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yelling, “Don’t put me down there with him! Let me up!”
    “Mr. Rawlins.” A little mouse was eating at my fingers. “Mr. Rawlins?”
    When I opened my eyes I saw Miss Eto pushing a scrap of paper at me.
    “I got it.” She was smiling. I smiled too because she had saved me from the dream.
    “He lives in Mecca,” she said.
    “Where?”
    “Mecca. It’s out around Joshua Tree National Monument. I don’t know if he lives in the town. I don’t think so. His address is RFD.”
    “How’d you get it?”
    “I called the navy in San Diego and told them that our letters come back from down there. I said that we needed to write to him. Then they said that if he quit because of medical problems maybe I could get the information from Washington or from the insurance company they use—Patriot Trust in San Diego.” She smiled. “I knew that with Washington you have to work through the mail. But I talked to a nice lady at Patriot.”
    “Mm,” I said like a barroom intellectual. “Thanks, Miss Eto.” I had the strange urge to kiss the tiny woman. Maybe she even leaned toward me a shade. But kissing wasn’t in the program between us. I shook her hand, gave her a quick military nod, and marched out of there.
     
     
    THERE WAS STILL SPACE in southern California in those days. The desert was an old place inhabited by people who were original Californians. Desert men and women in pickup trucks stopping at diners that had bottomless cups of coffee for a nickel, or at the occasional oasis where piped-in water fed date palms and lush flowering cacti. Railroad tracks ran along the side of the flimsy ribbon of a highway and the trains went so fast that they seemed to come barreling out of nowhere and then, just as fast, they were gone.
    Civilization was scant out there. You drove for hours seeing nobody and nothing. The air was thin and the only water for miles around was in the three glass jugs on the seat next to me in the car. I refilled all three in Mecca’s sole gas station.
     
     
    THE POSTAL CLERK didn’t know where Marlon lived but she said that he got his mail at a general store about forty miles away.
    “He told me once,” the jowly white woman said, “that he just had one’a them tar shacks. You mostly got yer tar shacks up to the north. You could just take the road out that way and ask at the crossroads store. That’s where he picks up his mail. I bet they know right where Mr. Eady lives. An’ if’n they don’t you could just suck down sodas and camp out a couple’a days—he’s bound to show up sooner or later.”
    She wasn’t joking.
    On either side of the road there was nothing for as far as I could see. The nothingness ended in lifeless hills. I had both of the windows open and was through my water supply before I was half the way there. The radio said that it was one hundred and sixteen degrees. My light green pants had turned dark green with sweat. The desert is like the worst felon in San Quentin. It’s a senseless killer barren of any sign of intelligence.
    But the desert is also beautiful. It’s hard to tell at first sight. It stays in the range of the lighter shades. Buff and yellow and gray like a clear sky a minute after sunset. Most life forms are small and hard out there. Tiny little bugs with long legs to keep them off the hot sod or with giant gaudy red claws to fight off a world far larger than them. Once every four or five years it rains enough for little puddles to form. In the mud hump-backed crustacean shrimp, who had reached the end of their evolutionary trek before the first dinosaurs appeared, hatch from pebble-hard eggs. They mate and die quickly. A week later desert blossoms, so tiny that you have to get on your knees to see them, break out everywhere. They’re bright and strawlike; dry and rough because the desert will suck any moisture right away like some insane god pulling the souls out of his children before they’ve had the chance to live.
    I reached the general