"Look here, look here, look here!" She actually pulls Walker, tugging on his shirt, pulling him from the bedroom where he's reading his book into the living room where the TV gives off heat.

"My latest commercial," she says as quickly as she can so to leave as much of the ad as possible undisturbed from her own talk, her own words to tell him about it.

The car zooms the road around it. You see the grill face bouncing in close-up to hold the road steady. You see the picture, sound and road life from the tires and the man and the woman hugging their bodies together in the spacious front seat. The music is repetitive, like speed, like the round spin of wheels.

The overall color is brown, but like candy. There is something smooth about it, so smooth. She thinks that this one evokes her dream of the feeling more than anything else she has ever created so far. It's not there, but she's partway to the feeling, partway to the dream. The flash of steel gobbles up the smooth road; the model couple bounce their bodies inside the new car model. And then, just before the commercial ends, like the heart attack to give your short life an exclamation point, comes a flurry of images, like their whole lives before their faces, from the speed of their hugging, from the grip of their driving, and their lives flash so quickly not because they are dying but because they are driving, and driving so fully, as if it were a revelation of religion, as if it were the highest state attainable in being and emotion.

Even tho she's seen it a hundred times or more, even tho she planned it out in every detail, every motion and wink on paper beforehand, even tho she saw it come together part by part like the skeleton holding together the most perfect and gorgeous body, even tho it all sprang from her head, it still gives her goose pimples. Her body has completely broken out this time. She still feels the young love of Walker inside her form the sudden strong wind of the commercial on her face.

She has to sit down for a moment and she pulls Walker down with her on the couch as the regular surrounding TV resumes and plays with such a dimmer light, with sounds so dull that she could have suddenly switched to a whole and lesser TV reality, but the remote control is on the tabletop across the room, and she never switched anything. It's just that the rest of the TV is just so much less than that powerful vision, that ad statement of the century, the sounds and images she wrote. She knows she'll win the Adnational awards on the strength of that one. She knows she'll go all the way because nobody can touch that one, not even someone with a superior keyboard or even a much better and more costly production crew. She's been giddy about this one for weeks, holding it so inside like a tumor that has now burst out and the weight is gone. It's on the air and now she is ready for the praise. It's on the air and now she is ready for all the respect she'll get, the eyes as dotted and dazed as hers still are.

When she's able to draw back her breath to her usual rate, once she's slightly released her hard grip on her husband's shirt, she can barely, but she does, say, "What do you think?"

She's prepared for the strongest praise. She holds her eyes shut in anticipation and because she can't watch the rest of the TV that her ad has to sleep and startle in, she can't watch that surrounding dullness like a blurry sad world around her shiny hand-cut gem with edges so sharp they sting your eyes.

"It was okay," Walker says after a long pause, and it was what he said but it was not the praise that she was truly expecting. It was not the praise that her ad deserved; it was not the words to say how much it meant to him, how important it would be. It was not the words to point out her amazing touches, her way with images and with the basic stuff of life. It was not the words to say that her touch was so deft; it was not the words that anybody who had paid any attention at all to it would say. No appreciation of her control of the basics, no appreciation of her narrative sense, the compactness and perfection that 30 seconds can bring. Nothing about the immense allness that she put in such little negligible time. No appreciation at all in fact. Nothing more than a log would say to her after seeing such a vision roll down the mighty river. Less than a log would say to her after it grew eyes to see it and appreciate its brilliance.

She's ready to explode about his lack of support but first she gives him one more chance. She rephrases the question, but in her rising anger she says the question quickly and almost like singing, like a priest chanting the sacrament a little faster than usual because the choir sang too long and now he has to clear the congregation for the next scheduled service.

"Doesn't it make you just want to die, doesn't it make you just want to drive that, doesn't it make you just want to go out and junk your car and get a new one, get one of the ones that the commercial is about?"

Walker still sits beside her. He's not going anywhere because she still has a grip on his shirt and she's actually strengthened her grip in the last few seconds.

"Not necessarily," he slowly says. "My car still works..."

"Walker, you are hopeless," she says, cutting him off with the wrath that he never really knew was there. He tries to relax his way thru it because he knows it will end at some future point, but in the meantime he's got to adjust his seat for her rage like multiple stage knives already thrown at him and merest microns away from stinging his flesh and hovering there for the long miserable moment before they start tearing into his skin and spraying his blood.

"I work my head and hands to the bone for those ads and the least you can do is recognize my achievement. I squeeze it all out so hard and the least you can do is throw some enthusiasm. Do you have any emotion left in you? Do you have anything inside? You are hopeless and I am without hope as long as I am beside you." She says much more and then stops, but now things still come out in a lower rumbling sound like aftershocks, "You are hopeless."

Speechless

Don't know the words

But the car alarm can

Roscoe said: "After the first few pedestrians were run over we'd organize a vigil on the spot of the killing and stand near where they had been run down. We'd stand there and we wouldn't eat for that day. We would fast in our protest. The skies were grey then but you could still see far. We'd put up a sign with a picture of the deceased if we could find a picture. People driving by would slow down when they saw us but then peel off fast when they figured out what we were doing.

"I used to blame it all on you. I used to think that you were the one responsible, all the time. I'd say, 'Look what that racecar driver Walker has done. Shame on him.' I'd say that, I'd think it as we stood there in the cold and rain and the cars would look at us on their way by.

"We were a target when we did that, how could we be anything otherwise? We were out there, near the edge of the street and we were could have had those red circles on us. We were easy pickings, and I lost one of my companions, Neal, on one of the vigils. That was the vigil that turned out to be the next to the last one. He had separated from the group to look at something and a car came along smack and ran him down.

"At the last vigil we lit candles. We didn't know it was the last, but we lit candles in the evening and our faces flickered, red and yellow. More flames were in our eyes. We stood at the spot where a little girl had been run over, we stood in a place where we could still see the blood that hadn't washed away, and we sang a song of her name.

"We didn't see the cars coming. There were three or four of them. They ran right into our circle, they accelerated thru and smashed us down like a kid jumping up and down on a nest of ants. I got away. I don't know how. I blamed it all on you. I blamed Walker. I said, 'if I ever get my hands on him.'

"Later I heard about these gatherings, the ones that you started, and then I felt at home, and then I felt differently."

Silence

For the moment

Cars break it theirs

After he killed the boy he had to try walking again. He had to give up his car and walk again, or walk again for the first real time. His first few steps of walking and he felt such shame and he felt that shame in his first few steps and he felt that way forever. The forest of cars and only his tiny two feet. The dust and dried mud and his companion the empty pop bottles. The bits of litter, lost paper from wrappers, from abandoned essays, the papers ridden brown by car tires or by the faces that look at the roads and not around them.

He found a hat in his closet, a hat that he already had, that he had had for a long time and had worn very little because mostly he had worn his racecar driver helmet, but he got this thin brown hat and put it on because the sun was so strong, because the sky was too long and too high above him. He put it on because the sun was so far above his head and all the space above him was not good for him and he would flinch too many times if there was just so much space up there. He put on his old magic hat and he found that maybe he could trick the cars a little with it, that he could hide them in the small brim or put them in the sun, and he could put himself there if he put the hat on just right in his hair. He could feel his hair and he could feel the hat and he put it on to keep out the sun but he found that it had such strength to take out the cars too.

He picked up a little pocket notebook and put it in his pocket. He found the notebook useful for keeping notes of his walking. He could put down a path that he found quite useful, or he could put down the sudden words and phrases that came to him with so many steps. Maybe it was a good response to a question by Penny or a question by Livius and he had no clever answer to at the time but now he thought of one, and he could write it in his notebook so he could remember it if there were a next time.

He drew his ways in his little book; he drew the paths and the maps that he figured with his footsteps. He wrote down important observations, like how to avoid the oncoming bumper, and what route to take when the traffic was heaviest and the traffic was low, and what routes to take if you were not traffic, but a bony body trying to make your way in the world on just two feet and not a car jailer-companion.

When he saw another pedestrian, someone else walking too on the lonely sidewalk where he tried out his walking, when he saw another walking person, he felt the aura of shame that surrounded him or her at first too. He kept his eyes down low, she kept her eyes on her feet and she collected trash or pretended to be doing anything at all except walking and they took their steps and just hoped they'd make it, they kept on walking in hope of their destination.

Once there was the chaos

Of so much living

Now it's the peace of parkinglot

"I'd like to get one of the Enemy and twist his head around to twist his head off," Livius said. "I'd twist it like I twist off the top of a Haley's Beer, with that great golden taste. I'd do it to get back our cars because we need to get them back."

The war reports on the big screen TV washed their faces white and red. Penny smiled. Livius knew that Penny would smile if he said such a thing like he just went ahead and said and that's why he said it, and also because he meant it.

"Walker," Penny asked her husband, and turning, "don't you want to go to Enematia too, like Livius, and twist off the heads of some of the enemy to get our cars back?"

Walker didn't say anything. He just sat there looking at the reflection of the light of the TV explosions on the tile floor of the War Bar. He wondered what such explosions would do to his own hometown and to his favorite walking paths.

He didn't say anything. He didn't even nod or smile. He just looked up in such a way that you would have to write his words. He looked like you would have to write the caption of his mind with your own pen or pencil. Tracia, sitting silent too, smiled at that.

A tailpipe blew

The world

Her death kiss

The tender ground beneath his feet, he took one step and took another. His body could balance when it was just one foot, or one leg standing but the other swung out in the loud and in the soft and in the grass and on the path and held him up now in the passing moment. Beneath his feet the crushed leaves and blowing Styrofoam. Beneath his feet the soft ground that slightly dipped for his moment of weight and then its sudden release. He momentarily occupied the space between ground and sky, he used his forward motion to hold himself against the gnawing, his body like that treetrunk that he partly saw in passing, that he glanced at and saw only as a type, as a dictionary drawing in his mind to slowly repeat until the next one. His shoes had a slight sound, as if there were millions of tiny rocks between sole and the surface and tho it all looked so level from a long-off view, it really had subtle rises and falls and these you would never know unless you felt them with your whole body. He knew a car was coming from its growing fainting breath of sounds and if he heard a car coming he tried to change his direction, he tried to walk away from where it was coming. This made his walking turn into a puzzle, a pinking shear of a line on the map, back and forth like he was nervous or a waveform or thinking and maybe he was.

The building close beside him like he could reach for it if he needed to for balance. The sidewalk in squares with borders that take his feet so suddenly to another country of footsteps. The look and the sounds that greeted him, and the sun so strong he had to put on a cap. This was his walking cap and he could fold it up when he had to hide it and he could put it on to exercise his eyes, and he could put it on because it kept him safe from too much sky and showed him just a little more.

Remember those fake X-ray specks? Maybe his walking cap was just a little like they were; maybe his cap could put eyeballs on his bending kneecaps or a periscope for the cars just up ahead. Maybe it helped him see not in pictures but in thoughts and feelings, and helped him define and interpret such things as a sudden shiver, or the distinct impression that his hand stroking the air to balance his footsteps had just knocked into something even tho the air was clear and the sun guaranteed such brilliant vision. Maybe his hat could make a drawing in his mind, a drawing that he would have to stop for and put in pen ink on his little notepad.

He walked with his feet. He walked with his feet and his hat and his notes. He walked very poorly with his very first steps but then he put it all together and he walked like an expert who had always known the sky so far above him.

Broken metal

The sharpest teeth

Accidents eat right thru you

Ball had a home and a grandma and dying fireflies to guide his eyes at night in loops and patterns. He had twelve fine questions that he would ask for an answer when he was not quite sure, when he needed more explanation. He had a quizzical look with the life of his eyes and there would be no more hurting if his way was to be had. Very often he followed, if his father was walking or his mother or if his ball were running away, fast or slow he would follow someone and see where they would take him.

Ball would grow up to be president someday; he would grow up to save the world from torture and hatred. He had the same twelve questions to help him figure out the hard times and he could use them like a can opener to feed himself for the time being.

Bigger than need be

A hand-thrown boulder

A car surrounds its driver

The kitchen table is cluttered with all kinds of things, mail opened and not quite read, magazines, a dish or two from a far-off dinner, not dirty but just sitting still. Walker bends his eyes down for some reason, but when Penny walks in he turns himself into a big smile, "Honey, how are you today?"

"Good, dear. How is your car running?"

"Just fine," he says, trying his best to put his face expression somewhere in the newspaper pages that he holds up high to catch the best light.

He looks up at the clock. "It's time for me to go," and he gives his wife a kiss before heading to the street. Around the corner is his car, sitting there quietly. He presses his keychain so that the car alarm makes a chirp then turns the key in the slot to open the door. He sits behind the wheel but rather than putting on his seatbelt he puts the keys back in his pocket. He picks up the screwdriver under the seat and pulls out the cover of the speedometer and odometer. He turns the odometer up about two miles, pretty much the length of his journey, and then locks up his car to walk the trip instead.

There are the open sidewalks and the streets most direct but he walks the secret alleyways, and the narrow cracks. He finds his own twisting path and strides it with gigantic strong steps. He avoids the cars and their windshield eyes. If he hears one approaching he looks for a shadow so that he can disguise himself momentarily behind it. He waits for the car to pass and then waits slightly longer. Then he continues his walking, his legs out far for his pace, so meaningful and necessary.

Penny's car is in the garage. She can imagine it surrounding her as she rides her coffee and spoons her morning cereal. She pours the coffee into a big cup and snaps the top on it. She assumes that the cup will fit perfectly in the cup carrier in her car. She locks the door between the house and car behind her and unlocks her car and gets in. The cup does fit perfectly when she sets it in its perfect place. She presses the button to open the garage door and turns the key to start up the sounds. The radio comes on, and it is an oldies song about driving a fast car down the open roads.

The highway is thick with traffic. She has about the same way to go as Walker, about two miles, and her car inhales its way thru the mass of traffic on the busy street. All of the cars there are playing their radios too. It makes it hard to hear her own, until someone inches by with his own car's radio on the very same station that hers has. The sounds make a curious echo as his car inches its way past hers. He is in the fast lane. She is only two blocks away from her work when the car in front of hers suddenly steers out of its lane. It veers off in front of and past her and past all the other lanes of cars all the way toward the curb. The car has to squeeze itself between the other lane of slowly moving vehicles, but after that it is clear sidewalk. The sidewalk isn't wide enough for the car, but the car speeds up anyway. Its left wheel smashes down lawn and rolls over fences but with a few bumps merges back with the traffic to gain some velocity and then slow as much.

The woman standing on the corner didn't see the car coming until it hit her. Her dog noticed and he barked once in that direction, but the bark wasn't loud enough communication to warn her woman properly. The woman was just walking with her dog on the big wide sidewalk. She was completely in the open, but she might have been a little old-fashioned too. Her hair was silver, and back in a bun. She had stopped so her dog could look back and bark. And then the speeding car on the sidewalk hit them both and scrunched them under its wheels and chassis. It dragged them both for a few more feet before it got to a mailbox and steered itself right and back into the traffic lanes.

Penny was at work just a few moments later and facing her computer screen. She wondered if she could adapt that scene from her trip in to work to the script that she was writing. She thought about how it might be staged. Who might act the parts and the shot of the sidewalk lines catching your eyes and made with a camera pointing down from the hood of the car. A closeup of the dog so you could see it bark. A slow motion shot of the bumper hitting the woman's body.

She types in some of these thoughts but when she looks it over it really doesn't do anything for her. She highlights the lines she just typed in and presses the delete button. Instead of that scene on a busy city street and another well-executed pedestrian killing she imagines an open winding mountain road. No other cars in sight. The Speedster taking the curves as if it was riding on a rail. No pedestrians for thousand of miles. Maybe no pedestrians left at all.

Five cars

On vacant lot

Call the gang task force

The war reports are on TV and Walker hears them and Penny just looks. The war has slowed down but we keep bombing them. The Enemy say that the cars are really theirs, but when a local spokesman on the TV news interview show tries to let the TV audience know this much he gets suddenly cut off for technical difficulties.

The entire nation of Enematia fights back to keep the cars for themselves. Walker even imagines the desert crust and the smashed-in buildings grabbing a stick or sharing in the deception.

See it in the sun

The car body holds a crater

From a bump you never saw

It's round like the sun, it's the ball that Ball throws and he throws it to Walker and Walker throws it back, but so softly that it bounces once then it bounces twice before it gets to Ball and Ball says, "Throw it harder the next time."

"I'm sorry, Ball," Walker says, "I'm sorry, Ball, for everything, for throwing the ball too soft and for running over you, for killing you, I'm sorry for that."

"Just throw the ball harder," Ball says, but when it's Walker's turn to throw he throws it soft as usual.

It's frustrating for Ball because Walker can never throw the ball hard enough, and so Ball is satisfied just throwing the ball not at Walker but against the side of a building and catching it on its tall bounce and it makes a spin sound against the brick wall, and it makes a sling shot sound or the sound of your eyes opening after a long dream and Ball has lots of suggestions for Walker, like throw the ball harder, and the suggestion that maybe he should do some classes for other pedestrians. He means this really, Ball says it to Walker, that Walker knows the ways to walk because he really does after all, and maybe he should share that information with other pedestrians.

"You should call them 'Pedestrian Defense Classes,'" Ball suggests, and Walker thinks about it once and he thinks about it twice and it's a good idea and he takes the suggestion.

Ball stops bouncing the ball for a moment or two and he just looks at Walker with those sad big eyes and Ball says you should do it, you should do it dad. Walker doesn't know where that last word came from because he's not a father and Penny is not a mother and he can't even throw the ball hard enough to Ball but still the boy had a good idea.

Flat tire

Bent fender

Keys are locked within

Part Seven

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