Unassigned Territory (9 page)

The man, from what Obadiah could see of him, looked big. He had a large, round head and thick dark-rimmed glasses and every few seconds he seemed to look over in Obadiah’s direction. He had pulled into the lot shortly after they had and had parked right next to them, in spite of the fact that there were a number of other spaces available. Obadiah stole another glance at him now. The man was shoving a burger into his face. Obadiah looked quickly away, out across the purple hood, and then back over his shoulder, along the length of the case which pressed against his seat. He would feel less uncomfortable, he thought, had Delandra been content to steal something smaller.

As it was, they had been forced to take the backseat out of the car, then to tie the trunk lid to the bumper to keep it from flopping up in the air and blocking visibility altogether. Inside, they had slid the front seat all the way forward and still the case was pushing against the backs, holding them forward just enough to make riding uncomfortable and driving worse. They had wrapped the case in a canvas tarp. But the Thing was too damn big to hide and the tarp was mainly to save them from having to look at whatever it was that lay looking back at them from beneath the glass.

There were apparently two possibilities: Sarge had made it or he had found it. Put another way, the Thing was either sacred or profane. It was difficult to know what to believe. Nor was it especially easy to reach a conclusion about what Delandra had told him they were going to be able to do with it—that there really was a buyer waiting for them out there beyond a dark horizon. But then, really, the events of the past few hours had been so extraordinary already, he was no longer sure how many of the old rules still applied. He was a man who, in a single stroke, had repudiated a lifetime, a system of belief, a family, friends. He was a man for whom the lines had been cut and he saw himself now—a tiny weightless figure from some sci-fi scenario, his arms flapping slowly about his head as he slipped into deep space. It was a grim picture and to contemplate it too deeply seemed to invite insanity. He had accordingly devised a kind of formula. Contemplation required time and rest. Speed and motion, on the other hand, did little to invite it. And so far he had been lucky; he had been able to keep things happening at such a pace that many of the implications of his actions were still behind him—scattered in his wake like the debris of a lost ship.

At rest the debris caught up. At rest he was inclined to review the series of events which had gotten him here, to look for the rational sorts of connections one always hopes for but which, in this particular case, seemed to be missing. This, he decided, was more like a dream. It had certainly begun with an image worthy of a dream—the dark-haired girl before the white metal wall, the day drained of color and shot through with a high white light born of heat and emptiness and vast distances. And when he did stop long enough to think about it, as he had just now, he did so with a kind of dumb wonder that any of it had happened at all. But it had and unlike that scene played out in the Pomona Hotel some forty-eight hours previously there were no missing parts; if he tried he could remember everything. He could remember the line of shadow drawn across the dusty hood of the Buick by the roof above the pumps. He could remember the crackling of the hot metal and the hiss of steam and he could remember what Neil Davis said to him when he thoughtlessly turned the key, killing the engine. Neil Davis had called him a fool and it was just about then that he’d seen the girl.

•     •     •

She would have been difficult to miss—black-and-white zebra stripes above red-and-yellow boots, a black mohair sweater and white-framed wraparound shades. There was a wraparound smile as well with too many teeth in it and which, beneath a desert sun, Obadiah found reminiscent of the grille belonging to a certain Buick Century the family had once owned. She was standing before a white metal wall above whose uppermost edge a red, white, and blue chevron floated lazily upon an empty sky. Her hair was black and thick, parted in the middle and just long enough to touch her shoulders. The face which held the smile was remarkable as well, Obadiah thought, not so much for what one would immediately call great beauty, though it was true she was not unattractive, but rather for the way in which it seemed to suggest something—an attitude perhaps, a certain level of audacity he could not recall having run across before and he knew almost at once, or at least later would believe that he had known, it was a face which might change his life.

He had gotten out of the car and walked toward her, up a steep gravel drive. The blackness of her hair, the black sweater, the black-and-white dress, the black-and-white sunglasses—it all seemed to vibrate before the stark white wall at her back as if she were the work of someone interested in optical illusions. He had meant to ask her about something but his mind seemed to have gone as blank as the sky above them. What in the end he asked her about was food. He asked her about breakfast and she had pointed out a place. They could see it from the station—a green-and-white sign with a name at the top like Mom’s, or Pop’s. It eluded him now. They had been standing side by side at the edge of the platform, looking back toward the town as Neil Davis reached them. “You’re asking her about food?” Neil had asked of Obadiah. From the girl he wanted information. He wanted to know about mechanics and tools, the nearest Buick dealer. The girl had told him this was her uncle’s department, that the man would not be down for another hour or so, at which point Neil had rested his hands on his hips and looked back toward the town. He had looked at the sisters waiting in the car and finally at Obadiah. “Well, crap,” he said, “we may as well eat while we wait. The sisters are probably tired.”

It was as Neil was walking back toward his car that the first in a series of really remarkable things happened. The girl had suddenly taken a step closer to Obadiah and covered his forearm with her hand. “Let me tell you something,” she said. “That place down there is really a dump. Know what I mean? Stick around and I’ll cook you some eggs.”

Obadiah’s face had widened in a foolish grin. At least he had assumed it to be foolish. He had walked back down the gravel drive to tell the others that he was going to hang around the station for a bit and they had looked at him in the way that Neil Davis had looked at him when he killed the engine.

Neil had stared at him longer than the others, an odd series of expressions dancing across his face. The dance had ended in disgust and they had indeed left him. He had watched them walk away, growing smaller as they descended the drive, and he had turned to the girl.

She was as tall as he was. When the wind pushed her dress back against her legs he could see that they were long and well muscled. And so, scarcely knowing what he was doing, knowing exactly what he was doing, he couldn’t decide, he had followed her along a steep, rocky path toward a peculiar-looking shack, something built of wood and tin and corrugated fiber glass sheets which appeared to float above the hump of the hill in a sky burned white at the edges. “So tell me,” she asked. They were by then at the door. “What’s with the sister stuff?” She was pointing with her thumb toward the blue speck of Neil’s car.

“What sister stuff is that?” Obadiah asked.

The girl had only looked at him and laughed. “See,” she said, “you think like I do. I saw it right away. Come on in and I’ll show you my rock collection.”

Once, following her along the path, Obadiah had prayed for heart failure. Upon reaching the shack, however, and with one foot already in the door, it seemed clear to him this prayer would go unanswered. “I’d like that very much,” he said. He had ducked beneath a chunk of wood the size of a railroad tie and the door—it was made of what appeared to be flattened oil drums—swung shut behind him with the kind of sound the pop-top makes on an aluminum beer can and the vast, colorless morning passed from sight.

The eggs, of course, had never materialized and what got cooked up in their stead was a mix of something Obadiah Wheeler had not experienced before. The one thing about it, however, when it was over, he did not have to wonder whether his virginity had been lost or saved. It had in fact been lost with a vengeance in back of a Chevron station in the middle of unassigned territory and he had been wide-awake through the whole thing. It was true there had been times when certain thoughts had intruded upon the moment. At one point he suddenly found himself imagining Neil Davis telephoning his father. At another he imagined doing so himself. Once, he had seen the face of Harlan Low. At last, however, it had all slipped away and there was only himself and Delandra Hummer, her face drawn up so close to his own, her sleepy, half-closed eyes and her warm breath on his neck. A twenty-two-year-old virgin was one of the funnier things she had run across in some time and she had laughed and scolded and whispered to him in a voice which was not unlike that first voice he had heard in the Pomona Hotel as soft and warm as any desert wind, and then she had guided him inside her and swung her legs up and over his shoulders, hooked a finger in his asshole and he had come so hard it was a kind of religious experience.

When it was over they sat around the shack and talked and Delandra got some beers out of the refrigerator. A couple of times she had gone back outside, telling him she had to check on something at the station. The first time she did it he was afraid she wasn’t coming back. She was, after all, his first lover and it was not unlikely that he had done something wrong. The thought depressed him and he found that the idea of being alone terrified him. The alternatives he had once envisioned as mutant shapes seemed now to have found life in the desert. Through a crack in a sheet metal wall he saw what lived in unassigned territory—their bright, sluglike bodies awash in light, they crawled toward him from the desert floor, sticky snail trails of spent saliva smoking in their wake.

But she had come back and there was more beer and more talk and Obadiah, scarcely knowing what he was saying, had begun a ridiculously incoherent version of his life’s story—just as if this person he barely knew would be interested. He told her what the sister stuff was about. He even told her what Special Service boys did. He told her about his deferment and his draft board. He tried to give her some indication of what the morning’s activities were going to mean for him and in the same breath mentioned the possibility of his going to Canada to escape the shit which was bound to hit the fan. It was the first time he had actually expressed this idea verbally and he was quite taken aback by Delandra’s response. She appeared to think it an excellent idea and before Obadiah stopped to think about it further himself, the two of them were talking it over just as if it were going to happen, just as if it made perfect sense that the two of them do it together.

And yet, somehow, even all the talk had not served to make it real, not for him. It was the kind of stuff you made plans out of when you were drunk. It had no weight—not even when Delandra said she had an idea about how they could raise the necessary money and Obadiah had begun to put his clothes on, just like he was going to do something about it. And later, after he had gotten his first look at the Mystery of the Mojave—which in itself was enough to detract from the reality of almost any situation—and they were wrestling the Thing into the back of Delandra’s car, it hadn’t seemed real even then. He still thought somehow that it was the booze, or the sex.

Actually, it wasn’t until Delandra was seated behind the wheel and he was standing at the door, his hand upon the roof, that he realized what was coming down was indeed the real thing, that he was in the act of making a choice which would radically alter the rest of his life and he had for the first time considered the moment. It was, he imagined, the kind of moment which came for people with their fingers on the triggers, and for the first time that day everything seemed to grind to a halt, to achieve form and weight all at once so that it was in something like slow motion that he observed his own final move: his hand slipping from the heated metal of the roof, trailing as it dropped a tiny vaporous trail from the tip of each finger—as if each contained a miniature jet engine—something he did not imagine it was possible to see, until his hand had in fact reached the pitted chrome handle, had taken it into his grasp, and Delandra had whooped and banged on the wheel, put it in
D
for Drive and Obadiah had begun to appreciate the beauty of speed. The town had flown by them—a string of images, like frames off a scrap of film held to an open window: a clump of cactus, a desert museum, the white smudge of dust upon a turquoise sky. And it was only necessary to sit there to make it happen.

O
badiah was driving when they left the burger stand and he was certain the lights behind them belonged to the blue pickup. The truck, he believed, had followed them out of the parking lot and back onto the narrow highway. After a mile or so of staring into his rearview mirror he said as much to Delandra. Delandra jerked around in the seat to look out the back window. She never did anything slowly, Obadiah had noticed. If you told her to look at something, she would not just turn her head. She would swing her whole body around, and maybe bump into something in the process, or kick something with her boot. It was not that she was graceless. It was just that she seemed to have too much energy. It was like she had to keep looking for ways to throw some off. Obadiah was not ungrateful for this. It was her energy, he was certain, which fueled him now. When she swung back around it brought her face up close to his own and he could smell the burger and grilled onions on her breath. But it didn’t matter. Her hair was loose and wild about her face—which appeared to him, by the poor light of the dashboard, to be slightly flushed. He felt flushed himself, a bit feverish. He guessed that he was feverish. Perhaps he was sick.

“Well, it could be the pickup,” she said. “You can only go two ways out of that dump so it’s fifty-fifty. Don’t worry about it.” She put her arm up over the back of his seat and he could feel her fingers on his shoulder. Her fingers were rather thick and strong for a girl—but nice, too, smooth tanned skin, short, clean nails. He liked feeling them on his shoulder. He liked the way she sat close by his side. Other girls had sat that way, on dates, if you wanted to call them that, but they had only been girls from the congregation and there had been nothing between them. This girl was his lover. It made all the difference. It made him different too. Or perhaps it made him the same. He had always been different; he had been raised to be. In the world but not of it. A pilgrim and a stranger. Now he had a lover and he was like the rest of them. It was a cause for both celebration and sadness.