Unassigned Territory (8 page)

D
elandra Hummer listened to a cat on the sheet metal roof. She put a pillow over her head and tried to go back to sleep. Then Bob Holt’s shepherd began to bark and she gave it up. There was a warm yellow light breaking through the blinds which covered the room’s only window. The light only looked warm, however; the room was still cold as hell. She kicked back the covers and sat up on the edge of the mattress. The mattress was on the floor. There was a straw mat alongside the mattress but the cold rising off the concrete came through it and made the bottoms of her feet ache.

She sat there for a moment in an effort to get her bearings. She’d been living in the room for a month now and every morning she looked it over like she was seeing it for the first time and was surprised to find herself there. Her father had built the room years ago when he’d first moved to the desert. It was what he and Rex had lived in until the trailer came. He’d built it over a concrete slab he’d found behind the station. The walls and roof were made from bits and pieces of things he’d taken from local mining sites. It was amazing that the structure was still standing. What was even more amazing was that she had come back to it. A month ago she’d been sleeping on a king-size water bed surrounded by mirrors and oil paintings of plump naked women. Now she was surrounded by clapboard and tin, with nothing more interesting to look at than the dust-covered rocks she had collected as a child. And the rocks made her blue. Looking at the rocks she was forced to think about Sarge, to reflect upon the fact that he had—God only knew why or when—taken the trouble to move the things up here from the trailer where she had kept them, to arrange them in neat rows upon the pieces of pine he had nailed to the walls to serve as shelves. It was an image to boggle the mind and to think about the why of it was to invite a depression which might linger for days. “Never thought I’d fall, but the bottle took it all,” she said—they were the lines to a song. Except that in her case it wasn’t the bottle. It was something else and she had yet to put her finger on it.

She’d slept naked and when at last she managed to get her ass off the mattress she moved quickly around the room, picking up whatever article of clothing she happened to see and putting it on. She found a black-and-white zebra-striped cotton dress, a pair of red-and-yellow cowboy boots. She added a black pullover mohair sweater against the cold. When she picked up the sweater she found there was a rock from her collection beneath it. She picked the thing up and looked at it in the illusory light. She could still remember finding it. Actually, she could remember finding them all. For the most part, there was little of real value in her collection. Some quartz and fool’s gold, a few geodes. Mainly there were rocks that looked like something else. The rock in her hand, for instance, had reminded her of a fat woman’s ass. There had even, at the time, been a particular fat woman in mind—someone she had seen with Sarge when he thought no one was looking. The geodes were really her favorites, however. It was because they looked like one thing on the outside and like something else when you opened them. She placed the fat woman’s ass on the shelf next to her diploma from the Rainbow Beauty College and jerked the blinds. She was treated to a peculiar sight.

There were two cars headed down the main drag from opposite directions. One was a baby-blue Buick, the other, a red Cadillac convertible with the top down. Both cars had California plates and both were streaked with dust. The Buick was smoking.

The next thing she noticed was the unusually high number of Negroes suddenly converging on the junction. There appeared to be several in each car. She took a Kleenex from the pocket of the dress and blew her nose—painfully. She seemed to recall having mashed it against something, possibly a fireman. Lurid fragments of one more lost night rose suddenly like a gritty haze across the morning. She deliberately avoided remembering any more and noticed—as the cars below her drew closer—the most peculiar thing of all. It was her brother, Rex Hummer. He had managed somehow, together with the three Negroes, to squeeze himself into the front seat of the de Ville. And there he sat, hopelessly contorted in an effort to accommodate his companions, his big white face shining in the sunlight. The blacks were wearing hats and shades. Except that one of them wasn’t a black man. That was the next thing she noticed. He was almost as dark as the others but as the car passed below her she saw that he wore the kind of hat the Indians wore and that there was in fact straight black hair hanging out beneath the brim in back, covering the collar of his jacket, and seeing that made her uneasy because he had the look of someone she had not planned to see again.

The cars, which were moving quite slowly, stopped as they drew alongside one another and Delandra could see a white man in the Buick asking for directions. It looked as if Rex was trying to answer him. She could not, of course, hear what was being said, but once she saw Rex gesture back over his shoulder in the direction of the station—as if that was what the man had been asking about. Delandra wiped her nose and chucked the Kleenex. She went to a small refrigerator at the foot of the bed and took out a beer. “Hair of the dog,” she said. Then she moved back to the window.

The Buick had by now reached the gravel drive which circled the pumps. The red de Ville had reached her father’s museum. There was a young man sitting behind the wheel of the Buick. She guessed that he was in his early twenties. He had blond hair and she found that he reminded her of a lifeguard she had once known in Manhattan Beach. The memory was a pleasant one and she decided the young man looked like someone she should probably fuck. On the other hand, the man she had seen in the Cadillac was now standing at the entrance to the museum with his back to her and he looked like someone she should probably get closer to. It was the kind of dilemma her life had thus far been made of and she felt her heart quicken in her chest. When she stepped outside into the morning she found that the blond-haired boy was standing in the sunlight staring at her and so she supposed it was a case of first things first. She smiled down on him from the concrete ledge which skirted the station’s metallic walls just as a sudden gust of wind pinned the cotton dress to her legs. She could see the wind moving across the face of the grade. She saw a patch of wild-flowers turn their faces to the road. She saw pollen dust and the luminous white petals of the Joshuas floating in the sunlight, drifting like snow above the desert floor.

I
t was late Sunday afternoon before Neil Davis got through to Harlan Low at the Tonopah Hotel. Harlan stood in the hotel’s lobby, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear, and looked out across the soiled red carpet, the flagstone steps, and the street beyond them. The street looked white and dusty in the full heat of the day. Above the buildings which lined the street across from the hotel Harlan could just make out a thin sliver of sky.

“Davis,” he said. “Get hold of yourself, brother. Just give me the facts.” He had not had to speak that harshly to anyone in some time. The last part, about the facts, even sounded corny to him. He wondered where he could have picked up such a line. Television perhaps. There was a television in the lobby of the Tonopah Hotel. Harlan could see its dark screen now—a dull thick mirror above the bar. He could make out his own reflection—the white dress shirt he wore standing out quite vividly in the gloom. He had to look up to see the screen and the angle from which he observed himself served to make him look even heavier than he already was. He looked like a cartoon. “What?” he asked. He was not sure if he had heard correctly. He continued to study the image above him with a kind of contempt. Neil Davis repeated what he had just said and Harlan realized that he had heard correctly after all. He looked away from the television set and into the scarred wood of the booth. He studied his free hand, the short thick fingers and neatly trimmed nails. He discovered that he was nodding his head, as if Brother Davis were standing in front of him. “All right,” he said at last. “It’s going to be all right. You stay there. I’ll leave the others here and come down there myself. What was that?” He had to stop once more as Neil asked him about transportation. “No,” Harlan said; he found that it was necessary to keep cutting Brother Davis off in order to speak himself. “It will be okay. I’ll rent something.” Neil started to say something else but Harlan cut him off right away. “Just wait for me, Neil. Understood?” He waited for Neil Davis to understand, then replaced the receiver and walked outside, into the heat.

Within two hours Harlan was back on the road in a rented Ford. He’d only told the others about the missed turnoff and car problems, had said that as much as he regretted it he was going to have to cut his stay short, that he was going to help out Brother Davis with the car, and that he would no doubt be seeing them all at a later time. He said good-bye in front of the Tonopah Hotel where Ruth Bishop provided him with a bologna sandwich and a bottle of beer.

The beer and sandwich sat next to him now, the dark bottle sweating against the pale green fabric of the Ford’s seat. In spite of the fact that he had not eaten since breakfast—one greasy pair of eggs and hash browns in the Tonopah Café—he could not quite bring himself to start on the food. His stomach had been feeling rather queasy in the heat and he had begun to develop a headache. The headaches, he had found, seemed to begin with a kind of tic around his right eye. There were pills in his briefcase for just such moments—pills for his stomach, others for his head—but he did not stop to sort them out. He stared instead into the heat waves, the thin asphalt ribbon which stretched before him for as far as he could see, and he put the pedal to the floor.

He didn’t open the beer until dark and by then it was warm. He drank it anyway, using it to wash down a pain pill. He looked into the headlights of a passing car. He’d seen it coming for a long time and when it was gone the road ahead was black and unbroken. He continued to think about the lights and found they reminded him of the spotlights the Liberian soldiers had rigged above the compound to prevent them from sleeping. They were made to stand, staring into the lights, as they had been made to stare into the sun that afternoon. The guards had circled them, making sure that all were doing this. To be caught looking elsewhere meant a butt stroke from a rifle. He finished the beer and let the bottle drop to the floor. He didn’t like thinking about Africa very much and silently cursed the lights which had reminded him. When he let himself think about it at night he usually dreamed it as well—would wake up drained and angry and afraid. The fear was connected to more than a fear for his own life. It had to do with being needed—the way those African brothers had needed him wanting more than a man could give. He didn’t want to be needed in that way again.

He took one hand from the wheel and ran it back through his hair, squeezed the back of his neck and tried to shift his attention to the task before him. When he thought of the story Neil Davis had told him over the phone he did not know whether to be angry or saddened. The truth was, such a complete ration of horseshit he had not heard in quite some time.

Neil’s car, it seemed, was in pieces with some bully of a mechanic making outrageous demands for repair. There was something about spending the night in the car, out on some back road at the door of a whorehouse—Panama Allen’s daughter actually sleeping in the whorehouse. Neil had also lost his wallet and yet even that was not the capper. That Special Service boy, Obadiah Wheeler, had provided that. He had apparently—and Harlan was still not sure he had all this correctly—run away with some woman. Not only had he run away with her, they had stolen something as well, a relic of some sort as near as Harlan had been able to tell from what Neil had told him, something at any rate from a museum. It really was one of the oddest stories he had heard in some time, and Harlan Low had heard some odd stories. It went, more or less, with the position. A visiting Elder served about a dozen congregations at one time, roughly two thousand people, and was privy to all manner of confessions—some of it hopeless and sad, much of it unlooked-for and ridiculous.

Harlan picked up the bologna sandwich at his side and tested it once more for weight. At last he put it down still untasted and wished instead for another beer—a cold one. He noticed another set of headlights in the distance and hit his dimmer. The approaching lights did not reciprocate; they rushed toward him, high and bright out of the blackness of the desert. Harlan stared hard into their glare. As the truck passed he hit his horn, feeling the Ford rock in its wake. He gripped the wheel and tried to quiet the tic which had begun to pick up speed around his right eye, tried as well to imagine what in the world that poor dumb-ass boy had gotten himself into.

T
he orange neon of the A & W sign did funny things to the green of Delandra’s car. Obadiah Wheeler looked across the resulting purplish tint on the hood and watched the last of the sun’s light drain from a darkening sky. At last there was only one thin band of red—an airbrush job above the hills, and then that was gone too and he was alone with the night.

There was a greasy-looking burger sitting on a dark blue tray in front of him along with a large root beer in a frosted mug. He could not quite bring himself to start on the burger but watched instead as small drops of perspiration gathered on the mug, running slowly down its sides to form a wet ring on the paper place mat. The place mat had a map of the western half of the United States on it. There were small orange stars on the map to indicate the locations of various A & W franchises. Obadiah studied the map. He was waiting for Delandra to come back from the rest room. He sipped on the root beer and tried not to imagine that the man next to him in the blue pickup was staring at him.