Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  “If you were a widow, would you marry me?” he asked. Vivienne was already walking down the hill. The sun was waning on the bank. The bouncing desert migraine shone on. Van Gogh knew hell was a sunny day. Van Gogh was our monk to the canvas. Van Gogh knew about the burn. Van Gogh spoke to the crows on the sunniest of days.

  VIVIENNE AND VAL walked back down to the remains of the Cook Bank building. Vivienne left Val, and walked to Johnny. They watched, as Val restarted the holiday special rendition.

  “Danny, let’s cut to the nukes. What can you tell me about your time in Spain with the family, Christmas holidays just like now, family time, right? You, the missus, your four kids, you take them down south to Málaga. Correct? For New Year’s, January 1966?”

  “I have never been to Spain, my dog has never been to Spain, my cat has never been to Spain, my mother has never been to Spain, my father has never been to Spain, my sister has never been to Spain, my son has never been to Spain, my daughter has never been to Spain and I have never been to Spain.”

  “So, you’re in Málaga, but you have work to do nearby. At Palomares. Little fishing village, some market gardening, tomatoes.”

  “There was no daylight in Spain.”

  “Now, if it please the court,” Val said, reaching into his jacket pocket, pulling out a photograph, serrated edges, black and white: two men in swimming trunks, standing in waves. One man tall, the other one short. “I would like to introduce into evidence a photograph.” Val tapped the photo. “This short guy? In the Speedo? That’s you, Daniel Coma, only forty years younger.” Val showed it to Danny. Then Val passed the photo to Vivienne, who looked at it, and passed it to Johnny, who passed it back to Val.

  “This is preposterous,” Danny said. “I demand a cab.”

  “Sorry, Danny, the last taxi left in 1910.”

  “Call dispatch!” The sight of the photograph had put Danny back into the state he had been in on Las Vegas Boulevard, when he had dressed like a bird.

  “Tell me the story of this snap, Danny. You’re at the beach. It’s the first week in January 1966. Lucky you, you get to be on the Costa del Sol. I think I was in Copenhagen that year. What about you folks on the jury? Did anybody ever pay you to go to the beach in Spain and hobnob with the American ambassador?”

  “1966, let me see,” Vivienne said. “I think I was... Oh yeah, that’s right. I was back in Vietnam. Taking pics of the soldiers, getting in even deeper. The American government had left Crazytown and gone right into the crotch rot of Psychosis Corners.”

  “Me?” Johnny said. “In ’66? I think that was the winter I took that freighter from Havana to Luanda, and I got the light bulb for my book set in Angola.”

  “I never heard anything about any book about Angola,” Danny said.

  “No surprises, there,” Johnny said.

  “Now, now,” Val said. “Let’s keep our eyes on southern Spain. Sunny days, the beach, coastal seafood, Daniel Coma, fixer-at-large, by special invitation is meeting with the American ambassador to Spain.”

  “I want to lawyer up.” Danny was so used to deniability that even though the photo Val had in his hand had appeared in TIME magazine, Danny denied it existed.

  Danny maintained that I-am-not-here look. “In Vietnam,” he said, “we were looking for peace. We got a ceasefire, you people have no idea. We were trying. Rusk, Pearson, me, we were giving it our all.” Danny had left his birdman fugue and rejoined his pissed-off bitter bureaucrat part.

  “Giving it your all? No, Danny, you were giving it your some. When they upped it to four hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam you were doing US dirty work in Spain. You dare to mention Lester B. Pearson, our beloved ex-prime minister, please. You think you’re Lester Bowles Pearson? Since when did you play semi-pro ball and head up the UN, like Pearson?”

  “He was the reason I got into politics,” Danny said.

  “Another category error heard from,” Val said. “What you got into was a pair of gloves to leave no prints when you broke into foreign offices.”

  “Like he said,” Vivienne said. “Politics.”

  “If our Pearson was your role model, Dan, what in the hell happened? He brought in the forty-hour workweek. He’s in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. He got us our own flag. He was a fly boy, he went to war, he was a medic and an airman, he crashed a plane, and then, while recovering, he got hit by a bus in a blackout in London and he came home and, next thing you know, he invented peacekeeping. Lester B invented it. He started NATO, he started the UN, he averted the crisis in the Suez. For God’s sakes, Danny. Wake up, Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize. I am talking here about a statesman. Our man Pearson. You signed on to be a career sneak. You washed the blood off their words.”

  “A troll with immunity,” Vivienne said.

  “Meanwhile, what was your idol Pearson doing? He goes down to the States, and in good old Philly, he gives a speech at Temple University, criticizing LBJ sending more soldiers to Vietnam. Unheard of. Pearson dissed LBJ in Lyndon Johnson’s own country. A Thou Shalt Not of diplomacy. Here was a man. Pearson put the diplomatic shiv into LBJ.”

  Val got up. “Then, as the story is told, Lyndon Johnson summoned Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson from Temple U to Camp David. Whereupon LBJ picks up Pearson by his lapels, shakes him, tells him, ‘Don’t you dare come in my house and talk to me like that.’ Pearson refused to send Canadian boys to Vietnam.”

  There is the man who shies back and makes no decision. There is the man, exhausted by his options, who just lets his impulse manager go, and picks anything. But Danny Coma was the third man, the man who stays on the shore and invents the lie that he has crossed the Rubicon, and tells it to the mirror, and the mirror says that the man in the mirror has done that thing and the mirror whispers to tell it to the face of those who have made the crossing. You could see the sides of Danny’s cheeks chewing themselves.

  Val went on. “Okay. All right. A little detour, to speak of what a man is. But now let us stay in the days of Vietnam, but let us travel, once again, to those sunny climes of southern Spain. January 1966. Just after New Year’s. Along the coast from Málaga, there in Almería, there in Almanzora, there in Mojácar, there in Palomares.”

  “So big deal, so I took the kids to the beach,” Danny said, not looking at Val, but talking to the far shining horizon.

  Vivienne shook her head, questioning, “You took my nieces and nephews to that beach?”

  “They are my brother’s nieces and nephews,” Danny said to Val. “Not hers.”

  “Danny,” Val said. “Let us contemplate the story of that January, as it has come down to us through history. They call it Broken Arrow. The US Broken Arrow over Spain.”

  And the story goes something like this: On January 17th, 1966, a Monday, two planes, one flying east from inside Spain, one flying west all the way from South Carolina, USA, collided over southern Spain, over the fishing village of Palomares. It was a refuelling mission. The plane from the United States was a B-52G carrying four hydrogen bombs. The mission was called Operation Chrome Dome. The idea was to fly to the European borders of the Soviet Union, and return.

  At thirty-one thousand feet, a KC-135 out of Morón Air Base in southern Spain began to refuel the B-52. The story is told that the nozzle of the refuelling boom hit the B-52 fuselage. The planes exploded. The four Spaniards in the KC-135 were killed, and three of the seven American crew were killed. And four H-bombs landed near the Spanish fishing village of Palomares.

  Palomares is on the Mediterranean, nine miles from the resort town of Mojácar, and not far from the Costa del Sol town of Almería, a desert land on the sea known to movie lovers as the area where Sergio Leone made his spaghetti westerns.

  Now come up a little northeast from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, put your eyes to the sky and there you see two planes explode, two planes catch fire and four H-bombs land on European soil. The United States became the avatar of its own nuclear nightmare.

  The ti
ny Spanish fishing village became briefly world famous, because the story went that the conventional explosives inside a nuke, which normally set it off, did set off two of the nukes. The third nuke was said to have not detonated. A fourth H-bomb was lost at sea. The stories vary.

  Danny Coma was sent in to stage-manage this nuclear disaster. The questions began fast: did all the bombs, not just two, in truth, go off at Palomares? Was it two or three? Or was it four, and there was a fifth hydrogen bomb the US was trying to cover up? An H-bomb that no one ever found, leaking into the fish and shellfish, and which sat, nuclear, on the Mediterranean Sea floor, still leaking into the twenty-first century? Might that tasty olive-oiled octopus be radioactive?

  That Monday, January 17th, 1966, was a black swan day. As delegates met for nuclear disarmament conferences, the day that could never come had come, the day when you happened to drop hydrogen bombs on an ally. Future doom was already in progress.

  The American B-52 carried four hydrogen bombs. Each H-bomb was 1.5 megatons. Each bomb was one hundred times the power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 5th, 1945. You could say that on that January winter morning, the United States dropped four hundred Little Boys on Spain. You could say that the United States hurt its amigo in peace, España, one hundred times more than its enemy in war, Japan. You could say it, because it was true. Japan received a total of thirty-six kilotons, Spain received a total of six thousand kilotons.

  The only thing to do with such a monumental sovereign sin was to spin it. Send in the spinners! Ask them to eat nuked seafood out of nuked sea water. Ask them to swim in the blue plutonium sea.

  The American ambassador to Spain, Angier Biddle Duke, went swimming in the Mediterranean at the nearby beach resort of Mojácar, to demonstrate to the press that four hundred Little Boys dropped nine miles away meant nothing, left no radiation. The ambassador, at age twenty-seven had been on the cover of Life magazine, at age forty-eight he had been in charge of protocol for John F. Kennedy’s funeral and at age fifty US ambassador Duke paddled around in radioactive waters to spin the nukes. If a state representative was in exposed skin and swimming trunks in the water, the spin said, wouldn’t he be nuts to do that if the water was nuclear?

  In the photograph beside Duke was Danny Coma, his arm around the ambassador’s shoulder.

  Maybe it is not what a nation does in victory, but what it does in shanda – in shame – that makes it a nation. Does it shrivel and con, or does it stand tall and make reparation and tell the true story? Do you repent, or do you spin the shanda?

  “And you took your children down there,” Val said. “In lieu of truth-telling, you’d rather poison your own kids.”

  “Objection!” Danny said. “Stop calling me names. Look, I will show you the dirt,” Danny said. “It’s here in my suitcase. It’s in the car.”

  “In the what? Where? You are telling me you put a suitcase with radioactive dirt from Spain forty years ago in our car?”

  “You naive youngsters. What did you think we would do? Leave the evidence in the ground? American troops were dispatched, quite handily I might say, to dig up the dirt and repatriate it back to the US.”

  “Hang on,” Val said. “You are telling me to hide it they – what? – flew the Spanish radioactive soil back to the States and buried it?”

  “Indeed.” Danny scratched his balls.

  “Where?”

  “How should I know? The funeral was private.”

  “What? In paper bags, I suppose.”

  “For your information, it came in coffins. They covered the coffins with flags and kept the dirt hidden.”

  “So, let me get this straight. You can’t today, by order of the president, take photographs of the pine boxes holding servicemen who died overseas, but they could ship the nuclear accident evidence back using those coffins like jokes from a TV show about inept cocaine cowboys?”

  “Don’t blame me. I smiled and ate shrimp.”

  “Danny; Danny Danny Danny. Daniel. Dan. Don’t you see? You got poisoned.”

  “I will have you know that was very fertile soil. Legacy tomatoes. Heritage seeds. I made some quite lovely pan con tomate out of it, if I do say so myself.”

  “Am I crazy or are you crazy or am I the only one here who is nuts? You made Spanish crushed tomato bread out of plants that grew in nuclear soil?”

  “All I get is criticism.”

  “You carried that nuclear dirt on planes?”

  “More than you’ll ever know. My tomatoes had immunity. If you didn’t want my dirt in the trunk of your car, you should have let me sit in the front seat. Minding my own business at my posting at Paris, you kidnapped the special ambassador to Rhyolite. I do not negotiate with hostage-takers.”

  “Just say you are sorry,” Val said. “All we want is that you allocute to the court. Tell us how you regret what you did. Tell us, once and for all and finally, that you feel remorse for lying to the public about the nuclear water and the poisoned food chain. That you regret your role in the torturing of the Canadian photographer Vivienne Pink, daughter of Isadore ‘Izzy’ Pink, former mayor of Toronto. We need to see you feel remorse. We need you to feel sick at heart.”

  “Perhaps,” Danny said. “In due course at the end of the day never let it not be said that in the final analysis, where was I? Ah. Of course. I have it now. Édith Piaf! ‘Je ne regrette rien.’ And yes, many salutations for the trigger. Yes yes. Cows.” Danny’s Speedo had fallen down to his knees, and he urinated on the rocks. He stepped out of his Speedo, allowing his nether brothers a little desert air.

  “May it please the court, I would like to introduce, what is, in my opinion, the much overlooked scandal of the blue steak.” Danny put his hands behind his back, his head leaning forward, as he walked back and forth in front of Val, swinging the Coma jewels. “Of course, this had been of some concern to the international community on the ground, for an unspecified but notable length of time, not at this point in time, but prima facie, once.”

  “Get to the meat,” Val said. “Show me the regret. Be merciful, Dan, to the damaged.”

  “Oh, I had to meet with the terrorists. Medical degrees? Sorry, impress me. Art collections. I’ve seen art. Wives in high leather boots. On and on about their bombs. I sat across those terror tregua tables with them, negotiating ceasefires day and night, and I can bring you this information: not one of them knew what a blue steak was.” He retrieved his Speedo and pulled it up his bony legs.

  Val lit a cigarette. “Danny, the three of us have a room reservation at Stovepipe Wells. We need to leave soon. We’re not feeling so well.”

  “Yes, your honour, with my greatest pleasure. I spent my life telling them, ‘Go out and get a cow. Walk the cow through town. When the cow gets in front of the damn restaurant, send the waiter out with a gun to shoot the cow. Then set the kitchen on fire, and rush the cow back to the kitchen door. Let the cow look through the double doors and smell smoke. Then push the cow into the kitchen fire and pull the cow out, fast. Then put the damn cow, bloody and burned on a plate. That is blue.’

  “But oh no. Did they give me a blue steak? No sir, Uncle Sam Siree. People of the jury, do I not deserve your pity? People, I asked for a steak, they gave me small leather goods on a plate, ‘here’s the horseradish.’ I rest my case.” Danny saluted. “Avanti!”

  VAL TOOK DANNY over to the vehicle. Val popped the trunk. Danny took out his little hard suitcase, an old-school one, tan and brown, and he clicked back the metal locks and opened it up, like a travelling salesman. There was his booty: smelly socks, another blue Speedo, a fuzzy grey fleece pullover, a pair of pale chinos crumpled into a ball and a paper bag. He put his hand in the paper bag and came out with a handful of dirt.

  “Get that away from me,” Val said, backing off.

  “This dirt, kind sir, I would like to inform you,” Danny said, sifting the gritty mix through his hands, letting some of it fall on the ghost ground. “This is one of our finer clandestine soil
batches. A mere culling from the American Broken Arrow nuclear crop. But first impressions…”

  Val had no idea what Danny was getting at. That was rare for Val. “What’s going on here, Danny? What’s all this BS leading to?”

  “As fine as your finest Islay whisky,” Danny said. “With much the same notes of salt and iodine. But this, my friend, has in it some of the rare dirt gathered from the Vallegrande Airport. The Big Valley. In that excellent year of 1967.”

  That Val knew. The legend of the killing of Che: First, the men who came to kill Che Guevara were kind and gave him one last pipe to smoke. But one of them took the pipe away immediately, and saved it for a souvenir. Then the executioner posed for a photo with the man he was appointed to execute. Then he executed him. Then they flew Che’s dead body to Vallegrande Airport, where they posed for more photographs with the corpse. October 9th, 1967. Then they cut off Che Guevara’s hands and posed with the amputations, soon put into formaldehyde in a jar. Then they secretly buried Che at the airport. They assumed they would be known in glory, for the charisma dust that might fall to them, for murdering a legend. But, like wind, a photo op has a life of its own. Saint Che before the Martyrdom. The Corpse of the Martyr Doctor Guevara Lynch.

  “Talk about incompetents,” Val said. “Dead Che might as well have hired Washington to market his image. The killers are Fulanos de Tal, little Joe Nobodies. But like a magnetic force we are pulled to the face of Che. And now, Danny Coma, you are telling me you took some of the soil from the Bolivian airport where the botch-up boys interred Che Guevara, and mixed it with the Spanish soil from where the Americans accidentally dropped several nukes near Málaga?”

  “It’s excessively rare, my son. Antique terroir. We even have some zygote tomatoes.” Danny fished down in the paper bag and brought out a small red object. Palm of his hand, pulpy, glowing, zaftig. It looked like a miniature callipygous Venus.

  “Don’t you worry, little one,” Danny said, speaking to the tomato. Diva, or demented, who knew?