American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,65

pay her his respects and offer her her old position. But Mona turned it down. The person who had worked that job was gone, just as the happy creature of lazy Sunday mornings was gone. Now she could tolerate nothing but endless highways and miles of ugly country and the constant shuffle of motels, a beery, dreary life of mundane odd jobs and faceless, wordless lovers. And somewhere in the midst of all that miserable wandering she looked at herself in the mirror and saw a glimpse of the trembling, mad woman who had once told her to stay in the yard until the ambulances were gone, just before she lay down in the bathtub and stuck her chin on the barrel of a twelve-gauge.

Mona considered doing the same. Perhaps, she thought, it was a kind of family duty, carrying on in her mother’s footsteps.

Yet almost as the thought crossed her mind she got a letter notifying her that her father, Earl Bright III, had sloughed off his mortal coil to transcend this earth and touch the heavens, and so on and so forth, and waiting in the bleary wreckage of his life was a confusing invitation to come visit this little slice of paradise in the shadow of Mesa Abertura.

Now Mona is here, sifting through the remains of another person’s life, yet this life was over long before she died. How and why this happened, why some germ of madness infected her mother’s brain, remains a mystery to Mona. And though she hates herself for it, she feels nothing but anger at the woman projected on the wall. She hates that Laura Alvarez and the rest of this town has a joy that has always eluded her. She hates that this place is perfect forever, whereas she has only a dream of something that now feels as if it might never have happened, a dream of two people, mother and child, who never truly were.

Mona isn’t really paying attention to the movie anymore; she’s just staring through the morass of flickering blue faces as she imagines her own failings. Yet then her anger goes cold and something in her brain, the tiny cop part that still scrutinizes everything she sees, speaks up and says—Did I just see…?

She sits up, watching the film. The cameraman is following her mother through a dense thicket of people, all of whom are waving to the camera. Mona waits, but she doesn’t see it again, so she has to go through the laborious task of rewinding the film.

She starts it again and sits before the glowing wall, waiting, watching. The cameraman turns a corner and begins wading through the throng, Mona’s mother sometimes stopping to wave him forward. People keep turning to look at the camera and its blinding light as it passes, and then one huge, pale face comes swooping out of the crowd like a wayward moon…

“What the fuck?” breathes Mona.

She rewinds it again, and watches it once more. The empty room seems even bigger than before, and she shivers a bit, feeling cold and vulnerable. For projected on her wall, just very briefly, was the smiling face of none other than Mrs. Benjamin, the very woman who not more than a few days ago claimed she did not remember Mona’s mother at all. She’s standing in the crowd to the side, listening to conversation with a polite smile, and as the camera passes by, her eyes flick over, irritated—Who brought that damn thing?—before her polite smile returns and the camera moves on.

“She lied,” says Mona aloud. “Why did she lie?”

But even more concerning, Mrs. Benjamin does not appear thirty years younger in the film. She looks the exact same age as she did the other day, around seventy. Yet this film has to have been taken more than thirty years ago. Right?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There is only so much nothing a man can take, Norris learns, before he has to do something. It’s only been three weeks since Bolan sent them to do that job on the mountain, yet it feels like an eternity, each hour stretched to a day by Norris’s screaming paranoia. But so far nothing has happened, and Norris has made sure to do nothing as well. This, of course, is part of Bolan’s orders: don’t do a damn thing, he told him. Buy groceries. Watch television. Read, cook, whatever. Just don’t talk to me or anyone else, and don’t step a single fucking toe out of line, you hear?

Norris