Long Straight Highway (redux)

So anyone who actually reads this site might be wondering what it was that just happened. In Aristotelian philosophy we might discuss the variety of kinds of causes that caused this story, but honestly I can never remember all of them. So let’s just say the less interesting reason was to just write something, to get back in the habit of writing. The more interesting reason, though, was to let the process unfold, and then think about what it was that unfolded. A sort of “Behind the Music” about an earnest band nobody cares about.

So let’s start in the large:

THE PLAN

When I write I don’t know where I’m going. At all. Often it starts with a sentence, devoid of context, devoid of character, devoid of everything but the rhythm of the sentence and whatever ambience gets dragged along for the ride. Two examples that come to mind:

“You would call me fat fuck.”
“It takes a certain kind of hungry if you want to get to Dreamtown.”

This story wasn’t like that. This story started out with nothing whatever, not a single sentence, and never got more planned than that. Kind of like skiing downhill when you don’t know how to ski: you’re mostly trying to not fall on your ass, and if you get lucky you manage, for stretches, to enjoy the process; and in the end you just want to wind up at the bottom with no broken bones and some semblance of dignity.

CAUSALITY

If you can’t plan then you need to have something that gives a skeleton to a story, that keeps it from being a long, winding fugue on nothing in particular. This is especially important if you are temperamentally predisposed to writing long, winding fugues on nothing in particular.

The best solution I’ve found is to keep saying “which caused what” to myself. Sometimes this is very obvious and clockwork-like: the Russian chick (from Connecticut) reveals that she got the giant run out of town; Harv hits her and kills her; which forces the group to come to a kind of decision. Every action in that sequence has a consequence: x happens, which causes y to happen, which causes z to happen.

Other times the causal flow is less clear. The first third of the story was just winging it, but afterwards some things had been established: the men on the crew, their relationships to each other, the setting and the history implied in the setting. Which allowed me, later in the story, to zoom out, and create some larger-scale causal relationships: Ted is kind of a dandy; this causes him to develop a certain relationship with the client, who is also a kind of poseur; which brings the inter-group tension to a head, later, after Harv kills the Russian. It’s a sloppy string of cause and effect, which I don’t feel great about. But these are the factors in play.

Usually when I’m going to revise a story, the causality aspect is what I think most about, since once the story’s done I know what pieces are in play. For example, Stoney turned out to be way more central than he was first imagined to be (at first he was just a faceless client); the giant, who appeared halfway through, became pivotal, as did Harv’s relationship with her. Now the job is to go back and better prepare these things. What’s the deal with giants? What do they have to do with anything? What’s Stoney’s story, exactly? Once those things are better established — once I have a sense of what they mean — they can drive the story’s events more forcefully and more sensibly.

More later.

Some uncertain number of hours later five of them came out: Stoney, one of the Russian chicks, some guy Harv didn’t know, Ted, and Elan. Stoney was going on about something, gesturing grandly across the plains as if the whole vast expanse belonged to him somehow, or would soon; then he gestured at the sky, in much the same fashion. “Big sky country my ass,” he hollered. “Beat that sky, motherfuckers!” Everyone in the group laughed.

“Harv!” Ted hollered, spotting him propped against the side of the building. “I thought we’d lost you! Get over here!”

Harv hadn’t stayed true to his goal of not drinking: he’d had three beers over the course of the evening, each of which mired him further in self-loathing and resentment; but neither had he given in fully and put away six or seven, which would have been closer to his usual quantity. He didn’t feel like joining the group, but neither did he want to be seen as explicitly not joining it, which would have resulted in some other brand of ruckus; so he tossed back the remainder of his beer and walked over to where the people were standing. Stoney gave the slightest possible nod acknowledging his approach; and Elan clapped him on the back, probably hoping to smooth down his ruffled feathers.

“So tell them,” Stoney said, turning back to the Russian chick. “Now that we can hear.”

“It’s not so good of a story, I don’t know why you make some big deal of it,” she said. Her accent seemed British with a foreign twist, Harv thought, but maybe the Russians learned British English. And what did he even know about accents, anyway? Everything he knew was from television.

“Just tell it,” Stoney said. “It’s funny.”

“So we get into town some nights ago and we go to a hotel: no rooms, because so many are working on a construction –”

“That’s you guys,” Stoney interrupted, elbowing Ted lightly in the ribs. Ted flashed him a pretend smile.

“We say: what other hotels are there, and the man tells us there is a hotel at so and so. We go to this next hotel, and it is horrible, it smells like rotten meat. So we go back to the first hotel, and I say, surely there is a room to be had here, and the man says no, no room. We are arguing for a while and out walks this, I forget the word in English, –” here she said a word in some other language.

“Giant,” Stoney said.

“Giant,” she said. “In my country we have many giants since the war, in the broken places, they are very bad, robbing people and stealing things, they are like animals except with hate, hateful animals. So I say to the man, ‘you have no room for me because this thing, this giant, is staying here?’ And the man looks at me and he is, he is. Uncomfortable, he looks very nervous. So I say: ‘Have this thing removed at once or I will call the sheriff.’ And he calls over another man and they go into the back room, and we are standing there for a minute and then he comes back and says, ‘we have a room for you, it will be some small minutes.’”

“Anyway, after a while we go to the room, and then after a while more we come out to have a drink, and as we come to the door we hear yellings, and the giant is in the lobby, it is yelling at the man at the front desk, he is afraid, and it is yelling and yelling, and then another man comes out with a gun, and the giant stops yelling, and they are just standing there. And the man, the first man who was afraid, now he yells at it to leave, and it stands there for a moment, and then it turns to leave. But then it turns back, and says something like: where are my bags, give me my bags. And the men talk to each other, and they don’t have its bags, there is some confusion about the bags. And the giant starts yelling some more, and then the sherrif arrives, and he also has a gun, and they take the giant and put it in a truck. All this time we are standing there, my friend and I, just watching this, it is like a movie.”

All Harv could hear was blood in his ears, blood swirling around everywhere.

“What happened to the giant?” Elan asked.

“They took it away,” the Russian said, as if he were dense.

“The sherrif drove her out of town,” Stoney said. “After that, who knows. She was probably fine. Got a ride from a trucker or something.”

“They should have just shot it,” the Russian said. “It will only cause trouble later.”

“Shut the fuck up you stupid cunt,” Harv said.

Everything stopped. The Russian looked at him like a dog had started talking; the look Stoney flashed him was harder to describe. The third guy in Stoney’s party had the surest reaction, which was to surge forward and cock his fist back. Harv, who had been boiling for the last two minutes, moved like someone had undammed a river: he stepped to the side and smashed the guy in the face with the palm of his hand, sending him spinning to one knee.

Harv turned back toward the rest of them. The Russian chick had produced a small pistol from somewhere and was pointing it at Harv. She squeezed off a round that tickled the hair of his forearm before Harv got to her, knocked her hand aside as she squeezed off another round. Before he really thought about it he grabbed her arm under his elbow and hammered his other hand into the side of her head. Even in the heat of the moment he felt her neck crumple and knew that he’d killed her.

After that, nothing. Nobody was moving, except for the guy whose nose Harv had broken, who had now also been shot in the leg. “Son of a bitch,” he said, toppling over entirely, blood spatter coating his face like someone had spray-painted it.

Harv looked at the dead girl, then at the fallen guy. Then, slowly, at Stoney, who was still vacillating between a series of dwindling options. Before he could decide on any particular one Harv had already reached back underneath his shirt and drew his own compact pistol, which he did not point exactly at Stoney, but which was clearly readied for action in that direction. Stoney’s eyes got so wide he looked like one of those Japanese cartoons. He slowly raised his hands to shoulder height. “Whoa,” he said, finally.

“Harv,” Elan said.

“What the fuck –” Ted said.

“Pick a side, Ted,” Harv said, looking at him coldly, and shifting his weight ever so slightly. “Think careful.”

Nobody said anything for a second, and you couldn’t hear anything apart from the wind and the whistling respiration of Stoney’s guy on the ground.

“It’s a shame about your friend,” Ted said finally, nodding at the Russian chick. Then he nodded at the fallen guy. “Attacking your man like that.”

Give Stoney credit, Harv thought. He was a quick study. “And who knew she could hit so hard,” he said. “Right Freddy?” Nobody said anything, so Stoney repeated himself. “Who knew a bitch from Conecticut could hit so hard, right Freddy?”

“Right,” the guy on the ground croaked.

“Connecticut?” Elan said.

Harv’s job was basically done: he re-checked lines of sight and mechanical fitness of the defenseworks, which he’d done a number of times already. For turrets with guns he made sure they could pivot and swivel throughout the full range of motion, and that they were restricted such that they couldn’t shoot into the walls or ceiling, or back into the body of the bunker. After that he and William started packing: empty gypcrete barrels, welding and cooling equipment, the various meters Elan had scattered throughout the place, excess cabling.

“What’s up with you?” William said at one point, after Harv tossed him a folded up firesafe pad.

“What?” Harv said.

“You’re whistling,” William said.

“I’m happy,” Harv said. “Is that so weird?”

“What is it really?” William said.

Oddly enough, Harv really was happy. Next to the feeling of building something this was the best part of the job: the finishing up, the getting the fuck out, the prospect of not seeing any of the crew for at least a week. Nevermind that he had no place he really wanted to be and nothing he was looking forward to. Which was maybe the most idiotic thing about his existence, that its high points consisted basically of transitions between two things he didn’t want. This was one of the host of things he tried not to think about — there was joy to be had in simple movement, and he took what he could get.

Getting the last bits cleared up always took way longer than it should have, all the checking and re-checking, finding little pieces of this or that and stuffing them into the truck; or, occasionally, needing to get something out of the truck again, requiring somebody to scramble inside and rummage through stuff until they unearthed the transistor box, or the hydraulic toe bar; and so what Harv had expected to be about a two PM departure didn’t roll around until around eight.

The sun had ducked behind the horizon, at the end of a million miles of dirt and tumbleweed. Harv sat in the driver’s seat ready to go, thinking about how his feet hurt. Elan and William sat in the back, untraditionally silent; they’d been mired in some mutual sulk since this morning. Harv half-wondered if it was the comment about not being able to afford a biting whore, but didn’t care enough to ask. He kept staring into the side-mirror hoping to spot Ted ambling toward them in his drunken pirate’s walk.

Eventually he showed up. Harv started the truck, but instead of going round to the passenger side Ted came over to Harv’s window. “Not so fast,” he said. “We’re having a drink with Stoney.”

“What?” Harv said.

Ted shrugged. “He invited us to the bar to celebrate.”

“Fuck that,” Harv said. “You go celebrate with him if you want. We’re going home.”

Ted’s face hardened. “You feel like working on this crew again, Harv?” he said. “Think careful.”

The two men stared at each other, and the silence in the cab of the truck became even more profound than it had been. Harv’s hands tightened on the steering wheel till they made fists. It had been a long time since he could hear rage in his ears, washing over him like the sound of the sea, but this did it: not just the blunted expectation of thinking they were leaving and finding out that they weren’t leaving; and not just Ted being a douchebag and making decisions without consulting anybody. But the fact that Ted was acting like the crew was his personal enterprise and not something they’d all built together over the course of a decade; and most of all, the fact that, so far as the world was concerned, he was basically right.

“I’m riding with Stoney and his friends,” Ted said after a few seconds, when it became clear that Harv had said what he was going to say. He pushed himself away from the truck with a theatric ease, the big dog reaffirmed. “You guys, call a cab, or get a ride from someone. Tell em to take you to Pam’s.”

Harv watched Ted walk away; got his temper under control. It took a minute.

“So, Pam’s?” Elan said, eventually. “Sounds classy.”

“Thanks for the support,” Harv said; and when Elan started to stammer something: “I don’t wanna hear it.”

They were maybe two days away from finishing Stoney’s bunker, and Harv was infused with the usual combination of satisfaction and unease. The satisfaction owed to having brought something into existence: once all you could see at this site was nothing interrupted by tumbleweed; and now a concrete dome arched from the plains dirt, speckled with hemispherical turrets out of which poked mini-Gatling mounts. Inside the gate doors a maze of girders turned the dome into a cartesian grid of conduit and exposed cabling, a high-tech canopy through which Elan swung like a monkey in a tool belt, taking readings and running tests.

In the sub-basement William, wrapped in the Big Joe exoskeleton, shifted huge plastex tanks into place, thrice-filtered water fed from new wells; and subcontracting crews put the final security welds on caps over various intake holes. Is were getting dotted, Ts crossed. Turning nothing into something this complex, this … beautiful, this perfectly-suited to its purpose — it was a feeling Harv enjoyed at no other time, which was a good feeling as long as he didn’t think about it what it implied.

“Turn that frown upside down, big shooter,” Elan said at one point, descending from the ceiling with a mouth-full of plastic ratchet ties, which he spat into a giant plastic bucket. To the outside observer Harv was checking line of fire to the door from one of the sentry breakers: anybody who managed to breach the outer defenses would get transformed magically into chum at the door step, at least once Stoney installed the shrapnel gun. Lots of people didn’t bother actually installing the shrapnel gun, since it was so expensive, but it was good to know you had the option.

“What?” Harv said.

“It’s almost quitting time,” Elan said.

“Right,” Harv said.

“In a couple of days we’ll be sleeping in our own beds again,” Elan said, grabbing some mesh wiring sleeves from a box and stuffing them into a pouch on his belt.

“Yippee,” Harv said.

“You’ll be re-united with all your favorite porn,” Elan said, pushing a button attached to his harness. From somewhere above them a motor started whirring, lifting him toward the ceiling like an ascending angel. “And that hand-lotion you like,” he called down, “the stuff that smells like jasmine.”

“It just keeps getting sweeter,” Harv said, to nobody.

Now that they were finishing the bunker Stoney showed up more often. The charitable explanation would have been that he was excited — he’d dumped a king’s ransom on some new digs and had every right to be excited at the prospect of it turning from fantasy into concrete and metal — but the more likely explanation was that there were more people on the site now, and consequently more opportunity for him to be seen. He always dressed in the same clothes, and in that respect was no different from Harv, although he was different from Harv in that he did it to make a statement. Harv mentioned this idea to Elan once, at lunch.

“What kind of statement do you think he’s making?” Elan said.

“I dunno what he’s trying to say,” Harv said, chewing his log of buffalo jerky. “But what he’s actually saying is that he’s a gripper.”

“Everyone you meet seems to be either a douchebag or a gripper,” Elan said. “Ever notice that?”

“It hasn’t escaped me,” Harv answered, and Elan laughed.

Even so, Harv couldn’t figure out why Stoney bothered him — they’d had a lot of clients far worse in every regard. One guy, three years ago, had demanded Ted change the design to include more turrets, even after being told that the number of turrets he wanted would compromise the integrity of the shell. But he insisted, and Ted complied, and then the guy had showed up with the local Warden and run them out of town. “Look at them turrets,” the client had said. “That wall ain’t structurally sound.” They’d lost a third of their pay on that deal, which meant a bunch of their subs went unpaid and they were blackballed in Northern Iowa.

Then there was the client who had given Harv a bunch of shit until Harv had picked him up and smashed him face first into the back of their truck. The guy’s nose broke, spit blood everyplace, and for a second Harv thought that he’d finally crossed a line he couldn’t uncross. Miraculously, though, it had worked out: the client decided that maybe he’d hired the right guys, and he backed off. Even so, whenever they approached a site for the first time Ted made a point of telling Harv not to talk to the client. As if it had been Harv’s idea in the first place.

But Stoney. He showed up and just sort of hovered, sometimes wandering throughout the site and basically standing there until one of the subs asked him what the fuck he was doing. At which point he would smile, mention off-handedly that he was the guy putting money in the sub’s pocket, and that the sub had better keep his fucking mouth shut if he hoped to see any of it. Whatever else was true Stoney seemed an apt judge of character — he never pulled this act with anybody who wouldn’t stand for it.

“I want you to stay away from him,” Ted told Harv at dinner one night. They were eating at the hotel, which they rarely did, but the desk guy at the hotel mentioned that they’d got hold of some chickens — big truck up from Louisville, apparently — and was frying them up, and both William and Harv insisted on getting back in time to eat.

“What the fuck, Ted,” Harv said. He felt like the whole front of his face was covered with grease and crumbs of breading, which probably took away from his moral high ground, but it couldn’t be helped. “I’m not an idiot. I don’t go picking fights with clients.”

“Much,” Elan added, with a smirk.

“It’s not you I’m worried about,” Ted said.

“Holy shit,” William said, coming back from the serving table with his plate heaped with fried chicken thighs and cornbread. “There’s a chick at the front desk who’s gotta be almost eight feet tall, I shit you not.”

Harv put down the remains of his drumstick.