The Dark Country

by Dennis Etchison

  He got out and walked over to the rest room.

  Inside, white tiles and bare lights. His eyes felt raw, peeled. Finished, he washed his hands but not his face; that would only make sleep more difficult.

  Outside again and feeling desperately out of synch, he listened to his shoes falling hollowly on the cement.

  "Next week, we've got to get organized. ..."

  He said this, he was sure, because he heard his voice coming back to him, though with a peculiar empty resonance. Well, this time tomorrow night he would be home. As unlikely as that seemed now.

  He stopped, bent for a drink from the water fountain.

  The footsteps did not stop.

  Now, wait, he thought. I'm pretty far gone, but—

  He swallowed, his ears popping.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Hell, he thought, I've been pushing too hard. We. She. No, it was my fault, my plan this time. To drive nights, sleep days. Just so. As long as you can sleep.

  Easy, take it easy.

  He started walking again, around the comer and back to the lot.

  At the corner, he thought he saw something move at the edge of his vision.

  He turned quickly to the right, in time for a fleeting glimpse of something—someone—hurrying out of sight into the shadows.

  Well, the other side of the building housed the women's rest room. Maybe it was Evvie.

  He glanced toward the car, but it was blocked from view. He walked on.

  Now the parking area resembled an oasis lit by firelight. Or a western camp, the cars rimming the lot on three sides in the manner of wagons gathered against the night.

  Strength in numbers, he thought.

  Again, each car he passed looked at first like every other. It was the flat light, of course. And of course they were the same cars he had seen a half hour ago. And the light still gave them a dusty, abandoned look.

  He touched a fender.

  It was dusty.

  But why shouldn't it be? His own car had probably taken on quite a layer of grime after so long on these roads. He touched the next car, the next.

  Each was so dirty that he could have carved his name without scratching the paint.

  He had an image of himself passing this way again—God forbid—a year from now, say, and finding the same cars parked here. The same ones.

  What if, he wondered tiredly, what if some of these cars had been abandoned? Overheated, exploded, broken down one fine midday and left here by owners who simply never returned? Who would ever know? Did the Highway Patrol, did anyone bother to check? Would an automobile be preserved here for months, years, by the elements, like a snakeskin shed beside the highway?

  It was a thought, anyway.

  His head was buzzing.

  He leaned back and inhaled deeply, as deeply as he could at this altitude.

  But he did hear something. A faint tapping. It reminded him of running feet, until he noticed the lamp overhead.

  There were hundreds of moths beating against the high fixture, their soft bodies tapping as they struck and circled and returned again and again to the lens; the light made their wings translucent.

  He took another deep breath and went on to his car.

  He could hear it ticking, cooling down, before he got there. Idly he rested a hand on the hood. Warm, of course. The tires? He touched the left front. It was taut, hot as a loaf from the oven. When he took his hand away, the color of the rubber came off on his palm like burned skin.

  He reached for the door handle.

  A moth fluttered down onto the fender. He flicked it off, his finger leaving a streak on the enamel.

  He looked closer and saw a wavy, mottled pattern covering his unwashed car, and then he remembered. The rain, yesterday afternoon. The rain had left blotches in the dust, marking the finish as if with dirty fingerprints.

  He glanced over at the next car.

  It, too, had the imprint of dried raindrops—but, close up, he saw that the marks were superimposed in layers, over and over again.

  The Firebird had been through a great many rains.

  He touched the hood.

  Cold.

  He removed his hand, and a dead moth clung to his thumb. He tried to brush it off on the hood, but other moth bodies stuck in its place. Then he saw countless shriveled, mummified moths pasted over the hood and top like peeling chips of paint. His fingers were coated with the powder from their wings.

  He looked up.

  High above, backed by banks of roiling cumulus clouds, the swarm of moths vibrated about the bright, protective light.

  So the Firebird had been here a very long time.

  He wanted to forget it, to let it go. He wanted to get back in the car. He wanted to lie down, lock it out, everything. He wanted to go to sleep and wake up in Los Angeles.

  He couldn't.

  He inched around the Firebird until he was facing the line of cars. He hesitated a beat, then started moving. A LeSabre. A Cougar. A Chevy van. A Corvair. A Ford. A Mustang.

  And every one was overlaid with grit.

  He paused by the Mustang. Once—how long ago?—it had been a luminous candy-apple red; probably belonged to a teenager. Now the windshield was opaque, the body dulled to a peculiar shade he could not quite place.

  Feeling like a voyeur at a drive-in movie theater, McClay crept to the driver's window.

  Dimly he perceived two large outlines in the front seat.

  He raised his hand.

  Wait.

  What if there were two people sitting there on the other side of the window, watching him?

  He put it out of his mind. Using three fingers, he cut a swath through the scum on the glass and pressed close.

  The shapes were there. Two headrests.

  He started to pull away.

  And happened to glance into the back seat.

  He saw a long, uneven form.

  A leg, the back of a thigh. Blond hair, streaked with shadows. The collar of a coat.

  And, delicate and silvery, a spider web, spun between the hair and collar.

  He jumped back.

  His leg struck the old Ford. He spun around, his arms straight. The blood was pounding in his ears.

  He rubbed out a spot on the window of the Ford and scanned the inside.

  The figure of a man, slumped on the front seat.

  The man's head lay on a jacket. No,-it was not a jacket. It was a large, formless stain. In the filtered light, McClay could see that it had dried to a dark brown.

  It came from the man's mouth.

  No, not from the mouth.

  The throat had a long, thin slash across it, reaching nearly to the ear.

  He stood there stiffly, his back almost arched, his eyes jerking, trying to close, trying not to close. The lot, the even light reflecting thinly from each windshield, the Corvair, the van, the Cougar, the LeSabre, the suggestion of a shape within each one.

  The pulse in his ears muffled and finally blotted out the distant gearing of a truck up on the highway, the death-rattle of the moths against the seductive lights.

  He reeled.

  He seemed to be hearing again the breaking open of doors and the scurrying of padded feet across paved spaces.

  He remembered the first time. He remembered the sound of a second door slamming in a place where no new car but his own had arrived.

  Or—had it been the door to his car slamming a second time, after Evvie had gotten back in? If so, how? Why?

  And there had been the sight of someone moving, trying to slip away.

  And for some reason now he remembered the Indian in the tourist town, slipping out of sight in the doorway of that gift shop. He held his eyelids down until he saw the shop again, the window full of kachinas and tin gods and tapestries woven in a secret language.

  At last he remembered it clearly: the Indian had not been entering the store. He had been stealing away.

  McClay did not understand what it meant, but he opened his eyes,
as if for the first time in centuries, and began to run toward his car.

  If I could only catch my goddamn breath, he thought.

  He tried to hold on. He tried not to think of her, of what might have happened the first time, of what he may have been carrying in the back seat ever since.

  He had to find out.

  He fought his way back to the car* against a rising tide of fear he could not stem.

  He told himself to think of other things, of things he knew he could control: mileages and motel bills, time zones and weather reports, spare tires and flares and tubeless repair tools, hydraulic jack and Windex and paper towels and tire iron and socket wrench and waffle cushion and traveler's checks and credit cards and Dopp Kit (toothbrush and paste, deodorant, shaver, safety blade, brushless cream) and sunglasses and Sight Savers and teargas pen and fiber-tip pens and portable radio and alkaline batteries and fire extinguisher and desert water bag and tire gauge and motor oil and his moneybelt with identification sealed in plastic—

  In the back of his car, under the quilt, nothing moved, not even when he finally lost his control and his mind in a thick, warm scream.

  SITTING IN THE CORNER, WHIMPERING QUIETLY

  It was one of those bright places you never expect to find in the middle of the night, a place of porcelain and neon lighting and whitewashed walls. I walked in with my old army bag stuffed full of a month's dirty clothes and swung it on top of one of the long line of waiting, open washing machines.

  A quarter to three in the morning.

  And nobody in sight for miles and miles.

  I let out a sigh, which not surprisingly turned into a yawn, and felt for the change in my pocket.

  I didn't see her at first. That is to say, I knew she was there without turning around. I think it was the cigarette smoke. It cut a sharp edge through the hot, stifling, humid dryer air that hung so thick in the laundromat you felt you could stick out your finger and jab a hole in it.

  "Well, he finally got what he wanted."

  I moved along the wall to the corner detergent dispenser. It was very late and I couldn't sleep and I had come here to be alone, just to have something to do and to be left alone to do it, and I was in no mood to try my hand at winning friends and influencing people.

  I heard water running in the sink next to me.

  "That's what he thought, all right." Her voice came very close to me now, going on as if picking up a running conversation we might have been having.

  I turned my head just long enough for a quick glance at her.

  She was young but not too, twenty-nine going on forty, and pretty, too, but not really very. She had long hair hanging down to the middle of her thin back, with blond streaks bleached in, tres chic, you know, and one of her phony eyelashes was coming unglued in the warm, wet air.

  "A house in the Valley, two cars—no, three—paid vacation in the Virgin Islands, and a son, yeah, a little Vladimir Jr. to carry on his glorious family name. Just like he always wanted. But that was all he wanted—that's the part they never tell you in front."

  She dropped the butt of her Pall Mall and lit another at once, pulling long, hard drags down into her lungs.

  "Last week the kid took the gun from the closet and walked up to me in the kitchen," she continued, starting to hand-wash a sheet in the sink. "Pointed it right at my head and said, 'Bang, you're dead, Mommy.' 'Well,' I said, 'are you gonna do it or not? Don't ever point one of those things at someone unless you're gonna use it.'

  "So he did. The kid pulled the trigger. I didn't think h; had the guts. 'Course it wasn't loaded. That really pissed me off. It was just like Vladimir, not teaching him what it means to be a—but what would his dad know about that? About what it takes to be a man."

  She scrubbed at the soiled sheet, pausing to jerk a wet hand up to move a strand of hair away from her face. I couldn't help taking a better look at her face then. It was like the rest of her, young and yet old, drawn and tight, made up expensively even now, in the middle of the night, though obviously in haste, and tired, and blank. For a second then, overpoweringly, I had the belief that she was the same young/old woman I had seen seated in the window of a beauty salon in Beverly Hills once; and later, in a cocktail lounge with another girl, waiting, with long, sharp fingernails the color of blood. French-inhaling a Marlboro and with a look on her face that told you she had a hundred-dollar bill in her purse. And that she was waiting. Just waiting.

  She picked up her Pall Mall with a wet thumb and first finger, drawing hard.

  I noticed the clock on the wall: three o'clock.

  "That was when I got it. All these years, trying to figure a way to teach him and mat God damned kid of his something."

  I fed a couple of nickles into the detergent machine.

  She paused long enough to take a couple of more lengthy hits from her Pall Mall. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the smoke blowing out into the white light.

  "So tonight he comes home and makes the pitcher of martinis, as usual, and goes into his room and closes the door. I go to the door and ask him what the hell's wrong this time. He says he doesn't know. He just wants me to leave him alone."

  She laughed startlingly, hoarsely.

  "Okay, hot shot, I'll leave you the hell alone, I think. You wanna come home from your fucking office looking like a corpse again tonight and lay around until you fall asleep for the zillionth time? All right, I'll let you!

  "We'll find out if that's what you really want.

  "Only first you and that little pussy of a son of yours are gonna get a lesson you'll never forget."

  She turned on the water full force. It gushed out, flooding the basin faster than it could empty.

  "Who ever said if you wash it in cold water it'll come out? Damn. Why the hell did I have to give him the striped sheets, anyway?

  "So I wake the kid up. It doesn't matter—he's awake, and the bed's all wet as usual. I ask him if he remembers what I taught him.

  "It takes a minute or two, but he finally catches on, the dumb little bastard.

  "So I go get the bullets down and tell him to go in there and prove to me that he remembers what it was I beat the shit out of him for last week. ..."

  I started to dump my stuff into a machine at the far end of the room. Then, all of a sudden, the thread of what she had been saying got through to me.

  I turned back to look at her.

  She was grinding a bar of soap into the sheet now. At the edges the spot was a thick brown, almost black, but at the heart I noticed it was still a deep, gummy shade close to the color of her nails as her fingers flashed violently around the material. The steam was rising up from the basin to surround her.

  I closed my eyes fast.

  Outside, a car came suddenly from nowhere and passed hurriedly by, swishing away down the empty boulevard. She finished the story. I didn't want to hear it, tried to block

  it out of my ears but she told it through to the finish. It didn't matter to her. She had never been talking to me anyway.

  My eyes jammed shut, harder and harder, until I saw gray shapes that seemed to move in front of me. Never before in my life up to that moment could I remember feeling so detached, so out of it. I leaned the heels of my hands against the washer. The quarter slipped from my fingers, clanked against the enamel and hit the cold, cracked cement floor.

  The last thing I heard her saying was:

  ". . .So afterward I tell the kid to go back to bed, to go to sleep, just to go the hell to sleep, but he can't. Or won't. He just sits there on the floor in the corner, the gun still in his lap, whimpering quietly. That was how I left him, the little sissy. ..."

  Disgusted—tired and sick and disgusted out of all memory and beyond all hope—I forced my things back into the bag and stumbled out of the laundromat. She said something after me but I didn't want to hear what it was.

  I pulled my coat up around my ears. I was starting to shiver. I snorted, at no one in particular, at the night and all the people i
n it, everywhere, the stupid, unthinking people who don't know enough to leave a man alone, just to leave you the hell alone the times when you need it most. There was no place left for me to go, no place at all anywhere in the city. And so, breathing steam, I made it away from there as fast as I could, heading off down the street in the same direction as the car and blinking fast, being careful not to step on any cracks, all the way back to my room. My quiet room.

  THE WALKING MAN

  It was one of those long, blue evenings that come to the Malibu late in the year, the water undulating up to the beach like some smooth, sleepy girl moving slowly under a satin sheet. I must have been staring, because the bartender leaned over and pushed the empty glass against the back of my hand. "Another?"

  "Vodka," I reminded him. The sky, out by the point that shelters the Colony, was turning a soft, tropical orange of the kind one expects to see only on foreign postage stamps. The edge of the water lapped the pilings below the restaurant. An easy, regular rhythm, like the footsteps outside on the pier.

  He reached for a dry napkin. "Live around here?"

  "A few months," I told him. It was still true, for the moment, at least. I hoped he would let it pass. I didn't want to go into the alimony and the rest of it, not now.

  He had the Rose's Lime Juice in his hand. The way he handled it, I could see he hadn't been at this too long. He was young, still in his twenties; I wondered how he had got the job with all that sun-bleached hair. "Should've seen it back about May, June," he said. He picked up a cherry, one of the green ones, but I held up my hand and he put it back. "All that sand out there?"

  I turned back to the window and looked with him.

  "Rocks," he said. I heard the rough ice cubes drop into the glass. "Right."

  "Out there, I mean. Boulders like you never seen. Like the moon or something. Five, six feet of sand must've washed in over the summer."

  He was right. I remembered the beach below the sun deck of our newly leased house: the sand slick as a wet peach as far as we could walk at low tide, and piled in solid around the posts; and I remembered waking one morning to find it gone, washed out from under us during the night, everything but the rocky underpinnings, all the way out to the tide pools where mussels held to the sharp erosions, crusted hard against the beaks of the circling gulls. Now, the season and the waterline changing, it was all coming back. I remembered, and he was right.