At the speed Lazeer drove, it took over a half hour to traverse the eighteen-mile stretch. He pulled off at the road where we had waited. He seemed very depressed, yet at the same time amused.
They talked, then he drove me to the courthouse where my car was parked. He said, “We’ll work out something tighter and I’ll give you a call. You might as well be in at the end.”
I drove sedately back to Lauderdale.
* * * *
Several days later, just before noon on a bright Sunday, Lazeer phoned me at my apartment and said, “You want to be in on the finish of this thing, you better do some hustling and leave right now.”
“You’ve got him?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He sounded sad and wry. “He dumped that machine into a canal off Route 27 about twelve miles south of Okeelanta. The wrecker’ll be winching it out anytime now. The diver says he and the gal are still in it. It’s been on the radio news. Diver read the tag, and it’s his. Last year’s. He didn’t trouble hisself getting a new one.”
I wasted no time driving to the scene. I certainly had no trouble identifying it. There were at least a hundred cars pulled off on both sides of the highway. A traffic-control officer tried to wave me on by, but when I showed him my press card and told him Lazeer had phoned me, he had me turn in and park beside a patrol car near the center of activity.
I spotted Lazeer on the canal bank and went over to him. A big man in face mask, swim fins and air tank was preparing to go down with the wrecker hook.
Lazeer greeted me and said, “It pulled loose the first time, so he’s going to try to get it around the rear axle this time. It’s in twenty feet of water, right side up, in the black mud.”
“Did he lose control?”
“Hard to say. What happened, early this morning a fellow was goofing around in a little airplane, flying low, parallel to the canal, the water like a mirror, and he seen something down in there so he came around and looked again, then he found a way to mark the spot, opposite those three trees away over there, so he came into his home field and phoned it in, and we had that diver down by nine this morning. I got here about ten.”
“I guess this isn’t the way you wanted it to end, Sergeant.”
“It sure God isn’t. It was a contest between him and me, and I wanted to get him my own way. But I guess it’s a good thing he’s off the night roads.”
I looked around. The red and white wrecker was positioned and braced. Ambulance attendants were leaning against their vehicle, smoking and chatting. Sunday traffic slowed and was waved on by.
“I guess you could say his team showed up,” Lazeer said.
Only then did I realize the strangeness of most of the waiting vehicles. The cars were from a half-dozen counties, according to the tag numbers. There were many big, gaudy, curious monsters not unlike the C.M. Special in basic layout, but quite different in design. They seemed like a visitation of Martian beasts. There were dirty fenderless sedans from the thirties with modern power plants under the hoods, and big rude racing numbers painted on the side doors. There were other cars which looked normal at first glance, but then seemed to squat oddly low, lines clean and sleek where the Detroit chrome had been taken off, the holes leaded up.
The cars and the kids were of another race. Groups of them formed, broke up and re-formed. Radios brought in a dozen stations. They drank Cokes and perched in dense flocks on open convertibles. They wandered from car to car. It had a strange carnival flavor, yet more ceremonial. From time to time somebody would start one of the car engines, rev it up to a bursting roar, and let it die away.
All the girls had long burnished hair and tidy blouses or sun tops and a stillness in their faces, a curious confidence of total acceptance which seemed at odds with the frivolous and provocative tightness of their short shorts, stretch pants, jeans. All the boys were lean, their hairdos carefully ornate, their shoulders high and square, and they moved with the lazy grace of young jungle cats. Some of the couples danced indolently, staring into each other’s eyes with a frozen and formal intensity, never touching, bright hair swinging, girls’ hips pumping in the stylized ceremonial twist.
Along the line I found a larger group. A boy was strumming slow chords on a guitar, a girl making sharp and erratic fill-in rhythm on a set of bongos. Another boy, in nasal and whining voice, seemed to improvise lyrics as he sang them. “C.M. Special, let it get out and go./C.M. Special, let it way out and go./ Iron runs fast and the moon runs slow.”
The circle watched and listened with a contained intensity.
Then I heard the winch whining. It seemed to grow louder as, one by one, the other sounds stopped. The kids began moving toward the wrecker. They formed a big silent semicircle. The taut woven cable, coming in very slowly, stretched down at an angle through the sun glitter on the black-brown water.
The snore of a passing truck covered the winch noise for a moment.
“Coming good now,” a man said.
First you could see an underwater band of silver, close to the dropoff near the bank. Then the first edges of the big sweeping fins broke the surface, then the broad rear bumper, then the rich curves of the strawberry paint. Where it wasn’t clotted with wet weed or stained with mud, the paint glowed rich and new and brilliant. There was a slow sound from the kids, a sigh, a murmur, a shifting.
As it came up farther, the dark water began to spurt from it, and as the water level inside dropped, I saw, through a smeared window, the two huddled masses, the slurrped boy and girl, side by side, still belted in.
I wanted to see no more. Lazeer was busy, and I got into my car and backed out and went home and mixed a drink.
* * * *
I started work on it at about three-thirty that afternoon. It would be a feature for the following Sunday. I worked right on through until two in the morning. It was only two thousand words, but it was very tricky and I wanted to get it just right. I had to serve two masters. I had to give lip service to the editorial bias that this sort of thing was wrong, yet at the same time I wanted to capture, for my own sake, the flavor of legend. These kids were making a special world we could not share. They were putting all their skills and dreams and energies to work composing the artifacts of a subculture, power, beauty, speed, skill and rebellion. Our culture was giving them damned little, so they were fighting for a world of their own, with its own customs, legends and feats of valor, its own music, its own ethics and morality.
I took it in Monday morning and left it on Si Walther’s desk, with the hope that if it were published intact, it might become a classic. I called it “The Little War of Joe Lee Cuddard.”
I didn’t hear from Si until just before noon. He came out and dropped it on my desk. “Sorry,” he said.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Hell, it’s a very nice bit. But we don’t publish fiction. You should have checked it out better, Marty, like you usually do. The examiner says those kids have been in the bottom of that canal for maybe eight months. I had Sam check her out through the clinic. She was damn near terminal eight months ago. What probably happened, the boy went to see her and found her so bad off he got scared and decided to rush her to Miami. She was still in her pajamas, with a sweater over them. That way it’s a human-interest bit. I had Helen do it. It’s page one this afternoon, boxed.”
I took my worthless story, tore it in half and dropped it into the wastebasket. Sergeant Lazeer’s bad guess about the identity of his moonlight road runner had made me look like an incompetent jackass. I vowed to check all facts, get all names right, and never again indulge in glowing, strawberry-flake prose.
Three weeks later I got a phone call from Sergeant Lazeer.
He said, “I guess you figured out we got some boy coming in from out of county to fun us these moonlight nights.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I’m right sorry about you wasting that time and effort when we were thinking we were after Joe Lee Cuddard. We’re having some bright moo
nlight about now, and it’ll run full tomorrow night. You want to come over, we can show you some fun, because I got a plan that’s dead sure. We tried it last night, but there was just one flaw, and he got away through a road we didn’t know about. Tomorrow he won’t get that chance to melt away.”
I remembered the snarl of that engine, the glimpse of a dark shape, the great wind of passage. Suddenly the backs of my hands prickled. I remembered the emptiness of that stretch of road when we searched it. Could there have been that much pride and passion, labor and love and hope, that Clarissa May and Joe Lee could forever ride the night roads of their home county, balling through the silver moonlight? And what curious message had assembled all those kids from six counties so quickly?
“You there? You still there?”
“Sorry, I was trying to remember my schedule. I don’t think I can make it.”
“Well, we’ll get him for sure this time.”
“Best of luck, Sergeant.”
“Six cars this time. Barricades. And a spotter plane. He hasn’t got a chance if he comes into the net.”
I guess I should have gone. Maybe hearing it again, glimpsing the dark shape, feeling the stir of the night wind, would have convinced me of its reality. They didn’t get him, of course. But they came so close, so very close. But they left just enough room between a heavy barricade and a live-oak tree, an almost impossibly narrow place to slam through. But thread it he did, and rocketback onto the hard-top and plunge off, leaving the fading, dying contralto drone.
Sergeant Lazeer is grimly readying next month’s trap. He says it is the final one. Thus far, all he has captured are the two little marks, a streak of paint on the rough edge of a timber sawhorse, another nudge of paint on the trunk of the oak. Strawberry red. Flecked with gold.
<
* * * *
“Are you a moralist?”
In the same Show magazine interview quoted earlier (and well worth reading in its entirety if you can get hold of a back issue), Ray Bradbury answered this question with:
“I think I am, above everything, for the question of morality arises again and again with each machine that we create. . . . While machines are amoral, sometimes the very manner of their construction, and the power locked into their frame, inspires man to lunacy, idiocy, or evil. Some of the greatest liberals of our time are illiberal and demonic in a car. Some of the greatest conservatives become radical destructionists when they step on the starter and rampage off after murder. I once asked a class in design at the Art Center in Los Angeles to design a car that would cause men not to prove their masculinity every time they slung themselves into the bucket seat. ...”
I thought—indeed, I knew—no one could write another freeway satire I would want to read, let alone reread, or reprint. One of the differences may be that the author had not read any of the others: or so at least, his brief biographical note suggests. A professional musician, James Houston has been writing for eight years, publishing stories and poems in literary magazines and men’s magazines in this country and in England. An essay on California appeared in a recent issue of Holiday; his first book, The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, a history of surf-riding in the Pacific, was published this year by Tuttle.
* * * *
GAS MASK
James D. Houston
Charlie Bates didn’t mind the freeways much. As he often told his wife when he arrived home from work, he could take them or leave them alone. He listed freeways among those curious obstacle-conveniences with which the world seemed so unavoidably cluttered. Charlie was neither surprised nor dismayed, then, when one summer afternoon about five-thirty the eight lanes of traffic around him slowed to a creep and finally to a standstill.
He grew uneasy only when movement resumed half an hour later. His engine was off; the car was in gear; yet it moved forward slowly, as if another car were pushing. Charlie turned around, but the driver behind was turned, too, and the driver beyond him. All the drivers in all the lanes were turned to see who was pushing. Charlie heard his license plate crinkle. He opened his door and stood on the sill.
He was on a high, curving overpass that looked down on a lower overpass and farther down onto a 12-lane straightaway leading to the city’s center. As far as Charlie could see in any direction cars were jammed end to end, lane to lane, and nothing moved. The pushing had stopped. Evidently there was nowhere else to push.
He looked into the cars near him. The drivers leaned a little with the curve’s sloping bank. Nobody seemed disturbed. They waited quietly. All the engines were off now. Below him the lower levels waited, too—thousands of cars and not a sound, no horns, no one yelling. At first the silence bothered Charlie, frightened him. He decided, however, that it really was the only civilized way to behave. “No use getting worked up,” he thought. He climbed back in and closed the door as softly as he could.
As Charlie got used to the silence, he found it actually restful. Another hour passed. Then a helicopter flew over, and a loudspeaker announced, “May I have your attention, please. You are part of a citywide traffic deadlock. It will take at least 24 hours to clear. You have the choice of remaining overnight or leaving your car on the freeway. The city will provide police protection through the crisis.”
The ‘copter boomed its message about every 50 yards. A heavy murmur followed it down the freeway. The driver next to Charlie leaned out his window.
“Are they nuts?”
Charlie looked at him.
“They must be nuts. Twenty-four hours to clear a goddamn traffic jam.”
Charlie shook his head, sharing the man’s bafflement.
“Probably a pile-up further down,” the man said. “I’ve seen ‘em before. Never takes over an hour or two. I don’t know about you, but I’m stickin’ it out. If they think I’m gonna leave my goddamn Valiant out here on the freeway, they’re all wet.”
His name was Arvin Bainbridge. While two more hours passed, he and Charlie chatted about traffic and the world. It was getting dark when Charlie decided he at least ought to phone his wife. Arvin thought the jam would break any minute, so Charlie waited a while longer. Nothing happened.
Finally Charlie climbed out, intending to find a phone booth. He realized, however, that in order to reach the ground he’d have to hike a couple of miles to an exit. Luckily Arvin had a tow rope in a trunk. Charlie tied it to the railing, waved his thanks, swung over the side and hand-over-handed to the second level. From there he slid out onto a high tree limb and shinnied to the ground.
Gazing up at the freeway’s massive concrete underside and at Arvin’s rope dangling far above him, Charlie knew he’d never climb back. “What the hell,” he said to himself, “I might as well go home. The cops’ll be around to watch things. Besides, the car’s all paid for.” He began searching for a bus or a cab. But everything, it seemed, was tied up in the jam.
In a bar where he stopped for a beer to cool off, he learned that every exit, every approach, every lane in the city’s complex freeway system was jammed. “And ya know, it’s funny,” the bartender told him, “there wasn’t a single accident. It all happened so gradual, they say. Things slowed down little by little, and the whole town stopped just about at once. Some guys didn’t even use their brakes. Just went from one mile an hour to a dead stop.”
It took Charlie two hours to walk home. When he arrived his wife, Fay, was frantic.
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I started to, honey . . .”
“And what happened to your pants?”
He glanced sheepishly at his torn sharkskin slacks. “I was shinnying down this tree. I guess somebody left a nail in it.”
“For God’s sake, Charlie, this is no time to kid. If you knew how worried . . .”
“I’m not kidding. You’re lucky I got down at all. Some of the guys are still up there—the older guys—the fat ones—couldn’t get over the rails. And a lotta guys wouldn’t leave. Probably be out all night.”
She looked re
ady to cry, and she stared as if he were insane. “Charlie, please . . .” He put an arm around her and drew her close. “What happened, Charlie? Where have you been?”
He guided her to the sofa and they sat down. His hairy knee stuck up through the torn cloth. “I thought you’d see it on TV or something.”
“See what on TV?”
While Fay sobbed and sniffled, he told her the whole story. By the time he finished she was sitting up straight and glaring at him.
“Charlie Bates, do you mean you just left our car out on the freeway?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology] Page 11