thousand dollars, and packed the money in his suitcase. He filled out the express-checkout form as Tim Whitley and told them to leave the charges on the credit card, then dropped it in the box on his way out of the hotel at eleven in the morning.
He was feeling better today than he had felt for months. He had gotten sick of Tim Whitley’s meaningless chatter and needed to put an end to it. Since he was a child in school, he had been amazed at the capacity some people had for being weak and annoying. If they weren’t stopped, their needs would expand gradually to require everything their imaginations could encompass, and their talk would amplify to smother all silence and make real thought and feeling impossible.
Hobart was aware that he couldn’t expect every person he met to be what he was. But he could expect them to carry their own weight and find ways to encourage and comfort themselves without making excessive demands on Jared Hobart. A man you were traveling with should be able to limit the amount of attention he needed to divert from the task at hand. He should be able to refrain from whining. He should be able to do what babies learned to do, which was to put themselves to sleep without talking long into the night to work their brains into exhaustion.
Leaving Tim Whitley under a pile of rocks in the desert had been the proper thing to do. Having two hundred thousand dollars was twice as good as having one hundred thousand, and Whitley’s lack of self-discipline had made him a risky partner. A man who couldn’t wait to tell stories about himself to impress a companion would never be able to resist telling somebody someday about killing Philip Kramer.
Hobart came out to the front of the hotel, gave the parking attendant his ticket, and went to stand in the waiting area across the driveway. He stood with his eyes closed and his muscles relaxed and savored the currents of hot desert air swirling in under the big canopy and touching his face and arms. He recognized the quiet engine of the Hyundai, opened his eyes, and watched the parking attendant setting his suitcase and Whitley’s in the trunk. He handed the young man ten dollars, got into the car, and drove out onto the Strip.
Hobart didn’t mind the traffic on the Strip. He was safe, well fed, rested, and he was in control of a vehicle with a full tank of gas. It was about the highest pinnacle that a creature on this planet could reach. The minor fillips and incentives that some people craved did not in terest him. Once a man had been in prison, his mind became receptive to small improvements in his physical well-being, but he could recognize the emptiness of status and the illusory nature of security.
Hobart drove the Strip like the others, invisible because his car didn’t excite envy and his driving didn’t stimulate fear, and because it was difficult to be here without staring at the fantastic buildings and the lighted signs. In fifteen minutes, he was south of town heading out Route 15 in the stream of cars that ran toward Los Angeles. He took the exit to Route 95 and headed due south through the desert. Here he found relief from the congestion.
The world was getting too crowded. When he was growing up near Cabazon, the big attraction for outsiders was the giant concrete dinosaur that looked down over the freeway that led to Palm Springs. Now the Indians had built a big, fancy hotel and casino, and there were two huge outlet malls. People seldom got the point. One dinosaur or one outlet mall were kind of interesting. Two or three of them next to each other in the middle of the desert was just freakish.
He took the back way along 95 through Needles and Blythe, skirting the Arizona border down to Interstate 10, and west through Palm Springs, Indio, and Cabazon. It was night when Hobart drove up into the hills above the freeway exit and stopped at a driveway into an asphalt rectangle about the size of a football field. There were rows of trailers lined up along the sides of the square two deep, and in places three deep. There was a set of power lines strung up on a row of poles stepping up the hill, and smaller lines off the poles for hookups to the trailers, so there was light in many of the windows. The barbecues smoking in all ends of the place gave it the look of an encampment, a caravan of people who had just arrived at sundown and would be leaving in the morning, but it wasn’t. Hobart’s girlfriend Valerie had lived here for at least twenty years.
Her parents, Connie and Ralph, had come to the desert out of irritation. They seemed to have lost their tolerance for brushing against people, until their nerves were like old wiring with plastic insulation that had worn and cracked open. They spent their days behaving as though they still lived in Los Angeles, the mother taking Valerie to school and then coming home to water the flowers in the pots on the asphalt beside the trailer. Her husband drove fifty miles to Palm Springs every day to work fixing cars. He had been an engineer in Los Angeles, and the job was easy for him. He never had to talk to the customers directly. Valerie’s parents could act that way, living in an imaginary place, but their daughter was in the world outside their heads. She went to school with the other desert kids, and spent her spare time walking the vast empty places with Jared Hobart.
He stepped up to the trailer, grasped the window frame, pulled himself up and looked in the window. He could see two clean dishes on the table, two glasses, and a vase of flowers, the kind that her mother used to grow in pots.
He walked around the side of the trailer to the back end. There was a dim light in the small window above the bed. Hobart looked around, found a big empty pot, turned it upside down and stood on it. He could only see a bit of the bed, but it seemed to be made, and he was sure it wasn’t doing any moving. He heard a car coming, and then saw the headlights shining on the blacktop to his right. He stepped off the pot, spun it upright and set it on the pavement approximately where he had found it. He went around the left side of the trailer and waited near the door, one foot resting on the steps.
Valerie got out of her car, walked to the steps, put her arms around him and kissed him once quickly, then edged past him and unlocked the door. She pushed it open for him, said, “I’ll be there in a second,” and went into the dark.
After about a minute, she came back into the trailer and shut the door. “You feeling jealous, Hobart?”
“Why would you say that?”
“You moved my pot to look in my bedroom window.”
“If you were asleep, I wouldn’t want to wake you up.”
“Sure you wouldn’t.”
He met her gaze for a moment. “Where were you?”
“I went to a movie with Maria.”
Maria Sandoval was one of the people who had grown up with them in the desert. He looked out the window in the direction of the Sandoval trailer. When he looked back at Valerie, she was smiling. “There’s the phone. If you feel like it, you can call her.” She walked toward the back of the trailer.
“Where are you going?”
“To bed. I guess you don’t want to come.”
“Well, maybe I do. It’s been a hell of a long drive, and I’m pretty tired.”
“If you’re tired, then maybe you ought to call Maria instead.” She said it over her shoulder, but the head start she had wasn’t enough, because Hobart was quick. Before she could reach the tiny bedroom he was scooping her up into his arms. He ducked to bring her through the door, flopped onto the bed with her, and in a moment they were wrestling each other out of their clothes.
Later he lay in Valerie’s bed staring at the false ceiling. There was an inch-thin layer of old insulation above, but the roof was metal and he could hear when the desert wind blew the particles of sand and bits of dirt against the walls and made ticking sounds that usually soothed him and helped him sleep.
Tonight it wasn’t working.
Hobart was aware that he had wasted his life, but he seldom spent time regretting it anymore. He could have married Valerie when they were young. She had always wanted to get married in those days, and had stopped wanting to only when he went to prison.
Probably they would have had a few kids and built a place outside Palm Springs, far up in the hills. That was where the really rich people had built winter homes since then, so it was too late now. It was too late anyway. After Hobart got out of prison, five years had passed, and Valerie was different. When he said anything about marrying her, she just laughed and shook her head and changed the subject. If he would let her, she would say, “Why buy the bull when I get the bullshit for free?” or “I’m saving myself for Jesus,” or some other craziness to tell him the time had come and gone. His whole life was like thatburned up. He had no claim that anyone had done this to him. He had burned it up himself, for no particular reason except that he once thought he could get more of everything if he just took it.
Now, when he thought about the past, it was always the old days when he and Valerie had been kids. He
