Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  “Hell, John, I’m a Texan. I can imagine things that would blow your mind. But yeah. Uh, just out of curiosity, think we could pass this old boy?”

  I shrugged. “We will when there’s a good place to do it, and here is not one. Anyway, they don’t stay on roads very long—they don’t like them—so he’ll probably move off soon. It’s narrow here and a truck could come around that curve—”

  I saw the glow of headlights and flashed mine rapidly and repeatedly until a big semi, pulling a City Market trailer, appeared. He had slowed to about ten, and crept by the elk and then me slowly; you can never tell what elk are going to do, and everyone has seen them just casually walk from the shoulder into the lane with a moving car almost on top of them. You just kind of have to hope that you won’t be in that moving car at the time.

  I could barely see the trucker waving through his windshield at me. I waved back. The elk had stopped to watch the truck pass, and so I stopped, and now I was about ten feet behind the elk. I drove slowly up to him, at about a mile an hour. He resumed walking in my lane.

  “Maybe he’s going to Denver too,” Travis said. “Not in a hurry, though. Feels the same way as you do about sci fi conventions.”

  “Well, the summit tourist store is closed by this time of night, and Monarch ski area won’t open for another few weeks, so he can’t be headed this way to get a cap that says ‘WORLD’S BEST GRANDMA’ or a lift ticket. Maybe he’s headed over to the roadhouse in Poncha Springs to grab a beer. But we’ve got a solution available now.”

  I pulled right and Travis grabbed the holy-shit handle above his window; as dark as it was out there, and as unfamiliar, for an instant it must have seemed that I was driving over a cliff, instead of into a wide truck pullout. I sped up slightly, cruised on around the elk, got back onto the road, and went on at a speed a little more appropriate to the twentieth, almost twenty-first, century.

  “You couldn’t have just crowded him till he got out of your way?”

  “If I was driving an ambulance and lives were at stake, sure, I’d take a chance on that. Not when it’s about just getting me to the geekfest. You can usually crowd them, but there’s a little risk because now and then they get mad about that. And you saw how big they are. A deer will wreck your car by getting in front of it, if you’re going fast enough; an angry elk can do a pretty good number on your car, with both of you starting from standing still. And when it comes to colliding at speed, well, a deer will wreck your car but an elk will kill you, especially if he goes up onto the hood, which they tend to do. So, call me a wimp—”

  “Wimp,”

  “Call me a coward—”

  “Coward.”

  “Oh, god, call me a cheap slut sex poodle, that’s my favorite.”

  “Yuck.”

  A few miles later, as we wound down from Garfield to Maysville, Travis said, “So, um … your colleague, Melody Wallace … is she attached?”

  “Not that I know of. And Gunnison is hell on the single. Once you’ve dated both the people in your age range there’s not a lot of alternatives left. That have anything to do with your idea that you might be visiting more often?”

  “Uh, everything.”

  “Well, she kind of obviously likes you too, you idiot.”

  We rolled past the yellow haunted house in Maysville, and on through Poncha Springs, the few streetlights at that crossroads suddenly blinding after all the long darkness, made the left turn onto 24, and headed up towards Johnson Village.

  “So,” he said, “it doesn’t seem to me like skewing your market sense is really grounds for you to do more than avoid the fans, or politely decline invitations.”

  “Okay,” I admitted, “so, they remind me of the guys I had to hang around with in high school because I couldn’t find any better friends than that. Now that I’m allowed to sit down the table from the cool kids’ clique, I don’t want to spend time with the nerds anymore.”

  “Life is high school with money.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Me, just now. Lots of other people before I think.”

  As we topped a rise, I was doing about eighty, taking a small risk of a ticket at that time of day—that area between Salida and Buena Vista is a notorious speed trap, because it’s so dull that people try to get through it as fast as they can, there are lots of good places for cops to hide, and there are many short stretches where the limit is suddenly, unexpectedly lower.

  Down the hill in front of my truck, a deer was running straight at me, in my lane.

  The road was empty. I downshifted, let the engine howl up close to the red line, changed lanes, switched off the headlights so I wouldn’t blind and hypnotize him. He was still plainly visible as a dark silhouette on the light blue of the road.

  He changed lanes to match me, and he was getting much closer, still running full tilt.

  I switched lanes back and braked, sounding the horn.

  He switched lanes again to head straight for the middle of my bumper.

  I switched lanes again and pushed the brake to the edge of skidding. The buck hesitated, then darted into my lane.

  I locked the tires—not what you should do, just a pure tension reaction—and we skidded into him, doing about thirty or so, hitting him with the right front corner of the SUV.

  The steering wheel kicked against the heels of my hands with a single, hard slam that I controlled with effort; crunch-bang of metal breaking around an empty space, over on Travis’s side of the truck.

  The deer bounced back in front of us, crossed the road in a sick cartwheel, and flopped and tumbled onto the shoulder to the left, neck obviously broken. I pulled the truck over onto the right shoulder, set the parking brake, put it in neutral, and left it running.

  “Why are you—”

  “Sometimes when they go partway under, especially on that side, they smash the starter,” I explained. “I might be able to get this thing to a gas station on its own power if I don’t turn it off.” I grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment and got out to take a look.

  “Got a spare flashlight? I ought to take a look at the deer.”

  “In the glove compartment. Need a hunting knife for him, there’s one there.” If you drive in the mountains much, you get in the habit of carrying something of the kind.

  “Thanks.”

  It was cold but dry that night, the kind of weather people hope for in hunting season. I had just an instant to note that without headlights, the sky was ablaze with stars, enough, even without the moon, to silver the snow on the Collegiate Peaks.

  I was in an old sweatshirt and jeans, so I just got down on my belly and shone the flashlight upwards to get a good look. There wasn’t much blood on the bumper, but it was partway off; the starter was half-buried in a tangle of bent metal, the radiator was leaking, and so many little braces and supports were broken and twisted that I wouldn’t have bet on the battery not dropping onto the road sometime in the next few miles. “No good,” I said. I got up, dusted myself off, reached into the car, and turned off the engine. “Have to call Triple A from here. Thank god for cell phones and the towers being all over around here.”

  “What will Triple A do?” Travis said, coming back from the deer.

  “Tow it back to Gunnison. I can’t afford to spend half a week in Salida or Buena Vista getting it fixed and I don’t have any way to get to Denver now. Trip canceled. I’m sorry, Trav.”

  “Hmm.” Travis grabbed up his bag; with our flashlights off, the lighter parts of his features glowed like dim, disconnected nebulae in the dark shape he cut out of the stars behind him. “Listen, John, how far is it to the nearest twenty-four-hour gas station?”

  “Probably that would be either the Amoco in Poncha Springs or the Texaco up in Nathrop. Both of those are dot-on-the-map places with fewer than a hundred people. Just let me call a tow with the cell, Travis, there’s no point in you heroically walking for help.”

  “I wasn’t planning to be a hero,” he said, “i
t’s just that … hmm. Well, here’s the thing, John. That old deer was dead. Like you’d figure, way he tumbled. But he was wearing a collar with a radio thing on it—”

  “Oh, shoot,” I said. “Must be a wildlife research project. There’s going to be paperwork too.”

  “Would a Department of Wildlife collar have a lead going up from that collar to a metal jack that went straight into the back of his head? Or would Fish and Game collars carry an acid self-destruct, so that by the time that I looked that collar was melting and smoking?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That deer was steered into us with that gadget which is now burning away on its neck. Officially such things don’t exist but I’ve heard plenty about them in the black world.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “The other side found me again, John. I don’t know why they haven’t moved in yet, but they haven’t, so I should get running before they show up. For your safety too, you know, bud. So which way’s my nearest gas station? I should start moving quietly, one direction or the other. We closer to Poncha or to Nathrop?”

  “Nathrop,” I said. “Keep going the way we were going.”

  His hand fumbled at my right wrist for a moment, then gripped my hand and shook it. “Later,” he said, and an instant later, I was alone by the road.

  I called Triple A and got them headed out toward me; they said they’d take care of calling the staties.

  It took an hour for the tow to get there, since the nearest available truck was actually the one at my favorite garage in Gunnison. While I waited, I got my flashlight and went to look at the mysterious cyber-deer that Travis had described, but found no deer there at all. Some blood and hair in spots where he’d touched down in his deadly tumble; a big bloody patch on the gravel. But nothing led away from there, no deer tracks, no trace of a vehicle, no footprints. And yet the deer was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The day after Christmas, I’d gotten up at five-thirty in the morning, though it hadn’t snowed. It had snowed, and heavily, a couple days before Christmas—if you want to be assured of having a white Christmas with icicles on the eaves, all the houses looking like melted cakes, all the trees holding big armfuls of snow, all the emergency rooms full of heart attacks and thrown-out backs, and all the streets full of nasty gray slush, you could do worse than move to Gunnison, Colorado (though you’d do even better in Crested Butte, a bit farther up the road). The town looks like Christmas looks on television and in most people’s childhood memories (which, nowadays, are mostly of television).

  Kara was going to see her family for the holidays, on a cheap flight at 6:35, Gunnison to Montrose to Tucson, where her sister was going to pick her up and they’d drive to LA together. It’s a great flight—a glorious view of the “America’s Switzerland” area around Telluride, and it nicks a corner of the Grand Canyon, and those are just the high points, on the way down to the soft warmth of the winter desert.

  “Don’t be jealous,” Kara said when I kissed her good-bye at the airport. “You’re the one that decided the book had to get done.”

  “One British publisher, the IRS, a bunch of doctors, and the credit card companies are the ones deciding that,” I said. “I’m outnumbered. Have a good trip, hunh?”

  “I’ll try.”

  I stuck around the airport long enough to watch her plane take off and to start feeling sorry for myself; kicked myself in my mental butt for that; and drove home, about a three-minute drive. On the way I saw that the W Café was closed, so I went around the block, back onto Tomichi, and saw that the Quarter Circle, the other good breakfast place in Gunnison, was open. It was even a shorter walk from my house.

  I parked, went inside, and fed the cats. They were all wandering around mewing, the way they did when they were disappointed by my having allowed Kara to escape, which they regarded as very poor management. Since I hadn’t bothered to take off my coat, I walked right out the door and down Colorado Street, the packed snow crunching under my boots; it’s easier to walk in the street than on those sidewalks, where the city plow trucks leave headhigh mountains of snow, and fresh sheets of ice form every afternoon.

  If you like it quiet, you owe it to yourself to try Gunnison, Colorado, just before dawn on December 26th. It seemed as if I could hear the bits of carbon banging against each other in the smoke rising in slow, perfectly vertical columns from every chimney, and the crackle of my breath freezing onto my beard. I could hear the occasional crunch or squeal of my duck galoshes on the snow, my own breathing, and almost, it seemed, the slow soft beat of my heart. Between the blinding pools of the streetlights, I could see that the sky was just beginning to creep from black to deep blue, and the dusty haze of dimmer stars was being cleared out, leaving just the bright ones shining.

  The Quarter Circle has been rebuilt and remodeled so much that only the center part of the outside facade reveals its origins as a just-post-WWII hamburger stand. Inside, it’s what you’re always hoping for when you stop in a family restaurant in a small town—scrupulously clean, neat, decorated with some pencil sketches and watercolors, rungbacked hardwood chairs, and those tough modern unstainable tables. Big windows let in all that mountain sunlight. It’s where the ranch guys come to sit and have coffee during the off season, when most of the day’s work is done by 7:00 A.M.; there’s a senior-citizen crowd, a college faculty crowd, and usually a prayer group of townspeople on any given morning, plus whoever drifts over from the hotels across the street or just wanders in because they like the place. If you’ve been there a few times, you’ll have shaken the owner’s hand and you’ll be greeted by name; it’s the kind of place that is more common in the movies than in real life, which indicates that real life could use some fixing.

  On the day after Christmas, it was as close to deserted as I’d ever seen it in the morning—only about half full. Cattle don’t know it’s the day after Christmas and neither do the stomachs of the men who feed and tend them; old people get lonelier even than usual on that day; so those crowds were a bit overrepresented, compensating for the people who were sleeping in, or still stuck at home putting up with family and holiday stuff.

  I vaguely wished I’d brought a book, but service was so fast that it hardly mattered. I was just sprinkling Tabasco and ketchup on the eggs when a familiar voice said, “Well, hey, I was gonna walk up to your house, but I was hungry, and here you are.”

  “Travis!”

  “Right on the first guess.” He was standing by my table, his old duffel bag slung over his shoulder, wearing a couple of raggwool sweaters, a heavy denim jacket, a hunter’s flap-eared hat, and Bean snowsneakers, which is to say, dressed like half the local population. “It’s the accent that gives me away, isn’t it?”

  “Have a seat. Get some breakfast. This place is good. How have you been?”

  “Well,” he said, “most recently, I’ve been freaking cold, but I got lucky and got a ride with a trucker all the way from Canon City, and decided I’d rather come here where there was likely to be a warm place, than stay there and hope for a ride to Saguache, which was less likely, especially day after Christmas. So that’s the recent history. In the longer run, it’s been a tale or two. Or six. Several of which got to the weird part and then just kept going. The story as a whole is kind of a long one.”

  “How much coffee, and how long have you been up?”

  “There’s a twenty-four-hour truck stop right outside Canon City,” he said, “which is about the only place you can get a ride there, since the prison’s right there and right near the highway. Got into Canon real early last night and had been up for twenty-four then. So I went to bed about seven, couldn’t sleep no later than four, got up, slung up the bag, sat and drank coffee and looked for a ride till one came through. That old trucker was filling up two one-gallon thermoses to keep himself going, and we drank it pretty much continuous all the way here. So I guess I’m a little wired; a nine-hour nap followed by maybe a half gallon of coffee. I’
ll try to pause for breath now and then. Where’s old Kara?”

  “With her family—or actually, she’s landing in Montrose, right now, on her way to visit her family,” I said. “Are you still working for Xegon? How did that case come out?”

  “I’m still working for Xegon, and it hasn’t come out, yet. With a good pot of coffee or three, you could hear at least a little more of the story, and then if you like, maybe even go see a tiny bit of it—might involve a little driving, this evening.”

  “What a surprise,” I said.

  “Aw, don’t be that way. If it wasn’t for me, you’d never go anywhere.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out a check. “This is what the guy at the Standard station told the Xegon folks that repairs to your truck cost.”

  He handed me a check; it was made out to me and drawn on a Xegon account at a First Interstate in Albuquerque, and it was accurate to the penny, if you counted an exact $250 lagniappe thrown in.

  “Well,” I said, tucking it into my wallet, “it certainly does improve a guy’s mood. I thought for sure I’d get a note from you or something when Gaudeamus did the series about ‘Robodeer, Enemy of the 4Runner.’ I mean, Harris McParris even had Triple A, and Robodeer’s real name was Poncha. How could there be that many details?”

  “Actually, I wasn’t reading Gaudeamus right then—if you’ve saved it, I’d like to. I was kind of busy living a pretty good story, all that time.”

  I didn’t really want to be grouchy with an old friend, and besides my life had just improved drastically in the last few minutes—I wouldn’t be moping around the house all by myself, I had an unexpected windfall (since I’d already paid to have the truck fixed), and besides there was apparently going to be a good story in this one. So I gave up trying to be crabby, and my old friend sat down and we carried on like old friends.

  Presently I asked him, “Can you tell me any part of the story here in public, or is this another wild one?”