Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Page 5

  Then I slept again and when I woke up it was nearly dusk and somewhere a wolf was howling at a new moon rising in the purple sky.

  *

  In the dying light the cut I had made really did look like a grave--the grave of some mythical ogre. Goliath, maybe.

  Never, I told the long hole in the asphalt.

  Please, Elizabeth whispered back. Please . . . for me.

  I got four more Empirin out of the glove compartment and swallowed them down. "For you," I said.

  *

  I parked the Case-Jordan with its fuel tank close to the tank of a bulldozer, and used a crowbar to pry off the caps on both. A 'dozer-jockey on a state crew might get away with forgetting to drop the sand-flaps on his vehicle, but with forgetting to lock the fuel-cap, in these days of $1.05 diesel? Never.

  I got the fuel running from the 'dozer into my loader and waited, trying not to think, watching the moon rise higher and higher in the sky. After awhile I drove back to the cut in the asphalt and started to dig.

  Running a bucket-loader by moonlight was a lot easier than running a jackhammer under the broiling desert sun, but it was still slow work because I was determined that the floor of my excavation should have exactly the right slant. As a consequence, I frequently consulted the carpenter's level I'd brought with me. That meant stopping the loader, getting down, measuring, and climbing up into the peak-seat again. No problem ordinarily, but by midnight my body had stiffened up and every movement sent a shriek of pain through my bones and muscles. My back was the worst; I began to fear I had done something fairly unpleasant to it.

  But that--like everything else--was something I would have to worry about later.

  If a hole five feet deep as well as forty-two feet long and five feet wide had been required, it really would have been impossible, of course, bucket-loader or not--I might just as well have planned to send him into outer space, or drop the Taj Mahal on him. The total yield on such dimensions is over a thousand cubic feet of earth.

  "You've got to create a funnel shape that will suck your bad aliens in," my mathematician friend had said, "and then you've got to create an inclined plane that pretty much mimes the arc of descent."

  He drew one on another sheet of graph paper.

  "That means that your intergalactic rebels or whatever they are only need to remove half as much earth as the figures initially show. In this case--" He scribbled on a work sheet, and beamed. "Five hundred and twenty-five cubic feet. Chicken-feed. One man could do it."

  I had believed so, too, once upon a time, but I had not reckoned on the heat . . . the blisters . . . the exhaustion . . . the steady pain in my back.

  Stop for a minute, but not too long. Measure the slant of the trench.

  It's not as bad as you thought, is it, darling? At least it's roadbed and not desert hardpan--

  I moved more slowly along the length of the grave as the hole got deeper. My hands were bleeding now as I worked the controls. Ram the drop-lever all the way forward until the bucket lay on the ground. Pull back on the drop-lever and shove the one that extended the armature with a high hydraulic whine. Watch as the bright oiled metal slid out of the dirty orange casing, pushing the bucket into the dirt. Every now and then a spark would flash as the bucket slid over a piece of flint. Now raise the bucket . . . swivel it, a dark oblong shape against the stars (and try to ignore the steady throbbing pain in your neck the way you're trying to ignore the even deeper throb of pain in your back) . . . and dump it down in the ditch, covering the chunks of asphalt already there.

  Never mind, darling--you can bandage your hands when it's done. When he's done.

  "She was in pieces," I croaked, and jockeyed the bucket back into place so I could take another two hundred pounds of dirt and gravel out of Dolan's grave.

  How the time flies when you are having a good time.

  *

  Moments after I had noticed the first faint streaks of light in the east I got down to take another measurement of the floor's incline with the carpenter's level. I was actually getting near the end; I thought I might just make it. I knelt, and as I did I felt something in my back let go. It went with a dull little snap.

  I uttered a guttural cry and collapsed on my side on the narrow, slanted floor of the excavation, lips pulled back from my teeth, hands pressing into the small of my back.

  Little by little the very worst of the pain passed and I was able to get to my feet.

  All right, I thought. That's it. It's over. It was a good try, but it's over.

  Please, darling, Elizabeth whispered back--impossible as it would have been to believe once upon a time, that whispering voice had begun to take on unpleasant undertones in my mind; there was a sense of monstrous implacability about it. Please don't give up. Please go on.

  Go on digging? I don't even know if I can walk!

  But there's so little left to do! the voice wailed--it was no longer just the voice that spoke for Elizabeth, if it had ever been; it was Elizabeth. So little left, darling!

  I looked at my excavation in the growing light and nodded slowly. She was right. The bucket-loader was only five feet from the end; seven at most. But it was the deepest five or seven, of course; the five or seven with the most dirt in it.

  You can do it, darling--I know you can. Softly cajoling.

  But it was not really her voice that persuaded me to go on. What really turned the trick was an image of Dolan lying asleep in his penthouse while I stood here in this hole beside a stinking, rumbling bucket-loader, covered with dirt, my hands in flaps and ruins. Dolan sleeping in silk pajama bottoms with one of his blondes asleep beside him, wearing only the top.

  Downstairs, in the glassed-in executive section of the parking garage, the Cadillac, already loaded with luggage, would be gassed and ready to go.

  "All right, then," I said. I climbed slowly back into the bucket-loader's seat and revved the engine.

  *

  I kept on until nine o'clock and then I quit--there were other things to do, and I was running out of time. My angled hole was forty feet long. It would have to be enough.

  I drove the bucket-loader back to its original spot and parked it. I would need it again, and that would mean siphoning more gas, but there was no time for that now. I wanted more Empirin, but there weren't many left in the bottle and I would need them all later today . . . and tomorrow. Oh, yes, tomorrow--Monday, the glorious Fourth.

  Instead of Empirin I took a fifteen-minute rest. I could ill-afford the time, but I forced myself to take it just the same. I lay on my back in the van, my muscles jumping and twitching, imagining Dolan.

  He would be packing a few last-minute items in a Travel-All now--some papers to look over, a toilet kit, maybe a paperback book or a deck of cards.

  Suppose he flies this time? a malicious voice deep inside me whispered, and I couldn't help it--a moan escaped me. He had never flown to L.A. before--always it had been the Cadillac. I had an idea he didn't like to fly. Sometimes he did, though--he had flown all the way to London once--and the thought lingered, itching and throbbing like a scaly patch of skin.

  *

  It was nine-thirty when I took out the roll of canvas and the big industrial stapler and the wooden struts. The day was overcast and a little cooler--God sometimes grants a favor. Up until then I'd forgotten my bald head in consideration of larger agonies, but now, when I touched it with my fingers, I drew them away with a little hiss of pain. I looked at it in the outside passenger mirror and saw that it was a deep, angry red--almost a plum color.

  Back in Vegas Dolan would be making last-minute phone calls. His driver would be bringing the Cadillac around front. There were only about seventy-five miles between me and it, and soon the Cadillac would start to close that distance at sixty miles an hour. I had no time to stand around bemoaning my sunburned pate.

  I love your sunburned pate, dear, Elizabeth said beside me.

  "Thank you, Beth," I said, and began taking the struts over to the hole.

/>   *

  The work was now light compared to the digging I'd done earlier, and the almost unbearable agony in my back subsided to a steady dull throb.

  But what about later? that insinuating voice asked. What about that, hmmmm?

  Later would have to take care of itself, that was all. It was beginning to look as if the trap was going to be ready, and that was the important thing.

  The struts spanned the hole with just enough extra length to allow me to seat them tightly in the sides of the asphalt which formed the top layer of my excavation. This was a job that would have been tougher at night, when the asphalt was hard, but now, at mid-morning, the stuff was sludgy-pliable, and it was like sticking pencils in wads of cooling taffy.

  When I had all the struts in, the hole had taken on the look of my original chalk diagram, minus the line down the middle. I positioned the heavy roll of canvas next to the shallow end of the hole and removed the hanks of rope that had tied it shut.

  Then I unrolled forty-two feet of Route 71.

  Close up, the illusion was not perfect--as stage make-up and set-decoration is never perfect from the first three rows. But from even a few yards away, it was virtually undetectable. It was a dark-gray strip which matched the actual surface of Route 71 exactly. On the far left of the canvas strip (as you faced west) was a broken yellow passing line.

  I settled the long strip of canvas over the wooden understructure, then went slowly along the length of it, stapling the canvas to the struts. My hands didn't want to do the work but I coaxed them.

  With the canvas secured, I returned to the van, slid behind the wheel (sitting down caused another brief but agonizing muscle spasm), and drove back to the top of the rise. I sat there for a full minute, looking down at my lumpy, wounded hands as they lay in my lap. Then I got out and looked back down Route 71, almost casually. I didn't want to focus on any one thing, you see; I wanted the whole picture--a gestalt, if you will. I wanted, as much as possible, to see the scene as Dolan and his men were going to see it when they came over the rise. I wanted to get an idea of how right--or how wrong--it was going to feel to them.

  What I saw looked better than I could have hoped.

  The road machinery at the far end of the straight stretch justified the piles of dirt that had come from my excavation. The asphalt chunks in the ditch were mostly buried. Some still showed--the wind was picking up, and it had blown the dirt around--but that looked like the remnants of an old paving job. The compressor I'd brought in the back of the van looked like Highway Department equipment.

  And from here the illusion of the canvas strip was perfect--Route 71 appeared to be utterly untouched down there.

  Traffic had been heavy Friday and fairly heavy on Saturday--the drone of motors heading into the detour loop had been almost constant. This morning, however, there was hardly any traffic at all; most people had gotten to wherever they intended to spend the Fourth, or were taking the Interstate forty miles south to get there. That was fine with me.

  I parked the van just out of sight over the brow of the rise and lay on my belly until ten-forty-five. Then, after a big milk-truck had gone lumbering slowly up the detour, I backed the van down, opened the rear doors, and threw all the road cones inside.

  The flashing arrow was a tougher proposition--at first I couldn't see how I was going to unhook it from the locked battery box without electrocuting myself. Then I saw the plug. It had been mostly hidden by a hard rubber O-ring on the side of the sign-case . . . a little insurance policy against vandals and practical jokers who might find pulling the plug on such a highway sign an amusing prank, I supposed.

  I found a hammer and chisel in my toolbox, and four hard blows were sufficient to split the O-ring. I yanked it off with a pair of pliers and pulled the cable free. The arrow stopped flashing and went dark. I pushed the battery box into the ditch and buried it. It was strange to stand there and hear it humming down there in the sand. But it made me think of Dolan, and that made me laugh.

  I didn't think Dolan would hum.

  He might scream, but I didn't think he would hum.

  Four bolts held the arrow in a low steel cradle. I loosened them as fast as I could, ears cocked for another motor. It was time for one--but not time for Dolan yet, surely.

  That got the interior pessimist going again.

  What if he flew?

  He doesn't like to fly.

  What if he's driving but going another way? Going by the Interstate, for instance? Today everyone else is . . .

  He always goes by 71.

  Yes, but what if--

  "Shut up," I hissed. "Shut up, damn you, just shut the fuck up!"

  Easy, darling--easy! Everything will be all right.

  I got the arrow into the back of the van. It crashed against the sidewall and some of the bulbs broke. More of them broke when I tossed the cradle in after it.

  With that done, I drove back up the rise, pausing at the top to look behind me. I had taken away the arrow and the cones; all that remained now was that big orange warning: ROAD CLOSED * USE DETOUR

  There was a car coming. It occurred to me that if Dolan was early, it had all been for nothing--the goon driving would simply turn down the detour, leaving me to go mad out here in the desert.

  It was a Chevrolet.

  My heart slowed down and I let out a long, shuddering breath. But there was no more time for nerves.

  I drove back to where I had parked to look at my camouflage job and parked there again. I reached under the jumble of stuff in the back of the van and got the jack. Grimly ignoring my screaming back, I jacked up the rear end of the van, loosened the lug-nuts on the back tire they would see when

  (if)

  they came, and tossed it into the back of the van. More glass broke, and I would just have to hope there had been no damage done to the tire. I didn't have a spare.

  I went back to the front of the van, got my old binoculars, and then headed back toward the detour. I passed it and got to the top of the next rise as fast as I could--a shambling trot was really all I could manage by this time.

  Once at the top, I trained my binoculars east.

  I had a three-mile field of vision, and could see snatches of the road for two miles east of that. Six vehicles were currently on the way, strung out like random beads on a long string. The first was a foreign car, Datsun or Subaru, I thought, less than a mile away. Beyond that was a pick-up, and beyond the pick-up was what looked like a Mustang. The others were just desert-light flashing on chrome and glass.

  When the first car neared--it was a Subaru--I stood up and stuck my thumb out. I didn't expect a ride looking the way I did, and I wasn't disappointed. The expensively coiffed woman behind the wheel took one horrified glance and her face snapped shut like a fist. Then she was gone, down the hill and onto the detour.

  "Get a bath, buddy!" the driver of the pick-up yelled at me half a minute later.

  The Mustang actually turned out to be an Escort. It was followed by a Plymouth, the Plymouth by a Winnebago that sounded as if it were full of kids having a pillow-fight.

  No sign of Dolan.

  I looked at my watch. 11:25 A.M. If he was going to show up, it ought to be very soon. This was prime time.

  The hands on my watch moved slowly around to 11:40 and there was still no sign of him. Only a late-model Ford and a hearse as black as a raincloud.

  He's not coming. He went by the Interstate. Or he flew.

  No. He'll come.

  He won't, though. You were afraid he'd smell you, and he did. That's why he changed his pattern.

  There was another twinkle of light on chrome in the distance. This car was a big one. Big enough to be a Cadillac.

  I lay on my belly, elbows propped in the grit of the shoulder, binoculars to my eyes. The car disappeared behind a rise . . . reemerged. . . slipped around a curve. . . and then came out again.

  It was a Cadillac, all right, but it wasn't gray--it was a deep mint green.

  What fol
lowed was the most agonizing thirty seconds of my life; thirty seconds that seemed to last for thirty years. Part of me decided on the spot, completely and irrevocably, that Dolan had traded in his old Cadillac for a new one. Certainly he had done this before, and although he had never traded for a green one before, there was certainly no law against it.

  The other half argued vehemently that Cadillacs were almost a dime a dozen on the highways and byways between Vegas and L.A., and the odds against the green Caddy's being Dolan's Cadillac were a hundred to one.

  Sweat ran into my eyes, blurring them, and I put the binoculars down. They weren't going to help me solve this one, anyhow. By the time I was able to see the passengers, it would be too late.

  It's almost too late now! Go down there and dump the detour sign! You're going to miss him!

  Let me tell you what you're going to catch in your trap if you hide that sign now: two rich old people going to L.A. to see their children and take their grandkids to Disneyland.

  Do it! It's him! It's the only chance you're going to have!

  That's right. The only chance. So don't blow it by catching the wrong people.

  It's Dolan!

  It's not!

  "Stop it," I moaned, holding my head. "Stop it, stop it."

  I could hear the motor now.

  Dolan.

  The old people.

  The lady.

  The tiger.

  Dolan.

  The old--

  "Elizabeth, help me!" I groaned.

  Darling, that man has never owned a green Cadillac in his life. He never would. Of course it's not him.

  The pain in my head cleared away. I was able to get to my feet and get my thumb out.

  It wasn't the old people, and it wasn't Dolan, either. It was what looked like twelve Vegas chorines crowded in with one old boy who was wearing the biggest cowboy hat and the darkest Foster Grants I'd ever seen. One of the chorines mooned me as the green Cadillac went fishtailing onto the detour.

  Slowly, feeling entirely washed out, I raised the binoculars again.

  And saw him coming.

  There was no mistaking that Cadillac as it came around the curve at the far end of my uninterrupted view of the road--it was as gray as the sky overhead, but it stood out with startling clarity against the dull brown rises of land to the east.

  It was him--Dolan. My long moments of doubt and indecision seemed both remote and foolish in an instant. It was Dolan, and I didn't have to see that gray Cadillac to know it.