I had read an article about the Lost Dutchman Mine in my (otherwise mind-numbing) airline magazine. Apparently it had first been discovered in 1840 by a young Mexican boy hiding from his irate father: then by three Mexicans, who had been dumb enough to show it to a homicidal Dutchman called Jacob Waltz. The Dutchman had killed all three of the Mexicans, and dug the mine for himself, occasionally appearing in Mesa and Phoenix with pocketfuls of gold nuggets. I liked that. I mean, wouldn’t you like to roll into your local bar, dusty and sweaty, your pockets bulging with gold nuggets?
On his deathbed, Waltz confessed to a friend that he had killed not only the Mexicans but eight more men who had tried to follow him back to the mine, and gave his friend a map showing where the gold was buried. However he must have been a seriously incompetent cartographer, because his friend couldn’t find the mine, and neither have any of the hundreds of prospectors who have combed through the Superstitions since.
There was something about that story that appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. I’ll bet that Jacob Waltz wasn’t a killer at all, but the biggest hoaxer this side of the Gila River.
I crossed Papago Joe’s used-auto lot, and gave a postman’s knock on the side of the trailer. Not far away, a shaggy German shepherd barked and yanked at his chain. ‘Down, Fang,’ I told him. He carried on barking, but not very enthusiastically. It was almost impossible to be enthusiastic about anything in this heat, even about biting my leg off.
I knocked again. Eventually the trailer door was opened up. I found myself confronted by a thin, pale boy of about nineteen, wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and heavy boots and black transparent panties with lace round the edges.
‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Whaddya want?’
‘My name’s Harry Erskine. I’m looking for Papago Joe.’
‘We’re closed, man. We got nothing to sell. All of our cars got damaged. ’
‘I’m not interested in buying a car.’
‘Then what?’
‘I told you. I want to see Papago Joe.’
The boy scratched the back of his neck and winced. ‘I don’t know, man. He’s not too excited about talking to anybody right now. All his cars got smashed. He lost his daughter in a custody case. Apart from that, he’s been drinking.’
It was so damned hot on that lot that I was practically braised. A few tomatoes and onions, and a sprinkle of sage, and I would have made a perfect cotolette di maiale alla modenese.
I said, ‘I don’t really give a damn whether he’s been drinking or not. I just came all the way from New York, and I need to talk to him. ’
‘You came from New York?’
‘I just arrived, about an hour ago.’
‘You came all the way from New York just to talk to Papago Joe?’
I nodded.
‘Hey,’ said the boy. ‘That’s extra. That’s really extra.’
‘Glad you think so,’ I told him. For some reason — despite the fact that he was such an obvious goofball, and despite his terrible T-shirt and his cock curled up in his see-through panties — I decided that I liked him. There aren’t very many originals left, but this guy was obviously one of them.
The trailer door swung shut, juddering on its hinges, and the boy disappeared inside for what seemed like three hours, especially in this heat. I could cope with New York when it was hot. New York was all sweat and grime. But out here, Under The Old One, it was clean and dry like a fan-assisted oven. One breath, and all the hairs in your nostrils shrivelled up. Two breaths, and your lungs were pemmican.
The door opened again. The boy had a serious look on his face. ‘Papago Joe says okay. But he needs some firewater.’
‘Firewater?’
‘Didn’t you ever read cowboy comics? He wants a bottle of Chivas Regal.’
‘Some firewater,’ I complained.
‘It’s all right You can buy it across the highway at the Sun Devil. Ask for Linda. Tell her that E.C. Dude sent you.’
I dabbed my forehead with my crumpled handkerchief. ‘E.C. Dude? What kind of a name is that?’
‘Just tell her, E.C. Dude.’
‘Does that stand for anything? E.C.?’
He covered his eyes with his hand, as if he were so tired of people asking him what E.C. stood for that he was almost ready to commit suicide.
‘I’ll bet it stands for Elvis Charisma,’ I teased him.
His eye appeared through his partly-opened fingers. So that onlie ye Eyes look’d out. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. My mother hated Elvis. My mother was into Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Besides, my real first name is Trenton and my real second name is Partridge. E.C. Dude is just a name I made up for myself. Would you want to be called Trenton Partridge? I mean, get real.’
‘So E.C. doesn’t stand for anything at all?’ I asked him.
He shrugged, looked away. ‘It does, as a matter of fact. But whether I tell you is down to me.’
‘You’re right,’ I said, with a serious nod. ‘I’ll go buy the firewater.’
I walked away, across the dusty sun-baked lot I knew that E.C. Dude was still standing in the open doorway of the trailer watching me. That’s the wonderful thing about teenage kids. They try so hard to be different and sophisticated that they all end up acting exactly the same. Mind you, I guess that’s true of almost everybody. But I bet myself a hundred dollars that by the time I reached the perimeter fence of the used-car lot, E.C. Dude would tell me his name.
I walked slower and slower. My shadow cowered beneath my feet as if it were afraid to come out. I passed a wrecked Electra and a crushed-up Le Sabre. I had almost reached the perimeter fence. Then I heard E.C. Dude call out, ‘Extra Cool!’
I turned around, took off my sunglasses.
‘Extra Cool!’ he repeated. ‘That’s what E.C. stands for! Extra Cool Dude!’
‘That’s great,’ I told him. ‘I like it. Nothing like wearing your heart on your sleeve.’
I crossed the shimmering-hot tarmac and climbed the gritty wooden steps to the front door of the Sun Devil Bar & Grill. Outside, you could easily have mistaken the Sun Devil for a concrete blockhouse because that’s about all it was. The only giveaway that this was a palace of refreshment was a red-and-blue neon sign announcing Coors beer on draught.
I opened the screen door and went inside. It was so dark after the blinding white desert that I had to stop and blink for a while before I could see where I was or where I was going. The air-conditioning was set to North Pole.
There was a long dimly-lit bar with a vinyl-padded front and a row of chrome and vinyl-padded stools. Behind the bar hung a parody of one of those old-time reclining nudes, only this one looked more like a centerfold from Playboy, a glossily airbrushed girl sunbathing on a desert rock. Out of her tumbling brunette hair poked a pair of nubby horns, and in her hand she held a three-pronged toasting-fork.
A juke-box was playing some sentimental Tammy Wynette-type song. As far as I could make out in the gloom, the only other customers in the Sun Devil were a porky little man in a light green suit and white shoes who was perched up on a bar-stool with his white stetson hat and a Bloody Mary in front of him; and a mountainous black-bearded trucker who was sitting at one of the tables, shovelling up corned-beef hash and eggs as if his stomach were a landfill project.
As I approached the bar, however, a young blonde woman came out from the back. She had blue eyes as big as Bambi, and she was wearing a tight white sleeveless blouse. Quite pretty, if you like Western waitresses.
‘He’p you?’ she wanted to know.
‘I want a bottle of Chivas Regal, if you have one to spare.’
She nodded her head in the general direction of Papago Joe’s. Joe’s got you buying, does he?’
‘He’s done this before, then?’
‘Just about ever’ time anybody comes to talk about the murders,’ she said. She reached down under the bar and produced a bottle of Chivas Regal. ‘He used to drink Johnnie Walker but not these days.’
I gav
e her two twenties and she gave me the change. ‘What happened over there?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘Nobody really knows. My son Stanley saw it happen but of course he’s only just turned nine. And E.C. Dude saw it, did you meet E.C. Dude?’
‘Yes, I sure did. Quite a character.’
‘All they say was the cars all kind of slid across the lot and crashed into each other. When the deputy came to see what all the noise was about, Stanley kept on screaming that there was somebody inside the workshop. So they opened up the workshop and there they were, all dead, all chopped up.’
I frowned. ‘Had Stanley been in the workshop before?’
‘Unh-hunh, it had been locked up for years.’
‘So how come he knew there was somebody in there?’
The young woman shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Childish intuition I guess. Kids can pick up vibes that grown-ups can’t pick up, do you know what I mean? They’re like dogs and gophers.’
‘Is Stanley around?’
‘Oh … sure.’
‘Do you mind if I talk to him?’
The young woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you a reporter?’
I shook my head. ‘My name’s Harry — Harry Erskine. I’m kind of an investigator.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Did you ever see that movie Poltergeist? I’m kind of a psychic investigator.’
‘You mean you go looking for ghosts and stuff?’
‘That’s it I go looking for ghosts and stuff.’
‘Gee, I never realized people actually did that.’
‘Oh, they actually do that, all right.’
The young woman held out her chilly little hand and I shook it ‘My name’s Linda Welles,’ she said. ‘You stay right here and I’ll go find Stanley.’
While she was gone, I looked up at the television over the bar. Although the sound was turned down, I could see flickering images of downtown Las Vegas, taken in what looked like the middle of a blood-red night. I saw the ornamental fountains in front of Caesar’s Palace churning with debris and fallen statues and crimson foam. I saw a row of casino billboards on Las Vegas Boulevard toppling like bowling-pins: the Silver City, the Morocco Motel, the Riviera, the Silverbird, the Sahara. I saw cars tumbling over and over — a stretch limo sliding sideways along Desert Inn Road, trailing a shower of sparks.
People were running, buildings were falling. I saw the pink-and-white striped tent of Circus-Circus collapsing. I saw the Aladdin vanish. Then, in terrible silence, the Landmark hotel-casino tower dropped into the ground — literally dropped right into the ground.
Linda came back, leading a small grumpy boy. I pointed up at the television. ‘Have you seen that?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘It was on earlier. Isn’t it awful? I sure hope we don’t get a cyclone like that round here.’
‘Do you mind turning up the volume?’
She turned it up. A voice that sounded like a strained Dan Rather was saying, ‘— fifty or sixty square miles … all flights to Las Vegas have been diverted away from the area and highways have been cleared for emergency services … so far impossible to estimate how many people have died … although the toll of dead and injured could run into thousands …’
We listened soberly. There were interviews with seismologists, meteorologists and engineers. The engineers were anxious that the ‘tremorless earthquake’ could affect the integrity of the Hoover Dam, thirty miles south-east of the city, and that Lake Mead might suddenly burst down the valley of the Colorado River, causing widespread destruction. So far it had been impossible for rescue helicopters to fly through the storms.
‘It was red … the sky was red …’ said one exhausted-looking pilot. ‘But right in the middle there, where all the hotels were falling … we saw something black, like black smoke — black kind of tendrils of smoke … like a boiling octopus.’
The man in the green suit said, ‘Hey, Linda, switch over to the game, would you mind?’
Linda obediendy switched channels to Phoenix playing the L.A. Clippers. The game was almost over. ‘Have to oblige the regulars,’ she explained, rolling her eyes up.
Stanley whined, ‘Mom, I want to go back outside.’
‘No, Stanley. I want you to talk to Harry first. Harry this is Stanley. Stanley this is Harry. Listen, Stanley, Harry wants to ask you some questions about what happened when all the autos crashed at Papago Joe’s.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Stanley protested, trying to twist his hand free.
‘Well, you have to talk about it.’
‘Don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Hey, Stanley,’ I said. ‘Come around here. Come on. I want to show you something.’
Linda nudged him and Stanley reluctantly came around the bar.
‘You have a quarter in your ear,’ I told him.
He stared at me as if I were a prime candidate for the funny farm. But I reached into his ear and produced a quarter, which I turned this way and that, and then dropped into his shirt pocket.
‘How did you do that?’ he said.
‘I didn’t do anything. You had a quarter in your ear, that was all.’
‘Are you a fairy?’ he asked me.
‘Hey … do I look like a fairy?’
‘You’re wearing a pink shirt. Only fairies wear pink shirts.’
‘Get out of here. The President wears pink shirts.’
‘Exactly.’
I said, ‘How about a root beer? You like root beer?’
‘Okay, so long as you show me how you do that thing with the quarter.’
‘I told you, I didn’t do anything. Is it my fault if you walk around with quarters in your ears?’
We sat at a table in the corner. Stanley had a root beer and a pack of dry-roasted peanuts which he ate greedily and very noisily, with his mouth open.
‘I’m going to go talk to E.C. Dude and Papago Joe,’ I explained, ‘but first of all I wanted to hear all about it from you.’
Stanley chewed for a while, and then he said, ‘We heard all this crunching and crashing and everything, and all the cars went sliding across the lot.’
‘Did you see anything else?’
He hesitated, then quickly shook his head.
‘Did you see something that looked like a shadow?’
He kept on chewing. He managed to challenge my stare for about twenty seconds, then he had to look down at the table.
‘How did you know there was something inside of the workshop?’ I asked him.
He looked up again. His eyes were dark. ‘I don’t know. I just did.’
‘You saw a shadow, didn’t you? Something that looked like a shadow?’ He nodded.
‘You want to describe it for me?’
He swallowed, and hesitated. Then, very slowly, he raised his hand over his face and parted his fingers so that only his eyes looked out ‘It was dark and it was running and it had a great big head and it was all bent over like a buffalo and it ran like this.’
Here, he hunched himself forward and gave an imitation of a heavy, uneven loping movement.
‘Did you mention the shadow to anybody else?’
He nodded. ‘Deputy Fordyce, and my mom, too.’
‘And what did they think about it?’
‘They didn’t think anything. They thought it was maybe somebody’s shadow, somebody running away, and it just looked funny because of the way they were running.’
‘Did E.C. Dude see the shadow?’
‘Yes,’ said Stanley.
I took a long cold swallow of beer, and then I leaned back in my chair and looked at Stanley intently. ‘What do you think it was?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know. I think it was a sort of ghost.’
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
He shook his head. ‘Not ghosts like in Ghostbusters. Not Slimer or anything.’
‘But you do believe in the shadow?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I sat thinking for a while,
and Stanley sat watching me. Eventually I leaned forward and found a dollar seventy-six in small change in his left nostril.
‘You know what?’ I told him. ‘You’re better than a one-armed bandit.’
E.C. Dude said, ‘I’d almost given you up, man.’
I climbed the steps into the trailer. Inside, it was frigidly air-conditioned, like everywhere else in Arizona, but le grande luxe on wheels it wasn’t. The sides and part of the roof were spectacularly stove in, and all the left-hand windows, instead of being glazed, were covered in sun-yellowed plastic sheeting. A television set with no screen sat perched on a broken table, and the only other furniture appeared to be mattresses and broken wooden chairs and Indian blankets. A zig-zag-patterned blanket had been hung across the width of the trailer in order to separate it into two ‘rooms.’ In spite of the air-conditioning, the trailer was aromatic with unwashed feet, marijuana, pine-scented toilet block and cigarette smoke.
‘I brought the whisky,’ I announced, holding up the bottle.
‘Hey, extra,’ said E.C. Dude. He lit a Camel and then held out the pack. ‘Smoke?’
‘Don’t, thanks.’
‘That’s cool. Wish I could quit. My old man died of lung cancer. I should of tape-recorded some of his coughing, just to remind me, you know. He practically coughed up the soles of his goddamned shoes.’
I looked around. ‘Is Papago Joe here?’
‘He’ll be out in a minute. He’s flossing his teeth.’
Somehow it never occurred to me that Indians might floss their teeth, but I guess they’re only human, like the rest of us. Even Geronimo must have had to go to the little boys’ room now and again.
I said, ‘The reason I took so long was because I talked to Stanley.’
‘Oh, yes,’ nodded E.C. Dude. ‘Linda’s kid. I like him. He’s something extra, that kid.’
‘He told me about the automobiles crashing. He told me about the shadow, too.’
E.C. Dude lit his cigarette and looked a little shifty. ‘Well, he’s a bright kid. He’s got a whole lot of imagination.’
Burial Page 33
