THE HIGH DESERT
The desert seems silent until you are being hunted. The night seems dark until you want not to be seen. Park hunched to the earth, zigzagged through the scrub. The night had brought a million million stars stretched out overhead to the edges of everything. Below, rock and cactus stretched out to the same forever.
Staring up at the ululating sky, Park tripped over a rock. He went facedown. He slid down a hill. A cactus broke his fall. Pain pricks from spines all over. Holes in his skin, air on his inner flesh.
He didn’t know why he was being hunted. Why the deputy had fed him the mushrooms. It didn’t matter why. Only that it was happening. He understood that he was nothing but vibrations like the scientists said. He managed to wrest himself away from those thoughts, to focus on where he was.
He’d hurt the fat deputy’s leg. He doubted the man could follow him into the desert. That meant Park was safe for the moment. He needed to get his bearings, look for the glitter of Hangtree. He climbed a ridge. He reached the top of a rock. He reached up for the moon but he couldn’t quite touch it. He turned in a slow circle until he found the lights of the town.
A bullet snapped past his ear. It left a bright red line in the night.
He left his body long enough to see himself at the top of the ridge, painted against the sky. He’d made himself a target. And they’d found him.
Gunshot.
A little star was born and died in a valley below him. The gunman moved from the shadows, surefooted through the scrub. It wasn’t the fat deputy hunting him now. Park guessed it was Houser. The man moved toward him, fearless, knowing Park wasn’t armed.
Park moved down the other side of the hill. Something slashed at his leg, yanked him down to the desert floor. He reached down, felt cold metal. Barbed wire strands from a long-dead fence. He yanked at it to clear it from his leg. The strand ran about a yard long.
Rocks hissed on the slope above him.
It was Houser moving. Park moved too. He’d passed through something now. Now he felt no buzz, no thing at all. He wasn’t even sure he was a thing. All the walls between him and the world were just ideas, and he was just an idea, and when he died the idea was the only thing that would cease and every volt of energy and every molecule of him would stay, so who could say that death was a thing?
Yet he planned to not die.
Park felt the cold of the desert leach into him. He drank up the desert cold. Cold all the way through. A lizard walked across his foot. Like a message from the world telling him it was true. Park was a lizard, cold all the way to the blood, just exactly as cold as the world around him. We’re all lizards that way, he thought.
He was a part of the desert now. Houser moved down the hill. He moved sure-footed but uncertain. He stumbled, a stranger in his own desert. Park moved behind him, moving so slow, so silent. Houser’s animal instincts must have kicked up, something from the base of the brain honed by millions of years of eluding the wolves, that told him to spin, to raise his gun. Park’s hand came up, knocked the pistol off course. The gunshot as Houser pulled the trigger flashed and boomed and wiped away the world for both of them.
They fought then on the desert floor, both blind and deaf. They stumbled and fell on each other. Park felt Houser’s hands on his skull. His head slammed into the dirt. Flashes of color burst through the blindness. He felt a pool of nothingness open up around him. He bucked with all his strength, felt Houser lose his balance on top of him. Park wormed his way backward. Sharp pain snagged in his back. The barbed wire. He reached behind him and yanked the strand out from under him. It tore furrows in him but he got it free, just as sight and sound started to return around the edges of existence, just as Houser scrambled onto him once again.
Houser got his hands on his skull again. Park got the loop of wire around the sheriff’s head. He yanked both hands so the loop tightened on Houser’s neck. Blood squirted hot against his skin. Houser poured all over him. He squealed and splashed. Park made noises too. He shared the man’s death with him. He watched the soul flutter out of the man. He saw his last breath like a white puff of smoke. He heard the ghost fly by. When it was done he left the body for the desert to take.
He saw a shack on the top of a nearby hill. He moved toward it. He found a road that led to the shack. He stepped onto the road. The night caught fire, lit from the path below, twin headlights blinding him. The car door opened. The fat deputy came out, shotgun raised, all of him a streak against the night to Park’s eyes.
“Where’s the sheriff?” Jimmy asked.
“Everywhere,” Park said. He wore a bib of blood, black in the moonlight, still warm from Houser’s body. “He’s right here for sure.”
“You bugfuck motherfucker,” Jimmy said. He raised the shotgun. Park walked down the hill toward Jimmy. The barrel of the gun was a swimming hole. He was ready to dive in. His feet shuffled in the dirt. Everything music. Everything strings.
“Ain’t no way you could have killed him,” Jimmy said.
“Weird, right?” Park laughed. The air he sucked in tickled his lungs.
Jimmy kicked Park down at the side of the road. He stepped back into the road and raised the shotgun. He had a smile on his face. Park smiled back. He meant it. He opened his arms up into the night. He felt every grain of oxygen in the air, the warmth of every pinprick of light from dead stars overhead. He wondered if he would feel the buckshot pass into him, join him, and separate him. He hoped so.
A hiss like sudden rain came through the night.
They both turned to face the thing rolling down the hill. A car rolling with no headlights. The car hit Jimmy head-on. It knocked him into the air. He came back down headfirst. His body twisted on itself in a way that a body can’t do. The brake lights of the rolling car glowed red. Dust kicked up as the car slid to a stop.
Charlotte Gardner sat behind the wheel. Polly McClusky sat shotgun. She had the face of someone twice her age. She had a gun pointed at Park. Park still had his arms in the air from seconds before, when it had been the deputy who had the gun on him. One gunman traded for another. So goddamn funny he had to laugh.
“Polly?”
She looked at him. Emotions like roiling fish on her face.
“You’re the guy,” she said, her voice so different from when they’d spoken on the phone. “The to-help guy. Why are you here?”
“I’m here to help,” he said. He walked forward. He saw Polly held her bear in her lap, its stomach split open.
“Oh no,” he said.
A weird frog croak came up from the backseat of the car. Polly tilted her head toward the shape.
“He wants to talk to you.”
“The frog?”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
Park walked to the back of the car. The backseat was gore. Nate McClusky’s life was spread out all over the seat. It glowed with it. Nate McClusky was cut up, oozing, one eye sliced out.
Nate took him in with his one eye.
“You get him?” Nate asked. “The sheriff?”
Park nodded yes before he could even start to figure out if it was a thing he should admit to.
“You put it on me,” Nate said.
“What?”
“Killing the sheriff. You pin that on me.”
Nate lay back with a smile on his face. It occurred to Park that he was supposed to arrest Nate now, but it was just a thought and he paid no mind to it.
“We’ve got to go,” Polly said to Charlotte.
“Are you going to be okay?” Polly asked Park.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”
“We got to get him to a hospital,” Polly said. “Thank you for looking for me. You don’t have to anymore.”
He watched them head down the road into Hangtree. Then they were gone and Park was alone in the desert. And he stood there next to the cop car. He took off his bloody shirt and he realized he was cold and he climbed in the deputy’s car and he drove away.