He’d been squinting at the billboards since they passed through Basalt – what you’re working for… quality of life… the comfort you deserve – gold letters on blue signs, almost unreadable with that low sun shining straight into Cable’s eyes, the road all glare, and the desert made of glinting rock, and the mountains drawing his look, always. Up in them was the end of Nevada. Beyond them was all the bigness of California. Tomorrow was the Pacific. He would drive right up to it, and get out, and carry April Mae to the water, and wade in deep enough she could reach down and trail her fingers in it. He would hold her there as long as she wanted. Then he would get to work.
Ahead, the big last sign stood: Mustang Mountain Estates. The home of your dreams or The home you’ve always dreamed of, or…. He pulled to the side of the road. In the passenger seat April Mae was completely naked. She had the most beautiful breasts he had ever known, so smooth and mellowy that each time he held them it was like holding something newborn. She lay how she had fallen asleep: the seat craned back, her blonde-streaked hair piled to let the air at her neck, lips white with sunscreen. One arm folded over her eyes. The other draped down her middle, over her smooth girl’s belly, the sweat lake of her navel, down between where her legs would have been. Her fingers just barely nuzzled the prosthetic that sealed up her body where most people had a waist. It was a thick cap of hard pink plastic. April Mae called it her nub. Over the years, the word had taken on for them the same playful deliciousness as any name they might have called her absent woman’s place.
She mouthed first sounds of waking. “Where are we?”
“Still in Nevada. You want a blanket?”
“We’re not even in California?”
“No.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Quit it.”
“You quit it.”
They smiled at each other as he covered her with the sleeping bag. “It gets cold fast here,” he said. Then corrected himself: “Quickly. We’ll be in San Jose tomorrow.”
“Why don’t we just drive all night. I’m sleeping fine.”
“All Right.” He was trying to learn to say it like it was two words.
“Baby,” she tapped playfully at the flat bone between his chestmeat, “I’m joking.”
He was looking at the billboard. “You need to empty out?”
She felt the catheter bag below her nub. “I’m only half full.”
“It would be easy to pull off here.”
Her eyes took him in. “You really aren’t tired. Not even a little.”
Just the last bloodsmear residue way over in that low part of sky and Cable Aistrop driving at a roll-slow speed on fresh laid asphalt between the newly begun houses. Some were only posts sunk in cement, some boned out with beams, or half-fleshed in sheetrock, or just wombs of gouged earth where ones would come soon. Beneath the hoard of flickering stars he watched them each slide past.
Night had taken over, and they were climbing, by the time they crossed into California.
“California,” he said.
She reached over and punched the horn. They left the sound behind them. In Benton, they left route six, too. They had been on six all through Nevada and now they felt really, fully, in California. The map showed mountains, and a lake. Neither of them had really believed in the idea of a lake, not out here, but now it seemed anything could happen.
“Maybe there’ll be a hotel,” April Mae said. “A resort.”
“Might be a campground.”
“If there isn’t, we should come back. We could build our own.” Pleasure emanated off her like body heat. “Holy shit.” She gave his thigh a light punch. “Baby? By a lake?”
“Our own little Vegas.”
“Holy shit,” she said, and punched his thigh again.
In her lap, a fishing catalogue was open to the outboards, her penlight running a slick along the page. Now that they were free and on their way she was beginning to want things.
Back home in Lusters Gate her father had dangled before them the life there was – backhoes and gravel pits and the pick of his Bluetick litter – laid it out straight to sixty-five on the dock dragging Bullheads up from the New River bottom. What country do you think this is? she’d told him, and worked on Cable with the idea of what could be, worked on him right up until the night he tried to get them started, and even after he came back empty, April Mae running her thumbs over his eyebrows while his heart still hammered and telling him all the things she knew he could do if he would only let them happen.
He had listened to “Grounding Your Grammar” four times, like the introduction said, and done the same with “The Power of Persuasion,” and now he put in “The Accent Advantage.” The woman’s accentless voice came on.
“…your soft palate, and when it should hit your hard palate. Think about where your tongue…”
He pictured her like the woman in the ad in Forbes: frameless glasses, serious brown hair, `you-can’t-touch-me…yet’ smile beneath the words What’s holding you back? 68% of top executives say it could be the way you speak.
“Make an `O’ sound. Good. Feel the way making an `O’ sound…”
And they rode the new road into switchbacks of moonlight and through the shadows of the cutbanks, winding always upwards toward the pass.
The Towncar was straightening out of a black curve when the headlights showed the old man. He was muleing up the hill, miles from nowhere, surrounded by nothing. Step, step, the heels of his flip flops flashing white as deer tails. He’d tied his shirt onto his head by the sleeves and the rest hung, slapping his neck. The two grocery store bags he carried knocked at his knees, plastic handles stretched thin with the weight. The last town they’d passed had been Benton Hot Springs and that was ten miles back and a thousand feet down.
In the rearview, the old man burned brakelight red. Cable turned the cassette off. Surrounded by the dying tick-down of the engine, he fought the creep of failure – picking up the old man was such a hick-like thing to do.
“Baby.” April Mae stared at him above her beautiful, bare breasts.
“Shit.” He could see the old man jogging for the car. “I’m sorry. I’ll get your shirt. Where’s your shirt?”
He held the sleeping bag over her while she tugged on her tank top, then covered her absence with the bag’s nylon folds. Together, they arranged it so she could pass for whole.
“Where are we going to put him?” she asked.
The backseat was crammed with what they hadn’t sold. Cable moved the half eaten bag of beef jerky off the armrest to the dashboard, cleared the rest of the travel trash to the floor, and raised the upholstered divider.
Stepping out into the night, he called to the old man, “No, no. Over here. This side. You can get in my side over here.”
The old man’s stench took the clean feel right out of the air.
“Cable Aistrop,” Cable said.
The old man took his hand. “BJ. And not cause I suck dicks.” He grinned at April Mae. “Or get mine sucked much, anymore.”
Part Two
They drove in an unquiet of car noise.
The old man sat, hugging his two blue bags, shoulder skin sweat-slicked against Cable’s upper arm. When Cable glanced at April Mae, he could see the old man’s leg had spread into her leg zone, but if the old man noticed the absence he didn’t say.
“Where can I drop you at?” Cable asked. Then: “At where can I drop you?”
“Cable,” the old man said, “you can drop me right here if you want.”
“He means,” April Mae said, “Where are you heading to?”
“I don’t believe you told me your name.”
“April Mae.”
“April Mae Aistrop. That has a pretty ring to it. April Mae Aistrop.”
“Hancock. We’re getting married when we get to San Jose.”
“Oh, the coconuts were falling,” the old man sang in a phlegmy semblance of tune, “but they didn’t bother me. On the night we did the boom boom by the sea.” He grinned at April Mae, then Cable, swiveling his head between.
“Where are you coming from?” Cable asked.
“The store.”
“Benton Hot Springs?” The old man was busy digging in his bags. “That’s a hell of a walk.”
“You can only live on Leonid kill for so long,” the old man said. “Here, hold out your hand.”
Neither Cable nor April Mae did any such thing.
“Leonard kill?” she said.
“Leonid.” He took her hand. “They’re good.”
Cable listened to him fill her palm. “That Leonid kill?”
The old man shot a wet chunk of laugh out of his nose. “Oh, Cable.”
“It’s seeds,” April Mae said.
“Oh, Cable,” the old man said again. “You tickle my pits.” His laugh dribbled down to spurts. He tried to take Cable’s hand.
“I’m driving,” Cable said, and put both hands on the wheel like he never did. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the old man pour a pile into his own hand, then drop his face to lip up a few seeds.
“Open your legs,” the old man said.
Cable jerked a glance at April Mae.
The old man pushed the bag into Cable’s lap instead. “You can nibble on that,” he said though a chewfull.
“That’s nice of you,” April Mae said.
“No. It’s just decent. You’re too young to remember how it could have been, how it was meant to be. What it still is. I’m talking people. I’m talking how to be to each other. You don’t know that because you think it all ended when they tore down the wall.” He spat a slurry of chewed shells into his other hand.
“This country has forgot how to share.”
“We’re giving you a ride, aren’t we?” Cable said.
“Cable, you must be a business man.” He was going to start laughing again. “You must be an executive.”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, you will be.”
“I aim to.”
“One handful of sunflower seeds per ten minutes of ride.”
“Is that still ten minutes to go?”
“Ten minutes total. When we get there I’ll write you a receipt. Oh, you’re going to do fine.” The old man opened his mouth, slapped the rest of the seeds in. He chewed furiously, temples bulging, then drooled all of what he’d done into his palm. “Miss Hancock,” he said, “roll down that window.” He leaned all the way across her to stick his hand out into the night. His mess splattered the glass. Bent across April Mae, his face was a foot from hers and he was staring at her chest.
When he was done shaking his hand, he settled back between them. “That’s it up there. I doubt it was ten minutes, Cable. I better take half a handful back.” He reached into Cable’s lap. Cable smacked his hand away.
“Okay then.” The old man wiped his hand on his chest and reached into the bag of jerky on the dash. “I’ll just take one of these and we’ll call it even. We stopping in San Francisco?”
Cable hit the brakes fast enough April Mae had to grab the sleeping bag to keep it from sliding off her nub. He reached across the old man to stop her from sliding, too, and only took his hand from her to put the Towncar in reverse.
An arroyo, and a swale of gouged-out dirt, and a house. Hutlike, shackish. One lone stunted tree stood by looking like it had been put in an oven at 450 and forgotten. But it wasn’t as dead as the stumps. The stumps were everywhere, a near hundred of them, long dead tree trunks sunbleached near white and propped up in stands made of old tires laid flat.
“This your home?” April Mae said.
The old man took his eyes off her chest long enough to say, “Every inch.”
“All right,” Cable said. Saying it in two words made him feel another level above the old man. “You can get out my side.” He swung open his door and slid out to clear the way.
The old man didn’t move. He sat in the yellow ceiling light, eyes full of April. “I didn’t want to do this here, in the car, with Cable,” he told her. “But I’m gonna have to ask…”
Cable lost the next words in a sudden explosion of dog fury, a vicious mix of snarls and barks and the things dogs do in their throats that make you forget they are anything so familiar as dogs. He snapped his head around looking for the source. It was too big, and coming too fast, to bother with details. He jerked back into the car and slammed the door. The cab went dark again.
“…get so you just don’t care,” the old man was saying.
“Fuck,” Cable said.
“You want something, you say so,” the old man explained to April Mae.
“I hope that’s your dog,” Cable said.
The dog had come to a gravel-spewing halt in the headlights. Two glints of eyes, a collar of hackles, and teeth flashing with each bark.
The old man reached up and flicked the ceiling light back on. “Cable,” he said, “You have a hell of a beautiful woman, here.” The dog let off a fusillade. “It’s the car. Leonid has a thing about cars.”
Cable’s thoughts were all dog-bent until he caught sight of April Mae’s face. She had put on the mask of nothingness she wore when someone did something extreme enough to shake her.
“I know it’s a strange request,” the old man said. “But I’m not a man who’ll shush. Shush is a word I don’t care to know.”
“April Mae?” Cable said.
“April Mae Hancock, you are a goddamned beautiful woman. For near ten minutes I’ve been looking at your green, green eyes and your brown, brown shoulders and that white, white shirt, and the whole thing, the whole…”
“Okay.” Cable grabbed the old man by the upper arm.
“Baby,” she said.
“What did he say to you?”
“Take it easy,” April Mae said. “He’s seventy.”
“Seventy-four,” the old man said.
“What did you say to her?”
“I told her I’d pay,” the old man said.
“He asked to see my legs.”
“I did,” the old man said.
Cable stared at him. “Call off your dog. And get out.”
“Wait,” April Mae said.
“No,” Cable said. “No, no, no, no.”
“She can keep her pants on,” the old man said.
“Don’t even,” Cable said. “She has beautiful legs. She has legs so beautiful you don’t deserve to see them.”
“Two hundred dollars,” the old man said.
“Give us a sec,” she said to the old man.
“For the whole thing. Up to your waist.”
“Go out to your dog,” she said. “Let Cable and me talk.”
“Another hundred with your panties off.”
“This makes me sick,” Cable said and could feel, even as he said it, her respect for him sink another notch.
When the old man was outside and the doors shut, she said, “How bad is it?”
“Gas is so high.”
“It’s that bad?”
“No, sweetheart.”
“How much’ve we got?”
Part Three
The whole time the old man was in there with her, Cable stood with the headlights scalding the back of his rod-stiff neck, and could not look. In front of him, the dog stood stiff legged. He tore at slabs of beef jerky, dropping tiny bits of meat like tithed pieces of his finger tips.
The groan of the car door. The dog’s tail wagged. “Thank you,” he heard the old man say and then, coming up close behind Cable, “I didn’t think so.”
I’ll take everything, Cable thought. I’ll take everything he has.
Crouching at her side, the car door open and playing its endless song, Cable told her he was just going to go inside with the old man, make sure he didn’t try to run off before he got the money.
“Where do you think he keeps it?” she whispered. “How much do you think an old man like him could have?”
“Shut the doors” he said, and, looking at the dog, “Roll that window up.”
Everyone knows the stories: nothing but dog food in that old hill woman’s cupboards, no phone, no heat, no nothing when they found her body but the cast iron stewpot stuffed with a hundred grand; or the one who shot Cable’s nephew for using the outhouse when the boy just needed to shit and no way he could know the safe was in there; they kept them in teapots, pillow cases, jars submerged in spring boxes. He knew enough to know an old man like that didn’t shell out money like he’d promised without a whole lot more hid somewhere close by.
The old man opened the door onto a lightless hole of a room and disappeared into the black. Inside, something clattered across the floor.
Cable halted at the doorjamb. “Where’s the switch?”
“To your left. On the wall.”
He felt for it, found it, flicked it. Nothing.
“You must think I’m rich,” the old man said.
“Get your flashlight.”
“Oh Cable,” the old man snorted. “You are good company.”
“Get to wherever you keep it, and pay up.”
A quick rustle, metal clinks. The old man hurled something in the dark: clattering rain; wild rolling of loosed change; coins spinning themselves quiet. Just the old man’s wet laughter trickling through the dark and the pieces of change glinting like bullet casings spat out.
“Oh boy,” the old man chuckled. “Oh boy, Cable, you better come in.”
Strike of match, bloom of light. An honest-to-god kerosene lamp casting flickering glow just like they’re supposed to. “Come on,” the old man said. Lowering himself into a crouch, he squat-crawled the floor from coin to coin. “In, in.” His glance flitted from the floor to the corners, the door, Cable. “Quick. Get.”
Cable stayed where he was. The place was one room: red plastic basin filled with grey water, two-burner stove, pot-bellied propane tank, cot lumped with wool blankets, rusted lawnchairs with sagged strips for seats, and an old iron welding table with drag-gouges streaking the floor from where it sat to Cable’s feet. The closest thing to decoration was on the wall above the cot: an age-bleached poster of foreign words and a smooth-skulled man, red face faded to pink, hand outstretched in a salute to the broken windows across the room. The wall around it was hackled with nails. All the walls were. Small, dark spikes knee-height to ceiling. Hung clothes dangled from them in dark, greasy clumps. Between them, the window sills were lined with canning jars, every one, and the entire far wall’s floor-edge was filled, corner to corner, with blue plastic shopping bags wilted and – Cable’s eyes jerked back to them – moving. He watched them come alive. A bulge rippled from one end to the other.
The old man sprang up, his gaze scrambling along the floor. “Shut that door,” he said, just as whatever it was darted across to the dimmest part of wall, heading straight for Cable.
“Shut it, shut it!” The old man’s sandals slapped in his rush to slam the door closed behind Cable. “Criminy. You give me the shits. They don’t have doors where you come from? Leonid’d eat her whole.”
“Eat her?”
“My Cookie.” Worry had squeezed the old man’s face into a creased mass hard as balled foil. “Leonid’d gnaw her ears to ass.”
“What is she?”
“Don’t leave that door open, got me?”
“Okay.”
“I like you Cable. But you about gave me some serious runs.” The old man trawled the room with his gaze. Then: “There you are.” His grin was a brown-gummed sparseness of teeth. “That’s my bunkie. That’s my sneaky girl.” He crept toward the cot, holding a jacked spread afore him, tonguing rapid wet clucks. “That’s my strumpet. My mite bunkie strumpet.” The shadow beneath the bed expelled a hiss. “Oh!” the old man said, “Oh, now!” and, moving with new urgency, proceeded to dribble out a string of drippy talk. It was so like a woman spelled by her baby, or a man sunk to loving his dog, or a retarded child in the midst of rhapsody, so like Cable himself with April Mae on winter nights back home in the Virginia hills when the electric blanket hadn’t yet warmed up, and they were curled back to belly, her shoulder wings pressed to his chestcave, her breasts draining the chill from his hands, the tops of his thighs cuddling her cold plastic nub, warm plastic tube, so much like the love babble they would pass between them then that Cable, now, could not bear to look.
The old man lunged under the cot, scuttled out rear first. Whatever he’d caught inside the jacket jerked back and forth, legs shoving at the fabric. “Shhh,” he whispered, “Shhh, Cookie,” as he unpeeled the folds.
It looked Mesozoic, beagle-sized, covered snout to tail in scales the color and size of bruised toe nails. There was something swine-like in the flattened snout, the beard wisps beneath the chin, and yet rodentian in its slit eyes, its shivering tail, possumish pink belly beneath gray scales. Its stubby feet – thick nails hooking off the toes – flailed.
“Good Christ,” Cable said, “What kind of animal is that?”
The old man looked at Cable like he was the one outside of the age in which he belonged. ”Look.” He peeled the jacket off the thing’s midriff revealing a grime-darkened swaddling of rags strapped to the animal’s middle with gritty strips of duct tape. “I fixed her up. From the jaws of death. Brought her in and gave her a bed and fed her scraps and,” he grinned, “didn’t even charge her a dime.”
“How can you touch it?”
“Oh.” The old man looked as if he was going to kiss the thing. “Oh, oh.”
And watching him it came to Cable: his half-grown hand holding a potato bug rolled up in his palm, and the out of county teacher leaning over him, telling how where she was from they called them armadillo beetles.
“Why isn’t it rolled up?” he asked.
The old man’s smile scraped against the armadillo’s body rag. “Cable, you are a busload of fun.”
“Isn’t that what they do when they’re scared?”
“Scared?” The thing was kicking at the old man’s chest, its nails scrabbling. “She needs me.” The old man’s eyes hung on him. “You understand. She’s my company. My goodwife. Leonid, he’s an unfriendly bastard of a coyote-blooded dog, but Cookie…”
In the lamplight, his eyes were yellow and the skin of his face looked like it had gone so soft it might lose its grip on the bone. There was the trickling in the arroyo behind the shack, a Saw-whet owl repeating its monotonous call. The car engine hacked up sound. Every second Cable listened to it, his muscles tightened around his bones.
Over there by the cot was the old man whispering a few last sugar words (he let the animal go; it clambered for a place to hide) and over there was a fry pan that looked heavy enough, and a razor strop hanging over a basin, and over there the orange handles and long spikes of screwdrivers mounted to the wall, and there hung a bow saw, nail like a cigarette butt in the corner of its lupine maw. Sometimes it seemed his world was made of things waiting for him to enact them.
“Three hundred dollars,” Cable said.
The old man’s fond gaze lifted from his hiding pet. “Yup. Yup, yup. And plug me if it wasn’t worth it.” With a wink, he turned, slapped sandals across to the hedge of plastic bags, bent, and dug inside one. “True, that April Mae is one unique woman. But three hundred dollars.” He blew wind out his cheeks. “You have to admit, for three hundred I should’ve at least got a peek at those mams.”
“You got plenty,” Cable said, eyes full of the bag, of what kind of money the bulges could mean.
“What I’m wondering,” the old man said, “is just what a woman like that, even with mams like that, has to do to get a man to pop?”
“All right,” Cable warned.
The old man rose from his crouch, one hand’s finger and thumb down the lidless throats of two tomato cans, the other hand holding a gallon milk jug sloshing with yellow liquid. “No,” he said, filling the cans to the flood gauge of his knuckles, “what I really want to know is how in the world you get her to pop.”
“All right, I said.”
“And how she got to be how she is period. Yes, Cable, I believe for three hundred I’m owed at least that. To know what I’ve seen, what I’ve gazed at this night, and will see again from now on in my –“
“You’re owed nothing.”
“Was she born that way?”
“Nothing.”
“Or was that way done to her?”
“Alright,” Cable said.
“Or was it you who did it?” The old man gave Cable a grin that made him feel as if the hair had been shorn from all of his body. Then the old man extended a can. “To April Mae,” he said. “To one fine set of mams.” The old man’s throat muscles pumped the drink down.
“Get me the money,” Cable said, “and I won’t hurt you.”
The old man tossed the drained can. “Deadlines,” he said through a wet grin. “Schedules. Cable Aistrop is a man on the go.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“A man of the times.”
“I’m going to ask you –”
“One more time. Now this must be where I say ‘Then What’? Or ‘What if I don’t’? Come on, Cable, give this old welfare wasting pinko a taste of the old –”
“You made the deal.”
“Good!”
“You asked me and April Mae…”
“The contract!”
“…in exchange –”
“Yes!”
“Get the money!”
“The kneecaps!”
“Get the fucking money!”
“The finger breaking!”
The smack, when it came, seemed to exist only in the quiet carved out after, the sting on his palm, the old man’s welling eye. Cable was still fighting the impulse to say he was sorry when the old man reached across to his face. His finger tips were sticky and gentle, and for a second Cable let them press at the clenched jawbone beneath his ear, tilt his head easily as a barber’s would in the midst of a cut. Then he jerked away.
The old man’s laugh reeked of drink. “Yup, true blue beneath those gills.” He brought the second can to his mouth. “Now, let’s see if we don’t have something to stay that fearsome hand.”
Part Four
Drink in one hand, the old man dug with the other through all those nail hung clothes: the hips of slacks, a jacket’s belly pouch, the inner lining of a long canvass coat, sedulously through garment after garment. Soft crackle of paper. Brief flash of green. An orchard of pockets in a crowd dipper’s dream. Beyond him, through the panes of bad glass, the Towncar’s headlights burst on. Off. On again. Cable tried to keep an eye on the old man, to see where he would get the rest of the cash, but the blinking lights kept drawing his eyes. The idea that she knew how long it was taking, and how much harder that would make it, made him afraid for the first time all night.
“That’s it,” the old man said.
Cable took the wad. A long whispering of Washingtons and Lincolns. “There’s only ninety-one.” The old man had his face to the can, snorting and licking like it was a feed bag.
“You’re two hundred and ten short.”
“Tell you what,” the old man’s yellowed eyes stared over the rim, a rust mustache on his upper lip. “I’ll give you a deal. A bargain, Cable. C’mon, you entrepreneur, your eyes oughtta light up.” He smacked a palm on one of the jars perched on the sill. ”You ever seen anything like this?”
It looked like a jar full of sand.
“I didn’t think so,” the old man said. “There isn’t anything like this. Anywhere.” He jutted a chin at all the jars lining the room. “Except for here. And they’re all different. Every one. Where’re the raised eyebrows, Cable? Where’s the jaw drop? C’mon, c’mon – unique – which makes them what, Cable? What’s it make them?”
“Sand.”
“Valuable. Valua…Pictures in sand, you tycoon. Destroyable, fragile, art, Cable.” He jabbed a finger at his temple. “Use your boss lobe, Cable, use your scalper eye: its sand pictures. It’s more valuable than paint.” He lifted one off the sill, forearms straining with the weight. “How much do you think those old Jappy holy holy’s sitting on the floor drawing with sand…How much do you think they’d sell them for? If they didn’t rub them out? If they put them in jars instead? How much? You don’t want to even think about it. It’ll make an entrepreneur like you sick.”
“You couldn’t sell that.”
“Sell it?” The old man tried to spit. “Each one takes a month. Layer by layer. Trickle by trickle.” His tongue strained to clear the spittle from his chin. “A month of my life, Cable. In a jar. Here.”
The glass was cold and heavy.
“Look at the Goshawk.” The old man jabbed a finger at the glass. “There. There.”
Cable let go. The jar slammed into the floor with a low, solid boom. It rolled, unbroken, across the room to stop with a clank against a metal table leg. For the first time that night, the old man was utterly silent. Cable reached to the window, took hold of another jar, lifted it high above his head. “Where do you keep it?”
The old man’s face was slowly calcifying before him.
This time he hurled it against the floor with all his strength. The crash cleared the room of any other sound, sprayed his shins with sand and glass that bruised through his jeans.
“Where do you keep it?”
“It’s in your pocket.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s what you’ve got in that pocket, Cable.”
Another crash, shout from the old man, leaking of sand through split glass.
“Come on,” Cable said. The old man’s eyes were hard and watery as granite split by a spring. “You don’t live off this shit. You live off something. Come on!” And, to fight the tone of pleading creeping in, he hauled off another jar and smashed it to the floor. Through the hole the crash punched in the air there came a long wail: the car horn.
“Shit,” Cable said.
“Leonid!” The old man got the dog barking.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
“Get in at her, Leonid! Tear her to chunks! Eat her whole!”
The horn blared on and on, pressing at Cable’s eyes, into his head, bleeding out his ears, and he went at the jars, all of them now, tearing them off their ledges, hurling them to the floor, one after the other, a mad rush around the perimeter of the room, the crashing and thudding coming like thunder upended from the sky and buried in the ground, rolling beneath the boards.
Then they were all down. The floor littered with smashed remains, the lamplight loosed wild upon the thousand reflecting shards. The horn blared on. In the corner, by the stove, crumpled beneath the bow saw, holding tight to his knees, skin flecked with winkings of red, the old man squatted. Among all the stillness of the rest of him, his eyes moved, found Cable, held.
Don’t look, Cable told himself, Don’t listen. He crunched over the glass until he was standing over the hunkered shape, a cracked jar heavy in his hands, leaking a whisper of fine sand. He raised it above his head.
“Just tell me where it’s at. At where it is. At…Jesus, old man, just tell me where…” When he finally looked at the old man’s eyes he could not take his own away.
“You’ll have to do more than that,” the old man said.
He was bent back so he could peer straight up at Cable and in the glaucous membranes of his eyes, in the lamplight flicker over the small hard pupils, Cable saw the entire reel of what he must do, as if the old man had scried it already and was projecting it back at Cable, frame by frame. From the road, April Mae pushed the horn blare at him in long, gasping thrusts. He stared at the rise and fall of the old man’s chest, trying to understand what she was trying to tell him. He knew what she would say, could even hear the cadence of her voice, but it was as if he had lost the ability to understand the language they had shared.
Slowly, he lowered the jar, set it on the stove. Not a line on the old man’s face changed, but his eyes stopped projecting, and started taking in. They were suddenly full of Cable. Under the old man’s stare, he stepped away, slowly, then faster – the crunch of glass, grind of sand – until he was at the door.
The cool night rushing his face, lamplight spilling around him, he peered up at the dark Towncar. Its horn spread wrong noise like a lake growing itself in the midst of the desert. He stood there until she saw him.
“Baby?” he heard her say.
“It’s alright.” His voice got the dog going again. He waited for her to say more. He could feel her waiting for him to say more. The dog barked like it was trying to expel something stuck in its chest.
“It’s alright,” he said again.
Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark.
Though the open door, he looked back at the old man. The shack was more still now, the furniture old, the lamplight dimmer than it was a half minute ago. Spread across the floor, the spilled sand seemed like earth risen through the cracks between slowly settling boards, a half century gone by. Broken glass glittered, tiny shards, larger blades. It looked like a site conceived for some horrible trial, the glass and the fireflicker and all that sand, like some tribal desert rite laid out between him and San Jose.
“Oh Cable.” From his far corner the old man spat up laughter. “Cable, I had you all wrong. Turn back, scalper. Turn back, knight of the road. Cable Aistrop, they are going to roll you up and eat you raw.”
Part Five
The lamp had gone out by the time he finally left the shack. It was lighter outside in the blast of the stars and he could make out the path cutting through the stumps. Gravel crumbled beneath his shoes. It seemed to him that the snapping of the glass, the grinding sand, had followed him out of the shack, and up the path, would keep on even in the car, even wherever he might step out.
When he heard the breathing behind him, he turned, half expecting the old man. It was Leonid, moonlight in his eyes, looking at him. A whiff of something – damp and warm, like April Mae’s inside-scent when he cleaned her around the nub – made him back up against a dead tree. The dog came on. Something was wrong with its head. It was too large by half, misshapen, and then he saw that it was carrying something in its jaws. It looked almost funny, staring at him with the oversized creature flopped out of his mouth, would have been funny if it wasn’t for the slobbery gnawing, and a swallowing sound like the dog was about to choke. It came within licking distance and stood there, watching him, ribs heaving. The smell was stronger now. Behind him, through the window glass, April Mae was saying something. Save me, it sounded like, or baby, or…When she had first come back from the hospital the nurse had shown him how to wash her still raw stump, and how, afterwards, to massage the damp remains of what muscles she had left, and what to do if it leaked, and when it did it had smelled as strong as that. Show me, she was saying, or owe me, or…With a jerk of its head, the dog inched his maw further over the armadillo. Cable stared at the scales, wispy hair, tail hanging out one side of the jaws, head lolling out the other, a pale strand of bandage trailing down the dog’s chin and sticking to its smeared chest. Neck straining with the effort, Leonid raised the animal up to him as if it was an offering.
They were driving again before April Mae got up the nerve to ask. He felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out the wad of cash and put it back in again. It was an even longer time before she said, “How much?”
He reached to the radio and turned the language tape on.
“Baby,” April Mae said, “Is that just the three hundred? Baby?” Her fingers were in the curls at the back of his neck. It felt good, and he resented it.
“Now,” the cassette woman said, “Really rural. Pay attention to where your ‘R’s land in your mouth as well as the way that the ‘U’ sound sits in the back of your throat.”
“What happened in there?”
“Really rural,” he repeated.
“Cable. Baby.”
He was trying to focus on the consonants the way the cassette woman wanted, but April Mae was fighting his hand to get it into hers and, anyway, he didn’t think he cared anymore.
“What did you do?” she said.
“That old man,” he said, as much to cover the retrieval of his hand as to stop her asking. “He had a lot more than you’d have thought.”
“How much?”
“Plenty.”
“A thousand? Five thousand? More than five thousand?”
That was how it went until he made up a number.
They drove up the mountain until the pass leveled out. He had a strange flat feeling like they had landed. Then the road dropped and they were going down. It was not dawn, not even near, but the point where Cable, staring at glimpses of valley below, realized he could not have seen them in just moonlight.
“What was that animal?” she asked.
“A pet.”
“What kind of pet?”
“A dinosaur.” He tried to smile at her. Breaking the stillness of his face loosed something in him that made his eyes well and his throat begin to tighten and he got his face still again and hoped that the small moment he had managed to look at her would make her quiet again . Maybe she would go back to her old catalogue with her new dreams and not say anything for the rest of the ride. They would be in San Jose by noon.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened.”
“…an open facial expression,” the cassette woman said. “Don’t be afraid to open your mouth.”
“You two,” Cable said. “Women.” His laugh was as bad an idea as the smile had been. He reached over and shut the tape off. April Mae reclaimed his hand. She stroked the veins on the back of his knuckles with her soft fingers while they took the curves.
“He was a communist,” Cable said after a while. “You believe that? This day and age? They oughtta’ve made a museum of that place.” He could feel his neck hot and knew his face would be red and he was glad it was dark.
“They oughtta’ve put him in a glass case. They oughtta’ve…”
“Ought to,” April Mae said.
“They oughtta’ve shipped that guy to Virginia. Ship him back – ”
“It’s okay,” she said.
“Wasn’t made for the modern world.”
He didn’t think there could be anything softer than her lips on his knuckles. It made the skin beneath his eyes hurt.
“Baby,” she said. “You did good.”
He looked at her for a long time then, looked at her even as the car began to veer. He looked until he was sure she must see in his eyes what the old man had seen, but all he knew was what was in hers: that had it been her in there instead of him the ninety one dollars crumpled in his pocket would be the lie, and did good would be the truth, and San Jose would still be San Jose. The tires spat gravel at the metal beneath his feet. She reached out and eased them straight again. For a moment she was close enough he could smell the vanilla of her neck.
Later, they pulled over so she could empty out. She swung open her door and he sat in the ding, ding, ding until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He yanked out the key. There was just the dribble-splash, and the smell. He got out. At the edge of the turnoff was a drop, and a view. He walked over to see it.
There was the lake. All around it was a country it seemed impossible he had ever imagined was his: graying desert, rocks, and dirt, and a sparse scattering of strange shapes that, even in the feeble light, bore little semblance to all he had known of plants before. Nothing moved. Not an animal. Not a bird. Down below, the shores of the lake were crusted white. Salt, he figured. The whole thing surrounded by fields of salt, pillars of it rising like the ruins of some great civilization, and, in the middle, as if hoarded from any animal that might be foolish enough to try to make it down there, was all that water. Under the brightening sky, it shone back silver. Shimmered. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
April Mae did not see the lake until a quarter hour later, and then she pointed it out every time they swung around a curve. Route 120 plowed by it in a black strip, but they found a gravel road marked with a brown US Forest Service sign. Dust boiled behind them. It was dawn.
They parked in front of a rusted chain draped between two salt-crusted posts. The gravel road disappeared into a gravel beach. He got out into the breeze. It smelled of the sea, and stung his face with fine white grains that made his eyelashes sticky and his hair stiff before he had even gotten her out of the car.
“Where’s the water?” she said, her eyes shielded by her small, delicate hand.
Arms full of April, he jutted his chin toward the lake. She was talking as he carried her, but he was surrounded by a low whispering noise he could not place. He could see the white mounded pillars twice his height shedding their salt in currents of wind, and small birds scampering, and the land looking ever drier in the strengthening light, and the solid dark mountains beyond and, growing nearer, the lake. She was talking to him about plastic surgery, the cost of prosthetic limbs, speaking louder as they went, the strange whisper growing into a hum, a drone, until she was almost shouting the words Investment, and Why hold back? He nodded as if he were listening. He was watching the surface of the lake. The entire surface seemed to be moving, as if the water itself had come alive.
“Do you see that?” he said, but the wind swept his words under the strange drone, and he could barely hear her now talking about the best neighborhoods in San Jose and a house with a lemon tree and, after all, they had come so very close.
It was not until they were at the edge of the water that he saw the flies. Millions of them swarming the surface, waves of black roiling over the white brine. April Mae squirmed. Gripping her to his chest, he kicked through flies so thick he could not see whether he was entering the water or still on land. They battered his jeans, roared at his calves. Out in the middle of the lake, they shimmered, silver. It seemed to Cable that they looked as beautiful as they had from above, that, in such a place as this, it was incredible there was anything living at all.
