The National Security Advisor was drowned out by lengthy honk
ing from out in the lot. It was Puck and Trillium in the Camaro, which
had been decorated all over with toilet paper in different fashion shades and psychedelic prints, and beer cans and a crudely lettered Just Mar
ried sign. It seemed that after a night of nonstop partying, the couple
had been down to the county courthouse, obtained the license, headed
straight for the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather, and in short order were
hitched, Einar acting as best man and deciding himself to elope with
another groom-to-be who’d been waiting for a bride with what turned out to be cold feet, as, in fact, he discovered with signs of relief, were his
own. For a recessional, Puck and Einar talked the electric organ player
into accompanying them on a duet of the Ethel Merman favorite “You’re
Not Sick, You’re Just in Love,” from
Call Me Madamy
though there was
the usual awkwardness over who would sing Ethel Merman’s part.
Puck and Doc found a minute to talk. “Congratulations, man, she’s
a swell chick.”
Marriage, even in this town, will do strange things to a man. “She
can save me.” Nodding wide-eyed as any bus-station runaway.
“Who’s after you, Puck?”
“Nobody,” his eyes almost pleading, though not with Doc necessarily.
“Salvation, see, I’ve got my own hangups with that, ‘cause I’m feeling
maybe I could have saved Mickey from what happened, whatever that
was. Maybe even Glen, too?”
The swastika on Puck’s head began to pulsate. “Ain’t exactly been tip-
toein through no tulips about that myself,” he said. “Glen was a fuckup,
but we were blood brothers, and that should’ve meant something. But if I would have stayed on that shift? it would
’ve
happened to me instead.”
Which wasn’t saying, exactly, that he’d have sacrificed himself for Glen.
He had a look in his eyes now that Doc wasn’t too comfortable with.
“And you, you couldn’t have saved nobody.”
“That much of a done deal, you think?”
“You don’t want to be fuckin with this, Mr. Sportello.” The swastika
was throbbing furiously now. “Ain’t like this is the Mob. Not even the
pretend Mob you people think is the Mob.”
Doc fumbled for a joint. “I’m not following.”
Puck reached Doc’s pack of Kools out of his shirt pocket, lit one, and
kept the pack. “These Mormon fucks in the FBI. They keep preachin
everything here is wops. Like end of the
story, Jinito,
nothin but the wops,
get rid of the wops and everything’s comin up roses, as Ethel always sez.
Well forget that race shit, man, that’s all just for cover. Howard Hughes,
what’s he? Aryan to the bone, right? but who’s he working for? what about the
Mob behind the Mob?”
Now, if Puck had been some average California beach-town doper, Doc
might have put this down to ordinary paranoia and wished him a happy
honeymoon and got back to work. But Puck still wanted to deny he knew
anything about anything, and whatever that was at his back, closing in,
was even too frightening for silence to do him much good either.
“Here, here’s an easy one,” Doc downshifted. “Did Mickey ever talk about some city he wanted to build someplace out in the desert?”
“Lately, he never did nothing but. Arrepentimiento. Spanish for ‘sorry
about that.’ His idea was, anybody could go live there for free, didn’t
matter who you were, show up and if there’s a unit open it’s yours, over
night, forever, et cetera et cetera, and so forth as the King of Siam always
sez. Here, you got a road map, I’ll show you.”
Trillium came over and slid her hands under one of Puck’s tattooed
arms, the one with the skull with the dagger in
its
eye socket. “We’d bet
ter be on our way, my love.”
“You guys can have the car,” Doc said, “which is paid up for another
week, and also whatever’s left on the room, consider it my wedding pres
ent. Can I have my smokes back?”
Trillium walked Doc out to where Tito was waiting with the limo. “He really is the love of my life, Doc. He needs me.”
“You’ve got my office and home numbers, right?”
“We’ll call, I promise.”
“All the best, Mrs. Beaverton.”
evening came, taking
everybody by surprise. Tito drove Adolfo and Inez to the airport, and as he pulled back out onto the highway, he and Doc noticed a car just going in the airport entrance, motor-pool gray, with something unhesitant and unforgiving in
it’s
movement that told them who it was there for. Tito ascended to the freeway and headed out into the desert. “Nice town, but let’s lose it.”
Like spacemen in a space ship, they were pressed violently into the seat
backs as Tito engaged some classified performance feature, and outside
the windows city neon began to lengthen in long spectral blurs, to shift toward blue ahead while in the black distances framed by Tito’s mirror each point of light grew reddish, receded, converged. Tito had Roza Eskenazi tapes playing over the car stereo. “Listen to her, I adore that
chick, she was the Bessie Smith of her day, pure soul.” He sang along for
a few bars.
“Ti
á
timo mer
á
ki,
who hasn’t had that, man? a need, so hopeless, so shameless, that nothing nobody can say means shit.” Sounded like more addict talk to Doc, but after he got used to the scales and vocal styling he found himself thinking about Trillium, and wondering what she’d make of these
rembetissas
of Tito’s and the particular kind of longing they sang about.
They drove through the night, and in the first light they got to the turnoff Puck had shown Doc on the map, and followed a state road to a county road, left the blacktop then for a ranch road of packed dirt, past battered and dangling gates and across dry washes on strumming cattle guards, past yucca and squat little cactuses, desert wildflowers at the roadside, rock outcrops in the distance, dark moving patches out in the alkaline brightness that could have been burros or coyotes or mule deer, or maybe aliens from long-ago landings, for Doc could feel evidence everywhere of ancient visitation.
They came over a ridge, and there, down a long slope into a valley whose river might’ve vanished centuries ago, was Mickey Wolfmann’s
dream, his penance for having once charged money for human shelter—
Arrepentimiento. Doc and Tito lit a wake-up joint and passed it back and forth. Beyond the project stretched an expanse of desert only marginally developed, here a scatter of concrete structures, there a distant smokestack or two among the scrawls of chaparral. Later Doc and Tito
wouldn’t be able to agree on what they’d been looking at. There were sev
eral what Riggs Warbling had called zomes, linked by covered walkways.
Not perfect hemispheres but pointed at the top. Doc counted six, Tito seven, maybe eight. The terrain be
tween the complex and themselves
was also strewn with giant almost-spherical pink rocks, though they could also have been man-made.
“Can we get down there to have a look?” Doc wondered.
“What, in this? We’d break an axle, wipe out the oil pan, some shit. You’d need a four-wheeler. Unless you think we can walk it? You got a hat?”
“I need a hat to walk?”
“Rays, man, dangerous rays.” In the trunk Tito found a couple of gigantic sombreros he’d bought in Glitter Gulch for souvenirs, and he and Doc put them on and set out in the desert breeze for Arrepentimiento.
It took longer than they thought. The zomes ahead, like backdrop art
in old sci-fi movies, never seemed to come any closer. It was like feeling
your way through dangerous terrain at night, though Doc was conscious
of the sun overhead, the star of an alien planet, smaller and more concentrated than it should have been, zapping them relentlessly with hard radiation. Lizards came out from behind the visible world and stood
timeless and breathless as rock to watch Doc and Tito.
After a while it began to look more like an abandoned construction
site. Scrap lumber bleaching in the sun, spools of rusted cable, lengths of plastic pipe, snarls of Romex, a wrecked air compressor. Plastic sheeting
had blown away in places, revealing the skeleton underneath, struts and
connectors, looking sometimes like an openwork soccer ball, sometimes patterns on a cactus, or seashells people bring back from Hawaii.
“Don’t see any padlocks,” said Doc.
“Don’t mean we can just walk in.”
Doc found a door and it opened easily, and he stepped into a soaring shadowy vault.
“All right, you can stop there.”
“Uh-oh.” Doc said.
“Or you can keep on coming, clear on into the next world. Ask me if
I give a shit.” It was Riggs Warbling with a couple weeks’ start on a beard
and holding a .44 Magnum, a Ruger
Blackhawk, cocked and pointing
at the middle of Doc’s forehead,
it’s
barrel showing little if any wobble,
though the same could not be said now for Doc
’s
voice.
He took off his sombrero, respectfully. “Well, howdy, Riggs! Happened to be in the area, thought I’d take you up on that invite! Remember me? Larry Sportello? Doc? A-and this here’s my friend Tito!”
“Mickey send you?”
“Um, no, as a matter of fact I’ve been trying to find out what happened to Mickey.”
“Jesus. What
didn’t
happen to him.” Riggs eased the hammer back down, though he still looked plenty agitated. “Come on in.”
Inside was a gigantic refrigerator full of beer and other foodstuffs, a number of slot machines, and a pool table and reclining chairs, and actually, now that Doc thought of it, more space, judging from the out
side, than there could possibly be in here. Riggs saw him looking around
and read his mind. “Groovy, ain’t it? Kind of a switch on Bucky Fuller,
basically—instead of fewer dollars per cubic foot enclosed, this is more
cubic feet per dollar.”
Doc’s response normally would
’ve
been, “Isn’t that the same thing?” But from some nuance in Riggs’s behavior, perhaps the insane stare, or the tight grip he still had on his gleaming black handgun, or the inability to keep his voice from breaking into higher registers, Doc dug how dummying up might be a slightly wiser move.
Suddenly Riggs’s head assumed a new angle, and he appeared to be staring through the zome wall at some point in the distant sky. After a
few seconds came the sound of unmuffled jet-fighter engines, approach
ing from that direction. Riggs raised the muzzle of his piece a few inches
and it looked for a second like he was about to start shooting. The roar
overhead grew to an almost intolerable level and then faded.
“They send them over from Nellis every half hour,” Riggs said. “At first I thought it was just some routine flight path, but turns out it’s all deliberate, authorized buzzing. All day, all night. Someday they’ll get
Mickey to approve a rocket strike, and Arrepentimiento will be history—
except it won’t even be that, because they’ll destroy all the records, too.”
“Why would Mickey bomb this place? It’s his dream.”
“Was. You saw what it looked like out there. He’s pulled the money out, stiffed all his contractors, everybody’s walked but me.”
“When did this happen?”
“Around the time he disappeared. Suddenly no more acid-head philanthropist. They did something to him.”
“Who?”
“Whoever. And now he’s back with Sloane, yes the happy couple together again, honeymoon suite at Caesar’s, big heart-shaped water bed, got his hand on her ass in public all the time, like, ‘This is mine folks, don’t even think about it,’ and Sloane going along with the whole
bought-and-sold routine, not even eye contact with other men, especially
not ones she’s been, what’s the word, seeing?”
“I thought Mickey was cool with all that,” Doc almost said, but was pretty sure he didn’t.
“He’s a born-again family man anymore, whatever they did to his brain, they also reprogrammed his dick, and now of course she won’t give me the time of day. I’m just sitting out here with a rifle across my
knees, like the ghost of a crazy prospector at some old silver mine, wait
ing for the righteous husband to pick his moment. Dead already but don’t know it. You heard he made a deal with the Justice Department.”
“Some rumors, maybe?”
“Listen to what he did. Is this an example to the young, or what?
Mickey buys this tiny parcel on the Strip, too small to develop even as a
parking lot, but right next to a major casino, and announces plans for a
mini-casino,’ like those little convenience stores you see next to gas sta
tions? fast in and out, one slot machine, one roulette wheel, one blackjack
table. The Italian Business Men next door think of all the downscale traf
fic this will bring in right under the noses of their refined clientele, and they go crazy, threatening, screaming, flying their mothers in first class
to stand and glare at Mickey in silent reproach. Sometimes not so silent.
Finally the casino gives in, Mickey gets his asking price, some insane multiple of what he paid, which will n
ow go to finance the renovation
and expansion of the Kismet Casino and Lounge, where he’s become an active partner.”
“So he
’s
another Vegas heavy now, watch yer ass Howard Hughes and
so forth, well, thanks for the update, Riggs.”
Another sortie of fighters came over.
When they could hear again, Tito spoke for the first time. “Can we give you a ride someplace?”
“The thing about zomes is,” Riggs with a desperate grin, “is they can act as doorways to other dimensions. The F-105s, the coyotes, the scorpions and snakes, the desert heat, none of that bothers me. I can leave whenever I want.” He motioned with his head. “All I have to do is step through that door over there, and I’m safe.”
“Can I look?” said Doc.