I walked into the desert till the world began to curve, till the electric lights dropped behind the warp of the horizon. You can never get completely away from the light pollution of all those towns, but where I stopped the stars were brighter. Again, no moon.
No tire tracks here, but I found myself squatting next to somebody’s lost muffler. It had been there so long there was nothing left but a lacey filigree of brownish rust. I could have blown the whole thing away like a globe of dandelion seeds. But I didn’t touch it. Nearby, a flat spiny cactus reached across the pale sand. A handful of small bleached stones, worn smooth as coins, scattered without a pattern.
I hunkered motionless on my heels. I waited. Presently a cat appeared, stalking so slow I really couldn’t perceive the movement. For a time I wasn’t even sure that splotch back toward the glow of habitation wasn’t just some inanimate object that had been there all night. But no. I couldn’t see it move but I could see that it had moved. About the size of an ordinary housecat, though maybe, probably it had gone feral. A jackrabbit was frozen, crouched tight to the sand a few yards to my right, completely motionless except for the tips of its long ears revolving, searching for sound. The cat made no sound, but when it had come within a dozen feet, the rabbit got itself unstuck and bounded away at the same moment or a short hair before the cat launched itself hopelessly, too short, too late. The cat pursued anyway. Its silence was strict.
I couldn’t even find any paw prints in the sand, that cat had moved so lightly. Just a couple of scuff marks where it landed from the mistimed pounce.
My back was sore, my thighs and calves cramped, from crouching motionless myself for so long. But still I tried to lay down my feet as soft and weightless as cotton balls, as I walked back toward the trailer park. Orion was there in the eastern sky, with his jeweled belt, and the sword jutting down from it. The dick, Laurel liked to call it, for a joke.
My hands were cold when I came inside, though it wasn’t yet at all cold in the desert. My legs and my back were all right by then but my hands stayed stiff and I couldn’t seem to warm or loosen them. If I got arthritis, I thought, I couldn’t deal. I found a can of Tiger Balm and smeared a dab over my knuckles and palms, rubbing till the grease was all absorbed and the tingling menthol burn had faded. I knew I didn’t really have arthritis.
I dialed the number Pauley had found for me. Two rings, three rings, four. My thumb hovered over the reset button.
“Hello …”
The voice was recognizable, though not unchanged. That huskiness, and a drowsiness in it. Had I expected to wake her up? A shade of alarm, as from someone unexpectedly roused. The night sky was just beginning to shatter. I’d carried the cordless phone to a lawn chair on my wooden deck, where I sat looking over the predawn desert, beyond the diamonds of chain-link fence. It would be later on the East Coast, though. Full daylight there. Maybe it was a weekend, I don’t know.
“Hello?”
Certainly, it was Laurel’s voice. I began to imagine the lines between us, pictured the phone signal bouncing off some satellite up in the slowly lightening sky where my eyes were turned, my gaze dissipating like the beam of a flashlight you shine into the black night of the universe, disappearing there. I could feel her turning blindly toward the silence where my voice remained hidden. Like an antenna searching for a signal. A head tied up in a black silk bag.
When I came to, the sun was up and in the distance I could hear machinery grinding down a mountain. Building, razing, it never stopped. My clothes and my skin were coated with a fine stone grit. The dial tone droned from the wireless handset I held cupped in both hands, clasped into my navel. Laurel hadn’t said another word.