He seemed to be driving down an incline in a sort of park. Probably it wasn’t a party as he’d first suspected. Probably it was the Columbus, Nebraska, Tourist Information Center. But open at night? Jesus, what a town! What a live wire, go-to-hell-god-damn-it town!
Then he was perhaps a hundred or so feet from the lights and in a kind of circular parking lot. He parked and took his flashlight and walked toward the lights.
It was not until he was almost upon them that he saw that they were not electric lights at all, that he saw that they were flickering, that he saw that they were flames, that he saw that they bloomed like two bright flowers from twin pots sunk into the ground, that he saw that they were set beside a brass plaque, that he saw the inscription on the plaque and read that these twin combustions were eternal flames in memory of the dead and missing Columbus Nebraskans of World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam.
“Oh,” he groaned aloud, “oh God, oh my God, oh my, my God, oh, oh.” And he wept, and his weeping was almost as much for those Columbus Nebraskans as it was for himself. His cheerfulness before, his elevated mood, was it the euphoria? Was it? No, it couldn’t have been. It was too soon. Maybe it was only his hope. He hoped it was his hope. Maybe that’s all it was and not the euphoria. Feel, feel his tears. He was not euphoric now. His disappointment? No, no, disappointment could not disappoint euphoria. No. He was sad and depressed, so he was still well. Hear him moan, feel his tears, how wet. Taste them, how salty. He remembered, as he was admonished by the inscription on the plaque, the dead soldiers and sailors and marines and coast guardsmen of Columbus who had died in the wars to preserve his freedom. He remembered good old Tanner, dead himself perhaps in Rapid City General, and the father of the kid — though he’d only heard about him — who started his car for him, the man with the heart attack. He prayed that the lie he’d told was true, that the boy’s father’s cardiograms had stabilized. (He was sorry he’d lied to the boy. See? He was sorry. He felt bad. How’s that euphoric?) He recalled the boy himself, the broken-field runner.
“Oh, Christ,” he said, “I, I am the broken-field runner. I, Flesh, am the broken broken-field runner and tomorrow I will look at the map and see where I must go to stop this nonsense and wait out this spell of crazy weather.”
Except for the eternal flames, Columbus was black till the sun rose.
So it was not the first time he was fooled. Nor the last.
The last — he stayed on three days in Hays, Kansas, because in the morning the power came back on; he was very tired, exhausted; he needed the rest — was the evening of the day he decided to leave Hays. At five o’clock the power failed again. Rested — he felt he could drive at night once more — he climbed back into the Cadillac and returned to Interstate 70. His gas cans — screw the hick pumps, he’d decided, and had accumulated the twelve cans by then and had had them filled — were in the trunk, his grips and garment bags again on the backseat. He’d eaten at the motel and was ready for the long drive west. (He’d decided to go to Colorado Springs.)
After the layover in Hays it was pleasant to be back on the highway again, pleasant to be driving in the dark, pleasant to be showered, to wear fresh linen, to be insulated from the heat wave in the crisp, sealed environment of the air-conditioned car, to read the soft illuminated figures on the dash, the glowing rounds and ovals like electric fruit.
He leaned forward and turned on the radio, fiddled with the dial that brought up the rear speakers, and blended the sound with those in front. His push buttons, locked in on New York and Chicago stations, yielded nothing but a mellow — he’d adjusted the treble, subordinating it to the bass — static, not finally unpleasant, reassuring him of the distant presence of energies, of storms, far off perhaps but hinting relief. He listened for a while to the sky and then turned the manual dial, surgical — and painful, too; this was his right hand — as a ham, fine tuning, hoping to hone a melody or a human voice from the smear of sound. It was not yet nine o’clock but there was nothing — only more sky.
But of course. I’m on FM, he realized when he had twice swung the dial across its keyboard of wavelength. He switched to AM and moved the dial even more slowly. Suddenly, somewhere in the soprano, a voice broke in commandingly, overriding the static and silence. Flesh turned up the treble. It was a talk show, the signal so firm that Ben assumed — he had left Kansas and crossed the Colorado line — it was Denver.
“The Dick Gibson Show. Go ahead, please, you’re on the air.”
“Hello?”
“Hello. Go ahead, please.”
“Am I on the air? I hear this guy.”
“Sir, turn your radio down.”
“I can hear this guy talking. Hello? Hello?”
“Turn your radio down or I’ll have to go to another caller.”
“Hello?”
“We’ll go to a commercial.”
There was a pause. Then this announcement:
“Tired of your present job? Do you find the routine boring and unchallenging? Are you underpaid or given only the most menial tasks? Then a job with the Monsanto Company may be just what you’re looking for. Monsanto Chemical has exciting openings with open-ended opportunities for men and women who have had two years’ experience in the field of Sensory Physiology or at least one year of advanced laboratory work in research neurophysiology. Preferential treatment will be given to qualified candidates with a background in ethnobotany and experimental cell biology, and we are particularly interested in specialists holding advanced degrees in such areas as the determination of crystal structures by X-ray analysis, kinetics and mechanism, or who have published widely in the fields of magnetic resonance, molecular orbital theory, quantum chemistry, and the nuclear synthesis of organic compounds. Applicants will be expected to have a high degree of competence in structure and spectra and advanced statistical mechanics. Monsanto is an equal-opportunity employer.”
“The Dick Gibson Show. You’re on the air, go ahead, please.”
“Dick?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dick, I’ve had this fabulous experience and I want to share it with your audience. I mean it’s a believe-it-or-not situation, a one-in-a-million thing. It’s practically a miracle. Can I share this with your audience, Dick?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Yes. Thank you. Well, to begin at the beginning, I’m a brother.”
“A brother.”
“Yeah. But you see my parents split up when I was still a little kid and then my mom died and my father was too sick to take care of us, so my brother and me were farmed out to different relatives. What I mean is, I went with my mother’s sister, my aunt, but she couldn’t take care of the both of us so my brother went with an older cousin. I was six and my brother he must have been around eight at the time. Well, my aunt married a soldier and they adopted me legally and he was transferred and we pulled up our roots and we moved with him, and I was, you know, what do they call it, an army brat, going from post to post with my aunt and my new father, the corporal. He was a thirty-year man and we like traveled all over, pulling up our roots every three years or so, and when I was old enough to leave the nest I got a job with this company, and as time went on I met a girl and we dated for a while and finally we decided to get married. Now we have children of our own, a boy seven and a cute little girl four.
“Well, sir, I’m with the J. C. Penney store, and I made a good record and Penney’s opened up a new store in the suburbs and about a year ago my department head asked me if I’d consider moving to the new store with the idea in mind that I could train the new kitchen-appliance salesmen and be the head of the department and run my own ship. Well, of course when an opportunity like that opens up, you jump at it. Opportunity knocks but once, if you know what I mean.”