But his body — he’d been sick, he’d been in hospital, M.S. was a stress disease — couldn’t adjust to the new hours and he had to return to the old pattern of traveling the highways during the day, thinking to change directions when the radio told him of the brownouts in western Nebraska — he’d been heading for Wyoming, for the high country, mountains, as if electricity followed the laws of gravity, pushing his Cadillac uphill (but that wasted gas, too, didn’t it?) toward the headwaters of force — and drop toward Kansas. He couldn’t decide. Then, on Interstate 80, he saw detour signs spring up sudden as targets in skeet, the metal diamonds of early warning. He slammed his brakes, slowed to fifty, forty, twenty-five, ten, as the road turned to gravel and dirt at the barricades and the traffic merged two ways. A tall girl in an orange hard hat stood lazily in the road holding up a heavy sign that said SLOW. Her bare arms, more heavily muscled than his own, rubbed death in his face. He yearned for her, her job, her indifference, her strength, her health. He stopped the car and got out. “Tell me,” he said, “are you from west of here or east?”
“What? Get back in your car, you’re tying up traffic.”
“Where do you live? West, east?”
“Get back in that car or I’ll drive it off into a field for you.”
“Look,” he said, “all I want…” She raised her arms, lifting her sign high and plunging its metal shaft into the earth, where it quivered for a moment and then stayed, stuck there like an act of state.
“You want to try me?” she threatened.
“I want to know if they’ve still got power west of here.”
“Power’s all out west of here. Get back in your car.” He lowered his eyes and returned to his car and, going forward slowly and slowly back, made a U-turn in the dirt and gravel narrows.
“Hey,” the tall girl shouted. “What the hell—”
On the sixth day, on Interstate 70, between Russell and Hays — the radio was silent — he looked out the window and was cheered to see oil rigs — he remembered what they were called: “donkey pumps”—pumping up oil from the farmers’ fields, the ranchers’. The pumps drove powerful and slow as giant pistons, turning like the fat metal gear on locomotives just starting up. Ridiculous things in the open field, spaced in apparent random, some almost at the very edge of the highway, that dipped down toward the ground and up again like novelty birds into glasses of water. Abandoned, churning everywhere unsupervised and unattended for as far as he could see, they gave him an impression of tremendous reservoirs of power, indifferent opulence, like cars left standing unlocked and keys in the ignition. There was no brownout here. (Of course, he thought, priorities: oil for the lamps of Asia, for the tanks and planes of political commitment and intervention. Flesh was apolitical but nothing so drove home to him the sense of his nation’s real interests as the sight of these untended donkey pumps in these obscure Kansas fields. Wichita had been without electricity for two days while the thirsty monsters of vacant west central Kansas used up enough to sustain a city of millions.) He pulled off the Interstate at Hays and went up the exit ramp, heading for the Texaco station, the sign for which, high as a three-story building, he had seen a mile off, a great red star standing in the daylight.
It wasn’t open.
He crossed the road and drove to the entrance of a Best Western Motel. He went inside. The lobby was dark. At the desk, the cashier was preparing a guest’s bill by hand. “Is that what you get?” They checked the addition together.
“I guess,” the man said.
“Did you want to register, sir?” the clerk asked Ben.
“What’s happening? Why are the lights out? Is your air conditioning working? The TV? What about the restaurant? Will I be able to get a hot meal? Is there iced coffee?”
“There’s a power failure,” the clerk said. “We can put you up but I’m afraid all the electric is out. You’ll have to pay by credit card because we can’t get into the register to make change.”
“But the pumps,” Ben said. “All those pumps are going. I saw them myself. There can’t be a brownout. What about those pumps?”