Stallion Gate (8 page)

“It is your Christian duty to defend the Philippines. You recruits will be trained by the finest instructors in the American Army. They will be equipped with the most modern weapons. They will be led by the greatest general. You will be the bastion of Christian democracy in the Pacific. When the Japanese hordes descend on the Philippines, we will stop them on the beaches, we will push them back into the sea, we will sink their adventure in the bottom of Manila Bay.”

The
teniente del barrio
had a pet iguana on a string. Around its neck the lizard had a chain of gold with a crucifix. It raised its crest and hissed with each tug of the string, and the cross sparkled against scales.

“This American sergeant has come from a great desert
over the ocean to help defend your islands. He has been especially assigned to turn your patriotic young men into a great new Philippine Army. Listen to him, obey him, follow him, and the Philippines will never fall. Thank you.”

The lieutenants stepped back. The
teniente del barrio
hesitated, then clapped. Everyone else clapped, so softly it sounded like rain. The lieutenants saluted. Joe saluted, and at once the recruits did, too.

But a week later the Japs didn’t sail into Manila Bay: they wiped out the air bases at Clark Field and Iba, landed at Vigan and Legaspi, at each end of Luzon Island, and started marching toward Manila in the middle. Joe remembered one of his recruits who pissed on a bomb, a dud that had torn through the bell tower of a church. It was an act of frustration because the ammo for antiaircraft was so old and corroded that it detonated under five thousand feet. Mitsubishi bombers flew at six thousand and dropped bombs all day long. So the recruit stood on the edge of the hole the bomb had made in the sacristy and unleashed his personal torrent of scorn down onto the dud. He was big for a Filipino, in a loose shirt, shorts, American boots. Joe was having a smoke by the altar. Only, it wasn’t a dud; the bomb had a time-delayed fuse. High explosive expanded at about ten thousand feet per second (that’s all explosions were, expanding gases), but Joe always believed there must have been some moment, however brief, of shock, understanding and disappointment in the boy’s mind before the bomb turned the church tower into the barrel
of a gun, and him into the projectile that was shot up through it. Some moment, some understanding. If brief, at least bright.

Across the mesa, an afternoon caravan of MPs moved slowly, avoiding each rock and possible snake. As the men and horses passed out of sight, Joe slipped out from under a piñon tree and down the chute of the Hanging Garden to the loading apron. He flipped a whittled stick in one hand. The control bunker was empty. He had thirty minutes before he was supposed to be at one of Oppy’s rare parties back on the Hill.

He had replaced the padlock on the magazine bunker months before. He’d left a key inserted, and the scientists meticulously guarded it as if they were carrying out strict Army security. He opened the lock with his own copy of the key, squeezed through the door, shut it, turned on a flashlight and set it on the shelf. On both sides were shelves of meters, gauges, yaw cards, film magazines, copper and alloy tubes. In a cage in back were the high explosives. Joe could make out Torpex, Baratol, Comp B, Pentolite, all TNT-based explosives. Also cordite, Primacord, smoke pots, gelignite, primers and Navy powder. The cage went from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling, and its door had a combination lock. With his arm, he could reach over the cage top and nearly touch the high explosive.

Joe took from his pocket a buckskin strap and tied it to one end of the stick. When he was a kid, he and his friends used to hide along the Rio in the winter and
trap juncos. The fat gray birds liked to flock on banks where the snow had melted. The boys tied horsehair nooses on willow branches above the river’s edge and caught two birds at a time, singed the feathers off in a fire and ate them hot. Delicately, Joe slid the buckskin noose over a brick of gelignite. The explosive would go to Santo Domingo, a pueblo south of Santa Fe; there were some veterans among the Domingos, some experts with explosives. The gelignite fell on its side. He shook the stick to draw the noose tight, gently lifted the brick clear of the shelf and brought it over the top of the cage to his free hand. It was cool as clay. The second brick slid loose as it came over the top and he caught it waisthigh.

The New Mexico National Guard had arrived in Manila in September of ’41. Supposedly they were chosen because New Mexicans were brown, spoke Spanish and would mix well with Filipinos. Rudy Peña had volunteered for the Guard because of his brother, Joe.

Joe hardly remembered Rudy. He was ten years younger, pudgy, quick to cry. His black hair stood up like rooster feathers. He was a wetter of the bed he shared with Joe, a longtime crawler, a late talker. During the worst winter, when the Army came through Santiago in trucks and threw off fifty-pound sacks of dry milk that were frozen hard as cement bags, Joe dragged a sack in each hand while his little brother clung to his leg and bawled, his face a mask of frozen snot.
The harder Joe tried to kick him off, the tighter he held on.

By sixteen Joe had left the pueblo, and all he saw of Rudy was in photos from Dolores: Rudy and rabbits, Rudy on a horse, Rudy in a tie, the soft and surly face developing into a stranger with dark, nearly Arab looks. After the years of fighting and music in New York, it was a shock to hear that he’d meet his brother in the middle of the Pacific.

Joe was training the newly constituted Philippine Army, and when he got back to Manila the Guard had already rolled out to Clark Field. The history of the Guard was a huge and intricate joke. Coming from landlocked New Mexico, they were trained in coast artillery. On arrival, they were given British cannons that had been bought as surplus from World War I. Within a week of the invasion they were fighting as infantry in the jungle. General MacArthur said the Philippines would never fall and President Roosevelt dispatched convoys of ammo and supplies to Manila, but out at sea the convoys turned around and headed for Europe, and MacArthur slipped away one night in a torpedo boat.

Before Joe ever found him, Rudy had vanished. The whole New Mexico National Guard vanished on Bataan. When Joe escaped and got Stateside and toured defense plants, the colonel in charge of publicity called him a walking advertisement for the Army, which seemed illogical to Joe, since he was one of a handful of men who got out of the Philippines compared with all the thousands who didn’t.

Dolores seemed to agree with Joe. She wrote him not to come back to Santiago because as far as she was concerned her only real son, Rudy, was dead. So instead of going home, Joe took the colonel’s wife to bed and got shipped to Leavenworth.

One trick the Japs had was to tie themselves high up in the fronds of a coconut palm. A sniper would eat a handful of rice, then swallow water from a canteen to make the rice swell and the stomach feel full. They could stay up in a tree for three days. But this one had been up for a week or more, tied so tight he couldn’t fall, swaying in the breeze and watching the world go by: planes, patrols, clouds. Joe wouldn’t have seen him if he hadn’t stepped on a rifle and looked up at the face staring down from the palm. The head was black as a coconut: holes for eyes, hole for a mouth, shirt and stomach burst open. A flying advertisement for Bataan.

When the Japs called at night, “Hey Joe!” “Over here, Joe!” Joe often wondered whether Rudy Peña had ever thought there was some confusion, that they’d come for the wrong man.

Without even trying to be quiet, Joe closed the magazine bunker door, snapped the padlock shut and followed his flashlight across the apron toward the Hill. He figured he owed the Army nothing.

Oppy had taken over the house of the headmaster of the old Ranch School. It was a stone-and-timber cottage behind a stand of spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The sun had just set over the Jemez, leaving the sky bright and the mesa dark. Joe had strapped on his Sam Browne belt and .45. His guard post was the garden.

Seen through the windows the cocktail party had the quality of the pages of an illustrated book being idly turned. The Oppenheimers entertained infrequently and briefly, and when they did, only the highest level of the Hill’s scientific community was invited, so the guest list was basically European. Their faces were rosy with tension and drink. Joe saw Fermi and Foote arguing, the bemused Italian rocking impassively on his heels while the Englishman gesticulated with a highball. Fermi’s and Teller’s wives, two small, dark women, leaned close for a confidence on the sofa. The ensemble of faces changed from moment to moment, but everyone inside seemed to glow.

“Sergeant, you look lonely.” Kitty Oppenheimer was
carrying a scotch out for him. With a smile, she would have been a pretty woman. Her brown hair was a tangle. She managed to look blowsy and sharp at the same time.

“Thanks.” Joe took the glass.

“Shoot to kill.”

“I will.”

“Shit.” She tripped on a boy’s scooter and landed on her back in a flower bed. “My zinnias. Nothing’s going right. Let me rest, for God’s sake.” She waved away Joe’s hand. “They’re singing the ‘Marseillaise’ again in there. Give me a smoke.”

Joe set the drink on the grass, put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “You’re pissed as a skunk,” he said.

“Goddamn right I am. Sergeant, what I meant to say when I came out was that you look lovely. You do. All dark and Byronic out here in the gloaming. She’s pretty, isn’t she, Joe? And young. He was engaged to her sister once, did you know that?”

“Who?”

Kitty rambled on. “He was a real hero to Anna, I suppose. Men do that to little girls. Then when the girls grow into women, the men try to stay romantic figures. There are any number of interesting psychological aspects. I have my breath back.”

She gave Joe her hand and he pulled her to her feet. The story was that she was part European nobility, related to Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr.

“Can you stand?”

“I must return to my duties as hostess of the Royal Society of Prickless Physicists.”

“Can you walk?”

“The funny thing is, at a certain point you don’t worry about other women at all. If you’re smart, you worry about girls.”

“Take a keep breath. Today Germany, tomorrow the world.” Joe picked a flower from her shoulder. “You can do it.”

“I look like Ophelia.” Kitty had a throaty, corroded laugh. “I always thought I’d be Lady Macbeth.”

After she returned to the house, Joe poured the scotch out. The party would be over soon and he’d go to Santa Fe to deliver the gelignite waiting in his jeep; he’d have his drink then. Besides, some guests were wandering into the garden now to take advantage of the evening, the hour between the heat of the June day and the chill of the mountain night. The altitude of the Hill was seven thousand feet. Voices seemed to carry, or maybe they were just louder. In the last month, since the defeat of Germany and death of Hitler, all the émigrés seemed wrapped in a rubicund patriotism, as if their Americanism had been confirmed. They’d make Trinity work, no matter what. He saw Kitty inside with Oppy and the woman who had been in Oppy’s car that morning. Kitty sat on the hearth and the new arrival stood at the far end of the fireplace while, between them, Oppy leaned, almost contorted, at an angle across the mantel. The toe of his Wellington touched Kitty’s knee and his long fingers stroked the glass that the younger woman had
set on the corner of the mantel. He looked like a poet dictating. Kitty looked like a toughened muse. The younger woman seemed both wary and fascinated. The azalea was no longer in her hair.

“One grenade here could change the history of physics, couldn’t it, Sergeant?”

Captain Augustino had rolled up to the garden gate and stopped his jeep behind Joe’s.

Joe saluted. “Yes, sir.”

“What in the world are they doing now?”

A radio was being handed out a window. The sound of a piano drifted across the garden to the cars. Joe hadn’t realized until now that the mesa crickets were chirping away, vying now with Beethoven. A sonata with insects luring the entire party outside, except for Oppy and the two women.

“I think that’s the Hill station, sir. I think that’s Teller playing.”

Los Alamos transmitted a signal that died before it reached the valley. Teller was sloppy on technique, but his playing had a lot of momentum.

“Sergeant, what would you say if I told you that Mrs. Augustino is dead? That she was shot by an intruder back in Texas and that the intruder escaped?”

The Beethoven was coming to a crescendo. No one in the garden could hear what was said by a captain and sergeant at the gate.

“I’d say you were lying, sir. Why would you kill her when you can make her pay for the rest of her life?”

“Sergeant, you show real promise. Come closer.”

The music was followed by light static, and there was a hush of anticipation as people stood around the radio. Cigarettes glowed in the shadows.

“Sir?”

“Wait,” Augustino said.

“Once upon a time in a dark wood there lived three little pigs”
—a deep voice with a Middle European accent issued from the radio in the grass. Teller again, reading bedtime stories.
“The first little pig was a poet. The second little pig was an artist. But the third little pig was a practical pig who enjoyed working with hammers and saws.”

“Go on,” Augustino urged Joe.

“I didn’t drive Oppy today, so I have nothing to report.”

“With Dr. Oppenheimer, there’s always something to report. He went all the way to the railroad station to pick up a Dr. Weiss. They came by Santiago. You met them. What did they say?”

“Nothing. Their car went off the road, I helped them out, and that was it.”

“Sergeant, it wasn’t the grace of God that got you out of the stockade; it was me. I can send you back to that hole anytime.”

“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—”