Ranjeet puts down five hundred dollars with a flourish. At which point the dealer deals himself an ace and a face. With a studied calm, the dealer remarks, “Bad luck, sir.”
This is followed by two more top-dollar bets, desperation wagers. With the remaining five hundred, Ranjeet moves down to one-hundred-dollar increments. Of these, he loses three, wins one, and loses two more.
“You know the ending? You already know the end, so I’ll just tell you the end, which is that I woke up to hear Skye screaming. The wind had blown up, which is the special requirement of a wildfire, and Skye was screaming. I was wearing a nylon windbreaker over a halter top, and I don’t really remember what Skye was wearing, because at the moment when I woke up, Skye was already in a lot of trouble, with the campfire having blown out of the campfire ring. Skye’s clothes were on fire, and I ran over to help her. I remember thinking that we didn’t have anything at all that would be good for putting out a fire. We didn’t even have any water. We were just a pair of stupid girls who didn’t have anything and who hoped our boyfriends would turn out to be better guys than they seemed. We didn’t have any water and we didn’t have any shovels, and I could see that Skye was trying to pat the fire out on her arms and back, and I jumped on her, and I was trying to put out the fire on Skye and I could feel that I was not really getting the fire, that something was making the fire burn brighter, and maybe that was my nylon jacket burning, but I didn’t have time to pay attention to it because I looked up and I saw that there were flames all in the night to one side of us, like the night itself was burning up. Before I could even deal with Skye, I said, ‘We’ve gotta run, we’ve gotta run,’ and we were both running, and I was patting down my arms, and I remember that I was trying to put out the jacket and I was trying to figure out if I could pull it off, but I couldn’t pull off the jacket because it had already melted. The only good thing about all of this was that we could hear the sirens in the distance. We could hear where the road was, because that was the direction that the sirens were coming from, and we were running toward the sirens, and Skye was wailing, and I was running as fast as I could, and finally we got to the road, and that’s where I passed out or went into shock. And I just want to tell you, in case you ever wondered about trauma, that I didn’t forget how I got to the hospital, or the first skin grafts, and I never did forget the fire. I wake up a couple of nights a month feeling like I’m running from fire. That fire burned four days. My name was in the papers, and everybody knew what Skye and I had done and what the boys had done, which is that somehow we started the Skull Valley Fire, and after that I never went outside to a party ever again. As soon as I finished school, I came east to New York to get away from the Skull Valley Fire, from the horses in their paddocks who died because of me, because of my stupid teens. If I came east, maybe no one would know how I felt about what I had done.”
When Ranjeet has lost the last of his money, they get up from the table, taking leave of the new dealer, an Asian man with none of the complicated style of his predecessor, who is now gone on his break. It’s only when they’re passing through the maze of slots that Jeanine takes a quarter from her clutch, throws it into a one-armed bandit, pulls the lever, and waits as the alarm goes off crazily on its summit, indicating a major payout. The coins tumble into the tray below, more coins and more coins and more coins, until the tray can’t begin to contain the scale of the payout. Thousands! More than thousands! Ranjeet looks around, stunned, waiting for the uniformed employee. Jeanine says she can’t believe it, but somehow she can. Sometimes this is how it goes. Can he wait here for a second? She really has to go to the bathroom, just wait, just wait. And while he’s waiting for the money, she heads for the elevator, for the room, for the car key. It’s only four or five hours to Phoenix.
Sagebrush, creosote, ocotillo, waving fields of parched grasses uninterrupted to the horizon. The occasional juniper like a blemish on the emptiness. Even the tumbleweed doesn’t seem stagy, doesn’t seem added for effect; that’s how Vanessa knows she’s where she’s supposed to be, in a place where the wind on the rails really does howl, where the freights do rumble through the crossings for the rest of the day, where the best bar in town can’t afford a neon beer sign, where the one dilapidated market has an entire aisle of tortillas. A swirl of dust blows up around you, as if the range has a quarrel with you for cluttering its absences. You startle an antelope or a deer when you go out walking, but you shouldn’t go out walking, because no one does.
Alpine, Texas. She’s come here to find that it’s among the last places in the country unexploited by the film business, an exploitation she now means to bring about with a vengeance. She means to line up a bunch of trailers, longer than the longest freight train, and she means to assemble a bunch of union guys who will descend on the local bars by the dozens, and she means to send extras in Mongolian outfits into this rangeland, and these Mongolians will be stabbing at one another, with the fight choreographer yelling from just offscreen. There will be helicopters hovering over all of the action, equipped with cameras and massive lenses.
Her itinerary: first, the Gila National Monument. From there, she moved south and east. Vanessa liked it better in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and she liked it there for one reason. The Low Rider. Well, there was also the possibility of Alamogordo. Yes, Vanessa favored the idea that a Geiger counter might pick up echoes of long-ago blasts. But what Alamogordo looked like was like everything else. On the second day, they turned south toward Carlsbad. Why is it, at these caverns, that there’s always a tour guide who has to point his flashlight at a stalagmite and compare it to an elephant? No way. Cutting short Carlsbad, they decided to head east toward the Big Bend. It was a long drive, and they let themselves stop at whatever picturesque roadside beguiled.
Then, while driving east into the dawn, in a Pontiac Grand Am in teal, Vanessa managed to stumble on this place, scarcely of note on any map, except for its state university. Alpine, TX. She had no reason to know that she’d long been yearning for such a place, a place so slow and backward and lost. Maybe the whole month of November had been bringing her near to Alpine. With each bit of bad news in the prior weeks, she had drawn closer. Fuck Dallas and its oil culture; fuck Houston and its art museums. Out here was a plateau the size of Rhode Island with only seven thousand legal inhabitants, a few starveling longhorn steer, some horses, and antelope. Heartbroken towns full of tumbleweed and excessively large pickups with tinted windows.
Her room at the Javalina Motor Court smells like a swimming pool, and the hot water isn’t hot, and Vanessa’s stomach is knotted from the taco she ate in town, and there are a half dozen distressing messages on her voice mail, not one of them from her mother, who she still expects will call. There are the frequent messages from the department of Missing Persons. Madison, meanwhile, claims to have found a good office rental in or near to the World Trade Center. Means of Production will be closer to Robert De Niro and the other classy addresses of Tribeca. But still. There’s no cell phone contact out here in Alpine, so there’s no point in trying to return the calls now at the inflated motel rate. If you drive up into the mountains, she was told by Jack from Brewster County Properties, you might be able to make contact with a satellite.
And speaking of space junk, Alpine is a known location for unidentified flying objects. So it is that Vanessa attempts to roust Allison Maiser, intern and location scout. They are going to drive into the hills to watch for UFOs. Jack knows the guy who knows where to go. It’s big business hereabouts. Vanessa saw a storefront that boasted trips for prime viewing. This sounds like something that could be worked into the script. Maybe dowsing, the skill passed down through the generations in
The Diviners,
was first learned from interstellar wayfarers. Maybe there should be UFOs or space aliens at the end of the story.
Allison’s door is beige and is peeling, and the room number has come loose, is dangling upside down, revealing an aqua paint coat underneath, from a cost-conscious period of motel administration when bright colors prevailed.
“Get up!” Vanessa pounds on the door. “I have an idea.”
Allison sticks her nose and homely eyeglasses into a narrow space between the door and its frame. In her hand, a dog-eared paperback that she picked up in Albuquerque, Louis L’Amour.
“Unidentified flying objects! When else do you think you’re going to get the chance!”
“I was reading —”
“Divining is some kind of genetic mutation, and maybe there are UFOs at the beginning and end of the story, and the dowsers are touched by the lights given off by the UFOs, and that’s how they develop the skill, and the mutation is passed down. Should I call Ranjeet? At the end of the story, the last dowser is conscripted into NASA.”
Vanessa explains how she saw the storefront advertising expeditions, and about the tip from Jack the Realtor. Allison Maiser could refuse, of course, because she’s Allison Maiser, but she ultimately gets a coat on, though she’s still wearing her pajama bottoms. It’s back into the Grand Am. Soon they have met up with their guide, Bo Fontaine, a one-time military man who has seemingly spent the last twenty years drinking too much and who has failed in this period of time to perfect the art of shaving without a mirror. For fifty dollars, Bo says, they get to go for a drive and hear his spiel, which is about a woman called Brenda Mae Millerton, who, in these very parts, just north of the town of Alpine, was taken up into a shining disk, probed, and released, during which adventure she learned, above all, that the aliens have been visiting the southwestern United States simply for the reason that the landing surfaces here are amenable to their craft. These aliens also visit the Nunavut Territory, and that’s why the Inuit drew those unusual drawings.
The aliens understand and are attracted to love, Bo continues, in his four-by-four, and therefore, “It’s pretty likely that they have a conception of Jesus. In the beginning was creation, and that means
all
of creation; it doesn’t just mean creation here, it means creation far and wide, creation scattered about in the night skies, creation amongst the galaxies that you see from that telescope . . . what’s that . . . the Hubble telescope. Creation means the creation of galaxies; it means those are real pictures coming from real galaxies, black holes, and such, which means He was there when the aliens were created, as He was always there. He’ll be there when we travel to the stars. Put it another way: The aliens are aspects of creation. The aliens are in His own image, just like we are.
“No need to fear the unidentified flying object because even if the pilots of that craft have three heads or eyes in the palms of their hands or whatnot, they know love, see what I’m saying?” Bo goes on without self-consciousness. His chatter is transitional: from the lights of Alpine to the blackness of the farm road that leads due east. Again and again, in the days of driving, Vanessa has found herself at night in a landscape that has more
nothing
in it than anywhere she’s ever been. Here it is again, producing a feeling both soothing and unsettling. The arresting nothingness of the back roads, jackrabbits hopping off the tarmac before their headlights. It could be mountains out in that darkness ahead and behind; it could be a stately sequence of ridges. It could be nothing.
They don’t know anything about Bo. They don’t know, really, that he’s not a rapist in training or a world-class serial killer. There must be more serial killers in the great state of Texas, because they execute so many of them. Vanessa knows how to kick a guy in the balls hard and she knows how to punch at the Adam’s apple of a man with a sharp jab so as to choke and incapacitate. She’d do either of these things before she’d let a sweaty redneck dishonor her or the intern.
In fact, if she needs to, she resolves that she will maneuver herself into a position where she can inflict bodily harm on Bo, after which she will tell Allison that she has been wanting to kiss her. Because ever since the night when they watched
The Werewolves of Fairfield County
together, the night when Vanessa found herself in bed with Allison the intern, who was definitely a top, there has been no consort between them. It should be, when women love women, that the male tendency toward callousness, toward the recoiling from intimate talk, sharing feelings, never rears its head. Women shouldn’t fuck and run. But once Allison had wrapped her arms around her, and inserted some things in her, and used her tongue on her, and told her that she was now Allison’s possession, until Vanessa was laughing because it was all so funny and so new, laughing until the moment when she started crying, once Allison had done all these things, it was as if she embarked on a campaign of neglecting Vanessa in the office. If not for serving as location scout, which Vanessa offered Allison in hopes that they would then share a hotel room, she would probably be as far away from Vanessa as she could get. It has been a little tense. Nevertheless, Vanessa will tell Allison that something has come over her, some feeling has come over Vanessa out here in the desert, in the limitless night. She will tell Allison that she thinks that this life is made for more than work and pizza and television. She wants Allison to understand that they could address these philosophical issues together. This conversation would involve a fair amount of kissing. And more.
“Is there a reason why we have to be so far out of town?” Allison asks Bo, from the backseat.
“We have to be this far out of town,” Bo shouts, and he seems to like to shout, “because right near here is where Brenda Mae Millerton was when she was abducted by the disk-shaped object I was telling you about. Right along this road is where the
visitors,
because that’s what we like to call them,
visitors,
made themselves known to Brenda Mae.”