A feeling of lightheadedness came over him as he drove by what local kids called (with knowing sniggers) the Road to the Hole, but it passed when he kicked the AC up a notch. Although he had protested, he was actually glad to be out of the house. That sense of being watched had faded away. He turned on the radio, tuned to Outlaw Country, got Waylon Jennings (the best!), and began to sing along.
Chicken dinners from Highway Heaven was maybe not such a bad idea. He could have a whole order of onion rings to himself, eating them on the way home while they were still hot and greasy.
8
Jack waited in his room at the Indian Motel, peering out between the drawn drapes, until he saw a van with a handicap plate pulling out onto the road. That had to be the old bag’s ride. A blue SUV followed it, undoubtedly full of the meddlers down from Flint City.
When they were out of sight, Jack went up to the café, where he ate a meal and then inspected the items for sale. There was no aloe cream, and no sunblock, either, so he bought two bottles of water and a couple of outrageously overpriced bandannas. They wouldn’t be much protection from the hot Texas sun, but better than nothing. He got in his truck and drove southwest, in the direction the meddlers had gone, until he came to the billboard and the road leading to the Marysville Hole. Here he turned in.
About four miles up, he came to a weather-worn little cabin standing in the middle of the road. It must have been a ticket booth when the Hole was a going concern, he supposed. The paint, once bright red, was now the faded pink of blood diluted in water. On the front was a sign reading ATTRACTION CLOSED, TURN BACK HERE. The road had been chained off beyond the ticket booth. Jack went around the chain, jouncing along the dirt hardpan, crunching tumbleweeds, swerving around sagebrush. The truck took a final bounce and then he was back on the road . . . if you could call it that. On this side of the chain it was your basic mess of weed-choked potholes and washouts that had never been filled in. His Ram—high-sprung and equipped with four-wheel drive—took the washouts easily, spitting dirt and stones from beneath its oversized tires.
Two slow miles and ten minutes later, he came to an acre or so of empty parking lot, the yellow lines of the spaces faded to ghosts, the asphalt cracked and heaved into plates. To the left, backed up against a steep brush-covered hill, was an abandoned gift shop with a fallen sign he had to read upside down: SOUVENIRS AND AUTHENTIC INDIAN CRAFTS. Straight ahead was the ruin of a wide cement walk leading to an opening in the hill. Well, once upon a time it had been an opening; now it was boarded over and plastered with signs reading KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and COUNTY SHERIFF PATROLS THIS AREA.
Right, Jack thought. They maybe take a swing-through once every February 29th.
Another crumbling road led away from the parking lot, past the gift shop. It went up one side of a slope and down the other. It took him first to a bunch of decrepit tourist cabins (also boarded up) and then on to some kind of service shed, where company vehicles and equipment had probably once been stored. There were more KEEP OUT signs on this, plus a cheery one that read WATCH FOR RATTLESNAKES.
Jack parked his truck in the scant shade of this building. Before getting out, he tied one of the bandannas over his head (giving him a weird resemblance to the man Ralph had seen at the courthouse on the day Terry Maitland was shot). The other he fluffed around his neck to keep that fucking burn from getting worse. He keyed open the lockbox in the truckbed and reverently lifted out the gun case that contained his pride and joy: a Winchester .300 bolt-action, the same gun Chris Kyle had used to shoot all those ragheads (Jack had seen American Sniper eight times). With the Leupold VX-1 riflescope, he could hit a target at two thousand yards. Well, four out of six tries on a good day, and with no wind, and he didn’t expect to be shooting at anywhere near that distance when the time came. If it came.
He spotted a few forgotten tools lying in the weeds, and appropriated a rusty pitchfork in case of rattlers. Behind the building, a path led up the back of the hill in which the entrance to the Hole was located. This side was rockier, not really a hill at all but an eroded bluff. There were a few beercans along the way, and several rocks had been tagged with things like SPANKY 11 and DOODAD WAS HERE.
Halfway up, another path split off, apparently circling back to the defunct gift shop and the parking lot. Here was a weather-worn, bullet-pocked wooden sign showing an Indian chief in full headdress. Below him was an arrow, the accompanying message so faded it was barely legible: BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. More recently, some wit had drawn a Magic Marker word balloon coming from the big chief’s mouth. It read CAROLYN ALLEN SUCKS MY REDSKIN COCK.
This path was broader, but Jack had not come here to admire Native American art, so he continued upward. The climb was not particularly dangerous, but Jack’s exercise over the last few years had mostly consisted of bending his elbow in various bars. By the time he was three-quarters of the way up, he was short of breath. His shirt and both bandannas were dark with sweat. He set the gun case and pitchfork down, then bent and gripped his knees until the dark specks dancing in front of his eyes disappeared and his heart rate returned to something like normal. He had come here to avoid a terrible death from the sort of ravenous, skin-eating cancer that had taken his mother. Dying of a myocardial infarction while trying to do that would be a bitter joke.
He started to straighten up, then paused, squinting. In the shade beneath an overhanging ledge, safe from the worst of the elements, there was more graffiti. But if these had been left by kids, they were long dead, and for many hundreds of years. One showed stick men with stick spears surrounding what might have been an antelope—something with horns, anyway. In another, stick men were standing in front of what looked like a tepee. In a third—almost too faded to make out—a stick man was standing over the prone body of another stick man, his spear raised in triumph.
Pictographs, Jack thought, and not even the best ones, according to the big chief back there. Kindergarten kids could do better, but they’ll be here long after I’m gone. Especially if the cancer gets me.
The idea made him angry. He picked up a chunk of sharp rock and hammered at the pictographs until they were obliterated.
There, he thought. There, you dead fuckers. You’re gone and I win.
It occurred to him that he might be going crazy . . . or had already gone. He pushed that away and resumed his climb. When he reached the top of the bluff, he found he had a fine view of the parking lot, the gift shop, and the boarded-up entrance to the Marysville Hole. His visitor with the tats on his fingers wasn’t sure the meddlers would come here, but if they did, Jack was to handle them. Which he could do with the Winchester, he had no doubt of that. If they didn’t come—if they just returned to Flint City after talking to the man they’d come to talk to—Jack’s work would be done. Either way, the visitor assured him, Jack would be as good as new. No cancer.
What if he’s lying? What if he can give it, but not take it away? Or what if it’s not really there at all? What if he’s not there? What if you’re just crazy?
These thoughts he also pushed away. He opened the gun case, took out the Winchester, and mounted the sight. It put the parking lot and the entrance to the cave right in front of him. If they came, they would be as big as the ticket booth he’d gone around.