Trinity Fields (50 page)

How it surprises me to hear him use the word again. He must have sensed what I was thinking because he interrupts himself long enough to make acknowledgment.

“Traitor, yes. But Brice, this is half of why it was only you I could come to now. Because you're the only person who possibly could understand what this has meant to me, my act of traitoring, and I guess the only one who could forgive me.”

“Did you find him?”

“Wagner. He was like a figure out of some mystical religion all of his own making. He seemed to be there, out there ahead of me somewhere, but he wasn't. All threads without anything tied to them once you reached the end, that was Wagner, or I should say that was the many Wagners, all these manifestations that I heard in echo but never could discover. It was like trying to touch a sound, like trying to close your fist on a beautiful passage of music. The music went on even while you held your fist tight and it went on after you opened it up and saw there wasn't anything there. Wagner defined the term
missing in action
—he was still active and still missing, and that's what he'll be for me for as long as I live, and it's the cruelest thing, Brice. Anyway, when I was in-country deep, to get back to what I was saying, I began to notice that there were many Wagners out there, rumors of servicemen who'd established fiefdoms, or who were living in caves with seven wives, or who were still held captive by Pathet Lao who were keeping them like human wampum, trading chips against the day when Laos would want to open up again to the world, and America in particular. All of it seemed, as the days went on—and believe me I knew that I couldn't stay in there very long before somebody would say something to someone else and the presence of this unwelcome drifter would come to the attention of people who didn't want me or anybody else wandering around the countryside untended—all of it seemed fantasy, with every new story I heard. My Lao was good, so it wasn't that I was getting the information wrong. It was that the information itself got bent and mangled as it went from mouth to ear. But one of the things I'd heard about was the yellow rain and how the Laotian government was waging a discreet war now against those who fought on the other side back a decade and a half ago. So before I left, I wanted to try to work my way down to Alternate, see what was there, find out if anything was left of Long Tieng, and even see if I couldn't find Kha Yang's family. I never made it that far and so I'll never know the answer to that one either. I was staying outside a village just south of the Plain. In the village there were Hmong with others, but the Hmong set up at the edges, up on the higher stretches of this mountainside. When the chopper came in, I was sleeping off a ways from the Hmong village. I knew that they'd been using chemical weapons in there as far back as seventy-nine, they'd been torturing these people ever since we abandoned them. Trichothecene mycotoxin, the poor man's atom bomb as it's been called, is what they use on them. Early in the morning. The dawn breeze carried it down with the help of polyethylene glycol, very gently blew it through the settlement. And then, like that, the chopper was gone and the cloud had slipped away into the land and the trees, and into our lungs and eyes. People crying, standing up in the first light and sobbing, and I knew that it was time for me to move quickly, as much for their sake as mine. I had friends of friends in this village and knew that if I was discovered here, there would be more for them to pay yet. No end to vengeance. So I left. How I made it back down to the river I couldn't tell you, it was like a dream, I just ran in the direction the compass needle told me to go. I ate roots, weeds. When I found the Mekong I did what I had seen others do so many times, I built a little makeshift raft of bamboo and once it got dark I paddled my way across as quietly as I could. Unlike those poor Hmong, once I was in Thailand I was more or less safe. I'd gone all that way and found nothing of what I wanted to find. But I began to find other things—and it was the beginning of my trip back here.”

On a summer day back when Kip and I were ten years old, as part of the civil defense program, all our townspeople were evacuated from the Hill. A warm June afternoon, cloudy skies. The threat of atomic warfare was forever in our minds, and all across the nation exercises such as this were conducted. People gathered in underground shelters, streets were deserted as sirens pierced the air, radios broadcast a pairing of notes meant to hurt the ears and alert the populace that nuclear war was under way and that they should find sanctuary.

The evacuation that day was remarkable for its scope and, to those of us who were possessed of healthy imaginations, for its realism. Our fathers were frightful in their seriousness as they came home from the Techs to fetch us after what was called warning blue had sounded, at three-thirty in the afternoon. Eight thousand of us left our houses and schools and places of work and fled through the three main exits from town. Catastrophe and heartache were mirrored in every face. Were the bombs coming, we truly would not have seemed to one another more grim.

Downtown, as we left, they simulated looting so that the police could practice panic control. Other teams of men gathered at sites to prepare for the identification and counting of the dead, and town doctors grouped to ready themselves to treat the wounded. Overhead, we saw jets twisting in the skies, having been scrambled from nearby Kirkland base; The local radio station issued reports about the evacuation as we streamed down the canyonside out toward the desert foothills where we were told to park our cars along the shoulder and huddle ourselves beside their great rounded bulks as a hawk's cry riffed against the screaming of the jet planes above.

Kip and I swore that if this ever came to pass, we wouldn't get separated. We had plans of our own. We told each other that if the time came, and the war came, and that if we survived the blast, what we would do was get ourselves somehow to safety in one of the Indian ruins, wait for the cloud to blow away and the radioactivity to thin out, and then we would walk across the desert together until we got to Chimayó, because we were convinced that the Hill would be gone and the rest of the world might even be gone, but that the church somehow would still be there.

—Water from the creek, he'd say.

—Good fresh water.

—Yeah.

—And if we have to, I bet we could live on the posito dirt until the first crops'd grow, I would say.

—Yeah, 'cause we'd grow corn and beans ourselves.

—And we'd make bread.

—Or our wives would.

—And we'd build houses side by side.

—Sure would.

—And that's where we'd live.

—Sure would.

Thus, our plan, but we managed that afternoon to get separated along the road. Guards at the gates directing traffic in the confounding exodus must have signaled Kip's father to go one direction and mine to go another. In the newspaper, the civil defense director for our town called the operation successful and said that he was “extremely well satisfied with the results.” The town had been almost completely evacuated in something less than an hour and “threatening planes,” he said, “were destroyed fifty miles north of Los Alamos,” whatever that was supposed to mean.

—Did they really shoot down planes? I asked Kip.

—I think so but I don't know, he answered.

We couldn't bring ourselves to admit the failure of our own scheme for a week or two, until one day walking along barefoot over at the border of one of the mesas, Kip said, —That whole thing they did where we had to leave the Hill and go down there to escape from being blown up by the bomb? That was stupid.

—I know, I said.

—No, I mean it was stupid, Brice, stupid just like we are stupid.

I didn't get it. —How come we're stupid? We're not stupid.

—Did we do what we said we were going to do if that happened?

—But it wasn't our fault.

—Doesn't matter. We weren't together and we would of died.

—No, I said. —We'd have made it down to Chimayó separate, and then we'd have gone ahead like we said.

—Once we got separated that'd be the end of it, boy. It would have been like this . . . and Kip traced the tip of his thumbnail across his neck. I was flattered by the thought that Kip would consider it the end if he and I were separated during the course of a war.

—You're right, I said. —If they do another one of those drills, what we do is we stay behind. We'll hide and let them all run down into the desert. We'll get through it somehow, boy.

—Shake, he said.

We reached our small hands out to one another and shook. As it turned out, civil defense exercises after that one were more modest. We were never evacuated again and so our resolve was not tested until our days in New York, when again we failed to live up to the standards and principles of our friendship. I still have a copy of the newspaper clipping announcing the success of the civil defense drill that June—the makers fleeing what they had made, fleeing with such efficiency and dispatch—and in it there are lines that never fail to rouse wry laughter from me. A certain percentage of police were evacuated along with Hill residents, the paper reported. The police chief said this measure was taken to insure that authorities would be available to help out “after the disaster let up.”

After the disaster let up? Since when was it the nature of disasters ever to let up? I wondered. Disasters don't let up, they only let us down. Always down.

The New Mexico afternoon was dissolving toward evening. This had always been my most cherished season here. In other parts of the country, late winter into early spring seems desolate, the buds ripening, yes, but still like promises not yet kept, and the trees stand naked without so much as a shawl of snow to cloak them. Elsewhere, back east, upstate where Jess and Ariel and I often liked to go to get ourselves away from the city, it was impossible to walk this time of year. The frozen ground gave way to mud, a mucky mud that bore a petrified crust at midnight, then thawed at dawn and never dried out during the course of the sunniest day. The grass was pale, the hyacinth and crocuses—pathetically tiny and vulnerable to late snow—might have perforated the dark damp clay, but all the perennials remained dormant. Fallen limbs, broken branches, the roads white from salt and sand. And the sky, the sky interminably white, a blister upon the firmament, like a soreness from the ice and wind. That, to me, was early April elsewhere. Here it was different, always. The desert too can be muddy, but of a pregnant red. Here the sky never stopped with its constant performance, it did not matter which season. The densest, strongest, most muscular, meaty clouds anywhere on earth. Now clear, now rain. Now palest blue, now deep gray-blue. The sky here was an improvisational genius.

And I suddenly realized that Kip had stopped talking and my eyes had wandered away from him, up the ridge of Tsi Mayoh. What did the Tewa words mean? flaking rock?—they'd once mined obsidian from this valley. The sandstone cliffs, the fallen boulders, all of it the color of a fawn's coat. Nothing had changed an iota since the last time I glimpsed it. What solidity there was to the earth, despite the best efforts of we rascals who run about enacting our dreams on its back. And look at us, me and Kip, look at what the quarter century had done to us.

We'd walked a little, other stories came forth. One night he thought the mosquito netting had fallen on him and he woke up clawing at it in a fever to get it off his skin. He wrestled with it in the dark for some very long minutes before coming to the realization that it wasn't netting but just a thick pelt of his own sweat. He stood up in the dark and held his arms out at ninety-degree angles from his sides, partly to let the air dry him off, partly as a self-punishment for being maniacal. Held himself there for an hour, like a Christ without a cross but crucified anyway.

There was a story about a formal dance that was held in the royal capital at the ambassador's residence, and how several of the Ravens had flown in for the party, changed out of their flightsuits and into rented tuxedos. At the ball were the entire lot of warring factions, represented by embassy staffs and local ministers. The Chinese were there, smiling and enjoying themselves, the Russian ambassador's wife assented to Kip's offer to dance to the music of a small but adequate band. Champagne, crudités, caviar. It was as if the war were not going on. There were spooks and Pathet Lao who earlier the same day might well have been out in the field trying to kill each other, but tonight was a night off, a temporary truce held to the strains of swing music. And then, everyone left, having bid one another goodnight, having shaken hands, and the next day were right back into the business of fighting. “That's a true story,” he remarks, as if even he can hardly believe it in retrospect.

He told me about how once, just for a lark, he and Wagner had taken their planes up on a clear Sunday morning, out from Luang Prabang, and headed north. Rules of engagement prevented them from flying above the twenty-first parallel, but they wanted to see what was going on along the China Road. China Road was known as no-man's-land and they wanted to find out why. They had, by then, so many hundreds of missions between them that their aircraft had become metal extensions of their bodies. Wagner loved nothing better than to show off—shine his ass, as they used to put it—so as they flew along he cruised with the plane's wings at vertical, one wing pointed down to the earth and the other straight up toward the sky. He could pull this off for a while, but then would arc over and fall toward the ground. He rolled his airplane and snapped it upside down and flew along inverted, hanging in his straps until Kip heard him say, —Get on my tail.

Kip pulled in twenty feet behind him intrail. Nose to tail, elephant walk, down low enough to stay out of the propwash.

The next thing Kip knew, they were going straight up. The sun was in his eyes. Up into a hammerhead climb, a steep ascent, until just before his wings began to complain, before they ran out of airspeed and went into a stall, Wagner rolled ninety degrees and let the nose sink into the horizon until they fell straight down. They gained velocity faster than a scalded ape—another pilot idiom—plunged into a nice roll and came to a perpendicular with one wing pointed to the earth again, and the other straight up to the clouds.