‘None taken,’ Tom muttered.
‘Mind you,’ the sergeant continued, ‘that only goes so far as the next thou’ clicks — after that you’ll be in striking distance of the Tontines.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Anything can go down there. Bloody anything.’
Tom laughed as well, in a manner that he hoped suggested shrewd understanding.
The sergeant patted one of the rifles. ‘Galil,’ he remarked. ‘Nice piece. Bing-bongs down south favour them — we’ve got a few too. Two-stage trigger’s a bit of a non-starter; still, whack in a box, put it on fully auto’, and you can take out those black bastards before they get in too close, yeah.’
The sergeant flicked a finger to his shiny origami cap and sidled away to join his colleagues at the checkpoint. Then he turned back. ‘ ’Course, you’ve gotta handgun, yeah?’
‘You heard that, did you?’ Tom asked Prentice, after they had been waved through, and the SUV was rollicking once more along Route 1.
‘Oh, yes, old chap,’ he replied.
Struck by Prentice’s self-satisfied tone, Tom glanced over at him. He was holding an automatic pistol. Agitated, Tom looked at the highway, then back at the gun. It appeared quite alien in Prentice’s soft hand: a space-blaster hefted by a clerk. The automatic had crude, functional lines: rectangular barrel, larger rectangle for the stock. His yellow finger rubbed the trigger guard, then poked inside it and flicked the steel curlicue of the trigger itself.
‘I hope that fucking thing is on safety,’ Tom snapped.
‘ ’Course it is, old chap.’ Prentice spoke with dreamy self-absorption. ‘D’you take me for a moron?’
‘Where’d you get it from? D’you know how to use it properly? Why didn’t you tell me you had it? You could’ve gotten us arrested.’
These remarks ricocheted in the smoky interior of the car. As Tom understood it, handguns were an anathema to Prentice’s countrymen; it hardly seemed likely that he could handle one competently.
Prentice went on titivating the trigger, and when he replied it was with an air of erotic reverie. ‘Honestly, Brodzin-ski, I didn’t take you for such a nervous ninny. There’s nothing illegal about carrying a handgun in these parts — anyone with any sense does. If you weren’t quite so wrapped up in yourself, you’d’ve taken the trouble to assess the security situation a little more thoroughly.’
‘Fuck that,’ Tom spat. ‘Do you know how to use the thing?’
‘It’s my wife’s cousin’s.’ Prentice raised the automatic to his furtive mouth; for a second it seemed he was going to kiss the barrel. ‘I brought it with me from down south; even in Vance you never know when some buck bing-bong might run amok, try and rape your lady.’
Tom yanked the wheel and jabbed the brake pedal. The SUV slewed, then jumped over the ridge of earth at the side of the highway. They came to a halt. Tom rounded on Prentice: ‘Do you know how to use it? By which I mean to say: have you ever actually fired that gun, you fucking poseur?’
For moments there was shocked silence, then the flies, which had been hypnotized by the thrust of glassy hardness against their hairy feet, began to flit.
Prentice cleared his throat. ‘Eurgh-ahem, well, now you come to mention it, Brodzinski, no, I haven’t fired it, as such, although I do have a perfectly good understanding of it as a weapon. It’s a Browning BDM. It has a fifteen-shot magazine, nine-millimetre calibre. This toggle here’ — he fiddled with the stock — ‘switches it to “revolver mode”. .’
Tom wasn’t listening. He slammed the SUV into gear, and it scrambled back on to the blacktop. He didn’t speak until they were humming along.
‘Put it away, Prentice,’ he said. ‘Put it away. Till we know how to fire the thing it’s just another fucking liability. Put it away, and then. .’ he said, groping for conciliation, ‘when we’ve put some distance between us and that, um, incident, we’ll find a quiet spot where we can practise with it and the rifles. OK by you?’
Prentice signalled his assent by withdrawing the magazine from the automatic. With great deliberation he placed it, together with the gun, in the glove compartment.
* * *
The SUV hummed on across the interminable desert. The heat spiralled; the men sweated. Prentice rolled down his fly screen. The landscape, which, since they left the road stop that morning had been intimidatingly featureless, now began imperceptibly to alter, slowly becoming threatening, and then downright scary.
The wavering silhouettes of the mesas on the far northern horizon declined. The bled, absorbing their bulk, buckled and then broke up. Deep furrows appeared in its surface, gathered, then consolidated into severe wadis. The colours went from bright to lurid: rusty reds flared scarlet, subtle sable sands became wastes of pus-yellow dirt. The salt pans’ mineral glitter intensified, bluer and bluer.
With each cigarette Prentice lit, Tom felt his own desire for nicotine rise up his gorge. He swallowed it down with pride. In his self-denial lay his strength, his probity, his — Tom blanched at the phrase, yet embraced it — moral fibre.
The glare lasered through Tom’s Polaroid sunglasses. He could feel his skin tighten, his blistering lips flake. He resolved to buy better glasses, more sun block and moisturizer, as soon as they reached a decent drugstore.
At least the badlands hid the burned-out vehicles. Route 1 maintained its arrow-straight westerly flight, over embankments and through cuttings, while the car carrion was hidden in hollows: ragged metal obscured by ragged rocks, its paintwork camouflaged by the desert’s own deceptive bends. Tom knew that they would never see the ragged rascals coming.
They drove fast for fifty, a hundred, three hundred klicks. It was well after noon, when Prentice — adopting the wheedling, infantile tone that made his requests sound like ‘Are we nearly there, yet?’ — broke the silence. ‘Um,’ he ventured. ‘I’m awfully peckish, Brodzinski, what say we pull over for a picnic?’
‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘Why not? Picnic and pot-shots, eh, Prentice? Just the ticket, old boy.’
They made camp in the bed of a deep, angular wadi that Tom had negotiated the SUV carefully into. They were only a few hundred yards off the road, yet completely hidden from it by bluffs streaked purple with glittering mineral deposits.
Prentice fussed about like an old maid. From the pile of trash that had accumulated on the back seat of the SUV he retrieved a square of whitish cotton that he spread on a flat rock. He found the sandwiches Tom had bought during his night-time provisioning and arranged them, together with two bottles of mineral water, on top of the cloth.
Tom said listlessly: ‘Shrimp cocktail or coriander chicken, Prentice? The choice is yours.’
Prentice unsealed the cellophane pouch of the shrimp cocktail sandwich and recoiled from the smell. Then he dutifully commenced chomping.
Tom took his time, feigning picnicking leisure. He raised one of the hot water bottles to his chapped lips, then held it away so he could scrutinize its label. ‘Deep in the desert wastes of the Western Province,’ the copywriter had written, shivering in a smoked-glass fridgidaire in Capital City, ‘Lake Mulgrene stretches for a thousand kilometres across the land, a crystalline expanse of health, purity and hydrolytic balance.
‘Here, the Entreati people make their winter encampments, on the shores of what they call “The Great Mirror of God’s Face”. And, employing technology perfected throughout millennia, they refine and distil the precious fluid you are about to imbibe. They call it entw’yo-na-heemo, “The Tears of Paradise”. We call it, quite simply, Mulgrene Mineral Water — because we know you like it straight.’