Desert City Diva

by Corey Lynn Fayman

  ‘Did he tell you what I was looking for?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he say where it was?’

  ‘Desert View Tower.’

  Gibbons laughed. ‘A decent guess, Roland Waters, but not the correct one.’

  ‘I talked to the police. They know about Dotty.’

  ‘I’ll take care of that bitch when I’m done. I’ve waited a long time for this.’

  ‘I want to see Macy.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re in love with that little mongrel?’

  ‘I don’t like to lose clients.’

  ‘You’re too old for her. That would be my concern.’

  ‘I feel like I owe her something.’

  ‘She’s done with you. You’re fired. She knows her true destiny now.’

  ‘I’d like to have her tell me that.’

  Parnell took a step towards Rolly. ‘Macy told me all about you,’ he said. ‘You’re an even bigger fuckup than I thought.’

  ‘The police are looking for you.’

  ‘Rolly Waters is one sad sack of shit. Not the kind of man I would approve of.’

  Rolly climbed to his feet and shifted his weight to his good leg. Parnell retreated two steps.

  ‘This is mine,’ he said, indicating the diddley bow. ‘No one will press charges. They owe me. I can put them in jail.’

  A light blinked on from a trailer nearby.

  ‘Who’s out there?’ someone called. Gibbons glanced towards the trailer.

  ‘The aliens are waking,’ he said. ‘Gleep, gleep. Time to go.’

  ‘I want to see Macy.’

  ‘She needs to spend some time with her people. Not losers like you.’

  ‘Wait,’ Rolly said, taking a step towards Gibbons. ‘Are you her father?’

  ‘Who’s to say? It was so many years ago. I get confused sometimes, all those stupid, eager women. I’m sure you know how that is. You were the rock star. Oh, wait, I forgot. That never happened, did it?’

  Rolly wanted to throw something at Gibbons. ‘Is Macy your daughter?’ he said.

  ‘She never came to visit me. All these years. We have a lot to catch up on.’

  Rolly took a wobbly step towards Gibbons. The voice from the trailer called out again.

  ‘You’d better scram. I’ve got a shotgun.’

  Gibbons put one finger up to his lips, turned on his heel and walked away. Rolly watched him go. Did Macy think Gibbons was her father? Had she suspected it? Growing up on the reservation, surrounded by Daddy Joe’s UVT obsession, she might have read about Gibbons, seen his photograph. It was something she might have clung to, a fantasy about her bad boy father, a killer. It explained her strangeness, her separateness from the tribe. It explained the outlaw blood in her veins.

  Everyone was an outlaw in Slab City. On the run. They’d come to escape from themselves, to relieve the pressure and pain in their lives, away from the traffic and TV, the lost jobs and unpaid mortgages, the soul-killing demands of just staying upright in the modern world. There hadn’t been enough money, or love, or purpose in that world to sustain them. They came to Slab City because it was cheap, because it was free, because no one would bother you if you didn’t want to be bothered, because your time was your own instead of your company’s. You could see where you stood in the universe, living under the stars. You came to Slab City to be born again, just like the man who’d built Salvation Mountain.

  The UVTs had tried to escape even farther. They’d tried to escape to the stars. Their true nature was with the aliens, above and beyond the debasements of earthbound humanity. But it was a false promise, a swindle. Gibbons took their money. He cheated them. Twenty years after they’d died and he’d gone to jail he would still get to pick up his check. Rolly couldn’t believe Macy would go along with it, even if Gibbons was her father. He wouldn’t believe it until he’d heard Macy say it – until he looked her straight in those bright gold eyes and heard the words from her mouth.

  ‘Help!’ he shouted, breaking into a clumsy trot. Electric jolts of pain shot up his left leg. Gibbons looked back and hastened his pace, revealing a similar limp in his gait. Neither of them gained any ground on the other.

  ‘Help!’ shouted Rolly again, trying to rouse the Slab City denizens. ‘He’s getting away.’ He didn’t care who came after them or what kind of guns they might brandish. He needed to stop Gibbons. A loud blast filled the air, a warning shot from one of the trailers. Other lights went on. Gibbons ducked off the road, into the bushes. Rolly followed him. Prickly branches tore at his clothes. He crossed an open space near a trailer camp. A light went on outside the trailer, illuminating the area. Gibbons scuttled into the shadows like a big cockroach. Rolly ran to the end of the trailer and looked behind it. He couldn’t see anyone. He heard a grunt from inside the trailer.

  ‘Who’s there?’ someone called.

  ‘Call the police,’ Rolly yelled back.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘He’s trying to kill me. Call the police.’

  Rolly spotted a break in the brush on the other side of the trailer. He stepped through the break onto a new road. A dark figure moved away from him. He set out after it. Gibbons had put more space between them. Rolly had to keep Gibbons in sight and rouse the Slab City regulars. If enough people started looking, they’d find him. Gibbons couldn’t taser them all.

  The dark figure climbed a small hill at the end of the road. Rolly kept after him, stumbling up the slope. He paused at the crest and searched for movement below. There was an open expanse of manicured desert below him, filled with large, irregular shapes. It was East Jesus, the sculpture garden. Deep orange broke on the eastern horizon, the first curve of the sun. Rolly looked back to the Slabs. A dozen encampments now had their lights on. He shouted down to them from the summit, like an Old Testament prophet exhorting the wandering tribes.

  ‘East Jesus,’ he called to them. ‘He’s over here, in East Jesus.’

  A shadow rose up towards him. It made a tapping sound and jolted his body with a painful shock. He wrenched away from the pain, dropped to one side and rolled down the hill into East Jesus, coming to rest against the half-buried tire perimeter. He lay on his back and stared up at the sky. He saw stars in the firmament but they might have been stars in his head. It was confusing. A shadow moved over him, an evil alien who shot people with ray guns and filled them with poisonous gold liquid.

  ‘Help,’ Rolly said.

  ‘Shut up,’ said the alien. He lifted his arm and swung something at Rolly, as if striking a kettle drum. A dissonant orchestra exploded in Rolly’s brain. It faded away and he heard only ghost notes, the notes no one plays.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Trailer

  Rolly opened his eyes to a dim yellow light and saw the particle board underside of a Formica table. He lifted himself up and took in the rest of his surroundings. It was the interior of an old trailer, small and cramped. Steam drifted up from a small pot on the stove. His head pulsed in a languid jackhammer of pain. He put his hand to his face. His left nostril had been plugged with a large wad of cotton. He sat up to the table, squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples.

  Something rattled in the back of the trailer. He opened his eyes and looked for the exit, wondering if he should try to escape. The trailer didn’t seem to be moving. They weren’t on the road. He didn’t have the energy to make a run for it. He hoped some Good Samaritan had delivered him here.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  Cool Bob stepped into view. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How you feeling?’

  ‘I’m OK, I guess.’

  ‘You want to go to the hospital?’

  ‘You think I need to?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Bob shrugged. ‘You sure got a gift for getting messed up.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m pretty good at that. How’d I end up here?’

  ‘Me and some of the guys found you. That was you, right, screaming for help?’

  ‘Did you catch the guy?’

  �
��People heard you ragin’. They thought you were baked on meth or something. I remembered what Macy said, though, about you being so orthodox.’

  ‘Did anyone call the police?’

  ‘As a general rule, we don’t invite the authorities into our domain unless it’s absolutely necessary. Only if there’s some misdeed we can’t handle ourselves.’

  ‘Like Randy No Pants in the hot springs?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be the kind of singularity where we engage officers of the law.’

  Rolly nodded. ‘The guy stole my diddley bow,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, man. Odious.’

  ‘I was coming to see you.’

  ‘Double odiferous. You know who did the deed?’

  ‘His name’s Parnell Gibbons.’

  ‘Not a moniker with which I’m familiarized. Definitely not native. Is he Canadian?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘The first blast of Mounties rolled in today. That’s why I was asking. They like to set up their own section before the winter season.’

  ‘He said he was Macy’s father,’ Rolly said. ‘He just got out of jail.’

  ‘Macy’s dad did this to you? Dude, you need to work on your relationships.’

  Rolly put his hand to his nose again, felt the cotton stuffing.

  ‘You can probably take that out now,’ said Bob. ‘You were dripping pretty good when we found you. Going to have a nice shiner, too. That eye’s starting to turn.’

  Rolly tugged the cotton from his nose and took a look at it. It was soaked with blood but most of it had dried. He touched his nose. It felt swollen. He hoped it wasn’t broken.

  ‘Hey,’ said Bob. ‘Why were you looking for me?’

  ‘I need to talk to that guy. The gold guy, the guitar maker.’

  ‘He’s not usually agreeable to conversational ambitions.’

  ‘He’s the only one who can help me.’

  ‘He’s seriously inauspicious.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘We just call him Goldhands.’

  ‘Listen, Bob, you care about Macy, don’t you?’

  ‘Macy’s profound. Sexy with a semi-automatic, too.’

  ‘You’d want to help her, then, if she was in trouble?’

  ‘Irrefutably.’

  ‘This guy that hit me, Gibbons, the one that says he’s her father. I think he killed No Pants.’

  ‘Now that’s consequential,’ said Bob.

  Rolly nodded. ‘Tell me about the other time No Pants was here,’ he said. ‘When he brought the other lady, the one with the white hair who talked about aliens.’

  ‘That chick tripped me out seriously.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She was expounding, you know what I mean? On how we’re part alien, like it’s part of our heredities. She was saying everybody’s got this alien blood in them – it’s in their DNA or something. Some people have more than others, you know, they’re closer to being full aliens. She said you could recognize people sometimes, the more alien ones. You can recognize them by certain signs.’

  ‘What were the signs?’

  ‘Gold was one of them. She liked to talk about gold.’

  ‘What’d she say?’

  ‘Well, you see these aliens, you know like the full aliens, she said they have gold in their blood, I mean it’s not really blood, ‘cause they’re not us, but it acts like blood does in humans. She said that’s why there’s always gold being used in religions, because religions are always about higher powers. It’s just that most people don’t understand that the higher powers are aliens. She got really turned on about it. They were looking for aliens.’

  ‘Were they looking for Goldhands?’

  ‘I think so. They were kinda general in their questions. They wanted to know if I knew anyone who showed the signs.’

  ‘The gold signs?’

  ‘Yeah. Like in their eyes. They said if you saw somebody with gold eyes or gold hair that was a real connection. I asked No Pants if he thought Macy was alien.’

  ‘What’d he say?’

  ‘He got kinda obtuse.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He pretended like he didn’t know her, said I must be confusing him with someone else. I think it was ’cos of the other lady being with him, like maybe he didn’t want her to know. I backed off.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘They asked if I knew any alchemists. They said people who worked with gold, that they had some kind of connection to the aliens too. I guess they were looking for Goldhands, now that I think about it.’

  ‘I need his help, Bob. It’s important.’

  Cool Bob twisted his lips to one side of his mouth. He looked out through the front of the trailer and scratched his beard.

  ‘We got a code around here in the Slabs,’ he said. ‘We protect our own. If a guy doesn’t want to be found, we’re not gonna give him away as long as he contributes positively to the citizenry. Not a disgruntler, or something.’

  ‘Why do you call him Goldhands?’ Rolly asked.

  Bob stared out the front window. His eyes moved, as if watching something outside.

  ‘He knows how to make gold from old electrical stuff, like computers. He collects parts, stuff he finds, or people trade with him, for his help with electrical stuff. It’s mostly old computer boards and electrical things. He’s got chemicals and burner stuff too.’

  Something rattled against the back window of the trailer. It sounded like gravel.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ Rolly said. ‘It’s Goldhands?’

  Cool Bob walked to the front of the trailer, opened the door and stepped outside. He shut the door behind him. Rolly heard muffled voices, but he couldn’t make out any specifics. The door to the trailer opened. Cool Bob stuck his head inside. ‘Goldhands wants to talk to you. Outside.’

  Rolly slid from the booth, walked to the door, stepped down onto the sand and planted himself next to Bob. The other man, Goldhands, stood about twenty feet from the trailer, just inside the shade of the overhanging canopy. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses. The hair he had left clung to his head like a shriveled badger.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ Rolly asked.

  The man nodded. ‘I remember the Waters.’

  ‘I remember Buddy Meeks, the best guitar tech in town. He and I used to talk a lot.’

  ‘That man is in here,’ said Goldhands, tapping his right hand with its gold fingers to his temple. ‘I remember him. Before the Conjoinment.’

  ‘Can I still talk to him? To Buddy Meeks?’

  ‘The Waters can talk to him. Only the Waters.’

  Rolly smiled. There was enough of Buddy Meeks in the man to bring back his own memories. Buddy, the nerd, behind the shop counter at the Guitar Trader, his glasses slipping down his nose, going off on a tangent, giving long, detailed explanations of what made your guitar imperfect and how he could improve it. Sometimes the boss would interrupt them, remind Buddy that he didn’t pay him to stand around talking with customers all day. Rolly had enjoyed talking to Buddy. He’d learned a lot from him.

  ‘I figured it out,’ Rolly said. ‘The combination. I opened the box. It was empty.’

  ‘The box is empty. Yes. The vibrator box is only for practice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Waters must practice. Practice makes perfect.’

  ‘Why do I need to practice so much?’

  ‘The Waters must be perfect. He must play the Astral Vibrator.’

  ‘Isn’t the box the Astral Vibrator?’

  ‘The box is for practice. The Astral Vibrator is for The Conjoinment.’

  Rolly thought for a moment. The real Astral Vibrator was somewhere else. It was wherever Gibbons was going. ‘Parnell Gibbons has the diddley bow,’ he said. ‘He stole it from me. He’s got Macy, too. And the key.’

  Buddy Meeks looked up at the sky and screamed. ‘Teotwayki!’ He paused then howled again, three times.

  Rolly
looked at Cool Bob, gauging his reaction. ‘Why does he do that?’

  ‘Three times like that,’ said Bob. ‘He’s calling the Rockers.’

  A response to Buddy’s call echoed through the air, then another. They sounded close by, within the area inhabited by the year-round Slabbers.

  ‘That’s the Rockers,’ said Bob. ‘They’re echo-locating, so he knows where they are. It shows that they’re ready and listening.’

  Buddy Meeks howled again, this time with a stop and start rhythm, short, long, short.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Bob. ‘SOS call.’

  Cool Bob joined the chorus, repeating the start and stop rhythm, the SOS call. Calls came in response. They sounded closer than before. It was like being part of a wolf pack. Someone ran in from the road. Rolly recognized the drummer from the band. Soon others had arrived. They were all members of the band – the drummer, the bass player and the man who played saxophone and piano.

  ‘What’s up?’ said the drummer, catching his breath.

  ‘You all remember this guy?’ said Bob, indicating Rolly. ‘Guitar player who sat in with us at The Range a couple nights ago?’

  The band members nodded and greeted him.

  ‘Somebody slugged him and stole his diddley bow. Somebody in camp.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’ said the keyboard player.

  ‘Goldhands made the SOS call,’ said Bob. ‘It’s up to him.’

  All eyes turned to Buddy Meeks – Goldhands. He signaled to Bob with his hands.

  ‘Road trip,’ said Bob.

  The band members cheered.

  ‘Where we going?’ said Bob.

  ‘The Conjoinment,’ Buddy said.

  Bob looked over at Rolly. ‘You know where that is?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Rolly. It all made sense now. And it made no sense at all. ‘We can take my RV.’

  ‘OK, boys,’ said Bob. ‘Let’s saddle up. Me and Goldhands will go with this guy. You guys get the rocket ship and meet us at the guardhouse, follow us from there.’

  ‘Electric or acoustic?’ said the bass player.

  ‘Fully loaded,’ said Bob.

  ‘Holy shit, Bob,’ said the drummer. ‘You mean it?’