The Desert King: A Jack Trexlor Novel

by T. F. Torrey

  “Try not to get shot,” Sharon shouted at me, still laughing as I left.

  I didn’t answer.

  Chapter 11

  John and Erica had gone farther downstream from the truck than Macy and Sharon had gone upstream. By the time I got to them, my heart had slowed down to normal and I felt better. And the scene here was worth almost getting shot.

  John stood at the water’s edge, with the water lapping at his feet, intently watching his line in the water. Erica sat to his left with her pole lying on the rocks next to her. She seemed content enough for the moment just to watch him fish. On the other side of them, of course, curled the river. Past it, the bluff was not as tall as it was at the truck, and downriver it got lower and lower, eventually turning into an ordinary riverbank. From my vantage point on a small knoll, I could see hills rising from behind the cliff. Farther downstream, where the bluff was lower, I could see purple mountains in the distance—so far away they were hazy.

  Perfect. I glanced at the rocks where I stood—checking for snakes—and sat down to sketch, feeling the hot breeze on my face.

  John looked up at me and smiled broadly. “How’s the art?” he asked.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  Erica glanced at me and quickly looked away.

  For the next hour or so, I drew John, Erica, the bluff, the river, the hills, the mountains. As I drew what I saw, I was quickly amazed, not by my drawing ability, but by the scenery. Maybe the years I’d lived in the city had prejudiced me. I had expected to be drawing practically nothing but saguaro cacti, but when I opened my eyes to draw I saw a multitude of plants. Mesquite trees, all kinds of grassy weeds, evergreens like holly and hemlock, and all kinds of thorny, cactus-looking things that I didn’t know what they were called.

  The three fields of vision—the distant purple mountains, the close hills speckled with saguaro and stuff, and the pair of fishermen in the foreground—were stunning to look at, difficult even to sort out in the same eyeful. If I could draw this well, it would be one of my best drawings, and later one of my best paintings, ever.

  I quickly sketched in the background and enough vegetation details to keep my memory alive. The atmospheric perspective was amazingly clear in real life, but terribly difficult to capture on paper in pencil. Overhead I drew a couple of the vultures or eagles or whatever they were in the distance. They’d be easy to paint later.

  Then I drew in John Lupo. He looked every bit the desert fisherman, decked out in his cut-off shorts and his tan fishing vest and his outback hat slung low against the sun. As I drew, he got a bite on his line and fought in a huge catfish. I drew the fish, too.

  The catfish put up a good fight, but he was no match for John. Maybe it was because of that heavy-duty fishing line, but the fish didn’t look that big. John finally got him in close and grabbed him in his hand, carefully avoiding the spines. He held the fish up for Erica and me to see, grinning.

  Erica applauded enthusiastically.

  John put the fish on a short piece of rope, got fresh bait from the can next to Erica, and cast his line again downriver. Turning back to Erica, he asked her if she’d like to fish now. She shook her head.

  I was glad. Sitting there on the rocks by the water, with her legs crossed, leaning back on her hands, she made an excellent subject. I drew her carefully. I drew her broad-brimmed hat. I drew the delicate curves of her face, the equally gentle curves of her body. I carefully detailed the way her jumpsuit hung loosely on her arms and legs, the way her hair fell about her shoulders to the middle of her back.

  When John ran out of bait in his coffee can, he dumped out the extra water and stowed the hook on his rod. Erica got up, and I realized they were going back to the truck for more bait. I got up, too. I was getting thirsty sitting there in the sun.

  “How’s the drawing going?” John asked as they walked to me.

  “Great!” I said, noticing that Erica was deliberately avoiding looking at me.

  “Let me see,” John said.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not done yet.”

  “So?”

  “So, if I let you look at it I’ll be jinxed. I won’t be able to change it. It won’t be mine anymore.”

  He looked at me funny. Maybe humored, maybe suspicious. “Well, when can I see it?”

  “When it’s done.”

  “When the drawing’s done?”

  I thought and shook my head. “When the painting's done.”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “Artists,” he said, with the same tone he would have used to say something like dirtbags. “Let’s get back to the truck.”

  He and Erica walked past me as I collected my pencils and closed my sketchbook.

  Following them through the bushes back to the truck, I realized that I was beginning to feel quite at ease there in the desert. Sharon and Erica had kept quiet. Sharon even seemed to be getting into a better mood, though it probably helped not to be around her. My drawing was going well. I realized that I’d spent more time drawing Erica than anything else, so it looked like she was the focus of the picture, but that would work itself out. I was thinking of titling my painting “The Big Peaceful Easy”.

  Though we’d kept our eyes open after our unusual encounter, we hadn’t seen any other people since Sheep Bridge. Not park rangers, not tourists or other fishermen, not poachers. No one.

  It was still blistering hot, but the worst was past. The sun was on its way down now, and I was even beginning to enjoy the heat. The intense sun felt like it went right through me, cleansing and rejuvenating my body, right through to my bones.

  Looking back, I’d say that that was the turning point of the trip. Before that point things went well. Of course, there had been the incidents with the snake and the guys in the truck. But compared with what happened in the next forty-eight hours, we’d been in paradise. Now, however, my enjoyment of the trip was at an end.

  It began as John was refilling his coffee can with minnows and crayfish from the bait bucket. Macy came marching back to the truck and threw his rod and rifle into the back. Sharon followed him, slowly, at a distance. “You and me have to talk,” he said to me.

  I ignored John’s raised eyebrows. “Let’s go up here,” I said, walking back up the trail we’d driven in on, away from the truck and the crowd. Without even thinking, I knew exactly what was wrong.

  Sharon had narked.

  ***

  “Sharon told me,” Macy began, “why you weren’t at our wedding.”

  All I could do was sigh. I’d been through this many times before, with policemen and lawyers and judges, with psychiatrists and religious leaders, with other old friends, even with only the darkness. I knew how the conversation was going to go. I knew what he would say, mostly how he would say it, what I would say back, how he would try to make me see the light. I knew that my arguments would be no match for years of dogma. But I hoped against hope that I could somehow make this conversation different.

  All the times before, I’d only managed to alienate myself from the people trying to help and understand me. All the times before, I’d drifted apart from my friends. I wanted this time to be different. I wanted to stay friends with Macy. More than that, I wanted to be good friends again.

  But I knew Macy wouldn’t be able to make me see the light, because the light just wasn’t there.

  “What did she tell you?” I asked.

  “She said you couldn’t come to the wedding because you were in some hospital for the mentally unstable.”

  Normally, I would be compelled to argue with even this statement, to clarify where I was and how I had been unjustly put there and what it meant. Instead, this time, I thought perhaps my best approach would be to simply downplay the whole situation. “Yeah,” I said.

  “She said you were there because you tortured some guy up in Kingman.”

  “Yeah,” I said again.

  “So it’s true?”

  I nodded.

>   Macy lowered his eyes and turned away. Just like everyone else had. “You know,” he said, “you think you know some people. Then—wham!” He paced back and forth a bit on the rocks, staring thoughtfully at the ground.

  I shrugged. “I had good reasons.”

  “Of course you did, Jack. Everybody has good reasons,” he shot back sarcastically.

  I sensed that he hadn’t heard the whole story, and I wondered how much Sharon had heard.

  This kind of questioning attack ran contrary to Macy’s nature, but I understood what was happening. I knew that he was in his heart a good and honest person and he liked to think his friends were, too. This revelation had struck to the core of his being, and he was feeling a bit out of his element.

  I knew how that felt. At one time, I too had been religious. I had believed in “The Word”. Now, however, Macy and I were on opposite sides of a philosophical divide. The only thing that might make things right between us was for him to know the whole story, though that probably wouldn’t help, either.

  “Did Sharon tell you why I did what I did?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I should probably tell you the whole story. Maybe then you’ll understand,” I said.

  He stopped pacing and looked expectantly at me. “Maybe,” he said. He seemed to be keeping an open mind. Maybe there was hope after all. Maybe this time could be different.

  I took a deep breath and started at the beginning. “You remember me talking about Diane?” When I had known Macy those summers in Grand Terrace, I had been visiting my father. Macy had never met Diane.

  “Your girlfriend in Kingman?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. Well, back before I left Kingman, she and I were getting pretty serious about each other. We even talked about getting married.”

  “I think I remember that.”

  “Yeah. Well, we had some disagreements about some things, like where we might go to college together, but in general we thought we’d be together forever.”

  “Go on.”

  “Okay,” I said, pausing just a bit, remembering. I didn’t like thinking about it. I liked talking about it even less.

  By now I had several versions of the story. At the time of the incident, I had gone over the full version with police and lawyers and everyone until I was absolutely sick of it. I wrote the whole story down once, with the intention of telling it no more. When I had to speak of the incident now, I used the abridged version, which I could usually tell without becoming overwhelmed with anger. With the wrong audience, though, it escalated into the I-did-it-and-I’d-do-it-again version, full of venom. I had a feeling that this would be the one Macy would wind up hearing.

  “At the time, Diane was working at a flower shop. She liked working there, but she hated her boss. He was always … making passes at her, that sort of thing. She always said no, but he always asked, and it bugged her. It bugged me, too, because the guy knew we were serious. He was always friendly to my face, and behind my back he was always trying to get my girl into the sack.”

  “And you tortured him for that?”

  I held up a hand for patience. “Let me finish my story,” I said.

  Macy nodded apologetically.

  As I continued, he stared intently at me, as if searching my face for the truth. A flicker of hope like the gray first light of day entered my mind. Macy was trying to understand. Maybe, just maybe, he would.

  “I never let people doing things behind my back bother me,” I said. “Everybody does it, and letting it bother me wouldn’t change a thing. Besides, Diane and I were in deep. I knew that she wasn’t just going to throw that away. I trusted her.” I paused again, shaking my head at the memory.

  Macy waited for me to continue.

  “One morning, I woke up, and everything was different. Everything was different. It was a Sunday. I went to get her for church, and she was avoiding me. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Everything just seemed wrong.”

  Macy tipped his head questioningly, but didn’t speak.

  “After church I went back to her house. She was cleaning everything incessantly. I could tell something was wrong, but she wouldn’t say what. I tried to console her, somehow, but she was so cold. She didn’t want to talk. She was just … empty.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I—I—what could I do? I didn’t know what to do. She was just so—so different—so cold.” My memories of that time were still clear. “I went home, and she called me later that night. She said she wanted to go to the drive-in, but it was just a trick. When she came to pick me up, she just wanted to drive around.”

  Macy waited patiently. I had his rapt attention.

  “She was anxious. She wouldn’t look at me. She seemed like she wanted to talk, and I actually started to wonder if she was trying to break up with me.”

  “But she wasn’t?”

  I shook my head. “She stopped the car in a quiet place, and I knew she was going to tell me something big. I knew—I sensed—something had happened the night before. Finally, she told me.”

  “Yeah?” He was really on the edge of his feet, frowning with concern.

  I took a deep breath. “She said it flat out, just matter-of-fact. She said that the night before, after everyone else had left, her boss called her back into the back storage room of the flower shop, and when she went in he raped her. Just like that.”

  Macy was stunned, and very clearly disturbed. He sat down on the rocks where he was and thought. Perhaps he was thinking about what he would have done. Apparently coming up empty, he looked up expectantly at me. “Then what?”

  “Then—well, then I made a lot of mistakes.”

  “Like torturing the guy?”

  “No, that was okay. I’m talking about before that, right then when she told me.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I asked her all the wrong questions. I was suspicious and confused and upset. I asked her what she was wearing and if she fought back and if she’d screamed. Things like that.”

  “That was the wrong thing to ask?”

  I nodded. “It demonstrated a lack of trust, for one thing. More than that, it was suggesting that she might have wanted that to happen.”

  “And she didn’t?” he asked innocently, not as an accusation.

  “Fuck no,” I said, instantly venomous.

  Macy became defensive. “So you tortured the guy?”

  “No, not yet. First I suggested that she report it to the police, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want people to know. She didn’t want to be accused of wanting it, and of course that’s what would have happened.” I sat down on the rocks now also, facing Macy but about eight feet from him. “As I realized that she wasn’t going to report it to the police, I became increasingly … furious. I tried a lot of things to get the police involved. I went to them myself, but they didn’t believe me. I tried to trick her attacker into making a recorded confession. Things like that.”

  Macy started to say something, probably something sympathetic, but I wanted to get through this.

  I interrupted him before he could speak. “Nothing worked. Everything just kept getting worse. I wound up alone in my apartment, trying to make some sense out of everything, trying to find some way that everything could still be okay.”

  This time as I paused, Macy waited wordlessly.

  “Eventually I thought of some kind of relief. I thought that at least, if no man could punish that asshole, at least he would have to answer to God.”

  “That’s right,” Macy said.

  “That’s what I thought. Just to reassure myself, I decided to look it up in the big book. You know, just for some comfort.”

  Macy smiled and nodded. This was his style.

  “But then I discovered something strange. Or at least something strange to me. I looked for ‘thou shalt not rape’ or anything along those lines. You know what I found?”

  Macy thought a bit and shrugged.

  “It isn’t th
ere. Nowhere in the whole book did it say anything like ’don’t rape women’.”

  “No,” Macy said, incredulous.

  “It’s not there.”

  “It has to be.”

  “It doesn’t have to be, and it just plain isn’t.”

  “You just didn’t look in the right place,” Macy said. “It’s in there.”

  “I looked through the whole damn thing,” I said, “and it isn’t there.”

  Macy was still incredulous.

  I continued. “Twice it’s mentioned. In Deuteronomy it says you shouldn’t rape someone who’s engaged, and it says that if a man is caught raping an unpledged woman he will be fined.”

  “Yeah,” Macy said enthusiastically, as if that was a start.

  “That’s it. Nothing more. End of story.” I shook my head and looked away. “And that’s not even close.”

  Macy was quiet.

  “So then I was completely dazed. If heaven was going to be a place where rapists were greeted as my equals, then I didn’t want to be a part of it. I started thinking seriously about killing that bastard.”

  “Killing him, huh? What changed your mind?”

  I smiled. “Well, while I was looking through that book I noticed a few things. The Bible is silent on the topic of rape, but it’s also silent on some other topics.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as it doesn’t say don’t maim, don’t blind, and most importantly—at the time—it doesn’t say don’t torture.”

  Macy was silent, full of thought.

  “So then I was acting crazy. I got some hare-brained scheme to capture the guy. It was weird. Everything seemed to fall into place. He was closing up the flower shop alone. I waited for him in the dark, and when he came out I knocked him out with some ether. No one noticed. Nobody came by. I tied him up good and I took him out to my father’s trailer on Lake Mohave. When he woke up, I had him tied to a chair.”

  “Didn’t you think what you were doing was wrong?”

  “No! I wasn’t thinking of it that way. All that was in my mind was this asshole closing the door on Diane in the back storage room.”