ALL THE WAY UP from El Paso, which is where you first start noticing how much sky there is, the image stays with me. I've managed to shut it away for a long time, but now, maybe because we're on the spoor, getting close, it comes back. I look up at a cloud the size of Idaho, and there it is. At a mountain rising from the ground like a fist polished smooth: there, too. And in cholla and scrub cactus at the side of the road.
"I could definitely use a beer about now. You could probably do with a break, too. Unless you feel the need to push on, that is."
I look over at him. What he's said is slow to register. The world comes to me these days in a kind of stutter, like the time delay on radio talk shows.
"Maybe we could grab something to go?" I'm dry myself, from looking out at this landscape as much as for any other reason.
He nods once, eyes straight ahead as always. Both hands are loosely on the wheel, left elbow a buttress in the window. At the next exit he swings off into a service plaza larger than many of the Southern towns I grew up in. My father was career military, outspoken enough at the incompetencies and inefficiencies involved that he was repeatedly transferred. I counted once: eleven high schools. Maybe that's why I myself have always had such respect for authority. But it could have gone either way.
He fills up, goes inside to pay, and comes out with a six-pack of Heineken and the Slice I asked for. Back on the road he pops one of the beers and sips at it for the next thirty miles. The rest are tucked away under his legs. The two of us, the Slice, and the beer bottles just about fill the little Miata.
Flies. The sound of them was what I always remembered, always thought of. Then Sergeant Van Zandt's voice at last penetrating. How many times has he already asked?
"You okay, Mr. Gorman?"
I nodded, said could I see her.
Well, generally… He stopped. Motioned with one hand for attendants to uncover her. A plain, somewhat muscular woman herself not much older than Faith folded back a corner, watching me closely the whole time. I nodded, and she put the cover back in place.
"It's Faith then. It's your daughter," Van Zandt said.
"Yes."
"You understand that we can't do anything here," Delany says. I lurch back up into the world as it is. "There's no outstanding warrant, which severely limits the scope of my actions."
I went to him because of his reputation as a bounty hunter. "So here's what we do. We go in, have a look, poke through the ashes of the campfire. We find something, anything at all, then we ask the locals to step in. You okay with that?" I nod. I see my daughter's face below me, shimmering in heat that rises off the asphalt. An eye is gone. Ear and scalp are torn away on that side.
Delany pulls out another beer, drops the empty bottle back in the pack.
We're coming into the Chiricahuas, mountains unlike any others I know, ghostly somehow, the whole range eroded by wind, water, and time to skull-like stands of stone, honeycombed with caves and unlikely passages where Cochise eluded all pursuers.
Farther on, past Tucson, reservation lands lie slumbering to every horizon, cluttered briefly by trailers or tarpaper shacks, rusting automobiles and appliances, propane tanks. "Unless you want to cancel all that and just blow him away, of course," Delany says.
He was, I was told, the best in the state at finding people - the best, period. That information came almost a year after Faith's death, on my last visit to Van Zandt's cubicle tucked away on the fourth floor behind rows of filing cabinets that looked as though cars had been driven repeatedly into them. "There's just not much else I can do for you, Mr. Gorman," Van Zandt said. "The case remains open, of course. We don't officially close homicides. And bulletins will stay in circulation - till they're crowded out by new ones, at least. You never know. Sometimes things fall into our lap when we least expect it. Meanwhile, you might want to consider giving this man a call. I'm not telling you this as a cop, of course. I have a daughter myself."
He slid a business card across the desk to me with two crooked fingers, tapped it once with the index, and let go. "He's a detective. Specializes in finding people, and he's damned good at it. Lots, including some who do the same kind of work, say there's no one better."
I looked down at the card. Buff-colored, almost translucent parchment. And engraved: not thermography. Just SEAN DELANY and a phone number.
Brought up on cheap detective movies and hardboiled novels, despite the card I'd half expected to find Delany in some gin mill with a cigarette hanging out one side of his mouth and a madeover blonde on the other arm, with eyes like bad sunsets and a tie that doubled as napkin. Instead, by way of his answering service and a secretary who called back immediately, I found him at Geronimo's, a mid-city health club. He was finishing up a set of handball, had a thing or two to talk over with the investment counselor who'd been his opponent, and would see me outside in five minutes if that was all right.
We met at his car, a British-green Miata. He had traded sweatshirt and shorts for a full-cut cotton suit like the ones Haspel used to make down in New Orleans and wore a knit, alligatorless shirt beneath. At a mall nearby he ordered felafel from a Greek fast-food stall, and I had three coffees as we talked.
"What do you do, Mr. Gorman?" he asked at one point.
"I'm an architect. I build things."
We talked a while longer, and he agreed to help me. From the first I've been won over by Delany's quiet-spoken, self-assured, ever-so-civilized manner. But now as we move ever farther from the city-into the scruffy hills and scrubland of West Texas, through ancient, barren New Mexico, and on into Arizona, growth like bright green veins in runnels formed by water washing down mountainsides- I can't help but notice how that's begun changing. Simple things, at first: endings dropped from a word here or there, rougher cadences. Then articles and conjugations drop out, leaving behind a language all nouns, present-tense verbs, prepositions. The man with whom I get out of the car in Tucson seems not at all the one with whom I began the trip back in Fort Worth.
"It doesn't have anything to do with justice or finding the person responsible," Chris said to me a few nights be-fore. We'd met for coffee at a carefully neutral restaurant. She came directly from work; I, now unemployed, from the one room apartment I'd finally settled into after months of motel rooms. "Don't you see that? That's why I left, why I had to. It's the world you want to hurt now, Joe. You want to hear it scream, want to tear something away from it, want to hurt it as much as it's hurt you."
Hurt? No. What I feel is numb. What I feel is nothing. I look out at the world and don't recognize, don't register, what's there. Only with effort, in a kind of forced gulp, will my mind take it in.
"Welcome to Tucson," Delany says.
The city has come surreptitiously up around us and now seems to go on forever, sprawling across this treeless, light-struck landscape. Distinctive mountain ranges stand at each point of the compass. A map names them for me: Catalina, Santa Rita, Rincon, Tucson. We drive along something called the Speedway past The Bashful Bandit, Empress Theater and Book Store XXX, Weinerschnitzel. Past bars, fast-food emporiums, video shops, used-car lots, hardware and auto-parts stores.
"The Miracle Mile," Delany says. "But most people around here just call it the Armpit." Pickup trucks with bodies rusted wholly through in moldlike patches overtake us, leave us behind. "Place we're looking for 's up ahead a little ways." He pulls into the parking lot of a motel that looks as though it might have been built early in the fifties when such things were novelties. It's set back off the road half a lot or so. The wooden sign is shaped like a palm tree, with the legend REFRIGERATED AIR and its name, NO-TEL MOTEL, painted on.
"Room fourteen," Delany tells me.
It's on the second tier. Inside, a TV plays loudly: sirens, brakes screaming, metal slamming into metal.
"We're in luck." He knocks.
"Yeah?"
"Maintenance. Sorry to bother you, but we've got a major water leak downstairs. Have to check it out. Take us a minute or two, tops."
"Hang on."
Nothing for a time - Delany and I exchange glances - then the door opens a couple of inches, and a slat of face shows in the crack. Sharp, finlike nose, small mouth, drooping eyelid. Day's growth of beard.
He takes in Delany's clothes.
"Hell, man, you ain't-"
But Delany ducks his shoulder into the door, hard, and keeps going.
The man inside staggers back out of the way as the door slams against the wall. He reaches for the rear pocket of his jeans. Delany is there. Stomps down on his instep and, when he bends forward over the pain, pivots behind him on one foot, grabbing his long hair in a fist. The man's eyes round as Delany's hand tightens.
"Be nice," Delany tells him. "Man needs to talk to you."
I step inside and shut the door.
Wary, expressionless eyes follow me.
Delany pulls a gun out of the man's back pocket and hands it to me.
"Your call," he says, stepping off to the side.
So I shoot him.
Delany lets go of the hair as the man goes down. When he tries to breathe, air whistles out of his chest. He puts a hand gently against himself as if to hold the air in, says "Shit" with an even louder whistle, and is still. I notice there's no difference in the eyes.
"Cops be here in six minutes tops," Delany says.
He's standing by the bedside table looking through things piled up there, magazines, a cheap plastic wallet, stray bills and change, a couple of envelopes.
"But we got us another problem," he tells me.
"Yeah?"
"Wrong bird."
I look at him.
"This wasn't your man." He holds up a folded paper from one of the envelopes. "Gentleman here's freshly laundered, just out of the joint. Been a guest of the state almost three years."
"But how…"
He shrugs. "Information's what you make of it. I thought we had a fit. Sometimes it doesn't work out right. Sometimes it does."
Delany takes the gun from me, wipes it with his handkerchief, and puts it in the dead man's hand. He presses the hand hard against the grip, feeds the forefinger into the trigger guard.
"Thing is," he says, "does it matter?"
And I realize that it doesn't. That it doesn't matter at all. Someone's paid. A life's been taken. That's what matters. Maybe I understood all along, understood without knowing I understood, that this was the best I could hope for. Maybe Delany knew that, too.
We go down the back stairs, get in the Miata, and pull away, north on Oracle to West Miracle Mile, then due west till we jump I-10, hearing sirens build to a scream behind us. I watch the Catalina mountains, the Tucson mountains, all this sky. Everything bright and alive, sharply defined, in the noonday sun. I can go back to building things now. Later I look up again at the Chiricahuas and think how little we've changed. We huddle together in the vertical caverns of our cities, around our megawatt campfires, and try to fill up the darkness with chants, songs, magic. We understand so little, we're always afraid, and sometimes still, the best we can do is offer up a sacrifice - hoping to drive out whatever blue devils overtake us.
Another short story by James Sallis, Shutting Darkness Down,
can be found online at the Richmond Review.
|
James Sallis published by No Exit Press Long-legged Fly/Moth An Ace Double - Two Novels In One
Ghost Of A Flea (h/b) Cypress Grove [due July 2003] |