Desperation (22 page)

4

“Nice,” Cynthia said. “I mean,
that's class.”

“What?” Steve asked. He was sitting forward, watching the road carefully. More sand and tumbleweeds were blowing across it now, and the driving had gotten tricky.

“The sign. See it?”

He looked. The sign, which had originally read
DESPERATION'S CHURCH & CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS WELCOME YOU
! had been changed by some wit with a spraycan; it now read
DESPERATION'S DEAD DOGS WELCOME YOU
! A rope, frayed at one end, flapped back and forth in the wind. Old Shep himself was gone, however. The buzzards had gotten their licks in first; then the coyotes had come. Hungry and not a bit shy about eating a first cousin, they had snapped the rope and dragged the Shepherd's carcass away, pausing only to squabble and fight with one another. What remained (mostly bones and toenails) lay over the next rise. The blowing sand would cover it soon enough.

“Boy, folks around here must love a good laugh,” Steve said.

“They must.” She pointed. “Stop there.”

It was a rusty Quonset hut. The sign in front read
DESPERATION MINING CORP
. There was a parking lot beside it with ten or twelve cars and trucks in it.

He pulled over but didn't turn in to the lot, at least not yet. The wind was blowing more steadily now, the gusts gradually merging into one steady blast. To the west, the sun was a surreal red-orange disc hanging over the Desatoya Mountains, as flat and bloated as a photo of the planet Jupiter. Steve could hear a fast and steady
tink-tink-tink-tink
coming from somewhere nearby, possibly the sound of a steel lanyard-clip banging against a flagpole.

“What's on your mind?” he asked her.

“Let's call the cops from here. There's people; see the lights?”

He glanced toward the Quonset and saw five or six golden squares of brightness toward the rear of the building. In the dusty gloom they looked like lighted windows in a train-car. He looked back at Cynthia and shrugged. “Why from here, when we could just drive to the local cop-shop? The middle of town—such as it is—can't be far.”

She rubbed one hand across her forehead as if she were tired, or getting a headache. “You said you'd be careful. I said I'd
help
you be careful. That's what I'm trying to do now. I sort of want to see how things are hanging before someone in a uniform sits me down in a chair and starts shooting questions. And don't ask me why, because I don't really know. If we call the cops and they sound cool, that's fine. They're cool, we're cool. But . . . where the fuck
were
they? Never mind your boss, he disappeared almost clean, but an RV parked beside the road, the tires flat, door unlocked, valuables inside? I mean, gimme a break. Where were the cops?”

“It goes back to that, doesn't it?”

“Yeah, back to that.” The cops could have been at the scene of a road-accident or a ranch-fire or a convenience-store stickup, even a murder, and she knew it—
all
of them, because there just weren't that many cops out in this part of the world. But still, yeah, it came back to that. Because it felt more than funny. It felt
wrong.

“Okay,” Steve said mildly, and turned in to the parking lot. “Might not be anybody at what passes for the Desperation P.D., anyhow. It's getting late. I'm surprised there's anyone still here, tell you the truth. Must be money in minerals, huh?”

He parked next to a pickup, opened the door, and the wind snatched it out of his hand. It banged the side of the truck. Steve winced, half-expecting a Slim Pickens type to come running toward him, holding his hat on with one hand and yelling
Hey thar, boy!
No owner did. A tumbleweed zoomed by, apparently headed for Salt Lake City, but that was all. And the alkali dust was flying—plenty of it. He had a red bandanna in his back pocket. He took it out, knotted it around his neck, and pulled it up over his mouth.

“Hold it, hold it,” he said, tugging her arm to keep her from opening her door just yet. He leaned over so he could open the glove compartment. He rummaged and found another bandanna, this one blue, and handed it to her. “Put that on first.”

She held it up, examined it gravely, then turned her wide little-girl eyes on him again. “No cootiebugs?”

He snorted and grinned behind the red bandanna. “Airy a one, ma'am, as we say back in Lubbock. Put it on.”

She knotted it, then pulled it up. “Butch and Sundance,” she said, her voice a little muffled.

“Yeah, Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Omar and Sharif,” she said, and giggled.

“Be careful getting out. The wind's really getting cranked up.”

He stepped out and the wind slapped him in the face, making him stagger as he reached the front of the van. Flying grit stung his forehead. Cynthia was holding onto her doorhandle, head down, the Peter Tosh shirt flapping out behind her skinny midriff like a sail. There was still some daylight left, and the sky overhead was still blue, but the landscape had taken on a strange shadowless quality. It was stormlight if Steve had ever seen it.

“Come on!” he yelled, and put an arm around Cynthia's waist. “Let's get out of this!”

They hurried across the cracked asphalt to the long building. There was a door at one end of it. The sign bolted to the corrugated metal beside it read
DESPERATION MINING CORP
., like the one out front, but Steve saw that this one had been painted over something else, some other name that was starting to show through the white paint like a red ghost. He was pretty sure that one of the painted-over words was
DIABLO
, with the
I
modified into a devil's pitchfork.

Cynthia was tapping the door with one bitten fingernail. A sign had been hung on the inside from one of those little transparent suction cups. Steve thought there was something perfectly, irritatingly, showily Western about the message on the sign.

IF WE'RE OPEN, WE'
RE OPEN

IF WE'RE CLOSED, Y'ALL COME BACK

“They forgot
son
,” he said.

“Huh?”

“It should say ‘Y'all come back,
son.
' Then it would be perfect.” He glanced at his watch and saw that it was twenty past seven. Which meant they
were
closed, of course. Except if they were closed, what were those cars and trucks doing in the parking lot?

He tried the door. It pushed open. From inside came the sound of country music, broken by heavy static.
“I built it one piece at a time,”
Johnny Cash sang,
“And it didn
't cost me a dime.”

They stepped in. The door closed on a pneumatic arm. Outside, the wind played rattle and hum along the ridged metal sides of the building. They were in a reception area. To the right were four chairs with patched vinyl seats. They looked like they were mostly used by beefy men wearing dirty jeans and workboots. There was a long coffee-table in front of the chairs, piled with magazines you didn't find in the doctor's office:
Guns and Ammo, Road and Track, MacLean's Mining Report, Metallurgy Newsletter, Arizona Highways.
There was also a very old
Penthouse
with Tonya Harding on the cover.

Straight ahead of them was a field-gray receptionist's desk, so dented that it might have been kicked here all the way from Highway 50. It was loaded down with papers, a crazily stacked set of volumes marked
MSHA Guidelines
(an overloaded ashtray sat on top of these), and three wire baskets full of rocks. A manual typewriter perched on one end of the desk; no computer that Steve could see, and a chair in the kneehole, the kind that runs on casters, but nobody sitting in it. The air conditioner was running, and the room was uncomfortably cool.

Steve walked around the desk, saw a cushion sitting on the chair, and picked it up so Cynthia could see it.
PARK YER ASS
had been crocheted across the front in old-fashioned Western-style lettering.

“Oh, tasteful,” she said. “Operators are standing by, use Tootie.”

On the desk, flanked by a joke sign (
LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION, FOR I SHALL FIND IT MYSELF
) and a name-plaque (
BRAD JOSEPHSON
), was a stiff studio photo of an overweight but pretty black woman flanked by two cute kids. A male receptionist, then, and not exactly Mr. Neat. The radio, an old cracked Philco, sat on a nearby shelf, along with the phone.
“
Right about then my wife walked out,”
Johnny Cash bawled through wild cannonades of static,
“And I could see right away that she had her doubts, But she opened the door and said ‘Honey, take me for a—' ”

Steve turned off the radio. The hardest gust of wind yet hit the building, making it creak like a submarine under pressure. Cynthia, still with the bandanna he'd given her pulled up over her nose, looked around uneasily. The radio was off, but—very faintly—Steve could still hear Johnny Cash singing about how he'd smuggled his car out of the GM plant in his lunchbucket, one piece at a time. Same station, different radio, way back. Where the lights were, he guessed.

Cynthia pointed to the phone. Steve picked it up, listened, dropped it back into its cradle again. “Dead. Must be a line down somewhere.”

“Aren't they underground these days?” she asked, and Steve noticed an interesting thing: they were both talking in low tones, really not more than a step or two above a whisper.

“I think maybe they haven't gotten around to that in Desperation just yet.”

There was a door behind the desk. He reached for the handle, and she grabbed his arm.

“What?” Steve asked.

“I don't know.” She let go of him, reached up, pulled her bandanna down. Then she laughed nervously. “I don't know, man, this is just so . . . wacky.”

“Got to be someone back there,” he said. “The door's unlocked, lights on, cars in the parking lot.”

“You're scared, too. Aren't you?”

He thought it over and nodded. Yes. It was like before the thunderstorms—the benders—when he'd been a kid, only with all the strange joy squeezed out of it. “But we still ought to . . .”

“Yeah, I know. Go on.” She swallowed, and he heard something go click in her throat. “Hey, tell me we're gonna be laughin at each other and feelin stupid in a few seconds. Can you do that, Lubbock?”

“In a few seconds we're gonna be laughing at each other and feeling stupid.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said, and opened the door. A narrow hallway ran down it, thirty feet or so. There was a double run of fluorescent bars overhead and all-weather carpet on the floor. There were two doors on one side, both open, and three on the other, two open and one shut. At the end of the corridor, bright yellow light filled up what looked to Steve like a work area of some kind—a shop, maybe, or a lab. That was where the lighted windows they'd seen from the outside were, and where the music was coming from. Johnny Cash had given way to The Tractors, who claimed that baby liked to rock it like a boogie-woogie choo-choo train. Sounded like typical brag and bluster to Steve.

This is fucked. You know that, don't you?

He knew. There was a radio. There was the wind, loaded with sour alkali grit, now hitting the building's metal sides hard enough to sound like a Montana blizzard. But where were the
voices
? Men talking, joking, shooting the shit? The men who went with the vehicles parked out front?

He started slowly down the corridor, thinking that he should call out something like
Hey! Anybody home?
and not quite daring to. The place felt simultaneously empty and somehow
not
empty, although how it could be both things at the same time was—

Cynthia yanked on the back of his shirt. The tug was so hard and so sudden that he almost screamed.

“What?” he asked—exasperated, heart pounding—and realized that now he
was
whispering.

“Do you hear that?” she asked. “Sounds like . . . I dunno . . . a kid bubbling Kool-Aid through a straw.”

At first he could only hear The Tractors—
“She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, She said her telephone number was 911”
—and then he
did
hear it, a fast liquid sound. Mechanical, not human. A sound he almost knew. “Yeah, I hear it.”

“Steve, I want to get out of here.”

“Go back to the truck, then.”

“No.”

“Cynthia, for Christ's sake—”

He looked at her, at her big eyes looking back up at him, her pursed, anxious mouth, and quit it. No, she didn't want to go back to the Ryder van by herself, and he didn't blame her. She'd called herself a hard-headed babe, and maybe she was, but right now she was also an almost-scared-to-death babe. He took her by her thin shoulders, pulled her toward him, and planted a loud smackeroo on her forehead, right between the eyes. “Do not worry, little Nell,” he said in a very passable Dudley Do-Right imitation, “for I will protect you.”

She grinned in spite of herself. “Fuckin dork.”

“Come on. Stay close. And if we
do
have to run, run
fast.
Or else I might trample you.”

“You don't need to worry about that,” Cynthia said. “I'll be out the door and gone before you even get it in gear.”

The first door on the right was an office. Empty. There was a cork-board on the wall covered with Polaroid shots of an open-pit mine. That was the big wall of earth they'd seen looming behind the town, Steve assumed.

The first door on the left, also an office. Also empty. The bubbling sound was louder now, and Steve knew what it was even before he looked into the next door on the right. He felt a measure of relief. “It's an aquarium,” he said, “that's all it is.”