The Last of the Winnebagos

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.