by John Darnton
He turned a corner and the vision evaporated. But it left him light-headed. He hit the gas pedal and enjoyed the sway of the car as it snaked around the curves, still climbing. Finally, he reached a small plateau and there off to the right, where the clerk at Camp Verde had said it would be, was a dirt road winding off down a canyon. A dusty sign there told him it was the way to the Camp Verde Indian Reservation.
He took the road. It traversed the bottom of the canyon for a half mile, the ruts and stones rocking the car wildly. Giant promontories moved in toward him until they formed sheer cliffs on either side, just far enough apart for the road to pass through. Then the cliffs abruptly fell away, so that driving past them felt like stepping through a grove of tall trees to enter a meadow. Ahead was a dusty field and a cluster of wooden buildings.
The car stopped in a dust cloud before the main building. A burro with a colored blanket draped across its back was tied to a log fence, and it turned its head slowly to look at Jude as he stepped out into a puddle of dust. The air felt humid, and when he stepped upon the grass, it broke under his shoes as if it were brittle and petrified, like glass.
He heard flies buzzing around the burro; its tail flicked the rear right flank, which twitched. On the log directly in front of the car, Jude saw a foot-long lizard, sitting immobile in the shade. Its feet were splayed, clasping the fence in an embrace, and it cocked its head to one side and watched Jude with one large eye, rocking its head ever so slightly. As Jude walked around the fence the eye trailed him slowly. When he reached the threshold of the building, the animal scampered in a half circle and turned the other eye and resumed its deep, blank stare.
Inside were three Indians, two women and an elderly man. Only the man acknowledged him, nodding once. Jude explained what he was after, and without a word the man led him to a back room lined on three sides with old filing cabinets, and left him there. There was a single window of thick glass, obscured by dust, and the floorboards creaked when he stepped on them. It was stiflingly hot, and round patches of sweat appeared in no time on the underarms of his shirt.
He located the drawer he wanted and opened it. An array of thick cards, smudged gray with thumbing on the upper edge, fell before him. Each was filled in: names, dates, some with a child's footprint in ink. Most of the names were Navajo. He flipped through and came, surprisingly quickly, to his own. It was done in a florid hand, in purple ink. Date of birth: November 20, 1968. Place of birth: Jerome, Arizona. Weight: 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Attending physician: the name was scribbled. He stopped and stared; his given name was Judah. That was strange. Why did he think all these years that it was Judas? Who had told him that—his father? There was his father's name: Harold. His mother's name looked as if it had been obliterated. That was strange.
Jude closed the drawer, and searched in another one. He soon found that name too, Joseph Peter Reilly. The date of birth was five months later than his own. He had guessed it would be there, but still it was surprising to see it in black-and-white, in that same florid script, to realize that he and the judge both traced their early years up into these mountains. Still, that did not explain why the judge had been so upset when he'd seen him—it was hardly likely that the judge would have recognized him after all that time. Somehow, he'd known who Jude was, and he'd known they shared this childhood connection, both members of a desert cult.
Finally, with a heavy heart, Jude looked for the third birth certificate, the one he hoped he would not find—but of course it was there, too. He stared at it for a while.
He spent more than an hour combing the files, looking for more cards in that script, but there were simply too many to go through. The heat made him dizzy, and his discovery depressed him, so eventually he closed the sixth file drawer, leaving a dozen more unopened, and left the room. The elderly man nodded to him in farewell. He opened the door to step outside, and there was the lizard, still gripping the fence, looking inscrutable and almost malevolent.
He got in the car and drove back to Camp Verde.
By the time Jude returned, Skyler was feeling a little better and he looked better, too. He sat on his bed, watching reruns of sitcoms. Tizzie was pacing around and complaining; she said she was going stir crazy. So they decided to drive to Phoenix for the evening to "take a break," as she put it.
On the way down Route 17, plunging south alongside the Agua Fria ravine and losing altitude so fast they could feel it in their ears, Tizzie and Jude argued. It had begun in the Best Western parking lot when Tizzie had offered to drive them in her car.
"Your car?" demanded Jude. "Where did you get a car?"
"I rented one. You don't think I'm going to just sit around all day."
"And how did you pay?"
"Credit card."
At that, he exploded. "They can trace us," he said. "Why the hell do you think I've been so careful to pay cash everywhere?"
"Maybe it's not so easy," she retorted. "And even if they could, by the time they do, we'll be long gone."
"It was a dumb thing to do. They were watching me in New York. They'll be looking for me and Skyler everywhere. And now you may have just told them where to start. If they're looking for me, they're looking for you, too."
She was quiet.
"Only yesterday you were worried about the Orderlies coming after us. Have you forgotten?"
"No."
They passed a runaway truck ramp—a turnoff that led to a road looping up a long incline that stopped in midair like a ski jump. Then they came to the sign for the turnoff to Route 260 that Jude had taken earlier.
"Where did you go, anyhow?" asked Tizzie. "You just left us there for hours."
Jude ignored her question. He had to impress upon her how serious their situation was. He told her about Hartman's e-mail message.
"The FBI?" she said. "Why would they come after us? And how come they're involved in something like this—whatever this is?"
"I wish to God I could answer that. If I knew that, maybe I'd know what the hell we're in for. All I know at this point is not to trust anyone. Anyone at all. And not to make their job easier for them by leaving clues all over the place. Credit cards are the first thing they'll look for."
Tizzie had fallen silent, and Jude took that as a sign that his point had sunk in. Forty minutes later, they had crossed the desert and arrived in Phoenix. The transition from dirt and cactus to freeways and malls was so abrupt, it felt as if something in between must have been removed. They passed an Economy Inn and a Souper Salad and a succession of gas stations, drive-through banks and doctors' clinics. The streets all looked the same. There was no one on the sidewalks, and the bus stops were deserted.
Eventually, they found Mr. Lucky's, a country bar on Grand Street. It sat under a big neon sign of a joker, a two-story light blue building bursting with sound. They pulled into a parking lot filled with pickup trucks. When they opened the car doors, the heat struck them in the face like a wall. They walked past a couple necking in the shadows.
"Well, Skyler, now you're going to see the real America," said Jude.
They stepped inside, and the screeching fiddles of a country music band bounced off the walls and drowned out speech, and clouds of cigarette smoke billowed through the room. On a wooden dance floor, men in cowboy hats, tight pants and boots and women in halters and shorts were line dancing. A loudspeaker announced a drinks special in a drawl: "Fifty cents, long-neck beer." Stand-up tables were placed not far from the long wooden bar.
Jude lighted up a cigarette, grinning, and shouted: "My kind of place."
He pushed through to the bar and emerged sometime later, clutching the handles of three frosted beer mugs. They made their way to the rear and out a back door, where there was a corral encircled with a thick wooden fence.
On it was written, WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS AND THE WEST BEGINS. They found seats in a grandstand and sipped their beers in the heat.
A placard with a name was displayed on a nearby wooden tower, a public address system mumble
d the name of a cowboy, and on the other side of the ring a wooden door suddenly swung open. Out came a man with a number on his back riding a bucking steer. He held on with a hand between his legs while his other arm flailed at shoulder height, his body flopping in counter rhythm to the bucking animal beneath him. Five seconds later, he toppled onto the ground, a blur between the steer's legs, and then when two men ran out with flags to distract the animal, he leapt up and ran off, limping slightly only when he reached the fence. They finished the beers, and Tizzie went for refills. Another rider came out the chute.
Jude watched Skyler, who was totally engrossed in the spectacle.
"I know what you're thinking—that you'd like to try that," he said.
Skyler looked at him and smiled, and Jude knew he was right.
"Me, too," he said.
"You know, I'm not exactly like you," Skyler replied.
They downed the beers, and the next time Jude ordered a shot glass of whiskey as a chaser and then another. Soon he was having difficulty focusing on the people around him. When the next wrangler came out the chute, Jude's head swayed slightly as he looked at the spectacle; he felt it was incredibly moving and he wondered who he should root for—the man holding on for dear life or the animal desperate to throw him off his back. He bummed a cigarette from a man behind him. Shielding the match from the wind, he almost burned his fingers.
Tizzie was looking at him.
"You ought to take it easy, Jude," she said.
"Well, it's tough. This stroll down memory lane. Nostalgia for the past and all that. You ever feel that?"
His tone seemed freighted with meaning.
"You're drunk."
He took that as an invitation to have another round. They didn't join him, so he went inside to the bar alone and sat on a stool. He downed another shot and ordered another.
"Hold on there, friend," said the woman bartender, dressed in a flannel shirt in the air-conditioning. "You've had enough for one night."
He fixed her with a bleary eye.
"Enough celebrating for you," she said, not unkindly.
"Not celebrating," he muttered. "The opposite."
At that point, Tizzie and Skyler came and told him it was time to leave. They helped him to his feet and made their way back through the bar and the music and out the front door. Jude felt his head spin in the heat and someone fishing through his pockets for the car keys. He heard Tizzie say to Skyler: "I better drive."
They deposited Jude in the rear, and he laid his head upon the backseat.
"Don't trust anyone," he muttered. "That's the truth—no one."
The car started up and backed out of the parking space. Jude tried to focus upon the back of Tizzie's head, the top hairs glistening in the beams of an oncoming car.
He felt the fabric of the seat against his cheek and the weight of exhaustion. He wanted nothing more than to sleep for a very long time. In his drunken state, he had a wish-dream—that Tizzie slipped over the divide into the backseat, to hold his head in her lap and stroke his brow and tell him that everything was going to be all right. He didn't really expect it to happen.
Tizzie drove slowly and carefully and was bothered by the glare of headlights from a car behind them. She noticed that it took every turn she took, all the way back up Route 17 to the Best Western. She thought of her fight with Jude earlier. The disquieting thought that the car could be following them had proved him right.
¨
Jude got up early and fought his hangover with two cups of dark coffee, then a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. He borrowed a skeleton key from the front desk, let himself into Tizzie's room and found the car keys on a heap of crumpled bills on top of a dresser. She was deep asleep on her back, one arm bent across her forehead.
Outside, the sky was pink and blue with wisps of clouds. The heat hadn't started up yet.
He took Route 17 south and made the same turn on 260 West and passed the large rock protruding into the road, but this time he continued climbing past the turnoff to the Indian reservation. The road got narrower as it turned steeper and more and more trees dropped away, and huge clumps of tumbleweed collected in the gullies and embankments. He passed through the small town of Cottonwood—a food store, water-pipe outlet and a collection of trailers—and turned left on 89a toward Jerome. Still, the road was going up; in the distance he saw the humped peaks of the Black Hills mountain range.
He waited for that buried sense of familiarity to rise again and take hold of him, but it didn't happen. The landscape—humped hills of green and brown with occasional slashes of red earth—remained unconnected to him. He spotted gray trailings from a mine that had settled on a hillside like an ancient avalanche, and then another and another. The road began making hairpin turns, and the car fishtailed around them. He came to a gully with red tailings, the sign of an old copper mine, and then to a ravine with the frames of log houses.
Then to a sign, which read: ENTERING JEROME and underneath Elevation 5246 and underneath that Founded 1876.
He recalled what he had read about the place: once a thriving copper, silver and gold mine, it had been home to fifteen thousand people at its peak in the early thirties. Then the price of copper had plummeted, and the population had dropped along with it to five thousand souls, mostly miners, drunks, gamblers, ruffians and whores. The miners had worked the old United Verde under Phelps Dodge until the ores were finally exhausted in 1953, and everyone had left. It had turned into a ghost town prone to landslides and sinkholes, but had recently come partly alive when hippies moved in, taking over the old houses and selling trinkets to tourists.
The road dipped to the right and then mounted abruptly, ascending a thousand-foot escarpment. The climb was so steep, his back pressed against the seat. Halfway up, the road deteriorated. The guard barrier was down for long stretches, and rocks and dirt from landfalls spilled out onto it so that he had to slow to a crawl to negotiate the narrow passage between the debris and a sheer drop-off to his left. Once, when the car rode over a pile of dirt and the front wheels rose up, he caught a glimpse of movement in the rearview mirror; it looked like another car behind him on a switchback at the foot of the mountain. He kept one eye on the mirror, searching for it, but it disappeared into an interior ravine. Finally, he reached the top, and as his car swerved onto level ground, he gave a kick to the accelerator so it seemed to land, as if coming off a wave, and before him he saw the shacks and streets of Jerome lying on a plateau.
The main street was cracked and gutted with potholes, but not totally deserted. He could see a half dozen cars and people moving about on the sidewalks. On one side it was lined with storefronts—some closed with rusted signs, metal gates, and shutters hanging by their hinges. But others were open—a pizza parlor, a bar, a coffee shop and a museum. The street doubled back and mounted to a second level, where the wooden structures had settled at odd angles. In the middle was the ancient three-story Central Hotel, the wooden railings on its triple balconies still perfect. Beyond, the road continued.
Jude took the road—out of instinct—driving up the mountain. It turned past leaning and toppled telephone poles and half-finished houses and abandoned shacks, black with age, that were cut into the ridges of the red-scarred earth.
Two more miles, and Jude came to a dirt side road. It was a mile long and ended at a tiny town. He parked the car and locked it, then walked down the center of the single street. No one was around. There was an empty barber shop with its front window broken, weeds growing under the old leather chairs. One whole section of storefronts had collapsed backward like a fallen stage set. Above it, he could see a sudden drop-off obscured by weeds, and then a spectacular view of green valleys and red hills as far as the eye could see.
He stepped inside a dry goods store whose empty windows were streaked with dirt. He walked upon creaking floor planks, and in the half darkness saw rows of empty wooden bins and racks and an old metal cash register decorated with filigree. Dust was everywhere, lyi
ng in a thick carpeting, broken only by the zigzag trail of lizard tracks. He stepped outside.
Next door was a bar; a faded sign out front said it had been owned by Thomas J. O'Toole. Here the dust was an inch thick. The bar itself, twenty feet long and chest-high, had rounded holders at the bottom where the brass rail used to be and a faded Western salmon mirror above. He spotted a wooden table upon which rested an uncorked bottle three quarters full of a brown solidified liquid. He left.
Two doors down was a house of faded green clapboards. The front windows were blocked by a sheet of rusted tin held in place with twisted wire. He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The front hall was empty, and there were footsteps in the dusty steps leading upstairs. He entered a side room where yellow-dirty lace curtains still hung. A foot-pedal Singer sewing machine and wooden chair sat in the glow of a large window. An old pair of shoes with turned-up toes lay underneath.
Out back was a wooden porch, its rotting floorboards covered with rocks and slanting precariously toward the escarpment. He decided not to test it and walked back through the house toward the front hall and went upstairs. His feet sank into the carpet of dust and sent tiny clouds billowing against the faded wallpaper. The ceiling was low and the hallway narrow and dark. He looked into the first bedroom. It was largely empty, except for a bookshelf with a dozen old books and a rocker; when he pushed it, the rockers left gashes in the mat of floor dust. The hallway creaked; he thought he heard a sound downstairs and froze for a full minute. He heard nothing more. The second bedroom had a broom, and one corner was swept clean; it contained a soiled mattress, and near it a plate with a candle held in place by melted wax. A rucksack lay at the foot of the mattress, along with an opened copy of Penthouse magazine. It was dated three months ago.