Well In Time Part 26

"I didn't know you had a helicopter. It's a nice one-or was."

"It's a Sikorsky S-434 turbine. State-of-the-art. But it needed a few bullet holes to add character. We were kind of embarra.s.sed by how pristine it was."

"Why do you need one?"

"You can ask that, when it just saved your skin? Besides, when we're not rescuing fair maidens, we've got business to transact. And we fly into El Paso now and again to shop, too. Where do you think that bologna in your sandwich came from? This is our glorified shopping cart."

Calypso busied herself, arranging her feet so that Lobo could curl more comfortably on the floor. In doing so, she spotted a machine gun, mounted on the firewall.

"Shopping. I see," she said drily. "Are you taking me to El Paso then?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l no. Jimmy the Butcher's got friends there."

Calypso waited for him to say more, but he flew calmly on in silence.

"Where then?" she asked finally.

"Someplace no one's going to look for you. To a friend of mine, who'll take you to another friend."

"And then what?"

Calypso's heart was sinking with the sudden realization she had no place to go, no one to return to. She had no money, no credit card, no ID, and deeply regretted leaving her pack behind in the cave. All she had was the clothing on her back and a guardian wolf with the generic name of Lobo. How far could she get with that?

As if reading her mind, Cat said, "My friend will fix you up. That's his specialty-getting people established across the border."

He threw a stern glance at Calypso. "You do realize your time on this side of the border is over, right?"

Calypso's eyes filled with tears. "I hadn't really thought about it."

"Well, start thinking."

Calypso bent to bury her fingers into Lobo's ruff, her head turned to the window. She didn't want Cat to see the tears that insisted themselves on her, despite her effort to suppress them.

"Go ahead and cry," he said gruffly. "You've got a right."

Tears brimmed over and streamed down her cheeks.

"Where's my friend, Hill?" she asked suddenly. "Did you kill him?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l no. Why would we do that?"

"Then where is he?"

"I put him on Toe and gave him some strong suggestions about just having had a nice parting from you and Javier at your ranch. Then we took him to Chihuahua and put him on a plane. He's probably just getting over jet lag in Paris, about now."

Calypso's shoulders sagged with relief. "Thank G.o.d," she breathed.

Cat snorted and said sardonically, "No, actually you can thank me."

The chopper flew low through twisting canyons, always northwestward. They crossed the summit of the Sierra and skimmed along its steep western slope. At last, Calypso felt the craft beginning to descend. Looking down, she saw a little shack nestled in a fold of hills amid scrawny oaks, black rocks, and brush.

"End of the line," Cat said as he brought the bird down in a dirt yard.

Vortices of dust rose around them as the rotors slowed and finally came to a stop. When the dust had cleared a bit, Calypso could see a grizzled man standing in the door of the cabin. Cat shoved his chin toward him.

"There's your next connection."

He opened his door, slid out and went to talk to the man, while Calypso got herself and Lobo out on the other side. The two men approached her.

"This is Rat," Cat said. "As in Desert."

Calypso reached to shake a grimed, leathery hand. Rat stood about four foot ten, by her reckoning. He was wearing rough white cotton pants of a Mexican peasant, although he was clearly Anglo, a grungy singlet stained coffee brown, and scuffed and sloping huaraches. She could just see eyes of piercing blue above a bulbous nose, within a cloud of wildly curling, desert tan hair and beard. He could be, she thought, anywhere from twenty-five to seventy.

"He'll take you on the next leg," Cat said. "I gotta get back. I'm missing all the fun."

"I can pay you all for your trouble," Calypso stammered. "Once I get my bank account straightened out..."

Cat held up a restraining hand.

"It's on the house," he said. "We haven't had this much excitement since the last time. We were getting stale. We owe you."

He reached a large and powerful hand to her shoulder, pulled Calypso to him and kissed her soundly on the lips. Then he turned and trotted back to the chopper.

Just as he was pulling the door shut, Calypso called, "Cat!" With his eyes trained on her, she smiled broadly, threw him a kiss, and mouthed "Thank you!"

His head jerked with a chuckle, he flashed a salute, the turbine whined and in a suffocating cloud of dust, he was airborne. In seconds, he and the helicopter were gone, with only the hammering echo of its rotors rebounding from the dry hillsides.

"So" Rat said when the dust had settled enough to speak. He looked her up and down. "You ready to roll?"

Calypso looked around her. Besides the decrepit shack, there was a lean-to filled with firewood and hanging strings of drying chilies, another sway-backed shed, and endless miles of scrub.

"Where?" she asked, bewildered. "How?"

"Aha!" Rat exclaimed.

He held up his forefinger, cautioning her to wait. Like an unwashed leprechaun, he bounded to the shed and dragged the door open. Back in the shadows, Calypso could just make out a large grill grinning at her, with chrome teeth secured by a fat lower lip of chrome b.u.mper.

Rat disappeared into the shed. There was a moment's silence, then the thunk of a heavy car door closing and the deep, throaty roar of a big engine kicking over and revving.

Suddenly, out the door of the shed flew a huge powder blue boat-a 1960 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, almost twenty feet long. The ragtop was back, revealing plump white leather tuck-and-roll seats. The two-door convertible throbbed and s.h.i.+mmied from the power of its engine and from the blasting of its tape deck, already scorching the air with the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black."

"Hop in," said Rat, deadpan. "Three hundred forty-five horses at your service," and he tipped a nonexistent hat. His head barely showed above the dash.

Calypso's eyes swept the car from its ma.s.sive hood, over six feet in width, along its bullet-shaped sides to its pointed tail fins. The only anomaly was that its sleek body was jacked up on a ma.s.sive undercarriage and oversized, k.n.o.bby tires that still sported elegant, crest-embossed Cadillac wheel covers.

She opened the pa.s.senger side door, pulled the white leather seat forward, got Lobo safely installed on the back seat, and then slipped into the front. She groped for seat belts but Rat just shook his head.

"Not in this model," he said.

Gripping the wheel and ramming the four-speed transmission into gear, Rat slammed his foot to the accelerator. The car dug in like a racehorse in the starting gate and then with a tremendous lurch, fountains of dirt from the rear wheels and a graceful S-shaped fishtail, it leapt forward, and charged out of the yard.

Calypso shrieked as they appeared about to crash straight into an outcropping of black rocks, but Rat hauled on the steering wheel and wrenched them onto a narrow track that was more rock and rut than drivable surface. Down this he tore, apparently with no sense that modulation of the accelerator was possible.

Rat reached a small, grimy hand to the k.n.o.b and cranked the tape deck to maximum volume. "I see a line of cars and they're all painted black..." wailed two built-in speakers on the back deck.

Wind whipped Calypso's hair and she hauled it in, twisted it into a rough rope and coiled it into a knot at the nape of her neck. The locket hammered against her chest in response to the jolts of the road, like a metronome metering the rhythm of fate.

"I could not foresee this thing happening to you..." the Stones sang, and Lobo threw his head back and howled in agreement.

Rat drove by looking through the spokes of the steering wheel but this did not diminish his exuberance. Wind flattened his bushy tan hair against his skull and streamed it behind him like a snarl of fis.h.i.+ng line. His beard pressed against grinning teeth and his short fingers, sun-creased and lined black with dirt, drummed time on the perforated leather of the wheel.

On and on, down the endless desert track they roared, trailing a tall rooster tail of dust. The autumn sun spread flat, white light over rough tracts of blue-gray shrub and jagged, misshapen stone. The Stones sang, Lobo howled, and Calypso hung on, fearing for both body and sanity.

Bushes growing on the verge of the almost impa.s.sable track sc.r.a.ped along the sides of the car, shrieking. A blast of fall wind sent a cloud of dead oak leaves into the air as they whizzed through a small copse. Leaves pelted them and so did "Gimme Shelter."

"Oh, a storm is threat'ning/My very life today/If I don't get some shelter/Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away," Mick Jagger wailed.

"War, children, it's just a shot away/It's just a shot away." The relentless, driving rhythm underpinned the contrapuntal madness of the car's lurching frame, its pounding shock absorbers and hammering leaf springs.

They raced across a desert slope, the Cadillac tipping almost forty-five degrees. Calypso, on the downhill side, looked into a nest of black, jagged boulders, like a mouthful of rotten teeth waiting to crush and mangle.

"Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'/Our very street today/Burns like a red coal carpet/Mad bull lost your way..."

Her mind was a blur of images, backing wildly through recent chronology, as if to create a drag that would slow forward momentum-the chopper's winds.h.i.+eld suddenly bursting into a shattered web; the smoking timbers of Rancho Cielo; the face of El Lobo as he was sucked down...

"The flood is threat'ning/My very life today/Gimme, gimme shelter/Or I'm gonna fade away..."

They plunged from the slope down into a dry arroyo of sand and boulders. With a tremendous jolt, the convertible high-centered on a rock but Rat pressed even harder on the accelerator. The vehicle kicked up a fountain of sand, dragged its sc.r.a.ping undercarriage off the rock, and shot up the other side like a charging bull. Calypso saw one of its elegant wire- and crest-decked hubcaps roll off down the wash.

"War, children, it's just a shot away/It's just a shot away/It's just a shot away/It's just a shot away/It's just a shot away..."

Rat drove until the Cadillac ran out of gas. It was late afternoon and they had descended from the hills into flat desert flecked with low, widely s.p.a.ced bushes of dusty gray-green, and small cacti with very long black thorns. The track, while still rutted and rough and only one car wide, now had two distinct wheel tracks, signs of increased usage.

Rat coasted to a stop and immediately hopped out to open the trunk. Calypso unfolded her legs, which felt drunkenly unsteady on the sandy soil. Lobo hopped over the side of the car and trotted off into the desert.

The capacious trunk, Calypso saw at a glance, was filled with slos.h.i.+ng red plastic gas cans, several large caliber carbines using high velocity magnum cartridges, a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, and a case of dynamite. An open metal pail of blasting caps listed beside it, along with two detached huevos del toro, drum magazines for the AK-47 and AR-15 a.s.sault rifles she glimpsed, shoved into the rear of the trunk. She closed her eyes and looked away.

She walked out into the desert to get away from Rat's endless, off-key humming, as he slurped gas into the tank. "It's just a shot away/It's just a shot away/It's just a shot away..."

After the racket, the near silence of the desert was almost hallucinogenic. A cold wind rattled the dry limbs of the scrub. A small bird cheeped repeatedly somewhere close at hand. A hawk cried, up near the sun. The thrumming of branches in the wind seemed to repeat the urgent rhythm of the song's chorus.

She searched the horizon with dry, reddened eyes looking for any sign of civilization and saw none. She scanned the ground, hoping to find something-an interesting stone, a shard of gla.s.s, a bit of rusted metal-to act as talisman, but there was only yellow sand.

All too soon, Rat tooted the horn. Calypso turned back and was relieved to see Lobo bounding toward the car from the opposite direction. In a graceful leap, he cleared the side of the car and took up his station in the center of the back seat. Calypso climbed in, Rat punched the car into a wheel-spinning start, and in an instant they were flying through the desert again.

It was just turning dusk when they spotted an obstacle in their path. It appeared that hunters in a big four-wheel drive truck were changing a flat tire, taking up the entire track. Two men in camouflage stood with shotguns broken over their forearms while a third squatted, laboring at the rear wheel. All three heads came up in alarm as the Cadillac hove into view.

Rather than slowing, Rat sped up and with a sudden heave, wrenched the wheel to the right and charged off the road into the desert, mowing down a bush, and dodging a small outcrop of stones. Calypso gave a whoop of surprise and the tape, that had been silent between songs, suddenly yielded up "Sympathy for the Devil" at top volume, conga drums throbbing.

"Please allow me to introduce myself/I'm a man of wealth and taste/I've been around for a long, long year/Stole many a man's soul and faith..."

"Trap," Rat shouted.

Calypso doubted it. She had an un.o.bstructed view of the hunters as she and Rat crashed past them through the sagebrush. All three were open-mouthed with astonishment by this apotheosis of a powder blue Cadillac convertible, charging along as if powered by Satan himself. Clearly, this was straining their credulity as well as their masculinity.

Their complete befuddlement struck her as so comical that she began to laugh and then to howl, until tears streamed down her cheeks. Lobo, possibly experiencing a pack moment, threw back his head and howled, too. Calypso's final view was of the three, open-mouthed and moving zombie-like to the front of their crippled truck for a last view, as the Caddy roared back onto the road with the Stones blasting.

"Pleased to meet you/Hope you guess my name..."

Calypso had lost count of how many times the Stones tape had replayed. "Don't you have any Credence Clearwater?" she shouted over the din.

Rat's head was pumping in time to the beat. "Who?"

Evening fell as a flaming western sky gradually cooled to ash. One of the car's dual headlights had been knocked askew so that its beam penetrated the roadside desert, giving evidence of approaching civilization. Beer cans, many laced with bullet holes, lay among the cactuses in increasing numbers. Enclaves of dead refrigerators, sagging couches, and spine-broken recliners sprawled amid the sagebrush.

At last, in the distance Calypso saw a flash of light, then another and another, until the phenomenon proved to be the rhythmic pulsing of a red and yellow neon sign alternately reading, FOOD/ BEER. She realized she was famished and not just for food, but for human companions.h.i.+p other than that of the crazed and uncommunicative Rat.

Still at high speed, Rat cranked the wheel and slid sideways into the dirt parking lot of the roadhouse. Slamming on the brakes just short of a line of parked cars and trucks, he brought the Cadillac to a halt with a final fishtail flourish. The persistent wind carried the dust of their arrival over them in a rain of fine particles, as the Stones finally fell silent, with a final yowl.

"Love is just a kiss away, love is just a kiss aw..."

"We're here," Rat announced with evident pride in his accomplishment.

Calypso looked around her. Other than the tar papered bar building there was nothing else around. The shadowed desert stretched off in all directions.

"Where?" she asked.

Rat didn't answer. He was already out of the car heading for the saloon doors, from which the sound of a honky-tonk piano and the smell of cooking were wafting. Calypso pushed the hair from her eyes and allowed herself to admit her hunger.

Pus.h.i.+ng the door open and standing to straighten the same dirt-crusted jeans and sweater she'd worn in the cave, she said, "Come on, Lobo, let's go. This doesn't appear to be a place where we're expected to dress for dinner."

The wolf stood on the back seat, his nose to the wind. Then, apparently approving the smell of cooking meat, he leapt over the side of the car and came to stand by her knee. Calypso dropped her hand to his broad head.

"Stick with me, kid," she said. "I have no idea what to expect."

As Calypso shoved open the bar door, the interior air hit her, warm and humid, bearing the unmistakable smells of beer, cooking meat, and sawdust. The room was foggy with cigarette smoke, backlit by neon beer signs, and a single mirrored ball over a tiny dance floor, where two couples shuffled in clenches that looked more like wrestling holds.

In a back corner, she could just make out a figure bent over the keyboard of an antique upright piano. From the sound of it, several keys were missing and the rest were untuned, but the pianist was nevertheless eliciting from them an energetic and playful boogie-woogie.