Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

Steve went west on Route 80; he turned around and came back eastward. On some trips, when he passed through Stroudsburg, he called me on the phone to say hello. Then he would turn around again and head west. Somewhere in the middle, though, his trip required a decision. Frequently he took the northern detour, through a bland farm country, and he avoided the sight of even the Gremmage chimney smoke. At other times he took the southern detour (particularly in autumn, his favorite season), because it wound through a dense and silent State Park. But every once in a while, very rarely but always in early afternoon, every once in a while he drove straight through Gremmage.

There were always rides to Gremmage. When he took the detours he had to wait, oh, hours for a ride. When he decided to go through Gremmage the cars would line up on the highway’s shoulder, anxious to have him aboard. As he rode through the town he watched, but no one seemed to be particularly unusual, nothing looked at all strange. He rode slouched down in his seat, he looked through the tightly closed window.

The flame of Gremmage drew him, the poor, doomed moth. Again and again he circled, back and forth he flew, above, below and, more and more often, through Gremmage.

And here the voice of reason whispers: one very cool night, starlight and moonlight bathing the strip mines with perverted ardor, Steve walks a lonely dirt road. He is entertaining himself with a scene from a hypothetical movie. “Colonel Rafferty, you can’t send a boy up in a crate like that!” “This is war, Lieutenant. We must all make allowances, and we must all make sacrifices. That boy . . . that boy is my son!” “Your son! But, Colonel, I ... I didn’t know that you had a son.” “Until thirty minutes ago, Lieutenant, I didn’t know either.”

“Help . . .”

With the good, clean Quaker State nothing around him, you can no doubt see the confusion in Steve’s features. Someone has asked him for help. He knows that he can’t even take care of himself.

“Help me, please . . .”

But we knew Steve, at least I did, and I know that he was basically a good kid. He had come to that universal Good Samaritan turning point in his life.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Good . . . Good King Wenceslas looked down . . .”

Sitting here in our sanitary colonials, guarded by legions of little black iron coachboys holding lanterns, guarded by phalanxes of iron flamingos, sitting here in our homes, we can afford not to shudder. We can pretend to see that unvaried night with its road and Steve and wretch. We can delude ourselves into thinking we feel that ginger-ale effervescence at the base of Steve’s spine. We’re not going to have to do anything when Steve’s own voice comes back to him from the swollen throat of the near-corpse by the side of the road, singing his own song.

“Oh, God,” Steve said. His voice broke the occult silence, which was already punctured by cricket calls, bird sounds, and leaf rustles. “What should I do?”

Steve found him in a ditch, this poor guy, beaten and robbed and left to die. Crusts of blood, and dirt, and other

“I... I...”

“Easy, old-timer,” said Steve, “easy there. Don’t try to talk.”

“Beware . . .”

Did you feel another ripple of terror? No? Of course not.

“Beware of what, old-timer?”

The man coughed, the blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth just the way movies have taught us to expect. He told his story haltingly, painfully. He was the last beatnik, the last of the old Gregory Corso school of poets. He was looking for America, too. The rest, ah, it is so evident that it hurts.

“Thus . . . beware . . .”

“Beware what, old-timer?”

“Beware . . . beware . . . be . . .”

The old beatnik’s legs tensed, his back arched, his neck muscles tightened. At last he relaxed and as he slumped back he whispered, “Gremmage.” He let out his last breath with a wheeze, and the Allegheny midnight smoothed itself with silence.

Steve knelt, cradling the corpse in his arms. Perhaps he wept (I like to think that he did); he set the man’s body down again, and closed the dead eyes forever. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he said by way of benediction.

Yes, he could have guessed, and should have, as I did, that Gremmage had done this evil thing. He stood and shouted, loudly into the black etwas of sleeping Pennsylvania. He mourned, and he prayed, more than he had ever prayed before in his aimless life, and he screamed. “Quo vadis, America?” he screamed. Quo vadis, indeed, Steve. Never again would he venture near Gremmage.

Even as his vow echoed from the wooded mountains’ majesty a night-grayed Saab pulled to a stop. A thin, neatly dressed man leaned across the seat and rolled down the window. Gracefully. “Hi there,” he said, smiling. “Need a ride?”

“No.”

“Well, then hop in! Julian’s waiting supper.”

They drove in strained silence for some minutes. At last Steve said. “Which way’s Gremmage?”

“Back the other way, baby.”

“Fine. Keep going.”

The man let him out a short while later. Immediately the Mustang pulled up. The guy and girl in it smiled at Steve. The chick asked, “Going to Gremmage?”

“No,” said Steve.

“Okay, get in.”

He sat in the back seat and discussed old Ian and Sylvia albums until the couple had to leave the main road. Steve got out and was picked up by a little old lady in a red and white Dodge. She was delighted to learn that Steve was a poet. Her late husband had been one, too. Steve recited his poem. When he finished, the old lady turned to him and smiled. “That’s very interesting,” she didn’t say. She didn’t say that at all.

“All right. Here we are: Gremmage!” she said. Steve got out of the car and found a place to sleep.

“Yes,” he swore the next day, “I will learn this town. I will discover every ugly sore it has to hide. I will bring it down about the ears of the Gremmagers. I’ll take care of all of them.”

He took the twelve-dollar guitar from around his neck and put it on the sidewalk. He sat on the curb, his defenses inviolable, waiting for Gremmage to make its first move and its first mistake. When they come to hold me down and cut my hair and beard, I will kick their groins, he thought, I will karate chop their Adam’s apples.

“Hey, kid, you new around here?”

Oh, Steve, he was smiling, the Gremmager was crossing Ridge Street, hand out, smiling, welcome, welcome! Steve! Sometimes you forgot that you knew that you couldn’t take care of yourself.

“You got a place to stay, kid?”

Why, no, he didn’t have a place to stay, hadn’t had a real shower in a while, traveling a lot and all.

“You hungry, kid?”

“Yeah, well, you know. Yeah.”

“Well, come on over to the diner. We’ll buy you lunch. This is a friendly town we got here. Lots of towns around here, they wouldn’t like one of you hippies wandering around and all. But here in Gremmage, why, doggone happy to have you.”

See them now. See Steve hand his guitar up to one of the grinning locals, see him stand, see them all head off down Ridge Street to the diner, about nine Gremmagers and Steve. Can you listen? Can you catch Steve’s nervousness, do you find fear in his words? No? Do you find fear in his bearing, in his easier laugh? No? I told you that he couldn’t take care of himself.

He slides into a booth in the diner. The locals divide, so part of them sit with Steve and part take their own booths. They all look alike to Steve, so he does not find the one with his guitar. It does not matter, he guesses.

And then they talked. The waitress took their order, cheeseburgers and french fries; they laughed when Steve said pop instead of soda (or the other way around). They talked and laughed; the laughter wasn’t forced, it was, beyond doubt, genuine. Steve was surprised, his defenses grew steadily more violable; he sort of liked the Gremmagers. They talked.