“Greed,” said Andy.
“You want to believe it,” Don said. “Anyway, it was some time, I grew up hearing the stories of the No Name Siphon when the boys dynamited her. Then they went back and dynamited again – it was June, summertime – a train of LA detectives armed with machine guns and Winchesters. How dare those farmers fight for their water? Oh they set up roadblocks, they searched cars, they had floodlights on the highway, that water war was twenty years old by the late ’20s. Talk about the Roaring Twenties, the best gangsters you could find were the government water bureaucrats out of Los Angeles. Oh, that old wound is fresh up there.
“When the farms went out of business, some of those boys who knew something about riding and wrangling made a living in the pictures, which were just coming along. The movie people came up to the site of the water wars and damned if they didn’t hire some of those same men who opened the Alabama Gates to be in a Hopalong Cassidy or two. I had a great-uncle got hired for Lives of a Bengal Lancer, right there by Lone Pine. I had a cousin of mine, used to grow apples, was out on the Olancha Dunes there as an Indian extra for Gunga Din. If that damned Los Angeles had never stolen the valley water, the farmers and ranchers would have been too busy working their land to play extras in the movies.”
The waiter came over. Bill, Visalia, CA. “Hey Bill,” Don said.
“Hey Chemical Donny,” Bill said. “Ready to order?”
“Don’s going to have,” Don said, “your sole amandine.”
“Rice or potatoes?” Bill asked.
“Rice and lots of it,” Don said. ”And go easy on the broccoli. That stuff’d kill a steer.”
“Gotcha,” Bill said. “And for you?”
“I’m not too hungry,” Andy said. “A glass of house red.”
“Eat, son,” Don said.
“Do you do a turkey club?” Andy asked.
“I can ask Cook.”
“Do,” Don said. “Tell him Chemical Donny is here. Tell him we want his special turkey club, lots of fries. You good with that, Andy?”
“I’m good. Thanks.” Time was weighing on him. “Hey, remember in Rawhide where Jack Elam holds up Susan Hayward’s dress against him like he’s going to put it on?”
“Sure,” Don said. “I liked the part where the other guy, the more dumb one, Yancy, he sits on the bed and tries on her shoes. They didn’t make a big deal about it, but those cowboys were fond of women’s clothing. Yancy sure had a crush on those shoes.”
“The guy who escaped from prison, Zimmerman…Zim out of New Orleans and his mother has, what was it?” Andy said, trying to remember it. “Did Mom kill the mulatto Zim married, or was it just that she disapproved? What was Zim in the clink for?”
Andy’s brain was a scramble of timepieces, fragments from old movies, Vivienne.
Bill came with the sole for skinny Don, and well-built Andy got his turkey club, perfectly toasted with good-cut fries. They sat like old buddies eating fast. Men in the army, men in prison, men brought up in households with frugal moms eat fast. They eat fast, gathering their plates close to their bodies. Andy surveyed the room. At a table on the other side of the room sat a small old man. White fedora, a big-sized navy-grey sweatshirt on top, fleshy little legs stretched out under the table, cowboy boots. The little man was using his mouth dramatically to chew on his food. He waved for the female waitperson with his hand up as if he were voting in a Senate count, imperial and elfin.
“Where are we?” Andy asked.
“Where? We’re in Paradise, son. We are in God’s country. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind HIM a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering instead of his son. We’re in Stovepipe, Andy. Stovepipe Wells.”
The little old elf stood up. “I am the special ambassador to Iraq!” he called to the room, opening his arms wide to receive his minions. Nobody paid much attention. They were used to crazy old guys wandering in from the old miner country in these parts.
“Guess that’s the guy who fired Saddam’s army,” Don said. “I generally head for the hills when you meet some guy’s got the word special in front of his title. My view? If you’re so damned special, you don’t need to advertise.”
The special ambassador at his table for one waved a piece of meat on a fork at Eugene, who swept a new couple through from the podium and seated them. The special ambassador rose, pushed his table back and, using his meated fork as an aide to communication, began to speak. “I am in charge of public security, not the president.”
“Hey, Chief Fema,” called out a sturdy woman in a trucker’s hat near Don and Andy, “heck of a job, buddy.”
The old guy seemed oblivious to the taunt. He put his gesticulating fork down. He braced himself with the table edge, his arms thin and old, brown-spotted. He looked around the room of eaters, the way a king let out of his moated castle might. He beamed, the room was full of his subjects. “Yes, I have been personally put in charge of the public safety. It is me, it is I. I, I, I will be running the security from now on, not the president.”
“No doubt,” said Andy. Maybe this Dionysius in Depends could get him a deferment.
“Pre-emptive psychosis,” said Don. “I’ve seen it. I was a medic in Laos. Lost in Laos. Yeah, that was the movie they should have made. You saw it. They went in, they came out, the jungle fever subsided, they got paralyzed. You ever read Ubu Roi? They go in, and they come out believing they are the puppet man they were hired to play. Ubu is a dog who thinks he is a king. Ubu is a consul who thinks he is a royal. Ubu, I will tell you, young man, is this damned real estate boom. Ubu Heights, Ubu Homes, Ubu SUVs, Ubu Hummers, it’s all going to end one big shithole of pardon my French.”
Chemical Donny surprised Andy. But why? He himself looked like a construction worker or a soldier – he was both – and he was an educated man, more in the tradition of the men of the GI bill, so why shouldn’t this cat be brain cool? So, Chemical Donny was white as a spectre and read Alfred Jarry.
“We read Lord Jim at college,” Andy said.
“Same difference. Some men are too civilized to take it. The factor of Patusan. The Tuan of Titwaddle. They start putting fingers on the ladies. Now you got eight staff, three of them female, and some Chief Fema comes in and they won’t work with him, but they are all I got. How to keep Chief Walking Digits from getting into ladies’ underwear?”
He pulled a pack of Three Castles out of his breast pocket. Andy accepted. They were wildly strong smokes.
“What you do,” Don said, “is you give the poor bugger a title. Some men will shut up for as long as it takes to get the mission accomplished just because you name them special bugger. I’d rather have some puffball blowing hot air than getting into my girls’ matched quim sets, right, son?”
“Lemon meringue or coconut cream?” Bill the waiter had appeared at their table.
“I didn’t realize we had Pentagon royalty in the house,” Andy said, raising his chin in the direction of Chief Fema.
“He said he was heading to Washington to give a speech,” said Bill.
“I am going to London with my cat to meet the Queen,” Don said.
“I’ll carry your water,” Bill said. Don and Andy chuckled.
Nevertheless, Don the severely white man stood up and applauded the special elf to the president. “Good job,” Don called out. “Well done, Pepe.”
Don sat down. He pulled about half the smoke into his lungs, briefly got more colour in his face than Andy had seen in hours and said, “Nothing changes, does it? Your Lord Jim there, son? Conrad wrote that one hundred years ago. Pilgrims off to the hajj, Muslims going to Mecca, nothing much different, won’t be one hundred years from now. Abandoning the Muslim ship is going to haunt us.” He mashed the cigarette stub into a glass ashtray.
The elder elf took off his white fedora, bowed from the waist, put the fedora back on his head and proceeded to wobble on his skinny pins past the podium
to the exit, without paying. His waitress caught him, and Don and Andy watched the gesticulating and wallet removal and card handing over and the signing of the paper. The special elf to the duchy of Stovepipe doffed his hat and set off, perhaps to organize the security of the North Pole, and meet with ambassadors Donder and Blitzen.
ANDY WALKED UP the desert highway alone.
This was real darkness.
A roadrunner the size of Ohio ran across the sky in streaks. He was not AWOL yet. Canada. There was an honourable tradition of escaping to Canada. They did not look down on war resisters there, they welcomed them. The Vietnam War resisters were now grandpa age, zaydes who could give counsel. Could he be a refugee, take refuge with her? With Vivienne? The papers were saying that in the first year of the war with Iraq, more than five thousand US military personnel deserted. Where were they? Was each one alone, bivouacked in his solitude, in cars or private deserts? They said that three years into the Iraq war, eight thousand had deserted.
In the sky, the roadrunner became a roadrunner’s tail and drifting head.
The night air, rich with dark dry tinder, put on his lips the electric ghost kiss of Vivienne.
Andy walked back towards the Stovepipe settlement, where only the metal roofing shone in the moon a long way ahead like dots and dashes of tin Morse code.
Love is so short, and the forgetting so long. Brotherly love is so short, and there is no forgetting.
HE WOKE UP in a room with one bed.
He opened the door. The air was fresh and thin. The light was piney, under lacy pale green trees. There was a garden chair by his door: white rounded back, with thick arms, white-painted metal. He walked out on the dirt.
He was at a motel-style length of rooms. He looked at the numbers: 1 to 16. He was at room 15, the number 15 nailed vertically on the post in green patina metal, the 1 and below it the 5. It was dead quiet. He was in his clothes, but barefoot. He walked out to a main building in time to see the Buick Riviera, top down, drive west towards the badlands, severely white Chemical Donny zipping away.
He had been taken over the mountain in the night.
He came back to the white metal chair. It could not be tomorrow. This could not be the next day. If it was, he had made a decision. But he had not made a decision. Had he made a decision of omission?
Had he gone AWOL by accident?
What had happened to the hours between the time he had walked the road at Stovepipe under starlight and now, bright morning? Had tomorrow come and gone?
Could he plead blackout?
Was he up for a court martial? Was he other than honourable? Or this new category: accomplished – they who have suffered a trauma. Was Vivienne a trauma?
He went back inside room 15, lay on the bed, turned on the TV. Jack Palance got out of a big blue boat of a car, in the middle of nowhere with white-peaked mountains behind him. An old gas pump sat there, an old guy came out of a shack, “Help you, sir?” “Not many people around,” Jack Palance said to the aging gas jockey. “No sir.” “What’s that?” Jack asked, pointing to the highest mountaintop. “Why that, sir, is the highest point in the United States; that’s Mount Whitney.”
“I came here for my health,” Jack Palance said.
Andy fell asleep on the bed.
HE WOKE UP to the sound of a girl singing in a high little voice, a girl allowed to smoke many cigarettes, singing “The Thrill is Gone.” Andy lay there, listening. The voice told the true story: the thrill, supposedly gone, was a haunting. That thrill would not get gone, at all. Andy got up and looked out the door: a large car, a lemon yellow Studebaker Commander, the same model he and Sean had driven and crashed the night before Sean hanged himself. “The Thrill is Gone” was coming from the car. Just like in The Misfits, where the car outside the cabin door played music so Monroe and Gable could do that slow jive, age and youth, in Nevada heartache. Andy lit a cigarette. The car kept looping that one song, the singer’s voice tiny but nicotined, the voice of a wizened cherub. Ah, yes. It was Chet Baker. Andy’s dad, Barry, loved Chet’s music, the trumpet, the thrilling man-girl voice. He used to play it on the big stereo speakers in the house.
Andy got off the bed and sat down in the metal chair outside his room. He lit another cigarette off the first. Chet Baker jumped or fell from an Amsterdam hotel room in 1988, and they flew his body back to his home in the California desert, a returned water bird back to the haunted promise. And the musician was gone, and the thrill remained.
Now the Commander Sublime was singing, “They’re playing songs of love but not for me,” recorded in the early deep of the nuclear era, love in small thermonuclear Chet Baker registers. Through sierras of broken teeth, Chet’s cracked mouth went around his beauty horn and offered a radioactive ministry to the lost souls of thirst.
Andy picked a tobacco thread out of his lips and blew smoke into the crackling air. The war is long, the thrill is short, the love is short, you go berserk, because the songs of love were not for thee.
The TV was speaking lines from inside, through the open door. Robert Mitchum, pushing around the who-gives-a-damn with such damn style you could kill yourself. Andy looked back into the room: A sign showing Bishop, north of Mammoth Lakes, north of Mono Lake, he knew that country. He used to drive a pickup truck over the mountain to Bishop for R & R from Deep Springs College, his alma mater, the famously unknown desert college, deep in the empty Deep Springs Valley. He had intended to herd cattle and study Kierkegaard at Deep Springs, to be a cowboy intellectual in the desert. The desert had seduced this San Diego boy. The remoteness had appealed to him. Vivienne made him remember his original intention. A life of the mind, being physical in his body. Things got lost in war. She opened up the desert inside him. The sense that you drove for hours facing vehicle breakdowns to go over the mountain from your college that had only two dozen students, just to see a town, like your soul could again be a pioneer in the possible. Who stewards your soul when you have lost it? The car sang Andy back to sleep, like a little girl lullabying her daddy. He woke up in the chair to more cold morning and the car wasn’t there.
Andy put his hand in the pocket of his gold windbreaker, pulling out the Pink smokes package. Something else came out with it – a piece of olive green jersey. Vivienne’s. Had he taken it from her room? Did she give it to him? He smelled it. Like sweet oranges, a light citrus, covered with the smell of her he couldn’t define. A womanly sweat, something cedar, even chocolate. He lay back in the chair, with the jersey over his nose and mouth. He was somewhere in Death Valley. Let it be. But she would not let him be. She was inside him. If he removed his body, Vivienne Pink would still be with him. He needed to get away from her. He inhaled the intoxication of her. He reached into his left pocket. He took out his pistol. The world dismantles men, and leaves their parts unholy.
11
AUTOPSY ON THE AIR
JOHNNY AND VIVIENNE got deep under the down duvet. He was kissing her neck. They smelled of semen and viscosity. They were heated, sweaty, getting the post-love chills, hair wet, giddy. They were in Johnny and Val’s room. Two queen beds. Room 10688. Johnny fed Vivienne strawberries from the room service breakfast at two in the morning: OJ, muffins and croissants, big pot of coffee, berries, yogurt and omelettes. Val had agreed to look for Danny in front of the Eiffel Tower. The Birdman of Paris.
VAL FOUND DANNY at his perch right below the bistro Mon Ami Gabi. “It’s time to go to Death Valley,” Val said.
Danny twirled his red ski pole in circles. “Fucking A,” he said. “You got that right.”
“Come along, Mr. Towne,” Val said, using Danny’s alias from his Montevideo days.
“Thank you, kind sir,” Danny said, as Val led him into the Flamingo, across the slots floor, a sharp right down the mini-shopping hallway to the parking garage stairs. Up four flights, Val held the door open for Danny. A couple came through the door, paying no mind to an elderly gent in half a bird suit. At the vehicle, a 2005 white Honda Accord – Val wanted whi
te paint to reflect the sun, Vivienne wanted a car low to the ground for better photos, Johnny wanted a trunk, where he could put his brother – Val said, “Climb aboard, captain,” lifting Danny by a feathered armpit.
“Always glad to be of service,” Danny said, laying himself down in the trunk space. Val adjusted an oxygen tank already set up beside Danny. “Hey, hey hey!” Danny said. “Dubya W. all the way!” Val slammed the trunk shut.
WHEN IT WAS brighter morning, they drove out of the valley of Vegas into the pariah lands.
On a windy open plateau, Val said from the back seat, “Stop up ahead. At that store. I have to see someone there about a thing.”
Vivienne said, “I want to go straight through to Death Valley.”
Danny was banging from inside the trunk. “Your brother’s calling, Johnny,” Val said.
“Vivienne’s right,” Johnny said. “We can make it to Death Valley in no time. I’m not stopping.”
The store appeared off the road on the right. A half-hour from a major metropolis there were no billboards, no turnoffs, a lot of sky, a lot of restricted land. One small store, takeout food, available gas. “John,” Val said, “am I not your second-in-command? Besides which, your Vivi can grab some nice pictures. I know the proprietors, Vivi, there’s some great desert shots out the back. Lots of areas, what say?”
“Fine,” Johnny said, swerving the car fast on the empty highway.
Here, the legendary Thunderbirds had made home base. Here was the area where men and women sat and operated drones for Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, in the Big Nowhere, the planet had been heated beyond Hades. Here, the biggest scandal of the twentieth century had taken place – hundreds of atomic, hydrogen and thermonuclear bomb tests. Here, men heated the globe, and they touched evil, and they liked it. Here, a twirling giant chicken up high asked you in giant letters: WHY SLEEP?
Val led them into the store.
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