Gods Without Men (18 page)

Who would leave a wife alone in a strange camp? It was obvious to Segunda the man Deighton didn’t care for Salt-Face Woman at all. Everyone said so. That was why she cried so much. At night it was cold. She had only a thin blanket. Segunda saw Mockingbird Runner bring her a quilt. She saw them talking in the firelight. She saw Mockingbird Runner lay down beside her.

I shall explain to her about death, said Mockingbird Runner, as he washed himself in the water the next morning. There is no need, Segunda told him. These people know more about it than you or I. But
he would not listen. It was what Salt-Face Woman wanted to know, he said. He wanted to make her happy.

That afternoon the two lovers climbed the rocks together. Though it was years since Segunda had walked so far, let alone scrambled over boulders or up narrow paths, she followed them. She saw them sit down together in a sheltered spot. She saw Salt-Face Woman open up her little book. Segunda crept closer and strained to overhear. It was as she’d feared. Mockingbird Runner was telling the story of the time Coyote traveled to the Land of the Dead.

Coyote was wandering around, aimlessly as usual. He was feeling sad that so many of his companions had been killed in the war against Gila Monster.

“Haik
ya
! I am lonely. There is no one to help me carry the game I kill-aik
ya
! Where are my friends, the friends with whom I used to play the hand game and sing by the fire? Gila Monster and his people have killed them all.”

He asked his penis, who knew many more things than he. “Penis,” he said, “what shall I do-aik
ya
! Once I had companions to help me dance the old dances, but Gila Monster and his people have killed them all-aik
ya
!”

His penis thought for a while. “If you want to see your friends, you must travel to the Three-Finger Rocks and look inside the cave beneath them. There you will find Yucca Woman, weaving a basket. She is blind and will not know what you are doing, just so long as you are quiet. Cling to a strand of devil’s claw and hold on tight, because she is weaving together this world and the Land of the Dead. At the moment when she holds the willow wands open, there is a gap between the two worlds. You can crawl into the Land of the Dead. But whatever you do, never let go of the devil’s-claw strand. If you do, you will be trapped.”

So Coyote traveled over the mountains and across the white sands and came at last to the Three-Finger Rocks. Sure enough, in the cave beneath he found old blind Yucca Woman, weaving her basket.

“Who is there?” asked Yucca Woman. “Nobody is there-aik
ya
!” said
Coyote. “Just an old dust devil, the kind the children beat with sticks.” And Yucca Woman went back to her basket weaving.

Coyote made himself very small and flattened his belly against a strand of devil’s claw, clinging tightly as Yucca Woman’s nimble fingers threaded the weft through the willow wands. As soon as the strand passed beneath the willow, Coyote found himself in twilight. It was cold and gray. He looked across the land and saw many dim green lights, the glowing campfires of the dead. He squinted into the darkness. Finally he recognized the faces of his companions, the young warriors killed in the war against Gila Monster. He called out to them. “Haik
ya
! Hello, my brothers! How good to see you! Are you happy here-aik
ya
? Do you have enough to eat?” His friends replied, but being dead their voices were very faint and hard to hear. Just then, the nimble fingers of Yucca Woman passed the devil’s claw strand back through the willow wands and once again Coyote found himself in this world.

He felt frustrated but remembered the wise words of his penis. A second time Yucca Woman passed the devil’s claw thread beneath the willow and a second time Coyote clung on tight and passed into the Land of the Dead. Once again he saw his companions sitting around the pale campfires. Once again he called out. This time they beckoned to him, showing him they had made a place for him beside the fire. Still he couldn’t hear their words. When he passed into the Land of the Dead a third time he couldn’t resist and let go of the strand. He dropped to the ground and went to sit by the fire with his companions. “Old friends, it is good to see you-aik
ya
! Tell me the news. What game do you hunt down here in the Land of the Dead? Do you still wrestle and throw sticks to pierce the hoop?” His friends said nothing.

“Coyote!” said his penis. “You have been very foolish! Look what you’ve done!” Coyote squinted up through the gloom and saw a young warrior climbing onto the devil’s-claw strand. “Good-bye, Coyote!” shouted the warrior. “Good-bye and thank you. You have saved me from the Land of the Dead. I’ve been here ever since I was speared in the war against Gila Monster. Now I shall go back and feel the sun on my face, and run and hunt and lay down with a woman.” Coyote shook his
fist. “Haikya! You tricked me-aik
ya
! I’m sorry I ever came down here.” He wept and wailed as he thought about how he had been tricked. “What a fool was I, to let go of the strand of devil’s claw. Now I will have to wait here in this gloomy spot, until I can fool another person into taking my place.”

Segunda listened to this story and knew that for all his power, Mockingbird Runner had fallen into a trap. She lay in the cover of bush and watched the lovers take off their clothes. She saw his red body next to her white body, and she knew there would be a baby, and it would be Coyote’s baby, belonging half to this world and half to the Land of the Dead.

“I suppose,” said Jaz, “we’d better wait for Mommy.” Raj was standing at the foot of the lounger, staring at the sky and humming in a high-pitched wavering tone, usually a sign he was hungry. Jaz tousled his hair. Raj took a step back, out of range.

“Oh, to hell with it. I could use something to eat, too.”

He fixed a lunch of tuna fish and rye crackers. They ate together by the pool. Raj stood, clutching his food in a hot little fist. Daddy perched glumly on a folding chair. Raj drank apple juice. Daddy had a beer. Daddy had another beer. He crushed red Tecate cans under the sole of his flip-flop and threw them at the painted metal bucket that served as a trash can. What the hell was Lisa playing at? She’d made her point. He was more than ready to apologize. If he admitted his faults, then maybe they could all go look at scenery or something. She was the one who’d wanted to take a trip out to this godforsaken place. And until she came back with the car, he and Raj were stuck at the motel.

An hour went by. He coaxed Raj into the pool and held him while he splashed, feeling his wriggling body twisting about in his arms, a little seal cub, a porpoise. Afterward he smeared more sunscreen on the boy’s torso and tried to persuade him to wear the floppy-brimmed hat Lisa had picked up at a Walmart on the way out of L.A. Raj didn’t want to know about the hat. Even tying the strap under his chin didn’t work; his fingers deftly picked open the knot as soon as Jaz’s back was turned.

The more he thought about Lisa, the more the print on his paperback novel swam in front of his eyes.
You people
. Well, sometimes she
was
you people. A piece of string, for God’s sake. That’s all it was.

Another hour passed. Jaz took Raj’s hand and went out to look at
the road, in the magical hope that this would conjure his wife and their rental car out of the shimmering blacktop. The air had a pink haze. He considered walking down the hill into town. How long would it take? An hour? With the boy?

He always defaulted to work when stressed or angry. The sun was low and he was failing to concentrate on a pile of reports when his cell phone started to vibrate in his pocket, playing a trebly polyphonic “Ride of the Valkyries.” Not Lisa. The ringtone was his bad-taste private joke on Fenton Willis, a man it was probably risky to make jokes about, even if he wasn’t your employer.

“Mr. Willis.”

“Jaswinder.” The firm’s CEO was the only person in Jaz’s life other than his parents who insisted on using his full name. He pronounced it
Jass-whine-dur
, a mangled sequence of syllables he emitted with such ponderous formality that Jaz sometimes felt like the object of a hearts and minds campaign.
Step one: Look him in the eye and address him using correct honorific. Step two: Tell him why you regret calling in the airstrike on his village …
Watercooler gossip had it that in Vietnam Willis’s job had been to clear Vietcong tunnels, crawling along in the dark with a flashlight and a .38. Sometimes, on the subway or waiting in line for a coffee, Jaz found himself wondering how many of the men around him had done such things. Which of the guys strap-hanging on the F train had been to war? Which of them, with their copies of the
Post
and their laptop cases, had tortured or killed?

“So, how’s the desert?”

“It’s just great, Mr. Willis. We’re all having a great time.”

“Glad to hear it. I stayed in a neat little place round there. Working cattle ranch. Help with the roundup, rope a steer, that kind of thing. I could get Linda to send you the details. Great place. You spend a night on the range. Eat beans out of a mess tin, Indian feller tells ghost stories. Mesquite fire, the whole nine yards.”

“Sounds awesome, sir. But maybe next time. Our itinerary’s kind of set.”

“I see. Look, son, I wouldn’t bother you on your vacation, but I had
lunch with Cy Bachman yesterday, and he seems to think you aren’t happy.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly.”

“Well, how would you put it?”

“I think we’re working well together. And Cy’s a talented guy. No doubt about it.”

“But?”

“I think there’s too much exposure. If it goes wrong there could be consequences.”

“That goes without saying. We’ve got a lot of chips on the table.”

“Not just losses for the firm. Systemic consequences.”

“You’ll have to unpack that for me.”

“I just think we haven’t thought through the logic of what we’re doing with Walter.”

“Cy says you’re risk-averse. He says you pitched him some kind of candy-assed moral argument, told him you thought taking highly leveraged positions based on his model was against your conscience.”

“That wasn’t what I said.”

“So what did you say? If you think the model’s no good, then you need to stand up and say so. I’m not paying you to spot problems and keep them to yourself.”

“Well, I—”

“And you need to tell me what in hell’s name your conscience has to do with the price of rice.”

This was not a conversation Jaz wanted to have, not today. Preferably not ever, but particularly not today. He thought of asking Willis whether he could call him back, but that wasn’t really an option. If right now was when Fenton wanted to talk about Cy Bachman and the Walter model and all the rest of the shit Jaz had hoped to keep in a holding pattern over the fan for another few days, then right now it would have to be. It was obvious what Bachman had been saying. Their relationship had never been straightforward, and now—after their argument—he wanted Jaz off the team. Fenton was doing him a courtesy, allowing him to defend himself, but it was probably a
fait accompli
. He assumed
his security pass had been deactivated. They were probably boxing up his personal effects for the courier.

This had been coming for a while.

He’d first set eyes on Cy Bachman two years previously, over lunch at a steakhouse in the Financial District, the kind of place Willis favored for meetings, where you could eat eighty-five-dollar Wagyu burgers and wash them down with bottles of Opus One. Bachman turned out to be vegetarian, a fact Willis evidently knew and had ignored when making the booking. While the CEO told a boring story about a horse he was thinking of buying from a stable in Saratoga, Jaz had watched an elegant, fiftyish, shaven-headed man shoot his French cuffs and tackle an enormous bowl of arugula, whose size appeared to be the kitchen’s consolation for the meal’s total absence of protein. It occurred to him the salad was a joke—the place was known for the “no rabbit food” motto emblazoned on its creamy letterpress menu. Bachman affected neither to notice nor to care.

When Willis finished the horse story, Bachman smiled at Jaz and complimented him on a paper he’d coauthored at MIT, outlining a simplified statistical technique for describing the behavior of certain assemblies of particles. Jaz was disarmed, but at the same time wary. Bachman had a reputation as one of the most talented financial engineers on Wall Street; it was an open secret that Willis had poached him from one of the big banks to head a new research team. He assumed the lunch was because Willis wanted him to work under Bachman. The comment was his new boss’s way of letting him know he had prepared. Later he’d discover that this care and meticulousness was carried through to every aspect of Bachman’s life, from his fastidiously stylish dress to his almost neurotic concern for the visual presentation of data. A trailing zero could drive him into a rage. He insisted his team was “properly attired” even if all they were doing was writing code.

Willis seemed untouched by Bachman’s aura, his WASP sense of entitlement and large personal fortune providing an effective shield against intellect. “Enjoying your meal, Cy?” he chortled.

Bachman made a face. “This is revenge,” he explained. “I took him to a raw-food place in the Village.”

“Bastards made me a coffee out of pistachio nuts.”

Jaz laughed heartily. He knew better than to be fooled by Fenton’s bluff manner. Behind the genial clubman’s mask, the oak-paneled three-martini smokescreen he put up to fool the credulous, a ruthless tactician lurked. When it came to the acquisition of money, he was entirely pragmatic, prepared to act without prejudice or sentiment. In this respect, he was quite brilliant. Jaz couldn’t help but connect this ability to suspend judgment, to take each new situation entirely on its own merits, with the image of a man crawling down a tunnel with a gun in his hand, feeling his way in the dark.

“So Jaswinder. Cy’s taken a look at your work and he thinks he could use you on Walter.”

“Walter?”