Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

There were only two kinds of things in the desert, the things that were dying and the things that were surviving against all odds. The dead and dying things were all around you. There were always the saguaros flopped over and scorched, only the struts that once improbably supported them left visible, or the yellowed prickly pears, or the desiccated tumbleweeds rolling past. Smaller rodents were always being plucked from their holes by passing hawks. Rattlers were always lying in wait. And it wasn’t that infrequent, especially in Rattlesnake Canyon, out by where the mining claims were tilled, on the land owned by the government, that you saw a dead body or two, or what remained of a dead body. You saw the bodily parts that hadn’t been subjected to the rigors of the food chain, the bobcats or the coyotes or the pumas, and then the raptors, the crows, and then the bugs, the waves upon waves of bugs, and the elements themselves (which were last in the process of desiccation, but which were the most sustained, the way Vienna Roberts saw it). The dead bodies upon which these elements performed their sanding and varnishing were usually the border jumpers, that was obvious, but there were regular people from Rio Blanco too, people who lost their way, and who were out walking, trying to get away from it all, from the manifold hardships of the day. They didn’t prepare. There were pirates on the interstates now too, or highwaymen. Vienna had always thought that highwaymen were guys you heard about in old country-and-western songs, but maybe they were more than that. Maybe they were fringe elements from the Union of Homeless Citizens. Grizzled men who thought that the approach of people like her parents was too gradualist . These grizzled men, who were well acquainted with violence and intimidation, referred to her parents, and bleeding-heart organizers in general, as stationaries . Maybe these grizzled homeless men killed stationaries and dumped their remains out in the desert, like on this stretch of road that ran all the way out to the coast, if you were willing to go that far. Toward Gila Bend, and farther. The bodies were picked clean before they even had time to rot, as the great trucks rumbled past on the underpopulated interstate. Death was what made sex in the desert so compelling, so taboo, so irresistible to Vienna Roberts. She liked to say so anyway. They had the Pulverizer in the back of the van and were driving west in silence, she and Jean-Paul Koo, and there was something spooky about it too. When you couldn’t see anything but cactus clear to the horizon, that was when she liked to stop. Take the interstate forty miles or so to the dirt road and then the dirt road to the primitive track, and then get out and walk. By then usually she was already feeling shivery, like the only smart thing to do would be to take her clothes off, or at least the parts of her clothes that were in the way. And they had to try to wheel the Pulverizer out too. With the rubber glove on the butt plug part of it. Then they had to try to hook up all the electronics and hope that the electronics would work even though there had been a lot of sandstorms recently. The sand could really jam up the working parts. She wondered if Jean-Paul had a hard-on, and she kept trying to look over at him in the passenger seat to see if she could tell. He wasn’t arranged the right way. It just really wasn’t that sexy when she would go to all this trouble to try to get him out into the desert, because she did it all for him , even if he didn’t know it or didn’t really care, she did it all for him , and when he just wasn’t all that into it, you know, it was sort of not sexy. It was like Jean-Paul just didn’t want to have sex at all anymore, or he wanted to watch porn for ten minutes, bang away, and then roll over and go to sleep. She felt like hominid sex was a story that you told. It had to have all the things in it that a proper story had in it, like big uncertain passages, reversals, spots in which the villains became heroes, vice versa. You just couldn’t do that in the time allotted by Jean-Paul’s porn collages, which he liked to load onto the wrist assistant and watch while he was doing other things, like calling the bank or something. It wasn’t sex as much as it was the cold cuts counter at the supermarket. She still remembered what they were like at first, when she was trying to get him to have sex. Which he did like maybe once a day tops. He didn’t even want to have sex in the car at all. There were so few cars these days that it was easy to see if there was something going on in the car, and it was, you know, pretty dangerous, with the possibility that you could run off the road and into the washes, where you might be killed or eaten by coyotes.

He was fiddling around with the satellite radio, and it began saying something about the likelihood of rain in the region (after the part about mountain lion attacks), and that would be a laugh, because monsoon season was over. And they hadn’t had any rain at all in a month, except maybe one or two days when it came and washed away everything in its path, and then vanished as quickly as it had come.

“Great, just great,” Jean-Paul said, and she loved the faint traces of his Asian accent, which he tried to eliminate by the use of certain everyday English-language-type words, especially obscenities. “You’re taking me out into the desert to hook up all this electrical fucking apparatus to me, and there’s supposed to be a rainstorm.”

“Just one time maybe you could express a little bit of interest, you know? Love interest?”

“Gland interest, maybe.”

Vienna said, “That’s a totally pleasant thing to—”

“I fucking thought that the reason all the fucking web broadcasts are all recommending hominid sex or whatever is that it frees you up from stress. I mean, I like having my prostate milked as much as the next fucking guy, but that doesn’t mean that I know what love is.”

“Your position is, like, noted .”

“Two billion in seed capital, and some shops up and down the coast, or in all the casinos, then my dick will be really hard, comatose .”

“Your dick will be hard because you like it when I make it hard.”

No comeback available on that one, Vienna guessed, and anyway the van rolled off the last dirt road that had the pockmarked No Hunting signs on it, and they were doing great damage to the shock absorbers, in and out of the washes, with the mountains massed around them every which way and dark clouds overhead. Even with the satellite radio blaring some more suggestions for how to beat the sixth consecutive year of the down market by investing in Sino-Indian municipal bonds and terrorist futures, you could hear that the silence was coming to envelop you, and then when you shut off the engine, which is what she did next, there was the pinging of the engine cooling down, and then there was the symphonic calm of the audible desert. The two of them climbed down from the van, into their dramatic aloneness.

Around the back of the van, Jean-Paul busied himself with the Pulverizer, trying to roll it down some planks that were included in the UHC’s van for purposes just like this (wheelchair spokespersons). Vienna Roberts had the blanket she’d brought, a tan one that wouldn’t show the dust and dirt when she took it home later that night. It was in the midst of this wholesome and, she thought, feminine responsibility that she saw the disaster that was taking place, which was that the Pulverizer, weighing in somewhere near thirty kilos or more, was about to topple off the planks that Jean-Paul was using to roll it down. The Pulverizer was balanced for a moment, and in the desert silence, the sex-and-death silence of the desert, it seemed as if this moment of equipoise might last. There wasn’t a sound but the grimacing and sighing of muscular effort issuing forth from her French and Korean boyfriend. The clouds hovered above the mountains, and the mountains beckoned from geological prehistory, and the distant interstate babbled like a creek babbling, nothing more, and she lunged, she lunged at Jean-Paul to try to save the Pulverizer, and she watched as it tipped to his right, the little gloved hand that was meant to do all the pulverizing appearing to wave as the whole thing, the expensive and unusual marital aid, achieved momentum, plummeted out of Jean-Paul’s grasp, and fell onto a scattering of sedimentary rocks extruding from the sand, where, upon succumbing to gravity, it collapsed with an unpleasant crunch.