THE CALLBACKS CREAMO HAD EXPECTED the night before came while we were eating breakfast, and like a good and trusty hound, he immediately rose to take them. By the time he returned, his eggs (sunnyside up) looked as appetizing as puddles of yellow plastic, but he picked at them anyway, as he grumbled. Preliminary analysis of the tire treads led to a plant in Chicago specializing in custom tires for military vehicles: large-scale, four-wheel drive trucks. “There aren’t any military bases within 500 miles!” he grumbled.
“How about all those boyfriends?”
“Dead ends. So far. There could always be one we don’t know about.”
“How about Dr. Gnecht? Did you get any news back about him?”
Creamo scowled. He liked his mysteries to be straightforward and not filled with underground caves, whacky biologists, and girlish folderol. He eyeballed the rigid piece of bacon in his hand and then gave me his steno pad. “Look for yourself,” he said, “if you can read my writing.”
Alexander Lucian Gnecht, PhD. 15 y w/ Dept of Agr, Pubs/Sc Amer/ Natl Geo (bats disords.) Black-filed.
“So he does actually work for the government. Will wonders never cease?” I sighed. “What does ‘black-filed’ mean?”
“It’s a term the feds sometimes use to describe an internal investigation,” Creamo explained. “He must have gone rogue and that’s why the FBI is here.”
“I wonder why the department sent out a couple of interns to work with him if he was under investigation. Any mention of when he was black-filed?” I asked.
“Evidently that information is in the goddamned black file.”
“Figures. No psych?”
“Yeah, but you had that one nailed—no family, no friends, several referrals for counseling, the whole shebang. They’re going to send us a fax as soon as the secretary gets into the office. Dimwits can’t figure out how to use the machine,” he chuckled, looking over at me impishly. “There was something interesting about your buddy Winnie Peterson, née Ralston.”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’re in for a surprise.”
“Please—no suspense. Just spit it out.”
“Read—it’s on the next page.”
He watched me flip the page, chuckling at my expression when I’d finished reading. “See. Not what you expected I bet.”
“Don’t be silly—I’m a trained psychiatrist!”
“And I’m an ex-cop.”
“So the sheriff has to be lying.”
“It would seem so.”
“I mean, he has been living in these parts for awhile, right?”
“Yup. That’s what he claims.”
“Shall we call him on it?”
“Not unless you want to hear another line of bull.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “If you want my opinion . . .”
“No thanks—you’re leaving town, right?”
“You should try to track down the three girls Winnie Peterson says she released. Come on, it should be easy enough to contact the mental hospital.” He ignored me. I continued anyway. “And I’m pretty sure the crazy old coot at the store in Steptoe is Leticia Honeywell’s grandfather. If you can track down at least two, one of them should lead you to Meredith Hyman, if indeed she did escape.”
He wasn’t paying attention to anything I said.
“What do I have to do in this place to get more coffee?”
“Well, here’s a suggestion. Get up and get it yourself.”
He scowled. “Gotta get my own booze; gotta get my own coffee. This place is a real shit hole.” He leaned backwards in his seat and shouted at the waitress. “How do I get a cup of coffee in this place?”
The waitress had her back to us, chatting with someone who’d just entered the café. She turned slowly and sneered in our direction. Behind her stood the jocular, loquacious, and often indecipherable Captain Wug. He gave us a wave and, taking the coffee pot from the waitress’ hand, made his way to our table.
“May I join your reticular ruminations?” he asked. He was dressed in a bomber jacket, trousers that looked like they’d been made from parachute material, well-worn boots that laced above his ankles, and an old leather helmet.
“Sure, sit,” I replied. “You just saved Creamo from a lapful of boiling hot java!”
He laughed heartily, pulling up a chair, “I believe you’re right! In fact, if I were the two of you, I’d be having breakfast down at Casa Maria tomorrow morning.” He looked first at me and then at Creamo, “I hope I’m not interrupting . . .”
“We were just wondering how a runner-up to Miss Nevada and the wife of a local war hero could have ended up as an administrator out at Enev. Perhaps you know.”
“You’ve got me half-baked with mulberry sauce, my dear. I’ve only been out here a few years. Not nearly long enough to acquaint myself with this area’s finer specimens of womanhood.” He paused before continuing. “However . . . if the war hero you’re talking about is Ward Peterson, then, yes, I did hear something. I won’t pretend that nasty rumors don’t fly about these parts faster than fleas on mule deer, but . . . I try not to listen, not because of any sort of moral imperative, mind you, but because the missus would skin me alive if I did! She is the finer person.”
“Now you’ve got my imagination piqued. What happened to the war hero?”
“Oh it’s nasty stuff and completely hearsay. The facts, which I don’t mind repeating, are that no one has seen him for years. He lives on what remains of the Peterson ranch and never comes into town. His wife lives at the girls’ reformatory—some wagging mouths say it’s her way of doing penance for sins of the past. There, I’ve given you enough of a clue.”
“Women,” Creamo growled.
“I expected to see you two at the strip this morning. Weren’t you interested in the terrain behind Cavalry Peak, you know, as a possible setting for your epic saga of undying love?”
“I’ve changed my mind—I write romance novels; not science fiction.”
“Oh, what a pity!” he sighed. “I thought I’d fly you two out there myself, for the price of a full tank of gas that is. My blushing bride tires of the scenery and demands, ever so sweetly of course, that we adjourn to our winter abode, by commercial air, unfortunately. So, this may be my last flight of the season before I say sayonara to my sweet mistress.”
“Go for it, Butters,” Creamo chuckled, pulling twenties from his wallet. “I can’t go. I gotta wait here for Hyman’s call. I tell you what, I’ll even let you take the camera in case you happen to spot something interesting—like maybe the entrance to the caves of Oswando Land, or whatever that place is called.”
“Thank you, but statistically, small airplanes are more dangerous than . . .” I began.
“Statistically, anything can kill you,” Creamo reminded me. “You’re not afraid, are you?”
“Not that I know of. I’ve never been up in a small plane.”
“Then go. It’s a piece of cake. Just like being in the big ones.”
The airstrip was a few miles west of town. It was basically a rutted strip of asphalt running parallel to a two-lane highway. The hangar was about the size of a barn and housed a rusty coke machine, cots for overnight visitors, and a walled-off section used as an office, wherein pilots could access radar equipment, topographical maps, and unsolicited advice proffered by ‘the Colonel’, an old-timer who took to the air these days only occasionally. There were maybe a half-dozen small planes parked haphazardly outside the hangar, looking well loved and used.
Before we set off for his plane, Captain Wug perused the radar. The skies looked clear. Excellent weather for a flight.
“Don’t we have to file a flight plan?” I asked.
“Already done,” Captain Wug replied. “Generally the Colonel gives me and the boys a pass; however, since we will be flying over an area Search and Rescue won’t enter unless they know for a fact you’ve crashed, I duly complied.”
“That’s reassuring,” I quipped.
What have I gotten myself into, I thought as we walked through the planes. They all looked so flimsy, like they were made from a kit by some high-school kid. My spirits lightened momentarily when I spotted a canary-yellow four-door model, with shiny silver propellers and a brand-spanking-new vibe. Oh, please let that be the captain’s plane, I thought. Please, please, please.
It was not. The captain’s pride and joy was a biplane: the type flown in vintage air shows, the type you imagine piloted by a lunatic in long purple scarves, flying upside down while buzzing the crowds.
“Where are the parachutes?” I asked, as he helped me onboard, the upper wing so close to my head that I could touch it. The worn seats were not built for comfort; the windshield was pitted from years of desert flight.
He started up the propeller through an odd bit of sorcery involving several knobs and doohickeys. “This is a Polikarpov Po2 biplane, my fair wordsmith. We won’t be flying high enough for a parachute to serve any purpose other than as a shroud. During the war these planes were known as the Whistling Death.”
“During the war? This plane was flown during the war?”
“Yes, dear, by our then good buddies the Russians. Russian women in particular. But never fear; she has a relatively new Ash 61R engine so she’s like an old pro with a tightened vagina, if you’ll pardon my French. Plus she’s got sturdy shoes and can set down in inhospitable terrains, always a good thing for flights beyond the Space Man.”
“What is the Space Man, exactly? A hieroglyph?”
“A hieroglyph? No, my dear, it’s a tor or perhaps a stone run, we’d have to ask Professor Hank for the proper geological term, a rock formation that, from above, resembles a child’s drawing of a man with an extra large head, like an astronaut or deep-sea diver.”
Suddenly we were rolling, bouncing on the uneven surface as we passed the other planes. I had a strong urge to jump, but the thought of how ridiculous and foolish I would look stopped me. I can do this, I told myself. Piece of cake.
The captain continued, “There are those who absolutely refuse to see the Space Man for what it is, arguing that it must be the creation of man or alien or even God!”
“Like the people who see the image of the Virgin Mary in a shriveled potato.”
“Exactly. You’ll see—we’ll fly over it but not much further beyond. Not that I put much store in the rantings of my superstitious colleagues but because, as I said, SAR will refuse to come find us if we get lost too deep in that territory.”
We’d reached the runway, a black strip now shimmering like a mirage in the sunlight. “See anything?” he asked.
“What do you mean? I see power lines at the end of the runway. Are you sure we’re taking off in the right direction?”
“Other planes, my dear, a flock of birds. Maybe even, a UFO!”
“I see power lines dangling . . .”
“Say good-bye to your earthly womb, Mademoiselle Candlelight of the Romance Genre and prepare to be reborn in the sky, free of all petty concerns, free to dance with the clouds! Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, —and done a hundred things I have not dreamed of,” he sang as we picked up a little speed but not nearly enough to be airborne. My heart was pounding, my hands sweaty. Tears squeezed from my eyes. I was so frightened, I couldn’t even talk.
A few feet from the end of the runway, he jerked back on the throttle and up we rose, not smoothly like a jumbo jet, but like a roller coaster, up and down and finally skimming over the hot, buzzing wires.
“Holy Shit!” I mumbled. “I could have touched those power lines!”
“Hang on to your stomach, my dear,” he uttered with unadulterated glee. “We’re not clear yet—we’ve got an exhilarating half roll coming up; otherwise we’ll slam right into the side of Rattlesnake Mountain.”
“Exhilarating? My ass! Who designed this runway? It’s more like an obstacle course.”
“Nonsense! Try landing a cargo plane on Lindbergh Field. Now there’s an obstacle course.”
Below I could see jackrabbits scurrying this way and that, perhaps thinking a giant hungry hawk was above them, and then, without warning, the right wings dropped and I was sideways, face-to-face with the desert floor. The engine revved loudly as the plane rolled in a wide half circle, its shadow flitting along the desert floor like a ballerina pirouetting across the stage. The sudden awareness of my body as a shadow provoked a twitch of existential angst. Something intrinsic to me had escaped and now laughed from its place of relative security at my precarious predicament. I felt like frigging Peter Pan.
“You’ve got to admit. It’s better than sex,” Captain Wug sighed as the wings leveled off. We were heading east into the sun, following the highway leading back into town.
“I can’t remember sex,” I muttered. Both of my armpits were drenched. My stomach lay far behind on the dusty tarmac. Sex was the last thing on my mind.
“Pshaw! A lovely lass like you? Perhaps that’s why you’ve chosen the romance genre . . .”
“Before you go any further, Dr. Freud, I should confess. I’m not really a romance novelist. God forbid. The most anal-retentive CPA on the planet could write a more believable romance novel than me! I’m actually trying to find a girl who disappeared from the girls’ reformatory four days ago. At one time I was considered an expert in, well, abnormal psychology, which is what got me into this pickle. My real name is Fi Butters.”
“I see.”
“Well, there’s an old cemetery at Fort Palmer and just above it, a mine tunnel that was boarded over, but somehow the young ladies—inmates if you want to call them that—have pried open the boards and have been using the tunnel to escape. But I can’t figure out where to. One of miscreants claimed under hypnosis that the tunnel leads to a sinkhole. Have you seen anything like that?”
“A sinkhole? That’s usually the type of thing you’d expect to find in the Yucatan or Florida.”
“Yes, I’d considered that she might have been describing a repressed childhood memory . . .”
“Sinkholes would be quite unusual out here, unless . . .”
“Unless?”
“The subterranean peculiarities of this area are legendary, my dear, making it impossible to catalogue the many oddities, the many strange occurrences.”
“There are a lot of old mining operations in this area, right?”
“Mining is what made most of Nevada, mining and the railroads.”
“Anyone actively working out at any of the old mines?”
“Hmm,” Captain Wug sighed, “hmm.”
“Anyone who might be working out of a pair of those aluminum trailers?”
You’d think the desert would be more scenic from a small plane but it isn’t. You see things from the air that you miss whizzing by in a car—backyard garbage dumps, the half-eaten carcasses of cows, ponds fluorescent with pollutants. Things people want to hide. It’s like the ultimate form of snoopery, peeking in folks’ backyards from above.
“Spanish Spring!” he exclaimed after a few stale moments. “I heard that someone’d dragged a pair of Airstreams and a generator out there. No one seemed to know what they were doing, but it was the site of flourishing enterprise at one time. Why don’t we fly over and do a reconnaissance?”
“There’s only one problem with that plan. The men working out there are not only armed, but they’re paranoid.”
“How do you know that, my dear?”
“I ran into them while I was checking out the mine tunnel.”
“And you think the girl may have too?”
“Could be. I’m kind of curious to see where exactly it is.”
“Then by happy circumstance, we are in the perfect machine. We’ll cut the engines on approach and glide over the valley.”
“Is that safe?”
“That’s the beauty of Polikarpov! You know what it was used for, don’t you?”
Of course, I did not.
“Aha. Well, my dear, at the end of the war, with able-bodied men in short demand, barely trained but fearless Russian women took to the sky in these old crop dusters! Their mission—to steal over the German borders in the wee hours of the morning and drop explosives on sleep-deprived, shell-shocked soldiers. The eerie whistling of the bracing wires was the last sound those poor sods heard before the bombs dropped.”
“This plane was a bomber? It doesn’t look big enough to drop water balloons from.”
Captain Wug laughed. “They were nuisance bombs. A bit of blasting powder and nails—firecrackers! Able to start fires, nothing more. But that was enough, my dear. Enough to prevent those sniffling cowards from getting a decent night’s sleep. And the fact that the planes were piloted by women and not men! Ha, ha, ha! Shriveled their egos! The mighty Teutonic warriors, the heros of the Third Reich, prime examples of the Master Race, quivering in their bunks at night because of a few daring, barely trained babushkas in biplanes! Ha, ha, ha!”
Captain Wug reveled in this story for several minutes more, the memory of these fine specimens of womanhood, these Amazons of the Air, who evidently captured both his undying admiration and seemingly endless imagination decades before, still stirred him into such a froth that I worried whether his heart could take it. The only thing that brought him back to the present day was the sight of Calvary Peak now looming on our horizon, its summit shrouded by a petticoat of wispy cumuli.
The notorious Space Man was, I must admit, a disappointing sight, a pattern of rocks that, with a huge amount of imagination, could be said to resemble a man with a very big head and octopus-like legs and arms. It didn’t inspire any fear or even curiosity in me. It did, however, sit at the end of a long flat plateau that, like so many desert outcroppings, reminded me of the outer battlements of a medieval castle.
“I see what you mean about the Space Man.”
He chuckled, “I’ve heard there are striations on the head of the Space Man that upon laborious inspection detail the end of days.”
“Oh yeah? If you say so.”
He laughed again.
As soon as we cleared the plateau, the vast expanse of wilderness behind Cavalry Peak unfolded; stony mountains barren of green, between which glacier-forged gorges lay stripped bare like stone quarries, waiting for the hapless to wander into uninvited and be defeated. Over a range of purple-toothed peaks to the south hung a worrisome umbrella of dark purple clouds.
Captain Wug scowled as the umbrella rapidly changed in shape, bubbling higher into the sky and sending long fingers of stratus streaking towards us like pointing fingers.
“For the love of Sassafras! What hellish maelstrom gave birth to that audacious squall?” Captain Wug snarled as he reported our coordinates to the Colonel.
“There’s nothing on the radar,” was the garbled response.
“Balderdash—I can see it plain as the nose on my face.”
The garble quickly changed to static. We’d lost radio contact.
“Perhaps it’s best if we don’t dillydally over Spanish Springs,” the captain sighed.
“Forget Spanish Springs! I’ve seen tornadoes that looked less deadly than those clouds.”
“Oh nonsense. A pilot is always at his best in inclement weather! Besides, we’re almost there. In fact, I think I see it now. ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.’”
Spanish Spring hardly resembled a pleasure dome. What was left of the mine clung to the side of the mountain in tatters and rust, blasted by sand. At one time, it had been a sizable operation with conveyer belts and trestles—all the latest and greatest, now ransacked by looters, thrill seekers, and the elements. But the sight seemed to inspire the captain as he cut the engines:
“But oh! That deep romantic chasm
which slanted down the green hill athwart a cedar cover!
A savage place! As holy and enchanted as e'er
beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman
wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
a mighty fountain momently was forced:
amid whose swift half-intermitted burst huge fragments
vaulted like rebounding hail.”
He stopped his recitation. “Can you hear it? The whistling of the bracing wires, the whistling death.”
“I think we’re about to fall into that mighty chasm, Kubla Khan,” I quipped. “Can’t you feel us dropping, and there’s no trapeze net beneath us, you know?”
He chuckled. “What you’re feeling is the barometric pressure falling,” he claimed as we came within view of two Airstream trailers. “Ho—there they are! Hiding behind the old mill, for shame. I wonder how they managed to drag those wretched sardine cans all the way out here. Take a gander, my dear—is this the place? ”
I took a quick and nauseating glance over the wing. “Yup. There’s Gnecht’s jeep. Listen, I don’t want to sound like a Nervous Nelly but shouldn’t we be restarting the engines?”
“Shortly, shortly,” he promised as we made a slow turn. “I take it that your previous experience in the air has been limited to somniferous treks cross-country in a wide-body, flying bar. Such a pity! This is true flight! Gliding on the wind, through wispy clouds from which the seraphim observe the petty misdeeds of the mortals.”
He was right, of course. This was real flying. That other experience, of sitting cramped in an aisle seat waiting for Coke and peanuts, listening to babies cry or the man next to you snore, the sound of the jet engines purring steadily as you breathe recycled air, that was for cowards, for wimps unwilling to look death in the face and sneer, for dullards who do not wish to boldly go where no man has gone before. In other words, people exactly like me, “I’m not ready to play footsies with angels. Could you just do me a favor and start the bloody engine?”
“I was preparing to do precisely that,” he claimed, twisting his knobs and doo-hickeys. “Then we’ll head due west—out of the path of that juggernaut. Look at how it’s grown! My goodness—you might get a picture of that, my dear. Proof that we’re not telling another fish tale.”
The first attempt to restart the engine failed. It was the wind he claimed. It was hitting us from the wrong angle. He turned so that the wind was behind us. The propeller began to sputter. But not for long. “We’re going to have to ditch,” the captain sighed. “Let’s hope we can reach the plateau.”
***
When he saw the storm approach, Louie Lopinsky ran down the hill to the safety of ‘The Tank’, which is what he called the gas-guzzling four-wheel drive he’d rented in Ely. It stretched his budget, he later told me, but he was sure his publisher wouldn’t mind, even though he hadn’t been offered a signed contract—yet.
In the process of stumbling through the weeds, he’d gathered many little prickles in his socks, stinging him around the ankle like a colony of fire ants. He was trying to remove them when he heard sputtering overhead. A small plane in trouble. He waited several minutes expecting to hear an explosion but there was none. Curious, he thought, were they able to land? The terrain for as far as he could see was hilly and rock-strewn. Except for the long flat plateau. Perhaps the pilot had been able to restart his engine and avert the necessity to put down, but a little voice whispered, no. The plane had gone down. Then the downpour hit.
“You’re the man who came to see me in the hospital,” was my first comment upon seeing Louie Lopinsky again. The captain had broken his collar bone following our landing. Any movement jiggled bone shards, causing them to dig into his flesh, but the fact that he’d been injured not during the landing but after, leaping from the cabin in the windstorm to secure the plane, was a hard pill to swallow. Not nearly as hard to swallow, however, as the necessity to ditch in the first place. Apparently, it isn’t that easy to cut the engine of a plane and then restart it after coasting several hundred yards, even if you used that technique dozens of times against the Germans with stunning success. Still, despite his agony, I was sure that the resulting tales from this adventure would more than compensate.
“I sure am surprised to see you again so soon,” Lopinsky said as he helped me immobilize the captain’s shoulder. “I thought you’d still be in the hospital or at least recuperating. I didn’t expect you to plop out of the sky in front of me!”
“I certainly didn’t either.” Now that I knew he was an FBI agent I was dying to ask Lopinsky who he was investigating, but, not knowing the captain’s medical history, the priority was to get him taken care of first. Questions later.
“The plateau is pretty steep,” Lopinsky said, “I can leave you two here and go get help…”
“No,” the captain and I both said in unison.
“We’ll just take it slowly,” I promised. Luckily Captain Wug was in reasonable shape, and, save an occasional twinge of pain, managed to stay upright until we got him down the slippery hill to Lopinsky’s car.
“What’s your name, Captain?” Lopinsky asked as we drove down the creek bed. “As soon as I get a signal on my ham radio here, I’ll tell whomever I reach to contact your family. Mighty useful things, these radios. You wouldn’t catch me out in the desert without one.”
“Wilson Umberto Grayson,” the captain admitted, slowly. “Young man, you’re indeed a scholar . . . and a gentleman. Do assure my blushing bride that Natasha has only a few bumps and bruises. I fully intend to . . . um, fly her off the plateau as soon as I’ve been diapered and patched.” Each word required breath and came with pain.
“I’m sure she’ll be comforted by that thought!” I chuckled.
Once we got radio contact, we were directed to a clinic on the outskirts of town where the enchanting Mrs. Grayson awaited our arrival, a smile on her face but worry in her eyes. She looked about twenty years younger than the old goat she was married to. Upon seeing her, he put on a brave face, greeting her thusly, “Alas, my ravishing temptress . . . my nubile bride . . . never fear. I’ll not let my bumps and bruises interrupt our . . um, nightly celebrations of your delicious nether regions!” And then, thankfully, the nursing crew wheeled him away.