Stallion Gate (4 page)

No more than an hour before. This was the best part of hunting: the parsing of time. He had probably hunted in this same spit of spruce and pines twenty years ago with his father.

When solid forms were so faint, it was easy to see into memory. It was a quality of the hour, neither night nor day, that lent every second its weight. Eyes seemed to grow huge and adept even as they were fooled by the nod of a branch. An owl seesawed through the trees. Joe didn’t care if deer or light ever came. If someone was going to shoot him through the head, this was as good a time as any, but the captain was watching with the same concentration. Of course, mice, shrews and rats ran back and forth all night, and hunters saw their snow tracks only in the morning. At daybreak a man could only see well enough to shoot something his own size. Shadows clung, half-born. When what was real and what was shadow was uncertain, a man could meet his opposite, Joe thought. Like this white racist officer from Brownsville, Texas. He and Joe could huddle under the same spruce bough.

“Sergeant, tell me,” the captain whispered, “have you ever thought of this as the Century of the Jew?”

“No.”

“Marx was a Jew by blood, you know. The worldwide
Communist movement started with Marx. The Russian Revolution was largely led by Jews, such as Trotsky. Every country on earth, even China, is fighting for its soul against Marx.”

“Even China?”

“History unfolds like a wonderful and terrible adventure. There are great rhythms and cycles. Each century is different.”

“What was the last century?”

“That was the Century of the White Man.”

Joe couldn’t figure what this had to do with Mrs. Augustino. “Sure wasn’t the Century of the Red Man.”

“No. But now we’re all in the same boat, Sergeant. First Marx overthrows traditional authority and religion; then another Jew destroys every absolute in the laws of science.”

“Really?”

“Science was built on absolute laws until Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum physics. Marx and Einstein. Now there’s nothing an intelligent man can believe in, either in religion or in science. The very word ‘atom’ in Greek means that which is indivisible, did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“Which does not mean”—Captain Augustino stirred beside Joe—“that they haven’t suffered. When I hear of the suffering of the Jews under Hitler, I wish I were a Jew myself. You see, in the Century of the Jew they’ve taken our hearts, when they already had our minds. You see how it’s coming together, all of it, right here.”

“Here?”

“I’m talking, Sergeant, of the Third Great Jew. Sergeant, what would you say if I told you that J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most brilliant man you or I or anyone here has ever met?”

“Could be, sir.”

“Sergeant, what would you say if I told you that Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union, intent on developing an atomic weapon here only so that he can deliver the finished plans to his Soviet friends?”

Joe didn’t know what to say. They had entered a depth of insanity that he was unprepared for.

“You’d say I was mad, wouldn’t you, Sergeant?”

“Have you”—Joe picked his words carefully—“passed your opinion on to General Groves, sir?”

“As did the FBI. But the general is in Oppenheimer’s thrall. Everyone is. Nobel laureates are his lapdogs and the United States Army has been tied up and delivered as a gift to him. I have felt the allure myself.”

“Have you, sir?”

“The most fascinating conversations in my life have been those with Oppenheimer on history. He read
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
on a single train trip from New York to Los Angeles, and
Das Kapital
on the way back. This is a physicist, I remind you.”

“True,” Joe said. Oppy was always trying to launch turgid conversations.

“Have you ever noticed something hypnotic about him, Sergeant? The way people will go into his office saying one thing and come out saying the opposite? The
way everyone imitates him? The way he’s made his own empire here? Here at this focal point of history?”

“You’re following orders from the FBI or someone in Washington, sir?”

“I don’t need orders from anyone. Everyone in intelligence already sees the obvious connections. It’s—”

“Shh!” Joe saw three shapes emerging silently out of the opposite woods and stopping at the trees’ edge. Three large blurs watching and listening. Could be deer, elk or horses. Joe crouched lower. The Winchester had an open sight on a short barrel, one round in the breech and five in the magazine. He wondered how good Captain Augustino was with the Marlin.

The first breath of day was a leaden gray light. Stars dulled and disappeared while the three blurs came into focus. Elk or deer from their utter quiet, Joe felt. They were waiting to make sure the meadow slope was safe, just as he was waiting to be certain of his shot. Blue light poured into the Valle, lifting the finest granules of snow. Gradually he saw them: two bull elk and a pregnant elk cow. Strange a cow would be with bulls at this time of year, he thought. He aimed at the bull on his side, assuming the captain would take the other. The bucks were beautiful, dark heads and big antlers ahead of their soft tan bodies. A heart shot, he decided. His own heart stood still, waiting, watching the lightening slope of meadow snow growing against the angle of pines. The three elk stood on shadows.

When Augustino shot, the elk cow dropped in a heap.
The bucks bolted into the woods and crashed through the trees.

“You didn’t fire,” Augustino said.

“You shot the cow.”

“I gave you the bucks.”

Joe stood up. “You don’t shoot a cow that’s carrying. She was carrying, anyone could see that. You said you were a hunter.”

“Sergeant, you missed your—”

“You don’t shoot a cow that’s carrying. I thought that at least you were a hunter. I listened to this garbage of yours about Jews, this fucking drivel, because you’re an officer. But you don’t shoot a cow that’s carrying. You’re fucking crazy, Augustino, you know that? Oppy’s worth ten of you or me. That shit about Marx. I lived in New York. I marched for the Spanish Civil War vets. I had two coeds screwing me for a solid month to teach me about Marx while you were beating off in the sheets of Brownsville.”

“I’m warning—”

“Don’t warn me!” Joe ripped away the bough over Augustino’s head and then swung the Winchester against the trunk. The rifle cracked in half. Barrel and breech flew away while the stock stayed in his hand. He threw it aside. “Don’t warn me.”

“Go on,” Captain Augustino said, his tone changed. He hadn’t budged when the rifle had sliced over his head, though the color went from his face, making the half-moons under his eyes even darker.

Joe started across the snow for the elk cow. The top
of her neck was blown off and her legs sprawled in every direction, but her eyes were still wet and alive. The pregnant belly rose distended and hard above the rest of her.

“Let me tell you,” Joe yelled. “Your wife says you have a prick the size of a wet inchworm. It’s got to be twice the size of your brains.”

He walked faster in the snow, unbuckling his coat away from the .45 that rode inside his belt. He felt Augustino raising the rifle behind him. Heart shot? Head shot? With the .45 free he took the last ten steps on the run. When Augustino shot, he was already diving.

The cow kicked as the second bullet hit. He landed on the other side and rolled back against the elk. Captain Augustino stood, disdaining cover, and levered another round into the breech. Joe rested the .45 on the cow and put the captain in the square notch of the gun’s sights, for all the good it would do, considering the accuracy of an automatic. He squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked and a branch exploded five feet above Augustino’s head. “Shit!” He squeezed off another. Bark blew off a tree next to the captain.

Augustino slipped behind branches. All Joe could see of him was the vapor of his breath and the tip of the rifle. His own breath came like the steam of an engine. The cow was too small. If Augustino started to stalk and come at him from a different angle, he was dead.

The rifle barrel leveled again, but aimed at where the bucks had vanished. Then Joe saw two men in blankets and snowshoes coming out of the pines, their faces and
hands blackened with paint, long hair unbraided and loose. Although the first was stooped with age, he led the second with a long cord tied to the wrist, as if the man behind were blind. Following, he shouldered a net stuffed with dead bluejays; the net looked like a brilliant blue wing. There was also an owl in the net, and a nighthawk, birds that could only be netted against a moon. The men must have heard the shots, probably saw them fired, but they crossed the meadow between the elk and the trees where Augustino hid, neither quickening nor stopping, slowly trudging down the snowy slope with the prizes of their own hunt. Though they seemed to be headed in the direction of Santiago, Joe didn’t recognize them. They moved like an apparition, or a short parade from another world. Then they reached a line of aspen at the bottom of the slope and were gone.

“Sergeant!” Augustino called out. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to kill you. I do want to kill you, but I have more important things to do.”

“The hell you do.”

“I have duties to perform.” Augustino stepped forward into the clearing, his rifle in his left hand, barrel up. “I can’t allow myself to be distracted, to enjoy mere personal vindication, to sink to your level.”

“It was your idea to come here.”

“Shoot an officer and it’s your life, Sergeant.” Augustino dropped the rifle as he approached. “We came for an elk and we shot one, that’s all that transpired. Nothing else really happened.”

“Because you missed.”

“But you’re not in a position to publicly accuse me of anything, not a sergeant fornicating with the wife of the officer he accuses. This is an experience to put behind us. A morning’s hunt is all.” He stopped twenty feet short of Joe.

“You don’t shoot a cow that’s carrying.” Joe aimed. Head shot? At this range, a .45 would take off the captain’s head from the brow up.

“We have to get back to the Hill to pick up the Director and General Groves.” Augustino looked at his watch. “Mrs. Augustino will be going to Sunday services.”

“If you want to get rid of me, Captain, why don’t you just post me to the Pacific or Europe?”

“No, you serve me better where you are.”

“Doing what? Driving? Opening doors? Screwing your wife?”

“The information, Sergeant.”

“Useless.” Joe got to his feet.

“Not at all, Sergeant. It makes you an informer.”

“There’s got to be something else.”

“Think of it this way. What we’re building here is a secret weapon, right? You’re my secret weapon. Your other choice is the stockade, if you want to go back there.”

“You’re a lunatic, Captain.”

“What can you do about it?”

Heart shot? At this range, a round would punch out the captain’s heart, aorta, half a lung. Joe let the gun hang straight down and fired. The elk’s legs jerked once,
like a spasm in a dream. It stretched its neck across his feet and its eye faded as it died.

“I’ll expect a report later on anything Oppenheimer says—conversations with Groves especially, anything political in particular.” Augustino hadn’t flinched. He took the deep, satisfied breath of a man turning for home. “The usual.”

The car was a blue Buick sedan with a V-8 engine and gray plush interior. In back were Brigadier General Leslie Groves and Oppy; in front, Klaus Fuchs, a field radio and, at the wheel, Joe. The inside of the windows beaded with condensation. Outside, all of New Mexico seemed to tip from Los Alamos, mesa turning to foothills of black piñons on white snow.

The general’s whole body looked tucked, badly, into his uniform. Groves was a tall man; his gray hair was vigorous and wavy, his mustache bristled and his eyes were bright as steel, but below the collar, starched khaki and overcoat bulged everywhere under the pressure of soft fat. He was fond of Los Alamos. His domain extended from the giant production plants in Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to the original labs in Chicago, but they were run by Union Carbide and Du Pont or the pain-in-the-ass Europeans in Chicago, whereas Los Alamos was his personal duchy, run by his inspired choice, Oppenheimer, and was the real heart and soul of the project, the greatest scientific
effort in the history of mankind. The Buick, the best car in the motor pool, was always set aside for him when he came, and he was always driven by Joe. Other brass and VIPs who had come from Washington with the general referred to Joe as “Groves’ Indian.” The story got around that even the President had asked Groves about his “Indian companion.”

Oppy wore an old Army greatcoat that could have been wrapped two times around him and a porkpie hat that emphasized the narrowness of his skull. His hands fidgeted because the general allowed no smoking in the car. Klaus Fuchs sat practically at attention in an overcoat, fedora and rimless glasses that seemed to flatten his eyes.

Groves hadn’t wanted anyone from the British mission—they thought Los Alamos was Oxford—but as Oppy said when he picked the general up, Fuchs wasn’t really British.

“I’m going to see the President tomorrow,” Groves said. “He’s going to ask me why we need a test. We will have barely enough uranium for a single bomb, and we hardly have any plutonium at the moment. ‘Why should we waste any of it on a test?’ he’ll ask.”

“There are two separate devices,” Oppy said slowly and patiently, not because Groves was stupid but because he was not naturally articulate and these were the simple words Oppy wanted passed to Roosevelt. “There is the uranium device, which has basically a gun-barrel design. We don’t expect to have enough refined uranium until July, but we’re confident the device will work.
Then there is the plutonium device, which has a complicated ‘implosion’ design. By July, we expect to have enough plutonium for two bombs, by August enough for two more, and by September plutonium for another two, but there is no certainty the design will work. It’s the plutonium device we have to test, and it’s the armory of plutonium devices that will end the war, not the single detonation of our uranium device. You can tell the President that choosing a test site is a sign of confidence.”