WE CLIMBED OUT AT EIGHT-HUNDRED FEET PER MINUTE and I contacted the Phoenix flight services to open the flight plan, using Elko as my destination, got the weather, which was clear, then requested “flight following,” a way of keeping the airplane under watch by the flight center.
“UFOs?” Neffie said when I was off the radio.
“What?”
“You told Monica you were looking for UFOs?” she asked again.
“How did you know that?”
“When we were walking to the plane. She asked me if we were only looking for our friend or were we looking for UFOs as well.”
“Oh no,” I said, not wanting Monica to feel hurt. “And you said … ?”
“I said I thought you had seen one once and that it was always on your mind a little, but I wasn’t sure.” She turned to me with a slight questioning arch in her eyebrow.
“Remarkable. That’s exactly what I said—I was looking for spacecraft, but when she lit up, desperate for the connection, I knew I had opened the wrong door. I mean, this is no casual interest for her. I kept retreating until I said something like I probably never saw one, but by then she wouldn’t let it go. She told me to hang on to the dream. She was sure I saw one. I’m glad you took care of her.”
“She needed it. To dispose of things, if nothing else. She’s a good woman. I wonder if Gus knows that.” Neffie gazed out the window.
A three-quarter moon had risen into the heavenly dome. The light gave the land below a silken sheen of gray velvet and the planet stretched out, clearly visible. One of the worries of night flying is not being able to see the horizons, but tonight that would be no problem. Once we were at altitude I picked up a heading to our next waypoint and switched on the autopilot. The plane was well-equipped with plenty of first-class radio and navigation equipment.
“Did you ever see a UFO?” Neffie asked.
“Not so’s you’d know. I’ve seen some unexplained lights in the sky, and I’ve seen a few unusual things when I’ve been flying, but hardly what I’d call UFOs. The thing that got to me about Monica was the life-altering aspect of her sighting. I have no doubt she saw something; what, I don’t know, but the compelling element is her report of this telepathic communication with a benevolent being and her feeling of peace and, as she said, indescribable love. It’s like she wanted or needed something so much she created an instrument to bring it into her life.”
“One of the Zamora legends has spaceships,” she said.
“I’m not surprised.”
“In Chuchen, thousands of years after the first legend, the one when Neftoon saved all the people from the wolves, there was another incident.
“Do you remember the young boy Zamora gave the flute to, and the berry seeds? He was to become known as Kokopelli in the tales of the Anasazi. The story goes he lived for over a thousand years, like some of the main figures in
the Old Testament, and that he traveled about, planting seeds not only of berries and other plants, but also having many children.
“At the time of this legend, Chuchen was a city of several thousand people and Kokopelli was the father of the chief of Chuchen. So, when Kokopelli would visit, there was always a big celebration, the chief would turn out the finest food, and there would be a party for five days and nights. Fortunately, Kokopelli came but once a year.
“The legend of Black Wolf was passed along during these festivals and Kokopelli always emphasized the ending, explaining that Neftoon had sacrificed herself for the good of the tribe.
“As the years went on, this notion of sacrifice became more and more perverted, until the chief began to use it to his own ends. Sacrifice, he taught, must involve the offering of one of the young women of Chuchen to the goddess Zamora. This offering included virginal sex with the chief, then the death of the young girl by tossing her over a cliff. Since the chief chose the girl, he held the little village in fear, ruling more and more absolutely because he controlled life and death among them. It was taught that sacrifice to Zamora kept the tribe from harm and insured prosperity, so it was an honor to be the sacrificial offering, an honor to everyone but the one being sacrificed.
“Things got worse. A general malaise descended on the people once a year as they all wondered who was going to get sacrificed, as they sank deeper and deeper into the belief the only way happiness and the well-being of the village could be assured was to kill one of their children.
“One particular year, the young girl who was chosen
for the sacrifice decided she would not go along with this madness, and ran away. She was only twelve years old, so the grown-ups quickly overtook her, cornering her in a small ravine. They picked her up, tied her, and threw her over the back of a donkey and brought her back.
“When they got to town, they took the girl to the chief for the sacrificial sex but she simply wouldn’t uncross her legs. She said they would have to kill her first. Then she cried out in anguish that if sacrifice, the destruction of something, was what made the world work, wouldn’t they all be better off dead? Who would want to live in a world where life was made sacred by death?
“At that moment a great, golden vessel came from the sky and landed near the ceremonial site. Out stepped Neftoon Zamora, looking exactly the way she was described in the legends. The town was jubilant … and terrified. Since for years they had been killing people to get Zamora’s blessings, they were happy to see they had finally gotten her attention. On the other hand, life had become a nightmare, for their life was ruled by death. This reality, they thought, lay directly at Neftoon’s feet. Naturally they were worried. What new horror would she visit upon them?
“The first thing Zamora did was go to the altar built for the sacrifice of the young child, and let her loose. Then she turned to the people and told them that destroying someone was not sacrifice but a type of insanity, that the legend of Black Wolf had been perverted.
“She said the important part of the Black Wolf legend was understanding the power of intelligence over ignorance, the power of love over hate.
“Then she pointed to the ship and said the legend of her
sacrifice was like the spaceship. She cautioned them not to worship the spacecraft, but to see it as a symbol of the basic power of intelligence, organizing ideas in a way that was useful to them, that insured the perpetuation of order and harmony, that maintained life, instead of destroying it.
“There were by this time chief priests of the Zamora cult, and they questioned her. How, they asked, could such a terrible twist of her teachings have happened?
“She said it was because the nature of mortality was to destroy itself, so the man who accepted mortality as his selfhood would always see death as the only outcome of life. After that, she got in her spaceship and took off.
“The Chuchinas drove the chief from the village, tore down the alter, and reduced Kokopelli to a comical figure like the tooth fairy. Then they began to build Chuchen once more, this time with a new legend of Neftoon Zamora.
“And what do you think is the part of the story that has been most carefully preserved? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you. It’s the spaceship part. There exist now elaborate descriptions of the spacecraft, paintings of it, sculptures of it, speculations and teachings about its drive mechanism, even detailed descriptions of writings and symbols purportedly on the outside of the ship. All of this combined with the idea Zamora was from another planet, way out of reach, and from time to time she might land and help out with things, or if we could only build a spaceship like hers we could make our way to Zamoraland, somewhere beyond the heavens. In South America there were even landing strips maintained in case she should ever return. Go figure.”
We were nearing our destination and I was privately wishing for a spaceship with exceptional powers, since I was
wondering how I was going to find a private field at night, moonlight or not. It’s one thing to have a horizon to navigate by, another to try to find a little airport somewhere on the ground. I had Elko as an alternate if I couldn’t find it, but I only had so much fuel. I could look around for about ten minutes, then we would have to land at Elko, something I was not looking forward to.
When I got over the field as shown on the flight plan, I decided to see if the runway had pilot-controlled lighting. This is a way for a pilot who needs it, to turn on any airport landing-strip lights remotely.
I tuned to a standard Unicom frequency and hit the mike switch three times in succession. It worked. Right below a fully-lit runway appeared. Lavishly lit in fact. It had the lighting system of a major airport, something you might see at LAX.
I made one pass over the runway but didn’t know until I was down low whether it was paved or not, then a few hundred feet off the end I could see it was a good, hard surface in excellent condition. The runway must have been eight-thousand feet long, big enough and wide enough for commercial jets. As the wheels of the origami-butterfly plane chirped on the asphalt I noticed lights had gone on in some buildings at the end of the runway.
We rolled off to the side onto a parallel taxiway. More lights were coming on. It was a little after ten o’clock in the evening. I imagined we had woken someone up. I couldn’t suppress my trepidation.
“This may not have been such a good idea. Maybe we should get back in the air right away,” I said to Neffie. It was too late.
A small airport jeep pulled in back of the plane as another one pulled in front. I had not seen them until they were next to us. The one in front turned on a large FOLLOW ME sign on the back of the jeep. The men in the jeep behind us had M16 rifles and were holding them with the barrels straight up, the butts of the guns resting on the floor of the jeep, next to their boots.
The field was surrounded by a group of low mountain peaks. Ahead were the hangars and several airplanes. Inside the first hangar, off in a corner was a Lear fifty-five, dwarfed by the room, next to it a Pitts, a little bi-wing sports plane, then the Avanti I had seen at the center, next to it an A-Star helicopter, next to it a Gulfstream G Four, the status corporate airplane, and finally a Canadair Challenger 600, the more serious corporate jet, like a thirty-five-foot long 737, a real no-nonsense bird. The open door was revealing the interior light as it spilled out onto the tarmac. Behind it were two more huge hangars, each one well over fifty-thousand square feet. These people were into aircraft and had a lot of money.
From offices along the side of the hangar I saw four men in black jumpsuits appear, walking onto the hangar floor, watching the little Beech closely. The jeep in front of me drove into the hangar, one of the men jumped out of the right seat and motioned me forward with the usual ground-handling signals. At the last second, when I should have stopped, instead I did a ninety-degree turn and began to taxi away. The jeep that was behind us raced around toward the front of the plane and forced us off the tarmac into a dirt-and-gravel apron and finally blocked our path. The two men jumped out and held their guns at the ready.
The man who had been giving me ground signals before ran around to the front of the plane and began frantically drawing his hand across his throat in a gesture for me to shut down the engine.
I didn’t like getting pushed around like this. Just for the hell of it, I revved the engine up to a high RPM. The two men with the M16s lifted the guns to their shoulder, ready to fire. I pulled the mixture knob to shut off and the engine died. I noticed with some degree of satisfaction I had kicked up a huge amount of debris and dust, which was settling over the big airplanes in the hangar in back of me. I hoped the gravel had damaged a few windscreens. I turned to Neffie and made a kind of “I couldn’t help myself” face in apology for endangering us. She was calm.
“Well. Here we are.”
More men began surrounding the plane. All of them were white, in black jumpsuits, with no markings, and all of them were big. Neffie and I crawled out of the plane. The oldest man came up to me. He was nodding a sardonic “I know your type of smart-ass” nod.
“Are you with Gus?” he asked.
“Yeah, well, I mean this is his plane.” I decided to say nothing more. I looked the man straight in the eyes.
Then Neffie said, “Is he here?”
The older man, clearly the boss, looked at the rest of the team. I looked past him into the hangar and was pleased to see it was now filthy from the little butterfly’s prop wash. One of the men was checking the intake of the Gulfstream’s jets for dirt, a handful of which he found and held up in disgust for his boss to see. His boss was now glaring at me. I was expressionless. “You’ll just have to deal with it, pal,”
I thought. I hoped it showed in my eyes, but was careful to give nothing away for free.
“Yes. Wait here, please.”
He walked away and left Neffie and me standing there surrounded by seven men. No one said a word. The tension was so thick you could skate on it. After what seemed like a week, the boss signaled from the office. He was holding a phone. At this the seven men dispersed, leaving one young fellow. He was in his early twenties and looked like he was right out of the military police.
“Follow me, please.”
We walked to the office at the side of the hangar, through it, and to the outside where the boss and one other man were sitting in a small gas-powered golf cart. He motioned curtly for us to get in.
The two jumpsuits sat in the front, Neffie and I in the back. In a movie, this was where we would have been blindfolded. We drove away from the hangar along a small paved road, barely wide enough for two of these little carts.
Riding behind the two men, I could look around unobserved by them. We were in the middle of a complex of large metal buildings, strictly utilitarian, lit by yellow-sodium arc lights. The buildings were surrounded by black asphalt, which disappeared after a few feet into a sandy terrain, some of which was now all over the inside of their pristine hangar, thanks to me. With the lights I could see something of the countryside, but not enough to tell the detail. What forms I did see were low hillocks and some peaks, made grotesque by the vapor lights. The roadway we were on turned away from the main buildings and into the desert, into the enveloping night.
Then, as we rounded the base of a hill I saw it, poised on top of one of the mountains: an enormous house, five stories high, occupying the entire top plateau, all sides of the house built to the edge of the mountaintop, which was the edge of a precipice. The house was twice as big as the hangar. It sat on the top of this mountain like a Bavarian castle, only without a hint of fantasy, the only ingress the road we were on.
The road curved up the side of the hill in a long series of s turns to an eight-foot-high solid gate that swung open on our approach. Extending out from the gate in both directions was an antipersonnel fence of staggering proportions, eight feet high and topped with rolls of razor wire. Approximately every ten feet along the perimeter was an outward-facing sodium floodlight, and from these one could see the power boxes that attached voltage to the fence.
Behind this fence, roughly twelve feet up the hill, was another eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire as well. Between the two fences was gravel, freshly raked, and I imagined, covering some type of detection system should anyone stray into this terrible trap.
As we neared the main residence, I could see the building blocks comprising the house were all of one piece. This was not a group of buildings, but one giant edifice, of different levels and enclosures, a castle without turret, tower, or palisade. It was as if a suburban stucco home had swollen until it covered the mountaintop. Nowhere was there character of any type, no decoration, art, colors, attention to design—nothing but a faceless stack of boxes over thousands of square feet atop the mountain.
We came to a stop at a front door like the front door
to a tract home but twice the size. Faux brass handles over a machine-carved panel door. Ironically, in the center of the left-hand door was a small glass peephole of the type they provide in cheap motels. The door opened and we were greeted by Armando Hotchkiss.
Hotchkiss was disarmingly open. He was not smiling, but he was not frowning either. I felt as if he saw everything, that if he had been asked to describe the most minute detail of our clothing or mannerisms he could have done so perfectly. He was wearing a silk bathrobe and velvet monogrammed slippers.
I thought him to be in his late seventies or early eighties. An enormous pair of black-rimmed glasses covered a hawklike, angular face, but he had a relaxed mouth and eyebrows. He seemed supremely confident and assured. The glasses had small panels on either side coming back along the stems, which filtered out the side light through small dark lenses, making the glasses look more like protective goggles than optometrics. The lenses, however, were clear, and his gaze drilled out from behind them, unwelcoming but unwary, an unusual combination.
Neffie and I got off the little cart, which drove away. We stood there waiting for Hotchkiss to make his opening. For a second his brow furrowed slightly. Then, quickly, he controlled his face again. He relaxed, but somewhere in the depths of his soul I was sure this man was encountering a threat and steeling himself against it.
I glanced at Neffie without turning my head. There was the slightest narrowing of her eyes. Something was up, all right. The air was cool, the skies were clear except for a distant, blue cold front of approaching clouds, the wind was
dead calm, but I knew if I could only have been inside the heads of these two people I would have heard the clap of thunder and the roar of a gale, the clash of hostile powers.
“Why, if it isn’t, I mean … you look exactly like … like Neftoon Zamora. My god. This is quite a night. Quite a night. Come in, come in.”
I turned and looked at Neffie for some clue or insight into what was transpiring between her and Armando, but she only looked back and gave the slightest shrug of her shoulder. Whatever was between these two she was not going to reveal at that moment. We both followed him in. The foyer was precisely what the exterior had promised: a large entryway with nothing of distinction and not one decoration except for a hideous pot on a pedestal, a kind of shopping-mall decoration from hell.
He led us through several rooms of no apparent purpose, but gigantic nonetheless, until we finally came to a study and office. It was also colossal, with several seating areas. He sat at a round table encircled by four straight-back chairs, and motioned for us to do likewise.
“How did you get Gus’s airplane? I’m sorry. I’m Armando Hotchkiss. How did you get Gussie’s plane?” He was not interested in Neffie or me introducing ourselves to him.
“It’s a bit unusual, but we were at the center when he left, and we think he may know where a friend of ours is, so …”
“What were you doing at the center? Are you a member?” He interrupted me.
“Good lord, no,” I said. “I mean … uh … no of
fense, but, no. We were looking for someone Gus had with him when he came to Apache Springs.”
“I see. I see the connection. And you?” He turned to Neffie.
“I was at the diner,” she said.
“Oh, of course. Of course you were … would have been.” Hotchkiss had the deep back-story on Gus and the diner, this was becoming obvious, and there was more he knew about Neffie than he was showing.
“Is Gus here?” Neffie asked.
“He is, he is. Would you like me to wake him? Actually, no, let me take that back. It’s late, I’ve been in bed an hour now. We actually should all be in bed. Is there anything that can’t wait till the morning?”
“Yes. We need to know what happened to Kweethu. We think Gus kidnapped her and I want to know where she is,” said Neffie, direct and tough.
“Kweethu? I …” Armando shook his head, then sighed in resigned annoyance. “All right then … I’ll get him.” He crossed to a desk that did not have one piece of paper on it and picked up a small handheld radio. “Tommy, can you wake Mr. Rutcliff? Have him come to the east study. Thank you.” Armando turned to us. “He’ll only be a minute or two. So you took his plane and followed him?”
“No,” I said. “Wild hunch. He left a flight plan behind so we followed that.”
Before anyone could say more, however, Gus walked in the room. This was not the man I had seen at the service station, not the master of ceremonies I had seen at the center. He was drastically and dramatically changed. It was almost
as if his physical stature had shrunk. He was sweating profusely. The look in his eyes was intense as a cornered animal’s. He may well have been wakened, but it looked to me more as if he had been unhooked from a noose, that he had been on the verge of something terrible and perhaps still was. Our sudden arrival had stopped whatever horror was afoot, but it looked as if Gus thought of this summons only as reprise, not salvation. When he saw Neffie, he turned pale and I thought he would faint.
“I believe you have a mutual friend with these people,” Armando said to Gus.
Gus steadied himself by leaning against a chair. He was staring at Neffie and gave me only a quick glance.
“I know you,” Gus said to Neffie. “You work at Li’s Diner.”
“That’s right,” Neffie said. “The one you shot up.”
Gus looked at the floor, then back to her, then to Armando.
“I told you, Li was the one who stole the money,” he said to Hotchkiss.
Hotchkiss shrugged, as if to say, so what?
“More to the point, Gus, what happened to Kweethu?” Neffie was at her full height.
“Who?” Gus was perplexed.
“Kweethu. You had her in the car with you.”
“The old woman from Quemado? I took her back to Acoma, let her off at bingo.”
The little kid had been right. She was playing bingo.
“When?” Neffie pressed him.
“After I came back from the diner. I had forgotten she was in the car … .”
“You forgot about her?” Neffie said.
“I offered her some money to take me to Li. In the … uh … excitement, I forgot about her, that’s all. When she popped up in the backseat, she said she wanted me to take her to bingo at Acoma, Sky City Casino. So I did. That’s the last I saw of her.”
“You let her off, that was it?” asked Neffie.
“That was it,” Gus said.
We all stood silent. Neffie looked at Gus for a long time, trying to convince herself of his honesty, I thought. At last Armando broke the silence.
“If that’s all you need, can we all go to bed?”
Neffie turned to me. “We can call there, find out when she left, see how long she was there.”
“You’ll be happy to know they brought your airplane, Gus,” Armando said.
I could see Gus was not happy about this at all.
“Here?” he said, surprised and a little miffed.
“Down in hangar two,” Armando said.
“Who flew it?” Gus asked.
I was about to say something, but Armando was curt.
“Gentleman and lady … this meeting is over. I’m going to bed. You all will do the same, please. You can work out all mysteries tomorrow morning. Nothing more needs to be discussed tonight.”
He pushed a button in his desk and almost instantly a young man entered the room, early twenties with a military haircut, thick neck and sloping shoulders. He stood, saying nothing, legs slightly apart, his hands folded in front of him.
“Tommy, show these people to their room. Are you two separate or together?”
Armando looked at Neffie. The question was deep, directed only at her.
“Together,” Neffie responded.
“Fine. Show them the suite by the library. We will have a late breakfast. Good night.”
With that, Armando held his hands out to herd us from his study. None of us said another word as Gus went off to the left, down a hallway, and Armando pressed a button for an elevator directly opposite the door to the study. As the door opened in front of him, Tommy, Neffie, and I started our walk down a long hallway, down a series of stairs, through some other tremendous rooms dotted with useless furniture, and finally to a suite of three rooms, a bedroom, bath, and dressing room. It was like a business hotel, no character, humanity, grace or charm in any of it. The only picture, above the bed, was a print, a picture of a house and its reflection in a lake; autumnal, purely decorative, perfunctory, nearly bucolic, simply awful.
“There are towels and bathrobes in the closet.” He nodded his good night, closed the door and left. Immediately after he was gone I went to the door and tried the handle. It was open, so I pushed it outward and checked down the hallway. Tommy was about to turn a corner when he heard me and looked back.
“Did you need anything?” he asked, polite but distant.
“No, just … just checking,” I said. “Thanks. Good night.”
He continued around the corner.
“Well, we’re not locked in,” I said as I closed the door behind me.
I looked around the room. There was no phone, no
television, no books, nothing of ordinary life in a connected world. The room was like a cell. It was creepy. Most houses have a sentience, a personality, the evidence of which is the bric-a-brac, art, furniture design, a point of view. There was nothing like that here.
“There’s a little basket of shampoo and lotions,” Neffie said as she came out of the bathroom. “Like a motel.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The Bates.”
“Probably more than we know,” Neffie said as she bounced on the bed once, then stretched out.
I went into the bathroom to see the loot: four small bottles of toiletries, enough for one use. “What do you suppose he does?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Neffie yawned. “At least I have the feeling Kweethu is safe. I didn’t get any negative hits off Gus, more like dopey hysteric.” At that moment I realized Neffie had been analyzing Gus more for his relationship to Armando than for his involvement with Li and Kweethu. Not only was she sure Kweethu was safe, more importantly it seemed, she had decided Gus was inconsequential in any proceedings here at Armando’s empty castle.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
“It makes sense. Kweethu has stayed at the casino for twelve straight days before. She won eighteen-hundred dollars once and that was it, she’s played religiously ever since, bingo, blackjack, craps, whatever. It’s sad. Who would have thought that the great wisdom of the Native Americans would turn out to be ‘always split aces and eights’?”
“If she’s safe, what now?” I tried not to let it show, but I was confused, far out of touch with my purpose in coming to the enchanted land. I wanted to find the source
of an extraordinary music, to learn what I could about the artistry, perhaps to gain a bit in my practice as an artist. What was I supposed to learn here? I looked at Neffie on the bed, her gorgeous form; enticing, warm, comforting. The love that had overtaken me when I first met her and made love to her was transmuting. I felt different. What appealed to me now was her clearheaded strength, her capacity for calm in unusual circumstances. I had left my attachment to her as a possible life partner back in Welach. Perhaps it was for the best. I still loved her, but I was learning more about what that meant.
“We fly back with Gus. Unless you had something else in mind.” Neffie propped her head up, resting her elbow on the bed.
Discomfort was crowding around me. Throughout my trip I’d had this nagging feeling of something not right, sometimes a free-floating anxiety, other times focused on specific peril, but always there, chipping away at my composure. It was rising this night, more corrosive than before. Usually I could shake it, turn my thoughts to more benevolent or comforting ideas, but tonight that wasn’t working. It was fear, no doubt of that, but something underneath the fear, more hideous, a satanic, evil magnetism, sucking me by sections into a disorganization, into a universe uncontrolled, random, subject only to a malevolent caprice. Whatever Welach was, Armando’s castle was the opposite. I wanted out, the sooner the better. Neffie knew this.
I crawled next to Neffie in the bed and turned my back to her as I drew one of the pillows to my chest and curled around it in a fetal position. I did not undress or pull the covers over me. Neffie settled too, but only after rubbing
my arm, a loving caress. Some of the strength she possessed came through to me, calming me. Still, the abiding thought in my head was “I don’t want to be here.” I rolled over and looked deep into this woman’s eyes and kissed her full and long on the mouth, drinking deeply of her soul. Whatever had brought me here had brought me Neffie too, and for that I would always be happy. I folded into her arms, where peaceful, dreamless sleep was only moments away.