Thanksgiving (2 page)

ALSO BY MICHAEL DIBDIN

The Last Sherlock Holmes Story
A Rich Full Death
Ratking
The Tryst
Vendetta
Dirty Tricks
Cabal
The Dying of the Light
Dead Lagoon
Dark Specter
Così Fan Tutti
A Long Finish
Blood Rain
And Then You Die

Griefe lurkes in secret angles of the heart.
JOHN MARSTON,
Antonio’s Revenge

FOR KATHERINE

LUCY IN THE SKY

At night in the desert you can see for ever, which is where Lucy first appears. Taking this old road, a thin red line on the Rand McNally map, seemed a fun prospect at the time, but it isn’t working out that way. So far from there being more to see – after dark on a cold October evening? – there is, if anything, less.

Back on the new highway, there’d at least be some other traffic to keep you company. But this road’s no longer travelled, and you can see why. The untended surface has gone to pieces, patched and potholed, ribbed from the summer heat and infiltrated by a scree of sand blown in from either side, depending on the vagaries of the wind. At the speed you need to make sense of this invisible landscape, you could easily end up spinning out and flipping over if you didn’t constantly keep alert. Which isn’t easy, hour after hour, with nothing to do but scan the wedge of blacktop which the car drives before it.

So when light appears on the horizon dead ahead, it immediately assumes an importance out of all proportion to its actual magnitude. Just a distant glow is all. A brush fire, it might be, if anything grew out here. An oncoming vehicle, but it would be the first so far. Maybe a town, if there were any. It could be anything, quite frankly. Or nothing.

Problems with the surface aside, the rental car handles like a dream. On Highway 93 you could have set the cruise control to around a hundred and then snuggled down in the heated, ergonomically adjustable seat, finger-tipping the power steering while the radio warbled sweet nothings and the big eighteen-wheelers ate your dust. But you have to work at this bitch of a road. Let one of those craters in the surface catch you fumbling and you’d be belly up in the scrub before you could spit. As for music, forget it. Nothing grows in this wilderness of static but ghostly gibberish.

Sometime later, you realize that the light source up ahead has taken on a recognizable form. Human, to be precise. You can’t believe your eyes at first, but there comes a time when you have to. Not long afterwards, it becomes apparent that the luminoid is sexed as well, her charms displayed in varying shades of red, the intensity reflecting the erogenous rating of the zone in question, while a continual alternation of three static poses creates an illusion of mobility. At once grandly proportioned and intimately detailed, the female figure shimmers and pulses in the swirling air. All her parts are cosmic. She consumes acres of sky, an erotic constellation.

Once past a certain point the pattern starts to disintegrate again, rapidly losing shape and sense as you close in on it. Under that mass of meaningless lights, you now make out the familiar contours of a gas station with garage and diner attached. The concrete forecourt is cracked and crazed, the office roofless and gutted, the eatery boarded up. In every corner, the wind is busily hoarding dirt. The entire scene is bathed in the suffused light of countless red and white bulbs mounted in apparently random profusion on a painted hoarding attached to a metal tower some fifty feet high, heavily rusted and swaying alarmingly in the wind that moans as the structure troubles for an instant its passage through the enormous darkness.

I opened the glove compartment and slipped the loaded revolver into my coat pocket, feeling faintly ridiculous. By the shifting light cast by the bulbs overhead, I made out a figure walking towards me across the forecourt.

‘Gas?’ he called out. ‘You’ll need to pull over to the pump.’

Lucy had apparently taken the family photographs, so while she never appeared, Darryl Bob Allen was in almost every one. The burly physique, the bristling beard, the long hair tied back in a ponytail, the affectless gaze. He always looked slightly ill at ease, as though a photograph might find out the flaw he hid in movement in real life.

She’d told me about a prenatal clinic they’d attended, before Claire was born, where she was thinking about each couple: ‘He did it with her.’ Her husband’s patriarchal pose in those photos was the same. The notional subject, baby Claire or wee Frank, was duly dandled and presented, but their father’s expression was one of detached, impersonal pride, as though to say ‘I stuck it in her and shot my wad, and here’s the living proof.’

I got out of the car.

‘Hi. I’m Anthony.’

He looked away to one side.

‘Oh, right. You’re real late. I’d just about given up on you.’

Lucy had always rated charm and a good voice. Unsurprisingly, Darryl Bob turned out to have both.

I shrugged apologetically.

‘It took longer than I counted on. I thought all the maps in the road atlas were the same, but it turns out Nevada is half the scale of the ones I’ve used before. I’d figured on about two hours, but it ended up taking more than twice that.’

I didn’t mention the time I’d spent getting used to aiming and firing the revolver.

‘Yeah, well, welcome to America. About the only thing the several states have in common is you have to drive on the right. Plus frankly there ain’t that much to put on a map out here. It’s wall-to-wall sweet fuck all, basically.’

I pointed up at the mast with its array of coloured bulbs flicking on and off.

‘Except for this.’

He smiled in a diffident, boyish way. I’d never imagined this side to him. In those photographs he was always scowling purposefully at the camera. It occurred to me for the first time that he maybe just didn’t like being photographed.

‘Oh, that’s a little private project. Got it from a beach resort down in La Jolla. There used to be a neon display in the centre with the name of the place, just below her breasts, but I took that off. Kind of liked it more abstract, know what I mean?’

‘It’s certainly eye-catching. Especially out here in the middle of nowhere.’

‘There’s a ton more. Want to see?’

He seemed genuinely eager. We walked over to the concrete garage, opened the door and turned on a light. The entire space inside was filled with huge signs, stacked one against the other. In the corner there was a sink and photographic equipment.

‘I’ve got others out back. One thing about living here, you can just leave stuff lying outside, like those planes the Air Force stores round here. I was planning to mount them all, one time. Wire them up, create a kind of neon theme park. Thought it might get some touristic interest going out here. I mean, this is like a lost folk art, you know?’

All the while he was taking stock of me, in a surreptitious way. In the days when Allen still lived close to us, he’d used to drop by occasionally to take the children out for some Disneyland Dad treat, but Lucy had tactfully arranged matters so that we never met. He’d never seen a photograph of me, of course, and was naturally curious to see what his successor looked like.

‘These must have cost a fortune,’ I remarked.

Lucy had made a big point of the fact that Allen had never paid her a dime in child support, yet he had apparently been making grand plans for leisure attractions in the middle of the desert.

‘They’re kind of pricey now, but I was ahead of the curve. People used to see them as scrap. Junk, even. You could pick them up for next to nothing.’

‘And that?’ I asked, gesturing at the photographic equipment.

Allen smiled in an odd, knowing way.

‘Oh, that’s another hobby of mine.’

I thought of all those amateurish snapshots in the family album, ill-composed and badly exposed, often with a finger creeping over the lens. Those were the ones I had seen, the ones which Lucy had taken. If photography was one of Allen’s interests, why hadn’t he taken any pictures?

‘Yeah, I used to be heavy into photography,’ he added, closing up the shed. ‘Did it for a living, one time. Plus some of the stuff I took you couldn’t exactly take to the drugstore to get developed.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean it might have got me arrested. Anyway, the quality of that commercial stuff is shit, and you can’t crop and home in the way you can if you do it yourself. Saves money, too.’

‘Talking of that, you have this on all the time?’ I asked, pointing up at the mast swaying in the gusts of wind sweeping in out of the night.

‘Twenty-four hours a day. This is a gas station. We never close. We lose a little bit on every sale, but we make up for it in volume.’

‘Your light bill must be pretty steep.’

‘Comes free. Up on top there’s a wind vane I cannibalized from a heating system upgrade. It’s hooked up to a generator back of my trailer. As long as the wind blows, the current flows. The tower came from an AM radio station that went out of business. Only cost a couple of hundred bucks, those guys just wanted it out of there. I dismantled it, trucked it out here and put it back up again.’

‘Big job.’

‘Luce always said I was good with my hands.’

He laughed.

‘But then she told you the same thing, didn’t she?’

‘I’m hopeless as a handyman. If I’ve got a little problem, I write a little cheque. And how can you possibly know what Lucy told me?’

‘I just do. When it comes to Luce, I’ve been there, done that. Got the whole situation taped, so to speak.’

With a broad smile, he jerked his head to one side.

‘Let’s go.’

He strode off across the forecourt. I followed, my hand in my right pocket to disguise the sagging bulge on that side. I’d bought the revolver that afternoon at a gun show I stumbled into when I took a wrong turning leaving the airport terminal and found myself in one of the halls of a convention centre. The vast impersonal space was lined with home-made stalls covered in lengths of cloth or plastic and decorated with handwritten signs. The event might easily have been an antique market or a used book fair, but these folks were selling weapons. Just about every conceivable form of firearm was on display. I didn’t see any tanks or rocket launchers, but I had no doubt that they were available to special order. I did see one old geezer carrying an automatic assault rifle over his shoulder. The paper flag stuck into the barrel read: ‘Only $400. Barely used.’

I’d bought the revolver on impulse from a morose, tubby man who said he went by ‘Lefty’. I gave him a story about needing to defend my home from the scum who were running around these days. He nodded in a sympathetic but slightly bored way. He didn’t care what I was going to do with the gun any more than a car salesman cares where you plan to drive. All Lefty wanted to do was make a sale. He proceeded to describe the technical virtues and drawbacks of the various models he had on sale. As he talked me through each one, he picked it up and put it in my hand. It was an odd feeling. I realized that I had never before touched something which was solely and specifically designed to kill.

Once round the corner of the abandoned gas station, the wind was harsh and relentless. Lights were showing in an aluminium trailer mounted on concrete blocks. Darryl Bob Allen leapt up a set of three steps and opened the door.

‘Come on in,’ he said.

The interior of the trailer seemed cramped but cosy. The walls had been lined with some sort of wood facing, the floor was carpeted. Stacks of shelving and cupboards to either side left a narrow passageway which eventually opened into a small living area with a beaten-up leather sofa, a swivel chair, a stereo and a TV. In the centre stood a cast-iron woodstove with a galvanized chimney pipe running up to the roof. The air was warm and pleasantly scented with woodsmoke. A thirties-style wooden standard lamp with a pleated cloth shade stood in the corner, the light wavering and flickering like the bulbs on the sign outside.

‘How ’bout a little music?’

Without waiting for an answer, Allen pushed a button on the tape deck.

I can see, right out my window,
Walking down the street, my girl,
With another guy.

His arms around her like it used to be with me.
Oh, it makes me want to die.

He made a few dance-like steps in time with the music. He clearly danced well, with both grace and power. Another thing Lucy had implied in an unguarded moment was that her ex-husband had been both energetic and eager to please in bed.

‘What you think?’ he asked.

He was referring to the music, or maybe his stereo rig, but I chose to misunderstand.

‘You dance really well.’

‘Not as good as Luce,’ he said, sitting down in the swivel chair. ‘Man, she was good. Put her whole body into it, but at the same time she was always in perfect control. Know what I mean? You can tell when a woman’s good, and believe me, she was good.’

He laughed.

‘She used to complain sometimes, next morning, that her feet hurt. I said to her, your
feet
? You like to dance? You ever dance with her?’

Here it comes.
Oh here it comes.
Yeah here it comes.
Here comes the night.

Allen turned the tape off abruptly and pushed the rewind button. While the tape was whirring away, he strode off into the darkness at the far end of the trailer, returning with a quart jug of Canadian whiskey and two glasses. The tape clacked to a stop. He stuck it in its box and seemed about to replace it on the shelving stacked with other cassette and VCR tapes. Then he seemed to change his mind and laid it on the table.

‘Want a drink?’ he asked.

‘No thanks. I have to drive later.’

‘You’re heading back tonight? That’s a long way. Hell, I can put you up here. The sofa turns into a bed, kind of.’

Still standing, Allen poured a glass for himself. He was swaying slightly, and I realized that he was drunk. He’d probably started early, expecting me to arrive hours ago. So much the better. It would make things easier, when the time came.