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"What the hell is that?" Napperstick asked. "Looks like something from outer space."
"Some kind of plant," Baron said. "That's obvious."
"That's one mean plant," Napperstick said. "I wouldn't take a nap around it."
They drove on, crossing from light into darkness in quick-blinding succession. Tree shadows dimmed the road and cooled the air like night. Ahead in a gloat of sunlight stood an abandoned Sinclair station, the cheerful green brontosaurus pockmarked with bullet holes. This seemed like the kind of country a man could hide in, but Baron knew better than that. People in this kind of country knew when outsiders in strange cars came through; they noticed the cars even more than they did the flat twangy western accents. The dark green safety of hackberry and water oak and hickory was an illusion.
"I used to collect dinosaurs," Napperstick said. "I had a lot. My mother threw them down the toilet when I broke a two-by-four on my sister's head. I never forgave her for that."
"Jesus Christ, man."
"Yeah, I know. It's strange the things you get attached to."
"No, I mean your sister. What happened to her?"
"I don't know. Brain damage maybe. It could be why she married that black guy."
"Man, you almost give me the creeps."
"I do? How about that?" Napperstick grinned like a shy man given a compliment.
The light was vanishing slowly from the afternoon. Every now and then,
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they passed a Cadillac or a Lincoln coming from the Gulf Coast. The cars all had gauzy screens stretched across their grilles to keep the insect world from their fiery pistons. "When I'm rich, I'm going to get me one of those cars." Napperstick said.
It was midevening, summertime dusk, when they came to a brick motel with a lustrous sign, the color of moon, that pleaded VACANCY. If the motel had a name, Baron didn't notice it. They had been traveling for three days straight. It was a motel. That was enough.
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A year before, Baron's wife had left him for nothing in particular"anything is better than this," she'd saidand he began blowing back and forth across the country in his Mustang, a man tumbling in crosswinds of rage and numbness. Baron was a terrible husband but he had loved his wife with a passion that made him tattoo her face with the blue and black marks of his fists. "I'll never stop loving you," he cried, pounding her around the bedroom that night she left, thinking she's history, she's history, pounding her until he was sobbing and she was spitting at him like a cat from the corner of the room. "Thank God I didn't have your baby," his wife spat. ''Thank God for small favors like that."
So he had gone driving. He felt like a guest in his own life, someone wearing the wrong clothes, not knowing whether to kiss or shake hands. In the summer, he had been speeding through Nevada, lost in a fragile glory of amphetamines and desert light, able, as long as both persisted, to maintain an acceptable vision of what lay ahead. Of course, he had narrowed his vision to where the future was a matter of days, and next month loomed as blank as outer space, an emptiness he did not even want to imagine.
For a man whose future extends about as far as a windshield, automotive difficulties can mark a sea change as profound as divorce or death in the family or winning the lottery. Somewhere in the desert, between Reno and Carson City, Baron's Mustang threw a rod. A piston heated up as orange as an ingot and the motor locked. The radio was playing so loudly that Baron did not hear the engine's clattering, the sound of a steam radiator banging away in the dead of winter. He noticed the acrid smell of burning oil, though for a moment the odor was unattributable in the swelter of sagebrush and baked sand.
Then the car just quit.
Baron let the Mustang roll onto the shoulder and finished listening to a song, "Dead Flowers," by the Rolling Stones. The speed was still pumping through him, a river of energy. He kept beat with the song, tapping on the dashboard, his arms as brown as a Mexican's.
The desert spread out around him, yellow and white, the monotony broken only by a few shriveled yucca plants, sagebrush, rocks. It felt like home.
When the song was over and a commercial for an airline roared onto the
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air, he switched off the radio, grabbed his sunglasses and his pills, and began walking. "Fuck you," he yelled in a voice that was his and that came from nowhere. He had a rage that he was born with. A mountain range as black as coal cut an austere and parallel track miles to the north. He plunged on down the highway, walking with an antic speed that did not wilt in the sun. It was Napperstick who finally stopped, placid and smiling, a young man, baby-faced, with an incongruous scar slicing down his cheek.
"How about an ice-cold beer?" Napperstick said, dangling a Budweiser out the window.
"All right, buddy," Baron said. As he reached for the beer, the man jerked the can inside the car. "Jesus H. Christ," Baron said. "Is that supposed to be funny?"
"I'm just fooling with you," Napperstick said, grinning. "Here you go, man." He handed Baron the beer and opened the passenger door. "That your Mustang back there?"
"I'm walkingcross country," Baron said.
"That's a good one. Serves me right."
They drove together, first to a mechanic Napperstick knew in Monroe, then to the grocery store for another six-pack, after which Napperstick decided to quit his most recent job as a day laborer on a new hospital. Baron sat drinking with the man, remembering the joy of exchanging words, stories. He didn't know a soul in the world. They spent the rest of the afternoon finishing a bottle of tequila in the mechanic's backyard, listening to the ring of a hammer and the clang of engine parts on the cement floor of the aluminum shed, watching stars nestle in the darkening blue space between the sharp peaks in the distance.
They remained at ease in their silence for a while. Then Napperstick said, "I figure you're my 'approaching emperor.' "
"What in hell are you talking about?" Baron said.
"The Ching said I had to 'advance over the plains with an approaching emperor.' I take that to mean you; you can't take these things too literally. We don't have emperors anymore. Anyway, I've got to get my butt in gear, change my life. I've been stuck here too long."
"What the fuck's the Ching?"
"The Chinese book of prophecy."
"You believe that stuff?"
"Sure. Why not? I mean, I might as well."
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Toward one o'clock in the morning, the mechanic hoisted the motor back onto the block, took what was left of Baron's moneyNapperstick had already made him a loanand went to bed. "You can sit around all night if you want," the mechanic said. Through the bright haze of the tequila, Baron felt a camaraderie
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for the baby-faced man with the scar and the lank, blond hair. He wanted them to move, to do something before the pale, dissipating edge of daylight sapped him of his sudden ambition, his sense of infinite possibility.
"Let's go somewhere," Baron said.
"I've got something else to do," Napperstick said.
They got into the Mustang and barreled out of town, going north, through the desert, toward the range of mountains. Baron rolled down his window with a pair of pliers and inhaled the aroma of sage growing out in the desert. The wind was blowing away the hair he had carefully arranged over his bald spot, but he was drunk, and it was cool and dark, so he didn't mind. He admired his own insouciance.
"This is what it's all about," Baron said.
They kept on driving for months, hemmed in only by the Spanish language to the south, tundras to the north, and oceans on either side. There was still enough space to roam, and both of them had all the time in the world.
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At the motel, Napperstick was reclining on one of the beds, leafing through the I-Ching and watching a porno movie. He kept clicking the toes of his cowboy boots together and trailing his fingers down the knife scar that ran like a gulch down his cheek. His touch was as light
and dreamy as a lover's.
"You really love that scar, don't you?" Baron said, chewing a vitamin C tablet that was as bitter as a child's aspirin. He'd read that vitamin C prevented hair loss, and he kept touching his scalp to check on his hairline.
"Love what?" Napperstick said, gazing at the screen's wan light.
"You know what," Baron said. His voice had the sharp edge of rebuke to it.
Napperstick smiled and scratched his cheek. A warm breeze blew in the window from the parking lot, heavy with the scent of gasoline. "It's Channel Blue," he grinned. "Twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sensuality."
"They don't do much for your self-image, do they?" Baron meant anatomically.
Napperstick just smiled, as enigmatic as a woman in an advertisement.
"We have to pay for those movies," Baron added. "They're not free."
"That's all right. We're going to be rich," Napperstick said, still smiling.
"You little pissant. Turn that shit off."
Napperstick just lay there, studying his book. Baron snapped the TV off.
There hadn't been any news since the weekend, three days ago, no news, no word, no deals, no ransom. They'd taken the boy from a backyard pool in the resort of Sun Valle, high in the mountains of Idaho. It had been as simple as circling the brown-eyed boy with curly dark hair in People magazine. "The Wealthy at Play." The boy was going to be a heartbreaker when he grew up. Most rich people were, Baron thought. "He's ours," Baron said. "He's ours if
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you're up to it. I think we're entitled, and I'm emperor." Napperstick went along because he always went along, succumbing to the prophecy and the profane eloquence of Baron's flat voice.
The boy had been sitting at the edge of his parent's pool, lazily kicking his feet back and forth in the cool blue water. He was reading a picture book, green elephants and pink giraffes, his chin perched on his hand, his eyelashes long and feminine. Baron came up behind him, his tennis shoes squeaking on the smooth cement. The boy didn't even turn around. Baron cupped the boy's mouth and whispered in his ear, "You're a sweet little gumdrop," wondering where that came from. He kept cooing sweetness into the boy's ear, carrying him as light as balsa back to the car where Napperstick was gunning the motor. They raced down into the flatlands on their way south. When the news came on the radio, they panicked, tying the boy up and shutting him in the trunk. Then they continued on down the highway, laughing in their daring and relief like college boys on a prank.
But that had been the last of it. There'd been no ransom delivered, and no explanation, no news. No one had shown up in Reno, no one had shown in Vegas. They'd had enough time to get it straight.
"What are we going to do?" Napperstick said, his voice as toneless as he could make it.
"I've been thinking about it," Baron said.
"Well?" Napperstick said.
"I'm still thinking."
"If it would make it easier on you, I'll shoot him."
"It's not that simple," Baron had said. But maybe it was.
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That night the boy screamed out in his sleep. Baron heaved himself out of unrecallable dreams, unsure of whether the scream had been nightmare or worse, and listened intently to the room's buzzing silence. The boy cried out again, full-throated fear, and Baron went to him, kneeling against the cold porcelain of the tub where they had bound him, shaking him gently by the shoulders, rubbing his hair, whispering Hey man, hey man into his ears.
The boy's eyes opened wide for a moment, then closed, and he mumbled something unintelligible. "What was that?" Baron said. "What did you just say?" As if the boy were telling him important news, prophecies from beyond his waking knowledge. But the boy's body relaxed again into more comfortable sleep; he licked his lips in somnambulistic contentment and was silent. Baron pulled the blanket smooth over the boy and left him sleeping in the bathtub.
"This is getting on my nerves," Napperstick said. He was rolling a joint, using a telephone book to collect the seeds.
Baron said nothing. The smoke swirled across the room, as sweet in his
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memory as the scent of rain on a parking lot. He drifted off to sleep, dreaming of traveling to a new place, fresh and unencumbered.
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Despite the emphatic light of midmorning, the room remained as gray and grainy as a newspaper photograph. Baron, half asleep, his face burrowed into the pillow, was listening to the maids wheeling their carts down the sidewalk. The maids' voices were husky, full of confidential laughter; to Baron, the women were speaking a foreign language with inflections of menace. One cart clattered to a stop and a maid began rapping on the door.
"Get the fuck out of here," Baron yelled. The cart rolled on down the sidewalk, to the accompaniment of a sudden, aggrieved silence.
Baron went into the bathroom, shadowy and cool, and pissed with relief. The boy was watching him, as wary as an animal. His cheeks were red, imprinted with tiny circles from the shower mat he'd slept on.
Baron closed the lid and sat down on the toilet.
"How'd you sleep last night?" he asked.
"Fine," the boy said, his voice timorous, faint.
"What'd you dream about?"
"I don't remember," the boy said, looking down at the drain.
"You were having a nightmare," Baron said.
The boy said nothing. "Don't you remember?"
"I had a bad dream," the boy said. He looked shy and embarrassed. Baron marveled at how adaptable the boy was, how all children were as pliant as water, taking the shape of the lives they were leading, warm when it was warm, icy when it was cold.
Baron knew a little something about a boyhood in motels. "Watch TV for a couple of minutes," his father had said, twenty-two years ago, leaving their room for a beer and a pack of cigarettes and going all the way to Flagstaff, Arizona, to get them. Baron had watched TV for the next three days, drinking warm Cokes and listening to coyotes out in the Mojave and to the blue laughter from the room next door. He'd kept the curtains shut against the desert and just sat there, watching his shows until his mother showed up, all the way from Norfolk, Virginia. I had to leave a good time for this mess, she said, gesturing at the boy, the cartoons, the rumpled bed. Oh be nice to him, his mother's boyfriend had said, settling down on the bed to watch cartoons.
That kind of thing ran in the family. Baron knew that much by now. His heart had been chipped by hard weather into a muscle as clean and as sharp as obsidian. He was proud of that; he could stand almost anything.
And yet he felt a flash of love and pity for the boy, as sudden as a bolt of electricity striking him just beneath his ribs. It wasn't the boy's fault that he'd
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had such an easy time of it, that he had floated through his life like it was a warm pool. That was the way his world had been. Now he knew that there was more to it than that.
"You hungry?" Baron asked the boy.
The boy nodded.
"Speak up," Baron said. "You have to speak up for what you want."
"Yes."