The Hammer of Eden (2 page)

They waited for the radio signal from the doghouse that would start the next vibration. This could be done by the driver in the truck, but generally supervisors preferred to retain command themselves and start the process by remote control. Priest finished his cigarette and threw the butt out the window. Mario nodded toward Priest’s car, parked a quarter of a mile away on the two-lane blacktop. “That your woman?”

Priest looked. Star had got out of the dirty light blue Honda Civic and was leaning on the hood, fanning her face with her straw hat. “Yeah,” he said.

“Lemme show you a picture.” Mario pulled an old leather billfold out of the pocket of his jeans. He extracted a photograph and handed it to Priest. “This is Isabella,” he said proudly.

Priest saw a pretty Mexican girl in her twenties wearing a yellow dress and a yellow Alice band in her hair. She held a baby on her hip, and a dark-haired boy was standing shyly by her side. “Your children?”

He nodded. “Ross and Betty.”

Priest resisted the impulse to smile at the Anglo names. “Good-looking kids.” He thought of his own children and almost told Mario about them; but he stopped himself just in time. “Where do they live?”

“El Paso.”

The germ of an idea sprouted in Priest’s mind. “You get to see them much?”

Mario shook his head. “I’m workin’ and workin’, man. Savin’ my money to buy them a place. A nice house, with a big kitchen and a pool in the yard. They deserve that.”

The idea blossomed. Priest suppressed his excitement and kept his voice casual, making idle conversation. “Yeah, a beautiful house for a beautiful family, right?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

The radio beeped again, and the truck began to shake. The noise was like rolling thunder, but more regular. It began on a profound bass note and slowly rose in pitch. After exactly fourteen seconds it stopped.

In the quiet that followed, Priest snapped his fingers. “Say, I got an idea.… No, maybe not.”

“What?”

“I don’t know if it would work.”

“What, man, what?”

“I just thought, you know, your wife is so pretty and your kids are so cute, it’s wrong that you don’t see them more often.”

“That’s
your idea?”

“No. My idea is, I could drive the truck to New Mexico while you go visit them, that’s all.” It was important not to seem too keen, Priest told himself. “But I guess it wouldn’t work out,” he added in a who-gives-a-damn voice.

“No, man, it ain’t possible.”

“Probably not. Let’s see, if we set out early tomorrow and drove to San Antonio together, I could drop you off at the airport there, you could be in El Paso by noon, probably. You’d play with the kids, have dinner with your wife, spend the night, get a plane the next day, I could pick you up at Lubbock airport.… How far is Lubbock from Clovis?”

“Ninety, maybe a hundred miles.”

“We could be in Clovis that night, or next morning at the latest, and no way for anyone to know you didn’t drive the whole way.”

“But you want to go to San Antonio.”

Shit
. Priest had not thought this through; he was making it up as he went along. “Hey, I’ve never been to Lubbock,” he said airily. “That’s where Buddy Holly was born.”

“Who the hell is Buddy Holly?”

Priest sang: “ ‘I love you, Peggy Sue.…’ Buddy Holly died before you were born, Mario. I liked him better than Elvis. And don’t ask me who Elvis was.”

“You’d drive all that way just for me?”

Priest wondered anxiously whether Mario was suspicious or just grateful. “Sure I would,” Priest told him. “As long as you let me smoke your Marlboros.”

Mario shook his head in amazement. “You’re a hell of a guy, Ricky. But I don’t know.”

He was not suspicious, then. But he was apprehensive, and he probably could not be pushed into a decision. Priest masked his frustration with a show of nonchalance. “Well, think about it,” he said.

“If something goes wrong, I don’t want to lose my job.”

“You’re right.” Priest fought down his impatience. “I tell you what, let’s talk later. You going to the bar tonight?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you let me know then?”

“Okay, that’s a deal.”

The radio beeped the all-clear signal, and Mario threw the lever that raised the plate off the ground.

“I got to get back to the jug team,” Priest said. “We’ve got a few miles of cable to roll up before nightfall.” He handed back the family photo and opened the door. “I’m telling you, man, if I had a girl that pretty, I wouldn’t leave the goddamn
house.”
He grinned, then jumped to the ground and slammed the door.

The truck moved off toward the next marker flag as Priest walked away, his cowboy boots kicking up dust.

As he followed the
sendero
to where his car was parked, he saw Star begin to pace up and down, impatient and anxious.

She had been famous, once, briefly. At the peak of the hippie era she lived in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Priest had not known her then—he had spent the late sixties making his first million dollars—but he had heard the stories. She had been a striking beauty, tall and black haired with a generous hourglass figure. She had made a record, reciting poetry against a background of psychedelic music with a band called Raining Fresh Daisies. The album had been a minor hit, and Star was a celebrity for a few days.

But what turned her into a legend was her insatiable sexual promiscuity. She had had sex with anyone who briefly took her fancy: eager twelve-year-olds and surprised men in their sixties, boys who thought they were gay and girls who did not know they were lesbians, friends she had known for years and strangers off the street.

That was a long time ago. Now she was a few weeks from her fiftieth birthday, and there were streaks of gray in her hair. Her figure was still generous, though no longer like an hourglass: she weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. But she still exercised an extraordinary sexual magnetism. When she walked into a bar, men stared.

Even now, when she was worried and hot, there was a sexy flounce to the way she paced and turned beside the cheap old car, an invitation in the movement of her flesh beneath the thin cotton dress, and Priest felt the urge to grab her right there.

“What happened?” she said as soon as he was within earshot.

Priest was always upbeat. “Looking good,” he said.

“That sounds bad,” she said skeptically. She knew better than to take what he said at face value.

He told her the offer he had made to Mario. “The beauty of it is, Mario will be blamed,” he added.

“How so?”

“Think about it. He gets to Lubbock, he looks for me, I ain’t there, nor his truck, either. He figures he’s been suckered. What does he do? Is he going to make his way to Clovis and tell the company he lost their truck? I don’t think so. At best, he’d be fired. At worst, he could be accused of stealing the truck and thrown in jail. I’m betting he won’t
even go to Clovis. He’ll get right back on the plane, fly to El Paso, put his wife and kids in the car, and disappear. Then the police will be sure he stole the truck. And Ricky Granger won’t even be a suspect.”

She frowned. “It’s a great plan, but will he take the bait?”

“I think he will.”

Her anxiety deepened. She slapped the dirty roof of the car with the flat of her hand. “Shit, we have to have that goddamn truck!”

He was as worried as she, but he covered it with a cocksure air. “We will,” he said. “If not this way, another way.”

She put the straw hat on her head and leaned back against the car, closing her eyes. “I wish I felt sure.”

He stroked her cheek. “You need a ride, lady?”

“Yes, please. Take me to my air-conditioned hotel room.”

“There’ll be a price to pay.”

She opened her eyes wide in pretended innocence. “Will I have to do something nasty, mister?”

He slid his hand into her cleavage. “Yeah.”

“Oh, darn,” she said, and she lifted the skirt of her dress up around her waist.

She had no underwear on.

Priest grinned and unbuttoned his Levis.

She said: “What will Mario think if he sees us?”

“He’ll be jealous,” Priest said as he entered her. They were almost the same height, and they fit together with the ease of long practice.

She kissed his mouth.

A few moments later he heard a vehicle approaching on the road. They both looked up without stopping what they were doing. It was a pickup truck with three roustabouts in the front seat. The men could see what was going on, and they whooped and hollered through the open window as they went by.

Star waved at them, calling: “Hi, guys!”

Priest laughed so hard, he came.

*  *  *

The crisis had entered its final, decisive phase exactly three weeks earlier.

They were sitting at the long table in the cookhouse, eating their midday meal, a spicy stew of lentils and vegetables with fresh bread warm from the oven, when Paul Beale walked in with an envelope in his hand.

Paul bottled the wine that Priest’s commune made—but he did more than that. He was their link with the outside, enabling them to deal with the world yet keep it at a distance. A bald, bearded man in a leather jacket, he had been Priest’s friend since the two of them were fourteen-year-old hoodlums, rolling drunks in L.A.’s skid row in the early sixties.

Priest guessed that Paul had received the letter that morning and had immediately got in his car and driven here from Napa. He also guessed what was in the letter, but he waited for Paul to explain.

“It’s from the Bureau of Land Management,” Paul said. “Addressed to Stella Higgins.” He handed it to Star, sitting at the foot of the table opposite Priest. Stella Higgins was her real name, the name under which she had first rented this piece of land from the Department of the Interior in the autumn of 1969.

Around the table, everyone went quiet. Even the kids shut up, sensing the atmosphere of fear and dismay.

Star ripped open the envelope and took out a single sheet. She read it with one glance. “June the seventh,” she said.

Priest said reflexively: “Five weeks and two days from now.” That kind of calculation came automatically to him.

Several people groaned in despair. A woman called Song began to cry quietly. One of Priest’s children, ten-year-old Ringo, said: “Why, Star, why?”

Priest caught the eye of Melanie, the newest arrival. She was a tall, thin woman, twenty-eight years old, with striking good looks: pale skin, long hair the color of paprika, and the body of a model. Her five-year-old son, Dusty, sat beside her. “What?” Melanie said in a shocked voice. “What is this?”

Everyone else had known this was coming, but it was too depressing to talk about, and they had not told Melanie.

Priest said: “We have to leave the valley. I’m sorry, Melanie.”

Star read from the letter. “ ‘The above-named parcel of land will become dangerous for human habitation after June seventh, therefore your tenancy is hereby terminated on that date in accordance with clause nine, part B, paragraph two, of your lease.’ ”

Melanie stood up. Her white skin flushed red, and her pretty face twisted in sudden rage. “No!” she yelled. “No! They can’t do this to me—I’ve only just found you! I don’t believe it, it’s a lie.” She turned her fury on Paul. “Liar!” she screamed. “Motherfucking liar!”

Her child began to cry.

“Hey, knock it off!” Paul said indignantly. “I’m just the goddamn mailman here!”

Everyone started shouting at the same time.

Priest was beside Melanie in a couple of strides. He put his arm around her and spoke quietly into her ear. “You’re frightening Dusty,” he said. “Sit down, now. You’re right to be mad, we’re all mad as hell.”

“Tell me it isn’t true,” she said.

Priest gently pushed her into her chair. “It’s true, Melanie,” he said. “It’s true.”

When they had quieted down, Priest said: “Come on, everyone, let’s wash the dishes and get back to work.”

“Why?” said Dale. He was the winemaker. Not one of the founders, he had come here in the eighties, disillusioned with the commercial world. After Priest and Star, he was the most important person in the group. “We won’t be here for the harvest,” he went on. “We have to leave in five weeks. Why work?”

Priest fixed him with the Look, the hypnotic stare that intimidated all but the most strong-willed people. He let the room fall silent, so that they would all hear. At last he said: “Because miracles happen.”

*  *  *

A local ordinance prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages in the town of Shiloh, Texas, but just the other side of the town line there was
a bar called the Doodlebug, with cheap draft beer and a country-western band and waitresses in tight blue jeans and cowboy boots.

Priest went on his own. He did not want Star to show her face and risk being remembered later. He wished she had not had to come to Texas. But he needed someone to help him take the seismic vibrator home. They would drive day and night, taking turns at the wheel, using drugs to stay awake. They wanted to be home before the machine was missed.

He was regretting that afternoon’s indiscretion. Mario had seen Star from a full quarter of a mile away, and the three roustabouts in the pickup had glimpsed her only in passing, but she was distinctive looking, and they could probably give a rough description of her: a tall white woman, heavyset, with long dark hair.…

Priest had changed his appearance before arriving in Shiloh. He had grown a bushy beard and mustache and tied his long hair in a tight plait that he kept tucked up inside his hat.

However, if everything went according to his plan, no one would be asking for descriptions of him or Star.

When he arrived at the Doodlebug, Mario was already there, sitting at a table with five or six of the jug team and the party boss, Lenny Petersen, who controlled the entire seismic exploration crew.

Not to seem too eager, Priest got a Lone Star longneck and stood at the bar for a while, sipping his beer from the bottle and talking to the barmaid, before joining Mario’s table.

Lenny was a balding man with a red nose. He had given Priest the job two weekends ago. Priest had spent an evening at the bar, drinking moderately, being friendly to the crew, picking up a smattering of seismic exploration slang, and laughing loudly at Lenny’s jokes. Next morning he had found Lenny at the field office and asked him for a job. “I’ll take you on trial,” Lenny had said.