Unassigned Territory (16 page)

“Delandra,” Obadiah said. “I’ve seen it, remember? He might have made it. But he did not make it out of tin cans and hubcaps.”

“Who said he did? He used all kinds of stuff. Fiber glass, resin, a special rubbery stuff some guy used to deliver in big canisters.”

“What rubbery stuff? What guy?”

“How should I know?” She had him by the shirtfront now and he could feel her knuckles against his chest. “All I know,” she said, “is that I’m going to sell the son of a bitch to these goons at Table Mountain and I don’t want anybody to queer the deal.” Her nose was about half an inch from his and her hair was all over her face and he fancied he could even see her pulse in that little hollow spot below her throat and what he really wanted, he thought, was to make love to her, to get his pants down and hers off, to pull her down on top of him with her dress and cowboy boots still on and his cock inside of her and fuck her by the light of the moon.

“Hey, come on,” he said. His hand was on the wrist that held his shirt. “The material, the material.”

Delandra released her hold. She had one leg out straight next to his and one drawn up and he could see in the moonlight the pale smooth skin of her thigh. “I should feed you to the fishes,” she said. It was, Obadiah believed, something John Wayne had said in a movie called
In Harm’s Way,
and he, in turn, repeated something Delandra Hummer had once written on one of Sarge’s cards: “Beat me, fuck me, call me Ruth.”

Before it was over she had him on his knees with one hand on his cock and her tongue in his ass and the sweat was running down his neck and hitting the cracked earth of the Mojave with the sound of rain on glass and it wasn’t, he supposed, anything at all like what had happened to Sarge Hummer. And finally the moon was high and white and they were side by side once more and Obadiah could feel the cool chalky ground on his bare back, and on his ass, and on his legs and he was very much aware that she was the only other living thing anywhere around him for miles and miles. Just the two of them, like the first astronauts marooned on Mars, like Adam and Eve, for Christ’s sake, somewhere east of Eden.

He could have gone on casting about for comparisons for hours but was interrupted by Delandra. She had rolled toward him with one leg over his and her thigh against his groin. She had one hand on his face and he could feel the dust on her fingertips as she turned his face toward her own. “You’ve got to understand something,” she said. “I’ve had enough crazy people in my life. You know what I mean? And there’s just no percentage in it.” She tightened her grip on his jowls so he could feel his cheeks pressing against his teeth. “Just don’t you go crazy on me too, you little fucker. Go crazy on me and I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

Obadiah was looking into her eyes and once he fancied that he could see the stars winking behind them. He didn’t want to go crazy. He really didn’t. He was, after all, a personal friend of a certain Bug House, and he’d seen where that got you.

T
he approach to Porkpie Wells was rough and rocky and when he entered the town Rex Hummer felt he had entered the skeletal remains of some huge beast. To his left a beaten black-and-white sign hung from a post. The sign said: PORKPIE WELLS. ELEVATION 12 FEET. POPULATION 26. The centerpiece of the town was an old hotel some businessmen from Los Angeles built in the twenties. It was empty now. Twenty years ago someone with renovation on his mind had painted everything white. It was a two-story building, shaped like a U. There were arches on the first floor and tall rectangular windows on the second. The shaded arches and dark interior walls which showed through the open second-story windows stood in sharp contrast to the bone-white stucco and were what in particular gave Rex the illusion of having penetrated the rib cage of an animal long dead. There were a few cottonwoods making a mess around a cracked stone fountain where a ceramic boy stood clutching his tiny ceramic penis. But there was nothing taller than the hotel itself, nothing to break the sharp angles of white and black before a blue blaze of sky.

It was the second time in as many days that Rex had made the trip. He was still looking for the woman. When on his first pass he had found her gone, he’d driven as far north as Goldfield, Nevada, where the woman owned a mining claim and a shack. When she wasn’t there either he’d driven back to Porkpie Wells. He intended to camp here, in the ruins of the hotel, until she showed.

He parked by the cottonwoods. The radiator made a soft hissing sound when he killed the engine and a pale cloud of steam rose from beneath the hood. As he climbed from the cab he could hear the soft patter of water as it dribbled beneath the front of the truck. He stood for a moment in the shade of a wall, watching the puddle, then turned and started along the courtyard toward the back of the hotel. He kept to the narrow strip of shade provided by the wall, down along one long wing until he came to the steps which led upward onto a wide stone porch and the entrance to the opera house. If the centerpiece of Porkpie Wells was the hotel, then the centerpiece of the hotel was the opera house. It was the tallest part of the building and sat at the center of the two wings. It, like the hotel, stood empty for most of the year, but during parts of the spring and fall when Porkpie was likely to see a fair number of tourists passing through on their way to the ranch and inn near Furnace Creek, the opera house was open to the public. It was the woman who ran the place. Her name was Roseann Duboise. She billed herself as the Buffalo Woman and performed what were supposed to be authentic Indian dances. She sang songs, played a respectable ragtime piano, and served imported German beers. In the off-season, when she wasn’t making a fool of herself with the dances or working her claim in Goldfield, she lived in a tiny dilapidated trailer perched on the side of the ridge back of the hotel. The trailer was open to the public year-round, whenever she was there. In it she read palms, told fortunes, and saw auras, though the manifestation of auras was limited to certain months of the year and particular atmospheric conditions.

Coming out on the back side of the inn, Rex could see her trailer against the side of the ridge. It appeared to be strewn rather than built there—the wreckage of some light craft, most of it an oxidized shade of pale yellow. At one end there was a black and silver sign with a hand and the word FORTUNETELLER painted on it. Rex figured he might as well check the trailer one more time before checking into the hotel. His heart thumped heavily, however, as he began to climb. To see the woman had not been an easy decision for him. He was afraid of her and harbored certain peculiar ideas about her true identity and the reason she seemed to know more about him than anyone should. It was either, he had decided, that she was what she said she was, a reader of secret signs or—and it was difficult to be sure, twenty some odd years having elapsed in the interim—she was the woman who once lived with Sarge Hummer just long enough to provide him with a baby girl.

The day was hot and bright and Rex made his way slowly along the steep path toward Roseann’s trailer. To the east he could see thunderheads. He had hit rain in Goldfield and now it looked as if the storms were moving west. Once, while pausing to wipe his brow, he thought he heard a distant peal of thunder, though it might have been a navy fighter—sonic booms not being an uncommon occurrence in Porkpie Wells.

The path Rex followed was bordered by a variety of red and black stones. As he neared the trailer he began to find an occasional cow skull among the rocks. The things lay grinning up at him with broken teeth. Back of the trailer the ground continued to rise, up toward the lip of a dun-colored ridge which swept across the sky in a long jagged line. And back of that ridge there were others—bits and pieces of which were visible from where Rex stood. The bits and pieces jutted still farther skyward in broken bands of sun-washed earthtones. On the other side of all that was Death Valley.

By the time Rex reached the trailer he was somewhat winded. He stopped to rest by the black and silver sign. Looking back toward the hotel he was once more reminded of the carcass of an animal. Among the permanent places of business in Porkpie Wells was Charlie’s Bar. The bar had once served as the Porkpie Lounge and was attached to one end of the building. Looking down on it from this height Rex could see a slender ribbon of smoke curling from the roof and what looked to be three souped-up motorcycles he had not seen the day before. The motorcycles had a lot of chrome on them which flashed in the midday sun.

Rex found the door of Roseann’s trailer closed and locked from the outside. It was the way he had left it. A large brass padlock which looked like it was probably worth more than the trailer hung solidly against the chalky yellow paint. The curtains were drawn and the place had a quiet dusty look about it, as if no one had been there in some time. Rex dragged a hand across his brow.

Since losing the Thing he had become prey to mind-numbing headaches and spells of dizziness. He felt dizzy just now and sat to rest on the wooden crate which did service as the trailer’s front porch. Waiting for the spell to pass, he thought of the day upon which a combination of atmospheric conditions and high-intensity heat had made possible the manifestation of his own aura.

It was in the parking lot of a McDonald’s burger joint at the edge of Baker. There were golden neon arches there and a sign with a lot of zeros on it and Roseann had observed his aura—arching between the golden arches like an electrical current jumping between poles. She said it was something to see. It meant, she said, he was without question intended for something special. She was a large dark woman, dressed that day like a man—a flannel work-shirt, in spite of the heat, jeans and boots, a black hat with a beaded band. She had been sitting alone on a plastic bench drinking Coca-Cola from a paper cup. Rex had heard her whooping at him as he waited in line.

Later she had read his palm in an effort to figure out exactly what the something special was. She had seen a lot of things but the special part had been kept from her. She wouldn’t say by whom.

“You’re Sarge Hummer’s boy,” she had said.

“You saw that in my hand?”

“Your whole fucking life is in your hand,” Roseann Duboise had told him. “Your old man still in the monster business?”

Rex admitted that he was. He was seated by then on the bench beside her, looking at her in the heat and it was there he had begun to entertain the notion that he had seen this woman before—though in another guise. He had tried to picture her with lipstick and red hair. “Have you and I met before?” he asked her.

The woman ignored his question. He later understood it was a way she had. “Your sister shot your eye out with a pellet gun,” she said.

He had to admit to being somewhat astonished at hearing this piece of information. “It was an accident,” he said, “and she’s my half sister.”

Roseann had only shaken her head. “She’s no good,” Roseann told him. “I’ll tell you that right now.”

He’d seen her a couple of times after that. He’d driven out to the opera house and caught her Indian dance routine once. And later, when Sarge was dead and he was at work on the Hum-A-Phone, he’d remembered her load of junk and gone out to see if she had anything he might be interested in collecting.

And that was the last time. He’d caught her one evening, drunk on her ass and still in the buckskins she wore at the opera house.

She’d brought him back up to the trailer and he had gotten a look at what was inside. The place was full of all manner of weird-looking stuff—teeth, scalps, knives, horns, beads, and Indian dolls. What she was most proud of, however, was her collection of sacred stones. The stones were round and smooth. Some were the size of baseballs, some more the size of golf balls. Some were dressed in little knit sweaters Roseann Duboise had made for them herself. She explained to Rex how the rocks were capable of travel. “You lose something,” she said, “you can send one of these stones to find it for you.” It sounded handy enough to him. He had been about to ask how he might become the owner of one himself when he caught sight of something else. It was in a shoe box beneath some rocks. It was a photograph of Sarge Hummer. The picture had been taken when Sarge was in the Marines. Rex had never seen it before. His father was standing by the wing of an airplane. He wore a leather flight jacket, a T-shirt, and khaki pants. And he was laughing. Rex had not seen his father laugh that often. When he asked Roseann about it she said she’d picked it up in a thrift store somewhere. She said she collected photographs—but only of strangers. She said she had no interest in photographs of people she knew. She told him he could take the one of Sarge if it would make him happy—which he was considering doing when she made a pass at him. At least he had always assumed it was a pass. She’d asked him to take a look at something and then she had shown him her twat. She’d hauled up her buckskins long enough for him to see that the thing had been shaved bare and tattooed—decorated with what appeared to be a ring of teeth. He had declined to examine the object at closer quarters and the last he had seen of her she was standing on the crate upon which he now sat. “Send your old man out here sometime,” she had told him. “I’d like to meet his ass.”

“Sarge is dead,” Rex had told her.

She’d stood there looking at him for a moment. She was a large woman and given the elevation of her porch and the white buckskins gleaming in the moonlight she’d managed to look more like a water heater than a person. She hadn’t said anything. She’d just gone back into her trailer, letting the door swing shut behind her with a loud, hollow pop, and that was it—the last Rex had seen of her and the last he expected to until, that is, he came upon hard times, until the weird music stopped playing in his head and the Desert Museum was standing empty and silent as the grave. He’d come back then. Perhaps this time she would tell him what he was meant for. There had to be something.

At last he rose from the porch and dusted his palms on the seat of his pants. He went back down the narrow walkway, past the skulls and the rocks, and the silver and black sign with the hand painted on it, noticing for the first time and with no small amount of disgust, that she had given the thing six fingers. On her ass, he thought, or perhaps it just had something to do with not being able to draw any better than she could dance.