by Damon Knight
“I think I will sleep with Mary Margaret Road-Grader,” I said. “Watch out,” said Freddy. “I bet she makes love like she drives that machine.”
She was ready to cry, she was so tired. We were under the road-grader; the tarp had been refolded over it. There was four feet of crawl space between the trailer and the ground.
“You drive well. How did you learn?”
“From my brother, Donald Fork Lift. He once used one of these. And when I found this one . . .”
“Where? A museum? A tunnel?”
“An old museum, a strange one. It must have been sealed off before the Highway wars. I found it there a year ago.”
“Why didn’t your brother pull with this machine here, instead of you?”
She was very quiet, and then she looked at me. “You are a man of your word? That must be true, or you would not have been called to judge, as I heard.”
“That is true.”
She sighed, flung her hair from her head with one hand. “He would have,” she said, “except he broke his hip last month on a raid at Sand Creek. He was going to come. But since he had already taught me how to work it, I drove it instead.”
“And first thing you defeat Alan Backhoe Shovel?”
She looked at me and frowned. “I—I—”
“You made it up, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“As I thought. But I have given my word. Only you and I will know. Where did you get the serial plate?”
“One of the machines in the same place where I found my grader. Only it was in worse shape. But its plate was still shiny. I took it the night before I left with the truck. I didn’t think anybody would know what Alan Backhoe Shovel’s real plate was.”
“You are smart,” I said. “You are also very brave, for a woman, and foolish. You might have been killed. You may still be.”
“Not if I win,” she said, her eyes hard. “They couldn’t afford to. If I lose, it would be another matter. I am sure I would be killed before I got to the Trinity. But I don’t intend to lose.”
“No,” I said. “I will escort you as near your people as I can. I have hunted the Trinity, but never as far as the Red. I can go with you past the old Fork of the Trinity.”
She looked at me. “You’re trying to get into my pants.”
“Well, yes.”
“Let’s smoke first,” she said. She opened a leather bag, rolled a parchment cigarette, lit it. I smelled the aroma of something I hadn’t smoked in six moons. It was the best dope I’d ever had, and that was saying something.
I don’t know what we did afterward, but it felt good.
“To the finish,” said Winston Mack Truck, and threw the pitch-fork into the ground.
It was better than the day before—the bulldozer like a squat red monster and the road-grader like avenging yellow death. On the first yank, Simon pulled the grader back three feet. The crowd went wild. His treads clawed at the dirt then, and the road-grader lurched and regained three feet. Back and forth, the great clouds of black smoke whistling from the exhausts like the bellowing of bulls.
Then I saw what Simon was going to do. He wanted to wear the road-grader down, keep a strain on it, keep gaining, lock himself, downshift. Yesterday he had tried to finish the grader on might. It had not worked. Today he was taking his time.
He could afford to. The road-grader was light in front; it had hard rubber tires instead of treads. When it lurched, the front end sometimes left the ground. If Simon timed it right, the grader wheels would rise while he downshifted and he could pull the yellow machine another few inches.
Mary Margaret was alternately working the pedals and levers, trying to get an angle on the squat red dozer. She was trying to pull across the back end of the tractor, not against it.
That would lose her the contest, I knew. She was vulnerable. When the wheels were up, Simon could inch her back. The only time he lost ground was when he downshifted while the claws dug their way into the ground. Then he lost purchase for a second. Mary Margaret could maybe use that, if she were in a better position.
They pulled, they strained, but slowly Mary Margaret Road-Grader was losing to Simon Red Bulldozer.
Then she did something unexpected. She lurched the road-grader and dropped the blade.
The crowd went gonzo, then was silent. The shiny blade dug into the ground.
The lurch gained her an inch or two. Simon, who never looked back either, knew something was wrong. He turned, and when his eyes left the panel, Mary Margaret jerked his bulldozer back another two feet.
We never thought in all those years we had heard about Simon Red Bulldozer that he would not have kept his blade in working order. He reached out to his blade lever and pulled it, and nothing happened. We saw him panic then, and the contest was going to Mary Margaret when . . .
The black plastic of the steering wheel showered up in her face. I heard the shot at the same time and dropped to the ground. I saw Mary Margaret holding her eyes with both hands.
Simon Red Bulldozer must not have heard the shot above the roaring of his engine, because he lurched the bulldozer ahead and started pulling the road-grader back over the line.
It was Elmo John Deere doing the shooting. I had my carbine off my shoulder and was firing by the time I knew where to shoot.
Elmo must have been drunk. He was trying to kill an opponent who had bested him in a fair fight.
I shot him in the leg, just above the knee, and ended his Pulling days forever. I aimed at his head then, but he dropped his rifle and screamed so I didn’t shoot him again. If I had, I would have killed him.
It took all the Fossil Creek People to keep his sons from killing me. There was a judgment, of course, and I was let go free.
That was the last Sun Dance they had. The Fossil Creek People separated. Elmo’s people split off from them, and then went bitter crazy. The Fossil Creek People even steal from them, now, when they have anything worth stealing.
The Pulls ended, too. People said if they were going to cause so much blood, they could do without them. It was bad business. Some people stopped stealing machines and cars and plates, and started bartering for food and trading horses.
The old ways are dying. I have seen them come to an end in my time, and everything is getting worthless. People are getting lazy. There isn’t anything worth doing. I sit on this hill over the Red River and smoke with Fred-in-the-Hollow and sometimes we get drunk.
Mary Margaret sometimes gets drunk with us.
She lost one of her eyes that day at the Pulls. It was hit by splinters from the steering wheel. Me and Freddy took her back to her people in her truck. That was six years ago. Once, years ago, I went past the place where we held the last Sun Dance. Her road-grader was already a rust pile of junk with everything stripped off it.
I still love Mary Margaret Road-Grader, yes. She started things. Women have come into other ceremonies now, and in the councils.
I still love Mary Margaret, but it’s not the same love I had for her that day at the last Sun Dance, watching her work the pedals and the levers, her hair flying, her feet moving like birds across the cab.
I love her. She has grown a little fat. She loves me, though.
We have each other, we have the village, we have cattle, we have this hill over the river where we smoke and get drunk.
But the rest of the world has changed.
All this, all the old ways . . . gone.
The world has turned bitter and sour in my mouth. It is no good, the taste of ashes is in the wind. The old times are gone.
THE FAMILY WINTER OF 1986
The family that lays together stays together.
Felix C. Gotschalk
The fiery solar disc above me was so bright that I could not sensitively perceive its true shape, ascertain its mass, or follow the flow of its flaring streamers. Reflexively, my eyes avoided the furnace-eye of yellow-white energy, and it could have been blazing at ceiling height or millions of miles high, it matt
ered not. For a very few minutes, I could watch the great sphere edge up over the rooftops in the morning, and watch it sink behind the smooth mountains at dusk, and at these times it appeared perfectly circular.
My putative sire told me that our planet’s axis angle changed slightly during the winter months, so that, even though the fiery sun-plate was closer to us, the actual heat and light were reduced. And this is what I told my three putative offspring. But oh, how I wished the earth were green again! And how I longed for warm weather. The drought line began to move ominously north in the year 1950, and had crept up our peninsula at about thirty miles a year. In the fall of 1980 we cut down all fifty-seven trees on our 100-by-200-foot lot and sawed them into firewood lengths. We salvaged every twig, branch, and the smaller limbs as kindling, and worked hard with two-man saws, sawing the heavy trunks into two-foot lengths. There was widespread theft of wood that year, as well as theft of bushes and shrubs, and we installed an eight-foot chain-link fence at staggering cost to our credit lines. But then, all our neighbors had metal fences, and most had Dobermans, mastiffs, or shepherds as guard dogs. We all put up extra floodlights at first, but this was long before the power plants stopped functioning. We stacked the garage to the rafters with logs, and our four BMWs sat outside, three rusted and dry-rotted, and one running fairly well on a fifty-gallon charcoal burner conversion. At $7.50 a gallon, few of us could afford gasoline.
We burned all fifty-seven trees in two fireplaces during the winter of 1980. The temperature ranged from 37® below zero to about 40° Fahrenheit from October through March. We wore woolen jumpsuits, extra socks, even ski masks, and the five of us slept together for added warmth. Now, in December 1986, we still slept together, but the need for body warmth was waning in relation to the strength of incestuous sexual attractions. After all, when a healthy thirty-year-old man shares a king-sized mattress with a healthy thirty-year-old woman he loves, plus two strong sons, ages sixteen and seventeen, and a beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, things are bound to happen. We brought our two sheepdogs in one bitter cold night, brushed and curried and perfumed them carefully, and slept with them. They were docile, pliant, and heavy, and I had a bone-hard erection sleeping humped against one of them. My daughter grew soft and sweet, and she seemed to luxuriate against my erections, like a cat being stroked. This disturbed me in some ways, but I was secretly pleased and aroused also.
None of us had bathed for weeks, it was just too goddam cold to get undressed, and besides, no water was allocated for bathing. Oil ran out in 1977, natural gas in 1978, and most of the coal was gone by summer 1980. Municipal water supplies were cut off the same year, and electricity seeped feebly through the utility systems for a few straggling months, the lights glowing dim and yellow, then dying out. So we were like primitive Eskimos, striving to survive in a poorly heated rancher with thirty-five hundred square feet of floor space.
The very night we slept with the dogs, two large eucalyptus bushes were stolen from our backyard, the roots carefully dug out, every tendril and runner preserved, two clusters of fuel for somebody. I didn’t suspect any of our close neighbors of the theft, but somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble, scaling at least two eight-foot fences and digging in the frozen ground. Fuel was indeed more precious than food for us. In the front yard, we had pruned the holly bushes down to about two feet in height and used some of the branches for fuel, and we had carefully removed ten vertical two-by-fours from the attic framing, leaving some thirty-six-inch centers where the building codes required eighteen. I counted ninety-two of these six-foot-high boards in the attic and wondered how many I could remove before the roof threatened to fall in—Christ, what a strange thing to have to worry about!
The day suddenly turned leaden-gray, somber, quiet, funereal, and the snow began to fall. The temperature was 14* F. at 2 P.M., and every snowflake struck, cartwheeled, and, mercifully, began to cover the vistas of hard red earth, slashlike eroded gullies, rocks, glass, bricks, feces, ashes—anything that wouldn't burn was left on the ground, like so much gravel scattered on a porcelain floor. And on this now whitening vista, the rows of large houses stood out, like blocks on a board, like chessmen or Monopoly pieces: the Waggoners’ handsome white French Provincial, the Caseys’ mansard-roofed place, the outre five-level split the Browns built lovingly in 1965—row upon row of once fashionable homes that had stood on thick green carpets of zoysia and fescue and bermuda, and dotted with cedars and firs and pines. The scene was like a Dali painting, with incongruous, compelling foreground figures placed on a zoom-lens desert of stunning perspective-depth.
“Snow! Snow!” the kids sang out, crowding to the window.
The room was entirely bare, and one eight-foot section of paneling had been pried off, exposing beams and caulking and black asbestos siding. We burned the cornices first, then the shelves, cabinets and banisters. The mantelpiece kept us warm for an entire day, being about six feet long and two feet square and very goddam hard to saw in half. The moldings around the floors and ceilings were used quickly, making excellent kindling, and we had just begun the sad task of prying up the parquet squares in the dining room. Paper of any kind was so rare that we used old grease and garbage to seal cracks as we slowly pulled off pieces of the house, like Hansel and Gretel plucking hard cookies from the witch’s roof.
Betty, my putative mate of seventeen years, zipped her padded jacket shut and walked carefully down the partially dismantled steps to the basement. She carried twenty plastic jars outside to catch the snow for later water storage. The poor girl cried the winter we burned the draperies, but we had used all our extra clothing for fuel years ago. I used to have twenty suits and eighty shirts, not counting underwear, old clothes, and handkerchiefs. I worked in a bank and had to dress up every day. Now I was down to two sets of dirty long-johns, six pairs of athletic socks, five layers of sweatshirts, two pairs of woolen pants, a massive corduroy coat, and a thirty-eight-dollar Stetson that I dearly loved. I felt like crying myself the year we cut up my two-hundred-dollar cashmere shooting jacket and stacked the squared pieces beside the fireplace. Much later, on a twenty-below evening, I was to cut the brim from the Stetson and use it to start a fire. Life was, as Bill, our seventeen-year-old son, put it, a matter of groveling about for things to burn in the fireplace. For example, think hard —should that vinyl jacket stay thumbtacked over that crack in the wall, or should it be burned as fuel? It would burn rapidly, we decided, and it would smell bad and put sticky black filaments in the air, so leave it where it is. But the drawers in the end tables could be taken apart. Betty loves those heavy tables, so try to fix it so the drawer facings can remain. The two of them will probably have to be burned before spring anyway. Outside, the tortured earth-crust received the balm of white crystals—so soft a fall, and yet so harsh a shower of fluffy meteorites. In the blackened, cracked fireplace, an old cedar log burned quietly, almost with dignity, and I wiped my soot-clogged nose on a tennis ball because I was tired of wiping my nose on my sleeves.
It snowed for three days and three nights, a strange, silent, windless fall of white. When the coppery-red sun rose on the fourth dawn, our tiny parcel of the world was iced like frozen glittery cake frosting. The sky was swept clean, a deeply saturated blue, and the air was so clear that my sense of visual perspective had to accommodate the new binocular cues. Plumes of smoke rose straight up from dozens of chimneys, like faintly wavering pencil lines drawn on bold blue paper. The snow had drifted very little and was about three feet deep everywhere. And the landscape was perfectly untouched, I could not see a single footprint, tire track, animal pawprint, nor any signs of fallen branches (who had even seen a branch in recent years?) or birds or little children, or brave paperboys, or postmen, or milkmen—where had all these nostalgic images come from? Then, next door, Macy heaved his slop jar from an upper window, the shallow tin pan hitting the hard snow-crust face down. A tributary of yellow fluid ran slowly out on to the snow and steam vapors sifted upward. Reality had returned
. Sixteen-year-old Alex opened our back door and dropped our full slop jars straight down. Three years ago the door had opened onto a large redwood deck, with handsome railings and bracings and stairs. The deck was dismantled for firewood in 1983.
If life had any meaning left for us that winter, it centered on the primary survival function of keeping warm, keeping tolerably clean and fed, and, above all, fighting back new and persistent incest fantasies, sociometric shiftings in the family group, and trying not to get panicky in boredom or hopelessness. We all sensed that each others’ sex drives were active and strong. I jacked off every day, trying to stay detumescent, and it was a matter of where to go to do it—I had taken to pounding off in the attic, shooting the stuff down into the asbestos-litter insulation (damn shame asbestos won’t bum). Our scents grew pungent and spoor-like, fifteen-year-old Sandra bloomed like a sweet waxy flower, and the boys must have wrestled mightily with their fierce hydraulic pressures. I thought it would be so kind, so beautiful, so eminently right to have intrafamilial sex, but, dammit all, none of us seemed to be able to throw over our incest taboos. I thought how natural it would be for the boys to plow their dam or their female litter-mate, and what better way to introduce a young girl to sex than through the gentle skill of a considerate paternal figure? But tremendous conflicts arose in my mind—thou mayest not incestuate, a voice kept telling me, a stodgy voice straight from the throne of the superego.
The day rang clear and hard and bitterly cold. I spat from the doorway, and the spittle cracked into crystals before it hit the snow. I cranked the wireless and got a weather station report of 18* below zero. We roasted ersatz rabbit legs on the fireplace spit and ate them with hard pumpernickel and warm red wine (I had traded a BMW for three hundred bottles of wine back in 1981 and had never regretted it). We huddled around the fire, hunkered down, like primitive tribesmen worshiping an idol. We smelled of grease cracklings and hot gnawed bones. Sandra smelled lovely, a kind of musk-oil perfume, and the boys also had cologne smells partially masking the basic odors of dirty socks and sweatshirts with sodden-yellow armpits.