A Stranger Lies There (27 page)

“I'll help you find him, then,” she promised, still struggling with her words. “Does he live out there too?”

“I don't know for sure. But he just got out of Calipatria. He might still be in the area.”

“The prison.”

“You know anybody that was in there?”

She nodded vigorously and my heart skipped a beat. “Uh-huh. He was my boyfriend. For a while. But he left. Stole my money and disappeared.”

“When was this?”

She swallowed some beer and frowned, thinking hard on it. “Few months ago. Last year I guess.”

“The guy I'm looking for got out less than a month ago.”

“Sorry. Joe was the only one I know of.” A deep drag on the cigarette. I could hear the tobacco crackling as it burned. “But we can talk to my neighbors,” she said. “You think they'll know your friend?”

“I hope so. But he isn't my friend.”

Her face wrinkled up like she was about to cry, and my heart went out to her. “Sorry,” she spluttered. “I forget things sometimes.” Then she turned away, hitting herself in the head with the palm of her hand. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

I wondered if she was okay. Didn't know what to say, so I got up. “Wanna get going? My car's right here.”

“Okay,” she agreed, standing up slowly. “Here I come.” She stood in the hot sun and finished the beer. Walked over and tossed it in the dumpster. “Maybe I should get a beer for the road? Don't worry, I don't get pissy drunk.”

“No problem. Wait here.”

I came back with the beer and we got into the car. “By the way, I'm Tim,” I said, offering my hand.

She put the beer between her knees and took my hand. “Nice to know you. People call me Cat.”

“Is that a nickname?”

“No, that's my name.”

Chuckling, I started the car, glad I'd come upon her. We got back on the highway and drove slowly up the block. I was looking for Beale but didn't see it. I wondered how I could have missed it in this tiny town. But Cat directed me to turn right at Main Street and I followed her lead.

The neighborhood homes looked around fifty years old, with faded stucco weathered by wind and sun. Patchy, dried-out lawns like threadbare carpet behind sagging chain-link fences. Boxy swamp coolers perched on many of the rooftops. Nobody was about, but we saw lots of rusted-out cars, some of them up on blocks, in driveways and backyards. On the right, a large adobe building looked as if it might once have been a city hall, with broken windows and tumbling roof tiles like missing teeth. A little blond girl, maybe ten years old, drifted by on a bike, wearing a dingy blue dress and tennis shoes. She didn't look at us as we passed.

Two blocks later the houses stopped. The last one had a big backyard, densely overgrown with weeds. It looked like a scrap yard. Huge spools of rusting metal cable. Old tractor parts. Beat-up appliances like stoves and refrigerators and washing machines. Tires and wheels. Numerous items I couldn't identify, though the refrigerators looked like what my grandparents had used.

“That's Larry's place,” Cat told me. “He's a scrapper.”

“Looks like it.”

She lit another Lucky Strike. “Goes up into the shooting range and finds a lotta that shit. Takes whatever he can haul out. Explosives too.”

“You mean the gunnery range?” She must have been referring to the Chocolate Mountain Impact Area, where the army did live bombing. “Isn't it kind of dangerous up there?”

“Well, yeah,” Cat confirmed. “Larry almost got his foot blown off once.” There was live ordnance all over the place, I'd heard. “But you can make a pretty penny off that stuff. If you know the right people.”

You could also get blown to kingdom come, it seemed to me. Or disappear into an old mine shaft or well and never be heard from again.

“Larry knows all the roads and old Indian trails through there,” Cat continued, and shrugged. “He's not the only one that does it.”

Then she got quiet as we bumped over the railroad tracks outside town. The road turned into Beale Street at that point, heading straight for the bombing range. On the left was a small electrical station, with big transformers and power generators. The road turned to loose gravel, a thin ribbon of white winding through the brown desert scrub. My eyes followed it a mile or so into the distance. I squinted at what I saw. Part of a small hill up there was splashed with bright colors, and it didn't look like a trick of the light.

Cat was pensive beside me. Suddenly she spoke up. “I wasn't always like this, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just … I was regular people, like you. Before I got hurt.” She stopped and flicked some cigarette ash out the window, and I waited for her to continue. “Had a job in a bank, my own car, everything.”

We hit a pothole and jolted over it, making me watch the road more closely.

“How did you get hurt?”

“Somebody hit me in the back of the head. Right here,” she said, leaning forward to put her finger on the spot. The burning cigarette was right next to her hair, its ashy tip emitting a thin line of smoke. “Knocked me flat on the ground. Never knew what hit me.”

“Who did it?”

“Beats me. Somebody in a car, driving by. I was jogging down the street. Heard it coming up behind me, then nothing.”

“So they never caught them?”

“Nope.” Cat looked down at the beer bottle in her lap and started peeling the label. It came off in small pieces. “I was never the same after that.” Another gulp of the beer and a last drag on the cigarette. She dropped the butt outside, her face turned away. Fiddled with the control for the window. It went up and down with a motorized whine. “Couldn't remember things. Mixed up numbers at the bank all the time, till they had to let me go. I guess I can't blame 'em. Other people's money and all.”

What a world. One second she's a bright young woman with a good future, the next, an alcoholic with a mental impairment. And the worst part of it was that she remembered the way she used to be, that she could never go back. I looked over and saw Cat's second forty-ouncer mostly gone. Sometimes it was better to forget.

“I'm okay now, I guess. I have good days and bad days. Sometimes I get real mad at myself though, like when I lose my Social Security checks.” She shook her head and swallowed some beer. “That happened last month. I still haven't found it.”

“You like it out here?”

“Yeah, I do. Got used to the heat a long time ago. And I can do whatever I want, because there's nobody telling you what's what. I sleep a lot, walk around, talk with my friends. Listen to my music.” She turned to me. “You like Pink Floyd?”

“Definitely.”

That seemed to make her day. She was beaming as she spoke. “
Dark Side of the Moon
is my favorite. And the other one. What's that one about the animals?”

“
Animals
,” I replied, smiling. “I like that one too.”

“Yeah, it's good. Those sheep scare me sometimes though.”

I nodded, recalling the eerie sound effects on that album.

“Biggest thing I need all the time is batteries for the tape player. They're always going out. Half my checks probably go for that. But I listen to that stuff over and over.”

We were now approaching Slab City, and I slowed down a little. I'd found a short online article about it at the
Desert Sun
Web site last night. Every winter the “snow birds” would gather here, scores of retirees parking their RVs for a few months to escape cold weather. Slab City was literally that—a scattered collection of concrete slabs, foundations left over from the former Marine Corps base that had long since disappeared like a traveling road show blowing town. There were a few official structures that remained, I noticed, like a solitary quonset hut that resembled a half-pipe cylinder of corrugated metal. Here and there, squat brick boxes with viewing ports for observing bomb tests. They looked like carnival ticket-booths. The first one I saw, right at the roadside, was painted a festive purple. As we drove past it, I read
Welcome to Slab City
in colorful letters. A Xeroxed flyer taped to the wall urged people to sign up for Medicare benefits.

The population here could swell into the thousands when the snow birds came to town. But it was apparent now that most of them had left, probably weeks ago. All that remained were the die-hard year-round residents. They lived in a motley collection of scattered trailers, camper shells, and defunct old buses with foil in the windows and no wheels. Not more than a few hundred people, I guessed.

The reason for all that color I'd seen a few minutes ago was coming up on the right.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Salvation Mountain,” Cat murmured, giving me the feeling that it made the same impression on her, one of quiet wonder, each time she passed by.

It was a thing to behold, a colorful man-made creation sculpted on the side of a mesa. A multitude of religious messages and pictures were painted on the hardened adobe, all beneath a large cross that spread its arms against the eggshell whiteness of the sky. A huge pink heart upturned to the heavens proclaimed, “God is Love.” Biblical quotations crowded for position on the flat face of the hillside.
JESUS I'M A SINNER PLEASE COME INTO MY BODY AND INTO MY HEART
in raised white letters. Doves and fishes and flowers adorned the smaller spaces between the quotations. Another read,
FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON
. Closer to the road, an old abandoned flatbed truck, its hood yawning open in the heat like a panting dog. It was splashed with the same pastel shades as the mountain, with more doves and flowers and trees and hearts. The whole scene was fanciful and surreal, a heat-stroke hallucination in the middle of nowhere.

We'd slowed to a stop at the sight of it, and I took the opportunity to ask where her place was.

“Up ahead there,” Cat answered vaguely, pointing through the windshield, still preoccupied with the colorful outdoor shrine. A rattletrap pickup truck with an odd assortment of pipes and plumbing equipment sticking out the back chugged by in the opposite direction.

A little further into the settlement we came upon a man in a wheelchair inching up the road. He crunched laboriously through the hardpacked gravel. Dirt-clods crumbled under his wheels, which were dusted with a fine white powder. We drew even with him, but he didn't look up, grimly focused on getting wherever he was going. He wore a black baseball cap, also layered with dust, and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. There was some sort of emblem on it, and a word ending with
RA
that I couldn't make out from this angle. His powerful upper arms churned over the wheels like the transmission on an old locomotive.

Cat leaned out the window, greeted him with a good-natured chuckle. “Hey Leonard, where you going like a bat outta hell?”

Leonard looked up like he'd just noticed us and continued rolling. “There's a concrete bunker up yonder. You can follow me if you want.”

Cat glanced back at me, grinning like she was used to this, then addressed Leonard. “Haven't you heard? They cleared out. Couldn't stand the heat.”

“Shit, this heat ain't nothin' for the Delta,” he argued, but stopped his wheelchair anyway. Looked up at Cat as if he wanted to believe her. I stopped with him. “You tryin' to get me killed or something?” he said.

“Well I was just in town and they're nowhere in sight,” she said. “But don't let me stop you.”

At that, Leonard started up again, pumping furiously, panting hard in the dry, dusty air. He had a beat-up canteen in his lap covered with dents and scratches, and I could see that both legs ended in knobby stumps at his knees. I took my foot off the brake and shadowed him.

“Hey Leonard,” Cat continued, but got no response except a tired grunt. That didn't stop her. “You heard of anybody new around here?”

Leonard kept his eyes on the road, no doubt imagining something far different than what was actually in front of him.

Then he spoke up, apparently back in the present time, at least momentarily. “Nah. They all been gone for what? Month, at least. All them old folks in their big buses.”

“This guy would be alone,” I clarified over Cat's shoulder. “Probably about your age.”

“Nope,” came the terse reply, ending the conservation. He didn't even look up to see who I was.

“Thanks, Lenny,” Cat said. Then, as I accelerated: “Come by and see me tonight on your way back. I got a bottle around somewhere.”

Lenny kept quiet, back in his own head. It was a Sierra Club T-shirt, I saw in the rearview mirror.

Cat relaxed inside the car again. “That's my friend Leonard.”

We drove by another old camper shell sitting in the dust, where I noticed the girl I'd seen at the mini-mart. She had her little Jeep backed up to a small garden, and was carefully watering the spindly plants from the drum she'd filled up. I wondered how long they'd last in this environment.

Just past that Cat pointed out where she lived. A tiny Airstream trailer with no wheels squatting resolutely next to a skeletal, dried-out smoke tree that provided precious little shelter. The trailer looked like some sort of hump-backed animal that had curled up beneath the tree to die.

I pulled up next to it as Cat murmured, “He told me once about his legs.”

I turned off the engine and the car shuddered once.

“His Jeep got blown off the road in the middle of the jungle. When he came to,” she continued calmly, without a trace of her stutter, “both his legs were crushed underneath it. Dug himself out and crawled back up to the road where someone could find him.” Then her eyes got wide. “He was there for two days. Can you believe that?”

Cat seemed to be looking through me, and I couldn't hold her gaze. Others had fought and died over there, while I'd been slacking my way through college, going through the countercultural motions. Attending rallies between drunken make-out parties and getting stoned. And finally, throwing it all away in one blaze of stupidity. I thought about that warehouse in New York, lying on the cold floor writhing in pain. Couple of hours, at most, with all my limbs intact.