Unassigned Territory (12 page)

The castings were covered with a fine white dust and he was trying to get a better look at them when he bumped something with his head. Stepping backward and tilting his light he found himself face-to-face with a large medallion which had been fixed to a beam above him. His bumping it had set it in motion and the thing now swung easily at the end of a thin golden chain. The piece was made up of two parts, a circle and a hand.

He saw right away there was something wrong with the hand. In a moment he saw what it was. The hand had six fingers. A closer inspection revealed that the ring which circled the hand had been filled with eyes—they had been etched into the surface of the metal. He took a step backward and bumped a sawhorse. This made him jump and he jammed his elbow into a vise. He managed, however, to keep the medallion fixed in the beam of his light, as though he were worried about it going somewhere on him. In fact, the thing had spooked him. Nor did the unpleasant sensation show signs of dissipating as he continued to stand there, watching the object shorten its arcs within the circle of light he had made for it. The problem was, this was not the first time Harlan had run across such an object. He had seen something very much like it on two other occasions. The last was in Los Angeles. The hand had been fashioned of neon and he had glimpsed it one evening from the Santa Monica Freeway. The brother he was riding with believed the building beneath the hand to be some sort of temple. There had been no circle around the neon hand, but there had been a sixth finger. There had also been eyes. The hand was full of them. But this was the second time and it was hard to say how much attention he would have paid it had it not been for the first.

The first was in Africa, in a slum on the outskirts of Monrovia where he and another elder had gone to visit the sick child of a newly converted couple. The couple believed their son had been cursed in some way. It was not an uncommon reaction. The land there was rife with secret societies, fetishes, and devils.

Harlan had squatted with the others, beneath a tin roof, between walls of bamboo and corrugated iron. It seemed to be a part of the city to which the sea breeze was unable to penetrate. The air was hot and foul, heavy with the scents of sickness and burning garbage. A search had begun for what the couple believed to be the responsible object. Clothes were laid out and gone through, boxes emptied, furniture moved. At last, buried in a shallow hole just beneath the boy’s bed, they discovered a small wooden hand. The piece had been carved from a dark wood then covered with a thin coat of white paint. There was a wooden ring attached to the wrist. The hand itself had six fingers with an eye at the tip of each. It was agreed that the elders would take the object outside and destroy it. And Harlan had begun to do just that, was in the act of leaning forward to pick the thing up, when it occurred to him that he could no longer breathe. It was as if some outside force was preventing it. Sweat had broken upon his forehead. The warm, fetid air had closed in upon him in such a way that he felt certain he would faint and it had seemed to him as if something, the night itself perhaps, in the black rectangle of an open doorway, had assumed some form, as if it were the shadow of something else. He could not say how long this condition lasted. He did not faint. He took the hand in an abrupt movement of his own and lurched into the street, where he managed to toss the thing into the fire of a burning oil drum attended by some ravaged beggar.

Harlan turned off his penlight and went back into the museum. But he didn’t sleep there. He told himself it was because he wanted to be alone. He returned to the lot. He crawled into the backseat of his rental car and, using his jacket as a pillow, did his best to get comfortable.

He had never spoken to anyone about how he had felt that night in Monrovia. None of those present had said anything to suggest his actions were out of the ordinary. Perhaps he only imagined that he had lurched into the street. Perhaps he had simply walked. Perhaps the feeling was nothing more than physiological, the resuit of too rich a meal and foul air, the muddy coffee it was necessary to drink there in order to appear polite. When he returned home that night he had found his wife already in bed, asleep. But then he doubted he would have mentioned it to her anyway, fearing that it would only upset her. Instead he had made himself a drink and gone out onto the narrow balcony which had bordered their room to watch the starlight above the sea, to decide at last that it must have been the food, to warn himself that in the future he would have to be more careful.

There had been no comparable sensations the night he saw the neon hand at the side of the freeway. Nor had any returned to haunt him in the museum. So why, he wondered, was he here now, bent like a horseshoe in the back of a rented Ford instead of stretched out inside with the others? The last he had heard of the Liberian boy was that he had risen on the morning following the destruction of the hand, fully recovered. It did give one pause. An exorcism or a bad case of indigestion? “We have a wrestling,” Paul had said, “not against blood and flesh, but against governments, against the authorities, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places.” At the side of Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum, Harlan Low did what he had done that night in Africa, having found his wife in bed and himself alone. He watched the stars and he slept.

W
hen Harlan woke the stars were gone and there was sunlight coming in through the glass and making him hot. There was a bad taste in his mouth and his back hurt. He climbed out of the Ford and stood beside it. He put his hands on his hips and began working his torso in circles, first clockwise, then counterclockwise.

Doing the exercises he stared down on the paunch around his middle. The roll of fat was still fairly new and still a source of embarrassment. Beneath the paunch was a wrinkled pair of charcoal-brown slacks and a dusty pair of new wing-tip shoes. Harlan felt fat, sloppy, and out of shape. He realized that if he dwelt on this too long it would only depress him. He promised himself a better exercise program when he got back to the city, but then doubted the resolve as soon as he had made it and that depressed him as well. Harlan had grown up on a farm. He had always been a reasonably good athlete and he had always kept in reasonably good shape. The image of himself as an overweight, middle-aged man in baggy suits did not sit well and yet of late it was what he felt himself sliding toward. That before the morning was over he should have to confront the man he had met in the bar about Neil’s car did not sit well, either, and yet there it was. The one prospect seemed to aggravate the other. What was he going to do anyway? Walk up the hill looking fat and sloppy and appeal to the man’s sense of fair play? He looked across the street where the Chevron sat on the ridge—a low rectangle of gleaming white metal before a flat blue sky.

He was still looking at the station and considering his position when he heard the others arrive on the wooden porch of the museum. He turned in time to greet Panama Allen as she came down the steps.

“Morning,” Panama said. “Some fix, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Harlan said, “it is.”

They crossed the street together, Harlan slightly ahead of the others. He felt absurdly like the leader of something. The man he had spoken to at the bar was there to meet them. Harlan could see him in the drive as they made their way up the slight incline. Behind him Harlan could see the pale blue hood of Neil’s car gleaming in the sunlight.

The mechanic met them at the point where the incline flattened back out into a gravel drive which circled the pumps. “What can I do for you?” the mechanic asked. He was dressed in a greasy pair of coveralls, work boots, and a T-shirt. There was a small white oval sewn onto the front of the coveralls with the name FLOYD in red letters on the inside. The man’s arms were thick and hairy and on each forearm there was a tattoo. On one arm there was a heart with a dagger through it, on the other a Betty Boop with a name below it which Harlan could not read.

Neil started to say something but Harlan cut him off. “My friend here says you won’t take his check,” Harlan heard himself saying. He was aware of how it sounded but the words seemed to slip out under some power of their own. He was aware, too, of the others standing behind them. When he tried to look back in their direction, however, he was blinded by the morning sun and could not see their faces. He was able to imagine them, though. They would look blank and trusting—the faces of small children.

“That’s right,” Harlan heard Floyd say in answer to his question. “I don’t take checks from strangers.” Behind him, Harlan could hear Neil’s shoes on the pavement. He felt a hand on his sleeve. “I was thinking,” Neil said, his voice just above a whisper. “With the rented car, we could drive back to the nearest town and find a bank. We...” There was something in the tone of Neil’s voice which Harlan found difficult to bear. He raised a hand, cutting the brother off. When he spoke it was to make the voice go away. “He’ll take your check,” Harlan said.

The mechanic, who had turned his back to them and set about unlocking another door, suddenly stopped what he was doing and turned to face them once more. “Say what?” he asked.

“The check’s good,” Harlan said. He was trying to sort things out, to think on his feet. But for some reason it wasn’t working and he found himself somewhat astounded at the speed with which the thing was turning to shit—it was as if he had absentmindedly wandered into the stuff and was now unable to turn around and waddle back out. “I can vouch for it,” he said at last. It was of course a ridiculous thing to say and he wondered what it was, exactly, that had gone wrong. A man who cannot control his tongue, he thought, is like a ship without a rudder: James 3:4.

“And who the hell are you?” Floyd asked.

“He’s a minister,” Panama Allen said, her voice issuing from the morning light. Harlan’s first instinct was to cringe, his second was to giggle. The situation was worthy of a schoolyard. At Harlan’s side Neil Davis looked as if he was about to cry. Patience, Harlan thought, and yet even as the word took shape in his mind he grasped the problem. The problem was that on this morning in spring, on the edge of a town which, as near as he could tell, no one had thought enough of to name, his was gone. Somewhere between that compound in Gbaranga and the white heart of the Mojave, between the deportation hearing and the sniveling voice of reason, the stuff had been used up. The tank was empty. It was that simple. You could suck as hard as you wanted to on the siphoning hose. You could rock the car. The lousy tank was dry as a bone.

“If I want a nigger’s advice, I’ll ask for it,” the mechanic said. His voice seemed to come from an immense distance.

Harlan almost laughed. It was a damn dream. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger, wondering for one brief moment as he did so if there was not still some way out. At which point Bianca Allen spoke up at his side and he understood the play was no longer his.

“Honky motherfucker” was what Bianca said.

Floyd Hummer grinned and dropped the rag with which he had begun to clean his hands while Harlan Low, moving as he might had it in fact been a dream, let fall the sharkskin sport coat he had till now carried slung over one shoulder. He feinted with a left hand he had not raised in violence in twenty years and followed the feint with a straight right. He was hoping to catch Floyd in the Adam’s apple. It was a serious punch.

Unfortunately Floyd moved a bit and the blow caught him more on the collarbone than on the throat. It probably hurt. It might have knocked a smaller man down. It knocked Floyd backward and into a set of red metal shelves set on casters. With Floyd leaning on it, the drawers rolled back and crashed into the wall with a loud metallic thud. Floyd grunted, reached blindly into the top of the drawers, and came out swinging a long set of pliers designed for removing oil filters. Harlan would have liked to follow Floyd to the wall, possibly planting a wing-tip in his scrotum, but the wing-tips seemed to have other ideas and he was having a terrible time with traction. The shoes were still fairly new and the leather soles slipped wildly beneath him. It was, he supposed, no less than he deserved. He did, however, manage some forward momentum in Floyd’s direction and got there just in time to catch a wild hacking swing with the pliers on his forearm. There was a bright flash of pain which seemed to run in both directions along his arm as his hand went numb. But he continued to press. He watched the fingers of his left hand wrap themselves around Floyd’s wrist. He got his right hand to the inside of Floyd’s left arm, grabbed a handful of T-shirt, some of the coveralls, and drove his head into Floyd’s face. He brought his knee up at about the same time, hoping to catch Floyd in the groin, but caught instead what felt to be the metal edge of an open drawer. He felt the steel corner tear into his slacks and the skin beneath. He was aware of the warm trickle of blood down one leg.

Floyd pushed off the cabinet and for several moments the two men danced about the concrete floor like a pair of crippled dinosaurs. Stray coffee cups, someone’s windshield, the antenna on Neil’s Buick, all disappeared in their wake. Harlan was still fighting for traction while Floyd was managing a series of rabbit punches with the grip end of the pliers behind Harlan’s left ear. At last Harlan was able to twist Floyd’s wrist until he heard the pliers hit the floor. He dropped his head to Floyd’s chest, dropped both hands and punched as hard as he could, one, two, on Floyd’s ribs, one, two just beneath them, and then upstairs, hooking hard to Floyd’s head and that was just about it. Harlan Low was out of something for the second time that morning and Floyd was still in front of him.

Harlan feared for a moment that he might go down without even being hit. His lungs burned and his throat ached. His head throbbed. The colors seemed to have drained from the room so that he was seeing in black and white. Floyd did not bother to pick up the pliers. He just set himself and swung—a great roundhouse right which exploded on Harlan’s jaw. Harlan saw it coming a mile away and wished like hell he could have moved.