But most of the time, Cooper is in a relaxed and humorous (however sardonic, especially on such subjects as politics and religion) mood. The old man has been driving large rigs (he says) since he was seventeen years old. He’s never had a wife, family, or home (he says) and has never wanted one. His cab has been his ark—his words—through all the “floods of shit” that have been dropped on America by a pissed-off God in his lifetime.
Val can’t seem to get enough of the old reprobate’s barbed but almost iambic commentaries. I watch Val’s gleaming eyes across the campfire and think of young Prince Hal in Eastcheap’s Boar’s-Head Tavern at the rhetorical feet of Falstaff. (I was one of those scholars who infinitely preferred Falstaff—a source of wit not only in himself but in others and a potential Aristotle/Socrates tutor of the true humanities to the young prince in training—to the wordy killing-machine-cum-lying-politician that Henry V became in Shakespeare’s work, however moving the much-trotted-out “band of brothers” St. Crispin’s Day speech may be.)
But I digress.
Val actually said something to me yesterday in a tone devoid of the contempt, guardedness, and sarcasm that have ruled all his speech in my presence for the last four years or so.
—I could be a trucker, Grandpa.
I said nothing at the time but I came close to weeping to hear those few unguarded words slip out. (Including, I admit, the childish “Grandpa” that I’ve missed so very much.) Val has not spoken of being or becoming anything—other than his unconscious but continuous attempt at becoming a black-hole source of disillusionment so unrelenting as to approach pure nihilism—since he was twelve years old.
Before I become too sentimental, I need to remind myself here that it is likely that my grandson killed someone last week. Or at least tried to kill someone.
He seemed almost in shock that last Friday night in Los Angeles when he saw the photograph of his dead friend William Coyne on the 3DHD screen. The only thing I could get out of him about the attack on Advisor Omura in the first forty-eight hours of our flight was his repeated statement—I was with those idiot fuckers, but I didn’t shoot at Omura, Leonard. I swear it.
But Val never said clearly that he hadn’t shot someone, and the few times I brought up the Coyne boy’s name, Val’s violent reaction—his gaze dropping, his head snapping to look in another direction, his entire body stiffening—suggested to me that something had happened between the two adolescents on that last night in Los Angeles.
Whatever the source of the trauma in L.A., Val dealt with it by sleeping most of the time we weren’t stopped for rest during those first few days or nights. Because of the way he slept—twitching, shaking—I thought he might be using flashback, but a cursory search of his duffel bag while he slept didn’t turn up any vials of the drug.
It did turn up a black pistol which I considered confiscating but decided to leave in his duffel. We might need it before this trip is over.
WHEN VAL WAS AWAKE during the daylight hours on the third through fifth days of our exile, I listened in as he quizzed Julio and Perdita on the security details of our convoy.
It seems that our convoy consists of twenty-three eighteen-wheelers, some of which are armed with mini-guns and other serious weapons, while we’re also accompanied by four combat vehicles and a small recon-attack helicopter. The combat vehicles—I forget the details about their armament and such, but Val visibly devoured every caliber and horsepower and armor fact with great interest—are manned by mercenaries from a security company called TrekSec and paid for by these independent truckers or their firms.
Perdita showed us on their satellite nav system that another such convoy, made up of seventeen vehicles, is traveling about fifteen miles ahead of us and a much larger one is about twenty-four miles behind us on I-15. They keep in touch with one another.
According to Julio, the main problem on the Las Vegas–to-Mesquite-and-beyond-to–St. George stretch of I-15 is bandits, although the reconquista still make their occasional foray into the southern reaches of Nevada. Nuevo Mexico’s cartels’ repeated failures at adding Las Vegas to their territory is, according to Julio, forcing the reconquista military forays to be less and less frequent. He added that the increasingly effective anglo guerrilla raids around Kingman and Flagstaff have pretty effectively tied down the N.M. occupation forces over the past year or two.
Our immediate problem, Julio and Perdita showed us, lies just beyond the embattled and mostly abandoned town of Mesquite ahead where I-15 crosses from Nevada to Arizona and from the Pacific Time Zone into the Mountain Time Zone: the twenty-nine miles of Interstate that make their tiny cut across the northwest corner of Arizona and then into Utah and north have been wonderfully scenic and composed mostly of elevated highway, but bandits and warring U.S. and N.M. forces have dropped most of those bridges and elevated sections over the past decade.
Because of the Mormon Range and other mountains that run north and south along the state border like a sheer wall, the convoys will take an entire day picking their way along rubble-strewn makeshift surface roads—just ruts through the tumbled boulders and slabs of the former highway—along the Virgin River into Utah. Julio showed us satellite images of the winding canyon road where the trucks will be vulnerable to any bandit on the clifftops who wants to roll rocks down on us.
—Can’t we just go around? asked Val. Take a detour to the north?
Perdita showed us how there are no roads except desert tracks and dry gullies along the forty miles or so north of Mesquite to the tiny, abandoned towns of Carp and Elgin along the misnamed Meadow Valley Wash dry river, then almost a two-hundred-mile detour on old state roads 93 and 319 into Utah on their battered Highway 56.
—The twenty-nine miles in Arizona called the Diagonal of Death by truckers is slow and dangerous, said Julio. But it’s still faster than any of the half-assed detours. We’re still truckers. We need to get products to their destination on time.
So tonight we’re sleeping in a defensive circle off the highway just short of the abandoned town of Bunkerville. The name is appropriate, since a few military bunkers remain here.
A mile to the east, the mountains rise up like some terrible obstacle in one of the J.R.R. Tolkien–inspired movies. The opening for the Virgin River and the former I-15 looks like a dark and open maw—waiting.
We’ll be moving at first light. Perdita assured us that with the recon helicopter and our convoy’s firepower, there shouldn’t be a serious confrontation—just ten hours of bumping and jolting along in the truck’s lowest gears.
Val said to me tonight—
—This is like those old World War Two B-seventeen movies the Old Man and I used to watch. These convoys are like those packs of bombers huddled together for protection against German fighter planes.
It was the first time in several years that I’d heard Val mention his father without overt hostility.
THE COOKING FIRES WERE doused by 9 p.m. tonight and there was no frivolity around the campfires. The mood was somber. There was no bluster. Everyone knows that tomorrow will be one of the most dangerous parts of the voyage but there’s almost no talk of it. Plans and preparations have been made.
I’m terrified about tomorrow’s slow, exposed twenty-nine-mile gauntlet, but Val seems quietly excited… almost enthusiastic. The immortality of youth, I suppose.
Later tonight, when everyone had turned in, I talked to him after I saw him shutting off the little cell phone he’d brought along and removing the earbud.
I’d noticed the old phone our second night out and challenged Val about it—he had, after all, insisted that I throw away my phone because it might be tracked by authorities chasing him—and he’d explained how it had been his mother’s, and how all of the phone and GPS chips had long since been removed. Reluctantly, he told me that he listened to the daily diary function on it just to hear his mother’s voice.
This fact made my chest ache.
Val was willing to say more. I’m fairly certain t
hat his good mood and talkativeness were a direct result of the marijuana joint that he’d joined Julio and Henry Big Horse Begay and Gauge Devereaux and Cooper Jakes in smoking just an hour earlier around the last campfire of the evening. It had been my impression that Val had been using a lot of flashback over the past few years and perhaps some stronger drugs such as cocaine from time to time—I wasn’t sure about the latter—but had never got in the habit of smoking pot with his friends.
So now, in our high cots under the clear Kevlarglas air dam with the stars bright above us—the surprisingly effective acoustic curtain drawn between our cots and the Romanos’ bed below—Val gave me a very un-Val-like loopy smile and showed me the phone.
—It was my mom’s, your… you know. So like I said, it doesn’t have any of the trackable, traceable chips left in it—I pulled them out myself five years ago—but it’s got her daily voice reminders and a lot of text diary that I’d like to read but can’t.
I nodded but felt uneasy. This conversation was as thin and fragile as a stray strand of cobweb. The slightest wrong word or tone from me would, I knew, sever it or simply blow it away. I heard myself say softly…
—Are you sure you want to hear her voice and private thoughts, Val? Sometimes grown-ups say things in private that they wouldn’t necessarily want to have shared with…
Val grunted and shook his head and I knew that if it weren’t for the friendly effects of the potent grass that Joe Valdez and his wife, Juanita, had brought up from Old Mexico, I’d be looking at Val’s angry back. Instead, he kept talking to me.
—Yeah, yeah, yeah… but I think in that written diary there may be the clue I need to know why my old man turned against her… maybe even killed her.
—Killed her!
I shouted and actually clapped both hands over my mouth. Val cringed and looked toward the closed curtain. But there was no noise from Julio and Perdita below.
Nor did Val turn his back to me. Not yet. His whisper now was a fast, hot hiss, devoid of any joint-assisted relaxation.
—Leonard, you’ve asked me about a thousand times why I hate my old man. The answer might be in that encrypted diary text. It’s the main reason I’ve kept the goddamn phone all these years.
—Val, you don’t hate your father …, I began.
—I do, goddammit. I hate the cocksucker’s guts and if we somehow manage to get to Denver alive, I’m going to track him down to whatever flashback cave he’s rotting away in and kick him awake and put a bullet in his guts…
I had no idea what to say to this madness so I said nothing. It turned out to be the only way I could have kept the agitated boy talking.
—He found out that Mom was doing something, Leonard, and I think he killed her. Or had her killed. I really do.
I started to say something like—But your mother died in an auto accident, Val”—but I knew at once that I would lose him with that. The conversation would end as suddenly as it had begun. I cleared my throat.
—What kind of things was she doing that would so anger your father?
Val seemed to fold in on himself until he was a mass of defensive knees, elbows, curved back as sharp as those elbows, and lowered head.
—I don’t know. But she was gone a lot in those last weeks—hell, months—before she was killed in that convenient auto accident. She was sneaking out a lot. When the Old Man was putting in double shifts down at the precinct, gone whole weekends—sometimes four or five days at a time—so was Mom. She used to have me stay with my friend Samuel’s weird, smelly old grandmother—Sheila—down the street when she was going to be away overnight. Sometimes for several nights in a row. And the Old Man never knew. Mom swore me to secrecy, Leonard. Imagine a parent swearing her ten-year-old kid to secrecy.
I thought about it. It didn’t sound like the way Dara, my daughter, the light of my life, had ever behaved before. Or would behave.
—What do you think she was doing, Val? Having an… affair?
I couldn’t believe that I was asking my sixteen-year-old grandson this question. But suddenly I wanted to know the truth as much as this tormented boy had for the past six years.
Val shrugged. He suddenly looked very sleepy.
—Yeah, I suppose. Probably with that fat slob of an assistant district attorney she worked for, Harvey Cohen. That whole last year, he was always picking Mom up at weird hours when the Old Man was away at work. And the Old Man was always away at work.
My mouth was very dry and my chest hurt now not from emotion but from the more alarming pain of an old man’s thrice-treacherous heart.
—So, Val, you think that Dara was having an affair with her employer, Harvey whoever, and your father found out and killed her? Or arranged for her to be killed in that automobile accident that also killed an old couple and a truck driver? Does that make sense, Val?
He glared at me now and I knew that he was sorry he’d said anything about the old cell phone. The pot and the closeness between us were wearing off.
—Yeah. And if you want to tell me that the Old Man wouldn’t hurt her, save your breath. You don’t know the Old Man. You don’t know cops.
I merely nodded at that. It was true. I’d never spent much time around police officers—or wanted to—and for all my visits when Val was a baby and I still lived in the area after Carol, my third wife, died, I really had never been comfortable talking to Detective Nick Bottom. So instead of defending a man I didn’t know, I said…
—Could I see the encrypted text?
I could feel Val’s reluctance to show the files to me, mixed with his anger at himself and me for saying as much as he had about something he’d kept secret for six years, but without letting go of the phone, he activated it, thumbed through icons, and held the screen up so I could see it in the Nevada darkness.
I looked for a long moment, only asking Val to thumb forward through the pages of text. He did so—gracelessly. Then he turned the phone off and thrust it away in his pocket. He rolled away from me, pulling the thin blanket high up on his bony shoulders, but I wasn’t quite finished with our conversation yet.
—It’s a word-or book-cipher, Val. Based on a five-letter key word.
The boy snorted.
—Tell me something I don’t know, old man.
I let the rudeness pass. Something like excitement was stirring in me. Those encrypted pages might include a message to me. Dara and I had loved sending coded messages to each other when she was little. It irritated Carol, but Dara and I continued doing so, even after Carol got sick.
—Perhaps I could help with…
But I’d let my enthusiasm show through. Val pulled the blanket higher and edged farther away on his cot, showing me his back again.
—I know the kind of words that Mom would’ve used for such a cipher. None of them work. And it doesn’t matter anyway, old man. We’re probably going to get killed in the canyon tomorrow anyway. It don’t matter. Nothing matters.
The sudden bad grammar was a parody of his father’s police-speak, although Nick Bottom didn’t speak that way either. I was tempted to say aloud the “Bullshit, you tiresome little twerp” I was thinking but stayed silent until I said softly…
—Carol.” It could be “Carol.” Her mother’s name.
Val did sound almost asleep as he answered groggily one last time.
—Nope. Tried it. I told you… I tried all the fucking five-letter words that would’ve meant something to her. It’s just gonna… stay… encrypted. Go… to sleep, Leonard. We gotta get up early to get shot at tomorrow. Let me sleep, for Chrissakes.
I let him sleep.
After about an hour of lying there looking up at the cold desert stars, I sat up silently. My eyes had adapted to the darkness and I could see the phone protruding from his pocket as Val lay there snoring rather more loudly than I’d heard before.
I knew the five-letter word. I was sure of it.
I started to reach for the phone but stopped. If possible, I wanted Val to give me permission
to try the word and for us to watch the encrypted pages of Dara’s diary decrypt into readable text in front of us.
If possible. If it wasn’t possible, I’d take the phone away from him soon and read those pages for myself. For some reason I was sure that Dara’s last, secret message to the world was more important than the feelings of a surly sixteen-year-old.
I’ve written this in my own hand-written journal—hiding it away so Val won’t find it—and will go to sleep thinking of my daughter and of why she would have chosen the five-letter word that I am certain is the key to her final message to the world.
1.11
North of Las Vegas, New Mexico—Wednesday, Sept. 15
THE TANK SHELL that hit Nick and Sato’s Oshkosh–Land Cruiser was a lucky shot that exploded partially through the osmotic panel of the weapons dome atop the truck, beheaded the gunner Joe in a shaped-charge surge of fiery plasma, incinerated the rest of the ninja mercenary’s body in a microsecond, and instantly flowed down into the vehicle like a supersonic wave of hot lava that vaporized everything inside the truck that it did not set aflame.
Until that second, two and a half hours of the trip had been eventless to the point of boredom.
For the first ten miles down and away from Raton Pass, the two vehicles were technically under the protection of Major Malcolm’s hilltop artillery, but driving at forty-five m.p.h., they soon passed out of that zone.
Nick didn’t notice because he was too busy half paying attention to Sato going through all the evacuation, PEAP, comm, fire, and other details about the truck. Also because he was too busy trying to find a comfortable position. Not only did his oxygen mask, comm earbuds and microphones, all of his personal body armor and helmet, as well as the seat-sarcophagus itself, get in his way, but he’d shoved the big duffel bag holding his personal weapons in the space under his legs and now it was also getting in his way.