Unassigned Territory (31 page)

As he did he tried to put his finger on just what it was he found so irksome about the bowl he had just left in the museum. He was working on this little package, that was it. There was a hand in the package and what he wanted to believe about that hand was that it was the child of Leonard Maxwell. Now the stuff in the bowl seemed to hint at something else. It created one more loose end which, together with the already existing loose end, the African hand, seemed to point to another, quite different point of origin. And there, he thought, was the question. Was there a point of origin out there somewhere, in the real world, or was what he had stumbled onto nothing more than a coincidental grouping of common images? There had, after all, only been two of these things exactly alike and those were the ones on the temple and in the pamphlet, the ones directly traceable to Leonard Maxwell. As for the rest of them—no two were alike. They were similar, combining certain common elements—the eyes, the extra finger, the wheel within a wheel—just enough alike to be variations on a theme, and yet just different enough not to be connected in any way at all. It probably didn’t make much difference. It didn’t affect what had happened here. What had happened was that Harlan Low had disgraced himself in a stupid fight and that the Special Service boy Obadiah Wheeler had run off with a woman and taken something that did not belong to him. That was what mattered. It mattered that Harlan might have a chance to set things right. The rest of it, the back story which might or might not link Sarge Hummer to Leonard Maxwell and Ceton Verity, the point of common origin which might or might not exist for a variety of peculiar-looking hands, was of interest but probably not important, perhaps nothing more than a game with which one might kill time along the lonesome stretches of blacktop it was necessary to follow for hours to get anywhere in this part of the country—a puzzle, the likes of which he had found in Maxwell’s pamphlet.

Harlan uncapped his second beer and stared across his pointed yellow hood at an arrow-straight road which eventually lost itself somewhere miles ahead in the shimmering illusion of water. He took a long pull on the bottle. Harlan’s problem was that if he did not work on something like the puzzle—Maxwell’s, or his own, in which Maxwell’s had come to have a place—he was inclined to reflect on other things: the fight with Floyd, the return to Los Angeles, the image of Deborah seated at the edge of a shimmering turquoise pool. He elected to play.

He went back to it by way of trying to remember if anyone had ever told him exactly what the African hand was supposed to have meant. About all he could do now was to connect it in some way to the underworld. He recalled an old African sister once explaining some of her tribal beliefs. She had held her hand out flat before him. The world of the living, she had said, was what was on top. The bottom side belonged to the shades. The world itself was constructed along the lines of a pancake. On top everything was as you saw it. But on the bottom, everything was reversed. Mountains pointed down instead of up, as did trees, houses, etc. Some diviners, she had gone on to say, saw things upside down all the time, which was why they walked around with their heads cocked over to one side—it was a sign they were in more or less constant communication with the shades. Other diviners saw things upside down only when they were receiving visions. But then the shades, Harlan seemed to recall, had nothing to do with the hand. What had it been? The hand he had seen in Monrovia had been black. Shades were white, which meant they could be seen at night, and were not necessarily malevolent. But there was something else in the underworld—there was an African name the woman had said, but it was difficult and she did not care to pronounce it. For Harlan she had only spoken of this thing as the Others. The Others were not white like the shades. They could change themselves. They could be black and hence invisible at night and were therefore much to be feared. They were connected to all manner of evil and it was with the dark Others that Harlan was certain the hand had been associated.

Add to that now the fact that he had found a similar hand in the Mojave Desert, one associated with a suicidal tribe and an insane god—the similarity was enough to give one pause. And then there was this black-white element running through the thing as well. In the African story. In the Indian bowl. It led him eventually to speculate upon how all of this might fit Maxwell’s upside-down universe of malevolent gods and heroic nephilim. The task was not without its rewards. The Indian creation account, for instance. There was a fallen beginning for you, made you stop and think about where the creators of the cave womb had their heads. It had taken the Little War Twins, a pair of supernatural beings, to lead the people at the time of the Emergence. Interesting that there were only two of them. One thought of Elijah and Melchizedek. And the Emergence stories were linked in time to the Indian Deluge stories. Something perhaps like the end of the Elder World. And yet the people had been left to wander, searching for the lost middle. One could read—lost powers. And then there were those mythic beings, the monsters of the bowls, with which the Little War Twins had done battle. Zedroes, maybe, the Ancients’ crippled tools. At which point he caught himself at it and made himself stop. He smirked into the yellow glare of his hood, a liquid sky. He was trying to make sense of gibberish, for Christ’s sake. At his feet a pair of empty quart bottles clinked against one another and rolled beneath his seat. He glanced into his rearview mirror and shrugged at his own reflection. “Must be whiskey talkin’, Lord,” he said—the lines to a dimly remembered country song. “I swear it wasn’t me.”

•     •     •

The Studebaker was running hot by the time Harlan reached the summit of the range which formed the west wall of the valley. There was a turnout there and a small, shaded rest area with some wooden picnic tables and a pair of stone buildings.

The rest area was deserted and Harlan parked the coupe in the shade. He raised the hood and then went into the rest room to relieve himself and wash his face. Back outside he stretched out on top of one of the tables. It was a good deal cooler on the summit than in the valley below and without intending to, Harlan slipped into a light sleep.

The sun woke him. It had moved in the sky and he had lost his shade. He woke with a dull headache, his shirt wet with perspiration. When he went to the rest room for more water, however, he discovered that a maintenance man had arrived while he slept and turned the water off. The guy was doing something to some pipes beneath one of the sinks.

More than a little disgruntled, thirsty, desperate for a beer, Harlan Low returned to the Starlight coupe and headed out of the mountains. The temperature climbed as he descended. Soon he hit level ground and the car began to run hot once more. The plastic wheel grew hot beneath his hands and his shirt clung to his back. Miles of barren ground stretched away on all sides of him—chalk-white, tan, or gray, the edges blurred beneath layers of heated air. There was something hypnotic in the miles of desert road, the rush of hot wind through the open windows, and Harlan was groggy, fighting sleep, when he was jolted by the sight of what appeared to be a hitchhiker emerging from a shimmering mirage at the edge of the road some distance ahead of him.

Eventually it became clear the hitchhiker was a woman, and something of a trollop it appeared from the way she was dressed—red-and-yellow boots, tight jeans, a black-and-white leopardskin halter top—certainly not someone he would have stopped for under normal circumstances. But then these were hardly normal circumstances and Harlan Low began to ride his brakes. She stood at the intersection of the main highway and a small dirt road and once, downshifting into second, Harlan glanced in his rearview mirror—just to make sure there were no other possible rides following somewhere in the distance. The mirror was empty. The girl wore white-rimmed shades and she seemed to be smiling at him as the car came to a stop. A black guitar case rested on the pavement back of one leg and a dark leather purse swung from one tanned shoulder. He would take her, Harlan promised himself, no farther than the town of Trona. She had the look of someone it might be hard to get rid of and it was not until she began walking toward an open passenger-side window that he noticed the sticker on the guitar case which she had left in the road behind her. Black squiggly letters on a bright yellow field. The words had been hidden by her leg. He could, however, read them quite clearly now. The words said: I SAW THE THING!

R
ex Hummer sat at his uncle’s bedside on the second floor of the Kleco Community Hospital. Beyond a rectangular window, sunlight danced on an asphalt parking lot, across the colored roofs of the cars. Rex looked often at the cars. He had not eaten in many hours and in the direction of town a huge yellow and black Denny’s sign reminded him of his hunger. Staring in its direction, however, was preferable to staring at Floyd. It was not a pretty sight and what Rex kept thinking was, it might have been me. He did not take much pleasure in this recognition, but there it was. It might, after all, for Christ’s sake, have been him: minus one spleen, jaws wired shut, eyes reduced to angry purple slits. Rex looked toward the cars once more, the Denny’s restaurant. The room was warm and still. Floyd had drifted into a light sleep but now seemed to be stirring. At last he whispered Rex’s name.

“Yes,” Rex said, “I’m here, Floyd.”

Floyd, before he had drifted off for the first time, had been trying to tell Rex what it was like, how the men had come back, how the big guy had begun to cause trouble, how three of the local boys had gone after him—so much grist for the mill, but it was difficult for Floyd to speak. He tried often and had to rest. For a moment Rex thought his uncle was going to doze again, then it was clear he meant to continue. Rex slid forward on the edge of his chair and leaned against the bed.

“I musta got knocked out,” Floyd said. “Because the next thing I know, I’m outside. On my back and it’s hard to breathe.” He stopped and looked pitifully at Rex. Rex held his breath. There were tears in the corners of his uncle’s eyes—of rage or pain, Rex could not say. Somewhere down the hallway an old woman began to moan. Floyd hefted a beefy, bruised hand and clutched suddenly at Rex’s shirt. Rex felt himself drawn forward, lifted from his chair so that he had to rest both forearms on Floyd’s bed. His uncle’s misshapen face rose before him like a full desert moon. A peculiar medicinal stench enveloped him. Floyd’s voice was weak and strained. Something gurgled in his throat and even from this distance Rex had to strain to hear what he said. “Those niggers ain’t human, man. They burned down my goddamn truck and you want to know how?”

Rex said nothing. He looked into his uncle’s face.

“The big guy did it. And don’t ask me how, you little shit. He just looked at it.” There were tears running away from Floyd’s eyes now, squeezing out from the corners and running in tiny streams to dampen the pillow on either side of his head. His flattop was shining with grease and the sides, where it was long, were fanned out on the pillow like some greasy black halo and for the first time in his life Rex felt sorry for Floyd Hummer. “You hear what I’m telling you,” Floyd went on. “He didn’t do anything. He just looked at it. A funny kind of light came out of his head, I think, and he smoked the son of a bitch. What do you think of that shit?”

Rex maintained silence. Down the hallway the old woman was still moaning.

“Well, say something, God damn it.”

Rex blinked. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Jesus Christ.” Floyd released his grip on Rex’s shirt, allowing Rex to sink back into the chair. “You believe me? You think I’m fuckin’ crazy? I wanted to tell the cops. How do you tell somebody shit like that, man? I know what I saw, but how do you say it?” He looked away, back toward the ceiling. He rolled his head from side to side. “It’s a goddamn nightmare,” he said, and slipped once more into a troubled sleep. Rex rose from his chair and walked to the window.

Daylight had begun to ebb by the time Floyd came around again and before he could say anything a nurse came in to tell Rex he had only another five minutes. Rex went once more to his uncle’s bedside. There was still the inevitable question, for which Rex had tried to prepare himself on the road from the junction. Floyd now prefaced the question with a brief tirade aimed at Rex Hummer’s half sister. “The scummy cunt,” Floyd croaked from between wired jaws. “She thought that son of a bitchin’ Thing was worth something and she stole it,” he said. “If I thought you had anything to do with that I’d throw your ass out that fuckin’ window right now. And don’t think I couldn’t do it, either.” Rex would not have bet against him. He listened as Floyd raged on, his volume cut down but somehow suddenly more like the Floyd of old. “What in the hell did your old man have out there?” Floyd asked at last, arriving where Rex had known he would.

“I don’t know,” Rex said. There was orange light entering the room now, breaking through the blinds, splashing patterns upon the pale green walls.

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t know. But you knew it was something. Didn’t you? You little shit. You knew it was something. You’ve known it all along, known it and left it lying out there for anyone to find. Not some goddamn piece of scrap like the rest of them. You knew it was something.”

Rex nodded in the darkening light. “I knew it was something,” he agreed.

Floyd moved his head on the pillow while more tears squeezed out of his eyes. “And you kept your mouth shut and now who the hell knows where it is.” Floyd stopped and then went on. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing.” By this time the nurse, a hefty middle-aged black woman, had come back into the room. “I hope those niggers catch up to your whore of a sister and that Bible-thumping twat licker she ran off with. Serve ’em both right. And I’ll tell you what else.” Floyd had by now worked himself into a severely agitated state, attempting to raise himself on his elbows so that the nurse felt called upon to place a hand in the middle of his chest. “Now, now, Mr. Hummer,” she said. “Why don’t we just lie back down and try to relax. I’ll have something for you in just a minute.”