The Desert Waits

by J. Carson Black

  “She must have thought a lot of you. Now that I think of it, she did mention you a few times. You were friends in school?”

  “She was my ... mentor.”

  “Mentor?”

  Alex laughed as she remembered. “She taught me how to fit in, got me interested in boys, helped me make the transition from child to adult. She wouldn’t let anyone make fun of me.”

  Ted squeezed her hand again, running his thumb up and down the inside of her wrist, a mindless, repetitive motion that seemed to soothe him.

  Alex was assailed by a vision of Caroline, twelve years old. Her fairy-blond hair, her slender, tanned body perfect in cheap jeans and a Kmart top. “She was so beautiful, so popular. Everyone wanted to be her friend. What she saw in me, I don’t know. It was like a cardinal being attracted to a sparrow.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re beautiful, too.”

  Alex laughed. “Not like her. She looked like a movie star even then. Like a modern Jean Harlow.” Caroline had the same quality as Harlow—that wrong-side-of-the-tracks defiance, the vulnerability underneath. Like a moth attracted to the flame. Poor, doomed Caroline.

  Abruptly, Alex was struck by another parallel between Jean Harlow and Caroline. Jean Harlow had died during the filming of Saratoga: they’d had to complete the picture by working around her scenes. “You really think they can finish Jagged Impact now?” she asked Ted. “Without Caroline?”

  “You wouldn’t believe what they can do with computers these days. We can move her digitally from one scene to another. Put her head on another actress’s body. That’s what they did when Brandon Lee was killed in The Crow. We could rerecord her lines with another actress who sounds like her, make it all uniform. Nobody will ever know the difference, what’s really Caroline and what’s not.”

  Business as usual. It disturbed her that the studio might be looking at Caroline’s death as a logistical problem.

  “They were going to wrap shooting this week anyway. Most of it’s in the can.” Ted stared at her searchingly, seemingly unaware that his hand held hers in a vise. Alex squirmed and he lightened his grip.

  He apologized, adding, “It sounds so cold, doesn’t it? I’m really ambivalent about letting them finish the film. It’s just that I don’t want the public to forget her.” He sighed, stared at his feet in the water. “Between you and me, her last film didn’t do too well. When they’re relying on your name to sell a multimillion-dollar motion picture, they don’t give you a lot of chances. This was her opportunity to redeem herself, and I’m not going to let her down.”

  He released her hand and swung his legs out of the pool, resting them on the deck so he was facing her. “She was on her way back, Alex. If you could have seen the dailies—it was the best work she’d ever done. We’re talking Oscar, even though you know there’s a lot of prejudice against action-adventure films. She was that good. That’s the way she would have wanted to go out.”

  Alex noticed Ted spoke in clichés. She supposed it was due to the media he worked in.

  “It’s late. You must be bushed, and here I am talking shop.” Ted stood up and unrolled his trouser legs. He held out his hand and Alex took it, letting him help her to her feet.

  She realized she was shaking from the adrenaline rush, a natural enough reaction in the aftermath of a tragedy. Ted loomed close, invading her space. Involuntarily, she stepped back.

  Ted stepped back, too. “How about lunch tomorrow? I’d like to hear more about you and Caroline—your childhood. She didn’t like to talk about it much.”

  The desire to get away came with a rush, a dizzying suddenness that took her breath. She needed to be alone. She needed the fresh air, the salve she knew and loved best: nature. She needed the desert. “I thought I’d go out to the canyon tomorrow and photograph some animals while I’m here. And then I’ll probably head back to Tucson.”

  “Dinner before you go? I feel like I’ve known you forever. I guess because you and Caroline were so close.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was plaintive. “I really could use a friend right now.”

  Alex almost relented, but the idea of spending more time in his company didn’t appeal to her. They were still strangers; until tonight, he’d only been a name on a Christmas card. Alex sensed she might not be able to shake him if he started depending on her. “ I have to get back,” she said gently.

  He stared at her, his expression neutral. “Oh. All right.” He stuck out his hand. “It was nice meeting you, Alex. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been under different circumstances.”

  “Me, too.” She wondered if she’d offended him.

  The moment stretched like a rubber band. Feeling awkward in the extreme, Alex took another step back.

  Abruptly, Ted pulled her to him, squeezed her in a big bear hug. When he let her go, he said, “Thanks, Alex. Thanks for just being here.” Then he picked up his shoes and socks and walked away.

  When Alex awoke just before dawn, the sense of unreality persisted.

  She wondered why she wasn’t devastated by Caroline’s death, why she couldn’t grieve more. A gulf had grown between them in the intervening years, a natural result of living and growing. The Caroline she’d met briefly two days ago was not the same person she remembered. When she tried to summon up the young girl she knew before, the memory was vague. The past had faded to a flat, one-dimensional photograph. She could touch the surface, but as hard as she might try, she couldn’t climb back into that time.

  The image that came to mind was Caroline Arnet the movie star, the restless too-thin woman in biker clothes who paced her suite as if it were a cage.

  But she remembered me. Alex thought of the chain and shell fragment glimmering faintly in the moonlight. Apparently Caroline had thought a lot more of their friendship than she had.

  “That’s right, Cafarelli,” she said aloud. “There’s enough guilt to go around, but you go ahead and take an extra helping.”

  Alex wondered if it was just guilt that kept tugging at her. The skin over her bones was as dry as paper and her nerves tingled. She felt restless, jittery. Caroline still exerted a pull on her even though Alex didn’t understand its exact nature.

  She looked out the window at the mountain soaring above the terra cotta-colored roofs. The sun had just topped a rugged crag, backlighting the saguaros marching down the blue-gold slopes and setting the yellow-blooming palo verde trees on fire. She showered quickly and stuffed her clothes into the black duffel bag she used as a suitcase. She’d grab a quick breakfast, check out, stow the bag in her Jeep, and get out to the canyon by eight.

  Alex nearly tripped over the snaking television cables in the lobby. She counted four video cameras and a spate of microphones; reporters stalked the area, antennae ready for anyone with a story to tell. Inadvertently, she hunched her shoulders and tried to look unobtrusive.

  “Your room is paid for through the end of next week,” the desk clerk told her when she handed him the key.

  Alex didn’t mention that her room had been paid for by a dead woman. “I’ll be leaving today.”

  “You do know that breakfast is included.”

  She didn’t know that. Yesterday she’d woken up late and had a couple of handfuls of GORP on the way to the canyon. As if on cue, the smell of bacon wafted in from the coffee shop. Alex loved bacon, although she didn’t have it often. Some unknown gremlin in her ancestry had contributed high cholesterol to her DNA.

  Cholesterol or not, she was going to have the bacon. She’d come from a family where comfort came from food, and bacon was definitely a comfort food. It fell into the same category as grilled-cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup. She needed it for the dull ache in her stomach, although logically she knew the ache came from loss, not hunger. “When’s check-out time?” she asked the clerk.

  “Noon.”

  She took her key back, returned the duffel bag to her room, and went to breakfast.

  The place was overflowing with movie people and news r
eporters. They glanced at her as she entered the dining room, then dismissed her with a look. As she waited for the hostess, Alex overheard two of the crew in line ahead of her talking about Caroline’s death. Apparently they had been given the day off in her memory, less a tribute to the dead actress as a timeout for the director and producer to decide which scenes they still needed and how to get around the absence of Caroline’s character.

  “You think someone did it on purpose?” The thirtyish, earnest man wearing chinos and a Hawaiian shirt focused on his companion, a pale young woman wearing a pinched expression, a black tunic, and blacker leggings.

  “I heard they questioned Luther for hours,” she said.

  “Phil, too.”

  “He should’ve checked that gun. Brandon Lee wasn’t that long ago.” She lit up a cigarette and held it away from her side. The smoke rose like an Indian rope trick into Alex’s face. She stepped back out of the line of fire.

  The man lowered his voice. “You ask me, Phil’s not the problem. Booker’s got access to the props. In fact, he’s more likely to be handling them than Phil.”

  “You don’t think he … ” She hugged herself and shuddered. “God, he gives me the creeps.”

  “He’s crazy as a bedbug. Look at him.”

  Alex had no trouble picking out the object of their scorn. A short, little man sat at a table by himself humming “Stairway to Heaven” as he systematically divided his meal into something resembling a pie graph.

  “You know he was always bothering her.”

  “Oh, come on,” the girl in black snorted.

  “No, really. You’ve seen the way he looked at her. Like she was a butterfly pinned to a board.”

  “Don’t even go there,” she warned.

  “Amos said she got a bouquet of flowers while she was going over her lines last week. She took one look at the card that came with them and turned white as a sheet.”

  “Amos doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “He said she threw the flowers in the trash and tore up the card. He looked later, put the pieces together. It said, ‘From Uncle Wiggly.’ Weird, huh?”

  The hostess came up to seat them, and Alex didn’t hear any more.

  Behind the hotel a dirt road wound up into the foothills of the Cascabels, ending in a turnaround after approximately twelve miles. The only other vehicle was a white Volkswagen dune buggy canted on the mosaic of rocks at the edge of the road. A cotton-wood tree dappled the Cascabel Mountain Trail sign with sparse shade. The entrance consisted of PVC pipes set into the wire- strand fence; a turnstile to keep out motorbikes. Alex followed the trail up and over two ridges of desert scrub before reaching the fork which would eventually lead her down into Groves Canyon. It wasn’t a well-used trail, but she saw other footprints beside her own. Another reason she didn’t think the jaguarundi would come around here.

  Even at nine in the morning, it was hot. The spidery trail climbed steeply before leveling off along the ridge. As Alex hiked, her mind lingered on the conversation she’d overheard. Booker Purlie looked like the type to harbor an obsession.

  A car door slammed far behind her, muffled by distance. Another hiker maybe? Or the people in the dune buggy? She listened for the engine to start up, but there was no other sound. Another hiker then.

  Once over the last hill, the trail dropped rapidly to the canyon floor. The canyon was a tangle of young, green cottonwood trees, scraggly oak, and an occasional sycamore. Sunlight shimmered on the stream as it eddied and rippled through the gorge. Occasionally there were calm pools surrounded by great slabs of rock, and the sun laid out golden nets in the coppery water. The canyon got rockier as she went along, strangled by hackberry and clumps of tall beargrass. Gradually the path petered out, lost among a jumble of boulders and heavy vegetation. Alex paused, staring at the impenetrable brush, trying to figure out what to do. If she continued, she’d make enough noise to drown out a herd of bull elephants. Damn, it was hot! She sat down in the shade of a velvet ash and drank from her canteen.

  An arrow of light bounced off the tree beside her. Someone’s watch or canteen or belt buckle. She glanced up at the ridge, but temporarily blinded by the sun, saw nothing. The hiker must have taken the other path, gone higher into the Cascabels.

  She spotted a sketchy trail along the edge of the canyon that avoided most of the brush. It was a game trail, a natural corridor for wildlife. Hugging the path, Alex tried to keep below the brush line, careful not to slip on the loose rocks and make noise. The canyon became narrower, twisting in and out of shadow. Alex began to feel that same vague sense of foreboding she’d experienced when she first saw the Hotel Sonora. All of a sudden, she felt as though she wasn’t alone. She stopped, listened, scanned the canyon, every sense an antenna.

  Nothing except the sound of rushing water.

  Then just as she was about to start walking again, she thought she heard the scuff of a boot on rock. She glanced up. A tiny avalanche of rocks trickled down the hillside far above.

  The hair on the back of her arms prickled. Shielding her eyes, Alex strained to see to the top of the cliff. All she saw were saguaros poking into the neon-blue sky, growing out of the rock like candles in wall niches.

  Her heart broke into a gallop. Was someone watching her? Ridiculously, she thought of Caroline’s stalker. But who would want to stalk her?

  She waited, pressed uncomfortably against the rough bark of a mesquite tree poking out of the canyon wall. Alex was used to staying in one position for a long time. She’d outwait him. He was bound to make a move.

  Seconds stretched into minutes. Her heart hammered against her rib cage. Maybe it was her imagination. She’d been spooked by Caroline’s death, had begun to think about her own mortality. She was alone in a remote place, but that had never bothered her before. Logically, she had always known that all it took was the right place at the wrong time, that she could be raped and murdered and left in a shallow desert grave. She’d never sensed menace until now. Now, something was wrong.

  Alex closed her eyes and saw the ridge and sky in negative relief behind her lids, aching Day-Glo orange. Her heart was pounding now. Adrenaline ran like quicksilver through her veins, making her want to run. Run all the way back up the canyon to the turnaround, lock herself in her Jeep. She could picture it, hitting the lock pins, starting the engine, laying scratch as she got the hell out of here—What’s wrong with me?

  Hardly anyone came to this canyon. If somebody wanted a victim, why go looking for her in this remote area? Why not pick up a hitchhiker on the highway?

  It had to be the hiker, the one she’d heard earlier. He’d wandered off the trail, come too close to the edge. Her imagination had run away with her, that was all.

  He saw himself as a lion strolling the veldt among herds of zebras and antelope. He’d watched that exact scene in a documentary once, and it had surprised him how unconcerned the lesser animals had been by the presence of the majestic predator in their midst. They had seemed unaware that at any moment the lion could turn on them and take whichever victim he pleased.

  He was like that lion. The people he interacted with every day had no idea they were lesser beings at the mercy of his whims.

  He’d come up with other analogies to explain this amazing phenomenon: the magical boy at Disney World who was always propelled to the head of the line, getting to take the rides over and over again without paying; the brilliant director whose movies were populated by extras, extras in his film, their pathetic dramas enacted only to enhance his own story line. But he preferred the image of the lord of the jungle walking among his subjects; it came the closest to his true essence. Especially since his Damascus Experience. Since he had crossed over to the other side, so to speak.

  As a matter of fact, he had taken to calling himself The Lion.

  Today he was watching prey. He had her in the sights of his AR-15; he could kill her anytime. Just put a little more pressure on the trigger, blow her head apart like a
melon. Pow!

  He exulted in his power; it was a heady thing, holding sway over life and death. To think he hadn’t even known it existed until just recently—he’d been such a babe in the woods! That unforeseeable problem, that little snag, had turned out to be a completely unexpected bonus. It put everything else into perspective.

  He wasn’t just playing dress-up. To prove it, he had dropped his subscription to the American Survival Guide—a purely symbolic gesture, but one of which he was proud.

  He would miss it. The how-to articles had been excellent. He’d managed to become self-reliant in a relatively short period of time, and the magazine had kept him up to date on the latest in weapons and other gewgaws. But he couldn’t stand all that holier-than-thou blathering about the new world order, whatever that was. The people who read that magazine thought they were stronger and smarter than the average Joe who lived from paycheck to paycheck, but they were fooling themselves. They were just zebras of a different color. They were like everybody else in their need to validate their passion. They rationalized away the real power, the real truth. They missed the point.

  Guns were for killing, not for playing games.

  He, himself, was new at it. But he was already a player.

  He’d followed the wildlife photographer for the hell of it. It had been so much fun following Caroline, it was hard to stop once you were in the habit. He hadn’t anticipated that Caroline’s death would leave a void like this. When it came right down to it, he realized that he loved spying on people, seeing them when they were without pretense, when they weren’t wearing their masks.

  He loved the idea that the wildlife photographer was totally herself, thinking she was completely alone. Maybe she’d scratch her ass. Maybe she’d go to the toilet, ha ha, except here there wasn’t any real toilet around for miles. He’d loved watching Caroline on the set, watching as her antics became more extreme. He’d watched her fall apart, spinning faster and faster like a top out of control.

  But in the end, he’d been cheated. Next time, he’d make damn sure things turned out different.