Majestic (7 page)

"Gonna have to stay up half the night polishing the bottoms of our goddamn shoes," Hesseltine said.

"Why polish the bottoms of our shoes?"

"You can't eat off floors that have tar on them."

"Is that an example of your wit?"

"Maybe it's wit. Or maybe I'm just crazy."

"I think the former." Gray stepped into an especially soft spot and lifted his right foot out with a loud smack.

The concrete apron of the runway started just the other side of a chain-link fence. On it were six jeeps lined up in a neat row, waiting to ferry crew to the planes, which stood in the distance shimmering with heat. There were no flights planned for this afternoon, and the line was quiet.

Hesseltine fitted his aviation glasses to his face and looked longingly toward the rows of planes. Slowly he walked toward the car. In his mind he was, no doubt, running down a checklist, starting motors.

The car was hot to touch, hotter to sit in. With a long sigh he started it and nosed it out of the lot.

Walters's Jeep pulled in behind them, driven by a grim-faced PFC Winters, who had been dragooned into the job.

Once they were on the two-lane blacktop that led over to Roswell, Hesseltine lit a cigarette and tuned in a radio station. A show called Sundown Roundup was on, and they listened in silence. He knew that Gray didn't particularly like country music, and also that he was too polite to twist the dial if Hesseltine appeared to be enjoying himself. Hesseltine snapped his fingers in time to the thin caterwauling of a lonesome cowboy.

He hated the goddamn West. He would gladly have given an entire paycheck for a hoagie.

They drove through the town, past the restaurants, the bars, the general stores, the offices of the Daily Record. Hesseltine glanced buck with longing as they left the last of the bars behind. He was a man for a tall, cool one. He had a possibility of a date tonight, and he was damned if he was going to waste time out on some godforsaken ranch with Gray and Walters when he Could be dancing with a WAAF at the Nixon Bar.

He nosed the Chevy wagon to the sidewalk in front of Wooten's. The Jeep came in beside them. Gray got out of the wagon and trotted into

the store.

Hesseltine sat staring after him. Soon Walters came up to the car and leaned his head in. "Whaddaya think?"

"Wild goose chase. Some private plane went down in a storm."

"Funny place for a private plane to be. Middle of nowhere." "Flying Albuquerque-Roswell. Blown off course a few miles. Makes perfect sense."

Walters regarded him, nodding slowly. Compared to Walters, Gray was a real card. "Could be Russian," he said in dark tones. "Up from Mexico, or even from the coast. A recce plane launched from a sub. After a look at the 509th." "Didn't make it."

"How do we know? Maybe it had a good look and radioed everything back to the sub."

It struck Hesseltine as damned unlikely and he said so. "Well, Lieutenant, you may be right. But look at the stakes. Stalin wants, more than anything else in the world, to know exactly where the 509th is located, and its immediate orders." "But he can't get here. Surely not, Mr. Walters." "That isn't a CIC problem. You S-2s are supposed to be savvy in that department."

Major Gray came out of the store. "That's a good man, that Bob Ungar. I like men like him. Honest as the day is long. Friendly as hell." He held up a hand-drawn map. "He can't lead us out, he's got too much to do here in town. But he gave me very explicit instructions to his house. His wife and kids are there."

The tiny convoy started up again. A thought crossed Hesseltine's mind. "What kind of kids?"

"Daughter, he mentioned. Son he has with him." "Daughter?"

"A kid, Lieutenant. Twelve years old."

Hesseltine got quiet.

Beyond the clutch of Mexican shacks that ended the town Hesseltine picked up speed. Unable to stand any more of the whining music he spun the dial. A bad dance band pounded away at "Begin the Beguine." Father Coughlin screamed over waves of static. A woman explained that certain cactuses were edible. Somebody talked about how the DuBarry Success Course could bring more dates, more fun. You followed at home the same methods used at the Richard Hudnut Salon in New York.

Hesseltine spoke longingly about a girl in a pale gray suit tapping along in heels. He wanted that sweet and anonymous image with an ache that made him fall silent.

"They take the money of innocent kids," Gray intoned. "Nobody around here is ever going to look like she got within fifty miles of Richard Hudnut."

"Give me one of those Fifth Avenue dames. I'd take her up to the Rainbow Room and dance her until she dropped. These New Mexico girls have sand between their teeth."

"I wouldn't know. Jennine - "

"Jennine, I dream of Lilac Time - ' "

"Please, Lieutenant."

"I thought it was your song. You and Jennine."

"The way you sing it, it's nobody's song."

They swept off the blacktop onto a dirt road. The Jeep dropped way back to avoid their dust cloud.

They drove at a steady forty-five miles an hour, for three hot and dismal hours. When they stopped the shadows were long and the katydids were already singing.

They were in Maricopa, a town that consisted of ten houses strung along the roadside, a store, a bar and a gas station.

Everybody got down from the vehicles. Walters stretched his back, took off his sunglasses and began cleaning them with his handkerchief. His PFC driver whapped at his own uniform, bringing up clouds of dust.

"I'll bet that bar is full of cold beer," Hesseltine said. Nobody acknowledged him, but I have no doubt that PFC

Winter's eyes rolled.

"I'll go in and confirm these instructions," Gray announced. Walters went with him.

"You want a beer, Private?"

"Yes, sir."

"Our commanding officer will fail to realize this."

"Yes, sir."

"End of story, Private."

"Yes, sir."

Gray and Walters came hurrying back like men about to miss a train. "The road is about half a mile back toward Roswell," Gray said. "Then another thirty miles to the man's house. It's just a track."

It was far worse than that. Hesseltine waited for the Chevy to break an axle.

Amazingly, it didn't happen. This may have been because of the number of gates they had to open and close was so great that they never managed to get past twenty before they had to slow down again.

"The cattleguard hasn't been invented yet in New Mexico."

"Apparently not, Lieutenant."

"This is gate number sixteen."

"I haven't been counting."

Soon they arrived at a miserable hovel that was distinguished only by a tiny flower garden in the front yard.

The garden had sunflowers in it, and a few fat little cactuses with yellow flowers on them. Two kids, shy and afraid, cowered by the side of the house.

"Look out," Hesseltine muttered to Gray. "They might be commie dwarfs disguised as scared kids."

To Hesseltine's surprise, Gray stomped his foot against the floorboard of the car. He glared a moment at his junior officer.

"Close your window, Lieutenant," he snapped as he wound up his own. "Breaches of security are always a serious business, especially in a sensitive area like Roswell. For all we know, those kids are Commies and ready to report our least move to their cell leader. The fact that we're here on this ranch could be common knowledge in Moscow inside of an hour!"

Hesseltine was so taken aback by this outburst that he guffawed before he could stop himself. Gray glared at him. "You've got to take this seriously, Hesseltine."

"I'm sorry, sir. It's just that I've blown a date, and - "

"I understand perfectly. But we have to do this. And do it right."

"I agree, sir."

The porch had an old couch on it that was covered with a piece of canvas. The couch was sprung and there were places where animals had torn at the stuffing.

Gray was not a large man, but he felt huge in this little adobe-brick house. He knocked, the sound echoing flatly in the dark room beyond the rusty screen door.

Soon a shadow appeared moving forward from the back of the house, a woman gliding swiftly and crookedly along. She appeared behind the door, hesitant, her face clouding at the sight of the uniforms. She had a cigarette between her lips, which she took into her fingers. "Can I help you?" she asked, her voice soft.

Gray felt pity for her until he saw the flashing strength in her eyes. As he had many times before, he thought now that he did not understand these tough New Mexico people. "I'm Major Gray of the Roswell Army Air Force. This is Lieutenant Hesseltine and Mr. Walters." He did not introduce PFC Winters. The soldier, in any case, was lingering out by the Jeep.

"Come on in," Ellie replied, opening the door. The two children, who had been standing on the steps, now crowded past to be with their mother. "Go back outside, now," she said, "you let these men be. They're important Army men and they don't need kids to bother them." She herded them toward the back of the house. "They've never seen Army men so close," she added. As she spoke she smiled, and Gray was surprised without understanding why at how her smile made him feel.

For all his self-assurance Gray was an uneasy and open-hearted child of America. Her poverty spoke to him of his childhood seeing Okies on the road and hoboes in the back alley behind the white bungalow where he ate meals of collard and steak and cornbread. He had bounced along in the backseat of a clean little Essex, and heard his father say things like, "God has blessed us among the cursed millions, and we must never forget to thank Him."

One afternoon his father sat beneath the blooming wisteria in the backyard with tears streaming down his face. After that things had slowly gotten harder and harder. The Essex went, the refrigerator became an ice box again, the radio broke and was not repaired, and the leaves of autumn rolled down the street.

But there were also pennants won and comic books read and Baby Ruths eaten, and the sonorous majesty of Latin Club declamation contests. "In partem gloriae venio," and all the rest of it, Virgil and Cicero and the compressed fury of Seneca's plays.

The Grays had been a raft of neat, diminished pride in the shabby Midwestern ocean. These people were even worse off, and that scared him and made him hate them a little, and also feel tender toward them. Two generations ago most of the New Mexico settlers had set off westward from the ruins of Virginia, leaving their silk collars and magnolia evenings forever behind. They had slipped from grace and tumbled down into poverty's labyrinth of musty, rugless rooms and chipped white bowls on the dinner table.

"My husband's out back. I'll get him to come up." She left the living room, and in a moment her voice came again, low and hard and shockingly loud, "The Air Force is here!"

Hesseltine fidgeted with a bit of frayed cloth on the arm of the easy chair in which he was sitting. Gray stood nervously contemplating the large picture of Christ on the cross that hung over the mantel of the ancient, blackened fireplace. On the mantel there was also a picture of a lean, young man and a girl beside him.

"Would you like coffee," the woman said in her murmuring, prayerful way. Gray imagined the family before its picture of Jesus, praying against their frayed lives and the dry, hot desert where they made their living. He could not have been more wrong, of course. The Jesus was there for the colors, which Ellie thought matched the chair. And it was good for the kids.

Although all three men had declined coffee, the woman was making it anyway when her husband came banging into the house. He loomed through to the living room like a great caricature of Abraham Lincoln, stooping under the door and crossing directly to Cray. Walters and Hesseltine jumped to their feet.

"How in the world did you beat us," Gray asked.

"There's a road in that passes north of Arabela. Cuts off fifty miles."

"Oh."

"I thought I told you about it."

"We'd better get out to the crash."

"We can't."

"Can't?"

"It'll be dark before we get there. No use goin' until mornin'."

Gray could see by the looks on Hesseltine's and Walters's faces that they were just as appalled as he was.

"We got you each a plate of beans," the rancher said affably. "And coffee."

Gray managed to smile. Walters was impassive. Hesseltine looked like he was thinking about going AWOL.

Winters had come to the door and stood there hesitantly. "Bring in that half of bourbon," Walters growled.

The PFC produced a well-sucked half-pint of Old Granddad, which Walters handed to each man in turn.

Gray drank a swallow to be sociable. Hesseltine, he noticed, knocked back a couple of long pulls.

"That hit the spot," the lieutenant said. "Pardon me for drowning my sorrows. As of fifteen minutes from now I'm standing up the best-looking WAAF captain in Roswell."

"You better hope she doesn't put you on report."

"I like your sense of humor, Major Gray."

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

The rancher's wife called them into the kitchen, where they hulked around the table. When Gray saw how sparse the meals were, he knew that the woman had stretched four helpings of beans to eight. Even so, each plate had a little scrap of fat back on it along with the beans, and the coffee smelled rich and good.

They sat down to the crowded table. "This is some of that stuff," the rancher said. He put a couple of small pieces of tinfoil on the table.

Gray felt a flush of anger: he recognized it as foil from a burst weather balloon. He picked up the scrap of material. "Did you see the plane?"

"Lights. Heard the explosion. Then the next night y'all's blimp came over with the searchlights, but it missed the wreckage."

Gray frowned. "Blimp?"

"Sure. That big gray blimp."

Walters looked at Gray, took the foil from him. He held the stuff in his hand, staring down at it. Abruptly he crushed the foil to a tiny ball, then put it on the table.

To Gray's amazement, it sprang back to its original shape.

"You can't burn it or tear it," the rancher said as he spooned up the last of his beans. "I don't wonder, you couldn't put a bullet through it, either."