The Juliet (4 page)

He was waiting.

Tony showed little concern for the preservation of his uncle’s wheels. He gunned the Eagle down the washboard road. Larissa complained the loudest, but everyone held on to the doors and each other, bracing against the vibration.

“You’re gonna blow a tire!” she said, but Tony was a gambler at heart if not by profession, and he bet that he could hit the smooth asphalt of 980 before doing any real damage to the wagon. He was also betting on zooming by the dark stranger before the women would notice him, but Tony had not accounted for the man’s will.

The stranger stepped into the road.

Larissa yelled, “Tony, stop!”

He was already depressing the brake pedal. For the second time that night, Tony was looking at a body in his headlights. The man had a rough, small blanket draped over his head and shoulders like cloak, and only his chin showed. The blanket was faded but patterned like an animal skin, though not any animal that roamed these parts, and he held it closed near his neck with one hand. He wore a long sleeved shirt tucked into khakis that were cinched by a belt with a silver buckle and a flashy green stone set in the middle.

Work clothes and Sunday accessories. His other hand held a long, knobby stick.

The man showed a little more of his face: his mouth, his nose.

Miranda let out a short gulp of a scream. She couldn’t help it. Tony would have snapped at her, but he was distracted.

The man grinned. His smile was dark, even in the headlights.

Tony whispered, “Old teeth,” as if this were the stranger’s name.

Rhys asked, “Who is that? What do we do?”

Larissa leaned forward. “Is that the dude from The Mystery House?”

Tony began to roll down his window.

She said, “Are you crazy?”

Tony leaned his head out. “Can we help you, sir? We have an injured girl in here we have to get to the emergency room.”

The man didn’t respond.

Tony said, “I could come back for you if there’s a problem.”

The old man didn’t move for a few seconds. Then he bent over to get a better look through the windshield. In that position his whole face was visible. His jaw was square and heavily lined, and his eyes were black. He transferred the walking stick into the same hand that held the blanket closed at his throat and began to rummage around in his front pants pocket. He produced a flashlight and a knife, neither one of which was more than six inches long.

“He has a knife.” Tony cranked his window fast.

The man used his flashlight, shining the beam directly into the windshield. He started to bob up and down. He was laughing.

Miranda whimpered. “He sees me.”

“I think he does.” Tony put the car in motion again, this time more slowly. He hoped for enough room on the gravel road to drive around the old man without slipping into the deep rut ditches on either side.

Ginger locked her door, and then everyone else did too. In the middle, Miranda crouched in her seat and pulled the poncho up over her head so she wouldn’t have to watch.

The Eagle was running at a tilt along the crumbling slope of the road, but it was just enough. Tellingly, Tony passed the man on the left side, which meant that Rhys and Larissa were going to get an uncomfortably close look at the old coot.

Mr. Old Teeth, Rhys thought. A proper, bog-worthy
ysbryd
at last. His gran would be amused.

The man laughed and stood his ground in the high center of the road. Just before the car began its pass, he threw his blanket onto the windshield. Though it slipped off immediately, Tony braked and the old man began slapping the hood and grabbing Rhys’s door handle.

“Go! Don’t stop, go!”

The old man had his hands pressed on the passenger side window now, pushing as if he meant to force the glass in. The wagon rocked under the pressure, and Tony hit the gas again, peeling out and spraying the old man with gravel.

Just before they left Centenary and hit the county road proper, they heard a high, ugly scream, just like the ones they’d heard throughout the night. Rhys turned in his seat and saw the old man back there, still in the center of the road. He’d retrieved his blanket and was holding it out over his shoulders like a cape. His head tilted to the sky.

“Jesus, that was him. He’s been out there all night.”

“Looks like it.” Tony looked into the rearview and grinned. “Well, that was a rush, eh Scottie?”

“Don’t call me that,” Rhys said, but with little conviction as he watched the old man fade into the night, howling like a bad actor.

* *
*

Budge Lange held his pose, half vampire, half wolfman, until he could no longer see the red taillights of the station wagon. Centenary was an imperfect stage. He knew his audience had missed the nuances in his performance, like the double middle finger salute as he stretched out his blanket wings. And they’d fled too soon to truly appreciate the glow of his greenstone.

He liked to take the greenstone out when he could. She was a good girl with a bad reputation. They called her The Juliet.

He folded the dog blanket and started back up the hill. At the halfway point he found the tooth on the side of the road. Budge always had an eye for detail. The tooth seemed big with its bloody roots and all, and the clean part glowed; bone always acted strange under starlight.

He put the tooth in the breast pocket of his shirt. He didn’t keep a lot of things, but a tooth from a pretty girl deserved consideration. Maybe it was lucky.

When he reached the path that used to be known as Penance Lane, he hiked down to Lily’s to see what the kids left behind this time. He shined the flashlight on her so-called grave and poked through the leavings with his stick. Most of it was trash, but he did manage to pick up a cigar, still wrapped in cellophane. The English guy had had the decency to leave a few slugs in the Jameson’s bottle. Budge drained it as he stood behind the white cross that he himself had re-painted and re-stenciled, as he always did, on New Year’s Day.

Sometimes he wished he had friends. Most times he didn’t, so this was an ideal job even if he wasn’t that good at it. Centenary was cleared, for a little while anyway. The locals paid him in food and privileges commensurate with their relief. The sixties and its maniacs may have been long gone, but the fear lingered. Suspiciously, like an unfulfilled wish.

The night was fading, and Budge watched the ghostly shape of the Opera House become more certain. His acting days were over, but he still liked to rattle around in there, sometimes giving the great speeches of the great characters he had never been asked to play. The citizens of Centenary must have felt they’d achieved preeminence with their incongruous desert theater. Perhaps they thought the Opera House would defeat the savage landscape and domesticate the dreams of men.

Which differed from the dreams of women. Budge left the letters alone these days. Sometimes there’d be a card or an envelope dropped on the grave, a special message for Lily. He used to open them, but there was never any money inside, just a load of what Budge called the Dirty Sadness. Girls had a strange feeling about Lily Joy.

He picked his way back to the cottage just before sunup. As he put away his belt, he noticed that another prong had broken off the cheap buckle, leaving only two to hold the greenstone in place. “No more nights on the town for you, old girl.” He took a knife to the remaining prongs to liberate the gem before stashing it in the safest place he could think of. Budge cherished that stone and regretted giving away its smaller twin, but at the time he had been sentimental.

He extinguished the lantern and sat down at the card table with a box of pale blue stationery that had belonged to his Aunt. The envelope glue didn’t stick any more, but the color was still pretty. He wrote in block letters because his hand shook too much for cursive: FOR MANDY.

Budge patted his shirt pocket and felt for the sharp bump of the wild girl’s tooth. She sure was some kind of crazy. He’d been watching her act out all night. He’d been keeping an eye (and ear) on all of them, in fact. And if what that Indian guy said was true, she was local. He took a sheet of the pale blue paper and wrote LOVE, LILY JOY. Then he dropped the tooth on top and folded it into thirds before stuffing the envelope.

He licked the envelope and mashed it closed. Good enough. Come evening he’d go on down to Penance Lane and drop it on Lily’s grave. A test of nature. If that Mandy girl came back, he wanted her to have a reason. And if someone else grabbed it up first, well that was their problem. Everyone who came to visit Lily Joy was a sensitive soul, searching for something unexpected.

And if no one collected the letter it would crumble away, release its treasure, and there would be a girl’s bone in the grave at last. The very first.

Budge always felt bad that it was all made up. There was no Lily Joy, and she wasn’t buried behind the jailhouse either. He knew, because he’d done a little excavating shortly after settling in Centenary. He fancied himself an amateur archaeologist. He always dreamed of unearthing Lily’s skull, and all the good things that would happen if he did.

As he undressed and crawled into his narrow bed, he heard the
yip-yip-yip
of a
coyote just getting started. There’d be two more parts to this call: an escalation of staccato barks that sounded like mad laughter, followed by drawn out howling. Coyotes had to work themselves up to get their point across.

It wouldn’t be long before the first van-load of tourists pulled into Centenary, cranking up the dusty road.

Everyone looking.

There was always the possibility he had never dug deep enough. He was too old to do a thorough job. What if she was only a shovelful away, only a few more inches below? The uncertainty was sort of romantic.

Just before he dropped off, he heard the creak of his own front door being nudged open. Hesitation in the steps that followed, and the sigh of a skirt dancing through the dust. Lily Joy did not exist, but in these liminal moments she came to him anyway. She loved The Mystery House and trailed her fingertips along the walls that were cool but taking on the heat of the rising day. He liked to think of her looking for him this time, and because of her impossible condition, never succeeding.

The sun chased shadows through the house. On the table the blue envelope peeled open of its own accord. Budge’s Lily, the woman of his dreams, was a lost woman who had found a clue. She sat down to read what she had written.

THE GREAT BLOOM

Chapter 2

“Look kid, you want to be your own man, learn to leave like you ain’t coming back.”

—HOLT BRECK (Rigg Dexon) in
Gallows River (1977)

March 19, 2005: Centenary, NV

Rigg Dexon stood in the doorway of The Mystery House and watched a plume of dust sail in his direction.
Visitors.
As the plume fanned out and grew closer he cursed softly, the way a real man does when company’s coming. Perhaps the retired cowboy actor wasn’t suited to a hermit’s lifestyle, but he’d never get a chance to find out, would he? With tourists crawling all over the desert, no place was safe. He blamed it on the flowers.

The winter had brought a record rainfall of six and a half inches to Death Valley, and by spring, hipsters were floating kayaks on Lake Manly, a pluvial rift lake that hadn’t seen real water in 10,000 years. The wet winter led to the “Bloom of the Century,” and in March the desert was blanketed with swaying fields of white, yellow, and pink flowers.

The plume of dust turned into an old blue Subaru wagon that eventually squared itself with The Mystery House, grinding to a stop. This sort of thing happened more than he liked. Dummies sometimes managed to make their way to Rigg’s front door, despite its location up a class two canyon road. He was prepared for unwanted guests and kept a crate of bottled water by the door; it made it easier to send folks on their way if he was hospitable. If they recognized him and made a big enough deal about it, he gave them cooled bottles from the old, humming Frigidaire in the kitchen.

This time it was a couple, looked like retirees, or at least the woman did, with her steel-colored hair. The man was just an uninteresting blur through the windshield. Missouri plates. Looked like they couldn’t wait to come charging up for adventure, but now that they were parked in front of the shack maybe they weren’t so certain. They stayed inside their car, turning a map around in circles. There was a metal detector and a spade propped up next to a big red dog in the back. The dog panted from excitement, not heat. It was a cool day in the desert, sort of heavenly to a positive thinker.

Not just tourists, then. Treasure hunters. Rank amateurs by the look of them. It was funny how some folks thought they could start at the Everest of their desires. The desert was poison, didn’t they know that? Killed Lee Marvin for sure, and a lot of other Western stars Rigg could think of. Maybe the “Death” in Death Valley was too subtle.

He walked back to the old fridge and opened the door, taking out a weeping green bottle. It was morning still. He might as well look the part of an alkie recluse. The bottle’s label had been peeled off. It was an old habit from the paparazzi days. Rigg wasn’t just an actor, he was a brand unto himself. Accidental endorsements were money down the drain.