“Another metaphor!” said L., his eyes fixed on the mole.
He was still smoking, and, for a moment, I thought it odd that his cigarette had scarcely burned down at all. I remembered the eternal cigarette of the man in the yellow overalls in the Area for the Loading and Unloading of Metaphors.
“That’s how I see it anyway,” I went on somewhat uncertainly. “If there’s no resurrection, all that matters is memory, especially our memory of someone’s final days: how the person who was once part of our life died, if it snowed on the day he died or if the sky was blue, if the funeral was worthy of him, if his grave lies somewhere beautiful … In that sense, the mole is lucky. He’s lying here among trees and flowers, next to a spring. What’s more the walls of the canyon shelter him from the noises of the world. The only sound here is the rustling of leaves.”
L.’s cigarette was still not burning down. It seemed eternal.
Somehow he sensed my unease.
“You don’t get it, do you?” he asked, standing up.
I didn’t know what to say.
“You do realise that I’m dead, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, but the answer surprised even me.
L. began to sing, imitating the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”: “There is a flower within my heart, Daisy, Daisy! Planted one day …”
I began to weep helplessly.
“Stop it, L.!” I shouted.
When I woke up in our bedroom, I felt disoriented, as if the dream had altered time and space. At first, I thought I was still in the hotel in Kayenta; then, that I was in the house where I was born in Asteasu, in the first bedroom I could call my own; then, in the house that Ángela and I rented in Brissac, Mas de la Croix. I finally regained control of my mind and, like someone recovering from a dizzy spell, everything around me – the bed next to mine, the child sleeping in it, the window, the walls, the drawing pinned to one wall – gradually steadied and became clear again. I was in College Drive. The child was Izaskun, over whom I had kept watch at night ever since Brianna Denison was killed.
I got up and went out onto the back porch. Everything was in its proper place: the garden, Earle’s house at the far end of the garden, the raccoon’s yellow eyes next to the hut.
Ángela found me there.
“What are you doing up at this hour?”
“I had an absurd dream and came out here to get some air.”
At that moment, I didn’t feel able to give her all the details, and only mentioned the biography I had attributed to L. in the dream.
“In my dream, he was a physicist, specialising in optics at the University of Arizona. How ridiculous. L., a specialist in optics, when he was the only student at school who had chosen to study literature, and was the first boxer in history with a doctorate in seventeenth-century English poetry!”
“It’s just so sad about L. He was such a special person,” Ángela said, and we both went back into the house.
LAST SUPPER IN RENO
Dennis’s house was on the other side of McCarran, in Kane Court Street; it was a very modern building, composed of three rectangular modules. We parked outside the first of these – where there were two garages – and walked over to the large wooden verandah on the ground floor of the second module. It was sheltered from the sun by a dark blue awning. The table was already set for supper, with a white tablecloth and a vase of yellow paper flowers. The music coming from the speakers made the atmosphere on the verandah seem all the sweeter.
“It’s Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet,” Dennis said in answer to my question.
Earle put his arm around Dennis’s shoulders.
“Didn’t you know?” he said. “Dennis is a man of many parts. Classical music is the second most important of his interests, the first being insects. Have you been to his office recently? He now has two black widows and a praying mantis.”
Dennis brought us our beers. He seemed oddly flattered by Earle’s comments.
“It’s a really lovely house, Dennis, and the location is just amazing,” I said.
From the verandah you could see the Reno–Sparks plain, an area large enough to accommodate ten towns. In the distance, the desert mountains formed a kind of wall.
“It’s prettiest at night,” Dennis said.
It was still only seven o’clock in the evening, and the lights of the casinos and the houses had not yet come on. In another hour, the empty spaces of the plain would vanish into the dark, and the smaller area of visible landscape would be enlivened by car headlights.
Dennis showed us the passageway leading to the third module.
“The kitchen’s at the back. You could start bringing the food and drink out onto the verandah, if you like. Meanwhile, I’ll go upstairs to the living room and set up a movie for the girls.”
Izaskun and Sara had already told us that the television screen on the upper floor was ten times bigger than that of a normal television, and that there was a huge rug in front of it covered with multicoloured cushions. Even more amazing – to them – was the fact that the room had a fridge full of cold drinks and a microwave for making popcorn.
We, the guests, went up and down the passageway, carrying food and drink out onto the verandah. There weren’t many of us that day, just the usual people – Mannix, Mary Lore, Earle, Ángela and me, plus Alexander, Dennis’s bearded friend from Chicago, as well as a friend of his whom we didn’t know, a very smartly dressed man in his fifties, wearing expensive cowboy gear: leather boots, jeans, pale blue shirt, black silk waistcoat, dark hat.
The girls – Izaskun and Sara plus Mary Lore and Mannix’s three daughters – carried two trays of sandwiches upstairs, accompanied by Ángela and Dennis. The rest of us sat down at the table on the verandah. The temperature was perfect, about twenty degrees centigrade.
It was clear from the start that Mannix did not take to the stranger. He tended not to like affected people, far less what he called “urban cowboys”.
“It’s usually considered rude to keep your hat on at the supper table,” he said to the stranger as soon as we sat down.
“I thought it was up to the owner of the house to set the rules,” the cowboy said in response.
We all tried to take this comment as a joke, but, as any reader of Kerouac would say, we all picked up on the bad vibes.
“Now, let’s not quarrel,” Mary Lore said.
“No, let’s eat!” added Earle.
The table was well provided with food and drink: rice salad, potato salad, tabouleh, chilled yoghurt soup, chicken served in funny red cardboard containers, hamburgers and electric griddles to cook them on, Californian cheese – including one with a Basque name, Ona – Californian wines and cold beers.
The cowboy took off his hat, but then didn’t know what to do with it. In the end, finding nowhere else, he put it down on a chair.
“Oh, wear it, if you like …”
Mary Lore hesitated. She didn’t know his name.
“Patrick,” the cowboy said.
“Wear your hat, if you want to, Patrick.”
Mary Lore held out her hand to shake his. Mannix did the same.
With his hat off, Patrick looked younger, about forty. He had a scar on his forehead, a red mark that extended onto his scalp.
Earle and I also shook his hand.
Dennis’s friend, Alexander, came over to me. He was the polar opposite of the cowboy as far as clothes were concerned. He was dressed rather shabbily, in a baggy sweater more suitable for winter than summer, and his curly beard was in need of a trim. He was holding a can of Pepsi.
“Hi, I’m Alexander. We didn’t really get a chance to talk the other day,” he said.
“No, but Mannix told me that you’ve come down from Chicago to help Dennis sort out the university’s computer system.”
When I shook his hand, I noticed that it was very cold from contact with his can of Pepsi.
“How’s your Dunhill-smoking friend in the green velvet jacket?” he as
ked.
“You’re very observant,” I said.
“No, not really, but your friend did seem rather unusual, and I don’t just mean because of his physical appearance.”
“He left immediately afterwards. His daughter had to get back to school,” I told him. Then, pointing at the cowboy, I added: “Your friend seems rather unusual too.”
Alexander looked away and said:
“Yes, Patrick works at the airport, for the security department. Security people don’t tend to be the nicest people in the world, but he’s a good guy.”
When dictionaries define the word “vibration”, they mention brief, repetitive movements and the tremor that comes either from the air or from certain objects. On the verandah, on our side of the table, I felt something similar, as if there were a magnetic field operating underneath the dark blue awning. It wasn’t at all pleasant.
Dennis and Ángela appeared on the verandah, smiling broadly. They had come from the floor above, from a very different magnetic field. They had left the girls alone with the giant screen and the sandwiches, which meant that we could now begin our supper.
There were no empty spaces at the table, apart from Dennis’s chair, because he was now walking around, helping us to the salads.
“They held a vote to choose today’s movie,” Ángela told Mary Lore. “Guess which movie won?”
Mary Lore didn’t know.
“‘Ratatouille’!”
“Not again!”
“It got four votes out of five. Only Izaskun voted against. She was quite firm about it too.”
“Well, it is a movie for kids, and she’s not such a kid any more.”
“No, she’s growing up fast,” Mannix said. “The same thing happened to me. Yesterday, I was a little boy and now look at me. Suddenly, I’m a two-hundred-and-forty-pound hulk.”
“You can all talk blithely about the passing of time because you’re still young,” Earle said. “I daren’t even think about it.”
We raised our glasses to this thought, everyone except the cowboy. He carried on eating his rice salad as if he were entirely alone. At the other end of the table, Alexander was wiping a drop of yoghurt from his beard.
As it was getting dark, Dennis wound back the awning. I saw Izaskun standing at the upstairs window and gestured to her, asking if she wanted to come and sit with us. She shook her head.
Dennis placed two metal boxes containing fluorescent blue lights on the balustrade. These were intended to attract the insects and incinerate them.
“You’re being very cruel to those insects, Dennis,” Earle said. “There they are thinking you’re their friend and flocking to your verandah, and you go and incinerate them!”
Again, there were two exceptions at the table. Neither the cowboy nor Alexander smiled.
Earle whispered in my ear:
“Tell me, XY120, where did Dennis find these two guys? I’d say they came from Area 51. I wonder if Dennis is an alien too, or are you all aliens?”
Without Natalie there, Earle was his usual self.
“I don’t think Dennis is,” I said.
Izaskun had finished her sandwich, but was still at the window, observing us. What was happening at the table was obviously far more interesting than Ratatouille.
“What is it you do, Patrick?” Mannix asked.
He and Mary Lore were standing up, cooking the hamburgers on the griddles.
“I work at the airport, in security. It’s not a particularly nice job, but a necessary one,” answered the cowboy. This, more or less, was what Alexander had told me.
The conversation turned to the subject of security, but went no further than the usual banal clichés. The air was filled with the smell of hamburgers cooking.
I was struggling to remember. I knew that cowboy; I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t remember when or where.
Izaskun was now in the passageway that led to the kitchen, keeping close to the wall, as if she didn’t want to be seen. She beckoned me over. When I gestured to her, inviting her to join us at the table, she only beckoned to me more urgently, as if issuing an order. I gave in. When I reached her, I closed the sliding door behind me.
“Don’t you remember that guy?” she whispered. “He was in Tacos when the police arrested the fat man with the round head. You wanted to wash your hands and kept trying to get into the bathroom, but it was always occupied.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am. He was there in Tacos and he was wearing the same cowboy outfit too.”
She reminded me of other details from that night, and I had to admit she was right. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence to meet him at Dennis’s house, but there was no doubt about it. The guy at Tacos and the man having supper with us were one and the same.
“You go back upstairs, Izaskun,” I told her.
“I’m going to keep watching,” she said.
“It’s probably more interesting than watching ‘Ratatouille’ again,” I said jokingly.
“You bet,” she said, and she wasn’t joking.
When I returned to the verandah, Mannix and Mary Lore were serving up the hamburgers; Ángela and Earle were discussing Bruce Laxalt’s poems and the irreversible state of his health; Alexander and Dennis were studying a small computer, with Alexander explaining a new app that had come onto the market. As soon as I sat down, a mobile phone rang, and the cowboy got up and went over to one corner of the verandah to answer it. When I saw him there, any lingering doubts vanished. He was definitely the man we’d seen at Tacos.
The Schubert quartet that Dennis had put on at the beginning of the supper came to an end, and the ensuing empty silence seemed to endow the town with a larger presence: in the darkness, the white lights of the houses, and the fuchsias, reds and greens of the casinos seemed more intense. A yellow sliver of moon hung above the desert mountains.
The cowboy’s telephone conversation was brief. He put the telephone away in his waistcoat pocket and spoke to Dennis.
“There’s been an incident at the airport, and I have to leave. I won’t be long, though. I’ll be back before you’ve finished your dessert.”
“If you like, I’ll save you a hamburger,” Dennis suggested.
“No, thanks, dessert will be fine.”
“I’ll show you out,” Dennis said.
Alexander stood up.
“I’ll go with him, Dennis. Meanwhile, why don’t you put on some more music?”
I spotted a figure in the darkness. It was leaning on the window overlooking the verandah. Izaskun was still watching.
Dessert was apple tart and vanilla ice cream. Dennis and Ángela took five servings upstairs to the girls. Then we served up eight more plates and took them out onto the verandah.
“I don’t know where Izaskun has got to. She wasn’t upstairs,” Ángela said when we sat down again.
“And Patrick’s not back either,” added Mannix.
In the sky above Reno, I could see the lights of a plane making its slow descent. On the ground, at the airport, there didn’t seem to be anything much going on. It was the same in the streets of Reno. Most were dark and empty. Including Virginia Street. The only traffic to be seen was on the I-80 and on Route 395: the long-snouted trucks heading for Las Vegas, Chicago, Salt Lake City or Houston passing those going to Sacramento or San Francisco.
Then something changed on the I-80. A helicopter flew over the trucks and landed on the roof of a building. I didn’t need to see anything more to know that it was the air ambulance for St Mary’s Hospital. This was my ninth month in Reno. In another week, one of the planes taking off from the airport would be ours.
I was worried. Patrick had still not come back. Izaskun was not upstairs, nor could I see her at the window. My mind began making wild connections, and the palms of my hands were sweating. However, I had reached entirely the wrong conclusion. The cowboy wasn’t with my daughter. He was coming back down the passageway onto the verandah.
Rather chatti
er than he had been before, the cowboy explained the problem that had arisen at the airport. A passenger hadn’t turned up for his flight even though he had already checked in his luggage, and the plane couldn’t leave until they had unloaded the luggage and returned it to its owner.
“We found him drunk in his room at Harrah’s. He couldn’t remember a thing, not even that he was supposed to catch a plane. We told the guy, this isn’t Las Vegas, you know. You don’t fool around like that in Reno.”
He was eating his apple pie very quickly, mixing each spoonful with some of the half-melted ice cream.
Then Izaskun appeared on the verandah. She seemed very tense. Even Earle was surprised when he saw the look on her face.
“That man’s lying,” she said.
The cowboy continued eating his dessert as if he hadn’t heard her, eagerly spooning up what remained of the ice cream. On the other side of the table, Alexander sprang to his feet. Mannix, Mary Lore, Ángela, Earle, Dennis and I stayed where we were, waiting.
“He did leave the house, but immediately came back in again through the garage,” Izaskun said. “I saw it all from the window on the other side.”
Alexander took a step towards Izaskun.
“No, you’re getting things all confused, sweetheart,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “He left his car keys in the kitchen and came back to get them.”
Izaskun was not to be cowed.
“He looked in one of the bedrooms, then in one of the bathrooms. He’s been in the house all the time,” she told us.
Suddenly, we all had something to say, but the cowboy got in before us.
He stood up, wiped his mouth on his napkin, then took a badge out of his waistcoat pocket. His movements were very precise. He was a cold-blooded fellow, but doubtless a good policeman.
“Allow me to explain,” he said, in a more formal, distant tone of voice. “As you know, last month someone kidnapped and murdered Brianna Denison, and the case remains open. That’s why I’m here. According to information we’ve received, Dennis Horace Wilson could be the person we’re looking for.”
On the other side of the table, Alexander was stroking his beard. I had no doubt that he was our Judas, the one who had betrayed Dennis.
Nevada Days Page 34
