Unassigned Territory (13 page)

It was, as near as he could remember, the first time anyone had ever knocked him off his feet with his fists. He was considering some method of regaining them when Floyd put a work boot into his ribs and followed it with another to the side of his head. Harlan Low rolled onto his side, groaning, reminding himself of a beached whale he’d once seen near Cabo San Lucas. He was hurt and horribly disgusted. He was aware of the terrible spectacle he had made, and for the first time that morning he was scared. Floyd Hummer had grabbed a drawer full of tools. He was holding the whole mess over his head and Harlan Low was beginning to think about serious bodily harm—the kind of stuff you tried to live with when it was over—knowing every time you tried to walk that you had done it yourself, that you really had been stupid enough to pick a fight you never stood a chance in, that there really had been murder in your heart. Nor would it, he supposed, prove inspirational for those present—an incident not to be reported in the pages of the
Kingdom Progress Bulletin.

His vision, which had already gone to black and white, now seemed to switch to slow motion as well. He watched stupidly from the floor as Floyd lumbered toward him, the metal drawer held above his head. The moment had just about arrived, when Harlan saw something moving quickly among the shadows. He saw one bright slash of color in the midst of gray—a kind of electric pink—and understood that it was Bianca Allen. She had gotten her hands on what looked to be some kind of jack handle and she was winding up with it.

She caught the mechanic in the side, just below the rib cage but with the end of the handle curved round, digging up and into his solar plexus. Floyd stumbled forward and turned the shelf. Tools rained in front of him—a silver shower glittering in the sunlight which filtered through an open door—and Harlan understood as well that he had been granted one last chance. He reached blindly behind himself, grabbed something cold and hard, and pulled himself to his feet. Floyd stood looking at him, the empty drawer hanging from one arm a peculiar expression on his big square face. Harlan came a half step forward and kicked him in the groin. Floyd grunted and went to one knee. Harlan hooked hard to the temple and Floyd pitched forward, facedown, over the racks. It was a filthy business, Harlan thought. He staggered outside into the sunlight and puked on the gravel drive, where, as if to add to his already considerable chagrin, there was a car pulling into the pumps at just that moment. He was aware of a woman staring at him from the passenger-side window. The woman wore too much makeup and fake black hair. But he didn’t have long to appreciate the sight. Apparently the driver had decided to look for a more reasonable place to buy gasoline, and the car, which had slowed, now picked up speed once more.

It slipped back down the hill to vanish in the sunlight and Harlan was left on his knees at the edge of the pumps with nothing to look at besides Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum on the far side of the road, and nothing to think about except what he had found there, swinging in the shadows. Thinking of that, he thought of something else as well. It was something from a book, a spy novel, from a period in which he had still permitted himself the indulgence. It was something he believed Goldfinger had once said to James Bond: “Once is happenstance,” it went. “Twice is coincidence. Three times, Mr. Bond, is enemy action.” For a moment he found himself pleased in a simpleminded way for having remembered such a thing. The moment passed quickly. What it left him with was particularly unpleasant.

O
badiah and Delandra spent two nights in a small motel on the outskirts of Baker. The motel was of the old motor-court variety. The buildings were of pink stucco with bright green doors and there was a green plaster cactus in front of each room. Inside each room there were two small rectangular paintings of the desert. Obadiah knew about the paintings because he had spent a fair amount of time pacing the gravel drive which looped through the court, had glimpsed the interiors of rooms not his own. Delandra had spent a fair amount of time at a phone booth in, the parking lot of the liquor store across the street. From the telephone booth she had been able to watch Obadiah pacing the gravel lot. She had begun to worry about him. He still had not eaten and had taken to spending inordinate amounts of time contemplating the Mystery of the Mojave. As she leaned against the glass wall of the booth she had watched him stop with each round to stare into the back of the car. Later, when she asked him about it, he would only say that he was checking on the cargo. When Obadiah asked Delandra what she was doing on the phone, she would only say she was putting things together.

On the morning of the second day they went to a store in town and Obadiah bought some new clothes—he had till now been wearing the powder-blue slacks and Madras sport coat he’d left Pomona in. He bought a pair of Levi’s jeans and two western shirts, also a cheap pair of tennis shoes. He changed in the front seat of the car, in the parking lot of the store, at which point, things apparently having been put together to Delandra’s satisfaction, they purchased a six-pack and left town.

Baker was somewhere behind them now with the sun filling up the windshield and burning the last delicate colors of sunrise from the morning. Obadiah was growing accustomed to the lighting. In the morning and evening there were what seemed to be colored mists in the hollows of the ridges, across the bottoms of the salt flats and dry washes—mists of amber and ashes of rose, colors that ran to violets and blues. In the light of midday, however, the delicate hues vanished in the heat, replaced by shades of tan and gray, chalky whites and yellows. The mists, if in fact there were such things, gave way to another variety of aqueous illusion—the water mirages upon whose surfaces the tans and grays repeated themselves in silvery splendor.

It was a display which could, Obadiah had found, be particularly hard on the hungover—a club he seemed lately to have found a home in. He adjusted the sun visor before him accordingly. He dug Delandra’s spare set of white-rimmed sunglasses from the glovebox and wrenched a fresh beer from the plastic ring which bound it to the others. He drank quickly, squirming in his seat, looking for a way to get comfortable, though experience told him there wasn’t one. The new clothes didn’t help. The shirt felt stiff and scratchy, as did the jeans. At last he gave up, trusting the proper amount of beer would do the trick. He drank with his eyes closed, the morning slipping by unseen beyond an open window, and he didn’t open them again until he heard Delandra bitching about the bikers.

They had, at some point during the last night in town, been joined there by an invasion of motorcycles. The bikes were big, stock Harleys with all manner of machinery attached—windshields, roll bars, saddlebags, running lights, long, curving antennas that whistled in the wind. The riders seemed to come in pairs. They were middle-aged or older and on the backs of their matching leather jackets were names like John and Peggy, Ray and Rayanne, Pilot and Co-Pilot. Obadiah and Delandra had seen them earlier, around town, and now it looked as if they had caught them on the road. They were strung out for what looked to be about a mile and moving at about fifty miles an hour. Delandra had the Dart up to about eighty and she wasn’t the kind of girl who liked to be slowed down.

“God damn it,” she said. She hit her horn and moved out to pass the whole line. She got it up to ninety and she was cutting it pretty close. A couple of people yelled at them as they sped past. Obadiah slid down a bit in his seat. He wrapped his hands tightly about the beer can resting upon his chest and tried to imagine what kind of picture the two of them made, a pair of lunatics in matching sunglasses, pushed as close to the dash as they could get in a battered Dodge doing service as a hearse. “You could slow down a little,” he suggested.

“These dumb shits,” Delandra said, “will run every restaurant on the road out of food if we don’t beat them to it.” Obadiah turned in time to see one old man shout something at them—his face was all teeth and dark glasses. Obadiah grinned and waved. Delandra cut the Dart back into the right lane, forcing the man to swerve out of the middle of his lane and toward the shoulder. Delandra moved dangerously close to the shoulder herself before swinging them back on line. A mile or so down the road they came to a fork and Delandra swerved to the right, her rear tires catching a bit of the shoulder. Obadiah opened a fresh beer. “You know you really are the worst driver I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“You love it and you know it,” Delandra told him.

An hour or so later they came upon a settlement not unlike the junction—a collection of widely spaced shacks and trailers, their backs to a ridge of iron-colored stone at whose base had collected great white drifts of sand. The surface of the sand had been left rippled by the wind—perfect curving lines spaced at regular intervals as if the whole ridge had somehow been thrust down into a liquid earth.

Delandra swung the Dart off the road, parking before a small house bookended by a pair of railroad cars. The cars were in fact connected to the house, replacing its north and south walls. The entire structure had been painted a garish shade of yellow, trimmed in pink and green. An elaborate hand-painted sign running the length of the house’s roof identified the building as FLO’S RAILROAD CAFÉ.

“I’m going to buy you something to eat,” Delandra said, “and then I’m going to watch you eat it.”

They went inside where it was cool and empty and Delandra bought him something called the Railroad Platter, and she did watch him eat it—at least she watched him eat half of it, which was just about as long as she could sit still in one place, and then she started looking around for a phone. There wasn’t a pay phone but she finally pestered the old woman who served them into letting her use the one in the kitchen.

She was gone for some time and Obadiah, having done what he could with the Railroad Platter—the original weight of which he had placed at about six pounds—decided to pay the bill and go outside to have a look at the cargo.

It was a brilliant late morning with the air sharp and dry and dead still so that the sound of his new tennis shoes sinking into the sand beneath him seemed abnormally loud. Behind the restaurant the dark iron-colored ridge was like the broken blade of a knife against a pale, luminous sky.

The cargo was secure. Obadiah decided to crawl in anyway for a closer look. He went back on his haunches and turned a bit of the tarp so he could see the face. The Thing lay looking back at him from the gloom of its coffin. Sometimes he felt its eyes were following the movements of his. It really was the damndest thing he had ever seen. And he had examined it from all angles. Once when he was alone with it, he had even lifted the lid and tried rolling the Creature onto its side so he could see the back. The back looked like the front.

He was willing, if only because the alternatives still seemed at this point too farfetched, to accept Delandra’s banal proposal that her father had built it out of junk. Still, there was something about it which seemed to defy this logic. Looking at the Creature made him feel something. He couldn’t say it any other way than that and occasionally, trying to imagine what dark flower of the soul had opened to its touch, he would try as well to imagine something of the man responsible.

He would try to imagine him out there in his shed, building and discarding—to the ultimate exclusion of all else, as Delandra had said he had done. When he tried to imagine Sarge physically, however, to put a face, even if only in his own imagination, to the name, the only face he could come up with was that of his own father, which was rather long and narrow, punctuated by a pair of intense green eyes and capped by a patch of thinning light brown hair. Obadiah’s father had spent half of his life on the porches of his neighbors, perfecting his door-to-door presentation—if not to the exclusion of all else, at least to the exclusion of a good deal—and he had, on more occasions than Obadiah cared to remember, taken the boy with him—this while Obadiah was still too young to have a presentation of his own—so that Obadiah sometimes recalled this part of his childhood as a kind of pastiche of porches and voices, of half-remembered faces and fragments of sensory perceptions: a certain slant of sunlight upon his face, an odd-shaped chunk of sky caught between bright stuccoed walls. And, of course, there were the words—fragments of scriptural debate. They rang now as a kind of litany in his mind: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was a god—not God, but a god. And while it is true that the original text did not make use of the definite article, the grammatical construction nevertheless implies its use, as in Acts 28:6, where Paul, bitten by a snake but unharmed, is spoken of as a god.... It was a shame, he thought, that his faith had failed him, leaving these things in his head—chains of Scripture aimed at everything from establishing the continuance of the seventh creative cycle, to debunking hellfire and the Trinity. They lay there now in his mind, the fossilizing vertebrae which had once formed the spine of some great beast. He put his hands together and rested his forehead against their heels. He stared between his wrists into the eyes of the Mystery of the Mojave. The Mystery of the Mojave stared back. He believed for a moment that the Creature was trying to tell him something. The moment was lost, however, as Delandra Hummer rapped at the glass behind him with her knuckles. Obadiah replaced the tarp. Caught again, he crawled rather sheepishly from the car and stepped out into the hot blue day.

It looked as if Delandra was about to tell him something when they were interrupted by the roar of motorcycles. The bikes were peaking a small hill and descending upon the breakfast cafe like a line of mutant ants. Delandra jerked her thumb in their direction. “See what I mean,” she said. “We just made it.”

The riders began bringing their machines to a halt in the dusty lot, couples dismounting and stretching their legs, pulling off helmets and patting hairdos. Obadiah noticed one old guy walking toward them. It looked like the guy Delandra had almost run off the road. “Hey,” the guy yelled. His wife and another couple were standing behind him. More were beginning to move in their direction. “What the hell you think you were trying to do back there,” he asked, “kill someone?”