Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

‘Where’d all them houses go?’

‘Sold. Cut in half and put on trucks and hauled off to be planted in better ground.’

‘Your brother lives here?’

‘You been here, Bee, about twenty years ago.’

‘That was here?’

‘Changed, hasn’t it?’

Maggie wasn’t even born twenty years ago, but she doesn’t think it’s changed. She thinks it’s died. When she was locked down in that basement, in the Nightmare World, she sometimes found the shells of beetles whose insides had been eaten hollow by ants. This town reminds her of that.

Henry pulls the truck to a stop in front of a small single-storey house which was probably once painted white. It now looks about ready to collapse in on itself.

Henry looks at her and at Beatrice and says, ‘Wait here.’

Then he pushes open the door and steps from the truck. He walks to the front door of the house. A moment later he knocks.

Henry knocks on the peeling green-painted door and waits. When, after some time, there is no answer he knocks again. Ron hasn’t had a phone for several years so Henry could not call him to let him know he was coming. Probably he is at work. Last time the two men exchanged letters-four maybe five years ago-Ron had gotten a job as a guard at a privately run prison about twenty miles away, Joshua Tree Medium-Security Correctional Facility, mostly populated by non-violent drug offenders.

Henry walks around the perimeter of the house, looking for open windows and checking the closed ones to see if he can push them open, but in the end he finds himself back out front with no way inside. He could break a window, but Ron’s the kind of man who upon seeing signs of a break-in will shoot first and asks questions later. While there might be some irony in driving fifteen hundred miles only to get shot by the man you came to for help, irony just ain’t a thing Henry is willing to die for.

He walks to the truck and looks in the window.

‘He ain’t here. We’ll have to wait. You guys might as well get out and stretch some.’

‘I have to pee,’ Bee says.

‘Just take some of them McDonald’s napkins around back of the house and squat.’

He looks out at the faded gray street. He needs Ron to come home. Ian Hunt could arrive at any moment, and Henry has no weapons. He lost both his Lupara and his.22 in Sierra Blanca and has been utterly defenseless since. Ian could drive right up the street and put a bullet in his head and he couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it. That ain’t no position to be in.

That ain’t no fucking position to be in at all.

‘Come on, Ron,’ he says.

He looks at his watch. It’s only noon. If Ron works eight to four, as he used to, he won’t be getting home till four thirty at least, and that’s if he don’t stop off someplace to get lit. That leaves over four hours during which Henry can get his brains blowed out. And while this corpse of a town is a good place to finish this, nobody around to call the police about any noise and plenty of places to dump a body where it won’t ever be found, the qualities that could work in his favor could also work in Hunt’s.

If Hunt shows up in the next four hours or so.

If it weren’t for getting pulled over this would have ended yesterday, it would have ended last night. But after Henry lost his weapons, he knew the only thing to do was to get to Ron’s as quick as possible and hope when he got here he had time enough to prepare for Hunt. He still doesn’t know if he has that time. If it weren’t for that fucking cop this would be over. He felt kind of bad about having to shoot him at the time, the man was just doing his job, after all, opposed to Henry though he was, but thinking about the situation it’s put him in Henry’s glad he killed the son of a bitch.

He looks at his watch again, and he waits.

Ian and Diego cross the state line into Arizona around two o’clock in the afternoon, passing a sign welcoming them to THE GRAND CANYON STATE, though the surrounding desert looks the same as it did ten minutes earlier when they were in New Mexico. Ian has always liked the desert. The harshness of it and the emptiness. If God exists He lives in the desert, of that Ian is certain. None of the masks of civilization here. No grinning handshakes and knives in the back. The desert is honest: it will take you whole and leave a husk and you will know what it is doing while it’s happening. It is what it is and makes no apologies.

There is something to be said for that.

Ian coughs into his hand, and the cough becomes a fit.

Between the coughs he manages to say, ‘Take the wheel,’ in a tight, strangled voice, and Diego does so. His coughing fit is wet and painful and comes from a very deep place in him and when it is over tears stream down his face and the strong taste of metal fills his mouth.

He wipes his hands off on his Levis, rubs at his eyes, and takes the wheel once more.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

Diego stares at him silently for a long time.

‘Do you need to stop?’

‘No.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘ No.’

He glances at Diego, expecting him to say something, expecting him to tell Ian he needs to go to the hospital and take care of himself, expecting him to once more suggest that they tell the police what is happening, but he does none of those things. With only a nod he makes it clear that Ian’s answer is okay. As long as Ian knows what he is doing to himself, Diego will accept it and help him. He does not turn his back on his friends.

Diego rolls a cigarette and looks out the window. ‘When do you think we’ll get there?’

‘Around sunset.’

Diego grunts in acknowledgment, lights his cigarette, and cracks the window.

The wind blowing through the car is very loud and very hot, but it feels good against Ian’s face even as hot as it is.

He looks to the gray road ahead.

In another four and a half or five hours they should be there. In another four and a half or five hours he gets his daughter back.

Maggie hears the car before she sees it, and Henry must hear it about the same time she does, because he gets to his feet from the curb where he was sitting with her and Beatrice and sort of leans forward as if that will help him see it sooner. Maggie feels a burning hope that it is her daddy. It is her daddy and he has come to save her and he will wrap her in his arms and take her away from here forever.

A white Toyota turns the corner and the face behind the windshield is not her daddy’s. It is nothing like her daddy’s. It is an ancient face into which time has carved great hollows. The eyebrows are thick and bushy and gray. The nostrils flare. The tongue, a colorless piece of meat, pokes out and licks the dry lips and disappears back into the pit of the mouth like some blind burrowing animal that’s sensed a predator.

The car slows and, though it is merely a machine, seems to approach them with great caution.

Henry waves.

The man behind the wheel of the Toyota lifts his hand in an automatic return wave, but for a moment his face remains blank and stupid. Then his mouth opens in an ah and he smiles and says, audibly, ‘I’ll be a goddamned son of a whore.’

He pulls the Toyota into the driveway, pushes open the car door, steps out into the daylight, and holds out his arms. He is wearing a beige uniform and a belt with a black stick and a pair of handcuffs and a can of pepper spray hanging from it and black shoes. His thin gray hair is cut close to his head.

‘Henry,’ he says.

‘Ron.’

They hug.

‘How you doin’, Bee?’

‘Okay.’

‘Good to hear it. And you must be Sarah,’ looking toward Maggie. ‘I can’t believe I never met you before. I’m your Uncle Ron.’

Henry grabs Ron’s arm.