Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Her mother.

  She stretched her arms over her head; the bed creaked. She heard the sounds of trucks passing on the highway, horns blowing.

  “Sloan,” she whispered. She lay next to him in the bed he’d fashioned from an old table and two mattresses piled one atop the other. Her head pushed in an uncomfortable position against the window of the trailer; whenever she slept with him the back of her neck always seemed cold from being pressed against the window. There was a chill for her that had nothing to do with the external temperature: it had to do with an emptiness she felt inside whenever she awoke suddenly, a feeling of not being connected to the world to which she was waking.

  Instinctively, she reached up and touched the beaded scar around her neck, just beneath her chin. “Looks like somebody give you one helluva case of hickeys,” he’d said the night they’d met last year. He had kissed along the ridge of the scar when they made love that night, and when she saw the approaching climax in his eyes she pressed her neck against his lips and he had lapped hungrily at the scar as if he were some animal trying to reopen a wound.

  Someone trying to reopen the wound—and within each wound, a world.

  She didn’t bother trying to wake him again. From his congested snoring she knew he was still too drunk. Sloan hadn’t even bothered to take the baseball cap off; its rim poked up from beneath the yellowed sheet, his nostrils shaped like almonds, flexing with each snore.

  She turned awkwardly in the small bed.

  Out the window, the Sun Dial Trailer Park’s lights were like those in a football stadium, creating an artificial day long before sunrise. The other trailers were still; no doors slamming, no other dogs barking. Beyond them there was a hint of lavender that might’ve been dawn just stretching from the east, but it might’ve been the glare from the trailer park’s lights.

  She glanced at the Budweiser clock that Sloan had stolen from the Coyote Cantina: four twenty A.M. It was two hours off; the damn thing never kept good time. But she knew the time. She felt time passing, and wasn’t sure why, as if a memory were repressed within her.

  Carefully, she slid the sheet off her body. Her skin should’ve been smooth; she’d turned seventeen last December. But she felt old, and the desert had made her dry.

  She slid to the end of the bed. Sloan sniffled and the baseball cap fell backward off his head. His eyes opened briefly, fluttering, not seeming to recognize her, and then closed again. His peppered hair was matted against his scalp.

  Sloan, in bed, made hawking noises in the back of his throat. He shook his head dreamily, opening his eyes. His slate-gray eyes were outlined with red, bordered by dark circles.

  “Hamster eyes,” she whispered softly.

  “What was—did you hear something?” he coughed, clearing the back of his throat.

  “You were dreaming,” she said, “sweet little hamster eyes.”

  “Oh.” He closed his eyes, sliding his arm out from beneath the covers and patting the empty space next to him, “Back to bed.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Sleepy.”

  “Sweet little hamster eyes.”

  He turned, drifting off to sleep, murmuring her name. “Wendy. Miss Swan. Miss Wendy Swan, the love of my life. My mate.” He was used to her getting up this early, going for a drive in the truck. Once, he had followed her out, and watched the truck kick up dust out to the road. She had parked alongside the gulley near the Garden of Eden, and had just gotten out of the truck and stood there, watching the old house as if she were trying to memorize something about it.

  He stretched his arms across his face, and his mouth opened slightly.

  Later, after the enormity of sunrise was upon the town, Wendy Swan stood on the small stoop of cinderblocks that Sloan had erected beneath the narrow front door of the trailer. She shivered from the cool morning air, covering herself with her white terry cloth robe. The doors of other trailers and mobile homes creaked and grated as people awoke. She wondered what they all did—what did people do in the world, anyway? What was the purpose that kept them waking up in the morning, what made them take that first step? The thin wind coughed carbon monoxide from cars starting up, mingled with the odor of instant coffee. The hills and canyons were pale blue, the sky, dead empty. Beer trucks, Coca-Cola trucks, Arrowhead Water trucks, trucks loaded with oranges and avocadoes rolled and bumped along the pass over the Rattlesnake Wash on their ways through to Palmetto.

  When Wendy went back inside the showed him the chewed-through leather muzzle, Kevin Sloan was sitting in his jockey shorts at the breakfast table; he rubbed his white-socked feet together where the fleas had bitten in the night.

  “I heard something earlier,” Wendy told him. “But by the time I got out, she was gone.”

  “Damn dog,” Sloan said. But Sloan was always like this before he had his morning Ovaltine and cigarette. She set the leather muzzle down in front of him and went to the cupboard by the sink.

  He lifted the torn muzzle up in front of his eyes as if it were an expensive diamond necklace. “I shoulda known she was gonna do this. But I guess it means she’s a fighter, don’t it?”

  “She ran off somewhere.” Wendy sniffed at the quart of milk; it was partially soured. He might not notice if he’d already started smoking. She mixed it in a glass with Ovaltine. Then she reached into her robe’s pockets, withdrawing a couple of cigarettes. She slipped these between her lips and lit them both. She inhaled. She took the cigarettes out of her mouth. She bent down over Sloan, kissing him deeply, exhaling smoke into his mouth.

  He coughed, “Whew,” pulling his mouth free of her exploring tongue. “Wendy, honey, I think we both got a case of the zacklies. Musta been the beers last night—zacklies is when your mouth tastes ‘zackly like your ass.”

  She felt his hand rubbing her leg, searching for the gap in her bathrobe. When his hand found it, Wendy stepped away from him. She thrust one of the cigarettes into his mouth. She puffed on the other.

  Sloan took a drag on the cigarette. He said, “I love you, Wendy. And I know you don’t love me. I know about you.”

  “Oh, you do?”

  “Yep, I know all about you and your mysterious past. Nothing but secrets.”

  She said nothing.

  “Yep,” Sloan hacked, but continued puffing on the cigarette. “You didn’t run away from no home in Bakersfield, that’s the truth. You’re from here, right here. I know. I know about the way you go and look at the Beekeeper’s place. He your daddy or something?”

  “Not my daddy,” she said, and then grinned sweetly. “You’re so smart, baby.”

  “Where’d you come from, then?”

  “Oh,” she said, “a very dark place. A very cold, dark place.”

  “Tell me,” he whined.

  “If you want to know,” she said, leaning back against the small range, putting her half-smoked cigarette out in a bowl of leftover Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, letting her robe fall open, “it’s all there. Inside me. Do you want that? Boy? Do you want that?”

  “Yes,” he gasped, coughing into his glass of Ovaltine and practically falling back in his chair, “Jesus God, yes.”

  “Show me how much you want it,” she said, leaning farther back, reaching for the barbed wire that she kept for such occasions in the cabinet above the sink.

  2

  An hour later at the Sun Dial Trailer Park, four men sat on a concrete deck outside a double mobile home. Another hot Sunday morning, none of them wearing shirts, with their beer guts hanging down proudly across their laps. They were hungover, still sleepy. Their women had sent them out of the trailers early; they wore sunglasses to hide the sleepiness; one man flexed the tattoo on his biceps; the man on the end spat a wad of brown chewing tobacco every few seconds.

  Wendy Swan walked by, carrying an open umbrella.

  “Ain’t no rain likely,” the tattooed man said.

  She didn’t look their way. She wore a pair of aviator’s dark glasses, which gave her face a vaguely
comic look. She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be heading somewhere, although there was nowhere to go in the trailer park but to the desolate highway.

  “Lookit her.”

  “All you ever gonna get to do’s look.”

  “Bet she’s been had by the best and the worst,” another said. Spit. “Sloan maybe the worst. Bet he’s had her every which way.”

  “Thinks he’s hot shit fresh out of the cow’s ass.”

  “He beats her. See those bruises about two weeks back?”

  “I’d treat her sweet if she was mine, that’s all I’m saying. He hits that pretty thing?”

  “She was all bleeding one morning. Ginger told me about it— said she saw her getting out of her truck one morning, and she was all torn and bruised. Son of a bitch.”

  Spit. “Jesus, God, it’s gonna be a hot one today.”

  The tattooed man whispered, mostly to himself, “Pretty little thing like that. Oughta report it to somebody, ‘bout him hittin’ her and all, ‘fore he kills her.”

  Another shook his head, “He ain’t gonna do nothin’ worse’n break her heart.”

  3

  Charlie Urquart awoke that morning one of his favorite ways: a boner in one hand, a beer in the other. The beer was a leftover from the previous night, but the boner was new and shiny (at least to him) and there was a name attached to it, and it was the name of that white trash girl he’d seen out at the Wash, the one with that redneck, Sloan.

  Wendy something, that’s who she was.

  He had seen her once before, in Nitro, he and Billy and Terry had gone trolling through the trailer park once or twice to get some drunk-ass idiot to start a fight so the boys could clobber him—

  when Charlie had caught a glimpse of her, through the trailer window—

  naked—

  fresh from the shower—

  he noticed her white thigh—

  where someone had branded her.

  Jesus, it got him hard just thinking about it. Hadn’t had sex for almost five months, ever since Alison’s little mishap, and now he wondered how he was going to get my satisfaction—

  her pale white thigh, the scar tissue around the brand, the glow of her face…

  Charlie resumed his second favorite activity (next to torture).

  4

  Anyone who has ever lived up on the desert will tell you: no one goes to live in towns like Palmetto unless they’re hiding from something.

  They hide under rocks and in houses and in shady bars, waiting for the day to pass.

  And pass it does, slowly, into the afternoon, a Sunday when the streets are empty and the churches are full and night will not descend for several hours.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Secrets of the Bone

  1

  The town was originally called Boniface Wells. Back in 1897, a good twenty years after the mining disaster of the El Corazon Mine, Norton Boniface decided that the natural springs beneath the ground were curative, and attracted a following as a preacher and healer who finally succumbed to a bad case of lockjaw in 1927, having refused all medication that might have easily remedied his condition. His widow raised their four children, although only one survived into adulthood, named Lucas, who then went and took a wife at the ripe age of forty. This woman was bad—everyone said it though few ever met her—and married Lucas because she needed the solitude he took for granted. But Lucas was land-rich and cash-poor, and his wife was then given to certain extravagant habits, so when Gib Urquart came along and offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for land that was basically shit dust, he took it, and kept the land around the Rattlesnake Wash as well as the miniature castle his father had called, in his extreme vanity, the Garden of Eden. The story was, Lucas’s wife left him after she lost a child at birth, but there were enough Fundamentalists in Palmetto to spread the story that she worshipped the Devil, and was insane, and never turned toward the true light. These were the founders’ families, and their stories.

  After his woman ran off, Lucas Boniface fell apart. Someone else took over the big house, and Boniface himself just went to seed. Gib Urquart then took the ball, and ran with it, building nearly four hundred ramshackle development houses, all looking mostly alike; he brought in investors, and soon there were burger joints along the narrow highway. Naranja Canyon, transforming into Nitro, sprung up full-blown across the Wash, as soon as the trailers had parked across the rocky soil. Gib Urquart was a man with vision and drive, both rarities up on the high desert, and soon he actually had the place incorporated and was, himself, running the subatomic particles of the local political machine and having a grand old time.

  And then, for no reason other than the difficulty with which anything is grown at such altitudes and in such heat, the town died, and Gib Urquart’s fortunes declined, and although they still had the annual chili cook-off on Grubstake Days in July, and still had a small outpost for civic and legal matters, Palmetto and its sister, Nitro, barely even made the local maps.

  There it is. History of a small place. Nice and neat.

  But anyone who has ever lived up on the desert will tell you. There’s more. If you dig.

  2

  It was the beginning of the week, or maybe toward the middle—the man that lived beneath the road didn’t have much use for a calendar. He awoke, stretched, smelling the dirt of the Wash. Someone was burning something nearby, something that stank, along with mesquite. Who the hell would be lighting a fire in the morning? Holy moly. He looked at the Rolex that he had hanging around his cat’s neck: it was closer to noon than he’d like to admit to. “Demons are here, Isaac. I got the juice, but it ain’t enough. They been tryin’ make a nest here since back before I remember.”

  Isaac, the tabby, snarled at something, the hair on his back rising straight up, his ears going back. Something was down the other end of the corrugated steel cylinder that supported the road and provided a roof over the old man’s head.

  He picked up the flashlight near his pillow and shined it down to the dark end.

  The light hit two small red eyes.

  Fierce eyes.

  Demon eyes.

  “The Lord is with me, Evil One,” the man gasped, using his free hand to reach for a bottle of hooch. It was Thunderbird, and even though he had the money for better stuff, his tastes were simple. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, still I don’t fear evil.” He took a good long swig, and felt sweat break out across his forehead. He could smell his armpits stinking with fear.

  Isaac hissed, moving toward the Dark Thing with the Red Eyes.

  “I knew you come back,” he said, “I knew it, I smelled you out there on the road that day I found what you left behind. But I ain’t scared o’ you. Nossah. As in the last days, ye shall reap what ye sow, and what you gonna reap ain’t gonna be my soul. I know how to stop you.”

  He set the bottle down, and reached beneath the serape upon which he slept.

  He drew out a large knife, almost a buck knife, but fancier.

  He shined the flashlight on the blade. “Looky here, demon, I got the one thing you scared of, the one thing turns you to chickenshit on a shingle. You know where das is gonna send you? Straight to Hell, you ‘bomination. And this...” he said, remembering the thing in the handkerchief.

  What he had found.

  He redirected the light back to the demon eyes, and the Thing moved closer, well into the light.

  Before the old man could see what it was, he smelled it.

  The cat backed away, yowling.

  “Shit,” the old man said, because it wasn’t a demon odor at all, but the stink of a skunk. Sure enough, the polecat started running straight for him, and he and his cat both backed out of that cylinder as fast as they could. He ran out into the Wash, stinking to high heaven, with a little skunk, its tail raised high, running off in another direction.

  This was a typical morning for him, and as he stood there, shirtless, catching his breath a few moments later, he saw two boys out on th
e road and waved to them because he was friendly and lonely and crazy.

  And because someone had to warn people of what was to come.

  3

  Than Campusky said, “There’s the Bone. Old Bonyface. See him?”

  He pointed to an area up along the thorny brush on the other side of the highway. Peter saw nothing other than the endless Joshua trees and the crumbling adobe arch that was the beginning of the old Boniface graveyard beyond. They’d been walking through the Rattlesnake Wash by way of a shortcut from Nitro, where most of the fast-food joints were, back home to Palmetto. Peter still had a bit of a limp where his right ankle had twisted, but he endured the pain somewhat quietly, only moaning when he wanted sympathy. They were out looking for summer jobs—and barely speaking to each other, because the heat was getting to them, and they were angry and tired. They had only been able to fill out one application, at Paco’s Tacos, because they weren’t quite sixteen. Sixteen was the magic age, and Peter would turn in just a couple of weeks, but Than wouldn’t get there for five more months.

  “Hey, you’re not still mad about last night,” Than said, lip-farting. “Give me a break. What was I supposed to do? Jump down in there and fight off the dogs? Jesus, somebody shot a gun! So I was either gonna get shot or get my balls chomped. My mom’d kill me if she knew I was down there!” Than was always a little too excitable.

  “Forget it.” But it was all Peter could think of—not his anger at Than, but the excitement of riding with those two—Sloan and Wendy—of being drunk for the first time. Of knowing that he didn’t have to be the good kid anymore who obeyed the rules and did what was expected of him. He was almost sixteen. He could do anything he wanted.