I stood in the kitchen and it had become horrible, a reminder of what could have been. The effect of the yellow paint on the walls was grotesque. The sunlight struck me as out of place.
McCaffery did not sit. “Why have you been Googling conspiracy theories on Area 54 and researching antisecurity freaks like LASG?”
Christ! I didn’t know how closely these jerks were watching me. “Can’t sleep.”
“Look, Oberhelm, let’s figure out what our needs are. You need some safety and stability returned to your professional file … Am I right?”
Don’t say anything about the house in Ledoux or Ritchie Motherfucker. McCaffery didn’t know about the blood tech. As far as SAP was concerned, the trouble started with Sunshine. “I want my life back,” I said.
McCaffery looked at me with weary eyes. “I’m going to make my recommendation straight to you, off the record. Get out of Los Alamos. Go away for a few days.”
“You think I’ll be able to keep my job?”
“It’s going to be harder for you to keep it in jail.”
“I better … I better take some time …”
“That would be great. Take some time off. Don’t let yourself obsess over this.”
“I’ll get a flight to L.A. The other L.A. Hollywood, L.A.”
“There you go. Take in some movies. Go to the ocean. You got any money?”
“I have enough frequent flier miles.” And I did.
“Can you make it this weekend?”
“Yes.”
“It’s going to cost you a lot of miles.”
“I know.”
“Just don’t try coming into work again. Don’t contact any Lab employees until we can sort this thing out.
Okay?”
“Okay.”
After McCaffery left I drank some scotch and popped a few oxycodones. I woke up the PC and checked my frequent flier balance. I found a Sunday-afternoon flight to L.A. and a cheap hotel on Venice Beach, booking the ticket and the room purely with miles, the one thing the identity thieves had not thought to cash in. It started to get dark and I made a pot of coffee.
All night I smoked and watched cable. I went through all my weed. I did not want to see the nightmare again.
Saturday, July 13
I took the jar of change from the laundry room to Smith’s. After the Coinstar machine took its cut, I brought my ticket to the customer service desk, and the cashier was as surprised as me to see that it had come out to forty dollars on the nose.
I headed back to Mel’s and banged on his trailer door in the silence between two cumbias. He let me in and I followed him to the stove.
“Sunshine stole my fucking identity.”
“Ain’t that a bitch.” Mel pulled on a joint and hawked something semisolid from deep down in his chest, bull’s-eye against the side of his red-hot Scandia. The water in it steamed off in a few sizzling seconds and left behind a black badge of tar.
“He got a lot of money.”
“Someone got a lot of money. That Sunshine was always too much of a weasel to do anything right on his own.”
“You could have mentioned some of this.”
“I never told you to go looking for him. Besides, you’re the one came around asking about the Johnson house. What’d I say? When you walk up to a house like that …”
“Walk away.”
Mel spat another tarry phlegm ball. The coating on the stove was made up of black patches of the sticky resin from Mel’s throat. Thousands of badges layered the sides and top of the log burner, one for every useless night spent chugging Milwaukee’s Best. I looked down at my injured hand and saw a similar coating of such crud on the bench where I sat. I choked back a gag.
I said, “He told me the whole story of Ritchie Motherfucker.”
“Sunshine always was a terrible cook.” Mel grinned a black smile. A pocket of trapped air exploded in the fireplace. “Did he tell you about the dreams?”
“What dreams?”
“All that week he was dying of the gangrene, Ritchie had these dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Nightmares about something horrible happening on an Indian reservation. He said the name, said he had to warn them: Church Rock. I had never heard of it, but I knew it was like a natural monument, right? Ship Rock, Window Rock, Church Rock … I didn’t put any stock in it. Figured he was raving on account of the fever, but he wouldn’t shut up about it. We checked the news. Someone even found the number for the fire department in the town of Church Rock, New Mexico, and called to find out if anything bad had happened. Nothing. We told Ritchie nothing was happening, but he kept having these nightmares, awful nightmares—nobody even wanted to be around to hear him tell them when he woke up.”
I felt I needed air. “Go on.”
“Then right after he died we heard that name again:
Church Rock. It was all over the news. A dam broke at a uranium mine and flooded the Rio Puerco. Some Navajo kids had been wading in filling buckets.”
“When was this?”
“1979. But it was just a bunch of Indians in a ratty little res town, so nobody ever hears about it. It happened on the day Ritchie died, July 16.”
“The Birthday,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I gave Mel my forty bucks and he gave me a bag of pot. Back in the Spider, the list of names on the inside of the Mudslide carton was there on the passenger seat. I took out the Parker and crossed one out: Mel Woburn.
Why didn’t I tell somebody? Why couldn’t I ask for help? I wanted to believe the nightmare wasn’t real, but it was also more specific than that: I was trying to pretend I hadn’t been chosen individually. Why the passive? I didn’t know who or what had chosen me. Sunshine, the nightmare, the house? What was it about me that had made something choose me? Was I just unlucky? Was I fated to be prey? I was past the point I could have let it go, past where the house would let me go. Why was this happening to me?
When I got back to Los Alamos I Googled Church Rock 1974. On July 16 of that year, 1,100 tons of radioactive tailings in one hundred million gallons of toxic water had flooded the Rio Puerco. Kids playing, women washing clothes, men bathing—all subjected to six thousand times the allowable exposure to radiation, whatever the fuck allowable means. It backed up sewers, lifting manhole covers in Gallup and rolling on across the Arizona border. Today, seventy miles downstream, they can still meter radioactivity way off the counter.
Church Rock—it didn’t sound like a place that had been nuked, but the testimonials that came up on the antinuke sites were chilling: Mama said get the wash water. Why is the river so high today? Why is it so warm? Why does it stink more than usual? It happened just like Ritchie said, thirtyfour years to the day after the first man-made nuclear explosion at Trinity, July 16.
I put the PC to sleep and lay down on the couch. I didn’t want to be alone in the bedroom lying awake or watching TV. When I shut my eyes, the nightmare fried my mind.
A man wakes up in the middle of the night and hears the breathing of an infant beside him. He knows he is here for a reason, even if it is just an animal reason, and this is all that matters.
Another man wakes up and feels his wife beside him, his bed beneath him, his house around them, and it is enough.
A drunk wakes up with the flash of insight of a holy man, a message of beauty and hope, and even if the message is for him and himself alone, this too is enough.
A noise wakes me. It takes a moment before the memory of all that has happened comes crashing down on me. My limbs feel heavy. My head throbs. My heart feels like it is being crushed beneath a vast weight.
And then I remember.
I wake up with nothing but the nightmare lying there beside me. I do not want to tell anyone what I have seen, but I also cannot hold it alone. It never lets up.
Make it stop! Make it stop!
There will be no end to the corpses. They will stumble upon their vile corp
ses.
This is not happening.
Why does this surprise you that this shall come to pass?
Why me?
A promise from God to His followers.
What promise?
You have to tell them.
But I am not one of them.
Be the instrument, for I have already killed them.
Sunday, July 14
I packed a bag for L.A., the other L.A., but before I left I got on Google Maps and typed Ledoux, Morphy Lake. I toggled slightly north, slightly east, and located the bend in the dirt road. I switched to satellite view and pushed the zoom to an L-shaped blur that looked like the Johnson house. It had to be the Johnson house. It was the only house around.
I drove off the Hill to the valley below, and in Española an extraordinary thing happened. Depressed and irritable, about to pop another oxycodone, I looked out the window, eye drawn by the rainbow umbrella on the sign outside El Parasol, and saw Sunshine’s Volkswagen van. I turned around and spotted him eating a burrito at a picnic table. Heart pounded—the thief, eating a burrito bought with my stolen money! I hadn’t had my oxys yet. I pulled into the narrow lot, blocking the table where he sat. My blood was boiling. I reached under the passenger seat for the tire iron and jumped out of the car.
“You! You—asshole!” I shouted, waving the tire iron in the air. “You stole my fucking identity!” I pulled Sunshine off the bench and sat on him. He clutched the burrito desperately in one hand and I leaned into his other arm with the tire iron. Surprise had given me the advantage.
“Jesus! Don’t hit me with that!”
People in front of the taco stand had stopped eating and were staring at us, but nobody got between Sunshine and the tire iron. I took out my phone. “Number 32,” a girl called out on the speaker.
Sunshine started writhing and I pushed down on the tire iron. “Stay put, you fucking asshole!”
“You calling 911?”
“Fuck 911! You’re in deeper shit than that. You picked the wrong fucking identity to steal.”
“No shit! You’re the son of a bitch who never told me you worked for the Lab.”
I was shaking, fumbling with the numbers, and for an old hippie Sunshine was big enough. I didn’t know how long I could keep the advantage. “I can call this one guy and the whole fucking FBI will cut off all roads out of Española.”
“Choppers and shit?”
“Choppers and shit.”
Sunshine started to tremble, rocking back and forth.
“It’s Ledoux, that fucking house. Your name’s on that wall.”
“Number 33,” the girl called out on the speaker. “Number 33, carne asada,” and I thought of Oppie, tongue sticking out and eyes glassed over.
“You put my name up there?”
“No. But someone did, or why would you have gone way the hell out there?” I let up on the tire iron; Sunshine saw his window. “You know you’re never going to get it straight from the feds.”
“Fuck.” I lowered my weapon and looked at Shorn, Harold, Sunshine, holding him there in the gravel outside El Parasol, and I believed him.
A minute ago you lived life without an antagonist. Now that you know someone is after you, everything is different. You have to be on alert. It’s someone’s goal to bring evil to you. Right now someone is thinking about you. Life wakes up to you. Everything is charged.
What a strange place to find out I was cursed, in front of a burrito stand on a scorching July afternoon. I thought of the articles hanging on the wall in the house, and I believed Sunshine when he said he had nothing to do with it. I had driven away from the house without looking in the rearview, feeling superstitious. Now I knew it had not been enough. It did have something to do with me, this thing at the Johnson house. And worst of all, I knew I had to go back.
“Number 34,” the girl called, “Number 34, chicken tacos.”
“What kind of burrito is that you’re eating?”
“Chicharrón.” Pork rinds fried in lard. What I wouldn’t do to eat that every day if it wasn’t for the lipids being so fucked up! Just hearing him say it made my mouth start to water and my fleshy heart clutch.
“You got any cash on you?”
Sunshine nodded.
I held out a hand to help him up. “Let’s go to Red’s.”
I drove the Spider up Riverside Drive while Sunshine followed me in his van, persuaded by my threat of calling the FBI. We came in from the oven of the asphalt parking lot and sat at the bar. Red’s was subterranean and cool, and the bartender descended the three steps from the drive-through window.
Apprehensive, Sunshine looked to me to order. “Two whiskey and Cokes,” I said. The bartender scooped ice, poured the well whiskey, sprayed the Coke in, and we waited until he walked back up to the drive-through window.
Sunshine said, “When you told me about that girl—that piece of ass you were chasing …”
“Yeah?”
“That was a setup.”
“How do you know?”
The air felt a little colder and the AC sounded a little louder when Sunshine answered, “She had to get you to see your name on the wall.”
I thought about the blood tech and her black fingernail polish. “Mel told me about Ritchie’s nightmare,” I said. “I’ve been having one too.”
“Your name is on that wall, man. That’s all there is to it. You go there, you start having fucked-up nightmares, and then bad shit starts happening to you and everyone around you.”
“Who put Ritchie’s name on it?”
“Fuck if I know.” Sunshine looked at the ceiling of the bar and continued his story. The patterns were familiar. “The fucked-up thing is that after Ritchie died, there was a good lintel above that bricked-up window and the family was growing. We figured we’d replace that window with a door. I got my crowbar and pried out the window box. I started knocking out blocks with my old sledgehammer and what I found … Old man Johnson buried the family bones in that wall.”
“Jesus.”
“When the son did what he did, it was the middle of winter, and Johnson would have to go on living there in isolation with the corpses for weeks until the melt. The thought must have driven him crazy, if he wasn’t already crazy, so instead of keeping them on ice and waiting for spring to thaw the frozen ground, he built a fire outside the barn, burned the bodies one by one, and buried the bones in the east wall of the original room. Hundred years later that’s where we wanted the door, so I took some of the bones out and buried them. Only thing is, they didn’t stay there.”
“Someone dug them up?”
Sunshine hit his drink. “I dug them up, three nights later. I started having nightmares. I was going insane. I couldn’t sleep. Built the wall back, forgot about the door. The bones wanted to be in that wall.”
We both drank.
Sunshine said, “I thought I could change my name, hide my original identity, and be safe. But that didn’t help. This place follows you. It fucks with your life. I’m getting the hell out of New Mexico. Parasol was my last stop. Don’t have nothing but the chunk of change I got for your card number.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred bucks.”
“A lousy two hundred bucks!”
“Now they’re on me hard.”
“Who’s they?”
“I don’t even know. I never get their names. Protects the both of us. I’m just a freelancer. I get the number combo, there’s a beeper number, and it’s done. Before the cards get shut off, the syndicate orders some expensive jewelry or some computer shit online. They get the guy for five or ten grand. I get paid when I get paid. Someone, usually a teenage kid, different every time, stops by the diner with cash. But now a guy calls me and says, What the fuck? Was he from Los Alamos or something? Someone else stole your identity right out from under them. Someone with a lot more links, a lot more private data. This is international, serious shit.”
Sunshine paid and we went out to the parking lo
t. We both looked at the Volkswagen. I looked at Sunshine. “How far you trying to get?”
“Far as I can. You still going to call the FBI?”
“Not today.”
“Solid, bro. Give me a head start.”
In the parking lot outside of Red’s, I stood in the blinding sun and thought of another conjunction. Put simply, at this point McCaffery had one idea of how I might get my life back, and I had another. He could spout his SAP platitudes and sleep every night like a baby. I had a different idea. I had seen what the house could do to someone’s life.
I got back in the car and found the bottle under the driver’s seat, chewed three more of Kitty’s oxycodones, and chased them with the scotch. I glanced at the box on the passenger seat and took the Parker out of my pocket.
I crossed out another name. Sunshine. I stared at the only one that remained: Blood tech.
There were some unanswered questions for the blood tech. I decided to spend one more night in New Mexico and pay a visit to the health clinic in the morning.
The pills started working. The liquor washing over them created a magic potion, and the sun through the windshield reminded me of the simple things I still had that nobody could take away from me. I could smoke some weed. I could have a drink. I stared at the bottle and counted the remaining pills: twelve. Don’t let me grow to like this too much. Now is the time to smoke a joint. That joint will take this feeling and freeze it before it tips to bad, bummer, comedown, crash. Someone is hunting me, eating away at me piece by piece. A hundred miles away over the mountain range there is a house …
Curse the Names Page 10