Saguaro Riptide

ONE

Woodrow popped four excedrin, chewed, and dry-swallowed.

Having exhausted the supply of aspirin he kept in the Saturn, he had purchased the Excedrin in Tempe. But he had neglected to purchase a beverage. Hence the chewing and dry-swallowing.

It was odd. Just a few hours ago he’d felt tip-top. Leaving the dead cracker at the gas station, he’d donned a pair of sunglasses to ward off the afternoon glare as he headed south. Things had been just fine. He had enjoyed the drive, amusing himself with thoughts of the dead cracker locked in the trunk of his Camaro, cooking under the Arizona sun.

In spite of the sunglasses, the glare began to annoy Woodrow. It seemed particularly unforgiving in the desert-slicing the Saturn’s windshield into angry diamond patterns, riding the black freeway in shimmering waves, ricocheting off other cars with such lethal intensity that Woodrow felt he would rather meet a Medusa’s gaze than stare at the tinted window of one more Mercedes.

A Mack truck roared toward him in the northbound lane, its grille a blinding chrome nightmare.

Woodrow found himself squinting. Tears filled his eyes. .

And the taffy-pulling machine went to work on his brain, grinding. . twisting. . tearing. .

The Mack might as well have slammed him head-on.

The pain was supersonic.

It was ten miles to Tempe.

He barely made it.

He bought the Excedrin at a minimart. He swallowed two tablets in the parking lot and tried to sleep, but each time a car door slammed fresh needles of agony hammered his skull.

So, squinting, his jaws clamped together vise-tight, he drove out of Tempe and turned off on the first dirt road he found. He followed that road, and then turned off another. The second road was in miserable repair. That made him happy, for the likelihood of hearing car doors slamming on a rarely traveled road seemed exceedingly remote.

As twilight fell, Woodrow pulled to a stop and turned off the engine. The only sound he heard was a feeble whine rising from his chest. He blocked the front window with a sunscreen provided by the Saturn dealership in Las Vegas. Next he rolled down the side windows, took clothes from his garment bag, hung them over the glass like makeshift curtains, and rolled the windows up again. He then jammed the garment bag in the hollow behind the back seat, closing off the rear window.

He sat in the milky shadows and chewed two more Excedrin, waiting for true darkness, waiting for his headache to disappear.

And now he was chewing four more Excedrin.

And it was dark outside.

Woodrow removed his clothes from the side windows. Folded them and replaced them in the garment bag. Then he rolled up the sunscreen and tossed it in the back seat.

The night was mellow purple, going black.

Woodrow massaged his eyelids. His muscles relaxed.

For the first time in hours, he opened his eyes.

Fully. Not a rumor of a squint this time.

He gazed into the distance. His only wish was to relax. But a terrible frustration welled within him. He was wasting so much time. He had a job to do. He should have been in Pipeline Beach by now. Baddalach should have been dead hours ago.

If the dog hadn’t attacked him … If he hadn’t cracked his head on the floor of Baddalach’s condo. .

Things started to blur. Woodrow blinked several times, rubbed his eyes.

And then he noticed the light. Far off on the horizon, a pinprick rising over the low hills. Perhaps it was only an aircraft heading for Tucson. . but it was so bright. . perhaps a low-flying private plane. . a helicopter. . but it moved so fast. . and it was coming closer. . swelling, streaming across the wounded night sky like the blood of a cloudless afternoon. .

It was coming. . at great speed. .

Getting brighter. . brutally bright. .

Fresh needles of pain hammered Woodrow’s skull. .

He tried to look away but could not. So he cried out, whimpering like a child. . and he dropped the Excedrin bottle and pills spilled over the front seat. . and the brutal light was everywhere and he was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and he was slipping. . slipping. .

No. . Woodrow gasped. . he was not slipping. . not one inch. . he would not allow it. . he was chewing. . swallowing Excedrin. . dry. . and he would be just fine. . and the taste in his mouth was bitter Boraxo Death Valley days. . and he would drive on in just a moment because the thing in the sky was nothing more than an illusion. . but his hand could not find the ignition. . and it was difficult to concentrate with the light incinerating layers of night. . purple and violet and lavender layers. . and Woodrow could not help but watch … the light was hypnotic. . so hypnotic that Woodrow could not string two thoughts together. .

Two thoughts. . but four Excedrin. .

He had swallowed four Excedrin. . and doing same would allow him to string two thoughts together. .

Soon. . Praise Allah, let it be soon. .

Woodrow’s eyelids scoped down. . became honed steel slivers that sliced his retinas. . anguished tears dribbled through his squint. . and he was in the middle of nowhere. . and the light was everywhere. .

Getting brighter. .

And. .

It seemed that this was the place where old furniture came to die.

Woodrow stood in front of the Saturn. Glowing headlights cast his long shadow over a broken couch that had lost half its stuffing.

A twisted bicycle lay in front of the couch. To one side of that was a wheelless baby stroller with a headless doll as passenger. To the other, a mound of plump plastic garbage bags speared by clumps of surrounding yucca. And beyond that was more crippled furniture-three-legged chairs, a television with a cracked picture tube, shapely lamps stripped of their shades. .

And clothes were everywhere. Clothes that Woodrow recognized. Clothes from his garment bag.

His clothes, strewn about the desert like so much garbage.

Woodrow’s heart pounded. With shaking fingers, he reached to loosen his bow tie.

But it was already untied. . and his shirt was unbuttoned. .

He sat down on the broken couch and tried to imagine what had happened to him. He had been in another place. . a place where there was no broken furniture. . and the light had come. .

And he had lost all sense of time. .

And somehow. . somehow he had been transported to this place. . and his clothes had been strewn about. . his bow tie untied. .

He glanced at his wristwatch. It was very late.

A gentle breeze stirred in the distance, whispering through hollow knots of mesquite and ironwood, washing Woodrow’s brow. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with the dry scent of the desert and the raw stink of the abandoned couch.

He had to calm down. He had to think this through. Logically.

Many hours ago he had fallen and injured his head severely enough to cause a brief lapse of consciousness. Severe pain, in the form of a dog bite, had brought him out of it. But for a time he had been disoriented, unable to function properly-witness his run-in with the Vietnamese kid at Baddalach’s condo.

And then came his visit to the cracker’s gas station, where the feeling of disorientation returned. He saw bright lights, and his headache returned, and he blacked out. .

He killed the cracker during the blackout. He had no memory of the murder, but he knew that it had happened just as surely as he knew he had done it. There could be no other explanation, for he had been holding a bloodstained tire iron when the blackout ended.

Perhaps the bright lights had triggered the blackout, along with the pain. Perhaps that was what had happened here. It made sense-the lights had returned before this last episode, and so had the pain.

But this time he had blacked out in one place and regained consciousness in another. And it was different from the episode at the gas station: he hadn’t a clue as to what might have occurred in the interim.

At least it was over now. The pain was gone. The lights were gone.

But where had they come from?

Alone, sitting on a broken couch, Woodrow considered the question.

Each time he had seen the lights, they had come from the sky.

The sky was home to Master Fard’s space platform.

And the men who never smiled.

The breeze grew stronger, blowing down from the north cool and insistent and powerful enough to tear a fistful of stuffing from the couch’s wounded arm.

Tumbleweeds scratched over rocks, eluding yucca barbs, traveling south. The wind threaded small rips in the garbage bags, and they rose and fell like disembodied lungs gasping for breath.

A voice seemed to whisper in Woodrow’s ear, a voice from that science fiction film he’d seen as a boy: People of earth, look to your skies for a warning. . People of earth, look to your skies for a warning. .

Woodrow turned toward Mecca, knelt, and prayed. Perhaps it had happened. Perhaps, at last, he had seen the Mother of All Planes. Perhaps he had come face-to-face with the men who never smiled.

If only he could remember.

He rose and faced the wind, waiting, studying the desert by the spectral glow of the Saturn’s headlights.

A garbage bag gave up a handful of moldy confetti that rode the night, fluttering above ironwood and mesquite, over yucca and garbage and broken furniture.

A tumbleweed crackled by on Woodrow’s right, traveling the stream of darkness that flowed between the Saturn’s headlights. He turned and watched as it scrabbled over the Saturn’s hood.

And then, quite suddenly, he didn’t care about the tumbleweed.

He saw something else, something infinitely more interesting-a shard of yellow paper fluttering in the wind, one corner trapped by a windshield wiper.

Woodrow hurried toward the car, thinking of Master Fard and the men who never smiled; and a space platform that would rain explosive death upon the world; and messages that would drop from the sky, written in Arabic, which would allow 154,000 Muslims to survive the carnage.

He snatched the shard of paper from under the wiper blade.

Suddenly, everything made sense. His disheveled appearance, his conservative clothes tumbling across the desert sands.

Because the note was not written in Arabic, and the paper it was written on had been torn from Woodrow’s own notebook.

It read:

HEY NIGGER:

I’MBACK!

WOODY.