by Brady Udall
He lay facedown in the shag, splayed like someone floating in the middle of a warm summer pond, feeling quite comfortable except for the seam of pain at the back of his skull. Somewhere a door slammed, the sound of footsteps making the floor vibrate lightly against his chin, and as he slowly began to sink into deeper, darker waters, he heard Ted Leo’s voice: “Well look at this. Put down that phone, Coral, put it down. We don’t need to involve the police, go back to your rooms, girls, just a drunken customer, nothing to worry about, I think we can take care of him ourselves.”
A DREAM OF ESCAPE
Golden came to on his back, staring up in vacant wonder at the tilted dome of a star-blown sky. He had never truly noticed the night sky this way, seeing as if for the first time the individual bodies themselves, their particular hues and intensities, and beyond them whole galaxies like ghostly blooms of dust layered one on top of the other, the distances between them vast and growing as he watched. Only after several minutes of rapt astronomical observation, accompanied by a gentle rocking that made him feel as if he were laid out on the deck of some creaking old boat, did he think to wonder where he was. His hands were secured behind his back—this fact suggested gradually by the sharpening throb in his shoulders and wrists—and the familiar smells of dog and oil and dried blood told him he had been in this place before, and not all that long ago. His concussed brain took its sweet time circling around to the conclusion that he was in the bed of a moving pickup. Nelson Norman’s pickup, he decided, finally. And just like that he understood how he’d gotten here, and where it was he was being taken.
He rolled onto his side to take the pressure off his arms, rested his head on the bald treads of a spare tire; there was nothing to do now, he decided, but enjoy the ride.
This grew increasingly difficult as the road grew rougher and his mind cleared, allowing his body to assert its various pains and infirmities. A hard wind had begun to howl, tossing the occasional handful of sand into his face. Soon his arms were cramping, the edges of his vision sparkled with nausea, and the lurching of the pickup kept his swollen and tender head bouncing in rhythm against the spare tire. He was given thirty seconds of relief when the pickup eased to a standstill, someone got out of the driver’s side to conduct some mysterious business, and then they were moving again, the sound of dead vegetation screeching against the pickup’s sides and the chain-link fence of the Test Site passing slowly a few feet above his head.
When they stopped ten minutes later, Golden was in agony; the bones of his arms felt like they might pop from their sockets, his stomach sloshed with hot bile, and an old steel toolbox had managed to clatter inch by inch across the pickup’s bed and lodge itself against his hipbone.
“Nice ride?” Ted Leo shouted as he jerked open the tailgate. He grabbed one of Golden’s ankles, Nelson came around and grabbed the other, and with the well-timed teamwork of a magician and his trusted assistant, they yanked him from the bed in a single smooth motion so that the first thing to hit the ground was the back of his neck. Ted Leo told him to get up, and he rolled around, moaning, trying to find his breath, until Nelson hooked him under the armpits and hauled him to his feet.
Ted Leo, decked out for this late-night adventure in track pants and a gold silk kimono, reached into the glove box and came out with the long-barreled Luger that Golden had seen before. The pistol had reputedly been owned by Al Capone, and Ted Leo was fond of brandishing it when he was angry, or if he was in a good mood, showing it off to guests and friends as one of his most cherished possessions. He made a show of checking the clip and then slamming it back home with a loud ka-chick. He accepted a shovel from Nelson, told him to stay with the pickup, and gave Golden a stiff jab in the spine with its blade. “March, soldier. Double-time. We don’t got all night.”
It did not occur to Golden to fight or run. Even if his hands had not been secured snugly behind his back, he wouldn’t have had the focus or energy to use them; even if his legs were not weak to the point of shaking, his bad knee grinding with every step, there was nowhere for him to go. The fury that earlier had filled him so completely, that had carried him from Las Vegas on its combustible fumes and released itself upon the unsuspecting furnishings of the PussyCat Manor, had now burned off, leaving him flattened and spent, a hollow man walking meekly to his fate, leaking smoke and ashes at the seams, nothing left in him but surrender.
The wind came at them hard, pushing down out of the atmosphere in rhythmic bursts, raising walls of sand the two men walked through like spirits or ghosts. A startling patch of crystalline night sky would reveal itself for a moment, then disappear behind a black sheet of dust. Almost instantly Golden’s eyes and throat were caked with grit, his ears filled with hissing particles. Feeling nothing but the occasional jab from Ted Leo’s shovel when the wind blew him off course, he bowed his head and walked.
Just when Golden thought they had been separated, that he was walking alone into the roaring darkness, Ted Leo shouted for him to stop. Ted had a penlight, which he clenched in his teeth, and he scraped around in the dirt with his shovel, the dragon stitched into the back of his kimono whipping and writhing in the indefinite light. Even in the midst of a windstorm in the bitter hours of night, Ted went about this business with a kind of top-of-the-morning enthusiasm, as if everything were going perfectly according to some master plan. When the shovel rang out against metal, Ted Leo looked up and grinned like a jack-o’-lantern around the glow of his penlight.
He shouted something, but the wind swallowed every word. He was attempting to make some kind of speech, his eyes aglow, the black stalks of his lacquered hair lifting stiffly from his scalp. He kept on, gesturing with the shovel, but Golden could make out none of it; his head was filled with a crackling static that rose and fell. At some point Ted Leo realized his message, probably something cribbed from an old Jimmy Cagney movie—or maybe it was another lecture about the government’s atomic testing program—was not getting across. He stepped up and shouted into Golden’s face, “First off, okay, you’re going to tell me where she is! That’s what’s gonna happen first!”
She. All this time, and Golden had not given a single thought to Huila. For a moment he saw her face, got a whiff of sandalwood in his nose, and felt a pang. He was glad to know she’d gotten away, that Ted had not yet found her. Now all he could do was hope she had found somewhere safe to hide.
Ted Leo waited for a response, but Golden simply stood in the swirling dust, the cuff of his pants caught in the spines of a fat little barrel cactus, mute. He wasn’t sure if it was in some kind of protest against the horror of what had happened tonight, or if it was nothing but simple shock, but he had found himself unable or unwilling to speak, and in this silence, this refusal of words and their potential for harm, he had provided himself some small but necessary shelter.
“What’s this?” Ted Leo shouted, his voice straining. The wind blew his kimono out with a crack, reversed, snapped it tightly around him again. “You just going to stand there, you big dumb Mormon jackass, and let me shoot you and put you in this hole?” He pointed the penlight into Golden’s face. “Did you think you’d come all the way out here, after all you’ve done to me, the embarrassment you’ve caused me, thinking you’re going to break up my place, you’re going to hurt me, and then you’re just going to stand there looking at me like that?”
Golden gave a slight shrug; Ted Leo seemed to have summed up the situation quite nicely. Grasping the handle of the shovel with both hands, Ted Leo let the penlight drop, and in its residual glow Golden could see that Ted Leo’s cheerful mood was well on its way to abandoning him; his face had gone dark, his neck pulsing against its delicate gold chain. His big plan, apparently, was not working out as he’d hoped; he figured they would come out to this ominous location, he would give some kind of show-stopping speech made of equal parts Mafioso bromides and obscure scriptural references, and Golden would tell him everything he wanted to know before falling on his knees and, in a most pathetic and sa
tisfying way, begging the great Ted Leo to spare his life. But Golden was not cooperating and this windstorm was turning out to be a problem; Ted kept having to blink sand from his eyes and spit it from the corners of his mouth as he spoke. For Golden, it felt like small victory to be able to see, and have a part in, Ted Leo being angered to the point of apoplexy one last time.
Because he caught a stinging gust of wind to the face at just the right moment, he did not see the blow coming. Luckily, the head of the shovel glanced off his shoulder before it rang against his left temple, sending a hard rattle through his skull and pitching him sideways. He staggered, but did not go down. If the tone of his voice was any indication, this made Ted Leo even angrier.
“You think this is funny?” he shouted, his voice cracking and singing in two different pitches. He was gripping the shovel as if he might take another swing. “You think any of this is funny?”
Golden straightened, his head still chiming. Strangely, the blow seemed to have cleared his mind a little, as if counteracting the effects of the coldcocking that had been administered to him earlier. He felt something sharpen in his chest, a quickening of the lungs, and when he looked into the purple shadows of Ted’s contorted face, he remembered why he had come out here, and what he had failed so far to do: make this man pay for the harm that had been done to his boy, to his family. He had a harsh, metallic taste in the back of his mouth like a memory of the smell of Rusty’s blood, his burning hair and flesh, and something at the center of him wobbled and tipped, spilling the last dregs of anger into his veins. He lurched forward, jerking wildly at the cords holding his wrists, and even as he shuddered through one final spasm of grief and rage he realized he did have something to say, though he wasn’t sure what, exactly, and when he tried to speak what came out was nothing but mangled noise, something raw and shredded and torn up by the roots.
Ted Leo’s eyes widened and he took a step back, shielding himself with the shovel, his expression changing in a second from angry, to frightened, to mocking.
“What’s this?” he shouted, cupping his hand to his ear. “The man speaks. Say again, please?”
With this last bit of exertion Golden had drained himself thoroughly. He was tied up, wrung out, impotent in the truest sense of the word, and the only thing left to him now was to lodge a complaint, to let Ted Leo understand the suffering he’d caused. When he spoke, the pain in his throat made him dizzy: “You hurt my boy. My son.”
“Oh, I haven’t hurt anybody,” Ted Leo said brightly, “and I’ve had no reason to hurt anybody until you came along.” In illustration of his point he flipped the shovel around and with an awkward over-hand motion drove the handle-end deep into Golden’s solar plexus. While Golden was doubled over, gasping to recover his breath, Ted Leo busied himself—nearly at Golden’s feet—opening the bunker’s metal hatch. The first breath Golden was able to negotiate into his lungs was so full of the spoiled, dead air of the bunker that he gagged and launched into a new fit of choking.
“Get used to it,” Ted Leo said. He stood over Golden and gave him a paternal pat on the back. “You’re going to be down there a long time.”
When Ted Leo removed his pistol from the sash of his kimono and pressed the cold tip of the barrel against the side of his head, Golden experienced no panic or fear, but a spreading numbness, something close to peace. Bent over at the waist and unable to raise the necessary reserves to stand up straight and face his comeuppance, he stared into the perfect black hole in the ground that represented his oblivion, mesmerized by the notion that maybe he hadn’t, after all, come out here for justice or vengeance or plain, pleasurable spite, but to realize, finally and in the most complete way possible, his desire for release, his dream of escape.
He closed his eyes and waited. But oblivion seemed to be taking a while. Ted Leo, always one for dramatics, was letting the moment play out, and now it seemed he was talking again, standing directly over Golden’s doubled-over form and making some final pronouncement, though Golden could hear very little over the wind and the ocean sounds of his own lungs and heart. Something rose in him, some echo or vibration, and before he realized what he was doing he was already mumbling under his breath, his old habitual chant, Emma-NephiHelamanNaomi JosephinePauline NovellaParleySybil Deeanne…and as the names made their way past his lips he felt, as if for the first time, the peculiar shape of each one, their particular syllables attended in his mind by some token to whom each name belonged, a dragonfly barrette, a smile full of missing teeth, a pair of orthopedic shoes, the dusty scent of sun-warmed hair, a nightmare cry from down the hall, an infant’s tart breath, and here they came, his children, one after the other—not as a hopelessly long and tangled strand of DNA nonsense-letters, or as a single, pulsing organism (as he had come to think of them lately), ever-growing and demanding to be fed, but as individual bodies and faces appearing behind the glass of windows and the screens of front doors, waiting, eyes bright, wondering where he was, what was taking him so long to come home.
The names came faster now…GaleAlvinRustyClifton…bringing with them the memories of evenings, not so long ago, when they would squeeze together on the Barge, their heads still wet and soap-scented from their baths, and listen to him recite the made-up adventures of the Flatulent Astronaut or Johnny the Car-Driving Raccoon. Sweet, soft evenings when he could, if he tried hard enough, still hold them in the circumference of his arms. When he was still safe from the knowledge of how easily one of them might be lost.
Pierced by a fierce, sudden longing, he reached for them now…HerschelGloryBooMartinWayneTeagueLouise…believing if he could gather them one more time, before it was too late, they might be able to save him.
But, of course, he was too late, he would forever be too late, one step behind, apologies already in hand. He began to stumble over the names, mixing up the order and backtracking to get it right, straining to reach the list’s end, to do this one thing right, at least, this one simple, last thing…FigNewtonDarlingJame-o…and now he was no longer speaking the names so much as inhaling them, swallowing them into his lungs and holding them there, his tongue thickening in his mouth, his rib cage creaking as it swelled, unable to withstand the mounting pressures of anxiety and sorrow and regret, and all at once the muscles of his neck tensed so painfully his eyes watered, and with a single great roar of release, he sneezed.
The sneeze jerked him upright and he felt a sharp impact at the top of his head, a moment of luminous weightlessness, and then nothing. It took him some time to understand that his eyes were closed, and that with some effort he could open them. He found himself standing, apparently still alive, in the middle of a great, black silence, his vision full of dying phosphorescence. He looked around: the mouth of the bunker at his feet, the hunkering forms of sagebrush, and to his right, a small triangle of ozone-blue light, which turned out to be the penlight abandoned in the dirt.
By the fresh new pain at the crown of his skull and the sensation of cold as the wind passed over it, he was fairly certain that part of his head had been blown off. But he was still standing, still thinking, which meant either the missing portion of his head was not strictly necessary, or that some alternate explanation was in order.
Behind him a moan rose up—a slow, devastated sound—and there was his alternate explanation, in the form of a half-conscious Ted Leo laid out on the ground wearing a bib of blood, his nose burst all over his face. At this sight the back of Golden’s head began to sting more intensely, as if in sympathy for the damage it had caused. Ted moaned again, shifted one leg and, seized by a sudden, almost childish energy, Golden began to dance on his heels, working at his wrists; all along he thought he’d been tied up with some kind of cord, nylon or cotton, but he soon realized that it was nothing more than a few loops of electrical tape. With a sustained application of force he could get it to stretch just a little, a little more, and then he was free.
He cast around until he found the pistol. With a sudden black willingness he stood over
Ted Leo and leveled it at his chest. He sighed, swallowed, decided he had a better idea. His hands clumsy and numb, he managed to drag Ted Leo the five feet to the bunker and feed him, headfirst, into its mouth. The folds of Ted’s soft belly caught the steel edges, the fine silk of his kimono snagged and tore; it was like trying to force a Q-tip into a keyhole. It took more than a little nudging and tucking, then some outright shoving and tamping before something gave way and Ted Leo disappeared into the inky shadows with such a suddenness it was as if he’d fallen through to another dimension. Golden thought he heard a thud and the echoing word “No” but did not hesitate; he clanged the lid down and cranked the rusted latch.
In the moments he took to gather himself, to work the blood back into his hands and catch his breath, he sensed a vibration beneath his feet, a mournful lowing that quickly rose in pitch, spiking into pleading shouts, formless words that boomed and echoed and were slowly lost to the wind as he limped off into the swirling dark.
TWO BIG MEN, ONE LITTLE GIRL
When Golden opened the door and settled into the passenger-side seat, Nelson Norman did not so much as look his way. For a while they stared out the windshield at the granular light of predawn, an awkward silence between them like two strangers waiting at a bus stop. The cab smelled like stale beer and cinnamon gum, and the only sound besides the scudding wind was the comforting whir of the truck’s heater.
“So it’s just you then?” Nelson said finally.
Golden gave a slight movement of the head that might have been a nod.
Nelson eyed the pistol that Golden held in his lap. He let a good ten seconds pass. “You shoot him?”
“Thought about it.”
Ten more seconds. “He’s still out there?”
“In the bunker.”
“Huh,” said Nelson. He nodded once. “You going to leave him there?”