Gods Without Men (26 page)

“You OK, honey?” the manager asked Lisa. To Jaz’s surprise, Lisa nodded and gave her a hug.

“That’s good, dear,” said the manager. “That’s a relief.”

Jaz pointed the key at the car. The locks thunked open. They put Raj in his seat and belted themselves in. Lisa waved at the manager, who raised a hand as she walked back to the office.

“You were with
her
?”

“I ran into her at the bar.”

“That figures. Old freak.”

“Don’t call her that. She’s a kind woman.”

“In what way?”

“For two minutes, could you stop interrogating me? I need a coffee. I suppose there’s nowhere we can get something less revolting than the stuff at that place.”

“This isn’t Park Slope.”

He sped down the hill, ignoring her appeal to slow down. He pulled in at a Denny’s. They sat inside, silently watching the road through the window. Most of the other booths were filled with young Marines, scarfing down eggs. Jaz ate pancakes, watching Lisa nurse a mug of thin coffee. His self-righteousness was fading beneath a rising conviction that some disaster had occurred and he would be the last to know what it was.

“Did you meet someone?” he asked.

She knew what he meant. “Dawn,” she said. “I met Dawn, from the motel.”

“Who else?”

“I talked to people.”

“What kind of people?”

“I don’t know, Jaz. People. Men. I got drunk and talked to men. Now chop my head off with your curly sword for staining the family honor.”

“You just talked.”

“We just talked. I played some pool.”

“You didn’t come home until six. The bars round here don’t stay open that late.”

“Look, I know I should have phoned. I was angry. Let’s just try to deal with this. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. Let’s go take a look at the park. That’s what we came here to do.”

“You seriously want to do that?”

“Yes. Before it gets too hot. We don’t need anything from the motel. I just want to be outside in the open. I can’t breathe in that room.”

“We haven’t got a picnic. The water’s in the room.”

“We’ll get more water.”

“We haven’t brought his hat.”

“There’s a bag in the trunk. I don’t want to be in that room. Let’s just go, OK? You don’t have to talk to me.”

“That’s a stupid thing to say.”

“You know what I mean.”

They took the turn for the park and drove to the ranger’s station, where they paid an entry fee and got a map and a ticket to display on the dash. They sped on through a moonscape, cliffs and ridges strewn with shards of broken rock. The road climbed up to a gap, through a field of rounded boulders, haphazardly piled up into mounds and turrets, weathered into fantastical shapes. The light was dazzling. Below in the valley the concrete pavement shimmered on the straight and it looked to Jaz as if he was hurtling down into a phantom lake, set in a huge flat plain of Joshua trees. The lake broke into pools and streams. The pools and streams dried into flat white salt. All illusion, all fake.

“Make a left,” said Lisa, as they came to a junction.

“Where are we going?”

“See those rocks? I want to take a look at them.”

Jaz turned the wheel.

“Why? What does the guide say?”

“I don’t know. I saw them yesterday. Off in the distance. I tried walking toward them but they were too far.”

“You were here yesterday?”

“I think I must have been on the other side. I didn’t come into the park.”

They drove toward the three spires, which rose up out of the dust like skinny arms lifted up to the sky. On every side the horizon was marked by mountain ranges, a jagged, absolute border to the world. The country opened up, until only a few tortured Joshua trees broke the endless flat. Lisa watched the rocks intently, as if they were about to do something—start moving, sprout hands and fingers.

They left the car in a little graded lot by the road and took a path toward the rocks, pushing Raj along in his stroller. The ground was rough and the boy was a dead weight. Lisa handed over to Jaz, who felt like Sisyphus as he maneuvered his sleeping son onward. The path passed over a wash and climbed a gentle slope, pocked with creosote bushes. There was no sound but the crunch of their feet, the stroller’s squeaky bearings. Jaz could hear a faint high-pitched whine, almost at the edge of consciousness, and searched the sky for contrails. The clear ceramic blue was broken by high lenticular clouds, a formation of perfect little disks, like fluffy spaceships. He removed his sunglasses to get a look at them and was hit by a wall of light. The world was bleached out. Every scrap of color—Lisa’s green halter top, the stroller’s red nylon hood—had been subdued by the intensity of the glare. It was like walking through an overexposed photograph.

Finally they reached the rocks. They stood in their shadow and drained most of a bottle of water, decanting some into a plastic beaker for Raj. The three vast towers teetered on a flat plinth, stained black with desert varnish. They seemed to be straining directly toward the sun like heliotropic plants. Jaz looked at his watch. It was midday. He could see the car in the distance, a lone silver glint on the desert floor. Raj fell asleep again, so they parked the stroller in the shade and followed a path around the base to take a look at the country on the other side. A barren basin scrolled away toward the mountains, at its center the blown-out white plane of a salt flat, almost too bright to look at.

All about them on the ground were signs of recent occupation. Footprints, spent cartridges, a couple of crushed beer cans. They walked on, making a circuit. In one sheltered spot they found the remains of a
poured concrete platform, a base for some kind of structure. Its crumbling surface was blackened by fire.

“I’ve been here before,” said Lisa. “Except I’ve never been here.”

Jaz kicked a can. “Looks like someone had a party.”

He saw a yellowy glint on the floor and poked it with his toe, expecting broken glass. A rock, shot through with bright flecks. He picked it up and held it out.

“We’ve struck it rich.”

Lisa turned it over. “Is that gold?”

“Pyrites.”

Suddenly there was a huge crack, as if the sky had been broken open like an egg. Involuntarily they both ducked, putting their hands up to shield themselves. The crack became a long rolling roar and a fighter jet screamed overhead, just a few hundred feet above the desert floor. Within seconds it was just a dot, heading away over the mountains.

Lisa exhaled. “It felt like he was aiming for our heads. Are they even allowed to do that?”

“They can do what they like.”

“I bet Raj hated it.”

“He’s not making any noise.”

As they walked back to check on him, Jaz saw something wasn’t right. The stroller’s red hood was pushed back. The harness was undone.

“He can’t have gone far.” He said the words instinctively. Magical thinking, making it true. Lisa was already shouting for him. “Raj? Raj!” He joined in. “Raj? Raju? Where are you?”

Hoping to get a better view, Jaz climbed a little way up the big rock and shielded his eyes, trying to spot movement among the bushes. Lisa was heading to the far side of the rocks, cupping her hands to her mouth as she called out Raj’s name.

The emptiness was vast, inhuman.

“Jaz, over here!” He responded preconsciously to the tone of Lisa’s voice, scrambling down to the ground, running toward the sound. He found her on her hands and knees, peering into a crack in the earth, a kind of hollow that led down under the rock.

“Is he in there?”

“I’m not sure. Raj? Raj?”

Jaz got down onto his belly and wormed partway into the hole to peer into the blackness. All he could see was a broken bottle and a tangle of rusty fencing wire. The hole seemed to be choked with loose stones and brush.

“We need a light.”

“I don’t have anything.”

“There must be one in the car. A flashlight. Isn’t there an emergency kit or something?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Well, go check!”

“It’s a half-hour back down the trail.”

“Raju! Raj! Damn, I can’t see a thing.”

“Raj! Come to Mommy.”

Jaz tried to crawl farther into the hole. There was nothing to be seen, just rocks and beer cans and a bad smell, as if some animal had made it a lair. A coyote? Too late, he thought about snakes and came scrambling back to the surface, breathing heavily.

“I don’t think he’s down there. It doesn’t go very far. It’s full of rubble.”

Lisa stood up and ran a few paces, shouting Raj’s name. Then she turned and ran in the opposite direction. Jaz couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses. A sick feeling descended over him like a shroud. Something had happened, something that wasn’t going to come right.

They walked and shouted and walked and shouted, turning wider and wider circles around the rocks until their voices were hoarse in their parched throats and their clothes were coated in fine white dust. Even as his head spun and sweat soaked his back, Jaz felt as if an IV were pumping cold gel through his veins. The world was far away; he was trapped somewhere else, somewhere dead and bone-white, outside time and space. He thought perhaps he should look for prints, the ridged soles of a child’s sneakers, but any trace had been obliterated by his own tracks, crossing and recrossing the same ground.

His hands quivered and the skin under his eyes burned and above him a whirlwind came out of the north, a great yellow cloud with a fire infolding itself from the heart of it. Inside, hidden from view, were the airships, shadowing him as always, and inside them the cloven-footed airmen, their bodies sparkling like burnished brass. He turned his face upward, in case there should be a message or a hand tugging at a lock of his hair and lifting him up to Heaven, but there was no message and no hand, just a pull from behind as one of the mules in the train briefly lost its footing on the narrow path. He turned in the saddle to watch it right itself under its load of charcoal. The lead mule, the one he trusted with the fragile alembic and the flasks, fixed him with a yellow eye. He spat its curse right back in its long face and kicked his heels into the flanks of his nameless horse. Reluctantly, the spavined beast walked on. At length the cloud of light receded, and he was alone in the desert again, his skin prickling with little stars, the tips of his fingers throbbing as if held in scalding steam. Cry and moan, he muttered to himself. Cry and moan, Nephi Parr, for your God is a devouring fire.

Below him, the salt flat’s blinding white had softened to amber. The Panamints were scored by deep shadows, the flanks of the distant range the color of ripe peaches. It was, he thought, a lying color. There was no sweetness out there; the nearest water in that direction was thirty miles away. The fine white dust coated his clothes and skin, silting his eyebrows and the wiry hair on his arms. The whole plain had once been ocean and this was the origin of the great spectral sailing ships that plowed over it, lost souls eternally on the flood. Ghosted by the dust, he’d crossed before first light and started slipping and climbing over talus, and by the
time the sun was overhead he’d made it up onto ancient dry land and was following the trail toward the notch of the pass as the metals in the rocks sang to him in their high glittering voices.

Another hour and the sun would dip. By God’s grace he’d reach the Lost Promise before dark. Not that the night held any terrors for him, teem though it did with every form of creeping thing, for he was the moon’s representative in that still country, ambassador of change and transformation. The day he first rode into it, following Porter Rockwell the Danite, Christ’s blood had streamed in carmine ribbons across the sky and the sun had hammered inside his skull, and there had been great wrath and majesty and many deceptions of mind and eye. He’d been a young man, one of nine, covenanted to pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the murder of their Prophet upon the Nation, all sworn that they would teach the same to their children and their children’s children unto the third and fourth generation. They had ridden down out of the Sierras like a terrible swift sword, their hearts filled with love.

He took a swig of warm water from his canteen, as a figure appeared on the ridge and raised its hand. It wasn’t long before he could see the shacks and the pile of tailings by the mouth of the mine. The older of the two German brothers took the horse’s bridle and asked him in his halting English if he was well. He nodded and started to unload his gear, carefully lifting the iron flasks of quicksilver and stacking them in rows. The younger brother was working the arrastra, whipping four bony mules as they dragged the heavy grindstones over the crushed ore in the circular bed. He peered at the blue-black grit. It was the consistency of fine sand. They must have been walking the circuit several days to grind it down so far.

“You add water today?”

The young German shook his head.

“You ought to. It’s dry.”

Over in the shade of the mine car was a third man, squatting on his haunches beside the rails, chipping at a lump of ore with a hammer.

“What’s the Chinaman doing here?”

The German shrugged. “Working.”

“Damn yellow ape.”

He did not give way to anger, though for a moment there came a noise of wings, like the noise of great waters. The Chinaman paused in his task and peered at him from under his wide straw hat.

“Don’t you dare look at me.”

The Chinaman turned away and took up his hammer again. Least it wasn’t a nigger. Parr was very clear on niggers. The Lord God had caused a cursing to come upon the Lamanites, a sore cursing because of their iniquity. They had hardened their hearts against Him and He had caused that they should be loathsome unto His people’s eyes. He’d used up more than one of the devils during the war between the States and it was on account of such a killing that he’d lost his wives and been cast out to wander in the desert. That one had been got up as a preacher no less, a light-skinned buck who’d taken a high-and-mighty tone as he proffered his coin at the ferry crossing. If there was one kind of coon Parr hated harder than all the others, it was a yellow. Boy, he’d said to that monkey of a preacher, shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the Negro Race? If a white man mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty is death on the spot. The nigger said he never heard of such a law. He shot him in the face.