Gods Without Men (44 page)

It wasn’t his place to say any of that.

Finally, the Pinnacles rose up through the dust, three spires connecting earth and sky. When Ike saw them, fear landed on his shoulders and wrapped him like a cloak. He knew why he had avoided the rocks. And why they tugged at him, like a thread caught on a cactus spine.

They got out of the car and at once a wind rose up. The dust was in Ike’s eyes and nostrils, working its way between his teeth. Munro crammed his hat lower on his head and gave an order to his NCO, who deployed the soldiers. The wind whipped the running men’s pant legs around their ankles, sent little curls and whirls and vortices of sand scooting up off the ground.

Sure enough, there was a radio antenna perched about twenty feet up on the rock, a kite of metal rods with a length of wire spooling down into the mouth of a man-sized hole. There was junk lying about on the ground around it, tools and scrap and lumber. An ancient Model T, rusting and half filled with sand, was parked by a mound of what looked like mine tailings; its seats, all busted springs and sprouting horsehair, were propped up on some bricks under the overhang to make a sort of couch. There was a washing line with a faded denim workshirt and a pair of long johns pegged to it. There was a woodpile and an ax. From down in the hole came the sound of a crackly swing band. It sounded like one of the FM stations out of Los Angeles.

Sheriff Grice crouched down in front of the hole. “Deighton, you in there?”

There was no reply.

“Mr. Deighton, come out. We need to talk to you.”

Munro made another sign to his NCO, who barked an order. The soldiers unslung their rifles and pointed them in the general direction of the hole.

Grice looked around testily. “Take it easy,” he muttered. “He’s just an old man. He’s probably deaf.”

He shouted louder, and still got no response.

“Deighton, come out!”

The swing music stopped. A man’s voice rose up out of the cave, weak and cracked, hard to hear.

“What do you want?”

“We need to talk to you.”

“Go away. This is private property.”

“It’s the police, Deighton. Come on up here.”

“Go away.”

“Don’t play games. Come on out. We’ll have a talk and then we’ll be on our way.”

There was some banging and scraping and a ladder was propped up against the lip of the hole. A grizzled head poked out and took a look around. As soon as he saw the soldiers, he ducked back down again.

“Deighton. It’s all right. We just want to talk.”

Grice was trying to sound soothing. The old man hollered up from his pit, his voice hard to hear over the wind.

“The hell you do!”

Grice walked back to Munro, tying a handkerchief over his mouth against the dust. He pointed up at the antenna, dimly visible in the haze. “You can see. It’s just a crystal set or something. He’s no threat.”

“We’ll still need to search the place.”

The old man shouted on, calling them devils, saying that if they were trying to take away his knowledge (whatever that was), they’d have a fight on their hands. Then he broke out in a terrible, racking cough. Ike listened to him suffering down there, wondering what kind of den he’d made, in what filth he chose to live.

Munro sauntered forward, peered in, then stepped smartly back again.

“Jesus, he’s got a gun.”

As if to confirm it, there was a sharp crack, which sounded to Ike like a .30-06 rifle round.

“There’s no need for that!” shouted Grice. “You’re being a fool.”

Munro conferred with his NCO and called one of his men forward.

“We’ll gas him out.”

There was only one thing Ike’s mother ever told him about the man she’d been married to. One thing that stuck in his mind. As a kid in
the orphanage, Ike daydreamed he’d meet and fight the burned-face man. Even now that he was grown, twenty-one and in uniform, it still went around in his head. His monster was down in that hole. The thing couldn’t be put off forever.

“Wait,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.”

The others turned, frankly amazed to hear him speak.

“Let me go down there. I’ll bring him out.”

“Hell you will!” said Grice.

Munro was amused. “No, let him. Go on, boy, be my guest. You flush him for us.”

Grice barred Ike’s way. “You ain’t going down there like some hunting dog. Feller’s got a squad of his own men to take his orders.”

“I don’t mind, Sheriff,” Ike reassured him. “I want to do it.”

You either went after your monsters, or they came after you.

As he walked to the lip of the hole, he could sense the depth of the place, hear the silent thunder booming. He called out Deighton’s name, then crouched down and called again, this time in the People’s Language.

“Skin Peeled Open,” he called. “Can you hear me?”

There were many things he knew.

At that moment the wind died down. The man replied, “Who is that? Who’s speaking to me?” He said some other words in the People’s Language, but, to his shame, Ike could not understand.

“I’m Ike Prince,” he said in English. “My father was Mockingbird Runner and my mother was Salt-Face Woman.”

There was a silence. Then the ladder was pushed up again to the lip of the pit. Ike climbed down.

It was not a filthy den, but a cluttered little parlor, lit by a gas lamp. There was a chair and a table and an Army cot. The floor was swept, the walls smooth as plaster. The man himself looked ratlike, wizened. His face was not terrifying to look upon. One side was smooth scar tissue, the other scored with deep lines. A two-sided man. A man facing both worlds. He was clutching an ancient Springfield service rifle. When he spoke, his voice was a strangled rasp. Ike found he was not afraid. How
could he be, of such a husk? He knew then there would be no fight, no glorious taking of revenge. All he could feel was contempt.

“Why did you say that name to me?” Deighton wheezed.

“You didn’t expect to hear it again.” It was a statement, not a question.

“You’re Eliza’s son?”

Ike nodded. He surveyed the room. The aerial wire led to a radio set, an ordinary device in a big walnut cabinet, the kind of thing designed for a rich man’s house. Deighton had it mummified in cloths to protect it from dust and wired up to some device with a coil and a crank handle, which he supposed was a generator. There was paper everywhere, sheaves of it on every surface, bulging files stacked against a wall.

“What’s all that?”

“Knowledge.”

“What do you mean, ‘knowledge’? What is it you think you know?”

“I’m its keeper. I’m rescuing it from the dark.”

“You live in the dark, old man. Put that rifle down.”

Deighton lowered his gun. “I’ll kill you if you touch it,” he said plaintively.

Sheriff Grice’s voice boomed into the space.

“What’s going on down there?”

“All fine, Sheriff. I’m just persuading him to come out.”

“I won’t. I’ll die first.”

“Look at yourself. You’re already dead.”

The local kids swapped legends about Methuselah’s cave. Treasure, a maze of tunnels. There wasn’t anything of the kind, just that little room, like a burrow. A rat’s nest of paper. There was every kind of junk down there. Mining tools, spools of copper wire. The old fool had crates stenciled
DUPONT EXPLOSIVES: SPECIAL GELATIN
shoved under his bed and tin boxes of number-six blasting caps jumbled among the coffee and canned food.

“Eliza had a son,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I mistreated her.”

Ike shrugged. “Kind of late to be saying sorry.”

“But you’re her son. She had a son.”

Ike wondered why he had ever been scared to face an old fool who lived in a cave. That’s all this feller was. Now he’d seen him and it was done. He could climb back up into the world and get on with life.

“I just felt like taking a look at you and I did. They want you to come out. You better do it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ike Prince. Not that you need to know.”

“Ike Prince. Just that? Don’t you have another?”

Ike understood what he meant and it made him angry. He had only the one white name.

“You better come out or they’re going to throw tear gas down in here, force you.”

“Only if you’ll take care of this.” Deighton gestured at his stack of files. “If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to you. My life’s work. I studied the People, Ike Prince. That’s why your mother was there. To study.”

“Are you stupid? I don’t want your old papers. I don’t want anything from you. You know you were tricked? You been down here in a hole all these years. Where you wanted to put my father, down in a hole. But he tricked you. You took his place. He’s alive and you’re dead.”

There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He hurried over to his stack of files. “Please,” he begged. “What I said about your father. Saying his name to those men. I never meant for it to happen. I was jealous. A jealous husband. Please, the knowledge belongs to you. If you don’t take it, it will all go into the dark.”

It was pathetic, him holding out his box of scribblings, like it was the Queen of England’s crown jewels.

“I’ll tell them you ain’t coming out.”

Ike left the old man standing there, holding his box. He climbed the ladder. At the top, Grice and Munro were waiting. “He won’t listen,” he said. “You should use the gas.”

One of Munro’s men doubled back to the truck and returned with a metal canister. Sheriff Grice shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. He don’t sound like he can breathe too well.”

Munro was trying to brush the dust off his suit. “Well, sadly for you,
I don’t much care what you think. I haven’t got time to negotiate with some crazy old man.”

He gave the sign and a soldier sidled up to the hole, pulled the pin on the grenade and dropped it in. There was a hissing noise and smoke started billowing up. They stepped back, avoiding the plume, which streamed in the wind across the dry lake.

There was a noise like thunder.

The concussion knocked them all off their feet and they squirmed to take cover beneath the cars as a rain of rocks and small stones pelted down. Ike knew what had happened. He’d known it would probably happen when he told them to throw down the gas. As the rain of stones fell, he was laughing. Now he could go and live in the world. Be a good policeman, do his duty. The lid was closed on the past.

Of course, when they’d all picked themselves up and bandaged Munro’s head and driven the three wounded soldiers to the hospital and Grice was started on the long process of reporting and form-filling and sorting out who to blame, Ike ended up being the one to go down and scrape up the pieces. Splintered furniture, a lot of charred papers covered in Deighton’s cramped, tiny handwriting. Of the man, he couldn’t find anything much at all. Just a few fragments of bone.

Raj smiled up at his father, his deep brown eyes as alien and inscrutable as stars. “Look,” he said, pointing at a delivery van. Jaz gripped the little blue sneaker more tightly as his son hopped closer to the door, trying to get a better view. A miracle: That was the word Lisa used. God and Lisa were close these days.

“We’re going far,” he told him. They always went far. For several months, walking had been their main occupation; all through the winter, even when it was tough to push the stroller through the snow. Lisa would phone from the office and ask where they were. Out, Jaz would say. He’d make up fictitious errands, trips to Whole Foods, the dry cleaner. He’d tell these lies standing on corners in strange parts of the city, where bass blared from passing cars and men hung out in front of check cashers and bodegas.

He got Raj into his second shoe and carried the stroller down the steps. “You want to ride?” he asked. Raj shook his head. Hand in hand they set off down the hill, making toward the river. There was a bookstore in Chelsea he wanted to visit; no matter that there were a dozen closer places to buy a book. He and Raj would walk. Sooner or later they’d find their way across one of the bridges into Manhattan. They’d stop for a snack, sit on a bench in a park. The trip could use up most of the day.

At least it was warm. June had been wet and chilly; whole days of rain. They’d trudged the streets under twin yellow ponchos, Raj’s hair plastered against his face in wet black licks. Today the sky was gray and a humid pall lay over the street, cloaking the bodies of passersby in a
sheen of sweat; the dog walkers, the neighbor carrying some kind of cake from her car to her house, its large pink box held ritually in front of her like a religious relic or an unexploded bomb. The neighbor nodded hello and grinned, campily widening her eyes in what was probably supposed to be an expression of fizzy excitement.
Oh, that a day should have such cake in it!
As she fished in her purse for her keys, she stole a quick, voracious glance at Raj. Jaz knew her. Carrie-Anne or Carol-Ann. Her husband was a urologist. So ingratiating now, but a few months before she’d ignored him whenever they passed on the street. Yeah, he thought. Eat shit, lady. Try and pretend you never thought what you thought about me.

They walked past the coffee shop next to the subway stop. It had once been his regular spot, but he hadn’t been in there since the previous August. One morning on the way to work, he’d been standing in line when a woman tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned to see what she wanted, she spat in his face. Murderer, she hissed. Pedophile. God hates you. He’d been too shocked to react. By the time he worked out what had happened, she was gone, out on the street, the glass door rattling in its frame behind her.

The guy behind him had seen everything. “She spat on me,” Jaz said, disbelieving. “Did you see that? She spat on me.” The guy shrugged and got interested in something on the floor. Jaz cleaned himself with wadded napkins. No one would catch his eye. Eventually, the girl behind the counter asked, in an odd sarcastic tone, if he wanted anything to drink. Then he realized: Everyone in the place knew who he was. It explained the peculiar atmosphere, the invisible bubble of indifference that seemed to be separating him from the other customers. He left immediately and didn’t go out of the house again for three days. During the months of Raj’s disappearance, he got used to how people reacted when they recognized him: the silent disgust; the animal recoil. He’d tell himself they didn’t know him, that their anger was directed at something else, some personal mental darkness his presence in the checkout line or subway car was forcing them to confront. It didn’t help. He was jostled on the street, found it hard to get service in stores. Once
someone threw a soda can out of a car, which sent a great fizzy arc of orange onto the sidewalk in front of his feet.