The Dark Country

by Dennis Etchison

  "But how? I mean, what do they eat if—?"

  "Dates. Those are palm trees, remember? And each other, probably. You've never seen a dead one on the ground, have you?"

  Martin admitted he hadn't.

  "Not that way with the bats, though. They have to come out at night. Maybe they even hit the rats. I never saw that. But they have mouths to feed, don't they? There's nothing much to eat up in the hills. It must be the same with the peasants. They have families. Wouldn't you?"

  "I hate to say this. But. You did lock up, didn't you?"

  Will laughed dryly. "Come on. I've got something for you. I think it's time you met the nurses."

  Martin made a quick sidetrip to check the doors at their place, and they went on. They covered the length of the beach before Will found the porch he was looking for. Martin reached out to steady his friend, and almost fell himself. He was getting high. It was easy.

  As they let themselves in, the beach glimmered at their backs with crushed abalone shells and scuttling hermit crabs. Beyond the oil tankers, the uncertain outline of the island

  loomed in the bay. It was called Dead Man's Island, Will told him.

  He woke with the sensation that his head was cracking open. Music or something like it in the other room, throbbing through the thin walls like the pounding of surf. Voices. An argument of some kind. He brushed at the cobwebs. He had been lost in a nightmare of domination and forced acquiescence before people who meant to do him harm. It returned to him in fragments. What did it mean? He shook it off and rolled out of bed.

  There was the floor he had pressed with his hand last night to stop the room from spinning. There was the nurse, tangled in the sheets next to him. He guessed she was the nurse. He couldn't see her face.

  He went into the bathroom. He took a long draught of water from the faucet before he came out. He raised his head and the room spun again. The light from the window hurt his eyes— actual physical pain. He couldn't find his sock. He tottered into the other room.

  A young man with blown-dry hair was playing the tape deck too loudly. The sound vibrated the bright air, which seemed thin and brittle, hammering it like beaten silver. There was the girl in the blue tank top, still seated next to the smoldering fireplace. An empty bottle of Damiana Liqueur was balanced against her thigh. Her eyes were closed and her face was stony. He wohdered if she had slept that way, propped upright all night. On the table were several Parker Brothers-type games from stateside: Gambler, Creature Features, The Game of Life. A deck of Gaiety Brand nudie cards, with a picture on the box of a puppy pulling a bikini top out of a purse. Someone had been playing solitaire. Martin couldn't remember.

  There was a commotion outside.

  "What's that?" he said, shielding his eyes.

  "Talking Heads," said the young man. He showed Martin the tape box. "They're pretty good. That lead guitar line is hard to play. It's so repetitious."

  "No, I mean . . ."

  Martin scratched and went into the kitchen. It was unoccupied, except for a cricket chirping somewhere behind the refrigerator. Breakfast was in process; eggs were being

  scrambled in a blender the nurses had brought with them from home. Martin protected his eyes again and looked outside.

  There was Will. And there were*three or four tan beach boys from the other party. And the cop. He wasn't doing his leg exercises this morning. They were having an argument.

  Martin stumbled out.

  "But you can't do that," one of them was saying. "Stay cool, okay, motherfuck? You want the whole beach to know?"

  "You think they don't already?"

  "The hell they do! We drug him over out of the way. No one'll—"

  "No one but the maids!"

  "That's what I'm saying. You guys are a bunch of jack-offs. Jesus Christ! I'm about this close to kicking your ass right now, do you know that?"

  "All right, all right!" said Will. "That kind of talk's just digging us in deeper. Now let's run through the facts. One—"

  Martin came up. They shot looks at each other that both startled him and made him unreasonably afraid for their safety as well as his own. They stopped talking, their eyes wild, as if they had gobbled a jar of Mexican amphetamines.

  Will took him aside.

  "We've got to do something!" said the one with the souvenir hat. "What're you—"

  "Hold on," said Will. "We're all in this together, like it or—"

  "I'm not the one who—"

  "—Like it or not. Now just try to keep a tight asshole another minute, will you, while I talk to my friend Jack? It's his neck, too."

  They started back up the beach. Will propelled him ahead of the others, as to a rendezvous of great urgency.

  "They got him," said Will.

  "Who?"

  "The thief, whoever he was. Poor bastard. Two guys from next door cornered him outside our place. Sometime around dawn, the way I get it. Apparently he fell on the rocks. He's dead. They found me here a little while ago. Now—"

  "What?"

  "—Now there's no use shitting bricks. It's done. What we

  have to do is think of a way to put ourselves in the clear—fast. We're the strangers here."

  "We can make it look like an accident," said the one in the hat. "Those rocks are—"

  "Accident, hell," said the security cop. "It was self-defense, breaking and entering. We caught him and blew him away. No court in—"

  "This isn't the USA, you dumb shit. You know what greaser jails are like? They hate our guts. All they want's our money. This buddy of mine, he got . . ."

  And so it went till they reached the porch, the surrounding beach littered with the casings of burnt-out rockets, vomit drying on the rocks, broken clam shells bleaching between the rocks, the rocks like skulls. And here blood, vivid beyond belief even on the bricks of the patio, great splotches and gouts of it, like gold coins burnished in the sun, a trail that led them in the unforgiving light of day to the barbecue pit and the pile of kindling stacked in the charcoal shade.

  Martin knelt and tore at the logs.

  And there.

  The body was hidden inside a burlap sack. It was the body of the boy who had come by yesterday, the boy who had wanted to sell his jewelry.

  He felt his stomach convulse. The small face was scraped raw, the long eyelashes caked and flaking, the dark skin driven from two of the ribs to show white muscle and bone. A great fear overtook Martin, like wings settling upon him, blocking out the sun. He folded under them momentarily and dry-heaved in the ashes.

  Will was pacing the narrow patio like a prisoner in a cell, legs pumping out and back over the cracking cement, pivoting faster and faster at the edges until he was practically spinning, generating a hopeless rage that would not be denied but could not be released. His hands were shaking violently, and his arms 'and shoulders and body. He looked around with slitted eyes, chin out, lips drawn in, jaws grinding stone. Far down the beach by the Point an elderly man came walking, hesitating at each house and searching each lot. He was carrying a leather case.

  Will said, "You kicked him to death, didn't you? You stomped this child until he was dead." Then, his voice a hiss,

  he began to curse them between his teeth with an unspeakable power and vileness. The one in the hat tried to break in. He started shouting.

  "It was dark! He could've been anyone! What was he doing creepin' around here? He could've been—"

  But Will was upon him, his arms corded, his fingers going for the throat. The others closed in. People on the beach were turning to stare. Martin saw it all as if in slow motion: himself rising at last to his full height, leaping into it a split-second before the others could grab hold, as he fell on their arms to stop the thumbs from Will's eyes, to break Will's hands from the other's throat. Everything stopped. Martin stepped between them as the young one fell back to the flagstone wall. Martin raised his right hand, flattened and angled it like a knife. With his left he cupped the back of the young man's neck, holding it al
most tenderly. The young man's eyes were almost kind. They were eyes Martin had seen all his life, outside recruiting offices and Greyhound bus depots the years over, and they were a law unto themselves. He brought his right hand down sharp and hard across the face, again, again, three times, like pistol shots. The tan went white, then red where he had slapped it. For a moment nobody said anything. The old man kept coming.

  They passed motorcycle cops, overheated VW's, Jeeps, Chevy Luvs, Ford Couriers with camper shells, off-road vehicles with heavy-duty shocks and, a mile outside of town, a half-acre of pastel gravestones by the main road. Martin fit as best he could among the plastic water jugs, sleeping bags and Instamatic cameras in the back seat. The boys from next door were piled in with him, the one in the hat in front and Will at the controls of the four-wheel drive.

  The twenty-mile access road behind Ensenada wound them higher and higher, pummeling them continuously until they were certain that the tie rods or the A-frame or their bodies would shake loose and break apart at the very next turn. The lane shrank to a mere dirt strip, then to a crumbling shale-and-sandstone ledge cut impossibly around the backs of the hills, a tortuous serpentine above abandoned farmland and the unchecked acreage between the mountains and the sea. Twice at least one of the wheels left the road entirely; they had to pile

  out and lay wild branches under the tires to get across fissures that had no bottom. Martin felt his kidneys begin to ache under the endless pounding. One of the boys threw up and continued to retch over the side until Will decided they had gone far enough, but no one opened his mouth to complain. After more than an hour, they set the hand brake at the start of a primitive downslope, blocked the wheels with granite chips and stumbled the rest of the way, numb and reeling.

  The silence was overpowering. Nothing moved, except for the random scrabbling of lizards and the falling of individual leaves and blades of grass. As they dragged the sack down to the meadows, Martin concentrated on the ribbon of dirt they had driven, watching for the first sign of another car, however unlikely that was. A small, puddled heat mirage shimmered on the dust, coiled and waiting to be splashed. A squirrel darted across the road, silhouetted as it paused in stop-motion, twitched its pointed head and then ran on, disappearing like an escaped shooting gallery target. Great powdered monarch butterflies aimlessly swam the convection currents; like back home, he thought. Yes, of course; I should have known. Only too much like home.

  "Dig here," said Will.

  The old wound in Martin's foot was hurting him again. He had thought it would be healed by now, but it wasn't. He rocked back wearily on one heel. A withered vine caught at his ankle. It snapped easily with a dull, fleshy sound as he shook free. He took another step, and something moist and solid broke underfoot. He looked down.

  He kicked at the grass. It was only a tiny melon, one of dozens scattered nearby and dying on the vine. He rolled it over, revealing its soft underbelly. Too much rain this season, he thought absently; too much or too little, nourishing them excessively or not enough. What was the answer? He picked it up and lobbed it over their heads. It splattered on the road in a burst of pink. Watermelons, he thought, while fully-formed seeds pale as unborn larvae slithered off his shoe and into the damp grass. Who planted them here? And who will return for the harvest, only to find them already gone to seed? He stooped and wiped his hand. There was a faint but unmistakable throb and murmur in the ground, as though through a railroad track, announcing an unseen approach from miles away.

  "What are you going to do, Jackie?" Martin stared back at Will. He hadn't expected the question, not now.

  "It's like this," said Will, taking him to one side. "Michael, for one, wants to get back to his own van and head on deeper into Baja, maybe San Quintin, lay low for a few days. He wasn't registered, so there's no connection. Some of the others sound like they're up for the same, or for going north right away, tonight. Kevin's due to check out today, anyway."

  "And you?"

  "Don't know yet. I haven't decided. I'll probably stay on for appearances, but you do what you want. I wouldn't worry about the maid or anyone coming by to check up. Anyway, we hosed off the patio. Nobody else saw a thing, I'm sure. The girls don't know anything about it."

  There was a grunt. The sack, being lowered, had split open at the seams. Hands hurried to reclose it.

  "What's that?"

  Will grabbed a wrist. A silver bracelet inlaid with polished turquoise glittered against a bronze tan in the afternoon light. "I—I bought it." "Sure you did," said Will.

  "I brought it with me on the trip. Ask my girl. She—" Will stripped it off the arm and flung it into the shallow grave. "You want to get out of this alive, kiddo? That kind of work can be traced. Or didn't you think of that? You didn't think, did you? What else did you steal from him while you were at it yesterday? Is that why he came back last night? Is it?"

  "Lookit, man, where do you get off—"

  "We all hang together," said Will, "or we all hang together. Get it?"

  He got to his knees to close the sack. As an afterthought, he reached deep and rifled the dead child's pockets for anything that might tie in with Quintas Papagayo.

  His hand stopped. He withdrew a wad of paper money which fell open, a flower on his palm. A roll of American dollars, traveler's checks, credit cards.

  "Hey, that's—"

  "I had eighty bucks on me when—"

  Martin joined him in examining the roll. The checks were

  signed NORMAN WINSLOW. Two of the cards, embossed on the front and signed on the back, read JACK MARTIN.

  "Knew I was right!" said the one in the felt hat. "Fuck if I wasn't! Lookit that! The little son of a bitch. . . ."

  Martin straight-armed the wheel, running in darkness.

  He reminded himself of the five-dollar bill clipped to the back of his license. Then he remembered that his wallet was flat, except for the credit cards. Motorcycle cops passed him like fugitive Hell's Angels. He kicked on the lights of his rented car and thought of the last news tape of the great Karl Wallenda. He had been running, too, though in wind, not fog, toward or away from something.

  Did he look back, I wonder? Was that why it happened?

  . . . Heading for the end, his last that day was weak. Or maybe he looked ahead that once, saw it was the same, and just gave up the ghost. No, not Wallenda. For him the game was running while pretending not to—or the other way around. Was that his private joke? Even in Puerto Rico, for him the walk was all. Keep your head clear, he wanted to tell Wallenda. For that was how it finished, stopping to consider. But Wallenda must have known; he had been walking for years. Still he should have remembered. . . . Martin put on his brights, gripped the steering wheel and made for the border.

  He turned on the radio, found an American station.

  It was playing a song by a group called The Tubes. He remembered the Tivoli Night club, the elevated band playing "Around the World" and "A Kiss to Build a Dream On." He remembered Hussong's Cantina, the knife fight that happened, his trip to the Blow Hole, policia with short hair and semiautomatic rifles. The housetrailers parked on the Point, the Point obscured by mist. The military guns with silencers . . .

  The doll whose parts had been severed, its eyes opening in moonlight.

  Shaking, he turned his mind to what lay ahead. He wanted to see someone; he tried to think of her face. Her eyes would find his there under the beam ceiling, the spider plants in the corners growing into the carpet, the waves on Malibu beach, the Pleiades as bright, shining on what was below: the roots between the rocks, the harbor lights like eyes, the anemones closed inward, gourds and giant mushrooms, the endless pull

  of riptide, the seagulls white as death's-heads, the police with trimmed moustaches, the dark ships at anchor. . . .

  He came to a bridge on the tollway. Ahead lay the border.

  To his right a sign, a turnoff that would take him back into Baja.

  He sat with the motor running, trying to pick a direction. />
  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  IT ONLY COMES OUT AT NIGHT

  SITTING IN THE CORNER, WHIMPERING QUIETLY

  THE WALKING MAN

  WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE

  DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST

  THE PITCH

  YOU CAN GO NOW

  TODAY'S SPECIAL

  THE MACHINE DEMANDS A SACRIFICE

  CALLING ALL MONSTERS

  THE DEAD LINE

  THE LATE SHIFT

  THE NIGHTHAWK

  IT WILL BE HERE SOON

  THE DARK COUNTRY