The groggy desk clerk seemed unsurprised that, no, I did not want a room change but, yes, I wanted to pay cash for a second room. He was a plump young man with a brown face round as a moon. “Whatever you say, ma’am.” He tried to summon a smile as he gave me a small white envelope embossed with the El Rancho logo. “This message came for you tonight.”
I turned away from him to read the note that Santane had written in a calm, lucid hand. She asked me to take charge of Lucia’s body. She had intended to discuss this request with me after our meal, and she hoped I was feeling better now.
I simply cannot bring myself to bury this child, Ellen. I hope you will understand. I only ask that you not cremate her. The paperwork has been prepared and is waiting at the coroner’s office. Thank you for coming, and for trying to help Ruby.
Blake’s advice about rooms turned out to be good, because I fell onto the bedspread in the Humphrey Bogart room and slept soundly. When I awoke just before dawn, I returned to the Ida Lupino to shower but kept flashing onto the slasher scene in Psycho, so I sang Elvis Presley’s “Blue Moon” very loud.
It was barely light out when I walked down the large, curved staircase. Ed Blake sat in the lobby with his back to me. He wore civilian clothes, no gun or badge in sight. He was lost in thought and hadn’t heard me approach, so I hit the starter button on the old player piano behind him, which began to belt out “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain.” He stood up, visibly annoyed. “Turn that damn thing off.”
I turned it off, and he breathed deep, shrugged his apology, and said he knew a kitchen on the road to El Morro National Monument where locals drifted in during the early morning for take-out egg-and-bacon sandwiches. We could get good coffee there. El Morro was where he wanted to take me. “Have you been out to the big mesa?”
I tried to cheer him up. “Well, sightseeing hasn’t been on my priority list.”
“It’s an important place to me.”
We took my rental car, and, surprising myself, I even let him drive. Except for stopping for carryout coffee and sandwiches, we stayed quiet and passed the entrance to the Catacombs without comment. I was too drained to think about anything other than the fact that New Mexico was not where I belonged. Once we got to El Morro National Monument, he unlocked the big metal gate with his own key, drove us through, and relocked it. “A friend loaned it to me. Not legally, of course.”
We needed almost an hour to climb the steep, rocky path. Blake volunteered that most tourists didn’t make it past the watering hole at the base of the mesa, a dark blue spring edged thickly with green reeds. The spring had been key to the survival of both the Natives and their invaders, so the trail was lined with Spanish inscriptions carved into the sandstone as well as Native pictographs.
There isn’t much to say about the view from the top of El Morro in the early morning except that it’s beautiful. Not South Carolina, but beautiful. On the high mesa lay a partially excavated settlement where, Blake said, some fifteen hundred Natives had lived between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The exposed honeycomb of rooms unsettled me. “These people must have been really short.”
“I never know whether you’re joking or not, Ellen. Of course these people were smaller than we are. This was seven hundred years ago. Do you realize they had to carry all of their water and food up here? Depressions in the rocks served as cisterns, and on the plains down there they grew corn. Archaeologists think maybe a big drought caused them to abandon this place.”
We sat down on a large flat rock where we could see, in the rising light, extinct volcanoes and smaller mesas lining the horizon above the rapidly heating desert. The sandwiches were cold, but we ate them anyway, nursing our lukewarm coffee. Blake had brought along a small pack, and he stuffed our food wrappers into an outside pocket.
When I still didn’t speak, he said, “Some anthropologists think these people were an anomaly. Their pictographs aren’t like the other Pueblo tribes. It’s possible they were forebears of the Zunis, because the Zuni language is different from the other Pueblo tongues, and the Zuni physiognomy is unusual.”
I said as gently as I could, “Are you going to keep playing tour guide, or are you going to tell me what it is you’re trying to say?”
“We’re never going to know what these people were like.” His face was so sad and suddenly much older. “What I wanted to tell you, Ellen, is the real reason that I’m not a federal agent anymore. You remember I already knew about your brother?”
“Yes, and your friend at the FBI office in Gallup gave you a copy of Royce’s file. Mine too, unfortunately.”
“That’s right, but I haven’t told you that I was in BATF before I was in the FBI, and how it might relate to your brother and Joe Magnus.”
I stood up, spilling my coffee. “Jesus Christ, Blake, you were involved with Royce’s case before this thing with Ruby happened?”
“No, of course not.” He stood up too, but he had the presence of mind to put his coffee cup down first. “I wasn’t involved at all. But all of the federal agents, even rookies like me, were aware of the Silent Brotherhood and the other white terrorist organizations. What I wanted to tell you is that I got fired from BATF because I found out there was a right-wing element operating within it. A rogue element. Maybe something like that is still happening. My friend in the FBI wasn’t certain why BATF bugged us, but it was you they were following, not me.”
“You know all this for certain? In the sixties we were right about the feds?” I began to walk away from him, skirting the edges of the excavated ruins. The inhabitants couldn’t have been more than five feet tall.
Blake moved behind me, carrying his daypack. “Listen, there really was a lot to fear about the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement. Even from women like you. That’s why there was a file.”
“Lesbian nation, right? Sex without men, so fucking threatening. Why don’t I climb down into one of these rooms so you can see what a larger-than-life woman really looks like?”
“Please stop walking away from me, Ellen.”
I liked him so much and wished I did not.
“In the government,” he said when I turned to him, “there was genuine fear that a revolution could get triggered in this country.”
I looked up into his face. This man was making me cry and Ruby had not. “They thought white boys with college degrees and megaphones could start a revolution?”
“The white students weren’t the problem. It was CORE and the Black Panthers that put all that paranoia on the government’s radar.”
“Those uppity folks might rise up?”
“It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Okay, maybe it is. I love your fury about stupidity. It’s such a relief talking to you. More than a relief.”
He had begun to shiver, and I was shivering too, although we weren’t cold. “Listen,” he said, “I was a young, patriotic man, and in Vietnam I thought we were trying to save the world for democracy. But when the FBI burst into Fred Hampton’s house in Chicago and killed him in his bed, I had my first doubts.”
“You were in the Vietnam War? Is that something else you’ve left out?”
“Yes, but I was in navy intelligence, and I didn’t get any closer to Vietnam than California. That was when BATF recruited me. Among the younger agents there was a lot of discussion about Hampton’s death. Most of us approved of the decision to take him out, but we had serious disagreements about how it was done. He was asleep in bed, and they shot his pregnant wife beside him.”
“I can’t believe I’m even talking to you. You thought it was all right to ‘take out’ a Black Panther leader? It’s bad enough that I have to deal with Royce Burns as my brother.”
“This all happened a long time ago, Ellen, and we’re both different now. I’m just trying to tell you the truth. I was a rookie BATF agent in North Carolina when there was a shoot-out between an organization called the Communist Workers’ Party and the Ku Klux Klan. My job was to assist the local police behind the scenes. You don’t remember any of this? It was all over the news. Anyway, a bunch of cars pulled up in front of the place where the commies were gathering, and the Klan guys got out of their cars and shot right into the crowd. One guy stood there firing with a cigarette hanging from his lip. Five of the six CWP leaders were shot in the head or heart. The only black male wasn’t hit, and he was arrested for inciting to riot. Then the Klansmen drove away.”
“That’s a tidy scenario.”
“Yes, but two video cameras were still running, which turned it into a public fiasco.”
“Okay, I remember now.”
“Here was my problem. I recognized the sharpshooter. He had been my informant on a previous case. His red beard was new, but I knew who he was. So I realized that someone must have sent him into this situation to assassinate the CWP leadership. I couldn’t have been the only field agent who figured this out, but I was the only one naive enough to write a report. I was twenty-seven years old, and I thought we were the good guys. The CWP were just a bunch of loony intellectuals working in factories, trying to organize the workers. But because of my letter a big stink developed in BATF. The Klansmen got caught and were acquitted, except for the man with the red beard. Him they didn’t find, of course. Then I got my first bad job review and was informed I was being transferred to Quantico because the FBI would be a better fit for me. In other words, I was forced to make a lateral move or I was done as a federal agent. But about your brother or you, no, I knew nothing at all. Not until Ruby’s children went missing.”
“I’m still so rattled about that file on me.”
“Ellen, you went into hiding with a bombing fugitive.”
“Her boyfriend was the bomber. She was never dangerous. We were just white girls who thought we were revolutionaries because we stole food from grocery stores and spray-painted buses with feminist slogans.”
“Don’t sell yourselves short. It wasn’t the women’s movement that was threatening, it was the overall picture. If the FBI leaders thought Martin Luther King was dangerous, can’t you imagine what they thought about radical lesbians?”
“You’re saying ‘they’ now?”
“I’ve always been saying ‘they,’ damn it, and now I’m probably going to lose my job again.”
We stumbled along the mesa, past the excavation, into the untouched parts of the ruins. He pulled a packet smaller than a book out of his bag. “You ever see one of these?” He began to unfold a large silver square that looked like a piece of tin foil. It crinkled and flashed.
“A giant condom?”
He laughed. “No, it’s a space blanket. Developed for astronauts and now used by backpackers and emergency rescue crews.”
“I’ve seen them, but I doubt they keep anyone warm.”
He wrapped it around us like a silver cocoon. “It wasn’t only BATF I quit, Ellen. After a while I resigned from the FBI too. Then I joined the police force in Bowling Green, Ohio, where I had been based. As you might imagine, I went up their ranks fast. Within that world, I was a big deal. But I lost my heart for it when my marriage fell apart. So I came out here to rebuild myself.”
He unwrapped us, spread the space blanket on the ground in a sandy place sheltered by a ledge of sandstone, and sat down.
“It’s not that cold up here,” I said as I sat down beside him. He arranged his daypack like a pillow and wrapped us both in the silver blanket. We lay on our sides, faces close together, as if this had been our intention all along.
I put my hand on his penis, half-erect inside his pants, and he began to stroke my breast. “A revolution is a woman who doesn’t wear a bra.”
I pulled my shirt up but didn’t take it off, and he touched the mild scars under my breasts. “Had them lifted. Face too. Just because I don’t wear makeup doesn’t mean I’m not vain.” I pulled his head up and kissed him on the mouth. “You taste like bacon.”
He unzipped his pants and pulled them partway down.
I began unbuttoning his shirt. “Why do you always smell like Old Spice?” I held his unshaven face. “Listen, if Royce Burns is my brother, what am I supposed to do about it?”
We sat up to unlace and remove our boots, and soon all of our clothes were off. “I like being naked outdoors,” he said.
I lay back, and he slid one finger inside me, then two. I groaned against my will but still managed to say, “No microphones up here?” The ground hurt my back, but I wasn’t cold because of the space blanket. “Aren’t we going to get sunburned?”
“Are you really a lesbian? I just don’t understand what that means.”
“Thank God for astronauts.”
I tried to turn him over without uncovering us from our silver cocoon. “Isn’t it time your back hurt a little?”
“Nope.”
He kept me pinned beneath him while I half struggled against him, and he began to thrust with a steadiness, an intentness, looking down at me. I had to turn my face away. “If somebody interrupts us, I’ll have to kill them.”
“There’s nobody else up here. Nobody alive.”
We fucked for what seemed like a long time. I wrapped my legs around him and held on to his back so tight my arms began to go numb. I didn’t want to come this way, helpless and pinned and aching in a way I couldn’t remember. Then it was long and slow and spinning, and when I felt him come inside me, I came too.
Afterward we were silent, breathing, on our backs together and looking up at the clean blue sky. I turned on my side and studied his tough, salt-streaked face. Blackheads on his temples, nose hairs not plucked. Probably never had been plucked. He hadn’t shaved, so my cheeks were chafed and burning. “Listen, Blake, sex can bond inappropriate people.”
He sat up and stared toward the extinct volcanoes lining the horizon. “It’s not the sex that’s bonding us, Ellen.”
I sat up too, touching the white rim of skin at his hairline. “What’s your theory?”
“It’s because I see who you are,” he said, still looking at the horizon. “And you see me. So I think it’s the usual stuff.”
“I can’t handle a connection like this, Blake. Too many trips around the block.” I stood up and began to sort out my clothes. His semen ran down my leg, and I wiped it off with my underwear. “Maybe we should bury these up here,” I said. “Leave another ghost behind.”
He was sitting, naked, hairy, vulnerable. “I know how strong you are,” he said, squinting because the sun was behind me. “It’s part of what I like.”
I handed him his white briefs. Fruit of the Loom. “I don’t think our emotions are reliable right now.”
He stood and balanced on one foot to step into his shorts. “Good luck with getting past this,” he said.