Unassigned Territory (7 page)

The really crazy part, though—Rex thought later, when it had all ended—was that none of them, none of those families on their way to Death Valley, none of the Vegas-bound high rollers, fifty-dollar haircuts, white belts, and double knits ablaze beneath a desert sun, none of those husband-and-wife Harley-Davidson teams in color-coordinated leathers, none of the conventioneers—the endless parade of UFO watchers, 4-H’ers, cowboys, and truckers—not one of the whole miserable crowd, ever did get to see the last and final version of the Thing—the one without a name because just to look at it had been enough to send both Rex and Delandra running for the door and the night beyond it, the one that was so very smooth without a hint of chicken wire or fiber glass or resin, the one whose strange and cavernous skull held eyes that were somehow still alive and could roll right with you, smoke you sucker, on the very spot, and Rex had to admit that it would have been worth something to have stood there just one time with the Sarge, to have watched just one batch of tourists spill out of that clapboard gloom and make for their cars—real fast, the way Rex liked to imagine it, tripping over their own goddamn feet, fumbling for keys and yelling at their squalling brats—driving like madmen back out into those terrible miles of nothing, knowing at the bottoms of their stingy souls that somehow things were just a little weirder than they had originally thought, that the Mystery of the Mojave was for real, Jim, you’d better fucking believe it.

B
ut of course it never happened that way and Rex Hummer was able to treasure no such memories. Vindication had been a long time coming. That it would one day arrive was the stuff of Rex Hummer’s dreams and he thought often of his own first glimpse of Sarge Hummer’s revenge. It had come on a cool and moonless night. Rex and Delandra had known by then of Sarge’s illness and when he failed to present himself for dinner on a second consecutive evening they had gotten worried.

The museum that night was without light—Sarge having recently blown some fuses which he had failed to replace. Rex had carried a flashlight and together he and his sister had followed its weak beam through the familiar rooms. As they approached the resting place of the Mystery of the Mojave, however—which room it was also necessary to cross to get to the shed—it appeared that another kind of light was seeping from beneath the closed door to meet their own. The light had an odd greenish color about it, together with an unpleasant odor—something distasteful and acrid, something like the odor of burning batteries, something that had made him want to turn away—and he had stood there for a moment, hesitating, turning to Delandra, their faces close enough so that even now he could remember the scents of tobacco and Juicy Fruit on her breath, the greenish light reflected in her black Mexican eyes. At last he had pushed open the door. The odor grew stronger, as did the greenish light which was clearly coming from the glass case containing Sarge Hummer’s latest installment of the Mystery of the Mojave—a version neither Rex nor Delandra had yet seen. Rex approached the box slowly and what he saw there he had never, even after all this time, arrived at a satisfactory way of describing. Sometimes it seemed to him as if the Thing was an animal, and sometimes it seemed to be a machine. The body was big and there were whole areas covered by what he could only describe as matted fur, or possibly feathers. In other places there was no fur at all and things that might have been bones swelled out bare and smooth, shining softly in the dim light. Still other parts had a hard, armorlike quality about them and gave off a faint iridescent sheen. The green light seemed to come from the Creature itself—if indeed it was a creature—to seep from peculiar cavernous openings in what Rex supposed was the Thing’s skull. And beneath two of these openings were what appeared to be a pair of smoldering eyes. The eyes were the worst, or most magnificent—or at least the most memorable—part of all. They seemed capable of movement and on the evening in question had for some indeterminate period of time effectively reduced Rex Hummer’s spine to jelly and his tongue to wax while somewhere high above his head a peculiar wind—or at least he had first imagined it to be a wind—had begun to sing among the wooden rafters, and something like tumbleweeds had begun to scrape the parched clapboard walls.

It was hard to say now just how long he and his sister had stood there, struck dumb by what their father had wrought, but at last their legs had begun to work and they had run back breathless into the night and the desert where Sarge himself was to die just twenty-four hours later—not hard and ugly like the doctors had said: he just stopped and died and that was it. They’d found him facedown in the rust-colored sand, by the butane tanks in back of the Chevron.

For Rex Hummer, that night in the museum had come to mark a turning point, a bisecting of his life in which the cluttered slate of what had gone before was wiped clean and nothing that came after it could ever be quite the same. Sarge Hummer had passed from a figure of ridicule to one of immense mystery. Thomas had touched the side of Jesus, his fingers in the open wound. Rex Hummer had seen the Thing. He pasted one of his own bumper stickers to the rear of his trailer and prided himself on its secret meaning. And yet it was a full year before he returned to the resting place of the Mystery of the Mojave.

It was during that year that Floyd moved out from Texas to take over the station and Delandra moved into town. And Rex had been left alone with Sarge’s land, the trailers, and the Desert Museum. He grew used to the loneliness. The land was all owned free and clear and Floyd was willing to pay for odd jobs around the station and bar. There were times he thought of leaving. But where would he go? And how could he leave what Sarge had left? It was like some secret knowledge passed on from one generation to the next. It was what made him different. And what gave him power—or could be made, he knew somewhere in his heart, to give him power. It was a puzzle he reflected on at great length and at last he began to visit the museum once again.

He had to. By the end of a year he was afraid that perhaps his memory was playing him for a fool. He discovered to both his relief and his astonishment that it was not, though it seemed to him that with the passing of time the greenish light and peculiar odor had faded—almost, as if the Thing were cooling down. And soon he was returning on a regular basis, though always by night. And he took to wearing certain clothes, to the practice in fact of certain repeated gestures and thoughts before entering the room itself. And finally an only half-articulated idea had begun to form and the lights had once again begun to flicker in Sarge Hummer’s old shed. And while the regulars around the junction sat pickling their brains at the Cock & Bull, chasing the few unattractive women the climate had to offer, occasionally punching one another out and in general squandering and debauching their sorry lives in the pursuit of trivial pleasures, Rex Hummer took his first faltering steps down that path least traveled, storing for himself something no thief could steal, nor moth and rust consume. He began work on the Hum-A-Phone and an odd music had begun to play in his head.

He began with the horns he found in the rusting carcasses of cars he came upon back among the hills. He particularly liked the horns from the older cars—curved and rusted like the bodies he had taken them from, touched by the desert. The desert, he discovered, was always there, in the parts he liked best. He found it in the scraps of corrugated tin he took from empty mining shacks, in the pieces of broken glass and in the small smooth stones.

He attached rubber balls to the horns and mounted them on racks so he could squeeze several at once. He cut the tin into thin strips of varying length and suspended them on wires from a metal rod. He filled small coarse sacks with rocks and put the pieces of broken glass in the bottom of a pail. He made pedals for his feet and connected them to mallets with which he could bang the glass in the pails or hit the strips of metal. He made a rack with hollow sticks on it and when he blew into the sticks they produced a high, strange whistling sound. He added the keyboard from a child’s xylophone he found in a charred ruin. But whatever he added, it always seemed to him that something was still missing. The Hum-A-Phone grew to a ridiculous size and when he had shown it to Delandra on her return to the junction—the used-car dealer dead, a warrant hanging over her head, looking as tired and burned-out as he’d ever seen her—she had only shaken her head as if the sight of it made her feel even older than she looked and told him he was as bad as Sarge Hummer and something had moved inside of him as she said it, as if hearing just those words spoken out loud had triggered a series of recognitions capable of delivering both joy and unbearable sadness. He understood for the first time that he could add to the machine forever, that there would always be one piece missing, one element of a sound which played almost continually now in his head, that was not just as he wanted it, and that what really he had set out to reproduce was what he had heard that first night in the museum, what he had taken for the whine of wind in the rafters, the dried thorns of dead weeds upon clapboard walls, and yet a sound that was somehow more than the sum of those parts—something like the last plaintive cry of a wounded gull circling an endless winter sky—the voice, in fact, of the Thing itself, and when he understood that he sat down and cried. He walked barefoot in the desert and cut his feet on rocks and he felt for the first time what he guessed Sarge must have felt in his workshed—why he was always there, always discarding the last version in favor of the new, never satisfied—until perhaps at the very end when at last he had made the connection and, having made it, lay down to rest. And so Rex understood something else as well—the meaning of Sarge Hummer’s legacy, the mark he had been left to match. He was at once proud and brokenhearted. A lifetime of yearning unwound before him like some lost and endless highway, humming in a voice he could not name.

A cold sweat had collected on Rex’s brow by the time the first lines of color had begun to gnaw at the edges of a cool and inhospitable day. It had been a sleepless few hours and he could not recall a night having fled so quickly. He stood now on the cold flooring of the Terry trailer in his bare feet and considered his predicament.

He had often imagined a reopening of the Desert Museum. Strobe lights. Stereophonic sound. Rex Hummer in white buckskin at the controls of the Hum-A-Phone. The unimaginable creature paired with the unimaginable sound. Enough to turn any citizen’s spine to piss. For months he had worked toward such a goal and he had waited for a sign.

He had often tried to imagine what form the sign might take. The possibility of pimps in a dust-covered de Ville had in particular eluded him. And that he should be bullied into an advance tour before he was ready seemed a mockery of all that he had done; yet there seemed no alternative to meeting them as he had said he would back on the street in front of the Cock & Bull. It would be better to be there himself than to let them nose around without him. And these were clearly men who did what they damn well pleased—some throwback to the wildmen that had once roamed these plains and Rex did not for more than a second or so imagine he was the man to call their hand, or draw against the drop on the main street of the junction.

He thought of the brutes now as he studied his reflection in the small square mirror above the plastic sink—the broad, fleshy face, the thick, sloping shoulders. He was indeed Sarge Hummer’s son, and he could not help wondering how Sarge would have handled the situation. There was a rifle under the bed in the trailer—something else Sarge had left him—but Rex had never fired the thing and was more than willing to leave it there now. He would meet them he supposed with nothing more than a few shots of bourbon in his guts to ease the pain.

He went to the kitchen and took a pint bottle of Jim Beam from the cupboard beneath the refrigerator. He knew what people thought of him. They thought he was weird. They’d thought Sarge was a little weird, too, but they had respected him. In Rex’s case they just thought he was weird. They were, of course, moronic assholes and he was bound one day to set their heads on straight. He took a couple of pulls on the bottle and chased it with some water from the sink. He recapped the bottle and stuck it back under the fridge. Fuck yes. It was something he liked to think about—setting heads straight. Vindication would cast her shadow among these barren hills yet and if she was a long time coming it was at least good to know that upon arrival she would swing a heavy boot.

Fifteen minutes later, the Jim Beam still burning his empty stomach, dressed in T-shirt, jeans, and broken-down cowboy boots, he made his way down a steep trail toward the main drag of the junction.

He paused at the bottom of the grade, long enough to drag a hand over a three-day beard and then back, through his hair, which felt thicker than it should have with grease and dirt.

Up on one hill he could see the ruins of Bob Holt’s canvas awning. He noticed, too, Delandra’s dirty green Dart parked near the Chevron. He stood for a moment eyeing the car. It was badly dented from all the things she had run into. Some of the dents were new, others had gone dark with rust. There were two yellow-and-black stickers on either side of the rear bumper. I saw the thing! And indeed she had. Though all she’d ever said about it was that it was no big deal, that he should have gotten good at it—it being all he had done—and had then gone on to note that the sad part was, it was like being good on the accordion, no one gave a fuck. But the first thing she had done with the car Mr. Ott gave her was put the bumper stickers on the back and he never had been able to figure that one out. He was about to go on when a peculiar sound came to his attention.

The sound had come from somewhere behind him and he looked back in the direction from which he had come. What he saw was the bright flash of sunlight on chrome and glass—a spot of it moving down out of the hills. Car, he guessed, coming down off that little old back road, which was unusual these days because there wasn’t anything back there but an overpriced whorehouse across the line and no one that he knew of ever drove in. It was a businessman’s sort of place and they flew in. The car had raised a halo of dust to hang in the sky above the flash of metal and sun, but he could see now, too, as the car got closer that it was smoking as well, steam leaking out of the grille and joining the dust, and he guessed that was the reason for the peculiar sound. Assholes had probably broken something on that bad road and he guessed Floyd would probably figure a way to ream them still further before they got out of this place. He thought about that for a moment and it almost made him smile but then he thought again of those boys waiting for him and the smile was short-lived.