The River of Dancing Gods (2 page)

"Yeah. San Antone, that's me..

"Air Force brat?" He was nervous at pushing her too much, maybe upsetting or alienating her—she was on a thin edge, that was for sure—but he just had the feeling she wanted to talk to somebody.

She did, a little surprised at that herself. "Sort of. Daddy was a flier. Jet pilot..

"What happened to him?" He guessed by her tone that something had happened.

"Killed in his plane, in the finest traditions of the Air Force.

Page 5 Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods Sucked a bird into his jets while coming in for a landing and that was it, or so I'm told. I was much too young, really, to JACK L. CHALKER 7 remember him any more than as a vague presence. And the pictures, of course. Momma kept all the pictures. The benefits, though, they weren't all that much. He was only a captain, after all, and a new one at that. So Momma worked like hell at all sorts of jobs to bring me up right. She was solid Oklahoma —high school, no marketable skills, that sort of thing.

Supermarket checker was about the highest she got—pretty good, really, when you see the benefits they get at the union stores. She did really well, when you think about it—except it was all for me. She didn't have much else to live for. Wanted me to go to college—she'd wanted to go, but never did. Well, she and the VA and a bunch of college loans got me there, all right, and got me through, for all the good it did. Ten days after I graduated with a useless degree in English Lit, she dropped dead from a heart attack. I had to sell the trailer we lived in all those years just to make sure she was buried right.

After paying out all the stuff she owed, I had eight hundred dollars, eight pairs of well-wom jeans, a massive collection of T-shirts, and little else..

He sighed. "Yeah, that's rough. I always wanted to go to college, you know, but I never had the money until I didn't have the time. I read a lot, though. It don't pay to get hooked on TV when you're on the road so much..

She chuckled dryly. "College is all well and good and some of it's interesting, but if your degree's not in business, law, medicine, or engineering, the paper's only good for about thirtyeight hundred—that's what I still owe on those loans, and it'll be a cold day in hell before they see a penny. They track you down all over, too—use collection agents. So you can't get credit, can't get a loan, none of that. I got one job teaching junior high English for a year—but they cut back and laid me off. Only time I ever really enjoyed life..

"So you been goin' around from job to job ever since?.

"For a while. But a couple years of working hamburger joints and all those other minimum-wage, minimum-life jobs gets to you. I finally sat down one day and decided it was fate, or destiny, or something. I was getting older, and all I could see was myself years later, sitting in a rented slum shared with a couple of other folks just like me, getting quickies from the night manager. So I figured I would find a man, marry him, 8 THE RIVER OF DANCING GODS and let him pay my bills while I got into the cooking and baby business..

"Well, it's a job like any other and has a pretty long history,.

he noted. "Somebody's got to do it—otherwise the government will do that, too..

Page 6 Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods She managed a wan smile at the remark. "Yeah, well, that's what I told myself, but there are many ways to go about it.

You can meet a guy, date, fall in love, really commit yourself— both of you. That might work. But just to go out in desperation and marry the first guy who comes along who'll have you— that's disaster..

"Works the other way, too, honey," he responded. "That's why I'm paying five hundred a month in rehabilitation money— that's what they call alimony these days in liberal states that abolished alimony—and child support. And she's living with another guy who owns an auto-repair shop and is doing pretty well; she has a kid by him, too. But so long as she don't marry him, I'm stuck..

"You have a kid?.

He nodded. "A son. Irving. Lousy name, but it was the one uncle he had on her side who had money. Not that it got us or him anything. I love him, but I almost never see him..

"Because you're on the road?.

"Naw. You'd be surprised what you can work. I'm supposed to have visitation rights, but somehow he's always away when I come visiting. She don't want him to see me, get to know me instead of her current as his daddy. Uh-uh..

"Couldn't you go to court on that?.

He laughed. "Honey, them courts will slap me in jail so fast if I miss a payment to her it isn't funny—but tell her to live up to her end of the bargain? Yeah, they'll tell her, and that's that. Tell her and tell her and tell her. Until, one day, you realize that the old joke's true—she got the gold mine in the settlement and I got the shaft. Oh, I suppose I could make an unholy mess trying to get custody, but I'd never win. I'd have to give up truckin', and truckin's all I know how to do.

And I'd probably lose, anyway—nine out of ten men do. Even if I won—hell, it's been near five years." He sighed. "I guess at this stage he's better off. I hope so..

"I hope so, too," she responded, sounding genuinely touched, JACK L. CHALKER 9 with the oddly pleasing guilt felt when, sunk deep in self-pity, you find a fellow sufferer.

They rode in near silence for the next few minutes, a silence broken only by the occasional crackle from the CB and a report of this or that or two jerks talking away at each other when they could just as easily have used a telephone and kept the world out.

Finally he said, "I guess from what you say that your marriage didn't work out either..

"Yeah, you could say that. He was an Air Force sergeant at Lackland. A drill instructor in basic. We met in a bar and got drunk on the town. He was older and a very lonely man, and, well, you know what I was going through. We just kinda fell into it. He was a pretty rough character, and after all the Page 7 Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods early fun had worn off and we'd settled down, he'd come home at night and take all his frustrations out on me. It really got to him, after a while, that I was smarter and better educated than he was. He had some inferiority complex. He was hell on his recruits, too—but they got away from him after eight weeks or so. I had him for years. After a while he got transferred up to Reese in Lubbock, but he hated that job and he hated the cold weather and the dust and wind, and that just made it all the worse. Me, I had it really bad there, too, since what few friends I had were all in San Antonio..

"I'd have taken a hike long before," he commented. "Divorce ain't all that bad. Ask my ex..

"Well, it's easy to see that—now. But I had some money for the first time, and a house, and a real sense of something permanent, even if it was lousy. I know it's kind of hard to understand—it's hard to explain. I guess you just had to be me. I figured maybe kids would mellow him out and give me a new direction—but after two miscarriages, the second one damn near killing me, the doctors told me I should never have kids. Probably couldn't, but definitely shouldn't. That just made him meaner and sent me down the tubes. Booze, pot, pills— you name it, I swallowed it or smoked it or sniffed it. And one day—it was my thirtieth birthday—I looked at myself in the mirror, saw somebody a shot-to-hell forty-five looking back at me, picked up what I could use most and carry easy, cashed a check for half our joint account, and took a bus south to think things out. I've been walking ever since—and I still haven't 10 THE RIVER OF DANCING GODS JACK L. CHALKER 11 been out of the goddamned state of Texas. I waited tables, swept floors, never stayed long in one spot. Hell, I've sold my body for a plate of eggs. Done everything possible to keep from thinking, looking ahead, worrying. I burned out. I've had it..

He thought about it for a moment, and then it came to him.

"But you jumped out of that fella's car..

She nodded wearily. "Yeah, I did. I don't even know why, exactly. Or maybe, yes, I do, too. It was an all-of-a-sudden kind of thing, sort of like when I turned thirty and looked in the mirror. There wasn't any mirror, really, but back there in that car I still kind of looked at myself and was, well, scared, frightened, maybe even revolted at what I saw staring back.

Something just sorta said to me, 'If this is the rest of your life, then why bother to be alive at all?'.

He thought, but could find little else to say right then. What was the right thing to say to somebody like this, anyway.

Flecks of rain struck his windshield, and he flipped on the wipers, the sound adding an eerie, hypnotic background to the Page 8 Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods sudden roar of a midsummer thunderstorm on a truck cab.

Peering out, he thought for a moment he saw two Interstate 10 roadways—an impossible sort of fork he knew just couldn't be there. He kicked on the brights and the fog lights, and the image seemed to resolve itself a bit, the right-hand one looking more solid. He decided that keeping to the white stripe down the side of the road separating road and shoulder was the safest course.

At the illusory intersection, there seemed for a moment to be two trucks, one coming out of the other, going right, while the other, its ghostly twin, went left. The image of the second truck, apparently passing his and vanishing quickly in the distance to his left, startled him for a moment. He could have sworn there wasn't anything behind him for a couple of miles, and the CB was totally silent.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and things took on a more normal appearance in minutes. He glanced over at the woman and saw that she was asleep—best thing for her, he decided. Ahead loomed a green exit sign, and, still a little unnerved, he badly wanted to get his bearings.

The sign said, "Ruddygore, 5 miles." That didn't help him much. Ruddygore? Where in hell was that? The next exit should be Sheffield. A mile marker approached, and he decided to check things out.

The little green number said, "4..

He frowned again, beginning to become a little unglued.

Four? That couldn't be right. Not if he was still on I-10.

Uneasily, he began to think of that split back there. Maybe it was a split—that other truck had seemed to curve off to the left when he went right. If so, he was on some cockeyed interstate spur to God knew where.

God knew, indeed. As far as he knew or could remember, there were no exits, let alone splits, between Ozona and Sheffield.

He flicked on his interior light and looked down at his road atlas, held open by clips to the west Texas map. According to it, he was right—and no sign of any Ruddygore. He sighed and snapped off the light. Well, the thing was wrong in a hundred places, anyway. Luckily he was still ahead of schedule, so a five-mile detour shouldn't be much of a problem. He glanced over to his left again for no particular reason. Funny.

The landscaping made it look as if there weren't any lane going back.

A small interstate highway marker, the usual red, white, and blue was between mile markers 3 and 2, but it told him nothing. It didn't even make sense. He was probably just a little crazy tonight, or his eyes were going, but it looked for all the world as if it said: °o? What the hell was that? Somebody in the highway department must have goofed good there, stenciling an 8 on its Page 9 Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods side.

At the 2, another green sign announced Ruddygore, and there was also a brown sign, like the kind used for parks and monuments. It said, "Ferry—Turn Left at Stop Sign..

Now he knew he had gone suddenly mad. Not just that he knew that 1-8 went from Tucson to San Diego and nowhere 12 THE RIVER OF DANCING GODS near Texas, but—a ferry? In the middle of the west Texas desert.

He backed down to slow—very slow—and turned to his passenger. "Hey, little lady. Wake up!.

She didn't stir, and finally he reached over and shook her, repeating his words.

She moved and squirmed and managed to open her eyes.

"Urn. Sorry. So tired.. .What's the matter? We in El Paso?.

He shook his head. "No. I think I've gone absolutely nuts.

Somehow in the storm we took an exit that wasn't supposed to be there and we're headed for a town called Ruddygore.

Ever heard of it?.

She shook her head sleepily from side to side. "Nope. But that doesn't mean anything. Why? We lost?.

"Lost ain't the word," he mumbled. "Look, I don't want to scare you or anything, but I think I'm going nuts. You ever hear of a ferryboat around here?.

She looked at him as if he had suddenly sprouted feathers.

"A what? Over what?' He nodded nervously and gestured toward the windshield.

"Well, then, you read me that big sign..

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked. "Ruddygore —exit one mile," she mumbled.

"And the little brown sign?.

"Ferry," she read, suddenly awake and looking very confused.

"And an arrow." She turned and faced him. "How long was I asleep?.

"Five, maybe ten minutes," he answered truthfully. "You Page 10 Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods can still see the rain on the windshield where the wipers don't reach..

She shook her head in wonder. "It must be across the Pecos.

But the Pecos isn't much around here..