Unassigned Territory (44 page)

Obadiah could not say that he did.

“For at present we see in a hazy outline by means of a metal mirror.”

Obadiah nodded at the street. The fact was, he was not, after all, up for this; he found that Harlan’s words had produced in him a particular weariness he had not counted on. It was an awkward moment. On the one hand, he believed the man at his side to be at some very fundamental level, dead wrong. On the other hand, he believed that what the world wanted was more of him. Nor did he wish to appear ungrateful. In the end, he supposed it was the reference to Paul which made for him a way out. Or made, at least, for a common ground and a way for him to say what else he had come to say. “I believe,” he said, “that you quoted Paul in the desert.”

Harlan wiggled the fingers at the end of his cast. “I was hoping,” he said, studying the fingers, “that the desert had been laid to rest.”

“It was something from Paul. For both the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks for wisdom. But we preach Christ impaled.”

Harlan said nothing.

“The act of love,” Obadiah said. It seemed quite plain to him, really; suggested in part by Harlan’s sermon it had become so somewhere between the edge of the hole and the lobby of the Rose Hotel. It was how one kept one’s finger on the pulse, the something with which a man might go armed into the night.

Harlan massaged his jaw with his free hand. It was a habit he had picked up in the hole. He could not recall having spoken of the act of love. Perhaps it had gotten weirder out there than he had imagined. He was willing however to let the brother finish.

“The thing is,” Obadiah said, “I’ve asked Delandra to marry me. She’s here, in town. A friend of mine is driving out from Pomona with some money, then he’s going to stick around and be best man. After that he’s going to drive us back. He can drive you back, too, if you’re interested.”

Harlan was struck somewhat dumb. “To Pomona?”

“I’ll have to square things with my family.”

“You can do that?”

“I can let them know what’s going on. We’ll have to come back to San Bernardino in time for the trial.”

Harlan adjusted the shades on the bridge of his nose. “You’re going to be married today?”

Obadiah gestured across the street toward a red-brick building. The bricks seemed to have acquired a slick, shimmering surface in the afternoon light. At the side of a doorway there was a window with lacy white curtains in it and between the curtains a pair of pink neon hearts and some red neon letters which read: THE CHAPEL OF ETERNAL LOVE. In one corner of the window there was a green-and-brown-neon palm tree and a small white sign which said: TROPICAL SE1TINGS AVAILABLE.

“I don’t know what to say,” Harlan said. And in fact, for the moment, he didn’t. It occurred to him that these little talks of his had been taking odd turns of late—something like a car on an icy road. The boy’s instincts for absurd decisions appeared unfailing.

“The thing,” Obadiah was saying, “is that my friend is bringing some money for the ceremony. But I would sort of like to give her a ring. You know? And there are all these pawnshops around here. And I was wondering if you could maybe front me enough money to pick one out. I could let you have it back real soon.”

Harlan shook his head. He massaged his jaw. His first impulse was to laugh out loud and it seemed to him that massaging his jaw might help. It occurred to him that he never had gotten around to quoting James 4:17. Seated now, however, before the afternoon’s pale fire what he found himself thinking of instead was the fourteenth verse of the same chapter: “For what is life?” the Apostle asked. “It is even a mist, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” In the end he kept both verses to himself. He suppressed his laughter. He stared instead into the shining brick building which faced them from across the street. The Chapel of Eternal Love. For some reason—perhaps it was only the time of day, the dusty light—the thing looked to him as if it were on fire. “How much money?” he asked.

R
ex Hummer had, in the course of his life, successfully engineered the deaths of only two living things. Both events were very much alike. This bothered him. Neither had been a clean job. Both had included a messy decapitation. Perhaps it was the only thing he knew. Of the two living things, one was a chicken. The other, a man.

Sarge kept chickens once. Delandra said she would cook one if Rex killed it. Rex tried to chop the chicken’s head off with a small hatchet. Only the chicken was hard to hold and it moved at the last minute and Rex only chopped its head halfway off. At which point the chicken had gotten away from him and run and flopped and sprayed the back of the Desert Museum with blood before Rex could run it down and finish the job. Delandra had screamed and hooted. Sarge had put his head out of the museum and looked around. He had looked at the hatchet in Rex’s hand, at the headless chicken, the blood-spattered ground. He’d looked directly at Rex Hummer and said, “For the love of Christ,” then he had gone back inside.

It was what Rex thought of as he inched his way through the blackness of the tunnel. He remembered the look of disgust on Sarge Hummer’s face as he stood at the back of his workroom and surveyed the carnage. Sarge, Rex knew, had killed men in the war, but it was not something he talked about.

Now Rex had killed a man but it was not something he wanted to think about. He didn’t want to think about how the big body had bucked and heaved beneath him, or about the weird sucking noises it had made, or how the blood had sounded as it hit the glass in the truck. But he did.

He thought of other things, too. He thought about how when Sarge had made his first Thing he had been scared by it—he was still too young to be embarrassed. He’d had this recurring dream, for something like six months, in which the Thing climbed from its coffin and chased him into the desert. He would wake screaming. Sarge would come trudging into the room he had built for Rex at the side of the trailer wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt, baggy khaki pants. He would sit down by his son’s bed and he would talk to him—it was just about the only time they did talk—when Rex woke up scared. Sarge, it seemed to Rex then, was always up himself, sitting on the deck with a bottle or a six-pack, alone in a straight-backed wooden chair. When he came into Rex’s room he would sit by the bed. He would preface whatever he was going to say by saying, “Now look, boy.” He rarely used Rex’s name. It was always “boy.” Once he even took Rex out to his workshed in the dead of night and took one of the Things apart so that Rex could see how it had been put together. “See, boy,” Sarge had said, “it’s just junk.” It had always seemed to Rex, looking back on it, however, that saying it had not given the man pleasure.

He tried to imagine the Sarge with him now, in the darkness of the tunnel. “Now look, boy,” the old man would say, “that noise back there is all in your head. Do you understand that?”

Rex was not sure if he understood it or not. Nor was he sure why he shouldn’t be afraid of something because it was simply in his head. If it was in his head, it was somewhere. He put the question to Sarge.

Sarge looked at him the way he had looked at him the day he cut the head off the chicken. “If it’s in your head,” he said, “make it go away.”

Rex tried to make the rattling of the wooden gate go away. It didn’t work. It followed him yard after invisible yard, all the way to the end of the Frenchman’s tunnel, which he located with his head. He had been moving at an angle, bent forward in his struggle with gravity, when suddenly the blackness hardened into a wall of rock and smacked him in the face. The collision sent a shower of sparks into the darkness and a pain down one arm. It was the arm from which the bullet had taken its bite. He dropped the rope and leaned back against the wall. There were matches in the pocket of his jeans. With both hands needed for the sled, however, they had been of little use to him until now.

With the match, he saw the inside of the tunnel for the first time. It was higher than what he had imagined. Tasting a bit of night air, he saw that there was an air shaft in the ceiling above him. He saw the steel ring near his feet which marked the trapdoor Dina Vagina had spoken of. And he saw what was left of the altar built by the Frenchman’s wife. The thing was drooping across the wall of a small alcove which had been dug out just to the side of the wall Rex had found with his face. The candles he’d heard of were gone. In their place was a row of beer cans. Above the beer cans was the painting of the Frenchman. Rex caught a glimpse of it before the flame of his match reached his fingers, then exhausted two more matches looking at it.

The man’s skin was dark, like a Negro’s. His features, however, were more like those of a white man—straight nose, thin lips. His hair was thick and black, reminding Rex of the Indian he’d seen in Trona. His eyes were the color of the sky. The expression with which the man stared into the blackness he had created reminded Rex of the expressions he’d seen on the portraits of certain Indian chiefs. The man had his arms folded across his chest. One hand was tucked beneath an arm, out of sight. The other hand rested on a bicep. The hand, however, had been tampered with. Somebody had painted out all but the middle finger, so that what the Frenchman had been left doing was giving the bird to his life’s work.

When the third match was gone Rex went down on all fours and began to grope for the ring. Finding it, he raised the door. At once a faint, greenish light seeped up and into the tunnel. The light revealed the rungs of a wooden ladder descending into a circular passageway lined with brick.

Rex returned to his sled. It was while he was untying the first piece that he realized he had not heard the scraping sounds in some time. In a moment, however, he realized the sound had been replaced by something else. His own breathing had become more regular since resting from his labors. What he realized was that between his breaths, he could hear the breathing of something else, a shallow panting in the blackness. He quickly retied the rope. There would be no time to carry the stuff down piece by piece. He dragged the sled to the entrance of the passageway. He raised one end and pointed it down. Fortunately the hole was large enough to accommodate it. He couldn’t hold it that way for long, however, nor could he say how far the drop was, being unable to see clearly the floor of Verity’s extension in the weak light. At last, unable to lower it any farther without dropping it, he let it go. The ladder groaned beneath its weight. He heard the sound of splintering wood. The sound was followed by a metallic banging, a waterfall of random notes, and then silence. Even the breathing he had heard was gone for the moment. Rex moved toward the hole and lowered himself into it. Reaching for the handle on the bottom of the trapdoor he found that there was a mechanism there with which the thing could be locked from the inside—a dead bolt, a ring, and a padlock. Pulling the door down over him he shoved the bolt into the hole prepared for it in the brick wall. He flipped it around so that the brace came down over the ring and he took the padlock in his hand. It occurred to him that without a key, without knowledge of what other exits might or might not exist, he might in fact be locking himself in, just as he was locking out what was perhaps a figment of his imagination. He seemed to hear the voice of the Sarge somewhere behind him—“Now look, boy.” He reopened the door. He strained to hear something through the crack he’d made between the door and the floor of the tunnel. What he heard was the sound of breath sucked into heaving lungs. It was like the rasp of a plane moving across rough wood. With trembling fingers he reset the lock. He passed the arm of the padlock through the ring and he snapped it shut.

H
arlan had remained on the bench for some time after Obadiah limped off into the light on his silver crutches. He could remember very little of what had passed between them at the Table Mountain Mines. He wanted to believe that this was not his fault.

He stayed on the bench until the sun had gotten below the rooftops opposite him and the shade he had sought earlier was no longer doing him any good. It wasn’t like there was nothing to do. There was still the matter of the Studebaker left at the mines, which was going to necessitate a phone call to the brother in Las Vegas. There would also have to be a phone call to his wife in Los Angeles, and a suitcase of his belongings was still at the hospital. He supposed that he would take Obadiah up on his offer of a ride back to Pomona. He couldn’t drive himself and it seemed preferable to any of the alternatives he could imagine. It would be the ride in which the fewest explanations would be demanded of him. Before doing any of it, however, he needed a drink.

He wound up in a tall western-style building calling itself the Silver Boot Saloon, where he drank a pair of double Jack Daniel’s, with beer chasers, and listened to a fat bartender in a red and black flannel shirt make dumb jokes about his arm. After that he went back to the hospital for his things.

•     •     •

On the ground floor of the hospital there was a pharmacy and a small gift shop. Harlan had a prescription for some pain pills and while he was waiting for it to be filled, he browsed through the gift shop. It was filled with the usual junk one found in such places—an array of trinkets and cards and small stuffed things. Harlan bought a pack of gum and went to the counter to pay for it.

The counter was glass on three sides. There were turquoise rings and watches and fake Indian jewelry on black velvet beneath the glass. On top of the glass, near the cash register, there was a tall golden rack which sported a thick collection of chintzy-looking medallions on gold-colored chains. Harlan was standing very near the rack, fishing in his pockets for enough change to pay for his gum, when it occurred to him that the medallions in question were all of a kind. They were six-fingered hands in slender golden circles. Upon closer inspection he found that there were both right and left hands within the circles, that some of the circles were smooth, while others had little marks on them—what might, he supposed, pass for eyes.

“Will you be taking one of those too?” the woman behind the counter asked him.