Meg drifted back into awareness at
the feeling of motion. She stirred at a dry chuckle, and came fully
aware at the giggle of a little girl. She raised her head and saw
the Indian in the corner dinette seat, reading a paperback. Or,
rather, looking, as she saw it was a collection of MAD magazine's
wordless Spy Vs. Spy
comics. He chuckled again as he turned another page. She turned her
head and saw a girl of perhaps five years old, perched in the the lap
of a woman with vividly deep red hair, who in turn had turned herself
sideways in the longer seat of the dinette.
“Hi, I'm Dianna, and this little
thing is Janie,” the redhead said. The girl giggled. “I hear
your name is Meg.”
“Yeah,” Meg said. She started
to sit up, but then sank back. “I think Dr.- Carlos mentioned you-
you and Ted?” Dianna nodded, and Meg knew immediately that Ted was
not in the picture. She changed the subject: “Where are we going?”
“For now, back to the main road,”
Dianna answered. “Dr. Wrzniewski sent some of us back to meet the
rest of our group.”
“Rest... how many of you are
there?”
“I can't say, myself,” Dianna
said. “About a hundred. People come and go all the time... Oh,
don't misunderstand. We've lost people, but mostly, they just go.
Carlos and George take people with us if they really need help, like
you, but they never make anyone stay. Some do, some don't, it's
about half and half. Mostly, the ones that go head for someplace...
or people... they wanted to get to all along.”
“So where are you headed for?”
Meg said.
The girl chimed in, “Where are we going, Mommy?”
“Nowhere in particular, I
suppose,” Dianna said with a slightly wistful smile. “As far as
we know, there really aren't any places left to go. We just stay on
the move; we stop to pick up food and gas as we go along, and go
places if we have a lead on something big...”
“And get away from them,” Meg
added.
“Yeah,” Dianna said sadly.
“Them.”
“You know... I heard something,”
Meg said. Dianna looked a little more serious, and Meg guessed,
correctly, that she already knew the story. “I heard that the
government was setting up safe places. First it was shelters in the
cities, run by the police. Then the army came in and started moving
people out to places in the country side, deserts and mountains,
like... reservations.” She glanced at the Indian, but saw no
reaction. “That's what I heard. Well, my boyfriend told me he
heard it.”
Dianna drew an arm a little tighter around her daughter. “No, they
tried that, but it never worked out,” she said. “We don't waste
time looking for anything like that.” The Bus followed behind them,
and as they made a turn Meg saw Moby Ralph behind it. By the time
they reached the turn-off from the main road, they passed three more
vehicles, a 27-foot Travco that could only be Flipper, a World War
2-vintage Jeep, and a towering silver-skinned vehicle that was not so
much a motorhome as a self-propelled trailer. “Monstro, I
presume?” Meg said.
“Yup,” Dianna said. “One and
only.”
“What is it, anyway?” Meg said,
craning her neck. “It looks like somebody just went, like,
Frankenstein and put an old Airstream trailer on a big truck.”
“It was a Spartan, actually,”
Dianna said. “The trailer, I mean. You can recognize them by that
front window, like a wrap-around windshield that sticks forward,
especially on the early models. That one's 1947; we checked the
nameplate. There was a big boom in streamlined aluminum trailers
right after the war, and Spartans were at the high end. A lot of
them got used a little, and sold off or just abandoned. Then,
somewhere along the line, someone thought of turning them into what
we'd call motorhomes.”
“Why di'n't they just take the
trailer, Mommy?” Janie said.
“Well, Janie,” Dianna said
mischievously, “sometimes even big boys do really silly things...
.”
Meg sat up as a pickup truck went by. Its boxy but streamlined cab,
painted red and white with a siren on top, gave her a sense of deja
vu. “That's Little Red, our A100 pickup, and here's Red and Big Red
Jr, our A-series vans,” Dianna said. Two vans, clearly variants of
the same model as the pickup and also clearly former fire department
vehicles, followed behind, and Meg recognized it as one her family
had owned when she was in grade school. One was longer than the
other, and lacked windows. “Red's an eight-door passenger van, and
Big Red has an expanded hundred-and-eight inch wheel base; they
called it the A108. They all have the 318 engine upgrade, the same
they used in the B-series and even some of the L-series trucks.
Speaking of, here's our big boys...”
Two more fire department vehicles,
a flatbed carrying a GMC Vandura and an even bigger tank truck. They
bore about as much mutual resemblance to the pickup and van as the
“Before” and “After” guys in a marginally convincing mail-
order miracle fitness ad. “Those are Red Wagon and Gunga Dodge, two
of our L-series trucks. Gunga Dodge is an L700 two-thousand gallon
water carrier. It's the biggest vehicle we have, about 25 tons
full..
if we can keep it full. The Wagon is an L600, and we think started as
a ladder truck. It was stripped down to the cab when we got it, and a
mechanic bought it and turned it into a flatbed car carrier. That's
a funny story...
“Back when Carlos was starting at
his school, he talked his department into buying a 108 new for his
department's field trips, but about ten years later, they sold it to
help pay for two new fifteen-passenger GMC Vanduras. Several
vehicles got sold, and the faculty bought up most of them, like that
Type 2 Bus at the station. Professor Harrington turned that one into
a camper, and George bought a Dodge twelve-passenger that ended up
back in the field trip roster. But the 108 was snapped up before
anyone even knew about the sale. Carlos was furious, and he was
seriously obsessed with getting another 108. Then a few years later,
he got a lead on one that was being sold off at a municipal fire
department auction. He went with Ted... this was a few years ago...
and found the van in a lot with the other vehicles. Ted told me,
after, that it was no reserve, but Carlos put down everything they
had in the first bid. And then it turned out it was the only bid!”
She smiled, but pressed a hand to her eye.
Meg asked, not quite sputtering, “Did- he...?”
“No,” Dianna said. “He- It
was before any of this. A few months after the auction, actually.”
She gently nuzzled Janie, and Meg said no more.
“Ah, and there's the Yellow
Submarine.” Another L700
passed, a semi with the yellow and black colors and orange lights of
municipal maintenance vehicle and a similarly-painted tank trailer in
tow. “Carlos got the truck and trailer at a municipal auction, same
as the fire department vehicles. It was
probably used to deliver fuel to road construction crews and remote
construction sites. The big trailer's 5000 gallons with two
compartments, split about 60-40. We fill the big one with diesel,
and the other with regular gas... or, again, we would if we could
keep it full. And this is Yellow Cab, from the same lot.”
They pulled to a halt alongside a Jeep FC crew cab tow truck, painted
with a jaunty checkered pattern. She knew enough about trucks to
know that the A-frame tow rig was improvised and fairly light, but it
had obviously been strong enough to go the distance with Greg's Audi
hitched behind it “Hey, that's mine,” she said. She pulled out
the keys.
“I'm sure Professor Wrzniewski
will give it back,” Dianna said.
Meg stood up and looked out the door. In addition to the tow truck,
there was another yellow FC fitted out as a light tank truck and
towing a second tank on a trailer, a Jeep Gladiator with an unusually
large slide-in truck camper and a 3-door Rabbit hitched to a
fiberglass trailer. Meg took a closer look at the trailer, whose
rounded shape and orange color called Cinderella's pumpkin carriage
to mind. It was small, with a body only about ten feet long, and
presumably light-weight, but still looked a bit big for such a small
car to be towing.
She took an even more careful look at the camper on the truck. Part
of the roof was moving. As she watched, the cab-over front of the
roof, already much taller than the usual upper bunk, expanded into an
upper room that opened onto the rest of the roof like a balcony. A
man emerged, waved in the direction of the Goliath, and then unfolded
a chair.
Meg was surprised when someone called back from the cab, “That's
Daniel. He's my husband. I'm Becky.” She looked belatedly at the
driver. It took a moment to convince herself that the woman at the
wheel was old enough to be driving the car.
“Wait,” Meg said aloud, running
through Carlos's story. “Becky... the grad student?”
“That would be me,” the woman
said. “I'm into my doctoral work now, or I was.”
“That would make you...” Meg
frowned. “Older than I am.”
“I don't know,” Becky said.
“How old are you?” Janie giggled.
“Well, might as well go meet
people and see what shape my car's in,” Meg said. She stepped
down, and Janie scampered after her. She looked over her shoulder,
expecting the young mother to be following right behind her child.
Instead, Dianna was slowly stretching one leg and then the other,
before stretching out her arms and raising herself in a slow and
steady motion. When she was on her feet, she reached over her
shoulder and snatched up a cane. Meg tried not to stare as the woman
who had already impressed her as a dynamic and vibrant beauty came
hobbling out. She stopped trying when she saw the pervasive scars
beneath the other woman's tank top.
“It was a single car accident”
Dianna said, gripping Meg's shoulder for support as she made the
descent to the ground. “I was driving, with Ted, and Janie... and
her big brother and baby sister. I don't know what happened. Nobody
does. They know Ted got Janie out. They think he had a chance to
get Jack, too. Instead... They said they found him with his arms
around me. They said that's why the the burns are on my back.
Mostly.” Then she hobbled a little faster after her daughter.
David N. Brown Mesa Arizona
No comments:
Post a Comment