Unassigned Territory (5 page)

The signs were in various states of disrepair now, many of the red letters faded or lost completely—their vacant white backgrounds blinding in the glare of high noon. A few, however, were still legible and occasionally, at the peak of the season when people still used the old road to escape traffic on the interstate, Rex would notice some car loaded down with family—a station wagon perhaps, greasy kid faces pressed to the glass, slow as it rolled into the junction, passing the Desert Museum, its occupants having been hooked some miles out by one of Sarge’s signs and eager for a glimpse of the Mystery of the Mojave. Rex Hummer had, of course, seen all of the mysteries—first to last—and he often imagined that it had done something to him, that whatever it had done was in some way connected to his current plight. He had spent a childhood in the sunlight, passing tools to Sarge, watering down Delandra as she lay red-faced and crying in the cab of the truck as sign after sign rose up in their wake, halfway to Los Angeles it had seemed then, with country music and Dodger games spilling from the radio, the wicked crack of Sarge’s hammer like a gunshot against the blue expanse of sky. All things considered, it had not been a bad time.

Rex had carried a mug of beer with him from the bar. He felt the weight of it now, sweating in his hand, and he threw back his head to pour it down—cold burn warming the night. The sensation was pleasant enough but there was a certain sadness, he found, gnawing at the edges of his mood, and it occurred to him that he’d best not pursue his memories much further, that he was, after all, at just this moment, still a winner at the Cock & Bull. He looked once more across the wide sweep of land above which the stars filled the sky. He studied the great pale curve of the Milky Way. He looked toward the ruins of Bob Holt’s awning in time to see the small dark shape of some desert animal crawl from beneath the canvas and scurry into the night.

Everyone had pretty much gotten back to battle stations by the time Rex returned to the bar. A couple of people clapped him on the back as he passed and said, “Nice job.” Rex nodded. He had just taken up his stool and seen the last of the pitcher into his glass when he heard someone yell from across the room. “Holy shit,” the voice said. A dozen metal folding chairs scraped the linoleum as the regulars, still a bit spooked from the wind, Rex supposed, headed for the windows. Floyd looked up from behind the bar and asked what the fuck was going on. “Carload a niggers,” someone yelled back. “Holy shit.”

This was a bit out of the ordinary. There were, of course, black people who stopped from time to time at the Chevron, but they were only strangers off the highway. There were, as far as Rex knew, none living anywhere near the junction and he was quite certain none had ever come looking for a good time at the Cock & Bull. The place was obviously a redneck bar—always a few dusty pickups out in front, and Floyd’s Confederate flag decals on the front windows beneath the beer signs, and, if that wasn’t enough, you could generally hear the country music spilling out the front door. Rex thought of all this as he waited on his stool. He imagined that once they got a good look at the place they would just keep going. He would keep going, he thought, if he were them.

“Jesus H. Christ,” someone said. “They’re gettin’ out.

This, Rex believed, was serious, or at least potentially serious and he glanced at his uncle to see how the asshole was taking the news. He found Floyd staring toward the door with a kind of dull wonder written on his large, square face. When he caught Rex looking at him he winked. “What da ya say, Pork Rind?” his uncle inquired. “Looks like head-knockin’ time to me.”

Rex turned away. Head-knockin’ was not his strong suit. For one thing he was blind in one eye and it did funny things to his depth perception. For another he was rather thick and slow. He was not good with his hands and prone to nosebleeds.

Back of the bar Floyd had begun to hum the “Niggers’ Night Out,” a little opus of his own devising, something he had brought with him from Texas when he’d come out to take over the Chevron franchise after Sarge’s death. Rex studied the block-size head, the small features above which Floyd had managed to engineer his blue-black hair into a greasy flattop with fenders. Fights could go bad in a bar like the Bull. The law was a good thirty minutes away and none of that would mean a thing to Floyd Hummer.

Rex threw back his head and put the last of the beer into his throat. He peered with a single eye through a light fog of pale blue cigarette smoke toward that crack in the roof from which the moon had fled and he heard the front door swing on its hinges. It swung back hard enough to bang against the cigarette machine, which was backed against the front wall between the door and window, and suddenly everything got real quiet in the Cock & Bull, like it had out on the street, after the wind. Rex Hummer lowered his glass and turned on his stool. Framed in an open doorway was possibly the biggest man he had ever seen—six foot seven or eight, maybe, and close to three hundred pounds. Chest like a refrigerator, thighs like water heaters, and all dressed to kill in a dark three-piece pinstriped suit of gigantic proportions. The only thing small about the man was his head and that looked to Rex to be about the size of a small honeydew melon. The man stood for a moment on the porch, surveying the room from behind a pair of black-rimmed wraparound shades. He had to duck to get through the door, and when he straightened up it appeared for a moment as if the room would be too small to hold him.

There were three of them altogether and they formed just about as bizarre a collection of humanity as Rex had seen on the streets of the junction in some time. The second man through the door was also black. He was not as tall as the first and not as heavy, but when Rex looked at him he was reminded of something Sarge used to say: skinny as a snake and just as mean. The man had a long, bony look to him and though he, too, was decked out in a three-piece, double-breasted pin-striped, the suit did not fit properly, fit in such a way in fact as to lead Rex to the conclusion that no article of clothing ever had hung correctly from that cadaverous frame. Bony wrists and white cuffs shot from the end of either sleeve and hung there at weird angles—ruby-red cuff links and gold rings flashing in the smoky gloom of the bar. He wore shades like the big man’s and an odd-looking gray felt hat with a dark band and even the hat looked to be the wrong size—riding too low above a face that was all right angles and shining in the yellow light like it had been hacked from polished black stone.

The third man was an Indian. He was short and heavyset. He wore dark slacks and black western boots, a blue work shirt with a yellow string tie and a black leather thigh-length jacket of western cut. His hat was the kind of tall, black hat Rex had seen on the Indians from the reservation near Needles. The hat had a beaded band around it and two small feathers on one side. The Indian looked to be the oldest of the three. His face was so deeply lined Rex could see the creases from across the room. It was a face with the desert in it, he thought, not something you would ever want to fuck with. And when the Indian walked and his coat swung back Rex could see there was a bone-handled bowie knife damn near as long as the Indian’s thigh strapped to his leg in a leather sheath.

The men crossed the room and seated themselves at a table. It was a quarter till closing time. Someone coughed and Rex could hear a couple of chairs against the linoleum. No one said anything. Most of the regulars were watching Floyd, and Rex could not say that he was unmoved by his uncle’s predicament. It was not, after all, your run-of-the-mill carload of niggers and probably, Rex thought, a certain malign sense of satisfaction stirring somewhere back of his breastbone, a good deal more than the local crop had bargained for.

“Looks like Hollywood come to the desert,” Floyd said at last. But his voice seemed to have gone hoarse—as if he were nursing a cold. “I’ll be dipped in shit,” he added, after another moment, but the new, weird voice was the same.

A couple of drunks at the bar managed to laugh. “Fuckin’ A,” someone said. Someone else muttered to Floyd that they would back his play, but judging by the way the guy was slurring his words, Rex did not imagine it was anything Floyd could take great comfort in.

Floyd stood for a moment longer behind the bar, the leading edge of his flattop glistening like a row of freshly oiled iron filings poised in the grip of some magnetic attraction. “Yeah,” he said once more, “Hollywood come to the desert.” It seemed about all he could come up with. You had, Rex thought, to feel a little bit sorry for the jackass.

“Fuckin’ A,” the same moron chimed in once more. Someone else made a crack about faggots and Rex began to get nervous once again. Splitting, however, seemed quite out of the question and so he stayed where he was, hunkered behind the white cotton shirt, the sweating pitcher—the spoils of victory for God’s sake—nailed to his stool as surely as if some fifth leg had been run from the floor right into his puckered asshole. It was a position he retained as Floyd crossed the room to inquire if perhaps the big boy would not care to arm wrestle him for a round of beers. It was a ploy for which Floyd was justly famous and when the big boy was beaten he would be asked to leave—at least that was the way the scenario had worked in the past.

There was a mirror in back of the bar—wood-framed with gold letters that said old bushmills on it—which Floyd had picked up from some guy who was selling them alongside the road, and it was by way of this invention that Rex observed the scene taking place behind him. To his great horror the smaller of the two black men had lit a pair of cigarettes and arranged them in such a way that whoever lost would have to put one out with the back of his hand.

Rex put the last of his pitcher into his mug and chugged it. Before he could put the glass back down, however, he heard two things. He heard one of the locals say: “Make it plain,” and he heard someone’s hand hit the table, hard. When he looked he was in time to see Floyd Hummer grinding out a butt real good with the back of his hand. Fuckin’ A.

The blacks were outnumbered three to one but not an ass left a chair. It was kind of sad, really. Floyd Hummer went back to the bar and started washing glasses and when one of the regulars got up to play the jukebox he shouted at the guy to leave the mother-fucking thing alone. It was closing time, for Christ’s sake. And so it was. And before long what was left of the locals began slinking out the door, into the cold, black hours of a brand-new day.

Rex Hummer was about to leave himself when suddenly all three men rose and started toward the bar. “Say, look here, Jim.” It was the bony black man who spoke. “We Vegas bound man, but we’ve been checkin’ out these signs. See the Thing. We come to check out its crib man.”

Floyd was some time in replying. He was drying a pitcher. At last he held it to the light and ran a towel around the rim. “Wouldn’t know about any of that shit,” he said. “You want to know about that, you talk to the sausage here.” He nodded in the direction of Rex Hummer.

The black man poked at the brim of his hat with a long finger. Three freakish heads swiveled toward him and Rex suddenly found his own crazy face among them, reflected in the twin sets of Foster Grant wraparounds. It was a suffocating experience. The Indian leaned one hand against the bar and the lights caught a large silver and gold belt buckle at his waist, what looked to be some kind of hand in a circle of mother-of-pearl. “Yo,” Rex said at last. What else could he say? He did own it. It was his museum and his land and if anyone owned what was left there, lying inside of it, he owned that, too.

“Well,” the man asked him. “What about it?”

“Yo,” Rex said once more. He was waiting for the correct words. Like Moses before the Pharaoh. Beads of sweat popped from his forehead. His mind felt like a dark and empty room. And yet somewhere his pride was like the flame of a tiny candle, refusing to go out. “Well,” he began again, clearing his throat. “You can’t see anything in there now. There’s no lights and it would be dangerous.” He stared into the dark, faintly pockmarked face of the man who had arranged the cigarettes upon the table.

The man looked at his companions, then back at Rex. There was, Rex noticed, something beneath the shades which might have been a smile. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to look at for long.

“What you mean by dangerous?” the man asked.

“He mean the Thing, home boy.” It was the big man who spoke. “He mean the Thing don’t like niggers.”

“Maybe he means the Thing does like niggers,” the Indian said. “He likes dark meat.”

The black men seemed to find this amusing. It sounded to Rex like something he ought to leave alone. “Snakes,” he said. It seemed to be the best he could do on short notice.

“Say what?” the big man asked.

“Rattlers,” Rex said. “The place isn’t used. Wouldn’t want to step on a rattler.”

The big man seemed impressed. “Dig it,” he said. “Me and snakes don’t get along.”

The Indian laughed but said nothing. The thin man appeared to give the matter some thought. “Simple,” he said. “Wfe catch Vegas on the P.M., we catch the Thing on the a.m.”

Rex Hummer received the suggestion with a quickening of an already palpitating heart. “And that’s mine, too,” he imagined himself saying. He was looking over the one guy’s shoulder at the Hum-A-Phone glittering on the stage. “And if you want to see the Mystery, you’ll have to hear the sound.” And for a moment he almost thought he had said it, but then he knew he hadn’t.

T
hey were running on empty when a patch of light appeared in the distance. Bianca noticed them first. “Lights,” she said, and leaned forward so that Obadiah could feel her breath against the back of his neck. Neil responded with a grunt and picked up speed.

What lay before them was neither a town nor a gas station. It appeared at first glance to be some sort of government compound. There was an American flag at the top of a pole with a light on it and at the base of the flag there were half a dozen aluminum trailers. The trailers, arranged in a square, were surrounded by a chain-link fence. There were a handful of spotlights on the fence, and between the fence and the flagpole there was enough light to cast a pale white mist on the night sky. Neil pulled up close to the chain link and killed the motor. The silence of the desert filled the car. “Maybe they will have some gas,” Neil said. His voice sounded much too loud and was followed by a moment of strained silence—nothing like a government compound to make a carload of The Friends nervous. They were, after all, among the most persecuted religious groups on the planet. They had died by the hundreds in Nazi death camps. They died today behind the Iron Curtain. Obadiah knew of one brother who had died in the L.A. County jail waiting transfer to Stafford, Arizona, for refusing induction. And someday soon the apocalyptic shit was bound to hit the fan. Even Obadiah Wheeler believed in the fire next time and he was a man of little faith. He stared into the gloomy yard of the compound as Neil eased himself from the car, and thought about persecution.