He drew black borders all around the pages. The letter started out okay, but went downhill. “Sarah moved out and into a rented room,” he wrote. “I reckon I was just too much to handle.” He didn’t explain, but I did my own reckoning. I could imagine that it was Jesse, plus two cats and two dogs, trying to get into a ten-wide-fifty trailer, that got to Sarah. “I think she misses me,” he wrote, “but I expect she’ll have to bear it.”
Then the letter got just awful.
“A pack of wolves came through from Canada,” Jesse wrote. “They picked off old Potato like a berry from a bush. Me and Mike found tracks, and a little blood in the snow.”
I sat in the summery dayroom surrounded by sailors shooting pool and playing Ping-Pong. I imagined the snow and ice of home. I imagined old Potato nosing around in his dumb and happy way, looking for rabbits or lifting his leg. Maybe he even wagged his tail when that first wolf came into view. I sat blinking tears, ready to bawl over a dog, and then I did, and to hell with it.
The world was changing, and it wouldn’t change back. I put in for sea duty one more time, and the chief warrant who ramrodded that motor pool turned it down again. He claimed we kept the world safe by wrenching engines.
“The ’62 Dodge is emerging as the car of choice for people in a hurry.” Matt Simons wrote that in February ’64, knowing I’d understand that nobody could tell which cars would be treasured until they had a year or two on them. “It’s an extreme winter,” he wrote, “and it’s taking its toll on many of us. Mike has now learned not to punch a policeman. He’s doing ten days. Sam Winder managed to roll a Jeep, and neither he nor I can figure out how a man can roll a Jeep. Sam has a broken arm, and lost two toes to frost. He was trapped under the wreck. It took a while to pull him out. Brother Jesse is in the darkest sort of mood. He comes and goes in an irregular manner, but the Linc sits outside the pool hall on most days.
“And for myself,” Matt wrote, “I think, come summer, I’ll drop some revs. My flaming youth seems to be giving way to other interests. A young woman named Nancy started teaching at the school. Until now, I thought I was a confirmed bachelor.”
A postcard came the end of February. The postmark said “Cheyenne, Wyoming,” way down in the southeast corner of the state. It was written fancy. Nobody could mistake that fine, spidery hand. It read:
Road Dog
Run and run as fast as he can,
He can’t find who is the Gingerbread Man
The picture on the card had been taken from an airplane. It showed an oval racetrack where cars chased each other round and round. I couldn’t figure why Jesse sent it, but it had to be Jesse. Then it came to me that Jesse was The Road Dog. Then it came to me that he wasn’t. The Road Dog was too slick. He wrote real delicate, and Jesse only printed real clumsy. On the other hand, The Road Dog didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox. Somehow it had to be Jesse.
“We got snow nut deep to a tall palm tree,” Jesse wrote at about the same time, “and Chip is failing. He’s off his feed. He don’t even tease the kitties. Chip just can’t seem to stop mourning.”
I had bad premonitions. Chip was sensitive. I feared he wouldn’t be around by the time I got back home, and my fear proved right. Chip held off until the first warm sun of spring, and then he died while napping in the shade of the bulldozer. When Jesse sent a quick note telling me, I felt pretty bad, but had been expecting it. Chip had a good heart. I figured now he was with Potato, romping in the hills somewhere. I knew that was a bunch of crap, but that’s just the way I chose to figure it.
They say a man can get used to anything, but maybe some can’t. Day after day, and week after week, California weather nagged. Sometimes a puny little dab of weather dribbled in from the Pacific, and people hollered it was storming. Sometimes temperatures dropped toward the fifties, and people trotted around in thick sweaters and coats. It was almost a relief when that happened, because everybody put on their shirts. In three years, I’d seen more woman skin than a normal man sees in a lifetime, and more tattoos on men. The chief warrant at the motor pool had the only tattoo in the world called “worm’s-eye view of a pig’s butt in the moonlight.”
In autumn ’64, with one more year to pull, I took a two-week leave and headed north just chasing weather. It showed up first in Oregon with rain, and more in Washington. I got hassled on the Canadian border by a distressful little guy who thought, what with the war, that I wanted political asylum.
I chased on up to Calgary, where matters got chill and wholesome. Wind worked through the mountains like it wanted to drive me south toward home. Elk and moose and porcupines went about their business. Red-tailed hawks circled. I slid on over to Edmonton, chased on east to Saskatoon, then dropped south through the Dakotas. In Williston, I had a terrible want to cut and run for home, but didn’t dare.
The Road Dog showed up all over the place, but the messages were getting strange. At a bar in Amidon:
Road Dog
Taking Kentucky Windage
At a hamburger joint in Belle Fourche:
Road Dog
Chasing his tail
At a restaurant in Redbird:
Road Dog
Flea and flee as much as we can
We’ll soon find who is the Gingerbread Man
In a poolroom in Fort Collins:
Road Dog
Home home on derange
Road Dog, or Jesse, was too far south. The Dog had never showed up in Colorado before. At least, nobody ever heard of such.
My leave was running out. There was nothing to do except sit over the wheel. I dropped on south to Albuquerque, hung a right, and headed back to the big city. All along the road, I chewed a dreadful fear for Jesse. Something bad was happening, and that didn’t seem fair, because something good went on between me and the Chrysler. We reached an understanding. The Chrysler came alive and began to hum. All that poor car had ever needed was to look at road. It had been raised among traffic and poodles, but needed long sight distances and bears.
When I got back, there seemed no way out of writing a letter to Matt Simons, even if it was borrowing trouble. It took evening after evening of gnawing the end of a pencil, I hated to tell about Miss Molly, and about the dancing ghost, and about my fears for Jesse. A man is supposed to keep his problems to himself.
At the same time, Matt was educated. Maybe he could give Jesse a hand if he knew all of it. The letter came out pretty thick. I mailed it thinking Matt wasn’t likely to answer real soon. Autumn deepened to winter back home, and everybody would be busy.
So I worked and waited. There was an old White Mustang with a fifth wheel left over from the last war. It was a lean and hungry-looking animal, and slightly marvelous. I overhauled the engine, then dropped the tranny and adapted a ten-speed Roadranger. When I got that truck running smooth as a Baptist’s mouth, the Navy surveyed it and sold it for scrap.
“Ghost cars are a tradition,” Matt wrote toward the back of October, “and I’d be hard-pressed to say they are not real. I recall being passed by an Auburn boat tail about 3:00 a.m. on a summer day. That happened ten years ago. I was about your age, which means there was not an Auburn boat tail in all of Montana. That car died in the early thirties.
“And we all hear stories of huge old headlights overtaking in the mist, stories of Mercers and Duesenbergs and Bugattis. I try to believe the stories are true, because, in a way, it would be a shame if they were not.
“The same for road ghosts. I’ve never seen a ghost who looked like Jesse. The ghosts I’ve seen might not have been ghosts. To paraphrase an expert, they may have been a trapped beer belch, an undigested hamburger, or blowing mist. On the other hand, maybe not. They certainly seemed real at the time.