“It happened last night, I didn’t hear a thing. Sometimes the Streak defends itself against threats.”
“How’s that a threat?”
“Idiot thing might’ve been clattering its hooves on my valves, who knows. Maybe it mistook us for a mating rival and tried to pick an antler fight.”
My valves, mistook us, defends itself: At times Todbaum spoke of the supercar as if it were his own body. Other times, as if it were a phenomenon alien to him. Perhaps he was as confused as Journeyman. The Cordon, in proposing the townspeople separate him from it, had made Journeyman see Todbaum and the Blue Streak as separable. Yet Journeyman had supposed Todbaum was the car’s master. What if the reverse were true?
“So, what’s the wake-up call about, Sandy? You here to read me the riot act?”
“I crashed at Maddy’s last night,” Journeyman said, semi-apologetically. Semi-apology being perhaps his life mode supreme.
“You give her the contract?”
“Yes,” Journeyman lied. “She’s thinking it over.”
“Game on,” said Todbaum. “This is gonna be epic, when me and her get together.”
“Peter, you know, don’t you—she’s a lesbian.”
“Who isn’t?”
At least a hundred reasons Journeyman could think of to ignore this remark. “There’s something else.”
“Then cut the circumlocution, baby. Eschew surplusage.”
“I need to know what happened between you and the Cordon people.”
“Why, exactly?”
“They see me as your—” Journeyman couldn’t find this word, so he turned the phrase around. “They see you as my responsibility.” He left the pronoun they unparticular. Let Todbaum think it meant only the Cordon, not the riders up from Granite Head. Not Maddy.
“So, you want me to tell you a story, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Like a private viewing in a gallery, off-hours. Only I’ve got obligations to my regular audience now, Sandy. I can’t waste the material.”
“I don’t want your material,” Journeyman said. “I want the truth.”
“What if the truth, my dear Alphonse, is that I plowed my treads over the skulls of a bunch of those fuckers? There might not be much more to it than that.”
“I’d like to know the details.”
“Well, you can wait. Where’s your vaunted story sense? Can’t you see the geographical arc of what I’m doing here, grinding across the vast terrain, the frontier thesis in reverse? Come back tonight, I’m doing Pennsylvania and New Jersey, into New York.”
“I missed some chapters, I guess.”
“Ninety percent of life is just showing up, Sanderton.”
“I’ll try to improve my attendance.” Their banter felt perfunctory and empty, dress rehearsal for a show that had closed years before. Journeyman glanced at the dead deer. He wanted out of the cockpit, out of the grip of the lightly humming, radiation-leaking device that had magicked Peter Todbaum across the continent and back into his life. Journeyman considered its night luminosity, the strange fluorescence that lasted after the campfire died and the moon vacated, like a child’s glow-in-the-dark pajamas. The glow made no sense for a crypto-military vehicle that might depend sometimes on stealth. Was the machine breaking down?
Seated in his swiveling pilot’s chair, slurping espresso, Todbaum looked swallowed in decrepitude, barely animate. Perhaps the Blue Streak was a kind of life-support mechanism, operating Todbaum as its human proxy. What if it was ready to discard its meat puppet? What did the Blue Streak want?
Todbaum read his mind. “You’re thinking I look like shit.”
“Yes.”
“Well, the feeling is mutual. You deserve to see this, coming around so early in the a.m. I don’t feel human until the sun gets hot. Maybe three, four in the afternoon.”
Feel human? Journeyman wanted to ask. How would you necessarily know?
“I’ll come back tonight,” he said to Todbaum. “I’ll come back for the story.”
46.
Special Rider
“SHE WAS ANOTHER LIKE ME—maybe the first I’d met the whole way across. By that I mean she wasn’t content to settle in one locality; she had ants in her pants. That isn’t meant as a knock on you guys. What happened here is a general condition, the way of the world. But she just wasn’t Arrested like everybody else. That got my attention right away. I guess you might say she was a very arresting woman.”
The fire lit the scene, lit the faces of Todbaum’s regulars scattered around it. The widowers, Theodore Nowlin and Edwin Gorse. Sophie Thurber, that enigma. Mike Raritan now regularly came to take in the Todbaum stories, on what basis Journeyman couldn’t know. Two women from Granite Head, Sarah and Eden, who’d come on bicycles, not for the first time. The teenagers, who hung at the gazebo as though on a street corner. Their contingent had grown. It seemed to Journeyman it might be half of those high school age. One of these was Danny Limetree, Sterling’s bereft twin. The other teens had girded themselves around him, as though he’d become their wounded prince. A couple of off-the-gridders, names unknown to Journeyman, deep-woods hippies, him with dreadlocks, her in a turban and poncho, sat together. Andy, the town shrink—another surprise.
And Journeyman. He was a regular here, he supposed. The story underway concerned Todbaum’s exit from Pittsburgh. He drew the scene unappealingly, as a region of militarized checkpoints, refugee camps, and bureaucratized resource distribution centers, like a permanent hurricane- or flood-management sector.
“I snuck my ass into this abandoned mall on the outskirts, a real negative zone. You remember what they called ruin porn? Well, I was living on set. Having rolled in with a couple weeks’ supply of this and that I figured I could do some recon before I got too near to the East Coast, you know, the old enclaves, the Acela corridor. I wondered what anyone would: was there a teenage president, were the Nazis in charge, what did they replace the Empire State Building with, can you still get a good egg cream, did the Sox win the pennant, all that shit. But seriously, don’t hold your breath because I have no fucking clue.”
Creeping around the wings of this stage, Eke and Walt. They’d placed themselves in charge of the firewood. One or the other plunged in at intervals, almost gamboling, to add fuel to the blaze. It made an outlet for their nervy energy, perhaps also an excuse to be present without openly joining Todbaum’s crowd. The former Cordon men now seemed to Journeyman to be holy innocents. Did they have an inkling of their place in Astur’s scheme? Out across the water, Quarry Island revealed itself as a nullity, a blot where no starlight danced on the rippling water. It would have been on a night like this one that the French boat had grounded itself to pieces on the island’s sea-facing rocks.
“It was the nearest thing to my current residency in your park, if you see it from a certain point of view. Not that I had anything to compare with you folks, shit. A few curious vagabonds came around to yak and bring me some examples of the local provender, but this was pretty abject stuff, goat’s-head soup with dog-biscuit crackers on the side, that sort of thing. Nobody fetched me piping-hot cornbread and rhubarb compote out in that neck of the woods.”
Journeyman wondered not whether there was a teenage president, but who in the towns had gifted Todbaum with cornbread and compote.
“She turned up with her bag packed. Call it confidence or desperation, adds up to the same thing. Bag packed and a warning: they were about to move on me, to attack with a bunch of fertilizer explosives, a shit-bomb. Like your friends figured out, shit-tech might be the only tech that never gets Arrested. Only tech, honestly, that gives me the willies. So, she snuck up with her satchel in hand, a stolen loaf of pretty fair pumpernickel, and her one request: that I convey her down the road a patch, as they say. My first hitchhiker. What can I say? I’d gotten lonely by that point. I dug her chutzpah. I named this lady ‘Pittsburgh,’ just to needle her, since the only thing she’d tell me about herself was that she wasn’t from around the
re.”
Wonder, wonder, such things to wonder over. How had it all come to exactly this? When would Journeyman figure it out, if not now? Here in the oasis of time at the end of the world? Yet since Todbaum’s arrival, time had perhaps restarted. Todbaum was his own ticking clock; he carried deadlines, crises. Worse than a clock. A ticking bomb.
Wonder this: If shit-tech was the only tech to outlast the Arrest, then what powered the Blue Streak? Was its fuel rod definable as a form of shit? Perhaps that was what separated Todbaum from most men: His turds could kill, his shit had kilowattage. His, far from being biodegradable and soil-nutritive, had a carcinogenic half-life.
“A little voice told me to take Pittsburgh’s warning to heart. Same voice that had kept me alive to that point. Anyway, that mall wasn’t a going concern, there was doodley-squat for me there. So, off we took. Pittsburgh turned out to be a weird bird. Hot and cold conversational-wise, though I did pry out of her—the night we drained the last of the Macallan—that she’d passed through the Arrest’s first phase in a desert arts colony in Taos, New Mexico. Poetry, she told me. I figured that was what she kept scribbling in the little blue notebook stashed in her bag. And, you’ll pardon my French, but Pittsburgh was a hell of a cocktease, too. You know how when you used to flip cable channels at two a.m. it felt like you were always about to see a bare tit, only you never actually did? That was Pittsburgh all over. She had some kind of geisha-ninja superpower for dressing and undressing in layers. Always these furshlugginer layers. Being around her was worse than being alone, because alone I could do what I liked, alone I could at least dream.”
Todbaum’s stories, his ceaseless renditions of that old song we long to hear, where did it all come from? Could it be the first time Journeyman wondered this? He’d lived in Todbaum’s verbal sewage flow for more than half his life. Todbaum wasn’t simply a liar—he couldn’t be simply anything. His tongue seemed wired to some invisible current: what his audience needed and feared to have spoken. Should Journeyman halt the tale and warn his listeners, the swelling constituency at Founder’s Park, not to believe? He couldn’t. He was part of the constituency. He’d come wishing to hear the truth beneath the lies, or beneath the stories, the mad pastiche—a recombinant hash of truth and untruth, of exaggeration and invention and translation, of sleight of hand, of this switched for that. The lie that tells the truth.
Todbaum’s was a gross art. Journeyman craved it. It had something to tell him, he felt certain.
No doubt, that feeling in Journeyman was what Todbaum relied upon.
“She said she had friends in New York, that I should come with her there. I asked how she knew they were alive, or what made her think the city was in any shape to access, Manhattan not some walled-off maximum security island, or just long since starved into desolation, its hordes having skeletonized Dean & DeLuca and Gristedes within the first weeks. It ran against every instinct in my body to steer the Streak into the greater metropolitan area—I told her so. My notion was I’d swing north, cross the Hudson, get into the clear. But she had this sway with me, I can’t say why. Like she’d really heard some long-distance call. Convinced me at least to drop her off in North Jersey, Hoboken maybe, near enough to see the skyline.”
It seemed to Journeyman that the stories were growing meaner. Or perhaps just this one, specially cultivated for his command reception. Someone passed a flagon of hot mulled cider into Journeyman’s hands. He took it gratefully, gulped a mouthful, and recoiled: it had been spiked with something as astringent as rubbing alcohol, or formaldehyde. A creature flapped in the trees overhead. Larger, Journeyman thought, than a crow. A raptor, maybe, sizing them, monitoring for strays from the flock.
“Turned out I cut her loose a few days too late. I had to kick the bitch to the curb. Finally snuck a look at her secret notebook. It wasn’t poems. She’d been copying down every move I made, navigationally speaking, drawing up cute little diagrams of the dashboard and gauges, too, drafting up a proper little cookbook for mutiny.”
Was this a warning? Did Todbaum know Journeyman had been charged, at least in the minds of the men from Granite Head, with dividing Todbaum from his machine? Journeyman had been only the Streak’s second hitchhiker, after Pittsburgh. Todbaum had told him so. Yet it felt less the case than that Todbaum sought to get a rise from his listeners. As though he’d grown disgusted at how raptly they’d follow him anywhere. He wanted to toss it in their faces.
“That diva never put out, you know that? Instead she had me eating out of the palm of her hand, getting all in my cups, spilling my guts. Bitch never put out, not once. I should have ground her under my treads, smashed her in with me hobnail boot, the ungrateful cunt. All right, I’ve had enough of this crap for tonight, everybody go home.”
47.
Gorse
JOURNEYMAN RAN INTO EDWIN GORSE the next day, a rare sighting on the main road. Gorse was agitated. He spoke with an air of implication, as though he and Journeyman had incurred a deep complicity the night before, at Founder’s Park. This was out of character, in the extreme.
“We’re going to need to mobilize our resources,” he fretted. “This thing will test us in ways we haven’t remotely prepared for.”
“What thing, exactly?”
Gorse ignored the question. Though winter’s extremes had flattened out, this was a true autumn afternoon, orange three-o’clockish light tilted off the bay waters visible between the library and town hall, leaves tumbleweeding down the empty street. “I’ve been talking with Theodore Nowlin,” said Gorse. “He’s with me, totally. It’s time for those among us with organizational aptitudes to step to the fore. We can’t just hope to stay viable as this sort of Tinkertoy community. I mean we’d better invest in our own values or admit they were always held at a very shallow level to begin with.”
“I don’t actually know how one invests in values,” Journeyman hedged. The word made him wonder whether Gorse had been offended by Todbaum’s drift the night before. By “cunt” and “bitch.” But that wasn’t it.
“By defending them,” Gorse said angrily.
“Defending them how?” Journeyman said. “You mean by, like, protecting what’s going on down at Founder’s Park?”
“Why should that strike you as funny? The whole peninsula’s a burning platform, Mr. Duplessis. But crisis also provides opportunity.”
“No, I’m sure you’re right. I just thought the Blue Streak was better able to defend itself than we are. Isn’t that the whole point?”
“I suppose you’d rather not consider how we put ourselves in such a vulnerable position. Todbaum’s come here to tell us who we are, and it isn’t pretty.”
“I suppose I’m with you there.”
“You say that. But have you even listened to his accounts? The things he’s seen?”
“I’m pretty sure that among the things he’s seen is John Carpenter’s Escape from New York,” Journeyman said. “In fact, he used to have a production still of Adrienne Barbeau standing on the hood of a car holding a pistol taped up in his dorm room.” Was Todbaum actually credible to someone like Gorse?
Journeyman at least felt he’d seen into Gorse, at last. The widower wasn’t shy, he was angry. He’d come to the peninsula imagining his worldly successes would make him impressive, and no one had even noticed. Todbaum’s arrival had reminded Gorse to remind others he was a necessary and serious person.
Journeyman thought of the motherless daughters, Gorse’s captive audience. Was Gorse grooming their organizational aptitudes? Perhaps he was making his girls ready for the world he wished to see return. Journeyman wondered how many others wished for the same—not many, he suspected. He wasn’t even certain that he did.
Gorse had hitched his star to Todbaum! Well, he was hardly the first.
48.
On Astur’s Boat Again
JOURNEYMAN WAS REGULARLY ON ASTUR’S boat again. He thought very little of it—the old boatsickness had fled his body. He’d sail alone or with his siste
r, or with some others who relied on Astur for crossing back and forth to Quarry Island. Journeyman could finish his rounds by lunch, even on days when he had to visit the Lake of Tiredness. After that hour, he became Astur’s boat boy, even learned a knot or two.
He was with her the day she ferried Eke and Walt across, with their tent, and stash of goods, and two extra backpacks loaded with dry goods and jars of preserved food, all organized for them by the Spodosolians. It came as a shock to see the two men all in readiness at the docks.
Journeyman exchanged names with Walt for the first time, before they entered the close quarters of Astur’s sailboat. The two had grown hairier in their time in the woods. They smelled of the deep underbrush, of vernal pools, but cured in campfire smoke.
“I can’t believe we’ve never met,” said Journeyman, feeling stupid. Eke and Astur moved the last of the provisions into her boat. Astur hurried. Journeyman could tell she liked this wind.
“I’m not surprised,” said Walt, grinning. “I never got off the back of my horse, few times I come down here.”
Eke and Walt huddled inside the cockpit’s coaming, sheltering from the water. These were not boating men. Journeyman wondered at the helplessness that might overtake them, stranded on an island. Once off the Tinderwick mooring, halfway across to the island, the two leaned together, blunt hands joining, Eke’s head on Walt’s shoulder. Journeyman tried to look away, but the cold autumn sun dazzled on the water, forcing his gaze back into the boat. Astur, turning from her steady labor at the tiller, smiled.
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