by Giles Blunt
“He is. He’s looking after you and me and the whole wide world right now. Obviously that don’t mean we up and quit our moral responsibilities.”
Baxter shook his head. His cellphone rang and he picked it up, squinting at the tiny screen. He switched it off and put it back down. He no sooner did that than his land line, a bright red phone designed to imply security at a national level, also began to ring. He punched a button and it went silent.
“You’ve got a real jones for this girl and you can’t even admit it. You’re obsessed, Bill, I can see it a mile away.”
“Think what you want,” Bill said. “I know what’s in my heart.”
“Uh-huh.”
Baxter took out his Mont Blanc and scribbled a note to himself. That was just like him, to make a note on a Post-it with a fountain pen.
“All right, Bill, but you owe me one. And I want you back Monday at the latest. You’ll be doing graveyard.”
“Lance, I’m fifty-five years old. Let the younger guys do graveyard.”
“Are you so tight with the Lord you can’t see when a mere human being is doing you a favour? Get the hell outta here.”
Fifty-five and still taking orders; it was enough to make a grown man cry. Bill always tried to be humble, the way Jesus was, but Jesus was half divine and clearly had an advantage or two.
Now, Bill’s first glance at the hotel room confirmed that Sabrina had not somehow snuck past him. Her jeans were strewn across the end of the bed, which was otherwise unrumpled. Her backpack was on the floor. Her suitcase was open on a fold-out stand, and it squeezed his heart to see how full it was. Bye-bye, Bill, it said, I’ve lit out for good. She had taken almost all her clothes, not that she had a vast wardrobe. You’d think that someone so beautiful would have closets full of the latest fashions, but Sabrina owned almost nothing.
He knelt beside the bed and sniffed the jeans, burying his face in them and breathing deeply. “Don’t go,” he said. “I swear, I will buy you everything you need. I will be your provider and you will be my helpmeet.”
The suitcase contained mostly T-shirts, though she hadn’t packed the yellow one that said Cancun.
He found the dark skirt that he yelled at her for wearing because it showed too much of her legs. Those beautiful legs that sent waves of lust riding through his body. He didn’t want other men lusting after her that way.
“I was yelling more in pain than in anger,” he said to the hotel room now.
But he remembered how the expression on her face had changed. How the muscles in her cheeks had gone slack, her eyes dimming to a darkness that he recognized was fear. Fear, and something worse: contempt.
“Oh, Lord, why did you send me this beautiful creature, if not for me to take under my protection?”
She had used the shower. The bath mat was askew, and a towel was slung over the shower curtain rail. The air smelled of coconut shampoo. Girl things were set out neatly on the glass shelf above the sink: eyeliner, some kind of flesh-coloured stuff in a tube, lip balm. He opened the lip balm and touched it to his bottom lip, then the tip of his tongue. He picked up her hairbrush, put it back.
He went back to the other room and knelt again beside the bed, clasping his hands together until the knuckles whitened.
“Oh, Lord, help me bring Sabrina back, for she done truly lost her way. And woe betide those who led her astray, who made straight the way unto eternal fire.”
He clutched a T-shirt in both hands and brought it to his face. A sob escaped his throat, but he checked the urge to weep. Mostly because he had a pretty good idea where Sabrina was headed next.
Max woke up. Cold metal was pressing against the base of his skull, as if he had fallen asleep with his head resting on a pipe.
He could see the lights from the trailer park, white orbs in the window, which was open. He could smell the faint smells of oil and gas from someone’s badly tuned motor. A dog barked in the distance and, farther off, yobbos guffawed.
He reached behind his head and felt the pipe, palpated the little ridge at the end pressing up against his skull. The sight. He sat up, back pressed against the head of the bed.
Wyatt Earp was sitting on the bed beside him, knee-high boots resting on top of the covers. Doc Holliday was perched sideways at the foot, drinking from a silver flask. They were the animatronic creatures Max had seen the day before.
“New wigs,” Max said. “Is that what you’ve come for?”
“We don’t need no steenking wigs,” Wyatt Earp said. His mouth moved in the most unsettling, jerky motion, out of sync with his words.
“You scared yet, fatso?” Doc Holliday sneered at him from the foot of the bed. “You should be.”
“The wigs,” Max said. “I’ll just get up and fetch them for you.”
Wyatt Earp put an arm around his shoulder. It felt just like you’d expect a robot’s arm to feel, squeezing him so that he could not even squirm. The barrel of the gun pressed against his temple.
“You first,” Doc Holliday said, making a pistol of his fingers. “Then the boy.”
“Oh, no. Not the boy,” Max pleaded. “Not the boy.”
The bang went off in his ears like a cathedral bell. He felt the bullet crash into the bone behind his ear. He would only have a second or two to save Owen. It took all his strength to raise his right hand, bending at the elbow. He grabbed the barrel of the revolver. It was scorching hot, the metal searing his hand. He couldn’t hold on. He pressed his pillow to the back of his skull to staunch the wound and passed out.
Sometime later, he peeled the pillow from his head and opened one eye. The pink fringe of morning glowed in the Rocket’s window, and the room was gunslinger-free.
FOURTEEN
Max was not a man to cling to a mood, Sabrina had to give him that, and breakfast always seemed to make him positively sprightly. Her storied father had been a spiky bundle of negativity in the morning. Set your juice glass down too hard on the kitchen table and he’d reach across and give you a swipe on the ear. All you usually saw of him were his hands gripping the newspaper, which he snapped and rattled as if it were responsible for the outrages it reported. His moods made mornings a time of trepidation for Sabrina and her mother, and she realized now, sitting in the sunny nook of the Rocket, that they coloured her perception of breakfast to this day.
Max was humming and whistling in the galley, fixing coffee and poached eggs. He commented, cajoled and exclaimed over his cooking in several different accents. Just in the course of cracking eggs he went through Scottish, Irish, Indian and a Southern black bluesman accent that made Sabrina laugh in spite of herself.
“You’re a one-man United Nations,” she said. “Doesn’t it get crowded in there?”
“Desperately, my dear, desperately,” he said, setting a plate in front of her. “Eat ’em while they’re hot.”
“These are great,” she said, sprinkling salt and pepper on two perfect eggs. “I never actually ate poached eggs before. It must be an English thing.”
“One of the many amenities we gave to the world, along with Shakespeare, Sir Larry and the Beatles.”
“Don’t forget slavery,” Owen put in.
“Slavery existed long before the British Empire, boy.”
“Not in this country.”
“Please. No politics at breakfast.”
Owen switched on the television at low volume, flipping channels until he found a local news show, Breakfast Television with Rick and Rona. It was one of those set-ups where two manic hosts make jokes at each other between reading the news and interviewing people involved in unusual pursuits.
The male half of the show went solemn at the next item. “A dinner party ended in bloodshed last night as two armed men robbed and terrorized guests at the home of Bradford and Cassandra Blake. Tork Williams is live at the scene.”
A shot of the Blake residence showed crime scene tape and forensic officers coming and going. The reporter breathlessly recounted how the two men had interrupted
the dinner and robbed the guests of cash and jewellery that “could be” worth up to half a million dollars.
“Local businessman Reeve Chandler was shot as he tried to stop the men. He was taken to County General, where he’s in critical condition with gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen.”
Sabrina didn’t like morning television, but Owen seemed riveted. Even Max had gone still to look at the screen.
“A security camera got a shot of the two men as they made their getaway out the front door. One of them is an older man-described as an Australian with a shaved head. The other is late teens/early twenties with dark hair and long sideburns.”
The screen showed low-definition, jerky shots of the two making for the door, looking back over their shoulders. Their panic was obvious, the bald man with the gun still in his hand stopping at the door to turn around and brandish it again at the people they had robbed.
Max sat down and shook pepper all over his eggs, then let fly with a mighty sneeze. “Navigator,” he said to Owen, between blowing his nose and wiping his eyes, “what’s our heading?”
They set out east on US 80, straight into the morning sun. Sabrina sat behind Max and Owen, listening to Feist on her iPod. Her T-shirt and jeans were feeling a little lived-in, but there had been no question of going back to the hotel to retrieve her luggage, not with Bill parked in the lobby.
They passed a sign announcing Bisbee.
“How now, good Bisbee, what news?” Max said. “Owen, instruct us in the lore of Bisbee. How came it hither and wherefore.”
Owen pulled out a Blue Guide and flipped through it. “Used to be a big silver mining place,” he said. “Copper, too. Home of the famous Queen Mine and the Lavender Open Pit. In July 1917, a thousand striking miners were rounded up and hauled out of the state and dumped in the New Mexico desert.”
“Respect for the working man,” Max said, “is what made this country great.”
The Rocket creaked and rattled along at a stately pace, Max tapping out rhythms on the steering wheel to music only he could hear. Owen turned a couple of times to look back at Sabrina and give her a small smile. He was cute, she had to admit. His uncle was peculiar, but Owen seemed much more solid than most guys his age, despite an upbringing that had to have been at least as unconventional as her own.
They passed Douglas, and continued through the Pedrogosa Mountains. Not that they looked much different than all the other mountains in Arizona-scrubby, with rounded tops, more like big hills than what she thought of as mountains. The light turned purple in the long shadows they cast, and there was something unsettling about them.
“The Chiricahua Apaches used to hide out in those hills,” Owen told them. “Outlaws, too.”
“Outlaws like who?” Sabrina said.
She wanted to hear Owen talk more. She liked his voice, and the way he was interested in different places and things. But he just shrugged and said, “Billy the Kid.”
To pass the time, Sabrina tried to read some of Much Ado About Nothing in the Collected Shakespeare she found beside the TV. It didn’t seem nearly as funny as the movie, and she put it aside. She flipped through a case of CDs: there were obscure comedy items, a French instruction CD, Celtic folk tunes, Leonard Cohen, a complete John le Carre audiobook, a lot of Celine Dion, as well as Green Day and Broken Social Scene. There was also a set of three CDs called Bob Hedge’s Dialect Practice Sessions.
Here and there US 80 offered a few miles of ragged asphalt, some abandoned buildings and more tumbleweed than anyone needed to see. They listened to country music on the radio and didn’t talk much. Sabrina had never been on any road trips that took longer than a day. It was strange how you settled back into a reflective state. The washed-out glare of the sun, the procession of hills and cactus, the odd herd of goats, took on a gauzy unreality, totally disconnected from the air-conditioned interior of the Rocket.
“We have reached the City of God,” Max said during one of the better stretches. “Somehow I didn’t expect to find it in New Mexico, U.S.A.”
He was referring to Lordsburg, which he slowed to cruise through. The place looked flat and insubstantial. Everything about it said “mining town of the 1880s” or thereabouts. The sun hammered down on the empty streets. The only thing moving was a ratty-looking yellow dog that trotted along with a self-important gait as if late for a meeting.
“Looks like no one’s left in Lordsburg,” Owen said. “Including the Lord.”
“I hope that dog’s all right,” Sabrina said.
“That dog is the Lord,” Max said. “It’s the tail gives him away.”
There was a brief flurry of excitement when Max saw a sign for Shakespeare.
“The Swan of Stratford lives! And who would have suspected it would be in the desert?”
“Relax, Max. It’s just a ghost town.”
“All the better. Hamlet, Banquo, Pompei? Will adored ghosts! An obvious must-see.”
Owen waved the guidebook at him. “It’s got nothing to do with Shakespeare. It was a silver mining place that went out of business. It’s privately owned, and it’s only open for tours on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
But Max would not be dissuaded. So they drove along miles of dusty highway until they came to the gate that contained the same information Owen had already reported.
“Bugger,” Max said.
Beyond the gate they could see the main street, the low storefronts and what looked like an old hotel.
“Billy the Kid worked in that hotel,” Owen said. “But he didn’t enjoy washing dishes, so he turned to a life of crime.”
“A common but tragic flaw,” Max said. “Antipathy to manual labour.”
Not long after that, they were back on the interstate. “Did you know,” Max said, “that the town of Deming has twenty-seven gas stations, twenty-one restaurants and thirteen motels?”
Sabrina looked up. “How would you know a thing like that?”
“The State of New Mexico tells me so.” He pointed at a sign that contained exactly the information he had just imparted. Apparently, the State of New Mexico, or at least the part of it along the I-10, wanted to remind visitors of the treats that awaited them in each of its towns and cities. Signs popped up every few miles, keeping them completely, not to say relentlessly, informed.
“I refuse to stop anywhere with fewer than forty-three restaurants,” Max said. “A man has to have choice.”
Owen opened the CD player, pulled out the disc, and reached back for the case of Bob Hedge’s Dialect Practice Sessions. Sabrina got a look at the disc he was holding; it was labelled Australian.
Later that afternoon they passed the Continental Divide.
Owen flipped open his cell and dialed Roscoe again, but there was no answer.
“Oh, now, it’s too bad the base Hungarian isn’t here to see this,” Max said. “Him with his Great Dividing Range.”
“That’s the Continental Divide?” Sabrina said. It was little more than a flat ridge of rock baking in the sun.
She had been pretty quiet since Lordsburg. Owen tried to steer the conversation around to Max’s sales prospects in El Paso-the local theatre company, the drama department of the university, a couple of wig shops-but Max was oblivious. He recited some Lewis Carroll verses and told a funny story involving Peter Ustinov and a bottle of vintage port. Mile after mile of scrubland rolled by. The road was empty, wiser tourists realizing the desert is best travelled at night.
They passed through miles of Martian landscape, vistas, dust and weeds that eventually turned into pepper fields, and then they came to El Paso. They settled the Rocket in a campground that was near a crumbling old mission with a solitary priest smoking a cigarette by the front door. They all wanted to stretch their legs, but it was still too hot to enjoy a walk, so they ended up taking the Taurus to a shopping mall. It was like being inside a gigantic refrigerator, and they walked around the Gap and Banana Republic and American Eagle Outfitters until they felt crisp as cucumbers. They had dinner
at a coffee shop that provided a car wash while they ate, and afterwards they went to see the new Tom Cruise movie. Owen had a funny sensation that the three of them must look like a family out together, as if they were normal.
Max went straight to bed when they got back to the Rocket, but not before another attempt to persuade Sabrina to visit her father.
“He’s your friend, Max,” she said without looking at him, “not mine. You go visit him if you want to.”
“Unnatural child.”
“He never really cared about my mother, never really cared about me. Why should I care about him?”
“When I wrote and told him I was planning a trip out this way, his only request was to ask me to check in on you. We wouldn’t be together if he hadn’t.”
“Listen, Max, this man you admire so much treated my mother like shit right up until the day she killed herself by swallowing every pill in the house. So forgive me if my feelings about him are not exactly tender, okay?”
Max put his hands up in uncharacteristic surrender, backed into his bedroom, and closed the door with a sensitive click.
Owen switched on the TV and flipped through newscasts, trying to find one from Tucson. Sabrina fiddled with her iPod. They sat in silence together, grazing their separate media.
After a while Sabrina said, “Are you trying to find out if that guy’s okay?”
“What guy?”
“The guy Max shot last night.”
Owen started to protest, but she held up a slim hand and shook her head. “You’re forgetting I grew up with a criminal too. I know the signs-the excitement, the adrenalin, the nerves. You have the hairpieces, Max is master of foreign accents, and I see from your CD collection that you’ve been practising Australian. I have to say, Owen, I didn’t peg you for a violent person.”
