by Ellen Datlow
I took a sip of my beer. “I’ve heard that, too.”
“Have you seen them move?” the girl asked.
“Never have.”
“I still want to see them anyway,” she said.
“Maybe,” Delauney said. “But tomorrow it’s the ghost town, okay?”
“You won’t be disappointed,” I said.
Sophie was looking at me. She seemed unconscious of the intensity of her gaze or that I might be aware of it. I wondered what she saw in my face, whether there was something there that revealed more than I wanted her to see. There was a spray of freckles splashed beneath her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. She was beautiful. I wanted desperately to know what was inside her head at that moment, but Delauney leaned close and whispered something to her. Something I didn’t catch. She laughed and her face flushed red, and I didn’t know what that meant. It was Cath’s bedtime, she said. I smiled to let her know it was okay, but I could see she was troubled. She told Delauney to stay a while if he wanted. But I felt edgy suddenly, angry that she was going. I wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“I gotta go, too,” I said, standing up. “Early start in the morning.”
“No problem, Henry,” Delauney said. “Thanks for all your help.”
I turned to Sophie. “It was good to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand, using formality just to feel the touch of her skin. There was no harm in it. “Enjoy your stay. You too, Cath. Keep that eagle eye on your folks.”
Sophie frowned, as if puzzled at something I’d said. I left the bar and set off out into the quiet darkness. It was less than a mile back to the empty bungalow, but it seemed like the longest walk I ever took.
BEFORE I CAME to the valley, I lived out on the coast. I was a deputy in San Luis Obispo’s sheriff’s department. I was good at the job and had ambitions to make sheriff one day. There was a woman I’d been seeing and I’d begun to think maybe she was the one. But things didn’t turn out the way I planned. Something happened I hadn’t counted on, one of those situations nobody could foresee. There was no time to think and what I did, I did instinctively. IAD ruled that it had been self-defense, but I knew as well as anyone the kid never had a gun. After the investigation, things began to fall apart at work and my girlfriend began to cool on me. A week after she left, I quit the department and spent eighteen months drifting round the Midwest, feeling sorry for myself and listening to songs about regret. Living in Death Valley cured me of that. Like Robert Frost said, whatever road you’re on is the one you chose and the one you didn’t take is no longer an option. I came here, worked as a volunteer, then after six months, got a ranger’s post and in time, I saw there was no going back.
Some people find that hard to accept. This morning I got a call to check out a vehicle parked up at Quackenbush Mine. There was a dog in the back seat of the truck, a German shepherd. Her tongue lolled out her open mouth and she managed a feeble wag of her tail against the seat when she saw me. The window was cracked open a half inch but even so, it must have been over 130 degrees inside. It took me twenty minutes to find the driver, coming down from Goldbelt Spring. He was a heavyset guy, in shorts and vest, a 49ers cap hiding his close-cropped skull. Had a woman and two kids with him, boy and a girl about ten or eleven.
“Is that your truck down there at the mine, sir?” I asked him.
“The Cherokee, yeah.”
“Your dog is dying in there.”
“Aw shit,” he groaned, lurching down the slope. “I knew this would fucking happen.”
They always say they knew what would happen. Which, instead of justifying what they did, only compounds the situation. He bleated on about how he didn’t want to keep the dog on a leash and how his wife kept on about how you had to because that was the rule and so, in truth, it wasn’t his fault, he was just thinking about the dog. I led him back down to his vehicle, got him to open it up and lift the dog out onto the ground. Her eyes were glazed, her body still.
“She’s still alive,” the guy said. “I can feel her heart.”
“Step back out of the way,” I told him. I unholstered my gun, stuck the barrel against the dog’s chest and squeezed the trigger.
The woman screamed.
“Jesus Christ,” the guy said. “Jesus fucking Christ—you killed her!”
“No,” I said. “You did that.” I stood up and checked the vehicle over to see if there was anything else I could cite the son of a bitch for apart from animal cruelty. I gave him the ticket and drove off, leaving him to bury the dog in the dirt.
Heading south on the Saline Valley Road, I heard Rydell’s voice crackling over the Motorola, requesting assistance at an incident in Hidden Valley. I responded and told him where I was.
“It’s a vehicle come off the road, two people injured,” he said. “Quick as you can, Henry. Hannafin’s already on her way down from Grapevine.”
I spun the Expedition around, throwing up a cloud of dust as I accelerated north along the dirt road. My heart was racing like it knew what I was going to find but the truth was, I had no real idea what to expect up there.
When I saw the truck turned on its side ten yards off the road, the feeling of anticipation disappeared, leaving me vaguely disappointed. Five kids were seated in a semicircle a few yards away from the vehicle. One of them, a fair-haired kid about eighteen, got up and came over to me. “I think Shelley broke a leg,” he said, nodding toward the others. “And Karl’s maybe busted an arm.”
“You the driver?”
He hesitated before nodding.
“You been drinking? Smoking some weed?”
“No way, man, nothing like that. Just took the bend too fast, I guess.”
All of them were cut and bruised, but only the two he’d named were badly injured. Shelley looked like she was in a lot of pain. I was splinting her leg when Hannafin arrived and went to work on the others. After we had them patched up, we put Karl and Shelley in Hannafin’s vehicle and two others in mine. The driver made to get in front beside me, but I shook my head. “Take this,” I said, handing him a two-liter bottle of water.
“What for?” He looked bewildered. “Oh man, you saying I have to wait here?”
“There’s a wrecker on its way from Furnace Creek. Should be here in three hours.”
The journey to Grapevine took the best part of an hour. The two in the back remained silent for most of that time, either too dazed to talk or wary of saying something that would incriminate their buddy. Or maybe they sensed my own unease, a feeling of disquiet that had been bothering me all day. I’d been expecting some kind of revelation, but all I had was the feeling that I’d been asking myself the wrong questions.
There was an ambulance waiting at Grapevine Station to take the two injured kids to the emergency room in Amargosa Valley. The other two said they’d wait at Grapevine for the tow truck to show up with their vehicle and driver. In the station office, Hannafin made fresh coffee while I stared out the window toward the mountains bordering Ubehebe Crater. She said something I didn’t catch and I didn’t ask her what it was.
“Is it any different today,” she said, “from how it was last week?”
“They’re the same,” I said, though I knew she wasn’t talking about the mountains.
She handed me a mug of steaming coffee. “You been keeping to yourself lately.”
I felt weary and disinclined to have the conversation she wanted.
“What’s bothering you, Henry?”
I sipped the coffee, trying to put my thoughts in some kind of order.
“It’s good to see you’ve lost none of your charm and conversational skills.”
I forced a smile. “I’m sorry, Rae,” I said. “Got things on my mind, is all.”
“Anything I can help with?”
I liked Rae, liked her a lot, but that’s all it was. I wasn’t looking for any kind of relationship. I was never much good at explaining such things, feelings, or their absence. “Just some stuff I have to deal with,” I
said. “Nothing that matters too much.”
“A problem shared is a problem halved.”
“There is no problem.”
“I forgot,” she said. “You don’t have problems, ever.” She bit her lower lip, I guess to stop from saying anything else. I didn’t know what she might have wanted to say and I didn’t care. I felt empty inside, empty and lifeless as the salt flats.
I drained my coffee and set the mug down. “None I lose sleep over.”
“I think you should talk to someone.”
“I talk to people all the time.”
“No you don’t, Henry. If you did, you wouldn’t be losing touch.”
“I’ll be seeing you, Rae,” I said, leaving the office. Hannafin was my friend, but that didn’t mean she knew all there was to know about me. It was never that simple.
AT FIRST I saw nothing on the road. I drove past the Grandstand on my left and headed south another mile before pulling over, somewhat confused. I picked up the radio, intending to give HQ a piece of my mind. But before anyone could respond, I’d got out of the vehicle and was watching the small dust cloud that had appeared away to the south. I grabbed the binoculars from the dash. Between my position and the cloud, a vehicle was stopped in the middle of the dirt road. The dust cloud seemed to be moving farther south, as if marking the trail of some other vehicle, one I hadn’t seen. Dry heat rippled across the exposed skin of my arms, sucked all the moisture from my mouth. As I stared at the dust cloud, it was pulled apart by a wind I didn’t feel.
Nothing moved around the SUV. I scrambled up the slope to my right, moving southwest toward a patch of creosote bush. From there I looked down at the road, first at my own vehicle, then at the other, half a mile, maybe less, from where I stood. I squatted down in the scrub, removed the Sig Sauer 9mm from my holster and laid it on the ground. The sun was falling slowly toward the mountain behind me, but its heat seemed to have intensified. A sudden movement caught my eye. I watched through the binoculars as a man got out of the SUV and walked to the edge of the dirt road. He just stood there gazing out at the playa like it was a picture of beauty rather than heat and desolation. Two other people joined him, standing on either side. I tried to see what they were looking at, but nothing moved out there, not even the goddamn rocks. The mountain’s shadow bruised the edge of the Racetrack.
A fourth person had arrived. I watched his lips moving as he pointed across the dry lake. Sound travels a fair distance in this stillness, but I didn’t hear a word. There was something unsettling about the way he held himself, thumb looped into the belt at his waist, that made me feel numb and disconnected. After a few moments the first three set out walking, heading east across the playa. The last guy stood there a while, till they were two or three hundred yards out, then he followed them, taking his time, keeping his distance. A redtail circled above him and when he stopped to glance at it, the bird flew off to the north. A line of thin, ragged clouds chased each other away across the valley, as if anxious not to intrude. Beads of sweat dribbled from beneath the straw hat and down my face as I worked to fill the silence with the imagined sound of their footsteps crunching across the Racetrack.
Nothing made sense.
Long, thin shadows followed them, clawing the dry mud like the fingers of a man dying of thirst. The figures grew smaller as they receded into the distance. I clambered down the slope to the Expedition and drove south until I reached their vehicle. I thought about calling Rydell but wasn’t sure what to tell him. All I’d seen was some folks set out across the Racetrack on foot, same as countless visitors had done before them. But if there was no mystery, then why was my heart racing so fast? Why couldn’t I shake off the feeling that this was all wrong?
I stood by the side of the road, no longer able to see any of them, accepting that I had no choice but to follow. Strange, disorienting sensations flowed through my body, setting flares off behind my eyes and thrumming in my ears. I began to walk. The ground was hard and bone-dry, but even so, I found a trail of footprints. They were quite distinct, but what disturbed me was that there was only one pair, not four. I tried to ignore this and figure how long it would take me to catch up with the group. After thirty minutes, I should have been able to see them, but nothing moved out there. I quickened my pace. The mountains to the north and west punctured the sky, opening wounds that bled over the horizon and down onto the playa. Ten minutes later, I stopped and listened. Nothing, no birds, no wind, no voices. I unholstered the 9mm again, held it up and fired two shots. And was appalled when I heard nothing. My hand shook as I stared at the pistol. I’d felt the recoil, and the smell of cordite on the breezeless air contradicted the silence. I checked the magazine, saw that two rounds had been discharged. It was just the sound that had been lost, a realization that made my isolation more complete. If sound couldn’t exist here, then what could? When I stared at the mountains enclosing both sides of the valley, I knew that even memories were not real in this place. I felt more alone than anyone had ever been, without even the company of the dead. With the light fading, I took a bearing on a western peak and set off toward Racetrack Road.
It took me the best part of an hour to find my vehicle, and by then, night had settled on the valley. I stared up, overwhelmed by the immense darkness. There was no moon, and the night seemed blacker than usual, as if half the stars were missing from the sky. It seemed the only way to account for the intensity of the night. I sat in the cab, radio in hand. I wanted to speak to someone, hear some familiar voice, but I was stopped by a doubt I couldn’t explain. The feeling of wrongness persisted, had grown stronger in my head. It didn’t make sense at first, not until I’d grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler, turned the key in the ignition, and flicked on my headlights. The road in front of me was empty and I was alone with the fallen stars.
I SAT IN the Expedition in the parking lot, feeling a deep weariness in my bones, the sort that can hold you for hours on end. My hand was on the door but I couldn’t move. I watched cars come and go, people walking by like this was normal, like nothing at all had changed. I even saw Sophie Delauney walking across the parking lot, hand in hand with her daughter. She stopped halfway across the lot, turned, smiled, and waved at me. She seemed unaware of the people around her, and I felt my mind melting, my sense of being fading away in her presence. I thought maybe there were things she wanted to say, words she’d left unspoken. I felt the wrongness of letting her go without talking to her again, at least one more time.
But before I could go to her, Delauney himself walked past, though he appeared not to see me. He carried two large suitcases, which he stowed in the back of the Rav4. A vein began to throb in my temple. Drops of sweat stood out on my brow though the sun was low in the sky and the air con was blowing. He got in the driver’s seat and started the Toyota. Sophie stood by the passenger door and glanced my way again. She looked right at me, but I knew she wasn’t seeing me at all. Whatever look she had on her face, it didn’t mean anything. By the time I got out of the Expedition, she’d climbed in beside Delauney and they were pulling out of the lot.
Later, I sat in Arcan’s nursing a beer. Troubled by what I’d seen, I tried to cloak the strangeness in reason but I couldn’t make it fit. The feeling that I was thinking about someone else had taken root in my brain. That I had no control of my own life nor any clear idea where I was heading. Maybe I’d spent too long in the valley. Maybe it was time to leave. Only, I wasn’t sure I could.
Old Arcan himself came in the bar and made one of his regular attempts at playing the host. He claimed to be a direct descendant of one of the first men to cross Death Valley, but nobody believed it. His ex-wife told someone he’d been born plain Bill Judd. I watched him move from one guest to another, carefully selecting those on whom he wished to bestow his hospitality. Thankfully, I wasn’t among them.
I found myself thinking about Sophie Delauney. They were the kind of thoughts I had no business thinking, that caused pleasure and pain in equal measure, but I thoug
ht them anyway. Some lives were full of certainties but mine seemed to be made up only of “what ifs” and “maybes.” It should have been no surprise that it had become less real to me.
I ordered another drink and stared into the mirror behind the counter. The people in there seemed to have purpose in their lives, to know what they were doing, where they were going. If I watched long enough, paid attention to the details, maybe I’d discover how to make my life more real. Arcan was holding forth to the group of Japs sitting round a table across the bar. Jaime was working his routine on a blonde girl at the end of the counter. She looked bored, and I guessed the only reason she was tolerating his bullshit was the lack of any other diversion. I wondered if the real Jaime was having any better luck than the one in the mirror. And here was Sophie Delauney, standing just a few feet behind me and watching my reflection watch her, or maybe it was her reflection watching us. Do mirrors take in sound the way they do light? I don’t think so. I couldn’t hear anything, no music, no talk, not even the clink of glasses. It was a long time before I remembered myself and thought to say hello. But a second before I did, she beat me to it. She climbed up onto the bar stool beside me and caught Jaime’s eye.
He was there in a shot. She pointed to my half-empty bottle of Dos Equis, told him to bring one of those and a glass of Merlot. I said I hadn’t expected to see her again. She shrugged and told me they’d had a long day. Drove down to Badwater, where Delauney had decided to hike out on the salt flats. Went half a mile before the heat got to him and he returned to the car. Later, they went to Chloride City. She wasn’t looking at me as she talked, but at the guy in the mirror, the fellow who looked just like me but whose thoughts were not the same as mine. The ache in her voice seemed to hint at some inner turmoil. I wanted to offer words of comfort and reassurance, tell her everything would be okay. But thinking the words was easier than saying them.