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Authors: Martin Cruz Smith

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BOOK: Stallion Gate
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“Different.”

“How different?”

“There are different stories, which I remember poorly. Have you seen the clowns at the dances here?”

“No.”

“Well, when the world was new, a brother and a sister set out across the mountains. He was handsome. She was beautiful. As they slept on a mountaintop, he realized that he loved her. When she woke up, she saw that he did. She tried to escape by stamping her foot and splitting the mountain so that a river flowed between them. He threw himself on the ground until he was bloody, and she felt so sorry for him that she swam back across the river and slept with him. The incest made them outlaws. Their children became clowns.”

“What about everyone else?”

“Everyone sort of wandered up out of the earth.… I really can’t tell you about Indians.”

Least of all, the Indian steeping in the water. Why the hell was he taking the chance of stealing high explosive
to give the stuff for nothing to Cleto when he could make a killing off the contractors in Albuquerque? Did he want to get caught and sent back to Leavenworth or shipped to the Pacific? There was an element of not just self-contempt, but of self-destruction.

“I can tell you about Indians,” Harvey said. “When I was eight, some so-called civilized Cherokees threw me into a water tank. The walls were about six feet high and it was half full. It didn’t have the aroma of this water, but it had slime, hence amusement value, the payoff being what I would look like when I hauled myself out. As I climbed out I noticed the water level sinking a little bit. I got back in and the water level went up. I went in and out, in and out. Then I calculated the volume of the water displaced and its weight, and from that my weight and volume. I had recently read in the
National Geographic
, between pictures of African breasts, that crocodiles weighted themselves by swallowing stones so they could swim lower and sneak up on those poor African girls. So I shouted from the water for the kids to throw some rocks into the tank. That was my real start in physics. You know, I’m starting to like this water. Does it mean I’m sweating poisons or I’m cooked?” He paddled back and forth between Joe and Anna Weiss. “What are you going to do after the war, Joe? Still thinking about opening a jazz club? I bet you’d need a silent partner.”

“How silent? Does that include the clarinet?”

Harvey stopped in the middle of the water. “Joe, do you think I’m drunk?”

“Are you?”

“Pi to ten places is 3.1415926535. Could a drunk say that?”

“You did.”

“He’s right,” Harvey murmured to Anna. “In the Texas Panhandle we have tent meetings where people roll on the ground and drool and talk in Hebrew, Hittite and Welsh. It’s nothing to speak the simple alphabet of algebra or the garbled Greek of physics. But, Joe, Joe, Joe, I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

“How could you get me into trouble?”

“I wouldn’t say anything, but I wanted you to understand if I disappeared. Because you’re my good friend.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Joe, I’m quitting the Hill.”

“Quitting?”

“Nobody remembers. We started this project only because Hitler had his project, so he couldn’t blackmail us with his bomb. Now it looks like he never made one. Now we say we’re going to use it on Japan, which doesn’t have any project.”

“Hold it. This afternoon at the Hanging Garden, you nearly killed yourself working on this bomb.”

“I was undecided then. I thought I’d let fate choose for me.”

“Well, that was a glorious pose, you and the cordite. This still doesn’t make any sense to me. If the Japs had the bomb, you don’t think they’d drop it on us?”

“But they don’t. We do, and we have to make the
ethical choice. Joe, I didn’t leave Amarillo to become a physicist to atomize a hundred thousand human beings. When Oppy came to Columbia and recruited me, it was to make a bomb so Hitler wouldn’t use his. That’s all I signed up for; that’s all anyone signed up for.”

“Except the Army, Navy and Marines.”

“The ethical choice—”

“Is a hell of a luxury. It’s not one that enlisted men have.”

“Well, as a civilian—”

“You’re a civilian because Oppy got you a draft deferment so you could come here and build a bomb. I’m your friend and I’m happy for you. So build the bomb and end the war. Boy, Captain Augustino would love this conversation. Augustino would haul you off the Hill in a car trunk.”

“I’m prepared to suffer for my decision.”

“Suffer for your decision? Harvey, there are men dying on shitty piles of sand all over the Pacific. There are men stuffed in the holds of ships heading to Japan for the invasion. I think
they’re
going to suffer for your decision. Who else have you told?”

“Just me,” said Anna.

“You helped Harvey come to his decision?”

“I hope so.”

“Well, there ought to be room in Augustino’s car trunk for both of you. Good luck,” Joe said, and heaved himself out of the water. Quickly, he picked up his uniform, belt and shoes. This wasn’t the idyllic night in the hot springs he’d had in mind, not at all.

Harvey stood as tall and defiant in the water as he could get. “Are you going to report us?”

“No, but I’ll let you geniuses find your own way down.”

“Stay,” Harvey begged.

“Yes, tell us more fascinating Indian experiences,” Anna said. “Lift more cars. Play more waltzes.”

On the road to the Hill, deer dashed in front of Joe’s headlights. They were mule deer, five or six of them. He braked and skidded right to the edge before he stopped. His lights picked out the scribbling flight of moths, the dart of a nightjar, and then faded over the long drop to the canyon floor.

The world was full of victims, all too eager to take you with them.

11

Light lay in the blue shutters and between the threshold and the door. The house had two rooms, a kitchen with a wood-burning stove and a larger room for everything else. The adobe walls were whitewashed with kaolin. There were a cot, maple bureau, enamel-topped table and chairs, dusty pails, an open carton of pots and a corner fireplace that was black and empty. On the walls were a crucifix, the Virgin, Saints Michael and Christopher (wading through water, the Christ child on his shoulders), and photos of Rudy in his confirmation suit, dressed in feathers and bells for a dance, in his uniform and garrison cap.

Joe had heard that Rudy was dead. The B-17s at Clark Field had been loaded with fuel and lined up in rows when the Japs came over. Each bomber blew up the next one, and the last B-17, trying to take off, rolled over a gun battery before exploding. No bodies were found.

He sat on the hard bed and smoked, using a pail as an ashtray. He was aware that he didn’t look up, and
knew it was out of fear that Dolores would come in from the kitchen with a dishcloth in her hand. Or that Rudy would be standing at the foot of the bed, whining, wanting to box. It was the first time he had been in the house in years, and it was just as bad as he’d thought it would be. Smaller. There was nothing so claustrophobic as memory.

Rudy could still be alive. Hiding out in the jungle. In a prison camp. In Japan.

Of course, Fuchs was right. If the bomb worked, all the Rudy Peñas in the world wouldn’t measure up to a single Oppy, Harvey or Fuchs.

It was goddamn Harvey who’d sent Joe to the house. Little Harvey and his need for approval. Why tell a sergeant that you’re leaving the war? Joe hadn’t gone back to the Hill. He’d picked up a couple of bottles at a bar and gone out target shooting, looking for unlucky coyotes. He’d figured he’d wake up in a motel in Esperanza, the Spanish town across the river from Santiago. Instead, he woke up in Santiago, in this house.

At least he’d made up his mind: he was going to tell Augustino. The captain wanted something on Anna Weiss, and Joe would give it to him.

The house groaned, or was it the sound of himself? The kiva he’d fallen into had nothing on this. He dug in his pocket for another cigarette.

The door swung open. Dull, blinding sun filled the room, and in the doorway stood a phantom.

“Rudy?”

“Who?” Joe shielded his eyes.

“Mrs. Quist. Joe? That’s you?” The wraith stepped in and became a tiny lady in a white Lana Turner suit, turban and sunglasses. “You’re the last person I thought I’d see here.”

“You and me both.” He could see how wrinkled his khakis were, the butts on the floor.

“Pots, Joe. This is always my first stop.”

“I’ll get out of your way.” He heaved himself off the bed. His shoes were still on. As soon as he finished opening the carton of pots on the table for Mrs. Quist, he stumbled outside to the pump. Her Hudson was parked alongside the jeep.

Morning had come and gone. Around Santiago rose thin columns of black smoke because the noon stillness was a good time for firing pots. In the backyard across the road, Sophie Reyes tended a fire of pine, cedar and bits of two-by-fours piled around a milk carrier filled with pots. She picked up a piece of wood that seemed to be nothing but flame and put it where the fire seemed sparse. When an ember rolled free, she swept it back into the fire with a brush of yucca stalks. She held a soot-blackened tin sheet to block any unwanted breeze. Everything she did the same as Dolores. Dolores and Sophie had been sisters, and Sophie had the same helmet of black-and-gray hair, wore the same traditional one-shoulder dress, smudged apron, Montgomery Ward shoes.

Ben Reyes came out a screen door into the yard. His braids hung around a puckered, leathery face. He wore no shirt, only a vest, kilt, pants and moccasins. Usually
his contribution to Sophie’s work was to sit in a chair and sort feathers. Today he was head to head with another doddering ancient with a walking stick.

Joe pumped water into his hands, rinsed his mouth, combed his hair with his fingers. With the sun directly overhead, the one-story adobe houses appeared waisthigh. The ladders leaning against the roof lines were bleached, the wood twisted; the ladders looked balanced on their own shadows. The pueblo was a maze of dirt road and alleys, outside ovens, corrals and ramadas, homes distinguished one from another by a blue frame on these windows, a green frame on those. The Peña and Reyes houses were at the edge of the pueblo, but an alley ran directly to the plaza and he could see the cottonwood with its tire swings. He watched two boys run across the plaza, climb onto a roof, gather their courage in a breath and jump to a lower roof. He remembered making the same heady leap, and the stirring of husks and chili dust when he landed.

Santiago. Never mind that he’d spent his adult life in New York and toured the entire country, East Coast, West Coast, Mexico and France. Before the war he’d gone to Paris with Big Chief Russell Moore, a trombone player, a 410-pound Pima from Komatke, Arizona. In the Palais de Sport, Joe knocked the French heavyweight champion three times through the ropes and still lost the decision because the French kept throwing their man back in like an undersized fish. Big Chief had his trombone at the Palais, and every time the crowd threw their fighter back, he played a slow, rising slide. That
night Joe and Big Chief drank absinthe from brandy snifters in a cafe—unworried about war because the French had a bigger army than the Germans.

That was six years ago. Now he’d rolled like a stone back to where he’d started. The funny thing was that the war had freed most of the men in Santiago, drafting them out of their bean fields, and sent back the one man who’d gotten away. The mills of the gods were slow and all fucked up.

Jazz was liberation. Joe had always been a counterpuncher, and that’s what bebop was all about: hooking off the jab. Charlie Parker claimed to be part Cherokee or Cree. Any dressing room of black musicians was full of would-be Indians. Those were Joe’s Indians.

As Ben and his friend approached, he sat up to preserve a modicum of respect. Ben’s companion was in dirty coveralls, braids and the white cotton blanket of a Taos elder, but he wasn’t old, just blind, his eyes sunken and shut. Trachoma, Joe thought. Until sulfa, trachoma had been common in the pueblos. No one caught it now except the sort of traditionalist who wouldn’t deign to use Anglo medicine.

“Spring’s coming, Uncle,” Joe said.

“Spring’s coming very nicely now.” Ben scowled and did an introduction. His friend’s name was Roberto.

The three men spoke Tewa. It was the language of a number of the Rio Grande pueblos and was expressive in describing the beauty of the clouds, rain, water, corn. Tewa was also the language of a people who had wandered through the wilderness arguing. No pueblo existed
for long without splitting into two parts that despised or at least suspected each other. Hence, Tewa was a tongue that was rich in phrases and intonations of derision and scorn.

“Still cold in Taos?”

“A little cooler.” Roberto’s voice was quizzical, as if he were picking up a new object with it. “You come up to Taos much?”

Taos thought it was the top of the world, maybe one step below the Hopi, but very close to heaven. It occurred to Joe that what he needed at the start of the day was not a religious fanatic, but a coffee or a cold beer.

“Haven’t seen you for a long time, Uncle.”

“Saw you in December. You were hunting.”

“Ben said the other hunter was hunting you,” Roberto said.

Joe remembered the escapade with Augustino and the two trappers connected by a rope who had stumbled out of the woods and into the light of the dawn. Ben and a blind man.

“Thanks, Uncle, I didn’t know who you were. You came through at just the right time.”

“Thank Roberto, not me. Wasn’t my idea.”

“He was hunting you?” Roberto asked. “He was crazy?”

“He was an officer. Smoke?” Joe felt for a pack, but his pocket was still empty.

“Have one of mine.” Roberto took a thick handrolled cigarette and stuck it into empty space.

“Thanks.” Joe reached. The things always tasted like dung, he thought. Roberto put one in his own mouth and Joe lit it, then his own. “That’s some smoke.” Joe coughed.

“From Taos.”

Roberto held on to the side of the jeep. He had a long Spanish nose. His hands looked surprisingly strong, the nails caked yellow. So that was how he got by: mixing adobe by hand, Joe figured. It was something a fanatical blind man could do. Roberto wouldn’t be able to make much adobe that way, but what he made would be fine stuff.

BOOK: Stallion Gate
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