The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  He put in the call to his uncle Lymon. “I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ve got Aunt Iris.”

  “We’ll have dinner waiting,” his uncle told him. “I cooked it yesterday. And can you do me a favor? There’s a little market fifty miles this side of Ludlow out on 1-40, the Gas’n’Go. They’ve got grape Nehi soda in bottles. Pick me up a couple of six-packs, will you? I don’t get out that way much, and I can’t find it in Bullhead City. I’ll pay you back.”

  “My treat,” Calvin said.

  “Then make it a case,” his uncle said, and both of them laughed.

  FRED WOOLSWORTH

  The barren peaks of the Dead Mountains loomed ahead, off toward the horizon on the north side of the highway, sharp against the desert sky and bunched together along the Colorado River where California, Arizona, and Nevada merged, and where lay the magical, invisible line that marked the time zone. Calvin looked into the rearview mirror, unpleasantly startled, as he most often was, at the sight of his own face. Elaine had told him once that he looked like a young Jimmy Stewart, and he reminded himself of that from time to time. He was the right build anyway, and he could see the resemblance, but there was some essential quality he lacked—the endearing manner of speaking, maybe, or the twinkle in the eye.

  He looked past himself, deeper into the mirror, at the gray hills of the Bullion Range, diminished and hazy but still visible behind him. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t a lick of difference between the two dry ranges—one in front and one behind—except that one was associated with gold and the other with death. Probably the names were the quirk of a geological survey team that had come out from the west and lost its sense of humor along the way, which wouldn’t be any more difficult than losing a penny if you were out here in the desert for more than a few days.

  He tossed his road map onto the passenger seat and considered the strange fact that a person forfeited an hour merely by crossing into Arizona—a purely imaginary hour, of course, but an hour that could only be regained by turning around and heading back west. Except if one never returned west, then one was an hour closer to the grave, if only in some mystical sense. There was something unsettling in it, although he was unsettled by any number of things these days—a consequence, probably, of some variety of looming midlife crisis, although he was a little young for that sort of thing, which was … unsettling.

  A vehicle appeared on the highway ahead of him now, shimmering in the heat haze until it solidified into an old green pickup truck with a bad muffler. It roared past, the sun glaring so brightly on the windshield that it might have been Elijah rattling away in a glowing whirlwind, bound for the Promised Land. Some fifty miles past Ludlow he spotted the grape soda connection, and he turned off the highway into a solitary two-pump gas station, lunch counter, antiques store, and market rolled into one. The sign on the big window read “Gas’n’Go Antiques and Cafe.” The place sat adjacent to a dry lake that wasn’t dry. Over the last few weeks, late summer storms had strayed in from Arizona and left a few inches of water in the lake bed, which cheerfully reflected the blue sky, tinged with gold from the declining sun.

  A gust of wind ruffled the surface of the lake, breaking up the reflection, and Calvin climbed out of the Dodge and into the searing heat, nearly staggered by it after the air-conditioned trip out from Eagle Rock. A hand-painted sign on the gas pump read “Pay First!” in order to ward off bolters, so he went inside, hauling two twenties out of his wallet. He shut the door behind him to keep out the heat, and a little bell jingled, although no one came out. There were the sounds of a swamp cooler working on the roof and a distant radio playing country-western music, but the place was apparently empty of customers.

  He smiled approvingly and glanced around, taking in the junk food on the shelves, the groceries, the sign over the lunch counter that advertised chili fries and cheeseburgers. Maybe on his way back out he would stop in for a bite to eat, generate some serious heartburn for the long drive home. He could grab a roll of antacids to keep his aura on the necessary sublunar wavelength. Cases of beverages lay piled on the floor beyond a picnic table with benches, including, conveniently, an unopened case of grape Nehi soda.

  The antiques sat against the wall by the deli case—baloney and bologna side by side. There were roadkill license plates, bric-a-brac, oil lamps, a rack of books, and some dusty souvenirs including a small plastic toilet with multiple removable coaster-seats that read “I crapped out in Las Vegas.” He was sorely tempted to buy the toilet seat coasters as a gift for his aunt, but instead he stepped across to look at the books, which were mostly Westerns and old cookbooks, but also a few likely looking strays. He felt the familiar surge of interest and greed, the off chance that there would be something valuable, or at least strange enough to be appealing.

  The paper was dried out in most of the books and was decomposing and fly specked—the eventual fate of everything in the desert—and at first glance there wasn’t much in the racks to interest him. Then he spotted a sort of oversize pamphlet, bound like a book, but with its heavy paper cover stapled on near the spine. It was titled The Death of John Nazarite, Betrayal in the California Desert and was published by something called the Fourteen Carats Press in Henderson, Nevada, in 1956. The logo of the press was a flat-bottomed, panning-for-gold pan with the legend “Fourteen Carats” on it. The price was thirty-two dollars, which had to be cheap. The heavy paper cover was chipped along the edges from heat and sunlight, but for a paper-bound book with fifty years on it, it wasn’t in bad shape, especially considering where it lived. There was a frontispiece in it, a woodblock illustration of a woman standing before the mouth of a cave in a fortress-like cliff, holding a platter bearing a bearded, severed head. The wide-open eyes in the head gazed out longingly over what might have been the Dead Sea, and in the distance stood a range of rocky, desert peaks. The illustration was titled “Bring Me the Head of John Nazarite.”

  It appeared to be the Salome and John the Baptist story with some geographic curiosities—the Jordan River having become the Mojave, and the Dead Sea exchanged for the Salton Sea. One illustration pictured several men in white tunics with red crosses on the front. One of them held an ornate wooden chest the size of a bread box. The caption read “The Red Cross Knights Receive the Head.” Clearly the book was cultistic, a piece of California crypto-history. Calvin was possessed by the certainty that the Fates badly wanted him to divest himself of thirty-two dollars. He looked at the list of Fourteen Carats Press publications in the back of the pamphlet—books on secret societies, desert mummies, saucer cults, the Lost Dutchman’s mine—nearly two pages of seductive titles, plenty enough to give his life purpose again.

  He would add this happily to his growing pile of paper and ink that virtually no one else on earth had the slightest interest in. One nice thing about being a bachelor, he thought as he turned toward the front counter, was that you could do as you pleased, although it wasn’t always clear to him why he was pleased to do as he did, especially when he had no one to please but himself. During the time that he had been with Elaine, he hadn’t nearly as often done as he pleased, but he had often been surprised to find that he was pleased anyway.

  He put the thought out of his mind and grabbed the toilet seat coasters on the way to the register. He couldn’t show up at his aunt’s doorstep without a token of his esteem, after all. He recalled that she had a set of salt and pepper shakers that had been owned by a shirttail relative of Elvis Presley, and there was an evident Elvis Presley connection here, too—the King dying on the throne and all—although it was unlikely that he could point it out to his aunt.

  A woman who might have been sixty-five came out of the back to wait on him. She was wide and suntanned and had a naturally scowly look that reminded him pleasantly of Tugboat Annie. She had large arms, as if she wrestled bears and was good at it. “Gas?” she asked him, her voice sounding like gravel on sandpaper.

  He considered a humorous reply, and then rejected it. “Pump number tw
o,” he said, handing her the two twenties and then rooting a third out of his wallet. “Take the book and coasters out of it first. And that case of grape soda.” As an afterthought he grabbed a single bottle out of the cooler. “A cold one, too.” He hadn’t had a grape soda in years, and he was full of a sudden nostalgia for the taste of purple.

  “You’ve got enough left out of the sixty for about an eighth of a tank,” she said.

  “I’m only going a few more miles,” he told her, waiting while she punched buttons on an old cash register. There was a ringing noise when the cash drawer flew open. “I’m looking for the turnoff over to New Cyprus, down along the river I haven’t been out there for years, and I remember that last time I passed right by the turnoff and drove another ten miles before I knew I’d missed it.”

  “It ain’t marked,” she said. “Used to be a red cross painted on the highway right there, but it’s been blacktopped over half a dozen times. That’s their mark, you know, those New Cyprus folks.” She looked at him intently, as if it somehow made a difference whether he knew or didn’t know.

  He nodded, wondering abruptly whether Uncle Lymon was one of the Knights who had received the head. There wasn’t a lot to do in New Cyprus, which was isolated even in a land of isolation, and it was a rare evening that Uncle Lymon wasn’t off at the Knight’s clubhouse, the Temple—or else the Temple Bar, depending on its function on any given day—wearing a tunic with a red cross embroidered on it and half covered with badges of rank and retired fishing lures.

  “You’d think they’d repaint it,” she went on, “but New Cyprus is homestead territory, so nobody’s in charge of anything. Either that or everybody’s in charge of everything, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a bad way to be, either. My old man used to drive out there for lodge meetings, but he’s been dead these past three years.”

  “The Knights of the Cornerstone? My uncle’s some kind of officer in it.”

  She nodded her head as if she had known it all along. “You’re Al Lymon’s nephew. That’s what I thought.”

  “Calvin Bryson,” he said, putting out his hand.

  She shook it and nodded. “Shirley Fowler. I see the Lymons now and then when I drive over the hill to visit my granddaughter, but not as often as I’d like. How’s Nettie? She doesn’t get out much these days.”

  Calvin shrugged. “Her cancer was in remission, but it’s bothering her again, although I don’t know how bad. She’s had about all the treatments, and there’s not a lot that can be done about the pain. She spends some time in the past, too, I guess you’d say.”

  “Well, the past isn’t a half bad place to visit once in a while. Tell her Shirley Fowler sends her regards.”

  “I’ll be go-to-hell!” a voice said behind him, and Calvin turned around to discover a heavyset bearded man, maybe seventy, just then stepping out from behind a rack of Little Debbie snack cakes. Had he been there all along … ?

  “I’m Fred Woolsworth,” the man said. “So you’re Cal Bryson? I’m a friend of your uncle’s. He told me his nephew was coming out for a spell.” He was loaded up with Navajo silver—a big squash blossom on his bolo tie and a watchband that must have weighed half a pound.

  “Glad to make your acquaintance,” Calvin said. “Wool-worth, like the dime store?”

  “Woolsworth, with an s. Like ‘money’s worth,’ but wool. My daddy used to say, ‘When you go out to shear sheep, make sure you get your woolsworth!’” He laughed out loud.

  Calvin smiled and nodded, trying to think of a gag line of his own involving sheep, but coming up with nothing but “ewe,” which pretty much only worked on paper. If he had his sketchbook he could draw the cartoon. “When did my uncle tell you I was coming? I didn’t know it myself till today.”

  “News travels fast out here in the desert,” Woolsworth said. “Believe it or not, I knew your daddy back in Iowa, before he came out West with your mother. Nearly fifty years now. Your daddy moved out on the coast, and I wound up in Bullhead City. Wasn’t nothing there in Bullhead but the river back then, and one bridge downriver across to the Needles side. Lots of water under that bridge over the years. Now we’ve got casinos across in Laughlin, and God knows what next. There’s talk about moving that big English clock out here—Big Ben, they call it. Set it up in that park next to where they put in the new Wal-Mart. You’d be surprised at the stuff that finds its way into the desert, including people. Anyway, I was sorry to hear your daddy passed away.”

  “Thanks,” Calvin said. Somehow the Big Ben idea just didn’t sound feasible to him. Next to a Wal-Mart?

  “You’re out here on account of your aunt’s sick, I suppose.”

  “I’m bringing out a family heirloom, too, but that’s not an excuse for coming out here. I just want to spend a little time on the river. See the folks again. It’s been a couple of years now.”

  “Of course,” he said, nodding heavily. “Of course. God bless. I didn’t mean to suggest you needed an excuse to do the right thing. Just making small talk. You can’t be bringing much of an heirloom, though, in that little bitty vehicle of yours.”

  “Family artifact,” Calvin told him.

  “Artifact?“ Woolsworth said. “That’s a good word. It’s got real weight to it. It elevates a thing above the doodad level, if you know what I mean. Now, that plastic toilet you’re buying there, that’s a doodad.” He laughed out loud again.

  Calvin smiled politely at the lame joke. Woolsworth was a real card.

  “Tell Al Lymon that Fred Woolsworth says hello. Tell him I’ll see him at the Temple one of these evenings real soon. Tell him sooner rather than later. Will you do that? Just them words.”

  “I will,” Calvin said. Woolsworth went out through the door, the bell jingling behind him, and he angled across the lot as if he were going to walk back down the highway. Calvin took a step forward to get a better look and saw that there was an old green pickup truck parked at the corner of the lot near the propane tank. Woolsworth climbed into it and a moment later the engine roared to life. The truck pulled out onto the highway heading east toward Needles, its broken muffler making the engine sound like an outboard motor.

  “I’ll be damned,” Calvin muttered, remembering the truck that had passed him earlier, not a quarter of an hour ago, traveling west. It couldn’t be the same truck. If it was, then Woolsworth must have turned around after passing him and come straight back east. But there was nothing fifteen miles back down the highway except empty desert. Where had the man been going?

  Shirley opened the grape soda and handed it to him, and then put the toilet seat coasters into a bag. “He’s a real character,” she said, referring to Woolsworth. “I didn’t see him come in. Did you?”

  “No,” Calvin said.

  “Watch out you don’t talk too much to people you don’t know out here in the desert.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  “Anyway, what you do about that New Cyprus road is to watch for it on your left just about exactly two miles past the Henderson cutoff. If you’re not looking for it, you won’t see it, because it runs down across the wash, and it’s usually under a couple of inches of sand. Don’t slow down till you get across the wash and back up onto the pavement, or you’re liable to find yourself stuck. And give this to your uncle,” she said. She reached under the counter and fished out a cardboard box taped shut—a box exactly the same size as the box that contained Aunt Iris’s veil. The address was made out to Al Lymon, c/o the Gas’n’Go. It was from Warren Hosmer.

  “Thanks,” Calvin said, taking it from her. He hefted the box in his hands—another ghost-infused veil? He started to say something, but gave up. He wasn’t going to get any answers out here on the highway. He set the box on the case of grape soda and laid the book and the sack on top, then picked the whole lot up, snagged the open soda bottle with his right hand, and turned toward the door, half expecting to see Fred Woolsworth across the road, lurking behind a yucca.

  Outside again, he cramme
d himself sideways against the car, pulled the door latch with his pinkie finger, and set his armload of boxes on the seat. The oppressive heat was a living presence, like the plague or an axe murderer or Woolsworth’s muffler—something that couldn’t be ignored. He started filling the tank and then leaned against the fender of the Dodge while the pump worked. He sipped his soda, looking out over the desert.

  The same storms that had filled the dry lake had generated a second blooming of wildflowers, and on the rise above the gas station there were patches of blue and yellow blooms. There was no denying that the desert was a beautiful place, especially near sunset like this, when it was cooling down and when the shadows were long and lent an air of mystery to things, but to live out here would be a different matter—impossible in high summer. Still, people did live here, for some reason, like Shirley Fowler and Fred Woolsworth, or his uncle and aunt, for that matter. It was the solitude, maybe, that attracted them.

  The gas pump shut off, and Calvin hung the nozzle back on the pump. “Fred Woolsworth,” he muttered. What a character. The man’s talk had had a vaguely ironic tone, like a veiled insult, although probably it was a mere nutticism, as his father would have put it. He felt as if Woolsworth had been sizing him up, though, and had found him wanting. He finished the soda and pitched the bottle into the trash. Purple tasted pretty much the same now as it had twenty years ago, which was comforting in these times of world turmoil and grim change.

  As he was climbing into the car it came into his mind that Woolsworth hadn’t bought anything at the store, not even the Little Debbie cakes he had apparently been fingering. That struck Calvin as odd—the man joyriding in the desert and then stopping at the Gas’n’Go for no reason at all. He had most likely come in while Calvin was looking through the books and had hung around, lurking out of sight behind the snack food, waiting for an opportunity to start up a useless conversation. There was no reason for any of it, which didn’t seem reasonable.