Rattlesnake (2 page)

“Where you heading?” Jimmy asked.

“Rattlesnake.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

“’S up north, on Highway 49. Gold rush country.” He had a voice like a truck driving through deep gravel, bumpy and broken. “You headin’ that way?”

“Sure. If the car makes it that far.”

Looked like Jimmy had a destination after all.

T
HE
MAN
’
S
name was Tom, and he reeked of cigarettes, booze, and the type of old dirt that’s been building up a long time. Of course, Jimmy had been sleeping in the Ford lately, and he probably didn’t smell his best either. They put up with each other’s stink without complaint.

Tom could have been any age from fifty to eighty. His eyes were watery and his hands shook. He coughed often, a thick sound, and he turned down Jimmy’s offer of chips and candy. “Ain’t hungry.”

“When did you eat last?”

“Dunno. But I ain’t hungry.”

Well, you couldn’t force a man to eat. But Jimmy saved some of the Snickers bar, just in case.

Maybe Tom would have slept. But the road was long and empty, and Jimmy hadn’t had a conversation with anyone in ages. “Were you waiting for a ride for a long time?” he asked.

Tom grunted. “Since sunset. Trucker took me there all the way from Flagstaff, but he was turnin’ down to Santa Clarita. Nobody stopped for me since then.” For the first time, he took a good look at Jimmy. “Why’d you stop?”

“You looked cold.”

“Where you goin’? I know it ain’t Rattlesnake.”

Jimmy shrugged. “Didn’t have anywhere specific in mind.”

“You runnin’ from something?”

“Nope. Just… driving. How about you? What’s in Rattlesnake?”

Tom paused a long time before answering. “Used to live there. Long time ago. Thought maybe—” He stopped to hack up half a lung, and when the coughing ended, he didn’t finish his thought. He turned his head away from Jimmy to stare out his window at nothing while Jimmy stared straight ahead at not much more than nothing.

The silence grew too loud. “Have you ever been to Minden, Nebraska?” Jimmy didn’t wait to see if Tom would answer. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, except it’s not too far off I-80. I stayed awhile there, a few years back. There’s a tourist attraction—Harold Warp’s Pioneer Village. It’s sort of a collection of collections. Like everyone in Nebraska emptied out their attics, garages, and barns and dumped the contents there in Minden.” He’d spent a summer working the snack bar there, flipping burgers and dumping fries into hot grease. It had paid just enough for him to rent a room from an old couple who lived nearby. Hadn’t been a bad gig.

“Never been,” Tom said.

“Well, it’s worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood.” He remembered the oppressive heat of a Nebraska summer, the way the plains seemed as endless as the sky, and the fireflies that danced in the evenings.

He shifted slightly in his seat. The springs were shot. “They have all these cars. Starting from horse-and-buggy days, actually. Then they have a steam car, some Fords even older than this piece of crap… all the way through the years. But it’s not the biggest collection of cars I’ve seen. I worked for a few weeks once on a farm in Missouri, helping build new fences. My boss there, he had a couple of huge barns completely full of cars. Hundreds of ’em. He was addicted to car auctions, I guess. None of them ran. They were dusty, full of spiders and bugs and mice. But he kept on buying more.”

His passenger didn’t reply. Didn’t even cough. Jimmy swallowed some of his coffee, which had cooled to bitter sludge. “One time I was riding a Greyhound bus to…. Shit. Don’t remember where to. I remember it was raining, though, and you couldn’t see through the windows ’cause they were all fogged up. There was a lady sitting a couple rows up from me. She wasn’t hardly more than a girl, really. She was on the bus already when I boarded, and she looked real scared when I walked by, like maybe I was gonna hurt her or something.” Jimmy got that look often. He wasn’t huge, but he was big enough when he carried some weight, and he figured there was a toughness to his face. Mostly he didn’t mind if people were a little scared of him—it meant they were less likely to try to fuck with him. But sometimes it made him sad and lonely, and that day on the bus had been one of those times.

“So there we were, bumping along in that bus, on our way to somewhere. There weren’t many passengers. And the girl, she made this funny sound. Sort of a muffled scream? I got out of my seat and asked her if she was all right, and she looked up at me with the biggest eyes I ever saw. ‘I’m having a baby,’ she said. And she sure as hell was. Driver pulled over and called for paramedics, but that baby was in a hurry. He was born right there on the Greyhound, with the driver and me and a soldier helping out. I got to be one of the first human beings that little boy ever saw. I wonder how he’s turned out. He’d be near twenty now. Almost as old as I was then.

“That baby looked up at everyone with astonishment clear in his eyes, and he squalled loud enough to wake the dead. It’s supposed to be a good thing when a newborn cries so strongly, I know that. But still, I always wondered if that kid hadn’t been damned disappointed with the life he’d been born into.”

After ten or fifteen quiet minutes, Tom cleared his throat. “You got people somewhere? Family?”

That was a simple question with a complicated answer. Jimmy said, “Not really.”

“Me either. Not no more. Used to, though. How old are you?”

Jimmy had to calculate a bit in his head to answer precisely. “I turned forty-three last month.” He hadn’t celebrated it—nobody to celebrate with. Fuck, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d known anyone well enough for them to wish him a happy birthday.

“Then you still got time.”

“Time for what?”

Tom coughed some more before answering. “Listen to me, Jimmy. Someday you’re gonna be an old bastard like me, and you’re gonna regret shit, and you ain’t gonna be able to do nothin’ about it. Don’t wait. You got stuff in your life needs fixin’, you gotta fix it now, while you can.”

Trying to ignore the sharpness in his chest, Jimmy shook his head. “I’m fine. I’ve just got itchy feet is all. I can’t stay anywhere very long before I have the urge to move on. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Tom snorted. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with it long as you’re happy. Are you happy?”

Jimmy didn’t reply.

A few miles later, Tom removed a paper from his pocket. It crackled a bit when he handled it. Out of the corner of his eye, Jimmy saw him unfold it and stare at it awhile even though the car was too dark for him to read. Then Tom folded it again and tucked it away.

“I had a son,” Tom said very quietly. “Back in Rattlesnake. I loved that boy. But I guess I loved the bottle more. Left him and his mama when he was just little, and I ain’t seen him since.”

If Jimmy hadn’t been driving, he’d have closed his eyes tight. Instead he narrowed them and kept his gaze forward, where the road had begun to rise a little toward Tehachapi Pass. “How old is he now?” he asked, tight-throated.

“Dunno.” Tom coughed a minute. “Grown.”

“So why are you going to Rattlesnake now?”

“Got sick. I think it was all that fucking regret sitting in my belly, growing like cancer. I wrote him a letter. I was gonna mail it, but I don’t know his address. Don’t know if he’s even there anymore. Maybe he moved on years ago. But I couldn’t just throw the damn letter away. Tried to, but couldn’t. So I decided to try to deliver it myself. If he’s still there.”

Wishes were like poison, Jimmy thought. When you made them, they were all bright and shiny, sweet as candy. But they lingered and languished and didn’t come true, and so they curdled and went bad. Became toxic. That’s why he never made them to begin with.

“I hope you find him,” Jimmy said.

The response came as a sigh. “Yeah. It’d sure be nice to see him, even if he hates my guts. I don’t care if he yells and calls me names. I just wanna see him.” And he moved his seat back a little—Jimmy was surprised it could still recline—and closed his eyes.

Jimmy took another swig of coffee.

T
HE
F
ORD
grew louder as it climbed the mountain, until it was grumbling and clanking alarmingly. Jimmy eased up on the gas and hoped the car would be happier once he began to descend. But it wasn’t. If anything, its complaints grew louder as he coasted down into farmland, rolled through the sleeping city of Bakersfield, and headed north on Highway 99.

Normally he wouldn’t have worried about the car—if it died, it died. It had happened to him with other cars. He could hitch a ride, or he could stay put long enough to earn money for a bus ride or another junker car. He wouldn’t even have been bothered by the very early hour, because the temperature here was tolerable and big rigs plentiful. But for once he actually had a destination in mind. And he had a passenger. He truly wanted to get Tom to Rattlesnake.

As he drove on, the sky to his right began to lighten although the sun hadn’t yet appeared over the Sierras. The car made noises like a bad concert, he decided. One with too much percussion and with guitarists who couldn’t agree on which song they were playing. He made up lyrics in his head to keep himself awake.
This is it, for my piece of shit, car that’s gonna up and quit. It’s not fine, to lose what’s mine, here on fuckin’ Ninety-nine.
Yeah, well, he’d never claimed to be a musician.

Despite the din from the engine compartment and inside his head, Jimmy’s eyelids grew heavy. They still had another two or three hours before they reached Rattlesnake. The car might make it, but it didn’t look like he would. At least not without a nap. He was relieved when he came upon a rest area at the southern outskirts of Fresno, and he took the exit gratefully. “Just need a little shut-eye. Thirty minutes.”

Tom didn’t answer.

The parking lot was empty except for a handful of trucks clustered at one end and a beat-up old van near the bathrooms. The big overhead lights had switched off, but the morning light was still tentative and dim. Jimmy piloted the car to a spot far from the other vehicles and cut the engine, which stopped with a final clatter and a tired sigh.

Before he got too comfortable, his bladder reminded him how much coffee he’d drunk. “Fuck. Be right back,” he said to Tom, who still snoozed away. Jimmy pulled the keys from the ignition and turned to give Tom a good poke. “I’ll be right back,” he repeated more loudly.

And that’s when Jimmy realized Tom wasn’t sleeping.

“Fuck!” he yelled as he scrambled for his door handle. Once he got the door open, he nearly fell out of the car. He stood there breathing hard, staring at his passenger.

Tom didn’t look much worse than he had in life. His eyes were closed, his mouth hung slightly open, and his skin had taken on a waxy pallor. But there was no sign of distress on his face, and if he’d made any sound when he died, it had been too quiet to hear over the racket of the car.

Although Jimmy had witnessed only one person entering the world, he’d seen several people shortly after they’d left. Overdoses. Accidents. Once he’d seen a bunch of cops clustered around a lonely corpse at the side of a highway. Someone had covered the body with a blanket, but its bare feet stuck out. And for a few sticky summer months in a southern town he couldn’t now name, he’d worked as a cemetery groundskeeper—mowing the lawns, trimming the trees, getting rid of faded flowers. He hadn’t actually seen any dead people then, just their caskets and their freshly filled graves. But death wasn’t new to him by any means. It just didn’t usually ride shotgun.

He calmed rather quickly, then considered what to do next. His first thought was to keep driving all the way to Rattlesnake, find Tom’s son, and hand over the body. Except Jimmy didn’t like the idea of driving with a dead man, and it would be a hard thing to explain to the cops if he got pulled over. Or if his car followed Tom’s lead and died too.

He could dump the body somewhere and take off. But that was sneaky. And poor Tom didn’t deserve to be treated like a sack of litter. Besides, in today’s Big Brother world, there were apt to be surveillance cameras somewhere, and then once again the problem of explaining himself would arise.

His best option, he finally decided, was to get the cops involved right away. Yes, he’d
still
have to explain—no getting around that—but he wouldn’t look nearly so suspicious.

Fuck. Cops made him… itchy.

Jimmy decided that his bladder was a bigger emergency than Tom, seeing as Tom was already dead. He hurried across the lot to the dank bathroom, pissed like a racehorse, and washed his hands. When he emerged from the smelly little building, he looked for a public telephone. He found one all right, but it was busted. The handset was cracked into pieces, the bottom half still hanging from the cord.

He considered trying the van but vetoed that idea and loped to the big rigs instead. He pounded on the driver’s door of the first one he came to.
Crete Carrier
, said the neatly painted lettering on the cab.
Lincoln, Nebraska
.

He had to pound a second time before the driver appeared at the window to glare at him. “Whaddya want?” the guy yelled. His wispy gray hair stuck almost straight up in a case of bedhead that might have been funny under other circumstances.

“I need you to call the cops!” Jimmy shouted back.

“Why?”

“I got a dead guy in my car!”

Well, that got the driver’s attention. He blinked at Jimmy in astonishment before disappearing. He must have been calling or radioing his buddies, because within moments all the trucks disgorged men who looked as if they’d woken suddenly from a deep sleep.

“Show me,” said the Crete Carrier guy.

They silently followed Jimmy across the lot, looking like a baseball-cap-wearing funeral procession. When they reached Jimmy’s Ford—with the driver’s door still wide open—they clustered around and gaped.