In the west, the sun had gone as the last vestiges flared in chromatic red and orange and windrows of lavender clouds dulled to smoke gray. Somewhere westward, night was already facing him, and he went on toward it as if he and the darkness had some appointment to keep. For some time he’d been aware of sounds, the equable cries of birds, a truck somewhere laboring through the gears.
The next morning Bascom woke with light the color of haze heavy on his eyelids, heat bearing down on the flesh of his face and throat. His throat felt as if it had been cut with a rusty pocketknife and he had a thought to feel and see, but some old caution stayed his hand. Some things are better not known. He judged it better to enter into the day with caution, who knows what lay ahead?
Or behind. He lay very still and tried to locate himself. Where he was, where he’d been. Jagged images of the night before came unsequenced and painful, little dayglow snippets of chaos. Like snapshots brought back from a demented backroads vacation. He’d been in a car, six or seven men sitting crammed tightly shoulder to shoulder. Had there been a woman? He seemed to remember perfume, soft drunken laughter. A siren, the systole and diastole of a cruiser’s lights. Riding through the actual woods down to a hollow, brush whipping the car, the breathless impact of a tree trunk. The protest of warped metal and a final shard of glass falling like an afterthought.
Running through the woods. One picture of him frozen in air, limbs all outflung and his mouth an O of surprise and an outstretched vine or bramble or perhaps clothesline hooking him beneath the chin and his terrific momentum slinging him into the air. Later on, the cry of some beast he suspected was yet unrecognized by science, some horrible hybrid of loon and mountain cat. Oh Lord, he said aloud, then immediately wondered if there’d been anyone about to hear it and opened his eyes to see.
The first thing he saw was the sun and he wrenched his face away in agony and saw a field of grass, a horizon of stems and clover blossoms like trees in miniature. A sky of a malefic bluegreen that seemed to be alive, pulsing and throbbing. He looked back into the ball of white pain that stood at midmorning.
An enormous blue monolith seemed to rise above him, and it took him a few moments to realize that it was his left leg distended into the air, rising at a precipitous angle and tending out of sight into the malicious sky he wanted no part of. As if some celestial beast or outlaw aberrant angel had snatched him up by the left leg to hove him off, found him ungainly or not worth having and departed or simply paused to rest.
Well now, Bascom said tentatively.
After a time, he realized that the cuff of his jeans was caught on the top of the chain-link fence and hung him here in dismissal. Well son of a bitch, he thought. Reckon I was chasin something or runnin from it. He remembered voices and gunfire and riders and their steeds that seemed to have been lithographed on the stormtossed heavens themselves. By inching forward, he was able to jiggle his leg. He looked as if he was climbing the fence with his buttocks, using them as a snake uses its ribs. In this manner he was able to accumulate enough slack in the denim to wrench his leg free. He rolled backward and sat up in the grass with his legs folded under him and his face in his hands.
Oh Lord, he said. A person ought not have to live like this.
He looked about cautiously, like a player sweating over the last down card in a poker game. Who knew what he’d find? A dead body, a canvas bag of money stenciled FIRST NATIONAL BANK, a knife with blood crusted on its blade, a dead sheriff with a bloody and unserved warrant clutched in his fist. But there was just the fierce arsenical green of the field he was in, a distant treeline, birds moving above it like random or malignant spores on a glass slide. When he rose he noticed the white flaps of his pockets turned wrong side out and when he patted himself down he found he had no more than the nothing whatsoever he’d come into the world with. Just these ragged vestments of jeans and tee shirt. A right shoe. But he was of a philosophical turn of mind and this served him in good stead here. If you don’t know what you had you can’t miss it when it’s gone.
He judged the road southward for he’d seen the sun glare off the tops of occasional cars and, as this was the only sign of civilization he’d seen, he followed the chain-link fence toward it through the stunned hot silence of the day. He was enormously thirsty and all he could think of was water. When the fence ended by the roadbed momentary indecision halted him. He looked left, he looked right. Right was touched by some vague familiarity, ephemeral as social memory and, never one for covering the same ground twice, he turned left and plodded along the shoulder of the road, head down as if he were looking for something he’d lost among the brackery of dewberry vines and honeysuckle.
Each footfall brought a shock of electricity to his brain. As if his feet completed some bygone telluric circuit when they touched the earth. He thought of white rats and other small laboratory animals whose job it was to close the electrical circuit painfully until they learned better. He began to feel watched by some celestial scientists that studied him from on high, watched one step after another. This is an exceedingly slow subject, why doesn’t he learn? But Bascom was of an optimistic nature and after he began to sweat, he felt better, and he thought if he could find some water he might actually live.
He saw the sign long before he could read the letters and beyond it the screen of a drive-in theatre and the green of earth shaped in curved tiers where the rowed speaker posts stood like some esoteric crops. Centered in the back of the convoluted earth a white stucco building warped itself up out of the sundazed landscape. Past that a white frame house sat in the blue shade of the hills.
A figure he judged female was moving purposefully along a row of speakers at some obscene chore, bending and straightening, stooping and rising up the rows going on like someone picking cotton. After a time, she turned past the white building toward the house in the woods and vanished in the trees.
He could read the sign now. FREE CAR THURSDAY, it said. He stopped and studied it bemusedly perhaps looking for amendments, fine print. There was none. He wondered what day it was. He spat a cottony mass onto the roadbed. Probably a catch to it, he said aloud. He went on.
He was soon upon the car itself. It was sitting aloft parked on a platform framed atop creosoted poles. A ramp of sawmill lumber led from the earth up to the platform. Bascom crossed and peered through the fence. A faded green Studebaker that looked as if it had been ridden hard and illy used. But free was free and a gift mouth not to be examined. It had presumably been driven up the steep ramp.
He left the roadbed. He turned in where a narrow cherted drive branched off past a sign that said STAR VUE DRIVE-IN and crossed between the screen where it rose enormous on tall posts and an untenanted ticket booth and followed the curving drive to the stucco building.
He walked all around the building. He was looking for a spigot, but he didn’t find one. He felt dry as gunpowder, weightless as dry leaves. He pushed open a door hinged to open either way like the batwing doors of a saloon. Hey in there, he called. No answer. Just the hum of machinery, the whir of an unseen fan blowing. Looking about he saw that he was in the concession stand, a cornucopia of boxed candy bars and gum, bagged potato chips, and the soda fountain with its gleaming chrome appurtenances. Its cunning pump levers like knobbed gearshifts. Compartmented paper cups you pulled free one by one, a sliding door under the counter that revealed miniature ice cubes in a stainless-steel bin.
He’d learned how to work the dispenser and he’d finished a Coca-Cola and half an Orange Crush when the door opened and a redhaired woman stepped through it. She was looking back over her shoulder and didn’t see Bascom until she’d slammed into him. Shit, she said, and leapt away wild-eyed, orange soda all down her front.
What are you doing in here? Who are you?
Bascom was picking up ice cubes and replacing them in the paper cup. He looked about for something to mop up the soda.
I just come in off the road. I was needin a drink of water.
I guess if you was broke you’d just walk in a bank and help yourself, she said. Just fill up your pockets and be gone.
I been broke all my life and ain’t robbed no bank yet.
Well, you’re young, she said. Give yourself time. No need in rushing into things.
Bascom set the ice on the counter and studied her. She had bright green eyes and pale skin faintly freckled. A medusa-like head of red curls sprayed so heavily in place they seemed to have been glazed and fired in a kiln. He judged her somewhere in her forties, maybe forty-five. She was dressed heavily for the weather in warm men’s clothing and he could tell nothing about her body.
Well? Do you want to see my teeth?
What?
You’re looking me over like a horse at an auction barn.
He looked away and said nothing.
You just pushed the door open and walked in like you owned the place. We’re closed here. You can’t show movies in the daytime.
I was just lookin for a faucet and couldn’t find one. I’ll get a drink and be on my way.
On your way to where?
I don’t know. Whatever’s down that road.