And West Is West (5 page)

“How long do you have?” Ethan asks.

Leston's smile seems relieved, as if he is glad to get a last detail out of the way. “Three months.” He shrugs. “A week.” Leston is still smiling. “In my condition, who can tell?
God
?”

Ethan closes the car door and Leston puts the Mercedes in drive. “Call her,” he reads on the doctor's lips through the closed window.

“WHAT'S THIS? WORK
crap?” Alex asks, nudging the banded bundle on Ethan's kitchen pass-through. Leston's folder has sat there for a week.

“That's what I told Yahvi,” Ethan says, sliding Alex a can of Pabst. For himself he fills a glass from a bottle of ale with a winged dog on its label. “But it's from Zoe's old man. Family secrets.”

“What were they?” Alex asks.

“Haven't looked. Not my prob.”

“That's chilly,” Alex says but doesn't dig further. He's preoccupied by a group show at an eighth-floor Chelsea gallery. And he's just broken up with the cellist, Eva—which is why he's stopped by. “It's going to be awkward if you're still hooking up with her friend,” he tells Ethan as if they were symbiotic dating twins.

“I'm not hooking up with Yahvi anymore,” Ethan says.

“No! Say it's not so, bro.” Alex's boyish, grinning face reminds Ethan of James Franco. But Alex is a few inches shorter than Franco and handsomer.

“We're doing sleepovers now.”

“You serious?” Alex's grin leaks away. “Well, if you start hearing gossip about me, stay cool.”

“How am I going to hear any gossip about you? It's earnings week so I'm at the bank all the time.”

“Big deal, you're always at the bank. And by gossip, I mean girlfriend talk.”

“What?” Ethan says. Then he realizes that Alex means Yahvi, that Alex is worried about Yahvi speaking with Eva. Now it's Ethan's turn to grin. “So, what's she going to tell me?”

“Fuck, dude. Nothing.”

“Better I hear it from you first.” It's not often that Ethan gets a chance to tease Alex. Normally he is on the receiving end of any comedy.

Alex, as though he's breaking sweat, wipes his brow with the side of a hand. “Christ.”

“Fess up.”

“All right.” Alex guzzles the Pabst and then mashes the aluminum can flat on the granite countertop. Ethan opens another beer for him and waits.

Being with Alex is often as nostalgia inducing for Ethan as a stroll down the street where he grew up. But Alex, nearing thirty, and despite producing hundreds of canvases, has not made a mark on his profession. Ethan suspects that the paintings he purchases from him are his primary means of support. He has vowed to himself that his friend will not starve, that he'll financially support Alex into old age if it comes to that. And why not? He'll have the bucks. With his bonus this year alone, Ethan could pay off a good chunk of his condo. Of course, he can never let Alex know about his plan. It would wreck their friendship.

“What happened was . . . ,” Alex starts, hesitant, his second Pabst gone, and partly down his chin. He backhands his mouth dry. “I was trying to talk Eva into a threesome, all right?”

Ethan shakes his head. “Dude! No you didn't!” Beer buzzed, he feels quite jolly; Alex always recovers quickly from his dating debacles. With his mug empty, Ethan is considering a refill, the beginning of a full night of frat boy commiseration with his dumped best friend. Then he remembers that it's earnings week and he needs to be sharp for tomorrow. But he
is
overdue for a binge. Really, it's been years—the last was on Alex's twenty-sixth birthday.

Now Alex is looking at Ethan with a pained expression. “You're not getting it, are you?” He leans an elbow on Leston's folder. “Well, since you're collecting family secrets. I wanted Eva to sleep with me and another guy.”

“But,” Ethan says, his jaw loose, “you're not gay.” He looks down at the fresh Flying Dog he is pouring himself—it is foaming onto the counter. Alex pulls Leston's package away from the puddle.

“Bi, dude,” Alex says and pitches his empty Pabst toward the recycle bin. Basket. “Been that way forever. I'm gonna go now. Let things sync up with you.”

Trailing Alex to the door, Ethan feels as whimpery as a dog being left behind in an empty house.

“It's cool you never saw it,” Alex says. “It's not like I ever wanted to do you. At least not since freshman year. So about my opening next week. Bring Yahvi if you want. We're good then, right?” He is gone before Ethan can answer the question.

TOE-TO-TOE, ETHAN AND
Yahvi rise in a crowded elevator. She is smiling up at him and he has the desire to give the tip of her nose a little peck, just as if they've become one of those publicly cute couples. The hoop Yahvi wears through her left nostril makes her unpretentiously exotic—nose rings are traditionally Indian. In her green leggings and platform sandals she is presenting herself as what she is.
Bicultural
. Anxious about Alex, he immediately corrects this label to
human
.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Yahvi says. “No.
Inflation
. One dollar.” She taps his arm playfully. “Now you've gotten even
me
talking like a banker.”

Ethan's eyes wander over Yahvi. “Forgive me,” he whispers and touches his lips to the spot on her brow where occasionally, though not tonight, she places a stylish bindi. Until her mention of banking, he had almost erased his day's other anxiety—earlier his new algorithm had logged an unusual return, trading in Pakistani rupees. This would have been a good thing except that some of Yahvi's extended family lives in Pakistan. When he looked up on the wire what had triggered the profit, he read of a drone strike on the Afghanistan border—it was just the raw, quickly telegraphed text that his algorithm, in microseconds, had processed to gain an arbitrage advantage. However, twenty minutes later, Dwayne Hoke was in his office showing Ethan images already posted to Al Jazeera's Arabic news site—an incinerated pickup truck and beside it a large piece of something burnt that shouldn't have been but was likely human. “Good work,” Hoke had said as if Ethan had fired the missile himself. “We cashed in some more evildoers.”

No
.
I will not think of this
, Ethan tells himself as the elevator door slides away. He and Yahvi and the other art partygoers disperse into the hall.

Alex's group show is opposite the elevator, in a wide gallery space with partitions. Ethan sees phosphorescent seascapes and high-finish, classically rendered portraits of Mr. Magoo, Elmer Fudd, Scooby-Doo. But he spots nothing by Alex. He takes a flyer from a stack near the entrance and recognizing one of Alex's images reads its caption to Yahvi.

“ ‘A metaphysical union of Franz Kline and Cy Twombly filled with postmortem irony.' Isn't it supposed to be
postmodern
?”

Yahvi squeezes his arm. “Then it wouldn't be ironic.”

“I am so uncool,” he says.

He has been brooding about Alex for a week, about the person he thought was his best friend but who, for a decade, has withheld part of his identity from him. Alex's revelation makes Ethan admire his friend. But it also distances him. The embrace of all experience is an ideal he could never emulate.

He and Yahvi now walk around a partition. Two of Alex's paintings, large ones with atypical slashes of color, fill a corner of the gallery. Alex, dressed smartly—or is it ironically?—in vest and cravat, stands beside his work. He is listening closely to an angular woman of indeterminate age. Then Alex turns to him and opens his arms. Ethan exhales and steps forward.

CHAPTER 7

Nevada

Colonel Voigt heard of the security breach during a call from Washington. Sergeant Jessica Aldridge had been relating sensitive information about the al-Yarisi strike in letters to her father, one Donald Alan Aldridge, a convict in Florida. It has led to this, her final briefing.

At attention Jessica keeps her eyes high, mostly over the colonel's head, on his wall filled with certificates of merit and photos of jets plowing contrails. When her lips stop moving, after she has told Voigt everything and there is nothing more to say and he is satisfied, he pushes toward Jessica a document he has signed and looks away.

“All packed up?” Voigt asks.

“This is the last of my stuff, sir,” Jessica says, showing him the backpack she is wearing.

“Dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir,” she says and salutes. Voigt does not return it.

Two beret-wearing security forces escort her to a jeep and, with the sun baking their necks, they drive her out of the base gate. At the highway bus stop one of her escorts, behind shaded lenses, gives her a hand flick before the jeep kicks up dust and leaves her there. A last salute. Somehow Voigt has gotten her a general discharge. The way she feels is that she deserves an other than honorable.

Jessica does not blame her father for what has happened.
She
wrote to him about the al-Yarisi incident knowing the details were secret. But she expected them to be kept between Don and her, between father and daughter. She believed that letters sealed in envelopes were the final way one could keep a distant conversation private. And she expected that corresponding in handwritten words to someone cut off from the outside world would be even more private. She feels stupid. Her job was spying on locations half a world away. Why would she have assumed that anything can be hidden anymore?

A rig speeding by sends hot sand into her face. Then a car leaving the base pulls up beside her.

“Ride, Sergeant?” the driver asks, using her old title without irony. It does not surprise her that the pair haven't heard of her discharge. Voigt, for morale's sake, and also, she suspects, out of personal disappointment, has likely been keeping her failure quiet.

“You going to Pancho's?” she asks the airmen. But where else would they be going since they're not pointed toward Vegas.

“Fuck yeah. Hop in,” says the passenger. His fatigues bear no insignia. Because he is not young Jessica assumes that he has been busted down several ranks, probably for insubordination. She bristles at his tone before swallowing the fact that she no longer owns the rank on her own fatigues.

Jessica climbs into the backseat and gravel rattles in the car's wheel wells before the vehicle aligns itself on the road. She feels strange, outside of herself, almost out of control like she is skittering down a water park slide and allowing what may come to come. If this letting go can be called a decision, she decides to apply no resistance. It is the path of least resistance.

At Pancho's, after she downs four quick beers, Phyl offers her some special attention.

“Hard day?” Phyl's two words, in one so laconic, are equivalent to a State of the Union address.

In answer Jessica requests another beer and Phyl pours it smoothly, does not press her question. Phyl, Jessica knows, will take care of her just as she has done with other airman. If she falls off her stool, Phyl will lay her down on a backroom cot to sleep off the drunk. No fuss.

Jessica only notices that hours have gone by when she sees that the ashtray where she has been mashing out her cigarettes resembles a forest of miniature stumps. Her throat feels raw. She has not peed since arriving, though now she senses the dull urge. At least she has eaten, if only from the peanut bowl before her. She seems to have created for herself a little world here, a smoky bubble reality filled with clacking billiards and juke box country. Swaying, she decides that she must stay here forever, must ask Phyl for a job, must become heir to this desert pit stop. She sees herself in a body as crusted and wizened as Phyl's. Saved.

“Sergeant Aldridge,” a voice says pleasantly. It isn't Phyl, who has moved out of Jessica's bubble. It's Dunbar.

Bastard
, she thinks, and her sideways tongue tries to uncurl the word against him. Now that she has nothing to lose she is ready to avenge the gambling airman he'd banished to Kyrgyzstan.

“Button it!” Dunbar says over her mumbling as she tries to stand.

She is putty and Dunbar is helping her off the stool, picking up her backpack and leading her. After they step outside the stars filling the sky surprise her. It is as if she is seeing the desert night for the first time.

“Where we going?” her lips manage to say as Dunbar guides her into a car.

He sits behind the steering wheel before answering. “To where you sent your things, Sergeant. Amargosa?”

Her memory of packing her on-base dorm room, like the past few weeks, is blurry.

“Quieter than Vegas, I guess,” Dunbar says conversationally.

“Better hiking,” she slurs.

“That so?”

“Death Valley.”

She sees Dunbar frown. Right now she thinks it funny that
death
is in the name of her next destination. She hadn't thought so far ahead, only that she wanted solitude. Amargosa, on the unpopulated edge of the Funeral Mountains, seemed the place to go. It was a nowhere town where she knew nobody.

“Buckle up,” Dunbar says, and she manages to. Despite his warning he pulls out of Pancho's dirt lot slow and easy with the brights on. Is he a cautious man under the bluster? Jessica thinks she might have misread him from the start.

They tunnel through the night for half an hour before she asks Dunbar to pull over. Jessica walks onto the roadside and goes behind a bush that she can tell from its pleasant odor is sagebrush. Pulling down her fatigue pants, she looks up and traces the stars. But there are too many dots to connect and she is unable to identify a single constellation. It's all white noise up there, pressing down on her the way the overabundance of information from a drone's cameras sometimes did. But she had known how to read through the garbage. She had been a damn good sensor operator. She might have become an even better pilot. Better than Dunbar, she bets, with his corrected astigmatism. But not anymore. Not anymore.
Fuck it
. “Fuck it,” she shouts.

“You good, Sergeant?” Dunbar calls. Jessica remains quiet. “Sergeant,” he calls again.

“Yes sir.” She stands and buttons up. After lighting a cigarette she finds her way back via the glow of the taillights. “You're really going out of your way,” she tells the lieutenant, who is leaning against the idling car. “You live in Vegas, don't you?”

“Boulder City.”

“Quieter than Vegas, I guess.”

“Less smog.”

“Right,” Jessica says and flicks the cigarette into the sand. She is sobering and headachy.

JESSICA UNLOCKS THE
door and pushes it in. A burnt dust odor mingles with the smell of fresh cardboard. She finds the light switch and illuminates a few boxes piled in the center of the room by the movers. She regrets the expense a little. She doesn't own much and could have left it behind.

“Well, that's it then,” Dunbar says from the walkway. “You good to go?”

“You mean
to stay
,” she says. She notices a coffeemaker atop the dresser. “Come in. I'll make you a brew for the ride home.” She is studying him out there, his shadowed face handsome as a sculpting. She would have him come inside and take her to bed without sentiment until she is blotted out. But this sudden fantasy is hers alone. Such thoughts seem to be nowhere near Dunbar's. Aside from the reality that he is physically out of her class, Jessica understands that she is a security risk. In all ways she has become an untouchable to her former colleagues.

“Thanks, but I'll be going. Just wanted to be sure you landed safely,” says Dunbar.

“I'm still up in the air.”

“You'll be all right,” he says without conviction. Even though these could have been his goodnight words, he pauses for three fast heartbeats and Jessica expects him to walk into the room and take them in another direction. “Ssoo,” he says, the hiss of the word a prying screwdriver, “you aren't going to be hiking the Valley alone?”

Dunbar, she decides, isn't a bad guy, not at all. And that he isn't extinguishes her wish for his touch. Sure, he has an ego and likes it stroked. But underneath he is a responsible type. What he has just asked is whether she is equipped for a desert hike, not so much gearwise as psychologically.

If she knew she might say.

She untwists some bills out of her fatigue pocket, change from the hundred she had broken at Pancho's, and holds them out. “For the gas,” she tells Dunbar.

“The ride's on me, Sergeant.”

“No. It's not.” She lets the bills float down to the walkway, to Dunbar's feet, and then she shuts the door between them.

AWAKENING IN A
strange, overly soft bed Jessica feels achy and disoriented. Then her boxes of packed belongings bring her back to who she is. Who she was.

Snapping out of bed from habit, she goes straight to the curtain and draws it aside. Below, out the window, glints the motel's elaborate pool. It is shaped like a lagoon. Beyond this artificial oasis a bleak scrubland unfolds. And at the edge of this lowland, distant enough to be shadows in their predawn gloom, loom the hogback peaks of the Funeral Mountains.

Jessica does not believe that humans are the toys of destiny; she believes that people can choose their fate. But if they stop choosing, that's when destiny arrives. The Funeral Mountains seem like a good place to be after a debacle. A place where you can bury the past. This is all she knows for the moment. For with nothing before her and with as much time for herself as she used to lack, her wheels are spinning waiting to catch. But there is no traction. What she was is over, has been reduced to two sensations: thirst and hunger. She gets dressed in yesterday's fatigues.

Downstairs, the breakfast bar has opened. She eats reconstituted eggs, rubbery pancakes. A young boy with his parents stares at her through a skeleton mask. She stares back. Then she remembers it's the thirty-first. Halloween. Since she is wearing fatigues maybe the boy thinks that she, too, is in costume. And she is, kind of; being in uniform makes her an impostor now. She's not a protector anymore, a self-conception on which her self-esteem has depended. When she looks at the boy again his mother is lifting the mask to the top of his head so he can eat. Jessica polices her table and passes near the family.

“Morning, Sergeant,” the father cheerily says. Though he's not in uniform, he has the presence of an officer of some service.

“Good morning, sir,” she says rigidly. Shamed by her deception, her wrinkled uniform, her very being, she drops her eyes to the floor.

By the casino entrance—for what would a Nevada motel be without slots, roulette, and blackjack—a sundries shop beckons. From a cooler Jessica removes a bottle of water and pays a coot who stares at the
ALDRIDGE US AIR FORCE
across her chest. His crusted eyes seem not to be reading but reconnoitering past the letters and the camouflage pattern of her shirt as to whether or not she has breasts. What she does have are plastered flat by a sports bra.

“One dollar. Sold,” the coot says like an auctioneer.

Outside in the sun Jessica adjusts her cap and begins walking. She crosses a footbridge over the fake lagoon and passes through a tarmac parking lot where RVs float on heat waves. When her boots crunch gravel she calculates the distance ahead. The ripples of distorted air only allow her to guess that the first mountain might be five or ten or fifteen miles off. She swigs from the water bottle and then marches militarily into the emptiness. Every now and then she veers to avoid a creosote bush, the kind of scrub that becomes tumbleweed in a storm. There is no breeze except for the heat rising from the ground.

What am I trying to prove?
she thinks.

Nothing
, she answers.

The mountain grows. A palm of water she slaps onto her forehead leaves streaks of momentary coolness, but the air is so dry nothing drips from her chin. She has not brought enough liquid for an hour's excursion. Yet she keeps walking and does not look back.

Somewhere she crosses a border and each step gets harder, but not because she is tiring—she will not admit to that. It is because she is walking up a grade toward the foothills. She finds shade beneath a rock eroded into the shape of a mushroom. After smoothing the ground with a boot, she sits. Then she lies back, lethargic with heat and fatigue. When she awakes and starts walking again, it is into the shadow of the mountain. The sun has come around into its decline.

Second by second twilight encroaches. Before darkness arrives Jessica chooses a place on the slope to camp. There is an inch of water left in her bottle. For dinner she allows herself a capful to dampen the grit in her throat. She coughs and spits, instantly regretting the lost moisture. Her training in this tells her that she is in a yellow zone where her electrolytes might crash and her brain will short circuit. She almost wishes this would happen so she could stop remembering her dismissal and those girls in that other desert. Curling up on the slope, she offers her bones to the ground.

Streaks of light cross the black sky. Shooting stars or dreams? She cannot tell how long she keeps her eyes open, or even if they are open. She is shivering.

When dawn strikes the mountain it is like an anvil on her skull. The weight comes not from the atmosphere but her dehydration. She squints at her water bottle and notes that during the night she had emptied it. She does not feel upset. There is no panic in her. She gets up and starts trudging back the way she came and into the sun. It would be too easy to go up the slope and get lost forever, but she is not suicidal. That is not why she is here. She knows this now. But whatever has called her out here is not finished with her yet.