I WOKE EARLY, JUST BEFORE DAWN. NEFFIE HAD SNUGGLED under the covers sometime during the night and was still wrapped in them. I moved as quietly as possible so not to disturb her, went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and hair.
The window that had been dark the night before was now gray and drizzly with the opening day. I heard a plane and looked out in time to see the Canadair take off, followed in less than a minute by the Lear. A few more minutes passed and the Pitts took off. I saw them only seconds after they were airborne before they disappeared into the overcast. I couldn’t see the runway or the hangars from my room.
I found a new toothbrush in a cellophane-wrapped box and some mouthwash in the bathroom. I had nothing with me for traveling, only the clothes I was wearing and had now slept in. I looked a mess, except I noticed there was no sign of injury left on my face. All was back to normal. Neffie did not stir.
I left the room, deciding to explore a little in the early-morning hours. As the light increased I could see more and more of the construction of the house. Everything was common, probably expensive, but plain, transitory, constructed to minimums. If Hotchkiss had built this lair he had done it with the intention of any day abandoning it. The entire house
was disposable, a throwaway. The sink in the bathroom was fiberglass, the carpets industrial-type, an ugly pale-green tight twill, wall-to-wall, the same in every room, the door handles and bath fixtures not worth the slightest, serviceable just for the time being.
I walked along the hallway and peered into a few of the rooms. Each one was the same, large, with a seating area near one side or the other, ugly furniture in oppressively dull tones of beige and rust, faded earth tones. There was a light layer of dust on everything and bits of litter here and there.
At the end of the hall was a kitchen—again huge by ordinary standards—but furnished with appliances like the ones in the kitchen of a recreational vehicle. I realized how hungry I was. I hadn’t eaten again for a day, maybe more. What was it about this whole trip that kept me from regular meals? I opened the refrigerator and was amazed. It was packed with the most succulent food. Pates, beautifully prepared salads, stacks of sandwiches, all apparently recently made, fresh fruits and juices. I took a sandwich and ate it. It was delicious—fresh lettuce and cucumbers with avocado and a slice of exotic, sharp cheese on the freshest and nuttiest bread. The odd thing was I could not help feeling as if I had stolen it, so inhospitable were the living conditions.
I noticed there were no plants, no greenery, no flowers or pictures of flowers. The walls were bare except for smudges around the light switches. Yet, the size of this whole house was so enormous, and its location so remote and difficult, it must have cost millions of dollars to construct and finish.
Out each window were sheer drops of fifty to a hundred
feet. The house was separate from each of the hilltops around it by twenty or thirty feet, so the isolation was complete.
I looked around the kitchen for a trash basket to throw away the sandwich wrapper, but didn’t see one, so I threw it in the sink and continued my exploration. It did not appear anyone else was awake. I was halfway looking for the library Armando had mentioned; I could tell a lot by looking at his books. Instead I came to a great room with a sign above the door saying SUNSET ROOM. Inside was Armando himself, seated at a computer, still dressed in the silk bathrobe and slippers from the night before. Next to him was an empty bottle of brandy and he was smoking a Lucky Strike while he pecked with one finger at the keyboard in front of him.
At one end of the room was a wall-size picture window, looking across a gully to a neighboring hilltop twenty feet away. The soil outside was a brutal brownish-gray that I could see was matched by the skies, a flat, low overcast and light rain. There was no trace of flora, just a gathering mud rolling away across the bald hill.
Armando looked up as I walked in. “Well, you’re up,” he said, words a little thick. I gathered he was in his cups from the brandy. Either he was an alcoholic or he had been up all night—probably both. “I never got back to sleep, so I thought I would come and see what was happening in the planet’s self-constructing neural net.”
“I got up a few minutes ago. Neffie is still asleep. I got a sandwich from the kitchen. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Oh, is that all? Let me get you something else.” He triggered an intercom next to him. “What would you like, breakfast?”
Though his speech slurred ever so slightly, he was lucid and alert, something beyond me and any booze I might have.
“I don’t know, I …”
He spoke into the intercom.
“Tommy, bring a couple of bagels, some cream cheese and lox, and … let’s see … a quart of orange juice and a pot of coffee. We’re in the sunset room.” He looked at me, smiled and took a long drag of the last of the Lucky Strike, which he stubbed out in an ashtray full of brother butts.
“Tommy will get you something. It’ll be a minute.”
Armando was seated at a folding table with an elaborate desktop computer on it. Around the room were other folding tables stacked with piles and piles of color copies, and along every wall, stuck to the drywall with pushpins, were hundreds of pictures, all pornography. I was intimidated. Armando knew that and enjoyed it. I was trying not to look. He saw me.
“Shocking, isn’t it? The mind of a new media.” He lit another Lucky. “But only shocking for a moment.”
The stacks of papers on each of the tables turned out to be more pornographic pictures. Armando stood up.
“Here, don’t be afraid. Look.” He handed me a particularly graphic photo of a bound woman with several men around her having their way.
“What is this?” I asked, glancing at the photo, then laying it back down on the table next to the computer.
“Men at work,” said Armando.
Tommy showed up at the door with the tray of food Armando had requested. He tapped lightly on the doorjamb to get our attention. Armando beckoned him in as he cleared
a space from the pile of the photos on one of the tables, stacking the photos on the floor.
“Put it there. Thanks.”
Tommy put the tray of food where Armando had instructed and left. Armando held up a Styrofoam plate of toasted bagels.
“Here,” he said. “Eat.”
I was still hungry, so I pulled a rickety folding chair up to the little table and made myself a bagel with lox and cream cheese—one of my least favorite foods, but these were delectable, the best I ever had.
“Is this what you do?” I asked between bites.
“By this you mean …?” he waited for me to fill in the aposiopesis.
“Pornography. Do …”
“Not unless you call the phone company a pornographer because of obscene phone calls. I run Web sites, on the Internet. This is the stuff people post. I have nothing to do with it.”
“You’re an Internet service provider?”
“No, no. I started a Web site, that’s all. A place where people can see what other people have posted, of themselves, of things they have. I started with a photographer, and when he found he got more hits by doing nudes, he started doing harder and harder stuff. I have ten sites now, all password-protected. Look.”
He sat in front of the computer and pulled up a Web browser. Then he punched in a URL for someplace I didn’t recognize.
“This site is in—well, I’m not going to tell you where it is—but it’s not in the U.S.”
The first page came up, simple graphics and a text description of what was inside, which was sex. The page had a telephone number to call for a password, which was good for twenty-four hours.
“You bring up the page on your browser, you get the number, call it, and get a password. Then you can go into the page and download whatever you want. On some of them I have a link to a bulletin board where you can upload as well. The telephone number is the international equivalent of a nine-hundred number—you know, where the caller pays? Each call is about two dollars to the caller. I keep a dollar forty and the phone company keeps sixty cents. Every week they send me a check.”
“You don’t make any of the content on the site?” I asked.
“Not one pixel. We make the home page describing the goods. That’s it. The rest comes from the patrons.”
“How many people sign on a day?”
“On all ten sites, eight-hundred thousand.” He looked at me and smiled through another puff. It took a minute to sink in.
“Eight-hundred thousand? Wait a minute, that’s …”
“A million-six. Roughly. Some days more. Some less.”
My head reeled. More astronomical numbers.
“That’s like … like …”
“It’s not like anything. Not Disneyland. Not Home Shopping Network. Not the New York subway. It is a brave new world. I’m getting out of it.”
“A million dollars a day is very … it’s a lot,” I said, idiotically.
“Not as much as you think. It seems big because I don’t
do anything. But then, that’s the secret, isn’t it? Do as little as possible and make as much as you can.” The smoke curled around his head, he flicked an ash into the ashtray, and leaned back in his swivel chair.
He was saying something I had heard many times before, usually from people who were trying to run a con game, losers with nowhere to go, trying to eke out a life. Except Armando was making over a million dollars a day trafficking in pornography and was getting his check from the phone company.
“This game is over, though. I’m moving on.”
I finished all the food, most of the orange juice—fresh—and some of the excellent coffee. Armando had not eaten any. He buzzed for Tommy, who showed up and cleared everything.
“Tommy, bring me another bottle of this.” Armando held up the almost-empty brandy bottle for Tommy to see. He dug through some of the photos and produced a tin of Altoids, mint candy.
“I’m going into an Altoid, coffee, cigarettes, and brandy period. I can feel it. I couldn’t get to sleep last night, which I was afraid of. If I get woken up inside of an hour after I go to sleep, I can’t go back to sleep. I stayed up all night. I guess I’ll stay up all night tonight as well.” He stared at me, silent, intrusive. Then he said, “I looked you up on the Net.” More stare, deeper intrusion, waiting for a reaction. My eyebrows raised in spite of all my effort.
“You have quite a history. Not a great one, mind you. I thought you might be somebody really important, coming here with Neftoon Zamora and all, but you’re an interesting ‘also-ran.’” He turned his head slightly to the side, his eyes
never leaving mine, pushed the fingertip-size Lucky to his lips, took a drag, then blew the smoke from the corner of his mouth up and out toward the cottage cheese ceiling. He stubbed out the butt. All without once taking his eyes away. “Is the stuff I found true? Did you invent that cable thing, that music, what’s it?”
He meant Music Television, MTV. It was a popular and successful cable television service. Clearly, he knew this.
“Everybody invented MTV. It’s a running joke.” I said.
“Yes, but you really did, didn’t you? You’re not joking. It’s in the books.”
“Well …” I hated this. There was a subtle, arrogant will at work, sliding up the power tree, looking for control, domination. My ego started into overdrive. Who was this jerk? What did he mean, an interesting “also-ran”?
“What’s it worth?”
“MTV? I don’t know. A lot.”
“A lot?” he smirked. “He reached for the brandy and poured the dregs into a Flintstones’ jelly glass. “I’d say a billion U.S. How much of that did you get?”
I hadn’t gotten very much. I was paid well enough for the work I did. Perhaps I had come up with the basic idea, but other people had built the enterprise. They made all the money. What I received was peanuts by comparison.
“A lot.” I said. I was in the grips of something terrible. I was defensive and afraid.
“You say a lot a lot. How much then?” The smirk widened into clear derision.
I was lying, protecting myself from this man’s opinion. It was horrifying. What made me want to impress him, or
to best him? Why was I falling backward? I had to stop myself, but I didn’t know how.
“Plenty. If it’s any of your business.” A childish move. I drew myself to full mental height, and felt like a moron next to Armando. This was a goading, insidiously hateful man, pushing me back on my heels, making me stutter, explain myself, calling my very existence into question by his attitude of scorn.
“No, no, it’s none of my business. I only wondered.” He grinned, pleased with my obvious discomfort. “But …” he paused, took a sip of brandy, and his mouth curled in disdain. “If you are just a simple sideline player, a marginal, sort of meaningless … what? Artist? Businessman? I don’t really know what you’d call what you do … then, how do you keep going? What gets you up in the morning, if it’s going to be just another mediocre day, just one more failure of some kind?” The disdain faded into a mocking, malicious leer, then to a sincere and waiting openess. I had never seen so many change-ups so fast. “How do you go on?”
What a question. It was ironic I should have any concerns about the opinions of this apparently lonely, greedy little man, hunched like a troll over his computer, brokering pornographic picture-distribution services, but the question was at once so sarcastic and then again so pointed and genuine I was totally off balance.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Bullshit. The question is how do people like you keep going? What drives you forward? Do you draw strength from your family, from your career, from your friends? What?
Because if that’s what it is, then you’re just an idiot. Somehow, though, I think you may be smart, and if it’s something else, I want to know what it is. I really do.” He had relaxed. The pointed attack on me subsided.
I would ordinarily resist this type of cynical and confused interrogation, but there was a strange quality about this man that made me stay with him, made me want to answer—perhaps not to defend myself anymore, but to explain things the way I saw them. The most important thing in my mind though was staying calm. Armando Hotchkiss was infuriating, and I instinctively knew better than to quarrel with him.
“My friends and my career are beyond your ability to comprehend, and I mean no offense … or defense, by this. But if you really want to know what keeps me going, I can give you some clues. It’s a love of beauty, a love of life, to find activities to express that love and beauty completely, to live …”
“More bullshit. That’s exactly what I thought you would say,” he interrupted. “Let me ask you another question. Do you believe in God?”
“What difference does that make?” I thought of LittleHorse.
“Okay. Don’t tell me. You know, people like you never get anywhere because you do not understand the importance of power. How it works, where it comes from, and how to get it. Popularity is power. That’s the cheapest trick—a winning smile, good dinner parties—there is some power in that. Money is power. The real control of big money gets you a long way in this world. It doesn’t even have to be your own money as long as you control it, but if it is, then your power is up an order of magnitude. Knowledge
is power. Do you know what I did in the sixties? When I was forty-three? I took the SAT’s, the college-entrance exam. I made a perfect score. Perfect. I didn’t miss one question. You know why I did that? Because I wanted to be sure I was not going to get passed by other people with more knowledge than me.”
“You seriously think making a perfect score on the general-entrance exams for American colleges and universities is a sign of real knowledge?” I didn’t deliberately infuse the words with stunned incredulity, but they were. Armando sneered.
“I don’t think anything I don’t think seriously. You’d do well to take a lesson from that,” he growled.
Okay, I thought. Rich first. Smart second. A distant second, and in his case, also last. This was probably all there was to Armando Hotchkiss. I knew some smart, rich people, but I never knew a smart criminal, even though all the criminals I knew tested well, very well indeed. Armando might be sidestepping any criminal involvement with the pornography he was brokering. I’d be willing to bet he could even make a good case for the morality of pornography, but he was as crooked as the branch of a dead oak—bent, twisted. That was clear, so somewhere in all this, he was not as smart as he thought he was.
“If you have any two of those three—popularity, money, knowledge—you will have all the power you need. Any two. Me, I have all three, and I have needed them less and less as I have gotten older. You know why? Because power begets power. Now that I am getting ready to die, I have finally learned the secret of all power, a secret you will never know. Because, my boy, you see, talent is not power,
skill is not power, trying to do the right thing is not power, and I’ll tell you without question, beauty is not power. None of those things will bring you power, much less real money, and never will. In fact, you will lose what power you have because these things blind you so.” He leaned back in the cheap swivel chair and smiled, satisfied. He lit another Lucky, took another long puff, and held it in.
Tommy came into the room and set a new bottle of brandy next to Armando. “Everything is ready. Whenever you wish, I can let them know,” he said to Armando. Armando nodded as he hoisted the Flintstones’ glass, sticky from all the earlier drinks, and filled it half-full with the booze.
“I know better than to offer you any of this, so you’ll excuse me.” He took a big gulp, devouring half of what he had poured.
“So you feel as if you have achieved all power?” I asked, honestly curious about what this man could be thinking.
“Oh, my son, my son. Why would you ask such a question unless you were dull. Of course not, of course not. I have never sought omnipotence. It’s a fool’s errand.”
“Then what—three-quarter power?”
“Don’t be cute. Think about this. What is the means of survival? Power over your environment. When the first men danced around the campfire, what were they doing? They were trying to control their experience, to make it rain, or stop raining, whatever. Why? To survive. Everything we do is to survive—not only this mortal life but whatever life there may be. I seek power not because I want to play with it, but because I must, because I am naturally selected to.
What do I do with it? I destroy everything that would endanger me.”
“Excuse me, Armando, but that is a perverted sense of natural selection. You know, there is a town called Welach …”
Time stopped. It was as if all the walls of Armando’s castle had folded outward and down and we were left, only the two of us, in an open field, some huge, impossible space. I heard nothing, I felt nothing.
Armando stared at me as if his heart had stopped beating. All the muscles in his body froze. I knew at this instant why I had come to this place, Kweethu notwithstanding. A terror crept over me, then awe. All of the events since I had left Doc’s focused on this one moment between me and Armando. I knew I must protect Welach from him at all cost, knew Armando and Welach were mortal enemies, that one would not survive in the presence of the other.
Then I felt what Neftoon Zamora must have felt when she stood in the circle of closing wolves and knew she must run directly towards Black Wolf. I was sure I had no choice but to confront and confuse this man and draw him away from any notions of Welach, a city I now understood was sacred, must never be exposed to even the slightest possibility of discovery by one such as Armando Hotchkiss. The taunting, mocking questions before had aroused my defenses, but I was helpless because of it, without clarity of purpose other than my own ego and vanity. That petulant resistance would provide little real protection, would instead create only a cycle of reactions leading to angrier and angrier exchange covering no new ground. It would not do here.
What I could see now perfectly was that Welach was a secret place, known only to me and the others who sanctified it. I could also see why the inhabitants of Welach kept the town so remote, so hidden. I felt firsthand the palpable and real commitment to the treasures of Welach. From here I saw even clearer the importance of Chuchen, the master city, governing by its quiet and gentle laughter, the simple lives of its children, the beat of its heart. No, Armando would have no chance of ever discovering from me anything about Welach. Because this time, I knew what to do, exactly how to handle him.
Armando was alert, prickly, every sense aware, a giant predatory cat upon its prey, ready to pounce. I tried to bypass the remark about Welach, but I knew he would return.
“Natural selection isn’t about …”
“What about Welach?” he interrupted, slowly, carefully.
“What? Oh, Welach. Nothing, really. I was just …”
Armando shifted in his chair. With the turn of his head, a gesture so slight but so distinct, stopping me again, he sized me up, looking for a flank to attack, and said, “then …” He paused for an eternity. “Why did you bring it up?”
I had only one move, but it was a move I was sure would work. Because now I understood Armando, this artless man with his billions, this empty soul looking for a Welach to exploit, to enlist into his service of useless ideas, his perverted and shallow sense of natural selection. This man who would exploit the myths of creation for ticket
sales, could be confused and lost in an instant, just as easily as Neftoon Zamora had jumped over Black Wolf. First, the run directly at him.
“I was thinking about some of the legends. I don’t need to tell you, Welach, like Santa Claus, doesn’t really exist.”
Then the jump.
“They represent something, I guess.” A pause as long as his. “Nobody is sure what.” I watched him and grinned, blank, inscrutable.
Then, there it was. In a quandary, he flickered, ever so slightly, like a still candle flame caught in the wind from the wings of a wayward moth, a confusion passing over his face. I had him. Was I making sense? Was I being vague? Was I just stupid? He didn’t know. Armando could hear the words, but he couldn’t hear the spirit.
We both sailed off the cliff.
“I really was commenting on your ideas about natural selection, the survival of the fittest. You know Darwin never used that phrase?”
Armando put his hand to his chin, and rubbed his thumb and forefinger back and forth together across it, contemplating. Then, he squinted and gazed at me. Was I just some enchanted fool?
I gave him one last parting non sequitur, one last moment of empty-headedness, destroying even the pretense of knowledge of the existence of Welach. “It really is about survival. I had the best sandwich I ever had right from your kitchen,” and with that, all notions of Welach vanished in Armando’s conviction of my stupidity, the natural condition of the species.
He settled fully back into his chair and waved his hand in the air, dismissive. Yes, I was a fool. Probably not even enchanted.
“Well, so much for all this. You’re obviously a nice man, stupid, but pleasant enough. I don’t want to get in a discussion with you about evolution or sandwiches. You have too much to learn and I have too little you could grasp. And besides, I have other problems.” Armando stood up. I stood with him.
“When are you leaving?” he asked me.
“As soon as everyone is up, I would think.”
“Very good. The Justice Department is in a snit and have gone into their Waco mode. We all should move along as soon as possible.” He made it clear he had no intention of talking to me any further, pushed the remainder of the pack of Luckies, in his robe pocket and shuffled out of the room, holding the brandy and the Flintstones’ glass precariously among the fingers of one hand.
As he walked out of the room and out of sight, the strangest sensation came over me, a victory, but without the celebration. I had closed the door to Welach as fast as I had opened it. I felt relieved, happy Welach had become such a part of me I had instinctively known it must hide from the likes of Armando.
I thought about Welach, about being uncomfortable with the people, feeling LittleHorse was posing when I first met him, too perfect a sage, too perfect a wise man. I measured that against the feelings I had here in Armando’s castle. Everything in the castle made sense, an unpleasant place to be sure, but it was consistent, it all fit together. Welach didn’t fit, seemed impossible, but it was the best place I had
ever been. Even my own insecurities and difficulties faded in the light that radiated from Welach into my thinking. Welach was not a mystery, but a secret. Armando’s castle was no secret—indeed, was obvious, even predictable.
The computer screen caught my eye. It was still at the home page Armando had pulled up. There were pictures of women in salacious poses with buttons and icons next to them, all with the telephone number to call for the password. I looked around the room.
Now that Armando was gone—or more to the point, now that I was alone—I took time to look at the pictures carefully. After the initial shock of pornography wears off, it stops having much effect, like looking at the meat counter of a local market, after a while you forget these are pieces of dead animals. I didn’t know why the pictures on the wall had been chosen. They seemed the same as the pictures in the piles: no better, no worse; no more graphic, no less. Then I saw the children.
They were not on the wall but were part of a pile on one of the tables. In all there must have been ten- or twenty-thousand pictures, color copies from a computer file, and this pile of child pornography appeared to contain at least a thousand. I recoiled, then picked one up. It was a nude picture of a young girl, probably eight, legs apart, smiling and looking directly at the camera. I didn’t know what to think. I was horrified in one way and angered in another. I picked up the next one, then the next, until I had shuffled through perhaps a dozen. The shock never wore off, but I was overtaken with a curiosity about this subject, wondering who could possibly be interested in such things. Armando had called it the mind of a new media. Could this be right?
What I did understand was that I wanted to do something to destroy these pictures, Armando, his enterprise. I sat down at the computer and started hacking around, following a vague idea that if this was the main controlling computer, maybe I could shut them all down and ruin his empire. It was a dumb idea born of spy stories and the whole omniscient computer nonsense, but it seemed worth the try. I got through to the local operating system easy enough, a couple of keystrokes, then I went through to his other Web sites, but I couldn’t get into their operating systems. He didn’t have a system-operator status, at least not from here. After a few tries of some passwords, all of which were “authorization failed,” I looked around in the local hard drives. There was about five gigabytes of storage on one internal and one external hard drive, most of them graphics files. I was sure these could not have been the only files of the pictures I saw, but just for the hell of it, I erased them. Then as one last, serious, “up yours” I reformatted all his drives, erasing everything, operating systems and all.
It was silly. I was not ever going to do any permanent damage to Armando this way. I kept thinking about all the movies and novels where the good guy goes in and gets to the main computer and blows up the planet, but there was nothing like that here. I had only managed to erase his hard drives, probably little more than a nuisance, but it felt good and that counted for something. I heard a noise and stood up, walking away from the computer. I half-hoped it was Armando, so I could discover with him that his hard drives had been trashed and I could shake my head in amazement and commiseration about these darn computers and computer glitches. “Maybe it was a virus, Armando.”
Instead, Gus came in the room. He looked worried, but not for his life anymore.
“Is Armando here?” he asked. At that moment I heard the sound of a helicopter and a jet. Out the window of the sunset room, Gus and I watched the A Star and the Gulfstream streak skyward. We both knew Armando was on one or the other.
“No,” I said. “He left about fifteen or twenty minutes ago.”
Gus actually wrung his hands in dismay.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I think there is some kind of problem outside.” He turned and motioned for me to follow him down the hall, across an open atrium and then to a window that looked out over the road that came through the front gate. He was right. There was a big problem.
Down the hill, still outside the double antipersonnel fences, hundreds of agents were amassing. In the distance I could see several motor homes and a few-dozen cars parked tactically advantaged for a siege. Thirty of the agents were coming up the hill along the main road, M16’s slung across their arms in front, all wearing Kevlar helmets and black bulletproof vests. They were walking on either side of one of the baby tanks the Justice Department seems fond of using in assaults on secure residences. I felt like a Branch Davidian.
“Have you seen Neffie?” I asked Gus.
He shook his head.
“We better get out of here,” I said, not wanting to clarify my presence among stacks of pornography to an attorney general who had just lost his main prey. “I’m going to get Neffie. We’ll meet you at … I don’t know, try to
get to the plane. Look for a back way.” He nodded in agreement and ran off to look.
I ran down the hall to our room but Neffie was not there. I called her name and heard an answer filter through the kitchen. I raced toward it.
Outside, I heard the growl of the tank and the hum and sizzle of high-powered electrical wires as they were severed. The engine of the tank roared over the noise.
I ran in the kitchen and called Neffie’s name again. This time the answer was clearer. She had walked into the sunset room as we had walked out. As I dashed back to the room I heard the front door cracking in two. The little paper-and-wood house was coming apart effortlessly with the approach of the Justice Department tank. Neffie was looking at the pictures on the wall.
“My god,” she said. “Look at this.”
“We have to get out of here. That’s the Feds coming through the front door. This is the last place I want them to find us.”
Neffie had walked to the computer and was looking at the screen. It said FINISHED FORMATTING DRIVE C: FORMAT ANOTHER? Y, N? She read it, then looked at me. “What’s this?”
“Really Neffie, I don’t want to get caught in here. I’ll explain later.” There was another loud crash, glass breaking, more fencing ripping up.
“Why don’t we just invoke the self-destruct function on this? This whole house is wired to it and will blow up in ten minutes.” She looked at me urgently.
“Self-destruct? It will? I, uh, I just erased everything …” I looked at Neffie, who was smiling.
“I’m just kidding, Nez. I see what you did. It was a good thing. Useless, as you may have guessed, but a good thing.”
I really did love this woman; so at ease in the most unnerving situations, able to play around, to not get caught-up in the drama. I smiled, then in spite of myself I laughed, but not without the conscious thought: I’m standing here, laughing as the United States Justice Department, the same ones who—without the slightest hesitation—killed eighty people in Waco, Texas, are taking aim with a tank at the very spot I’m standing on.
“It was a little like letting the air out of his tires, I know, but that probably fits with his petty-criminal mentality, however much money he has.”
“Oh, no. Armando Hotchkiss is not a petty criminal. He’s the real thing, genuine evil. It’s him and the ones like him that are our only real worries at Welach. He’s come the closest to finding us.”
“So … you do know him?”
“No. Know of him.”
“And … what does he want with Welach?”
“Who knows? Maybe to expose us, to destroy our life outside the system he corrupts. Maybe to exploit us, put up a supermarket, a parking lot, start a new cable channel. But mostly just to prove he and his ideas are right, that Welach can’t exist. In fact, doesn’t, in his evolution.”
I now saw why she had brought me here, felt the jubilation of my momentary defeat of Armando. I was going to tell her of the encounter, how I had protected Welach, and in so doing had moved it into the most secret place in my heart, all of which I now understood had been her intention.
I was going to tell her what I understood of the songs of Neftoon Zamora, of the miracle of Chuchen, of the legends she had told me. I was going to grab her and smother her with gratitude and kisses.
But the front door exploded, inward.
The halls of the house began to fill with burly men all shouting in their command voice, a studied way of shouting designed to intimidate. Unfortunately for me it always made me laugh. I thought they sounded ridiculous, but ridiculous or not they were all shouting, “Everyone in this house is under arrest. ATF. Stay where you are and raise your hands. ATF.” Someone must have nudged command-voice number one because immediately following this instruction came command-voice number two shouting, “ATF. You are all under arrest. Lay down on the floor and cover the back of your head with your hands. ATF. Do it now! ATF.” Nothing like conflicting instructions from someone with a gun to create nuclear-grade anxiety.
The only way out was through the plate-glass window that formed the back of the sunset room. If we could get through, jump to the neighboring hill, we might have a chance to get out of the area. At least we would not be caught in the midst of twenty years-to-life.
For whatever reason the first band of ATF had turned down another hall, away from us, but I knew it was only a second before the next wave would come in and head our way.
I picked up the folding chair and threw it at the window. The chair broke to pieces, the window only shook. I picked up the swivel chair Armando had been sitting in and threw it. It just bounced off. I heard the next bunch running
through the door. It sounded like the tank was right in back of them. The clatter of their boots rumbled, muffled by the junk carpet, like crates of apples being poured onto a marble floor. Neffie was standing beside me, watching the door. I reached in my pocket and nervously fingered the leather bag LittleHorse had given me. As I shook it, the stone fell out in my hand, a stone the size of a walnut, a stone suddenly with the weight of a meteorite.
I hurled it at the window with all my might. It must have hit the tension point of the glass, because the window shattered like the safety glass in a car, first turning white with millions of tiny scars, then falling out of the window frame into the gully outside, leaving a perfectly square, perfectly open hole.
Outside the drizzle and fog were completing their own assault on the compound. The day had closed down like a bad business, leaving only the murky traces of a dismal sky, the inside of a coffin. I stood there, hesitant, uncertain, thinking of the gorge between the window and the neighboring hilltop. What if the men with the automatic rifles were out there as well? What if the house was surrounded with them? What if I jumped into the void, somehow made it across the abyss, only to plop into a nest of angry young men with low-technology intelligence and high-technology ordnance?
Neffie stepped in front of me, pulling on my arm, urging me into a run. The closer I came to the window the more I could see into the chasm outside the window, deeper and deeper the closer I came. I gave a yell, a yell of terror and hope, and jumped. At that instant I felt Neffie’s hand in the small of my back, pushing me like some primal force, a giant spring firing me from a cannon, and with almost no effort I
sailed over the pit and plowed headfirst into the hilltop, into the frosting of mud the drizzle had created on the dusty terrain, then rolled down the backside, away from the house.
The back of the hill was a shallow slope, and I rolled for a hundred feet before coming to a stop at the bottom. I was knocked out of breath and lay there, coming to my senses, for several seconds. I knew that even if they found me now, they could never prove I was in the house. I might have been wandering around out here, maybe prospecting, communing with nature. I could say almost anything I wanted now that I was away from the house. I sat up and looked around, alert for perimeter guards.
I looked for Neffie. She was nowhere in sight. Had she fallen into the gully between the window and the hill? I stayed on my knees and crawled back to the hilltop where I had landed. Impossibly, the fog became denser, closing around me, sometimes cutting my visibility to a few feet in front of me.
When I reached the top I could see back into the room through the shattered window. It was full of the serious men in black. They were looking at the pictures on the wall and in the piles around on the tables. I peered over the edge into the gorge below, but there was no Neffie. The mist cleared, then gathered, then cleared again, billows of occlusion. I leaned farther over the hilltop into the hole, but she was not there. I studied the room carefully. She was not inside. She was not in the room. She had not fallen in the gap. And she was not with me. As I sat hunkered behind the hill of freedom, I heard the sound of an airplane engine, a sound I was sure was the Beech. I stood up and ran full-speed toward the sound, the runway and maybe, I hoped, Neffie.