Kane

KANE

Michael Prescott

writing as Douglas Borton

www.michaelprescott.net

Table of Contents

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

From the author ...

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Books by Michael Prescott

For Jeanine Basinger and John Frazer

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

—Henry Brooks Adams

1

Where the desert met the sky, there was a man.

A tall man dressed in black, a distant figure shimmering like a mirage behind a tremulous curtain of heat. He was out there alone, and he was walking slowly, deliberately, crossing the bleak stretches of gray shale and alkaline sand, coming toward the town.

At first, he’d been no more than a smudge on the landscape, a wavering shadow amid the ghost flowers and the skeletonweed, like the shadow of a hawk cast by the westering sun; but there had been no hawk. There had been only the shadow, creeping over the pinkish, blistered desert soil that looked so much like sunburnt, peeling skin, moving closer, ever closer, until at last it resolved itself into a human form, tall and dark, smoky with distance, but unmistakable now.

At the corner of his service station, Bill Needham leaned against the Coke machine and watched.

Bill Needham had inherited two things from his father—a long, angular, oddly pinched face and the service station. Of the two, only the latter had proved to be of any real value; and as the years had slipped by and the town had emptied out, there had been fewer tanks to be filled, less work to do, until finally things had reached the point where, on a good day, Bill was lucky to see three cars in his place.

Still, he showed up for work every morning at nine sharp and hung around till eight at night—seven thirty in the summertime—just like in the old days. The old days.

God, he hated to think of it that way. A man shouldn’t be nostalgic at thirty-two; it wasn’t natural. Shouldn’t be idle, either, but he couldn’t help that part of it. He would sit in his office all day, listening to the whir of the air conditioner in the window, riffling through the pages of a magazine or a paperback book while the daytime programs flickered on his black-and-white portable. Whenever a car did pull in, he attended to it with anxious concern, checking under the hood, squeegeeing the windshield, wiping the tires with a damp cloth, and making conversation to pass the time.

What little money he made was mostly in repair jobs, which he did from time to time when his services were needed, everything from tune-ups to body work. His customers were all local people, the folks he’d known for years, the handful of diehards who hadn’t drifted away like tumbleweeds over the horizon.

He got no other business. No passersby, no travelers, no truckers. No outsiders ever passed through this town, not anymore. Nobody ever came here.

But it looked like somebody was coming now.

Bill Needham squinted, shading his eyes against the sun that had set the western sky aflame. He’d first caught sight of the man about twenty minutes ago, at seven o’clock, when he came out to get a soda from the Coke machine. The machine was the old-fashioned kind that coughed up bottles, not cans. Bill liked that; he appreciated the coldness of a bottle’s frosted glass against his hand. He stood there sipping his Coke and looking at nothing, and that was when he saw what he had thought was a shadow, but was not. He’d been watching ever since, studying the man’s progress. Once, when he’d finished the soda, he turned away briefly to deposit the bottle in a garbage pail full of empties; when he turned back, he half-expected to find that the man had vanished like the mirage he was; but he was still there.

And getting closer, closer by the minute. But not hurrying. No, just sort of ambling along, nice and easy, taking his sweet time about it. Strolling, you might say. Strolling through the southern Mojave, where the mercury on this mid-July day brushed a hundred fifteen, where the air was so dry it cut your skin like a fine spray of glass and your body would cry out in an agony of thirst after a half hour or so. The man didn’t seem to mind. Didn’t even seem to notice.

Things were quiet in the service station, as they nearly always were nowadays. There was no sound save a low, rhythmic slapping, the sound of Johnny playing paddleball. Johnny was Todd Hanson’s boy, grown to sixteen years, tall, gangly, and slack-jawed, all knees and elbows; with school out for the summer, he’d taken to hanging around at the gas station, for no reason Bill could guess. That paddleball game was his sole diversion. Bill had his back to the boy at the moment, but he could picture Johnny flicking his wrist, staring with hypnotized fascination at the small rubber ball as it struck the paddle again and again. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

He blinked a bead of sweat out of his eye and felt it run down his cheek, dancing briefly like a drop of water on a hot griddle, evaporating in the next instant, a victim of the heat and the dryness that sucked the moisture right out of your skin.

The man was perhaps a mile from town. He was tall and lean, long-boned and thin-shouldered, a skeleton man. He wore a hat of some kind, wide-brimmed, battered, and dark, throwing his face into shadow. A rectangular hump loomed on his shoulders; it looked like a backpack. A long black coat fell from his shoulders to well below the knees, enfolding him like bat wings. Black boots tramped the sand in a slow, steady march.

Johnny, Bill said, his voice low. The boy, intent on the game, didn’t hear. Hey, Johnny. He raised his voice a fraction. Come over here, will you.

He heard Johnny give the ball one more bounce. Then there was a low crunching of footfalls, which stopped at his side. Bill kept his eyes on the man.

See that? he asked quietly.

There was no answer, but he knew that the boy had seen what he saw, that he was staring at it and was held by it, just as he himself was.

The Coke machine rattled briefly, then fell silent.

After a long moment Johnny cleared his throat. Car broke down, he said matter-of-factly.

Bill had already considered that possibility. He shook his head. No road out there. He jerked his thumb toward the other end of town. Highway’s that direction.

He heard the rubber ball bounce at the end of its elastic band. Thwack. Thwack.

Got lost, Johnny said.

Don’t look lost. Don’t even look tired.

He’s prospecting something. Digging up Indian bones.

Not exactly dressed for it.

Well, then ... what?

I don’t know.

Silence.

Bill kept watching the man. He was almost afraid to look away. Afraid that if he did, even for a split second, the man might vanish like a mirage.

The man walked on, moving inexorably closer. Now he was perhaps three-quarters of a mile away. Heat rippled over him like waves of distortion in a sheet of glass.

So, Johnny said, you think we ought to go pick him up?

Bill took a moment to think it over. And as he did, he felt something, something that started as a coldness in his gut, then moved through him, shivering up his spine, shimmying down his legs, and set his skin tingling with gooseflesh. For the first time since he’d thrown out the Coke bottle, he let his eyes wander from the vision in the desert. Suddenly he didn’t mind if that man vanished like smoke.

His gaze dropped to his hands, hanging at his sides. They were shaking.

He drew a long, deep breath, feeling the brittle air scrape his throat. Slowly he raised his eyes again. He looked toward the horizon.

The man was still there. He hadn’t winked out like a dream. He was just walking along, same as before, in that same slow, regular, oddly stiff-legged gait. Nearer now. Closing in.

So he was real, then. No apparition, no fancy born of heat waves and dust devils. Only a man. Well, there was no reason to be afraid of a man.

But all of a sudden, Bill knew he was afraid. Because when he looked at that man out there alone in the desert, that man all dressed in black, he saw something more than a man. He saw death.

No, Bill Needham said softly. No, I don’t think we should pick him up.

***

Tuskett, California, was a little town dying by the side of an untraveled road. It sprawled under a mesh of high-tension wires, a checkerboard of closed shops and homes with shuttered windows, of mesquite bushes crawling over trailers streaked with rust-colored dust, of peeling paint and skin, of the mingled smells of sweat and kerosene. A small, forgotten, ugly town. Sixty miles to the west lay San Bernardino; twenty miles to the east was the Arizona border. Where Tuskett was, there was nothing.

The road, a weary strip of cracked macadam sprouting weeds in the double yellow, hadn’t always been empty of traffic. Once it had carried smiling young families in Ford station wagons, setting out to see America with their backseats full of squealing laughter and Mickey Mouse ears; and truckers tooling along in their big diesel rigs with Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams singing songs of the workingman on the AM radio; and restless men with cigarettes in their mouths and the unfamiliar feel of civilian clothes against their skin, moving west to find jobs in Southern California, where everything was possible. Each day some of them stopped off in Tuskett for a bite to eat or a road map or a cup of java. A few stayed forever. Most moved on. They kept the town alive, even thriving, in those days when it seemed that the line of cars stretching to the horizon would never end.

But all that was long ago, ancient history, lost to memory ever since the interstates. Now traffic flowed along concrete arteries called Route 10 and Route 40 and Route 15, soulless things, and the back roads were forgotten, and the little town of Tuskett was left to bake in the broiling sun, clinging to its patch of dirt like a hardy desert plant, withering slowly.

Viewed from a height, Tuskett was a perfect square, divided from north to south by a single thoroughfare, Joshua Street, named after the row of Joshua trees that lined its western side. The surviving business establishments were strung between the corpses of dead stores with boarded-up windows and untended lawns gone to seed. Here you could find Charlie Grain’s coffee shop and Dick Lewis’ barbershop and the police department, where Lew Hannah worked part-time as police chief, when he wasn’t minding his grocery store.

Four side streets, unimaginatively numbered First, Second, Third, and Fourth, crisscrossed Joshua Street at regular intervals. Houses lined the streets, mainly prefab, single-story units with flat roofs and aluminum-siding walls and one-and-a-half baths, the kind of things that had gone up in such great numbers after the war, during Tuskett’s brief, heady boom. Most stood empty now, their front walks split into webworks of jagged cracks like dry riverbeds, their yards overgrown with shepherd’s purse and dogbane. Faded For Sale signs poked their heads out of thickets of weeds with stupid, stubborn optimism.

Tuskett’s southern border was defined by the road that had been its lifeline. The road had had a name once, but it was long forgotten; the Old Road, folks simply called it now. Billboards stood along the roadside, their messages peeling off in ragged tatters.NEEDHAM’S SERVICE STATION, one sign warned, LAST FUEL FOR THIRTY MILES; a huge yellow arrow pointed toward Joshua Street like the finger of God. WELCOME TO TUSKETT, CALIFORNIA—another billboard greeted the empty blacktop—YOUR OASIS IN THE DESERT.

Just east of town, not far from the billboards, lay the dump, a pile of rusted automobiles and tin cans and yellowed newspapers smoking in the heat, where down through the years Tuskett’s children had been warned not to play.

At the town’s four corners, there were four landmarks, each with its own story to tell. To the southeast, at the tip of Joshua Street, lay a trailer park, which had once been crowded with homes and life; most of the trailers had been hitched up and driven off long ago, but a few stayed, as if rooted in place. To the southwest, opposite the trailer park, stood the Tuskett Inn, a motel that had done a fine business in the old days; it had been shut down ten years ago, and for a few years after that, kids had gone there on restless summer nights to throw stones through the windows and scrawl messages on the walls, but now all the windows were busted and nearly all the kids were gone. To the northeast lay the town’s only church, open to all denominations and all faiths, its little congregation shepherded by the Reverend Chester Ewes, who had a framed certificate of graduation from the Sacred Heart Divinity School on the wall of his office and a golden statuette of the crucified Christ on his desk. And to the northwest was Bill Needham’s service station, his father’s legacy.

But the town’s greatest landmark was located in its exact center, like a bull’s-eye. It was a water tower, six stories high, which loomed over Joshua Street like one of the three-legged Martian war machines in that Orson Welles Halloween show. In years past, kids had been known to climb up there, though naturally it was forbidden; from the roof you got a fine view of the town, the road, and the desert stretching to the matte-blue outline of the Sheep Hole Mountains fifteen miles to the southwest.

There was little to do in Tuskett except watch the time pass, and there was precious little reason to stay; but there were those—fewer each year—who did stay, though they couldn’t have said why. On this Tuesday evening in mid-July, the town’s population numbered twenty-three. Twenty-three people who still called Tuskett their home. People who’d lived most of their lives here, and who, in most cases, expected to die here as well.

They had stayed, and they got by, living their quiet lives, adjusting the tempo of their days to the slow crawl of the shadows across the desert floor, marking time by the beat of ceiling fans; they rose with the sun, they talked with friends, they sweated out the heat of the afternoon, and they retired to their beds, another day gone; and on summer nights, in the heat and stillness, the older folk among them would lie awake and listen for the hum of traffic on the Old Road, the traffic that would never come again.

***

It was nearly eight o’clock, and Johnny had gone home for supper about twenty minutes ago, but Bill Needham, who lived alone and had no supper waiting, had stuck around, held by curiosity.

The man was still coming. He hadn’t changed direction or altered his course in the slightest. It seemed almost as if he were headed straight for the spot where Bill stood, still leaning against the Coke machine, his position unchanged from half an hour before. As if he’d come out of the desert, out of all those trackless miles of waste, out of nowhere and nothingness, simply to get to this one place and this one time. Bill thought of that, and for a crazy moment he was sure that it really was death he was seeing, the Reaper, old Mr. Bones himself, striding out of the dusk-mottled sky to carry him away.

He shook his head.

The man was nothing to be scared of. He was just some outdoors type, maybe not quite right in the head, who got his kicks hiking through the desert. Bill had read somewhere about a guy who’d walked across the continent and back again, just for the fun of it. Maybe that was the story here too. Maybe.

Except he knew it wasn’t.

He waited.

The man reached the edge of town, where Joshua Street began. He walked down the middle of the street, still moving slowly, cautiously, as if testing the ground with each step. He paid no attention to the service station or to Bill Needham. He just kept walking, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his boots crunching on the blistered pavement. It seemed that he wasn’t aiming to take Bill with him to the beyond, after all; he was just walking on by.