And West Is West Page 6

  Jessica does not believe that humans are the toys of destiny; she believes that people can choose their fate. But if they stop choosing, that’s when destiny arrives. The Funeral Mountains seem like a good place to be after a debacle. A place where you can bury the past. This is all she knows for the moment. For with nothing before her and with as much time for herself as she used to lack, her wheels are spinning waiting to catch. But there is no traction. What she was is over, has been reduced to two sensations: thirst and hunger. She gets dressed in yesterday’s fatigues.

  Downstairs, the breakfast bar has opened. She eats reconstituted eggs, rubbery pancakes. A young boy with his parents stares at her through a skeleton mask. She stares back. Then she remembers it’s the thirty-first. Halloween. Since she is wearing fatigues maybe the boy thinks that she, too, is in costume. And she is, kind of; being in uniform makes her an impostor now. She’s not a protector anymore, a self-conception on which her self-esteem has depended. When she looks at the boy again his mother is lifting the mask to the top of his head so he can eat. Jessica polices her table and passes near the family.

  “Morning, Sergeant,” the father cheerily says. Though he’s not in uniform, he has the presence of an officer of some service.

  “Good morning, sir,” she says rigidly. Shamed by her deception, her wrinkled uniform, her very being, she drops her eyes to the floor.

  By the casino entrance—for what would a Nevada motel be without slots, roulette, and blackjack—a sundries shop beckons. From a cooler Jessica removes a bottle of water and pays a coot who stares at the ALDRIDGE US AIR FORCE across her chest. His crusted eyes seem not to be reading but reconnoitering past the letters and the camouflage pattern of her shirt as to whether or not she has breasts. What she does have are plastered flat by a sports bra.

  “One dollar. Sold,” the coot says like an auctioneer.

  Outside in the sun Jessica adjusts her cap and begins walking. She crosses a footbridge over the fake lagoon and passes through a tarmac parking lot where RVs float on heat waves. When her boots crunch gravel she calculates the distance ahead. The ripples of distorted air only allow her to guess that the first mountain might be five or ten or fifteen miles off. She swigs from the water bottle and then marches militarily into the emptiness. Every now and then she veers to avoid a creosote bush, the kind of scrub that becomes tumbleweed in a storm. There is no breeze except for the heat rising from the ground.

  What am I trying to prove? she thinks.

  Nothing, she answers.

  The mountain grows. A palm of water she slaps onto her forehead leaves streaks of momentary coolness, but the air is so dry nothing drips from her chin. She has not brought enough liquid for an hour’s excursion. Yet she keeps walking and does not look back.

  Somewhere she crosses a border and each step gets harder, but not because she is tiring—she will not admit to that. It is because she is walking up a grade toward the foothills. She finds shade beneath a rock eroded into the shape of a mushroom. After smoothing the ground with a boot, she sits. Then she lies back, lethargic with heat and fatigue. When she awakes and starts walking again, it is into the shadow of the mountain. The sun has come around into its decline.

  Second by second twilight encroaches. Before darkness arrives Jessica chooses a place on the slope to camp. There is an inch of water left in her bottle. For dinner she allows herself a capful to dampen the grit in her throat. She coughs and spits, instantly regretting the lost moisture. Her training in this tells her that she is in a yellow zone where her electrolytes might crash and her brain will short circuit. She almost wishes this would happen so she could stop remembering her dismissal and those girls in that other desert. Curling up on the slope, she offers her bones to the ground.

  Streaks of light cross the black sky. Shooting stars or dreams? She cannot tell how long she keeps her eyes open, or even if they are open. She is shivering.

  When dawn strikes the mountain it is like an anvil on her skull. The weight comes not from the atmosphere but her dehydration. She squints at her water bottle and notes that during the night she had emptied it. She does not feel upset. There is no panic in her. She gets up and starts trudging back the way she came and into the sun. It would be too easy to go up the slope and get lost forever, but she is not suicidal. That is not why she is here. She knows this now. But whatever has called her out here is not finished with her yet.

  Reaching the flats she kicks through a dune and her reason for being here announces itself.

  “No,” she says as a voice tells her what to do. She sits down on the hot sand and pushes her fingers through its surface. “Just let me go,” she says.

  But they aren’t going anywhere, she and the sun. Reasoning, she determines that she is not delirious because the sun’s voice is a whisper. But it will rise into a shriek if she does not have water soon—sooner than the four hours it will take her to walk out of the desert.

  “All right,” she says, relenting to the voice. “But I keep the pants and boots.”

  The sun does not argue.

  Jessica claws out a foxhole deep enough to crawl into and she lets fall into it her camouflage cap and military ID. Then she removes her shirt and after folding it neatly, honorably, lays it in the hole so that the identification tags ALDRIDGE and US AIR FORCE are visible to the sky. She is nameless now. As she buries her past, the sun licks her bared skin.

  CHAPTER 8

  Florida

  Dear Jessica,

  As you sent no response to my last letter I have been reluctant to write again. But as I am where I am today because of bad judgment here goes. I especially hope writing you is no mistake after what happened here a few weeks ago.

  The guards went through my cell and took all my old papers away. Everything I wrote about and everything you wrote to me about is gone. I thought it was punishment for a contraband pack of cigarettes I got caught with. But afterward a guard told me that your letters contained secret military information.

  Nothing you wrote seemed that secret. Even the part about the wives of that terrorist guy. Though what does a fool like me sitting in a cell know? I hear the country out there has gone crazy. That you cannot climb into a plane without getting a naked x-ray now. That the police have cameras watching every street corner. Are steel bars the only difference anymore between being in a prison and being on the outside? The length of a leash though certainly does count so I hope those letters they took from me have not shortened yours. I wish I could turn back the clock and warn you about what not to write. But then my keepers would have read the warning. No matter how I turn it around this was going to be a lose-lose situation. And now I have lost you.

  My child I guess I dont have anything else to write. You know where I am if you ever want to drop a line. If not bless you for the letters sent. That they were taken from me proves they were more than I deserve. Good thing I read them over a thousand times. I can remember every word.

  Your loving father,

  Don

  CHAPTER 9

  Nevada

  “What the devil is willful defiance?” Voigt, at his desk behind closed doors, asks his wife. Linda rarely disturbs him at work. It’s about their son Luke, suspended for two days.

  “Some catch-all the schools use now,” Linda says.

  Voigt hears a horn beep. Linda’s on her way to pick up their son at Canyon High.

  “Apparently he was defending you to his homeroom teacher. It got heated.”

  “The teacher bring up the subject?” Voigt asks. Recently there’d been drone protests outside the base. People arrested for lying down in the road and blocking traffic. It’s not a mass movement yet, just an indicator of dissatisfaction. Is Luke’s suspension another? If it weren’t for that, he might admire the teacher for taking up the pacifist side in a school with a good percentage of students from military families. Isn’t this, theoretically, what he’s fighting for? Freedom.

  “I don’t know,” Linda says. “Luke threw a book at
the blackboard and they have zero tolerance for any hint of violence.”

  “Hell,” Voigt says. “I’ll speak with him tonight. At least it’s only two days.”

  Linda pauses a moment. “Everything good there?”

  This is the Voigts’ code. “Yeah, we’re good.” What Voigt means is that there were no strikes today. That he won’t come home brooding. For other than this, he cannot go into details about what he does. “Just some paperwork from DC today.”

  “Good. See you tonight then.”

  “You bet,” he says and rings off.

  He turns to the letter again—a copy of Don Aldridge’s latest correspondence to Jessica. A Janet Sloan from Homeland Security has enlisted him in the effort to monitor any future breaches related to Sergeant Aldridge’s old duties.

  Sloan, in her call to him, had explained how an observant correctional officer at Seminole City, reviewing prisoner letters for contraband and illegal communications, noticed that Don was writing to an Air Force sergeant about the recent al-Yarisi strike and seemed to have information that wasn’t in the news reports. New at his job and ex-military, the guard went beyond his primary duty of enforcing prison regulations and passed the letter up to an assistant warden, who then raided Don’s cache of correspondence from his daughter. One of those letters contained other information not publicly released, about the two dead girls, but it had been let through by a less scrupulous screener. The assistant warden brought the letter cache to the warden, who made a call to Homeland Security in DC. It was a see-something, say-something situation.

  Voigt considers that it might have been better if Jessica’s violation had never been seen. Clearly her intention wasn’t to go public about the Yarisi strike not being a clean kill. And Don, sitting in Seminole City Correctional, wasn’t likely to spread the word. But to hell with the what-ifs.

  Reviewing the latest letter, Voigt makes a note that Don has mentioned al-Yarisi’s wives. This observation does not require his special familiarity with the situation. Everyone involved knows those deaths are to be kept quiet. It’s just a busybody’s work, this task.

  Yet through the correspondence, Voigt is gaining more insight into his ex-sergeant, more than he had gotten from her security screening or her record as a drone operator and then pilot. And her father, all things taken, seems a somewhat decent man. Voigt hates to think this, but he is curious about Jessica’s next letter to him. About how she is taking her dismissal. It will be good to keep track of things, and not just for the sake of security. He files the letter, a secured PDF copy, on his hard drive.

  CHAPTER 10

  New York City and Upstate

  “Ethan?” Zoe’s voice is trembling. “Ethan?”

  Caller ID on his BlackBerry had revealed Zoe’s number to him. For the past five seconds, after standing up from his desk in his office at the bank, he has been faking a bad connection, waiting for Zoe to disconnect. He’ll need to change his number.

  “My father said I should speak to you . . . Ethan?”

  Zoe, a catch in her voice, sounds ragged. He has been remiss. It is two weeks since Leston gave Ethan his documents and gradually he has moved them from his kitchen pass-through, to a shelf under the counter, to the recycle bin. The latter was an act of bravado. He was only pretending to throw them out, just as he is only pretending now that he will not speak to Zoe.

  “Hello,” he says.

  “Oh, you’re there.”

  “I’m here.”

  The ache of her absence returns. It is what he has been avoiding by not opening the folder that Walter Leston gave him.

  Zoe takes a quick breath. The sigh she releases quavers.

  “Are you okay?” Ethan asks.

  There is dead air. “Of course, you don’t know anything. You couldn’t, could you?”

  “Know anything?”

  “I mean, even though you were in touch with my father.”

  “Just once. He came into town to see me.”

  “And what did he want?”

  “He gave me some documents . . . I’ve been meaning to mail them back. He wanted me to look them over, but I haven’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “He said they were about your . . . family. Not any of my business.”

  “Then why did he give them to you?”

  “I . . .” Ethan hesitates. He does not wish to say that her father was trying to manipulate him. That the doctor believes that Ethan’s possession of the papers might bring Zoe and him back together. An unwell man, a dying man who likes control, he wants Ethan to take care of his daughter when he is gone. Despite their headbutting, Ethan gives himself credit for being the best option Leston had found for his Zoe. Less agreeably, perhaps Leston sees in him the stiff, analytic dourness by which the doctor governs his family. Or is it governed his family? “Has your father . . . has he . . . already?” Ethan says.

  Zoe’s fury is sudden. “You knew? You knew what he was planning?” Zoe’s wail pierces. Ethan leans a hand on his desk to stay steady. “You fucking heartless bastard. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have stopped him.”

  Her reaction makes Ethan leap to the worst conclusion—not that Leston is simply dead but that he has taken the easy way out. “Oh, Zoe,” he says. “I’m so—”

  “How could you not do anything, Ethan?”

  Suddenly it’s clear. Leston had come to him as part of his final preparations. Looking back the signs were there: the ironic demeanor, the coy prognosis about how much time he had left. Facing a terminal illness, he wanted to die in his own way. Suicide under such conditions was logical. Ethan could easily construct a quality of life algorithm that would make the same decision. But he cannot tell Zoe this. “Your father only told me he was sick,” he says pathetically trying to excuse himself.

  “But if you had read what he gave you, it might have changed things,” Zoe says, pleading against the facts, as do all who are in the early stages of grief. Ethan pulls himself back into detachment. He knows that he can only help Zoe right now by taking some of the blame. Zoe goes on with a sob. “At least it might have changed things for my mother.”

  “Your mother?” Ethan absorbs Zoe’s words until their meaning burns through. Irreligious as he is, “Jesus,” he blurts. He takes a gulp of air. “I’m sorry, Zoe.”

  Ethan’s breathlessness must be proof of innocence. Now Zoe’s the one detached. “Somehow he arranged for an EMS to arrive after it was over.”

  “How did they? . . .”

  “Nembutal and wine. They were in their bed. I was told they went peacefully. I don’t even think my mom knew what was happening.”

  “AREN’T YOU EVEN curious?” Alex asks.

  “No,” Ethan says. It has been four days since Zoe’s call. He has still not looked at the documents her father gave him. Whatever Dr. Leston was up to, he will not be drawn into his web. “My life has moved on from Zoe.”

  “That’s icy, man.” Buckled in the passenger’s seat, his head turned away, Alex seems to be gazing out his window. Through breaks in the tree line Ethan sees flashes of the Hudson below. He has rented a black BMW and he and Alex are on the Palisades gliding north to the Lestons’ funeral.

  “Could you do it?” Alex asks.

  “Do what?”

  “Off yourself like her old man.”

  “Who knows,” Ethan says.

  Alex has pulled his hair into a neat ponytail. He has evened out his movie star’s stubble and put on unscathed black jeans and a clean black shirt. He is wearing work boots though, originally black but now flecked with the pigments he’s not been able to scrape off. The dark sports coat that Ethan has loaned him lies draped across the backseat. Its arms are too long, but Alex has folded the sleeve ends into cuffs. He is handsome enough to make any clothing look deliberate, as if they are a new and edgy style.

  “Barbiturates and booze. Those are the sane man’s choice,” Alex says.

  “You’ve been thinking about this, have you?”

  “Why n
ot. At our age dying is still a game. You can choose to or not. When you’re old your choice is basically to die slow or to die fast.”

  “And if you choose fast? What about the people you leave behind?”

  “At least they won’t have to watch you fall apart.”

  Ethan has heard this argument before, if not so overtly. He’d heard it in Leston’s study when the doctor described his wife’s future with dementia.

  “So you think Zoe is better off?”

  “Are you high?” Alex says. “She’s suffering. I don’t know why you didn’t go up there already to help her through this.”

  “We are not together anymore. Maybe her new boyfriend is handling those duties.”

  “Does she even have one? I spoke to her and she’s up in the country alone.”

  “Then why didn’t you go?”

  Alex shakes his head. “Because I never lived with her.”

  “Zoe’s life is not my responsibility,” Ethan says.

  Alex comes back at him hard. “We’re not animals. We’re all each other’s responsibility.”

  “Sort of like . . . ,” Ethan starts. He was about to say sort of like buying someone’s paintings so they don’t starve. Instead he gnaws his inner cheek.

  Alex reaches into the backseat and pulls Leston’s manila folder onto his lap.

  “Put it back,” Ethan says.

  “You can’t give this to her without reading it.” Alex undoes the clasping rubber band.

  “Put it back,” Ethan says.

  “What are you afraid of?” Alex opens the folder. “Dude, it’s just old newspaper clippings,” he says. And then he begins to read aloud.

  LOCAL TEEN MISSING NEARLY A MONTH

  Monroe, Conn., Jan. 20, 1989—The Monroe Police Department is asking for help in locating a missing 16-year-old girl. Susan Leston, who goes by the nickname Zee, was last seen on December 26th in her home at 28 Oak Court. She is believed to be unaccompanied. Leston is described as a white female with blonde hair and a fair complexion. She is approximately 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighs 105 pounds. She was wearing a leather coat when she disappeared. Anyone with information should contact Sgt. Murak of the Monroe Police.