The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  Hailey started driving on I-15 back to Utah but instead turned south onto Route 93 over the Hoover Dam and through Grasshopper Junction and Santa Claus and into Kingman, Arizona, and then east on I-40 to Flagstaff and south into Phoenix to the Scottsdale Embassy Suites. Antonio wasn’t at the front desk so she went to the hotel bar and ordered a Bloody Mary. She noticed that there weren’t any ashtrays. She lit a cigarette anyway. She blew a smoke ring across the bar and it floated into the top shelf liquor bottles in front of a large finely polished mirror. The bartender told her the hotel was non-smoking and she smiled, took a long drag, and ashed on the floor.

  Chapter 30

  County Rd. 172, Kingman Wash Access Road, Mohave County, Arizona.

  The pickup followed the dirt road as far as it went, about five miles as the crow flies from the Hoover Dam, but separated from the dam by rugged mountains without trails that would take considerable work to cross. Tom let the truck skid to a stop, the chrome bumper slightly indenting around a wall of boulders that had slid there some time after the road’s creation. Dust billowed over the cab and through dashboard vents. Tom checked the rearview mirror as he had every minute or so throughout the night but saw nothing except his own trail of dust scattering with the wind.

  The cloth seats smelled of cigarette smoke and someone else’s sweat. With the heat of the morning sun, the cab quickly filed with the scent of dashboard musk. Tom was desperate to ditch the truck. The Network would be using real time satellite images to search for the truck in an ever-widening radius from the hotel massacre. He’d parked under the mountain’s steepest side in hopes that the truck might be missed by cursory inspection, but he doubted that would work, not when he was so close to their target. He quickly searched the cab for anything useful and became even more alarmed. Loose syringes, shotgun shells, and little baggies filled with white flakes that Tom guessed was methamphetamine. The truck was a mobile prison sentence. He found a little over three dollars in change under the seats and floor mats and buried at the bottom of the glove box. In the door panel under the armrest he found an old first aid kit with a few Band-Aids, gauze, tape, and a weathered tube of antiseptic ointment. The real find was a drawstring laundry bag that he used to hold his belongings instead of the homemade satchel made out of his shredded and soiled coat. He threw his half-full water bottle along with an empty one into the bag and started walking.

  He walked slowly up the mountainside in a general northward direction, using his hands to press down on his knees to gain leverage and to steady himself. The mountains were as barren as any he’d crossed, rock with intermittent patches of sand that sifted into his boots through the loose seems and invisible pores. He skirted barrel cactus and rock-nettles as he worked his way up the slope, eyeing the summit and the endless blue sky beyond. He reached the top and instinctively crouched down. Below, the Hoover Dam shown white in the sun, its giant curve bulging out toward him. Lake Mead was dark blue with a green iridescence near the shoreline where the lake met the mountains. The four mammoth penstock towers rose a hundred feet above the waterline and several more hundreds below. So much concrete beneath so much water. The enormity of the structures filled him with exhilaration and dread. He felt at once insignificant and uniquely important.

  He crept to a flat spot between the rocks guarded by a silver cholla and a patch of dune primrose. He took his green plastic poncho out of the laundry bag and hooked the hood onto the cholla and stretched it over to the rocks for a slice of shade. And then he waited. He watched and waited. A thin line of traffic moved in both directions over the dam. Otherwise the dam and the penstocks stood impassive, no sign of the massive hydroelectric generators whirling away somewhere beneath. No sign of any other human activity.

  He sat almost perfectly still. He thought the adrenaline he was running on would wear off, but now that he was here, so close, after all this time, it didn’t. He didn’t feel tired even though he hadn’t slept in days, didn’t feel hungry even though he hadn’t eaten and had no food to eat. He was mesmerized by the dam, hypnotized by it. As much as he stared, he couldn’t understand it, its size, its importance, its domination over the huge expanse of deep blue lake which itself was made from the dam, born from concrete and existed because of it.

  Every hour or so he sipped from his water bottle. At sunset, when the landscape seemed to flip colors with the sky, the land going through purples and blues as the sky went to oranges and reds, his water bottle was empty. He didn’t necessarily feel thirsty, it was just reality that he’d need more water to survive another day.

  The level of Lake Mead had apparently dropped at some point in recent years so that the entire lake was ringed by a fifty-foot band of rock that looked bleached white after decades spent under water, hidden from the sun. Tom started down toward the lake, but the closer he got to the lifeless band of white stone the steeper and more unsteady the terrain until he had to climb back up to the ridgeline and follow that down several miles to a sandy wash dotted with tamarisk and encelia that led to the lake. He filed his water bottles and took a long drink. Then he disrobed and waded into the cool water, fully submerged and scrubbed himself with bottom sand and pebbles to clean off the body funk. The sky was black, the water was black, and the stars were infinite. The dam was above him now, still visible in the darkness, always visible.

  He emerged from the water and put his beggar’s rags back on. He gathered his bag and noticed signs of fishing, kids most likely, tangled lightweight fishing line and pink bobbers and little orange marshmallows used to catch catfish and bluegill. He spent an hour gathering the fish bait from the mud and rocks and rinsed them off in the lake and then hiked back up to his spot on the ridgeline above the dam.

  He spent the next day watching the dam under his poncho tarp, every hour or so taking a drink of water and eating a little orange-dusted marshmallow. That night he went back to the wash and bathed and looked for more fish bait.

  The next day he was thinking clearly. The Network had most likely postponed any attack on the dam. The melee at the hotel would have caused problems. At least three dead that he saw, if you included Lorne, who he thought would probably die. Maybe more, he hadn’t checked inside the hotel room where there had been considerable gunfire. Whether the fallout from that bloodbath had postponed the attack or not, he had to concede that the attack could now be days, months, or even years away.

  Still he repeated his routine for the next few days, and when the days began to run together in earnest and he could no longer tell what was a dream or a dream within a dream, he put his poncho in his bag and slung the bag over his shoulder and walked slowly down to the road that crossed the dam. He walked across the Hoover Dam on the sidewalk next to the road with a tall railing for the tourists to safely cross without falling to their deaths and continued walking all the way to Boulder City, Nevada. He walked through the endless traffic lights and strip malls and fast food joints of Boulder City until the shoulder of highway 93 narrowed and cars flew by at ninety miles an hour, showering him with grit. As night fell, a Deputy Sheriff from Clark County stopped him and asked him where he was going and where he’d been and when he couldn’t answer took him to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission. Tom thanked the man and shook his hand when he left.

  Tom spent three months at the homeless shelter. The staff provided him with a new set of second-hand clothes, using rubber gloves to bag up and dispose of his old tattered garments. Every morning he showered and shaved and brushed his teeth until his gums bled. At night he slept well, having nothing of value to worry about anyone stealing. The days he spent mostly in the common room with the pay vending machines and the free coffee, reading what sections of the newspaper he could corral from the other residents, looking for the signs.

  There was an unsettling air in the Las Vegas shelter, an anxious hum beneath the surface of the place that was different from other shelters in distant parts of the country. There was never a consistent rhythm to the day there. Instead of a calming regularit
y, there was a jumpy vibe that bread agitation among the population. Perhaps it was the smell of all that money circulating just outside the door, won, lost and wasted. There were more degenerate gamblers than other places to be sure, to whom just being in Las Vegas was a special kind of exquisite torture.

  Tom was polite and friendly to everybody. He befriended a man in the bunk next to him named Terrence who spent two weeks at the Rescue Mission talking non-stop about how he hated Las Vegas and hated the Mission even more. Terrence was a poker player who felt he’d lost all his money in the worst possible way because he had no one to blame but himself, couldn’t even blame it on luck, kept insisting he’d gone broke on a game of skill, and thus, he was unskilled. Tom never expressed an opinion one way or the other.

  Eventually Terrence’s brother came to pick him up and drive him the three hundred miles west back to Bakersfield, California. Terrence convinced his brother to take on an extra passenger and then convinced Tom to come along. Las Vegas is no place for good people he said. We’re good people.

  Bakersfield was quiet. Wide streets with low houses. Long blocks, desert scrub and green bushes, spindly pines and distant sun-bathed mountains. Long sunsets and slow time. Palm trees.

  The brother was not going to take Tom in, not even in the garage since that was where Terrence was going to put his life back together, but he did take him to Valley Baptist Church where Tom was given directions to the homeless shelter and told he could come back anytime.

  The shelter gave him a bed but they could not help him get work since Tom refused to accept paper money, so instead everyday Tom walked to the church where he swept and mopped the floors and did whatever odd jobs he felt skilled enough to attempt. He was patient. When the giant GOD LOVES YOU sign out front blew a fuse and was alight no more, he spent eight hours sitting cross-legged in a hundred degree sun rewiring the thing even though he had never excelled at electrical systems during surveillance training. The pastor fed him at least one meal a day and often gave him donated food to bring back to the shelter at night. Over time the parishioners grew accustomed to seeing Tom working about the church, and there was a noticeable uptick in canned food donations. Every evening Tom filled his drawstring laundry bag with canned vegetables, powdered soups, and boxes of pasta and slung the bag over his shoulder for the long walk to the shelter. The donations were more than welcome at the shelter, and eventually a volunteer there gave him a proper frame backpack for his daily journeys back and forth from the church. The shelter had an easy client, and the church had a useful parishioner, and Tom fell into a routine like none other he’d ever had.

  A year passed and then another. He spent Thanksgivings with Terrence and Terrence’s brother and his family, a kind of flesh and blood life lesson to the children about charity and needing charity, but otherwise saw them little. Although he spent everyday at the church, he usually made himself scarce around church services, tinkering in the basement or manicuring the grounds, not because he had any particular aversion to religion but rather because he felt like the hired help, enjoyed feeling like the help.

  One brilliant blue sky November day, he was picking leaves out from under the shrubs along the side of the church by hand when Terrence’s brother tapped him on the shoulder and told him that Terrence had left town, was probably back in Vegas and up to old ways, but that Tom was still invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Tom nodded and thanked him for the invitation. He had Thanksgiving with Terrence’s brother’s family but said even less than usual. The children were busy tapping on mobile devices with their thumbs through most of the dinner, and the football game on the big screen high definition television was largely unwatched and thus even more meaningless than it had ever been.

  Living off the grid Tom had never had a cell phone, but now he noticed people attached to sleek little devices everywhere. When he observed people on his daily treks back and forth from the homeless shelter to the church, they invariably had a transmitter in at least one ear. They were listening to music or talking on the phone or checking their email or linked in to a global positioning satellite or to a van down the street. It was impossible to tell. The Network had never had it so easy, he thought. Hiding in plain sight. That was his tactic.

  He began running scouting missions at night. If anyone could be a Network agent, if everyone looked like one, then only diligence would reveal the truth. Patterns show themselves eventually. And they were there. The same man in a sweat suit on the same block three nights out of five preoccupied with his handheld device and the earbuds they were attached to, and on the other two nights the same woman walking two black Pomeranians and talking nonchalantly into a bluetooth affixed to her right ear. And then the pattern repeated. Sweat suit man three nights and dog woman the other two. It gave him a little thrill that they were still there, that he’d found them. Or had they found him?

  He couldn’t sleep at the shelter anymore. The bunk seemed to have narrowed. The breathing of the other men in the room at night in the dark, not knowing who they were, where their allegiances lay. When he shut his eyes, the movie he saw playing on his mindscreen was of the dam blowing, the water blasting through the fissures in the concrete, a tidal wave scouring the canyon walls, obliterating everything in its path, drowning them all. If they had found him then an attack was imminent.

  Tom left the shelter and slung his pack and walked up Monroe Avenue a mile and half on his usual route, but a block before Valley Baptist Church he took a left so he wouldn’t have to pass the church and continued up and circled the block back to Monroe and kept walking to Highway 99 and stuck out his thumb. He caught a ride almost immediately. Dressed in khakis and a blue button down he looked more than presentable—he was downright nonthreatening. Over the years the parishioners who’d grown used to seeing him around the church preferred donating their better cloths to him: not the dingy t-shirts and old college hoodies that made it to the goodwill bins, but rather barely worn slacks and shirtsleeves bought by a dear one who misjudged a size or believed some exaggerated weight loss. He thought of his current mode of dress as slightly used, business casual. Perhaps his new uniform was only given to him because it made him more palatable as a fixture of the community, but the advantage was the best hitchhiking of his life. His first ride took him all the way to Fresno. The next took him not just to Stockton but onto the I-5 exchange. Hitchhiking on Interstate 5 was unnerving with eight lanes of traffic doing 90 miles an hour, but a young couple in a Subaru Outback took mercy, mistaking him for a stranded motorist, and drove him to Sacramento. Sacramento posed the usual challenge of first finding the outskirts of town and then a suitable location to hitch from. Twice he got rides that led back to the interstate only to be let off a few exits up the road. Darkness fell, and not wanting to try the Interstate again he walked all night through town heading north until he found a two-lane county road and began getting rides at dawn. His cloths were rumpled now and not as crisp as they’d felt the previous morning, but he looked okay and he easily found rides through Yuba City, Live Oak, and Oroville on to Chico where he got back to highway 99 to Red Bluff. He headed north, now it was only north, to the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state not far from the Canadian border, the biggest dam in the United States and one of the biggest in the world, holding back the entire Columbia River. He knew he was taking a huge risk. The Grand Coulee Dam was the second most valuable target after the Hoover Dam, but maybe the Network had given up on the Hoover Dam after nearly four years without an attack. Call it a hunch, but doing something was better than doing nothing. And if he were right he’d change history.

  Chapter 31

  US Route 97, near the Oregon state line.

  The road was hemmed by trees on both sides with deep forest to the mountains beyond. The shoulder was carpeted in pine needles, wet and slick by mist and recent rain. Tom breathed in the cool humid air feeling the dampness cut right to his skin under his clothes as if he was naked to the elements. He breathed out white water vapor like some snowbound
bison and stopped walking. He lit a soggy GPC and watched his exhale gray and take on substance, swirl and hover just overhead instead of disappearing into the mist. He supposed this was not what would classically be called cloud forest, but nonetheless the clouds hung so low they obscured the tree tops and left moisture glistening on the lower branches and on the rocks, lichens and mosses, and saturated the leafy forest undergrowth. He knew Mt. Shasta was close by to the south, Mt. Hood farther away to the north, and the dam even farther away to the northeast, but he couldn’t see them. All he could see were trees and road wrapped in a gray shroud.

  Tom heard the heavy throttle of a big rig and then the throaty reverberations of a fully deployed air brake, and he instinctively stepped a couple paces off the shoulder. Visibility was down to a few dozen yards. He looked back the way he’d come but could see nothing beyond a white wall of clouds at the base of a mountain pass, hiding the twisting road above. There was a second of warning when headlights reflected eerily in the surrounding fog and then a tractor trailer materialized out of the mist barreling passed him; running lights outlined the entire frame, a neon rectangle slicing through the vapor. A line of cars followed closely behind the eighteen-wheeler, headlights refracting off the bumpers, glass and taillights of the cars in front of them. The convoy sprayed a fine particulate mud splatter across Tom’s khaki trousers. He walked with his thumb out long after the convoy had passed, feeling the cold water squish in the bottoms of his boots.

  He slowly became aware of the world darkening. The casing of fog and cloud grayed to charcoal, shading down imperceptibly as dusk fell. It began to rain in earnest, the drizzle turning to big heavy drops drove stinging by the gathering wind. He dawned his green poncho, but it did nothing for his khakis over his lower legs which soaked almost clean of mud in the deluge and clung to his shins as fastly and translucent as Saran Wrap. As he walked on, he felt that he was swimming through some interstitial space, neither day nor night, wet nor dry, awake nor asleep, crazy nor sane.