Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕

Me, I drank my share of Cokes and swallowed enough diet pills that I forgot all about California. I don’t remember much except for sweaty dreams of missiles firing in the night until we hit Highway 99. The windshield and cab both (Ed liked to drive with the windows open, though he cursed the wind and splattered bugs) looked like Araby from the dust and sand. Ed handed me a hot apple and I bit into it with relish. My hair hurt from being blown so hard.

“Hey,” he yelled. “Going all the way to Montana!”

“Nah!” I told him for the third time or so. “Just to a filling station round here.”

“That one good?” he said and nodded to an oasis right off the side of the road, six pumps and a restaurant that looked to be named EAT. But the pump handles and hoses had been removed and storefront windows had been shattered and stood agape like the mouth of a toothless old codger. Like Ed’s own mouth.

“I’m looking for one that hasn’t been built yet,” I said nice and loud, and we both laughed. “How ‘bout that one!” Ed cried and pointed to a scraggly bush on the opposite side of the highway. “Or that one!” and his finger whirled. “I’ll stop right now!” Both canned-ham hands were back on the huge steering wheel now, and Ed hopped in his seat, jumping on the brake; the truck stuttered with his stupid enthusiasm, “Here,” and I jerked in my seat, “or here!” and another jerk, “Or how about here!” and the jerk next to me jerked suddenly too and smacked his paunch into the rim of his steering wheel. Then he leaned back and drove on like he wasn’t a jittering freak at all, but just some salt of the earth fellow bringing ottomans to Montana and coffee tables to California, all part of some crazy living room algebra.

“How long you been driving this rig, Ed?” I asked. I smelled something acrid and ashy like a campfire of garbage, the clutch a bit burnt maybe.

“Three weeks. Three weeks Friday.” I laughed so loud and he joined me. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. Then he stopped and explained that only a month ago he’d been selling siding, aluminum siding. He’d worked his way up from the crew that’d actually wrap homes in the stuff; he had a good eye and a steady hand, and even better, a wide jack-o’-lantern smile and a nervous tic. The tic, Ed demonstrated, was a spasm in the neck, it made him tilt his head and wink and smile wide as the prairie for a second of thick white teeth. Whenever he said something like “Howdy” or “Friday” Ed would have this friendly little spasm, the kind of freak folksy smile that made me want to hand him the shirt off my back, and my pants too.

“So I was really good at sellin’ sidin’,” Ed explained, his face twitching in robot warmth at the word “really” and oh yes I knew he was really good at selling siding. “But the bosses wanted me to sell more and more, every day,” (twitch twitch twice in a row there). “They gaymee a script. It said ‘really’ and ‘very’ and ‘pardon me’ and ‘today’ and all sorts of other words that set off mah tic.

“But it done gone set off too much and mah face froze,” and he turned to me with his wild smile and wink, a face that forgot to fade back to human proportions. The skin across his face was stretched across the bones and bunched up by his right eye. His smile was wide, too wide, like some tough in a bar had taken a knife to Ed’s cheek and left a big flapping scar from lip to ear. He held the look for a long time (good thing the road was mostly empty, I could feel the truck drifting across lanes) and then turned away. “Scared the shit outta alla us. It was stuck lahk that for a month or more. But the boss took money outta his own pocketbook and sent me to the doctehr, and he fixed me up. Long needles and ointments and it worked.”

“And then they fired you, Ed? Why would they spend all that money on you just to let you go?” I asked him.

“Nah. When I got back to the office, boss didn’t want it tah happen again. So he kept me in tah office and I sold sidin’ over the phone. But folks just plum stopped buyin’. The boys in tah bullpen were real sorry to see me go though. They said they lahked mah face.” And he smiled again, this time for real, a relaxed smile fueled by the joy of the road. He took a hand off the wheel and idly passed his palm and twitching fingers over the dash, looking to corral some wayward pills.

As the day drifted into afternoon I began to worry a bit as so many of the Highway 99 roadside diners and truck stops seemed to be closed. We’d barely crossed the state line by my reckoning, but already some of the little roadside establishments were boarded up; others seemed open at first but as Ed slowed we saw that their windows were darkened, pumps locked, parking lots home only to weeds growing into brush. I didn’t want to dip into a town yet, not if even Frisco was set to fall to the demon in the sky.

I remembered too many old towns from my trips with Neal back in the fifties, back when the little burgs of ol’ 99 were still half-mad with freedom. One ville I’d never even wrote about broiled away under the Nevada sun, little more than a scattering of buildings around a chain link fence factory. They didn’t do anything themselves down in little Compassion, Nev. All the food was trucked in, all the trucks were stuffed with government cash and miles of fencing on the way out, but when sun set and weeks ended, the whole town went a little wild. Old men drove their creaky Models A Fords in crazy eights around the town square. Girls and guys both thumped on iron drums and whooped it up on their porches. On the edge of town, Neal and I saw lizards and brown mice scattering like they’d been called by a Pied Piper playing “Anywhere but Here.” Neal kicked at them as we walked past the one lamppost in town and into the weekend bacchanal. Party was religion, between Friday at five and Monday at nine. I even got a day job at one of the bars, lifting drunken managers and linemen up firemen style, walking them across town and dumping the bodies out by the factory gates for a splash of cold water from the foreman’s bucket. The mayor paid me off personally, with his wife’s pie, plus a handful of old silver dollars and a great and loving handshake.

They don’t make towns like that anymore.

Our ribbon of highway was a long stretch of nothing, except for a little wrinkle. A tent, a folding table and an old convertible, and a hill of dirt in the shade. I nudged Ed and asked him to please pull over, and even before he brought the truck to a complete stop, I was out the open passenger-side door, shouting, “Neal! Neal! It’s me Jack! Hey Neal! C’mon out!”

And out of the dirt pile he walked, legs and arms loose and swinging. I hopped out of the cab and tumbled to my knees. Neal was already on me, dusting off my pants and shoulders, “Jack! Jack, old chum, old bean, old buddy! It’s been—”

He stopped and looked away from me, shifty-eyed. Then he turned back, flashing me a grifter’s smile. “It’s been a long while! How’s the book going? Did you get my letters? I still have a bunch of yours.” And he ran behind me and both hands on my shoulders started hustling me towards the little tent. “You need to meet my partner too.” I turned to Ed. He was out of the cab and urinating on his front tires, for luck or at least for lack of another place to politely let it fly.

So I ducked under the flapping tent roof (the walls were rolled up to better fling dirt away) and noticed a shallow little hole, some maps on a card table and a man snoozing alongside the freshly dug ditch. He had wavy hair, the kind that looks windblown before the wind even starts up, and cheap glasses. One arm was tossed casually outside the shade of the tent and had tanned into a bright gold. Neal woke him up by kicking a bit of dirt on him. “Hey Nelly, Jack is here.” Nelly just smiled and nodded though, not bothering even to pop open one eye and give me a gander. I liked that about him, actually.

“So! Let me tell you everything!” Neal started. “God, chronologically. No, too long and ridiculous, in order of importance.” He flung out a hand and gestured like a Broadway producer. “This! Is! Your! Last! Chance!” He waved both arms, almost ready to fly. “It’s a filling station! You know, I almost called it On The Road filling station, but I thought that might get me into trouble, you know, with your publishers. It’d bring the girls in though—it’s amazing how many of them drive past here after they give up their Hollywood dreams.” His arm was back around my shoulder, and he turned me back towards the road and waved his hand again in a feverish attempt to transform Ed’s long-winded piss against his piss-poor truck into an opium dream of chicks in cars, all smiles and cat-eyed sunglasses, here to ball.

“Neal?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t this be the first chance gas station from California’s point of view?” And he laughed, that old powerful laugh. The laugh that made him the center of the world once upon a time, and he turned again and shouted over his shoulder, “Hey Nelson, you were right!” If Nelson responded, it wasn’t with his voice or body.

“Is that guy okay?”

“Oh yeah—he’s been doing most of the digging. I’m more of the idea man. I’m going to make this an A-1 roadside attraction. Hang out here all week, pumping a little gas, maybe helping a motorist in distress or three, then Friday at five, I’ll hang up the Closed sign, then roar back into LA. Maybe head on up to the city. Nelson can watch the place on Mondays even, if I’m too hungover or if my babies need me.”

“Babies, eh? Are you still with—” I’d forgotten her name. She had had a hangdog look about her. “Nah,” Neal said, before she even came to me. He knew he was far beyond whomever it was I remembered. “I want to settle though. You know, being kept in stir does a number on a body sometimes.” He looked up at me again and then his face exploded into yet another smile, this one a warm smile, a grin from his boozy little heart. “You’re here!” he said, realizing it for the first time. Then he looked up at the sky, “Boy’s really something. Looked like something I scooped up in a net once, when I was down in Baja.” I just looked at his chin, flat as an iron. He was shaved utterly clean, the veins in his neck still blue under pasty, pimpled skin. Neal hadn’t been out here for long.

Ed in his foghorn voice said, “Hey thyeah, Jack. Ahr yer comin’ along or is this tah spot?” I nodded and trotted up to him. We slapped hands,