Unassigned Territory (6 page)

When he was young, Obadiah used to lie awake nights thinking of persecution. He had stood sweating in the musty aisles of the Pomona Public Library with a copy of Fox’s
Book of Martyrs
propped open before him on more occasions than he cared to remember. The book had come to have a certain hold on him, drawing him toward it whenever he entered the building. Surviving torture seemed unimaginable to him. What would you do, brother, when they put the blowtorch to your balls? He had always expected to crack immediately. When the brothers in Liberia had cracked they had become instant objects of derision among their tormentors—often faring more grimly than those who had stood firm. Watching Neil Davis pass through a gate, he found himself thinking of Harlan Low. Beatings and bad water. Days without sleep. His contemplation of Elder Low, however, was interrupted by Bianca Allen, who was leaning forward once more, her arms folded across the back of his seat, her elbow pressing against his shoulder blade.

He watched as Neil crossed the yard and approached a trailer. The door was opened by a blond woman in a maroon bathrobe. The woman looked once in the direction of the car then quickly ushered Neil inside.

“Friendly,” Panama said.

Bianca made a peculiar snorting sound and Obadiah began to reflect upon what it might mean that the roofs of the trailers were skirted by a thin bead of red neon.

Within five minutes brother Davis was back in the car, having learned firsthand what the red lights were all about. “So the guy at the station has had his little joke,” he said. He paused to punch the steering wheel with the butt of his hand. The wheel vibrated in the silence. “It’s a house of prostitution,” he said. “We’ve crossed the state line. This is Nevada. The nearest gas station is that way.” He jerked a thumb toward the desert in what appeared to be no direction in particular. “But the woman here says the road is bad and that we should wait until morning. There’s a workshed that way”—he jerked his other thumb in the opposite direction, toward the end of the trailers—“in which there may be a couple of gas cans.” He paused for a moment. “She says we’re welcome to it. She says that this place is pretty well known but that most people don’t drive in. They fly. There’s a strip over there on the other side of the trailers.” Neil stopped talking and, in the silence that followed, the drone of a distant engine grew out of the night. Neil seemed to find some small satisfaction in the sound. “See,” he said, “there is one.”

They listened as the sound of the engine grew and a small plane did, in fact, set down somewhere on the other side of the trailers, after which they could hear the laughter of men.

“Well,” Panama Allen asked, “how do you do?” Her words were followed by a burst of high-pitched, unpleasant laughter. “So where do we sleep?” Bianca wanted to know.

“I guess we’ll have to sleep right here,” Neil Davis said. “We certainly can’t sleep in there.” He gestured toward the trailer. “I believe there are some blankets in the trunk.” The night had turned surprisingly chilly after the heat of the day. “I’ll get them.” They could hear him at the rear of the car, shifting weight, banging things around. At last he returned and sat down behind the wheel once more. “Damn,” he said. “Excuse my language, but I guess I took them out to make room for the literature.”

Bianca jabbed at the back of Obadiah’s seat. “I don’t know about you all,” she said, “but I’ll sleep in there if they’ll let me.” Obadiah had no choice but to open the door and let her out. As he was doing so Neil spoke up at his side. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, sister.” Bianca was by now, however, standing in the lot near the door. She leaned forward, almost touching Obadiah and spoke to Neil across the front seat. “My butt’s cold right now, honey. You can have the car, and this trip, too, as far as that goes.” With that she turned and walked off toward the gate. “That child,” Panama said, and followed the exclamation with one more burst of high-pitched laughter.

Obadiah looked toward the trailers. The red neon drew a narrow vibrating line at the edge of the sky and above the neon a piece of the moon had risen like a chip of melting ice, bathing the desert in a snowy light.

It was, alongside every other night he could think of, the longest Obadiah could recall. It dragged on interminably, charged with half dreams and bizarre levels of consciousness, the buzzing of lonely planes, and when at last he stood, along with Neil Davis, in the workshed at the far end of the trailers, checking for gas cans by the first gray light, he felt that they had been there, at the side of that narrow road, for at least several days.

There was gas—perhaps two gallons’ worth, enough, the woman who had first met Neil at the door surmised, to get them to a Chevron station somewhere down the road. Neil gave the woman some money and, in a surprising offer of reconciliation, suggested that Obadiah drive. Perhaps he assumed that even Obadiah could not lose them on a road without turns. Perhaps he wished to save himself for the more important driving which lay ahead. Obadiah accepted the offer. He listened to advice on the avoidance of potholes and started down the road. For a time, he could see the woman from the trailers in the rearview mirror. She was standing at the edge of the chain-link fence in the maroon bathrobe, one hand raised to shield her eyes, one at her side. There was something in the pose, he thought, which suggested the wife of Lot, turned to statuary at the edge of Sodom. He looked at her several times and then at last she was gone and they were alone with the morning and it was, he had to admit, in spite of everything, quite beautiful. The distant hills which at sunset had turned purple appeared once more as jagged stripes of red and yellow on a field of crystal blue. The air was fresh—so fresh you could taste it, dry and clean, yet shot through with the scents of greasewood and sage. Obadiah wished he could feel more in tune with it, less a spectator. As it was, he clung to the wheel of Neil’s LeSabre like a ghost while the morning slipped past him, following a narrow dirt road as it crawled through a forest of Joshua trees.

At last the car peaked a small rise and began a bumpy descent. In the distance a handful of buildings became visible—scattered across a corrugated hillside. The road curved and the buildings slipped from view.

“There it is,” Neil said, “a Chevron sign, just ahead.”

It seemed to Obadiah that he had seen something too—red letters on a field of white. He squinted into the dust, the twisted limbs of the Joshuas, the heat waves just now beginning to swarm at the edges of the land.

When the sign appeared again Neil groaned and slapped at the dashboard with the palm of his hand. It was not a Chevron sign at all, but rather some kind of homemade billboard.

Sunbeaten and buckled, it swung toward them from a turquoise sky. There were large letters on the sign. Once, Obadiah supposed, they had been red. Now they were the color of dried blood, flecked with white where the paint had fallen away, scarred with buckshot. Obadiah dragged a hand through his hair. “What is it?” Bianca asked from the backseat. As if in answer the dusty LeSabre made an odd kind of whirring sound and emitted a cloud of pale smoke. SEE THE THING! the billboard said. Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum. LAST CHANCE GAS, COLD BEER.

S
low Hound, Pluto, Pluggard, Stinkhorn, Link, even a Ruth: Rex and Delandra Hummer had named all of their father’s creations—no matter how pathetic. And many were painfully so—some bit of chicken wire left to protrude from a twisted limb, the curled end of a sheet of fiber glass not completely covered with resin left to rise from beneath a formidable jaw. More than once, standing in the gloom of Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum, surrounded by a handful of schoolmates come to inspect the latest installment of the Mystery of the Mojave, Rex Hummer had been embarrassed by his father’s reckless craftsmanship.

Rex thought about them now—the whole sorry line of homemade monsters—as he lay in the back of a twenty-five-foot Terry trailer and waited for the dawn. It was true that Sarge had honed his skills. What began as a scam had ended as an obsession. Sarge had given up on everything else, the gas station, the bar; toward the end there had only been his work—long hours in the shed back of the museum, discarding creatures almost as fast as he could turn them out, littering the desert with severed mannikin parts and fiber glass castings, turning that whole area, from the back of the building to the crest of the first hill, into a veritable junkyard of discarded Things. Sarge had known by that time that he was dying, and he had simply pared it down—Rex could see it now. The man had channeled his energies—everything else could go to hell, and had.

There were a lot of things about his father that Rex had never known—never would know, now. He had resigned himself to that, to dealing with what little he had. Once Sarge had been a Marine. He’d started out in the peacetime Corps. He had been in the Philippines in the beginning and he had been there again, at the end, when the Corps came back. He had seen some shit. He was not patriotic about it. Once to Rex’s mother’s great horror, Sarge had apparently started a fistfight at a Fourth of July day parade by refusing to stand for the national anthem. Rex had heard the story, more than once. Sarge had been a car salesman, a roofer, a carpet layer. He invested a small inheritance in a raceway. The venture failed. Then Sarge passed a few bad checks and wound up in the California Correctional Institution for Men at Chino. When he got out his wife was gone. She’d left with one of his partners from the raceway. Sarge’s drinking increased. He wrecked a car and nearly died, receiving for his efforts an odd heart-shaped scar across his forehead. It was not long after the wreck that Sarge moved himself and Rex to the desert. Rex was five.

When Rex was eight, Sarge met another woman, a fat, sloppy woman, in Rex’s opinion. The union produced a child—Delandra—a fat, dark-haired baby that looked almost Mexican. Sarge never married the woman and when she left, she left the kid, too, just as Rex’s mother had left hers, and Sarge was the father of two.

It was then that Sarge hit on the idea of the Desert Museum and the Mystery of the Mojave. He’d seen similar scams and he was, after all, in the right place for it. “People will believe in things out here,” he had said. “It’s the space and the emptiness. And no one gives a fuck.” Rex could still remember him driving into town and coming back with an armload of monster magazines and comic books, could still remember him hunched over a failing card table to produce the first childlike drawings of the Creature—they had seemed childlike to Rex even then and he was scarcely ten years old himself.

What Sarge might have lacked in talent, however, he made up for in drive. He was a thick, powerful man—a good deal shorter than his brother Floyd, but nearly as strong, with a full head of coal-black hair which he wore slicked back wet above a tanned head and the raised flesh of the curving scar, and soon enough he’d been at work on the museum, hammering and sawing, building mostly with scraps he picked up at other building sites, until at last, there at the edge of Route 15 where it wound through the Mojave Desert, on the California side of the state line, there really did spring up the low, ramshackle collection of clapboard and scrap, and there really were big red-and-white signs to attract the curious, and there really was, at one end of the odd building, in a room built especially to house it, asleep on a bed of red dirt, beneath a dusty glass case, the first crude version of Sarge Hummer’s Mystery of the Mojave. It lay twisted in the musty gloom like the victim of some terrible accident, arms and legs akimbo, sand carefully arranged to cover the mistakes, dead gearshift eyes staring blindly into the raised wooden roof where thin shafts of sunlight pierced the cracks and filled the room with an eerie, almost cathedral-like light.

For the next fifteen years you could say that Rex Hummer grew up with the Thing, one Thing or another. His first real job was sneaking around in the dust attaching bumper stickers to cars which read: I SAW THE THING! The work paid a dollar an hour. It was dangerous. Most people don’t want a bumper sticker admitting to such an act—particularly the kind which adheres to the chrome in such a way that removal is both messy and time-consuming, occasionally impossible. You can get the kind that ties on and Rex always wished that they would but Sarge couldn’t see it.

Later, when Delandra was old enough, she would help and Rex came to understand that there was something about a girl, a pretty one: Delandra could get caught and not get yelled at.

Or maybe it was just that she was younger, for as she grew older and fatter—more like her mother in Rex’s eye—people yelled at her too. But by then both she and Rex had grown more hardened to the reproof; they had also gotten better at it and were caught less. By this time, too, they had learned to make more of a game of it and Rex still had fond memories of sitting beside Delandra in the front seat of Sarge’s Chevy truck watching the
turistas
spill back into the lot, blinking their eyes against the mighty sun, some shaking their heads, some chuckling, or maybe explaining to some kid too young or too stupid to know better that it was all a joke, that some guy had just made it himself. And sometimes a few would stumble out laughing because Delandra had snuck in that night and replaced Sarge’s usual bit of drivel (the part about how he had found the Thing in the desert and how it had been examined by scientists, and so on—which information he kept on a small card at the foot of the glass case) with something clever of her own. Delandra’s cards usually said things like “Beat me. Fuck me. Call me Ruth.”

The smiles, however, tended to fade when their owners saw what had been done to the rear bumpers of their cars—that bright yellow sticker with the black squiggly letters, like they’d come from some horror movie poster: I saw the
Thing
!. Sometimes they’d go back and bitch at Sarge about it but usually it came to nothing. There was always something about Sarge, his big square head and hands, his thick sloping shoulders, those quick black eyes that had seen all the shit. Most people just drove off complaining and it was Rex and Delandra’s turn to smile. I saw the Thing, sucker.