“Give me the damn dirt, Danny,” Val said, then he pulled his hand back.
“Oh wait,” Danny said. “We have one more thing to show the man, do we not, little one?” He fished further down in the paper bag, pulling out a Rolex watch. “Don’t mind if I do. The very one,” he said, “as you might have guessed. Doctor Ernesto Guevara’s wristwatch. Rolex GMT Master. The man had good taste, I’ll have to give him that.”
Consider the man, Daniel Coma, hearing the silent applause in the shadows. Consider that he scooped up the bird suit from the trunk, and carrying his avian avatar in one hand and a nuclear-execution blend in the other, and wearing the Rolex stolen from the corpse of the sainted asthmatic physician, he bade, “Hasta Luego!” while walking back east towards the main military highway.
19
ROOM 214
JOHNNY AND VIVIENNE got in the back seat of the white Honda. Val got behind the wheel. In that early slow sundown, which goes to black quickly, they drove west into light and shadow, descending to sea level.
“You know, I remember having a beer with Che,” Val said. “In Ireland on St. Paddy’s Day.”
“Like hell you did,” Vivienne said, checking out Val’s laughing face in the mirror.
“True story,” Val said. “So I’m doing some checking up on our boys in the IRA. First I had to go to New York, because Che was speaking at the UN. December 1965. Sure, a couple nutjobs had tried to knock Che off in Manhattan: a woman with a knife at the UN, and then some real brainiac who sat in the East River with a badly timed bazooka. So then Che decides to tour the world and check out his Irish roots.”
“Che? Irish?” Vivienne asked.
“Absolutely,” Val said. “Lynch. In another life he was Ernie Lynch. So, I had a little sit-down with Ernie in Limerick. March 1966. Think about it. St. Paddy’s Day in Ireland, and two and a half years later they assassinate him in Bolivia. He had a great low droll voice, Che did. He spoke in that distinct Argentinian Italian-sounding lilt.”
“Without the photographs of Che, there would be no worldwide Che,” Vivienne said. “Heck of a job, CIA.”
THE THREE MUSKETEERS pulled up at the Stovepipe Wells rustic motel. They went up the timber stairs into the motel’s reception. The check-in area was about the size of the front seat of their vehicle. Jammed into it were three people, a tall fair-haired man with a shorter woman, pouring coffee from a Pyrex set on a hot plate on a little table, speaking Russian, and a round man in a scarlet short-sleeved shirt and a panama hat. He was at the counter, mid-conversation, saying, “No, that is not right. I was distinctly told I could drive right up to the room.”
“Sir,” said the tall man at the counter in an Irish knit sweater the colour of the sand outside. “Sir. You can easily drive up to the room. I think you will find there is no problem here, I think you will find there is no disagreement, sir, we are on the same page. You will be able to drive your car right up to the room. The cars back up to the walkway and you will be able to unload right there. I can send somebody with you to help you unload. Sir, the room is as advertised.”
It was the way the clerk, whose name the threesome had forgotten, but whose face they knew as that droll gent from years gone by, said sir that alerted them to his inner voice saying, “We got a live one here.” He had seen it all. But the clerk was in the hospitality industry and he knew it, and so, a modern miracle, he was being hospitable. “Sir, if you want to take your car around, I will send José here right with you.” He looked at Vivienne, then at Val, then at Johnny. “Well, look at that. Here they are. Folks, glad to see you back, with you soon as I get my friend here sorted out.”
The man in the scarlet short-sleeved shirt took off his panama hat and claimed precious space on the tiny counter. The Russians in their ski jackets stayed in the corner and sipped their coffee from their Styrofoam cups, watching. Val was near the counter with Vivienne slightly behind him and Johnny was at the door, no one else could get in the small space. “No,” the scarlet-shirted man said. “That is wrong.” He was tapping a brochure for the motel, Stovepipe Wells Village. “Look. Look at this picture.” The clerk did not look at the picture. The world over, travellers take the brochure snap as the literal bible and base their true heavenly happiness on a small thumbnail shot, then get to Saint Peter and complain. Here it was: level five loony-tune negotiation.
“No, that’s not right,” the round man said to the man at reception. “Look.” Tapping the tiny snap in the brochure. “This car is pulled right up to the room.” The car in the photograph was not pulled right up to the room. It was pulled up, as the clerk said, to the walkway that had a shaded overhang and benches, a walkway about six feet wide. The cars pulled up on the sandy gravel, and then it was smooth carrying across the walkway to the rooms. That was what the picture in the brochure showed.
“I have come from Hawaii; we got off the boat from Hawaii last night in Los Angeles. I have boxes of goods I import from Hawaii – clothing, textiles – I am not carrying those into the room. What do you want me to do with them, leave them in the car? Well I am not leaving them in the car, mister, I can tell you that much, that is for sure. I have important goods I am carrying from the big island, we drove all night to get here, now you tell me I can’t drive my car, I can’t back my car to the door of my room. What kind of place is this?”
“Sir,” said the clerk, picking up the phone and dialling. “I am happy to find you alternate accommodation in the town of Beatty. If you prefer I can call Pahrump. There are plenty of places in Las Vegas. It’s a three-hour drive; you can be there by seven. Furnace Creek is just down the road an hour. I can call and see if we can get you into Furnace Creek, if you prefer it to our Stovepipe. Party of three?” he said to Val, while trying to find a better place on earth for the round man with the scarlet summer shirt in winter.
“I do not want any of your alternate accommodation, I want this.” Tapping the photograph in the brochure. Sticking with his negotiation at heaven’s portal.
“Sir, we have you in the Tucki section.”
“Well put me where the back of my car is at the door to the room.”
“No such room exists, sir. It’s our busy time, you were lucky to get anything at all without a reservation.”
“Who do you people think you are? I just got off a ship from Hawaii, I have things to sell.” He waved his hand to the door. Vivienne had not noticed it before, but they had parked right beside an old beat-up station wagon, a woodie wagon stuffed to the gills with green garbage bags, the back area stuffed so the driver couldn’t see behind him, the bags coming out the windows. Sitting thin and hunched in the back seat was a pale woman with dark hair, looking stunned and travel-beat herself.
The round man waved again. “At this rate you know what’s going to happen? She’s going to have to unload the whole damn thing. She had to load it off the boat in LA, and now look what you’re going to do to the poor woman. Last time I stop in this place. What a dump. Okay, Becky, I got bad news coming your way.”
He pushed past Val and Vivienne, smelling like the sea and mouldy humidity; he flat out pushed Johnny away from the door and made his sour egress. The clerk said, “Merry Christmas, folks. I trust you’re all now in the proper New Year’s spirit. They’ll be hanging Saddam, get out your bubbly.”
They all chuckled. The Russians chuckled. They pitched their Styrofoam cups and left. The tiny space felt mansion-like all of a sudden.
Vivienne stepped right up to the counter. “Coma. Reservation for three. Room with a dunes view.”
“That’s right, the Coma party.” The clerk found them in the file. “Room 214 in the Roadrunners,” he said. “You’ll find maps and the daily weather right there, folks, and menus for the restaurant. There’s drinks and appetizers in the saloon, and we have coffee ready at five in the morning, if you’re aiming to go out early.”
“Oh we are aiming,” Johnny said, coming up behind Vivienne. “Aren’t we, sweetie?”
“We love going out in the dark,�
� she said to the clerk. “Get some of your fine joe, get a head start on the picture takers. I like to get into the dunes before sunrise.”
“Well, good luck to you. You’re going anywhere too far afield, you let us know; check in with us, in case you go missing. You can die of thirst in the winter too.”
“Gotcha,” Vivienne said. He handed her three key cards without anybody having to ask.
They got back in the car and drove from the reception parking to the parking just outside their room. Johnny put his key card in the slot at room 214. They faced east to the dunes, watching the sun pour low from the west through embedded palms, and the small sandstorm at the dunes looked like a golden shower cut ten ways, and then early night green came into the golden storm.
They ate early and well, and slept in steady REMs, Vivienne and Johnny in one double bed, Val in the other.
20
THUNDERBIRD
INTERSTATE 95 RUNS out of Las Vegas, reaching the same elevation as Nellis Air Force Base and the Nevada Test Site and Creech Air Force Base, set up in reaction to Pearl Harbor and used today by combat-ready airmen flying MQ-1B Predators and MQ-9 Reaper aircraft. Here under desert skies air-power innovation took place for the Korean War; here research and special weapons and the famous Thunderbirds had made a home; here there had been staging bases for the delivery of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union for joint verification tests; here was the home of remotely piloted aircraft being used in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And here a man dressed as a bird stood on the highway, hitching.
He held out a cardboard sign: THE SLEIGH BROKE.
A snazzy pink Ford Thunderbird stopped on the opposite side of the road, heading back north. Danny Coma ran across the highway.
A sharp Thunderbird, a dazzling pink T-bird from back in the day. The woman at the wheel was blond, she wore a turquoise stud in her right ear and her hair was in a scarf laden with metallic thread that sent emerald greens, ruby reds, sapphires of blue electric zizzing in the wind. “Get in,” she said, opening the suicide seat door for the big bird. The bird climbed in, sheltering a small hard suitcase from the driver’s view. “Hey, honey,” she continued, “how ya doing. Whatcha got in the suitcase?”
“Top of the season!” the big bird said, adjusting his bulk into the creamy leather seat. “Wow! Flush out the cowards! There has been some loose talk on these matters…travelling for some time on a variety of, well – Lips zipped.” He put the suitcase on the floor in front of him, resting his feet on it like a footstool.
“You said it,” the woman at the wheel said. She wore big dark sunglasses. The big bird, who had none, squinted as the rays from the west beamed into his left eye. They drove the empty lane, through protected areas. A permanent sign read: MILITARY EXERCISE IN PROGRESS. Though this was a public thoroughfare and a major roadway, kept up excellently, the citizenry and touristic travellers were not on a government-controlled and government-maintained highway in quite the same way they would be anywhere else. When they drove north out of the metropolis of Las Vegas on the interstate, they were on a highway passing straight through an old nuclear test lab. The cars were vehicular mice in the lab hallway. A pretty woman in a pink T-Bird driving a small man in large feathered suit was the least of the weirdness.
And the big bird carried nuclear dirt from Spain in his suitcase, gathered from the fallout of the bombs developed right there on that highway. The bird examined his red mitt.
“You a salesman, honey?” the lady in the scarf and shades asked. “I’m dying for seafood. They have to fly the octopus here. Hell, they have to put the lettuce in an aisle seat. Cause if that is octopus in your luggage, you know what? I’d pay for some squid. You got squid, brother?”
They passed by the open area where the High Desert State Prison sat, a long, low box on scrub. Grey mountains with a dusting of snow on their peaks sat behind it, against the hard blue sky. A sign came up on the right: NO HITCHHIKING.
“Call me Andres,” the big bird said.
“Okay, Annie,” the driver said.
“Andres, if you please,” he said, scolding her for saying his fake name incorrectly.
The big bird leaned forward, no seat belt, and put his mittened red hand on the windshield, saying, “I come from Viking blood; I fought naked as a Norseman! I sat commando on the prow in Greenland. I walked the Santiago Camino. Un aplauso, por favor, muchas gracias. I got that revolution started in Portugal, I was behind it, they call me Mike the front man. Do you know, young lady, that fully 87.3 per cent of CIA plants are called Mike? Oh, yes. I was Mike in Lo Curro when I concocted sarin; I let those Lefties – ha! – have it. Me and Mike, Mike and Mike they called us, we set sarin loose in Chile, we killed that Dutch banker, oh yes, no fear.” He held up the red mitten.
She pulled down her shades and looked at him with lime green eyes.
Ahead, there were blue-red ranges below blue-grey ranges. The rock sheers evolved in true slow reportage.
“Call me Daniel,” Danny said, introducing himself by his real name.
“You seem more like an Annie to me,” she said, alluring by her uncaring, just driving the highway.
“I was young. They put a headset on me: ‘Listen to the enemy.’ I felt important, honey.”
She slowed the car and she beamed those radiant limes at him through the red-brown dust. “You do not call me honey, I call you honey, or you can get out here.”
Here was nowhere at all.
Beatty, which led into Death Valley, was about a half an hour away. Mercury, just north of Beatty, was about an hour away. Beatty and Mercury had stayed alive for years as service centres for the staff, the scientists, the military working at the Nevada Test Site, which the pink T-Bird had passed some miles back. Nearly all the land for hundreds of miles outside of Las Vegas was set aside for military purposes and government land management, from Las Vegas through the four hundred eighty-eight miles on up to Reno and beyond. (Imagine travelling north by northwest from Amsterdam to Belfast, and the land and all the water you travel through being military or government, with spookily few civilians.) Nuketopia is with us.
Planes invisible and eyes invisible watched the pink car, the big bird, the lady in a scarf at the wheel.
The big bird said, “We were under orders to get the Left. We kidnapped the Dutch banker, if I do say so myself. We beheaded him, nice job too. Mike was good at that handiwork. We sent him to Guatemala where he did a nice job with those aid workers at the hotel in the jungle at Petén. That was Mike, you know, he came on to them like he was…what is that word you people use? Progressive? Sure. In Chile, we called ourselves The Red Group.” Danny had had a mental breakdown after he walked out of the ghost town with his nuclear ground blend in a suitcase. His mind, after the interrogation, had skidded back to the things he had done in the name of public safety, money and a hubris skill set.
“I am Daniel,” the bird man said. “It was I who ran that Red Group. Bunch of idiots. I will tell you something, honey, you will find incompetents right across the political spectrum. Views?”
“You call me honey one more time and I will personally mount you on my hood, little horsey.”
“Ha. Love a woman with a sense of humour. I recall one time in Patagonia, we were on our way to Colonia Dignidad. Right beside that nice eco-park. We are great hikers, the wife and I. Were. She was a little wisp of a thing; she blew off a cliff one day. Don’t worry, I was cleared, honey pie.” He put his hand on her thigh.
The lady with the lime-green eyes slowed her pink T-bird on Interstate 95 just south of the desert town of Beatty. “Get out,” she said.
“Aw, come on. Why finger me? My wife was advising. She advised a couple Germans what questions you use to find out what the children know. She spent nine years getting that medical degree, and then she goes and gets a psych doctorate on top of it.”
“Get out, big boy, or I’ll get it out for you.”
“No.”
They were in a dangerous posi
tion, stopped on a government highway through the atomic secrets’ areas. You do not stop along that road to have a random cheeky fight with a feathered nut who claims to be CIA black ops, especially in a neon pink T-bird.
Unless, of course, you were one of them.
She was one of them.
“Are you getting out?” she asked.
“Aw come on, you can’t be serious.” The big bird was talking to the pretty lady like she was his wife or his incompetent secretary. She was staying deadpan, hiding a reaction that said, “This feathered yapper will be useful, then I will complain to State. He is insufferable, is there any way we can fire him?”
“Things continue to remain somewhat uncertain,” the big bird said, his arms crossed like chubby limbs, a big bird in a fat avian snit. “One had to be prepared for sudden and unexplained changes in the military situation. I had to write their damn memoranda, if I might say, of fucking understanding. Host nations you don’t want to know. I had to cover their asses, that was me, thereby clarifying reports made pursuant to advance notification procedures.”
This was the place that language was built to cover. This was the location where the -ations and -abilities were put to frequent use, to cover the plain awe of the spinal cord of earth lifting to the sky, with every vertebra of fire exploded, with every thyroid of every child threatened. Plain speech is the enemy of the bureaucracy. Daniel Coma had twisted his love of language to make meeting about nuclear disarmament, and using the abstract words of meetings at the top levels, a safe thing to touch, to remove the harm from the living by speaking in dead words, to name things best named clearly, best because best for the soul of nations, and to do harm, by naming them in the worst possible way, however on the other hand, named in obfuscation and reification and nuclear capabilities, and here they were. The bombs went off here. The tests were done here. The radiation came from here. The plutonium drifted from this locale. This was the place. This was Atmosphere Zero.
Death Valley Page 17