Unassigned Territory (39 page)

He made a dinner out of the beef jerky and Planters peanuts. He sat on the rocks above the tunnel. He could see his truck from there, and some of the road. The water had left some boulders at the mouth of the gorge and to get past them he was going to have to move the Hum-A-Phone piece by piece. Once inside, he hoped to tie the instrument to a sled he had brought and drag it behind him. He would also have to do something about the gate, but he had come prepared. There were tools in the truck and the gate was not what was bothering him. Nor was it the moving of the Hum-A-Phone.

He cracked the seal on a fresh half pint while the moon rose up yellow and nearly full, spilling light across the eastern ridges of the valley. The light spilled all down beneath him, breaking into the gorge, splashing right up to the tunnel entrance and the foot of the ridge upon which he sat. He watched the desert for a long time. He felt his eye grow keen and quick in the dark, fired by the bourbon. At last, satisfied that he was alone, he came down off his perch and he began to work.

He worked for some time, moving slowly back and forth between the truck and the tunnel. In places the soil was loose and sandy. In other places it was firm, and yet with a certain sponginess about it, as if it were not really ground at all, but something made that way on purpose. Occasionally he would have to fight the belief that he was being watched. He would stand until his breathing had become soft and regular. He would strain to hear something more than the dull throbbing of his own blood. And then he would go on.

He was at the back of the truck, pulling out one of the last pieces of his instrument when he heard the engine. There was no question about it this time. He put down the piece he was holding and turned to look back down the road—trying to make some guess as to how far away it was. He didn’t have to guess for long. He was still at the back of the truck, ass against the tailgate, when the lights hit him and he felt himself freeze like a rabbit on the highway.

For a while the lights were in his face and he couldn’t see what kind of vehicle it was, or how many people were in it. Table Mountain People, or cops. He guessed it would be one or the other. Somehow he did not think this had anything to do with what had scared him on the road. At last a man got out of the vehicle and came walking toward him out of the light. He was a big man. When he got close enough, Rex could see he wore a metal helmet, that there was a handgun in a holster at his waist. There was, however, something unsteady about the man’s step and Rex could see quite early on—perhaps it was something he sensed, even before the man had begun to speak—that the man was drunk. “What are you doing here?” the man asked him. His voice had that thick, swollen sound to it that Rex often associated with strong drink.

Rex might have asked the man the same, but he didn’t. The man, being drunk, made him both wary and relieved at the same time. “I’m camping,” Rex said.

“This is a restricted area,” the man said. “You’ll have to find another spot.” He was close enough now so that Rex could smell the whiskey on him.

“I’ve already put out some of my gear,” Rex said.

The man stepped to one side and looked into the back of Rex’s truck.

“You call this camping equipment?” He was looking with some curiosity at the last few pieces of the Hum-A-Phone.

Rex said nothing.

“You have any ID?” the man asked.

“You a cop?”

The man had both his hands at his waist now, his thumbs hooked on the belt which held the holster. He was a good eight or nine inches taller than Rex. Rex had still, in the available light, not been able to get a good enough look at the man’s vehicle to determine its color. It had struck him, however, that this was the man Tom Shoats had warned him of—the big man who had come to the Desert Museum. Tom Shoats had not known what the man was after. Perhaps, Rex thought, this man did have something to do with what he had seen on the road after all. The thought gave him courage. This man was drunk. His fly was open. “I’ll see your ID.” the man said.

Rex shrugged. “My wallet’s with my gear.” He pointed back into the darkness of the gorge.

The man looked in that direction as well. He looked to Rex as if he was trying to figure out if there was anyone else back there. “Why don’t you get it,” he said. “And start on your stuff while you’re at it. Like I said, this area is closed to all use.”

For a moment Rex could not tell if the man was going to accompany him or if he was going to wait. In the end he waited and it was, Rex thought, the man’s second mistake. The gun was at the mouth of the gorge and from the rocks Rex would have a clear shot. It was not something he had counted on and yet as he walked back along the wash he began to understand that for which the desert’s white-hot light had tempered him, like fine steel, in a high heat.

The man had begun by nosing around. Now he was trying to interfere. He should have known better, Rex thought. He should have laid off the booze and kept his fly zipped. Because there were some things you “just knew.” They were like natural laws or something. A man should just know, for instance, that it was unwise to pass between a lion and her cub, a bear and its prey. And God knows it was a mistake to fuck with a man of destiny when his time was at hand.

H
arlan waited for a long time for the girl to return. Even after it had become clear to him that she would not, that something terrible had happened. Once he thought he heard the sound of an engine. On another occasion he thought there were distant flat popping sounds that might have come from a gun. Without her, of course, he would die. He tried to get used to the idea. It was necessary to get used to several ideas at once. That it was his fault, that he had allowed the two of them, ill-equipped as they were, to come after Obadiah, that he had been stupid enough to fall into a hole, that he had taken the keys with him. It went on and on.

At times he slept—or something like it. There was a dream. The dream seemed to repeat itself at regular intervals. In it, Harlan was carrying water. He carried it the way he had carried it in Africa, in a large wooden bucket on his head. It was the way they made him carry it. Only it wasn’t Africa in the dream. It wasn’t anywhere, as near as he could tell. There was no yellow-green blades of grass, and no mud, and no riverbank and no biting flies. It wasn’t the desert, either, exactly. Only there was red asphalt and a yellow sky. Mainly there was just all this weight squeezing the top of his head flat and compressing the vertebrae in his neck until he felt that his eyes would explode in their sockets and sometimes there was water in his face and he would try to lick it away from his lips, knowing that it was dirty, that it would make him sick. On occasion he was aware of a sound he took for laughter.

At other times, when he was more or less awake, he imagined what it was he would have said to Obadiah Wheeler had he been able to catch up with him. He imagined a little sermon built around the text he had quoted in the motel room: Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “For both the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks look for wisdom; but we preach Christ impaled.” But then he changed his mind and thought perhaps he would use the fifth chapter of Hebrews instead. There was a nice series of verses there, beginning with the eleventh: “Concerning Christ we have much to say and hard to be explained, since you have become dull in your hearing.” And he would end with the fourteenth verse, which spoke of the ability to distinguish both right and wrong. For it seemed to him the Wheeler boy had indeed become dull in his hearing, that he had lost sight of something fundamental and Harlan meant to remind him. He seemed to have forgotten that without Christ impaled the world was without hope. And extra dimensions, and time tunnels, and alien beings—if in fact any of these things actually existed—were not going to change it. In the Father’s house there might be many mansions but on planet Earth, Jesus Christ was still what it was all about.

There was that. And then there was the other part, the part about not screwing up. The way Harlan had screwed up when he fought the mechanic, the way the Wheeler boy had screwed up when he stole something that was not his. It was the part about God’s word being a mirror, the part about keeping honest. The Word was what called people to decision and it was what changed their lives. It flat kept them from killing each other. It kept their miserable asses in line and without it, it was like the man said, it was all vanity, and a striving after the wind.

Harlan imagined himself saying all of these things to Obadiah Wheeler. He imagined the boy sitting rather dejectedly before him, the prodigal son with tears on his cheeks, nodding his befuddled head at the beauty of Harlan’s wisdom.

He’d heard, of course, that there were no atheists in foxholes, not with death staring down on you like some black shining spider with a grinning skull for a face and a silvery web strung clear back to the beginning of time, and yet Harlan Low, who had never been an atheist in life, found it difficult to pray. He tried but found the whining tone of his voice unbearable and went back to alternately lecturing Obadiah Wheeler on the fundamentals and carrying the water. In time he saw that these activities had their purpose. Without them he was inclined to tamper with his puzzle. And that, in the blackness of the hole, in his present condition, was bad news. There was something about the hole. The conventional logic did not seem to apply. It was as if the edges of the hole were doing something to it, bending it back upon itself, forcing it into bizarre and unnatural shapes. The thing was, certain things were possible in the hole which should not have been possible at all. He was largely at fault, much of it was stuff which should have been left alone. He could see that now. And he supposed he would have, had it not been for an instant in time: Harlan’s African Experiences. It had, he thought, a certain ring.

It was not that he couldn’t make sense out of that experience well enough within the framework of his own system. He could do that. It was just that there was something about the Thing, as if It—whatever that was—did not want to be contained so easily, leaving him compelled to seek out other explanations. It was like picking at a wound, looking for something you hoped wasn’t there. And yet now, here, either as the result of his picking or because it really existed, he had found something—an unlikely combination of myth, superstition, and pulp science fiction which seemed, horrific as it was to contemplate, to add up to something—another explanation at least as good as his own. And there, he thought, was the terror in the night, the shape at the door. And without the water to carry, or the boy to lecture, it was what he was left with, until at last he found himself mumbling a kind of prayer after all. He asked for the water, or for the boy. He asked deliverance from the twisted shape of his own thought, from the half-things toiling somewhere below him, in the cave womb of the world. He asked that when his time came he might not go whining into the night. And when he first detected what appeared to be the sounds of someone sobbing—the sound was faint and seemed to come from a great distance—it was as if he had been granted some glimpse of the infinite mercy of his God, and he vowed to preach as he had not preached before: The Act of Love. The Word as a call to decision. The Word that would be as a fire in his bones. And his would be the voice, crying out in the wilderness, setting straight the way of his Lord. Making it plain, in other words—the parable of the talents and the minas, the ten virgins, the prodigal son. He had the boy in his sights now and he meant to run it all down, had in fact begun, when something interrupted him and in a moment of illumination he perceived that the boy was not simply an aspect of his dream, but that there was, in fact, a shape at the edge of his hole, a voice independent from his own. At first he suspected a trick. His vision had been bent back upon itself, as had his logic. It was the power of the hole. But this was not the case. He could see. There were stars. There was a shape. There was a voice. The voice spoke his name.

Harlan stared into the night sky. “Obadiah Wheeler?”

“Obadiah,” the voice repeated. “Harlan, is that you?”

Harlan was sweating now, freely, as if he had broken a fever. “You simple asshole,” he heard himself say, “thank someone I’m not your old man.” It was a moment of particular lucidity. When it passed he commenced to bear witness.

T
he first thing that came into Obadiah’s mind when he realized it was Harlan Low in the hole—before he thought to question how Harlan and Delandra had come to be together in the first place, or to wonder what they were doing on the road to the mines—was that they had crossed paths with the wrong people, possibly Richards himself, that Harlan had been thrown into a mine shaft while terrible things were done to Delandra. Eventually he understood that this was not the case, that Harlan had fallen into the hole by himself, that Delandra’s fate was unknown.

It took some time to get this far. The man in the hole was in bad shape. There were periods of delirium. At one point Obadiah believed the man had referred to him as a simple asshole. This was followed by a kind of sermon. The sermon appeared to take the form of a snake swallowing its own tail. It was during those relatively brief periods of lucidity that Obadiah learned about the fall, the keys, the distant popping sounds which might have been gunfire.

He limped about in the blackness, circling the hole. He called to Delandra. There was no response. When he had done that he began to look for a stick himself. What he found were a couple of pieces of nylon cord. He knotted them together and returned to the hole. Looking down the thing was like looking into an inkwell. He half expected to see his own reflection. There was a certain uncanniness about hearing a voice come out of it that was difficult to accept. He put the makeshift line into the shaft and waited for Harlan to attach the keys. It had been agreed that he would try for the Ranger station Harlan had seen going into Death Valley.

Obadiah knelt among the shards of wood while Harlan fumbled with his end of the line. Eventually it was done and Obadiah hauled the keys to ground level. He took them down the grade and slid in, behind the wheel. He fumbled with them until he found the one which fit the ignition. He turned it and hit the gas. The car made a kind of chugging sound and then stopped. Afterward there was only a sharp electrical clicking.