Tom could easily picture Anya’s dread at the thought of being stranded in Radium. Miranda had responded the same way at the remotest possibility of it.
About a year after he bought the Forum, and after the humiliation of his ruined former life had receded far enough into the past for him to come out of hiding, Tom had called the three people he had left behind who he thought might still wonder occasionally what had happened to him: his mother, his sister and Miranda. His mother and sister were quick to forgive him for the heartless way he had walked out of their lives, thankful he was alive and well. He was relieved to discover that they weren’t ashamed of him, but were concerned about his well-being. They made it easy for him to resume the uncomplicated relationship they’d had before, checking in with each other on their birthdays, at major holidays, and at other odd times. For Tom, their easy acceptance and the connection to his past, however perfunctory, had inherent value, anchoring him in time just as his new ownership of the Forum rooted him in the specific place of Radium. After the absurdity of his meltdown at the Mail, for him to acknowledge having come from somewhere and to be in contact with his family represented a necessary step toward normalcy, however modest and however tenuous.
Miranda was another story. Upon picking up the telephone and hearing his voice, she cursed at him in unintelligible Portuguese and then started sobbing. When she was done with that, she stunned him by making immediate plans to come see him in Radium. He picked her up at the airport in Grand Junction. When she walked off the concourse, past the security barrier to where he was waiting for her, she stepped right up to him, handed him her carry-on bag, and instead of the peck on the cheek he anticipated, she slapped him, hard. She had clearly worked out the choreography of her arrival for maximum dramatic impact.
She was only mildly horrified by the banality of Grand Junction, as they drove through it. The empty spaces between the edge of the city and Radium were of no apparent interest. Radium, though, might as well have been an outpost on Mars. When they reached Tom’s place she showered immediately and then drew him into bed. It was the first time he had been with a woman since leaving Marathon and he welcomed the human contact.
“I really did love you, you know,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “I didn’t know.”
“Maybe it’s because you can’t love.”
“Yes. I’m sure that’s it.”
Tom’s response sounded glib, even to his own ear, but that didn’t make it false. If he hadn’t been capable of loving Miranda when they lived together, it was also true that he hadn’t yet healed and was no more capable of loving her now. He wanted to say more, to explain that it really wasn’t her fault – that it was his failure and his alone, and that he was working on it – but that would have sounded even more selfish. After all that had happened and from the vantage point of his new life, which he could not abandon and she could not share, there didn’t seem to be any point. It was easier to accept blame, and it was more honest and kinder, too, just to let Miranda go.
The two of them had never talked that much; their affair was based on other points of contact, the sexy impression they created as a couple on the dance floor, the buzz of cocaine and blur of alcohol, their glamorous careers, but in Radium there were no nightclubs, Miranda had no routine to follow, and the dust, the empty spaces and the silence broken only by the wind, the traffic on the highway and the occasional bark of a dog all conspired to drive her to a state of complete apathy. Tom felt badly for her and one night during her stay they drove to a cowboy bar in the town of Norwood, on the road to Telluride. He later realized that he hadn’t cared enough to drive the rest of the distance to Telluride, where she would have felt much more at home.
Following the glum experience of trying to dance to country music while ignoring the ranch hands leering at her, Miranda rebooked her return flight home to leave a few days earlier than she’d planned.
Midway on the long drive to the airport, Tom broke the silence: “I’m sorry.”
There was nothing more he could say. More words, he felt, would only undermine the sincerity behind those two words.
“I know,” she said. “It’s okay. I think maybe it’s even better this way.”
She was looking away from him, gazing out the passenger door window at the sheer, impossibly colorful canyon wall that rose hundreds of feet on the other side of the river, possibly contemplating the meanings of its green, yellow, black, and ochre bands of rock. The cliff was nothing more or less than a geologic accounting of the millennia, of long gone oceans and extinct forms of life, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tectonic uplift, and erosion, against which mere human emotions were minuscule.
“Yes,” she added a few miles on. “It’s better for both of us. But I will remember you.”
“I will remember you, too,” he said.
Mark Brubaker’s house wasn’t much different from Ray and Sarah Walker’s, but with no evidence of a woman’s touch, not a single grace note, not a wilted flower in a cracked pot or a tree cultivated by a human hand, not even a scrap of a faded curtain behind one of the filthy windows. It was just another crumbling shack built by a long-gone uranium prospector, surrounded by rusting junk on a dusty acre of land a dozen miles from Radium, down a labyrinth of rutted roads where nobody would ever venture unless they were either lost or knew exactly where they were going.
Brubaker was evidently home: his rig, conspicuously shiny on the sere landscape, sat off to the side of the shack. Tom pulled up to the house and sounded his horn so that Brubaker wouldn’t be startled, but nothing stirred. He parked, opened the door of his car, stepped out, and pressed on the car horn again. Still nothing. Tom slammed his car door shut and walked toward the house. He knocked on the door and shouted, “Hello? Anyone home?” No response. He tested the door. It was locked.
Tom walked around to the rear of the house. There was a small mountain of partially crushed beer cans just outside the back door, and thousands more cans sliding downhill into a small dry ravine that ran behind the shack. Tom stepped up to peer in a window when the adjacent door creaked open.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” a man’s voice growled.
Tom jumped back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for Mark Brubaker.”
“You are fucking trespassing, dude. That’s way dangerous.”
Brubaker was about forty and not the least bit self-conscious about the fact that he was completely nude. Perhaps he didn’t feel naked: He was covered from the top of his ankles to his neck and wrists with bawdy tattoos. Tobacco juice drooled out of the corner of his mouth. Brubaker’s genitals were completely obscured by the overhang of his belly. The bright light of the outdoors clearly hurt the fat man’s eyes, since he shaded them with his meaty left hand.
“I’m Tom Austin. Publisher of the Forum.”
“What’s that?”
“Local paper.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I was hoping we could talk.”
“What about?”
Good question, Tom thought to himself. He was deeply regretting that he had come, and should have known better than to poke around, and was wracking his brain for a way to retreat.
“Nice place you got out here.”
“It’s a shithole.”
“Yeah,” Tom said.
“But it’s private.”
“Sure is. Hard to find.”
“You know, you are really starting to piss me off,” Brubaker said.
“That’s probably not a good idea, is it?”
“Nope. Not a good idea at all.”
Brubaker shifted his position in the doorway and Tom saw that he held a pistol in his right hand.
“Hey, I’m really sorry that I trespassed onto your property, man,” Tom said. “I should have called first to make an appointment. So I’ll just leave the way I came.”
“Don’t got a phone,” Brubaker said, squinting as he raised the gun and pointed it at Tom.
Tom made a slow move back the way he’d come.
“Not yet,” Brubaker said, waving the gun. “Now you got me curious. Why the fuck are you here?”
“It was a mistake. I just got lost. Gotta go,” Tom said, taking another step backwards, and Brubaker fired at his feet.
The noise was startling, far louder than Tom thought a gunshot could sound, louder than Albert DeRichter’s shotgun, which he’d recently fired on North Mountain, probably, it occurred to him in an instant, because this time he was the target. If he’d been shot in the head, that bang, that explosion, would have been the last experience of his life, the sound of his death. Or would he have heard it at all? They say you don’t hear the shot that kills you, though of course it’s only a guess: there’s really no way to know if that’s true. In any case, Tom’s ears rang and his heart pounded, painful proof he was still alive.
“I could shoot you right now,” Brubaker said off-handedly. “Your dead body would fall right down there and I wouldn’t have to do nothing to get rid of you. Coyotes would eat you in a day or two. They even eat the bones. Nobody would ever find you.”
Tom raised his hands in a gesture of submission.
“Yeah,” he said, wondering how many others had met just that fate in the ravine, and more specifically if Ray Walker was one of them. “Of course, you’d have to get rid of my car, too. Coyotes wouldn’t eat that.”
“Get your skinny ass over here.”
The inside of the shack was as cluttered as the yard, and it stank of rotting food, stale body odor and, not faintly, of sewage.
“Take off your clothes,” Brubaker said.
“You’re not gonna rape me…?” Tom asked.
“Do I look like a fag to you?”
Tom shrugged as if to say, “Got nothing against it if you are.”
“Maybe you noticed I’m not wearing nothing,” Brubaker said. “You want to talk to me, it’s gotta be even. And I don’t feel like getting dressed.” He waved the gun.
“Are you sure about this?” Tom asked. “You don’t want me to just go? Forget about this whole thing? Like I was never here?”
Brubaker answered with another shot at Tom’s feet.
“Shit man!” Tom shouted as he started to quickly unbutton his shirt. “You gotta stop that. You’re gonna give me a fuckin’ heart attack.”
Through the front window, past Brubaker’s hulking form, Tom could see his car. It looked far away.
“Get naked,” he said. Tom obeyed and soon found himself sitting unclothed on a filthy couch across from Brubaker, who occupied a chair he had moved to a critical position, cornering him and blocking any escape. The image of Anya in this house, with this man, was more than Tom could summon up. Brubaker might not rape Tom, but he had surely raped his Russian bride, and probably her son, too. She had called him a cruel animal and a barbarian but her words had failed to convey his complete debauchery. Of course they had fled. Of course Ray Walker had helped.
“You think maybe you can put the gun away now?” Tom asked. “It’s making me way nervous.”
“No problem,” Brubaker said, and tossed it on a stuffed armchair a few feet away. “You’re not going nowhere, are you?” He laughed. “So what can I do for you?”
He asked it as casually and as innocently as if there’d been no threats or gunfire, as if the two men were not sitting naked across from each other, as if he were a waiter in a restaurant taking an order, or a salesman in an upscale retail store: “How can I help you?”
There seemed to be absolutely no point in dissembling. Maybe Brubaker had been shrewd in stripping Tom of his clothes.
“I’m looking into the disappearance of Ray Walker,” Tom said. “I heard you knew him.”
“Fuck you,” Brubaker said.
“Look, I’m sorry…”
“No, I mean it,” Brubaker said, his eyes narrowing. “You are fucking gonna tell me who sent you.”
“Nobody.”
Brubaker shook his head slightly, sadly, as if deciding how to respond to an outrageous impertinence, a bald-faced lie, and then with lightning speed and astonishing agility he sprang at Tom and pinned him down on the sofa.
“You’re an asshole and a liar!” he shouted.
Brubaker had planted himself on Tom’s chest and was crushing the air out of him, pinning Tom’s arms between his thick legs. Tom struggled but it was hopeless. Brubaker not only outweighed him by a hundred pounds, but was obviously stoned out of his mind, propelled by adrenaline, his strength superhuman, his focus intent on something….
Tom anticipated that Brubaker was going to try to rape him, and resolved to fight to the death, but that’s not what Brubaker had in mind, at least not immediately. He heard the fat man’s labored breathing as he worked a belt around Tom’s torso, pinning his arms to his side, and buckling it tight.
“What do you want from me, man?” Tom asked, resorting to words to try to slow down the assault.
“That’s not the right question,” Brubaker said. “Who sent you here? Why are you here?”
“Nobody.”
Thwack. Brubaker slapped him hard with the back of his hand.
“Fuckin’ liar! I know it’s DeRichter. But what did he send you for?”
Were the DeRichters back at the center of everything?
Tom had abandoned his theory that being the Uranium King’s son had led to Ray Walker’s undoing and was following an entirely different thread, one that tied Ray Walker’s disappearance logically to a psychotic meth-addict who had virtually enslaved his mail-order bride. There was no need for the DeRichters or for any reference at all to Walker’s lineage to construct a scenario ending in Walker’s demise at Brubaker’s hands. The trucker was plenty sinister all by himself to account for any imaginable depravity. But now, even as he was under assault, Tom was cycling back and trying to conceive of a more complex narrative linking not only Ray Walker, Anya, and the demonic Brubaker, but somehow involving the DeRichters, too.
He couldn’t connect the dots.
“No way, man,” Tom protested.
“I’m not fuckin’ stoo-pid!” Brubaker was shouting and at the same time was tightly wrapping a bungie cord around Tom’s ankles, and another around his knees. Tom’s face stung and he could feel blood dripping from his nose.
Checking his work and satisfied that Tom was immobilized, Brubaker lurched to his feet. Tom watched him bend over a table and pick up a small blue-tinted zip-lock baggie and dump some of its contents into a plate. Then he heard a “chop, chop, chop” sound, like cocaine being crushed with a credit card. But it wasn’t coke. Tom knew it had to be meth.
“What are you doing?” Tom asked. But Brubaker ignored him, concentrating on the task at hand, mixing the crushed crystals of meth with water, filling a syringe with some of the resulting liquid and then he was leaning over Tom with the needle.
“Hey man,” Tom said. “I don’t shoot….”
“Just a little truth serum,” Brubaker said. “That’s all.”
“I’m telling you the truth….” But it was too late. Tom felt a sharp needle prick on the inside of his thigh, followed by a cold sensation as the meth flooded the vein that Brubaker had expertly penetrated. Within seconds the cold flush rushed to his chest and then to his head and a drug-induced euphoria was battling the panic he felt at being tied up.
“Man this totally sucks,” he said. “You gotta untie me.”
“Relax and enjoy it,” Brubaker said. “All you gotta do now is tell me who sent you. If you do, maybe I’ll let you out of here alive.”
“I told you, man, nobody sent me. I’m just trying to find out what happened to Ray Walker, and I thought maybe you could help.”
Brubaker was calmer now, apparently satisfied that the truth serum was working, allowing him to relax.
“What would I know about it?”
“Didn’t your wife work for him?”
“Yep.”
“It must have pissed you off when she disappeared.”
“Nope. She was a lousy fuck, like fucking a dead fish. Couldn’t cook or clean worth shit, neither.”
“Did you ever talk to Ray Walker about it?”
Brubaker ignored the question, his interest in the subject spent, and concentrated instead on the baggie of meth, the plate he emptied it onto, the card to chop it with, and the water to dissolve it in, and he muttered to himself as he injected a syringe full into his own inner thigh.
“Salt Lake tomorrow,” he muttered, “then Seattle and LA and Phoenix….”
“A lot of driving,” Tom said.
“Yeah.”
“You gonna untie me now?”
“Nah.”
Beneath the flap of Brubaker’s stomach, Tom could see that his dick had become hard, no doubt from the speed coursing through his veins. He wondered if the drug had had the same effect on him, and glanced down to see that it had. To be supercharged with speed and trussed up like a chicken at the same time was an almost unbearable torture. There was nothing he could do to end it but he could feel some give in the belt and bungie cords and wriggled them as loose as he could without being conspicuous about it, gaining an inch or two of slack.
“Meth makes me horny enough to fuck a dog,” Brubaker said. “When it first hits, that first rush….” He had fallen back into an armchair and was playing with himself.
“You’re not gonna try and fuck me, are you?”
“I told you I ain’t a fag, din’t I?”
“Man, why’d you do this to me?”
“I din’t tell you to come out here.”
“Am I gonna get AIDS or hepatitis from that needle you poked me with?
“Prolly.”
Tom gazed up at the ceiling of the shack, covered in spider webs and ropes of dust that seemed to vibrate with life. More dust motes skipped about in the air. Across the room, he could hear that Brubaker was wanking with more energy now, grunting. Tom was at the center of a web, as tightly bound as a spider’s prey. Brubaker was completely crazed, a tweaker over the edge, so paranoid that a stranger trespassing on his property had to have been sent with malign intent by DeRichter. Though it was Brubaker who had tied him up, Tom figured that the Uranium King or more likely his son must be the alpha spider.
How much time passed? He couldn’t tell. It seemed like an eternity, but might have been just a minute or two. Brubaker was standing over him, still wanking. And then Tom felt himself being lifted up and flipped over onto his stomach. Brubaker was going to rape him after all. The fat man’s weight pressed against him.
Tom struggled against the belt and found just enough slack to work his right arm free. Brubaker had him pinned, but Tom was able to grab an object, an iron fire poker. With a surge of energy, and as Brubaker had raised himself up to angle for position to penetrate his victim, Tom pushed him off and swung around, thwacking him with all his force on the side of his head.
Brubaker groaned and fell backward. He had already suffered his fatal injury, but Tom didn’t back off. He was charged with his own meth-fueled adrenaline rush and pressed his advantage, whacking his assailant again, landing a blow at the base of his neck, and another blow, crushing his upper right arm, by this point a completely gratuitous injury to the broken corpse of a man who was dead or dying fast. Blood was spurting from Brubaker’s neck and flowing from his mouth.
Tom roared, a naked gladiator drenched in another man’s blood, and breathing heavily he stared at the horror he had wrought: Brubaker’s mangled and tattooed corpulence, his blood slowly spreading across the filthy floor; the dank odor of his death mingling with the preexisting stench in the house.
“It was self-defense,” Tom muttered to himself, as if he were pleading with the sheriff or a judge or jury, or even to a higher authority than that, presenting his justification before the reality of the brutal killing he had just committed fully sank in, even before Brubaker’s body had stopped twitching.
Tom freed himself from the remaining bonds as quickly as he could and backed away from the scene, finding Brubaker’s mildewed shower. Standing under a stream of hot water, he watched with a kind of detached fascination as Brubaker’s blood flowed off of his body and ran down the drain. His mind was playing tricks. The bloody water flickered in strobe-light fashion from technicolor to even more disturbing black-and-white – right out of Hitchcock’s Psycho – and back to color. He was far too stoned from the mainline injection of meth to rationally process what he had just done.
His mind was racing.
“How did I get here?” Tom said out loud. “What did I do?”
He got out of the shower and quickly got dressed, studiously avoiding the bloody mess he had made. He was unable to distinguish whether he was energized by the violence he had perpetrated or the drug he’d been injected with or by a combination of both, but he was charged with a strong sense of purpose.
If Tom wasn’t a full-on tweaker, having never used meth before, the drug still had a beneficent affect on him, making him indifferent to everything that was wrong and focusing his thoughts exclusively on his own mission: to understand what had happened to Ray Walker. He couldn’t say why, but at that moment nothing was more important. Indeed, the solution to the mystery seemed more crucial than ever, critically important, an urgent necessity. It was the key to … Tom had no idea to what, precisely … which was to say it was the key to absolutely everything, to eternal enlightenment and the very meaning of his sorry existence.
Brubaker had assaulted him and had died for it, but he had also provided him with good information, shifting the focus of the investigation back to the abiding enigma of the DeRichters.
The sun was just setting to the west.