Burial (43 page)

Lunch was served as we flew over the south-eastern
corner of Colorado. I toyed with my breadcrumbed Southern-style chicken and my lima bean salad, but my stomach was knotted up like one of those balls you make out of rubber-bands. Lolly leaned over, fork poised, and asked, ‘Are you really not going to eat that chocolate brownie?'

‘Oh. No. Go ahead, have it.'

‘Chocolate is my only weakness, you know. Apart from you-know-what.' She kissed the air with her surgically bee-stung and plumped-up lips. She must have been well on the family vault side of seventy-five. Still, who was I to complain? I was thirty years younger but I wasn't having half the fun that she was, and that was for sure.

The cabin staff were taking away the trays when the pilot suddenly came onto the intercom. ‘Ladies and gentlemen … we've just received a report from Phoenix Sky Harbor that there is severe cyclonic weather in the Las Vegas area. Early reports don't indicate how serious the storms might have been, but I have to tell you that all connecting flights from Phoenix have been delayed until further notice.

‘I'll keep you posted with further information as soon as it becomes available. '

There were cries of bewilderment all round the cabin. One woman said, ‘My husband's in Las Vegas! My husband's in Las Vegas!'

Lolly, with her mouth full of yet another chocolate brownie, said, ‘This is weird. They don't have cyclones in Las Vegas, do they? I never heard of a cyclone in Las Vegas.'

I shrugged. ‘Something to do with global warming, I guess.' But I had a tight, dull, deep-down feeling that it was nothing to do with cyclones. According to Dr Snow's maps, it had been close to the O.D. Gass Ranch in Las Vegas that eighty-six Washo Indians had been killed in 1862 by Colonel Patrick Connor and two hundred and fifty cavalrymen. This was the same Colonel Connor who, the following year, surrounded four hundred Shoshoni Indians on the Bear
River in Utah, under cover of a blizzard, and massacred them all. Two-thirds of them had been women and children.

The Mormon civilians who had counted the dead had said that the snow for hundreds of yards around looked like ‘strawberry-ice' because of all the blood that had soaked into it.

I guess I couldn't blame the Indians for wanting their revenge, for wanting their lands back, for wanting America the way it once was. But maybe too many years had passed. Maybe the Indians had to accept that — rightly or wrongly — the old days were over. Who wanted to live in a tepee any longer? Who wanted a world without air-conditioning and Jack Daniel's and Cadillacs and implant dentistry?

The 737 captain came back on the intercom. ‘Unhh … ladies and gentlemen … the cyclonic weather situation over Las Vegas appears to be continuing … so we're going to make arrangements for any passengers who have ongoing reservations to stay overnight in the Phoenix area. If you have any queries, please don't hesitate to talk to your flight attendants.'

Lolly said, ‘Do you know something? This is very weird. Just one weird thing after another. My astrologist said this was going to be a weird year.'

I tried to smile. ‘Yes. Mine too.'

The sun hit me like a hammer when I walked out of the terminal at Sky Harbor, over no degrees. I had forgotten to bring my sunglasses, so I spent the first fifteen minutes walking around with my eyes squinched shut like Robert Mitchum. I rented a white Lincoln Town Car from the Budget desk. At sixty-one dollars a day, with twelve dollars insurance, it was far more than I could afford, but after the captain's announcement about Las Vegas, I thought, wothehell wothehell. If the civilized world was going to end tomorrow, I might as well be driving a decent car. The young man behind the desk was called Scott. He had a
perfect tan and a perfect white shirt and perfect teeth and handed me a complimentary map.

‘Just keep an eye out for seniors,' he warned me. ‘They tend to do things unexpected. Like unsignalled U-turns, because they suddenly remembered they left their Zimmer frame at home.'

I drove out eastwards on Apache Boulevard through Tempe and Mesa. I can't say that the suburbs of Phoenix have much to recommend them. They're just like anywhere, except that they're hot. Gas stations, souvenir shops, markets, shacks. People standing around looking desiccated and bored. Everywhere heat and shadows and that strange dry smell of desert and cactus and automobile fumes.

No wonder old people retire to Arizona. Apart from the fact that it's permanently hot and permanently dry, it's unreal. It's like living in an episode of
The Cisco Kid
, the sun so glaring and the shadows so black. You might just as well be on TV. And if you're on TV, like Duncan Renaldo and Jay Silverheels and Dan Blocker and James Arness, you never die. Your body might have been consigned to the mausoleum, but there you are, every weekday morning, still riding and shooting and jumping and smiling. How could anybody say that Lucille Ball is dead?

I reached Papago Joe's Oldsmobile dealership sooner than I expected. There was an ochre-painted building on one side of the highway, with a faded sign saying Sun Devil Bar. On the other side of the highway, a chaos of battered cars, dusty and sun-baked, and a spectacularly dented Air-stream trailer, and a rickety sign with a buffalo skull nailed to the top of it, announcing PAPAGO JOE BARGAIN USED AUTOS. Nothing Over $3300, CLOSED FOR REFURBISHMENT.

I parked the Lincoln next to the Sun Devil Bar & Grill and walked across the highway. In the clear, glassy distance, I could see the crumpled heights of the Superstition Mountain,
where the famous Lost Dutchman Mine was supposed to lie. The mountain wavered in the heat, in the same way that Samuel had wavered when he had given me Martin's message, and it looked just as unreal.

I had read an article about the Lost Dutchman Mine in my (otherwise mind-numbing) airline magazine. Apparently it had first been discovered in 1840 by a young Mexican boy hiding from his irate father: then by three Mexicans, who had been dumb enough to show it to a homicidal Dutchman called Jacob Waltz. The Dutchman had killed all three of the Mexicans, and dug the mine for himself, occasionally appearing in Mesa and Phoenix with pocketfuls of gold nuggets. I liked that. I mean, wouldn't you like to roll into your local bar, dusty and sweaty, your pockets bulging with gold nuggets?

On his deathbed, Waltz confessed to a friend that he had killed not only the Mexicans but eight more men who had tried to follow him back to the mine, and gave his friend a map showing where the gold was buried. However he must have been a seriously incompetent cartographer, because his friend couldn't find the mine, and neither have any of the hundreds of prospectors who have combed through the Superstitions since.

There was something about that story that appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. I'll bet that Jacob Waltz wasn't a killer at all, but the biggest hoaxer this side of the Gila River.

I crossed Papago Joe's used-auto lot, and gave a postman's knock on the side of the trailer. Not far away, a shaggy German shepherd barked and yanked at his chain. ‘Down, Fang,' I told him. He carried on barking, but not very enthusiastically. It was almost impossible to be enthusiastic about anything in this heat, even about biting my leg off.

I knocked again. Eventually the trailer door was opened up. I found myself confronted by a thin, pale boy of about
nineteen, wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and heavy boots and black transparent panties with lace round the edges.

‘Yeah?' he said. ‘Whaddya want?'

‘My name's Harry Erskine. I'm looking for Papago Joe.'

‘We're closed, man. We got nothing to sell. All of our cars got damaged. '

‘I'm not interested in buying a car.'

‘Then what?'

‘I told you. I want to see Papago Joe.'

The boy scratched the back of his neck and winced. ‘I don't know, man. He's not too excited about talking to anybody right now. All his cars got smashed. He lost his daughter in a custody case. Apart from that, he's been drinking.'

It was so damned hot on that lot that I was practically braised. A few tomatoes and onions, and a sprinkle of sage, and I would have made a perfect
cotolette di maiale alla modenese
.

I said, ‘I don't really give a damn whether he's been drinking or not. I just came all the way from New York, and I need to talk to him. '

‘You came from New York?'

‘I just arrived, about an hour ago.'

‘You came all the way from New York just to talk to Papago Joe?'

I nodded.

‘Hey,' said the boy. ‘That's
extra
. That's really
extra
.'

‘Glad you think so,' I told him. For some reason — despite the fact that he was such an obvious goofball, and despite his terrible T-shirt and his cock curled up in his see-through panties — I decided that I liked him. There aren't very many originals left, but this guy was obviously one of them.

The trailer door swung shut, juddering on its hinges, and the boy disappeared inside for what seemed like three hours, especially in this heat. I could cope with New York
when it was hot. New York was all sweat and grime. But out here, Under The Old One, it was clean and dry like a fan-assisted oven. One breath, and all the hairs in your nostrils shrivelled up. Two breaths, and your lungs were pemmican.

The door opened again. The boy had a serious look on his face. ‘Papago Joe says okay. But he needs some firewater.'

‘Firewater?'

‘Didn't you ever read cowboy comics? He wants a bottle of Chivas Regal.'

‘Some firewater,' I complained.

‘It's all right You can buy it across the highway at the Sun Devil. Ask for Linda. Tell her that E.C. Dude sent you.'

I dabbed my forehead with my crumpled handkerchief. ‘E.C. Dude? What kind of a name is that?'

‘Just tell her, E.C. Dude.'

‘Does that stand for anything? E.C.?'

He covered his eyes with his hand, as if he were so tired of people asking him what E.C. stood for that he was almost ready to commit suicide.

‘I'll bet it stands for Elvis Charisma,' I teased him.

His eye appeared through his partly-opened fingers.
So that onlie ye Eyes look'd out.
‘You've got to be kidding me. My mother hated Elvis. My mother was into Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Besides, my real first name is Trenton and my real second name is Partridge. E.C. Dude is just a name I made up for myself. Would
you
want to be called Trenton Partridge? I mean, get real.'

‘So E.C. doesn't stand for anything at all?' I asked him.

He shrugged, looked away. ‘It does, as a matter of fact. But whether I tell you is down to me.'

‘You're right,' I said, with a serious nod. ‘I'll go buy the firewater.'

I walked away, across the dusty sun-baked lot I knew that E.C. Dude was still standing in the open doorway of the trailer watching me. That's the wonderful thing about teenage
kids. They try so hard to be different and sophisticated that they all end up acting exactly the same. Mind you, I guess that's true of almost everybody. But I bet myself a hundred dollars that by the time I reached the perimeter fence of the used-car lot, E.C. Dude would tell me his name.

I walked slower and slower. My shadow cowered beneath my feet as if it were afraid to come out. I passed a wrecked Electra and a crushed-up Le Sabre. I had almost reached the perimeter fence. Then I heard E.C. Dude call out, ‘Extra Cool!'

I turned around, took off my sunglasses.

‘Extra Cool!' he repeated. ‘That's what E.C. stands for! Extra Cool Dude!'

‘That's great,' I told him. ‘I like it. Nothing like wearing your heart on your sleeve.'

I crossed the shimmering-hot tarmac and climbed the gritty wooden steps to the front door of the Sun Devil Bar & Grill. Outside, you could easily have mistaken the Sun Devil for a concrete blockhouse because that's about all it was. The only giveaway that this was a palace of refreshment was a red-and-blue neon sign announcing Coors beer on draught.

I opened the screen door and went inside. It was so dark after the blinding white desert that I had to stop and blink for a while before I could see where I was or where I was going. The air-conditioning was set to North Pole.

There was a long dimly-lit bar with a vinyl-padded front and a row of chrome and vinyl-padded stools. Behind the bar hung a parody of one of those old-time reclining nudes, only this one looked more like a centerfold from
Playboy
, a glossily airbrushed girl sunbathing on a desert rock. Out of her tumbling brunette hair poked a pair of nubby horns, and in her hand she held a three-pronged toasting-fork.

A juke-box was playing some sentimental Tammy Wynette-type song. As far as I could make out in the gloom, the
only other customers in the Sun Devil were a porky little man in a light green suit and white shoes who was perched up on a bar-stool with his white stetson hat and a Bloody Mary in front of him; and a mountainous black-bearded trucker who was sitting at one of the tables, shovelling up corned-beef hash and eggs as if his stomach were a landfill project.

As I approached the bar, however, a young blonde woman came out from the back. She had blue eyes as big as Bambi, and she was wearing a tight white sleeveless blouse. Quite pretty, if you like Western waitresses.

‘He'p you?' she wanted to know.

‘I want a bottle of Chivas Regal, if you have one to spare.'

She nodded her head in the general direction of Papago Joe's. Joe's got you buying, does he?'

‘He's done this before, then?'

‘Just about ever' time anybody comes to talk about the murders,' she said. She reached down under the bar and produced a bottle of Chivas Regal. ‘He used to drink Johnnie Walker but not these days.'

I gave her two twenties and she gave me the change. ‘What happened over there?' I asked her.

She shrugged. ‘Nobody really knows. My son Stanley saw it happen but of course he's only just turned nine. And E.C. Dude saw it, did you meet E.C. Dude?'