I stepped backward into the rain, the shock of cold rain dousing my hair, freezing the crown of my head, my bare arms and legs. I ran toward the Leaspoke, gasping at the thrill, my own miraculous speed. It felt like flying, like the slow soar from the highest swing of our grade school playground, until I crashed through the lobby of the Leaspoke and slipped in my boots on the polished hall, shooting out a hand to steady myself against one of the casino columns. I hurried to the elevators and slammed the button again and again until it came, shivering the whole ride up to the twelfth floor.
Inside my room, I turned the duffel bag upside down on the mattress, sorting through the jeans and underwear and rolled-up socks to grab Fischer’s bright yellow file and shake out his notes, the surveillance photos, Lucas Driscoll’s mugshot and arrest record listed in black and white. Though several years old, the mug was clearer than any casino eye-in-the-sky. A drop of water from my nose landed smack on the page, bleeding the image, fuzzing a spot by his ear. The high, smooth cheekbones could have been the same, the dark hair sticking out the bottom of his baseball cap. In the photo the man’s mouth was set on edge, as if biting his tongue. I understood how sleeplessness and hunger and grief could eat away at reality, bending experience into phantasm. Hadn’t I imagined Penny on this selfsame bed only hours before, stretching on the coverlet like a lioness?
It was a question of possibilities. If the man in the photograph could have been the man at the Lonestar, if one person could be so brazen as to disappear and reappear consistently in your life, while others you longed for stayed gone, impervious to the depth of your yearning for their return. I walked away from the bed to the bathroom and turned on the light. I began to peel off my wet things, shucking my shorts in a corner. I arranged my T-shirt over the shower rod with cold hands, then sat down on the toilet seat, listening to rainwater drip from the hem.
58
The second time I drove to Carr, I was alone. In the midday light, the narrowing of freeways felt familiar, the fork in the road, the demarcation of the dirt road from gravel, the small metal mailboxes with their eager scarlet tongues. Only the distance remained unchanged, the feeling of time stretching across the miles. The gas cans I filled in Nye clattered in the truck bed with every bump of my tires. I didn’t want to stop for any reason, or allow for the burden of unencumbered thought. I drove through the back of the hamlet and pulled the truck under a pine tree, the lower boughs partly obscuring the truck’s windows, the rearmost portion of an abandoned Winnebago. From where I parked, I had a partial view of the peach trailer. If the zombie had been parked out front, I would have seen something of its monstrous girth when I entered the park and circled around. That it was missing probably meant the sandman was, too. Still it was a relief not to have to see it. That giant, hulking shape, the memory of its blinding light cage cutting through the dark.
I worried I’d fall asleep while waiting; that in a community as small as this one, some nosy neighbor would inevitably feel compelled to stop by the cab and knock insistently on my window, interrogating my purpose. Only after the minutes began to accumulate—twenty, thirty, an hour—did I realize how wrong I’d been. In a community as small as this one, there was a compound interest in minding one’s business, in making peace with difficult neighbors, in living and letting live.
An hour later, a slim woman in a long printed dress ducked out from a vintage rollaway, a plastic hamper balanced on her hip. I watched her set the hamper on the ground and pull a wet sheet from the basket, shaking the twisted fabric free. She pinned a corner of the sheet to a clothesline with a wooden pin, then walked the sagging fabric along the length of the line, placing another in the middle of the sheet, a third at the opposite end. She returned to the hamper, bending to retrieve a clumped fitted sheet. Halfway through, she seemed to run out of clothespins. A moment of consideration, a breeze ruffling stray curls around her face, her hand seeking her hip’s perch. Then she was moving again, draping the remaining pillowcases over the line unsecured. She picked up the basket and disappeared inside.
After she was gone I slipped out the passenger door and unbuttoned my pants, squatting by the back tires to relieve the pressure that had been building for miles. I climbed back inside the truck to wait, sweating again. I unlocked the glove box and fished through weathered copies of car insurance and old gas station receipts to find a handful of stale peanuts. More than three hours after I first arrived, the front door to the peach trailer opened and the rasp-voiced mother stepped out, her dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail. She spoke over her shoulder to someone still inside before letting the door slam shut behind her. She walked a few yards to a row of cars parked along the perimeter of the hamlet and unlocked the door of a red compact, the roof sunken in as if an asteroid had fallen from the sky years before and landed there, and no one had ever thought to fix it.
I felt a wave of nausea watching the woman start her car and back carefully out of the spot, a sparkling white hatred. Yet she had done nothing wrong. She had simply birthed a child, the same as Catherine’s daughter, and Catherine before her. Children emerged in variability, for better or worse. When I felt certain she was really gone, I adjusted the strap of Penny’s purse across my chest and forced myself to get out of the car, easing the door shut.
I had imagined a million different scenarios for this moment: a break-in, a holdup, a masked army flanking my back in solidarity, guns drawn. In reality, I simply knocked on the door. For a long while, nothing happened. Then the metal door screeched back on its hinges. The sandman stood in front of me, stooping as if under some psychic weight, white gauze wrapped around his skull like a cockeyed halo. He took me in slowly, his blue eyes limpid, uncertain, stripped of their once fierce, blazing intent. The longer I stared, the tighter the furrow between his brows became, as if he had an inkling of why I’d come and a storm was threatening to gather in response. Before his fury made it to the surface, he looked away and took a step back from the door. He wandered away as if he’d forgotten why he he’d come at all. I was left alone at the threshold.
I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me. The baby gate was gone, the puppies, too, though the dank animal smell remained. Hank lay sprawled on the couch like a weary lion. He tucked his great furred head between his paws, watchful but silent. The sandman was ambling deeper inside the trailer, disappearing down the hall. I felt a sudden desperate thirst, as if I were the one who had been left in the desert for dead and only just crawled my way back, dusty and parched. I moved into the kitchen and took a jelly glass drying on the dishrack, filling it under the tap. I drank it down in three gulps and filled it again. When I was done I picked up the rubber gloves hanging over the faucet and wriggled them on. I washed the glass. On the kitchen counter was a spice rack, an innocuous pair of faux crystal salt and pepper shakers, a knife block. I dabbed the gloves on the dishtowel and pulled out the chef’s knife, examining the blade. Then the bread knife, the blade long and serrated like alligator teeth. The paring knife fit in the palm of my hand, easy to maneuver, probably the best for close work. I slid it back in its slot. Wouldn’t it be better to leave people and places and things just as they were, to stop before sending more ripples into a restilled pond?
From somewhere inside the trailer, a television turned on. I followed the noise down the hall until I came upon him in a small, claustrophobic bedroom in the back, propped up on a pile of pillows. He was watching old cartoons on a small TV, Tom chasing Jerry all the way up a long, winding staircase, then back down again. He made no acknowledgment of me but reached for the nightstand. I lurched farther into the room, but it was only a bowl of cereal he wanted. He picked it up, cradling the bowl in his giant palm, tucking it underneath his chin. He spooned soggy flakes into his mouth, chewed slowly. Did I really know if he could speak?
“Look at me.”
My hands were beginning to go numb again, but they had been capable, they might still obey simple commands. I reac
hed for the purse, pulling out Fischer’s gun. This weight was so unlike the tire iron in the truck, so much easier to lift: one tool never meant for violence, the other made in its image. I moved deeper into the room and came alongside the bed; I set a knee on the mattress and raised the gun in my hands. I bent incrementally closer, until the tip of the gun brushed past his bandage, sinking into his sand-colored hair, the muzzle trembling against his skull. It would be just like shooting a squirrel, like shooting a watermelon. It would be like none of those things.
“Do you know who I am?”
Still he didn’t look up, his expression focused toward the television set, a lamblike unconcern.
“I’m going to tell you who I am,” I said.
63
Early the next morning I checked out of the Leaspoke, then headed downstairs to the restaurant. A dishwater blonde with a lip piercing was laying out breakfast as Norma had promised, stacking cereal bowls and coffee cups on the tablecloth, overloading a plate with cinnamon rolls and bagels, a pyramid of bulbous muffins. The bar was already open, Bloody Marys on five-dollar special. In the corner of the room I saw the rear exit Norma had mentioned. It was early for breakfast; I had beaten the tourists, but there was already an elderly man at the bar nursing a beer, looking like he had yet to go to bed. A younger man in a casino uniform poured coffee from a carafe directly into his travel mug. I stepped up to the spread of pastries with Penny’s yearbook photo in hand, holding it up for the blonde behind the table to see. She glanced at it warily, already annoyed.
“I’m wondering if you can help me,” I said. “My friend stayed at this hotel a couple weeks ago and never came home. Can you tell me if you’ve seen her?”
The girl snapped her gum. “Isn’t that the girl the police were here about?”
“Yes. No one’s heard from her since.”
“Are you here with some cops?” She took her time to blow a large pink bubble before snapping that, too. “Do I need to call security?”
“No! I’m just a friend of hers. I paid for my room. I’m leaving. Can you tell me if you’ve seen her?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw her.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. A few days before the cops showed up. Pretty, right? I could have told them. They didn’t ask me. They asked the dealers on the floor. The manager told us that.”
“You really saw her?”
“She took a muffin and some coffee, yeah. Then she went back inside.”
“She didn’t leave through that back door?”
The girl swiveled around to look at the rear exit, as if just noticing it was there. When she turned back she was making a face, as if my question was a complication she hadn’t bothered to consider.
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she was going back to her room. I guess if she came back later she could have left that way. Why? She’s your friend?”
“Yes. And she’s still missing.”
“I mean, she’s not a very good friend if she didn’t call you.”
“The police think something might have happened to her. If she came back later, could she have used that back door without you seeing?”
“If it’s slow I’m in the back.”
“Aren’t there cameras in here?”
“Listen,” the girl said, “this isn’t the Venetian, okay? I mean, there are cameras in front, in the lobby. And the gaming floor, duh. I know because they arrested a grip of people for skimming the house. But I’ve worked here for over a year and if there’s a camera in here—first of all, that’s super creepy, because they don’t tell us shit, and second of all, the manager’s a perv so I don’t even want to know where he’s got them going.” She leaned in, close enough that I could smell the bubble gum on her breath. “What do they think happened to her?”
I folded up the yearbook photo, zipping it into the front compartment of the duffel. Like PJ the night before, the girl seemed to relax once the photo was put away. I picked up a muffin, pretending to be interested. “What is this, poppy? I heard some woman in Sparks makes these.”
“You know she won some fair? The grocery store’s going to start selling them.”
“They look great.” I set the muffin on a plate. “When you saw Penny, how did she seem? Did she look like she might be in trouble?”
“I don’t know. She was wearing sunglasses. Big ones like . . .”
“Like a movie star.”
“Hold on.” The girl held up a finger, taken by a sudden idea. She disappeared into the back room. I waited for her to reemerge with a fresh clue, another employee, the Jake of this place who could explain the camera system, the tapes; how the world could lose a person and so few people could seem to care. Five minutes later the girl returned alone. She carried a white paper bag, bumpy and full.
“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Whatever,” she said. “I hope you find your friend.”
65
The rain stopped and left behind more temperate weather; supple, prolonged afternoons, sable evenings dipping into chill. I drove through Virginia City’s downtown peppered with locals, through a series of back roads thronged by unkempt cottonwood trees. The hostel was a refurbished cabin painted an intrepid cornflower blue. I walked along the length of the building, scanning the dusty windows for some clue as to what lay inside. Near the front of the building I caught sight of a hollowed-out face in the reflection, sharp in the chin and cheeks. Striking, if only in the moment before I recognized it as my own, pared away from the previous life that marked it strange.
The interior of the Prickly Pine was quaint; a rose-patterned couch, a crowded array of porcelain squirrels suspended on the fireplace, a crocheted doily covering the TV stand, its black screen covered by an inch of dust. On the wall a corkboard was covered with pastel flyers advertising English lessons, AA meetings, paranormal support counselors, movers for hire. A hefty, straw-haired woman sat behind an inset counter with the type of pale, nondescript features that would be difficult to describe later if she ever disappeared. She worked on a book of crossword puzzles behind the desk, her mechanical pencil poised. When she looked up I met a pair of watery gray eyes trapped behind clear plastic frames.
“How much for a single night?”
She gestured to a blackboard behind the desk, the rates printed in chalk. “Fifteen. Cheaper if you stay awhile.”
I dug into Penny’s purse and slid her a twenty. She passed me the change and stood up, grabbing a key from a lockbox of hooks behind the desk.
“You don’t have to tell me your name,” she said, “but give me something to call you.”
“Cale.” If something happens to me, tell them my name is Cale.
“I’m Martha,” she said, shuffling around the desk. Generous in the hips and thighs, a childbearer with a family somewhere to miss her. “Cale, I don’t know how much you know about us out here in Virginia City, but we have lots to love and plenty to do. Have you been to the miner’s museum? The opera house? We have a cultural center on R Street where you can take painting classes, ceramics, knitting. I do believe they offer glassblowing. Just ask if you want a brochure.”
She stopped midway down the hall in front of a groove-paneled door and turned the key. The room was painted the same impossible blue as the cabin’s exterior. Inside it felt like I was moving within an ocean or a tear, treading water through Poseidon’s tumultuous feelings. There was a single set of bunk beds flanking either wall, boasting identical lapis-colored sheets pulled into tight hospital corners, thick navy fleeces folded down at the feet of the beds, a small square notecard propped on every pillow. I set my duffel bag on the bottom bunk closest to the door and picked up the prayer card, scanning its message. I stepped up the ladder to peek at the top mattress. They were all the same.
“Did you want a brochure?” Martha asked.
“No, thank you
.”
A set of steel lockers along the wall hung open, all the cubbies empty. There was no luggage in the room. It was off-season, and business was slow. I was surprised by my own disappointment. The longer I was away from Pomoc, the more I missed my childhood bedroom, the house I grew up in, the sanctuary of a family made up of even a single other person, and that, creating a world. I reached in the duffel bag and pulled out one of the gas station copies of Penny’s yearbook photo, handing it to her. Martha unfolded it warily. “What’s this?”
“Have you seen her? She’s a friend of mine. She disappeared from home a few weeks ago. She might have passed through this area at some point.”
“I don’t think so. Who is she?”
“Just a friend. She’s missing.”
Martha’s expression, not unlike that of casino personnel and waiters and gas station attendants and bus depot drivers from Pomoc to Virginia City and everywhere in between: bewilderment, distaste, a sudden desire to distance themselves from me and whatever tragedy I’d managed to court. She handed the flyer back, clapping her hands together when they were free.
“I didn’t tell you about the movie theater!” she exclaimed. “And did you see the rotary out there in the main room, on the side table? Local calls are free. Long distance I’ve got to charge you a dollar a minute. When I’m not here you’re on the honor system, just write down your calls on the pad by the phone.”
She turned around to leave.
“You’re going to want a brochure,” she said.
66
The Twin Desert Cinemas played double features at midday, six bucks a pop. Even with matinee prices, I was the only one in line for the three o’clock show, peeling a bill from Penny’s dwindling supply. I stood under the neon glow of the convenience stand and ordered a popcorn from the skinny teenage usher, his ruddy cheeks pockmarked with acne. I pegged him for a sophomore, the new school year only recently begun. He must have shot up several inches over the summer because his movements were jerky, spastic, an unoiled tin man growing into new arms and legs, the incalculable degree of power required to motor through a stride. He reached for a stack of flat popcorn boxes on a high shelf and brought the whole pile crashing down on his head. I watched him build them one by one, springing to life like cardboard castles in his hands.
A Prayer for Travelers Page 24