Down Solo (11 page)

Melinda’s staring at me triumphantly. “You’re so fucked!”

I go straight to the table, pick up the transmitter and push the “Arm” switch. I tell Melinda, “Say goodbye to the Big Island.” A clatter from the Tec-9 sends bullets through the thin wood wall of the house and out the other side. I push the red button.

¤ ¤ ¤

Melinda screams an endless “Noooo . . .” that is drowned out by the explosion. Debris clatters against the wall of the shack; seconds later, more lands on the roof. After a few minutes the crows return and Melinda’s scream subsides to a convulsive sobbing.

The trailer’s not looking too good. I hope the keys are in the Saturn, or I’m in for Freddy Krueger’s Easter egg hunt. I duck back into the shack for the backpack. I sweep up the three cell phones and put them into the pack. For some reason I feel thirsty, so I grab a Coke out of the cooler. Melinda looks up at me and says, “What about me?”

“What about you, Melinda? Just a minute ago you were all excited about me getting killed, and now you want my sympathy?”

“You can’t just leave me here like this.”

“Well, yes I can. There’s a cloud of black smoke a quarter mile high coming off the trailer. I’m sure somebody’s going to be dropping by soon.” I retrieve the torch and toss it to her. “Here, this’ll keep you entertained.” The flame is out.

“It needs butane.” She’s pathetic now, eyes pleading. She looks to the drawer.

I pull out a new can of butane and hand it to her.

“Bye, Melinda. It’s been swell.”

I feel strangely invigorated, and the cold coke tastes good going down my throat. The dirt is brown and the shrubs a dull green; I can see color, though it’s washed out and dim, like at dusk. I wonder if my condition is improving. Maybe I was just badly wounded.

Yeah, right. And whoever delivered me to the morgue was an idiot. And besides, badly wounded wouldn’t explain my ability to leave the body. Roaming seems to be a special privilege of some kind of extraordinary state.

Or I’m badly wounded and delusional. Now there’s a possibility.

There’s a film I saw in college: During the Civil War, a man is about to be hanged from a bridge. Union soldiers are standing guard. The rope breaks and the man swims down the river toward safety. Pursued by rifle shots and baying hounds, he finds a road and runs toward his plantation home. A beautiful woman seems to float down the steps from the veranda, her hand stretched out to greet him. When their fingers touch, the rope snaps taut and the man is hanging from the bridge. There’s a book about Jesus on the cross that’s basically the same story. I wonder if that’s my story too: to wake up and die.

I’m down Herbie’s hill at the juncture of his private driveway and the road back to the highway. Left on that road takes me into the hills, to the mine.

To Ratboy.

To Mindy.

There’s nobody in the world that I’m closer to than Mindy. She understands me with a wisdom that I can’t begin to explain. She knows my problems and forgives me unconditionally. Her mother says it’s because I let Mindy do whatever she wants, that Allison’s been forced to play bad cop to my good cop for so long that in Mindy’s eyes I can do no wrong, but I think there’s more to it than that.

Well, I would, wouldn’t I?

I make the left turn and head up into the hills. The road crosses a dry creek bed and gets steeper. I put the Saturn into second gear. I can see the plume of black smoke from the trailer over my left shoulder.

I’m high enough in the hills that I can see the ocean in the rearview mirror. The sun catches just right through the windshield and I’m blinded for a second. I hear another echo of the roaring in my head, the bullet invading my skull; I’m flying off the bike and there’s a face behind the gun. Is it Ratboy’s? Or his partner’s? I can’t capture it. What doesn’t make sense is Ratboy showing up at the restaurant for the reports. Did Jason send him? Then who was Tanya talking to at the coffee shop when she said that I didn’t show up with the briefcase? Her husband? Where does he fit in the picture? And why are there two conflicting reports?

The road crosses over the creek bed again and then goes parallel to it into a sort of dip between two hills. The brush is scraping the car on both sides, and the Saturn’s shocks weren’t built for this terrain. The road gets bumpier as it gets steeper. I wonder if the C-4 in the backpack is sensitive to jostling; I have no experience with it. Nor do I have experience with gun fights, gold mines, or the Mexican desert, but there’s only one way to go and that’s forward. Unless the C-4 turns me and the Saturn into a second pillar of black smoke in the Mexican sky.

I hit the top of a rise and the view changes entirely. The road leads down into a flat valley nestled between the hills, with higher terrain about a half mile on the other side. About twenty yards down from the top of the rise there’s a partially open gate with barbed wire and a sign that says “Private Property.” There’s a stand of trees on either side of it. The barbed wire extends north and south from the gate. I decide to park in the shelter of the trees.

I grab the backpack and walk to the tree nearest the gate. The valley sits in a depression in the hills, about two hundred feet below me. To my left, the hill I’m on steepens and becomes an almost vertical wall forming the north side of the valley. Set against it is a long, rectangular concrete building, its single door open. Two small shacks sit next to it. Beyond them is a water tank and then a series of pyramid-shaped mounds, some taller than the building. A bulldozer sits idly in the dirt. Cactus and mesquite trees grow randomly, some right up to the side of the structure. The road from the gate leads down to the building and then veers south and recedes into the distant hills. Down that road, about halfway to the building, is the Chevy van I saw in the picture in Ratboy’s room.

It’s a weird place to have stopped and parked. Herbie’s binoculars bring the van up close, and I don’t like what I see. First of all, the van seems to have veered partly off the road and is turned sideways to me. I sharpen the focus and see that the windshield is missing. I swap the binoculars for DeShaun’s gun and sling the backpack over my shoulder. I head down the road, keeping the van between me and the concrete building.

The driver’s side door is open. There’s shattered glass all over the seats and floor, but no one inside, and no blood. I step in and crawl between the seats; the rear of the van is carpeted with thick plush. Aside from fast-food wrappers and some empty beer bottles, the only thing I see is a pair of Mindy’s sunglasses, the same pair she was wearing when I picked her up forever ago at her mother’s.

I run my hands through the plush, combing it with my fingers. Up against the bench that runs lengthwise behind the driver’s seat, right at the juncture with the floor, I feel a hard, metallic nugget. It’s a bullet, flattened from impact. A bit more scrabbling around yields two more. I study the passenger-side panel and see the light streaming in from three holes.

I could play it safe and roam, but last time the re-entry knocked me out for a while and left me disoriented, which wouldn’t be good if anyone decided to check out the van. Instead, I slip back between the seats and crouch in front of the passenger seat and peer out the window. There’s a body about thirty feet away, sprawled in the middle of the dirt road.

The van’s door opens with a loud squeal. I drop to the ground and move, crab-like, toward the body. Something crunches under my hand; a tarantula’s body fluids seep between my fingers and remind me of the blood flowing from Jason Hamel’s wound.

A heavily tattooed Mexican wearing a wife-beater tucked neatly into baggie shorts lies on his back in the dirt. His head is shaved and has a red devil’s face tattooed on it with Roman numerals on his forehead. He looks like he spent most of his life pumping iron. There’s a pool of blood in the middle of his chest, and flies are buzzing over it. I get closer and see maggots squirming blindly on his neck and shoulders. There’s a gun in his right hand, a big military issue S&W .45.

I kneel to remove the gun, as the Ruger is down to two bullets. A hand snaps out and grips my wrist. I see the gun swing around to point in my direction as the man’s eyes pop open and glare at me. Our eyes meet and his expression turns from a triumphant leer to one of panic. He screams, “No, no, Madre de Dios, no,” and coughs up blood. His body quivers, the gun fires over my shoulder, and his eyes lock in a stare to nowhere. The quick and the dead, two qualities that should never combine, and he saw them both in me. So, I am vindicated. At least the dying know what I am.

I take the gun, which has fallen out of the man’s hand. A shot rings out and the dirt flies up three feet to my left. Another shot, this time slamming into the van’s front hubcap and sending it spinning off into a cactus thicket. A third one hits me just under the right clavicle. I feel the impact, but no pain. I let it take me to the ground and lie spread-eagled and motionless. Leaving the body, I watch an older man walk up the road from the building, a rifle in his hand. He’s dark and lean and has a face like a crumpled grocery bag. His denim shirt has mother-of-pearl snap buttons that match the huge buckle on his belt. His teeth are the color of the plug of tobacco he spits out as he raises the rifle.

I re-enter the body and fire into the man’s heart. The rifle sounds like a cannon as it discharges five feet from my face, but the bullet hits the dirt beside me.

I will the body to move. I will the heart to pump the blood to feed the cells to imitate life. I’m getting better at this. My shoulder wound bleeds, but I go on.

¤ ¤ ¤

The gunshots don’t seem to have attracted any more attention. I approach the building holding the dead man’s rifle in one hand, the .45 in the other. The windows are small and square and about head high, but if I’m going to offer a target to anyone inside, my face isn’t my first choice, so I duck through the door, ready to fire. There’s no one inside. It’s all one room, about forty feet long and twenty wide. Four bunk beds are in the far end, two against each of the longer walls, with a couple of ramshackle chests of drawers between them. I approach the beds; they have uncovered mats on them and resemble the ones at the county jail. Each has a sleeping bag rolled up at its end. There’s no sign that Mindy has been here.

The other end of the building has a huge table propped up on two-by-fours. Workbenches line the walls, covered with buckets of rock and dirt. There’s a kitchen corner with a steel sink and a hose for a faucet. A wooden chair faces a mirror that is stuck to the wall. A four-burner electric hotplate and a small refrigerator, along with a few hanging light bulbs, indicate that there must be a generator somewhere outside.

The big table is strewn with junk: buckets of dirt and rock; magnifiers and an old microscope; various tongs and long, needle-nosed tweezers; a hatchet and a fire extinguisher; a boom box and a stack of CDs—Marvin Gaye, Quincy Jones, Aretha Franklin; a terrain map, presumably of the mine and the surrounding mountains; and the odd pen, flashlight, sunglass case, and pocketknife, all covered with a layer of dust. It looks like someone left years ago, planning on coming back the next day.

I go back outside. There’s a broad expanse of nothing but the occasional cactus or bush ahead of me. The dirt road comes down from my right and then bears south—the way I’m facing—to some hills miles away. To my left are the two shacks and the mounds of dirt, and, far beyond that, an incongruously wooded hill.

The shacks are empty. Bunks with mats. Rat shit on the window sills. They look like they were built by the same guy that made Herbie and Melinda’s palace, but this time he was in more of a hurry. There’s an outhouse past the second shack that I couldn’t see before. Still no sign of Mindy or Ratboy and his giant friend.

I walk past the water tank, which has a Rube Goldberg set of PVC pipes leading back to the main building. Behind it, to my left, is the steep hill, almost a cliff, that backs the main building and the shacks. Ahead of me is the first of the dirt and rock mounds I viewed from the gate at the entrance. It’s about twelve feet high, and I have to walk around it to the right or climb over the lower part that butts up against the cliff. I keep the rifle pointed ahead of me as I climb.

There’s a hole in the cliff, just past the mound of dirt, about five feet high, with a scaffolding of two-by-fours propping it up at the opening. A wheelbarrow sits on its side in the shadows about five feet in. I sit with my back to the wheelbarrow, scan the valley for any sign of life, and leave the body. About ten feet into the tunnel I realize it’s useless; I can’t see in the dark any better than when I am in the body. I re-enter the body and put the rifle down and the backpack next to it. Herbie’s flashlight and the dead Mexican’s .45 point my way into the dark.

I’ve always hated the dark, but enclosed spaces make my head want to explode. For our honeymoon, Allison and I went to Italy. It had always been a dream of hers to see the Vatican, the ruins of Pompeii, the Amalfi coastline, the tower in Pisa; we did it all, holding hands and exploring like high-school kids in love. One day we were having lunch in Siena when a middle-aged British couple sitting at the table next to ours started telling us about the bell tower of the church across the piazza from us. “Fabulous,” the woman said. “You can see for miles in every direction.”

After lunch, Allison and I walked to the church. A buck apiece bought us entrance to a narrow, winding stairway, just wide enough to let one person climb at a time. I went first. A tiny, dim bulb shaped like a candle and strung on a wire once at every full turn of the stairway provided just enough light to see the steps. The amber-colored walls were cool and smooth. About six turns up, the person ahead of me stopped; someone was descending and neither could pass. Allison was right behind me, with the British couple—on board for their second time—at her back. The lights flickered, became suddenly very bright, and then died with a faint clicking sound.

If I had been in a sarcophagus under a pyramid I would have been more comfortable. I wanted to go berserk, to push Allison and start a domino effect of fallen tourists I could trample on my way to open space. I got short of breath, dizzy and desperate, and prayed the prayer of the momentary believer:
Help me, I’ll do anything.

¤ ¤ ¤

And now, here I am, stooped over and shuffling into the narrow blackness, the beam from the light illuminating nothing but a small circle on the ground. I will the body to move. I trudge on, full of dread, ready to put a hole in the next tweaker, gangbanger, or Mexican thug that gets in the way of me finding my daughter. I aim the light ahead; it gets lost in the gloom. I walk face first into a spider web and want to scream and tear my skin off. I wipe my face in the crook of my arm and keep moving.

I must be forty feet into the tunnel. It’s starting to veer to the left; when I pass the bend, the darkness is complete. It’s quiet as a tomb. There’s a beer bottle on the ground, and some loose chunks of rock, but if Mindy’s in here she’s either not awake or not alive.

The silence is broken by a sudden flutter of wings and a chorus of squeaking that I never want to hear again, followed by a weird shriek and hoof beats on the tunnel floor. A wave of bats flitter around my head and in the slender beam of the flashlight I see a beast charging at me. It looks like a hairy black pit bull with tusks for the tiny second I can see it before it slams into my legs and knocks me on my back. The flashlight goes out as it flies from my hand. The beast’s hoofbeats recede into the darkness while the bats swirl above me in a sonic nightmare of leathery fluttering and squeals.

If it weren’t for Mindy, I’d have given up long ago. I don’t know what gods I’ve offended, but they’re having their way with me now.

¤ ¤ ¤

Time goes by, who can measure? The bats have settled down; somewhere up above they’re happily perched, upside down, grasping the rock ceiling with their claws, folded into their wings, back to their bat dreams. I seem to be indestructible, and yet I feel so vulnerable. Snakes like caves—I read that somewhere. Scorpions, spiders, poisonous lizards, guns with silencers, rat-faced killers, yes!—and rats, too, scurrying here where I’ve made my bed, it seems, for I’ve lost interest in moving.

I paw at the dirt on my right side until I feel the cool metal of the flashlight. I grasp it and hit it with heel of my left hand. Nothing. I push the button and remain in the dark. The batteries fall onto my chest when I unscrew the cap. I put them back in and the beam appears like a comet, slicing through pitch black like a laser through obsidian.

I sit up and swing the light around the tunnel walls and now the floor. No rats and not a snake in sight. I’m glad I left the backpack at the entrance; falling on the C-4 might have left me with too many separate parts to get moving again. I pick myself up and follow the beam back around the bend; the mouth of the tunnel is a circle of sunlight ahead of me.

The view of the desert is like a balm to the soul, space to move and breathe, the sun my friend, the sheltering sky. I tuck the .45 in my pants, put the flashlight in the backpack, and pick up the rifle. East, away from the tunnel and the mounds of dirt and the water tower and the buildings, away from the dead Mexicans and Ratboy’s van and my nice new car, out toward the foothills and the patch of greenery I saw from the main building.

It’s a weird little desert oasis, thick with mesquite and palms and, now that I’m closer, flowering sage. It fills a shallow canyon that cuts into the foothills and veers to my left in a gentle slope for about a quarter mile before tapering off into the surrounding hills.

I climb some boulders and find a worn path through the bushes. It winds through the trees and rocks and brings me to a stream that originates somewhere at the top of the canyon and bends to the south just ahead of me. I wade across and wind up on a sandy beach in the crook of the bend. Footprints are scattered everywhere, and the remains of a fire smolder in a small depression in the sand. I am in Ratboy’s sacred place, the stream where his adoptive father baptized him.

Upstream, to the northeast, the bank to my left rises steeply, becoming a rock wall after about a hundred yards. On my side of the stream, the patch of sand narrows and becomes a muddy path between the water and a grade of boulders and dirt and bush. Two sets of footprints are clearly visible, one fairly small and terminating in a distinct point—I recall Ratboy’s boots—and the other simply enormous, making huge gouges in the soft mud. I follow their lead, rifle ready. A hawk soars overhead and swoops down to my right, emerging from a crevasse between two giant rocks with something gray and furry wriggling in its talons.

The stream narrows and deepens. A cluster of boulders and trees make an island that interrupts the water’s flow so that it quickens where it has cut a path to either side. As I approach I raise the rifle, since I can’t see beyond the fork in the stream. Beyond it, the mud path disappears, along with the footprints. Standing there, upstream from the little island, I look at the opposite bank and see a rock spur jutting out from the cliff. It causes the water to churn before it meets the island and divides. In the crook on the downstream side of the spur is a depression in the cliff wall and a flat rock platform about a foot underwater leading into it.

I wade across to the island through waist-high water. A fallen tree gives me something to grab onto and I climb to the top of the largest rock. I am ten feet above the water, looking down at the depression in the cliff, and I can see now that it darkens as it recedes into the rock wall. It’s a crevasse, deep in the shadows even now at midday. The swirling water looks deep on this side, but it’s only about eight feet to the shallow rock shelf, and there’s a lower boulder I can launch from.

I lay the rifle down and remove the backpack. The .45 and the flashlight will be my friends in the dark once again, if I make it past the mouth of the cave. I put them in the backpack and remove the C-4 and detonator and lay them on the rock and strap the pack on my shoulders. I climb down to the launch-point and study the water. There’s no way to tell how deep it is, but it’s moving and probably over my head. I hurl myself upstream and stroke across and am conveniently swept by the current onto the rock shelf.

I’m ankle-deep in water, but in three steps I’m inside of the rock wall, crouching in the dim light, waiting to be shot once again, the .45 ready in one hand and the flashlight, not yet on, in the other. Four more steps and I’m in total darkness, moving as silently as I can. I hear a clatter and shushing sounds coming from somewhere ahead of me. I freeze and hear the click of a hammer being cocked. I whisper loudly, “Jason!”

Silence. A rustling sound, then Ratboy’s voice, incredulous: “Dad?”

I take three steps forward, four, five. I have no idea where they are. I whisper his name again: “Jason, where are you?”

Now his voice is desperate, grateful, pathetic. “Dad, I’m sorry. They took over the camp.” The voice is coming from right in front of me. I say nothing. He blurts out, “Dad, is that you?” I turn on the flashlight: he’s a deer caught in headlights; his left shoulder is bandaged and bleeding; his gun pointed randomly out to his right; his lazy eye blinks out of synch with the good one. I say, “Nope,” and shoot him in the forehead.

A roar of pain and rage erupts from the shadows and Ratboy’s gorilla-shaped friend charges at me. His unformed features make him look like a thug with a nylon stocking over his face, a giant, dumb bank-robber. He slams me into the rock wall and picks me up and throws me across the cave and charges again. I drop the flashlight as I hit the opposite wall, but this time it stays on. I leave the body and let it crumple to the ground.

From above, in the minimal glow of the flashlight, I can see Ratboy’s body collapsed against the wall in a sitting position where the cave ends in a rounded cul-de-sac. Mindy lies curled up a few feet away, alive or dead I can’t tell. I watch Gorilla-boy raise a fist and smash my face. He raises it again. I float to Ratboy and probe. I move closer; there’s nothing in my way, and I move in. I look through Ratboy’s eyes and raise his gun and pull the trigger. The first bullet hits Gorilla-boy in the ass but he delivers his blow anyway. I fire again, and again, and again. The monster falls over with a groan and stops moving.

¤ ¤ ¤

I exit Ratboy’s body and linger in the dome of the cave space. I feel contaminated, soiled as though immersed in a psychic cesspool, infected by a soul-sickness one can only confront with dread, or with a faith larger than I’ve ever known. I hesitate to take this sickness back to my own body, as though it might take residence there like a stain that can never be washed away.

I re-enter my body because I have to. It’s badly damaged, but serviceable. I put my hand to the back of my head; it’s crushed from the impact against the cave wall and feels soft, like baby fat. My right cheek is smashed and I can feel bits of bone crunching when I press it with my fingers. I pick up the flashlight and go over to Mindy. She’s inert but breathing, either drugged or knocked unconscious.

I go back to Ratboy’s body and search his pockets. A rabbit’s foot—but no, I check it out with the flashlight and it looks more like it once belonged to a cat; a folding combat knife; a wallet; and a small Ziploc baggie full of pills, but no keys. I have to struggle with Gorilla-boy’s body to turn him over and get to his front pocket, where I find a set of keys and put them in my pocket. I shine the light on his face; he looks like a huge sleeping infant, all malice gone. Ratboy still looks like a rat, his expression frozen into a permanent sneer, his upper lip pulled back so that his canines glint wetly in the flashlight’s beam.

I retrieve the .45 and tuck it in my pants. Mindy feels light as a feather as I pick her up, but is completely unresponsive. I stagger to the mouth of the cave and step down onto the submerged shelf and launch myself backward into the stream. The current carries us a short way until my feet touch bottom and I can walk to the opposite side and climb up the rocks to the mud path. I take Mindy back to the beach and lay her next to the fire pit and go back up the path, across to the island, and retrieve the C-4 and the rifle.

Mindy’s still unconscious when I get back to her. I hoist her onto my back and head toward the sun. My vision is dim; the desert and sky look grainy and dark, even though it’s still, by the sun’s position, mid-afternoon. The trees and bushes are amorphous shapes, without definition or significance, and I know only that I have to get to the building and that in order to do that I have to keep the hillside to my right. I’m obsessed with two things: one is to get Mindy home to safety; the other is that someone set this all in motion, and I’m going to find out who and why.