Night Shift Page 19

  "Wait," the trucker said immediately.

  "I think we ought to fuel them," I said. "We can wait for a better chance to get away. Counterman?"

  "Stay in here," he said. "You want to be their slaves? That's what it'll come to. You want to spend the rest of your life changin' oil filters every time one of those . . . things blats its horn? Not me." He looked darkly out the window. "Let them starve."

  I looked at the kid and the girl.

  "I think he's right," he said. "That's the only way to stop them. If someone was going to rescue us, they would have. God knows what's going on in other places." And the girl, with Snodgrass in her eyes, nodded and stepped closer to him.

  "That's it then," I said.

  I went over to the cigarette machine and got a pack without looking at the brand. I'd stopped smoking a year ago, but this seemed like a good time to start again. The smoke rasped harsh in my lungs.

  Twenty minutes crawled by. The trucks out front waited. In back, they were lining up at the pumps. "I think it was all a bluff," the trucker said. "Just--"

  Then there was a louder, harsher, choppier note, the sound of an engine revving up and falling off, then revving up again. The bulldozer.

  It glittered like a yellowjacket in the sun, a Caterpillar with clattering steel treads. Black smoke belched from its short stack as it wheeled around to face us.

  "It's going to charge," the trucker said. There was a look of utter surprise on his face. "It's going to charge!" "Get back," I said. "Behind the counter."

  The bulldozer was still revving. Gear-shift levers moved themselves. Heat shimmer hung over its smoking stack. Suddenly the dozer blade lifted, a heavy steel curve clotted with dried dirt. Then, with a screaming howl of power, it roared straight at us.

  "The counter!" I gave the trucker a shove, and that started them.

  There was a small concrete verge between the parking lot and the grass. The dozer charged over it, blade lifting for a moment, and then it rammed the front wall head on. Glass exploded inward with a heavy, coughing roar and the wood frame crashed into splinters. One of the overhead light globes fell, splashing more glass. Crockery fell from the shelves. The girl was screaming but the sound was almost lost beneath the steady, pounding roar of the Cat's engine.

  It reversed, clanked across the chewed strip of lawn, and lunged forward again, sending the remaining booths crashing and spinning. The pie case fell off the counter, sending pie wedges skidding across the floor.

  The counterman was crouching with his eyes shut, and the kid was holding his girl. The trucker was walleyed with fear. "We gotta stop it," he gibbered. "Tell 'em we'll do it, we'll do anything--"

  "A little late, isn't it?"

  The Cat reversed and got ready for another charge. New nicks in its blade glittered and heliographed in the sun. It lurched forward with a bellowing roar and this time it took down the main support to the left of what had been the window. That section of the roof fell in with a grinding crash. Plaster dust billowed up.

  The dozer pulled free. Beyond it I could see the group of trucks, waiting.

  I grabbed the counterman. "Where are the oil drums?" The cookstoves ran on butane gas, but I had seen vents for a warm-air furnace.

  "Back of the storage room," he said. I grabbed the kid. "Come on."

  We got up and ran into the storage room. The bulldozer hit again and the building trembled. Two or three more hits and it would be able to come right up to the counter for a cup of coffee.

  There were two large fifty-gallon drums with feeds to the furnace and turn spigots. There was a carton of empty ketchup bottles near the back door. "Get those, Jerry."

  While he did, I pulled off my shirt and yanked it to rags. The dozer hit again and again, and each hit was accompanied by the sound of more breakage.

  I filled four of the ketchup bottles from the spigots, and he stuffed rags into them. "You play football?" I asked him. "In high school."

  "Okay. Pretend you're going in from the five."

  We went out into the restaurant. The whole front wall was open to the sky. Sprays of glass glittered like diamonds. One heavy beam had fallen diagonally across the opening. The dozer was backing up to take it out and I thought that this time it would keep coming, ripping through the stools and then demolishing the counter itself.

  We knelt down and thrust the bottles out. "Light them up," I said to the trucker.

  He got his matches out, but his hands were shaking too badly and he dropped them. The counterman picked them up, struck one, and the hunks of shirt blazed greasily alight.

  "Quick," I said.

  We ran, the kid a little in the lead. Glass crunched and gritted underfoot. There was a hot, oily smell in the air. Everything was very loud, very bright.

  The dozer charged.

  The kid dodged out under the beam and stood silhouetted in front of that heavy tempered steel blade. I went out to the right. The kid's first throw fell short. His second hit the blade and the flame splashed harmlessly.

  He tried to turn and then it was on him, a rolling juggernaut, four tons of steel. His hands flew up and then he was gone, chewed under.

  I buttonhooked around and lobbed one bottle into the open cab and the second right into the works. They exploded together in a leaping shout of flame.

  For a moment the dozer's engine rose in an almost human squeal of rage and pain. It wheeled in a maddened half-circle, ripping out the left corner of the diner, and rolled drunkenly toward the drainage ditch.

  The steel treads were streaked and dotted with gore and where the kid had been there was something that looked like a crumpled towel.

  The dozer got almost to the ditch, flames boiling from under its cowling and from the cockpit, and then it exploded in a geyser.

  I stumbled backward and almost fell over a pile of rubble. There was a hot smell that wasn't just oil. It was burning hair. I was on fire.

  I grabbed a tablecloth, jammed it on my head, ran behind the counter, and plunged my head into the sink hard enough to crack it on the bottom. The girl was screaming Jerry's name over and over in a shrieking insane litany.

  I turned around and saw the huge car-carrier slowly rolling toward the defenseless front of the diner. The trucker screamed and broke for the side door.

  "Don't!" the counterman cried. "Don't do that--"

  But he was out and sprinting for the drainage ditch and the open field beyond.

  The truck must have been standing sentry just out of sight of that side door--a small panel job with "Wong's Cash-and- Carry Laundry" written on the side. It ran him down almost before you could see it happen. Then it was gone and only the trucker was left, twisted into the gravel. He had been knocked out of his shoes.

  The car-carrier rolled slowly over the concrete verge, onto the grass, over the kid's remains, and stopped with its huge snout poking into the diner.

  Its air horn let out a sudden, shattering honk, followed by another, and another. "Stop!" the girl whimpered. "Stop, oh stop, please--"

  But the honks went on a long time. It took only a minute to pick up the pattern. It was the same as before. It wanted someone to feed it and the others.

  "I'll go," I said. "Are the pumps unlocked?"

  The counterman nodded. He had aged fifty years.

  "No!" the girl screamed. She threw herself at me. "You've got to stop them! Beat them, burn them, break them--" Her voice wavered and broke into a harsh bray of grief and loss.

  The counterman held her. I went around the corner of the counter, picking my way through the rubble, and out through the supply room. My heart was thudding heavily when I stepped out into the warm sun. I wanted another cigarette, but you don't smoke around fuel islands.

  The trucks were still lined up. The laundry truck was crouched across the gravel from me like a hound dog, growling and rasping. A funny move and it would cream me. The sun glittered on its blank windshield and I shuddered. It was like looking into the face of an idiot.

  I switche
d the pump to "on" and pulled out the nozzle; unscrewed the first gas cap and began to pump fuel.

  It took me half an hour to pump the first tank dry and then I moved on to the second island. I was alternating between gas and diesel. Trucks marched by endlessly. I was beginning to understand now. I was beginning to see. People were doing this all over the country or they were lying dead like the trucker, knocked out of their boots with heavy treadmarks mashed across their guts.

  The second tank was dry then and I went to the third. The sun was like a hammer and my head was starting to ache with the fumes. There were blisters in the soft webbing between thumb and index finger. But they wouldn't know about that. They would know about leaky manifolds and bad gaskets and frozen universal joints, but not about blisters or sunstroke or the need to scream. They needed to know only one thing about their late masters, and they knew it. We bleed.

  The last tank was sucked dry and I threw the nozzle on the ground. Still there were more trucks, lined up around the corner. I twisted my head to relieve a crick in my neck and stared. The line went out of the front parking lot and up the road and out of sight, two and three lanes deep. It was like a nightmare of the Los Angeles Freeway at rush hour. The horizon shimmered and danced with their exhaust; the air stank of carburization.

  "No," I said. "Out of gas. All gone, fellas."

  And there was a heavier rumble, a bass note that shook the teeth. A huge silvery truck was pulling up, a tanker. Written on the side was: "Fill Up with Phillips 66--The Jetport Fuel"!

  A heavy hose dropped out of the rear.

  I went over, took it, flipped up the feeder plate on the first tank, and attached the hose. The truck began to pump. The stench of petroleum sank into me--the same stink that the dinosaurs must have died smelling as they went down into the tar pits. I filled the other two tanks and then went back to work.

  Consciousness twinkled away to a point where I lost track of time and trucks. I unscrewed, rammed the nozzle into the hole, pumped until the hot, heavy liquid splurted out, then replaced the cap. My blisters broke, trickling pus down to my wrists. My head was pounding like a rotted tooth and my stomach rolled helplessly with the stench of hydrocarbons.

  I was going to faint. I was going to faint and that would be the end of it. I would pump until I dropped.

  Then there were hands on my shoulders, the dark hands of the counterman. "Go in," he said. "Rest yourself. I'll take over till dark. Try to sleep."

  I handed him the pump.

  But I can't sleep.

  The girl is sleeping. She's sprawled over in the corner with her head on a tablecloth and her face won't unknot itself even in sleep. It's the timeless, ageless face of the warhag. I'm going to get her up pretty quick. It's twilight and the counterman has been out there for five hours.

  Still they keep coming. I look out through the wrecked window and their headlights stretch for a mile or better, twinkling like yellow sapphires in the growing darkness. They must be backed up all the way to the turnpike, maybe further.

  The girl will have to take her turn. I can show her how. She'll say she can't, but she will. She wants to live.

  You want to be their slaves? the counterman had said. That's what it'll come to. You want to spend the rest of your life changin' oil filters every time one of those things blats its horn?

  We could run, maybe. It would be easy to make the drainage ditch now, the way they're stacked up. Run through the fields, through the marshy places where trucks would bog down like mastodons and go--

  --back to the caves.

  Drawing pictures in charcoal. This is the moon god. This is a tree. This is a Mack semi overwhelming a hunter.

  Not even that. So much of the world is paved now. Even the playgrounds are paved. And for the fields and marshes and deep woods there are tanks, half-tracks, flatbeds equipped with lasers, masers, heat-seeking radar. And little by little, they can make it into the world they want.

  I can see great convoys of trucks filling the Okefenokee Swamp with sand, the bulldozers ripping through the national parks and wildlands, grading the earth flat, stamping it into one great flat plain. And then the hot-top trucks arriving.

  But they're machines. No matter what's happened to them, what mass consciousness we've given them, they can't reproduce. In fifty or sixty years they'll be rusting hulks with all menace gone out of them, moveless carcasses for free men to stone and spit at.

  And if I close my eyes I can see the production lines in Detroit and Dearborn and Youngstown and Mackinac, new trucks being put together by blue-collars who no longer even punch a clock but only drop and are replaced.

  The counterman is staggering a little now. He's an old bastard, too. I've got to wake the girl. Two planes are leaving silver contrails etched across the darkening eastern horizon.

  I wish I could believe there are people in them.

  SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK

  Jim Norman's wife had been waiting for him since two, and when she saw the car pull up in front of their apartment building, she came out to meet him. She had gone to the store and bought a celebration meal--a couple of steaks, a bottle of Lancer's, a head of lettuce, and Thousand Island dressing. Now, watching him get out of the car, she found herself hoping with some desperation (and not for the first time that day) that there was going to be something to celebrate.

  He came up the walk, holding his new briefcase in one hand and four texts in the other. She could see the title of the top one--Introduction to Grammar. She put her hands on his shoulder and asked, "How did it go?"

  And he smiled.

  But that night, he had the old dream for the first time in a very long time and woke up sweating, with a scream behind his lips.

  His interview had been conducted by the principal of Harold Davis High School and the head of the English Department. The subject of his breakdown had come up. He had expected it would.

  The principal, a bald and cadaverous man named Fenton, had leaned back and looked at the ceiling. Simmons, the English head, lit his pipe.

  "I was under a great deal of pressure at the time," Jim Norman said. His fingers wanted to twist about in his lap, but he wouldn't let them.

  "I think we understand that," Fenton said, smiling. "And while we have no desire to pry, I'm sure we'd all agree that teaching is a pressure occupation, especially at the high-school level. You're onstage five periods out of seven, and you're playing to the toughest audience in the world. That's why," he finished with some pride, "teachers have more ulcers than any other professional group, with the exception of air-traffic controllers."

  Jim said, "The pressures involved in my breakdown were . . . extreme."

  Fenton and Simmons nodded noncommittal encouragement, and Simmons clicked his lighter open to rekindle his pipe. Suddenly the office seemed very tight, very close. Jim had the queer sensation that someone had just turned on a heat lamp over the back of his neck. His fingers were twisting in his lap, and he made them stop.

  "I was in my senior year and practice teaching. My mother had died the summer before--cancer--and in my last conversation with her, she asked me to go right on and finish. My brother, my older brother, died when we were both quite young. He had been planning to teach and she thought . . ."

  He could see from their eyes that he was wandering and thought: God, I'm making a botch of this.

  "I did as she asked," he said, leaving the tangled relationship of his mother and his brother Wayne--poor, murdered Wayne--and himself behind. "During the second week of my intern teaching, my fiancee was involved in a hit-and-run accident. She was the hit part of it. Some kid in a hot rod . . . they never caught him."

  Simmons made a soft noise of encouragement.

  "I went on. There didn't seem to be any other course. She was in a great deal of pain--a badly broken leg and four fractured ribs--but no danger. I don't think I really knew the pressure I was under."

  Careful now. This is where the ground slopes away.

  "I interned at Cente
r Street Vocational Trades High," Jim said.

  "Garden spot of the city," Fenton said. "Switchblades, motor-cycle boots, zip guns in the lockers, lunch-money protection rackets, and every third kid selling dope to the other two. I know about Trades."

  "There was a kid named Mack Zimmerman," Jim said. "Sensitive boy. Played the guitar. I had him in a composition class, and he had talent. I came in one morning and two boys were holding him while a third smashed his Yamaha guitar against the radiator. Zimmerman was screaming. I yelled for them to stop and give me the guitar. I started for them and someone slugged me." Jim shrugged. "That was it. I had a breakdown. No screaming meemies or crouching in the corner. I just couldn't go back. When I got near Trades, my chest would tighten up. I couldn't breathe right, I got cold sweat--"

  "That happens to me, too," Fenton said amiably.

  "I went into analysis. A community therapy deal. I couldn't afford a psychiatrist. It did me good. Sally and I are married. She has a slight limp and a scar, but otherwise, good as new." He looked at them squarely. "I guess you could say the same for me."