Matt was consulting his map. "Only a little farther. Maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes. A half hour at the most."
I groaned. "A half hour?"
He stood, brushing dead leaves off the seat of his pants. "Let's go. The sooner we get there, the sooner we'll be finished."
"What if it's not even the right place?"
"It's the right place. I went over that videotape twenty times."
I forced myself to stand. "All right. Move out."
It figured. The area where Matt thought the tire iron had landed was surrounded by thick, nearly impenetrable bushes, many of then covered with thorns. We jumped over some, slid under others, and a few we just waded through. My shirt and pants now had holes ripped in them.
"You owe me," I said, as we traversed a particularly difficult stretch of ground. I stepped over a monstrous science fiction-looking beetle. "You owe me big time."
He laughed. "I hear you." He grabbed a low tree branch above his head and swung over several entangled manzanita bushes. I followed suit.
"Shit!"
I heard his cry before I landed. I miscalculated, fell on my side, then stood, brushing off dirt.
We were in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by a natural wall of vegetation. In the middle of the clearing stood a makeshift wooden shed.
And on the shed wall, carefully painted in white block letters was a single word:
GIANT
"They found it. The fuckers found it." Matt dropped his shovel. He looked as though he had just been punched in the gut. "I thought for sure we'd be the first ones here."
I didn't want to rub it in, but I had told him so. "I warned you," I said.
He stood in silence, unmoving.
I looked over at the shed, at the white-lettered word- GIANT-and though it was hot out and I was sweating, I felt suddenly cold. There was something about the small crude structure, about its very existence, that seemed creepy, that made me want to jump back over the wall of bushes and head straight down the hill to the car. The fanatic interest and posthumous adulation that surrounded people like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis had always disturbed me, had always made me feel slightly uncomfortable, and the shed before me increased that feeling tenfold. This was not part of a museum or a collection, this was some sort of... shrine.
And the fact that it was obviously homemade, that it was in the middle of nowhere, hidden in an impossible-to-get-to location, intensified my concern.
I did not want to meet up with the fanatic who had put this together.
Matt still stood silently, staring at the shed.
I feigned a bravery I did not feel. "Let's check it out," I said. "Let's see what's in there."
"Okay." He nodded tiredly. "Might as well."
We walked across the short grass covering the clearing and stepped through the open doorway. After the morning brightness outside, it took our eyes a moment to adjust to the
darkness.
Matt's eyes made the transition first. "Jesus . . ." he
breathed.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs were pasted onto the walls of the shed. The pictures were of women, some young, some middle-aged, some old.
All of them were naked.
They were in various poses, and at the bottom of each photo was a signature.
But that was not all.
In the center of the room, embedded in a large square chunk of stone, was the tire iron. The tire iron Dean had thrown. The bottom half of the tool, with its curved chisel end, was sunk deep into the rock. The top half, with its rounded wrench end, stuck straight up. The metal was immaculately polished and showed not a hint of rust.
Obviously someone had been taking care of it.
The chill I'd felt outside returned, magnified.
"Jesus," Matt whispered again. He walked into the center of the room and gingerly fingered the tire iron. "What the hell is this?"
I tried to keep my voice light. "It's what you've been hunting for all morning."
"I know that, dickmeat. I mean, what's this” He gestured around the room.
I shook my head. I had no answer.
He climbed on top of the stone slab and straddled the tire iron. Using both hands, he attempted to pull it out. His face turned red with the effort, the veins on his neck and arms bulged, but the tool would not move.
"You know what this reminds me of?" I asked.
"What?"
"The Sword in the Stone.' You know how all those knights tried for years to pull the sword out of the stone but no one could? And then Arthur pulled it out and became king of England?"
"Yeah."
"Maybe if you pull this out, you'll be the next James Dean."
"If I pull it out, we'll both be rich." He strained again, trying to loosen the unmoving piece of metal. He reached down for his shovel and started chipping at the base of the
tool.
I watched him for a moment, then let my gaze wander back over the photos on the wall.
The nude photos.
I turned. Before me, level with my eyes, was a photograph of a gorgeous redhead lying on a bed, spread-eagled. Her breasts were small but the nipples were gigantic. Her pubic hair proved that the red hair on her head was natural. The-name scrawled across the bottom of the picture was Kim something.
The photograph next to that was taken from behind. A large bald vagina and a small pink anus were clearly visible between the two spread cheeks of the woman's buttocks. Not as visible was her face, blurred in the background and looking out from between her legs. Her name was Debbie.
Next to that was a picture of Julie.
I stared at the photo for a moment, unable to believe what I was seeing, unwilling to believe what I was seeing. Julie, Matt's girlfriend, was standing, her arms at her sides, her legs spread apart, smiling at the camera.
I looked away. The pose wasn't that intimate or that graphic. All I could see were her overdeveloped breasts and the thick triangle of dark brown pubic hair between her legs. But I did not like looking at my friend's girlfriend naked. It seemed obscene somehow, my viewing of the photo an invasion of their privacy.
Matt was still trying to pull the lug wrench out of the stone.
I debated with myself whether I should tell him. On the one hand, he was my friend, my best friend, and I didn't want to see him hurt. On the other hand, this was something he should know about, something he would want to know about, no matter how unpleasant it was, and if I were really his friend I would tell him. I cleared my throat. "Matt?" "What?" He did not even bother to look up. "There's something here you gotta see." "What is it?"
I took a deep breath. "Julie."
He stopped yanking on the tire iron and jumped off the stone. All the color had drained out of his face. "What are you ... ? You're not serious." I pointed at the photo.
He stared at the picture, then looked at the surrounding snapshots. He took a deep breath, then reached out and grabbed the photo of Julie, ripping it off the wall. Beneath her photo was another, older picture of a nude girl with a 1960s beehive hairdo.
"Fuck," he said quietly. He began tearing Julie's photo into tiny pieces, letting the pieces fall onto the dirt. There were tears in his eyes. "Fuck," he repeated.
I knew what he was feeling, but I tried to smooth it over. "Maybe she-"
He turned on me. "Maybe she what? How can you explain this, huh? What possible rational explanation could there be?"
I shook my head. There was nothing I could say.
A tear rolled down his cheek. "Fuck," he said, and the word caught in his throat.
I felt even worse now. I'd never seen Matt cry before, and somehow the sight of that was more disturbing, more intrusive, than having seen Julie naked. I felt as though I should reassure him, touch his shoulder, clap a hand on his back ... something. But I had never done that before and did not know how to go about it, so I stepped out of the shed, leaving him alone with his pain. If I couldn't give him comfort, I could at least give him privacy.