Move Under Ground | Page 4

leaves collapsed into a ditch here, a
root grabbed my ankle and set me flying like a jiujitsu move from a
Navy buddy there. I came across a squirrel drowned in a stagnant
puddle, and it looked at me like only a wetsack rodent carcass could.
Don't screw this one up its black pebble eye said to me, and when you
can stare a dead squirrel in the eye and hear it demand a promise from
you while even the mosquitoes hover in the air and wait for your
answer, you know you got some serious headaches ahead.
The highway was white and near-deserted. Big Sur had become a bit of
what some tin-eared newspaperman would call a Mecca for kids
looking for real live Beats and the orgies and nitrous parties that were
always supposed to swirl up from the rot in our wake, but that didn't
last long. Once the newspapermen got wind of it and sectioned our
little land off to sell to the public, the tourists came. And after the
tourists, the families came in their huge station wagons stuffed with
kids screaming for ice cream and white-tile bathrooms and they'd never
stop for you, not for one of those crazy beatniks they'd come to see.
Maybe once in a long while you could catch a ride from a lone man.
They were the same guys who had souped up their wagons and took to
the road at eighty miles an hour, bursting from the wavy horizon just to
see how far they could go without even tapping their brakes. Five years
later though, their paperbacks were in some attic trunk and old poems
ashes and they'd turned to breeding for the goddamn race. No longer

could I catch a ride from these mindslave men, though I occasionally
caught their eyes as they slowed, tempted as they were to pull over,
kick the wife out and load me in for a wild ride up to The City. They
were the guys in the short-sleeved button-up shirts, the men with
sunglasses pushed up to the tops of their noses, with their arms leaning
on the window well of their car doors just to get a little breeze, just so
that they could stare into the sun for a moment longer and forget about
the mortgage and the PTA and their goddamn uncle-in-law the John
Bircher who wanted to set them up fine with a job selling aluminum
siding to their own fellow chained oarsmen. But they drove past and
turned to their little wives and said "Ah, there's one," and left me to
curse on the asphalt.
And it being a hot July afternoon, none of the truckers were ready to
stop for me when they could just pull over three miles uproad and
guzzle down a gallon of ice water or chilled Cokes along with a pork
chop and half a beer, so I put the late-setting sun on my left and started
hoofing north on the bloody balls of my feet, thumb out. I walked on,
waving my thumb at the empty ghost of a road, occasionally swigging
some water from my canteen. It was rough in my bloody boots; now
my ankles were chafed as well. I balanced the rucksack on my head to
keep the sun off of it, but that didn't help, and the straps had already
dug into my shoulders, so I took to swinging it, tossing it twenty yards
in front of me, and then leisurely strolling over just to pick the sack up.
No wonder I wasn't getting any nibbles from the few folks who did
drive by.
It got dark fast; there was hardly any dusk at all. And behind me, I
heard the roar of a convoy, but they weren't old trucks coming my way.
Instead, it was wagons, sedans, curvy Studebakers, and even a few old
crank cars with rumble seats and shivering fabric roofs. Town cars
driving five abreast in tight formation across only two lanes of highway,
eating up the shoulders, headlights suddenly blazing a terrible,
beautiful amber. I cut into the wood and watched them zoom past from
a little ditch I happened to fall into. Above the narrow, mud-stained
alley I was in, the collective purr of the motorcars choked themselves
silent. There were hundreds of cars, it seemed, all stinking of fumes

thick enough to cover the scent of the wet leaves I picked out of my
teeth and ears. I hustled backwards, lost my rucksack, found it again
and fell hard, banging my kneecap like a cymbal. I heard a dozen doors
slam behind me, and limped a bit, rucksack in my arm football-style, to
put some space and trees between me and whoever that horrible Them
was looking for me. The