American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Why?” asks Dord.

  “Why? Well. I guess because everyone on the ladder has agreed to it. Because it’s easier that way. Because they want to believe the person above them. And they don’t want to know what they’re not supposed to know. And so this guy riding high on the chain gets to say how things are and how they aren’t, what’s to be known and what isn’t, and that’s a lot easier than everyone else doing it for themselves.”

  Dord turns this over. “I think that’s bullshit.”

  “Oh?” asks Zimmerman.

  “It ain’t so organized. I’m at the Roadhouse all the damn time, and all I ever see is everyone running around batshit crazy. There ain’t no chain.”

  “Well. Things have been a bit chaotic of late.”

  “Chaotic? That don’t hardly begin to describe it.”

  “I don’t describe it at all,” says Zimmerman. “Not my job.”

  The truck coasts on through the darkness. Then it slows and Zimmerman turns onto a rocky dirt road. Dord can barely make out something ahead: a ravine, it looks like, a big one.

  “So where’s your place on the chain?” asks Dord.

  “Low. Not as low as you, Dord, but low.”

  “And what are you gonna do when the chain falls apart?”

  The truck pulls to a stop. Zimmerman shrugs, throws it in park, and gets out. “I don’t know. Find another chain, I guess. Come on. You’re helping me carry our passenger down.”

  They each grab a flashlight and walk to the back of the truck. “I’ll let you get his feet,” says Zimmerman. “It’s easier. Watch for the tire spikes, though.”

  Dord puts the flashlight in his armpit, grimaces, and grabs the pair of ankles sticking out of the tarp. The man’s socks are bloody and his two-tone shoes now sport a third tone. Zimmerman clambers in, grabs the other end of the tarp, and pushes their burden out.

  It is a long and dangerous route down to the ravine. Dord, who is backing, takes extra care with each step. He is convinced that the wrong step would snap his ankle and send him tumbling down the ravine, so he ignores Zimmerman’s chiding (“You’re moving slower than fucking Christmas!”) and backs down baby step by baby step.

  He cannot imagine any punishment more hellish than this. He swears to God, as he so often does in the throes of his addiction, that this is the last fucking time he’s getting high, because every fucking time he gets high something goes absolutely bugshit, and then the next thing he knows he’s carrying a dead body down an uneven precipice in the middle of the night, and fuck me, is that something cold and wet running down my arm, oh Christ almighty I hope I’m imagining that…

  Finally Zimmerman says, “Okay. Stop.” He maneuvers to the edge of the ravine and looks out. The bottom is dark, yet he does not point his flashlight down. “All right. We’re gonna throw him over. You ready?”

  “Sure,” gasps Dord.

  “Okay. Count of three. One. Two…”

  With each count they swing the dead body back and forth, each time moving longer and faster. Then on the final count they let him go, and he’s moving so fast and he’s so heavy that Dord almost sails into the ravine with him. Zimmerman has to reach out and snatch him by the wrist to keep him on the path. “Careful,” he says calmly in Dord’s ear, like this is a routine occurrence for him.

  There is a thud at the bottom of the ravine. But there is no sprinkling of rocks, nor any dust rising up from the darkness. And that thud did not sound right: there was a wetness to it, one that shouldn’t be heard at all out in the desert.

  “Did something break?” asks Dord. “In him, I mean.”

  “Don’t know, don’t care,” says Zimmerman. “Give me the gun. The one you picked up at the road.”

  Dord hands him the bloody pistol, happy to be free of it. Zimmerman shines his light around the path until he finds a large, flat red rock just off to the side. Brown stains lie across its face in streaks. Zimmerman walks to the rock, places the gun in its exact middle, and turns it so it’s facing the path, as if he wants anyone who comes down to the ravine to see this gun on this stained rock.

  “All right,” says Zimmerman. “Back to the truck.”

  Dord looks back at the dark ravine. “Ain’t we gonna look to see if he’s hid right?”

  “He’s hid fine. And we were told not to look.”

  “What? Why?”

  Zimmerman gives him an angry look. “Dord… this is just one of those things, okay? One of those things we talked about. Let’s just go.”

  “I’m so goddamn sick of that, Mike,” says Dord. “I’m sick of being told what I can and can’t do. We’re being led around by the nose here.”

  “Dord…”

  “Come on, we just hid a fucking body for these folks, and we can’t even check to see if the work’s done right? It’s our asses on the line if he’s found out here. I got a fucking pocketful of DNA evidence here.”

  Zimmerman does not answer. He just watches Dord with anxious eyes, and says, “Listen. I’m going to walk back up to the truck. And I’m not going to look anywhere but ahead of me. I suggest you do the same. You do, and you’ll be fine.” Then he turns and trudges back up the path, head bowed and eyes averted.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Dord. He struggles for a moment, wondering what to do. For though Dord has a talent for belligerence, he likes Zimmerman and he doesn’t want to disbelieve or disappoint him. He seems to be the only sane voice in Dord’s life at the moment.

  Yet his curiosity is too much. He wants to know. He has to know. He has to find out what they don’t want him to see, especially when it’s just a few feet below him.

  “Just to check,” he mutters. Then he turns and shines his light down into the ravine.

  At first he sees nothing but rock. This concerns him. He even starts to wonder if the body has disappeared. Then the light falls upon a two-tone shoe in a pale blue pants leg, and he inwardly sighs in relief. It’s way down at the bottom, where no one would ever think to look, and it’d take a rock climber to safely get down there.

  He is about to leave when he stops. Didn’t they have the body wrapped tight in a tarp? If so, how could he see the leg? When he carried it down the only thing that stuck out was the man’s feet. And those shoes were quite bloody, yet the one he just saw was not…

  Dord turns and flashes the light back down. He finds the two-tone shoe and shines the light on the rest of the body.

  The tarp is gone. Did it unroll? he wonders. But something else is different… the man’s suit is not bloody anymore. It’s dusty and dirty, but not bloody. Dord can see the blue color from here. And he still has his white panama hat on… yet Dord is sure they left that behind in the road.

  Then the light falls upon the bundle of red hair spilling out from under the hat, and he sees that the man’s fingernails are painted bright red, and he realizes this is not a man at all.

  It’s a woman. A dead one, but a woman all the same. Yet she is dressed in the exact same clothing as the man from Wink.

  “What the fuck?” breathes Dord. He realizes he is sweating, and has to blink the drops out of his eyes. Then, trembling, he shines the light out a little farther.

  The dead woman is not alone. Far from it. The bottom of the ravine is littered with dozens of corpses, all of them dressed in pale blue suits, two-tone shoes, and the odd white panama hat. They have been killed in a number of ways—throats or wrists slashed, or, judging by the bruises around some of their necks, some were hanged—but by far the most predominant method is a single bullet wound to the head, just like the man Dord and Zimmerman scraped off the road not more than a half an hour ago. Dord can see their man in the tarp now: he has landed in something dark and gray-black and glistening, yet Dord thinks he can see the shape of a hand or a curled foot among that rotting mass, and through all the yammering and howling in his mind Dord wonders exactly how long this has been going on.

  Most of them are men. They vary in size: short, tall, fat, skinny. A few of the bodies
are women. But it’s not until the beam of light falls upon a small boy, no older than eleven, dressed in a small pale blue suit and cute two-tone shoes, that Dord begins screaming, especially when he sees the neat little hole drilled right between the boy’s eyes, which stare up at him from the bottom of the ravine with hollow, rotted sockets.

  The next thing Dord knows he’s sprinting up the path to Zimmerman’s truck. Because as it turns out, Zimmerman was right: he did not want to know. He did not ever, ever want to know.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It’s easy, Mona thinks, to understand why so many prophets found gods while wandering out in the desert. Because there cannot be any place on earth as strange and empty as a desert. Merely passing through it warps your thoughts: your perceptions of how the world works are broken down with each empty mile until civilization feels like a dream. And though any barren wilderness falls well short of achieving anything close to infinity, the sight of so many leaning red cliffs and so much empty horizon manages to inch the mind closer to understanding what infinity is.

  For as Mona powers the Charger up the road to the mesa, she realizes she has never felt so small in her life. It’s as if the world has been upended, and she is clinging to the point of a copper-red stalactite hanging from the roof of an endless cave, and below her are oceans and oceans of that cloudless, electric-blue sky, and were she to slip and drive off the road she would surely go plummeting into it, falling into that endless, flat blue, and though she might plead and beg for the fatal kiss of hard earth she would never, ever receive it. She would just keep falling.

  She’s been eyeing the chain-link fence running alongside the road. She passes yet another sign about Wink, this one a half-ruined thing asking her why she would ever wish to leave, though Mona could think of a few million reasons. She slows down when the fence’s silver glimmer turn to snarls of black. She pulls over and sees that there is indeed a gap in the fence, and it’s quite large, nearly twenty feet across.

  “This must be the place,” she says. Then she frowns, thinking of the doughnut tire. It can’t hold up on uneven terrain, and it’d be impossible to get a good tire for the Charger out here. And besides, she doesn’t trust a damn soul in this town anymore.

  She decides this will have to be done on foot, as she feared. She’ll drive the Charger in just far enough for it to be hidden from the road, because while she hasn’t seen anyone else along the highway, she’s not willing to take the chance. So, wincing each time she hears a rock or branch snap under the tires, she slowly, slowly steers the Charger through the gap in the fence.

  Mona parks it behind a fallen ponderosa pine, then gets out and scans the way ahead. She cannot see much of a road out here. She looks around, marking this spot, for though she’s brought plenty of water the desert is large and it can’t last forever if she gets lost.

  She shoulders the pack she made for herself (using a pink child’s backpack from the Ponderosa Acres’s “lost and found” box, as her previous pack was too small for this expedition) and begins her trek to the mesa. It is not unbearably hot in such high deserts, but it is quite dry, and the wind seems to corrode her skin.

  She crests one hill and stops. For a moment she thought she saw something in the landscape, but then it was gone…

  She takes a step or two back and scans the countryside. Then things align just right, and she sees it.

  There is a road, just as Parson said there would be. It is incredibly faint, like a whisper of a brushstroke on a painting, but it’s there. She can see it winding across the rocky terrain, running over hills and ridges until it disappears behind the shadow of the mesa. It’s like a seam in the skin of the earth itself, as if the desert was stitched together here.

  It will be a long walk. But this, Mona has decided, is hostile territory. Parson can tell funny little riddles all day, but he doesn’t know jack shit about infiltrating what essentially is enemy ground.

  And that’s what Mona’s going to be doing. There are secrets at the mesa no one wants her to know. So she hikes the pink backpack up high on her shoulders, bows down low, and starts to jog across the desert.

  She stops in the shadow of every tree and rock to survey the territory around her. She sees no movement. There is no wildlife, not even any birds. She is utterly alone here. Still she does not let her guard down. Sometimes as she runs she touches the butt of the Glock, reminding herself how close it is, and what she will need to do if she encounters any—she searches for the right term—obstacles.

  Things feel more and more unreal as she runs. The sun does not seem to move: it is forever stuck at just a half hour after dawn. Its slanted light turns the shadows into a staggered calligraphy that loops across the red ground. Enormous cliffs somehow keep creeping up from out of nowhere, slowly emerging from behind what looked like a simple knoll, like she’s being stalked by the mountains. And everything here is quiet, save for the wind. It is such a harsh change from the piney valley of Wink.

  One peak rises, then slowly falls, as if she’s wading through a red sea. But as this peak falls, she thinks she sees something behind it—something thin and gleaming white…

  “The hell?” she says. She reaches into her backpack and takes out her binoculars. She glasses the hilltop behind the cliff and scans for what she saw.

  It’s hard to miss. There behind the cliff is a white column sticking straight up out of the ground. It contrasts brightly against the dull red of the terrain. And the column is too perfect, too unblemished, for her to think it’s there naturally.

  As she watches, a violet light on the top of the column blinks on, then off.

  “No,” she says. “Not naturally.” She purses her lips and studies the area around the white column. She sees no one. She thinks for a moment, then takes out the Glock. Then she starts off toward the column. She’s uneasy, because one thing Parson said has been bothering her:

  It winds around the mesa, through rocks and trees and gullies, and… and some things I cannot describe.

  It’s the “things he cannot describe” part that gets to her. It was as if he thought she’d see things that were beyond his conception. And while she doesn’t know Parson that well (and isn’t sure she’ll ever get the chance, now) she doesn’t think there’s much beyond him. Parson seems to be very good at knowing things, so if the things out here confound even him…

  She emerges from the shadow of the cliff and sees she is at the base of the hill with the white column. It’s about twelve feet tall, standing perfectly perpendicular to the top of the hill. It looks like it’s made of metal, yet she can’t tell if it’s painted white or if the metal just is white. She’s not sure how long it’s been out here—if it was part of the Coburn operation then the damn thing must be older than she is—but it shows no signs of wear and tear.

  For some reason the sight of that tall, white column makes her hair stand on end. It is just too perfect. It’s like the wind turbines she saw in West Texas, so strange and beautiful in an alien way, but even worse: the thing has no business being there, and yet there it is, blinking that violet light.

  She considers what to do. She cannot say why she thinks it is dangerous, but she is sure of it. It is doing something in some intangible way, just as the wind turbines were turning and turning.

  Against her better judgment, Mona decides to check it out. There is something strangely fascinating about the column, something hypnotic in the way its light keeps blinking on and off. So she starts off toward it, trying to ignore the sick sensation in her gut that suggests this is a damn stupid idea.

  Though the column is not that tall it seems to tower over her as she approaches it. She feels a little sick; it’s like the proportions of everything in this country are all thrown off. And there’s something else wrong… something about the shadows on the ground…

  Once she’s about twenty feet away from it, she stops. There’s an electrical taste in her mouth that she doesn’t care for, like she’s been sucking on a battery. She squats
and studies the column. Its top is smooth and rounded, like it’s a big white bullet sitting on the top of the hill. And though the light keeps blinking, she can see no bulb, not even a hole in its white casing. If it is a casing, that is.

  She cocks her head so one ear is toward it. The column is humming, very softly, an electrical sound that seems to pulse a little bit. She smacks her lips. Maybe she’s wrong, but she thinks the electrical taste in her mouth ebbs and flows with the pulse of the hum.

  Mona brushes her hair out of her eyes and keeps studying it. She walks around it in a half-circle, trying to see if she can spot a seam or a bolt or a screw in its smooth white surface. She can’t see any, but it’s hard because her hair keeps getting in her face. The wind just doesn’t let up out here.

  Then the wind finally drops a bit, a lull in the breeze. Yet Mona’s hair stays right where it is, right in front of her eyes.

  She pushes it down and watches, confused, as it slowly rises back up.

  She looks down at her arms and sees that every hair there is pointing straight at the column. Then she thinks, pinches a lock of her hair, and holds it taut in front of her face. She watches in amazement as the very tip of the lock slowly lifts to point toward the white column…

  It’s static electricity, she realizes. The damn thing must be giving off a crazy-strong static field for it to pull at her from here.

  She looks around to see if the field is pulling on anything else, and as she does she sees what’s wrong with the shadows on the ground: though the sun is in the east, behind her, all the shadows on the ground are pointed toward her. She walks a few feet back from the column, and sees that’s not quite right: the shadows are actually all facing away from the column. It’s like it’s projecting a bright light, one her eyes can’t see, but one that still casts shadows.