“Just as well!” he boomed, then added with a laugh: “For the cat, I mean!”
He indicated to me that I should leave the cellar and then he put on a kind of surgeon’s mask.
I waited in the kitchen. I couldn’t see the raccoon in the garden, but I could see the blue jays, who were sitting in the trees, cackling. About thirty or so feet away, at the top of the hill, the sun was glinting on the windows of the house belonging to our neighbour, Robert “Bob” Earle.
The trainee exterminator was moving around outside. He directed his fumigation gun at one corner of the porch and squeezed the trigger, then repeated this operation on the stone steps and, as far as I could see, outside the garage too. He, too, was humming to himself, although not any particular tune.
The big man did not emerge from the cellar for a quarter of an hour. He went straight to the truck he had parked outside the house and put his fumigation guns and his plastic case in the back.
“So, did you see anything?” I asked when he returned to the house.
“There was a spider on the bookshelves. Don’t worry, though, I killed it,” he said. At least I think that’s what he said.
“A spider?” I asked, surprised.
He nodded, but without looking at me. He was leaning over the table, filling in an invoice. When he had finished, he smiled and showed me how much I owed him. One hundred and forty dollars.
“One hundred and forty dollars?”
He said something else I didn’t understand, but at least there was no doubt about the figure. One hundred and forty dollars.
It seemed to me that the engine of his truck started up very cheerfully, almost burst into song, in as good a mood as its owners, the exterminators. It reached the junction of College Drive and Sierra, turned on its left blinker and disappeared.
THE BOTTLE IMP
There was a stall at the entrance to the library where they made coffee to go, so that you could take it with you into your class or to your desk. They served it in plastic cups with a lid on so that it wouldn’t go cold. I met Dennis while I was queuing up, and he asked me about the exterminators.
“Apparently, they found a spider in the garage,” I told him. “But they didn’t show me the body.”
The more time passed, the more convinced I was that there had been no spider in College Drive.
“I doubt he was lying,” Dennis said, reading my thoughts. “There are a lot of them about this year.”
Our cups of coffee were ready, and the student in charge of the stall set them down before us after first fitting them with a cardboard ring so that we wouldn’t burn our fingers.
Dennis adopted the same pose as he had the day he came to connect us up to the university computer network – arms folded, one hand cradling his chin.
I paid for the coffees and handed him his cup.
“Have you got five minutes?” he asked.
“Of course.”
We walked through the library to his office. It was as small as ours, but his had windows with a partial view of Reno and of the desert mountains beyond. I counted seven computers on his desk and on the floor.
The thing he wanted to show me was on top of a metal filing cabinet: a glass jar with a round metal lid, and inside it was a spider like the one I’d seen on the Internet, a black widow.
“I caught it yesterday,” Dennis said.
He picked up the bottle and held it in the air so that I could see it from below. There was the spider’s belly and the red mark in the form of a diabolo, or, to use Dennis’s word, an hourglass.
The spider moved its long legs.
“Watch this,” Dennis said.
He shook the bottle. The black widow raced up and down the glass walls.
“Incredible energy, eh?”
Dennis returned the bottle to its place on top of the filing cabinet.
“I’d better go and do some work,” I said. I wanted to get back to my office and drink my coffee.
Dennis told me that his plan was to test the spider’s powers of endurance, to see how long it could live without food and with a limited supply of oxygen.
“If it’s still alive in two weeks, I’ll let it go.”
Two weeks seemed a long time to me, but I said nothing.
HELICOPTERS
I was woken by the noise of engines and immediately identified the metallic buzz, the rhythmic beating of a helicopter blade. It wasn’t just one helicopter transporting a patient to St Mary’s hospital. There were a lot of them, and they seemed to be flying very low. The windows in the house vibrated.
I ran out into the garden. The sky was full of red lights, and the noise seemed to affect everything, the house, the trees, the air. One of the helicopters passed immediately overhead, and I could see the lettering on it and the colours. It was one of those big-bellied ones they use for carrying troops.
Silence returned to the garden. Next to the shack, the raccoon was looking at me with its two yellow eyes, as if nothing had happened.
A DOSE OF MORPHINE
(A MEMORY)
A week after being admitted to hospital, my father was given an overdose of morphine. When I went to see him, he mistook me for a man who had worked with him in the forests of the Pyrenees sixty years before.
“Where are the oxen?” he demanded. His eyes were watery.
“What oxen?” I said.
“What do you mean ‘what oxen’? The ones we need to transport the timber! We have to load it onto the train tomorrow!”
I placed one hand on his arm. He brushed me off.
“Just get those oxen, will you! The timber’s too heavy to haul with a rope!”
His shouts could be heard in the corridor. I pushed the buzzer next to his bed to summon help.
A young nurse appeared.
“Are you the owner of the oxen?” my father asked.
“Is he off his head?” said the nurse.
“Mind what you say! Show some respect!” That would have been my older brother’s response, but I wasn’t quick enough and said nothing. However, she could see that I was annoyed and she blushed.
“I’ve been in the timber business for three years, and nothing like this has ever happened to me before,” my father said.
The matron came into the room then. She spoke to my father, calling him by his name and asking him all kinds of absurd questions before attaching a pouch containing a tranquilliser to the tube in his arm.
“Would you come with me for a moment. There’s something I’d like to say,” she said, indicating the door.
A patient was walking slowly down the corridor, holding a bag containing urine. Two women were supporting him, one on either side. The matron let them pass before speaking.
“The young woman who looks after your father at night is not to be trusted,” she said at last. “She puts up the bars around the bed and then goes off to the snack machines. She spends all her time reading magazines or talking on her mobile.”
“Well, she shouldn’t do that. We’re paying her a fortune.”
“That’s nothing to do with us,” she said. “What’s worrying us is that your father keeps trying to get out of bed. The other night, we found him with one leg over the top of the bars. If he has a fall, it could be very serious.”
I had been about to protest at the sheer nerve of the younger nurse, but what I had just heard made me forget all about that.
“He always has been very strong,” I said.
I went back into the room. My father’s eyes were less watery now.
“What do you want?” he said in a nasal voice. A second later, he was asleep.
SEPTEMBER 12
WHAT TO DO IN DANGEROUS SITUATIONS
Izaskun and Sara came home from school talking about what they had been taught to do in the event of some potentially dangerous situation.
“If the siren sounds eight times, that means there’s a fire,” they explained. “In that case, we all have to line up and walk in an orderly fashion to a p
articular part of the playground. Each class is allocated a different area.”
We thought that was it, but it wasn’t.
“If bears appear in the playground, we have to turn out the lights and crawl under our desks. And it’s the same if a gunman starts firing at us. You have to turn out the lights and hide under the desk.”
A STROLL THROUGH DOWNTOWN RENO
The automatic door to the Eldorado Casino opened just as we were passing, and the first thing I saw was a gigantic screen showing Elvis Presley. He was wearing a tight white sequinned jumpsuit and singing one of his hits, “In the Ghetto”. The people at the fruit machines took no notice, their eyes fixed on those other screens.
A young woman was standing at the corner of Virginia Street and 2nd, peering upwards, craning her neck like a bird. She was wearing dark glasses and carrying a white stick in her right hand. She was blind.
“Can you help me, please?” she called out when she felt us close by.
She asked us where the Greyhound bus station was, and we only knew where it was because it was close to the public dispensary where we had gone for the vaccinations required by the school, and so we explained that she had to go down 2nd, then count six streets along. The bus station was on the left. She walked briskly off, tapping the ground with her stick.
We continued along Virginia Street, listening to the cling-clang of the metal signs on the street lamps being blown about by the wind. The street suddenly became very brightly lit, as if we had just emerged from a tunnel. We walked another hundred feet or so and found ourselves beside the Truckee river. The waters boiled and churned like a mountain stream, swirling round the rocks.
We had been told that some young people in Reno used to amuse themselves racing from one bridge to another on the inner tubes of old truck tyres; that day, we saw only ten or twelve hippy types sitting on the bank. One of them was rather unenthusiastically playing with a black dog.
We crossed the bridge and reached a monument, the war memorial. Engraved on the marble panels were the names of all the Nevadan soldiers who had died in America’s various wars – the First World War, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. On the panels dedicated to the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the names occupied half of the surface or slightly less.
I copied the last five names into my notebook:
Raul Bravo Jr. Marines. Died March 3, 2007. Iraq
Anthony J. Schober. Army. Died May 2, 2007. Iraq
Alejandro Varela. Army. Died May 18, 2007. Iraq
Joshua R. Rodgers. Army. Died May 30, 2007. Afghanistan
Joshua S. Modgling. Army. Died June 19, 2007. Iraq
A twenty-something girl in glasses went over to the monument and stood there, slightly hunched, head bowed, for two minutes or so. Then she straightened up, shot a disapproving glance at Izaskun and Sara, who were running around among the panels, and told us off, saying that we should show some respect for the dead. We called the girls over and left.
We caught the free downtown bus that took us back up Virginia Street to College Drive. Ahead of us, during the whole journey, stood a huge cross lit up in pink neon, looming out of the darkness. It was on a hill the other side of McCarran. We had never even noticed it during the day.
THE VISIT
There was a knock on the door of our office in the library. A man of about sixty, with blue eyes and white hair, stood there.
“Hi, I’m Bob Earle, your neighbour,” he said, shaking my hand.
I felt guilty about not having visited him as I had promised Mary Lore I would.
“I’ve been meaning to come up to your house to say hello, but just haven’t got round to it. I’m sorry,” I said.
“Nonsense. I’m the one who should have come and introduced myself the day you arrived, and brought you a couple of pizzas too. Trouble is, I thought Mary Lore was going to bring them, and Mary Lore thought I was going to. What a welcome to Nevada! Straight to bed with only what you were given to eat on the plane!”
He held out his card.
“I’m afraid I don’t have a card,” I said and started writing down our number on a piece of paper.
“Oh, don’t worry, I know the number. The College Drive house was my study when I used to teach at the School of Mining.”
“Of course. Mary Lore told me. Ángela’s working in the archives at the moment. I’ll introduce you to her later. And to the girls.”
“Everything alright at the house? According to Dennis, the insect problem has been resolved. I hope they didn’t bankrupt you.”
Earle was wearing jeans and a sky-blue shirt. He was a strong, good-looking man and, perhaps because of that, because of the confidence he felt in his own physical strength, he seemed warm and direct, with none of the awkwardness of the very shy.
“Very nearly!” I said. “They charged us a hundred and forty dollars!”
Earle’s smile concentrated itself in his eyes.
“I reckon Dennis has a share in the business. He sends those robbers in as soon as he finds out someone new has arrived in town.”
Then he changed the subject.
“Would you like to go for a drive in the desert? I’d be more than happy to show you around,” he said.
The invitation caught me by surprise, but I accepted immediately.
“Great. How about tomorrow morning, Tuesday?”
I again said yes.
“Good. I’ll pick you up in College Drive at eight o’clock,” he said. “Bring something to eat and something to cover your head, a cap or a hat.”
A silence fell.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it isn’t sunny in the desert tomorrow,” he said with just a hint of a smile, then strode off to the C.B.S. office.
A DRIVE IN THE DESERT
Earle was looking from side to side, screwing up his eyes, and I couldn’t imagine what it was he was looking for. We had left the roads behind us by then – the 80, the 50, the 361 and the 844 – and were deep in the desert, and all I could see was a barren plain and the occasional hill covered in sagebrush, the plant that appears on the Nevada flag. Now and then, we saw the tyre tracks of another vehicle, but, generally speaking, there was nothing but earth and rocks and more earth and rocks.
Suddenly, far off in the distance, I spotted a trapezium-shaped mountain, and the sense I had of being in a totally empty space only intensified. The mountain somehow lent depth to the landscape.
“When I was a boy, I used to come here to catch rattlesnakes,” Earle said. “Then I would sell them to zoos or pet shops. It paid pretty well.”
He tended to pause between speaking, but after three hours in his company, I no longer felt embarrassed by these silences. After a while, he went on:
“I’d pin them down with a forked stick, then put them in a canvas sack, the kind that lets in the air. Easy. I loved it.”
I imagined the rattlesnakes squirming around in the sack, trying to pierce the fabric and bite the hand of the hunter.
“If you keep the sack away from your body, there’s no problem,” Earle said when I told him what I was thinking. “And even if it does bite you, it’s not really that bad. A rattlesnake bite is rarely fatal.”
I had read in the Reno Gazette-Journal that a young man had spent four months in hospital after being bitten by a snake, and had only survived because he was helicoptered out of the desert. I didn’t say anything though.
Several orange-coloured mountains appeared behind the one shaped like a trapezium. That’s where Fallon must be, Fallon being the nearest town according to the map, about sixty miles away. A two- or three-hour drive in that terrain.
We started to climb a hill. The road was stony and flanked by trees that looked like rather scrubby pines. Earle told me they were pinyon pines.
“They’re ugly trees and nobody much likes them nowadays,” he said. “But for thousands of years, the Indians used the pine nuts to make flour.”
Earle was gripping the wheel hard. It wasn’t ea
sy to control the Chevrolet Avalanche as it lurched over the rougher stretches of road. It took us a quarter of an hour to climb the slope.
The hill was flat on top and there was a canyon running through it, nearly a thousand feet long. We got out of the car and stood looking down into the depths of the canyon to see what was there: clumps of grass, a few alder trees, and some intensely red rocks protruding from the walls. Not a sign, as Earle pointed out, of the Citabria single-engine plane piloted by Steve Fossett, who had disappeared about two weeks before while flying over that same desert.
“Seems like God gave up on him,” Earle said. “He doesn’t give up on the birds, mind; he provides them with pine nuts to eat, but he wasn’t so generous with Fossett.”
Steve Fossett – the “Adventurer’s adventurer” or the “American hero”, depending on which newspaper you read – was famous throughout the United States for his exploits in the field of extreme sports. He held more than a hundred world records, including being the first man to fly solo non-stop around the world in a balloon. His disappearance was one of the most talked-about events in Nevada and all over the country.
A lizard poked its head out of a crack in a rock, then instantly vanished. Earle made another remark about Fossett.
“I’m not really surprised God gave up on him. He asked too much of him.”
We went back to the car and set off again.
“What shall we do if we meet Fossett’s ghost?” I asked.
“We’ll ask him to tell us exactly where he crashed.”
“That will save the search parties a lot of work.”
“Not to mention money. I hate to think how much gas they’ve used on rescue planes and helicopters.”
We drove downhill, parallel to the canyon, and my feeling now was that we were leaving one sea behind us and entering another still vaster sea. For miles and miles around, as far as the eye could see, there were only a few isolated mountains, mostly trapezoid in shape and black and ochre in colour. I looked for the orange mountains I had seen earlier, and, when I couldn’t find them, thought that perhaps they were only that colour because the sun had been shining directly on them, and that they, too, were ochre and black. I was wrong. There they were, to our left, the orange mountains. We weren’t driving in a straight line, but were gradually veering to the right.
Nevada Days Page 3
