The Desert King: A Jack Trexlor Novel

by T. F. Torrey

  “That’s right,” John said. “That would be like bungee jumping. Only without the bungee cord.”

  “Great,” Sharon said.

  The thunder struck, more faintly now than before. “Over three miles,” Erica said.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  “For now,” John said, “I think we should stay here and try to get some rest. They’ll never find us here in the dark. If they even bother to look.”

  “How did they find us before?” Erica asked.

  “They probably saw us when we went to get the fish,” John said.

  “Or they went where they figured we’d be able to defend ourselves,” Macy suggested.

  “We’ll stay here,” John said. “We can take turns sleeping, and we can sit close to each other in this depression to cut the wind and keep warm till the morning.”

  “What will we do in the morning?” I asked.

  “Let’s just take this one step at a time.”

  At least we had a gun now.

  ***

  We didn’t really take turns sleeping.

  The storm churned past us, staying west of us as it moved northward. For a couple more hours we had front-row seats to a spectacular lightning show, but all we got hit with was claps of thunder and slaps of wind.

  Macy and John were wet, and they rubbed their arms and legs to keep warm. John had changed into a T-shirt and jeans he must have gotten from the wreckage across the river.

  The night became quite chilly. I sat down in the depression, sheltered from the wind. Nestling into a cradle of rocks and sand, I sat back, mostly comfortable, with my arms crossed, hands tucked underneath my arms to keep warm.

  To my right, Macy and Sharon sat at the edge of the depression, where Macy could see more of the area around us. They cuddled together for warmth, tucking their hands into various parts of each other’s clothes.

  Contrasting them, John and Erica sat to my left. John sat on the highest edge of the rim, tirelessly watching over the hillside and the area across the bluff where the poacher’s fire had been. Erica sat next to him. John sat with his arms crossed, gun between his chest and arms. Erica sat with her legs bent, knees touching her chin, arms curled around and under her legs with her hands between her thighs.

  Macy and Sharon looked like a couple of high school sweethearts on an adventure in the big world. John and Erica looked like a couple of platonic friends enjoying each other’s intellectual companionship.

  When the storm finally began to break up, we all began to doze off in various ways. Sharon went straight to sleep and stayed there. Sometimes I thought I could hear her snoring softly. Macy stayed alertly sitting up as she snuggled asleep against him. Then it was hard to see if his eyes were open or closed. Finally he dissolved with Sharon into a tangle of arms and legs and sleep.

  I wished I could sleep, but I couldn’t. Somewhere in the night two guys were trying to write our names on their bullets. I dozed sometimes, but every little noise woke me up. Each rustle of wind, every swish of clothing from Macy and Sharon shifting positions flipped my eyelids open wide and sent my heart pounding.

  Every time I woke up, Erica was a bit closer to me. It seemed she was slowly rolling downhill in her sleep, right toward me. John, however, remained awake and steady in his perch. Never was I in doubt that his eyes were open, though occasionally I wondered if he was sleeping with them open or if he had hypnotized himself somehow.

  The night seemed to drag on forever, but eventually I did manage to doze off for quite a little while.

  ***

  A distant motor noise snapped my eyes open. At once I was awake, listening intently. Gradually it registered in my brain. It wasn’t a motor at all. It was Sharon, snoring again. This time, though, I felt like the night was over. I still felt tired, but dozing had taken the edge off the exhaustion. I felt cold and sticky and hungry and stiff. My mouth was pasty and my eyes crusty. Other than that I was ready and raring for the day.

  Some time while I was sleeping, Erica had finished rolling up against me. Now she lay right next to me, curled up with her head next to my leg. The one warm spot on my body was the outside of my left thigh where she breathed against my jeans. The soft, cool spot in my palm was her hand, stretched over her head, tucked under my hand.

  Looking around, I saw the first pale streaks of dawn stretching up into the eastern sky, lifting everything to gray. To the west the moon sank into the distant mountains as if running from the light of day. At the edge of the depression, John now stood watching the unfolding morning.

  Also, it seemed to me, he’d been watching his girlfriend snuggling closer to me. He’d probably seen our hands come together in our sleep. Not cool.

  I moved away from Erica and stood up, stretching and shivering. The storm the night before had left the air crisp and clean.

  While I was stretching, I found myself looking at John’s outback hat. Back in Phoenix, before I knew him, that battered, brown, leather hat had conveyed an air of rugged nobility and had looked almost out of place on him. Now, though, silhouetted against the daybreak, it seemed perfect for this master of the desert who carried himself like a cross between an English aristocrat and an Indian chief. Very classy.

  “What time is it?” I asked John quietly.

  “Almost time to start moving,” he replied.

  “I’m doing my part,” I said, and stretched more all over. “Any sign of your friends with the guns?”

  He shook his head. “None at all,” he said, and sighed. “They’re turning out to be pretty good. Quite … quite clever.”

  “Quite homicidal assholes,” I said.

  John said nothing, but he seemed on the verge of saying something, so I waited while he found his words. “Jack,” he began finally. “About yesterday morning …”

  “Yeah?” A thousand thoughts ran through my head. I didn’t want to talk about that night with Erica. I didn’t want to make her look bad, but I didn’t want to make myself look bad, either.

  I needn’t have worried.

  “If you hadn’t knocked Erica and me out of the way when you did,” he said, “they would have nailed us for sure.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I couldn’t picture John going down.

  “Definitely. I didn’t even know they were there. They had all the time they needed to aim, and we were good targets for them, not moving at all.”

  He paused, and I said nothing.

  “If you hadn’t knocked us down,” he said, “we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “It was nothing,” I said casually. “I wasn’t even thinking. I just saw them pointing those guns and I kind of went on autopilot, I guess.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “If you hadn’t, we’d be gone, and if you hadn’t grabbed Erica when you did last night, she probably would have been beat up pretty bad on the rocks by the river.”

  “Forget about it,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just reacting.”

  He shook the thoughts from his head. “Anyway,” he said. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

  “You,” I said, “are entirely welcome.” We stood silent for a moment. When it was clear that he was finished with what he was saying, I decided to ask him something. “How did you come to know so much about … the desert?” I asked.

  He thought a moment before answering. “When I was a kid,” he said, “my father used to go out to the desert for days, weeks at a time. When I was old enough, he took me with him. He taught me how to listen to nature, to live off the land.”

  “Was that around here?” I asked.

  “Mostly we went up north, where it’s a different kind of desert,” he said. “But we were in this area quite a few times.”

  “So your father taught you how to live out here?”

  “My father taught me many things,” he said.

  I nodded, and we stood silent for a few seconds, watching the fingernails of daybreak slowly getting their grip on the darkness shrouding the desert. With the othe
rs sleeping, I decided it was the perfect time to ask him about something else, something that had been on my mind all the previous day. “John,” I began.

  He’d been turning away. Now he looked back.

  “Maybe it’s none of my business, and I’m certainly not complaining, but yesterday … you … when you found out about Erica and me … you … I …” I ran out of words.

  He understood. “You expected me to hit somebody?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Me.”

  “For what?”

  “For … for … you know.”

  He sighed. “Jack, two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “I know,” I said. I hated being patronized. “But sometimes it sure feels right.”

  “Not to me,” he said.

  I didn’t believe him. “Aren’t you at least a little mad at me or Erica?”

  “No, Jack, that would be stupid. I would be an idiot to expect that she had no life before she met me.”

  That made sense—it was what I’d told myself, after all—but something about his Ghandi-style brush-off still bugged me. “Macy said that you used to be live up in Winslow with a wife and kids,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “He also said that you caught your wife cheating on you, and you just walked away.”

  “That’s right,” he said again, adding, “I have plans to take my kids back soon.”

  “But you didn’t hit anybody?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?” I asked, my voice growing louder.

  “It wouldn’t have been right.”

  “Why not?”

  He held up his hand, motioning for me to keep my voice down and to give him a chance to explain. After a little pause, he said, “I don’t like to act out of anger.”

  I ventured it again. “Why not?”

  He turned away for a second, thinking. Turning back suddenly, he asked, “Do you believe in death, Jack?”

  That caught me kind of off guard. “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really see what that has to do—”

  “I don’t,” he said, his eyes alight with some strange passion. “I believe in eternal life.”

  “The heaven and hell kind of thing?”

  He shook his head. “I believe that souls go on many adventures. That they live many lives in many different bodies in many different times. Understand?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “But what—”

  “The only thing that remains constant throughout all your lives is your eternal soul. In a sense, your soul goes on these adventures to learn things.”

  He paused again, and this time I did not speak.

  “Eventually, I suppose, your soul could degrade completely and be condemned to some damned place. Hell perhaps.”

  “How?” I asked.

  He smiled a little. “By giving in to the temptations of lust, greed … or anger. Those three are the gateways to hell. They degrade your soul.”

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “Before you do anything, you ask yourself, ’Is this lust or anger or greed?’”

  “No. After a while, avoiding them is almost automatic. If you just view the world objectively, you’ll see that those three are at the core of all bad news. They circle around a person, leading him from one to another to another until he’s lost everything good about him, and his soul is an empty shell.”

  I thought for a moment. “So how would he get out?”

  “The only way to win that game, Jack, is not to play. So when you tell me that you and Erica acted on your lustful feelings before I met her, you can expect me to be angry, Jack. But I won’t be. I just don’t play that game.”

  “That’s … unusual,” I said. “Is that something that your father taught you?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding slowly and smiling. “My father was an unusual man. He was hard-working, genuine, honest. He loved the desert. Things like that are hard to find in most people. Things like that are what I like about Macy.”

  I let that sink in for a while. It was heavy and thick.

  Around us the scenery had become hazy gray and was beginning to show color and contrast with the approaching sun.

  Suddenly something struck me as not quite right. “What about back in Phoenix, John?” I asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Remember when I hopped over the fence to save the girl then you hopped over and beat up those guys to save me?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “What about it?”

  “Weren’t you acting on your anger then?”

  He shook his head. “Every person has a right to be free and happy. When they tried to infringe on her rights, you stepped in to help her, out of respect for her. Respect for living things is good. When they attacked you, I stepped in to help you. We got into a fight to preserve our rights. That doesn’t require anger, just an instinct for survival.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As souls living in these bodies at this time, we owe it to ourselves to survive with our rights. Survival is not just a right, and not even an option. It’s our obligation.”

  I thought I understood what he meant, but I also thought he was somewhat misled. That night back in Phoenix, he might have been fighting for lofty ideals of soul survival and such. But I remembered I was angry. Not just angry. Fighting mad. “What would you do,” I asked, “if we were to catch the guys who are chasing us now?”

  “Turn them over to the police, testify against them, and move on,” he said without hesitation.

  “Before we turned them in, wouldn’t you like to hit them just a couple of times? Just for their trouble?”

  He laughed a little. “No. I don’t want to get into it.”

  “And aren’t you just a little angry about Erica and me?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Everybody makes mistakes. That’s another of our rights. Becoming angry won’t change it. It would just make things worse. I don’t want that.”

  I didn’t like being regarded as a mistake, although I certainly was one. “Don’t you want to hit me just a little bit?” I asked.

  John smiled wide and looked directly into my eyes. “Let me put it this way, Jack. If you’re ever infringing on my rights and I have to fight against you for survival, I’ll put a little extra effort into it, for Erica. I’m human too. And since I also have the right to make mistakes, Jack, why not?”

  That made things clear.

  Chapter 18

  At first I didn’t know if I should take that as a subtle threat or not. After a moment, though, I decided not. If he’d wanted revenge, he’d had all kinds of chances to get it the day before. Because he’d repeatedly gone out of his way to help me, however, I could only believe he truly had no interest in revenge.

  I wondered where he’d gotten his philosophy, or where his father had.

  After a brief pause, John brought us back to reality. Looking at the spreading dawn, he said, “We should all be awake now. If they’re going to come after us, it’ll probably be within the next hour.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because now is when we’re most likely to be sleeping.”

  He was right. We woke the others.

  John woke Erica while I shook Macy awake. Macy jerked his eyes open and looked up at me, eyes all bloodshot and fuzzy. His expression ran a gamut of questions. First he didn’t quite recognize me. Then he wondered who Sharon was. Then he wondered where he was. Then he wondered why I had woken him up.

  “Sun’s coming up,” I said. “John says we better get up.”

  “Oh,” he said. He stretched on the ground where he was. “Sure.” With a groan, he began untangling himself from Sharon.

  Erica woke right up, acting as refreshed as if she’d slept the night on a water bed. Sharon, when Macy roused her, stood up all stiff and groggy.

  “What’s going on?” Macy asked, his eyes still fuzzy. “Are they back?”

  “Not yet,” John said. “But if they are going to come back, now’s when the
y’ll do it.”

  “So what’s our move?” Macy asked.

  “We should go to a place where we can keep a lookout for them. Some place we can run or defend from,” John said.

  “The hilltop again?” I asked.

  “The hilltop,” John said.

  “Again,” Sharon said.

  We went.

  In the gray light of morning, it only took us about five minutes to negotiate through the cacti and washes up the hillside. The morning birds had begun to awaken and chirp and trill their morning songs. The cool air and the exercise invigorated us, so by the time we took up watch posts around the hilltop, we weren’t tired anymore.

  As we took our positions, I couldn’t help but notice the contrast of the girls. Sharon’s makeup was now two days old. The remains of her mascara and eyeliner were smeared into black puddles around her eyes, giving her a zombie-like look. Her hair spray now held her hair securely puffed out on one side. She needed a makeover.

  Erica was the other extreme. She didn’t seem to wear much makeup to begin with, and she definitely didn’t need any. Her face was clean and smooth and her hair only stylishly unkempt. If I had been Sharon, I would have been bitchy, too.

  John sat facing south, downriver, Erica at his side. Behind him, Macy and Sharon sat facing north. I sat facing the sun rising out of the distant mountains to the east. High and far away, I saw three birds circling in the sunrise, already searching for breakfast.

  “Hey, John,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at him. He had gotten a piece of cloth from somewhere and was cleaning his revolver with it. “What kind of birds are those? Bald eagles?”

  He turned to look where I was pointing. After only a couple seconds he replied, “Nope. Buzzards.” He went back to cleaning his gun.

  To me, the morning felt just a little colder.

  “Do you think they’ll come after us?” Macy asked.

  “I doubt it,” John said. “Now that they know I have my baby.”

  I could hear the confusion in Macy’s silence.

  “You mean Erica?” he asked finally.

  “No, I’m talking about my revolver. This Brazilian .357,” John said. I looked back at him again. John held his gun up in front of his chest. He and Erica looked at it with a certain reverence. “This baby.”