To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker—EM Cioran
She throws her duffel bag in the back and I start the truck.
I put it in gear and she slams her door, doesn't bother with the seatbelt.
"I want to show you something if you can wait on those eggs."
Angel looks me up and down.
She says, "Sure."
I start down Main Street practically in a dust storm. When I get to the first intersection, which I know by memory, I stop.
"There's an apple in the glove compartment."
I drive through the intersection.
Angel opens the glove compartment and takes out the apple.
"It's not poison is it?"
"You want me to take the first bite?"
"Nah."
We drive on. Outside of town. Outside of everything. Soon it's just scrub brush and boulders, not even a trailer home in sight. The road turns to dirt.
Angel chews the apple.
"You're not taking me somewhere to rape me, are you?"
"No. Are you scared?"
"A little."
"See in that glove compartment under the AA big book there's a gun. You hold onto that."
She opens the glove compartment and takes out the big blue book. Underneath is a Glock with a giant clip sticking out the handle.
Angel picks it up. She turns it in her hand.
"Is it loaded?"
"Oh yes. Unroll your window and fire a shot."
Angel manually unrolls her window. Awkwardly holds the gun with both hands. Aims it at the road next to the truck. Pulls the trigger.
Bzewntt.
She looks at it like it's magic. It's obviously the first time she's fired a gun.
"You hold onto that, I don't want you to be scared."
She sets the gun in her lap with both hands.
"You're sober?" she says, closing the AA book back in the glove compartment.
"Yeah."
"For how long?"
"Four-thousand one-hundred forty-eight days. So there's no alcohol at the house. I'm sorry if I forgot to list that among the rules."
"It's no problem. My dad was an alcoholic. I get it."
"Do you drink?"
"A little."
"There's a bar in town. I'll show you where it is. Just not at the house and don't come home drunk. I don't want to smell that shit."
"Where are we going?"
"It's just a place I like to go and sit. I'm gonna make you those eggs, don't worry—it's just you never want to miss a view. You never know when you're gonna be cooped up on a bus staring at the back of someone else's seat or otherwise restrained and contained by city life like if you leave me and go to Vegas or something and you're stuck in elevators and hotel rooms and hallways and streets and all that crap. I just want you to see this because it's special to me and I want to see if you're the kind of person who likes a good view or if you're the kind of person who couldn't care less."
"Ok, but eggs. I'm starving. You don't have any more apples?"
"No. View. Then eggs. I promise."
So we drive off in the direction of Wagner Canyon. I pull my truck right up to the edge and I see Angel grip the seat like we're going over.
She gets out without looking at me.
I slam the door and walk along the edge of the canyon.
There's a tiny creek running all the way through its middle. The rest is thorny scrubs and plain grass, some tiny trees.
I kick the dirt.
Angel is standing with her hands in her back pockets, blue stars pointed out over the canyon, my Glock tucked in the front of her jeans.
"What do you think?"
Angel nods.
"Yeah. This is nice. I've never seen anything quite like this."
"Neither have I," I say. "That's why I love coming here so much. Been to Utah—some beautiful canyon lands there—but something about the Dakotas. No one comes here, you know? Too rough for most people. Not people like us, though."
Angel looks at me.
"Settlers came through here, when they were first exploring America. The Natives said, Do not camp here. This is a valley of death. You find another place to stay, etc. Of course the white settlers didn't listen. They stood prob'ly right about where we are now and said, Doesn't that look beautiful? A nice little stream, plenty of green plants we can eat, little white rabbits we can eat. So they unloaded their wagons. Turns out that creek only flows on certain days. Been like that for hundreds of years. There's some kind of natural well system that fills and empties, only lets water through like one day out of six. And those green plants? The leaves on those cute little trees? Poisonous. And that valley is full of snakes. Those settlers didn't give up, though—they said This is our valley, this is where we're gonna live. One by one they died. Last guy left, his name was Wagner. That's why they call this Wagner Canyon."
"What happened to him?"
"He died too."
"How?"
"He shot himself in the face."
Angel turns my Glock in her hand. It gives her such a feeling of freedom. She could shoot me at any time. But I read her at the diner—read her like the Natives read the sky. They can look at the sky and tell you the weather better than a five-day forecast. And that's how I read Angel—like a forecast, like the sky. That gun wasn't protecting her—it was controlling her. She just didn't know it.
"Go ahead and shoot it."
"Where?"
"Out there."
I point into the canyon.
"Is it ok?"
I chuckle.
"There's nothing out there!"
She holds the Glock with two hands and shoots—pwemp pwemp pwemp. Hardly any recoil.
"How many bullets are in the clip?"
"A lot," I say.
"Doesn't law enforcement set limits on the clip sizes for civilians?"
"Do you see any law enforcement out here?"
Angel holds her arms straight and shoots.
A bullet flies across the canyon, hardly losing any altitude.
She lowers the gun.
"What's your name?"
"Matthew."
"Matthew what?"
"Matthew Simple."
"I think you're lying to me about your name," she says, plainly.
"Well I think you're lying to me about yours. It's not Angel. But you have good reason to lie. You just met me. I could be dangerous. You don't want me to be able to use your name to track you down. But I'm an old man compared to you. You'll soon see where I live. What reason would I have to hide my name from you? Anyway, everyone in Pain knows my name is Matthew Simple."
"I just don't trust you—I don't think that's your name."
"Well, Angel..are you an intuitive person?"
"Yes."
"Then I advise you to trust your intuition."
She looks at the ground. Then at the gun. Then back up at me.
I point.
"Get a good look. I don't know how long you're planning on staying in Pain, but I don't get out a lot and if you stay in town, say, five days, we could be at the farm five days—except I'll drive you to the bar if you want—but I want you to have a big place to remember, so you can go there in your mind if you need to, forget you're shoeing horses and smelling pig shit."
The young girl does—she looks out over Wagner Canyon, takes it in.
She looks at me with her thumbs through her belt loops, Glock in her right hand, and I see her eyes—her laughing eyes—eyes that contain a smile without the help of any other feature of her face.
That's what attracted me—the arc of those eyes and the dragonflies within them. She had iridescent wings and honeycomb skin. Her back was strong—her spine—a grown man couldn't break that young thing unless he was completely crazy.
"Did you know that a dragonfly—you know how flies and shit have tons of little facets that give them that panoramic view that makes 'em so hard to kill?" I say.
"Yeah," she says.
"Well a house fly has six-thousand of those facets. But a dragonfly has thirty-thousand—way more than any other insect."
"I'd never try to kill a dragonfly," she says.
And I say, "Let's get back to the house."
Angel and I head to the truck. I see her take one more look over Wagner Canyon—I have no idea why they call it Wagner Canyon, by the way—and she gets in the truck with my Glock across her lap and slams the door.
I drive around the town to avoid any busybodies seeing me carrying my prey to my house. I take Blythe Road, which is nothing but some one-room houses with meth heads and a bike rodeo.
"What's all that junk?" Angel asks.
"To you it's junk. To them it's shit they weld together for the bike rodeo!"
"Fuck is a bike rodeo?"
"It's like jousting, but with custom bikes—bicycles with flame throwers welded onto them and rotating spikes and shit."
"Do they ever kill each other?"
"Not quite, but they try."
I laugh.
"Why is that funny to you, someone almost dying in a bike rodeo?"
" 'Cause that's what they set out to do!! I mean what do you think is gonna happen if you weld a flame thrower to a bicycle."
I keep on laughing.
Angel looks at me skeptically—but it's too late now. If she was gonna be skeptical, the time for that was back in the booth at Betsy's—and she failed that little test.
We go out, and out, and out Blythe Road, and get to my place.
As soon as I pull up in the driveway she says, "Where's the barn?"
I grab the Glock with my left hand and with my right, inject poor Angel with one-hundred milligrams of Benadryl. I put the needle in her left arm through her shirt sleeve and drop the plunger. I don't take the Glock away from her, I just hold it in place, with my finger on the trigger.
Angel looks at me.
"Your name isn't Matthew Simple," she says, as she slips into the well of sedative.
"No."
She falls further down the well. Her hands release their hold on the Glock and I take it from her. I pull the needle out of her arm and keep a hand on her so she doesn't fall over.
"You wanna know my name?"
Angel nods, totally relaxed, almost sleeping.
"It's Matthew Temple. It's a pseudonym. Simple. Temple. Everyone needs a pseudonym. Even you."
Angel nods.
"That's true," she slurs.
"So what's your real name, Angel Blue Stars?"
"It's not Blue Stars."
I reach in her front pocket with two hands and take out her wallet. It's white with a picture of a rainbow unicorn and glitter diamonds all around the edges. It has a zipper. I unzip it. She's got like three dollars. I pull her driver's license out of its sleeve.
"Anna Miller. Lehighton, PA."
"That's where I live," she says.
"No it's not," I tell her. "You live with me now."