American Elsewhere (35 page)

Granted, Dee hasn’t actually ever shot anyone with the Mossberg. He also has not ever actually hunted with the Mossberg. He did shoot several trees and targets with it when he first got it in the mail, but this tends to make the gun pretty dirty, and Dee finds cleaning it incredibly tedious. So since then it’s been mostly dry-firing for Dee, which can’t be
that
different from the real thing because the fundamentals remain the same: you are still pointing your gun at a target, still pulling the trigger, etc. And dry-firing has yielded another nice bonus: he’s hardly gone through any of the expensive ammunition he bought with the rifle, so there are still boxes and boxes of it sitting on the floor of his truck cab.

When Dee pulls up to 313 Madison—a small, neat adobe home on the outskirts of Wink—he is still riding high on swagger. He considers
walking up to the front door with the Mossberg slung over his back, but remembers that Zimmerman always says that’s overkill. (Zimmerman, like Bolan, considers the Mossberg to be both totally absurd and superfluous.) He reluctantly yields to his mental Zimmerman, and leaves the Mossberg sitting on the floor of his cab. But he does lift up his shirt and make sure the Desert Eagle is still in the right spot.

As he walks up the front steps, the swagger returns. He raps on the frame of the screen door with a feeling of genuine authority, and pastes a big smile across his face when he hears the footsteps coming to the door.

The dead bolt slowly turns. Then there’s a snap, and the door opens just enough for one small, watery, terrified eye to stare out at him.

“Morning, uh—” Dee cannot confirm the gender of the person on the other side of the door. He struggles before saying, “Morning! I was wondering if it’d be possible for me to check the creek out behind your house? My wallet fell in it last night—got up to some high jinks, I’m afraid—and it got plumb washed away. Won’t be a moment, and I’m terribly sorry to intrude.”

The watery eye continues staring at him. Then it bobs up and down in what might be a nod, and the door slams shut. There’s another snap as the dead bolt slides home again.

“Sheesh,” says Dee. “So much for hospitality.” He hops off the front porch and heads to his pickup. He looks back at the house. After confirming that there’s no one in the windows, he discreetly takes a small spade and a tough piece of canvas from the bed of his truck and hotfoots it around back.

Christ, he thinks. Everyone in this burg has gone nuts after what they did on the mesa. It was just one guy, too. Seems like Bolan has Zimmerman kill a guy every other month, and no one freaks out about it, or at least not like this. But then, the people Zimmerman kills are usually people everyone expects to die: druggies, lowlifes, small-time enforcers, etc.

He remembers what he’s come here for as he approaches the creek. He realizes now that his story about the wallet was a dumb one: the creek is completely dry. That doesn’t matter, though, not now. He
hops down into the creek bed, takes off his sunglasses, and looks around.

Here’s the hard part: Dee never has any idea where his quarry could be. Conceivably, it could be anywhere. It’s in the fucking ground, after all, and there’s plenty of ground around here. And it can vary in size…

He shuts his eyes, counts to ten, and opens them. Nothing. He shuts them again, counts to twenty, opens them, and sees…

There is the very subtle suggestion of an unnatural bend in one part of the creek. Like the running waters get pulled to one side, rubbing up against the earth. If you didn’t know to look for it, you’d never see it; but once you did, you wouldn’t be able to stop seeing it.

Dee walks to the bend in the creek, reaches into a pocket, and takes out a nickel. (He prefers nickels because not only do they have more copper than pennies, they’re also easier to see.) He holds it out straight in front of him between two fingers, and lets it drop.

Theoretically, it should fall straight to the ground. But it doesn’t: about halfway down it swoops away from Dee, just very slightly, as if the wind is pushing it. But there isn’t any wind in the creek bed.

He steps back, shuts one eye, holds his arm out, and sticks up his thumb like an artist taking stock of a painting. He estimates the direction in which the nickel was headed, and lines it up with the wall of the creek bed.

“Bingo,” he says, and starts to hack away at the creek bed wall with the spade.

It doesn’t take long until he hears a high-pitched, metallic
ping
as his spade bites into the earth. He wriggles the blade of the spade back and forth, spilling more earth onto the ground. Then the wall of the creek bed gives and something small tumbles out.

The object is small, but the
thud
it makes when it hits the creek bed is not. It strikes the ground so hard Dee feels it in the soles of his feet.

He winces. He is not looking forward to getting this son of a bitch back to the truck.

He kneels and brushes the soil off the object. Underneath the pile of earth is a small block of what looks like a very dark, worn metal. It’s
not more than four inches wide on any side, yet there is something about this block—perhaps the way it pulls your gaze, even if you’re not looking anywhere near it—that would give any onlooker the impression of profound heaviness. Perhaps you would even begin to wonder if this small cube of metal has resulted in the odd slope in the neighboring yards, which all appear to funnel toward this point, once you really think about it.

Because Dee spends most of his nonwork, non-fucking time getting his pump on with his Bowflex and free weights, he’s the only one in Bolan’s crew who’s in the sort of physical condition to carry this little item. (Maybe. Or maybe they just want to give him the shit jobs, he thinks.) He starts by laying the sheet of tough canvas out next to the cube. Then he pulls a pair of thick gloves out of his pocket and puts them on. These gloves were a little tough to get out here: they’re made for handling blocks of dry ice, because the cube of metal is very cold. He can see condensation forming on it even now. He’s seen others lose layers and layers of skin to the damn things before, so he’s cautious.

Dee squats, sets his legs (because you always lift with your legs, not your back), and starts to tip the little block over. It’s always surprisingly hard: this is not a material that ever wants to move. And the size of the cube is never an indication of the weight: there was one that was hardly bigger than a quarter that was a
huge
pain in the ass to move.

Dee successfully gets the block tipped over onto the heavy canvas. He looks around at the creek bed and finds the shallowest spot. Then he folds the canvas patch up over the cube, knots it in his hands, and starts dragging it over.

He was right: it is a goddamn headache to get this thing out of the creek. It digs a four-inch trench as Dee hauls it, and it tears the shit out of the creek walls and the grass up top once he finally gets it over. Every time, he waits for an ache to blossom in his loins, because he’s sure this work will give him a hernia someday, but so far he’s been golden, and hopefully today won’t be the day.

It takes him the better part of twenty minutes to move the cube fifty yards. The worst part—which is
always
the worst part—is when he has to pick it up in a dead squat and place it in the truck bed. He asked
Bolan to get him one of those hydraulic lifts—maybe the kind for getting handicapped people on buses, or something—but his boss’s response was not positive, to say the least.

He wipes the sweat from his eyes when he slams the truck bed door shut. He cracks open a bottle of water and pounds about half of it. Then he glances north, to where the mesa is.

He sighs and leans on the side of his truck. The lab is big. It’s always bigger than you think it is. And he’s covered in sweat, and—he checks very quickly—his boots are already dusty again.

He checks the list again. “Not sure, huh?” he says. “This’ll take all day…”

He might as well get started now. Bolan’s boss—that spook in the hat—hates waiting. Dee has never spoken to this man, or even seen him; he’s just heard reports about him. And apparently Dee’s cube-collecting project is one issue the spook has a lot of problems with. Dee is told that in certain communications with Bolan and Zimmerman, the spook describes one cube in particular that he’s been looking for for a long time, the mother of all of these damn things, one a couple feet high and a couple feet wide. Dee goes white at the idea of having to pick up such a thing, and is frankly quite happy that they have not found it yet.

He hopes that’s not what’s waiting for him up on the mesa. He’d rather dig a hundred of the bastards out of a creek bed than deal with that.

It’s a long drive up to the mesa. He enjoys it less than he thought he would. This part of the country always feels very peculiar, like it’s
stretched
. It’s so peculiar, in fact, that Dee almost swears he saw a red muscle car parked behind a pine somewhere out in the desert. But that’s stupid. Even for Dee, that’s stupid.

The door is made of dull metal and is striped like a yellow jacket. The neon-yellow bands run diagonally from its top right corner to its bottom left. There are old yellow block letters spray-painted at the top that read
WARNING
, but what they are supposed to be warning you about is not made clear. On the whole it is not a large door: it is about seven feet tall and three feet wide, and it’s set about a foot into the rock side of the mesa, by means of a construction method with which Mona is not familiar.

(And she thinks—Coburn is
in
the mesa? Like
inside
of it? Is the entire mesa hollow? She remembers an article she read about that particle accelerator thing in Europe, CERN or whatever—wasn’t it completely underground? Perhaps Coburn isn’t all that different—underground, yet also raised into the air.)

She is surprised by the size of the door. She expected it to be a loading door, but it’s obviously meant just for people. She wonders why.

But what is most surprising is that the door stands open about an inch or two. It has a huge, clunky doorknob, one of those kinds you usually see in really old public restrooms, but it is not engaged: someone forced the door ajar, probably by kicking at it, judging by the way the metal frame has bent. From the pile of dust built up at the bottom, it seems it’s been this way for some time.

The thing that Mona doesn’t like is the way the door was kicked
open. Because, judging from the way the lock and frame are bent, whoever did it was kicking from the inside.

She reaches into her pocket and takes out the key Parson sent her to get. Since the lock is broken, it would appear the key is unnecessary. But then, Parson never explicitly said the key was for this door. She just assumed that was what he meant.

She examines the key and the lock. The lock is pretty basic; the key, however, remains an intimidating four-inch piece of industrial technology with about two dozen teeth.

No. No, this key is meant for something else. Something much more important.

“Shit,” says Mona.

She rubs the back of her neck. She doesn’t like this at all. This is worse than Weringer’s house. Even Parson, who is often so dismissive of the oddities happening around town, holds Coburn in some kind of reverence.

His words echo in her head until she feels she’s about to have a panic attack. She wishes now, more than anything, that she understood him more. She wishes she could grasp the meaning behind his little parable, which seems to have been so crucial that it drove him into a coma. And she is beginning to wish that she’d chosen to just beat it and leave town, leave this little clutch of shifting shadows and veiled words behind and find a new life somewhere else.

But another part of Mona knows that a new life isn’t coming. She’s used up all her wishes, all her fresh starts, and this is the last place to find anything that could remake her. And when she remembers the film she watched back in her mother’s house—the smoke-filled room, the glamorous, cheery woman striding in from the patio—she knows that there are secrets behind this door she simply must understand. Because unless she’s wrong, somewhere behind this surreal, forbidding door is the history of her mother, or at least a part of it. But that’s more than Mona’s ever had in her life.

She remembers Parson gave her one other clue, one she hasn’t had
the time to look at yet. She sits down in the shadow of a large rock, reaches into her pocket, and pulls out his note cards.

She looks at the “Cat” card to see if she’s missed any hidden code, but if so a closer look doesn’t help. It appears to just be an innocuous and rather vapid definition of the word, like one a grade-schooler would make for a project.

She looks at the next card. She is not at all surprised to see that it is:

DOG

(noun)

A small domesticated carnivore,
Canis familiaris,
noted for its loyalty and servitude. Its puppies are a lot of fun!

“What the
fuck
,” says Mona, shaking her head. She starts flipping through them. They are all fairly insipid and utterly useless. There is a card for “Octopus” (
the mother dies after laying her eggs, which is quite sad
), for “Sunshine” (
it’s what makes plants green!
), and for “Home” (
where your family and friends are, and where everything makes sense
). She looks at the definition for “Home” for a while. Maybe he’s coding something into the first letter of each word? But when Mona actually takes the time to test this idea the letters spell nothing but gibberish.

Frustrated, she starts flipping through the cards. There must be over thirty of the damn things. But then she comes across a card that is markedly different from all the others:

PANDIMENSIONAL

(adjective)

1. The quality of existing in several different aspects of reality at once, rather than just one

2. The ability to operate or move across the same