Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  And at other moments, like the flickering lights of the dark valley below them, she was seeing the inside of a dusty tent, seeing the faces of a hundred or more strangers, seeing a younger Stella with her child standing before a boy-preacher who raised his hand to slap the girl.

  Stella kept talking. “I’d taken her to doctors, to psychiatrists, to all charlatans of Los Angeles, to priests—the list was endless. The tent revival was something of a lark. I believed that God was truly dead and that if there were a will behind the universe it was the will of an imbecile, and survival in the world must be at any cost. The boy was making a name for himself, a preacher’s son who had the healing gift himself. Michael Southey. He was on the television one night telling the world that he could raise the dead and cast out demons and heal the sick. The Second Coming. But he was unprepared for what I brought before him. Wendy. I took her before him and I told the whole circus crowd that she was possessed of a demon. He made me confess my sins, and it was a three-ringed circus, and the show I gave them, Nessie! I lied and lied, I painted a picture of myself as the best mother in the world, humble, a victim, and a penitent before the altar of God. Then he made Wendy confess, too, and I saw in my little girl’s eyes her fear, all her fear caught up in her eyes, and I watched it turn to anger. I watched her unleash something within herself, something that had been under control. A little girl. All her childhood, completely taken over with self-control, and now she was losing it, she was willing it gone. And the boy began slapping her, his hand coming up to praise the Lord, and then again and again and again and again. Until she was bleeding.” Stella fell silent.

  She looked out her window, and Nessie saw again what she’d witnessed before with Stella—the woman wasn’t really looking out her window, but was looking back into herself.

  Locked inside herself and the key is somewhere up here on the desert.

  “So he didn’t cast out her demon,” Nessie said.

  “He got more than he bargained for with her.” Stella crossed her arms over her chest. “I told you about the vacuum: it sucks in dirt, but also blows out air. Well, the demon left Wendy, left her, but that young man slapped it right into himself, probably without even knowing it. The boy hadn’t lied—he really could cast out demons, and I soon discovered he’d once been able to heal the sick.”

  “Once?”

  “It was the air blowing out when the dust got sucked in. He was holding my hand, he was slapping her, squeezing my hand, Nessie, hard, very hard. Scratches all up and down my hand. It was like he was trying to squeeze the juice out of me, but it was his juice I got, got that gift, that imbecilic gift that heals when it wants, but not always, and not with everyone. He got the dust, but I got the air. And the fire...all around us. Explosions, lightning, all the energy that boy had drawn from her, from my girl, it caused a short circuit, it caused some kind of wire to melt, the whole place went up, and only a handful of us got out of there with not much more than a charred arm.”

  Stella began rolling the sleeve of her sweater up, and the blouse beneath it, rolling it up and exposing pink mottled skin.

  Nessie glanced over, slowing the car down to a full stop. She turned on the inside light of the car.

  “I can’t even heal it myself, it’s a burn that never heals.”

  “The fingerprints,” Nessie said, finally looking back to the road. “What the hell—”

  “Hers. Wendy’s. Where she grabbed me, where she held on to me. Always there. Always with me. It never heals.” Stella’s voice was weary, and she clutched her left arm with her right hand. “I’ve spent years just trying to scrape it away with razor blades, but it only makes the scar worse.” Then Stella said, “There’s where Naranja Canyon used to be.”

  But where she pointed was just an empty mesa.

  “I wonder if Peter is here at all. I wonder if it isn’t a mad dream I’ve had. Wendy. The Lamia.”

  Nessie look her foot off the brake and the car shuddered forward. “If there’s a route to madness, this is definitely the end of the line. Looks to me like I just entered that dream of yours.”

  Nessie Wilcox couldn’t believe that she had gotten it together enough to acknowledge what she saw just a few feet ahead in the road.

  “You see those skulls?”

  Stella was not listening to her, but to something else: a howling animal.

  A dark figure scrambled from the desert to the side of the road, and for just a second, Nessie thought it was some kind of demon from Stella’s past.

  But it was only a man waving his hands in the path of the car’s headlights.

  5

  Diego Correa waved the car down, and the station wagon pulled over near him. Inside were two elderly ladies. They had locked their doors and rolled up their windows as if he were a thief or worse. He smiled his best smile, and one of the women, the one driving, rolled down her window and shouted, “Oh, hell, he doesn’t look like a demon to me.”

  And the other woman, whose face Diego could not see clearly, said in a very loud voice, “You’ve never seen one. You don’t know.”

  Diego leaned over to get a good look at the woman on the passenger’s side. She was a beautiful old woman, and even though the wrinkles had got her in their grip, she had that thing in her eyes, that spark. She had what people who had gone through this kind of experience had: a fire of life that could not been doused, Hell just might be worth going through for that. “You must be her mother,” he said. “How do you do. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long, long time.”

  6

  The lights blinded Peter—What in God’s name kind of lights are those? Lasers? The twin beams of light seemed to bleach the darkness of night away, and with it, the landscape of Nitro and Palmetto. The light had found every crack and crevice, it obliterated the contours of the rises and canyons out across the desert. A flatland of night. He shut his eyes because the pain was too intense, like a pounding headache, but pressing from the outside of his head, someone punching him in the eyes.

  And that noise, that howl.

  He was sweating, and when he looked at his hands again, they looked just like his good old hands. Not the claws of a demon.

  The light down the road was no longer a magnificently hurting light.

  Just headlights.

  Headache was gone.

  Car headlights.

  The headlights down the road: Would they belong to someone who could help him? Would it be Stella? Were they already her victims? Would they be, like he himself was, afraid he was becoming one of her own? Would her disease be taking them over, too?

  Peter glanced around from the hill behind the last standing walls of the Garden of Eden. Few traces of the community stood. These walls around him had been gutted by the fires in ‘80, and like the few remaining walls that stood on distant mesas like gravestones, these were blackened and crumbling. The town had, for the most part, been cheaply made. All but the oldest houses had gone up like the dried summer grass that surrounded them. Skeletal hulls of fast-food joints were barely visible down the highway. The plateau above the wash, on either side, was a junkyard of used home appliances, old refrigerators in a stubby field, a rusted-out car along the highway’s shoulder, a massacred piano propped between the standing walls of an old stone house. It had become a dumping ground for people who had never lived there. It was where they went to lose the things that their county or city waste management wouldn’t allow. A large mound of trash bags, set in a pyramid, rose from a gulley near where the Majestic Diner had been. This small footprint in the high desert had become something unwanted, unloved, untended. So even the man who tossed the first old broken-down mattress off the back of his truck, thinking he was getting away with something—even he had known, beyond the wild legend of Palmetto and Nitro, even he had smelled it: this region was poisonous.

  Should carry a government warning: “toxic waste dump, keep out.”

  The wilderness had not reasserted itself too much, either. Palmetto and Nitro would never
again be in anyone’s guidebook to the wildflowers of the desert. The vegetation that had come up, mangled Joshua trees and thrusting scrub brush, had not conquered the plain that had been the town; instead, they were dwarfed by these trash bombs thrown from car windows, tossed out the back of trucks, brought by someone tired of seeing the old Westinghouse taking up space in the garage, or the old Ford Pinto rusted out from floor to roof. “Hey, I got an idea,” a guy would say to his wife. “I’ll borrow the neighbor’s pickup and lug it off up the hill and just bury it standing up in that place in the hills. Nobody gives a crap about that old shithole, and anyway, everybody else is dumping up there, why not us?”

  “Why not us?” Peter said aloud, trying to ignore the fever that burned up and down his arms and legs. He leaned against the wall and thought he was hallucinating. There, among the adobe brick rubble of the Garden of Eden, interspersed with trash and mattress springs and the silhouettes of a couple of old cars, was a grove of beautiful flowers, with a slight shine to them as if there was a light coming from their center. Roses, mainly, growing as he had remembered them growing there when he had been a boy and had seen over the wall, perfectly cut, blooming this evening just as they bloomed then, on the rough desert. He went over and sat down near them, smelling them. They smelled delicious, and their petals held tiny pearls of dew.

  “All these years,” he said, shaking his head.

  Something moved from among the roses, a thin shadow. The only impression he had of it was that it was some kind of animal, like an antelope, which seemed absurd.

  But then it was gone.

  Peter heard a rustling among the trash bags, and his heart again skipped a beat.

  “Peter,” someone said from the shadows. “You’re here too. Guess I should’ve counted on that.” The man had been there all along, inside one of the junked cars, sitting up in the driver’s seat. He must have been sitting incredibly still, and it was only his voice and a slight movement of his head that clued Peter in to the fact that this was more than just a trash bag bunched up on the front seat. Peter’s head was pounding like crazy and they both heard it again, a howl out in the desert.

  Something stung Peter’s hand, and he looked down at it. He’d been touching the wet edge of one of the rose petals, and some small insect scampered across his forefinger. Like a ringing in his ears, sound shifted for a second, and I heard Alison’s voice, Hurts, Peter, it hurts, my skin, crawling...

  The man in shadows said, “Hey, Peter? You okay? It’s me, it’s Charlie, remember? I been sitting here watching her. Or it. You okay?”

  Alison’s voice, transmitted through the insect and the rose, to Peter, Peter, hurts, help me, warm, warm...

  7

  Alison could barely open her eyes: the lids were heavy and swollen almost shut.

  Above her, she could make out Nathaniel’s face, and she felt drool hit her cheek. His face had been picked at like an adolescent who wanted to pop all his pimples, and in so doing had left gouges and scar pockets around his chin and beneath his eyes.

  “She wants you to come to her now,” he said, and she felt his hands, scraping at the dirt-bed he’d stuck her in, tugging at her and everywhere he touched her she felt shooting pains like cold, hollow, dull needles thrusting into her skin.

  8

  Twelve hours before, when Charlie Urquart had entered the town in early morning, his first thought had been: ghost town.

  That was what the newspapers and television reporters had called it the second week of July, when most of Palmetto and Nitro had been gutted by fire. What hadn’t been charred had died of fear.

  “I’m one of the ghosts now,” he said as he drove his cab through a quick tour of the junk pile that Palmetto had become. He couldn’t bring himself to see all of the town. Some of the memories were too painful. He didn’t associate the sixteen-year-old Charlie with himself. Not much, anyway. It was as if he’d been asleep until July 4, 1980, and then someone had awakened him.

  What am I waiting for? he wondered as he circled back through the hollows of town, the spaces in the dirt where he could vaguely remember houses and stores and hamburger stands. The cab was finally, after three days of almost constant travel, beginning to overheat. He smelled burning rubber as he approached the Rattlesnake Wash.

  “Giving up on me, are you?” He patted the steering wheel. “Well, you and me both. Knew I couldn’t run too far from what I was.”

  He was tired, felt a heaviness in his head as if it were filled with marbles. Been losing a few on this highway.

  As he sat there in his cab, staring aimlessly out the window, he thought he saw something shining in the wash, but it was only the glint of a plastic trash bag. “Getting spooked,” he said. The wind was strong that morning, and much of the garbage blew like tumbleweeds across the bumpy stretch of road. She’s not even here anymore. I’m just brain-damaged. What I’m afraid to face is that I’m insane. I should be undergoing some kind of therapy—is that what Paula back in New York was leading up to? Study the lab rat and then a little shock treatment to get his chemistry going in the right direction. Might’ve been a good thing.

  His throat was dry and the spreading odor of burning rubber filled his nostrils.

  “Don’t die on me yet,” he prayed to the god of taxicabs, and turned up to the driveway of the Garden of Eden. He drove across its lawn, and his foot hit the brake as soon as he’d gotten around an old refrigerator. He had expected nightmares to resurface and the dead to walk.

  But he hadn’t expected this.

  “Jesus,” he gasped, turning the key off in the ignition.

  Wildly growing rosebushes all up and down the main courtyard and what could mildly be termed the lawn—all the colors of the spectrum, just as they had been when he was a boy, only now there were more, and they grew around much of the trash; they rose in thin, creeping vines up the sides of the burnt walls of the house. As he investigated further, getting out of his cab, not bothering to shut the door, he saw that the roses even grew in the old foundation, pushing up from beneath the cracks in the concrete, twisting together with the grillwork of a rusted-out old Hudson Hornet. The roses had blended, even, with the car’s wheels, so they appeared to be blooming all along the underside of the Hudson. It was not a mess, but seemed perfectly ordered, as if it were meant by nature to please the human eye. Charlie wondered at the miracle of the Earth, how it took over even the most chaotic places and set them in order. As if a cosmic gardener had come through for the past decade and woven a tapestry of flowers amid this burnt heap. Charlie walked around the car, looking at the flowers growing inside it.

  And saw something that made him believe he was walking through one of his waking nightmares. He was ready to see his father, or an enormous Deadrats sitting there behind the wheel.

  Sitting upright in the passenger’s seat, a small human skeleton. A child’s bones. Some madman had put a baseball cap on the skull, and Jockey shorts around its pelvis.

  Each bone in the skeleton had been tied together with small bits of string or wire, threaded through holes in the bone that had been bored through or chipped at. Whoever had done it had taken his time, a craftsman from Hell, perhaps, for each bone was delicately sewn piece by piece, with not one out of place. Around the skeleton’s neck was a thin gold chain, and on the end of the chain, a small watch.

  Something about the watch caught his eye, and, without wanting to, Charlie leaned through the window to get a closer look at it. He heard a buzzing, and glanced in the backseat—there was some kind of beehive built into a hole that had been torn along the vinyl. Every few seconds a small bee crawled out of it and flew out through the glassless back window. Charlie touched the watch with his fingertips. It was running, but it was not a battery-operated watch. It had been wound by someone.

  He lifted it up, closer to his face. On the back was etched, “To my son, Charles.” “I am walking through a dream,” Charlie said, almost laughing. “Dad, that watch you gave me, way back in, what was it,
‘72? The last nice thing you did for me. About the same time you started cutting me up and jabbing me big time, huh? Well, if you’re listening, Dad, you know what? It sounds crazy, but I forgive you. You were one fucked-up-son of a bitch, and who knows what demons drove you, but you’re dust now, and I forgive you. Hope you and Mom can forgive me.” Charlie shook his head, smiling at the absurdity of his existence. “A watch. To keep track of time with. All I’ve got of you, Dad. You were never there, not really, it was just some bad piece of you. And now, just time.”

  There was a crack running across the crystal of the watch, and for a moment, Charlie almost forgot how that had happened, and then he remembered. Holding Wendy, feeling her warmth, how she led him out of the braincave for just a respite, and the feeling of her body as she wrapped her legs around his waist and he entered her with most of his clothes still on, his pants down around his ankles, and his shirt only partially unbuttoned. How she had reached for him, and held him by the wrists while she took him even higher into the realms of the Big O, and then something bad happened. She had felt it, too, something different, and for a second or two, she lost control in fluttering gasps and heaves, and her hips had rocked, and he had been there then, his mind not shot out into some cosmic well of forgetfulness, but right there with her and instead of a demon he had held a woman and had thought: She’s human, too, she’s not just what’s inside her, but flesh, and blood. And in a panic, she had almost crushed the watch on his right hand, scratching at him desperately in that moment of self-recognition and vulnerability.