Long Straight Highway (redux)

“What the fuck happened to you?” Ted said when Harv showed up at the site. He made a point of looking Harv up and down. Presumably noticed that Harv was still wearing yesterday’s change of clothes instead of his work clothes, the main difference being that the change of clothes were clean.

“Don’t wanna talk about it,” Harv said, walking past Ted and toward the bunker, out of which could be heard drilling and hammering in fits and starts.

“Oh, well okay then,” Ted said, throwing up his hands. “That’s cool. Whenever you feel comfortable getting started.”

Harv stopped walking. Turned and fixed Ted with a very weary and very pointed look. Ted had seen that look enough times over the years to know that this was an occasion to let the argument go.

Just then Elan popped out of the bunker, holding a length of fiber optic cable and what appeared to be an optical switch in front of him like damning evidence of some kind. He was clearly poised to say something until he saw Harv, who he looked up and down much the way Ted had seconds earlier, although his face settled on a decidedly different expression.

“Oooh, walk of shame!” he said, as Harv trudged past.

In short order the waitress emerged from the front, full of faux-attentiveness under the auspices of taking their orders, and staring at them while pretending not to stare at them. This, too, the giant must have been well used to. They ordered glasses of wine — Harv caught himself wondering how she could possibly be satisfied with the same size of glass a normal person would drink out of — and then the waitress disappeared in a puff of anticlimax. Harv didn’t know what he’d expected out of the encounter; she was a giant, but so what? Was she supposed to start throwing furniture through windows? Eating people?

The bad thing was that Andy Griffith seemed boring now, and Harv’s mellow feeling had gone away for reasons he couldn’t explain. Instead of the happy indeterminate fog all he could think about was all the shit left to do on the bunker for the next few days: he’d be welding support rods over what would be the ceiling, the plumbing and electrical crews would ship in from somewhere, and Ted and the rest of the crew would spend hours arguing with them about the differences between a house and a bunker, all the usual territorial disputes and posturing, days of tedious fucking around -

all so that some rich paranoid douchebag could have a concrete dome fortress in the middle of what had practically been a wasteland before the attacks, and now was just a million miles of dirt and hard living. And after this job, another one, and another one, until Harv got too old to work and then started drinking himself to death in earnest. Of course, he might be killed first. That was always possible, and getting more likely every day.

Son of a bitch, he thought, tossing back the rest of his whiskey and standing up. This went downhill fast.

“We didn’t mean to chase you out,” the normal-sized woman said to him, while he was patting himself down looking for his keys.
“Huh?” he said.
“We can move further away if we’re bothering you,” she said. “We weren’t trying to ruin it for you.”
“No, no,” he said. “No, you didn’t do anything. It was ruined before you got here. Although I’ve never been clear on when exactly it happened.”
“Twenty-three years ago, I would think,” the tall woman said.
Harv looked at her directly for the first time, and not because she was seven and a half feet tall.
“You know what, honey?” he said. “More and more I figure that’s just another goddamn thing we tell ourselves.”
They all stared at each other for some indeterminate length of time, Harv, the giant, and the normal woman; and then the giant reached across the table and pushed a chair out. “Why don’t you join us,” she said. “I think it would do us all some good.”

The next few days ran together, the way the last decade had run together: one long stretch of the same old shit differentiated only by the particular locale in which they happened to be working. He wondered why it should feel this way, since compared to how a lot of other people were living Harv was practically Marco Polo, now working at a tent city outside of Fargo, now shooting down the stretch of absence leading to what had used to be Omaha and now was a smoking crater with a surge of bunkers and garbage-houses sprung up around it. Each port of call a new world, so why this protracted sameness?

Elan had a theory, of course. The problem was that in this, as on so many other occasions, Harv didn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about. “There’s an information frontier,” he’d said. Ted and William had taken the truck to pick up weapons, leaving Elan and Harv to kill three hours in what had to be the boringest cafe in the Quad Cities, although at least the pie was good, giant pieces of blackberry and respberry with a crust dense as old tar, the way Harv liked it. Although maybe that was bad, too, since he’d eaten three pieces in the last hour and his vision was starting to blur.

“What’s an information frontier?” Harv said, eying the waitress, who looked to be eighty years old but still spry somehow. Despite the blurred vision he was thinking of ordering another slice — maybe the peach this time — which was one of the stupid things he was always doing: sometimes if you fucked yourself up enough the only thing to do was to fuck yourself up even worse, try to plow through to the other side. Though he wasn’t sure what this would mean in the context of pie-eating.

“The border between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible,” Elan said. “Even though we work all over the place, everywhere we go is fundamentally the same at the most important level of abstraction. It’s like the heat death of the universe.”

Elan was talking even faster than normal. He wouldn’t stoop to the pie — he avoided sugar out of some principle Harv had never been real clear on — but boredom had driven him to a cup of coffee, which he drank so rarely it had the same effect that cocaine had on Harv, not that he’d had cocaine in an age. You couldn’t get it clean anymore, and Harv had no urge to dip into whatever crap people were concocting in their barns and turn himself stupider than he already was.

“What does that even mean?” Harv said. “That sounds like a bunch of made-up shit.”

“Exactly,” Elan said.

“I dunno if you think this is clever or what,” Harv said, raising his hand to the waitress. “All this blathering. It just makes you sound retarded.”

The waitress came over before Elan could respond. “If you get another slice of pie I’m gonna be seriously impressed,” she said.

“Get ready to be impressed then,” Harv said.

“On the bright side,” Elan added, sliding the salt shaker from hand to hand like he was playing air hockey, “if you shit your pants from eating all this pie, I’m pretty sure you’ll remember the episode.”

“That’s the first smart thing you’ve said all day,” Harv said.

“Look who made a joke!” Elan said. “God, they grow up so fast.”

“I wasn’t joking though,” Harv said.

Harv slept hard and without dreams and woke up annoyed, which was par for the course. He’d woken up annoyed for as long as he could remember, but he’d woken up at least twice as annoyed since the time William told him that everybody else woke up in good spirits. “I’m not really too dramatic or nothing,” William said. Harv was driving and William was riding shotgun, literally: the Dakotas had flared up again and you had to be careful, although they never heard so much as a peep. “But there’s been times when the only reason I didn’t blow out my brains is because I knew the next day would be better. And I don’t mean just since everything went to shit, even when I was like fifteen it was that way.”

“Even if that’s true,” Harv said, picking at one of his rotten back teeth with a concrete nail, and scanning the long straight highway for ominous signs, “it would be worse to feel better for a minute and then feel like shit again right away.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” William said. “Don’t ask me why.”

“It’s probably your spirit of philosophical inquiry,” Elan called from the back seat.

William thought about that for a second. “Fuck you,” he said, over his shoulder.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Elan said.

At first Harv figured it was just something about William, but he kind of paid attention after that and the ‘better spirits in the morning’ thing really did seem to be a general phenomenon: it was true of the rest of the crew — even Ted was practically chatty for the couple of minutes after he woke up and before he finished his coffee — and if it was true of them then it must have been twice as true for normal people. Which was just another thing to feel cheated by: even a few minutes grace once a day was too much to ask.

“Maybe it’s because you never dream,” William said, on another occasion. At some point Harv had made the mistake of letting slip that he didn’t dream. When you spent as much time together as they did it was amazing the amount of shit that slipped out.

“Maybe it’s because half the time when I wake up I’m smelling your fucking feet,” Harv said.

“Touchy touchy,” William said.

By the time they got to the job everybody was surly, not just Harv, which is why they went to the job before the hotel: they were tired of each other, and unloading the truck and prepping the site and talking to the client would get them out of each other’s faces and minds. They’d been a team long enough to know their reactions to things, to know how they worked and how they responded, to each other and to events. That, Ted always said, is what gave them a leg up: they could actually introspect. After Ted said it it became even truer than it might have been already, and they started taking pride in it, even when they were in the process of hating each other.

Ted wasn’t exactly the leader but he was the architect, and the architect had the most obvious responsibility, so informally he sort of was the leader. Harv also thought that Ted had a kind of gravitas, even though Harv didn’t know the word ‘gravitas.’ Ted also looked like an ex-pirate, which seemed, ironically, to put clients at ease: if some bunch of guys was going to build an energy efficient home where a family of five could also cause massive casualities to an invading force of fifty, well, you wanted that bunch of guys to look like they’d lived a certain kind of life. Ted, all stoic and wind-swept and squinty, got that job done. Harv, who looked like someone who picked fights for fun, was also good for that, although by mutual agreement he didn’t talk to the clients. Elan, who looked like a movie star, provided contrast. Maybe he made them seem safe — how bad could they be if they had a movie-star looking guy? William didn’t look like anything special, so that didn’t really fit into the theory, but maybe the other three were enough.

The client, when he pulled up in his truck, looked like somebody who wanted to be a cowboy but wasn’t: tall, mid-fourties, three-day beard, wearing a trenchcoat that had never seen rain, and boots that wanted spurs. The guy looked, Harv thought after a second, like a rip-off of Ted, like a crappy imitation watch, and Harv could tell both Elan and William, who had just returned from pissing behind a tree, thought the same thing. Harv worried for a second that the client himself, whose name Harv couldn’t remember, would notice the bizarro-world resemblence, and that it would cause trouble of some kind. But the guy came and shook hands with Ted, who met him halfway, and if the guy had any issues he kept them to himself.