Carolina Crimes

by Nora Gaskin Esthimer

  “Yes, ma’am. Of course. Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy. Please respond. You need to increase altitude, over.”

  Silicone gloves were mandatory to keep moisture and dirt from her prosthetic hand’s parts and electrical connections. Although her BeBionic came with many flesh-colored, life-like covers—even separate male and female versions—Maggie preferred the plain, jet black glove as a reminder to herself and others. She didn’t want her prosthetic mitt looking too real.

  “How low are they?” she said.

  “Two thousand feet.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Two thousand.”

  Maggie told herself to stay calm. The bomber’s pilot, Air Force Major Anthony Pinella, had been flying B-52 Stratofortresses for seven years, and while there was truth in the joke the sixty-year-old bombers flew like eight locomotives pulling ten thousand garbage cans, Maggie knew Tony Pinella. Rain and lightning wouldn’t put a man like Tony off his game. He could fly the Stratofortress through a car wash. Still, he was operating close to the Pinyon, Vallecito, and southern Santa Rosa mountain ranges—peaks that reached over four thousand feet.

  The radio officer gasped. His fingers reached for the radar screen. “Shit!”

  Maggie frowned. “What’s the matter?”

  Her friend Pinella’s cold war era B-52 jet bomber carried a crew of five, men and women with spouses and children and brothers and sisters, moms and dads. Also on board was an expensive piece of experimental weaponry Maggie and her team had designed, plus whatever remained of Maggie’s Air Force career.

  “Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy.” The radio officer’s voice had jumped half an octave. Sweat beaded his forehead. His fingers reset controls and dials that Maggie didn’t understand. “Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy. Please respond. Over.”

  “I said what’s the matter?” Maggie pressed the radio man’s shoulder with her right hand, her real hand. His tan uniform slid smoothly under her fingers, like polished wood. Maggie liked her uniforms stiff, too, but Zuniga’s contained more starch than a truckload of potatoes.

  “They’re gone.” Zuniga lurched forward. “They—” His voice warbled. “They dropped off radar.”

  Maggie groaned. She’d seen cemeteries full of death during her military action in Iraq. But non-experimental aircraft weren’t supposed to crash on this wide open, Southern California desert test range. These training facilities were known worldwide for their year-round good weather.

  “Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy. How copy, over?” Zuniga’s voice begged for an answer, but nothing came back but static.

  Maggie faced a room of anxious gazes. She bumped the volume on her voice. “Let’s get two rescue teams ready. Right now.”

  The Chinook throbbed, hissed, and thrashed, poking Maggie’s senses every second of the flight. She fought the distractions by monitoring the topography below the chopper on her BlackBerry, glancing only occasionally at the young men and women beside her. The Naval Air Facility emergency crews wore orange jumpsuits and blue helmets. Their black boots, sacks, and bundles of equipment jammed the chopper’s cabin.

  Maggie fought an old feeling. Sinking despair. What the hell had happened to her simple, fairly common weapons test? She tried to push the negative voices from her head but couldn’t. You lost your mother, you lost your hand, you lost your F-15. Now you lose the Air Force’s experimental weapon with two hundred pounds of explosives? You lose everything! You’re a loser! Did everybody go through this mental crap when life went badly, or was it only her? Right this second she felt like she’d never done a damn thing right in her whole life.

  Maggie sucked in a slow breath and let the air go at an even slower pace. She needed to get a grip, do her job. Maggie Black was no loser. She’d earned Burbank High School’s highest grades her senior year. Class valedictorian. She’d entered the U.S. Air Force Academy when she was barely seventeen. She’d been a naturally great pilot, too, earning the second-best scores in her class of cadets and then later, easily meriting a slot in Ace Billy Payton’s squadron during the Iraq War. Many years after that, when her plane’s hydraulics had taken a fluke, small-weapons hit, she’d flown the F-15C hundreds of miles upside-down and survived a nasty bailout.

  Maggie Black was no loser.

  Above the Carrizo Badlands, the two helicopters maybe ten minutes out of their El Centro Naval Air Facility, one copilot spotted a tower of black smoke to the north. Maggie’s phone caught the attention of the rescuers on each side of her, especially after the helicopter banked hard right toward the Fish Creek Mountains.

  Maggie and the brightly clad Navy search and rescue crew jumped from the chopper onto a sparse and rugged desert landscape one hundred yards below a still-smoking crash scene. Tony Pinella and his B-52 had plowed directly into the side of a desert mountain—pale, sulfur-colored rocks piled to the height of a skyscraper.

  Maggie saw no piece of wreckage bigger than a couch, nor any sign of the air-to-ground cruise missile carrying her experimental weapon. The plane’s devastation was jaw-dropping and complete. One hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds of rolled steel, plastic, rubber, aluminum, and other sundry elements, plus forty thousand gallons of fuel. What had been a massive subsonic bomber, forty feet high, one hundred and fifty-nine feet long and one hundred and eighty feet across, was now a junkyard in the blackened V of intersecting rock formations.

  Maggie’s phone buzzed as she joined the search. It was her commanding officer, Brigadier General William Payton, his call a reminder there were nonhuman consequences to the crash of her B-52, consequences like her selfish career problems she’d dismissed earlier.

  Maggie left a group of rescuers and hurried to a lonely spot where she could speak without being overheard. The house-sized boulder at her back contained long-embedded ancient shells inside a darker layer of stone. Two buzzards circled in a dark sky.

  “Hello, Billy,” she said. “I was going to call you when I knew more.”

  “The NAF flight chief called me, said our plane crashed. Any survivors?”

  “We just arrived at the crash site, but I can’t imagine anybody survived,” she said. “They don’t get any worse. Right into the side of a mountain. Our borrowed B-52 is blackened scrap.”

  She heard her old friend curse. They’d met at the Air Force Academy and under Billy’s leadership years later, Maggie had joined the large, second wave of female fighter pilots trained when women were approved for combat. With Billy as her wing commander, she’d piloted an F-15C Eagle on forty-seven combat missions over Iraq.

  “What about our experiment?” Billy said.

  “Scrap, too, it looks like. I see nothing resembling our cruise missile, nothing left bigger than a piece of furniture around here.”

  “Jeez. Maybe Pinella deployed our missile when he saw they were going to crash. Get those explosives away. The missile had emergency parachutes, right?”

  “Yeah, but I doubt he had time. Besides, we’d already know it. We installed a separate transponder on the weapon. There’s no signal.”

  “Shit.”

  Oh, yeah. A whole big smelly pile of the stuff. She and General Payton had seen their share of crap flying over Iraq, three times drawing an anti-aircraft missile lock-on, having to destroy an enemy radar site. This was way worse. None of their combat team had suffered a scratch during the war. Tony Pinella and his crew were dead.

  “Listen, Maggie, I need proof our exploding air to ground missile isn’t on the loose, okay? Find me pieces at least. I’m going to have some congressman grilling my ass tomorrow or the next day. The crash of an Air Force test plane will be on TV soon, I promise you.”

  “We’ll find it,” Maggie said. “I’ll give you a call as soon as we do.”

  Not a scratch during the war. Maggie had lost her hand afterward, when she’d been reassigned to the 22nd Fighter Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. Small arms fire during a postwar mission over Iraq had caused her F-15C to crash in the G
erman countryside, destroying a barn and wiping out half of a popular farmer’s cattle herd. Her commanding officer at the time had questioned Maggie’s piloting in his incident report, said she could have avoided most of the damage. The bastard. His comments were the result of Maggie having ended their romantic relationship. He’d even showed her the negative report, offered to change the wording if she’d resume the affair.

  He would always be The Bastard.

  “It’ll be dark in a few hours,” Billy said, “I’m going to give you tomorrow as well. But if you don’t get that missile back, find some wreckage to show those pricks on the Armed Forces Sub-Committee, you can drag your ass up here to Edwards and explain to my CO in person. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Maggie had suffered a recurring dream since her wartime crash, but that night the repeat arrived in particularly vivid format. In the dream, or nightmare as the images turned out, Maggie’s arm was whole again. Maggie reclaimed the title of complete and uncut, a woman with all her parts, all her charms, all her natural born self. And Whole Maggie did what she loved best—fly an F-15C Eagle, soaring between white clouds in a soft blue sky.

  Flying, floating, weightless.

  Above the earth and free, twisting and banking faster than the wind.

  Then suddenly out of control.

  Flying was like heaven to Maggie, soaring like the birds, and she first woke up from the dream breathless and sweaty, still lost in the flying. But seconds later, when her consciousness came all the way back, a stinging heartache grabbed her. Maggie’s left arm and hand were missing two inches below the elbow. The normal, four-limbed human she’d been born no longer existed.

  Maggie Black was forever different.

  TWO

  Asdrubal Torres often used his weekends to hike and forage in the barren mountains and deserts near Southern California’s Salton Sea. The plants and rocks and creatures had been sacred to his mother’s Cahuilla people for thousands of years, and by living alone among the dry land’s natural inhabitants, fasting, sometimes drinking a toloache to invite the spirits, he rejoined a natural, harmonious world the white man had nearly destroyed.

  With no elephant tree bark for his toloache one Saturday, Torres walked to a harsh, secluded mountain valley where a few of the sacred and dangerous trees still grew. The sky was blue and clear, and the air warm but not hot. He found himself singing one of his mother’s old bird songs as he made his way along a dry creek bed dotted with golden-flowered manzanita bushes. He’d heard his mother sing the song many times, although she had never explained its meaning, nor was he certain of all the words. But even when humming, the rhythm and melody played happily inside him, a sign perhaps of his own contentment at the beginning of another vision quest.

  His happy mood vanished as he approached the ancient and revered trees. Hearing voices, he crept to where he could scale the arroyo’s bank and observe from behind a house-sized stand of the prolific manzanita. Had he angered the spirits with his song’s unremembered words, his humming? His mother’s warnings about the power of these trees had alerted him to an “ever-present spirit” that threatened violent death.

  What he saw made the blood roar inside his ears. Two teenagers—boys he recognized from his own reservation—not only relieved themselves on this rare and sacred desert stand of elephant trees, they inexplicably laughed while doing so. Their urine collected near the snakelike exposed roots spreading from the largest tree’s bulbous trunk. Grandmother of this whole stand, the tree these boys had selected to poison with their waste was at least five hundred years old. Perhaps one thousand.

  Could these ignorant children be unaware of the blasphemy they committed, the risk they took with their lives? His fingertips pressed white against his palms. How could any Cahuilla, even drunken teenagers, defame the sacred trees of their forefathers? Many Cahuilla enemies—Serrano, Yuma, and Mojave braves—had died from arrows tipped with poison from these elephant trees. His mother always used great care to honor and praise those departed souls and the courage of the warriors’ tribes whenever she collected bark.

  The boys ceased their laughing when Torres appeared from behind the big yellow bush. “You urinate on your own spirit, fools,” he said. “The power of every ancient Cahuilla warrior lies—”

  “Fuck yourself, culo.”

  The world stopped spinning for Asdrubal Torres. Staring at the sneering, disrespectful boy who had cursed him, Torres saw in that single moment the decline of his entire Cahuilla nation. The indications had been all around him for decades. Important activities of their ancestors, like cultivating desert plants, or traveling to the oak groves to gather acorns, were now considered a waste of time. The tribe rarely prayed together or celebrated the most blessed Cahuilla traditions. Puul, net, and ngengewish were words rarely spoken. His clan of Cahuilla people drove foreign cars, ate cheeseburgers and worked for the tribe’s gambling casinos.

  He slipped the hunting knife from his belt and showed the blade to the taller boy, the one who cursed and called him culo, or ass in Spanish. Torres clenched the knife so hard, muscles in his right arm trembled. In his heart, he believed that unless he acted right then and with every effort and all means available, Cahuilla culture would be lost forever. To do nothing would be the same as acknowledging his people never existed. All in that moment. All in the way these boys ridiculed and cursed him. Young braves from his own reservation.

  He had to do something.

  The blasphemous teenager laughed, his teeth wide and white. “What do you think you’re going to do with that knife, old man? Give yourself a haircut?”

  His younger friend yapped like a small dog, and the laughter set off an explosion inside Torres. Perhaps the fierce spirit of the elephant tree seized him through toloaches he had ingested over the years. Or maybe the failures of his personal life piled up all at once. For certain, he remembered his jaw rattled when he tried to speak again to the boys; also, that the trembling in his arm spread throughout his body. When the earthquake reached his toes, he lunged at the boys like a hungry spider, his long knife slashing.

  After praying for the dead boys, cleaning up, acquiring his bark, and thanking the elephant tree for a piece of its skin, Torres hiked north to a secret trail in the tall pink mountains. The hidden path wound across valleys, up rocky canyons, and through half an acre of jumping silver cholla cactus, eventually reaching a boulder only visible after navigating the maze of white spines.

  He would find no drunken teenagers here.

  On the sacred rock, which was taller than himself and wider by a factor of ten than anything he could embrace, an ancient Cahuilla artist had pecked and scratched intricate designs—a tangled pattern of lines, plus seven stickmen riding four-legged beasts and carrying long knives. These petroglyphs could have been chipped into the rock as late as 1774 when the first white man, Spanish explorer Juan Batista de Anza, traveled through this pass on his way to Los Angeles. But, of course, who really knew? The Spanish had been exploring the land east of the Colorado River for two centuries before that, and the idea of men with long knives riding animals could have been a tale passed across the desert for generations before de Anza.

  He sat cross-legged in his traditional place of power beside the sacred art. In preparation for drinking the hallucinatory toloache and his quest, he prayed as he traced the ancient stone lines with his fingertips.

  Oh, Great Spirit, thank you for letting me be part of this mysterious world today. Thank you for all the people, plants, animals, creatures, and spirits I share this life with. Know that my heart is grateful. Should you grant me yet another day on this earth, I pray your love and wisdom will guide me.

  Despite his decades-long hope the spirits would show him a solution to his people’s decline, Torres never specifically prayed for such a gift. His mother had taught him not to ask for favors. If you wanted things, she said, you must search inside. Ask the Great Spirit only for guidance. His mother had taught him that daily prayer to tha
nk the Creator for another day of life was every human’s duty.

  Though he did not ask for direct help, Torres sensed that day would be different, that the spirits had already intervened in his life and would further enlighten a path for him. An idea or a plan would come. The day had been special from the beginning, and surely the two boys had been a sign, perhaps a sacrifice that would somehow show Torres how to guide his people away from the white man’s world of greed and conquest.

  He crushed a tiny bit of elephant tree bark with his thumb and forefinger, then placed this non-deadly amount into his mother’s stone bowl with a quantity of dried datura root and other ingredients, some preserved and a few collected that day. He mixed and drank the toloache, then closed his eyes and began to chant, a call to the animal spirits who lived nearby.

  In time, they all came to see him, too. First the mouse, who told him not to leave his place of power. Then the rabbit, who explained it was safe to travel, but not slowly, and not in the direction Torres had planned. And the coyote, who urged him to charge and bite if he was hungry enough.

  Little sound accompanied Torres’s hike up the pile of pink rocks white men called the Santa Rosa Mountains, nothing but wind across his ears and the talking of crows and hawks. The black-feathered birds chattered more than necessary, but Torres had learned to take comfort in their nervous vigilance. Mountain trails could be dangerous, particularly under the spell of a toloache.

  Reaching a prominent western cliff overlooking the Salton Sea and the Coachella and Imperial valleys, the view was like standing on the rim of a giant serving dish, the Salton Sea but a tiny patch of blue at the very center of the dish’s bottom. North and south of the distant blue lake, two green quilts of farmland stretched the length of both valleys. Once the site of a great inland sea named for his people, now the white man’s cities sprouted inside this green slime like poisonous mushrooms.