American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  It’s almost always good. Often it’s very, very good.

  And every night, Bolan thinks as he stares out his office window, there is lightning on the mountains, and the bulbous red-pink moon. It does not matter what phase the moon is in, nor does it matter what the weather is like. These are the things that compose Bolan’s world: the red-pink moon, the Roadhouse, and the blue lightning on the mount.

  Well. Maybe not just those things, Bolan thinks, perhaps a little bitterly. There will always be the little favors he has to do for the people in charge. But without those, where would he be? Certainly not here, listening to David Dord, occupant of the absolute bottom rung at the Roadhouse, except maybe for the downstairs girls. Or some of them, at least. A couple of the whores are pretty canny, more so than Dord.

  Bolan turns back to him. “What do you mean, you think it went well?” he asks over the thumping music from downstairs. “How does a funeral go well? How would you deem one a success, Dave?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” says Dave. “You stick the fucking guy in the ground and hopefully he stays there. Then the preacher says all the appropriate whatnot and you’re done. That’s how I judge it.”

  Bolan blinks slowly. “That’s a very low bar, Dave,” he says. He wishes the Roadhouse were not doing such good business tonight: this is a conversation he’s been dreading all day, and he wants to hear every bit as clearly as he can. “Think, Dave,” he says. “Think real hard for me. Did anyone say anything? Did anyone do anything at all? Anything out of the ordinary? I’m just curious here, Dave. Enlighten me.”

  David Dord, who in his funeral garb looks like a child wearing Daddy’s suit, simply shrugs and shakes his head. “Tom, it was a funeral. It wasn’t a hot spot for talking. No one was particularly eager to discuss their affairs or any such fucking thing.”

  “As far as you saw it.”

  “Yes, as far as I saw it.”

  Bolan slowly blinks again. He is already regretting sending Dord. If he could have he would’ve sent Zimmerman, who is in charge of security at the Roadhouse, and is always very dependable. But after their little job up on the mesa, Bolan knew Zimmerman would be far too hot to send to the funeral. He’s given Zimmerman the next two weeks off, and hopefully the man is spending his time somewhere indoors and quiet, maybe with one of the house girls, which might make everything a lot less quiet. The other two—Norris and Dee—Bolan is keeping close to the Roadhouse. They’re both young and, like a lot of the help Bolan seems to get, quite stupid, and the other night was their first real trial. Bolan needs to know if they’re going to crack. So far Dee seems steady, which does not surprise him: the boy has coasted by on looks and muscle for so long that his mind is too underdeveloped to realize how dangerous their job on the mesa really was. But Norris, well… he isn’t so sure. The kid is definitely messed up. Bolan doesn’t think he should’ve sent him along at all now, not even as the driver.

  But he can’t really blame Norris. Zimmerman told Bolan what happened to Mitchell in that place. The room that just didn’t stop… and even though Norris never actually went inside, Bolan is aware of how disturbing those kinds of places can be. There are places in Wink you just don’t go.

  But all this means he had no one better to send to the funeral than Dord. Dord is not a man Bolan would trust with buttering a piece of toast. He hates looking into Dord’s soft, pasty face and seeing those dull little eyes peeping back at him. He wishes now that he had sent Mallory. Mallory would’ve done a good job, and come back with simply piles of information. But because she is so good, Bolan has Mallory off doing another little errand tonight, one he is even more nervous about than the funeral.

  He checks his watch. It should not be long now.

  “So it all went quietly,” says Bolan.

  “Yes.”

  “And nobody mentioned anything of note.”

  “Note?”

  “Nothing about, oh, foul play.”

  “No,” says Dord.

  Bolan smiles at him coldly. “That seems pretty unlikely, Dave.”

  “Why? I thought you said things went well up there.”

  “They went well. Well enough, I guess. But they know what’s up.” He swivels in his chair to stare out the window again. It is a black night with a strong wind, and he can see the ponderosas waving in the blue luminescence of the parking lot lights. “They know something’s wrong. They just don’t know if they can do anything about it.”

  “And they can’t, right?”

  Bolan stares out the window for a moment longer, watching the dancing trees. Bolan is the sort of person who has looked like he’s in his late fifties for the past thirty years. He has no hair on his head except for his eyebrows and a small, snow-white goatee, and his eyes are puffy and hooded. His face does not emote particularly well: the best expression it makes is one of cynical disappointment, as if he’s expected this sour turn of events and it has confirmed his worst suspicions about the world. Luckily for Bolan—or perhaps unluckily—this is the exact expression he needs to make most of the time.

  From downstairs there is the sound of breaking glass, and a whoop. Bolan absently says, “Go downstairs and help Norris. It sounds like we’ve got a real crowd on our hands.”

  “Fucking truckers,” says Dord, standing up.

  “Yes. Fucking truckers.” He does not watch as Dord leaves. He just hears the sudden burst of music as his office door opens, then closes. He’s tried to soundproof his office as much as possible, for although he runs a roadhouse, he cannot stand country, specifically Nashville country. But it always finds its way in somehow.

  He opens a drawer in the side of his desk. In the drawer are his two most important fallbacks: a loaded .357 Magnum, and fourteen bright pink bottles of Pepto-Bismol. With a soft grunt, Bolan plucks out one bottle, strips the cap of its protective plastic, and cracks it open. He throws away the cup that came taped to the top—the suggested dose became insufficient about a year ago—and opens up another drawer, this one containing highball glasses and paper napkins. He takes one glass and fills it to the brim with the thick, pink fluid, and then, without a moment of hesitation, he downs the entire thing. He sighs a little as he sets the glass down, its sides now coated with milky pink residue. Perhaps this will mollify the ocean of acid currently swirling around his esophagus, or perhaps not. Bolan then picks up the now-empty bottle of Pepto, gauges the distance between the desk and the trash can beside the liquor cabinet, leans back in his chair, and shoots. The bottle twirls through the air and bounces off the lip of the can to fall clattering to the floor. Bolan lets out another irritated grunt and stands to walk over to it.

  As he stands he glances out the window again, and stops. The ponderosas are still dancing outside, and the parking lot is still mostly empty.

  Will they call tonight? he wonders. They would have to. Too much has happened for them not to drop in. But then, they might not. They have been getting harder to predict and understand recently. Which is saying something, for them.

  Bolan is not actually a resident of Wink, nor is the Roadhouse part of the town. His proximity to it is entirely coincidental: Bolan was told ten years ago that this highway route would soon be open to more trucking, and so would be a prime spot for a roadhouse, but the people who told him this were quite wrong: all the traffic to Santa Fe chose a very different route, one that bypassed him entirely. Bolan, desperate, wondered then if any of the nearby towns could possibly sustain the Roadhouse, yet all of them were too far away. Except, of course, for Wink.

  For the first few years of his time at the Roadhouse, Bolan was not sure that Wink still existed. He had been told about it by several locals—something about government work decades ago—but he never met anyone from Wink, and he sure as hell didn’t sell anything to them. The signposts to Wink never even seemed to lead anywhere. But one morning as he was cruising through the mountains, wondering what to do with his crumbling business, he looked down and spotted the prettiest little town square he’d e
ver seen, nestled at the bottom of the valley.

  It stunned him. He’d had no idea it was there. It took several hours to find the way down. Perhaps, he wondered, this was why he never saw anyone from Wink—it was too hard to decipher the goddamn roads in or out. But as he drove along the town’s streets, marveling at this quaint little burg he’d been living right next door to for God knew how long, he began to get a different idea.

  Wink seemed to be a singularly pleasant place. The sunlight felt different here, and the trees were so big and the sidewalks so pristine and white… he actually parked his car and watched a group of boys play baseball. Bolan had no memory of something so blissfully pleasant as that short little game of three innings, but he wished he did.

  Maybe no one left Wink because you’d be crazy to leave. It certainly wasn’t a boomtown by any stretch of the imagination, but everyone here seemed so content.

  He eventually noticed a few suspicious glances coming his way, mostly from parents. He realized what an odd figure he must cut, sitting in his bright red Camaro, watching the children play. Some residents, coming in from some errands, actually stopped on their lawns to look at him. No one said anything, but the message was clear: We’ll tolerate you for now, but that doesn’t mean you’re welcome here.

  Small towns, Bolan thought. Always so damn hostile to outsiders. He started the car, pulled away, and watched in the rearview mirror as the town disappeared in the hills. It’d seemed an interesting discovery, but a useless one—none of those people seemed like the kind to visit the Roadhouse.

  Yet one day, about three years ago, he had a visitor from Wink. And the damnedest thing about it is, he cannot now remember what this visitor looked like. Bolan remembers the bright light shining down from his office lamps, and there was a man with a briefcase in the chair in front of his desk… and Bolan thinks he remembers a blue-gray suit, and a panama hat, yet the way the light struck the hat made the face below nothing but shadow…

  But what the man told him he remembers very well.

  Bolan eyed this strange, indistinct figure, sitting up ramrod-straight in his office chair, and he cocked an eyebrow when the man said, I am told you are a man in dire straits.

  Well, fuck whoever told you that, then, Bolan told him.

  A moment of silence. Yet Bolan did not get the impression the man was either intimidated or offended. We have a business opportunity for you, he said.

  And Bolan said, Oh? And what kind of opportunity would that be?

  And the man said, Please lower your blinds.

  My blinds?

  Yes. The blinds on the window behind your desk. Then I will show you.

  And when he did this the man opened his briefcase, and there inside, packed tightly as one would pack socks and underwear, were plastic bags containing a very bright, clean white powder. We have a business opportunity for you, the man said again.

  And Bolan listened.

  Even today, Bolan is not sure where the heroin comes from. Presumably they have someone somewhere, probably Mexico, he guesses, because God knows what’s up with the border these days. But Bolan, who already did a small amount of dealing when the visitor from Wink made his offer, has now managed to build a fairly respectable little kingdom up here in the mountains, and gotten quite rich. It is mostly a ferrying industry: he is not an outlet, but a warehouse. He is also not entirely sure how this happened, or why the visitor from Wink put it all in motion. What the hell did Wink, a tiny town out in the middle of nowhere, have to do with the drug trade?

  Bolan does not know. But though he is indisputably the ruler of his little kingdom, he knows there is a bigger kingdom out there, one of which he’s but a part. He is not sure who its king is, or even if there is one; he just knows that he makes fortunes only on the whims of someone else, and that he, like Dord and Norris and Zimmerman and Mitchell (who, he has to remind himself, is now Out of Service), takes orders and follows them without question. Now it is no longer a question of their turning off the tap on him; now he wonders what they would do if he refused.

  Bolan is not stupid. He does not bite the hand that feeds him. But he has looked closely at the hand, and what he saw deeply disturbed him.

  There is a reason Bolan has never gone back to Wink after that first visit. He would not even go there if you held a gun to his head. He knows what’s there now.

  He walks to the trash can, picks up the bottle of Pepto, and throws it away. As he returns to his desk he sees there is something on the corner: a soft pink blob of fluid. It must have been flung off the bottle when he made his shot. He wipes at it with a finger. It does not come off, but smears.

  A knock at the door. “Come in,” he says.

  The door opens, and in walks Mallory. To his amusement, she has on a floral sundress that is yards longer than anything she usually wears. This wardrobe choice is not incidental, of course: in Wink her normal garb would attract a lot of eyes and clucking tongues, and entirely too much attention.

  Mallory scowls at him. “What are you smiling at?”

  “The head of the PTA, I think,” he says.

  “Fuck you.” She walks to the liquor cabinet, a heavy canvas satchel swinging from her shoulder, and pours an absolute vat of scotch. Mimicking Bolan’s own feat with the Pepto, she downs it without even blinking. Mallory is a marvelously talented woman, Bolan knows that, yet she has always been a virtuoso drinker. Back when the Roadhouse was first founded, she was its original downstairs girl, taking the boys riding high off their payday to the basement for a half hour’s indulgence. After the visitor from Wink, the establishment gained customers and they hired more girls, and she became the downstairs manager, tending to all the needs and issues the girls inevitably had. And to manage it efficiently, Bolan knew, you had to have a sharp eye for human weakness, and the ruthlessness and shrewdness to act on it. As such, Mallory has assumed the unspoken role of number two at the Roadhouse.

  She pours herself another, but before she can drink Bolan walks to her and gently takes the glass. “How’d it go?” he asks.

  “I got it, didn’t I?” She raises and lowers the shoulder with the satchel.

  Bolan watches her carefully.

  “I did,” she says. “It went fine.”

  “Who did you use?”

  “A junkie,” she says.

  “Who?” Bolan insists.

  “A girl named Bonnie,” says Mallory. “You don’t know her.”

  “The same girl you used last time?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know if we can use her again.”

  Bolan cocks an eyebrow. “And why is that?”

  “She’s all screwed up, Tom,” says Mallory. She takes the scotch back and downs it, throat clicking, and grits her teeth as it settles. “And not just because she’s a goddamn junkie. She knows what we’re having her do is fucking weird. She just doesn’t know how.”

  Bolan gives a faint, unpleasant laugh. “I’m not surprised,” he says. He takes the satchel off her shoulder and walks back to his desk, where he unzips it.

  Inside the satchel is a polished wooden box, about the size of a cigar box. It has not been taped and tied shut; these precautions are not yet necessary. But he still feels extremely anxious holding it.

  “She says she’s being followed,” says Mallory.

  Bolan looks up. “By who?”

  “She doesn’t know. She doesn’t actually see anyone, she says. But she knows it’s there.”

  “It?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Bolan purses his lips, then sits down on the floor behind his desk. Underneath the desk on the left-hand side is a thick metal safe. “Is that all she said?”

  He hears the clink of the scotch bottle against the lip of the glass, then another click as her throat forces the scotch down. “Christ, no. She was babbling. But she says when we send her to go get… that thing, that someone watches her. She feels something there, Tom, in that place underground. It watches her come in, and it watches her take
that thing, and it watches her leave. But she says when she leaves, it follows her, and it keeps watching her.”

  Bolan twists the dial back and forth and opens the safe. Supposedly, the salesman said, this thing is so dense and impenetrable you could store uranium in it and sleep next to it and go cancer-free for years. What Bolan is about to store there is not radioactive—at least, he doesn’t think it is—but he would still prefer more protection if he could get it. But if this safe were any denser it would probably break through the damn floor.

  He sets the little box in his lap. Before he undoes the clasp, he asks, “Do you believe her?”

  “Believe her? Are you kidding? Of course I don’t believe her, she’s out of her gourd.”

  He smiles a little. He expected that answer. Mallory is not the type to suspend her disbelief for anything. Which is a pity, because Bolan probably knows more about what is going on in Wink than anyone else, and he knows not to scoff at stories like that. So many of them turn out to be true.

  He carefully undoes the bronze clasp on the box, takes a little breath, and opens it up.

  Sitting inside on a cushioned interior of dark green velvet is a tiny skull. To most people it would appear grotesque but unremarkable, simply a fleshless, bleached rodent skull like that of a rat or mouse. Bolan knows it is actually a rabbit skull. Or it appears to be a rabbit skull. He’s studied their messages, and though they did not state outright what they needed him to get—and what he in turn had someone else get for him—he can read between the lines as well as anyone.