“How could he have known?”
“Anyone who reads Weird Tales could find out about me and HP easy enough,” said Howard. “There was an Injun at the last gas station who could’ve brought him the hose-and put a hole in the old one, come to think of it. He coulda told him the three of us were comin’. The rest is just mumbo jumbo.”
“Why would he bother?”
“Huh?”
“What would the old man have to gain by feeding us and repairing your car? Why would he go through such an elaborate charade just to do that?”
Howard scratched his hat. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s workin’ with those fellas in black who tried to kidnap you.”
“He certainly didn’t seem to want to harm us in any way.”
“Well, who the hell knows?” Howard said, losing his patience.
“Maybe they got some custom among the Hopi to help people of the Master Race.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Glory.
“Well, I can’t figure it. Everything that’s happened in the past couple of days has been spooky as hell, and I’d just as well it all stop. I like to write this sort of thing, but livin’ it ain’t exactly my idea of fun. We’ll see what Klarkash-Ton has to say about it when we see him.”
“Klarkash-Ton? That sounds like some Moorish prince.”
“Sorry,” said Howard. “It’s Clark Ashton. Clark Ashton Smith.”
“The poet?”
“You heard of him?”
Glory’s voice suddenly grew soft. “Hasn’t everyone? I love his work.”
“Figures.” Howard sped up and passed a slow-moving truck loaded with empty chicken cages. Feathers flew outside the window. “I been meanin’ to ask ya,” said Howard. “Why did you scream back there? Another nightmare?”
“Yes,” said Glory. “It was bad. The same dream I had before about those men in the black suits taking my baby. There really was something uncanny about that hogan.”
“Could you tell it to me?”
Glory was quiet for a moment, ruminating. “I’ll tell you why it was so terrible,” she said finally, “but I can’t bear to repeat the dream.”
“Fair enough,” said Howard, glancing at her in the mirror.
“I was away at college back East when my mother passed away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Miss.”
“Thanks for your sympathy, but it was a while ago. I was a junior when I heard the news. It was in the spring, and losing her that time of year was terrible for me. My mother was the most important person in my life. When I got the telegram I couldn’t stop crying for days. I hate telegrams now. I cried my eyes out, and then I had to get away from everything. My roommate and I ran off down to New York City with our clothes packed in typewriter cases to fool our professors. We hitched a ride on the Old Post Road with two men who were going down from upstate to work on a skyscraper. They were just workers, you know, the coarse and rough type, though they were really nicer than any real gentlemen or the West Point boys we knew. We stopped along the way by a beautiful lake for a picnic, and then one thing led to another, as they say. My friend was fine, but by the’ time the school year was over, I knew I was pregnant.” She saw Howard’s grip tighten on the steering wheel at the mention of the men. She knew what he was thinking. “And you’re right,” she said to him, “the boys were probably Indians, though we never asked. You must be wondering why a college girl would sleep with an Indian. You must think it’s demeaning, don’t you? But then you never would have imagined me at a women’s college until I told you, right? You boys have been thinking of me as a common oil-town whore. You boys really don’t know all that much about the world, though you seem to pretend an awful lot.” She saw Howard’s grip relax, perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps because he was just sleepy after having stayed up through the night.
“You got me there, Miss.”
“Please call me Glory.”
“Glory. You’re right. I never woulda pegged you as a college girl. So you never finished school?”
“My father’s plan was to have me graduate and find me a West Point man. They used to come up from the Academy by bus for our dances almost every weekend. I was able to hide the pregnancy all summer, and I had to do some real soul-searching to decide if I wanted to keep the child. You know what I decided?”
“Well, I woulda kept the baby. God’s gift, even if his father was an Injun…”
“You’re right. I decided to keep him. Halfway into the fall semester I couldn’t hide it anymore. There’s only so much you can do with baggy sweaters, especially in a school full of women. They found out and sent me back home to have the baby, and then everything went to shit.” She saw Howard visibly wince at the word. “I decided to keep him, but it wasn’t because of God or anything like that. It was because my mother was gone, and I had to balance things. lowed it to her. My father knew plenty of good doctors and even some shady quacks who would have done the job, but I wouldn’t hear of it. He said it was too much of a shame on our family, and Grandmother agreed, and I was supposed to disappear for a while, as if! were still away at school, until they could find some story to deal with the baby. I don’t know what they had in mind-probably something laughable like finding the poor infant on their doorstep in a basket-something like that. Well, they sent me off to a sanitarium, and I heard the rumor there that Grandmother had found a family to take the baby, so after he was born I took him and ran away.”
“You just up and ran off? Did you have money or some relations to take you in?”
“I didn’t have anything. And I didn’t want to become a Salvation Army charity case, either. That’s why I ended up in an oil town making ends meet by being friendly to men and letting them be nice to me in return. It wasn’t all that bad, you know, and the kind of finishing education I got made it easy to talk about lots of different things. That kind of education is just to make a wife good for upper-crust cocktail parties, anyway.” She paused for a while, listening to the wind outside, the growl of the tires on the road, the occasional rattle and thump from the trunk. “I didn’t do bad with my baby, you know. He was the sweetest thing. I got marriage proposals all the time from boys who wanted to take care of us-wanted to have a wife and a son all in one package. I had a little oak crib in my place, and he was quiet most of the time. It was hard, of course, trying to take care of my baby and those boys at the same time, but I managed. I used to keep him in the crib on his tummy, like the doctor told me after he had the croup, and one day, just after I was done with one of my customers, he just didn’t wake up again. He just went to sleep and didn’t wake up again. He looked just like he was asleep, for a couple of hours. I left him like that. I might have checked for his breathing if he’d been a few weeks littler, but I didn’t because he was sleeping so nicely, and he just didn’t wake up. He was sleeping…” And now, as if the desert air had dried up her tears, she couldn’t even get a proper cry out of herself.
10
NEW MEXICO. HIGH BLUFFS, mesas in the distance, clapboard shacks, adobe trading posts with Indian head logos, abandoned hulks-all westbound-on the roadside. They passed within a dozen miles of the ancient pueblo of Acoma, then the old trading town of Santa Maria de Acoma, where they saw the new mission church, which seemed to grow out of the side of the rocky mesa just above the settlement. For the next twenty miles they found themselves in the bad lands, where they wove through the malpais, a bizarre landscape of hardened black lava flows, millions of years old, that encroached upon them from either side of the road. Had they known that the Navajo said these knife-sharp jags of volcanic rock were the clotted blood of ancient monsters slain by the great Twins, they would have found it easy to believe after Imanito’s story. In the distance they were tracked by the snowcap of Mt. Taylor, the highest peak in the San Mateo range. A few miles west of Thoreau they finally reached the Continental Divide. ‘
“Well, here we are,” said Howard, pulling over as if he were at the end of their trip. “W
e’re sittin’ smack on the backbone of America. If it was rainin’ and a drop hit some sharp rock and split in two, half of it would go down to the Gulf and the other half would go down to the Pacific. What do ya say we celebrate with a drink of somethin’?”
Lovecraft gave in to Howard’s enthusiasm, and they stopped at the Great Divide Trading Post, where they bought three ice-cold sodas and ritually downed them with Glory. To amuse Howard, Lovecraft and Glory each sprinkled drops both east and west before getting back in the car. They continued downhill now, passing Fort Wingate and a sign for Kit Carson Cave, which Howard was loath to miss; they passed red-sandstone cliffs, and then they could see the lights of Gallup in the near distance across the flat land before they climbed into the Arizona high country.
Howard pulled over for gas at a Phillips 66 in Kingman; he parked, and while the gas jockey filled the tank, he did his best to wash and wipe the cracked and pockmarked windshield himself, griping under his breath about the broken suspension, which had made for quite a rough ride since they had left Imanito’s hogan. “Hey, y’all,” he said through the window, “how about some food? That Injun stew ain’t holdin’ me much longer.”
They stopped to eat breakfast at a nearby diner, a wood-framed building with a false adobe facade. Howard, ever the Texas loyalist, once again ordered his native soft drink. “I’ll have a cold Dr Pepper,” he called to the waitress. “Got some trail dust that needs washin’ down.”
Glory lit a cigarette despite Lovecraft’s disapproving look. “What a good idea,” she said. “I’ll have an omelet, Miss, and a Dr Pepper hot.” The waitress raised her eyebrows. “That’s right,” said Glory. “Hot. Nice and hot, but make sure you don’t bring it to a boil or you’ll kill the flavor. And add a wedge of lemon if you’ve got any,”
Howard screwed up his face in a look of disgust. “What possessed you to do that? Dr Pepper ain’t meant to be drunk hot. That’s just damn stupid.”
Glory was getting fed up with Howard’s holier than thou attitudes; she decided to provoke him. “Well, Bob, there’s a lot of things I’ve done that ‘ain’t’ meant to be done. You know, sleeping with men I’m not married to…”
Lovecraft was looking around at the neighboring tables; he visibly winced when he saw the disapproving look of the elderly couple sitting just behind them. He gave them a sheepish smile before he turned back to his company.
“…getting knocked up in the middle of a fancy college education I was supposed to have so I wouldn’t have to spend my life cleaning up after some man…” Glory took a long, manly drag of her cigarette and playfully blew a plume of smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “…and smoking.” She pulled the cigarette out of her mouth and held it in front of Lovecraft’s face. “Twenty years ago, a woman would have been thrown in jail for this.” She put the cigarette back in the corner of her mouth and went on in a purposely stilted mumble. “Kind of stupid when you really think about it, ain’t it, Bob?”
Howard was momentarily speechless at Glory’s tirade. Lovecraft made a note to himself not to raise her ire.
“Besides,” she said, “maybe drinking it hot will catch on one day.” Howard shrugged. “The hell it will,” he said under his breath. Glory looked at him, trying to figure out what it was he had just said.
Howard repeated himself more loudly for her benefit. “I said the hell it will. No soda pop invented in Texas is ever gonna be drunk hot.”
Glory gave a melodious laugh at Howard’s misguided bullish Texan patriotism. “Hey, why don’t we make a short detour and go up to get a look at Boulder Dam?”
“What for?” said Howard.
“I’ve always wanted to see it. It’s supposed to be one of the most spectacular pieces of engineering of all time. How about it, boys?”
Howard couldn’t agree, probably out of principle. “I say we keep our pace. We can’t afford to diddle around out here. Whattya say, HP?”
Lovecraft looked thoughtful, as if he were weighing options. He was eager to get to Smith’s place, to be sure, but he had always had the tourist’s itch in him. “Well, my understanding is that the project is nearly finished. And the stop is actually right along our route, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. So what?” said Howard.
“It is also my understanding that Texans enjoy things that are large, or vast, or massive, given all the jokes I’ve heard. Let’s go, Bob.”
Howard just grumbled contemptuously and blew bubbles in his Dr Pepper when it came, watching Glory take dainty sips from hers.
THEY TOOK HIGHWAY 466, turning north off of Route 66. Just before noon they pulled over to look down at the nearly completed dam and the partially inundated valley that would soon be called Lake Mead.
“Don’t look like no wonder of the world from up here,” said Howard. “Looks like something a school kid would make in a shoe box. ”
Glory had to admit that the scene wasn’t quite as awesome as she had expected. Driving through the desert landscape did something to your sense of scale-you couldn’t tell after a while in that flatness if something was massive and distant or modest and, close; you had no sense of how far away the mountains were because they always seemed the same distance away on the horizon. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go down and see what it’s like from up close. I bet it’s different.”
“Uh-huh.” But Howard was pleasant about it. He parked on top of the dam and they got out to look over the edge, and this time it was an entirely new place.
“Incredible,” said Lovecraft, the wind from below blowing back his short hair and causing him to squint involuntarily. “Incredible , indeed.”
Even Howard couldn’t hide his awe. He leaned forward as far as he could, holding one hand over his hat to keep it from blowing off, and gazed down into the slope of concrete that arched downward like a half parabola that seemed to go on for miles. “This must be bigger than the pyramids,” he said. “All these trucks fulla concrete are like ants dragging crumbs to build a mountain. Makes you proud to be a man, huh, HP?”
Lovecraft gave Howard a sideways look and smiled.
But Glory was more interested in the water-so many millions of gallons it would be measured in acre feet-trapped behind the monolith of concrete, inundating the features of the valley in which it was trapped. She wondered what was there. Animals? Vegetation? People and their homes? All of it would be drowned in the clear water of the Colorado River as it came out of the Grand Canyon. It would sit there, those millions and millions of gallons, seeping slowly into the rock faces of the valley walls, pushing at the single smooth barrier of man-made stone except where it would be channeled out in the spill ways. She imagined what it might be like to live in that valley, where the air would be water; if she didn’t breathe, if no bubbles came from her nose and mouth, the clear water would be indistinguishable from air, only colder and thicker, more shimmery and beautiful the way the light rippled in it.
Howard looked at the information on the roadside billboard. “I can see why it was man that conquered the planet,” said Howard. “Sorry, Glory, for bein’ so difficult.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Seven hundred twenty-six feet high when it’s finished. Wow, that’s higher than the tallest pyramid, ain’t it?”
“The Great Pyramid of Khufu is only four hundred eighty-one feet tall, if I remember correctly from my research for Houdini,” said Lovecraft. “The dam will be thirty feet shorter than the pyramid is wide when it is complete.”
“Well, that makes this a hell of a lot more magnificent, don’t it? A nation like this could conquer the world, huh?”
“Do not forget,” said Lovecraft. “The Mesoamericans built an even greater pyramid. The old druidic races built Stonehenge, the Romans built their Coliseum, their roads, and their aqueducts. This makes me think less of conquest than of the wonders of the ancient world.”
“Please,” said Howard, but he was too late.
“The great Colossus over the harbor of Rhodes, the Lighthou
se of Alexandria, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the—”
“Great Eye Pyramid of Atlantis,” said Howard, knowing that it would annoy him.
Lovecraft drew his eyebrows together to mark his displeasure. “Well, and now what are they all but ruins or myths? This rampart of stone is impressive for the moment, but it will not stand the test of centuries. Nor will the nation that built it. As for Atlantis, perhaps it has left not even a ruin of its great pyramid because it was all a figment of some man’s imagination.”
“Well, thank you very much for such an uplifting lecture,” said Glory.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to damp your high spirits,” said Lovecraft. “It’s just that I have little regard for such myths as Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria. It has always disappointed me that Bob and Klarkash-Ton would write of such places when their own imaginations could have provided ample rich settings.”
“Like what?” Howard asked. “Some inbred New England backwater where you wouldn’t know if you were diddlin’ your cousin or a cow?”
Lovecraft turned away and didn’t reply.
“Bob,” Glory said, “don’t you think…” He had already stalked off to the car. She joined him there and sat for a while until Lovecraft had cooled down enough to return, and they drove the rest of the way to Boulder City in a stony silence.
WHEN THEY REACHED the fringes of the burgeoning town of Las Vegas, Glory was filled with the relief of knowing her trip was over. “Take the next right on Fremont Street,” she said.
“Where did you say your sister was employed?” Lovecraft inquired as if he were about to note the fact in his journal.
“The Boulder Club.”
Lovecraft couldn’t help the sarcasm that tinged his voice. “Ah, I should have guessed,” he said. “It seems to be a running theme in this barren province.”
As they entered the dim interior of the Boulder Club, Lovecraft was suddenly struck by the cold. He pulled his jacket around himself and looked around through the smoke that tinged the air. The smell of spilt beer and liquor, stale smoke, bad cooking from the kitchen; a tinge of anxiety, excitement, and dejection in the air in the scent of human sweat; the murmur of voices, mumbles under the breath, the occasional loud curse or shout of joy. This was not the place for him; this was the gateway of a doomed city, the fringe of Gomorrah waiting for its harbinger of destruction. Lovecraft followed Howard and Glory past the clatter and click of one-armed bandits spinning out their symbols and spitting out their change, the rustle and shuffle of dealers flicking cards onto green-velvet tabletops. And in the periphery, men pretending to look nonchalant as they kept vigil over each and every customer.
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