Kenosha suppresses a smile and seems to weigh the question judiciously. Then he goes into his routine. “Red hair will bring plenty wampum. And I need ornament for rear-view mirror of pickup. Maybe his balls would do.”
“No. Too small.”
Reynolds turns to Sayers. Disgusted. “I told you Jericho had flipped out. What do we do now?”
“We wait,” Sayers tells him.
Jericho puts the knife away and follows Kenosha several yards along a path of fine, reddish-brown soil. Again, they squat on their haunches, and Kenosha points to footprints in the dirt. “Combat boots.”
Jericho nods and picks up several spent cartridges. “Five-point-five-six millimeter. Military issue.”
“I know. That is why I want you to see this.”
They walk up a rocky slope. Neither man speaks for several minutes as Kenosha leads them higher up the incline, the rocks yielding to a grassy ridge. Below them in the hollow is a dry coulee and on the far ridge is a sandbagged bunker and an old cabin of blackened logs. They work their way down the ridge, walking through waist-high, pungent sagebrush. A rustling in the bushes, and a jackrabbit bounds away. As they slow on the flat ground of the hollow, Kenosha gestures toward the underbrush. Jericho pushes his way through tumbleweed and grama grass, and half-a-dozen vultures beat their wings and take off, cawing out angry cries. Deep in the brush is the carcass of a moose, its hide peppered with bullet holes.
“Who would do this?” Kenosha asks.
Jericho shakes his head. “I know how you must feel. Just as your ancestors did when white men slaughtered the buffalo.”
“What are you talking about, Jack?”
“When the white man shoots animals for sport, he kills your brother.”
“My brother went to Utah State and sells tax-free bonds in Salt Lake City.”
Undeterred, Jericho goes on, “I understand your oneness with nature. The sap that flows through the trees is the blood of your veins. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth.”
“Jack, my friend, are you drunk?”
“Hell, no. I’m in touch with your spirituality.”
“You sound like some bullshit special on PBS”
“But I’ve read all about the Indian tribes of the West,” Jericho says, “your identification with nature, your pantheism.”
“Sorry, Jack, but I’m a Lutheran.”
“Oh.”
Kenosha motions him to follow, and they begin walking up the slope of the ridge beyond the old cabin, bracing themselves on rocks for the steep climb. With a wry smile, Kenosha says, “In case you’re suffering from any illusions, Jack, I’ve also got a satellite dish on the double wide, and I order imitation pearls from the Home Shopping Network. Every morning, I get the Chicago Tribune on the Internet, and I got a little money put away in an Individual Retirement Account, too.”
“I see.”
“None of us talk about that river and sky shit anymore Jack, except when someone sticks a microphone in our face. Maybe Tatanka Yotanka, who you would call Sitting Bull, talked that way. Maybe Chief Seattle really wrote that letter to the Great White Father in Washington, and maybe he didn’t. ‘What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires?’ If you ask me, Jack, a Hollywood screenwriter had a hand in that.”
“You’re a cynic, Kenosha. You’re not one with the land.”
At the top of the ridge, they pause. Kenosha turns to face Jericho. “Don’t get me wrong. I love nature. I get a calendar every year from the Sierra Club. Fine pictures of eagles and pumas.” He gestures down the slope toward the carcass of the elk. “I hate this as much as any decent man — red, white, brown or black — because I can’t stand to see needless death or needless waste. Animals are creatures of beauty, and I treasure them. But no more than you do, my friend.”
“I’ll write a report and try to find out who did this,” Jericho says, “but I can’t believe that anyone in the 318th would have—”
Kenosha silences him with a wave of an arm. He points into the next valley, a lush, irrigated landscape. Strands of trees, rocky cliffs, a tumbling stream, then open fields with grazing cattle… and finally, incongruously, a semi-circle of ten ugly concrete silo caps, blemishing the land like poisonous mushrooms. “The 318th did this, did they not?”
No use denying the obvious. “Guilty as charged. What do you suppose the old chief’s screenwriter would have said about our so-called Peacekeepers?”
“He would have said they rape our mother, the Earth.”
“We’re taking them out, filling in the holes.”
“I knew it would happen. Sooner or later, either you would do it, or the earth would do it for you. In the end, my friend, the earth will prevail.”
“You didn’t learn that on the Home Shopping Network,” Jericho says.
Kenosha locks Jericho with a level gaze. “No. Maybe a little of that tree sap still flows through my veins.”
-8-
The Brass Are Coming
A battered VW Beetle with a roof placard, “Old Wrangler Tavern,” grinds its gears and chugs up the incline of a road made of crushed rock. Inside, Jimmy Westoff, a pimply seventeen-year old in jeans, denim vest and cowboy boots, stomps the accelerator to the floor and talks to himself. “Fuck me, this thing’s gonna die. Next time, I’ll take a mule.”
The car travels along a perimeter fence topped with razor wire. Jimmy laughs as he passes a rusted sign — “Rattlesnake Hills Sewage Plant — No Trespassing” — and drives through an open gate.
“Sewage plant,” he says, and spits out the open window. “Air Force is full of shit, that’s no lie.”
Another half mile up an incline, he pulls to a stop in front of a Quonset hut with a metal roof and no markings. At the sound of his squealing brakes, two Air Security policemen wearing berets and sidearms emerge from the hut.
The first one out, an E-3 with the name tag, “Dempsey, R.” slips a flask of bourbon into his back pocket. “Jeez, Jimmy, what took you so long? Those burgers are gonna be colder than Captain Puke’s heart.”
“Ain’t my fault Uncle Sam dropped you in West Jesus,” Jimmy says.
“Duty, honor, country,” the second airman, Carson, says without conviction.
“Yeah, well next time, you oughta ask for duty at a so-called sewage plant closer to town.”
Dempsey counts out some bills and gives Jimmy the money. “Ain’t no more next times. When they close this baby down, we got nowhere to go but back to the world.”
Jimmy hands Dempsey several bags of burgers and fries and starts to make change. “Keep it,” Dempsey says.
“Wow. Thanks, general. Two bucks. I’m gonna head to Las Vegas for the weekend.” Jimmy gets back in the VW and coasts back down the hill before popping the clutch to fire up the puny engine.
Carrying the burgers and fries, Dempsey hops into a Jeep just inside the perimeter fence. “Man the fort,” he tells Carson.
“Hey, you forgetting something?” Carson asks, tipping an imaginary bottle to his lips.
Dempsey shrugs, pulls out the flask and tosses it to his buddy. He hits the Jeep’s ignition and kicks up gravel pulling away. It’s less than a mile up the road to a windowless Security Building on the lower slopes of the mountain. A steel bridge with a barred door runs like an above-ground tunnel through the building and beyond it to a cone-shaped steel elevator housing cut into a rocky cliff. Several hundred feet beyond the Security Building is the silo cap, a circular pad of concrete six-feet thick and fifty feet in diameter.
The Jeep passes a small wooden barracks and a mess hall built in the shade of a strand of pine trees. A dam and a lake stocked with trout sit at the top of the mountain, and an aqueduct winds down the slope from the dam.