American Elsewhere Read online

  Norris looks up. This far from the city lights the stars seem even closer than before. It makes him uncomfortable, or perhaps it is the ionized taste that seems to hover in the air around the top of the mesa. It is a Wrong place. Not the Wrongest, God knows that’s so, but still deeply Wrong.

  Dee eyes the surrounding cedars and ponderosa pines nervously. “I don’t see it,” he says over the babbling of the hooded man.

  “Don’t worry about that,” says Zimmerman. “It’ll come when it’s called. Just set him down beside the falls.”

  They do so, gently laying their captive down on the rock. Zimmerman nods at them to back away, and he reaches out and pulls off the burlap sack.

  A kindly, plump face looks up at them from underneath a messy mop of gray hair. His eyes are green and crinkled at the edges, and his cheekbones have a happy red tint. It is the face of a bureaucrat, an English teacher, a counselor, a man used to the shuffling and filing of papers. Yet there is a hardness to his eyes that unnerves Norris, as if there is something swimming in their depths that does not belong there.

  “There is nothing you can do to me,” the man says. “It is not allowed. I cannot understand what you are attempting, but it is useless.”

  “Get back a little bit,” says Zimmerman to his two companions. “Now.” Dee and Norris take a few steps back, still watching.

  “Have you gone mad?” asks their captive. “Is that it? Guns and knives and ropes are mere ephemera here, chaff on the wind. Why would you disturb our waters? Why would you deny yourself peace?”

  “Shut up,” says Zimmerman. He kneels, takes out a small penknife, and begins to cut at the tape and the string on the small wooden box.

  “Have you not heard a word I said?” asks their captive. “Can you not listen to me for one moment? Do you not even understand what it is you do?”

  The box is now open. Zimmerman stares at its contents, swallows, and places the penknife aside. “Understanding isn’t my job,” he says hoarsely. Then he picks up the box with both gloved hands, moving gingerly so as not to disturb what is within, and brings it over to where their captive lies.

  “You cannot kill me,” says the bound man. “You cannot touch me. You cannot even harm me.”

  Zimmerman licks his lips and swallows again. “You’re right,” he says. “We can’t.” And he tips the contents of the box over onto the bound man.

  Something very small and white and oval comes tumbling out. At first it looks like an egg, but as it rolls across the man’s chest and comes to a stop before his face it becomes clear that it is not. Its surface is rough like sandpaper, and it has two large, hollow eyes, a short, snarling snout with two sharp incisors, and many smaller, more delicate teeth behind those. It is a tiny rodent skull, lacking its jawbone, and this gives it the queer impression of being frozen mid-scream.

  The bound man stares at the tiny skull on his chest. For the first time his serene confidence breaks: he blinks, confused, and looks up at his captors. “W-what is this?” he asks weakly. “What have you done?”

  Zimmerman does not answer. He turns and says, “Come on! Now!” Then all three of them sprint over the rocky slopes to the chain-link fence, arms pinwheeling when they misstep.

  “What have you done to me?” calls the bound man after them, but he gets no answer.

  When they reach the fence they pull open one of the holes and help each other through. “Is that it?” asks Norris. “Is it done?”

  Before Zimmerman can answer a yellow light flares to life in the trees beside the waterfall. The three men look back, and each is forced to squint even though the source of the light remains hidden. The light seems to shiver strangely, as if the beam is interrupted by many dancing moths, and the way the light filters through the glade gives it the look of a leaning rib cage.

  In between two of the tallest pines is what looks like a man, standing erect, hands stiff at its sides. Norris cannot remember its being there before; it is as if this newcomer has appeared out of nowhere, and with its appearance there is a new scent to the air, an odor of shit and rotting straw and putrefaction. Norris’s eyes water at the barest whiff of it. The figure stares down at the bound man, but its head appears strange: sprouting from the top of its skull are two long, thin ears, or possibly horns. It does not move or speak; it does not seem to even breathe. It simply stands there, watching the bound man from the edge of the pines, and due to the bright light from behind it is impossible to discern anything more.

  “Oh my God,” whispers Dee. “Is that it?”

  Zimmerman turns away. “Don’t look at it!” he says. “Come on, run!”

  As they climb back up to the road the voice of the bound man cuts through the sound of the waterfall: “What? N-no! No, not you! I didn’t do anything to you! I never did anything to you, I didn’t!”

  “Jesus,” says Norris. He moves to look back.

  “Don’t!” says Zimmerman. “Don’t attract its attention! Just get up to the car!”

  When they vault over the highway barrier the shouts from the waterfall turn into screams. The light in the trees begins to shudder, as if more and more moths are coming to flit around its source. From this height the three men could look down and see what is happening there at the foot of the waterfall, but they keep their eyes averted, staring into the starlit asphalt or the lightning in the clouds.

  They climb into the car and sit in silence as the screams persist. They are screams of unspeakable agony, yet they do not seem to end. The driver hits the tuner on the radio again. It’s Buddy Holly again, but this time he’s singing “Love Is Strange.”

  “Must be playing a marathon or something,” says Dee softly.

  Norris clears his throat and says, “Yeah.” He turns the volume up until the song overpowers the shrieks from the valley below.

  Dee is right: it is a marathon, and next comes “Valley of Tears,” and after that is “I’m Changing All Those Changes.” The screams continue while the men listen to the radio, swallowing and sweating and sometimes clasping their heads. The scent of sweaty terror in the car intensifies.

  Then the unearthly light beside the road dies. The men look at each other. Norris turns the radio down, and they find the screams have stopped.

  As the last of that septic yellow light drains out of the pines, dozens more lights appear farther up the mesa. They are common office lights, the lights of many structures standing on the mesa. It’s as if they all share a common power source that’s just been turned back on.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” says Zimmerman. “He was right. The lab’s up and running again.”

  There is a moment of shocked silence as the three men stare at the lights on the mesa. “Should we call Bolan?” asks Norris.

  Zimmerman takes out a cell phone, then rethinks. “Let’s get the body first,” he says.

  “Is it safe?” asks Dee.

  “It’ll be done by now,” says Zimmerman, but he does not sound totally sure.

  At first they do not move. Then Zimmerman opens his car door. After a moment of reluctance, the other two follow suit. They walk to the side of the road and stare down at the waterfall, which is now dark. There is no sign of anything unusual having transpired on the rocks. There is only the spatter of the waterfall, the hiss of the pines, and the pinkish light of the moon.

  Finally they climb back over the barrier and begin the awkward journey down. As they descend, Norris takes one last glance up at the lights on the top of the mesa. “I wonder who it’s bringing here,” he says softly.

  There is an angry shush from Zimmerman, as if the trees themselves could hear, and the men continue into the darkness in silence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mona Bright’s been to some pretty piss-poor funerals in her day, but she has to admit that this one takes the cake. It even beats her cousin’s funeral in Kentucky, when the grave was hand-dug in a tiny church graveyard. That was a pretty medieval affair, she knows, but at least then the gravediggers were all family member
s, and they treated the ceremony with a little dignity. Here in this miserable potter’s field in the middle of nowhere, there is no one to attend but her and the gravedigger, a local contractor with a backhoe who currently has his rattling old vehicle parked just beside the open grave. He hasn’t even turned it off, he just has it idling. He sits on the footstep and when he isn’t wiping his face clean of sweat he is eye-fucking her something fierce. Already she can see him formulating any number of lines he hopes might magically translate this sordid little afternoon into a quick fuck in whichever motel is closest.

  She asks him what his next job is. He is surprised, and thinks and says, “Well, they got a parking lot they need leveled off in Bayton.”

  Christ, she thinks. Gravedigging at two, parking lot at three. What an interesting little county her father chose to die in.

  “You got anyone else coming?” he ventures.

  “Doubt it.”

  “Well. You want to go ahead and get on with the show?”

  “There isn’t a minister coming or anything?”

  “I believe you have to schedule him.”

  “So it isn’t an automatic civil service or whatever?” she asks, and laughs morosely. “I thought this was God’s country.”

  “Not for free, it isn’t,” says the gravedigger.

  Where they are is Montana City, Texas, which is a joke of a name: it can only be called a city in that it has two traffic lights. One is broken, but they don’t count that against it. Mona had the option of transferring her father up to Big Spring, which is bigger in the sense that a gnat is bigger than a flea, but she doesn’t see why she should foot a dime more than she has to to plant her father, Earl Bright III, deep in this godforsaken soil. After all, he was a horrific skinflint, and it feels appropriate to stick him in a stretch of earth just as begrudging and hostile as he was in life.

  The gravedigger climbs into his backhoe. “You want to say something?”

  She thinks about it, and shakes her head. “It’s all been said.”

  He shrugs, revs the engine, and starts it forward. Mona watches impassively behind her silvered sunglasses as the crumbly clay earth tumbles down to embrace the pine coffin below.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yadda yadda yadda.

  Earl, of course, had not been foresighted enough to write a will, so all of his belongings enter the complicated and cryptic world of probate. Or at least it would be complicated anywhere else, but here the judge plans to go elk hunting in a week, so they cut down the time before the heirship proceeding accordingly, because honestly, who cares.

  On the appointed hour, Mona dutifully appears at the local probate court, a low-ceilinged place filled with the reek of burned coffee. It looks as if it moonlights as a VFW hall. There’s a moment of confusion when the officials see Mona, for though Earl was as white as snow, Mona’s looks are all her mother’s, so she is quite Mexican. But Mona was prepared for this—she has to be, in Texas—and the appropriate forms and badges of identification mostly quell the questions. Then they get down to business.

  Of a sort. The judge is present, but he’s got his feet up on the table and is utterly absorbed in his newspaper. Mona doesn’t mind. The easier this is, the better, because she’s looking for something specific, a treasure Earl would have never parted with even in his most extreme old age: his 1969 cherry-red Dodge Charger, the pride and joy he spent most of his life on, and which Mona was forbidden from ever driving. As a teenager she often dreamed of sitting in its leather seats and feeling the motor burst to life with the push of the pedal, the vibrations of the pistons dancing up the steering shaft and into her arms. Once, on a hot summer evening when she was sixteen, she tried to steal it for the night. She hadn’t even gotten it out of the garage before he caught her. Even today, the resulting scar has not healed.

  So it is a very bitter grin that blossoms on her face when the gray-faced little court officer informs her that yes, that vehicle is still licensed to Mr. Bright, and as the deceased never indicated who it should go to she can claim it if she is willing. “By God, I am willing, sir,” she says. “I am damn willing.”

  “All right,” he says, and makes a note. “And what about his other properties?”

  This comes as a surprise. Judging by his living conditions, her father had been scratching out a miserable and penniless life in this tiny town. “What other properties did he have?” she asks.

  Oh, a fair few, the officer tells her. The car, for instance, is located at a storage unit with several of his other belongings, and these are hers if she wishes. She shrugs and says, why not. There’s a small sum of cash, which she takes. There are also a few parcels of land he still owns, the officer says. These Mona turns down: she is well aware that her father has sold any land worth selling and has been living off the proceeds; the rest is unsellable scrub. The officer nods and tells her that just leaves the matter of the house.

  “No sir, I do not want that flea-infested shack he was living in,” she tells him.

  “Well, that’s good, because he didn’t own that,” he says. “That he was renting. This would be a house left to him in”—he checks the paper—“New Mexico.”

  “It’s what? In New Mexico? I never heard of him owning a house out there.”

  The officer turns the document around to show her. “Looks like he didn’t, originally,” he says. “It was left to him, but went unclaimed. In his case, it was left to him by one… Laura Gutierrez Alvarez?”

  At that, Mona is almost struck dumb. Though the clerk is nattering on about New Mexico law and uniform probate law, Mona can hardly hear a word of it.

  Momma, she thinks? Momma had a house? Momma had a house in New Mexico?

  Then, slowly, her shock turns to rage. She cannot believe that the old bastard never told her that. For years she peppered him with questions about her mother, whom she barely remembers save for a few childhood images of a thin, trembling woman who wept constantly and stared out of windows, yet never went outdoors. Mona never knew that her mother had once had a life beyond their tiny West Texas home; yet here, recorded in the fading ink of an ancient typewriter, a paper tells her of a paper that tells her of a deed in her mother’s name, which in turn tells her of another life far from here, a life before Earl, and Mona’s own birth, and all the bitter years they spent together as her father roughnecked across the country.

  “What else can you tell me about it?” she asks.

  “Well… not much. There’s nothing else in the original will, which is pretty basic. I suppose your father never acted on it.”

  “Never? He just sat on it?”

  “Seems that way. The will itself has an expiration date of”—he checks—“thirty years.”

  Something about this troubles Mona. “Thirty years from Earl’s death?”

  “Erm, no,” says the official. He checks the papers. “This would be thirty years from the date of your mother’s death.”

  Mona closes her eyes, and thinks—fuck.

  “What?” says the official. “Something wrong?”

  “Yeah,” says Mona. “That means it expires in”—she does some math in her head—“eleven days.”

  “Oh.” The official whistles lowly. “Well. Better get a wiggle on, I suppose.”

  Mona gives him a prime no shit glare, then squints to read the home’s address:

  1929 LARCHMONT

  WINK, NM 87207

  Mona frowns.

  Wink? she thinks. Where the fuck is Wink?

  The question stays on her mind as she drives into Big Spring to track down her father’s storage unit. It even pushes out all thoughts of the Charger. She has never felt there was much to know about her father—and what else was there besides the bitter silences, the smell of cordite, and the Silver Bullet tallboy clutched in one hairy fist?—yet now she is given to wonder. If all this is true, if her mother really did leave him a house in a distant town, then he must have known at least a little about it—right? You don’t just inherit a house and
then stick all knowledge of it away and forget about it, do you?

  It strikes her as she pulls into the storage center that if anyone would ever do such a thing, it would be her daddy. He was just the type.

  The storage center attendant is initially suspicious of her. Not just because she’s asking to open someone else’s unit, and has to produce a lot of documents and fumble with a lot of keys to prove her case, but also because that particular unit hasn’t been opened in over two years. Finally he gives in—though Mona suspects his objection was mostly fueled by a reluctance to get out of his chair rather than some professional honor—and he leads her through the maze of boxes and metal doors to one of the larger storage units at the far back.

  “Is he dead for reals?” asks the attendant.

  “He is for reals dead,” says Mona. “I’ve seen him.”

  “If that’s the case, you got a week to clear all this out, just so’s you know,” he says, and he unlocks the unit and sends the door rattling up.

  Mona’s eyes spring wide. The court officer described the storage unit as having “several” of his belongings, and she also recalls the term “a fair few” being used. But what confronts her in the storage unit is such an imposing pile of tottering shit that she is almost faint with the idea of sorting it. It’ll take her twelve days at least to get a quarter of the way through it.

  She gets a hefty Maglite from the storage clerk and a dolly to wheel some of this stuff away. She is thankful to have driven her old truck here, as it will definitely come in handy. But it does not take long for her to spot a shape on the side of the unit, something long, with sleek angles, draped in a thick tarp. She spies a tire peeking from underneath one fold, and her heart leaps.

  It takes her more than a half an hour to get all the boxes off it, but soon the powerful form of the Charger emerges from the beige clutter. When she has enough cleared she rips the tarp off, and a cloud of dust rushes up and balloons out to fill the unit and most of the pathway outside. It is so thick it cakes her sunglasses. She waits for it to settle before she removes them, leaving flesh-colored holes in her now-dusty face.