Desert Places

by Blake Crouch

  “What’s Luther’s last name?”

  “Kite.”

  “Like fly a kite?” He nodded. “Open up.” I shot him a mouthful of water. “I saw Luther on the phone list in your wallet. Is that number the best way to reach him?”

  “It’s his cell. What are you trying to do, Andy?”

  “You ever met Luther in Scottsbluff?”

  “Once.”

  “Where?”

  “Ricki’s. Can I—”

  “Who’s Ricki?”

  “It’s a bar on Highway Ninety-two. Please, Andy…”

  I touched the open nozzle to his lips and squeezed cold water down his throat. He sucked frantically, and I pulled it back after three seconds as a transfer truck roared by. I took Orson’s cell phone from my pocket. Dialing Luther’s number, I held up the half-empty squeeze bottle.

  “The rest of it’s yours,” I said. “Find out if Luther can meet at Ricki’s tomorrow night. And be peppy. Don’t sound like you’ve been drugged up in a trunk for twenty hours. Fuck anything up and you’ll die slowly of thirst. I mean it. I’ll keep you on the brink of madness for days.” He nodded. “Brevity,” I said. Then I pushed the talk button and held the phone to his ear.

  On the first ring, a man answered. I could clearly hear his voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Luth?”

  “Hey.” I dribbled water onto Orson’s face.

  “Where are you?” Orson asked.

  “Gateway to the west. Just crossing the Mississippi. I can see the arch right now. Where are you?”

  I mouthed, “Eastern Nebraska.”

  “Eastern Nebraska,” Orson said. “You staying with Mandy tomorrow night?”

  “Yeah, you wanna hook up at Ricki’s?”

  “What time?”

  “How’s nine? I’m staying tonight in St. Louis, so I won’t be in Scottsbluff till late tomorrow.”

  “All right.” I moved my finger across my throat. “Hey, Luth, you’re breaking up.”

  I pressed the button to end the call and returned the phone to my pocket. Then I gave Orson the rest of the bottle and watched the desperation finally retreat from his eyes.

  “You need something to eat?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’ve gotta piss, Andy.”

  “Can’t help you there.”

  “What do you want me to do, piss in the trunk?”

  “It’s your car.”

  I opened the back door and fished out a syringe and a vial of Ativan from the fanny pack. Another car passed us, heading toward Lincoln, and I suddenly felt anxious to get on the road again.

  “Turn over, Orson.” I stuck him with the needle.

  “Andy,” he said as I put my hands on the trunk to close it, “you’re very good at this.”

  The coffee and sinus medication had worn off hours ago, and on the tediously straight roads of western Nebraska, I now operated solely on the determination not to fall asleep.

  I’d been driving for twenty-three hours and thirty-five minutes, and I existed in a limbo between sleep and consciousness. Occasionally, my forehead would touch the steering wheel, and I’d jerk back up and cherish a five-minute oasis of petrified alertness. Then my mind would drift back, and I’d lose consciousness for that split second and scare myself to death all over again.

  Heading up Highway 26, fifty miles northwest of Ogallala, the prairie awoke. A peach sunrise was lifting out of the eastern horizon, and as the light strengthened, the land spread and spread and spread, farther than it seemed possible. It had changed overnight, and because I had not witnessed the gradual topographic expansion, this sudden revelation was staggering. For an easterner driving west, the stark vastness of the land and sky is always inconceivable, and I imagined a symphonic aubade to accompany the majesty of the morning.

  At 6:30 a.m., I crossed the tree-lined North Platte River into the town of Bridgeport. In the southern distance, the tips of numerous sandstone buttes were catching coral sunbeams. Though several miles away, it looked like I could reach out and touch them.

  Highway 26 cut through the sleeping town. On the western fringe, there was a motel called Courthouse View (named after a prominent butte five miles south), and I got a room there. Since I’d given Orson enough Ativan to maintain sedation for the better part of the day, I left him in the trunk, walked inside, and crashed.

  I’d be meeting Luther in fourteen hours.

  I checked out of Courthouse View in the late afternoon, and heading northwest toward Scottsbluff on Highway 92, I started mulling over what I’d gotten myself into with Luther. In all honesty, I’d done a stupid thing. It was already 5:07, and that left me a little under four hours to determine how I would kill him, dispose of him, and leave town unnoticed. Finally, I concluded that I was being hasty and reckless. Besides, I couldn’t get past the idea that I was going to get myself killed fucking with this guy. So fifteen miles outside of Scottsbluff, I decided not to go through with it. I’d been methodical up to this point, and while it was tempting to orchestrate a quick, clever way to do in Luther Kite, four hours wasn’t an adequate length of time in which to do it.

  Ricki’s was a true shithole. On the southern outskirts of Scottsbluff, in the shadow of the eight-hundred-foot bluff from which the town assumed its name, I pulled into its dirt parking lot and turned off the car. Stepping outside into the dry, tingling cold, night was imminent, though the sun still illumined the prairie and the spire of Chimney Rock, tiny but distinct in the distance. The tourist brochure in the motel claimed that the five-hundred-foot inselberg had been a landmark for pioneers on the Oregon Trail—the first indication of the Rocky Mountains, which lay ahead. Walking toward the trunk with two squeeze bottles of water and three bags of potato chips, I stared at the golden sandstone buttes of the Wildcat Hills, thinking, I’d like to pick one of those hills and lie down on top and never leave. I’d just sit out there and erode, alone.

  I’d bought the food at Courthouse View, but the motel parking lot had been too crowded to risk opening the trunk. Ricki’s parking lot was empty except for Orson’s Lexus and a pickup truck.

  Orson was awake. Even the sallow evening light burned his eyes, so he closed them. He’d pulled his cuffed hands under his feet, so they were now in front of him.

  “Here,” I said, placing a squeeze bottle in his hands. As he drank it like a baby, I dropped the bags of chips and the other bottle inside. “It won’t be much longer,” I said. “We’re just thirty-five miles from the Wyoming border.”

  I had a syringe prepared and I shot another 4-mg vial of Ativan into his ass.

  I located a pen in the glove compartment and tore off a piece of the Vermont state map. I’d considered just calling Luther and having Orson cancel our meeting, but I had misgivings about my brother’s current ability to mask the atrophy in his voice. So stuffing the pen, paper, and Glock into my jeans pocket and pulling on a gray wool sweater, I locked the car and walked across the dirt parking lot toward the bar.

  Above the door, a neon sign displayed ricki’s in blue cursive. I walked under the humming sign and entered the deserted bar, which was smaller than my living room. Its ceiling was obtrusively low, booths lined the walls, and with only two windows, one on either side of the door, I felt as though I were stepping into a smoky closet.

  The sole patron, I sat down at a bar stool on the corner. The bar was constructed of unsanded railroad ties that still smelled of tar. Names, oaths, and declarations of love and enmity had been carved into the black wood.

  As I pulled out the pen and scrap of paper, a woman emerged from the kitchen.

  “We ain’t serving yet,” she said. She wore tight jeans shorts and a black turtleneck with bearcats: ’94 state champs across the chest. Her black hair was wiry and stiff, and she’d have benefited from orthodontic care.

  “Your door was open,” I said.

  “Well shit. What do you want?”

  “Whatever you have on tap is fine.”

  While she g
rabbed a glass out of the freezer and commenced filling it with bronze ale, I started what would be Orson’s note to Luther. L—I made a

  She set the glass down on the railroad tie. “Dollar fifty.”

  I handed her two of Orson’s dollar bills and told her to keep the change. Foam spilled down the sides of the glass. I took a sip, tasted flecks of ice in the draft, and continued scrawling on the scrap: friend this morning—you know how that goes. In fact, she composed this letter before I …Anyhow, I though it prudent to leave town asap. Sorry we couldn’t meet tonight. Have fun in Sas. O.

  I folded the torn map into a neat little square, wrote “Luther” across the town of Burlington, and set it on the bar. Then I sat there, drinking my beer, thinking, So people actually leave notes with bartenders. How many times have I written this scene? It doesn’t feel real.

  Sipping the beer, I surveyed the empty bar—unadorned concrete walls, no jukebox or neon beer signs. There weren’t even cute cowboy slogans to fake the prairie culture for transient easterners like me. Just a drab, hopeless place for hopeless westerners to get drunk.

  I finished the beer, and as though her ears were attuned to the sound of empty glasses clinking the wood, she came back through the door from the kitchen and stood in front of me.

  “You want another one?” she asked.

  “No thanks. Where is everyone?”

  She looked at her watch. “It’s only six,” she said. “They don’t start getting here till seven.”

  A car pulled up outside. I heard its tires lock up in the dirt.

  “Where’s Ricki?” I asked.

  “That son of a bitch is dead.”

  She took my empty glass and set it in a brown plastic container.

  “Would you do something for me?” I asked.

  “What?” she said joylessly. She was possibly the most indifferent person I’d ever met. I wondered why she didn’t just go slice her wrists. I pushed the square of paper across the ties.

  “I’m supposed to meet a friend here at nine, but I can’t. Will you give this to him?”

  She looked suspiciously at the square of paper, then picked it up and jammed it in her back pocket.

  A car door slammed outside.

  “What’s he look like?” she asked.

  “Shoulder-length black, black hair. Even darker than yours. Very white. Late twenties. Fairly tall. Dark eyes.”

  At the same instant I heard footsteps approaching the door, she said, “Well hell, ain’t that him?”

  I glanced over my shoulder and watched Luther Kite walk through the door. Sliding off the stool, I slipped my hand into my pocket and withdrew the Glock. By the time I’d chambered a bullet, he was standing in my face, looking down on me.

  I took it in piecemeal. The reek of Windex. His blue windbreaker. Ebony hair against a smooth cheek. My finger moving once. Luther falling into me, clutching. Screaming behind the railroad ties. Gasping. Blood on nylon. My right hand warm and wet. Running through the dirt to the car. Cold. The spire of Chimney Rock now dark. The rushing prairie and the maroon hills as I sped toward Wyoming.

  30

  I pulled over after midnight onto the shoulder of I-80, halfway through Wyoming, outside the town of Wamsutter. There was no moon, so I had no sense of the land, except that it was even more expansive and forsaken than Nebraska. Pushing the suitcases onto the floor and curling up in the backseat, I closed my eyes. When cars passed on the interstate, the Lexus shuddered. I fell asleep wondering if Ricki’s had really happened.

  I awoke at 3:30 a.m. to the sound of Orson moaning. When I climbed out and opened the trunk, he was flailing around inside, though his eyes were closed. I stirred him from the nightmare, and as he opened his eyes and regained cognizance of his surroundings, he sat up.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Middle of Wyoming.”

  “I’m so thirsty.”

  “You’ll have to wait till tomorrow.” He stretched out his arms and yawned.

  “I heard a gunshot,” he said.

  “Orson, how do I find the cabin?”

  He lay back down. “Will you give me another shot?”

  I sat on the bumper. “Of course.”

  “This is I-Eighty, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stay on Eighty till you hit Rock Springs. It’s in the southwest corner of the state. From Rock Springs, take One ninety-one north and start watching the odometer. When you’ve gone seventy miles, you’re gonna have to pull over and bring me up. I’ll take you the rest of the way.”

  “All right.”

  “Are we heading for it tonight?”

  “Nah, I’m wiped. I’m gonna sleep till morning.”

  “Andy, did you kill Luther?”

  “I chickened out,” I said, standing up. “So you left him a note.”

  “I know I—”

  “You’re fucked up. I’ll go get your shot.”

  Over the course of two thousand miles, it was bound to happen.

  Tuesday morning, I’d passed the exits for Red Desert, Table Rock, Bitter Creek, and Point of Rocks, when thirty miles east of Rock Springs, I heard the whine of a siren—a Highway Patrol SUV crowded my bumper. With my Glock wedged into the pouch behind the passenger seat, I pulled over into the emergency lane, reassuring myself, Why would he want to search the car? Orson’s unconscious. I’ve got the proper license and registration. Ricki’s may not have even happened. I’m golden.

  The officer tapped on my window. I lowered it.

  “License and registration,” he said in that austere, authoritative tone, and removing the papers from the glove compartment, I smiled and handed them through the window.

  He walked bowlegged back to his hunter green Bronco and climbed inside.

  The clock in the dashboard read 10:15, but it felt later. The prairie had turned arid. Across the northwestern horizon, a chain of tan hills rose out of the flatland. Gray clouds massed beyond.

  I noticed the sweater and jeans I’d worn into Ricki’s lying on the floorboard on the passenger side. It happened. They were stained with Luther’s blood, and I regretted not having thrown them out last night at the gas station in Cheyenne. I started to scoop them up, but the gravelly crunch of the officer’s footsteps stopped me.

  I righted myself and looked back through the open window into his face. The officer was my age. He reminded me of a lawman in a movie, though I couldn’t recall which one.

  “Know why I stopped you, Mr. Parker?” he asked, handing back Orson’s license and registration. I placed them on the passenger seat.

  “No sir, officer.”

  He removed his reflective sunglasses and stared down at me through hard, pale eyes.

  “You were swerving all over the goddamn road.”

  “I was?”

  “Are you drunk?” A gust of wind lifted his hat, which he caught and shelved under his arm. He had unruly blond hair, the variety that, if allowed to grow out, might bush into an Afro. The image of the officer with a blond Afro lightened my heart, and I chortled.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing, sir. I’m not drunk. I’m tired. I’ve been driving for the past two days.”

  “From Vermont?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He glanced at the suitcases in the backseat. “Traveling alone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Which one of them suitcases is yours?”

  How sly.

  “Both of them.”

  He nodded. “And you only been on the road since Sunday?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Must be in some kind of hurry.”

  “No, not really. I just wanted to see how fast I could cross the country.”

  I thought he might grin at my ambition, but he remained as stolid as ever.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “California.”

  “Whereabouts in California?”

  “L.A.”

  “Eighty don’t go to L.A. Eight
y goes to San Francisco.”

  “I know, but I wanted to drive through Wyoming, seeing as how I’ve never seen this part of the country. It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s fuckin’ shitland.” I gazed into the gold badge above his green breast pocket, filled with the presentiment that he was on the verge of ordering me out of the vehicle.

  “Well, you ought to know that you’re heading into one hell of a storm,” he said.

  “Snowstorm?”

  “Yep. Forecast says it’s supposed to get real bad.”

  “Thanks for the warning. I hadn’t heard.”

  “Might want to find a motel to hole up in. Maybe in Rock Springs, or Salt Lake, if you make it that far.”

  “I’ll consider that.”

  He looked askance at my face; he’d noticed my fading bruises. “Someone hit you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “At a bar this past weekend.”

  “Must’ve been one hell of a fight.”

  Everything was one hell of a something with this guy. I was definitely putting him in a book.

  “Looks like you took a few knocks there,” he said.

  “Yeah, but you should see the other guy.” That threadbare cliché got him. He cracked a smile and, looking off across the wasteland, reckoned that he’d better get going. Peering into the rearview mirror, I watched him saunter back to the Bronco.

  Cool fucking cucumber. And I meant me.

  Rock Springs was an ugly brown town, dedicated to the extraction of coal, oil, and a mineral called trona from deep beneath the surrounding hills. It was larger and more industrial than I’d anticipated, and I wondered what twenty thousand people did for fun in this northeast boundary of the Great Basin Desert.

  I pulled into the congested parking lot of a supermarket. It had been raining and snowing for the last half hour, the flakes sticking to the desert but melting on the sun-warmed pavement. Jogging through the windblown snow toward the entrance, I feared that at any moment the roads would accept the ice, and then we’d never reach the cabin.

  The supermarket was an entropic battlefield—frenzied shoppers compulsively stripping the shelves of bread, milk, and eggs. Because I didn’t know what Orson had stocked at the cabin, I grabbed a bit of everything—canned food, fruit, cereal, loaves of white bread, even several bottles of the best wines they had (though they were quite unexceptional). The checkout lines stretched halfway down the aisles, and I’d started to roll my shopping cart to the back of one, when I realized I’d have to wait for an hour just to pay. Fuck this. You’ve done a hell of a lot worse than steal.