Walker remembers the day well and clearly. He loved that grandstand as only a son could love her. It was the only mother he ever knew, for Graylung wasn't a mother, he wasn't even a father tho he could act like one sometimes.

Walker made the long walk over to that part of town in order to stand in the shadows around the demolition site. He stood near but not close to the tall orange portable plastic fence to keep the cars out, to keep them from taking one last amateur spin around the speedway circle. He stood in the shadows and smelled the puffs of popcorn smell each time the wrecking ball hit into the wood walls of the stands and splintered them. He heard the crack like bones in your body. The old wood gave way with a toothpick snap and before too long the whole stadium was down on the ground as if it were praying to it, and down on the ground as if the first tree that made it had just fallen again.

The tears dripping from his eyelids and the dust from the demolition painted stripes on his face, just like it used to be on race days when his body and mind were burned to turn the round wheel of his Speedster 48 to victory, or at least to second place.

Some day

There will be more parking

Than grains of sand

It wasn't a large city, but it had a well-developed freeway system. If you drew it on a map you could forget about the streets and buildings and just draw the freeways, and they'd make a pretty picture. First there were two small circles near the middle. These circled the downtowns like a pair of eyes, but one was drooped below the other, or the first was raised in suspicion. There was a larger ring around that like a face. Some sections of the loop were flat and straight as if the map were an underinflated ball that came to rest on the floor on that side, and some sections curved slightly. In between and to the sides of these circles it was all lines and curves - the whole face had gone crazy and there were three or more noses that flowed right into four or five mouths, some opened, some closed, and the dozen or so thousands of hairs that wrapped around and over the upper loop and fell into the middle of the face as a beard and sideburns as well. In a wide big radius around the face there were too many large crescents, like moons that might someday meet - this was the great outer loop freeway to be, still under construction. Color them all in different lines, red for four lanes, blue for six lanes, green for eight lanes, orange for ten lanes, brown for twelve lanes, grey for fourteen lanes and so forth.

Oftentimes separate freeway lines rode side by side, with just a small gap between them. Sometimes they touched, like two friends driving together and waving sometimes but still side by side, only concrete median between them. This was "the system," and most people in town knew their way around it pretty well. Sometimes you had to use the old fashioned streets to drive some places, but these were risky propositions, and there weren't really that many of them left.

If you have a head of your own

You can surrender it swell

To the car radio dial

"This is Super Livius, the mobile man in the street, playing the greatest hits from my car radio to yours. The streets are clearing, my friends, and there's an eighty percent chance of heavy traffic tomorrow, a forty percent chance tonight. We have a warm front of travelers moving from California, across the Dakotas they are crossing as I speak, and they should hit the metroplex by rush hour tomorrow morning. The result will be gridlock, so use alternate routes. Let me repeat - use alternate routes. Even if you need to go to Canada to go across town, do it, you must do it, so use alternate routes to leave the proper freeway for the handful of us who really know how to use it. Use alternate routes: that means to go by another way, like a long way around it. And so here's the next thirteen year old singing sensation, Little Cindy, with her latest hit, 'Drive me to the Cosmetics Aisle.'"

Wheels for eyes

Rolling into wisdom

Running over insight

A racetrack has a grandstand, where the people sit, and a speedway, which takes their eyes from their pop and candy to something and somewhere that they cannot be. And sometimes the grandstand is empty of people, and that is just another workday for the crews and grease monkeys. A speedway is a street that goes for a while and comes back to itself, and Walker has to cross it to visit a small car or a pit crew and when he does he sometimes looks down at his feet and sees what he is walking upon and that sad smooth surface and sometimes as he walks across it he hears the noise of an oncoming race car and then he looks up and flinches as if it was oncoming but it never is, it is always an empty street that he sees, or an empty track to his left, or his right, whatever the direction is for traffic, and he is safe but he is frightened. It is that way at the racetrack, the grease monkeys know you have to cross the roadway to get your wrench or get your can of oil, and so the drivers do not try to drive you over, to drive you down to death and splat. But once Driver leaves his raceway work world and has to walk on his journey back to his home, the rules are completely different, and he has to become his secret walking person.

Walker knows the secret spying ways to go, he knows you have to take the culvert by the trees, you have to walk this section on your knees and watch that the cars don't see the fluff of your hair, and if you keep it down it's like you're not even there. You can keep yourself a secret with your body bent lower. Sometimes it's wet down there and sometimes it's a dry floor, and if you leave too early you might be seen so you have to wait until the clock ticks around, until the frost has turned from green. If you walk this way you will get there faster, but if you make a mistake it could just be disaster.

Walker knows the ways to move his body with a hush; you can cover your tip top with the clutter of the cars and you can make a hesitation that will cloak you in the hours. You might not think there is any way past this place, any way to get past the freeway embankments, but if you take his advice and use your eyes for enemies, you will take the right steps that can lead you on so suddenly, that even take you there where the door and safe inside is suddenly waiting.

Because once you are inside a building it is suddenly safe to walk, it is suddenly safe for everybody, as safe as at the racetrack. More people have the carts these days, like wheelchairs but much heavier, the motorized dollies to pull their big bodies around on the inside spaces, but many still walk inside because you can't get your car thru the old fashioned door and it is certainly necessary to be in an inside place to do certain things that you have to do daily. So most people keep their legs in some shape, they walk all around and its fine if it's inside but if it's outside you better watch out because if you walk in public somebody's going to run you over and it won't be their fault, it will just be an accident in the eyes of the law and in all the other headlights that pass your body by.

There is hope inside, and that is what Walker thinks and says, but outside there are only cars.

If they were your own

Your own feet to master

They'd hit the brakes

If she could go faster, if she could go further, if she could drive her eyes out and to the living daylights and even more; if it were beyond speed, and her foot was down and she could hover like rose petals on the skin of the water, if she could be the call of meditation on the sun streaks of the church wall, if it were possible to drive to the next state of action and the radio so loud in her ears and the windows so open with rush or closed to hush it to float her in her own silence, she can go further and faster but can she drive to her dream of a feeling she can drive but can she get there, she knows she can but she must try even harder. She must try with the streak between her toes, with all her organs flying and the pieces so they are meaningless, she must try with movements like a clock twitching to and fro like it has thrown its springs to the far ocean currents to the splash of reaction and the creak of morning bones. She can drive with the fast food wrappers, push roll down the window and holding them flapping like flames for a second until you release them in float on the roller coaster air for a spell and the face sauce still drips on her lips but she doesn't have time to check the vanity mirror because the sun is not so low and besides she knows where she must go. She has to drive to her dream, she has to drive so far that she feels something, so that she feels her dream of a feeling and then she will know the next word out.

If you

If me

If the automobile between us

He didn't see it coming, it was his usual back alley way and if somebody found him there he could just say he was snooping around and his car wasn't far off, parked just down the block and he'd point at one even tho it wasn't his car to point at. He's usually very careful, but his mind was on the next class he was to give when he turned the corner and tripped over the dead pedestrian. It was a fresh kill, a slight fog rose up from the hot steaming blood into the cold air of winter.

She was young, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the most, and probably dreamed of driving as soon as she could, but now she would never get her license. He could see the indent stain of the bumper on her smooth round face and for a moment he tried to imagine the chain of events that put her body here bleeding on the sidewalk. Was she trying to cross the street and did she drop something, like a scarf, on the street and try to pick it up and didn't notice the oncoming car that wasn't about to stop for her. And who was it that pulled her body over to the sidewalk to bleed: was it the driver of the car that hit her or the driver of another, or another invisible walker.

A car on Ranger Street, quieter than usual in the middle afternoon, tore him to the here and now and he looked up before sliding back into the back alley shadows.

And if your life

Is sad and blue

Buy a new car to cheer it up

The street is narrow the street is broad the street is quiet the street is loud the street is where our dreams come true the street waits for me and waits for you the street is straight or takes a bend the street comes eventually to its end the street holds the promise of a journey where the street is a bully and unfair, the street is a canvas we can paint with our lives the street is a canvas we can paint with our death.

The street is like many others, with fences, and sidewalks and homes at its edges, they will pry into your sensitive secrets if you will allow it. The street has a dangerous face if we give it some width, the street has lines where you may cross it but beware for your life, beware.

I have a story to tell you, a story over your beer or crackers, it's a life story, a long life story that starts with a baby and goes till he trips and falls and goes till he lies down dead asleep and this is a story to tell you because what else could I tell you. This is a story I tell you because I forgot what else to do, how to show you a picture which tells you a story too, how to put a street in front of your face and see if you can tell the story in there as if it were. Finally the first person walking by after hours of faceless cars only passing, and that person has a story as well about why they are walking and where and how much further.

If you walk you take your life with you in your own two hands, if you drive you turn your life into a machine, if you walk the world is your whole inside and you have it, if you drive the world is only inside your car and everything outside could be a joke or an insult - it's not even necessary.

Car sun

Rolling done

Round like always

"This is Super Livius, your drive time rocking king, now and forever, this time and all time, for it's always drive time and it's always rock time. Here are the greatest hits from the zeros and the ninety-one thru nine, and the eighties and the sixties and the seventies and the teens and the twenties and all of them. I'm the mobile best station, from my car radio to yours. Here's the traffic forecast for your excursion weekend. Keep your windshield wipers flapping because the sky is crying. Keep your windows clean because the view will be devastating. Lots of traffic as always, so prepare to listen to the hits on your radio."

It roars so loud beside you

And is quiet when it is far away

Perhaps it will never come back some day

He knew how, he knew how to walk in the shadows where no driver would see him, how to use parkinglots to his advantage and how to move so swiftly and so carefully that you had to guess he'd gotten there by car, but it really was not the case.

He was not the only one, he was one of a small group of resisters, and he ran seminars late at night in an undisclosed location where he told his secrets to the other pedestrians, where he acted out his avoidance maneuvers, where he demonstrated the physics of shadows and how to use them for your foot-based transportation purposes, and he taught them all a thing or two. Each week his class would be slightly smaller than the week before. You must remember that these were the days when drivers were vicious, and if you were a pedestrian and you were not wily, your days were certainly numbered.

His eyes went over the heads of the class. There were three missing this week, three gone, either dead or incapacitated, and he would never see those three again. He felt sad about it but he did not cry, he would do that later, on his pillow silently in the middle of the night when he'd wake up with a jump at his own death dreams of the grills of cars getting closer and looking down at his legs and they meant it in slow motion, and the gravity pulling him down and under where the wheels are rolling fast and create their own under-chassis weather patterns.

If you are inside one

You are alone

If you are outside there is hope

Has Walker found a group of likeminded people or is it only an illusion. The meeting room with its tables and chairs, the low carpeting on the floor that shushes the discussion so that no cars may hear them. Does he lead these meetings or it is something that he hopes for, something in all the like-minded people, in the faces that are some hostile and some not. Even when the low rumble of a car starting up hits his house he knows it's okay because there are others, or maybe these others are just something that he imagines.

There is something similar about this spot of ground. The one that he's walking over in the delicate moment. How the sun is barely melting the snow and the water formed there holds a ripple from the wind. That food wrapper that frames it to one side, that empty plastic bottle of motor oil that still has a last few drips on its lips. It is the scene under his feet but he cannot walk over, he must stop and watch it as if it was something that he had seen before, as if it were the whole corner of the world he occupied, the low snow mountains spotted with dirt and grease, the small melted lake in the middle, the various bits of torn paper like human civilization, as if he were suddenly a colossus with legs thicker and taller than any possible tree and he could look down upon it as if his footsteps could so attack geography. This has something familiar about it, like the world he is alone in, like the company that will not keep him, like the warnings that blow across the bitter crisp air. There is an entire world below him and he is simply one stage of it, one step of it that can step over and kick a whole mountain away and free the lake to seep into its surroundings and pick up the scraps of paper and so dissolve all habitation. And pick up the motor oil bottle and be careful of the drips on its lips and is this something he could possibly know, is this something he could possibly do, or is it all so far below him or miniaturized beyond recognition or meaning. He steps around it, looking up carefully for all the cars that could squash him like an ant.

What is that whimpering

Could it be

My long lost car

They have TV skin shining on their faces as they watch the bombs drop on the Enemy town for operation, "Twitch and Shove." The reporters, who are actually soldiers and generals and lay soldiers who play reporters on TV, they say that the bombs are so precise that they will continue to bomb the Enemy but that the bombs will be sure to hit everything else but miss the stolen cars. The ground assault has begun with tanks and empty scaffolds of car carrier trucks racing across the desert to the seats of power and the parkinglots beside them.

"I hope we get our cars back," Penny says, her eyes still stuck on the TV screen. "I hope we get them soon. You might want one of those cars too, honey," But Walker just watches and his heart pounds faster and harder.

The tanks see some farmers walking along the road and the tanks roll over the farmers, just as they might do if they drove home here. It's funny how a car can be like a tank sometimes. It's funny how you can drive up on the sidewalk and keep on driving. It's funny how you can see that guy with the political t-shirt and how you can gun the gas and just drive him over, flat and bleeding behind you on the sidewalk forever. How that will keep him from marching or walking for a long time if not always.

It's not like it's all there, the voices of birds, the voices of falling trash, the simple of the rivers, the complex of them too. It's not like it's all there waiting just for him. The morning stillness that the wind only knows how to shiver just a little. A faraway stopping sound, the moping of a truck with its brakes a little baby cry.

He doesn't know anything when he walks across country on his two feet - he feels as empty as a piecrust without its pie. He has no constant radio to beat its viewpoint into him, only the birds which don't even speak his language in either love or hatred. Their propaganda is only music to his ears; their sales pitches don't prove that he has to spend any money.

He doesn't get any wiser but maybe he doesn't get any dumber either. He has to find a new route and makes a note of it in his notebook. He draws a line that curves around trees and boulders. He draws a double path and when his feet pause that's the river in lines and with shading. It could be language too, a new way of writing that does not need a road.

You trust it

You ignore it

You despise it

"This is Super Livius on the Rock Waves 26, from my car radio to yours. I give you the moving messages, the pattern of my brainwaves, my steering suggestions for heavy traffic, my opinions in all matters, and now, to move you in the motionless lanes, the latest hit by eleven year old Tiny Wendy. It's called, "Cut off my legs with joy, my daddy bought me a new car."

Don't decide now

You have all that

Drive time yet to go

The backhoe dug into the guts of the grandstand. Steel screamed on steel and it made your eyes and ears cry as companions. It smashed wood beams like broken leaves and with a wave like the ocean or like a greeting from your friend, one side tumbled up for a last second then forward then down where it dissolved like most of the things that don't fit in your memory and designed the air and the wind with its specks, with its clunks and its dust and what fell up to make it fall down.

His mouth made two silent mountains in the dusty air before him. They were brown, then purple, then shivered away from sight.

It's like the job you hate

But must

On four wheels

The assembly line was far down below her. But even tho it was down so far, with her eyes dipping below her chin, Tracia could still see that more of the workers had driven their cars right up to the conveyor belt. These workers reached their arms out their driver's side window to turn a nut or screw in a screw, whatever the repetitive task that was theirs to do on the assembly line. The other workers, the ones who hadn't taken their cars inside to work, looked on at those who worked in their cars, their co-workers safely shelled inside, able to get a bite from their sack lunch whenever they felt like it, and those that watched from the outside had a kind of envy in their faces and in their hands.

Tracia's excuse was that her keyboard cable wasn't long enough to reach in behind her steeringwheel. Plus, if she was in her car it would be much harder for her to look down at the assembly line on the floor so far below. Now she could just tilt her head down to see it. In her car, it would not be so easy. She might be able to figure out something with mirrors and rolling down windows, but even so".

She had to see the assembly line because that was her job, really. She was in Ad Compliance - that was her position. She was the one in charge of it for this factory and she had to be sure that the cars coming off the line met the standards set for them by the likes of Penny and the others writing the company advertising. Ad Compliance wasn't exactly the job she dreamed of having years ago in Junior Ad Copywriter's Scouts, but it was a job, and far better than the line-work far below.

And she never had the quick mind for phrases that her best friend Penny did. Tracia knew that Penny was in the ideal place for Penny, and that she was probably one of the best in the business. Tracia was happy in her own little job, observing, watching and evaluating. Her job was important too, tho not as glamorous as Penny's. Maybe this job, above all other jobs in the world past and future, was what she did best, Tracia thought, if it really was the kind of job that one could do best.

An alarm hiccupped beside her, and with a quick look down Tracia could see the hang-up in the line. Someone had opened his car door to reach a nut going by on the line, and when he closed the car door again, he caught a part of the partially assembled car going by on the belt in his side view mirror. Tracia had to go down there quickly and pulled out her slide rule and pocket watch. She checked the crime scene thoroughly but she could detect no major ad damage to the car under assembly, so she ordered the line back to motion and everyone returned to their tasks and repeated.

You live

You drive

You die

A great dream of power. A great dream of all-powerful power, or power like a flame that eats up all others, of power like a road that determines the way quite deliberately. Of power like the sounds that buy the silence, of power as a truck to play on your own senses, of power as a way to deceive everyone and your own body as well, of power as a great mystery, of power as ignorance, of power so stupid, so set in its tragic ways. Of power unable to lift its drunken face, of power incapable of a kind word or gesture, of power red as blood, of power from a gun, of power from a car that rolls over the smallness, the quiet, the peace that the river and the trees make by their presence.

One car

Two cars

Too many cars

Tracia: Do I love my car? Not particularly. But it lightens my load, it gets me places, it looks nice and it feels good. It's so perfect and quiet inside my car and I can roll up my windows and suddenly I am invincible. No harm can reach me because I can always drive away. Nothing to fear if I can steer down another threat. It's my power; it's my way to go. I can drive it all around and come out some place. It makes it all so simple. It makes it all possible. It gives me a good sense of myself, who I am, what I can be. It tells me things, it tells things about me to me. I can listen to my husband on the radio. I can visit my friends or at least chat with them on the phone. I've got plenty of room between me and the next driver - just the right amount of personal space in the busy creepy world. My car is my aura, my halo, my crown. It will get me up the road and never let me down. It will tell me that I am somebody and show me the way to more success. I can make a mess inside it but that's just me and I'm the only one in this personal space of mine. Nobody else's breath, no other teeth, good or bad. It's just me and the nice cool seat and I've got a good view forward thru the windshield and back thru the mirrors and to the side and I can roll down my windows to hear the jet air or I can roll them up and feel the rush of peacefulness and I'm safe because I have a seatbelt and I'm smart because I have a roadmap and I'm witty because I know the names of the streets and I can find a free parking spot even if it takes a few left turns and right turns. I'm in my car and I am my car, but it's not so important, not really. I could take it or leave it but I'd rather take it.

The path

To enlightenment

Does not have a route number

Part Nine

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