FIVE
Ian wakes to the sound of a knock at the door. He opens his eyes and sees white ceiling and a fan turning slowly. A few flies hang above him, punctuating the ceiling. His chest aches and throbs. He sits up and grabs the bottle of pain pills and pours a few into his mouth, then punches some caffeine tablets through the foil backing of the plastic sheet in which they were packaged and swallows those as well. There is another knock at the door. He gets to his feet, bending down to pick up the satchel, and he walks to the door and pulls it open.
Diego stands on the other side, looking tired. But he is showered and dressed in clean clothes and freshly shaved, though he missed a patch of hair under his left ear and another just under his chin.
‘What time is it?’
Diego looks at his watch. ‘Nine thirty.’
‘What? Fuck. What did you let me sleep so long for?’
‘You needed it.’
‘Anything last night?’
Diego shakes his head.
‘Not that I saw. Might have driven past, several cars did, but nobody stopped here.’
Ian nods.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Guess I catch up with them in California.’
‘We catch up with them in California.’
Ian shakes his head.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Get dressed. I’ll buy you breakfast.’
Monica brings them eggs and bacon and bagels soggy with butter. Ian thanks her and takes a sip of orange juice and watches her walk away. He wishes there was more in him. He wishes when he looked at Monica he felt something. But he does not, nor does he think he could. Not now. Even thoughts of the future are oddly emotionless, not like they used to be.
‘Distant,’ he says under his breath.
‘What?’ Diego picks up a piece of bacon and takes a bite of it.
Ian shakes his head. Nothing. ‘I’m serious about wanting you to go back to Bulls Mouth,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you near this. You have Cordelia and Elias to think about and you shouldn’t be here.’
‘He’ll kill you.’
‘Maybe.’
‘And if he does, what happens to Maggie?’
Ian looks down at his plate and pokes at his eggs with a dirty fork, but does not eat. After a while he simply sets his fork down again.
‘That doesn’t concern you,’ he says finally.
‘You know better than that.’
‘There’s nothing I can say, is there?’
‘Nothing you can say what?’
‘To get you to drive back to Bulls Mouth.’
‘No,’ Diego says.
Ian nods and is silent a long time. Finally he says, ‘Okay.’
He picks up his fork again and scoops egg into his mouth. It is flavorless and the texture is somehow terrible and dead in his mouth, but he chews and swallows and takes another bite. They have a long day ahead of them.
A long day during which someone will almost certainly die.
Ian throws his duffel bag into the back seat of his car.
‘Why don’t I ride with you?’ Diego has his own duffel bag hanging from his fist. ‘I was up all night. I could get some sleep in on the way.’
‘What about your car?’
‘I’ll pick it up on the way back.’
‘Okay. Get in. I’ll be right back.’
Ian stands in the doorway and says, ‘I’m going.’
Monica looks up from a crossword puzzle she has laid out on the counter before her and sets her pencil down. It rolls to the edge of the counter and falls to the floor, but she only glances at it a moment before looking back to Ian.
‘Are you really gonna stop by on your way back?’
‘We’re leaving Diego’s car. We’ll have to pick it up.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
She smiles.
‘Good. Maybe we can really go on that date then.’ Ian is silent for a long time. Then, smiling: ‘Maybe we can.’
Ian and Diego are on the road by ten fifteen. Diego smokes a cigarette with the window down and looks out at the desert while they drive, and then he snuffs his cigarette out in the ashtray, puts his seat back, and goes to sleep.
Ian drives in the silence.
Today is the day he gets his daughter back. It is strange to think about. Strange and frightening for reasons he cannot begin to understand. Or perhaps for reasons he refuses to understand. But he will get her back nonetheless. He will get her back and he will hold her in his arms.
In a life of failures he will have this.
They pass a sign that says KAISER NEXT EXIT, and Henry puts on his turn signal and merges into the right lane. Maggie looks out at the desert. She feels half in a dream. They drove all night. Almost all night. Henry fell asleep once and the truck rolled onto the shoulder of the road, but he snapped awake as the truck jerked about and grabbed the steering wheel and pulled them back out onto the interstate. Shortly after that he pulled off the road and they slept. But Henry must not have slept too long because the next time she awoke it was still dark and Henry was driving again.
He pulls off the interstate and onto a smaller road, passing a place with a sign that says DESERT CAFE, and Maggie imagines they serve dirt sandwiches. You pick them up and the sand falls out between the slices of bread and into your lap.
How’s the sammy?
Oh, it’s a bit dry.
Then they’re past the cafe and all that Maggie can see is empty desert. The road is filled with potholes. Thatches of dead grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt. Vapor rises in the distance.
They drive by a sign riddled with shotgun holes, rusted and barely readable. It says KAISER 8 MILES, and there is a white arrow pointing straight ahead.
‘We’re almost there, Bee,’ Henry says.
‘I can’t wait to get out of this truck,’ Beatrice says.
Maggie can’t either. They have been driving a very long time. She can’t wait to get out, but she is afraid of what will happen once they get where they’re going. She doesn’t understand why she hasn’t seen Daddy since yesterday afternoon. Maybe he forgot about her. No, she knows better than that. He did not forget about her. Her daddy would never do that. Maybe Borden got him, got him and killed him for Henry. Borden isn’t real. She knows that. Borden isn’t real and even if he was real he couldn’t leave the Nightmare World. He is like a fish in that way and cannot leave the waters of the dark place where he was born. Even if he was real he couldn’t. But he isn’t. Her daddy didn’t forget her and Borden didn’t get him. Daddy is coming for her. She looks back over her shoulder but sees only road: empty gray road: and everything in the distance receding and receding and receding.
They drive through miles of emptiness. Dirt and shrubs and strange-looking trees. There are stretches of road that vanish beneath the windswept sand, but the asphalt always emerges some time later. And after a while they start passing by gray hills like heaps of ash, and the ground looks harder, and then a great gray pit in the earth, carved down and down and down, like stairs for a giant, and the pit is surrounded by broken machinery and at the bottom of it blue blue water, the only water in sight.
‘Iron mine,’ Henry says. ‘Dried up in the seventies.’
Not long after that they arrive at the entrance to a small town surrounded by hills. A lonesome, desolate town, seemingly abandoned. There are buildings here, but they are not peopled. There is not a soul in sight. And it is silent. Not even the barking of a dog to stain the clear, quiet air.
‘Goddamn,’ Henry says.
He drives up the main street slowly, passing a gas station whose windows have been shattered. A Coke machine out front is lying on its side looking like someone took a baseball bat or a crowbar or a sledge hammer to it. Past that and on the other side is a grocery store, also empty. The middle of the day and not a single car in the parking lot, only a few bushes growing from the cracks in the asphalt. The front windows of the grocery store have also been shattered, and Maggi
e can see what look like food cans scattered across the lot, maybe things people didn’t want like beets and lima beans.
They round a bend and pass an abandoned school, blue buildings left to flake apart beneath the desert sun, a baseball diamond which once had green grass growing in it now dead brown, bleachers sitting empty in the distance. Another turn and they enter a neighborhood of residences, the street lined with telephone poles made gray by the weather. Two out of three houses seem to have vanished. There is evidence that they were once there; the foundations laid out on the ground in the shapes of houses let you see where various rooms should be, but the buildings are gone. In the back yards rusty clothesline poles poke from the ground, usually with the lines long rotted away. Occasionally a T-shirt hangs from a rope like a flag of surrender.
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ Beatrice asks.
‘This is the right place,’ Henry says.
‘Where’d all them houses go?’
‘Sold. Cut in half and put on trucks and hauled off to be planted in better ground.’
‘Your brother lives here?’
‘You been here, Bee, about twenty years ago.’
‘That was here?’
‘Changed, hasn’t it?’
Maggie wasn’t even born twenty years ago, but she doesn’t think it’s changed. She thinks it’s died. When she was locked down in that basement, in the Nightmare World, she sometimes found the shells of beetles whose insides had been eaten hollow by ants. This town reminds her of that.
Henry pulls the truck to a stop in front of a small single-storey house which was probably once painted white. It now looks about ready to collapse in on itself.
Henry looks at her and at Beatrice and says, ‘Wait here.’
Then he pushes open the door and steps from the truck. He walks to the front door of the house. A moment later he knocks.
Henry knocks on the peeling green-painted door and waits. When, after some time, there is no answer he knocks again. Ron hasn’t had a phone for several years so Henry could not call him to let him know he was coming. Probably he is at work. Last time the two men exchanged letters—four maybe five years ago—Ron had gotten a job as a guard at a privately run prison about twenty miles away, Joshua Tree Medium-Security Correctional Facility, mostly populated by non-violent drug offenders.
Henry walks around the perimeter of the house, looking for open windows and checking the closed ones to see if he can push them open, but in the end he finds himself back out front with no way inside. He could break a window, but Ron’s the kind of man who upon seeing signs of a break-in will shoot first and asks questions later. While there might be some irony in driving fifteen hundred miles only to get shot by the man you came to for help, irony just ain’t a thing Henry is willing to die for.
He walks to the truck and looks in the window.
‘He ain’t here. We’ll have to wait. You guys might as well get out and stretch some.’
‘I have to pee,’ Bee says.
‘Just take some of them McDonald’s napkins around back of the house and squat.’
He looks out at the faded gray street. He needs Ron to come home. Ian Hunt could arrive at any moment, and Henry has no weapons. He lost both his Lupara and his .22 in Sierra Blanca and has been utterly defenseless since. Ian could drive right up the street and put a bullet in his head and he couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it. That ain’t no position to be in.
That ain’t no fucking position to be in at all.
‘Come on, Ron,’ he says.
He looks at his watch. It’s only noon. If Ron works eight to four, as he used to, he won’t be getting home till four thirty at least, and that’s if he don’t stop off someplace to get lit. That leaves over four hours during which Henry can get his brains blowed out. And while this corpse of a town is a good place to finish this, nobody around to call the police about any noise and plenty of places to dump a body where it won’t ever be found, the qualities that could work in his favor could also work in Hunt’s.
If Hunt shows up in the next four hours or so.
If it weren’t for getting pulled over this would have ended yesterday, it would have ended last night. But after Henry lost his weapons, he knew the only thing to do was to get to Ron’s as quick as possible and hope when he got here he had time enough to prepare for Hunt. He still doesn’t know if he has that time. If it weren’t for that fucking cop this would be over. He felt kind of bad about having to shoot him at the time, the man was just doing his job, after all, opposed to Henry though he was, but thinking about the situation it’s put him in Henry’s glad he killed the son of a bitch.
He looks at his watch again, and he waits.
Ian and Diego cross the state line into Arizona around two o’clock in the afternoon, passing a sign welcoming them to THE GRAND CANYON STATE, though the surrounding desert looks the same as it did ten minutes earlier when they were in New Mexico. Ian has always liked the desert. The harshness of it and the emptiness. If God exists He lives in the desert, of that Ian is certain. None of the masks of civilization here. No grinning handshakes and knives in the back. The desert is honest: it will take you whole and leave a husk and you will know what it is doing while it’s happening. It is what it is and makes no apologies.
There is something to be said for that.
Ian coughs into his hand, and the cough becomes a fit.
Between the coughs he manages to say, ‘Take the wheel,’ in a tight, strangled voice, and Diego does so. His coughing fit is wet and painful and comes from a very deep place in him and when it is over tears stream down his face and the strong taste of metal fills his mouth.
He wipes his hands off on his Levis, rubs at his eyes, and takes the wheel once more.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
Diego stares at him silently for a long time.
‘Do you need to stop?’
‘No.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘ No.’
He glances at Diego, expecting him to say something, expecting him to tell Ian he needs to go to the hospital and take care of himself, expecting him to once more suggest that they tell the police what is happening, but he does none of those things. With only a nod he makes it clear that Ian’s answer is okay. As long as Ian knows what he is doing to himself, Diego will accept it and help him. He does not turn his back on his friends.
Diego rolls a cigarette and looks out the window. ‘When do you think we’ll get there?’
‘Around sunset.’
Diego grunts in acknowledgment, lights his cigarette, and cracks the window.
The wind blowing through the car is very loud and very hot, but it feels good against Ian’s face even as hot as it is.
He looks to the gray road ahead.
In another four and a half or five hours they should be there. In another four and a half or five hours he gets his daughter back.
Maggie hears the car before she sees it, and Henry must hear it about the same time she does, because he gets to his feet from the curb where he was sitting with her and Beatrice and sort of leans forward as if that will help him see it sooner. Maggie feels a burning hope that it is her daddy. It is her daddy and he has come to save her and he will wrap her in his arms and take her away from here forever.
A white Toyota turns the corner and the face behind the windshield is not her daddy’s. It is nothing like her daddy’s. It is an ancient face into which time has carved great hollows. The eyebrows are thick and bushy and gray. The nostrils flare. The tongue, a colorless piece of meat, pokes out and licks the dry lips and disappears back into the pit of the mouth like some blind burrowing animal that’s sensed a predator.
The car slows and, though it is merely a machine, seems to approach them with great caution.
Henry waves.
The man behind the wheel of the Toyota lifts his hand in an automatic return wave, but for a moment his face remains blank and stupid. Then his mouth opens in an ah and he smiles and sa
ys, audibly, ‘I’ll be a goddamned son of a whore.’
He pulls the Toyota into the driveway, pushes open the car door, steps out into the daylight, and holds out his arms. He is wearing a beige uniform and a belt with a black stick and a pair of handcuffs and a can of pepper spray hanging from it and black shoes. His thin gray hair is cut close to his head.
‘Henry,’ he says.
‘Ron.’
They hug.
‘How you doin’, Bee?’
‘Okay.’
‘Good to hear it. And you must be Sarah,’ looking toward Maggie. ‘I can’t believe I never met you before. I’m your Uncle Ron.’
Henry grabs Ron’s arm.
‘Listen, we need to talk—now.’
‘Okay,’ Ron says, ‘let’s head inside.’
Maggie sits silent on the floor while Henry and Ron sit on the couch. Henry talks, and though his talk is at least half lies Maggie does not interrupt him. She merely watches and listens. While Henry tells his story Ron’s face changes, and his posture. His eyebrows lower on his head and his brown eyes seem to go black as shadows fill the deep pits of his sockets. The corners of his mouth curl down. His large nostrils flare. His loose bones weld together, locking him into a tight robotic posture. His round shoulders square, his c-shaped back snaps straight. His hands open and close in a motion Maggie recognizes from Henry. His tongue licks his dry lips. And when Henry is done Ron nods and says, ‘So how long we got, you reckon?’
‘I don’t know. He could be here any time.’
‘And he’ll be heading to the house?’
‘Best as I can figure.’
The Dispatcher Page 24
