by Brian Hodge
Andy wanted to believe it would be only a matter of hours before Sheppard turned up. Although for being by all indications a law-abiding civilian, he’d done a remarkable job of disappearing without a trace.
The Mitsubishi he’d been driving had been found last night by a deputy in Mohave County, the northern neighbor of La Paz. It was out of gas and abandoned on a roadside outside a pissant little town called Cimarron. The place had been canvassed, with nobody having seen hide or hair, and the search had quickly widened. If he’d fled into the desert on foot, the helicopter search—infrared by night, visual by morning—hadn’t spotted him, while on the ground dogs hadn’t been able to pick up a trail that went anywhere. Maybe he’d thumbed a ride from a stranger. Andy was still waiting on a trooper to bring in the contents of the Mitsubishi’s trunk. Mohave deputies had popped its lid last night on the roadside, in case there was a body to recover, but they’d only found two pieces of luggage.
Since last night Andy had been having no better luck getting anything other than answering machines whenever he tried calling Los Angeles. Not that he expected Sheppard to pick up his own phone, but he’d been hoping to at least confer with this Samantha Emerson, find out what she was to Sheppard, why he had her car.
Even if she was away as well, Samantha had a roommate named Angelique, both of them on their machine’s silly outgoing message. In lieu of anything more productive to do at the moment, Andy dialed it one more time, was midway through leaving yet another message when somebody picked up and croaked out a hello.
“Miss Emerson?” he asked.
“No, no…this is Miz Berry.” Husky, sleepy bedroom voice. You could practically hear the hair tumbling into her eyes. He liked it a lot. Told her who he was again and she cut him off: “Oh, right, I was supposed to call you back, right?”
“Well, I’ve got you now, that’s the important thing.”
“Who’d you say you were with again?”
“The Arizona Department of Public Safety.”
“The guys who put those orange cones in the middle of the road, like that?”
“Not exactly. More like the state police.”
“Oh. Hey.” Angelique’s senses starting to sharpen. “Sam’s okay, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know any reason why not. I just need to talk with her about her car.”
“Her car? Is it Jamey?” Really beginning to worry now. “Jamey’s okay, isn’t he? Was there an accident?”
“No, nothing like that. I’ve just got this car, a Mitsubishi Mirage, registered to Samantha Emerson, here in impound. It was towed last night.”
White lie. It had been towed to the state crime lab in Phoenix.
“What’d Jamey do, park in a tow-away zone again?”
“That must’ve been it,” Andy said.
“Uh huh. He always says it’ll only be a minute,” and by now Angelique was only too happy to fill in the blanks for him. Except none of it was close to what he’d been expecting—it was worse. This poor guy had been en route to his own wedding? Andy had always known that the universe was a cruel place, but sometimes he forgot how creative it could be.
Angelique gave him a phone number for Samantha Emerson’s parents in Flagstaff, explaining that she’d flown there last Friday. Jamey had kept her car after taxiing Sam to LAX; for his upcoming cross-desert trip to rejoin her, it would be more reliable than his own fickle little two-seater, some vintage British sports car that looked great but refused to run half the time.
“You’re not going to the wedding yourself?” Andy had to know.
“I have to work,” she said. “I can always catch it on video.”
8
HIS novelty had worn off. Beyond his food and toilet breaks, the Hardestys were mostly ignoring him. Jamey supposed he’d been around long enough to become just one more piece of furniture, hauled home on the assumption they could let it sit awhile, then sell it for a mark-up.
Out of boredom, he turned inward…eyes closed, halfway to catatonia. Kids did it instinctively when their world became imperiled. He wandered back to the yoga class where he’d met Samantha—he the pupil, she the teacher—and some of the breathing exercises she’d shared. In for a slow count of four, hold for seven, exhale over eight. Very relaxing. He fell into the rhythm until he didn’t need to count, could simply exist, float around inside his skull. Certainly, as a boy, he had spent enough time constructing kingdoms in his mind, then remaking himself into whoever seemed likely to live there.
Now, though, he lingered in his own past, memories evoked by yesterday’s drive through the panorama of Arizona. Jasper and Rupert probably had something to do with it, too. Deserts, destiny, and sibling squabbles? In a twisted way, life had come full circle.
It seemed now that so much of his life had been rooted in a single afternoon during the family vacation seventeen summers ago. He remembered the sun, so harsh that the towering rock walls of the Utah desert seemed the only things that could endure it. He remembered awakening in the backseat of the car, nudged from sleep by changes in rhythm and direction. How the sun through the window had baked the spitwads across the back of his neck into a crust. Melissa’s grin. She was being a brat again. It was more than what Melissa did best. It was the reason that the devil had ingested a laxative and shat her onto the face of the earth.
As he roused from sleep, scraping dried spitwads from his neck, Jamey asked where they were going. This looked like none of the places where his father normally pulled off for gas. He saw no gas stations at all, just spotty brown hills, tan rock, blue sky. It was desolation incarnate, eerie in its beauty. His mother explained what a good thing it would be for him and Melissa to see the petroglyphs, drawings that Indians had made many centuries ago, before they knew about Jesus.
They’d impressed him mightily, these haunting and mysterious paintings, like ghosts that had lain against the flat rock walls and faded into them. But they hadn’t been left there for him, nor for anyone else with skin like his —he sensed this even though at age twelve he could never have articulated it. He stared up at them, here where a wire fence and tribal law brought the dirt road to a dead end. He stared up at them, open-mouthed at their silent majesty, and felt like an alien.
For the next hour the four of them wandered among the boulders and cliff faces and tenacious grasses bursting from inhospitable ground. He wondered if left to her own devices Melissa might not climb high and slip and fall screaming. And as she died, pulped like a melon across the rocks, she would realize every wrong thing she’d done in her eight heinous years of life, and beg her brother for forgiveness. They would be reconciled at this tragic end of hers, then he would close her eyes as he’d always seen done in the movies and move on to the somber business of comforting his parents, standing taller than any twelve-year-old in corrective shoes had ever stood.
But things like this didn’t happen on family vacations, at least not to any families he knew, so they piled into the car again. They backtracked, again passing through a speck of a town where, earlier, they’d not seen so much as a gnat moving. Dad took a vote, and everyone was parched and hungry enough to stop at a brick diner squatting on one corner of what appeared to be the town’s only intersection.
From half a block away, Jamey was the first to spot the welcoming committee: two dogs hanging about the diner’s entrance. A medium-sized mutt, black with white patches, and its pal, solid gray and looking a lot like a Malamute that some neighbors had owned, only larger.
Closer up, it became the biggest dog he’d ever seen.
Jamey was clomping out of the car even before his dad had geared it into park. He’d never met a dog he hadn’t liked. No dog had ever laughed at his crooked foot. No dog had ever shoved him just to see which direction he would fall.
The black-and-white wagged its tail at his approach, while Jamey realized at a level of sinew and bone that there was something very different about the gray. Lanky and muscular, it watched with golden-yellow eyes. This was no dog, bu
t something else. In those eyes, the color of a corroded sun, he saw a wildness that had never lived in the liquid brown gaze of the mutt. Jamey dropped to his knees on the concrete and reached out a hand to each. He shut his eyes and shivered in the heat. You didn’t even need to look at them to tell the difference. The mutt’s fur was silky soft, something to be stroked at a fireside. The gray’s coat was heavy and coarse, dense as a northern forest. He felt a soft gust of breath in his ear, the tender lick of a tongue.
“I’ll be damned.” His father’s voice, behind him. “That’s a wolf.”
His mother began to order him away from it. When Jamey turned to tell her that everything was fine he saw that Melissa had clambered onto the hood of the car to cringe behind Mom’s back. When the hot metal burned her knees, she scrambled like a monkey onto Mom’s shoulders. Of course Dad had no choice but to swing him bodily away from certain disembowelment. And wasn’t this just like them, like every set of parents: creating humiliating emergencies where there were none.
The dog and wolf watched them retreat, panting in the simmer of July heat and dropping their heads back onto their paws to wait it out.
Inside the diner, the Sheppards sat four abreast on vinyl-crowned stools. The only other people here were the counterman and a big-bellied Navajo shooting pool in the back. The place smelled like decades of dust and grease, and for the moment Jamey wanted to never leave, because he’d found magic here, along with a strange sensation that he’d been here before.
When he asked about the wolf, the counterman told them that it had wandered in out of the desert one morning a few months back, showing no inclination to move on. Beyond that, nobody had a clue as to where it had come from. Wolves were all but extinct in the lower forty-eight, and certainly in the west—this was years before grays had been reintroduced into Yellowstone Park.
The counterman’s theory: someone’s bad idea of a pet, dumped after a change of heart or loss of nerve. Still, the rogue animal had proved even-tempered enough to tolerate, an enigma to be regarded with fondness and maybe a bit of wary distance. The man said he fed it beef scraps to supplement its diet of wild hares. Then he paused, as though recognizing Jamey’s fascination and his mother’s fear, neither one very well concealed, and he assured them that the animal was fed enough to keep it from having any interest in skinny boys. Jamey figured it went without saying that he’d probably meant skinny boys who couldn’t run fast.
Most of the counterman’s charm, though, was reserved for Melissa. He called her “little lady” and how she reveled in it. On any other day, in any other place, she would have found this man with his week of beard and his ample gut gross beyond endurance. Just look at her, though—eight years old and already conscious of the reactions she could elicit with a tilt of her head, the proper giggle, the flash and flutter of her blue eyes. She sat on her stool and kicked her dangling legs and made an elaborate show of agonizing over the menu, center stage for as long as she pleased.
No one paid attention when Jamey got up to explore. He discovered unlikely treasure pinned to a bulletin board along the hallway near the bathrooms: a newspaper clipping, faded and brittle after two years of bone dry air. He felt a sudden thrill in realizing that his sense of déjà vu was valid, in recognizing the faces in the photo: actors Nick Nolte and Kurt Russell, standing beside the same pool table where the Indian was now shooting stick. Imagine. Imagine that.
Back at the counter, Jamey tugged his father’s arm: “Dad, hey Dad, guess what, right here, right in here they filmed a scene from that movie Body Bag Blues, there’s an article back there about it.” Thrilled, because this film was a huge point of pride with him, the first R-rated movie he’d ever seen, since Mom had yet to allow HBO in the house and a VCR was a wait-and-see sort of thing. But this one he’d seen in the theater last year just as God had intended. “Here’s where they filmed that scene where they had to kill Martin Sheen.”
And his father finally looked at him and shook his head and said, “You shouldn’t have seen a movie like that, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
The counterman was busy with their orders when Jamey sneaked outside to wait until the food was up. He sat between the wolf and the dog, at total ease and certain that they must be more understanding company.
He looked beyond what little town there was to see, toward the barren rims of rock where ancient pigments lingered after hundreds of years. Yet it seemed no greater marvel than when he thought of this greasy place crammed full of lights and cameras and a bucket of blood.
This was a most excellent day.
Jamey had to scoot aside when the door banged open, fearing he was about to be dragged away again for his own so-called good. But it was only the Navaho, legs in Levi’s swinging past him with a clocking of dusty boots. The man was halfway to an old pickup that might’ve once been blue as a robin’s egg when he stopped and turned to grin at Jamey. Round amiable face, like ruddy leather, with long strands of black hair caught at one corner of his mouth. Why he would remember a thing like that Jamey didn’t know, but there it was, after all this time.
“It’s a kick, ain’t it?” the Navajo said.
“What is?” Jamey asked.
“Sittin’ there, in the company of something that could kill you. Kill you real easylike. But chooses not to. Not today, at least. That’s a kick.”
I guess it is, Jamey thought while the man drove away. His hand rested upon the wolf’s coarse thicket of fur, and he looked into the wild yellow eyes. Wondered what its mouthful of teeth would look like bared, wide open, shearing down to the bone.
Savage killing instincts—that was about as much as most people ever seemed to credit them with. But acting as though it were somehow wrong for wolves to even get hungry. Few ever seemed to realize what wonderful parents they made. Jamey had found this more compelling than their hunting habits when he’d first heard it in science class. Wondering what it would be like to have been raised by wolves instead.
When the diner’s door banged open behind him again he knew his number was up this time: Melissa, sent to fetch him.
“Dad says you better get in here, ’cause our food’s almost ready. Mom says you better hurry, ’cause you have to wash your hands first.”
She told him this as though nothing gave her greater pleasure than to steal away his own. But he had to grin, too, at the way she’d opened the door only as far as she had to, inches, ready to slam it against teeth and claws. Melissa’s eyes grew hard and her nose crinkled with a sneer; her mouth puckered into a prissy little sphincter.
“If I had a gun, I’d shoot it,” she said. Then she looked up from the wolf and smiled, as smug as if just two minutes earlier their parents had come right out and told her they loved her best. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot you.”
****
The luggage from Sheppard’s car had arrived late in the morning, but Andy couldn’t get the warrant to look inside until after the judge returned from lunch.
Its owner was still a missing person, hadn’t hitched a ride the rest of the way to Flagstaff. After talking with the roommate, Andy had called the bride-to-be, who was long past annoyed over her fiancé’s failure to show up and had graduated to frantic.
It would’ve been easier if she’d first caught wind of the situation last night on local TV—at least now he would be phoning with the news that it wasn’t as bad as it had first appeared. Now, though—starting from scratch. How were you supposed to break a thing like this to a woman planning her wedding at the Grand Canyon in two days? I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is he probably still loves you…
And Samantha wasn’t much help. No, she didn’t know where he could’ve gone. No, he didn’t know anybody else in Arizona. Mostly she asked Andy things he could never answer: Why didn’t Jamey call me after it happened? Telling him things he knew weren’t entirely true: He wouldn’t hurt a soul—Andy hoping she would never have occasion to see that security tape.
He wrapped up
the call by telling her that if Jamey should show up at her door, call her, whatever, to insist that he establish contact. Immediately.
“I don’t ordinarily do this,” he said, and gave her his pager number as well.
Midafternoon brought the warrant for the luggage. Nothing fancy, just a pair of sturdy black nylon pieces from J.C. Penney, someplace like that. Their leather name-and-address tags gave the same home base that Andy already had on him. Inside were clothes—Sheppard was a roller, not a folder—and toiletries. Hair gel. A velvety flip-top box containing a diamond ring. His passport. But nothing to indicate where he might have gone to ground.
From a broad zippered pocket on the smaller suitcase’s lid, Andy slid out a movie script, bound with gold brads. Something called Nightlife, the title centered on its stiff cover; in a lower corner it had been stamped as a pre-production draft. A note penned by a flamboyant hand on memo-size office stationery—The Avalon Agency, with a Beverly Hills address—was clipped to the cover:
Jamey dear,
I scrounged this sneak-peek since I’m friends with the Prod. Designer. The shooting draft may of course change, but when do they not?
Read! Study! Pray! Sacrifice a virgin! Stop shaving 2 days before the audition and you ARE the character of Justin Gray!
XO,
Sherry
So maybe he really had been in a Mountain Dew commercial. What a screwy thing to brag about if he hadn’t. What a screwy thing to brag about even if he had.
Andy put in his next call to Beverly Hills.
“You mean you don’t have him?” shouted Sheppard’s agent. This Sherry Van Horn person to whom he’d been transferred. “What have you done with him!”
