Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Indians, according to Anglo myth, were more spiritual, “closer to the Earth.” It never occurred to the whites that the reason the Indians were so close to the Earth was that they were poor, and that they had been kept in poverty and on reservations by vicious and stupid policies set up and tolerated by the same white folks who had become so respectful of their spiritual condition.

  Loren remembered that, some years before, running water and flush toilets had been introduced into the Taos Pueblo. There had actually been opposition to the move on the part of Anglos who were horrified by the desecration of a historical and sacred site. That was the problem with the whole view of Indians as our spiritual superiors, Loren thought: people forgot that these superior, spiritual beings were actually people who needed to take a crap now and again.

  Almost directly across the highway was a contrasting point of view in the form of a rugged monument of stones with a bronze-green plaque. ON THIS SPOT ON JULY 21, 1884, SIX MEN OF H TROOP, 9TH U.S. CAVALRY, WERE KILLED BY RED SAVAGES.

  The history didn’t let you forget.

  The junkyard was on a hill, visible for miles in all directions. It was surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence, chain link in back, painted wood in front. The wooden fence had been painted with a Hamm’s beer ad, a bright pastoral view of evergreens and lakes, rioting green grass, stately white-tailed deer, a glowing sylvan Minnesota scene as far removed from the reality of dry, alkaline New Mexico as from the moon.

  Loren pulled onto a dirt side road that led to the yard’s side entrance. German shepherds paralleled him, barking cheerfully. He parked in front of the gate, let the dogs lick his hand for a while— they were so starved for company that they were utterly useless in their role as guard dogs— and then Loren let himself in. The dogs jumped around him in chaotic joy.

  Jerry’s trailer was an old Airstream sitting on rotting tires flat for twenty years. Strings of rust drooled from its rivet heads. It was surrounded by the decayed rubble of twentieth-century transportation systems: cars, trucks, buses, even a sagging row of electric streetcars that had been pulled out of Atocha in the 1940s. Loren banged on the door, then opened it and stepped into the darkness. He couldn’t see anything at all. A male voice speaking Russian gobbled at him from the back of the trailer. His foot hit something solid. He groped for the light switch and flipped it.

  The trailer was full of stuff that Jerry had collected over the years, most of it malfunctioning apparatus. In the dim light of the sixty-watt overhead bulb Loren could see several typewriters, a pair of old Osborne computers, an ancient stainless-steel Waring blender, a couple toasters, a McIntosh keyboard with several keys missing, and some mismatched tire hubs, gears from a manual transmission, all interleaved with piles of paperback books, magazines, old newspapers, a huge backlist of National Geographic . . .

  The stuff rose to the rounded ceiling on all sides, giving off a faint odor of dust, decaying pulp, and machine oil. Loren tried not to let any of it touch his clothing. The voice in Russian continued.

  “That you, Loren? I’m getting dressed!”

  Jerry’s voice came from the back of the trailer, over piles of stuff. Though the trailer was less than twenty feet long, there was no obvious way from one end to the next. Loren knew there was a tunnel, however, created when Jerry had laid some planks between the built-in dinette and the sink, then piled more of his kibble on top.

  There was a scurrying sound. Preceded by a strong scent of Mennen’s Skin Bracer, Jerry appeared in the tunnel entrance. Loren stepped back to give him room. Jerry stood up. He was carrying a small pink cardboard box and wore a yellowed white shirt, a pair of pleated brown slacks, and old brown cowboy boots. Jerry rose and brushed off his knees, then opened the box and offered it to Loren.

  “Chocolate-covered doughnut?”

  Loren eyed the box and wondered how old the doughnuts were. “No, thanks,” he said. “Debra’s cooking.”

  “Right. I’ll have just one, then.”

  The Russian voice babbled on. Jerry stuck a doughnut in his mouth, then jammed the box carefully between an old upright office typewriter and a bunch of crumbling science-fiction magazines tied up with twine. Loren wondered how long the box would stay there. Years, maybe. He left the trailer and Jerry followed. Delighted dogs swirled around them as they walked to the gate. Jerry reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a string tie, then put the tie around his collar.

  ”Learning to speak Russian?“ Loren asked.

  Jerry removed the doughnut from his mouth. “Streaming audio,” he said. “I just like to listen to the sounds. And Radio Moscow has the most amazing music. Like from another planet.“

  You’re the one from another planet, Loren wanted to say, but he never actually managed to say it. It would have been pointless, anyway.

  “I can listen to Russian Top Forty,” Jerry added, “because my sound system is based on transistors, and they’re based on the holes between things.”

  Loren looked at his brother. “Holes?” he said. He knew what was coming.

  Jerry, the Useless Fact Machine.

  “Yeah. Holes. See, there are atoms, right? And atoms are protons and electrons. Electrons move, and that’s electricity. But when electrons move, they leave big holes behind. And that’s what transistors are based on.”

  Loren peered at his brother across the roof of his car. “Based on holes?” he said.

  “Yeah. See, when the electrons move off, new electrons appear out of nowhere to fill the holes. I can’t remember what they do when they get there, I just remember reading about it.”

  Loren opened the car door. “The holes are in your head, Jerry.”

  Jerry resembled his younger brother, the same strong build, the same broad cheekbones and curly dark hair, but there was something undefined about him. Unfocused, Loren thought. As if you were looking at him through a pane of glass smeared by fingerprints.

  He hadn’t always been that way— growing up he was a healthy Atocha kid, popular, outgoing, a member of the high school basketball and football teams. And then for some reason he joined the military, and when he came back from overseas something had changed him.

  Whatever happened, Loren knew, it wasn’t war. Jerry’s duties consisted of guarding NATO installations in Thessalonika.And by the time Jerry came back, something had gone out of him— he’d become vague, lost focus— and he bounced around Atocha aimlessly until one of the deacons at Loren’s church, as a favor to Loren, gave him the Airstream to live in.

  Loren got in the car and started the engine. Jerry sat in the passenger seat, then reached to touch the walnut stock of the Remington shotgun propped in the rack between the two front seats.

  “Duck season opens next Friday,” Loren said. “I’m planning on taking the day off. You wanna go?”

  “Sure.”

  “Right after church.”

  Jerry gave a sigh. “We’ll miss half the morning.”

  “Jerry,” Loren said. “The church got you a place to live. And a whole bunch of jobs that you tossed away.”

  “Did I ever ask the church for anything?”

  “I did.”

  “Did I ever ask you to ask?”

  There was silence. Loren backed the Fury onto the dirt road, then turned back to town.

  “You’ve got to hang on to the things that are important,” Loren said. “You’ve got family, you’ve got a faith that wants you. A whole town you grew up with. You can’t just let it all slip away.”

  Jerry brushed doughnut crumbs off his shirtfront. Beneath the strong after-shave he had an odd smell, part auto grease, part dust, as if he were a bit of disused machinery sitting on the shelf for a long time, another item in his pile of kibble.

  “I don’t know why you’re always complaining,” Jerry said. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah. You’re still here.”

  “I’m going to church like you want me, and I’m going hunting with you on Friday.”

  “Yeah.”
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br />   “So what’s your problem, Loren?”

  Loren didn’t answer, using the necessity of stopping at the end of the dirt road and turning onto Route 82 as an excuse.

  The Fury raced on in silence, a good ten miles above the limit. Ahead of them were lines of sandy ridges painted blood red by sunrise, the valleys between them all deep purple shadow. The terrain, Loren thought suddenly, looked like the weathered, wrinkled skin of an old Apache woman. Dry and aged and filled with reality. He found himself struck by the insight as the car coasted over a ridge.

  “Holy fuck!”

  Loren slammed on the brakes. The Fury lunged for the narrow shoulder, into the entrance to the Earth Church parking lot. A pair of old pickups, both heavily laden with what seemed to be a ton of old furniture crowned by mattresses and box springs, one trying to pass the other on a rise, did a slow-motion dance of inept avoidance and managed to miss the cruiser by inches. As Loren weaved past he glanced directly into the dark, unsurprised eyes of a small boy, the child riding in the bed of one of the pickups surrounded by stacks of household goods.

  Loren brought his car to a stop, heart flailing in his chest. He reached for the siren button, then hesitated.

  Breakfast was waiting. Church was waiting.

  The hell with it. New Mexico had long been the worst state in the U.S. for auto accident statistics— by a considerable margin— and it was time to make at least a little change.

  Both drivers were, in fact, clearly drunk. Loren cited them and called for a patrolman to come up from town and haul them to jail. The little kid jumped out of the truck and followed Loren around, yelling curses in Spanish that he probably assumed Loren didn’t understand. His favorite word was “chota,” which any southwestern cop understood as being an uncomplimentary reference to the law enforcement profession. Loren looked down at the boy. “Cállate la boca, chivito!” he said, and the kid shut up in a hurry.

  Jerry gave a laugh as Loren got back in the car. “New Mexico drivers,” he said. “Nothing like ’em.”

  “Worst in the world,” Loren said. “And these were drunk, too.”

  “You know,” Jerry said, “I wonder if there’s some kind of bacteria in New Mexico, in the soil and in the air. A little bug that transmits incompetence. And everyone who lives here gets it sooner or later.”

  Loren grinned. “You may have something there.”

  “It’s the Third World here. Drivers who can’t drive, teachers who can’t teach, administrators who can’t sign their names, politicians who only get elected because the voters are as stupid and bigoted and inept as they are. An aboriginal population that gets shat on by everybody. Nothing sensible ever prospers, everything ambitious turns to farce. Pathetic. It’s the land of mañana. And it’s been that way forever, and nothing’s gonna change it.”

  Loren gave his brother a surprised look. Jerry’s bizarre speculations were hardly ever serious; this last seemed heartfelt.

  “Maybe not, Jer,” he said. “But maybe it’s just the way we do things.”

  “The way we don’t do things, you mean.”

  There was a wink of red on Loren’s left. He turned to see the red sun gleaming on the silver body of the maglev train returning from the ATL facility to town, a sign of the latest attempt to transform the country, to inject, as with a hypodermic, a new century into the land where the germ of incompetence had for so long thrived.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Church of the Apostles of Elohim and the Nazarene was Atocha’s largest church. The Apostles, unlike the Saints and the Holy Romans, had been imported specially in the 1880s, when Riga Brothers began their copper operation. The gold and silver miners already living here were too unreliable— they’d work long enough to get a grubstake, then go off prospecting. Riga Brothers, whose board chairman was an Apostle, proposed importing entire families of coreligionists from upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania— stable family people, the kind you could count on to form a community. Maybe five hundred families had answered the call, singing hymns as they rode to Atocha on the train.

  But like all populist religions, the Apostles were prone to schism.

  In the plaza across the street from the deco church was a small group of people clustered around a gray-haired man standing on a wooden box. The box was sky-blue, and on each side was painted a carefully detailed pyramid above which hovered a gold-glowing eye.

  “I have the answer!” the man shouted. “I have seen!”

  “Oh, hell,” Loren said as he got out of his car.

  The man on the box was named Alfred Roberts, and he was a former mayor of the town and a former member of the Apostle congregation. When his brother was convicted of stealing highway funds, and after his own trial ended in a hung jury, he lost his job to Trujillo; and since then he’d been disbarred, split from the Apostles, and set himself up as a prophet, living off welfare and the earnings of his tiny band of converts.

  “As the Lord spake to Samuel Catton,” he shouted, “and so he has spaken unto me!”

  Spaken? Loren wondered. He and his family moved rapidly up the sidewalk, their eyes turned away. The whole scene was too embarrassing.

  “Listen!” said Roberts’s wife, Amy, “and ye shall be saved!”

  Loren remembered dating Amy for over a year, just after he came back from Korea. She’d left him for Roberts, he’d figured, because a successful contractor had a lot better prospects than a rookie cop.

  Look at her now, he thought.

  The people around him were his family and disciples, and were draped in blankets against the October morning chill, an Old Testament touch that, against the plaza’s deco background, made them seem more demented even than their ravings. Amy Roberts carried a sign that said HEAR THE TRUTH. Others carried books and pamphlets. A vacant-eyed teenage girl, visibly pregnant, with bad skin and her hair frizzed up above her ears, carried another sign that said THE CHURCH REFORMED. No one knew precisely who she was or where she had come from; she was only seen rarely, cashing her government assistance checks. Rumor had it she was Roberts’s “bound concubine.”

  All false prophets, Loren figured, tended toward harems. One of the signs by which you knew them.

  “The church is corrupt!” Roberts screamed. His fist thudded repeatedly against his chest. “Its doctrine is perverted! Mine is the true road to heaven!”

  Another kind of asshole, Loren thought, another kind of advertisement.

  “Get a job!” yelled one cheerful churchgoer.

  “I am the one and true prophet!”

  “Get thee behind me, welfare!”

  “Follow me to salvation!”

  “Give the taxpayers a break!”

  Loren reached the top of the church steps, then hesitated. Official duty seemed to be interrupting him a lot this morning.

  “Go on in,” he said to Debra, and turned around. He crossed West Plaza and walked up to his former boss. His skin crawled as he neared the man— he remembered Roberts as a pleasant, hand-shaking, inoffensive member of the establishment, and the transformation to Old Testament lunatic gave Loren a case of the certified creeps.

  Roberts’s eyes twinkled as he beamed down from his perch. His cheeks and nose were rosy from drink or the cold. His flock watched Loren with silent, suspicious eyes. “Loren!” Roberts said. “Long time, no see! Hast thou seen the light, my son?” Loren could smell whiskey on his breath.

  “If you don’t shut up, Al,” Loren said, “I’m going to bust you.”

  Roberts raised a hand, but his voice was still cheerful. “Thou canst not halt this new preaching. Thou couldst as well stand against the wind, or the tide.”

  “Let’s see your permit, then.”

  Roberts frowned down at him. “Thou art wearing the seven-pointed Star of Babylon on thy breast. Does this mean that thou hast given thy heart to the Evil One?”

  Loren sighed. Some fundamentalist looney had started the Star of Babylon business a few years ago, and he hadn’t heard the end of it since.<
br />
  “What it means,” he said, “is that the sheriff’s department has six-pointed stars, and we wanted to look different. Now, how about the permit?”

  “The Lord’s servant,” loftily, “does not need—”

  “You can stand here all you like,” Loren said, “and you can offer your literature, but if you start shouting and creating a disturbance, I’m going to pop you.”

  Roberts thought for a long moment, then resolution entered his face. He drew his blanket tighter about him and straightened, staring at the church.

  “I shall stand mute,” he said.

  “Fine. That’s all I ask.”

  As Loren turned to go back to the church, he heard Roberts’s soft voice.

  “Miracles happen every day.” A miracle, Loren figured, the guy could stand up.

  *

  “Before I begin today’s message,” said Pastor Rickey, “I would like to remind everyone that the Calamity Fund is running low on supplies of food and clothing. Let the lucky among us share our bounty with our neighbors.”

  Rickey looked up. “Today is the day in which we begin a week of contemplation and meditation upon our sins,” he said. His Susquehanna accent made the word “our” sound like “ower.”

  Loren sat in his pew and scowled at the hymnal sitting in the rack in front of him. He had heard this opening sermon, or something very like it, once a year for every year of his life, and his mind was occupied with other matters.

  Cipriano had called in the middle of breakfast to tell him that while staking out the Texas car, a battered old Chevy sub-compact, that was sitting in front of his cousin Félix’s house, he’d seen Félix himself walking out of the house, wearing his bathrobe and picking up his El Paso newspaper. Cipriano stopped to ask, like any friendly relation, if Félix had had any company. Félix’s relations from Harlingen had indeed stayed for two nights, but just that morning Robbie Cisneros had picked them up to go hunting, something Félix thought was just fine because, to tell the truth, he never much cared for Anthony and his horrible family, anyway.