Nora only glared. Unreachable, just like her mother.
“Can’t say I didn’t try,” Rosa added with a shrug before walking away.
Nora rode Frank’s lunch over every day, knobby knees bumping the handlebars of her outgrown bike. After work, he’d shower, back his pink-and-gold 1952 Dodge convertible out of the driveway, and she’d leap in. Pink tutu. Bare feet. Up the pin-straight highway, ripping past wheat fields, burning up the road to the Canadian border. He sweated out his anger while she swallowed her scream as they hit a bump in the road and went airborne, bending into the curve around a silo town. She soaked up Frank’s approvaclass="underline" “Good girl, never show your fear.”
“Hey, pipsqueak,” he’d say as they approached the border roundabout, a casual thumbtack on the map before the world went crazy. “Ready?”
“Do it slow, Frank,” she’d reply, cool as an Arctic breeze, lips pursed like she’d seen in the movies.
While he slowed the car to a crawl, she would stand in her seat, stepping over the windshield onto the hood, unfolding herself into a handstand. Spider legs in the air. Toes caressing the endless sky. Pink tutu fluttering like a spring blossom. They would slowly circle the border roundabout, past the cheering, dark-blue guards. An eight-year-old girl, hood ornament on a pink-and-gold convertible. Behind the wheel, a teenage boy in a checkered cowboy shirt, counting the hours to freedom.
On the road back, they’d give one final roaring yell before reaching the turnoff to the base. Slowing down, they’d salute the billboard that proclaimed: This Is the Future.
Proud days those had been for the residents of the base, who went to bed in their idyllic tract houses dreaming of that future. More than seven thousand brave souls, flyboys and their families, up there at the stark edge of the earth, beautiful except for the six months of winter, three months of mosquitoes, and the month of mud in between. Fewer than two hundred fools now slept in their abandoned beds.
Nora ran past the fenced-off runway and airfield. The Multinational Aerospace Corporation — MAC, Inc. — the world’s second-largest aerospace empire, was using the airfield to test its latest technology up here in the cold, secret silence. Shiny new high-tech warehouses gleamed amidst the decay. Area Fifty-One-and-a-Half, the locals called it. Imaginations ran wild: UFOs, black ops, the Illuminati. Every few months, MAC, Inc. brought in a planeload of Germans or Japanese to check out the secret projects. A hundred of them at a time, the locals claimed, stayed a month in a nearby town, eating fat steaks and looking for cowgirls. Last week Nora had seen a convoy of rented cars with bewildered Asian faces behind tinted glass. Maybe they’d survive the month, but she doubted it. They’d die of boredom first.
Nora continued on through the fog that rose from the overgrown playing fields and headed back toward home. Night ghosts hissed at her. She couldn’t begrudge their anger. She was alive. They were long gone but restless, their lives cut short by pink slips after the Cold War was forgotten. Most families had packed up their houses and transferred their dreams to warmer places. Some left their silverware in the sink as a gift to scavengers.
Except Aunt Rosa. Aunt Rosa would never have left her forks and furniture to be picked over, Nora mused as she cleared a rotted pole fence. Aunt Rosa had stayed put. Deciding not to go south with her flyboy husband, she got herself a county contract dismantling the commissary where she had once worked. She found a new boyfriend, then another one. And then Phil came along with his big dream.
Phil’s dream wasn’t even original. It was a hand-me-down from an old pal, a retired pilot who, thirty years ago, bought up the deserted houses, rechristened the base town St. Marie, and tried to build a refuge for right-living military retirees who wanted to hit golf balls over the horizon in peace and quiet. But the county raised the property taxes sky high. Bankruptcies, lawsuits, and liens followed. A luckless whore, St. Marie was once again abandoned. A few retirees hung on and Phil had seen opportunity in the isolation.
Phil’s idea was short of work. He’d read a few business books on job retraining after the paper mill shut down and had a five-step plan. One: buy up the liens. Two: rebrand. Forget the golf course, build a shooting range to attract bird hunters. Three: horizontal expansion. Hunters need bullets. Maybe the government too, with all the wars it was getting itself into. He’d open a little manufactory in the empty commissary. Bring in some illegals, bunk ’em in the back, set ’em to work. Cartridges, casings, and slugs, all nice and quiet, off the map. Money from the cartridges would buy back the liens. Four: rename. No more St. Marie. Philson, Montana. He liked the sound of it. Five: he always forgot the fifth but loved the sight of his open hand.
“You’re outta your mind,” Nora had replied to her aunt’s call to come home.
“You speak Mexican, doncha? We need you to handle the Mexicans.”
“Salvadoran, Rosa, you said they’re Salvadorans.”
“Well, you speak Illegal, and that’s good enough for me.”
Shit, Nora thought as she replayed their conversation. Now here she was, up to her tits. Phil scouring the back road junkyards for brass and lead. Aunt Rosa handling the business end, Nora using her service-worker Spanish to oversee the men who poured the casings and the women who packed the cartons.
Phil wasn’t the only one with a scheme. A couple years back, out-of-town suits arrived, bought back some houses from Jenkins at the bank, and moved motel furniture in. Shiny vans arrived in the middle of the night — dark glass, no number plates — to drop off passengers and suitcases. The next morning the town awoke to new residents. Sometimes it took a week for the new arrivals to come out into the sunlight, blinking at the endless horizon, the wheat-field ghost town with tumbleweeds whipping across the airfield.
For the most part, they kept to themselves. Always tetchy, always looking over their shoulders. Witness protection, the locals assumed, thereafter referring to them as the Witnesses.
Nora smiled to herself. What bright light in the feds had decided to dump a load of Witnesses on an abandoned air base in Montana? It was like some twisted, cosmic joke. Hiding in the wide open, spooked by the emptiness, afraid to leave. The Witnesses had bartered their lives for a death sentence in nowhere.
In the predawn, Nora and Stasi had the town to themselves. Lights flickered from a few scattered buildings as insomniacs twitched the curtains. Every seventh house or so was occupied. Early spring weeds poked through cracked roads. Some houses were immaculate, painted and polished. Others were lopsided, water stained, peeling.
The security light tripped on at Witness Mike Smith’s small house and Nora caught the glint of his binoculars through the upstairs window. Always ready. An arsenal of guns in his garage. Late fall, Stasi had nicked a steak waiting by Mike’s grill and the jerk had sworn he’d shoot the dog if she came in sight of his place again.
Winded, Nora slowed her pace on the edge of town. The burned-out shell of the bachelors’ quarters always spooked her, its jagged edges cutting the horizon.
Stasi sensed the presence before Nora. Ears back, her body a sleek arrow, she pointed movement at the corner of the carbonized building.
Nora narrowed her eyes, stopped in Stasi’s frozen shadow.Smelled a whiff of cigarette smoke. Saw the red light of a draw.
High schoolers sometimes roared the twenty miles from Glasgow, up Zombie Road, they called it. They held all-night keggers in abandoned houses, had sex among the near-dead, and then torched the houses. Some tweakers had tried to move in and cook meth for the workers in the Bakken oil fields but blew themselves up. Now Philson had itself a repurposed fire truck, compliments of MAC, Inc., and a volunteer fire department, compliments of themselves.