Last Summer at Mars Hill (17 page)

I started to snap that I was Mrs. Nobody when the woman went on, “This is Sue Brownen. You called me today, n’ I, I—”

I sat bolt upright, the clock in my hand. I
had
only been asleep for a few minutes. “Yes!” I said, a little breathlessly. I knocked aside a water glass, looking for my tape recorder, a notebook, anything. “Sue, of course, right. What’s going on?”

“George—my husband, George—well, he called me tonight.” In the background I could hear a child crying, another woman’s comforting voice. “He says I don’t meet him at Jojo’s he’s coming after me.”

She stopped, her voice thick. I found a pen, scribbled
Jojo’s
on the back of my hand. “You’ve called the police, right?” I was on my feet now, grabbing my jeans and crumpled T-shirt from the chair where I’d slung them. “And you’re not alone, you’re not at home, are you? You’re not someplace he can find you?”

“No’m, I’m at—” The voice in the background suddenly rang out shrilly, and Sue Brownen choked, “I’m somewhere safe. But I just thought—well, I been thinking about it, I thought maybe you could write this up, you said maybe you could pay me—”

I got an address, a post office box in Pauls Valley. She wouldn’t tell me where she was now, but I made her promise to call me early in the morning, before I checked out. When I hung up I was already dressed.

It was crazy, getting all hyped up over some routine wife-beating case, but I needed some damn angle for that story. It was after eleven. I had no idea what time the bars closed here, but I figured on a weeknight I was probably pushing the limit at midnight. Outside I paused at Lyman’s door. His room was dark, the shades still drawn. I thought of waking him up, but then Lyman hated going on any kind of location shoot where he might run into trouble. Although the odds were I’d end up cruising some dead bar with nothing to show for it but an interrupted night’s sleep. I stopped at the motel desk, got directions to Jojo’s, and left.

Returning from the Lauren Ranch we’d passed several small buildings at the edge of town. One right next to the other, each long and narrow beneath its corrugated tin roof. Names were painted on their fronts—
BLACK CAT, ACAPULCO, JOJOS
—but only the last was open. A number of pickups were parked in front, more of a clientele than I thought the tiny place could hold. When I drove past I saw men gathered before the crooked screened entry Not the sort of men I’d want to tangle with alone; not the sort of place most women would go into, with or without an escort. I turned the car around in front of a boarded-up Sinclair station and made another pass, this time pulling into the lot of the shuttered roadhouse next door. I parked in front of the crude drawing of a black cat, shut off the motor, and waited.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic in and out of Jojo’s. The small group remained in front of the door, maybe because there wasn’t room inside; but after about ten minutes two uniformed men came out. The rest of the little crowd parted, shuffling and adjusting their gimme caps as they passed, calling out greetings and laughing. The two cops crossed the crowded lot to another pickup, this one silvery blue and with a light on top, and leaned against it for a few more minutes, laughing and smoking cigarettes. Finally they slung their booted feet into the truck and drove off, the men by the door raising chins or hands in muted farewell.

So that was the local justice department. I sat in the car another five minutes, barely resisting the urge to lock myself in. I lived on the Lower East Side, I saw worse than this buying the
New York Times
every morning; but still my heart was pounding.
Stupid, Janet, stupid,
I kept thinking; I should have brought Lyman. But at last I got out and walked over to Jojo’s.

No one said a word as I passed. One guy tipped the bill of his cap, and that was it. Inside was dim, lit by red bulbs the color of whorish lipstick. Smoke curled above the floor and a sound system blared a song I hated. It was crowded; I saw two women in booths toward the back, but their appearance didn’t reassure me any. Behind the painted plywood bar a tall dark-skinned man yanked beers from a styrofoam cooler and slid them to his customers. The men moved aside as I approached, watching me coldly.

“I’m looking for George Brownen,” I said. I pushed a ten dollar bill across the sticky counter. “He been here yet?”

The man looked suspiciously at the bill, finally set a Miller bottle atop it and pulled it toward him. “He’s gone,” he said shortly. He kept his eye on the bill but still didn’t touch it.

“How long ago?”

The bartender turned pointedly to serve another customer. I waited, trying not to lose my temper or my nerve. Still he ignored me, finally crouching to attend to some business behind the plywood counter. A few more minutes passed.

“Sheriff lookin’ for him, too,” a voice announced beside me. I looked up to see a weathered man in a faded Harley T-shirt. He lit a cigarette, holding the pack out to me and then sticking it back in his pocket. He raised his chin to indicate the bartender. “He ain’t gonna tell you nothin’.”

Another man poked his head over the first’s, staring at me appraisingly. “Brownen just left with another gal, young lady. But maybe I can help you.”

I smiled tightly, shaking my head, and looked back for the bartender.

“Yessir, he sure did. ’Nother yankee,” the first man was saying. “Hey Jo, you bringin’ in tourists these days?”

Scattered laughter. The bartender stood and looked at me with dangerous red eyes. I nodded once, turned, and fled.

The crowd at the door let me pass again, though this time their voices followed me as I walked back to my car. I did my best not to run, once inside I hit the autolock and sat for a moment trying to compose myself. After a minute or two the faces in front of the roadhouse had all turned away.

Still, I didn’t want to sit there, and I sure didn’t want anyone to follow me. When I started the car I drove behind the Black Cat, hoping to find a way out; and that was where I saw them.

She had changed her clothes. Now she wore tight jeans and a red blouse, and cowboy boots—surprisingly worn-looking boots, even in the cracked circle of blue light from the single streetlamp I could see how old those boots were, a working man’s boots, not some rich urban lawyer’s. They were leaning against her RV, arms crossed in front of their chests, talking. Once she threw her head back and laughed, and the man looked at her, confused, before he laughed, too. He was tall and good-looking, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He glanced at my car as I drove by, but Irene Kirk didn’t even look up. I knew without a doubt in my mind that he was George Brownen.

Abandoned railroad tracks crisscrossed behind the roadhouses. Next to them stood a burned-out warehouse with the rusted logo
RED CHIEF
flapping from a pole. I shut the engine, killed the lights and sat, watching Kirk and Brownen, trying to imagine what they were saying. Was she doing some kind of research, pretending to be one of her hard-luck clients? Or did she just have a taste for rough trade? The thought made me grimace, and I slid down in my seat so there’d be no way they could see me.

Only a few more minutes passed before she slapped the front of her van and started for the door. Brownen waited, called something and pointed across the lot. I knew he was trying to get her to follow him to his truck. But Irene only laughed, slinging her slight frame up into the driver’s seat and leaning over to open the other door. Brownen waited another moment, until she turned on the headlights. Then he walked slowly to the RV and climbed inside. Very faintly I could hear barking, and then that was swallowed by the van’s engine and the crunch of flying gravel as the RV pulled away.

I followed them. I knew it was crazy but I felt reckless and pumped up after my visit to Jojo’s. Plus there was nothing to worry about, really; there was no way they could recognize me, cruising a safe distance behind them, and back inside my car I felt invulnerable. I don’t know what I was thinking—probably nothing more than some misplaced voyeurism, or maybe a hope that they might stop somewhere and I could see where Brownen lived.

A rusted double-wide trailer on the outskirts of this failing oil town…

That would be how I’d write it up; but they didn’t go to Brownen’s place. They headed north, toward the Interstate and the mountains, then turned onto a gravel road that ran parallel to the highway. I slowed until there was a good distance between us; it was easy to keep them in sight. There was no other traffic. After a few minutes we were in open country again.

They drove for a long time. I rolled down the window to catch the night wind, heavy with the smell of wild sage and the ubiquitous taint of petroleum. I didn’t turn on the radio, from some faint ridiculous fear that they might somehow hear it.

Overhead the moon was setting, bright as a streetlamp. The stars looked white and surprisingly solid, like salt spilled on a black table. As I drove the land slowly began to rise around me, gentle hills at first, hiding the rolling farmlands and the dull orange glow on the horizon that marked Ardmore to the south. The air streaming through the window was warm and sweet. I was composing my article in my head, thinking how Lyman had enough grisly photos that we wouldn’t need much text. Far ahead of me the RV’s taillights jounced and swam, twin meteors burning across the darkness.

I don’t know when I realized that we were back among the stones. On some unconscious level it must have registered—I’d been climbing steadily for a long time, the prairie somewhere in the soft darkness behind me. But suddenly I jerked upright, as though I had drifted asleep at the wheel.

I hadn’t: it was just that it was a shock, to look out the window and suddenly see them like that. In the moonlight they looked more like tombstones than ever. No, not tombstones, really, but something worse, infinitely more ancient and incomprehensible: barrows, menhirs, buried ossuaries. Lyman’s comment about dragon’s teeth didn’t seem so stupid now. I stared out the window at those meticulous rows of bleached sharp spines, and wondered if it was true, if those stones were as ancient as he’d said.

When I looked up again a moment later I thought I’d lost the RV In front of me the cracked road twisted until it disappeared in the blackness. The van’s lights were gone. I had a jolt of panic, then sighted it: it had turned off to the right and parked. It sat on a high ridge overlooking the lines of stones, its rounded bulk silhouetted against the moon on the edge of the world.

Absurdly, I still wanted to follow them. If they’d been watching at all they must have seen the car behind them; still, I cut my lights and pulled to the side of the road to park. I was in one of those tiny deep clefts poked into the strata of limestone and scrub. No one could see me, although they might notice that my car had abruptly disappeared. I waited a long time, striving to hear something above the soft hissing of the wind in thorny brush and the staccato cries of a nightjar.

I finally got out of the car. The air felt cooler here. Something scrabbled at my feet and I looked down to see a hairy spider, nearly big as my hand, crouch in a pocket of dust. I turned and began to walk quickly up the rise.

In a few minutes I could hear voices, surprisingly close. As I reached the top of the little hill I crouched down, until I was half walking, half crawling through loose scree and underbrush. When I reached the top I kept my head down, hidden behind a patch of thorns.

I was close enough that I could have thrown a stone and hit the side of the RV. Another sheer drop separated us, a sort of drywash gully. The ridge where they were parked was a little lower than where I crouched. Between us marched three rows of stones, sharp and even as a sawblade. I heard faint music—Irene must have put the radio on—and their voices, soft, rising now and then to laughter.

They were walking around the van. Irene kicked idly at stones. The wind carried the acrid smell of cigarette smoke from where Brownen followed her. I tried to hear what they were saying, caught Irene pronouncing something that sounded like “wife” and then Brownen’s laughter. I peered through the brush and saw that she was carrying something in one hand. At first I thought it was a whip, but then I saw it was a stick, something slender and pliable like a forsythia wand. When she slapped it against her thigh it made a whining sound.

That sound and the thought of a whip suddenly reminded me of the dogs. I swore under my breath, squatting back on my heels. And as though the same idea had come to her, Irene headed for the back of her van. She walked slowly, almost unthinkingly; but somehow I knew that this was calculated. She’d meant all along to let those dogs out. It was the reason she’d come here; and suddenly I was afraid.

For a moment she stood in front of the door, staring at where Brownen stood with his shoulders hunched, looking at his feet and smoking. Behind her the moon hung like a silver basket. The jagged hills with their lines of stones marched on, seemingly forever, the stones dead-white against the gray earth and somber sky. Still Irene Kirk waited and watched Brownen. She didn’t stand there hesitantly. It was more like she was thinking, trying to make up her mind about something. Then, with one sure motion she threw the door open.

I had thought the dogs would bound out, snarling or barking. Instead at first their heads and front paws appeared. There were two of them, sniffing and whining and clawing at the air. Big dogs, not as large as mastiffs but with that same clumsy bulk, their heads looking swollen compared to the rest of them. I heard Irene’s voice, soothing yet also commanding. Brownen looked up. There was no way for me to tell if he was afraid, but then he dragged on his cigarette and ground it out, shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and looked quickly from Irene to her animals.

The whining grew louder. The dogs still remained at the edge of the van, crouched like puppies afraid to make the little jump to the ground. And then I realized they
were
afraid. When Irene took a step toward them their whining grew louder and they fell over each other, trying to race back into the van; but then she raised that slender wand and called something. Her voice was clear and loud, but I had no idea what she said.