“I’m doing this, I’ve never had a bit of real assurance that when it’s done with, this, this your project, that I’ll be left alone after, because I want you out of my life, understood, out.”
Krieger was strangely sincere. “After, you are as free, that’s shackled, hear shackled, Hannah … free as before. You don’t seem to understand this is a project that is well, it’s not your standard capitalist transaction, supply-demand, listen, you ever think about me? I already asked, but—Hannah you should have stuck with me, I am a Clark, a Lewis; I want West, want West, not its product. Not gold, West, man. Let these others develop, take their pans to the ore. I own West, I sell, I disappear get into something new like turn into a ghost and live under somebody’s fingernail.”
This time he hung up.
Hannah listened for a while to the dial tone.
Lupi had never seen such an enormous man before. He did not let his astonishment betray him. He appreciated he was becoming acclimated to surprise. He was reminded (by noetic twist) of that Christmas evening so long ago, poor old Milo, charlatan, minor-league politico who made it up into the ranks of an ambassadorial sinecure nevertheless poor old Milo, for no one need die in as miserable, claustrophobic, degrading a way as he had died. Perhaps it was the simple innocence which this big man emanated, the nice slow eyes, the smile? Milo was innocent after his own fashion, Lupi thought now, as is Olid, and here another, whose weight alone was warmly held in the sway of his arms as he walked, the ease of his sloping shoulders seemed to convey gentleness, thus innocence. Since when was innocence a point in favor? since lately?
This too was perhaps a pivot point for Lupi. Such a repository of evidence against social struggle he’d become, and at this his face was so covered with dejection Henry came directly up to him to state resonantly, “This one here got the weight of the world on him,” turning a broad countenance to Hannah.
She said, “Henry, Madeleine, this is Mr. Matteo Lupi.”
Maddie appeared from behind the back of her husband. Her face was like Nini’s after they’d gone skiing in Limone that once, darkened under the sun burning down on the treeless alpine slope. Lupi remembered how he had broken his finger, by stepping on it with a ski. All that whiteness, the ice, and looking down to see the finger bent hideously backwards. He couldn’t remember which finger it was now—index? ring? But he recalled with ease the precise rosy shade of his girl’s cheeks, a shade he hadn’t seen again until Maddie. All so awkward, though in the icy air not notably painful, popping the finger back into its normal line, edging himself obliquely, plowing sideways, down the mountain—all the while the finger swelling, going blue—with Nini’s encouragement (she had a laugh, or two, didn’t she? having decided it wasn’t that serious).
Maddie, at whom Lupi managed in the midst of his remembrance a fuller smile than circumstances warranted, or allowed, remarked, “All we need now’s the fan.”
“Fan?” Lupi’d given up Nini beside the great turning wheels at the bottom of the trail, there at the lift. He’d missed a couple of exchanges.
“This might not be as bad as we’d thought, Maddie,” Hannah said.
“Your Krieger’s tied up in it, isn’t he?”
“Maddie,” Henry muttered, low.
“—so it’s bound to be as bad as we’d thought.”
She never spoke to Hannah like that; even Lupi could construct this much for himself.
“What was that about the fan?” Couldn’t they discuss something else? Hannah tried not to laugh, but she failed. Lupi’d remembered that, then, too. His mother used to say it in English—the fan was what the shit hit.
She halved muffins with the tines of a fork, and crouched down to place them on the foil bed in the broiler. Lupi gazed up. The wall behind the stove was covered with brightly patterned rectangles, license plates, some rusty, some bent, some immaculate. Lupi stared at it; he was reminded of something, of—
“All fifty states,” Hannah said, standing again. “A fair sampling of the different years, too. Nebraska and Oklahoma complete.”
—reminded of Houston, its rectangular geometry. He was about to draw the comparison for Hannah but when he looked down from the decorative wall he found her staring at him, stiff-necked, unyielding, expression as unreadable as the symbols on the plates behind. Startled, Lupi stepped back.
“You’re not what I thought you’d be.”
A fire truck quarreled with the summary silence.
“What did you think I’d be?” Lupi asked, attendant to the prospect of catching a glimpse into the mechanisms of his dilemma.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Hannah sat at the long table and watched Lupi eat. Except for this end where he ate, the entire surface of the table was heaped with objects. Lupi would later learn they were principally her fishing and trapping collection: pronged spears, eel trap, mouse traps, traps for moles and bears, possums, martens, beaver, brown bottles of musk scents, and a host of fishing nets and shuttles to mend them with.
Lupi finished breakfast. He had never eaten steak for breakfast before, but addressed it with the same vim shown by the “dad” on the television set promoting steak sauce, half pretending he was in one of his westerns, one filmed indoors, say, painted sets and unshaven skinny actors, make it in Fargo, no Albuquerque, no Cimmaron City. This was what Americans did. It was tradition. He ate his steak, talking, glancing around at the eccentrically appointed room. It was morning, he told himself, this was breakfast.
“But, what I was saying before,” Hannah resumed. “I was told you were coming. They told me to expect you.” Her voice had grown faint, as if she were lowering it in order to overhear another conversation taking place between two other people. “Can I ask you a question? Do you know what you’re doing here, that is, what they, or you, intend to do with that man?”
“Why?”
“Why … I think that’s obvious. I don’t want to get involved in something that’s—it’s just and this whole thing is beginning to feel over my head.”
“Can you tell me something?”
“Well?”
“Can you tell me how you know Mr. Krieger? I might be able to answer your question.”
“Krieger … well, long story.”
“Have you ever heard of a Miguel Sardavaal?”
Hannah shook her head, yet Lupi seemed to have changed from sleuthlike (no longer the naif) to resigned: it was the same kind face her father Nicholas pulled for days after he returned home from one of his fugues: somewhere between meek and deferential.
“You aren’t in this, are you,” he said, as if disappointed.
“What’s that mean?”
“I mean you’re not being paid.”
“God, of course not.”
“Well why are you putting up with—?”
“You mean Krieger didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Did you meet someone named Jonathan?”
“What does he look like?”
“I don’t know, I never met him, it’s just that Krieger and I knew each other once and years later—it’s like he’s an inevitability, but of course you already know that because you know him—anyhow I thought I finally had lost touch with him but I came into this inheritance and it seemed like the next day and there he was again, doing me a favor, always doing me favors—”
“What favor?”
“He knew what I would do with the money, I told him once what I would do if I ever had any money, so he knew, and he already had found these people who could help me.”
“Why didn’t you just say no?”
“What good would it have done, look you’re here aren’t you, you think that’s the result of me saying yes? They showed up here and they had nowhere else to go. What’s more they’re good people, Maddie and Henry, good people.”
“But what were you saying about someone named Jonathan?”
“Jonathan’s the one who led Krieger to Maddie, you see? Krieger knew Jonathan d
own there in Central America and got to his father who’s so crazy his own daughter won’t even talk about him and there was some … never mind, for godsakes it doesn’t really matter, it’s all just loops and loops, and in any case I can see how you’re in it—it’s not even that Krieger believes I owe him anything. He just likes things to be this way, knots and tangles, makes him feel safe, I suppose.”
“Safe from what?”
“Himself, obviously, who else but.”
Lupi took in a little city air through his mouth. Tasted of sulfur. “But what was it you meant you thought he would have told me?”
“Everybody has their favorite secret, their other life, don’t they?”
“No.”
“Come on, of course they do. What’s yours?”
“Why should I say. Look, I’ve got things I’d better get to.”
“You don’t have anything you’d better get to. You’re stuck. Now what’s yours?”
“I don’t have any,” though when she pursued it Lupi felt the pressure build toward the projector’s click, then subside.
Things begin to happen. They feel like movie, but aren’t. Hannah comes out from the back of the loft. She has put on rubber boots and an oversize hand-knit sweater. She has brought with her another pair of boots. “Come on,” she says to Lupi. “I want to show you why you’re here and not somewhere else.”
He considers refusing, figuring that at least some form of resistance to this flow might be worthwhile, or dignified, but settles for a brusque “What,” knowing that it somehow impugns his authority (but what authority?—there is that delicate matter, too).
What to lose, nothing. He unlaces his shoes and steps into one of the heavy rubber boots Hannah has given him. It’s too large.
“Here, hold on,” Hannah says, goes to the back and returns with a pair of socks. “Put these on so you won’t get blisters.”
“Look, maybe I don’t want to see anything.”
“You’ll like this.”
Lupi pulls the boot off, slips wool socks over his own, pushes his feet into the boots.
The air was damp, cool, inert. The rain had for the moment stopped falling. Pools of fresh water had collected like mirrors in the various depressions across the flat roof. A fog settled over the city, dampening it. Lupi looked to his right, out across the street to the rooftops of other buildings, but the fog was dense, so what he could see was muted and obscure.
“This way,” Hannah indicated.
Lupi trailed behind her. Together they circled around the north end of the bunker, walking toward the silo tower. The Neptunes stared blankly into the gathering mist above as they entered a door at the tower’s base and, rather than climbing the staircase that led up to the large stone busts, turned right. Hannah pulled a set of keys from her pocket and unlocked a door and started down a set of concrete steps. That cock crew again, the one Lupi’d heard before.
Air that rushed up to them was warm and rich. At once Lupi was able to recognize that smell; it was as distinctive and familiar to him as anything from his childhood. It was the dark, raw, earthen odor of the farmers’ meadows and feedlots, like those he visited beyond Fiesole, on the Pian di Mugnone or along the trickling Ménsola. The sweet, sharp scent of urine and manure and of alfalfa and hay. Lupi’s hand traced the rail as they went down another flight to the landing. The smell was much stronger. Hannah paused, started to say something to Lupi, a word, a warning, but nothing came to her, and she opened the door and walked through.
A pasture. A hound dog, barking gaily, bounding across the artificial plateau toward them. The tin ceiling painted sky blue; and indicated here and there, a puffy white cloud, the kind of towering anvil-shaped cumulus that can throw half a county under shadow on the high plains. Several skylights in the huge loft like holes cut into the trompe l’oeil sky to reveal the grayness of the universe beyond. A red truck. An old berlin covered in silkies and Rhode Island reds, clucking. Half a dozen cattle, living cattle, cropping at scattered hay in a corral. One licks at barrel salt in a tub, flicks its ears. Windowless. Along the walls more painted scenes of the high prairie stretching away to an uncluttered horizon out at the earth’s edge. The landscape gold with wheat and with neat fields of corn, barley, rye and other grasses. Timothy, orchard grass, smooth bromegrass. The realistic rendering of a white farmhouse, a clutch of outbuildings, a windmill standing on its frail legs, a barn and red silo centered in an oasis of oak trees far off.
The cattle are disturbed from their grazing. A half-moo; quiet. Their docile heads now individually lift away from the scattered bundles of hay and, while some continue to masticate, others blink, eyes like dark grapes at the centers of porcelain settings, each assumes a sidelong stare at Lupi and Hannah. Tardy black-and-white eyes each with long, girlishly curly lashes moistly take in these two intruders. A baleful lowing drifts from one dizzily into the air. A warm munching fractures the stillness. Sprigs of mullein foxglove, woolly and wan yellow, are fastened by brads to pillars and corral posts near the animals. These are meant to provide magical protection for the cattle.
Once Hannah speaks, however, having heard that familiar voice, they one by one drop their provident heads and continue to graze.
“So this is America,” breathed Lupi.
Hannah dropped her hands into the pockets of her jeans.
“Yes, I guess it is at that.”
Lupi’s face was frozen and alive as he took in the land and the sky, smelled the air. He smiled. Laughed. “It’s just the way I thought it would be!”
Envoi, that came to Lupi late in the first day, that came not as movie, but this time as a bit of dream. That was as if he could see it on the wall behind the bed where he sat, again, nursing the old man with the bad medicines. That seemed as if it had happened. Maybe he was merely hoping it had; though he couldn’t see why. He wasn’t mean enough to command such grief.
A boy off the road, his life in the balance. In a superficial way it is already unclear whether he is alive or dead. For while he is standing against the narrow trunk of the orange tree, a smile absurd and vacuous slit across his face, eyes closed, his chest is not seen to heave, although a prismatic crown of sweat stands in an oval around his forehead. He is fourteen or fifteen years old, shirtless, shoeless, his fatigue pants handed down from some bygone conflict. Five young kids hotly debate his future. His insensate body has been searched by them and no identifying paraphernalia, no tags, no papers, no uniform suggest which side it is he fights for. He must be fighting for either one side or the other, one of the kids has shouted. Not even his teeth, which are neither rotten nor studded with fillings, allow access to his background. He will not speak to them. He’ll not tell them which side he is fighting for. It is infuriating. His features bear the high-cheeked nobility of rural boys descended through many generations of Indians.
He is anonymous but must be sentenced. The short, stocky kid slaps him diligently about his shoulders and face with the barrel of his rifle, shouting in a high, sharp, dry voice, “¡Claro, claro hombre!” The boy, informed by the jolt of the kid’s rifle butt which tears heavily across his cheek, collapses on the ground.
The earth is like iron. He rolls on his belly. He makes no struggle. He makes no further movement. Only the breath passes in and out of his mouth, which is awfully cracked.
He must, they argue, be some deserter. It does not matter that his field glasses, his gun, his ammunition are similar to their own, for in the flow, the lascivious, unchecked, rampant, unmitigated flow of matériel into the area, it is not the origin of the weaponry but into whose hands it comes that is important.
Something has gone wrong, something premature, and the innate sense of ritual, a procedural dictate that insinuates into the blood from deep in the brain stem, from a part of consciousness that reaches far back into pre-cultural, preliterate mind, is offended: the boy is dead. This makes it less attractive to rape him before they mutilate him. Another basic kind of argument is incited by this mischance of t
iming, and words fly. The most nondescript of the young militiamen steps forward and without warning puts an end to all discussion by firing into the boy’s neck.
His pants are removed. Tittering filters down through the forest before he is left naked, high in the pine mountains a few kilometers inside the border. He is abandoned to the shade of the orange tree, which plays over his ribbed back.
The kids descend by a path down the declivity of broken rocks. There will be another chance, perhaps later that same day, to set right the sense of ritual. Meantime, the stocky older kid, a self-styled jefe, has taken the pretty dragon ring for himself. He wears it on his thumb—admiring it every few steps, holding it up to the sun, where it glints—taunting the others with this bit of booty he has claimed for himself.
The voices fade.
They are gone.
There is only the sound of the birds. Later, a scorpion makes herself a temporary nest in the dead boy’s gaping mouth.
III
Oz
1.
HOW WAS IT that Franz’s yawn from all those years ago seemed even now to be saturated in complicity with Krieger? Francis Wrynn’s ignominious yawn where the jaw yawed and fell away flamboyant to one side, like a flesh-and-blood document that communicated to Krieger the interview with Hannah was concluded and it remained only that their discussion be brought to an end. Maybe that wasn’t right. Perhaps it wasn’t fair—still, there was no forgetting that yawn, its false pearl-pink teeth, its shape at full extension like an inverted pear, overbite like an eave sheltering the narrow, feminine lower mandible. But to Krieger the evening was young. Be here now. There was far too much to talk about for Franz to start yawning. It was the last year of the sixties, Krieger might have protested, and the world would probably not survive long into the decade ahead, the emerald green of nuclear winter laced through the plumage of its rising wings. It didn’t matter to Krieger that Franz, who at any rate lied about his age and the face lifts and fanny tucks he’d undergone, admitted to being in the region of fifty-five and, by his own assessment, was lazy, laggard, and not inclined to tag along to nightclubs and bars with his young friends (who did little else). Among these friends Krieger seemed to be his closest and was surely the most willing to accept the money Franz handed out with such liberality in exchange for those little favors he would ask, like running a parcel out to the island or taking a drive up to the lake district. Once in a while, more often than not at Krieger’s insistence, Franz did condescend to step up to the low stage, draped in velvet bunting around its scrim and curtained behind with material which sparkled under the stagelights, in the club he himself seemed to own—Krieger had never been able to figure out how these thick, enmeshed nets of ownership worked, as they spun themselves around and about Franz’s person—and sing a standard or two with the piano trio. The microphone lay in the palm of his hand. The low highhat splashed some, the pianist finished his intro and nodded over to Franz, who crooned,
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