Unassigned Territory (21 page)

“In other words, you wouldn’t want these people to get the idea you were a Drone.”

“I know I wouldn’t,” the brother told him.

Harlan was about to hang up when it occurred to him there was still something important he had forgotten to ask. He wanted to know about the name and he wanted to know about the hand.

“They say Elijah was one of the Visitors,” the brother said. “They think Melchizedek was the other. They think maybe there were only two.”

Harlan thought for a moment. “Melchizedek because he was without genealogy. Elijah because he ascended in a chariot of fire. Am I close?”

“On the button,” the man told him.

Harlan shook his head against the receiver. “Except that Elijah wasn’t a black man and his ascension was in fact a transference. The Bible shows he was still alive, on earth, at a later time.”

“This is true,” the brother said, “wouldn’t do any good to tell them, though. It would be like trying to talk to them about that finger thing.”

“The finger thing?”

The man proceeded to tell him that the Sons had a bible of their own.
The Book of Stones.
It was suppose to be older than the Bible. It was what the Visitors put down and what Maxwell translated. Some of the stories in the Bible were in fact, according to the Sons, bastardized versions of incidents originally recorded by the Visitors. Ezekiel’s vision of the wheelworks was a case in point. The incident here was the arrival of the Visitors. The Bible called them cherubs. It failed to mention that their hands, as well as containing a number of eyes, also had six fingers.

This was not an idle omission. Zedroes and Ancients had, toward the end of the Elder World, tried many times to assume the form of the Visitors in order to trick men. Such was the Visitors’ power, however, that neither Zedroe nor Ancient could accomplish this completely. There was always something just a little bit off, one detail they could not manage, something apparently to do with the hands—and hence the symbol of the Sons of Elijah.

“The thing is,” the brother told him, laughing a bit into the phone, “they do have a tricky little point there about those hands.” Harlan had asked him what the tricky little point was.

The point was this: In the twelfth verse of The Book of Ezekiel it says that the creatures had eyes in their hands. In the twenty-first verse it says that their hands had the likeness of those of earthling man. Now when (it was a question the Sons were fond of asking) was the last time you saw someone with eyes in their hands?

Harlan sat looking at the verses now, in the white glare of the room’s single overhead light. The verses did not represent a contradiction to him. And yet he could see how it was just the kind of thing some yo-yo like Leonard Maxwell would make something of. He listened to the metallic pinging of the rain upon the cooler at his window. He looked at the text. He would leave in the morning, he promised himself Rain or shine.

O
badiah was up early. The air was cool and bone-dry with the ridge in back of the motel shining like metal filings before an empty sky. It had been agreed, upon leaving the compound, that he and Delandra would meet Jack and Lyle on the coming evening at the Blue Heaven Motel.

Delandra, optimistic, did not believe the boys would misbehave. Obadiah was less certain. He was still entertaining the idea that Jack was in fact the man he had seen at the A & W—though Delandra had dismissed this notion so quickly, Obadiah had begun to wonder. It had, after all, been dark. He had been in a weird state of mind. Perhaps the session at the trailer had only fueled his paranoia. And yet either way he was not happy with the scenario. Either Jack was the guy at the burger joint, which suggested connections neither he nor Delandra knew anything about. Or Jack was simply Jack—which in itself was bad enough. Selling the Creature to Verity, if in fact he had proven to be the eccentric old fart Delandra had described, was one thing. Jack and Lyle were something else. Obadiah found that sitting in their trailer had made him slightly nauseous and he did not look forward to seeing them again. Nor was he much impressed by Delandra’s plan for avoiding bullshit—should her optimism prove ill-founded.

The plan—alternate plan B, Delandra liked to call it—had Obadiah stationed just outside the rear wall of the motel, ear cocked beneath an open bathroom window, Delandra’s pistol in hand. If there was trouble he could... and there was the tricky part. Come through the bathroom window, gun blazing, bullets ripping bloody holes from Jack’s fat chest? Obadiah had tried to envision how this would work. He thought of it again now as he leaned against the fender of Delandra’s car in the stillness which had followed the storm. He tried to imagine jumping bad on the likes of Jack and Lyle. With the exception of one twenty-two-caliber rifle he’d once used for target practice at a summer camp at the age of eight, he had never handled a weapon of any kind. Which is why he was here now, why they were up early instead of sleeping late in one another’s arms. Delandra had determined he should practice with the gun.

When she came out of the motel she had the gun with her. She gave it to Obadiah as she got into the car and he held it now, in his lap, the barrel pointed at the floorboards between his feet. The thing made him nervous. He kept waiting for it to go off and destroy his foot. It made him feel guilty and more than a little foolish.

Nor was the gun the only thing bothering him. The rest of it had to do with their intended sale of the Mystery of the Mojave, and as the gleaming towers of the Trona Chemical plant slipped from view he tried to decide how the subject could best be approached. He waited until the town was well behind them. He waited until Delandra had found a half-dozen junked cars rusting in the sunlight at the end of a narrow dirt road. The cars were at the bottom of a shallow sandy bowl at which the road had ended. Delandra parked at the lip of the bowl and got out. Obadiah followed her. When he got around to speaking he found that his voice had the odd, flat quality voices often did in that climate. It was a quality of sound he now associated with the barking of Jack’s dogs. “I’ve been meaning,” he said, “to talk to you about this sale.”

Delandra’s only response was to cast a sideways glance in his direction. It was pretty much what he had expected. He continued to follow her. She was headed into the bowl, taking these big long strides, throwing her boots out in front of her, skidding with each step, kicking up clouds of dust and sending small rockslides ahead of her, into the cars. She reached the bottom ahead of him and stood there resting, bent at the waist, hands on her knees. Obadiah did the same, winded from the speed of the descent. At last he put a hand on her arm. “Delandra,” he said. “I’m serious about this.”

She turned her head to look at him, the sunglasses perched crookedly on her face. “Give me a break,” she said.

“Come on, I want to talk. I want to talk seriously about this thing before we sell it to somebody and it’s too late.”

“You want to talk seriously about the Mystery of the Mojave?” Delandra laughed.

“Seriously. Is that too much to ask?”

“Yes. I’m not a serious girl, Obondigas. You should know that by now.”

What Obadiah wanted to say was that having seen the Mystery of the Mojave, he believed he had incurred a certain responsibility for it. “You’re responsible for what you see,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about that thing we’ve been dragging around with us for the past three days. I mean I don’t care what you say about your old man making it, I say it’s no ordinary thing and what I’m suggesting is that we make some serious attempt at finding out what it is. You admit it is different from the others. So what if he didn’t make it? Aren’t you just a little curious? Wouldn’t you like to know for sure?”

“No,” Delandra told him. “I wouldn’t. And anyway, how would you suggest that we go about doing this?”

“Get somebody to look at it.”

“We’re getting Jack and Lyle to look at it, remember?”

“I was thinking of somebody who just might know what the fuck they were talking about. You know? Lyle thinks Verity was Jesus Christ.”

Delandra smiled at the thought. “Lyle’s a good boy,” she said. She took the gun from Obadiah and began putting shells into the chamber. She held the gun out in front of her while she did this. She held it turned on its side, pointing slightly downward. When she was finished she gave the cylinder a spin. It made a soft clicking sound which she ended with a flick of her wrist. “When the hammer’s down, that’s like the safety,” she said. “You have to pull the hammer back to cock it and you have to recock after each shot. It’s an old gun. It belonged to the Sarge. He had the oversize grips put on. When you fire it use both hands.” She brought the gun up quickly, pulling the hammer back with her thumbs. The following blast was deafening. Obadiah flinched and looked away. He had no idea what she was aiming at.

“Your turn,” she said. She passed the gun to Obadiah.

He found the dark wooden handle still warm from her grip. “I don’t get it,” he said. He could barely hear himself speak. “I can’t understand why you’re not more interested in this.”

“I thought you wanted to go to Canada,” Delandra said.

“I do.”

“So all right. So let’s raise some cash and do it.”

“Maybe we could do both.”

“Jesus.” She was standing with her hands on her hips now, her glasses still crooked on her face. “And who in the fuck do you think you’re going to get to look at that thing? The cops? Shit, you show that thing to anybody like that and they’re either going to laugh in your face or they’re going to confiscate it for some damn reason and that will be that.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the cops.”

“Who, then?”

“I don’t know. Somebody at a university or something.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Delandra said. “Shoot at something, will you?”

Obadiah looked around for something to aim at. The gun felt like a lead weight at the end of his arm. He aimed the thing in the general direction of a rusting Plymouth station wagon and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked in his hands, jerking his arms upward. When he looked back at the car he found that there was now a bullet hole in the panel above the rear wheel.

“Maybe you could aim at something smaller,” Delandra suggested.

He picked out a carton of beer bottles perhaps twenty feet away. The first two shots did nothing but send chunks of earth flying into the sky. The third shot hit the carton and sprayed the ground behind it with shards of broken glass. He left the hammer where it was and lowered the gun. “I think,” he said, “that we should show it to someone who could look at it and tell us if it’s man-made or not. I mean, think about it for a minute. Maybe your old man wasn’t as crazy as you thought; maybe he really did find something. Who knows, you might put his name in the goddamn history books.”

“Big deal,” Delandra said. “Sarge didn’t read books. He hated fucking books.” She was walking away from him now. Obadiah followed. They walked past the cars and out into a clearing on the other side. There was a pile of rusted oil drums in the clearing and when Obadiah caught up to her she was looking at something on one of the drums. “There,” she said, “shoot that.”

There was a large gray lizard sunning itself on a scrap of rusted metal.

“You’re kidding me.”

Delandra took the gun from his hand and set the hammer. “Don’t be such a goddamn wimp,” she said. She raised the gun toward the drum. Obadiah grabbed her wrist. He did it just as she was in the act of pulling the trigger and the bullet slammed into one of the drums. The lizard disappeared. ‘ Don’t be such an asshole,” he told her. “There are enough assholes around already.” He stood close beside her, his hand still on her wrist.

“If you can’t shoot a lizard,” she asked him, “how will you shoot your old friend Lyle?”

“I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.”

“Oh, no,” Delandra said. “Heaven forbid that the game get rough. Maybe you could quote him a few Scriptures.” She jerked away from him.

He stood for a moment, watching her go. She disappeared among the cars. When he saw her again she was already moving back up the grade on the far side of the bowl. The gun was pointed at the ground, swinging at the end of one straight arm. The sunlight was bright in her hair and suddenly what he was thinking about was how it felt to be inside of her in a dark room with just the scent of their bodies in the darkness and her breath on his neck and how she could work a kind of magic he had only, until the recent past, barely been able to imagine. He thought of her on top of him with just the moonlight on the side of her face and that sleepy kind of half smile that was part of the lovemaking and he thought of how when he had come in off those flats at the roadside rest on the outskirts of Trona he had found her crying and he started after her.

He caught her at the car. She was already inside, behind the wheel. Obadiah got in next to her. It was the way they had begun. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

Delandra only shook her head and started the car. She was starting to feel tired and feeling tired made her angry. “Don’t even ask,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to know.”

D
elandra drove without speaking. She drove without doing anything except stare at the road and by the middle of morning they were back in Trona, where nothing seemed to have changed. The town still looked like no one was home. Delandra turned off the highway and down a short stretch of paved road. The road ended between a deserted theater and the bar called the Corner Pocket.

The bar was nothing but a small stucco box which had been painted the color of pea soup. There was a white pickup truck in the parking lot with a sign on the door which said TRONA CHEMICALS. The theater was a much grander piece of architecture and had something of an art deco air about it. There was a large tiled entry and a ticket booth made of glass and polished aluminum. There was scrollwork in stone at the edges of the building and above the sidewalk there was an empty marquee which someone had thrown a couple of rocks through. There were still bits and pieces of whatever the marquee was made of strewn along the walls beneath the stonework where the wind had left them.