The Flicker Men (36 page)

The ribbon unspooled. Miles more. Brown shrubs clinging to the edge of a low canyon wall that finally opened to the expanse. A wide red wild.

As I drove, I gradually became aware that there were two of me. The one who drove, and the one who dreamed, and I saw a hare striding out in the scrublands—a loping run that kept pace with the vehicle. A mystical blackness in the shimmering heat, too faint to see with your eyes, though you could feel it was out there—long legs kicking, maw open, red tongue streaming out from a sly, grinning face, while behind it a coyote chased with snapping jaws, and I was the coyote, and I was the hare, and I was the driver, and the woman in the backseat wasn't anyone, anywhere, not even herself.

The tires squealed as the car followed the curve, and I snapped awake, spinning the wheel, overcorrecting. The sickening pull on my body against the seat belt before finally straightening out, gaining control.

Mercy had come awake but said nothing.

*   *   *

She drove while I slept.

Three hours later, she shook me awake. “We're getting close.”

I opened my eyes to the broken landscape. Low hills. It all looked the same. I wondered how she knew.

“How close?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe less.”

“How many times have you come here?”

“Once,” she said. “A year ago.” She slowed and turned off the main road onto a dusty drive that disappeared over a rise. Brown shrubs covered the stony soil. “I never wanted to come back,” she said.

The car crested another rise. The road went on and on into the distance, brown and dusty, for several miles, following the curve of the upland before seeming to evaporate into the shimmering air. Mercy slowed the vehicle to twenty miles per hour but pressed on.

“Why did you stay with Vickers? You could have walked away, so why didn't you?”

“You mean live a normal life?”

“Yeah. There are worse things.”

I watched her. Her body rocked with the movement of the car over the pitted road. It seemed a track more fitting to four-wheelers than any kind of car.

“What makes you think I could have?”

I looked at her hand resting on the wheel. The missing parts of fingers.

“What happened to your hand?”

She looked at me, following my gaze. “I don't remember.”

“How can you not remember?”

“There were worse things. Things I lost far worse than this.” She held her hand up, damaged. “And
that's
what I remember. I remember them tearing me apart. Toying with me, like a child might pull the wings off a fly. I remember dying—being right at the edge of it.”

The car rocked on its suspension as we crossed another deep hole. I didn't understand. “You remember things that didn't happen?”

Mercy's eyes were far away, gazing out through the filthy windshield. “They did happen. It's like there's a fissure, and the world can
pull
you, and I was suddenly on a different track—a track where I'd lived, instead of dying and I was left with this hand that I didn't recognize.” She looked down at her own hand. Her face was grim.

“What do you mean, ‘pulled you'? Who pulled you?”

“The world. It's like a correction that happens. A fracture.”

I thought of Stuart.
I think sometimes it can get confused.

“When it happens,” she said, “you remember the track you come from, mostly. Not the one you're pulled to. Though there's a little bleed-through. Maybe a quick flash of memory, but it's like it happened to somebody else. This”—she held up her hand—“happened to somebody else.”

“It looks like it happened to you.”

She shook her head. “A different version of me. What happened to me was much worse.”

*   *   *

We rounded a bend in the rutted track, and the land opened up, dropping slightly, and I could suddenly see for miles.

You hear about people dying in the wilderness, their car breaking down. I could imagine it easily. Humans are at the mercy of their instruments.

It was a desolate landscape. Dry and inhospitable. More scrub and rock and low, desiccated trees. I squinted through the filthy windshield.

There was something up ahead, maybe half a mile.

Mercy saw it, too. She eased the car to a stop and hit the windshield washer fluid. Precious liquid sprayed across the glass, making streaks in the dust.

The patch of land was maybe thirty yards square, nestled between two low hills. In that spot, the land was greener, with grasses and flowers—and there above it, spread like an umbrella, loomed a huge, gnarled tree, rare in this arid country, and under whose branches crouched a small, dilapidated trailer, shimmering in the summer heat.

We'd seen similar trailers over the last day's drive, on the outskirts of towns. Often surrounded by junk and broken-down cars. But this was the middle of nowhere.

“It hasn't changed,” Mercy said.

She shifted the car back into drive, and we continued on, slowly descending the gradual slope. As we approached the settled spot of land, I got a better look at the trailer. Whatever its original color might have been, it had been whitewashed long ago to fight off the sun. Streaked with dust and grime, its chrome trim sandblasted to a cloudy countenance. Even the windows looked fogged—an aging glaucoma, as if the panes had seen too much and wished to see no more. The yard was heaped with castoffs. A small love seat lay tipped on its side. There were two cars, only one of which looked like it was from this lifetime—a familiar gray sedan. Vickers's car. A small dent in the right front quarter panel. So she'd made it after all. The other car's wheels were sunk into the ground, so that it rested on its belly in the red dirt. The paint was a faded pink that might have once been red. I saw wheelbarrows, and bicycles, and a large metal bucket whose sides were crushed in.

The front door of the trailer was open to the heat. A screen door swayed crookedly in the breeze.

Mercy pulled the car to a stop thirty yards short of the trailer.

I looked at Mercy's face, and I could see the fear. She didn't want to approach.

“What is this place?”

“The last of the hides,” she said. “This is where Vickers brought Hennig when she nursed him back to health.”

 

47

We sat. The engine idled.

“We didn't come all this way to stop now,” I said.

She shook her head. “The car stays here in case things go wrong.”

“And if they do go wrong?”

She was quiet for a moment, considering my words. “Maybe one of us makes it back to the car.”

I glanced at her. “I don't think where we park is going to matter.”

She didn't want to drive any closer, but in the end there was no point not to.

“It'll be fine,” I said. Which might have been a lie, of course. I had no way of knowing, one way or the other.

She reached for the window buttons.

It was three o'clock and the worst heat of the day was over, but it was still a killing heat that poured through the opening windows. It might have been 105 degrees. I couldn't imagine the temperature inside that trailer.

She shifted into drive, and the car eased forward. She parked in the shade beneath the tree and after cutting the engine reached under the driver's seat, and pulled out a gun. She tucked it behind her back and smoothed her shirt over the lump.

When we opened our car doors and stepped outside, a hot breeze lifted my sweaty hair from my forehead. The air was oven dry, and the dust of the badlands hung in the wind.

“Come on,” I said.

We made our way up the path to the trailer. A child's metal swing set, decades old, swayed in the breeze. On one side of the swing, the chain was frozen in rust; on the other, it had broken and lay strewn on the ground. The hinge made a rusty squeak as the wind moved the sun-bleached wooden seat.

“Vickers hasn't survived this long by being careless,” Mercy said. “Or without having contingencies.”

The stairs at the front door looked as old and weather-beaten as the swing. Made of plywood and two-by-fours, bleached gray by the sun. We walked up the crooked stairs to the front door.

Mercy had to close the screen in order to knock. “Hello?” she called out, knocking on the fogged glass.

There was no response.

“Anybody here?”

She opened the screen door and stepped inside.

The interior of the trailer looked no better than the exterior. The carpet was worn to its threads in a path between the couch and the kitchen. A small TV sat on top of a larger one in the living room. There was a gray, sagging sofa. Coffee table. Cheap glass knickknacks positioned on a shelf near the front door—ceramic puppies and cats and elephants. I saw a crucifix on the wall. Then another. A statue of Mary stood vigil on a side table by the couch. There were small statues of saints, of various sizes and means of manufacture, located strategically around the room. Some were cheap plastic of the type you saw on car dashboards. Others were larger, hand painted, made of glossy ceramic.

“Hello?” Mercy called out again.

At the far end of the hall, the bedroom door was open. The bed unmade. Bright white sheet waterfalling to the floor. But the trailer was empty. Nobody there.

“Vickers, you here?”

As if in response, a noise drifted in through an open window. An old man's voice, from outside the trailer. I took a few steps deeper into the living room and parted the curtains behind the couch. The backyard was much the same as the front. Part trash heap, part wilderness. Overgrown with weeds and grass. Twenty yards out, the land rose slightly, and a large lean-to had been constructed from an immense white tarp and wooden poles, providing shade for a picnic table. At the table, bent over their work, was an old couple. The man stooped and gray and the woman sitting beside him in a ratty wicker chair.

“People,” I said. “I don't see Vickers, though.”

Mercy stepped next to me and looked out through the window. She stared for a long time. “She's here.”

“And who are they?”

“The people who live here. This is their place.”

Beyond the glass, the old man's brow furrowed as he worked with his arms, bent over some task we could not see. The old woman murmured softly, clutching a yellowed newspaper.

“They don't know we're here.”

“They know,” Mercy said. “Come on.”

I followed her down the rickety stairs and around the side of the trailer. The yard here was more overgrown than I'd realized. Rougher. Tall grass and small green shrubs. As we approached the pair at their picnic table, the old man looked up. He said something in Spanish to the old woman. She glanced at us briefly, green-hazel eyes registering no curiosity, before she went back to her newspaper. I looked down and saw what the old man was working at. He yanked hard, pulling with his knobby hands. The fur pelt came away from the flesh like an overtight sweater. He was skinning a hare. A large butcher knife lay before him.

Along with the knife, there were two other hares on the table. One laid out flat and the other one caged. Wild jackrabbits, by the look of them. Little running machines, with long legs and sleek, narrow bodies.

Of the three animals, one no longer had skin or life, but the other two still breathed, red-brown fur sporadically twitching as the old man worked beside them. The one closest to him flared its nostrils.

The old man took the knife and cut away the skin at the dead hare's front paws. The fur pulled free.

The old couple might have been married, or they might have been kin. The man seemed older and more weather-beaten. A constellation of age spots across his large nose.

“Is Vickers here?” I asked.

The old man didn't even look up from his work, just waved us farther on with a bloody hand. And that's when I saw the trail.

We followed the path down a gradual slope and found Vickers lying near a small pool that had gathered between the low hills. A natural seep from the uplands. It was cooler down by the water.

“So you made it,” she said, pale green eyes lifting to us as we approached.

She looked terrible. Her once-neat clothes now ragged and bloody. Her hair hung in matted clumps of dried gore. She clutched something dark and red in her hand, but I couldn't tell what it was.

Mercy dropped to her knees at Vickers's side. “You're hurt.”

Vickers ignored that. “You came without Hennig,” she said. “He's dead then.” It wasn't a question.

Mercy nodded.

Vickers closed her eyes and took the news with the bow of her head. When she finally lifted her face again, she looked at me. “Now it's down to you two,” she said.

“And you,” Mercy replied.

Vickers shook her head. She tried to smile, but the effect looked ghoulish on her bloody face. “I didn't make it either,” she said. She sat up, wincing at the pain. She coughed into her bloody sleeve. “The hounds are fast. Hellish beasts. How did you get away?”

“The tide flats,” I said. “We got lucky.”

She nodded again and opened her hand, and I saw that the shape she held was a rabbit's foot. The fur streaked in crimson. She caught me looking. “A present. For good luck, they say.” She smiled. “But not for the rabbit. Tell me, do you think all good luck must come at a cost?”

“You make your own luck,” I said.

Vickers tried to smile again. “That's exactly right. You do.” She gestured up the trail where the old man stood at the table. “He's making some now.” The knife chopped down on the hare's leg.

Vickers extended her hand to me, holding out the foot. It was bloody and raw.

“Go on,” she said. “Take it. You're either the rabbit, or you hold the foot.”

I took it. It was heavier than it looked.

“Come, help me stand,” she said. “I've been lying here too long.”