American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She watches as Mrs. Benjamin lays him out on the couch cushions. “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “I don’t know,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I have never witnessed anyone attempt to tell someone something not meant to be discussed. There are rules, you see.”

  “I don’t. Will he die?”

  Mrs. Benjamin laughs. “Oh,” she says. “Aren’t you so sweet.” Then she peers at Mona, and all her good humor is gone again. “What I wonder is, why would he tell you such a thing? It’s not for you to know, dear. It’s very bad for us. We’re sensitive about such things, you see.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Mona says. “I don’t know what the hell he meant by anything he said, either. None of it made sense to me.”

  Mrs. Benjamin surveys Mona for a long time. “He meant for you to do something, didn’t he. He trusted you. I can’t imagine why, but he did. He had—he has—intentions. It’s likely he even knew this would happen to him, I suppose.” She looks back at Parson, who lies unconscious on the couch with his mouth open. “You do know, my dear,” she says absentmindedly, “that I could kill you, if I wished? I could tear your head from your neck, or gut you with my bare fingers. It’s allowed, you see. You’re not from here.”

  “I’d drop you before you moved,” says Mona, who begins backing away slowly.

  “Hm,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “No. I doubt it. I very much doubt it.” She frowns. “But I won’t. He was doing something. He knew something. Maybe something I don’t. Parson’s always been quite damnably good at knowing things. So I’ll let you be. For now.” She picks Parson back up. Once more he seems to weigh no more than a feather to her. Without a word, she begins walking toward the open door.

  “Where are you taking him?” asks Mona.

  “To my home, where it’s safer,” says Mrs. Benjamin over her shoulder.

  “Why’s it safe there but not here?”

  “Because I’ll be there, silly,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But maybe nowhere’s safe anymore. If I were you, dear—and I’m not, but if I were—I would stay inside for the rest of the night. I know you probably have something important to do, but I assure you, it can wait until morning. Who knows what’s out here with us? Even I can’t say.” And she totters across the parking lot with the limp body in her arms until she passes out of the light of the neon sign, and disappears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A bump for David Dord isn’t a bump for your average cocaine user, if such a thing could even be said to exist. He does not sniff at a tiny dot of coke balanced on the rim of a novelty spoon, or haltingly insufflate a fragile line running along the edge of a bowie knife. No, Dord prefers his cocaine to be administered in heaps, hillocks, veritable mountains, tumbling, tumbling piles and pyramids and pylons of cocaine. He wants each bump to be so significant that he has trouble actually getting it into his nostril, like a man wrestling a big sandwich into his mouth. He wants it to inadvertently coat his upper lip and maybe his chin and cheeks; he wants there to be accidents, damn it, needless, wasteful accidents, immense avalanches of cocaine lost en route between the bag and his sinus lining. For David Dord does not use or abuse cocaine (and the difference between the two when they refer to an illegal, highly addictive drug is mystifying to Dord); no, he applies it liberally and generously, not only to his mucous membranes and from there the tangle of tissues that form his nervous system, but also to his face, neck, shoulders, arms, fingers, and, if he’s entertaining someone, maybe even his junk.

  This is because Dord holds to one rule and one rule only: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And you had better motherfucking believe Dord has it. Dord has it big-time. He’s been sitting on a pile of gold ever since things started picking up at the Roadhouse. Ever since they got that visitor from Wink, in fact.

  “You’re getting it all over the goddamn seats,” says Zimmerman. He glances at Dord disapprovingly as he pilots his Chevy truck around another M. C. Escher–like bend in the road.

  “So?” says Dord. He takes another pinch from the bag (which never leaves his vest pocket), places it in the general vicinity of his nose, and takes a big waft. He can feel that peculiar banana perfume start broiling away in the bottom front of his brain. Soon it will suffuse each lobe and tickle his spine, making everything dance and jitter to an engaging rhythm.

  “You do know that we’re doing some pretty fucking high-pressure shit here, right, Dave?” asks Zimmerman.

  “I been made aware.”

  “So it probably isn’t too advisable to be coked to the gills for this, is what I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying. I’d generally argue in the opposite direction, though.”

  “And why is that?”

  Dord stares into the highway ahead of them. The headlights make pools of light on the asphalt. Sometimes it feels as if they are chasing the pools rather than following the road, like they are about to leap up off the earth and dive into that glittering stream of tarred rock and white streaks. “You been in to see Norris lately?” asks Dord.

  Zimmerman shifts uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. “No.”

  “Well. That’s why.”

  “Norris is why you’re getting fucked up?”

  “Sort of, sure.” Dord takes a massive pinch of coke—costing upwards of seventy bucks, he’d guess—and rubs it on his teeth. Then he laughs, amused by his own decadence. He’s worked for dealers and movers before, but never on this level. Bolan is the prime conduit of a variety of interesting substances for most of the American Southwest, and apparently he’s able to fund this little venture solely through the goodwill of the man from Wink, that spooky fuck in the panama hat.

  Or at least the revenue his heroin brings in. But as things have heated up in Wink (and especially since Norris staggered into the Roadhouse, shrieking like a banshee with his skin cracked like parched earth and oozing something yellow), Bolan’s cared less and less about keeping an eye on his product, which has allowed several people—well, only Dord, really—to go about self-applying that product with a zeal usually only seen in infants eating pudding.

  They give you an inch, you take a fucking hemisphere, Dord thinks. Because after all, this shit ain’t lasting. He knows that whatever’s happening in Wink, things won’t stay put for long. Bolan and his crew are holding on to the wolf’s ears with their goddamn fingernails, though Dord seems the only one to have cheerfully accepted this.

  “What road was it again?” asks Zimmerman.

  Dord pulls out a shred of paper and squints at it. He has to shut one eye to get the words to stop hopping around. “Copper Valley.”

  “Fuck,” says Zimmerman. “That’s right over near Weringer’s.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t much care for revisiting that place.”

  “Why? Ain’t he dead? You’re the guy who did him in, I thought.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Is that not the case? Did you fib to the big man?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Dord.”

  Dord chuckles, rolls down the window, and sticks his head out into the night. The lights of the town turn to brilliant streaks along the cliffs.

  “Don’t do that!” hisses Zimmerman.

  “Why not?” asks Dord.

  “It’ll attract attention,” says Zimmerman. He grabs Dord and hauls him inside. “Roll it up.”

  “Aw, come on.”

  “Roll it up, damn it.”

  Groaning, Dord obeys. “You’re no fun, you know that, Mike?”

  Zimmerman eyes the side of the road. “You don’t come to Wink often, do you, Dave?”

  “I come a tolerable amount.”

  Zimmerman laughs. “Horseshit, you do.”

  “I do. I swear I do.”

  “What’d Bolan last send you out here for, then?”

  Dord crosses his arms sulkily and mutters something.

  “What’s that?” asks Zimmerman.

  “Box,” says Dord.

  “Box? Box
what?”

  “Had to deliver a box,” says Dord angrily.

  Zimmerman caws laughter. “A box? He had you deliver a box? And when was this, a year ago? More?”

  “It was a goddamn important box, I’ll have you know.”

  Zimmerman is so tickled by this that he starts pounding the steering wheel.

  “Fuck you, Mike,” says Dord. “It ain’t funny. He just… he just don’t appreciate my talents.”

  “I guess he should have you test the coke,” says Zimmerman. He looks Dord over. “Though I guess he wouldn’t want to have you bathing in it. What the fuck, Dord, you try and take it in by osmosis?”

  “This is a lifestyle choice, Mike,” says Dord.

  “And what lifestyle would you be choosing, exactly?”

  “I’m living it. Living the dream. I’m living like a fucking rock star, Mike, one hundred percent. Fucking Def Leppard, that kind of shit. You ever lived like that, Mike?”

  “No,” says Zimmerman.

  “You’re missing out, then. You ought to give it a shot.” Dord ruminates on this for a moment. “You ever hear about how Def Leppard, like, at this one party at a hotel, they got this chick to put a baby tiger shark up her cooter?”

  “Did you really just say the word cooter, Dave?” asks Zimmerman.

  “Chick had nine orgasms,” says Dord. “Nine fucking orgasms. Can you believe it? Nine.”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “Well. That’s some crazy shit right there. I can dig that shit, though. Living loud’s the only way to live, I say.”

  Zimmerman gives a noncommittal grunt as they drive by the town library. It’s a white limestone, space-age-looking structure that looks like it could take off and zip through the stratosphere at any moment. It stays lit up at night, which makes it a vaguely disconcerting sight in the darkness. Dord can just make out someone standing motionless in the window, and he turns to see, wondering who’d be at the library in the middle of the night.

  “Don’t look,” says Zimmerman softly.

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t, all right? People don’t live loud around here, Dave. Take that as a word of advice.”

  “Fuck that.”

  Zimmerman sighs and points the truck into the hills.

  They come to the spot after about twenty minutes. Zimmerman’s been cruising at five or ten miles an hour, murmuring to Dord to keep his eyes open, when they spot the glitter of something lying in the road. He immediately brakes and throws the car in park. Then he hops out and flicks on a flashlight.

  “Looky,” he says, and points it at the road.

  A string of tire spikes runs across the asphalt. There’s a big gap in the middle, and some thick tire tracks just beyond.

  “They got something,” says Zimmerman. He follows the tire tracks with his flashlight, but the beam fades before it can find the end.

  “What the fuck are these?” says Dord. “Why’d anyone put these out here?”

  But Zimmerman just laughs, grabs a tarp from the back of the truck, and motions Dord on.

  They walk for about thirty yards before Zimmerman comes to a halt. He mutters a swear, dismayed. “Wish I’d brought some overalls,” he says, and he flashes something in the middle of the road.

  At first the only thing Dord’s eyes can track is the color purple, and he’s convinced there’s just a big purple slug lying in the middle of the road, because that’s exactly what it looks like. But as they approach and his eyes adjust, he sees it’s not purple, or at least it wasn’t originally: once the thing was blue, a very pale shade of blue, but since it is now soaked in red the two colors have mixed to form a bizarrely vibrant purple.

  The thing is a man. A man in a pale blue suit. But it’s like someone popped a firework out of the back of his head, covering his body in bright red blood.

  “Holy shit,” says Dord. “Is that guy dead?”

  “I sure hope so,” says Zimmerman. He unrolls the tarp and lays it down next to the body. “Come on, help me roll this out.”

  “Wait. Wait, I thought we were just gonna go pick something up.”

  “We are. What did you think we were going to pick up? You thought this was another one of your high-pressure box jobs, Dave?”

  “Well I thought someone would’ve mentioned if it was a goddamn dead body! Why didn’t they get Dee to do it?”

  “Dee is off doing something else important,” says Zimmerman. Then he scratches his head. “Shit. I forgot something. Look around for a gun.”

  “Where? On the ground?”

  “No, in the goddamn trees,” says Zimmerman. “Yes, on the ground. Jesus Christ…”

  They both stoop and squint as Zimmerman flashes the beam around the road. Finally there’s a glint of metal below the dead man’s arm.

  “There it is,” says Zimmerman. “Grab it, will you.”

  Dord is wishing he weren’t quite so high right now, and with trembling hands he grabs the dead man’s wrist and lifts his arm (and who would have ever thought a man’s arm would be so heavy) and reaches underneath. When he touches the gun he screams and whips his hand back.

  “Quiet, damn it!” says Zimmerman. “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s covered in blood! And it’s cold!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” says Zimmerman. “Will you sack up and grab the thing?”

  Wincing, Dord eases the bloody gun out from underneath the body. He holds it away from himself with two fingers, as one would a smelly sock. “What… what do I do with it?”

  Zimmerman rolls the body onto the tarp with the practiced movements of a veteran. “Stick it in your pocket or something.”

  “What! I ain’t doing that! That’s fucked up, Mike.”

  “Dord, you are either sticking it in your pocket or I am going to stick it somewhere that’ll make you bowlegged for quite a while, all right?”

  Dord swallows a cry as he slides the gun in his pocket and the cold wetness soaks through to his thigh. Then he stops. “Wait a minute. So, did I just get… like, DNA evidence all over myself?”

  Zimmerman laughs hoarsely as he starts wrapping the body up, rolling it tight like a particularly gruesome cigar. “Don’t worry about it. No one’s going to come looking for this guy.”

  “Why not?” Dord sees there’s something lying in the middle of the road, about ten feet away from the body. It’s a white panama hat, though its top is blown out and it’s spattered with blood.

  Dord remembers something and peers at the body being folded up in the tarp. His jittering eyes trace over the once-Easter-egg-blue suit and the white tie…

  “Wait a minute!” says Dord. “This is that creepy motherfucker of Bolan’s!”

  “Is that a fact,” says Zimmerman. “Please grab this creepy motherfucker’s legs.”

  “What happened? Who shot him, Mike?”

  “Just grab his goddamn legs, Dave.”

  Dord is too surprised by this realization to argue. He picks up the body (which, like the arm, is really just shockingly heavy) and helps Bolan drag it to the truck. “So are we out of business? This guy was the one footing the bills, right?”

  But Zimmerman just laughs again, which doesn’t calm Dord at all. But it’s not like much would right now, short of a couple of Vicodin and a shot of bourbon, which is his usual post-party concoction.

  They toss the body in the back of the truck. There’s an odd tinkling sound when it lands. Zimmerman looks it over with the flashlight. “Aw, damn,” he says. “We forgot about the tire spikes… Jesus, they’re all stuck in his back.”

  “I ain’t looking,” Dord says quickly.

  “I’m not asking you to. Ah, well. It’s not like he’s going to complain. Come on, let’s get hopping.”

  Zimmerman has to pull a three-point U-turn to get going back the way they came. He lights a cigarette, and his craggy, weathered features are reflected in the truck’s window, making it seem some flickering specter is floating outside.

 
; “And Bolan knew just where that guy was gonna be?” asks Dord.

  “Kind of,” says Zimmerman.

  “How? Did we shoot him? This was a play of ours, wasn’t it?”

  Zimmerman gives Dord a pitying look. “Dave, do you have any idea how things work around here?”

  “Yeah. Well. Kind of. Kind of, I guess.”

  Zimmerman clucks and shakes his head as he makes an abrupt turn. They wind away from the town and the mountains, out into some of the flatter countryside surrounding Wink. The headlights catch stray chamisa sprawling into the road and make them look like bursting fireworks.

  “They work the same way here as everywhere, once you think about it,” says Zimmerman. “Because you might think the chain stops at Bolan, but it doesn’t. Bolan’s got his superiors, too.”

  “The guy from Wink,” says Dord. He glances over his shoulder. “The guy in the back of the truck.”

  “Maybe,” says Zimmerman. “Bolan’s got… let’s say, a phone. He’s got a phone that rings every once in a while, and when he answers it a voice on the other end tells him what to do. But I guarantee you—I just guarantee you—that that voice on the other end’s got someone of his own telling him what to do. Maybe they don’t call him, maybe they have meetings or send letters, who knows. And above that guy, there’s someone else. There’s always someone else. A man tells a man tells a man.”

  Dord’s brain feels like it’s bubbling away as he tries to absorb what Zimmerman’s telling him. Everything is crackling: there is dust striking the car, pebbles pinging off the undercarriage, the tarp in the back keeps wrinkling as the dead body (oh my God we have a dead body in the back of the truck) shifts around with each turn. The chamisa leaves blue streaks on his eyes and the country outside the window looks positively lunar, and as Zimmerman’s voice chants in his ear he wonders if the truck will just lift off and go sailing through the stars.

  “But here’s the thing—none of them really know what’s going on,” says Zimmerman. “They think they do. They really, really want to believe that. But they don’t. All they’ve got to go on is the say-so of the guy above them. And sure, somewhere way, way up the ladder, there’s a top. A guy at the top of the chain, talking down at everyone. Everyone passing his word along, like gossip. And his word is like the word of God, I guess.”