Garrett Rowlan
The cloud resembled a gigantic brain in pain, a migrating migraine floating two
hundred yards above the desert floor. Its blurred edges wavered like tiny feet as it neared
the small, California desert town of Noah. Veins of molten silver stitched its furrowed
clumps.
Watching from the town’s one road, Ellen leaned on her cane and pulled her
shawl tighter and hoped for death. She wanted to feel the sky-flung fire. A million volts
of Chemo on her diseased brain might kill her or cure her, anything better than this
waiting room of death in the California desert. She walked to the center of the two-lane
road running toward Nevada and looked up as if daring the cloud to strike her.
Disdaining her, the cloud veered to the east. She watched it go as a dozen people
from the town of Noah looked at it for guidance, answers. Ian was among them.
That night, Ellen and her neighbor, Ann Seagram, found seats in the back of the
town hall, a large room with brick walls. It was a remnant from the days when Noah was
a thriving community, built upon mining. Fifteen people attended. Ian Cash, the small
town’s owner, stood in front of them, rocking slightly in his polished boots. He waved a
Bible. “Exodus,” he said, “Chapter thirteen, ‘The Lord went before them, by day a pillar
of cloud to guide them on their journey, by night a pillar of fire to give to them light.’”
He closed the book. “That was like the cloud that guided me. I wanted to find a holy
place. I saw the Nevada state line ahead and I knew that wasn’t going to be holy.” He
allowed himself a small smile, his white teeth shining like fire through a grate. “I turned
off the highway and I saw a cloud. It was a cloud that drew me here. It was a sign and the
cloud we saw today is a sign that a curse has been laid upon us. Question is, what are we
going to do? I’ve read the Bible, and the Lord gave me the answer.” He opened to a page
marked by a yellow post-It. He cleared his throat. “Deuteronomy, Chapter Twenty-one.
‘If one be found slain in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it, lying
in the field, and it be not known who hath slain him…’” He stopped. “Now hasn’t that
happened to us? The unsolved murder of Jim Wells is a curse. He wasn’t found lying in
the field, but on the road leading out of town. Regardless, this land has been polluted, and
the unsolved murder must be expiated.”
He stepped aside and Marie Hammond waved her Bible. “Numbers,” she said.
She ran the general store that Ian owned and which sold tickets for the California lottery,
making a nickel on each sale. They came from Los Angeles and cohabitated without the
blessing of marriage, Ian being gun-shy after three failed bouts of matrimony. “Chapter
Thirty-five, verse Thirty-three,” Marie said, “‘Ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye
are; for blood it defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is
shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.’”
Ian stepped forward. They seemed to work some routine. “‘A blessing and a
curse,’” he said, “that’s from Deuteronomy too, Chapter Eleven, Moses says, ‘Behold I
set before you this day a blessing and a curse. A blessing, if ye obey the commandments
of the Lord your God … and a curse, if ye will not obey…’” He surveyed the room
slowly, making eye contact. “God has given us a way to remove the curse. Deuteronomy
says in the case of an unsolved death that the town nearest the deceased shall sacrifice a
heifer. The elders will wash their hands in the blood.”
“Who’s going to be sacrificed?” Mike Brown spoke. Like Ellen and Ann, he was
a recent arrival in the town. Ian found him in the general store’s dirt parking lot one
morning and gave him a rundown trailer for shelter and employment as a handyman,
factotum, and gofer. Between his sporadic work and occasional checks from unknown
sources, he shot off golf balls in the desert and drank beer. Sitting in jeans and a flannel
shirt, he asked, “Why don’t you sacrifice that damn mutt of yours?”
He was referred to Howie, a mangy black dog that he didn’t like, had tried to kill
and apparently failed, and who had bit him on the ankle, a few weeks ago.
As Ian shook his head, Ellen got shakily to her feet. “Why not sacrifice me?” she
said. “Make it a human sacrifice. I’m going to die soon, anyway. Just make it quick, a
bullet to the back of my head.”
“The Bible inveighs against suicide,” Ian continued. “And the law against
murder.”
Ellen sat back down, helped by Ann.
“I propose another sacrifice,” Ian said. “We’ll sacrifice my Toyota Camry, burn it,
and then clean our hands in bottled water, Evian. We’ll make a modern kind of sacrifice.”
“You can’t torch that car,” Mike said, shooting to his feet. “It’s fully loaded. GPS.
Wire rims. 160 horsepower at 5600 rpms. The stereo kicks ass.”
Ian shook his head. “Wasn’t Abraham willing to sacrifice Isaac? Our willingness
to sacrifice what we love shows God how much we want His blessing. In two nights, on
the full moon, we’ll burn my car.”
“I just waxed it!” Mike protested, to no avail.
After the meeting, Ellen and Ann returned to their adjoining trailers. Ann helped
Ellen whose walk had become unsteady. The tumor had messed up the connections
between her brain and body.
“I wish that cloud had fried Ian instead,” Ann said. “I’m sure he’s responsible for
Jim’s murder.” Jim was Ann’s son and the victim of an unknown assailant. He was found
outside of town early one morning, a bullet hole in his chest. “Who else but Ian has those
kinds of connections to LA?” Ann turned. “Are you okay?”
“I’m just a little chilled,” Ellen said.
Ann reached down and turned on the space heater and set a cap with earflaps on
Ellen’s head, its gray hair tangled as old straw. “I think he betrayed my son, it was he
who told Bill Hall that Jim was here. I’m positive Ian helped him.”
Ellen knew the story. Bill Hall had been the father of a girl named Tina, who had
broken up with Ann’s son and was subsequently struck by his car in Los Angeles. The
night had been wet and foggy, and the car had braked and skid on the damp pavement
just as the girl ran across the narrow, curving street to her own car.
A tragic accident, bad timing, the girl running in the rain as Jim went south from a
friend’s house, but then the relationship was always his idea. No charges were filed, but
when a bullet subsequently went through Jim’s windshield, just missing him, he left town
to be safe, or so he assumed. He didn’t get far. Ann shivered too but not from disease but
from thinking of Jim lying face-up on the cold pavement.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Ellen said. “It’s just that I get these chills.” She moved her feet closer to
the space heater.
“Why did you offer yourself as a sacrifice?”
“I might as well make my death mean something, I don’t know if my life has.”
They heard the train approaching. It came out of the pass from California and
continued to Las Vegas and beyond. It never stopped in Noah, though at one time it had.
Peeking through Ellen’s window Ann saw, in the train’s nearing headlights, the pod-like
shell that had once sheltered passengers waiting, but that was years ago, in another
century. The train passed, a rumbling in the night.
“I didn’t want to die in the city,” Ellen added. “I’ve had a lifetime of cars and
concrete and sirens at midnight. My story is like Ian’s. No, I didn’t see a cloud guiding
me here from the freeway, but I came here on a whim. It felt right. When I got the
diagnoses, I knew I had stepped into a slot waiting for me. I’ll die here.”
***
Bill Hall turned off the freeway and headed toward Noah. It was the last
California off-ramp. As he took the east-curving lane with the lights at the Nevada border
ten miles to his left, he thought of the curving, hilly LA road where his daughter died six
months ago. Bill still heard that awful sound, the car’s impact, metal on flesh, the sound
that cut his life in two.
It wasn’t an accident, no matter what the police report said. The drizzling night,
the road’s curve, and Tina’s running across the street without looking around (Tina’s
mother had supplied this detail to the cops, and Bill would never forgive her) was all
nonsense. He knew the truth. She’d been murdered by Jim Wells. Bill had never liked the
boy, a troubled soul whose mother, one Ann Seagram, was an actress in marginal movie,
TV, and commercials. Tina died, then Jim, but Bill’s rage was not expelled: Ann
Seagram too if he had the chance.
Bill wanted more than a balancing of the scales, a restoration of order. He wanted
vengeance. On the night of Tina’s death, he had pulled Jim Wells from the car and would
have beaten him to a pulp but the neighbors intervened. There was nothing to intervene
out here.
It had all been planned. A quarter mile from town, hid by the elevated tracks, he
took the gun and softly closed the car door. At the general store, a few days ago, Ian gave
him the high sign as Ann Seagram approached. Bill slid back into the shadows. When she
emerged from the store, carrying a small bag of groceries, he had followed discreetly past
the two-lane road running through town and beyond, until he saw her enter a trailer near
the railroad tracks, right down a slope from an old, abandoned station stop. In the
distance, he heard the chugging sound of a train approaching, going from California and
to Las Vegas and beyond. He checked his watch.
Climbing to the rails, Bill glimpsed a gathering a hundred yards away, in the
center of town. The diversion that Ian said would provide just enough time for Bill to do
what he’d needed to do. “She’ll think the ceremony is stupid and will stay in her trailer,”
Ian said.
Looking down, he saw the trailer with the telltale awning above the door. Bill
climbed down and looked through the window. Ann Seagram watched television.
Bill heard the train approaching. It would cover the sound of the gunshot.
***
Two trailers away, Ellen’s headache became a universe expanding until things
went black and when she woke she raised her arm and the motion carried her up out of
herself, like a shadow that had slipped free of its source. She saw herself slumped, dead, a
faint bauble of drool from her lips. Good riddance: She was never one to regard her body
as beautiful, even when she was young and slim, and now, seeing herself sitting in a
slouch, her hair gray and her face lined and her mouth slack, she was glad to leave.
And she did. She went to the window and found herself able to slip vaporously
through the opening in the sliding pane.
She rode swirling breezes as she rose in a vapor. The wind pushed her into town.
She saw the general store and its adjoining dirt parking lot where the car-burning
ceremony was underway. Bonfire flames reflected on the polished Camry, which had
been cleaned and washed, like a maiden prepared for sacrifice. A few people stood
waiting. They were retirees, desert rats, misfits; some worked as maids or janitors at the
casinos located on the Nevada state line, a dozen miles away, or even Las Vegas, its
downtown an hour’s drive from here.
The wind shifted, and Ellen moved down the railroad tracks. The train was
coming, two dozen boxcars snaking behind the laboring engine. She had no body, no
eyes and yet she saw a light from Ann’s room showing a man outside her trailer.
Something wasn’t right in the way he stood, his fists bunched at his sides. Before
she could do anything—and what could a ghost do!—the desert breeze whisked Ellen
back to the center of town, to the ceremony. Buoyed by winds which left her twirling, she
heard Ian raise his megaphone and say, “We make the sacrifice.”
He touched the hood of the car whose interior had been filled with flame-friendly
material, papers and wood chips. Holding the megaphone up toward the starry sky just as
the train neared, the warning bell clanging, he said, “God, remove the curse you have
given us. We offer you this shining exemplar of technology. It does zero to fifty in six
seconds.” Ian rotated the megaphone as if to send his voice into all corners of the cosmos.
“Lord, take this sacrifice, this Toyota Camry with rear-window defogger and GPS
technology and new sparkplugs, take this as a sign of our willingness to burn in cleansing
flame. Amen!” He raised the can of gasoline and poured and sloshed the remainder of the
gas inside the car and flung the empty canister aside. He went to the bonfire and pulled
out a burning stick as though grabbing it from the forge of the gods.
“Now to light the sacred fire!”
“No!” Mike Brown, who had listened to this speech with increasing agitation,
now ran into the circle, pushed Ian away, and opened the Camry’s door. The key had
been left symbolically in the ignition, to mark the car’s preparation to travel to a better
place, as Ian said. As the train neared Mike started the car and drove. Ellen, by an effort
of will, slipped in the open window. “That way,” she said, a vaporous finger like stray
smoke pointed toward Ann’s trailer.
Paying no attention, apparently oblivious to her, Mike said, “I’m leaving this
fucking town,” and made the train tracks just ahead of the guardrails dropping.
He went a couple hundred yards to freedom when the gas pedal got stuck and the
steering wheel started to twist on its own. The Camry pulled off the road and almost hit
another parked car as it made a long U-turn before the steering wheel wrenched itself into
a straight ahead shot that Mike couldn’t correct as it headed toward the tracks. The train
passed as Mike shot up the slightly elevated tracks and across them and down. As red
lights receded the Camry descended and smashed into Ann’s trailer.
The air bags deployed. Ellen felt them push her out the window. Mike escaped too
just as Ann stumbled out of the trailer, one side of it dent inward by the runaway car.
Blood ran down the side of her face.
She moved a few steps forward before her legs gave out under her. Falling to her
knees, she looked back. A man emerged from her trailer. His body must have taken the
impact of the crash, for he dragged one leg and one arm hung as if broken. A gash on his
neck bled profusely. In his good arm he carried a gun. He lifted the gun and shot himself
as the train headed north.
***
Later, Ann Seagram left, going back to LA. Ian was acquitted of conspiracy in
Ann’s attempted murder. Mike Brown left the hospital and went to parts unknown. Ellen
remained riding the wind.
Sometimes at night she’ll catch the train that passes to the north, and it carries her
for a distance before releasing her back to the dark, silent, and empty desert. Sometimes
she’ll see a luminous cloud by night, shining down from heaven.
She goes farther each time, closer and closer to the state line, and Ellen knows
that one day the train will take her past it, all the way over the border and beyond.