Empire of Dust (29 page)

A
t 5:45 in the afternoon, four unhappy people drove into the dusty parking lot of Abner's roadhouse. The arguments of the previous night, ending in Damon's sharing Jezebel's tent and sleeping bag, had proved too much for Ted and Aileen, who were found missing the next morning.

Damon had awakened in the early dawn next to a sleeping Jezebel and decided in retrospect that it hadn't been all that great. In fact, it had been pretty shitty. There was some excitement that had come with dominance, but the woman was really the worse for wear.

She had lost a lot of weight since Ezekiel had disappeared and resembled one of those skinny, skanky lowlifes in a CK commercial, only older. In the brightening light of dawn, she wasn't much of a turn-on. And her face was thinning, too. Her nose was looking positively beaky, and her eyes were starting to get that haunted, sunken look he had seen in pictures of starving kids in Africa. The whole thing was starting to suck.

Then he climbed out of the tent and saw that Ted and Aileen's tent was gone. He looked around a little, just in case they had moved it somewhere else—but no, they were gone, all right.

Damon walked over to the bulk of Rodney's sleeping bag and prodded the man with the pointy toe of his boot.

Rodney shot up to a sitting position, blinking away sleep. "What the . . ."

"That was a hell of an idea you had last night to unify us," Damon said. "Teddy Boy and Aileen have hit the goddamn trail."

"What?"

"They're gone. And if I hadn't been sleeping with the keys in my pocket, they probably would've stolen the van. Great idea, Rodney. You get me laid and end up losing a third of our party.
Hell
of an idea."

"Shit. Aw, shit. . . ." Rodney flopped back onto his air mattress. "That dumb sonofabitch."

The day went downhill from there. The van felt a little less crowded when they got on the road, but the tensions among them were greater now than it had been when Ted and Aileen had made up part of the equation. Damon felt hate flowing from everyone who was left.

Rodney was pissed at himself and at Damon for throwing his bad advice up to him; Charlotte was pissed at Damon for rewarding her devotion to him by banging Jezebel; and Jezebel, instead of warming to Damon for his domineering ways, seemed rather to ooze hatred for him. It wasn't, he thought, a bunch of happy campers.

And instead of focusing Jezebel's spindly powers, Damon's actions of the night before had diffused them, if her indecisiveness at every crossroads was any indication. But now, instead of becoming weepily frustrated, Jezebel was growing angrier at her inability to sense the direction of the Divine.

They had driven all around Canyon de Chelly, finally escaping the tourists when they got on the Indian roads north of the canyon. But Jezebel couldn't seem to make up her mind which way she wanted to go, so they stuck to the largest roads, and eventually found themselves heading south again.

"There's
something
down here, damn it," Jezebel said. "I feel
something
on this road, I know it . . ."

They had driven slowly down IR 12, stopping at every dusty crossroads and letting Jezebel sniff for spoor or whatever it was she was doing. At last they saw a shabby little roadhouse with a Pepsi sign hanging from a post with ABNER'S beneath it. "Jesus," said Rodney, "could I ever use a beer!"

"You and me both," said Damon, happy to find something he and Rodney could agree upon. It seemed their dream of finding the Divine was blowing away as quickly as the dust that swirled around the van as Rodney pulled it into one of many vacant spaces in front of the roadhouse.

There was a rusty soft drink cooler outside. Next to it, pressed against its cold metal, lay a skinny yellow dog. Charlotte hurried ahead so that she could pat it, but as she leaned down, it raised its head and gave a soft, rumbling growl deep in its throat, and she stood up again and walked around it.

Inside there was a counter on the left and booths on the right. Both went three quarters of the way down the building until they were stopped by the kitchen, which had a door in the middle of the wall and two windows on either side, one for the counter man and one for the booth waitress.

As the four entered, the cook, a short Navajo woman in an apron and a white paper hat, passed two plates through to the counter man, who took them to two cowboys sitting on stools next to the door. These men were in their fifties, Damon guessed, though the desert sun might have weathered them beyond their years. They looked at Damon and the others, and the closer one eyed him up and down, as though he didn't quite get the black leather pants and vest. "Howdy, cowpoke," the man said, then chuckled and turned to his just-delivered plate, as though not expecting an answer.

Damon stopped dead. He had had quite enough shit from the world and the gods today, and now he was getting more from this skinny brown-as-a-nut hick asshole who was digging into a plate of what looked like jackrabbit and beans. "
'Cowpoke?'
" he said.

Then he felt Rodney's hand on his arm, tugging at him to come along to the booth near the back that Jezebel and Charlotte were staking out. "Come on, man," Rodney said softly. "No point."

Damon went with him, turning his head and holding the gaze of the cowboy, who had looked up from his plate and watched Damon with a challenge in his eyes. Damon sat in the booth with Jezebel, on the seat facing the door and the cowboys. He kept watching the man as intently as the man was watching him. Without looking at his plate, the cowboy picked up a forkful and chewed it, his mouth open, still watching Damon.

"Christ, what a moron," Rodney said.

"Him or me?" said Damon.

"Both of ya. Twenty years ago I woulda done the same dumb macho bullshit. But it ain't worth fightin' about. Ignore him."

Damon snorted and looked away from the cowboy, checking out the rest of the place. Besides them and the cowboys, only four other customers were there. They were Navajo men seated near the front, wearing work shirts and jeans and talking quietly. The Navajo counter man was pouring coffee from a big silver urn.

The kitchen door opened, and a tall boy in his late teens came out with a tray full of burgers and sandwiches, which he took to the Indians in the booth. On his way back, he stopped at Damon's table and handed them laminated menus. "You can bring two beers right away, pal," said Rodney. "What do you ladies want to drink?"

"No beer," the boy said flatly.

"Whaddya mean, no beer?" asked Rodney.

"You're on the reservation," the boy said. "No alcohol served."

"Jesus holy Christ," said Damon. "You telling me we can't get a beer anywhere in this godforsaken shithole?"

"Aw shit," muttered Rodney.

"I'll just have a Coke," Charlotte said, trying to still the waters.

"Pepsi okay?" the boy asked, a little nervously.

"Not for me," said Damon. "Goddamn it, I want a
beer
." It had been one of those days, and things weren't going to get any better. He knew the law was the law and he should just forget about the stupid beer, but he had gone beyond the point of being rational.

He felt as if his whole life were slipping away from him, and something in him perversely made him want to shove the rest of it over the edge. He couldn't have a damn thing that he wanted in his life, not a group to follow him, not the Divine, not even a lousy beer. He had screwed up everything he had tried. If he hadn't killed Ezekiel Swain, they probably would have found the Divine ages ago. It just wasn't fair. He was righteously pissed, and somebody was going to pay for this world of shit in which he now found himself.

"I'm sorry," the Indian kid was saying, "we don't
have
any beer, and if we did, we couldn't
sell
it. You want something else to drink?"

The world went red before Damon's eyes. "I just want a beer . . . one goddamn teeny-weeny bottle of beer. That's what I want."

The grizzled cowboy who had been playing peekaboo with Damon had spun around on his stool. "They ain't got no beer, Mr. Rubber Pants. You deaf along with being queer, sweetheart?"

Damon started to get up, but Rodney was out of his seat before he could stand and pushed him back down. Damon was trembling with rage. "Hell with him," Rodney said coldly, "and hell with the beer. You order a Pepsi and somethin' to eat, and we'll get the hell outta here."

"Aw, looka that, Buddy," the cowboy said to his friend, who had also turned and was grinning at Damon and Rodney. "His honey hadda stop him from playin'. Probably afraid them two dykes they're with might get hurt."

Damon saw Charlotte's face blush a burning red. Rodney, keeping his hand clamped on Damon's shoulder, turned and looked at the cowboys. "I'm not his
honey
," he said in a low, even voice. "I'm his
friend
. And these ladies aren't
dykes
. And we're just gonna sit here and relax now and have a little something to eat." Then Rodney turned his back on them and sat back down.

The cowboy was silent for a moment, and Damon tried to look at his menu through the red haze that was still blinding him. But then the cowboy clucked his tongue and spoke again.

"Ain't nothing sadder than an old biker that's turned into a peter puffer."

He said something after that, but Damon never heard it. A roar from Rodney drowned it out as the man jerked himself out of the booth and ran like a tank at the offending cowboy on his stool.

The cowboy scarcely had time to spin partway around before Rodney was on him, smashing into him with a force that slammed them both onto the counter and then slid them off the end onto the floor. Rodney reappeared, getting to his feet. He was holding the cowboy by his shirt front and began to smash the back of the man's head onto the end of the counter.

The cowboy kicked his feet and smacked at Rodney with his fists, but the fists quickly became open hands as the man grew weaker. Then the cowboy's friend Buddy got into the action.

He grabbed a glass sugar container, ran to Rodney, and smashed it open on Rodney's head. Rodney, dazed, dropped the cowboy and staggered back, blood running from a cut over his eyes. By that time, Damon had jumped Buddy from behind, wrapping his arms around the man's neck and jaw. Buddy staggered backward, having enough presence of mind to bite the forearm that was pressing into his face.

Damon howled with pain and jerked his arms away just as the man swung around and landed a lucky roundhouse on Damon's temple. "
You little pussy!
" Buddy yelled, and hit Damon hard in the gut, then pushed him so that he tripped on the stools and fell partly onto the counter.

The cowboy was up again. He shook his aching head to clear it, and then went after Rodney, who was blinking like he didn't know what country he was in. The cowboy ripped a big key ring off his belt and laid a vicious backhand rake across Rodney's face with the ends of the keys. Rodney screamed in a voice that shivered the spines of the watchers. The fighters didn't have time to be impressed with Rodney's vocal range.

As the cowboy got set to slash Rodney again, Jezebel stepped in. In one quick move, she picked up a big glass shard from the broken sugar container and came up with it under the man's chin before he could strike again. The sharp point buried itself in the soft spot beneath his jaw, angled up the back of his throat, and slipped right into his brain. His fist spasmed open, and the keys fell to the floor. The cowboy followed them a moment later.

Damon wasn't doing much better than the cowboy. Buddy had shoved him behind the counter and into the coffee um, knocking it over so that the top came off and scalding coffee cascaded out in a brown sheet. The heat of it made Damon hiss in his breath as he fell into trays of cutlery below it, sending the silverware clattering to the tile floor.

Buddy leaned over the counter, grabbed a handful of Damon's long hair in his wiry fingers, and yanked up hard. Damon's head snapped back on his neck and his fingers scrambled frantically for something with which to hit the attacker above him. They closed around the handle of a serrated steak knife.

Damon didn't even look. He just rammed the steak knife into the air, hoping that it would come in contact with some part of the man, and it did. The blade slid into Buddy's left eye socket, slicing the eyeball open as easily as a razor blade through a hard-boiled egg.

The shock and the pain were so great that Buddy didn't even yell. His fingers remained clenched in Damon's hair as though he had suddenly turned to stone. When Damon saw the damage he had done, he released the knife handle, horrified by the sight of Buddy's dripping eye and the other untouched eye glaring in fury at him.