The Vanishing Point (24 page)

The colonel began to speak. His voice was amplified by a microphone, and Claire could hear him clearly when her attention wasn't focused on her search. He said that he had been a helicopter pilot in country whose job was to ferry out the wounded and the dead. “I came home with a concrete heart,” he said, “that it took a chisel to break up.” He talked about a ceremony he had attended at the Wall. It seemed inevitable, at a Vietnam event, that sooner or later someone would start talking about the Wall. Claire had been there and thought it was a magnificent tribute, reminding her in some ways of Victor Westphall's chapel—wings or arms emanating from a vanishing point. An end, but also a beginning. The colonel recounted the experience of touching a name he recognized and seeing his own reflection in the polished, black surface transforming into an image of the person he knew. Claire had had a similar experience. The colonel said there were a hundred thousand people at that ceremony and he could feel the eyes of one of them staring at him so intensely it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

On the table near the bulletin board Claire found the book that listed all the names inscribed on the Wall in alphabetical order. She opened it and began turning the pages, stopping for a minute to listen to the conclusion of the colonel's story. At the end of the ceremony, a man he didn't recognize came up and asked if he'd worn a helmet with a lightning bolt painted on the side. “Yes,” the colonel replied.

“You flew me out in your chopper. You saved my life,” the man told him.

Claire
had come to the
B
's in the book. She scrolled down until she found the name she'd been looking for, Louis Bastiann. There were more than 58,000 names, and duplication was to be expected, but there was only one Louis Bastiann. He died a month before Jonathan Vail disappeared. Time enough for the effects and duffel bag of the fan with no family to be shipped home to his hero. If Jonathan had been contemplating honoring his draft notice, the death of Lou, his fan and alter ego, could have been the straw that convinced him to flee. He'd been presented with a ready-made identity, the clothes and the dog tags, and an excuse—death might well be waiting for him in Vietnam, too. He had Jennie, who was willing to con law enforcement and give him two days' head start. He didn't even need to go to Mexico or Canada. He could travel most of the world as Lou Bastiann and never be discovered, planning, perhaps, that one day, if amnesty were ever granted, he would come back and finish out his life as Jonathan Vail. When Jonathan split, he was a little-known regional writer, but during the time he was gone, the mystery of his disappearance and the impact of
A Blue-Eyed Boy
turned him into a legend, a legend that Claire herself had helped to perpetuate. If he'd come back as Jonathan Vail after amnesty was granted, would Jennie have been willing to let him go on being the hero and taking credit for a book she had written? What would his life have been like? Claire wondered. He would have faced the contempt of some for dodging the draft and of others for allowing his name to be put on a book written by someone else. He might have been full of doubt about his writing talent, troubled by the relationship with his family and with Jennie. If he reappeared as himself it would be as a flawed human being, but if he went on living as Lou Bastiann, the legend of Jonathan Vail would survive. He could be both a legend and a man. “Sometimes life is a flowing river, sometimes it's a well run dry. A name or legend carved in stone lives forever.”

But the discovery of the journal had changed everything, raising the issue of publication and giving Jonathan back some control of his destiny. Claire wondered who went to the cave to retrieve the duffel bag, Jonathan or Jennie or both? The van could belong to either of them. Jonathan could have used her address to register the vehicle in New Mexico even if he didn't actually live in the state or in the country. What had he or she been after? The duffel bag with the name Lou Bastiann on it could be seen as evidence that Lou had died and that someone was impersonating him. And there may have been something in the bag that one or both of them wanted. Tim might have come upon the person in the cave and stumbled into his own death. If that was the case, the evidence necessary to prove it was in the white van in the parking lot. Claire looked down at her hand, which was stalled beside the name of Lou Bastiann. There were close to 60,000 names in this book, men, mostly, Jonathan Vail's age—many more identities he could assume if he escaped from Angel Fire.

Claire had been so engrossed in her thoughts that she had stopped listening to the colonel's speech. It came as a surprise to hear the mixture of applause and ululation that followed. She closed the book, walked to the auditorium, and looked in. The audience was giving the colonel a standing ovation.
Visibly
moved by his speech, men and women hugged and cried. The folksinger asked for his guitar. The audience began to sit down. Claire didn't find Jennie Dell's blond head in the crowd, but the profile of Lou Bastiann/Jonathan Vail stood out. He wore a denim jacket and a bandanna folded into a headband. When she spotted him, she stepped out of the doorway. The folksinger began to sing “This Land Is Your Land,” inviting the audience to join in.

Chapter
Eighteen

C
LAIRE WALKED ACROSS THE FOYER AND STEPPED OUTSIDE
into a day that had turned blustery. The trio of flags resembled dragons that coiled and snapped in the wind. The sinuous lenticulars she'd seen earlier had become billowing storm clouds. The air had the feeling of incoming snow. She looked over the Moreno Valley, considering her options, wondering whether Jonathan had seen her. If she had to confront him, she would prefer to do it when there were other people close by. The program listed several more speeches, indicating that the ceremony would continue for some time.

Her cell phone was in her car. She could use it to call Ellen Frank, but before she did, she stopped to consider the consequences of making the call. Her job had been to preserve the legend of Jonathan Vail, and the legend would be better served if she kept what she'd discovered to herself, which might also be what Harrison would prefer. Would he or Ada really want to learn that their prized archive was the work of a fraud? That Jennie Dell had been the author of
A Blue-Eyed Boy?
That Jonathan Vail had spent a good part of his life hiding out as Lou Bastiann?

While Claire considered her options and weighed her obligations, she hugged her arms to her chest to keep out the wind. It was too cold to stand outside and wait for long. She looked through the door to the visitors center and saw that the foyer had remained empty. There was no indication that Jonathan had seen her or had left the auditorium. Overriding any other consideration in her mind was the loss of Tim Sansevera's life. She began walking up the path toward her truck, eager to get out of the cold but feeling that her shoes were weighted with lead. The wind whirled, picking up dust and debris. The arms of the chapel reached out. Behind her the flags fluttered and flapped. Claire pulled up her collar to ward off the cold and kept her head down to keep the stinging dust out of her eyes.

She didn't hear footsteps, didn't know Jonathan was behind her until he tapped her shoulder. She spun around and faced him, knowing she was the one who had been deceived yet feeling she had just been found out. Jonathan wore dark glasses. The wind tugged the gray hair from his headband and curled it over his head.

“Claire?” he asked. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Hello, Jonathan,” Claire replied.

At first he seemed incredulous, tipping his head and staring at her through the dark lenses. “You know?”

“Yes.”

He
exhaled then, and his body language expressed relief, as if he's just dropped a backpack that had long been a burden. “We need to talk. Let's get out of the wind.”

Claire felt no need to talk, but Jonathan took her elbow and edged her toward the chapel, pushing open the door that was never locked and guiding her inside. The chapel offered shelter, but the wind whistled around the prow and entered the building through crevices and cracks. The sixties tape played on, with music drifting in and out of audibility as if it were being transported from a distant concert on the wings of the wind. Claire heard Credence Clearwater Revival sing “Have you ever seen the rain?” before the music faded out. There was a dampness inside the chapel that suggested the concrete walls hadn't set. She leaned against the stucco in the entryway, feeling faint and dizzy.

Jonathan leaned against the opposite wall and raised the dark glasses. He wasn't wearing the tinted lenses that had been his cover, and Claire saw the blue eyes that the writer had been famous for, the eyes of a young man buried in the wrinkles of middle age. Coyote eyes, she thought. Trickster eyes.

“How did you find out?” he asked.

“Lou Bastiann's name is on the Wall and listed in the book in the visitors center. He died in 1966.”

“You must have had some reason for looking there,” Jonathan insisted.

“I always believed that if Jonathan Vail were alive he would have come back and claimed the admiration due him. Then I tracked down Jennie's novel and read it. The similarities between her book and
A Blue-Eyed Boy
are obvious. If she wrote
A Blue-Eyed Boy,
Jonathan Vail could be anywhere. He might have been the man Sam Ogelthorpe saw kill his cow or it might have been Lou Bastiann. I had only your word and Jennie's that Lou Bastiann was in Vietnam in 1966. I needed to find out for myself.”

“Jennie's a better writer, but after
Out of the Blue
didn't sell, she couldn't find a publisher for her next book. I had a reputation, so she borrowed my name and my life for
A Blue-Eyed Boy.
She never should have told you she'd written a novel.”

Probably not, Claire thought, but ego will out. “It's not human nature to publish a book and tell no one about it.”

“Is it human nature to want to be a legend even if you know you don't deserve it?”

“That's difficult to say,” Claire replied. “Few people ever have the opportunity.”

The eyes that remained restless no matter what color they were settled briefly on Claire before darting away. “My life was either shaped by events I couldn't control or by opportunity. Take your pick. When the army sent me Lou's stuff after he died, it gave me a ready-made identity. I wasn't doing a very good job of being Jonathan Vail. Taking too many drugs. Not happy with my writing. My family was on my case. The relationship with Jennie was trouble. I knew I didn't want to go to Vietnam.

“I carried Lou's duffel bag into the canyons and hid it in the cave in Sin Nombre, along with my
journal.
I held a little ceremony in the cave, dropped some acid, turned myself into Lou. The writer became the fan. I caused a rock slide, thinking my identity and thoughts would stay buried until I was ready to dig them up. I never told Jennie about the duffel bag. She knew I was going to Mexico, but I didn't tell her for years that I had assumed Lou's name. No one could make her reveal it if she didn't know it.

“Time passed. I liked my expatriate life in San Miguel de Allende. When I told you Lou couldn't write anymore, that was the truth. I stopped writing and made a living repairing cars. After I injured my leg, I couldn't do that kind of work anymore, so I began crafting folk art sculptures out of spare parts. I have a reputation as a metal sculptor in Mexico.

“When I left the States I was known only as a regional writer. Who would have dreamed that while I was gone
A Blue-Eyed Boy
would become a bestseller and Jonathan Vail would turn into a legend? Jennie wouldn't have let me go on being the hero if I'd come back, so when amnesty was granted I stayed where I was. I return every year to renew my vehicle registrations. I visit Jennie, see how the legend is doing, come to Angel Fire to pay my respects to Lou. I avoid my family. I had my life. Jennie collected the royalties. It was an arrangement that worked for both of us until your graduate student found Jonathan's journal.”

He stopped talking, and Claire began listening for some sign that the ceremony had ended—people talking outside, footsteps on the path, some indication that she and Jonathan weren't alone in the dank chapel—but all she heard was wind and Janis Joplin cackling as the tape continued to spin.

“I can explain about your student.” Jonathan placed the palm of his hand against the wall near Claire's head and leaned close. She felt he had invaded her space, but she feared that stepping away might anger him. The headband and the vivid blue eyes were making him appear wilder and more dangerous.

“There's no need to explain anything to me,” she said, pressing against the wall. She knew that while confession might be good for the confessor, it could be dangerous for the one who hears it. The duffel bag in the van was evidence. There were hundreds of miles between here and Mexico. Lots of time for federal investigators to find Jonathan if he drove away. At this point she would be more than happy to turn the investigation over to them.

“You're my archivist. You want to know all about me, don't you?” he asked in a voice that had the pleading tone of a person who has kept his secrets for too long.

“I'm the keeper of the legend, not the keeper of the truth. If you have a confession to make, you should make it to the rangers.”

Jonathan acted as if he hadn't heard her. His eyes went to the light beaming through the slit behind the altar. “It wasn't Jonathan's fault,” he began. “Like being given Lou's identity in the first place. It just happened.”

Given
his identify change, it wasn't surprising that he would talk about himself in the third person, but Claire found the dissociation disturbing. The chapel began to feel claustrophobic. She wanted to be in her truck, cradling her cell phone in her hand, but she felt pinned in place by the strength of his arms.