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With a push of his foot he turned to face the billboard below, the highway beyond it. Across from the
billboard, parked off the highway, he saw an old pickup. He observed it clinically. It looked as if it
should be in the saddle of the car crusher, ready to be squared. Thing probably died in midmotion and
had been deserted by its owner. It stayed there long enough, he might try to haul it over and make an
offering of it to the crusher.
Another push of his foot and the chair spun and squeaked and he saw the mountains rising up to the
night clouds, punching through them like a baker's fingers through light-crust dough. The half-moon
was a gravy bowl falling out of the sky, disappearing into the gradual pink of the coming day.
A push of the foot. A squeak.
To the right of the mountains was the shack he had grown up in, dilapidated now. Shadows dangled
like black spider webs over the boarded-up door and window frames. It taunted him with bad
memories. It seemed at any moment his old man would come out of there with his belt in hand, ready
to beat either him or his brother or their mother. Yeah, the old man, he could envision him perfectly.
Angry from the whiskey and the dark color of his skin, wanting to be white and rich and at the wheel of
a Thunderbird.
Well, in a way, he had gotten his wish. Behind the shack was the spot where Billy Hands, now as
much Thunderbird as man, was buried, a hubcap for his marker.
He swung the chair to his left and looked at the car crusher. Until recently, it had been abandoned,
like the lot. He had done a bit of mechanic work on it a short time back, had used the wrench to pull an
old Chevy into the saddle so he could mash it into a rusty square, and had followed it with half a dozen
junkers so pitted with corrosion their automotive identity was questionable.
He had made an additional change by designing a portable switch he could work the way you worked
a TV remote. He kept it in a weatherproof container attached to the bottom of the swivel seat. No more
pulling levers. He merely had to set the cars in line with the wench below, then he could sit up here and
push buttons and see the machine work. It was a glorious view, and the crusher did its job now as well
as it had so many years ago.
He wondered if when he had used the crusher the sound of it had been heard way out on the
reservation, and if those who heard it might think his father was out from beneath his hubcap, out of his
block of Thunderbird, and back on the job.
But no, the mountains and the trees obstructed the car crusher noise. Most likely, it could only be
heard down on the highway if you were driving slow with a window open. It was as if the hell of all
automobiles was up here. The car crusher a kind of mechanical Satan, smashing the metallic souls of
the less fortunate.
To his ears, the sound of it crunching the metal again after all these years was like a lullaby---a lullaby
because he had learned properly how to hate this place and all it stood for, how to turn that hate into
irony. How to gain revenge for himself and the Manowacks, though the Manowacks did not know he
was their avenger. They were too lost to know or understand.
The way of vengeance had been before him all the time, but he hadn't realized it until one afternoon
he observed a '65 Ford Mustang drive by. He admired the Mustang, as he always admired them. Then
it occurred to him that it was named after a wild horse. This was obvious, but for the first time he truly
began to consider it, saw a solid connection between the machine and the animal.
The animals of olden days were the prime examples of power, speed, strength. They were the magical
representatives of their time; totems and spirits were viewed in their images. But the white man had
destroyed their powers and had replaced them with engines named after them, engines that ran faster
and stronger than their namesakes and were worshipped and respected more mightily than any animal
ever had been.
And if, as the Manowacks believed, all things animate and inanimate were alive, had what some tribes
called a manitou, a magic spirit, then it stood to reason that the otherworld, the doman of the gods,
would claim the newer Mustangs and Thunderbirds and Impalas as their earthly representatives, not
mangy coyotes and wolves, owls and hawks eating dead meat off the highways. And as the animals
were less in sight and mind, their contours and actions would be less remembered in detail, unlike the
automobile which was on every corner, every street, in every drive, in every garage.
Automobiles. Sleek in design, pleasant with the aroma of fresh upholstery, great windshield eyes with
which their drivers, the brains of the beasts, could see out at the world. Motors they could feel between
their legs and beneath their feet, the throbbing energy of potent technohorses tugging at the bit, ready to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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