Madlands Page 19

  At the room’s door, she turned and looked back at me. “Take care of yourself, Trayne.”

  “Whatever. By the way—” I tilted my head toward D. “How was he? I mean, I have a personal interest in this. It’s my body he’s using.”

  Eastern smiled. “Trainable. The raw talent’s there.” Then she was out the door.

  I stretched out across the bed, hands clasped behind my neck, trying to make myself comfortable. And had my own smile going.

  Eastern had underestimated how much I knew, how much I understood. She’d forgotten, or else never really known, how close to her I was, how much I could read out from her.

  Somewhere, in all the stuff she’d just told me, she’d been lying.

  And I didn’t think it had been that last little bit.

  THIRTY-TWO

  D KEPT a shamefaced silence for most of the way, as we headed south.

  Trust an old farm boy like him; his shitkicker code of morality was locking in big time. Torn between lust and self-loathing. I should have known as soon as we’d hit town that he’d be looking to do a swan dive into the fleshpots. Whatever hellfire Bible-thumpers were loaded into his memory from the archives’ files, they’d programmed him into viewing any city, and especially this one, as Sodom and Gomorrah on greased wheels. He’d lucked out by getting picked up by Eastern in her classic hooker transformation; she’d obviously shown him a good time without warping his mind onto some Of Human Bondage plot line.

  After Eastern had left, I’d managed to rouse D with a cold wet rag from the bathroom down the hall. He’d opened up eyes that’d looked like cherries boiled in milk, then had rolled onto his stomach, hung his head over the side of the bed, and spat on the floor. Then he’d gotten dressed in silence, exuding the sullen radiation of someone who’d gotten kicked out of the Garden of Eden for too many parking tickets.

  “Are you going to be like this the rest of your life?” We’d been walking for a couple of hours, and I was getting bored with the gloom routine. “Or what? Because if you just want somebody to kick your ass for being a bad boy—if that’s what’ll make you happy—then just bend over. Don’t give yourself a hernia trying to do it yourself.”

  He glared at me, puritanical murder in his own heart. Then he smiled, looking abashed. “Well, shoot. I guess it ain’t the end of the world.”

  “No, that’s coming up later. You got your ashes hauled; that doesn’t exactly qualify you for the mark of Cain on your crotch.”

  D mused on this as we walked. “She was a right pretty thing.”

  “Heart big as all indoors. You did yourself proud, you bold buccaneer. Or something like that.”

  Ironic that he got that little strut in his walk, his pleasure at having made his mark in the big city, just as we got to the outskirts. The Joadoid pseudo-L.A. was considerably smaller than the one I was used to. I supposed that was historically accurate. The concrete and brick thinned out, and we were on the side of a two-lane highway cutting through the ubiquitous orange groves.

  I already had bad memories of territory like this. This brand of landscape was where we had been hassled before. I kept an ear cocked for the distant rasp of police motorcycles. If I heard as much as a whisper of decently tuned Harleys, we were going to dive into the underbrush.

  Deep evening had set in, when D turned to me and said, “I saw a ghost.”

  “Just now?”

  He nodded, stopping in his tracks and grabbing my arm. “Over there.” He pointed to the trees some distance from the side of the road.

  I looked, and saw a flash of something white moving around. Not a ghost, but worth investigating. I didn’t want anything sneaking up on me.

  The two of us crawled through the orange groves’ fallen branches and thick mulch of dead leaves, until we could see over the top of an irrigation embankment into a small clearing on the other side.

  “Holy shit.” D’s muttering was heavy with disgust. “It’s them dumb motherfuckers.”

  “Keep your voice down.” I reached over and pushed him flatter to the ground. “You want them to know we’re here?”

  D’s ghosts—there were more than one, probably close to a dozen in all—stood around a small fire, drinking beer, telling jokes and laughing with big guffawing voices. All dressed in white robes that came down to the middle of their shins; the cuffs of their trousers were visible beneath. The robes’ pointed hoods were pulled back, dangling like used condoms behind the men’s necks. Their beefy red faces shone with excited sweat.

  “Goddamn Klan assholes.” D sneered at the gathering. “There ain’t enough trouble in the world, these dickbrains gotta go lookin’ to cause more.”

  I didn’t have to explain to D who the men were, or what they were doing out here. He knew all about them; in his world, the place and time he’d come from, they weren’t ancient history. I knew about them from all my rooting around in the archives. I’d gotten far enough into the subject to know that a bunch of KKK troopers were entirely appropriate for Joadoid Southern California. The mistake most people made, when they had any kind of handle on The Grand History of Cretinous Behavior, was in assuming that the Klan had been necessarily a racist, anti-black organization. An assumption like that made it hard for people to believe that there had been any Klan activity at all in California in the thirties, when there just hadn’t been that many blacks out here to begin with, at least not enough for even the worst black-hater to get hot and bothered about. Why bother dressing up in pointy-headed ghost costumes to get on blacks’ asses when there weren’t any blacks around? What people forgot, or never knew—and D did know—was that the Klan’s original function had been as a terrorist organization supported by rich landowners to keep poor farm workers in their place and prevent them from agitating for better pay and working conditions. Naturally, in the American South after the Civil War, this meant that the KKK mainly went around knocking in black skulls with axe handles, and it had made a big appeal to the white population’s racism for support of its clandestine activities. But in the orange groves and cotton fields of California, the KKK popped up again, happy enough to fuck with the poor Okies and other Dust Bowl refugees who’d fled West looking for work. There’d been plenty of local historians who’d tried to suppress this ugly history—I’d come across their worthless puff-piece books, all sunshine and gold rushes—but I’d seen the contrary proof down in the archives, ancient black-and-white photographs of Klan rallies that filled the streets of the pokey farm towns around here.

  Those old photos flashed through my head while D and I watched the Klanners having their party. Amazing how much it proved the dictum that if you’ve seen one asshole, you’ve seen them all.

  I gave D a nudge. “Come on—let’s get out of here.” I kept my whisper barely audible. Parked at the edge of the clearing was a mud-spattered pickup truck; in its bed was a full complement of discolored baseball bats and other unpleasant articles. I could see a lot of reason for not letting these yahoos know that we’d been spying on them.

  We backed down from the ridge of the embankment, until we were sufficiently far away that we could stand up in the grove’s darkness and not be seen. The dead leaves crackled unnervingly under our feet. We finally reached the road, and picked up the pace, resuming our progress southward.

  The stars overhead were our only light. Both D and I were tired enough by this point that, once the adrenaline pump of spotting the local Klanners having a good time had passed, we could almost drift asleep as we walked. More than once, one of us caught the other, stumbling off the side of the road into the dry weeds.

  I came up from one semi-drowse to see our shadows stretching out before us, the silhouettes of our legs normal-sized and sharp, the shapes of our heads magnified and blurring into the darkness. That wasn’t right, but it took a moment for my leaden brain to figure out why.

  There were headlights behind us. My spine snapped straight as I looked around and spotted, beyond the double glare, the shape of the pickup truck barr
eling toward us.

  No time to say anything; I plowed into the drowsy D beside me, clutching him around the shoulder and toppling him off his feet. The two of us went sprawling hard into the strip of gravel at the road’s edge, just as the truck steamed past.

  “What the—” D pushed me away. He lifted his head and blinked dazedly, then saw what was happening.

  The brake lights lit up as the pickup truck slammed to a halt several yards farther on. Out of the headlights’ glare, I could see the white-robed figures piling out of the cab; the ones who had been riding behind vaulted over the tailgate. They started passing out the baseball bats to each other.

  I dug the police revolver out of my jacket pocket. If these rednecks thought they’d come across a couple of helpless fruit-pickers, somebody they could stomp into the ground as an object lesson to whatever migrant workers might be in the neighborhood, they were set for a surprise. I didn’t have enough ammunition to take them all—there were only five bullets in the revolver’s chambers—but I figured I’d only have to plug a couple before the others hightailed it out of here. Even if they only left long enough to fetch reinforcements, or weapons like the usual shotguns and .22 rifles found in farmhouses, D and I would still have time to make an escape cross-country.

  My pocket had torn open on a sharp rock when we’d hit the ground; my full weight had scraped the revolver in the dirt. The chamber wouldn’t rotate until I’d rapped the gun across my other hand a couple of times. The hammer mechanism ground back through a layer of grit as I cocked it.

  “What the hell ya gonna do?” D looked at me and the revolver in alarm.

  “Just be quiet.” We were both flat on our stomachs; I raised my head and sighted the revolver through a fringe of weeds. “When I say so, we pick it up and run.”

  The Klanners, spreading themselves out along the road, came walking toward us. One fat one—his gut tautened the front of his white robe—seemed to be in charge. “Them shit-heels oughta be right around here somewhere.” He looked from one side to the other, bat in hand. “They couldn’ta gotten very far away.”

  I aimed at the man’s gut—it was the easiest, most obvious target. The stub barrel wavered, then locked onto the joggling white expanse. I squeezed the trigger back.

  The revolver blew up in my hand.

  “Shit! Goddamn!” I howled, clutching my wrist. A wet spatter of blood from my torn palm oozed under my fingers. The jammed revolver had spun to rest in the dirt in front of me.

  One of the Klanners shouted, “Jesus! Bastard’s got a gun!”

  “Come on—” D yanked me to my feet. “We gotta get out of here.”

  We stumbled into the orange groves’ depths. My forearm still tingled with an electric buzz, but I could flex the fingers of my bleeding hand. We crouched down and tried to see what the Klan guys were doing.

  Out on the road, silhouetted by the truck’s headlights, they gestured excitedly to each other, waving the bats around. We could see them, but not hear what they were saying.

  “They’re really pissed now.” I squeezed my wet hand into a fist. “They really want us now.”

  D pointed to the activity. “That bunch there’s gonna try and circle around us.” A group had split off from the others. “We better make tracks.”

  We ran at an angle slanting away from the road, until I grabbed D’s arm. “There’s something burning.” The sharp odor of smoke drifted under the tree branches. “You can smell it—”

  A wind gust raised distant orange-red sparks dancing in air. The smoke was visible now, billowing close to the ground.

  “They’re going to burn us out.” The dry leaves mounded under the trees made perfect tinder. “Come on—”

  The smoke clung choking in our lungs as we ran. The fire ran faster; we could see it lunge up ahead of us. The strip of road at one side was the only sector not aflame.

  We made no plan, other than to dive as quickly as possible into the open and sprint for the other side.

  For a moment, I thought we’d made it, gotten ahead of our pursuers. My eyes stung and blurred from the smoke.

  I didn’t see any white ghosts, so the blow that caught me behind the ear seemed as though from something invisible. I sprawled across the road, my torn hand ripping on the rough surface.

  I rolled onto my back and saw the man, his Klan robe stripped off, standing over me. He grinned and hoisted the baseball bat over his shoulder.

  My head throbbed and clanged with each pulse. In my wavering vision, I saw D a couple of yards away, pinioned by two more of the disrobed Klanners.

  I reached toward him and shouted. “D! Go on! Do it! Do it—”

  They jerked his arms behind him; a grimace of pain stretched his neck and jaw taut. But he heard me; his eyes squeezed tight, he shook his head in refusal.

  “Shut the fuck up.” The man above me let fly with the bat once more.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE last time I’d seen the face that came swimming up before me, it’d accompanied a baseball bat slung over the owner’s shoulder.

  That’d been in the dark, out on the road. But I was still able to recognize the big, loose smile and the little, fat-swaddled pig eyes. It was brighter here—I blinked at the glare of an overhead light bulb—and I couldn’t smell the acrid smoke of the fire burning through the orange grove. But the man’s smile promised just as much gleeful violence, the whole aria of kicking someone else’s ass. Probably mine

  “Well, I’ll be switched. You are alive.” He laughed in some space behind his waddled chins. “We were afraid the county was gonna have to plant you, and we ain’t got any trustees to do the diggin’ right now.”

  The only reply I could think of was along the lines of Eat shit, and I didn’t think it was worth it. The bat and the guy’s friends might still be somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes a little wider and felt the glare ricochet inside my skull. The pain bloomed like a red flower, and I had to struggle against falling back into unconsciousness.

  Now I saw where I was. Walls blank except for encrusted dirt, and words and dates scratched to the ancient whitewash beneath; one wall of grey-painted metal bars. Some kind of jail cell—I was lying on a sagging cot that folded from the wall on two short lengths of chain; on the other side of the cramped space, I could see D on another cot. He lay unmoving, his face turned away from me.

  “Now we won’t have to go to all that trouble. At least, not yet.” The man stood up; he’d been sitting on a splintering wooden chair in the middle of the cell. His bulk blocked enough of the light spilling in from beyond the bars that I could open my eyes all the way without being blinded. The Klan robes were long gone. Now he had on a khaki shirt with a deputy’s badge pinned on. He threw a wet rag at me. “Here—clean yourself up. There’s somebody wants to talk to ya.”

  The cell door clanged shut behind him. I watched him walking down the corridor past the empty cells; then I picked up the rag. It turned pink, with darker bits of dirt and crusted blood, when I ran it over my face. Somebody had wrapped a grey strip of cloth around my injured hand for a bandage. Red had soaked through in the center of my palm.

  I sat up, bruises singing as they slid over the bones beneath. I creaked over to D’s cot. “Hey—” I nudged his shoulder. “You okay?”

  He looked like shit, face puffy, one eye swollen shut. He groaned when I ran the wet rag over his forehead; one feeble hand tried to brush the rag away.

  “Goddamn piss-ants.” He rolled over and spat something red on the cell floor. “Coulda taken ’em . . . if they’d come at me one at a time . . .” The words came around his thick tongue with difficulty.

  The last glimpse I’d had of him, out on the road, he’d been going down under a half dozen or so of the Klanners. With that many so tight around him, they hadn’t been able to whale away at him with the bats as freely as they would have otherwise—that was probably the main reason he was still alive, without his brains scattered all over the asphalt.

  “Yeah, well, when
it’s their bats, and their field, they get to make the rules.” I was having trouble staying standing up; I dragged the wooden chair over and flopped down on it. “And we’re not just dealing with amateurs here, you know. Our friends happen to be the local law, it seems. The bed sheets and pointy hats are just something they do on the side.”

  “It don’t surprise me.” D managed to get himself upright. He winced as he ran a hand over his ribs. “When folks are that mean, they’re sonsabitches all day long.”

  We weren’t able to talk anymore; the smiling deputy came up to the bars. He pulled out his keys on their leather lanyard and unlocked the door. “You there—” He pointed at me. “Get your ass out here. Time to go for a little walk.”

  The deputy led me to another section of the jail, away from the cells. I contemplated jumping him, but decided against it; I could hear others nearby.

  “You know, I could make it worth your while.” I kept my voice low, confidential. “Say, maybe to leave the back door unlocked. Some little . . . accident like that. I mean, you’ve already had your little fun with me and my friend. And we’ve learned our lesson. You let us go, and we’ll be long gone before you know it. And we won’t come back.”

  “Shut your mouth.” His smile vanished. “I ain’t interested in listening to some Okie trash like you. Put a sock in it, and keep on moving.”

  I got shoved into a straight-back chair in front of a desk. “Here he is.” The deputy closed the office door behind him.

  The man on the other side of the desk lifted his gaze from what he’d been reading. Big-knuckled Lincoln hands laid the papers down, and I found myself looking straight into Identrope’s face. “Hello, Trayne.” He smiled at me.

  It took a moment before I found my voice. I nodded, feeling my hands sweat, the salt stinging the one bandaged palm. “Hi,” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “It is strange, isn’t it? Not anything I’d ever have expected.” His smile faded. “Not from you, Trayne.”