Unassigned Territory (15 page)

They were by now halfway back to the car, standing at the side of an old-fashioned red-and-white-striped barber’s pole. At their backs the street ran downward, past a smattering of houses toward the white, shimmering surface of the dry lake.

“Flattops with fenders are always hip,” Delandra told him. He was pleased to see the prospect of a haircut amused her. Perhaps they were on similar frequencies after all.

Obadiah counted change in the palm of his hand. “You know,” he said. He had been thinking about the conversation in the bar. “It would be funny if this one turned out to be the real thing.”

“Your haircut?”

“The body we’ve been hauling in your car. I mean I was thinking about that note. I was thinking it would be funny if this time Sarge was telling the truth.”

Delandra nodded but she wasn’t smiling. “I guess it would depend on your sense of humor,” she said. “But anyway, so what?”

“So what?” He repeated her question. It was somehow not the response he had expected.

Delandra looked up and down the street. “Must be an echo out here,” she said.

•     •     •

She waited for him in front of the shop. He could see her out there, seated on a bench while the old man worked on his head. Her face was turned toward the street and the sunlight lit her throat and the underside of her jaw in such a way that made her neck look long and sleek. It was like he was seeing her for the first time and found that she reminded him of a bird of prey.

Obadiah had asked the barber to take it all off. He waited now impatiently as chunks of blond hair covered his shoulders. “Funny,” the old man said—he was probably in his seventies, thin and wrinkled with a full head of white hair that was streaked here and there with strips of yellow the color of tobacco stains. “Most young folks nowadays want it long. You’re not one of those hippies, I take it.” The old man seemed to find the whole idea of hippies somehow amusing. Obadiah assured him that he was nothing of the sort. “In fact,” Obadiah told him, “I’m a full-time minister.”

“You don’t say,” the old man said.

“Yes, I am.”

“What denomination?” the old man wanted to know.

When Obadiah told him the old man shut up and didn’t say anything else. When he was done he whirled the chair around so Obadiah could see himself in the mirror. His hair was short enough to have been a butch—except for the top, which was still a bit too long for that. He was pleased to see that the old man couldn’t cut hair worth shit and that the sides did not match. His mustache, he saw now, should go as well. He suggested this to the barber and the man removed it with a straight razor. When it was done, Obadiah crossed the street for a pair of fifty-nine-cent sunglasses before allowing Delandra to examine him. She did so from all angles, at last deciding he no longer resembled the lifeguard from Manhattan Beach. “The new Obo,” she said. She put a finger to her chin in mock concentration. “It’s different. You’ve got to give it that.”

Obadiah found a piece of dusty plate glass and studied his reflection. The shades and haircut gave his face an odd gaunt look he had not seen before. His body looked different, too, he thought—though how much of this Was due to the glass and how much to the weight he had lost in the last few days, he could not say, but he definitely looked longer and thinner, more angular somehow in his stiff western shirt, the dark jeans which still had not been shrunk to fit. Delandra joined him in the glass so they could look at each other together. He watched as her reflection broke into a smile beneath the dark glasses which he had tilted, stems way up. above her ears, so they rested on her face at a crazy angle. Obadiah laughed out loud. He had, during the haircut, been thinking about the question Delandra had put to him going in and an answer had presented itself: The world was a different place, that was what. If Sarge Hummer’s note was true, then the world was one kind of place. If the note was a lie, then it was another. It was a little like having religion. The world was a more interesting place if there was more to it than what met the eye and he wondered now if a man who had stopped believing the Word had become flesh might take a chance on Sarge Hummer. He said nothing to Delandra, not wishing to disturb the festivity of the moment. Still, he was certain there was something at the core of this idea which had accounted for that feeling of euphoria with which he had left the bar and it occurred to him as well that if motion had been the first part of his most recent equation for happiness he had, just now, on the streets of Rimrock, stumbled upon the second. It was, after all, he thought, what every man needed: something to hope for, something to do, and someone to love.

I
t was near dusk by the time they reached the roadside rest on the outskirts of Trona, and Obadiah’s disappointment was immediate. In the miles between Rimrock and Trona he had imagined it all a bit differently—more mysterious somehow. Confronted with the reality this whole idea seemed so silly, he wondered how he had ever arriv ed at such an expectation in the first place.

Delandra, on the other hand, seemed quite pleased with herself. She sat eyeing the desolation with a satisfied smirk as Obadiah stepped from the car. A tepid wind tugged at his shirttail and a peculiar odor wafted across the flats. “Are you coming?” he asked.

Delandra was hanging her head out an open window. “Coming where?”

“I don’t know. To look around.”

“Look around where? You can see the whole fucking place from right here.”

This was true. It was without a doubt the least inviting roadside rest he had yet seen. There was not a tree in sight, no line of wind-bent cottonwoods, no blade of grass. There was only a wide gravel lot at the side of the road, a tiny block building and a series of odd-looking picnic tables which appeared to be made out of fiber glass. Everything had been painted an ugly shade of dark brown and trimmed in orange—though by now the paint was chipped and weather-beaten and in places had begun to peel. On the west wall of the rest rooms someone had left a spray-painted message which read:
Welcome to the pitts.

Obadiah crossed the gravel lot and entered the building. He relieved himself in a urinal someone had pulled halfway out of the wall and which, when he flushed it, quickly deposited a gleaming pool of water on the concrete floor. Then he went back outside and looked toward town. Trona, Delandra had told him, had been built around a chemical plant and standing now at the edge of the lot he could just make out a series of tall, rectangular structures rising above the remnants of a mirage which still ringed the flats. Above his head the sky had taken on a depth of color he did not believe he had seen before. A deep cobalt blue of neon intensity arched above him like some immense circus canopy. The only break in this illusion lay toward the western horizon where a thin band of orange light had begun to spread above some ridges. As he came down the single step he felt once more the tepid wind laced with the peculiar smell. Delandra was still watching him from the car, an arm out the open window, her chin on her bicep. He felt that some show of looking around should be made, though rarely had he found himself in a spot where so little seemed to present itself for inspection. The rest area occupied a gravel strip at the edge of the road and was shaped roughly like a quarter-moon. The highway curved through one side and on the other lay the flats.

Obadiah glanced once more in Delandra’s direction and then turned toward the desert. He wandered rather halfheartedly toward the edge of the gravel and then eased himself down a slight embankment. The embankment turned out to be steeper than it had first appeared and when he reached its bottom he was standing upon the flats and a change he had not counted upon was immediately apparent. From the rest area you could see the flats and it all looked very desolate and empty with nothing much to see. From the flats at the base of the incline, however, you could not see the building or picnic tables or the rest area at all. With the rest spot removed, Obadiah was alone with the landscape and suddenly quite aware of himself in relation to it—the scale of things, as it were. He became aware, too, of the ground itself. It was composed of a kind of dried mud which had cracked into great hieroglyphic patterns. The fissures between the chunks of ground were deep, the chunks themselves of a remarkably uniform size and shape, composed of a substance which, in one place, would pop like crockery beneath his feet, while in others it seemed to absorb his steps completely, giving back no sound at all.

He walked for some time, taken in by the great distances, the peculiar relationship of space and light, the proportional scale of his own body. He walked until he came to a fence. Somehow the idea of a fence running across the middle of a salt flat did not make much sense. Upon closer inspection he found that it was a government fence. It was low—maybe four feet high, made of barbed wire run between a series of short dark posts. On one of the posts he saw a sign which read: NAVAL WEAPONRY SITE ONE HUNDRED YARDS AHEAD, STAY CLEAR! Looking farther, he saw another fence. The second fence was taller and there were small red lights at the tops of the poles which supported it. There was nothing else. The fences ran in either direction for as far as he could see. Could naval weaponry account for the cigar-shaped craft and strange light Sarge had seen from his camper? The discovery of the site certainly suggested one kind of explanation, and yet, in a crazy sort of way, it was an explanation contradicted by the land itself, which seemed, since distancing himself from the pathetic rest area, to suggest quite another and he felt once more a rising of his spirits, some surge of that same excitement he had felt in the town. He had, after all, seen the Thing, the existence of which seemed to him more meaningful by the hour, less likely to be explained by ordinary occurrences. Or was it just that he wanted extraordinary occurrences? Perception is an embrace. He had read that somewhere. The phrase came back to him now on the dried mud of the great flat.

Above his head the blue had gone to purple while the thin line of orange light which had earlier lain to the west had erupted in a brilliant display of reds and pinks and yellows. The colors swept upward from the horizon in a series of luminous arcs. To the north the towers of Trona had caught the light in such a way as to make of the town a golden city at the edge of the plain and he wondered if there was not, somewhere in these acres of light, in the hieroglyphics at his feet, or even somehow, in the silence itself, an attempt to communicate. It was a peculiar idea and yet one which seemed to dissipate upon articulation until that sense of euphoria he had felt only moments before was all but gone and in its place there was only an unpleasant sense of emptiness. What, he wondered, in the fuck was the matter with him? Had he really made some significant discovery in the least expected of places or was he simply losing his mind? A kind of theory formed: a mind weakened by years of self-abuse, broken at last beneath the truckload of guilt brought on by a series of rash acts. He stumbled once in the mud, cursing an upbringing which in the end had managed only to bring him to this. Perhaps, he thought, all he was really after was something not that far removed from what his parents must have felt when they had found The Way. For they must, he thought, have had their moment—something the likes of which had just now eluded him, that recognition, sudden or gradual, of another reality. For him it had not quite worked that way. For him the answers had always been there. He could see now, of course, that the answers had been their answers, that his journey had worked as a reversal of their own, a working of his way back through the system they had given him in a process of undoing until the pattern of meaning had broken down, the code dissolved into simple noise once more. Still he envied them their vision and he would, he thought, have gladly welcomed any revelations which might care to visit themselves upon him at this moment, here, on a quickly cooling patch of earth one might as easily see as biblical as otherworldly, and he found himself standing still once more, mute, receptive, awaiting the Word, or perhaps the arrival of one more cigar-shaped craft and the intrusion of another order of being. Anything, really, to sweeten the pot. It did appear, however, that he was, on the evening in question, shit out of luck and with nothing more interesting than the ever-present noise of his own breathing mechanism rattling in his ears he started out once more across the flats, moving this time in the direction from which he had come, back toward the rectangular shapes of the rest rooms and the impossible shapes of the picnic tables which had come to resemble something like gallows above a black horizon.

He had not yet reached the rest area, however, when he too, like Sarge Hummer before him, was set upon by a strange creature. In Obadiah’s case the mystery was short-lived—the creature soon recognizable as the offspring of Sarge himself. It was wearing a dress and cowboy boots.

It had grown dark quickly, with the moon not yet risen much above the surrounding ridges, so that upon reaching the base of the incline leading back to the road he was for several moments immersed in shadow and it was here that he nearly collided with Delandra Hummer, who was by now making her way down the incline in an effort to locate him. She loomed suddenly in front of him and he actually dropped to one knee in an effort to avoid collision. In spite of the fact that he had only recently been hoping for some brand of remarkable encounter, it scared the shit out of him. Judging by her response it scared the shit out of her, too, and for a moment they sat side by side on the ground, breathing hard, and it took a moment for him to realize she was crying. At least he thought she was crying. He could feel her shoulders shaking and something in her voice made him glad he could not see her face.

“What in the fuck were you doing out there,” she asked him. “What are you, crazy like the rest of them?”

He was somewhat taken aback by her reaction and said nothing. He was trying to think of something witty to say, but nothing came to mind.

“You’re not funny,” she told him. “I told you. He built it out of junk.”