Death of a Citizen (8 page)

“I brought you some coffee,” she said as we stopped, facing each other.

I took the cup and drank from it. The coffee was hot and strong and black, obviously designed to jolt me sober and keep me awake on the road. The coat she’d thrown over her shoulder and the sturdy moccasin shoes into which she’d stuck her bare feet made her blue angel-robes look flimsy and inadequate. There’s supposed to be something very sexy about a woman running around outdoors in her nightie—magazines catering to the male taste seem to be full of these elfin creatures—but it just looks kind of drafty and ridiculous to me. Her face looked sleepy and sweet in the floodlights.

“I took time to duck into the darkroom and load up some film holders for the big 5x7,” I said, lying unnecessarily, like any dumb criminal. “I hate to do it in a changing bag when I don’t have to. Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I heard the motor running,” she said, indicating the truck, still idling noisily. “I thought you’d already left, and I was lying there wondering what it was. Then somebody parked in the alley for a while, probably just some kids necking, but I... I get a little nervous when I’m alone in the house. By the time they drove off I was wide awake. Be sure to lock the gate behind you, or they’ll be using our compound for a lover’s lane next.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, thanks for the coffee. I’ll try to phone from San Antone—as we Tejanos call it.”

We stood looking at each other.

“Well, be careful,” she said. “Don’t drive too fast.”

“In this relic?” I said. “It would be a miracle. Well, you’d better get back inside before you catch cold.”

I was supposed to kiss her, of course, but I couldn’t do it. The masquerade was over. I was no longer M. Helm, Esq., author, photographer, husband, father. I was a guy named Eric with a knife and two pistols, intentions unreliable, destination unknown. I had no right to touch her. It would have been like making a pass at another man’s wife.

After a moment, she turned and walked away. I climbed up into the cab of the truck and drove it out into the alley. I climbed down again and closed and padlocked the big gates. As I walked back to the pickup, the yard lights went out behind me. Beth never could stand to see a light burn unnecessarily…

The truck is a 1951 Chevy half-ton job, with a four-speed gearbox and a six-cylinder engine developing a little less than ninety horsepower, and it’ll shove any of your three-hundred-horsepower passenger cars right off the road, backwards, from a standing start. It has no damn fins over the tail-lights, or sheet metal eyebrows over the headlights, and it was built in that happy postwar era when they didn’t have to sell cars, all they had to do was make them and call up the next guy on the list. There wasn’t any sense fooling with pretty colors under those conditions, and all Chevy’s commercial vehicles came through in the same shade of green, which, as far as I’m concerned, is as good a color as any, and a lot better than some of the emetic combinations adorning Detroit’s latest rainbows on wheels.

It’s a real vehicle, and you can do anything with it. I’ve hauled a thirty-five-foot house trailer, climbed Wolf Creek Pass in a blizzard, and dragged a Cadillac out of a ditch with it. Anything, as long as you’re not in a hurry and don’t mind getting half beat to death in the process. Beth claims riding in it gives her a headache, but I don’t see why it should: it isn’t her head that takes the punishment. She can’t understand why I cling to it, instead of trading it in on something newer and faster and more respectable. I tell her that her Buick takes care of our respectability, and I don’t want to go any faster. It’s almost the truth.

The fact is that before the war, as kids will, I used to play around with some fairly rapid machinery. I raced some and covered other races with my camera; and during the war, as I’ve already mentioned, I had occasion to do a little driving under fairly hectic conditions. Afterwards, happily married, I said to hell with it. I wasn’t going to be that kind of guy anymore. It was like hunting. I wasn’t going to tease myself by sneaking out to murder a harmless little deer once a year, after spending four years stalking game that could shoot back. And I wasn’t going to tempt myself by putting something low and sleek and powerful in the garage, and then using it to commute to the grocery at a legal twenty-five miles per hour. I was going to give the beast inside nothing to feed on. Maybe I could starve it to death. Down, Rover, down!

Well, it worked up to a point, but some time during the evening I had passed that point, and now, picking my way sedately out of Santa Fe in the dark, I no longer found any satisfaction in the practical aspects of the strong and solid and durable old vehicle beneath me. I could no longer kid myself that I really enjoyed having a truck as my private transportation, not even as a kind of one-man protest against the bloated and over-decorated machines driven by everybody else.

All I could think of was the fact that we sure as hell weren’t going to run away from anybody, no matter what happened. Oh, I’ve worked her over a bit from time to time, when I’ve felt like getting my hands greasy. She’ll still hold sixty-five all day and do eighty in a pinch, but it had damn well better be a long, smooth, straight stretch of road when you wind her out, and you’d better get off the go-pedal in plenty of time before the next curve, or you’ll never make it. They build trucks to haul pay-loads, not to run the Grand Prix of Monaco.

Any family sedan built within the past five years could catch us, even those underprivileged heaps with just one exhaust pipe, one measly little single-barrel carburetor, and poor-man’s gas in the tank. A souped-up police car would be knocking on the tailgate before its automatic transmission kicked into high. We were practically a standing target, should anybody want us for anything. I’d had the same naked feeling in those damn little planes they’d sometimes used to ferry us across the Channel, the ones that had to move aside for any southbound flock of geese in a hurry.

I just wasn’t hardened to it any more, and I drove very slowly and carefully, keeping an eye on the outside rearview mirror; and when Tina rapped sharply on the glass behind me, I almost lost my dinner.

The front window of the canopy matches up with the rear window of the pickup’s cab, but neither of them open, so you can’t say there’s any real communication. I drew a long breath, turned on the dome light, and glanced around. Her face showed up white and ghostly through the two panes of glass. She had her little pistol in her hand. With it, she beat again on the glass, and gestured vigorously towards the side of the road.

I pulled over, jumped out, hurried to the rear of the truck, and unlocked and opened the door.

“What’s the matter?”

“Get it out of here!” Her voice, out of the darkness, was harsh and breathless. “Get it out, or I will shoot it!”

I had a wild gruesome thought that she was talking about the girl she’d already killed once. I had visions of Barbara Herrera rising up with blind eyes and clotted hair... Then there was a silent movement in the opening, and our gray tomcat stood there, its green eyes slitted against the street lights and its fur on end: apparently it didn’t approve of its company, either. It meowed at me softly. I picked it up and tucked it under my arm.

“Hell,” I said, “it’s just the cat. He must have jumped aboard while we were loading up. He likes to drive. Hi, Tiger.”

Tina said from the darkness, in a choked voice: “How would you like to be locked up with a dead person and have
that…
I can’t stand them, anyway. They give me the creepies, the sneaky things!”

I said, “Well, we sure don’t want to give you the creeps, do we, Tiger? Come on, boy, let’s get you home.”

I scratched the beast’s ears. It’s not my favorite animal by a long shot—we’d only got it because the kids needed a pet and dogs are too noisy for a writer to have around— but in Tiger’s book I was a cat man from away back. We were soul-mates, and to prove it he was now purring away like an amorous teakettle.

Tina had made her way to the rear of the truck, with some difficulty, since there wasn’t room for her to stand up under the canopy and she wasn’t exactly dressed for making progress on hands and knees.

“What are you going to do with it?” she demanded.

“I’m going to take him home,” I said, “unless you think we should keep him with us for company.”

“Go back? But that is crazy! Can’t you just—”

“What? Turn him out here, five miles from the house? Hell, the poor damn fool can’t even find his bowl of milk in the morning if you happen to move it across the room. Anyway, he’d get himself run over sure, and the children would miss him.”

She said sharply, “You are being sentimental and stupid. I absolutely forbid—”

I grinned at her. “You do that, honey,” I said, letting the hinged door drop. She must have pulled back in time; I didn’t hear it hit anything on its way down. I set the latch, got into the cab, waited for a lone car to go by, and swung back towards town.

Suddenly I was feeling fine. You can stay tense only so long. I was over the hump. I was driving ten miles out of the way, with a corpse in the bed of the truck, just to take a worthless alleycat home. It was exactly the kind of screwball thing I needed to wake me up out of my panic-stricken trance. I reached out and scratched Tiger’s stomach, driving one-handed, and the ridiculous beast rolled over on its back in abject appreciation, all four paws in the air. Apparently he’d never heard that, unlike dogs, cats are reserved and dignified animals.

I tossed him out at the corner, half a block from the house. All the driving around hadn’t been wasted. The solution to our problem had come to me, and I threw the truck into gear again and headed out of town by a different route, no longer creeping along and paying no more attention to the rearview mirror than I normally do. If anybody wanted us, they’d catch us. There wasn’t any sense in worrying about something that couldn’t possibly be avoided.

I dropped into low gear for the last steep grade to the mine. Even that didn’t quite do it, and I double-clutched into compound low, which is an unsynchronized gear and quite a trick to get into smoothly while the wheels are turning. I hit it right for a change, the lever went home without a murmur, and we ground on up the mountainside in the dark with that fine roar of powerful machinery doing the job it was designed for. It always gives me a kick to throw her into that housemoving gear and feel her buckle down and go to work, using everything that’s under the hood, while the big mud-and-snow tires dig for traction…

Maybe that was my trouble, I reflected. I just hadn’t been using everything that was under the hood for a hell of a long time.

I pulled up just below the mine entrance, where enough of a level spot remained—most of the road and other construction had washed out or blown away since the workings were abandoned. God knows how long ago—to let me park on a reasonably even keel just short of a small arroyo some rainstorm had cut across the little flat. Beyond this gully, the headlights showed me the barren hillside and the mine opening, a black hole surrounded by weathered, crumbling timbers. It gave me the creepies, as Tina would have said, to think of going in there at night, although why it should be worse at night, I really couldn’t tell you. Fifty feet inside the entrance, the time of day—or the time of year, for that matter—would make no difference at all. It was a good place for what we had to leave there.

I cut the lights, got the flash from the glove compartment, and went back to open up the rear end. I heard her move inside; she made her way out onto the tailgate, but when she tried to swing her legs over the edge, something caught and ripped, and she had to pause to disentangle her sharp heel from the hem of her dress. Then I helped her down, and she pulled back and hit me alongside the jaw, with the flat of her gloved hand, just as hard as she was able. She might be fifteen years older than when I’d last known her, but her muscles showed no signs of advanced senility.

“You think it’s a joke!” she gasped. “You sit up there on the soft seat with springs and hit all the bumps and laugh and laugh! I will teach you—” She drew back her hand again.

I stepped back out of range and said hastily, “I’m sorry, Tina. If I’d thought, I’d have brought you up front as soon as we were out of town.”

She glared at me for a moment. Then she reached up and yanked off her little veiled hat, which had drifted into the neighborhood of her left ear since I’d last seen it, and threw it into the truck.

“You are a liar!” she said. “I know what you think! You say to yourself, this Tina, she is too big in the head after all these years. I will put her in her place, I will show her who is boss, she with her lady-like airs and furs and fine clothes, I will teach her to let her man knock me down, I will teach her to frame me, I will shake her like a cocktail, I will scramble her like an egg!” She drew a long and ragged breath, removed and folded her furs carefully, and laid them inside the truck canopy, out of harm’s way. She went through the feminine routine of settling her girdle and tugging down her dress. I heard her laugh softly in the darkness. “Well, I do not blame you. Where are we?”

I rubbed my jaw. It wasn’t true that I’d gone out of my way to make the ride rough for her, but I will admit that the thought of her bouncing around in back hadn’t brought tears to my eyes, either. With a person like Tina, you take any little advantage you can get.

I said, “If I told you we were in the Ortiz Mountains, or the Cerrillos Hills, would you know any more than you did before? We’re back in the boondocks, about twenty-five miles southeast of Santa Fe.”

“But what is this place?”

“It’s an old mine,” I said. “The tunnel goes straight back into the rock, I don’t know how far. I came across it doing research for an article a couple of years back. The first gold rush on the North American continent was staged in this part of New Mexico, and people have been prospecting these dry hills ever since. I made a series of pictures of all the old holes I could find. There are hundreds of them. This one’s pretty tough to reach; I doubt if anybody gets over here once in five years. I wasn’t sure I could make it all the way in without a jeep, but the weather’s been dry and I thought it was worth a try.”