Stallion Gate (17 page)

“I’ve never made love with a giant before.”

He turned her on her back and drove deeper. Perspiration shone between her breasts. As she wrapped her legs around him the bed groaned. She pulled him in with her hands until he was lifting her high with each stroke.

Her shoes and fedora were by the door, where she’d dropped them as soon as she came in. Her jumpsuit was sprawled on the floor. His uniform lay over a chair.

Outside, the afternoon dimmed. Inside, a pearly grayness crept along the walls. The room was decorated with photographs of the Alhambra. The pictures trembled as he held her against a wall so that her toes barely touched the floor. The whole wall trembled, like a vertical sheet.

She was weightless and strong. She seemed to ride him, to be on all sides of him, to swallow him and be swallowed at the same time.

When they moved away, the wall bore the damp imprint of her back and his hands.

The radio in the room, the Capehart console, looked like an old trombone player napping in a chair.

The walls could be paper, ready to burn, tear or fold back and drop him into space.

“You’re crazy to do this,” he said.

“Oh, yes, I’ve been certified.”

“Certified?”

“Officially,” she said and smiled.

It was the dual moment of knowledge. The learning of legs, hands, skin, sweat, when the body is the whole terrain and the obsessive scope of attention. Every word echoes on and on and becomes the color of action. Breath synchronizes and the sheets twist.

They sat cross-legged on the bed, the ashtray and haze of smoke between them. Although the heat of the day had faded, their sweat shone.

“I was in love,” she said. She lit a cigarette for him and put it between his lips. “I loved a French boy. He
was very poetic. I loved a German boy. He was very depressed. It was fun to be in love. What I liked was the element of irrationality. This isn’t love at all; this is pure irrationality.”

He inhaled, filled his lungs and let the smoke escape so that his breath filled the room. Of one thing he was certain. “You’ve never been in love before,” he said.

She watched as if from a cat’s distance. Until her eyes closed and she arched. With her hair back, her forehead seemed higher, the lofty brow of genius, so the black hair was the giveaway, swaying, a jet flag whipping the dark above him. Until he pulled her head down and opened her mouth with his, and she gathered his hair in her fingers and would not let the kiss go.

She asked, “You’ve been in love?”

“It was a flight to the moon, a night in June. Icy fingers up and down my spine, that same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine.”

She rested the tip of her finger between his eyes. “Tonight is the last night in June.”

“I knew one of them was right.”

In total dark she lay on him, with him in her, the last drawn-out confusion of lovemaking. So deeply connected, they were halves of each other. So still there was no sound except the sea-rush of highway traffic and the slowing, purposeful step of their hearts.

* * *

The car was a Plymouth two-door she had borrowed from Teller at the pueblo. He found jazz on the radio. Stars lit the road. Wind whipped the hair around her face.

“I loved King Kong,” she said. “I would have traded places with that girl. King Kong was very popular in Germany. And you can play the piano too.”

“Great.”

“And a boxer. I asked all about you.”

“Was a boxer.”

“You were good?”

“Not bad. I got interested in other things.”

“Music?”

“I love the piano. I love the weight, the shape. There’s something about a concert grand, playing a high E in an empty house.”

“And women? Is it the same, the high E in an empty house?”

“Well, a little. How did you get involved in the Hill?”

She thought for a moment, but he could already hear her voice. Most important for him was that a woman have her own voice, and he’d never heard anyone like her.

“I could always see numbers. It’s like having your own world, or a world you only share with a few others. Prime numbers. Positive numbers and negative numbers in patterns like physics. To amuse myself I did a paper on reaction multiplication when I was sixteen. I was in a sanatorium.”

“Why?”

“Hysteria. Anemia. Pregnancy. It depended on which doctor you talked to. I was lucky to be in the sanatorium at all because they weren’t supposed to take Jews, but my father, although he had lost his professorship at the university, was so respected that I was allowed in. The sanatorium had once been a monastery with gardens and orchards, even lemon trees, that ran in terraces to the river, the Elbe. In one garden was a bower of honeysuckle that stirred with bees. I retreated there. I tried to think of things so small and insignificant that they would be almost pure mathematics, that they would have nothing to do with the larger, real world. I watched the bees move from flower to flower. This was just after the Meitner-Frisch article on fission—you remember that?”

“I think I was fighting in Chicago that day. I must have missed it.”

“Bees and neutrons are a little the same. The paper was only a few pages and it couldn’t be published because I was a Jew. Five years later in New York, Oppenheimer came by.”

“You were surprised?”

“It was so odd to see him because he used to have long brown curls. He had cropped his hair, like Joan of Arc, to go to war. Yes, like Joan of Arc! In his hand he had a copy of that paper I wrote as a girl. First, he asked if I wanted to see my numbers come to life, then he invited me to work on the project.”

“He’s a seducer.”

“Yes.” For a minute she looked into the canyon, and
to the mountains beyond, to distant lightning collecting at a peak. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you, about Harvey? You didn’t report your friend Roberto either, did you?”

“That doesn’t mean I agree with Roberto.”

“Or with Harvey and me.”

“Two more weeks to Trinity and then it will all be over. Maybe it will fail.” He could feel her disappointment. “I hate arguments. I’m a coward. Arguments are full of words, and each person is sure he’s the only one who knows what the words mean. Each word is a basket of eels, as far as I’m concerned. Everybody gets to grab just one eel and that’s his interpretation and he’ll fight to the death for it. Roberto’s from Taos, which he thinks gives him the right to say up is down. Harvey’s from Texas, which makes it strange he and I agree on a goddamn thing. As for you and me?”

“Yes?”

“Which is why I love music. You hit a C and it’s a C and that’s all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like being intelligent. Like understanding. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at the piano and picks out the undeniable truth.”

“You’re going to hear about me,” she said slowly. “That I’m insane and a tramp. I don’t care what people say, but I want you to know that only one is true.”

“Which one?”

“Which one is important to you?”

He hesitated, and during that moment they neared the first checkpoint. Since he always kept the MPs supplied
with cigarettes and ration coupons, he’d expected to be waved through as usual. But tonight the checkpoint was a Western scene, a tourist painting: the amber light of a shed reaching out to men on horseback, the riders slouched and weary, horses steaming in the night air. Also, jeeps with their headlights on blocked the road on each side of the checkpoint shed. He stopped and left the Plymouth’s lights on. “Stay here,” he told her as he got out. “If anyone asks, we were driving around, you don’t know where.”

The horses were lathered bright in the headlights. Among the riders was Sergeant Shapiro. Corporal Gruber had a sling around one arm.

Shapiro laughed. “Fell off his horse, Chief. Broke his fucking arm.”

As Joe pushed into the shed, Captain Augustino looked up from the map he was sharing with Billy and Al. The captain was sleek in an Eisenhower jacket. The two cowboys were crusty from a day’s riding. Al’s little eyes and mouth were drawn tight and there was a white stubble on his jawline. Billy’s hair hung lank, dirty and yellow.

“Speak of the devil.” Augustino looked delighted, as if some deserved amusement had come his way at the end of a weary day. “Come in, come in, Sergeant Peña. You know our friends Al and Billy from the Indian Service. Billy’s the one you tossed like a sack of manure at the dance.”

The shed was small for four men and a potbellied stove. There was a hanging bulb. On the walls were a
clock, map, telephone, a yellowed silhouette guide to German planes, clipboards with old orders of the day, license lists, sign-in and sign-out sheets. Joe suspected that the only names signed out and not back in were his and Anna’s.

Augustino paused to let the general discomfort grow. “You missed the excitement, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Absolutely, Sergeant. Why, we had a regular posse out, a dragnet looking for an Indian friend of yours. You know, your friend who assaulted one of our guests with a shotgun. The same friend whose place you took at the dance. Weren’t you supposed to be driving the Director?”

“He wanted to know the identities of the dancers, sir, so I joined the dance.”

“Just like that. Did you determine any identities?”

“No, sir. They didn’t take their masks or paint off around me.”

Al snorted. “You didn’t know the dancer whose place you took was about to be arrested?”

“How would I know that?”

“Excellent question, Sergeant,” Augustino said. “That’s just so excellent it’s what we’ve been asking all day. These gentlemen suspect some kind of informer, but it’s my belief that they’re dumb and you’re smart. Who’s right, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t know that either, sir.”

“Well, I have an intimate and high regard for you, Sergeant, I do.” He smoothed the map with his hands.
“Now, we have spent a vigorous day on every dirt road and arroyo around Santiago Pueblo. We did find some rattlesnakes. I think it was Corporal Gruber who had a nasty spill. Your friend, however, seems to have vanished.”

“He must be pretty fast, sir.”

“And blind at that, Sergeant. Both shocking and remarkable. And how was your day, Sergeant? Was it a full one?”

“Yes, sir, I was trying to carry out the Director’s request. Unfortunately, I was not successful.”

“Wherever he was, that’s where we’ll find his blind friend,” Billy told Augustino, “and we won’t have to scramble into every pisshole Indian ruin again.”

“Were you alone, Sergeant?” Augustino looked out at the Plymouth. “Alone on this quest?” The captain took the sign-out sheet off its hook. “Don’t answer. Don’t do anything until I’m back.”

Then he was out the door and striding eagerly to the Plymouth’s headlights. Joe could make out Anna’s silhouette inside the car.

“Tossed me like a sack of shit, huh?” Billy asked.

“It was the captain’s expression,” Joe murmured as he watched Augustino lean in the Plymouth’s window.

“Now, Billy acted like a genuine asshole today, interfering in a ceremonial, and I’d like to apologize.” Al had a wheezy, singsongy voice. “In exchange, I want you to tell me who tipped you we were going to pick up your blind pal. Someone did, because you didn’t figure that out on your own. Please, I’ve been kicking
Indian ass for twenty years, I know Indians. Turn around, please, when I’m talking to you.”

Al held his rust-spotted, short-barreled Colt, an old-fashioned model called the Shopkeeper’s Friend. Al was a small man—cowboys tended to get worn down like fence posts—but the gun made him a little larger, as if he were levitating. Billy leaned back.

“This is Indian country,” Al said. “The Indian Service is the only thing that keeps it running in any civilized manner. Abuse the Indian Service and you undermine the system that keeps you people alive.”

Joe looked out the window. He could see from his gestures that Augustino was asking Anna to step out of the car.

“At the very heart of the system is respect. Billy and I spend weeks surrounded by Indians to enforce the laws. Laws about sheep, about booze, about proper schooling. All that keeps us safe from all the drunken bucks is respect. Hell, otherwise they’d have to send the cavalry in with us every time, wouldn’t they? Look at me.”

Al’s eyes were screwed up with the earnestness of communication. His hat had moved back, showing hair stuck flat as feathers on the untanned upper half of his forehead.

“That’s why what you did today to Billy was so dangerous, because it undermined our professional respect. Even if it was nothing but Pueblos who saw. Thank God it was Pueblos, not Navajos or Apaches. So Billy apologizes.”

“I’pologize,” Billy said quickly, as one word.

“Now,” Al said, “you tell us who tipped you and you tell us where your blind friend is.”

Through the window, Joe saw Augustino stepping back as if Anna was getting out of the car.

“Son-of-a-bitch, you look at me!” Al raised the gun to Joe’s waist. “Listen, you’re just one more buck to me, one more barroom hero. You bucks came back from the first war the same way and I trimmed you down fast. You don’t want to talk, then watch while I blow your balls off. Because you’re a fucking Indian and I’m the Indian Service and you’re not acting right.”

Al’s hand was steady, broad, callused at the web from handling rope. He moved the plowshare hammer back.

“No,” Joe said. “No, this is a United States Army post. I’m a staff sergeant carrying out the orders of the director of an Army project. You’re a shitkicker and a sheepfucker and you won’t do anything.”

Al shook his head, lowered the Colt and eased the hammer forward. The door opened behind Joe, and Augustino returned alone. Al laughed. “You were right,” he told Augustino, “it’s going to take a while after this war to get things back to normal.”

Augustino looked at the gun. “Out,” he told Al.

“I was just—”

“Out, both of you.”

While the cowboys slipped past Joe and through the door, Augustino sat on the map. He took a cigarette from a case, lit up and sighed.

“Fun and games, fun and games, Sergeant. Not to
be taken seriously. A pair of drifters like that, if they weren’t employed by the government they’d be in a soup line. At least they can stay on a horse, which is more than we can say for the Military Police. Sometimes I think we have the Dead End Kids in uniform.” His gaze shifted to the door and the car waiting outside. “She says she asked you to drive her around. She says you were a courteous chauffeur all day and all night. Dr. Oppenheimer says he sent you back to check on the dancers. Everyone’s covering for you, Sergeant.”