"Except the Army, Navy and Marines."
"The ethical choice–"
"It's a hell of a luxury. It's not one that enlisted men have."
"Well, as a civilian–"
"You're a civilian because Oppy got you a draft deferment, so you could come here and build a bomb. I'm your friend and I'm happy for you. So build the bomb and end the war. Boy, Captain Augustino would love this conversation. Augustino would haul you off the Hill in a car trunk."
"I'm prepared to suffer for my decision."
"Suffer for your decision? There are men dying on shitty piles of sand all over the Pacific. There are men stuffed in the holds of ships heading to Japan for the invasion. I think they're going to suffer for your decision. Who else have you told?"
"Just me," said Anna.
"You helped Harvey come to his decision?"
"I hope so," she said.
"Well, there ought to be room in Augustino's car trunk for both of you. Good luck," Joe said and heaved himself out of the water. Quickly, he picked up his uniform, belt and shoes. This wasn't the idyllic night in the hot springs he'd had in mind, not at all.
Harvey stood as tall and defiant in the water as he could get.
"Are you going to report us?"
"No, but I'll let you geniuses find your own way down."
"Stay," Harvey begged.
"Yes, tell us more fascinating Indian experiences," Anna Weiss said. "Lift more cars. Play more waltzes."
On the road to the Hill, deer dashed in front of Joe's headlights. They were mule deer, five or six of them. He braked and skidded to the edge before he stopped. His lights picked out the scribbling flight of moths, the dart of a nightjar, and then faded over the long drop to the canyon floor.
The world was full of victims, all too eager to take you with them.
11
Light lay in the blue shutters and between the threshold and the door. The house had two rooms, a kitchen with a wood-burning stove and a larger room for everything else. The adobe walls were whitewashed with kaolin. There were a cot, maple bureau, enameled table and chairs, dusty pails, an open cardboard box full of pots, and a corner fireplace that was black and empty. On the walls were a crucifix, the Virgin, Saints Michael and Christopher (wading through water, the Christ child on his shoulders), photos of Rudy in his confirmation suit, dressed in feathers and bells for a dance, in his uniform and garrison cap.
Joe had heard that Rudy was dead, that the B-17s at Clark Field were loaded with fuel and lined up in rows when the Japs came over. Each bomber blew up the next one, and the last B-17, trying to take off, rolled over a gun battery before exploding. Not that bodies were found.
He sat on the hard bed and smoked, using a pail as an ashtray. He noticed how he didn't look up and he knew it was out of fear. Fear that Dolores would come in from the kitchen with a dishcloth in her hand. Or that Rudy would be standing at the foot of the bed, whining, wanting to box. It was the first time in years that Joe had been in the house and it was just as bad as he'd thought it would be. Smaller. There was nothing so claustrophobic as memory.
Rudy could still be alive. Hiding out in the jungle. In a prison camp. In Japan.
Of course, Fuchs was right. If the bomb worked, all the Rudy Peñas in the world wouldn't measure up to a single Oppy, Harvey or Fuchs.
Goddamn Harvey and his need for approval. Why tell a sergeant that you're leaving the war? Joe hadn't gone back to the Hill. He'd picked up a couple of bottles at a bar and went out target shooting, looking for unlucky coyotes. He figured he'd wake up in a motel in Esperanza, the Spanish town across the river from Santiago. Instead, he woke up in Santiago, in this house.
At least he'd made up his mind. He was going to tell Augustino. The captain wanted something on Anna Weiss, and Joe would give it to him.
The house groaned, or maybe it was the sound of himself. The kiva in the ground had nothing on this. He dug in his pocket for another cigarette.
The door swung open. Dull, blinding sun filled the room and in the doorway stood a phantom.
"Rudy?"
"Who?" Joe shielded his eyes.
"Mrs Quist. Joe? That's you?" The wraith stepped in and became a tiny lady in a white Lana Turner suit, turban and sunglasses. "You're the last person I thought I'd see here."
"You and me, both." He could see how wrinkled his khakis were, the butts on the floor.
"Pots, Joe. This is always my first stop."
"I'll get out of your way." He heaved himself off the bed. His shoes were still on. As soon as he put the carton of pots on the table for Mrs Quist he stumbled outside to the pump. Her Hudson was parked alongside the jeep.
Morning was come and gone. Around Santiago rose thin columns of black smoke because the noon stillness was a good time for firing pots. In the back yard across the road Sophie Reyes tended a fire of pine, cedar, bits of two-by-four piled around a milk crate filled with pots. Sophie plucked up a piece of wood that seemed to be nothing but flame and put it where the fire seemed sparse. When an ember rolled free, she swept it back into the fire with a brush of yucca stalks. A soot-blackened tin sheet blocked any unwanted breeze. Everything she did was like Dolores. They had been sisters, and Sophie had the same helmet of gray hair, wore the same traditional, one-shoulder dress, smudged apron, Montgomery-Ward shoes.
Ben Reyes came out through a screen door into the yard. His braids hung round a puckered, leathery face. He wore no shirt, only a vest, kilt, trousers and moccasins. Usually his contribution to Sophie's work was to sit in a chair and sort feathers. Today he was head to head with another doddering ancient with a walking stick.
Joe pumped water into his hands. Rinsed his mouth. Combed his hair with his fingers. With the sun directly overhead, the one-story adobe houses appeared waist-high. The ladders leaning against the roof lines were bleached, the wood twisted; the ladders looked balanced on their own shadows. The pueblo was a maze of dirt roads and alleys, outdoor ovens, corrals and open porches, homes distinguished one from the other by a blue frame on these windows, a green frame on those. The Peña and Reyes houses were at the edge of the pueblo, but an alley ran directly to the plaza and he could see the cottonwood with its tire swings. He watched two boys run across the plaza, climb on to a roof, gather their courage in a breath and jump to a lower roof, and he remembered making the same heady leap, and the stirring of husks and chili dust when he landed.
Santiago. Never mind that he'd spent his adult life in New York and toured the entire country, East Coast, West Coast, Mexico and France. Before the war he'd gone to Paris with Big Chief Russell Moore, a trombone player, a 410-lb Pima from Komatke, Arizona. In the Palais des Sports, Joe knocked the French heavyweight champion three times through the ropes and still lost the decision because the French kept throwing their champion back in like an undersized fish. Big Chief had this trombone at the Palais and every time the crowd threw their fighter back, he played a slow, rising slide. That night, Joe and Big Chief drank absinthe from brandy snifters in a café unworried about war because the French had a bigger army than the Germans.
That was six years ago. Now, he rolled like a stone back to where he'd started. The funny thing was that the war had freed most of the men in Santiago, drafted them out of their bean fields, and sent back the one man who'd got away. The mills of the Gods were slow and all fucked up.
Jazz was liberation. Joe had always been a counter-puncher and that's what bebop was all about, hooking off the jab. Charlie Parker claimed to be part Cherokee or Cree. Any dressing room of black musicians was full of would-be Indians. Those were Joe's Indians.
He saw Ben and his friend approaching the jeep. Ben's companion was in dirty coveralls, braids, and the white cotton blanket of a Taos elder, but he wasn't old, just blind, his eyes sunken and shut. Trachoma, Joe thought. Until sulfa, trachoma had been common in the pueblos. No one caught it now, except the sort of fanatic who wouldn't use Anglo medicine.
"Spring's coming, Uncle," Joe said.
"Spring's coming very nicely now." Ben scowled and introduced his friend. His name was Roberto.
The three men spoke Tewa. Tewa was the language of a number of the Rio Grande pueblos and it was expressive in describing the beauty of the clouds, rain, water, corn. Tewa was also the language of a people who had wandered through the wilderness arguing. No pueblo existed for long without splitting into two parts that despised or, at least, suspected each other. So, Tewa was rich in phrases and intonations of derision and scorn.
"Still cold in Taos?"
"A little cooler." Roberto's voice was quizzical, as if he were picking up a new object with it. "You come up to Taos much?"
Taos thought it was the top of the world, maybe one step below the Hopi, but very close to heaven. It occurred to Joe that what he didn't need at the start of the day was a religious nut; what he needed was a coffee or a cold beer.
"Not since the war started, actually. Always mean to. Uncle, I never got a chance to thank you. December, you stumbled into a hunting party. You must have been out trapping in the snow. You came through at the right time."
"Thank Roberto, not me. Wasn't my idea."
"Ben said the other hunter was hunting you," Roberto said.
Joe remembered that the two men coming out of the woods into the light of the dawn were connected by a rope or a thong. Ben and a blind man.
"Then, thank you," Joe told Roberto.
"He was hunting you?" Roberto asked. "He was crazy?"
"He was an officer. Smoke?" Joe felt for his cigarettes. His pocket was empty.
"Have one of mine." Roberto took a thick, hand-rolled cigarette and stuck it into empty space.
"Thanks." Joe reached. The things always tasted like dung, he thought. Roberto put one in his own mouth and Joe lit his, then his own. "That's some smoke." Joe coughed.
"From Taos."
Roberto held on to the side of the jeep. He had a long Spanish nose. His hands looked surprisingly strong, the nails caked yellow. So that was how he got by; mixing adobe by hand. It was something a blind man could do. Roberto wouldn't be able to make much adobe, but what he did make would be fine stuff.
"We know what you're doing up on the Hill and we want you to stop it," Ben said.
Neither Joe nor Roberto paid attention to him.
"I met your mother once," Roberto said.
"Yeah?"
"I guess you were in New York. She was a clan mother, wasn't she? Winter Clan?"
"You're a Winter Clan?"
"Summer."
"She was winter." For Christ's sake, everyone on this side of the pueblo was Winter Clan. Then he remembered Roberto was blind. "This is mostly Winter Clan here."
"We want you and the Army to stop it," Ben said.
"Well, Ben," Joe said, "I doubt very much you know what's going on up on the Hill, but if you want to stop it, you tell a general, you don't tell a sergeant."
"Your mother made great pots," Roberto said. "She had that special clay."
"Yeah, the white clay."
"You were the only one besides her who knew where she got it, she said," Roberto told Joe.
"Her and Sophie."
"You're making poison," Ben said.
"Ben," Joe asked as softly as he could, "Remember Pearl Harbor? Bataan?"
"You play the piano, she said," Roberto told Joe. "And I met your brother Rudy."
"I am telling you now to stop it."
Joe was trying to control his temper.
"You really ought to take your case to Roosevelt, Ben. Or maybe to the boys from Santiago who are out fighting right now. Or to their mothers."
Ben spat in front of the jeep. "Talking to you puts me in mind of the worm. The worm has no ears and no balls."
"Well, Ben, your contribution to the war effort, sitting and farting and sorting feathers, is known and appreciated by all."
"It's been a good visit," Roberto told Joe. With his walking stick he hit Ben on the shin to locate him.
"Any time," Joe said.
Ben acted like there was a whole lot of conversation yet to be had, but Roberto gripped the old man firmly by the arm and, blind or not, led Ben across the road to Ben's yard.
Crazy. First Harvey, then Ben Reyes.
"I'll give you a dollar for each one," Mrs Quist stood in the doorway and brushed dust off her white suit.
She'd been coming from southern California to Santiago as long as Joe could remember. Once she'd been a visible woman, a little more tanned each year. Now she was wrapped up like an ambulatory burn case. Her voice was nasal, as if it were burned. Joe followed her into the house.
Five pieces were lined up on the table. A polychrome pot with a plumed serpent chasing itself so closely there was no leaving from tail to jaw. A plate as black and shiny as coal but perfectly round and decorated with a ring of a hundred finely-drawn feathers. A brown pot grooved like an acorn squash and as smooth as polished stone. A tall wedding pot with elegant, twin necks. A little black seed bowl, round as a ball, with a small hole.
"This house is a mess. If Dolores saw it…" Mrs Quist sighed from aggravation and waved away the dust.
"A dollar each?"
"I'll lose money. If you take in the expense of my travel, the ration cards for gasoline, hotel, food, closing down the shop, there's no way I'll see a profit. I've been sick, you know."
"You did say a dollar."
Mrs Quist carefully put the squash pot into a box padded with newspaper and wood shavings.
"I can't sell them in Santa Fe. There aren't any tourists, just soldiers. Soldiers buy postcards, not pots. Probably, by the time I get back to Los Angeles, half of these pots will be broken, so I'm paying five dollars for two or three pots."
She wrapped the plate and dropped it gently into the bottom of another box, then wrapped the polychrome pot and set it on top of the plate.
"I may not be able to sell any of these. The war changed everything. People are coming back from France and Italy, they've been all over the world now. They're going to want fine art, going to want to collect paintings, Picassos, Monets, not Indian pots."
"That sounds tough."
"That's the way of the world, Joe."
He couldn't see her eyes through her dark glasses. Her mouth was a lipsticked oval. He'd grown up with the annual visits of Mrs Quist, with her annual lament. He couldn't remember when there'd been a good year for selling pots.
"Most traders are only working on consignment now, in fact." She packed the tall wedding pot with special care. "They wouldn't give you any money at all and then you'd have nothing."
"Nothing instead of five dollars?"
Mrs Quist packed the bowl last, and then she laid and smoothed a dollar note on the table where each piece had stood.
"There."
The notes crinkled. One slowly spun.
"Aren't you going to pick them up?"
"Later."
The breeze was nothing more than warm air drifting into a cool adobe house. The spinning dollar drifted to the table's edge.
"Well, it's your money, you do what you want with it."
"Oh, I'm only doing what Dolores would have done if she were here, Mrs Quist. She would have listened to everything you said and she would have taken a dollar a pot. You're going to make $20, $25 apiece? You've always made that kind of money out of Dolores. She always knew, I used to tell her, but she was too embarrassed for you to say anything. She was embarrassed for your greed. But she said you could have the pots, so you can. Except this one." Joe removed the seed bowl from the box. "Now, that's your dollar bill on the floor and you can pick it up if you want." Joe hadn't meant to frighten her, but Mrs Quist stepped back as if he were going to hit her. "No? Then let me help you go."
Joe carried the boxes to the Hudson and carefully laid them on the back seat. He held the door for her while she got quickly behind the wheel, put in the ignition key and pressed the starter. Her sunglasses trembled until she caught her breath.
"Joe, if I were you,
I'd pick up all that money and clean up that house before Dolores sees it."
"Dolores is dead. Died last year." Joe pushed the car door shut. "I thought you knew."
A Cadillac was squeezing through the alley along the back fence of the Reyes' yard, and Joe paid no more attention to Mrs Quist as she pulled away. The Cadillac was a white coupe with chrome louvers and it maneuvered like a fighter plane up to the pump. The driver's window rolled down and a thin, black arm hung jauntily out. A diamond ring winked from the pinky.
"Hey, you are back home, Joe. I looked for you last night at the Casa and you weren't there." Pollack grinned and shook his head, expressing separate emotions at the same time. "Someone said they saw your jeep outside here. That's good. It's good to go home." Pollack had a sly, yellow smile, wide nose and a flat forehead that curved into tight gray hair with blue-black scalp shining through. When he spoke, his hands had the sort of fluttery movements that put Joe in mind of fans at gospel meetings. When he got excited, his eyes looked like they would pop with emotion. He always dressed in a silk shirt during the day and a tuxedo at night. Altogether, he gave the impression of an alley cat who had achieved a dignified old age. "It's good to see you back here."
"You drove all the way for the sight?"
"I was looking for you. I can't go up that secret mountain to get you, I've got to catch you when I can. I could've used you last night. Had a piano player must've been German. All he knew was polkas. Must've been a POW."
"Sorry."
"It's your club, too, you know."
"I haven't heard you say that for a long time."
"You don't share the profits, mind, because your daddy Mike never put any money in. But we were partners. His name is on the papers. He was going to buy in, but he never had the chance. I always sent a little money this way to your mother, you know. I didn't have to, but I did. What is that you're smoking? Smells like it collected in a hoof."
"I know." Joe dropped the homemade and stepped on it.
"Thing I learned was always be sharp. A person in the public eye has a responsibility to look sharp."