I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  I said, “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Chili said, “A Jew would never admit it.”

  I said, “What is this about?”

  Chili said, “You look like a Jew to me.”

  I realized that there might not be any law here in Pesadilla. There certainly was no security in the bar.

  Nacho stood up so quickly his chair fell over. He put a finger in my face. “You and me, we’re going to have it out. Let’s go.”

  Grady held Nacho’s arm. “Not now.”

  I noticed that Lacy was gone, her cigarette still lit in the ashtray.

  Grady seemed to be reading my mind. “A man could go missing in Shoshone County, and they wouldn’t find a trace.”

  Tinker poked his head in the door and told us the car was ready. “Gentlemen,” I said, “it’s been real.” I left the chips on the table, took Patience by the elbow, and led her out of the Full Moon, to my great relief. What an unholy mess there might have been. I told Patience, “Don’t look back.” Lacy leaned against the hood of a battered Willys jeep, adjusting the strap of her blouse and smoking a cigarette. When she saw me, she dropped the cigarette, crushed it out on the gravel, and walked back to the Full Moon. I asked Tinker if there was a police station nearby.

  “County seat’s sixty miles that-a-way.”

  “No deputies in Pesadilla?”

  “There’s only fifty-four of us here. We take care of our own.”

  The ring finger on his right hand was missing.

  He said, “Crimes of passion, mostly.”

  “You know those boys inside?”

  “A bit.”

  “Assholes,” Patience said.

  He told us he was from Denver when I asked.

  “So how did you end up here at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I got lost.” He handed me a receipt. “Found myself at the Luck Be a Lady Motel down the road.”

  “Lost?”

  “Long story short: My wife. My brother. My bed.” He told us Pesadilla wasn’t always so dead. He pointed toward the mountains and told us about a played-out marble quarry ten miles away. “When that was operating, this was one lively East Jesus.”

  ON THE WAY out of town, we passed the vaguely familiar man from the Coffee Shop and the Shell station, sitting in his idling truck at the crossroads, scratching his beard. Patience noticed him first and said she’d seen him in Winnemucca at the bar where we stopped to have a drink. She took out her notebook. I said, “What are you writing?”

  “His license plate number. Make and model. Bronze Dodge Ram.”

  We headed south. We hadn’t gone five miles when the car coughed, rattled, and lurched. I shook my head and stifled a scream. Patience, who’d been writing more in her journal, said, “It’s okay.”

  I said, “It’s not okay. Don’t say it’s okay when it’s not. Okay?” I briefly considered turning around and having Tinker fix his shoddy jury-rigged repair job, but I kept imagining Grady and friends gleefully awaiting our inevitable return. I held my breath, and the car ran smoothly, but what would happen when I exhaled? Patience pointed out a bullet-riddled yellow warning sign by the side of the road with a stooped stick figure dragging a shouldered cross toward the highway. Jesus crossing.

  She said, “That’s a good sign.”

  I said, “How on earth is that a good sign?”

  She said, “It’s providential.”

  And then I saw, in the rearview mirror, the cowboys’ red pickup barreling toward us, headlights flashing and horn blaring. Grady waved us over to the side of the road, and when I ignored his request, he pulled alongside. Chili rolled down his window, made a gun with his thumb and forefinger, extended his arm, shot me, and laughed. And then they sideswiped our car. Patience cried. She tried our two networkless phones. Now we were driving ten miles an hour, our front bumper on their rear bumper. The bronze Dodge Ram passed us both, the driver staring straight ahead. Chili climbed out of the cab and into the bed of the moving truck and then leaped onto the hood of our car. He hooked his fingers into the depression between the hood and the windshield and held on. Grady braked us both to a stop. Chili took a wrench out of his pocket and pummeled the windshield. I put the car in reverse and floored the accelerator. Grady gave chase in reverse. Chili lost his one-handed grip and slid off our hood and under the wheels of the pickup. I saw my chance to escape when Grady and Nacho got out to pull Chili from under the truck. He seemed to be lodged in the wheel well. I turned the car around to head for Pesadilla and what I hoped would be sanctuary. I hadn’t counted on Grady’s rifle. Grady shot out the right front tire. I kept going, struggling to keep the car on the road. I crested a hill, looked back at an empty highway, and felt relieved for no reason. Maybe I thought we were invisible.

  When they caught up with us moments later, Grady had me drive off the highway and head for the mountains. We hadn’t gotten a quarter mile when the car died. Grady pulled in front. Chili was folded up in the bed of the truck. His right arm was slung unnaturally over the back of his head. Nacho pulled Patience from the car. I decided I’d take control of the situation, ask them what they wanted, get them talking, reason with them. I heard my door open. I turned and got hit in the face with what must have been the butt of Grady’s rifle. And all my troubles and all my sentience vanished beneath a shroud of thundering darkness.

  I woke with a crushing pain on the side of my head. I didn’t know where I was or who I was or why I was in such distress. I pulled myself up. It was dusk or it was dawn, and I was in a small car off the road in the desert somewhere. Nevada. I was in Nevada. There! One small step. I’d been in an accident. My left eye was swollen nearly shut, but my arms and legs worked. I opened a bottle of water and drank. I could feel my parched neurons firing again. I stepped out of the car and saw the four blown-out tires and the bullet holes in the side panel. I remembered the mechanic telling me about the marble quarry. I remembered the letter A on the side of a hill. A card game. And then it all came back, and I thought, What have they done with Patience? They didn’t kill me, so they wouldn’t kill her. Or did they think I was dead? I walked in a widening circle and called her name. I walked to the highway. By then it was dark. I waited for a passing car, but none appeared. I saw a dim light in the distance. I walked back to the inoperable Mirage, grabbed all the water I could carry, took my phone, and made for the light, which might have been a mile or ten miles away.

  I hoped I was stumbling toward a house, not a campfire or a will-o’-the-wisp, a house where I could call or radio the authorities, put some ice on my face, and beg for a lift into Pesadilla, and I hoped that whoever lived at my destination did not turn in early. With the light doused, I’d never find my way. I looked up and tried to locate the Big Dipper and Polaris in the random scatter of stars. I hoped whoever lived at the house was not alarmingly shy of strangers and did not own a shotgun. An unexpected knock at the door, I realized, might panic a man who had chosen to live an isolated existence, a man with something to hide, perhaps, or someone to hide from. I heard the howl of coyotes in the distance.

  I knew I’d eventually have to describe our assailants to the cops. I’d start by naming them: Chili, Nacho, and Grady. And Chili should be easy to find. He’s got a shattered elbow, a hyperextended right arm. He’ll probably be blubbering in pain when you find him. Nacho has a porn-star mustache and three tattooed teardrops beside his left eye. Grady has brown hair, a chipped front tooth, and he blinks his tiny eyes more rapidly and vigorously than is necessary or normal.

  After forty-five minutes or so I reached the house, a sixty-foot single-wide up on cinder blocks. Looked to be aqua and white, but hard to tell in the darkness. I climbed the three steps to the porch, set down my water bottles, and knocked seven beats, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits, the jauntiest, most nonthreatening knock I could think of. I whistled and waited. The light went out in the window to my left. I knocked again, this time, one-t
wo-three.

  12

  WHEN I SAW the pistol pointed at my hammering heart, I expected to become a homicide statistic in the next moment. I raised my arms, shut my eyes, and stepped back, knocking a galvanized bucket off the canted porch. I managed to say, “I’m in trouble, sir. I need your help.” He lowered the gun to my belt. “I’ve been kidnapped.”

  The seedy old coot holding the gun zipped his fly with his free hand and looked past me into the night. He said, “I don’t see no bad guys holding you hostage.”

  “My girlfriend was taken.”

  “Happens to the best of us.”

  I said, “We need to find the abductors.” As soon as I said the word abductors, I knew it didn’t sound right. Made me think of muscle and flesh.

  “Who took your sweetie?”

  “Three guys named Grady, Nacho, and Chili. You know them?”

  “I might.”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  “Got no phone.”

  “Really?” I held my face. “Got any ice?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, can you give me a lift into Pesadilla?”

  “Can’t.”

  “I can see your pickup from here.”

  “Can’t drive at night. Got the macular degeneration. Be blind as a Texas salamander soon.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “No can do.”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “In the morning.”

  “I can’t wait till morning. My girlfriend’s in danger. I need a cop.”

  “Chili’s a cop.”

  “He’s a criminal.”

  “These are not mutually exclusive occupations. Real name’s Angel Ramos Gonzalez. Shoshone County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “I should go.”

  “You should stay. You’ll get lost out there. It’s not safe. Coyotes, rattlers.” He opened the door wider and motioned me inside. I shook my head and stepped off the porch. He fired a shot that hit the bucket. I covered my ears. You forget just how loud gunfire is until a shot goes off by your head. The shot got some sheep bleating out there in the dark.

  I said, “Are you insane?”

  “Yes.” He switched on the interior light. He wore a soiled white T-shirt and had a goiter the size of a mango on his neck. His eyes were Barbicide-blue.

  “You’d shoot me?”

  “In the blink of an eye.”

  I stepped past him into the living room. He was shoeless. I said, “I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

  “I’m just standing my ground here, protecting my castle from invaders.”

  While my ill-mannered host locked the door and fastened the dead bolt, I looked around at the dismal living room, at the ragged Naugahyde reclining chair and the black mold on the baseboard. I asked him his name. When a person hears his name, parts of his frontal cortex light up, as do parts of the temporal cortex and the cuneus, and I planned to say his name and fire up his brain a lot, get him thinking about who he was and maybe jump-start some inhibitory behavioral controls. And then when he said my name, he’d have to feel just a little closer to me, right? At work I dealt with pain, suffering, and despair on a daily basis. My job was to know how the brain works, how it talks to us, how it is a slave to our emotions.

  “Creed. Creed Wackell,” he said.

  “My name’s Wylie, Creed.”

  “Perhaps we should keep this on a no-name basis.”

  “You’re living in squalor here, Creed. You know that.”

  The thin blue curtains were frayed at the hem. The dung-colored carpet was stained with what could have been motor oil. On the otherwise bare paneled wall hung a decoupaged plaque of da Vinci’s Last Supper on a tree slice, evidence, I thought, of previous residents, a benighted family of Catholics, maybe even Creed’s own family, long since fled to some safer haven. A shabby little artificial Christmas tree slouched in a dark corner of the room. Creed put his hand on my back and pushed me toward the kitchen.

  The kitchen was under repair. Creed was in the process of removing the linoleum from the plywood floor. He took his toolbox off a kitchen chair, placed it on the floor, told me to sit at the table, and then got me a plastic cup of lukewarm milk from the fridge for some reason. It smelled like onions, and I couldn’t drink it. He drank bourbon from a pint bottle.

  I said, “I like bourbon, Creed.”

  He said, “How did you get yourself in such a mess?”

  I said, “Iodine will fix that.”

  “What?”

  “The goiter, Creed. More salt on your food.”

  “You a doctor?”

  “Not quite.”

  He placed the pistol on the table and took a cell phone out of his pocket.

  I said, “Liar.” How the hell did he have service?

  He hit speed dial and held the phone to his ear. He said, “He’s right here. You want him?” I guessed the call was to Grady. “Okay. No problem. He wants to know how his honeybunch is.” Creed looked at me out of the side of his eyes, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. He ended the call, set the phone on the table, and stared at me. I could hear him ticking. He was packed with explosives, the timer was set, but I didn’t know when he’d go off.

  I said, “The macular, Creed, is it wet or dry?”

  “One of each.”

  “There’s treatment for the wet these days.”

  “If He has smeared over my eyes so I cannot see, who am I to challenge God’s wisdom?”

  Creed the fatalist. I said, “So what happens now?”

  He touched his index finger to the middle of his forehead. “You get a bullet right about here.”

  I almost said, You’ll never get away with this, but I knew that he would. I said, “What have they done with her?”

  I don’t spend my alone time thinking. I spend it watching the people in my daydreams, and this immersion in fantasyland has left me vulnerable to abrupt intrusions from the here and now. All my life I’ve been easily startled by an innocent voice breaking the silence or a gentle hand on my shoulder. My body leaps, my heart races, my breathing stops. So how is it, then, that I’m so composed in the face of actual danger? Like just then. Here was this homicidal shithead with a loaded pistol and an empty heart threatening my life, and I was as calm as a Trappist monk. I have no control over this baffling serenity that envelops me when the pressure rises.

  He drummed his fingers on his phone and smiled. “And then I haul your carcass up to the mountains and drop you off. Leave the gun, so it looks like a suicide. Not that anyone’s ever likely to find what’s left of you anyway.” He stopped his drumming and curled his lips like an alert and aggressive dog. I knocked the cup of milk from the table. Creed said, “No use crying.”

  I reached down for the cup and grabbed the claw hammer from the top of the toolbox, stood, and smashed the hammer down on Creed’s hand with all the speed and force I could muster, crushing it into the concrete tabletop. He screamed. I grabbed for the gun, but he had it in his unbroken hand, fumbled with it, and tried to squeeze the trigger. This time I hit him in the face with the hammer and detached the lower jaw from his skull. Creed dropped the gun, and I grabbed it. Was it loaded? I fired a shot at the stuffed sage grouse on the counter. The bird came to life and flew to the floor. I turned back to Creed and said, “Where are they?”

  He slammed his head into the table. When he sat up, he spit a fountain of blood, teeth, and bone my way through his slack mouth. He wailed. He said what sounded like “Fub jew.”

  I realized I might not understand a word he said now, and he couldn’t write down an answer with his mangled hand. I told him if he didn’t get that hand looked at soon, it would never heal properly. Not to mention the jaw. I told him to relax. I wasn’t going to kill him. But now I couldn’t get my own self to relax. My hands trembled. I was panting, not breathing. I kept my eye on him while I searched the kitchen.

  I said, “I’ve got every right to kill you. You understand that. I know you do. But, dead, you�
��d just be out of your considerable misery, and I think you ought to wallow in it for a while.” I opened the fridge to find half a can of pork and beans, three pitted, bruised, and wrinkled tomatoes, a dead silverfish, and four cans of light beer. The freezer was empty. Creed hadn’t lied about the ice. I held up the empty ice cube tray and said, “Can’t do anything for your pain because you live like a pig.” I found what I was looking for in the junk drawer—a box of fifty .9mm hollow-point bullets and the keys to the pickup.

  I took Creed’s phone from the table and hit redial and speaker. Grady answered and said, “What’s it this time, Creed?”

  Creed said, “Mubba fuh fuh hatta hun.”

  Grady told him to call back when he was sober. I ended the call and called Bay on Creed’s phone because mine still had no service. I told him the abbreviated story. He said he was on his way. “Keep both phones with you.”

  I said, “I’m going to find Patience.” But I had no idea where to begin. I told Creed he should have had the phone password-protected. I knew I would not have been able to beat the password out of him. Creed valued loyalty above all other character traits, apparently, which is commendable, but leaves you open to betrayal, and, in this case, to a bleak and attenuated future. I stuffed both phones in my pocket and gave Creed one more chance to tell me where his friends had gone and what they’d done with Patience. A listener will often lift an eyelid when something clicks. I said, “They in Austin? Pesadilla? Malachite?” He shut his eyes.

  I said, “What is this, the bad guys’ code of honor? You’re all shithouse rats, and you know it. You tell me where they are, and I’ll have an ambulance sent out here. Wherever the hell here is. And tonight you could be dreaming morphine dreams between freshly laundered sheets.”

  I told him to stand. When he wouldn’t, I fired a shot between his legs and into the metal chair. He stood then. I shoved him to the door, unlocked it, and pushed him across the yard to the side of the single-wide. There were a dozen jittery sheep enclosed in a foul-smelling pen. I had Creed sit on the ground by the gate. I started the pickup: full tank of gas and a staticky radio. I turned off the radio, turned on the headlights, and saw Creed lumbering through the sagebrush toward the mountains. I told him to stop. He kept going. I fired a warning shot in the air. He screamed in agony and fell. How bad a shot was I? I followed the sound of his howling and found him writhing on his back in agony. He’d stepped on a spring-loaded steel leg-hold trap, and its formidable jaws had clamped down on his bare foot from ankle to instep. He screamed for me to set him loose.