Unassigned Territory (29 page)

“But if somebody,” Delandra said, “killed Sarge for the chryslerama, why didn’t they start up the Electro-Magnetron? Why is the part still missing?”

“Because they didn’t get it. They killed him but they couldn’t find the crystal. And that could explain why Jack was out there that night, in the desert. They had been watching the museum, waiting for something to break. When we drove off with the Thing they knew something was up.”

“They waited for two years?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. You’ve got to admit it would explain why Jack was following us.”

Delandra stared into the seatback in front of her. She lifted the guitar from her lap and slid it over the seat so it rested behind the wheel—a six-eared chauffeur taking them nowhere. “If it was Jack at the burger stand.”

Obadiah shook his head. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “Something is going down out here. I’m not going to tell you I know what, exactly, but something.”

Delandra put her fingers to her temples. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’ve got to move. You’ve got to move. This is bullshit.” Obadiah just looked at her. “Don’t give me that. Your father may have been killed. You’re not interested?”

Delandra continued to rub her head, making little circles with the tips of her fingers. “Can’t you see what you’re doing?” she asked. “You’re making all of this up. This theory of yours all depends on believing Sarge when he says he asked somebody about the crystals. I mean crystals? Come on. The man was a bullshit artist. He could have picked up an idea like that anywhere. And I’ve seen plenty of notes where he claimed to have shown something to someone. Strictly bullshit. Can you imagine any reputable person driving to the desert to examine the Mystery of the Mojave? And if the stuff about the crystals is bullshit, then where are you? Sarge was sick, Obo. There were no marks on his body. You’ve seen the Thing and now you’re trying to build this big elaborate theory around it.”

Obadiah had been staring into the empty pool where a sliver of white light curved across the concrete bowl. He could not pretend to be unaffected by Delandra’s words. It was the kind of thing he had been wrestling with himself throughout the afternoon. One minute it would all appear to fit—like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, arranging themselves in an intricate pattern only to be dissolved with the next flick of the wrist, so that he would be left reminding himself of certain tragic fools from his recent past: the crazed, lonely people he had met on more porches than he cared to remember, alone with some weird theory they had hatched all by themselves—strange paranoid systems built from the detritus of years of unenlightened research on any number of marginal subjects until eventually everything they heard or saw could be made to fit the pattern—intrigues and conspiracies multiplying around them like cancerous cells. And he had wondered if it would end that way for him too—one more ragged pilgrim on the road toward some bankrupt enlightenment, endlessly sorting information while the truth rolled on, untouched, beneath his very nose. But then Bill Richards had knocked on his door. He had come bearing gifts and what Bill Richards had shown him, Obadiah was now about to show Delandra. He wished, however, to preface the revelation with one more gem of wisdom. “I know one thing,” he said at last. “You can take just about anything and make it sound ridiculous. You can also make it sound credible. I’ve lived with that sort of thing. I mean I grew up in a group most people will dismiss out of hand as being half-baked. And yet there are some very smart people there. And when you hear them talk about it you see there are ideas at the core that are not half-baked at all. And nine out of the ten people who are putting it all down are people who really don’t know anything about it. They’re just parroting what others have said, or repeating ideas they assume to be hip.”

“And you think that’s what I’ve been doing with Bill and Judy?”

“What if there was a way,” Obadiah asked her, “to check out some of this stuff?” When Delandra didn’t say anything he went on. “Because there is something else. Something new.”

It seemed to Delandra that with this statement a peculiar expression had attached itself to Obadiah’s face. The expression was something between a smirk and a sheepish grin. He looked like a man who had just taken all her checkers and her first impulse upon seeing this smile was to punch him in it.

Obadiah dug a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “Richards and Judy went back to the rest stop,” he said. “I told them about Sarge’s note. They went over the place with a fine-tooth comb.” Obadiah opened his hand. In his palm lay an irregularly shaped piece of crystal. Delandra groaned. “They found some of these in the towel dispenser.”

Delandra stared at the rock with a kind of horror. For it seemed to her that with the arrival of the stone, another presence had entered the car—something anonymous and malignant, an icy blackness to which she was no stranger.

“They said from the looks of the dispenser, no one had touched it for years. There’s a very good chance this is it, Delandra. And there’s a way to find out.”

So it was true, Delandra thought, there was something, what till now she had been content to call the Hummer Curse, and it had taken those who should have meant the most—all the men in her life. For she had seen them recede, drawn away into fantasy or madness, into some private hall of mirrors where no one else was allowed. Like some well-worn deck of flash cards, a handful of stratagems spread themselves in her mind. They were, however, by now quite familiar and of doubtful value. She had always believed in moments of sensitivity—moments in which a simple touch might wound or heal. It was a belief which had thus far done little more than fuel a nagging sense of guilt. And where now to place Obadiah Wheeler in this spectrum? Was there time yet to snatch him back from the void? Might she fuck him just desperately enough to save him? And yet even as she turned toward him he was going on about something else “It’s like there are all of these elements,” he told her. “And there are these relationships between them. This, for instance, is the area in which the Table Mountain People lived. It’s where Verity was sent to build his dome. Archaeologists found these unusual crystals at Mount Carmel. Now these people Bill knows of have found more crystals in the Table Mountain range, at a site which may have been used by the Table Mountain People, and those crystals may be like the ones Sarge found on the flat. And Trona itself? Do you know what that means? It’s a crystal. And then there’s all this secret government stuff out here—as if someone was on to something, but not telling anyone. And all these mining sites?...” Delandra might have bolted but the hour was late. The wind had begun to toss bits of loose rock into the bowl of the empty pool and somewhere at the back of the motel a shutter had begun to bang against a blue stucco wall. And though she continued to make the appropriate responses at the appropriate times, it was all on automatic pilot now, and that was something she was good at. The late Mr. Ott had owned an airplane for Christ’s sake. A Beechcraft Bonanza with room for four.

T
here were in fact several Jacuzzis at the Death Valley Inn, plus two bars, a couple of good-looking restaurants, and three heated pools. Harlan made no use of any of it Saturday night. He showered, lay down on the bed to rest his eyes before dinner, and when he woke up it was twelve o’clock noon, Sunday. At which point he’d taken a second shower, eaten a huge ranch-style breakfast, and returned to his room to use the phone. He wanted to get hold of the brother he’d spoken to earlier in New York but was told Brother Mitchell had gone to the farm and would not be back before Monday.

Harlan had sat for some minutes on the edge of his bed, thinking this over. He had wanted to talk to Mitchell again before moving on, though he could not say he found the prospect of a second night at the inn unattractive. He’d looked from his window, past the shading fronds of a well-kept palm toward a distant yellow ridge. At certain points along the ridge brilliant outcroppings of chalk-white stone rose abruptly like teeth before a turquoise sky. And he had thought, too, that until he managed to get hold of the brother in New York, no one would know where he was. There would be no phone calls, and none of the guests would address him as Brother Low.

Later he’d gone to a gift shop and bought several articles of clothing. He’d bought a pair of sandals, a pair of swimming trunks, a loose-fitting Hawaiian-style shirt, and a straw hat. The hat had a brown band and a red feather in it and was engineered along the lines of those made famous by Frank Sinatra. That evening he’d treated himself to double martinis in an uncrowded lounge near a huge stone fireplace and then taken himself into the Lotus Room for salad and prime rib, coffee, and a little something in the brandy snifter, and on the way back to his room, watching a sunset at the west end of the valley, had congratulated himself on only interrupting his meal once to think about the bodies with the missing parts and Obadiah Wheeler. In his room he had napped. On the second night, however, he awoke in time for the moonlight swim he had promised himself the night before.

He woke to a full moon, a mild dry wind. He stood for a moment on his balcony, his eyes closed, his body turned to the wind, before returning to look for the trunks he had purchased that afternoon.

There had only been one pair which fit him. They were dark brown with large green and pink flowers on them, and looking at himself now in the room’s full-length mirror, he was beginning to have second thoughts about wearing them in public. The trunks were dark. His chest, belly, and thighs were embarrassingly white. He looked like a lousy refrigerator on its way to Florida, a refrigerator with a black eye, and bruised ribs, nothing at all like what he had felt, naked on the balcony, in the wind. At last he swung a towel around his neck and went outside, his new rubber sandals flapping loudly against the bottoms of his feet.

The water in the pools was warm with a light mist rising from glassy turquoise depths. There were flagstone planters built up around the pools and there were palms in the planters. Their fronds rustled gently in the breeze. Harlan had one of the pools to himself. Perhaps fifty yards away a pair of couples sat with drinks in a Jacuzzi—bodies blurred in the mist, their voices reaching him across the stone.

He swam leisurely laps in the warm water, moving with surprising grace for a man of his size, letting the tension seep from his neck and shoulders, letting his mind drift. At some point it occurred to him just how long it had been since he had done anything like this. When he left Africa it was supposedly to rest, but really it had only been to step into another position of responsibility and there never had been much of anything resembling a real vacation. And that, in a backassward sort of way, was, he could see now, at least part of what he’d been after with this trip into unassigned territory. Backassward because of course he was still the man in charge, still the guy who had to tell everyone else what to do and when to do it. And maybe that was what lay back of his fight with the mechanic—just too much stress, for too long. And yet perhaps this was all he had needed. Just this. He could not believe, sliding now through the water which was as soft and warm as summer air, that he had really gone looking for a fight. It seemed like a bad dream, or the dumb move of some other moron he had only heard about.

He cruised to a stop at the shallow end of the pool and hooked his elbows up over the sides, left his body and legs to float out in front of him, occasionally breaking the surface with his toes. He had been doing this for several seconds when he became aware of someone watching him and looked back along one arm to see the cocktail waitress who had served him in the Lotus Room seated now on a plastic deck chair. He wondered how long she had been watching him. “Come on in”—Harlan heard his own voice booming in his ears, somewhat surprised by his own good humor—“water’s great.”

The girl laughed. She was perhaps twenty-five. She had dark hair and wore one of those little butt-twitcher uniforms common to her trade. Her legs were long and shapely, made to look even longer by the short dress and high-heeled shoes.

“I’m still working,” she told Harlan. “I’m on a break.”

He could see now the red tip of a cigarette glowing near her knee.

“Too bad,” Harlan said, the crazy part being that he meant it.

“I could maybe bring you another drink,” the girl offered. “Grand Marnier, wasn’t it?”

“Why not?”

“It’s on the house,” she told him when she returned.

Harlan thanked her. He was seated now on the deck, his legs still in the pool. He sipped the drink while the girl sat back down in the plastic chair and crossed her legs.

“Traveling by yourself?” she asked him.

Harlan said that he was, that he was out from Los Angeles on business. He thought for a moment that she was going to ask him something about his business, or that she would say something about the bruises on his face. But she didn’t. Instead, she asked him about where he was from. He told her that he was from the Midwest originally, but that just recently he had returned from Africa. She seemed to think it was quite interesting that he had been there, though she did not ask much about that either. She began instead to talk about herself. She told him she was from Arizona and had never been much of anywhere. She was divorced and had one kid, a girl. She asked Harlan if he had any children and he said no. She did not, he noticed, ask if he had a wife but went rather into a fairly extended rap about the difficulties of meeting men. Harlan went along with her. He said he didn’t see how she could possibly have any problems in that regard. She pretended to be flattered. “You know what I mean,” she said. There were, of course, a lot of men around, but too many were of the young, fuck-up sort, a breed with which she’d had her fill. Older, more mature men were evidently where it was at, at which point Harlan began to believe that, strange as it seemed, she was indeed coming on to him. He felt the warm water lapping the insides of his knees, the brandy warming his chest and face. What, he asked himself, would it take to make this evening complete?