faster than ever and he wouldn’t play the Sleepy LaBeef tape.
I had a hard time relaxing, way Steve was driving. And I was thinking about Crier and his dead eyeballs getting whipped by the wind. I knew it wasn’t a thing to get on Crier’s nerves, but it was damn sure giving mine a workout, and I didn’t even have to look at him. Still, the thought of those dead eyeballs behind me…
When Steve had asked for that cigar, I had seen that there were some sunglasses in the glove box, and I got those out. They were neon yellow and had little bulldogs in the top corners of the frames and the dogs had black BB eyes that rolled around at the slightest movement. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it was something.
I handed them back to Bob and told him what I wanted, and he put them on Crier. It helped. Crier even looked alive. He appeared to be nothing more than an excessively cool dude with his dick in his pocket.
Course, a little later in the day he started to bloat up and stink a little, and I couldn’t think of anything to help that. We had to pull over and put him in the trunk, sunglasses and all. Steve fussed about this, because he had to work at unwiring the lid, but he did it. I think he was afraid if he didn’t, Grace would kick him in the balls. She had that look.
We got Crier dumped in the back without his dick falling out of his pocket, got him wired in, and we were off. It seemed strange not to have the old boy with us, after all we had been through, but it did smell a mite fresher, especially to Bob and Grace.
It got darker and darker and pretty soon we got to that stuff Grace told us about. Storms whipped posters and popcorn sacks and the like every which way. The moon looked even more false than usual and it shone like a projector light through the trees, hitting the strips of film that twisted and twined there. Film ghosts were no longer reflected in the mirror and the windows. The highway was full of them: cowboys with six-shooters, knights with swords and lances, apes and madmen, giant stalking machines from War of the Worlds, the smiling Brady Bunch. We drove through them all as if they were mist.
Film strips crawled onto the highway and made smashed cellophane sounds beneath our tires.
When Steve got tired, we pulled over and I got behind the wheel. I drove until I couldn’t, then I swapped with Bob who drove until he had to swap with Grace.
When it got back around to me, the gas gauge showed a quarter tank.
5
Daylight, and things looked a little better. No ghosts melting through the car, and no film crawling. A little storm activity, but nothing special. The sun looked worse than ever, like a pie pan spray-painted gold.
The trees were rubbery-looking and the ground reminded me of Styrofoam. The fruit we found to eat was shriveled and bitter to the taste. Everything around us looked a little cheap and off center, like the way it is when you make a real close examination of what you bought at a thrift sale.
We found a few chocolate almonds lying about and some soft drink puddles, so I knew we were getting close to the highway’s end; the place Popalong had told Grace about. It struck me that Steve ought to know what he was in for. All he knew was that he was giving us a ride to the end of the highway. He didn’t know we had some idea what was there, and he didn’t know what we had in mind.
Steve had a mirror in his glove box, one of those kinds with the props behind it, and he had that and his pocket knife and a little kit with a tiny pair of scissors and a toenail clipper in it, and he was working on his whiskers. It made me hurt to watch him.
“Who you cleaning up for?” Bob asked him.
“Myself. I never could stand whiskers. I still don’t look so good when I finish, since I can’t get close enough, but it beats looking like you boys.”
“I think we ought to explain something to you,” I said.
“About what?” Steve said. He finished up and folded the mirror stand and put it and the kit in the glove box.
“About the end of the road,” Grace said.
Steve leaned on the car and got what was left of his cigar out of his pocket. When it died out he hadn’t relit it. He didn’t light it now. He put it in his mouth and rolled it from one side to the other.
“We kind of know what’s at the end,” Grace said. “We’ve got an idea what we’re going to do there.” And she told Steve a condensed version of the story she told us. When she finished Steve quit moving his cigar. He took it out of his mouth and put it in his pocket. I couldn’t help but think of Crier’s dick.
“Sound’s like you folks are going to get killed, is what it sounds like to me,” Steve said.
“We don’t expect you to go if you don’t want,” Grace said. “We’d appreciate your carrying us as far as you can, though.”
“What if I said this was as far as I was going?” Steve said.
“That would be it then,” Grace said.
“You’d walk through this stuff at night?”
“I would,” Grace said.
“I’m not crazy about that part,” Bob said. “I might even be talked out of it. I might even ride back with you the other way.”
“You?” Steve asked me.
“All that matters right now,” I said, “is are you going to the end or not. If you go back, you know what you’ve got.”
“Sounds like I have a pretty good idea of what I’m gonna get if I go forward too.” He looked hard at me. “Tell you what else, I think if I go back and Bob here goes with me, you’ll go too. You don’t look like any kind of hero to me. The gal here will keep walking, I can tell that. She doesn’t think she needs much of anybody.”
“That’s not true,” Grace said. “I can use all the help I can get. But if I don’t get it, I’m going on.”
“I’m no knight in white armor, lady,” Steve said.
“Never crossed my mind you might be.”
Steve smiled and put the cigar back in his mouth. He still didn’t light it.
“All right, I’ll haul you on, but maybe we ought to come up with a game plan. And first thing to start with is getting rid of the old boy in the trunk. He’s starting to stink all the way from the back. It bothers my driving. I don’t figure we’ll have to eat him, with all this fruit and stuff out there, so let’s get shed of him.”
6
I got Crier’s legs and Bob got him by the shoulders and we lifted him out of the Plymouth’s trunk. He had swelled up a bit, and he really did stink.
We carried him over to the side of the road and put him down. I said, “I told him I wouldn’t do this. I promised I’d get him to the end of the highway.”
“Me too,” Bob said, “but a person doesn’t always get what they want, and you can’t always keep your promise. Besides, if he’d known he was gonna stink like this, maybe he wouldn’t have asked it of us.”
Crier’s dick had come out of his pocket and rolled up next to the spare, and since it was past the handling stage, and looked like a big jalapeno going to rot, Steve got a couple of sticks and scissored it out of there and carried it over and dropped it next to Crier.
“We ought to bury him,” I said.
“Something will just dig him up,” Steve said, “and this ground isn’t any kind of ground for digging. But if you want, there’s a worn-down spot over there and we can throw him off in that, maybe find something to cover him up, for all that amounts to.”
We carried Crier over to the worn-down spot and put him in it. He was stiff as a tire iron and lay there in the indentation as if he had fallen sideways out of a chair and frozen. Steve kicked the dick on over and into the hole and we got some brush and limbs and the few rocks we could find, and put them on top of him. We got everything
