She left Glenn in the cab and went to check quickly if there was anything of use in the back of the truck. If she was going to walk back to civilisation she’d need food and water. There was none – just the half-empty oil can, some tins of paint, a bag of cement, and the bundles of initiate rods. She picked her way through the debris of the farmhouse, thinking it might have a kitchen, perhaps a bicycle leaning against a wall out back, but the place had been abandoned for years and contained only dust and rat droppings.
When she came back past the truck, Glenn flopped out of the passenger seat and stumbled towards her.
“Wait, Vivian,” he said.
He grasped at her coat and she tried to shrug him off but he sunk his fingers into her arms.
“It’s not at all what you’re thinking,” he said.
He clung to her like a child. She looked down and saw him, his broken glasses still somehow attached to his face. He nudged them up his nose in that familiar gesture. She pushed him back into the tailgate.
“Where’s Jesse?” she asked.
He sagged and said nothing. Vivian reached into the truck bed and pulled out one of the initiate rods. She hefted it like a baton in one hand.
“Careful, Vivian,” he said, “that’s a sacred rod. Violence is not the way of Telos.”
“Where’s Jesse, Glenn?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She struck his elbow and he howled.
“I’m serious, Vivian! For God’s sake! I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”
“Not privy to the secrets of Telos, right? Why don’t we just phone Shiv now, then?”
“He doesn’t know either,” said Glenn. He put his uninjured arm out and came forward slowly, as if approaching a wild animal. “None of us do. We thought maybe you did. We thought maybe you could help us.”
Vivian watched him and took several dry breaths.
“Are you trying to tell me that no one in top brass actually knows where Telos is?”
“Be calm, Vivian. We know your brother is up the mountain. We know he has ascended. Truly ascended. Only…”
“Only what?”
“There are certain truths here that need to be shared. I’m willing to share them, Vivian, only because I know you are ready. So put down the rod. If you please, dear heart. Let us talk. Let us commune. Two souls, together.”
He tried to put a hand to her cheek, and she flinched and raised her weapon. He caught the rod in mid-air and tried to yank it from her, but she held on and pulled it out of his fingers and he went for her throat. They spun like that, three or four times, and she couldn’t prise his hands off her. He started hissing.
“You fucking horrible cunt,” he said, and his voice sounded like someone else altogether, and she felt his nails on the soft skin behind her ears.
Her knee made contact with his groin and when he doubled over she cracked him hard on the side of the head. He swayed and looked up at her sadly, and she hit him again, and he fell to the floor.
Vivian looked at him sprawled in the dust. She nudged him with a toe.
“Why would I know where Jesse is?” she said. “Why would I know?”
He didn’t move. Vivian checked his breathing. It was very shallow, not much more than a flutter. He might have been dying. She dragged him around the other side of the truck and leant him against the wheel arch; then she changed her mind, hauled him to the cab, and propped him up in the passenger seat. She took off through the prairie grass, giving the horses a wide berth, and joined the road where Carl had first lost control of the truck. She was still holding the rod, for some reason, its tip now bejewelled with a deep red.
* * *
To begin with Vivian worried she would die from thirst or exposure, but after an hour’s hiking she was half-convinced that she was already dead. Under the high sun the prairie was a kind of purgatory, a dusty and bleached wasteland that she wandered through like a lost soul. If she was not dead then she was at least asleep, and dreaming an endless, colourless, dreadful dream.
Even though it was nearly November the midday sun was oppressively hot. She thought she could feel her hair sizzling and shrinking under its rays. When it became unbearable she took shelter in an old outhouse, so old it didn’t smell of anything, though it did still have a pin-up tacked to the wall, the shape of the woman’s naked body now just a whiteish, irradiated outline. Vivian waited on the seat for half an hour or so, hoping that the door would open on someplace completely different, but the weird dead land was all still there when she left. She found a small, broken-down tractor whose tyres had mostly disintegrated but which still had a key in its ignition. She got in the seat and tried it, not really knowing what she would do if it started. She hadn’t had a driving lesson in her life. It didn’t start, at any rate. The key wouldn’t even turn.
It was nearly evening when the dirt track met the highway – whether it was the 55, she didn’t know. She was too thirsty to swallow. Her mouth hung slightly open like a dog’s. At the turning was a bar and restaurant called Dos Amigos, which on the face of it didn’t look very different from the abandoned farmhouse the truck had destroyed, except for the neon sign of two sombreros over the entrance. There were a couple of pickups and a motorcycle parked outside. Vivian realised she was still clutching her bloodied rod. She threw it in a ditch by the roadside and covered it with dirt and gravel and approached the entrance of the bar.
Dos Amigos was a Tex-Mex place, even though it was halfway to Oregon, and leaned far more heavily towards Tex than Mex. It had saloon doors that flapped noisily when Vivian entered. Inside, the walls were hung with a mixture of buffalo heads and plasma TVs and signs that made goofy but also threatening jokes about trespassing and gun ownership and what you should expect from your wife. The barman and the clientele looked up in silence when she came in, as if she were a newcomer in some frontier town; a lone gunman.
Vivian took a stool at the bar. The barman came over to her.
“Evenin’. What can I get you?”
“I just need a glass of water.”
“Say again?”
“Just tap water.”
He stared at her, then looked at the other men at the bar. She wasn’t sure if he was having trouble with her accent, or if he was offended that she wasn’t buying a drink.
He said nothing. Then he turned, filled up a shot glass from the tap, and set it on the bar in front of her.
“That’s twenty bucks,” he said.
He looked at her seriously, then the other men at the bar started laughing, and he joined in. Shoulders still shaking, he filled another, larger glass with water and slammed it down and walked away without saying anything.
Vivian emptied both the shot glass and the larger glass and looked up at one of the TVs that was hanging from the wall. It was showing a hunting programme of some kind. Some men in fatigues were chasing pigs with an anti-aircraft gun attached to the back of a truck, and having a great time by the looks of things. The pigs didn’t stand a chance. When she looked away she saw that the men at the bar were watching her, not the TV, and she peered into the depths of her glass.
The barman came back and leant on one elbow.
“Look, I’m sorry, miss, all joking aside, but you’re gonna have to buy something if you want to sit there.”
It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford it – she still had all of Jerome and Minnie’s cash in her coat, bound in a rubber band. The real problem was her stomach, which after all that had happened was clenched like a fist and itching from the inside out. Any kind of alcoholic drink was out of the question.
“Can I get a juice?” she said.
“A juice?”
More sniggering from the other drinkers.
“Or a milk?”
The barman laughed again and shook his head.
“I can do you a glass of milk, no problem. Something to eat? Hot wings are good.”
“I can’t do spicy.”
“Can’t do spicy,” he repeated.
“Do you have any nuts?”
“Sure do.” He shook his head and laughed. “Milk and nuts, coming right up.”
His guffaw turned into a strange, lingering whine and he disappeared into a room behind the bar that she presumed was a kitchen.
“That’s some accent you got,” said one of the drinkers.
Vivian just looked at her empty, dirty glass and nodded.
“You British?”
She didn’t respond to that. She didn’t want to tell anyone anything about herself.
“Lot of Brits on the road these days. Come out to Cali looking for God knows what and it just chews ’em up and spits ’em out.”
“Lot of Americans, too,” said another man.
“That’s true too,” said the first.
Vivian suddenly saw what she looked like in the mirror behind the whiskey bottles, dirty and bruised, padding sprouting like white hair from the tears in Jesse’s coat. Her hands were still black from where she’d covered them in motor oil.
“I’m not a tramp,” she said.
“A tramp?”
“I mean, I’m not homeless.”
The first man held up his hands to protest his innocence. He was wearing a Stetson and bolo tie with a silver star.
“I ain’t judgin’, I’m just sayin’ it’s a shame is all.”
Vivian turned away from him again.
“Where are you headed?” he persisted. “You headed north, I can drive you. I can tell you’re alright.”
She didn’t know where to look. Not at him, not at the TV, not at herself in the glass behind the bar.
“Where you comin’ from? You walk here? Must of walked here, ain’t no buses or nothin’ that come by here.”
She could have told him she’d been drugged and kidnapped and was possibly on the way to being murdered, but for some reason couldn’t say it. Some complex of guilt and fear. The distorted, nightmare vision of the crashed truck came back to her. Carl pinned in his seat and covered in blood, Glenn sprawled in the dust with his eyes rolling up into the top of his head. The rod was buried only a stone’s throw away from the bar. If someone found the scene and followed her tracks it wouldn’t look good for her at all. The only witnesses were Carl and Glenn, and the whole Telos machine would rally around them if people started asking questions. Besides, it seemed the police wouldn’t even get involved if it was Telos business, not according to Jerome.
“I need to get back to Mount Hookey,” she said to the man in the Stetson, just as the barman reappeared from the kitchen. He was holding a packet of nuts and a litre of milk in a cardboard carton. Everyone looked at each other.
“Hookey?” said the man at the bar. “Ah. No, miss, that’s one place I ain’t going.”
“You don’t want to go to Mount Hookey,” said the barman. “That’s some whack-job, druggy amusement park. You’re better off staying around here.” He put the nuts and litre of milk on the bar. “You can keep that,” he said. “We’ll call it five.”
Vivian reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the roll of notes and gave him ten. His eyes widened and narrowed at the sight of so much money. One of the other drinkers whistled.
“If I let you keep the change,” she said, “can I use your phone?”
She didn’t know who she wanted to call. Her mother was both the first and last person she wanted to speak to. Troy might have been old enough to drive, perhaps he could come and pick her up if she got through to the motel. The police weren’t going to help.
“Are you in some kind of trouble, miss?” said the barman.
“Do you have a phone here?”
He scrutinised her and the oily roll of bills in her hand and shook his head.
“Depends what you want to use it for.”
She turned to the other drinkers.
“Do any of you have a phone I could borrow?”
They rustled like hens on their stools. She looked at the man in the Stetson and the bolo tie and the plaid shirt and suddenly thought of another faded, retired cowboy: Jerome. She patted the many pockets of her coat and felt the large plastic pebble of the pager he’d given her.
“Listen, I’m sorry, miss,” said the Stetson, “but I don’t want to get mixed up in anything here…”
“Forget it,” she said.
“Say what?”
“It’s fine. I know someone. What road is this?”
“This here’s the Old Stage Road south.”
The Old Stage Road! She really was in a Western.
She took out the pager. This was another intriguing development for the barman and his customers.
“Say, what is that?” Stetson asked.
She didn’t answer. She looked at the dull screen and had to angle it just-so to read what was written there. The thing must have been twenty years old. It was like dealing with her motel room alarm clock all over again. She hadn’t checked the pager for days and already she had two messages from Jerome. One just said: Anything? The one after that had arrived the previous night, and said: You okay?
She let the barman keep the change anyway. Then she emptied the nuts into the large exterior pocket of her coat, swigged from the milk carton, and went back out into the cool, pink evening.
She sat on the ridge of the ditch where she’d thrown the rod and composed a message to Jerome. It was only two letters, in answer to his second question. It said: No.
17
BY THE time Jerome arrived – with Minnie in the passenger seat – Dos Amigos had closed and it was freezing. One by one the other customers had come outside and gotten in their trucks and on their bikes and driven away with no idea that she was perched there in the darkness. Then someone had switched off all the neon and turned down the music and the world was all silent and starlit and Vivian had only the crickets for company.
Jerome’s Buick emerged like a submarine, headlights cutting through the pitch black, and pulled up on the other side of the ditch. It stood there ticking. Vivian got up and felt the blood rush back into the bottom of her legs. She slid to the bottom of the ditch, dug up the rod she’d used to batter Glenn, then went up to the car and opened one of the rear doors and got in. Jerome turned on the interior light and twisted in his seat.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said.
Minnie reached between the two front seats and put a hand on her knee.
“We are so sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “If we’d known…”
“It’s fine,” said Vivian. “It’s not your fault.”
“I brought you some coffee.” She took a thermos flask out of a basket between her legs. “The top is also the cup. Just screws off like that. No, other way. That’s right.”
The coffee was hot and sweet and delicious. Vivian sat in the back seat and warmed her filthy hands on the plastic cup and they drove through the night in silence. Occasionally Minnie would rustle in her seat, turn, and give Vivian a lingering, sympathetic smile over her shoulder. Then she’d go back to staring at the endless highway.
Once she looked at her husband and said, “If they did this to her, what have they gone and done to Nathan?”
But Jerome didn’t reply.
After an hour’s driving they arrived at a township called Gazelle. The Buick’s headlights illuminated the sign as they entered, “Population: 4”, but it was more likely it was forty-something, and the second number had fallen off. It was just one road of neat and modest bungalows. There were a couple of empty wooden barns among them, though it didn’t seem like a lot of farming went on in Gazelle. They pulled into the driveway of a house with a picket fence – blindingly white in the car’s headlights – and a veranda with a swinging chair.
“Alright,” said Jerome, “this is us.”
They got out and Minnie led her to the front door.
“Watch your step here,” she said as they went up onto the veranda.
Jerome fumbled for a moment with the keys. A dog barked somewhere down the road. Minnie blew on her hands.
“Getting cold,” she said.
Inside the house was warm and smelled of coffee and roasting meat. The living room seemed old-fashioned, all brown and orange furnishings, a fringed lampshade hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Bookshelves and chairs and a coffee table that were all varnished to an unnatural gloss, or perhaps weren’t real wood at all. They also had a pale stone fireplace filled with coals that were perhaps also artificial. Vivian saw an enlarged version of the photo of Nathan at his graduation, in a gold frame in the centre of the mantelpiece.
“Well,” said Jerome. He put his thumbs into his belt loops and sagged like a question mark. “I suggest you get yourself cleaned up, and get yourself fed, then you can tell us what’s what. Minnie, do you want to get her a towel and all the rest?”
Vivian nodded and followed Minnie down the hall to the bathroom, which was clean and neat but also looked like it hadn’t been redecorated in thirty years or more. Minnie started the taps for her, tested the temperature three or four times like she was drawing the bath for a baby, and then let it run. She gave Vivian a towel and a nightie and a heavily perfumed bar of soap, whose scent reminded Vivian so much of her mother that she had to leave it on the corner of the sink, diametrically opposed to where the bath was.
Jerome and Minnie were waiting for her when she returned. The nightie was like a hair shirt against her skin. She sat with them at the kitchen table and Minnie gave her some meatloaf that was cold in the middle and scalding on the outside, but didn’t taste bad.
They watched her eat, still in silence, and when she finished the last mouthful and put her knife and fork together Minnie said, “There. Better?”
“Much,” said Vivian. “Thank you.”
Jerome took her plate and dumped it in the sink.
“Now,” he said, coming back to the table. “What in the hell happened to you?”
Vivian began by talking them through everything that had happened since she’d left the Chinese restaurant – about the course, and the initiates, and Glenn, and Shelley, and Shiv – but apart from names and specifics of the rituals of Telos, she couldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.
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