by Jim Dodge
When they woke the next morning, José was there with a suitcase full of clothes for each of them. When they had dressed, he drove them to an airstrip near Sacramento and turned them over to a pilot who flew them to Salt Lake City in his battered old Beechcraft while regaling Daniel with tales of World War II dogfights in the clouds over France.
A thin, hawk-faced man was waiting for them at the landing strip near the Great Salt Lake with new driver’s licenses for Shamus and Annalee (now James and Maybelline Wyatt), credit cards in the same name, four thousand dollars in cash, and a ’71 Buick registered to Mrs Wyatt. He told them to drive to Dubuque, Iowa, and make a phone call to the number he provided. It wasn’t until the three of them were alone in the Buick and moving east that they finally caught up with themselves. Shamus tried to explain what he thought was going on.
Three weeks earlier, after eighteen months of meticulous planning, Shamus had attempted to steal some uranium-235 from a Tennessee refinery. When Shamus slithered through the hole he’d cut in the cyclone fence, a guard who wasn’t supposed to be there called halt, but Shamus clubbed him with his flashlight just as the guard pulled his gun. It went off harmlessly, but the shot brought security at full alarm. A searchlight pinned him to the ground. He kicked the guard’s gun away, pulling his own when they started shooting. He took a wild shot at the searchlight, missed, instantly understood he didn’t have a chance in a gunfight, rolled to his left as a burst of automatic rifle fire geysered dust behind him, rolled again, and came up running. Using the dust cloud for cover, he sprinted for the nearest building.
He got lucky twice in a row. The first piece of good fortune was a bullet that grazed his lower lip, so close it raised a blister but didn’t break the skin. The second break was a rumpled old man walking toward the parking lot, oblivious to the probing searchlight and bursts of gunfire, so lost to the moment that when Shamus pressed the gun barrel to the back of the old man’s head and told him, ‘Get in the car and go,’ he’d turned around and said, puzzled, ‘Escargot?’
Finding a hostage, however obtuse, wasn’t the end of Shamus’s luck, for the old man who drove him through the front gate with a gun at his head was Gerhard von Trakl, Father of Fission and the ranking nuclear scientist in America. Shamus intended to keep von Trakl only until they reached the getaway car, the first of three switches he’d already set up.
But to Shamus’s wild surprise, von Trakl begged to go along. He told Shamus that he was a virtual prisoner of the U.S. government and was no longer interested in the work they wanted done. He wanted to explore the other side of the equation, the conversion of energy into mass, and ultimately, he supposed, the obliteration of the distinction. He confided to Shamus that he’d made a fundamental scientific error in his career – he’d viewed the universe as a machine instead of a thought.
While Shamus was delighted to discover that the most brilliant physicist in the country was a fellow alchemist at heart, he knew that von Trakl’s employers would never stop looking for him till the old man was returned. But von Trakl refused to be freed, and for reasons Shamus honored.
Shamus compromised. He kept von Trakl through the first car switch, but a mile from the second switch Shamus pulled over and forced von Trakl out on the empty country road. He promised von Trakl he’d leave the car a mile up the road, wished him luck with his new research, and thanked him for his company, then fried rubber as von Trakl started to reply.
A mile down the road he exchanged the car for the dirt bike he’d stashed the day before. He gunned the dirt bike up the hill. He cut the engine at the crest and coasted down the long, gradual slope into Coon Creek Valley. He abandoned the bike in a dense stand of hickory, covering it with the camo netting he’d pulled off the battered Gimmy pickup he’d hidden there earlier in the week. But when he reached to open the truck’s door, a laconic voice behind him said, ‘Ain’t none of my business, friend, but less’n my scanner done fucked all up, they’ll have a roadblock at the end of the valley ’fore you can fart the first bar o’ “Dixie.” Be my suggestion to ride with ol’ Silas Goldean here, seeing as how me and most of the local law grew up together and get on fine, and they know I got a fondness for going over to the res’vor this time of night and soaking a doughball for them catfish. Got a good place for ya to ride, too.’
And so Shamus went through the roadblock curled up in a cramped compartment under the backseat of Silas’s dusty Packard sedan while Silas jawed with a sheriff ’s deputy about a turkey shoot early next month to raise money for the local Grange. Silas’s second cousin was waiting at the reservoir in a funky johnboat to ferry him over to another cousin who locked him in a camper and drove all night to an airstrip south of Nashville. A cross-country flight punctuated with what seemed like twenty refueling stops eventually ended on Cummins Flat, two miles down the ridge from the Four Deuces, where Smiling Jack had picked him up.
Though Shamus found it difficult to believe, Gerhard von Trakl had evidently made his own escape, a fact that pleased Shamus immensely even though it meant personal grief. The Feds unfortunately assumed the daffy old bastard was still his captive and had poured on the heat – or as much as they could without causing undue media attention. They didn’t seem to want any, in fact, since there hadn’t been a hint in the press or on screen that the country’s foremost nuclear physicist had been kidnapped inside the nation’s largest facility for the production of fissionable materials – an understandable silence, as such information would not inspire the citizens’ confidence or advance any political careers.
‘But,’ Shamus said, bringing his story up to date, ‘somebody wasn’t silent. Somebody had to tell them where to find me, because they did. When they turn up the heat, somebody burns, and then it all starts burning, collapsing as it’s consumed. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your losses – your possessions, your home, the labor and heart you put into it.’
‘It’s not the first time,’ Annalee assured him. ‘That’s how we got to the Four Deuces, even though Daniel might not remember.’ She was driving, so had to prompt him with a quick glance over her shoulder, ‘Not that you should.’
But Daniel, who’d listened intently from the backseat, didn’t want to talk about what he didn’t remember. ‘How many people knew you were staying with us?’
Shamus responded without hesitation, obviously having given it some thought himself. ‘You, your mother, Smiling Jack, and the pilot, a young black guy named Everly Cleveland, Bro for short. Those are the ones I know for certain; there were probably others.’
‘The pilot betrayed you,’ Daniel said.
‘Said with great certainty,’ Shamus noted. ‘Your evidence?’
‘Mom and me wouldn’t do it and neither would Smiling Jack. And besides, the pilot flew over two thousand miles with a bunch of stops, so the plane almost had to be noticed. See, that would be smart – to check the little airstrips.’
‘Yeah,’ Shamus sighed, ‘that’s the most likely case, but who knows? If it was the pilot, though, I hope he turned me cold. Went straight to a pay phone and snitched me off.’
‘Why?’ Daniel said, puzzled.
Shamus, who had turned around to face Daniel, shifted his gaze past Daniel and out the rear window, following the white line back to the horizon. Daniel didn’t think Shamus was going to answer but Shamus suddenly snapped back to attention, his eyes boring into Daniel’s as he said, ‘Because if he didn’t turn me cold, they beat it out of him, and that puts his blood on my hands.’
On a hand and a glove, Daniel thought. He didn’t say it because something in Shamus’s voice and eyes frightened him, something feverish and weak, something that fed on its own corruption, drew nourishment from its self-loathing and suffering, and Daniel wanted to leap away from Shamus’s intimate guilt. He prefaced his question with a vague reassurance. ‘But you’ve got friends, too. Besides Mom and me, I mean. Somebody is helping you. Helping us, really. Who is it?’
Shamus glanced at Annalee, then back to Da
niel. ‘You’re sharp, Daniel. What one of my teachers called “a good sense of what’s going on inside what’s going on.”’
Daniel shrugged off the praise. ‘It’s pretty obvious that somebody is flying us around and giving us cars and money. And instructions.’
‘AMO,’ Shamus said.
Daniel didn’t understand. ‘You mean like ammo for guns? Ammunition?’
‘No, though the pun is suggestive. Amo as in the Latin I love.’ Shamus reached backhanded along the front seat and lightly touched Annalee’s neck with his right hand.
Annalee wanted to pull over and hold him in her arms and let him touch her just like that anywhere he wanted, the warmth of his bare fingertips at the base of her neck, the brush of soft leather on thigh, belly, nipples, throat.
She listened distractedly as he continued. ‘AMO is the acronym for Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws – or, as some members claim, Alchemists, Magicians, and Outlaws, which they contend was the original name. Another faction, small but vocal, insists AMO has always stood for Artists, Myth-singers, and Outriders. As you might sense, there is constant and long-standing contention about AMO’s origins and development, a situation encouraged by the fact that the Alliance does not keep a private account of itself – all records must be public. Since AMO forbids nearly all direct reference to its principles and practices, the public accounts – books and music being the most available – are extremely oblique, hidden in images and the arc of metaphor.
‘But whatever the true derivation of its name, AMO is a secret society – though more on the order of an open secret, in fact. Basically, AMO is a historical alliance of the mildly felonious, misfits, anarchists, shamans, earth mystics, gypsies, magicians, mad scientists, dreamers, and other socially marginal souls. I’m told it was originally organized to resist the pernicious influences of monotheism, especially Christianity, which attacked alchemy as pagan and drove it underground. From what I gather (I’m not a scholar on the subject), AMO has survived as an extremely loose international alliance of self-described moral outlaws and wild spirits. And though the alliance is so loose it’s nebulous, the center is tight.’
‘What do you mean?’ Daniel said.
‘In each country or region, there’s a seven-member council called the Star. Council members can serve up to forty years or resign at any point. Star members nominate potential successors, who must be approved by the other council members. I’ve never been sure exactly what the Star’s job is beyond administration and special projects. Each Star member has a small field staff to assist her – and I use her because four of the seven Star members, by tradition, must be women.’
‘That’s wise,’ Annalee nodded, glancing at Shamus long enough to flash a smile.
‘Can more than four be women?’ Daniel said.
‘Yes – but not any fewer. That make sense?’
‘I suppose,’ Daniel said, not so much lacking conviction as withholding judgment.
Without taking her eyes off the road, Annalee said, ‘I have a feeling that we were keeping house for AMO, right? That’s who we’ve been working for?’
‘Smiling Jack is a field assistant for Volta, one of the Star members, so I think that’s a safe assumption. But they dislike the phrase working for. They prefer thinking of it as a natural alignment of mutual interests, and therefore an extension of the alliance.’
‘Well shit,’ Annalee said, ‘why not tell us? Or ask us to join?’
Shamus raised his hands in mock defense. ‘Don’t ask me why they do what they do. The only policy I know about recruitment is that you’re not supposed to approach people till they’re ready, and then to tell them the truth. I would suspect in your case that there’s some legal concern about Daniel, since you might be nailed for conspiracy if membership could be proven, and that’s a harder fall. Also, members are supposed to donate five percent of their net income to the cause, so maybe they didn’t want to lean on a single woman’s purse. Besides, you spent enough time on the street to understand the wisdom of knowing no more than you need to.’
Before Annalee could reply, Daniel leaned forward intently and said, ‘You keep saying they. Aren’t you a member?’
‘I was,’ Shamus said. ‘I quit.’
‘But they’re still helping you.’
Shamus sighed. ‘It’s complicated. I started out as a smuggler. Cigarettes and watches at first, then drugs, then gold. Gold was the first thing I’d ever moved that moved me. The first bar I ever saw, it was like the sun rose in my blood. I was working out of Florida at the time, very young, ambitious, imaginative, with a talent for safely transporting contraband from point A to point B. I was reliable, I was discreet, and I was making lots of money. And unlike most smugglers, I didn’t fling it away on drugs, racing boats, and high-flying women. I had fun, but at a level less extravagant than my income, because no matter how good you are, you can get unlucky.
‘I’d got to the point where I had plenty of money and lots of doubt that my luck could hold, so I was thinking about getting out of the business when Red Lubbuck paid me a visit. Red was the main mover on the Gulf side, so naturally I assumed he wanted to talk business; I was surprised when he told me about AMO instead. It was, like Red himself, very straightforward: I could enjoy the benefits of alliance in return for the annual dues, five percent of my net, paid on my honor – no collectors, no audits, no questions asked. The benefits of alliance, according to Red – he went into detail, but I’ll just mention them – were technical and legal assistance; a network of skilled and reliable people; the use of various facilities, from safe houses to machine shops; access to intelligence services, which Red claimed, correctly, were exceptional; and the possibility of using communal knowledge and educational opportunities to expand one’s own talents.
‘Red was persuasive without applying pressure, but I’d always worked independently and was thinking about retiring anyway, so there was no sense in joining an organization of strangers on vague promises of unusual opportunities and collective strength. I told Red I was flattered, but my answer was a friendly no thanks.
‘My Boston Irish can’t accommodate Red’s Cracker twang, but I can quote his reply from memory: ‘Hell son, we ain’t interested in your smuggling. That’s just an occupation, prone to go belly-up any time. What we’d like you to do is go study precious metals with Jacob Hind, who you probably never heard of, being young and unawares, but we think he’s one helluva teacher, a flat-out master – forgotten more shit about precious metals than you’ll ever learn. But Jacob Hind is pushing ninety. You’d be his last student.’
‘That snared me. As mentioned, I was becoming increasingly taken with precious metals and nervous about smuggling. Smuggling, after all, is a job, and no matter the danger or reward, a job gets boring. So I joined AMO, and three months later I was on an island in Puget Sound, the lone and bewildered pupil of Jacob Hind.’
‘Was this like regular school?’ Daniel wanted to know.
‘Not like today’s, no. If anything, it was plain old-fashioned master-apprentice.’
Daniel poked Annalee’s shoulder. ‘We just were reading about that a month ago, huh Mom?’
‘We sure were,’ Annalee said. ‘But let Shamus finish his story.’
‘Was Jacob Hind a good teacher?’ Daniel said to Shamus. Annalee wasn’t sure if the question was meant to defy her or encourage Shamus to continue.
‘A good teacher?’ Shamus repeated thoughtfully. ‘It’s a good question, even if I can’t answer it. At first I thought he was completely loony, this daft old Dutch-English fool who lost control of his bladder when he was excited, which was often. Half the time he babbled in Latin and when he did speak English it was almost entirely in metaphor. ‘The most precious stone is the river in flames.’ ‘One who has a man’s wings and a woman’s also is the womb of matter.’ The Latin may have been all metaphor, too. Anyway, I had difficulty grasping his lessons.
‘However, he had a great metallurgical laboratory and a better
library – even though, again, half of it was in Latin or Greek. I was just beginning to understand his methods, and with them a sense of his substance, when he died suddenly of a heart attack.’
Shamus paused, taking a deep breath. ‘That’s how I burned my hand. When Jacob’s heart gave out, he staggered against the lab table. We were in the middle of an exercise involving the transformation of silver, and when he flailed his hand out to catch himself he hit the crucible of molten silver, spilling it on my hand. In that instant of shock before the pain consumed me, Jacob grabbed me by the shoulders and, with such power it seemed effortless, pulled me to him in a fierce embrace, shuddering as he gathered breath to whisper in my ear: “Make them return to ninety-two.”’
Annalee said, ‘What did he mean, “return to ninety-two”?’ Daniel was glad she asked.
‘I’m not sure what he meant,’ Shamus said. ‘In the Periodic Chart of Elements, ninety-two is uranium, a precious metal, the last natural element – last by being the heaviest in terms of atomic weight – before the fifteen created by man. If I’d understood him correctly in our brief time together, he despised man-made elements because they were dangerous, corrupting, confusing, and unnecessary.’
‘But how could you make them return to ninety-two?’ Annalee said.
‘I wish I knew. I wonder about it every day.’
Daniel said, ‘Now I understand.’
‘What?’
‘Why you quit, and why they keep helping you: They owe it to you for hurting your hand.’
‘But I didn’t quit then. In fact, when I recovered I took over Jacob’s lab and continued my studies. AMO not only approved, they provided me with a Latin teacher. In six months of demon study I could read most of the old texts. Out of the emerging connections, I became fascinated by the radioactive elements, and, not surprisingly, uranium in particular. Old ninety-two itself, Jacob’s point of return, the end of the natural line before the man-made mutants of linear accelerators and nuclear reactors. I had uranium samples, of course, but it was uranium-235, the fissionable isotope, that interested me. But since 235 is used in nuclear bombs, the government has it all. And if nothing else in my studies was clear, it was overwhelmingly obvious that we cannot comprehend elemental powers and processes without direct communion.
