China Lake (15 page)

He swung his head toward Sammy. ‘‘I said I was washing up. Do you comprehend what it means to be clean? ‘Cleanse your hands, you sinners.’ ’’

The John Deere cap pushed past Sammy, unzipping his pants and heading for the urinal. A moment later he groaned with relief.

Behind Sammy came the sound of squeaky boots. The lavender woman appeared at his shoulder and said, ‘‘Peter. We’re ready to go.’’

John Deere said, ‘‘Judas Priest, lady. Close the damn door!’’

Wyoming said, ‘‘Give me a minute. I’ll wash them off. I will.’’ But he looked at his arms as if they were strangers, maybe his Whore of Babylon hand puppets doing a raunchy skit at the ends of his elbows. He didn’t move.

She clapped her hands. ‘‘Peter Wyoming!’’

He pointed a soapy arm at her. ‘‘This is on your head. Today’s performance was poorly managed, and look at the result.’’

‘‘It was your idea.’’

‘‘Chenille! Jeremiah two!’’

She got mad, Sammy was sure. She squeezed her mouth into a tight line and said, ‘‘ ‘Though you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me.’ ’’

John Deere shook himself dry. ‘‘Christ on a pony. From now on I’m pissing in the bushes.’’

Wyoming turned on him. ‘‘Don’t bother with modesty. Can’t you see what she is? ‘A wild ass, in her heat sniffing the wind!’ ’’ He raised high his soapy hands. ‘‘Who can restrain her lust? None who seek her need weary themselves!’’

A new man pushed Sammy aside and went in, a tall dude, slim and strong, with a dark face. He said, ‘‘Pastor, it’s getting late.’’

The sight of Paxton seemed to calm Wyoming. He let his hands drop and took the paper towels Paxton handed him, using them to carefully, carefully dry his hands. Done, he let them flutter to the wet floor. That was when he noticed Sammy standing fretfully in the doorway.

Wyoming leaned forward, chin first. ‘‘Are you saved?’’

Oh, crap, Sammy thought. Then Chenille tried to take Wyoming’s arm. He pulled away and walked off, shaking his head.

Sammy watched them go out of the corner of his eye. Why did the nutcases always turn up when he was by himself? Holding his breath against the stink, he turned off the faucets and waited to see if the sink would drain.

Outside the men’s room, Paxton and Chenille were lagging behind Wyoming. Paxton said, ‘‘I told you this stunt with the cops was a bad idea. It’s way past time for showboating. It’s time to get down to it.’’

Later, Sammy told this to the police. But just then he didn’t look up. The sink was clogged and the floor was slippery. Damn, this tore it. He was definitely going to study harder for his SATs, get into a good college, and get the hell away from gas station customers forever.

But first he had to ring up the sale for the two pickups. When he got around to the pumps, though, they were pulling out without paying. He ran after them, yelling, knowing he wouldn’t catch them. The people in the back of the green Dodge just stared at him. He glanced down to get the license number. The truck had no plates.

Brian headed to the airfield at six the next morning. On his way out he shook my shoulder and murmured for us to come over to the base about noon; he’d gotten a visitor’s pass for me. I squinted up at him. Though woozy with sleep, I had the feeling that he’d been standing over me for some time, wondering why Luke had crawled onto the floor next to me, and probably feeling second-best. When he left, the heels of his old cowboy boots clicked on the tiles in the front hall.

After breakfast Luke and I unpacked boxes and then took a bike ride to his new school. It was hot, but China Lake sprawls across a flat valley floor and it was easy riding. The streets were wider than the Champs-Élysées and sported the names of first ladies: Mamie, Jackie, Lady Bird. The dry air and beaming sun did nothing to lessen my tension headache. Luke was subdued, and I felt uneasy, wondering where Tabitha and the Remnant had gone, and what lay out there in the shining desert day.

At the school Luke seemed excited to spot the first-grade classroom, with its purposeful clutter and Halloween decorations. On the playground he climbed a jungle gym, and hopped down complaining that the metal was hot. The day was mild compared to what the Mojave can throw at you, but we weren’t used to it. We came home sweating and thirsty.

Around noon we drove to the base. I showed my pass at the gate, where a sign reminded drivers to arrange a police escort if they were delivering explosives. Things looked familiar. The Phantom jet still posed on a pedestal inside the gates. The office buildings and laboratory complexes remained lemon yellow, flat-roofed, and nondescript. The cottonwood trees had grown taller. Traffic was lackadaisical.

At the airfield we parked near the control tower and walked toward the tarmac. Fighter jets and attack helicopters sat gleaming in the sun. The smell of jet fuel wafted to me. A Harrier roared off the runway, engine exhausts glowing orange. Inside one of the hangars a squadron emblem was painted on the wall:
VX-9 Vampires
. And what, I thought, would Tabitha make of
that
? Luke bent his head down, away from the blistering white sunlight, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes.

‘‘Here.’’ I took off my sunglasses and set them on him. They looked huge, turned him into a miniature Blues Brother. ‘‘Better?’’

An F/A-18 howled down behind us. Luke clapped his hands over his ears. Soon a second Hornet came in, tires screeching as they hit the runway.

I said, ‘‘There’s your dad.’’

They taxied past, and I glimpsed the first pilot’s brown face beneath his helmet. Brian was following behind him. Brian parked and spooled down the engines, and an enlisted man brought a ladder so he could climb down from the cockpit. When he hopped to the ground, I set my hands on Luke’s shoulders. This was how I wanted him to see his father: next to a fighter jet, with parachute straps and survival gear hanging from his shoulders, his helmet tucked under one arm. As warrior, protector, defender of the free world. I felt my throat closing up, and didn’t care if it was syrupy, blubbery sentimentality. This moment showed Luke something worthy, something pure.

It was this way whenever I went to an airfield. It had been this way when I was little and our dad took us to see the Blue Angels. As they swept overhead, all turbine roar and gleaming metal and aerobatic beauty, Brian squeezed my arm and whispered,
Someday that’ll be me.
And it had been this way the first time I watched him fly in, and he sauntered toward me smiling that world-eating smile.

Captain America, Jesse called him. Damn right. Why shouldn’t I adore him?

He and the black pilot walked toward us, chatting. When he saw Luke, Brian waved, calling, ‘‘Hey, there, little man. Come meet Commander Marcus Dupree.’’

Dupree exuded calm power. He had a strong handshake, a direct gaze, and a creamy bass voice that crooned, ‘‘So, this is the famous Luke Delaney.’’ A minute later he was putting his helmet on Luke’s head, and Luke was trying to talk and look around, his head wobbling when he turned it.

Brian was smiling, though it stretched his features tight, telling Luke that Dupree’s call sign was ‘‘Dupes.’’ Handing back the helmet and saying, ‘‘Come on; I’ll show you the Hornet,’’ he took Luke’s hand and walked toward the jet, talking about the wings, the control surfaces, swinging Luke up onto his shoulders and pointing out the twin tails.

Luke said, ‘‘What’s your call sign?’’

Brian touched his name tag, BRIAN DELANEY, LCDR USN, ‘‘SLIDER.’’ He said, ‘‘Can you read that?’’

Luke said, ‘‘It’s you.’’

Dupree and I hung back. He said, ‘‘I heard what happened yesterday. Hell of a homecoming.’’

‘‘You’re not kidding.’’

‘‘They both look wasted. Are you going to stick around for a while?’’

‘‘A few days.’’

‘‘Is there any way you could extend that?’’

‘‘Why?’’

His voice sounded as soothing as a late-night jazz deejay’s, but his words jarred. ‘‘I’ve known your brother a long time. And I have to tell you, right now he’s riding right out on the edge.’’

‘‘He’s had a rough time,’’ I said, too strongly. ‘‘I mean, I know divorce isn’t combat, but it’s still a bitter thing.’’

‘‘Life deals rough times to all of us. But it’s dangerous for a man to develop a taste for bitter things.’’

I turned to face him. ‘‘What are you saying, Commander?’’

‘‘It’s Marc. I’m saying that Brian is soaking his head in acid. You need to help him take a deep breath and calm down before he has a helmet fire.’’ He paused, and clarified: ‘‘Before his brain gets so scrambled that he does something stupid, in the air or on the ground.’’

‘‘How come you didn’t have the missiles loaded on your jet?’’ In the backseat of Brian’s Mustang, Luke was excited and talkative. ‘‘It would be so cool to see them.’’

Brian was driving us around the base, a nostalgic tour, taking us through its small-town center, past the community swimming pool, baseball fields, a church, a McDonald’s. I was quiet. Marc Dupree’s words had stuck to me like gum.

‘‘How do they sound when you shoot them? Like
shhhook
, or more like
crishshsh
? That would rock.’’

Half the houses on the base had been torn down. Whole neighborhoods, my puberty, safe streets where we lived with cheap, tidy houses and well-ordered expectation, were gone. Even the roads had been ripped up. Military downsizing. I said, ‘‘Ronald Reagan isn’t in the White House anymore, Toto.’’

‘‘Ding-dong, the Cold War’s dead.’’

When our family was stationed here, this place had a buzz. The Soviet threat had imbued people with purpose. More PhDs lived here, per capita, than anyplace in the country, and they were scientists and engineers, like my dad, who took it as their personal mission to develop technology that would save the lives of American pilots. Of course, I had seen the view from the high school—sports, liquor, sex, fast cars, kids ejecting to more populated and temperate places the instant they got their diplomas, which is why Santa Barbara has a high percentage of China Lake alums. But teenage boredom didn’t make China Lake a death zone. The town was nowhere close to Isaiah Paxton’s dark vision of spook heaven, Antichrist central, a secret, deadly city.

Brian was pointing at a vacant lot, saying, ‘‘Remember when?’’

Luke said, ‘‘Can’t I see what a missile looks like? Please?’’

Brian looked at him in the rearview mirror, half-amused, half-exasperated. ‘‘Fine.’’ Swinging the Mustang into a hard U-turn, he headed off base.

We found what Luke was looking for at the China Lake Museum, a small cinder-block building that housed great themes—life versus death, predator versus prey. A wildlife diorama showed stuffed rattle-snakes and coyotes pouncing on small mammals, with the victims posed in the moment preceding death. A poignant tableau, lunch. But Luke didn’t care about that. He headed straight for the Sidewinder missile.

It was a lean weapon, a slender metal arrow about ten feet long, positioned on the downward arc of flight. Luke looked at it, goggle-eyed, and then touched its guidance fins, and stood in front of it with arms flung outward, as if it were about to impale him. He asked how many of them Brian could load on his jet, and how far they could fly to blow up a target. Brian pointed out a photo of an F/A-18 firing a Sidewinder, explaining how the missile attached beneath the plane’s wing, and how he fired it off, calling,
Fox two
.

‘‘That means heat seeker,’’ he said. ‘‘Fox one means it’s a Sparrow missile.’’

From across the room a woman said, ‘‘Oh, my hell. Evan Delaney.’’

I turned, surprised and oddly wary. She was six feet tall with shaggy blond hair and round-rimmed glasses, wearing a museum badge.

‘‘Abbie Johnson.’’

‘‘Give the girl a cigar. And it’s Hankins now.’’ She had a bright alto voice and a big smile. ‘‘My God. Last time I saw you I was bent over barfing after running the four hundred.’’

Actually, the last time she had seen me was in court, the day we were sentenced for the pot bust. But I knew what she meant. On the track team I used to take the baton from her in the 4x400-meter relay. She had been whip-crack fast and threw up after every race. We called her the Vomit Comet.

‘‘Not doing much running these days, though.’’ She lifted up her billowy skirt to show me, above her white Reeboks and gym socks, a fat surgical scar. ‘‘Dirt bike wreck, back in college. And I know you won’t believe it, but I said adios to the partying, married a dentist, and started having babies. The fastest little buggers on the street. I’m Mrs. Civic Duty, rah-rah China Lake, and get your jaw up off the floor.’’

It was coming back to me now—that I could never stay mad at her. Though the years had dramatized her physique, expanding it to Wagnerian proportions, I said, ‘‘Abbie, you haven’t changed a bit.’’

She laughed. ‘‘Dammit, gal, you either. What’s your life story? Married? Kids? This your family?’’

Brian had wandered away, but when I introduced him he turned and gave a pro forma smile. Abbie said, ‘‘I remember you!’’ Looking at Luke, she said, ‘‘He’s gorgeous. Your wife must be a knockout.’’

Brian’s smile went starchy. ‘‘We’re getting divorced.’’

‘‘Oh, sorry.’’

‘‘Yeah, well.’’ He looked as if he’d been turned into cardboard. Put him into the wildlife display, he’d have fit right in with the rabbits.

Fortunately the phone rang at the front desk. Abbie went to answer it, and Brian said through his teeth, ‘‘Let’s go.’’ He took Luke’s hand and headed for the door, ignoring Luke’s, ‘‘But, Dad . . .’’ I followed, waving to Abbie on my way out.

She cupped her hand over the phone receiver. ‘‘Tonight. There’s a bar on China Lake Boulevard, the Lobo. It’s Friday. Come on down.’’

Nodding vaguely, I chased Brian outside. Luke was saying, ‘‘Why did we have to leave?’’ and Brian was telling him to get in the car. Luke turned on the whine. ‘‘But I wanted to stay.’’