American Elsewhere (29 page)

A pale figure enters the beam of her flashlight, walking in the middle of the road. She sees it is a man dressed in a blue-gray suit and a white panama hat: the Native American from Chloe’s, she realizes, the man who was watching her. He still has his hands in his pockets, and he stares at her with coal-black eyes as he approaches, his two-tone shoes clacking against the asphalt.

“Stop,” she says. “Hands where I can see them.”

The man pays no attention, but just keeps walking toward her.

“Stop, goddamn it,” she says. “I am armed.”

He keeps walking, but finally halts when he’s within about ten feet of her car. He looks at her, then at the doughnut, then at the torn, ruined tire, and then back at the road behind him. “Looks like you had some trouble,” he says. His voice is quiet and calm and a little high-pitched. It’s also a little mush-mouthed.
He talks like a deaf person
, Mona thinks. “I thought I heard something.”

“Please get your hands where I can see them, sir,” says Mona angrily.

“Tire problems are common on these roads.”

“Hands,” says Mona again. “
Hands.
”

He smiles and takes his hands out of his pockets. They’re empty. “Hands. Hands,” he says, echoing her as if it’s a joke he’s still getting. “I came to help you.”

“You can help by leaving.”

“Are you often so brusque with those who try and help you?”

“No, but I’m often brusque when I hit some fucking tire spikes and nearly wrap my car around a tree.”

“Tire spikes?” he says. He looks back down the road. “Is that what those were?”

“Yes,” says Mona. “And to be honest, sir, I find it highly coincidental that you happen upon me right after I nearly drive off the fucking road.”

He smiles at her, his eyes glittering in the ruby-red glow of her taillights.

“What are you looking at?” she asks, disconcerted.

“We’ve met before,” he says.

“No, we haven’t.”

“We have. I know the curve of your face and the light in your eyes. I know you. And you know me.”

“I fucking don’t. I’d remember you.”

His eyes thin, but his smile doesn’t leave. “Perhaps not… perhaps you were described to me by someone, long ago… I never thought I’d meet you here, wandering these roads. These dark roads. They go a lot of places, the roads. You find a lot of things, if you keep walking.”

“Then please keep walking.”

“What are you doing out here?” he asks softly.

“Go away,” says Mona. “Just turn around, walk, and go away. It ain’t hard.”

“What’s your name?” he asks. “Where are you from? You’re not from here. So where?”

“Turn around. And walk.”

“You were in his house, weren’t you?”

Mona swallows but does not answer.

“Yes,” he says. “Once I knew a woman who was brave and strong and beautiful. We lost her to the horizon. She went a-walking and I saw her only once after that, one sad little moment. For then she died. She died for you. For me. For us. For everyone.”

Mona tries to ignore how her flashlight beam is trembling a little.

“I want to bring her back,” he says. “And I think you do too.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Mona says.

He leans forward a little. “She whispers to me, from deep in the earth,” he says. “Wrapped around the mountain’s spine. Do not lose hope. She is not gone. She is only sleeping. She is waiting for you. She’s been waiting for you from the beginning.”

“You have me mistaken for someone else,” says Mona. “Now get the hell out of here, or I will shoot, and it will fucking hurt.”

“I can show you,” he says. He extends a hand. “Take my hand.”

“Mister, did you not just hear what I said? I am going to fuck you up like no tomorrow if you don’t get moving.”

“You can’t hurt me,” he says. “Nothing can hurt me. I’ve died so
many times. Gone walking through so many starlit fields. I lie rotting in so many barrens, even now. Nothing can hurt me.”

“Then you won’t mind me putting a round in your knee,” says Mona. She points the Glock at his leg.

“I can show you,” he says again, voice still soft and even.

Mona’s grip tightens on the Glock.

“I can show you so much,” he says. The man takes a step forward, eyes shining strangely.

And in the split second before he takes a second step, Mona swears she sees something in his eyes—or maybe
behind
his eyes—squirming, many little tendrils flicking about in the pools before his brain.

She’s so horrified by this that she almost doesn’t notice the gun go off. Even though she is transfixed by what she sees, Mona’s aim is as straight and true as ever: the flesh above the man’s knee, just where the quadriceps tendon connects to his kneecap, completely erupts. The man grunts slightly (and Mona can’t help but notice that it’s not a grunt of pain, but of surprise, as if the man is saying to himself,
Well now that’s inconvenient
) and falls forward to the ground.

Yet he does not fall completely. He supports himself with the other knee, steadies himself, and then lunges forward and grasps her right wrist.

There is the crash of lightning, and the world fills with blue, and she hears his voice say, “I can show you.”

She stands on the road, but the world is gray and thin and flimsy, as if made of fog and mist. There is a dark form beside her holding her hand, but she has no attention for it: her eye is immediately drawn to the countryside around her.

She can see the pale shapes of trees and shrubs and hills, but in places the countryside is pockmarked and filled with a bright blue light, as if massive spotlights are hidden in the hills. All of them are pointed straight up, shining directly into the sky, piercing the clouds and rising into the dark heavens.

Or, she wonders, is something above the clouds shining
down
onto these spots? And do they coincide with another vision she had? Did she not once see coils of lightning streaming down to brush these very places?

But as she stares at these glowing spots in the countryside, her eye eventually falls upon the faint form of the town in the valley. She can see through it, past it, underneath it, and when she realizes this she sees that the earth below the town and even under the mesa is not solid…

There is something underneath the town. Something buried there, sleeping, waiting. It is broken into a million pieces, it feels like. And though it is shattered, she can feel it turn its attention to her, dreaming of her, this lost, broken woman standing on the hillside…

And it recognizes her.

She begins screaming, and she writhes and rips her hand back and squeezes it…

There is a crash, and Mona is released. She realizes she has her eyes shut, and she opens them and sees she is still standing on the road, but the world is no longer gray and misty.

Then she smells gunpowder, and she realizes she has just fired the Glock again.

She looks around. The man is kneeling before her, face fixed in a look of complete surprise.

“Oh,” he says, and he falls back until he is sitting on the road.

There is blood pouring from his chest. She can see the tiny rent in his shirtfront with blood spurting out of it, and she slowly, stupidly realizes that she has put it there.

“Oh, fuck,” says Mona.

The man touches his wound and looks at the blood as if he has never seen such a thing.

“Oh, oh fuck,” says Mona again.

He sits in the middle of the road, still staring at his chest in shock. He looks around himself, contemplating his situation, as if he’s just tripped and he’s wondering who saw.

“Just… just sit there,” says Mona. She sticks the gun back in her pants and cautiously approaches him. “Just don’t move, you’ll make it worse. Lie down, and just…”

The Indian appears to come to some decision. He reaches into his coat and produces something dark and glimmering. It takes her a moment to see it’s a snub-nosed .38.

Mona doesn’t even pause to think. She dives to the right, behind the Charger, pulls the Glock back out, and points it at him again. “Don’t!” she says. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

But the man does not point the gun at her. He examines it, as if trying to remember how such a contraption works, before lifting it and sticking it under his chin.

“No!” cries Mona.

She stands up, but it is too late: the gun goes off. Streamers of red come bursting out of the top of the man’s skull like fireworks, and he topples back.

“Fucking Christ!” screams Mona. She rushes to him, but she can see he’s already far beyond help. His body is totally limp, the asphalt already covered in a spreading sea of blood.

Mona stops and stares, wondering what to do now. She has never shot someone before now, and though she has seen people die it was never in such a horrific manner.

But the man’s body is not completely still. His ruptured head is twitching from side to side. And somehow Mona does not think his neck is jerking it back and forth: instead, she thinks the source of the motion is coming from
inside
his skull, as if something within is beating against its walls.

There is a squelching sound, and she thinks she can see something sprouting from the gaping wound at the top of his head, tiny gossamer tendrils wriggling out as if trying to taste the air, and as the thing struggles the flow of blood triples…

“What the
fuck
,” says Mona softly.

Then with a tiny, reedy cry, the wriggling stops, and the little tendrils appear to foam up (exactly like baking soda and vinegar) and dissolve. The dead man lies still in the middle of the road, gun still in his hand. Mona stares at him, not sure what to do.

There is a flash of lightning from out over the town, the bolt rushing
down to strike to ground, and a clap of thunder. Mona turns to look. The cloud lightning above the mesa is roiling as always, but that strike was much closer, and unlike the normal lightning it produced a thunderclap…

She does not need to think about it more. She dashes around to the driver’s side of the Charger, jumps in, and peels out.

When Mona comes rushing into the office at the Ponderosa Acres, Parson looks up from his desk—his expression stuck between amusement and irritation, as always—and asks, “I take it your visit was a success?”

Mona wonders what to say. Something shudders and curls in her stomach. She runs to his trash can, grabs it, and vomits into it prolifically.

Parson looks on, mildly perplexed. “Or perhaps not?” he asks.

“Things got fucked,” gasps Mona.

“They got what?”

“Fucked,” she says again, angry. “Things went fucking nuts on the way back here!”

“In a matter that concerns the key?”

“No, it does
not
concern the key. I don’t
think
. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Then you have it?”

She glares at him, streams of spittle still hanging from her lips. She wipes them off with a forearm, rummages around in her backpack, and takes out her glove with the key wrapped inside. She looks at it, then up at Parson. So far, he’s given her very little reason to trust him.

He seems to sense this. “
I
am not going to do anything with this key,” he says.

“That’s not really a comfort, Mr. Parson.”

“I will not even take it from you. This key is more for
you
than for me, Miss Bright. I only wish to see it, and verify what it is.”

She throws it to him, and he does not react at all, as if he’s never caught anything before in his life: the glove bounces off his shoulder and lands on his desk. He looks at it, confused.

“There’s your fucking key,” she says.

He opens up the glove, looks within, and smiles. “Good. Very good.”

“No. No good at all,” says Mona.

“Why not?”

“Some crazy fuck attacked me on the road,” she says. “And I shot him. Well… I actually shot him a couple of times. But then he took out his own gun and, and…” She mimes holding a gun to her chin and pulling the trigger, and makes a childish
pkchoom
noise. “Blew his own fucking brains out, right then and there, like it was nothing.”

“This man… shot himself?”

“Yes!” says Mona. “Are you not fucking hearing me?”

“But why did he attack you?”

“I don’t know! He just did! He was, like… lying in wait for me. He’d set up some tire spikes, I’m almost sure of it, and I blew a tire and had to change it and that’s when he came at me.”

“He… came at you?”

“He tried to grab me.” She pauses. “Well. He actually did grab me. And when he did, I saw…”

Parson is sitting forward. He asks, “You saw something?”

“I saw underneath the town. There’s something there, something broken and laid out all over and under this valley. And it saw me, and I felt like… like it
knew
me.”

Parson is quiet for a long, long time. “And you saw this when this man grabbed you? As if he was showing it to you?”

“I guess.”

“What did he look like?”

Mona describes him, but Parson shakes his head and says, “He
does not sound familiar… I have never seen such a man in Wink. This is troubling.”

“More troubling than him blowing his brains out?” she asks.

He bobs his head from side to side, as if to say that they are roughly equal in his mind.

“What’s going to happen?”

“To you?” asks Parson. He thinks about it. “Well. If he is dead, he was no one of note.”

“Are you
serious
?”

“Yes. I can tell when someone…
important
has died. As I did with Weringer, and Macey. And if his body is there, I expect someone will come to collect it in the night. Such things happen frequently with items left out. Even corpses, I assume, though I have never witnessed such a thing.”

Mona tries to ignore the sea of crazy shit he just said, and focuses on one thing in particular: “What do you mean,
if
he is dead? The top of his goddamn head was gone!”

Parson looks at her stony-faced. He shrugs.

“You can’t tell me, huh?” she says. “It isn’t allowed?”