Unassigned Territory (10 page)

“You’ve got to eat something sooner or later,” she said. He had been turning down food since he’d met her. He had passed on lunch at a place called The Desert Inn and somehow he never had been able to get started on the A & W burger. Delandra had had a few bites of it, after finishing her own, then thrown the remainder at a sign. There was a six-pack of tall cans on the floor between her feet. She broke it open. “Let’s drink them one at a time,” she said. “And share. They’ll stay colder.”

He liked sharing with her. They passed the cold, sweating cans back and forth between them. He took long drinks and the beer burned in his throat, moving quickly to his head. “I don’t know,” he said after a time. He was looking into the rearview mirror. “I would feel better, I think, if I knew who that was, Delandra. I’m not kidding; that guy in the place was looking very weird.”

“Well, shit,” Delandra said. She shook her head. “You’re a nervous boy, Obo. Why don’t you just pull over and let him go by.” She shot out a booted foot and hit the brakes. The car swung into a skid. They were going down the road sideways for a moment—Obadiah fighting the wheel, trying to remember if you went with it or against it. He jerked the wheel back in the direction of the skid, hit the gas, and the car popped back around, ran off the pavement and onto the shoulder, finally sliding to a stop in a shower of dust and sand. “Jesus Christ,” Obadiah said, and killed the engine. The headlights drilled two holes into the night. The holes were pale yellow and filled with swirling clouds of dust. Delandra reached across his chest to kill the lights and everything went dark and quiet except for the sounds of their breathing and the popping of a hot engine.

Obadiah looked into the mirror. He could see those lights almost on top of them now. Suddenly a dark pickup shot past them and then hit its brakes. They could see the taillights come to a stop and what looked like the dark head of the driver turning to look back toward them. Obadiah remembered the large round head and thick glasses. Delandra still had one arm over his shoulders and he could feel her fingers digging into his flesh. He waited for back-up lights. The back-ups did not materialize, however, and suddenly the taillights were moving away from them once more, at last vanishing in the darkness.

“He just wondered if we were hurt,” Delandra said.

Obadiah sat watching the empty road. The black, tortured shapes of several Joshua trees stood grouped near the side of the car. In places their branches were touched by moonlight and stood out like silver against the night sky. Obadiah looked into Delandra Hummer’s face. “Don’t be too sure,” he said.

Delandra took a drink of beer. “Come on,” she said. “Who would it be? There’s nobody interested in this thing but you, me, a carload of niggers, and this fool I’m going to sell it to.”

When Obadiah looked away he felt her teeth on his neck. “It’s wired,” she whispered. “Wait and see.” And then her fingers were at his fly. When he looked at her she laughed. He tried crawling on top of her there in the front seat but got his feet tangled up in the wheel. They wound up stretched out on top of the case in back of the seats. “This glass is really thick,” Delandra said. “Just do it slow and deep.” Obadiah could feel her fingers back up under his shirt and her breath on his neck. He felt something give a bit beneath him. The movement was accompanied by the sound of cracking glass. He buried his face in her hair.

He didn’t open his eyes until he’d come and when he did he found that a corner of the canvas tarp had been pulled back beneath them and that by the moonlight slicing in through the rear window above their heads he could see something beneath the glass—what looked to be the dull gleam of two yellow eyes staring up at him. When he saw it he kicked something with his foot and the trunk lid sprang up suddenly behind them. Delandra screamed and Obadiah fought to get his pants back up over his ass before someone’s headlights could find it. He somehow wound up outside on all fours, crawling along a sandy shoulder—feeling that he was about to be sick once more while Delandra Hummer said something about roadside affairs and opened up on the Joshuas with the handgun she kept in the glove box.

Obadiah continued to crawl through the night. He couldn’t decide if he was ill, insane, or just very drunk. What he knew for certain was that he was moving much too slowly and something was gaining ground—the enormity, perhaps, of what he had done. He had broken his parents’ hearts. That was the worst part, he thought, about the kind of break he had made. It was not simply the wrestling with yourself, it was the people you hurt, the people who had given you love and yet were bound to see any wandering from the path as being somehow a rejection of that love. It occurred to him that this was not fair on their part, but there it was. Perhaps, he thought, this was after all the darkness outside—a dead spot in the soul, without equilibrium or pride, punctuated by gunshots and the dull gleam of monstrous eyes. Living on Bug House time. God have mercy.

Part of the trouble, it occurred to him, with the way he had been raised, was the odd blend of innocence and cynicism it fostered. The Friends had no problem with something like Vietnam. They’d known the score for some time now. The world, brother, was in the grasp of the Wicked One, and he guessed maybe he could not quite stop believing in that. His faith in a counterfeit world was quite strong. He accepted its imminent demise and believed it was earned. He had no quarrel with man’s fall. It was somehow redemption and the straight and narrow he had stopped believing in. It didn’t leave a lot to fall back on. He supposed he was not the first to contemplate this abyss—though that thought did little to comfort him now. He clutched at a handful of sand, hoping to calm the dry heaves which had taken him. He imagined once more the pink, sweating face of Bug I louse leering at him from an immense sky—the skin stretched tight from the scarring, the government-issue bridgework which allowed the mouth to sag in inappropriate places, the eyes glassy, red rimmed, a trifle wild. It was, he saw suddenly, the face that ordered the world. Not God or the devil. It was Bug House himself, the pudgy little son of a bitch. It was a kind of epiphany and he likened himself to Saul of Tarsus struck blind on the road to Damascus by the sight of his Savior. The immense face of Bug House, however, emitted no great radiance and rather than struck blind he found himself only slightly nauseous.

Delandra Hummer had put away the gun and taken up a redfaced Gibson Hummingbird. She was sitting on the passenger side of the seat with the door propped open and her legs stretched out in front of her so the moonlight could hit her boots. A simple three-chord progression wafted across the land. Obadiah imagined the softly glowing eyes of whatever it was they had stolen staring back at him from the glass-and-wood coffin. He imagined the eyes of the Mystery of the Mojave finding the Thorazine-blasted eyes of Bug House far above him and he felt himself gone weightless once more, strung like catgut between them. Delandra plucked the guitar and he himself was the sound—the waterfall of notes dissipating in the darkness. “Well Obo was a good old bo,” Delandra composed in country twang. “But I don’t know where he’s been. Obo why don’t you crawl on over and play with me. Obo why don’t you crawl on over and we’ll have a partee.”

Obadiah lay on his stomach in the cool sand, little bits of gravel sticking to his face and hair. He rolled onto his back and looked down the length of his body, across the tips of his shoes. He watched Delandra Hummer at the open door of the Dodge. Her song seemed to have driven his image of Bug House from the sky, leaving only the night, and it occurred to him that he was, in spite of everything, a lucky man. He thought about pulling himself together and getting to his feet but he let the idea slide. He was vaguely worried about scorpions and snakes but even that fear was not enough to overcome the inertia of the moment. He called out to Delandra across the tops of his shoes. “Delandra,” he called, and she stopped singing. He saw her turn in his direction though he imagined he would be hard to see—given his distance from her and his supine position. “What is it, Delandra? I mean, really. What is that Thing?”

Delandra Hummer strummed a chord. “Beats me,” she said. “But I’ll wager I can sell it.”

W
hen Rex found the Thing gone he had been seized by something more than panic, by an emotion as malign and ravenous as any he had yet endured. In a cold sweat he had climbed the hill back of the empty museum, boots sliding in the loose soil, a knot of white-hot pain riding high in his chest. And there was nothing for it but to run. And he had, driven by a dumb animal fear: fear of the men who had threatened him, fear of a new and unspeakable emptiness at the center of his being. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” Rex said. By the dim light of his dashboard he could see his miserable face reflected in the windshield of his father’s truck and it was to this flabby, translucent phantom that he occasionally addressed himself. “Man’s not stupid,” he said, repeating what the Indian had said to him. “Gracious no. Not this dumb suck butt. Not Rex Hummer.” The apparition grinned stupidly and Rex’s words came back to him like rain on a hard wind.

•     •     •

The men had been waiting for him in front of the bar, the two black men, the Indian. They were driving a 1959 Cadillac de Ville. The car was fire-engine red with white leather upholstery and so bright it was hard to look at by the light of midmorning. There was some kind of wooden chest riding lengthways in the backseat, making it necessary for all four men to ride up front as they returned to the museum.

It was a short, cramped ride and on the way the cadaverous black man offered an explanation. “My boss runs a business out of L.A.,” the man told him. “I make trips all over and I buy things. Take them back to the city. The Man owns a shop; he fixes them up, sells them.”

“Kind of an antiques dealer,” Rex offered.

“That’s it,” the man said. “But it doesn’t have to be antiques, just something I think people will go for.”

Rex had given this some thought. Somehow the man did not look like what you would expect an antiques dealer to look like.

Later, in the musty gloom of the museum, the man told Rex he believed his boss could use the Mystery of the Mojave. Knowing what his people needed, that was the thing, he said, the key to success. And it appeared the Creature would fit quite nicely at the intersection of Pico and Sepulveda where a second cousin’s eatery—Monster Burgers by name—could use a gimmick. “Stand him right there on the corner,” the man said. “Put a double double burger in his hand.” At which point the Indian had laughed out loud and the black man had offered Rex the absurd price of one hundred and fifty dollars for the culmination of his father’s life’s work.

They were, by this time, standing in the back room of the museum. The light, which had been so brilliant on the spines of the ridges, was now weak and pale, the color of soured milk as it spread across the wooden floor at their feet. “The Creature’s not for sale,” Rex had told them.

The cadaverous Negro turned to look at his two companions. “Thing’s not for sale,” he said. “Now ain’t that about a gas.” He reached inside his coat and produced a white envelope. Inside the envelope there was a yellowed piece of newsprint. “Then what’s this?” he asked. He passed the newsprint to Rex.

But Rex didn’t have to read it to know what it was. It was one of the ads Floyd had run when he first came out from Texas, when he had decided something as useless as the Desert Museum ought to be sold and had run a number of ads to that effect, without bothering to say anything about it to Rex. The ads said: “For sale: Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum. Object of Mystery included.” There had been virtually no response at the time and when Rex had confronted Floyd about it, telling him the museum was his and not for sale, Floyd had only shrugged it off and said, “Suit yourself,” and, as far as Rex knew, there had been no more ads.

“This is a year old,” Rex said. “The Object of Mystery is not for sale. None of it is.”

“Thing’s not for sale,” the man said once more. “None of it is.” He treated this as if it were a source of some secret amusement. “Well, fair enough,” he said at last. “But I must tell you, at some point the man I work for may want to see this for himself. He may want to make you an offer.”

The man had removed his dark glasses upon entering the museum and Rex now stood looking into a pair of deep black eyes. He said nothing.

“Just so we understand each other,” the man said. “The Thing may not be for sale, but we were here first. You won’t forget that. You won’t go moving it, or selling it to anyone else. Am I right? No funky numbers on the part of y’all. You wouldn’t do this poor nigger wrong?”

But it was the Indian who had answered—whose answer Rex was hearing still: “ ’Course not,” the Indian had said. And he had clapped Rex once on the shoulder, slapping him with a large, flat hand that felt to Rex like the backside of an iron skillet. “Man’s not dumb.”

Lord no, not Rex Hummer. And after that they had left. Confused, Rex had followed them as far as the porch, where he watched them walk back into the street. He had been told that it should be possible for him, during certain hot days in the spring, to see auras. Someone capable of seeing such things herself had told him this. He had yet to see any but the thought occurred to him in the empty museum that now might be the time. He saw nothing, however, except the heat waves on the red metal of the car and the men’s dark suits, which were like holes in the morning. On the opposite side of the road he had seen his sister. She was without an aura as well—though this did not surprise him. From her he got nothing more than the yellow-gray rooster tails of dust tossed by her bootheels as she climbed the hill, looking, he thought, like someone in a hurry.

Before the day was over he came to know what she had been in a hurry about. She always had been a sneak and he guessed that she had been spying on him, that quite probably she had heard everything that went down between him and the men, that from what was said she had gotten the idea that the Thing might be worth something and she had grown just desperate enough to steal it. And yet oddly enough his very first impulse was not toward rage but toward self-deprecation. He had in fact done what only hours before he had sworn not to. He had done a poor nigger boy wrong.