The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes Read Free Book Online Page B

to use that tent. I’ll sleep in the car.”
    He could not find it. Once he stopped the automobile—all its wide tapering body listed—and climbed out, leaving the door open, its sharp edge jammed in the sand. He looked back to the sound of the heavy engine on weeded soil, to the small light burning over the blue blouse, the green silk slacks of the woman. Then, bent double, he stepped in front of the headlights and peered closely at a few square feet of ground, looking for some trace of a house, a piece of wood once shaped by saw, a brick that had burned under the fire of a kiln; as if he expected to find the town or its remnants in a hole at his feet. The cowboy had spoken of it, he himself remembered it and yet, picking up a handful of grit and dust, perhaps she was right.
    “I don’t see it,” he said. The bites itched on his chest and shoulders.
    “I could tell from the highway,” his wife answered. “There weren’t any signs.”
    Though not stopped by barrier—fence, rock or ravine—the automobile was sucked close to the loose and dibbled earth, slowed by the invisible roots of parasite plants stretched like strings across its path, exhausted of speed and air. Camper felt a harsh and lazy magnetism that, foot by foot, might crack its windows, strip it of paint and draw the stuffing from the seats. He watched for something to steer by.
    “You can’t expect to find a town just anywhere,” said his wife.
    And at that moment they were attacked for the second time during the night by snakes. They ran over it. Flat and elongated, driven upon in sleep, it wheeled, rattling from fangs to tail, chased them,caught up with the car, slithered beneath it, raced ahead into the light and reared. The snake tottered, seemed to bounce when it became blind, and, as Camper touched the brake, lunged so that it appeared to have shoulders, smashed its flat pear skull against the solid, curved glass of one headlamp, piercing, thrusting to put out the light.
    “Go back and kill it! Go on, get out of this car!”
    Quickly he drove ahead, reaching one hand through the darkness to quiet her, and saw, hardly above the sands, the railless, short rotten planks of an abandoned sidewalk starting from the desert.
    “I told you, I knew she was still here!”
    Lou put her forehead against the glass.
    She lifted the boy into his left arm, piled his right with towels. In a free hand he clutched the cowhide suitcase.
    “There’s nobody here,” she hissed as they climbed the boot smooth dormitory steps. The rooms, down segregated corridors, were dark, not a light nor single man appeared in the foyer on the walls of which hung pictures—a girl, a horse’s head—torn from magazines. Standing together for a moment on the cold linoleum floor, Camper imagined forty bearded shovelers and forty china mugs stretched along the bare planks of a makeshift table: a silent, before dawn meal.
    The soft, fibreboard walls of the corridor sagged, split at the bottoms. Sand swept across the floor. Camper padded forward, stopped, moved again in his extra wide, sea rotted sandals; behind him the red high heels of the woman cracked.
    “Try that one, Lou,” he whispered, and in a narrow room, screen half ripped from the window, they looked upon a tousled iron bed, a body that slept beneath a raincoat.
    “Here,” he said, “try ‘22’.” The number was splashed on the door in peeling whitewash.
    “Open it yourself!”
    Camper squeezed the rattling glass knob between his fingers, pushed, shielded by all he carried, leaned into the dust and mold. “No,” he whispered, staring a moment, “not this one, either.”
    The lamp, beside a card table with a hole ripped in its center, worked, but the lock catch dangled from the door jamb.
    “Keep the shades down,” he told her after each trip to the car, “there’s no sense letting everyone know we’re here.”
    “Everyone! You got a nerve.” She sat on a campstool, stretched herself, blew down the