Murder of Angels (28 page)

Almost all the way to the end of Highway 24 before Daria would let Alex stop somewhere, and every time the speedometer dropped below seventy-five or eighty she’d start drumming her fingers on the dashboard and looking nervously over her shoulder, out the rear windshield, at the night-shrouded road stretched out behind them. She talked and chewed aspirin and Tums while he drove, telling him all the things she’d sworn she’d never talk about with anyone, not friends or shrinks or even Niki. The secrets she’s carried since Birmingham, what she saw in Spyder Baxter’s house when she went in after Niki, all those years ago. And Alex listened, and drove, and didn’t say a word.

Finally, a mile or so outside Limon, a mile or so left until 24 merges with I-70 West to Kansas, they pass a billboard—
GAS-FIREWORKS-CIGARETTES-GEOLOGICAL MUSEUM-GAS
—and Daria doesn’t argue when Alex says that they’re stopping. The tank is almost on empty anyway, the needle sitting on the red E for the last thirty miles or so, and it’s a wonder they haven’t wound up stranded somewhere.

“I need a drink,” she says, as the Saturn bumps across the rutted, unpaved parking lot towards the pumps, raising dust and throwing gravel.

“Sure, fine by me,” Alex replies, pulling up next to the self-serve regular, and he cuts the engine.

“I’m not going to get drunk. I just need a drink. Just a beer would do.”

“Just a beer sounds bloody brilliant,” he says and kisses her on the forehead before getting out to pump the gas. She sits in the car a moment, staring at the shabby, whitewashed front of the gas station lit by halogen lights so bright they hurt her eyes after the long darkness of the highway. There are Halloween decorations and a large plywood sign propped near the door, an amethyst geode painted on it, purple and white and brown—
WONDERS OF CREATION
—and she silently prays to whatever gods might be listening that this isn’t a dry county. The smell of gas is filling up the car, because Alex left his door standing open, the acrid, sour-sweet smell to make her stomach even worse, so she gets out and shuts her door.

“Go on ahead,” he says. “I’ll be in as soon as I’m done here.”

“I can wait. I’m not sure I’m up to seeing people.”

“You’re fine. There’s no sense you standing out here in the cold. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die?” and she smiles and wipes her runny nose.

“Whatever you say, love.”

“I say what time is it?”

Alex glances from the digital display on the pump to his wristwatch. “Coming up on nine thirty,” he says, and that’s not nearly so late as she’d thought.

“You really ought to get something to eat, too,” he tells her, and Daria looks back at the grimy windows half hidden beneath cigarette and beer ads and paper jack-o’-lanterns.

“There wouldn’t be beer ads if this was a dry county,” she says.

“No, there wouldn’t,” Alex agrees. “Now either get your ass inside or get back in the car before you freeze to death.”

“Yeah,” she says, and heads for the front door, buttoning her pink and gray cardigan sweater and imagining how good a beer will taste. Any beer at all. At this point, a fucking PBR or Budweiser would be heaven, ambrosia sent down from Olympus to soothe her nerves and stomach, to take a little of the sting off the last few hours—the escape from the hospital in Colorado Springs, then almost getting her ass run over by a fucking semi because she was having a conversation with a monster, all the crazy, secret shit she’s told Alex. Niki’s suicide.
All
of it.

The door jingles loudly when she opens it, a cowbell rigged up just above her head, and the old man behind the counter, old man with long white hair and a beard to match, looks up from the biker magazine he’s reading and nods at her. Kris Kringle on vacation from the North Pole and slumming as some desert-rat hippie, this old man.

“Good evening,” he says in a voice as smooth as melted butter, but he doesn’t smile.

“Hi,” Daria replies and wipes her nose again. “Do you sell beer?”

“Yes, ma’am, we certainly do, just as long as you’re old enough to buy it and can show me some ID,” and he winks at her.

“Better watch yourself,” she says and winks back, wishing that Alex would hurry up, because she isn’t in the mood to be charming. “You really got a museum in here?” she asks.

“Now, I’ll admit that sign exaggerates just a mite. But we do got a few things most folks don’t see every day. You want a peek?”

Daria shrugs and glances through the grimy glass door, trying to see if Alex is finished with the gas, but there’s a faded ad for Winston Lights in the way.

“I really just came in for the beer,” she says.

“Ah, come on. It’ll only take you a minute. Two minutes at the most. It ain’t the goddamn Smithsonian Institution, but I got a couple of curiosities that’ll make you look twice.”

“I went to the Smithsonian once. But that was a long time ago.”

“Well now, that makes one of us,” the old man says, scratching at his beard as he steps out from behind the counter. “Back here,” he says, “past the porno. You can grab your beer after we’re done.”

Daria glances longingly at the door again, but there’s still no sign of Alex, just a glimpse of the Saturn around the edges of the Winston ad, and maybe whatever the old man has to show her will at least take her mind off everything for a few minutes. So she follows him deeper into the store, past a big display of
Hustler
and
Penthouse, Playboy
and at least a hundred other titty magazines.

“That stuff don’t offend you, does it?” he asks and jabs a thumb at the magazine rack.

“Oh no,” Daria says. “Not at all.”

“You’re a dyke, aren’t you, girl?” he whispers and grins at her, showing off a dingy set of loose-fitting uppers. And before she’s even quite sure that he actually said what’s she just heard him say, the old man nods and shrugs his wide shoulders.

“Hey, it ain’t no big whoop. My own goddamn granddaughter’s a lesbo, and who the hell am I to start passing judgment? Way I see it, ain’t none of it nobody’s goddamn business if women don’t want nothing to do with dick.”

“Do you always talk to customers like this?” Daria asks, and he shakes his head.

“Not all of them. Just the ones look like they ain’t got a mop handle shoved up their butts.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Well, I suppose you can take it however you want, miss. Ain’t no skin off my snout,” and he pushes open a brown door with a hand-painted sign that reads
MUSEUM THIS WAY
nailed to it. And then Daria sees the plaque hung above the door, an oblong disk of varnished pine and there’s a jackalope head mounted on the plaque, glass-blind eyes and tall jackrabbit ears and a small set of antlers—the tiredest joke in the West—and she stops and stares at it.

“Ain’t you never seen a jackalope?” the man asks, and Daria nods her head very slowly.

“Sure,” she says. “Sure I’ve seen jackalopes.”

“Well, that’s not just any old jackalope, mind you. That there’s Senior El Camino, the holy guardian jackalope of Big Sandy Creek. He does me a favor, watching over the place.”

“You’re a very strange man,” Daria says, and he winks again and disappears through the brown door. She stands staring at the taxidermied hybrid a moment or two longer, remembering the dream that might not have been a dream at all. Niki on the plane, and a few strands of blue fur, a single white feather caught in the stewardess’ hair.

You have to remember this. You have to remember because I can’t get back there myself.

There’s never enough time to do things the right way.

“So, when’s it finally gonna start to sink in, that she’s really gone?” Daria asks the jackalope’s severed head, or she’s only asking herself, or maybe she’s asking no one at all. Maybe she only needs to
hear
the question. If Senior El Camino has an opinion, he keeps it to himself, and she steps through the doorway into a small, dimly lit room that smells like cobwebs and neglect.

“My youngest son, Joe, he started this thing, couple’a years before he moved out to Kansas to open his own place,” the old man is saying, standing in front of a sturdy, homemade display case, and he wipes some of the dust off the glass with a red paisley handkerchief from his back pocket. “He went up to Denver when he was still in high school, to that natural history museum they got up there, and I guess it kinda, you know, inspired him.”

Inside the case is a fossilized jawbone, almost as long as Daria’s arm, studded with curved, two-inch teeth, gray bone and chocolate-black enamel, and she leans closer for a better look. The jawbone is laid out on green felt and surrounded by an assortment of fossil oysters and shark’s teeth and tightly coiled ammonites. Some of the ammonites glint dully, despite the dust and dim lights, still wearing an iridescent covering of mother-of-pearl. There’s a hand-lettered piece of cardboard near the jawbone, and she squints to read what’s written there:
PLATECARPUS
,
A MOSASAUR FROM THE CHALK SEA
, 70
MILLION YEARS OLD, GOVE COUNTY, KANSAS
.

“He’s especially proud of that one there,” the old man says, pointing at the case. “Dug it up and cleaned it off himself, showed it to some scientists in Denver, and they wanted it for their museum, but he told ’em no siree, no way. He found it, he was gonna keep it.”

“What’s a mosasaur?”

“That depends who you want to listen to, I guess. You ever read the Bible?” he asks, and she shakes her head no. “Well, see, it talks a good bit about this big ol’ sea monster called Leviathan—‘Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are
terrible
round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.’ That’s from the Book of Job.”

“You don’t exactly seem like the sort who quotes scripture,” Daria says.

“Ain’t you never heard that looks can be deceiving?”

“Never judge a book by its cover,” she adds.

“Right you are, missy. Anyway, some damn Baptist preacher wrote all that down for me after I showed him this fossil. He said it was the remains of Leviathan. My son, on the other hand, says that Leviathan’s just an old Hebrew name for crocodiles, and this mosasaur ain’t no crocodile at all, but just a sorta big lizard.”

“A
very
big lizard,” Daria says. “So what do
you
think?”

“Well, now, I think it’s a fine thing to find just laying there in the ground, either way you look at it. My son, Joe, says that way back when there was still dinosaurs alive, millions and millions of years ago, all these parts round here were at the bottom of the sea. That’s where the mosasaurs lived, I reckon. And those shells, too,” and he taps at the glass case. “That is, unless you listen to Baptist preachers, in which case it’s all just junk from Noah’s Flood. You want to see the rest?”

“There’s more?”

“You bet there’s more. I got a two-headed gopher snake and a quartz crystal big around as my fist. I got Indian arrowheads and a live Gila monster.”

And then Daria sees something else in the case, just a small, rusty metal sphere lying between the mosasaur jaw and an especially large oyster shell, but suddenly there are goose bumps beneath the sleeves of her sweater and a pricking sensation along the back of her neck.

“What’s that?” she asks, and the man stoops down for a closer look.

You know what it is. You know
exactly
what it is and never mind how it got here, you know it anyway.

“Oh,
that,
” the old man says and taps on the glass again. “Why, that’s just a musket ball Joe found when he was picking up sharks’ teeth by the side of the road. That ain’t nothin’, but I figured I might as well put it in there with the rest.”

“Can I see it? Will you take it out and let me see it, please?”

“Wait a second now. That’s not usually the way I do things, letting customers handle the exhibits, I mean.”

“Please,” Daria says again, and the old man frowns and rubs at his coarse gray-white beard.

“You make one exception,” he mumbles, “you end up havin’ to make exceptions for everyone and his sister.”

“Please, I won’t tell
anybody
.”

“But it’s just an old musket ball, probably someone out shootin’ at deer or buffalo or—”

“All I want to do is see it.”

He stares at her and rubs his beard indecisively, his eyebrows arched and furrowed like two albino caterpillars. Daria’s afraid to look away from the rusted ball, afraid it might vanish, afraid it’s just what he says, only dread and wishful thinking making it anything more.
Which is worse?
she wonders.
Which could possibly be worse?
and now the old man has stopped staring at her and is busy looking through dozens of mismatched keys attached to a big brass ring.

“It ain’t nothin’ but a damned old musket ball,” he grumbles, and Daria nods her head.

“I know,” she says. “I know it’s just an old musket ball, but I need to see it, anyway.”

“Well, I can tell you right now, the two-headed gopher snake’s a hell of a lot more interestin’.”

“I’m sure it is,” she replies, and the old man’s at the back of the case now, one of his keys to make tumblers roll and the hasp of a padlock pops open. “I’ll see it later. I’ll see it next time.”

“Who you tryin’ to kid? You ain’t never gonna be coming back this way, missy. Hell, I been wondering what you’re doing way out here in the first place, smelling like money and some big city by the sea.”

“I was looking for something,” Daria says, as the old man reaches past the dagger teeth of the mosasaur, and now she knows that’s the
real
guardian, not Senior El Camino, but the jaws of this Leviathan.

“
Everybody’s
out there looking for
something
. Sometimes, I think that’s the only thing keeps the world spinnin’ on her axis, all the goddamn people out there
looking
for something.” He lifts the rusted metal ball from the red felt and holds it cradled in his palm for a moment.