The Collection

Blazer fled as they approached, and they both got in the driver's side, quickly shutting the door. The McDonald's mess on the floor had disappeared.

He reached for the keys in the ignition, but they were not there. He checked on the floor, patted his pockets, looked over at Lydia. 'Do you have the keys?'

She shook her head. 'You didn't take them with you?'

'I left them here. Shit!' He slammed his hand against the steering wheel, causing the horn to blat loudly. They both jumped.

Outside, the papers were swirling closer, junk food wrap­pers-inching forward along the ground toward them, ripped posters creeping alongside.

'Let's get back to the gas station,' Lydia said.

Josh nodded. 'I think they need another demonstration to make sure they leave us alone, though. Get out my side.'

They got out of the car, and he doused the front seat with lighter fluid.

'What are you doing?' Lydia demanded. 'That's our car! We need it! We'll never get out of here without it!'

'We'll get out.' He lit a match and threw it onto the front seat. The cloth seat covers went up in a whoosh of flame, and the papers on the street, obviously agitated, whirled in incoherent frenzy, widening the circle around them.

Josh grabbed his wife's hand again, and they started back toward the gas station. Dust blew into their eyes, stinging. They were halfway there when he saw a car coming along the highway toward them. 'A car!' he said excitedly. He moved quickly to the center line and waved his arms back and forth in the classic distress signal.

The car came closer.

'Help!' he yelled. 'Help!'

The car sped by, honking its horn.

'Asshole!' Josh yelled in frustration, holding up his middle finger. 'Goddamn son of a bitch-'

Lydia put a restraining hand on his arm. 'Come on, let's go to the gas station. Maybe that old man can help us.'

'He can't even help himself. If he could, he wouldn't still be here.'

'There will be other cars. This is a major highway. Someone's bound to stop.'

'If we create a disaster,' Josh said, nodding. He smiled grimly. 'Let's go.'

The gas station was empty. They searched the office, the garage, the men's and women's bathrooms, but there was no sign of the attendant. It was now nearly five, and though nei­ther of them said anything, they both realized that it would soon be dark. Although the highway itself was clear save for a few stray pieces of windblown trash, the desert surround­ing the gas station was covered with papers and was grow­ing more crowded by the minute.

'What are we going to do?' Lydia asked.

Josh unhooked the hose from one of the gas pumps. 'Start a fire.'

'What if-?'

'Don't worry,' he said.

He pressed down on the handle of the nozzle and poured gas all over the dirt and cement surrounding the two pumps. He stopped pumping and handed her the matchbox, saving a handful of matches for himself. 'Go up to the road and tell me when you see a car coming. If anything starts moving to­ward you, use the lighter fluid and torch it.'

She started to say something but saw the look of almost fanatic determination on his face and decided against it. She moved slowly across the pavement toward the highway.

Josh continued to pump gas onto the ground, soaking the entire area around the pumps. The hose was not very long, but he moved as close to the building itself as he could and watered the cement with it. The papers surrounding the gas station swirled crazily, frenetically. 'A car!' Lydia shouted. 'A car!' Josh dropped the hose, ran toward the edge of his gas pool, and struck a match on the pavement. It caught, then sputtered out in the wind. 'A car!' Lydia screamed.

He struck another match, dropping it, and the ground ex­ploded in a rush of fire, singeing his face. He ran toward Lydiar feeling the heat against his back, and the second he reached the edge of the highway, there was a thunderous ex­plosion as the pumps blew. The ground shook once, and a moment later pieces of metal fell from the sky. A small hot chunk landed next to Josh's foot and another near Lydia, but none of the fragments touched them.

'Come on!' Josh ran into the highway. The car was not coming from the north but from the south, and he stood in the middle of the northbound lane, waving his arms, franti­cally pointing toward the burning gas station.

The car pulled to a stop a yard or so in front of them. A middle-aged man with graying black hair and a mustache stuck his head out the window. 'What happened?'

'Explosion!' Josh said as he and Lydia ran forward. 'We

need to get help!'

'Hop in fast,' the man ordered. 'My wife's going to have a baby, and we don't have time to waste.'

They got into the backseat of the car. Looking out the window as the car took off, Josh saw angry papers swarm­ing over the spot where they had stood. Others flew around the spiraling smoke which billowed up from the fire.

He hoped the whole damn town burned down. Josh reached for Lydia's hand, held it, smiled. But she was frowning, looking forward. In the front seat, the man and his wife were silent. The man was concentrating on the road. His wife, next to him, was bundled beneath a heavy blanket, though the temperature in the un-air-conditioned car was so warm it was almost stifling. 'You're going to have a baby?' Lydia asked.

'Yes, she is.'                                                               ;

'Where's the hospital?'

'Phoenix.'

'But isn't Tucson closer?'

The man didn't answer.

Lydia scooted forward on the seat. 'Mrs.-' she began.

'She's asleep.' The man's voice was sharp, too sharp, and Lydia moved back, chastened.

Josh's heart gave a warning leap in his chest. Sitting next to the window, directly behind the passenger seat, he had a perfect view of the space between the wife's seat and the door, and he craned forward to get a better look. His mus­cles tensed as he saw the sleeve hanging off the edge of the seat beneath the blanket, saw the fingers of gum wrappers, the packed tissue paper palm.

But he said nothing, only held Lydia's hand tighter.

'Hope we make it in time,' the driver said.

'Yeah,' Josh agreed. He looked at Lydia, his mouth dry. The car sped through the desert toward Phoenix.

The Idol

As teenagers, every time we watched Rebel Without a Cause, my brother would invariably suggest that we look for James Dean's lug wrench. We lived in South­ern California, so we knew that the scene in which Dean goes on a field trip, has an altercation with one of his classmates, and throws a lug wrench over the side of a wall into some bushes was filmed at Griffith Park Observatory. It must still be there, my brother al­ways argued. The people who made the movie didn't hike down the hillside and go rummaging through the bushes for it after they filmed that scene. What did lug wrenches cost back then? A buck?

He can't have been the only one to come up with this plan, I thought. A lot of people must have thought the same thing over the years.

But what kind of people were they?

'There! Did you see it?' Matt stopped the VCR and re­wound the tape for a second. 'Watch carefully.'

James Dean, cooler than cool in his red jacket, backed away from the group of young toughs. 'I don't want any trouble,' he said. Realizing that the tire iron in his hand could be construed as a weapon, he cocked his arm and hurled it over the cliff.