Ortiz glanced up just in time up to see a deer or an antelope bounding — no, flying — across the hood of his car. Some kind of hoofed thing, anyway: The cloven hoof came down on his exterior rearview, shattering it. Holy fucking shit. Behind him, the creature continued bounding across the desert in great leaps.
Ortiz stuffed the article in his satchel and took the wheel with both trembling hands. Enough foolishness. He kept his eyes on the road the rest of the way to Vegas.
The sun had already set by the time he got to the city. With a frisson of professional satisfaction, he turned his car away from the lights of the Strip and headed into the dark barrio of his study. The only things he could see were what his headlights illuminated: the potholed street, and at the end of it, the elm tree.
The tree had been hideously lopped, its stumped limbs raised in supplication to the heavens. Who would do such a thing to a tree, especially here in the desert, where shade was so needed? But again, it wasn’t his place to pass judgment on these people. They needed the wood for their carvings, after all. Or maybe they turned it into charcoal for cooking, as people did all over the Third World.
Speaking of charcoal, the two men digging behind the huts were no doubt preparing a barbeque pit for the fiesta. That meant the food was a long ways from being ready. Maybe this was to be some sort of drawn-out, all-night fiesta; Ortiz regretted not having gotten something to eat on the road.
Nor should he be drinking on an empty stomach, but already the man who had invited him to the baile had thrust into his hand a big plastic glass of chicha, the traditional Mictlano fermented corn drink. So okay, cool, let the party begin.
The man ushered him to a rickety metal table set up in one corner of the dusty courtyard. Two other men joined them. Another metal table had been set up in the corner opposite. The only illumination came from a dim kerosene lamp suspended from a wire running from the roofs of two of the huts. But it was enough to allow Ortiz to see Vicente’s squat body take a seat at that table opposite.
A four-man band emerged from the shadows and struck up vigorous binary rhythms on an accordion and chicken-scratch strings. The men at Ortiz’s table urged more milky chicha on him. The drink was cool, if a bit acid. Probably quite nourishing. He drank and listened to the homely music and smiled at his friends. The red neon ¡Viva! sign shone bright in the distance.
Then, as if choreographed, a group of women assembled themselves in the fourth corner of the courtyard, all dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. Among them was the woman with the bruise. She glanced at Ortiz’s table, then at Vicente’s, then dropped her gaze to the ground.
Men from both tables began taking women to dance, though not before first asking the woman’s husband or boyfriend for permission. Ortiz watched the dancers shuffle in the dust, and loved them. He felt deeply connected to them, to these people whose ancestors — and his, on his Native side — had crossed the Bering Strait and made that immense and brave journey down into Mesoamerica, where they had built vast empires. Now they had returned back north, to the great Nevada desert, where he was ever so fortunate to be witness to their ancient rites.
Okay — maybe he didn’t love Vicente so much. Vicente remained at his table, sipping his chicha morosely and refusing to look in Ortiz’s direction. Ortiz supposed he should have gone to his table right off and greeted him and the other men seated there. Well, he could do that now. He would drink with them. He would win them with his smile.
He stood, swaying slightly. The men with him pushed their chairs from the table. The band struck up a fast-tempoed tune. Ortiz made it halfway across the courtyard when someone pressed a machete into his hand.
And that’s when, in its exact wording, Talon’s text came to him, as if written in the dark air before him:
The disputed woman’s husband smashes the lantern withhis machete, and the baile is plunged into darkness. Themachetes of the two rivals strike each other, ringing inthe night. Cries and insults from all sides reach a joyfulcrescendo. After the clashing of the machetes is over, abrief silence ensues, until a voice shouts, “Get a light overhere!”
A new lantern is lit. It illuminates a group of mensurrounding a dead man. The dead man’s companionscarry his body to the freshly dug grave, while others throwdirt on the pool of blood on the dance floor. Regardless of whether the dead man is the disputed woman’s husbandor his rival, she weeps copiously and goes to her house, accompanied by female friends or relatives. The victoriousman goes back to his table and shouts for more chicha allaround, and the band strikes up anew.
Soon the men who have buried the dead man emergefrom the shadows. They join the victor at his table and forthe rest of the evening they celebrate his triumph, and thecommunity is unified once again.
It was funny. If they wanted him to, he could recite it for them right there in the middle of the courtyard, as if he were addressing an audience of academics. The litany of gibberish might amuse them. But already the lantern was smashed, and the scene, just as Professor Talon’s article said, was plunged into darkness.
Part III
Tales From the Outskirts
Atomic City
by Nora Pierce
Test Site
The bus is plugging across the sterile moonscape, rattling on the pockmarked desert road. From the last row of bench seats, Marcus reads aloud from his lesson plans: “Operation Doorstep evaluated the effects of a nuclear explosion on a typical American family. An entire town was constructed for the test, complete with myriad domestic structures, stocked refrigerators, bridges, and automobiles.” He looks toward the front of the bus, past the bobbleheads of tourists from somewhere in the Northeast, past five girls with razored pink hair, past an extremely old couple in matching track suits, and finally catches the response from his own students: iPod cords worm down their necks, heads roll in sleep: a silent consensus of aggressive boredom. The only lively one is Marcus’s class clown, Stanley, who is trying to flirt with the girls from Coalition Pink, activists on the tour to witness for the peace movement. They’re ignoring him, all but one who lectures him in a Socialist jargon. Do you know how many civilian casualties were estimated in Hiroshima? Do you know how many cancer cases were settled in relation to this site? We demand justice and compassion. Do you want to take some literature back to your school? Stanley finally turns around in his seat and huffs, “Damn Pinkertons.” A little snort of surprise escapes Marcus. Stanley knows about Pinkertons?
Seven hours into the eight-hour tour, sixty miles from the next drab stop. The last stop was so boring that a few of Marcus’s students didn’t even bother to get off the bus. They are indifferent to the sight of the gutted desert, permanently gouged and bloated, though they’ve spent their whole lives downwind of the place. Every one of them has some cousin, some old aunt somewhere on a nuked dead-end street.
To tune out, Marcus takes off his glasses. He’s severely near-sighted, so the life around him blurs and his world shrinks to the small space of the pages on his lap. The photograph on his Henderson Junior High School Learning Outcomes Objectives for Knowledge (LOOK) Field Trip Planner shows impeccably groomed mannequins tossed about in make-believe agony. In a test house set up farther from the explosion, the family is still intact. All but the dad, whose nose is blown off. Marcus flips through the official Nevada Test Site handbook he downloaded from the Internet. In the interest of Cultural Preservation, it reads, if any worker should come across what he believes to be human remains, he should stop working and immediately contact his supervisor. Marcus puts his glasses back on and looks up at the two lone Shoshones across the aisle from him. The Indians have a deadpan, skeptical look about them. They introduced themselves back at the security briefing in Vegas as Jimbo and Robert Bitterroot, taking the tour to get a look at old Shoshone land. Marcus can’t remember which one is which. He suspects they’re really along to verify the remains of some legendary ancestor, to examine some pottery shards or conduct some ancient ceremony. One raises an eyebrow when he catches Marcus staring at him. The other looks out the window and snorts. What the Shoshone sees in the ash and sand-colored landscape is so startling that the pork rinds he’s been snacking on come out of his mouth in little crystalline flecks. “Hey,” he calls to the driver, handing his brother the snack bag and standing up in the shaky bus. He wipes the pork rind dust from his chin. “You just passed a body, man.”