Blood Makes Noise (21 page)

Academically, he considered that this probably ended his affiliation with the local Montoneros.

He spent two nights in Palermo Park, under the abandoned carousel, letting his mind draw together beads of ocean from a fistful of singed 1956–1957 files. He took time. Time for the blisters on
his face to calm. Time to absorb the words of the files. The words between words.

Michael Suslov, a mediocre suit at the American embassy during the 1950s—skipped across those words lightly. Alejandro would have passed over him completely but for two facts: this colorless ghost of a man seemed to have a gift for being in the orbit of people like Hector Cabanillas, Pedro Ara, Moori Koenig, etc., all of whom had, in some way, rumored involvement with the theft and concealment of Her.

And Michael Suslov had shot his wife.

The act was so completely without motive, the situation so confused and out of character for the man—this and the fact that it happened almost immediately after Her final disappearance was suggestive, only made more so by a passing reference in a BA police memo that while Michael had sat dazed on the kitchen floor, splashed with his wife’s and unborn child’s blood, someone had searched his house. Searched it for what?

Maybe this embassy ghost wasn’t so colorless after all? Was it possible he had somehow come into possession of Her in the fall of 1956? And if so, would Michael Suslov, fifteen years later, have any knowledge of where She was now? Alejandro had no answers to this, but if the American who shot his wife was still alive somewhere, there, under the old carousel, Alejandro vowed that he and Suslov would have a small conversation about it.

His Montonero friends must have figured him for the north road out of town, for there they waited for him. But his friends were slow, and deep down, he knew, wanted to ask him
why
first.

The leading one he killed simply because he chose to fire first, and that was always the most important thing. The second fled behind a wall as Alejandro faded into shadow. He waited. Felt the anxiety of the other. Waited for the man to fidget, feel the darkness turn enemy, make a mistake.

It came quickly. A break left for the light—a
Porteño
thing to do—when a break right, into darkness—a gaucho thing to do—might have saved him.

The
crack
, echoing off cobblestone, pierced his thigh and he tumbled hard. Alejandro lined up again, then paused, for he recognized the face. Corada, the guerrilla unit’s accountant and document forger. Corada’s gun had skittered clear, and Alejandro approached leisurely. If the leg shot had frightened the accountant, the sight of Alejandro’s face terrified him.

“Oh sweet mother of God…”

Alejandro stood above him. “Corada.”

Corada’s face crinkled at the voice. “Jesus…Alejandro? I…I didn’t mean…it wasn’t…” The words stacked up, collided with one another. Alejandro knelt down, drew his
facón
blade and danced it across Corada’s neck.

“Do you want to live?”

“…What?”

“Do you want to live?”

“Yeah…yeah…”

Alejandro tapped the blade lightly over the accountant’s throat. “I need the address of a certain American. Then I will need a passport, money, and a plane ticket.”

The accountant gulped once. “Sure. Sure, Al.” He drew his hand to his face and studied the blood. “Christ…you blew half my leg away…” Corada gritted his teeth. “This is for Her, isn’t it?”

“It’s for the revolution.”

“It was always for Her with you, Al.” He swallowed. “It was always for Her…”

S
ometimes she came in dreams. Young, familiar, forgiving. On bad days she materialized on corrugated waves of desert heat. On those afternoons Michael would stop taking amphetamines.

When he got up for work, the sun hadn’t. When he came home it was already a memory behind mountain rims. In between he labored in the mine’s darkness, waste water soaking him to the thigh.

Nobody spoke on the bucket ride up. There was a time when this had been a cowboy job—chasing fat, gleaming veins of gold, like drowsy buffalo—a time when you could hold a fortune in one hand. Now you crushed ten million tons of anonymous ore a day, and nothing passed through your hands but your life.

On the surface it was as dark as below, and the transition was a simple one. Nobody got a beer; nobody wanted to talk about it. They just drifted, undead, for home.

He caught a ride the rocky dozen miles to the weak, sodium glow of Beatty. Michael didn’t own a car. Didn’t see the point of ever leaving this place. He tried to remember the driver’s name but couldn’t. He didn’t know any of their names.

Beatty. The other towns of this desolation zone had folded and died a half century ago when the ore turned against them. But Beatty, the coffin maker, endured, limping through the years an eviscerated truck stop. Then gold was pronounced once more worth the effort to remove it, and again Beatty went into the mountain.

Michael stepped off the pickup at his trailer, shut his eyes against a gritty blast. The wind never stopped. Primeval and bigger
than your whole life, Beatty was a speck it didn’t even pause over. Flotsam spun about his legs. Nothing rotted here. It was all a time machine: old cars, dead dogs, last year’s leaves. They whirled around some, settled, but they didn’t disappear. Nothing did, every night faithfully waiting for you on the front step.

There was a small dusty chapel across from the trailer park. Michael had gone there alone once to light a candle for his mother but once there lit one also for Karen, his father, then Maria, Evita…and soon there weren’t enough candles. And Michael realized there would never be enough candles, not ever, and didn’t return.

He shut the door to his paper trailer, fell on the bed as the swamp cooler banged and drooled down laminated panel walls. The exhaustion cleared a moment, as it always did before he passed out, and that was a dangerous time. The time when his wife came, a woman whose love was someone else’s memory but whose death was all his. He needed hate, but she wouldn’t oblige. So he brought his own, fermented and self-administered. When finally he dropped into a shallow amphetamine sleep, he was wearing his clothes.

Four hours later he jittered awake, vomited once, and sat on the carpet with his head against the paneling, feeling the vibration of the swamp cooler. It was so ravaged, this night, every night, that it comforted him like a muddy grave.

There would be no question of sleep. He’d sit there, listening to wind buffeting past on its way to Death Valley. Sometimes he’d turn on the a.m. talk shows, hollow voices crackling off the ionosphere from Salt Lake. Sometimes he just sat there and cried.

Come dawn it would be his day off, and the first cold shots of light would freeze him with terror at an entire day available and unplanned. Later it would bring Rosa.

“Mike?”

“Go away.”

She’d come in anyway, Rosa. All business as she got him off the floor, stripped down his week-old clothes, and forced him into the bath. He’d curse her, but he’d go, and she’d tell him the news—which brother was in jail, her asshole manager at the bar, the two hippies some highway patrolmen beat the shit out of for being hippies and being in Nevada.

“They were actually
yippies
though, y’know.”

Michael swallowed some pills, and Rosa’s voice moved to arm’s length, where he could handle it. She didn’t mind the pills. Alcohol had killed her father, fucked up her brothers, and continually induced her mother to take off her panties in public. That Michael didn’t drink much, even if he spent most of his time in a pharmacological haze, put him a notch below sainthood.

Rosa. Gap-toothed with ironed hair dyed a flaxen chrome. Friendly eyes and strong, no-nonsense hands.

“Oh my, what would you do without me, Mike?”

Rosa was certain she alone stood between Michael and oblivion. But Michael needed his pain far too much to ever let that train pull too far out of the station.

“Guess what today is?”

“I don’t know.” It was the guttural rasp of a drowned man. It’d been…days?…since he’d spoken.

“C’mon, think.”

“Sunday.”

She blew out a petulant breath. “Oh come on, don’t be so
stupid.
”

He could see several fragments of his mind drifting through the bathroom, and he was in no mood to try and collect them for an answer. “I don’t know.”

“It’s your birthday, silly.”

He dried himself, but she combed his hair and presented the results proudly in the medicine cabinet mirror. “See? Cute.”

He felt absolutely no ownership of the face that stared back.

The shower had roused him to at least a heightened state of stupor as he pulled on clean jeans and a shirt. Rosa was waiting on the bed coyly, hands behind her. “Close your eyes.”

He was feeling game and complied. Rosa led him to the bed, laid a package in his hands, and declared, “
Ta da!
” He opened his eyes.

“Well, look at this…” He slipped the ribbon off and pulled away the top. Inside was an antique clarinet. Rosa bit her lip uncertainly.

“I thought you’d want a new one…”

She must have looked forever to find the exact model. The one Michael inherited from his father and lost during one of his three-day disappearing acts in the desert. It was in good condition, just a little tarnished, the velvet box frayed but sturdy.

He lifted it. His father’s clarinet had been the absolute last link to his childhood. It was such a thoughtful gift it made him feel mean and unworthy. He turned to Rosa, sitting there now wondering if she’d made some terrible mistake, and kissed her. “It’s wonderful. Thank you. It’s more than I deserve.”

She hugged him back fiercely. “Oh baby, I love it so much when you’re happy.” Her touch, the feel of her sweater, renewed him. He stood and opened the door, ready to face the day.

It was night.

They had dinner/breakfast at the mom-and-pop steak joint—Rosa’s treat—and the food sat foully in his belly, but he felt okay and tried to make it good for Rosa. The evening had a shot, but then they went by her bar for a nightcap, and there was noise and other shithead miners and suddenly she was his girl now and his mood imploded, leaving him hunched in the restroom jamming pills down his throat, seeking the middle distance.

She had a cake waiting for him at the trailer, but he couldn’t even count the candles on it, which weren’t forty-four anyway.
They ate it, sat there rummaging the wreckage of another night, and fell asleep.

When he woke there was thunder ugly and deep over Tonopah. He disentangled himself from Rosa, pulled on his jeans, and walked out barefoot amongst luminescent gravel. The wind had lost its arrogance and was in full retreat from a thunderhead coming over the mountains, swallowing the sky, black on blacker.

And Michael began to run.

Out of town, across beaten, weedy lots. Through fissured sandstone, into the path of the storm. Thunder throbbed his frame, and it began to rain. He couldn’t hear his breath, but when it failed he collapsed to his knees, shot his face up into a sky roiling spun lead above him, and thought,
Oh God, oh God, what have I become
…

S
trange time, the ride up. You had to stand still because the bucket swayed easily and there were always too many, shoulder to shoulder. Down at the minehead the weight of the earth crushed and steamed the air. On the way up it relaxed, and the armor of sweat he wore went clammy as he was dumped into a sucking Nevada August.

The crew drifted to their pickups and Suburbans, haphazard in the lot. Michael hated these moments. The ten seconds of forced interaction to hitch a lift back to Beatty. The half-tons and four-wheel drives gunned, and as Michael shuffled among them he noticed the tan rental sedan, puny and awkward. Standing against the door, arms folded, was Hector.

He looked exactly the same, unchanged, and that only deepened the nightmare mirage.

“
Michael
.”

Michael stood there, squinting as the glare scooped out his mind, listened once more to the nightmare speak, then did the only sensible thing with a nightmare: turned his back on it and walked away.