The Hollow Man

In This Valley of Dying Stars

Bremen was walking along the edge of the desert when the police car pulled up alongside him on the county road. There was no other traffic, so the brown-and-white vehicle moved at his walking pace for a moment. Bremen glanced once at the lone officer in the car—a square, sun-leathered face, oversized mirrored sunglasses—and then he looked back at his feet, careful not to step on any of the yucca plants or small cacti on the desert floor.

The police car pulled ahead fifty feet, turned onto the shoulder of the asphalt road with a small cloud of dust, and braked to a stop. The officer stepped out, unbuckled a strap over his revolver, and stood by the driver’s side of the car, his mirrored glasses reflecting Bremen’s slow approach. Bremen decided that the man was not a state highway patrolman, but some sort of county mountie.

“Come here,” ordered the officer.

Bremen stopped, still six feet out into the desert. “Why?”

“Get your ass over here,” said the cop, his voice still flat and low. His hand was on the grip of the revolver now.

Bremen held his own hands out, palms visible in a gesture of both acquiescence and conciliation. Also, he wanted the cop to see that his hands were empty. Bremen’s oversized Salvation Army sneakers made small sounds on the soft asphalt as he came around the rear of the patrol car. A mile ahead on the empty road, heat waves rippled and broiled above a mirage of water on tarmac.

“Assume the position,” said the officer, standing back now and gesturing toward the car’s trunk.

Bremen stood and blinked a moment, not willing to show the cop that he understood the term too readily. The cop took another step back, gestured impatiently toward the lid of the trunk, and removed his revolver from the holster.

Bremen leaned forward, moved his legs a bit farther apart, and rested his palms on the trunk. The metal was hot and he had to lift his fingers like a pianist poised to begin.

The cop stepped forward and, using only his left hand, quickly patted down Bremen’s left side. “Don’t move,” said the officer. He shifted position slightly and used the same hand to pat Bremen’s right side. Bremen could feel the presence of the loaded revolver behind him and the tension in the cop’s body, ready to spring back if Bremen whirled. Instead Bremen continued leaning on the car while the officer stepped back four paces.

“Turn around.”

The policeman still held the pistol, but it was no longer aimed directly at Bremen. “That your car back at the Interstate rest stop?”

Bremen shook his head.

“Seventy-nine Plymouth?” continued the officer. “Colorado tags MHW 751?”

Bremen shook his head again.

The officer’s thin lips twitched ever so slightly. “You don’t seem to have a billfold,” he said. “Any ID? Driver’s license?”

Thinking that another shake of the head might be considered a provocation, Bremen said, “No.”

“Why not?”

Bremen shrugged. He could see his own image in the mirrored glasses—his reed-thin form in the filthy and baggy clothes, khaki shirt torn and unbuttoned now in the heat, his chest pale and shrunken, his face as pale as his chest except for the sunburned nose, cheeks, and forehead. He had paused at that first Colorado gas station minimart to buy a razor and shaving cream, but he’d left both in the trunk of the car. His bare face looked strange to him now, like an old photograph suddenly come upon in an unlikely place.

“Where are you headed?” asked the cop.

“West,” said Bremen, taking care not to shrug again. His voice was very raw.

“Where you coming from?”

Bremen squinted against the glare. A pickup passed them in a roar and cloud of grit, giving him a second. “Salt Lake was the last place I stayed awhile.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jeremy Goldmann,” Bremen said without a pause.

“How’d you get way out here on this county road without a car?”

Bremen made a motion with his hands. “I hitched a ride on an eighteen-wheeler last night. I was sleeping this morning when the guy woke me up and said I had to get out. That was back up the road a ways.”

The officer holstered his pistol, but did not come closer. “Uh-huh. And I bet you don’t even know what county you’re in, do you, Jeremy Goldstein?”

“Goldmann,” said Bremen. He shook his head.

“And you don’t know anything about a stolen car with Colorado plates back at the Interstate rest stop, do you?”

Bremen did not bother shaking his head again.

“Well, this state has laws against vagrancy, Mr. Goldstein.”

Bremen nodded. “I’m not a vagrant, officer. I’m looking for work.”

The officer nodded slightly. “Get in the back seat.”

Through his headache and two-day hangover Bremen had been catching glimmers of the man’s thoughts. Flat certainty that this wimpy-looking beanpole was the car thief who had dumped the Colorado Plymouth back at the rest stop. Probably caught a lift to Exit 239 and hiked down this road in the dark, not knowing that the nearest town along it was another thirty-four miles. “In the back,” he said again.

Bremen sighed and got in the back. There were no door handles back there. The windows had wire mesh rather than glass in them and there was a double-mesh partition between the front seat and back. The gaps in the mesh were so small that Bremen didn’t think that he could get a finger through. It was very hot and the vinyl flooring smelled as if someone had vomited there recently.

The police officer had gotten in the front and was talking on a radio when a Toyota 4×4 that had been headed east pulled to a stop next to them. A woman leaned out her window. “Howdy, Deputy Collins. Got a live one back there?”

“How do, Miz Morgan. He’s not too lively right now.”

The woman peered at Bremen. She had a long thin face with sharp bones angling against skin more sun-beaten than the deputy’s. Her eyes were a color of gray so light as to be almost transparent. Her hair was tied back and seemed to be a dark, not-very-natural red. Bremen guessed her to be in her late forties or early fifties.

But it was not just her appearance that struck him. Bremen had allowed himself to focus on mindtouch, but there was none. The deputy’s thoughts were there … stolid, half-angry, impatient … and Bremen could even sense the neurobabble from far down the highway and even from the interstate eight miles back, but from the woman, nothing. Or, rather, where there should have been the tumbled mélange of impressions, words, and memories, there was only a loud rasping … a sort of neural white noise, as loud as an old electric fan in a small room. Bremen sensed something within or behind that curtain of mindnoise, but the thoughts were as indistinct as shifting figures on a television screen filled with electronic snow.

“Couldn’t be you’re arrestin’ the fellow come to answer my hired-man ad, now are you, Howard?” The woman’s voice was surprisingly deep and very self-assured. There was only a hint of banter in her tone.

The deputy looked up. Bremen saw the sunlight glinting on his glasses as he stared at the woman. The Toyota was higher than the patrol car and the deputy had to lift his head to look at her. “I doubt it, Miz Morgan. This’n is probably the fellow who left a stolen car out to the Interstate late last night. We’ll take him down to the station and send his prints out on the wire.”

Miz Morgan never looked at the deputy. She continued to squint at Bremen. “What’d you say his name was?”

“Goldmann,” said Bremen. “Jeremy Goldmann.”

“Shut up, goddamn you,” snapped the deputy, turning in his seat.

“By God,” said the woman, “that was the name of the man who wrote answering my ad.” Then, to Bremen: “Where’d you say you saw it? In the Denver paper?”

“Salt Lake,” said Bremen. He had not eaten in almost twenty-four hours and his head felt very light after the long walk through the darkness and desert sunrise.

“That’s right. Salt Lake.” She finally looked at the cop. “By God, Howard, you do have my hired man back there. He wrote me last week sayin’ the wages was agreeable to him and sayin’ he was coming out for an interview. Salt Lake. Jeremy Goldmann.”

The deputy swiveled in the front seat, his gunbelt creaking. The radio rasped and crackled while he thought. “You sure the man’s name was Goldmann, Miz Morgan?”

“Sure was. How could I forget a Jew name like that? It sorta tickled me, thinking of a Jewish fella working livestock.”

The deputy tapped the wire mesh. “Well, he’s still probably the one who abandoned the stolen car with Colorado plates.”

The woman edged the Toyota forward a foot so she could stare down at Bremen. “You drive a stolen car here?”

“No, ma’am,” said Bremen, wondering when he’d last called someone “ma’am.” “I hitched a ride and the fellow let me out at the last exit.”

“You tell him you were headed for the Two-M Ranch?” she asked.

Bremen hesitated only a second. “Yes’m.”

She backed the Toyota up a few feet. “Deputy, you got my hired hand back there. He was supposed to be here three days ago. Ask Sheriff Williams if I didn’t say I was waiting for a city fellow to come down to help me with the gelding.”

Howard hesitated. “I don’t doubt you told Garry, Miz Morgan. I just don’t remember nobody mentioning anybody named Goldmann coming.”

“I don’t recollect tellin’ Garry his name,” said the woman. She glanced ahead down the highway as if expecting traffic at any second. There was none. “I don’t recollect it being anybody’s business, to tell you the truth, Howard. Now why don’t you let Mr. Goldmann get in with me so I can interview him properly. Or is there a law against walkin’ along county roads these days?”

Bremen felt Howard’s resolve shifting on uncertain sands. Miz Fayette Morgan was one of the biggest landowners and taxpayers in the county, and Garry—Sheriff Williams—had been out to court her a few times. “I just don’t have a good feeling about this guy,” said Howard, removing his mirrored glasses as if in a tardy gesture of respect toward the lady staring down at him. “I’d feel better if we cleared his name and prints.”

Miz Fayette Morgan’s lips compressed with impatience. “You do that, Howard. In the meantime you’re detaining a citizen who … as far as I can tell … has done nothing more illegal than admit to hitching a ride. If you keep this attitude up, Mr. Goldmann will think that we act like the fat-slob frontier hillbilly hick cops that we see in the movies. Isn’t that right, Mr. Goldmann?”

Bremen said nothing. From somewhere down the county road behind them a truck ground up through gears.

“Make up your mind, Howard,” said Miz Morgan. “I need to get back to the ranch and Mr. Goldmann probably wants to get in touch with his attorney.”

Howard jumped out, released the door from the outside, and was back behind the wheel before the truck came into view a quarter of a mile behind them. The deputy drove off without an apology.

“Get in,” said Miz Fayette Morgan.

Bremen hesitated only a second before going around and climbing up into the Toyota. It was air-conditioned. Miz Morgan cranked up her window and looked at him. This close, Bremen realized how tall she was—at least six-two or six-three unless she was sitting on a stack of phone directories. The truck passed them with a blast of its air horn. Miz Morgan waved at the driver without moving her gaze from Bremen. “You want to know why I told that cargo of cobblers to Howard?” she asked.

Bremen hesitated. He was not sure if he did want to know. At that second he felt a strong urge to get out of the cab and to start walking again.

“I don’t like little assholes who act like big assholes just ’cause they got some authority,” she said. The last word—authority—came out like an obscenity. “ ’Specially when they use that authority to pick on someone who’s got enough troubles, which it looks like you do.”

Bremen set his hand on the door latch, but hesitated. It was at least eight miles back to the interstate and another twenty-some to the nearest town, according to the fuzzy map he’d picked up from the deputy’s thoughts. There would be nothing for Bremen in the town except a possible run-in with Howard. He had kept eighty-five cents after the last gas fill-up in Utah. Not enough to eat with.

“Just tell me one thing,” said the woman. “Did you steal that car Howard was talkin’ about?”

“No.” Bremen’s tone didn’t even convince him. Technically, that’s true, he thought tiredly. Soul Dad was the one who hotwired it. Soul Dad, the tarp village, Denver, the man going home to his daughter … it all seemed light-years and real years away to Bremen. He was very tired, having slept only an hour or two in Utah the day before. The woman’s white-noise mindshield … neuroblock … whatever it was, filled Bremen’s head with static. It blended with the ache from alcohol withdrawal to give him the best escape from the neurobabble he had found in four months.

Even the desert had been no refuge. Even with no people in sight and ranches visible only every four or five miles, hiking across the desert had been like wandering in a vast echo chamber filled with whispers and half-heard shouts. The dark wavelength of thought that Bremen somehow seemed attuned to now evidently had no limitations of distance; the crackling and surge of violence and greed and lust and envy had filled the interstate with mindnoise, had echoed down the empty county road, and had bounced back from the lightening sky to drown Bremen in reflected ugliness.

There had been no escape. At least in the city the closer surges of mindtouch had given him some clarity; being out here was like listening to a thousand radio stations at once, all of them poorly tuned. And now, with the white noise from Miz Fayette Morgan’s mind blanketing him like a sudden desert wind, there was a certain peace.

“… if you want it,” the woman was saying.

Bremen shook himself into wakefulness. He was so tired and strung out that the late-morning sunlight coming through the tinted windshield of the Toyota seemed to flow like syrup across him, the woman, the black upholstery.… “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

Miz Morgan showed her impatient smile. “I said, you can come back to the ranch and try out for that position if you want to. I do need a hired hand. The fella who wrote to me from Denver never showed.”

“Yes,” said Bremen, nodding. Each time his chin came down it wanted to stay down. He struggled to keep his eyes open. “Yes, I’d like to try. But I don’t know anything about—”

“Name like Goldmann, I wouldn’t think so,” said Miz Morgan with a flicker of a grin. She gunned the Toyota around in a tight turn that bounced up onto the desert sand and then back on tarmac, accelerating toward the west and the Two-M Ranch somewhere out beyond the heat ripples and mirages that floated like phantom curtains ahead of them.