Connie Willis - The Last of the Winnebagos

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2024-12-23 0 0 145.28KB 49 页 5.9玖币

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The Last of the

Winnebagos

by Connie Willis

On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road. I was in the

far left lane of Van Buren, ten lanes away from it, and its long legs were

facing away from me, the squarish muzzle flat against the pavement so it

looked narrower than it really was, and for a minute I thought it was a

dog.

I had not seen an animal in the road like that for fifteen years. They

can't get onto the divideds, of course, and most of the multiways are

fenced. And people are more careful of their animals.

The jackal was probably somebody's pet. This part of Phoenix was

mostly residential, and after all this time, people still think they can turn

the nasty, carrion-loving creatures into pets. Which was no reason to have

hit it and, worse, left it there. It's a felony to strike an animal and another

one to not report it, but whoever had hit it was long gone.

I pulled the Hitori over onto the center shoulder and sat there awhile,

staring at the empty multiway. I wondered who had hit it and whether

they had stopped to see if it was dead.

Katie had stopped. She had hit the brakes so hard she sent the jeep into

a skid that brought it up against the ditch, and jumped out of the jeep. I

was still running toward him, floundering in the snow. We made it to him

almost at the same time. I knelt beside him, the camera dangling from my

neck, its broken case hanging half open.

"I hit him," Katie had said. "I hit him with the jeep." I looked in the

rearview mirror. I couldn't even see over the pile of camera equipment in

the back seat with the eisenstadt balanced on top. I got out. I had come

nearly a mile, and looking back, I couldn't see the jackal, though I knew

now that's what it was.

"McCombe! David! Are you there yet?" Ramirez's voice said from inside

the car.

I leaned in. "No," I shouted in the general direction of the phone's mike.

"I'm still on the multiway."

"Mother of God, what's taking you so long? The governor's conference is

at twelve, and I want you to go out to Scottsdale and do a layout on the

closing of Taliesin West. The appointment's for ten. Listen, McCombe, I

got the poop on the Amblers for you. They bill themselves as 'One Hundred

Percent Authentic,' but they're not. Their RV isn't really a Winnebago, it's

an Open Road. It is the last RV on the road, though, according to Highway

Patrol. A man named Eldridge was touring with one, also not a

Winnebago, a Shasta, until March, but he lost his license in Oklahoma for

using a tanker lane, so this is it. Recreation vehicles are banned in all but

four states. Texas has legislation in committee, and Utah has a

full-divided bill coming up next month. Arizona will be next, so take lots of

pictures, Davey boy. This may be your last chance. And get some of the

zoo."

"What about the Amblers?" I said.

"Their name is Ambler, believe it or not. I ran a lifeline on them. He was

a welder. She was a bank teller. No kids. They've been doing this since

eighty-nine when he retired. Nineteen years. David, are you using the

eisenstadt?"

We had been through this the last three times I'd been on a shoot. "I'm

not there yet," I said.

"Well, I want you to use it at the governor's conference. Set it on his

desk if you can."

I intended to set it on a desk, all right. One of the desks at the back, and

let it get some nice shots of the rear ends of reporters as they reached

wildly for a little clear air-space to shoot their pictures in, some of them

holding their vidcams in their upstretched arms and aiming them in what

they hope is the right direction because they can't see the governor at all,

let it get a nice shot of one of the reporter's arms as he knocked it

face-down on the desk.

"This one's a new model. It's got a trigger. It's set for faces, full-lengths,

and vehicles."

So great. I come home with a hundred-frame cartridge full of passersby

and tricycles. How the hell did it know when to click the shutter or which

one the governor was in a press conference of eight hundred people,

full-length or face? It was supposed to have all kinds of fancy light-metrics

and computer-composition features, but all it could really do was

mindlessly snap whatever passed in front of its idiot lens, just like the

highway speed cameras.

It had probably been designed by the same government types who'd put

the highway cameras along the road instead of overhead so that all it takes

is a little speed to reduce the new side-license plates to a blur, and people

go faster than ever. A great camera, the eisenstadt. I could hardly wait to

use it.

"Sun-co's very interested in the eisenstadt," Ramirez said. She didn't

say goodbye. She never does. She just stops talking and then starts up

again later. I looked back in the direction of the jackal.

The multiway was completely deserted. New cars and singles don't use

the undivided multiways much, even during rush hours. Too many of the

little cars have been squashed by tankers. Usually there are at least a few

obsoletes and renegade semis taking advantage of the Patrol's being on

the divideds, but there wasn't anybody at all.

I got back in the car and backed up even with the jackal. I turned off the

ignition but didn't get out. I could see the trickle of blood from its mouth

from here. A tanker went roaring past out of nowhere, trying to beat the

cameras, straddling the three middle lanes and crushing the jackal's rear

half to a bloody mush. It was a good thing I hadn't been trying to cross the

road. He never would have even seen me.

I started the car and drove to the nearest off-ramp to find a phone.

There was one at an old 7-Eleven on McDowell.

"I'm calling to report a dead animal on the road," I told the woman who

answered the Society's phone.

"Name and number?"

"It's a jackal," I said. "It's between Thirtieth and Thirty-Second on Van

Buren. It's in the far right lane."

"Did you render emergency assistance?"

"There was no assistance to be rendered. It was dead."

"Did you move the animal to the side of the road?"

"No."

"Why not?" she said, her tone suddenly sharper, more alert.

Because I thought it was a dog. "I didn't have a shovel," I said, and hung

up.

I got out to Tempe by eight-thirty, in spite of the fact that every tanker

in the state suddenly decided to take Van Buren. I got pushed out onto the

shoulder and drove on that most of the way.

The Winnebago was set up in the fairgrounds between Phoenix and

Tempe, next to the old zoo. The flyer had said they would be open from

nine to nine, and I had wanted to get most of my pictures before they

opened, but it was already a quarter to nine, and even if there were no

cars in the dusty parking lot, I was probably too late.

It's a tough job being a photographer. The minute most people see a

camera, their real faces close like a shutter in too much light, and all that's

left is their camera face, their public face. It's a smiling face, except in the

case of Saudi terrorists or senators, but, smiling or not, it shows no real

emotion. Actors, politicians, people who have their pictures taken all the

time are the worst. The longer the person's been in the public eye, the

easier it is for me to get great vidcam footage and the harder it is to get

anything approaching a real photograph, and the Amblers had been at

this for nearly twenty years. By a quarter to nine they would already have

their camera faces on.

I parked down at the foot of the hill next to the clump of ocotillas and

yucca where the zoo sign had been, pulled my Nikon longshot out of the

mess in the back seat, and took some shots of the sign they'd set up by the

multiway: "See a Genuine Winnebago. One Hundred Percent Authentic."

The Genuine Winnebago was parked longways against the stone banks

of cacti and palms at the front of the zoo. Ramirez had said it wasn't a real

Winnebago, but it had the identifying W with its extending stripes

running the length of the RV, and it seemed to me to be the right shape,

though I hadn't seen one in at least ten years.

I was probably the wrong person for this story. I had never had any

great love for RV's, and my first thought when Ramirez called with the

assignment was that there are some things that should be extinct, like

mosquitoes and lane dividers, and RVs are right at the top of the list. They

had been everywhere in the mountains when I'd lived in Colorado,

crawling along in the left-hand lane, taking up two lanes even in the days

when a lane was fifteen feet wide, with a train of cursing cars behind

them.

I'd been behind one on Independence Pass that had stopped cold while

a ten-year-old got out to take pictures of the scenery with an Instamatic,

and one of them had tried to take the curve in front of my house and

ended up in my ditch, looking like a beached whale. But that was always a

bad curve.

An old man in an ironed short-sleeved shirt came out the side door and

around to the front end and began washing the Winnebago with a sponge

and a bucket. I wondered where he had gotten the water. According to

Ramirez's advance work, which she'd sent me over the modem about the

Winnebago, it had maybe a fifty-gallon water tank, tops, which is barely

enough for drinking water, a shower, and maybe washing a dish or two,

and there certainly weren't any hookups here at the zoo, but he was

swilling water onto the front bumper and even over the tires as if he had

more than enough.

I took a few shots of the RV standing in the huge expanse of parking lot

and then hit the longshot to full for a picture of the old man working on

the bumper. He had large reddish-brown freckles on his arms and the top

of his bald head, and he scrubbed away at the bumper with a vengeance.

After a minute he stopped and stepped back, and then called to his wife.

He looked worried or maybe just crabby. I was too far away to tell if he

had snapped out her name impatiently or simply called her to come and

look, and I couldn't see his face. She opened the metal side door, with its

narrow louvered window, and stepped down onto the metal step.

The old man asked her something, and she, still standing on the step,

looked out toward the multiway and shook her head, and then came

around to the front, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, and they both stood

there looking at his handiwork.

They were One Hundred Percent Authentic, even if the Winnebago

wasn't, down to her flowered blouse and polyester slacks, probably also

one hundred percent, and the cross-stitched rooster on the dishtowel. She

had on brown leather slip-ons like I remembered my grandmother

wearing, and I was willing to bet she had set her thinning white hair on

bobby pins. Their bio said they were in their eighties, but I would have put

them in their nineties, although I wondered if they were too perfect and

therefore fake, like the Winnebago. But she went on wiping her hands on

the dishtowel the way my grandmother had when she was upset, even

though I couldn't see if her face was showing any emotion, and that action

at least was authentic.

She apparently told him the bumper looked fine because he dropped the

dripping sponge into the bucket and went around behind the Winnebago.

She went back inside, shutting the metal door behind her even though it

had to be already at least a hundred and ten out, and they hadn't even

bothered to park under what scanty shade the palms provided.

I put the longshot back in the car. The old man came around the front

with a big plywood sign. He propped it against the vehicle's side. "The

Last of the Winnebagos," the sign read in somebody's idea of what Indian

writing should look like. "See a vanishing breed.

Admission—Adults—$8.00, Children under twelve—$5.00 Open 9 A.M. to

Sunset." He strung up a row of red and yellow flags, and then picked up

the bucket and started toward the door, but halfway there he stopped and

took a few steps down the parking lot to where I thought he probably had

a good view of the road, and then went back, walking like an old man, and

took another swipe at the bumper with the sponge.

"Are you done with the RV yet, McCombe?" Ramirez said on the car

phone.

I slung the camera into the back. "I just got here. Every tanker in

Arizona was on Van Buren this morning. Why the hell don't you have me

do a piece on abuses of the multiway system by water-haulers?"

"Because I want you to get to Tempe alive. The governor's press

conference has been moved to one, so you're okay. Have you used the

eisenstadt yet?"

"I told you, I just got here. I haven't even turned the damned thing on."

"You don't turn it on. It self-activates when you set it bottom down on a

level surface."

Great. It had probably already shot its 100-frame cartridge on the way

here.

"Well, if you don't use it on the Winnebago, make sure you use it at the

governor's conference," she said. "By the way, have you thought any more

about moving to investigative?"

That was why Sun-co was really so interested in the eisenstadt. It had

been easier to send a photographer who could write stories than it had to

send a photographer and a reporter, especially in the little one-seater

Hitoris they were ordering now, which was how I got to be a

photojournalism And since that had worked out so well, why send either?

Send an eisenstadt and a DAT deck and you won't need an Hitori and

way-mile credits to get them there. You can send them through the mail.

They can sit unnoticed on the old governor's desk, and after a while

somebody in a one-seater who wouldn't have to be either a photographer

or a reporter can sneak in to retrieve them and a dozen others.

"No," I said, glancing back up the hill. The old man gave one last swipe

to the front bumper and then walked over to one of the zoo's old

stone-edged planters and dumped the bucket in on a tangle of prickly

pear, which would probably think it was a spring shower and bloom

before I made it up the hill. "Look, if I'm going to get any pictures before

the turistas arrive, I'd better go."

"I wish you'd think about it. And use the eisenstadt this time. You'll like

it once you try it. Even you'll forget it's a camera."

"I'll bet," I said. I looked back down the multiway. Nobody at all was

coming now. Maybe that was what all the Amblers' anxiety was about—I

should have asked Ramirez what their average daily attendance was and

what sort of people used up credits to come this far out and see an old

beat-up RV. The curve into Tempe alone was three point two miles. Maybe

nobody came at all. If that was the case, I might have a chance of getting

some decent pictures. I got in the Hitori and drove up the steep drive.

"Howdy," the old man said, all smiles, holding out his reddish-brown

freckled hand to shake mine. "Name's Jake Ambler. And this here's

Winnie," he said, patting the metal side of the RV, "Last of the

Winnebagos. Is there just the one of you?"

"David McCombe," I said, holding out my press pass. "I'm a

photographer. Sun-co. Phoenix Sun, Tempe-Mesa Tribune, Glendale Star,

and affiliated stations. I was wondering if I could take some pictures of

your vehicle?" I touched my pocket and turned the taper on.

"You bet. We've always cooperated with the media, Mrs. Ambler and

me. I was just cleaning old Winnie up," he said. "She got pretty dusty on

the way down from Globe." He didn't make any attempt to tell his wife I

was there, even though she could hardly avoid hearing us, and she didn't

open the metal door again. "We been on the road now with Winnie for

almost twenty years. Bought her in 1989 in Forest City, Iowa, where they

were made. The wife didn't want to buy her, didn't know if she'd like

traveling, but now she's the one wouldn't part with it."

He was well into his spiel now, an open, friendly, I-have-nothing-to-hide

expression on his face that hid everything. There was no point in taking

any stills, so I got out the vidcam and shot the TV footage while he led me

around the RV.

"This up here," he said, standing with one foot on the flimsy metal

ladder and patting the metal bar around the top, "is the luggage rack, and

this is the holding tank. It'll hold thirty gallons and has an automatic

electric pump that hooks up to any waste hookup. Empties in five

minutes, and you don't even get your hands dirty." He held up his fat pink

hands palms forward as if to show me. "Water tank," he said, slapping a

silver metal tank next to it. "Holds forty gallons, which is plenty for just

the two of us. Interior space is a hundred fifty cubic feet with six feet four

of headroom. That's plenty even for a tall guy like yourself."

He gave me the whole tour. His manner was easy, just short of

slap-on-the-back hearty, but he looked relieved when an ancient VW bug

came chugging catty-cornered up through the parking lot. He must have

thought they wouldn't have any customers either.

A family piled out, Japanese tourists, a woman with short black hair, a

man in shorts, two kids. One of the kids had a ferret on a leash.

"I'll just look around while you tend to the paying customers," I told

him.

I locked the vidcam in the car, took the longshot, and went up toward

the zoo. I took a wide-angle of the zoo sign for Ramirez. I could see it

now—she'd run a caption like, "The old zoo stands empty today. No sound

of lion's roar, of elephant's trumpeting, or children's laughter, can be

heard here. The old Phoenix Zoo, last of its kind, while just outside its

gates stands yet another last of its kind. Story on page 10." Maybe it would

be a good idea to let the eisenstadts and the computers take over.

I went inside. I hadn't been out here in years. In the late eighties there

had been a big flap over zoo policy. I had taken the pictures, but I hadn't

covered the story since there were still such things as reporters back then.

I had photographed the cages in question and the new zoo director who

had caused all the flap by stopping the zoo's renovation project cold and

giving the money to a wildlife protection group.

"I refuse to spend money on cages when in a few years we'll have

nothing to put in them. The timber wolf, the California condor, the grizzly

bear, are in imminent danger of becoming extinct, and it's our

responsibility to save them, not make a comfortable prison for the last

survivors."

The Society had called him an alarmist, which just goes to show you

how much things can change. Well, he was an alarmist, wasn't he? The

grizzly bear isn't extinct in the wild—it's Colorado's biggest tourist draw,

and there are so many whooping cranes Texas is talking about limited

hunting.

In all the uproar, the zoo had ceased to exist, and the animals all went

to an even more comfortable prison in Sun City—sixteen acres of savannah

land for the zebras and lions, and snow manufactured daily for the polar

bears.

They hadn't really been cages, in spite of what the zoo director said. The

old capybara enclosure, which was the first thing inside the gate, was a

nice little meadow with a low stone wall around it. A family of prairie dogs

had taken up residence in the middle of it.

I went back to the gate and looked down at the Winnebago. The family

circled the Winnebago, the man bending down to look underneath the

body. One of the kids was hanging off the ladder at the back of the RV.

The ferret was nosing around the front wheel Jake Ambler had so carefully

scrubbed down, looking like it was about ready to lift its leg, if ferrets do

that. The kid yanked on its leash and then picked it up in his arms. The

mother said something to him. Her nose was sunburned.

Katie's nose had been sunburned. She had had that white cream on it,

that skiers used to use. She was wearing a parka and jeans and bulky

pink-and-white moon-boots that she couldn't run in, but she still made it

to Aberfan before I did. I pushed past her and knelt over him.

"I hit him," she said bewilderedly. "I hit a dog."

"Get back in the jeep, damn it!" I shouted at her. I stripped off my

sweater and tried to wrap him in it. "We've got to get him to the vet."

"Is he dead?" Katie said, her face as pale as the cream on her nose.

"No!" I had shouted. "No, he isn't dead."

The mother turned and looked up toward the zoo, her hand shading her

face. She caught sight of the camera, dropped her hand, and smiled, a

toothy, impossible smile. People in the public eye are the worst, but even

people having a snapshot taken close down somehow, and it isn't just the

phony smile. It's as if that old superstition is true, and cameras do really

steal the soul.

I pretended to take her picture and then lowered the camera. The zoo

director had put up a row of tombstone-shaped signs in front of the gate,

one for each endangered species. They were covered with plastic, which

hadn't helped much. I wiped the streaky dust off the one in front of me.

"Canis latrans," it said, with two green stars after it. "Coyote. North

American wild dog. Due to large-scale poisoning by ranchers, who saw it

as a threat to cattle and sheep, the coyote is nearly extinct in the wild."

Underneath there was a photograph of a ragged coyote sitting on its

haunches and an explanation or the stars. Blue—endangered species.

Yellow—endangered habitat. Red—extinct in the wild.

After Misha died, I had come out here to photograph the dingo and the

coyotes and the wolves, but they were already in the process of moving the

zoo, so I couldn't get any pictures, and it probably wouldn't have done any

good. The coyote in the picture had faded to a greenish-yellow and its

yellow eyes were almost white, but it stared out of the picture looking as

hearty and unconcerned as Jake Ambler, wearing its camera face.

The mother had gone back to the bug and was herding the kids inside.

Mr. Ambler walked the father back to the car, shaking his shining bald

head, and the man talked some more, leaning on the open door, and then

got in and drove off. I walked back down.

If he was bothered by the fact that they had only stayed ten minutes and

that, as far as I had been able to see, no money had changed hands, it

didn't show in his face. He led me around to the side of the RV and

pointed to a chipped and faded collection of decals along the painted bar

of the W. "These here are the states we've been in." He pointed to the one

nearest the front. "Every state in the Union, plus Canada and Mexico. Last

state we were in was Nevada."

Up this close it was easy to see where he had painted out the name of

the original RV and covered it with the bar of red. The paint had the dull

look of unauthenticity. He had covered up the "Open Road" with a

burnt-wood plaque that read, "The Amblin' Amblers."

He pointed at a bumper sticker next to the door that said, "I got lucky

in Vegas at Caesar's Palace," and had a picture of a naked showgirl. "We

couldn't find a decal for Nevada. I don't think they make them anymore.

And you know something else you can't find? Steering wheel covers. You

know the kind. That keep the wheel from burning your hands when it gets

hot?"

"Do you do all the driving?" I asked.

He hesitated before answering, and I wondered if one of them didn't

have a license. I'd have to look it up in the lifeline. "Mrs. Ambler spells me

sometimes, but I do most of it. Mrs. Ambler reads the map. Damn maps

nowadays are so hard to read. Half the time you can't tell what kind of

road it is. They don't make them like they used to."

We talked for a while more about all the things you couldn't find a

decent one of anymore and the sad state things had gotten in generally,

and then I announced I wanted to talk to Mrs. Ambler, got the vidcam and

the eisenstadt out of the car, and went inside the Winnebago. She still had

the dishtowel in her hand, even though there couldn't possibly be space for

that many dishes in the tiny RV. The inside was even smaller than I had

thought it would be, low enough that I had to duck and so narrow I had to

hold the Nikon close to my body to keep from hitting the lens on the

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TheLastoftheWinnebagosbyConnieWillisOnthewayouttoTempeIsawadeadjackalintheroad.IwasinthefarleftlaneofVanBuren,tenlanesawayfromit,anditslonglegswerefacingawayfromme,thesquarishmuzzleflatagainstthepavementsoitlookednarrowerthanitreallywas,andforaminuteIthoughtitwasadog.Ihadnotseenananimalintheroadlike...

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Connie Willis - The Last of the Winnebagos

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