Unassigned Territory (18 page)

As for the rest of Trona—the Corner Pocket Bar, Frank’s Liquor, a pair of large mustard-colored buildings which turned out to be the school, a church made of concrete blocks, a theater, a handful of thrift stores and junk shops—it all lay scattered among the loops and curves of the highway as it meandered in the dusty blue shadows of the Trona Chemical Works before straightening itself out and making like a streak, one slender arrow of sunlit pavement running in a rule-straight line toward the eastern rim of Death Valley, as if its builders had at last remembered what was what and gotten the hell out in a hurry.

And there was one final detail he noticed that morning, a kind of coup de grace he picked up on after rolling down his window for a breath of fresh air. It was the peculiar and noxious odor Delandra told him was a product of the chemical plant and one of Trona’s—together with the weather—more or less constant features. And with the discovery of this last bit of news he was set upon by a second set of images for which he was at once willing to abandon the first. The second set had nothing to do with documentary films or old photographs but was drawn instead from the reading he had done between the ages of about twelve and fifteen—the years in which he had worked his way through the entire Winston’s SF-for-young-people series he’d discovered housed in the Pomona Public Library—so that what he was at last able to see in Trona was not really a town at all but an outpost of some sort. A Martian mining complex. A penal colony on Equatorial Mercury. The last uranium works of the fifth moon of the planet Tractar. The image was particularly satisfying when thought of in light of what he and Delandra Hummer had come to find: a landing strip for alien craft.

“I didn’t tell him I didn’t know where it was,” Delandra said. “I kind of wanted to sound like I was familiar with the setup.”

Obadiah nodded. It made sense to him. “Why the hell not?” he said.

“Anyway,” Delandra went on, “it should be easy enough to find. All we have to do is ask someone about where they hold the UFO conventions. It’s all in the same place. I know that much.”

They wound up at a small thrift store on the eastern edge of the town. It was a white Quonset hut type of building situated on a wide gravel shoulder at the side of the interstate. There were perhaps half a dozen people inside, not counting the two old women in yellow aprons who appeared to run the place. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up as Obadiah and Delandra came through the door.

Obadiah, immediately uncomfortable beneath their collective gaze, drifted off toward a rack of aging sport coats and assorted Hawaiian shirts as Delandra approached one of the women seated behind a desk. He was not so far away, however, that he could not hear their voices. He heard Delandra ask about the Martian Museum and then he heard one of the women laugh. “There’s nothing like that here, honey,” the woman said. “I guess you got the wrong town.”

“Nonsense,” Delandra said, “I know there’s something like that here. I don’t live that far away. I’ve heard about it for years.”

“Well, I can’t say what you’ve heard, dear, but I’ve lived in Trona for fifteen years and I know there’s nothing like that around.”

“And you never heard of an airstrip for flying saucers?”

The woman laughed again. “Someone’s been pulling your leg,” she said. The other woman laughed with her.

Obadiah had by now drifted farther toward the rear of the store, where he found himself suddenly staring into the sunken face of a thin middle-aged man. The combination of the man’s height—his head only barely rising above the rack of coats—together with the dull used look of his clothing had caused him to blend in so well with the used sport coats that Obadiah almost passed him without seeing he was there. For a moment the two men stood facing one another. At which point the man smiled, displaying a set of ragged yellow teeth, and disappeared as if he’d been caught at something. Obadiah returned to the shirts. But there was something about the man. It took him a moment to decide what it was. It came to him while holding a brown and yellow polyester item to his chest before a thin rectangle of mirrored glass. It wasn’t the man. It was him. He’d been thinking the guy was weird, but looking into the mirror, what he saw was that the man looked no weirder than he did himself. Perhaps it was the new haircut, the stiff clothing, the missing mustache, the lost weight.... The real revelation, however, was satisfaction this sense of camaraderie aroused in him. It was true he had long ago grown accustomed to feeling on the outside of things—having grown up in The Way. But that, at least when he hadn’t been out knocking on doors, was a kind of secret difference because no one had grown up looking any straighter than he had. But now, staring into this bit of mirror in a desert thrift store, he was remarkably pleased to see he had at last achieved a certain harmony between freak sympathies and outward appearances. He had never had a problem believing in a world that was passing away, it was looking like he might give a shit that had always bothered him. It had never been a world he’d had a stake in and now, suddenly, he looked the part. He no longer looked like a scoutmaster—or some guy who had played basketball in high school. Nor, he was equally happy to note, did he look like those of his generation now camping in The Haight. No uniforms for Obadiah Wheeler. He looked like what for some dark reason he had always been drawn to—like something you might find lurking in the shadows of the Pomona Hotel—and he knew in his heart that there had always been just a trace of something in Bug House’s twisted smile which he had found to admire.

He brought the brown and yellow shirt for fifty cents and by the time he got to the cash register to pay for it Delandra had concluded her business with the old woman and was standing on the porch in the sunlight. She had her arms folded across her chest and was looking back into the store. When she spoke it was loud enough for the woman at the cash register to hear. “The old whore won’t tell me a goddamn thing,” Delandra complained.

The woman gave Obadiah a sour look. Obadiah smiled and handed her a pair of quarters.

They were crossing the dirt lot when Obadiah suddenly noticed someone coming out from in back of the store, angling across the lot to meet them. It was the man with whom he had recently shared a brief moment of recognition at the rear of the shop. “I know what you’re looking for,” the man said when he reached them. He sounded a bit out of breath, as if the trip across the lot had taken something out of him. Perspiration beaded along his hairline and streaked down one sunken temple. He stopped after he said it and stood looking at them in the heat.

“Well?” Delandra asked.

“She’s right,” the man started up again. He jerked a thumb toward the shop. “There aren’t any of those things anymore. But there used to be. Used to be a landing strip, and the Electro-Magnetron. Dr. Verity died.” He stopped again, for a moment, and looked toward a line of rocks back of the store. “When he died the people stopped coming. Then some vandals got in and tore up most of what he’d built.”

Delandra stood with her hands on her hips. She was several inches taller than the man and she stood looking down on him, the sun glancing off her hair and the edge of dark glass where it joined the white plastic rim of her shades. “Well, somebody is still around, somewhere,” she said. “I’ve talked to someone on the phone.” The man looked once more toward the rocks, as if that was where it all was. He shook his head slowly. “There’s someone out there,” he said. “The Electro-Magnetron is still there, and someone’s taking care of it.”

“Can you tell us where it is?” Delandra asked him.

The man pointed back the way they had come. “You go down there until you see the post office, then you make a left. It’s a dirt road and you stay on it for about two miles.”

Delandra looked at Obadiah. “Okay,” she said.

“There is one thing,” the man said. And then he was quiet, waiting to be asked.

“And what one thing would that be?”

The man’s shoulders were thin and bony and when he shrugged them the cloth of his shirt hung back against his chest like a loose sail. “Dr. Verity was real nice,” he said. “People went out there to see him all the time. It’s different now.” He paused and brushed at something on his upper lip with his finger. “There’s some funny people around now.”

“Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?” Delandra asked.

The man looked at her for a moment and moved his shoulders once more. “You know,” he said. “Funny.”

O
badiah looked east, toward Death Valley, where a group of thunderheads had begun to collect above a line of red rock. He was still trying to come up with some reassuring way of defining for himself what the oddball from the thrift store might have meant by funny, but he wasn’t having much luck. If the Mojave was capable of fueling the fantasies of UFO fanatics and fundamentalists alike, it was capable of producing fantasies of another kind as well—a peculiar brand of paranoia. Maybe it went back to the idea of scale, of vulnerability in a landscape without concessions to the notion of comfort. What at any rate Obadiah found himself imagining with mounting clarity as the car swerved through a sand bog was the exotic variety of funny people he and Delandra might find at the end of the white, dusty road—the guardians of Ceton Verity’s Electro-Magnetron. And this, in fact, if they were lucky enough to even find the thing before being caught in the lowlands by the unseasonable thunderstorm that had been building all morning along the peaks separating them from Death Valley.

Delandra had noted the clouds before setting out on the unpaved road but seemed to think there was time. “I just want to see who these people are,” she said. “I mean I talked to somebody and they acted interested. Shit, I don’t care if we sell it to the old man or not. Anybody with money will do.”

Obadiah had nodded, looked once more toward the clouds, and wondered if that was what he wanted too.

The man from the thrift store had given them directions which were vague at best and after half an hour on the dirt road they still had not found anything which looked like it might pass for an alien landing strip. At last, rounding the end of a long finger of iron-colored stone, they decided to stop the car and climb to the top of the ridge. “If we can’t see anything from up there we’ll start back,” Delandra said.

Obadiah sat listening to the silence which had filled the void left by the engine. He wondered if it was anything you ever got used to. The silences, the high white heat, the hurtful light.

It was slow going in the rocks and by the time they reached a ledge near the top Obadiah found that he was breathing hard, that his shirt was damp with sweat. They looked around at the empty flats beneath them. A sudden burst of thunder boomed out of the ridges to the east and rolled down across the desert floor. Above them a lone hawk circled and then wheeled away toward the west, along the stony spine of the ridge they had climbed. There were patterns on the flats below them—what looked like jeep tracks—another road which intersected with the one they had taken, but nothing else. Delandra slapped at a flat piece of rock with the palm of her hand. “Well, fuck it,” she said.

Obadiah nodded toward the clouds. “Storm’s getting closer.” Delandra looked east, across the top of her shades. “Let’s get back,” she said. “But let’s try the other road.” She gestured toward the place below them where the road they had taken crossed another just like it, one which seemed to run back the way they had come but on the other side of the ridge they were now on Obadiah looked at the thin white line. “You sure it goes back to town?”

“Reasonably. There’s not much else in that direction.”

The road hugged the ridge which obscured their western view. “It’s worth a shot,” she told him.

Obadiah regretted the choice of roads almost at once. The new road seemed softer than the one they had taken out and every few minutes they would hit a sand pit. Delandra would gun it, hitting the pit at about fifty miles an hour, exiting the other side amid clouds of swirling sand and dust at about ten miles per hour. “It’s the only way to make them.” Delandra told him. “You’ve got to hit ’em fast.”

“I’ll remember that,” Obadiah said. He was hanging on to the dashboard, watching the hood go white with dust. He was about to venture some gloomy prediction as to what the pits were going to look like when the storm hit when, suddenly, emerging from the longest bog yet and rounding a tight turn, they came hard upon a section of paved road and what could only have been, even if it had not been so marked by a large black-and-white sign, Ceton Verity’s Electro-Magnetron. “Wa, la,” Delandra said.

Obadiah found it difficult to assess the immediate impact the sight of Verity’s Electro-Magnetron in its natural habitat had upon him. The building itself was almost comical—as if they had stumbled upon the sight of some cheap sci-fi set. It was a circular building with a dome-shaped roof. The walls seemed to be made of wood, while the roof looked to be made of aluminum. The place might have passed for an observatory of some sort had it not been for the color scheme. The Electro-Magnetron was painted red, white, and blue, with gold and silver trim. There was one tall antenna at the top of the domed roof and all around the sides, at about that point where the roof and walls met, there were what Obadiah took to be antennas of another variety. These were shorter and thicker than the one on the roof. They were set paral-lei to the ground and were evenly spaced around the circumference of the building. Each arm was silver in color and capped with a red ball.

The oddest part of the scene, however, was the way in which the Electro-Magnetron interacted with its immediate environment—setting up a certain tension between the comical aspects of the building and its stark desert surroundings, which worked to lend a certain dignity to the whole affair. Obadiah was not sure if he should be amused or impressed. The Electro-Magnetron was of respectable scale. Its shining metal roof rose perhaps forty feet above the desert floor, cutting a great silver arc across the face of the ragged, blood-red stone which reached out to surround it on three sides, and one might have been willing to believe, had it not been for the zany paint job, that the structure had really been built there for some meaningful purpose. And yet, just as he was about to dismiss it as one more crackbrained attraction, he was forced to recall it was the same label he had once hung upon Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum.