He was almost to the freeway when he saw it, on the corner of an unmarked intersection. A well-kept little house, its tiny yard like a Japanese garden, rocks and sand raked into overlapping arcs of blues, grays, and whites, like a quadrant of night sky. Slowing his Travelall at the stop sign, he saw stars and planets twinkle and spin across the yard—sunlight, he realized, flashing off bits of quartz, obsidian, and mica.
Through all the nights he’d patrolled the area he’d never noticed the place before. A louvered garage door was secured with steel rods and padlocks, a long black Lincoln from the forties gleaming in the driveway. Above the door next to the garage, stenciled in simple black letters, a sign with the words
REVEREND RAY’S ROCK SHOP
He drove across the intersection and pulled to the curb for a better look.
The neighborhood was deserted—no one on the street, no cars, the houses boarded up. It was absolutely quiet. Even his tinnitus was muted now to quick bursts of static, faraway and close at the same time, like rattlesnakes. The sunlight was pale as an overcast winter afternoon, but the sky was clear bright blue. He remembered a solar eclipse one Sunday when he was five years old, home alone, the moon’s shadow racing down the street.
Feeling a little dizzy, he looked at his eyes in the rearview mirror, thinking he should get more sleep and eat better. Not drink so much. He had to take better care of himself or this job would kill him before he finished his eighteen months and could resign without looking like a quitter.
When he got out of his Travelall, walking toward the house, he felt okay. An airliner whistled high overhead. Mourning doves called from the trees. His ears chirped and whined like they always did. The dizziness was gone. He heard music, though. Someone singing maybe.
The Lincoln might have just been driven off a showroom floor out of the past, its black paint reflecting Hanson like a dark carnival mirror, compressing and expanding him, walking him off the ground, spreading him from bumper to bumper, then collapsing him to a dwarf trapped down in the chrome hub of one of the wire wheels. The wide whitewall tires were shiny new and the purple plush upholstery was pristine.
It was a piano he’d heard, coming from the house. He closed his eyes and felt the notes on his eyelids.
“It’s Georgia…always Georgia…”
Sounded just like Ray Charles, singing “Georgia on my Mind,” and it wasn’t a radio. Maybe some kind of elaborate sound system. He opened his eyes.
Why hadn’t he noticed the rock shop before? He stopped at rock shops off highways and county roads all the time. The owners were always unusual—eccentric, opinionated, obsessive, manic, sullen, paranoid—idiot savants of one sort or another, inbred geniuses, borderline psychotics who always received him as if he was a hallucination they’d been expecting. They’d take him back to their hidden storage sheds, show him the stuff in their basements, introduce him to their dogs. When he left they told him to be sure and come back soon and waved goodbye when he drove off as if he was leaving for another planet.
“Georgia on my mind.”
The big door knocker—a brass lion with a ring in its teeth and blue-green opals for eyes—seemed to consider Hanson when he stepped up to the door. Beneath the lion, a smaller sign:
Cleave the Soil and You Will Find Me,
Part the Sea and I Am There
Open for Business
The singing stopped, but the piano cruised along. Hanson reached for the door knocker, and whoever had been singing laughed, trilled the piano, and called “Come on in, Officer.”
Hanson opened the door.
He looked like Ray Charles: big dark glasses, smiling toward Hanson, but weaving his head as if hearing some other song. He was blind and sitting in a wheelchair at the piano, on the other side of a glass case of fist-size crystals that lit his face in patterns of blue and rose and diamond white. He played a few last notes of “Georgia,” fading them out to silence.
“I knew you were on the way,” he said.
“I didn’t know I was on the way.”
“You just didn’t realize it. And you won’t have no problems parked here. Nobody mess with my customers.”
“Was that you singing?”
The blind man nodded.
“That was wonderful,” Hanson said.
“Thank you, but that’s Ray Charles’s song, not mine.”
“His song, maybe, but your voice.”
“Just a trick,” he said, slumping down oddly in his wheelchair, as if he didn’t have any bones in his body.
“That’s a great looking car you got out there,” Hanson said, changing the subject. “Who…?”
“Just got it tuned up. Gotta keep your ride tuned and detailed.”
“Who…?”
“I can see fine when I’m drivin’ at night. Lights all around show you the way. My eyes is more sensitive at night, you see.”
Black, blind, and crippled, Hanson thought, and crazy too.
“Ain’t that the blues? Yes, sir, true enough.”
He hit a note, another one, then began to sing. A somber, funereal march: “Death don’t have no mercy—in this land. I say Death don’t have no mercy, in this land…” He laughed and trilled the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Since…uh?” Hanson said, trying to be polite.
“Since you saw me last. What brings you to Reverend Ray’s Rock Shop?”
“I was over—”
“It’s not a good location.”
“I was on my way to—”
“Not for a rock shop. I know,” he said, noodling the piano keys. “What you doin’ out here on your day off? More to the point,” he said, twisting his head around, looking up at Hanson with blind eyes through the dark glasses, “why you want to work out here at all? Where everybody hates you?
“I’ll tell you why,” Ray said, his blue-black dark glasses reflecting twin images of Hanson from below. “Hate is something you can depend on. Gives you something to live for. Better than love, an’ that’s a fact. Something you can believe in, little brother.” He played a few chords on his piano, then the same chords again, only in a different key. “You got any friends around here?”
“Well…”
“Dead,” Ray said, hitting a chord. “All the friends you had are dead. Why you suppose they already met with Death?”
Hanson thought about it.
“Well?”
“Bad luck.”
“Say what? How’s that?”
“They’re so good at what they do, bad luck’s about the only thing that can kill ’em. They get bored and take chances.”
“Messin’ with Death?”
“They’re not afraid of dying.”
“Everybody afraid of Death.”
“Not everybody.”
Ray played a few notes and sang, very softly, “And then I go back home, and hear your voice again, but I’m alone.
“Take a look around the shop,” he said, gesturing like a ringmaster. “I got the history of the world in this shop, little brother. Look here at my rocks, my gems, jewels, minerals, crystals. Precious, semiprecious, common, rare and priceless. I got fossils from the past and meteorites from before the past. I got it all here—life, death, gold and lead, love and war. Answers to questions nobody’s asked yet, not in this lifetime.
“See that green glass over there? One shelf down, yes sir, you found it. Sand fused into glass by the first atomic bomb. Down in New Mexico at the Trinity site.
“See that black glass? One shelf over? They call it weapons grade obsidian,” he said. “Uh-huh. For arrows and spears and what have you. Sharper than razors. Green glass, black glass, same old story, never changes. Whoever’s got the weapons got the gold too. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t matter if it’s claws, teeth, daggers, or atom bombs. Weapons evolution is what you might call it. Evo-lu-tion. People talk about evolution like it’s dependable though, logical. Forget that.” He paused to smile and shake his head, trilling the piano. “You can’t depend on evolution any more than anything else. Those dinosaurs ruled for millions of years, and they’d still be supreme, but there’s always surprises.” The piano rang like a church bell and he sang out, “Meteor strike!” laughing as the sound faded into the walls. “Didn’t expect that. Forget about survival strategies and evolutionary status quo. It all starts over then.”
Hanson clasped his hands behind his back so he wouldn’t knock anything over and have to pay for it. He leaned down to look at some of the dusty stones piled up on wooden shelves.
“What you’re looking at there’s called dogtooth calcite. That piece came from Mexico, way down in a flooded cave full of water and all kind of blind sharks and rays and poisonous snakes. Some places even the rocks have teeth. Gots to, to survive.
“The diamond next to it? That one. Raw and uncut as the day it blew out of a pipe in the earth five million years ago. Go ahead and pick it up.” Hanson picked up the diamond, turned it in his hands. It was the size of a billiard ball, heavy, gnarled and knotted, a frosted translucent white. He almost dropped it when Ray shouted, “And look at that, little brother! Down there, in that silver bowl, whole bowl of little meteorites, every one of ’em older than the sun, older than the solar system, all that’s left of a star that burned out, blew up and went black four thousand hundred million years ago. They rained down in a meteor shower over Johnson City, Texas, out of the night sky, not but seven hundred years back. Wish you could have seen it. Put your hands in there and feel the weight, which is something you can appreciate, I know that. They burned down through the atmosphere into pure nickel-iron alloy etched with tiny hieroglyphics and green crystals no one’s ever seen on earth, harder than diamonds and bright as flame. Look at that light!”
“How did…” Hanson began, reaching deep into the bowl of meteorites. He closed his hand on one and lifted it out. “Why don’t they…Sir?” Hanson walked over to the piano, gem-crusted meteorite still in his hand. Reverend Ray was gone, an empty wheelchair behind the counter where he’d been sitting. Hanson looked out the window at the strange, deserted neighborhood. A pair of dust devils were racing each other up the street.
Something thumped on the floor behind him. He knew he should ignore it. Dismiss it, refuse to acknowledge it and walk out the door. It wasn’t real anyway, in his opinion. But he turned around.
“Well, what?” he said. “What can I do for you?” He looked down at the jet-black big-eared rabbit, his ears scarred like a tomcat, pearly black eyes otherworldly and accusatory at the same time. A jagged streak of white fur alongside his nose. It was the same rabbit, the Temple rabbit. The meteorite was like a nail through his hand, throwing gold and green streaks of light across the ceilings and walls and floor. “What?”
The rabbit looked up at him, and Hanson saw prehistoric cave paintings and Renaissance angels in his eyes.
“Reverend Ray,” he called. “Sir? Is this your rabbit?”
No one was there.
“Gotta go. Outta my way, punk,” he told the rabbit, walked out and closed the door behind him.