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"What's that expression?" he said to me.
I smiled. "That's good night. I'm bushed."
"I'll get out of here then and let you get some sleep. You've got a great place. I'll expect a di
"Yeah, you know how much I love to cook."
"We'll send out."
"Good plan."
"You call me."
"I'll do that."
Truly, the best moment of the day came when I was finally by myself. I locked the front door and then circled the perimeter, making sure the windows were securely latched. I turned out the lights downstairs and climbed my spiral staircase to the loft above. To celebrate my first night in the apartment, I ran a bath, dumping in some of the bubblebath Darcy had given me for my birthday. It smelled like pine trees and reminded me of janitorial products employed by my grade school. At the age of eight, I'd often wondered what maintenance wizard came up with the notion of throwing sawdust on barf.
I turned the bathroom light off and sat in the steaming tub, looking out the window toward the ocean, which was visible only as a band of black with a wide swath of silver where the moon cut through the dark. The trunks of the sycamores just outside the window were a chalky white, the leaves pale gray, rustling together like paper in the chill spring breeze. It was hard to believe there was somebody out there hired to kill me. I'm well aware that immortality is simply an illusion we carry with us to keep ourselves functional from day to day, but the idea of a murder contract was inconceivable to me.
The bathwater cooled to lukewarm and I let it galumph away, the sound reminding me of every bath I'd ever taken. At midnight, I slid naked between the brand-new sheets on my brand-new bed, staring up through the skylight. Stars lay on the Plexiglas dome like grains of salt, forming patterns the Greeks had named centuries ago. I could identity the Big Dipper, even the Little Dipper sometimes, but I'd never seen anything that looked even remotely like a bear, a belt, or a scuttling crab. Maybe those guys smoked dope back then, lying on their backs near the Parthenon, pointing at the stars and bullshitting the night away. I wasn't even aware that I had fallen asleep until the alarm jolted me back to reality again.
I focused on the road, glancing down occasionally at the map spread open on the passenger seat. Joshua Tree National Monument and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park were blocked out in dark green, shaped like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. The national forests were tinted a paler green, while the Mojave itself was a pale beige, mountain ranges shaded in the palest brushstrokes. Much of the desert would never be civilized and that was cheering somehow. While I'm not a big fan of nature, its intractability amuses me no end. At the San Bernardino/Riverside exit, the arms of the freeway crisscross, sweeping upward, like some vision of the future in a 1950s textbook. Beyond, there is nothing on either side of the road but telephone lines, canyons the color of brown sugar, fences of wire with tumbleweeds blown against them. In the distance, a haze of yellow suggested that the mesquite was in bloom again.
Near Cabazon, I pulled into a rest stop to stretch my legs. There were eight or ten picnic tables in a grassy area shaded by willows and cottonwoods. Rest rooms were housed in a cinderblock structure with an A-line roof. I availed myself of one, air-drying my hands since the paper towels had run out. It was now ten o'clock and I was hungry, so I pulled out my cooler and set it up on a table some ten yards from the parking lot. The virtue of being single is you get to make up all the rules. Di
A kid, maybe five, was playing with an assortment of Matchbox trucks on the walkway while his father napped on a bench. Pop had a copy of Sports Illustrated open across his face, his big arms bared in a T-shirt with the sleeves torn out. The air was mild and warm, the sky an endless wash of blue.
On the road again, I passed the wind farms, where electricity is generated in acre after acre of turbines, arranged in rows like whirligigs. Today, gusts were light. I could watch the breezes zigzag erratically through the turbines, visible in the whimsical twirling of slender blades, like the propellers on lighter-than-air craft. Maybe, when man is gone, these odd totems will remain, merrily harvesting the elements, converting wind into power to drive ancient machines.
Approaching Palm Springs, the character of the road begins to change again. Billboards advertise fast-food restaurants and gasoline. RV country clubs are heralded as "residential communities for active adults." Behind the low hills, mountains loom, barren except for the boulders bleached by the sun. I passed a trailer park called Vista del Mar Estates, but there was no mar in view.
I took Highway 111 south, passing through the towns of Coachella, Thermal, and Mecca. The Salton Sea came into view on my right. For long stretches, there were only the two lanes of asphalt, powdery dirt on either side, the body of water, shimmering gray in the rising desert heat. At intervals, I would pass a citrus grove, an oasis of shade in a valley otherwise drubbed by unrelenting sun.
I drove through Calipatria. Later, I heard area residents refer to a town I thought was called Cow-pat, which I realized, belatedly, was a shortened version of Calipatria. The only landmark of note there is a building downtown with one brick column that looks like it's been chewed on by rats. It's actually earthquake damage left unrepaired, perhaps in an effort to pacify the gods. Fifteen miles south of Calipatria is Brawley. On the outskirts of town, I spotted a motel with a vacancy sign. The Vagabond was a two-story L-shaped structure of perhaps forty rooms bracketing an asphalt parking lot. I rented a single and was directed to room 20, at the far end of the walk. I eased my car into the space out in front, where I unloaded the duffel, the typewriter, and the cooler.
The room was serviceable, though it smelled faintly of eau de bug. The carpet was a two-toned green nylon in a shag long enough to mow. The bedspread and matching drapes were a green-and-gold floral print, flowering vines of some kind climbing up parallel trellises. The painting above the double bed showed a moose standing in lakewater up to his knees. The painted mountains were the same shade of green as the rug-just a little decorating hint from those of us in the know. I put a call through to Henry to tell him where I was. Then I dumped my belongings, christened the toilet bowl, and took off again, tracking north as far as the little hamlet of Niland.
I pulled in to what would have passed for a curb had there been a sidewalk in view. I asked a leather-faced rancher in a pair of overalls for directions to the Slabs. He pointed without a word. I took a right turn at the next corner and drove another mile and a half through flat countryside interrupted only by telephone poles and power lines. Occasionally, I crossed an irrigation canal where brown grasses hugged the banks. In the distance, to the right, I caught sight of a hillock of raw dirt, crowned by an outcropping of rock painted with religious sentiments. god is love and repent loomed large. Whatever was written under it, I couldn't read. Probably a Bible quote. There was a dilapidated truck parked nearby with a wooden house built on the back, also painted with exhortations of some fundamentalist sort.
I passed what must have served as a guard post when the original military base was still functioning. All that remained was a three-by-three-foot concrete shell, only slightly bigger than a telephone booth. I drove onto the old base. A few hundred yards down the road, a second guardhouse had been painted sky blue. Evergreens were outlined on the face of it, with welcome to painted in black letters on the roof line and slab city in an arch of black letters on white, with white doves flying in all directions. god is love was lettered in two places, the paint job apparently left over from the sixties when the hippies came through. Nothing in the desert perishes- except the wildlife, of course. The air is so dry that nothing seems to rot, and the heat, while intense through much of the year, preserves more than it destroys. I'd passed abandoned wood cabins that had probably been sitting empty for sixty years.