The Road Narrows As You Go (33 page)

Of course, said Frank. Natural's all there is. And you're right. These trails are much too random for human intervention. Humans can't resist patterns.

Here are patterns, said Rachael of three parallel grooves, as if the stones were in a neck-and-neck race spanning centuries.

But no patterns over there, said Frank. And besides, these are hardly parallel just because they're all in a line. Yeah, wind could do this.

Except if
I
can't push one, how can wind? said Jonjay. Whatever it is, it's a drawing nature made. I've always wanted to come here.

The paths do give them personality, said Sue. There's some weird feelings I get from the stones, like they are alive, there's a presence to them. Don't you feel it? Maybe there is a sentient phenomenon going on here. I wonder if they're watching us from their lifespan of eons.

Torchlight blinding. Ears ringing with heat's tinnitus. Sweating under unmitigated solarity. Ultraviolet headaches. Heatstroking. The sun and heat didn't affect Jonjay the same way it burned us. He took breaks to drop off stacks of paper at the Jeeps, one stack per stone, labelled accordingly. Then he would wander the playa for a while, gazing here and there and studying the ground for stones with an especially interesting path. Meanwhile we took breaks back at the Jeeps and guzzled from icecold thermoses of water and ran the engine for a blast of air conditioning.

Kravis wasn't going to get down on his hands and knees, not for art. Not in his Gucci casuals. On a tour of the playa, he found an abandoned park ranger's shack made of clay and bleached wood beams warped by the scorching time under the sun, and, in the mood for some shade, he went in. We followed him in a short time later, not knowing he was inside. We found a charming black cookstove, a card table, two wicker chairs, and a cot upon which we caught Kravis asleep. It was cool indoors compared
to the playa's frying pan, and the walls were covered in watercolours of haggard soldiers, sirens at the lagoon, dragon mountains, and other local Death Valley vistas spun into the floss of lonely fantasy. Not bad amateur art, we thought.

Hip studio, said Kravis as he sat up and yawned, put his sunglasses in his shirt pocket. Imagine this is your job, working out here, the kind of cosmonaut you'd become. Bet you anything there's a bottle stashed somewhere, probably under the mattress. Ah, there you have it. Wild Turkey—this man knew his business. Kravis found a tin mug hanging by a hook in the ceiling. And our lucky day, folks. Who wants to fight fire with fire?

He skulled the mug and licked his lips. Poured himself another shot before passing bottle and mug on to us.

Mark Bread proceeded to roll a two-paper joint for a hotbox.

We shouldn't be seen together, Kravis confessed. Not us—me and Frank, I mean. We're in cahoots, but you know, that's not kosher. Fuck it, I say. Who's looking? Idiots, that's who. He laughed. Give me back that bottle.

Dust the colour of coffee grinds swept across the ground in the wind, up into our faces where sweat dissolved the grains into lines of mud.

An hour later there were four of us walking together across the playa, Wendy and Sue in front, parallel like two stones. They had talked about what Wendy was up to, and what Sue was working on now, a short story about a renowned psychotherapist who leads a double life as a polyamorous drug addict.

I'm in psychotherapy for my teeth, Wendy told Sue. I have bruxism. Sue said the girl in her dormroom in college was like that, Sue could hear her teeth squeak and crack all night long. Wendy had tried a slew of doctors and treatments but none of them had cracked her code, she was wry and defensive and blind to herself as ever. She hoped for a consultation
with the celebrated repressed-memory expert Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who was on tour of America.

I still brux, she said. I brux all night long. I call it bruxing, not grinding. I brux my teeth.

You must suspect something. What do you think is at the root?

I'm stuck between me and myself, Wendy said and turned her gaze towards Jonjay in the middle distance rubbing on his hands and knees.
That's
my problem.
I'm
what I'm biting down on.

Sue said, Maybe you and I are quite alike. I feel the same way sometimes, like I'm caught between the person I am and the one I want to be. Being married young, I guess my experimentation went into in my fiction. But my stories are getting more traditional, so … I'm looking for more out of life these days.

It's like I experiment with people too much and end up drawing a traditional strip. Gee, why are we talking about these things, I'm sorry, I hardly know you.

I don't mind, said Sue. People fascinate me. Usually what's on our minds isn't what we talk about, we circle and circle but never get there. But I can tell you're an open person. You must be like this with everybody. You're not a private person, you're not shy to talk.

That's true, Wendy said. I can talk and draw.

Maybe it's not that you're trapped between your teeth. Maybe they grind because you're so open. After hearing so much from Frank about your success the past few years … well, now I regret we didn't meet sooner. We could be fast friends.

Totally. Let's be. So, what's Frank say about me? I can't help but wonder.

Oh, you know. He says how talented he thinks you are, and how many deals you've helped him make, and I can tell he likes you personally. Now I see why he does, because you're smart and adorable and you draw all day. You've got the best life. I can see why with a personality like yours you're so close to someone so reclusive as Jonjay.

Jonjay-in-the-box? Look at him, harmless as a kitten, but get to know him and I promise he explodes in your face. But then you sit around and wait for the next time he pops up. The one that got away is my roommate, imagine that, Wendy said guilelessly. Jonjay is the real reason I grind. My life would be completely different without him.

Presently we joined up with Piper Shepherd, who stood beside the dolomite Grandstand regarding the landscape through slitted eyes, disillusioned with the desert or himself. He bared his teeth against the wind spitting shards of sand at his face. The Grandstand was a volcanic outcropping of batwing rocks, black and broiling hot, the only unflat thing in a three-mile span, it could be the remnants of a burnt-out alien craft. From its peak we could survey the entire surface of the playa shimmering in heatwaves. Sue climbed to its peak and stood beside us with a hand over her eyes and said, My god, this place is desolate, the embodiment of
goodbye
. Death Valley is like walking into that word, really getting a sense of its scale against the puniness and fragility of the human heart.

Then she got a pocket sketchbook from her handbag and a Pentel, and, with the cap in her mouth, began to write. Once in a while she took a deep breath and wiped her eyes and nose against the back of her hand as if she were quietly crying.

Wendy came around from the other side of the rocks to join Piper in the shadow they provided. The temp dropped a degree. Piper's face was hidden under the brim of a straw hat. He pulled a kerchief from the breast pocket of his white cotton blazer and mopped his neck.

Ice water? she said, holding out her thermos.

They sat down on a natural bench of dolomite and shared the water. Dust clouds pirouetted in front of them, then vanished.

It's hard to believe it's almost Christmastime, Wendy said.

Piper choked and laughed. Christmas is banned here, he said. Death
Valley is a Santa-free zone. Nobody opens presents in Death Valley. What the hell.

For the longest time now I've imagined if I ever made a
Strays
Christmas special it would take place in the middle of a hot hot summer. Maybe one of the animals hears what Christmas is all about and gets the date wrong. So all the animals plan a big Christmas celebration with gifts and dinner feast and songs and everything, only to learn it isn't Christmas for six more months.

But you
are
making it already, aren't you? That's the rumour, isn't it? Yes, I heard about this project, in fact, said Piper. He drank the last of the ice water. You mentioned it in an interview.

Are your TV channels looking for a cartoon special that could air in July and again in December?

If it's good, Wendy, perhaps. It
is
rather unorthodox to make it yourself, you know, and sell it to us finished. Normal way to go about this is—

Naw, I'm a control freak, said Wendy. This one is too important to me. I don't want to pass a script off to Hanna-Barbera or some know-it-all who rewrites my ideas. I'd rather make it on my own and risk it never gets seen. It's my money, after all.

Piper smiled. You're cut from the same cloth as your man over there, he said.

Who, Frank?

Ha! No, but yes, him, too. I meant your friend Jonjay. Single-minded.

Oh, yeah, me and those boys. Those two are nothing alike, but somehow I'm like both of them.

I get that sense, said Piper. And that's in addition to being your own person.

A few minutes later, as we climbed down from the top of the rockpile with Sue, we heard the two of them laugh.

Would you look at that, Wendy said, looking pleased with herself and
frightened all at once as she pointed to the sailing stone at her feet. It was a flat slab of dolomite with a black top and on it there was an egg frying.

Sunnyside up and crispy on the edges, she said and peeled the egg off the rock and ate it.

Frank labelled his rubbings of the sailing stone's path in numbered order, put them into the dufflebag with the other packs. Justine hovered around the back hatch and seemed to be doing math in her head.

Kravis had enough of walking around in the pool of nothingness and came to watch Frank.

So is this kid the one moving all these stones around?

That's no kid, said Frank Fleecen.

Kravis pressed his hands to his hips and squinted. Know what I like most about it here in this dry emptiness? We are safe from Securities Exchange agents. We can say anything. Fucking liberating, isn't it? Nobody calling. Nobody watching. There's no one hiding around the corner.

Don't threaten me, Kravis. I don't care where we are. There's nothing left to talk about. Our business together is over.

I thought we were partners …, said Kravis as if he was coo-cooing a baby.

Frank snorted. Partners, says the tapeworm.

All the work I've done for you. Don't turn your back on me now. I'm not blind. I see the deals you aren't cutting me in on.

I'm not colluding with you, Kravis. Find some other sucker to break the law for you.

Oh, so, then why do I still have a carbon copy of a cheque you wrote me, and an invoice for
services rendered
? I guess I forgot to destroy these.

Frank said, calmly, If you've come all this way to extort me, let me dash your hopes on these stones right now. I'm not afraid of you. You're a gnat sucking blood off the anus of Wall Street. I will crush you slowly.

You're funny, Frank. Extortion? Ha! You're not used to being the one in debt, are you? Kravis said contemptuously.

We walked alone through the quiescence. How fast was the pace of change in a place like this? Just the two of us assistants, Mark and Rachael, walking together, feeling once again like freeloaders along for a crazy joyride in a Gulfstream IV to this frying pan. There was nothing else to do but walk so we walked. Except make rubbings. So we rubbed more trails behind sailing stones for Jonjay. Our sense of time was in some ways heightened in the Racetrack Playa, where time did not matter, by our shadows stretching longer by the hour. Time was also the cacophony of our shoes in our ears compared to the vast silence of the motionless lifeless landscape. Mark finished off Justine's bottle of vodka and had to be carried most of the way back to the Jeeps.

Standing there at the Jeeps watching their shadows stretch were Wendy, Frank, Piper, and soon Justine Witlaw's long, bobbing shadow joined our group and minutes later she arrived and stood next to us. It was her idea to buckle Mark into a Jeep so he would be out of the sun. Jonjay had collected over a hundred pages in the dufflebag and that was enough rubbings, we thought. We were ready to go. Frank asked where the other two were, Jonjay and his wife, Sue.

Wendy checked her wrist for the time. But she didn't wear a watch.

We waited. Then we spread out a bit and started to call their names.

Jonjay?

Sue?

Sue?

Jonjay?

There was no way of telling how far our voices carried across the playa, but they didn't seem to carry at all. No matter how loud we shouted. Talking into the vacuum of the desert, or the portal of it, sometimes when we called out it sounded like we didn't say anything at all, and other
times we heard voices from across the aural mirage of a great distance. We heard the wind say, Sue? Sue? Where are you, Sue? In Death Valley, the wind could roar in and make no impression on the bright blue jar of day glittering over us with sunspots. And the moon was up there too, it had gotten into position long before the sun gave up its time in the sky. The hard mattress of the Racetrack Playa was lunar and stretched for miles in every direction. Sue? And a thousand troughs in the rock led into scalding, dead-end canyons. Jonjay? The canyons opened into more canyons. Jonjay? The mountains cliffs stood shoulder to shoulder like Haight-Ashbury homes. Where could they be? A giant sand dune reclined in the nude, sunbathing her long, bare legs.

This can't be happening again, said Justine. He can't have. Oh balls. Frank and Wendy didn't hear, as they searched face-first into the gale force of the wind coming out of the canyons.

It was late into the afternoon and the sun would set soon. We had to leave now if we wanted to make it back to the Gulfstream before dark. That narrow road was treacherous in broad daylight. We shouldn't stay on the playa any longer except they were gone. Exfoliating sandstorms and numbing drops in temp were known to rip through the playa at night. We wanted to call for help. It was not safe here. We had to find them. They were nowhere to be seen. We had to get out of Death Valley. Time was running out. Night would kill us all. We waited a little longer for them to return. We didn't all want to be stranded, though. We must go. Yes, we must. It was time to leave Death Valley. Call for help at the nearest phone.