Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  He got to Lake Crabtree by two and parked at the edge of the entrance road. Groups of families seemed to be living in the open-walled picnic structures and in camper trucks in the parking lots. Long lines waited outside both restrooms. It took Nick twenty minutes to find Tom and the others where they’d built a fire in the center of a soccer field and ringed it with Styrofoam coolers. The wall reminded Nick of Harvey Chambers’ macroengineering in Austin, and that in turn reminded him of his dream.

  Nick offered his veggie dogs and half a loaf of oat bread. “Is it okay to just build a fire like this?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Tom said. “What exactly are you worried about? Pollution from the smoke? Using up precious natural resources? Park rangers busting us for not having a permit?” He waved an arm at the crowds that surrounded them. “All that stuff is over. Moot. Finito.”

  They sat down together and roasted a couple of hot dogs while Tom told his story. Everybody had a story now, though Nick considered his own rather pedestrian.

  “I was working late,” Tom said, “so I wasn’t on the highway when it happened. Sometime before six I got up and went to the bathroom, and when I came back this other guy who looked just like me was sitting in my chair, typing on my computer. It was the single weirdest moment of my entire life. That feeling, to be looking at something for which you know there cannot ever be a rational explanation. I just turned around and went back into the hall and pictured that kid in the Little Nemo comic strip. You’re too young to know what I’m talking about. Anyway, he had this hat with a sign on it that said ‘Wake Up!’ Flip, his name was. I tried everything I could think of to wake up—looking at my hands, pinching myself, holding my breath.

  “About that time the two Lisas came by and rounded everybody up who was still in the building and took us into the conference room. We borrowed John’s boom box and listened to the news, and of course once we understood what was happening we all wanted to go home, make sure our wives and husbands and kids were okay.

  “There was only one car between me and the other Tom, and by this point we’d figured out whose world this was. I mean, he had the keys and my pockets were empty. So he gave me a ride home and put me and my Suzie up in his and his Suzie’s guest room. I guess I can’t really complain, but...you can’t tell the difference between us by looking. Only I’m in the guest room and he’s in the whole rest of the house. He drives and I have to ask if I can ride along. And he always makes me ask. He hasn’t refused me anything, but he always makes me ask.”

  They both looked at the fire for a minute, and then Tom said, “Doesn’t it bother you? Them calling us ‘primes’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a math person, like me. What’s the definition of a prime number?”

  “Divisible only by one and itself.”

  “Doesn’t that seem lonely to you? Do you remember what they call numbers that aren’t 1 or a prime?”

  Nick shrugged. “I forget.”

  “Composites. Because they’re made up of other numbers. But the primes are all alone.”

  “Maybe they’re just self-sufficient,” Nick said, in an attempt to lighten him up.

  “You think?” Tom asked, staring with an intensity that made Nick look away.

  After another brief silence Tom said, “You know what’s really weird? The other Tom, he doesn’t have any trains.” In Nick’s world, Tom didn’t actually have a guest room because it was completely given over to his model railroad. “When I asked him about it, it was the first time he showed any real interest in me. ‘I always thought about doing that,’ he says. ‘I had this Lionel set I really loved when I was kid.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, I know. I was there.’

  “But they’re all gone, all those trains I put together by hand. The Texas Eagle. Southern Pacific Number One. Wiped out.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. I mean, you have to wonder what exactly is the point, when you can lose everything, just like that.”

  Although sympathetic, Nick hadn’t lost sight of the fact that he’d come to the park to get cheered up. He ate two hot dogs and drank a Coke, then extricated himself to join the softball game starting nearby. Other than having to play barehanded, it was the best he’d felt in two days, running, chasing fly balls, swinging a big stick at something.

  Darkness ended the game by five o’clock, and even with the night turning rapidly cold, the beer started to flow. Nick was not much of a drinker, and without physical exertion to distract him his thoughts kept stumbling over Angela, Angela and David, alone together back at David’s house.

  “Hey,” a voice yelled. “Anybody here speak Spanish?”

  At the edge of the fire Nick saw John the receptionist next to a slight man in black jeans, denim jacket, and a battered straw cowboy hat.

  Nick walked over. “A little,” he told John, and nodded to the other man. “Que tal?”

  “Es mi esposa,” the stranger said. “Ayudame, por favor.”

  “Okay,” Nick said, and asked him what the trouble was with his wife.

  “She’s having a baby,” the man said. “But it’s too soon.” His Spanish came fast and slurred, the way Nick was used to hearing it in Texas. “I need the hospital, but I can’t take her because somebody stole my car.”

  Nick looked back at the fire, thought briefly about Angela again, and then remembered all the men he’d passed on the road in the last two days. Guilt welled up inside him.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take you.”

  “Gracias, muchas gracias. Dios te paje.”

  The man’s gratitude made Nick even more uncomfortable. As they started across the field he said, “My name’s Nick. Where are you from?”

  “I’m Carlos.” He shook Nick’s hand. “I come from Vera Cruz, originally. Just now from San Antonio.”

  Nick said that he used to live in Austin.

  “I know Austin,” Carlos said. “There is supposed to be much work there.” He was nervous and sweating, and it was getting very dark. Nick heard voices nearby and couldn’t pinpoint where they came from. Suddenly he felt vulnerable and a little foolish.

  “Aqui es,” Carlos said abruptly.

  Someone shone a flashlight in Nick’s eyes and he had to fight the urge to turn and run. After a few seconds his eyes cleared enough to see a middle-aged woman in a black mantilla sitting on the grass. A girl who didn’t seem older than her late teens had her head on the woman’s lap. Two or three other men, one of them now holding the flashlight on the girl, stood in the shadows.

  Nick asked if she could walk.

  “I don’t know,” Carlos said.

  They were only a hundred yards or so from one of the parking lots. “I’ll go get my truck,” Nick said, realizing, once the words were out, that they might think he was running away. “Carlos, you want to come with me?”

  Nick half-ran, half-walked toward the spot where he’d left his truck. Carlos jogged beside him, thanking him again. “It’s the red one, there,” Nick said, then pulled up short. A man in jeans and a white sweatshirt was sliding a flat piece of metal into the window on the driver’s side.

  “Hey,” Nick said in English. “Hey, what’re you doing?”

  The man glanced at Nick with apparent disinterest and went back to work. In the glow of a nearby streetlight Nick could see the man’s dirty blond hair and narrow eyes.

  “That’s my truck!” Nick said, his voice cracking as the humiliations of the last two days reached critical mass. He ran at the man, grabbing for the hand with the jimmy. The man spun away, leaving the jimmy in the truck door and pulling something out of his waistband.

  It was a .38 revolver. For a second, as the muzzle swung in front of his face and the hole in the barrel filled the world, Nick considered that he was about to die. He reacted to the thought with sadness and a flash of self-pity.

  “Correction, motherfucker,” said the man with the gun. “According to the VIN, this here truck’s the property of University Ford in Chapel Hill.”
There was something red around his neck. Nick realized that this was one of the new vigilantes, whatever it was they were calling themselves.

  “Look,” Nick said, “this man’s wife is sick. We need to get her to the hospital.”

  “I don’t see nobody.” Nick looked back and saw that Carlos had disappeared. “Now,” the man said, “you got the key to this thing?”

  Nick could hear the pulse in his neck as his T-shirt scraped against it. It seemed oddly slow, but so was everything compared to the speed of his thoughts. He went through several possibilities before he finally said, “Yes.”

  “Hand that son of a bitch over.”

  Nick took the truck key out of his pocket. His hand trembled and he stood looking at it for what seemed like a long time.

  “You scared, motherfucker? You got every reason to be.”

  In fact Nick felt enraged and helpless, which was something altogether different. It made him want to cry. As he held out the key it shook loose from his fingers and clanged on the asphalt.

  “You clumsy piece of shit! God dammit!” The man took one step back and waved the pistol toward the weeds by the side of the road. “Get over there and get on your God damn knees.”

  “No,” Nick said, listening to his voice squirm out of control again. Self-loathing washed over him. “You’ve got the key, you’ve got the truck, you probably just killed that poor guy’s wife and child. If that’s not enough, go ahead and kill me too.”

  “You prime fuck. You think if I did kill you, anybody would give a God damn?” Nick saw then that the man was more afraid than Nick was, that Nick had caught him off guard by showing up so unexpectedly, that the man had failed to think through what it would mean to point his gun at someone. Nick still wanted to smash his ugly head with a baseball bat, but he no longer believed the man was ready to shoot him.

  “You’ve got the truck,” Nick said again, to remind the man that he had, after all, won. Then he turned and walked away, wondering if he’d misjudged and if the man would shoot him after all.

  He walked into a clump of trees and pissed against one of them. It wasn’t as private as he would have liked, but at that point he was beyond caring. It felt like hot blood draining out of him, and he was weak and shaky when he finished.

  Carlos and the others were gone. Nick made a half-hearted attempt to look for them, then went back to the company fire. He thrust his hands nearly into the flames and there still was not enough heat to warm him.

  Tom and Lisa materialized on either side of him. “Are you okay?” Lisa asked. “What happened?”

  Nick could only shake his head. “What’s going to become of us?”

  31. Lisa gave him a ride home. “It’s only a couple hours out of my way,” she said.

  “He had a Palm Pilot,” Nick said. He couldn’t seem to stop rehashing the incident in his head. “I didn’t really register that until just now. It was in a little holster thing on his belt. He was using it to run the Vehicle ID Numbers. Crackers with guns and hand-held computers.”

  “Now that’s really scary,” Lisa agreed.

  “He called me a ‘fucking prime.’ No, wait. He said, ‘you prime fuck.’ There was this absolute hatred in his voice.”

  Lisa glanced at him just long enough to make him wish he’d kept his childlike discoveries to himself. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Nice weather we’re having.”

  Lisa laughed. “Not for long. They say it may freeze tonight.”

  She let him out in his driveway and he walked around to the driver’s side. “You want to come in or anything? David’s being pretty accommodating, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my asking.”

  “It’s late.”

  Nick nodded. “Thanks for the ride.”

  She put a hand lightly on his arm. “Take care of yourself, all right? Just take everything slow and easy. You’ll be surprised what you can learn to live with.”

  She turned around in the driveway and Nick saw her hand come up over the roof of the car in a final salute before she pulled onto Hope Valley Road and was gone. Was that the goal, then? he wondered. To find out exactly how much he could in fact put up with? Until he too was shambling along the roadside on sheer inertia, eyes glazed, with nothing behind him and nothing in front of him?

  The house was dark except for a single light over the kitchen counter. Nick stopped there to scrub his face with dishwashing liquid and water as hot as he could stand. His fingers still twitched slightly, as if he’d had too much coffee.

  He went on through into the den. The TV was off for once and the house was deathly silent. Nick knew something was wrong, but he couldn’t say what it was. The night’s violence had left him thinking murder and mayhem, and that was the only reason he went into David’s bedroom.

  Before he could speak he heard the rustling of covers followed by Angela’s voice saying, “Nick?”

  He froze.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god. We fell asleep.”

  Nick switched on the light. Angela was holding the sheet up over her bare breasts. David was blinking, pushing himself up on one elbow.

  Nick turned the light off again.

  “Nick?” Angela said. “Nick, wait. Oh, Christ, Nick, I’m so sorry...”

  What Nick really wanted was a long, hot shower. He knew, though, that it would be some time before he got one. “When you’re dressed, David,” he said, “I need to talk to you for a minute.” He went back to the den and sat on the couch.

  The two of them came out together a few seconds later. David was in pants and shirt, Angela in a terrycloth robe. Angela was crying silently.

  “Just David,” Nick said.

  She looked at David, then at Nick, and thought better of whatever she’d been about to say. She went through the kitchen and the sliding glass doors to the guest house.

  “I’ll need a few things,” Nick said. “Some sweat clothes, or some drawstring pants, maybe a jacket. Whatever you have that might fit me. A sleeping bag if you’ve got one.”

  “Look here, I’m really sorry about this. We didn’t either of us mean for it to happen—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Could you see if you could find those clothes?”

  David nodded and left the room. Nick leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He couldn’t remember ever being so exhausted. Part of it, he knew, was the anticipation of fatigue to come.

  “Nick?”

  He started awake, amazed to realize that he’d actually drifted off for a few seconds. David was holding out a soft-side flight bag. Inside Nick found clothes, a tightly rolled sleeping bag, a Swiss Army knife, a couple of towels, a first-aid kit, some toilet paper. At the bottom was something metallic that Nick fished out and set on the couch beside him. It was a .22 target pistol.

  David laughed nervously. “I expect some might think me a bit mad to offer you that in the circumstances. But I thought you might—”

  “No, thanks,” Nick said. “Just put it away somewhere, will you?”

  David stashed it in one of the built-in drawers next to the TV, and when he came back he had money in his hand. “I’ve only got a couple of hundred here at the house. If you want to wait till tomorrow I could sort you out some more.”

  “No,” Nick said. “This will do.” The money only made Nick more resentful. The business with Angela was a separate issue, something he’d known would happen sooner or later. At that moment he hated David because David had everything to give and because Nick had nothing to do but take it. It made Nick careless of what David thought of him, made him greedy and arrogant and willing to push for more.

  Instead he zipped the bag and stood up. Then he followed David’s gaze and saw Angela in the kitchen doorway. Her cheeks were still wet. “You’re not going...?” she said. “Please, please don’t go. Wait until morning. Let us talk about it, at least.”

  “I’m just going over to Richard’s house.” David didn’t flinch, willingly complicit in the lie. Nick felt the chill he’d known once when h
e’d cut himself badly in the kitchen. The knife had gone much too deeply into his flesh, but there was no true sensation at first. “I’ll call you,” he said, in a hurry to get outside before the pain hit.

  “Be careful,” Angela said, with a catch in her voice that Nick knew he would remember later.

  He hefted the bag and walked outside.

  37. The night was clear and cold and he stopped to put on David’s jacket. Once he got moving he was actually making better time than the cars on Hope Valley, and there was satisfaction in that. It took him only half an hour to get to I-40, where he turned right and headed west along the access road.

  Fragments of his dream flashed through his mind, overlaying the reality of the stalled and abandoned cars beside the road, the smell of exhaust fumes, the trash tangled in the thick, brown grass of the hillsides. It was easy to imagine the drought never ending, the trees withering, falling, decaying into dust, while the privileged few huddled in their pyramids. But who would actually choose the desert, given the choice? Who would not walk, head down, putting one foot in front of the other, for hundreds and hundreds of miles toward whatever hope was left?

  He’d been walking for an hour when he heard voices speaking Spanish beside him. He looked up, in the space of a second imagining that it might be Carlos, somehow with his wife and a healthy, if slightly premature, baby, and that they would offer him a ride because he had at least tried to help.

  Instead it was a battered pickup that coasted along beside him, three men in the cabin. They all wore baseball caps and work clothes. One of them saw Nick’s searching look and nodded stiffly.

  Nick nodded back and said, “Buenas noches.”

  “Buenas,” the man said. “A donde vas?”

  “Tejas,” Nick said, giving in the Mexican pronunciation. “Austin.”

  “Us too,” the man said in Spanish. “I hear there’s much work there.”

  “It’s true,” Nick said, also in Spanish. “I saw it on the television.”

  Work, he thought, and more. For Nick it meant the only person in the world who would have to take him in, no matter what. Because how could you look into someone’s face, knowing they were just the same as you, and turn them away?