Madlands Read online

  “You’re asking me?” That proved how desperate Harrison was. “Here’s my advice. Don’t do anything. Just sit back and enjoy the show.” I hung up on him.

  D was holding down the fort, with a couple more empty glasses arranged before him on the bar. The old face of mine that he was wearing now looked slightly flush and loose from the alcohol percolating within. A lock of hair dangled in front of unfocused eyes. He looked like he didn’t get drunk too often, but when he did, he went all the way down the line, to that place called oblivion.

  I sat down on the stool next to him and took a sip from the half-empty glass I’d left when I’d gone to the pay phone. The bedraggled face turned to look at me.

  “I just know it.” Not mumbling, but picking each word out carefully, like soft diamonds from a pile of ashes, the way drunks do when they’re trying to hold on. “I just know he’d help me. We’re kin. Real kin. I just know it.”

  D was still rambling on about Identrope. That was fine by me. As long as this stayed an obsession in the guy’s head, I might be able to use him. I’d have to start putting together an exact plan. Maybe there was some way I could work it so that D killed Identrope. If D got rebuffed by Identrope, this longed-for help not forthcoming from Identrope—I still wasn’t clear on precisely what kind of assistance D was hoping to get—D could very well flip. Even if he could just be fooled into thinking that was the case, that his kinfolk had turned him down. D obviously had that primeval shitkicker sense of morality, of blood justice, where he could whip out a piece and blow away a snake like Identrope. It was a possibility. If that was the way I decided to go, there were still a lot of logistical problems to work out, like getting D within firing range of Identrope. I’d have to think about it.

  “We’ll get you there, pal.” I pulled bills from my wallet and laid them on the bar. “That’s a promise.” The bartender, polishing a glass with a damp rag, looked over and barely nodded, indicating that sometime in the near future he’d ooze over and pick up the money.

  I steered D out onto the sidewalk. He wobbled as if someone had cut his bones loose at the joints. He hadn’t had that much to drink—either he was the biggest lightweight going, or his brain wasn’t wired anymore for taking hits of any intoxicant other than straight o-positive.

  “You’re my real buddy.” D’s arm flopped around my neck. “You ain’t like them other shit-heels. Me and you—we gotta stick together.”

  “Sure thing.” I looked around, trying to figure out in what direction I had left the Hudson. The street had gone deeply dark, the streetlamps missing as though they had been sucked back down into the concrete. “Through thick and thin.” The bar’s vinyl-padded door closed behind us, and the dim light that had spilled out around our feet vanished, leaving us in total black.

  All the people had gone as well. The street was empty of its usual crowds. An idiot wind stirred the paper in the gutter, a whisper of the desert rolling loveless behind the hills.

  I looked up and saw dragon clouds eating the stars. My skin became the envelope of a corpse, eternity in the wet canyons of my gut.

  D had left my side and gone to the wall to shout out all the beer’s barking names. He staggered back with a luminous sober face, shaking hand rubbing the white spit strings from his lips.

  We’re in trouble now. My eyes had adjusted well enough to the dark that I could see the city’s buildings had become low squat shapes, the towers kneecapped into a small town’s drugstores and five-and-dimes. A single main street set apart the shuttered windows.

  I could see the Hudson now, at the end of the street. Dust hazed the fender’s gloss, the chrome pitted and tarnished. Hubcaps gone. The car hunkered down on wheels fitted with age-shredded whitewalls. A headlight had been smashed to leave a blind socket, and the windshield was starred with a spiderweb of shattered glass.

  Something big and bad had happened, while D and I had been in the bar. The world had turned, or at least this part of it. It didn’t look good.

  I glanced over at D standing beside me. And I saw it in his eyes, that world written small, a seed in two stones of fire. And I knew.

  He was home now. This was his world.

  “You know—” I looked at him, but he didn’t look back at me. “I don’t think we’re in L.A. anymore.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  WHERE we were, we were in the middle of downtown Shitsville, USA.

  I saw that more clearly in the morning, when the sun came up. We spent the night in the rusting hulk of the Hudson, D curled up snoring on the backseat—easy enough for him; this was all coming home as far as he was concerned—while I slumped behind the steering wheel, hands tucked inside my jacket to keep my fingertips from freezing off. I’d been thrown enough by this change in territory not to feel like wandering around in the dark. The whole landscape looked like the butt end of the universe; I didn’t want to chance coming across any of the hairier parts.

  I’d already thrown away my 9mm piece. It hadn’t come through the transformation any better than the Hudson. The gun I’d pulled out of my jacket had looked as if it’d been buried in an alluvial slump, the workings rusted and obviously inoperable.

  The sun rolled bleak and red over the low horizon, pulling long shadows out of stubby prairie weeds. The Hudson was parked right at the edge of the town, so I could look across the earth’s raw surface. What I saw was blight and dust, a true God-hated geography. One narrow road cut into the distance, bordered by sagging wire fences.

  I let D go on sleeping. I got out of the Hudson and stamped my feet to get the blood moving in them again.

  The small town was revealed in all its malignant glory. What had been the big sprawling city when D and I had stepped into that bar the night before had now shrunk down to a pokey main street fronted by one- and two-story buildings. The windows had old-style gilt lettering, with striped awnings tattered at the dangling edges. If a place like this had existed in any L.A. I had ever known, it would have had to be on a studio lot where they had been doing a period piece, something along the lines of Andy Hardy Meets the Great Depression. Even the spire on the little white church at the end of the street looked bent out of line, as though it had given up trying to stand straight.

  I looked back at D sleeping inside the Hudson. That sonuvabitch walking around inside my original body—I blamed it all on him. That Joad miasma he carried around—somehow he’d managed to blow away the world I’d come to know and be comfortable in, my shabby pseudo-L.A., and put in its place this Dust Bowl relic, some Okie farm town that had seen all its hopes, money, and topsoil go sailing away on a grey wind. This place was curling up to die. Anybody still left here would be a ghost walking around in the cemetery of its own life.

  This was going to make my job a lot harder. There was no getting around that.

  If we’d still been in the Madlands’ pseudo-L.A., I would have known how to get to Identrope, or where to find him, at least. It would have been a straight shot to the web tethered onto the ground at the edge of the city, and then climbing up to Identrope’s headquarters underneath the burning dirigible. But out here in the middle of nowhere . . . it was going to take some major navigational skills to get where we needed to go.

  And there were larger, more unsettling questions to be addressed. Such as how exactly we’d gotten here in the first place. It was one thing to blame D; it was another to figure out what that meant.

  Obviously, D had some unusual relationship with the Madlands, something I hadn’t encountered before. The Madlands’ amorphous, chaotic nature had all along been pulling things into existence, such as the pseudo-L.A. itself. In a sense, the Madlands had always been creating itself out of bits and pieces from the archives, pasting together an existential collage of image and dreaming Anybody who wandered into the zone just had to get with the program, either consciously or as another ego-submerged bit player.

  That’s what I’d thought was the deal with this D. That the Madlands had pulled up the Tom Joad persona from the anc
ient film racks in the archives, and stuck him with it. But now I had to consider the possibility that D and the Madlands were in some kind of two-way love affair. The Madlands had created him, so to speak, but he was changing the Madlands in return, drawing a big chunk of it into his 1930s, Grapes of Wrath world. In effect, the Madlands had created an entity with a power equal to its own.

  The big question now was whether D’s power exceeded the Madlands’. Whether D could pull all the zone into his own bleak, dusty world. At the moment, I was assuming that L.A. was still out there somewhere; it was just a matter of getting to it. But if D’s power was rolling on unchecked—as though he were some walking manifestation of the n-formation disease itself, my original face the disguise for D’s part in the Masque of the Grey Death—then the city, and the web and the burning dirigible, all of that, might be obliterated, replaced by this dilapidated shitkickerdom. And if that happened, I could pretty much kiss good-bye to any chance of getting at Identrope.

  Even worse would be getting to that point and discovering that there was no longer any way out. What if D, without his even trying to, made a spatial loop out of his grimly revised Madlands, the edges of the zone rolled back into its center? You could walk into this world, but you wouldn’t ever walk back out.

  These were the dark meditations working through my head as I leaned against the Hudson’s crumpled fender, and watched the sun come up over the flattened earth. Mornings are always the cruel wedge on my clock.

  I opened up the car and gave D a poke. “Come on, you weird sonuvabitch. You’re the one who got us into this mess. I’ll be damned if you’re going to sleep through it.”

  D raised his groggy head, red-gummed eyes blinking. “Huh? What’s going on?”

  “The end of civilization as we know it. It got canceled due to low ratings.”

  “What’s that, mister?” D shoved his slack face around with the palm of his hand.

  “Forget it. We got work to do.”

  We found some stale doughnuts and a working water tap in a diner halfway down the main drag. Crumpled newspapers in the stove and a match enabled us to boil up coffee.

  We didn’t find any other people. Either this place had come into existence without any, or they’d all had smarts enough to leave.

  D spoke the words inside my head. “We gotta get going.” He pushed crumbs around on the diner counter with his finger. “We gotta start out for Los Angeles. Right away.”

  I swallowed coffee brack. “Fine by me. The only problem is, which way is it?”

  He looked at me, amazed at such ignorance in human form. “Jesus Christ, mister. It’s west of here. It’s as far west as you can go. Everybody knows that.”

  “West?” It showed how long I’d been living in the city. Geographical references didn’t have a lot of meaning for me.

  “For shit’s sake. The sun comes up from over there.” D pointed. “So we gotta go thataway.” Another point. “Right where that big old highway heads out.”

  That big old highway turned out to be a stingy two-lane strip of asphalt. We started walking, the rising sun at our backs. Before we left, I’d checked out the Hudson once more and had found it stone-cold dead, a corpse of a car. Lifting the hood had revealed only rust and dry-cracked hoses. The Hudson wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Got any idea how far it is?” I was already sweating. I didn’t get into long-distance pedestrian mode very often. “I mean, how long we’re going to be walking?”

  D shook his head. “It ain’t far.” He was laying them down, a chin-first pilgrim’s expression set on his face. “Can’t you smell the water?”

  A cool breeze drifted toward us. I couldn’t smell anything, but could almost imagine the ripple of currents over rounded stones.

  D went on striding along. “We’ll get there,” he said, “when we get there.”

  Hours of silent walking went by. The noon sun battered the landscape and the brains simmering inside our skulls. The river, wherever it was, didn’t seem to have come any closer.

  Up ahead, the highway was greased with shimmering mirages. At the side of the road, I spotted a figure standing. When we got a little closer, I could see the person had a thumb out in classic hitchhiker pose, waiting for a ride. The person would have a bit of a wait; I hadn’t seen a car or truck on the highway the whole time D and I had been walking its length.

  We kept walking, and finally got close enough for me to see who the figure was. In my surprise, I called out: “Nora!”

  She looked at me with a blank, puzzled expression, as I stood right in front of her. “Am I supposed to know you from somewhere?”

  “Nora—it’s me. It’s Trayne.”

  She shook her head. “Mister, I don’t know you from Adam.”

  Was I in the wrong body, one that she wouldn’t recognize me in? For a moment, I couldn’t remember. And then I saw that it didn’t matter. Somehow, she had become part of this new/old world, pulled into D’s Dust Bowl sham reality. She had on a period dress, a cotton schmattah that came down to mid-calf. And those clunky shoes women wore back then, and a cloche hat. She looked as if she’d stepped right out of those ancient early thirties.

  D came up to us; I’d left him behind a few paces when I’d spotted Nora. He nodded politely to her. “Howdy, ma’am.”

  “You fellas heading to California?”

  D nodded. “We’re going to Los Angeles.”

  Nora’s small face lit up. “That’s where I’m going!” She dug into a little purse she was carrying. “I got a job waiting there for me, and everything.” She extracted a matchbook and handed it to me. “See, that’s the place I’m gonna be working.”

  I read the words on the matchbook. It was an advertisement for a dance hall; it promised “Lovely Hostesses.” She was on her way to be a taxi dancer in some dive in L.A., the whole dime-a-dance routine. It probably sounded glamorous to her; she still radiated the innocence I remembered from her previous incarnation. At least it would be somewhat in her natural line of work.

  Nora shook her head when I tried to hand the matchbook back to her. “No, you keep it. Then you’ll know where to find me, and you can come see me. You look like nice fellas. And you’re from round here, ain’tcha? Folks like us should try and stick together.” She stepped past me, closer to the side of the road. “Now, if you’ll excuse me a moment . . .”

  I heard the distant sound of a car approaching, and looked over my shoulder. A rolling dust cloud had bloomed on the horizon, and was heading for us.

  Nora got her thumb out. D and I hung back, watching her. I wasn’t surprised when the roadster came to a stop right beside where she stood. I only got a quick glimpse of the driver, nothing that I could recognize, before Nora climbed in. She waved out the window to us as the roadster sped off.

  D wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Them pretty girls get all the breaks.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why we’re still standing out here, isn’t it?” I gave him a push. “Come on, let’s get walking. We’ve got a ways to go.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “IT’S not far now.” D announced this as he scanned the landscape, a hand shading his eyes from the afternoon sun. He stood at the crest of a low rise, looking into the western distance.

  I finished wringing out my socks, wet from fording the river. The smell of water in the desert air caressed my back. We’d come a long way fast. Either that, or distances around here had taken on aspects of their ancient celluloid origin, the dull parts getting edited out. I reassembled myself and climbed up to where D was standing.

  “You see?” D made a gesture, somewhere between Daniel Boone and Moses, toward the horizon. “Look out there.”

  We’d been traveling through dust and dry rock. The river splashing along in the middle of the bleak territory had been the first bit of motion other than scuttling lizards and the sun crawling overhead. But on the other side, what lay before us was different.

  I’d half expected to see the city, my old pseudo-L.A., sp
rawled out, the grey buildings and streets subduing the earth beneath. That would have been convenient; we could have gotten right down to the business of finding Identrope. What we got instead was green, neat rows of orchards marching along. More of D’s world: these were the fabled orange groves that every Joad had longed to see, the promised land next to the Pacific. From up where we stood, the trees’ leaves looked like dark green leather, with a few gold specks of ripening fruit. L.A. was out there somewhere, beyond the groves and before the ocean. We still had some walking to do.

  “Come on.” D headed down the slope, loose gravel sliding under his feet. I followed after.

  We found another road, a two-lane job, better kept-up. The shade from under the distant orange trees stretched toward us. In the world I came from, the one that was generally thought of as being the real reality, the groves had been stripped out of this area long time before, replaced by concrete, asphalt, and despair. The feeling that one had found one’s beloved, only to have participated in her gang rape with power tools. Where I came from, the bones were buried so deep that people mourned without words, not knowing why they woke up with tears on their faces.

  It was good to see the trees. I owed D for that much, for his having given me the chance to turn my face toward green that I’d only known before from the black-and-white sections of the archives.

  “Where is everybody?” I shaded my eyes, peering forward to see if I could spot a farmhouse or any other sign of life beyond the trees. I wasn’t sure if I sensed the presence of other people nearby or not.

  D shrugged. “Beats me, jack. Didja think there was going to be a welcoming committee?”

  He must have been feeling good, getting flip with me like that. Probably in anticipation of his family reunion with Identrope, or at least the one for which he was hoping.