The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

As it happens, “Joe Lee” is a departure for MacDonald. It is not science fiction—unless you use the label in the Bradbury sense:

“Q. Are you attracted to science fiction because in a sense you are setting up your own standards, your own world, peopled by creatures of your imagination?

“A. . . . Science has raped as well as lovingly seeded our land. We are the natural children of that seeding and that ungentle rape. This is a science-fictional time. ... I am attracted, therefore, to my time, not to science fiction per se, but rather to the fantastic mechanistic elements that explode, implode, and drive the machineries of our existence. Science fiction in these circumstances is simple exhalation after decades of breathing in.”—from an interview in Show, Dec., 1964.

“Tonight,” Sergeant Lazeer said, “we get him for sure.”

We were in a dank office in the Afaloosa County Courthouse in the flat wetlands of south central Florida. I had come over from Lauderdale on the half chance of a human interest story that would tie in with the series we were doing on the teen-age war against the square world of the adult.

He called me over to the table where he had the county map spread out. The two other troopers moved in beside me.

“It’s a full moon night and he’ll be out for sure,” Lazeer said, “and what we’re fixing to do is bottle him on just the right stretch, where he got no way off it, no old back-country roads he knows like the shape of his own fist. And here we got it.” He put brackets at either end of a string-straight road.

Trooper McCullum said softly, “That there, Mister, is a eighteen mile straight, and we cruised it slow, and you turn off it, you’re in the deep ditch and the black mud and the ‘gator water.”

Lazeer said, “We stake out both ends, hide back good with lights out. We got radio contact, so when he comes, whistling in either end, we got him bottled.”

He looked up at me as though expecting an opinion, and I said, “I don’t know a thing about road blocks, Sergeant, but it looks as if you could trap him.”

“You ride with me, Mister, and we’ll get you a story.”

“There’s one thing you haven’t explained, Sergeant. You said you know who the boy is. Why don’t you just pick him up at home?”

The other trooper, Frank Gaiders said, “Because that fool kid ain’t been home since he started this crazy business five, six months ago. His name is Joe Lee Cuddard, from over to Lasco City. His folks don’t know where he is, and don’t much care, him and that Farris girl he was running with, so we figure the pair of them is off in the piney woods someplace, holed up in some abandoned shack, coming out at night for kicks, making fools of us.”

“Up till now, boy,” Lazeer said. “Up till tonight. Tonight is the end.”

“But when you’ve met up with him on the highway,” I asked, “you haven’t been able to catch him?”

The three big, weathered men looked at each other with slow, sad amusement, and McCullum sighed, “I come the closest. The way these cars are beefed up as interceptors, they can do a dead honest hundred and twenty. I saw him across the flats, booming to where the two road forks come together up ahead, so I floored it and I was flat out when the roads joined, and not over fifty yards behind him. In two minutes he had me by a mile, and in four minutes it was near two, and then he was gone. That comes to a hundred and fifty, my guess.”

I showed my astonishment. “What the hell does he drive?”

Lazeer opened the table drawer and fumbled around in it and pulled out a tattered copy of a hot-rodder magazine. He opened it to a page where readers had sent in pictures of their cars. It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen. Most of it seemed to be bare frame, with a big chromed engine. There was a teardrop-shaped passenger compartment mounted between the big rear wheels, bigger than the front wheels, and there was a tail-fin arrangement that swept up and out and then curved back so that the high rear ends of the fins almost met.

“That engine,” Frank Gaiders said, “it’s a ‘61 Pontiac, the big one he bought wrecked and fixed up, with blowers and special cams and every damn thing. Put the rest of it together himself. You can see in the letter there, he calls it a C.M. Special. C.M. is for Clarissa May, that Farris girl he took off with. I saw that thing just one time, oh, seven, eight months ago, right after he got it all finished. We got this magazine from his daddy. I saw it at the Amoco gas in Lasco City. You could near give it a ticket standing still. ‘Strawberry flake paint’ it says in the letter. Damnedest thing, bright strawberry with little like gold flakes in it, then covered with maybe seventeen coats of lacquer, all rubbed down so you look down into that paint like it was six inches deep. Headlights all the hell over the front of it and big taillights all over the back, and shiny pipes sticking out. Near two year he worked on it. Big racing flats like the drag-strip kids use over to the airport.”

I looked at the coarse-screen picture of the boy standing beside the car, hands on his hips, looking very young, very ordinary, slightly self-conscious.

“It wouldn’t spoil anything for you, would it,” I asked, “if I went and talked to his people, just for background?”

“Long as you say nothing about what we’re fixing to do,” Lazeer said. “Just be back by eight-thirty this evening.”

Lasco City was a big brave name for a hamlet of about five hundred. They told me at the sundries store to take the west road and the Cuddard place was a half mile on the left, name on the mailbox. It was a shacky place, chickens in the dusty yard, fence sagging. Leo Cuddard was home from work and I found him out in back, unloading cinder block from an ancient pickup. He was stripped to the waist, a lean, sallow man who looked undernourished and exhausted. But the muscles in his spare back writhed and knotted when he lifted the blocks. He had pale hair and pale eyes and a narrow mouth. He would not look directly at me. He grunted and kept on working as I introduced myself and stated my business.

Finally he straightened and wiped his forehead with his narrow arm. When those pale eyes stared at me, for some reason it made me remember the grisly reputation Florida troops acquired in the Civil War. Tireless, deadly, merciless.

“That boy warn’t no help to me, Mister, but he warn’t no trouble neither. The onliest thing on his mind was that car. I didn’t hold with it, but I didn’t put down no foot. He fixed up that old shed there to work in, and he needed something, he went out and earned up the money to buy it. They was a crowd of them around most times, helpin’ him, boys workin’ and gals watchin’. Them tight-pants girls. Have radios on batteries set around so as they could twisty dance while them boys hammered that metal out. When I worked around and overheared ‘em, I swear I couldn’t make out more’n one word from seven. What he done was take that car to some national show, for prizes and such. But one day he just took off, like they do nowadays.”

“Do you hear from him at all?”

He grinned. “I don’t hear from him, but I sure God hear about him.”

“How about brothers and sisters?”

“They’s just one sister, older, up to Waycross, Georgia, married to an electrician, and me and his stepmother.”

As if on cue, a girl came out onto the small back porch. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Advanced pregnancy bulged the front of her cotton dress. Her voice was a shrill, penetrating whine. “Leo? Leo, honey, that can opener thing just now busted clean off the wall.”