places.”
“What about the cars?”
“I checked mine. The reason the police still have Phil’s is that they’re checking it.”
“I still haven’t figured out why Phil was keeping this a secret,” Ray said.
“Because he had something big to hide. Now take me back to my car. We both have work to do.”
8
Jerry Hobart climbed the slope toward the plateau above the trailer park with Valerie. He looked back down toward the freeway. From up here he could see the long sprawl of modern buildings that made up the outlet malls, and beside the freeway entrance, the small greenand-white box of the Hadley Date Farms store that had been here when Hobart was born. In the other direction was the high, narrow building of the Morongo Casino Resort that the Indians had built. Beyond the buildings was the gray line of freeway that stretched from the beach in Santa Monica across the whole country to the beach in Jacksonville, Florida. They reached the plateau and walked for a few minutes.
Valerie said, “What happened to that guy you were working with last time I saw you? That Whitley guy?”
Hobart walked on for a few steps, climbing higher. “He didn’t work out, so we went our separate ways.”
“When did you split up with him?”
“Not long ago. A week or two. Why?”
“I was just curious, I guess,” she said. “I don’t see you all that often, and I like to keep current. Sometimes I make predictions. I didn’t like him much, and I was wondering how long it would take you to decide you didn’t, either.”
Hobart said, “He was a pretty good salesman because he was a talker, I’ll give him that. People would start out thinking twenty bucks was a lot for a string of lightbulbs, but after a while they were thinking that twenty was damned cheap for getting him to stop talking and go away. The lightbulbs made a nice bonus.”
Valerie gave the laugh she often gave as a comment, just “Huh!” once. When Hobart was away from her, even for a long time, he could always hear that laugh. When he closed his eyes at night and tried to picture her, he would see her begin to smile, then hear the laugh, the bright blue eyes wide and her mouth open just a little to show her perfect white top teeth. When they were young, Valerie’s teeth weren’t so good. He remembered them as small and oddly spaced. But in her twenties, while Hobart was in jail, she’d had them capped so they looked like a movie star’s teeth.
He had assumed that she would probably get married to somebody else while he was in jail, and thinking about it every day in his cell was part of his punishment. Instead, she had spent a lot of effort making herself look better and a lot of time driving east to Phoenix or west to Los Angeles with a couple of girlfriends, or at least that was her story. Probably she’d had a lot of boyfriends, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, then or now. She’d had the right to do whatever she pleased, and probably she had.
Sometimes she made vague remarks to hurt him. Once she said she was a whore with an expired “sell by” date on her. That was a couple of years ago. It was late in the evening when he was feeling sentimental about her, and he felt as though he had been stabbed. He hurt so much that he became enraged, looked at his watch, made a transparent excuse about a plane he had to catch, and left. He had done that to make her think he was lying and had a date with someone else. They had loved each other for so long that they knew the best ways to wound each other. She was smart enough to know that she could make him crazy by reminding him that she’d had sex with other men-probably more than a few of them. But she also seemed to fear that if she mentioned a name, she would learn later that the man had died suddenly. It had happened once, about ten years ago. Afterward, he had not wanted her to hear that the man was dead and get a feeling of undeserved power-that she could just say a name and the man would die-so he had made sure he didn’t come to see her for a long time. After six months, he had a postal service print up some cards that said he had a new cell-phone number, and sent one to her as though she were on a long mailing list. Since then, when she was in the mood to punish him for what happened to their lives when he went to jail, she would just imply that there had been other men. What she was implying was that the experiences had not been good-that they had ruined her-and that she considered every one of them his fault.
They walked for a half hour or more without talking, going up into the hills where other people seldom went, and they couldn’t see Interstate 10 or the buildings that had been built beside it. They walked with the scorching stones under their feet, the sun blasting over their heads and the wind moving out of the east across the desert keeping them dry. The wind was constant out here, so there were big wind farms just down the interstate with huge white windmills with propellers that looked like airplane parts, spinning together, pivoting a little when the wind shifted.
The silence was part of the etiquette of walking together in the desert. They walked and thought about basic things. It wasn’t a time to chatter about how the washing machine needed to get fixed or the damned government was getting worse or the car sounded funny. When they were together up here, they thought about each other and about themselves, and maybe a little about the other times up here over the years, and how it felt to be back.
Hobart’s phone gave its irritating musical tone, and he looked at Valerie and frowned. She was watching him as she walked, waiting to see what he was going to do. He turned the phone off and put it back into his shirt pocket without looking at the number.
They walked on, but the feeling was not the same after that. He knew she was thinking that he had violated the rules by carrying a cell phone out there. She was thinking he had turned it off, not to preserve the open connection between them, but to hide a call from somebody he couldn’t talk to in front of her. She was thinking it was a woman.
Hobart could see her shock hardening into resentment. This was deeper than the anger she felt when she tightened her jaw. When she was like this, the muscles around her mouth went slack again, so her face flattened. Turning off the phone had not restored the sanctity of their walk in the desert. Now all she was thinking about was that Hobart had a secret from her. He had another life away from hereaway from her. Once the telephone had dragged her attention away from being with him, she could only think about the fact that he was away most of the time, and that when he was, there certainly were things he did that he never told her. He had to get rid of the telephone issue. He said, “Hold up a minute.”
She stopped about ten feet away from him, halfturned and pretended to look toward something miles away, but held him in the corner of her eye.
He made sure she saw he wasn’t punching in a new number, or using the navigation button to find a stored number. He just pushed the button for a missed call, so the phone would return it.
She didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t listening, and couldn’t have, anyway. There were no other sounds she could pretend to be listening to. Even the wind was mild and steady.
“Hello,” he said. “You called me.” He listened for a few seconds, looking at the ground and moving small pieces of gravel around with his boot. “All right. Same price as last time.” He listened again. “I don’t bargain or give discounts. If you don’t want to make that deal, it’s up to you.” He listened again. “Okay. Then I’ll take care of it. Good-bye.” He turned off the phone and put it away, and then began to walk toward Valerie.
He thought she looked less annoyed, a little softer. It made him remember a time when they were in high school and had come out on a walk like this. They had already had sex a few times, at night among the big rocks in the hills on a blanket laid out on the stillwarm ground. On this afternoon they had been walking for two hours, so far into the desert that there was no chance that anyone would see them, even though they were in the open. They stopped in full sunlight on the flats and began to kiss. Neither of them ended the kiss, and things went further, and soon all of their clothes except their boots lay on the hot, sandy ground. At first they tried to lie together on their spread-out clothes. Nothing was thick enough except Hobart’s jeans, but the sun found the tiny copper rivets and metal buttons and heated them enough to burn skin. Finally Valerie placed her elbows and knees on the fabric of his jeans so he could kneel and enter her from behind.
As he remembered, he could still see her in the bright sunlight, the most naked and exposed he had ever seen anyone up to then, and she was amazing and beautiful. Even then he was awed at the generosity and bravery she had. He loved her, and loved even the self he had been on that day, too, because of how young and clumsy and stupid and sincere they were then.
