Bombshell (7 page)

“What's that?” Molly raised her tequila, mirroring Cash's gesture.

“Ukrainian. ‘Long life.'”

“Bitchin'.” Molly slammed her drink. “Let's get another.”

“Do you live here?”

“In this bar? Almost.” Molly grinned, revealing a silver incisor. “In Madrid, yes.” She eyed the slim paperback book protruding from the breast pocket of Cash's oversized black utility shirt. “The
SCUM Manifesto
. Long time no see. Do you go for girls?”

“I did.” Where the ceiling of the bar was collaged with currency, Cash saw Zelda's face dripping from every bill.

“Now you're an angry young man.” Immediately, Molly saw the nitroglycerin sheen of tears foregathering in Cash's blue eyes. She knew that it was not a consequence of her words, but of something that had been waiting
to break. “Fuck, I'm sorry. Something bad happened. I get it. Okay, let's get out of here.” Molly threw a mangled collection of dollar bills on the bar counter, calling out, “Later, Carla.” She took Cash's arm and directed her from the bar and into the street. They wound into the hollow hills toward Molly's cabin. “See these bottle walls?” Molly said, gesturing at the misshapen mortar and glass, “that's your emotions, glinting, rocked in capsules, pretty little compartments of pain. You're bottled up. I'm gonna show you my place, and you're going to stay in the cabin next to it. Been empty for a year. Stay. Get your shit together. I used to cry spontaneously like you too, like I was about to blow, but couldn't quite do it. Suddenly, I realized I needed to cut my prick off in Mexico.” Molly felt Cash slouching against her. As the day turned into weeks and now years, Molly had become Cash's closest friend and only confidant in New Mexico. Molly was also Cash's mechanic and landlord. Cash would assist her in her car repair and customization business. Since she spoke without a trace of an accent, Cash's Soviet birth was only known to Molly, just as the more prurient details of Molly's years hustling for estrogen shots and pills in the Castro and Chinatown were only fully known to Cash. Molly forged Cash's vehicle license for her. It was the ostracism that followed her sex change that had brought Molly by motorcycle to the isolation of Madrid twenty-five years ago. On the coatrack inside her thin front door, Molly kept the M65 field jacket she had worn in Vietnam. The rest of the cabin was pinned with Molly's tattoo designs and the illustrations she had created for hot rod magazines back in San Francisco.

April 4, 2011. When Cash stepped outside to visit Molly, she found the residue of last night's snow. Her breath misted in the morning air, and her boots cracked ice. Molly's house was adjacent to Cash's cabin. Between them was the low wall where Cash leaned her motorcycle and a telegraph pole stripped of its wires. There were no other immediate buildings. The
dun hills of Madrid rippled about them, cupping them in silence. Madrid's old mining cabins and crumbling adobes were scattered apart, separated by raw ground. The air was clean, but it bore the faint tinge of a trash can fire from the night before, somewhere closer to the drag. Molly's home was larger than Cash's. Sparks illuminated the ancient greenhouse that the older woman had converted into a mechanical workshop; several panes of glass were missing and thin vines and bindweed ate into the whitewashed frame. Molly was inside, working on a large engine.

“Hey, Moll!” Cash waved as she pushed through the chicken wire gate.

“Hi, Cash, how's it shaking?” Molly removed her welding goggles and disentangled them from her long gray-blond hair. Her biceps, inked with serpents and skulls, daggers and dolls, were glossed with sweat from the work. She wore torn blue jeans and an MC5 T-shirt. To Cash, Molly resembled a more beautiful six-foot Iggy Pop with tits. Her eye shadow, lipstick, and lipliner were permanently tattooed.

“
Pas mal
, lady,
pas mal
. What about you?” Cash touched a part of the engine, crushing the grease between her fingers.

“Oh, I'm recovering, I guess.” Molly put one of her muscular arms around Cash's shoulders, a scent of sweat and grease. “C'mon
chica
, let's go inside.” As they entered her house, Molly continued: “I went to that new gay bar in Santa Fe last night. You know: Manolete's.”

“I saw that your car was gone.” Cash said. “You have a margarita hangover?”

“Jesus, no, I wish! I'm totally depressed. It was awful. No one wanted anything to do with me. Pardon me for sounding melodramatic, but I've
discovered that I am at the lowest level of the queer hierarchy. The voluntary, experimental, heterosexual, post-op trans-woman.” Molly steered Cash toward her couch, ushering her audience.

“Really? That is a predicament to be in.”

“It was the same when I was in San Francisco and all the pre-ops on the street hated me because they thought I was making
fun
of them, when
I was the only one that had actually gone through with it
. I always wondered how my having a vagina was making fun of them? Anyway, the drinks were thin and the Muzak was an enema. The dykes aren't into me or curious the way they used to be. So, I thought I'd head out to the workshop this morning and hit things with hammers, but I'm pleased to have company from my best and only neighbor!”

There were chrome hubcaps on the white plastered walls of Molly's studio home, and a collage of tacked-up pen-and-ink sketches that had been influenced by Louise Bourgeois and Raymond Pettibon. Weird plastic flowers stood stiffly in vases filled with gravel chips and glass beads; Triffids in an aquarium. The light through the windows was beautiful, that penetrating clean light redolent of the atomic age in New Mexico. It stroked the bright colors of a series of postcards that Cash recognized as Hindu deities. She recognized the elephant-headed form of Ganesha and the blue skin and many arms of Kali.

“Who is this?” Cash indicated a conjoined form, a killer staring out over an imaginary battlefield. Its right breast was a flat strong pectoral plate, while the left was opulent and female.

“That's Ardhanari, the hermaphrodite form of Shiva.”

Cash thought of Oppenheimer.

“I just enjoy the pictures,” Molly said, disingenuously. “But, really, if I'm going to be reincarnated on this wheel,” she patted her modified genitals through her jeans, “I want to give them something to
think
about.”

“Wanna just watch television for now, though, before reincarnation?” Cash asked.

“Okay, sure. Switch it on. I have coffee. Do you need some?”

“Never refuse it.”

“Sorry if I dragged everything down with my self-pity.” Molly called from the kitchen. She laughed: “Love's a fuckin' battlefield, man.”

“Ain't it the truth,” Cash called back.

Molly returned from the kitchen, waiting for the percolator. “So, how's your love life, Varyushka?” She called her by the name that they only used in private.

“Aw, you know . . . ”

“You do get asked out, at least. I know you do.” Molly adopted a sarcastic tone. “All those hot dreadlocked chicks over at the Coalmine!”

“True, yeah.” Cash stared nervously at the walls. “But, after Zelda . . . ”

“I know, I know.” Molly stroked Cash's hair, tenderly. “I'm sorry.” Molly looked around for a means to change the subject. She walked over to a
slanting architectural draftsman's table. “Hey, check it out: I'm going through some of my old portfolio,” Molly explained, indicating a stack of soft-core airbrush work that was something like fuselage pinups of old bombers. “Those are from the hot rod magazines. Then there are these,” she said. Molly handed Cash a sheaf of photographs. Molly returned to the coffee percolator, absently knocking her brow against the pans that hung over it. “Coffee, cream, agave. There, we have everything. I'll switch on the tube, and you get the lube. Just kidding young lady.”

Molly's eighties television flickered into life after displaying nothing but a bright oscilloscope line that left a ghostly trail across the screen for the first several moments. Cash snatched up the sticky remote from the beer crate that stood in for a coffee table as she and Molly flopped back on the red velour couch. They watched in silence for minutes as the news cycle began to repeat itself.

Cash became agitated: “That's the strangest fucking thing. Now they're saying what? That they don't know if it was vandalism, an accident, or a lightning strike?
Lightning strike?
All we get today is some footage of some fat sunburned tourists in their Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps, whining because they can't go to White Sands and jerk off? They're walking this back and killing the story. Someone is screwing the lid down tight.”

“Local news, man. What were you expecting to see?” Molly scratched for something under her blond hair.

“Well, I'm sure I didn't dream that someone attached explosives to it and blew the shit out of it.”

“Maybe you did.”

“Now, it's so . . . so
quiet
. Maybe that means that they're taking it seriously?”

“Exercises. Cash, I'm not certain
what
you are talking about because I was out late being
ignored
in a gay bar, but whenever we have excessive military helicopter action out here, which is often, you know that it is always
exercises
, or the Man looking for meth labs or fields of marijuana. No, we are
not
hunting flying saucers. No, there is
nothing
rotten in the Land of Enchantment!” Returning to the kitchen for more cream, Molly continued: “Say, did I ever tell you about the time I was in a post office in Hunt, Texas, where they had an FBI wanted poster for Osama bin Laden? As if he'd be stupid enough to turn up there. This woman with steel wool for hair behind the counter said, ‘Oh, I call him the Q-Tip, because he kind of looks like a Q-Tip with that darn thing on his head.' Don't you just love innocent country folk?”

Cash wanted to tell Molly everything, but did not dare endanger her. The Blackhawks had been stood down, the temporary roadblocks had been dismantled, and the red earth went on, innocent and unsuspecting. But Cash knew that they would be hunting her now in the quiet cracks of America, in subtle dislocations of the street. She would leave in the morning, moving toward the city, making certain that she was being noticed.

They watched television until, as it often did, Molly's satellite dish lost signal and the screen turned to a monochrome fuzz of static and white noise. She would hit Los Alamos. The day after that, she would be gone.

APRIL 5, 2011. MANY OF CASH'S DAYS WERE WASTED TO NAUSEA.
She slopped from the shower stall, naked and soaking, almost ripping the shower curtain from its rail, and skidded over to the toilet, vomiting into the bowl. Cash fingered the goiter at her throat. It had always been with her, this pulsar beneath her skin, moving though its spectrum, marking time. The goiter was a symptom of her thyroid cancer. Her cancer came from Chernobyl, when a sparkling dust entered her infant throat, a misshapen crust of death, as it did thousands of others in the old haunt of the Amazon women. It was an invasion, a rape. Staring into her steamed mirror, she saw that the lump had enlarged. Since she did not exist, she could not afford health care. It was, she concluded, only the force of her will that postponed the victory of cancer. She ran her fingers over the bulbous skin once before the nausea pulled her back down to the lavatory. Brushing the taste of bile out of her mouth, Cash stifled the tears that threatened to overwhelm her.

She dressed in her black Malaria! T-shirt and dirty white jeans that clung to her thighs before lighting a fire in her wood-burning stove. She felt weak. There was nothing that she could do but sit numb at her kitchen table, sipping coffee and trying not to puke. In the corner of the room was a turntable in a scuffed red suitcase. Cash put on her cat's-eye glasses and thumbed through a selection of vinyl, lining up some records to play as she waited for the sickness to pass: Lizzy Mercier Descloux's “Herpes Simplex,” X's “White Girl,” Yoko Ono singing “Listen, the Snow Is Falling.” Even with her glasses, she struggled to focus her eyes on the record sleeves. Her guts twitched and heaved slightly. Reading was almost impossible, but this was her habit. She picked through ragged volumes, a rum-ringed edition of Monique Wittig's
Les Guérillères
, Friedan, De Beauvoir, Cixous, and returned to Valerie Solanas. Valerie's SCUM feminism was based on mutation and violence. As the nausea passed through her in cold waves, Cash wrapped her bicycle chain necklace over the goiter, the trinitite concealing it, even as the sickness fought to remake her flesh, to violate the soft atomic code of her skin.

As flames gathered in her stove, she thought of the wildfires that had threatened Los Alamos nine months ago, the wildfires that she had set in solidarity with her remote Ukrainian Amazon sisters who had started fires in the forest regions of Russia, the forest lands where fallout from Chernobyl had settled. The ash from these new fires was dispersed as far as Moscow, where a gray pall descended upon Red Square and the lurid minarets and bright bricks of the Kremlin. The people continued to work and shop, wearing white cotton masks across their faces. They were not told immediately of the origin of the ash and what the sickening smoke might contain. Broken only by thunderstorms, a nuclear autumn had come to Mother Russia. The reportage of the so-called wildfires only briefly expressed the fear that the spreading blaze could agitate 1986's contaminated earth, and that the fallout could be revived by the burning winds, before that imagery was suppressed. Here, Cash reflected, was a continental militant strike achieved with nothing more
than one box of matches and favorable weather. At Los Alamos, nuclear materials were stored under tarpaulins in the open air. Even from forty miles away, from the slag heaps of Madrid, Cash could watch the fires consuming fir trees in columns of flame and closing in on the site and its drums of radioactive waste. She did not want the fires to reach the corroding barrels of plutonium, only for a blast wave of panic to rinse the landscape. Yet, if they did, she was prepared. Death was coming to America, inexorably, by generations of poison slipping from radioactive topsoil into the Rio Grande, from the gentle glitter of strontium clouds, and from the creep of cesium in young bones. Or it might come suddenly, carelessly. Perhaps it could not be stopped. And as much as she set her will against it, she knew also that she embodied it. She was, as she thought of herself, the atrocity to conclude atrocities. There would and must be deaths, but not yet.