In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  She looked in the side mirror, past her own beautiful image, and saw the sun warming the east. She was about to say they should stop soon, find a shelter from the worst of it, hide the camper in the lee of a rock, when she felt the truck’s speed diminish.

  The Ford angled suddenly onto the rough shoulder, skidded in the gravel.

  Startled, she looked over and saw his boot upon the brake, and he was looking straight at her, and his eyes were bright and glittering and hard.

  They sat there, the truck’s motor running, alone in the middle of the desert, the sun on the rise behind them.

  “I’m going back,” he finally said.

  She sat unmoving on the seat, her back against the door.

  The Gaskin woman and her boy are the light behind the dark, he said to her. The stars behind the sky. They are ever thing I never had and you are old and dry and the woman and the boy, they are warm and soft and the word love is not a word you understand, and it is not a word I ever understood until the boy, because the boy is my friend, and they are the place I’m going, and I will kill my way back to them. If this thing I am is what I have to be, they will be my blood and we will be together, because the night, the stars, these things are not you.

  He hunched forward over the wheel, shaking, defiant, afraid, and even then, in his defiance, Rue could not help loving him. Her own expression felt strange upon her face, a slackness she had not known since a morning decades past, when she had awakened transformed and found the bloodless body of a child in bed beside her, her pale man gone.

  Betrayed.

  “But,” she said, “the sun . . .”

  “Get out,” he said, baring his teeth at her. “Get out of my truck, you bitch.”

  He saw it all break apart behind her eyes, the schemes she had been scheming, their future together. Moments before, stars had spun innumerable in those bright green orbs, and now their dark centers were expanding, eclipsing, drawing into their emptiness all the light of the world, entire galaxies. All manner of terrible things swirling in her collapse, thoughts incoherent, a wordless jumble of images: a balding creature in a ragged, threadbare suit; a stovepipe hat; a boy of seventeen at her nipple, she on her back and looking up at the pine rafters of a barn dripping with bird shit, the scent of hay; a boy and a girl screwing in an alley in a city he had never been to; words, jumbles of words that might have been stories or poems or lies she had told.

  He had just enough time to comprehend the scope of the pain he had wrought, and then she was at him, her hands closing around his throat.

  She crushed her thumbs against his eyes and would have sunk them into his sockets as far as the knuckles, but he seized her hair and pulled, and he heard something pop in her neck.

  She slumped onto the seat, and he was out of the cab and seizing her ankles, pulling her, his new hot blood emboldening him, a rallying cry in his veins. She caught hold of the steering wheel and pivoted onto her back and gave out a scream of rage that startled him motionless, and she raised herself up and locked her grip in the fresh flannel of his shirt. She hauled herself against him and buried her teeth in his neck. She bit, and the teeth he felt were sharp and numerous, not the teeth of a young and pretty girl but the—

  thousand, a thousand

  —teeth of the shark or the tiger or the ravening wolf, all of these at once.

  He stumbled backward into the highway.

  Her legs scissoring around him. Her fingers knotting in his hair.

  She burrowed deeply into his throat. The flesh tore where his right shoulder met his neck. He put both hands on her hips and charged her into the side of his camper. Once, twice, each time with a cry of rage, and each time, she lost purchase on his neck, and by the third strike she let go and fell onto the pavement.

  He sagged against the side of the camper, watching her crawl away on all fours.

  At the yellow line dividing the highway she turned and lay on her back looking up at him, one strap of her dress fallen from her shoulder, dirt on her thigh and blood—his blood—on her face and down her chest, between her breasts, soaking the rose petals of her dress, and she lay there in the highway and licked her lips and rubbed her face with the back of her arm, then licked her arm and laughed. She pointed at him and lay back in the highway and held her belly like a little girl.

  Her teeth bright and white and sharp.

  He pulled himself into his cab and shut the door.

  He snapped the truck into drive and wheeled left, dirt and gravel spitting, and once the truck was reversed upon the road, facing east, he braked.

  She lay in the road ahead, still laughing, holding her gut and rolling. Bathed in his beams.

  He stamped the accelerator.

  She never moved, but he felt no impact.

  Instead, he thought he saw something, like the flash of white wings slashing up and into the night, and then the pickup and cabover skidded to a halt, and he was idling in the highway. A patch of empty asphalt where she should have been, lit red in the glow of his taillights. He sat still for the space of six breaths, then he jammed the pedal to the floor and drove away, toward the coming morn.

  The sun will rise. The dawn will take her.

  And not long after, he would be back on that brown and grassy hill, and the woman and the boy would be waiting for him on the farmhouse steps, their hands outstretched. And they would walk together, the three of them, hand in hand in hand, through the Gates of Light shining in the sky above.

  I am the wolf, he thought. Look what I have done.

  He pressed his hand to his neck and felt the blood coursing freely there, among ragged ends of flesh.

  I am free.

  Somewhere behind him, in the clinging dark, Rue was laughing still.

  Tuesday

  October 21

  Late morning, the highway shimmering where it joined the sky.

  The state trooper, whose badge said his name was Kayo, sat and watched the pickup and cabover for a count of ten. He glanced at the all-points bulletin taped to the dash. The Ford idled less than twenty feet ahead on the shoulder. Backup: fifteen minutes out. Kayo said a prayer to the Virgin Mary and unsnapped the Mossberg 590 from its mount on the dash. He got out of his car and walked cautiously along the passenger’s side of the camper. Gravel crunching beneath his boots. He called out “STATE POLICE!” and swung the Mossberg up into a firing position, aiming it into the passenger’s window of the cab, but the cab was empty. Kayo heard boots on gravel that were not his own. He saw something, in his left periphery. He swung the shotgun around, but there he faltered, for coming toward him was a cowboy, tall and gaunt and bloody, and his face was obscured beneath the brim of his black straw hat by strips of white cotton.

  Jesus Christ, what is—

  It was Kayo’s last thought.

  Travis struck the barrel of the shotgun with the crowbar and the gun flew right and discharged, perforating the cabover and shattering glass. He hit the state trooper twice in the head with the bar and his gray felt Stetson tumbled off and landed bowl-up on the blacktop. The shotgun clattered to the pavement. The trooper slumped against the cabover. Travis kicked the gun into the scrub and seized him by the hair and pulled his head back and jammed the crowbar’s flat end into the trooper’s throat. Travis took a knee. He pulled the crowbar free and yanked the lowermost strip of bandage from his face and lapped at the spurting gash, even as blood came seeping through the rags at his throat.

  After, Travis dragged the body back to the cruiser and thrust it into the passenger’s seat. He saw, taped to the dash, the all-points bulletin that had been issued for his vehicle: a photograph of himself standing before the truck and camper. He went to the Roadrunner and brought out a red can of spare gasoline, which he poured all over the corpse and car. Doing this stoked some dim memory of a man and a fire, a big man, dark and terrible and rearing before the flames of a blazing village. Travis struck a match and set the car ablaze.

  He got into his truck, putting the trooper’s sho
tgun on the seat beside him, and pulled out heading east. He glanced in the side mirror only once and saw a black column of smoke rising like doom against the bright blue sky.

  Reader woke late, head a bucket of wet sand. He threw the one empty whiskey bottle away and looked long and hard at the second, unopened. He pissed bright yellow and took a hot shower. He was shaving when he remembered the cafe by the office, so he dressed down to his badge and gun belt and hat and went out to see if the place was still serving breakfast.

  The cafe and motel office were closed. A handwritten note was clipped above the night drop box: Gone to fair. Guest please leave key in box.

  Reader looked around at the empty parking lot, his the only car in sight. “Guess that’s me,” he said.

  He stretched and walked over to the vending machines. He had fifty cents in his pocket. He bought a package of Tom’s peanut butter crackers and ate the first cracker whole. He looked up the hill to the farmhouse, in back of it a creaking windmill, its blades gleaming gold in the late-day sun. The house itself was turn of the century, old and weathered. A station wagon was parked in the drive. He thought of the woman who had checked him in the day before, young, pretty. He turned away.

  Parked in the gravel RV lot behind the motel, less than fifty yards from where Reader stood, was a beat-to-shit Ford pickup topped with a Roadrunner cabover.

  He did not move.

  For the longest time he just stood and chewed his mouthful of cracker.

  The wind banged a tin shingle on the roof of a shed somewhere.

  Reader put the remaining crackers in his shirt pocket and eased away from the cabover’s sightline. He walked quickly through the motel’s breezeway to the cruiser, where he opened the door, leaned in, and snatched the mic from the radio. The dispatcher’s voice, young and male, crackled back. “Car three, ten-seventy-one,” Reader said. “Officer needs assist. Over.”

  “Roger, car three. What’s your twenty? Over.”

  “Fifteen miles east of Cielo Rojo, the Sundowner Inn. I got a positive ID on a Ford pickup and cabover camper, currently an all-points. Who am I talking to, son? Over.”

  “Barnes, sir. Over.”

  “Barnes, I want you to get on the horn to Waco and get word to Cecil Kasper of the Texas Rangers, Company F, that John Reader just stepped in it. You tell him that. Tell him I said bring everything and everyone to this location. Over.”

  “Roger. Backup’s en route, sir. ETA ten minutes. Over.”

  “Ten-four, Barnes. Obliged. Over and out.”

  Reader hung the mic and stood there, the wind kicking up eddies of dust in the parking lot. He thought about what he would tell his recruits to do. About what Connie would tell him to do. Wait. Wait, old man. But then he remembered the woman from the motel office, the farmhouse at the top of the hill, how the motel office and cafe were closed, despite the posted hours and the note that said they were gone to a fair and yet a station wagon was parked in the drive. So he shut the cruiser’s door and unsnapped his holster and walked around the far end of the motel, coming up behind the camper. He drew his Colt as he went and slipped quietly along the left side of the truck, below the camper windows, and checked the cab. It was empty.

  Reader returned quietly to the back and stood to the right of the door.

  He knocked. Lightly. Knocked again.

  When no one answered, he reached for the latch and lifted it.

  The door came open.

  He swung into the entryway, pistol raised.

  Silence but for the wind.

  Gun up, he stepped inside.

  The camper was gloomy and musty with a faint scent of mildew. He looked around and saw daylight shining through holes in the camper wall, glass from a shattered window littering the linoleum. A curtain hung over the sleeping perch, a homemade ladder leading up and disappearing behind it. To the left of the entrance was a toilet, and through the sliding door Reader could see shards of glass on the floor. These came from a broken mirror over the sink.

  He made his way to the front of the cabover, near the sleeping berth, and opened the closet door to the left of the ladder. Hanging inside were two flannel shirts with faux pearl snaps, several pairs of jeans. A pair of old cowboy boots. He fixed his gaze upon the curtain that was drawn across the berth. He put one boot on the ladder, then his left hand, pistol held firmly in his right. He climbed. Four steps up, he stood on the ladder and used his left hand to whip the curtain back.

  The bunk was empty, only a stained mattress.

  Stained darkly, he saw.

  And freshly.

  Reader sniffed the mattress, touched the stain.

  He backed down the ladder.

  Saw the cabinets below the berth.

  He took one step toward them, bending low to crouch beneath the bunk.

  Outside, something thumped lightly upon metal.

  Reader froze, instinct moving his thumb to the hammer of the pistol.

  Quietly, carefully, he turned and eased out of the camper, moving slowly so that his weight did not rock the pickup or the cabover. He edged left, aware that no amount of caution would keep him from being visible in the driver’s side mirror as he approached the cab. He held his pistol with the barrel pointed toward the sky. He came to the cab door handle. He took a deep breath. He reached out and seized the handle and hauled open the door, and the door gave out a squall, and Reader brought up his pistol and found it to be trained upon an empty cab.

  He heard another soft thump, and now he caught the motion from the corner of his left eye, and he saw an orange cat with a bobtail streaking away from the hood.

  He reached out and touched the hood.

  “Still warm,” he said to himself.

  The farmhouse, he thought.

  Reader licked his lips and gauged the distance he would have to cross, the distance before anyone with a vantage up on the hill might see him, but then he realized that he had likely already been seen, if anyone was up there. So he settled his hat on his head and set off at a quick trot toward the foot of the hill, the house beyond.

  He slowed when he spotted something in the grass. He looked around and stopped and bent to pick it up. It was a whirligig, a roadrunner. Its body made from wood and painted gray, its feathering blue. One of its two brown pressboard wings was broken. He recognized it as a whirligig of his father’s make. He saw the stencil-work, the eyes and beak he had painted himself when he was a boy, the enamel long-faded. He looked up and around once more, a sudden inexplicable sense of the universe in total, a God’s-eye view of the all the strands that formed the web. Some were straight and true, and others made patterns without purpose, as if the weaver were lost or drunk or simple. He understood, too, at that moment, that he had spent his life in pursuit of the wrong mysteries. He remembered his father teaching him how to whittle, starting with a block of discarded wood and shaving it down, one paring at a time. Find the shape it wants to be, John. It’s in there, waiting for you. Find the shape.

  But the shape was not the shape he had imagined.

  He heard the dry ratchet of a Mossberg shotgun.

  He turned his head toward the sound, and the gun went off and blew him forward onto the dry brown grass.

  Travis crawled out of the cabinet below the berth when the ranger left the cabover, shotgun in hand. He wore his cotton wrappings and they and his neck and the front of his button-up shirt were dried red with his and the state trooper’s blood.

  Rue had killed Travis, he was beginning to understand. She had torn him open and he could not mend. He had taken blood from the trooper, and it had brought him this far, but the wound on his neck had only slowed its flow, it had not stopped. The blood went in. The blood came out. I am a busted, broken sieve, he thought. A shell with cracks, like this god-fucked camper. They will make me whole again. The woman, the boy. Just a little longer. Let me hold on. Let me be whole.

  He came out of the back and rounded the camper and saw the ranger standing ahead, in the grass, looking down a
t something in his hands.

  Travis raised the gun.

  When the smoke had cleared, he went to the ranger where he lay facedown on the grass.

  The man’s leg and hip, he saw, were shredded.

  Travis reached down, rolled him over.

  The ranger’s gun came up in a single quick motion and fired, point-blank, into Travis’s gut.

  Reader pushed himself up on his left elbow and raised his gun arm and trained his Colt on the cowboy, and when he was satisfied that the cowboy was not going to move from where he lay on the grass, he dropped his gun arm and looked down at the mess that was his left thigh and leg. His shirt was tattered and soaked through with red all along one side, and he thought he could see something inside the wound that looked like an organ. Which one he did not know. He looked over his shoulder and saw that he was about ten or fifteen yards from the vending machines and boardwalk at the corner of the motel. He holstered his weapon—it took three tries to get the barrel in—and rolled onto his right side. Using his good arm and his good leg, he pulled himself across the grass and up onto the boardwalk. He left a thin red trail behind him, and by the time he had made it to the canopy between the motel and the cafe, his white shirt was almost entirely red below his chest. He pulled himself out of sight of the camper, and there, with his back against the motel’s cinder-block wall, he sat bleeding and dying. Bits of grass and gravel stuck to him. He looked up and saw the great spread wings of a mythical creature on the roof of the cafe and office, the Pegasus rearing in flight.

  Boots along the boardwalk, then a shadow fell over him.

  Stillwell loomed, one hand clutching the hole Reader had put in his stomach, the other holding a bloody crowbar. Face wrapped in torn strips of white, these plastered to his chin by blood, a flap or two hanging loose about the jaw, the skin there blistered and cracked. A broad black hat settled on his head. Dark black blood dripping between the brown leather fingers that covered the hole in the man’s stomach.

  Reader coughed, spitting blood into the dirt. He stared up into a pair of dark, shining eyes, all he could see of the face of the man who had killed him.