every speedwagon with growling tailpipes and wide tires contained some overwound DEA zealot who would just as soon blast you and take the dope. Every dark blotch on the horizon was a roadblock bristling with shotguns. What a nice unadorned target he made out here among the onion fields.
Finally, as dusk approached, they stopped at Nick & Nora’s Swim-O-Links for a dip in the pool in rented suits. Tildy’s white one-piecer with reinforced bra cups was at least one size too large; it bagged out in back and the shoulder straps kept slipping down. Christo challenged her to a five-lap race and lost, Tildy finishing with a sloshing burst, the suit peeled down around her middle by the rush of water. He paid for the chili dogs as promised, but fared no better at miniature golf. Tildy scored two holes-in-one, the first a shot that just missed the descending blade of a motor-driven Olde Dutch Windmill, the second a miracle putt that wobbled into the mouth of a cement polar bear, dropped through a pipe onto all-weather green carpet and rolled through a clot of dead leaves that altered the path of the ball almost ninety degrees, enabling it to reach the lip of the cup, teeter, fall in.
“I’d say you were a natural born athlete,” Christo muttered, tearing the scorecard to shreds.
GET US OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS
WANAWEETA MERCHANTS ASS’N
In northern Virginia they came upon an outgrowth of the Indochinese diaspora. The Ban Dinh Family Restaurant was just across the street from a gas station where Tildy flirted with the attendant while Christo swiped a quart of 30-weight and wiper blades that turned out to be the wrong size.
“How about a late supper with the boat people?”
“I’m not really in the mood for exotic food,” Tildy said.
“We’ll see. Maybe they’ve got a steak and lobster combo.”
It was warm inside the restaurant, steamy. Thai Airlines posters were tacked over sloppily pasted red wallpaper, blinking Christmas tree lights outlined the rec-room-sized bar, and on each Weldwood table was a cruet holding plastic roses. Except for a golden age couple dressed for a sales award banquet, puttering uncomfortably with the remnants of their meal, Christo and Tildy were the only customers in the place. A slender boy escorted them to a table with great ceremony and a wrinkly, don’t-shoot-me smile, laid out menus, withdrew pad and pencil from his designer jeans.
“You choose by number, write down here.” The smile was ferocious now, a rictus.
A chunky old woman, probably the kid’s grandmother, materialized at Christo’s elbow. Her stylized movements and buoyant manner suggested a veteran of service familiar with the ways of white people: Those were grand days in ’56 and ’57 at the Club Charenton near Saigon. We knew where we stood.
When she spoke, light did strange things on the metal bridge-work at the front of her mouth. “Good evening. You would like perhaps a cocktail?”
“A martini for me.”
“There are no more olives. So sorry.”
“That’s okay. Something for you?”
“Just tea,” Tildy said.
As they were studying the menus, Tildy murmuring that she’d be happiest with a bowl of plain rice, the other couple passed by on their way to the cash register. The missus loitered near their table, assuming the instant comradeship of compatriots stuck in some dreadful foreign backwater.
“Whatever you do, don’t order anything with pork. It tasted flat rancid to me.”
Christo nodded thoughtfully, twirled the pencil like a baton.
“No shit. Let me tell you something, lady. These people know what rat meat tastes like. They know that if you stand near a column of napalm smoke it’ll suck the air right out of your lungs. So do I. I’ve seen it happen. In your position I’d be damn grateful there wasn’t any strychnine in the food.”
She giggled, touched her lips, then felt the icicles of Christo’s glare upon her and beat it out to the car.
“You were really over there?” Tildy said, and a nasal voice from the middle recesses of her brain yelled: Sucker!
“Sure, sure. I was a real mudeater. Last of the doomsday grunts. I’d go days without sleep, get myself all smacked up and volunteer for night patrol, go for the big thrills. Maybe a little hand-to-hand combat, unzip some gook and lick the blood off my bayonet.”
“Sshhh.”
“Don’t be dense then. You know induction day was it for me. Ran around the halls dropping my shorts and spreading for anything in a uniform. Man, I had my 1-Y all signed, sealed and delivered inside two hours. It was a lot easier in those early days. Another year or two and they’d seen all kinds of dodges. You had to be a little more creative. Little brother of a guy I used to do street vending with went down with his pet St. Bernard, Rollo. Rollo used to drool all over himself after they spiked his Gravy Train with LSD. But the kid’s all smiles, very enthused, ready to ship out to the zone as soon as possible so he can start blowing Commies away. We’ve got to stop them before they reach Santa Barbara, all that. Just one thing, though. He’s got to take his dog along. ‘Can’t go anywhere without my dog, sir.’ Plants a kiss on those slimy chops. ‘Me and Rollo, we’re closer than brothers. Maybe you could teach him to sniff out landmines?’”
“Did they go for it?”
“Oh, yeah. The shrink was real impressed. Too bad it didn’t end there.”
“What happened?”
“It started to come down on him that summer. In buckets. His father died in a hotel fire. His girlfriend went out for ice cream one night and never came back. The band he was with threw him over for another bass player right before they signed a record contract. And somebody ran over his dog. So what the fuck, he went and enlisted in the marine corps. Got both his legs blown off in Cambodia.”
LANE ENDS 1000 FEET
This segment of the north-south artery was a memorial to our most recently murdered Chief of State. The rest area in which Christo and Tildy were parked had been named after the Hon. Elihu S. Robbinet, evidently a worthy Maryland jurisprude of days gone by. Such was immortality in the age of the disposable raincoat and the celebrity golf tournament; in a nation that communicated increasingly via T-shirt and bumper strip.
Christo dozed sporadically, a watch cap pulled down over his eyes, w
hile Tildy chattered on inside the clammy, hermetic little isolation box the Fiat had become.
“… like the way you stuck it right into that woman back at the restaurant,” she was saying. “That’s what I’m talking about. I admire that kind of conviction because I don’t have it. There’s a lot of meanness in me but I don’t use it, and that makes me feel so harassed. I’d like to be a real bullet-nippled bitch but I always fall short. All I can get to are the gestures. Maybe it has something to do with the choices I made a long time ago.”
“Timing.” Christo scratched his nose, rested his cheek on the steering wheel. “S’all in the timing.”
“For God’s sake, it’s not strategy I’m talking about.”
“It’s all strategy. And that’s all.”
“Then why can’t I carry it off? Why do I feel like a whore sometimes?”
“Don’t bother yourself over nothing. Let’s climb in the back seat and get friendly.”
“Uh-uh. Crank this thing up and move. I want to get to New York and show you just how much of a bitch I can be.”
“Right on, kid. Right on.”
UNION CITY, NEW JERSEY
HOME OF THE AMERICAN EMBROIDERY INDUSTRY
Christo leaned on the horn. “Poor, itchy New Jersey, the sick love-slave of New York. And how she loves the pain.”
The joy ride was over now. Ten minutes away from the target and Christo was antsy, constantly checking his mirrors, jaw muscles pulsing as he clenched his teeth. There was a taste of brackish water in his mouth, against his hot cheeks the sensation of emery paper. Tildy frittered up and down the AM band; nothing but news and commercials.
“Enough.” He slapped her hand away.
They spilled onto the bending, descending ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel and there, beyond the wharves and the viscous gray river, was that notorious skyline depicted on a thousand beer trays, decals, pennants; intaglioed on coffee mugs, woven into beach towels and sweaters. It was the image pilgrims took to bed with them at night: I have been there, to the sizzling core of the Machine. Today, through a thick and striated haze, it seemed to be melting away for good.