The Desert King: A Jack Trexlor Novel

by T. F. Torrey

  “No,” Sharon stated, “I get to sit up front, because this is my truck.”

  “No,” John said. “This is your husband’s truck, and I have to sit here so I can tell him which way to go.”

  They continued on like this. Macy interjected his comments, telling Sharon that yes John had to sit up front to give him directions and no she couldn’t sit in the middle because he needed the space to shift and yes he knew she was carrying his baby but no he didn’t think riding in the back would cause it any harm.

  While they argued, I stood off to the side of the truck, trying unsuccessfully not to sneak peeks at Erica. Once she caught me and smiled at me. I couldn’t tell if she remembered me or if she was just being nice. I really, really hoped she was being nice. She caught me again, and smiled again, only this time somewhat uneasily, like she thought I was a strange creep.

  Good. She didn’t recognize me, although I probably really was a strange creep.

  Finally Sharon lost the argument and climbed into the bed of the pickup. I climbed into the back as Macy fired up the engine. We picked our seating positions as Macy backed out of the parking space and nosed the truck onto 7th Avenue. In the forward center of the bed, up against the back of the cab, was the spare tire. Sharon arranged her duffel bags and plopped down on it. Erica arranged John’s and her duffel bags and settled into the driver’s side front corner of the bed. She took off her straw hat and put it in her lap to keep the wind from taking it on a somewhat different ride. I sat in the rear right corner, opposite Erica, leaning against the tailgate and my own duffel bag.

  None of us looked very comfortable, but it didn’t matter too much. We had barely gotten onto the road when Macy whipped the truck off the road at a gas station. Macy parked the truck in front of the pumps and climbed out. No one else moved, and I leapt out of the back in front of Macy.

  “I’ll pay while you pump,” I said.

  “Great,” he said, hauling a gas can out of the back. I waited inside while Macy filled the can and topped off his truck. Watching through the window, I saw John slide open the rear window of the cab and converse with Erica and Sharon. Maybe I was just paranoid, but I thought they were talking about me. Still, I couldn’t think of any way to back out now. I could see that I would eventually have to face the music on this one if I wanted to stay friends with Macy.

  But I didn’t have to face it just yet. I waited till Macy was done filling and had climbed back into the truck before paying the attendant. Macy took off as soon as I climbed into the back, before I could even get settled in.

  And again we had no sooner started when we stopped, this time parked in front of a supermarket down the road from the gas station. John and Macy both got out this time and headed off to the store. I started to get up, but they were already almost through the doors.

  “What are they getting?” I asked Sharon.

  “They’re getting water and ice and some soda to drink out in the desert,” Sharon said. She dug through her purse and pulled out some dark sunglasses.

  “Ooh,” I said, “that sounds like a lot. I better go give them a hand.”

  “No,” Sharon said. “Stay here and keep us company. Those two think they can do everything. Let ‘em.”

  I didn’t know how to refuse without seeming awkward. Sharon donned the sunglasses and pulled her sleeves up over her shoulders, settling into her arrangement of duffel bags to work on her tan. At least she was cordial.

  Erica pulled out some sunglasses of her own. “So, Jack,” she said coolly. “John tells me you’re a bartender?”

  “Uh, yeah, but I do some painting also.”

  “Oh?” she asked. “Where?”

  “In my apartment.”

  She laughed. A light, easy, almost musical laugh. “No. I meant where do you tend bar?”

  “Oh, uh, it’s a little place. You probably never heard of it,” I lied.

  “Where?” she persisted.

  I wondered if she was on to me. “Uh,” I said. “It’s right around the corner from Macy and Sharon’s place.” Before she could ask more, I changed the subject. “Have you and John been together long?”

  She shook her head, and I forced myself not to notice the way her hair danced on her shoulders and chest. “About three months.”

  “Really?” Sharon said. “It seems like a lot longer than that.” She launched them into a long discussion about when she and Macy had gotten together and how they were excited about finally having a baby and such trivia. It rapidly turned into “girl talk”, and they tuned me out.

  For the first time since I’d met her again, I was glad that Sharon had opened her mouth. I breathed a small sigh of relief. Erica didn’t seem to recognize me, and although that might be a blow to my ego, it was better than a blow to my skull. Sharon seemed to be in a better mood, and things in general looked brighter. The sun in particular looked brighter, and I silently reprimanded myself for not bringing my own sunglasses.

  Macy and John returned quickly. I helped them stock the coolers with the ice and water and soda, and soon we were ready to go again.

  As Macy and John climbed into the cab, lightning struck: Sharon suggested that Erica and John meet her and Macy for drinks and dancing sometime. Erica said maybe at the bar where I tended.

  “Gridlock?” scoffed Sharon. “No, we should go to a real bar, a dance club.”

  Erica stared at me wordlessly.

  I tried to be nonchalant as I turned away, but everything inside me wanted to run away. I could tell: she was remembering.

  Macy fired up the engine and guided the pickup back onto Bethany Home Road, heading east, into the sun. The wind hissing in my ears gave me good reason not to try to talk and the sun ahead gave me incentive to look away from Erica, as if I needed any. Occasionally I sneaked peeks. She stared at me constantly, a mixture of ire and astonishment in traces on her face.

  Macy drove us north on 7th Street and through many lights out on Cave Creek and finally out on Bell Road. Throughout the trip, Macy and John chatted in the front, though I heard nothing but the wind in my ears and the tires on the road. Sharon closed her eyes and lay back and tanned, and somewhere on the way she dozed off. For the first part of the trip Erica hardly took her eyes off me. From the look on her face I could see she was trying to remember, and perhaps remembering more than she wanted to. After a while she stopped watching me and stared alternately into the hat on her lap and off into the distance, occasionally glancing up at John in the cab.

  I used the time I wasn’t sneaking glances at Erica to study the scenery. It reminded me of the pictures on jigsaw puzzles. For much of the trip north, even though we left the limits of Phoenix, we never quite left the city. Several jagged mountains rose like monolithic rocks through the industrial carpet of the Valley of the Sun. Houses rose partway up the slopes before the mountainside became too steep for a house or a driveway. Though the jagged slopes challenged the tenacity of even the hardiest of plants, towering saguaro cacti dotted every surface, clinging sturdily to the sides and rising majestically from the peaks.

  It had been a long time since I’d been to the outskirts of Phoenix. In the city, so many palm trees have been planted that you’d have thought they were indigenous. As civilization gave over to nature on the outskirts, I found myself keenly aware of the beauty of the area. Although the whole area was indeed all desert, I became sharply cognizant of the difference between the city desert we were leaving behind and the raw desert we were headed into. I had grown up in Kingman and lived recently in Phoenix, but I had rarely ventured off the civilized path. I wondered what the region had looked like when it was all still wild, before Phoenix had been born. I even almost began to look forward to my fishing weekend in the pristine desert wilderness.

  But then I sneaked a look at Erica, and all that came crashing down. Her face had continued to fall since Sharon’s mention of Gridlock. I could tell now that she remembered me, and that knowledge would be hanging over my head the whole weekend, until the i
nevitable showdown occurred.

  Suddenly Macy slowed down and pulled off the road into a gravel parking lot. So abrupt was Macy’s stop that the coolers slid forward into Sharon’s feet, waking her with a start. I had to hold on to the tailgate to keep from being flung forward. I sat up quickly, expecting to see some emergency situation. There was none. I looked at the sign over the shop to see where we were. With a giant neon orange B and a similar enormous T, the sign said that this was Bill and Ted’s Excellent Bait and Tackle Shop.

  Sharon sat up and stretched as John and Macy hopped out of the cab.

  “We’re going to get some line and stuff for fishing,” Macy announced.

  “I’m going in, too,” Sharon said, stepping over the rods and gear onto the side of the pickup and hopping down onto the gravel.

  “Do you want to go in?” John asked, looking at Erica. She shook her head. Macy looked expectantly at me, and I shook my head also. A bell on the door jingled as they went inside.

  I looked away from Erica. This was the edge of civilization. The bait and tackle shop was one of the last buildings in sight along the road. The road had finally narrowed down to only two lanes, and the traffic was quite light.

  Erica immediately interrupted my appreciation of the relative solitude. “What are we going to tell John?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  She answered with a hurt stare. She knew exactly, and so did I.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “We have to tell him something,” she said. “If we don’t it’s like—like we’re lying to him somehow.”

  I sighed. Personally, I thought this lie was acceptable, even necessary. “If we say anything, it’s going to get blown all out of proportion. Why should we put anybody through that?”

  She thought about it a bit. “I just don’t want to be hiding anything from him. What if he finds out from somebody else?”

  “Like who?” I asked.

  “Macy or Sharon?” she offered.

  “They don’t know a thing about it, and I’m not about to tell them. I didn’t tell anyone, not a soul.”

  I could tell she didn’t really trust me. It wasn’t difficult to know why. Men have a reputation for bragging to their friends, even in situations where it is extremely ill-advised. As a bartender I’d heard many such boasts, and I’d seen a good many fights break out as a result. It had taught me at least one lesson: silence is golden.

  Right now, though, Macy and Sharon and John would be back soon, and I wanted this matter closed. I sighed, searching for the right magical words to help me out of this predicament. “Really, it was no big deal,” I lied. “Nothing special.”

  Bad choice. She looked off at the horizon, biting her lower lip. Her eyes glistened, and I really hoped she wouldn’t start crying. “Nothing special,” she said softly. “I feel like such a slut.”

  I tried to think of something conciliatory to say, to make her feel better about silence and everything. “Listen,” I began.

  But just then the bell on the door jingled again, and the others came out. John banged on the hood of the truck with the palm of his hand as he walked up.

  “Hey,” he said. “You two awake?”

  Erica looked up meekly at him and nodded.

  “Great! I was afraid that maybe you two were out here sleeping together.” He started to turn away, then realized his choice of words and turned back. “Well,” he said. “Not really sleeping together, or sleeping together, but, well—you know what I mean.”

  Erica lowered her head just a bit and nodded again.

  I gulped. “Well, we’re just out here, you know, admiring the scenery.”

  “Beautiful, ain’t it?” Macy interjected, coming around the truck past Erica. He came back to me, pulling a roll of fishing line out of the bag he’d got in the store. “Check this out, man,” he said to me. “We got us some extra heavy-duty fishing line.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  He was taken aback. “Dude, man,” he said. “For channel cats.”

  “You need a line that strong for catfish?”

  “Man, channel cats get big. What’s the record cat they caught out here, John? Sixty-four or sixty-five pounds?”

  “Yeah,” John said, “and they get even bigger than that. When the rivers dry up they sometimes pull catfish out of the mud that weigh over a hundred pounds.”

  “Yeah, man!” Macy said. “John says that lots of people have big fish like that bite on their lines, you know, but most people just don’t expect to catch anything that big, so they don’t have the right line.”

  “And you do?” I asked, leading him on.

  “Yep,” Macy said proudly.

  Sharon had climbed back into her seat while we’d been talking. “Hey, let’s get on the road!” she called to Macy and John. “I didn’t come along to sit in a parking lot.”

  “Next stop, Tonto!” Macy said enthusiastically. He and John climbed back into the cab.

  As Macy pulled back onto the highway, I looked at Erica and breathed a small sigh of relief. She stared off into the distance, eyes as incredibly blue as the sky, deep in thought. I had managed to stall her from telling John so far, but I wondered how long it would burn in her mind before she broke down and told him.

  ***

  For the next half hour or so, Macy drove us steadily farther out into the desert, headed for the distant mountains of Tonto National Forest. Tonto was a vast wildlife preserve northeast of Phoenix, encompassing millions of acres of desert mountains. Numerous rivers and washes fed several lakes, making the area popular with photographers, campers, bird-watchers, hunters, and—like Macy and John—fishermen.

  The long ride, however, was not overly exciting. Off in the distance, the mountains loomed larger and larger. Here and there a jagged hill reared up. Now and then we flashed through clusters of housing developments and buildings where civilization was taking root. Once, a sign announced that the fire danger was high. But by and large the land was wide and flat and full of cacti.

  Occasionally along the way we passed billboards advertising new housing developments being erected in the area. Most of them had been vandalized, and I found myself wondering who had spray-painted RAPE in large black letters across the faces of the billboards, and why. The topics of housing development and sexual assault seemed to me to be completely unrelated. When I saw the first one, I thought some kids had had some fun, or that maybe I’d misread it. After several such defaced billboards, it seemed some person or group must have been responsible, but I didn’t understand their motives.

  Whoever did the painting certainly took a bunch of time to do it. Along the way I saw at least a dozen marked billboards. They must have felt strongly about it, whatever the point was they were trying to make. And they sure had lots of time and black spray paint.

  Erica continued to wear a frown, so I avoided looking at her.

  Following Macy’s truck about twenty yards back was a tan truck of similar rugged style. The letters across the radiator grill of the one behind us left no doubt that it was a Dodge, and with that distinctive hood ornament I knew it was a Ram. The sun glinted off what looked like a police spotlight bolted to the driver’s door. With the glare off the windshield, though, I couldn’t see its occupants except in vague silhouette. There were two of them.

  I wondered what they were doing heading out into the desert. Perhaps they were preparing to paint some billboards, if they could find any not yet vandalized, or perhaps—there was too much. They could have been visiting or rescuing or sightseeing or anything. From the dented grill and hood, though, I bet they were going someplace rough.

  By this time Sharon had dozed off again, lying limp on the duffel bags. Macy and John talked excitedly back and forth, though it was quite impossible to hear them over the noise of the wind and the road.

  I was looking forward when Erica took her eyes off the horizon and cast a hurt stare at me. She then glanced up at John, who didn’t notice, and returned her gaze to th
e horizon.

  I wondered why it bothered her so much. If she meant anything to John, surely he would know she wasn’t a tramp. He might yet be leery of women in general, after the experience with his ex-wife, but he had to figure that Erica had had a life before she met him. All the same, it would be surprising for him to find out that a figure from her past had come along on his fishing trip.

  Another idea crossed my mind. A couple of times in my few months at Gridlock I’d seen couples run into her “old boyfriend”. Both times the “old boyfriend”, probably trying to salvage his ego, had confronted the couple, telling them that he’d “had her and she was no big deal”. Both times, fights had broken out and I’d wound up calling the police, and once I’d had to call an ambulance. But never had I seen the “new boyfriend” stay with the girl very long afterward.

  If she was worrying about that, though, she was wasting her time. First of all, I wasn’t an “old boyfriend”. And second, I’d seen John fight, and I didn’t want to ride anywhere in an ambulance.

  I couldn’t help thinking that he must have meant a lot to her for her to be worrying that much about me. But I couldn’t think of anything I could do that would help at all.

  By this time, Macy had taken a few more turns and we were cruising through the foothills of the mountains. We hadn’t passed a settlement in a long while. Suddenly Macy took a left turn and the pavement ended with a jolt. Sharon awoke with a start and looked around. Seeing the pavement receding behind us, she settled back into her cushions to go back to sleep. I took it we still had a long way to go.

  Looking around, I was captured somewhat by disbelief. I had had no idea that the foliage would be so thick out in the desert. Dense bushes and thick woods marched right down to the dirt road, so close that I could have reached out over the side and grabbed a handful of leaves and thorns. I figured that we must be close to a lake or a river in order for all those plants to get enough water.

  The Dodge Ram had turned with us, but now the driver had dropped back to follow about fifty yards or so behind Macy, no doubt to avoid the plume of dust Macy was sending up behind us. I decided they must be, like us, going fishing, but that truck shadowing us like a menacing dark cloud made me uneasy.