Gods Without Men (29 page)

“Do you mind?”

“You go right ahead.”

Reluctantly he turned his scrawny buttocks towards the sheriff, who lit a cigarette.

“Tell me, son, you in a gang?”

“No, a band. Musician.”

“You one of them white rappers?”

“No.”

“I see. You probably feel happier now you got your pants on. Less nervous, I expect.”

Another cop came over and said something to the sheriff, who stepped outside, holding up a hand in Nicky’s direction as if to freeze him in place.

The sheriff stepped back in. “Now, son, looks like I got to be elsewhere, but if you’d be so kind as to give your particulars to the deputy here, no doubt I’ll see you later. I’d much appreciate it if you didn’t go anywhere until I say so. You may be able to help us out.”

Without waiting for an answer, he strode off. The deputy, a young Hispanic woman with a braid and the same reflective sunglasses as her boss, took out her notebook.

“Mind showing me some ID, sir?”

He found his wallet on top of the TV. She peered at his driver’s license and handed it back, a quizzical smile on her face.

“Should I know you? You look kind of familiar.”

A helicopter swept overhead, the roar of its rotors filling in for his response.

Twenty minutes and an autograph later, he was on his own again. He flushed the peyote down the toilet, drew the curtains, put the chain on the door and sat against the foot of the bed, smoking and watching a local news channel’s eye-in-the-sky feed of the desert. A scatter of parked cars. A straggly line of deputies sweeping the area.

The situation was fucked up.

He watched TV until the sun went down and he felt safe enough to walk out behind the motel and look for a place to drop the gun. A big fuck-off gold pistol. It would have to be the flashiest cunt of a gun in the
whole world. He knew he ought to drive somewhere farther off, but was scared he’d get pulled over. He stood out in the open for a long time, feeling the last of the heat radiating out of the sand and listening to the distant sound of rotors. Some miles away, a helicopter was directing a floodlight at the ground. He watched it hover, a matchstick of light.

In the end he just walked back to the room and switched on the TV. All evening there were comings and goings outside. Voices, car engines, the crackle of police radios. He could still remember, very distinctly, the pressure of the little boy’s hand gripping his.

He was woken early the next morning by a loud rap on the door. He struggled into his jeans and squinted through the spyhole. It wasn’t a cop. Some guy in a suit and tie. The guy kept knocking for a while, then gave up. Nicky took a shower, dressed and checked the spyhole. No one there. When he stepped outside he saw Suit and Tie just down the block. Behind him stood another guy with a video camera.

He shut the door quietly and walked off as quickly as he could without breaking into a run, skirting the pool so as not to draw their attention. Suddenly the office door clattered open and the manager came running out of the office.

“Get off my property. Go on. Right now. You’re trespassing. You’re not guests of the motel and you didn’t sign in, so get the hell out of here.”

“Ma’am,” said Suit and Tie, “we’re just trying to do our job. We’d be happy to get your point of view also.”

Dawn told them to leave her customers alone and Suit and Tie said something about the First Amendment and Nicky tiptoed round the corner to find that the whole front lot was full of cars. There were police vehicles and outside-broadcast vans and station wagons full of local teens hoping to see some action. Cops were drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. News presenters were climbing on boxes to get the motel sign in frame. There was a peculiar carnival atmosphere.

He heard his name being called and turned to find a boy ambling towards him. Seventeen, maybe. White-framed dark glasses and directional hair.

“Nicky Capaldi? I blog at
Sounds West
. What are you doing here?”

“I’m trying to get some breakfast.”

“Are you something to do with the missing kid? I mean, like a relative or something?”

“What are you on about? Shit, my car’s boxed in.”

“Well, it seems like too much of a coincidence that you’re here, like, with this kidnapping going on? I mean, are you here to do a televised appeal?”

“What have you heard?”

“Just that there’s this kid and he’s missing?”

In his peripheral vision, Nicky saw Deputy Sheriff Loosemore. Apparently the blogger was even more unnerved than he was; he immediately made himself scarce. The sheriff leaned against the nearest Crown Victoria and looked him up and down. A few teenagers sidled closer, taking pictures of them talking.

“Deputy Alvarez said you were famous.”

“Any news on the kid?”

“None. We got every available man out looking, so any leads would be appreciated. You met the boy. I’m sure you understand.”

He gestured towards his car, like a salesman. Nicky got in and tried to look nonchalant for the kids sticking their phones up to the passenger window.

“Looks like you’re a regular pied piper to the young folk,” said Loosemore, dropping the sentence onto Nicky’s lap like a rattlesnake. They drove in silence to the station, where in a small act of mercy Nicky was given a coffee and a rubbery Danish which gave him a momentary sugar rush he mistook for optimism. In an interview room, with a tape recorder running, he told the story. The kid running into his room, the trip to Burger King, the chitchat with Jaz. So why had he got up so late? Where had he been during the day? He told the sheriff about the kids at the thrift store, the argument with the waitress at the diner. The interrogation went on and on. In a break, he said he needed to go to the loo, locked himself in a cubicle and phoned Terry.

“Where the hell are you, Nicky?”

“Come and get me.”

“Where are you?”

“Just fucking come, right now.”

“Nicky, listen to me. Are you OK?”

“No. I’m in a cop shop. You’ve got to come and get me.”

“Have they arrested you? Did you get arrested? It says on the Internet you kidnapped a kid.”

“It says I did what?”

“You didn’t do it, right?”

“Who says? Who says I did?”

“Nicky, you need to get yourself together.”

“How did this even happen to me? Right now, Terry. Come. I mean it.”

The Indian was up on the rocks. He must have watched them riding across the salt flat and decided to make a stand. When the posse men started to climb, he fired a couple of rounds, sending them squirming on their bellies for cover. They came back down, cursing. He couldn’t last forever. Food, ammunition or water: One of them would run short. Then it’d just be a question of who’d go up and get him. Until then, they’d have to sit and wait him out.

Deighton looked up at the sky. Though it wasn’t yet nine in the morning, the light was fierce. It fell on his head like a curse, a reminder of the guilt he bore. Without him and the lie he told, there would be no manhunt. He knew he ought to put a stop to it, to tell them he’d made a mistake, suffered a hallucination—whatever it would take. But they weren’t going to listen. The professor, the Boston Brahmin. Out here he was the lowest of the low, the lowest a white man could be.

He knew the place. That was what scared him most. Not by sight. From the last story Eliza had transcribed.
You must travel to the Three-Finger Rocks and look inside the cave beneath them. There you will find Yucca Woman, weaving a basket
. It was where the old Spanish friar had gone, during his missing days.
She is weaving together this world and the Land of the Dead
. It was the secret place, the womb of the mystery.

Death was in the sky, in the bone light hurting his eyes. Death was coursing through the sand under his feet.

He could taste it in his mouth.

He wasn’t even sure what he’d seen. But if he’d invented it, if it was some fragment of his unconscious mind, he should have been
able to explain. A perception in the absence of a stimulus. A trick of his war-disordered brain.

It had begun in the Indian camp at Kairo, when he drove out to check Eliza’s work. She was sullen, as she usually was when he drew attention to her habitual sloppiness. He’d taught her his method of notation, and in the field she’d learned the value of rigor when checking grammar and pronunciation, yet she persisted in making elementary mistakes. He had every right to speak sharply. If there were to be any record of the desert Indian culture, it would have to be made now. The Indians were dying out. They were already impure, both culturally and in terms of blood. Take the informant, this Willie Prince. He admitted to a white grandparent. He’d grown up at least partly in a civilized context and had huge gaps in his tribal knowledge. And he was one of the more useful ones. There were at least two people in the camp who appeared to have some level of Negroid admixture. They were all far from pristine.

Unexpectedly, Eliza started to cry. He told her not to behave like a child. She’d known what marriage would entail. It wasn’t as if he’d sugarcoated the thing. He’d made clear when he proposed that if she didn’t feel she was cut out for the work, she should go back to New York and find herself some schoolteacher. She’d sworn she loved him. Still, she was a woman, and he had the impression she expected to be coddled. When he first left her out at Kairo, she’d utterly failed to see the logic. The two of them could gather twice as much material if they worked separately. Of course there was a certain amount of discomfort involved, but her objections were grounded in selfishness.

Checking her work took time, and he stayed at the camp longer than he intended. He had business in town, letters to write and send to Washington, and now it was too dark to drive across the desert. He told Eliza to find a spot by a fire and went to the car to fetch his bedroll. The cold was bitter. A fierce wind was blowing across the basin, the kind that cut through clothing and made its way deep into the bones. His hands already felt cramped, and he had no expectation of sleep.

When he came back, he was surprised to find that Eliza hadn’t waited for him. It took a few moments to spot her, just one shape among the dozen or so huddled inside the largest wickiup. He shook her and asked what she thought she was playing at. She told him flatly to go away. The figure lying next to her propped itself up on an elbow. It was Willie Prince. Deighton was taken aback by the frankness of the man’s stare. Indians usually avoided one’s gaze. This buck looked impassively out of his broad flat face, entirely unafraid of being caught lying next to a white man’s wife.

Deighton’s first instinct was to strike them both, but he mastered it. He was not about to have an argument in front of a research subject.

“Come outside, right now.”

Reluctantly Eliza got up, but not before a look passed between her and Prince that was unmistakable in its import. Deighton felt physically sick. Eliza was a half-educated girl. He’d worked hard on her, made her fit to assist him in his labor. He’d shown her every consideration. He expected if not gratitude, then at least a recognition of the distinction he’d conferred on her by asking her to be his wife.

They stood opposite each other, shivering in the cold.

“What in heaven’s name is going on?”

She shrugged. “Something’s happened.”

“Your vagueness is always infuriating. Now tell me precisely and clearly. I don’t want to hang about all night.”

“I can’t be your wife anymore.”

It was unthinkable. He couldn’t in good conscience call the man a savage, for he had too much respect for the People’s culture.
Primitive
would be the term, a consciousness whose horizons were limited in unimaginable ways. He had always considered himself tolerant, but now that he was forced to contemplate miscegenation as a real physical act, a wave of disgust rose up in his throat. She might be (what had his mother written in that foul letter?) a “little shopgirl,” but she was still a white woman.

While he struggled for a response, she told him she was going back to bed. They would talk properly in the morning. He rubbed the smooth scar tissue on his chin, unable to marshal his thoughts.

He commandeered Segunda’s ramada, spreading out his blankets as close as possible to the dying fire. Whether it was an effect of stress, or his general poor constitution, he felt a sudden need to evacuate his bowels and walked out into the desert to find a spot. Before he squatted, he looked warily around. As expected, several of the camp dogs had followed him and were sniffing about, waiting to eat the fresh excrement. He’d never been particularly bothered by the squalor of Indian settlements, but this he always found supremely disgusting. There was one animal in particular, a big black mastiff that sometimes tried to knock him out of the way even before he’d finished. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to be among the pack, and he threw a couple of stones at the others, which trotted out of range and loitered, waiting their chance.

He exhaled, trying to relax his sphincter. There was just enough light to see the little plume of his breath before the wind snatched it away. He’d been squatting a few minutes when he caught sight of something moving out in the desert. It gave off a faint greenish-white glow, and he indulged the momentary fantasy that he was on an ancient seabed, fathoms deep, watching some eerie bioluminescent fish. He stared, unable to decide what it was. Curiosity aroused, he buttoned himself up and set off to find out.

He walked into the teeth of the wind, shivering and wrapping his arms ineffectually over his chest. When he got closer he was amazed to be confronted by an Indian walking along hand in hand with a white child, a boy about five years of age. Neither seemed to be carrying any luggage, and though both were dressed in light clothes they didn’t look as if they were feeling the cold. They weren’t making for the camp. There was no settlement in the direction in which they were heading, nothing but barren desert for at least a hundred miles. Strangest of all, the child appeared to be the source of the glow.

The pair paid no attention to him. They didn’t even seem to register his existence. Hypnotized, he followed in their wake. Afterward he wouldn’t be able to say why he didn’t try to speak to them. Something prevented him. Not fear or shyness exactly. The feeling that he would be intruding. He trailed behind, trying to match their easy stride across the flat moonlit sand. He was walking quickly, fast enough to feel sharp
stabs of pain in his chest, but he never seemed to gain on them. There was only one credible explanation: He was dreaming. The glowing boy and the Indian were just fragments, shrapnel thrown out by his restless brain. He slackened his pace, and the strange couple disappeared into the darkness.