The Wanderer

Hunter stopped the sedan’s motor, set the brake, and as the school bus drew up behind them third in line, he and Margo got out and hurried forward until they could see, too.

In front of them a slope stretched downward for a quarter of a mile in gentle undulations to a broad-ditched flat, then rose again, though not so high.

The slope was black to the left, dusty greenish-brown to the right. Monica Mountainway went down it in swinging curves, crossing and recrossing the demarcation line between the burned and the unburned.

Toward the bottom, almost on the demarcation line, it passed three white buildings surrounded by a wide graveled space and a high, wire-mesh fence. Then the road joined the broad-ditched fiat which led off in either direction, almost level but gently curving, until the hills hid it each way.

Down the center of the flat, following its contours, stretched what looked for a long moment exactly like a miles-long, flattish, scaly serpent thirty yards wide. The individual scales, which ran in glitter-bordered rows eight or nine across, were mostly blue, brown, cream and black, though here and there was a green or red one. Judging by its glittering sides, the serpent had a silver belly.

Wojtowicz, coming up behind them, said, “Cripes, we’re there. That’s it. Wow!”

The scaly serpent was inland Route 101, jammed with cars bumper to bumper. The glitter-border was the freeway’s wire-mesh fence.

Doc said hoarsely, “I want to talk to Doddsy and McHeath.”

Rama Joan said, “Ann, you can get them.” The little girl climbed past her mother and hopped out.

As soon as Hunter’s and Margo’s eyes stopped swinging and started to linger, details began to destroy the serpent illusion. At many spots cars had been driven wide on the shoulder, up against the fence. Some of these had their hoods up and dabs of white at their sides — Hunter realized these last must be towels, shirts, scarves, and large handkerchiefs: pitifully obedient “askings for assistance” set up before the jam got impossible.

At several points the serpent scales were twisted and whorled: accidents never cleaned up and attempts of whole groups of cars to turn and go back the way they’d come, either by crossing the median strip or by using the shoulder.

At three places the wire-mesh fence bulged acutely outward, each bulge filled with cars nose-on: these must have been trying to ram their way out. One of these attempts had been limitedly successful: the fence was down, but the way out beyond it blocked by a mess of cars ditch-overturned and crushed together, two half-climbed onto the others’ backs.

Here and there a few cars still moved in senseless-seeming, backward and forward jerks of a few feet each way. Stale exhaust-stench mixed with the burnt reek coming on the moist southeast wind.

Hunter thought of what it must have looked like at night in the last stages of general movement: five thousand cars in sight from here, ten thousand headlights swinging and blinking, ten thousand bumpers to clash and snag and rip, a few police speeding up and down trying to keep open lanes that relentlessly shortened and narrowed, five thousand motors, belching exhaust pipes, horns…And about a hundred thousand more cars between here and L.A.

He heard the Ramrod saying, “It is the valley of dry bones. Lord of the Saucers, succor them.” From the car beside him Rama Joan said softly: “Even an evildoer sees happiness so long as his evil deed does not ripen; but when his evil deed ripens…”

The biggest and worst car-crush of all was where Monica Mountainway entered 101 just beyond the three white buildings: a hundred or so cars slewed every which way, several overset, others ditch-jammed sideways, and the nearest three dozen burnt black — it occurred to Hunter that he was very possibly looking at the source of the brush fire.

Only after he and Margo had studied the cars for quite a while (or for an interminable, incredulous, eye-darting moment) did they begin to see the people. It was as if some universal law forced vision to descend by size-stages.

People! — three or four to each car, at least. Many of them still sitting in them, by God. Others standing or walking between them, a few standing or sitting on fabric-or-cushion-spread car roofs. Off to the left, beyond the burnt swathe, many people had climbed the fence and set up blanket-and-beach-towel-shaded bivouacs, yet few if any of them seemed to have gone far from the freeway that penned their vehicles; perhaps they figured the jam would be cleaned up somehow in a few hours or a day. And there wasn’t much walking around — they were sticking to the shade.

It was a stale old joke, Hunter recalled, that Angelenos, using cars even to visit the people across the street, had forgotten how to walk — one of those jokes that are little more than the unretouched truth.