Stone Junction (52 page)

Debritto’s rigid body barely twitched when he tried to scream. This couldn’t be his mother. He had no memory of her. She’d died when he was five months old. That’s what his father had told him. Why should he doubt his father? He’d always told him the hard truth. No, it had to be the poisons – some sort of auditory hallucination.

‘You were
born
evil. Full of sickness and rot. Shame of my flesh. Shame of my heart. You know my voice from the womb. You have dreamed my dreams. I gave you life. I gave you life, and you defiled it. Now I’ve come to take it back.’

Tape Transcript (partial):

Interrogation of Elwood and Emmett Tindell, brothers (ID Access
LCR 86755)

File: OPERATION NEST EGG

Tonopah Emergency Field Office, Nevada

April 10, 1987

Present: Reg. Sup. Keyes; agents Stanley, Dickerson, Peebe

PEEBE: Okay fellas, I want you to tell it to Supervisor Keyes. He’s flown in after a hard day, so keep it short and to the point.

ELWOOD: We got the same deal still? No charges on us – nothing; half of any reward or business deals; you take brother Emmett to the hospital and get his nuts fixed up; we get us a new Camaro and two thousand bucks each? That what we talking?

EMMETT: El, you’re fucking hopeless. Don’t tell ’em shit.

ELWOOD: Don’t fret on me, Em; your big brother knows what he’s doing. We’re in the big time here. This is CIA, not your sheriffs and highway troopers. This is
national
law. They can deal. So, Mr Peebe, Mr Keyes, how about it?

KEYES: That sounds reasonable to me. However, since we’re overburdened with paperwork, would you take twenty thousand in cash to cover the car and the medical bills yourself? You still get half of any reward money, walk out of here clean.

ELWOOD: You got the money on you, I wouldn’t mind looking it over.

KEYES: Dickerson? Show him. You can count it later. You don’t walk till you pass the polygraph, though.

ELWOOD: The what?

KEYES: Lie detector. We pay for truth and punish bullshit.

ELWOOD: I got no problem with that. Brother Em, how about you?

EMMETT: Officers, he’s been using drugs something fierce ever since he was a baby. There’s lots of things he thinks are true that ain’t even close.

ELWOOD: Why are you being like this, Em? We got outer-space invaders running around and you don’t want to cash in. Your nuts still swoll and achy, that it? Getting whopped in the nuts always did get you strange. Remember when we were seven and that red-headed Simmons girl liked to kick your nuts up your throat for waving your pee-pee at her? Remember? You got real fretted and grumpy, and––

KEYES: I’m sure you both had charming childhoods, but I’m much more interested in what happened this morning on Highway Ninety-five.

ELWOOD: Well sure. Okay. Me and Emmett was driving along, heading up to Reno to see if we could get us some jobs, and––

PEEBE: [to Keyes] Car was stolen in Phoenix yesterday. We just put the make and numbers out on the us-only line, Phoenix west, but it was already on a general APB.

ELWOOD: Hard to look for work without a car.

KEYES: Forget the car. Never happened. Go on.

ELWOOD: So we’re driving along about an hour after sunup and we see this guy sitting alongside the road. Kinda got his head tucked down on his chest and his hands over his face. Looked like maybe he was feeling puny. So me and Em, we pull over, see if he’s all right. But this guy – said his name was Herman – he wasn’t even next door to right. We seen that straight off. One thing, he’s wearing fucking
bowling shoes
, I mean right out there in the sage-brush and all. Bowling shirt, too. Name of some construction company on the back – Rice Construction, Price, something like that. He’s packing his bowling ball with him, and he’s got this backpack and real nice briefcase, too. Weird. Like he don’t know if he’s a bowler, forest ranger, or banker. What’s weirder, he’s
crying
. Not ‘boo-hoo,’ you know, but his eyes are ’bout as red as granddaddy’s long johns and his cheeks are all wet and streaky. But what’s––

KEYES: What’d this guy look like? Age? Size? Eye color?

PEEBE: We got it in detail already; went out with the car description on our line. I can run it by you quick.

KEYES: Quick.

ELWOOD: Hold on, dammit. It’s just getting to the
really
weird
––

PEEBE: [to Keyes] Mid-twenties, six feet, hundred sixty to eighty pounds, blue eyes, brown hair, scar on right temple, dressed as described.

KEYES: White man?

PEEBE: Yes sir. Sorry.

EMMETT: He’s just jerking your chain. Ain’t too many blue-eyed spades or spics I ever saw.

ELWOOD: You guys want to hear the weird part, or what?

KEYES: Okay, let’s hear it. The guy was crying …

ELWOOD: So naturally I ask him what’s wrong. And he says, ‘I think I was remembering a dream my mother had when I was in her womb.’ You got that? Guy fucking thinks he’s remembering dreams from inside his mama? Me and Emmett weren’t much for school, but you don’t need no graduation papers to see this guy is bat-shit loony, maybe run off from a nuthouse or something. His eyes looked crazy, too, kinda glassy and far away, and he generally looked all grungy. So wasted, me and Em had to help him get in the backseat.

KEYES: How much help? I mean, did he voluntarily enter your vehicle?

ELWOOD: Pretty much, yeah. We said we’d take him on to Reno, wouldn’t even make him pay for no gas. Me and Em was being nice.

PEEBE: Spare us. No charges, right? Just what happened.

ELWOOD: So we’re driving along and talking with this guy – Brother Em’s at the wheel, me riding shotgun, this Herman weirdo in the back – just getting acquainted, you know, and I ask him what he’s got in his bags and briefcase, just out of being curious. And he says real matter-of-fact, real cool, that he’s got extra clothes and shit in the little backpack, a grill in the bowling bag, and in the briefcase he’s got about twenty thousand dollars, cash money. So––

EMMETT: El, you dumb shit, he said grail.
Grail
, not grill.

ELWOOD: Me and Em’s been arguing over this all afternoon, but
grill
– like for cooking up meat – is what I heard. Struck me as kinda odd, too, that he’d be packing around some little grill in a bowling bag,’ specially since it looked like it already had a bowling ball in it. So I asked him if we could see this grill. He said seeing the grill was something you had to earn. So I said how ’bout seeing the money, and son of a bitch if he don’t say ‘Sure’ and open it right up. I took a
good
eyeful – never seen so much in my life – and then I looked at Em, and Em was looking at me. Me and Em been poor ever since we got orphaned off when we was pups. We––

PEEBE: Get
to
it, Elwood – save the shit. Your rap sheets are longer than your dicks.

ELWOOD: Okay. Sure. So we pull off on a nice little turnout a ways up the road – one of them history monuments – and Em gets this Herman guy out of the car to check out the marker, take a leak. Guy takes the fucking bowling bag
with
him. Now the way we work it, Brother Em’s the holder and I’m the whopper. I use a sawed-off ax-handle,’ bout this long, top foot drilled out a quarter-inch wide and filled back up with lead. So I come up behind him real easy as he’s standing there beside Em. Em nods he’s ready, so I plant myself solid, and when Em grabs him around the shoulders, I swing down with the club, swing hard. And this is the
truth
– hook me up to the biggest lie detector you got – right in the middle of the swing, the guy fucking
disappears
. And Em’s standing there with his legs braced, holding nothing but air, and the club smacks him right in the nuts. I’m sorry, Em. Fuck, what can I say?

EMMETT:
Nothing
, you dumb shit.

ELWOOD: He’s an
alien
, Em. People are
into
aliens. We’re gonna make a
ton
o’ money just by warning people against him. Could get us on TV.

KEYES: Whoa, you two. Let’s get back on track. Emmett, did you see this guy disappear like your brother claims?

EMMETT: That’s what my eyes saw. The rest of me ain’t believing it.

KEYES: Okay then. He disappeared. Then what happened?

ELWOOD: Well, Emmett screamed and went down. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on – looking around kinda wild to see where the guy mighta went to, but he was nowhere. Emmett’s sorta gurgling at my feet, so I bend down to see if I can help him, and the car starts up. Guy had snuck back to the car and was
stealing
it. Drove right off toward Reno, giving the horn a couple of big honks. Was another hour before your people happened by.

KEYES: I want you both to think hard: You said this guy got out of the car with the bowling bag, right? So when he disappeared, what happened to it?

EMMETT: No idea.

ELWOOD: Me either. I don’t remember seeing it on the ground by Em. Didn’t see him come back to get it. Figure it must have gone with him.

PEEBE: We searched the area.
Nada
.

ELWOOD: We’re dealing with some kind of outer space alien, right? Some sorta critter from the stars that can take our shape but get back invisible when it wants?

KEYES: So it would seem. But whatever he is, we’ll find him.

EMMETT: Hey, officer – don’t you listen? The guy can
disappear
. Get it? Poof! If he can disappear, maybe he can do other things. Ask me, you’d have to be superstupid to fuck with him.
Super
-super.

Daniel fidgeted behind the wheel of the Tindell brothers’ turquoise- and-pink Cutlass. Their alleged Cutlass, anyway, since he’d wisely checked the registration only to find it in the name of Mrs Heidi Cohen. Daniel somehow doubted she knew Emmett and Elwood personally. He remembered Mott telling him that if you were going to drive what he called ‘blind loaners’ – vehicles that the owners didn’t know they’d lent – you should borrow a new one every twelve hours.

When he discovered the registration anomaly shortly after leaving the brothers in the dust, Daniel had decided to ditch the car. He’d pulled off on a spur road and gathered his stuff to walk away when he was taken with the notion to try vanishing with the Diamond in daylight again.

He vanished for three futile hours. He still couldn’t see the Diamond’s spiral flame in daylight, and without its axis to mark the center, he couldn’t focus. He’d tried imagining the spiral flame but this split his attention. He gave up in a fit of frustration. He needed to step back. He was acting as if there were deadlines. He could take the rest of his life to work with the Diamond.

The time pressure he felt was actually the phantom pressure of pursuit, the sense that he had to enter the Diamond before he was caught. But objectively, they couldn’t catch him or seize the Diamond as long as he could vanish and take it with him. In an oblique way, his urgency was a failure to be true to himself, a failure to trust his powers.

‘I don’t trust me. Me don’t trust I. Is this a natural neural lag in accommodating change, or do we have a serious disagreement? And if it’s a disagreement, how can it be harmoniously resolved?’

Daniel tried to think about this, more from duty than passion. One evening at Nameless Lake Wild Bill had said the trouble with self-analysis was the built-in human eagerness to accept all sorts of preposterous and absurd suppositions, not the least of which were both the possibility and desirability of knowing one’s self. Bill had likened this to using a corkscrew to pull your image from a mirror. Daniel smiled. With mock sternness he told himself, ‘
You
have a problem with self-image. Admit it – I admit it.’ He came to his own defense. ‘But if you can vanish, you’re
supposed
to have problems with self-image. You’d be insane if you
didn’t
.’

Daniel started laughing. Knowing himself was no more improbable than a frog bringing him an armload of roses or falling petals turning into frogs.

The laughter relaxed him, collapsed the manic pressure to solve it
all right now
. He was a moth flinging itself at the sun. Volta was wrong. The Diamond wouldn’t destroy him; the Diamond was simply a possible means for him to destroy himself.

He decided his best strategy was to give up for awhile. He’d offered himself to the Diamond and so far had been refused. Fine. No more vanishing with the Diamond except in defense. If he was patient, maybe the Diamond would come to him.

He also decided to keep the twice-swiped Cutlass. If he couldn’t be captured, nothing could compromise his safety – or nothing except losing the power to vanish. Conserving his strength for emergencies was even more reason to quit vanishing with the Diamond.

His new approach, he thought, was adventurous yet eminently sane. Yet he was fidgeting behind the wheel because he kept imagining himself looking into the Diamond, pouring himself into the spiral-flamed furnace at its center, and he couldn’t allow himself that anymore. He turned on the radio for distraction.

A half-hour later, with the first stars glimmering above and the lights of Reno a pale hollow on the horizon, a blast of static fried the local station and Denis Joyner took the air.

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’m David Janus, your host for this sundown program of ontological inquiry, ‘Moment of Truth,’ brought to you from the mobile studio of the Public Bullcast System on the frequency to which you’re evidently tuned.

I trust you’ll find this evening’s program as compelling as I do, though its format is slightly different than our usual broadcast fare. That’s right, Santa, there is no Virginia. And while it saddens me to disabuse you of such sweet beliefs, I can only echo my old friend Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sweeping disclaimer that ‘the world is the case.’ Alas, dear listeners, we can only drink it by the glass.

Which brings me to the creative origins of tonight’s presentation. This afternoon as I browsed my library, sipping a young but ambitious petite syrah, I realized my enlightenment, while total, has become slightly stale of late. I therefore resolved that I would henceforth seek to explore complexities worthy of my pretensions. Thus decided, I fortified myself with an ounce of Serbian caviar accompanied by a chilled liter of Thunderbird (
sic itur ad astra!
), and began to search for neglected volumes from which I might glean information on topics which have traditionally bewildered less formidable brains than my own.