Nor did he feel any better mentally than he did physically. No sense of exhilaration — the runner’s high he’d experienced on his best days and in the second Bay to Breakers race. Just weariness and a sense of wasted effort.
Back at the apartment he showered and rubbed ointment into his aching leg muscles. By the time he finished a light breakfast it was nine o’clock. The rest of the day stretched out long and empty ahead of him. How to fill it? There must be something he felt like doing.
Sure there was. One thing.
Aloud he said, “Shit,” and went into the bedroom to get dressed.
At nine-thirty, with an uneasy mixture of anticipation and resignation, he was in the car again and on his way to the main library at Civic Center.
Beulah was in Nevada.
An old mining town in the southwestern Nevada desert, north of Death Valley and 150 miles or so from Las Vegas. Population, according to the 1990 census: 2,456.
It took him the better part of three hours, using the library’s supply of state maps and almanacs, to locate it and to determine that it was apparently the only place in the country with that name. If Beulah, Nevada, had a library, the paperback edition of A Treasury of American Verse must have come from there. But what about Ms. Lonesome?
He remembered the leathery texture of her skin, as if she had spent a lot of time outdoors in a hot climate. He remembered the Western-style shirt with the fake-pearl snap fasteners, and the stained suede jacket, and the Levi’s jeans, and the boots with the scrolled cowboy design. Well, maybe. If not Beulah, then someplace not too far away. It was possible.
He consulted a recent telephone directory for the section of Nevada that included Beulah. There was a listing, all right, for Beulah Public Library; he wrote down the address. Also listed was a single Mitchell — David M. — but it was in a town fifty miles away. He copied it down anyway, even though Janet Mitchell had almost certainly been a fictitious name.
Aimlessly he flipped through the yellow pages. Half a dozen businesses carried Beulah addresses; one was a mining supply outfit. This led him to the library stacks and a handful of Nevada guidebooks and history texts. Not too much in any of them about Beulah. The town had come into existence in the late 1880s, as a supply point from which mule teams had hauled machinery and tools and food to mines in the surrounding hills. One of its founders had named it after a favorite mule. Twice in the early years of the century it had come close to dying, when the gold-bearing veins in the mines petered out and they were abandoned. During World War II a tungsten find at nearby Black Mountain breathed new life into it; and in the fifties the U.S. Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission had begun operating hush-hush government installations in the general vicinity, one of the areas where the controversial open-air atomic bomb tests were conducted. The tungsten mine was still operating, as was a large gypsum mine in the Montezuma range to the west. The town’s population had remained more or less stable for the past fifty-plus years, partly because of the producing mines, the government installations, and desert-springs cattle ranches, and chiefly because it was situated on Highway 95, the main road between Tonopah and Las Vegas, with close access to Death Valley and the high-desert country along the eastern slopes of the Sierras.
So much for Beulah. So much for the possibilities.
Now what?
Harvey Sitwell resembled nothing so much as a bulldog, particularly when he frowned. There was no sign of a frown on Monday morning; his round face was cheerful, almost serene, which probably meant that for a change he’d broken a hundred in his Sunday foursome at Harding Park.
“Three weeks early?” he said in response to Messenger’s request. “How come, Jim?”
“I’d just like to get away sooner, that’s all. Truth is, I’m feeling a little burned out and I can use some R and R.”
“What’s your plan? Lie on a beach somewhere?”
“No. I thought I’d go to the desert.”
“Desert? Which one?”
“Down around Death Valley. I’ve always wanted to visit that part of the state and it shouldn’t be too hot this time of year.”
“No offense, but I can think of better places for R and R.”
“Well, I doubt if I’ll spend the whole two weeks in Death Valley.”
“Vegas, eh?”
“It’s only a few hundred miles farther.”
“I wouldn’t mind a week in Vegas myself. You’re not much of a gambler, though, are you?”
“Haven’t been, no,” Messenger said. “But I’ve been thinking that I need a little something to spice up my life.”
“Just stay clear of the crap tables,” Sitwell advised. “I blew nine hundred bucks on one in Vegas twenty years ago. Madge still brings it up now and then, when she’s pissed at me.”
“I’ll do that. Blackjack’s the only game I know.”
“Only game worth playing. Better odds.”
“So what do you think, Harvey? Can we rearrange my schedule?”
“Well, I don’t know.” Sitwell leaned back, interlaced pudgy fingers across his paunch: his thinking pose. “It’s a fairly slow time of year, no question of that. What shape are your accounts in?”
“Good. Nearly current on all of them.”
“How long would it take to bring everything up to date?”
“A week, if I put in some overtime and work into the weekend.”
“And you’d want to leave when?”
“Next Sunday. Monday at the latest.”
Sitwell considered a while longer. Then he popped his chair forward and showed his magnanimous grin — the one he seldom used when you were asking for a raise, and never when the subject was a higher slot in the firm.
“From what I hear,” he said, “Death Valley’s an interesting place. Let me know what you think of it, Jim... when you come back to work two weeks from next Monday.”
5
He left the city early Sunday morning and spent two full days on the drive to Beulah, Nevada. Taking his time, enjoying the scenery and the bagful of jazz cassettes he’d brought along for company. There was no hurry. This wasn’t just some quixotic adventure; it was a kind of healing vacation. Burned out and in need of R and R, just as he’d told Harvey Sitwell. A day in Beulah, at the most two, and then no matter what he found out he’d be free of Ms. Lonesome once and for all.
His route the first day was up through Yosemite, then down Highway 395 past Mono Lake and Mammoth Lakes to Bishop. The second day he took the desert highway from Lone Pine across the Panamint Mountains into Death Valley. Hot there, but not so hot that his Subaru’s air-conditioning had to be cranked up high. Sparse traffic, too. For long stretches it was as if he had the barren distances all to himself.
He’d heard it said that people are seldom indifferent to Death Valley; that you have one of two distinct reactions to it. Either you find it unsettling — endless miles of dead, sun-blasted landscape, where on windless days the utter absence of sound is so acute it creates a painful pressure against the eardrums. Or it strikes you as an almost mystical place — a living rather than a dead one — of majestic vistas and stark natural beauty. In the two hours he spent crossing the bowl of it, his reaction was overwhelmingly the latter. The monument both awed and stimulated him — so much so that two-thirds of the way into the Funeral Mountains that made up the northeastern boundary, he stopped and stood for a long while in the shade of an outcrop, looking out over the valley floor, watching the colors of rock and sand hills and salt flats change subtly with the inching shift of the sun. When he got back into the car, it was with reluctance. This was a good place for Jim Messenger, one he would return to. Its vast empty spaces dwarfed his problems, made them insignificant and therefore more tolerable.