Читать книгу Broken Ground - John Keeble - Страница 14

The great Basin stretches from southeastern Oregon southward through Nevada and inland southern California nearly to Arizona, and eastward across Nevada into Utah. Cut off from the sea, it is actually a series of basins that drain into one another. The evaporation rate exceeds ten inches a month, more than a hundred times the average rainfall.

In the old days, the people ate roots, seeds, piñon nuts, and grass, any plant that gave nourishment, and rabbits, squirrels, insects, worms, birds, lizards, every form of animal. They collected fish at the annual runs on the few waterways that entered the basin. This was their trade, interior and stable. Goods came in occasionally, but rarely went out. “Almost like plants,” wrote Colonel Fremont, “these people seemed to have adapted themselves to the soil and to be growing on what the immediate locality afforded.”

They were like air ferns, economical to the extreme. They lived the lateral existence of gatherers, attuned to natural detail. Their skin was like the sand, moistened by blood. Even today, most of the small towns are like tiny conductive densenings on a vast circuit board, while the big towns, Reno, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, soak up money and religion for their densely inward games of chance.

Hector Zeta, Manifesto for Spirits

LAFLEUR LOADED UP his personal articles at the tool shed, changed his clothes, and pulled out. To Rome, he took the route out of the valley and through the mountains by way of Corvallis, Lebanon, Waterloo, Foster, Sweet Home, and Cascadia to Sisters, the last town low on the eastern slope of the Cascade Range and named after the mountains, the snow-capped Three Sisters. The mountain country was cool and dense, a tangle of waterways, rock, and woods. The winding roadway made the driving intense. He pulled off not far beyond Santiam Pass to let his brakes cool. Jones jumped out from the seat, grunting heavily when she hit the ground.

He looked at his dozer, secure in its chocks, and stepped up on the truck bumper to check the backhoe. The chains were snug. He circled the rig, kicking tires, then stopped, leaned against the front bumper, and stared out at a charcoal-colored lava flow ringed sparsely with ponderosa pines. The conversation with Penny this morning and the robbery at Zymanski's last night seemed like figments, small as cocoons and heavy and elusive as mercury. He needed to bathe. He could smell his own odor coming through his shirt.

A magpie dropped out of a pine and jumped across the lava flow near the road. A second magpie scolded from the tree. Jones pissed on the rock. It was clear that this was the eastern side of the summit: dry earth and desiccated rock, twisted ponderosas, bright sky, bright black-and-white scavenger birds. One magpie made the needles at the ends of the limbs quiver as it jumped and cawed at the other's stiff-legged tour—looking for what, he wondered: seeds, granules, moth wings, larvae, mouse feces, bits of animal hide? Jones crapped, and when she left it, the bird hopped over and pecked at the pile. Jones looked back at the bird. The bird in the tree jumped and cawed. It sounded like a crow, like Gus trying to laugh.

Lafleur helped the dog into the truck, got in himself, and drove down from the mountains with surprising quickness to Sisters. The town was dressed up for the tourist trade. It had harmonized facades on its buildings and was organized, he imagined, to circulate bills of small denomination with great rapidity. A place of scrubbing, wiping, and arduous quickness, clean fingernails and shiny shoes and an infinity of price tags, Sisters sold curiosities along with the hamburgers, milkshakes, and fishing tackle: postcards, decals, signs, “Back Off!” mud flaps, dancing “Fuck You” fingers to mount in the rear windows of cars, bumper stickers that ranged from scatology to moral advice, something for everyone, toy guns, pocket knives, paperweights, ashtrays, polished rocks on chains, Indian headdresses made out of turkey feathers, scorpion and rattler tails mounted in clear plastic blocks, pornographic playing cards, coffee mugs with obscene slogans, crystal balls with naked women inside them, crucifixes, Saint Christopher statuettes, Day-Glo condoms, and rubber monster masks. It was a gateway, a complicated, thousand-headed creature of prey crouched at the verge of mountain and desert. Lafleur drove through.

Soon the three mountains rose from the flat on his right, white and looming. As he continued, they stood in his rearview mirrors, gradually growing smaller and more distinct. The Three Sisters became a measure of his progress. The pines were a measure. Back at the summit, the firs, cedars, spruces, and white pines had given way to yellow pulpwood, the ponderosas. Outside Sisters, the ponderosas dwindled. Water-starved, they grew scraggly and jackish, then they gave ground to the small piñon pines. When the piñons vanished it was just sand and scrub. He had slipped into the northwestern edge of the Great Basin. The aching in his head was a measure, too. It had spread down from his neck to his shoulders, slowly softened and enlarged like a web. Jones had her snout on his leg.

He would pass through two towns of size before reaching Rome, first Bend and then, better than a hundred miles later, Burns, those two dispersal centers where the sun would glint off the plastic and sheet metal of new construction. Otherwise, the tiny towns perched alongside the highway measured the hugeness of space, and his progress into something like nothingness…scrub, barren sand, harsh sun, and mountains in the distance, the three white ones quivering in his mirrors for miles, and the lower blue-colored ridges to the north and south like remote islands at sea, and the tiny towns that looked precisely like what they were and, he supposed, had been from the start: combination fuel sources, post offices, spare way stations for travelers—the faintly marked indices of a tenuous economy spread thinly across space.

The three white mountains occupied his mirrors, then they were lost in accordance with the long, slow rise and fall of the road. He would think they were gone, then they would come back again, surprising him with their whiteness, miles away, well after he had passed through Bend. Back and forth the mountains went. Long after they were gone for good he thought they must still return to his mirrors. They were there, all right, behind him somewhere, as luminous as memory.

Each little town consisted of two or three wind-scoured buildings, sometimes one, and had small mutilations of shed and fence, piles of metal, and had nurtured, usually, a few scorched trees. Sometimes there was just the one bleached, lonesome building standing against the waste. His road map gave them names: Tumalo, Millican, Brothers, Hampton, Riley, Hines, Lawen, Crane, Princeton, and Burns Junction on the way to Rome. He peered out at these places as he passed. Jones sat up and pressed her warm body against his. He pushed her off. She licked him in the face. He jerked and shoved her away. She snaked back to rest her snout on his leg again and left a widening patch of drool on his trousers.

The steering wheel trembled and the truck and trailer jolted rhythmically over the seams in the pavement. The engine roared softly. So straight was the highway and so monotonous the landscape it began to seem as if he were not there, hardly driving, hardly needing to touch the wheel. He wondered about the desolation of living in such a place. He made up sad, barely ambulatory lives: going to the hydrant outside, going to the cupboard for food, the husband and wife brushing shoulders, and the two of them staring across the table at each other with hollow eyes, wondering what to do, going to bed to make love, maybe, for a transfusion of entanglement, breath, and wet, and coming back out lightheaded and wondering what to do next, waiting for something to happen, a telephone call, a change in the weather, a breeze, a cloud, anything, or children watching the road, wondering what would happen if one of those vehicles that sped by, such as his, were to stop and pull in. He imagined such lives as he drove. It was his desolation he pondered, however. It was the half-crazed longing he had but only faintly understood in himself to be utterly empty, to scorch out his troubles and aching. Miles into the desert, beyond Burns, he passed under a line of high-tension wires mounted on derricks. Startled, he looked to his left, northward. A file of derricks strung together by gleaming cables extended to the distant hills. Metal glittered up there at the outer reach of visibility. Feed lines that he could not see dropped from the derricks to the ground. The Bonneville Power Administration had claimed an alley out of nothingness and filled it with high voltage.

A half hour later he was startled again by a Pacific Northwest Bell transmitting station: a low building, a tower made out of girders, steel guy lines tracing triangles in the air, and mounted on the tower four satellite receivers. The tower and cable and dish receivers shone in the sun. He cruised by at seventy-five. The transmitting station grew suddenly huge as he neared it and stuttered brilliantly in his eyes as he passed. He blinked and held the image in the back of his head, that thing that caught and sent on the voices from the airwaves through here—nowhere—to somewhere else.

He went through Crane, a slightly larger town than the others because of the station, he guessed, though with its line of square houses and dirty yards it still looked lonesome enough. His head felt big, but as he looked out at the desert his thinking tightened. His lassitude began to narrow toward the more alert melancholy of the good stranger. Maybe it was the vastness of the desert that did it to him, the barrenness of rock and sand growing insistent, and the way it refused to define itself as he roared through it, and something about the corporations—Bonneville Power, Pacific Northwest Bell—their extraneousness and their inevitability. The monoliths had left their tracings here, and his paranoia was stirred. He sharpened up. He was in transit as a loosely strung-together collection of disparate parts, truck and trailer joined by a hitch and loaded with cable and chain, a backhoe, bulldozer, cans, clothing, tools, dog, and tangled-up, stinking, earthbound man—on his way to scratch up the ground himself.

He rubbed Jones's ear, digging his fingers into the cartilage. The dog squirmed with gratitude. The cab reeked of dog and sweat. His shirt was stuck to the seat. He had a growing sense of the desert's abstractness, huge and undefining, which gave it the character of God. As he remembered, it was country near here for which the MX missiles on tracks had been proposed. Maybe it was a perfect place for a prison, too. He thought of the blueprints: housing unit and support building, gymnasium, industry building, high-security cells, shakedown rooms, contact and noncontact visiting areas, towers and control rooms, playing fields, and the cages and fences, fences upon fences, fences with razor wire, electrified fences…the monkey's tail. Growing apprehensive and a little wild as he neared his destination, he thought that he had entered one of those Biblical testing grounds he'd learned about in catechism classes, the tortuous wildernesses: Beer-sheba, Jeshimon, Shur, Paran, Negeb, or Zin. He wondered if he'd been longing for such emptiness, for a scorching. He almost felt as though he were at last entering the actual, barren, geometrical, overwhelming nightmare of his boyhood.

Rome was a three-building town. He pulled off onto the shoulder, dug his directions out of his hip pocket, and spread the moist paper out over the dashboard, studied it, then looked across the highway at the gravel road he was to take. It passed by one of the buildings, an old house freshly painted white that did multiple duty, it appeared, as a cafe, gas station, and post office. Its whiteness was brilliant in the early-evening sun. A bleached American flag hung dead in the air above the doorway. To his right was a second cafe, a rundown stucco affair. It sold gas, too. Out back were locust trees and a series of jerrybuilt pens. He saw a calf and a donkey, then a large sow dragged herself into view. The place had beer signs in its windows.

He could see the third building in his mirrors. It was a mobile home set off from the highway a half mile back. As he had passed it he had seen a sign advertising automotive parts and stones: geodes, agate, petrified wood. A small wrecking yard surrounded the mobile home. In his mirrors he saw the heat shimmering above the car bodies. Two pickups were parked in front of the cafe on his right. A car was parked at the cafe on the other side of the highway, but he saw no one, not a soul. Just ahead was a startling swatch of deep green, an irrigated alfalfa field, then a bridge that spanned the Owyhee River, and beyond the bridge and stretching into the distance along the far side of the riverbed was a line of pale-green limestone cliffs.

He glanced to the right at the beer signs in the windows of the second cafe. He was tempted to go get a cold six-pack, but he put his rig in gear and pulled across the highway onto the gravel road. Dust mushroomed behind him and his trailer clanked in the potholes. He passed irrigated fields and counted a dozen or more widely spaced farms, low wooden frame houses with attics, wooden barns, and the machinery in antic rows—protruding levers and perforated tractor seats and cockeyed wheels—alongside the outbuildings, the new closer to the buildings than the old, and the old closer by natural selection than the ruined. It was the river, the irrigation source flashing down at the bottoms of the fields to his right, that made the farms possible. After several miles of following his directions, making two turns and taking one fork to the right, he crossed a cattle guard and passed a sign that said BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT. Federal land. Abruptly, there were no more farms.

He drove on. All along the gravel road jackrabbits had been killed by passing vehicles. Some of the bodies were fresh. Some were dry and flat. Back by the farms the road was littered with them, but here they became occasional. They were a measure of traffic. He saw a herd of mule deer running away from the road. They jumped a fence one after another, fifteen or more of them, their bodies going up and coming down, shining in the light like a snake sliding over a stick. They ran across a field, descended, darkened, and vanished into an arroyo. The road swung away from the river and wove through sedimentary formations—tall, weird shapes, eroded and hollowed out, leaning precipitously. The jackrabbit bodies became rare. A hawk crouched over one at the roadside, then as the truck bore down the hawk spread its wings and flew straight up with entrails dangling from its beak.

He was angling nearer the pale-green cliffs again. He passed a welldrilling operation, a dark derrick poised high in the sky. Two men were there. He passed a big field grown wild with alfalfa, oats, and thigh-deep weeds. The field was marked with Day-Glo-pink survey flags. That was the site. As the road swung right, he saw more of the field. It crested and sloped downward. At the crest stood Phil Grimes's tractor and lowboy trailer, and next to them the LeTourneau, and then down low on the slope he saw a ranchstead—a metal building, old barn, rock silo, outbuildings, and a house. Just past the house lay the river, curled against the base of the cliffs. He geared down and took a hard right toward the ranchstead. He leaned forward and peered expectantly over the dash. Jones peered with him. The trailer tugged and clanked on the rough roadway. He turned into the ranchstead and circled, passing first a pair of loaded semi-trailers with yellow tarps drawn tight over their cargoes, then an ancient crawler tractor, a pickup, a silver Mercedes-Benz sportscar, a low-slung outbuilding, the barn, a string of small outbuildings joined by corrals. In the spaces between the outbuildings he glimpsed the overgrown field, sloping upward now, and the fluttering markers. He stopped in front of the house. A dense cloud of dust billowed over the hood of the truck. No one was in sight. He switched off the engine and climbed down.

Jones followed him. She squatted. The sharp scent of dog urine rose on the dry air. He moved around the front of his truck. The blazing sun hung at thirty degrees. From the distance he heard the drilling operation—the running engine and clanking of pipe. Jones rolled in the dirt, nuzzling it and happily kicking her legs. Lafleur looked down at the Owyhee River, which was hardly more than fifty paces from the house, its surface smooth and oily-looking. The dust his rig had raised had blown across the river, and now drifted slowly up the face of the limestone cliffs. He followed the dust with his eyes, tipping his head, and tried to gauge the cliffs' height—two hundred feet, maybe more. Looking made his head hurt. He told Jones to stay and headed for the house. He reached around and picked his damp shirt away from his back. He heard the clanking of drilling pipe more distinctly. The noise came at him from two directions—from the corner of the field and also reverberating off the cliffs. The porch of the house had a new board nailed in amongst the old ones and it moaned when he stepped on it. He had his fist poised to knock on the screen door when he heard voices.

He heard a woman say, “Where do you get off?” He heard a man say, “No, no. When do I get on?”

He heard the woman say, “Try climbing out of the ditch first.”

The man's bright, coiling laugh made Lafleur arch his back and bring his hand down.

“I need a hand up out of the ditch,” the man said.

“Not from me,” the woman said.

“Who else?” the man said, chuckling. The voices, the man's elastic tenor and the woman's alto, Lafleur recognized as the ones he had spoken with by telephone.

“Listen,” the woman said. “Slippery is one thing. Screwing a guy like Smythe is still one thing. But this business with that soldier of fortune, as you call him, is another thing altogether.”

“Not your concern,” the man said.

“It wasn't,” she said, “until his personnel file popped up on the screen.”

“Forget it.”

“For all you know that guy's a killer. Somebody's going to end up with him in their face. Then what?”

There was a pause, a profound silence from the house, and Lafleur rocked back without moving his feet. He wanted to get out of there, but he was afraid that if he moved the board would creak again. He thought about trying, anyway. He thought that if it creaked and the pair inside heard it, he could change direction and come up to the door and knock as if he had just arrived. Maybe he could just jump clear. Or maybe, he thought, he should take his chances and knock right now. Maybe they wouldn't know what he'd heard.

He raised his arm and held it up indecisively. A movement at a window on the side of the house caught his eye. It was a woman, bending over. The light played on her naked loin, side, and arm. Her hair glistened. Lafleur's arm lowered as if under its own power.

“He's not,” the man said in a low voice, “but you got to figure somebody like that's always going to be around.”

“Not around me.”

There was another, shorter pause, then the man said, “We need a demilitarized zone. A place where we can be ourselves. One would think it'd be the bedroom.”

“You're changing the subject,” the woman said.

“Or certainly the bed,” the man said, his voice filled with mockery.

“Bull,” the woman said.

“Beds. We've got two of them for God's sake. If one doesn't work, we could try the other,” the man said.

The woman straightened up. She was thin and tall and dusky-looking behind the screen. Lafleur's breath caught in his throat. She drew a blouse over her head, wriggled into it, then stepped out of sight. Her words emerged muffled as if she were leaning into a closet. “There's the barn. Maybe you could get stirrups on one of those pigs.”

There was another pause. Lafleur stared fiercely at the screen door in front of him. Whatever the conversation was about besides seduction—files, beds, pigs, a soldier of fortune who might be a killer—he had no idea and didn't want to know, but a strange thing had happened to him: While his sympathies were unquestionably with the woman, his body had been gripped by a craving wantonness. He found himself picturing the woman bent into a dark closet, her naked buttocks out in the light. He detested having been carried across the barrier to voyeurism, and yet he was definitely there, alone, helpless. An animal tingling filled his limbs.

He stiffened when he heard footsteps. The footsteps stopped. He glanced at the window and back through the screen door, but saw no one. The woman spoke, her voice angry and clear. “You don't get what you want whenever you want it, not with me. Not now. Not every damn time I take a shower.”

Lafleur thought: of course, the shower. They'd been in the bathroom when he rolled in and neither one of them had bothered to look out the window. They had no idea he was here, but then he thought: Here. And he wondered: Where?

…standing on the porch of an old ranchstead that was tucked into federal land, a sloping field full of survey flags on the other side of the house, out in the barren, high desert, alone here, seized by carnality.

He shifted his weight uneasily. The porch creaked. He froze.

“I guess I'll just have to learn how to surprise you,” the man said. He sounded as if he were about to spring.

“There've been too many surprises, already,” the woman said. “You're a surprise.”

The man said, “Then I'd better find a way to take surprise into a new dimension,” and then he laughed again. Because of the tone of his voice, and because of the sound of the laugh twisting toward cruelty, Lafleur expected to hear something crash in reprisal, a vase or boot thrown. That is a formidable woman, he thought. He heard the footsteps, then nothing, and then again the footsteps, coming near. Quickly, he reached out and knocked, making the screen door rattle violently. A figure appeared through the screen, a paleness growing larger. The door swung open and a man came out, a round man with a belly and a round brown face like a Buddha. He had small dark eyes. He squinted at Lafleur. “Yes?”

“Hank Lafleur.”

“Of course, “the man said. He stuck out his hand, which Lafleur took. The man introduced himself as Victor Sabat. “Vic,” he added. He glanced at the truck, then back at Lafleur. “I thought I heard something.” Lafleur frowned. Sabat grinned, revealing teeth and blue gums. He crinkled his skin all the way up to his forehead, and leaned forward and nodded briskly as if encouraging Lafleur to join in on a joke. Lafleur leaned back. Sabat was short and massively built in the shoulders and torso, but soft, as his palm had been soft, pudgy, and warm. He had tanned, spindly arms and wore beige cords, a white polo shirt, and a large gold ring on his finger. He scrutinized Lafleur's head.

Lafleur reached up and touched the bandage on his forehead. “Had a little trouble.”

Sabat's grin vanished. “So I heard.”

“I'm fine.”

The grin returned to Sabat's face. He was older than Lafleur had anticipated, perhaps fifty. As he grinned he turned his body and hunched up as if to subordinate himself, and yet he addressed Lafleur directly with his sharp, dark eyes. By his bodily presence he made Lafleur feel at ease, which if he had thought about it a moment ago would have been the last thing he might have expected from this one, who proposed taking surprise into a new dimension, who kept, conceivably, a killer on his payroll. The man's eyes, however, turned from one thing to the next as if to coldly tick them off in an inner ledger. “You didn't find Phil?” he asked.

“No, I came here first.”

Sabat moved to the edge of the porch and gazed up toward the outbuildings. Over to the left, but hidden behind the barn, was Phil's equipment, and farther along in the same direction the well-drilling operation. Sabat passed his hand slowly across his belly and brought it to rest at his belt buckle. Then he pointed. “That one's the bunkhouse.” He meant the low-slung building across from the barn. “You and Phil will be in there.” A light breeze blew by them. Lafleur smelled pig shit. “We're going to have you and Phil down for dinner,” Sabat said. “At about eight?” Lafleur understood that he was being told to find his own way to his room and that Sabat wanted to go back inside. He had losses in there, Lafleur supposed, that he wanted to recoup. “Then we need to talk,” Sabat said. “I'm sure you have questions.”

“Sure, I've got questions.” Lafleur was put off. He looked over at his dog, a lump of shiny darkness lying in the deep shade under the truck.

“I promise to fill you in,” Sabat said.

Lafleur turned back to him and nodded.

“Ned Blaylock tells me you're going to be very good,” Sabat said, and his eyes flicked to Lafleur's bandages again, then to the doorway, out toward the truck, and back to Lafleur. His eyes rested and widened, and his mouth opened. He had a gold incisor on the lower left side. Lafleur felt himself being keenly measured. He shifted his feet. The porch creaked deeply. He looked down at the new board that had been fitted in snugly amongst the old ones. The new board was scuffed, blond, and sappy. The old ones were gray and patinaed by wear and weather. He felt Sabat waiting. He was waiting, too, composing his own response to being measured while not speaking or looking at the man. It was a moment, a hiatus, in which an unspoken transmission passed from one man to the other, something made of fog, a shimmering, osmotic inquiry. The house was silent. Lafleur looked at the river, then at the rock promontories above the river and at the gently mounded earth between them, the sand as if airbrushed to a sheen and tight like skin over the bones of the earth. The river came through like a dark vein. He glanced back at his truck.

“Your dog?” Sabat said. “Uh huh,” Lafleur said. “A problem?”

“No, of course not,” Sabat said, grinning. “Here?”

Lafleur looked down, then up again, and said, “Until dinner, then.”

“Yes,” Sabat said. He moved quickly across the porch and opened the door. He hung there for a moment, rising buoyantly on the balls of his feet, and grinned again at Lafleur with his rubbery face, and said, “You can meet Iris, too.” It was a deft stroke that threw Lafleur off-balance. Sabat held his grin. His tongue tip was poised in the center of his mouth. The lines of his brow were angled upward. The smile invited Lafleur to smile back. Lafleur obliged by curling his lip. Sabat went in. The screen door's spring sang as it compressed and the door thudded softly against the jamb. Lafleur was left with his curled lip as he watched the cream-colored shape dwindle, then vanish inside the lair like a lion in a zoo. He wondered how long the grin remained fixed to Sabat's face, and how it looked to the woman in there, or what replaced the grin as the man neared her.

“Iris,” Lafleur said to himself.