NightSun

by Dan Vining

  “Go.”

  Nate was restless, stressed. He was lonely, though he wouldn’t call it that. He’d come back from downtown, from the rooftop in the TMZ, thinking about all the blue-gray eyes. He wanted a drink, badly, but he’d settled for water. And old pictures of blowing dirt and desperate White people. Maybe it was the heat. Or the dry. It had been close to a hundred in Los Angeles every afternoon for a week and it hadn’t really rained for two months, unless you counted the ten-minute shower the night he met Ava Monica downtown at the story bar. That didn’t count for rain, even if she had come into the joint in a raincoat, as if it had been pouring out on there on the street. He had thought about ragging her, making a joke about it, but he hadn’t. Everybody pretends in different ways, pretends they’re somewhere else or someone else or that it’s some whole other time instead of: now, here, you. He was as guilty of it as anyone.

  And his old man was worse. The LP playing in the background was Bodie’s record, Woody Guthrie…

  I just blowed in and I got them Dust Bowl blues

  I just blowed in and I’ll blow back out again…

  What’s a young LAPD motorcycle cop living a block off Ivar in Hollywood in the sixties—at least until he could find a woman to marry who’d make him have a kid and move to a house in the Valley with a pool—doing listening to Woody Guthrie sing about the Dust Bowl?

  I seen the wind so high it blowed my fences down

  Buried my tractor six feet underground…

  Nate took another slug of his water. It wasn’t Bombay Sapphire gin but it was good, bottled in the mountains. Bottled in glass, ten bucks a bottle. It came from snow melt and High Sierra springs, not like the soulless pipe water from the big de-sal plants that nowadays kept LA hydrated and sort of almost halfway kind of green.

  The living room wall was blank. The projector had come to the end of the queue.

  “Current,” Nate said. “Zone seven. New Dust Bowl.”

  The News. Here, now, you.

  First came the sound of a very-present wind—ten-channel now—howling, moaning, whistling, sounding like a beast dying. Then came the visuals, vivid, enormous churning clouds of dust, blowing across the living room wall, rattling Nate’s windows. In the pictures, it came in under the doors, dusting everything—section after section of farmland in 2023 Oklahoma and Colorado and Texas and Missouri, blown away by the brown wind—people holding onto their hats, leaning into it, tumbleweeds crossing the interstate. The images were so crisp and clean and high-defined that they seemed unreal, the clearest things in the room.

  “Stop,” Nate said. The wall went blank again.

  He didn’t need to see any more. It had been all over the news: two years of drought, Sirocco winds blowing without a break for weeks at a time, “Dusters” and “Okies” fleeing dead farms and dead farm towns, a repeat of the Dirty Thirties but collapsed into twenty-four months. The backstory was as predictable as all history is: topsoil gone, over-farmed/over-machined land, the wrong crops planted, boom and bust. That very American mix of greed and optimism. Before he stopped it, the last footage had shown lines of beat-up RVs now turned to desperate purposes as they plowed into the curtains of dust drawn across the highways, headed west. Again. The New Migrants.

  Nate didn’t need to see the faces looking out the windows of the RVs. They’d come where history told them to come, come west to work the fields and vineyards and the almond and apricot orchards in the Central Valley—and the factories in LA—where the Mexican migrants had worked before the massive Oaxaca Find two years ago that had brought oil wealth to Mexico and called los nacionals home. Mexico was the new Saudi Arabia. The New Okies had come and—as before, in the thirties—there were too many of them and not enough work. And, as before, not all of them were from Oklahoma. “Okies” was a slur. They came from several states, some all the way from Arkansas. Some of them had gone north to Oregon, some had landed in the East Bay—Oakland and Fremont—and some south to LA. None had gone home to Tulsa or Stillwater or Muskogee or Colorado Springs or Topeka or Springfield. For now, there was nothing much to go back to. Some of them—Nate now knew—were there that very night in the TMZ, still coughing up the dirt in their lungs.

  He went into the radio room in his second bedroom and sat at the control board. He still had nothing to say to his vast audience of a dozen or so night owls. Tonight, he was just listening to the music. Scratches and all. The album he was broadcasting was a Library of Congress recording, and it sounded a thousand years old, as if it had been found in a cave somewhere.

  I had good gal, long, tall, and stout

  I had to get a steam shovel just to dig my darlin’ out…

  He looked over at a gap under the window shade. Light on the sill, dawn. The All-Night Man had run out of it once again: night.

  www

  Whitey Barnes had a nice place down in Baldwin Hills. Two-story, columns out front, like a little White House. Or a plantation house. It was nice enough to make Internal Affairs take notice, if they’d known about it. They didn’t. The current governor was a real man-of-the-people—rode a bike, ate nothing but raw vegetables, fruits, and nuts, lived in a Craftsman cottage on a modest street in Santa Monica. Except his boyfriend was a pop star with a $50 million house a half mile away in Brentwood. Everybody downtown joked that there was a tunnel and the governor could walk in the front door of his humble un-air-conditioned bungalow, take the elevator down, and the electro-roller would jet him over ten blocks so he could come up into his real house and eat a rib eye. So maybe Whitey had himself a tunnel running back to Inglewood and his legal residence.

  Nate was hovering at two thousand feet above Whitey’s place, too high to be noticed by anyone on the ground. Besides, day and night there were so many Crows and EMT wagons and fire rigs crisscrossing Los Angeles they didn’t even catch the eye anymore unless they had a siren whooping. Nate curled around to where he could see the backside of the house. Whitey had a swimming pool. Nate smiled. Nobody could get a variance for a swimming pool anymore. It was kidney-shaped and had a cover stretched over it, painted the same green as the artificial lawn around it so that it looked like a putting green. Whitey had a tennis court, too, though the net was down.

  Nate was alone, lone-wolfing it. No-Name was probably at home, curled up in his jammies, wondering if it was too late to enroll at Long Beach State, train for a job where no one was trying to kill you or hang off your skid. Nate looked west. Sparkles, dark blue water. The way the light bounced off the Pacific made him feel something. What was that sensation? Oh yeah…pleasure. It was almost enough to make him think about making some changes in his life, maybe not sleeping past noon every day. It wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning. He hadn’t gone to bed, had just put on another Dust Bowl record while he watched the sun break over the hill on the other bank of the Cahuenga Pass, the 101 already clogged with commuters who’d be lucky if they made it to work by noon. He’d brushed his teeth, stepped into the shower and out again, then into his body armor and a fresh flight suit.

  He hadn’t shaved. He thought maybe he’d grow a beard, even knowing he’d be mocked for it by friends and enemies alike.

  “It is you,” said Carrie, appearing before him in the cockpit.

  Nate said, “I thought I had you turned off.”

  “It’s not possible to turn me off,” she said.

  “I could lose my job, just by listening to you say that line. ‘Acquiescing to harassment,’ I think it’s called in the handbook.”

  “Los Angeles would be the poorer if you weren’t protecting and serving us, Nate Cole,” she said. “Are you growing a beard?”

  “It’s growing itself,” Nate said. “So this is you in the morning.”

  “This is me. Where are you?”

  Of course she/it knew exactly where he was, down to the half foot. Her question helped remind him that Carrie was part of The Grid, that
she was The Grid. But where’s the harm in pretending she was real? She knew Nate about as well as anyone else in his life. They’d spent more time together than almost anyone else who came to mind. They’d laughed, they’d cried. They’d worried about each other. They’d told each other, “Take care…” They even sang “Happy Birthday” to each other. Nate had made up a birth-date for her—11/06/91, the number on his Crow’s tail—and she didn’t correct him. She was flattered. Or some twenty-two-year-old Sri Lankan guy who’d programmed “her” was.

  “I couldn’t sleep so I’m pretending to work,” Nate answered. “I’m south, running down something for one of my CIs. But I was just thinking about going out to the beach, maybe even go over to Catalina. Land on the sand, blow their minds, eat some calamari.”

  “I’ve never seen it,” she said. “Catalina. If you go, leave your down-lens on for me.”

  “Did you bring your bikini?”

  “Where’s your gunner?” she said.

  “Home in bed, I hope,” Nate said. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Go.”

  “Do other CROs learn their gunners’ names?”

  “I keep telling you, Nate, I only have eyes for you.”

  “Good song. The Flamingos.”

  “Do you want me to sing it for you?” she said.

  Below, a private transport was hovering over Whitey’s house, getting ready to land on the tennis court, a tennis court without a net.

  “Next time,” Nate said, and clicked her away. Then he reached under the dash for the comm-line switch he’d installed, bootleg, and cut the link to HQ. Nobody needed to know where he was.

  He went up another five hundred feet—almost omniscient—whipped into a one-eighty, and fell in behind the hired transport bird that had lifted off from Whitey’s. He looked west at all that sparkling water and the little range of smooth mountains beyond that was Catalina Island. Next time.

  www

  Automobile and truck assembly plants had folded left and right in the years since the last of the Swarzenegger nukes went online, the electric Feds came along, and “Detroit” moved to 中国. No industry took a knockout blow like the one the RV business took, a sucker punch in the first round when filling the tank in a Winnebago went to $1,000 about the same time the government went to shaming—and then fining—RVers for spending their money inappropriately, “without sufficient regard for others.” Everywhere all at once no one wanted to be seen stepping up into or down out of a motor home, even if they were using it to go see Grandma in Sun City.

  So why then was Nate looking down at a parking lot full of brand-new RVs?

  It was up north in the high desert—Antelope Valley—fifty miles by air from Baldwin Hills, a parking lot behind an old dead Ford factory. Or it had been dead. Ford had built the plant ten miles outside of Palmdale in 2017 to turn out a hybrid with a forgettable name that some unforgettable-name-creation company in San Francisco had come up with. Ford had bought robots, hired a few union humans for the sake of appearances, and cranked out a thousand automobiles a day for two years, parking them door to door, head to tail, in a five-acre fenced lot. They were all painted beige. Then it ended, at midnight on a Thursday. The plant was shut down, locked up, the last of the cars loaded onto railcars on the spur out back, and that was that.

  But now this was this. An RV factory in 2025? Nate was hovering at ten thousand feet. The Crow’s undercarriage target & track camera threw the scene below onto his monitor. The unit had a long lens, gave him a view that was like standing on a hill fifty feet away. He watched as a tall and wide door on the smallest of the Ford plant’s four buildings rolled up and a fresh RV was birthed. The model wasn’t much changed from the old days: a boxy behemoth, shiny two-tone brown. Gas-powered. He could tell it was gas-powered but the motor wasn’t warmed up, coughing white smoke out the tailpipe. It sped out of the plant and was driven at a good clip to its place in the front row in the lot, next to a sibling. On the far end of the lot were a dozen bare-bones truck chassis waiting to be built upon. The big garage door was already descending. The RV driver stepped down out of the motor home, trotted across the asphalt, and slipped under the door, barely making it before it closed. Somebody was messing with him, workplace humor. It was 115 degrees down there.

  Whitey’s transport had been on the ground ten minutes, parked inside the fence close to the side of the building. The long blades still rotated slowly—probably something to do with keeping the bird’s AC going—but Whitey hadn’t gotten out. Then a second transport blew in. A man with a shaved head—Nate guessed Central or South American—got out of the back of the second helo, as if it were a limo. Getting out was a struggle for the shaved-head man because he was crippled up, dead legs. A second man came out with him who could have helped, but the helper never helped, just stood by. The first man was strapped into a MotoWalker in a sitting position. He rolled out of the back of the helo—roughly, in fits and starts—and then the robotic device took him upright, brace-bars straightening and locking into place. They were like stainless steel crutches and came up under his armpits to hold him straight, with small retractable wheels on the ends so he could roll. The man squared his shoulders and ran his hand over his shaved head. He was only disabled from the hips down. He was wearing a flashy grape-colored suit wholly inappropriate for the location and the time of day and the season of the year. Or the decade. He was short, when you subtracted the extra three or four inches the MotoWalker had just added. He wore reflector sunglasses.

  Whitey still hadn’t come out of the first helicopter.

  Nate centered the camera sight on the machine-assisted man. “Capture,” he said. A recorder started recording. “Close on the face. Track and ID.” The lens came in tighter, tight enough to see the blue cloudless sky reflected in the hombre’s shitty-looking sunglasses. Nate reached under the dash and relinked to the home office.

  “Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Iberriz,” a man’s voice said almost immediately over the radio. “DOB: Eight–twenty–eighty-nine. Place of Birth: South America. Principality: Unknown, possibly Peru. Current Address: Multiple Addresses, District: East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights. Citizenship: Unknown, possibly Peruvian.”

  Nate was missing his radio girl Carrie. Radio Ron didn’t have much personality. “Occupation…” the radio voice began.

  Nate interjected a guess, “Uh…orthodontist, Pasadena.”

  “Laborer,” the robo interrupted, “Unemployed since two thousand fourteen. Incarcerated: two thousand six to two thousand ten—Men’s Correctional, San Luis Obispo. Two thousand eleven to two thousand fourteen—Lompoc. Two thousand nineteen to two thousand twenty—High Desert Prison/Susanville.”

  “There you go,” Nate said.

  “Physicality: Differently-Abled since two thousand twenty-one.”

  “And the gang affiliation I’m guessing would be—”

  “Inca.”

  Ignacio “Nacho” Iberriz was still standing out there in the high desert sun. Whitey was still making him wait. More workplace humor? Iberriz apparently had enough waiting and pivoted and started to locomote toward Whitey’s helo. The MotoWalker was designed to roll on its wheels until it came to a change in whatever surface was underneath that necessitated a step. Then a wheeled foot would rise—the brace-bar unlocking and breaking at the knee—and set down. And then it was the other leg’s turn. The device had an unexpected grace to its movement, as if it had been designed by an injured runner or dancer.

  The hatch opened and Whitey got out. The automatic eye of Nate’s camera detected the new action at the other helo and quickly shifted, finding Whitey. It closed in until his face filled the screen.

  “Scanning for ID…” the voice said, the program back home at Parker Center going to work.

  “Yeah, I know who he is,” Nate said and reached under the console in a hurry and killed the link, lest there be a record of who was where
when. Coming out behind Whitey was another man, another Brown man. “But I don’t know who you are,” Nate said.

  The third man was tall, barrel-chested, wore a white, crisp quayabera shirt and shiny black skinny-toe Western boots. And a black cowboy hat. He wasn’t a cowboy. He looked like a businessman, but a businessman from somewhere else, somewhere harder and tougher than LA, somewhere where the sun beat down even hotter. Import/export would have been a good guess. The drug trade. Nate considered switching on the identifier again but thought better of it. The tall man was standing too close to Whitey to risk Whitey getting ID’d too and all of it going into the system. Besides, something told Nate this third man wasn’t going to be in anybody’s book, at least not in the US.

  The Black cop introduced the two Browns and they shook on it, whatever it was.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I’m gonna miss you, Johnny,” Nate said, watching Johnny Santo come out of a Mexican restaurant with a woman-not-his-wife on his arm. He was sucking on a mint, probably the free kind from the bowl next to the cash register. He was wearing that polyester Jesus Malverde shirt again and had a spring in his step, practically merengue-dancing down the sidewalk, looking about as satisfied with life as a man ever looks. In LA, anyway. Two CROs with their gunners, who just happened to be walking by at the right moment, closed in on him from different directions. The gunners already had guns in hand, so Santo lost his it’s-all-good look in a hurry. He raised his hands so as not to get shot outright. Nate’s friend Tucker was one of the CROs. Tucker engaged Santo in conversation while the other CRO patted him on the belly. Big surprise: Johnny Santo had a gun in his waistband. And he was still on parole, too.