He walked under it, eyes on the hook.
Wheelruts in sandy scrub showed the way. Horses had been along this route too, recently.
A smell tickled in his nose, triggering salivary glands. Leech hadn’t had a Big Mac in days. He unwound the scarf from his head and knotted it around his neck. From beside the road, he picked a dungball, skin baked hard as a gob-stopper. He ate it like an apple. Inside, it was moist. He spat out strands of grass.
He felt the vibrations, before he heard the motors.
Several vehicles, engines exposed like sit-astride mowers, bumping over rough terrain on balloon tyres. Fuel emissions belching from mortar-like tubes. Girls yelping with a fairground Dodg’em thrill.
He stood still, waiting.
The first dune buggy appeared, leaping over an incline like a roaring cat, landing awkwardly, squirming in dirt as its wheels aligned, then heading towards him in a charge. A teenage girl in a denim halter-top drove, struggling with the wheel, blonde hair streaming, a bruise on her forehead. Standing like a tank commander in the front passenger seat, hands on the roll-bar, was an undersized, big-eared man with a middling crop of beard, long hair bound in a bandanna. He wore ragged jeans and a too-big combat jacket. On a rosary around his scraggy neck was strung an Iron Cross, the Pour le Mérite and a rhinestone-studded swastika. He signalled vainly with a set of binoculars (one lens broken), then kicked his chauffeuse to get her attention.
The buggy squiggled in the track and halted in front of Leech.
Another zoomed out of long grass, driven by an intense young man, passengered by three messy girls. A third was around somewhere, to judge from the noise and the gasoline smell.
Leech tossed aside his unfinished meal.
“You must be hungry, pilgrim,” said the commander.
“Not now.”
The commander flashed a grin, briefly showing sharp, bad teeth, hollowing his cheeks, emphasising his eyes. Leech recognised the wet gaze of a man who has spent time practising his stares. Long, hard jail years looking into a mirror, plumbing black depths.
“Welcome to Charlie Country,” said his driver.
Leech met the man’s look. Charlie’s welcome.
Seconds—a minute?—passed. Neither had a weapon, but this was a gunfighters’ eye-lock, a probing and a testing, will playfully thrown up against a wall, bouncing back with surprising ferocity.
Leech was almost amused by the Charlie’s presumption. Despite his hippie aspect, he was ten years older than the kids—well into hard thirties, at once leathery and shifty, a convict confident the bulls can’t hang a jailyard shivving at his cell-door, an arrested grown-up settling for status as an idol for children ignored by adults. The rest of his tribe looked to their jefé, awaiting orders.
Charlie Country. In Vietnam, that might have meant something.
In the end, something sparked. Charlie raised one hand, open, beside his face. He made a monocle of his thumb and forefinger, three other fingers splayed like a coxcomb.
In Britain, the gesture was associated with Patrick McGoohan’s “Be seeing you” on The Prisoner. Leech returned the salute, completing it by closing his hand into a fist.
“What’s that all about?” whined his driver.
Not taking his eyes off Leech, Charlie said, “Sign of the fish, Sadie.”
The girl shrugged, no wiser.
“Before the crucifix became the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity, Jesus’ early followers greeted each other with the sign of the fish,” Leech told them. “His first disciples were net-folk, remember. ‘I will make you fishers of men.’ Originally, the Galilean came as a lakeside spirit. He could walk on water, turn water to wine. He had command over fish, multiplying them to feed the five thousand. The wounds in his side might have been gills.”
“Like a professor he speaks,” said the driver of the second buggy.
“Or Terence Stamp,” said a girl. “Are you British?”
Leech conceded that he was.
“You’re a long way from Carnaby Street, Mr. Fish.”
As a matter of fact, Leech owned quite a bit of that thoroughfare. He did not volunteer the information.
“Is he The One Who Will...?” began Charlie’s driver, cut off with a gesture.
“Maybe, maybe not. One sign is a start, but that’s all it is. A man can easily make a sign.”
Leech showed his open hands, like a magician before a trick.
“Let’s take you to Old Lady Marsh,” said Charlie. “She’ll have a thing or two to say. You’ll like her. She was in pictures, a long time ago. Sleeping partner in the Ranch. You might call her the Family’s spiritual advisor.”
“Marsh,” said Leech. “Yes, that’s the name. Thank you, Charles.”
“Hop into Unit Number Two. Squeaky, hustle down to make room for the gent. You can get back to the bunkhouse on your own two legs. Do you good.”
A sour-faced girl crawled off the buggy. Barefoot, she looked at the flint-studded scrub as if about to complain, then thought better of it.
“Are you waitin’ on an engraved invitation, Mr. Fish?”
Leech climbed into the passenger’s seat, displacing two girls who shoved themselves back, clinging to the overhead bar, fitting their legs in behind the seat, plopping bottoms on orange-painted metal fixtures. To judge from the squealing, the metal was hot as griddles.
“You are comfortable?” asked the kid in the driver’s seat.
Leech nodded.
“Cool,” he said, jamming the ignition. “I’m Constant. My accent, it is German.”
The young man’s blond hair was held by a beaded leather headband. Leech had a glimpse of an earnest schoolboy in East Berlin, poring over Karl May’s books about Winnetou the Warrior and Old Shatterhand, vowing that he would be a blood brother to the Apache in the West of the Teuton Soul.
Constant did a tight turn, calculated to show off, and drove off the track, bumping onto an irregular slope, pitting gears against gravity. Charlie kicked Sadie the chauffeuse, who did her best to follow.
Leech looked back. Atop the slope, ‘Squeaky’ stood forlorn, hair stringy, faded dress above her scabby knees.
“You will respect the way Charlie has this place ordered,” said Constant. “He is the Cat That Has Got the Cream.”
The buggies roared down through a culvert, overleaping obstacles. One of the girls thumped her nose against the roll-bar. Her blood spotted Leech’s scarf. He took it off and pressed the spots to his tongue.
Images fizzed. Blood on a wall. Words in the blood.
HEALTER SKELTER
He shook the images from his mind.
Emerging from the culvert, the buggies burst into a clearing and circled, scattering a knot of people who’d been conferring, raising a ruckus in a corral of horses which neighed in panic, spitting up dirt and dust.
Leech saw two men locked in a wrestling hold, the bloated quarter-century-on sequel to the Wolf Man pushed against a wooden fence by a filled-out remnant of Riff of the Jets. Riff wore biker denims and orange-lensed glasses. He had a chain wrapped around the neck of the sagging lycanthrope.
The buggies halted, engines droning down and sputtering.
* * *
A man in a cowboy hat angrily shouted “Cut, cut, cut!”
Another man, in a black shirt and eyeshade, insisted “No, no, no, Al, we can use it, keep shooting. We can work round it. Film is money.”
Al, the director, swatted the insister with his hat.
“Here on the Ranch, they make the motion pictures,” said Constant.
Leech had guessed as much. A posse of stuntmen had been chasing outlaws all over this country since the Silents. Every rock had been filmed so often that the stone soul was stripped away.
Hoppy and Gene and Rinty and Rex were gone. Trigger was stuffed and mounted. The lights had come up and the audience fled home to the goggle box. The only Westerns that got shot these days were skin-flicks in chaps or slo-mo massacres, another sign of impending apocalypse.