American Elsewhere (51 page)

Megan is shocked. She would have never dreamed of doing such a thing. Lady Fish’s home was her own. It was not a place for visitors, not even Megan.

She walks to the edge and looks down. How often she observed the curves and crenellations of the muddy earth conforming to meet Lady Fish’s long, swirling shape…

Then the old woman’s face appears at the bottom of the tunnel. Her face and hands are filthy with mud. “Hello, there,” she says.

Megan jumps. Then she draws back, slowly.

“Oh, don’t be frightened, dear,” says the old woman. She climbs out of the tunnel with remarkable agility. “I won’t hurt you. I’m not here for you at all.”

Megan still keeps her distance. The old woman smiles and sits down on the ground. “I think you’re here for the same reason I am,” she says.

Megan still does not trust her enough to answer.

“By which I mean, we share a common acquaintance.” The old woman nods at the tunnel.

“Are you a friend of hers?” asks Megan.

“
Hers?
” asks the old woman, as if a little surprised to hear the term. “Oh. Well. I am actually, erm, her sister, if you must know.”

“Her sister? No, you’re not.”

“I most certainly am, dear.”

“But you don’t look anything alike.”

“That does not mean we are not sisters. It’s why I’ve come looking for her.” She looks back at the tunnel, concerned. “How long has she been gone?”

“Why?” asks Megan.

“Because I am worried about her.” She pats the ground next to her. “Come sit by me. There’s nothing to be troubled about.”

Though initially reluctant, Megan does so. It is hard to mistrust a little old lady covered in mud.

“She was your friend, wasn’t she?” the old woman asks.

Megan nods. “Was it wrong?”

“Was what wrong?”

“That we were friends,” says Megan.

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because I do a lot of bad things,” says Megan. “It’s why everyone left. Why Lady Fish left.”

“Lady Fish? Who do you mean by… ah. I see.” The old lady considers it. “You think she left because of you? Well, I very much doubt that.”

“You do?” asks Megan, hopefully.

“Yes,” says the old woman. “You don’t seem to be a very bad girl to me. And I think she had other reasons for leaving.”

“Are you going to try and bring her back?”

“If she wishes to, I will try to make that happen.”

“I hope you do,” says Megan. “I miss her.”

“You were very close, I take it.”

Megan nods.

“When did she leave?”

“After the funeral.”

“Mr. Weringer’s funeral?” asks the old woman.

“I don’t know his name.”

“I see,” says the old woman. “So it was very recent, then. Did she say anything to you before she left?”

Megan thinks as she stares down into the tunnel. And she remembers. It can be so hard sometimes to remember their conversations. It’s like having spoken to someone in a dream.

“She said she was worried about me,” she says. “She said… she never wanted anything to happen to me.”

“Did she,” says the old woman.

“But I wasn’t sure why I would be in trouble. I hadn’t done anything then. And I’m not in trouble, am I?”

“I have no reason to think so.” The old woman goes silent, thinking. Then she looks around the edges of Lady Fish’s house, examining the mud. “Hm.”

“What is it?” asks Megan.

“Nothing, but… was anyone else here? Recently, I mean. Did anyone else come to see Lady Fish?”

Megan thinks. It seems like so long ago… but then she remembers one evening when she sneaked out of the house to see Lady Fish, because she had heard shouting from down in the basement, and her mother kept going down and coming up and going down, and the smell of cigarettes was so strong Megan just had to get out of the house, and she went straight to Lady Fish… but she saw someone was there.

“A man,” says Megan. “A man came to see her.”

“And who was this man?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Well, what did he look like?”

Megan thinks hard. “He was wearing a hat.”

“A hat?”

“A white hat.”

“A white hat…,” says the old woman. “Hm. No, that doesn’t mean anything to me. But perhaps it is something. Did you hear what they were discussing?”

“I could hear what he said. But I couldn’t hear what Lady Fish was saying. You never can, unless she’s talking to you.”

“Really? She must be one of the very young ones, then. What did this man say?”

“He said he needed help. Help in bringing someone back, I think. And Lady Fish needed to come with him.”

The old woman goes very still. She stares through the trees into the sunset, her face grave.

“I see,” she says quietly. “That is very good to know, then. Very, very good.” She stands up. “I must go now, my dear. You have been very helpful. For that I thank you.”

“Will you find her?” asks Megan.

“I hope to.”

“And she’ll come back?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, my dear,” the old woman says.

“But you have to know,” says Megan. “How can you not know?” The loneliness that descends on her is blank and crushing. She sits down on the marshy ground and begins to cry.

The old woman, who previously seemed so grandmotherly, simply watches, her eyes small and inscrutable. It is then that Megan begins to feel, even through her sobs, that all of this person’s actions and behaviors have been an affectation, like she was repeating lines from a memorized script that has worked well for her so far; and yet when confronted with something unwritten—like the sobbing of a small child—she has no idea what to do. She only stares, indifferent, unmoved.

“Understand,” says the old woman, her voice wry and cold. “Understand, understand, understand. Understand that this is not a tragedy.
This is not a thing to be mourned. You should be relieved. What happened here was no more than glimpsing something from the side of your eye, but you did not fully witness it, you did not fully see, comprehend, know. If you had, well… what you saw and what you spoke to and what you think you possessed was an illusion, a mistranslation, a deception. Perhaps she deceived you, or she deceived herself, I cannot say. But I will say that you are a very lucky girl, not because you met Lady Fish, but because you met her and still exist. In a fashion.”

“I don’t understand,” says Megan, sobbing.

“No,” says the old woman. “And for that you should be very thankful.” She turns and begins to walk farther into the forest.

“Where are you going?” asks Megan after her.

“To do the same thing many times over, I expect,” says the old woman. “To knock upon many doors, and receive no answer. Do not follow me, girl. Where I go, you cannot come back from.” And the old woman fades into the trees, and is gone.

Megan sits on the muddy ground, clutching her knees. Then, still sniffling, she stands up and walks to Lady Fish’s home. She stares into it, trying to draw comfort from memories of her past meetings here. None comes.

She sits and slides down into the opening in the earth. The slick, dripping walls enclose her legs and shoulders. She keeps going down until she can no longer see open sky, and there she curls up into a ball and begins rocking back and forth, remembering better days when there was a voice in the darkness that told her everything was all right, and all the daily wounds life dealt her were far away, and nothing hurt.

Fucked, fucked, and more fucked
, thinks Bolan. He cracks open another bottle of Pepto, the third tonight, and pounds it.
Triple-fucked
, he thinks.
Quintuple-fucked. Octuple-fucked.
More, perhaps, but his math skills are lacking.

Bolan sits on a column of boxes in the exact pose of Rodin’s
Thinker
, staring out at the large basement below the Roadhouse. Every square foot is filled with large boxes, and inside each of these boxes are four shrink-wrapped sets of encyclopedias. To the average eye these would appear unremarkable, but within the fourth set in each box, in a hollowed-out space starting at
Uganda
and ending at
ultimatum
, is somewhere around seventy thousand dollars’ worth of heroin. Where these encyclopedias go, Bolan isn’t sure. But people pay a lot of money to make sure they get there.

He is trying to do three things right now. The first is to calculate exactly how much money is currently in his warehouse. This involves maneuvering around some astronomical numbers, but he is pretty sure he has about twenty million dollars’ worth of heroin here at this moment, ten million dollars’ worth of cocaine, and about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of encyclopedias (which no one gives a shit about, of course).

The second thing he is trying to do is comprehend exactly where the encyclopedias and the heroin come from. The origin of the cocaine he knows, having arranged that deal himself with the funds
generated from the heroin. But the heroin itself is a mystery. Before today he always believed (or perhaps
chose
to believe) that the man in the panama hat simply acted as a connection between Bolan and some foreign source. Yet after covertly sending out feelers into the networks of New Mexico, Bolan now knows that absolutely no heroin is being routed
to
the Roadhouse, especially not in any encyclopedias. It is only coming
from
the Roadhouse. Which means that these shipments he has Zimmerman pick up from many hidden caches in Wink are coming from somewhere local.

Perhaps Wink itself.

And that’s odd. Because last Bolan checked, there were no enormous poppy fields around Wink.

The third thing Bolan is trying to do is keep himself from thinking about a nasty suspicion he has: that the heroin he is distributing across the Southwest, and also throughout Wink, serves a purpose beyond making a lot of fucking money. What that purpose would be escapes him.

But though Bolan doesn’t remember a lot from his school days, one little factoid has come swimming up in his brain more and more: his history teacher once told them that Greek oracles had to ingest some very funny mushrooms to act as conduits for whichever god needed to speak. Bolan does not believe in a god or gods, but this bit of knowledge has somehow gotten stuck in his head: people might need a narcotic aid to navigate realms of the unknown.

And to his regret, Bolan knows there are a lot of unknown realms in Wink.

Is it possible that the only reason he is making millions of dollars off of heroin is that the man in the panama hat needs a select few citizens of Wink to be high?

The idea is stupid, ridiculous, laughable. Why would he need them to be high? What purpose could that serve? Well, they would need to be, reasons Bolan, if they had to go someplace the man in the panama hat could not go himself, and do something he could not do. But if he wants that, why not distribute the heroin himself?

Well
, thinks Bolan,
because he’s being watched too. He needs someone outside, someone distant.

Yet even if all this is true—and every conclusion is one hell of a stretch—why provide a warehouse-load of illicit drugs? Why not give Bolan just enough to get the necessary people doped up? Why give Bolan millions of dollars’ worth of product?

That one is a tough nut to crack. But Bolan thinks he knows.

They don’t understand how people work. Not really. They couldn’t present just a tempting offer: they had to make it unbelievable, something he absolutely could not pass up. Subtleties of any kind are lost on them.

And all of these mental arguments, which take several hours to sort out, lead to one question Bolan is absolutely terrified of:

If the people in Wink are able to make a fount of endless heroin out of nothing… what else can they do?

There is a tapping at the door, and Bolan jumps and nearly topples off the boxes. “Christ!” he says. “What?”

Dord is standing at the threshold. He is pale and twitching: one hand keeps tugging at his belt loops.

“Yeah?” Bolan asks.

“Got a call from Zimmerman,” says Dord. “He found Dee.”

“Yeah?”

“He was unconscious. Someone beat his face in.”

“At the
lab
?”

Dord nods. Then he begins bobbing his head as if he’s forgotten the conversation entirely and is listening to a song. He’s obviously coked to the gills.

“Who the hell goes up to the lab except us?” asks Bolan. “Us and…” He gestures toward nothing with a nod. The man in the panama hat is such a presence in every conversation that he hardly needs to be acknowledged.

“Don’t know,” says Dord. “Zimmerman says Dee’s up but he’s not talking so good. Concussion, probably.”

“Christ.”

Bolan considers the conversation to be closed, but Dord keeps standing there.

“What?” asks Bolan.

“One more thing, boss,” says Dord. “It’s, uh—talking.”

“What?”

“It’s talking. Typing.”

“What is?”

“That thing in your office. The light’s on.”

“What! You should have fucking said that first!” Bolan hops down off the column of boxes and sidles past Dord and makes his way upstairs.

He unlocks and enters the soundproof passageway. The stock ticker has printed out a long line of tape. It is the same word, over and over again, evidently repeated when Bolan did not answer:

MEETING MEETING MEETING MEETING MEETING

“What’s this?” says Bolan. “A meeting?”

A pause. Then:

YES

“A meeting between who?”

Another pause. Then the stock ticker types away:

BETWEEN YOU AND ME

Bolan pales. “You want us to meet? Then… well, come right up, I guess.”

NOT HERE TONIGHT AT GULCH BY HIGHWAY CROSSROADS

He almost chokes. “What? You want me to come to
Wink
?”

The machine is still. Bolan imagines it to be a hunched predator contemplating its next move.

Then:

YES MIDNIGHT

“But… I can’t… I can’t go there!”

The stock ticker is silent. It must not find that response to be worth an answer.