Night Relics (22 page)

Bobby opened the back door and went out. Beth went looking for her purse. She checked the locks on the doors and windows.
She had given Klein the key that morning so that he could get in to work on the locks. Outside, Bobby had found a tomato stake
and was sword fighting with a tree limb.

“Hop in the car,” Beth said to him.

“We can’t,” Bobby said. “I haven’t found the alien yet.”

“Hop in the car. You can do without it, and you weren’t looking very hard anyway.” All her patience had drained away.

“No, wait,” Bobby said, starting to explain his thinking on the matter.

“Get in the
car
,” Beth said evenly.

Then, as with the shoe, Bobby remembered where the alien was. They found it in the sandbox, buried up to its neck. That was
what pirates did to their enemies, Bobby said. They buried them up to their necks on the beach and then waited for the tide
to come in and drown them.

“Sometimes I feel that same way,” Beth said, rinsing the alien off with the hose. But her voice shook, and it wasn’t as funny
as it should have been.

I
NSTEAD OF ROLLING ON UP THE HILL TOWARD THE CONDO
, Pomeroy turned left up Trabuco Canyon Road for the second time that morning. He touched his lip and winced. It was tender,
maybe a little swollen where Klein had hit him. He’d regret that before they were through. Probably he already did. Klein
didn’t know which way to jump, and it was getting to him bad. The Trooper bounced along through the arroyo, past two dead
cars and an overturned refrigerator, all of them rusted and shot up. The dried-out husks of yucca and sumac jittered in the
wind, and the sun was nearly blinding through the dusty windshield.

Even with the windows rolled up he could smell dust and vegetation mixed with the stale-cigarette odor of the inside of the
Trooper. There was the faint smell of something else, too, like old lettuce, coming from the inside of the cardboard carton
on the passenger-side floor. He had made the rental agency wash out the ashtrays and hose the upholstery down with some kind
of scented spray, but that
had done nothing except add a sickening miasma of roses to the car’s interior. Probably he wouldn’t keep the car beyond a
couple of days anyway. Still, he was going to talk to the manager about it. That was no way to run a business, renting a car
like that to a non-smoker.

He braked carefully, grabbing the camera on the seat beside him and easing the Trooper across a wash, past a swinging gate
made of rusty steel poles and old barbed wire. There was a crudely drawn skull on the No Trespassing sign that hung from the
gate, and the word
trespassing
was missing an
s.
The bushes around the gatepost looked like a graveyard for broken Budweiser bottles, and it wasn’t until the Trooper had
bellied up out of the wash that Pomeroy noticed a man kneeling in the brush near the gate, jerking on the rope of a chain
saw. He wore a dirty baseball cap and a beard and there was some kind of tattoo on his bicep. They locked eyes for a moment,
and the man spit into the weeds without turning his head. Pomeroy looked away, washed with a sudden abject fear. It was as
if the man had seen straight into him, and made a judgment.

For a moment he was almost nauseated by the confrontation. It was a direct insult, the spitting into the weeds. He knew that
with all his heart. He was sensitive in that way, almost psychic. He got it from grocery store checkers and waiters and people
on the street. It was some kind of jealousy in people of a lower station; you could see it, plain as day, in their eyes and
in what they said.

He shivered violently. Ignorant, damned white trash … The man hated him. His spitting told the whole story. For all he knew
Pomeroy was the Angel of Mercy, but the man loathed him anyway. What was it? The new car? The fact that Pomeroy’s hair was
cut and combed? That Pomeroy knew how to spell and wasn’t some kind of illiterate Okie beer-drinking … What did a man like
that
want
, aside from more liquor?

He suddenly imagined Beth walking through the canyon alone. How would she
deal
with a man like that? It was
unspeakable, first his eyes on her, then his hands, touching her … She’d be struggling, trying to jerk free, maybe pleading
with him as he drags her out of sight of the road. One of the man’s dirty hands is tangled now in her hair. She claws at his
face, hurting him. Then suddenly the man stops, standing stock-still like a light-blinded animal. A dark hole has opened in
his forehead, and a single line of blood trickles into his eye. He falls face first into the dirt as Beth jerks away, into
Pomeroy’s arms. She’s crying, but it’s over now. It’s all right. He’s come for her.

He straightened the steering wheel, bringing the car back onto the road. Reaching down, he flipped back the flaps of the cardboard
carton on the floor. Inside lay a pellet gun. He’d had it forever, bought it at a hobby shop something like twenty years ago.
The only living thing he’d ever shot with it was a parakeet. Next to the gun was a piece of twine, neatly looped, the loops
tied with a bow. There was a can of tuna fish, too, packed in oil, and a can opener and a paper plate.

He wondered suddenly how much Beth had learned when she was spying at the fence. Klein, if
he
knew anything about last night, would have been a fool to tell her. His mind played through the conversation this morning.
It couldn’t have made any sense to her. Maybe she hadn’t heard anything. He couldn’t imagine that she was a snoop.

He suddenly realized that he hated it out there in the hills, and it wasn’t only the trash dumped on the roadside or the crappy
little trailers back in the scrub without decent plumbing and full of subhumans. As the Trooper rounded the long bend out
of the open arroyo and into the green shadows of the high-ridged canyon, he knew that he hated the trees and the dark fern-covered
hillsides even more. He hated the wind and the flying leaves and the goddamn broken-up road that went straight to hell no
matter what was done to flatten it out. There was no order to anything, just a wild, threatening chaos, like in the filthy
mind of the beerswilling
man with the chain saw, if “man” was the word he wanted.

He probed his lip with his tongue again, tasting blood now. Damn it! He slammed the edge of his hand against the steering
wheel. Klein had made a
big
mistake, just like Larry Collier had made a mistake, too, all those years ago. And it would have been so
easy
to avoid, if only they could see who it was in their lives that was really
important
. Like the man just now by the roadside, they were too ignorant to believe that Bernard Pomeroy was a player, and look what
it had cost Collier: his wife, his family, his
life,
for God’s sake. That was the sad result of jealousy and ignorance.

That’s what people had to learn. “Take this seriously,” he wanted to say to men like Klein and Collier, like a father would
say to a son. You couldn’t always
explain
things— like for instance what it means that a stove is hot. A child learns respect fast when he touches the damned stove.
After a while he doesn’t ask why. If Pomeroy had a son he would go ahead and let him touch the stove, and get it right the
first damned time. What he develops is
trust
. That’s what Klein didn’t have—trust. Collier hadn’t had any, either. He hadn’t trusted Bernard Pomeroy to come through. That
was the modern world. For men like Klein and Collier, their own word on things apparently didn’t mean anything
binding
, and so they didn’t know that a man like Pomeroy meant what he said.

“Damn it,” Pomeroy said out loud, slamming the steering wheel again, “if I say the stove is hot, and that somebody’s going
to get burned, then somebody’s going to damn well get burned!”

The wind blew sand against the front end of the Trooper with a pinging sound. He passed a couple of empty cars parked at the
creek crossing, and he could see two men fishing back down the creek despite the wind. Early this morning he had driven out
to the airport and turned in the Cherokee at the Hertz lot, throwing the trash bags full of
clothes and shoes into a trash bin behind a supermarket, which is where he had gotten the cardboard carton. He had only later
realized that there might have been some identifying thing—thrown-out junk mail, say—along with the trash and clothes in the
bags. He was getting sloppy. The whole episode last night was sloppy. He bit down on his lip, concentrating on the suddenly
lancing pain.

He could see Ackroyd’s place through the trees now. The driveway was empty. The old man had gone off to church. He swung the
Trooper into the turnout across the road and cut the engine. Luck was with him. The Siamese cat lay sleeping in the sun, curled
up on the cushion of a redwood lawn chair beyond the house. “Opportunity knocks,” Pomeroy said out loud, and he opened the
car door carefully, leaving it open. The road was empty in either direction. Despite the wind, he could hear the sound of
a car engine in the distance, but that was a chance he’d have to take, even though it might be Ackroyd himself, coming home
from church or from a run up to the general store.

Taking the box out of the car, he rehearsed what he would say if it
was
Ackroyd—a conversation that had played through his mind a hundred times: the price, the virtue in getting out while the market
was good, a little bit of idle chat. Working through the conversation, he slipped open the lid of the box and groped inside,
not looking in. Forty thousand dollars? That’s right, probably it
was
more than the place was worth. A one-bedroom, after all, and on leased land.

The cat lay sleeping. His hand closed over the pellet pistol, still inside the cardboard box. Six feet, four feet. He stopped,
listening to the wind, and conceded a point to Ackroyd. Yes, it was a big living room. And the built-ins were nice. You didn’t
find craftsmanship of that quality anymore. These old houses … Pride of workmanship … But of course the kitchen was small,
and with all the Forest Service
regulations nowadays, you really couldn’t expand the place.

He pulled the pistol out of the box, aimed it, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

T
HE WIND PICKED UP SUDDENLY, WITH A SOUND LIKE THE
ocean sighing across rocks. It pushed through the chaparral in a wave, bending the stiff shrubs in a rustle of dry leaves,
and Peter averted his face from a gust of flying sand.

In the moment that he shut his eyes, he saw a face in his mind—the face of the woman he had seen last night on the dark road,
briefly framed in the rearview mirror. It was as if he glimpsed a snapshot of her, taken in a different time and place. He
was suddenly swept with a memory of her, sharp and clear. She was younger, dressed in white, standing on a sunlit lawn, the
wind blowing her hair. His life was full of a happiness that nothing could darken….

Then the image faded. The wind fell and the picture in his mind slipped away, taking the happiness with it. He tried to recall
it, but couldn’t. It was simply gone. Whatever he had seen or felt had abandoned him. It was as if some elemental thing had
rushed past—something of actual material substance, like a memory built of moving air—and had disappeared into the shadows
of the oakwoods that lined the canyon walls below. For a moment he stood there watching the trees in expectation, still possessed
with the notion that something had come, or better yet, returned to
him out of the past—a cool breath of autumn wind that had left him strangely regretful and empty for its passing.

He nearly turned back. The open ridge above seemed suddenly solitary and lonesome and strange. From somewhere he heard the
solitary cawing of a raven. Far down the canyon the wind still stirred the tree branches, and he could see a dust cloud rising
along the empty road. Then, with a premonitory rustling, the wind began to blow along the ridge again, steadily now. Peter
started up the trail. To hell with going back down. If relics of old memories haunted the morning air, then maybe it was best
to follow them. He leaned forward as the hillside steepened, the trail winding between outcroppings of sandstone. Sage and
greasewood, shuddering in the wind, grew out of cracks in the rocks.

Soon he was out of sight of the canyon, very near the top of the ridge. The trail was almost level, and the shrubbery grew
so thickly on either side that it would take a machete to hack through it. He had the disturbing feeling that the wind was
almost an animate presence, rushing at his back, and the myriad noises, the rustling and grating of the wind in the dense
brush, sounded like the exhalations and utterances of a living thing. Suddenly he was anxious to get out of the thick chaparral
and into more open land. He quickened his pace, now and then getting a glimpse of the dense trees below. The top of Falls
Canyon lay only a short distance to the southwest.

Then suddenly, from somewhere in that direction, lonely and distant, came the now-familiar sound of a child’s crying.

Peter stopped, listening to hear it again, and right then the wind grew suddenly still. In the lingering silence he heard
the faint echo of the woman’s voice in return, calling anxiously. Peter hurried upward, breaking into a run. The wind slammed
into him, shrieking up the narrow path, pushing him forward as the trail steepened again, rising the last forty or fifty feet
toward the ridge.

He broke out into a clearing—the same one where he’d seen the woman and boy last night—and ran headlong toward where the trail
disappeared into the chaparral again, overwhelmed with the certainty that they were just ahead of him. A knot of leaves and
twigs swirled up into the air a few feet in front of him, sweeping along in a dusty cloud. The mass of debris rose head high,
buoyed up by the wind, seeming almost to expand and contract like a lung. There was the heavy hum of buzzing flies or bees,
and the sound of hurried footfalls from ahead of him, unnaturally loud, the feet of the woman and boy scuffing on the rocky
path, the woman’s breath sobbing in and out of her throat, the boy wild with fright, crying aloud….