Stallion Gate

  The word from Washington was that Truman's military advisers claimed Trinity was a waste of time, that the bomb was a scientific boondoggle, a hoax, a dud. Oppy put on a brave front.

  "You're not going to dance?" Anna asked Joe. So far, she was no more than civil to him, as if they'd hardly met.

  "No."

  "Joe's different," Oppy said. "He's a progressive Indian. A bebop Indian." Oppy turned to Joe and lowered his voice. "By the way, when we get to Trinity, Groves wants you to patrol for Apaches. That incident in the snow seems to have lodged in his brain. He thinks it takes an Indian to stop an Indian."

  It wasn't a major ceremony, not a saint's day or a basket dance, just a dance for late planting, open to the public but unannounced. Maids had told people on the Hill that "something would be happening". Among the hundred or so spectators, Joe saw Fermi and Teller. Foote sported British Army shorts and a sombrero.

  The dancers moved with a step. Half-hop. Turn. There were few young men; most of them were in the service. Grandparents and girls moved happily to the sonorous beat, gently stirring up dust. Hop. Shuffle. The monotony used to drive Joe crazy. A placid merry-go-round of tame Indians and corn. Shuffle. Turn.

  "Who are the painted ones?" Anna asked Joe.

  "Clowns."

  "What do they represent to you?"

  "Ancient Greeks."

  The clowns were performing feeble antics inside the dancers' circle. Joe remembered when they were fierce mimics who imitated Navajos, tourists, Catholic priests, when clowns were at least the heat in the pueblo milk.

  Cottonwood leaves rustled; on the hottest day, a cottonwood could sound like rain. Ladies from Santa Fe, veteran watchers, opened folding chairs. Oppy murmured something that made Anna laugh, and Joe excused himself to take a walk.

  Behind a low stone wall and a small graveyard at the west end of the plaza sat the mission of Santiago. The walls were adobe seven feet thick at the base; the church looked like a monolith thirty feet high. A fort, actually, from the days when the Apaches used to raid the Rio Grande Valley. On the roof was a graceful iron cross and a bell, both cast in Spain. The door was always shut during dances.

  The graveyard had marked and unmarked mounds, and a scattering of new white crosses for soldiers. Their backs to the plaza, two cowboys sat on tombstones and smoked. They were wiry men in sweat-stained hats. The older was about sixty, with calloused hands and a chicken-track neck. The younger had long blonde hair and wore a vanity shirt like the kind Roy Rogers sang in. The satin had turned to a muddy iridescence and strips of curlicue piping had fallen off.

  "Sergeant Joe Peña," Joe said and stuck out his hand. "I never saw cowboys at an Indian dance before."

  "I'm Al." The old man gave Joe the briefest possible shake. "This is Billy."

  Billy cocked his head, as if that reduced Joe in size. His nose twisted when he smiled. "Fuck off."

  "You can see better over in the plaza," Joe said.

  "We've seen Indians before," Billy said. The shirt was shabby, but painfully romantic. No one would wear it unless he'd considered the possibility of an Indian maiden eyeing him in it.

  Joe wanted to give him every chance. "Indian Service?" he asked.

  "Who says?" Al looked up, pushed back his hat, revealing stringy hairs stuck to damp, untanned forehead.

  "You're Service riders," Joe said.

  Billy dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. "No one said that."

  "It's not hard," Joe said. "Cowboys. Here. But not for the dance and you don't care for Indians. And you smell like sheep shit. That's right, you've been out shooting those Navajo sheep. With that?" He looked at the gun on Al's belt, a rust-speckled Colt .45. "Doing your bit to win the war?"

  "Because they let you in the Army–" Billy began.

  "But this isn't the Navajo reservation," Joe said. "No Navajos here. You're lost."

  "Peña." Al stored the name away aloud. "You work on that magic mountain the Army's got."

  "I'll show you the road out," Joe offered.

  Billy stood up. "You don't–"

  "By the way, that shirt," Joe said and shook his head. "That shirt looks like shit and spaghetti on a plate."

  "I told him," Al said. He slid off the tombstone, stretched and started for the graveyard gate. "Catch you later, Sergeant."

  Though Billy looked bewildered and reluctant to leave, he followed the older man. Halfway to the gate he turned to say, "We got those Navajos, every one."

  The tombstone Al had been using for a seat was a weathered slab of marble that said "Miguel Peña, 1895-1935". Dolores had bought the whitest stone in Santa Fe and it shone while she was alive. Billy had been sitting on a smaller, rose marble marker that said "Dolores Reyes Peña, 1899-1944". She bought it along with Mike's in anticipation; there was nothing more exotic to Dolores than a rose. Only lately had Joe started to realize how young his parents were. He picked up the butt Billy had thrown down, field-stripped it and blew the tobacco away.

  There was a certain definition, an edge to the dance when Joe returned. One black and white clown had a camera and was taking a picture of Foote. Then aimed it like a gun. The clown in sunglasses pretended to be blind and stumbled with a stick along the front line of the tourists, pinching a skirt here, feeling a blouse there. In the dancers' line, women giggled. Slide. Half-toe. Turn.

  A third clown slipped out of the circle. One pillow was tied to the back of his loincloth and another was strapped to his belly. A fur moustache was stuck to his lip, gold stars to his shoulders, and on his head he wore an Army officer's cap with a paper star. Ponderously he walked clockwise to the dancers, so that they passed in review for him. When he added a twitch to the pillow on his ass, the impersonation of General Groves was complete. The other clowns bowed and salaamed. Anna Weiss laughed, but Oppy looked pained.

  A Buick four-door drew up in front of the mission. Fuchs was at the wheel and Augustino was with him. Cars weren't allowed that close. When a tribal policeman went to the car and waved it on, a rear window rolled down and Joe saw the Indian Service rider called Al. The car stayed.

  The clown in sunglasses produced a small firecracker. Another clown took it, another clown blessed it and a fourth clown put it on the ground and pretended to light it while the clown-Groves raised binoculars to his circled eyes to watch. All the other clowns except the one in sunglasses put their fingers to their ears.

  Nothing.

  A second match was tried. A third. A fourth.

  A dud.

  One after another, clowns inspected the firecracker and passed it on until it was with the clown-Groves, who studied it through his binoculars and gave it to the clown in sunglasses, who turned and presented the firecracker to Oppy. The crowd closed in to see. The dancers had never stopped and the singers hadn't ceased their chant, but their eyes were on Oppy, too. Joe had never seen Oppy blush before. The clown in the sunglasses got on his knees and begged.

  "Go ahead, Oppy!" Foote shouted. "Be a sport!"

  In the car, Augustino pointed to the clown in glasses.

  Anna handed Oppy a cigarette lighter. The other clowns fell to their knees to plead. Oppy rescued a smile and lit the fuse and threw the firecracker into the air, where it exploded with a puff and a bang.

  Whether the firecracker happened to come at the end of the morning dance or was the signal for it to stop, the circle of dancers abruptly broke and dispersed for lunch. The clowns went off in single file, holding on to the long black tails of each other's loincloths, through an alley on the north side of the plaza which was out of bounds to tourists.

  Fuchs' Buick was gone.

  "You should be proud," Jaworski said and shook Oppy's hand. "They're dancing for our victory and success."

  "Wasn't there some element of menace?" Teller suggested.

  "Nonsense," Foote said. "Oppy, you played your part beautifully, even modestly."

  Oppy returned Anna's lighter. "Anna, I have to leave."

  "I'll stay. They're more aliv
e than you said."

  Augustino had joined the group. "They certainly are alive. Can we talk, Dr Oppenheimer? You and me and Sergeant Peña?"

  The parking lot was an oat field beaten into a cloud of dust. More cars were arriving than leaving. Augustino's jeep was next to the gray Army sedan Joe had brought Oppy in. Joe still couldn't find Fuchs' Buick.

  Augustino asked, "The ones in the black and white greasepaint, Sergeant— are they idiots or traitors?"

  "The clowns?"

  "Whatever," Augustino said, "that was a serious breach of security. They singled out Dr Oppenheimer here in public view and identified him with explosives. Any outsider with a background in physics had to notice him and Teller. The imitation of the general was in the worst possible taste. What is the religious purpose behind that?"

  "You'd have to ask them, sir."

  "I'd love to. Who are they?"

  "I don't know, sir."

  "A tribal secret?"

  "I guess so, sir."

  "There's a great deal you're not telling me these days, Sergeant. Do they dance again?"

  "This afternoon, sir."

  "Same clowns, same people?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then I think it would be wise for you to drive the Director back to the Hill now, before there's another incident. You do agree, Dr Oppenheimer?"

  Oppy stared back at the plaza. "I thought we had good relations with these people. I thought we were friends."

  "What other incident, sir?" Joe asked Augustino.

  "Follow me," the captain said after a pause.

  All traffic leaving the lot for the highway had to pass over a narrow cattle guard. Joe stopped for incoming cars while Augustino's jeep went ahead. As always when they were alone, Oppy sat up in front with Joe. He tapped on the dashboard impatiently, as if a herd of morons were holding him back. Word of the dance had spread. From Santa Fe open buses dropped off tourists, who hurried on foot across the guard. A short figure with a camera and binoculars round his neck Joe recognized from the bar of La Fonda, the New Yorker named Harry Gold.

  Joe dug into his pocket and gave Oppy what looked like a wire-mesh button. "That's a microphone Augustino put in your house while you were gone. It's time you knew what's going on around you."

  Oppy held the microphone up to the light of the windshield as if he were examining some mildly interesting artifact.

  "It was hidden," Joe said. "It wasn't put there for your protection. He's watching you, he's after you."

  "I know." Oppy's voice had fallen to a whisper. He turned the tiny microphone over and over.

  "Tell General Groves," Joe said. "Tell the general that his head of Intelligence thinks you're a Red spy."

  "The general knows." Oppy looked at Joe with a clear gaze of resignation and contempt. It was an inner look, a meditation. He put his hand out of the open window and dropped the microphone on to the dirt outside. "You can't help me, Joe."

  "You're in charge of the most important lab in the war and you're scared of a captain? They can't do anything without you. You're the goddamn bomb."

  "It's… a temporary situation."

  The cattle guard was clearing. Augustino's jeep waited far up the road.

  Joe got out. "Then I'll help Augustino."

  Oppy slid behind the wheel and asked, "Help him?"

  "He wants to know who those clowns are. It takes an Indian to stop an Indian, right?"

  "Joe–" Oppy started to protest. He began again. "Joe, twenty more days. After Trinity, no one can touch us."

  Joe made a wide circuit of Santiago on his way back. Fuchs' car was gone, probably halfway to the Hill by now. The Indian Service riders, Billy and Al, were drinking beers in the back of a tribal police car in an alley. All around the plaza Indians ate fried bread on their roofs. Under the plaza cottonwood in an island of shade, tourists ate sandwiches. Waxed paper floated over the ground on waves of heat.

  15

  Around the shaft of sunlight that came down the ladder to the kiva roof, three clowns repaired their black and white stripes from Mason jars of body paint. Two clowns without caps rested on the wall benches. The last stood in the shadow of the corner to drink a Coke and piss into a pail. All turned to the side door as Joe came in.

  He hadn't been in a kiva for almost twenty years. Outside, the kiva of the clowns was a plain adobe house. Inside, though, the walls were painted with shapes that seemed to hover in the dark. Snakes. Swallows. Stepped mountains and red and white clouds. The zigzag lightning slats of a dismantled altar stood between Spanish chests of prayer sticks and dance wands. The floor was beaten earth, and had the traditional hole that led to the center of the earth. The clowns themselves seemed dislocated, white blocks, bars of black. Even so, Joe saw that one of the clowns without a cap, a clown with loose gray hair, a heavy belly and spindly legs was Ben Reyes.

  "Psoot-bah!" Ben said; it was an order for a dog to scram. "Get out!"

  "There are two Indian Service cowboys out there," Joe told the other clown without a cap. "I think they came to arrest you."

  "You pointed him out," Ben said.

  "Fuchs pointed you out," Joe told the other clown.

  The clown's long brown hair fell to his shoulders, but he still wore sunglasses from the morning dance, despite the dark of the kiva. He tilted his head and smiled at Joe as if sharing a joke.

  "You gave the firecracker to Oppenheimer and you didn't try to take it back," Joe said. "When you were pretending to be blind out there, you still bumped into too many people."

  "Not bad for a real blind man, though," Roberto said.

  "Not bad."

  "They'd really dare do it?"

  "You pulled a shotgun on the wrong Kraut. He's our Kraut and there's a war on. I don't know how he knew you would dance, but he knew and the captain in charge of security on the Hill knew and they pointed you out to a pair of Indian Service riders. Don't worry, Fuchs and the captain fingered you and ran. The cowboys watched the dance for five seconds and they saw you from a distance. Bring in someone else to dance. You'll have all afternoon to get back to Taos."

  "Coke?" Roberto asked. "You thirsty?"

  "No, thanks."

  "Hot out there, isn't it?"

  "If you're going to get someone, you better do it now."

  Roberto removed the dark glasses and laid them on the bench. His eyes looked not only shrunken but painted out.

  "Well, it's not as simple as that, Joe. No one is allowed in while clowns are here. I don't think anyone but you would break the rules."

  "If six clowns don't come out of here, the riders will come in for you."

  "You dance," Roberto said.

  "Him?" Ben asked.

  "There's no one else," Roberto said.

  "It would be a joke," Ben said.

  "You show him what to do," Roberto said.

  The three clowns by the ladder squatted and talked among themselves. It would be a great disgrace to include someone as ignorant as Joe Peña in a ceremony. On the other hand, it would be a great disgrace to have an elder from another pueblo arrested in Santiago.

  "No," Joe spoke up. "For once, Ben is right. I only came to warn you."

  Roberto acted genuinely puzzled. "What good is a warning if you won't help?" he asked. "That's a fake warning."

  "From a fake Indian," Ben said.

  "Fair warning." Joe held up his hand and made it a wave as he moved to the door. "From here on, I don't even know you."

  "He went away an Indian and came back a black man," Ben said. "He went into the Army and became a white man. Maybe there's no one there at all any more. Now, his brother was an Indian."

  "Ben," Joe said and shook his head.

  "Best thing that happened to his mother was she died before today," Ben said.

  Joe returned from the door. "Ben, Ben, Ben. Don't say another word."

  "I need your help," Roberto said.

  The paint was greasy and thick, and he felt as if his whole body were a mask. His hair was t
ucked up into the striped cap, which was tied by a black thong under his chin. The other clowns painted black outlines around his eyes and mouth, and knotted black scarves around his neck, wrists and ankles. I can't believe this, Joe thought, this is happening to someone else; he felt like he was standing apart and watching himself be prepared, as if he were lending just his body. The tail of the long black loincloth trailed on the floor. No moccasins were found big enough, so he was going barefoot, and Roberto suggested that Joe stay within the circle of dancers as much as he could. Everyone gathered at the ladder and shared a last cigarette. Roberto wore his white Taos blanket, ready for a separate exit. One of the other clowns had the dark glasses now. Ben tucked a bullwhip under his arm. The sun had moved west, making the light from the roof dimmer, the angle sharper, and Joe had the sensation that the kiva was sealing over him. Finally, the clowns climbed the ladder one by one, Joe last. They burst off the roof and down an alley, dogs and boys running at their side. Although Joe tried to hang back, sheer length of stride brought him to the front. There was a tunnel of shade, then the brilliant, droning heat of the plaza and a bigger crowd than before. All the northern roofs were crowded. The tourists had spread across the whole southern side of the plaza. Only the watching priests and elders were the same, as if they hadn't moved since morning. Joe expected at any moment someone would shout, "That's not a real clown, that's Joe Peña!" He chased an old lady and a girl into the dancing line.

  The plaza seemed to wheel round him. His paint seemed already washed with sweat. He saw Foote. Jaworski and Harvey had come. The drumming started. At the east end of the plaza, among the very last tourists, he saw the Service rider named Al. At the west end was Billy.

  Just long enough for Roberto to get away from the kiva, Joe told himself. As the circle of dancers began to turn, he slipped through it and used it as a screen. The steps weren't that hard to pick up, a slow 4-4 beat. Hop, slide, half-turn. Without warning, the singers and drummer went to a fast 3-4, then back to the slow 4-4. Joe stumbled, but it was taken, as a joke, because, after all, he was a clown.

  The whole idea was that everyone did precisely the same step in the same way without embellishment or conspicuousness. The circle was a cosmic gear moving in clouds, calling in game, drawing up corn. Any individuality was a loose screw.