Gods Without Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

There were whole junk towns, San this and San that, fuck all to them except concrete: concrete boxes to live in, concrete lots in front of concrete malls for all the little junk people to go and buy things. He was happy to pass through withoutstopping, to see those places as blurs by the side of the highway. A water tower, a wall painted with the tiger crest of some high-school sports team. He didn’t care that his phone was ringing every few minutes. He didn’t care the radio had nothing on it but Bible preachers and dinner jazz. The road was white as a bone, the sky was airbrushed blue, and he was on his way to the emptiest square on the map. Nothing mattered except keeping it tight, slotting into a space between speeding cars, peeling off at a junction, swinging round and over and under and back, leaving disaster far behind.
    How long did he drive for? Three, maybe four hours. The car didn’t have air-conditioning and the wind blasting through the open window was hot and gritty. His brain was starting to sizzle in his skull like an egg in a pan, so he pulled in at a petrol station, stuck another sixty dollars into the tank and bought a big jug of water, most of which he poured over his head. As his poor swollen gray cells relaxed back to their normal size, he looked at the phone. Eleven missed calls. Several from Terry, a couple from Jimmy, even one from Noah. He didn’t bother listening to the messages.
    Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t about the band. The only person he wanted to hear from was Anouk. He willed the phone to ring again, for her number to appear on the screen.
    Call me, babe.
    Come and get me.
    The gaps between the junk towns grew bigger. Soon the only signs of life were rows of giant white wind turbines and billboards advertising casino resorts. An outlet mall rose up at the roadside like a mirage. Then nothing. Miles of rock and scrubby bushes. Eventually the light began to fade. Sparks were darting about at the edges of his vision, little comets he kept mistaking for overtaking cars or bats flying towards the windscreen. He was coming into a town whose name he hadn’t caught when he saw a motel sign. There were dozens of these shabby places along the route. Desert this and palm that. This one was called the
Drop Inn
. He was too tired to go any farther.
    Reception was no bigger than a cupboard, a little box with a desk, a bell, a rack of postcards and a clattering screen door. The woman whoemerged from the back room had bigger hair than he’d seen on a real person since he was thirteen and found his mum’s cache of eighties workout videos. She was wearing a purple jumpsuit, which might have been hot (or at least ironic) on a twenty-year-old, but on her it was sort of sad, an outfit fixed at the fashion moment when its wearer last felt beautiful. He couldn’t tell how old she was. Forty-five? Her mouth had little lines round it. When she wasn’t talking, it shaped itself into a tired grimace, as if she’d spent too much of her life saying things she didn’t mean.
    She told him to call her Dawn and insisted on giving him the full tour. He said he was tired, hoping she’d just give him the room key, but she was having none of it. She chattered away as if he was the most exciting visitor she’d had in months (which might have been true), pointing out all the details, the “touches.” The “rec room” had a coffee machine, a shelf of dog-eared books and a board with takeaway menus pinned to it. Outside, the “landscaping” consisted of a few flowering bushes poking up out of the dust, sheltering some little plaster foxes and bunnies. All the animals were painted purple. The corrugated-iron fence which screened the kidney-shaped pool was purple too. So were the fraying covers on the loungers, the doors to the rooms and the tiles sunk into the dirt to make a border for the concrete paths. “We turn the spa pool on between five-thirty and ten,” she told him, as if this was information