Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

“In this car?” Nan asked.

“Who said in this car? Let’s turn north on a nice little road, and we’ll find a spot to trade cars, and well keep on rolling, on those nice little back roads.”

We put the dome light on and checked the maps. We found a good place to turn, and we kept pushing. I spelled Sandy for a while and he slept. I wanted to be rid of the Ford. Every pair of headlights in the night was potential danger.

By two in the morning we’d made over five hundred miles and we had come to a small place named Lufkin. A roadhouse beyond town was doing capacity business. A lot of banners were strung up, so I guess it was some kind of club affair. We parked a hundred yards beyond the place, and Sandy went back with Shack, after telling me this hadn’t been in my course of study.

Nan and I waited in the dark car, ducking low when another car came by and the headlights swept across us.

“I keep telling him and telling him it’s better we split up,” she said indignantly. “No, he’s got to have a crowd, an audience like.”

“You can take off any time. Go ahead right now,” I told her.

She told me what unmentionable thing I could do to myself. We waited there in unfriendly silence. I kept thinking of the magical way that black hole had appeared in the peeling, sun-burned forehead, with a small frothy edge of blood around the bottom of the rim.

A car without lights suddenly drifted up beside us and pulled in ahead of us. The brake lights glowed briefly. Sandy yanked the door open beside me and said, “Go get in the other car. Make it quick, man.”

Nan and I got into the other car. Shack was behind the wheel. The Ford pulled around us, lights on. Shack turned the lights on and followed it. They’d picked up a weary old Olds that smelled like a farmyard and sagged low in the back left corner. We were on the road to Nacogdoches. Sandy, ahead of us, slowed way down as we crossed a small bridge over the Angelina River. No cars were coming in either direction. Beyond the bridge was a long slope covered with brush. Shack came to a stop as Sandy turned the Ford down the slope. He gunned it and went churning down through the brush, bounding recklessly, making a hell of a racket. He got a good long way from the highway. We could see only the reflected glow of his lights. They went off. In a few minutes Sandy appeared in the beam of our headlights, grinning toward us. Shack got out. They scuffed out the tracks of the Ford on the shoulder. They had also taken a spare plate from another car. With difficulty we got it onto the Olds and threw the Olds plate off into the brush.

Sandy took the wheel and we got back up to speed. The engine was noisy. Sandy laughed with delight. “Man, we lifted the plate first, and we moved around until a drunk came wobbling out. He stopped at this car and we came in behind him and soon as he had the keys in his hand — pow! — like a tree fell on him. Our luck, she is running good. The tank is full.”

About a hundred and fifty miles later we crossed on over into Arkansas. The Olds was running hot. There was a line of gray along the horizon in the east.

Sandy checked the maps again and we headed more directly east. Somewhere west of Eldorado, Arkansas, with the misty sun high, we turned off on a dusty track that faded away in dense woodland. Sandy slept in the front seat, Nan in the rear seat. Shack and I stretched out on opposite sides of the car. Birds and insects made sleepy midday noises. The forest floor smelled sweet and loamy. I felt a thousand taut springs unwinding, felt the world fading. Just as I tilted down into sleep I wished that it was a sleep that would never end.

Sandy nudged me awake with his foot when the day was almost gone. There was an icy stream a hundred feet away. We used the cold water to freshen up and scrape the stubble off. Nan went a dozen feet downstream, stripped, soaped herself, squatted in a shallow pool and rinsed, not knowing or caring that Shack did not take his eyes off her for an instant. When she pulled her slacks on again he made a low moan, very deep in his throat, half growl and half moan.

I had glanced at her a few times as she bathed there. The tilted sunlight came between the trunks, dappling the grass, her haunches and the black pool. With that heavy crop of hair and the faint and dusky shadow of the pelt that ran down the cleft of her back, she could have been Prehistoric Woman, a diorama in a museum of natural history. Our modern culture had put red paint on her lips, metal in her mouth, and a puckered surgical scar on her belly. But all the rest — the slightly brutish cast of features, the S curve of waist into hip, the saffron nipples, the pubic pyramid, the elemental savageness — these were unchanged across fifty thousand years.

I could not want her. She had been tossed to me, the way you flip a pack of cigarettes to a friend, and it had been nothing. Once you have accustomed yourself to drinking acid, sour red wine is like stale water on the tongue. I sensed, however, how sublimely suited to each other were Nan and Hernandez. Sandy called them the animals. They were displaced in time. They both belonged in prehistory, back in callous violence, roaming the raw land, mating with random fury, tearing at each other, charring the bloody meat of the latest kill in the fire in the mouth of the cave.

They were not for this time. But their inadequacy was not the same as Sandy’s and mine. There are the constitutional inadequates, whose bodies have too frail a grasp on life. And the mental inadequates, trapped back in their dim minds. Sandy is a moral and social inadequate, unable to cope with the folkways and structures of his culture. I am an emotional and spiritual inadequate — but this can be said in a much simpler way: I have no capacity to love. A man who cannot love is like one of those machines that jokester mechanics build as a gag. Wheels go around and lights flash and plungers go up and down, and it makes a ratchety noise, but it has no purpose. A machine without a purpose, once it is out of control, is dangerous. Once I came very close to being able to love. But that, of course, was Kathy. After Kathy the pointless machine began to work with greater speed and fury...

As we drove east into the Arkansas dusk, I felt dull, wooden, spiritless. I felt as if all the furniture of my mind had been reupholstered in dusty black velvet. I took a hundred small naps, and in the periods of going to sleep or awakening, their voices sounded metallic and unreal over the rolling thunder of the Olds.

I was asleep when they picked up a better car, a red-and-white Chevrolet, a new one, in some small city in Arkansas. They picked it up in the parking lot of a private club. I vaguely remember transferring from the Olds to the newer car. And I can remember Sandy relating their adventures in his taut, tumbling voice.

He was calling Shack a monster. In sneaking through the dark and crowded parking lot of the club, hearing the music coming from the club, they had come across a car where a couple was making love in the back seat.

“Both of them bagged,” Sandy said. “So before I can move a pinky, the monster opens the rear door, takes that stud by the nape of the neck, pulls him out, pops him one time, drops him and kicks him under the car. The woman is saying in a little whiny voice. “Wheresha go? Arthur! Arthur! Whereya, baby?’ So the monster says, ‘Here I am!’ and he dives in there like a fullback going over center. In about five seconds that broad realizes something brand-new had come into her life, and she didn’t like any part of it, man. She starts yelping like she’s being killed, so the monster thumps her one too. While this is going on, I’m pulling Arthur out from under the car and checking him over. Fifty-eight bucks, but no keys. When the monster got out, I had him pick Arthur up and chunk him back in there with her. When the lights come on for those love bugs, they’re going to be confused like. The next car I checked was this one, and it had the keys in it.”