“Yes, please. It’s a family emergency.”
“Please hold while I connect you—”
Are you kidding me? Is this a trick—?
“Colonel Curtis’s office.”
Um…
“—hello?”
Sounding like a prattling fool, even to myself, I give my name, my occupation, my nine-digit Social (am I paranoid?), my cell phone number and a brief description of the reason for my call (“I have information pertaining to the current whereabouts of his father”) and am told with icy dispatch that my message will be passed on to the Colonel.
I put my cell phone down and stare at it because as everybody knows, that will make it ring.
Ten minutes go by, while I eat my salad. Fifteen.
Guy probably has a busy schedule.
Flying planes around.
Maybe, god forbid, he’s in Iraq.
I pace, and think of other things I could be doing. I didn’t handle this well. I should have left the number of the hospital. The important thing is not for me to talk to the Colonel but for the Colonel to talk to his father. But what if he doesn’t want to? What if, after thirty years, he’s made up a story in his mind about why his father disappeared, a tale that permits him to forgive or to accept the fact? Why would he want to hear a different tale — a counter-story — at this point in his life? We tell ourselves the things we want to hear, not necessarily the things that are the truth, and it’s selfish of me to want to know what story the Colonel has manufactured for himself in the name of mental health.
Or what story Clara Curtis or any woman, for that matter, married to a man with more than one sexual identity manages to tell herself on those dark nights when the unspoken truth must be too obvious.
I don’t love you.
Or perhaps I love you but I love someone else as well.
I love another way of being and this life is killing me by inches and I need to get away from here or die.
What did the Curtis children — Harold, Florence, Beth and Katherine — think about their father’s disappearances? I know the stories that they told themselves had at their core a classic mythic entity — a larger-than-life Father, the Father as a Hero. I know they created for themselves the story of a spiritual antithesis, even if it wasn’t true, of what a modern kid might do, of a false deity, a modern day Flat Daddy. For the Curtis children el jefe, the Chief, could do no wrong, even when wrong was all that he was doing. So I wonder how it was for this Air Force Colonel, and yes my self-investment drives my curiosity because I had to do a lot of magical explaining to myself in the years after my father’s suicide and I’m frankly curious about how others — we, generic humans, as a tribe—create whatever stories that we need to just so we can cope.
At four o’clock my cell phone finally rings and it’s Lester calling from the pay phone by the nurse’s station to say that things aren’t looking good.
“Heart function,” he attempts to fathom as he speaks: “They’re saying that he doesn’t have enough.”
“Where’s Clarita?”
“She’s here. I’m going to take her home. Then I’ll come back and stay with him again tonight.”
I tell him that I think I’ve found the son.
“That would be the miracle. To see the two united. I’ll go tell the old one not to die just yet.”
I call the general number for Nellis Air Force Base again and ask for Colonel Curtis Edwards. I get an answering machine with a female secretary’s voice and this time the message I leave is a winner for its clarity and precision — I identify myself and say the Colonel’s father is dying in cardiac intensive care at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas and leave that number.
Done.
Tomorrow I’ll go home.
I walk up to the Strip and lose myself in the crowd, trek all the way to the Venetian for the kitsch pleasure of prosecco by the fake canal, then wander back down to the not-so-hip Mon Ami Gabi at the Paris for an early dinner of moules frites where I can sit street-side on the Strip and watch the crowd and catch the water show at the Bellagio across the street.
By ten o’clock I’m back in bed at the Alexis, sound asleep, too exhausted to even dream, because that’s just the kind of Vegas party animal I am.
At six forty-five a.m. my cell phone rings. CALLER I.D. BLOCKED. A resonant male voice. Am I speaking to Miss Wiggins?
“You are.”
“This is Colonel Edwards of the United States Air Force.”
And I guess I did dream, I dreamed the speech that I would make to him if he called back because I find myself sitting up in bed and reciting a coherent argument for him to meet with me.
I tell him that two days ago I had received an unexpected call, myself, from Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas claiming that my father had suffered a possibly fatal heart attack.
“My father died on April 28, 1970, in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. A date and place you might remember,” I say.
In the absence of a response I tell him the hospital representative had told me that the man in Sunrise Hospital had convincing documents to identify him as my father so I had driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to see him for myself.
“Events have proven that the man is, in fact, your father and that he adopted my father’s name after finding his body in the Park that April morning.” On his continued silence I ask, “Have you called the hospital yet, sir, as I previously suggested?”
I wait through another silence and then say, “I found your father’s Bible at his residence, sir, with your boyhood picture and I’d like to hand these over to you if you—”
“Am I to understand from this that you’re still in Las Vegas?”
“Yes, sir. If you’d like to meet I—”
“—in my office.”
“I could be there in an hour.”
“I’ll instruct the Gate.”
For a civilian, the combined terrain of Nellis Air Force Base and Range is as frightening a place as an orphaned foreign country under military occupation, or as segregated from the mainstream nation as the Sioux, Arapahoe or Apache were meant to be, on reservations. Maybe all our military bases are as tightly sealed as this one, but I doubt it, because with her multiple locations around Vegas, Nellie holds a record in land size as well as the questionable honor of having surrounded the nation’s official Atomic Testing Site throughout the 50s and into the next decade, and if you approach the Bombing and Gunnery Range from Tonopah, from the north, on Nevada Route 95, you begin to see the twisted logic of our government’s program of enlightened land use: there is just plain nothing else that could have been done with this godawful land so why not bomb the hell out of it and strafe it all to kingdom come.
When we were still marketing aboveground nuclear testing as NOT DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH and a dandy source of pyrotechnic entertainment for your neighborhood, the flyboys out at Nellis used to post the bombing schedule in the local papers so Vegas denizens could power up the briquettes in their backyard barbecues and get out the lawn chairs for a little bit of awesome fireworks courtesy of uncle sam. The last time we blew something up at Nellie, albeit underground, was 1991 and I suppose there may be some conspiracy theorists out here who might notice that that was around the time the Vegas Strip started going pyro-and hydrotechnic in its own way with crowd-pleasing sidewalk shows.
The Gunnery Range is still a hotbed of half-life particles and conspiracy speculation but the Base, where Nellie’s personnel are quartered, is tucked behind Sunrise Mountain, a twenty minute drive from the Strip, straight up Las Vegas Boulevard — and its entry regimen in these days of heightened Homeland Security is no laughing matter.