Unassigned Territory, page 14
Rex took the news that she was in fact the girl with the bikers without flinching. But he was not unaffected. On the one hand, he wanted to tell himself that he’d best think twice about taking her anywhere. On the other hand, there was what Charlie had told him. He had encountered decorated pussies twice now, both times in Porkpie Wells. The coincidence appeared pregnant with meaning.
“Yeah, I really want to get back up there. You know, to look at these guys you wouldn’t think they were such pussies.” Rex assumed she was referring to her traveling companions but it sounded like dangerous talk to him and he left it alone.
The girl proceeded into a lengthy rap about Table Mountain, how she and some other people had gotten into renovating this old mining town and how there was this doctor up there who had built all this righteous stuff. She had been stupid to leave. Her sister, with whom she had been traveling at the time, had talked her into it and they had gone to San Francisco where it was nowhere near as righteous as Table Mountain and she had been trying to get back ever since. She stopped for a while and looked at her hands. “The doctor died,” she said suddenly, “but he left everything to the Table Mountain people—that’s what we started calling ourselves. The only thing is, the doctor had this daughter—a real asshole, and she says she’s taking the will to court.” The girl stopped to laugh. Her laughter was rather deep and throaty—not at all what Rex had expected. “She’s going to take a will to court,” she repeated.
Rex nodded and looked at the way the girl’s big golden earrings flashed in the light now slicing through a narrow window near her head. The Table Mountain stuff was not news to him. He’d even met Dr. Verity once himself—a large, red-faced man with a paunch and a balding head. The guy had driven out to the Desert Museum years ago in a big pink Lincoln and offered to buy one of Sarge’s Things. He said nothing about this to the girl.
“It was fun when Verity was around,” the girl said. “When he died it was sad. We took his body out to this ridge and the aliens came and got it. I left after that. But I shouldn’t have. I got this letter a few weeks ago from one of the sisters. She says Verity has come back. He has begun to appear.”
“Begun to appear?” Rex asked. He wasn’t sure that he cared for the sound of it.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know that much about it yet. He’s gotten beyond the human form. He’s going to teach us how to use the Electro-Magnetron.”
Rex had heard about the Electro-Magnetron too. It was something of a joke among the locals. He’d heard that it had been built to reverse the aging process, but that there was a part missing. “I thought there was a part missing,” Rex said.
The girl looked at him for a moment. “There was,” she said. “Did you know there was a race of people at the center of the earth?”
Rex said nothing. In the courtyard the shadows had begun to lengthen. He tried to picture in his mind what a red, white, and blue pussy might look like.
The girl wrapped her arms around herself as if she had taken a sudden chill. “It’s like another dimension down there, and these people, they’re like gods or something.” She stopped suddenly to laugh. “It sounds crazy,” she said, “but can you imagine it? If there was a way to bring them back?” She smiled sweetly at the thought. “Blow some fucking minds, or what?” She hugged herself once more and her smile seemed to spread out to include things. It included Rex in such a way as to make him feel he had already agreed to take her where she wanted to go. He could not say the feeling was unpleasant. But then he thought of an empty museum at the side of a pitted asphalt road and the feeling died on the vine. He would have taken this girl there, he thought. She would have seen the Thing. She would have heard the Hum-A-Phone. Blow some fucking minds indeed. There was suddenly sweat on the back of Rex’s neck, a dull, drumlike thumping back of his eyeballs. “Tell me,” he said, “why don’t these guys want to take you anymore?”
“I told you,” she said. “These guys are wimps. These guys wouldn’t know a large time if it came up and buggered them in the ass. I mean they’re not even real bikers. Shit, I lived in Oakland with some Angels once. These guys are dildos.”
“Yeah, but what are they afraid of?”
The girl looked him in the eye. The orange light gave the bruised flesh of her cheek a faintly iridescent quality. “They think the people up there are devil worshipers,” she said. Some fuckhead they met told them he’d heard some very weird stories. Like if these people don’t think you’re right on they might cut you up and sacrifice you to somebody.” The girl continued to look at him. Then she smiled. “It’s strictly bullshit,” she told him.
Rex nodded but he was paying little attention to her now. A thought had come to him. It had appeared among his memories like a blade of grass upon parched ground. It had to do with the profound sense of disappointment once expressed on the part of Delandra Hummer over her father’s refusal to sell Dr. Verity one of his Creatures, and Rex returned the girl’s smile with one of his own. From somewhere beyond the wall came a sound—music turned up real loud but so far away that only the bass line could be heard in the bar, a dull throb like the sound of blood.
That he was a man of some destiny was something Rex had never doubted. He’d believed it when Roseann Duboise had told him he was meant for something special and he had known in his heart he would not be forsaken. That simply was not his fate. He had after all come to Porkpie Wells seeking a sign. He looked once more at the girl and then back into the courtyard where the orange light lay gleaming on the snowy walls, and finally back toward Charlie at the far end of the room where the bartender, at last having caught his eye, was busily finger-fucking the fist he had made out of one hand with the forefinger of the other. He was holding the whole business high enough over the bar for Rex to see and grinning like a demented rodent.
When they entered Trona on the following morning the weather had turned muggy and the sky the color of pearl. The Thing, for the first time since they had stolen it, was no longer in the car. They had left it in their room at the Blue Heaven Motel, the bedspread covering the case, a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.
The golden city Obadiah had once glimpsed from the edge of the flats was, it appeared, a hoax of the cruelest variety for he did not believe he had seen an uglier town. Searching for some set of images with which to compare it, he was at first reminded of certain old photographs of eastern mill towns—those black-and-white portraits of industrial desolation. Tortured landscapes wherein sorry company towns hunkered on treeless hills in the shadows of smoking factories. They’d had, of course, to do something about the color scheme in the Mojave. The dirty grays and blacks of hard eastern winters had given way to the red-shaded earthtones of equally hard desert summers. As for the company town, its houses were of faded stucco pastels—pinks and greens and yellows, but bleached and dusted with a fine gray dust until they had taken on something of the quality of old work clothes washed too many times, bleached by long days beneath the sun. The houses were single-story structures, each one identical in design to its neighbor—low rectangular buildings with peaked sheet metal roofs that fanned out into a ten-foot overhang all around, making for deep porches and shade for the coolers which sat stacked in their shadows. In front of the houses there were makeshift fences of wood and wire and yards of sand.
As for the rest of Trona—the Corner Pocket Bar, Frank’s Liquor, a pair of large mustard-colored buildings which turned out to be the school, a church made of concrete blocks, a theater, a handful of thrift stores and junk shops—it all lay scattered among the loops and curves of the highway as it meandered in the dusty blue shadows of the Trona Chemical Works before straightening itself out and making like a streak, one slender arrow of sunlit pavement running in a rule-straight line toward the eastern rim of Death Valley, as if its builders had at last remembered what was what and gotten the hell out in a hurry.
And there was one final detail he noticed that morning, a kind of coup de grace he picked up on after rolling down his window for a breath of fresh air. It was the peculiar and noxious odor Delandra told him was a product of the chemical plant and one of Trona’s—together with the weather—more or less constant features. And with the discovery of this last bit of news he was set upon by a second set of images for which he was at once willing to abandon the first. The second set had nothing to do with documentary films or old photographs but was drawn instead from the reading he had done between the ages of about twelve and fifteen—the years in which he had worked his way through the entire Winston’s SF-for-young-people series he’d discovered housed in the Pomona Public Library—so that what he was at last able to see in Trona was not really a town at all but an outpost of some sort. A Martian mining complex. A penal colony on Equatorial Mercury. The last uranium works of the fifth moon of the planet Tractar. The image was particularly satisfying when thought of in light of what he and Delandra Hummer had come to find: a landing strip for alien craft.
“I didn’t tell him I didn’t know where it was,” Delandra said. “I kind of wanted to sound like I was familiar with the setup.”
Obadiah nodded. It made sense to him. “Why the hell not?” he said.
“Anyway,” Delandra went on, “it should be easy enough to find. All we have to do is ask someone about where they hold the UFO conventions. It’s all in the same place. I know that much.”
They wound up at a small thrift store on the eastern edge of the town. It was a white Quonset hut type of building situated on a wide gravel shoulder at the side of the interstate. There were perhaps half a dozen people inside, not counting the two old women in yellow aprons who appeared to run the place. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up as Obadiah and Delandra came through the door.
Obadiah, immediately uncomfortable beneath their collective gaze, drifted off toward a rack of aging sport coats and assorted Hawaiian shirts as Delandra approached one of the women seated behind a desk. He was not so far away, however, that he could not hear their voices. He heard Delandra ask about the Martian Museum and then he heard one of the women laugh. “There’s nothing like that here, honey,” the woman said. “I guess you got the wrong town.”
“Nonsense,” Delandra said, “I know there’s something like that here. I don’t live that far away. I’ve heard about it for years.”
“Well, I can’t say what you’ve heard, dear, but I’ve lived in Trona for fifteen years and I know there’s nothing like that around.”
“And you never heard of an airstrip for flying saucers?”
The woman laughed again. “Someone’s been pulling your leg,” she said. The other woman laughed with her.
Obadiah had by now drifted farther toward the rear of the store, where he found himself suddenly staring into the sunken face of a thin middle-aged man. The combination of the man’s height—his head only barely rising above the rack of coats—together with the dull used look of his clothing had caused him to blend in so well with the used sport coats that Obadiah almost passed him without seeing he was there. For a moment the two men stood facing one another. At which point the man smiled, displaying a set of ragged yellow teeth, and disappeared as if he’d been caught at something. Obadiah returned to the shirts. But there was something about the man. It took him a moment to decide what it was. It came to him while holding a brown and yellow polyester item to his chest before a thin rectangle of mirrored glass. It wasn’t the man. It was him. He’d been thinking the guy was weird, but looking into the mirror, what he saw was that the man looked no weirder than he did himself. Perhaps it was the new haircut, the stiff clothing, the missing mustache, the lost weight.... The real revelation, however, was satisfaction this sense of camaraderie aroused in him. It was true he had long ago grown accustomed to feeling on the outside of things—having grown up in The Way. But that, at least when he hadn’t been out knocking on doors, was a kind of secret difference because no one had grown up looking any straighter than he had. But now, staring into this bit of mirror in a desert thrift store, he was remarkably pleased to see he had at last achieved a certain harmony between freak sympathies and outward appearances. He had never had a problem believing in a world that was passing away, it was looking like he might give a shit that had always bothered him. It had never been a world he’d had a stake in and now, suddenly, he looked the part. He no longer looked like a scoutmaster—or some guy who had played basketball in high school. Nor, he was equally happy to note, did he look like those of his generation now camping in The Haight. No uniforms for Obadiah Wheeler. He looked like what for some dark reason he had always been drawn to—like something you might find lurking in the shadows of the Pomona Hotel—and he knew in his heart that there had always been just a trace of something in Bug House’s twisted smile which he had found to admire.
He brought the brown and yellow shirt for fifty cents and by the time he got to the cash register to pay for it Delandra had concluded her business with the old woman and was standing on the porch in the sunlight. She had her arms folded across her chest and was looking back into the store. When she spoke it was loud enough for the woman at the cash register to hear. “The old whore won’t tell me a goddamn thing,” Delandra complained.
The woman gave Obadiah a sour look. Obadiah smiled and handed her a pair of quarters.
They were crossing the dirt lot when Obadiah suddenly noticed someone coming out from in back of the store, angling across the lot to meet them. It was the man with whom he had recently shared a brief moment of recognition at the rear of the shop. “I know what you’re looking for,” the man said when he reached them. He sounded a bit out of breath, as if the trip across the lot had taken something out of him. Perspiration beaded along his hairline and streaked down one sunken temple. He stopped after he said it and stood looking at them in the heat.
“Well?” Delandra asked.
“She’s right,” the man started up again. He jerked a thumb toward the shop. “There aren’t any of those things anymore. But there used to be. Used to be a landing strip, and the Electro-Magnetron. Dr. Verity died.” He stopped again, for a moment, and looked toward a line of rocks back of the store. “When he died the people stopped coming. Then some vandals got in and tore up most of what he’d built.”
Delandra stood with her hands on her hips. She was several inches taller than the man and she stood looking down on him, the sun glancing off her hair and the edge of dark glass where it joined the white plastic rim of her shades. “Well, somebody is still around, somewhere,” she said. “I’ve talked to someone on the phone.” The man looked once more toward the rocks, as if that was where it all was. He shook his head slowly. “There’s someone out there,” he said. “The Electro-Magnetron is still there, and someone’s taking care of it.”
“Can you tell us where it is?” Delandra asked him.
The man pointed back the way they had come. “You go down there until you see the post office, then you make a left. It’s a dirt road and you stay on it for about two miles.”
Delandra looked at Obadiah. “Okay,” she said.
“There is one thing,” the man said. And then he was quiet, waiting to be asked.
“And what one thing would that be?”
The man’s shoulders were thin and bony and when he shrugged them the cloth of his shirt hung back against his chest like a loose sail. “Dr. Verity was real nice,” he said. “People went out there to see him all the time. It’s different now.” He paused and brushed at something on his upper lip with his finger. “There’s some funny people around now.”
“Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?” Delandra asked.
The man looked at her for a moment and moved his shoulders once more. “You know,” he said. “Funny.”
Obadiah looked east, toward Death Valley, where a group of thunderheads had begun to collect above a line of red rock. He was still trying to come up with some reassuring way of defining for himself what the oddball from the thrift store might have meant by funny, but he wasn’t having much luck. If the Mojave was capable of fueling the fantasies of UFO fanatics and fundamentalists alike, it was capable of producing fantasies of another kind as well—a peculiar brand of paranoia. Maybe it went back to the idea of scale, of vulnerability in a landscape without concessions to the notion of comfort. What at any rate Obadiah found himself imagining with mounting clarity as the car swerved through a sand bog was the exotic variety of funny people he and Delandra might find at the end of the white, dusty road—the guardians of Ceton Verity’s Electro-Magnetron. And this, in fact, if they were lucky enough to even find the thing before being caught in the lowlands by the unseasonable thunderstorm that had been building all morning along the peaks separating them from Death Valley.
Delandra had noted the clouds before setting out on the unpaved road but seemed to think there was time. “I just want to see who these people are,” she said. “I mean I talked to somebody and they acted interested. Shit, I don’t care if we sell it to the old man or not. Anybody with money will do.”
Obadiah had nodded, looked once more toward the clouds, and wondered if that was what he wanted too.
The man from the thrift store had given them directions which were vague at best and after half an hour on the dirt road they still had not found anything which looked like it might pass for an alien landing strip. At last, rounding the end of a long finger of iron-colored stone, they decided to stop the car and climb to the top of the ridge. “If we can’t see anything from up there we’ll start back,” Delandra said.
Obadiah sat listening to the silence which had filled the void left by the engine. He wondered if it was anything you ever got used to. The silences, the high white heat, the hurtful light.
It was slow going in the rocks and by the time they reached a ledge near the top Obadiah found that he was breathing hard, that his shirt was damp with sweat. They looked around at the empty flats beneath them. A sudden burst of thunder boomed out of the ridges to the east and rolled down across the desert floor. Above them a lone hawk circled and then wheeled away toward the west, along the stony spine of the ridge they had climbed. There were patterns on the flats below them—what looked like jeep tracks—another road which intersected with the one they had taken, but nothing else. Delandra slapped at a flat piece of rock with the palm of her hand. “Well, fuck it,” she said.
