by Jarret Keene
Soon the men who have buried the dead man emergefrom the shadows. They join the victor at his table and forthe rest of the evening they celebrate his triumph, and thecommunity is unified once again.
It was funny. If they wanted him to, he could recite it for them right there in the middle of the courtyard, as if he were addressing an audience of academics. The litany of gibberish might amuse them. But already the lantern was smashed, and the scene, just as Professor Talon’s article said, was plunged into darkness.
PART III
TALES FROM THE OUTSKIRTS
ATOMIC CITY
BY NORA PIERCE
Test Site
The bus is plugging across the sterile moonscape, rattling on the pockmarked desert road. From the last row of bench seats, Marcus reads aloud from his lesson plans: “Operation Doorstep evaluated the effects of a nuclear explosion on a typical American family. An entire town was constructed for the test, complete with myriad domestic structures, stocked refrigerators, bridges, and automobiles.” He looks toward the front of the bus, past the bobbleheads of tourists from somewhere in the Northeast, past five girls with razored pink hair, past an extremely old couple in matching track suits, and finally catches the response from his own students: iPod cords worm down their necks, heads roll in sleep: a silent consensus of aggressive boredom. The only lively one is Marcus’s class clown, Stanley, who is trying to flirt with the girls from Coalition Pink, activists on the tour to witness for the peace movement. They’re ignoring him, all but one who lectures him in a Socialist jargon. Do you know how many civiliancasualties were estimated in Hiroshima? Do you know howmany cancer cases were settled in relation to this site? We demandjustice and compassion. Do you want to take some literature backto your school? Stanley finally turns around in his seat and huffs, “Damn Pinkertons.” A little snort of surprise escapes Marcus. Stanley knows about Pinkertons?
Seven hours into the eight-hour tour, sixty miles from the next drab stop. The last stop was so boring that a few of Marcus’s students didn’t even bother to get off the bus. They are indifferent to the sight of the gutted desert, permanently gouged and bloated, though they’ve spent their whole lives downwind of the place. Every one of them has some cousin, some old aunt somewhere on a nuked dead-end street.
To tune out, Marcus takes off his glasses. He’s severely near-sighted, so the life around him blurs and his world shrinks to the small space of the pages on his lap. The photograph on his Henderson Junior High School Learning Outcomes Objectives for Knowledge (LOOK) Field Trip Planner shows impeccably groomed mannequins tossed about in make-believe agony. In a test house set up farther from the explosion, the family is still intact. All but the dad, whose nose is blown off. Marcus flips through the official Nevada Test Site handbook he downloaded from the Internet. In the interest of Cultural Preservation, it reads, if any worker should come across whathe believes to be human remains, he should stop working and immediatelycontact his supervisor. Marcus puts his glasses back on and looks up at the two lone Shoshones across the aisle from him. The Indians have a deadpan, skeptical look about them. They introduced themselves back at the security briefing in Vegas as Jimbo and Robert Bitterroot, taking the tour to get a look at old Shoshone land. Marcus can’t remember which one is which. He suspects they’re really along to verify the remains of some legendary ancestor, to examine some pottery shards or conduct some ancient ceremony. One raises an eyebrow when he catches Marcus staring at him. The other looks out the window and snorts. What the Shoshone sees in the ash and sand-colored landscape is so startling that the pork rinds he’s been snacking on come out of his mouth in little crystalline flecks. “Hey,” he calls to the driver, handing his brother the snack bag and standing up in the shaky bus. He wipes the pork rind dust from his chin. “You just passed a body, man.”
Marcus’s students perk up. They lean across the aisles and crane their necks toward the rear of the bus, where feather boas are dangling around the seats of the Pinkertons. There is nothing to be seen in the back of the bus but a restroom, so the students get up—one, then two at a time—and lean over the unoccupied seats to try to get a glimpse.
“They’re from JCPenney,” Marcus says. “They’re just mannequins.”
“Please stay in your seats,” the driver says. He sounds bored too.
The Shoshone says, “That ain’t no doll, man.”
Marcus watches the driver adjust his mirrors and look a little closer. He downshifts, leaves the bus idling, and steps out. The Shoshone follows him and tries to push the bus’s front door open, but it buckles back. The kids crowd around one of the rear windows, affording Marcus a tiny, triangle-shaped view of the driver outside. He stands a few yards away, talking on a cell phone, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun.
“He locked us in?” asks one of Marcus’s students—not one of the brightest kids.
The elderly couple rearranges the packs and lunch sacks at their feet, readying themselves to get off the bus.
“Shit,” Marcus says.
A female student looks at him horrified. “Mr. Marcus!”
The girl sitting next to her—Sandra—pops her Bubbleli-cious with a bandaged finger. “He totally just said that.” She does an imitation of his nasally voice, “He said, Shit!”
The driver gets back on the bus and the Shoshone, who remained by the door, slips past him. His brother follows. “Hey,” the driver calls, “you two stay on the bus.” But the two men wander over to the figure in the brush. The driver grabs the escort badge hanging on a ribbon around his neck and points it at the rest of them. “We’re going to wait here for the military police unit.” His eyes shimmy. “Everyone must stay on the bus!”
“Turn up the air conditioner,” one of Marcus’s students says.
Marcus puts on his menacing face. “Pipe down, Jonathan.”
“He said, Pipe down, Jonathan,” Sandra makes Mr. Marcus eyes: low-lashed, squinty ones, with hairy inverted-comma eyebrows that she mimes by pulling up the skin between her brows and fluttering her fingers. “He was all, Pipe down.”
The driver locks them back in and goes after the two Shoshones. Marcus watches them through the little triangle. “Get back in your seats,” he tells the kids. The driver remains a few feet away from the body, but waves his arms instructively, while the taller of the two brothers leans over the body and turns his ear toward the man’s mouth, as if listening to some last confession.
“I think he’s still alive!” Sandra says.
Then the tall Shoshone tilts the chin up to open the airway and the afternoon glare catches a bright red blot on the old man’s nose, a wet smudge of blood. The driver backs away a little more, while the other brother makes a bellows of the man’s chest. They do this for a while and get nowhere. Then they huddle. After a bit, they all look back at the bus at once, and Marcus feels as if he is sitting with his students and the other tourists outside the principal’s office, waiting for the parents to be called.
The driver walks back to the bus with an exaggerated casual gait, followed by the brothers.
On the bus, the elderly woman puts a hand out to stop the two Indians. “Was it really a dead body?’
Marcus watches the driver eye the Indians sternly in the rearview mirror. The one who talks, shrugs.
“I bet he ain’t just walked all the way out here and died,” says Stanley.
“Calm down,” Marcus says. He wipes his glasses on his shirt so hard that the frame buckles and he has to force it back into shape.
“But serious-up, Mr. G. Ain’t nobody coulda just walked all the way out here. It hadda been someone on the bus. ”
“Ooh,” Sandra says, “He was all, It had a been someone in here.”
“That’s ridiculous.” One of the Pinkertons waves him down.
“Naw, really. Let’s take a count, in case someone’s missing, like in that Agatha Crispy movie.”
“Christie movie,” Marcus says. “Agatha Christie.”
“He was all, A
gatha—”
“Shut up, Sandra.”
The kids rally around Marcus. What’s wrong with Mr. Marcus? Look, he took off his glasses. Leave him alone, he’s upset.
Marcus looks out the window, dusted with desert debris, at a small cabin on the road ahead. A tall, broad-shouldered guard points a machine gun toward him. But when he looks closer, Marcus realizes the figure is two-dimensional, just a cardboard cut-out meant to scare off wandering activists and moon-landing denialists who might manage to make it past the cages and the warning signs and the punishing landscape.
“There is only twenty-six!” Stanley pumps an arm in victory. “Somebody’s missing like in the movie!”
“Awesome,” someone says.
The students take off their ear buds and look around. Marcus watches as some of them wrap the ear bud cords around their iPods and stroke the sterile white rectangles affectionately, like babies with their blankies. In the rearview mirror, he sees that the driver’s eyebrows have lifted. Marcus can tell he is counting. He flips through the clipboard on his lap, does a second count. Then he turns off the ignition and the bus hushes slowly to rest. He walks to the back of the vehicle. All eyes follow him down the aisle, where he stops and knocks on the bathroom door. When there is no answer, he jiggles the handle and finds it locked. “Hey!” He pounds. “Come on out of there, please.” There is no answer. He works the handle again and then grips it like a nine iron and jerks it. “All right,” he says. “If this is a joke, it won’t be tolerated.” He looks sternly at Marcus’s students, who shift in their seats. He sits down with the Pinkertons and flips through his clipboard again. “When I call your name, I want you to say …” He pauses.
“Say present,” Marcus suggests.
“Okay,” the driver begins. “Barry Marcus?”
Marcus raises his hand. “Present.”
The driver goes down the list of Marcus’s students.
Present, here, over here, they drawl, just as they do in the classroom.
“James and Robert Bitterroot?”
The two Indians don’t say present—it’s obvious. The driver marks them on his list.
“Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson?”
“We’re here.”
The driver calls off a group of women’s names and all the Pinkertons answer present.
“Mr. Lancet.”
The bus is quiet.
“Mr. Lancet?”
The driver flips through his clipboard again. He covers the page with his hands, reading something carefully. His face blanches a little and he looks up at the two Shoshones.
The bus’s radio crackles. “Bird-Dog Operations calling. Yourescort’s got your twenty. He’s coming up on you now.”
A Black Hawk helicopter flies into view, and for a moment Marcus thinks it’s coming for them, but it heads toward Bald Mountain. Stanley gives a play-by-play as a jeep rolls across the lakebed and pulls alongside the bus. A soldier hops out and heads toward the figure on the road. Then the doors swing open and another boards the bus. “You are supposed to do a count at every stop,” he says on the way up the three little stairs. He walks past the driver, tosses a few pink boas into the laps of the Pinkertons in the rear seats, and yanks hard on the bathroom door. Then he pulls out a complicated-looking tool from one of several pockets on his fatigues, clamps it between the door knob and the frame, and yanks hard, releasing the door. It flaps against one of the young Pinkertons, who was leaning in to see. She rubs her head. A stench fills the bus, chemically treated urine and feces soaking in the heat. Watery bits trail down the ridges of the bus. No one inside.
The soldier makes a whirling motion with one hand. “Turn it around, back to Mercury.” He scans the rows as he walks back to the front of the bus. “Everyone remain calm.” Then he steps outside for a moment and talks on a primitive-looking CB that hangs from a box. When he gets back on the bus, he says to Bird-Dog, “Cleared and on our way.” The driver puts the bus into gear so quickly that the standing students bob around the interior like wobbly bowling pins.
As the bus turns around and drives slowly past, an MP draws yellow tape around the figure and a few gasps bounce around the vehicle. Another MP holds the man’s wrist, as if checking for a pulse.
“Maybe he passed out from the heat,” one of the Pinker-tons says. “He looks old.”
“Maybe you Coalition Pinkertons did it!” Stanley stands up and does an elaborate Boo-ya! victory dance that ends with Spock fingers and a bird call. The students press their faces against the bus window. I don’t remember him. Wait, was he thatguy who brought the water in from the cafeteria? No, stupid, thatguy had red hair.
“Who was he?” Sandra asks Marcus.
“I don’t know, Sandy.”
A Nalgene water bottle hangs around the body’s neck, evidence against heatstroke. The corpse wears comfortable-looking Tevas, but one of the legs is bent inward at an unnatural angle. The soldier collects things from the man’s pockets and lays them out on some hospital-blue tissue paper on the ground. There is a roll of Mentos, a bookmarked paperback, and what Marcus recognizes as a desert first-aid kit.
Back at Mercury, the military escort hustles them all off the bus and into the canteen. A group of scientists in a line shovel macaroni-beef and Salisbury steak out of steam trays and onto paper plates. They notice, but don’t seem surprised by the tour group.
Two men in weird outfits—not military fatigues, but not quite suits—ask if anyone saw the man acting strange. Did he seem dehydrated; was he talking funny, slurred? Nobody remembers him. So they corral the tourists around two sets of cafeteria tables, and begin to take each of them, individually, into the kitchen. They start with Mr. Stevenson, whose wife has to remind him to adjust his hearing aid.
While he waits, Marcus watches Stanley create a paper football out of a napkin and shoot it through a goal post Sandra makes with her thumbs and pointer fingers.
“Know what?” Stanley says to her, “We in that murder movie, baby.”
“Stop saying that,” she tells him. But he keeps at it. He stands up and points at various people sitting at the tables. “Check it out, everybody’s got a motive for killing somebody around here.” He points to the girls. “Them Pinkertons are trying to get them to stop testing.” He points to the two Indians. “And they was here first, right? They just want their crib back.”
“Stop it,” Sandra says.
“Naw, serious-up, we from Henderson, right?” He swoops his hand along the tables, referring to Marcus and his students. “We all downwinders.”
“I see you’ve been paying attention to this unit, Mr. Mathews,” Marcus says. “Well done. Now, please. Sit down and be quiet.”
Stanley whispers to Sandra: “Why’s your finger bandaged?”
Sandra looks incredulous. “My tips got infected! See,” she shows him her nails, “the rest are acrylic. Anyways, it was like that when I got on the bus.”
“In the movie, everybody stabs the guy one time.”
“But he wasn’t even stabbed.”
“I’m just saying, is all.” Stanley leans across the table and mimes the Psycho shower scene.
“What about those two?” one of the Bitterroots asks Stanley. “They in on it too?” He points to the elderly woman, and his brother laughs.
When the men in the weird outfits take Marcus into the kitchen, they ask him what he saw.
A body.
Why was he on the tour?
Nevada State Lesson Plans.
Did he see the man out on the flats? Was he acting strange?
He can’t recall.
Marcus and his students spend another hour sitting around the table before the military escort returns to drive them back to the entrance, where a bus will return them to Vegas. The escort’s radio crackles on during the bus ride and he covers it with his hand. This does little to muffle the sound and the word suicide shoots like a pinball through the bus.
As soon as the kids file off the bus at the DOE and retrieve their c
ell phones, prohibited on the trip, they’re texting their friends and shouting over each other. The dead guy wasa famous scientist! He worked on all kinds of, like, big nuclearbomb shit! Check it out. Here’s his Wiki. Here he is in a picturewith Albert Einstein. The Pinkertons call the media, who arrive before Marcus’s scheduled yellow school bus, and they snap their boas in the air. They shout at the cameras that the scientist couldn’t wash the blood off his hands. They take off their pink T-shirts and turn them inside out, revealing a single letter printed on each one, so that standing together they spell out P-E-A-C-E. But the cameras linger on Stanley. They even get a quick interview in front of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino before Marcus is able to hustle him onto the school bus. The article that runs later in the Henderson Times shows the highlighted passage from the dead man’s paperback. It’s a simple quote often attributed to Einstein. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
The kids are mostly asleep and the bus is quiet when they finally pull into Henderson. The parents are assembled in the school parking lot, hugging each other, sharing something out of a steaming thermos. They’re watching a portable television inside someone’s minivan, and Marcus can see the images clearly. Footage of the blasted-out house from Operation Doorstep runs in a loop with images of the Coalition Pink women and a black-and-white picture of the old man leaning over some papers with Albert Einstein. Marcus can even make out Stanley’s yearbook photo crossing the screen.
As the students file off the bus and into their parents’ arms, Marcus soothes them. He reassures. He jokes good-naturedly with the parents to break the tension. And finally, when the last of them—Sandra and her four little sisters—pile into their father’s Hummer and drive out of the parking lot, Marcus makes his way across the lot to his old Ford Escort.
