Nightmares and Dreamscapes Page 4

  "This is Bill at Rennie's Catering," I said. "We got a party Saturday night at 1121 Aster Drive in Hollywood Hills. I wanted to know if one of your girls would check for Mr. Dolan' s big punch-bowl in the cabinet over the stove. Could you do that for me?"

  I was asked to hold on. I did, somehow, although with the passing of each endless second I became more and more sure that he had smelled a rat and was calling the phone company on one line while I held on the other.

  At last--at long, long last--he came back on. He sounded upset, but that was all right. That was just how I wanted him to sound.

  "Saturday night?"

  "Yes, that's right. But I don't have a punch-bowl as big as they're going to want unless I call across town, and my impression was that he already has one. I'd just like to be sure."

  "Look, mister, my call-sheet says Mr. Dolan ain't expected in until three P.M. Sunday afternoon. I'll be glad to have one of my girls check out your punch-bowl, but I want to straighten this other business out first. Mr. Dolan is not a man to fuck around with, if you'll pardon my French--"

  "I couldn't agree with you more," I said.

  "--and if he's going to show up a day early, I got to send some more girls out there right away."

  "Let me double-check," I said. The third-grade reading textbook I use, Roads to Everywhere, was on the table beside me. I picked it up and riffled some of the pages close to the phone.

  "Oh, boy," I said. "It's my mistake. He's having people in Sunday night. I'm really sorry. You going to hit me?"

  "Nah. Listen, let me put you on hold again--I'll get one of the girls and have her check on the--"

  "No need, if it's Sunday," I said. "My big punch-bowl's coming back from a wedding reception in Glendale Sunday morning."

  "Okay. Take it easy." Comfortable. Unsuspicious. The voice of a man who wasn't going to think twice.

  I hoped.

  I hung up and sat still, working it out in my head as carefully as I could. To get to L.A. by three, he would be leaving Vegas about ten o'clock Sunday morning. And he would arrive in the vicinity of the detour between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty, when traffic was apt to be almost non-existent anyway.

  I decided it was time to stop dreaming and start acting.

  I looked through the want ads, made some telephone calls, and then went out to look at five used vehicles that were within my financial reach. I settled for a battered Ford van that had rolled off the assembly line the same year Elizabeth was killed. I paid cash. I was left with only two hundred and fifty-seven dollars in my savings account, but this did not disturb me in the slightest. On my way home I stopped at a rental place the size of a discount department store and rented a portable air compressor, using my MasterCard as collateral.

  Late Friday afternoon I loaded the van: picks, shovels, compressor, a hand-dolly, a toolbox, binoculars, and a borrowed Highway Department jackhammer with an assortment of arrowhead-shaped attachments made for slicing through asphalt. A large square piece of sand-colored canvas, plus a long roll of canvas--this latter had been a special project of mine last summer--and twenty-one thin wooden struts, each five feet long. Last but not least, a big industrial stapler.

  On the edge of the desert I stopped at a shopping center and stole a pair of license plates and put them on my van.

  Seventy-six miles west of Vegas, I saw the first orange sign: CONSTRUCTION AHEAD * PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK. Then, a mile or so beyond that, I saw the sign I had been waiting for since. . . well, ever since Elizabeth died, I suppose, although I hadn't always known it.

  DETOUR AHEAD 6 MILES

  Dusk was deepening toward dark as I arrived and surveyed the situation. It could have been better if I'd planned it, but not much.

  The detour was a right turn between two rises. It looked like an old fence-line road which the Highway Department had smoothed and widened to temporarily accommodate the heavier traffic flow. It was marked by a flashing arrow powered by a buzzing battery in a padlocked steel box.

  Just beyond the detour, as the highway rose toward the crest of that second rise, the road was blocked off by a double line of road cones. Beyond them (if one was so extraordinarily stupid as to have, first, missed the flashing arrow and, second, run over the road cones without realizing it--I suppose some drivers were) was an orange sign almost as big as a billboard, reading ROAD CLOSED * USE DETOUR.

  Yet the reason for the detour was not visible from here, and that was good. I didn't want Dolan to have the slightest chance of smelling the trap before he fell into it.

  Moving quickly--I didn't want to be seen at this--I got out of the van and quickly stacked up some dozen of the road cones, creating a lane wide enough for the van. I dragged the ROAD CLOSED sign to the right, then ran back to the van, got in, and drove through the gap.

  Now I could hear an approaching motor.

  I grabbed the cones again, replacing them as fast as I could. Two of them spilled out of my hands and rolled down into the gully. I chased after them, panting. I tripped over a rock in the dark, fell sprawling, and got up quickly with dust on my face and blood dripping from one palm. The car was closer now; soon it would appear over the last rise before the detour-junction and in the glow thrown by his high beams the driver would see a man in jeans and a tee-shirt trying to replace road cones while his van stood idling where no vehicle that didn't belong to the Nevada State Highway Department was supposed to be. I got the last cone in place and ran back to the sign. I tugged too hard. It swayed and almost fell over.

  As the approaching car's headlights began to brighten on the rise to the east, I suddenly became convinced it was a Nevada State Trooper.

  The sign was back where it had been--and if it wasn't, it was close enough. I sprinted for the van, got in, and drove over the next rise. Just as I cleared it, I saw headlights splash over the rise behind me.

  Had he seen me in the dark, with my own lights out?

  I didn't think so.

  I sat back against the seat, eyes closed, waiting for my heart to slow down. At last, as the sound of the car bouncing and bucketing its way down the detour faded out, it did.

  I was here--safe behind the detour.

  It was time to get to work.

  *

  Beyond the rise, the road descended to a long, straight flat. Two-thirds of the way along this straight stretch the road simply ceased to exist--it was replaced by piles of dirt and a long, wide stretch of crushed gravel.

  Would they see that and stop? Turn around? Or would they keep on going, confident that there must be an approved way through since they had not seen any detour signs?

  Too late to worry about it now.

  I picked a spot about twenty yards into the flat, but still a quarter of a mile short of the place where the road dissolved. I pulled over to the side of the road, worked my way into the back of the van, and opened the back doors. I slid out a couple of boards and muscled the equipment. Then I rested and looked up at the cold desert stars.

  "Here we go, Elizabeth," I whispered to them.

  It seemed I felt a cold hand stroke the back of my neck.

  *

  The compressor made a racket and the jackhammer was even worse, but there was no help for it--the best I could hope for was to be done with the first stage of the work before midnight. If it went on much longer than that I was going to be in trouble anyway, because I had only a limited quantity of gasoline for the compressor.

  Never mind. Don't think of who might be listening and wondering what fool would be running a jackhammer in the middle of the night; think about Dolan. Think about the gray Sedan DeVille.

  Think about the arc of descent.

  I marked off the dimensions of the grave first, using white chalk, the tape measure from my toolbox, and the figures my mathematician friend had worked out. When I was done, a rough rectangle not quite five feet wide by forty-two feet long glimmered in the dark. At the nearer end it flared wide. In the gloom that flare did not look so much like a funnel as it
had on the graph paper where my mathematician friend first sketched it. In the gloom it looked like a gaping mouth at the end of a long, straight windpipe. All the better to eat you with, my dear, I thought, and smiled in the dark.

  I drew twenty more lines across the box, making stripes two feet wide. Last, I drew a single vertical line down the middle, creating a grid of forty-two near-squares, two feet by two and a half. The forty-third segment was the shovel-shaped flare at the end.

  Then I rolled up my sleeves, pull-started the compressor, and went back to square one.

  The work went faster than I had any right to hope, but not as fast as I had dared to dream--does it ever? It would have been better if I could have used the heavy equipment, but that would come later. The first thing was to carve up the squares of paving. I was not done by midnight and not by three in the morning, when the compressor ran out of gas. I had anticipated this might happen, and was equipped with a siphon for the van's gas tank. I got as far as unscrewing the gas-cap, but when the smell of the gasoline hit me, I simply screwed the cap back on and lay down flat in the back of the van.

  No more, not tonight I couldn't. In spite of the work-gloves I had worn, my hands were covered with big blisters, many of them now weeping. My whole body seemed to vibrate from the steady, punishing beat of the jackhammer, and my arms felt like tuning forks gone mad. My head ached. My teeth ached. My back tormented me; my spine felt as if it had been filled with ground glass.

  I had cut my way through twenty-eight squares.

  Twenty-eight.

  Fourteen to go.

  And that was only the start.

  Never, I thought. It's impossible. Can't be done.

  That cold hand again.

  Yes, my darling. Yes.

  The ringing in my ears was subsiding a little now; every once in awhile I could hear an approaching engine . . . and then it would subside to a drone on the right as it turned onto the detour and started around the loop the Highway Department had created to bypass the construction.

  Tomorrow was Saturday. . . sorry, today. Today was Saturday. Dolan was coming on Sunday. No time.

  Yes, my darling.

  The blast had torn her to pieces.

  My darling had been torn to pieces for telling the truth to the police about what she had seen, for refusing to be intimidated, for being brave, and Dolan was still driving around in his Cadillac and drinking twenty-year-old Scotch while his Rolex glimmered on his wrist.

  I'll try, I thought, and then I fell into a dreamless sleep that was like death.

  *

  I woke up with the sun, already hot at eight o'clock, shining in my face. I sat up and screamed, my throbbing hands flying to the small of my back. Work? Cut up another fourteen chunks of asphalt? I couldn't even walk.

  But I could walk, and I did.

  Moving like a very old man on his way to a shuffleboard game, I worked my way to the glove compartment and opened it. I had put a bottle of Empirin there in case of such a morning after.

  Had I thought I was in shape? Had I really?

  Well! That was quite funny, wasn't it?

  I took four of the Empirin with water, waited fifteen minutes for them to dissolve in my stomach, and then wolfed a breakfast of dried fruit and cold Pop-Tarts.

  I looked over to where the compressor and the jackhammer waited. The yellow skin of the compressor already seemed to sizzle in the morning sunshine. Leading up to it on either side of my incision were the neatly cut squares of asphalt.

  I didn't want to go over there and pick up that jackhammer. I thought of Harvey Blocker saying, You ain't never gonna be strong, bubba. Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some wither up and die . . . Why you pulling this crap on your system?

  "She was in pieces," I croaked. "I loved her and she was in pieces."

  As a cheer it was never going to replace "Go, Bears!" or "Hook em, horns!" but it got me moving. I siphoned gas from the van's tank, gagging at the taste and the stink, holding onto my breakfast only by a grim act of will. I wondered briefly what I was going to do if the road-crew had drained the diesel from their machines before going home for the long weekend, and quickly shoved the thought out of my mind. It made no sense to worry over things I couldn't control. More and more I felt like a man who has jumped out of the bay of a B-52 with a parasol in his hand instead of a parachute on his back.

  I carried the gasoline can over to the compressor and poured it into the tank. I had to use my left hand to curl the fingers of my right around the handle of the compressor's starter-cord. When I pulled, more blisters broke, and as the compressor started up, I saw thick pus dripping out of my fist.

  Never make it.

  Please, darling.

  I walked over to the jackhammer and started in again.

  The first hour was the worst, and then the steady pounding of the jackhammer combined with the Empirin seemed to numb everything--my back, my hands, my head. I finished cutting out the last block of asphalt by eleven. It was time to see how much I remembered of what Tinker had told me about jump-starting road equipment.

  I went staggering and flapping back to my van and drove a mile and a half down the road to where the road construction was going on. I saw my machine almost at once: a big Case-Jordan bucket-loader with a grapple-and-pincers attachment on the back. $135,000 worth of rolling stock. I had driven a Caterpillar for Blocker, but this one would be pretty much the same.

  I hoped.

  I climbed up into the cab and looked at the diagram printed on the head of the stick-shift. It looked just the same as the one on my Cat. I ran the pattern once or twice. There was some resistance at first because some grit had found its way into the gearbox--the guy who drove this baby hadn't put down his sand-flaps and his foreman hadn't checked him. Blocker would have checked. And docked the driver five bucks, long weekend or not.

  His eyes. His half-admiring, half-contemptuous eyes. What would he think of an errand like this?

  Never mind. This was no time to be thinking of Harvey Blocker; this was a time to be thinking of Elizabeth. And Dolan.

  There was a piece of burlap on the steel floor of the cab. I lifted it, looking for the key. There was no key there, of course.

  Tink's voice in my mind: Shit, a kid could jump-start one of these babies, whitebread. Ain't nothin to it. At least a car's got a ignition lock on it--new ones do, anyway. Look here. No, not where the key goes, you ain't got no key, why you want to look where the key goes? Look under here. See these wires hangin down?

  I looked now and saw the wires hanging down, looking just as they had when Tinker pointed them out to me: red, blue, yellow, and green. I pared the insulation from an inch of each and then took a twist of copper wire from my back pocket.

  Okay, whitebread, lissen up 'cause we maybe goan give Q and A later, you dig me? You gonna wire the red and the green. You won't forget that, 'cause it's like Christmas. That takes care of your ignition.

  I used my wire to hold the bare places on the red and green wires of the Case-Jordan's ignition together. The desert wind hooted, thin, like the sound of someone blowing over the top of a soda bottle. Sweat ran down my neck and into my shirt, where it caught and tickled.

  Now you just got the blue and the yellow. You ain't gonna wire em; you just gonna touch em together and you gonna make sho you ain't touchin no bare wire wither own self when you do it neither, 'less you wanna make some hot electrified water in your Jockeys, m'man. The blue and the yellow the ones turn the starter. Off you go. When you feel like you had enough of a joyride, you just pull the red and green wires apart. Like turnin off the key you don't have.

  I touched the blue and yellow wires together. A big yellow spark jumped up and I recoiled, striking the back of my head on one of the metal posts at the rear of the cab. Then I leaned forward and touched them together again. The motor turned over, coughed, and the bucket-loader took a sudden spasmodic lurch forward. I was thrown into the rudimentary dashboard, the left side of my face striking
the steering bar. I had forgotten to put the damned transmission in neutral and had almost lost an eye as a result. I could almost hear Tink laughing.

  I fixed that and then tried the wires again. The motor turned over and turned over. It coughed once, puffing a dirty brown smoke signal into the air to be torn away by the ceaseless wind, and then the motor just went on cranking. I kept trying to tell myself the machine was just in rough shape--a man who'd go off without putting the sand-flaps down, after all, was apt to forget anything--but I became more and more sure that they had drained the diesel, just as I had feared.

  And then, just as I was about to give up and look for something I could use to dipstick the loader's fuel tank (all the better to read the bad news with, my dear), the motor bellowed into life.

  I let the wires go--the bare patch on the blue one was smoking--and goosed the throttle. When it was running smoothly, I geared it into first, swung it around, and started back toward the long brown rectangle cut neatly into the westbound lane of the highway.

  *

  The rest of the day was a long bright hell of roaring engine and blazing sun. The driver of the Case-Jordan had forgotten to mount his sand-flaps, but he had remembered to take his sun umbrella. Well, the old gods laugh sometimes, I guess. No reason why. They just do. And I guess the old gods have a twisted sense of humor.

  It was almost two o'clock before I got all of the asphalt chunks down into the ditch, because I had never achieved any real degree of delicacy with the pincers. And with the spade-shaped piece at the end, I had to cut it in two and then drag each of the chunks down into the ditch by hand. I was afraid that if I used the pincers I would break them.

  When all the asphalt pieces were down in the ditch, I drove the bucket-loader back down to the road equipment. I was getting low on fuel; it was time to siphon. I stopped at the van, got the hose . . . and found myself staring, hypnotized, at the big jerrican of water. I tossed the siphon away for the time being and crawled into the back of the van. I poured water over my face and neck and chest and screamed with pleasure. I knew that if I drank I would vomit, but I had to drink. So I did and I vomited, not getting up to do it but only turning my head to one side and then crab-crawling as far away from the mess as I could.