The Indian woman nodded. “You never know when they’re comin’,” she said.
“Leave Thompson five hundred dollars in cash every time they come through though.” The cowboy winked at me.
I felt a depression coming on like winter fog. I sat there holding the coffee in my hand until it burned. Four hundred miles of all-night driving for this? I leaned in toward Thompson.
“Did they leave a forwarding address, any place they can be reached?”
“None.”
“Well, where do they come from?”
“Search me.”
“There’s no way I can locate them? It’s very important.”
She shook her head.
“What about a man named Phil Jonas?” I asked. “Tall, short blond hair. Muscular. Did he ever show up for the games?”
“Never heard of him.” Thompson wrote out my check on a little green pad and handed it to me. “Anything else you want to know?”
“No,” I said, “no.”
I stepped out onto the main street of Tonopah. The sun had risen over the mountains and a strong midday heat was building up, creating atmospheric waves over the macadam highway. I walked along the sidewalk. The stores seemed empty, barren black caves against the white light. I began to feel dizzy. It was hard moving around in the desert without sleep. I crossed the street and continued along the other side past a Singer Sewing Machine Center and a Woolworth’s. They too were empty except for a pair of salesgirls who lingered in the rear of the Woolworth’s by the candy counter. The people of Tonopah were lizards who crawled under rocks in the heat of the day. I headed back toward my car, cursing Marty Katz for his faulty information and myself for being such a fool as to come out here in the first place.
When I got back to the gas station, the cowboy was standing by the pump.
“Hey, fella,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. One time about a year ago, maybe a year and a half, I saw some of them gamblers riding along a dirt road like they was in a big hurry.”
“A dirt road? Where were they going?”
“Don’t really remember . . . I think . . . no, I can’t recall.”
“What kind of a car were they driving?”
“A Lincoln . . . or was it a Merc? Yeah, a Merc. A Merc or an Olds.”
“Where was it?”
“About a hundred miles south of here . . . give or take.”
“Give or take what?”
“Fifty miles.”
“Fifty miles? There must be a lot of dirt roads in fifty miles of desert.”
“Sometimes. But most of them don’t go nowhere. They just wind up into the mountains ten or fifteen miles and disappear.”
“Disappear? Was that the kind of road they were on?”
“Go on down 266 a piece and see for yourself.”
The cowboy waited for me to respond.
“Yeah . . . thanks a lot,” I said.
He tipped his hat and walked back to Thompson’s Cafe.
I got into my car and drove off, forking left on 266 toward Vegas and down into a valley. What was I doing? Looking for a dirt road that someone I didn’t know might have been driving a year ago to a destination that was totally unknown to me? The whole adventure was absurd.
The road curved along the mountains through groves of joshua trees and then dipped into the low desert. The vegetation diminished and the temperature increased. It must have been well over a hundred. The mutilated carcass of a coyote sauteed on the cement apron. A trio of concrete missile cylinders loomed huge out of the earth behind it. Several dirt roads curled off into the desert, but I didn’t stop. I sped past, the frame of the Buick rattling like Gabby Hayes’ buckboard.
The desert was low but it kept getting lower and from the saline quality of the land I guessed I was approaching Death Valley. Soon I saw an intersection with an Arco Station and a sign pointing to Death Valley Junction; a roadside diner advertised itself as the last eating place for eighty miles. I continued on but slowed a half mile beyond it. A large placard with faded lettering was propped against a boulder on the side of the road. A smaller dirt road ran off into the desert beyond it. I studied the words on the sign—COTTONWOOD MEADOWS/SLOTS—GIRLS—DANCING/14 MILES/“YOU CAN’T GO WRONG A THE MEADOWS!”
The meadows. Cottonwood Meadows.
I pulled over to the curb and looked out at the desert. The dirt road went off in the direction of Death Valley, out toward a crease in the Panamint Range, diving over a ridge and disappearing behind the mountains. Maybe ten miles straight and another four on the far side of the rocks. A rough trip in a four-wheel drive vehicle but sheer madness in a jalopy like mine.
I switched on the radio for the time. It was nearly twelve o’clock. In fifteen or sixteen hours Howard Eppis would detonate a freeway and with it Miles Hawthorne’s chances at the presidency. And here I was trying to decide whether to go off on some godforsaken road to nowhere. What could it be way out there beyond the rocks? Did they expect anyone to negotiate fourteen miles of dirt road for some measly supper club and a few slot machines? With such a faded sign the place had probably folded up years ago.
Cottonwood Meadows. Death Valley Junction. The meadows by the junction. That’s what the bastard had said up on Mt. Olympus. The meadows by the junction.
I turned onto the dirt road with a jolt which almost broke the front suspension. The car lurched forward and crashed into a cactus, pushing in the front fender and wedging the body into a mound of clay. I backed up and moved out on the road again, heading out over the desert. A fine coat of dust was rising over the hood and falling in layers on the front window like an action painting. The car was a hot box. A steady stream of sweat poured down my face, soaking my shirt and pants. Another river ran down my neck and back into the padding of the seat beneath me, vaporizing on contact, the thermal equivalent of the Arctic where the spittle freezes before it reaches the ground.
After what seemed like an hour, I came to a fork in the road marked by the shell of a wrecked Oldsmobile. A yellow arrow was painted on the trunk with the words COTTONWOOD MEADOWS, 11 MI. written beneath it. Three rotten miles, that’s all I’d gone. I looked forward and backward at nothing but desert. The surface of the earth shimmered in front of me. Then, off in the distance, I noticed two dots moving toward me. I watched as they appeared to bounce in midair like jack rabbits over a prairie bush, not on the dirt road, but straight over the desert itself in a direct line from the Southwest. Now I could see two men on motorcycles. Harley-Davidsons. New and shiny, even in the dust. The drivers were dressed to match in tailored cowboy shirts, cracked leather boots and authentic Los Angeles Rams football helmets. Rich ranchers. They pulled up in front of me, revving their engines.
“Cottonwood Meadows?” I shouted to them, but they couldn’t hear over the roar of the Harleys. On closer inspection I could see they were father and son. The father wore a pair of silver motorcycle goggles. He looked at me laughing, and made a circle with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. Then he thrust his right index finger through, in and out, in a coarse gesture and said something I couldn’t understand. With a nod the two men took off in the direction of the meadows. They were soon out of sight, although I did my best to keep up with them, gunning the Buick along the dirt road, listening to the carburetor bang against the inside of the hood.
Within a mile the road became graded and I was able to go faster, approaching the foothills of the Panamints, red and sculpted like Indian artifacts. The car drove through a notch, continuing down still again to sea level or below at the edge of Death Valley. Up ahead I saw a clump of trees, cottonwood and ash, growing from a small oasis above what must have been a natural spring. A cluster of ranch houses stood behind the trees beside a pond with swans floating on it. A wood wagon wheel decorated the front of a very large metal trailer. The scene was idyllic, a romance of the Old West out of a John Ford film.
I continued through an archway which said COTTONWOOD MEADOWS WELCOMES YOU, past a short desert landi
ng strip with a Cessna and a Piper Cub at the end beneath a corrugated overhang. The two Harley-Davidsons were wedged between a jeep and an International Harvester at the back of the trailer. I pulled up behind them and got out, walking around to the front. The windows were covered with pink and orange colored lights glowing on the inside. A pair of gelatin cupids danced on either side of the door. I heard the sound of cheap Mancini music coming from a scratchy victrola. A black woman dressed like a mammy in a red bandana and gingham dress opened the front door and looked at me.
“Come on in,” she said.
“The water’s fine!” said the rancher who had emerged out of the darkness behind her. I could see his son with his arm around a blonde in hot pants and fishnet stockings.
I stepped up into the entry room of the trailer, a waiting room of sorts ringed with paisley cushions. A couple of men in flight outfits were seated against the wall. The mammy was showing them two of the girls, one black and one white, both tall and statuesque like Vegas showgirls, but over-the-hill, the kind that would be pushed to the back of the line on weekends.
“A little of the old in and out,” said the rancher, nudging me in the ribs with his elbow and swilling booze from a silver hip flask. “Like to bring the boy down every couple of weeks,” he continued. “Takes the edge off, if you know what I mean.”
“You always come here?”
“Best girls in the state. Everybody knows that. And safe, too. Doctor flies in every Friday to check ’em out.”
I stared out at the ranch through the tinted gelatin. The swans crisscrossed in the pond under a weeping willow tree. A large older man in a cook’s hat and apron ambled over to them and threw them bread crumbs from a cookie can, calling to them with a curious grunting noise. The swans hissed back and swam over to him.
“How ’bout y’all?” said the mammy, tapping me on the shoulder. She had a brunette and a redhead with her. The brunette was in a jumpsuit with a zipper down the front open to the waist.
“I don’t think I could meet the price,” I said.
“Price? Hell, boy, I’ll pay,” said the rancher, clapping me on the back. His breath reeked of bourbon. “This is your lucky day!”
I looked more closely at the brunette. Her hips rounded off gently to a pair of slim curvy legs. She wore deep maroon lipstick and dark eyelashes. Her pale, almost translucent skin looked like some Berlin cabaret dancer in the twenties. She had a soft, decadent feeling to her that was definitely appealing.
But what was I thinking about? I had a job to do.
“Come on, boy!” The rancher clapped me on the back again. “What’re you waiting for?”
The brunette smiled. She took me by the hand and led me down the hall past a series of cubicles and a small projection room. I didn’t resist. It had been a long time. Besides, who cared about a murder and a big election fix? They could wait.
“What’s your name?” Her room had a single plastic rose on the bedstand and a framed Lautrec print on the wall. La Moulin de la Galette. Patchouly incense burned from a brass pot above the wardrobe.
“Moses,” I said.
“I’m Cynthia.”
She slipped out of her jumpsuit and stood by the mirror, her body highlighted by the yellow bulb. Her breasts were firm and sharply pointed. Then she moved toward me and we embraced, falling onto her light folding cot. Out in the corridor, I could hear some people laughing. She reached for my fly and unzipped it with surprising eagerness. In a moment we were rolling on the cot, pulling at each other. We kissed and my tongue went deep into her mouth. Her hand moved up the inside of my thigh, passing lightly over the groin. We were breathing hard. She sat up on my legs and I entered her as she dug her fingers into my chest. Then she rode up and down as I drove in, hungry as a starving man at the proverbial banquet. It had been three months, after all. I slid my finger along her clitoris from the front and she began to shudder, biting hard on my neck. This wasn’t like the whore I’d been with on a summer vacation in France who wouldn’t let me kiss her and fucked with her blouse on. This was the real thing. Or seemed to be.
She came three times, then I did too, our fluids mingling on the sheets. After that we fell back and relaxed, closing our eyes for a few minutes. I felt like I was on a magic carpet. After a while, Cynthia got up and douched herself in a white enamel bowl.
“You really got into it,” I said, watching her.
She smiled. “I like it. I get off on a lot of different men.” She put down the bowl and walked over to me, touching my arm with the tips of her fingers. I grabbed her hand and held it.
“Why here?” I asked.
“Why not?” she answered, reaching under the end table, tossing me a baggie of a dark reddish grass, probably Panama, and some Marfil papers. I rolled a joint and passed it over. “In college I used to do it with guys just so they’d take me out to dinner. Now I do much better than that. Somebody’s going to do it and it sure beats marriage.”
I knew what she meant. She took a good hit on the grass and passed it back to me. I held it in as long as I could. On the wardrobe next to the incense, I could see a small photograph of a little girl. She might have been Cynthia’s daughter.
“Where’d you go to school?” I asked.
“University of Denver. I was an art major. Mostly I posed.”
“That’s why you have the Lautrec.”
“Yeah. You like Lautrec?”
I nodded.
“I used to think I was Jane Avril,” she said, sitting next to me. “Jane Avril at the Moulin Rouge. Imagine that. But you can’t be Jane Avril out here in the middle of the desert.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
We sat there a little longer, smoking the joint. Cynthia leaned over and looked at herself, primping in front of the mirror. “Jane Avril avec ses hommes.”
I ran my hand down her back.
“Three atta time, Ralphie!” I heard the rancher shouting from the corridor. “You can do it.” He crashed to the floor.
“Dumb bastard,” said Cynthia, fingering the roach. “Drops $500 every time he comes here and then gets so drunk he can’t even get it up. You should see him when he’s angry.” She laughed to herself, taking a final pull. A buzzer went off over the door jamb, flipping out a small paper flag. Cynthia turned to me and gave me a deep soul kiss. “Time’s up, honey. Sorry.” She reached down and tossed me my jeans, deftly stepping into her jumpsuit and zipping it up to the navel.
I stood and put on my clothes. She brushed the lint off my shirt. “Come again,” she whispered in my ear. “I liked it. . . . Really.” She opened the door and escorted me down the hall. I couldn’t be sure whether she was telling the truth but it was more fun to accept it. Out in the waiting room, a drunken Naval officer was doing the hula in front of an Oriental girl. The mammy sat in the corner smoking a cigarette from a long red holder. Cynthia touched me on the cheek and returned to her room.
Inside the trailer, with the mood music and the colored lights, I had almost forgotten it was daytime; but walking out on the ranch grounds was like moving from a cattle car into a blast furnace. I wanted to take a running jump into the pond but held up under the watchful eye of the old cook. He was sitting under the tree with the swans at his feet.
“Want a room?” he asked.
“Room?”
“We’ve got rooms back there if you want to spend the night.” He pointed over at the ranch house. “We’ve got rooms and we got a cafe, if you want bacon and eggs.”
“I’m not hungry at the moment, thanks.”
I slumped down opposite him in the shade of a desert ash. I still felt a buzz from the grass and wondered if it would help me solve the case, put the clues together as it sometimes could. I doubted it. Fifty yards away I could see an aluminum shed locked with a chain and combination. It had ventilation slats at the top and a pair of round portholes boarded over from the outside. Another fifty yards to the left a stone well stood in the shadow of an acacia.
I pushed myself
up and walked in the direction of the shed. The cook got up and followed, lagging a few feet behind and studying me with his head at an odd tilt. He was a big man with the meaty hands of a field worker.
“Looking for something in particular?”
“No.”
“Cause they don’t like you walking around casual . . . that’s not what it’s for.”
“It’s a nice spread. Who owns it?”
He bent over and extracted an iron hoe from the bottom of a wheelbarrow. “I can’t tell you that, mister, even if I wanted to.”
“Alfred Craw?”
“Craw!” He spat on the ground in contempt.
“Sorry I asked.”
I veered away from the shed in the direction of the acacia bush. A mangy dog ran across my path, disappearing behind the ranch house. I could hear a squawking from the chicken coop, the cry of the hens echoed by the hissing swans. At the other end of the oasis, some Mexicans were tending the date palms. They wore white handkerchiefs tied around their foreheads.
I approached the well. A circle of wooden planks surrounded its crumbling walls. A metal bucket hung from a rusty cable. I peered down into the water. It was limpid, pure spring water—clear at the top and descending into blackness. My reflection was sharp, the details of my face as precise as in a fine mirror. But the water was deep, endless. A stone dropped straight down would go forever, maybe emerge on the other side of the globe.
“You won’t find nothin’ in there.” The reflection of the cook appeared next to mine. His expression was impassive. “Unless you’re looking for fish.”
I turned to him. “What fish?”
“Prehistoric fish. From when Death Valley was a lake.”
“They’re not alive?”
“Some of ’em. Up near the surface in underground tributaries where the water ain’t too hot. The Navy sent down frogmen a few years back to catch the buggers . . . but they got trapped in a cave and ran out of air. Still floatin’ around in there, I reckon.” The cook rubbed his chin with his wrist.
“The fish or the frogmen?”
The Big Fix Page 12