I don’t want to see all you people so scared, it drives me nuts, it makes me mad. I’ll take it.
That kid — some joker shot him off his water buffalo — I’ll take care of that for you, junior.
Napalm burns, no problem — just put it on here.
Straighten up, pops. That’s O.K., brother. Well I can’t explain it to you but it’s easy for me.
“All you people,” Hicks shouted, “Let it go! Let it go, you hear! I’m out here now. I got it.”
They must know I’m out here now, he thought, they must be feeling it.
“Everybody! Everywhere! Close your eyes and let it go. You can’t take it — you don’t have to take it anymore. I’ll do it all.
“You see me walking? You see me stepping out here? No — it doesn’t bother me a bit.”
No I don’t require any assistance, beautiful, I do it all myself. That’s what I’m here for.
Got it. Got it all now.
So there was always a reason, he thought. There had always been a reason. You never know until the moment comes and there it is. He walked along and the triangle dissolved. There was no need for it.
In the course of things Marge would be there; he was pleased that he had not forgotten her. He wanted Con verse too, Converse had always sold him short, always put him down a little. But he would understand it.
He loved them both — they would understand it and as lonely a business as it had to be, you wanted people sometimes, people who would understand it.
I don’t know how it works, he told them, I do it because I can do it — it’s as simple as that.
What are you carrying? someone asked.
“Pain, man. Everybody’s. Yours too, if you only knew it.” What’s the weapon for? What’s in the bag? The bag. “It’s mine,” Hicks said. “I carry that too.” It’s not necessary now. It’s not necessary but it’s mine. All right then. Maybe it’s not so simple. He reached behind his right shoulder and felt for the strap.
Can’t get it off. Doesn’t matter. Let’s just say I carry what I carry and leave it at that.
It’s not so simple because there are as many illusions as there are grains of sand in the goofy mountains and every one of them is lovable. The mind is a monkey.
The bastards, he thought, now they’ll take it back.
Let them take it back then. Let them have all the illusion back. Strip it down, we’ll have it whole. The answer is the thing itself.
So much for the pain carrier.
So much for the lover, the samurai, the Zen walker. The Nietzschean. Take it all back. Look, he told them, I can love those birds up there as much as anything in life. I don’t need your charity.
After a while, he could no longer see the birds and he began to be frightened again. I am not my five senses, he thought. I am not this thought. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow…
Belay that. In the end, there was only the tracks. That’s enough, he said, to himself, I can dig tracks.
Out of spite, out of pride, he counted the crossties aloud. He counted hundreds and hundreds of them. When he had to stop, he leaned his head on his rifle and held to the blazing rail with his strong right hand.
_
THE ROAD SOUTH AND WEST RAN BETWEEN YELLOW HILLS, dappled with stands of live oak like fairy forts.
An hour after sunrise, they came to a diner with drawn black shades across its windows and three dusty pumps out front. Converse pulled in and sounded the horn. After a minute or so, an old man wearing a holstered pistol on his belt came out and filled their tank, and watched Converse spark the wires.
“It’s all different over here,” Converse said, when they were riding again. “You’d never guess that place was back there.”
Marge wiped her nose on a corner of the quilt she had gathered around her.
“Are you badly?” Converse asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said, “it can’t be all that bad then.”
He was so tired that he could barely keep his hands on the wheel. He talked to keep himself awake. “We might try going south,” he said, “we’re so close to the border.”
But the border was not the way. They would get lost in the desert going overland, and if they drove south of the frontier zone the Mexicans would demand all manner of automobile registration and put stickers everywhere.
“Maybe east,” he said. But east was desolation, a day and a half of dry barrens to be chased across.
“Do we know anyone in San Diego?” he asked Marge.
“I don’t.”
“I like the idea of San Diego. If we get that far.”
“He wants us to pick him up.”
Converse was certain there would be no flats, no place where tracks crossed the road. The clarity of freshness of the dawn had encouraged him to aspire toward a reality in which there was no place for such corners.
“Why does this shit happen to me?” he asked Marge.
“Do I like it?”
“You manage to handle it,” she said.
“Handle it?” He was outraged.
“One thing I hate,” he told her, “is tough-mindedness. It repels me.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, my father was working in Twenty-One.” Marge stirred in pain and turned her face toward the window. She had heard about it before.
“He kept the papers away from me when he came home. He never told me about it. He thought it would upset me.”
“He was a nice guy,” Marge said.
“Yes, he was. He was a very sensitive man. He never saw a light-up hidden valley, or an Elephant Bomb. Neither did his father. He would never have imagined such things.”
“He’s lucky he’s dead,” Marge said.
“They say the world is coming to an end. They say that’s why it’s so fucked up.”
“Wishful thinking,” Marge said. “The world will go on for a million years.”
At the mention of a million years, Converse nearly fell asleep at the wheel. He caught himself in time and kept them on the road.
As they drove farther, the hills were lower and dryer — before long there were no more oaks to be seen and no more yellow grass. At last, the land was flat on both sides of the road, and they came to a grassless plain of mesquite and creosote bushes that stretched northward to the brown rims of the mountains. The outer ridges were steep and spired, capped with wind-worn fantasies that gave jagged edge to the horizon line. After several miles, they came to narrow tracks crossing the paved road. The tracks led northward into the emptiness, toward the ridge.
Converse stopped the car and climbed out. There was no one in sight, no other cars on the road in either direction. He leaned his folded arms on the square hood and put his head down.
“Listen to it,” he said, when he had raised his head again, “it’s incredible.”
Marge shook her head impatiently.
“What?” she asked, almost pleadingly.
“The silence of it,” he said. “It comes out of nothing to nowhere.” Marge got out and looked down the line of tracks. “He’s walking out there.”
“I don’t believe it, do you?”
“Yes,” she said. Converse got back in the Land-Rover. “O.K. then. Let’s get him.” She walked back to the vehicle and looked down at him in pity.
“Look,” she said. “You could have gotten out. You were driving — you could have gone to a bus stop. You could have stayed back at that filling station.”
“Don’t trifle with me,” Converse said. “We’ll see if he’s out there. We’ve got nothing better to do.”
She got in.
“He’ll have the dope.”
“I daresay he will. And you’ll like that, won’t you? Because you can use some.”