Nevada Days

by Bernardo Atxaga

  We reached an area where the earth was wet and the colour of plaster, and we left the tracks of our tyres imprinted in it. In the distance, we saw what looked like a pinkish object, a mother-of-pearl box.

  Earle pointed.

  “It’s a roulotte, you know, a caravan. Hunters come here looking for antelope.”

  I looked hard at the roulotte. There were no hunters. No antelopes either. The only moving thing was our car.

  We drove another five or six miles across completely flat terrain, then started to go down another slope. The mountains we could see ahead of us now looked like mounds of earth emerging from the sea, the islands of an archipelago. I remembered the time I spent in Villamediana, a village in the Spanish province of Palencia, and reading somewhere that Castile was like a sea of earth. I told Earle this.

  “Here, it’s something more than a metaphor,” he said. “Each of these mountains is a unique system with its own flora and fauna. The reptiles and the insects you find on one don’t exist on another. And that’s exactly what happens on islands in the sea.”

  We could make out a road, a straight line, which was a slightly paler colour than that of the earth. When we reached it, Earle began to accelerate as if we were driving onto an approach road to a freeway. The car threw up clouds of dust behind us.

  “What’s going on over there?” he asked, accelerating still more.

  About five hundred yards further ahead, next to a rocky outcrop, I saw a FedEx delivery van. The two front doors stood open and the van was parked at a strange angle, neither perpendicular to the road nor facing the rock nor parallel with it.

  We stopped about fifty feet from the van. Earle took a rifle out of the boot and released the safety catch. He told me to stay in the car.

  He went over to the rocky outcrop and started walking round it, rifle at the ready. A minute later, he reappeared on the other side and approached the van. Suddenly, he stopped. Then he lowered his rifle and signalled to me that there was nothing to worry about.

  He returned to the car and took a forked aluminium pole out of the boot.

  “Come with me.”

  The windscreen on the driver’s side of the FedEx van was shattered. Earle told me to look through the other side.

  On the driver’s seat I noticed what appeared to be a pile of brown cloth. It was a rattlesnake. It had its head up, looking first at me and then – its coiled body shuddering as it moved – at the other door, where Earle was standing with the metal pole. There was a sound like maracas. The snake was flicking its tongue frantically in and out.

  Earle failed to pin the snake down properly and as he was picking it up, he managed to drop it onto the roof of the van. Then it slithered towards me, fixing me with its two black eyes … No, that only happened in my head. Earle playfully scolded the snake, saying that the driver’s seat was only for drivers, not mouse-hunters. The snake hung limply from the forked pole, like a belt.

  Earle went round the back of the rock, and I followed.

  “I had to remove it from the seat,” he said. “People don’t take care and just open the doors of vans without even looking.”

  He released the snake, and it vanished among the clumps of sagebrush.

  We returned to the Chevrolet Avalanche, and Earle called the police on the radio he’d had installed. They answered instantly.

  “Fallon Police Department,” the voice said. It sounded as if it were speaking from underneath the earth, not from Fallon.

  Earle provided his personal details and our position on his G.P.S. The subterranean voice took only a few seconds to tell us that we were near a ghost town called Berlin. Then it asked for the van’s licence-plate number.

  “Wait a moment,” Earle said. He started the engine and drove forward a few feet before dictating the relevant letters and numbers.

  “Anything else we need to know?” the subterranean voice asked.

  “The windscreen on the driver’s side was broken, and the interior was a complete mess. Looks like a robbery,” Earle said.

  “Sure.”

  The subterranean voice sounded grubbier now, as if mingled with sand and grit, and I couldn’t quite understand what it said. It referred several times to that abandoned town called Berlin and to Fallon prison. The conversation seemed very relaxed, and before it ended, Earle gave a loud guffaw.

  “They found gold and silver in this desert, and they gave the mine the name of the man who found it, a man called Berlin,” Earle explained when we set off again. “But it was never as big as the mines at Tonopah or Virginia City. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a ghost town.”

  Berlin, the ghost town, appeared to us just half an hour after leaving the FedEx van: a dozen or so wooden shacks and a larger building, also made of wood, with a single-eaved roof, the slope of which matched the slope of the mountain. Several paths led off from there, two still quite clearly marked. The first crossed a plain thickly covered with sagebrush, and that path, according to Earle, led to Fallon; the second, perpendicular to the first, went up a hill through a small gorge into an area of bushes and trees.

  I told Earle a true story Ángela had told me. Two young men got off a train somewhere in Nevada and set off on foot to Berlin, about sixty miles away, with only a bottle of water. They had never seen or even imagined a desert like this.

  “They arrived half-dead and nearly blind,” I said. “One of them never recovered and died shortly after starting work at the mine.”

  “I don’t think we’ll meet his ghost either,” Earle said.

  After spending all morning with him, I was beginning to get used to his sense of humour. He meant that Berlin was so empty that it didn’t even have any ghosts.

  We stopped outside the larger building, the centre of mining activity in the age of gold and silver. All the mining machinery and tackle was still there, and so were all the birds in the area, taking advantage of the shade cast by the roof. Most were flying from beam to beam or perching on the cables; some came and went constantly, in and out of the large windows that faced onto the hill.

  Earle smiled.

  “The powers-that-be in Nevada keep the building maintained so as to attract tourists. And they have actually succeeded in attracting a few. In fact, we’ll probably see them soon.”

  We set off in the direction of the gorge and the trees and shrubs. About a couple of hundred yards further on, we saw two white vehicles. They were parked by the side of the road; near them, about ten or so men were standing in a line, working. Their overalls were white too.

  As we approached, the conversation about the FedEx van between Earle and the subterranean voice began to make sense. I knew now who those people in the white overalls were: prisoners.

  “What do you think of Berlin’s tourists?” asked Earle, slowing down.

  I recalled something I’d seen many years ago when I was driving to New Orleans and was kept hanging about for half an hour in a traffic jam, while about twenty men wearing orange overalls and shackles were working with spades and hoes to clean the hard shoulder of the freeway. Two policemen were watching them, rifles cocked.

  The Berlin prisoners weren’t shackled together, and they stood to one side to let us pass. Most were Latinos. The youngest must have been about twenty-five and the oldest about sixty. The young men looked really strong and healthy, the older men looked scrawny.

  Earle accelerated once we had passed them, and we started to drive up a hill that led to the gorge.

  “I didn’t see any guards,” I said.

  “The desert is their guard,” Earle said. “And what better guard could you have?”

  He remained thoughtful for a while.

  “There were a couple of guys I really didn’t like the look of,” he went on. “The two non-Latinos. Did you notice? Their eyes lit up when they saw us. Especially the guy with the little beard.”

  I glanced in the rear-view mirror. All I could see were white dots against a background of stones.

 
“A big, strong guy?” I asked.

  “A real brute. He’s probably in jail for having strangled someone.”

  We were in the gorge now, and the trees and shrubs transformed the landscape with their intense green. Earle braked for a moment and, turning to the right, headed downhill. A little stream interrupted the path, and we were across it in an instant, before, slowly, we began to climb again.

  We travelled about two hundred yards and arrived in a small square, which was in marked contrast to the desert and the landscape around Berlin. It was partly surrounded by a concrete wall, and there was a wooden shack with a notice saying TOILETS and another structure with a roof that seemed to reach right down to the ground with no supporting walls.

  “Time to see the lizard!” Earle cried. “And it’s pretty big, as you’re about to find out.”

  And there was indeed a giant lizard painted on the wall in the little square. A plaque told us it was an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that had lived about two hundred million years ago and reached a length of over sixty feet. The actual fossil was in the building with the low roof.

  In the painting, the ichthyosaur bore a striking resemblance to Flipper.

  The building was closed, and we could only see the fossil through some small windows at ground level in the side wall. It was uncomfortable crouching there, with the sun burning your back.

  At first, the ichthyosaur that had swum in the sea two hundred million years ago looked like the dried-up bed of a stream. In the part corresponding to its head, there was a slight bulge and at the other end there was what looked like a real tail.

  “Great place, isn’t it?” Earle said.

  He meant the building, which was a lot taller than I’d thought when I saw it from outside, and inside was a large empty space, uninterrupted by any columns. The only source of light was provided by the rectangular windows in the roof, which lit up the whole area.

  It was very hot, more than thirty degrees, and I felt as if my shirt was burning. The shrill whirring of insects buzzed in my ears. I stood up.

  “We need to find some shade,” Earle said.

  We sat down next to a tree trunk, on a rock, and ate our sandwiches and our tangerines in silence, while we gazed at the Flipper painted on the wall. The painting was not at all appropriate. That cartoonish style had the effect of infantilising a dolphin, even an ichthyosaur, which was fine on screen, but not in the desert.

  I was picking up the orange peel, when I heard a voice. It rang in my head. The prisoner with the small beard was whispering to one of his companions, and I could hear it as if in a dream:

  “I’ve had enough of breaking stones out here in the desert, and there’s no way I’m going back to jail. Did you see the car those two guys were in, the ones who’ve gone to see the fossil? It was a Chevrolet Avalanche. If we stole it, we could be in Fallon in no time. I have a buddy there who could hide us until the police get tired of looking for us.”

  Absurd as it may seem, I could hear the voice as clearly as I could smell the tangerine peel.

  “They might have a gun in the car,” the man with the little beard said. “We would have to move fast once we’d stopped the car.”

  His companion said something I couldn’t hear. The “radio” inside my head was not tuned in to him.

  “If we take anyone with us, it should be Gonsalves,” the man with the beard said. “He knows quite a lot of people in Las Vegas, and that could be useful once we get out of Fallon.”

  A small bird rather like a thrush hopped over to us; Earle said it was a sage thrasher, and emptied a few crumbs from his sandwich bag onto a rock.

  “I should have brought a handgun with me too, not just the rifle,” he said. So he had heard the prisoner whispering in his ear too.

  “Do you know how to drive?” he asked. He was serious.

  The Chevrolet Avalanche was almost twice as big as our Ford Sedan, but I said I’d be happy to drive.

  “I’m worried about that prisoner with the little beard. I’m sure that when he saw us, he immediately thought of a plan. He may have taken me for an old man, an easy target.”

  I got into the driver’s seat.

  “What do I have to do to cross the stream down below?” I asked.

  “Close your eyes and step on the gas.”

  Earle smiled, and I felt reassured.

  I found it hard to get the pressure right on the accelerator, because it was very sensitive and the slightest touch sent the car lurching forward. When we crossed the stream – way too fast – I managed to flatten all the bushes on either side.

  The stones and rocks on the road – loose stones and rocks sticking up out of the ground – slowed our progress, making us bounce and sway about; but we soon recovered our balance. A hundred yards further on, the road became smooth again.

  The prisoners working near the two white vehicles no longer looked like white dots, as they had when I saw them in the rear-view mirror, but real people with heads, arms and legs. Earle grabbed the rifle and placed it between his knees, barrel downwards.

  The prisoners were not all working together. First, there was one, then behind him another; then a group of five or six, then about twenty yards further on, three more men, backs bent.

  The first of the prisoners, the one nearest to us, was the man with the small beard. He stepped into the middle of the road and signalled to us to stop, as if he were a traffic policeman. He was holding a spade in his right hand.

  “Shall I stop?” I asked.

  Earle nodded, then lowered the window about an inch.

  The prisoner with the beard came over.

  “Could you give me a couple of cigarettes, one for me and one for my friend here?”

  He spoke very politely, pointing with his free hand at the other non-Latino prisoner.

  “You’re not supposed to do this. You know that, don’t you?” Earle said.

  The man with the beard did not move a muscle. He was considering his response.

  “Prisoners have no right to stop a vehicle. You know that, don’t you?” Earle said again.

  The man’s eyes were dull, as are the eyes of anyone who has spent years in prison. For a few seconds, he stood there, still thinking. Then he looked down.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, stepping back.

  I put my foot down too hard on the accelerator, and the Chevrolet Avalanche leapt forward. The bearded prisoner’s companion jumped out of the way. Those who were working a few yards further on stepped back too, even though there was plenty of room for us to pass. Earle closed the window and put the rifle on the back seat.

  When we reached Berlin, I stopped the vehicle outside the mining building and we changed seats.

  “After that test, I have no doubts about your skills as a driver,” Earle said, giving me that half-smile of his, “but I think I would prefer to take the wheel, if you don’t mind. It makes me feel young again.”

  We set off. The plain stretched out ahead of us as far as the horizon. The sky was completely blue.

  We drove ten, twenty, thirty miles. On some stretches, the green of the sagebrush disappeared and the terrain looked as black as if it had been scorched by fire, or else white or off-white; elsewhere, the earth became sand and formed dunes like those in “Lawrence of Arabia”. I suddenly felt very sleepy and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again, I saw a chain of mountains ahead of us. They seemed as flimsy as light clouds and not made of rock at all.

  “Carry on sleeping, if you like. There’s not much to look at in the desert,” Earle said.

  Then suddenly there was. Two black blades crossed the space between us and the Fallon mountains at supersonic speed.

  I sat up in my seat.

  “Military aeroplanes,” Earle said. “F-16 fighters probably.”

  The air base at Fallon is home to more than three thousand people, military and civilians, and the surrounding area is the U.S. Navy’s biggest air warfare training centre. They perform daily practice bombin
g raids. The 1963 atomic test took place there too.

  “At least the navy was considerate enough to make it an underground explosion,” Earle said.

  He turned on the radio and pressed some buttons. All that emerged from the speakers, though, was a metallic whistle.

  “Last time I drove past here, I could hear the pilots’ conversations, but today nothing doing,” he said. “I’m going to tune in to the air base radio station instead and see what music they’re playing.”

  The names of singer and song appeared on the small screen on the radio. Elvis Presley, “Love Me Tender”.

  We were coming into Fallon. The first sign was a horse ranch, then some very green alfalfa fields, with the irrigation sprinklers going full blast. Fifteen minutes later, and we were in an urban area, at a roundabout adorned with an old fighter plane, painted in the colours of the American flag.

  I noticed the new song being announced on the radio screen. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson. “Ghost Riders in the Sky”.

  “Time doesn’t pass in Fallon. They were playing that song last time too,” Earle said.

  We stopped outside a respectable-looking bar and went inside. The bartender – who had a helicopter tattooed on his arm – made a joke when I ordered a Budweiser. I didn’t quite understand and merely smiled.

  The walls were covered with framed photographs, mostly of planes, but the one in the corner near the door showed three young marines. They were in dress uniform, gold buttons on their navy-blue jackets. All three had died in Afghanistan, killed in action.

  The door opened and in came two marines. They walked past, ignoring us completely, not even bothering to say hello, and sat at the back of the bar. We paid for our beers and left.