American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,111

third column, just barely a hair of white, standing on a hill far beyond that one. The three of them all form a line extending from just before the mesa and partway around the valley, silently blinking their purple lights in unison.

“Like a fence,” says Mona. She puts down her binoculars and looks at the column closest to her. “Like an electric fence, or a wall.”

This begs the question: what is it meant to be fencing out?

She turns this question over, and looks back down the slopes to the small green valley below. She can see a few roofs from here, and the black, charred memorial tree in the park.

Maybe the columns aren’t meant to fence anything out. Maybe they’re meant to fence something in.

Mona stands and starts walking back toward the mesa. Things no longer feel quite so distorted to her. Though the desert is still a striking place, it is not so surreal or disorienting. She wonders if the white columns project more than just an invisible barrier. Perhaps they are regulating something, like a water filter in an aquarium, and though she can’t see the effects of that regulation she can sense it somewhere in the back of her head.

She is almost sure of one thing, though: whoever put the columns there didn’t do it with people in mind. Otherwise she’s positive she wouldn’t have been able to get through. They must be meant for something else.

Maybe there’s a reason people never leave or come to Wink, she thinks. This troubles her deeply. Because she did not experience any barrier when she first entered this valley. That means that either there are no columns and no barrier on the other side—which she thinks unlikely—or she was allowed in. As if she’d been expected.

She absently glances up as she considers this disturbing thought, but stops dead in her tracks. She stares at the sky, then shields her eyes with her hand to better see.

“No way,” she says. “No fucking way.”

Five minutes ago, the pale face of the morning moon was its usual dusky pink. That was on the other side of the white columns, she remembers, inside whatever field it is those machines are putting out.

On this side, sure, the moon is still in the same place, hanging just above the tip of the mesa. But it’s returned to its normal white color. There’s not a trace of pink in it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Dee Johannes may not know what the hell he is doing, but he is determined to look good while doing it. As he sets out on his curious errand, which is the first of two for today, he’s sporting his freshly-ironed Larry Mahan paisley pearl-snap shirt, a pair of extra-starched Wrangler retro jeans that he’s got hiked up real high so they don’t sag around his ass, and of course his ostrich-skin Luccheses, which he buffed and polished to a fine shine last night. He’s been polishing them every night since he came to work at the Roadhouse, because goddamn is there a lot of dust out here in the desert, and you can’t even walk to your car without your boots turning a pale gray. He’s not sure how all the cowboys stay so good-looking in the movies when the country is so openly hostile to sartorial maintenance. There isn’t even a dry cleaner for miles.

Of course, these items are just accessories to the real centerpieces of his look: the nickel-plated Desert Eagle riding in the front of his belt, and the Mossberg 4x4 bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. The Eagle he got off of a man he and Zimmerman pummeled half to death in the parking lot of the Roadhouse last winter; the Mossberg was a meticulously researched online purchase that he had to get shipped to a post office one town over for him to pick up. He has, of course, polished both of these before beginning on this outing, and he’s very pleased with how they gleam in the dawn sun.

Though Dee has a lot of possessions, many of them deeply treasured—his HDTV, his Bowflex, and his Ford F-150 King Ranch pickup, for example—none of them is closer to his heart than the Mossberg. For the Mossberg, in Dee’s mind, is the definitive, undeniable emblem of manhood, his holy token of vigor and virility; he is convinced that merely holding the Mossberg bestows upon him a sort of animal, savage charisma, like just touching its walnut stock (with matte blue