“What voices, Danny?” Val sent a full charge through him.
Danny rose up off the car seat. “The generals. Mrs. Coma. ‘Mrs. C.’ They said we needed to right the balance. The IMF was on our case. The hounds of banking said we had to cleanse the country of terrorists. No one takes pictures. That was certain. Mrs. C. said it would be all right; the work was authorized through channels. Fully compensated, come the day. ‘Why sleep,’ she said. We slept in red rivers full of electric wires… Is that her calling me? My missus on the crater…she speaks again of the need to shed the incarnadine…can I cleanse myself there…?” Danny opened the car door and fell on the gravel, missing by a second having his head cut off by the car door slamming in the wind.
Danny stumbled up. He looked like he had the famous medical umbles: the mumbles, the stumbles, the grumbles, the tumbles. He mumbled about the cleansing waters but there was only drying wind. Wind so loud Johnny and Vivienne at the crater edge couldn’t hear anything. Val came out of the car and held Danny from behind. Danny saying, “I must go see her.” Trying to wrestle out of Val’s strong hold. “I see her at the crater. My love. You are forgiven!” Danny was granting merciful pardon to the ghost of his torturer spouse.
“Danny, just say you are sorry to Vivienne. Express remorse. Your wife is no more. The harmed one, Vivienne, is here. The reckoning is upon us.”
Danny was struggling to break free. “No,” he said. “Let us go see her. She has a new mission. We fed them to the rivers. We took them to the beaches. We fed the wires into the Río de la Plata. We could not allow the Enemy Camera. Enemy Art knew too much. She took me under her wing, Mrs. Coma. The new mission, yes. In her coat may I find the fresh green river.” Danny turned, put his arms around Val. He looked up at Val from eyes drained of the whole world. Age and acts were bearing in. “She put me in the crazy house. She dressed me like a bird and made me do things to those who threatened our nation.”
Val pushed Danny’s arms away. “Danny, it was never your nation or hers. You were foreign hirelings working for the Americans in other foreign locations.”
“She took me to a nuthouse. I don’t remember what she told them. She took me to the three corners, Paraguay. She came back, I don’t know when. I said why don’t we go hiking, like we used to. I had to push her off the cliff. Still the water ran red out of the tap. Still every household appliance seemed like a tool for the torturer. She was my mudlark. Yes! The new green mission…she is right there.”
Danny ran from the car to the edge of the crater, spread his arms wide and jumped. Vivienne and Johnny rocked in the wind as Danny had rocked in his pain memory fever. Val hustled to the crater edge. Down below, Danny Coma was hanging from a narrow shelf of the fanglomerate, his fingers digging in. Johnny walked away. Val walked away. Vivienne took a picture. Then she knelt down, inching backwards to the crater rim. She stretched her legs over the side in Danny’s direction. Danny called out, “Vivienne!”
“Yes, Danny,” she said, “I’m coming.” She landed her feet on his shoulders and pushed him hard. Danny Coma slid down Ubehebe Crater. “Good night, Ambassador.” She looked up to the top of the rim. There was Val, reaching his arms down. He hoisted her up. She turned and took a pic of Danny falling to the Ubehebe Crater bottom, and another of him flat out on the orange core. “Let’s go,” she said.
“What a shame,” Val said. “The sin of suicide.”
They drove away from Ubehebe Crater in a low glowing pink through the corn-husk spectres flanking the road. The car curved past the dunes with their green shimmer at dusk. They rounded the final curve, hung a fast left through open parking and drove up to the walkway at room 214.
Four departed, three returned.
The walkway was full of feathers. Danny’s bird suit was in a trash can, sticking out.
DANNY LAY AT the bottom of the crater. He had skinned arms and legs. His bare chest was ripped up. Nobody came to visit the crater. The sunset was a blink in time. No one reported Daniel Coma missing. It was December 28th. The day of reckoning. One of Danny’s legs was broken. The temperature went down from a high of 62 to a low of 28 Fahrenheit. Danny rubbed his hands together to get the stains out, the bloody stains. His malfeasant dripping fog entered the textile pattern of the crater. He spoke to the ghost of Mrs. Coma. The next day, the man at the bottom of the Ubehebe Crater was dead of exposure. His wife was already dead, his two adult daughters were used to him disappearing for years with no contact. Nobody came to the crater the next day, sun to moonrise. On the third day, a turkey vulture with a six-foot wingspan took up the wind columns and rode the venting air with brown wings and a red head, making its characteristic grunt sounds, even SSSSSS hissings, having no vocal cords, but having a sense of smell from the sky for the carrion of a necrotizing mammal, and tore pieces of human flesh to carry and eat. Later, the low walking animals of fur made it down the slope and back up with rags of his skin and shards of his bones. On that day, December 30th, 2006, in Madrid, Spain, the ETA terrorists with whom Danny had negotiated a ceasefire in March bombed a parking garage at the Madrid airport.
26
DEATH VALLEY ODALISQUE
TWO DAYS WENT AWOL. Vivienne, Johnny and Val fell into an atomic shock lassitude in their motel room. From bed to door seemed like an insurmountable project. Val in his bed, Johnny and Vivienne in theirs, kept sleeping, kept prodding each other to get up and eat, kept falling back into the late December darkness. On December 30th, they woke up, three in a bed, got up, put on coats over their pyjamas and walked to the motel saloon for happy hour. They nibbled appetizers and drank cocktails. Johnny dubbed them sandtinis. They toasted Danny. Johnny spoke about how he was just a kid when Danny left home. How he kept a lookout for his older brother, an ear out, hoping to hear from him. But he never did. Once in a while much later, when Johnny was an adult, Danny would call from somewhere and speak to him on the phone in a stiff manner, like a condescending stranger talking to a clever four-year-old. And all that time, Johnny never knew the dark heart behind the twerp. Cain was no brother to Abel. Cain married a torture doctor; Cain’s wife did inflict grievous harm on the wife of Abel.
IN A BRAIN fog, the Three Musketeers checked out of room 214 on December 31st. The Honda crawled up Towne Peak. Some wag had inserted a painted apostrophe s, making it Towne’s Peak. Vivienne posed Johnny the writer beside the sign. They descended five thousand feet in ten minutes, their ears popping. They were travelling further west, in inland California.
They came to a massive salt playa. It looked like a lovely blue lake in the morning sunshine. They turned right, where there was no road sign. They were in the rain shadow of the Eastern Sierra now.
Ahead lay the legendary Panamint Dunes, rising behind Lake Hill. They were in the Panamint Valley. The wind had formed the sand, which had once been granite. The small rock mountains slid off other buttes through detachment faulting, the wind weathered the new limestone rocks. Once, this land was not protected, but now it was in Death Valley National Park, officially. The road they travelled was listed in the guidebooks as Look for the sign to Big Four Mine Road, but there was no sign for Big Four Mine Road or Small Four Mine Road or any sign at all; guidebooks were best used before or after a trip.
Along its sides grew creosote, bursage with its burrs, devil’s guts – the parasite strangling the modest grey-green bushes with orange-threaded dodder nooses.
It was a zydeco road.
Men had played New Orleans Boozoo Chavis zydeco music on tin washboards smoother than this road. Vivienne in the suicide seat, with her camera trained out the window, bumped and jiggled; the undercarriage of the low vehicle jumped and hurtled, lurching. They drove down the desert road at the speed of fast rain, about one inch per hour. Jiggling like Jell-O down the desert gravel towards the Panamint Dunes until Vivienne called, “Stop!”
On their left in the desert scrub sat a car, rusted and abandoned, pockmarked, crushed, insides removed. Vivienne jumped out while their car was still movi
ng.
The crushed and mutilated body, its fire stolen, had been sitting in the desert who knows how long, waiting for its close-up. Who knew how long the big sky had tended this old body? Who knew what the occasional flat-topped cloud saw looking down at the gouged and vivisected steel? Who knew what filmmaker chanced up the no-name corduroy and eyeballed the steel hobo in the deep Mojave?
How long had the rusting corpse been waiting in western isolation, dreaming the old CinemaScope and Technicolor dreams? And finally, here came the camerawoman who would make the car a star, and she got to work: Ruined Coupe, Panamint Valley, Death Valley California, December 31, 2006.
She came close, Vivienne Pink, the car whisperer.
There were bullet holes in the body, and she moved in towards them.
Below the three bullet wounds were four more in a rectangular pattern. The whole body had hundreds of wounds, it was shot full of them. A brown body with white patches and the greening patina of age. She moved forward on hard sand in her soft red-and-black leather sneakers, she did not want to disturb the dead.
The body’s wheels had been amputated. There was nothing to carry it away, only rocks left. The steering wheel had patchy skin, brown peeling on the shiny white. Blue lakes pitted the rusty brown. The suicide door was frozen open, a paralyzed wing. She took small shutter kisses towards the capture.
Vivienne Pink, hunter, moved in to three feet, a sympathetic capture distance. She thrilled to know her prey in her scope, but the real thrill was the intimacy of the hunt. Transubstantiate the dead object, make it live in an art oasis. You could bring the dead to life by the empathy in the shutter.
Vivienne looked down at her arm as she hunted the car skin. Her arm was scalier, whiter, the patch above her wrist had risen, she rubbed it against her hip, white powder came off on her olive green pants. She saw her wrist bones inside the scaly skin. She shot her own degrading skin.
She turned and shot the car skin, a white patch on it. She shot the ground, patchy powder on beige green. She shot a cloud, one cloud in a cloudless blue field. She moved one step in towards the jagged blue patches of the car. She got dizzy, feeling like she had been lifted to that airplane window again, and she was looking down on herself: tiny white risen parts, tiny mountains beside snaking green water. It was the car.
She felt weak. The blue mountains were large surrounding her, shedding their dust. She looked at her arm. It too looked like the land as seen from a window seat. Fossil white patches, sinks, dips, thin hair trees, scabby epidermis. She felt a thickness under her right armpit that she did not remember being there before. She lifted her arm. A large bubbling was there, purple, grey, leaking black blood. She leaned forward and wiped her bloodied wrist on the car body, then shot a quick picture of this. She came around to the car front.
The corpse was filled with rocks. Who drove the body here, who shot the body full of bullet holes?
She got up and ran around the other side.
Inside a coyote lay in wait for her.
The coyote had been watching her from inside the car body, and she had not seen him. She had been ambushed by nature’s own. Was it ever any other way? She might be thirty-four years in, in visiting Death Valley, but the wild coyote had desert ancestors older than the wandering tribes, in sand and indigo silks. Their manners and their morals went way back to when mountains walked without them, and sand dunes sang like Peggy Lee with no one to hear them.
Vivienne held her camera down at her side.
Without a camera, there was no picture. She had learned that, back in Vietnam. An idea for a photograph is an idea; a witness without a camera is a witness. She wanted to bring her witness to the world, in pictures. Hold that camera close, let it live and die with you. You and the coyote.
Vivienne Pink moved two feet closer to the coyote inside their shared corpse vehicle. She took a further half-step with her right foot, using it as a balancer, one leg forward, one leg back. The coyote had not moved one coyote furry hair. It had eyes like headlights as they stood inside the car that had none.
Vivienne had seen animals in Iraq used as decoys for Improvised Explosive Devices. The animals were murdered, slit open, the matériel put inside them and then they were sewn back up. Who was to say that this coyote standing so still was not a decoy, a perfectly sewn and stuffed taxidermic weapon? Who is to say that this was not somebody’s idea of fun, or maybe they had stumbled onto a remote sensing area, where the coyote might be blown up at a distance. After all, China Lake was not far, other military grounds were not far, if you made it out to the main road and went in the other direction. Had the military been given permission to use national parks? This car corpse was an ark of sorts. Two by two, camera girl and coyote.
Vivienne locked eyes with the coyote. Come on, Mr. Fur, give me some angles. You are beautiful. Scrutinize my face, let’s collaborate. No mellow here, baby, just you, just me, just Death Valley.
The coyote stared at her. Vivienne saw he had a ripped right eye, ripped like the steel peelings of the inside of the car. His fur eyelid had been cut. His gold-red skin was bare of fur, she saw now, in a few flank spots. He had one metal bolt in his side. He did not look wild in a fresh way, he looked wild in a wounded way. Damaged, the way the rabid can be. Her empathy was disciplined. There were great pictures here. She was mute as the desire to use only her eyes impulsed her. The coyote had the characteristic bent back legs. The front legs stiff, straight. He had that marvellous thick tail, though it was cut halfway up, indented, as if for fun someone had semi-scalped it.
Her camera was at her side, still. She was all eyes.
She was on the coyote’s turf. Dig that long nose, so steady, dig how the nose is the prime visual feature. Dig those ears, their sharp points. Big ears, all the better to hear your soft night prints with. All the better to make a mess of your laughing, those ears, the original desert mountain surveillance. Furry echo chambers, fur canyons, those pointed ears of the coyote. There was no companionship here. This was not friendship. This wild was the ring, this desert was the agon, this coyote was her enemy, a valuable enemy, a valued one, maybe this was her golden combatant. This coyote could roam with the wild dogs of slum alleys, and be regal, and rule the gang. He could enter the ring, in charge, and she was the underdog, and she could take away his image but leave his soul, and he could be intact and she could win and he could win, as long as he did not eat her.
He could win, even if he ate her.
Vivienne lifted her camera, now in a quick clean move. She took a shot of the coyote. The coyote did not attack her.
He was the perfect posing model, showing his angles, showing parts of himself at the same time, articulating his limbs. He was the Fur Pharaoh. He received her in the rubble of his ruined kingdom. In his vast mesquite country he received her, amidst the wintering berries. He was trim, battle-hardened, fearless, curious. She was a stray mutt with her own battle scabs. He was staking his claim, as a creature who ruled this desert dominion moment; he ruled even the ruins. Here was evolution indisputable, the soft fur scape and the hard red eye. Come to Daddy, let Daddy tear out your eyes.
His nose smelled her camera lens. His eyes took in the smell of her scarred parts.
She took two more shots, three was a good number. No even numbers, even numbers were bad luck, stay with the odds, stay with the good luck wild coyote. The coyote moved. He moved towards her. She did not budge. He stopped. She dared raise her camera, leaving her stomach exposed, her crotch, her legs, her precious photographer’s feet. He was full face and torso in her frame. His eyes had history. That was his story. He invited her back into her genes. He invited her into the feral chain. Yes.
She was jealous of his four legs. Oh, to have two extra legs to rush up the dunes and see the world from on high, and prey at night into tents, to come down from the avalanche cities into the urbanscapes and terrorize exurbia with your professional silence.
Come on, baby. Do something.
The coyote moved to the
side of the car carcass, towards one of the emptied windows. But just a foot. Vivienne could now see a black box on his left side, facing her as he came alongside of her, tied to his flank, like a Hebrew phylactery box that contained the Torah you davened with every morning. What was it? Was it a bomb? Her gut said bomb.
Get out of the car, coyote. Nice and easy. Her heartbeat lowered; it did that in emergencies. Like an athlete.
She took a pic of his side, with the box on it, his Torah box on his damaged desert fur, a desert ancient as she had suspected and known. Carrying the Torah and the sand ark, a desert nomad. Get that pic. Get it as easy as if it were your last one.
The coyote climbed up through the window. Vivienne shot his ass with the mysterious black box sticking out of his fur profile. She shot him going through the window. Then he – marvellous – turned and looked back at her. He jumped out of the car towards the salt playa. Vivienne followed the coyote with her telephoto. The coyote reached the playa. Its fur shone regal orange in the high crystal sunshine on the salt, simply sensational, a fur ghost in the promised land of playa. The coyote blew up. The coyote exploded. Someone, somewhere, had set off an explosive device that was either in the black box or in the metal bolt Vivienne had seen on him. Vivienne shot the explosion out of instinct and because she was in the middle of shooting.
She shot the explosion as the shock wave lifted her up, rattled her brain, shook her, filled her mouth with sand, threw her against the car, banged her against the car, beat her up, let her down.
Johnny and Val flew through the air and fell down, hitting gravel and animal bones that had been lifted from hidden areas and flown, forensic material weaponized by the shock wave.
The car had a new small dent in it, from Vivienne’s head being pounded on its side, and Vivienne had small mulches of rust and green patina from the car on her. Who knows which photograph of us will be the last one ever taken?
Death Valley Page 23