He’s mixing his families. Christopher didn’t exist in his thinking two days ago, now he’s vying for attention with the people—the good people, who raised him. He’ll have to reconcile all this. He has to. “God never gives you more than you can carry,” was another thing his mother said. He’ll get through this. One way or another he will. Or he won’t because as his father once told, “Mother kills her children.”
He’s confident he will come to accept everything, if not understand it. He’ll go to Tahoe alert and aware that he is probably being played. He is not in possession of all the facts. Trent knows more than he’s saying. How does he know Jessica? Who is Jessica? Was it dumb luck they met at the roadside this time or before? How long had he been there?
He thinks to wake Trent and demand answers, but doesn’t. He’s a confessed liar. Michael can’t be sure that anything he tells him is true. Nevertheless, he’d still like to hear what he has to say. But he’s sleeping. No need to wake him. It’ll wait. Like his return to Salt Lake City and that other life he was only six hours away from, it’ll wait.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Michael drives over the crossroads at Crystal Springs in the dark without slowing down the car.
Hours later, he stops for coffee, more fuel, and a rest room break outside of Tonopah and doesn’t wake Trent. It’s the Last Chance for Gas Snak-Mart and Fuel Stop. The sign was colorful once, but it’s a weathered white memory of its former glory.
Michael gets a coffee and pays for it without uttering a word. The clerk behind the counter, a not unattractive woman, worn old by the same elements that blasted the color off the sign, lets the silence alone and gives him his change with a nod.
Outside, sipping his coffee, stretching his legs, Michael studies his passenger through the car window. His memory is suspect on so many levels, but even in light of everything else that has happened to him, he thinks he is looking at Trent Tagget, missing son of the Connecticut upper class. He has the same striking features as the man in the photograph, the man long dead. He has the coloring of the woman in the photograph, the woman long dead, the daughter Heidi Tagget pines for. The picture of the little boy, the missing one, the vacancy in the grave was of a child. This youth in his stolen car could be him. Should be him. Is him.
The coffee isn’t working. He needs something else. He hasn’t had a cigarette in weeks but he doesn’t miss them. What he craves, what he can never get enough of now, is sweets. He returns to the station and fills a bag with every flavor of candy it offers. He’ll taste each one searching for a flavor, an effect. A memory. In the aisle, he closes his eyes and savors a lemon drop feeling remembered emotions stir around his tongue. Sweet and sour are the closest he has come, but it not what he’s looking for. There is a taboo exhilaration each time he eats a candy looking for that one flavor. An exciting forbideness, not unlike the feeling he had when he snuck into the girl’s shower in high school. There’s a sexual component to the flavor he’s searching for.
“I thought you left,” says the cashier.
“Sweet tooth,” he says.
“You buying out the whole store?” She’s pleased with her teasing.
“Just about.”
“Where’re ya’ headin’?”
“Tahoe.”
“Hunting?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Folks came by earlier today. They said they were going up there to hunt.”
“Hunt what?”
“Didn’t say.”
The total appears on the register with a snap and chime. Michael looks at it and digs in his pocket. “You lonely out here?” he asks her. In the daylight, on a busier road, in a bigger place, such a question would be impertinent. But here, on the “dark desert highway,” it’s not. There’s an innate intimacy among the night owls and the lost.
“Gets that way sometimes,” she says, turning her head in bashfulness.
He hadn’t meant it that way, but he thinks why not?
“I’m Michael,” he says.
“I’m Terri. Who’s in the truck?”
“Hitchhiker.”
“You like to live dangerously.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Lots of folks go missing on these roads. It’s dangerous to pick up strangers.”
He smiles. “You got someone?”
“Why ya’ asking?”
He likes her demureness. She’s embarrassed and flattered. Twenty years ago she must have been the girl of the county, but time has taken the superficial parts away from her and left her a better woman.
“Would you like to make love to me?” he asks her.
Her eyes go large and she looks around the vacant store. She’s not flattered anymore. She’s scandalized. “I don’t know what you think I am—”
“I think you’re an attractive woman who’s old enough to do as she pleases with whom she pleases.”
“I don’t please with you,” she says.
“Okay.” He puts money on the counter.
She punches keys on the register and the drawer flies open. She collects his change.
He shakes his head.
She drops it in a charity jar for a Scout troop trying to get to Virginia for some reason.
She watches him uncertainly. Michael senses he’s scared her a little, but aroused her too.
“We’re God-fearing folks around here,” she says, stopping him at the door.
“Which God?”
“I’m Lutheran, but there’s some Baptists and Mormons too.”
“Oh, that God,” he says.
A newspaper by the door catches his attention. The headline reads: Donnie Do Signs Tipp-Z to Three Record Deal on his New Label.
“We only get the national one on Sunday,” says Terri. “That’s yesterday’s.” Her voice is softer than before. “The local paper will be here in a couple of hours,” she says. “If you wanna wait.”
Michael reads the story. It’s a short fluff piece. The whole paper is a fluff piece. Tipp-Z is an underground Bay Area rap group that earned some fame on the internet. If you go online, the paper has links to their videos on YouTube. Donnie Do, also known as Ron Dully, is the son of a Silicon Valley billionaire, Micah Dully of Dully Computer Security Solutions. Donnie Do’s label “Do the Music” was on death watch a year ago but turned around thanks to new investors. None of this would interest Michael in the least except he recognizes the face staring off the newspaper in a backwards baseball cap. Donnie Do was the man Jessica drove away with in Oakland.
“I don’t know if I should call the police on you,” Terri says.
“For propositioning an attractive woman?” He doesn’t say beautiful. She’s not.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Call the police or sleep with me?”
“Both,” she says. “Neither.” She’s flustered.
Michael puts the paper down and goes to the counter. “Terri, are you happy?” he asks her.
“Nobody is.”
“Good answer.” He sucks another candy, a medley of sweet fruit. “We’re all marching to death. Each step we take is a step closer, each breath we take, one less in the kitty.”
“What’s that got to do with this?”
“Take a little comfort where you can.” He’s confused her. He didn’t mean to. His thinking has gone a little off the rails. He surprises himself with his own words.
“It’s sinful,” she says.
“Come here.” He leans over the counter. He pulls her chin to his mouth and kisses her softly on the lips. He remembers Alturas, The Shady Day Inn, hourly rates, room 115.
Esmerelda.
He kisses Terri and pours into the moment an apology to the woman who died with him. He caresses her lips, tastes her sweet tongue, and hopes to be forgiven, not for her death, but for his disrespect of it.
Time slips and spins and stretches. He has no idea how long he kisses the woman at the Last Chance For Gas Snak-Mart and Fuel Stop, but it is long enough.
/> The picture in the paper is another nudge, another puzzle waiting for his attention further up the road. He could bed Terri now. He knows it. He could finish his apology, give her a night to remember, and seek an atonement long overdue, but he holds back. He’d like to think he’s respecting her propriety and vulnerability, but he knows he’s afraid he’ll kill her.
They break apart, panting and thirsty.
“I’ve got to go, Terri,” he says. “Thanks for the kiss.”
He steps out into the cool desert air and looks back toward Tonopah’s lights. His road is the other way, into the darkness.
Just then he remembers something his sister told him. He’s not sure if was Lynette Kalson or Gloria Oswald, but he giggles when he remembers it and pokes his head back into the store.
“Terri,” he says.
“Yes?” Rejection and hope are writ clear on her face.
“If God gives you lemons,” he says. “Get yourself another god!”
She looks like he’s insulted her. He hadn’t meant to. He thought it was funny and appropriate. He can’t leave her like that, so he says, “I’ll probably be back this way.”
“Be careful out there,” she says. “The roads aren’t always safe.”
They share a smile and he withdraws to the car.
Twenty miles on he’s still thinking of Terri and the natural yearning of two lonely people to spend a brief intimate moment together. Esmerelda and Terri, years apart but not so far.
He’s back in the wasteland. In the moonlight he can see far off mountains on either side of the road, distant and forbidding. Pale sandy dunes stretch across the unmeasurable expanse to lap at the bases of the craggy mountains like a frozen sea. Struggling bushes and cactus dot the surfaces like drowning sailors.
He doesn’t pass a car for an hour, not a paved side road or mileage marker, then like the side of a freight car he passes a billboard and reads: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16.
There’s not a human structure beside the road as far as he can see. Outside his car, there’s not a man-made light from horizon to horizon. But here is God. Here is religion, right in his face in the middle of the night. In the desert. God is in the desert.
The quote is well known to him, the billboard identical to countless others he’s seen from Arizona to Idaho. He mulls it over as he drives. His passenger sleeps soundly.
It is the main tenet of Christianity, and this night, on this road, he finds it ridiculous. It is complete self-deception. Where in nature is there the like? Where in this world an example of that philosophy? What pattern in nature suggests that there is everlasting life in any form regardless of affiliation or aspirations?
Life leads to death. That is what every person sees. That is the natural order of the world. It is reality, but it is so terrible that people make mental gymnastics and sacrifice—murder and mayhem to deny it. Would not God teach His lessons in every leaf and season? Would not the laws of the universe be whispered on every dying breath? The Christian promise is a lie. Give him a god like Kali who promises death, who puts it in your face, makes you see it, absorb it, understand it. Respect it and love it. Kali, the god of deceivers who alone speaks the truth.
Prophets find God in the desert.
Hours later, he approaches the Sierra Nevadas. He passes the occasional farm hidden behind hills, their whereabouts betrayed by dirt roads with gates breaking up the infinite barbed wire barriers beside mailboxes and palms. There’re increasing signs of water, life, and civilization.
The sun threatens to rise behind him, and he feels the eight hours of driving like a weight on his hips.
“Trent get up,” he says. “We’re nearly there.”
The youth blinks his eyes. “Wow,” he says. “Already? Time slips by doesn’t it?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Where are we?”
“Just passed the turn off for Topaz Lake.”
“Pull over. I gotta piss.”
“You want to drive?” says Michael. “I don’t know where to go once we hit the city.”
“Neither do I.”
“What? This is your soirée. How’re we supposed to find Jessica?”
“She’ll be around. We’ll keep our eyes open. We won’t be the only ones.”
“What?” says Michael, but an answer must wait. Trent is out of the car pissing in a ditch before the car comes to a complete stop.
Traffic blows by honking at the pissing boy either in disgust or teasing. Michael never knows which it is when they honk at him.
“That car has a smooth ride,” Trent says zipping his fly.
“I think it cost seventy thousand new,” says Michael. “It better have a good ride.”
Michael tosses him the keys and gets in the passenger side.
“What now?” Michael says.
“To Tahoe. Hook up with the family.”
“By the hook you will know the family,” Michael says to himself. “By the throat you will have the sign.”
Trent draws his hand to his neck, a simple subtle gesture, but the same one Michael has seen a half dozen people make to him in the last month. The sign.
“Do you remember now, Jack?” says Trent.
“Jack!” Michael exclaims. “Joe, Jesse, Jack. The J. The hook.”
Trent nods slowly and slides the car into gear. “Welcome back, Baby Michael.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“How do you know that name?”Michael says
“You’re a legend.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“I’m bringing you in,” says Trent.
“What’s all this about?”
“Michael,” he says easily, holding the wheel with his wrist, taking the vehicle over eighty. “I’m bringing you back.”
“Why you?”
“I found you first,” he says.
“Goddammit I want some answers. Stop evading me. No more riddles. What the hell is going on?”
“I was hoping to avoid this part,” he says. “Jessica’s the one who should do this, debrief you and all that. Can you wait that long?”
“But we don’t know where she is.”
“That is true. But we’ll find her. If she’s not busy.”
“Is she like the queen or something?”
He laughs. “No. No no no no. She’s good at calming people down, that’s all. She’s really good at putting people at ease. A place you need to be. She’s a good talker.”
“I can’t wait,” Michael says. “I’m going mad. Tell me what’s happening. Who am I?”
“We’ll be there soon.”
“Tell me what you can,” Michael says, careful to put calmness into his voice. His clear thinking is eroding, but he has enough left to soften his tone.
Trent glances at the speedometer and the early morning road. He sighs. “You’re a wizard, Harry,” he says.
“What?”
Trent laughs hard and long, tears in his eyes before he calms down enough to speak. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ve been practicing that for days. Seemed appropriate.”
“I’m not laughing,” Michael says. “I’m going insane.”
“You are the boy who lived,” Trent says. “See the parallel?”
“Trent, if you don’t start giving me straight answers, I’m going to kill you.”
The laughing stops. Trent’s eyes harden and hold. After a minute, he says, “Baby Michael survived the Barstow suicides. The family thinks you were left alive and left to the care of clay men because you were too young to be prosecuted.”
“The family?”
“Children of the Mother, Michael,” Trent says. “Don’t act stupid.”
“Kali.”
“Yes. Mother’s Hunters. The Faithful Tigers.”
“How big is the family?”
“A couple hundred. Small enough to keep track of, big enough to cover the territory.”
/>
“How’d you find me?”
“She had a hand in it,” he says.
“Jessica?”
“Kali, stupid,” he says. “Keep up will you?”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“The story goes that you were looking for candy. While your streak was on a hunt, you found the sacrament and helped yourself.”
“What? My streak?”
“That’s what a group of tigers is called. Lions are a pride, fish have schools. Tigers have streaks.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“Jessica can explain it better,” he says. “You want to wait?”
The sun creeps up, blinding Michael in the rear-view window.
“No. My streak was hunting, and I was looking for candy,” he says. “Go on.”
“Candy. Sugar. That’s the sacrament. You found the streak’s jaggery and helped yourself. It could have killed you. It could have driven you insane, but instead The Mother loved you that day, and you joined the family.”
“Family, not streak?”
“Streak is a hunting party. In some cases they’re family units. Mother, father, kids and all that. Like you had. Other streaks are groups of people who work well together. Some work alone. Like me. I’m a solo hunter. I do my own digging.”
“Jessica?”
“She’s in a streak of three this year. Last year she had five, I think.”
“So the streaks break up?”
“Sometimes. Not usually the families though.”
“But they weren’t my family,” he says. “I was born Michael Hammond.”
“You were loot, my brother. Like me. You were stolen. Kali loves the stolen.”
“Are all members of the Family stolen?”
“Oh no. I can think of like, five of us. Six with you back. Are you back?”
Now Michael laughs. “I’ll tell you after I’ve been to Hogwarts.”
The sand is behind them. They’re in the high mountains now; winding roads, pine trees and cabins.
“I have a question for you,” Trent says. “How is it you don’t remember any of this?”
“I forgot,” he says. “I lied to get by. I lied to survive. I lied long, and I lied well, so well that I think I forgot what the truth was. Does that make sense?”
What Immortal Hand Page 23