The car started up and backed out of the parking space. Jude tried to focus upon the back of Tizzie's head, the top hairs glistening in the beams of an oncoming car.
He felt the fabric of the seat against his cheek and the weight of exhaustion. He wanted nothing more than to sleep for a very long time. In his drunken state, he had a wish-dream — that Tizzie slipped over the divide into the backseat, to hold his head in her lap and stroke his brow and tell him that everything was going to be all right. He didn't really expect it to happen.
Tizzie drove slowly and carefully and was bothered by the glare of headlights from a car behind them. She noticed that it took every turn she took, all the way back up Route 17 to the Best Western. She thought of her fight with Jude earlier. The disquieting thought that the car could be following them had proved him right.
Jude got up early and fought his hangover with two cups of dark coffee, then a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. He borrowed a skeleton key from the front desk, let himself into Tizzie's room and found the car keys on a heap of crumpled bills on top of a dresser. She was deep asleep on her back, one arm bent across her forehead.
Outside, the sky was pink and blue with wisps of clouds. The heat hadn't started up yet.
He took Route 17 south and made the same turn on 260 West and passed the large rock protruding into the road, but this time he continued climbing past the turnoff to the Indian reservation. The road got narrower as it turned steeper and more and more trees dropped away, and huge clumps of tumbleweed collected in the gullies and embankments. He passed through the small town of Cottonwood — a food store, water-pipe outlet and a collection of trailers — and turned left on 89a toward Jerome. Still, the road was going up; in the distance he saw the humped peaks of the Black Hills mountain range.
He waited for that buried sense of familiarity to rise again and take hold of him, but it didn't happen. The landscape — humped hills of green and brown with occasional slashes of red earth — remained unconnected to him. He spotted gray trailings from a mine that had settled on a hillside like an ancient avalanche, and then another and another. The road began making hairpin turns, and the car fishtailed around them. He came to a gully with red tailings, the sign of an old copper mine, and then to a ravine with the frames of log houses.
Then to a sign, which read: ENTERING JEROME and underneath Elevation 5246 and underneath that Founded 1876.
He recalled what he had read about the place: once a thriving copper, silver and gold mine, it had been home to fifteen thousand people at its peak in the early thirties. Then the price of copper had plummeted, and the population had dropped along with it to five thousand souls, mostly miners, drunks, gamblers, ruffians and whores. The miners had worked the old United Verde under Phelps Dodge until the ores were finally exhausted in 1953, and everyone had left. It had turned into a ghost town prone to landslides and sinkholes, but had recently come partly alive when hippies moved in, taking over the old houses and selling trinkets to tourists.
The road dipped to the right and then mounted abruptly, ascending a thousand-foot escarpment. The climb was so steep, his back pressed against the seat. Halfway up, the road deteriorated. The guard barrier was down for long stretches, and rocks and dirt from landfalls spilled out onto it so that he had to slow to a crawl to negotiate the narrow passage between the debris and a sheer drop-off to his left. Once, when the car rode over a pile of dirt and the front wheels rose up, he caught a glimpse of movement in the rearview mirror; it looked like another car behind him on a switchback at the foot of the mountain. He kept one eye on the mirror, searching for it, but it disappeared into an interior ravine. Finally, he reached the top, and as his car swerved onto level ground, he gave a kick to the accelerator so it seemed to land, as if coming off a wave, and before him he saw the shacks and streets of Jerome lying on a plateau.
The main street was cracked and gutted with potholes, but not totally deserted. He could see a half dozen cars and people moving about on the sidewalks. On one side it was lined with storefronts — some closed with rusted signs, metal gates, and shutters hanging by their hinges. But others were open — a pizza parlor, a bar, a coffee shop and a museum. The street doubled back and mounted to a second level, where the wooden structures had settled at odd angles. In the middle was the ancient three-story Central Hotel, the wooden railings on its triple balconies still perfect. Beyond, the road continued.
Jude took the road — out of instinct — driving up the mountain. It turned past leaning and toppled telephone poles and half-finished houses and abandoned shacks, black with age, that were cut into the ridges of the red-scarred earth.
Two more miles, and Jude came to a dirt side road. It was a mile long and ended at a tiny town. He parked the car and locked it, then walked down the center of the single street. No one was around. There was an empty barber shop with its front window broken, weeds growing under the old leather chairs. One whole section of storefronts had collapsed backward like a fallen stage set. Above it, he could see a sudden drop-off obscured by weeds, and then a spectacular view of green valleys and red hills as far as the eye could see.
He stepped inside a dry goods store whose empty windows were streaked with dirt. He walked upon creaking floor planks, and in the half darkness saw rows of empty wooden bins and racks and an old metal cash register decorated with filigree. Dust was everywhere, lying in a thick carpeting, broken only by the zigzag trail of lizard tracks. He stepped outside.
Next door was a bar; a faded sign out front said it had been owned by Thomas J. O'Toole. Here the dust was an inch thick. The bar itself, twenty feet long and chest-high, had rounded holders at the bottom where the brass rail used to be and a faded Western salmon mirror above. He spotted a wooden table upon which rested an uncorked bottle three quarters full of a brown solidified liquid. He left.
Two doors down was a house of faded green clapboards. The front windows were blocked by a sheet of rusted tin held in place with twisted wire. He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The front hall was empty, and there were footsteps in the dusty steps leading upstairs. He entered a side room where yellow-dirty lace curtains still hung. A foot-pedal Singer sewing machine and wooden chair sat in the glow of a large window. An old pair of shoes with turned-up toes lay underneath.
Out back was a wooden porch, its rotting floorboards covered with rocks and slanting precariously toward the escarpment. He decided not to test it and walked back through the house toward the front hall and went upstairs. His feet sank into the carpet of dust and sent tiny clouds billowing against the faded wallpaper. The ceiling was low and the hallway narrow and dark. He looked into the first bedroom. It was largely empty, except for a bookshelf with a dozen old books and a rocker; when he pushed it, the rockers left gashes in the mat of floor dust. The hallway creaked; he thought he heard a sound downstairs and froze for a full minute. He heard nothing more. The second bedroom had a broom, and one corner was swept clean; it contained a soiled mattress, and near it a plate with a candle held in place by melted wax. A rucksack lay at the foot of the mattress, along with an opened copy of Penthouse magazine. It was dated three months ago.
Suddenly, Jude flinched. A sound reached him, far away but loud, a pounding noise that seemed to shake the room. It got louder and louder. At first he thought it was a landslide that was going to bury him alive, but then he recognized the throb of engines. He rushed to the front bedroom and looked down just as the noise turned deafening: a group of motorcycles thundered down the main street, leather jackets flying in the wind, and clouds of dust spewing up behind. There were five or six of them, bulky men spreading their abdomens on the gas tanks, beards and studs and helmets and thick forearms gripping the handlebars. They were gone almost as quickly as they had come, riding off on the road farther up the mountain.