Unassigned Territory (19 page)

Delandra let the Dodge roll to a stop near what looked to be the front of the building and from this vantage point they could see the Electro-Magnetron was not entirely alone. Perhaps fifty yards down the road someone had set up a pair of aluminum house trailers. The trailers were surrounded by a chain link fence and within the compound created by the fence there looked to be a couple of trucks and one or two cars. The vehicles were all parked behind the trailers, in the farthest corner of the lot from where Obadiah and Delandra sat, and it was hard to see for sure just how many there were. Someone had also erected a fence around the Electro-Magnetron—this capped with barbed wire—and near the gate someone, perhaps, Obadiah thought, Verity himself, had posted a black sign with silver letters. The word ELECTRO-MAGNETRON was printed at the top and below that there was some kind of explanatory note. Obadiah read through it several times without coming any closer to knowing what the odd-looking building was all about. It apparently had something to do with the collecting of electromagnetic impulses which were to be used in the manufacture of mana rays, which in turn were to be used for the furtherance of life, energy, and harmony. Delandra killed the engine and they climbed from the car. There was moisture in the air now and the smell of rain. But at least they had found the paved road which Delandra was sure would get them back to Trona.

They were moving closer to the gate and sign when they heard the distant popping of a trailer door. They looked toward the second, smaller compound in time to see a man moving down the steps which led to one of the trailers. He did not appear to look in their direction but moved around the end of the trailer, walking toward the trucks and cars. He had a rifle in one hand. He carried it loosely, even with his thigh, parallel to the ground. A moment later they heard an engine start up and soon a pickup was bounding across the rutted dirt of the compound, hitting the piece of road upon which Delandra had parked the car and moving toward them, a thin trail of white dust floating in its wake.

Delandra and Obadiah were standing between the Dart and the gate. “We could make a run for it,” Obadiah suggested. He smiled to let her know he was kidding but the smile had not been an easy thing to muster and was probably, he thought, not very convincing.

“Relax,” Delandra told him. “All these assholes out here carry guns. They like to play games. But we’ve got the Thing. Right? Just act cool.”

“Right,” Obadiah said, and might have found it an easier pose to assume had he not suddenly noticed that the approaching truck was painted a dark blue and looked very much like the one he had seen that first night at the A & W burger joint.

Back at the compound, behind the truck, a pair of large, gangling dogs had run to the edge of the road and begun to bark. The barking had an odd, flat ring to it—a kind of metallic popping upon the heavy air which preceded the storm.

T
he man driving the truck had little crosses tattooed on each hand, in the skin between the thumb and forefinger. Obadiah noticed the crosses because of the way the man stood when he reached them. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops.

He was not the man Obadiah had seen at the root beer stand. He was tall and rangy with a narrow white face and long white hair pulled back in a ponytail. His brows and lashes were white too. He was almost an albino. He might have been thirty or he might have been forty. The white hair made it difficult to tell. He was dressed in work boots, jeans, and a dirty white T-shirt without sleeves. The cut of the T-shirt worked to accentuate the length of the man’s trunk. His torso and arms appeared slightly longer than what they should have been and Obadiah found that the man reminded him of the kind of lizards he used to catch in his aunt’s woodpile. Alligator lizards, his aunt had called them. And the guy did look like he’d been under something for a while. He looked like being out from under it made him uncomfortable.

“Something you need?” the man asked.

“We’re looking for Dr. Verity,” Delandra told him.

The man studied them for a moment. “He died. You the woman who called?”

Obadiah glanced at Delandra. Her eyes had narrowed behind the shades. “I might be,” she said.

The man smiled for the first time. “I might be,” he repeated. “I like that.”

They followed him back to the compound in the Dart. A kid and two dogs met them at the gate and then chased them toward the trailers. The guy in the truck stopped as he entered and shut the gate after them. Storm clouds were overhead now and as they stepped from the car they felt the first full drops of rain on their faces. By the time they got to the red wooden steps leading up to the nearest trailer, the compound had gone to mud.

The man Obadiah had first seen at the A & W was waiting for them in the trailer. It was the same man or it was someone who looked very much like him. No one said anything about it and it soon became apparent that none of those present were going to cop to much.

The man was seated in a large green rocker which filled up most of the trailer’s living room. On the other side of the trailer from which Obadiah and Delandra had entered there was a sliding glass door which opened onto a deck built of two-by-fours beneath an aluminum awning. The glass in the sliders was greasy with nose prints and hand prints. The child who had run after them in the yard was there now, on the deck, one hand on the glass, the other down the front of his pants. Behind him, framed in the open doorway of a storage shed, there was a fat woman doing something in front of a large tub.

The man in the green chair introduced himself as Jack. He called the blond man Lyle.

“You’re Sarge Hummer’s girl?” the man said when Obadiah and Delandra had seated themselves on a bench seat at one end of the glass door.

Delandra shrugged. “You could say that,” she said.

The man laughed and showed a mouthful of bad teeth. His head was as big as Obadiah had remembered it and the body that went with it was big as well—fat, but the kind of fat you expected covered a good deal of muscle. The man wore a dirty pair of jeans and a black T-shirt which said “Who needs niggers?” on the front. “He was a crazy son of a bitch, wasn’t he?” the man asked.

Delandra had settled into the seat with one arm up and resting along its back. She had her legs crossed in front of her and her glasses pushed back on her head. “You wouldn’t have said it to his face,” she said. Her eyelids were still propped at about half-mast. All in all it was, in the opinion of Obadiah, a fine pose. She looked, he thought, a bit sleepy and a bit bored, maybe just a bit contemptuous of what was around her. It was a pose he very much admired.

Jack laughed again.

“Who’s your friend?” he asked.

“Just a friend.”

“He have a name?”

“I don’t know,” Delandra said. “You’ll have to ask him.”

Jack looked at Obadiah. “Obadiah Wheeler,” Obadiah said.

Jack repeated the name. “Sounds like some sort of toilet bowl cleanser.”

Lyle grinned at Obadiah. “You don’t have to sit still for that shit,” he said.

At his side, Obadiah felt Delandra moving on the bench. “So come on,” she said. “Let’s talk business. Are you the guy I talked to on the phone or aren’t you?”

“You were supposed to be here this morning,” Jack said. “You’re late.”

Delandra shrugged. “We had some trouble with the car.”

Jack just looked at her. Delandra stared back. Obadiah looked at Lyle and then outside, toward the fat woman in the shed. The rain was coming down in sheets now, tearing miniature canyons out of the mud and sand beyond the aluminum awning. As Obadiah watched, a brilliant pattern of lightning raced across the sky above the shed and the woman. The rain in the trailer was like hail on a tin can.

“So what, exactly,” Jack asked, “do you have?”

“Something Dr. Verity expressed interest in before he died,” Delandra said.

“Not one of those bullshit things your old man was always building,” Jack said. “You wouldn’t be trying to push off one of those?”

“Something he found,” Delandra said. “I don’t know what it is. I know Verity was interested. I know some other people are interested now.”

“What other people?”

“I don’t know. Some black guys from the city.”

Jack looked at Lyle. Obadiah, seated just a bit forward now on the bench, was able to look down the length of the trailer, past the cooking and dining area toward the back bedroom. There was something on the wall there, at that end of the trailer. It looked like some kind of little shrine. It was painted the color of the Electro-Magnetron and had light bulbs around it. Somehow the sight was not comforting. He looked back at his shoes upon the soiled floor.

“And you want to auction it off. Is that it? Highest bidder gets it?”

“Something like that,” Delandra said.

Obadiah had inadvertently let himself get caught staring at Lyle. “Dr. Verity was Jesus Christ,” Lyle told him.

Obadiah felt a slight chill run along his spine. “That’s cool,” he said.

“You bet your ass it is,” Lyle said. He sounded mad about something. Obadiah didn’t think that Lyle mad was something he wanted to see.

“So when do we get a look?” Jack asked. “You have it now?”

“No,” Delandra said, “we’ll have to get it.”

Jack looked at Obadiah. “You’ve seen it?” he asked.

Obadiah said that he had.

“What is it?”

“A body.”

“What kind of body?”

“I believe it’s the body of an alien being,” Obadiah said. He made sure he looked Jack in the eye.

Jack’s face did not change with the news. “Maybe you should go get it,” he said. “Your girlfriend can stay here; just to make sure you come back with it.”

Obadiah continued to look the fat man in the eye. It was true. He really wasn’t ready for this.

“Cut the crap,” Delandra said. “If you’ve got the money and you want to talk, let’s set up a time and place. If not, we’re out of here.” Jack looked at the two of them, first Obadiah then Delandra. “You’re a tough one, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Business,” Delandra told him.

“Listen,” Jack said as they were leaving. “Your old man was an asshole. I would’ve said that to him anytime.”

Delandra just looked at him. They were at the door now. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and beyond the wooden railings of the porch the mud was strewn with puddles the color of the sky. “Whatever you say,” Delandra said.

“Hey, Sweet Meat, that’s my style. Remember it.” In the background Obadiah could hear Lyle chuckling. “See you soon,” Jack said.

A huge rainbow had sprouted above the iron-colored range by the time they hit the asphalt which led to Trona. Delandra dragged a hand up over her forehead and back through her hair. She glanced at Obadiah in the seat next to her. He had one hand on the armrest. The other was rolled into a fist, resting on his thigh. His profile had a pale, drawn look to it beneath the black arm of the shades and the regrettable haircut. “Just a couple of regular guys,” she said. Obadiah looked at her but she could not see his eyes, only her own face in the shades. She looked away, back across the rain-streaked hood. “You were all right,” she said. Obadiah did not respond. She was trying to decide if she wanted to ask him about what he had said in the trailer. He had managed the right line at the right time with sufficient conviction and it was about this conviction—or the illusion thereof—that she was curious. She was just at the point of asking and then changed her mind. Perhaps she thought it would be better not to know.

H
arlan’s room had no view. A bulky cooler filled its only window and if he wanted to know what the day was doing he had to do one of two things. He could go to the cooler and peel back the strip of aluminum foil which had been attached to the top half of his window, or he could leave his room and walk down the hallway to the living room, where a large picture window looked out upon a yard of sand and cactus. On the other side of the same room there was a sliding glass door which opened upon a small patio. Standing on the concrete slab one could look west across a new redwood fence, and see part of the Las Vegas skyline.

For the most part, Harlan preferred peeling the foil. He couldn’t really see much that way and was reminded of TV dinners, but it was enough to tell him something about the weather and was preferable to stalking about the house where he might be stopped for conversation by one of its three occupants. Harlan was interested in the weather because as soon as the storms stopped, he intended to leave.

The house, part of a new development on the eastern edge of Las Vegas, was owned by a young couple, acquaintances of Neil Davis, and it was where Harlan had been brought to recover from the beating he had taken at the Chevron. He had been here since Monday afternoon. It was now Wednesday afternoon and it was raining. Hard. Neil Davis and the sisters Allen had already left. They had gone on up to Tonopah. Harlan had wanted it that way. He wanted to be alone. He had told them he would rent something in Vegas and drive it back to L.A. If, however, he had intended to get back to Los Angeles immediately, he would not have bothered waiting out the storm. As it was, a number of factors contributed to his still being here. For one thing, he hurt more than he cared to admit and had, in fact, blown one day—Tuesday—in bed. For another, he had no intention of returning to Los Angeles, not just yet. He had some looking around to do and that would be made a good deal easier by dry weather. He also needed some information; he needed a phone and a place where he could be reached. Still, he was not comfortable here, and as he stood at the window staring past the foil into a rain-slick street, he was anxious to be gone.

Normally, staying in someone else’s home would not have been a big deal for Harlan. He had lived most of his adult life in homes not his own. He had gone into the circuit work in his twenties and that was how visiting elders lived in those days. Now many owned house trailers, which could be moved from place to place, or even, in some areas, kept in a central location, allowing the brother to drive to the different congregations he served—almost a normal life—and a few Harlan knew of even had children, something which was pretty much unheard of when Harlan had started. The governing body had felt then it was important for the elders to stay in the homes of the brothers. And so Harlan had, at first as a bachelor, later with his wife—sleeping in someone else’s bedroom, eating in someone else’s kitchen, kicking off one’s shoes in front of someone else’s TV, figuring out which people you could relax with over a couple of cold ones and which ones would take offense, or pester you night and day with silly questions. You tried, of course, to weed the latter off your list, but there always seemed to be one or two you couldn’t get rid of. As a bachelor it really hadn’t been that bad. He had always adapted to things pretty easily—go outside with a beer and toss the football around with someone else’s kid. With a wife it had been harder. Takes an unusual woman, he supposed, to be content in other people’s houses, and Judith had never been. Later, when they had moved to Africa, they had lived in the branch home with other missionaries and that was better—more like having your own place, but then in Africa there had been the country to contend with and by that time Judith’s health was not so great.