American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,1

in the halls? Pale faces peeping out the windows? And some of the front lights are on, ones Norris could have sworn were dark just a second ago. He tears his eyes away, puts the car in first, and guns it.

They rip through the neighborhood lanes until they reach the main roads. The two men remove their ski masks. Zimmerman is older and bald with a graying beard, his cheeks bulging with the promise of pendulous jowls in later life. Out of the three of them he’s by far the most experienced in this kind of thing, so it’s extra unnerving to see how obviously terrified he is. The other, Dee, is an athletic young man with blond, perfectly parted hair, the sort of hair found only in Boy Scout advertisements. Dee either doesn’t understand what’s going on or is so dazed by everything that he can hardly shut his mouth.

“Jesus,” says Zimmerman. “Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“What happened?” asks Norris again. “Where’s Mitchell? Is he all right?”

“No. No, Mitchell isn’t all right.”

“Well, what happened?”

There is a long silence. Then Dee says, “He fell.”

“He what? He fell? Fell into what?”

The two are quiet again. Zimmerman says, “There was a room. And… it just seemed to keep going. And Mitchell fell in.”

“And when he fell,” says Dee, “he just didn’t stop… he just kept falling into the room…”

“What do you mean?” asks Norris.

“What makes you think we understand what we saw in there?” asks Zimmerman angrily.

Norris turns back to the road, abashed. He points the car north toward the dark mesa that hangs over the town. Sometimes there is a thud or a shout from the trunk behind them. They all try to ignore it.

“He knew we were coming,” says Dee.

“Shut up,” says Zimmerman.

“That’s why he’d prepared those rooms for us,” says Dee. “He knew. Bolan said it’d be a surprise. How could he have known?”

“Shut up!”

“Why?” asks Dee.

“Because I’m willing to bet that that thing in the trunk can hear us!”

“So?”

“So what if this doesn’t go right? What if he gets away? You just gave him one name. What more do you want to give him?”

There is a heavy silence. Norris asks, “How about some music?”

“Good idea,” says Zimmerman.

Norris hits the tuner. Immediately Buddy Holly begins crooning “That’ll Be The Day” from the car’s blown-out speakers, and they all fall silent.

As they climb the mountain road they leave the town behind. The grid of streetlights shrinks until it is a spiderweb beaded with morning dew, stretched across the feet of the mesa. The town sits in the center of a dark fan of vegetation running down the mountain slopes, fed by the little river that winds through the center of the city. It is the only dependable source of water for miles around the mesa, a rarity in this part of New Mexico.

A painted sign swims up out of the darkness ahead, marking the northern border of the town. It has a row of white lights at the bottom, making it glow in the night. It shows a smiling man and woman sitting on a picnic blanket. They are a wholesome, white-bread sort, he square-jawed and squinty, she pale and delicate with cherry-red lips. They are looking out on a marvelous vista of crimson mesas at sunset, and at the top of one mesa is a very small bronze-colored antenna, one that would obviously be much larger if you were close. The clouds in the pink skies seem to swirl around the antenna, and there is something beyond the antenna and the clouds, something the man and the woman are meant to be looking at, but the two rightmost panels of the sign have been torn off, leaving raw wood exposed where there should be some inspiring vision. Yet some vandal has tried to complete the picture with a bit of chalk, though what the vandal has drawn is difficult to determine: it is an outline of a figure standing on the mountains, or where the mountains would be, a giant, titan-size body that would fill up the sky. The figure is generally human but somewhat deformed: its back is too hunched, and its arms are too ill-defined, though that may be an indication of the limits of the artist.

At the bottom of the sign is a line of white words: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING WINK—BUT WHY?

Why indeed, wonders Norris. How he wishes it were not so.

Up in the high mountains the air is unusually thin. It makes the night sky