The Secret History of Las Vegas (13 page)

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elephone poles lined the road like a girder of wood and wire. It seemed like they were all that kept the road in a near-straight line, desert falling away on each side. Salazar drove so fast the poles blurred alternately into one, then back into a row like a serial crucifixion, becoming more presence than fact, more blur than thing, lurking always at the edge of consciousness, but then quickly and conveniently forgotten. With each slight turn or sway in the black thread of road, the sun shifted, alternately blinding, alternately bathing everything in a halo. Rocks and hills rose out of the brown scrubland like ancestors birthed from myth. Sunil could see why deserts inspired both the belief in God and the call to seek Him here. Wasn't Jesus tempted in a desert such as this, forty days into a fast? And didn't the jinn inhabit the dark caverns of caves and sand dunes? And who wouldn't believe—especially lost or camped out here, in the time before this road and electric and telephone wires everywhere and cell phones and the noise of it all—that things were supernatural? He knew it made no rational sense, but he did believe in ghosts. Who wouldn't after what he had seen in the death camp at Vlakplaas?

All the nuclear explosions held in underground aquifers here pointed to how hollow the desert really was. Even before the bombs, there had been the endless mining expeditions during the gold rush. It was easy to see the traces on the surface—ghost towns littered the desert—but it seemed that subterranean Nevada was left to legend. These legends, of an earth populated by spirits, were so rampant that even Herbert Hoover, thirty-ninth U.S. president, himself a onetime Nevada hard-rock miner, had written about them.

Did you know that this place is rife with myth and history, Sunil said to Salazar, who was stuffing a handful of orange Cheetos into his mouth.

Nope, he said, spitting crumbs everywhere.

Dusting the shower of orange crumbs from his arm, Sunil continued. The moon landing is believed to have been faked somewhere here, he said.

Bullshit.

Well, you know it won't be the first hoax involving science and the moon, Sunil said. In 1835, Sir John Herschel, on the front page of the
New York Sun,
claimed to have found intelligent life on the moon. He described vast forests, seas, and lilac-colored pyramids, even herds of bison and blue unicorns.

Sounds like he could have a job out here designing hotels and themed attractions, Salazar said.

You see these telephone poles? They are only here because of lynching, Sunil said.

That's fucked up.

People usually are. When they were first introduced into neighborhoods, Americans hated the poles so much they chopped them down. Made the landscape ugly, they said. But when someone discovered they could lynch blacks in the middle of town using the poles, they really caught on. Doesn't hurt that they are shaped like crosses.

Do you think anyone was lynched on one of these poles?

Hard to say, although I doubt it. These haven't been here long enough. There is only one recorded lynching in Vegas history, which means there were probably less than a hundred actual ones. That's racist math for you. Still, the thought of driving under them is disturbing.

Yeah, fucked up. There was awe in Salazar's voice. Why do you like history so much if it always tells you that we're a race doomed and full of shit?

I keep hoping to find out that we aren't, Sunil said.

And are you guys in South Africa as fucked up as us?

At least, if not more, Sunil said.

Shit.

Yes, sir, shit.

The landscape alternated between sand and rocks, ghost buildings and dead-end exits and a barrenness that defied that particularly American notion of manifest destiny. They drove in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Sunil's mind turned to the myths of the Nevada desert and the twins.

Everything old and telling about the human past is always buried, always submerged, in earth, in water, in language, in culture, one overlapping the other. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that humans couldn't wait to escape the past, to escape from things no longer desired. Forgotten. Until a new generation, their wounds sufficiently blunted by time, arrives on the scene to begin excavations.

He wondered what some future generation or even an alien culture of anthropologists and archaeologists would make of the current city of Las Vegas if it became lost under the desert long enough. Would it be read as the perfect Earth culture, its acme? With representatives from all over the world building what could only be described as embassies? Each casino no longer the bizarre facade it was but rather coming together as the true United Nations? Or would it be seen as the home of world religion, each casino a representation of one group or the other? The temples were already here—pyramids, sphinxes, lions, Roman ruins, statues of liberty, all sainted icons, and the famous searchlight on the Luxor some beacon to an indifferent god? It was not without precedence—many a bizarre and crazed cult of holy people had journeyed here to flower and then die in the anonymity of the desert, only the strong surviving, like the Mormons.

With the push westward, the link to the civilizing European force grew weaker, and it wasn't long before Las Vegas and her inhabitants developed a serious self-esteem problem. Nevada governors, businessmen, and newspapermen were all in search of a truth and an ancient mythology that would validate them, make them the cultural equal of the eastern United States, prove that this land and its recent arrivals weren't so raw, that there was an antiquity here to rival Europe.

And soon, submerged and subterranean cultures began to play a flirtatious hide-and-seek with the fevered men who so desperately wanted these myths to be true. Before Lake Mead flooded towns and even cities in the 1930s, drowning out the Mormons still lingering on the fringes of Mammon, ancient civilizations were found that would be lost again to the waters of that blue fractal—but not before they fueled the lunacy of the Cascadian theory of human evolution.

Captain Alan LeBaron, amateur archaeologist, who explored much of Nevada and Utah from 1912 to 1930, claimed that the human race began here. The evidence piled up. In 1912, LeBaron claimed to have found Egyptian hieroglyphs on a rock in Nevada that dated back to before the Egyptian civilization. In 1924, LeBaron discovered the hill of a thousand tombs, each tomb exactly two square feet and concealed under stones fitted without the use of mortar. Then Babylonian and Mesoamerican heliographs, ideographs, and glyphs were discovered. Then caves covered in Chinese script and the skull of a man believed to be seven feet tall and whose cheekbones clearly identified him as Chinese but whose hair proved he was of Caucasian origin.

And on and on it went, one discovery after the next; proof that human life and culture, of all races in fact, began here in Cascadia and then spread to the rest of the globe. LeBaron contended that the colonization of America by whites was simply a result of the biological imperative to return to the land of their origins and reclaim it.

Sunil jerked back from his ruminations when Salazar pulled off the road into a gas station.

Are you all right? You looked lost there for a while, Salazar said, killing the engine.

I'm fine, Sunil said, yawning and stretching.

Salazar got out and headed for the convenience store. He returned with a new bag of junk food.

What have we got here, Sunil asked, opening the bag of food. There were more Cheetos, some Snickers, a bottle of water, a browning banana, a small Coke, and a fistful of Twinkies.

Wasn't sure what you wanted, so I got a bunch of stuff, Salazar said, backing out of the gas station and merging back onto the main road at seventy without a glance at his mirrors.

You drive like an Egyptian taxi driver, Sunil said.

I'm the police, Salazar said.

What's with all the junk food anyway, Sunil asked.

Great American road-trip tradition, Salazar said. You have to eat enough junk to gain a pound a mile.

But Twinkies?

What are you talking about? That's bona fide American grade-A cuisine. Guaranteed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Shit, have you even had one?

Yes, I have, and I must say it was one of the most disappointing moments of my grown life.

What the fuck? Come on, you're joking, right?

When I was a kid in Soweto, every comic book I read, from
Batman
to the
Silver Surfer,
all had amazing ads for Twinkies. It was sold literally as the food of superheroes. I could almost taste the creamy vanilla sinfulness of one of them. Oh my God, how I wanted one. I don't think I've ever wanted something as bad as that, except perhaps sea monkeys. I waited thirty years, until I got here. First thing I bought when I got off the plane was a Hostess Twinkie. I couldn't believe how awful they tasted! Like sugary petroleum jelly. I was so mad, so fucking mad.

Salazar laughed. If it's any consolation, they took us all in, he said.

Agh, man, you have no idea how disappointing it is to want something since you were a child so much you begin to develop a nostalgia for it, even when you've never had it. And then to finally eat it, and it's like a mouthful of rancid grease.

Easy there, Doctor. It's just a cake.

But it wasn't just a cake. Not to me.

What about the sea monkeys? Fare any better there?

Fuck no! Magical families of smiling creatures with nice faces and crowns that would perform underwater stunts for you and keep you entertained? A child's best friend, instant pets, all that shit. I sent off for them but all I got was a tank of dead brine shrimp.

Salazar was laughing so hard his eyes were watering.

Well, at least mine were alive, he said. But I can see how disappointing it might have been if you were expecting literal miniature underwater monkeys. You know what, Doctor? I'm going to buy you real live sea monkeys when we get back to town. Hand me a Twinkie, will you?

S
till daydreaming, Salazar asked Sunil.

They'd been driving for at least an hour in silence, punctuated only by the radio, which was on an easy rock station. It seemed to Sunil that he'd heard Boy George perform “Karma Chameleon” at least five times before Salazar shut the radio off to talk.

A little bit, Sunil said, sipping on some water.

We'll be coming up to another town soon, Methuselah, I think. We can stop there for lunch and gas up again for the return trip. Apparently this town is farther out than you thought. Ghost towns, Salazar said, his tone dismissive. Can't imagine why anyone would want to visit one, much less live out here in one.

It's the desert, I think, Sunil said. You have to admit there's something supernatural about it. For some people it's like falling down the rabbit hole. Besides, ghost towns are perfect places to be invisible in America, drop off the grid, so to speak. You can squat in a ghost town for a very long time if it's set back far enough from the road. You would have easy access to water, electricity, and good shade from the sun, and disguise from any overhead searches by plane or helicopter. I mean, there are roads, so you wouldn't have to build any new infrastructure. Hell, there are even enough farms within a day's hike to poach from.

A billboard flashed by announcing
JESUS IS COMING
. It wasn't that there was a billboard in the middle of the desert announcing Jesus's return that caught Sunil's attention as much as the fact that someone had spray painted
LOOK BUSY
under it.

Strange name for a town, Salazar said, pointing to a sign by an exit.

Sunil read it:
KING OF PRUSSIA
. Again, it wasn't the unusual name that surprised him as much as the fact that the exit looked blocked off with a sign that said
NOT AN EXIT
, and yet from where they were, it looked like a normal town spread out in desert-style adobe and wood-framed buildings. There was even an airstrip to one side of them.

I've always wondered what it would be like to live out here in a town like that, Salazar said.

This town, and many more like it, is part of something called the Nevada Test Site, Sunil said.

Where they exploded nuclear bombs back in the day?

Yes, but not just back in the day.

I'm forty and I have never seen the mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, so I would say yes, back in the day.

Of the fifteen hundred or so nuclear test explosions in Nevada, only three hundred were aboveground, so just because you've never seen one doesn't mean there haven't been any.

That's some Mulder and Scully shit you got going on. I never pegged you for a conspiracy nut.

I won't even dignify that with an answer.

In a couple of minutes the sign for Methuselah flashed by.

Well, here we are, Salazar said.

I for one would love to have a burger. Best thing about America is burgers and ketchup-soaked French fries and a cold drink, Sunil said.

Finally, something we can agree on.

They pulled into the lone gas station, one pump under an unsteady lean-to, and filled the tank. If there was an attendant, he was nowhere around.

Just off the road to their left was a paddock and couple of hungry horses standing listlessly around a trough full of rank water. One of the supports of the paddock was a bristlecone pine, all gnarled and twisted into a shape that belonged more in a nightmare than in the bright desert sun.

Odd tree, Salazar said, spitting.

Sunil wondered if that was some superstition or just bad manners.

It's a bristlecone, he said. Oldest living organisms on the planet, I think. In fact, there is a bristlecone pine somewhere in Nevada that is perhaps the world's oldest tree. It's over five thousand years old.

No shit.

The tree was named Methuselah. I wonder if that's what this town is named after. The location of the tree is a well-kept secret by the parks service, but maybe it's around here somewhere.

What's a Methuselah?

I figured you would know, being a Republican and quite possibly a hardline Christian.

Just tell me what the fuck it is, Salazar snapped.

It's the name of the oldest man to have lived, at least according to the Bible, Sunil said.

Bible's never wrong, Salazar said, walking over to the tree and peeing on it.

Is that some animal territory-marking ritual, Sunil asked.

Never seen a man pee on a tree before?

Sunil opened the door of the car and slid back in. There's a bar-cum-diner over there called Cupid's, he said. Let's see if we can find a burger to fall in love with.

Salazar shook himself at the tree, inspected his work, and, satisfied, zipped up and returned to the car.