64
I SCREAMED DOWN AT HIS TURNED BACK AS LONG AS THE WHEEL CRANKED, until I felt I might vomit, then we were at the top of the sky and I saw the van and I shut up. All I’d accomplished was riling the dogs.
“You okay?” Melinda asked.
“I’m fine.” My voice was shredded.
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He stood below, staring straight up, shielding his eyes with one hand. Now that I’d grown quiet, it seemed to make him curious. He put his hands out, unafraid, to crown each of the dogs, settle them down. The gesture couldn’t help but remind me of Heist. Soon Miller and Vacuum quit barking, though they ducked from under his hands and circled, whining, seeking a better sight line to us, or a staircase into the sky, one that didn’t exist.
“Have you ever seen him before, sweetie?” I kept my voice small for a few reasons. “In the Wash, maybe?”
“I don’t go to the Wash a lot.” She sounded defensive.
“That’s fine. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I just brought you since I knew the Bear was there.”
“You mean Laird?” Had Melinda, in her fear, forgotten his name? I suppose she might not be strong with names. She might have lost track of mine too. It might be enough that she had any language at all.
“Yeah. The one who drove with us. I wish he was here right now.”
“Me too, darling.” I couldn’t keep from calling her darling and sweetie. Under mortal stress, I was apparently transformed into my mother.
“Are you comfortable?” shouted the man below. The wind had eased, and our cab’s squeaking rotations had stilled. The mob of flying ants had risen to find us, and I heard the whirring of their wings, occasionally a tap-tap as their bodies bounced off the grate. Miller and Vacuum were settled into a low keening, deep in their throats. The man’s voice reached me surprisingly easily.
“No!” I shouted back.
“Normally it goes around and around!” he called out. Even shouting, his voice had a grin in it. “I wish I could show you! It makes a better illustration of the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma!”
“I know how a Ferris wheel works, thanks,” I shouted back. “I’m not in the mood right now. Let us down.”
“I can’t do that, sorry!”
“I’m calling the police.” My phone had no signal, of course. My attempts were draining the battery, so I’d switched it off.
“Go ahead, but I don’t think they have any influence on the dharmachakra!”
“I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“That’s okay, we’ll talk later!”
The sun crept upward. We were still higher. Nothing was visible past the boulders where Laird and the Jeep had gone. Our creaking grew slighter until we came to a dead stop. Motionless, I felt our jeopardy reconfigured into one of pure height. The wheel’s larger structure, its prospect as a form of vehicle, evaporated; instead, I felt we teetered top-heavy at the summit of a giant flagpole, our swaying more ominous for being nearly subliminal. Below, our captor puttered, the dogs danced and yipped, the dust rippled slightly. It nauseated me to look downward, but I couldn’t quit.
“Who is he?” Melinda whispered. She’d curled onto me, astonishingly small. She carried a warm-bready smell, albeit sourdough.
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t whisper, not with what I’d done to my throat. But I murmured, a voice just for her. “I’m pretty sure I saw him on the mountain. I saw his van. I think he picks up runaways and strays around the Zen Center, and maybe in the Wash.” I didn’t want to tell her he sometimes might also slit their throats. “It’s good you never met him.”
“Why doesn’t he let us down?”
“He uses the wheel as a jail.” I hadn’t accepted the whole fact into my body until the word escaped my mouth.
“I’d like to go down and bust his head.”
“Me too, honey.” My insipid condescension was really pointed at a child in myself, in panic at being caged in the sky. Was it possible to trigger agoraphobia and claustrophobia simultaneously? I’d feared the mountain and how it touched into the blue, two abhorrent vacancies. Now I was the mountain. It sucked to be the mountain. There was nothing to do up here but fear the sun. Everything sickened me, the vertigo, my own helplessness.
“I called a SWAT team,” I yelled at the man on the ground. “They’re right over that hill.” Gazing over the wastes, where my empty threat wasn’t about to materialize, I found myself recollecting my twig-sister, Lorrie.
“Instant karma’s gonna get you!” I screamed, covering Melinda’s ear with my palm.
His only reply was “Interesting!”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“Funny thing about me! I only worry about what’s right in front of my face!”
“We need a bathroom break.”
“It falls right through! Here, I’ll fix it so you don’t shit on the gears! Go ahead, I won’t watch!” He restarted the Ferris wheel’s motor and pushed the lever the opposite way, so we jerked backward. I screamed. The dogs shrieked. We descended a quarter turn, then stopped. Though he’d halved our distance to the ground, we dangled now over thin air and a rocky arroyo.
We’d lost our view of the vehicles behind the shed and the sheltering shade of one of the wheel’s giant struts, so our cab was further bared to the sun—not a win.
“What about water and food?” He’d put us in better range of a normal speaking voice, once he killed the put-put-put of the motor.
“Later,” he said distractedly.
The quarter-rotation seemed to agitate Miller and Vacuum. Though we’d gotten nearer, they acted as though something precious to them was getting farther away, on the far side. Perhaps it was. Were there prisoners besides us? I squinted through the sun-slashed armature to see whether other inmates languished in their gondolas. Perhaps at night they communed by a special language of Morse hinge squeaks. Maybe I could foment a riot. But there wasn’t any way to see into the distant cabs—or, for that matter, the closer ones.
Now that we were nearer to the fat man, Melinda squirmed from my lap and unbuckled from the bench to press against the far side of the cab. Something rose from her throat, a gargling, yowling sound unresolving into either a sob or scream. Before I noticed, she began to climb the front grate. She moved in a state of panic, I thought at first. I was afraid to touch her, to drag her back to safety—I might be trapped on the wrong side of the zoo bars, with a creature who couldn’t fathom captivity. (I’d at least grown up in a New York apartment.)
But no. Melinda spider-monkeyed to the wide seam at the grate’s top. Was it possible she’d crawl through? Having felt the narrowness of her silverfish body in my lap, I bet the only limit was her hat size. Her reward would be to cling to the outside of a dangling metal basket, a possibility that merely terrified me.
The action set our cab swinging again, reviving the squeaking, which made a call-and-response to the whining dogs. Our jailer looked up. Melinda froze, like an insect playing dead.
65
TIME STOPPED, LIKE THE WIND. HE SQUINTED UP. BUT YOGI WAS NO BETTER at staring into the sun than I was. He missed the wiry shadow clinging to the interior grate.
When he glanced off again, Melinda wormed through. Her weight on the roof of our cab caused a mere squeak, then she’d clambered from it, onto the rigid frame. I held my breath. She didn’t fall. She began a climb—not downward, but across the struts, to the wheel’s far side.
A single flying ant had squeezed through, as if in exchange, and now crawled on my forearm. I let it crawl.
66
FOR AS LONG AS SHE JOURNEYED SIDEWAYS, CLAMPING HERSELF TO THE Ferris wheel’s rusty framework, exposed and also disguised in the glare, inching farther from our cab, I underwent a bizarre hallucination, a kind of synesthesia: I was as much out there with her as I was in here with myself.
But no, that wasn’t quite it. It was more as though I’d beco
me the wheel, and it was my large body along which Melinda’s tiny one inched. In marsupial species the newborn grub has a first task no one can help it with, to voyage through its mother’s fur, from womb to pouch—that was how it felt. I felt her, like a tragic, hopeless itch I couldn’t reach.
The sensation was that of an immensity of physical sorrow, like the night of the election, or that moment when I’d stood with Roslyn while Reed College security used their master key to let us into Arabella’s abandoned, squalid dorm room. All the mothers, powerless to help daughters jaunting or plummeting into the bleak unknown. Yet as usual I was really only daughter, or mother, to myself.
67
THREATENING HIM WITH POLICE HAD BEEN DUMB. OUT HERE, POLICE WERE as theoretical an influence as contrails. My captor was a member of the Viscera Springs confuckancy—if I meant to distract him while Melinda crawled, I had to keep that in mind. However much he came on with the Zen-cosmopolitan flippancy, his worldview arose from inside a Bear’s fear and desire. I should speak to him in Bearish.
“When I said SWAT team I meant a Rabbit SWAT team. They’re coming with a message.” My voice was a croak, a sexy one, I hoped.
“Eh?”
When I had a better look, he’d shed his Buddha nature. His slablike cheeks were etched with fine lines, corroded by sun and wind. His broad glinting smile was made of crap dentures, swimming unmoored in blistered lips.
I tried not to glance at Melinda. If she fell, I’d know.
“It’s not a message in words,” I called out. “It’s a reply to the sign you laid out on the mountain.” Pushing my face to the cage, I made a cutting pantomime across my throat, bulged my eyes. “I was there.”
He looked at me differently then. “That wasn’t aimed at Rabbits.”
“Too bad. Heist and Anita called a counsel. There’s a Rabbit army in the hills.”
“I doubt that. They don’t get along. Heist’s been civilizing their offspring for years now.”
“I thought you wanted him back as your king.”
“In the Yahoo tribe, the king is blinded and kept in a cave. In times of war, he’s strapped on a horse and is the first to die.”
He’d seemed to journey a distance inside himself to dredge the little parable from his inventory. I’d say or do anything to get into that place and wreck it. “Charles Heist was your last chance,” I hissed, feeling savage. “You didn’t know what you had.”
“Possible.”
“Laird’s going to pull Charles out, then give the signal.”
“Laird’s another disappointment.” The fat man’s face clouded and seethed, like a pan of gravy on the verge of boiling. “But he won’t find Charles there.”
“Even better. The raid can begin immediately.”
“What’s the signal?”
“The sound of one hand clapping. I think I hear it now!” If only I’d kept my little horn, but no. I’d spent it in the dead king’s ear. Nevertheless, I felt that same madness summoned in me. It was what I had, and enough. While Melinda moved on the wheel, I’d use the madness to enthrall him. “The Rabbits want your mountaintop!” I’d speak past his provocations to stream anxiety into his animal core. “They’re in talks with the Koreans. They’re cleverer than you, and aging better, and taking younger boyfriends and hipper drugs.”
“Not the Rabbits I know.”
“Seen Neptune Lodge lately? They’ve got drones and surveillance tech. They’ve got an espresso machine that makes ayahuasca lattes. They put Shockley in the witness protection program. The Wheel of Dharma has four turnings!” I began taking off my pants. “Come closer, I’ll pee on your face.” (I did this once—long story.) I suppose it was my equivalent of a flowerpot to drop on his head, from the window of my captivity. Yet it was too much to hope he’d center below me, since he’d risk tumbling into the arroyo. “You know you want it!” Meanwhile I’d palmed the pepper spray from inside my purse, just on the chance I’d get close enough.
The sound that stopped us both was a familiar one. The latch sliding open on the outside of a cab, the same as it had sounded clanking shut. We both turned. Melinda wasn’t hidden. She wrested open the grate of a cab at the far side from me, the one that had consumed the attention of Miller and Vacuum. The man below turned and sprinted for the controls. If only the dogs would suddenly bite him to death, or at least bite his hands off. Instead they darted and cringed, seeming almost to be in a state of worshiping the wheel. Just as my pants were around my knees, the gears ground to life, and the cab lurched into motion again, jostling me into the seat. I sank, and they rose. Melinda, and the arms that emerged to draw her inside the opposite cab. They were Heist’s arms. I’d have recognized his stained crooked knuckles even if they hadn’t stretched out from the red leather cuffs of his motorcycle jacket.
I pulled up my jeans and covered my flowerpot.
68
THE MAN AT THE BOTTOM HAD A PROBLEM. HE COULD TRY KEEPING ME down low, and Heist at the top. Melinda hadn’t unlocked my cab. She’d feared the noise, or not thought of doing it before she started for Heist’s cell. But when the man halted the wheel Heist began his own journey out. Even injured—and he looked still badly injured—Heist was stronger than Melinda, and he wasn’t trying to hide. He scaled on the limbs of the wheel like it was a thing he’d been training to do. The man at the bottom restarted the wheel and we grunted into motion again. I aimed the pepper spray.
The renewed motion of the wheel froze Heist for a moment, but only a moment. Then he began crawling from the center to the periphery. If the man kept the wheel moving Heist would soon enough be at the bottom of one of the turnings. The man saw this and stopped the wheel again. We were all silent, watching, watching one another, except for the madness of the dogs, their murderous music that was incessant and substituted for any thought beyond simply watching. Heist resumed descending the ladder of the wheel, his limbs acting like those of a panther, or some diligent automaton. The man jerked the wheel to life for an instant, then stopped it short, trying to toss Heist free. Heist clung.
I saw the man below slapping at his face, which was shiny with sweat now. The flying ants had come to drink. They were like the pepper spray I’d had no chance to use, probably better. He waved angrily at the whirring cloud, then set the wheel in motion again, at top speed. This only slowed Heist for an instant. He was nearly at a point where any of us could imagine him jumping free. The man at the bottom left the controls then, and darted with his abhorrent grace for the shack, and behind, into the hollow where the vehicles waited. The Econoline with the giant tires and the wooden bumpers stuttered into life.
I dipped low and lost sight of the van, then found it again, rushing from the hollow, toward the entrance to the boulders, to skirt the gate of wire, even as I watched Heist find his limit and allow himself to drop to the wheel’s boarding platform, inert. I whirled round and round, watching. It was as the van veered and accelerated beyond the wire that the Jeep came roaring up the other way, out of the trap of boulders. Laird jerked the wheel to skid the Jeep sideways in a spume of yellow dust, to collide its rear driver’s-side portion like a sledge against the van’s front. The impact was abrupt, shriekless, the treads unable to grip on the surface, the brakes of no use. The van sat sprung unnaturally high on its tires, and it lost the battle with the sturdy, low-centered Jeep. The dogs were silenced, nuzzling their master. I heard the flying ants buzzing everywhere, their numbers still massing around us. No one had stopped the wheel, not yet. The fat man had come halfway through the windshield and lodged there, and his hands momentarily flapped on the hood, until they quit flapping. My finger jerked spasmodically on the pepper spray nozzle and the wind blew the little toot of pepper back into my face and I instantly vomited through the grate.
It takes a village.
Part VII
Desert Hot Springs
69
I’D WOKEN HIM IN THE PARKING LOT OF THE WALGREENS, AFTER I’D GONE in and found him a pack of clean white undershir
ts to wear beneath his leather jacket. He’d obliged me by putting one on, but when I pulled up to the gate at Two Bunch Palms, he was asleep again in the passenger seat, my little bundle of joy. The strapping young man at the front gate confirmed my name on a clipboard checklist and when he saw my sleeper, I put a finger to my lips and smiled. The gate man smiled back and pointed me to registration. He was a welcoming person working at a welcoming place, and once my name was on the list he didn’t see anything suspicious in a mid-afternoon nap. They probably got a lot of tired people here.
Then, as I began to roll through, the gate man noticed the state of the Jeep’s rear wheel well and bumper. It drove fine, but it didn’t look great.
“I hit an animal,” I said.
“What kind of animal?”
“An animal driving a van,” I said, and left him that to think about.
In the palm-shady parking lot I listened again to the message from Jane Toth, the social worker who’d first given me Heist’s name and phone number after the police had sloughed off my first inquiries. “I thought you should know that Charles Heist is missing . . . the police have been to his mobile home and office . . .”
There were only so many ways I could read between the scant lines Jane Toth had offered. Mostly, I tried to read her tone. Was she warning me to protect myself? Was Heist a suspect in an investigation, one I’d triggered?
But analyzing her motives for the call was pointless. What mattered was what I made of the fact of it. I couldn’t drive Heist home, which is what he’d asked me to do. I’d be driving him into a trap. I put my phone away and chanced leaving him sleeping in the Jeep again, in the resort’s parking lot, while I went in and got a key card for the room and brochures about the massage and the mud baths and the qigong classes. We were going to hole up here awhile, and we might as well know about the amenities. If Heist didn’t die on my watch, we might even make use of a few.
The Feral Detective Page 19
