"A buckle shone," Ben said.
Joe snatched his shirt from the ground. "Really? And you desperadoes slipped away? How many were there?"
"Just two," Ben said. "Those Service riders."
"No one riding drag? You sure are lucky. Two cowboys came straight into the sun. You flush and nobody follows. You came back here to your house?"
"Your house," Roberto said. "We thought they might be watching Ben's."
"Naturally. You could have kept on going."
Anna buttoned her shirt. "Joe," she said, "he's blind."
"Blind and crazy."
"Have you climbed the ladder in my dream yet?" Roberto asked Joe.
"See what I mean?" Joe asked Anna.
"The Service came by with a Federal warrant," Sophie said. "They were talking about sabotage and the FBI. They said they were watching the bus terminals, so Ben and Roberto should give themselves up."
"You saw the warrant?" Joe asked.
"I can read," Sophie said stiffly.
"They need your help, Joe," Anna said.
"To what? I already gave them two chances to escape, but they wanted to play cowboys and Indians, only now it's getting a little rough. I told them there was a war on, they didn't believe me. What do you care? A minute ago you couldn't get out of here fast enough. Come on, I'll take you back. You're shivering."
"I gathered some sticks there," Sophie said. "We could be warm if you have a match."
"You have to help them, Joe," Anna said.
"I don't have to do a damn thing. I'm not responsible for them. Don't tell me what to do. I made a fool of myself for you, but that's over, right? Over, and you're going. I don't want to hear any more about ethical choices from you. All I want is you in the jeep, you on the train and gone."
"Joe," Sophie said. "Please."
In a depression in the sand was driftwood that looked like antlers. He knelt and lit the shavings underneath with his lighter; yellow flames branched from stick to stick. In the glow, Ben's face was dusty and scraped from a fall. Roberto's hands were wrapped in bloody bandages. Joe looked up. Was the entire universe Indian, or were there scattered craters of sanity?
Roberto's eyes turned to the heat. "That spy on the cliff. Whatever happened to him?"
"He means Fuchs," Joe told Anna. "So far, Roberto, he seems to be getting away, which is more than I can say for you. A Federal warrant? That means another country, at least until this thing blows over."
"Smokes?" Ben asked.
Joe gave him his Luckies. "Keep the pack."
"I prefer Chesterfields," Ben said, but pocketed the cigarettes. "What do you mean, 'another country'?"
"Mexico's the nearest one. You can be another Pancho Villa, Uncle."
"I don't like Mexico. They do something funny to their beans."
"Yeah, they mash them into shit and pour flies over them. That's why they have such good beer. Uncle, are you listening? Mexico's your only chance. The war'll be over soon, people will calm down and then you can come back here."
"You'll take them?" Anna asked.
"Well, this really has nothing to do with you, does it?" Joe said. "You'll be in Chicago or somewhere. We will be a fond memory. You'll look at your pot or your silver pin and you'll always think of us. And, Lord knows, you'll always be grateful for your short but fascinating sojourn in Santiago."
"Stop it, Joe," she said.
"The Indian mysteries revealed, the firing of the clay."
"Please stop."
"The exotic nights with an authentic chief."
"I'm sorry."
"Joe, will you take them?" Sophie asked.
"Yeah. Okay, okay. It's not that hard. It means going to El Paso and taking the trolley into Juarez. We'll put some sunglasses on Roberto and a serape on Ben. Easy. But I won't be able to take them through until Sunday night."
"That's the night of the test," Anna said carefully. "That's the night you're fighting."
"Test of what?" Roberto asked.
"The weapon," Joe said.
"The gourd of ashes?"
"That's the one."
"And the ladder? You're going to climb it to the gourd?"
"I'm not climbing anything. I'm not even going to be there for the blast. The general wants me to drive around and make sure no wild Apaches wander on to the test range. That's why I can get away and fight. After the fight, we'll go down to the border. The trick is for you to hide out until then. and for you to get to the fight with a car."
"A serape?" Ben muttered. He already had the manner of an emperor going into exile. "Where are you going to fight?"
"Below Socorro is a little town called Antonio. There's just one cross-street. Make a left and go half a mile to the Owl Café. At the back of the café is a motel. The fight will start in the motel courtyard at 8 pm. By nine it should be over and the cars cleared out. That's when you show up."
"What if you can't go?" Anna asked. "What if there's a problem?"
Joe talked to Ben and Roberto. "Park in the courtyard and put out your lights. Wait five minutes, no more. There'll be MPs all over the place. If I can't join you in five minutes, that means there's a real problem. There won't be, don't worry, but in case there is, tell the driver to just go back to the highway and turn south to El Paso and then put you on the trolley car. When you find a place in Juarez, call the Casa Mañana in Albuquerque and leave a message where you're staying. If there's a change in plan before then, I'll tell Felix Tafoya, who seems to be just as good being a clown or tossing lightning wands as he is pushing a broom."
"Good." Roberto grinned. "You figured that out."
"Yeah. And Ben, your former brother Hilario told me the other day he'd never missed a dance in Santiago. I didn't see him at the dance when they came for Roberto, but let's assume Hilario was absent-mindedly telling the truth about his perfect attendance. He fingered Roberto and left. He'll be at the fight, so keep your head down."
Sophie came out of the dark, taking off the blanket she wore as a shawl. Joe thought she was finally joining the circle at the fire, but she threw the blanket over the flames, smothering them as she stomped on the blanket. "Indian Service," Joe told Anna.
"You're sure I can keep the cigarettes?" Ben asked.
"Yes. Get out of here," Joe said.
"That's good of you," Ben said in Tewa. "You're a good boy."
All the dogs on the east side of the pueblo were, by now, barking the alarm. Sophie and Ben led Roberto up the river-bank and around a screen of thimbleberries. Joe and Anna climbed to the jeep and pulled on their shoes. "This is, you know, much more interesting than a walk round Göttingen," she said.
"Very few cowboys in Göttingen," Joe said.
He started the jeep. Headlights out, they rolled past cottonwoods and water tanks and on to a dirty road between the pueblo and fields of barley and sorghum. Over peach trees was a glimpse of the church's low brow. The air stirred the smell of roasted chilies. Joe drove along an irrigation ditch towards the wooden planks that bridged a cross-ditch. The planks coughed as the jeep passed over.
"There!" Anna said.
Fifty yards ahead, the two Service riders were on horseback. Al, the older one, waved both arms for Joe to stop. Billy seemed to have acquired a handgun with a long, bright barrel.
Joe turned behind a windbreak of sunflowers. If he was stopped, he was AWOL. Anna was breaking security. At the same time, he could see what the riders were up to. Sophie, Ben and Roberto had taken to the ditch and Billy and Al were waiting for them to come up. The fields were a maze of ditches, all fed by the mother ditch at the north end, along the highway. If the fugitives reached the corn fields, where the rows of stalks were shoulder-high, the riders would never catch them.
Joe eased through the sorghum, the grass beating against the wheels. The riders paid no attention. The jeep rolled into the corn, mowing a row as it went. The stalks bent, broke. Red corn, blue corn, black corn, beaded corn, Indian corn. At the end of the row, he stopped.
&nb
sp; To his right, about twenty yards down the dirt road, Al was shouting, "Open her up, Billy."
To Joe's left, thirty yards up the road, Billy was leaning out of his saddle to turn the wheel that would raise the wooden gate of the ditch. Roberto, Sophie and Ben were neatly trapped. The flood of water would drown them or drive them back to Al.
"Get out," Joe told Anna. "I'll come back for you."
"I want to go with you," she said.
"I don't want you with me and I don't have time to argue. I want you waiting here until I come back and drive you nice and slowly to the Hill, so you don't miss your train in the morning."
Anna clutched the back of the seat. "No."
"Okay," Joe said.
He slipped the jeep on to the road, turned and stood on the accelerator. Billy was still leaning from his horse and yanking the gate wheel when he heard the engine approach. Twenty feet from Billy, Joe hit his headlights. The cowboy wore a gold sateen shirt and an expression of astonishment. His horse reared and toppled backwards out of the glare. Joe heard man and mount hit the water of the mother ditch, then the jeep was across the planks of the ditch and on to the highway, heading north.
A hundred yards up the highway, Joe spun around because he had to come back down the highway and along the mother ditch to get to the Hill. Billy was screaming he couldn't swim. Al had ridden up to the ditch and in the wan moonlight sat patiently on his horse, aiming his gun with both hands. A speckled Colt, Joe remembered. There was no way the cowboy would really shoot, he thought. Not an Army jeep.
As he passed in front of Al, Joe changed his mind, turned off his headlights, slammed on the brakes. The gun flashed, bobbed, flashed again. He floored the accelerator. The third shot was over-corrected, rushed, behind the jeep. The shots after that sounded like a tin pail being futilely kicked.
For miles, Joe and Anna drove without lights and without saying a word, as if the dark and quiet sustained the moment of escape and delayed the saying of goodbye. He and she were so different, he thought, that any words divided them. It proved how strange the Hill was that they'd met at all. Let the last little triumph roll as long as possible – for ever if possible.
He had to turn the lights on when they hit the switchbacks. As the jeep climbed, Anna acted busy by cleaning bits of corn stalk from the floor. She found two items that had shaken loose from under the seat– two zigzags of carved wood.
"What are these?" she asked, without directly meeting Joe's eyes. This is how it ends, he thought. Without real words, without even looks.
"Roberto's crazy wands."
"What are you supposed to do with them?"
"Call down lightning. Water your fields. Bring back the buffalo. Stop the bomb."
"You can do that?"
Joe took the wands from her and threw them sideways from the jeep. They spun, glittered and then plunged into the dark of the canyon.
"Not anymore," he said.
FRIDAY, JULY 13
25
Orders were no stopping en route, but as Joe went through Antonio, he slowed by the Owl Bar and Café enough to see Army engineers and MPs stationed in the motel courtyard. He gained speed again, leading a convoy of two jeeps, two CID sedans, a carry-all truck of spare parts and a covered truck bearing Jaworski and the sphere of steel and high explosive that was the implosive shell of the bomb.
"The MPs are there to evacuate the town in case of, you know…" Ray Stingo rode in the lead jeep with Joe.
"What's it like down here?" Joe asked. Ray had been in and out of Trinity for a week.
"Typical Army fuck-ups. We got some scientists, some of the million-dollar whiz kids, laying some wires out in the bushes and a B-29 comes over shooting some antelope. Fifty-caliber machine-guns. Scientists are running, diving, trying to fly. You see, the rest of the Army doesn't know about this."
They were already out of Antonio. Ray took a long, swiveled view of a far-off, flat horizon of buffalo grass, gray sage, yucca spears. "Fucking place for a test. You gotta shake your shoes every morning to get out the scorpions. You gotta bang a wrench on the jeep to chase the rattlers. There's gypsum in the water to fuck up your plumbing. Every five minutes you gotta run into the bushes and then it's you and the shit and rattler all over again." There was alkali in the water, too. Ray's black spit curl was plaster-hard. "It may be a new weapon, but it's the same Army."
"The odds?" Joe asked.
"Two to one. Odds on the fight are so good they scare me. I was thinking, I could be real set up on the Hill. I'd just piss away the money back in Jersey. I think I'll stay."
"There won't be any Hill after the war."
"Chief, I got one smart idea my whole life, okay? We didn't build this bomb for the Japs, we built it for the Reds. And we didn't even fight them yet."
Besides the convoy, Joe had seen no other Army traffic on the road. Stallion Gate was little changed. New barbed wire, new fence posts. A checkpoint that consisted of a tarpaulin-covered lean-to that provided a miserly wedge of shade. The MPs had been issued with pith helmets. Before leaving the Hill, each man in the convoy had been given a pink pass with a T for Trinity, which they exchanged at the gate for round white badges.
"Foreign Legion, Chief." Corporal Gruber was one of the MPs at the gate. His arm was still in a sling. His eyes were red from alkali dust. "A hundred degrees every day for two weeks. Fucking badges? Security? There must be fifty guys every night who walk off the desert for a beer. Single file between the snakes." He wrote Joe's name under the proper date and time on his clipboard. "Friday the 13th. Some day to bring down the bomb. Feeling good, Chief?"
"Good enough."
Gruber licked dry lips. "It's a question of confidence, right?"
"To a point."
Gruber waved him through. "One more fight, that's all we ask."
The ranch access road that Joe remembered as a faint trail in the snow was newly graded and topped with colichi, a sand-and-clay compound that had quickly disintegrated into fine white powder. Clouds of dust followed another convoy far ahead. Jaworski joined Joe and Ray in the lead jeep. He had a portable FM receiver and around his neck he wore the Polaroid all-purpose red goggles issued for the test. With his dark moustaches, he looked like a touring grandee.
"We're supposed to monitor the receivers at all times here, in case of an accident," Jaworski said. "Keys are supposed to be kept in ignitions at all times, in case of evacuation. That's why the roads are so wide. Myself, I wonder what you're supposed to do if there is an accident and you're not near a road and you don't have a real field radio you can actually transmit on."
Some static-ridden communications were erupting from the FM. Mainly, there was music. Carmen Miranda.
"Don't ask me how," Ray said. "The Army spent months finding a special channel just for us? It's the same channel as the Voice of America. The Latin edition. Orders are, ignore the sambas and the bombers."
"Well, what do you do if you're stuck out in the open and the bomb, accidentally, goes off?"
"The flash, the burst of gamma rays and neutrons would kill anything within a mile and a half of the tower. If you could get a couple of miles away and find a depression, a stream–"
"A stream in the Jornada del Muerto? That sounds like planning. There couldn't really be an accident, though, could there?"
"Yesterday, Joe, they were testing the firing circuits on a dummy bomb in the tower. Out of the blue, a lightning bolt. Imagine if the real bomb had been there. By the way, Anna Weiss asked me to tell you goodbye. She left early this morning for Chicago. She borrowed Teller's car to drive there, otherwise I suppose you would have driven her to the train station."
"I suppose so."
There were a couple of hundred men at Trinity, but they were so spread out over hundreds of acres that only a few could be seen at a time. Still, the closer the convoy got to Ground Zero, the more evidence of activity there was. A cable strung on a seemingly infinite line of stakes. The first blast-wave gauge, a box designed to bounce i
n the springs of a hoop. Photographic bunkers gray as shells on a beach, periscope stalks aimed south at a tower seven miles off in the clear, trembling air. Ground Zero. Six miles from the tower, the convoy reached the North 10,000-metre shelter, a timber bunker that sank into a protective slope of raw earth. Bulldozers browsed on the slope, tamping it. From North-10,000, a fresh tarmac road ran straight to the shot tower. Single cables multiplied into racks of wires. Planted in dead sage was an unmanned instrument bunker, a concrete block with portholes for cameras.
"Skyshine hole." Jaworski pointed to the single socket aimed away from the tower. "To monitor the general neutron scatter."
Skyshine? It sounded pretty, like the glitter of sequins shot in the air.
"Nervous?" Joe asked.
"Things have changed," Jaworski said. "We used to detonate shells using a long string. No one had a gauge. A charge worked or it didn't. No oscillographs or ionization chambers. What hasn't changed is that there will only be a handful of men who actually assemble the bomb. There'll be a hundred others screaming that this seismograph is vital or that pressure gauge must be repaired, but the only thing that counts is the weapon, right? Of course, in the war against the Kaiser we dropped nothing much greater than grenades from planes, and there was no background neutron scatter."
The tower at Ground Zero looked like an oil rig without the pipes, a spindly structure of steel beams and tie braces that rose 100 feet to a platform and galvanized-iron shed perched in the sky. One tower leg had steel steps with landings every twenty feet. A wooden ladder reached from the bottom landing to the ground. Foote was waiting on the ground in his sombrero and British Army shorts. His high explosives team of half a dozen draftees sat in undershirts, bathing shorts and handkerchiefs worn on the head pirate-style. As the convoy wound around and stopped at the tower base, CID officers jumped from the two security sedans and formed a skirmish line, pointing submachine-guns at cactus and rabbit brush.
Foote ambled at their backs. " 'They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in Heaven, is he in Hell, that demned elusive Pimpernel?' Joe, you brought my goods?"