American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,91

starts the Charger and begins heading back to the motel. And she cannot help but suspect that whatever happened on the mesa has something to do with what she just saw in that house.

And what did she see in that house? She has no idea.

When she was in elementary school in her podunk town in Texas, one of her classmates, Nola Beth, experienced a sharp drop in grades around the second grade. They quickly figured out that Nola’s vision had steadily become worse and worse: she just couldn’t see the blackboard. One day Nola came into school wearing a set of incredibly thick glasses, and though they did no favors to her appearance, Nola was ecstatic: she could see all kinds of things now, things she’d never known were even there. She’d had no idea trees were so pretty, she said. She could see every single leaf waving in the wind now.

For some reason, this terrified young Mona. It wasn’t that Nola’s vision had changed: it was that her vision had changed without her even knowing it. There were all kinds of things happening around her that she’d never known about, that she was blind to. Though her experience of the world had seemed whole and certain to her, in truth it had been marred, filled with blind spots, and she’d had no idea.

That same terror comes burbling up in Mona now. She wonders, What am I blind to? Is there more to the world that I could never see before? And why can I see it now?

But all these thoughts go flying out her head when she hears the bang and the Charger starts weaving out of control.

Mona immediately knows she’s got a flat, which would normally not trouble her, but this time she’s going about fifty along a mountain road with a two-hundred-foot drop on her right. She can feel panic rising up inside her, but she mentally slaps herself and swallows it. She gently pushes down on the brake and turns the wheel so the car puts pressure on the remaining three tires and comes sliding to a stop.

She does an internal check. She is not hurt, and though all the items in the car have moved about a foot, none of them seem damaged. Then she reviews the last ten seconds…

Did she see a sparkle in the road, just before the wheel popped?

She grabs her flashlight and the Glock, steps out of the car, and locks it. She shines the flashlight ahead up the road, sees nothing, then shines it behind.

There’s a sparkle again. She walks to it—it is farther away than she thought—and stoops down.

They’re tire spikes. Homemade ones, welded together out of wood nails. They look a little like big, crude jacks from a ball-and-jacks game.

Mona doesn’t say a word. She just takes out the Glock, makes sure there’s a round in the chamber and the safety’s off, and shines the flashlight around. She sees nothing but red stone cliffs and the odd juniper. But she remembers that it’s not wise to be out in Wink at night.

She turns out the light and stays there, not moving. If someone put down the tire spikes, then it’s likely that person was waiting for someone—possibly her—to come by and hit them. Which means she’s probably not alone out here, so she doesn’t need a light telling anyone where she is.

She silently moves to the side of the road and hunches there, waiting. She waits for nearly a half hour. She debates abandoning the car and heading back to the motel on foot, but she remembers the multiple warnings she’s received about going out at night in Wink, and after seeing what she saw in that house she now thinks those warnings weren’t idle. Eventually she decides that the smartest thing to do is get to the car, get the tire changed, and get the hell out of here.

She creeps back to the car, turns it on in case she needs to jump in it quick, and goes about the business of jacking up the car and putting the doughnut on. If she weren’t so confident in her ability to change a tire quickly she wouldn’t be so cavalier; but since this is a dance she did about a million times in her previous career, she doesn’t panic and her pulse doesn’t rise a single beat, and soon she’s got the last lug nut tightened.

It’s then that she hears the footsteps. Wooden-soled shoes, walking down the road