American Elsewhere (34 page)

She emerges from the shadow of the cliff and sees she is at the base of the hill with the white column. It’s about twelve feet tall, standing perfectly perpendicular to the top of the hill. It looks like it’s made of metal, yet she can’t tell if it’s painted white or if the metal just
is
white. She’s not sure how long it’s been out here—if it was part of the Coburn operation then the damn thing must be older than she is—but it shows no signs of wear and tear.

For some reason the sight of that tall, white column makes her hair stand on end. It is just too
perfect
. It’s like the wind turbines she saw in West Texas, so strange and beautiful in an alien way, but even worse: the thing has no business being there, and yet there it is, blinking that violet light.

She considers what to do. She cannot say why she thinks it is dangerous, but she is sure of it. It is doing something in some intangible way, just as the wind turbines were turning and turning.

Against her better judgment, Mona decides to check it out. There is something strangely fascinating about the column, something hypnotic in the way its light keeps blinking on and off. So she starts off toward it, trying to ignore the sick sensation in her gut that suggests this is a damn stupid idea.

Though the column is not that tall it seems to tower over her as she approaches it. She feels a little sick; it’s like the proportions of everything in this country are all thrown off. And there’s something else wrong… something about the shadows on the ground…

Once she’s about twenty feet away from it, she stops. There’s an electrical taste in her mouth that she doesn’t care for, like she’s been sucking on a battery. She squats and studies the column. Its top is smooth and rounded, like it’s a big white bullet sitting on the top of the
hill. And though the light keeps blinking, she can see no bulb, not even a hole in its white casing. If it
is
a casing, that is.

She cocks her head so one ear is toward it. The column is humming, very softly, an electrical sound that seems to pulse a little bit. She smacks her lips. Maybe she’s wrong, but she thinks the electrical taste in her mouth ebbs and flows with the pulse of the hum.

Mona brushes her hair out of her eyes and keeps studying it. She walks around it in a half-circle, trying to see if she can spot a seam or a bolt or a screw in its smooth white surface. She can’t see any, but it’s hard because her hair keeps getting in her face. The wind just doesn’t let up out here.

Then the wind finally drops a bit, a lull in the breeze. Yet Mona’s hair stays right where it is, right in front of her eyes.

She pushes it down and watches, confused, as it slowly rises back up.

She looks down at her arms and sees that every hair there is pointing straight at the column. Then she thinks, pinches a lock of her hair, and holds it taut in front of her face. She watches in amazement as the very tip of the lock slowly lifts to point toward the white column…

It’s static electricity, she realizes. The damn thing must be giving off a crazy-strong static field for it to pull at her from here.

She looks around to see if the field is pulling on anything else, and as she does she sees what’s wrong with the shadows on the ground: though the sun is in the east, behind her, all the shadows on the ground are pointed toward her. She walks a few feet back from the column, and sees that’s not quite right: the shadows are actually all facing
away
from the column. It’s like it’s projecting a bright light, one her eyes can’t see, but one that still casts shadows.

She’s not getting anywhere near that fucking thing, she decides. If she does she’s sure to die of cancer in a week or something. It was stupid of her to even get this close.

Mona decides she needs to forget about it. She turns around and starts back to the road. The mesa isn’t too far ahead now. Less than an hour’s walk, probably, and the more distance she puts between her and that thing—whatever it is, and whatever it does—the better.

She walks at a brisk pace, eager to get away from the white column, but when she’s about thirty feet past it her nose and eyes start watering. She pauses to sneeze, then continues, but it gets even worse. It’s as if she’s having an allergic reaction: every lining and every tissue in her skull has just swollen up like a balloon. Coughing, she staggers back down the hill and sits down on a stone to recover.

The attack fades. Mona rubs at her throat, wondering what the hell that was. She’s never had an allergic reaction to anything in her life. What could have caused it now?

She takes a sip of water, then stands and makes for the road again. But right at about the same spot on the hill, her eyes burn and she starts sneezing over and over again, awful, painful sneezes that make her throat burn.

“Fuck!” gasps Mona. She falls to her hands and knees and crawls back down the hillside. Again, once she’s moved several feet the attack fades.

She contemplates her situation as she catches her breath. She glances up at the white column, which is still implacably blinking its weird purple light. The more she looks at it, the more she doesn’t trust it.

“You’re doing this, aren’t you, you son of a bitch,” she says to it.

The column just keeps blinking. Mona glares at it, then looks back toward the mesa.

It doesn’t want me to get over there
, she thinks. It’s a very stupid thing to think, she knows that, but she also feels certain that it’s right. Someone put this thing here as a deterrent. Maybe they didn’t want anyone getting to this side of the mesa. And if they were able to make a piece of machinery affect people in such a way… well. What else is around the mesa? It makes Mona wonder if she really wants to go farther.

“Hell yes, I do,” she says angrily. She stands, glances at the white column, and grasps the pink straps of her backpack so it’s pulled tight against her back. Then she bends low, flexes her knees, and breaks off at a dead sprint.

At first she thinks she’s made it. She’s going so damn fast that it feels like she’s already passed that invisible line. But then the attack hits her
like a freight train, a lightning bolt, a ten-ton weight hurtling down out of the sky, and suddenly she’s stumbling forward like a drunk, sneezing uncontrollably, her vision blurring and her cheeks wet with tears.

Goddamn it
, no, she thinks.
No, I am not going to be beat by some fucking white stick on a hill.

She digs in her heels and starts trotting forward again.

About six steps out there’s a loud, sharp
pop
, like a lightbulb burning out, and Mona collapses, sure the thing just fried her like a Tesla coil. But the attack immediately stops. The burning sensation recedes from her eyes, nose, and throat, and she sits up, taking deep, slow breaths. She sees that her skin is red and blotchy, like she’s just been swimming in bleach. Hopefully that will go away soon.

She must have pushed through whatever barrier the thing maintains. She looks back at the white column. “Fucker,” she says, and she’s about to get back up when she does a double take.

There’s a hill about two or three hundred yards past the column, and she could swear she just saw another violet light on that one, too.

She reaches into her backpack, takes out her binoculars, and looks.

She’s not wrong: there is a second column standing on that distant hill. And unless the binoculars are lying to her, there’s a third column, just barely a hair of white, standing on a hill far beyond that one. The three of them all form a line extending from just before the mesa and partway around the valley, silently blinking their purple lights in unison.

“Like a fence,” says Mona. She puts down her binoculars and looks at the column closest to her. “Like an electric fence, or a wall.”

This begs the question: what is it meant to be fencing out?

She turns this question over, and looks back down the slopes to the small green valley below. She can see a few roofs from here, and the black, charred memorial tree in the park.

Maybe the columns aren’t meant to fence anything out. Maybe they’re meant to fence something in.

Mona stands and starts walking back toward the mesa. Things no longer feel quite so distorted to her. Though the desert is still a striking
place, it is not so surreal or disorienting. She wonders if the white columns project more than just an invisible barrier. Perhaps they are regulating something, like a water filter in an aquarium, and though she can’t see the effects of that regulation she can sense it somewhere in the back of her head.

She is almost sure of one thing, though: whoever put the columns there didn’t do it with people in mind. Otherwise she’s positive she wouldn’t have been able to get through. They must be meant for something else.

Maybe there’s a reason people never leave or come to Wink, she thinks. This troubles her deeply. Because she did not experience any barrier when she first entered this valley. That means that either there are no columns and no barrier on the other side—which she thinks unlikely—or she was
allowed
in. As if she’d been expected.

She absently glances up as she considers this disturbing thought, but stops dead in her tracks. She stares at the sky, then shields her eyes with her hand to better see.

“No way,” she says. “No fucking way.”

Five minutes ago, the pale face of the morning moon was its usual dusky pink. That was on the other side of the white columns, she remembers, inside whatever field it is those machines are putting out.

On this side, sure, the moon is still in the same place, hanging just above the tip of the mesa. But it’s returned to its normal white color. There’s not a trace of pink in it.

Dee Johannes may not know what the hell he is doing, but he is determined to look good while doing it. As he sets out on his curious errand, which is the first of two for today, he’s sporting his freshly-ironed Larry Mahan paisley pearl-snap shirt, a pair of extra-starched Wrangler retro jeans that he’s got hiked up real high so they don’t sag around his ass, and of course his ostrich-skin Luccheses, which he buffed and polished to a fine shine last night. He’s been polishing them every night since he came to work at the Roadhouse, because goddamn is there a lot of dust out here in the desert, and you can’t even walk to your car without your boots turning a pale gray. He’s not sure how all the cowboys stay so good-looking in the movies when the country is so openly hostile to sartorial maintenance. There isn’t even a dry cleaner for miles.

Of course, these items are just accessories to the real centerpieces of his look: the nickel-plated Desert Eagle riding in the front of his belt, and the Mossberg 4x4 bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. The Eagle he got off of a man he and Zimmerman pummeled half to death in the parking lot of the Roadhouse last winter; the Mossberg was a meticulously researched online purchase that he had to get shipped to a post office one town over for him to pick up. He has, of course, polished both of these before beginning on this outing, and he’s very pleased with how they gleam in the dawn sun.

Though Dee has a lot of possessions, many of them deeply treasured—his HDTV, his Bowflex, and his Ford F-150 King Ranch pickup, for example—none of them is closer to his heart than the Mossberg. For the Mossberg, in Dee’s mind, is the definitive, undeniable emblem of manhood, his holy token of vigor and virility; he is convinced that merely holding the Mossberg bestows upon him a sort of animal, savage charisma, like just touching its walnut stock (with matte blue finish) to his shoulder (which he has done sometimes in front of his full-length mirror, occasionally shirtless and occasionally a little more) causes him to exude a primal musk that will send nearby men packing and will cause any women who happen to look upon him to be filled with an almost evangelical, foaming-at-the-mouth arousal.

Dee’s experiments with using his firearm as an aphrodisiac have yielded, sadly, pretty mixed results, since a) There isn’t a place nearby with available women where he can just casually walk around with an enormous, high-caliber hunting rifle, and b) Most of the good-looking girls are at the Roadhouse, where you don’t need the Mossberg to get laid, but around fifty to a hundred dollars or a couple of ounces of blow. And besides, Dee’s already had all of them anyways. (Also, Bolan gets mad as hell when Dee brings the Mossberg into the bar. He says it upsets the room.) This is not to say, though, that Dee has not considered using the Mossberg in some sort of kinky role-playing game with one of the downstairs girls at the Roadhouse, perhaps slowly strutting into the room, wearing nothing but oil, his cowboy hat, and a pair of aviators, with the Mossberg jutting out proudly from his hands like he’s stalking a beast in the jungle, and the girl would be on the bed cooing in pleased surprise as he enters her chamber, or whatever it is she’s supposed to do. He almost went through with it once, but all the girls there are gossips and he knows if word got out he’d never live it down. So unfortunately the Mossberg remains relegated to a mere prop in Dee’s fantasies, and though most people would find the idea of a naked man standing in front of a bathroom mirror with a hunting rifle in one hand and his lubed, erect dick in the other to be pretty sad, for Dee Johannes it’s actually getting to be a little routine.

Dee tries to forget these fantasies as he strides to his truck with the rifle slung over his shoulder. In the light of day they seem a little silly. Before he climbs into his truck, he reaches into his pocket to check the list Bolan gave him. There are two locations written on it:

313 Madison—creek behind it in the backyard

The lab—not sure

“Aw, goddamn,” says Dee. He sighs, pushes his hat back, and scratches his head. There is no place he hates more than the lab. He wishes he’d read the list before accepting this duty from Bolan. But it would have gone to him anyways. Dee is the only one strong enough and with a powerful-enough truck to transport the items he’s been sent to procure.

But it’s okay. He likes riding his truck all over this rugged country. And though he is aware that the denizens of Wink are dangerous—as was proven when he accompanied Zimmerman, Norris, and Mitchell to that house not too long ago—Dee is confident there’s nothing in Wink he can’t handle. The logic that results in this conclusion can be kind of fuzzy in places, but essentially it boils down to the fact that if a man has a large enough vehicle and a large enough gun, there isn’t much he can’t do.