Johnny Rolfe

We’re on a thing that once was called Route 5. The autumn storms are fierce down here. We’ve put the rag top up on the jeep but it leaks. I’m driving north without the girl I love. Martin lies across the bloodied back seat and since he now takes up so little room Dick Buck can sit by him and cauterize his wounds. In the shotgun seat, Smith contemplatively holds his own injured left arm with his uninjured right arm. Who among us isn’t almost Martin now: woozy, incredulous, legless, enraged? “Who the hell’d you think you were, Tarzan?” Dick Buck says to him—or me—cackles unhappily, zips the back flap up, and turns again to Martin, who is hardly Martin any more, and yet more Martin than before. Bucky Breck drives our other car with four more hobbled or terrified men. Ratcliffe’s dead, to say the least. The bikes we threw in the creek. It’s done.

High, bright headlights coming toward us blind me through the rain. Behind them I can dimly see a long gray box on wheels. “Who the hell is that?” I say.

Smith says, “That’s a New York truck.”

“How do you know?”

“How many New York trucks are there? Don’t drive past them.”

I brake and so does the truck. Out of the truck steps a pimp and layabout—who among us isn’t both?—called Sal Argyle in a black rainsuit and matching broadbrimmed hat. I knew him vaguely in New York and may with lots of luck know him only vaguely someday there again. He walks up to the jeep and opens the flap a crack.

“You guys look like crap.”

Smith leans over me and says, “Where the hell you been?”

“Got a flat in Dover.”

“For a month?”

“They had good weed.”

“You have arms?”

“Some.”

“Supplies?”

“Some.”

“What does ‘some’ mean?”

“It means I traded some for weed.”

The rain that came in through the crack in the flap has soaked me by now and lightly burns my skin. Argyle, tall and thin, clings to the frame of the jeep so as not to be blown down the road by the wind. Smith jumps out. I thought he’d flatten Argyle but he evidently doesn’t want to waste the time. They walk back to the truck and seem to be climbing into it. On the back seat, Martin lets out a long moan. Dick Buck and I don’t talk but I think we both know what a grim turn of events for us this truck is. He murmurs what I guess are prayers for Martin’s erstwhile hacked-off legs. Every prayer has its wound. God made even those of us who give up on Him in our youth hope our wounds will make our likeness to Christ more than skin-deep, but I doubt even Dick harbors such a hope in Martin’s case.

Argyle climbs back into the cab of his truck and Smith returns to the jeep. “We’re turning around.”

“No,” I say.

“We have an opportunity.”

“The opportunity to lie face-down in a ditch?”

“The savages may not have fuel but they do have food processing technology we need, and somewhere around here they must have a big facility we just haven’t found yet. Argyle has twenty men in the back of his truck and weaponry enough to subdue the savages.”

“So let him subdue them.”

“He’s too subdued himself.”

“Then let Stuart send down reinforcements. We tried our best.”

“We tried our worst.”

“Same thing.”

“Stuart won’t send anyone else. He doesn’t care enough about this. If he did he wouldn’t have sent a weed-smoking pimp to rescue us.”

“He’s right not to care. Caring’s overrated.”

“Not caring is your bullshit paper-thin shield against disappointment. You lost the girl you love and you don’t want to go back because you’re scared you’ll lose her again.”

“No, I don’t want to go back because I’d be going back for your reasons, not mine. You think we deserve to have what they have at their expense. Please tell me what’s so good about us surviving instead of them.”

Against my right temple Smith presses the barrel of the gun he gave me on our way down here, a tender reminder. “I still love you,” he says, “but let’s have this nice conversation about values and beliefs someday in a dry place in New York over a stuffed pheasant.”

I put the car in gear and turn it. Martin says, “We’re going back?”

“Yes.”

“Good, I want to slaughter them,” he dreamily mumbles.

“Tell me you won’t be glad to see your girl again,” Smith says.

“I don’t know if she’s alive.”

“Don’t be ruled by fear, pussycat. When you see her next, sock a seed in there to make you want to stay alive. We need folks like you to balance out folks like him,” he says, indicating Martin.

“And who’ll balance out folks like you?”

He laughs and taps the side of my head affectionately with the barrel of his gun. No doubt if he were driving I’d put a gun to his head and tell him to go the other way, which supports my belief that who prevails is who has the better strategy or weaponry, a formula for success which virtue not only has no part in but is an impediment to, since virtuous thoughts drain time and force from strategic ones.

There’s no town to go back to so we stop the two jeeps and the truck for the night on hard high ground. Smith and I walk through the tapering rain to retrieve a few guns from the back of the truck. He must know I won’t try a one-man coup against his one-man rule. The air in the back of the truck is ten percent oxygen, ninety percent marijuana smoke. Hurricane lamps make a dim light. The twenty men jammed in this oblong box recline or sit or stand. Some talk, some play cards, some make love, some oil their guns, some do more than one of these activities at once. They’ve managed to transport intact their own two thousand cubic feet of New York across state lines, their means and end both being oblivion. I think I‘ll stay with them tonight, have found a vacant spot, have smoked a bone, and now am thinking this to you. Are you there?

CORNLUVR:	I‘m here.
GREASYBOY:	Where?
CORNLUVR:	Don’t know.
GREASYBOY:	But I didn’t even type my message to you, I just thought it.
CORNLUVR:	And yet I read the whole thing. So you’re back?
GREASYBOY:	I guess.
CORNLUVR:	What for?
GREASYBOY:	To take.
CORNLUVR:	Take what?
GREASYBOY:	What’ve you got?
CORNLUVR:	Nothing.
GREASYBOY:	Nothing—especially nothing—nothing above all else—is worth dying for.
CORNLUVR:	Meet me tomorrow at tomorrow o’clock by the puddle.
GREASYBOY:	Okay.
CORNLUVR:	Bye.
GREASYBOY:	Don’t say that.