Underworld (61 page)

“Then what's the problem? It's not exactly criminal activity.”

“No but it's weapons work. It's what I wanted. I wanted this and more. But now I'm feeling unsure about it.”

“It's important work, Matthew. We need the best people to do this work.”

They were camped just yards from the track. He made a charcoal fire and they emptied cans of pork and beans into a pan. They put on sweaters and sat on a blanket.

She said, “What would you do if you left?”

“I'm not sure. Get a doctorate maybe. I know some people who work in think tanks. I'd want to talk to them. Sound them out.”

She gave him a sour look. The term made her unhappy—think tank—and he didn't blame her. Passive, mild, middle-aged, ivory-towerish. People rustling papers in redoubts of social strategy. Situation reports, policy alternatives, statistical surveys.

He got the flashlight and led her to a spot where she might pee. The moon was nearly full. He waited while she lowered her jeans and squatted, more or less in one motion, and she looked at him and smiled, a dirty sort of smirk, a dirty-face girl with mucky drawers—didn't we do this once before, in another life? He played the light around them and softly sang the names of bushes and shrubs to the sound of Janet piddling. She laughed and peed in spurts. They thought they heard a coyote and she struggled into her jeans laughing.

They set up the dome tent and got into their mummy-shaped camp bags, nicely lined with flannel, and they realized the coyote was Wolfman Jack on the transistor radio, a howling disc jockey vectored into the desert from some bandit station below the border.

Don't put no badmouth on me, baby, we gon rock tonight. Da Wolfman
sending Little Richard to climb in your face from out of the glory days of the marcel pompadour and the glass suit. Richard don't need no dry cleaner. He got his Windex wid him.

The sleeping bag had stretch straps that made it possible for you to roll over on your side, if that was your preference, and when Little Richard started bending notes in his primal falsetto, Matty thought he was in bed in the Bronx, a fifteen-year-old capable of trading his brother's old fielder's glove for three or four raunchy rock-and-roll singles, which he played when his mother was out.

Janet called him Matthew. This was her way of separating him from family history, the whole dense endeavor of Mattiness, the little brother and abandoned son and chessboard whiz and whatever else was in the homemade soup.

He'd told Janet the story, how Nick believed their father was taken out to the marshes and shot, and how this became the one plot, the only conspiracy that big brother could believe in. Nick could not afford to succumb to a general distrust. He had to protect his conviction about what happened to Jimmy. Jimmy's murder was isolated and pure, uncorrupted by other secret alliances and criminal acts, other suspicions. Let the culture indulge in cheap conspiracy theories. Nick had the enduring stuff of narrative, the thing that doesn't have to be filled in with speculation and hearsay.

Of course Matt thought his brother was guilty of emotional delusion. But when Janet agreed too readily, dismissing Nick's version, he cut her off quick. He defended Nick. He told her how he himself had thought their father was dead, originally. Not a runaway, a dropout, the grievously weak man who takes a powder. Dead somewhere in untranslated space. And even if he was a little kid at the time. Even if he did the sad-funny fruitcake thing of going to the Loew's Paradise to see the soul of his faithful departed father drift across the starry ceiling. Even if he was unable to make a studied judgment, he told her, consider the episode itself, the journey he'd made to a movie house through strange neighborhoods, alone, at the age of six. The power of an event can flow from its unresolvable heart, all the cruel and elusive
elements that don't add up, and it makes you do odd things, and tell stories to yourself, and build believable worlds.

Who the hell was Janet to ridicule his brother?

There were scar lines in the distance, deep arroyos, and stands of tall saguaro on the south slopes of mountains.

The track was white sand and then red dirt, it was cracked playa, drained and baked, and then it turned abruptly to mineral green dust and then again to sand and finally stony rubble.

Janet liked to drive aggressively whatever the surface. The jeep bucked and jumped, leaning badly at times, and when the track went narrow in thick bush she had to tell him to get his dangling arm back inside before the thorny acacia cut him up.

“I don't think you should leave your job out of conscience. Conscience works both ways,” she said. “You have duties and obligations. If you're not willing to do this work, the next person may be less qualified.”

“How hot do you think it is?”

“Never mind how hot. Too hot to be here. You have special training and a certain kind of skill.”

“At some point we have to decide whether to turn around and go back out the way we came in.”

“Or what?”

“Or keep going into bighorn country and exit the refuge somewhere in the northwest sector before the exercises start.”

Ten minutes after he said this, they saw objects in the distance and he put the binoculars on them. They appeared to be tanks and jeeps, some trucks as well, but they were flimsy somehow, unbulky and perfunctory, showing squared-off contours and a cheap gleam—simulated tactical targets.

“I want us to be together,” she said. “You know how much I want a home and family. I want to have a child. I've always wanted these things. I want to be safe, Matthew.”

He reached over and fingered some loose hair at the nape of her neck.

“You want to be safe. This is the woman who works half the night treating injured people,” he said. “Shocks to the body. One emergency after another.”

“There's nothing unsafe about that. That's completely safe to me. It's the thing I do best and I want to keep on doing it. And you should do the thing you do best. That's what safe is.”

“If I keep this job, how do we live together?”

“We'll do it. We'll work it out,” she said.

The air went taut and the light took a chlorine edge and then it was raining hard. They couldn't see a thing and sat parked on a rise. The storm seemed to originate ten feet above them. They sat there waiting and they talked.

Matt could tell her anything. It was completely easy with her. She knew him before he was born. She could finish a thought he'd only barely started. She had no shaded spaces in her, none of the silences and disguises that can be fascinating, yes, but not for a guy like him, he thought.

They heard name-saying birds such as whippoorwills and phoebes. After the rain the heat came blowing back and he scanned with the glasses for birds of prey. They hung in the burning air, fantailed and soaring and great, and he went scrambling for the book when he spotted a large dark bird nested in the arm-crotch of a tall saguaro.

It was a golden eagle, immature, and he gave Janet the binoculars and took them back and couldn't stop talking. He talked and laughed and looked at the books. He talked less to Janet than to the bird. He checked the book a number of times to confirm for the bird's benefit that it was an eagle, an eaglet, with a bit of flashing on the wings and a wash of honey-gold at the hindneck.

Janet was not caught up in this. He glanced at her and found a complex plea in her eyes. She was asking him something but he wasn't sure what it was. He put the glasses back on the bird. The bird was a flick of the dial to her. You turned on the TV in the nurses' lounge and saw giraffe heads bobbing on the veldt. This was her nature preserve, a cramped room with a couple of sofas and chairs, where she sat and
yakked with the night staff about coffee prices and unsafe streets and the burn victim with the smell you can't describe—this was the handgrip, the safehold she needed to live.

But the look she'd given him was not about what she needed or where she preferred to be. She wanted him to understand something about himself.

Every defeat was a death inside the chest, his little bird-boned thorax. Basically dead at eleven, that was him. Good riddance to little wooden rooks. How many years did it take him to get over the game?

It was Fischer-Spassky that brought him back, and only briefly at that, two years ago, in Iceland, halfway between Washington and Moscow, where they played twenty-one games, Bobby and Boris, a summer's rousing theater of black and white.

Matt checked the newspapers and watched TV. He rooted for Bobby, the gangly boorish boy now pushing thirty. He identified with the public tantrums, all the rude demands, the strokes of unwholesomeness that Bobby consistently delivered, the open show of bitterness when he lost.

If the American's eventual victory didn't begin to redeem Matt's own sulky youth, at least it edged the game out of the private migraine of abnormal introversion and into the mingled thing out there, the everyday melee of competing states and material forces.

You need a makeshift word to describe the process. De-ego'd. This is what the game did to Matt. So let our Bobby rant. He was only showing what is always there beneath the spatial esthetics and the mind-modeling rigor of the game, beneath the forevisional bursts of insight—an autoworld of pain and loss.

He told her about mountains hollowed out in New Mexico. These were storage sites for nuclear weapons. He told her about the gouged mountain in Colorado where huge wall screens could display the flight track of a missile launched from a base in Siberia. He knew a few things about Obyekt, the Installation, built by slave labor in a
remote part of the USSR, and he told her about it—a center for bomb design.

People went willingly to these places, scientists eager to meet some elemental need. Or was it just a patriotic duty or the standard challenge of doing serious work in physics or mathematics? He thought they went in search, on impulse, almost recklessly, to locate some higher condition.

“You make it sound like God,” she said.

He told her what he could about the Pocket. The Pocket was just a cozy donut-dunk in a vast hidden system. A system predicated on death from the sky. He told her about the emergency networks, underground shelters carved out of mountains in Virginia and Maryland where leaders could keep the government running during a major war. He told her about accidents in the Soviet Union, rumored explosions and fires at nuclear plants, and the sense of excitement he felt, the thrill of devastation in the enemy barrens, and his subsequent shame.

You make it sound like God. Or some starker variation thereof. Go to the desert or tundra and wait for the visionary flash of light, the critical mass that will call down the Hindu heavens, Kali and Shiva and all the grimacing lesser gods.

“Maybe I stayed a Catholic too long. Should have got out when I was ten.”

He thought about the sensitives, preparing for psychic war, and he thought about the penitentes, men in black hoods dragging heavy wooden crosses through the desert, a hundred years ago, or fifty years, and lashing themselves with sisal and hemp, all that Sister Edgarish stuff, and speaking fabricated words—the maunder of roaming holy men.

“I don't know what you mean by staying a Catholic. I told you what I think about conscience,” she said.

“It's only partly that. It's mainly that I feel I'm part of something unreal. When you hallucinate, the point of any hallucination is that you have a false perception that you think is real. This is just the opposite. This
is
real. The work, the weapons, the missiles rising out of alfalfa fields. All of it. But it strikes me, more and more, as sheer distortion. It's a dream someone's dreaming that has me in it.”

Maybe Janet was a little annoyed by this. Found it self-indulgent or unconvincing or beside the point.

“I heard a story not long ago,” he said. “They did a bomb test in the nineteen-fifties in which a hundred pigs were dressed in custom-made GI field jackets and positioned at well-spaced intervals from the blast site. One hundred and eleven, to be exact, pigs, as the story was told to me. Then they exploded the device. Then they examined the uniforms on the barbecued pigs to evaluate the thermal qualities of the material. Because this was the point of the test.”

Janet didn't respond because whatever the point of the test, and whatever the point of the story, it was only making her mad.

“Picture it. Chester whites. A breed of large fat hog with drooping ears. Wearing khaki uniforms with zippers, seams, everything, and with drawstrings drawn because that's how the regulation reads. And a voice on the loudspeaker's going, Ten, nine, eight, seven.”

She told him to get his arm inside the jeep.

“Is this when history turned to fiction?” he said.

She looked at him briefly.

“That's not the question you're asking,” she said.

“What am I asking?”

“I don't think you're asking that question. That's a large question and I think you're asking a smaller question and it has nothing to do with pigs in uniforms. You're talking about something else completely.”

He didn't look at her.

“What am I talking about, Janet?”

“You tell me,” she said.

He kept his eyes on the rutted track and didn't say a word. Acacia slapped and twanged on the windshield and doors. They both watched the track.

There was a structure about two hundred yards ahead, concrete and bunkerlike, sand-streaked, with slit windows and brambly growth edging up the walls.

It was nearly sundown and they decided to camp nearby. There was
something irresistible about the building, of course, even an unyielding ruin such as this, slabbed private and tight. It stood alone here, with mountains behind it, and carried the tilted lyric of a misplaced object, like some prairie drive-in shut down for years with the audio hookups all askew and the huge screen facing blankly toward a cornfield. It's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response—not regret so much as a sense of time's own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.