by Lewis Shiner
But then, what would you write about a song like “Grand-Father’s Clock” or “The Little Old Cabin in the Lane”?
An old colored man pushed a broom back and forth, looking over at the Kid every once in a while. “Waitin’ for a train?” the old man finally asked.
“That’s right.”
“Ain’t no train for two hour.”
“I know that.”
He pushed his broom some more. “That your git-tar?” he asked after while.
“It is,” the Kid said.
“Mind if I have me a look?”
The Kid took it out of the case and handed it to him. The old man sat next to the Kid on the bench. “Pretty thing, ain’t it?”
“You play?” the Kid asked him.
“Naw,” the old man said. He held the guitar like it was made out of soap and might squirt out of his hands if he squeezed down. “Well. Maybe I used to. Just a little. Ain’t touched one in years, now.”
“Go ahead,” the Kid said. The old man shook his head and tried to hand the guitar back. The Kid wouldn’t go for it. “I think maybe you could still play some.”
“Think so?” the old man said. “Well, maybe.”
He put his right thumb on the low E string and just let it sit there. After a while he fitted his left hand around the neck and pushed at the strings a little. “Oooo wee,” he said. “Steel strings.”
“That’s right,” the Kid said.
The old man closed his eyes. His head started to go back and for a second the Kid thought maybe the old man was drunk and fixing to pass out. Then the old man took a jack knife out of his pocket and set it on the knee of his jeans.
It made the Kid uncomfortable. He didn’t think the old man was actually going to knife him over the guitar. But he couldn’t see any other reason for the thing to be out.
The old man didn’t open the blade. Instead he fitted the handle between the ring finger and little finger of his left hand. Then he ran it up and down the strings. It made an eerie sound, like a dying animal or a train whistle gone crazy.
Then the old man started to play.
The Kid had never heard anything like it. The notes howled and screamed and cried out bloody murder. The old man played till his fingers bled and the high E string broke in two.
When it was over the old man sat for a second, breathing heavy. Then he handed the guitar back. “Sorry about that string, son.”
“Got me another one.” Tears ran down the Kid’s face. He didn’t want to wipe them off. He thought maybe if he just left them alone the old man might not notice. “Where...where did you learn to do that?”
“Just somethin’ I figured out for my own self. Don’t mean nothin’.”
“Don’t mean nothin’? Why, that was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life.”
“You know anything about steam engines?”
The Kid stared at him. A couple of seconds went by. “What?”
“Steam engines. Like on that locomotive you gonna be ridin’.”
The Kid just shook his head.
“Well, they had all the pieces of that steam engine lyin’ around for hundreds of years. Wasn’t nobody knew what to do with ‘em. Then one day five, six people up and invent a steam engine, all at the same time. Ain’t no explanation for it. It was just steam engine time.”
“I don’t get it,” the Kid said. “What are you tryin’ to say?”
The old man stood up and pointed at the guitar. “Just that you lookin’ for a life of misery, boy. Because the time for that thing ain’t here yet.”
Just before dawn, as the train headed west toward New Mexico, it started to rain. The Kid woke up to lightning stitched across the sky. It made him think about electric streetcars and electric lights. If electricity could make a light brighter, why couldn’t it make a guitar louder? Then they’d have to listen.
He drifted back to sleep and dreamed of electric guitars.
Kings of the Afternoon
From somewhere beyond the ragged palm trees came the screaming of sea birds. He lay with his head in Kristen’s lap, watching the lines around her mouth. Her voice, with its rounded European vowels, seemed to mingle with the hissing of the sea.
“...I had crawled to the top of the hill,” she said, “and the water was close behind me. All I could smell was the burning of the bodies, and I knew that all of California was finished. They found me there, not conscious, and I was in a dream.”
Landon closed his eyes.
“In the dream I was sleeping,” she said, “and I was wrapped in a sort of blanket, soft, silver colored. From a distance I seemed to be watching and the sun was up but making no shadows and nothing seemed to be lighted, you know, but sort of glowed. Someone was carrying me, I could feel the hands, and they took me to the edge of a water. I remember the dark of it, and a mountain out in the middle. There was waiting a boat, and other hands reaching up for me. The hands, you know, were not human, but like fingers made out of rocks, and the body too was rough and lumpy. I had not then even seen the men inside the saucers, but I knew what they looked like.
“A big sail the boat had, black and stretching, but there was no wind. The hands took me and the boat moved away from the land.
“The sea was thick and clinging and full of odd lights.”
Landon stirred. A seagull stumbled across the beach toward them, its body coated with dark, glistening oil. The bird rattled its wings with a noise like gunfire. Landon sat up, watched the bird stagger and fall into the sand, one dark, empty eye fixed on him. Landon pulled his Colt and fired. The impact flung the bird into a ditch beside the highway.
He lit a cigarette, the match trembling in his hand. The smoke hurt his lungs and he coughed as he stood up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Along the sides of the highway abandoned cars lay rusting in the sun. The sky was free of saucers and the wind carried the smells of the sea.
Landon drifted into a doze, waking as Kristen pulled into a weathered café beside the road. The big Pontiac convertible skidded on the gravel and jerked to a stop between two plastic execucars.
“Where are we?” he asked through a yawn. The heat had glued his black sport jacket to his shoulders.
Kristen shrugged. “Here.” A hand-painted sign over the door read DON’S CALIFORNIA STYLE DINER and a card in the window added “Yes We’re open.”
The smells of grease and cigarettes drifted through the screen door. Landon opened it and stood for a moment framed by the doorway, leaving his sunglasses on, making no effort to hide the holstered Colt at his side.
A few executives lingered in back, sketching on their napkins. Kristen led the way to a booth and Landon sat down, his sweat-damp trousers squealing against the red vinyl. A boy in a soiled apron took their order, then went back to a row of beer mugs on the bar.
“Your eyes,” Kristen said, “they still hurt...?”
He nodded. A close call with a saucer the day before had nearly blinded him, the road melting into a steaming gash in front of him. He had fought the car off the road, tears streaming his face, as the saucer whipped away, leaving a mile-wide path of fire behind it.
Kristen, sitting with her legs stretched out on the seat, touched his arm. She pointed toward the kid at the bar, who had started to juggle the glasses he was supposed to be polishing. Landon took off his sunglasses. The kid was no more than five-eight, wearing boots, a T-shirt, and dirty jeans. His hair was shaggy and stood up like a brush on top, tapering into long sideburns. Light flashed off tortoise shell glasses that hid his eyes. A cigarette hung from his mouth.
The act was meant to be casual, but Landon sensed a desperation behind it, a hunger for attention and for something else as well. The executives had gone quiet, and there was a thump as one of the glasses hit the table on its way back up. Kristen suddenly caught her breath and then Landon saw it too, fragments of the shattered glass hanging above the kid’s head.
The kid stepped aside, catching the other
two glasses, and the fragments pinged harmlessly on the linoleum. The kid casually dried his hands and reached for a broom to sweep up the mess. Landon noticed the red stain on the towel, the trembling in the kid’s fingers, the odd sensuality of his gestures.
The kid brought their hamburgers, puncturing the beer cans with sharp, graceful stabs of the opener. Landon couldn’t help but notice the way Kristen watched the kid. He put his sunglasses back on.
“Bring one for yourself if you like,” Kristen said. The boy nodded. He was older than Landon had thought at first, maybe early twenties.
“You have a name?” Landon asked.
“Byron,” the kid said. He ate a potato chip off Landon’s plate, then spun away.
“Hey,” one of the executives said as he passed. “Bring me a beer, will you?”
Byron smiled at him. “Fuck off,” he said casually. He brought a beer back to Landon’s table as the executives lined up meekly at the counter, perspiring in their dark grey suits. A small man with sores on his face came out of the kitchen and accepted their plastic cards with a conciliatory smile.
“Assholes never tip anyway,” Byron said. He turned a chair around and sat with his head resting on his folded arms. The executives filed out and Landon caught the odor of hot plastic as they started their electric cars.
“So,” Byron said. “You cats are like...outlaws?” He kept looking back at Kristen’s face, again and again. He rubbed the back of his thumb under his nose and said, “I seen your car.”
“That’s right,” Landon said.
“I mean,” the boy said, a sudden urgency screwing up his face, “it’s like...if I...I mean...” Then he spun out of the chair and out the front door.
“He’s insane,” Landon said.
“He is beautiful. Can we keep him?”
Landon shrugged and finished his beer. “If you want him badly enough.”
As they started for the door the man with the sores said, “Ain’t y’all planning to pay for that food?”
Landon turned so the light from the doorway glinted on his Colt. “Just put it on our bill.”
“I never seen you before,” the man whined. “I got to make a living too. I’m on your side.”
“Tell it to Robin Hood,” Landon said. “I’m only in it for the money.”
They found Byron leaning against the front of the building, one foot planted into the wall. He’d taken off his apron and had a red zip jacket over one shoulder. He lit a cigarette and said, “Where you headed?”
Landon pointed north. “New Elay.”
The kid took the cigarette out of his mouth and said something to it, too quietly for Landon to hear.
“What?”
“Take me with you.”
Landon didn’t like the edge of hysteria in the kid’s voice. Before he could say anything, Kristen stepped in front of him and got behind the wheel. “Get in,” she said to both of them.
The land was gutted and torn for miles in all directions, rolling down to the oily Arizona coastline. Stucco crumbled from the walls of the shattered building, and vines tore the red tiles from the roof.
Behind a growth of acacias lay a burned-out neon sign that read MOTEL CALIFORNIA. Landon leaned against the sign, watching Byron. The kid walked in circles around the parking lot, sniffing the dusty air and squinting up at the sky. He squatted at the edge of the moss-filled swimming pool and tossed pebbles into the murky green water. The boy had been with them for two days now and hardly said a word.
“Come on,” Landon said. “Let’s see if we can find you a room.”
They worked down the row of cabins until they found one with most of the furniture still intact. Landon kicked idly at a pile of rat droppings and poked into the corners with a broken chair leg. The air held the tang of mold, urine, sour linen. He wound a window open and let in the gritty ocean breeze. A cough gently shook his chest.
Byron stretched out across the bare mattress and locked his hands behind his head. A smile stretched his cheek muscles into tight cords. “Now what?” he asked.
On the horizon were the executive office towers, massive, opaque, impenetrable. They’d passed the residence blocks on their way into New Elay, equally fortified and remote. The buildings in between, Landon saw, had taken their share of punishment from the saucers. Shattered glass and collapsed walls littered the sidewalks; glittering trenches of fused concrete cut the streets.
Kristen drove at high speed, weaving through the lines of plastic cars and fuming executives. Pedestrians, most of them in rags, stared at Landon with blank acceptance. A pack of children chased a dog with a mixture of malice and desperation. An old woman squatted to urinate outside an abandoned storefront.
Landon took a Peacemaker in a worn leather holster out of the glove compartment. Turning sideways in the car seat he showed Byron how to load and fire it. The kid wound his fingers slowly around the grip, his eyebrows contorted in an agony of concentration. Landon watched as the gun seemed to be absorbed into the boy’s hand.
Byron stood up on the back seat of the convertible and took aim at one of the execucars. The driver turned pale and swerved across the road, glancing off the cars on either side of him. Byron rolled his head back and laughed at the sky.
They pulled up in front of a heavily barred store window. A pair of steer’s horns were mounted above it. “A meat market?” Byron asked.
“Lots of cash, pal,” Landon said. “The liquor stores are too dangerous anymore.” He got out and looked back at the kid. Byron had taken his glasses off and was carefully putting them into the pocket of his red windbreaker. Without the glasses, the kid’s moist, deepset eyes gave him an unearthly beauty. He vaulted over the side of the car, holding the pistol as if he’d been born with it.
“Just stay out of the way,” Landon said. “No grandstanding. Point the gun but don’t shoot it, all right?”
Kristen led the way in, carrying a Luger and a cloth sack. Standing in the doorway, Landon kept his own gun in casual view. He could smell the raw meat, his stomach reacting with reluctant hunger. The customers shifted quietly out of the way as Kristen emptied the cash box. Byron stood in the center of the room, radiating quiet menace.
Kristen signaled, and Landon went back out to the car. The crowd had more than doubled in size in the minute or so they’d been there. Up and down the block Landon saw people moving toward him. He started the car and began inching forward. Kristen pushed through the crowd and got in the passenger seat, holding the sack of coins in her left hand. Then she looked back and shouted, “Hurry up! What are you doing?”
Byron was halfway up the metal grille that covered the front window. “He’s taking his trophy,” Landon said. The kid swung onto a metal bracket and began to tug at the huge pair of horns.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, the horns giving way under him. He dropped ten feet to the sidewalk, landing in a crouch, one hand slapping the cement. The other still held the horns.
He vaulted into the back of the car, holding the horns over his head. Landon was astonished to see a few smiles and raised arms in the crowd. He leaned on the car horn, pumping the clutch, moving forward a foot at a time. The crowd stared at Byron.
Just as he began to make some headway a frail blonde teenager stepped directly in front of the car. She looked hypnotized. Landon swerved, brushing her aside with the hood of the Pontiac. “Idiots,” he said. “It’s their money we just stole.”
He could see Byron, framed in the rear view mirror, holding the horns over his head.
From the door of the cabin Landon could see Byron slumped in a corner, mumbling and nodding rapidly. A bottle of pills was open by his foot, and his hands played nervously over a pair of bongos. A girl was stretched out on the mattress, writhing slowly with some internal pain or pleasure. The sight of her soft breasts and rumpled brassiere, her long legs tangled in the sheets, gave Landon a pang of formless longing.
“So fucking high, man,” Byron mumbled, eyes swollen nearly shut. “This shi
t, this shit...so goddamned high...” His fingers twitched and fluttered over the surface of the drums, coaxing out a shallow, frantic rhythm. “Spinning...falling...crashing...saucers crashing, and like...”
Landon turned away. “Where is she?” the kid screamed. Landon walked to the beach, the hot sand working in between his toes, foam spattering his black coat and trousers. Behind him he could still hear Byron railing against the saucers and screaming for his mother.
The day was clear enough that Landon could see shadowy mountains across Mojave Bay. Among the litter of plastic and rubber on the beach he found a bleached skull and the bones of a single grasping hand. A fit of coughing took him and he crouched in the sand until it passed.
From the distance came a low vibration, like pedal notes on an organ. The flat disk of a saucer dipped into the horizon and disappeared.
The motel driveway was crisscrossed with tire tracks. The smell of gasoline hung in the air. Byron’s motorcycle was gone and Landon had a sense of foreboding as he pulled up in front of Kristen’s room.
“Where is he?” he asked, not getting out of the car.
She looked worn, the lines of her face all pointing downward. “Gone,” she said. “With four, five others. On motorbikes. They are after the saucer, I think.”
“What saucer?”
“On the radio, it was. They say one low along the coast was flying, maybe in trouble.”
“Christ,” Landon said.
The tracks turned south along the coast road. Landon swung the Pontiac around after them. Unless they stayed on the highway there was no chance of catching them. Landon let the landscape on either side of the road melt into a yellow blur.
Eventually he realized that he’d been hearing a low screaming noise for some time. It seemed to be coming from ahead of him. Finally he saw a faint glow off to the east and pulled over. He got out and slammed the door, the noise inaudible over the throbbing whine.
The source of light lay over the next dune. Landon put on his sunglasses and drew his Colt. The sound carried a pulsing resonance that he could feel in his belly. He went over the top of the dune, his left hand pressed against the side of his head.