Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Then the crazy lady came. She just towed a trailer onto the land and started playing house, right there under the Pinnacle Rocks. Turned out it was privately owned, nobody even remembered by whom. Everyone thought it was government land. She didn’t bother anyone, only came into town when she needed supplies, driving an old Ford pickup that had been patched and filled and repaired so many times it was hard to say what color it might once have been. Mostly it was rust color. There were all kinds of theories as to why she was there and how she made her living. She must have had money from somewhere, for she didn’t work. Heaven knew how she spent her time.

One day one of the boys at the store got up courage to ask. She told him she was waiting for her daughter. No one knew what she meant by that until Uncle Ray, who’d been there when the accident happened, at the meeting or whatever, reminded them about the little girl who’d gone missing. The guy had climbed up the tower in his silver outfit, and after it started burning, a lot of wreckage had come down, killing three people. The kid must have been playing inside. There were a lot of kids around, apparently. She must have been burned right up.

Dawn sometimes worked at the store after school, and she got a good look at the crazy lady the next time she came in, at her greasy overalls, her sunburned arms and neck. Dawn wasn’t afraid of her. She was trying to get a sight of her eyes; that’s what you did, look at their eyes, except the crazy lady was staring at the floor. She counted coins into her hand and you could see she had dirt under her fingernails, in the creases of her palms. Working hands, like a man’s. Lord preserve Dawn from ever having hands like that.

“You having yourself a good time out there?” She bit her tongue for asking it. Old Man Craw stopped working the deli slicer and shot her a look. The crazy lady glanced up and there they were, little brown chocolate-button disks like a rabbit or a deer, peering out at the world from under that nasty chewed-up straw hat. Dawn saw nothing in them, not really, but afterward she told everyone in class how in her opinion the old bird wasn’t crazy, not at all.

By the following year there seemed to be a few people out at the rocks. They set up a kind of compound, with a wire fence, a couple of tin-roofed shacks. The sheriff sent Officer Carlsbad out to check on them. He came back saying they smelled kind of ripe but far as he could see they weren’t breaking any laws. The crazy lady started coming into town with an older guy who had an eye patch. Dawn couldn’t hardly look at him. Under the eye his cheek was slick and pink, like it was going to slide down over his jaw.

So now she knew they were definitely saucer people come back. It was obvious. She told Uncle Ray and he said whatever they were she should keep away from them. That was sort of official policy. Everyone in town was to be polite, no more. The young ones were supposed to keep their distance. Of course that made them all curious. There was every kind of rumor. They did a lot of driving by.

Then one day she saw the girl, just walking by the side of the road in the heat of the day, about five miles from town. Dawn pulled over and asked if she was OK. Thought she’d hear a story, most probably about being dumped there by some asshole boyfriend. Instead she said she was fine and her name was Judy and she was on her way home.

“Home?”

“Yes.”

“Just walking?”

She was blond and wore a sleeveless white shirt and jeans and had her hair in braids like a kid or an Indian squaw, which was amazing to Dawn because that was the time when all the girls were going for that big high hair, bubble and flip, the kind that took hours with rollers and spray. She looked about nineteen. And beautiful, without any effort at all, crisp and clean as if she’d just showered instead of walking however many miles in that sun. When she swung the truck around, pointing into town, this Judy said oh no, she lived out there at the rocks. Dawn couldn’t help but laugh.

“With them? You live out there?”

“With my mom and some friends.”

Who knew what to think about that? When they got to the compound Judy didn’t invite her in, just said thanks, see you another time, which made Dawn feel kind of sore toward her. She did get to tell the news to the girls over floats at the Dairy Queen and that was some consolation, but as it turned out she didn’t see Judy again until about a year later, when the girl made her real entrance into town life. By then Dawn had left school and was more or less just working at the store. She was there one afternoon, pretending to do something useful, when Judy walked in with the three freakiest-looking people you ever set eyes on. Dawn didn’t even want to blink in case she missed some shimmer or glimmer or strange remark or taking on or off of a hat or pair of dark glasses or a feather. One guy had all this silver and turquoise on him and a big black Stetson with a beadwork band and snakeskin boots and a long Mexican mustache. The other seemed to be wearing a pair of green ballet tights, through which you could basically see everything, which meant she tried to concentrate on the top half, where there was a rabbit-fur vest and a bare chest and a blond beard with little knotty braids in it — kind of disgusting, really — and if she didn’t want to look at that and couldn’t at the middle the only other option was his bare feet and they were just dirtier than hell. The other one was a colored girl, if you please, wearing a long yellow silk gown like a bathrobe, slightly torn and no bra underneath. Her hair was a big round Afro bubble and she was stoned on something, you could just tell she was, and in the middle of them all was Judy, in her jeans and her neatly pressed white shirt, looking just the same as before.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” said Dawn.

“Guys, this is Dawn. She’s one of us.”

Mexican Mustache made a kind of growling noise in his throat and leaned over the counter, all toothy and attracted. Dawn blushed right away. She hated how she did that. The others fell about the place, except Judy, who just stood there, smiling sweetly, like she was about to recite a poem.

“I’m sorry,” said the colored girl, “it’s just your face, man, you should see your face. You got eyes like — kerpow — you know?”

Dawn didn’t know and to be honest, it was her first-ever conversation with a colored person apart from one time on a class civics trip to Sacramento when they were there at the state capitol with a school from a deprived neighborhood. She must have looked confused or scared or something because right then Mr. Craw came bustling out of the storeroom and took a look at the customers and a look at her and put on his no-trespassers voice.

“Can I help you, young lady?”

Mr. Craw kept a.38 under the counter, alongside a baseball bat and a length of chain. He was positioned where he could reach it.

“I said, can I help you, young lady?”

Judy turned her big smile on him. “Sure, brother. You can sell us some food.”

“What kind of food?”

“Noodles, rice, cheese. Food.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.” He was flexing his hand under the counter like a Saturday serial gunslinger.

“I have a list.”

This set Mr. Craw back some. A little more clowning around and he might have used that gun. Mr. Craw had been a POW in Korea and now he liked to keep to himself. There was no Mrs. Craw. That mostly said it for Mr. Craw. Dawn just prayed those boys and girls didn’t remind the man of anything he didn’t care to be reminded of.

Somehow they got out alive with five big bags of groceries. She stood in the doorway looking after them. They had a school bus parked outside, painted all kinds of colors and patterns. The back half was stuffed with yards and yards of shiny fabric; there was so much, it was bursting out the windows. There was a sort of astronomy-dish item on top, and at least three or four more people hanging around outside, but she didn’t get a good look at anyone except a guy in a cape and a football helmet, because Mr. Craw pulled her back inside and told her to go and bag up the delivery orders for the veterans’ home.