Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Murmurs from all the others: agreement—some strong, some weak, but agreement.

  And Lolly’s voice, “Who you lookin’ for?”

  Faye said, “An old friend of ours. Sovawanea aTesuawane.”

  “That’s a funny name. Sounds like the people my grandma used to know when she lived in the south in Terrenos Perdidos.”

  Carolyn pulled the car to the side of the road and turned slowly around, speaking into the silence. “Terrenos Perdidos, Lolly?”

  “That’s what she called it. The place she lived when she was little.”

  “It means ‘lost lands.’ Did she live there with people?”

  “She tole me about em. They wasn’t people, not ezackly. They had names like that one you said. Okeah was one. And Setwon. And Toulenae. Those was my grandma’s sisters.”

  “Your grandma was Spanish, Hispanic?”

  “She could talk it, but she said her sisters was something else.”

  “Where was this place? Do you know?”

  “Down south, she said.”

  “And what did she call the people?”

  Lolly shrugged. “She never called ’em anything. No, she did, I just remembered. She said they’d been there a long time, longer than us, so they was the real first Americans. Then she’d laugh.”

  “Right,” said Carolyn. The others sat in stunned silence while she pulled the car back onto the road, which dropped off before them to allow the view of a hundred miles of open desert. At the edge of vision, beyond Las Cruces, was El Paso and then Mexico. That way lay a populated, traveled road. The way they were going, there’d be no one at all. Jackrabbits. Kangaroo rats. Javelina. And Terrenos Perdidos? Where in heaven’s name had that come from?

  “You know,” said Ophy, “one thing that bothered me about Sophy, she never got to know any really nice men.”

  “Sophy deserved someone nice,” Carolyn agreed. “She should have met someone like Hal.”

  “Or Simon,” Ophy offered.

  “Or William,” said Bettiann.

  No one said anything.

  “Like William,” she insisted. “We … when sex wasn’t all mixed up in it, we had wonderful times. He wanted me for sex, you know, but then … it got in the way. We could have been really good friends if it hadn’t been for sex!”

  “I never thought of William in that light,” said Ophy a bit sarcastically.

  “Well, you should. You get past all that ad-man talk, William is a very unselfish, very honorable kind of man. But he’s got … appetites, just like most people, and they screw things up.…”

  “Did,” amended Faye. “Did screw things up.”

  “For most people.” Bettiann sighed. “I wonder if it’s too late. For William and me.”

  They stopped in Albuquerque for gas, all getting out to stretch their legs. Carolyn stayed close to the car, circling it, happening upon a man who seemed to be peering at her axle.

  “Thought you had a oil leak there,” he said, wiping his hands on a grease-stained rag. “Musta been somebody else.”

  He moved away. Carolyn looked where he had looked, seeing nothing. When she raised her head, he was gone, into the garage, perhaps. She looked back at the car, worried. Why had he thought she might have an oil leak?

  She forgot about it on the drive to Deming. They were already weary when they found a grocery and bought fruit, bread, lunch meat, cans of soup, fruit drink, and cola. When these provisions had been stowed, Carolyn stood beside the car, searching the sky, the surrounding streets, the people moving about.

  “What is it?” whispered Faye.

  “Nothing. I don’t know,” she replied. “Just this feeling. I’ve had it all day.”

  When they left, their eyes were drawn to the three jagged peaks that serrated the southern horizon. Las Tres Hermanas. Three sisters.

  “Fates, weren’t they?” asked Ophy.

  Carolyn said, “Horribles seem to come in threes. Norns. Gorgons. But then, I was convinced that Sophy sounded like a Gorgon sometimes.”

  “How does a Gorgon sound?” Ophy asked.

  “Fatal,” Carolyn replied. “Inexorable.”

  Aggie laughed. It was a witchlike cackle, and they all pretended not to notice. An hour later they turned south once more, on a road that arrowed into the south, changing direction only once in the twenty miles to Hachita. The sun was halfway down the western sky. While Carolyn bought gas, they used the station rest room, wiping dusty faces with dampened paper towels, then got back into the car for the thirty-mile trip to Animas, the graveled surface churning beneath them, pebbles hitting the underside of the fenders in a constant rattle, long stretches of washboarding rattling their teeth as well.

  “There’s a campground in Animas,” Carolyn told them. “Or we can still make it to Cloverdale before dark.”

  “Cloverdale,” said Faye in a weary voice.

  Weary or not, there was no dissent. They had only one day. They had to do it all in the time they had, so they went on through the sleepy cluster of buildings that was Animas, then turned south, past the bare baked rodeo arena, its skeletal stands tilted to one side. A bit farther on they saw the squat bulk of Tank Mountain on their right. On either side the world sloped up, four or five miles east to the low, undulating line of the continental divide, closer on the right to the arroyo-riven slopes of the Peloncillo Mountains, bald and hot under the westering sun. Lolly slept in her nest like one drugged, lost in dreams.

  “How far?” asked Bettiann with an exhausted twist of her shoulders.

  Carolyn shrugged. “Another half hour. Maybe a little more. This road is lousy.”

  It went from lousy to worse, changing from gravel to dirt; Carolyn slowed and went into four-wheel drive. The mountains both to left and right became higher. On the right, sets of ruts wound off among the canyons, disappearing, appearing again. They swung to the right at a place the road divided, the left-hand route marked by a faded sign, Private Road. A couple of miles farther on, the road turned abruptly westward. Carolyn announced the odometer reading, went two miles more, then edged off the road and stopped, leaning on the wheel in exhaustion.

  “The best way to get where we’re going, the one with the fewest arroyos or mountains in it, is to leave the road now and drive south, cross-country, about four miles, then three or four miles west. That should bring us just south of the Cloverdale mountain, the one you can see ahead, a little to our left, with a lower peak between us and it. If we can’t go in the car, then we’ll have to walk. This isn’t rugged country, according to the topo, but I told Hal if we aren’t back by Friday, he’s to report us lost.”

  This announcement left them momentarily wordless.

  Agnes climbed from the car and stood looking around herself. The sun was still above the peaks to the west, a scarlet bonfire, flushing the lands with bloodied light. “We spend the night here?”

  The others joined her, turning slowly, their vision ending only at the crooked horizon, nothing moving, not a bird, not a beast, not even the whir of a grasshopper. Despite this vacancy, Carolyn still had the oppressive sense of being watched. She told herself it was foolishness. There’d been no one on the road but themselves. No one but Hal knew where they were going. Still, she jittered from foot to foot, watching the others as they stared indecisively, nervously.

  “I’d be inclined to get off the road,” Carolyn remarked finally. “Drive south about a mile, down into a draw, if we can find one.” She frowned, wondering why she wanted to be hidden.

  Ophy said, “I agree it would be better to be off the road. Sometimes hunters shoot from cars. This is pig-hunting country, and I don’t like being in the line of fire.”

  Carolyn’s face cleared, and she climbed back behind the wheel. Of course, that was the reason. To get out of the line of fire.

  They drove slowly south among cactus and many-branched cholla, brilliant with bloom, the ground dipping and tilting around them. Carolyn watched their progress in the rearview mirror, stopping when the r
oad vanished. Though they were not conscious of having descended, they were below road level when she stopped.

  They had descended into a shallow bowl into which the western hill reached a long, rounded ridge, an eastward-pointing finger. Carolyn drove around the end of the finger and west along its almost vertical wall, feeling a stone scrape harshly against the axle. She parked in the shadow of a sprawling clump of mesquite that overhung the east-west wall. With the car tight against the wall, they were invisible from the road. Invisible from the air, too, unless someone flew very low from the south.

  The others got out, moved around, stretched, wandered off to find privacy beyond a clump of mesquite or a pillar of eroded earth at the edge of the draw. The silence was less perfect there, broken with insect sounds, buzz chirp, rattle, buzz chirp.

  “I’d be happier if we hadn’t left tracks,” Carolyn said to Ophy.

  “That’s easy to fix. Help me get the canvas cover off the roof carrier.”

  Carolyn untied tapes and tossed the canvas to Ophy, receiving a square metal gadget in return.

  “This was by the rock we went over. Did it fall off the car?”

  The gadget was new and shiny, so it had obviously come with them. When Carolyn leaned down to look under the car, the thing in her hand stuck fast to the fender. “Magnetic,” she said.

  Ophy stared at her, saying nothing. Carolyn put her finger to her lips, wrenched the gadget loose, and went with Ophy as she followed their tracks northward. When they arrived at the road, Carolyn said, “How’s your arm?”

  “My arm’s not great, but I do jog most days.” She took the gadget and set off eastward on the road, vanishing over a slight rise. Long, slow minutes went by. Shadows lengthened into darkness. Eventually, Ophy came over the rise again, empty-handed. When she reached Carolyn, she stopped, leaning over, panting. “It’s at least a mile down the road, by a rock, like maybe it got scraped off. What was it?”

  “Another bug,” Carolyn answered. “Some kind of transmitter.”

  “Who?” breathed Ophy. “When?”

  “I don’t know. Cousin Albert’s buddies? Jagger? Whoever Jagger works for? As to when, I honestly don’t know, Ophy. Not before we got the car. Not while it was in the driveway. Maybe when we stopped in Albuquerque.” She frowned, remembering the man who’d thought she had an oil leak. God! How long was she going to go on being blind? She had to do better than this!

  They turned and walked back to the car, dragging the canvas behind them to wipe out their tracks. The wind cooperated, blowing sand in ripples to cover their trail. Ophy did not speak until they were almost up with the group; then she asked, “What do you think we’re going to find tomorrow?”

  Carolyn laughed, almost choking. “Oh, God, Ophy, I don’t know. This whole thing is unreal. I don’t believe it for a moment. What are we doing here?”

  “Trying to find an old friend. Or find out what happened to her. Though it may turn out we’re just camping out.”

  “Hal taught me to like camping out, long ago.…”

  Her voice trailed off. Ophy wasn’t listening. She was thinking about something else.

  “Carolyn … have you taken a good look at Faye since she’s been here?”

  “She doesn’t look good, does she?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say cancer.”

  “I haven’t wanted to ask.”

  “I’ll see if I can find out. Doctor’s privilege.” She kicked moodily at a rock. “What’s next?”

  “Light the camp stove, heat some food. Make nice level places for the sleeping bags while there’s still a little light. Scoop out a hollow where your hip or bottom goes. It’s hard to find the rock that’s burrowing into your backside when it’s pitch-dark.”

  “I’ll get them started.” And she was off to find Faye and delegate her to help round up the others.

  There was little or no conversation while they focused on bedtime chores, smoothing flat places in the sandy soil, spreading their sleeping bags. None of them did more than pick at the food, and even Lolly was less voracious than usual. She fell asleep as soon as she had eaten, leaving the others sitting around the stove, sipping tea. Carolyn was busy with her maps, planning tomorrow’s journey. As she shifted the pile, she came upon the morning’s FedEx packet, forgotten at the bottom of the stack. She ripped it open, took out the photocopies within, began to go through them.

  “Girls,” she said softly. “Ladies. You should hear this.”

  They gathered, edging toward Carolyn where she bent above the letter, reading by the light of the stove.

  “It’s a letter from Mike Winter, an old FBI friend of Hal’s. Hal asked him to tell us what he could:

  “ ‘Dear Hal and Carolyn,

  “ ‘Your local bad guy, Jagger, is a protégé of the so-called American Alliance, an arm of the International Alliance. For the last few decades the Alliances have been grooming candidates for political office or moving them into government bureaus here and abroad, wherever they can exert the most influence. Opinion here is that Jagger is or was being groomed as a possible U.S. presidential candidate.

  “ ‘The Alliance has always avowed patriotism in public and kept its real agenda quiet. This changed during the Gulf War, when female American soldiers suddenly appeared on Saudi soil. Nobody said boo to the U.S. so long as Kuwait was endangered and the missiles were incoming, at least not officially, but Arab clerics made no secret of being incensed at seeing females driving trucks, running around bare-faced within spitting distance of the holiest sites of Islam. Subsequently, according to our sources, a number of high-ranking imams held some ultrasecret multistate meetings at which it was decided their sacred way of life could be preserved only by putting women back in their place, once and for all, or words to that effect.

  “ ‘There was a complication. The conspirators felt putting Muslim women back in the tenth century wouldn’t be a final solution so long as other women in other countries were still moving around in public, getting themselves educated, running businesses, and so forth. Information moves across borders too easily these days, and if they wanted their own women suppressed, it would be necessary, ultimately, for all women in the world to live by the same rules. They turned to their good friend in the Vatican to help them out—they’ve supported him on population and abortion issues, now’s time for him to support them on the status-of-women issues—and very shortly both the Muslim states and the Vatican joined the Alliance, which has covertly opposed women’s rights for years. (See enclosed, 1943–1998, etc.)

  “ ‘We should have seen this coming, but the intelligence communities of the Western nations had been so focused on Communism and middle-eastern terrorism, they didn’t put this antiwoman agenda together until ninety-eight, when the Muslim fundamentalists began bombing women’s colleges both here and abroad. Almost immediately we traced this activity back to the Alliance. Almost ten thousand young women died in those bombings, over a thousand of them in the U.S.

  “ ‘The Alliance repudiates any form of population control on two grounds: The first is unspoken and has to do with the absolute right of males to pass on their genes as often as possible. The second one is stated publicly: The Alliance claims population control is unnecessary because millennial wars, famines, and epidemics are going to wipe out ninety percent of all people within the next ten or twenty years. If natural disasters don’t accomplish this, the Alliance is prepared to help it along. That Japanese cult that started the nerve-gas business back in ninety-five was a member of the Alliance; and we’ve traced shipments of nerve-gas chemicals and biological materials to Alliance headquarters, a place they call the Redoubt.

  “ ‘Learning even this superficial information has cost several agents their lives, none of them FBI because we’ve been told to keep our hands off. With the help of some friends in the IRS, we have been able to trace some Alliance income sources. Though most support comes from Mideast oil, I’ve been more professionally interested in support from inside the U.S.
I’ve enclosed information that may surprise you. Or maybe not.

  “ ‘Last item: No one has any information on Webster. We didn’t know anything about his father and we don’t know anything about him. Except for the difference in age, they could both be the same man. This one is said to have succeeded his father as head of the Alliance about forty years ago.

  “ ‘Destroy this after reading.

  “ ‘Mike.’ ”

  Carolyn passed out the papers that had come with the letter. They moved from hand to hand, quietly rustling. Agnes muttered brokenly.

  “What?” murmured Fay.

  “This sheet traces the flow of money from a certain archdiocese in the U.S.,” she said in a tight voice.

  “Was that why your archbishop wanted to cut off the money for your school?” asked Carolyn. “So he could support this?”

  “I don’t know,” Aggie said, pushing the pages away. “The Church does want us to return to our more … traditional roles.”

  Ophy looked at her curiously, wondering at her tone. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Perhaps … perhaps it’s time we did,” Aggie said.

  “You don’t mean that,” whispered Faye.

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps I do. Perhaps I’ve been misled, about a lot of things.…”

  Ophy shook her head as she leafed through the papers on her lap. “There’s a Hasidic group here that’s supporting the Alliance. They’re pouring money from the diamond trade into Alliance coffers. Their headquarters is just down the street from Misery. I’ve treated some of the women.”

  Jessamine murmured, “And I seem to have been working for other supporters of theirs. The NRA supports them, too. And the so-called prolife people. Shit.”

  Bettiann asked, “What does he mean, the FBI has been told to keep their hands off?”

  Carolyn said, “The one and only time I ever saw Webster was at the FBI. Albert took me there when I was about eighteen. Webster was with the FBI director, which would lead me to assume the top FBI people may be members of the Alliance.”

  They did not have many questions. The pages were numerous. The ones that might have been hard to understand had been notated in a precise hand with arrows and parenthetical explanations.