Quicksilver(11)

|?5?|

The federal highway led to a state route, and the state route led to a county lane that brought me to the long approach road to Sweetwater Flying F Ranch. Two stone columns supported a beam that overhung the entrance. To the beam was fixed a sun-faded sign featuring the name of the ranch and a silhouette of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. In the distance, the drab gray buildings appeared to have swaybacked roofs and canted walls. The blacktop driveway was fissured, crumbling at the edges. Beside one of the entrance columns lay two long-dead coyotes, now nothing but skeletons and dust-matted fur; maybe they had been shot by some idiot or succumbed to disease, or maybe they had died of boredom.

Sweetwater Flying F Ranch creeped me out. It looked like a place where a bargain-basement nut-cult leader like Charles Manson would hole up with a raggedy band of followers who practiced their stabbing techniques on kittens while waiting for some poor fool to knock on the door.

A little less than an hour remained before sunset. I didn’t want to be here in the dark.

Although I didn’t have a clue why I was here in daylight, I was nonetheless pulled toward the ranch by a power as irresistible as the sun and moon that attract the tides of the seas. I drove between the stone columns and under the decaying sign.

Time and a lack of maintenance had done to this place what a force-five hurricane might have done to a four-mast galleon in the days of sailing ships. The stone-and-stucco main building, which once no doubt housed a restaurant and bar and various public rooms, must have been a handsome single-story structure in its time, but it was battered and breached; sand had drifted against its walls so that one end of it was partly buried in the manner of a shipwreck that had washed up on a beach. The wind had stacked tumbleweed against one wall, where it clung like enormous barnacles. The bungalows, where guests evidently stayed, and the stables were in worse condition than the primary building.

At the extreme point of the second loop of the figure-eight service road stood an immense barn that most likely had once been traditional red but was now a rusty pink. The previously convex roof had assumed the concave form of a saddle, and the substrate had shed perhaps half the shingles that had been fixed to it.

Nothing about the barn suggested that it contained anything of interest. I cruised past, heading back to the other buildings. As I approached the end of the secondary loop, instead of continuing into the primary loop, I found myself turning left, into the lane I had just traveled. With the barn ahead of me once more, I pressed the accelerator.

Magnetism.

This was not like the pull I had felt that led me to the gold coin, not akin to the gentle but insistent force the moon exerts on tides. I felt as if the barn was the world’s largest electromagnet and I was but a helpless scrap of iron. The attraction wasn’t only physical, but also powerfully emotional. I wanted more than anything to be in that barn, desired it as a maniacal gambler might desire a seat at a gaming table, as a starving glutton might desperately fling himself at a buffet table. Being in that barn was essential, an urgent necessity, the reason I had been born, so if I didn’t get into that barn right now, if I didn’t penetrate those walls, I would have no reason to exist. Maybe this sounds like passion, a thrilling libidinous desire, but just keep in mind that the object of my lust was a barn. As I pressed the accelerator to the floorboard, terror rather than testosterone flooded through me.

I aimed for the big rolling door, through which once must have passed horse-drawn wagons bearing dudes and dudettes headed out on many a quaint hayride. I won’t say that the engine of my Toyota was screaming; that sad heap was too old and tired to scream, but it squealed like a pig on the slaughterhouse ramp, as if it knew what was about to happen to it. You can probably figure out that I didn’t die from the impact, but I certainly expected to, and yet my foot would not relent from the gas pedal. If I’d had a longer stretch of pavement, I might have passed a hundred miles per hour by the time of impact, but I was going only fifty-eight.

There’s an old movie about a guy’s severed hand that is imbued with supernatural life and crawls around with evil intentions. Although it’s not an Oscar-worthy production, I was reminded of it in that moment because my stupid foot, though still attached to my leg, seemed to possess a mind of its own. In spite of the fact it had committed me to a headlong collision with the barn, at the last second it jumped from the accelerator to the brake.

Evidently, the big plank door had suffered from years of dry rot or some such, for it exploded into dust and spongy chunks and thousands of prickly splinters. Because my traitorous foot jammed the brake down hard, the Toyota fishtailed as it plowed into the barn. A guy in there heard me coming and drew his gun and squeezed off a round that blew out the back window on the passenger side just before the rear fender clipped him so hard that he tumbled off his feet. As the Toyota completed a full turn in place, as if it were a carousel, another guy came into view, a pistol in a two-handed grip. The car swung to a stop. He put two rounds through the windshield. The safety glass dissolved. This time I was the master of my foot when I stomped on the accelerator.

As you must know by now, I am not an angry person, and neither am I given to violence when I am in full control of my extremities. However, there is only so much abuse a person can endure in one day before he goes John Wick on his tormentors. I didn’t build up a lot of speed in the fifteen feet that separated me from this second shooter, but I hit him hard enough to lift him off his feet and carry him across the barn and slam him into a wall that was not eaten with the same dry rot as the door.