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Article Excerpt
Jack Cady, F&SF, and Road Dog
By Kristine Kathryn Rusch
JACK CADY NEVER LOOKED like a stereotypical writer. He looked like a Pacific Northwest fisherman. He had an angular, weather-toughened face, which he accented with a beard but no mustache. His deep voice was authoritative, but his eyes were always kind.
And he was patient--oh, so very patient.
He had to be. When he sent me "The Night We Buried Road Dog," he walked into the middle of a battle zone. I, the thirty-two-year-old new editor of F&SF, and Edward L. Ferman, the magazine's former editor and the publisher who had hired me, were in the midst of a war.
I believe that novellas are the heart and soul of fantasy and science fiction at the short length. Ed didn't like novellas at all--partly (mostly) because they cost so much and took up so much space in the magazine. Jack Cady's "Road Dog," which was how we referred to it in-house, was 30,000 words long--exactly half the length of an issue of the magazine. I controlled content, but Ed controlled the purse strings. Every time I sent Ed a novella, I had to justify both the story's length and its quality.
Fortunately, I had an excellent track record. I edited a novella line for Pulphouse Publishing, the hardcover press I'd helped found, and most of the novellas in that line had been nominated for the major awards in the field.
I had an eye, and I knew it.
But Ed had different priorities. If we were going to publish novellas (and he wasn't even certain of that), he wanted each novella to be worth the space it took in the magazine. In other words, it had to be better than every other story in the issue. Four to five times better, since it took the space of four to five stories. A novella from an unknown, like Jack Cady was in the sf field in those days, wouldn't sell magazines, and so wasn't worth the money.
Valid arguments all. I've made similar ones when I've worn a publisher's hat. But "Road Dog" was something special--and I knew it.
"Road Dog" was one of the first novellas I received at F&SF. I loved the story. Ed hated it. So he sat on it--for months--while I fired off letters explaining the situation to Jack Cady, who graciously allowed me to champion his story because he wanted it in the pages of F&SF.
Eventually, Ed gave up. He had learned over the course of our working relationship that I could outlast him. (He didn't know how many letters I wrote to brilliant writers, asking to hang onto their novellas for another month.)
"Road Dog" became the cover story for the January 1993 issue.
Then the buzz started.... "Road Dog," reviewers said, was the story of the year. It won the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, among others (a few of them mainstream).
Fast forward to spring, 2008. Jack Cady--one of the kindest, most gentle souls I've ever met--is no longer with us. I haven't edited a word of someone else's fiction for more than eleven years.
Then Gordon Van Gelder, the publisher and editor of F&SF, sends me an email. Would I pick a story for the sixtieth anniversary that represented my tenure as editor?
Imagine my trepidation as I wrote back: Would "The Night We Buried Road Dog" work? I realize it's very, very long.
If Gordon had said no, I would have picked another story. A shorter story.... But Gordon didn't ask for another story. Instead, he said he had hoped I would pick "Road Dog." He felt it best represented my years at F&SF.
He wanted "Road Dog" for the very reason I did. Quite frankly, I believe "Road Dog" is one of the best stories I've ever read, let alone had a small hand in.
How small was my hand? If I remember correctly, I never asked Jack for a revision. I'm not even sure the manuscript received much copyediting. All I did was recognize an excellent story and champion it before my publisher, whose considerations (money and space) differed from mine. All of the credit for "Road Dog," however, goes to Jack Cady. Not just for his spectacular writing, but also for his patience.
I miss Jack. He will never write another new story--and that's a cause for sadness.
But he wrote some spectacular stories during his all-too-brief career. Fortunately, we can share my favorite right here. Those of you who are reading "Road Dog" for the first time, enjoy.... Those of you who read it more than fifteen years ago, read it again. It's one of those rare stories that gets better with age.
The Night We Buried Road Dog
By Jack Cady
I.
Brother Jesse buried his '47 Hudson back in '61, and the roads got just that much more lonesome. Highway 2 across north Montana still wailed with engines as reservation cars blew past; and it lay like a tunnel of darkness before headlights of big rigs. Tandems pounded, and the smart crack of downshifts rapped across grassland as trucks swept past the bars at every crossroad. The state put up metal crosses to mark the sites of fatal accidents. Around the bars, those crosses sprouted like thickets.
That Hudson was named Miss Molly, and it logged 220,000 miles while never burning a clutch. Through the years, it wore into the respectable look that comes to old machinery. It was rough as a cob, cracked glass on one side, and primer over dents. It had the tough-and-ready look of a hunting hound about its business. I was a good deal younger then, but not so young that I was fearless. The burial had something to do with mystery, and Brother Jesse did his burying at midnight.
Through fluke or foresight, Brother Jesse had got hold of eighty acres of rangeland that wasn't worth a shake. There wasn't enough of it to run stock, and you couldn't raise anything on it except a little hell. Jesse stuck an old house trailer out there, stacked hay around it for insulation in Montana winters, and hauled in just enough water to suit him. By the time his Hudson died, he was ready to go into trade.
"Jed," he told me the night of the burial, "I'm gonna make myself some history, despite this damn Democrat administration." Over beside the house trailer, the Hudson sat looking like it was about ready to get off the mark in a road race, but the poor thing was a goner. Moonlight sprang from between spring clouds, and to the westward the peaks of mountains glowed from snow and moonlight. Along Highway 2, some hot rock wound second gear on an old flathead Ford. You could hear the valves begin to float.
"Some little darlin' done stepped on that boy's balls," Jesse said about the driver. "I reckon that's why he's looking for a ditch." Jesse sighed and sounded sad. "At least we got a nice night. I couldn't stand a winter funeral."
"Road Dog?" I said about the driver of the Ford, which shows just how young I was at the time.
"It ain't The Dog," Jesse told me. "The Dog's a damn survivor."
You never knew where Brother Jesse got his stuff, and you never really knew if he was anybody's brother. The only time I asked, he said, "I come from a close-knit family such as your own," and that made no sense. My own father died when I was twelve, and my mother married again when I turned seventeen. She picked up and moved to Wisconsin.
No one even knew when, or how, Jesse got to Montana territory. We just looked up one day, and there he was, as natural as if he'd always been here, and maybe he always had.
His eighty acres began to fill up. Old printing presses stood gap-mouthed like spinsters holding conversation. A salvaged greenhouse served for storing dog food, engine parts, chromium hair dryers from 1930s beauty shops, dime-store pottery, blades for hay cutters, binder twine, an old gas-powered crosscut saw, seats from a school bus, and a bunch of other stuff not near as useful.
A couple of tabbies lived in that greenhouse, but the Big Cat stood outside. It was an old D6 bulldozer with a shovel, and Jesse stoked it up from time to time. Mostly it just sat there. In summers, it provided shade for Jesse's dogs: Potato was brown and fat and not too bright, while Chip was little and fuzzy. Sometimes they rode with Jesse, and sometimes stayed home. Me or Mike Tarbush fed them. When anything big happened, you could count on those two dogs to get underfoot. Except for me, they were the only ones who attended the funeral.
"If we gotta do it," Jesse said mournfully, "we gotta." He wound up the Cat, turned on the headlights, and headed for the grave site, which was an embankment overlooking Highway 2. Back in those days, Jesse's hair still shone black, and it was even blacker in the darkness. It dangled around a face that carried an Indian forehead and a Scotsman's nose. Denim stretched across most of the six feet of him, and he wasn't rangy; he was thin. He had feet to match his height, and his hands seemed bigger than his feet; but the man could skin a Cat.
I stood in moonlight and watched him work. A little puff of flame dwelt in the stack of the bulldozer. It flashed against the darkness of those distant mountains. It burbled hot in the cold spring moonlight. Jesse made rough cuts pretty quick, moved a lot of soil, then started getting delicate. He shaped and reshaped that grave. He carved a little from one side, backed the dozer, found his cut not satisfactory. He took a spoonful of earth to straighten things, then fussed with the grade leading into the grave. You could tell he wanted a slight elevation, so the Hudson's nose would be sniffing toward the road. Old Potato dog had a hound's ears but not a hound's good sense. He started baying at the moon.
It came to me that I was scared. Then it came to me that I was scared most of the time anyway. I was nineteen, and folks talked about having a war across the sea. I didn't want to hear about it. On top of the war talk, women were driving me crazy: the ones who said "no" and the ones who said "yes." It got downright mystifying just trying to figure out which was worse. At nineteen, it's hard to know how to act. There were whole weeks when I could pass myself off as a hellion, then something would go sour. I'd get hit by a streak of conscience and start acting like a missionary.
"Jed," Jesse told me from the seat of the dozer, "go rig a tow on Miss Molly." In the headlights the grave now looked like a garage dug into the side of that little slope. Brother Jesse eased the Cat back in there to fuss with the grade. I stepped slow toward the Hudson, wiggled under, and fetched the towing cable around the frame. Potato howled. Chip danced like a fuzzy fury, and started chewing on my boot like he was trying to drag me from under the Hudson. I was on my back trying to kick Chip away and secure the cable. Then I like to died from fright.
Nothing else in the world sounds anywhere near like a Hudson starter. It's a combination of whine and clatter and growl. If I'd been dead a thousand years, you could stand me right up with a Hudson starter. There's threat in that sound. There's also the promise that things can get pretty rowdy, pretty quick.
The starter went off. The Hudson jiggled. In the one-half second it took to get from under that car, I thought of every bad thing I ever did in my life. I was headed for Hell, certain sure. By the time I was on my feet, there wasn't an ounce of blood showing anywhere on me. When the old folks say "white as a sheet," they're talking about a guy under a Hudson.
Brother Jesse climbed from the Cat and gave me a couple of shakes.
"She ain't dead," I stuttered. "The engine turned over. Miss Molly's still thinking speedy." From Highway 2 came the wail of Mike Tarbush's '48 Roadmaster. Mike loved and cussed that car. It always flattened out at around eighty.
"There's still some sap left in the batt'ry," Jesse said about the Hudson. "You probably caused a short." He dropped the cable around the hitch on the dozer. "Steer her," he said.
The steering wheel still felt alive, despite what Jesse said. I crouched behind the wheel as the Hudson got dragged toward the grave. Its brakes locked twice, but the towing cable held. The locked brakes caused the car to sideslip. Each time, Jesse cussed. Cold spring moonlight made the shadowed grave look like a cave of darkness.
The Hudson bided its time. We got it lined up, then pushed it backward into the grave. The hunched front fenders spread beside the snarly grille. The front bumper was the only thing about that car that still showed clean and uncluttered. I could swear Miss Molly moved in the darkness of the grave, about to come charging onto Highway 2. Then she seemed to make some kind of decision, and sort of settled down. Jesse gave the eulogy.
"This here car never did nothing bad," he said. "I must have seen a million crap crates, but this car wasn't one of them. She had a second gear like Hydra-Matic, and you could wind to seventy before you dropped to third. There wasn't no top end to her--at least I never had the guts to find it. This here was a hundred-mile-an-hour car on a bad night, and God knows what on a good'n." From Highway 2, you could hear the purr of Matt Simons's '56 Dodge, five speeds, what with the overdrive, and Matt was scorching.
Potato howled 10ng and mournful. Chip whined. Jesse scratched his head, trying to figure a way to end the eulogy. It came to him like a blessing. "I can't prove it," he said, "'cause no one could. But I expect this car has passed The Road Dog maybe a couple of hundred times." He made like he was going to cross himself, then remembered he was Methodist. "Rest in peace," he said, and he said it with eyes full of tears. "There ain't that many who can comprehend The Dog." He climbed back on the Cat and began to fill the grave.
Next day, Jesse mounded the grave with real care, He erected a marker, although the marker was more like a little signboard:
1947-1961
Hudson coupe--"Molly"
220,023 miles on straight eight cylinder
Died of busted crankshaft
Beloved in the memory of Jesse Still
Montana roads are long and lonesome, and Highway 2 is lonesomest. You pick it up over on the Idaho border where the land is mountains. Bear and cougar still live pretty good, and beaver still build dams. The highway runs beside some pretty lakes. Canada is no more than a jump away; it hangs at your left shoulder when you're headed east.
And can you roll those mountains? Yes, yes. It's two-lane all the way across, and twisty in the hills. From Libby, you ride down to Kalispell, then pop back north. The hills last till the Blackfoot reservation. It's rangeland into Cut Bank, then to Havre. That's just about the center of the state.
Just let the engine howl from town to town. The road goes through a dozen, then swings south. And there you are at Glasgow and the river. By Wolf Point, you're in cropland, and it's flat from there until Chicago.
I almost hate to tell about this road, because easterners may want to come and visit. Then they'll do something dumb at a blind entry. The state will erect more metal crosses. Enough folks die up here already. And it's sure no place for rice grinders, or tacky Swedish station wagons, or high-priced German crap crates. This was always a V-8 road, and V-12 if you had 'em. In the old, old days there were even a few V-16s up here. The top end on those things came when friction stripped the tires from too much speed.
Speed or not, brakes sure sounded as cars passed Miss Molly's grave. Pickup trucks fishtailed as men snapped them to the shoulder. The men would sit in their trucks for a minute, scratching their heads like they couldn't believe what they'd just seen. Then they'd climb from the truck, walk back to the grave, and read the marker. About half of them would start holding their sides. One guy even rolled around on the ground, he was laughing so much.
"These old boys are laughing now," Brother Jesse told me, "but I predict a change in attitude. I reckon they'll come around before first snowfall."
With his car dead, Jesse had to find a set of wheels. He swapped an old hay rake and a gang of discs for a '49 Chevrolet.
"It wouldn't pull the doorknob off a cathouse," he told me. "It's just to get around in while I shop."
The whole deal was going to take some time. Knowing Jesse, I figured he'd go through half a dozen trades before finding something comfortable. And I was right.
He first showed up in an old Packard hearse that once belonged to a funeral home in Billings. He'd swapped the Chev for the hearse, plus a gilt-covered coffin so gaudy it wouldn't fit anybody but a radio preacher. He swapped the hearse to Sam Winder, who aimed to use it for hunting trips. Sam's dogs wouldn't go anywhere near the thing. Sam opened all the windows and the back door, then took the hearse up to speed trying to blow out all the ghosts. The dogs still wouldn't go near it. Sam said, "To hell with it," and pushed it into a ravine. Every rabbit and fox and varmint in that ravine came bailing out, and nobody has gone in there ever since. Jesse traded the coffin to Old Man Jefferson, who parked the thing in his woodshed. Jefferson was supposed to be on his last legs, but figured he wasn't ever, never, going to die if his poor body knew it would be buried in that monstrosity. It worked for several years, too, until a bad winter came along, and he split it up for firewood. But we still remember him.
Jesse came out of those trades with a '47 Pontiac and a Model T. He sold the Model T to a collector, then traded the Pontiac and forty bales of hay for a '53 Studebaker. He swapped the Studebaker for a ratty pickup and all the equipment in a restaurant that went bust. He peddled the equipment to some other poor fellow who was hell-bent to go bust in the restaurant business. Then he traded the pickup for a motorcycle, plus a '51 Plymouth that would just about get out of its own way. By the time he peddled both of them, he had his pockets full of cash and was riding shanks' mare.
"Jed," he told me, "let's you and me go to the big city." He was pretty happy, but I remembered how scared I'd been at the funeral. I admit to being skittish.
From the center of north Montana, there weren't a championship...
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