Stone Junction

ELWOOD: So we’re driving along and talking with this guy – Brother Em’s at the wheel, me riding shotgun, this Herman weirdo in the back – just getting acquainted, you know, and I ask him what he’s got in his bags and briefcase, just out of being curious. And he says real matter-of-fact, real cool, that he’s got extra clothes and shit in the little backpack, a grill in the bowling bag, and in the briefcase he’s got about twenty thousand dollars, cash money. So––

EMMETT: El, you dumb shit, he said grail. Grail, not grill.

ELWOOD: Me and Em’s been arguing over this all afternoon, but grill – like for cooking up meat – is what I heard. Struck me as kinda odd, too, that he’d be packing around some little grill in a bowling bag,’ specially since it looked like it already had a bowling ball in it. So I asked him if we could see this grill. He said seeing the grill was something you had to earn. So I said how ’bout seeing the money, and son of a bitch if he don’t say ‘Sure’ and open it right up. I took a good eyeful – never seen so much in my life – and then I looked at Em, and Em was looking at me. Me and Em been poor ever since we got orphaned off when we was pups. We––

PEEBE: Get to it, Elwood – save the shit. Your rap sheets are longer than your dicks.

ELWOOD: Okay. Sure. So we pull off on a nice little turnout a ways up the road – one of them history monuments – and Em gets this Herman guy out of the car to check out the marker, take a leak. Guy takes the fucking bowling bag with him. Now the way we work it, Brother Em’s the holder and I’m the whopper. I use a sawed-off ax-handle,’ bout this long, top foot drilled out a quarter-inch wide and filled back up with lead. So I come up behind him real easy as he’s standing there beside Em. Em nods he’s ready, so I plant myself solid, and when Em grabs him around the shoulders, I swing down with the club, swing hard. And this is the truth – hook me up to the biggest lie detector you got – right in the middle of the swing, the guy fucking disappears. And Em’s standing there with his legs braced, holding nothing but air, and the club smacks him right in the nuts. I’m sorry, Em. Fuck, what can I say?

EMMETT: Nothing, you dumb shit.

ELWOOD: He’s an alien, Em. People are into aliens. We’re gonna make a ton o’ money just by warning people against him. Could get us on TV.

KEYES: Whoa, you two. Let’s get back on track. Emmett, did you see this guy disappear like your brother claims?

EMMETT: That’s what my eyes saw. The rest of me ain’t believing it.

KEYES: Okay then. He disappeared. Then what happened?

ELWOOD: Well, Emmett screamed and went down. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on – looking around kinda wild to see where the guy mighta went to, but he was nowhere. Emmett’s sorta gurgling at my feet, so I bend down to see if I can help him, and the car starts up. Guy had snuck back to the car and was stealing it. Drove right off toward Reno, giving the horn a couple of big honks. Was another hour before your people happened by.

KEYES: I want you both to think hard: You said this guy got out of the car with the bowling bag, right? So when he disappeared, what happened to it?

EMMETT: No idea.

ELWOOD: Me either. I don’t remember seeing it on the ground by Em. Didn’t see him come back to get it. Figure it must have gone with him.

PEEBE: We searched the area. Nada.

ELWOOD: We’re dealing with some kind of outer space alien, right? Some sorta critter from the stars that can take our shape but get back invisible when it wants?

KEYES: So it would seem. But whatever he is, we’ll find him.

EMMETT: Hey, officer – don’t you listen? The guy can disappear. Get it? Poof! If he can disappear, maybe he can do other things. Ask me, you’d have to be superstupid to fuck with him. Super-super.

Daniel fidgeted behind the wheel of the Tindell brothers’ turquoise- and-pink Cutlass. Their alleged Cutlass, anyway, since he’d wisely checked the registration only to find it in the name of Mrs Heidi Cohen. Daniel somehow doubted she knew Emmett and Elwood personally. He remembered Mott telling him that if you were going to drive what he called ‘blind loaners’ – vehicles that the owners didn’t know they’d lent – you should borrow a new one every twelve hours.

When he discovered the registration anomaly shortly after leaving the brothers in the dust, Daniel had decided to ditch the car. He’d pulled off on a spur road and gathered his stuff to walk away when he was taken with the notion to try vanishing with the Diamond in daylight again.

He vanished for three futile hours. He still couldn’t see the Diamond’s spiral flame in daylight, and without its axis to mark the center, he couldn’t focus. He’d tried imagining the spiral flame but this split his attention. He gave up in a fit of frustration. He needed to step back. He was acting as if there were deadlines. He could take the rest of his life to work with the Diamond.

The time pressure he felt was actually the phantom pressure of pursuit, the sense that he had to enter the Diamond before he was caught. But objectively, they couldn’t catch him or seize the Diamond as long as he could vanish and take it with him. In an oblique way, his urgency was a failure to be true to himself, a failure to trust his powers.

‘I don’t trust me. Me don’t trust I. Is this a natural neural lag in accommodating change, or do we have a serious disagreement? And if it’s a disagreement, how can it be harmoniously resolved?’

Daniel tried to think about this, more from duty than passion. One evening at Nameless Lake Wild Bill had said the trouble with self-analysis was the built-in human eagerness to accept all sorts of preposterous and absurd suppositions, not the least of which were both the possibility and desirability of knowing one’s self. Bill had likened this to using a corkscrew to pull your image from a mirror. Daniel smiled. With mock sternness he told himself, ‘You have a problem with self-image. Admit it – I admit it.’ He came to his own defense. ‘But if you can vanish, you’re supposed to have problems with self-image. You’d be insane if you didn’t.’

Daniel started laughing. Knowing himself was no more improbable than a frog bringing him an armload of roses