Desert Places Read online

  “How long will I—”

  “No more questions regarding your quasi-captivity. I won’t tell you when or where you are.”

  “What will you tell me?”

  “You’re here to get an education.” He paused. “If you only knew. The substance of your learning will become manifest, so be patient.”

  “Can I please have my things?”

  He sighed, the first sign of frustration boiling under his breath. “We’ll talk about that later.” Then his voice softened, shedding its edge. “Pretend you’re an infant, Andrew. A tiny, helpless infant. Right now, in your room, you’re in the womb. You don’t understand how to use your senses, how to think, how to reason. Rely on me for everything. I’m going to teach you how to see the world again. I’ll feed your mind first. Fatten it up on the most brilliant thinkers in human history.” A white hand pushed through the bubble wrap and dropped a book onto the floor.

  “Your first meal,” he said as I lifted a hardback of The Prince. “Machiavelli. The man’s a genius. Undisputedly. Are you familiar with Hannibal, the general from Carthage who ransacked Rome? Marched his men across the Alps with an army of war elephants.”

  “I know who he was.”

  “Well, he marched his army all over the Mediterranean coast and Eastern Europe, but what made Hannibal’s army singular was that there was no dissension among his soldiers. Different nationalities, beliefs, languages, and no dissension in the ranks. You know what made that peace possible?” he asked. “In the words of Machiavelli, Hannibal’s ‘inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valor, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.’” He was silent for a moment, and I could hear only the dry, scorching wind pushing against the glass panes and my captor’s escalated breathing. “‘Inhuman cruelty,’” he repeated. “That gives me chills.” His voice had turned passionate, as though he were speaking to his lover. “So,” he said, “start reading that tonight, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, I’m starving.”

  “Good. I’m gonna make dinner now, so why don’t you start on that book. I hope broiled shrimp on angel-hair pasta sounds good to you.” He ripped the bubble wrap away and shoved the metal panel back over the opening. My head dropped in relief that he was gone, and I sat motionless in my white bathrobe, staring vacantly into the floor.

  A small lamp, screwed into the wall, exuded dim, barely sufficient light onto the pages. Because he’d yet to give me the duffel bag, I didn’t have the aid of my glasses, so my eyes were failing me.

  I dropped The Prince onto the floor, having finished half of it. I hoped that would be enough for him. When I reached up and turned off the lamp, the placid light of a full moon flooded in between the bars, soft and soothing. I would’ve dreaded to spend my first conscious night in the perfect darkness of a new moon.

  The room had grown unbearable from a day’s accumulation of sunlight, and though the heat had dissipated from the desert with the onslaught of night, it had lingered in my room. So I’d opened the window when the sun set, and now the dry chill of the desert night infiltrated the room, forcing me to burrow under the fleece blankets.

  Closing my eyes, I listened. Through the open window, owls screeched and coyotes or wild dogs yapped at the moon, though they seemed a great distance away. Since dinner, I hadn’t heard a peep from him. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing.

  For the last hour, jazz music had filled the cabin. It came quietly at first, stealing in like a whisper, so that I heard only the guttural rumblings of a bass. The volume rose, and the ride cymbal pattern and the offbeat swish of a closing hi-hat pulsed into the room. When the piano and trumpet and saxes climaxed through the wall, I suddenly recognized the song, and it took me back twenty years, to a different time, a different life. It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing “All Blues,” a moody, blues form piece in 6⁄8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.

  An acute scream soared above the music. I sat up and listened. Another scream ruptured the night. Clutching the iron bars, I turned my eyes on the desert, but saw nothing save miles of moonlit sagebrush. Again, a scream—a woman’s, closer than before.

  Fifty feet away, a figure stumbled through the desert, choking for breath. When it was halfway past the window frame, a second, larger figure entered on the left side. It lunged upon the smaller figure and drove it into the ground at the foot of a greasewood shrub.

  I heard a female voice, crying, shriller screams, pleadings, but the words were indecipherable when they reached my ears. The larger figure kicked at the ground. Then it knelt down, thrusting.

  More screams, the loudest, most piercing yet. Silence.

  Now only the large figure stood, staring at the ground. In a measured pace, it walked back in the direction from which it had come, pulling by long black hair what it had chased through the desert. I heard the footsteps and what it dragged sliding through the dirt, the woman’s legs still twitching.

  Suddenly, it turned and looked in my direction. Moonlight, bluish and surreal, streamed across the stranger’s face.

  I froze. My brother, Orson, stood smiling on the desert.

  5

  A stiff purple dawn unfolded on the desert, ending a terrible, sleepless night. I realized from here on out, whenever I closed my eyes, I would always see a man on a moonlit desert, dragging a woman through the dirt by her hair.

  At the approach of footsteps, I sat up in bed. A dead bolt turned and the door swung open, revealing a man of my proportions: same thin, muscular build, same stark blue eyes. Similar but not identical, his face looked like the ideal of mine, more handsome in its superior proportionality. He stood grinning in the doorway, and in contrast to my unkempt graying hair, his crew cut shone a perfect brown. In addition to black snakeskin boots and faded blue jeans, he wore a bloody white T-shirt with sweat marks extending down from the armpits. I wondered fleetingly why he perspired so profusely before the sun had even risen. His arms were stronger than mine, and as he leaned against the door frame, he took an aggressive bite out of a large burgundy apple.

  I couldn’t speak. It was like seeing not the ghost of a loved one, but the demon. Tears burned in my eyes. This is not real. This cannot be my brother, this terrible man.

  “I have missed you so much,” Orson said, still hovering in the doorway. I could only stare back into his blue eyes.

  Orson had disappeared from Appalachian State University our junior year, my last image that of him standing in the doorway of our dorm room.

  “You won’t see me for a while,” he had said. And I hadn’t, from that day to this. The police had given up. He’d just vanished. My mother and I had hired detectives: nothing. We feared he was dead.

  Now he apologized. “I wouldn’t have had you see that last night. The consequence of using old rope, I guess.” I noticed fresh scratch marks on his neck and face. Specks of glitter glinted on his cheeks, and I wondered if they’d come off the woman’s fingernails when she struggled. “You want breakfast?” he asked. “Coffee’s brewing.”

  I shuddered, repulsed. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I wanted to keep you in here for several days before bringing you out and revealing myself, but after last night …well, there’s really no use is there?”

  Sweat slid down my sides.

  As he bit again into the apple, Orson began to walk up a short hallway. “Come on,” he said.

  I climbed down off the bed and followed him out of my room, heading toward the front of the cabin. My legs felt unstable, like they might sink right down into a puddle on the floor.

  “Have a seat,” he said, pointing to a black leather sofa pushed against the left-hand wall. As I walked into the living room, I glanced behind me. At the terminus of a narrow hallway, two rooms, side by side, constructed the backbone of the cabin, mine on the left, a door
without a dead bolt or a centered metal panel on the right. A small Monet of a skiff gliding under a stone bridge hung from a log between the two doors.

  The walls of the living room were covered, floor to ceiling, with books. They stood on rustic shelves that protruded from the logs, and I was amazed at the diversity of the titles. I recognized, on the end of one shelf, the colorful jackets of the five books I’d written.

  My brother walked to the other side of the room, which became a tiny kitchen. A record player sat on a stool by the front door, a three-foot stack of records beside it. Orson looked at me and, smiling, set the needle on a record. “Freddie Freeloader” sprang out from two large speakers, and I eased down on the sofa.

  As the song progressed, Orson took a seat on the other end of the couch. The way he stared unnerved me. I wanted my glasses.

  “Do you think I could have my things now?”

  “Oh, you mean this?” Nonchalantly, he pulled my .357 out of his jeans pocket. “I did tell you to bring the Smith and Wesson, didn’t I?” His voice filled with angry sarcasm as his cold eyes dilated and burned through me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shifting uncomfortably on the couch, mouth running dry. “Wouldn’t you have done the same? I mean, I didn’t know—”

  “Trying to put me in your shoes won’t work.” He walked to the record player and lifted the needle. The cabin now in absolute silence, he moved to the center of the living room.

  “You fucked up, Andy. I told you just bring clothes and toiletries, and you brought a gun and a box of bullets.” He spoke casually, as though we lounged on a back porch, smoking cigars.

  “When you don’t follow my instructions, that hurts both of us, and the only thing I can think of to do is show you that not following them isn’t in your best interest.” He opened the cylinder of the .357 and showed me five empty chambers. “You fucked up once, so we’ll load one bullet.” He took a round from his pocket and slipped it into a chamber.

  I grew sick with fear. “Orson, you can’t.”

  “Andy-Andy-Andy. You never tell a man with a loaded weapon what to do.” He spun the cylinder, flipped it back into the gun, and cocked the hammer. “Let me explain how this punishes me also, because I don’t want you to think I’m doing this just for kicks.

  “I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you out here, and if your luck suddenly runs out and the twenty percent chance of this bullet being in the hot chamber bites your ass, I’ve done a lot of work for nothing. But I’m willing to take that chance to teach you a lesson about following my instructions.”

  When he pointed the gun at my chest, I uselessly held out my hands. He squeezed the trigger—click—and took a bite of his apple. I could hardly breathe, and as I buried my face in my hands, Orson put the record back on. The music started again, and he snapped his fingers to the offbeat, smiling warmly at me as he returned to the couch. When he’d removed the round from the chamber, he set the gun on the floor and plopped back down beside me. A wave of nausea watered my mouth, and I thought I might be sick.

  Holy fucking shit, he’s out of his goddamned mind. I’m going to die. I’m alone in a desert with a psychopath who is my brother. My fucking brother.

  “Andy, you’re free to roam the house now, and the desert. The shed outside is off-limits, and I’m gonna lock your door every night when you go to bed. You can quit pissing in the bowl. Shower at the well by the outhouse. It’s cold, but you’ll get used to it. The electricity comes from a new generator out back, but I’ve been too busy to put in plumbing.”

  “May I use the outhouse now?” I asked, scarcely able to muster my voice.

  “Sure. Always let me know when you leave. I don’t ever want to have to come find you.”

  Still shaking, I crossed the room and opened the door to sunlight ripening upon the russet wilderness. I shivered, girding the white bathrobe I’d worn for the last two days more snugly around my waist. When I reached back to shut the door, Orson stood in the threshold.

  “I have missed you,” he said.

  I looked at him, and for a second he was vulnerable, like the brother I’d loved when we were young. His eyes pleaded for something, but I was in no condition to consider what they wanted.

  “Who was she?” I asked.

  He knew damn well who I meant, but he said nothing. We just stared at each other, a connection kindling that had lain dormant almost to its death. There remained combustible matter between us. I wasn’t going to wait for him to close the door, so I turned away to walk down into the chilled dirt.

  “Andy,” he said, and I stopped on the steps, but I didn’t look back. “Just a waitress.”

  6

  I stood on the rickety front porch, in the shadow of a tin roof supported by rotten four-by-fours. A strong, steady breeze blew in from the desert, carrying the sweet, piquant smell of sagebrush, scorched earth, and flowers unknown to me.

  Four wobbly rocking chairs, two on either side of the door, swayed imperceptibly, but I sat down on the steps and shoved my bare feet into shaded dirt, still cool where it escaped the sun. My eyes wandered along the northern horizon, a mass of foothills and mountains. At least thirty miles away, there was no texture to their slopes. Only hunter green at the lower elevations, denoting evergreen forests, then shattered gray rock, then cloudlike glacier fields that would never melt.

  Sixty yards off the left side of the porch stood a large shed. It looked hastily built and new, its tin roof and smooth boards of yellow pine glowing in the sinking sun. A chain was wrapped snakelike around the latch that connected the double doors. Tire tracks led straight to the shed.

  A mile or so beyond, the desert rose several hundred feet to a ridge of rusty bluffs that extended south, sloping gently back to the desert floor. Scraggy junipers lined the top, their jagged silhouettes blackening against the sky.

  Since dawn, I’d been trying to read Machiavelli in my room. Hot and unable to concentrate on anything except how I might escape, I’d come outside looking for relief in a breeze. But even in the wind, sweat stung my eyes, moistening my skin and hair. Inside, I heard another jazz record—such an eerie sound track to this empty desert, the music so full, effecting thoughts of crowded New York City clubs and people crammed into compact spaces. Normally, I despise crowds and proximity, but now the claustrophobic confines of a raucous nightclub seemed comforting.

  I sat on the steps for the better part of an hour, watching the desert turn scarlet beneath the sun. My mind blanked, and I became so engrossed in the perpetuation of mindlessness that I started when the front door squeaked open behind me. Orson’s boots clunked hollowly against the wood.

  “Will you be hungry soon?” he asked. The rumble of his scratchy voice caused my stomach to flutter. I couldn’t accept that we were together again. His presence still horrified me.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I’d grill a couple of steaks,” he said, and I could tell he was smiling, hoping I’d be impressed. I wondered if he were trying to make up for nearly killing me. As children, whenever we fought, he’d always try to win me back with gifts, flattery, or, as in this case, food. “You want a drink?”

  God yes.

  I turned around and looked up at him. “If you’ve got it, Jack Daniel’s would be nice.”

  He walked back inside and returned with an unopened fifth of that blessed Tennessee whiskey. It was the best moment of my day, like a small piece of home, and my heart leapt. Cracking the black seal, I took a long swill, closing my eyes as the oaken fire burned down my throat. In that second, as the whiskey singed my empty stomach, I could’ve been on my deck, alone, getting shit-faced in the glory of a Carolina evening.

  I offered the bottle to Orson, but he declined. He walked around the corner of the cabin and dragged a grill back with him. After lighting the charcoal, he walked inside and returned carrying a plate with two ridiculously thick red filets mignons, salted and peppered. As he stepped past me, he held the plate down and said, “Pour a little
of that whiskey on the meat.”

  I drenched them in sour mash, and Orson tossed the tenderloin rounds on the grill, where they flamed for a couple of seconds. He came and sat beside me, and as the fuzziness of the whiskey set in, we listened to the steaks sizzle and watched the sunset redden, like old friends.

  When the steaks were cooked, we took our plates onto the front porch, where a flimsy table stood on one side. Orson lit two candles with a silver Zippo, and we consumed our dinner in silence. I couldn’t help thinking as I sat across from him, You aren’t that monster I saw on the desert last night. That is how I sit here without trembling or weeping, because somehow I know that cannot be you. You are just Orson. My brother. My blue-eyed twin. I see you as a boy, a sweet, innocuous boy. Not that thing on the desert. Not that demon.

  As the last shallow sunbeams retreated below the purple horizon, an ominous feeling took hold of me. The presence of light had afforded me a sense of control, but now, in darkness, I felt defenseless again. For this reason, I hadn’t touched the whiskey after my initial buzz, fearing inebriation could be dangerous here. The silence at the table unnerved me, too. We’d been sitting for twenty minutes without a word, but I wasn’t going to speak. What would I say to him?

  Orson had been staring into his plate, but now his eyes fixed on me. He cleared his throat.

  “Andy,” he said. “You remember Mr. Hamby?”

  I couldn’t suppress it. A smile found my lips for the first time in days.

  “Want me to tell it like you never heard it before?” Orson asked.

  When I nodded, he leaned forward in his chair, blithe, wide-eyed, a born storyteller.

  “When we were kids, we’d go several times a year up into the countryside north of Winston-Salem to stay with Grandmom. Granddad was dead, and she liked the company. So how old were we when this happened? Nine maybe? We’ll say nine so…”

  You feel like Orson, and I know, I hope it won’t last, but Christ, you feel like my brother in this moment.