Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  In another forty-five minutes or so the pavement ended for good, and the dirt roads began. Miles and miles of them, ticking and tocking beneath the truck bed as we seesawed our way forward over a washboard of uneven terrain.

  By the time the truck bumped to a stop, I’d lost track of everything except the painful pounding in my head. The door suddenly rolled up. Judging from the feel of the rocking, three people climbed up into the truck bed with us. Someone took hold of my feet, dragging me toward the back of the truck, where four more hands took ahold and set me gently onto the ground behind the truck. I listened as they went back for Gabe.

  One of them was shouting at the others in Spanish. “Sí,” one of the others answered back several times.

  I was lying on my side when they rolled me over onto my face, cut the zip ties from my body, and pulled off the hood. From the sound of it they did the same for Gabe.

  Wasn’t a half minute later when I heard the truck start. I tried to raise my head, but it felt like it was the size of a bus tire, so I just relaxed and listened to the sounds of the truck till it faded into the general hum of the universe.

  I don’t know how many times I drifted off to neverland before the desert sun came peeping over the horizon, fluttering my eyelids enough to drag me back to consciousness again. In the near darkness, I could see Gabe about six feet away, lying motionless on the ground. I tried to say something but couldn’t force anything out. That’s when I realized I could now see Gabe because, sometime during my fitful periods of unconsciousness, I’d somehow turned my head in that direction. My mouth was full of dirt and pebbles. I managed to pucker up enough to spit some of it out, but it seemed like an acre and a half of desert floor was still stuck to the inside of my mouth. That’s the moment when I realized that whatever drug they’d injected us with was beginning to wear off.

  By the time I could muster sufficient muscle to sit up, the sun was fully visible above the horizon and I was sweating like a racehorse. I looked over at Gabe, who was on all fours doing a stoned-out grizzly bear impression.

  I swallowed air and tried to force a sound from my throat, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was sand and gravel. I sputtered, spit, and looked around.

  They’d dumped us at the base of a big-ass desert mountain, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. To the east—hard to tell how far away—but way out there beneath that nuclear sun, giant white wind turbines did battle with the hot breeze blowing through the bone-dry canyons . . . looked like a million giant white pinwheels. To the west, nothing much at all . . . far as the eye could see, nothing but sand and scrub mesquite. A single rough track heading north marked the route the truck had taken after dumping us.

  I got up on one knee first, then the other. Felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, so I waited awhile before I attempted a full Homo erectus. Made it on the first try but just barely. Stood there on the desert floor, waving like a willow in the wind.

  I took two tentative steps toward Gabe and then stopped and waited for my equilibrium to reboot. I wiped my right hand on my shirt and then stuck a couple of fingers in my mouth, scraping along between my lips and gums, trying to get all the sand and gravel out of my mouth. Got most of it. What was left ground between my teeth when I closed my mouth. I winced but couldn’t work up enough saliva to wash it out.

  “You got any idea where the hell we are?” Gabe slurred.

  “None.”

  “We can’t just stay where we are,” Gabe said. “Not unless we can find some shade and water.”

  I nodded. “Sun’s gonna kill us if we stay here.”

  “That’s what’s supposed to happen.”

  “Whatta you mean?” I asked.

  “You remember all that yammering when they were handling us?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They were saying they should handle us gently so there wouldn’t be any marks on our bodies in case anybody ever found us.”

  I thought it over. “Smart,” I said finally. “Couple of bodies found out in the desert. No visible marks. Cause of death, dehydration. Sure, there’s gonna be questions—you know, how we got way the fuck out here and such—but nobody’s gonna put a lot of energy into getting the details unless there’s some hint of foul play.”

  Gabe tottered around in a tight circle. “Which way?”

  “I say we follow the truck.”

  “We need shade,” Gabe said again.

  I shrugged. “We can’t stay here.”

  “You know anything about desert survival?”

  “From French Foreign Legion movies,” I said.

  “This is a death march, man,” Gabe said. “We choose wrong and we die out here.”

  “Seems to me that all we know for sure is that the truck went that way, so sooner or later we’re gonna run into another road if we follow the truck.”

  “We came a long way on the dirt,” Gabe pointed out. “How far, you figure?”

  “Fifteen, maybe twenty miles.”

  “We ain’t gonna make it that far.”

  “Let’s go,” was the best thing I could come up with.

  All this stroll was missing was the fife and drum. We hiked for most of an hour over the featureless landscape. Following the tire tracks, losing them once in a while, and then finding them again. Moving steadily toward the northwest.

  Sometime around noon, I stopped and pointed at an uneven bump on the edge of my field of vision. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Looks like a tree or a bush,” Gabe said.

  That’s all it took. Something was better than nothing. We began trudging in that direction. Ten minutes later we were gazing at some kind of short, thick desert greenery replete with beautiful purple flowers.

  “I think it’s called a smoke tree,” Gabe said.

  “We can crawl down under it and get out of the sun,” I said.

  “I’m thinkin’ maybe we ought to check it for snakes first,” Gabe rasped.

  I reached down and lifted the nearest low-hanging branch. The molten sun lit the shaded space at the bottom of the tree. It took my senses a second to put the picture together. Straight lines. Something rounded at the other end. Boat shoes. Shoes? I looked over the top of the tree at Gabe. I swallowed hard. “You maybe ought to see this,” I said.

  Gabe walked around and squatted at my side. I lifted the branch higher, allowing more light into the space beneath the foliage. Gabe flinched. Almost fell over backward.

  Looked like he was asleep. Fully dressed, brown cargo shorts and the remains of a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt. He was lying in the fetal position. His skin had shrunken brown and wrinkled like a deflated football. His lips had retreated from his mouth, allowing me to see the pink upper denture that had fallen down onto his lolling brown tongue. Looked like a set of those chattering joke teeth.

  I couldn’t resist. I bent forward and touched his nearest arm with my index finger. Felt like old leather. The desert had petrified his corpse. Dried him out like an apricot.

  Gabe crawled back up beside me. “Can you lift it higher?”

  I stood up and put my legs into it. Gabe carefully went through the dead man’s pockets but came up with nothing. Whatever it was that held a person’s skeleton together had loosened up. When Gabe carefully rolled what was left of him up onto his side, his remains started to come apart. Looked like maybe one of his legs had come loose from the hip socket. On the other leg, the foot flopped deeper into the hole. For reasons unknown, we took the time to put him back in the same position we’d found him in. Almost like we owed it to him. No matter what.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked when we had all the pieces more or less back in place.

  “The missing Mr. Pickett. The old guy who insisted on seeing Mrs. Haller, called social services, and then did a disappearing act.”

  “Yeah . . .” I pointed at the body. Made a motion to suggest that we maybe could remove the remains from their final resting spot and take it over ourselves.
>
  “Should we?” I asked.

  “I’m not getting in there,” Gabe said. “I’ll die somewhere else.”

  So we left him in peace and followed our own footprints back to the road. Musta been one, one thirty by that time. The sun was a golden hammer, and we were rusty nails. Sometime around three o’clock in the afternoon, I stopped sweating. The inside of my mouth was so stuck together I had to reach up and give my lower jaw a hand in order to pry it open. My toes started catching parts of the desert floor as we stumbled along. Neither of us said much of anything other than to offer an occasional encouraging word. We kept pushing forward, slower now, a bit of loose-kneed wobble in our strides as we followed the tire tracks west.

  We walked until the moon began to rise in the east. It wasn’t like we ever decided to stop walking either. At some point we simply sat down on the ground, right in the middle of a small circle of mesquite. We looked over at one another and then flopped over onto the sand. Last thing I recall was Gabe saying, “We ain’t gonna make it, Leo.”

  Gabe might have said something else, but by that time I was engulfed in torrid dreams. Dreams of the ocean and of fire. I saw myself rising from the rippling waves like some god come to earth, and then a minute later my thighs rubbed together and I spontaneously burst into blue flame. Next thing I remembered I could feel myself swimming on the desert floor; part of me knew it was absurd, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was drowning in a sea of sand.

  And then Gabe was shaking my shoulders. Took me a while to get my eyes to focus. “Maybe we ought to walk while it’s cooler out,” Gabe said.

  I came up off the ground in sections. Took a hand from Gabe and a couple of tries to stand upright.

  I looked around. In the distance the wind generators spun languidly in the night air. Some twirling one way, some the other, creating a strobe-like sensory disruption, kinda like one of those old TENSION signs. Overhead the Milky Way glittered like a flaming carpet. The moon was . . . was . . . I lost my train of thought . . . something about a ghostly galleon flitted through my head as we collected what remained of our wits and stumbled on.

  Carolyn Saunders had banged on the security door three separate times before she bothered to try the handle. When the door opened to her touch, she checked the surrounding area to see if anybody’d seen her little exercise in stupidity.

  Unfortunately the big blue door wasn’t nearly so accommodating. She banged on it, waited, and then closed the security door and started back for the stairs.

  She was a couple of risers from the bottom when the voice stopped her in her tracks. “Hey.” She looked up. It was the guy in the ground-floor apartment on the alley side of the complex. She thought his name was Kevin and that Leo and Gabe were friendly with him. “You lookin’ for Leon?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “They didn’t come back last night,” he said. “Neither of them.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I hear everybody comin’ and goin’. That’s why my apartment’s so cheap.”

  “Maybe they—” she began.

  “I went up to tell them I got my truck back—you know, like it got stolen the other day—and Gabe always stays up real late . . . but last night there wasn’t nobody home. No lights, no nothing. Real weird.”

  Saunders opened her mouth.

  He cut her off. “Their car’s out back.”

  “Maybe they went—”

  He interrupted again.

  “They been here six or eight months, and far as I know, they ain’t ever gone anywhere before. Sure as hell not on foot.”

  He wanted to talk. She could tell. That made one of them.

  “Thanks,” was all she said before turning hard left and walking back out to Del Monte Ave. She’d been trying to call Leo for the better part of an hour before she’d decided to drive over. Hot and frustrated, she’d jammed her car into the handicapped spot across the street and thrown the OFFICIAL POLICE VEHICLE sign on the dashboard.

  Now she unlocked the door, leaned in, and rummaged through her purse until she found the key to the new apartment that Leo had given her the other day. She shouldered the bag, locked the car, and then checked the doors individually by hand. Cop sign on the dash or no cop sign, you left your car unlocked around here and there’d be a family of four living in it by the time you got back.

  Saunders walked a long Z over to Narragansett and let herself into the new building. The foyer and stairs had one of those floral-print carpets that was so visually busy you could slaughter livestock on it and nobody would have noticed. Someone was playing Fleetwood Mac. “Go Your Own Way.” A muffled NPR station rumbled from another apartment.

  She mounted the stairs and found number eight at the back of the building. She let herself in, checked the hallway behind her, and then closed the door. The minute she turned toward the room her breath caught in her throat like a fish bone. She pulled her gun from her right hip and used two hands to raise it to shoulder level as she sidestepped inside, swinging the weapon from side to side as she moved. A pair of lawn chairs lay on their sides on the carpet, one of which had been completely broken in two. The window on the alley side yawned wide open. A silver piece of duct tape fluttered in the ocean breeze. A series of paint scars on the lower corner of the window casing said something had been violently torn from its moorings.

  “Musta been the camera,” she whispered to herself as she began to move around the space in combat stance. Didn’t take long. The chairs and the dinged-up window frame were all there was. Other than that, the place was empty.

  She clipped her weapon back into its plastic holster and reached for her phone. Stopped and just stood there, mouth breathing. To call whom? What would she say?

  “I think you better take this call, Mr. Pemberton.”

  Pemberton set the Architectural Digest facedown on the end table and looked across the room toward Hector. “A call from whom?” he asked.

  “The Department of Health and Human Services.”

  Pemberton held out his hand. Hector walked over and handed him the phone.

  “Pemberton here,” he said.

  “Mr. Pemberton . . . my name is Marcia Grant. I am a senior officer in the San Diego County Human Services Investigation Bureau. We have been informed that you are the legal executor for Florence Haller. Is that so?”

  “Yes it is,” he confirmed.

  “Human Services has received a complaint regarding the welfare of Mrs. Haller.”

  “From whom?”

  “I’m afraid we are not at liberty to share that information, sir.”

  Pemberton sighed loud enough for Marcia Grant to hear.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Grant?” he asked.

  “Pursuant to California law 15610.23, after such a complaint is filed, our personnel are required to meet with Mrs. Haller personally in order to assure her continuing welfare.”

  Pemberton pulled his feet from the leather ottoman and sat up straight in the chair.

  “Mrs. Haller is quite ill,” he said. “Her doctor—”

  She cut him off. “We will be arriving with our own doctor,” she said.

  “I’m afraid—” Pemberton began.

  “And a bench warrant,” she went on. “Ten thirty this Friday.”

  “I’ll have to consult with her physician. I’m not sure he’ll—”

  “Ten thirty this Friday,” she said again. More forcefully this time. Click.

  Pemberton sat bolt upright in the wing chair for several minutes before he pushed the call button on the underside of the end table. Hector appeared thirty seconds later.

  “Yes sir.”

  “I need Mrs. Cisneros, Mr. Reeves, and Dr. Trager immediately. No excuses. Tell them we need to discuss a major change in plans.”

  “Yes sir.” Hector turned and hurried for the door.

  “Hector?” He turned back. “Are you prepared? Have you got your personal arrangements in place?” Pemberton asked.

  “Yes s
ir. For some time now.”

  “When we walk out of here, we won’t be coming back.”

  A thin silver line on the eastern horizon said morning was on the way. Problem was we both knew this could well be the last sunrise either of us saw, a thought that tended to put a damper on conversation. You know things are going badly when you look over at your traveling companion, someone you genuinely care about, and your first thought is, “Jesus . . . hope I look better than that.”

  Whoever said that death was the only real enemy had a point. You want something to make your other problems look trivial, a mental picture of your sun-bleached bones decorating the desert floor will sure as hell do the trick for you.

  Add a coyote gnawing on the bones to the picture, and you’ve arrived at full-scale terror.

  We looked like death. We smelled like death. But somehow the word never came up between us. Like maybe, at this point, neither one of us particularly gave a shit. Or neither of us wanted to be the one to first to say it out loud. I chided myself for hoping I looked better than Gabe.

  I’d rummaged through the annals of my life several times as we’d staggered on through the darkness. Some good, some bad, some moments to be proud of, others conjuring nothing but the hot face of shame. Such is life, I decided.

  I’d wondered why it was so easy to forget the good and dwell on the bad. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I’d come to the conclusion it was nothing more than part of our genetic survival package. Funny thing about life on earth, you could find eternity in a flower one minute and then eat bad chili in the next. When that happened, your will to live yelled in your ear: “Fuck the flower; remember the chili.”

  We kept walking . . . slower now . . . My right knee felt as if somebody’d driven nails into it. I’d have limped except I couldn’t figure out how to limp on both legs at the same time. As morning crept over the horizon, it felt like we were marching in deep sand. My legs were screaming at me. The impressions of the truck’s tires had disappeared sometime during the night. All we had to go on was the fact that the sun rose in the east. Not that it mattered much. We weren’t going to make it to another day without water. Watching Beau Geste thirty-five times hadn’t made me much of a desert survival expert, but I knew that much for sure. We might live for a week without food—it had been done before—but without water, we’d be dead before the sun winked at the darkness again.