by Robert Stone
The Secretary's special labor in the months following his embarrassing exposure to the press had been translation. He had been working on little reading costumes calculated to charm an audience, making crowns, transliterating the Greek alphabet. He had fashioned a pillowcase with an eye torn in it for his poem about Cyclops, Poseidon's son:
Blinkered child of sea and sky
Made weak by the sly man'S trickery,
Conniving Odysseus laughs and chooses,
Leaves to you the cursed, the defense of island realm, resounding cavern.
Defending your island, your realms your caverns resounding.
Then one day he took it to their faces, a banner short and sweet, and on it read: APOTETELEMENON! A strange device to the cowards—Mission Accomplished! Yes, strange to this one and that one, cowards and defeatists! Mission Accomplished, or something close, Victory!
"Nobody's killing me now," the Secretary screamed. And raced them to the window again. It was a close-run thing, but he was overtaken and put to bed.
From the Lowlands
LEROY TRAVELED EAST into the high country pursued by little sense of sin. He had made a lot of money being no worse than anyone else in the San Francisco Peninsula data business and in his way contributing a lot. He had gone early to Silicon Valley; he had lived with his first wife in a bungalow, a tiny place in the bamboo near the Stanford golf course. She had worked as a keypunch operator for Bank of America, and he was hired by Lockheed as an analyst.
The place he was headed for was high in the Mountain West, a second home so far upstream on a river called Irish Creek that past it the canyon went to ground. The gorge was still two hundred feet from rim to riverbank, but beyond Leroy's it sank from sight and became a descent into the heart of the high desert. Here the mountain sheep had nowhere to go but down to escape danger, and they had learned over generations to leap from the exposed crags when startled, and disappear into the shadows and scattered sunlight of the sunken canyon.
In some ways the house Leroy had built—or caused to be built—reminded him distantly of the bungalow in Menlo Park. It was much larger, to say the least, and it had a swimming pool. But it accorded with an old need that he was not at all ashamed of: being close to the land. It stood at the far end of the only access road, a mile and a half beyond where the paving ended. Approaching his house the track was only surfaced and sealed. Paving, the realtor had sworn to him, would come soon. When he had spent a few weeks in the house he was not sure he required paving, which would mean his road's extension and more development along the canyon.
Decades before, Leroy had happened by a university research center on one of the rare Saturdays when he was free from Lockheed, and had seen some acquaintances from the company playing with computers. They were the old computers of that time, which, people joked, looked like the Dnepropetrovsk hydroelectric dam. His friends were playing a primordial war game, dogfighting with virtual spaceships, blasting each other's entities on the screen. They were whooping and dancing and having enormous fun. Leroy thought it looked like fun too. He was as fun-loving as anyone, though he liked practical jokes most. He loved what had once been called the put-on, in his own definition of it. For example, on his BMW there was a bumper sticker that read: LOST YOUR CAT? CHECK MY TREADS.
His mountain property had two levels, both of them set well back from the river so he could assure himself that he was not like the reckless householders downstream. Some of them had balanced themselves on picturesque but heart-stopping outcrops, where they could crawl to the edge of their decks and look down over the rim into swirling white water. Leroy never failed to see, in his imagination, their terrifying fall into the canyon, houses and Franklin stoves and heritage tomatoes and trophy wives in a fatal descending whirl.
Leroy and one of his friends from the company were among the young men who employed the principles of the early computer game to establish their electronics company. They called it "electronics" at first, but it became ever so much more. He and the friend, whom he called Dongo, prospered. Life on the San Francisco Peninsula was good; he and Dongo could smoke dope and pick up chicks at Kepler's and party. Everyone had a beard and grew their hair long; it was a statement. You could laugh at the nine-to-five dorks from IBM with their white shirts and scabby close shaves. They laughed back, but not for long when their scene looked like it was going under. Then he and Dongo would sing a song about the IBM types that went:
They're drowning in the lowland, low land low,
They're drowning in the lowland sea.
It had been a long time since those days, but every once in a while the song came back to Leroy. As the drive to his house took him over the high prairie, the sweet land smelling of sage and pine, the plain disappeared into a dizzying impossible perspective that ended where the white-clouded, snowy, sawtooth-shaped peaks rose. Approaching the head of the valley, he hummed and sang "drowning in the lowland sea," not really thinking of IBM or Dongo or the First Girl or anything much. Just sort of singing along with the tumbling tumbleweed.
Dongo had really liked to party. Too much party, old Dongo. Dongo had turned Leroy on to acid once—there had been a lot around then—but Leroy, with his enthusiasm for work and his strong business sense, had not gone near it ever again. In fact, watching Dongo had led him to stop using dope altogether. Moreover, he had found a chick, not that he would call her a chick anymore. A woman, a woman who taught him all of love that he would ever know, which on the emotional level was not really too much. Barbara, the most beautiful of all things California.
Then Dongo starting losing it. Really. Dongo got so into acid that he thought he could teleport himself to remote galaxies. Much as Leroy loved the land, Dongo went utterly insane over the idea of it and moved to the toolies of Humboldt County. Leroy had been forced to take what was called in Communist dictatorships of the time "strong measures," as his Romanian girlfriend Ilena liked to say. Ilena's mother had been a commissar. Leroy had been forced to cut poor Dongo loose. He was able, legally it turned out, to take over the business, a fair-means-or-foul sort of thing, a dire necessity. One way or another.
Times were not then tough, but there was no knowing. Dongo was beyond help. Leroy never knew quite why he called Paul Dongo. There was just something Dongo-like about the guy. Poor Dongo hadn't liked it much from the first day, although he had never said "Don't call me Dongo." Probably, Leroy thought, he sensed where the power was. The petty resentment actually helped when the time came to move on, and Leroy, as anyone would, did what he had to do. What happened then was Barbara the beautiful, on some kind of fucking cosmic ray, beamed herself to Dongo up in Dongoville, California, but she came crawling back after a year and Leroy unwisely married her. Dongo died—had to happen. Leroy's marriage was brief.
Halfway across the prairie below Leroy's house was the Salikan River, of which his Irish Creek was a fork, and along the Salikan was an old mining town with the same name. Half the town's houses were post-sixties, alpine style or Old Westy, but there were fifties ranch houses, a steepled Mormon church and a black-and-white-movie motel at the top of the bluff over the river. An old general store stood beside it that had an Oakland Tribune newspaper rack on the wood sidewalk outside, though Oakland was nearly a thousand miles away, and insofar as Leroy could remember there was no such paper. Leroy parked his BMW out front.
The newspaper rack was always empty because Beck, the proprietor, was afraid that people would take newspapers without paying. Leroy himself had made a practice of doing that. Still, he wondered about Beck's savage irascibility. People around Salikan called Beck Caw or Crow or Craw or something of the sort, some sound they made. Craw was an older gentleman, as the wry youth of California said, God knew how old. There was a woman who worked with Craw sometimes, and Leroy had taken to thinking of her as Slob, which was his name for poorly groomed, overweight individuals. Slob, he presumed, was Craw's daughter, but who knew the relationships between these people?
Leroy straighte
ned up as he stepped onto the wood sidewalk. Maybe it was the influence of westerns: something about shed-like buildings with wooden sidewalks made a man feel like walking tall. And Leroy was in good shape. He worked out regularly. He thought it made him stand out from the obese jerkarounds you saw in town and at the downscale mall in the valley. The little bell tinkled when he opened the door of Beck's store. Craw and Slob were both behind the counter.
"Afternoon, folks," Leroy said going in.
Old Craw looked at his watch. Slob gave him a soft hello.
"Hey, Beck," Leroy asked, "you got the Oakland Tribune?" Leroy thought he might have made that joke before. Old Beck never looked at him. The daughter answered.
"Hasn't been an Oakland Tribune for a great many years," she said. "I'm surprised you ever heard of it, your age."
Leroy was pleased. Indeed, he appeared considerably younger than his years.
"I haven't," he told her, and walked away. He heard the old man start to say something but get shushed by his daughter.
Strolling down to the dairy case to get some skim milk, he was reminded of the first heavyset person he referred to as Slob. He was good at nicknames, at least he thought so, and pretty original. Some people, he thought, practically named themselves by not caring how they looked. The other Slob was a young man who had worked for Leroy, a bit of a genius type, too much so. Leroy had started out calling him George. Slob the First became political and made objectionable noises about contracts with the Defense Department. Some systems went into the making of cool modes of weaponry that featured nasty surprises for enemy personnel and their dependents. Of course they did terrible things to people—they were weapons, for Christ's sake. As much as anything else they reminded Leroy of the computer war games at the research institute. But it was the age of the agitator; people needed to piss and moan. If Slob First had not been so obnoxious about it, Leroy would not have conceived the plan to make him disappear, corporately speaking.
While Leroy was fetching his quart of milk and dozen eggs, a bunch of drive-through tourists came in. The man was slight and overpolite to Craw and Slob behind the counter, tentative and ingratiating as your drive-through tourists tended to be. His wife acted the same way, smiley, hi there. The wife was a babe in nice-fitting jeans and a tight University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, T-shirt with a blue hoodie over her hair. They had a child of about five, who unfortunately for the kid resembled his dad. While the couple fiddled around the counter, the lad wandered down the rows toward the dairy section where Leroy was getting his milk and eggs.
The little boy looked about him blankly. Leroy had a sudden impulse. Craw kept the candy under his birdy eye at the counter but his supply boxes were in the back, near where Leroy was standing. One carton of expensive chocolate bars stood beyond the child's reach but available to Leroy's. He reached up and took a bar of imported chocolate out. Catching the child's eye, he made a small clicking sound of conspiracy and handed it to him. After a moment the child took it and put it in his pocket.
At the counter Leroy paid a simmering Craw Beck for his purchases. Seven dollars, no less. The family group was at the counter behind him. Before Leroy reached the door, Craw exploded.
"You plan on paying for the boy's candy?"
He was speaking not to Leroy but to the father of the little boy.
"What candy?" the man asked.
"The candy in his pocket!" Craw said with a vicious smile. Beside him, Slob frowned. The wrapper was in plain view.
"He's not even allowed to eat candy!" the father said. More surprised, Leroy thought, than angry. A mild type. Leroy had paused with one hand on the door, a disinterested onlooker.
Turning to look at Leroy, the woman recalled what she had told herself she could not possibly have seen in the space of a moment. She gasped and pointed at him.
"That man!" she said. "He gave it to Todd. I'm sure he did."
Leroy shrugged. Slob looked at him suspiciously.
"Well, damn well put it back or somebody pay for it," said Craw.
Leroy went out at once and put the scene behind him.
Halfway between Beck's store and the post office he encountered a tall woman whom he had nicknamed Grannykins. It was not that she was particularly grandmotherly, only that the plain metal-rimmed glasses she wore lent her long lean face a certain severity. She came under Leroy's scornful definition of older lady; in fact, she was about his age. She was graying but distinctly handsome and had friendly brown eyes. He had first seen her on a horse. She had said hello to him that day, and he had the distinct impression that she was putting moves on him. It was just sad, he thought. She was so much older than any babe he would ever be seen with. Was she serious?
"And how are you today?" she asked, smiling. "I'm Sal," she reminded him. This woman, Leroy knew well enough, was really named Salikan, after the river. The idiotic name dated her pretty well, he thought, and he wondered how she lived with this embarrassment. Salikan, a dog's name. The thought made him grin, which she took as indicating pleasure in her company. He had the strongest impulse to explain to her what was funny, give her a tip about herself. Leroy had been told that Sal's parents had been rich hippies, descended from a Helena molybdenite tycoon. Leroy had never introduced himself, although she had told him her name many times before.
"Hi!" he said. He had to stop when she did.
"How are things with your house?"
"They're good."
"I ride up by your canyon sometimes," she said.
How pathetic, thought Leroy.
"Yeah, I've seen you."
"I don't go up there so much now. I've got wary."
"Right," Leroy said. "You can't be too careful."
Over her shoulder, he saw the flustered-looking tourist family approaching, snuffling little junior, angry mom, subdued loser dad. Sal saw that she had lost Leroy's interest and went away.
"Well, so long," she said. "You take care."
As the tourists passed, Leroy went into the post office to check his mail. Inside, a clerk stood behind the open parcel counter holding a fly swatter. Leroy went past him to the bank of post boxes, opened his and scooped out the useless paper, real estate ads and supermarket flyers. Just then his eye fell on a row of federal WANTED posters on a glass-cased bulletin board beside the street door and he sauntered over to inspect them. One of the fugitives, Leroy observed, was born Alan Ladd. He sometimes used "Bum" as an alias. Hilarious, thought Leroy. In fact, the man's face was a little daunting. The FBI wanted Bum for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for the crime of murder, committed a few times over on little provocation. At a distance his picture resembled the old cartoon image of a burglar, plug-ugly in the striped shirt and wool cap. But even Leroy could see that there was a man behind the small dead eyes that looked at you over his flute of a nose. The peculiar nose, the lines around his mouth and his round chin made him look like a bad puppet. Pinocchio. The poster said Alan Ladd had worked as a dog trainer; his face was both swinish and prim. Leroy went out, climbed into his BMW and began the drive upriver toward his house.
The huge sky over the valley showed a late-August afternoon light, and even from the car Leroy could savor the deliciousness of the waning day. In the distance a front was gathering, an enormous darkening tower that rose from the mountaintops to an azimuth where innocent blue began. The clouds, bank heaped on bank, spread like an angel army across a quarter of the sky and closed on the near hills. In his own way Leroy was stirred by the drama of it, but he was not in the mood for rain, not on the road up. The fleecy cumuli that had graced the afternoon were giving way before the front; sudden cloud shadows raced over the landscape. The idea of rain, the shadows, caused him a quick confusion of ideas. They were positive: things changed and he thrived. A man who believed in himself was free. The secret was that you could almost make your own weather if you stayed smart and strong. You could sort of make yourself the mysterious force. Leroy thought good things. He shivered.
The road before him c
limbed in tightening switchbacks, and it was pure pleasure to follow its turns up the slope. Sometimes his heading was the range of shadowed white peaks across the valley, sometimes the field of black volcanic rock that stretched away from the river. To drive such a car and know what you were doing was to own the road.
Climbing, he passed the last few frame ranch gates and then there were no more cattle grids or mailboxes. Driving the last paved half mile, he came to a cleared lot on the canyon side of the road. A house was being built there, a house as big as Leroy's own, as far as he could tell. About a dozen men worked on the construction—carpenters laying and nailing boards on an upper story, roofers, painters applying an undercoat to a completed separate building across the lot. A mobile roller for laying tar and an articulated loader were parked just off the road. Leroy pulled onto the shoulder. The building lot was surrounded by birches bending to a wind he could not feel at first. One moment, walking toward the construction, he was dazzled by sunlight, dazed by the afternoon heat that rose from the bone-dry earth. In the next, he was in the shadow of the imminent storm overhead, grazed by the wind out of the trees. The crewmen were all looking up the valley into the storm that seemed about to break.
Leroy was curious about the house that would be neighboring his. Its rising presence agitated him. On the one hand, he was annoyed that construction upriver was advancing. On the other hand—and he had not thought of it much before—there were times when the loneliness of his location impinged on his satisfaction. He wanted to start a conversation with the men working on the site.
"Hi," he called out. Right then he knew it was going to turn out wrong somehow. "Anything I can do for you guys?"
All of them turned toward him at once. For a long time none of them gave him any answer. He looked at each of them in turn. One of them looked like the man on the poster. It caused him a slight intake of breath. Of course it wasn't the same man, but the brutality of the workman's face shocked him a little. Then it seemed that all of them, the lot, had some weird vocabulary of features in common. It looked as though all they were going to do was stare at him, tight-lipped, hard-eyed. Then the man whose face he had thought most resembled the poster said:
