Koo, without giving any sign of the strain of excitement that swept through him, asked the woman to again explain the symptoms of the illness, which she characterized as “slow-moving decay, which doesn’t seem to affect the consciousness of the sufferer, at least not in the early phases of the illness, and these symptoms are accompanied by rapid hair growth, enlargement of the brow, and sunken eye cavities, pelvic girdle, and some other portions of the body. In the late stages, catastrophic hemorrhaging, skin failure, organ failure, and then death.”
“This sounds like radiation sickness,” Koo said. “Or perhaps long-term corticosteroid abuse.”
“The popular description of the disease favored by the Mars mission astronauts, though this can be considered anecdotal, was that the bacterium, M. thanatobacillus, caused bodies to ‘disassemble.’ ”
“Rubbish.”
“Gets the attention.”
“But what makes you think that the contaminant has actually entered the ecosystem?”
“We trust that it has not. Which is why we insist on your discretion. Most of the Earth Return Vehicle did break up or was vaporized, but there were a few larger pieces of the craft that we believe touched down on Earth, and if any of these contained Colonel Jed Richards, any or all of him, there remains the possibility that the infectious agent could be transmitted by rats, fleas, coyotes, for example, or border jumpers.”
Koo agreed to keep his eyes open. But what Koo had precisely begun to consider, in his very focused and scientific mind, was whether a bacterium that “disassembled” bodies could somehow be reverse engineered. It was an interesting question. Were there important medical applications as regarded the bacterium? Koo inquired of the woman from NASA if they had any idea where the pieces of the craft had gone down. She indicated that the remnants were likely spread out over a fifty-mile radius, including areas of terrain in northern Mexico. Koo determined to go in search, first thing in the morning. He wanted to find part of the astronaut. It didn’t even have to be that large a piece, he whispered to his wife. It could be as small as a finger.
By the witching hour of dusk, Bix Rafferty of the Forsaken Mining Corp. achieved a balance of the chemical reagents in his veins and arteries — non-drowsy formula, mescal, energy beverages, and Sea Breeze, an alcohol-based face cleanser — and this balance of reagents was enough that he occasionally experienced visitations by a certain Navajo holy man. Smitty. While Rafferty was certain that a Smitty really existed, a person called Smitty, he did recognize that the conversations with Navajo Smitty involved themes and subjects that seemed plainly ethereal, even paranormal, well above and beyond the two men called Smitty and Bix.
Smitty, who was a rather stout Navajo fellow with a military haircut and long sideburns, who wore a sleeveless denim vest and denim trousers, and whose face was rutted and pitted from sleeping out in the desert many nights, always appeared on foot. There were snakes, wolves, mountain lions, pigs, and the other things of the desert night, and only a holy man such as Smitty could negotiate these plagues and emerge unscathed and improved.
Despite mystical qualities that were immediately apparent to Bix, Smitty insisted that he was just a brother attending the community college in town. Smitty also claimed to work washing dishes at one of those drive-thru Mexican restaurants. And yet when the chemical reagents in Bix were balanced properly, Smitty represented something else too: the trickster. Smitty liked to flip bottle caps and to speak of the way even the cacti were animated with the Old Spirits—or else Bix was misremembering a number of conversations that took place late at night, or did not take place at all, except within the fervent confines of solitary imagination. Rafferty welcomed the Navajo because the Navajo came and went and didn’t care what anyone thought.
This night represented the fourth or fifth visitation of Smitty. A bounty of appearances. Though Smitty didn’t like talking about himself, he did idly remark this night that his parents were long since dead, as with many of his acquaintances from home. Likewise that he’d tried to make good on an apartment in Rio Blanco but had come up a little short in the department of finances. Smitty’s expression was anguished during this recitation of the facts; his demeanor was far from the laughing coyote face that Bix perhaps erroneously associated with the trickster and his narratives. Smitty, in his anguish, didn’t ask Bix Rafferty for cough syrup, wasn’t one of those freeloaders who came around kissing your wrinkled-up posterior solely for the purpose of sharing what you had. Smitty simply appeared, apparitional, as if to signal the persistence of a spirit world.
“Smitty,” Rafferty offered, “I am touched by your candor. I am touched that you would share your story. And I would like to reward you with this,” whereupon Rafferty generously passed him the Sea Breeze. “Let me just say that, yep, another day has come and gone, and not an ingot of any kind has been unearthed from the metric tons below. The water for the operation, in a time of regional drought, is already damnably unaffordable. Not to mention the rest of the overhead. Should I keep on?”
“Huh?” Smitty said.
“Let me answer a question with a question,” Rafferty said. “Does this desert land ultimately reward, or does this desert finally just take away, so that any civilization that perches itself hereabouts, any scattering of buildings and schools and granaries, will be wiped out whether by fire or flood or by the relentlessness of the sun?”
“Not sure I totally catch what the hell you’re talking about,” and then Smitty said, “excepting that it’s hard not to worry about drought.”
“There’s a rectitude to your tramps. There’s a poetry to the likes of you coming and going out here in the Sonoran Desert for many centuries. Things that have gone on, like the military hardware, you know these things better than most people. What’s best for the land, what is appropriate to the land.”
“A man hates to run into barbed wire.” The discomfort of Smitty was such that Rafferty himself could very nearly perceive it through the haze of cold-relief products and Sea Breeze. “You got to be real careful out late at night. A cow can do some awful damage to a vehicle. Buddy of mine hit one. The cow pretty much won that particular contest.”
Many things were inferred by Bix Rafferty in the next silence. Silence is a thing onto which meanings can be projected. For example, in a silence you might believe, with the proper balance of chemical reagents, that a radical depopulating of the desert landscape is called for, in which the white man and all of his ways, his preposterous medical clinics with their radiological devices, and his steroid-enhanced, lacrosse-playing übermen, should be deforested, by whatever means there was for deforesting the white men, and the only people who would be permitted to stay were the kinds of people who had a right relation to the land, and by that Rafferty meant people who appreciated the use of firearms, and who mined for the things under the ground, which were the things that the Old Spirits approved of and wanted harvested for the greater glory, and it was acceptable to the Old Spirits, Rafferty thought in the silence, if some of the men who remained were white men, because they were self-reliant believers. What wasn’t needed was a lot of conversation, he realized now, and this was the way in which Smitty, who was a holy man, was teaching Rafferty a lesson, by indicating that silence was just as important as conversation, and while Rafferty, who had once been a night school student back in the day, knew and understood that there was a so-called Socratic kind of instruction, which was all about the Q and the A, this was a completely different kind of instruction, the kind from Smitty, which embodied the inevitability of silence.