By the time she reached the crest of the mountain, and saw the dim lights below, the noise had changed again: it was now the sound of metal chewing on metal, the sickly diseased sound of a creature eating itself alive.
She started down the twisting nightmare with the rain suddenly slackening its beat and then ceasing entirely as she threaded her way around fallen boulders lying in the oncoming lane.
Forty minutes later she passed the blurred and weatherbeaten sign that said PETRIE, pop. 650. It was decorated with Kiwanis and Moose emblems.
She drove down the last of the mountain slopes, and grinding hideously, pulled onto the main street of Petrie, North Carolina.
Five stores. Three on the left, two on the right. And beyond them, thirty feet beyond, a gas station.
She rolled into the station. It was a brand of gasoline she did not know. There were three men lounging on straight-backed chairs, tilted up against the wall of the slatboard station, under a protective overhang. She pulled past the pumps, the Packard ratcheting and grinding, and stopped directly in front of them. She turned off the engine and stared out at them. They stared back, unmoving.
Selena got out of the car.
They still hung there, feet off the ground, chairs back against the wall, three men of indeterminate age, tanned and lined by life in the mountains. They were alive, she could ascertain that much, for two of them were chewing gum, and the third smoked a battered meerschaum, from which a curling filigree of silver-gray smoke regularly climbed into the suspiciously gentle night breeze. She was able to tell they were alive, additionally, by the looks of malicious lechery that invaded their faces. (In the mountains, far back in the hills of nowhere, the term “cool” had been invented, without having ever been named. These people were cooclass="underline" they would not acknowledge their own unsettled reactions…to anything. Like mummies they would sit, until the world around them turned to ash, and the sky dripped fire, and then they would slowly turn to one another and nod. Coolly. But Selena, dress plastered to her ripe body, could draw reaction from a lizard, from a stone, from a gallon of sea water. They registered, and their eyes brightened. But cool. They did not speak.)
“I’m having some trouble with my car,” Selena said.
An unspoken chain of command was established, and the youngest of the three men—perhaps thirty-five—nudged himself forward, and the chair legs hit the wooden platform. “What seems to be the trouble?” he asked, bored.
“Something’s broken inside,” she said.
Slowly, almost languorously, the man slid out of the chair. Selena thought he might just settle in a pool of tired flesh, but he came toward her, hands thrust into the back pockets of his limp coveralls. “Like what?”
Selena’s hands went to her hips, and her jaw thrust out. “Friend, if I knew ‘like what,’ I wouldn’t be asking you to look at it, now would I?”
“You ain’t from ‘round here,” he said, moving toward the car, chewing his gum furiously.
“No, I’m not.”
“Where y’from?”
“Are you going to take a look at this damned car or aren’t you?”
The gum chewer seemed startled by her language. He stopped, looked dull. On the front porch of the station, the second man—fortyish, nearly bald, wearing a filthy coverall with the gas station emblem on the breast pocket—hit the boards with his feet. The scene had been turned over to him: the young one had come up against something he couldn’t handle.
“Well, I c’n take a look at ‘er,” he said, and got up. The gum moved sluggishly in his mouth, and he matched pace with it toward Selena and the car.
He stood in front of the Packard for a moment, as if trying to decide which end contained the engine. Then he fumbled around the hood, looking for the latch. With exasperation, Selena moved beside him, reaching in through the front grille. “It opens from underneath.”
The older man attained a tone of cool disdain that completely repudiated his obvious unfamiliarity with the business end of an automobile: “Why, thank you, ma’am.” It was a brand of sarcasm honed to perfection by four hundred years of misdirecting the outsiders.
She opened the hood, and the man leaned over the front bumper, carefully not touching the mud-spattered metal with his already-filthy coverall. He stared down into the guts of the machine for long minutes.
Finally, without looking at Selena, he said, “Why don’t y’all start ‘er up.”
Selena felt a rising tide of frustration and fury. She got in and turned the ignition key. The engine coughed to life. The sound of metal grinding and tearing came up solidly. Superimposed as the latest symptom of a disease that had been built in sixteen years before when the car had been new. It was a strange kind of testimony to the excellence of the Packard manufacturers that the car was even able to start sixteen years later; a feat far beyond the capabilities of contemporary Detroit Iron.
The gum-chewing went on apace, the staring into the innards did not change phase, the observers said nothing, the sound of thunder caromed through the mountains.
Selena leaned out through the open door. “Can you do anything…?”
The man slowly looked up at her. His expression was one of mixed lechery and disgust. He did not have to say Lady, shut yore damned face, you’re in awuh part of the woods now, with yore damned long legs and all yore damned pretty skin a-showin’ through that skimpy li’l dress. an’ whut we want to do is whut we gonna do, so sit back an’ don’t be harangin’ us whilst we playin‘ with puttin‘ you in yore place; he didn’t have to say it. There it was, arrogant and infuriating for Selena, in his expression.
The youngest of the three ambled up beside the gum chewer, and they stared down at the machine together.
Nowhere is North Carolina. Nowhere is the land of the Gods. All the Gods. Not only the ancient Gods who have gone to sleep, and the recent Gods who are still worshipped, but the God of Rain, and the God of Lightning, and the God of the Hunt, who have taken on new attributes and new faces. And the newest, youngest, strongest Gods: the God of Neon, the God of Smog, the God of Luck, and the Machine God. People come to worship at strange altars. They place their oblations at the feet of graven images without knowing these are truly Gods they have found. The War God grows fatter each year, gorged on blood. The Love God fornicates with himself, weakening his genes, rebirthing as a thalidomide monstrosity. Paingod does his work and doles out his anguish, paying no attention to the cries of those crushed beneath his millstones. But the Machine God…
The sound had grown more violent. It was an ugly sound. In final frustration, Selena shut the car down, and got out. The tableau was still the same. The little porch on the slat-walled gas station; the old man still tilted against the front wall, smoking his pipe; the two observers still looking down into the engine as though studying a slide under a microscope; the mountains looming huge and dark around the town; the sound of the storm gathering strength to hurl itself against them once more.
“All right!” Selena snapped. “Enough is enough.”
The two looked at her. Then as one, they looked at the old man in the chair. And Selena realized all at once, that neither of these two fools could have done anything, had they wanted to: the old man was the mechanic. The other two were camouflage, the sportsmen who had been given Selena to toy with for a few minutes. It was the old man she should have approached.
He did not move an inch from his comfortable position as he informed her in a doughy, wheezing voice, “Can’t he’p you, ma’am. Trouble you got’s too big. Have t’take it on in to Shelby, or someplace, where they’s ‘quipped to make them kinda repairs.”