I didn’t see her again. I saw only my uncle, grim-faced. He helped me put my bags in the car.
Standing there in the driveway, moments from leaving Quiet, California forever—or at least for the next thirty years—I looked over at the Sparrows’ house. It was silent and still in the unknowing dawn.
—Thirteen—
IT TOOK ME one week to find him.
Driving across the Mojave Desert one sees little but an endless canvas of white, broken occasionally by indistinct blurs of tan or beige or ochre. Joshua trees, sage, and cactus predominate, when there’s anything living at all. It’s then, at midday, with no live thing in one’s range of vision, no cars in sight, that it seems as if what one is really traversing is the bright side of the moon. It’s almost impossible to imagine that the air outside the car windows is breathable, and indeed, it hardly is: the heat gives it a thickness that’s stubbornly difficult to pull into human lungs. The ribbon of road stretches into the glaring distance farther than one can see, seemingly forever.
Yet eventually, rising like some garish phoenix out of the ashes, comes civilization, or at least Las Vegas—that most unnatural of cities. I’d been here once as a college girl, on a senior trip with friends; I remembered the basic layout of the place, the creepy timelessness of the never-closing bars and casinos, the cheap and vulgar tone of it all, the way that, up close, everything seemed smaller than it should have been, and dirtier.
And yet I’d enjoyed it then; I enjoyed it now, after the newspaper offices and libraries were closed, once there was really nothing more I could do that day. I spent too much money, as one always does in Las Vegas. I played slots and poker. I socialized with boozy salesmen from Oklahoma, overweight executives from Chicago, and nervous college boys from Connecticut, one of whom came to my room one night and left, of course, before the next morning.
I wasted time, I wasted money. But in the end I found him.
As it turned out, he didn’t really live in Las Vegas, or if he did, it was at the very limit of the town. It was a long drive on a road white with desert dust, past all houses, all businesses, any signs of life. I was sure I’d taken a wrong turn; there was nothing out here but sun, sky, small hills in the distance. And yet, finally, quite literally at the end of the road, I saw a wooden shack.
It was truly a shack. Warped, dilapidated, the sight of it reminded me of nothing so much as period photographs of the Depression. It had a single window in the front, gray with grime. There was an old car parked beside the structure, but it didn’t look drivable. It was as if the desert were about to swallow this place, push it down with its winds, bury it in its sands. At first I couldn’t believe that anybody really lived here; surely it had been abandoned years before.
And yet as I sat in my air-conditioned car looking at the place, the door was pulled open. I knew then that I was in the wrong location, for out stepped an old man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and a plain blue work shirt and jeans. His sparse hair was white, stringy, sprouting in different directions on his head. He was stooped over to an extent that it appeared as if he had a hump on his back; his head, as he moved, tilted down at a precarious angle. His mouth was perpetually open and I could see a line of suspiciously full and even teeth: surely dentures. He’d seen me, or heard me; it couldn’t have been difficult, out here in the desert silence. He looked at me, head facing down, eyes looking up under his white and overgrown eyebrows.
I was about to put the car in gear, perhaps mouth the word Sorry as I pulled away, but he waved to me. His arm moved unnaturally, jerkily, like a marionette’s. He seemed to be smiling, but in that ancient face it was hard to tell: he might just have been squinting his eyes in the brightness.
I rolled my window down a crack. The furnace-air hit my eyes, made them water.
“Got my groceries?” he called from across the street, his voice high and wheezy, as if with each word he somehow leaked air.
“Your…? No, I’m sorry. I think I made a wrong turn.”
He looked at me, mouth hanging. His skin was hard, leathery, nearly mummified. It seemed pasted to his bones, as if there were nothing underneath it at all: no muscle, no fat. I couldn’t even imagine how old this man must be, or how long he had left to live.
“Wrong turn?” he called. “Where you goin’?”
I rolled the window down a bit further, felt my face burst into a sweat almost instantly. “I’m looking for a Mike Jones,” I said, giving the name I’d been told he used now, had been using for the past decade since he’d been free.
The man smiled then—it truly was a smile, I saw his mouth curve crookedly upward—and walked toward my car.
“I’m Mike Jones,” he rasped.
I stared at him as he shuffled toward me, becoming ever larger in my field of vision. It was impossible, I realized; I’d been given bad information. He came up to me and I said, “Well, I think I have the wrong person. It must be a different Mike Jones I’m looking for. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“Well,” he said, “don’t gotta be in a rush. Have some water before you go.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Jones, but I’m okay.” I held up the bottle of water that I’d been slowly sipping for hours.
“Um.” He was visibly disappointed. Part of his face, I saw, seemed frozen, or if not frozen, at least stiffened, difficult to move. That was why his smile was crooked. Stroke, I realized.
I was at a dead end, it seemed—literally and figuratively. My head hurt from the desert heat as well as from the liberal amount of drinking I’d been doing since I hit Vegas. Like most alcoholics, I never had hangovers; but I still could find myself feeling tired and achy after a night’s indulgence. The memory of the college student who’d leapt so enthusiastically into my hotel bed, only to crawl out again under cover of darkness, didn’t help. I wondered what it took to find a man who wouldn’t be ashamed to look at me when he woke in the morning. Of course, in truth, I disliked looking at myself in the morning too.
“Well, Mr. Jones, it’s been nice talking to you—”
“Young lady,” he said, “would you do me a favor?”
I looked at him. “What’s that?”
He licked his cracked lips. “Well, fact is, the woman who’s supposed to bring my groceries ain’t showed up. Thought she was due yesterday, but I ain’t seen her. Don’t know where she is.”
“Can’t you call her?”
“Ain’t got a phone, young lady. Just live out here by myself.”
“You have a car.”
“That thing? That thing ain’t run in five years. I can’t drive no more, anyway. Can’t see nothin’.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but…”
“What I mean is, could you give me a ride to the store?”
I looked at him. He was quivering, I realized; Parkinson’s, or something like it. The veins on the backs of his hands were dark and jagged against the liver spots on his skin.
“Well, I—Mr. Jones—”
“Sure be a help,” he said. “Don’t know what happened to her. She’s always so reliable. Unless,” he said, “you’re in a hurry.”
“Well, yes, I—I am.”
He nodded. “Okay, then. Sorry to bother you. Have a nice day.” And with that he turned, very slowly, and began making his way to the shack again.
I watched him. Finally I called, “Mr. Jones?”
He turned. “Yeah?”
“Where—where is the store?”
He shuffled toward me again, stopped halfway in the road. He pointed. “There’s a little place over yonder,” he said. “’Bout two miles. Dirt track. Your car’d be okay.”
I frowned, but knew I would be consumed with guilt if I left this ancient man with no help at all. I studied him: he was truly no threat. He was a man who was about to die.
“Well—you’re sure it’s two miles?”
“Positive.”
I sighed. “Well—I guess. All right.”
He smiled again. “Let me get my money,
okay?”
“Yes, sure.”
He moved off, noticeably more energetic now. I rolled up my window, unlocked the passenger door. I pulled the car around so that he would be able to step straight out of his front door into the vehicle without crossing the road.
“Hey, thanks,” he said when he appeared again. He stepped gingerly in.
“Now,” I said, “you have to give me directions.”
He did. We drove for perhaps a mile back the way I’d come, then took a dusty fork in the road I’d not even noticed before. It belatedly occurred to me that I might have offered him the use of my cell phone to call the person he was expecting, but by this point it was too late. Another mile or so brought us to a tiny brick building: the store. I went in with him. The place was old, perhaps as old as he was. Native American rugs and geegaws were everywhere, along with a small selection of groceries. I held a basket for him as he picked up bread, coffee, beef jerky, cans of beer. As we reached the counter the proprietor, a pale heavyset man in a T-shirt who looked nothing like a Native American, greeted him in a friendly way: “Nice to see you, Mr. Jones,” he said, ringing up the purchases. He glanced at me, smiling. “Ma’am.”
“Hello.”
“Mr. Jones, is this Eloise’s replacement?”
“Hah?”
“Eloise. Is this lady her replacement? Is she helping you now?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout no replacement.”
“Sure you do, Mr. Jones,” the proprietor said. “Eloise was moving, remember? You were supposed to call the—”
Mr. Jones looked up. “I forgot,” he said wheezily. “By damn, I forgot all about that.”
“Forgot?” The proprietor looked genuinely concerned. “Hey, Mr. Jones, you’d better use our phone here. Call them, get her replacement lined up.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, paying. “Yeah, I’d better do that.”
The proprietor produced a phone, handed the receiver to Mr. Jones. “Do you remember the number?”
“I—no. No, I don’t think I do. Got it written down, but that’s back at the house.”
“Well, then, you just call the Operator.” The proprietor punched the zero.
While Mr. Jones took care of his business, the proprietor looked at me. Before he asked I said, “I just happened to take a wrong turn onto his road. I don’t even know him.”
“Well,” he said, “you did your good deed for the day. Old Mr. Jones is kind of feeble these days.” Then, more quietly, “Likely to die out in that shack sometime.”
I nodded. After a few minutes the old man concluded his business, and we headed back up the road.
When it hit me it really wasn’t a surprise; I guess part of me had realized it all along. But it was only when he offered me a piece of jerky, saying, “I really ought to give you somethin’ to eat, lovely lady like you,” that I admitted to myself that this man was, of course, Mike McCoy. Through the wheezing, air-filled sound of his aged voice, the words lovely lady—their tone, their inflection—were unmistakable.
We pulled up to his shack.
“Wanna come in?” he asked.
I looked at him closely, this harmless old desert rat.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll come in.”
He was delighted, his crooked grin bursting forth. We got out of the car.
“Ain’t had a visitor in a long time,” he said, “other than those people who bring my groceries. An’ they never stop to chat.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
The shack was a single dark room. An oil lamp sat on the table. The shack was only slightly cooler than outside; I was sweating through my shirt.
“You don’t have electricity?” I asked.
“Nah. Got a propane tank out back. Keeps my hot plate goin’. Fan, when I need it. Sit down, sit down,” he said.
I did. We positioned ourselves at opposite ends of the single table. In the far corner of the room was an old bed, rumpled and sagging. There was a shelf that held a few knick knacks, a shortwave radio, the aforementioned fan, a few miscellaneous magazines.
“Ain’t much,” he admitted, noticing me looking around.
“No,” I agreed.
“All I need now, though. I’m eighty-one years old. Don’t need a lot.”
“No.”
We sat in silence. He popped open one of the beers he’d bought at the store. I declined his offer of one.
“Like to drink ’em when they’re still cold,” he explained. “No fridge.”
“I see that.”
“Ain’t had a visitor in a long time,” he said. “I told you that, didn’t I?”
“Yes. You did.”
Lucy, just go home.
“Forget a lotta things now,” he said quietly. His held his beer in two hands and yet it still quivered as it made its way to his lips.
“Do you?”
“I’m an old man,” he said. His voice was breathy, a hall of whispers. “Remember things that happened when I was little. Remember a dog I had, golden retriever. Bucky. Named him after Captain America’s sidekick.” He grinned crookedly. “Remember a lot of things like that. Way back. But lots is gone. Just disappeared. When they had me in that place they did things to me. Don’t recall exactly what. Bright lights, like a burnin’ in my head. They were gonna burn out the bad stuff, they said. Don’t know what that was. I just recall the burnin’, the burnin’. Brighter in my head than that desert out there.”
“Do you remember,” I said, my breath short, “Lucy Sparrow?”
“What’s that?”
“Lucy. Sparrow. Do you remember her?”
“Who’s that?”
“Or Maria Sanchez? Or Trista Blake?”
“Is one of them the lady that’s supposed to bring my groceries?”
I looked at him. His eyes were distorted behind the big glasses. He wasn’t lying, wasn’t pretending, unless he was the greatest actor of all time.
“Your name isn’t Jones,” I said. “It’s McCoy. Mike McCoy. And those are the girls you killed.”
“What’s that?”
“Lucy Sparrow. The other two. You killed them. You took them down to your basement and you tortured them and you murdered them.”
His face looked concerned, confused. “I did?”
“You did.”
He shook his head. “You know, I kind of think—it’s like there’s stuff buried back there, stuff that wasn’t totally burned out—it’s—but I can’t imagine. Why would I do that?”
“I was hoping,” I said, “that you would tell me.” My throat was dry. I’d been in this shack for five or ten minutes but it felt like hours, hours of roasting hell.
“I don’t,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t remember none of that.”
“Think,” I said. “Lucy Sparrow. A big blonde girl. She wore T-shirts and blue jeans. You met her at the Red Ball gas station where you worked. You met me there, too.”
“We know each other?”
“I was Lucy’s best friend.”
He shook his head again, face concentrated with thought. “Can’t remember nobody named Lucy.”
“You must remember your basement,” I said. “Your basement in Quiet, California. Your tools. Your dissecting table. You must remember killing those girls and hacking their bodies up with your bone saw and dropping their—their parts in the riverbed. You must remember that.”
He looked frightened now. I realized suddenly that I’d stood up, was leaning across the table, looming over him. He recoiled, his expression suffused with fear. He said nothing. His mouth hung open. He quivered.
I strode away from the table, the heat causing my head to pulsate. I marched to the shelf and lashed out, knocking the magazines everywhere and sending the radio skittering across the floor. There was a small kitchen area where he stored his food and I saw a butcher knife there. I grabbed it, turned to face him.
“Do you remember what you did?” I said. “Do you?”
&nb
sp; He couldn’t speak. His face had gone an ashy white. I walked up to him, stood there with the knife in my hands.
How’s it hangin’, lovely ladies?
You girls like to shoot pool?
C’mon over. We’ll have us some fun.
“Where’s your pool table?” I said.
“What?” he whispered.
“Pool. Pool. Don’t you like to play pool?”
“Ain’t shot pool in years.”
“How about girls? Have you hacked up any girls?”
“Ain’t—ain’t shot pool in years. The other—it’s—”
“It’s what?”
“It’s—ma’am, what kind of a man would do those things? It’s nothin’ a decent man would do.”
I looked at him for a long time. His dark eyes began to seem familiar behind the glasses: the broken blood vessels, the heavy old lids. But the energy in me dissipated then. I dropped the knife, collapsed in the chair next to him.
“Ain’t sayin’,” he murmured, “ain’t sayin’ I didn’t do it. Maybe I did. I heard about this before. There were people before came here. Maybe I did do it. Guess I’ll—guess I’ll go to hell if I did. Guess that’s where I belong. It sounds like an awful thing, a terrible thing. But ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I don’t remember nothin’ from back then. Only remember ol’ Bucky. Did I tell you about Bucky?”
“Yes,” I whispered, “you did.”
“Bucky was my golden retriever.” He was proud of this, of remembering this. “Named him after Captain America’s sidekick. Bucky. Beautiful dog. We used to swim together in the creek in the summers.”
I stared at the floor. It felt as if all my energy, my focus, were ebbing away. As if life itself were departing my body, leaving only emptiness.
“That was back in the peach time. Had peaches on our property. Used to pick ’em with my uncle. Paid me by the basket. Worked all day sometimes, got so I couldn’t stand no peaches. The grass was long there, and green. And…”
Tears had begun trickling down my face, I realized. I made no move to wipe them away.
“And we used to play, Bucky and me. He had a ball, like a rubber ball, he liked. Used to throw it for him, have him fetch it through the peach trees. Dog loved that ball. He…”
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