Stallion Gate (15 page)

“You want to sense something?”

Ray started to turn the tommy gun, but a rock slide had poured over a hairpin turn in the road and Joe had to brake and turn without locking wheels.

“That’s why I expect our problems at Trinity will be largely psychological.” There was a rustle of paper. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions?”

Joe downshifted. The ambulance slid over stones to the edge of the road. Larger rocks bounced in front and rang off the crankcase underneath.

“Sergeant Stingo, if you heard that you were in close proximity to radioactive material, would you feel comfortable, concerned, a little anxious, very anxious?”

“Shit,” Joe said.

The red taillights of the truck in front swung wildly.

“Boulder,” Joe said.

It was the size of a doghouse and sat in the middle of the road. The truck cleared it on the right and slammed into the rock wall, scraping sparks off granite. Joe headed for the same space, skidding, holding the wheel steady. Ray and tommy gun were pressed against the windshield. As the ambulance slipped past the boulder, Joe saw the truck ahead hit the wall again. Wrenches, jacks and tires spilled from the tarp, bouncing in the ambulance’s headlights. As the truck stopped, nose into the wall, the ambulance slid through between the truck’s tailgate and the edge. The lead car had halted in the middle of the road. Joe swung in, braked and pulled
the emergency brake at the same time, coming to rest against the car bumper only a second before the tail sedan rammed into the rear of the ambulance. A tire wobbled out of the dark and bounded by the headlights. Security officers ran up and down waving flashlights and tommy guns. Even Ray was distracted.

A scream that was both feminine and unhuman erupted by Joe’s ear, followed by a powerful bell-like gong as Santa flew out of his seat headfirst and hit the ambulance roof. He seemed still to be suspended in midair when Joe looked past him to the rear of the ambulance and saw the empty steel square and eight slack straps. The plutonium canister had broken loose and rolled forward, glinting and warm, to nudge Santa’s loafers and Argyle socks. The plutonium couldn’t explode. Joe would have been happy to explain this to Santa in order to reduce his psychic tension, but Santa had dropped to the ambulance floor.

“Gee,” said Ray.

“Orders are we don’t stop for anything,” the lieutenant in charge said when Joe pointed out the slumped figure of the analyst. “He’s already in the ambulance. We’ll leave him there.”

“He’s out cold, sir. He probably has a concussion.”

“Look, Sergeant, we’re lucky no one in the truck was killed.”

“What about this?” Joe pointed to the canister. “The strap hooks are broken.”

“God, we can’t have that thing rolling around. Somebody’s going to have to hold it. We’re losing time. Choose
up, one of you has to take it, or wedge it with something.”

Already, the truck, fender crumpled, was weaving around the ambulance.

The lieutenant ran off to the lead sedan. Again the convoy was reassembling itself.

“I’ll wedge it.” Ray’s eyes were red but unwavering.

As Joe let out the clutch, Ray slipped over his seat to the rear of the ambulance. Cautiously the vehicles moved down the mountain. Clouds scattered over the stars. There was a scuff of cloth and scrape of metal over the ambulance floor. Joe looked back and saw Ray tucking Santa into a corner. He couldn’t see the canister.

Ray was panting when he returned to his seat. “It was hot, Chief. Like a can of soup.”

It shouldn’t have broken the hooks, Joe knew. Eight steel hooks shouldn’t have snapped. It was as if the canister had leaped forward at the first opportunity. I’ll tell Oppy about Augustino, he thought. If they ship me off the Hill, I’ve got nothing to lose except a phosphorescent glow.

“Like a tin can of hot soup, Chief. Like it was alive.”

Down the rest of the mountain curves to Durango and all the way to the hills of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, there came from the back the sound of Santa rocking heavily as if the ambulance were a careening hearse.

Six clowns wore white paint with black horizontal stripes around their arms, legs and torso. There were black circles around their eyes and mouth. Black-and-white cotton caps twisted into horns. Short black scarves around the neck, knee and wrists. Long black breechclouts trailing behind. Rattles of deer hooves tied to the waist. Moccasins.

Together, they joked and prodded the dancers into a great circle in the middle of the plaza. The men wore regular work pants and handkerchiefs tied into headbands. The women were in dresses. Man, woman, man, woman, each holding an ear of corn in one hand and a yellow zigzag of wood, a lightning wand, in the other. Elders, singers and a drummer with a big Cochiti drum stood along the north side. Plaza and cottonwood framed the sky.

A new touch was the patriotic blue armbands with gold “V”s for Victory on all the dancers. One man had also come out wearing sunglasses. A clown stole the glasses, slipping them on another clown as the drumming
started. Deep voices lifted and the dancers began turning counterclockwise like a wheel.

“We don’t need Captain Augustino and his security apparatus,” Oppy told Anna. “Los Alamos has a much better defense. The Hill isn’t a place; it’s a time warp. We are the future surrounded by a land and a people that haven’t changed in a thousand years. Around us is an invisible moat of time. Anyone from the present, any mere spy, can only reach us by crossing the past. We’re protected by the fourth dimension.”

They and Joe and the rest of the tourists watched from the broad shadow of the cottonwood on the south side of the plaza. Back from Washington that morning, Oppy had changed to his Western gear: jeans, boots, silver buckle, hat at an angle. Anna wore her bizarre jumpsuit and a rakish fedora.

“It’s perfectly animistic,” Oppy said, “like an ancient Greek fertility rite. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. The ears of corn, of course, are phallic symbols.”

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 showed a brave smile.

“You’re not going to dance?” Anna asked Joe. 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.” He 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 from Santiago had told people on the Hill, “Something will 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 was an absence of young men, who were in the service. Grandparents and girls moved happily to the sonorous beat, gently beating 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 put at least some 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 the mission of Santiago sat at the west end of the plaza.
With adobe walls seven feet thick at the base and thirty feet high, the church looked like a monolith. 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 Old 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 callused hands and a chickentrack neck. The younger had long blond 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?”

“Just 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.

“You don’t—” Billy stood up.

“By the way, that shirt,” Joe said. “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 Montenegro Peña, 1899–1944.” She had bought it along with Mike’s in anticipation; there was nothing more exotic to Dolores than a rose. He picked up the butt Billy had thrown down, fieldstripped 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 breechclout and another was strapped to his belly. A fur mustache was stuck to his lip, gold stars were pasted on 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 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 to move 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 blessed it and a fourth put the firecracker 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 it 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, 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 single file, holding on to the
long black tails of one another’s breechclouts, through an alley on the north side of the plaza and 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 alive than you said.”

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