American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,114

way it pulls your gaze, even if you’re not looking anywhere near it—that would give any onlooker the impression of profound heaviness. Perhaps you would even begin to wonder if this small cube of metal has resulted in the odd slope in the neighboring yards, which all appear to funnel toward this point, once you really think about it.

Because Dee spends most of his nonwork, non-fucking time getting his pump on with his Bowflex and free weights, he’s the only one in Bolan’s crew who’s in the sort of physical condition to carry this little item. (Maybe. Or maybe they just want to give him the shit jobs, he thinks.) He starts by laying the sheet of tough canvas out next to the cube. Then he pulls a pair of thick gloves out of his pocket and puts them on. These gloves were a little tough to get out here: they’re made for handling blocks of dry ice, because the cube of metal is very cold. He can see condensation forming on it even now. He’s seen others lose layers and layers of skin to the damn things before, so he’s cautious.

Dee squats, sets his legs (because you always lift with your legs, not your back), and starts to tip the little block over. It’s always surprisingly hard: this is not a material that ever wants to move. And the size of the cube is never an indication of the weight: there was one that was hardly bigger than a quarter that was a huge pain in the ass to move.

Dee successfully gets the block tipped over onto the heavy canvas. He looks around at the creek bed and finds the shallowest spot. Then he folds the canvas patch up over the cube, knots it in his hands, and starts dragging it over.

He was right: it is a goddamn headache to get this thing out of the creek. It digs a four-inch trench as Dee hauls it, and it tears the shit out of the creek walls and the grass up top once he finally gets it over. Every time, he waits for an ache to blossom in his loins, because he’s sure this work will give him a hernia someday, but so far he’s been golden, and hopefully today won’t be the day.

It takes him the better part of twenty minutes to move the cube fifty yards. The worst part—which is always the worst part—is when he has to pick it up in a dead squat and place it in the truck bed. He asked Bolan to get him one of those hydraulic lifts—maybe the kind for getting handicapped people on buses, or something—but his boss’s response was not positive, to say the least.

He wipes the sweat from his eyes when he slams the truck bed door shut. He cracks open a bottle of water and pounds about half of it. Then he glances north, to where the mesa is.

He sighs and leans on the side of his truck. The lab is big. It’s always bigger than you think it is. And he’s covered in sweat, and—he checks very quickly—his boots are already dusty again.

He checks the list again. “Not sure, huh?” he says. “This’ll take all day…”

He might as well get started now. Bolan’s boss—that spook in the hat—hates waiting. Dee has never spoken to this man, or even seen him; he’s just heard reports about him. And apparently Dee’s cube-collecting project is one issue the spook has a lot of problems with. Dee is told that in certain communications with Bolan and Zimmerman, the spook describes one cube in particular that he’s been looking for for a long time, the mother of all of these damn things, one a couple feet high and a couple feet wide. Dee goes white at the idea of having to pick up such a thing, and is frankly quite happy that they have not found it yet.

He hopes that’s not what’s waiting for him up on the mesa. He’d rather dig a hundred of the bastards out of a creek bed than deal with that.

It’s a long drive up to the mesa. He enjoys it less than he thought he would. This part of the country always feels very peculiar, like it’s stretched. It’s so peculiar, in fact, that Dee almost swears he saw a red muscle car parked behind a pine somewhere out in the desert. But that’s stupid. Even for Dee, that’s stupid.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The door is made of dull