by Betty Webb
He smiled real sweet-like. “Hmmm. Where are my firearms now? You know, that’s a mighty good question. I kinda remember leaving them out there in the desert after I shot Mr. Donohue, but I don’t know exactly where that was ’cause it was dark and ou know how things look around here when it gets dark. Can’t see a thing.”
“I’ve had some experience with that. Are you sure you can’t remember anything else?”
“Hate to disappoint you again, ma’am, but nope. Oh, there’s that conversation I had with the Duke that night, of course. I always remember talking with him.”
“The Duke?”
“John Wayne. The Hollywood actor. He drops by regular to see how I’m doin’.”
She gave him a slit-eyed stare. “How does that work, Mr. Boone? I was under the impression that John Wayne died some time in the seventies.”
“The Duke stopped breathing the air of this Earth on Friday, June 11, 1979, at 5:35 p.m. But that don’t mean he ain’t still walking around, visiting with his friends, giving them the advice they need. Sometimes advice they don’t think they need.”
“What kind of advice has the long-dead John Wayne been giving you, Mr. Boone?”
He could tell she didn’t believe him and he didn’t much care. “Oh, that a man’s gotta sit tall in the saddle, be a stayer not a quitter. Words to live by.”
She scribbled something in her notebook. He wasn’t all that good at reading upside down, but it looked like “crazy” was one of the words. Having been called crazy more than a few times in his life, it didn’t bother him.
When she spoke again, her voice had changed. Now she sounded like she was talking to some addle-brained kid. “Did John Wayne tell you to kill Mr. Donohue?”
He looked up at the ceiling. The fly specks hadn’t gone away. There even seemed to be more of them. When he looked back down, he repeated the same answer he’d given the detectives. “The Duke would never tell somebody to do that, not without just cause, anyway. When I killed Mr. Donohue, I did it for my own good reasons. You see, people as old as me, we collect grudges. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Donohue once kicked Blue, my dog. Bet if a man kicked your dog, you’d shoot him, too.”
“I don’t have a dog.”
“Your cat, then.”
“No cat, no ferret, no goldfish.” She gave a deep sigh, the same kind Abby used to give him when he’d done something she didn’t much like. “Mr. Boone, you didn’t kill Ike Donohue, did you?”
Gabe didn’t answer right away, just studied the beauty of her. The blond hair, the green eyes, the back as straight and strong as that of a good horse. A woman a man should value, not lie to. But sometimes a lie was truer than the truth.
Crossing what was left of his fingers under the table where she couldn’t see them, he said, “Miss Jones, I killed that man as sure as you and me is sitting here enjoying the kind hospitality of the Walapai County Jail.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Gabe Boone was the worst liar I’d ever met.
As a detention officer escorted me back to the lobby, I understood why Hank Olmstead had hired me to help the poor old thing. I doubted if he was capable of killing anyone other than by accident, and he’d “confessed” for the sole purpose of springing Ted Olmstead from jail. In a way, it was almost gallant.
Didn’t Boone realize that if he stuck with his lame story he’d wind up spending what little time he had left in prison? It might provide him with three hots and a cot, but the prison gangs would eat him alive. However, his compromised mental state gave me hope. The man was in the full grip of dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s, and might be sentenced to a mental health facility. Not the best of all possible worlds, necessarily, but better than prison.
I stood there in the jail’s reception area for a few minutes, trying to figure out whom to call first. Olmstead and Jimmy would still be celebrating Ted’s release from jail, and I didn’t want to interrupt their fun. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough. Same for Anderson Behar, Boone’s new attorney.
Feeling more optimistic, I walked across the street to Ma’s Kitchen and ordered a meatloaf sandwich and fries to go. While waiting for my takeout, I looked into the dining section and saw Olivia Eames sitting at a deuce, pushing a salad around on her plate. When I waved, she motioned me over.
Now that I was closer, I saw how depressed she looked. “Salad no good?” I asked, then promptly regretted it. The too-thin reporter displayed all the symptoms of anorexia, and discussing food with anorexics was never wise.
“It’s delicious, but I’m not as hungry as I thought,” she answered.
“Happens to all of us at one time or another. Say, while you were collecting information for your Black Basin story, did you come across any mention of Gabriel Boone?”
“The cook who confessed to murdering Ike Donohue? There’s no connection that I know of. When I heard about the confession, I did try to get in to see him but they wouldn’t let me. As soon as I’m through eating, I’m going to camp out on their doorstep until they grant me an interview. I’m the press, for God’s sake! They have to let me in.”
There’s nothing like watching a reporter sensing a story in the making; she looked like a wolf smelling prey. Maybe she thought she could somehow connect Donohue’s murder to Tosches’, and by extension, to the Black Basin Mine.
“Is it true the man’s in his eighties?” she asked.
When I nodded, she vented an obscenity that drew frowns from nearby diners. Oblivious, she said, “So now we’ve got an octogenarian sitting in a jail cell, confessing to murder. Jesus, what a mess.”
“You can say that ag…” Before I could finish, Tara, the cute waitress who had a crush on Jimmy, came over with my to-go order, so I bade Olivia goodbye and followed Tara to the cash register.
When I arrived back at the Covered Wagons, I discovered that while I’d muted the television before driving over to the jail, I’d forgotten to turn it off. The John Wayne marathon continued in full bore. True Grit had finished and now an older, more exhausted-looking Wayne was shooting up a saloon that reminded me of the motel’s restaurant. Had the Covered Wagon’s decorator used the saloon as a model? Amused by their similarity, I unwrapped my takeout, un-muted the TV, and climbed onto the bed for a little light entertainment.
A few minutes later, Wayne took a bullet. Then another. And another. Shot full of holes, the weary warrior collapsed behind the bar and died. After the credits rolled, the marathon’s host said, “As we’ve just seen in The Shootist, J.B. Books, the character played by John Wayne, was dying of prostate cancer, which is why he’d provoked that final shootout. In real life, Wayne himself was dying of cancer, and The Shootist turned out to be the last movie he starred in. You can see by his appearance that he wasn’t feeling well.”
The host’s expression grew more serious. “Three years later, in January of 1979, after being in constant pain for months, Wayne went into the hospital for a gallstone operation. Instead of gallstones, the surgeons discovered that the lung cancer he thought he’d licked back in 1964 had metastasized to his stomach. They removed his stomach, but five days later, tests came back showing he also had cancer in his lymph nodes and intestines. John Wayne died six months later, mourned by millions of fans.”
Having suffered my allotment of gloom and doom for the day, I grabbed the remote and was about to change the channel when the next thing the host said froze my hand.
“This brings us to The Conqueror, said to be the worst film Wayne ever made because with his rugged Western looks and swagger, he was simply unbelievable as Genghis Khan. The Conqueror was filmed in 1954 in Snow Canyon, a recreational area outside of St. George, Utah. This is the movie so many of Wayne’s fans believe was responsible for his death. Of the two hundred and twenty Hollywood actors and crew members who worked on that Utah set, ninety-one contracted cancer. Most died, including John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendariz, and director Dick Powell. Why? The prevailing theory is that
they died because three years before filming began on The Conqueror, the U.S. military started above-ground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, ninety miles southwest of the film set.”
I frowned. Yes, I’d heard about the A-bomb testing. Who hadn’t? It had even been mentioned in one of my high school history textbooks. How could the tests be connected with all those deaths, especially Wayne’s? From what I’d heard, Wayne had been a heavy smoker and drinker, habits that seldom contributed to a long life.
The TV host’s next words cleared up my confusion. “Because of the prevailing western winds, the fallout from numerous nuclear bombs—many bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—blew straight into Snow Canyon. The tests turned the picturesque canyon we saw in the movie into a radioactive hotspot the film crew was subjected to for thirteen weeks. To make matters worse, Howard Hughes, who bankrolled the film, had sixty tons of the red-tinted Snow Canyon dirt shipped back to Hollywood so that any retakes necessary would match the scenes shot on location.”
He paused, then added, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, here is The Conqueror—infamous as ‘the movie that killed John Wayne.’ ”
A bite of meatloaf tumbled out of my mouth and onto my lap.
Snow Canyon was less than sixty miles from Walapai Flats.
Brushing the wayward meatloaf onto the floor, I jumped off the bed and ran to my laptop.
***
Ten minutes later I was punching in Olivia’s cell phone number.
“You were raised in this area,” I said, the second she picked up. “Walapai Flats received nuclear fallout from the Nevada Test Site, didn’t it?”
There was such a long silence that I thought the call had dropped, but then she said, “Well, well. So somebody finally broke the code of silence. Who was it? Earl Two Horses? He always was the wild card.”
“Code of silence? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how people clam up when…Wait a minute.” On the other end of the line I heard a man’s voice, then Olivia’s again. When she came back on, she sounded excited. “I just received permission to see that Boone guy for fifteen minutes, and it’s going down right now. Gotta go, but I promise to call you back as soon as I’m done.”
Dial tone.
I went back to my laptop, typing in BOMB+NEVADA TEST SITE. In the next half-hour I learned that between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. government detonated more than nine hundred nuclear bombs at Yucca Flat and Frenchman Flat, two of the main locations on the Nevada Test Site. The John Wayne marathon host had understated their power: some of those nukes were nearly five times the size of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of Second World War.
The radioactive fallout spread all over the U.S.—as far away as New York’s Central Park—but Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado received the largest doses. The result was an enormous cancer cluster centered in the American Southwest. Those radiation-caused cancers included male and female breast cancer, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and lymphoma. Thyroid cancer was a big killer, but so were cancers of the pharynx, small intestine, ovaries, pancreas, salivary glands, lungs, esophagus, stomach, brain, bladder, kidney, bile ducts, liver, colon, and gall bladder. The exact numbers of deaths resulting from the bomb tests was not known, but was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. In 1977, the National Cancer Institute released a report estimating that fallout-related deaths from thyroid cancer alone totaled as many as seventy-five thousand.
I gasped. My high school history textbook hadn’t mentioned deaths.
As I continued to read, I learned that on July 5, 1957, the Army drove more than 3,200 young American soldiers into the blast zone and exploded an atom bomb right over their heads. At seventy-four kilotons, the nuke represented the largest atmospheric test ever conducted within the continental United States. The government wanted to find out what effects eleven million Curies of iodine-131 would have on them. They found out, all right. Many of the men—some as young as nineteen—developed cancer. The bomb sterilized others on the spot.
When Olivia called me back a few minutes later, I’d calmed down enough to at least speak. “Let me tell you what I’ve discovered.” Hating the tremor in my voice, I ranted about immorality of using uninformed Americans as radiation test subjects until my throat was raw. “When Saddam Hussein gassed and killed five thousand Kurds, our government called him a murderer. But the U.S. government killed at least a hundred thousand more of our own people!”
Olivia didn’t sound all that steady, herself. “Sucks, doesn’t it? Look, how would you like to get away from Walapai Flats for a couple of hours. I’m leaving for Silver Ridge in a few minutes to get some final information for a story I’m writing. It’d be nice to have you along for company.”
“The Black Basin Mine story?”
“Not exactly, but in a way, there is a distant connection.”
As emotionally exhausted as I felt, the idea of taking a drive to Silver Ridge didn’t appeal to me. “I appreciate the offer, but before I got waylaid with all this radiation stuff, I was going to make some phone calls on behalf of Gabriel Boone. In fact, I’d better get started right now, because…”
“Lena, you’ll learn more about Gabe by going to Silver Ridge with me than by hanging around your motel room.”
Her use of the man’s nickname made it like they’d already become fast friends. While Boone had been cordial to me, he’d been less than forthcoming, certainly not hail-fellow-well-met. That alone made me change my mind.
“Pick you up in ten minutes,” she said.
I started to give her the name of my motel and the room number, but she stopped me in mid-sentence. “You’re not the only one who knows how to check people out, Lena. Covered Wagons, room 217, right?”
“Can’t hide anything from a reporter, can I?”
“Not for long.”
***
Olivia seemed edgy during the drive to Silver Ridge, and I wondered if she had another migraine coming on. If so, I hoped she’d have enough sense to pull over and let me drive her back to Walapai Flats. But when I brought it up, she waved my concern away.
“I’ll be fine. Thanks for the offer, though. If this damned headache continues, I might take you up on it after the meeting.”
We traveled in silence the rest of the way, and by the time we arrived in Silver Ridge, the last vestiges of the usual spectacular sunset had been swallowed up by indigo.
I’d always liked the small mining town. Settled by Mormon pioneers in the mid-eighteen sixties, many of their original homes still stood, lending it a Victorian flavor that has been erased from Southwestern towns which concentrated on expansion instead of quality of life. As we twisted and turned along the broad, shaded streets, I appreciated the curlicued porches, the carefully-tended rose gardens, the perfectly maintained picket fences. It was like entering another, more charming, century. Given the town’s bucolic charm, I couldn’t help but wonder why Olivia had traded it for the more frenetic demands of Boston and New York. Maybe she liked the adrenalin rush the cities offered.
“Here we are,” she announced, pulling into a Methodist church parking lot. Newer than most of the surrounding buildings, the church had made an attempt to blend with them by using a facade of weathered red brick and sparkling white trim.
“You brought me all the way up here to save my soul?” I said, as we exited her Explorer.
“I’m not sure the local Methodists are into that ‘saving’ stuff, but they’ve provided the room free of charge.”
As we reached the side door, a church van pulled up, disgorging several passengers. One of them, a middle-aged woman sporting a jaunty red turban on her head, saw Olivia and waved.
Olivia waved back. “That’s my cousin Edith.” she explained. “Other members of the Eames clan may be inside. At least, the ones who are left.”
“Left?”
“Look and listen.” She started picking at her lip again.
We followed
the van passengers down a dimly-lit hallway and into a carpeted parlor. Like most church parlors, the room was furnished with a mishmash of furniture. Flowered sofas, velveteen sofas, leather sofas—all different colors. Even though the room had no windows, lamps displaying the styles of at least four decades lent the room a cheery glow. Completing this picture of ecumenical benevolence, a painting of Jesus smiled down from a peach-toned wall as a white dove hovered over his head. Beneath it, Olivia’s cousin climbed to the lectern. The flowered dress she wore would have better fit a woman three sizes larger, a pattern repeated over and over in the room, where other men and women with little or no hair were dressed in loose clothing that suggested sudden weight loss.
They were dying.
Chapter Twenty-two
As my nose adjusted to the sharp medicinal odors that warred for supremacy in the large parlor, I studied the crowd more carefully. While some stood on Death’s doorstep, others appeared to be in radiant health. They all sat silently, holding yellowing photographs that displayed gaunt people, many of them children, attached to IVs. I recognized the elderly woman sitting in a damaged wheelchair near the door. At the demonstration, she’d been holding a sign that said ‘Hasn’t Walapai County Suffered Enough?’ Tonight she held no picket sign, just a photograph that was the double of the one on Gabe Boone’s bedside table.
“Is she related to Boone?” I whispered to Olivia.
“By marriage,” she whispered back. “She’s Elena Morehouse, Abby Boone’s kid sister. “That’s Abby in the photograph. Remember, I told you you’d learn more about Gabe here than anywhere else. These people are called Downwinders, Lena, because they all lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site. They…” She was interrupted by a rapping from the podium.
“This support meeting of the Tri-State Downwinders will now come to order,” Olivia’s cousin said. “We’ll start by going around the room, giving our names, our diagnosis or the diagnosis of our loved ones, and where our appeal against the federal government now stands. But before we do that, let me issue a warning.” Her thin face bloomed into a smile. “Keep it clean, folks. The press is with us today. My cousin Olivia, a big-shot journalist, has traveled all the way from New York to hear our stories. Olivia, wave hello to these nice folks.”
