The Juliet (5 page)

Rigg returned to the doorway and gestured with his inappropriate morning beverage. “Everything all right?”

The couple had almost islanded their vehicle. Those wagons were tough, but they didn’t have enough clearance. The man rolled down his window and leaned out. “Yeah thanks, we’re just ah…” He gave the shack and Rigg a confused once-over. “We were looking for The Mystery House? I think we made a bad turn back there.”

The couple didn’t recognize Rigg Dexon. “Yeah you did sir.” He put a little extra honey in his growl to give them another chance. “An’ anyways, the CDC burned that place down. On account of the rats.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hantavirus. Place was soaking in it. It’s carried by rats, like the bubonic plague.”

The woman was visibly disappointed. “No one told us that.”

Rigg’s folksiness was getting thicker by the second, setting up like pudding, but the couple still didn’t know who he was. “Parks Service don’t like that information to get out. Might cause a panic. Anyways, you best get your vehicle turned around. Ruts only get worser from here on up.”

“Hantavirus?” The woman didn’t believe him.

“Yup.” He knew how to send these folks on their way. And they were going without water, warm or cool, he decided. To hell with them. “Used to be called
Ko
-rean hemorrhagic fever. Nasty stuff. It’s anywhere you got rodents around here, anywhere they been peein’. Hantavirus!”

At the mention of an Asian vector, the couple blanched. Rigg was nothing if not a good read of people. “See ya around.” He pointed in the direction of the Amargosa Range, which for today anyway, was the right way out of Dodge.

The man didn’t need any more encouragement. He slammed the vehicle in reverse and managed a K turn that threw sprays of brown gravel everywhere. Rigg didn’t even flinch; he’d gotten to a point in his life where a bit of dust in the eyes and lungs felt natural.

Looking for The Mystery House.
He knew damn well what they were looking for. They were looking for a shiny piece of green rock that had been making fools out of men for more than a hundred years, Rigg included.

He watched the tourist treasure seekers rumble away, and he was curious about where they’d gotten their intel. The Mystery House–Juliet connection was an esoteric piece of lore at best.

Rigg went back inside. Beyond some unfinished enviro-friendly modifications on the exterior, there was nothing obviously special about the four-square stucco shack called The Mystery House. There was a large front room with a kitchen in the corner, and the bathroom and bedroom in the back, all painted a cheap green that sometimes glowed as if the sun was trying to tell secrets long covered over in plaster and mud. If the Big Bad Wolf came around, wouldn’t he be surprised to find out the house was half glass? It’d been built by a saloonkeeper named Hogg in the early 1900s at a time when timber was scarce but whiskey bottles weren’t.

They don’t show that on the TV, how Death Valley glitters with shards of glass everywhere.

The furnishings were sparse. He’d thrown most of it out, but what he kept was from another era, dead mud colors that must have been bright once upon a time, maybe even as far back as when Rigg first laid eyes on the place.

Back then there was a rock and roll band living inside, and a gutted Opal parked outside. He remembered a big, rangy rabbit that stood in front of the Opal and stared him down. And a naked-tittied girl in the doorway who smiled at the rabbit.

It was a location shoot, Rigg’s first, and he was in costume. So was she, sort of. The girl wore a beaded vest that did little to hide her hamburger bun nipples. She and Rigg had a cute conversation, and he knew she was making fun of him throughout most of it, but he didn’t care. He was getting paid, and he was chatting up a real live groupie. Everything she said to him was designed to stop the conversation dead, and he loved it:

Names are just labels.

That’s for me to know and you to find out.

I’m not into goodbye scenes.

And when she went back inside she left the door open, an unspoken invitation. The big rabbit walked over to the doorsill and stood almost exactly where the girl had stood. Rigg had always thought that rabbits hopped. Then the rabbit walked into The Mystery House like it lived there. That was probably the best day of Rigg Dexon’s life, and the great thing was, he knew it at the time.

A lot of years passed before Rigg made it back to The Mystery House, and now it was his. No girl though, which was for the best. A seventy-four-year-old hell-raiser brought to heel by his prostate didn’t have much to offer in the boudoir.

That couple was too afraid to get out of their damned car. Did they really think they were going to find The Juliet with their Walmart toy?

At least Rigg had maps. Or rather pieces of maps. He’d been collecting them for thirty years, long enough to call it his life’s work, outside of acting. And Rigg didn’t just have duplicates of some sections, he had triplicates, quadruplicates, goddamned octuplicates—and so many more boxes unopened. His first day in The Mystery House he laid out dozens of pieces, filling the green room with green squares that fluttered and whispered as he passed. The question—what fellow enthusiasts called “The Great Question”—was printed in curlicue script in the margins of the most coveted sections, the corner pieces:
Where is The Juliet?

As it turned out the question wasn’t so great after all. The question was more like a baby snake. But you couldn’t tell that to the couple with their metal detector and their big red dog and the car that was going to get them stuck the first time they mistook a wash for a trailhead.

Rigg’s maps were in piles now, dusty and neglected, weighted down with sticky tumblers and full ashtrays. Worthless, but a man couldn’t throw his life’s work away, could he? His life maybe, but not the work.

When he returned the bottle, his prop, to the fridge he thought about the treasure hunting couple and their one paper map. He wondered if they were going to get lost, this time for real. At least they had each other.

Rigg didn’t have anyone anymore, except a daughter in North Carolina. They say the years seem to go by faster the older you get because each one is a shorter percentage of the whole life, but these last four months all on his own, like Budge, come to think of it, were the longest ones he could remember. Everything was turned around, except time.

Rigg was with Budge, near the end. The old man jabbering away in a hospice in Ridgecrest. Rigg didn’t want to go like that, but he knew he probably would. There were cold spots, he could feel them, in his heart, lungs, and balls… The doctor told him men die
with
prostate cancer, not from it. Not unless it spreads. To the bones, to the liver. It gets to the liver, a fellow goes down fast. So to keep the cancer in check he took pills that reduced the production of male hormone, but the side effects made the cowboy in him grieve.

They said men thought about sex every seven seconds. These days Rigg’s mind went to cancer the way it used to go to women. He surely missed that preoccupation.

What if there was no such thing as heart and grit? What if character was just a matter of hormones?

A new idea popped into his mind. Well, new to Rigg Dexon.

“This is depression,” he said out loud. He pulled his old jean jacket from the hook. Back in 1979, when it was specially tailored for Rigg, the jacket cost a grand but it had been designed to look like it was worth about twenty bucks.

He patted the pockets, making sure he had everything but the house keys, which he left in the drawer where they’d been since November. Tourists be damned. He would leave the door wide open, and all the windows too. Let the chuckwallas and coyotes and coachwhip snakes run riot. Let the hippies squat, do drugs, and make dirty babies like they used to.

“Leave like you ain’t coming back,” he muttered. It was his most famous line, the one the fans still liked to hear him say. In the scene, he was on horseback, the anti-hero giving advice to the freckle-faced bastard son he’d just met. Then he rode away, leaving the boy behind in a Texas town where the streets were littered with bodies and half the buildings were in flames. Roll credits.

Perhaps it was too early for a public drink, but it was the right time for a change of scenery. Drinking alone was easy in the winter rain, but now it was spring, with all those wildflowers out there to remind him how he used to feel. Just knowing about them made a body itch for companionship. Companionship of a particular kind.

* * *

Willie Judy was about halfway between Beatty and Lone Pine when a pain shot through the middle of her torso, causing her to grip the wheel of her old Camry as if she could tear it off the steering column. The Judys were small and mean, with hearts that tended to go haywire at the most inconvenient times and often in embarrassing locales. Willie was preparing to meet her end alone, out in the middle of nowhere, but then the pain shifted downward. Melanie, the waitress at Shorty’s Ranch Diner, had served up a brimming large OJ instead of the small one Willie had ordered at breakfast.

It was Sunday, which meant the Sysco man was due the next day, and all the food service establishments in and around Death Valley had to make space. Willie’d drunk most of the juice before she noticed that it was a little odd tasting, and now her guts were rebelling.

And that was a good thing. She had an excuse to make a second stop on her route. She only needed to hold on until she made it to the Alkali, just another ten miles down 190. If she floored it she could make it before she burst.

She parked under the check-in canopy of the Alkali Resort and rushed into the dust-filled foyer where guests stomped the desert from their boots. She didn’t even pause to tickle Scottie’s potbelly pigs, Velma and Daphne, snorfling around in a wire pen next to the entrance. The Alkali was a motel-campground compound that strained the definition of “resort,” and these anti-corporate touches were part of the reason why.

Willie brushed by Tony Jackpot on his way out. He was dressed in tight everything—tight jeans, tight chambray shirt, tight leather vest—as was his habit. Even his hair was pulled back into a leather barrette. “Hi-Bye,” she said and made a beeline past the bar to the back office area and the executive toilet. She had privileges for no good reason, and sometimes she thought Scottie and Tony were too soft-hearted to run a business in the desert. Lucky for her, though.

She made eye contact with the gent at the bar. Rigg Dexon, just like Melanie’d said. Willie hadn’t missed him.

“Right back,” she said to him. “You stay there.”

The man had beer froth on his ‘stache, and his eyes twinkled
.
How the hell did he do that?

From the bathroom she could hear the muted voices of men. Tony’d backtracked apparently; she listened to him introduce himself to Dexon, who rumbled a “good morning” in return that sounded like weather. That voice was unmistakable. Then Scottie was talking. His accent always made it sound like he was asking a bunch of questions.

“Damn it, don’t scare him off,” Willie muttered. She had questions of her own. She turned on the faucet and the fan so they couldn’t hear as she cleared her system of the poison she’d ingested.

What Melanie had actually said was, “You hear that cowboy came out of hiding? He’s down at your pal’s drinking his breakfast.” Apparently, someone posted the news on the message board, whatever a message board was. When Willie asked Melanie what cowboy she was talking about, the waitress was stunned. How could anyone who worked in the Valley be so ignorant? Everyone knew Rigg Dexon had been holed up in The Mystery House all winter.

There were exactly three squares of paper left on the roll. Bachelors. Willie made do. She flushed the toilet, washed up, and checked herself in the mirror. “Calm down,” she said to her reflection. Willie was thirty now, not seven, and the man out there was just a washed up old actor, right? Willie combed her hair with her fingertips, wondering how much of her blonde hair was really gray. She didn’t have time for this, and she was going to lose her job if she didn’t get that carburetor delivered to Lone Pine by lunch.

She shut off the faucet and fan and heard the men laughing. Maybe about her. For reasons she never fully understood, her ways amused people.

* * *

Rigg recognized the gambler right away, but it took longer for him to remember who Scottie was, or used to be. Scottie poured him another pilsner, and Rigg raised his glass to his hosts: “To the Great Bloom.”

Scottie shook his head. “Blessing and a curse.”

“All blessing, I say,” Tony reminded him. “Rooms are all booked, and there wasn’t an empty table during the breakfast rush.”

“True enough, but those crazy-ass flowers are breathtaking in more ways than one. It’s disgusting, everyone hacking and sneezing.” Scottie stopped himself there. “Anyway, Mr. Dexon, it’s a pleasure to have you here.”

Rigg drank deep, let the alcohol hit him where he lived. He liked this place. It was simple and masculine, despite the name up on the lintel:
Lily’s Lounge.
The bar itself was a slab of heavily lacquered ironwood that could withstand the apocalypse if needed. He brushed the beer from his whiskers and said to Scottie, “I was just telling your friend here, I knew him right away like he just stepped off the cover of
All In
, but I didn’t work it out you were Rhys Nash till I saw the plaques back there.” Rigg pointed to a dim corner behind the bar where Scottie’s latest Badwater marathon plaque lay atop a pile of others, balanced on a stack of running magazines.

Scottie was a little shy about it. “I let my hair grow out between races.”

He wasn’t kidding. In the magazines, Nash’s head was always shaved down to the skin, sometimes covered by a beanie, but now his hair spiked out in uneven brown tufts as if a preschooler had gotten to it with blunt scissors. That and the hatchet nose, plus the sun creases around the eyes, made Nash look like a creature-man from a Celtic myth, certainly older than his years. Runners always looked like gizzards after a while.