“James and Robert Bitterroot?”
The two Indians don’t say present — it’s obvious. The driver marks them on his list.
“Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson?”
“We’re here.”
The driver calls off a group of women’s names and all the Pinkertons answer present.
“Mr. Lancet.”
The bus is quiet.
“Mr. Lancet?”
The driver flips through his clipboard again. He covers the page with his hands, reading something carefully. His face blanches a little and he looks up at the two Shoshones.
The bus’s radio crackles. “Bird-Dog Operations calling. Your escort’s got your twenty. He’s coming up on you now.”
A Black Hawk helicopter flies into view, and for a moment Marcus thinks it’s coming for them, but it heads toward Bald Mountain. Stanley gives a play-by-play as a jeep rolls across the lakebed and pulls alongside the bus. A soldier hops out and heads toward the figure on the road. Then the doors swing open and another boards the bus. “You are supposed to do a count at every stop,” he says on the way up the three little stairs. He walks past the driver, tosses a few pink boas into the laps of the Pinkertons in the rear seats, and yanks hard on the bathroom door. Then he pulls out a complicated-looking tool from one of several pockets on his fatigues, clamps it between the door knob and the frame, and yanks hard, releasing the door. It flaps against one of the young Pinkertons, who was leaning in to see. She rubs her head. A stench fills the bus, chemically treated urine and feces soaking in the heat. Watery bits trail down the ridges of the bus. No one inside.
The soldier makes a whirling motion with one hand. “Turn it around, back to Mercury.” He scans the rows as he walks back to the front of the bus. “Everyone remain calm.” Then he steps outside for a moment and talks on a primitive-looking CB that hangs from a box. When he gets back on the bus, he says to Bird-Dog, “Cleared and on our way.” The driver puts the bus into gear so quickly that the standing students bob around the interior like wobbly bowling pins.
As the bus turns around and drives slowly past, an MP draws yellow tape around the figure and a few gasps bounce around the vehicle. Another MP holds the man’s wrist, as if checking for a pulse.
“Maybe he passed out from the heat,” one of the Pinker-tons says. “He looks old.”
“Maybe you Coalition Pinkertons did it!” Stanley stands up and does an elaborate Boo-ya! victory dance that ends with Spock fingers and a bird call. The students press their faces against the bus window. I don’t remember him. Wait, was he that guy who brought the water in from the cafeteria? No, stupid, that guy had red hair.
“Who was he?” Sandra asks Marcus.
“I don’t know, Sandy.”
A Nalgene water bottle hangs around the body’s neck, evidence against heatstroke. The corpse wears comfortable-looking Tevas, but one of the legs is bent inward at an unnatural angle. The soldier collects things from the man’s pockets and lays them out on some hospital-blue tissue paper on the ground. There is a roll of Mentos, a bookmarked paperback, and what Marcus recognizes as a desert first-aid kit.
Back at Mercury, the military escort hustles them all off the bus and into the canteen. A group of scientists in a line shovel macaroni-beef and Salisbury steak out of steam trays and onto paper plates. They notice, but don’t seem surprised by the tour group.
Two men in weird outfits — not military fatigues, but not quite suits — ask if anyone saw the man acting strange. Did he seem dehydrated; was he talking funny, slurred? Nobody remembers him. So they corral the tourists around two sets of cafeteria tables, and begin to take each of them, individually, into the kitchen. They start with Mr. Stevenson, whose wife has to remind him to adjust his hearing aid.
While he waits, Marcus watches Stanley create a paper football out of a napkin and shoot it through a goal post Sandra makes with her thumbs and pointer fingers.
“Know what?” Stanley says to her, “We in that murder movie, baby.”
“Stop saying that,” she tells him. But he keeps at it. He stands up and points at various people sitting at the tables. “Check it out, everybody’s got a motive for killing somebody around here.” He points to the girls. “Them Pinkertons are trying to get them to stop testing.” He points to the two Indians. “And they was here first, right? They just want their crib back.”
“Stop it,” Sandra says.
“Naw, serious-up, we from Henderson, right?” He swoops his hand along the tables, referring to Marcus and his students. “We all downwinders.”
“I see you’ve been paying attention to this unit, Mr. Mathews,” Marcus says. “Well done. Now, please. Sit down and be quiet.”
Stanley whispers to Sandra: “Why’s your finger bandaged?”
Sandra looks incredulous. “My tips got infected! See,” she shows him her nails, “the rest are acrylic. Anyways, it was like that when I got on the bus.”
“In the movie, everybody stabs the guy one time.”
“But he wasn’t even stabbed.”
“I’m just saying, is all.” Stanley leans across the table and mimes the Psycho shower scene.
“What about those two?” one of the Bitterroots asks Stanley. “They in on it too?” He points to the elderly woman, and his brother laughs.
When the men in the weird outfits take Marcus into the kitchen, they ask him what he saw.
A body.
Why was he on the tour?
Nevada State Lesson Plans.
Did he see the man out on the flats? Was he acting strange?
He can’t recall.
Marcus and his students spend another hour sitting around the table before the military escort returns to drive them back to the entrance, where a bus will return them to Vegas. The escort’s radio crackles on during the bus ride and he covers it with his hand. This does little to muffle the sound and the word suicide shoots like a pinball through the bus.
As soon as the kids file off the bus at the DOE and retrieve their cell phones, prohibited on the trip, they’re texting their friends and shouting over each other. The dead guy was a famous scientist! He worked on all kinds of, like, big nuclear bomb shit! Check it out. Here’s his Wiki. Here he is in a picture with Albert Einstein. The Pinkertons call the media, who arrive before Marcus’s scheduled yellow school bus, and they snap their boas in the air. They shout at the cameras that the scientist couldn’t wash the blood off his hands. They take off their pink T-shirts and turn them inside out, revealing a single letter printed on each one, so that standing together they spell out P-E-A-C-E. But the cameras linger on Stanley. They even get a quick interview in front of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino before Marcus is able to hustle him onto the school bus. The article that runs later in the Henderson Times shows the highlighted passage from the dead man’s paperback. It’s a simple quote often attributed to Einstein. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
The kids are mostly asleep and the bus is quiet when they finally pull into Henderson. The parents are assembled in the school parking lot, hugging each other, sharing something out of a steaming thermos. They’re watching a portable television inside someone’s minivan, and Marcus can see the images clearly. Footage of the blasted-out house from Operation Doorstep runs in a loop with images of the Coalition Pink women and a black-and-white picture of the old man leaning over some papers with Albert Einstein. Marcus can even make out Stanley’s yearbook photo crossing the screen.