Unassigned Territory (35 page)

She supposed, however, that the question of the moment was what difference, in the long run, might Obadiah make? Was he like the rocks in her collection, the ones that only looked like something, or was there really something new and different on the inside? She had on occasion asked herself the same thing about Sarge. Never having cracked him, however, she had never answered it. “You know all I ever really wanted,” she said aloud (she was speaking more or less to Harlan Low but she didn’t look to see if he was paying attention). She was watching a small-time twister blow its wad upon the salted plain. “Was just a little something I couldn’t get at home.”

The fact was, Harlan had not been paying attention for some time. To his great annoyance he found that he had just solved Leonard Maxwell’s stupid puzzle. It had been like asking Delandra about Obadiah—he flat couldn’t help himself. The key lay in his lap, marked in translucent yellow ink in the pages of Bill Richards’s book:

In the following account the noncapitalized pronouns “he” and “they” refer to the shamans or to the laity, as the case may be, while the capitalized pronouns “He” and “They” refer to the “Ancient Ones,” from whom Harav He:ya derived his shamanistic powers. Unfortunately, the exact identity of these “Ancient Ones” is one of the unsolved problems of Mojave ethnology. All we know is that shamans whose power comes from the “Ancient Ones” are said to be more powerful than those whose power comes from the gods and that they use the right, rather than the left, hand in treating their patients. The most likely hypothesis concerning the identity of these “Ancient Ones” is that they are the culture hero Mastamho and his contemporaries.

He stared into the poorly antiqued dresser before him. Three days ago he had asked himself if the hand he had seen in Africa could possibly be connected to the two he had seen since returning to the States. Then he had found out something about the Sons of Elijah and decided that they could not. Several hours ago he had discovered the Table Mountain People, an image in a bowl, and a slice of myth one might compare to what he had found in Africa—both of which, if one were imaginative enough, might be seen to have a place in Maxwell’s implausible cosmology. It was an unlikely pill to swallow and a number of things argued against it. The variety of combinations, for instance. Maxwell’s were still the only two alike. Unless, and this was the key, unless the rest of them were right hands. A test for this hypothesis suggested itself. He pulled himself abruptly from the floor and walked outside. He went to the car and took Maxwell’s puzzle from the dashboard. The images floated upon the page before him. A left hand on the cover, a right in the circle. He folded the accordion. The puzzle continued to float, an afterimage before the sky. A swastika, a pentagram, a magnet, a load of ore, a shape from a map, the head of a man. The right six-fingered hand. It was clearly Maxwell’s contention that Nazis had used phony mining operations as a cover for some task performed in the service of the ancients, some combination of Magnetic Secrets and Occult Mysteries (the questions were of use here). The task had been taken up in the deserts of the American West as well. Someone had gotten wind of this as early as 1942 and imposed a ban. But now the ban had been lifted. The President was a Drone. A Great Society indeed.

Harlan stood in the heat of the lot. Of course this could have no real meaning. In the real world. On the one hand, he felt like a man on the brink of solving a difficult chess problem. On the other, he felt much the way he always imagined those single missionary boys at the home must have felt waking from a wet dream.

When he looked toward the motel he found that Delandra Hummer had come outside to lean against the wall.

“You want to know something?” he asked her.

“It all depends,” Delandra said.

“This guy, Richards. Did you know his father was a Nazi?”

“I would have guessed that he was an asshole, at least.”

“He was connected with a big Nazi cult in the thirties. Now you say his boy has an interest in some mines around here?”

Delandra shook her head. “The boy knows some people who work an archaeological dig around here. They found crystals at the dig. They found crystals in the bathroom. Remember?”

Harlan had forgotten about the crystals. “But the boy’s father was a Nazi. Do you know what that means?”

“It means,” Delandra said, “that we’re going to go after them.” The desert, at noon, was filled with afterimages, a variety of auras. When Harlan looked at the wall against which Delandra stood he found her image repeated, the colors reversed. He wanted to say that was exactly what it meant but he refused the indulgence. Because if you were going out there, he thought, you had to be very clear about the reason. The reason Harlan had come this far was to do something about the mess. There wasn’t anything else. If he thought, for instance, that there were mines in West Africa, in the Bomi Hills, that the mines were within thirty minutes of the port of Monrovia, or that he seemed to recall someone telling him the first to get interested in those mines were the Germans, prior to the war, if he thought all of that was going to add up to something here, in the heart of the Mojave, then he really was a fool, in a land where fools got swallowed whole—gaping wide-eyed at mirages while the desert ate them alive. So some other meathead would have to cop to the soiled sheets. No wet dreams for Harlan Low. The remains of Obadiah’s were what cluttered the room and he knew now what had angered him at the sight. Without really thinking about how it might look to her, Harlan went past Delandra and into the room. He held Maxwell’s pamphlet in his hand and there was a minor ritual on his mind. He took it directly to the bathroom where, eyeball to eyeball with a single pink flamingo in a sea of turquoise tile, he struck a match from the Lotus Room and disposed of Maxwell’s bit of rubbish in the sink. When he finished he found the girl watching him once more. There was an odd expression on her face and he felt that some explanation was expected. “For both the Jews ask for signs,” he told her, “and the Greeks for wisdom, but we preach Christ impaled.”

Delandra stood for a moment at the doorway, the scent of burning paper in her face. “We’ll go,” she said. “But you’ve got to promise me something. You’ve got to promise not to preach to me. I’ve had just about all of that I can stand.”

Harlan’s large red face widened in a grin above the sink. “You have my word,” he said.

“There’s an extra box of shells in my car,” Delandra said, “I’ll get them.”

“Shells?”

She pulled the handle of Sarge’s gun high enough out of her purse for Harlan to see what it was. Then she went outside. She left Harlan at the sink, his hands still wet from rinsing down the ash, doing his best to keep it straight, to pretend that he had not in fact begun to imagine that the emptiness beyond the shower curtain and the tile was really not emptiness at all but the vast, incomprehensible shape of something impossible to name—but whose presence he had felt once before.

Delandra crossed the lot. She looked both ways up and down an empty highway and she thought about what they were up to. It was why she wanted the shells. She might have invented an ax handle for her bondsman, but she hadn’t invented the bodies in the desert. Those had made the papers and whatever Obadiah had been wrong about, he had been right about one thing. Something was going on out there. People had been divided into parts and, as near as she could tell, she and Elder Low were about to drive off into the middle of it. It struck her as just the kind of thing she might do. It seemed, however, to evidence a remarkable lack of good judgment on the part of a straight arrow like the Elder. As if the alcohol did have some effect on him after all. Or maybe those African boys had hit him on the head harder than anyone knew. Maybe he was no longer the ace he was cracked up to be. It was something to think about. She sat with it in the unpleasant wind while the man finished his business in the bathroom.

T
hat the undertaking was not half-baked was attested to, Harlan felt, by the fact there had been preparations. Delandra had gone for bottled water: Harlan had purchased some antileak stuff for the freeze plug. They had consulted a map. Side by side in the front seat of Harlan’s rented coupe they had traced the line of a dirt road from the northern tip of Trona until it disappeared into the emptiness of the Table Mountain range. “Couldn’t be more than two or three hours,” Delandra had said. Harlan had looked into the map. Nothing but white space where that road ended. Washed clean in the blood of the lamb.

It was toward the white space they now drove and Harlan was still trying to tell himself it was all right. The road had been level for some time but as it entered the Table Mountains it began to rise. The range itself looked pretty much like the other ranges Harlan had been looking at for the past few days, barren rocky ground, bands of colored rock—mostly oxidized reds and dirty yellows; here and there, though, the chemistry was more lively and one could see a bright patch of blue or green, a bright orange, a chrome yellow.

Delandra’s theory was that the road would flatten out soon, following the crest of the ridge in a westerly direction. This was based on information she had gotten from Obadiah, who had gotten his from Bill Richards, who supposedly knew what he was talking about. “The thing is...” Delandra said. She was sitting forward in the seat, one arm on the dashboard, a hand braced on the seat at her back, “we can’t get too lost. We’ve got the mines to zero in on.”

This was true. Or at least Harlan liked to think that it was true. He was encouraged in this belief by the fact that the dirt road had been clearly marked back at the highway by a small wooden sign which read, TABLE MOUNTAIN MINES: 12 MILES. The uncertainty would come after they had found the mining site, at which point it would be necessary to more or less guess about the direction of the dig. From what Delandra had gotten from Obadiah, however, the dig was not a great distance from the mines. Nor did it, according to the map, look as if they could get too lost. To the south there was a weaponry range, to the north, mountains. The dig had to lie west of the mines and Richards had said there was road all the way.

So there was room for optimism. The problem was, the grade wasn’t doing the car any favors. The freeze plug had begun to leak again, making it necessary for Harlan to stop at regular intervals and add water, and the last time he looked, the water pump had begun to leak as well. Around each bend another piece of road continued the climb. Loose rock banged against the undercarriage of the car and white dust floated behind them, marking their ascent.

Delandra found that the dust made her nervous. Behind each rock she imagined killers. The sunlight burned her arm against the dash. Harlan drove hunkered forward, looking too big for the wheel, as if one good turn would wrench it from the rest of the car. She saw them in a kind of Laurel and Hardy escapade, pieces of the car dropping behind them, Harlan looking at the wheel with an expression of consternation on his big face, then throwing it out the window. Another fine mess... they would arrive with their arms around each other, nothing but wheels separating them from the ground.

“This may have been a mistake,” Harlan said. He had begun to think that it would be best to turn back, maybe put some new tires on Delandra’s car, try it again, with an earlier start. “We’re running out of daylight. The car’s hot.”

There was, in fact, steam rising from the hood now. Delandra drummed at the dash with her fingertips. “It can’t be much farther.” She wondered why she persisted. Something in her character, she supposed. The Hummer Curse. It would surely do her wrong.

To their left a huge outcropping of stone loomed, a sheer rock face streaked with red. Before it were the first signs they had found the mines: a pair of shacks. A hole in the rock. The grade eased, turned downward into a shallow valley. Harlan slipped the car into neutral, allowing them to coast. As he did so, he was struck with an almost overwhelming sense of déjà vu. It had, in fact, plagued him for some time, a shadow at his shoulder. It took him head-on now. It was the face of the cliff. The red rock, the blue sky. It was the Bomi Hills. Except that Harlan had never taken that particular drive. Perhaps he had seen pictures. Perhaps someone else had gone—his wife? He groped for an answer. “We’re here,” he said. He coasted off what there was of the road, missing a hairpin. The car bounced over rocks larger than those to which it had grown accustomed and flattened a rotting wooden post.

“Jesus,” Delandra said.

Harlan apologized. He put the car in gear, swung back on the road, and parked. They were in the V of the valley. Its sides were covered with a variety of skeletal structures, shacks, and holes. The outcropping of red stone cut into the brightness of the sun on the left-hand side of the car.

“We’re not anywhere yet,” Delandra said. “These are the mines. He’s at the dig, remember?”

“But this guy’s father has something to do with the mines. He owns one. Used to own one.”

Delandra sat looking at Harlan’s profile. There was sweat on the back of his neck, running down into the flowered shirt. His hands sat atop the wheel like a pair of hambones. She didn’t like it in the valley. “What are we talking about?” she asked. The man was beginning to worry her.

Harlan looked at the girl. Her eyes were as black as the barrels of guns. Why did he think this was it? The mines? He shook his head. It was the heat, he told her.

“Listen,” he said, “we can’t keep climbing.” The road rose again; they could see it exiting the valley, a curving chalk-yellow snake crawling among the rocks. “Let’s rest it, let it cool down. We’ll hike to the crest and see if we can follow the road, see what it does. Maybe we can see the dig.” He looked at Delandra. She looked across the hood and raised a hand. The crest was not far.

Harlan killed the engine and got out of the car. The silence was like something you stepped into—like the direct heat of the sun.

He began to walk toward the ridge. The girl was somewhere behind him. The fact was, he was embarrassed about saying This is it. Where was his frigging head? Heat, my ass. He had Maxwell’s puzzle on the brain. The frigging thing was making him see things. He knew, of course, there was a dig. The sight of the mines had excited him. As if this was where he meant to find something.