Unassigned Territory (34 page)

Obadiah returned her smile. “Where did you find the crystals?” he asked. He was hoping that topic might prove more interesting than the stuff about the tools. The woman stopped smiling. Her eyes were clear and green.

“What crystals are those?” she asked.

Delandra had been watching the car for a long time. At first it had appeared as a tiny yellow flame above the red asphalt of the road, not really discernible as a car at all—though, of course, there was really nothing else it could have been. Later, she could see what was clearly the rounded metal of a roof. The car was still a long way off and the rest of it was lost in a mirage so that it looked as if the thing were driving across the bottom of a lake to reach her. She straddled her guitar case and waited, continuing the imaginary conversation she had begun some time ago with a missing Obadiah. She had begun the conversation because she wanted him to know a few things. She wanted him to know that he had been right, back there in Trona, in front of the theater; she had planned to walk on that trail. But he had been wrong about a lot of it too. She had really not thought of selling the Thing until those men had shown up offering Rex money for it. That was when she had thought of Verity and his conventions, and put it together with her new friend’s recently proposed trip to Canada. Too bad the boy had come down with a terminal case of Mystery of the Mojave on the brain. Too bad about B&J, which in fact was the point of the conversation; she wanted him to see just how bad it really was. And just when she thought she had him scared with the bailbondsman story.

She couldn’t decide now if she wanted him to know the truth about that or not. On the one hand, she felt that the whole running-scared business had managed, in Obadiah’s eyes, to make her look an even bigger flake than he seemed to have begun to take her for already. On the other, there was something about the story that amused her. She supposed the amusing part lay in the difference between what she had invented, and what she knew to be true. There were, after all, three Indian brothers in Victorville, and one was a bailbondsman. One was a lawyer. The other was a crooked mechanic who used to do things to cars for Fred Ott, which was how she knew about them in the first place—a trio of useless lard buckets, perhaps as dangerous as the Three Stooges, unless you happened to have the mechanic do something to your car. Now, that was dangerous. It was also true that when she had first glimpsed the Indian at the junction she had taken him for the bondsman, though a closer look had told her this was not the case. In fact, she didn’t know who the men at the junction were. She supposed they were what they appeared to be, some trio of hipsters looking for diversion along the Vegas trail. She didn’t really want to think much about the men at the junction. Thinking of them made her think of her brother and that, really, was not what she needed, not just now, with Obadiah to talk to. The fact was, taking the Thing had not set as well with her as she had hoped it would. It was not that it was only half hers. It was that Rex was goofy over it. What she had told herself at the time was that getting the Thing away from him would probably do him good. What she feared now was that it would only make him goofier. Someday she would make it up to him. It was just one more item she had to talk about as she stood stewing in heat and remorse at the side of an empty highway, which was where the first ride of the day—a pair of drunken rednecks in a jeep—had dumped her when she made it plain she did not care to accompany them to Darwin, a mining town some distance off the main road. It had been an ugly little scene, uglier even than what had gone down before it at the Blue Heaven Motel, and by the time the yellow car appeared on the horizon, she had begun conducting her imaginary conversations out loud, something she took for a bad sign.

It seemed to take a very long time for the car to reach her, and with the heated air distorting things so, the machine did not appear quite real until it was nearly on top of her, its engine hissing softly in the stillness, spraying the tortured asphalt with steaming water.

The car was piloted by a large, broad-faced man wearing a flowered shirt, sunglasses, and a straw hat. The guy looked like such a caricature of a tourist that it was almost a joke and she decided he must be something else. Like maybe he was a Fed. Or some runner who had broken from the mob and was hightailing it, incognito, Vegas to L.A. on the back roads. Probably a horse’s ass but the day was warming up. Talking to herself was getting to be a drag and she was still a bit worried about the morons in the jeep. The jeep was yellow and black and when she had first caught sight of the car she had for a moment believed it to be the jeep, circling back for round two. The idea was not a pleasant one. She didn’t really care where she wound up, Furnace Creek, where she might find work at the ranch, or Vegas, or even back the other way, toward Los Angeles; anywhere, in other words, than where she was.

She crossed the asphalt to discover the driver’s destination, and to have a closer look at him. When the word
Trona
fell from his lips, her heart sank.

“Jesus,” she said. “Somebody cut me some slack. Trona? That’s it?”

The man looked at her for a moment. He was leaning slightly toward her, one arm braced atop the seatback next to him. She could see now that the dark glasses covered most of what must have been a badly blackened eye. “To be honest with you,” he said, “I don’t know if that’s it or not.” He paused. “You see, I’m looking for this friend of mine.”

Delandra sighed. The man was obviously some sort of yo-yo. It was also possible that the bruised face fed into her mob theory. She looked across the yellow roof of his car and lo, a flash of metal caught her eye—what looked, before vanishing in a dip in the road, to be a truck moving in her direction. It might have been a band of angels. She was about to tell this
turista
what he could do with his destination when a certain name issued from the interior of the car. “You wouldn’t,” the man asked her, “happen to know a guy by the name of Obadiah Wheeler?”

“What?” Delandra said. It was the best she could do on the spur of the moment. In the distance the truck had crawled out of the dip—a white sixteen-wheeler. And it was coming her way.

“Obadiah Wheeler,” the man repeated.

As a rule Delandra believed in copping to nothing. She hesitated, however, and it cost her the diesel. It rumbled past them, clattering like an empty freight. Was it fate, or what? “Suppose I do?” Delandra asked.

An hour later they were back in Delandra’s room at the Blue Heaven Motel. The man had taken off his hat and was seated on the floor, his back against the bed, his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. It was where Obadiah Wheeler had sat after Lyle hit him. He held a tall can of Colt 45 malt liquor in one hand and a copy of Bill Richards’s book in the other. So far all the man had told her was his name and that he was a friend of Obadiah’s, but Delandra had pretty much figured out the connection.

The room was dark and stuffy and Delandra drew a curtain to let in some light. She felt tired and somewhat foolish. It was only about six hours since she’d stood here watching Obadiah dress to go off into the desert with Bill and Judy, trying to come to terms with the incredible notion that she was losing out to the Mystery of the Mojave one more time. The sad part was she had threatened not to wait and he had gone anyway. The little fucker. Nothing could have pissed her off more and she could not deny that she had come back just now half expecting to find he’d gotten hip to what he’d walked out on and walked back, out of the desert to her, just the way someone might in a lousy movie.

The Blue Heaven, however, seemed to be fresh out of Hollywood endings and she could not shake the feeling that she had been had. So it was true, what they said. Everybody plays the fool. But the situation was growing just a little desperate. She was flat out of money, out of a set of wheels, out a friend and somewhere out there in the heat there was one demented mother-in-law and a trio of fat Indians thirsting for blood. Hers.

She walked from the window and seated herself by the door. She could actually hear the heated air boiling on the flats behind her. The warm odorous winds on Trona licked at the nape of her neck like fetid tongues of flame. Harlan Low was still on the floor. He was shuffling papers and drinking malt liquor. As she watched him, he popped the top on a fresh one and killed what looked to be about a third of the thing with one pull. She wondered if the guy ever got drunk but somehow she doubted it. It was funny, but the guy reminded her of the Sarge. Sarge drank like that. He could drink all day long and never get drunk. Maybe it had something to do with size. The man had discovered Bill Richards’s book. He was looking at the cover with a quizzical sort of expression on his big red face. She wondered if his face was red from the heat or if he was one of those people whose faces were always red. She bet it was the latter. The man opened the book and began to scan the table of contents.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” Delandra asked. The silence was beginning to annoy her. It was beginning to annoy her that the guy would not just come right out and tell her why he was looking for Obadiah.

The man turned his face toward her and she could see a scar light up along his temple and cheek. “Him?” he asked.

“You’re the Elder, right?”

Harlan admitted that he was. Under the circumstances he’d not been planning to advertise it.

“You’re the hotshot from New York.”

Harlan studied the girl in the chair. She was slouched way down with her legs stuck out in front of her, her hands folded on her stomach, the light from the parking lot shining in her hair.

“I suppose I would like to be thought of as something besides a hotshot,” he said. He had not felt anything like a hotshot for several days now.

“Come on. Obo says you’re a regular celebrity. I believe you’re a hero of his or something.”

Harlan just looked at her. He shook his head. “The boy’s somewhat confused.” He was pleased to see the girl had sense enough to laugh. She got out of her chair and went again to the door. It seemed difficult for her to remain long in one place. It was also clear she had not yet told him what she knew. On the ride into Trona she had only said that maybe Obadiah would be there when they got back, and that maybe he wouldn’t.

He wasn’t. And now Delandra, for her part, was wondering just how much of the sorry tale it was wise to lay on this guy with the flowered shirt and the straw hat. And to complicate matters further there was a pair of mutually exclusive options butting at one another inside her head like a pair of deranged billy goats.

She might, on the one hand, tell the guy any story she wanted to. She might tell him that Obadiah was in Tonopah, or Vegas, or San Berdoo, hoping of course that he would take her, at which point she could say good-bye and fade into the crowd.

On the other hand, there was the possibility that if she threw in with the guy she might just see Obadiah one more time. They might find him. There might be another chance. One plan had the look of something smart about it. The other appeared to be the plan of a fool. It was what she thought about, staring into the heat, and the smell, and the white shimmering flats. God knows this landscape made her feel old. She’d been staring into it all her life and it was still just the same. “I don’t expect him to be back,” she said at last. “He went to look for time warts with a couple of goons calling themselves Bill Richards and Judy Verity.”

“Verity, you say?”

Delandra nodded. “The name mean something to you?”

“It does,” Harlan said, “if her father happens to be the Verity who built the Electro-Magnetron.”

Delandra pushed a hand through her hair and sighed once more. “That’s our girl,” she said, and she told him the rest of it.

T
he room seemed curiously silent when the girl had finished and Harlan allowed himself a moment or two of drifting in it. “Then that’s what all this is about,” he said. He raised a hand to wave at what he had been looking at, the detritus of Obadiah’s research. He had found that for some reason the sight of the stuff made him angry.

“That’s what it’s about,” Delandra said, “a regular backyard scholar. I sometimes wonder what I see in him.”

Harlan was silent once more. He was watching the girl. He was beginning to believe she had a better head on her shoulders than one might imagine at first glance. She was seated just now on the bed, leaning back on her elbows, her eyes fixed on the light fixture above them. He watched the soft curve of her shoulders, the graceful line of her throat. “What did you see in him?” he asked. He couldn’t help himself.

The girl laughed. She got up again and went to stand by the door. She put a shoulder against the doorjamb and her back to the room. Beyond the hand-tooled leather of her boots Harlan watched the heat beneath a thin rectangle of turquoise sky.

Delandra stared at the highway. It was more or less what she had been asking herself, off and on, throughout the day and the truth was, answering it was more difficult than one might imagine. He was not bad to look at. And she liked fucking him—he was so sincere about it. But there was more mixed up in it than that. “What I see in him,” Delandra said at last, “are possibilities.”

She was grateful when the man did not respond. She continued to examine the landscape. The possibilities would have been hard to pin down. They had nothing to do with the straight life but rather with whatever it was which had driven him from her door. The Hummer Curse. The fact was, the boy had it written all over him and when she ran up against it there was nothing to do but lock horns with it all over again—what she supposed would have to pass for her own strain of the disease, that she should compete for the attention of men with Noah’s Great Rainbow. It had something to do with her penchant for continuing to come up short in the struggle. Which somehow fed back into the question about why she was here. Did she in fact love him—like everyone said you should? Or did she just flat hate to lose? The landscape offered no answers. But then it never had been much of a companion and it was stupid to expect anything of it now. The whole thing lay silently before her. The illusion of water. The undulating air. The dry wind.
This is your life.
She believed for a moment that the words had been spoken, delivered with all the sincerity of a television game show host with sculpted hair. The words were followed by a smattering of canned applause—as if the machine were on the blink. And she recalled that Obadiah Wheeler had found the balls to ask her about Fred Ott. Obadiah’s problem was that he didn’t understand what it meant to start with nothing. He didn’t know anything about these pitiful little attempted beginnings, each seemingly more grotesque than what had preceded it. Delandra knew of such things. Her memory was well stocked with false starts: the community college in San Bernardino. Night classes on speed. Instructors on the make. Living out of a car in the parking lot. Doing the Burger Man’s dirty work for him by day. Beauty college in Victorville. Now that was starting with nothing. What did Obadiah know of that?