Unassigned Territory (22 page)

Obadiah and Delandra sat in the car for some time. Neither of them said anything. Obadiah sat with his arm out the window, his elbow pointing at the empty theater. He was thinking once again about what this was costing him. It was costing him too much not to know everything. “You’re going to have to tell me,” he said. “We’re in this together and I ought to know.”

Delandra turned to face him. She was sitting with her wrists on top of the wheel. Her hair was still mussed from the wind. “I thought you said that if you don’t go home your people will have to notify your draft board. The government will issue a warrant for your arrest.”

Obadiah nodded. This was true.

“Then we haven’t much time, have we? And finding someone to look at the Thing would take time. You really want to go to jail for it?”

Obadiah studied the heat waves which had begun to chew at the edges of the hood. “No,” he said, “but then all of that will take time too. At this point I would be willing to take the chance.”

“Oh, boy,” Delandra said. She sat for a moment looking at her wrists. “The trouble,” she said, “is that I don’t want to take the chance. You see, yours is not the only ass on the line.”

Obadiah pulled himself into a more upright position. “I take it this is the part I didn’t want to know?”

“This is the part you didn’t want to know. The thing is, I put up my share of the Desert Museum as collateral with this bailbondsman. Now I’ve got less than a week before the court date and I don’t plan on being around.”

Obadiah removed his glasses. He wiped the sweat from the bridge of his nose. He supposed that he should hear the whole thing.

Delandra shrugged. “I got busted for possession one night in Victorville. I was a little short at the time and I had to use this bailbondsman a friend of mine knew about. You know how that works. The man puts up the money. You put up some collateral. I put up my share of the museum. I assured him the Mystery of the Mojave was included, though I don’t know why anyone would care. At any rate, you remember those guys you passed in the street the morning you came to the station?”

“The black guys in the red Cadillac?”

“Two black guys and one Indian.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, I did. And I think the Indian was the bailbondsman from Victorville.”

“You think?”

“It gets complicated,” Delandra said. “You see, there are these three brothers. They’re bondsmen. They have an office in Victorville. I talked to one of them. But they all sort of look alike, if you know what I mean. Now what I think is that this guy in the red car was one of them. I don’t know which one. I tried to get a better look at him but he never took the hat off and I never got that close.”

Obadiah sat staring into the dashboard. On the metal grillework over the speaker someone had lined up a row of toothpicks. They pointed toward the windshield like a miniature row of spears. “And you were willing to go out on this limb because I needed bread for Canada. You were going to walk on your trial date, get this bailbondsman down on your case, leave your brother holding the bag on the museum, all because I show up and you decide it might be fun to see Canada?”

“It’s the way my mind works,” Delandra said. “What can I say?” Obadiah continued to examine the toothpicks. The sun had moved just far enough to be visible at the edge of the windshield. Soon the front seat would not bear sitting in. He shook his head, as if to make something go away. The something stayed where it was. Like the sun moving at the edge of the glass, it filled the car with unwanted light. “What I think,” he said, “is that you were planning to walk on this thing all along. I think you were planning on selling the Thing, too, to the UFO freaks at Verity’s convention. And that’s what you were waiting for. Then the Indian showed up and it forced your hand. And there I was, standing around with my thumb in my ass, and you did need a hand getting it into the car.”

“You’re pretty smart, Obo.” She was giving him one of her more wolfish grins. “Except I never noticed that, about your thumb, I mean.”

Obadiah wanted to punch her in the teeth. “What I don’t get,” he said, “is why you were willing to walk on a possession charge. I mean that’s not that big a deal, is it?”

Delandra abandoned the smile and let herself slide back down into the seat until her face pointed at the roof. She was getting tired of making a joke out of it. It was really only marginally funny anyway. But then he had asked to hear the whole thing—as if that was something she knew more about, really, than he did. Still, focusing on the stained headliner already sporting a three-inch tear above her face (soon, she knew from experience, the thing would be hanging down, obscuring vision, a certain symbol, like some white-trash tattoo, of one’s station in life) she was willing to take a crack at it. She told him about how up until a month ago she had been married to this used-car dealer from San Bernardino by the name of Fred Ott, the owner of Ott’s Used Auto, actually two Ott’s Used Autos, one in Victorville, and one in San Bernardino, and how the guy was twice her age but how for the first time in her life she’d had some bread and someone willing to finance her excesses and so how it wasn’t so bad, at least not in the beginning. Toward the end there, however, things had begun to get a little weird. Fred believed he had been granted a vision and had taken to lying about the house all day in a pair of polyester shorts.

“A vision?” Obadiah asked. He was mildly curious.

“A small metal-headed man from the center of the earth appeared to him,” Delandra said. “He told Fred how the world was going to end. After that, Fred quit going to work. He stayed around the house writing letters, making phone calls. Occasionally he would go out to the library to look something up. Nobody would pay any attention to him, of course.

“Finally he became despondent and just took to staying home, lying around the house all day on the couch in front of the television in a pair of these polyester shorts.”

It was funny how those shorts had worked on her. Perhaps they were only a symbol—like the torn headliner and the tattoos. “Finally,” she said, “I began to see this guy who dealt a little. Fred found out about it and got even weirder. Until one night I went out in front of the house to meet Tom.”

“Tom the dealer?”

“The very one.” She did feel like she was telling him a joke. It was the way she always wound up feeling when she tried to say anything to anyone that meant something. “It was late and it was dark and I was out on the street talking to Tom when all of a sudden Fred comes running out of the house. He’s yelling. And he’s waving a gun. I knew it was Fred right away. He had his shirt off and I could see his white stomach and the polyester shorts shining in Tom’s lights. Tom thought it was a narc and hit the gas. Later, he said he thought he had it in reverse, but he didn’t.

“I wound up getting charged with possession. But then I heard that Fred’s mother had hired a lawyer and was going to try to get the charge upped to accessory to murder. And that’s when I started thinking about that convention, about selling the Thing and walking on the whole deal. And that’s when you showed up and started talking Canada.”

Obadiah looked into the empty plate glass of Trona’s fanciest building. He felt as a fish might which had just been gutted, quickly, so that there was just the one sparkling moment of awareness—the sun, the sky, what had been lost. “You make it sound like a fucking joke,” he said.

“I guess you had to be there.”

Obadiah said nothing.

Delandra went on. She didn’t seem to be able to shut up now, or to make herself sound anything but cheap. “But you know, I really don’t think the old lady cares that much about getting the charges changed. I think she just wants me gone. I think she just wants to make sure I don’t fight her for the car lots. So I decided maybe I would be gone. I didn’t want the car lots anyway. I figured I would just sell the Thing and split. Rex could work it out with the bailbondsman. It would do him good to be shed of the whole mess, anyway. Then that fucker showed up and saw what was there.”

“Except that maybe it wasn’t him and you don’t know because you couldn’t get close enough to get a good look. You told me before that you thought those guys were just some high rollers on their way to Vegas.”

“Listen,” Delandra said, “what we’re talking about here is the very possibility. Let me point something out to you. You seen many police stations in town here?”

Obadiah looked into the empty street. “No,” he said.

“You see any around the junction?”

“No.”

“You seen many cop cars on the road?”

In fact, he had not.

“That’s because there aren’t any,” Delandra said. “I mean, they’ve got them in the real towns, in Victorville, Ridgecrest, places like that. Out here, it’s just a sheriff’s department somewhere, or, if things get radical, the highway patrol. But a lot of the time it’s people like the Corasco brothers. And they have ways of getting things done.”

Obadiah used a hand to wipe his brow. “So why is this Indian—if of course he’s one of the Corascos—so interested in the Thing?”

“I believe it’s the principle that counts.”

“The man has his rep. Is that it?”

“The man has his rep. They were talking about one of his clients while I was in Victorville. Seems the Indian had done some chiropractic work on the guy with an ax handle. They had him in traction in the hospital across the street from the jail. They had a steel pin in his head to keep him straight.”

“Some rep.”

“It’s the kind of rep,” Delandra said, “that will make one think twice.”

Obadiah was going to say something else but he didn’t. He was going to say something clever about frontier justice. What he found himself doing instead was thinking for a second time about the bailbondsman from Victorville. He had to admit it did put a certain slant on things.

“Well, don’t look so disappointed,” Delandra told him. “We can be wanted together. You know that song? I want to be wanted?”

“Just like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Exactly. Now let’s go across the street for a drink.”

“Go ahead,” he told her. “I’m just going to sit here for a while.” Delandra opened her door. For a moment neither of them spoke. “Look, Obo, what did you expect, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Obadiah said. “I don’t know what I expected.” When she had left him he watched her cross the street. It was quite a picture: the tight, faded jeans, the red-and-yellow boots, the black T-shirt and black hair, the sunlight and the sound her boots made on an empty street. He noticed she had left her keys in the ignition and her purse in the back. It was fucking typical, he thought. He could see that now. Disaster clung to this woman like static electricity. A short life of sorrow was written all over her. But then what, he wondered, had he expected? What communion was there, after all, between light and darkness? Eventually he got out from behind the wheel and stood for a moment at the side of the car. The street, paved in asphalt the color of dried blood, was empty and brilliant, filled with a light he found difficult to bear. Crossing it, he followed her into the bar.

T
he Corner Pocket was about what he had expected. It was dark and gloomy and smelled like the customers had been pissing in the corners. There were a couple of guys standing around a quarter pool table and a fat man in a polo shirt sitting behind a counter next to a little oven with a glass door. There was a white cardboard menu above the oven with half a dozen items listed on it.

It took him a moment, after the brightness of the street, to find Delandra in the gloom. She was alone at a corner table. There was a pitcher of beer on the table and one glass. Obadiah was aware of the men watching him. He stood just inside the door. He was holding Delandra’s purse. He was tired and angry and he couldn’t decide if he was angry with her or with himself. It was, of course, ridiculous to imagine that one could pull into a place like the junction, jump into the sack with the first woman one saw, join her in robbing the local museum and still expect everything to come up roses. Everything he had been taught told him this was not the way it worked. On the other hand, he had grown up believing in miracles. He’d grown up believing in a new order, the end of death, and the eventual triumph of justice.

He crossed the room and placed her purse on the table. “You know what I don’t get,” he said. He was seating himself next to her. “Is why Fred Ott? Why not someone you loved?” He knew it was the wrong thing to say and he was mildly surprised at how quickly his resolve not to ask her about any of it had withered to nothing. He wanted to know everything. It was like staring into a wound.

Delandra had smiled at him as he crossed the floor. The smile died as he spoke. “Oh, come on,” she said. “Let’s not talk about that now. Let’s play some pool.”

“I want to talk about it.”

“About Fred Ott?”

“About you.”

“About the Mystery of the Mojave?”

“Among other things.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said. “Screw the Mystery of the Mojave. I’m sorry I ever introduced you. I wouldn’t have if I’d thought you were going to go fruit over it.” She sat there for a moment looking at him. “Look,” she said, “I’m going to shoot a couple of games. You want to come with or what?”

“No,” Obadiah said. “I don’t. Why don’t you at least wait until those assholes are done?”

Delandra looked at the men at the pool table. “How do you know they’re assholes?”

“I have a hunch.”

Delandra grinned at him. She took off her dark glasses and left them on the table, then sauntered off alone to get her quarter on the rail.

Obadiah sat watching her amid the stale cigarette smoke and the gloom, inhaling the variety of rancid odors which seemed to permeate the corner in which he sat. The blood burned in his cheeks. The men at the pool table wore jeans and blue work shirts. One of them wore a white windbreaker that said something about a softball team on the back. Every now and then one of the men would look in Obadiah’s direction, as if they were trying to figure out what kind of loser this young whore was dragging around with her. When they weren’t staring at Obadiah they were watching Delandra lean over to sight down her cue like it was their lucky day. Soon all three of them were whooping it up, poking each other in the arm and ordering more beer.