They drove through what might or might not have been a ghost town. Every wooden building and every shed had windows broken out or boarded up, but every property flew the Stars and Stripes. Either people still lived in the derelict buildings or some über-patriot had dressed up even the abandoned structures.
“Rennie,” said Emine, and it was her usual soft voice, not the sharp tones that had Rennie on alert. “I didn’t mean to offend. I do love this country, but I love my own country, and it’s a Muslim country, and I’m scared. What happened is horrible. It’s unimaginable except that someone did imagine it and made it happen and not because They hate your freedoms.”
“You don’t sound scared,” said Rennie. “You sound pissed off.”
“Why do you say that?” said Maria. “I mean why do people say that? Pissed on makes sense. You say Fuck off. But you don’t say you’re fucked off when you’re pissed off. And what’s urine got to do with it?”
“What do you call that part of speech?” Emine asked Rennie.
“Adverb?”’
“But these are unnecessary adverbs. Extra. It’s the hardest thing in English to get right.”
Rennie spoke no foreign languages but was fascinated by people who did so she should have enjoyed this conversation. Instead she once again felt left out.
“Why do you hang up when you put the phone down?” said Maria.
“Why do they say Shut up.”
So now we are they, Rennie thought.
“Come on.”
“Carry on. Get it on.”
“Call on is not the opposite of call off.”
“Blow it up,” Maria said. “Or blow it down.”
“What the hell!” Emine pulled over onto the dirt shoulder, tears pouring down her face. Her eyelids turned red, then swelled enough to shut closed her eyes.
“You must be allergic to something.”
“This never happened before.”
“You’ve always driven to LA,” Rennie said. “Now you’re behind the Creosote Curtain.”
“Creosote?” said Maria. “Desert flats with creosote. That’s where you find Crotalus scutulatus.”
They got out of the car to change places. Rennie got behind the steering wheel and Maria got in the backseat without having to be told it was no time to look for snakes.
“You know, you were right about viruses,” she said to Rennie.
So you were listening to me after all, Rennie thought.
“Bacteria too,” said Maria. “They stick together. Share resistant genes with their neighbors.”
The wind blew over a desert landscape that even desert lovers couldn’t love. Flat and brown, not even a Joshua tree, just the low skeletal scrub, the creosote chaparral.
Maria made a cold compress of Emine’s headscarf and melted ice water from the cooler. Emine reclined her seat, the cloth over her eyes.
Here and there they passed a truck repair yard, a lone trailer, a shack. The only color was the rust on a corrugated metal roof. There was laundry drying fast, flapping in the wind so you could see that people lived here but you couldn’t see why.
“Though you know,” said Maria, “if you had irrigation and cattle and you could survey your property on horseback, it wouldn’t be bad here.”
“You’ve seen too many cowboy movies,” said Rennie. She thought it would still be awful.
“How far are we from home?” Emine asked.
“Let’s get you indoors faster than that,” Rennie said. “The Visitor Center at the mine.”
Once on Rio Tinto property, the speed limit was 37.5 mph.
“Translated from kilometers,” said Maria when Rennie laughed. “The company is based in London. I could tell you things they’ve done in Latin America and it’s no joke.”
Emine was interested after all. She sat up to look: “Crushers, tanks, thickeners,” she said. “Cooling chambers, slurry filters, dryers, conveyors.” Then across the railroad tracks and up a graded dirt hill.
“The hell with slurry filters,” said Maria. “There’s a bathroom.”
She was first to claim a stall while Rennie studied the chart near the towel dispenser: eight colored stripes, from clear to brown, mostly shades of yellow. You compared your urine to the color to tell if you were dehydrated.
After Rennie emptied her bladder, she looked in the bowl, then opened the door without flushing. “I can’t tell.” She would never have asked Emine to look at her pee, but she asked Maria. “Am I dehydrated? Maria?”
“Oh, piss off,” said Maria. Then relented and looked. “You’re fine.” She tapped the chart. “There was a vegetarian restaurant I used to go to in Monterrey. They had illustrations and instructions for breast self-exams hanging on the stall door.”
“And guys wonder why we take so long in there,” Rennie said.
“Hello? Are you all right in there?” The voice from outside the door was female, not male. “Can I help you? Hello?” Berenice, the docent, herded them out of the restroom and into the Visitor Center, a woman with colors as muted as the desert. Gray sweater, gray slacks, gray hair, gray eyes. “Welcome to the largest open pit mine in California and the largest borate mine in the world.” Her left eye twitched as if in sympathy with Emine who would have wanted none and said, “The largest reserve and the largest mine is in Turkey.”
“Well, I’m sure Turkey has some, too,” said Berenice. “Boron is used in detergents, ceramics, glass, fiberglass, fertilizers.”
“And to regulate rates of fission in nuclear reactors,” Emine said. “It’s a neutron absorber so it can slow or even stop reactions in the event of a disaster.”
“Where did you say you are from?” asked Berenice.
“Desert Haven,” said Emine. “It’s also used for body armor. And what are you doing about slope failure?” Berenice took a step back, so Emine added, “I don’t mean you personally. I mean the mine must have slope monitoring techniques. You’ve got two fracture systems here—the West Jenifer and the Portal fault zones.” No reply from Berenice whose right hand clutched at her left wrist. “Is it possible to speak with one of your engineers?”
It wasn’t, but Berenice assured them that the short film in the screening room would explain everything.
It didn’t, though it did describe the mine accurately as “one of the two largest in the world” without acknowledging the US was #2.
“USA. Number One!” Emine muttered.
In the car, all across the barren high desert, they chanted “USA. Number One!” Being pissed off is not the same as being a terrorist, Rennie thought.