These were valuable skills that he was learning, that he was teaching himself by walking. These were valuable skills and rare. In those days it was so easy for any car to pick off any pedestrian. The pedestrians never saw it coming, they just didn't expect the worst, or hoped against it. The first lesson that Walker taught himself was to expect the worst, and that every car was a potential killer and not to take a single one of them for granted, and so he didn't, and so he watched each one with the greatest of suspicion, and he never let down his guard while there were cars to be predicted.

So many pedestrians were dying in those days; sometimes he'd even be walking by and close enough to see the impact. The person standing or walking and expecting nothing from that certain car, just another, just an innocent car and the driver within would never do something like that, would never, and then the car did and then the car hopped the curb and barreled down the sidewalk and smashed the tiny person against that pole, or hit them fast enough to send them bouncing, or hit them like a mouth and chewed them under the chassis.

Walker had valuable skills and he could teach them to the others walking, to the others on foot and not in cars and those at risk with their very lives to lose. He had all his notes in his notebooks and he could use these notes to describe classes and syllabi and he could teach from his small notebooks or from his head the things he knew so well from walking on his own.

He worked out a secret place in the shadows and the blind spot, a time and place that a pedestrian could find easily enough but a driver wouldn't notice until the twelfth time passing, and by then he and they would be gone into the night or the shadows by day, they would have scattered and it would be too late to catch them for torture or for jail.

He whispered to his fellow walkers the time and the place, and "Pedestrian Defense Class. Free." He'd see them on the sidewalks and some still hesitating in the dangerous streets and he'd tell them so with a wink and some words. And most of them probably thought it was some trick he had going, and they may have been the ones that the cars got to next with a smash, but three brave souls did find the place and time and their timid walking took them to the room and there was Walker with a blackboard, and if you were one of the three of them you might have heard of him before that because he was the picture of the racecar driver, and famous on TV and in the newspapers, but you were here already, and there was some promise of something, and when he started talking you could relax because he had important things to say, and he was not the enemy, he was not about to bite them with a car and its tires.

The silence

Of a cloud

Is a racetrack lie

The lights in the bar paint their faces red and blue and orange and black, depending on the light and picture coming from the big screen TV.

"If I was a soldier," Penny says, "I'd stand off from my unit and do a commando raid and get our cars back."

"Yeah," Livius says. "I'd do that too." His face lights up with a sudden burst of orange from the screen - the light comes from another direct friendly fire hit on one of our own tanks. "You'd think we would have gotten our cars back from the Enemy by now if we were really trying."

Tracia and Walker exchange looks but mostly they keep their eyes down low to look at the table and their glasses. Tracia says, "Maybe the Enemy doesn't want to give up those cars. Maybe those care don't belong to us."

Livius lights up with another blast. "I'll just pretend you didn't say that," he says. "Some people have been called traitors for saying less than that. They've been shot in the back for saying less than that, less than Hush, the invisible deodorant."

Penny blows up in a quick short laugh. "Walker says things like that too." She speaks with a serrated edge on her voice, and she could cut something if there was something to cut. "Some people just don't get it, just like some people don't get the taste of Black Hat Delicious Burgers."

Walker doesn't say anything. His mind is taking a walk some place far far away.

They all four leave to get in their individual cars to drive home. Livius and Penny quickly turn one corner to get to their cars and Walker walks with Tracia in the other direction.

"Do you want a ride?" Tracia asks him.

"Well, um," Walker says, "My car's working fine."

"But sometimes it's nice to not always have to drive alone," Tracia says, and maybe there's some kind of knowing look there in her eyes, or maybe Walker just wants there to be.

He nonchalantly accepts.

Walker opens the passenger side door as if he were breaking carefully into somebody's living room to steal her jewelry. He sits down in the seat beside Tracia as if a mine could explode him if his butt didn't sit right.

As they drive off, Walker twitches his body and face as if he was going to say something. He doesn't say anything. Tracia turns slightly as if she were listening. She hears nothing. Then Tracia twitches as if she were going to say something. Tracia says nothing. Walker hears nothing. They continue to do this all the way home, each ready to say something but then thinking better and stopping before anything can come out, and ready to listen, but not hearing, and not asking for more. Only the road speaks beneath them. Only their twitches say the story in silence.

Pencil thin

Tire wide

No competition

At his car defense classes, Walker will talk about the importance of the mind. "A car driver has a driver's mind. You must always be vigilant and remember this. You must repeat these words and so I will: 'a car driver has a car driver's mind.' And that doesn't mean that it's a car's mind, because a car has no mind, but a car driver's mind. A car driver's mind must be focused on the traffic lanes around him. A car driver's mind must be aware of the upcoming street signs and traffic lights that it must respond to. A car driver's mind has room for no more complexity than a painted stripe, and what does that mean in the big scheme of things? A car driver's mind can be baffled by the rococo of an older city, of buildings close to the street, of hidden parkinglots. This mind prefers large parkinglots in front of stores, it prefers the wide open view, so it can think of no more things than one thing at a time, so it can consider only what is necessary, and so move at its certain speed."

If there were a way to go

You'd think a car

Would have something to say about it

The bar lights up all four of their faces and the TV screams with the war and all its silence and color and all the objects and feelings that go unsaid. Livius and Penny say too much, they talk about all the cars they want and the smoothness of the next latest one and Tracia is smiling at them and listening, and there is sound and there is talk but then she realizes that she's not talking and Walker is not talking and there's that peculiar way that he looks at the TV screen, and the explosions don't light him up like they light up the other two.

She notices his face; it's almost like she notices it for the first time. How it is tall like it is standing up, while the faces of Livius and Penny and her own, really, for that matter in reflection, are round like they are squatting. How his eyes don't dart up and down, how their movement almost bobs, not the steady black eyes of driving but something different, something reading over every surface and not just straight ahead.

Walker's eyes meet Tracia's for a second and then their eyes walk on. Tracia looks back at Livius and Penny and she doesn't see her husband, and she doesn't see her oldest friend sitting next to him. She sees instead the mountains or the monsters that have taken them over these last few years. She sees the grimaces that can barely breathe their way around the cheeks, the flesh, and she sees Livius laugh so hard he breaks his chair and tumbles to the floor. Walker, less than half the size of Livius, helps the shaking mass of man up and into a new chair. Tracia notices the bone strength in Walker's arms that holds Livius up despite the immense mass and size of her fallen husband. Then she looks down at her own arms, big and round like doughy king size loaves of bread.

You think the sound

Is in your head

But then it spreads to everywhere

Outside, the cars are even louder today. The engineers who design them are adding more mean sound with every model year. They are turning the grills into angrier teeth whenever they can slip in a mid-year revision. They are doing more tests to see how quickly their model will rebound from a deadly collision with a pedestrian. They are doing all these things to make things better and life is even more of a challenge if you are on the sidewalk and trying to walk from one place to another.

And so the word of Walker's Pedestrian Defense class spread, from the first couple people who attended the first one to a few more and a few more. Walker, the leader of the sessions, attempted to keep the sessions interesting with his quiet ways and his steady notebooks. He could put his hat on his head inside the room and make a point in a way that you would remember it, or at least get the feeling. He was good at negotiating and at presenting all sides. He knew the word "patience" and he used it readily, and his methods for staying alive were so amazing, and certainly worked. All the pedestrians trusted him, and listened and waited for his slow wisdom when any of the students had a problem or was impatient.

Among the regular students, and one of the first that ever attended, was the gentleman named Roscoe. He was a big man for a pedestrian, and slow to his thoughts and never to his anger. He had a small voice and his favorite word was "wait," as if "wait and listen to the man. He has something useful to tell us." Roscoe lost his job long ago - he was a pedestrian by circumstance and not by choice, and his head had a light nod to it all the time. You could look out at a great group and spot him immediately by that slight movement, that light nod of his head. It was his greatest weakness, a weakness that got in the way of his attempt to master pedestrian defense, but it was a small bit of movement and usually too slight for a motorist to notice, or for most to notice.

Among the regular students, and also one of the first and the last, was Lydia. She wore a beret at an angle and her favorite word was "let's," as in "Let's get together and roll over some cars," or "Let's get together and change the price of gas at the station so that it's really expensive." She wasn't very patient at all, and that was her greatest weakness in pedestrian defense, where waiting for the perfect moment is such an important lesson. She had a twitch to go a little bit sooner, and sometimes this was helpful, and sometimes it was counter-productive.

All the "Walk/Don't Walk" signs had long ago been shot out by motorists with concealed-carry guns. If you asked one of the shooters why they did it they would simply claim self-defense. It didn't matter to Walker because Walker had his own ways to cross the street anyway, despite the absence of the signs. It had to do with waiting in the shadows, waiting for the exact pinprick moment, and then moving with that blind spot shimmy so you are almost flying over the asphalt, and it was hard to illustrate on the blackboard and with words, but if you went out with Walker for field practice and saw him demonstrate with a real street and its shadows, you would understand. And it would take you a great deal of patience, but maybe you'd get it someday, and then you would be an expert too.

Walker's success in walking was in part due to the fact that he knew all the secret places to walk, all the secret outdoor out of the way left off places to walk where the railroad tracks grew weeds, where the bottlecaps collected, where the candy wrappers held the rest of the world hostage; he knew these places and used them to his advantage. These were the places in the city that the roads could not see, that the street and highways had forgotten, and that had no parking spots for viewing or for arousing interest or for convenience. Walker knew the sliding entrances; he knew the way in past the tumbleweeds and abandoned cook-pots, he knew how to get there thru the concrete sides and the tenuous toeholds.

There aren't as many of these forgotten places as there used to be, not as many as he remembers from when he was a kid. All you have to do is pave a flat hot road thru to reclaim the territory for the headlights and the hard tires, and this has been done, he is sad to tell you, it has been done in all too many cases. Because it is after all only the abandoned industrial land shrunken out of purpose and awaiting future development, and that will come, it will come my friends, for the sake of the cars and their people inside like spiders.

A car defense class field trip would be such an instance where Walker takes a couple others thru such a landscape, and he will point out here is where you must be careful and here is where you can relax and rest and here is where you might want to stop for the view and here is a secret entrance or exit that you may never have thought of because you never ever thought of this place for walking in the first place.

Roscoe and Lydia accompany him on such a walk and the world is brown and far ahead of them and here you are quiet, but under the bridge loud with the rumble of cars they can talk of the revolution, and of ways of thinking or maybe not thinking.

And Walker just hears the cars above them on the bridge pounding down the metal in his mind. There are so many drivers above them and those drivers have no idea what lies just so slightly under their tires.

Walker finally talks, but it's only about their journey. "We have to be careful about the cliffs and the caves again," and the hillside hides them from the rest of the world and the high power lines might hum their location but that's if anybody is listening, but only if it could and if it were so nasty as the drivers.

You thought

There was a world

But there is traffic instead

Years ago, Penny Driver walked, and thought nothing of it. Her mind was thinking about the TV ads she would write as she walked across the street to her job or down the sidewalk for a taco for lunch. She was in the crowded city where she could walk two minutes and really be somewhere but her mind was on open roads, and the cars that twisted them to show their stuff, and the words and the pictures around them that would tell little stories.

Then she moved far from where she worked and she started driving. There were so many ways to work, and some of them went faster and some of them went slower but she could usually think it out and choose the best for each occasion. She was the one in charge, even tho she had a cold big steel body around her instead to keep her feet from being so weary.

Driver took the scenic route back from work today, along the long winding parkway with the river on one side and some buildings on the other, on the narrow winding road where her tires itched and scratched the ice. Oh, the world thru her windshield and the road that wound her there. Oh, the black silk line her journey feels with the radio playing to sing the songs.

The city with the old and the city made new and the new made old and the old made new. It's all such under, so under her tires, and fast and away with this road on the morning, and the sun aches under the far bridge; you can see its smudge but it's mostly the headlights that see the morning ahead of her.

She moves so smooth, as if it wasn't all around her, and her car is wide for half the road and she is small inside without her snacks, but someday. It's all so smooth and sailing as if she always had the wind right behind her and the radio moves her with the wheels and the grease of daily life moving until she sees the red lights up ahead and the long traffic backup and then it's, "damn," and then it's, "lousy," and then it's the long line like years and maybe it's some kind of accident up ahead or some other sort of stupid but here she has to wait as if a noose or some handcuffs, and here she sits behind the wheel but there's nothing to turn it to, not for the few jerks forward her foot can sometimes make.

Down below, where the cars don't go, is Walker and the rocks and the sloping river bank, and this is not a clear path, it is clearer just slightly ahead of him, but there is a long line of cars stuck motionless but for the small jerks forward which they might feel are progress but are really only compression, and he makes his way around the boulders to pass the cars from below one by one, and he was running behind for his meeting with Driver but now he will certainly get there before her on his feet, on his walk below on the secret pedestrian pathway, pounded thru the snow by only a few footsteps.

When he pauses beneath the car wreck pileup that spans the whole wide road he understands in one look why the traffic is so backed up, and the Bobcat operators are having trouble clearing the small and the big parts, the bent pieces of the collision. Walker thinks how easy it would be if the Bobcat drivers would only get out for a second and use their hands with gloves to move the pieces around much quicker. A big piece of bent car falls off the shovel and the Bobcat operator swears loud enough thru the windshield and then he lowers his shovel to try to slide it and move it up again, and certainly if you were two you could lift it one two three with your hands, but the Bobcat operators are not about to get out, not for this angry line of cars.

And the line goes off in its other direction too, and it winds so long, just as long in that direction, and growing longer as more cars come up to it behind, and they wait with their horns and their radios to keep the sound up and as Walker goes below he hears the faint signals as if he were slowly searching thru the dial in the radio at his ear.

Walker does arrive late at the War Bar for their meeting, but Penny doesn't get there until much later. She says, "You must know all kinds of secrets for getting around the traffic jams. Maybe it's all your racecar training. I thought for sure I'd get here before you today, and on my quick route the traffic was backed up for miles."

"I do have secrets," Walker says, but he just smiles to sum up the details.

Penny has her little portable TV player with her and she takes it out to show him the latest commercial that she wrote, and it's the one with the racecar and the new Speedster for plain folks and she presses the button so Walker can see and she expects him to rave at it but he just sees the color and hears the sounds and it's almost like he can't interpret the dots because his soul sinks down to his seat with the rush of cartoon air and the speedway bumps and rises. "Don't you love it?" Penny says when it is only partway thru, and if you could perceive the imperceptible you might perceive a nod but the cars race by on the completely open road and there are no traffic jams or secret pedestrians below them on the rocks, and when it's over Walker puts on his polite smile but it's like he's wearing mismatched socks with it, and Penny is proud but she doesn't see enough enthusiasm. This is not good. He should be elated and really happy about it because it is about him a little, or based on him, a bit.

But he's not too excited and he's got that sad and acted smile, so Penny thinks that he missed it and she has to show it to him again, but he's still the same, as if he can't get excited at the simple things, like a thirty second spot - not anymore.

"Sometimes, Walker, you're just a block of wood. I thought you would get excited about this, but I guess I was wrong." And she pouts in her corner as if the whole world were two walls that came together in the back of her head.

"I guess I'm speechless. That's good, isn't it," but he knows it's a weak response, he knows it's not good enough, he can see it in her knees when she gets up to her feet, and she says it's for the bathroom but she really doesn't have to go.

Maybe it was the traffic jam piled up inside her. Maybe it was the long morning that built up her senses, that sharpened them to a knife, but there was a small twitch in his face, there was something that could tell her everything if she had the key to understand it, if she had the clue. There was something very wrong there, in his faked little reaction, and normally she would have never seen it but the long wait in the traffic to get there made her otherwise. "I think I need to write a letter to get that parkway turned into a four-lane," and then she thinks of him and the way he just sat there.

Back at the table, she says, "I want you to help me with something. I want to make a campaign to have that parkway turned into a four-lane street. We could do it together. It will be great fun and we could have a lasting impact."

"I don't know," he says, "I'm pretty busy." And this is another clue. If he has no races to race these days then how can he be so busy, how can he not have the time to do something important like this.

"But somebody has got to do it and I think we're the ones to do it together. We could write that they could bulldoze some of those boulders down by the river and expand the road thru there."

And he just looks hard at her and his head slowly nods no and she knows that there's something wrong with him, very wrong, wrong enough for a doctor, wrong enough for intervention, wrong enough that even he will never realize how wrong it is unless a professional confronts him with the proper language and reasons and medications.

It all

Comes down to

Never enough parking

Her fingers feel the yellow newspaper clippings and that can well be why he is peculiar to this day. The clipping is from before he went on to race the Indy 500, and the local columnist had a long talk with Graylung and the custodial crew because Walker was regularly winning the races at the old grandstand at the edge of town. He was a rising star in the local sports scene and so he was the subject of a feature story in the pages of the Argus. There in black and yellow was the story of his birth and it used to be common knowledge but nobody talks about it anymore and Walker himself never mentions it to Penny at all. There is the story about how he was plucked from the grandstand, and how he didn't know the world until he got in a racecar and sped away around the track.

Maybe this is why he's strange sometimes; maybe his past is an answer, like an unlucky cloud that still hangs over him. And she still thinks she loves him but she never thought about a thing like this and how would a grandstand-womb make a person different from a person made by a usual womb, and what would it be like to be raised by the custodial staff at the grandstand way at the edge of town, the grandstand that will soon be demolished to widen the freeway, and for much more parking.

A vehicle

That will only take you

Where you have already been

"Oh, look at that one," Tracia says, drawing their attention to the big screen which lights up with another orange flame, bright and big and round like a fruit squishing out of its body, an explosion.

The reporter's voice plays under the bright cloud of debris: "Today our forces made another direct hit on one of our own supply vehicles. The enemy forces remain unscathed." Individual particles in the explosion cloud make arcs like big stinging frowns forward and back. As the eyes of the viewers follow the particles forward they probably don't consider that each dot is a shard of flaming metal.

"Ooooh," Penny says as the burning vehicle explodes again into a bigger cloud of smoke, the flames most likely just then reaching the fuel tank of the vehicle and so erupting.

Livius says, "Friendly fire is always so orange and welcoming, don't you think?" but none of the rest of the party bothers to answer.

The war team banners and neon beer lights tell you that they are in a war bar and their particular table is lit mostly by the big screen TV just next to it. Full and empty beer bottles make battle plan formations on the table of wet bottle circle blast holes.

Walker takes tiny sips of his beer but the yellow level never really seems to go up or down. He always gets a new one when Livius asks the waitress for another round, but whether he drinks more or much less is hard to really understand.

"Maybe they'll show that last explosion again," Livius says, the white glow from the reporter's face lighting up his own face.

"Our troops are going to get our cars back. That's all that really matters," Penny says, the beer all evening long turning her face slick in the low light.

"I think we're ready for another round," Tracia says, putting her bottle to her lips and chugging down the last inch or so in a tornado of tiny bubbles as the TV plays the explosion again, just like Livius hoped, instant replay, the orange light warming their faces like a campfire. The next four bottles come off the tray like the perfect small product that they are, as if they had just been filled and sealed by the machine, as if they had just been bottled by their shiny mechanical mother.

"I like that explosion," Livius says. "The media really got a good angle on it."

"Have they got our cars back yet?" Penny asks, beer silly and laughing at her own slippery humor.

"And how is your car?" Tracia asks her.

"I think I'm ready for a new one. The new Lemingata is so sweet. You've just got to see the ad for it I've been writing," Penny says, and when the war coverage hesitates and the commercials come back she hopes so much that one of them will be one of hers so she can nonchalantly tell the others that she wrote it and they will dish out all sorts of heavy compliments and comments that she really needs now like a fill-up but none of her commercials come up and she doesn't feel like lying tonight even if that one that just showed was derivative of one of hers, she feels.

She likes to be complimented for her work. It makes her feel so good to get those compliments. It takes her closer to her dream of a feeling, the dream that she always wants, wherever. She's always trying to fish compliments out of Walker but he's so begrudging of them. She'll show him one of her ads and he might nod or make a grunt of approval but what she really wants is for him to tell her all the things he liked about it and how brilliant it all was and she could talk a little for his edification about her inspiration and the secret symbols. All she wants is some of that, but she hopes and plays him clips and he never goes into much detail, much more than, "Very good." The lack of specificity in his praise is killing her.

"Walker saw my latest commercial. He liked it a lot," she tells the group and their beer bottles as the cars fade out and the faces and explosions resume.

Everybody turns to Walker and he sees that he might be expected to make a statement, so he says, "Good," and that's it - one word - and that makes Penny's teeth clamp down quick on her tongue, particularly the left side, gouging out a big tooth mark that will crater into a canker sore in the coming days.

"I don't think I'll need a new car for a while," Livius says, "but maybe your ad will convince me otherwise."

Penny takes this as the compliment it just might be and flushes with her supposed pride. Why can't Walker tell her things like that, she wonders, but she just has to laugh at the nice little words from Livius. Her laugh is just a snort of sound from one of her nostrils, and nothing more.

You need a car

The whole world over

You're not walking this crust

Part Eight

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