Unassigned Territory (30 page)

“I get off in a couple of hours,” the girl, who had by now identified herself as Deborah, told him as she stood up. “I have to go back to work but the bar will be open till two. Come by if you feel like it. You can tell me some more about Africa.”

Harlan said it was very kind of her to offer. He sat at the edge of the pool and watched her walk back toward the glass and stone of the building. He wondered if she was a hooker, or if the part about the fuck-ups and the older men was the real thing. It flattered him to believe the latter and so he went with that. He dried himself with the towel and padded off to his room in his bare feet. He showered and then sat naked on the edge of his bed. He sat there for a long time. He watched the clock on the dresser strike twelve. He thought of Deborah, alone in the Lotus Room. He thought of stone fireplaces and moonlight upon the leaves of palms. In the end he supposed that one mistake per trip was enough. He killed the lights and stretched out on his back in the darkness. But he lay there for a long time without sleeping, a lonesome traveler on a peculiar road which seemed to run from euphoria to dread and back again, from something which might have been contentment to what he knew was plain, stone-cold remorse.

H
arlan was up early enough on the following morning to catch Brother Mitchell before the meeting for field service in Brooklyn.

“You’re up early,” Mitchell told him. He seemed surprised that Harlan was still in the desert. Harlan told him something of what had gone down. He told him about the bodies. This was followed by a moment of silence. “You think this brother may be involved?” Mitchell asked.

“I don’t know,” Harlan said, “but I would like to find out. You know the boy’s presiding overseer had asked me to have a talk with him before this whole thing began.”

There was a soft clicking sound on the line. “I don’t think chasing him all over the Mojave first was part of the deal, was it?”

“Not part of the deal,” Harlan said. He was able to imagine Mitchell seated at the edge of his desk. He imagined the expression on the brother’s face. It would be not dissimilar to that worn by the man with the gray crewcut at Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum when he had pointed toward Los Angeles with his gun.

“So what can I do for you?” Mitchell asked.

“I don’t know, really,” Harlan said. He felt suddenly a bit foolish about what he was up to, as if his reasons for staying in the desert were a poor excuse for not getting back to the city. But he said nothing to Mitchell about the rest of it. Mitchell would hear about that soon enough. For the moment Harlan went with what he had started. He asked for the rest of what Mitchell had on the Sons of Elijah.

Mitchell cleared his throat. “We’ve got a book here,” he said.

It seemed someone had written a book about Leonard Maxwell and his group. There was also stuff in the book about Verity—the two men having once been partners. Before Harlan hung up he learned what the stuff was.

Mitchell had been wrong about Maxwell claiming contact. Maxwell had received a book.

“
The Book of Stones?
” Harlan asked.

It was
The Book of Stones.
Verity was the one who had claimed contact. He claimed to have met an alien on the East Coast who sent him west with plans for a building. The author of the book believed that at one time the two men had planned to form a group together, but that Maxwell had queered the deal by trying to market one of his devices. He believed that most of what Verity had written was a rip-off of Maxwell’s ideas and that Maxwell had invented the racial stuff to get back at Verity.

“I take it the author of this book is not a believer.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” Mitchell said. “So you’ve got Verity and you’ve got Maxwell. Now there is one other group the book deals with, something called New Light. And that’s something that Verity’s daughter has begun just in the last few years, The principal texts are her father’s. But the old man is out in your neck of the woods fooling around with hippies. The author thinks he’s out there trying to get even with the daughter for forcing him out of his own publishing business. It seems the daughter’s got this boyfriend whose father was one of the prime movers in a big West Coast cult group of the thirties. Ever hear of the Mighty I Am?” Harlan had not.

“Nazis,” Mitchell said.

Harlan looked from his window toward some reddish outcroppings of stone. The stone was just now beginning to color beneath the sun. “Sounds like a lot of people trying to get even with each other,” he said.

Mitchell laughed. “A regular soap opera. If you believe the book.” He paused. “Is it going to do anything for you?” he asked. “There’s more if it is.”

Harlan scratched his ear with the receiver. He visualized his puzzle. UFO cults with axes to grind? Something the boy had walked into, maybe? Or nothing at all? But then it did seem to feed rather well into what he had begun on the steps of Sarge’s museum. “Anything in the book about a guy named Sarge Hummer?”

“No,” Mitchell said, “I don’t think I would have forgotten the name.”

When Harlan had hung up he stood looking into the gathering colors of morning. Soon the colors would be gone, lost in the oven of the coming day. Mitchell had left him with a final thought: Verity, taking a break from his business during the war, had served for a time as part of an intelligence outfit based in England. Maxwell had spent time in England as well, recovering from wounds received in Europe. This was from the book. The book was interested in the hows and whys of these groups. A variety of theories was presented to account for what the groups were
really
up to. The theories were very conspiratorial in nature. One in particular was built around the rumor that at one point, shortly after the war, there had been talk in certain circles about using some of the high-level intelligence machinery generated during the war to fake some kind of outside threat—UFO phenomena, say—in an effort to maintain peace.

“What you’re trying to tell me,” Harlan had said, “is that Verity and Maxwell may have begun with good intentions.”

“I thought you would like it,” Mitchell said.

Harlan thought about that now as he stood looking at the rocks. Beyond the balcony at his window it had grown warm enough so that a water mirage had formed at the base of the yellow ridge. It was a perfectly detailed illusion, complete with the reflected images of the white outcroppings jutting into a blue sky, and he found himself wondering how long it would take to walk there. Distances were hard to judge in the desert. People had died here, or so he had been told, believing they could reach some point they’d picked out in the cool of the morning only to wind up trapped by the heat of the day, the point they had started for no closer than when they had begun. And, of course, there had been no fancy inns to welcome the first visitors, no pools or Jacuzzis. Just the land. Pieces of ground you could fry an egg on. Tricks done with mirrors. There, Harlan thought, was a conspiracy for you.

When Harlan had dressed he went outside. He wore his new flowered shirt and the Frank Sinatra hat. He went into the Lotus Room and drank two bloody marys. He looked for Deborah but she was not around. The girl who worked in her place was short and thin. She had red hair and pale skin and Harlan was moved by a sudden impulse to ask after Deborah. He let it slide. He went next door for breakfast and then back to his room to pack. He had in mind a return trip to Trona—one more crack at learning something new there. If he drew a blank he would return to the city.

It was still early when he had finished with the room. He locked his suitcase in the car, slipped on his dark glasses, and walked back to the highway. He had noticed a desert museum—hopefully of a more legitimate variety than the one he had visited last—at the entrance to Furnace Creek. It was a pleasant morning and he wanted a little exercise before hitting the road.

•     •     •

The museum was a single-story building made of concrete blocks. It was just opening for the day when Harlan reached it and there were perhaps a dozen middle-aged couples standing around out in front. Some had cameras dangling about their necks. A couple of the men wore flowered shirts much like Harlan’s. Harlan stood by himself at the edge of a small patch of grass and waited for the others to go inside. When he could no longer see anyone near the door, he removed his dark glasses, folded the stems so that they might fit into the front pocket of his shirt, and entered the building.

The museum consisted of two long rectangular rooms. The rooms were well lit, filled with low glass cases, maps, and charts. The charts provided information about things like the average amount of rainfall one could expect annually in Death Valley. Harlan strolled slowly among the exhibits, his hands clasped behind his back, his hat pushed well back on his head. He wanted to allow enough time for the others to stay ahead of him. This was easier said than done. A number of the glass cases contained miniatures of various kinds—the twenty-mule teams once used to haul borax out of the valley, the mining works at Trona, and so on. Items which two of the men seemed intent on taking photographs of from all possible angles. And then there was one of the wives who insisted on reading all printed information out loud in a nasal, singsong voice for the benefit of the others. All in all, it was a slow-moving crew, forcing Harlan to take more time than he would have liked. He had in fact gotten stuck above the miniature of Trona, feigning an elaborate interest in what was mined there when something the woman said caught his attention. “The Mystery of the Mojave,” the woman read, and then mumbled something Harlan could not catch before picking it up again. “Creators of this remarkable art remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of the American West. They lived along the northwestern edge of the Mojave Desert from roughly A.D. 100 to about 1150, at which time the culture seems to have simply vanished. Scholars today do not even know what this relatively small band called themselves but refer to them as the Table Mountain People—the name being taken from the Table Mountain range where much of their remarkable art has been found. According to legend passed down among surrounding tribes, the group may have committed suicide, though nothing is known for certain and some believe their demise may have simply been the result of the curve of rising population crossing the arc of falling natural resources. Basis for the belief in the suicide legend among neighboring clans resides in the Table Mountain People’s worship of the god Mastamho. According to Mojave mythology, Mastamho is said to have become insane. To this day many of the indigenous people believe that the appearance of Mastamho, even in a dream, will lead the dreamer toward insanity and a suicidal death.”

Harlan stood above the miniature town of Trona listening to the woman. Her voice issued from the farthest of the two rooms and when at last she had finished and the couples had filed back out into Harlan’s room once more, he went to see about the Mystery of the Mojave for himself.

He found that the entire second room had been given over to a display of the Table Mountain People’s art. The work itself consisted of dozens of ceramic pots on which either geometric designs or figures had been painted. Some of the figures were recognizable as people or animals. Others were of a more imaginative variety—bizarre combinations of birds, animals, insects, and people, so that Harlan was in fact reminded of another group of fantastic creatures he had recently seen in the other desert museum.

He stood for some time before the glass cases, quite taken in by the graceful lines of the work, the strange creatures which stared back at him from the hollows of the bowls. Eventually he found one piece in particular to which his attention kept returning. He found the piece referred to in the catalog as the Decapitation Bowl. At the center of the Decapitation Bowl there were two figures. One, dressed in a type of ritual garb, squatted on his haunches above the supine figure of the second. The squatting man held a weapon in one hand, the head of his opponent in the other. The longer Harlan looked at the bowl, the more he noticed. He noticed, for instance, that the body of the fallen man was black but his head was white. He noticed that the dead man had two right hands, each with six fingers. The printed information which accompanied the exhibit indicated that scenes on many of the bowls were believed to have derived from certain explicit scenes and characters from various Indian myths. The Decapitation Bowl, it was thought, depicted the victory of one of the Little War Twins over a witch at the time of the Emergence.

Scattered among the bowls was a variety of poster-size pieces of mat board upon which information regarding the Table Mountain People had been printed. From these Harlan learned that the Little War Twins were the ones responsible for leading men out of the cave womb in which they had been created. The cave womb, it seemed, was not much of a place. One poster described it thus: “The Underworld was a place of moral and social disintegration as well as physical morass. Everywhere were unfinished creatures, crawling like reptiles over one another in filth and black darkness.”

The last thing Harlan noticed about the bowl was the eyes. He had missed them for some time. The bowl was ringed in a kind of pattern—what Harlan had first taken for an optical pattern in which it becomes impossible to distinguish object from ground. Finally, however, he saw that the pattern was in fact composed of two separate but concentric rings—one which appeared, the more he looked at it, to move to the right, the other, to the left. A wheel within a wheel and the wheels were full of eyes all around.

A
t the intersection of the road which led from the inn and the interstate, there was a gas station and a market. Harlan filled the coupe there. He also purchased two quarts of beer. The day was heating up. He drank one of the beers in the shade of a lone cottonwood behind the store. The other now sat between his legs as he drove the narrow asphalt road which would lead him back to Trona. The sun was straight overhead, the desert spread flat beneath her light—hostile and yet beautiful. He drove toward distant, pale blue ridges and sand drifts the color of sunburned flesh.