Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Guess I catch up with them in California.’

‘We catch up with them in California.’

Ian shakes his head.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Get dressed. I’ll buy you breakfast.’

Monica brings them eggs and bacon and bagels soggy with butter. Ian thanks her and takes a sip of orange juice and watches her walk away. He wishes there was more in him. He wishes when he looked at Monica he felt something. But he does not, nor does he think he could. Not now. Even thoughts of the future are oddly emotionless, not like they used to be.

‘Distant,’ he says under his breath.

‘What?’ Diego picks up a piece of bacon and takes a bite of it.

Ian shakes his head. Nothing. ‘I’m serious about wanting you to go back to Bulls Mouth,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you near this. You have Cordelia and Elias to think about and you shouldn’t be here.’

‘He’ll kill you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘And if he does, what happens to Maggie?’

Ian looks down at his plate and pokes at his eggs with a dirty fork, but does not eat. After a while he simply sets his fork down again.

‘That doesn’t concern you,’ he says finally.

‘You know better than that.’

‘There’s nothing I can say, is there?’

‘Nothing you can say what?’

‘To get you to drive back to Bulls Mouth.’

‘No,’ Diego says.

Ian nods and is silent a long time. Finally he says, ‘Okay.’

He picks up his fork again and scoops egg into his mouth. It is flavorless and the texture is somehow terrible and dead in his mouth, but he chews and swallows and takes another bite. They have a long day ahead of them.

A long day during which someone will almost certainly die.

Ian throws his duffel bag into the back seat of his car.

‘Why don’t I ride with you?’ Diego has his own duffel bag hanging from his fist. ‘I was up all night. I could get some sleep in on the way.’

‘What about your car?’

‘I’ll pick it up on the way back.’

‘Okay. Get in. I’ll be right back.’

Ian stands in the doorway and says, ‘I’m going.’

Monica looks up from a crossword puzzle she has laid out on the counter before her and sets her pencil down. It rolls to the edge of the counter and falls to the floor, but she only glances at it a moment before looking back to Ian.

‘Are you really gonna stop by on your way back?’

‘We’re leaving Diego’s car. We’ll have to pick it up.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

She smiles.

‘Good. Maybe we can really go on that date then.’ Ian is silent for a long time. Then, smiling: ‘Maybe we can.’

Ian and Diego are on the road by ten fifteen. Diego smokes a cigarette with the window down and looks out at the desert while they drive, and then he snuffs his cigarette out in the ashtray, puts his seat back, and goes to sleep.

Ian drives in the silence.

Today is the day he gets his daughter back. It is strange to think about. Strange and frightening for reasons he cannot begin to understand. Or perhaps for reasons he refuses to understand. But he will get her back nonetheless. He will get her back and he will hold her in his arms.

In a life of failures he will have this.

They pass a sign that says KAISER NEXT EXIT, and Henry puts on his turn signal and merges into the right lane. Maggie looks out at the desert. She feels half in a dream. They drove all night. Almost all night. Henry fell asleep once and the truck rolled onto the shoulder of the road, but he snapped awake as the truck jerked about and grabbed the steering wheel and pulled them back out onto the interstate. Shortly after that he pulled off the road and they slept. But Henry must not have slept too long because the next time she awoke it was still dark and Henry was driving again.

He pulls off the interstate and onto a smaller road, passing a place with a sign that says DESERT CAFE, and Maggie imagines they serve dirt sandwiches. You pick them up and the sand falls out between the slices of bread and into your lap.

How’s the sammy?

Oh, it’s a bit dry.

Then they’re past the cafe and all that Maggie can see is empty desert. The road is filled with potholes. Thatches of dead grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt. Vapor rises in the distance.

They drive by a sign riddled with shotgun holes, rusted and barely readable. It says KAISER 8 MILES, and there is a white arrow pointing straight ahead.

‘We’re almost there, Bee,’ Henry says.

‘I can’t wait to get out of this truck,’ Beatrice says.

Maggie can’t either. They have been driving a very long time. She can’t wait to get out, but she is afraid of what will happen once they get where they’re going. She doesn’t understand why she hasn’t seen Daddy since yesterday afternoon. Maybe he forgot about her. No, she knows better than that. He did not forget about her. Her daddy would never do that. Maybe Borden got him, got him and killed him for Henry. Borden isn’t real. She knows that. Borden isn’t real and even if he was real he couldn’t leave the Nightmare World. He is like a fish in that way and cannot leave the waters of the dark place where he was born. Even if he was real he couldn’t. But he isn’t. Her daddy didn’t forget her and Borden didn’t get him. Daddy is coming for her. She looks back over her shoulder but sees only road: empty gray road: and everything in the distance receding and receding and receding.

They drive through miles of emptiness. Dirt and shrubs and strange-looking trees. There are stretches of road that vanish beneath the windswept sand, but the asphalt always emerges some time later. And after a while they start passing by gray hills like heaps of ash, and the ground looks harder, and then a great gray pit in the earth, carved down and down and down, like stairs for a giant, and the pit is surrounded by broken machinery and at the bottom of it blue blue water, the only water in sight.

‘Iron mine,’ Henry says. ‘Dried up in the seventies.’

Not long after that they arrive at the entrance to a small town surrounded by hills. A lonesome, desolate town, seemingly abandoned. There are buildings here, but they are not peopled. There is not a soul in sight. And it is silent. Not even the barking of a dog to stain the clear, quiet air.

‘Goddamn,’ Henry says.

He drives up the main street slowly, passing a gas station whose windows have been shattered. A Coke machine out front is lying on its side looking like someone took a baseball bat or a crowbar or a sledge hammer to it. Past that and on the other side is a grocery store, also empty. The middle of the day and not a single car in the parking lot, only a few bushes growing from the cracks in the asphalt. The front windows of the grocery store have also been shattered, and Maggie can see what look like food cans scattered across the lot, maybe things people didn’t want like beets and lima beans.

They round a bend and pass an abandoned school, blue buildings left to flake apart beneath the desert sun, a baseball diamond which once had green grass growing in it now dead brown, bleachers sitting empty in the distance. Another turn and they enter a neighborhood of residences, the street lined with telephone poles made gray by the weather. Two out of three houses seem to have vanished. There is evidence that they were once there; the foundations laid out on the ground in the shapes of houses let you see where various rooms should be, but the buildings are gone. In the back yards rusty clothesline poles poke from the ground, usually with the lines long rotted away. Occasionally a T-shirt hangs from a rope like a flag of surrender.

‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ Beatrice asks.

‘This is the right place,’ Henry says.