Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  The three men went into the snack bar. Vivienne went to the little bookstore. She had most of the books, the scats and tracks, the desert holes, the geology, the ranger tales, the survival tips, the maps. She asked the ranger at the counter if there was anything meaty, juicy, something she might not have read; what was his favourite book in the store? Without hesitation, he walked to the shelves and pulled out Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. The American West and Its Disappearing Water. The book was about twenty years old, the ranger said. It was the story of the mismanagement of water in California: the dams, the irrigation, the keening to the big hydroelectric projects, the killing off of the farmers’ livelihood and land, and the growth of Los Angeles at the expense of the Owens Valley. When the ranger said the words Owens Valley, his face lit up, his eyes squinted.

  “Do you mind if I take your picture?” Vivienne asked.

  “Ma’am, you go right ahead.” She had seen a light, almost a pilot light in its first low blue flame, in the ranger’s eyes, coming higher in his eyes. He told her the story: His grandfather had farmed apples up north of Lone Pine when the first wave of the water crooks was finished absconding with the Owens Lake water and the Owens River water, and were making moves on the Mono Lake water, where large underwater tufa formations lay, part of the fragile ecosystem of the ancient heritage and drainage. But the bastards came in and took even the small fragile water the apple orchard farmers had. The ranger said he used to go to see his grandpa in the early spring when the apple blossoms filled the trees and they stretched for miles with their pale pink blossoms in the valley, “Almost like a Van Gogh, ma’am, do you know what I mean?”

  Vivienne loved standing in an empty shop having an over-the-counter chat with a weathered regular guy who knew more, way more, than he let on to a passing stranger, but who had this knowledge reserve should a woman chance in, who was curious and liked conversation and was up for a couple minutes of intimate human speech, a small connection to remember, a moment of light in the pain. She did not have to ask him if he had served in the armed forces, if he was a veteran. She knew it. He was giving forth while maintaining a reserve, telling a story of his grandpa’s farm going down, the apple blossoms he walked under as a small child, his enchantment with them, his shock when he saw a Van Gogh, when as a soldier he passed through Amsterdam, and the tree in the painting was his grandpa’s apple tree in the Eastern Sierra. It gave him the same feeling. The ranger’s air reminded her that men who have served tend to know and tend to emit that life is short. If life was short, chat was easy.

  So, the ranger’s grandpa’s apple orchard went down, and the tiny community they had named Manzanar for the Spanish word for apple, manzana, became known not for farming, but for the rich open land the government took and made into a concentration camp for Japanese Americans. The ranger’s eyes burned high and with a low fierce flame. His passions clearly were water, his grandfather, the long-gone apple blossoms in spring and the sick hateful move of the Feds in taking Americans of Japanese ancestry, the majority of them citizens, and incarcerating them during the Second World War. “It seemed incredible,” the ranger said, “that they were making that movie with Bogart – what was the name of it?”

  “High Sierra,” Vivienne said. That damn movie had been stalking her since Vegas. Can you be on the lam from a movie about someone on the lam from the law? Do some movies pop up and peep at you, like true serial stalkers?

  “High Sierra, sure,” the ranger said. “Yeah, they’re making that movie there right past my grandpa’s old house, up 395, past Olancha and Lone Pine, and there’s Bogey hanging that left to go up the mountain.”

  “Mount Whitney,” Vivienne said.

  “That’s right, ma’am. If Mad Dog Earle had been driving up that way a couple years later, he might have seen the Feds out, paying no attention to him, but arresting Japanese Americans in the evening on the day of Pearl Harbor.”

  Vivienne had never heard of Manzanar. There was a Japanese internment camp near Lone Pine, where they made all the Westerns?

  “Ma’am, there is an Ansel Adams photograph he took at Manzanar, oh yes.” The ranger went over to the twirly postcard rack and picked out a black-and-white shot of rocks, big boulders, with mountains in the back. “You think this is just Mount Williamson like it says. But there’s a story behind this.” Vivienne was thinking how she wanted to just take this ranger along with her, gee he was swell. Well, that was her problem, she liked guys. She liked men. If you were looking for a man, it was nice to know there were men around.

  “You come back and see me sometime, I’ll show you a book we have on back order. Your friend Ansel Adams did with – maybe you might have heard of him – Tōyō Miyatake, one of the best-known Japanese photographers out of LA. They put him in the concentration camp, then he and Adams put together this sweet little book, Two Views of Manzanar. You see, Ansel could come and go, but Miyatake? He was behind barbed wire.”

  Vivienne was getting a one-on-one tutorial from a ranger, a book club for two.

  The story was that Ansel Adams came to the Manzanar internment camp, and he asked to take pictures of the watchtowers, and they refused him, they did not want him taking pictures that would show this internment camp as an internment camp. So he went up in the tower, asking to take a picture of the landscape. But he managed to get shots of other watchtowers, guard towers, barbed wire.

  “Ma’am, now this Mount Williamson picture is only of the rocks, but it could serve as a nice reminder. Mister Ansel Adams fought for the land, but he was always on the side of the people, he knew how to play the game is all. What’s your business, honey?”

  “I’m a photographer,” Vivienne said, ignoring the honey. Every guy got one complimentary honey.

  “There you go. You’re all set. Would you like to take the Cadillac Desert?”

  “I most certainly would,” she said. She had a single Visa card in a secret zippered pocket inside her pink leather jacket. “I’ll read it when I get home.”

  “Read it before that, ma’am. Read while you drive.” He was chuckling, enjoying his own little joke, but with the proselytizing fervour of a genuine reader. Vivienne liked that.

  “Where you off to today?” he asked.

  “We’re going to Ubehebe Crater, maybe Little Hebe, maybe even the Eureka Dunes. I once climbed them, whoa, that was like what? Three hundred feet?”

  “Ma’am, I would say more like five hundred feet, some of them are eight hundred feet.”

  “You mean I climbed an eighty-story building? And I’m a slug, a slob.”

  “Ma’am, you look all right to me. You might want to get that psoriasis looked into, though.” Her hands were scaly, with thick white salty areas, looking like half flaking cement, half chalk lines. “Ma’am, were you in a fight?” He reached out in a strange store intimacy between clerk and client, and touched the growing black growth on her cheek, now taking up almost the whole side of her face.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” she said. “We were just caught in an atomic bomb test back at the Nevada Test Site.”

  The ranger gave her a quizzical eye. You don’t believe me, she thought. But he was too nice and the book looked too good, and besides, she had more special rendition to attend to. “Any word on conditions at the crater?”

  “Other than the wind, none so far today. Couple big fuel trucks overturned at 395, crazy wind. Go safely, ma’am. Leave no trace.”

  “I never do,” she said. She came out of the store, and Danny, Val and Johnny were sitting at a picnic table under some cottonwood trees. It was considerably colder up here at Scotty’s, downright frigid, the trees swaying. “Let’s get going,” Vivienne said, although she was the one holding them up. “Let’s get Danny to the edge of the volcano.”

  25

  THE UBEHEBE CRATER

  THEY CAME BACK down the Grapevine Canyon Road, leaving Scotty’s magnificent Moorish folly behind them and headed up the rough drive to the Ubehebe Crater. Partway up, they came to the Gra
pevine Ranger Station. It looked like a border-crossing hut. There was a woman inside. She asked them where they were headed. They said they were heading up to take a look at Ubehebe Crater, and maybe drive on to the Eureka Dunes. She leaned out through the station window and said, “I wouldn’t advise that, folks. Not a great idea. You’re on your own up there. Going up over that mountain pass…then there’s nothing. I would advise taking a pass on the Eureka Dunes today.”

  “Is there any problem?” Johnny asked. “Anybody die?”

  “Not that I heard of,” the ranger said.

  “Any avalanches or snow?”

  “At Eureka? No, sir.”

  “I’m curious why a park ranger is advising us not to go to the most remote part of the park. If there is no problem, as you say.”

  Vivienne knew Johnny couldn’t help it. He smelled a story. He was hard-wired to be curious. “Sir,” the ranger said, “we’ve had some trouble. Nothing you need to worry about. It’ll take you six to eight hours.”

  “It’s only thirty-five miles,” Johnny said, testing her.

  She said, “Sir, that road to the Eureka Dunes is mostly a road in name only. We discourage visitors from going there.”

  “You trying to save the dunes from people?” Val asked from the back seat, patting Danny’s hand.

  “Something along those lines,” the ranger said, peering past the sun’s glare to see Val. “No trouble. Nothing to worry about. A professor out of Canada managed to get some matériel in the soles of his shoes on a flight to Vegas, said he was planning to blow up the Flamingo Hotel on New Year’s Eve. So far, word is, he, well it’s not for me to say, but the news is saying the professor was copycatting those Indonesian hotel lobby bombs. But no worries, folks, they caught him. No problem.”

  Vivienne said nothing. She bet money that it was the guy sitting across from her on the plane out of Pearson. The one with his white SUV shoes on top of his backpack.

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “We’re heading to the Ubehebe Crater. We want to show Gramps back there the great explosion of when was it?”

  “Oh, not too long ago at all, sir. Pretty recently. Oh, I’d say maybe two, three thousand years ago.”

  “Gotcha,” Johnny said, and they pushed the vehicle on through the increasingly cold upsweeps of wind.

  VIVIENNE AND JOHNNY got out of the car at Ubehebe Crater.

  The wind was so strong everything flapped, from jacket collars to earlobes. Vivienne put her hands to her ears – the wind was so noisy she could not hear, the wind had G-force – and she walked to the edge of the rim. She tipped back and forth; the wind was trying to push her down the sides. She put her camera, which was hanging around her neck, to her eye; her arms were rocking back and forth. She planted her feet apart and dug her toes down to capture the ground. Johnny came up behind her and held her waist with a wraparound hug, to steady her for her photo. Val was still in the back seat of the vehicle with Danny.

  The crater was a half a mile wide. The rim around it was thin. The sides of the crater sloping down looked like one large unfurled textile. White lines ran across orange-rust volcanic rock in chevron patterns, extrusions pushing up to the rim area where a band of purply brown ran around the giant rim. These were a type of alluvial fan deposits called fanglomerates. The floor of the crater, seven hundred feet down, was a soft brown with white pebbles or ghost growths leading to an orange centre.

  IN THE CAR, Val pulled out an art postcard. It was Pineapple and Anemones, by Henri Matisse. A vase of pink, red, mauve, white anemones spilling over to a yellow container holding a red-orange pineapple on a yellow table. The colours in the card seemed like a revelation in winter; the anemones in a vase, which Matisse painted in a cold war winter, seemed a gift across time. While the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, down in the south of France in Nice, Matisse painted a fresh pineapple in winter. He painted the everyday item as found desire, speaking to the other colours around it, the way a lover found alive might turn up, swaddled in wrappings, in winter, in wartime, alive, shining in a bright orange-red sweater.

  Val asked, “What do you see, Danny?”

  Danny was not paying attention.

  “Fresh fruit, now that’s a laugh,” Danny said.

  Val pressed a red button on his orange phone. This sent out a blue crackle. Even in the car, the desert air made any electrical device more effective. Val applied the phone (a radio wave device after all) to Danny’s forehead. “What do you see? Look.”

  “It’s a damn… I don’t know what it is. A pineapple. Fine. Fruit and flowers. What do you want me to do with it?”

  “You say you’re a man of culture, Dan. Wagner, Harry Potter, The National, what do you see in front of you?” Val held the Pineapple and Anemones postcard up to Danny’s face.

  “It’s a damn sun, some damn orange table, someone sent somebody a pineapple.”

  “You know what I see, Danny? I see a grenade. But maybe that’s just me. I see an orange grenade. I see wheels. I see that yellow basket as a carry-on. I see someone smuggling an incediary device disguised as a pineapple on board a plane.”

  Danny understood Val was making chitchat. Val, however, was giving Danny one last chance to show he had a suspicious mind. And one last chance to show remorse.

  “No tropical fruit on the plane,” Danny said, off in his hospital ward in his mind, nursing all those bedded grudges. “I get bumped to steerage. What kind of world are we living in? A woman has her comfort bear. It’s a real bear. I’m in business and a hairy bear is sleeping on my neck.”

  “Oh for pity’s sake, Dan. I could fritz you from morning to night and all you would bleed is a bunch of straw men.” He pushed the red button.

  “No. Stop it. I will not have it... What is that?” Danny started hitting his own face. “Get off, get off me, why is the river green? Why is the river red?” Slapping himself.

  “Danny, wake up, man,” Val said.

  Danny was rocking back and forth in the car, hugging his waist, saying, “I see the red rivers,” slapping his arms, “I can’t wash off the rivers. Is it her? Get her away from me… She told me what to do. Stop her voice.” Slapping his own head.

  Val was stumped. Val had promised Vivienne he would proceed.

  “Daniel Coma, you have heard the charges. Your wife, Mrs. Coma put the juice to Vivienne Pink. She tortured an artist. You watched. You participated. Allocute now, Danny. Confess. Ask God to forgive you. Forget God, ask Vivienne to forgive you. Now is the time. What is that cute word you use – reconciliation? How about repentance. If you repent, you might live to see another begging bowl day.”

  “Oh get off the pot, you amateurs.”

  Val pushed the white button. He pushed a black button. A robotic cobra emerged from the orange phone. It wound around Danny’s neck. Val pressed a blue button. The cobra applied even electricity around Danny’s neck.

  “Say you are sorry, Daniel.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “You heard her at Rhyolite.”

  “What else did she tell you?” Danny asked, closing his eyes, rocking back and forth again, speaking to someone not there. “Ah yes, my dear, I am coming. Not to fret. I have the up-to-date information for you. No, no. No need to do that…the beaches must be spared. There is too much blood already.” Opening his eyes: “What else did she tell you? That one.”

  “She told me. The details. You did more than try out the electricity on her.”

  “I want to know what she told you.” Like many an abuser who bonds with his subject in an odd belief that the two of them have been through something intimate together, Danny expressed himself in disbelief, a sense of disloyalty on the part of his victim, a sense that she had betrayed him by speaking of it. The utterance is the betrayal. The utterance to others. Because that brings others into the intimacy of the torture, reveals the secret of the act. The fear that binds private abusers and government torture-meisters is the fear of the storyteller. The story might be told in pictures; the sto
ry might be told in words. “What did she tell you? I want to know what she said.” In lieu of repentance, the torturer will look for the feeling he was duped. Evil is not banal. Evil is evil. Men who torture do not, in fact, say I was just doing my job. They speak of the clear and present dangers. They say you cannot understand what the times were like. They say that to rout out the subversives, they had to keep almost-killing the artists. They will say the best of their lot had a fine hand. They will praise each other for the delicacy of their fingers. They will, as men, praise men who have the knack. They will speak of their brethren as the fine jeweller, the expert neurosurgeon, the heart surgeon, those who can bring the living to a state of almost dying, and yet never quite kill them. They will look down on torturers who kill their subjects as clumsy amateurs. The high bar of torture is not death, but rather the voyeurism of seeing the living suffer. And after all that, look at the gratitude. “I want to know what she said to you,” Danny said. “Are there pictures?”

  “Just say you’re sorry,” Val said. “She’s right there, at the crater rim. Go to her, and tell her you are sorry for what you did. Ask her forgiveness.” Vivienne was waving at them.

  “I had no sleep. They told me I could sleep after the mission. I walked the Camino as a sorry pilgrim. Cannot we be nomads together, brother? It was, one must confess, slightly after the Tokyo Round that we began to – sham! Sim! Splat! Punta del Este, lovely for the holidays. One did most humbly accept the credencial on the Compostela Way. Pilgrim passport. Motivation: spiritual.”

  Val pressed a purple button. “Guess your thoughts on God left out the mercy,” he said. The robot snake tightened around Danny’s neck.

  Danny said, “Why is the river red? No one will answer. Where is the river? I can’t wash off the rivers.” He pulled at his skin, lifting the loose flesh, biting it. “The voices told me to do it.”