“How long a side trip?”
“Not long at all. Once we leave the interstate, the first road is paved but the second is just gravel, and the third is all natural shale. But none of it’s bad road, and it all leads up into the hills, not into the flats, so the chances we’ll be caught by a flash flood are so small they don’t worry me at all.”
“How small?” I asked.
“Tiny, really.”
“How tiny?”
“Infinitesimal, child.”
The desert doesn’t get much annual rainfall, but what it does receive tends to come all at once. A lot of terrific Japanese poets have written uncountable haiku about the silvery delicacy of the rain and about how it vanishes so elegantly into the moonlit river or the silver lake or the trembling pond, rain like a maiden’s tears, but not a line of any of them was appropriate to this insane storm. This was more of a Russian rain, in particular a mean Soviet rain, coming down like ten thousand hammers on ten thousand anvils in the People’s Foundry of the Revolution.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Mazie’s exit is about two miles ahead.”
When we got there, the highway sign didn’t say anything about Mazie. Instead, it warned ABANDONED ROADWAY / NO OUTLET.
When I noted this discrepancy between what Mrs. Fischer had promised and what the reality proved to be, she reached out to pat my shoulder with her right hand, driving only with her left, though in her defense, I must admit that she had slowed to sixty for the exit.
The two-lane paved road had been built in an age when we were still going to war with European nations, and it consisted of more potholes than blacktop. Fortunately, it didn’t go far before it gave way to the gravel road, which was more accommodating, although the deluge was so intense that I had to lean forward and squint to see the track, which seemed always about to wither away into sand and sage.
After we had gone no more than a quarter of a mile on the gravel, the headlights flared off a sign with reflective yellow letters that announced DANGER / STAY OUT / ARTILLERY RANGE / MILITARY VEHICLES ONLY.
When I questioned the wisdom of ignoring such a warning, Mrs. Fischer said, “Oh, that’s nothing, dear.”
“It seems like something,” I disagreed.
“It’s not official. Mazie and Tracker put that up themselves, years ago, to scare people off.”
“What kind of people would want to come out to this godforsaken place anyway?”
“The kind you want to scare off.”
By the angle of our ascent, I knew we were driving into low hills, although in this darkness and downpour, I couldn’t see well enough to confirm what I felt. Mrs. Fischer told me when the gravel gave way to a trail of broken shale, though I couldn’t feel any difference in the ride.
Shale is brittle and over the millennia is laid down in thin strata, so the fragments can be sharp, which is why I said, “Hope we don’t have a flat tire out here.”
“It isn’t possible, child.”
“No disrespect, ma’am, but of course it’s possible. Why wouldn’t it be possible?”
She glanced at me and winked. “One-Ear Bob.”
“What—you have some kind of armored tires or something?”
“Some kind of something,” Mrs. Fischer confirmed.
Before I could press for details, we had to stop because of all the snakes.
Twenty-one
IF YOU ARE FOND OF TARANTULAS AND RATTLESNAKES, this desert will delight you no less than the Metropolitan Opera enchants lovers of Puccini, Donizetti, and Verdi. It is a veritable festival of spiders, a jubilee of snakes with ten times more fangs per square mile than in Transylvania, and with more forked tongues than you would find even in the halls of Congress.
Mrs. Fischer was quicker than I to recognize what surged across the broken-shale track, illuminated by the headlights, and she braked to a full stop before driving over them. I leaned forward, fascinated by the creepy spectacle of at least a double score of six-foot-long rattlesnakes seething through the storm, some of them slithering flat to the ground, others with their heads raised, all moving south to north, as though they were livestock driven by herdsmen. Their sinuous bodies glistened in the rain, wet dark scales reflecting the halogen beams as if some magical energy shimmered through their muscular, continuously flexing bodies.
Perhaps their subterranean nests had flooded, forcing them out into the downpour, but that seemed unlikely because their instinct, which was really something more like a program, compelled them to choose their lairs with entrances shaped to direct water safely away. Besides, rattlers hunt singly, not in packs, and they don’t pursue prey at speed, but for the most part lie in wait. These snakes seemed unnaturally compelled, neither escaping from flooded dens nor driven by a need for food, but harried to some mysterious purpose.
I thought of the rats earlier in the day, of the yellow-eyed coyotes in Magic Beach more than a month previously, and I expected these serpents to turn their flat, wicked-looking heads toward us and reveal, by their interest, that what they sought was us. But they glided across the road without seeming to be aware of the limousine.
“They can’t do what they’re doing on a night like this,” Mrs. Fischer said.
“You mean the rain?”
“No. The chill. They’re cold-blooded.”
Of course. Unlike mammals, reptiles don’t maintain an optimal body temperature, and their blood warms and cools according to the temperature of their environment. They hunt when the desert, having banked the heat of the day, pays it out to the night. In weather as chilly as this, they should be coiled harmlessly in their nests, lethargic, dreaming the dreams of predators, if they dreamed at all.
Had the double score of snakes become hundreds, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Logic argued that such a strange scene might easily get even stranger.
Instead, the last of them slithered off the shale and among ragged clumps of mesquite, and Mrs. Fischer said, “All that lightning a while back … I think it meant something.”
“What do you think it meant?”
“Nothing good.”
She took her foot off the brake pedal, and the limousine eased forward.
To my right, at the periphery of vision, a flicker of movement caught my attention, and as I turned my head, an open-mouthed rattler slammed against the window in the passenger door, making a sound like bare sweaty fists smacking hard into a punching bag in a gym, and fell away at once. Two more erupted through the night, whiplike, eyes aglitter, fangs bared, drops of milky venom spattering the glass on impact and diluted at once by the sluicing rain. A coiled snake can strike at prey exactly as far away as the snake is long, maybe more than six feet in this case, because these were big suckers, unusually big, well fed on tortoise eggs, mice, kangaroo rats, grasshoppers, lizards, tarantulas, and a variety of other treats that you won’t find in your favorite all-you-can-eat buffet.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Goodness gracious,” alerting me to the fact that not all the thudding of snake flesh against limo was on my side of the vehicle.
Undulant serpents seemed almost to swim through the dense wind-driven rain, and collided with the driver-door window, four in quick succession.
“Well, I never,” Mrs. Fischer declared, sounding displeased with Mother Nature for this rude assault.
As she tramped on the accelerator, a rattler came over the port fender, snout-first into the windshield, where its hypodermic fangs hooked around a wiper blade, squirting venom. The wiper stuttered before lifting, almost broke, but then flicked the lashing reptile into the night before slapping back onto the windshield to resume rhythmically clearing away the rain.
“Good glass,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed.
“One-Ear Bob?”
“Absolutely.”
We left the snakes behind.
Mrs. Fischer eased up on the accelerator.
I said, “You ever heard of snakes attacking a car?”
“No, never.”
“
Me neither. I wonder why they would.”
“I wonder, too. And I don’t believe a snake can spring that far.”
“The length of its body, ma’am.”
“These came farther than that.”
“I sort of thought so, too.”
Bullets of rain broke against the armored glass.
“Have you ever eaten rattlesnake, dear?”
“No, ma’am.”
“It tastes good if you prepare it right.”
“I’m a little bit of a finicky eater.”
“I sympathize. The taste of lamb makes me gag.”
“Lambs are too cute to eat,” I said.
“Exactly. You can’t eat too-cute animals. Like kittens.”
“Or dogs. Cows are nice, but they’re not cute.”
“They’re not,” she agreed. “Neither are chickens.”
“Pigs are a little bit cute.”
Mrs. Fischer disagreed. “Only in some movies like Babe and Charlotte’s Web. Those are fairy-tale pigs, not real pigs.”
Neither of us spoke for a minute, listening to the rain drumming on the limousine, seeming to float through the night, and finally I said, “So when we finish whatever business we’re doing at Mazie’s, is there another route out or do we have to come back along this track?”
“There’s just this one. But not to worry, child. I don’t believe snakes have the capacity to strategize. Anyhow, doing what you have to do, always and without complaint—that’s the way.”
“That’s the way, huh?”
“That’s the way,” she confirmed.
A pair of thirty-foot Joshua trees appeared on each side of the road, eerie figures in the storm, less suggestive of trees than of blind creatures that might prowl the floor of an ocean, ceaselessly combing scents and tastes and, ultimately, small fish from the deep cold currents. They had been named by Mormon settlers, who thought these strange giants appeared to be warriorlike but also to be raising their arms beseechingly to Heaven, just as Joshua did at the battle of Jericho.
Easing off the accelerator again, Mrs. Fischer gestured toward the trees. “Even in daylight they look real, but they aren’t.”
“They aren’t Joshua trees? Then what are they, ma’am?”
As we coasted forward, she said, “Just try to ram the gate, and you’ll find out.”
A nine-foot chain-link barrier, topped with coils of concertina wire with razor-sharp projections, loomed out of the rain, and Mrs. Fischer braked to a stop before it.
Fixed to the gate, a large ominous metal sign featured a skull and crossbones in each corner. Red letters warned: EXTREME DANGER / BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH STATION / VIRAL DISEASES / FLESH-EATING BACTERIA / TOXIC SUBSTANCES / DEADLY MOLDS / DISEASE-BEARING TEST ANIMALS / ADMITTANCE ONLY TO PROPERLY INOCULATED PERSONNEL. Those words were repeated at the bottom of the sign in Spanish.
Mrs. Fischer said, “That’s just Mazie and Kipp’s way of saying ‘Private property, keep out.’ ”
“Probably works. Who’s Kipp?”
“Her husband. You’ll love him.”
“I thought it was just her and her two sons.”
“Well, dear, she’s a woman, not a paramecium. She didn’t just split in two a couple of times to produce Tracker and Leander.”
“Ma’am, the way things have been going lately, I take nothing for granted.”
From her purse, she retrieved her cell phone and placed a call. “Hi, Mazie. It’s Lulu from Tuscaloosa.” She waved at the gate, which I took to mean that a concealed camera was trained on the windshield. “Well, he’s my new chauffeur.” She reached out to pinch my cheek. “Yes, he’s adorable.”
Because it seemed to be the polite thing to do, I waved at the camera, wondering if it could detect the blush of my embarrassment.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Oh, that’s just because he dawdles. And since we’ve got an emergency we have to get to, I took the wheel.” She listened for a moment, said, “Thank you, Mazie, you’re a sweetheart,” and terminated the call.
I said, “Lulu from Tuscaloosa?”
As the gate began to roll aside, she said, “Oh, that’s just sort of my secret password. When you’re in the line of work that Mazie and Kipp are in, you need passwords and codes and cryptograms, that kind of thing.”
“What is their line of work?”
“Being helpful, dear.”
“That’s a pretty broad job description.”
“Being helpful, but only to those who ought to be helped.”
She coasted through the open gate, and I said, “How do Mazie and Kipp decide who ought and who ought not?”
“Well, they take new business only by referral from people they trust. And Mazie has the very best bullshit detector ever. And then there’s Big Dog.”
We came to a halt in a cage, chain-link overhead as well as on all sides, another gate directly in front of us. The gate behind us rolled shut.
As we waited, I said, “Who’s Big Dog?”
“When you see him, you’ll know. There just couldn’t be any other name for him.”
Slanting through the chain-link and the concertina wire, some of the raindrops battered and shaved themselves into a fine mist. Chaotic gusts of wind spun those ravelings of fog into half-formed dancers with featureless faces, as ragged as anything that had been long in grave clothes, and waltzed them across the cage, out into the open night.
“Ma’am, I hate being all questions, but—what are we waiting here for?”
“They’re checking out the car to be sure no one else is in it, because maybe we came here under duress.”
“How are they checking it out?”
“Beats me. Techie stuff. They’re probably scanning for insect spy drones, too, though I’m sure there isn’t one in the car.”
The gate in front of us rolled open, and Mrs. Fischer drove into a large compound that must have had a reliable water source, like an artesian well, because a forest of Phoenix and queen palms tossed in the wind. Mazie had made an oasis for herself.
Mrs. Fischer followed a gravel driveway, which appeared to be bordered by beds of succulents. She parked under a portico that, on blistering Mojave days, would shade the front of the house.
Neither the portico nor the residence was elegant. From what I could see, the single-story structure sprawled over as much as ten thousand square feet, but it was built of poured-in-place steel-reinforced concrete left in its “natural” finish, with a flat roof. It looked more like a bunker than like a home, with narrow deep-set windows that featured small French panes within stainless-steel frames and muntins that flashed silver in the headlights.
When we got out of the Mercedes, lights came on in the ceiling of the portico.
“Way out here, they must have their own generator,” I said, raising my voice to be heard above the keening wind that thrashed the palm fronds.
“Lots and lots of solar panels,” Mrs. Fischer said as she took my arm and pretended that I was helping her to the front entrance. “Plus two gasoline-powered generators, one to back up the other.”
“What are they—survivalists?”
“No, dear. They just like their privacy.”
More suitable to a vault than to a home, the stainless-steel door opened, and before us stood a fifty-something guy with a shock of red hair and lively green eyes. He had a face as sweetly appealing as that of Bill Cosby, a face of such likability that he would have been perfect to play the father in a TV-sitcom family, not in any contemporary show but in one made back in the day when sitcom dads were more real and less grotesque than they are now, when everyone still knew that families matter, when the word values meant something more important than the sales prices at the currently cool clothing store where you buy your gear.
He wore white tennis shoes, khakis, a white T-shirt, and a full-length yellow apron on which were printed the words KITCHEN SLAVE, and he was wiping his hands on a dishtowel. At the sight of Mrs. Fischer, he broke into a killer smile that would have been hard to match ev
en by Tom Cruise or a golden retriever. “Come in, get out of that nasty night.” As he ushered us across the threshold, he tucked the towel in an apron pocket. He took Mrs. Fischer’s hands, brought them to his lips, kissed them, not as a courtly Frenchman might have done, but as a son might have kissed the worn and aged hands of a beloved mother.
He said, “We were so happy when we heard about Oscar.”
“Kipp, dear, you’re as kind as ever. Oscar waited a long time for his big moment, and I’m sure he found the wait worthwhile.”
“No suffering?” Kipp asked.
“Not for someone who’d so completely gotten back his innocence. Oscar had been smooth and blue for years.”
“It’s just great news.”
“When the people at the funeral home gave me the ashes in an urn, we all drank some Dom Perignon. You know how much Oscar liked Dom Perignon.”
Turning to me, Kipp said, “You must be Edie’s new chauffeur.”
“Yes, sir. Thomas is the name.”
We shook hands, and he said, “May I call you Tom?”
“That’s as good as anything, sir.”
“Please call me Kipp.”
“Yes, sir.”
He would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.
“Have you had dinner?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Back in Barstow.”
“We ran into Chandelle and Gideon outside the restaurant,” Mrs. Fischer told him.
Our host said, “That was an amazing thing they did last December in Pennsylvania.”
“Wasn’t it, dear? And for ever so long, poor Pennsylvania has needed something amazing to happen there.”
“We might be outnumbered, Edie, but we’re going to win this thing.”
“I’ve never doubted it,” Mrs. Fischer said.
“What thing?” I asked.
“The whole amazing thing!” Kipp declared with childlike delight. “Anyway, we were just about to have dinner when you showed up, but I hear you’re in a hurry.”
Mrs. Fischer said, “We’re in a terrible hurry, Kipp. Could you put dinner in stasis and help us first?”