Stallion Gate (13 page)

“Mormon?” Roberto asked. “We have a lot of Mormons here.”

“Lutheran,” Fuchs said.

“That’s interesting. Don’t you think that’s interesting, Roberto?” Joe inquired.

“If he’s a missionary, that’s worse,” Roberto said.

“That’s right,” Joe conceded.

“I am a scientist,” Fuchs pleaded. “I don’t believe in God.”

“You’ll have to admit there is some contradiction in what you say from one moment to the next,” Joe told Fuchs. “It’s too bad that you don’t believe in God, because there is another way out, aside from being shot. You could become a member.”

“A member?” Fuchs asked.

“That’s how a lot of priests join,” Joe said. “If they happen to stumble on a ceremony, they have to join. That way they never reveal the secrets.”

“Like the Communist Party,” Anna said.

“The Party cannot be compared to Indian medicine men howling on a cliff,” Fuchs answered.

“Where does the Party howl?” Joe asked.

“It is not relevant.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

“Why spy on Indians?” Anna asked.

“Why are you siding with these ignorants? Why are you with the Indians? Why are you all against me?” Fuchs demanded. Spittle jumped toward Roberto. “You stupid, little blind man, you wouldn’t dare pull that trigger.”

For some time Joe had assumed that Roberto wouldn’t pull the trigger, so he was caught flat on his seat when Roberto’s finger squeezed the shotgun trigger shut. The
spurred hammer rose and snapped, sending a metallic click the length of the empty barrel and into Fuchs. The physicist’s face went green and puttyish, and his next breath came as a moan.

“Fascinating,” Anna said.

Fuchs moaned more deeply, like a cello. Roberto broke the shotgun open. The first barrel was empty, but in the second barrel was the brass eye of an unfired shell. Roberto pulled the shell out, fumbled for Fuchs’ shirt and dropped it inside it.

“Roberto.” Joe shook his head.

“This will make him more religious or more polite, I think,” Roberto said.

Joe considered throwing the shotgun down off the shelf, but a new one would cost its owner twelve or thirteen dollars from Ward’s.

“Got any more shells?” he asked Roberto.

“No.”

“They coming back for you?”

“Sure.” Roberto was cheerful, as if he’d hosted a social event. “You better be going before they get here.”

“Yeah.”

“It was good meeting you,” Roberto told Anna. “I’ll see you and Joe again.”

“Anything seems possible.”

“Good.” Roberto pointed in Fuchs’ general direction. “But don’t bring him.”

Joe had to carry Fuchs fireman-style off the canyon wall. When they finally got to the floor, Fuchs ran off,
gagging, behind the pines, wrenching his belt open while he ran.

Anna watched him disappear. “This is another planet.”

“New Mexico.” Joe felt for cigarettes, then remembered he’d smoked the last on the shelf.

“If he’d pulled the other trigger, he would have killed Klaus.”

“If he’d wanted to kill Klaus, he would have done it before we got there.”

“I thought so, but then …” She smiled. “Was Roberto crazy or not? Were we humoring him or was he humoring us?”

“Roberto knows what he’s doing.” Joe took a deep breath and looked straight up at the far-off, converging tips of the ponderosas. Up in the sky a squirrel swayed on the highest tip. Maybe he was blind. Maybe the other squirrels were coming back.

“They say you are so violent, Joe. You don’t seem so.”

He liked the way she ran her words together; the accent was sinuous in her mouth, alive and warm under the cool surface. It was the first time she’d said his name. He liked the explosion of the
J
.

“I don’t shoot blind men.”

“Your aura of violence must attract some women, though.”

“Yeah, first I fuck them, then I scalp them.” He sighed. “Sometimes the other way around.”

She clapped her hands together and laughed. “Wild, wild, Joe!”

Around them, juniper boughs nodded under mistletoe. Fuchs, shirt stained and reeking, lagged far behind.

“Oppy studied under my father in Göttingen. In Germany,” Anna said. “He seemed to live in our house. We thought he would marry my older sister, Emma. My father was very worried because everyone believed Oppy would leave physics for poetry. He was very German in Germany, except when he talked about New Mexico.”

“About New Mexico in Germany?” Joe was surprised.

“With my father he discussed physics. With Emma he discussed poetry, philosophy, psychology. With me he talked about wild Indians. I think I had the best bargain.”

“Oppy loves to talk.”

“Roberto is a medicine man?”

“A priest.”

“You believe in Indian medicine?”

“Crazy stuff like that? No, I believe Christ died and rose again in three days and ascended like a B-19. But Indian stuff is all around here. Like Roberto today, like the kiva I told you about.”

“I used to believe that if I ate a shrimp, I was an unclean girl and a shame to God’s eyes. Once I had a lobster and was positive that I would die in the night.”

He couldn’t imagine Anna scared. He had been scared with Roberto; she wasn’t.

“What do you suppose Oppy believes in?” she asked.

“Well, he’s not a very orthodox Jew. He sort of gets around the whole religious issue by going Hindu. What he really believes in, I think, is science. He thinks science can save the world. If every scientist were as good a man as Oppy, I might agree.”

“How good is that?”

“The best.”

They had reached the head of the ski slope that looked over Los Alamos. Dark spruce bordered a steep meadow of aspen that ran down the side of the mountain like a shaft of light.

“Enough Indians, enough guides.” Fuchs caught up. “What I want to know, Sergeant, is what you’re going to do about the madman who tried to kill me.”

“Who threatened you, you mean.”

“Tried to kill me while you did nothing.” Fuchs rose to his toes.

“There’s no reason to stir things up with the pueblo. Why don’t we just forget about it?”

“Forget about it? I want him reported. You know who he was; you said his name. And he knew you.”

“If you report him—” Joe began.

“No. You report him, Sergeant,” Fuchs said. “You.”

Joe had decided not to report Anna Weiss and to avoid Augustino for as long as he could. Now he had to see Augustino about a medicine man?

“Would you?” Anna Weiss asked.

“If Dr. Fuchs insists, I have to report the incident.”

“And put your friend in jail?”

“That’s not up to me.” Joe felt he was backing into a corner. Roberto wasn’t a friend; he didn’t know him until two days ago.

“Who is it up to?” she asked.

“The officer in charge of security.”

“Captain Augustino?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Ah.” Fuchs reset his glasses. “After all your talk, we see what kind of Indian you really are.”

“It’s Army business as soon as I see Augustino,” Joe tried to explain to her.

“I told you.” Fuchs turned to Anna. “I warned you he was Captain Augustino’s man. Good, Sergeant, you do as you’re told.” Fuchs backed away and then started downhill, stumbling through the dry grass.

Anna Weiss squinted as if she were trying to see something in the distance. Gray eyes with black edges, as if charred. “The world is full of people who take orders.”

“It’s an Army post. It’s as simple as that.”

“You’re right. I was foolish to think anything else.”

“I’m just a sergeant.”

“Captain Augustino’s man. And Mrs. Augustino’s man. Many things, but not very Indian.” She looked up at Joe. “The answer to your question is, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ ”

She went after Fuchs. Watching her descend, a white figure swinging from aspen to aspen, Joe wanted to call,
as if words could reach out and stop her. But he had no words; on his mountaintop, he was as dumb as a yearning brute.

Augustino wasn’t at headquarters or the Tech Area. In the commissary, Joe heard the captain had been seen driving on Bathtub Row.

Bathtub Row had nothing but long afternoon shadows. No maids hanging clothes or walking babies. There were no sounds except for jays and the drifting shouts of a softball game on the ball field. Walking past Fermi’s cottage and Jaworski’s stone house, Joe remembered that
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
was the early movie. Everyone with kids, even Kitty Oppenheimer, was at
Snow White
.

At the end of Bathtub Row a garden of poplars and spruces lent privacy to the Oppenheimer cottage. Augustino was coming out the kitchen door, and there was something about the way he moved that made Joe stop and watch. Augustino carried a small reel of white wire finer than the electrical wire used on the Hill. He let himself out the back garden gate and slipped into the trees.

A scooter still sat in the flower bed. The scooter looked rusted to the spot, and the flowers lay flat and dead. Joe knocked softly at the door. It was unlocked. The living room’s casement windows afforded sunlight that reflected off a hardwood floor and whitewashed stone walls. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan, an easy chair with a laurel pattern, stand-up ashtrays,
serapes on the sofa, bookcases, Santiago pottery on the fireplace mantel. Nothing apparently out of the ordinary.

Kitty didn’t like maids reordering the bedroom. A four-poster stood over ashtrays, open books, loose butts, water glasses. There was a Picasso lithograph on the wall, a disheveled bookcase. No white wires along the baseboard.

The study had a Spanish fireplace in the corner, a desk of spreading papers, two ashtrays of cigarette butts and a third ashtray with two pipes, a meerschaum and a briar. Pictures of Krishna and a sailboat hung on the walls.

The nursery had been a sun porch and still had the yellow light of the porch. A crib at one end and a bed at the other, teddy bears on a throw rug, a case of children’s books with a top row of German novels. Kitty used a German nurse.

He returned to the living room and moved around the periphery, lifting chairs, tables, sofa. As he pulled out the bookcase, he saw the white wire that emerged from the border of the floor, rose almost invisibly up the whitewashed wall and led into the back of the case. He searched through the records on the bottom shelf: Bach, Beethoven, Fauré. He spilled out the books above: Austen, Unamuno,
Jeune Fille Violaine, Thermodynamique, Upanishads, Interpretation of Dreams
. Behind Freud was the microphone, a wire mesh button no larger than a dime. He snapped it off.

Tracking the wire to the furnace room in the basement,
he found a new electrical connection off the junction box and a radio hidden behind a bin of soft New Mexican coal. He took the radio and neatened up the books. By the time he left there was no sign of his visit or the captain’s, nothing but resonance, a fading disturbance like two trails in a cloud chamber.

Utah sky was different. Scrubbed clean. Saline. Instead of vultures, gulls.

Fort Douglas, Salt Lake City, was different from Los Alamos because Douglas was so quiet. No booms from a mesa, no Indians, no women. Just the olive-drab lethargy of the rearmost echelon post in the United States Army.

The motor pool was a Quonset hut with open wings of galvanized steel over shadows and the glow of welders. Joe and Ray Stingo waited at the pumps. A noon sun lifted the reek of gasoline off the macadam. Ray’s pompadour, usually sculptured with Wildroot, hung like crepe.

“Chief, you should’ve fought.”

“They asked for you and me.”

“Why?”

Joe walked to the other side of the gas pumps rather than argue. He and Ray had flown in from Santa Fe the night before, and all the way Ray had asked the same question.

“The Texas kid killed Shapiro,” Ray said.

“That’s what I heard.”

Ray stalked Joe around an oil can. “Captain Augustino must’ve wanted you to fight.”

“The captain never said anything to me about it.” Joe hadn’t spoken to Augustino since Oppy’s cocktail party the week before. “Look, while Oppy’s still in Washington I’m available for this.”

“But what about me?”

“You’ll be okay.”

A convoy rolled toward the pumps. Army sedan, truck, ambulance and tail sedan had started out the day before in Hanford, Washington, and had come five hundred and fifty miles. Fort Douglas was where the teams switched.

“Too late,” Ray moaned.

The schedule was strict. As soon as the lead sedan was at the first pump, four CIC lieutenants jumped out and a fresh quartet took their place. Mechanics swung wearily out of the repair truck, a slope-fendered Dodge 6×6. The two men Joe and Ray were replacing pulled the ambulance hand brake together and jumped out. Joe and Ray climbed in, Joe behind the wheel. The rear of the ambulance was green Army. No white cross, no cots, no stretchers, no medicine. Only two fold-down seats and, farther back and taking up most of the space, an open steel square, four feet to a side, bolted to the floor and braced to the walls. Restraining straps of 1,000-pound-test nylon reached inward from the eight corners of the square and hooked at the center onto a suspended
50-pound spun-steel canister. The canister was lined with graphite and lead, and carried, inside a hollow of moderating water, a ten-gram lead-coated, stainless steel capsule of jellylike plutonium nitrate that drivers called the slug.

The two sergeants from Hanford had bright eyes and stubble and the air of men returned from the dead.

“Want some bennies?” One came over to Ray’s window and offered a handful of white pills. Ray took three and swallowed them. “You better take this, too.” He handed in the tommy gun that the co-driver was supposed to carry.

“Secure the convoy!” the lieutenants shouted at one another. They were boys right out of college and right into intelligence, and would never see war. As they ran around with .45s and submachine guns they reminded Joe of the sort of kids who brought baseball gloves to big-league games. New mechanics clambered into the truck. Its back was stuffed with ambulance, car and truck spare parts in case there was a breakdown on the way. The orders were—as always, from Groves—no stopping.