Unassigned Territory (41 page)

She’d gotten them out of the jeep, one at a time, very slowly, and had moved them around to the front. She was about to back them into the shack when the guy with the mirrored shades did something funny. Later, it was difficult to remember exactly what he had done. Whatever it was, he had preceded the action with a kind of smile. Maybe it was just the smile that had done it. Or maybe he really had made a move. The fact was, she shot the bastard. He’d put a hand out and she had shot him through it. Only the bullet had done some very weird things. It appeared to have removed about half of his hand, gone up his arm somehow, and torn a piece of his ear off. After that it had put a hole in the door of the shack.

The man went down on his knees, the other man standing over him. She almost felt sorry for the beggar. It did, however, make getting them into the shack easier. The driver wasn’t about to make any moves and the other guy was fresh out. He’d lost his mirrored shades in the process of being shot and without them his eyes had a kind of milky helplessness about them. The driver’s eyes were the ones that had gone glassy, like a wounded animal’s.

They tried to tell her she couldn’t leave them there, making it necessary for her to point out to them that they were wrong. She not only left them, she took their jeep. She supposed that if the wounded man was lucky she would get help back to him before he bled to death, or died of shock, or did whatever it was that people did when they’d lost something. Once, driving away from the shack, in the very last of the day’s light, she thought she noticed a finger on the hood of the jeep. Graciously, the light failed quickly, and she could not be sure if that was what she had seen or not.

But then the finger, if in fact there was a finger, was the least of her worries. She had Harlan Low to think about and the sunlight was gone. The jeep had no winch and no rope, nothing except that scatter-gun between the front seats. There wasn’t even any drinking water and in the end she had decided to try for the highway. It seemed to make the most sense. There were now two casualties to report. This, however, like everything that had preceded it, turned out to be harder than it looked. It took her a while to get her bearings in the dark and at about the same time that she hit the interstate, she ran out of gas. She wound up walking into Trona. It was a long walk. Her ankle felt mushy and swollen in her boot. Her back hurt and her head ached from banging against the metal floor. By the time she got to Trona it was very late indeed. She woke up some guy who lived behind the market and asked for a phone. The man stood around in a pair of boxer shorts and bedroom slippers, watching her while she made the call. When she was finished he told her they had themselves a little chopper in Ridgecrest. He offered to take her to the mines, just to make sure everyone got found.

“Thanks,” Delandra said, “but no.”

The man shrugged. He shuffled off into his kitchen and began running water. Delandra went back outside, into the cool air that had the first taste of morning on it. If she wasn’t sure about the man, she was at least sure about the cops. If she went anywhere near them there would be a lot of unpleasant questions and as soon as they’d had time to run a make on her she would be on her way to Victorville in the back of a truck.

What she had on her mind was another ride. She went to the front of the market and waited. She actually put out her thumb once. A station wagon came rolling out of the west and slowed down. The thing was filled with a family but she put out her thumb anyway. The people looked at her like she was from Mars—everybody except the husband. He pretended not to notice. She could see him in there, hunched over the wheel, peering into the market like that was all there was. The little scene made her so tired, she went back to sit on a pair of wooden soft drink crates someone had stacked near the Coke machine and when the next car came by—a truck with a single man in it—she didn’t even bother to get up.

She sat on the crates for a long time. Sometimes she closed her eyes and sometimes she looked into the yellow light which had begun to blossom in the east until at some point she noticed that the flats had lost the look of dirty snow which was their true color, which you only saw at dusk and at dawn, that they had begun to shine.

She was still on the crates when the man who had let her use his phone came outside. He was still wearing the bedroom slippers but he’d put on a flannel shirt and some jeans. He had a cup of coffee for her. “I imagine they’ll take your friend back to Ridgecrest,” he said. “There’s a hospital there. I can drive you if you want me to.”

Delandra had looked one more time into the flats. The sunlight was upon them now and they seemed to be made of something impossibly pure and bright and for a moment it seemed to her as if all the choices had already been made. “Why not,” she said.

The man took her directly to the hospital. He loaned her a twenty-dollar bill and let her out in the parking lot at the emergency exit. But there were some cops standing around near the reception desk and she was afraid to ask about Harlan Low lest she be identified as the person who had made the call.

Across the hall from the nurse’s desk there was a small waiting room. The room held a pair of orange Naugahyde couches. There was a television set mounted on the wall. Delandra went to the vacant couch and sat down. On the other couch there was a woman with a little boy. There were some ice skaters on the television. The woman was trying to get the boy to watch the skaters, but the boy was more interested in climbing on the furniture. When Delandra sat down he came straight to her and leaned against her knee. He was holding some kind of disgusting candy on a stick with one hand and the stuff was all over his face. Delandra took a cigarette from her purse. When she lit it the woman came and got the boy.

Later a man in work clothes came in and sat with the woman and the boy. The two cops who had been outside left but a third cop showed up. He entered the waiting room and sat next to Delandra. The cop made her nervous. She had the idea he was looking at her. She got up and went into the hall.

She was thinking about leaving and coming back later when a pair of double gray doors swung open to emit an orderly with a gurney and she caught sight of something at the end of the room. What she saw was a straw hat on the back of a chair.

She put her cigarette out on the floor and went through the doors. She went for the hat and found Harlan in a bed not far from it. There wasn’t a lot of time. They were getting ready to put a pin in his arm.

“He’s here,” Harlan told her, “somewhere.” And while the nurse went to see about X rays Delandra heard about how it had gone down. She heard about how Obadiah had left the camp, and how he had set off a flare. She heard about the stick with nails on it. Harlan was a bit dopey from what they had given him and this detail seemed to please him. It took her a moment to get the picture. In the end, what she gathered was that Obadiah had been guarding the hole from an Indian. At some point she realized it was her Indian. There had apparently been a big argument when the time came for them to get into the chopper. Obadiah didn’t want to put down his stick. It was the part Harlan seemed to enjoy the most. “We were pretty tired by then,” he told her. “It had been a long night.”

Once outside, it occurred to her that she had not slept in a long time. She crossed the street and found that she was about half a block from the Ridgecrest police station. She walked past the station. She passed a couple of bars and a number of those chapels that perform speedy wedding ceremonies. She went into the lobby of the first hotel she found. The hotel was called the Rose Hotel and the carpet had once been covered with roses. She could see this by looking at the borders. The nap with which the roses were made was raised so that the patterns of leaves and blossoms and long, curving stems had once covered the floor in swirling, art deco patterns. At the center of the floor, however, the roses had long since been worn down to nothing. In the center everything was slick and black with dirt and in some spots there was nothing but threads with the floor shining through underneath. The single rooms were seven dollars a night. She registered under an assumed name with a tough-looking Mexican. He gave her a key and she went upstairs. There was a bed, a dresser, one chair, and a bathroom. There were curtains at an open window. The curtains looked to have been from the time of the carpet. The window was open and the sounds from the street below drifted into the room.

Delandra took the last cigarette from her purse and went to the window. She put the cigarette, still unlit, between her lips and leaned against the sill, the heels of her hands pressing down upon the wood which had grown hot in the direct light of the sun. Her trial date was nearly upon her now. Soon, she thought, she would indeed be a wanted woman. A warm breeze slipped past the curtains and brushed her cheek. It smelled faintly of garbage and sunlight. She had no idea of what she expected to happen next. At first the image of Obadiah’s long vigil in the face of her invented Indian had only depressed her. But there was perhaps a change in the wind. She could feel it, staring into the harsh light, the brassy sky. She had this idea that maybe she would come around. She even had this idea that in time the incident might achieve a certain radiance. Looked at long and hard enough, in fact, the thing might even shine. A beacon in the darkest of nights. But then she was tired. Her head did ache. And it was like Harlan had said, it had been a long night.

When she had finished the cigarette she went in to use the bathroom before getting into bed and found that a list of the house rules had been posted on the door for her edification. No alcoholic beverages. Of any kind. No loud music. No loud guests. No cigarettes in bed. No dancing. Perhaps, she thought, she had inadvertently joined an order. The thought made her dizzy. On her way to bed she found herself wondering if these rules were strictly enforced. There was a wastebasket at the foot of the bed, however, and in it an empty Gordon’s gin bottle. The sight relaxed her mind. The Rose Hotel was just like everything else. It was a fucking sham.

O
badiah had no place to stay. And since he was wanted for some questioning the police captain offered him a cell. They ran a file on him. They took three sets of fingerprints and took away his belt so he couldn’t hang himself. The captain told him the file would be stamped “sleeper” to show he had not been arrested. Obadiah said he didn’t plan to hang himself over any of this but they took his belt anyway. An officer led him down a dimly lit hallway and put him in a cell by himself. Obadiah had never been in a jail cell. It was long and narrow with a toilet at one end and a small rectangular window with a heavy screen high on the wall at the other. In between there was a narrow bunk with two blankets and a pillow on it. The bunk was hard. He sat on the edge of it as the guard closed the door. When it slammed shut he could hear the tumblers drop. Without the light from the hallway it got dark fast. The quality of the stuff took him by surprise. “It’s dark,” he said. Nor was the finality of the tumbling locks something he had counted on. He was set upon by a wave of claustrophobia as thick and as strong as the blackness.

The guard, apparently having heard what Obadiah said, spoke to him through the metal door. “What did you want to do, Sport, sleep or play pinochle?”

Obadiah, humiliated, said nothing. He thought of Harlan Low in the hole. The thought comforted him. He was very tired but it was hard to unwind. He’d spent most of the day around the hospital and the police station, answering questions. His ankle was not broken. Just badly sprained. The doctor told him he was lucky. He wanted to believe he was.

There had not been much that he or Harlan could do to keep Delandra’s name out of it. Even before either of them talked to anyone what was left of Harlan’s car had been identified. It had also been recognized as a car which had tried to enter Table Mountain from another direction the day before. And then there was Delandra’s guitar case with the Thing sticker and her name, so that by the time someone got around to asking questions they already knew about Delandra Hummer and the Desert Museum. They knew about Harlan’s fight with Floyd and about the missing Thing. They had done their homework. There wasn’t much left to do but play it straight and answer questions. The trick lay in answering the questions while still hanging on to some shred of one’s dignity. This became increasingly difficult and for Obadiah the feeling of losing it came while trying to explain for about the fifteenth time just exactly what he had hoped to find in the desert with Bill Richards and Judy Verity. After that he just gave up and answered questions. He didn’t worry about dignity, but he felt himself growing steadily less substantial, collapsing inward by sections. He believed that ultimately he would disappear. It was what he had to look forward to when the sun rose.

It seems some dickhead at the station, an old-car buff, had passed the word that the Starlight coupe Obadiah had destroyed was already something of a collector’s item. In the wake of this, Obadiah had become known as the guy who blew up the car. Harlan was the guy who had fallen in the hole. Unless you were talking to the men who had brought them in, in which case Obadiah was the guy with the stick. The funny tiling was, all things considered, he really didn’t mind the car. He had come to hold the position that the car meant something. It marked the spot. It was like the Table Mountain Mines. No one would do anything with it. It would sit there for hundreds of years. He imagined that someday he and Delandra Hummer would visit it together. They would bring the kids. “See,” someone would say, “this is where it went down.”

He slept fitfully. The feeling of claustrophobia came and went. At some point during the night they put someone in a cell, or in the drunk tank, and the guy wouldn’t be quiet. Obadiah heard him alternately howling and cackling for the rest of the night. It was hard on the nerves. He kept imagining that he was in fact a prisoner here, that the sleeper business had been a ruse. They would never let him go. He could look forward to spending the rest of his life in places like this. He had seen something he shouldn’t have. He had fallen into the hands of the manipulators. Or possibly they had done something to his mind. He couldn’t seem to stop imagining things. Once, before leaving the hospital he had even imagined that he had seen Delandra Hummer pass an open doorway at the end of a hall. Once more, later, from a window in the police building, he had imagined that he had seen her go into a cheap hotel. He knew he hadn’t. She was too smart for any of that. He had lost her. And when he wasn’t battling waves of panic generated by the closeness of the walls he was chewing on remorse. At some point, however, he did manage to sleep because when the guard came in the morning he had to wake him. But he didn’t feel like he had been sleeping. He felt like he had been digging ditches. The guard took him to a room where there was coffee and a box of doughnuts. After that they went to another room to answer more questions. He had expected to have to answer questions alone but the captain had decided it was time to question both him and Harlan together and Harlan was already in the room, waiting for him. For some reason Obadiah found the sight reassuring. It must, he thought, have been the way those African brothers felt, the Liberian flag fluttering above them in the dawn’s early light.