by Don DeLillo
“Let me watch this.”
“He gets shot. He dies in the street.”
“I’m too good to you,” she said.
“You’re not good to me. I’m good to you.”
“I’m too good. That’s always been my trouble.”
“I’m good to you,” he said. “You don’t know how good.”
“Ralphie used to tell me. ‘You’re too good to people. Don’t be so good all the time.’ He was right, as usual.”
Talerico spread some jam on a slice of leftover toast.
“Who the hell is Ralphie?”
“Only my brother.”
“That gets thrown out of college. That makes his parents ashamed. Which, that brother?”
“Stop hanging around. I don’t like it when you hang around. Go out. Jog, like a Canadian.”
He took a bite out of the stiff toast.
“When you water—listen to this, Annette. When you water, if you put too much water or do it too often, you cause little punctures in the leaf. You know which one’s the Swedish ivy. It’s hanging. It’s the only one in the living room that hangs down. Now I’m going away again so I’m telling you so you’ll be careful. Go easy. Don’t be in such a hurry to empty the can. Too much water, the cells burst.”
“You make me tired. You’re why I’m tired all the time.”
“I’m good to you,” he said “You don’t know what goes on out there.”
Selvy held the magnum by the barrel. Dipping slightly, he moved his arm slowly back, then brought it forward, swiftly, tossing the gun, end over end, into the Rio Grande.
He walked back along the dirt road toward Sample’s Café. There was a pickup next to his car at the side of the house. Nadine stood on the front steps, looking a little shiny.
“Changed your clothes finally,” he said.
“I’ve decided to become a total blue-jeans person.”
“Now that you’re home.”
“I might even sleep in them. That’s an open threat. My dad’s here.”
“I know.”
Some of the houses had been abandoned. Others were half ghosts, apparently still occupied, but with windows out completely, or with soft plastic sheeting replacing the glass, torn sheeting, sheeting rippling in the wind, and with sand everywhere, and tire tracks in the harder dirt, distinct reliefs, like tribal markings left behind to clarify local weather and geology.
Her father sat at the kitchen table, using a penknife to pick at the insides of a fluorescent light fixture. He was older than Selvy had expected, with a raw look about him, all brick and sand, and a tie-dyed blue bandanna around his neck. Functional, Selvy thought. Keep the sweat from moving freely.
“My dad, Jack Rademacher. Glen with one n Selvy.”
They sat around a while talking about the weather. Nadine went out to buy an ice cream at one of the general stores up the road. There was a lull. Her father kept scratching at the fixture.
“I think she came in with beer.”
“No thanks.”
“I don’t take a drink myself.”
“Lately I’ve kept away.”
“I never have. I never saw the point.”
“I have,” Selvy said. “But recently I decided to keep away. As recently as a day or two ago.”
“What was she doing in New York?”
“Acting.”
Jack shook his head, although not in disbelief. It was a comment, bitterly negative. He mumbled something about the ballast in the fixture. Needed new ballast.
“She saw her sister.”
“In Little Rock,” Selvy said.
“That one’s damn crazy. We lost hope for that one early. What the hell’s she doing out there?”
“Nadine went alone.”
“She must be selling picture frames,” Jack said.
He finished what he was doing and went upstairs. Through the window Selvy saw Nadine talking to a couple of small girls, dusty kids in dresses they’d outgrown. Jack came back down, carrying an old pair of boxing gloves, which he set before Selvy on the kitchen table. They were small and discolored, not very heavily padded, the leather peeling everywhere.
“I used to fight for money. Before her sister was born. The border towns. Their mother wanted me to give it up. I had over twenty fights.”
“Weren’t you past the age, even then?”
“I was fit,” Jack said. “I never trained. I never ran the way they do. Didn’t see the point. But her mother was carrying the first. What the hell, I stopped.”
He carried the gloves back upstairs, returning a moment later. There was another lull. Nadine said something that made the two girls laugh. One of them jumped several times, laughing, the tips of three fingers in her mouth.
“You know about that training base,” Selvy said. “You go west to Marathon and then it’s southeast of there, near where the silver mines used to be, off on some mud road.”
“Mule deer, some dove and quail.”
“Is it still there?”
“They pulled out in July.”
“Where to?”
“Didn’t say where to. Try Central America.”
“Did they take everything with them?”
“They left some barracks standing,” Jack said. “There were a dozen or so of those long barracks. Now there’s two, maybe three.”
“I’d heard they might move.”
“I couldn’t tell you why, exactly. They were never too free with information, were they? Always was a secretive kind of place. They had their reasons, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“If they didn’t have their reasons, they wouldn’t have plunked down in the middle of nowhere.”
Selvy drove his car down to a lookout just above the river. He walked back up to the house.
That night he sat on a cot in an almost bare room off the kitchen. The temperature kept dropping. He heard the plastic sheeting on the windows of nearby houses whip and snap in the wind.
The girl came in.
“What’s the plan?”
“No plan,” he said.
“We’re leaving soon, aren’t we?”
“I thought you’d want to stay a while. He seems to like having you back. You want to stay, don’t you?”
“Do I look like I’ve got long cow tits, wearing this sweater?”
“I don’t know. Take it off.”
“You want to go alone, don’t you? Never mind. I didn’t say that.”
“Take it off. Then I can tell you.”
She bent a leg back and kicked the door shut, lightly. She took off the sweater, and her shoes and jeans, and stood there in her briefs. Appliquéd beneath the elastic band were the words: Not tonight—I’ve got a headache. Selvy leaned back on the cot, knees bent up, to unlace his shoes.
“I’m beginning to think you maneuvered me here.”
“What for?” he said.
“So you could leave me with someone. That way you wouldn’t have to just slip out some morning with me in some motel room, sound asleep, leaving me there. You want to leave me with him.”
He took off his shirt.
“If I had maneuvers in mind, I’d have left you at your sister’s. I showed up, didn’t I, after your sister’s.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“This is the end of the line,” she said.
He smiled, stepping out of his pants. Nadine smiled too, moving toward him and delivering a mock blow to his arm. They tried to make love quietly. It was an old cot, and squeaked, and Jack was somewhere nearby, moving about. She kept on smiling, her eyes closed. When they were in bed together, everything about her suggested appealing healthiness. It bothered him. She seemed to think sex was wholesome and sweet.
Selvy would never understand her. All the more reason to think of her as the girl. But he was beginning to understand something else. Black limousine. Certain things were becoming clear.
After Nadine left to go to her room, he heard Jack come downstairs and knock at
his door. He showed Selvy a photograph of three men he used to go fishing with. They stood in front of a pickup, wearing trail vests and wading boots.
“This one’s Jack Brady. Same as me. Jack. This is Vernon Floyd. That one’s Buck Floyd.”
Selvy nodded.
“Now that pickup. I goddamn swerved to avoid a hole about so wide and my rear tires went for a walk on me. Truck swapped ends for sure. Now Vernon. He called me every name. Brother Buck couldn’t talk for laughing.”
He looked at Selvy, who nodded again. Then he took the picture back upstairs. Selvy listened to the sheeting as it snapped in the wind.
It was becoming clear. He was starting to understand what it meant. All that testing. The polygraphs. The rigorous physicals. The semisecrecy. All those weeks at the Mines. Electronics. Code-breaking. Currencies. Weapons. Survival.
All the paramilitary sessions. The small doses of geopolitics. The psychology of terrorism. The essentials of counterinsurgency.
What it meant. The full-fledged secrecy. The reading. The routine. The double life. His private disciplines. His handguns. His regard for precautions. How your mind works. The narrowing of choices. What you are. It was clear, finally. The whole point. Everything.
All this time he’d been preparing to die.
It was a course in dying. In how to die violently. In how to be killed by your own side, in secret, no hard feelings. They’d been grooming him. They’d spotted his potential, his capacity for favorable development. All this time. It was a ritual preparation.
We are teaching you how to die violently. This is the only death that matters, steel or lead or tungsten alloy, death by hard metal, taking place in secret. To ensure the success of the course, we ourselves will kill you.
He lay in the dark, smoking.
Sure. The rougher the testing, the more certain you can be they’re preparing you to die. They want perfect specimens, physically and otherwise. It’s less resonant if you’re flawed.
So. He’d be able to sleep now. Good.
All conspiracies begin with individual self-repression. They’d seen his potential. He’d checked off the right numbers in the elaborate profiles. They liked his style in the interviews. The computers approved.
Black limousine.
Of course. It was only fitting. All this time they’d been conveying him to the cemetery. In short hops. In stages. Now he knew. He’d sleep finally. Good.
He listened. The wind sound was haunting, a series of timed cries, level and clear. There was a change in direction and the wind’s speed increased. The sound grew very different. The wind met creaking obstacles, banging through the hulks nearby, the ghost structures with windows blown out and doors leaning, weeds coming up through the floorboards.
The girl came to him in the dawn, moon-striped and pale, with dream-brown eyes, knocking over a chair as she crossed the room. She scrambled under the blanket. It was freezing and they couldn’t stop trembling with cold-induced laughter as they pressed tight in the dark.
It hit seventy-five next day. They walked down the winding dirt road to the car, still parked near the river. Nadine sat on the fender. Selvy sat on the front end of the roof, his feet on the hood. The sky was glassy blue, marked by a single vapor trail formed in the wake of a passing plane.
“Are you as sluggish as I am?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s my biorhythms. They’re way out of whack today.”
“I’m great, I’m tuned.”
“Biorhythmically I feel awful.”
“You need a swim,” he said.
The river wasn’t wide here. On the Mexican side the rock wall was variously gray and copper, depending on the shadow line. Down here, with no buildings in view, no people around, it was all rocks and sky. A hawk sailed parallel to the cliff line where it ran straight for a fifty-yard stretch. He watched Nadine climb down to the lower bank, cautiously, skidding down the last dusty incline on her bottom, using her feet to brake.
Her voice was small, though remarkably clear.
“Got hit spang in the mouth with a pebble.”
She stripped to her briefs and stepped into the water. The river twisted here. From his perch he could see material suspended in the areas of water that were touched by the sun. Mineral particles, brownish sediment. She slipped full-body into the river, dog-paddling in small circles.
“Not too cold. I thought it might be colder. Haven’t done this in five years.”
Her voice kept changing as she turned toward the opposite bank, then circled back this way. He saw her touch bottom at the near bank and stand erect, running her hands through her hair. When she spoke again he could tell by the pure tone of her voice that she was looking up at him.
“Hey, bo, come on down, get a little wet.”
Selvy was looking across the river to the top of the rock wall. Two figures had appeared on the cliff line. First one, then the other ARVN ranger. He felt the briefest of regrets, thinking of his handguns. There was no mistaking the one he’d roughed up. Mustache. Wouldn’t take his eyes off Selvy. The other one, the knife squatter, the one who’d waited motionless in the microbus, didn’t mind tossing a look at Nadine.
She looked up that way, following Selvy’s gaze. Then she turned toward the car again. Her voice was very small.
“I don’t know more’n a monkey who they are.”
Selvy remained on the car roof, watching them.
“They’re not local people exactly,” he said. “Why don’t you stay right where you are for the time being? Put on your shirt if you want.”
The two men remained for a long moment on the cliff line. Stetsons, sunglasses, tight denim pants. Nothing behind them but clear sky. Finally they moved back. Because of their higher elevation, from Selvy’s vantage point, it took just two steps. They were out of sight.
The girl put on her jeans and climbed up to the lookout.
“This is turning into a Western,” she said.
“What was it before?”
“I don’t know what it was before. But it resembles a Western right now.”
“Nothing like a swim,” he told her. “You ought to be feeling better.”
Selvy got in the car and started it up. Nadine kept looking over to the Mexican side. When the car started moving, she walked after it, opened the door and got in. He drove up to the post office. Less than a hundred yards away, tourists were emerging from a bus.
Selvy got out of the car and went over to talk to the bus driver. Above the curved windshield, in the slot where destinations are lettered, appeared the words: WILD WEST AND MEXICO. Nadine watched the imprint of her wet underwear gradually appear on her jeans.
He came back to the car and leaned against the door on her side. A few of the tourists drifted down this way, going into the general store, taking pictures of each other.
“I’m leaving the car with you.”
“You want me to keep it for you.”
“I want you to keep it.”
“Keep it, period,” she said.
“That’s right.”
The tourists slowly spread through town, mostly older people and eight or nine Japanese. Selvy walked over to the house. Through the front window she saw him speaking to her father. He came back out, carrying a can of beer and a soft drink, also in a can. He held them in one hand back against his hip.
Nadine remained in the car, sipping the beer. Selvy leaned against the door. A man asked if he’d move the car. He wanted to take a picture of his wife standing near the post office door. The car was in the way. Selvy said no.
In pairs and small groups, the tourists eventually reassembled outside the bus. The driver appeared, unwrapping a stick of gum. No one stepped aboard until he was behind the wheel.
Selvy tossed the empty soda can onto the back seat. The girl’s jeans were wet, an explicit outline. Her shirt was wet in patches. She’d taken a map out of the glove compartment and was unfolding it elaborately, spreading it across the dash and up along the w
indshield. He walked over to the bus and stepped on. The door closed behind him with a splash of compressed air. In the brief moment before he slipped into his seat, Selvy noted something odd about the people, or the seating pattern, or something—he wasn’t sure what.
It wasn’t until they were well under way, heading west on U.S. 90, that he turned in his seat for a longer look. It was the Japanese. They were spread throughout the bus, singly or in pairs, nine of them, and they were all asleep. The other tourists talked, compared postcards, looked out the windows. It was as though the Japanese, secretly, by inborn means, had been able to communicate to each other the placid imperative: sleep.
He faced front again. They’d gone to sleep immediately and they continued sleeping despite the noise and motion. This apartness he’d always found interesting in Asians. This somehow challenging sense of calm. It only remained for him to discover whether they’d wake up simultaneously, raising their heads in unison.
3
All the windows were closed. The blinds were down. Lightborne double-locked the gallery door. Then he turned toward Odell and gestured, arms outstretched, palms up: what do we have?
Odell looked up from a book of etchings. He was older than Richie, but not much, and fuller in the face, although with the same prominent teeth. The book was titled Extraterrestrial Sex Positions.
Sixteen millimeter, he said. Considered an amateur film gauge at the time this footage was shot. No standard, or optical, sound track. Magnetic sound, if any, would have to be added. Problems there with certain projectors. Possible problems adapting 16mm to motion picture theaters. Schools and churches, yes. TV, yes.
“Wonderful,” Lightborne said. “Schools and churches, that’s wonderful.”
He’d had to strain to hear what Odell was saying. Odell spoke rapidly and sometimes indistinctly, with much more of an accent than his cousin had—a run-on Georgia voice, a clip-clop, rather than Richie’s slight but piercing twang.
Lightborne circled the small table that held the projector Odell had brought with him. They wouldn’t be able to view the film until the following day. The projector had a defective part, Odell had discovered, and it was ten p.m.—too late to find a replacement.
Curiously, Lightborne wasn’t disappointed. He found he was in no hurry to look at the footage. At some rudimentary level it was an experience he feared. He’d feared it all along, he realized. His involvement brimmed with fear.
