John Gardner - October Light

Dancer shook his head. “Lovely.”

Santisillia smiled on. “It used to be, in those days, there’d be convoys of the things, taking the nitro to someplace in Colorado. Fist knew the schedule. There we were, loading up, me and Dusky and Dancer cramming the stuff up in tight little holes, Fist and his apes throwing it in by the forkful, brazen as hell. I just stood there, all amazement. I didn’t know what kind of truck it was, he had a canvas on it at the time he loaded. He drives away in front of us, before it’s even good and dark, and we think we’ve seen the last of him in this Vale of Tears — at least Dancer and me do. Dusky’s not talking, as usual. Bout ten o’clock we pull out and start north. We drive fifteen minutes, with Dusky taking a little nap in back — cool old man with this long woolly hair — he looked like a sheep was growing out of him — and all of a sudden you’d think the whole Mexican army was on us. Blam blam blam! Old car of ours slams into the ditch with fire coming out of her, ready to blow any second, and we jump like a couple of rabbits and yell ‘Hey you got us! Señors, you got us! Surrenderons!’ And we stand on the road with our hands on our heads. Dusky’s gone. No sign of him. He was always like that. Maybe he’d slipped off miles ago. When trouble was around he could smell it. Show up weeks later, and someway talk us into working for him again. So boom, goes the car, and it knocks us fiat on our faces.

“Then out of the bushes comes Fist and his two apes. ‘Get in,’ says Fist, and now I see his truck’s parked under the trees. We start over, both of us, myself and Dancer, but Fist says, ‘Just you,’ and points the heat at me. We stare at him, his face all lit up from our burning car, crazy looking. I look at Dancer. ‘Hey man,’ he says, ‘it’s twenty miles from noplace.’ Far as you can see all there is is those desert bushes and pricklypears and maybe a half-dead burro. ‘Get in,’ Fist says, and he waves the gun. Since I got no choice, I do it. I hear him say behind me, ‘Start runnin, boy.’ I’m scared as hell and I look at the apes. They shake their heads, and when I start to climb out, they grab me. Then I hear the shot and I do climb out, and Fist’s there with the muzzle in my belly. So I got to go with him, and I don’t know if Dancer’s alive or dead. Maybe they’ve finally snuffed even Dusky. As for Dancer, I find out later old Fist just winged him; so crooked he can’t even shoot.

“But I don’t know that then. All I know is we go about fifty kilometers and then Fist pulls into some trees again, and we sit waiting. The apes pull the canvas off the truck and shove it down inside with the pot. Along comes the nitro convoy, pretty soon after that, and now they’ve got me behind the wheel, with the pistol in my ribs, and they make me pull in behind like we’re part of the group. He doesn’t tell me what’s happening — I don’t ask; I’m too scared. ‘Just drive, boy,’ he tells me. ‘Misbehave and I’ll blast your top half off.’ I know he’d do it. He’s decided he needs me because there’s not many white men drive that load. Just Mexicans and blacks. Any time we come near anybody, these three hombres duck down under the dashboard. I decide he’s crazy. Sometimes he even laughs. ‘What do I do when they stop me at the border?’ I say. ‘They won’t,’ he tells me. I think about it. It makes no sense. We drop back from the convoy, Fist’s orders.

After a while, about five kilometers short of the border, we come to a town where something’s happening — crowd of people in the street, lot of broken out windows, some smoke from a fire, bodies and parts of bodies all around, some of ’em children, and of course a big detour. Everybody runs from the truck, screaming and waving. Old Fist peeks through the window, smiles like crazy, ducks down again. When we come to the border, about five kilometers farther on, Fist tells me ‘Talk nice.’ I’m ready. They don’t even put the gate down in front of us, just wave us through. I’m hip by now. How’d you arrange it?’ I say. ‘That truck that blew up.’ ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘I arranged it.’ Man, I believe him.”

Santisillia stopped, smiling as if with admiration, and finished off his coffee. He reached down for the cigar he’d started before.

“Is all this true?” Peter Wagner said, looking over at Fist as he would at, say, a dead animal bloated for a week. He looked at Mr. Goodman. “You went along with it?” He glanced at Jane.

I wasn’t there, she thought of saying.

“You’re crazy, all of you,” Peter Wagner said. There was sweat on his forehead. “I mean, innocent people, harmless villagers — You know that about him and—”

“Now, now,” Santisillia said. He lit the cigar. “They had no choice, you see — Mr. Nit, that is, and Mr. Goodman. They were accessories and, from a narrow, legalistic point of view, horrible vicious smugglers. They had families to think of. Their children’s future. And then too, if they were to turn on their leader and then he should somehow escape the constabulary — vindictive old bastard that they knew him to be …” He smiles as if the whole thing delighted him. “And of course we must understand Captain Fist’s point of view. A ghastly accident of consciousness in an accidental universe …” He let it trail off.

“He should kill himself,” Peter Wagner said.

Santisillia laughed. “Ah, but that was not the direction in which he was predetermined.” He tipped his head back, blew tobacco smoke at the stars.

Peter Wagner leaned forward a little, studying Jane as if to understand Santisillia by means of her expression. She smiled unhappily to herself and she knew she could be no help — indeed, had no wish to be. She’d stopped thinking about it. Men were forever worrying unanswerable questions. She got up to get their plates, ducking away from the smoke of the fire, and, when she’d collected them, carried them back to scrape into the flames. She kneeled, set the plates in a pile — she’d wash them later — and poured herself another cup of coffee. The fire troubled the rock walls with shadows like bad dreams.

Peter Wagner said to Santisillia, “You don’t believe all this. You said yourself, he sold his soul to the Devil.”

“Ah, Peter,” Santisillia said with a smile, “you know there’s no god, no devil.”

“Shit,” Dancer said.

Peter Wagner turned his head away. He wiped sweat from his forehead and compressed his wide lips, glancing left and right like a cornered rabbit. He knew there was something he had to figure out, but he was drunk and high, too foggy to get it straight.

Jane lit a cigarette, indifferent to it all, and held the marijuana in her lungs. At last she lay back on the flat stone and looked at the stars. Still no movement in the sky, no sign of life. The ground was cool now. The fire had burned down to coals, so that the walls had only a faint glow.

Santisillia said, “Everything’s got to be an accident unless you decide there are gods and devils. We do nothing. Peter Wagner’s uncle plows out snow and saves freezing people by pure accident, because he’s caught in the Sundayschool bag, or his father was a doctor, or God knows what. Captain Fist does all these ungodly things because it happened to rain all through his childhood, or his father was a drunk, or he’s an XXY, or his blood’s deficient in, say, riboflavin. So everybody’s a machine, an automaton, unless you decide there are gods and devils and there’s some magic way they can get to you.”

“Luther, are you telling me there are gods and devils?” Peter Wagner said.

“There are no laws but the laws of science,” Mr. Nit said.

Dancer looked disgusted. “Shit man, gwon down where you come from.”