The baby was gone.
The baby was lost.
A quick glance at the bedside clock, the hour just shy of three in the afternoon.
A prescription bottle of tranquilizers unopened, a full glass of water on Connie’s bedside table.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and watched the thin black line moving and not moving across the ceiling. Ants. A caravan of ants. A mass exodus. Streaming in from somewhere behind the blinds, making for the hallway beyond the bedroom, to a warm spot in the attic, or to fresh water in the bathroom.
He got up, wearing the clothes he had put on to go to work that morning, and went into the hallway. Of course, he had not gone to work. He had not gone for several days. He stood barefooted in the hallway and followed the line of ants where it trekked in a loose diagonal down the wall and behind an old family portrait, his own face reflected at him from the glass: twenty years younger, fewer lines, though the first were forming. Behind the glass the faded sepia tones of his mother and father, he and his two brothers seated in front of them, both older, both killed in the war, the portrait hanging on the wall between the bathroom and—
Amy’s room
—the nursery.
From a high shelf in the hall closet he took down a can of poison aerosol. He turned toward the nursery, and as he did, he happened to notice, on the glass surface of the family portrait, a single black speck crawling across his mother’s cheek. He raised his thumb to wipe out the trespasser, and he saw that the portrait was not really of his mother and father but of himself and his wife and the daughter who was not to be.
Amy.
She was thirteen in this picture, which had been—
would be
—taken, he somehow knew, by a department store photographer, years hence. Connie’s idea. A family portrait against a backdrop of mottled blue, something they could frame and wrap for friends at Christmas: the father in his charcoal suit and matching tie and white Stetson, the mother in her white silk blouse and navy JC Penney skirt, the daughter in her rainbow-banded sweater and yellow plastic hair band. Her face freckled.
The single ant crawled on, rejoined the ranks marching on the nursery door, and now Reader saw, in a slant of afternoon light, that the faces smiling out from the portrait were once again those of his father and mother, both long dead. He also saw that the door to the nursery, which had been closed moments before, was open.
To hell with ants, he thought. My wife is asleep in our bed without my body beside her and she needs me, and that room is a cold and haunted place now, and there is no comfort to be had there in that terrible truth. Of course, though, he went in, helpless not to because, he was slowly realizing, this was a dream, and dreams had their own designs on truth and comfort.
He had spent a month that winter painting and decorating a little girl’s nursery in yellow and blue. A nice mahogany crib, a gold rocker-recliner in the corner, the soft blue walls trimmed in white stenciled clouds now blazing with the honey-colored light of late afternoon. The ants crawled, Reader saw, over a lampshade patterned with the dotted flight of a bumblebee.
The ants, weirdly, were following the bumblebee’s stitched path.
Reader took one step toward the lamp, finger on the nozzle of the aerosol can, and that was when he heard, from somewhere in the hallway outside, a soft thump.
Followed by another.
Then another.
Silence.
He waited, head cocked, listening.
He turned back to the line of ants, but the ants were all gone.
He heard again, from the hallway, a soft thump.
He walked out of the bedroom and saw, at the far end of the hall near the head of the stairs, a dark and shambling form. It was girl-shaped, its legs twisted and crooked, its gait slow and forced. Each soft thump was the sound of its bent right hand striking the wall to hold its balance. It was not much more than a shadow in the gloom of the hallway, where shafts of sun slanted only from the open bedroom doors. The shape of the girl’s head was strange. The jaw looked like a bureau drawer left too far open and slanting down, and her hair had been made thick and stiff with something that had dried.
Reader shifted the can of spray poison from his right hand to his left and reached for the gun at his hip. But the gun was not there. His belt was off, downstairs, looped around a chair that was pushed up to the kitchen table. He took a deep breath and closed his hand, inexplicably, around the can of aerosol instead, and that was when the girl-shaped thing stepped into the light and he saw that her head was a boiling mass of black ants.
He woke, almost thirty years older, the sun in his eyes.
Winking through the curtained motel window.
He sat up and went to the toilet and pissed and splashed water on his face.
He saw the two bottles of whiskey on the table by the window and remembered why he was here, at the Sundowner Inn, Cielo Rojo—
pretty
—and so he walked over and uncapped the bottle he had already broken the seal on. It was half empty. He drank. He drank some more.
Travis stepped out of the camper to a vast desert sky purpling over, the sun fading behind the distant mesas. He heard and saw a neon sign crackle to life above the pink adobe office. Across the way, beyond the gazebo and the cactus garden, in space two, an old man in cut-offs and flip-flops sat in an aluminum lawn chair, drinking Miller High Life. Three spaces over, two men not quite as old as Travis were pitching a tent taken down from the roof of a rust-patched green Volkswagen. They had long beards and tangled hair held back from their foreheads by red and blue bandanas. In the horseshoe bend of the road, there was a rock path that led a ways from the campground to a low, flat-roofed outbuilding, the men’s and women’s toilets. On around the bend, another site was occupied by a long, mildewed Winnebago, one light burning inside.
And, finally, in space twelve next to the pickup and Roadrunner, a family of three sat at a picnic table, a fire burning in their metal pit. A blue canvas tent was pitched, mosquito netting thrown back over the entrance. Luggage lashed to the roof of a wood-paneled station wagon. The three of them at the table eating an early dinner of Spam and Lutz potato chips, the husband in his gray porkpie hat and khaki shorts, not a day over thirty, the wife in capri pants and a blue camisole and pink sweater to cover her arms against the cool desert twilight. And a boy. Small, blond, in red shorts, a blue T-shirt, and white Converse high-tops.
Travis watched them, mother and boy: so like Sandy, so like Annabelle.
If I cannot have them—
Yes, Rue said. Oh, Travis. They are perfect.
He swallowed.
The sun bled out, and the night came on like a shroud.
At supper, which was leftover meatloaf and peas and potatoes from the cafe, Annabelle asked Sandy if he still wanted to go to the fair. “Opens tomorrow,” she said.
Sandy hesitated, pushing peas around on his plate. After a moment, he nodded.
“Well, all right,” Calhoun said. He sat across from the boy.
After dinner, Annabelle stood at the sink washing dishes. Calhoun, who had been watching TV with Sandy in the living room, got up and took a rag from the counter and began drying the dishes as she placed them on the drainer. Annabelle closed her hand over his. Later, the boy fell asleep in front of the TV, and Annabelle let Calhoun scoop him up in his arms and carry him to bed.
Annabelle excused herself and closed the bathroom door. She turned on the shower and shed her jeans and blouse. She stood beneath the spray and closed her eyes and did not see the shape of the rabbit that formed on the glass as the steam filled the room.
Travis watched from where he sat at his fire, poking a cottonwood branch in the coals. All the other campfires had burned low when the boy and his mother set off together for the toilets. The father was rummaging something inside the tent, his silhouette large upon the canvas.
Travis followed quietly, the lonely outbuilding like an orange-lit island in an ocean of night, the d
esert breeze a current washing him toward it. The mother and boy walked up the rock path and up the concrete steps and separated at the entrance, the woman going to her bathroom, the boy to his. “Wait for me out here,” he heard the mother say.
The light that burned in the toilets marked Ladies was a sickly fluorescent green. The air smelled strongly of shit and cheap strawberry-scented freshener. There were three toilet stalls and three shower stalls, and the very first toilet door was closed. He could hear the woman pissing steadily inside. He stopped before the door, his boots clopping softly on the sand-colored tile. He peered through the crack and saw the woman inside, her pink sweater around her shoulders. Her pants bunched at her knees.
What am I now? he thought.
He closed his eyes.
There is no stranger, no other face.
I am the wolf. I have always been the wolf.
The pissing had stopped.
“Hello?” the woman said. “Is someone there?”
Travis took a deep breath and kicked open the door. She had time for one brief yelp before the fist-sized rock he had picked up outside cracked against her left temple. The force of it slammed her sideways off the toilet, and Travis hit her again. Blood sprayed in a fan across the dirty tile wall behind the commode. He seized a handful of the woman’s hair and dragged her out of the stall. She reached feebly up to fight his hand, but her arms fell away as she lost consciousness. He took the rock and smashed the mirror over the bathroom sink and took one of the long shards and plunged it into the woman’s neck where she lay on the floor. He tossed the glass away and dropped to his knees beside her and began to drink the blood flowing out of her, his mouth opening and closing and filling. He swallowed. Drank. Swallowed. He felt the woman’s hands fumbling at his shoulders until they fell away and her body went limp and her eyes rolled up in her head, and the blood coursed weakly out of her onto the dirty tile floor.
He stood up and saw his reflection in the smashed mirror above the sink, his chin and neck washed a bright apple red and solid beneath the blood, though split into a dozen jagged shards. His eyes burning sulphur. He licked his lips and waited for the revulsion to come, but nothing happened save his own stomach grumbling like a beast awakened.
He stepped out of the women’s restroom and found the woman’s son bent over an electric water fountain in the little alcove at the top of the steps, his lips pressed against the spigot. The boy pulled away from the fountain and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His eyes drifted from the blood staining Travis’s shirt to the cowboy’s chin, which was slick with it.
“You went in the wrong one, mister,” he said.
Travis gathered them both into a stall, mother and boy, and put the boy in his mother’s arms on the toilet. Intertwining their limbs, their bodies cold. The woman held her son against her breast, protective of the child even in death, the boy’s cheek resting on her shoulder. He had never done anything like this before and he did it now for reasons he could not have said. It was how he had always imagined his own reunion: he would find her, she would hold him. Mother and child, together forever. But he was not thinking of the things he had lost anymore. He was thinking now of the things he had found. Where he knew to find them, back in Texas at the Sundowner Inn. Or maybe he was thinking of everything at once, and it was all somehow bound up in this unexpected portrait he had made of love and death. He stood staring at it for the longest time.
Together forever.
He closed the stall door gently and removed his shirt and tore paper towels from the crank dispenser on the wall and washed the blood from his face and neck and chest. He put his shirt back on inside out to hide the heaviest of the stains. Passing space twelve, he saw the father in his porkpie hat and khaki shorts standing over the fire pit, poking at the embers where earlier they had all three roasted marshmallows. The father lifted his hand and said good night. Travis lifted his to be polite.
Inside the cabover, Rue came to him in the dark, and she whispered thanks in his ear, and they lay together, and he felt her suckle at the soft flesh of the old wound in his thigh, that dry oasis now restored. He heard the sound of her drinking, the wet sucking, licking, lapping, and he felt her tongue against his skin, cold on cold, the only warmth between them that of the blood flowing out of him—that and the hate that burned in his heart for her. He had never felt so alone. So empty. As Rue drank, he closed his eyes and pictured the mother and the boy he had killed, their faces no longer their faces. Instead, the woman’s face was Annabelle’s, and the boy’s face was Sandy’s. And slowly, as the sounds Rue made against his thigh grew wetter and louder, Travis understood. Annabelle and Sandy opened their eyes, there upon the toilet, and they reached out their hands, and like the new thing he was—no longer a lost child, no longer a man in search of a mirage at the end of some forever highway—Travis took up a shard of glass and cut his own wrist, and Annabelle and Sandy fell eagerly and lovingly upon his wound.
Once Calhoun lay snoring, Annabelle fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed that she and Sandy stood in the yard as night fell, hand in hand, and below them, at the foot of the hill, was Tom. The motel blazed with light behind him, much larger and grander in the dream than it had ever been. Tom beamed at them, waiting with open arms. He wore his olive army coat and, beneath it, the T-shirt and jeans she had given Travis Stillwell to wear. To wear after . . .
After what?
After a mess had been made . . .
Made clean.
She couldn’t remember.
“Daddy!” In the dream, the boy slipped her hand, and Annabelle went running down the hill after Sandy, calling his name, telling him to wait, wait for me, wait for Mommy, but he did not listen. Too late she remembered the story she had told the boy about their picnic along the river, and the awful thing Tom would say—
What took you two so long?
—and now Sandy was in his father’s arms, only these arms were not the arms of Tom Gaskin but the arms of Travis Stillwell in Tom Gaskin’s clothes. And there was something behind Stillwell, crawling out from beneath the boardwalk, from beneath the ground itself, bones and scraps of flesh and rags of red hair and roots and rocks and desert weeds falling away from a skull that jutted with a mouth of teeth, and as Stillwell’s arms closed around her son, Annabelle woke.
She sat up on the edge of the bed, one hand over a racing heart.
Calhoun rolled onto his stomach but he did not wake.
She put on her robe and went quietly to Sandy’s bedroom and looked in on him. The boy slept soundly, curled on his side, back against the wall. She went out onto the rear stoop and took a near-empty pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her robe and was about to light one when she looked at the little shed where the boy’s rabbit cages were. For no reason she understood, she went to the kitchen and got a flashlight and walked in her slippers across the dry grass to the shed and went inside.
She rolled the light slowly around the shed.
Stared, for a while, at a corner of the shed.
Something is buried there, she thought. She set the flashlight on the dirt floor and got down on her knees and began to dig in the dirt with her hands. She dug for a while and found nothing but dirt. She closed her eyes and smelled earth and old paint and kerosene. She let the dirt sift through her fingers, and suddenly her hands were closed around something solid, long and rough and knobby on both ends. A bone? Had she found a bone buried here in the dirt of her dead husband’s shed?
She opened her eyes and saw what she held in the glow of the flashlight.
It was the turtle.
Rue was silent as Travis drove west, the window down, the cold desert air rushing through the cab. Her red hair and green eyes and soft white flesh—her youth, her grace, her beauty—all restored from the sustenance she had taken. She was born anew through him, her cowboy, her killer, and he through her, and their time of sharing had come to the end of its beginning, and all the rest was middle, with no end ever. She had arranged the s
ide mirror to look upon herself and had not stopped gazing at her reflection—marred only by the old white scar her pale man had left upon the base of her throat—for all the black miles shed between Hungry Bend and here, the desert dark.
Soon the sun would rise, and they would take shelter, together, equals for the first time since the cowboy’s turning.
She turned on the radio, and out of it came the light, sad warble of his world, near drowned by the fresh rushing wind. The music was for him. She did not have to look at him to know he was uneasy in his satisfactions, the blood rushing fresh and furious in his veins for the first time since his turning. He was strong in blood now, if not in will. He did not know of any world without a restless need. He had known no such way when he was living and now that he was not, the cessation of one need for another was like the sudden stanching of a phantom limb bleeding out. The thing he had always been driven before was now behind him, and ahead lay the long and blissful dark of her way. His restlessness would do him proud in this, she thought. It would become his strength, and she would be his light in the darkness. She thought these things while still staring at the face he had returned to her in the glass, a face she had thought lost the morning her soul had fled her body. She had been in search of something herself, she realized, and in him she had traded the old for the new.
If he felt or heard or understood any of her thoughts, he made no sign.
She looked at him now and saw that one of his fingernails was red with the blood of the woman or the boy he had killed. A crescent of red, she knew, that surprised him in its sudden appeal when his eyes fell upon it.
It can be whatever you want it to be, my love. Our passions chain us or free us.
He looked away from the blood and drove on, mute and implacable in the soft green glow of the dash lights.
Rue’s thoughts turned to the western ocean, the cities upon its shores, bright places where the skies glowed by night with artificial light and there was no need of sun or stars. Places where people lived in the dark as well as the day.
In Valley of the Sun Page 25