Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways by F. Paul Wilson Read Free Book Online

for some music— rock, preferably—but all he found was country or folks speaking Spanish or sweaty-voiced preachers shouting about Jay-sus .
    If you want to believe in Jay-sus , he thought, fine. If you want me to believe in Jay-sus , fine too; you can want anything you wish. But do you have to shout?
    He finally found a rock station but it was playing Lou Reed. He quickly hit SCAN. Through the years Jack had come to the conclusion that Lou Reed was a brilliant performance artist whose act was a lifelong portrayal of a singer-songwriter who couldn’t carry a tune or write a melody.
    The tuner stopped on a dance station. Jack didn’t dance, the beat was monotonous, and he’d arrived in the middle of a woman doing a double-time version of “Boys of Summer.” He bailed when a cheesy organ attempted to duplicate Kootch Kortchmar’s riffs from the original. What had Don Henley ever done to deserve that?
    Next stop, one of the country stations—“Gator Country One-Oh-One Point Nine!” He liked some country, mostly the Hank Williams—Senior, preferably—Buck Owens, Mel Tillis brand of mournful nobody-loves-me-but-my-dog-and-he’s-got-fleas-so-pass-that-whiskey-bottle-over-here-if-you-please ballad. He lasted maybe fifteen minutes on 101.9. Three songs, three singers, and they all sounded exactly the same. Was that the awful truth about modern country music? The one they’d kill to keep? One lead singer performing under a gazillion different names? Jack wasn’t sure about that part, but he had no doubt that the same guy had been singing backup harmony on all three songs.
    Okay. Can the radio.
    He saw a sign for Novaton and hung a right off US 1 onto a road that ran due west, straight as a latitude line. Looked like someone had given a guy a compass and a paver filled with asphalt and said, “Go west, young man! Go west!” It made sense. No hills or valleys to skirt. The only rises in the road he’d seen since leaving the airport had been overpasses.
    He checked out the sickly palms and pines flanking the road. He’d worked with a landscaper as a teen and knew northeast greenery, but even healthy these trees would be a mystery to him. Dead gray fronds lay on the shoulder like roadkill while some skittered onto the pavement when the breeze caught them.
    All the houses along the road were squat little ranches in overgrown yards, with carports instead of garages; they hunkered against the earth as if hiding from something. Every once in a while a warehouse would soar to one-and-a-half stories, but that was an aberration. The favored exterior shade seemed to be a sick green like oxidized copper, and here and there a pizza-size DTV dish would poke up from a roof. He’d been expecting lots of red-tile roofs but they seemed a rarity; most were standard asbestos shingles, pretty threadbare in many cases. Oddly, the shabbiest houses seemed to sport the most magnificent palms in their front yards.
    Even if he didn’t know much about tropical or subtropical trees, he did know banyans; their distinctive aerial roots gave them away. The road to Novaton was loaded with them. In some stretches banyan phalanxes lined each side of the street and interwove their branches above the pavement, transforming a bumpy secondary road into a wondrous, leafy green tunnel.
    He recognized a couple of coconut palms, only because of the yellowing nuts hanging among the fronds. Plants that in New York grew only indoors in carefully watered and fertilized pots flourished like weeds down here.
    He passed a tall white water tower emblazoned with the town name and shaped like one of those old WWI potato-masher hand grenades the Germans used to toss at the Allies. At its base lay a dusty soccer field flanked by a high school, a middle school, and a senior center.
    He passed a feed store. Feed what? He hadn’t seen any cattle.
    Abruptly he was in Novaton and quickly found the center of town—the whole four square blocks of it. The directions from