Tomb Tapper
THE DISTANT glare of the atomic explosion had already faded from the sky as McDonough’s car whirred away from the blacked-out town of Port Jervis and turned north. He was making fifty m.p.h. on U.S. Route 209 using no lights but his parkers, and if a deer should bolt across the road ahead of him he would never see it until the impact. ‘It was hard enough to see the road.
But he was thinking, not for the first time, of the old joke about the man who tapped train wheels.
He had been doing it, so the story ran, for thirty years. On every working day be would go up and down both sides of every locomotive that pulled into the yards and hit the wheels with a hammer; first the drivers, then the trucks. Each time, he would cock his head, as though listening for something in the sound. On the day of his retirement, he was given a magnificent dinner, as befitted a man with long senior-ity in the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmenand somebody stopped to ask him what he had been tapping for all those years.
He had cocked his head as though listening for something, but evidently nothing came. “I don’t know,” he said.
That’s me, McDonough thought. I tap tombs, not trains.
But what am I listening for?
The speedometer said he was close to the turnoff for the airport, and he pulled the dimmers on. There it was. There was at first nothing to be seen, as the headlights swept along the dirt road, but a wall of darkness deep as all night, faintly edged at the east by the low domed hills of the Neversink valley. Then another pair of lights snapped on behind him, on the main highway, and came jolting after McDonough’s car, clear and sharp in the dust clouds he had raised.