As we rocketed along the rainswept interstate, miraculously not hydroplaning off the pavement and into a stand of cactuses as the laws of physics would seem to have required, Mrs. Fischer said, “Wherever it is these child-stealers are holed up, you can’t go in after them with just that pistol or either of the other two I have with me. You’ve got to weaponize yourself better than that.”
“I don’t much like guns, ma’am.”
“Does it matter whether you like them or not?”
“I guess it doesn’t.”
“You do what you have to do. That’s who you seem to be to me, anyway. You’re one who does what he has to do.”
“Maybe that’s not always what I should do.”
“Don’t double-think yourself so much, child. You had a good dinner of properly fried food, and if you want to live long enough to have another one, you’ve got to weaponize properly.”
The rain fell so hard that, in the headlights, the entire world seemed to be melting. The vaguely phosphorescent landscape shimmered as though every acre of it must be liquefied and in motion, seeking a drain into which to pour itself.
“Ma’am, the closest town of any size where they might sell guns is back in Barstow. And they don’t just let you put your money down and walk out ten minutes later with a bazooka or whatever it is you think I need. There are waiting periods, police checks, all that.”
“That’s certainly true in Barstow and in Vegas, but there’s a lot of territory between the two.”
“A lot of mostly really empty territory.”
“Not as empty as you think, sweetie. And some places out there, nobody bothers much with waiting periods and the like. What we need to do at this particular time in this particular place is take a side trip to Mazie’s and get what you need.”
“Mazie’s? What is Mazie’s?” I asked with some doubt and a little suspicion.
“It’s not a whorehouse, though it might sound like one,” Mrs. Fischer said. “Mazie and her sons, Tracker and Leander, do a bit of this and that, and they do it all well.”
“How long a side trip?”
“Not long at all. Once we leave the interstate, the first road is paved but the second is just gravel, and the third is all natural shale. But none of it’s bad road, and it all leads up into the hills, not into the flats, so the chances we’ll be caught by a flash flood are so small they don’t worry me at all.”
“How small?” I asked.
“Tiny, really.”
“How tiny?”
“Infinitesimal, child.”
The desert doesn’t get much annual rainfall, but what it does receive tends to come all at once. A lot of terrific Japanese poets have written uncountable haiku about the silvery delicacy of the rain and about how it vanishes so elegantly into the moonlit river or the silver lake or the trembling pond, rain like a maiden’s tears, but not a line of any of them was appropriate to this insane storm. This was more of a Russian rain, in particular a mean Soviet rain, coming down like ten thousand hammers on ten thousand anvils in the People’s Foundry of the Revolution.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Mazie’s exit is about two miles ahead.”
When we got there, the highway sign didn’t say anything about Mazie. Instead, it warned ABANDONED ROADWAY / NO OUTLET.
When I noted this discrepancy between what Mrs. Fischer had promised and what the reality proved to be, she reached out to pat my shoulder with her right hand, driving only with her left, though in her defense, I must admit that she had slowed to sixty for the exit.
The two-lane paved road had been built in an age when we were still going to war with European nations, and it consisted of more potholes than blacktop. Fortunately, it didn’t go far before it gave way to the gravel road, which was more accommodating, although the deluge was so intense that I had to lean forward and squint to see the track, which seemed always about to wither away into sand and sage.
After we had gone no more than a quarter of a mile on the gravel, the headlights flared off a sign with reflective yellow letters that announced DANGER / STAY OUT / ARTILLERY RANGE / MILITARY VEHICLES ONLY.
When I questioned the wisdom of ignoring such a warning, Mrs. Fischer said, “Oh, that’s nothing, dear.”
“It seems like something,” I disagreed.
“It’s not official. Mazie and Tracker put that up themselves, years ago, to scare people off.”
“What kind of people would want to come out to this godforsaken place anyway?”
“The kind you want to scare off.”
By the angle of our ascent, I knew we were driving into low hills, although in this darkness and downpour, I couldn’t see well enough to confirm what I felt. Mrs. Fischer told me when the gravel gave way to a trail of broken shale, though I couldn’t feel any difference in the ride.