Hallucination.
Heat exhaustion.
The firing off of synaptic nerves before they went silent.
But it was the feeling he could not escape. The feeling that sat in his soul, accompanying the dark shades of psychosis. The feeling in the pit of his stomach of absolute loneliness. Absolute isolation from all things.
Soon, sleep did overtake Jack, and as an unknown blessing to him, he dreamt of nothing.
27
The next morning Jack followed Laura out of the bedroom and Boots met them standing in the kitchen.
“Yous feeling better this morning?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Jack said.
“Well, all right then. You can come with me and help me get some grub.”
Jack looked at Laura quizzically as he started after the old man, who was already out the door. “I should get something to eat first.”
“I got some here for you,” Boots replied, tapping a bag slumped over his shoulder. “And there be some breakfast on the table for you, Laura.”
“All right,” she answered. “You two have fun.”
What a way to wake up, Jack thought. Not only was he following behind Grizzly Adams, but he got sent off by low-budget sarcasm.
Out on the porch, Boots grabbed a shotgun that was leaning next to a stool and slung it over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Walking west into the desert, five steps behind Boots, Jack watched the swaying of the gun barrel over the old man’s shoulder. The rhythm of the walk mixed with the intensity of the shotgun drove any remnants of the sleep hangover out of Jack’s head.
He had figured last night in the dark that he could take Boots if the old man charged him with an axe. A shotgun changed the equation. They walked on, with the sun at their back and their shadows shortening with each step. The western hills loomed large, but unapproachable.
“You ever kill anything, Jack?”
“What’s that?”
“Kill anything . . . you ever kill anything before?”
“No.”
Boots stopped and turned. “Came pretty close though, didn’t you?” The chew in the old man’s mouth dripped from his lip onto his beard as an evil grin stretched across his face. He wiped his arm across his mouth and the smirk was gone.
Jack’s eyes lowered to the dirt at his feet. Boots turned and kept walking.
“Really ain’t that hard. Just point at what you want dead, and bam!”
“That easy, huh?”
“Yeah, that easy.”
They walked on for half an hour in silence.
Boots spit on the ground as he stopped. They came up to a small gulley that ran perpendicular to their path. Jack could see a worn foot trail that led to the bottom of the dried-up creek bed, and he followed Boots slowly down the ridge. To the north end of the crevice was a small patch of foliage, and Boots sat there staring at it.
“Why don’t you walk down there and scare up some birds, Jack.”
“W-w-what?”
“Flush ’em out, and I’ll kill ’em quick.”
Jack looked north up the creek bed, at the shrubs about fifty yards ahead. He couldn’t process what was being asked of him. “You w-want me to walk down there?”
“Ain’t hard, Jack. Just walk down there and they’ll get spooked, fly up, and bam.”
The idea of walking with his back to a crazy man with a shotgun did not sit well. Arguing with a man with a shotgun wasn’t a good idea either. Jack slowly started walking backward with his eyes glued on Boots, and the gun.
“Come on, Jack, what you think I’m going to do? Shoot you?”
Jack suppressed the stutter that was inching toward his lips. “The thought crossed my mind.”
“Naw. If I wanted you dead, I’d not bother with you in the first place. Sure ain’t going to waste a shell on you.”
Jack backed up a couple more steps, moving slowly down the creek bed. “I guess that makes sense.”
“Sure does . . . you just have to trust me. Now turn around and get down there. It’s going to get real hot here if we stand around all day.”
Turning, Jack felt the sweat begin to leak out of every pore of his body. He forced his legs to move, as the exhaustion of the past several days mixed with the fear in his mind. One step, then another, looking at the ground for snakes and bugs, imagining Boots behind him with the gun trained on his back. With each step, he was sure he would hear a blast, then the punch of lead ripping between his shoulder blades. It seemed logical, a perfect place to off someone, down below the desert floor, out of sight of any living creature. Another step. He looked up and still saw his destination as if through a tunnel. The rock walls terminating in a small patch of brown and green. A cozy spot to die. Another step.
Suddenly he heard commotion ahead. Screeching and chirping, a covey of quail shot out of the shrubbery and raced up over his head. He dropped down as he heard the shotgun go off behind him. A second blast soon followed.
Lying on the rock, Jack heard footsteps approach. He sprung to his feet and checked his body manically for bullet holes and open wounds. There were none. As his pulse slowed back to normal, Jack watched as Boots picked up two birds off the valley floor and walked over to him.
“Good job, Jack. This should do us.”
Jack stared back at Boots, panic and anger filling his body.
“You should see yourself. About jumped out of your skin. Haha, you thought I was really going to shoot you, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Sure did. Let me tell you something. If I was ever going to do that, I’ll do it to your face. Deal?”
Jack continued to brush himself off, trying to rub some manliness into his composure.
“Let’s be going . . . getting a bit hot out here.”
28
The day wore on in slow motion. They ate lunch together from the two birds. Boots was a master of the iron skillet, and all were full. They sat on the front porch and made small talk, as much as creatures from different worlds could.
Jack was disengaged. He felt unsettled. He did not want to be here. He wanted to get back. How could they have ended up in the one place on earth where a simple phone call to get them back to the city was impossible? It was simple—this old man was lonely, talking to his horse and dead people all these years and now had a captive audience. He wasn’t going to let them go until he told them all of his stories of panhandling and skinning ’coons.
Laura was enthralled by Boots. She listened to his tales of desert life and the way things used to be. She seemed to be oblivious to the real situation they were in. She was still on a vacation of sorts.
Why was she encouraging this? Why was she not on his side? Why did she not back him up at times like these? Why couldn’t she see that their situation did not improve from when they were sitting on the highway baking in the sun?
Boots talked about how he moved out in the old times. “Pushed out,” he said, as if there was ever a place where he fit in. “Just not into what people got into.” So he moved out here in the middle of nowhere. His form of running away, Jack surmised.
“Desert is a fine spot,” Boots went on. “You can see a man coming for miles. Ain’t no one can sneak up on you. By the time they get to you, they be worn down. Not ready for no trouble. People in town, they get all worked up. Little man acting big, big man acting bigger. Naw, you can have all that. Out here ain’t no one act tough who ain’t gone in a day or two. There is a peace to that.”
“And the view is unbelievable,” Laura said, looking out onto the western mountain range.
“Yeah, you can’t beat that. Beauty and death out here. Up there on one of them mountains some plane fell out of the sky. Had some lovely lady from film on it. Don’t think they felt much. Over right quick, from what I hear. Mountain probably didn’t look too good from their eyes.” Boots chuckled. He leaned forward in his chair and spit, tobacco turning the sand a deep brown before drying up and cracking again. “I’ve been up ther
e a few times. You can still see some pieces of the plane. Must’ve been quite the mess.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“It be a funny thing. You get up one day and then it ends. You don’t see it coming, but you think you have all the time. That lady probably thought she’d make some more movies, live grandly. But boom, done.” Another spit into the sand punctuated the statement. “Kinda like you, huh?”
“I guess you’re right. I never thought we’d be here right now,” Laura said softly.
Jack just sat listening, stewing in his recollection of the highway. Of his mistake. Of his failure. He was sure Laura’s comment was aimed at him. A small dagger from a quiet victim.
“Bet she never thought she’d be painted across no mountain, huh? But it happens. Ain’t nothing to do about it. It just happens.”
“You sure you didn’t drag them all back here and bury them, Boots?” Jack said, horrifying Laura in the process. Good, he thought. Get mad. Wake up!
“Naw, Jack. That would be a long haul from up there.” Boots spat again, seeming not to notice Jack’s tone.
Jack got up and paced the porch before walking off around the house. He just couldn’t sit any longer.
“A bit antsy, that one.”
“Yeah”—Laura smiled—“he gets anxious pretty quick.”
“I’ve seen it before. Man who can’t sit down ain’t never happy. Always got to be going somewhere.”
“He’s a good guy, Boots.”
“You say so. Man like that get beat down mighty quick where I come from.”
“He just wants to get home. We both do.”
“I can understand that. You seem to be taking it all good.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of enjoying this. Like I said, I never thought I would be sitting here right now.”
“Never can tell what’ll happen. You get home, don’t worry. Just be patient.”
“Okay.”
“I can take you out, if you want. Jack don’t seem to care about it.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t imagine leaving him here, or rather, having to have you deal with him alone.” She smiled, and Boots smiled back.
He pulled the plug out of his cheek and refreshed it with some fresh chew. “Yeah, he’s an ornery cuss. If I’m here by myself with him, I’m liable to put him in the ground out back.”
29
Red sat behind his desk and thumbed through some paperwork. Not much had come down the wire. A few funny stories from the next county, but another light day here in nowhere. He had a rough night’s sleep, never able to fully settle down, and it wore on his face today. Officer PJ was sitting in the other chair directly below the oscillating fan, which caused her blonde hair to blow every which way. Red found himself peeking at her out of his peripherals and laughed to himself. Yeah, he was old, but he wasn’t dead yet. It finally got the better of him.
“Can you move, for Pete’s sake?” he said with a grin.
“Oh, sorry, Red, am I blocking the air?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Thanks.”
PJ moved her chair closer to Red’s desk and took a good look at his tired mug. “You’re not sleeping good?”
“Not so much last night. Kept thinking about that car out there James and I looked over yesterday. It just didn’t seem right.”
“What you mean?”
“Well, you get a couple, pretty well off from a big city. They come out here for a couple days, stay at a pretty fancy place. One day they rent a car, drive it as far from any living soul as you can get . . . get out . . . walk off . . . and disappear.”
“Two of them?”
“Rental and hotel clerks said they were husband and wife.”
“Murder-suicide?”
“Could be. No blood in the car though. That’s a long way to go if one of the people don’t want to go, you know? I would assume they both drove out there on their own accord.”
“Robbery, then double homicide?” she asked as if chomping at the bit.
“Purse left in the car with a string of credit cards. Seems like that would be gone if it was a robbery.”
“Mob hit?”
“You watch too much TV.” Red chuckled. He liked the banter, no matter how ridiculous. It made him feel young, less lonely. “No, there was just something strange about the whole scene. It was like that car hit something out there. Something that stopped it cold.”
“A rock?”
“No, almost like a wall or force field or something. I don’t want to sound crazy, and maybe it’s too late for that, but . . . it looked like the air just pushed it back and kept it from moving. Makes no sense.”
“Hmmm . . . aliens maybe?” PJ smiled. She gave a girlish wink to Red and he managed to keep from showing his embarrassment.
“That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Make this easier to explain. Naw, probably something simpler, it’s just my mind won’t stop racing to the extreme, you know? Most likely scenario is like you said . . . murder-suicide. Probably one of them killed the other someplace else, and then drove out there to do themself in. That would be the most likely scenario.”
“But you don’t feel it? You don’t think it’s something simple like that?”
Red stared down at his desk in deep thought. There was a sensation like a small candle burning in the back of his skull, an idea slowly morphing but still not in a comprehensive form. He looked back at PJ, who waited with extreme interest, and shook his head.
“No. Something out there just didn’t feel right. I don’t know what it was, but I think this couple ran into something out there. What it was or who it was, I have no idea.”
30
Jack stood by the back fence posts and stared off into the distance. Beyond the endless horizon, he wished in his gut to see a sign of humanity somewhere out there that he had missed. Something that he could point to, grab Laura by the hand, and start running toward. Some beacon of freedom. He thought of different prisoners in history, because that is how he viewed himself now.
A captive.
A hostage.
The only difference was that he was bound in by infinite space. Pinned down by an ever-expanding universe.
He envied the traditional prisoner to the degree that they could see their walls. To see the cinder block, the razor wire. At least then you could focus your mind. You would know where freedom was, just on the other side. But where was freedom out here? One step out changed nothing.
One of Jack’s favorite stories was about a man who managed to escape the frozen prison camps of Siberia and walk thousands of miles to freedom in India. The narrator had trekked through mountains and deserts, snow and heat, all in the quest to be a free man. It was an inspirational story that every office jockey dreamed of having the cojones to attempt. The fact that the story was a fake had crushed his inner adventurer. Of course it was a fake, Jack thought as he scanned the rock sea in front of him; no one could survive this.
The horse snorted and woke Jack out of his daydream. He looked over at the mare, who stared back at him.
“What are you looking at?”
The mare just stared back, passive eyes boring a hole through Jack’s head. He walked over to the horse but did not touch it.
“I bet you’d like to get out of here too, huh. Penned up in this forsaken place. What kind of life is that for you?”
With a constant flick of the tail, the beast swatted the flies off its back, and seemed to enjoy the conversation it was having with the man.
“I bet you’d like to run free, just get out of here and run.”
The mare stamped its hoof, and then again. It kept stamping and now started to jump around the pen as if something Jack had said spooked the life out of it. Its neighing and clopping building louder and louder as the horse worked itself into hysteria. Jack stumbled back, wondering what he did to cause the animal to freak out.
He turned around, ready to start yelling for Boots, when he saw them.
He was wide awake.
This was no hallucination
They were real.
Like a low, pitch-black fog, a stream of shadows rushed north across the desert at the base of the western mountains. Its origin stretched south beyond imagination. A raging river of wind and dust moving faster and faster like a midnight freight train. The horse went crazy, stomping, jumping, snorting.
“Boots!” Jack screamed. He screamed again as sand started blowing across his face, the clear air moving with the black rip current, a sandstorm building. The old man came running around the house. He went straight to the pen and calmed the horse, leading it into the little shed and shutting the door. The wind intensified, blowing harder and obscuring the blue sky above.
“Get inside, Jack! Move it!”
Jack ran to the front of the trailer and through the front door. Laura was standing in the kitchen, a look of worry across her face as the wind increased in intensity outside.
“Where’s Boots?”
“He was right behind me!”
Jack ran to the bedroom and looked out the window onto the back. He could see the horse shed through the blowing dust. The horse tucked away from the wind but probably going spastic locked away. He could see the mountains, with a black band of swirling shadow at the base. It was pulsing, moving faster and faster, whipped into frenzy. All this he saw, his eyes wide open, his head clear.
Out by a fence post, Boots stood erect in the wind, staring at the mountains. He seemed unaffected by the haboob brewing around him. His beard flapping in the wind, filling with dust. Jack pounded on the glass, but the old man didn’t turn. Laura came up behind Jack and looked out the window too.
“What’s he doing out there?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We need to go get him.”
“We need to stay in.”
“Is he crazy?”
“I don’t know.”
They watched as Boots raised his hand toward the west and started shaking his fist. His mouth was moving as if he was yelling at the wind. Scolding it, chastising an unruly class of hellions. He screamed and bellowed, but the sound of his voice barely penetrated the glass.
Purgatory Road Page 7
