The landscape changed as they drove higher, the trees thinned out and became scraggly, and then they were above the treeline, and there was nothing but rich brown earth and dark slate-colored rock.
“The fuckin’ Continental Divide,” Carl said softly. “From here on in, the streams all flow west. It’s the roof of the world, make it, the backbone of this great fuckin’ continent. Made this drive a thousand times, still can’t help thinkin’ about it. Fuckin’ pioneers crossed all this in covered wagons behind horses and mules, make it, bucko! Shit, they musta had balls the size of watermelons! Makes ya proud, don’t it, Bob? Know what I mean?”
Bobby nodded, for in that moment he did understand, and something he had feared lost was all at once found, and he understood what he had been feeling. There was just him, and Carl, and the timeless grandeur of this immense landscape, as it had always been, as it would always be, and none of what lay in the cities and the lowlands could ever touch it.
“Yeah, Carl,” he said contentedly. “Makes you proud to be an American.”
Carl drove through Vail, a onetime resort town that had been overdeveloped into a miserable little industrial city that seemed obscenely out of place in this glorious mountain setting, then dropped Bobby off on the highway where a narrow feeder road wound back into the canyons, right in the middle of glorious nowhere.
Bobby stood there on the road all by himself in the high mountains, and not minding it at all, for the better part of an hour before he got picked up by a big empty flatbed hauler driven by a squat, ugly woman with crew-cut blond hair and wearing an ancient brown leather jacket, whom he at first took for a man.
“Esmerelda’s the handle, believe it, not exactly butch, now is it, used ta call myself Erika back when I cruised the bars in Philly in neo-Aryan gear, brass swastikas and all, ya shoulda seen me, woulda creamed ya cojones, but when I came up here to blow all that, I took back the name ma mommy gimme, seemed only right, know what I mean . . . ?”
She laughed when Bobby goggled uneasily at her. “Hey, relax, boy, I ain’t about to eat you, not my thing, I’m what they call a diesel dyke, though never drove nothin’ but these fuel-cell haulers, now this time, it’s a load of logs I’m pickin’ up—’bout a hundred down the road for Salt Lake, so I can take ya as far as the turnoff. . . .”
Bobby got another hitch almost immediately after Esmerelda dropped him off, this time on a slow, full log hauler driven by a black man named Duke who claimed to have had a cuppa with the New York Yankees way back when, went two for fifteen in the majors, you could look it up, but just couldn’t handle the split finger. Duke took him all the way down into the corner of Utah, where the mountains got lower and rockier, and things started to dry out, and he could feel the warm breath of the approaching desert, and taught him more about baseball than Bobby had dreamed possible.
The sun was going down by the time Duke dropped him off at a little rustic camp beside roaring river rapids, just a tiny general store, a fuel station, and a few cars and tents down by the riverside.
“Now you listen up, Bob,” he told him. “You don’t try to go no further tonight, and tomorrow you don’t take no ride that don’t get you all the way to Vegas, ’cause you do not want your ass caught out there by the road in the desert! And when you get to Dodger Stadium, spring for a seat in the lower deck right behind the plate and see if you can pick up the old split finger any better’n I could; you’ll see why I’m out here truckin’ it, betcha!”
Bobby went into the store and bought himself packets of some plastic-looking yellow cheese and rubbery pink charcuterie, an apple, a small loaf of whole wheat bread, and a can of beer, which was about all he could figure out to put together for dinner out of the meager stock. The man behind the cash register had long red hair, a bushy unkempt beard of the same color, a big belly bulging out his T-shirt over a wide belt, and all in all fitted perfectly Bobby’s image of what an old mountain man should look like.
“Uh . . . you wouldn’t have a room to rent for the night, would you?” he asked.
The storekeeper looked at him peculiarly. “This look like a motel, Angeleno?” he said. “Too good to sleep out by the river?”
“Uh . . . I don’t have a tent or a sleeping bag.”
“Huh?” The storekeeper seemed quite amazed by that. “Watcha doin’ way out here without campin’ gear?” he demanded righteously.
“Hitching my way to California.”
“Jeez!” the storekeeper exclaimed, his surprise tinged with a certain awe, or so it seemed. He studied Bobby speculatively. “Ain’t got no room, but I got an old bag I could lend you. ’Course this ain’t free-lunch city.”
“How much?”
“Got something else in mind, city boy. You afraid of a little honest grunt-work like the rest of ’em?”
“I can handle it, I guess. . . .”
The storekeeper took him around the back of the building and opened a door flanked by three big empty garbage cans. Inside was a musty storeroom piled with cardboard boxes of canned goods. Empty cartons, old tin cans, and general litter were scattered all over the dusty wooden floor.
“Shouldn’t take you more’n an hour t’clean this mess up, and then you can have the sleeping bag for the night, or crash in here. ’Course if you ain’t never slept out under the stars in this country, and from the looks of you you haven’t, y’d be an asshole ta miss it!”
It actually took more like two hours for Bobby to get the job done, but he really didn’t mind, it was the first time he had done physical labor for anything, let alone a simple place to sleep, and somehow it made him feel . . . connected to something he could not quite define, a part, somehow, of the mighty landscape, of this western country and its timeless slow-moving stream of life.
And of course, he opted for the sleeping bag and took it down to the riverbank, where he ate his cold meal and drank his beer staring into the foaming rapids, luminescent and scintillant in the brilliant mountain starlight.
Then he crawled into the sleeping bag, deliciously tired after the long eventful day, and lay there gazing up at the stars through the gently waving tree crowns.
Oh yes, he had been right to leave the cities and the airports behind him to ride his thumb along the open road, for an entirely different America had emerged from this ground-level perspective.
People here still seemed to be living off lumbering, ranching, farming, and servicing each other, as they had since other sons of Europe had first made their way west across this great continent to become Americans. The American West and its people had in some deep way not changed since the days of the cowboys and Indians and would in the same deep way remain as they were long after cities grew old on Mars.
Out here, drifting off to sleep by an American river under these brilliant American stars, Bobby was content for the first time since he had set foot on these shores. At last he felt that he had in some way come home. At last he had found a piece of the America of his dreams, an America he could truly love.
The next morning, Bobby canvassed the people in the tents by the river, trying, as per Duke’s warning, to find a hitch that would take him all the way across the desert to Las Vegas. The best he could find was an old retired couple named Ed and Wilma Carpenter, on their way to Death Valley, where, they assured him, he should be able to catch a lift to Los Angeles even at this time of year; what with the Fuller Dome and all, it was a summer resort for Angelenos too, even with the heat.
“You can drive, son, can’t you?” Ed Carpenter asked him. “Wilma and I, we’re getting on a bit, and we could do with a bit of relief.”
Bobby thought about lying about it, but he had already told them one about being a UCLA student on his way back to school from visiting his folks back East, and besides he had no idea whether he could fake it once behind the wheel.
“ ’Fraid not,” Bobby said. “I never learned how.”
Ed looked at him peculiarly. “You go to school in Los Angeles, and you can’t drive a car?”<
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“Uh . . . I live in the dorms, and I’ve got a bike,” Bobby said, giving him a good European explanation. “And . . . uh . . . my folks, they don’t have much money,” he added when Ed didn’t seem to quite buy that for some reason.
Ed looked at Wilma. Wilma looked at Ed. They both shrugged.
“Well, why not?” Ed said. “The car just about drives itself, and there won’t be any cops out there. Be good to have a young man to talk to. What you say, Bob, you want to try to learn how to drive? After all, you are a Californian, sort of. . . .”
“Oh, Ed!” Wilma cried. But she giggled, and the three of them climbed into the electrocruiser, Bobby in the backseat, and off they went, with Ed Carpenter at the wheel.
The car was a fuel-cell job with four-wheel electrodrive, air conditioning, plush bucket seats front and rear, a water-cooler, a little refrigerator, “our little living room on the road,” Wilma called it.
Ed and Wilma had owned a furniture store in Golden, and after ten years in business, they had put aside enough to put a down payment on the building it was in. Never thought they’d make enough to retire, but then three years ago, a developer came around and bought up the whole block to put in a shopping mall, gave them a nice price, and after they closed out the mortgage, they had enough money to buy a life annuity which paid out enough so they could indeed retire and take these little camping trips, see Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Zion, and now Death Valley. Their son Bill was a captain in the Air Force, flew Penetrators out of Edwards, and they were going to tool up there and pay him a visit later on.
They were a pleasant enough old couple, and as the car descended out of the western slopes of the Rockies into the dry and rocky high desert, they had exhausted their modest little life story and started quizzing Bobby about his.
Bobby had been dreading this a bit; it was going to be a long drive, and he didn’t like the idea of spinning long elaborate lies for these honest, open people, but it was second nature by now, and besides he was fearful of revealing his European background to the parents of a captain in the United States Air Force.
So he made up a story about his mom and dad back in Akron, she was a schoolteacher and he was a foreman in a steel mill, just plain folks, but they had managed to save up enough money to send him to UCLA, what with a partial scholarship he had gotten, where he was presently majoring in world history, thought he might end up teaching too, maybe even at a university level, who knows . . . ?
“World history?” Ed said somewhat dubiously. “What are they teaching about that at UCLA these days?”
“Pardon?”
“I hear tell they got Reds teaching history to you kids out in California, or so Bill says. . . .”
“Reds? You mean . . . Communists?”
“Oh, Ed!”
“Now come on, Wilma, everybody’s always hearing this stuff, now we’ve got a chance to really learn something about it from Bob here. What about it, Bob?”
“What about what?”
“Well, for instance, is it true that those European-loving chrome-domes are telling you kids that the Russians won the Second World War?”
“Well, they sure don’t teach us that the Germans won it,” Bobby replied uneasily.
“ ’Course not! We went over there and gave that Hitler what for after the Peens all rolled up and presented their butts to the Krauts—”
“Ed!”
“And the Marshall Plan? They teach you how the Peens swindled us out of all those billions and never paid back a dime?”
“What?”
“See, Bill was right, Wilma, they don’t teach these kids a damn thing!”
“Now you watch your swearing, Ed Carpenter!”
“Now what about Vietnam? What do they teach you about the KGB selling heroin to the hippies and starting those riots in Chicago?”
“Uh . . .”
“I thought so! Why I’ll bet they don’t even tell these kids how KGB agents in the Carter administration sold out the Panama Canal to the Communists in Panama! Or the way the English started the Civil War to grab our cotton fields. Or how Fidel Castro killed Jack Kennedy.”
“Oh don’t be silly, Ed, everyone knows all that!”
Even in the air conditioning, Bobby started to sweat as nice old Ed Carpenter poured out the most amazingly bile-filled crackpot version of fragmentary history that he had ever heard.
The Mexicans had forced America into the Mexican War by invading Texas. Communist agents had created the stock market crash of 1929 so they could elect themselves FDR, whose wife, Eleanor, was an agent of the KGB. A senile Ronald Reagan had been hypnotized by Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a secret graduate of the Pavlov Institute. The Soviet entry into Common Europe was the first step toward the creation of a Soviet world empire, and Spaceville was a front for the clandestine creation of a European Battlestar America, which would be used to force the United States to give back the property that America had just so righteously seized. . . .
“That what they teach you at UCLA?” Ed Carpenter demanded.
“Uh . . . not exactly,” Bobby muttered dazedly. “I mean—”
“I thought not!” Ed declared triumphantly. “See Wilma, Bill was right, they don’t teach these kids a goddamn thing!”
“I will not have you swearing in front of this boy!” Wilma cautioned crossly. “What kind of people do you want him to think we are?”
Bobby had to choke back his laughter at that one at the time, but as the drive wore on, he had time to ponder the question seriously, and it perplexed him sorely indeed.
They came out of the western foothills of the Rockies into the most amazing landscape Bobby had ever seen. The Great American Desert stretched out before him under a pitiless blue sky, a vast wasteland of naked rock and searing sand in washed-out tones of dun and gray, an immense and apparently utterly lifeless nothingness that seemed to go on forever.
Here the road was arrow-straight, the traffic was sparse, and after about an hour, Ed Carpenter pulled over to the side of the road.
“Why don’t you take this stretch, Bob?” he said with a grin. “No way any cop can sneak up on us out here!”
And Bobby found himself driving the electrocruiser across the Great Desert at exhilaratingly high speed, while Ed, and when she could get a word in edgewise, Wilma, kept up a ceaseless patter.
Driving the car, even for a neophyte, was simplicity itself; there was power steering so forgiving you could take your hand off for five minutes at a time on a road like this, an accelerator pedal and cruise-control switch, a brake pedal, which Bobby never had to use once, a digital speed display, and that was about it.
The conversation, though, was deeply disturbing. One minute Ed Carpenter was expanding on the immensity of the landscape and the incredible courage of the pioneers who had crossed it in covered wagons, and the next he was ranting about the treacherous Peens who were befouling American Embassies and seizing American property. He would launch into quite a fascinating discourse on the creatures that lived in this wasteland, and then he would segue into a diatribe against the Mexican government, which was persecuting honest American homeowners in Baja, and which soon enough was going to get what it so richly deserved.
More disturbing to Bobby than the rabid jingoism, or the necessity of holding his tongue when the better part of him cried out to refute this vicious blather, was the fact that, despite what was being spewed forth, he liked Ed and Wilma Carpenter.
They had been kind to him. They were polite avuncular old folks with a feel for the country they were traveling through. Their love for America was genuine and somehow touching. They even let him drive their car.
Yet at the same time, they sincerely believed the most vile chauvinistic filth. Ed Carpenter’s ravings were exactly the sort of stuff that the European media put in the flapping mouths of the worst sort of caricature Americans. What had happened to America to make them like this? How could good people like Ed and Wilma believe such stuff?
What w
as he supposed to believe about them?
Wilma took the wheel about fifty kilometers from the outskirts of Las Vegas, just as the billboards were starting to appear, and turned off onto a ring road around the city.
“We don’t go through Vegas?” Bobby said, rather disappointed.
“Goodness no!” Wilma replied. “The traffic through the center is terrible, and besides, it’s full of Japs these days, come to gamble away the money they’ve taken from us, and all sorts of prostitutes and perverted sex shows besides!”
“Not the sort of thing for a nice young man like yourself to see,” Ed agreed. “The American Ginza they call it, and the Japs can have it! Now Death Valley, where we’re taking you, that’s something to see, you’ll never forget it, I promise you that, Bob!”
Once they had skirted Las Vegas, a low range of sere mountains started to rise along the western edge of the road, and soon enough Wilma took a turnoff toward them, through a little town, and up the slope, to a view from the crest of the ridgeline that quite took Bobby’s breath away.
Below them stretched a long desert valley beneath the towering peaks of the High Sierras, an elliptical dry lake bed, all salt and sand, shimmering in the waning afternoon sunlight like an immense mirage, like something that wasn’t quite there. And flashing and gleaming in the middle of it like the faceted eye of a gigantic insect, a huge geodesic dome.
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