by Sarah Black
Easy looked like his eyes were going to bug out at this. “Agent Orange doesn’t just happen! Somebody decides to use it. Civilians and leaders forget their personnel resources are actually real people who can be hurt, and then they have to live with the consequences.”
“I remember that phrase,” the man said. “Personnel resources. They used to talk about personnel resources and materiel resources. They said it all fancy, person-EL, materi-EL.”
“Dickhead officers,” Easy said, then grinned and jerked a thumb in my direction.
The old man studied me carefully. “Your hair is really pretty. You look like you could be a model or something. It looks like my wife’s hair when she was about your age. The men, too, they wore their hair long like you. Her people didn’t cut it unless they had a reason. I’ve told her not to cut it off when I go, but she probably will. I think it won’t be long now.”
Easy leaned forward. “How can you tell? Is it the oxygen?”
He shook his head. “It’s the damnedest thing. When I was a kid, I loved parachute rigging. I loved it more than anything. I could do it in my sleep. I even dreamed sometimes I was rigging parachutes, my hands flying over that material, folding and tucking everything in perfectly. Then I’d wake up and realize I’d been dreaming, and now I had to go off and do it again, for real. I haven’t done that for a long time, but just recently, I’ve been dreaming again. I’m rigging parachutes in my sleep, fast and perfect, every tuck and fold. I wake up feeling happy, knowing somebody’s got themselves a safe parachute and the jump’s gonna go fine. Yes, sir,” he said, and it sounded like he was talking to himself. “Everything’s gonna go fine.”
He looked up, realized we were both smiling at him. He cleared his throat. “Now, I bet you boys would like a tamale. There is a Waffle House about a mile up the road, but my wife, she’s been making green corn tamales today. Her people call it kneel-down bread. There’s enough for everybody.” He waited for our nods, then pulled a little walkie-talkie from the front pocket of the vest that held his oxygen tank. He clicked it on. “Evelyn, are those tamales about done? I’ve got two hungry boys out here.”
She didn’t reply, but the walkie made a clicking sound. He put it back in his vest. “She don’t like talking on this thing. Says her voice sounds funny. Now she just gives me clicks. I don’t really know what the clicks mean, but at least I know she heard me.”
She was not as old as he, maybe midsixties, Navajo or Apache, with long hair tucked up in a bun at the back of her neck. She was heavyset and wore a long cotton skirt and sneakers underneath. The basket she was carrying had Tino and Easy sitting up at attention. She pulled out paper plates, gave us each a green corn tamale. The outer corn wrappings were charred like they’d been on the grill. She studied Easy for a moment, put a second one on his plate. She only smiled when Tino put his head on her foot and gazed up into her face with one imploring black eye. She broke off a tiny bit of tamale, put it down next to him.
When she had served everyone, she pulled her chair out and sat just to the side of her husband, a little behind him. She spoke to him under her breath. I didn’t recognize the language.
“I don’t know.” He turned to me. My mouth was full of the most delicious, smoky, hot roasted corn tamale that had ever been made by human hands. Easy looked like he was about to kneel at her feet. “She says it looks like a javelina attack,” the old man said. “What happened to the little dog.”
“That’s exactly what it was,” Easy said. “Three of them. A mother and two babies. Vicious little pig bastards.” He reached down, picked Tino up in one hand, and gave him a kiss on his knobbly head.
Evelyn nodded, reached into the basket, and brought out more tamales.
Chapter Nine
WE SKIRTED around the city sprawl, drove south. The landscape changed from red to biscuit brown, the cliffs and sandstone mountains gave way to a drab landscape dotted with wind-scoured scrub and cactus.
When we saw the first saguaro cactus, Easy pointed out the windshield. “I have seen pictures of those and they did not look like that.”
The sad specimens on the roadside south were broken and deformed, arms canted at strange angles, streaked with ugly brown, like the burns from lightning strikes. Some of the cacti were growing new limbs, bulbous rounds like giant green moles stuck on at strange angles.
“Jesus,” Easy said. “It’s like some mutant bomb has gone off down here. This is what everything’s gonna look like after the apocalypse.”
“You Tennessee boy. You’re used to soft and green when you look out the window.”
“That’s because I’m human and humans eat things that are green.”
“Some of us eat more green than others. Do you really eat burgers every day? I mean, every day? Really? When was the last time you had a salad?”
He raised a middle finger in my direction.
The Waffle House had had an early-morning special of sausage scramble with three eggs and green chili. If I had to look at another green chili cheeseburger over lunch I was going to shave my head bald. Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea. Start fresh. Or I could just get one of those portable juicers with attached cup and make some fruit smoothies, and keep my hair. I bet I could talk Easy into drinking a fruit smoothie.
“What?” Easy was waving at me from the driver seat.
“Are you in this dimension? Can you hear me, Major Tom?” For a moment, David Bowie joined us in the big truck.
“Yes, Easy. I was just thinking. Silently. To myself. It’s what brains do.”
“You don’t really think he traveled down here on that bike.”
I hesitated. “No, not really. Can you see it?” The roads were full of eighteen-wheelers, most of them coming up from the border. There were no shoulders. The roads just crumbled off into sand and rocks, covered with blowing plastic grocery bags, fast food cups, and an occasional dead dog. “I don’t know where they find the pretty cactus they put on the postcards.” I turned over the postcard with a cartoon-perfect saguaro with googly eyes attached, and read Austin’s scrawl. I’m going to see some raptors at the National Park. Is that cool or what? And you can mine for rubies and if I find one I’ll bring it home to you, Mom. Love, Austin.
“Do you know what he’s talking about, mining for rubies?” Easy shook his head. “I looked it up at the Waffle House. There’s a state park over in New Mexico where you can mine for stones, but it’s at least a couple of days east of here. He wouldn’t have backtracked if he was heading for the coast. Or gone back into the mountains if he was looking for warm nights.”
“He might have got lost, not realized he was riding east again.”
I thought if Austin could ride on a bike and not realize the sun was rising in his face and that yesterday it had set in his face, we were in more trouble than we could handle.
“There’s a national park or monument or something east of here, where the saguaros are, right? Then Organ Pipe Cactus down on the border.”
“Let’s just get to Ajo,” Easy said, “because we know his phone is there. Maybe if we can find the boys who have it, they can tell us something.”
I tapped the postcard again. “This thing about the raptors. They have those ranger talks in the parks. Maybe the raptor thing is one of those. But this cactus isn’t the kind they have down in Organ Pipe.”
“That cactus,” Easy pointed out, “has googly eyes glued to it, and that would have driven every other consideration out of his mind. I don’t think he cares about getting his cactus species properly catalogued.”
I slipped my sunglasses on. “Understood. Okay. Ajo, then.”
We rode in silence, the grim landscape unfolding outside the truck windows.
Easy reached over, took my hand. “Are you still pissed off at me?”
“No,” I said. I pulled my hand away. “I’m upset with myself. What you said yesterday about my letting the boys get a crush on me. I didn’t….” I stopped for a moment, tried to think what I wanted to say. �
�I’m upset because I didn’t realize I was doing it. And if I was, it was a failure of leadership. Was I indulging myself and putting those men at risk? I didn’t think so at the time. I’d never do that intentionally. I have to say, no matter what else, no matter how many things I’ve failed to do right, I thought I was a good leader. Now I’m thinking, maybe I fucked that up too. If so, the list of things I’ve done successfully in my life is down to nothing. Zero, zip, nada.”
He reached for me again, pulled my hand over, and rested it against his chest, over his beating heart. “You were the best. You were the best officer I ever served with. You were everything you wanted to be, James Lee. Brave and strong. You took care of everybody. You led by example. I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t you. It was me. I was envious, I think. Those boys, they were just a couple of years younger than us, right? But it seemed like they’d been given some permission that I’d been denied. They could be open, be themselves. Make big eyes at the handsome captain. Even flirt a little bit. Somehow I missed out on that. It wasn’t okay for me. I had to be careful, watchful. And you told me we had to pick the Army or each other, it couldn’t be both. The sound of that rattled around in my head, and I kept thinking, why not both? Why the fuck not? I still can’t get it out of my head.”
I looked over at him, the old argument rising like a ghost between us.
“I know what you said, Jamie. It wasn’t being gay, it was being in the chain of command. It was the distraction of being lovers in a combat unit. I get that. But it was being gay too. We had to be extra careful not to fuck up in any way, because they were just waiting for somebody to fuck up. You were one cautious son of a bitch. And then I thought you used the Army as an excuse. It was too much work. Me and you together, too hard, too complicated. It wasn’t worth the effort, so you just used the Army to blow me off. Easier to slide through life alone. Meditating when things got tough.”
I felt the thumping of his heart, held my palm against warm cotton. “I’m ready to put this to bed,” I said carefully. “Let’s put it to bed and start from here. Or not. Your choice. This time it’s your choice. But I am tired of this and I’m not apologizing one more time for doing what I thought was right. If you thought I was just blowing you off because it was too hard and I was looking for an easy life, then you can go fuck yourself. You never knew me, not one bit, if you thought that. I’m not explaining myself to you again.”
He seemed to hold his breath; then he let my hand drop. “You sounded just like your old self there, James Lee. Like Captain Hooker laying down the law.”
“Yeah?” I was nearly snarling. “Sorry to hear that. Because now I’m just a bullshit yoga teacher at the YMCA.”
“You could be a ponytail model. I bet I could get you a gig with L’Oréal or somebody. They could photoshop a girl’s face in under all of that hair and sell a million bottles of shampoo and conditioner.”
“I swear to God I’m shaving my head.”
He reached over and stroked my leg to calm me down, and I felt my breath hitch a bit, then slow down and even out. He’d brushed my hair the night before, a hundred strokes until my scalp had tingled and sung with happiness. He’d made it into a braid and set it over my shoulder so it wouldn’t get in my way when I slept.
“No. That you are not. Not in my lifetime. And if it’s really my choice this time, then I choose you. Yoga teacher in your freak shoes and leggings and I’ll even choose that asshole dog.” Tino was in disgrace with Easy for chewing the ends off the leather laces in his boots.
“What the hell’s wrong with my shoes? If it’s not my dog, it’s my shoes!”
He stared out the windshield. “I’m not fighting with you today. I’ve still got indigestion from the sausage scramble, and I forgot to buy more Rolaids. But your shoes have toes, Jamie. Toes. That is just not right.”
A green chili cheeseburger every day for lunch was not right, but I kept that thought to myself. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of an argument, and maybe my feelings were still raw from what he’d said to me yesterday, but I’d let him get more Rolaids before we got into it again.
“Hey. James Lee? I totally dig on this authentic you.”
AJO HAD a pretty main street and Spanish Colonial plaza rising from the desert, the buildings shimmering in the heat. The plaza looked old but seemed to be in good repair. A big Border Patrol Ranger station on the outskirts of town probably kept some government money coming in. We were driving by the huge abandoned copper mine on the outskirts of town before we realized we were out the other side. Between where we were and the Mexican border was the town of Why, population twelve, and lots of cactus.
We pulled off, studied the old abandoned mine. It was huge, nearly a mile across. They’d left it open, a big pit mine that had given up silver and then copper until it had played out in the eighties.
“There a lot of mines where you’re from?”
“Used to be,” Easy said. “It’s getting more dangerous, and you see three generations of men die from lung disease, you start to wonder if there isn’t some other job you could do. Like anything else. But mostly they’ve shut down the old mines, the mills.”
“Some of these old mines out West, they fill them up with water, see if anything else will float to the surface. They let the pools evaporate and then scoop the minerals or whatever off the top.” The old pit was ringed with barbed wire, the signs stating Danger in English and Spanish. “But mostly everything they take from under the surface out here is radioactive. Uranium, like that old man told us about up in Utah. So any mining out here leaves these radioactive tailings behind. And they get in the rivers and water.”
“Jesus, you’re cheerful today, James Lee.” Easy pulled onto a gravel road, made a U-turn, and drove back toward town. “You blink too hard, you’ve missed this place.”
Back in Ajo there was a motel, a library, diner, laundromat. We started making the rounds, showing our pictures and asking questions. We got nothing but suspicious stares and quick shakes of the head. Easy had the idea of asking at the library if Austin had a library card and got into an argument with the librarian about privacy and using other people’s Social Security numbers.
“He’s an adult, isn’t he?” she said more than once, and Easy tried to explain that yes, he was an adult, but not by much. And he was the boy’s cousin, didn’t that count for anything? It did not. She recommended we try the police substation, just across the plaza.
“We are getting nowhere,” I said, pulling Easy back outside. I gave him a bottle of water. “Drink. You need to hydrate.” We stood on the sidewalk, looking around. Nothing looked suspicious. No one appeared to be our band of irregulars waiting for us with a stolen TracFone. There had been no answer since the first call. “Okay, enough,” I said. “Let’s go on down to Organ Pipe, see if we can ask a ranger about raptor shows.”
“Okay,” he said, taking a long pull on the bottle of water. “First, a quick visit to the substation. That librarian was right. I don’t want to drive out of here and leave him sitting in the county jail.” He looked me over. “You wait at the truck, take Shithead for a walk. This is a job for a barber, not a ponytail model.”
Tino seemed to like the way the desert smelled, with the strange cactus and scrubby brush, the trash and abandoned brass of someone’s target practice. He nearly snagged a gecko, sleepy from the sun. I poured him out some San Pellegrino and he drank two little bowlfuls.
“This is a special treat,” I said. “Don’t get used to it. Listen.” I looked around. “Don’t get too down in the dumps.” Tino stared miserably up at me with his one beady eye. “He still loves you. And I understand that his boots smell very good to you. But he likes the boots and doesn’t want you to chew on the laces. You’ve got to control yourself.”
Easy met us at the truck, shaking his head. “He has not been arrested in this county for the last three months.” He pulled open the truck’s door and climbed in. “The deputy was Marine Corps. And he tried the phone, said it w
as dead. They might have taken the battery out of it after you tried to scare them straight.”
“That’s good. One worry down.”
“We should have been asking the cops when we stopped. Most of them are vets.” He huffed for a moment. “We’ve screwed this up. We’ve been asking clerks at the drugstore and we should have been asking the cops. Are we gonna have to go back to the beginning and start this trek over again?”
“We’ll do what we have to do, Easy. But let’s finish off this road before we call it a fail and think of something else.” This was met with silence.
The drive down to Organ Pipe was long and slow, on a narrow two-lane road, and there were two Border Patrol checkpoints along the way. The panel vans, trucks, and RVs were given careful inspections. The undercarriage of our truck was checked with mirrors on long rolling sticks.
“Are they looking for drugs or illegals?” Easy rolled down his window and handed over his license and registration.
The agent gave me a careful study; then he asked for my ID as well. Nice. “Are you two going across the border?”
Easy shook his head. “We’re going down to Organ Pipe. Hiking and to see the raptor show.”
“Be careful out there,” the agent said. “Lots of unfriendlies on the hiking trails.”
We got back on the road again. “The borderlands look like they’re under martial law,” Easy said. “I didn’t realize things were like this.”
“Me either,” I said.
“That guy was giving you the eye.”
“Because of the long line of black-haired beauties that came before me. Shit, my people were probably here generations before his Irish ass got off the boat. If he’d said something to me in broken Spanish, I would have gotten seriously pissed off.”
“Well, you can take comfort in the fact that his freckled nose was probably peeling three minutes after he arrived in Ajo.”
“Did you hear him? Unfriendlies? Shit, that dickhead never served.”