Unassigned Territory (11 page)

As the day wore on he saw of course that there was a good deal more to it. There was, for instance, for the first time in Rex Hummer’s adult life, an empty museum. There was also a silent museum, for at some point it had come to him that for the first time since that night he and Delandra had snuck in to find their father’s last version of the Thing, the peculiar sound failed to play in his head. And it was then, alone in the silence, that Rex had been set upon by something worse than fear.

And yet with this feeling had come another kind of revelation as well. In the time he’d spent alone with the Mystery of the Mojave, Rex had on occasion contemplated the possibility that this last version was not something Sarge Hummer had made. It was a repugnant possibility. He preferred to think of the Creature as Sarge Hummer’s final word to a world which had paid him no mind. What he saw now, in the terrible silence of the museum, was that none of that really made any difference. It was what it was and there was nothing more to say. And now a task lay before him. He could not say precisely what the task was. It seemed to hover there, just beyond the range of his vision—a shape in a sandstorm. And yet to see the shape clearly would be to understand the purpose for which he had remained in the desert, for which he had been forged in her enormous heat. And he knew it was time to see the woman.

It was where he was going now, to see the woman. He drove on little white pills and coffee laced with Old Crow and the resulting combination lit the landscape perfectly. He had, after all, to stay sharp. There was no way around it. Signs and portents would guide him now. This understanding had manifested itself to him on a desert highway. So far the closest thing to a sign he had seen was a dead owl, but he was not without hope, even if what lay before him was nothing more than a huge empty hole, as cold, as black, as silent as space.

I
t was well past midnight when Harlan Low found the place Neil had described to him. It wasn’t much of a place. He took a paved road from the interstate, which soon turned to gravel, then to smooth, hard-packed dirt as it entered the town. The road bisected a pair of dark, rocky ridges, running in a gently curving line at their base. Above the road, scattered along the high ground, a sorry collection of trailers, stores, and mining shacks were visible in the moonlight.

Harlan drove the length of the road. He started at the museum and ended at the bar. He saw the blue roof of Neil’s car through the windows of the Chevron, but no sign of his people. He decided to stop at the bar and ask. He decided a cold beer wouldn’t hurt anything, either.

He knew the bar had been a mistake when the bartender, a large, belligerent man sporting tattoos and a greasy black flattop, correctly identified him as one of the Bible thumpers who had robbed the local museum. “I suppose,” the man said to him, “you’ll want to make restitution.” He turned to grin at a number of his friends who had arranged themselves at the bar. The men wore T-shirts and trucker’s hats. They appeared to be in uniform. One, a man with a gap-toothed grin and the face of an idiot, said something Harlan could not quite catch. It sounded like fuckin’ A.

“I will want to know more about it,” Harlan said. “I understand the boy left with the sister of the owner. I was hoping I might speak with him.”

“No can do,” the bartender said. “Owner’s gone already. Went out after them himself. Had the gun in the rack too, didn’t he, Jim?”

“You bet,” someone replied.

The bartender seemed to find this amusing. Harlan was not sure about how much of it to believe, but it was clear no one was going to tell him anything else.

“Maybe,” the bartender said—he appeared to be giving it some thought. “I could just figure in what you people owe with what you already owe for that car down there.”

Harlan was leaning slightly forward, his hands flat on the bar. It was the position he had assumed upon entering and he found that the wood was suddenly slick with sweat beneath his palms. “I thought maybe you already had,” he said, and then regretted it right away. He was, after all, a long way from home. He had been more than a year now without a beating and he was not looking for another. The situation had the look of something both ludicrous and potentially dangerous. The trick was in not making it more of either.

The bartender put down his towel. “You trying to be funny?” he asked.

“No,” Harlan told him, “I wasn’t.” He had begun to look for the the door. He wondered if anyone would try to stop him. He felt pissed off and foolish by turns. And why, he asked himself, hadn’t Neil Davis been smart enough to keep his mouth shut in front of some ape like the one before him? The question made him angry. The anger was accompanied by guilt.

The bartender grinned at the man with the space between his front teeth. “What’d I tell you?” he said. He looked once more at Harlan. “I seem to recall the good book having something to say about liars and thieves.”

“It says they will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”

The bartender continued to grin. “Looks like your boy lost his spot.”

Harlan forced a grin of his own. He looked toward the yellow light in the window and the black slice of bad road beyond it. He lifted his hands from the bar. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again,” he said. He turned slowly. The man closest to him stepped to one side. Harlan fixed the door in his sight and started toward it.

“Hey, I’m sure of that my ownself,” the bartender called after him.

Harlan had grown up in The Way. His father had picked up on the movement and the family had followed suit. He had seen earlier, more radical days when the brothers had not been content with just knocking on doors but had gone looking for all of the confrontations they could get. They had often spent Sunday mornings picketing churches with signs which said things like RELIGION IS A SNARE AND A RACKET. They had staged their own parades, using sound cars and signs. Harlan and his brother had always managed to stay at the back of the parades just in case there were any fistfights to be had with hecklers.

It was what he thought about as he swung the car around in front of the bar and headed back down the road. He also thought about something he had recently read in one of the magazines. It was something one of the missionaries had said about the incident at Gbaranga—how for an entire night she had listened to the sounds of a brother being beaten, how the blows had echoed across a dark compound as loudly as the barking of a gun, and how when the brother was not receiving abuse he had led a number of the other brothers in song. Harlan Low had been the brother and when he read about it he thought of something he’d once heard a boxer say about seeing himself knocked out in the film of a fight. The guy said he didn’t get scared until he saw the pictures. What Harlan thought of now when he thought of that night was what the woman had said about it. He found that what she said scared him. He couldn’t remember anything at all about the song.

He drove slowly along the road. Africa had left him both gun-shy and quick to anger. It was a ridiculous combination. He found that the man in the bar reminded him of a certain Liberian soldier and he felt it was important to remind himself that rearranging the man’s face with the toe of his shoe would not bring lasting happiness. He reminded himself as well that the parades and fistfights had taken place a long time ago, that he had been a good fifty pounds lighter in those days and not nearly as smart as he was now.

He was still thinking this over when, on his second pass of the Desert Museum, he noticed a shadowy figure standing on the porch waving its arms.

“Had an idea that might be you,” Neil said as he approached the car.

Harlan sat behind the wheel, his window open to the night air. He found the sight of Neil Davis produced in him a certain weariness.

“We found it open,” Neil said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the museum. “Seemed like as good a place as any to spend the night.” Then he shrugged. “No hotels in this burg,” he said.

In spite of the weariness Harlan was not ready for sleep. Nor was he eager for conversation. After encouraging the others to turn in he returned to the porch. He sat alone on a rough plank step and stared into the darkness of the road. He was worried that the men in the bar might get drunk enough to work themselves into something and come looking for them. It was the kind of thought he entertained more readily now than at any time in the past. That he should entertain it at all made him angry. The anger did nothing to lessen the fear, however. It was just something he had come home with.

He sat on the porch until the bar had closed and he had seen the headlights of half a dozen pickups bounce down the wash and turn toward the highway. He continued to sit on the porch. He listened to a pack of dogs yapping somewhere at the north end of town. Finally he got up and went inside. He decided to see what he could of the place Obadiah Wheeler had seen fit to rob.

The building was without artificial light but there were long, empty windows along both walls and with the shutters thrown open Harlan found the moonlight sufficient for obtaining a general idea of what there was to see.

There wasn’t, it first appeared, a lot. Neil had arranged some long, narrow boxes on the floor of the main room upon which the others now lay sleeping. In the moonlight Harlan found that the sleeping figures reminded him of corpses in a makeshift morgue. He walked quietly around them. He passed through two smaller rooms, both empty save for a number of empty glass cases, before arriving at a third room above whose entrance someone had nailed a piece of wood with the words THE THING written on it. The Thing, apparently, was what Wheeler and the local girl had taken and the room was indeed empty. Harlan stood for several minutes at its center, in the darkness. He was trying to figure it but found he hadn’t enough to go on. An affair of the heart, perhaps. Harlan had given in to an affair of the heart once. He had been eighteen years old at the time. He had run away with a neighbor’s wife and they had gone to Kansas City. His father and the woman’s husband had come looking for them. It was an absurd story. At least it seemed absurd to Harlan. The woman’s husband wound up pulling a gun on him in their apartment. He wasn’t very good with it and Harlan had taken it away from him. Then his father, who had been looking in another room downstairs, had come up and Harlan had fought his father. He could have taken his father but he hadn’t.

In the end—not the night of the fight, but in the end—Harlan had done what his father wanted—he had gone home. What he had found at the time was that living with the woman was doing something to him. When he had left with her he understood he was breaking a rule. But he thought it was only one rule; he had thought that he could violate one principle and yet still live by the others, and what he found was that it didn’t work that way. Later he believed he had learned the truth of Paul’s words when he said that God’s Word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference. It was the revelation which had pointed him down the road he still followed. It was about keeping honest and as near as Harlan could tell, obedience to the Word was the only thing that worked.

Harlan went to an open window. The night air was cool against his face. He could see a bit of the road and above that the ridge which led to the interstate. Above the ridge the sky was filled with stars. He tried for a moment to imagine what the girl the Wheeler boy had run off with might be like. Neil Davis had described her as a common whore. The curious thing about that was, it was more or less the way Harlan’s father had once described the woman Harlan had run away with. There were times when it suited him to imagine he no longer remembered the woman’s name, but he did. He continued to stand at the window, to examine the huge black shape the ridge had cut from the starlit sky. The woman’s name was Virginia. At one point during the summer of his eighteenth birthday she had given him a record as a present—the Paul Whiteman recording of “I’m Coming, Virginia.” It was supposed to be a joke, something she had picked up in a secondhand store. The thing turned out to be something of a collector’s item, however, as it contained a cornet solo by Bix Beiderbecke and there were times now, when Harlan thought of her, when he imagined he could still hear the pure tone of Bix’s horn as it filled a cheap two-room flat complete with bamboo shades and colored lights, windows open upon hot summer nights.

The woman had died some ten years later, or so Harlan had been told, in a Memphis hospital of cirrhosis of the liver—an ugly death and what he supposed was the point of the story, what one ought to remember about the pursuit of empty pleasures. That he remembered more, that the cheap trappings of a romantic sentimentality still clung to the episode like the scent of a dime store perfume, was a nagging source of irritation. That the trappings were capable, on occasion, of generating actual tears, was worse than irritating. But then he supposed there was a point in all of that too. It had something to do with the stuff choices were made of. Though not a subject he ordinarily talked about, it was, he thought, under the circumstances, something he might take up with a certain Obadiah Wheeler, should the opportunity present itself.

There was one more room in the building. It was a small, windowless room stuck to the back of the one which had housed the Thing and when Harlan pushed through the door and stepped inside he found himself in complete darkness.

He stood for a moment just inside the door, fishing in his pocket for the penlight he had recently attached to his key chain. The penlight had been a gift from a brother who worked for a big brake outfit and got penlights with their advertising on them for free. It was exactly the useless kind of thing people were always giving him. When he had found it he pushed its frail light around the room—a workroom, it appeared. There were benches and a long table and a number of tools lying about as if no one had picked anything up in a long time. In one corner of the room there were what looked to be a stack of fiber glass castings.