Running Dog (23 page)

It wasn’t until they were well under way, heading west on U.S. 90, that he turned in his seat for a longer look. It was the Japanese. They were spread throughout the bus, singly or in pairs, nine of them, and they were all asleep. The other tourists talked, compared postcards, looked out the windows. It was as though the Japanese, secretly, by inborn means, had been able to communicate to each other the placid imperative:
sleep
.

He faced front again. They’d gone to sleep immediately and they continued sleeping despite the noise and motion. This apartness he’d always found interesting in Asians. This somehow challenging sense of calm. It only remained for him to discover whether they’d wake up simultaneously, raising their heads in unison.

All the windows were closed. The blinds were down. Lightborne double-locked the gallery door. Then he turned toward Odell and gestured, arms outstretched, palms up: what do we have?

Odell looked up from a book of etchings. He was older
than Richie, but not much, and fuller in the face, although with the same prominent teeth. The book was titled
Extraterrestrial Sex Positions
.

Sixteen millimeter, he said. Considered an amateur film gauge at the time this footage was shot. No standard, or optical, sound track. Magnetic sound, if any, would have to be added. Problems there with certain projectors. Possible problems adapting 16mm to motion picture theaters. Schools and churches, yes. TV, yes.

“Wonderful,” Lightborne said. “Schools and churches, that’s wonderful.”

He’d had to strain to hear what Odell was saying. Odell spoke rapidly and sometimes indistinctly, with much more of an accent than his cousin had—a run-on Georgia voice, a clip-clop, rather than Richie’s slight but piercing twang.

Lightborne circled the small table that held the projector Odell had brought with him. They wouldn’t be able to view the film until the following day. The projector had a defective part, Odell had discovered, and it was ten p.m.—too late to find a replacement.

Curiously, Lightborne wasn’t disappointed. He found he was in no hurry to look at the footage. At some rudimentary level it was an experience he feared. He’d feared it all along, he realized. His involvement brimmed with fear.

Moll Robbins would be joining him for the screening. He wanted a disinterested intelligence on the scene. More than that. He wanted company. Human warmth. An interpreter of the meaning of his fear.

It was all so real. It had such weight. Objects were what they seemed to be. History was true.

Odell said he’d talked to Richie on the phone. Richie was barricaded in the warehouse. He was feeding the dogs infrequently, to give them a meaner edge. He’d had this feeling for months, Odell said. Someone was out to get him. Some dark force. There was a sniper somewhere, waiting for the right moment. He was sitting on a bed in some rooming house,
cleaning his rifle scope. He had a bullet with Richie’s name on it. Dallas, Richie would say. What am I doing in Dallas?

“All he talks about is John F. Kidney, Bobby Kidney, Martin Luther Kang, Jaws Wallace.”

“What?” Lightborne said.

“I keep telling him what Rose Kidney told Tiddy Kidney.”

Long pause.

“What did she tell him?”

“That was Harry Truman.”

“If you can’t stand the heat,” Lightborne said.

“That was Harry S Truman, wasn’t it, said that.”

Odell went on.

Richie was obsessed not only by his impending assassination but by the conflicting reports that would ensue. He’d been shot by one white male, or two white males, or one white male with a mulatto child. The rifle used had no prints, had several sets of prints, now being checked, or had several sets of prints but they’d been accidentally wiped off by the police.

Richie was especially obsessed by fingerprints being wiped off by the police, Odell said.

Lightborne went behind the partition into the living area. He turned on both taps in the wash basin, hoping this would lead Odell to think he was shaving. Then he sat at the foot of his cot and stared into the black window shade three feet away.

History is true
.

Selvy got a ride from a man in a pickup, south from Marathon. The man was about seventy-five years old. There was a deer rifle on a rack at the back of the cab. Four hours till nightfall. The desert.

He saw it as a memory. Deep gullies at right angles to the road. Flash-flood warnings. Yucca stalk and ocotillo sticking out of the sand. Things don’t usually resume existence
precisely as you’ve recalled them. Spires, buttes, pinnacles, the eroded remnants, to left and right, in scaly rust and copper and sandy brown. Well ahead he saw the waveform, the scant silhouette, of the Chisos Mountains, palest slate, lying so completely in a plane it could not possibly be more than arbitrary light, a mood or fabrication.

Finally a car approached and passed. Then nothing again. A buzzard on a fencepost. Single windmill in the distance. Everything here was in the distance. Distance was the salient fact. Even after you reached something, you were immersed in distance. It didn’t end until the mountains and he wasn’t going that far.

They stopped for gas at the old frontier store, an adobe structure with a lone pump and the remains of a small covered wagon out front. Selvy went inside. There was a broad counter covered with rocks for sale. Along one wall was the owner’s barbed wire collection. There were display cases full of sundries. In one case, Selvy spotted an item labeled Filipino guerrilla bolo.

The owner got it out for him. A long heavy single-edged knife with a broad blade. Flecks of rust. Small nicks in the cutting edge. Fifteen dollars.

“I always thought bolos were curved blades.”

“Machete family,” the owner said. “Vegetation, cane.”

“From bolo punch, I guess I got the idea. An uppercut that comes way around. Got any honing oil?”

“I might find some.”

“With all those rocks over there, think you can find one that’s perfectly rectangular, about half an inch thick?”

“If you want a whetstone, I’ve got some Washita, if I know where to find it.”

Selvy also bought a canteen and filled it with water. Then he paid the man and went outside. A teenage girl was cleaning the windshield. When she was finished, they moved back onto the road.

“Planning on making it before dark.”

“There’s time,” Selvy said.

“I’ve my doubts.”

“We’re right about there. I’d say less than five minutes and we’ll be there.”

“You don’t want to forget the walk.”

“I’m tuned,” Selvy said. “The walk is good as made.”

A coyote loped across the road and disappeared in some brush alongside a gulley.

“What’s that you got there?”

“Filipino guerrilla bolo.”

“Where’s your jungle?”

“I bought it for the name.”

“You didn’t get your money’s worth unless a jungle came with it.”

“I like the name,” he told the old man. “It’s romantic.”

Along a slight elevation in the highway, he spotted the primitive road that led to the Mines. The man stopped the pickup and Selvy hopped out and started walking east. The trail was dusty except for isolated parts, hardened mud, where he saw signs of old tire tracks, mostly heavy tread.

The canteen was looped to his belt, left side. Bolo on the other side, at a forty-five-degree angle to his leg, cutting edge up.

He began to run. The canteen bounced against his thigh. He ran for twenty minutes. It felt good. It felt better with each passing minute. Prickly pear and mesquite. A memory unwinding. He walked for an hour, then ran for fifteen minutes. A dust devil swirled to his right. The weather was changing down there, far beyond the transient whirlwind. Something was building over the mountains.

Ninety minutes later he saw the barracks, two of them, surrounded by debris of various kinds, kitchen and plumbing equipment, a gutted jeep, a useless windmill, anonymous junk. This grouping of common objects he found briefly
touching. Signs of occupancy and abandonment. Faceted in sad light. A human presence. In the rose and gold of sunset.

The wood-burning stove still sat in the long barracks. He found canned food in a locker. In the smaller building a dozen cots were ranged along a wall. He dragged one of them back into the long barracks and set it near the stove.

After eating he went outside, wrapped in a blanket. It was still clear in this area, broad scale of stars. No more than thirty degrees now, dropping. Dry cold. A pure state. An elating state of cold. Not weather. It wasn’t weather so much as memory. A category of being.

The temperature kept dropping but this didn’t signify change. It signified intensity. It signified a concentration of the faculty of recall. A steadiness of image. No stray light.

It was snowing in the mountains.

All behind him now. Cities, buildings, people, systems. All the relationships and links. The plan, the execution, the sequel. He could forget that now. He’d traveled the event. He’d come all the way down the straight white line.

He realized he didn’t need the blanket he was wrapped in. The cold wasn’t getting to him that way. In a way that called for insulation. It was perfect cold. The temperature at which things happen on an absolute scale.

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection.

Choice is a subtle form of disease.

When he woke up it was still dark. Gray ash in the stove. He walked to the window, naked, and looked east into the vast arc of predawn sky. He crouched by the window. He crossed his arms over his knees and lowered his head. Motionless, he waited for light to burn down on the sand and rimrock and dead trees.

A set of tracks ran east and west along the front of the warehouse in downtown Dallas. It was a five-story building with corrugated metal doors and flaking paint. There was a loading platform out front. A small sign:
PREVIEW DISTRIBUTIONS
. All the windows were boarded up.

Inside Richie Armbrister sat at a long table, tapping the keys of a pocket calculator. At his elbow a desk lamp burned. Nearby three dogs lay sleeping. In the gloom beyond was the figure of Daryl Shimmer, Richie’s bodyguard, extended across an old sofa. Two more dogs near the sofa, sleeping. Beyond that, in total darkness, fork lifts and pallets and shipping cylinders, enormous ones, numbering in the hundreds.

Daryl was becoming increasingly morose and withdrawn. Physically distant. Richie noticed how he’d gradually been moving farther away. The sofa was a backward step, from Daryl’s point of view. He’d spent the whole evening sitting in a fork-lift vehicle in the dark, about thirty yards away. He’d had to revert to the sofa if he wanted to sleep.

Everyone else was gone. They left singly, in pairs, in small groups, over a period of twenty-four hours, reverently, slipping out the north door. The warehouse was quiet for the first time since Richie had bought it.

There had been phone calls from a man who identified himself as Sherman Kramer. Daryl recognized the name. Kidder. A small-time operator. But with connections. Large connections.

A certain man was spending a lot of time in the parking lot across the street. Richie had watched him through a gap between two boards that were nailed across one of the windows. He spent most of his time near the Ross Avenue end of the lot, which was the far end in relation to the warehouse. He leaned against a car. Or walked back and forth. Richie thought it
might be the man he’d found in his sauna aboard the DC-9. Hard to tell from this distance, looking through a dirt-smeared window.

Lightborne’s phone was disconnected. No forwarding number. Richie had wanted to speak with Odell. He trusted Odell. Odell was family. Real family. The only number he had for Odell in New York was Lightborne’s number. Disconnected.

He tried to concentrate on the figures before him. Avenues of commerce. That’s all he cared about. The higher issues. Demography. Patterns of distribution. Legal maneuvers and technicalities. Bookkeeping finesse. He’d never even asked Lightborne what the footage was supposed to show.