When it came right down to it, Bill always ended up feeling sorry for the guy. Conspiracy theorists like Marvin lived in a constant shadow of fear. They operated on such a jaded worldview, it consumed them. Especially when they were a tad schizophrenic like Marv.
Bill had already started to forgive himself before he turned the cruiser away from the office. He drove about seven miles the opposite direction and dropped Marvin off at the entrance to Mars’ Greenhouse Gas Terraformer, Autowreckers, and Scrap Metal Yard (Or Anything Else You Don’t Want)—the ungainly named junkyard where the Martian lived. Bill opened the back door for him.
“All right, Marv, I want you to go in and take your meds, you hear?”
“Yes, sir,” the Martian said, firing off a mock salute from the brim of his hat. “I’ll go take my mass-murder pills right away, sir.” He took a few steps, but then Bill saw something.
“Hey, Marvin, stop.”
“Yes, sir, anything you say, sir.”
Bill resisted the urge to glance at the old red truck, the same truck he’d seen at Rat’s, only now its bed was empty, the fertilizer gone. And Bill had to wonder, what the hell?
“You mind if I take a quick look around?” he asked.
Marvin straightened. “Got a warrant?”
“No, it’s not that,” Bill said, “I just need to pick up a part for the jeep. That tailgate never has shut right.”
“Don’t got any parts for a jeep,” Marvin said.
Bill gazed around the wrecking yard at all the vehicles, bashed in, gutted, and otherwise demolished. He lingered for a second on the red truck.
The license plates.
They were gone.
Bill could have sworn the truck had plates before. So if the pickup belonged to the farmer’s supply, what was it doing here at the Martian’s with no plates? And where the hell was the fertilizer?
From what Bill could tell, Marvin wasn’t much on gardening. There was only one other thing he could think of you’d do with a ton of ammonium nitrate.
“Mind if I take a look anyway?” Bill asked. “I might see something you don’t.”
“Closed for the day,” Marvin said. “Sorry.”
Bill reviewed his options. Marvin had asked if he had a warrant. He didn’t. And he needed more probable cause before a judge would even listen.
At last, Bill decided it was better to let Marvin think he could lower his guard. He needed something more solid. Why not let the Martian hand it to him?
“All right, Marv. Keep out of trouble.” Bill started to duck into his cruiser, but Marvin stopped him.
“Hey, you ever notice how there isn’t any reservation? You ever thought about that, man?”
Bill furrowed his brow, trying to show Marvin just how incredulous he was. He wanted to leave all these rusty metal hills of pipes and panels behind.
“We’ve got one for the Blackfeet, the Flathead, the Crow. In fact, there’s one for most of the major tribes of Montana, but not for the Ebumnanyth. There aren’t any descendants at all. Why do you think that is?”
This time, Bill was actually intrigued. It was true; the Ebumnanyth, a small tribe, had been wiped off the Cracked Rock map, except in legend. Except for a few unmarked graves up at Harcum.
Marvin smiled and looked around at the treetops surrounding his junkyard. On the steeper hill to the west, the Quaking Aspens seemed to be peeling away in flakes of gold.
“There’s something special about this place,” the Martian said, turning his smile on Bill, a creepy thing that looked way too much like Charles Manson’s crazy-clown face. “Even the Indians knew it.” He walked off down a long corridor of junk refrigerators and stoves, and disappeared.
Bill looked at the Aspens, and then to the old cell tower high on the craggy mountain. A contrail, Marvin’s so-called chemtrail, streaked above the antenna array. Bill’s eyes flicked to the shadow of Empty Mine halfway up the hill, and he thought of Marvin’s “cracks.”
One translation of the Ebumnanyth name for the town was Hollow Mountain.
Once Marvin was out of sight, Bill walked over to the red truck. He peeked through the windshield, but the VIN had been removed from the dash.
The driver’s-side door was unlocked. Bill opened it and looked at the jamb and doorpost. There, too, the VIN had been removed. Bill popped the hood and checked the engine block, where the number had been filed off. He checked the front end of the frame near the wiper fluid container. He even checked inside the wheel wells. No VIN.
No owner’s manual, no registration card.
Bill thought for a second.
There was no way to prove Marvin had been the one to scrape all identification from the vehicle, and there was no way to prove this truck was sitting here for any other reason but to be crushed and cubed. Bill couldn’t even prove it was the same truck he’d seen at Rat’s (though he knew it was).
Back inside the cruiser, he picked up his radio.
“Hey, Aaron.”
“Yeah, Bill?”
“Remind me to keep an eye on the Martian, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
“Thanks.” They hung up and Bill lit one of Mrs. Disney’s Montclairs, glad he hadn’t returned them yet. He could only hope the nicotine would be enough to settle his hands.
CHAPTER 6
“So, JJ, tell me about your first week of school? Are you glad to be back? Excited about the assembly Friday?”
JJ didn’t look up from his phone. He could see Mrs. Keeler in his periphery, sitting in her leather chair, wearing her leather knee-high boots.
The counselor’s office had two sides to it: the business side with her desk and photos of her family, and the counseling side with the bookshelves, coffee table, chair, and comfy leather couch.
“What assembly?” JJ asked, avoiding her eyes.
Mrs. Keeler smiled politely down at his phone. “JJ, please, you’ve been coming to see me since the sixth grade. You know my policy.”
“It’s what I want to talk about, though,” JJ said, refusing to put away his phone. She’d already made him take off his hat.
“And what would you like to talk about?”
JJ scooted to the end of the couch cushion and handed his little clamshell to the counselor.
Mrs. Keeler’s glasses hung in the V of her cardigan, dangling from a golden chain. She put them on and peered down at the picture JJ had blown up onscreen. “What am I . . . oh, I see.”
“It’s kind of blurry,” JJ said. “Sorry. You can’t really tell, but they’re handing off a skull.”
“I see.” Mrs. Keeler returned his phone and lowered her glasses.
JJ sat back, staring at the small, pixelated image on his clamshell. “They dug ’em all up. It was crazy.”
“Yes, I’m sure it was quite upsetting. I, for one, didn’t see the harm in letting them relocate my ancestors. And they compensated me quite well.”
“Some of them were your family?” JJ asked. “Did they get any sh—sewage dumped on them?”
Mrs. Keeler clenched the end of her glasses between her teeth for a second. “So tell me, JJ, how did watching this disinterment make you feel?”
“I don’t know. I mean, you had family there. Who was it, your great-great-great-grandmother? How’d you feel?”
“Well, it’s like I said. I was well compensated.”
“Did you get to go see their bodies?”
Mrs. Keeler tapped the tip of her glasses against her whitened teeth and then let them drop back to her breast. “I’m not sure I’d want to do that.”
“Why? Think it’d creep you out, make you cry or something?”
“Are these some of the feelings you had, JJ, watching the disinterment?”
His counselor was great at answering questions with questions. Better than his dad, even. JJ had grown wise to the trick, though, and he liked asking his counselor questions anyway. He had figured out all her buttons, what each one did when he pushed it. He liked pushing them sometimes.
He also knew if he wasn’t assertive enough, they would end up talking about what she wanted to talk about, and JJ didn’t want to talk about that.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I guess I thought it was kind of cool. I mean, I don’t know any of those people like you do. I’m not related to any of them. I guess I just thought it was cool.”
“I see.”
Mrs. Keeler crossed her legs. She wore a skirt and stockings today, along with the boots. She was an older lady, with dyed-black hair, and JJ never would admit this to any of his friends, but she had nice legs.
“JJ, a lot of children your age, particularly boys, are often preoccupied with death. Especially if it has affected someone they know.”
“Huh,” JJ said. He didn’t like when she did that—speak in general when they both knew she was talking about him. She wasn’t very subtle when she pried.
“How would you describe your perspective on death?” Mrs. Keeler asked.
“I don’t know.”
But he did know.
As JJ stared at the photo on his phone, he knew full well it wasn’t death that engrossed him. It was the fact that he had watched the whole thing right there on his phone: all that butt mud, running into the graves while people scurried around like insects—it had all happened right there on his crappy low-resolution screen, not in real life, to real people.
Even now, sitting in front of someone related to one of the skeletons they’d dug up and crapped all over, it didn’t feel real. The same way all those people jumping off the USconn roof hadn’t felt real. It all seemed like something he’d watched on the web. And he couldn’t conjure up sympathy for any of them.
JJ had come to the counselor’s couch thinking he might want to tell Mrs. Keeler that. He’d almost admitted it to his dad when Mini Mark got them busted for the memes, but at the last second JJ realized he’d only get in deeper shit if he told his dad something like that. Deeper shit, or more therapy.
He stared at the picture on his phone, deciding whether or not he could tell his counselor how he truly felt. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I guess I just think it’s kind of cool.”
“Help me understand. You think death is cool?”
“Sure,” JJ said, but he had already stopped paying attention to her. He brought his phone up closer, studying something he hadn’t seen before in the background of the shot.
A little blue fold of something.
Beneath a face.
JJ’s cell phone beeped. A text. It was from
After a line break it added, <@ HMS this Fri!>
Mrs. Keeler had gotten the same text.
* * *
“About the bar tonight,” Steve said on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, about that,” Bill said into his headset. He panned his camera around the junkyard and scooted his butt, trying to get a more comfortable seat in the tree stand. “I don’t think I can make it.”
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah,” Bill said, but it wasn’t.
He wanted to tell his friend what was going on with him, just so he had a valid excuse for flaking out. But Bill couldn’t tell his friend anything, because if he told Steve he was trying to quit, Steve would figure out that Bill had a problem. And no one knew about Bill’s problem. At least, he didn’t think anyone did. The same way no one knew he was sitting halfway up a Ponderosa, wearing camouflage, spying on the Martian with a telephoto lens.
He couldn’t see the bags of ammonium nitrate anywhere in the dump. He’d looked. He had no clue where Rat and the Martian had stashed the fertilizer.
“I just, I was planning on staying home,” he told Steve. “Thinking about watching the debate.”
“That’s tonight?”
“Yep. Week went by fast, didn’t it?”
Steve chuffed. “It’s like I went to sleep and woke up in a different town.”
“Speaking of which . . .” Bill squinted and readjusted the viewfinder against his eye. “You hear they bought the old building across from Mountain View?”
“Wait, they’re putting a PCo next to our cemetery?”
“And our church.”
“Isn’t there a law against that?” Steve said.
“They bought out the cell tower, too, I guess.”
“Well, that explains the letters then.”
Bill had seen the letters on the mountain as well. They were about a mile up the hill from him now.
In a clearing adjacent to the tower, the local kids usually wrote huge messages using logs and rocks painted white. Steve and Bill, when they were young, had written their own message: a huge pair of boobs. They always joked about doing it again, one of these nights, but then they’d usually sober up and realize they were both a little over halfway to senior discounts at the diner.
Recently, the message on the mountain had been changed to read PCo in big white letters. Bill had more incentive than ever to change the damn thing.
“I have to drive by all of it just to get to work,” Steve said. “I’m tempted to floor it for the whole stretch, just so I don’t have to be angry quite as long.”
“Thanks for pointing out my new speed trap,” Bill said. They both chuckled. “Look, man, sorry about tonight.”
“Nah, I can’t go anyway. There’s an assembly.”
“Yeah? Then I don’t feel so bad.” But Bill did. He felt worse. Lies on top of lies. It didn’t stop him from peeping into the Martian’s bedroom, though.
He dialed in the lens on Marvin’s living complex, comprised of four travel trailers parked in a square. Their doors all opened onto a common deck.
Marvin rented some of them sometimes, as summer houses, but he wasn’t renting any now. It was his off-season.
In two of the trailers, lights made the curtains glow, but Bill had yet to see the Martian. He’d yet to see even a silhouette behind the curtains.
“So what’s this assembly about?” Bill asked.
“The PCo.”
Bill’s fingers paused on the zoom. “At the school?”
“Yep, right in my home court. I’ve got some choice questions written down for them, too.”
Bill lowered the camera and pressed the headset to his ear. “Listen, Steve. Are there any protestors there? Anyone from the graveyard?” Staring down at Marvin’s trailers, Bill added, “Any close encounters?”
“No,” Steve said, “no Martian. Should I be worried?”
“Nah, just . . .” Bill stuffed his gear back into his bag, which he lowered to the forest floor with a rope. He stood up on the tree stand and prepared to ratchet it back down the pine. “No one told me about any assembly. I would’ve worked it.”
“Is Marvin going to fling crap at us?” Steve asked.
“Tell me if he does, all right? How long’s the event? Has it started?”
“It has.”
Bill thought he could hear the dull roar of the crowd over the phone. He didn’t hear any shouts of dissent, though. No booing, no jeering.
“How long?” Bill said again, checking the safety harness wrapped around the tree.
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “They didn’t tell me anything. The event organizers, even the principal—all they’d say was PCo’s coming. It’s like some big secret. Oh, man, you wouldn’t believe their tour bus either. It’s as big as a rock star’s. They’re really shoving it in our faces.”
“I’ll be right there,” Bill said.
“Wait, why—”
But Bill had already hung up.
He’d left his jeep parked behind a thick growth of chokecherry. After packing his gear and tree climber into the back, Bill checked the shoulder holster he wore under his digital woodland jacket. Yep.
He jumped into the jeep and tried not to stir up a trail of dust all down the mountain. A good hunter never made deer wise to his spot till he’d put a bullet in them.
* * *
Steve stopped at the double
metal doors into the gym and let his phone sink slowly into his pocket. The crowd was so loud he could feel the brick vibrating.
Should I be worried?
Bill had told him no, and Steve trusted him. Bill probably just wanted to be at the assembly if, indeed, Marvin showed up to throw feces.
Steve heard something clicking in the hallway and looked up. “Barks?”
The dog had stopped near the other set of doors into the gym. He stared at Steve.
“What’re you . . .” He stopped himself. Steve had asked the German shepherd that question too many times before. He knew there was no answer to explain anything Barksdale did. “Hey, boy,” he said, walking over to pet the dog.
Barksdale licked his hand, but then turned his head, ears perked. He trotted off around a corner and disappeared.
Steve stood, telling himself to calm down. Barksdale showed up in all sorts of weird places, and not just because bad things were about to happen. Sometimes it was because he smelled food. Or a cat.
So Steve opened the doors to the gym, trying not to let it affect his blood pressure.
People overflowed from the stands and all the extra fold-up chairs, so that girls were coaxed to sit on boys’ laps and some people were forced to stand, leaning against the walls or the sides of the bleachers. Students, teachers, staff, parents, and, of course, local news had turned out to see what the roar was all about.
But no protestors.
Not yet.
Steve saw his son in the stands, sitting next to his backpack. He made his way up, trying not to step on anyone.
“I’m saving it,” JJ said as Steve handed the backpack to him and took the seat anyway. JJ’s friends, Richard Clement and Mark Moore Jr., laughed.
“Good evening, folks,” Principal Warner said, booming through the PA. He gave his introduction, and Steve managed not to roll his eyes when Warner lauded himself for keeping the school on the cutting edge of education.
“Sure,” said Mary McPhail from Home Ec, whispering into Steve’s ear from the next riser up. “That’s why the textbooks are the same from when I was a student. Twenty years ago.”
The Phone Company Page 7
