Unassigned Territory (43 page)

The man scissored him with his legs, all the time spraying blood like a ruptured hose. Rex, trying to free himself, backing up, dragged the man from the truck bed then fell himself beneath the weight of the man’s legs, which were still locked around him, and for a moment they had rolled there in the moonlight, on ground gone slick and dark with blood, until Rex had managed to free himself—he had used the shovel as a lever. Once on his feet he had held the shovel out in front of him like something you would use to dig postholes with and he had come down with it hard. He’d come down hard and he hadn’t stopped until it was done, until the big body had ceased to buck and heave and thrash with its legs and the only sounds were the after-sounds—stuff letting go, like a blown engine which has begun to cool, its fluids loosed upon thirsty soil.

When it was over there were a lot of things to do he hadn’t thought of before. He had to hide the body. He had to hide the truck. He had to get the last of the Hum-A-Phone to the mouth of the tunnel. It all seemed to take a very long time and it was only after he had driven the Land-Rover back to the northern side of the dirt road upon which he had entered and dug a shallow grave in the loose sandy ground between some creosote bushes, that he noticed he had lost the man’s head; that it must have fallen out of the truck somewhere between the gorge and the grave site.

He was still looking for it when he discovered that the sense of being watched had returned. He noticed also that the struggle had done something to his sight. It was as if his field of vision was now ringed with a pulsing silver light. The intensity of the light rose and fell. At its dimmest, it was a vague, foglike halo. At its brightest it was a glowing ring, filled with tiny dancing sparks—brilliant enough to all but obliterate the landscape.

The phenomenon both terrified and fascinated him. When it all but went away he halfway wanted it back, just to examine it again. When it came on strong he was afraid it would shut out the night completely. He would lose the tunnel. He would wander blindly in the night, tracked by whatever it was that watched him from the rocks, whatever it was, he knew now, that had come to stop him.

This sensing of a malign presence—suddenly the night was alive with it—was what at last drove him from his search. He fled the scene of the struggle like some scavenger bird driven from its find by a larger predator. He ran blindly back across the spongy soil of the gorge, the last piece of the Hum-A-Phone, a lamp pole with metal shade, like the stake of the Savior, slung over one humped shoulder. He ran between the walls of the wash and whatever it was that watched him ran too. There was loose rock tumbling now—tiny landslides of dirt and gravel, one per footfall. It followed him to the wooden gate, the ruined wooden wheel. He stumbled inside and he swung the gate closed behind him. Once he thought he saw something out there, back in the gorge, looking at him through the wooden bars of the gate. What he thought he saw was the fat Indian from town holding the head of his opponent like a lantern before the night. Sparks flew before the vision and when the sparks were gone so was the Indian.

He took some rope from the Hum-A-Phone, and his belt. He tied the gate closed, pulling the knots as tightly as he could. His arm was throbbing now—it was the first time since being shot that he was actually aware of the pain.

Only after securing the gate did he realize he was without his light. The darkness which lay before him was absolute. Behind him, however, there was nothing but blood and destruction. There was whatever it was that had watched him.

The Hum-A-Phone was still disassembled but the pieces had been stacked upon a wooden sled and tied down. He put the length of rope that was attached to the front like a wagon tongue over one shoulder and he started into the blackness. It swallowed him whole. He could see neither his hands nor the rope they clung to, though both were within inches of his face. He stumbled headlong into the cool heart of the tunnel. She welcomed him with a musty breath, with webs and dust. He kept his head down. He kept his legs pumping. He made a picture of an engine, pistons sliding in their shafts. He held it in his mind. If he was moving toward something he was moving away from something as well and at last he heard it—a kind of distant scraping sound, what could only have been the wooden gate at the tunnel entrance. The sound was like the light, it came and went, starting when he started, stopping when he stopped, and then he saw what it was. He was being fucked with, that was what. He was inside and it was rattling his cage.

H
arlan was sitting on a bench which faced the street in front of the courthouse when Obadiah came out of the hotel. Obadiah crossed the street and sat down next to him. There was no wind and the sun was bright on the asphalt and cars.

“You been in there all this time?” Harlan asked. He gestured with his head in the direction of the jail.

“No. That didn’t take long. They found Richards’s Land-Rover with the old Thing in it. They wanted to know if it was what we were trying to sell.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them we were trying to sell something else.”

Harlan looked into the street. He had learned about the bailbondsman from Victorville during all the talk. He felt the man’s existence suggested an explanation of things which could only add to his embarrassment. “You should have told me the Indian was a bailbondsman,” he said.

Obadiah shrugged. “He was interested in the Thing, whoever he was.”

“Business,” Harlan said, “strictly business.”

There was something in the man’s voice, Obadiah thought, anger, disappointment, possibly disgust. A red, white, and blue school bus with religious slogans on it rumbled along the street in front of the courthouse.

Obadiah watched the bus. He was able to share with the man at his side a moment of contempt. “Okay,” he said, “business. But whose business?”

Harlan shook his head. “I’m afraid you and I are talking about two different men. I’m talking about the man in the red car.” The man in the red car was the man they knew about. The third man belonged to Obadiah. The jeep, after all, could have been taken away by someone else. The gun might not have been Lyle’s. It was an impressive list. The frustrating part was what no one but himself seemed to appreciate—the fact that the real Thing was still out there somewhere, that someone had it. “You know,” he said, “I thought of something back there I hadn’t thought of before.” He looked at Harlan. “You interested?”

Harlan made a gesture with his free hand. Obadiah took it as one both of resignation and an offer to continue.

“Delandra once told me that years ago Verity tried to buy one of Sarge Hummer’s Things. I think he did buy it. And I think that’s it, in there.” Obadiah nodded in the direction of the jail.

A fly landed on Harlan’s cast and started to rub its front legs together. It looked as if it was praying. Harlan watched it. He said nothing. He was waiting for the boy to go on.

“It’s one of two things,” Obadiah said.

“It always is.”

Obadiah noticed the man was looking at him out of the side of his face. It was what Delandra called giving someone the fisheye.

“Or maybe three. What it comes down to is, Who has the Thing? I’ve been thinking lately about Ceton Verity. Did you know no one ever found his body? They say he was transferred.”

“They would.”

“But suppose he didn’t die. Suppose he faked it.” The idea seemed to open up a whole new range of possibilities.

Harlan nodded, pretending to give it some thought. In truth, it was not that he was totally uninterested. It was just that he had done what he could. It was out of his hands. “So let me ask you something,” he said. “About this Thing. Are you sure that one back there isn’t the one you took? Think about it. That must have been quite a moment for you, when you decided to help the girl. Maybe you saw what you wanted to see. It wouldn’t be the first time, you know.”

Obadiah laughed out loud, He hadn’t meant to. This big stupid guffaw had just broken from his throat like a bird from a cage.

“I say something funny?”

Obadiah sat shaking his head. He was fighting the urge to laugh once more. The thing was, he had suddenly seen why no one but himself was very excited about the missing Thing. It was because they didn’t believe in it. They thought they had it. It made perfect sense, of course. The boy had run off half-cocked. He’d gotten excited. They thought he was saying the one in the jailhouse was the wrong one because to admit otherwise would be too humiliating to bear. Perhaps they thought he was deluded. The funny part was, he couldn’t blame them. He would have thought so himself. Anyone would. It seemed to make going on about it rather pointless. Still, the man had tried to give him a way out, and now he was waiting.

Obadiah shrugged. “I can see your point,” he said. “But yes, I’m sure that the one back there isn’t the one we took. My point was that if you knew who had it now. Verity. The bondsman. Maybe even...”

Obadiah’s voice trailed away. It was swallowed by a pause pregnant with meaning. Harlan shifted his weight on the bench. He was deeply embarrassed about what had happened here. He had gone into the desert when he shouldn’t have. He had behaved foolishly. He had fallen into a hole. He had said some things. He knew that what Obadiah had just stopped short of doing was making reference to that something of which the hand was perhaps the symbol. The suggestion made him want to grind his teeth. He hadn’t forgotten what he had put together. Nor had he forgotten that moment which had spawned it. Still, this stuff which had transpired since his fight with the mechanic—the driving, the puzzles—it was coming for him, more and more now, to have about it the quality of those water mirages with which he had lived for the past several days—a trick done with mirrors, an eccentricity of the land itself. He thought he saw how it worked. Obadiah had come with a cast of conspirators, Harlan, with his Cult of the Hand. In a kind of magic moment at the edge of the hole the stories had merged, each lending weight to the other. But the moment had passed. The stuff about the bailbondsman had helped. “I suggest you forget the ‘maybe even’ part,” Harlan said. “As for your detective work, you’re talking to the wrong guy.” He pointed over his shoulder with his usable thumb. “It’s the Man’s problem, now.”

After that they sat for several moments in the shade, without speaking. At their feet the sunlight swam in the street. The buildings baked in it. The day, Harlan thought, had that slow, hot feel about it. You wanted to stay in one spot. He was working on his. He had his bailbondsman. The boy could keep the Thing.

“You know,” Obadiah said at length, “you’re right about the detective work.” He was looking for a way to get past something. It was what he and Harlan still had between them and it seemed to him that something ought to be said about it. “It’s his problem but it’s hard to stop thinking about it. I mean, thinking about what happened is like thinking about the Thing.” He stopped for a moment and then went on. “When we were out there...” He nodded toward that end of town which ran into the desert. “I had this idea that everything that had happened had been orchestrated in some way. You see, I still think Delandra and I saw Jack the night we stole the Thing. And when you started talking about this hand I thought maybe I was beginning to see who it might be. Delandra’s position was always that no one was orchestrating anything, that it was all just a bunch of random events. The deaths of Sarge and Verity, for instance—if Verity is really dead. A guy that just looked like Jack following us that first night. Jack and Lyle carved up by the Table Mountain People, just like the Man says. Nothing too intricate, in other words. About the time I decided I would never know for sure it came to me that it was going to be that way with a lot of things.”

“I take it you’re not going to go hunting, then.”

“No.”

Harlan nodded. He removed his hat and wiped his brow. He had an idea of where the boy was headed. He had an idea as well that this in fact was the “little talk” for which they had come, that he had been given a second chance. He ran a thumb along the rough crease of the hat and set the thing back on his head. “No one ever promised us it wouldn’t get complicated,” he said. “What you want to understand is that a man can’t use the complications in pretending he doesn’t know right from wrong.” He was thinking of the words of James 4:17: “Therefore if one knows how to do what is right and yet does not do it, it is a sin for him.”

Obadiah listened to what Harlan had to say. The words were not without effect. They suggested accountability and he guessed maybe that was something else he couldn’t stop believing in. He felt accountable. To whom, exactly, it was harder to say. Because no matter how Harlan’s words affected him, they were, at least in context, part of something bigger. It was the something bigger that had failed him—if not him, exactly, then life itself perhaps—the very thing it had sought to contain. It seemed to him there ought to be some way of saying this. “Do you know anything about information theory?” he asked.

“ ‘I publicly praise you, Father,’” Harlan said. He was in the tenth chapter of Matthew, the twenty-fifth verse. “ ‘Because you have hidden these things from the wise and intellectual ones and have revealed them to babes.’”

“Or what about that movie,” Obadiah said. He was looking for another tack. “
Sunset Boulevard?
I was thinking of something Norma Desmond says to William Holden: ‘I
am
big. It’s the
pictures
that got small.’”

It was not, Harlan thought, that he was without affection for the boy. It was just that rarely had he felt himself in the presence of someone whose every other word or deed so begged for an ass kicking. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” he said.

Obadiah turned from the street to find Harlan staring at him. The man’s face was bruised and sunburned and looked about as wide as one of the brick buildings at their backs. “It stopped making sense,” he said.

“Maybe you worried it to death.”

“That happens?”

“I think so. You wind up forgetting what Paul said about it. Remember?”