Clarita reappears—dressed, her hair combed—and tells us she is ready.
“Clarita,” I ask. “Did Enrico die?”
“—sure, I already tol’ jou he is die.”
“No, I mean: why did Eduardo leave these things behind?”
“…worth a fortune,” Lester adds.
“He leave them for Enrico.”
“Enrico was still alive when Eduardo left?”
“Si—he go. Like that.” She snaps her fingers. “—break Enrico, in hees heart.”
“He left his wife in the same way.” I snap my fingers.
“—he has wife?”
“—and four children.”
“I don’ understan’,” she says.
I look at the pictures of Edward and Enrico again, This is us, they say, when we are happy.
But it was the 40s.
And he had once had the admiration and respect of Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan.
And he was working on his memoirs.
As ever, he was working on his MYTH.
When you’ve immortalized great chiefs of state, tribal chiefs and Presidents, when you’ve broken bread with Red Cloud, T.R. and Geronimo, what does your private life have to do with the way you want your name to be remembered?
In his own mind he was CURTIS, the signature—E.S.C., the monogram—and who on earth would care, in the gristmill of posterity, if the only thing it said on his gravestone were the two words, LOVING FATHER?
Lester tells Clarita there will be wheelchairs at the hospital and he offers to carry her to the truck but she insists on going in her moto because she doesn’t like to “be push,” and within minutes we’re on the road, the two of them chatting up a storm in the front cab while I hold onto the wheelchair with both hands to keep it from rolling all around the flatbed of the truck, my hair flapping in my face as we speed along under the now predictably scorching Vegas sun.
I go inside with them so I can show the I.D. that we found to the nurse at the nurse’s station on the cardiac floor and then while Clarita sits beside “Johnny’s” bed I tell Lester I’m going to check into a hotel to work the phone and Internet to try to locate Curtis Edward’s son before the weekend starts and places of information, like schools and businesses, shut down.
I give him my cell phone number and he agrees to call me later and in half an hour I’m standing in the middle of my own loft suite at the Alexis, an off-Strip hotel across the street from the Hard Rock but far enough away from the noise to guarantee some quiet. I draw a hot bath then get down to work checking the online White Pages for Elkton, Virginia, and then Mapquest to find out where the hell Elkton, Virginia, is. There are four Edwardses listed in Elkton and after I have my bath I call them all, asking in my best non-threatening I’m-a-nice-person voice if any of them are missing an old man named Curtis.
Not one.
If the son was ten years old in 1970, as the article says he was, he would have graduated high school in ’76 or ’77 so I dial Elkton Regional High and ask to speak to someone who can help me trace a graduate, owing to a “family emergency.” I get a really nice sounding lady who digs out yearbooks for those years and finds a Curtis Edwards, Jr., in the senior class of 1977.
“Would you happen to know if he went on to college after high school?”
She asks me to hang on a while and then she comes back and says they don’t keep those kinds of records but that someone in the office remembers Curtis Edwards, Jr., and would I like to speak to her. I say I would and then a second nice sounding lady comes on the line and tells me she doesn’t remember Curtis, Jr., himself, but she remembers he was well known in the town because he got written up in the local paper when he won a scholarship to the Air Force Academy “out there in Colorado.”
I call Colorado Springs and ask to speak to the press office and tell the young man on the other end my tale (“family emergency”) and after some time he’s able to confirm that Curtis Edwards, Jr., graduated the Academy in June 1981.
“Is there any chance that you can tell me his address?”
“No, ma’am.”
“The town he lives in?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Because of Homeland Security?”
“Because, I think, of the Constitution.”
“Can you say if he’s active or retired?”
“I can say that he’s on active duty, ma’am.”
“Can you tell me where?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Can you tell me his rank?”
“Ma’am, why would you want to know his rank?”
I take a breath. Sir, I say: “I’m trying to find a man whose father has had a serious heart attack and may not make it through the weekend. This man’s last name is Edwards. Aside from having an entire Air Force Base named Edwards, how many Edwardses do you think you might have on active duty? Ten, fifteen? Twenty? If I knew this gentleman’s rank it would—”
“That would be a colonel, ma’am.”
I Google Col. Curtis Edwards, Jr., and come up with nothing.
I order lunch.
I think about how to find a colonel in a haystack, and then when my room service arrives it dawns on me to call Nellis Air Force Base right here in Vegas a couple miles away and ask to speak to a public relations liaison. Which I do, while sitting on the bed, picking at my thirty dollar salad. My call is passed from one department to another and while I wait I doodle the colonel’s last name on the hotel notepad, followed by his first name. Then I draw two lines and stare:
EDWARD /S/, CURTIS
“How can I help you, ma’am?”
I explain the story (leaving out my personal involvement) to a man who says he’s the public relations officer and then he asks if he can call me back after he relays my story to Personnel and I tell him no, I’d rather hold. After a while another person comes on the line and says, “I understand you’d like to speak to Colonel Curtis?”
“Yes, please. It’s a family emergency.”
“Please hold while I connect you—”
Are you kidding me? Is this a trick—?
“Colonel Curtis’s office.”
Um…
“—hello?”
Sounding like a prattling fool, even to myself, I give my name, my occupation, my nine-digit Social (am I paranoid?), my cell phone number and a brief description of the reason for my call (“I have information pertaining to the current whereabouts of his father”) and am told with icy dispatch that my message will be passed on to the Colonel.
I put my cell phone down and stare at it because as everybody knows, that will make it ring.
Ten minutes go by, while I eat my salad. Fifteen.
Guy probably has a busy schedule.
Flying planes around.
Maybe, god forbid, he’s in Iraq.
I pace, and think of other things I could be doing. I didn’t handle this well. I should have left the number of the hospital. The important thing is not for me to talk to the Colonel but for the Colonel to talk to his father. But what if he doesn’t want to? What if, after thirty years, he’s made up a story in his mind about why his father disappeared, a tale that permits him to forgive or to accept the fact? Why would he want to hear a different tale—a counter-story—at this point in his life? We tell ourselves the things we want to hear, not necessarily the things that are the truth, and it’s selfish of me to want to know what story the Colonel has manufactured for himself in the name of mental health.
Or what story Clara Curtis or any woman, for that matter, married to a man with more than one sexual identity manages to tell herself on those dark nights when the unspoken truth must be too obvious.
I don’t love you.
Or perhaps I love you but I love someone else as well.
I love another way of being and this life is killing me by inches and I need to get away from here or die.
What did the Curtis children—Harold, Florence, Beth and Katherine—think about their father’s dis
appearances? I know the stories that they told themselves had at their core a classic mythic entity—a larger-than-life Father, the Father as a Hero. I know they created for themselves the story of a spiritual antithesis, even if it wasn’t true, of what a modern kid might do, of a false deity, a modern day Flat Daddy. For the Curtis children el jefe, the Chief, could do no wrong, even when wrong was all that he was doing. So I wonder how it was for this Air Force Colonel, and yes my self-investment drives my curiosity because I had to do a lot of magical explaining to myself in the years after my father’s suicide and I’m frankly curious about how others—we, generic humans, as a tribe—create whatever stories that we need to just so we can cope.
At four o’clock my cell phone finally rings and it’s Lester calling from the pay phone by the nurse’s station to say that things aren’t looking good.
“Heart function,” he attempts to fathom as he speaks: “They’re saying that he doesn’t have enough.”
“Where’s Clarita?”
“She’s here. I’m going to take her home. Then I’ll come back and stay with him again tonight.”
I tell him that I think I’ve found the son.
“That would be the miracle. To see the two united. I’ll go tell the old one not to die just yet.”
I call the general number for Nellis Air Force Base again and ask for Colonel Curtis Edwards. I get an answering machine with a female secretary’s voice and this time the message I leave is a winner for its clarity and precision—I identify myself and say the Colonel’s father is dying in cardiac intensive care at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas and leave that number.
Done.
Tomorrow I’ll go home.
I walk up to the Strip and lose myself in the crowd, trek all the way to the Venetian for the kitsch pleasure of prosecco by the fake canal, then wander back down to the not-so-hip Mon Ami Gabi at the Paris for an early dinner of moules frites where I can sit street-side on the Strip and watch the crowd and catch the water show at the Bellagio across the street.
By ten o’clock I’m back in bed at the Alexis, sound asleep, too exhausted to even dream, because that’s just the kind of Vegas party animal I am.
At six forty-five a.m. my cell phone rings. CALLER I.D. BLOCKED. A resonant male voice. Am I speaking to Miss Wiggins?
“You are.”
“This is Colonel Edwards of the United States Air Force.”
And I guess I did dream, I dreamed the speech that I would make to him if he called back because I find myself sitting up in bed and reciting a coherent argument for him to meet with me.
I tell him that two days ago I had received an unexpected call, myself, from Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas claiming that my father had suffered a possibly fatal heart attack.
“My father died on April 28, 1970, in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. A date and place you might remember,” I say.
In the absence of a response I tell him the hospital representative had told me that the man in Sunrise Hospital had convincing documents to identify him as my father so I had driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to see him for myself.
“Events have proven that the man is, in fact, your father and that he adopted my father’s name after finding his body in the Park that April morning.” On his continued silence I ask, “Have you called the hospital yet, sir, as I previously suggested?”
I wait through another silence and then say, “I found your father’s Bible at his residence, sir, with your boyhood picture and I’d like to hand these over to you if you—”
“Am I to understand from this that you’re still in Las Vegas?”
“Yes, sir. If you’d like to meet I—”
“—in my office.”
“I could be there in an hour.”
“I’ll instruct the Gate.”
For a civilian, the combined terrain of Nellis Air Force Base and Range is as frightening a place as an orphaned foreign country under military occupation, or as segregated from the mainstream nation as the Sioux, Arapahoe or Apache were meant to be, on reservations. Maybe all our military bases are as tightly sealed as this one, but I doubt it, because with her multiple locations around Vegas, Nellie holds a record in land size as well as the questionable honor of having surrounded the nation’s official Atomic Testing Site throughout the 50s and into the next decade, and if you approach the Bombing and Gunnery Range from Tonopah, from the north, on Nevada Route 95, you begin to see the twisted logic of our government’s program of enlightened land use: there is just plain nothing else that could have been done with this godawful land so why not bomb the hell out of it and strafe it all to kingdom come.
When we were still marketing aboveground nuclear testing as NOT DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH and a dandy source of pyrotechnic entertainment for your neighborhood, the flyboys out at Nellis used to post the bombing schedule in the local papers so Vegas denizens could power up the briquettes in their backyard barbecues and get out the lawn chairs for a little bit of awesome fireworks courtesy of uncle sam. The last time we blew something up at Nellie, albeit underground, was 1991 and I suppose there may be some conspiracy theorists out here who might notice that that was around the time the Vegas Strip started going pyro-and hydrotechnic in its own way with crowd-pleasing sidewalk shows.
The Gunnery Range is still a hotbed of half-life particles and conspiracy speculation but the Base, where Nellie’s personnel are quartered, is tucked behind Sunrise Mountain, a twenty minute drive from the Strip, straight up Las Vegas Boulevard—and its entry regimen in these days of heightened Homeland Security is no laughing matter.
A smile will get you nowhere in this atmosphere.
Granted, I’m used to looser “secure” venues—even on the Sony lot or at Universal I have to show a photo I.D. to get through the gate and when I went for jury duty last month at the Van Nuys Court House in the San Fernando Valley I had to show two pieces of identification and have my bag X-rayed and walk through a microwave (just kidding). Rather than increasing my assurance in my safety these procedures make me feel the opposite of safe, they make me feel more vulnerable, less saved from what, exactly? From what exactly are these procedures designed to save me? Pull over to the side and step out of your vehicle, ma’am, please, I’m told at Nellie’s super-fortified Gate. I smile and say I’m here to see the Colonel. A German shepherd on a tight rein has some olfactory fun around my Michelins and two guys in white helmets and combat gear go over every inch of my car’s interior while another guy in a bulletproof vest investigates the undercarriage of my PT Cruiser with a tilted mirror on a stick. That makes me feel safe. A mirror. A device I use in my own bathroom. To tweeze my eyebrows.
A rectangular piece of plastic with the letter F is placed on my dashboard, the letter showing through the windshield, and I’m told to drive to the next checkpoint, several hundred feet away, and hand the piece of plastic to the MP there. He gives me another piece of plastic with the letter G on it and directs me to turn right, toward a parking lot about a quarter of a mile away down a well-patrolled thoroughfare, where I’m asked to show my photo I.D. again and then instructed where to park and where to enter the nondescript cement building straight ahead.
After a bag X-ray, a body screening followed by a full bag search in which every item in my bag is scrutinized, including the Bible, I’m directed toward a reception desk and then a woman in an Air Force blouse and skirt comes to get me and leads me down a gray-carpeted hallway to a closed door. She knocks, discreetly, twice, opens the door and I find myself in a large office, tastefully appointed in the Spartan manner, face to face with a tall fit man in his mid-forties who I can only conclude must be the Colonel.
My experience with military men above a certain rank is that they are very clean, almost impeccably clean in their comportment, as if training for the possibility that they might have to kill someone or at least order others to that duty, has had a compensatory effect of demanding of them unwarranted but perfect manners so before the Colonel can begin to charm me
with his sugared brass I draw out the picture of him in elementary school and hand it to him with the Bible. This is how I found you, I explain. He takes these from me and points me toward a chair facing his desk. There’s a sofa and two armchairs in the near corner of his office but he directs me, instead, to a place where his large desk will be between us. I slide the Polaroids of his father with Ann-Margret and Dean Martin across the surface and tell him, “There are more like these.” I watch him read the newspaper clipping in the Bible and look at the photographs. I watch him as he starts to piece years and this new knowledge together and at a certain point, through his ensuing silence, I begin to feel that watching him invades the privacy he needs at such a moment so I look away. I let my gaze travel over the things he’s chosen to display: Maps. There are maps on all four walls, framed topographical projections of the Earth, three dozen of them, with detailed isometrical pictographs and color washes defining rising elevations, mountains, ridges, canyons, flats in smooth concentric circles—maps drawn looking down on earth from somewhere high up in the air—and I’m reminded that this man across from me, by the very nature of his job, has seen the Earth in ways, at heights and speeds, that Da Vinci only dreamed of.
The Colonel breaks his revery by reaching behind him to a bookshelf and bringing forth a twelve-inch plastic model of a dark green painted helicopter transport with two rotors, the kind I recognize from the Wagnerian beach scene with Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.
“It was my birthday,” the Colonel says. “I was ten years old.” He spins one of the little model’s rotors with a finger. “…and I loved making model airplanes.”
He looks at me.
“Pop had gone to F.A.O. Schwartz—that famous toy store in New York. To buy me this. And he’d been driving all night, straight back from New York City, to bring it home for me, in Virginia, as a surprise. It’s an Apache,” he explains.
“The rotors move.”
He demonstrates.
A long silence passes between us. And then I have to ask, “—what happened?”