Philip Dick - In Milton Lumky Territory

“How did you happen to meet her?” his father asked.

He gave him a meager account.

“Then she’s from Boise,” his father said, pleased. “Not Reno.”

If they find out that she was my fifth grade teacher, he thought, they’ll probably want the thousand dollars back. At that, he laughed.

In the kitchen his mother was showing Susan a set of hideous ornate dishes that a friend had sent her from Europe, and Susan was exclaiming at their beauty. He began to feel a little more relaxed.

On the drive back home he stopped in downtown Boise at a drugstore, telling Susan that he wanted to pick up cigarettes. What he actually bought was a box of envelopes and some three-cent stamps. He put the check into an envelope and addressed it to himself and Susan, stuck a stamp on it, and gave it to the clerk to mail for him.

“What was your parents’ reaction to me?” Susan asked several times on the trip.

“We’ll see,” he said. He had not told her about the check.

“How do you mean, ‘We’ll see’?”

“If they liked you,” he said, “they’ll express it concretely. With people like that, old-fashioned rural people, there’s nothing to interpret. They’ll give you their reaction; you’ll know.”

“I wondered,” she said. “Because I couldn’t tell a thing. Your mother was sweet and upset and he was polite, but I couldn’t tell how much they meant it.”

The next day the envelope with his father’s check arrived at the store. He opened it and showed it to Susan.

“See?” he said. “They approve.”

Transfixed, she said, “Bruce, it saves our lives. Look what you can get at dealer’s cost with that.” It brought about a genuine change in her morale; for the rest of the day she planned and schemed and considered an infinite number of future solutions. “What grand people they are,” she said to him. “We should write to them or even go back out there and thank them personally. I feel so odd—but I guess it’s all right to accept it.”

“Sure it is,” he said.

“Why don’t I call them on the phone and thank them?”

He said, “Let me do it.”

With the thousand dollars cash he was able to assure the loan from the bank. It came through at the end of the month; now he had twenty-five hundred dollars with which to buy goods to sell. But he still did not know what to buy. He put the money into an account that would draw four percent interest, and the interest on the total was not much less than the interest due on the fifteen-hundred dollar bank loan.

But I have to find a warehouse full of something soon, he realized. Or borrowing and begging this money will have been a mistake. As of now we’re making nothing; we’ll have to start dipping into the account to pay our monthly bills.

Maybe I’ll wind up using the money to meet the monthly payments due on the loan. That would be a novel way of doing business.

By now he had scouted the Boise area and found nothing. To Susan he said, “I think I’ll have to get out on the road.”

“To where?” she said. “You mean a long trip?”

“Maybe to L.A. Or to Salt Lake City. Or Portland. Some place where I can find something warehoused. I can’t let that money sit.”

He began to make calls long-distance, trying to scout something in advance.

Two days later he had the Merc entirely lubed and checked over, its tires rotated, and then, with a suitcase in the trunk, he set off by himself on Highway 26, going west into Oregon and California.

The first stretch of driving brought him entirely through Oregon and into the northern-most part of California. Turning south he passed through Klamath Falls, through the border station, and then made the difficult drive past Mount Shasta and along the twisting grades near Dunsmuir in the deepest part of the lumber country, with lakes and fast-moving water always within sight.

Early in the morning he left the mountainous lumber country and came out onto furiously-hot flat valley farmland. Worn out, he pulled off the road at the first motel.

The motel amounted to nothing more than shack-like cabins facing one another in two lines, with gravel strewn about, and giant century plants at the office door. In a pair of lawn chairs a middle-aged couple slept, shaded by a beach umbrella. Several cars had pulled off the road and parked. He saw and heard a few children scratching in the dust in the shadows by a cabin porch.

However, he had already shut off his motor. After haggling with the motel owner he made his regular deal: use of the cabin for a period of eight hours for a dollar and a half. His tenancy did not entitle him to bathe, or to get into the bed, but he could wash his face, use the hand towel but not the bath towel, lie on the bed without throwing back the covers or touching the sheets, and naturally he could make use of the potty. At eight in the morning he locked up his car, entered the badly-ventilated cabin, and lay down for his nap.

At four in the afternoon the owner woke him. A number of cars had begun to show up, and the cabin was needed. He collected his watch, which he had taken off, and his shoes, and padded groggily outside into the still-blinding sunlight. As soon as he was out, the owner’s wife hurried in with a fresh hand towel and soap.

“Any place around here I can eat?” he asked the owner, a short balding cross-looking man.

“There’s a coffee shop and gas station about ten miles farther on,” the man said, striding off to greet a Plymouth full of people that had come crunching over the gravel toward the motel office.

Bruce got back into his car, started up the engine, and drove back onto the road.

When he spied the coffee shop he drove up to the pumps of the gas station, told the attendant to fill the tank, and, leaving the car there, jogged across the highway to the coffee shop. While he ate a meal of meatloaf with gravy, canned peas, coffee and berry pie, he watched the attendant checking the water and tires and battery.

Lighting a cigarette he sat at his empty plate, conscious of his loneliness.

The all-night drive had not given him any pleasure. The glare of oncoming headlights had bothered him more than usual. And the straining, hour by hour, to stay awake and see each of the reflector-posts that indicated bends. He had played the car radio all night, hearing mostly static and indistinct snatches of popular tunes from stations too far off to be identified. They floated in and out. Faint voices of announcers, speaking from other states, selling products for stores that he would never see.

And of course he had run over a variety of running shapes, some of them rabbits, some possibly snakes and lizards. And just at sunup two brilliantly-colored birds had flitted directly in front of him and then vanished. Later, at a gas station, when he had raised the hood, he had found both birds dead and crushed at the bottom of the radiator. He had been unable to avoid any of the things he ran over, and that depressed him. He could not drive the highway without killing one small animal after another. And the number of already-dead animals, flattened out on the pavement ahead of him, exceeded all count.

At night, on the highway, he passed through closed-up towns in which not a single light had been left on. Those towns alarmed him. No persons, no motion. Not even cars parked at the gray-dark shops. The gas stations empty and deserted, too; a terrible sight for the driver to see. But sooner or later a lit-up gas station put in an appearance, often with one or more giant diesel trucks parked nearby with motors on, the drivers inside the cafe eating roast beef sandwiches. Spot of yellow light, with jukebox going, washroom standing door-ajar, gleaming white tiles and bowl, paper towels, mirror. Entering, he had washed his face, and looked out past the open door, at the lumber forest. At the flat blackness outside the washroom. How lonely it all was. How silent.