Where There's a Hole in the Sky
A story. About 50 paperback pages.
A young man drives to the Chihuahuan desert to investigate a mysterious electrical anomaly. The final chapter of this story was published on July 3, 2023. Jump to chapter (desktop only): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Chapter One.
Historically, there has only been enough of an appetite for one gas station between Ozona, Texas and Fort Stockton, Texas. In 1991, it was an Alon Fuel Center on the west side of US-349—within sight of I-10, about two miles north of the intersection.
Tom drove a red 1984 Chevrolet Celebrity.
He knew the tank took a little over fifteen gallons when he topped it off. He knew he got about twenty miles to the gallon in Houston, but it would be better on the highway, maybe twenty-three. He wrote the number down in an empty space on his map, in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert. He thought about it for a second, rubbed away the three, flipped over his pencil and replaced it with a two.
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no I’ve said too much
Tom spread his map taut over the steering wheel with his palms. He pressed the dull edge of his pencil into the paper and crossed a notch through I-10 at a zig-zag break in the hills, where he guessed he was pulled over, and another one a couple inches down at the junction. He drew a fat line over the road between them, then leaned back and squinted at the shiny section of highway. He measured it with his thumbnails. Forty miles. He checked the fuel gauge again, then he pushed the map into the glove-box and threw it shut. He turned up the radio.
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
The air that blustered through the Celebrity’s windows smelled like asphalt and grass. Mostly it smelled hot. It blew up beneath the driver’s side mirror and made a slipstream into Tom’s nostrils, where it tunneled through his sinuses and warmed up the inside of his face. The scene outside had not really changed for two hundred miles: there was the road; behind the road, a spine of rusty hills; and in between, sloping miles of cracked, hopeless land covered in sandstone dust and barbed plants the color of gloom. It was beautiful country. The landscape was austere and magical, stripped clean by the sun and crackling with electricity. Your tires could crack, burn, and boil over the same rocks where imagined generations of American forebears had bled out with arrows in their ribs and cactus spines in their feet. It was western mythology, soaked down into the dirt. You could live off it. Tom leaned back in his seat and tuned into it all the way through his spine. The engine hummed and hummed.
From the highway, the Alon station looked like a molar stuck out of a dry jawbone. A cracked concrete drive sheared off from the road and buckled up to the lone square station building at the back. Tom pulled the Celebrity into the only working pump bay and scratched under his arm while he stepped out into the heat. He hung the nozzle into the tank and clicked the handle open.
Tom was tall, over six-foot-two with his sneakers on, and he stuck his head out over his neck when he stood. He had Irish skin that flushed in the heat, and he was blond, with a close haircut and a widow’s peak that had made a good start on deepening. His face was long and square.
This is it, he thought. This is the place.
The sun lit up the scratches in Tom’s sunglasses so they sparkled. He had seen the edges of the desert outside San Antonio, and once through the window of an airplane, but he had never been out this far west. He sniffed deeply and tried to get another dose of the sizzling air into his blood.
People here have it figured out.
The station building felt dark inside. Tom’s irises stretched open fast enough to hurt. The fluorescent tubes in the ceiling were dirty and dim, and the air conditioning was so cool that it felt wet on his skin. An electric bell chimed over the door as Tom walked through and dispelled most of the austere desert magic he had gathered outside; this was just a gas station. He frowned.
“In the back, honey.”
A beanbag-shaped woman with stiff red curls and skin like formaldehyde preservation sat at the counter. Half of her face was hidden behind a portiere of scratch-off tickets and prayer cards. Her hand was in a bag of Fritos.
“It’s—what?”
“Bathroom, honey, right back there.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Tom. He hung his sunglasses over his T-shirt.
“Can I get ten dollars at, uh…” He leaned back from his waist to look out at the pump canopy.
“Only one station, honey,” the woman said through a mash of chips. She raised up her hand to cover her mouth. “Regular?”
“Yeah.” Tom yanked a thick fold of bills out from the front of his jeans and put a damp ten on the counter.
“You’re good to go, honey.” The woman left the bill where it was and pressed her thumb down into a button on the register.
“Thanks.”
A TV hung in the corner over a cooler of canned iced tea. It was showing black-and-white footage of European men with thick eyebrows gesturing at one another over a table. Beside them, a series of photographs showed tank columns rolling down a highway between clay-roofed houses and handsome rows of trees. Tom watched absently while he tried to lift a bag of gummy worms off their hook. The bag slipped and went to the floor.
“Sorry,” said Tom, not really to anyone. He bent down. The last shine of desert magic evaporated off of him while he squatted on the linoleum.
The Celebrity was searing hot when Tom rejoined her. He flung a drizzle of gasoline onto her bumper as he replaced the hose in its bay, threw his candy onto the passenger seat, and peeled out onto Highway 349 fast enough that the back of the car scraped down on the asphalt. The pump station beeped after him.
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
Tom sang along with the radio and pressed his sneaker down into the pedal until the air conditioning, the fluorescent lights, and the hardships of Europe were all forgotten. He let his mind search for mania. He was Jack Kerouac. Should he start smoking cigarettes? The mountains were beautiful—so beautiful. This must be the place. He let his imagination fill up the desert along the driver’s side—he could live out here clean, if he wanted to. That ridge is where he would walk with his pack, scouting out things to trap and sour berries to pick in the juniper stands. Probably no one had been within a hundred yards of that valley in a hundred years. He could dig out a shelter under one of the overhangs. Just live. Tom imagined building fires out of dry brush and writing, just writing, in a fat leather journal while his rainwater boiled. He would publish his opus by wrapping it in a shirt and setting it out on the center stripe of the highway. Tom smiled. He let his arm swing out the window and whack the door in time with the radio. He blew through the light where 349 pulled onto I-10 and pressed on the gas until the Celebrity rumbled and shook.
Tom pulled out his map at a stoplight in Fort Stockton. He let it slide down into his lap while he turned onto the town’s parallel drag, which kept the Pecos County courthouse, a law office, and the only auto-parts store listed in the 1988 Texas Road Atlas for fifty miles. The Celebrity bounced low on its suspension as Tom pulled up into the drive. The plastic sign over the auto-parts store was sun-bleached and cracked.
A spindly boy in a red vinyl vest came out from an aisle as Tom walked in.
“Hey uh, what can I help you with?” he said. A section of skin above the boy’s mouth was shiny and pink. It looked like it had been pulled taut and super-glued in place.
“Need to buy some batteries,” said Tom.
“Yeah, man, right over here.”
The boy ducked his head while he turned and made a nervous gesture with his hand. They walked by rows of canned engine oil and coolant recharge. The batteries were stacked up against the back wall.
“You looking for a certain brand?”
“Uh, no, just need—” Tom scanned over the rows of plastic blocks.
“Do y’all have AGMs?” he said.
“Uh, what’s—” the boy put his hand on his lip and tilted his head. “Do you, uh—is that a brand?”
“Sorry, no, um, absorbed glass mat,” said Tom. “They usually have a blue sticker.”
“Yeah, uh, let me look.” The boy half-walked, half-ran down the wall of batteries. He stopped at a column of blocks with thick lime-green caps and blue labels on the side.
“I think these, maybe,” he said. Tom walked over and looked at the stack.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “I need—uh, sorry. Hold on, I’ve got it written down.”
“If you let me know your make and model, I can look it up—”
“No, thanks, I’ve got it written down, I’ll be right back,” said Tom.
The boy lifted his fingers up off his jeans and bobbed his head.
Tom squinted against the sun as he walked back outside. He put his key into the Celebrity’s rear and popped the trunk, releasing avalanches of fine sand that had accumulated along the seams. Inside, his gear had shaken into a bird’s nest of steel flat-bars and thick spools of wire. Tom used both hands to cram the heap an inch to the side, until he could see the cardboard corner of a notebook underneath. The sharp edge of a fastener gouged a scar into the book’s cover as Tom yanked it free.
The air conditioning in the shop fell over Tom as he pushed back in with his shoulder. The boy was standing dutifully by the wall of batteries, batting the insides of his legs with his hands. He nodded.
Tom flipped open the notebook to a dog-eared page. He traced down the margin with his finger.
“Uh, do these say what voltage they are?” said Tom. He looked up.
“Um, so this number here,” the boy went up to the wall and cheated out like he was giving a demonstration. “This one tells you how well it starts up in cold weather.” He pressed his finger down onto the sticker on one of the batteries.
“Oh. Does that matter a whole lot?” said Tom. The boy looked up with his finger still stuck out.
“Huh?”
“Just, cause—the heat out here.”
“Oh. Ha, yeah—yeah, you know, it can get pretty cold, in the winter sometimes.”
“Oh.”
Tom looked back down at his notebook. He squinted at a line of messy figures.
“Yeah, man,” said the boy. “So that’s that one. I think—” he pushed his finger down onto another number.
“So this one’s, amp, uh, amp-hours.”
“Okay, so,” Tom traced across on the page. “Right, so that’s how much it’s got in there.”
“What?”
“Like how long it’ll last.”
“Yeah, I think that’s right.” The boy let his arm drop down to his side. He stretched out the skin around his mouth by cocking his jaw forward and pulling it back into place in a circle.
“So I think,” said Tom. He shifted his weight. “I think they’ve gotta all be the same voltage.”
The boy nodded and kicked out his jaw again. The pink skin above his lip shone like a strip of packing tape.
Tom flipped over a page and looked down the notes on the other side, then he walked up to the wall and lifted up one of the battery cases with the heel of his palm. A row of numbers was embossed on the bottom. He checked another one—they matched.
“Okay, yeah, looks like all these are the same.” Tom stepped back. “Do you think you could help me load these up?”
“Uh, sure—you need, uh, a couple? Or what?”
Tom included an extra five for the boy when he counted out the stack of bills. The two of them stood outside next to the Celebrity with sweat stains through the fronts of their shirts. The boy had thrown his vest onto the curb and had his sleeves rolled up over the elbows. He scratched the side of his mouth while Tom walked his finger over a small shelf of cash and handed it over. They had managed to fit forty-seven batteries into the back of the Celebrity and another six in the trunk, as well as a pile of thick-gauge jumper cables stacked up almost to the ceiling on the passenger seat.
“Uh, you want a receipt?” the boy said.
“No, that’s fine, thanks.”
“Alright, man.”
The boy gave a salute with his chin and went back inside. He forgot his vest on the curb.
Chapter Two.
Maxfield Hall at Rice University was built in the seventies in a fit of Byzantine revivalism, all pink brick and cement, bleached and molded into fine columns. Almost all of the interior had been cleared out and paved over to make space for the undergraduates’ high-voltage engineering projects. Drifts of coffee mugs clumped together on aluminum shop tables, coils of wire hung in thick bundles from the ceiling. The students wore mustaches and t-shirts with short sleeves, and they liked to drink beer while they worked.
Mike walked in front of Tom and kicked vacuum hoses, cooling fins, and other debris out of their path on the way to his lab station. Mike was five-nine, nearly twenty-three, awkward, clever, and handsome among the engineers in their class. He had an easy laugh. When he thought something was really funny, his mouth bent into a square, his lips curled in around his teeth until they disappeared, and he howled.
In their junior year, Mike had annexed the two lab stations adjacent to his by unscrewing their steel dividers and pulling the shop tables together to make a Tetris piece. About once a semester, a spirited underclassman would try to balkanize Mike’s territory by pulling the tables apart and replacing the dividers. These efforts were unsuccessful. Now, Mike swept a pile of punch cards onto the floor and wedged himself onto a stool. He offered another to Tom, who instead leaned forward and rested his head on the table between his elbows.
“Alright. So did you have diff-e at all?” Mike slurred.
Tom pushed himself up and looked at Mike flatly.
“I mean, differential equations?” said Mike.
“No.”
“Okay, sorry. But, like—calculus?”
Tom burped.
“Alright,” Mike began, gesticulating with his open hand above his head. “They found this thing called electricity. It’s all around us, but you can’t see it. You know how you don’t have to put oil in the lights to make them turn on anymore?”
“Yep. Got it.” Tom’s head felt like it was being held underwater.
“Beautiful,” said Mike.
Mike reached under a stack of binders and yanked out a notebook with an abused cardboard spine. The destabilized stack fell sideways and tipped a Dixie cup full of cold coffee onto a roll of fax paper.
“Fuck, get that—get that,” said Mike. Tom mopped the spill into a trash can with the side of the paper roll and set it upright on the table. A little pool of coffee grew out from its bottom.
“Alright, so look,” Mike continued. He pulled the notebook in front of him and flipped open a new page.
“They measure electricity in the atmosphere all the time. It helps with predicting storms. UCLA and a few others have these weather balloons they send up, and they get readings from all over. They’re pretty accurate. Now hold on a second.”
Tom watched while Mike smushed his pen into the open page sixty-four times. When he was finished, he had a messy eight-by-eight grid of inky dots. The edge of his hand was blue.
“Alright. There.” Mike looked up at Tom. “The voltage between the ground and the atmosphere is pretty much the same wherever you are, okay? There’s a positive charge in a layer over the whole planet. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Tom.
“Okay.” Mike drew vertical lines through the eight columns in his matrix.
“But the resistance on it—” Mike held up his pen and flicked it like he was poking the air. “—is different everywhere. Do you know Ohm’s law?”
“Um—is that—” Tom tried to remember the name of the horseshoe-shaped symbol he’d seen on some of Mike’s equipment.
“It’s easy, it’s just voltage,” Mike drew a V in the corner of the page, “equals current,” = I, “then—” Mike paused. He drew a little arrow pointed at the I and wrote current beside it. “Times resistance,” he finished. He completed the equation by placing an R next to the I, then he looked up at Tom and continued gesticulating with his pen.
“So if the voltage is constant, that means the current’s going to go down the more resistance there is, and vice versa. It’s an inverse relationship.” Mike underlined the three-part equation.
“Okay.”
“And we said the atmosphere has a constant voltage,” Mike prompted.
“So—right.”
“Right—so the resistance and current fly up and down across each other depending where you are.” Mike pointed his fingers for emphasis. “They vary opposite. And the resistance goes up or down all the time, depending how much water’s in the air, or pollution, or dirt, or whatever. It usually goes up outside of cities and on the steep side of mountains, that kind of thing. But there’s one spot where it drops geometrically.” Mike dropped the point of his pen down onto the page.
“What?”
“It drops exponentially. Really suddenly. And it just stays there, too, it doesn’t change with the weather or anything.”
“Okay.”
“It’s weird!” Mike yelled. He dropped the pen and splayed his hands out wide at his sides. “It’s really weird! It doesn’t make any sense.”
“So, uh—what makes it do that?” said Tom. He hoped that would do. He put his head down between his arms.
Mike dropped his hands and smeared blue ink onto his jeans without noticing.
“They have no idea.” He said the words, no idea, like they were a criminal indictment.
“So, are they—are they trying to figure it out? Or what?” said Tom from between his elbows.
“I don’t even think they’ve noticed,” said Mike. “There’s nothing from the research group at UCLA, nothing from the national weather service. None of the papers that cite the electrical readings mention it. My best guess is the change is so small where they’re measuring that they’ve just ignored it. But the numbers are there—it’s like the edge of a black hole. The readings coming off of all the balloons in the area show resistance trending down straight to zero in the middle.”
There were a few seconds of silence while Mike looked at Tom expectantly.
“So what’s it mean?” said Tom.
“Ohm’s law.” Mike thumped the equation in the corner of the page with his knuckle. “Resistance dropping to zero means current goes—” he jabbed into the air with his thumb.
“Up?” said Tom.
“To infinity.”
Mike picked up the pen and placed its tip on the first dot in the corner of his columned matrix. He drew a line straight across to the other side. He replaced his pen on the next row and drew another line, and another, each time letting the line bow outward slightly in the middle. He bent each line more severely as he approached the center of the grid, then drew the mirror image on the other side, until he completed the diagram with a final straight line across the bottom row. The result was a crude three-dimensional bulge that seemed to grow out of the page.
“So—” said Tom. He squinted at the drawing.
“So,” said Mike, “there’s a column of practically infinite potential current just sitting there in the atmosphere southeast of El Paso.” Mike stabbed his pen into the bulge, then he pulled it off into the air high above his head, like a rocket.
“You could flip on a lamp and their hair would stand up on Pluto,” he said.
Tom looked down from Mike’s pen. He tried to appreciate whatever it was that Mike was telling him, then he gave up. He lowered his eyes conspiratorially.
“The Plutocrats?” he whispered.
“The fucking Plutocrats,” said Mike. He threw his pen down onto the notebook and laughed so hard that Tom thought his friend would be toothless forever.
Chapter Three.
From a low-orbit satellite swinging over Texas, the Celebrity looked like a single red-hot electron buzzing its way over a transmission line between Jacksonville, Florida and the Santa Monica Pier. The long center of the line was Far West, Texas—the vast stretch of the Chihuahuan desert west of the Pecos river and east of El Paso. The people there were mostly working-class families whose water tables and land values had fallen below recovery a long time before. Any of the towns east of the Mexican border and south of Odessa would have a population of a few thousand, about half Spanish-speaking, with a single high school that offered trade classes like agriculture science and machining. Ector County, further north on I-20, was the only section of dirt with enough life left in it that an economy could grow there on its own. The rest of the region got by on a slow drip of oil money that leaked down from Odessa over the intra-states. There was an Air Force base further back, north of Ozona, and a few good factory ranches that still operated here and there. Mostly there were rocks, and sand, and sun, and glassy ribbons of asphalt strung around between them.
The last piece of Tom’s drive was on Route 385. The road began in South Dakota at an old mining town called Deadwood Gulch, drained down from there along the eastern edge of Colorado, cut through the Panhandle, and emptied out a thousand miles south at the top of Big Bend. Tom drummed on the steering wheel, sang into the smoldering afternoon air, and pressed down on the gas pedal until he, in his beveled steel ship, and nearly fifteen-hundred pounds of lead-acid and electrolyte matting were flying down the asphalt at ninety-five miles-an-hour. The batteries bounced in brick stacks on the back seat and scraped across each other in their plastic casings.
Marathon marked the last major turn—west on US-90, toward El Paso, or Ciudad Juarez. The highway there sank a few inches into the ground, so that the desert seeped in over the rumble strips and hid the town’s single crosswalk under a layer of sand. It sprayed back onto the shoulders as the Celebrity flew over, past sandstone buildings filled with long shadows and a rusted trailer park. Then there was nothing; then Alpine, a desiccated miniature of a town like a plaster dollhouse; then nothing; then Marfa; then nothing; then the hills.
The Celebrity crunched over the edge of the asphalt where Tom pulled off the road. They bounced over a shallow drainage ditch, across a pair of railroad tracks, and onto the raw sand for a moment before the Celebrity’s wheels found traction on a caliche service road that ran along the rails. Tom turned into the road, followed it for a half-mile, then turned north, into the broad and raw valley of Presidio County. The wheels sent up long plumes of dust that ignited in the sunset as it broke in a slant over the hills. Tom followed his map into the clear desert while the shadows grew down from the rocks and the sky purpled, beside a shelf of exposed lime that glowed like uranium, around a gulch, then two hundred yards into the bowl of the valley. He found a loose pair of tracks that the surveyor’s truck had bent into the grass, squinting to keep them in the low light. The Celebrity bounced and scraped under the rising stars, and Tom was by himself. Cactus needles screeched across the Celebrity’s hubcaps and gouged at her ribs, and there was no one to meet or to talk to or call. Loneliness rolled down from the sides of the hills.
When sunset finally broke, it left the whole valley smoldering blue-black like fresh ash. The papers folded in his glove box said that Tom owned a tiny square-cornered section of it, but he couldn’t tell. He imagined his title to the land would be like an aura, something he could feel when he arrived there. But it wasn’t. It was a flat plywood stake hammered into the ground and wrapped with a strip of reflective tape. The Celebrity’s tires crunched to a stop, and the engine died. Tom switched off the headlights and pulled the key out of the ignition, and the lamps on the dash clicked off. It was quiet. The edges of Tom’s world flew out like phantoms into the darkness, and everywhere was still and flat and warm. The insects roared. Tom watched the moon flicker up over the hills in a slick line, and he fell asleep there, in the driver’s seat, with his cheek pressed over the window frame. The stars moved in waves overhead.
Chapter Four.
The sky was still filled with fraying knots of stars when Tom groaned awake. A wisp of sunlight coiled up from the horizon across the highway and bleached into the air, turning it the color of denim. The sandstone shelves that surrounded the valley soaked in a few drops of the new light and became yellow.
Tom had shifted around in his sleep, and his long body was twisted sideways across the center console with his head bent against the stack of jumper cables. The warm morning air seeped through the open window and fell down over his face. It bothered him awake. His bones creaked as he unfolded.
Tom pissed in the grass. The uncomfortable night had polished him down—he felt tired, and exposed, and a little silly, standing alone out there in the desert. He wanted to stretch across the back seat and go back to sleep, but the batteries were stacked there like metal bars across a park bench. He frowned.
The air heated up and washed around in the bowl of the valley as Tom unloaded the forty-seven plastic bricks onto the ground and shoved them into rows. Their green caps made them look like lily pads on the dirt. He threw the jumper cables next to a cactus, then he wiped his hand across his face and lifted open the Celebrity’s trunk. A bag of bolts had torn open and spilled out over the floor. Tom bent over and yanked the first clump of metal stakes over the bumper and let them fall clanging onto the ground, splayed out like pickup-sticks a few inches behind the car.
Four hours later, Tom was in the driver’s seat with his face hung forward over the A/C vent. The morning’s haphazard construction site shone in the rearview mirror. It was an unfinished mess, but the steel pieces had gotten too hot under the sun for Tom to touch. And he was tired. He needed gloves, and food. The A/C blew over him.
Tom’s land was twenty miles west of Marfa. The town opened up on the left as he drove in, spilling out of the dust along the edge of the highway.
Marfa, Texas was an old town, by southwestern standards, starting out as a railroad stop in the eighteen-hundreds. More recently, the town had revived itself by providing hospitality to restless coastal artists: they came as far inland as they could from Los Angeles and New York, looking for Rumspringa, and fell in love with each other in the desert. They populated the shops and bars, grew up, and put folk art in their front lawns. Mostly, Marfa was a hotter and drier version of any middle-American town. Its buildings were low and clean. The high-school football team was called the Shorthorns after a breed of cattle. The residents encountered UFOs in the evening and went back to work in the morning. Over the phone, the land clerk had described where Tom could find the post office, the bank outlet, and the handful of restaurants that kept regular hours.
“Anything else you need, give me a call,” he had said. “Or just ask someone.”
Tom drove down Marfa’s centerline with the Celebrity’s windows rolled down. Wives were at home, kids were out for the summer. They hopped around in between sprinklers and hollered games across their parents’ parched lawns. A man and woman with gray hair held onto each other on their way down a sidewalk. They had thick sunglasses.
“The people here are the last ones out here that sort of act like they aren’t,” the land clerk had told Tom.
“Aren’t what?”
“Out here.”
“Huh?”
The shop where Tom stopped looked like a park station that had been cleared out and refitted. As Tom walked in, a taxidermied armadillo on the opposite wall bobbed its head to rattle a bell on its neck. A short woman in an oversized tie-dye shirt pulled on her husband’s sleeve and giggled. She was peeking over at Tom from an aisle of homemade candles. Tom smiled dumbly and turned to look back at the door. A piece of nylon cord was tied to the door jamb, strung over a pulley in the ceiling, then looped down around the armadillo’s neck like a noose.
“Isn’t that funny?” the tie-dyed woman said. Her eyes were wide and expectant. Her husband drifted away along a row of canned goods.
“Hm?” said Tom.
“The—” The woman pointed over at the strung-up taxidermy. She looked ready to giggle again.
“Oh.” Tom glanced at the store clerk; she had her head down over a clipboard. Tom turned back to the tie-dyed woman and gave a polite nod. The store was too small to avoid her.
“This is such a fun little place,” the woman said. “We’re so glad we stumbled in here.”
“Yeah,” said Tom. “Are, uh—y’all visiting?” He set his palms on the backs of his hips.
“Oh, yes, from way out, in Mesquite.” She stretched the vowel in way to show how far Mesquite was.
“Wow,” said Tom. He smiled with his lips together. He nodded and started to turn down into another aisle.
“What about you?” she said.
“Oh, I—uh, I came out from Houston.”
“Oh, our daughter’s there! Where are you in Houston?”
“Um—I’m living here, now,” said Tom.
“Oh!”
“Yes, ma’am. Good to meet you.” Tom smiled his flat smile again and drifted away. The clerk looked up from her clipboard.
After a few minutes, Tom returned to the front of the store with gloves, a package of tarps, rope, two citronella tiki torches, an aluminum pot, and a loose collection of other sundries all balanced against his chest. He unwound his arms to let them slide onto the counter in front of the clerk.
“How are you doing?” he said. He tried to push his things into a neater pile.
“Doing fine.”
The clerk had long, gray-rooted hair tied in a ponytail and wore a khaki apron. She started lifting up Tom’s merchandise and punching their prices into the register.
Over her shoulder, Tom noticed a miniature espresso machine set up on top of a microwave.
“Oh, do y’all do coffee?”
The clerk looked up from the register. Her eyes were tired. She looked at Tom for a second, then she looked over at the small machine.
“Yeah, what would you like?”
“Just a coffee would be great, thanks.”
The clerk turned back to Tom.
“I can do an Americano,” she said.
“Hm?”
“I can do an Americano.”
“What’s that?”
“Espresso and hot water. We don’t have a drip.”
“Oh. Uh—yeah, that’s fine. Thanks.”
The clerk turned around like an eighteen-wheeler. She set the back of her wrist against her waist and pushed at the espresso machine with her thumb.
“Ma’am, I’m, uh—I’m gonna grab a few more things,” said Tom.
He turned and went back into the aisle. He grabbed two thick cotton blankets dyed like baja jackets and a decorative pillow with the word Faith stitched into it, then he started scooping cans of Spaghetti-O’s onto the tops of the blankets.
“Sunscreen,” the clerk called from the front. Tom turned.
“What?”
“You need sunscreen. It’s over by the bug spray. You need some of that, too.”
“Oh.”
Tom obeyed. He pulled down three bottles of titanium dioxide sunblock and a can of DEET and brought them with the rest to the front.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Mm-hm.”
The register clicked mechanically while the clerk punched in the new items. After a few seconds, the espresso machine gurgled behind her and squirted two ounces of hot water into Tom’s coffee. The clerk swirled the drink around a few times and set it on the counter.
“Thanks,” said Tom.
“Mm-hm.”
The armadillo rattled its bell.
“Hey, Candace.”
Tom turned. The customers were a tall, bony couple. Their skin was young and tan, and both had delicate tattoos that reached up over their collarbones. The girl wore a bright turquoise bandana over her hair.
“Hey yourselves, babies,” said the clerk.
The couple each pulled a can of soda out of a cooler and walked out through a screen door on the other side of the store. Tom watched them sit down at a picnic table.
“They didn’t pay!”
The tie-dyed woman was peeking up over a stack of canned vegetables. Candace looked up.
“Hm?”
“They took drinks from back here.” The woman pointed an indignant arm straight out at the cooler.
“They live around here, honey,” said Candace.
“So for them it’s free?”
“Excuse me?”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It’s my store, ma’am.”
“What about him? He lives here.”
Candace followed the woman’s eyes to Tom.
“No, he doesn’t,” she said.
The tie-dyed woman looked like she would respond, then she pouted and drifted back down below the vegetables.
“Do you need a receipt, honey?” Candace said to Tom.
“Oh, no, thanks,” said Tom. He was blushing.
“Okay. We’re cash-only, right now, honey.”
“Yeah. No problem.”
Tom pushed his hand down into his pocket and found his roll of cash. He flattened out the stack.
“Uh, sorry, can you make change?” he said. Candace was looking at Tom’s hands with her eyebrows raised.
“Should,” she said. She took a bill from Tom and started pulling out his change from the register.
“Do you have someone out here you can get to if you need?” she said.
“Hm? Oh. I know, um—” Tom paused. “John, uh—the land man out here. He helped me get set up.”
“Stonand?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
Candace nodded.
“Good,” she said. “You have enough water?”
“Um—”
“There’s an Ace on third a few blocks up. Head up there and get a couple of those big jugs they’ve got outside. You can get whatever else you’ll need out there, or there’s a Dollar Tree up off of seventeenth.”
“Okay. Thanks,” said Tom.
“Make sure you’ve always got some gas in your car. And just head straight to John’s if you need anything. He lives back in the trailer behind his office. Alright?”
“Alright. Yeah, thanks.”
“Good. Just head back there and grab him. He’s okay. And you can always come by here.”
Chapter Five.
Tom called Mike from a pay-phone stall on TX-35. He leaned sideways into the plexi-glass frame and squeezed the receiver cord between his fingers while he waited to get connected. His knuckles were white.
Mike answered with his full name: “Mike Anastos.” He always introduced himself that way.
“Hey, man, it’s—uh, Tom.”
“Oh, hey man.”
“Hey.”
Tom’s voice caught. He heard Mike chewing. Mike had a plan, like the rest of their friends. He was going to be an engineer with a paycheck and a retirement account and an apartment in San Antonio and a life that was good. He was spending the last weeks of his childhood watching TV with his parents in the house he’d grown up in. He was okay.
“Hey, was all that serious about the beacon?” said Tom.
“What?”
“About the—how the electricity—or, current, you said—you’d feel it way out in, uh, you know.” Tom heard Mike shuffle the receiver to his other ear.
“What you were talking about in the lab,” said Tom.
“Man, what?”
“Out on Pluto. Their hair would stand up on Pluto.”
“Oh—yeah, man, I mean—what do you mean?”
“Were you serious?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s there, man. It’s, weird, it’s bona fide. I sent a letter out—”
“So what do you have to do?”
“Uh—what?”
“How do you use it?”
“Hey man, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good. Sorry. Can you just tell me? I mean, sort of walk through it. How do you set it up?”
“Set what up?”
“The beacon.”
“What—why do you keep calling it that?”
“Cause it—didn’t you—it goes way out, way out there, right?”
“Way out where?”
“Out in space.”
“You want to send something out in space?”
“Yeah. I mean, yeah, not something, just. I don’t know.”
“They already do that.”
“What?”
“Send stuff out in space. You mean like a message?”
“Uh, yeah. Wait—they do?”
“Yeah, on radio bands, there’s a lot of them. I think they, uh, there’s probably marketing at those places, right? Or, like, HR.”
“What?”
“You mean for a job?”
“N—no. What? No.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Tom turned and hit his head on the receiver hook.
“Fuck.”
“You alright?”
“But this would be different than that, though, right?”
“What?”
“Like this, thing. This would be different than those other ways.”
“Uh, I mean—yeah. I guess, yeah, it’d be weirder. Like—”
“What?”
“What?”
“What do you mean weirder?”
“Like, radio waves are normal, I guess. This isn’t like that. Electricity doesn’t normally read like that off of—”
“Exactly, that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“It’s different, like you said.”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah it’s a weird thing.”
“From the radio waves, all that. It would be different.”
“Yeah. Right. Man, what’s going on? Where are you calling from?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay. Yeah, I know, I’m just—”
“How do you use it?”
“Man what are you talking about?”
“The fuck—the beac—the spot, with the resistance where it goes way down, what do you put there?”
“Anything, man, I don’t know. Something that puts out a current. What are you wanting to do?”
“Does it have to be strong?”
“What do you mean have to be? To do what?”
“To send something out—there.”
“What? No, just, something with current. Stronger the better, I guess, but—“
“And just, like, let it go continuous?”
“The current?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I guess. What are you trying to do?”
“I want to find something. Or just do something.”
“Find what?”
“I don’t know. I just need to do something. I want to go somewhere.”
“Man, what’s going on?”
“Can you help me figure out how to set it up?”
“Set what up?”
“I just need your help.”
“Tom—”
Mike stopped. The receiver hissed.
“You there?” said Tom.
“Yeah, I’m here. Hey, did you, um—”
Hiss.
“How’s Hannah?” said Mike.
Hiss. Tom bit on the inside of his lip. His legs felt heavy.
“I talked to her,” he said.
“Okay.”
Mike was quiet. Tom turned his body in, away from the road.
The Celebrity pulled up in the alley beside Mike’s parents’ house a little after eleven that night. Mike was waiting on the porch.
“Turn your lights off,” he said.
“Oh.”
Tom followed Mike around the side of the house into the backyard. Mike had turned his mother’s garden shed into a clubhouse when he was sixteen. Since then he had stapled up patterned wallpaper, glued bright teal polyester carpet onto the floor, and hooked up a generator to a window unit and a satellite TV.
Mike held the door open. A linoleum-topped card table stood in the middle of the room with a case of beer sweating onto it. Mike’s drafting notebook was open beside it.
Chapter Six.
Tom made his camp the next day. He spread a few tarps on the dirt and put chunks of sandstone down on their corners, then he stood up four big camping tents, zip-tied their frames together, and cut out the inside walls with garden shears. Two more tarps went over the top with bungee cords and made a wide room, where he spread out a carpet of egg-crate foam and cheap, fluffy duvets. He lined up his jugs of water and Igloo coolers against the wall for his beer and paperback books. He kept his rolls of cash and the land documents locked in the Celebrity’s glove box.
For three days after, he built the beacon. He began in the early mornings and worked into the afternoons with his hands in gloves to hold the metal. His erector-set machine rose out of the dirt like a steel shrine, pointed straight up into the sky and held together with zip-ties and rubber clamps. He wrapped the jumper cables around the punched beams until their ends coiled up in pools underneath, like snakes slithering over a temple. He laid the batteries in billowing Druidic circles around the base and hooked them up in series to a fat relay box under a tarp. At night he lay in his tents with the doors unzipped, reading his paperbacks by flashlight until he fell asleep in the warm air.
At noon on the sixth day, Tom stood beside the beacon looking up at the long section of sky between the hills. The day had warmed until the blue air was bright and thick and cloudless. The last pieces had stayed in the glove-box until the end. They were expensive—a pair of four-centimeter vacuum tubes with cadmium filaments. He pulled one out of its foam cradle and held it up to the sun. The thing looked like a tapered light bulb with a pointed gray cap. The sunlight stuck to its sides as Tom spun it around a little. He screwed them into a strip of sockets that hung in a wiry tangle off the side of the beacon. That was it.
Tom walked backward into the weeds. He liked the way the beacon looked from further away, like something left behind and forgotten in the valley. He turned around and kicked into the grass until he found the end of the cable he had thrown there. He picked it up and knocked the clamp on his knee to shake the dust off, then he walked around to the back of the Celebrity where he had pushed its mate in under a tire. He squeezed the clamps open and held them straight out, turning his head away a little and squinting. He brought the clamps together and let their jaws snap closed.
The cadmium filaments exploded. Their vacuum bulbs were black with soot, and the tangle of cables around the sockets was smoking and licking green flame. A slag of sparks fell onto the dirt.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
Despair grew in the cradle of Tom’s gut while he threw the clips apart and ran over to the machine. He ripped cables off their contacts at random. Frustration and anger stung at the corners of Tom’s eyes and made him embarrassed, his being there, the whole project, it was all embarrassing. He was embarrassing. He slipped on one of the cables and fell onto his elbow, skinned it, looked down and saw the dirt clumping together with the slough of peeled skin and red blood seeping into the creases.
From there on the ground, Tom saw a long plume of caliche smoke ripping up over the edge of the hills behind the Celebrity. For a second Tom was still, watching the white cloud rise and blow around where it didn’t belong. Then cold instinct shivered down his back, and Tom pushed himself up off the ground. He looked up at the beacon. The sparks had stopped dripping, and only a smell like ozone and burnt rubber hung around in the air. He ran, he didn’t know why, stumbled in the dirt over the rows of batteries and jumper cables. He fell down through the Celebrity’s open door and landed on the driver’s seat sideways. He wanted to be hidden.
The rip of white smoke drifted higher into the air and dissolved while its creator came into focus in the rearview. It was the front of a narrow truck, an old truck, flying in over the grass. It came up over the top of the rearview and entered stage-right on the passenger-side mirror; it was an old truck, sure, a worker’s truck, a rusted-up truck, still too far away to see what was inside. Tom didn’t have a gun, he thought, and then he wondered why he thought he should have one. He twisted around in the seat and pulled the door closed, fingered the locks, watched the truck fly up alongside his camp and brake so hard its tires ripped the grass. The driver’s door came open and pushed over a tangle of holly-weed behind its hinge.
“Run, baby!”
A man was jumping out of the truck and shouting. His sunburnt-and-freckled head was wrapped in a red bandana, and his chest came together with his belly like a barrel. He hopped while he stepped.
“Come on baby!” he shouted. He hopped in front of the truck and joined there with a woman that came around the fender, his girlfriend, it looked like. She covered her mouth while she laughed. The man laughed too, and he pulled her along by the hand through the grass. Tom shivered. His eyes switched to the glove-box, thinking about his cash.
The two of them came up to the Celebrity too quick, like they were on roller-skates. The woman slammed up on the side of the car, so her breasts pressed up over her tank-top against the back window. They left a print.
“Hey,” yelled Tom, but the sound came out flat and wet.
“Hey, come ‘own, buddy! Come ‘own buddy! We might need a ride outta here.” The man slapped his thick hand on the hood while he yelled. “Can we join you?”
Tom reached across for the window crank, but his fingers just slipped around on the plastic.
“Uh, hey, hey,” Tom’s voice shook and squeegee’d through his throat while the man reached down through the passenger’s side window and pulled up the lock, threw open the door. He fell in and shook the Celebrity’s chassis. The woman slid into the seat behind him and pulled the door back in with her momentum.
“Oops,” she said. “Didn’t mean to slam it!”
“Hold ‘awn, hold ‘awn,” the man said, and he held his arms out to his sides so one of them hovered over Tom’s lap and the other bent up across the window. He held his head forward and tilted like he was listening, expectantly.
“Quiet, quiet,” he said. He let his arm bounce in the air over Tom. Tom hadn’t said anything; his whole body was shocked and useless.
In the miles around Tom’s camp, the whistling sound of the desert flew around between the hills and over the dry gullies, across all the little cracks and crevasses in the parched ground. All Tom could hear was the sound of his own breath and a quiet sub-bass whoosh of his blood pumping around behind his ears. And there, in the middle of all of it, there was the cry of a police car’s electric siren, clean and unnatural and despairing, dying out as it flew along its way down the highway. It disappeared, and left behind silence.
There was a long, still moment. And then the man started laughing. His laugh was deep and violent, like the blood in Tom’s ears, and it rushed up from the man’s belly into his throat until it shook his mouth. The woman laughed, too; the two of them were uproariously tickled by the escape, or the grand absurdity, or stupid love, or something.
“You got it, man, you got it,” the man puffed out between gasps. “We—ha, God—”
“He had us! He fucking had us!” the woman hollered. She pulled herself up between the seats and slapped the felt cushion by Tom’s ear.
Tom felt himself pull up to the door and claw around for the handle. The door swung open and he fell down onto the dirt beside the Celebrity. He left a smear of blood stamped into the dust by his elbow.
“Fuck,” he heard the man say from in the car. “You alright? Fuck. Hey, it’s alright.”
Tom skittered across the dust on his hands and his chest, picking himself up to an awkward, apish run. He made it to a breathless stand on the other side of the rows of batteries.
“I’m alright,” he yelled. He bellowed it, like it was a threat, even though it made no sense. It was the only signal that had made it down from his brain-stem into his throat.
The woman was getting out of the car. “Good, you’re alright, sweetheart,” she said.
“Sorry, man, we didn’t mean to tear in here like that,” the man said. He put his hands up above his head while he pushed out of the Celebrity with his feet.
“I don’t have anything valuable out here,” said Tom. His blood was still pounding in his ears, and there was a sucking feeling pulling in his chest.
“We’re alright man, we’re not gonna rob you. We were just speeding, and then—” Tom saw the man hold in another laugh, so he had to bend in a little at the belly. The woman took over the sentence.
“Then I just told him to.” Her eyes were buggered. “They were so far back and I just thought, you know, maybe we could get away with it one time, and, you know, and just try it, and—God, fuck—”
She turned back to the man with a big grin. The man was looking back at her, trying not to laugh, putting his heart in it. He put his arms down and wiped one of them across his face to get the tears and the snot. It settled him out. He took a wet breath.
“We’ll get outta here, man, sorry,” he said. “Just give us a second to hang out, we’ll just wait ‘til it gets dark and we’ll head back out, we’ll be outta here.”
“I’m Tom,” said Tom. Just like that. It was one of the messages that leaked down from his brain. This one came from deep, back in the quiet well that runs under the tunnel that made the monkeys into humans.
“Uh, Rucker,” said the man. “I’m Rucker. This is Rachel—” he held his arm out to the woman. Her grin cooled down into a sweet smile while she turned. Her eyes ran Tom straight through.
“Good to meet ya,” she said, just like that, and she about lost it laughing.
Chapter Seven.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Tom.
“What?”
Rucker was walking around the beacon. He lifted his hand up against the sun while he squinted through it.
“Rachel,” he said.
Rachel was lying down on the back seat of their truck with her legs hung out the door. She kicked her feet.
“What?” she yelled.
“Nothin’.” Rucker looked over at Tom. His expression was strange.
“What are you building this for?” he said.
“I said I didn’t hear anything,” said Tom.
“What?”
“I mean I won’t tell.” It sounded stupid coming out of his mouth. “It can be like y’all drove up to meet me here, and I didn’t know.”
The expression on Rucker’s face broke. He came into a smile with his cheeks first.
“What? Aw, man, we’re not—we’re not gonna fuckin’ hurt you.”
“I know, I just mean, like, it’s the same as if y’all just drove up and saw the thing and stopped here. It’s the same as that, so it’s okay.”
Rucker laughed.
“Awkay, yeah, man, right. It’s like that. We’re not holding you up, man, just feels like we should keep the truck off the road for a while, right? Just until it’s dark and we can play dumb about it, or whenever. If you want us to bug out, just lemme know. God, that was stupid. Rachel—” he leaned out from behind the beacon, “—is your heart still pounding baby?”
Tom looked over. Rachel’s feet had stopped kicking; her chest rose and fell, like she was asleep. She didn’t answer.
“So what is this, man?” said Rucker. He was looking straight at Tom.
“It’s, uh, it’s an amplifier.” Tom didn’t feel like they should be talking about it, any of it. He felt embarrassed and scared, and embarrassed to be scared. He wanted them to go.
“Like a speaker?”
“No, uh, for electricity. It’s an experiment, I guess.”
“What kind of experiment?”
“Uh, just—do you know Ohm’s law?”
“Mm-hm.” Rucker stopped circling the beacon and went to the truck. He opened the driver’s door and reached in.
“Is that with the horseshoe symbol?” he called over his shoulder. He came out with a pack of cigarettes.
“Yeah,” said Tom. “It’s based on that, how the voltage and the resistance and all work together. The atmosphere right here is weird, it’s got less resistance, so a current signal can get really far out there.”
“Out where?” Rucker pulled a cigarette out of the pack with his mouth. He held the pack out to Tom.
“I’m alright, thanks,” said Tom.
“So you just hang out here by yourself?” said Rucker.
“Yeah, just setting this up.”
“But you’re, uh—you’re like our age, kinda, right?”
“Yeah, I guess. Twenty-three?”
Rucker nodded while he lit his cigarette. He started laughing a little out of the side of his mouth, but he tried to hide it with the cup of his hand. The kindness of it put the absurdity into more relief than if he hadn’t. Tom started laughing too. Rucker looked up, and they laughed together. Tom felt lighter. His shoulders settled down over his neck.
“So you’re out here in the desert, just hanging out. Working on this electrical experiment by yourself,” said Rucker.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Tom. “Do you, uh—do y’all want a drink?”
“What?”
“I got beers, if y’all want.”
“Uh, yeah, I would think so.” Rucker pulled the cigarette out of his mouth; it made a fft sound. “You want a beer, babe?” he said.
Rachel lifted her head up.
The three of them got drunk together while the afternoon wore off. Rachel was taking classes part-time at Sul Ross State, in Alpine. Rucker split his time between there and El Paso, where he worked at a warehouse loading trucks with his brother. He wanted to get a job with the Border Patrol, but he couldn’t keep his urine clean. They were both from Far West. Rachel had been out to Lake Charles once, for a bachelorette party, but that’s as far east as she ever got. Rucker hadn’t been further west than Tucson. They both had the sun deep in their skin, which made Rachel prettier and Rucker look older than he was. He had deep, fine wrinkles under his eyes that spread down around his cheekbones.
“Why do you need the car batteries?” he said.
“What?”
They had pulled the tarp off of Tom’s tents and laid down the stakes to make an open pallet. Tom was leaned back against one of his coolers.
“Why all the batteries and not a generator or something?” Rucker was circling the beacon again.
Tom tried to remember what Mike had said about it.
“It has to do with the way the current spikes up,” he said.
“You mean the amplitude?”
“Um—yeah, I think that’s right. It makes the amplitude different when you put the batteries in rows. They go up to that box and it puts the signal into a pattern.” Tom gestured weakly at the relay box.
“So you’re a real engineer?”
“No—I mean, I didn’t really design it.”
“Whatcha, got this out of a catalog?”
“No, my friend helped me with it.”
“Ah, awkay.”
Rucker came back around the beacon and sat down with them on the pillows. Rachel was stretched out on her stomach with her legs kicked up in the air. She had one of Tom’s paperbacks open and was reading through the last chapters. Her brown hair rippled between her shoulder blades while she fidgeted her elbows.
“You done geeking out?” she said.
“Outta what?” said Rucker.
“About the ham radio.”
Rachel rolled over onto her back. She was reading Neuromancer.
“S’not a ham radio, babe.”
“Awkay.”
Rucker fell over onto his side and reached into the cooler behind Tom. He pulled out another can of beer.
Night came into the sky slowly. A thin column of clouds pulled it over the tops of the hills into the valley, dragging in the evening like a bolt of lavender chiffon held up in the breeze. Rucker got up a few more times to walk around the beacon and poke at the cables; Rachel kept reading with Tom’s flashlight. Tom snuck glances at her and made himself busy with the camp, picking up and trying not to think about what he would do next, where he would go, now that the beacon was ruined. All three of them were drunk.
When it was almost dark, Tom flipped on the Celebrity’s headlights and fished around in the grass for long twigs they could make a campfire with. He hadn’t bothered with lighting the place before, he just used his flashlight or fell asleep whenever it got too dark to see. Rucker carried in chunks of sandstone and set them on a patch of bare dirt between the cars. The purple light caught the wrinkles on his neck and the knitted muscles in his arms. He was bigger at night, it seemed like, and Rachel was more beautiful. When they had a fire going, she hopped backwards onto the bed of the truck and squeezed her chest in between her shoulders. Rucker poked at the fire with a stick.
“So what’re you doin’ out here, man?” he said.
Tom was leaned back against the Celebrity.
“Making this thing,” he said. He turned and looked back at the top of the beacon. Licks of reflected firelight bounced around in its steel cage.
“Ah, awkay.” Rucker looked up at Tom. His eyes were glassy.
“What?” said Tom.
“You came out here just to make this thing? You gonna leave it out here when you’re done building it?”
“No, I mean—yeah, I guess I can leave it out here if I want.”
“That what you’re gonna do? Then come back and check on it sometime? It’s got a recorder or somethin’?”
“No. I mean, I might leave a camera or something.”
“A camera? What’s it gonna see?”
“I don’t know, man. The readings.”
“Man what’re you doin’ out here in the desert, setting this thing up? Camera ain’t gonna catch any electrical readings. You gonna live out here? Thought you were an engineer. You came out and gonna live out here, just like that?”
“I said I’m not an engineer.”
“Are you gonna?”
“Gonna what?”
“Live out here with this thing.”
“I said I don’t know, man.”
“Awkay.”
Tom drank his beer. Rachel had her head leaned back onto the base of her neck. She was smiling at the stars.
“You’re funny,” she said.
“So are you.” Tom pulled a sip out of his beer. He tilted his head up.
“Y’all were gonna steal my car,” he said.
Rachel and Rucker both looked over at him. Their heads moved in unison. Their faces were still for too long, it felt like; then Rucker’s broke up into a smile. He threw his poker into the fire and hopped up onto the truck bed beside Rachel. The bed sank down low over the wheels.
“You picked a good spot, man. There’s a hundred miles out here’a nothin’, most ways. There’s nothin’ better than that.” Rucker laid himself back flat. He pointed straight up at the sky.
“You see that, man?”
“What?” said Tom.
He looked up. The trail of clouds had drained down into the well of the valley and made a perfect ring over their heads. Sirius shone blue and clear in the center.
Chapter Eight.
Rucker and Rachel were gone in the morning. Their tire tracks carved a long arc through the dust and disappeared into the grass. They didn’t leave anything else behind.
Tom stared up into the sky for a long time, enjoying the pieces of cloud that traced a circle around the valley. When he pushed himself onto his elbows there was sweat under his back, and a line of ants was marching in toward the moisture. Tom squished them individually with the meat of his thumb.
How do you feel, most of the time?
I don’t know. What do you mean?
I mean—what’s it like to be in your head, walking around in there, day after day?
He got up and stretched. The beacon was finished smoldering; he could leave it up, or he could pull it down. You couldn’t see it from the highway, anyway. Tom went to the Celebrity and turned on the engine. He would drive into town, find something to buy. Something to eat, maybe.
The road was hazy. The center stripe dipped and broke, and in every direction there was blue sky and dry rock, and heat. Tom rolled down the window to let it in. He flipped on the radio, flipped it off. There were men talking in Washington and men talking in Europe. No one spoke on the highway in the dry sun. Tom laughed.
That was it, he thought. He remembered the odd way that Kurt Vonnegut liked to begin a thought: Listen.
“Now listen,” Tom said aloud.
“No—just, listen.”
He turned the radio back on. Somebody sang passionately in an unknown place, in a language he couldn’t understand. Tom shouted over the ballad:
“There is nothing, nothing it is like to be me.”
“Listen.”
He let go of the steering wheel and caught it on his knee. He reached down for the lever that let the seat back and pulled.
“Listen.”
He pressed into the gas pedal and kept the wheel straight with the side of his shin. He was leaned back, looking up through the bottom of the window at the rocky hills that rolled by in the haze. He started to hum in tune with the radio. He closed his eyes.
From the stratosphere, it looked like there were flies buzzing around Far West, for a second. They jumped and circled and landed. They clumped like electrons and buzzed red-hot along I-10 until it glowed in the daylight. The whole Rio Grande valley had a migraine, an explosion of electrical thought that forked along the roads and filled up the dry ravines, and then it cooled. Polarities swapped and justified, and the flies died because there was no food. The thing was hot and dry, and motionless, and the stratosphere drifted on.
“Do you want it?”
Rucker yanked at the tangle of metal on the side of the road. His large behind was stuck out the passenger side. After a few more yanks, he had the radio free and he backed out of the Celebrity with his elbows.
“Hey—cowgirl. You want it?”
Rachel was lying over the truck’s hood with her legs kicked out over the grill. She rolled half-way over and squinted at Rucker.
“What?”
“The, uh—fuck, what is it. The radio,” said Rucker.
“Oh—no, that’s okay.”
“Alright.”
He dropped the aluminum case into a canvas duffle bag he had open beside the Celebrity. A bird went by overhead.
“Alright, think that’s it,” said Rucker.
Rachel bounced her heels off of the bumper on the way down to the asphalt.
By noon the yellow sun was pouring into the valley and searing the rocks. The haze was burned off and clarified. Rucker and Rachel bumped along the dirt tracks that peeled off from the highway behind the hills.
“Can you go a little slower?” said Rachel.
“Sure. Feel okay?” Rucker looked over at her.
“Yeah, just—car-sick, kind of shook up down here.” She put her hand over the bottom of her gut.
“Yeah," said Rucker.
Tom’s camp was still laid open to the sun. It was a palette of hot cotton and trash with sand collecting in the creases.
“Oh, I forgot,” said Rachel. She hopped out of the truck while they rolled in. Rucker watched her go to the coolers and pull one open. She started pulling out handfuls of paperback books. Rucker parked the truck over its tracks from the night before.
“Find anything?” he said.
“No.”
The beacon was done. Rucker walked over and kicked his shoe through the dirt under the slagging voltage regulators. The ash scattered.
“Look in the middle pages, too,” said Rucker.
“I am.”
After a few minutes Rachel lay down with Tom’s paperbacks scattered around her like an aura. She folded one of her legs over the other and closed her eyes.
Rucker circled the beacon again. He sat down cross-legged on the dirt and looked up at the thing. The ring of clouds had almost blown apart in the wind. In between the sky was blue enough to make Rucker’s heart hurt. It was beautiful country. He lay back on the ground and fell asleep.
In the evening the two of them flipped through the books again, and Rucker walked along each cable from the battery terminal to where it ran up Tom’s steel citadel. That’s all they were, just power lines. He turned over the socket bay and pulled out the burnt regulators. They were cadmium, just too thin a gauge for the peak amplitude coming off so many rows of—what, car batteries? He went over to the truck and lifted the hood to check.
“It’s just an amplifier,” said Rachel. She danced over the word. She was bored.
“You’re right,” said Rucker. “Think we need to take it down?”
“Why? There’s nothing here.”
“Yeah. Alright. Sure you don’t want to check the radio?”
Rachel pushed out her lower lip.
“Yeah, let’s try it,” she said.
Rucker smiled. He brought out the bag and took out the Celebrity’s beat-up radio case. When they had it hooked up to the truck’s stereo, the two of them looked across at each other and smiled. It was tuned to a Spanish station. Rucker reached out and turned up the volume, and they sang along together:
¿Cómo puedo hacer?
Intenta un modo
No es posible que se pueda querer más
Pensando así lo perderás
They laughed over the last line.
“Ooh—” Rachel cupped her hand up under her gut.
Chapter Nine.
The sheriff’s deputy for Presidio County called Candace, and Candace called John Stonand. He was cleaning out the tube that connected his trailer to the septic field under the lot. He left the brush stuffed in the end and went inside to get the phone.
“Ms. Loeb,” he said.
“Hey, John.”
She told him about the Celebrity on the side of I-10.
“Radio gone?” he said.
“Yep.”
“Okay.”
John took his time finishing the maintenance on his trailer. Once a week he cleaned the ends of the septic and water hoses, brushed and rinsed the electric terminals, and washed down the surfaces inside and out with ammonia and water. The whole thing smelled like cat piss when he was through, but it gleamed bleach-white and new. There was no cleaner trailer.
After forty-five minutes, he washed his hands in the fold-out sink, locked the spigot, and changed his shirt. Before he left, he called the town’s wreck yard and left a voicemail, then he backed his truck out from under the canopy and pulled out into the road.
Candace met him outside the store. She flipped the cardboard sign around to Closed on her way out.
“Still got your apron, hon,” said John.
Candace looked down at her front, then shrugged. She buckled into the passenger seat beside John, and they headed toward the highway. The asphalt glimmered where the heat steamed off of it.
“I actually liked the kid,” said John.
“Yeah. Me, too,” said Candace.
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
John cranked down his window and slowed down as they passed the sheriff’s deputy at the crash. The deputy tipped his hat while they drove by; John lifted his hand off the door and nodded. They drove on.
“What do you think it is, keeps them comin’ out here?” said Candace. She had her eyes forward.
“Ah, I’m not sure. I’ve wondered that.”
John turned the dial on the radio.
¿Cómo puedo hacer?
Intenta un modo
No es posible que se pueda querer más
Pensando así lo perderás
“I mean it,” said Candace.
“What?”
“What do you think about it?”
“I don’t know. What is there, about it? They come out here for something. I mean, they keep coming.”
“That’s what I mean.”
John still had his hand out the window. He drummed on the door. Candace cranked down her window an inch to let the pressure out.
“I guess it’s just kids that age,” said John.
“Seems like it’s just boys,” said Candace.
“Yeah, I guess that’s right. I don’t know.”
Candace looked out at the hills.
“This one was nice,” she said.
“They’re all nice,” said John.
They slowed again when they came to the turn-off by the railroad tracks. John pulled the truck over the rumble strip and situated his wheels over the lip of the asphalt to keep from drifting. He had Candace pull him out the map from the cubby beside her seat, and he unfolded it across the dashboard. It was a surveyor’s map, fresh from within eighteen months, with light topography showing the ravines that crisscrossed the valley beneath the hills. John traced away from the highway until he came to the plot he’d marked out for the kid a few months before.
“Think they’re gone?” said Candace.
“Yeah, they’re gone.”
They bounced off the road and down along the lane that ran beside the rail ties, then John pulled a wide turn to cut across the bowl of the valley. He tried to keep them on the grass. The sky overhead was blue and smearing down in the rough edges of the hills. John leaned his head out the window and craned his neck to take a wide view of the area as they came up on Tom’s campsite.
“Gone,” he said. Candace nodded.
“What do you think that one is?” said John. He pointed with his thumb out at the beacon. Already Tom’s metal ziggurat looked like an ancient thing excavated in the desert. Candace leaned over and looked.
“Same as always, some fucking thing,” she said.
“This one’s big.”
“Yeah.”
John cut the engine. The Mexican on the radio gagged on his ballad.
Candace went to Tom’s pallet and kicked through the blankets. A column of ants went tumbling down into a crease.
“Think this is safe to pull down?” said John.
He was standing under the beacon, looking up through it.
“I don’t know,” said Candace. She reached down and picked up one of the paperbacks.
John pulled the beacon down sideways. A couple of jumper cables pulled off of their terminals and arced, snapping like crackers. John jumped.
“Careful,” said Candace.
“Yeah.”
They took three trips to pack out Tom’s camp. Candace kept a few of the books and a plaid shirt; the rest of it they pushed out into a dry crevasse ten miles north. The batteries spat and plumed when they punctured on the rocks, and the beacon’s steel beams clattered mightily into the fissure. At least three of the thing’s predecessors were buried there under a layer of sand and wood debris.
When they were back near the highway, John’s long-range radio receiver crackled and blipped from where it was clipped on the overhead visor. John pulled it down.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Looks like he he had some plans in here,” a man’s voice said over the speaker.
“In the car?”
“Yep.”
“Plans for what?”
“I mean, designs, or uh, schematics. Just a notebook. For whatever the kid was up to out here, looks like.”
“Ah.”
John held the receiver away from his mouth while the truck shook over the railroad tracks.
“That’s alright, we found it,” he said.
“Okay.”
The radio hissed.
“You want me to keep the notebook for you?”
“Probably should toss it,” said John.
“Okay.”
John clipped the receiver to his visor and looked across at Candace. She had her forehead rested up against the window, looking out at the sun while it drooped low over the desert. John pulled the truck over the lip of the highway and drove on.
The end.
This is fantastic and I look forward to reading more. <3