Stallion Gate

  "But they didn't say anything, sir."

  "The poet was a lazy pig and made himself a house out of nothing but straw. Straw walls, straw tables and chairs and a straw door he always left open—"

  "I have an FBI report that a Soviet courier is on the way or already here. Suddenly, Dr Oppenheimer takes the time to meet this Dr Weiss and personally escort her here. It doesn't make sense. You've seen her?"

  "It was dark this morning."

  "She's in there with the Oppenheimers right now. It could be a regular communist cell meeting. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what they're saying right now, to know whatever they say when they think they're alone?" Augustino pondered the possibility. He looked up at Joe. "I want you to keep an eye on Dr Weiss. I want you to get close to her. Use your Indian charm. Next time we talk, have something for me."

  The captain started his jeep, reversed and U-turned back towards the lodge. There were laughs in the garden.

  "Or I'll huff," Teller's voice rose dramatically. "And I'll puff. And I'll blow your house in."

  9

  Santa Fe was an hour away, but it was the shopping and social center of the Hill. People went to Woolworth's or Sears during the day, and at night to the La Fonda hotel. On the plaza in the center of town, the La Fonda was a three-story mock-adobe fantasy with exposed beams and wooden balconies. The hotel had also become, thanks to the Hill, an outpost of the FBI.

  It was the task of the Bureau to watch everyone from the Hill who came into Santa Fe. Since everyone went to the bar of the La Fonda, the agents comfortably stationed themselves in the hotel lobby. When Joe entered, half a dozen agents stirred, then recognized Oppy's bodyguard and settled back into rustic leather chairs. The agents called scientists from the Hill "long-hairs." Everyone from the Hill, who could spot them by their straw snap-brim hats, called the agents "creeps."

  The bar was full. Santa Fe was the state capital and attracted a large number of alcoholics who were legislators or lobbyists, plus oilmen, cattlemen and tourists. The bartender was a strategically placed agent, and everyone had suffered while he learned to build a decent martini. For once, Joe didn't see Harvey or anyone else from the Hill. It had taken him two hours to get to Santa Fe because he'd had two flat tires on the Pojoaque Creek shortcut to the highway. Under his arm was a newspaper folded over wrapped strips of gelignite. All he wanted to do was deliver the high explosive and keep on going to Albuquerque and the Casa Mañana.

  "A bourbon," Joe said, since he was there.

  "That's against the law." A gnome in a white suit hopped onto the stool next to Joe. Hilario "Happy" Reyes waved a Havana panatella as if in the comfort of his living room—which, in many ways, the bar of the La Fonda was. "Tsk, tsk, serving liquor to an Indian? I suppose we can make an exception for the Chief."

  "And you," Joe said.

  Hilario was lieutenant governor of the State of New Mexico. More, he was legend. He was from Santiago Pueblo, and Joe had seen old pictures of him dancing in white buckskin leggings at the Omaha world's fair of 1898. But when statehood came in 1912, Hilario had become "Happy" Reyes, a Spanish politician, and had since served in every state administration, only once falling as low as judge. Since Roosevelt's second term, he'd become a Democrat. He was ancient and vigorous, as powerful as a joker in the deck, a worn but still potent magician, an evil Jiminy Cricket.

  "To the home of the brave." Joe picked up his drink.

  "I want you to fight, Joe. I have a boy from Texas. Natural southpaw. Fast. Knocks them out with either hand. Hasn't had a fight that's gone four rounds. Works up on the Hill with you."

  "You're setting up fights again?"

  "Joe, it's the spirit of the times. Entertainment. Baseball hasn't stopped. There's a one-armed outfielder playing for the St. Louis Browns right now. Hasn't stopped baseball." After years of wearing his white planter's hat, like a girl holding a parasol against the sun, Hilario's brown skin had become bleached to a pallor that made his eyes, which were black as tar, all the more piercing. "Joe, when you're as old as I am, you find out that people lead very short lives."

  "I noticed that on Bataan."

  "Then the experience wasn't wasted. Now it's time again for fun. I want you to meet a fan of yours."

  "Harry Gold." Hilario's friend popped out from behind the stool. Gold was short, swarthy and so fat that he looked inflated inside his double-breasted suit. He wobbled on new boots and removed a new Stetson to shake Joe's hand. His hair was dark and wavy.

  "Harry's a New York Jew," Hilario said.

  "I saw you play with Charlie Parker on

  52nd Street

  ," Gold told Joe. "And a couple of weeks ago, at the Casa Mañana. I always wondered what happened to you."

  "Joe used to be the Indian Joe Louis until that nigger music got to him. Joe, you're still popular. The boy has beaten everyone in the state. You're the only action left."

  "I haven't fought for two years, Hilario."

  "That's not so dangerous for a fighter of your quality. Anyway, you're like a thoroughbred coming down in class."

  "The comeback of Chief Joe Peña?"

  "Don't laugh. I can set it up in two days and guarantee you $2,000 just for showing up and laying down."

  "I'm looking for investment opportunities in New Mexico," Gold said to Joe.

  "Why don't you just put your money directly into Hilario's pocket?"

  "That's your problem, Joe," Hilario said. "You don't know how to boost your own home state. Word is, some black marketeer is dealing high explosives to Indians. There are legitimate businessmen who can't get explosives during wartime, contractors and developers, men with money. I want to give you this opportunity, Joe, because that Texas boy is going to beat the shit out of you."

  As Joe worked his way back across the lobby, the special agents were re-reading their sports pages. The headline folded over was "B-29s Pound Nips". A circle of ladies in crocheted dresses were retreating from an Indian selling necklaces. His hair was tied back in a single grey braid, his dirty shirt buttoned at the neck. He offered them one arm draped with turquoise strands and then the other. Together, ladies and Indian moved past the poster of a flamenco dancer and through the double glass doors that led to the dining room.

  Joe meant only to glance in. There were about twenty tables, enough to assemble a miniature, artificial Santa Fe: society Spanish in heirloom mantillas, artists who had fled New York, cultists who had fled California, lawyers not sharp enough to practice law anywhere else, all sitting in the glow of stamped tin chandeliers. The ladies found a table. The Indian stood at it, holding out silver rings and pins in his hand, and still hadn't seen Joe. From the table nearest the kitchen Harvey waved a clarinet. With him were Klaus Fuchs and the woman from the car, Anna Weiss. They were having after-dinner coffee.

  "Back in business." Harvey held the instrument out for Joe's inspection. It was a used Pan American with a chrome-edged bell, the basic high school model. "Picked it up in the pawn shop."

  "This ought to strike terror in the Emperor's heart," Joe said and handed the clarinet back. "Feeling okay?"

  "We had a premature detonation on the test range this afternoon," Harvey explained to Anna. He looked up at Joe. "Just the bloody nose. I'm fine. Sit down."

  "The sergeant has other duties, I'm sure," Fuchs said.

  Anna Weiss said, "Sit, please."

  She wasn't a rosy English fair. Not pallid, either. More of a smooth china paleness, made all the more startling by her hair, black as an Indian's but finer, and rakishly set off by a red lacquer comb. She wore a Hawaiian shirt with red palm trees. The ensemble had a go-to-hell quality that would test the nerve of any escort, let alone a stuffed shirt like Fuchs. At least her accent was softer than his.

  "Through his clear thinking and quick actions, Dr Pillsbury saved the lives of a great many men this afternoon," Joe said as he sat. He laid his newspaper on the table.

  "You didn't tell us, Harvey," Anna said.

  "Tell them, Ha
rvey," Joe said. "How you doused the cordite."

  "No, no." Harvey had been drinking. A blush rose from his neck up. "Joe's the real war hero."

  "I saw him in action this morning," she said. "He defeated a car."

  "It's unbelievable they let him in." Fuchs had yet to address Joe directly, and now he stared at a new irritation.

  The old Indian Tenorio stood at the table and displayed his arms laden with necklaces, nodules of blue and green turquoise on knotted string. Cleto was a Santo Domingo man, and the Domingos sold jewelry up and down the Rio and even into Navajo country in Utah. His eyelids were low and his shirt was stained with trails of brown chili sauce, but the ribbons in his hair were bright and La Fonda not only suffered, it prompted Cleto to approach guests as long as he did so with the minimum of contempt.

  "How much?" Joe asked.

  "Two dollar." Cleto laid the necklaces on the table.

  "Ridiculous." Fuchs picked up a string and held it close to the candlelight. He scratched a stone with his fingernail. "You know what turquoise is?" he asked Cleto.

  "Turquoise."

  "Turquoise is, in fact, a phosphate of copper and aluminum."

  "One dollar." Cleto shrugged.

  "See, you didn't even know what you were selling. I just told you, you should pay me. I've seen these stones. They change color, they fade, they're hardly diamonds. They're stones off the ground."

  "Not off the ground." Joe lifted a necklace. "They have to mine them. The old way is to build a fire against the rock, then throw water on the rock. The rock shatters and you see a seam of fresh turquoise like a blue stream of water. It would be easier to use explosives, but they're impossible to get now." He put two dollars on the table and gave the necklace to Anna Weiss. "For you."

  "You're a gentleman, Sergeant. Thank you."

  She slipped the turquoise string over her head and inside the collar of her shirt. The stones were mixed: evening blue, blue-weed blue, mountain lake blue, corn green. With the shirt and comb, she looked like a ragpicker of all nations. A beautiful rag picker though.

  Cleto quickly gathered the necklaces and money from the table and moved away.

  Fuchs took a deep breath.

  "Sergeant, sometimes your simpleness seems almost clever. You have what we called in Germany a 'peasant wit'. Do you understand? But there is a great difference between cleverness and intelligence. Where you see pretty stones, I see phosphate. Where you see 'longhairs', I see an elite. To be honest, the war will be won by intelligence, by science, not by soldiers. Not to denigrate anybody’s sacrifice."

  "Klaus, we're all soldiers fighting for the same cause," Harvey said.

  "And we all have different causes." Fuchs turned to Anna Weiss. "Take the necklace off, it looks foolish."

  "Willst du lieber einen gelben Stern haben?" she asked. "Oder einen roten?"

  At the sound of German, the entire dining room fell silent. In the hush Harvey whispered, "Joe, that old guy with the necklace stole your newspaper."

  "You're seeing things. You need a cure," Joe said. "Let's get out of here. Let me take you up to some hot springs, some sacred healing waters. You're invited, too," he told Anna Weiss and Fuchs.

  "Impossible," said Fuchs.

  "When?" Harvey asked.

  "Right now," Joe said. "Tonight. I'll lead you in the jeep."

  Anna Weiss said, "Yes."

  10

  High above the Jemez road, a hot spring poured into a well of rock. Pink coralroot crept out of pine needles. Spruce bough and moon floated on sulfurous steam.

  Joe was already in the black water. Harvey bobbled like a rubber duck. Anna Weiss laid her clothes on the edge and stepped in. As she sank, her eyes looked directly into his and she said, "Joy through strength." She went under and came up, her hair molded to the sides of her face.

  "Too bad Klaus didn't want to come up from the car," Harvey said. "He's getting a little testy. It's the pressure from Trinity. Only a month to go."

  "Why Trinity?" she asked. "Why does Oppy call the test site that?"

  "From an English sonnet," Harvey said and mimicked Oppy's hoarse whisper. "Batter my heart, three person'd God, for you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend."

  "Doesn't it have a name already?" Anna asked.

  "Stallion Gate," said Joe.

  "An American name, I like that better."

  "So do I."

  "This is the perfect example of average temperature," Harvey said. "Half of me is cooking and half of me is freezing, but the average temperature is very comfortable."

  Every time one of them stirred, water –pungent, buoyant, black– spilled from the well and over moss soaked with the same sharp smell. Between branches they could see the peaks of the Jemez, some hanging in shadow, some shining with scree. Clouds on an easterly wind made the mountains move forward like a wave.

  "There was a volcano here as big as Everest about a million years ago." Joe spread his arms along the rim of the well. "When it blew, it threw rocks as far as Kansas. There's still a volcanic vent beneath us."

  "Like a deep-banked ember," she said.

  "And all these hills are sacred to the old people. Shrines in the caves. You never know what you're going to stumble into. My father and I were hunting one day, when we both fell into a hole. A hole in the ground, dust swirling around. We'd fallen into an old kiva. We were sitting on the floor of it. All around us were these figures. A man with blue skin, blue as a bluebird, and the head of a buffalo. A purple swallow with the head of a girl. A mountain lion sitting like a man. The kiva could have been five hundred, maybe a thousand years old, but the colors were as bright as if they'd been painted the day before. And in about an hour, they faded. In two hours, you could hardly see them. I couldn't even find the place now. It's filled in with dirt and disappeared, but there are more."

  Joe was surprised at himself for telling the story. First, that he remembered it. Second, because it smacked of noble-red-man-seduces-tourist. Maybe that's what he was trying to do.

  "What is the religion here?" Anna asked. "Was Adam created on the sixth day? Was Eve created from his rib?"

  "Different."

  "How different?"

  "There are different stories, which I remember poorly. Have you seen the clowns at the dances here?"

  "No."

  "Well, when the world was new, a brother and a sister set out across the mountains. He was handsome. She was beautiful. As they slept on a mountaintop, he realized that he loved her. When she woke up, she saw that he did. She tried to escape by stamping her foot and splitting the mountain so that a wide river flowed between them. He was so mad for her that he threw himself on the ground, and his face swelled and bled, and she felt so sorry for him that she swam back across the river and slept with him. The incest made them outlaws and their children became clowns. Not exactly the same story as the Bible."

  "What about everyone else?"

  "Everyone sort of wandered up out of the earth. Hard, finished, completed. I really can't tell you about Indians."

  Least of all the Indian steeping in the water. Why the hell was he taking the chance of stealing high explosive to give the stuff to Cleto for nothing when he could make a killing out of the contractors in Albuquerque? Did he want to get caught and sent back to Leavenworth or shipped to the Pacific? There was an element not just of self-contempt, but of self-destruction.

  "I can tell you about Indians," Harvey said. "When I was eight, some so-called civilized Cherokees threw me into a water tank. The walls were about six feet high and it was half full. It didn't have the aroma of this water, but it had slime, hence amusement value, the pay-off being what I would look like when I hauled myself out. As I climbed out, I noticed the water level sinking just a little bit. I got back in and the water level went up. I went in and out, in and out, then I calculated the volume of the water displaced and its weight and, from that, my weight and volume. I had recently read in National Geographic, between pictures of African breasts
, that crocodiles weighted themselves by swallowing stones so they could swim lower and sneak up on those poor African girls. So I shouted from the water for the kids to throw some rocks into the tank. That was my real start in physics. You know, I'm starting to like this water. Does this mean I'm sweating poisons or I'm cooked?" He paddled back and forth between Joe and Anna Weiss. "What are you going to do after the war, Joe? Still thinking about opening a jazz club? I bet you'd need a silent partner."

  "How silent? Does this include the clarinet?" Harvey stopped in the middle of the water. "Joe, do you think I'm drunk?"

  "Are you?"

  "Pi to ten places is 3.1415926535. Could a drunk say that?"

  "You did."

  "He's right," Harvey murmured to Anna. "In the Texas Panhandle we have tent meetings where people roll on the ground and drool and talk in Hebrew, Hittite and Welsh. It's nothing to speak the simple alphabet of algebra or the garbled Greek of physics. But, Joe, Joe, Joe, I don't want to get you into trouble."

  "How could you get me into trouble?"

  "I wouldn't say anything, but I wanted you to understand if I disappear. Because you're my good friend."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Joe, I'm quitting the Hill."

  "Quitting?"

  "Nobody remembers that we started this project only because Hitler had his project, so he couldn't blackmail us with his bomb. Now it looks like he never made one. Now we say we're going to use it on Japan, which doesn't have any project."

  "Hold it. This afternoon at the HangingGarden, you nearly killed yourself working on this bomb."

  "I was undecided then. I thought I'd let Fate choose for me."

  "Well, that was a glorious pose, you and the cordite. This still doesn't make any sense to me. If the Japs had the bomb, you don't think they'd drop it on us?"

  "But they don't. We do and we have to make the ethical choice. Joe, I didn't leave Amarillo to become a physicist to atomize a hundred thousand human beings. When Oppy came to Columbia and recruited me, it was to make a bomb so Hitler wouldn't use his. That's all I signed up for, that's all anyone signed up for."