Next, we came to an obstacle we did have to go around—a stream that looked to be shallow but was at least twenty feet wide. Liz handed me her camera, took off her shoes, tied the laces together, hung them around her neck, and started wading into the creek.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s slippery… and, oops, getting deeper.” On the bank, I saw her slide forward and then slip under the water. I dropped the camera and the bag in the high grass on the bank and waded in. She came up spitting water and I grabbed her, fighting the muck underfoot for traction. We both went down into the water. Back on our feet, soaked through, we slid and slipped back to the bank and sat on a horizontal log.
“Jesus, what a mess,” Liz said.
“Well, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I said, stripping off my shoes and pouring water out of them. I stood up and my suit streamed water. Liz, whose jeans and cotton shirt were plastered to her body, laughed, and shook water out of her hair. *
“Compared to the inaugural trip of the Titanic, it was a terrific idea,” she said. “Well, at least we’ll look like we’ve been through a riot when we get back.”
We retrieved the camera and the bag after a search and walked along the bank of the creek several hundred yards. There, of course, was a wooden bridge.
“It doesn’t look safe,” I said.
“Afraid you’ll get wet?” Liz asked, starting across. The decrepit bridge held her, and I followed, carrying the photo equipment. We clambered up the bank and there, only a few hundred yards distant, was the big four-lane highway.
Naturally, it had a chain link fence to keep farm animals and people from wandering onto the road. Liz dug her toes into the metal lattice and got over with not much trouble, but it took three tries and some tugging by Liz from the top to get me up and over. I sat on the ground, feeling fully my age plus Liz’s. But at last we were on the road.
My watch was still working and showed it had been nearly an hour and a half since we started. The normal copy deadline was gone, but I knew there was still twenty minutes or so to get at least something short into the first edition. I figured we were a minimum of eight miles from the edge of town.
Traffic was heavy but moving fast on the highway. We saw half a dozen cars and trucks carrying people who looked like they might have been at the concert, and two ambulances screamed down the left lane toward town in the first five minutes we stood on the shoulder.
At first, we tried just lifting our thumbs, but no one even slowed. Then we tried waving—I peeled off my wet coat, but it was too dark and too soaked to make much of a flag—and then shouting “Stop!” and “Help!” as well. The cars kept roaring by.
“Wait, give me the bag,” Liz said. “I think I know how to get their attention.” She dug into the main compartment and pulled out the strobe light flash. As the next cluster of cars approached us, she aimed the apparatus diagonally across the road and fired it several times.
One of the cars slowed and a woman, dressed in a psychedelic tee shirt and wild punker hairdo that made her look like a cartoon character who has just stuck a finger into a light socket, gaped out at us.
“Ooo, they’re weird-looking,” she shrilled at the driver. The car pulled away with a screech.
Another car pulled up and a bald-headed man leaned across from the driver’s side.
“Jump in, honey,” he said to Liz. We both started toward the car and the man barked at me, “Not you, turkey. If the lady wants a ride, she’s welcome. You aren’t.”
Liz smiled at the big man. “Thanks, mister. I can guess what I’m welcome for. Stick your ride.”
The traffic was getting heavier, but our luck didn’t seem to be. Liz tried the strobe light trick again and a helmeted motorcyclist pulled over on the shoulder.
“Another lover?” I said.
The cyclist answered by taking off the helmet and letting her long red hair fall over her shoulders. “Trouble?” she asked.
“God, yes,” Liz said. “We need to get to town quick.”
“Well, I can take one of you. You can send somebody back for the other.”
There was no doubt who would go. I wasn’t about to leave Liz alone on that road, and besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted my first ride on the back of a motorcycle. Furthermore, someone would have to process her photos, and there was no assurance that Whine would still be in the office.
Liz climbed on the back of the bike, pulling on the extra helmet that had been strapped to the seat.
“Tell Grace I’ll be in as quick as I can, but if someone can come out in a car it might be faster. Oh, and Liz, be sure he knows it was Shiu out there,” I said.
I started walking along the shoulder toward town, waving at cars as they came up behind me. No dice. I tried using the strobe, but we apparently had run the battery down or else dripped water into it from our soaked clothes.
After about a mile and another thirty minutes of slogging, I came to a lighted interchange and trudged up the off-ramp. It was still country, and I wasted another twenty minutes or so walking each way on the road looking without success for a gas station, a store, or an outdoor phone.
I started back down to the highway on the entrance ramp and heard a wheezing motor behind me. It was an aged pickup truck, which slowed and stopped in response to my frantic waving.
“I’ve got to get to town,” I told the white-haired man behind the wheel. “I’ll give you twenty bucks for a ride to the newspaper office downtown.”
“You a reporter?” the old fellow asked. “Hop in.”
In all, it was about ten miles to the office, and it took us about twenty minutes as he nursed the truck along at a sedate thirty.
But time goes fast when you’re having fun; the old boy asked me how I got stuck on the road in wet clothes and, before waiting for an answer, treated me to a rapid-fire recitation of the sins of the media. He culminated with the statement that it was all the fault of the international-banking, communist-Iranian-Jews, who were using the money from our gasoline to buy up the papers and television stations in order to sap our moral fiber with pornography, health-food craziness, and gun control propaganda. Shooting was too good for them, he announced.
He delivered me to the front door of The Capital Register & Press just after 11:30. When I offered him a soggy twenty-dollar bill, the old man waved it off. “Oh, shoot no, son. t wouldn’t be the Christian thing to take money for helping a traveler in distress.”
I could hear the presses rumbling as I walked around the side of the building to the night door. I squished up the stairs to the newsroom, which was dark except for one big light fixture over the city desk and a dimmer light in Swift’s office.
Grace and Darlington were at the desk. A fifth of Jim Beam, Grace’s “end-of-the-world” bottle (brought out of the drawer only after the desk had worked through big disasters, such as when the Democrats won a state election), was on the desk between them.
Sam’s eyes widened as I approached. “Jesus—you look like the survivor of a sewer cave-in. Did Claggett find you?”
I plopped down in one of the high-tech, ergonomic chairs, probably ruining the upholstery, and accepted a Dixie cup of bourbon. “Did Liz get here all right?”
“Oh sure,” Grace said. “That’s how we knew to send Drew out looking for you on the interstate. Liz took her pictures in to process them, but she was shivering so I told Tandee to stay on and sent her home in a cab. You two really go in for strenuous frolics, don’t you?”
I ignored the crack. “She told you what happened?”
“Yeah, and just in time. I don’t think I could have made Swift stop the first edition if she hadn’t come in when she did. Diana finally found a phone at some farm way the hell and gone in the country just after Liz arrived, and we were able to make some sense out of it. Anyway, we’re rolling with the correct story now.” Grace handed me me a front page dummy. The two big heads read: