Stone Junction

by Jim Dodge

  As if to confirm the keys’ absence, Wally spread his arms, his open palms upraised in a mild plea for forbearance. ‘I had to wake you to give you the news.’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘Good news,’ Wally said merrily.

  ‘Do you have my truck?’

  ‘No,’ Wally smiled. ‘That’s the good news.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘For you. See, we towed our truck in about sunup – it ate a valve – and after we had some breakfast, Annie went to Tucson for parts. We don’t have much money, but we have lots of relatives between us, and Annie’s cousin’s brother-in-law has a wrecking yard in Tucson. Anyway, about an hour ago, two guys in a grey Chevy sedan, last year’s model, came up the road. They were both large men with nice shines on their shoes. They said they were U.S. Treasury agents out looking for a man named Isaiah Kharome so they could give him a large tax settlement that he’d never collected. But to tell you the truth, they didn’t look like men happy to be returning money. They looked like men who had terrible childhoods.’

  ‘I see,’ Daniel said. ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I told them we hadn’t had a guest in over a month and that I didn’t recall seeing a seventy-two Chevy four-by with a camper, New Mexico license LXA 009. I wouldn’t have been able to tell them that with much conviction if your truck had been parked here.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Daniel said. ‘They weren’t Treasury agents, though, I can tell you that. The IRS is hunting me because I claim my writing is religious and therefore tax exempt, but they don’t agree. They’ve been hounding me for months – Isaiah Kharome is my pen name.’

  ‘Ah,’ Wally said, as if he finally understood. ‘I didn’t think they had money for you. Only trouble. But see how generosity encourages good fortune? You kindly lend me your truck, and it’s gone when they’re here. Not only that, I’ve always thought that when people are chasing you, the best place to be is behind them.’

  ‘So they’ve gone on, I take it. Toward Tucson?’

  ‘That’s what their car tracks show. I always take a morning run so I went down to the highway to check.’

  ‘I’m a little worried about your wife. They might see the truck on her way back from Tucson.’

  ‘Before my run, I used the CB to call my uncle in Dos Cabezas who has a phone and he called Annie’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s wrecking yard to leave a message that she shouldn’t drive on the interstate today. She will understand. Annie is strange even for a woman, but she possesses great intelligence. She also likes to drive fast, so I would expect her back by early afternoon with your truck, and also with some groceries. We will have a feast to good luck this evening if you would like to join us.’

  Daniel frowned and said ruefully, ‘No, gosh, I can’t. I’m supposed to be in Phoenix tonight.’

  Wally said with a faint chastising edge, ‘I had a teacher, an Apache holy man named Two Snakes, who taught that the best place to hide was where they’d already looked.’

  ‘He sounds like a very wise man,’ Daniel said, ‘but I have obligations beyond my control, and I must honor them.’

  Wally nodded. ‘Religious obligations and family obligations are very important to keep things going right. But you should take the scenic route to Phoenix – Six sixty-six, to Seventy, to Sixty, and then Eighty. But of course these tax people are everywhere you go these days.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Daniel assured him. ‘I’m difficult to catch and much harder to keep.’

  When Daniel heard his truck drive in two hours later, he was still sitting on the edge of the bed, his shirt in his hands. He was thinking about what to do next, given the news of pursuit. He felt tired, calm, and strangely content, as if something was coming inevitably to a conclusion, its trajectory locked. He admitted to himself that he wanted a conclusion, wanted one soon. He didn’t feel he had the power to hold on much longer. He decided to call Volta at the first opportunity. His cover was evidently blown and he wanted to know why. That was a practical matter. But he also owed Volta an explanation, or as much of one as he could give. And maybe Volta could give him some advice on how to proceed with the Diamond, how to see inside it. Daniel didn’t want to return it until he’d seen what it was the Diamond wanted him to see. Maybe Volta could offer him perspective. He felt like he was too close to see clearly, yet he couldn’t back away.

  Daniel pulled out of the Two Moons Rest Stop an hour before dark. He left five thousand dollars on top of the TV, more an endowment to the notion of rest than a tip for services. Wally Moon had his head under the hood of a battered pickup when Daniel drove by. Daniel tooted twice. Without looking up, Wally Moon lifted the box-wrench in his hand and made a gesture that was, at once, forward and farewell. THE NOTEBOOKS OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL

  My name is Jennifer Raine Escapedangone; also known as you can kiss my sweet little ass good-bye. Me and Mia went out easy the way Clyde came in. Quick on tiptoes down the hall to the end of the wing and the unlocked janitor’s supply room and then feet first down the laundry chute into the basement, kids on a slide, landing on a pile of fear-rank, night-sweat sheets that Clyde had mounded there for us. The basement walls were ringed with huge washing machines and dryers, and right above them was a series of narrow, ground-level windows. The fifth window on the eastern wall had a broken lock. I slithered through onto the cool lawn, then reached back for Mia. I felt our hands touching in the darkness, the pain and trust between us giving me strength, and pulled her through the window. We scampered across the moon-shadowed grounds to the brick wall, six feet at most, more a screen than a barrier, and from there, as my dear DJ says, it was simply a matter of over and out, out, out, out, and free, good gods, at last!

  The first place we stopped was your standard all-nite drug-dealing diner at the edge of town – chafed plastic glasses, tape-scabbed stools at the formica counter, the waitress in a frayed, ice-blue rayon dress, bra and slip straps showing through, country-and-western on the radio in the kitchen, the spattering grill-grease and the radio’s static indistinguishable, and four junk-grayed men nodding to the same slow rhythm as they dunked donuts in their cold coffee.

  I ordered a chocolate milkshake to share with Mia. We’d just finished when two young strutters came in, sleaze-boys, the kind who live on what they roll from junkies. I didn’t like the way they looked at me. I wanted out of there so bad I left the whole five for the waitress and headed for the door.

  The greasiest one waited until I’d passed before he called, ‘Hey mama, where you going? The party’s just about to get started.’

  ‘Sorry, I have a date with the DJ to dance on Jim Bridger’s grave.’ I walked away.

  I hitched a ride around dawn from an old rancher in a battered flatbed who said he could only take me a little ways; I told him that was far enough. I lied to all his questions, and said nothing when he scolded me for hitching alone. ‘Lotsa bad men out driving. Drunked-up, too.’

  He took me almost to Fairfield. I went to a Salvation Army store and bought some faded Levis and a men’s flannel shirt with my last five dollars.

  After that I hitched a ride – another farmer – to here, somewhere in the central valley. I’m writing this by the scatter of moonlight through the cracked shakes of an abandoned barn. It’s ramshackle and smells like old piss, but it’s shelter enough on this warm spring night.

  Ever since we got here (Mia’s already asleep – she had a tough day) I’ve been trying to remember that yeasty odor of bread rising in my grandmother’s warming oven from when I was four or five, and I just smelled it now, sharp and musky, and I remember my blue pajamas and the moonlight sheen on the goosedown quilt as soft as a goodnight kiss. And if I hold really still and forget myself, I feel the mist of my father’s seed in my mother’s pulse, can feel myself passing bodiless between them, my face erupting out of nothingness, my tiny mouth already hungry for a voice, and I can see my first dream shiver through the veins in my almost transparent eyelids, but I can’t remember what I was dr
eaming. The first dream – that’s what I want to know. I want to remember the first dream I ever had. And then I’ll use that knowledge to ransom my ghost from the lightning.

  Daniel didn’t call Volta at the first opportunity, nor the hundredth. He couldn’t figure out if the second thoughts represented prudent doubts or were merely allowing him to put it off. His cover was clearly blown, and Daniel had to consider the possibility that Volta had decided that the Diamond was safer with the government than with him, and had turned him to CIA, rolled over on him, ‘dropped a dime’ as Mott said.

  He had to consider it, but he didn’t believe it. More likely, there was a tap, or maybe an agent inside the Alliance. A tap would make it risky to even call Volta, since they probably would set it up for immediate trace. That would provide his general location, if nothing else. He wasn’t worried about being caught – he could vanish with the Diamond and walk through a wall of tanks – but he didn’t want the annoyance. Nor did he want to leave them the truck with Wally’s and Annie’s fingerprints and a paper trail they could perhaps follow back to the AMO people who had set it up. But when all that convenient logic was exhausted, Daniel, with the fiercest honesty he could muster, knew the reason for his reluctance was a decidedly unreasonable intuition that he would be sadder for the call. Sadness would weaken him in his attempt to see what the Diamond wanted to offer.

  He was thinking about drawing a blind yes or no from a hat when it struck him that he had never tried looking into the Diamond’s center with his eyes closed. He pulled over at the next rest area and vanished with the Diamond. He looked into its center steadily and then closed his eyes. He saw an after-image of the spiral flame that faded quickly. He could imagine the Diamond, see the flame center clearly, but could not see inside it. After an hour, he forced himself to reappear with the Diamond and get back on the road.

  He received two signs almost immediately. The first was premonitory: a mileage sign that read GLOBE 37. The second sign was so direct Daniel stopped the moment he saw it. The sign was on the wall of a fire-gutted gas station, written large on the outside face of the cinderblocks; the heat-blistered paint had peeled and fallen away, and of what was once a list of parts and services, all that remained were:

  AKES

  ARK PLUG

  VOLTA REGULAT

  The phone booth at the far end of the lot was unscathed except for a lingering odor of damp smoke.

  Volta answered on the first ring: ‘Allied Furnace Repair, Night Service.’

  Daniel said, ‘The place I’m calling from advertises “akes, ark plugs, volta regulats.” It left me no choice.’

  ‘Well,’ Volta replied mildly, ‘I’m glad to see you’re beginning to develop a sense of humor. You’re going to need it. First of all––’

  ‘I have doubts about the privacy of this line,’ Daniel interrupted, adding, to explain his apparent rudeness, ‘before we get started.’

  ‘No, the line is secure. But I surmise by your doubts that you already know your traveling identity has been compromised.’

  ‘So I’ve gathered.’

  ‘Listen while I explain what happened. Listen carefully. It’s a revelatory explanation.’

  Daniel listened as instructed. As Volta described Dredneau’s torture, Daniel closed his eyes and slumped back against the phone-booth wall. He could feel what was coming in Volta’s voice from the slight tremor at the end of each precise statement, feel it in the precision itself, and when Volta revealed that the man who’d tortured Dredneau had also shot his mother for no reason, Daniel softly cried, ‘Ohhh no. No.’

  Volta paused a moment, then continued, ‘Subsequently, through some inspired work by Smiling Jack, we learned the code name of the person who betrayed the Livermore theft to the CIA.’ Volta stopped and waited.

  Daniel, too stunned to think, took a deep breath. ‘The killer and the snitch – you didn’t mention their names.’

  ‘Daniel,’ Volta said evenly, ‘I will give you the names when you bring me the Diamond. I promised you in the hospital, the first time we met, that I would do everything I could to help you find your mother’s killer, and now he is known. I’ve honored my promise. Daniel, you vowed that in exchange for my help you would share with me the privilege of beholding the Diamond and the responsibility of returning it to hiding, safe from us all. You haven’t honored your promise, and even granting extraordinary circumstances, that shows an utter lack of respect for me, and yourself. If you want to revenge your mother, you must honor your promise with the Diamond. That’s fair.’

  Daniel howled, ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do? Terrorize him until he kills himself?’ Daniel hurled the phone at the glass wall but the cord was too short and snapped back against his wrist. He grabbed it and slammed it down on the hook.

  He stormed back to his truck, started it, then turned it off and slumped back in the seat. ‘It’s fair, it’s fair, goddammit, it’s fair. But I didn’t want to know, don’t need decisions.’ He walked resolutely back to the phone booth and redialed Volta’s number.

  Volta again answered on the first ring. He didn’t seem surprised to hear Daniel say, ‘You’re right, it is fair. But I’m going to keep the Diamond until I see inside it, or through it, or whatever it allows me to do. I want to see inside this Diamond a thousand times more than I want to revenge my mother’s death – and even though Wild Bill cleaned out most of that cold frenzy, I would still revenge it. Do you understand what I’m saying? That as much as I would like justice for my mother, it’s nothing compared to my desire to open the Diamond. I need you to let me go. I need your blessing.’

  ‘I’ve already let the Diamond go, Daniel, and I think the only way it will ever open for you is to let it go. You’re free to do as you can, free to go, free to return. I have no claims on your soul. I wish you luck, and I wish you success. But I will not give my blessings because I believe the Diamond will destroy you. It may destroy you beautifully, magnificently, but it will destroy you, Daniel, and I will not bless pointless waste.’

  ‘It wants me to see. I can feel it.’

  ‘It’s a mirror, Daniel. Just another mirror.’

  ‘I think it’s a window. A door.’

  ‘Know thyself,’ Volta said, ‘and to thine own self be true. I have too much admiration for you to deny your right to explore as you must. But I wouldn’t be true to myself – or you – if I didn’t tell you I think you’ll be destroyed, and that if you are, Daniel, it will break my heart.’

  ‘But you don’t understand––’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Volta cut in. ‘I grant that possibility. But then, maybe you don’t understand. Maybe you’re obsessed, powerless against the Diamond, or simply too young to know better.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Daniel said. ‘But that’s what I’m committed to finding out.’

  ‘May you find what you seek.’

  Daniel smiled in the dark phone booth. ‘That sounded like a blessing to me.’

  ‘Then may you find what you deserve.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a blessing, too. I’ve earned this right, Volta, and though you truly helped me earn it – for which you have my endless gratitude – it’s mine. And this is what I’m feeling in my marrow: It is mine not because I earned it or physically possess it; the Diamond is mine by destiny.’

  Volta said, ‘Be thrice blessed then. I’ll add an ancient Estonian blessing: “May your journey have an end.” The Diamond is your responsibility now.’

  Daniel said quickly, ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way. But as part of my sense of responsibility, I vow to bring the Diamond to you when my work is finished, or if for some reason I can’t and am forced to return it to hiding, I’d like to return it to wherever you had intended.’

  ‘No, Daniel. I let it go. I can’t tell you how clean it felt when I finally released it from my grasp. And for that lesson, I thank you. I’m going to fold up this operation now, and go home to Laurel Creek Hollow. You have the routing numbers; the direct line is sev
en multiplied by the day of the month. Call if you want, or come visit. I’ll guarantee your welcome but not my assistance; that will depend on the wisdom of what you need and my capacity and inclination to provide it. Let us take our leave as friends.’

  ‘That’s all I wanted,’ Daniel said, his eyes burning with tears. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Good-bye, Daniel,’ Volta said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Daniel repeated. ‘Yes, good night. I’ll be in touch.’

  They hung up at the same time.

  Volta spent the rest of the night on the phone and radio dismantling the operation and reassigning people and resources to other projects. Ellison Deeds, Jean Bluer, and Smiling Jack were all in the field somewhere, so he left messages to call him upon their respective returns. He packed equipment till well after sunrise, then slept fitfully for a few hours. He lay in bed and tried to imagine what Daniel saw when he looked into the Diamond. Daniel had said he could only see into the Diamond when he vanished with it. Volta was skittish about even imagining himself vanished. He remembered the temptation to cross the threshold and keep going, consumed in some undreamable whirlpool of felicity, an ecstatic suicide. Instead, he tried a technique he’d learned from Ravana Dremier, slowly condensing himself to an essence and then separating it from his psyche, lifting himself out of himself as an objective witness, yet retaining his will to know.

  He still couldn’t imagine Daniel vanished and looking into the Diamond, but paradoxically – having abandoned rationality for empathetic imagination – he suddenly understood what he might have deduced through laborious reasoning. Daniel saw a spiral flame in the Diamond, just as he’d seen it in the vision he’d reported to Volta. That explained why he’d called it ‘mine,’ and why he thought it was meant for him alone. His vision, of course, had disposed him toward seeing it. Volta was the only other person in the world capable of confirming whether the spiral flame was indeed only visible to the vanished. And both of them knew Volta wouldn’t vanish again. Daniel had perhaps chosen to spare them both the sorrow of refusal – whether out of kindness or pity, Volta wasn’t sure.