Gods Without Men

1942

He knew how they must look. The very picture of hick cops, him and the sheriff standing on the porch with their bellies stuck out and their mouths open, watching the show.

The convoy came down Main Street like there was a fire: a truck full of soldiers and an olive-drab Plymouth staff car, which coasted to a halt at the foot of the steps. The man who got out wore civilian clothes: a gray fedora, wingtip spectators and a fancy suit with wide peaked lapels. To Deputy Prince he looked more like a pimp or a fag movie actor than a guardian of the nation’s security. He certainly wasn’t a Fed, that was for sure. When he got up close to shake hands, the stink of cologne could have knocked an elephant on its ass.

“Office?” said the man. Too busy for pleasantries.

“You expecting Tojo or something?” Sheriff Grice gestured at the troops in the truck.

“Excuse me?”

“Seems like you come equipped to fight a war. Ain’t no Japanese Army out here.”

“There’s such a thing as the home front. I thought the news might have reached you.”

And with that, the man pushed right past them into the building. He ducked under the counter, walked through to Grice’s office and sat down in his chair. He did just about everything but put his feet up on the desk. The sheriff looked like he was about to split his skull.

“I’ll need your full cooperation,” said the man, swiveling from side to side on Grice’s chair.

“That a fact?”

“And your discretion.” He jerked a thumb at Prince. “Is this boy trustworthy?”

“Reckon so. Ike’s got a good record with the department. And he’s not much on talking.”

“You a native, son?”

“My father was, sir.”

That got him. That always got them. Wrong way round. Instead of some guy having an adventure, tasting a little dark meat, he now had to think about a white woman doing it with an Indian.

“Seems I got myself a regular Lone Ranger and Tonto combination,” he snorted, turning his flash of anger into a joke. “Well, let’s get down to it. We have to check out everything, no matter how slight. My office received a communication from a Miss Evelina Craw, said she suspects you have a German spy in the area. Says he’s transmitting messages.”

Grice grinned. “Sounds to me like you’ve had a wasted journey. Miss Eve-lina’s not the most reliable source. She’s talking about Methuselah. He’s a crazy old bird lives out at the Pinnacle Rocks. Or under them, I should say. Been out there twenty-some years. He’s no more a German than I am.”

“Under them?”

“Dug out a cave with his own two hands. He bought a silver claim off Miss Evelina’s daddy, back when he owned the Bar-T, but everyone knows there’s not a cent of silver or anything else out there. Oh, there was, up in the Saddlebacks, but that was all mined out years ago.”

“Get to the point, Sheriff.”

“The point? You should probably just turn round and go back to Los Angeles. Miss Evelina’s got too much time on her hands.”

Outside, the men in the truck were smoking cigarettes, upending canteens. The official, whoever he was, hadn’t thought to bring them in out of the sun.

“I see,” he said, examining a scuff on the toe of his wingtip. “Methuselah. You have his real name?”

“How about you tell me your name first?” Grice was openly angry now.

The man looked blankly at him. “You may as well call me Munro. The rank’s captain.”

“Captain Munro. What are you a captain of?”

“Being a pain in the ass, it seems. Don’t be obstructive, Sheriff Grice. Yesterday you took a call from your boss, saying to afford me every assistance. You remember that call, right? Every assistance. That’s you affording me, not the other way around. So, if you could just tell me the man’s name, we can wrap this thing up sooner rather than later, and I can let you go about your no doubt urgent official business.”

Grice’s face was a mask. “He’s called Deighton. I had someone check the claim papers when Miss Evelina first brought it to my attention. There weren’t nothing to it. She’s an old woman. Never married. She gets ideas.”

“Well, my information is this Mr. Deighton has radio equipment. He may or may not be a danger, but if he’s transmitting, then it’s a matter of concern.”

“What in hell would he be transmitting?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out. If you and your boy would care to show me the way, we can leave right now.”

As Ike Prince well knew, it was Grice’s afternoon for going over to the Barrington place and solacing himself with the widow. He had no interest in driving all the way out to the Pinnacles and rousting out Methuselah. But they got into Munro’s car, Ike riding shotgun beside the uniformed driver, the sheriff grumpily sitting in the back, as far away from Munro as he could get.

It was a long hot silent journey.

As they left the highway and started down the rutted track toward the Pinnacles, Prince looked out the window. Overhead a white contrail bisected the sky like a scar. Since the start of the war, the military seemed to be all over the desert. There were barbed-wire fences and trucks on the roads and signs saying NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER. Day and night you could hear the distant boom of ordnance from the bombing range on the far side of the Saddlebacks. Sometimes there came a sound like rolling thunder and you’d look up to see a silver shape moving too fast to be a conventional plane. The Air Force was testing some kind of new super-aircraft. Secret technology. Mysterious lights at night.

No one ever asked Ike Prince what he thought of the war, or the mystery lights, or anything much at all. And if they didn’t ask, it wasn’t his place to say. About Methuselah, for example. About why the old man chose to live in a hole under the rocks. He knew more about Methuselah than Methuselah knew about himself.

When she got sick and realized she was going to die, his mother had said to him, Remember who you are. He was a little boy then, but he remembered, so when they came and took him off to the orphanage, he was stronger than some others. He might have been a half-breed orphan, but he had an inheritance: He knew his father’s true name.

Not that he boasted about it. Some things grow more powerful when kept in the dark.

Everyone in the high desert knew the story of Willie Prince. It was a dime-novel story, a radio-serial story: the last real manhunt of the Old Frontier. It was also an Indian story, and any Indian story always has two versions. The white version told how Willie Prince, a whiskey-crazed brave, kidnapped a child and was chased for almost a week over the desert, until he turned and made a stand on the Pinnacle Rocks and got shot down like a dog. Most people didn’t know there was any other. Maybe a few old ladies on the reservation told it over their quilting. And him. How Mockingbird Runner fell in love with a white man’s woman, how that white man was consumed with jealousy and came after him with a posse, how he ran in the old way, outpacing them as easily as a mule deer outpaces a tortoise, until he came to the crossing-place, the sky hole between this land and the Land of the Dead. How he fooled the white man into thinking he was a corpse, by swapping his bones with the bones of a dead coyote. How he escaped to live a long and happy life in Snow-Having, far to the west.

Some people remembered, some didn’t. Few knew the name of the jealous white man, or that afterward he was driven insane by the guilt of what he thought he’d done. Very few indeed knew he came back to the rocks to dig for Willie Prince, trying to cross over and take his place in the Land of the Dead.

No one but Ike — no one living — knew Willie Prince ever had a son.

It wasn’t his place to say any of that.

Finally, the Pinnacles rose up through the dust, three spires connecting earth and sky. When Ike saw them, fear landed on his shoulders and wrapped him like a cloak. He knew why he had avoided the rocks. And why they tugged at him, like a thread caught on a cactus spine.

They got out of the car and at once a wind rose up. The dust was in Ike’s eyes and nostrils, working its way between his teeth. Munro crammed his hat lower on his head and gave an order to his NCO, who deployed the soldiers. The wind whipped the running men’s pant legs around their ankles, sent little curls and whirls and vortices of sand scooting up off the ground.

Sure enough, there was a radio antenna perched about twenty feet up on the rock, a kite of metal rods with a length of wire spooling down into the mouth of a man-sized hole. There was junk lying about on the ground around it, tools and scrap and lumber. An ancient Model T, rusting and half filled with sand, was parked by a mound of what looked like mine tailings; its seats, all busted springs and sprouting horsehair, were propped up on some bricks under the overhang to make a sort of couch. There was a washing line with a faded denim workshirt and a pair of long johns pegged to it. There was a woodpile and an ax. From down in the hole came the sound of a crackly swing band. It sounded like one of the FM stations out of Los Angeles.

Sheriff Grice crouched down in front of the hole. “Deighton, you in there?”

There was no reply.

“Mr. Deighton, come out. We need to talk to you.”

Munro made another sign to his NCO, who barked an order. The soldiers unslung their rifles and pointed them in the general direction of the hole.

Grice looked around testily. “Take it easy,” he muttered. “He’s just an old man. He’s probably deaf.”

He shouted louder, and still got no response.

“Deighton, come out!”

The swing music stopped. A man’s voice rose up out of the cave, weak and cracked, hard to hear.

“What do you want?”

“We need to talk to you.”

“Go away. This is private property.”

“It’s the police, Deighton. Come on up here.”

“Go away.”

“Don’t play games. Come on out. We’ll have a talk and then we’ll be on our way.”

There was some banging and scraping and a ladder was propped up against the lip of the hole. A grizzled head poked out and took a look around. As soon as he saw the soldiers, he ducked back down again.

“Deighton. It’s all right. We just want to talk.”

Grice was trying to sound soothing. The old man hollered up from his pit, his voice hard to hear over the wind.

“The hell you do!”

Grice walked back to Munro, tying a handkerchief over his mouth against the dust. He pointed up at the antenna, dimly visible in the haze. “You can see. It’s just a crystal set or something. He’s no threat.”

“We’ll still need to search the place.”

The old man shouted on, calling them devils, saying that if they were trying to take away his knowledge (whatever that was), they’d have a fight on their hands. Then he broke out in a terrible, racking cough. Ike listened to him suffering down there, wondering what kind of den he’d made, in what filth he chose to live.

Munro sauntered forward, peered in, then stepped smartly back again.

“Jesus, he’s got a gun.”

As if to confirm it, there was a sharp crack, which sounded to Ike like a.30–06 rifle round.

“There’s no need for that!” shouted Grice. “You’re being a fool.”

Munro conferred with his NCO and called one of his men forward.

“We’ll gas him out.”

There was only one thing Ike’s mother ever told him about the man she’d been married to. One thing that stuck in his mind. As a kid in the orphanage, Ike daydreamed he’d meet and fight the burned-face man. Even now that he was grown, twenty-one and in uniform, it still went around in his head. His monster was down in that hole. The thing couldn’t be put off forever.

“Wait,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.”

The others turned, frankly amazed to hear him speak.

“Let me go down there. I’ll bring him out.”

“Hell you will!” said Grice.

Munro was amused. “No, let him. Go on, boy, be my guest. You flush him for us.”

Grice barred Ike’s way. “You ain’t going down there like some hunting dog. Feller’s got a squad of his own men to take his orders.”

“I don’t mind, Sheriff,” Ike reassured him. “I want to do it.”

You either went after your monsters, or they came after you.

As he walked to the lip of the hole, he could sense the depth of the place, hear the silent thunder booming. He called out Deighton’s name, then crouched down and called again, this time in the People’s Language.

“Skin Peeled Open,” he called. “Can you hear me?”

There were many things he knew.

At that moment the wind died down. The man replied, “Who is that? Who’s speaking to me?” He said some other words in the People’s Language, but, to his shame, Ike could not understand.

“I’m Ike Prince,” he said in English. “My father was Mockingbird Runner and my mother was Salt-Face Woman.”

There was a silence. Then the ladder was pushed up again to the lip of the pit. Ike climbed down.

It was not a filthy den, but a cluttered little parlor, lit by a gas lamp. There was a chair and a table and an Army cot. The floor was swept, the walls smooth as plaster. The man himself looked ratlike, wizened. His face was not terrifying to look upon. One side was smooth scar tissue, the other scored with deep lines. A two-sided man. A man facing both worlds. He was clutching an ancient Springfield service rifle. When he spoke, his voice was a strangled rasp. Ike found he was not afraid. How could he be, of such a husk? He knew then there would be no fight, no glorious taking of revenge. All he could feel was contempt.

“Why did you say that name to me?” Deighton wheezed.

“You didn’t expect to hear it again.” It was a statement, not a question.

“You’re Eliza’s son?”

Ike nodded. He surveyed the room. The aerial wire led to a radio set, an ordinary device in a big walnut cabinet, the kind of thing designed for a rich man’s house. Deighton had it mummified in cloths to protect it from dust and wired up to some device with a coil and a crank handle, which he supposed was a generator. There was paper everywhere, sheaves of it on every surface, bulging files stacked against a wall.

“What’s all that?”

“Knowledge.”

“What do you mean, ‘knowledge’? What is it you think you know?”

“I’m its keeper. I’m rescuing it from the dark.”

“You live in the dark, old man. Put that rifle down.”

Deighton lowered his gun. “I’ll kill you if you touch it,” he said plaintively.

Sheriff Grice’s voice boomed into the space.

“What’s going on down there?”

“All fine, Sheriff. I’m just persuading him to come out.”

“I won’t. I’ll die first.”

“Look at yourself. You’re already dead.”

The local kids swapped legends about Methuselah’s cave. Treasure, a maze of tunnels. There wasn’t anything of the kind, just that little room, like a burrow. A rat’s nest of paper. There was every kind of junk down there. Mining tools, spools of copper wire. The old fool had crates stenciled DUPONT EXPLOSIVES: SPECIAL GELATIN shoved under his bed and tin boxes of number-six blasting caps jumbled among the coffee and canned food.

“Eliza had a son,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I mistreated her.”

Ike shrugged. “Kind of late to be saying sorry.”

“But you’re her son. She had a son.”

Ike wondered why he had ever been scared to face an old fool who lived in a cave. That’s all this feller was. Now he’d seen him and it was done. He could climb back up into the world and get on with life.

“I just felt like taking a look at you and I did. They want you to come out. You better do it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ike Prince. Not that you need to know.”

“Ike Prince. Just that? Don’t you have another?”

Ike understood what he meant and it made him angry. He had only the one white name.

“You better come out or they’re going to throw tear gas down in here, force you.”

“Only if you’ll take care of this.” Deighton gestured at his stack of files. “If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to you. My life’s work. I studied the People, Ike Prince. That’s why your mother was there. To study.”

“Are you stupid? I don’t want your old papers. I don’t want anything from you. You know you were tricked? You been down here in a hole all these years. Where you wanted to put my father, down in a hole. But he tricked you. You took his place. He’s alive and you’re dead.”

There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He hurried over to his stack of files. “Please,” he begged. “What I said about your father. Saying his name to those men. I never meant for it to happen. I was jealous. A jealous husband. Please, the knowledge belongs to you. If you don’t take it, it will all go into the dark.”

It was pathetic, him holding out his box of scribblings, like it was the Queen of England’s crown jewels.

“I’ll tell them you ain’t coming out.”

Ike left the old man standing there, holding his box. He climbed the ladder. At the top, Grice and Munro were waiting. “He won’t listen,” he said. “You should use the gas.”

One of Munro’s men doubled back to the truck and returned with a metal canister. Sheriff Grice shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. He don’t sound like he can breathe too well.”

Munro was trying to brush the dust off his suit. “Well, sadly for you, I don’t much care what you think. I haven’t got time to negotiate with some crazy old man.”

He gave the sign and a soldier sidled up to the hole, pulled the pin on the grenade and dropped it in. There was a hissing noise and smoke started billowing up. They stepped back, avoiding the plume, which streamed in the wind across the dry lake.

There was a noise like thunder.

The concussion knocked them all off their feet and they squirmed to take cover beneath the cars as a rain of rocks and small stones pelted down. Ike knew what had happened. He’d known it would probably happen when he told them to throw down the gas. As the rain of stones fell, he was laughing. Now he could go and live in the world. Be a good policeman, do his duty. The lid was closed on the past.

Of course, when they’d all picked themselves up and bandaged Munro’s head and driven the three wounded soldiers to the hospital and Grice was started on the long process of reporting and form-filling and sorting out who to blame, Ike ended up being the one to go down and scrape up the pieces. Splintered furniture, a lot of charred papers covered in Deighton’s cramped, tiny handwriting. Of the man, he couldn’t find anything much at all. Just a few fragments of bone.