Unassigned Territory (4 page)

By midmorning the small caravan had stopped for coffee somewhere on the eastern edge of San Bernardino and Obadiah was again awake, rubbing his eyes in the glare of one more asphalt parking lot while the towering orange and blue-green sign of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant revolved slowly in a dull brown sky far above him. Farther east, the edges of San Gorgonio were visible through the smog with the sky fading to a pale turquoise above them—a promise of more pristine vistas to come.

Obadiah’s return to consciousness was marked by a painfully stiff neck and a throbbing headache. He managed to bum a pair of aspirins from Panama Allen and washed them down with black coffee as he sat with the others in a large semicircular booth.

His companions seemed in high spirits. Even Ben Bishop, normally a somber lad who, as near as Obadiah could tell, spent most of his time trying to kick self-abuse, was engaged in a rather animated discussion with Neil Davis and Harlan Low. The conversation had something to do with fuel additives and gas mileage. Obadiah sat quietly with the sisters. He managed to put down a greasy patty melt and had to admit to feeling somewhat better by the time they left—felt good enough, in fact, that when Neil asked if he would care to drive, he accepted. Harlan was now driving the Plymouth and in possession of Neil’s map. “Just follow him,” Neil said to Obadiah. “He knows the way.” It sounded simple enough. Obadiah slipped the Buick into Drive and followed Elder Low skyward along a sparkling concrete ramp.

It was hard to say, later, just how the two cars became separated. It apparently happened somewhere around a confusing interchange east of the city. There were a number of contributing factors: Obadiah’s newfound energy proved short-lived. His hangover returned with a vengeance, complicated by a greasy patty melt now riding high against his sternum. Then there was Elder Low’s surprisingly heavy foot, and Neil Davis had elected to doze. The interchange loomed suddenly on the horizon—blue-gray concrete bridges rising like the delicate arcs of some mutant lawn bird, green signs everywhere, their silver letters shimmering in the desert light. Obadiah looked at the display of signs. Somehow the number twelve seemed to stick in his mind but there was a sixteen-wheeler hard on his ass and little time for decision. He bore to the right, toward bluer skies and cleaner air. Temples banging and stomach churning, he clung to the wheel with sweat-damp hands and drove on.

The interchange slipped from view. The road grew straight and long, an asphalt jewel in the brilliant light. The pounding in his temples began to subside. His stomach relaxed. At his side, Neil Davis continued to sleep. The sisters Allen rode silently behind him. It was almost as though he were alone with the landscape, and a strange euphoric feeling seemed to settle over him. A small white sign said Route 12 near a sandy shoulder and the euphoric feeling deepened. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the heat waves, he imagined Elder Low in a two-tone Plymouth eating up the highway. Panama’s aspirins were beginning to take hold. He eased his foot down and felt the Buick surge beneath him. He drove until Neil Davis jerked away at his side and screamed. At first, Obadiah thought the man was having a nightmare. Before he could pull over, however, the car began to make an odd sound.

Obadiah could not be sure if Neil Davis was more upset about finding himself on the wrong highway, or at the loss of his air-conditioning. The brother stood on a sandy shoulder, beneath a blistering sun, the hood raised, a small red toolbox open at his feet. He was bent at the waist, leaning over the fender of the car. Obadiah stood on the shoulder as well, with Bianca and Panama Allen. The elder Allen looked hopefully toward Neil Davis’s ass as it strained the seams of his navy blue slacks. Bianca, Obadiah noticed, was not staring at Neil but instead stood looking rather wistfully back down the empty highway in the direction from which they had come.

“I thought you understood,” Neil said, his head still in the open jaws of the LeSabre. “Route Twenty-eight.”

“I don’t know where I got twelve,” Obadiah said. “I guess I thought that was the one you were pointing at in the lot.” It was, of course, a lame thing to say. He recalled the sight of a thin gray line streaking through white space.

Neil pulled his head out from under the hood. There was grease on his cheek. “Twenty-eight,” he said. “Twenty-eight.” Obadiah could see that he was working at remaining calm. Neil was by nature an energetic man, one given, Obadiah suspected, to occasional fits of violence. The man was a bachelor of medium height and build. His most distinguishing feature was his nose—a large, fleshy member that seemed to dominate his face and give it, somehow, a rather gopherlike look. His head was tilted back at the moment, nose pointed slightly skyward in the direction of Obadiah. “Twenty-eight,” he said once more. “And we’ve lost our air.” He stepped away from the car and chucked a wrench into the small red box.

Obadiah took a step forward and peered into the mass of metal and wire beneath the hood. He had no idea of what he was looking for but felt somehow that it was expected of him. He could not shake the feeling that Neil was blaming him for the mechanical failure as well as the wrong turn. Perhaps he had done something wrong. “Sorry,” he said.

Neil shrugged and closed the red box. “Can’t be helped now,” he said. “We may as well head back. They’ll be far ahead and it’s going to be a hot ride.”

“How hot?” Bianca asked. Neil and Obadiah both looked at her. It was the first time that day that she had spoken.

“Hot,” Neil said. “I’ll drive.”

It was definitely hot. The sun was once more coming through the windshield. Obadiah loosened his collar and rolled his sleeves, put his elbow out the window, and watched the tiny blond hairs on his forearm bend like a miniature field of wheat in the hot wind.

They rode, for the most part, in silence. Obadiah could not say how far he had driven in the wrong direction—apparently, much farther than he had guessed. At last they stopped at a small gas station and Obadiah joined Neil in standing to one side of it, squinting at a narrow back road that ran away from them and lost itself in a distant line of red-and-yellow hills. “Fellow here says this road connects with Twenty-eight,” Neil said. “And I seem to remember something like it from the map.” He placed his hands on his hips. “It would sure save us some time,” he said. “What do you think?”

Obadiah stared at the road. Above them the sun had moved into the western half of the sky. “The guy’s sure it goes through?”

“Says so. And he seems like a nice enough fella. I talked to him while you were in the head. Even left a
Bulletin
with him.” Obadiah looked from the road to the station and back again. He hated to put a damper on Neil’s enthusiasm. This had been the first really friendly exchange since the breakdown. “Why not?” Obadiah asked. Neil, apparently motivated by some sense of adventure, nodded and rubbed his hands together. “I’ll inform the sisters Allen,” he said, “of our decision.”

Neil Davis entered the desert whistling a tune. By sundown, with the sky the color of a bad bruise above them and the interstate nowhere in sight, the tune had given way to a tortured silence.

“Shit,” Bianca Allen said, speaking from the darkness of the backseat, “we really lost now.” Her words had been the first in some time and when no one answered she went on. “We could die out here,” she said, “middle of nothin’.”

“Nonsense,” Neil Davis said.

Obadiah was not so sure. He gazed toward a distant line of jagged rock, black against a darkening sky. He thought of what Harlan Low had said, about how things were different out here. They had certainly been different so far—one had to admit. He looked once more into the road before them, as scarred and pitted as the surface of the moon. The headlights seemed to swing from side to side, a dance of light and shadow, and he was reminded of his whereabouts some twenty-four hours earlier—the flickering light of Bug House’s candles, the shining plastic heads of the Tiki gods, the priestly Bug House in black robes, and it seemed suddenly quite fitting and proper to him that he in fact should die here. Perhaps his situation was analogous to that of Jonas, perhaps if he pitched himself from the car now, into the blackness of night, the others would be saved, and he imagined that the lines of an old bluegrass song had begun to ring in his ears: “Just before the lamps were lighted / just before the children came / while the room was very quiet / I heard someone call my name.”

S
eated on a barstool at the Cock & Bull, head tilted to facilitate the act of pouring beer into his throat—a position which also enabled him to increase the volume he could comfortably handle—Rex Hummer saw the moon as it came to rest directly above a crack in the roof. Its light was white and brilliant and he thought of the hour. It was, he imagined, somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday morning—a lost and dangerous sort of time, given over as it so often is to blurred vision and impaired judgment and Rex had seen more than one atrocity carried out beneath its spell.

It was approaching closing time and the Bull’s regulars were staring sadly into corners or lurching across an ancient black and white linoleum floor, willing at this point to, as the line in a certain obscure song had it, take a chance on a woman who looks like Karl Malden. Rex considered it a sad and tiresome sight, one, however, to which he was no stranger, of which his own desperate longings had so often been a part.

This night, though, was better than most. For one thing it was a Saturday. Saturdays are talent showcase nights at the junction, and on this particular Saturday, Rex Hummer had taken first place. He had won a free pitcher and a T-shirt. The T-shirt had a picture of a cock and a bull on the front (the cock standing on the bull’s head, the bull’s eyes rolled toward it in an expression of cross-eyed anger). On the back of the shirt were the words I’M A WINNER AT THE COCK & BULL.

Minor as the triumph might be, it was wrested from stubborn soil and Rex would take it. The occasion had, after all, marked the first public appearance of the Hum-A-Phone, a musical instrument of Rex’s own invention, and he saw in this a certain historical significance. The sad part was, there was no one to share the moment with him. Sarge might have been willing but he was dead. His half sister, Delandra, was out for the evening, possibly in Kleco, fucking the fire department. And that left Floyd, Rex’s uncle. But Floyd had little interest in such things and had only sneered when he’d caught sight of the device and whispered something to one of his buddies which Rex had been unable to catch.

Rex wiped the foam from his upper lip and rocked back on his stool, eyeing the machine, which still rested upon the small stage. He had seen it many times, of course, but always in the trailer, or workshed, and he was admiring now the way in which the various parts shone beneath the hot yellow spotlights of the bar, or how they seemed to attract the pale, dusty colors cast by the jukebox near an open front door. He blinked as a tiny series of contractions snaked through his guts. The sight of the instrument always seemed to stir in him the same series of feelings. At first there was satisfaction at what he had wrought, a sense of awe even, but this unfortunately was short-lived and followed quickly by a certain restlessness in which he realized that the instrument’s sound was not yet, precisely, the sound he was after. The restlessness was often followed by a kind of panic. Rex swallowed more beer. He was hoping, in light of the evening’s achievement, to prolong the satisfaction—possibly avoiding the panic altogether—when a peculiar wind rose up out of nowhere and came rushing through the cool clapboard night like an empty freight across the desert floor.

The Cock & Bull regulars, Rex Hummer among them, stood in silence beside an empty road and stared into the darkness covering the Mojave. At their backs an Olympia sign cut yellow patterns from the night. The jukebox was silent. They had gotten outside just in time to see Bob Holt’s Aljo lose its new canvas awning and for several uneasy moments it had appeared as if a real blow was in the works. And then nothing.

Rex remained outside after the others had followed Floyd back into the bar. He could not recall a wind having risen so suddenly only to end so abruptly. But there was something else, too. Or at least he had imagined that there was something else—a moment in which the void of silence left by the wind had not yet been filled by the electric whine of the jukebox at his back, a sliver of emptiness in which a certain tone had lingered—not even what you could rightly call a sound, something lone and discordant. A fragment. He strained to hear it now, or to feel it. But the sound, if indeed there had been such a thing, was gone and Rex was alone on the porch. Still, he believed he had heard something. His sense of hearing, he felt, was a good deal more sensitive than most, trained as it was by his months of work on the Hum-A-Phone.

From where Rex stood he could see most of the junction, the gas station and market, the dozen or so house trailers climbing the slow rise above the Cock & Bull, their aluminum bodies catching moonlight so that they seemed to hang there against the blackness of the hill like so many strange aircraft descending upon the town. Looking toward the highway he could make out that spot where the old version of the interstate joined a little-used back road—wide sweep of sand and gravel—white in the light that spilled from the Chevron, and just beyond that the dark, rambling shape of his father’s Desert Museum—locked and boarded now, alone with its single exhibit. And past the museum, at just about that point where his vision began to fail against the darkness, he could make out the black rectangular shape of one of his father’s homemade billboards.

There’d been a whole series of billboards once, littering the highway for miles in both directions. Giant red letters on a field of white, one phrase to a board, they’d stood like mutant Burma-Shave ads at the side of the road: SEE THE THING! MYSTERY OF THE MOJAVE! MISSING LINK? ALIEN BEING? MYSTERY OF MODERN SCIENCE! And then in smaller letters on the final sign—the one Rex could just now make out: SEE THE thing! SARGE HUMMER’S DESERT MUSEUM LAST CHANCE GAS, COLD BEER.