The black leather seat is still so angry from a persistent beam of sun that I’ve slid down so my bare thighs hang off the edge.
How many minutes does it take on a 90-degree day for the temperature in a car to reach 160 degrees? a) two hours b) forty minutes c) less than ten minutes.
C, less than ten minutes. I’d aced my trainer’s written final.
The electronic readout on the dashboard declares today’s temp close to 100. I turn to check Barfly. He’s perfectly happy, his nose inches from a vent, ears blowing.
I mindlessly flatten and smooth the list on the steering wheel. I stare at the collection of words, numbers, and letters that tumbled out of Carl’s brain, and try to decide the best way to approach it.
I remind myself that everybody’s lists are inscrutable. We all have a personal shorthand. It was almost impossible to decipher my mother’s grocery lists unless you knew things like t.p. meant toilet paper and b.p. meant big potatoes and d.p. meant dill pickles. No one would ever figure out some of the lists filed tidily in my storage unit at Fred’s.
Lightly, I cross off all of Carl’s conditions I’ve already met: Camera, sweet tea, Dairy Queen, Whataburger, new nail clippers, 100 percent feather pillow, and CFS. CFS was chicken-fried steak, and he’d eaten it twice.
I run another line through Bible. Carl had snatched one from the drawer in one of the motels.
The New York Times. A near-impossible find at a Texas truck stop.
I mark through almost everything that can be eaten or swallowed. I pause at 1015s.
A 1015, I’m sure, is not a tax form. It refers to the popular super sweet Texas onion, named for its planting date of October 15. Most Texans don’t know this. Carl, being a farmer’s grandson, probably does. And Ruby Red is not a stripper; it’s a grapefruit.
The three books——11/22/63, Lonesome Dove, and Ulysses—are listed one under the other. All of them seem meaningless other than as a way to pass the time.
Ten items left. I narrow more, penciling a star beside the generic items that seem a little ominous to me in a list made by a serial killer. It’s why I hadn’t bought them.
Hiking boots, rope, shovel, waterproof watch (resistant @ 300 meters), flashlight, WD-40.
Glad Press’n Seal.
I see it over a nose and a mouth.
Just three things remain:
Baby Head
Muleshoe
Mystery Lights
They are all destinations. Carl has made three X’s, Austin being one of them. I spread the map across my lap.
Baby Head is a cemetery six hours southeast of Muleshoe—a few dozen forlorn graves that are a blur outside the window. Indians kidnapped a young white girl in the 1850s and stuck her head on a pike at the bottom of a mountain to warn settlers away. That’s the lore.
The reason I even know Baby Head exists is because Carl took a photograph of the cemetery’s historical marker with plastic baby doll heads dangling off it like cans on a honeymoon car. Not Carl’s doing, I learned while researching. He was merely documenting a local tradition.
There is no X near Baby Head.
But there are X’s close to the other two.
Muleshoe is the West Texas town near where Carl’s grandfather ran his farm.
Marfa is the town closest to the desert phenomenon of the Mystery Lights.
Carl had shot a photograph of the strange lights in the sky and lived to tell. He made it the opening picture in his Time Travel book.
He also tucked a picture of a girl on parched desert land in his suitcase. He wears her necklace with a key around his neck. The desert girl means something to Carl, too.
I shift the truck in gear. I’m heading to the Mystery Lights. I can spend the night in Marfa. If he isn’t there, I’ll drive to his grandfather’s farm.
Carl has no idea how far I am willing to go. No one but me does.
TITLE: MYSTERY LIGHTS
From Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman
Marfa (off Highway 90), 2000
Hasselblad 50mm, tripod
Photographer’s note—I’ve always been a skeptic about the ghost lights, the Mystery Lights, the Chinati lights, the Marfa lights—whatever the natives want to call them. On my West Texas jaunts, I’d occasionally see them jitterbug in the sky like aliens as I looked across Mitchell Flat toward the Chinati Mountains. Until this night, I’d left documenting them to the tourists who draw up here right after sunset. Scientists debunk them as high-energy particles or electromagnetic currents, or even bouncing headlights. Believers will remind you that Indians talked about these “ghosts” long before cars existed. On this night when I pointed my camera at the stars, six round orbs appeared, floating in a straight line across the flat. They collided into a bright balloon that began to speed toward me. I ran. My camera was on a timer or this shot wouldn’t exist.
49
I’m only an hour out of Austin when Carl crawls into my brain.
If he were sitting in the seat beside me, he’d have his head out the window, snapping his real or imaginary camera at the puffy Toy Story clouds, begging me to stop for peach stands or roadkill, insisting he pan for gold every time we cross the meandering Pedernales.
He’d be sneering as we pass a town called Hye and a winery named Fat Ass.
I don’t miss him. It would just be nice if he were keeping me awake.
It will take about seven hours driving straight through to the Mystery Lights. That’s going to be my first stop. The “official” viewing area used to be pretty much just a turnout on a desert road until a rich Texas ranch family helped legitimize the phenomenon with a small parking lot and bathroom.
I’m limiting myself to three pit stops to pee and water Barfly and to comply with my gas-tank-never-less-than-half-full rule. My company on the drive is eighty percent pickup trucks, at least half of them white. I try to keep an eye out for Carl, but I’m not the only Texan hiding behind tinted windows and sunglasses.
I’m feeling more vulnerable and insignificant as the bowl of Texas sky expands and I shrink. Somebody once described this piece of earth as The Big Empty, and nothing was ever so aptly named.
The rolling green Hill Country has transformed sharply in the last half-hour to scrubby brown desolation and cacti with stiff arms.
The irritant keeping me alert at the moment is an old blue VW Bug driven by a woman with stringy blond hair that hangs out of a red baseball cap. Her car windows are wide open, which in a Texas July means she’s as poor as the dirt flying in.
There’s either an animal or a furry blanket on her lap. She weaves and dawdles outside the lines. She passes me. I pass her. We do this dance four times before I decide enough. The gas stations are getting sparser every mile, the trucks fewer.
The blue VW charges past me as I pull off at a run-down gas station sporting a pole with a Texas flag big enough to wrap the whole place like a present. The sign planted in the pale dust outside: Don’t Die a Virgin: Terrorists Are Up There Waiting for You.
No other vehicles. Bars on the windows.
I decide something cold to drink is worth venturing inside. As soon as I push open the door, I’m hit with a chilly blast of window air-conditioning, the smell of tamales, and the jangle of Tejano music.
I say, “Dr Pepper,” and the teenage boy in the Houston Astros cap behind the counter points to a tub of beer. He looks too young to be selling alcohol but I’m guessing his customers aren’t complaining. The Dr Pepper bottle caps are deeply embedded in ice with a selection of Corona and Ozarka water.
Only three drink choices in the whole store because the owner knows his audience. I grab two glass bottles of Dr Pepper, Carl’s high-end, pure-sugar kind from over the border. I pick up a string of beef jerky and the last five tampons in an open box that are being sold as singles for $2 apiece. The owner knows his desperate market, too.
While I’m paying the kid, including for the high-dollar gas I’m about to pump, I notice through the dirty fog on the
door that the blue Volkswagen is pulling in. The boy hands me my change, barely glancing at me. Good, because I made no effort at disguise or makeup today.
When I push open the door, the blue Beetle is nowhere in sight. I suck down the Dr Pepper and toss the bottle and the receipt into an old plastic bin marked Recycling. It feels liberating not to subtract this spree from my budget. Since Carl took off, I’m not counting. Not money, not steps.
I yank on the pickup door.
The woman from the Volkswagen is sitting in the truck’s passenger seat, facing forward, as still as a crash test dummy, like there’s a gun leveled at her head on the other side. I see a slice of profile, a baseball cap, and caramel blond hair that’s the matted, tangled texture of an old Barbie doll’s.
Now she’s turning, removing the hat and hair simultaneously.
Carl.
“Funny, huh?” He’s grinning. “It’s all one piece. I bought it at the Goodwill on Lamar. It’s an old Six Flags Over Texas souvenir.”
“Where have you been?” My voice is angry, but the relief is seeping into every pore.
“I thumbed a ride with a pair of girls going back to Austin.”
“And then.”
“Don’t know. Think I lost a little time.” He taps his forehead. “And then I got a car. I found you on Guadalupe. Thought you saw me. Anyway, I followed you to the donut place. Thought I’d wait until you looked a little less pissy.”
I scan the front of the store. No blue Volkswagen. “Did you steal the car? Where is it?”
“Parked behind the store. Keys inside.”
“You took off on me, Carl. We had a deal. Conditions.”
“The girls were cute. A little high.” He tosses the cap into the backseat. “Go ahead. Ask. I can see it on your face.”
“Did you…hurt them?”
“I certainly did not.” Emphatic. Enjoying himself. I want so badly to believe him.
I fill the tank, $50 worth, and climb back into the cab. Carl has taken my beef jerky out of the bag and is tearing his teeth into it. The extra Dr Pepper I left in the cup holder is half-gone.
I reach into the seat behind me for my backpack. I don’t want Carl to see the bag of loose tampons. Instead, my hand brushes against something soft.
I know the smooth blanket feel of Barfly, and this isn’t it. I flip around. The dog is stretched out in the back, unfazed, with company.
“There’s a cat in here.”
“Baloney. He does better than I thought he would on three legs.”
Baloney. The cat pictured in the flier that was stuck under my windshield wipers. The handicapped one that hits the litter box every time.
“We don’t have a litter box,” I murmur.
“What did you say?”
“Carl, we can’t keep the cat.”
“I’ve heard that before.” He swallows the last dreg of Dr Pepper. “Which dead girl are you on now?”
50
Carl won’t confirm why he drew his second X in the middle of the desert near the Mystery Lights. He’s noncommittal about the importance of driving there. I spread out the map in the cab to show him.
“Who drew all those lines?” he demands. “It’s confusing. By the way, Walt’s upset you didn’t say hello.”
I tamp down my frustration and remind myself that we are not necessarily on a journey to a grave but to that place in Carl’s head where he keeps his secrets. Our trip, as much as I want it to be, might not be a physical destination.
And it isn’t just about my sister—it’s about all the girls. Not just Vickie and Violet and Nicole, not just the little Marys or the lady in the rain or the one in the desert, but every other murdered or lost girl whose name I ever wrote down on a list.
I know I’m teetering, that my boots are over the edge of the same pretty precipice as the desert girl in the picture and if I don’t pull back soon, the canyon will slam up to meet me.
But I also know the truth. No one else but me will ever carry it this far.
Jack Kevorkian was a lunatic who assisted suicides in the back of his van before it was ever considered humane. A principal contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary was a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane after killing a father of six. The mathematical genius Pythagoras had an aversion to beans because he thought part of the soul exited the body with every fart.
Crazy people get shit done.
There has to be a reason why Carl kept that picture of the girl in the desert with the little key around her neck. Somewhere in this vehicle, her photograph is still riding along in his suitcase. That same key is still hanging off Carl’s neck, hidden under his shirt. The sun reflected off it when he bared his chest at the beach.
“First stop,” I tell Carl firmly, “the Mystery Lights.”
He shrugs. “You’re the boss.”
Carl naps most of the ride. As the sun drops and his chest rises and falls in steady rhythm beside me, I imagine how it would feel to stop the truck, pull my gun out of the console, and shoot him in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. I’d watch his blood land like black raindrops on the dark leather. It could be the most satisfying second of my life—the price maybe being every single second afterward.
When I wake him at our destination, it’s gently. We’re standing on the dark side of a road, waiting for aliens or ghosts or swamp gas or whatever it is to prick Carl’s conscience.
We stare up at the giant handfuls of shiny sugar tossed into a wasteland of night, the most stars I’ve ever seen in my life. The desert and its shadows stretch all the way to the rippling muscles of the Chinati Mountains.
We’re a little late for prime-time viewing. There’s no free show tonight, no kaleidoscope of lights dancing around. There is never any guarantee the lights will materialize.
I think that tonight it is maybe more profound without them. The air is expectant. There’s a deep spiritual stirring in my gut, even with Carl at my side. Maybe even more because of him.
I’m holding hands with the past—the stars above me that died light years ago, the dinosaurs and Indians who are cobwebs in the sand, the girls Carl killed.
The light tickle of laughter floats from two couples leaning against a car behind us, drinking wine.
“I saw the picture of the girl in your suitcase,” I tell Carl. “Did you take that out here? It’s beautiful. Why didn’t you put her in your book?”
“You’re a goddamn snoop. There are thousands of pictures I didn’t put in my book. Dozens of girls.”
“This one must mean something special.”
“I don’t know why you just don’t straight up ask if I killed her, too.”
“You marked an X here,” I persist.
“I marked the X because it’s one of my favorite spots. I want to be buried around here.” And then he mumbles, “We’re nothing but exploded matter.”
Tell me something. Anything. Please. It’s the first time I’ve pled with him, even in my head.
“The lights aren’t coming tonight,” Carl says curtly. “I don’t feel it.”
Carl heads back to the truck. One more time, I’ve learned nothing. I linger a little longer, waiting, wondering if Rachel is out there somewhere in the dark.
* * *
—
We slide onto the barren streets of Marfa, population 2,000-minus, around 9:30 P.M. No people. No other cars. Flickering streetlights.
The town is so desolate, so dusty and dreamlike, we could have time-traveled to the empty set of some zombie Western. It is like we are the last living things on earth—killer, cat, woman, dog—all crammed in the cab of this truck.
Carl is chattering away about Dostoyevsky, of all things. My brain feels like it might burst if he doesn’t shut up.
My own head jibbers away, too. Where the hell is this old hotel with the Spanish stucco that Carl’s been talking about for twenty miles? How many waters are left in the cooler? How am I going to get rid of the cat?
Is a point-blank shot
to the head the most efficient way to kill a cowboy zombie?
“Marfa was a railroad hub in the 1880s. There are still conflicting stories about whether the town was named for a character in The Brothers Karamazov or the Jules Verne book Michael Strogoff,” Carl is saying. “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” I say, while my head pounds. “Keep going.” Keep the peace.
“A railroad executive’s wife who settled here picked the name out of a book. But no one is sure which book the lady was reading.”
This, Carl can remember.
“Turn right up here,” he instructs impatiently. Since I climbed back in the truck eight miles ago, Carl has been offering rambling directions to the Paisano, a historic hotel close to the town’s courthouse. He’s insisting on staying there tonight, one of his haunts on photography pilgrimages.
Now he’s pointing. Sure enough, an oasis of white lights is interrupting the dark. “Hotel Paisano will be my treat.” Carl delivers this with a completely straight face. “And let me work at getting Barfly in the door. Trust me. You’ll get a good night’s sleep. You’ll love Marfa in the morning.”
I don’t tell Carl I’ve already been to Marfa, little desert city of the surreal. I’ve read all about its artsy hipster personality in Texas Monthly and The New York Times, a paper I will likely finally find here for Carl in the morning in some shop that will offer Viva La Feminista coffee.
I know all about the minimalist art movement ignited by Donald Judd in the 1970s when he abandoned New York and began installing his large-scale art projects in the Texas desert.
His rows and rows of aluminum boxes transform into abstract, shimmering beauty depending on which way the brutal Texas sun falls on them through the windows of an old artillery shed. They’ve been playing with the blinding light here for almost fifty years.
Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense Page 19