Unassigned Territory (17 page)

B
y the time Rex got down from the ridge the shadows in the courtyard had begun to lengthen and had taken on a slightly bluish hue in the warm orange light. The bikes he had seen from Roseann’s trailer were still in front of the bar. They were big, chopped Harleys with long chromed forks and high-gloss tanks. He paused for a moment to admire the work before moving past them and into the building.

He hadn’t been in Charlie’s for close to two years but it didn’t look as if much had changed. The place was still dark and musty, still smelled of spilled beer and stale tobacco. Charlie was back of the bar. He looked up as Rex came through the door and greeted him by name. Charlie was a tall, skinny desert rat in his late forties. He had light brown hair which was long and stringy and which he wore pulled back tight against his skull with a ponytail in back long enough to strike him between the shoulder blades. He had a large mustache and a graying, pointed beard and sometimes reminded Rex of old photographs he’d seen of Buffalo Bill Cody. Except Charlie was skinnier. Buffalo Bill on speed. Charlie fancied himself a guitar player and occasionally showed up at the junction for talent showcase nights. He probably would have showed up more often if Floyd hadn’t proven himself partial to giving Charlie a bad time and yelling things like “Hey, Pencil Dick” at him when he was trying to perform.

“Heard about your new invention,” Charlie said as Rex crossed the floor. “First place, huh. The man’s a Hollywood star.” He said this as if he were speaking to a roomful of people. In this case, however, there was no one there but a scrawny Mexican at one end of the bar and the owners of the Harleys hunkered down in a booth way at the back and none of them looked particularly interested in the news.

Rex shrugged it off. “Seen anything of the Buffalo Woman?” Charlie set a beer down in front of Rex. “On the house,” he said, and then: “Fuck no. I hear the old whore’s got herself a new beau, though. A real Indian if you can believe that. Jesus, can you imagine tying into that wench?”

Rex took a drink of the beer. “You ever seen the guy?” he asked. “The Indian? Hell no. The guy’s from Victorville, I think. The only reason I even know about him is that he showed up at one of her gigs at the opera house”—Charlie jerked his thumb in the direction of the courtyard—“and wound up beating the shit out of a couple of tourists. Great for business, huh?” Charlie paused to shake his bony head. “Why you interested?” he asked.

Rex ignored him. He was staring into the bottles back of the bar and thinking about Indians.

“Hey,” Charlie said, his face lighting up noticeably. “I hear Floyd got beat by some nigger.”

Rex nodded and Charlie began to laugh. The laugh turned into a cough and he stomped around behind the bar for a full thirty seconds trying to get hold of himself. When he returned to where Rex was sitting, there were tears in his eyes—of joy or physical discomfort, it was hard to say. “Wish I coulda been there, man.”

“Do yourself a favor,” Rex told him. “Don’t ever let him hear you laughing about it.”

Charlie wiped his nose.

“You ever get that piano tuned?” Rex asked. There was an old white upright in one corner of the bar. It had been badly out of tune the last time Rex was here, but he was thinking he might like to fool around with it. The piano was at the same end of the room as the bikers, though on an opposite wall. He looked back in their direction now. “Fucking lowlifes,” he heard Charlie whisper, “been holed up over there in the north wing for close to a week now. Got this little pussy with them, though.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows several times in rapid succession before casting a sly smile in Rex’s direction. He then paused, as if to add weight to what would follow. He leaned slightly forward on the bar and reduced his voice to a gravel-laden whisper. “And guess what else?” he asked. “The little dirt bag was in here the other night dancin’ on the tabletops, showin’ off this fancy dye-job she’d done on herself. Now let me tell you something about the location of this little item.” He wiggled his thumb in the direction of his own crotch. “She’s got the little beggar dyed red, white, and blue.” Charlie slapped the bar and chuckled beneath his breath. “Yes indeed,” he said, “one patriotic pussy comin’ right up.” This time he laughed out loud. His laughter charmed like the death rattle of a wounded animal and Rex turned away from it. He left the bar and crossed the room. He went to the piano and sat down.

Behind him the two largest bikers, a bearded blond and a brunet appeared to be arguing over whether or not the brunet had ever been a cop. “Sheet, man,” Rex could hear the blond guy saying, “you were never a cop, man.”

“Hey, fuck you, man,” the brunet said, “I was, too, a cop.” Rex played several tentative notes on the instrument. He was strictly self-taught but he liked fooling around with it. Perhaps it would help him relax. He began by trying to pick out the melody line to “Hong Kong Blues.” Behind him he was aware of the bikers getting quiet. “Hey, rock and roll, man,” someone said. “Shut up, Dick Head,” came a reply. Rex ignored them. He was trying to remember the words: “This is the story of very unfortunate colored man / got ’rested down in old Hong Kong / he got twenty years privilege taken away from him / when he kicked old Buddha’s gong.”

Finally the bikers got up and left. Rex could hear them clomping across the floor behind him. For a moment sunlight flooded the bar, then a door slammed and it grew cool and quiet and dark once more.

He played for what was perhaps an hour. At some point the door opened again and soon Rex was aware he had attracted an audience. There was a girl listening to him. She was seated at the table where the bikers had sat earlier and he wondered if she was the girl who had been keeping them entertained in the north wing. She was a small boyish-looking creature. She wore oversize khaki pants and a loose-fitting white tank top. She had short black hair, a small nose, and large dark eyes.

Later, when Rex stopped for a little break, she walked over to where he was sitting. “You’re okay,” she said.

Rex was not used to being approached by women—at least not the kind of women he imagined he could ever be interested in. This girl was something different and she made him nervous. He could see upon closer inspection that she was recovering from a very righteous black eye. There was still a good-sized bruise running down into her cheek, accentuating the darkness of her eyes and the whiteness of her skin. She wore large gold earrings and a small dark tattoo on one shoulder—a little cross with beams of light spreading out from the top. She pulled a chair away from the table and tossed herself into it. She landed with one leg drawn up, a foot on the seat, a forearm resting across one knee. It was a position which revealed an armpit and most of one small breast.

“That your truck out there?” the girl asked.

Rex said that it was.

“I was wondering,” she said, coming right to the point, “you going anywhere near Table Mountain? Like maybe you could give me a ride?”

Rex had not been thinking of going there. He looked away from the patch of soft dark hair beneath her arm, the white curve of skin. “I might,” he said, having discovered that his heartbeat was something he could hear.

The girl nodded. She had an odd voice—Betty Boop with a whiskey throat. “I’ve been trying to get up there for two weeks now,” she said. “These pussy bikers were going to take me. Now they don’t want to,”

Rex took the news that she was in fact the girl with the bikers without flinching. But he was not unaffected. On the one hand, he wanted to tell himself that he’d best think twice about taking her anywhere. On the other hand, there was what Charlie had told him. He had encountered decorated pussies twice now, both times in Porkpie Wells. The coincidence appeared pregnant with meaning.

“Yeah, I really want to get back up there. You know, to look at these guys you wouldn’t think they were such pussies.” Rex assumed she was referring to her traveling companions but it sounded like dangerous talk to him and he left it alone.

The girl proceeded into a lengthy rap about Table Mountain, how she and some other people had gotten into renovating this old mining town and how there was this doctor up there who had built all this righteous stuff. She had been stupid to leave. Her sister, with whom she had been traveling at the time, had talked her into it and they had gone to San Francisco where it was nowhere near as righteous as Table Mountain and she had been trying to get back ever since. She stopped for a while and looked at her hands. “The doctor died,” she said suddenly, “but he left everything to the Table Mountain people—that’s what we started calling ourselves. The only thing is, the doctor had this daughter—a real asshole, and she says she’s taking the will to court.” The girl stopped to laugh. Her laughter was rather deep and throaty—not at all what Rex had expected. “She’s going to take a will to court,” she repeated.

Rex nodded and looked at the way the girl’s big golden earrings flashed in the light now slicing through a narrow window near her head. The Table Mountain stuff was not news to him. He’d even met Dr. Verity once himself—a large, red-faced man with a paunch and a balding head. The guy had driven out to the Desert Museum years ago in a big pink Lincoln and offered to buy one of Sarge’s Things. He said nothing about this to the girl.

“It was fun when Verity was around,” the girl said. “When he died it was sad. We took his body out to this ridge and the aliens came and got it. I left after that. But I shouldn’t have. I got this letter a few weeks ago from one of the sisters. She says Verity has come back. He has begun to appear.”

“Begun to appear?” Rex asked. He wasn’t sure that he cared for the sound of it.

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know that much about it yet. He’s gotten beyond the human form. He’s going to teach us how to use the Electro-Magnetron.”

Rex had heard about the Electro-Magnetron too. It was something of a joke among the locals. He’d heard that it had been built to reverse the aging process, but that there was a part missing. “I thought there was a part missing,” Rex said.

The girl looked at him for a moment. “There was,” she said. “Did you know there was a race of people at the center of the earth?”

Rex said nothing. In the courtyard the shadows had begun to lengthen. He tried to picture in his mind what a red, white, and blue pussy might look like.

The girl wrapped her arms around herself as if she had taken a sudden chill. “It’s like another dimension down there, and these people, they’re like gods or something.” She stopped suddenly to laugh. “It sounds crazy,” she said, “but can you imagine it? If there was a way to bring them back?” She smiled sweetly at the thought. “Blow some fucking minds, or what?” She hugged herself once more and her smile seemed to spread out to include things. It included Rex in such a way as to make him feel he had already agreed to take her where she wanted to go. He could not say the feeling was unpleasant. But then he thought of an empty museum at the side of a pitted asphalt road and the feeling died on the vine. He would have taken this girl there, he thought. She would have seen the Thing. She would have heard the Hum-A-Phone. Blow some fucking minds indeed. There was suddenly sweat on the back of Rex’s neck, a dull, drumlike thumping back of his eyeballs. “Tell me,” he said, “why don’t these guys want to take you anymore?”

“I told you,” she said. “These guys are wimps. These guys wouldn’t know a large time if it came up and buggered them in the ass. I mean they’re not even real bikers. Shit, I lived in Oakland with some Angels once. These guys are dildos.”

“Yeah, but what are they afraid of?”

The girl looked him in the eye. The orange light gave the bruised flesh of her cheek a faintly iridescent quality. “They think the people up there are devil worshipers,” she said. Some fuckhead they met told them he’d heard some very weird stories. Like if these people don’t think you’re right on they might cut you up and sacrifice you to somebody.” The girl continued to look at him. Then she smiled. “It’s strictly bullshit,” she told him.

Rex nodded but he was paying little attention to her now. A thought had come to him. It had appeared among his memories like a blade of grass upon parched ground. It had to do with the profound sense of disappointment once expressed on the part of Delandra Hummer over her father’s refusal to sell Dr. Verity one of his Creatures, and Rex returned the girl’s smile with one of his own. From somewhere beyond the wall came a sound—music turned up real loud but so far away that only the bass line could be heard in the bar, a dull throb like the sound of blood.

That he was a man of some destiny was something Rex had never doubted. He’d believed it when Roseann Duboise had told him he was meant for something special and he had known in his heart he would not be forsaken. That simply was not his fate. He had after all come to Porkpie Wells seeking a sign. He looked once more at the girl and then back into the courtyard where the orange light lay gleaming on the snowy walls, and finally back toward Charlie at the far end of the room where the bartender, at last having caught his eye, was busily finger-fucking the fist he had made out of one hand with the forefinger of the other. He was holding the whole business high enough over the bar for Rex to see and grinning like a demented rodent.

W
hen they entered Trona on the following morning the weather had turned muggy and the sky the color of pearl. The Thing, for the first time since they had stolen it, was no longer in the car. They had left it in their room at the Blue Heaven Motel, the bedspread covering the case, a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

The golden city Obadiah had once glimpsed from the edge of the flats was, it appeared, a hoax of the cruelest variety for he did not believe he had seen an uglier town. Searching for some set of images with which to compare it, he was at first reminded of certain old photographs of eastern mill towns—those black-and-white portraits of industrial desolation. Tortured landscapes wherein sorry company towns hunkered on treeless hills in the shadows of smoking factories. They’d had, of course, to do something about the color scheme in the Mojave. The dirty grays and blacks of hard eastern winters had given way to the red-shaded earthtones of equally hard desert summers. As for the company town, its houses were of faded stucco pastels—pinks and greens and yellows, but bleached and dusted with a fine gray dust until they had taken on something of the quality of old work clothes washed too many times, bleached by long days beneath the sun. The houses were single-story structures, each one identical in design to its neighbor—low rectangular buildings with peaked sheet metal roofs that fanned out into a ten-foot overhang all around, making for deep porches and shade for the coolers which sat stacked in their shadows. In front of the houses there were makeshift fences of wood and wire and yards of sand.