Her Camry wouldn’t make it up Goud’s Trail, and Tony promised he’d take her there in his 4Runner, but so far he hadn’t made time. Asking Scottie was out of the question, not in high season.
Willie was untying her soaked apron when she spotted the keys to Scottie’s old green truck. They were hanging on a nail next to the back door of the kitchen, and they were already in her grasp before she could remind herself: I make bad decisions.
No one seemed to notice, though. Raymond, the cook, was busy making about a dozen burger platters, and Hilda, the teenager they brought in from “a program,” seemed hypnotized by the mango pulp swirling around in the smoothie machine. Scottie was on the floor, and who knew where Tony was—probably telling tall tales in the bar.
Willie slipped out the back and found the old truck where it had been parked for days, up against the grease barrels. She climbed into the cab and felt around for a seatbelt but could only find the buckle half. At least the engine turned on the first try. She rolled out of the lot with the headlights off until she turned onto the highway.
It was pitch black out there except for the lines on the road and the bugs in the headlights. After half an hour she arrived at the sign for Goud’s Trail. Pitted and rocky, the trail had been carved out by miners in the nineteenth century and widened for two-lane traffic sometime in the twentieth. Unmaintained since, the road was now a single lane with its margins collapsed and reclaimed by creosote bushes. Scottie’s truck vibrated, but the going would get worse before it got better. Desert roads always started off passable but degraded the further you went, especially the ones with the word “trail” in their names.
This was not the smartest thing she’d ever done, nor was it the dumbest. It was sort of in the middle-low category. So what if she busted an axle out here in the lonesome dark? How was that any better or worse than sweating out another night in her apartment in Trona?
The ruts smoothed out as the grade pitched upwards into chilled air. Rock walls rose up on either side like monsters in the dark, and the canopy of stars narrowed, lining up single file in the only strip of sky that was still visible.
When the sky spread out again, she’d emerged from the slot canyon to a level apron furnished with a few tall boulders leaning together. Smaller ones crowded below.
“There it is,” she whispered. She pulled off the road onto the apron, and behind one of the boulders she spotted a lighted window. Willie shut off the engine and stared hard until her eyes adjusted.
A light on meant someone was home.
People don’t just give houses away. Scottie had said that repeatedly, and Tony had argued with him, but really, neither one of them knew what this meant to Willie. Otherwise they would have kept their opinions to themselves.
There was Dexon’s Jeep, nearly invisible until the black night sorted into shadows. So he decided to stay, after all.
Willie hopped out of the truck as lightly as possible. “Hello?” she called out, as she tried to get her bearings. A huddle of boulders demarcated the bluff’s edge, and beyond was the vast basin of Centenary, hidden by night except for a tiny red dot, like a firefly fixed in place. A campfire, so far away. The air was different up here, herbal and cool, so unlike the chemical stench of Trona.
“Hello?” she called again. She saw only one window per wall, each emitting a weak but magical light. Having been raised a trespasser, she approached with a stealthy instinct. Struck by the house’s boxy simplicity, she flashed back to all the places she had lived in, each one of which had seemed like an organism ready to digest her. The exception was the trailer she and her mother lived in for three months when she was fifteen. She’d felt comfortable in that drafty tin can, and oddly secure.
Please let this be mine.
She knocked lightly, so as not to wake him. The last thing Willie wanted was for Dexon to come to the door only to say he’d changed his mind. When there was no answer, she took that as cosmic permission to have a look around.
She started at the kitchen window, low to the ground and small. The light inside came from a distant room, but there was enough to make out crucial details. A narrow stove was jammed in next to a battered refrigerator with its brand name in unreadable silver script across a pale door. Those appliances came from different generations, but both were older than Willie. In the dim light they could have been white or gray or olive, she couldn’t tell. Hell, maybe they were pink. The table directly under the window was big enough for two to have breakfast once all the beer bottles were cleared off. The linoleum tile was split in a couple of places, but the gaps were ancient, having bonded with the exposed sub-flooring like scars.
On the opposite wall a picture had been tacked up, but it was a blur.
The kitchen opened out into the front room, but the narrowness of the window prevented Willie from seeing much more.
She crept up to the front window at an angle, ready to duck and run. The light definitely came from a hallway in the back of the house, and the main room was dim. The walls were in bad condition with large, dark broken patches forming continental shapes, and there was a sofa and a chair piled up with junk—newspapers, it looked like. There was a general green tinge to the darkness, as if a poison gas had filled this room in particular.
Willie put her hands around her eyes on the glass. The skin on her shoulders prickled when she recognized the map pieces. Dexon was looking for The Juliet, and he was using the Nuggetz maps to do so.
Then she saw it. A slim, small crescent poking out from behind the sofa. A gray void in the green shadow. It was the tip of a boot, sole exposed, toe pointed to heaven. Willie knew exactly what she was looking at.
It wasn’t the first time she’d found a dead body. It wasn’t even the second or the third, for that matter. This had been happening to her all her life, and she was more than ready for it to stop.
* * *
June 1982: Hardy, West Virginia
Willie Judy was only seven when she found her first dead body, though she didn’t see the whole of it, just a pair of jean-clad legs ending in work boots sticking out from under a blue tarp. The rest of the guy was under the plastic that was weighted down in about five places with encyclopedia volumes. The dust-coated room was broken up, furnished with smashed chairs and a sloping bookshelf with the rest of the encyclopedia books flopped sideways. The dead man’s legs looked like junk, too.
“Mom?” Willie couldn’t remember the way out.
Her mother answered from a hallway. “Willie, where’d you get to?” And then, as she appeared in the doorway, “Oh shit.”
Her mother ran to her and grabbed her up. “Oh honey, oh shit.” She took Willie out through the wrecked kitchen to the back door and onto the sagging porch. Soon they were standing in the weedy lawn with all the dragonflies.
“Carl!” Willie’s mother yelled to the back of the house. Most of the paint had faded from the clapboard and every single window was thoroughly broken. Not even shards of glass stuck in the frames, but there were some with garbage bags hanging in shreds from the sashes.
It wasn’t their house. It was a bandit house, one of many that Willie’s mother and uncle had taken her into, always uninvited, never knocking. Carl and Mona Judy liked their Sunday drives with Willie along, and more times than not they were looking for winding roads they’d never traveled. Carl and Mona loved it, exploring, finding, taking. Willie, however, was more circumspect about their foraging adventures, even if it did mean they had more things than the Judys could otherwise afford, including toys. Willie was always worried that the bandits might return and ambush them.
And now this. She found one at home. Dead.
“Carl, please!” Mona should have shushed, Willie thought. Uncle Carl poked his head out of a second floor window. “What? Is Willie hurt?” Only Carl was allowed to go upstairs in the bandit houses. He knew how to dance over rotted floorboards without getting hurt.
Mona shook her head at him. “They’s a body i
n the parlor under a tarp.”
Willie was impressed by her mother’s steady declaration of the facts. This was a problem, a problem to be resolved.
Carl disappeared from the window and came out of the house in no time, heading towards Mona and the child, frowning like that dead man had spoiled his fun. “Well shit,” he pronounced, taking Willie from Mona, toting her all the way back to the car.
They drove home in silence. Willie fell asleep in the back, the way she always did. When she woke up she was in her own bed in her own cozy home, and the dead man seemed like an inconvenient dream. She assumed the grownups had taken care of it, whatever that meant, and at supper they only talked about the day before, the week ahead, and nothing else. They did not go on another Sunday drive for a long time, at least not with Willie along.
Years later Willie realized that “bandit” houses were actually “abandoned” houses and that Carl and Mona were weekend pickers supplementing their legitimate jobs by going through derelict properties for anything they could use, swap, or sell. Her uncle was a hardware clerk and her mom was a school bus driver.
In the heart of the recession, there were a lot of houses to pick, places left behind as “somewhere” became the middle of nowhere, and life became impossible. Location, location, location. Not even the land had enough value to make the agony of selling worth it.
Willie would have understood this if she’d been the kind of kid who asked questions, but she liked to stay quiet and watch things play out.
The second dead human Willie had ever seen was when she was ten, in Lafayette, Louisiana where they had moved so her mother’s new boyfriend could try his hand at oil rig work. To protect Willie from over-exposure to lurid Deep South Catholicism, they stopped going to church and studied the bible at the kitchen table. Mona liked to brag that Willie was public schooled and “home-churched,” but no matter how carefully one hides, martyrs will find you to show off their bleeding wounds. Willie found Father Samuel at the bottom of a coulee with his head cracked open. She’d been walking to a friend’s house early in the morning and there he was. Palmetto bugs swarmed his wet parts, but she felt more fascination than fear. Willie sat on the edge of the coulee and waited for an adult to come along. When asked why she hadn’t run home immediately, Willie said, “I couldn’t just leave him alone like that.”
And then a couple of years later, the Judys moved to East Texas where Willie saw her third dead body. Her best friend’s teenaged cousin had hung herself in the woods that provided a barrier between the schoolyard and the chicken processing plant. It was a commonly used shortcut, but Willie was the first to spot Eileen Gauthier, strung up with yellow plastic rope. She was especially curious as to why Eileen wasn’t wearing underpants, a fact made apparent as her floral culottes fluttered overhead. Her shoes were missing too, and Willie searched for them while she waited for an older kid or an adult to come along.
A dead bandit, a dead priest, a dead girl. That was a lot for a girl to see before she’d had her first period, but Willie Judy always kept her head. She became interested in the condition of death, death on its own terms, disentangled from the why. She had learned quickly that death wasn’t just a part of life, it was the most important thing that ever happened.
And then the Judys themselves fell, one by one, into early graves. As Willie grew older she realized that she would never grow very old at all.
* * *
March 20, 2005: Centenary, NV
The front door to The Mystery House was unlocked and once inside, Willie banged into an unexpected clutter of boxes left on the doormat. She groped the wall and found a series of six switches, only one of which seemed to work. Overhead a bare bulb hummed to life.
Rigg Dexon was flat out on the floor. For a moment Willie thought: maybe he’s just dead drunk, but in her heart she knew she was only half right. She crouched by his side and lowered her ear to his mouth. Nothing. She took his pulse. Nothing.
Nothing except a syringe stuck in Dexon’s arm.
He was green. There were green maps stacked everywhere, and there was still a greenish glow that tinted the air in the room, even after the light was turned on. Broken glass littered the floor. Willie saw now that some of the wallboard had been chopped and pried away to reveal rows and rows of bottles embedded in cement.
She examined Dexon from head to toe without touching him. There were a couple of unsettling details, apart from the obvious. One was a piece of notebook paper folded into his shirt pocket. Even without removing it, she could see that there was an ink-heavy message inside. Another detail was the white paper bag on the couch. Carter used bags just like it, and only yesterday Dexon had gone off to pick a fight with him.
Willie sat on the floor against the wall, staring at the man who had given her such hope. Dexon’s face didn’t look real, his features too symmetrical and sharp. His mustache just sat there as if it could be snatched away. Corpses always looked fake, but in this case she could see he’d had work done; the skin hung over the nose, cheekbones, and chin like a tarp.
That white paper sack seemed to glow in the general green gloom.
“You son of a bitch.”
She crawled over to him again, through the plaster and the shards. The needle in Dexon’s arm was only barely inserted under the skin, but she could see a little blood in the barrel. Willie climbed over to the sofa and grabbed the bag and hissed at what she saw inside. She’d always assumed the bags were for the small stuff that went with the big stuff, hardware, belts, plugs, etc. Carter always dropped a couple in her trunk when she made a parts run. It never occurred to her to check the contents. Why would she? Auto repair was the dullest subject she could imagine.
“Damn you Carter, and damn you Dexon,” she muttered.
There was no landline that she could find. She had to get back to the Alkali to call the police.
It was all a mess. All ruined. Soon everyone would know that a famous actor had OD’d in a legendary house in Death Valley, a house that was supposed to be Willie’s house now. She could not stop eyeing that piece of paper in Dexon’s pocket. A message in a bottle house.
* * *
March 21, 2005: Death Valley, CA
Willie slept until one in the afternoon, waking in the stifling heat of a trailer. Scottie had set up two 48-foot singlewides in the back corner of the campground near the dumpsters. The trailers were for seasonal employees to live in rent-free in exchange for security and maintenance. There was a shotgun just inside the front door.
The AC was running, but it was no match against a Valley afternoon. Willie lay in the bunk trying to remember how to breathe when she realized it wasn’t the heat that woke her. Someone was pounding at the trailer door. Finally, she thought. The deputy who took her report seemed more annoyed than interested, inconvenienced by the late hour. Now she imagined all kinds of law enforcement out there, forming a wedge of power to overtake her and force her into revealing truths both factual and metaphysical.
“Just a minute.” The knocking stopped. Willie struggled with the cheap robe Scottie had given her from the camp store, still in its plastic packet, and when she shook it loose, the square lines where it was folded remained sharply visible. She was skinny enough that the robe covered her completely, but the fabric was so light it didn’t hang so much as it floated stiffly over her breasts and thighs.
No cops out there. Only Scottie on the stoop with a take-out container and a Coke from the restaurant.
“Hangover food,” he announced. When he climbed inside, he looked around and behaved as if the ceiling was lower than it actually was. “I haven’t been inside one of these for a while. Cramped but tidy. Hate to see what Terry’s done with his.” Terry was a beet-faced dry drunk Scottie’d hired to clean the guest rooms.
Willie felt a headache coming on, as if she really were hung over. “Did the Deputy call or come back?”
“No. Why would he?” Scottie put the food on the tiny table in the kitc
henette and started going through the drawers. He found a fork and a cup and set the table. Then he sat down so he could watch Willie eat.
“Well, come on.” His grin was unsettling, given the circumstances. It was the same grin he flashed in all the magazine photos—snapshots from the finish line.
“Thanks. I just thought the cops might have more questions.” Willie pulled the robe a little tighter. She sat across from him and lifted the plastic lid from the take-out container. A cheese and veggie omelet. She tried to look grateful, even though there were too many flavors and textures present for her comfort.
No follow up from the law. What kind of place was this? She began to pick at the parts of the omelet that were least involved with other parts. She took a big gulp of cola.
Scottie said, “Well, I don’t think they know that place is legally yours. If you want I’ll call later, see when they can release the property.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Was it messy? You may need to hire a special cleaner or something.”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“You seemed pretty shaken. I mean, we’re all upset, of course.”
“I’ll be fine.” Willie discovered a shred of pepper in the egg. “But I don’t think I’ll make it into work today.”
Scottie half chuckled. Willie could smell it on him, his insecurity. His want. His need to be needed. Her being out of commission ignited in him a paternal predation that was as ugly as it was sweet.
Willie gave him a little peep under the robe, showing him the edge of an ugly bruise while keeping her breast covered. “Gets worse the farther up it goes,” she said. “We need to rethink my suitability for kitchen work.”
“On the contrary. Your instincts are spot on. That’s why you got hurt. You just need to learn how to fall properly. Crucial skill in food service, to fall right and save the dishes. Shouldn’t be an either or choice.”
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