Fathoms (Collected Writings)

by Jack Cady

  Fathoms

  Collected Writings, Volume 2

  Jack Cady

  Underland Press

  Introduction: The Storyteller

  Kristine Katheryn Rusch

  The best writers write like they talk. Their voice appears in every word. Even if the story’s narrator has an accent different from the author’s own, the author’s voice overlays it—the voice of a storyteller, masking his tone, speaking louder, speaking softer, but telling a story just the same.

  So, I wasn’t surprised when I first met Jack Cady. I had heard his voice many times, speaking through his fiction. What surprised me about him was the way he looked, and the kindness in his eyes.

  When I met Jack, he had a little over a decade to live. We didn’t know that, of course. He looked healthy and vital, strong and powerful. I met him at some Northwest writers conference in the deep midwinter which, here in the wilds of Oregon and Washington State, is overcast, rainy, and always about 45 degrees.

  Jack wore a beautiful white cable-knit sweater, the kind known as a fisherman’s sweater. And indeed, he looked like he had just stepped off a trawler, and was headed to the pub for a pint. With his thick unruly mop of white and dark hair, the matching beard without an accompanying mustache, and a craggy face, he could have posed for the cover of a calendar of Men of the Northwest—from any decade.

  Only those eyes gave him away. Bright, dancing, so full of life and intelligence and sheer puckish humor, those eyes held the secrets of a man who had a distinguished career in literature. He started with a bang, winning the prestigious Atlantic Monthly “First” Award in 1965, the Iowa Prize for Short Fiction in 1972, and many other hard-to-win mainstream literary honors.

  I knew that only because, as comrades at local writers’ conferences, we had to listen to each other’s bios over soggy pastries and cold eggs at breakfast ceremonies. Jack also taught writing at Pacific Lutheran University, and like anyone who lectures, he had some set pieces which I heard more than once. But I always listened to him speak, because I always learned something new.

  When we met, I edited what was then the science fiction field’s most prestigious—and literary—magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I also had a writing career, which was much less distinguished than his.

  One particularly dismal Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference, we sat down together over soggy sandwiches this time, and he mentioned he had a ghost story for me. I was pleased. I loved Jack’s work.

  I encouraged him to send me the story.

  Shortly thereafter, “The Night We Buried Road Dog,” landed on my desk. The story wasn’t a story at all. It was a novella—a short novel—and it wasn’t science fiction.

  I was having trouble with the publisher of the magazine, Edward L. Ferman. He hated novellas, felt they wasted space in the magazine better served for shorter stories, and often refused to contract for any novella I sent to him. (He was in charge of contracts and payment; I was in charge of content.)

  I could wheedle a science fiction novella payment out of Ed fairly quickly, but fantasy . . . well, that took some doing. So I approached Jack’s novella with a bit of trepidation. But that opening paragraph . . .

  Brother Jesse buried his ’47 Hudson back in ’61 and the roads got just that much more lonesome. Highway 2 across north Montana still wailed with engines as reservation cars blew past; and it lay like a tunnel of darkness before headlights of big rigs. Tandems pounded, and the smart crack of downshifts rapped across grassland as trucks swept past the bars at every crossroad. The state put up metal crosses to mark the sites of fatal accidents. Around the bars those crosses sprouted like thickets.

  . . . hooked me, and carried me through the story quickly. I heard Jack speaking in my ear (I still hear Jack speaking in my ear) as I read, and I knew I had something special.

  I also knew I had a fight on my hands. Ed Ferman was an East Coast man of a particularly Thurberish type, the kind who seemed frightened by any idea of wide open spaces. And here was the quintessential tale of wide open spaces, a story about back roads and ghosts, a purely American tale, but an American tale of an America that Ed had never experienced and never wanted to experience.

  He read it and remained unmoved. He told me to bounce the novella. I refused. We held that impasse for months.

  Finally, I called Jack and explained the situation. I knew I could wear Ed down eventually, but it would take time.

  Jack laughed. He was in no hurry. I was. I felt embarrassed by the situation. Here I was, the editor of the magazine, and my publisher had decided to thwart me on one of the best stories I had ever read.

  I warned Jack that my gambit might not pay off. He shrugged. He had all the time in the world, he said.

  I only wish that were true.

  It took more than 18 months for me to wear Ed Ferman down. In that 18 months, other novellas I had purchased over Ed’s protests were nominated for awards. He decided maybe I had an eye for these things.

  “The Night We Buried Road Dog” appeared in the January 1993 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as the cover story, illustrated by the marvelous Kent Bash, an artist known for his automobile art as well as his science fiction art.

  The novella hit the field like a bomb, and suddenly, Jack Cady became a “new” writer—at least inside the tiny sf genre. Everyone wanted his work. “The Night We Buried Road Dog” became one of the quintessential F&SF stories, one of the stories mentioned in tandem with other genre-defining stories from the magazine, like Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers For Algernon” and Stephen King’s Dark Tower tales.

  “The Night We Buried Road Dog” received nominations for every major award in the science fiction and fantasy field. The novella won four of them, including the Nebula and the Stoker. It also made two year’s best collections and since then, has been reprinted several times.

  But “The Night We Buried Road Dog” isn’t the sum total of Jack’s work. I published a few more of his stories before I retired from editing (the first time) in 1997. He continued to publish stories in F&SF, as well as other magazines and anthologies.

  Each story has that distinct voice, warm and inviting, yet commanding and confessional at the same time.

  Jack Cady’s voice.

  The man is gone. I’ll never share a bad convention meal with him again or a good restaurant meal when the convention is over. We’ll never discuss our love of the sea again, or talk about why we love literature.

  But his voice remains. His stories remain.

  Jack Cady is one of literature’s greatest treasures. If you’ve never read his work before, you’re in for a real treat.

  If you have read his fiction, then you know.

  Settle in. Relax. And listen as Jack Cady beguiles you with stories that seem deceptively simple, and always go straight to the heart.

  —Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Lincoln City, Oregon

  September, 2015

  The Night We Buried Road Dog

  I

  Brother Jesse buried his ’47 Hudson back in ’61 and the roads got just that much more lonesome. Highway 2 across north Montana still wailed with engines as reservation cars blew past; and it lay like a tunnel of darkness before headlights of big rigs. Tandems pounded, and the smart crack of downshifts rapped across grassland as trucks swept past the bars at every crossroad. The state put up metal crosses to mark the sites of fatal accidents. Around the bars those crosses sprouted like thickets.

  That Hudson was named Miss Molly, and it logged two hundred twenty thousand miles while never burning a clutch. Through the years it wore into the respectable look that comes to old machinery. It was rough as a cob, cracked glass on one side, and prime
r over dents. It had the tough and ready look of a hunting hound about its business. I was a good deal younger then, but not so young that I was fearless. The burial had something to do with mystery, and brother Jesse did his burying at midnight.

  Through fluke or foresight, brother Jesse had got hold of eighty acres of rangeland that wasn’t worth a shake. There wasn’t enough of it to run stock, and you couldn’t raise anything on it except a little hell. Jesse stuck an old housetrailer out there, stacked hay around it for insulation in Montana winters, and hauled in just enough water to suit him. By the time his Hudson died he was ready to go into trade.

  “Jed,” he told me the night of the burial, “I’m gonna make myself some history, despite this damn Democrat administration.” Over beside the housetrailer the Hudson sat looking like it was about ready to get off the mark in a road race, but the poor thing was a goner. Moonlight sprang from between spring clouds, and to the westward the peaks of mountains glowed from snow and moonlight. Along highway 2 some hotrock wound second gear on an old flathead Ford. You could hear the valves begin to float.

  “Some little darlin’ done stepped on that boy’s balls,” Jesse said about the driver. “I reckon that’s why he’s looking for a ditch.” Jesse sighed and sounded sad. “At least we got a nice night. I couldn’t stand a winter funeral.”

  “Road Dog?” I said about the driver of the Ford, which shows just how young I was at the time.

  “It ain’t The Dog,” Jesse told me. “The Dog’s a damn survivor.”

  ═

  You never knew where Brother Jesse got his stuff, and you never really knew if he was anybody’s brother. The only time I asked, he said, “I come from a close knit family such as your own,” and that made no sense. My own father died when I was twelve, and my mother married again when I turned seventeen. She picked up and moved to Wisconsin.

  No one even knew when, or how, Jesse got to Montana territory. We just looked up one day and there he was as natural as if he’d always been here, and maybe he always had.

  His eighty acres began to fill up. Old printing presses stood gap-mouthed like spinsters holding conversation. A salvaged greenhouse served for storing dog food, engine parts, chromium hair dryers from 1930’s-beauty-shops, dimestore pottery, blades for hay cutters, binder twine, an old gas-powered cross-cut saw, seats from a schoolbus, and a bunch of other stuff not near as useful.

  A couple of tabbies lived in that greenhouse, but the Big Cat stood outside. It was an old D6 bulldozer with a shovel, and Jesse stoked it up from time to time. Mostly, it just sat there. In summers it provided shade for Jesse’s dogs: Potato was brown and fat and not too bright, while Chip was little and fuzzy. Sometimes they rode with Jesse, and sometimes stayed home. Me or Mike Tarbush fed them. When anything big happened you could count on those two dogs to get underfoot. Except for me, they were the only ones who attended the funeral.

  “If we gotta do it,” Jesse said mournfully, “we gotta.” He wound up the Cat, turned on the headlights, and headed for the gravesite which was an embankment overlooking highway 2. Back in those days Jesse’s hair still shone black, and it was even blacker in the darkness. It dangled around a face that carried an Indian forehead and a Scotsman’s nose. Denim stretched across most of the six feet of him, and he wasn’t rangy, he was thin. He had feet to match his height, and his hands seemed bigger than his feet; but the man could skin a Cat.

  I stood in moonlight and watched him work. A little puff of flame dwelt in the stack of the bulldozer. It flashed against the darkness of those distant mountains. It burbled hot in the cold spring moonlight. Jesse made rough cuts pretty quick, moved a lot of soil, then started getting delicate. He shaped and reshaped that grave. He carved a little from one side, backed the dozer, found his cut not satisfactory. He took a spoonful of earth to straighten things, then fussed with the grade leading into the grave. You could tell he wanted a slight elevation, so the Hudson’s nose would be sniffing toward the road. Old Potato-dog had a hound’s ears, but not a hound’s good sense. He started baying at the moon.

  It came to me that I was scared. Then it came to me that I was scared most of the time, anyway. I was nineteen, and folks talked about having a war across the sea. I didn’t want to hear about it. On top of the war talk, women were driving me crazy; the ones who said ‘no’ and the ones who said ‘yes.’ It got downright mystifying just trying to figure out which was worse. At nineteen it’s hard to know how to act. There were whole weeks when I could pass myself off as a hellion, then something would go sour. I’d get hit by a streak of conscience and start acting like a missionary.

  “Jed,” Jesse told me from the seat of the dozer, “go rig a tow on Miss Molly.” In the headlights, the grave now looked like a garage dug into the side of that little slope. Brother Jesse eased the Cat back in there to fuss with the grade. I stepped slow toward the Hudson, wiggled under, and fetched the towing cable around the frame. Potato howled. Chip danced like a fuzzy fury, and started chewing on my boot like he’s trying to drag me from under the Hudson. I’m on my back trying to kick Chip away and secure the cable. Then I like to died from fright.

  Nothing else in the world sounds anywhere near like a Hudson starter. It’s a combination of whine and clatter and growl. If I’d been dead a thousand years you could stand me right up with a Hudson starter. There’s threat in that sound. There’s also the promise that things can get pretty rowdy, pretty quick.

  The starter went off. The Hudson jiggled. In the one-half second it took to get from under that car I thought of every bad thing I ever did in my life. I was headed for hell, certain sure. By the time I was on my feet there wasn’t an ounce of blood showing anywhere on me. When the old folks say, ‘white as a sheet,’ they’re talking about a guy under a Hudson.

  Brother Jesse climbed from the Cat and gave me a couple of shakes.

  “She ain’t dead,” I stuttered. “The engine turned over. Miss Molly’s still thinking speedy.” From highway 2 came the wail of Mike Tarbush’s ’48 Roadmaster. Mike loved and cussed that car. It always flattened out at around eighty.

  “There’s still some sap left in the batt’ry,” Jesse said about the Hudson. “You probably caused a short.” He dropped the cable around the hitch on the dozer. “Steer her,” he said.

  The steering wheel still felt alive, despite what Jesse said. I crouched behind the wheel as the Hudson got dragged toward the grave. Its brakes locked twice, but the towing cable held. The locked brakes caused the car to side-slip. Each time Jesse cussed. Cold spring moonlight made the shadowed grave look like a cave of darkness.

  The Hudson bided its time. We got it lined up, then pushed it backwards into the grave. The hunched front fenders spread beside the snarly grill. The front bumper was the only thing about that car that still showed clean and uncluttered. I could swear Miss Molly moved in the darkness of the grave, about to come charging onto highway 2. Then she seemed to make some kind of decision, and sort of settled down. Jesse gave the eulogy.

  “This here car never did nothing bad,” he said. “I must have seen a million crap-crates, but this car wasn’t one of them. She had a second gear like hydramatic, and you could wind to 70 before you dropped to third. There wasn’t no top end to her, at least I never had the guts to find it. This here was a 100 mile-an-hour car on a bad night, and God-knows-what on a good’n.” From highway 2 you could hear the purr of Matt Simon’s ’56 Dodge, five speeds, what with the overdrive, and Matt was scorching.

  Potato howled long and mournful. Chip whined. Jesse scratched his head, trying to figure a way to end the eulogy. It came to him like a blessing. “I can’t prove it,” he said, “’cause no one could. But, I expect this car has passed The Road Dog maybe a couple of hundred times.” He made like he was going to cross himself, then remembered he was Methodist. “Rest in peace,” he said, and he said it with eyes full of tears. “There ain’t that many who can comprehend The Dog.” He climbed back on the Cat and began to fill the grave.

 
Next day Jesse mounded the grave with real care. He erected a marker, although the marker was more like a little signboard:

  1947–1961

  HUDSON COUPE—‘MOLLY’

  220,023 MILES ON STRAIGHT EIGHT CYLINDER

  DIED OF BUSTED CRANKSHAFT

  BELOVED IN THE MEMORY OF

  JESSE STILL

  ═

  Montana roads are long and lonesome, and highway 2 is lonesomest. You pick it up over on the Idaho border where the land is mountains. Bear and cougar still live pretty good, and beaver still build dams. The highway runs beside some pretty lakes. Canada is no more than a jump away; it hangs at your left shoulder when you’re headed east.

  And can you roll those mountains? Yes, oh yes. It’s two lane all the way across, and twisty in the hills. From Libby you ride down to Kalispell, then pop back north. The hills last ’til the Blackfoot reservation. It’s rangeland into Cut Bank, then to Havre. That’s just about the center of the state.

  Just let the engine howl from town to town. The road goes through a dozen, then swings south. And there you are at Glasgow and the river. By Wolf Point you’re in cropland, and it’s flat from there until Chicago.

  I almost hate to tell about this road, because Easterners may want to come and visit. Then they’ll do something dumb at a blind entry. The state will erect more metal crosses. Enough folks die up here already. And, it’s sure no place for rice grinders, or tacky Swedish station wagons, or high priced German crap crates. This was always a V8 road, and V12 if you had ’em. In the old, old days there were even a few V16s up here. The top end on those things came when friction stripped the tires from too much speed.

  ═

  Speed or not, brakes sure sounded as cars passed Miss Molly’s grave. Pickup trucks fishtailed as men snapped them to the shoulder. The men would sit in their trucks for a minute, scratching their heads like they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. Then they’d climb from the truck, walk back to the grave, and read the marker. About half of them would start holding their sides. One guy even rolled around on the ground, he was laughing so much.