She smiles and opens her phrasebook to see how to say “red.”
33
JESSE HAULS HIMSELF OUT OF THE ROAD AND INTO THE SCRUB, his fear of being spotted worse than his pain. The effort exhausts him. He can’t do anything afterward but stare up at the glittery web of stars spun across the sky.
He should’ve anticipated trouble. Edgar’s been getting more and more sneaky and defiant and at the same time more strange, all his talk of visions and the Little Devil. If he hadn’t been distracted by Johona and the Fiends, he’d have seen this coming. He let his guard down, and now he’s paying the price.
It’s 3:30 by the time he can stand. Two hours until sunrise. Wells, the nearest town, is an hour’s drive. His best guess is Edgar will stop there. He’ll need to get a ride soon if he’s going to make it by dawn.
He retrieves his denim jacket from where he tossed it while changing the tire and buttons it over his torn and bloody shirt. The guns are in the Galaxie, but he’s got his knife. He sets off along the shoulder.
He’s been walking fifteen minutes when headlights finally appear. He steps into the road and waves his arms. A semi charges out of the darkness like a rhino. The driver sounds his horn but doesn’t slow down. Jesse is nearly bowled over by the blast of hot wind as the truck passes. He fingers grit from the corner of his eye and keeps walking.
Ten minutes later another truck comes along, from the opposite direction this time. Jesse crosses the highway. Again, the rig blows by like the driver didn’t see him, as do two more that pass during the next half hour.
Time is growing short to reach shelter before daybreak, and panic nibbles at Jesse’s edges. More headlights. He stands in the road, waving madly. It’s a car this time, a dusty Gremlin. It slows and comes to a stop twenty feet away.
“What’s wrong?” a man calls out.
“I had an accident,” Jesse yells back.
He reaches into his pocket for his knife as he hurries to the car.
“Hold up,” the driver says. “Keep your distance.”
Jesse ignores him and goes to his window, which he’s desperately trying to roll up. He’s an old man with thick glasses and buck teeth. An old woman cowers in the passenger seat, clutching a little old dog. Jesse grabs the edge of the window and stops it from going any higher.
“I need a ride into Wells,” he says.
“Let go of the glass,” the old man says, still trying to turn the handle.
“I’m hurt,” Jesse says.
“Let go of the glass.”
Jesse yanks the door handle, but the door is locked. He reaches through the window for the knob. The woman screams, the dog barks, and the man stomps on the gas. Jesse is spun around when the Gremlin takes off, twirls and falls to the ground.
The realization that it’s too late to make it to Wells settles over him like a leaden shroud. He starts walking again. False dawn comes and goes. He keeps walking. Another truck barrels past. He doesn’t try to flag it down, just keeps walking.
The sky is paling when he spies an abandoned homesteader cabin. He makes his way to the windowless, doorless shanty and sticks his head inside. It’s not the sanctuary he was hoping for. The roof has collapsed, leaving only one corner of the interior covered, and there’s no chance of cobbling a shelter out of the debris. Someone’s burned it all in the center of the dirt floor.
He scans the surrounding desert. Would a thick enough blanket of brush protect him from the sun? Might he dig a hole and cover himself with earth? He steps outside, drops to his knees, and begins scooping a temporary grave, but it’s only a foot deep by the time the sun crests the hills to the east and sends a wave of orange fire rolling across the desert.
He returns to the cabin and crouches under what’s left of the roof, can’t do anything but watch helplessly as sunlight slides toward him, a deadly incoming tide. Closer and closer it creeps, until he’s forced to stand with his back to the wall. The shadow of the remaining bit of roof holds back the brightness, but in an hour, when the sun rises above the cabin, there’ll be no escaping it.
He charts the sun’s ascent by the light descending the walls, his desperation increasing as one by one his benchmarks—the bent nail, the stain that looks like a ten-gallon hat, the top of the f in the spray-painted fuck next to the window—are illuminated. His anxiety peaks when the scrap of shadow beneath his feet starts to fade. His legs quake, his teeth chatter, and he wonders if he’ll shake himself to pieces before the sun incinerates him.
Then, suddenly, mercifully, a great calm blooms in his chest.
The wisest man he ever met was an old sailor who held down the end of the bar at the Whale, a lowdown San Francisco saloon later destroyed in the quake. Snipe, as this sailor was known, would, for the price of a rum, answer questions about matters both practical and philosophic, everything from what to do to unstick the lid of a pickle jar to how to woo a woman above your station.
One night, as a lark, Claudine bought him a drink and told Jesse to ask him something. On the spot, Jesse struggled to come up with a question. Snipe noticed his difficulty and said, “I know what you want to know. You want to know what happens to you when you die.” This was actually the furthest thing from Jesse’s mind. He was a rover and didn’t anticipate ever dying. But he humored the old man, telling him to go on.
“When you die, what you believe will happen to you is exactly what will happen to you,” Snipe said. “If you want angels, you’ll get angels. If you think you’re headed for hell, you’ll end up there. And if you think this sad slog is all there is, it’ll be all there is.”
Jesse scoffed at the words then, but remembering them now, he’s filled with new courage. He moves from the shade into the sunlight and walks out the door of the cabin. His flesh smokes, and the pain is everything he feared, but he doesn’t fear it anymore. After twenty feet his body is dust, but the rest of him keeps going. The rest of him steps onto the road and heads down it. The rest of him watches a cloud drift, a jackrabbit run. The rest of him sniffs sage and kicks an empty can. The rest of him sees Claudine materialize out of a watery mirage and runs laughing to her.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my team: Henry Dunow, Sylvie Rabineau, Jill Gillett, and Peter Dealbert. And thank you to Asya Muchnick and everyone at Mulholland Books.
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About the Author
Richard Lange is the author of the story collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World, Angel Baby, and The Smack. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the International Association of Crime Writers’ Hammett Prize, a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Los Angeles.
Also by Richard Lange
The Smack
Sweet Nothing
Angel Baby
This Wicked World
Dead Boys
Rovers Page 25
