Stone Junction

Two: EARTH

The earth, being eager to generate, always produces something; you will imagine you see birds or beasts or reptiles in the glass.

—Philalethes

Transcription: Radio Call Between

Volta and Wild Bill Weber

VOLTA: Bill, it’s Volta. I need a decision about Daniel.

WILD B.: You’re sure he’s never been to any school?

VOLTA: As perfectly sure as the last time we discussed it.

WILD B.: Well, what about organic brain damage. Anything show up?

VOLTA: They’ve run every test they have. No evidence of impairment.

WILD B.: So why was he in a coma for nine weeks?

VOLTA: It’s what the Corpus Hermeticum calls ‘hiding on the threshold.’

WILD B.: Still pounding them dusty tomes, huh?

VOLTA: Still curious.

WILD B.: And curiouser and curiouser, I bet. Personally, I’m partial to Westerns.

VOLTA: If you keep tweaking me, I’ll let it be known that when we first met, you were still a Jesuit priest – and a rather sensational young Latin scholar.

WILD B.: Just more proof them books get you in trouble.

VOLTA: That’s like blaming your legs for taking you to the whorehouse.

WILD B.: (laughing) ‘Silence is golden.’

VOLTA: Indeed. And decision is of the essence. That’s why I need yours on Daniel. And I do understand that you have some personal work planned, that you’re tired of teaching, that you’re old and cranky and have lost your edge, but Daniel may be the student you’ve been looking for.

WILD B.: Didn’t know I was looking. But all right, you’ve met him. How do you feel?

VOLTA: He’s got a ferocious mind, and, for one so young, not completely at the expense of subtlety. He strikes to the meat, but he’s impulsive, of course – youth again – yet remarkably self-possessed. He’s held himself together through some hideous blows, and I think––

WILD B.: (cutting him off) Feel. How do you feel about him?

VOLTA: (after a long pause) Powerfully attracted; powerfully repelled.

WILD B.: Ah, so that’s what got your attention.

VOLTA: On further consideration, you may be the worst choice imaginable.

WILD B.: Are you appealing to my pride or perversity now?

VOLTA: I wasn’t aware you made the distinction.

WILD B.: (laughing) Sold. I’ll take him. But no more than eighteen months, and I get to go off to the desert in peace. Plus you owe me a serious favor.

VOLTA: What’s that now? About three hundred and seven?

WILD B.: At least.

VOLTA: The Wyatt Ranch? Two weeks?

WILD B.: I’ll be there.

Daniel was arrested an hour after he officially regained consciousness. Alexander Kreef, an attorney specializing in juvenile law, arrived a few minutes later with a handful of writs and injunctions. He was accompanied by Daniel’s physician, furious his patient had been disturbed without his approval.

The dour lieutenant attempting to question Daniel was not impressed. ‘Excuse me all to shit,’ he bowed to Dr Tobin, then turned to Alexander Kreef and said with nasty delight, ‘The kid ain’t retained attorney yet – just come to.’

Alexander Kreef smiled pleasantly. ‘I was hired by Mr and Mrs Wyatt, his aunt and uncle, and am entered as attorney of record.’ He handed an eight-pound pile of papers to the lieutenant, who looked at them and dropped them on the floor.

Alexander Kreef kept smiling: ‘You ask my client one more question and I’ll bust your ass so hard you’ll shit through your ears. No, on second thought, ask away; we get more dismissals on procedural errors than airtight alibis.’

‘Fuck you.’ The lieutenant glared at Alexander Kreef, then Daniel, but put his microcassette recorder away.

‘Uh-uh,’ Alexander chided, motioning for the recorder. ‘Inadmissible without due counsel.’

‘Wow. Gee, no, really? Not that it matters, Counselor – seems he don’t remember shit. I mean it’s pretty fucking hard to remember something as quiet as an explosion that blew your momma into memories and bone chips.’

‘You cold prick,’ Alexander hissed, but it was lost in Dr Tobin’s outraged howl: ‘Good God, Lieutenant! This young man has suffered profound cerebral trauma, been in a coma for nine weeks, and you expect him to answer questions? Did it ever enter your feeble mind that the boy might have some form of amnesia common to severe head injuries – total, partial, or conditional?’

‘I’m not a physician,’ Alexander said, ‘but total seems likely in this case.’

‘Yeah, I bet. Probably won’t even remember if he was the alleged Mrs Wyatt’s son, or who his alleged father might be.’ Course with that paper factory they were running, probably hard to keep all the identities straight. Yeah, fucking hard to remember anything.’ The lieutenant looked at Daniel. ‘Ain’t that right, kid?’

‘I don’t remember you,’ Daniel said, then shut his eyes.

Daniel’s hearing was held on December 7. The serious charges were dropped in exchange for his mitigated nolo contendere to the lesser counts. He was placed in the guardianship of his aunt and uncle until he was seventeen, at which time, assuming no further arrests, his record would be sealed. Some red tape remained, but Alexander Kreef turned it into Christmas ribbon, and on December 21 Daniel was released. He left that afternoon with Matilda and Owen Wyatt for a cattle ranch in the coastal hills, roughly fifty miles north of the Four Deuces.

The Wyatts were in their mid-fifties, a happy, vigorous couple who took great pleasure in their life on the ranch. The Wyatts owned 1400 acres, but had always run fewer cattle than the carrying capacity allowed. While a struggle at first, their operation was now considered a model of ecological intelligence.

Riding north with the Wyatts Daniel felt tentative and vaguely numb, though they were easy company. He learned that they’d known Volta for fifteen years, from the time he’d helped end a serious rustling problem that had plagued them.

‘So you’re repaying a favor?’ Daniel inquired, curious why they’d gotten involved.

‘Hell no,’ Owen told him, ‘we’re members of the Alliance.’

Daniel found that difficult to believe. ‘So the cattle are a front?’

‘Daniel,’ Tilly explained, ‘you don’t have to be illegal to be an outlaw.’

‘But you stood up in court and said I was a relative – perjury is illegal.’

‘The cops couldn’t prove otherwise,’ Tilly said, ‘so how do you know you’re not kin? We got big families on both sides, and both share the same motto: One Hand Washes the Other. Besides, we got tired of being so straight.’

As they pulled into the ranch just after dark, Owen pointed to his left. ‘You’ll be staying in that cabin down there past the feed barn. You see it there, got the light on?’

‘I see two lights,’ Daniel said.

‘The little cabin’s Wild Bill’s, your teacher – he pulled in a few days ago. Tilly and I’ll get the house warm and some chow on the table while you go down and say hello.’

‘If you want to,’ Tilly added.

‘You see who runs this outfit,’ Owen groused, but it was plain he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Nobody answered Daniel’s knock. He knocked louder, and when there was still no answer he opened the door and called, ‘Hello?’

When a voice squawked ‘What?’ he went in. Wild Bill Weber was sitting cross-legged and naked on the floor, slowly and methodically hitting himself between the eyes with a large rubber mallet. ‘Pleased to meet you, Daniel,’ Wild Bill said, continuing the rhythmic mallet blows. ‘I’m Bill Weber. We’ll be working together.’

‘You’re my teacher?’ Daniel said, not so much incredulous as nervously perplexed.

Wild Bill threw the mallet at Daniel’s head.

Ducking, Daniel heard the mallet whiz by his ear and hit the wall with a dull thock, the wooden handle clattering as it rebounded across the floor. He started to pick it up and hurl it back, but instead turned on Wild Bill and demanded, ‘Why did you do that? What are you doing?’

Wild Bill was watching carefully. After a moment he said, ‘Daniel, let’s get it clear right from the jump: I’m the teacher. I work on the questions; you work on the answers. So you tell me why I chucked my brain-tuner at you.’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘No idea.’

‘Good,’ Wild Bill nodded. ‘That’s the right answer. But from now on there are no right or wrong answers.’

‘I’m not following this at all,’ Daniel admitted.

‘You probably won’t for about a year, so just relax and do what I tell you and maybe we can both get through without much damage.’

The year passed quickly for Daniel, the time greased by routine. He woke at 4.00; did his dawn meditation; joined Tilly, Owen, and Wild Bill in the main house for breakfast at 5.00; worked until 4.00 in the afternoon; did his evening meditation; ate dinner at 6.00; did the dishes if it was his turn; had free time from then till 9.45; received formal instruction from Wild Bill between 9.45 and 9.50; and then did his dream meditation and went to bed at 10.30. The diversity of the routine saved Daniel from boredom.

The day’s work was anything from branding cattle to scrubbing the kitchen floor. Daniel fixed fence, fed stock, and cut wood. They planted and cut hay and did special projects, like building a smokehouse. He usually worked with Owen or Tilly, for Wild Bill flatly refused any direct contact with the cattle, dismissing them as ‘twisted critters and dumb insults to wild spirit.’ Tilly and Owen argued otherwise – persuasively, Daniel thought – and the subject caused some strain. But one winter night some lightning-spooked steers broke down the corral. Wild Bill saddled up and rode out with the rest of them in the storm to herd the cattle home, bringing the last strays in well after breakfast.

Owen grinned hugely as Wild Bill rode in, enjoying the sight of Bill working cattle as much as the return of the steers. ‘Well, well,’ Owen had greeted him, ‘git along li’l dogies.’

Wild Bill reined up sharply, barking, ‘Don’t be getting no goddamn notions now. I might be a fanatic, but I’m no purist. As long as I’m living here, I’ll lend a hand when you’re truly pressed. Don’t mean I’m joining the fucking Grange.’

Daniel’s three daily meditations, like the ranch work, shared only a structural formality. Wild Bill’s instructions had been brief: ‘Morning meditation is to fill your mind; evening meditation is to see what it’s filled with, and dream meditation is to empty it. You’ll figure out right away that filling it, seeing it, and emptying it are the same, but keep in mind that they couldn’t be the same unless they were different. So it’s not so much concentrating on the purpose, as concentrating through it. This first week we’ll sit together and I’ll show you the postures and breathing and such, but after that you’ll do them alone in your cabin. I’ll check on you whenever I want. The first time I find you not doing your meditations, I’m through as your teacher. So if you ever want to quit and don’t have the guts to tell me so, all you have to do is let me catch you fucking off when you should be sitting.’

After showing Daniel the postures and appropriate breathing for each meditation, he’d explained, ‘Now the most important thing is to get your mind dialed in on Top Dead Center, focus down for depth, and put the needle right through the zero. I’ll show you what works for me.’

Wild Bill went to the closet, explaining over his shoulder, ‘I’m going to my audiovisual department. Can’t hardly call yourself a teacher these days without some audiovisuals.’ And had stunned Daniel by reaching in the closet and pulling out a human skeleton.

Daniel, though he flinched, didn’t say a word.

‘Okay,’ Wild Bill said, holding the skeleton by the spine, ‘before every meditation you do this little exercise called “Counting the Bones.” Probably the oldest psychic woo-woo practice in the world – goes all the way back to the Paleolithic shamans as far as I can follow. What you do is simple: You imagine your skeleton, and then, starting with the toes, count your bones. And I don’t mean that “one, two,” shit – just see each bone clear in your mind and move on. You go up the body from the toes, both legs at once, join at the pelvis, shoot up the spine, swoop across the ribs, run out the arms, sail back to the shoulders, up the neck to the skull, and then right to the center of your brain.’

‘The brain isn’t a bone,’ Daniel said.

‘Neither is your dick,’ Wild Bill explained.

If Daniel found such explanations baffling, he was even more bewildered by the five-minute daily segment that constituted his formal study. Wild Bill asked one question and Daniel had five minutes to answer. Wild Bill never indicated if an answer was right, wrong, faulty, inspired, weak, provocative, or ill-considered. And the questions were such that the answers couldn’t be checked.

‘Where did you set your fork when you finished your waffles this morning?’

‘That bird we saw in the orchard – what color was its throat?’

‘What did Tilly say about the cornbread recipe Owen claims he learned from his Grandma?’

‘When the wind shifted along Fern Creek this afternoon, which direction did it blow?’

During his dream meditation, supposedly emptying his mind, Daniel thought about the questions and his doubtful answers. Slowly he became aware of himself in the world, seeing what he saw, doing what he did: laying the posthole digger next to the picket maul; the shapes of clouds; the curved black plume of a cock valley quail on the fencepost; the phase of the moon.

But no matter how much he concentrated in the physical moment or focused through meditation, he kept hearing his mother scream, ‘Daniel! Run!’ And as his numbness gave way to grief, and grief to the buried rage of depression, the only question he really wanted answered was what had happened in that alley.

He told Wild Bill, ‘Volta said he would investigate my mother’s death and let me know what he learned – he gave me his word. And in ten months I’ve heard from him once, to say there was no progress. I guess I better do it myself, which means I’ve got to quit here and go back to Berkeley. It’s nothing personal. I mean, it’s nothing between you and me; it’s with Volta.’

‘Then take it up with him.’ Wild Bill shrugged. ‘But I’ll tell you this: If Volta gave you his word, I can stone guarantee two things – he’s working on it, and he’ll let you know. Volta may be the most honorable man I ever met. To a fault, perhaps. And besides, AMO has an extraordinary intelligence network. You won’t do any better on your own. And you do understand that if you just take off, Tilly and Owen might catch some shit. My suggestion is to talk to Volta. Give him a call in the morning. And sleep in if you want, since I guess we’re done with school.’

‘Let me talk to Volta first,’ Daniel said. ‘I would have before, but I don’t have a number for him.’

‘I got about twenty,’ Wild Bill said.

But Daniel didn’t need them. Volta arrived the next morning with a letter from Shamus. They went to Daniel’s cabin.

‘Before you read it,’ Volta said, ‘let me supply some context. Shamus is hiding. When the bomb exploded, it aborted the plutonium heist; therefore, there was no overt connection. But there were suspicions––’

‘I know,’ Daniel interrupted. ‘They asked me about him specifically. I couldn’t remember.’

‘It’s these damn computers. They probably pulled anybody who’d made a try, came up with him fleeing the Four Deuces with a woman and child – an idiot could see the connection. We’ve got to recruit more people with computer knowledge so we can either eliminate the information they want to retrieve or replace it with what we’d like them to have.’

Daniel said pointedly, ‘But nobody knows where Shamus is, right? Not the cops, not you?’

‘That’s correct.’ Volta smiled. ‘Forgive the digression on the skills the Alliance lacks. But while we didn’t know where he is, we did let it be known that we’d like to talk to him about the other people involved in the plutonium job.’

‘How did you do that? Let him know?’

‘We went looking for the others hard enough that the pressure was felt. Thus, the letter. It was sent from Topeka, Kansas, for what that’s worth.’ Daniel read the letter carefully.

Volta––

There were three people involved besides myself, Annalee, and Daniel (who was included at Annalee’s discretion, against my advice). Of the other three, two did not know about the diversionary bomb nor who would deliver it. The third, who constructed the bomb, did not know what it was for, when it would be used, or who would deliver it. It was evidently a faulty bomb, though the maker insists that given the nature of the device, accidental detonation was virtually impossible.

Leave it alone. I accept the blame. You have my word I will never make another attempt. Let me be.

S.M.

Daniel read it again. It looked like Shamus’s handwriting, but he wasn’t sure.

Volta said, ‘I want your permission to put out word that your mom yelled for you to run before the bomb exploded. Perhaps we can draw Shamus out – we need more information about those involved.’

‘Of course,’ Daniel agreed, then added with clear annoyance, ‘I figured you would have already done that. I mean, Shamus deserves to know. He’s blaming himself.’

‘He should,’ Volta said.

‘What do you mean? Do you think he messed with the bomb?’

‘No. I have no evidence he tampered with the bomb; none at all. I only meant that he was the agent for the occasion. He enlisted her help in a patently dangerous undertaking.’

‘She wanted to help him.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Daniel paused before answering. ‘It’s complicated. I wanted to help my mom, once she was involved. And I wanted to help Shamus because I thought he felt I was jealous that Mom liked him. I wasn’t. I just wanted her to be happy. And he made her happy, I guess. And also because I believed in what Shamus was doing, and because of the excitement, too, I suppose. Like I said, it’s complicated.’

‘It’s all complicated, Daniel. That’s why it’s taking time to sort it out.’

‘So why didn’t you tell him that it wasn’t an accident?’

Volta said, ‘First of all, because we don’t know it wasn’t an accident. Secondly, because Shamus might already know it wasn’t.’

‘How?’

‘Maybe Shamus didn’t intend to leave any implicating witnesses.’ Volta cocked his head slightly. ‘You do understand that possibility?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Daniel said flatly.

‘Do you want to proceed on the basis of belief, Daniel, or should we seek some concrete information?’

‘Just proceed is good enough. You’re wrong about Shamus, though – but I guess that’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself.’

‘I intend to. I’d also intended to stay through tomorrow and enjoy the good company here at the ranch, but something urgent has developed in L.A., and I must be there this evening. But I can’t leave without asking how you’re doing with Wild Bill and his odd pedagogy.’

‘You’d have to ask him. I have no idea.’

Volta smiled faintly. ‘Well, just remember that from Wild Bill “maybe” is high praise.’

After Volta left, Wild Bill walked over to Daniel’s cabin, feigning surprise when he saw Daniel sitting on the porch. ‘Still with us?’

‘Still here,’ Daniel said absently.

‘What is it now?’

‘I don’t know. Volta… I don’t quite ever believe him.’

‘He’s done right by you, near as I can tell. He is a tad slippery, but that’s because he doesn’t leap to conclusions. Likes to get a grasp of what’s going on, the big picture, before he starts mucking around.’

Daniel said, ‘Is that why you called him last night?’

‘Wrong,’ Wild Bill chuckled.

‘Just a coincidence he shows up this morning?’

‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that coincidence is the natural state of affairs? “As above, so below.” Only time I worry about coincidence is when it quits happening. That’s when your ass goes up for grabs. But for now, why don’t you get your little cracker ass up off itself and go fetch the shotguns and a couple o’ boxes of number eights – I told Tilly we’d stroll up the creek and see if we could find us some quail for dinner.’

‘What about lunch? Should I pack some sandwiches?’

‘Probably a coincidence, but I already did it while you were jawing with Volta.’

The routine held through April without significant change. Daniel was restless and increasingly impatient with Wild Bill. The lovely spring weather didn’t help. Then, on the last night of April, during formal instruction, Wild Bill surprised Daniel with a question that had an answer, albeit an answer Daniel was reluctant to provide.

‘You know that skeleton I gave you out of my audiovisual department to help you counting bones?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you call it? I mean its secret name.’

‘Well,’ Daniel stalled, ‘it’s sort of ridiculous.’

‘Let me judge that. I’m an expert.’

‘I call him “Mudflaps.”’

Wild Bill laughed helplessly, catching his breath only long enough to shriek in delight, ‘Mudflaps! Mud … Flaps.’

‘I’m glad you find me so amusing,’ Daniel said.

Collapsing to his knees, Wild Bill managed to gasp, ‘Me too.’

Daniel turned and walked out the door.

The next day Daniel ignored Wild Bill. He did his meditations and his work, but with an air of bored efficiency and chilly indifference. That night Wild Bill surprised him again.

‘Three holy men were traveling together. One was an Indian yoga, one a Sufi dervish, one a Zen monk. In the course of their journey, they came to a small river. There had been a bridge, but it had washed out in the winter flood. ‘Let me show you two how to cross a river,’ the yogi said – and damned if he didn’t walk across it, right on top of the water. ‘No, no, that’s not the way,’ the dervish said. ‘Let me show you guys.’ He starts whirling in a circle, faster and faster until he’s a blur of concentrated energy and all of sudden – bam! – he leaps across to the other side. The Zen monk stood there shaking his head. ‘You fools,’ he said, ‘this is how to cross the river.’ And with that, he hiked up his robes and, feeling his way carefully, waded across.’

Daniel waited.

‘Now the night’s question is this: What’s the point of that story?’

Daniel said without hesitation, ‘The river.’

Wild Bill looked startled. ‘Maybe,’ he said. He considered a moment and then repeated, ‘Maybe.’

Daniel said, ‘Volta claims that’s high praise from you.’

‘He does, huh?’ Wild Bill said distractedly. ‘You know, I should piss you off more often.’ He smiled. ‘Mudflaps. It’s all I could do to keep from laughing all day.’

Daniel smiled with him.

The next morning Wild Bill surprised Daniel yet again, announcing, ‘It’s my turn to quit. Actually, I’m going on vacation for awhile, which means you’re on vacation too – free to do whatever you want as long as you pull your weight on the ranch.’

‘I must have done really well or horribly poor last night,’ Daniel said, finding himself unsettled by the sudden changes.

‘Naw, you’re just ready for other angles, and we’re both tired and need to unbend. Like it says in the book, “Take care, from time to time, to unbend your mind from its sterner employments with some convenient recreation, otherwise your spirits may be weighed down, and you might lose heart for the continuation of the work.”’

‘What book is that from?’

‘The Ordinal of Alchemy.’

Playfully, Daniel said, ‘I didn’t even know you could read.’

‘Used to all the time, but I started losing heart so bad I almost destroyed myself on the “convenient recreations.”’

‘Are you going to see Volta?’

‘I hope not,’ Wild Bill said. ‘Jenny Sue is more like it.’

An hour later Wild Bill set out down the dirt road, his banged-up rucksack on his back, humming a marching song for the occasion, a lyric that made up in heartfelt emotion what it lacked in scansion:

Jenny Sue, ooooooo Jenny Sue,

Ain’t nothing in this whole gloriously sweet and delightful world

That little gal won’t do …

In Wild Bill’s absence, Daniel, like most students, screwed off. He converted the morning and dream meditations into sleep, and the evening meditation was reformed into fishing. In his free time he tied trout flies, read among his promiscuous selections from the library, or played cribbage with Owen. May warmed into June and June drowsed into July without word from Wild Bill. Then, on the fourth of August, what was left of him returned.

Daniel grimaced when he opened his cabin door and saw Wild Bill sagging against the frame. Both eyes were black, his left ear hideously swollen, a front tooth was chipped, and there was a neat row of stitches above his left eye.

‘Holy shit,’ Daniel blurted. ‘What happened?’

‘Aww,’ Wild Bill mumbled, ‘bunch of guys stomped the piss outa me.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cause that’s what I was trying to do to them.’

‘What about Jenny Sue or whatever her name is – your girlfriend?’

‘Last time I looked, she was helping them.’

‘Do you want me to take you in to the hospital?’

Wild Bill touched the stitches on his forehead. ‘I just got out.’

‘You want to come in and lay down? You look like you could use some rest.’

‘Kid, any more rest would fucking kill me. Pack up whatever you plan to live on till next spring. We’re going to the mountains.’ He reached into his shirt pocket with a scab-knuckled hand. ‘Here’s a list of stuff you’ll probably need. Another thing – we ain’t comin’ back for visits, so you’re not gonna be hearing from Volta or anyone else. You can call Volta tomorrow to see if there’s any news. You’ll be wasting your dime,’ cause you’d of heard if anything was happening. If you don’t want to go, I’ll go without you and we’ll call the teaching done. If you want to go, be ready in the morning.’

‘What about Owen and Tilly? They need a hand around here.’

‘There’ll be folks along to take care of that.’

‘Why the mountains? Are we hiding out?’

Wild Bill snapped, ‘No. We’re getting serious.’

His vehemence startled Daniel. He didn’t reply.

‘You want Volta’s numbers or not?’

‘No,’ Daniel said, ‘it’s okay.’

‘Get shaggin’ then. I want to get the fuck out of here.’

‘Not till you tell me what happened. What the fight was about.’

‘No secret. I said the bottle never ran dry. The bartender and his buddies said it did.’

‘I guess it did, huh?’

‘No shit,’ Wild Bill said. ‘Always.’

Tilly drove them north the next morning to the Huta Point trailhead at the edge of the Yolla Bolly Wilderness. Along the way she and Wild Bill figured out the resupply plans, deciding on a monthly interval, with the food and equipment to be cached in two metal footlockers near the old crossing on Balm of Gilead Creek. She hugged them briefly in farewell. Tilly was the last human being Wild Bill and Daniel would see for six months – besides each other, of course. They would see plenty of each other.

Daniel followed Wild Bill down and then up dark slopes of old-growth Douglas fir. He refused to ask where they were headed. Wild Bill didn’t offer a destination. He remained uncommonly silent, applying his breath to the trek, maintaining a steady pace.

They camped that night on the Middle Fork of the Eel. Each had brought his own tent. Wild Bill had explained, ‘I hired on to teach you, not sleep with you. And anyway, I’ve been known to do some late-night meditating that your snoring wouldn’t encourage.’

They finished pitching their tents as the last light faded. Daniel, ravenous, was eager for dinner, but Wild Bill told him that they hadn’t done their sunset meditation, which they were now adding to the other three. Its purpose was simply to sit and let the river roll. While he was on the subject, he informed Daniel that meditations, by ancient tradition, were doubled in duration while in the mountains.

‘That’s six hours a day!’

‘Eight for me. I normally do a half-hour at midnight and another at two. You probably should be doing eight hours yourself, but I’m easy.’

‘Does the question-time get doubled to ten minutes?’

Wild Bill ignored the sarcasm. ‘No. Five minutes is already too much work.’

Daniel had tried not to anticipate the question, but he had assumed it would be perceptual, not personal, and was caught slightly off guard when Wild Bill poked the fire and said, ‘Why haven’t you asked where we’re going?’

‘Because it makes no difference,’ Daniel replied.

Wild Bill rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, bullshit. When has that ever stopped you? I think it’s adolescent perversity myself. It’s wasted on the mountains. Just be real, that’s all it takes. And since you haven’t asked where we’re going, I’ll tell you.’

Their destination was a geomorphological anomaly called Blacktail Basin. In the center of the basin was a twenty-acre lake. Wild Bill claimed he’d never seen the lake on any map, thus giving credence to the local Indian legend that a Nomlaki shaman had cast a spell of invisibility on it after his first encounter with a white man. Since the lake was spring-fed – ‘filled from within,’ as the Nomlaki described it – they considered it a place of great power, and thus a place to be protected. Although Wild Bill had discovered it independently some fifteen years earlier, he contacted the Nomlaki elders whenever he planned to go there. They always let him. In their view, he had ‘seen through’ the spell, which could only mean the place had chosen to reveal itself to him. Who were they to grant a permission that was already so clearly given?

Since the lake was under the spell of invisibility and therefore didn’t exist, it couldn’t have a name – a referential problem the Nomlaki had neatly solved by calling it Nameless Lake.

Wild Bill spoke highly of Nomlaki culture. ‘The Nomlaki were known out to the coast and up to the Klamath for their shamanistic powers, healing and sorcery in particular, which are two of the tougher arts. And you’ve got to like a culture where the most precious thing you can own or trade is a black bear hide to be buried in.’

They crested the lower rim of Blacktail Basin late the next afternoon and headed down toward what Wild Bill assured Daniel was the lake, though it wasn’t visible. Daniel had expected the basin would be dramatic, but in fact it was quite shallow, with less than a four-hundred-foot elevation drop from the low southern rim to the center. The basin was heavily forested along its upper slopes. As they made their way downhill, the trees grew farther apart, and the fern and gooseberry understory gradually thinned away. Despite the change in density, the flora seemed arranged in such a way that while you had a feeling of open forest, you couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of yourself. Daniel almost walked into the lake before he saw it.

Daniel followed Wild Bill around the lake to a terracelike meadow. Sheltered by the steeper northern rim, nicely oriented to the sun, with an unobstructed view of the lake, the meadow was a perfect campsite.

Wild Bill slung off his pack. ‘Goddamn! It’s a pleasure to get out from under this load.’

‘How high is this lake?’

‘High as you wanna get.’

‘I meant elevation.’

‘Close to three thousand feet,’ said Wild Bill.

‘We’ll probably get some snow then, right?’

‘Just enough to occasionally change the view.’

Stretching, Daniel looked around. ‘I can see why the Indians think it’s under some spell – the trees are a natural screen.’

‘What you don’t see,’ Wild Bill told him, ‘is that the shaman moved the trees.’

With a playfulness that both allowed and protected his mild disrespect, Daniel said, ‘Whatever you say, Teach.’

‘You’re learning. And I say we set up camp and then jump on the chores.’

When camp was squared away, Wild Bill announced, ‘All right, we’re home. Now to the chores. There’s only two: fishing for dinner and gathering firewood. Take your choice.’

Daniel said, ‘I’ll fish.’

‘That’s my choice, too,’ Wild Bill told him.

‘So I lose, right?’

‘Well … given my experience and all, I should fish – I’m a fish-catching fool – but don’t ever say Wild Bill ran you over by abusing his natural authority on almost anything that matters. Tell you what: I’ll fish for about an hour while you collect wood, and then you fish for an hour while I sit there and laugh. Whoever catches the most fish, he’s the Official Camp Fisherman for a month – the loser can practice when the rod ain’t required by the champ for survival protein production.’

‘You’re on,’ Daniel said.

Wild Bill winked. ‘That’s just what I tell them fish when I set the hook.’

Wild Bill caught two.

Daniel didn’t catch any. He couldn’t understand it – he was fishing off the same overhanging boulder where Wild Bill had caught his, and he could see the surface swirls of feeding fish. He was concentrating so deeply that he was startled to hear Wild Bill at his shoulder. ‘Count your catch, the hour’s up.’

‘Okay,’ Daniel sighed, ‘what’s the secret?’

‘Give me the pole and I’ll show you how it’s done.’

Daniel reluctantly surrendered the rod.

‘Now pay close attention,’ Wild Bill said.

When Daniel turned slightly to watch, Wild Bill put a hand on his chest and pushed him backward off the boulder into the lake. The shock of cold water brought him gasping to the surface.

Wild Bill was pointing down into the water. ‘See them rocks there in the shallows? Now see them black dots? Those are the stick-and-stone houses of caddis fly larvae, which is what the fish are feeding on today.’

Teeth chattering, Daniel waded to shore. He was furious, but he had to know. ‘Okay, what kind of fly were you using to imitate them?’

‘Well shit,’ Wild Bill said, putting his arm around Daniel’s wet shoulders, ‘I took my pocketknife and sliced that goony looking batch of feathers off the hook and put on some of those real caddis fly larvae. That’s what the fish are eating – not a bunch of feathers and tinsel and such.’

Daniel shivered. ‘That’s cheating.’

‘You got to fish ’em real slow,’ Wild Bill explained. ‘Sort of let ’em swirl up easy from the bottom. I tell ya, takes tons of patience and a pretty good sense of humor to get it right.’

The regimen was much like that at the ranch: meditation, daily work, nightly question. The only significant change was the addition of what Wild Bill called teaching, which amounted to Daniel listening to him tell stories around the campfire.

‘My dad saw something over on the Middle Fork that I doubt either of us ever will. He saw two full-grown male bears fighting over a she-bear. That ain’t so unusual, of course, but the thing of it was, one of the bears was a black bear and the other was a grizzly bear. Quite a tussle.’

‘Who won?’

‘Well, like daddy always said’ – Wild Bill paused to spit emphatically in the fire – ‘“Son, if you’re gonna be a bear, be a grizzly.”’

‘What kind of bear was the female?’ Daniel said.

‘You know what, Daniel? You could fuck up a steel ball.’

Daniel bristled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean it ain’t easy to fuck up a steel ball.’

Although the regimen was basically the same, the quality of the days was different. They existed quite easily. Along with the food they’d packed in – heavy on rice and beans – there were fish, edible plants and fungi in season, and birds, small game, and an occasional deer that fell to the .222/.410 they’d brought. To preserve ammo, they only took one shell in each chamber while hunting, a practice, Daniel soon discovered, that greatly increased his accuracy. On average, they spent less than an hour a day on food.

Daniel used his free time to explore the basin, day-dream, or work on various projects, most of which failed. He could hardly hit the hillside with the bow and arrows he made. His hand-carved duck call hastened mallards on their way. His fish traps didn’t.

Wild Bill was no help and less solace. ‘You can usually trace failure back to one of two things: design or execution. Looks to me like both of ’em got you.’

At the end of each month they hiked back to the Balm of Gilead crossing and picked up their month’s supplies from the two hidden footlockers. Tilly or Owen always left a note with any important news. There had been one message from Volta to say there was nothing to report. It took them ten hours to walk down with empty packs, and a tough sixteen going back. Twice during the winter they had to use ropes to cross the rain-swollen Eel. At first Daniel despised the overnight treks, but by winter he was actually beginning to enjoy the grueling all-day push back to the lake; the sheer physical exertion seemed to cleanse him of a rancid congestion that he could feel but not locate.

January was a terrible month for Daniel. It rained or snowed nearly every day. He stayed in his tent as much as he could. He discovered, as many others had before him, that the mountains impose you on yourself. He came to some realizations he didn’t like. The first was that he hadn’t recovered from his mother’s death. The raging, wrenching grief, once so palpably present, had faded into a haunting emptiness.

Daniel’s second unpleasant realization was that he hadn’t dreamed since the bomb explosion. Worried that this might indicate brain damage, he became so aware of his dreamlessness he could hardly sleep. He woke exhausted and eye-sore, as if he were a pilot who’d spent the night fruitlessly searching the ocean for a raft or signs of wreckage. He didn’t mention his dreamlessness to Wild Bill. If it meant something was wrong, he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and if it didn’t mean anything other than that he wasn’t dreaming or couldn’t remember them, then it didn’t matter.

His third realization was that obsessive carnal desire and almost daily masturbation was preferable to gloomy contemplations of his heartache and dreamlessness. He remembered Brigit Bardo’s face a hundred times a day, and her mouth a thousand, each accompanied by a pure genital urge for release. An early spring poured fuel on his fires. He couldn’t meditate for five minutes without an image of breasts or tautly curved buttocks or silken thighs affecting his concentration much like a boulder hitting a mud puddle.

Wild Bill noticed. One mid-February morning, clear and warm, right in the middle of their meditation, Wild Bill jumped to his feet and glared down at Daniel, demanding, ‘Just what in the holy-fucking-hell is bothering you?’

Daniel wanted to run for his tent. ‘I don’t know if I know,’ he stammered, ‘except I haven’t been dreaming, not since I was hurt.’

‘Goddammit, worry about your dreams when you’re asleep. Worry about getting wet when it’s raining. When you’re sitting, just sit. Don’t wiggle. Don’t wobble.’ Wild Bill started to resume sitting when he thought better of it. ‘Actually, I’m tired of fighting your hormones for attention, and I’m tired of looking at you. Go.’

‘What?’ Daniel said, both crushed and strangely relieved.

Wild Bill pointed north. ‘Go. That old fir snag there – go dead uphill from that and about a hundred yards over the crest you’ll find a little spring, and if you follow it down beneath the rock outcrop, there’s a cave. You can stay in the cave or wander around – I don’t care. But if you get lost and I have to find you, you’ll wish you’d stayed lost.’

‘Is this personal, or some sort of teaching?’

‘Both.’

‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘First,’ Wild Bill said with exaggerated patience, ‘you go. Then you have dreams and visions. If you can’t dream, just have visions. Explore the visions for value. Examine yourself for value. Try to figure out what’s valuable and what ain’t. In seventeen days you can come back.’

‘Fine,’ Daniel said with a touch of petulance, ‘but I’m taking half of everything. Since you’re staying by the lake, it makes the most sense that I take the gun and leave you the pole.’

‘Nope,’ Wild Bill said with finality. ‘I’m over sixty and you’re pushing sixteen. You take a knife and your sleeping bag; I keep everything else.’

Daniel yelped, ‘Forget it! That’s not fair.’

‘Bye.’ Wild Bill fluttered his fingers in farewell.

‘Fuck you,’ Daniel muttered.

‘Way your hormones are flooding, that’s kinda what I’m afraid of.’

‘It’d probably be better than getting beat up.’ Daniel immediately regretted saying it.

But Wild Bill laughed, and waved again. ‘Adios.’

Daniel stalked to his tent, stuffed his sleeping bag in its sack, and left without another word.

He spent the first week at the cave, eating from the thin smorgasbord of early spring plants. When he wasn’t foraging, sleeping, or meditating – he continued to sit, but half-heartedly – Daniel was absorbed in erotic fantasies of such sensual detail and endless possibility that he lay on his sleeping bag and masturbated till his forearm cramped.

To break the siege of desire, he decided to walk north to the headwaters of Cottonwood Creek. The weather was clear but cold. He ate whatever was available, mainly wild onions and some early miner’s lettuce, supplemented occasionally with frog legs. The nourishment kept him going, but wasn’t enough to fuel his usual pace. He tired easily and had difficulty concentrating for more than a few minutes. However, he experienced a lightness that wasn’t confined to his head, a sort of metabolic austerity, and with it came a profound sense of objectivity – uncluttered by judgments or combustible desires. He quit meditating and masturbating. He didn’t have any dreams or visions. After eight days of wandering in a slow loop, he reached the cave just hours before a storm.

The storm proved the last gasp of winter, but winter died hard that year: blinding lightning strikes; thunder so loud it raised dust on the cave floor; winds that sent widow-makers spinning out of the lashing firs, snapped off snags that splintered as they crashed; and then torrential rain. As he sat snug in the cave, a good fire with plenty of dry limbs stacked against the walls, watching the wind suck smoke out the cave mouth in a ropy braid, Daniel decided he would fast and meditate for his last three days. He wanted dreams and visions.

As Wild Bill would later rule, Daniel had two near-visions and one for sure, but Wild Bill was a hanging judge.

One near-vision began with the color pink. At first Daniel felt it was some sort of overture to an erotic fantasy, but as he watched, the color constricted slowly into the terror-brightened pink of a lab rat’s eye. And then he was inside the rat, running a maze, turning left, right, right again, running until he caught the scent of his own fear still hanging on the air and realized he’d tried that passage before. Daniel rose out of the rat’s body like mist lifting from a field. He could see the maze below him, a perfect square, infinitely intricate, no entrance or exit. The maze exploded when he screamed.

The other near-vision began with him floating just under the surface of Nameless Lake. He wasn’t dead, but had barely enough strength to lift his left hand out of the water. He knew no one would see, but it was all he could do. He floated, gathering the energy and will to lift his hand again. When he did, his hand was seized by another, powerful and sure. As it lifted him from the water, he saw a woman he didn’t know, tall and lovely and smiling, and he wanted her to lift him into her arms and hold him tightly, but in the same motion of pulling him free of the lake, she hurled him into the heavens. He fell through the galaxy, his hand still outstretched, but it didn’t matter – he would fall forever. He might as well have been waving good-bye. When he laughed, the wind-lashed rain was hurtling past the cave.

The real vision occurred on his last night. The storm had passed, trailing a thin fog in its wake. Feeling faint and dislocated, Daniel was sitting at the cave mouth watching the wisps of fog tatter and swirl in the moonlight when he heard his mother clearly call in the distance ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free,’ just as she had so many evenings playing Hide-and-Seek at the Four Deuces when he was a child. ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free,’ she called again, her voice more distant; and then once more, barely audible. She didn’t call again. Rocking back and forth, arms around himself, Daniel wept.

As he worked his way carefully downslope toward camp the next morning, Daniel felt simultaneously serene and raw.

Wild Bill was cooking pancakes when Daniel walked into camp.

‘Those smell wonderful,’ Daniel greeted him. ‘If there’s extra batter, drop one on for me. I’ve been fasting for almost a week.’

‘Yeah?’ Wild Bill tried to flip the pancake on the griddle, then had to pause and unfold it with the spatula. ‘What were you fasting for?’

‘Dreams and visions, as instructed.’

‘I don’t remember any instructions about fasting. Fasting is tricky. It can put an odd twist on things.’

‘It worked. I had visions.’

‘Just a second.’ Wild Bill slid the creased pancake onto a tin plate and handed it to Daniel. ‘So. What’d you see.’

‘I saw …’ Daniel started, then hesitated. ‘Well, actually I didn’t see anything.’

Wild Bill grunted. ‘Good start.’

Daniel couldn’t tell if the grunt was playful or cutting or both. He could feel the warmth of the pancake through the tin plate against his palm. ‘Do you want to listen or not?’

Wild Bill looked up. ‘Is it important to you?’

‘I cried,’ Daniel said, feeling like he was going to again.

Wild Bill said softly, ‘Then I’d be honored.’ He gave the pancake batter a quick stir and poured it sizzling onto the griddle.

‘It was something I heard,’ Daniel explained. ‘I heard my mother calling ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free.’ That’s what you yell at the end of Hide-and-Seek when you give up the search. That’s how the other players know––’

‘I’ve played the game. When did you hear her?’

‘Last night.’

Wild Bill watched the bubbles burst thickly on the pancake’s surface, then slipped the spatula under the crusted bottom, hefted it a moment, flipped. The pancake turned over two-and-a-half times, splatting down perfectly. But Wild Bill looked glum. ‘Goddamn, Daniel, I don’t want to crap on your parade, but you deserve the truth. That wasn’t your mom you heard last night. It was me. Yodeling.’

Daniel stopped his pancake halfway to his mouth. ‘Yodeling?’

‘Yodeling,’ Wild Bill affirmed. He lifted the pancake and slipped it on Daniel’s plate. ‘Eat. You’re delirious with hunger.’

‘You weren’t yodeling,’ Daniel said.

Wild Bill turned solemnly and faced the lake. He tilted his head back, exhaled slowly, took a slow deep breath, then another, and then astonished Daniel. With a power and bell-note clarity completely unlike his habitual grunts and mumbles, Wild Bill blended and blurred long open vowels and gliding consonants into an undulant song that shifted between rejoicing and keening, delight and lament. Daniel heard it clearly toward the end: ‘Allleee-allleee-ah-sen-freeee.’ Wild Bill repeated the phrase, then whirled it through itself in tight variations, winding it inward, suddenly leaping an octave, then slowly letting it slide into the last haunting note.

Wild Bill stood listening to his voice echo across the basin until it was absorbed into the air. He turned to Daniel. ‘Yodeling. I learned it from Lao Ling Chi, my teacher when I was doing work on breath and breathing.’

Daniel said, ‘That was lovely, it was close, but it wasn’t your voice I heard – it was my mother’s.’

‘Whatever,’ Wild Bill shrugged. ‘You heard it, so it’s yours to understand. Me, I’m going to go look for mushrooms for tonight’s rabbit stew. If you feel ambitious, I got a stack of fir saplings I thinned that need to be trimmed up and hauled back to camp. They’re piled at the base of that big maple on the west side. Take the hand-ax.’

‘Fine,’ Daniel nodded, wolfing down a pancake. ‘See you.’ He wondered what Wild Bill wanted with the fir poles but refused to give him the satisfaction of asking.

Swinging the horribly lopsided basket he’d woven from split reeds and grasses, Wild Bill made his way around the lake and then up the south slope to the rim. As he went over the crest, he stopped and gave a short yodel: ‘Oodell-a-eee-ooooo.’ It resounded in the basin.

‘Jerk,’ Daniel muttered. Wild Bill – always watching for mistakes, and taking a malicious glee in pointing them out. What kind of teacher was that? Daniel was beginning to suspect Wild Bill’s eccentricities were merely a screen for incompetence, and with a mean satisfaction he realized how much he’d enjoyed the seventeen days by himself – no scrutiny, no picking and prodding and little put-downs.

Daniel did the dishes, then took the hand-ax and headed around the lake. The saplings were stacked on a small bench about a hundred yards upslope from the lake’s edge. As Daniel hauled the first one off the pile he caught a flicker of color in the corner of his eye, thin bright red, thinking snake at first flash, then, with a bolt of terror, realized it was a wire.

A voice screamed from the sky. ‘Daniel! Run!’

He swung the ax at the wire but he was a moment too late. The explosion rocked him and he staggered backward, hands covering his temples, staring blankly as the blast-showered confetti of soggy leaves settled around him. He looked at his hands: no blood. He picked up the ax and spun around. When he saw a wisp of smoke from the small crater fifty yards uphill, he let the ax drop to his side and started looking for the wire.

With the piercing cry of an osprey, Wild Bill dropped on him from the overhanging limb of an ancient fir, driving Daniel to the ground. Wild Bill picked up the ax and tossed it away as Daniel rolled and came up quickly. He hit Wild Bill in the chest with a round-house right, following with a glancing left off his cheek. Wild Bill rolled his heavy shoulders and brought his fists up to cover his face, elbows tucked to protect his solar plexus. Daniel hit him a solid right to the stomach. Wild Bill grunted but kept his hands up.

‘Fight!’ Daniel yelled, and hit him hard in the stomach again. When Wild Bill’s hands dropped for an instant, Daniel followed with a left to the head. Wild Bill yelped, staggering sideways a moment before catching his balance. He shook his head to clear it, blinking against the blood running from a cut above his eye.

‘Fight, you fucker!’ Daniel screamed again.

‘She’s dead, Daniel. Dead.’

Daniel threw a left uppercut that hit squarely on the point of Wild Bill’s elbows, sending a jolt of pain up Daniel’s arm to his shoulder.

‘Come on,’ Wild Bill said wearily, ‘get it all.’

Daniel hit him with a right hook above the ear but Wild Bill rolled with the blow. Daniel threw a left but there was no strength in that arm so he threw a right that Wild Bill easily blocked with a shoulder. Daniel threw another, another, another, and then he had nothing left, all the rage and fear and loss emptying in a rush, and he fell into Wild Bill’s arms.

Back in camp, Wild Bill held an improvised compress to his cut eye and Daniel soaked his swollen hands in the cold water. They didn’t speak for a long time. Daniel was exhausted and Wild Bill had nothing to say. Finally, Daniel stood shakily and worked his hands. ‘When are we leaving?’

‘I’m heading out in the morning,’ Wild Bill said. ‘You’re welcome to go with me or you can stay if you want. Owen’ll be there around dark if you want a ride.’

‘What then?’

‘I’m going to Arizona and put some desert between my ears. All this lushness sort of depresses me. Makes the eye sloppy.’

‘What about me?’

‘You go on with your training. Up to you.’

‘My training? I didn’t know I was being trained. What for?’

‘Depends on what you learn.’

‘Uh-huh, right. Well, one thing I’ve learned is not to expect a straight answer.’

‘I take teaching seriously, Daniel. I won’t tell you what I don’t know.’

‘Then tell me what you do know.’

‘There’s sort of three levels of association with AMO. The first is friends and kindred souls. That association is a loose system of mutual aid and moral support. They don’t pay dues. The second is allies, actual members of AMO who pay their yearly five percent, and who receive and provide direct benefits of the Alliance. And then there are adepts. They are people with particular gifts and understanding who sustain and expand the Alliance’s traditional arts and practices.’

‘Is that what you’re trying not to tell me, that I’m being trained as an adept?’

‘No one is trained as an adept. An adept is one who has mastered a particular art, who has achieved a certain understanding. You can’t teach mastery. You can only teach certain skills of awareness, which in turn lead to the recognition of possibilities and opportunities for further development – as well as the dangers involved. Beyond that, you’re on your own. But as Synesius noted as early as the fourth century, “There is always guidance available if you’re available.”’

Daniel considered this a moment, flexing his hands. ‘Do you think I have potential as an adept?’

‘I don’t give grades, Daniel. But yes, clearly, you have potential. Most everyone does. But you see, it’s like this: The brain processes information, and information can be an endless ride. With the addition of the heart, some information becomes knowledge. The spirit, or soul, transforms it into understanding. But that’s the problem with abstraction – it misleads by separation.’

‘What sort of potential do I have? I mean, what direction should I take? I’m not asking you to make the decision for me, understand – it’s just that I’d value your opinion.’

‘I don’t know. But I have a strong hunch that you’d make one helluva thief. Actually, what AMO calls a Raven, which goes way beyond stealing. “Agents of exchange and restitution” is what Volta calls them. Ravens are the only adepts that AMO allows to kill other human beings, and they can only use their imaginations as the weapon.’

‘You mean by imagining them dead? Or like shooting them from a hot-air balloon drifting by their window?’

‘I mean by writing them a note saying “I’m going to kill you tonight.” And the next day, one that reads “I was detained; it’s tonight,” and the next day, “Prepare yourself,” and do it day after day for a couple of weeks and then catch him asleep one night and fire a bullet just above his head and when he screams awake say, “Oops, shit, I missed – oh well, there’s always tomorrow.” And ten days later the guy runs his sports car into a concrete abutment.’

‘Jesus, what had he done?’

‘Daniel,’ Wild Bill scolded, ‘silence is golden.’

‘It’s still murder, though, in a way. Right?’

‘If you want to split moral hairs, talk to Volta. The use of violence has always been hotly debated in AMO, and over the centuries there’s been about a hundred different “official” policies – I’m relying on Volta’s scholarship here. The current policy is what Volta calls “compassionate condemnation.” That means you shouldn’t use lethal violence except in the most extreme circumstances – like self-defense – but that people, out of fear and ignorance and rage, make mistakes. And there is a meanness in the world that must be dealt with.’

‘How’s your eye?’ Daniel said.

Wild Bill chuckled. ‘It’ll heal if you don’t keep hitting it.’

‘That was dangerous what you did, setting off that explosion. You couldn’t know for sure how I’d react.’

‘Not for sure, no, but life’s full of hazards. Despite the boom, it was a piddley charge, plus it was fifty yards from us, buried, and I had the det-switch in my hand.’ Course I was tired from having to haul ass back down the hill to get up in the tree, and then you spotted the wire.’

‘So while I was out starving and having visions, you were setting me up.’

‘Nope. As a matter of fact, for about the first two weeks I was in sunny Florida visiting my sister, and then I hustled back here to be with you. Had to hump it in two nights ago during that storm. I tell you, crossing the Eel cinched me up – I was going hand-over-hand on that rope we rigged, and that water had me horizontal. Don’t think my feet touched bottom once. Only way I made it was telling myself that I didn’t care how much Volta sweet-talked me, if I got across I was a retired teacher, finished and gone, just watch those desert sunsets and yodel with the lizards.’

‘That’s something I have to ask you,’ Daniel said, ‘something I really need to know. Were you yodeling last night?’

‘I was. But given the acoustics of the basin, I doubt you could hear me. Besides, you heard what you heard. I was just trying to help you understand it, that’s all.’

‘Why didn’t you say so this morning?’

‘Because I wanted you thinking. That way I could take you by surprise.’

‘I had two other visions if you want to hear them.’

‘Always interested in visions. But let’s talk over lunch, because not only did I dare the raging river with explosives in my pack, but also four thick filet mignons from Tilly and Owen, plus lettuce, broccoli, sourdough bread, and a twenty-buck bottle of Cabernet. Not to mention a small personal gift for you that must wait for the proper moment.’

They feasted and talked till late in the afternoon. Daniel recounted his visions, listened to Wild Bill explain why they weren’t quite truly visions, and then listened as Wild Bill gave him some history of AMO – his version, he stressed, since certain AMO lore was only transmitted orally, which invited revision and invention, and thus kept the facts straight. Wild Bill was relaxed, direct, and far more articulate than Daniel had ever seen him, but whether it was the wine, the morning’s events, or his last day as a teacher that allowed the mask to slip, Daniel didn’t know nor particularly care.

As the sun dipped toward the basin rim, Bill, a bit wobbly, stood and announced, ‘All right, Daniel, it’s the proper moment. Follow me.’

They walked down to the lake’s edge and faced the setting sun. After a long silence, Wild Bill took something from his pocket and turned to Daniel. ‘I want to give you a gift. I give one to each of my students – not like a damn diploma or a token of passage, understand, but an expression of gratitude for all they made me learn in order to teach them anything.’ He gently placed a hand-worked, solid-gold turtle the size of a quarter in Daniel’s palm. The turtle’s eyes were tiny, brilliant diamonds.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Daniel murmured, enthralled by its weight, its luster, the crystalline eyes.

‘Most of my students think the turtle is a symbol of balance between earth wisdom and water wisdom, but what I have in mind is slow learners.’

Daniel closed his hand around the turtle and looked at Wild Bill. ‘You know what I don’t understand?’

‘No,’ Wild Bill smiled, ‘but there’s a lot to choose from.’

Daniel ignored the charm. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so afraid of your tenderness.’

‘That’s another reason it’s a turtle,’ Wild Bill said. ‘Why do you think they have shells?’

Daniel laughed. He curled his index finger around the gold turtle, cocked his sore wrist, and threw it as far as he could toward the center of the lake.

The turtle hit the water with a silent splash, concentric ripples languidly spreading from the point of impact.

Stunned by Daniel’s act, Wild Bill watched the ripples, tried to feel their calm, inevitable dissipation within himself. He turned to Daniel then, nodded, and said, ‘Good. Very good. In fact, Daniel, that was excellent.’

‘I had an excellent teacher.’

They stood watching as the sun slipped below the rim of the basin. For a moment, as if the turtle in its depths was surrendering its light to the sun, the whole lake turned golden.

Transcription: Telephone Recording Between

Volta and Wild Bill Weber

WILD B.: ‘Lapidem esse aquam fontis vivi.’

VOLTA: Indeed. And how are you, Bill?

WILD B.: Headed for the desert.

VOLTA: You have a choice, Bill. I will give you one million dollars, or I will get down on my knees naked and beg you, if you’ll consent to teach another five years.

WILD B.: I’m done. Bye.

VOLTA: (laughing) All right, school’s out. How was your last student?

WILD B.: He’s paying attention.

VOLTA: No doubt. What do you think of him?

WILD B.: No limit. He slows himself down with questions, but some of them are the right ones. Even more, I think he’s capable of understanding some answers.

VOLTA: How did he react to the explosion?

WILD B.: As expected.

VOLTA: By the way, I was honored you consulted me. Or were you just trying to spread the responsibility in case it went awry?

WILD B.: Even the bold and brilliant get nervous.

VOLTA: True. But as long as they’re not too bold, they also grow wiser.

WILD B.: He knew to let it go, that he had to. He even had a powerful premonition the night before. He heard his mother calling Alllee-alllee-outs-in-free.

VOLTA: I told you he might be the student you were looking for.

WILD B.: You wouldn’t happen to know who his father is, would you? Daniel said not even his mother knew, but since you know everything, I thought I might ask.

VOLTA: Your flattery is wasted on my failure – I have no idea. His mother, Annalee, as I believe I mentioned, was a woman of well-founded pride and immense courage. There’s evidently much of her in Daniel.

WILD B.: No argument, but let’s not get carried away. He’s young. The young make some hideous mistakes.

VOLTA: They’re supposed to.

WILD B.: And there may be a problem. He hasn’t dreamed since his injury, or at least he doesn’t remember his dreams.

VOLTA: That’s dangerous.

WILD B.: So is remembering them.

VOLTA: Let’s not pursue it, Bill. Let’s honor our friendship by respecting our disagreements. You might also honor it by telling me what the problem really is, since you would never consider the lack of dreams anything but a blessing.

WILD B.: Daniel likes the edge. He’s a little too dazzled by oblivion.

VOLTA: Adolescence encourages ecstatic mistakes.

WILD B.: Too dazzled. But that’s just a sense I have, nothing else.

VOLTA: Is there a possibility your own fears or desires amplify your perception of his?

WILD B.: Of course.

VOLTA: I’m not challenging you. I sense the same thing in Daniel. You know, Bill, we ride the same wave so often, if it weren’t for your hard-headed foolishness, we’d have no disagreements at all.

WILD B.: Praise life for the saving graces.

VOLTA: That’s a bit like praising time for tomorrow.

WILD B.: Speaking of tomorrows, Daniel wants to know what’s next.

VOLTA: I wouldn’t attempt to consider it without consulting you. You’ve been with him eighteen months.

WILD B.: And about the last three he’s been cooking in his own juices.

VOLTA: Ah, hormones. Kiss the brain farewell. Any specific recommendations?

WILD B.: Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Daniel’s had a solid dose of the alchemical salts; an infusion of outlaw spirit might be timely – though it would be wise to have a tempering influence near at hand.

VOLTA: The Stocker operation. Mott and Aunt Charmaine.

WILD B.: Bingo.

Through more of Alexander Kreef’s legal wizardry, Daniel was released from custodial probation and, after passing a high school equivalency exam, allowed to seek gainful employment. Alexander Kreef had heard that Ariba Farm and Ranch Company was hiring, and happened to have one of their cards in his pocket. Daniel was hired over the telephone and told to report to the Rocking On Experimental Range Station, a three-thousand-acre ranch in southern Oregon. Mott Stocker, the ranch foreman, would be expecting him.

When they met at the horse barn a week later, Daniel was glad Mott had expected him and not been taken by surprise. Mott was six foot eight and a solid 260, his powerful physical presence strengthened by the thunderbolt-shaped scar on his forehead, his long black tangled hair and beard, and what proved to be his usual attire: an Australian bush hat with a band of sharks’ teeth strung on a thin, gold wire; a long-tailed buckskin shirt, grease-stained and grungy, belted with a snap-holstered Colt .45 automatic and sashed with a bandolier of extra ammunition; a jockstrap (buckskin pants when he went to town); and a pair of motorcycle boots. The only thing fragile about Mott Stocker was the pale blue of his eyes, a color that seemed almost too delicate to exist, that hovered on the threshold of perishing back into light.

Daniel liked Mott’s eyes and worried about the rest. As they saddled up, Daniel wondered how Mott’s mule, Pissgums, could survive his rider, not to mention the weight of the bulging saddlebags and twin scabbards, one holding a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump, the other a marine-issue M-16.

Daniel, with an attempt at lightheartedness, nodded toward the arsenal and said, ‘Are we expecting trouble?’

With a deep and thoughtful drawl, Mott said, ‘Better to have ’em and not need ’em than to need ’em and not have ’em.’

‘What’s in the saddlebags?’

‘Grenades, small mortar, extra rounds and clips, some other stuff.’

‘Well, you have ’em, that’s for sure.’

‘Yeah. But what I’d really like is a bazooka – one of those World War Two jobs. Awful hard to come by, though.’

A little nervously, Daniel asked, ‘Just where are we headed.’

‘Gonna ride up on Grouse Prairie and meet Lucille.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Dan, they told me you were coming here to learn the ropes. Some of the rope can tie us up, some of it can hang our ass. It’s an important part of the business to never ask more questions than you need answers for.’

‘I thought this was a cattle ranch.’

‘Moo,’ Mott drawled.

They reached the log bridge on Crawdad Creek right after sunrise. Halfway across, Mott jerked back hard on his mule’s reins, bellowing ‘Whoa, Pissgums, you sum’bitch!’ Daniel, following, pulled up his horse. Mott dismounted and reached under the bridge timbers for a quart jar of clear liquid.

He unscrewed the cap and lifted it toward Daniel. ‘Breakfast.’ He drank a third of the bottle. ‘Wahhh!’ he roared, offering the bottle to Daniel.

Daniel took it, his eyes watering at the fumes. ‘What’s this?’

‘Warmth in a cold world,’ Mott wheezed. ‘Whiskey. Homemade.’

Daniel took a cautious sip. ‘Whew,’ he said huskily, ‘it burns.’

‘Don’t be shy. Best have another slash – long ride to the top.’

Daniel took an even smaller sip and handed the bottle back to Mott, who offered it to the mule. Pissgums sniffed the bottle, snorted, shied slightly, then lipped the rim. Mott poured slowly till Pissgums tossed his head and backed away.

‘Goddamn, you’re getting particular,’ Mott said to the mule, then turned to explain. ‘He don’t like it if it hasn’t been aged at least a month.’

‘Hee-ee-yaw-yaw-yaw,’ Pissgums brayed, and bolted suddenly across the bridge.

Mott pulled his .45, cupping it as he swung on the fleeing mule.

Daniel yelled, ‘Hey! Don’t shoot!’

Mott fired, the bullet kicking up dust twenty yards in front of the mule. Pissgums stopped in his tracks and began browsing innocently.

Mott looked at Daniel. ‘Don’t worry, Dan. I always give him a warning shot ’fore I cut loose for serious.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t give him the whiskey,’ Daniel said.

‘Naw. The whiskey’s good for him. Gets him perky. Don’t ever give him any dope, though. Can’t handle it at all. Gets the bad paranoia.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Daniel promised.

A half hour later they dismounted in a grove of white oaks. ‘Coffee break,’ Mott said, pulling a stainless-steel thermos from a saddlebag. ‘Hope you like it strong.’ He poured a black ropy goo the consistency of hot asphalt into one of the cups. ‘I mix it equal parts coffee and hashish. The hash thickens it up.’

Daniel hesitantly took the steaming cup. ‘I thought you were supposed to smoke hashish.’

‘Ruin your lungs,’ Mott told him, pouring a cup for himself.

‘Do you take a lot of drugs?’

Mott drained his cup, wiping his mustache with a buckskin sleeve. ‘Yup. You?’

‘I tried some in Berkeley.’

‘What’d ya do? Give ’er up?’

‘Not really. Things just changed.’

‘Ya see,’ Mott said slowly, ‘that’s exactly the reason I take ’em. The drugs never change, but you do, so that way you have something to measure your changes against – sorta like a boulder in the river tells you the water level.’

‘I’m not sure I follow that,’ Daniel said, taking a sip of the resinous brew.

Patiently, Mott said, ‘Look at it this way, Dan: How can you know you’re changing less’n something else isn’t?’

‘Suppose it’s all changing together?’ Daniel countered.

‘Then you’d need drugs just to keep up.’

‘Or something,’ Daniel said. He was having difficulty just keeping up with the conversation.

‘Besides,’ Mott grinned, ‘I like it when the colors all run together.’

There were three more stops before lunch: a fire-hollowed fir stump that held a tank of nitrous oxide which Daniel politely sampled and Mott nearly drained; a buried stash of black opium the consistency of taffy – Daniel declining, Mott biting off a piece the size of a walnut; and taped in the crotch of a young maple, a waterproof canister of LSD microdots, Daniel trying one, Mott several.

They ate lunch at the Palmer Ridge line shack. The cupboards were stocked with quart jars of chili and the propane refrigerator was full of beer. Mott dumped the contents of several jars into a large, cast-iron kettle. ‘Seeing as how we just met today,’ Mott said as he lit the stove, ‘I’m gonna cook you up my Special Mott Stocker Seven-Course Mountain-Man Shitkicker Lunch: a bowl o’ red and a six-pack. I make a whole bathtub full o’ chili the end o’ every month and stash it around wherever I might find myself working. Let me warn ya right now, Dan: It’s pretty damn tasty fare.’

The first bite left flesh hanging from the roof of Daniel’s mouth. He sucked air to cool it.

‘Spicy, huh?’ Mott said, shoveling another spoonful.

‘Yaaa,’ Daniel gasped.

‘You bet. Secret’s in the chiles. I grow my own, out o’ my own stock – been perfecting it for about ten years now. You mighta noticed that little hothouse out in back of the barn? That’s all chiles. And I go in there every chance I get and insult ’em. Call ’em stupid-ass, low-down, dipshit heaps of worthlessness. I pinch ’em, piss on ’em, slice off a branch here and there. Water ’em just enough to keep ’em alive. No water – that’s what makes ’em hot, but the abuse is what makes ’em mean.’

Daniel, popping his second can of beer, was still unable to speak, but he nodded in understanding.

Mott shoveled down more chili, sweat coursing off his forehead. ‘This is venison chili. Where’s the beef? Hey: Fuck the beef. And fuck all them fancy chili cookoff winner recipes. This stuff is deer meat, chiles, spring water, little bit of wild pig blood, and three tablespoons of gunpowder. Sometimes I throw in a handful of them psilocybin mushrooms if there’s any around, though personally I think they weaken it.’

‘So would sulfuric acid,’ Daniel mumbled, his lips numb. At the mention of acid he noticed the cabin walls seemed to be melting.

‘Eat up,’ Mott urged. ‘Lucille’s due in an hour and we still got ground to ride.’

‘I don’t want to insult your hospitality, but the chili’s a little hot for me. Makes my ears ache.’

‘Supposed to. Good bowl o’ mountain red should just kick the dog piss outa ya and make your dick grow an inch. But don’t worry, you’ll work up a taste for it. Only thing that’d be insulting is if you brought a sack lunch with a cheese-and-sprouts sandwich or some such stuff. Tuna. Shit like that.’

‘I’ll wash the bowls,’ Daniel volunteered.

Mott drained another beer. ‘I’ll twist us up a coupla joints for the trail.’

‘What should I do with the leftovers?’

‘Dump it back in the kettle for Pissgums. He deserves a treat. Hasn’t tried to kick me in the nuts since last Tuesday.’

Daniel watched with fascination as the mule slurped the chili from the pot, alternating each bite with a mouthful of damp moss from the trunk of his hitching tree. Daniel tried a handful. It helped.

‘You’re really pretty smart,’ he said appreciatively, patting the mule’s neck.

Pissgums snaked his head sideways and bit Daniel savagely just below the ribs.

Daniel’s yowl brought Mott rolling through the cabin door, his .45 in one hand and a large knife in the other.

‘No! No!’ Daniel yelled, waving his arms. ‘It’s just Pissgums. The son of a bitch bit me.’ Daniel hiked his shirt and showed Mott the egg-shaped bruise.

‘You fucking with him or did he get outa line?’

Daniel wasn’t sure if Mott was asking him or the mule, but he answered anyway. ‘I wasn’t doing a damn thing except feeding him and giving him a friendly pat on the neck.’

‘Shit. Never do that. Pissgums hates affection.’ Mott holstered his pistol and slipped the knife back in his boot.

‘You know,’ Daniel said, rubbing the bite, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time in the hills. I know the hills. I feel safe there. When I woke up this morning I was looking forward to a pleasant day gathering cattle, and here I am six hours later, reeling from drugs, my ears still humming from lunch, with some whiskey-drinking sadomasochist mule who almost ate my rib cage, on my way to see a mysterious woman for even more mysterious reasons that – you were right – I really don’t want to know, and I’m beginning to believe that things are seriously out of control.’

‘Always,’ Mott agreed. ‘But it’s like the Rock Island Line: You gotta ride it like you find it.’

‘Fine,’ Daniel said. ‘Fine with me.’

‘We’re gonna get on real good, Dan,’ Mott grinned, a wild twinkle in his faded blue eyes. ‘All aboard.’ He slapped Pissgums on the nose and swung into the saddle. ‘Let’s go meet Lucille.’

Daniel and Mott heard her coming. They’d stopped in the trees at the edge of the ridgetop and waited a few minutes when Daniel caught the sound. Startled, he glanced at Mott. ‘What’s that?’

Mott, holding in a lungful from the cigar-sized joint he was smoking, answered in a strangled wheeze, ‘Lucille.’

‘No,’ Daniel said, listening intently. ‘No, it’s a machine – hear it?’ He imitated the sound: ‘Chwop: chwop: chwop: chwop …’ When his drug-soaked brain finally realized the sound was familiar, he whirled on Mott: ‘Fuck! It’s a helicopter!’

‘Yuuuup,’ Mott exhaled. ‘That’s what we’re waiting for.’ Behind the dense cloud of smoke, Mott’s voice seemed disembodied.

Daniel felt relieved, then irked. ‘Jesus, you might have said something. I’ve had some bad experiences with helicopters – they make me jumpy.’

‘Like turpentine on a sanded asshole, I’d say,’ Mott said.

‘So why is Lucille coming in on a helicopter?’

‘She isn’t. Lucille is the helicopter.’

‘Right. That makes as much sense as anything. And I suppose she’s bringing in your daily drug supply.’

‘You’re close, Dan. But it’s the weekly drug delivery and pickup. Pilot’s name is Low-Riding Eddie. He’s pretty good people for a flatlander, but I wouldn’t bad-mouth Lucille or you might find yourself in a knife fight.’

The helicopter roared in above the treetops, banked sharply, circled once, then settled, its rotor-wash flattening the grass. It was an old Sikorsky, Korean War surplus, but it had been altered dramatically. The body was chopped and channeled, all visible metal chromed, and the fuselage gleamed with hand-rubbed coats of metal-flake Midnight Blue. Ornate gold script on the rear panel spelled out Lucille. A large pair of pink foam dice dangled from a roll-bar in the cockpit.

‘That’s the Low-Rider,’ Mott said, lifting off a saddlebag. ‘Leave our beasts here and we’ll go give him a howdy.’

As they walked toward the chopper, Low-Riding Eddie clambered out of the cockpit with a battered suitcase in one hand, the other covering his head as he ran, crouched, from under the rotor.

On that high, Oregon mountain prairie, Daniel witnessed a sight few mortals can claim to share: A half-naked mountain man buying thirty pounds of Afghani hash from a thin, sallow-faced youth dressed in the highest late-fifties fashion cool: scuffed white bucks, black chinos held up by a skinny belt so pink it probably glowed in the dark, and a scarlet silk shirt, the back of the collar rolled up to the well-pomaded point of Eddie’s DA ’do.

Mott and Daniel met him at the tree line.

‘New cat in the band?’ Eddie asked Mott, indicating Daniel with an almost imperceptible shift of his sullen brown eyes.

‘This here’s Daniel the Nooky Spaniel, gets more ass than a toilet seat in a sorority house. Sent him here to learn a useful trade and eat some o’my chili to grow back what he’s wore off his pecker.’

Eddie nodded, regarding Daniel under hooded eyes.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ Daniel said. ‘And it’s a real joy to behold that beautiful machine you’re flying. She’s a work of art.’

‘I busted a knuckle or two,’ Eddie replied with a studied indifference. ‘She’ll turn two and a half in calm air. Blow the fucking doors off any chop the sky fuzz can put up, that’s for sure.’

‘That must be comforting,’ Daniel said.

‘Fuckin’ A,’ Eddie mumbled. ‘Peace of mind’s almost as good as a piece of tail.’

‘Low-Rider, goddammit, don’t remind me,’ Mott said. ‘I’m so horny I could fuck the crack o’ dawn.’

Eddie said, ‘Just so you don’t go fucking with Lucille.’

‘Naw,’ Mott assured him, ‘the only machines I like are guns.’

‘Man, you got to cut back on the drug abuse – your eyes look like … what do you call them fuckers anyway?’

‘Pinwheels?’ Daniel offered.

Eddie snapped his fingers. ‘That’s the one. Can’t tell if they’re whirling in or whirling out.’

‘I know,’ Mott sighed. ‘But unless I can get Dan here to pull some weight, I’m stuck with all the product evaluation. It’s a tremendous responsibility, but I’m built for the load, if you get my drift. If you’re interested, just happen to have a joint in my pocket off ’n a plant I grew myself and high-graded into stash. Cross between some Trinity Trainwreck and Humboldt Polio. Get ya so high your nose’ll bleed.’

‘Thanks anyway, man, but I can’t fly two planes at the same time, and I don’t have the time to start with. They added a drop in Cave Junction. Let’s jump on business. I gotta split soon.’

‘So whatta we got?’

Eddie lifted the suitcase. ‘Black ’Ghani, gold-stamped bars from the heart of the Hindu Kush. Last big load out before the Russians. Twenty pounds.’

‘Tell me in money.’ Mott reached into his shirt. Daniel, recalling the knife he’d produced from his boot, tensed.

‘Sixteen of the big ones.’

Daniel relaxed when Mott produced a large elkskin pouch.

‘Sixteen?’ Mott repeated with a touch of doubt. ‘That seems awful cheap.’

‘Don’t rumble it with me, man; I’m on salary.’

Mott took a huge roll of hundred-dollar-bills from the pouch and started counting. ‘I could turn it for twelve a pound and have ’em lined up at my door.’

‘We got a good buy, and you know the rule: Can’t tack on more than a hundred a pound if the Alliance fronts it.’

Mott grunted and kept counting.

‘Why that rule?’ Daniel said to Low-Riding Eddie.

‘Cools the greed.’

Mott finished flicking through the bills and handed a wad to Eddie. ‘That’s four grand. Squares us on last week’s peyote buttons.’

Eddie peeled off a single bill and stuffed the rest in his back pocket. ‘You make your nut?’

‘No problem.’

‘How’s the biz?’

‘Smooth and quiet. Any rattles down your way?’

‘Nothing shaking.’ Eddie took out his Zippo and held it under the hundred dollar bill. ‘Ready?’

‘Always,’ Mott said. ‘Fire away.’

Shielding it in front of himself against the light breeze, Eddie lit a corner of the bill.

Daniel, peaking on acid, was too stunned to say anything. He watched enthralled as the flames spread along the bill, leaving a flutter of ashes in their wake. When they reached the oval face of Ben Franklin engraved on the bill, Mott chortled, ‘Fuck-oh-dear, but I do like to see old Benny Franklin burn. Hated that motherfucker ever since they tried to convince me what a great thinker and citizen he was when I was back in first grade, back before I took warping my brain into my own hands. I’ll bet you a mink coat against a cornflake that the only time Benny Franklin ever got off was when that lightining zapped his kite.’

Daniel watched raptly as the flames burned closer to Eddie’s fingers.

Eddie didn’t let go. Instead, he dropped the bill in the palm of his left hand, slapped it almost simultaneously with his right, then brushed the ashes on the ground.

Pale eyes glittering, Mott enthusiastically suggested, ‘Let’s burn another one.’

‘Ain’t happening,’ Eddie mumbled. ‘They’re already pissed off about one. Wanna know why we can’t use a twenty.’

Mott erupted, ‘We can’t use a fucking twenty because Ben Franklin’s on the hundred!’ He took a breath. ‘And you see right there how that Puritan killjoy tight-ass Ben Franklin has infected the American mind.’ He minced in a searing falsetto, ‘“A penny saved is a penny earned,”’ then boomed, ‘Well, fuck that shit. A penny blown is a penny enjoyed.’

‘They’re squares, man, what can I tell ya?’ Eddie said. ‘Volta’s pretty cool, though; he digs it. He was the only vote in favor of burning more. Told me he’d ride up sometime and we could burn a grand of his personal income.’

‘Aw, piss on ’em,’ Mott said with sudden resignation. He picked up the suitcase and stuffed it in the saddlebag. ‘Let’s move.’

‘Later,’ Eddie waved.

As they walked back into the trees, Daniel said, ‘Shouldn’t you check the suitcase to see if it actually does contain hashish?’

‘Shouldn’t Eddie have counted the money?’

‘So you’re saying you trust him, right?’

‘We trust each other. It’s the backbone of the trade and the heart of the Alliance.’

‘What was burning that bill all about?’

‘For the hell of it.’

‘I can understand how you enjoy it, hating Benjamin Franklin, but what about Eddie?’

‘I have the feeling it just gets the Low-Rider off. A little kink in the wiring. I mean, look how he dresses. And every time I mention being horny he gets nervous about Lucille. I know I can get a tad rambunctious, but hey, I ain’t gonna fuck no helicopter.’

Daniel said, ‘It felt like a ceremonial purification.’

‘Better safe than sorry,’ Mott replied. He stopped in his tracks, groaning ‘Did Benny Franklin say that?’

‘I think so,’ Daniel said gravely. He didn’t know, actually, but he’d never seen Mott look scared before.

Mott had the knife in his hand before Daniel saw him move. He tossed the knife up, caught it by the back of the blade, and extended it to Daniel, handle first. As Daniel took it, pearls of sunlight shattered on its edge.

Mott dropped to his knees in front of Daniel. ‘Cut out my tongue.’ Mott closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. His abject vulnerability suddenly frightened Daniel. ‘Cud da fugger od!’ Mott demanded, sticking his tongue out farther.

Daniel realized then that Mott was as stoned as he was. He shifted logic. ‘You won’t ever be able to taste your chili again,’ he reminded him.

Mott opened one eye thoughtfully, then the other. ‘Couldn’t eat pussy either, could I? Kinda the clincher, huh?’ He got to his feet. ‘Well, even assholes like Ben Franklin get it right once in a while, I guess.’

Daniel handed the knife back to Mott.

‘You’re a clear thinker, Dan. I like that. We’ll make good pardners. I’ll keep you loaded, you keep me sane.’

They arrived back at the barn shortly after dark, taking a different route: cocaine, vodka, demerol, and, the last miles, a few Dexamyl spansules.

Daily life at the Rocking On was remarkably like that at the Four Deuces and the Wyatt Ranch, except the work involved the production and transfer of drugs. Mott assigned Daniel seven marijuana patches to plant and tend – each with thirty holes – and it took a long day’s ride to complete the circuit. Later he only had to check twice a week through the summer to make sure the drip-irrigation systems hadn’t clogged and the fences hadn’t been breached. Low-Riding Eddie usually delivered some illegal substance for sale once a week, and there were always general chores. Mott worked the same basic schedule, so he and Daniel seldom rode together except to meet Lucille. Mott claimed a seven-day work week on the grounds that drug use constituted research and testing, not recreation. After that first obliterating trip with Mott, Daniel kept his drug intake down. He declined so often that Mott finally told him, ‘Tell me when you want something,’ and quit offering.

The ranch house and numerous outbuildings occupied a thirty-acre alluvial plain above Dooley Creek. Many of the outbuildings had been built by Mott when he was taken by the notion that American carpentry as an art form had never gone through a period of surrealism. Mott had set out, with gargantuan energy, to rectify this. Daniel’s ‘cabin,’ for instance, looked like a head-on collision between a Maidu sweat lodge and a Swiss chalet, while the guest cottage might have been the bastard offspring of a Mongol yurt and a Texarkana motel. The only structures spared the influence of Mott’s surrealist period were the original ranch house and barn, and the forty-foot-square cinder-block bunker with a single iron door, which served as Aunt Charmaine’s laboratory.

Aunt Charmaine was a moderately tall woman in her early forties, thin, hazel-eyed. Daniel enjoyed just watching her move – each gesture was economical and precise, imbued with an elegant certainty. She wasn’t Mott’s aunt as he’d first assumed, nor anybody’s as near as he could tell. She was often absent from the ranch, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, but when she was there she spent most of her time in her lab. Daniel was curious what she did in there, but the extent of her explanation was that she was a research chemist. She gracefully deflected further questions until he understood her research was not a topic of discussion. She was friendly but distant. Daniel was fascinated by her, and not the least because Mott treated her with almost intimidated deference, actually calling her ‘ma’am.’

When Daniel questioned him, Mott said, ‘I don’t hardly know a thing about her, and she’s been here for three years. I don’t have a clue what she works on in that lab. I’ve never been invited inside, and you mighta noticed she don’t exactly jabber. Tell you the truth, that woman’s a little spooky. You get the sense she knows exactly what is going on and just what to do about it if anything needs doing. Like, one time we were having a little harvest party in the house and she came up to have a polite glass of wine before she trucked on back to the lab. When she was there, this big ol’ fly got in a jug of wine. People were all trying to figure how the fuck to get it out when Charmaine calmly gets a chopstick outa a drawer, pokes it down the bottle, and that wine-soaked fly hops right on the chopstick and she takes it outside where it buzzes away. People are going, you know, “Wow, that was slick,” and she sort of looked puzzled and said, “Nothing wants to die.” And I got this really weird feeling that the fly had told her what to do. It’s your call, Dan, but I know in my bones that if you got outa line with her, she’d line you right back up, and maybe line your ass right out, if you get my lean.’

Daniel still meditated morning and evening, but dropped the dream meditation because he thought it might be the cause of his continued dreamlessness. He hunted and fished, occasionally with Mott but usually alone. He read omnivorously, stocking up on library books on the monthly trip to town. Some evenings he smoked dope with Mott and listened to Mott’s plaster-cracking sound system, driven by banks of solar panels that would dwarf the average drive-in movie screen. Daniel learned to cook, out of necessity. He chopped wood. He went swimming. And when Mott wasn’t around, he snuck into the greenhouse and whispered endearments to the chiles.

The weekly descent of Mommy’s Commies added saturnalia to the routine. Mommy’s Commies was a commune of thirty-two young women and one old woman who lived on the Godfrey Ranch seventy miles east. The old woman was a Sorceress of the White Fury and the most brilliant teacher of its arts. When the women were at the ranch, Mommy, as she was called, expected them to pay undivided attention to the lessons at hand. When they were away she encouraged them to play, and especially to explore – with proper precaution – their particular sexual energies. Though not formally affiliated with AMO, Mommy’s Commies had helped distribute their contraband for fifteen years. Mommy felt a little danger and a chance to be bad were essential for fledgling sorceresses, and the money was good, too.

Eight women arrived every Thursday evening to make the pickup, and left the next morning to four different cities. Daniel never had a chance. Mott didn’t want one.

After Mott had greeted them, taking all eight in his arms at once and bellowing some endearment like, ‘If God didn’t want me to eat pussy, why’d he make it look like a taco?’ they gathered in what Mott referred to as the pleasure dome, the outside of which looked like a melting cube, for a brief business meeting and a long party. The inside of the dome featured padded walls, a thick carpet, Mott’s membrane-shredding sound system, and a bar that served Mott’s homemade whiskey and absinthe, and any drug you could name. Occasionally, the synergistic effects of multiple drug ingestion would cause what was then known in hip circles as a bummer and among young sorceresses as a learning experience. But despite the occasional psychic cave-in, the party mood usually prevailed.

After the ritual exchange of dope and money, the stash was divided into four, and then each woman cut a small portion for the party, most of which went to Mott as sort of a king’s tariff to protect their shares through the evening. Mott’s notion of a party was to take all available drugs and liquor, listen to some loud sounds, get naked, form a pile, and screw till you passed out. It never happened that way, but as the night burned on Mott usually convinced one or a few to repair to his place. Daniel, shyly, would ask one of those remaining if she would like to go to his cabin and talk awhile. After an hour of nervous chatter he would try to seduce her. His high success rate was more a tribute to their understanding than his style.

The women called them Boy Poet and the Grizzly Bear. A tawny blond half in love with Daniel caught the essential difference – ‘Mott loves us equally, all at once. Daniel loves us specifically, one by one.’

But, unfortunately, once only, for as Daniel soon discovered, after a single orgasm with a woman, he was impotent with her thereafter. Try as he (and they) would, which was considerably, he couldn’t get it up for any of them twice. The women were confused and understanding. Daniel was just confused. By the end of summer he was depressed, and at harvest, when all the Commies had arrived to help pick, dry, clip, and bag the powerful sinsemilla, the drying sheds were so erotically charged with the fragrance of ripe females – plant and animal – that Daniel could hardly bear it. Though he feared Mott might react with laughter or disgust, Daniel turned to him for help.

Mott listened to Daniel’s hesitant description of the problem and simply nodded. ‘Thought you’d been looking puny lately. Wondered what was going on.’

‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ Daniel said glumly.

Mott said, ‘This is going to take some massive thinking, and that means hitting the special reserves.’

They were in the main room of Mott’s house, the trapezoidal interior hung with animal skulls suspended from the ceiling on delicate silver wires. Mott jerked hard on a wolverine skull and Daniel heard a latch open behind him. Intrigued, he watched as Mott lifted a four-by-eight panel from the wall, revealing a storage space containing shelves of guns, ammo, grenades, and four gallon-jars of a greenish-tinged liquid. Mott took down one of the jars, rummaged in a box till he came up with a large, clear-plastic meat baster with a bright red bulb, and set them on the table in front of Daniel.

‘What’s that?’

Mott unscrewed the cap and bent over to savor the bouquet. ‘Something special I had Charmaine brew up in her spare time. Call it Ol’ Wolverine.’

‘Is it like your chili?’

‘Better.’ Mott dipped the baster in the jar and drew up a few inches of liquid. ‘It’s whole extract of coca leaf, peyote buttons, and poppy heads, then she centrifuges ’em or some damn thing to get the essence, and after that she makes a ten percent solution.’ Mott tilted his head, stuck the narrow tip of the baster in his nostril, and squeezed the bulb. ‘Razoooolllii!’ he cried, swaying slightly. He wiped the tears and handed Daniel the baster. Daniel, cautious, half-filled the tip. The effect of Ol’ Wolverine on the sinuses was much like that of Mott’s chili on the palate.

Thus fortified, Mott addressed Daniel’s problem. ‘What ya got,’ he explained, ‘is a weird case of Shrivel Dick. Nobody’s sure what causes it. Some docs think it’s physical, some mental. In your case, having taken some shrapnel to the brain, I gotta think that’s the reason. Don’t matter if it wasa sliver of metal, cause even if you blow a speck of fly shit through a bowl of jello, it’s gonna have some effect, right? And I’m assuming you actually do want to diddle these girls, and don’t suffer from some sorta unnatural pussy aversion.’

‘No, I’m sure,’ Daniel said.

‘So the message is gettin’ from your heart to your brain, but it ain’t making it from your brain to your dick – that’s the problem right there.’

‘It does once.’

‘Maybe the switch is weak, and one blast of desire fries it shut?’

‘Maybe so.’

‘What you’ve gotta do, Dan, is take the scientific approach. Do a fucking experiment. Get three or four of the Commies, blindfold yourself so you don’t know who’s who, then have ’em take turns on ya.’

Dolefully, Daniel shook his head. ‘I tried it two weeks ago with Helen, Jade, and Annie. Once each.’

‘Yeah? Is Jade that one with the tits that’d make your heart stand still?’

‘I guess.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’ta used the blindfold.’

‘Maybe not.’

Responding to Daniel’s glum tone, Mott said with sudden brightness, ‘But hey – what the hell? Women are awful hard critters to please.’ Long with always wanting everything to fit their mood at the moment, they want you to pay attention to ’em and be nice and give ’em credit cards. Once could be plenty. Blessin’ in disguise.’

‘Right now it feels like a curse.’

‘Well, short of brain surgery, you’re gonna have to live with it, and since you’d be stark motherfucking crazy to let someone cut on your brain, that leaves living with it – and you might as well start now. So what say, pardner, we take a moonlight ride up on Bleeker Ridge? Nothing in the world Pissgums hates worse than a night ride.’

‘No thanks, Mott, but I appreciate your asking.’

‘Think about it, Dan. Sitting up there on Bleeker Ridge watching the snow fall in the moonlight.’

Perplexed, Daniel said, ‘It’s not snowing.’

Mott seemed startled by the information, then smiled. ‘Well, maybe it’ll start.’

‘Thanks anyway, Mott,’ Daniel said, rising from the table, ‘but I think I’ll go watch it from the river. You and Pissgums have a good time.’

Daniel sat by the river, dejected by the one thing he hadn’t mentioned, the fear that his condition made love impossible. He hadn’t felt like discussing that with Mott. Mott was friendly enough, but never let friendliness cross the line into intimacy. Wild Bill was like that. Aunt Charmaine, too. All these AMO people with their guarded, friendly openness. Volta wasn’t even that friendly.

He caught a flash of light downstream, then heard the distinctive growl of Charmaine’s Chevy panel truck gearing down for the bridge. His mother had always claimed that old women knew everything important. He wondered if he would have been able to talk to his mother about his problem; it cheered him to feel certain he could have. He decided to consult Charmaine. As an older woman, she might have some insight. As a chemist, maybe she could make him a potion. When he stood up he felt a faint twist of nausea. Daniel took a moment to connect it with mescaline, and about the time he recalled that Mott’s Ol’ Wolverine contained peyote, he realized he was ripped.

Charmaine was in the kitchen, reading the paper and eating toast. Daniel, aided by the coca-mesc-opium combo, liked the way she held her toast.

‘Daniel,’ she said pleasantly putting down the paper. ‘How are you?’

‘I have a problem.’

‘Yes?’ There was neither apprehension nor cajolery in her voice, just the usual open neutrality.

‘It’s a sexual problem. I talked to Mott, but I wanted to ask your advice, too.’

‘You’re loaded,’ Charmaine said, looking at him intently, toast still poised in her hand.

‘Being loaded and talking to Mott are the same thing. He was riding Pissgums in the snow.’ Daniel paused, his train of thought derailed, then added awkwardly, ‘But I want to talk to you independent of being loaded.’

She gestured with her toast. ‘Sit down and talk.’

Daniel sat at the table and began to explain, absently turning a jar of marmalade between his hands. Charmaine reached over and lifted it from his grasp. Daniel stumbled, embarrassed. She listened with a calm focus that unsettled him.

When he’d concluded, Charmaine said, ‘So it’s not a problem of having one orgasm a night, but of being limited to one orgasm per partner, whether that night or next month?’

‘Yes ma’am, that’s it.’

‘Can you masturbate twice?’

Daniel nodded, stunned. He hadn’t even thought about that.

‘If you can make love with yourself twice but not anyone else, I doubt the problem is physiological.’ She stood, delicately brushed toast crumbs from her fingers, and started for the back door.

Daniel watched her go as if she were falling, either away from him or toward him, he couldn’t tell. He blurted, ‘I’d like to sleep with you. I think I could do it with you twice.’

Charmaine stopped and turned around, a hint of warmth in her smile. ‘I’m absolutely flattered, Daniel, but I’m just as absolutely not interested. I’m in the middle of some very demanding work, first of all. More important, I’m not the solution to your problem.’

‘Well, since I’ve already made a fool of myself, I might as well ask you something I’ve been wondering about. Whose aunt are you, anyway?’

Charmaine replied easily, ‘Nobody’s really. It’s a name Mommy’s Commies gave me years ago. It’s not widely known – and I’ll trust you to keep it that way – but I’m Polly McCloud’s daughter.’

‘Mommy of Mommy’s Commies is your mother?’

‘Yes. Though it doesn’t make me an aunt to the girls, clearly.’

‘Why don’t you ever visit your mother?’

‘I do.’

‘Oh,’ Daniel said. She acted as if he should have known, but how could he if nobody ever told him anything and were evasive if you asked?

Before Daniel could think of anything to say, Charmaine concluded, ‘I have work to do, and you have company waiting. Good night.’

Since he half expected Volta would be waiting for him in his cabin, he was mildly discombobulated to see a stocky woman with snow-white hair standing at his door. For an instant he thought it might be Polly McCloud, but then he recognized her – and was as shocked to see her as he had been the first time.

‘Goddammit, you better remember,’ she threatened.

‘Dolly Varden.’

‘I can show you my buckshot cherry if you don’t believe it. And don’t just stand there, come over and give this ol’ frame a squeeze – I need all the young action I can get.’

As he hugged her, he realized she was the first person he’d seen since his mother’s death who’d known her while alive. ‘My mother’s dead, you know,’ he said as evenly as he could.

‘Yes, I know. It made me sad in a real simple way. It’s also the reason I’m here. I’m acting as a go-between.’

‘Between who?’

‘AMO and Shamus Malloy.’

Daniel shook his head. ‘I’m a little dumb tonight. You’ll have to explain.’

‘Volta put the word out that you claimed your mother’s death was not an accident, that she had yelled for you to run before the bomb exploded, and that you wanted the names of Shamus’s accomplices since they might be responsible. When Shamus finally heard, he called Volta and said he wouldn’t give him the names until he was satisfied that you really had heard your mother scream for you to run. Obviously, Shamus thought it might be a ploy on Volta’s part to either extract privileged information or to keep Shamus feeling miserable. Volta suggested a go-between. They agreed on me.’

Daniel said, ‘You can tell Shamus it’s true, and that we’d appreciate the names of the others involved.’

‘So you don’t think it was an accident?’

‘It may have been. I don’t know. She yelled and then the bomb exploded – the same second. My gut feeling is that somebody killed her.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘No. That’s why Volta and I want the names of the others.’

‘I’ll tell Shamus personally.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Daniel,’ Dolly chided, ‘that’s confidential.’

‘Well, how is he?’

‘Torn up – he loved Annalee.’

Trembling, Daniel said, ‘So did I. Tell him if I didn’t do it and he didn’t do it, we should talk to the other three people involved, the bomb-maker for sure.’

‘Shamus asked me to warn you that Volta is a very strong and cunning man who didn’t want the theft to occur.’

‘Do you think Volta had anything to do with it?’

‘Personally? No. But he is a powerful and perceptive man.’

Daniel rubbed his eyes. ‘Dolly, do you mind if I ask your opinion on an entirely unrelated matter?’

‘Hell, I’d be honored.’

Dolly listened as he explained his problem. When he finished, she said, ‘So you can only make love with the same woman once – if I got it right?’

‘You do.’

‘Well, you best make it good.’

Dolly left the next morning with Charmaine after assuring Daniel that if and when Shamus provided the names, Volta would contact him.

At about the same time, seventy miles upriver, Jade Lavelle and Annie Sawyer waited for Mommy to return from her morning dip in the Rouge. They met her on the trail. Her short silver hair was still wet from her swim. She listened as they explained Daniel’s problem, her clear hazel eyes shifting from one speaker to the other.

Mommy’s response was swift and definite. ‘Don’t get involved with him. He’s going in a different direction.’

Annie and Jade were startled. Mommy seldom spoke so directly or emphatically.

As they thanked her and turned to leave, Mommy added, her voice much softer, ‘I know – oh, how I know – they are attractive.’

Over the next month, as the harvest was cured, clipped, and distributed, Daniel tried to follow Dolly’s advice. But he was still limited, for whatever reason, to one orgasm with each woman. All the Commies soon knew of Mommy’s comment, and those who hadn’t slept with him hurried to do so. By Thanksgiving, he’d just about run out of Commie lovers.

Fishing for steelhead, Daniel nearly leapt in the river when Volta appeared behind him and said, ‘Any luck?’

‘None,’ Daniel said.

‘Well, here’s some. We’re fairly certain we know who killed your mother. The man who made the bomb, Gideon Nobel.’

‘Why?’ was all Daniel could say.

‘He was in love with her, had been for years.’

‘It doesn’t sound right,’ Daniel said. ‘For one thing, I’m sure she never mentioned him.’ He began to reel in.

‘That’s part of the reason – the feeling wasn’t mutual.’

Daniel started to say something, but Volta held up his hands. ‘Let me apologize for the cheap drama – it’s an old show-business habit. Let’s go on up to the house and I’ll start from the beginning. That is, if you’re done fishing.’

They walked back to the ranch house and sat in the living room. Volta began, ‘Dolly contacted Shamus, gave him your assurance that your mother had shouted a warning just before the bomb exploded, and Shamus, after considering it for a few weeks, sent the names of the other people involved.’ He handed Daniel a piece of paper. Daniel recognized Shamus’s scrawl.

Carl Fuller – driver

Olaf Ekblad – inside

Gideon Nobel – bomb

‘What does inside mean?’ Daniel asked.

‘Going inside with Shamus, for the actual theft. As soon as I received the names – I’ve been in Mexico – I put some of our best people on them, and they’ve found out quite a bit in the short time they’ve had.

‘Carl “The Throttle” Fuller is an old wheelman, a real pro. We found him in Minneapolis without any trouble. He claims all he knew of the setup was his end – procuring the cars, arranging the switches, times and places for picking up the others. He didn’t know about the diversionary bomb, and never met anyone else involved except Shamus.

‘Basically the same story for Olaf Ekblad – absolutely trustworthy, no nerves, and he could have written the manuals for most alarm systems. In fact, AMO has used his services in the past and we’ve found him utterly reliable. He knew a diversion was planned, but not what or who was involved.’

Daniel interrupted. ‘But this Gideon Nobel did?’

‘Listen for a moment. Gideon Nobel met your mother when she was sixteen or seventeen – it was in San Francisco, during one of her visits.’

‘I was too young then,’ Daniel said, disappointed. ‘I won’t be able to remember.’

‘They met in North Beach and he fell in love. For over a year they were occasional lovers – much too occasional for Gideon. Your mother, it seems, was something of a street legend at the time, showing up for a few days a month and then disappearing. At any rate, their affair is still remembered. Gideon was evidently captivated; your mother, less so. She went out with other men, and there were a few public scenes that leave little doubt of his jealousy and anger.

‘Gideon was a highly regarded sculptor then, at least among the avant-garde. His most memorable work is a set of twenty-four pieces sharing the central image of Mickey Mouse. In fact, it’s called Mickey Mouse Time in America, and pieces of the set still exist.

‘While there may be aesthetic arguments about the value of his sculptures, there’s none about the artistry of his bombs. Expert workmanship. Untraceable connections for the explosives. The highest-quality components. Excellent safety features. And no mistakes that anybody ever heard about. Gideon also had a certain panache in his demolitions, always using a Mickey Mouse clock – sort of his signature, even though he replaced the clock mechanisms with more sophisticated timers.

‘Now this is important: Gideon, unbeknownst to Shamus, lived less than four blocks away from Shamus in Richmond. It is easily conceivable that he saw your mother and Shamus together, or even that Shamus told him about her – though Shamus denies that anyone but you and he knew of your mother’s involvement. It is possible that Gideon deduced your mother would be delivering the bomb. He knew that it was merely for diversion, which meant that it would present a very low risk for whoever delivered it, yet would require someone completely trustworthy – in short, a perfect job for Shamus’s lover.

‘At this point it gets a bit trickier. Shamus swears that Gideon didn’t know that the bomb was diversionary to a plutonium theft. However, Gideon knew something of Shamus’s history, and no doubt sensed his current obsession with fissionable materials – Gideon was not without wit, and obsessions are difficult to conceal. So it’s likely Gideon figured out what Shamus was after. There is evidence Gideon had reservations about his association with the heist, as he indirectly confided to certain friends days before the planned attempt – mentioning that he was involved in something that he regretted, fearing it would bring a great deal of scrutiny to his activities. It also seems Gideon had a particular antipathy to nuclear devices, considering them beyond the scale of intelligent control. Not unlike Shamus’s position, really, but with the crucial difference that Gideon believed they are so poisonous to the soul that you can’t mess with them without contamination, whatever your motives.

‘So. Between jealous revenge and a growing fear about his probable involvement in the theft of nuclear materials, Gideon decided to alter the bomb in some way – perhaps so that it would detonate moments after it was armed, or perhaps by a remote device.’ Daniel started to say something but Volta anticipated him. ‘So why did your mother know something was amiss in time to yell a warning to you? I’m not sure, but maybe it was something she felt when she armed the bomb or – and I wouldn’t discount this as a possibility – she remembered Gideon’s obsession with the Mickey Mouse image, probably knew he made bombs, did know a Mickey Mouse clock had been used in the one she was carrying, and came up with enough doubts and dangers to warn you.’

Daniel was shaking his head.

‘I know,’ Volta said, ‘the latter is fairly thin conjecture.’

‘Yes, it is – but more than that, it was the way she yelled for me to run. It wasn’t like there might be danger; it was immediate, urgent.’

Volta sighed. ‘I know. But by your own description she was extremely nervous, enough so that a vague connection might have become an urgent truth.’

‘What does Gideon say to all this speculation?’

‘Nothing. Nor will he. He was killed in a car wreck less than a year later – hit head-on by a drunk driver, who is now serving an eight-year term for second degree murder.’

Daniel said, ‘Circumstance, conjecture, a convenient death – it sounds awfully loose.’

‘I can’t disagree. But how would you like to check it out yourself? Investigative work is excellent training. Besides, you must be ready to come out of the hills for some bright lights and big city. It’s up to you, of course.’

‘I would like that,’ Daniel said. ‘I want some direct information.’

‘Done. I’ll set up a money drop for you in the city to support your investigation. You take care of the rest – lodging, food, and so forth. You’ll be on your own, but I’ll give you a number to contract me if you’re so inclined. I might be able to coordinate information and leads, and perhaps offer some instructions – suggestions, really.’

‘Why not give them to me now?’

Volta smiled faintly. ‘Because I’m not sure what they are. Things have been moving very fast lately.’

‘I noticed,’ Daniel said. He was just about to ask Volta’s opinion on his sexual problem when he heard Mott railing at Pissgums down in the barn.

‘I must leave within the hour,’ Volta said, getting to his feet, ‘and first I must talk to Mott and Charmaine.’

‘What do you have to talk to her about?’

Volta arched an eyebrow. ‘Business. She needs some supplies and new equipment for her lab.’

‘What does she make in that lab of hers anyway?’

‘She doesn’t always tell me, and I never ask.’

‘You just supply the materials and equipment on faith, right?’

‘Exactly. The same basis on which we provide your training. Please call and check in when you get to the city.’

Daniel left the Rocking On a week later, three jars of chili and a quarter pound of trainwreck weed in his pack, farewell gifts from Mott. Charmaine was gone for the month, so he left her a good-bye note thanking her for her help. He promised Mott he’d call if he ran across any new drugs or happened to hear about a vintage bazooka for sale.

Transcription: Telephone Call Between

Volta and Daniel

DANIEL: Hey, this is Daniel. I just went by the drop and there’s only a hundred dollars.

VOLTA: We’re not a rich organization, Daniel.

DANIEL: A hundred dollars won’t even pay rent. This is San Francisco.

VOLTA: I understand. It’s a dismal situation. But frankly, the finances are in shambles. Our accountant fell in love with her secretary. There’s a hundred-dollar limit on all nonessential outlays.

DANIEL: And checking out my mother’s death is nonessential?

VOLTA: Since it’s already been done to some degree by others – who were paid eight hundred dollars – it’s difficult to justify financially. And people besides myself are involved in these determinations.

DANIEL: Am I supposed to sleep in the park?

VOLTA: It’s been done to good effect.

DANIEL: I get it – part of the training.

VOLTA: Not specifically, no. We do, of course, assume that any of our students has the wit to survive in an affluent society.

DANIEL: What if I need to bribe someone for information?

VOLTA: Bribery is the failure of persuasion. And you’re certainly not being trained to acquire information that could simply be bought.

DANIEL: All right. A hundred a week is good enough.

VOLTA: A month.

DANIEL: You’re kidding. I’d rather devote my attention to investigating my mother’s death than finding out what garbage cans in which alleys are the best to eat from.

VOLTA: Perhaps you’ll find attention sharpened by necessity.

DANIEL: I thought I was supposed to get twenty percent of the truck farm profits?

VOLTA: You are. A hundred dollars a month for fourteen months is fourteen hundred dollars.

DANIEL: Fourteen hundred! It should be more like fourteen thousand!

VOLTA: Daniel, you’ve confused gross with profit. Gross is total income. Profit is the gross minus operating expenses, which include everything from land payments and taxes – it is three thousand acres, remember – down to kerosene for the lamps. It also includes ceremonial expenses, like burning hundred-dollar bills, and instructional salaries – Wild Bill’s, for instance. Plus, of course, the five percent dues you’re supposed to pay as an AMO member. We assume your honor, so take it out at this end to save the tedious and entropic transactions of sending it to you only to have you return it. It makes life easier for our accountants.

DANIEL: Maybe if they had more work, they wouldn’t have time to fall in love with their secretaries.

VOLTA: If, out of some notion of formality, you insist on receiving the 5 percent we’ve withheld, I’ll send it tomorrow. I believe it’s around ninety-three dollars.

DANIEL: (after a pause) No, keep it. Buy your accountant and her boyfriend a wedding present.

VOLTA: That’s very thoughtful. You’re a credit to Wild Bill. And Daniel, do let me know if you turn up anything interesting.

The first interesting thing Daniel turned up was a spirited blond named Epiphany Chantrelle. He met her in City Lights Books his second day in town. She took him home to a communal house on Treat Street, a Victorian three-story. The number of residents on any given day varied between two and twenty, depending on who was in town, or jail, or had just been released, or had left for Nepal, or returned from Chile. Nobody asked too many questions, and an almost self-conscious spirit of cooperation prevailed. There was always something cooking in the kitchen and the dishes got done. A neatly lettered sign over the sink read: ‘We’re all guests here.’ Beneath it someone had added Wild Bill’s familiar phrase, ‘One hand washes the other.’

He slept with Epiphany that first night, after explaining as straightforwardly as possible that he probably couldn’t have sex with her again. And he couldn’t, though he tried several times before she eventually left for Detroit with a drummer from Rabid Lassie. He made love – once – with six other women, but when he found he couldn’t repeat, decided to try celibacy awhile. Perhaps the problem would solve itself.

To anyone who asked, Daniel said he’d been working as a ranch hand since he was twelve, saved a little money, and had come to San Francisco to find out how people could live so close together.

Gathering information on Gideon Nobel proved frustrating and tedious. He couldn’t find anyone who’d even admit they knew Gideon made bombs. He did manage to see the highway patrol report on Gideon’s fatal accident. Gideon’s Volkswagen had been hit head on by a Chevy driven by a drunk pipefitter named Harlan Maldowny, whose wife had left him a month earlier. Harlan was still in Vacaville on the second-degree homicide rap. Daniel thought about visiting Harlan but decided it would probably be a depressing waste of time. It clearly hadn’t been a hit.

He checked out the list of Gideon’s North Beach friends that Volta had given him, or at least those that still remained. They recalled his passionate infatuation with Annalee, and some of the scenes he’d caused when rejected, but nobody thought he was the sort of man who would carry a torch or a grudge for very long.

Daniel’s investigation took a diligent five months, two pairs of shoes, and too many bus rides. And it all checked out pretty much as Volta had presented it until he met Charlie Miller.

He turned up Charlie Miller through Quentin Lime, an art critic who refused to believe Daniel’s line that he was an intern reporter considering writing a piece on Gideon Nobel.

‘First of all, Gideon Nobel was, if not an outright charlatan, the worst sculptor west of New York. Secondly, you’re much too young to be a reporter, even for an abomination like Teen Arts.’

‘I skipped a few grades,’ Daniel explained.

‘Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I refuse to discuss Gideon’s alleged work.’

‘Actually, I’m not so much interested in his work as I am in his life and his particular Bohemian lifestyle – you see, the focus of the article is on different artistic lifestyles.’

‘Well, that shouldn’t be difficult to uncover: He suffered quite publicly and volubly. I’m sure hundreds of people in North Beach alone could still provide you with the squalid details.’

‘What about his series of sculptures with the Mickey Mouse theme?’

‘Drivel,’ Quentin Lime sniffed, ‘pure, witless, kitschy drivel.’

‘It received some good reviews.’

‘Most reviews are written by morons about morons. Sensibility is at a premium in American culture these days.’

‘Did you know him personally?’

‘Never,’ Quentin Lime said icily. ‘We tended to frequent different social circles. Gideon considered himself a beatnik. He and Charles Miller wrote a miserable piece of self-promotion called the Three M Manifesto – essentially the crucial culture concept of “Mickey Mouse Moment,” which they, with childish illogic and grand infelicities of expression, advanced as a beatific state.’

‘I thought the Three M Manifesto had been published anonymously?’

‘I assure you that my sources, while I’m not at liberty to disclose them, are impeccable.’

‘This Charles Miller – who’s he? I haven’t heard him mentioned before.’

‘You’ve probably heard him referred to as High Life. Do you get it? Miller High Life. Bohemians are so witty.’

‘High Life, right, I’ve heard about him – but he’s in Spain isn’t he?’

‘Unfortunately, he returned two days ago, which means that in about a half hour he will be slouching at a back table in Cafe Trieste, holding court to an empty house. I hear he’s now billing himself as the Last Beatnik. Let us fervently hope so.’

‘Sit down, man,’ High Life motioned before Daniel could even introduce himself. ‘You know what the real work of art is, man? Life. Not just human life, but all life.’ He leaned forward confidentially as Daniel took a chair. ‘I used to be a painter. Now I’m the paint. You digging that?’

Daniel said carefully, ‘I think I know what you mean.’

‘But do you dig the tragedy of it?’

‘I thought it sounded fine.’

‘No, man. And you know why? There’s no canvas. They’re all turning into fucking robots out there. Power-suckers. Women are buying electrical vibrators to fuck themselves with, man. Personal appliances – it’s a whole new market. You see, man, Marx got it right for his time, but hey, who could have imagined advertising? A whole industry devoted to the creation of desire! Like we didn’t have enough, right?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve spent most of my time in the mountains.’

‘Go back, man. It’s your best shot at sanity.’

‘I probably will, but right now I’m trying to gather some information on a sculptor named Gideon Nobel.’

High Life looked blankly at a spot just over Daniel’s head.

‘I’m not a cop,’ Daniel assured him.

‘Man, everybody’s a cop or a reporter. Anybody that calls the cops is a cop. Anybody trying to write their way into the fame game is a reporter. You know what I’m saying? I mean, a person that calls the cops is a person that doesn’t have any friends. I don’t need that action, dig,’ cause I have friends. Maybe even this Gideon cat was a friend. Why would you want to know?’

Given High Life’s clear antipathy to reporters, Daniel tried a different cover. ‘I’m writing a graduate paper on his life and work.’

High Life cocked his head. ‘Oh yeah? Where you studying?’

‘Cal.’

‘Who’s department chair in art over there now?’

‘Polansky.’

‘You read the right catalogue, man, but Polansky had a stroke about three months ago.’ High Life started to rise from his chair. ‘See ya later.’

‘Actually,’ Daniel said, ‘I want to know about Gideon because I think he killed my mother.’

High Life sat down. ‘Hey, that’s too much. What was her name?’

‘Annalee Pearse.’

High Life looked at Daniel sharply, then shook his head. ‘Let’s fall by my pad, man. Do a little of the good shit and see if we can’t get this back on track.’

Charles ‘High Life’ Miller hadn’t been properly stirred in the melting pot. He had General Custer’s flowing blond hair and the dirt-brown eyes of Sitting Bull. His upstairs apartment on Columbus was furnished with a mattress, three orange-crate bookcases, wine bottles shoved in a corner, and a refrigerator that ran constantly and noisily. High Life sat on the mattress and rolled a joint. He lit it, sucked down a little hit, passed it to Daniel. As he exhaled he said, ‘Brought this shit back with me from Spain. Basques grow it in the highlands. Best kept secret on the planet, this weed. It’ll knock your dick in your watchpocket.’

Daniel took a few hits and passed it back, imagining Mott snorting in derision at the size of the joint. Mott’s, usually rolled in newspaper in the Rastafarian mode, required both hands just to hold on.

High Life asked abruptly, ‘Your mother now, she the Annalee who Gideon had the bad hots for back in the late sixties?’

‘So it seems.’

‘How’d she die?’

‘A bomb exploded.’

High Life nodded, staring at the joint in his hand. ‘Well, man, you know how it is – accidents happen.’

‘Not this time.’

‘I knew them both. Your mother couldn’t have been sixteen, seventeen. Stunning chick. Mysterioso. Make the scene for a few days and – poof – gone till you saw her again. Gideon was what? Early thirties? Very hip, definitely knew the scoobies from the doos. He went for her hard. He thought she might be an actual Moon Goddess. I mean, Gideon truly believed there are gods and goddesses who assume human form in order to increase their understanding of us. Anyway, I was in Vesuvio’s the night Gideon pulled a gun on Johnny Gilbert and threatened to blow him away if he didn’t quit porking your mom – that wasn’t very sensitive on my part, was it? But that’s what he said to Johnny Gilbert, who was a poet. She dug poets. But I’ll tell you, Gideon loved her as real as you can. He might have killed for her, but he’d never have killed her.’

‘She was in love with someone else.’

‘When are we talking about?’

‘Early 1980.’

‘No way. Me and Gideon were tight into the late seventies.’ High Life held up his thumb and index finger pressed together to illustrate how tight they’d been. ‘He’d gotten over your mother by then. He was an artist, and artists are passionate people. He wasn’t happy unless he was obsessed, taken with some glory vision, some monstro-truth, and when he was in it, he was in it, over his head. And when he came up, it ended. Like when he knew your mother, he was obsessed with moonlight. He used to go up on the roof at night and fucking moonbathe. He wrote letters to NASA threatening to kill any asshole astronaut that dared to set foot on the moon. He called your mom Diana – believed to his bones, man, that she was a genuine Moon Goddess. All he talked about was her and the moon. It lasted about two years. Then he got into Marx.’

‘Karl Marx?’

‘Don’t ask me how he made that leap, but he read every word of and on Marx for about two years. Then it was clouds.’

Daniel asked: ‘What about Mickey Mouse – was that another of his obsessions? He did a series of sculptures, didn’t he?’

‘Oh yeah, he got into Mickey deep. He gave me the second sculpture he did. They all represented an hour of the day, dig, and mine was midnight. A little painted bronze of Mickey Mouse with his head up his ass. Best one in the series, I thought. But I had to sell it when I hit some hard times. You know, in some ways Mickey was his last shot. After that he became extremely interested in, uh … sonic sculptures, if you follow me – loud noises. I mean, after Mickey Mouse, what’s left?’

‘When did he do these Mickey Mouse sculptures?’

‘Umm, let’s see? Must have been around seventy-seven, seventy-six. Yeah, seventy-six, the Bicentennial, because that Christmas he gave everybody a Mickey Mouse watch with the hands pulled off.’

High Life began a long rant against cultural idiocy, but Daniel tuned him out. In late 1976 they’d still been at the Four Deuces, but Annalee hadn’t been making her monthly city trips for a long time. It was highly improbable she could have connected Gideon to the bomb. And then Daniel surprised himself by immediately deciding not to tell Volta the new information, or not until he had thought it through.

It wasn’t pleasant thinking it through. He lay on his mattress in the basement of the Treat Street house resifting evidence, considering motives, entertaining the improbable, trying to seize the obvious, taking each person carefully, starting with himself.

He knew he hadn’t betrayed his mother, but it was possible that the girl who’d wandered into the house the night before the theft attempt and who’d so wonderfully sucked his cock might have been an agent investigating the phony paper they were producing. Maybe she’d found something in the house, a note or something his mother had left. The trouble with that was he didn’t think his mother knew where the bomb would be planted until the next morning.

He eliminated Shamus mainly on instinct. What he had learned didn’t contradict his gut feeling that Shamus had been the one with the most to lose. Volta’s suggestion that perhaps Shamus had changed the bomb so that it would kill Annalee seemed utterly farfetched; Daniel might have entertained it if Shamus had gone ahead with the theft, but he hadn’t, nor had he tried to eliminate the others involved.

Gideon was more problematic. A faulty bomb was possible, but Daniel had to doubt, in light of the information from High Life, that the blast had been intentional on Gideon’s part. High Life had claimed Gideon had never said much about nuclear devices one way or another except to insist they were possessed of such horrible karma it was best to not even think about them. Daniel wasn’t sure what that meant, since it could be taken as a mindlessly blithe dismissal or an aversion as deep as taboo.

He provisionally eliminated Carl Fuller, the wheelman, and Olaf Ekblad, the alarm specialist. Shamus had said whoever was involved would deal only with him and know only the part assigned, and evidently that was the case.

That left his mother. She, he thought ruefully, would have done just about anything to stay with Shamus, and whether the theft was successful or not, she was going to lose. Only by preventing it could she have stayed with Shamus. And though she certainly had her sacrificial side, it was insulting to think she would kill herself to save the relationship. She wasn’t crazy. And even if she would have endangered herself, she wouldn’t have put him in peril. But what finally convinced him it couldn’t have been his mother was the memory of her scream telling him to run: It had been terrified. Whatever had happened, she hadn’t expected it.

Daniel, heeding Shamus’s message to be careful of Volta, decided Volta should be considered as well. There were just too many unknowns. First of all, Volta would have had to know what was happening – where and when – which meant somebody would have had to tell him. Only Shamus and, for a few hours, he and his mother had known where the bomb would be placed. Of course, Volta had been strongly against the plutonium theft, and knowing how Annalee and Shamus felt about each other, he might have put tails on them. But it’s the nature of tails to follow, not anticipate, though perhaps there had been a way to get to the bomb before it got to Shamus. The other thing was, none of it felt like Volta’s style. But he knew exactly what Shamus meant about Volta. Even when discussing the weather, Volta always seemed to say just a little bit less than he actually knew.

After ten hours of hard solid thought on every possibility he could imagine, Daniel gave up. There were too many unknowns, too many improbable sequences, and all the evidence pointed to the obvious: a faulty bomb, probably a malfunction in the timer.

Transcription: Telephone Conversation Between

Volta and Daniel

DANIEL: Hello, Volta? This is Daniel.

VOLTA: And how are you, Daniel?

DANIEL: Broke and nowhere.

VOLTA: (chuckling) At least you’re making progress.

DANIEL: You’d have to convince me.

VOLTA: The last time we talked you were merely broke.

DANIEL: (sullenly) I suppose.

VOLTA: Have you made inquiries?

DANIEL: Yes, but without any startling discoveries.

VOLTA: Are you satisfied Gideon killed your mother?

DANIEL: Not completely.

VOLTA: I’m not satisfied at all. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it seems too improbable that your mother connected the bomb with Gideon just moments before it exploded. As I mentioned before, it seems far more likely she heard something inside the case – some sound, the timer connecting – that convinced her the bomb was about to explode.

DANIEL: That’s my tentative conclusion, also.

VOLTA: Have you explored it at all? The possibility of a faulty bomb?

DANIEL: No.

VOLTA: I have. I’ve talked to four demolition experts who all said it was virtually impossible there would be a warning sound, though it would depend on the type of bomb. One of the experts, ‘Blooey’ Martien said that if your mother was a particularly receptive soul she may have ‘sensed’ imminent death – he entered it as a possibility, but noted it was highly doubtful. However, when I attempted to obtain the police report on the bomb, it was missing. No record. Gone. So while you may indeed be nowhere, you’re not alone.

DANIEL: What do you mean the police record is gone?

VOLTA: I’m not sure I can be more explicit. The bomb report is not on file. With every bombing, there’s a lab analysis of the traces to determine the composition of the bomb, the type of explosive, so forth. Either the report was never filed – highly unusual – or it was removed. Or, mostly likely, it was misfiled in the bureaucratic paper shuffle. You’re welcome to look if you choose. I must say, though, we have an exceptional contact inside the department, and she’s gotten nowhere. Also, your inquiries will no doubt excite their curiosity about you, thus their scrutiny, and perhaps their wrath.

DANIEL: How do I know that you’re not making this up?

VOLTA: You don’t. But you’re free to verify the information. In fact, we’ll increase your pay to $120 a month to do it. It’s a rather strange arrangement, paying you to verify our honor, but

AMO has traditionally delighted in strangeness.

DANIEL: I’ll take your word for it. But thanks for the raise. I can afford lunch twice a week now.

VOLTA: Really, Daniel. Like most human beings, sniveling does not become you.

DANIEL: (quickly, trying to catch Volta off guard) Did you know my mother was seeing Shamus in Berkeley?

VOLTA: No. But I clearly surmised the possibility, since I did request your mother to call me should he appear.

DANIEL: What made you think he’d show up?

VOLTA: His eyes when he talked about Annalee.

DANIEL: Were you having Shamus watched? Or us?

VOLTA: (patiently, but with some snap) No, Daniel. You must understand that while I didn’t want Shamus stealing nuclear materials, and would have tried to dissuade him, I would not have physically intervened, and certainly not by killing your mother. If you think differently, we’re wasting each other’s time and spirit.

DANIEL: I’m sorry if I offended you. I’ve been asking questions for the past few months and I’m a little hungry for some answers.

VOLTA: All I can give you is my word that I knew nothing of the plutonium theft until the day your mother died in the explosion.

DANIEL: One of the reasons I ask is that Shamus says not to trust you. I wonder if you trust him?

VOLTA: Less so lately than before. He’s not doing well. He’s evidently drinking heavily and taking drugs – one of the painkillers, Percodan or Dilaudid.

DANIEL: That’s not like him. Does he still wear a black glove?

VOLTA: Yes, but with the fingertips cut off. All this comes from Dolly, by the way.

DANIEL: It’s depressing about Shamus.

VOLTA: Alchemy is full of cautions about becoming fascinated with the powers of decay. It is also traditionally held that a man burned by silver is marked by the moon.

DANIEL: (abruptly, but not demanding) I’m tired of thinking about all this. I don’t see anywhere left to go with it. What’s next, if anything?

VOLTA: Take a three-week vacation. The man I want to connect you with won’t be back till the twenty-eighth. Call around then and I’ll put you in touch. His name is William Clinton.

DANIEL: What will I be studying?

VOLTA: Concentration.

DANIEL: I thought that’s what I studied with Wild Bill.

VOLTA: Indeed. I trust you’re well prepared.

William Rebis Clinton was the ace safecracker west of the Rockies. Willie the Click, as he was known to his cohorts, could drill or blast any lock devised. However, as he repeatedly and vehemently pointed out, the highest expression of the safecrackers’ art was opening combination locks by touch alone, by becoming the spinning wheel, the tumblers and pins, by disappearing through your fingertips into pure sensation. On his fortieth birthday, Willie had resolved never again to use anything but his hands to open a safe. He hadn’t, and he was pleased. Drills and explosives did what Willie believed all technologies did: They killed feeling. By assassinating time and space under the guise of saving them, they keep people out of touch when the better state of being, according to Willie and others, is in touch. In his more delirious screeds, Willie claimed that industrialization was a Christian plot to destroy the pagan reflex between sensation and emotion.

Willie was a short, wiry man with intense brown eyes. His most notable trait was his tendency to speak in whirling bursts of proverbs, obscure quotations, metaphors, speculative observation, and oblique conceits. When Daniel had arrived at Willie’s apartment in the Mission District, Willie had taken Daniel’s offered hand and scrutinized it a few minutes before ordering Daniel to sit down and spread both his hands palm up on the worktable. Curious, Daniel complied, and then became suddenly anxious when Willie sat down opposite him and opened a case containing five silver needles, needles so slender they flirted with invisibility.

‘What are those for?’

‘The obscure by the more obscure, Daniel, the unknown by the unfathomable. To gauge sensitivity. Synaptic discrimination. Your particular neural awareness. It’s painless. Though I believe it was Carlyle who noted, “The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.”’ Willie lifted a needle to the light. ‘Now shut your eyes and tell me when you feel something – the slightest pressure or other sensation.’

Daniel shut his eyes and concentrated on his upturned hands on the table. He felt a tingling in his left index finger and told Willie.

‘Yes,’ Willie muttered, ‘continue.’

Daniel felt a burning sensation on his right ring finger. Then his left thumb itched, then his left middle finger tingled. Willie said, ‘Bah. Poor summation. A plus B, but no C. Clogged thresholds. You can open your eyes.’ Willie was glaring at him. ‘Virtual tactile insentience. A turtle has more feeling in its shell. So be it. As they say in Yugoslavia, “Tell the truth and run fast.” I’m afraid we’ll have to start with the absolute fundamentals. You do understand that opening locks is an art, and that a necessity of art is to intensify the organs it employs?’

‘No,’ Daniel said hesitantly, not without a touch of perversity, ‘I’m not sure if I do understand that.’

‘Muddy mind, troubled water. All right. Consider what Sickert had to say: “The whole of art is one long roll of revelation.” And it is revealed only to those whose minds are what Horace called “vacant” – though he was actually speaking of a woman whose heart is free. Get rid of yourself, Daniel. To open locks you must open yourself. Disappear through your fingertips.’

‘Suppose I don’t come back?’

‘A door always opens.’

Daniel started to say something but Willie cut him off. ‘No. No more abstractions for you. You are the kind who can swim in them, but you should be bathing in water squeezed from stone. If you’d please close your eyes, and place your hands palms upward on the table again.’

Daniel immediately felt something light and papery settle on each palm.

Willie commanded, ‘All right, open them.’

In his right hand Daniel saw a hundred-dollar bill. In the left, a slip of paper with a series of numbers.

Willie explained, ‘The phone number belongs to Oriana Coeur. The money is to pay her.’

‘For what?’ Daniel demanded.

‘For her profound sensual dimensions. You will see her every Thursday until you develop tactility. From seven o’clock in the evening till three o’clock in the morning on the other six nights of the week, you will meet with me here for study. We will start with alarm systems. Locks must await your work with Oriana. As an Estonian proverb has it, “You can’t expect the mute to sing.”’

‘What did you mean about Oriana’s “sensual dimensions”?’

‘Ah ha! You see? Attention begins when the imagination is seized. Oriana is a woman of the evening who has a remarkable sensitivity to touch. The fee for her company is usually five hundred dollars a night, but since she and I developed the exercise together, the charge is considerably less.’

‘So what will she and I be doing exactly?’

‘Oriana will give you the exact instructions, but essentially you will touch her where she directs you, using a variety of pressures and movements. You will practice until Oriana is satisfied. She, please note, not you. You keep your clothes on. Your purpose is not only to please her, but to literally have her life put in your hands. Literally. If her pleasure is the answer, your task, as Krause put it, is “to provide the riddle.”’

That evening, Oriana, her reddish-gold hair spilling over the pillows, arms flung wide, gave much more explicit instructions on where and how she wished to be touched – everywhere and any way she could imagine. At the height of her pleasure, Daniel imagined she was touching him, and for a long spinning instant lost all distinctions between their skins. Afterward, his hands felt like globes of light. But when Oriana, still flushed, began kissing his fingertips, asking what his pleasure was, he said he’d like to wait.

Oriana bit his middle finger gently. ‘So Willie told you to keep your pants on, huh? He’s such a purist.’

Daniel said, ‘It’s not really that. In the past, I’ve only been able to be with a woman once.’

‘What do you mean be with? That you could only come once a night?’

‘Once, period.’

Oriana was interested. ‘Then you can’t get it up again for her, ever?’

Daniel nodded.

‘Not even a little tremor of a twinge?’

‘Nothing.’

‘These ladies knew what they were doing?’

‘They were extremely desirable, and remarkably patient.’

‘So what do you think is going on?’

‘I don’t know. It could be from an injury. A tiny sliver of metal was once blown through the right front quadrant of my brain.’

‘Good Lord! What happened?’

‘It’s complicated, Oriana. My mother was killed in an accident and I almost was, too.’

‘Oh honey,’ Oriana said. She took Daniel’s hands in hers and pressed them to her face.

Daniel felt a tear against his palm. ‘Don’t cry,’ he asked her. ‘Please?’

Oriana flung his hands off her face and sat up on the bed, facing him. ‘Fuck you,’ she spit. ‘I’ll cry when I feel like crying.’

Daniel fell in love. He told her, ‘I want to wait to have sex with you because I’d rather have a future than a past.’

In reply, she embraced him in her bare arms. ‘Any time and all the time you want.’

Every Thursday evening Daniel was a brilliant student, but the rest of the week he was dunced by distraction. His mind wandered over Oriana’s lush and astonishingly responsive body. Willie’s mind was as interesting as Oriana’s body, but not nearly as provocative.

Nonetheless, over the next three months Daniel learned to disable fifty different alarm systems and pick almost any lock that could be opened with a key. As they entered the fourth month of instruction, Willie introduced him to combination locks. At the first week’s session, Willie made him sit for two hours blindfolded, ears plugged, wearing thick gloves before allowing him to attempt the simplest $3.95 combination lock. As Daniel twirled the dial, Willie coached him. ‘Feel inside the lock through your fingers. As if they were root tips seeking water. Feel for the slightest drag, the friction between molecules. Trust your fingertips. They are closer than your brain, far less busy, and immensely less complicated. You need to open this lock to see yourself, and as Edgar Davis Dodds said, “Freedom resides in being equal to your needs.” But first you must comprehend the difference between necessity and desire.’

Daniel wondered if he merely desired Oriana or actually needed her.

‘Daniel,’ Willie scolded, ‘is that a pretty sunset you’re watching up there on Jupiter?’

Daniel went back to work on the lock.

That night Daniel got some homework – a cheap combination bicycle lock. It was locked. When he returned it the next evening open, he received two locks to take home. Willie promised they’d begin the field-work portion of their study when he could open twenty at home overnight.

Willie scouted the first few jobs, and put Daniel through his paces, from disabling the alarm system to locating and opening the safe. Soon Daniel’s responsibility expanded to include scouting and planning. They made about one field-trip a week, or about as often as his visits to Oriana. Daniel had suggested to Willie early on that he thought working with Oriana twice a week would be doubly helpful. Willie said he was sure it would, but that he couldn’t afford it. Oriana, when Daniel asked if he might see her more often, had claimed that the pleasure center in her brain would fry shut if she saw him more than once a week.

Daniel, with Willie’s guidance, opened twenty-three safes during his apprenticeship. To Daniel’s utter dismay they never stole anything. The rule against theft had been firmly established on his first job, a dentist’s wall-safe in Tiburon.

‘Put it back,’ Willie hissed.

Daniel thought Willie was kidding and didn’t even pause as he stuffed the sheaf of bills and an ounce baggie of cocaine into his jacket pocket.

‘Daniel,’ Willie roared, ‘did you fail to hear me or fail to understand? Put it back. We’re practicing.’

‘Be serious,’ Daniel pleaded. ‘If we get busted, is that what we tell the cops – it’s okay, officer, we’re just practicing.’

‘We don’t tell the cops shit, ever. And we don’t steal unless it’s necessary. And we harken to Salinius’s observation that “the great enemies of honor are greed and convenience.”’

Daniel returned the drugs and money to the safe. ‘So what is this?’ he sneered. ‘Art for art’s sake?’

‘You flatter yourself. It’s merely practice. After much practice, it might become art.’

Daniel fired at him, ‘Hey! I’ve been living on a hundred dollars a month for almost a year!’

‘That’s plenty,’ Willie said. ‘Besides, you’ve been living on five hundred a month – a hundred for room and board, four hundred for Oriana.’

‘I get it,’ Daniel said wearily, ‘I suppose it’s charged to my account. You guys are merciless.’

‘Not really. We’re just playfully fair.’

‘Playful?’ Daniel repeated. ‘That’s twisted thinking.’ Daniel started to swing the safe door shut.

‘No,’ Willie stopped him. ‘Wait. Not only do we not take anything, we always leave then something for their trouble.’ He handed Daniel a small, elegantly printed card. On it was a quotation from Rilke:

… there is no place

that does not see you.

You must change your life.

Smiling to himself, Daniel dropped the card on the baggie of cocaine, closed the safe, and gave the knob a carefree twirl.

For Daniel, the most illuminating aspect of cracking safes was the things people chose to keep secret. Money and drugs were the most common items, with jewels, documents, and guns close behind, but after those the list got strange:

A quart jar of glass eyes

A flattened typewriter

A pair of black panties tied around a pair of roller skates (Oriana had howled when Daniel told her)

A tree-sloth fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde

A small twenty-four-carat gold yo-yo with a string of finely braided silver that Daniel had wanted so bad he could taste it

An old coffeepot

A piece of chalk

A petrified loaf of French bread

And Daniel’s favorite, a neatly printed note in an otherwise empty safe: ‘Eat shit, George. I’ve taken it all and I’m on my way to Paris with the pool boy.’ (This was Oriana’s favorite, too.)

Transcription (Partial): Telephone Call Between

Volta and Willie Clinton

VOLTA: A certain large library in our nation’s capital has come into possession of some old documents that rightfully belong to us.

WILLIE: I’m on my way.

VOLTA: What about Daniel?

WILLIE: You know I always work alone on jobs like this. To cite a popular Southern California proverb, ‘Just because everything’s different doesn’t mean anything has changed.’

VOLTA: Fine. I just thought it might make an interesting final exam.

WILLIE: He doesn’t need a final exam. He’s proficient, but that’s all he’ll ever be as a safecracker. Granted, he has some feel for it, but not wholeheartedly. My sense – and I may be wrong – is that Daniel doesn’t want in, he wants out. And it was Schiller, I believe, who said, ‘Blesséd are those whose necessities find their art.’ In my opinion, safecracking isn’t Daniel’s art. It hasn’t helped that his attention has been confounded by a lovely young woman.

VOLTA: I’ve never been a foe of sweet confoundings. After all, who’s to say what the lesson is unless you learn it.

WILLIE: You’re shameless! You stole that from Sophocles!

VOLTA: William, as T. S. Eliot said, ‘A good poet borrows; a great poet steals.’

WILLIE: I don’t have time to listen to you mangle quotes all day. When do I leave?

VOLTA: Twenty hours. Bruce on Castro is making the arrangements. What about Daniel? Any suggestions?

WILLIE: Give him some money and some time off. A hundred a month really is a bit grim. Otherwise, I fear San Francisco will be hit with a spate of B&E’s.

VOLTA: Well, as they say: ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him do the backstroke or suck blood from a turnip.’

When Daniel arrived at Willie’s Friday evening he found the door locked and a note pinned to the sill: ‘Daniel – Come on in.’ His brain still floating from the previous night’s session with Oriana, Daniel took a moment to comprehend the note.

He picked the lock and went in.

There was a safe on the worktable, a small Sentry combination. It was a snap. Inside was a stack of cards with the Rilke quotation, a handmade set of vanadium picks, and another note from Willie:

I’m sorry I can’t give you my personal farewell and good wishes, but some urgent business has usurped my attention. Please accept the picks as a graduation present. It’s been a privilege to work with you. I could go on, but, as Auden has chided, ‘Sentimentality is the failure of emotion.’

Volta asked that you call him asap through the Six Rivers exchange.

May the doors open on what you need,

Willie

As Daniel finished the note his first thought was now I can fuck Oriana. But the first thing he did was call Volta as requested. Volta, who seemed preoccupied, told Daniel a five-thousand-dollar cashier’s check was waiting for him at the Hibernia Bank, and that in two weeks he should meet Robert Sloane in Room 377 of the Bathsheba Hotel in Tucson.

Daniel cashed the check in the morning and took a cab back to Treat Street, instructing the cabbie to wait. He took only a few minutes to pack his gear. As he passed through the kitchen on his way out, he stopped to count out a thousand dollars in twenties, leaving them on the table. He directed the cab to the Clift Hotel, tipped the driver a hundred-dollar bill, tipped the doorman twenty for dealing with his luggage, and rented a suite for ten days, paying the full $1500 in advance. The suite was elegantly comfortable. He sat at the cherry-wood desk and dialed Oriana’s number. A computer-generated voice informed him the number had been disconnected.

He spent the next three torturous days wondering if she’d gone with Willie and why she hadn’t said good-bye. He tried her number over and over and the same hideous voice gave him the same bad news. He wondered if maybe she’d been hassled by the cops or a john. He thought about asking Volta to find out what was going on. He thought about Oriana’s long body, the curve of her flanks, the warmth of her inner thighs. He hurt.

When he stirred from a fitful sleep early the fourth day, he saw the red message light glowing on the phone. The desk informed him a letter had been left for him. In a few minutes, the concierge himself delivered it.

The note from Oriana was brief:

Now you’ll always have a future.

Daniel started laughing, and right in the middle of laughing he burst into tears. He couldn’t stop until he burned the note.

Six days later, on the night before his flight left for Tucson, Daniel relieved the Marina Safeway’s vault of ten thousand dollars and left it on the kitchen table at the Treat Street house before returning for his last night at the Clift. He believed it had been Willie the Click, quoting Schiller perhaps, who’d noted, ‘If luxury doesn’t inspire generosity, the luxury is undeserved.’

Bad Bobby Sloane – tall, lean, greying at the temples, always neatly and conservatively dressed – looked more like a savings-and-loan vice-president than a gambling fool. If you’d been around him in his early twenties when he’d succumbed to the only burst of flamboyance in his life, he might have handed you one of his business cards – and there it was, right under his engraved name:

ROBERT SLOANE

Poker Player & General Gambling Fool

I will play

Any man from any land

Any amount he can count

At any game he can name

Any place, face-to-face.

Bad Bobby had started playing poker for keepsies when he was nine years old, just after the Second World War. He’d played his first game around a migrant campfire in a Georgia peach orchard. He’d bought into the game with his father’s new boots, for which one of the men gave him fifty cents. His father had died a week earlier, beaten to death in a barroom brawl. Before sunrise, Bobby had turned five dimes into sixty-seven dollars.

Almost four decades later, Bad Bobby Sloane was generally regarded as probably the best all-around cardplayer in the United States, especially in Texas Hold-’Em and, since Johnny ‘He-Horse’ Coombs had recently cashed out, perhaps the best at Five-Card Stud.

Daniel’s knock at Room 377 was answered by a hotel steward. Behind him, through the drifting smoke, Daniel saw a card game in progress. He told the steward he was looking for Mr Sloane, and after a few minutes’ wait, Bad Bobby stepped into the hall. He had flat blue eyes and large, bony hands. He was wearing a well-cut houndstooth jacket, brown slacks, a lighter brown shirt, and a black tie with a gold stickpin fashioned in the face of the Joker.

‘Glad to meet ya, Daniel,’ Bobby said in his sleepy Georgia baritone. He took a room key from his jacket and tossed it to Daniel. ‘Go on down to the room and get the clouds outa your head. I’ll be along when I get there. Whatever you need, call room service and put it on the tab.’

Daniel nodded toward the door. ‘You playing in that game in there?’

‘Yup,’ Bobby sighed, ‘and I’m stuck and bleeding. That’s why it’s likely to be a spell.’

Bad Bobby wasn’t there when Daniel went to bed, but he was there in the morning, talking on the phone, when Daniel woke up.

‘Denver by four! What happened? The Raider cornerbacks get caught stealing cars? The defensive line busted at customs? Sweet Jesus, I may be an old coondog but I still know what a bone is. Shit, give me twenty grand on the Raiders. What’s the overs? Well mark me down another five on the unders.’

Daniel heard him hang up and then begin dialing again. ‘This is Robert Sloane in 377. Could you please send up some Eggs Benedict, two crisp-fried pork chops, and a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice.’ He saw Daniel was awake and said into the phone, ‘Just a moment, please,’ and then to Daniel, ‘You eating breakfast?’

‘Your order sounded good to me.’

Bobby doubled the order and hung up.

Daniel said, ‘Is the card game over?’

‘Broke up about a half hour ago.’

‘Did you win?’

‘I lost twenty thousand.’

Staggered as much by the amount as Bobby’s nonchalance, Daniel said, ‘That’s an awful lot of money, twenty thousand.’

‘Not if you say it fast,’ Bobby grinned. ‘Besides, you gotta remember you’re not playing for money, you’re playing for chips, and chips is just the way you keep track. The reason they make chips round is because they’re supposed to roll. And speaking of rolling, we best get our gear together. We’re leaving right after we watch the Raiders kick some Bronco ass.’

‘Where are we off to?’

‘El Paso. Promising Seven-Stud game.’

‘Am I going to play?’

‘Not for a bit. First you’ve got to learn the rules and manners, the different games and strategies, basic principles and moves. And since you’ll be playing my money till you’re good enough to win some on your own, I’ll be calling the shots. That’s the deal whenever I take someone on to teach. I call the shots until you can beat me heads-up in a gambling game, and then you’re free to do as you please. Any time you challenge me and lose, it costs you ten grand for my effort. That’s the game, Daniel, and it’s your choice. It’s also your first lesson, a bedrock gambling truth: If you don’t like the game, don’t sit down.’

‘Suppose I can’t beat you?’

‘Well, you’ll probably be so poor and frustrated and fucked up that I’ll cut you loose outa mercy, if you beg nice. That makes me out mean, but actually I’m about the easiest man in the world to get along with,’ cept for two things I can’t abide – sniveling and gloating. Don’t snivel when you lose or gloat when you win.’

‘Do you mind if I ask about your connection with AMO?’

‘No – though it’s not good card manners to press a man for information on his private life.’

‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘You didn’t.’ Bobby ambled over to the TV and switched it on. ‘When I first moved up into the high-stakes games, I went bust occasionally – well, more often than not, to tell the truth – and Volta offered to back my action. Most backers naturally want a chunk of the cake, fifty-fifty being about standard, but Volta only wanted five percent a year – of the net – with me to do the accounting. Can’t hardly beat that with a stick. Plus, I agreed to take on students now and then if Volta thought they had promise. You’re only the third one. First two mighta made it, but they went crazy ’fore they got there.’

Daniel started to ask where ‘there’ was, but Bad Bobby raised a finger and pointed toward the football game. ‘We’re gonna have months to talk on the road. Right now we got twenty-five grand that says there’s no way the Broncos can whup the Raiders by more than four points and that together they don’t score over forty-two. Let’s eat breakfast and watch our money.’

The Raiders won outright in a defensive struggle, and later that afternoon Bad Bobby left town as he ususally did – ahead of where he came in.

El Paso. Houston. Dallas. New Orleans. Nashville. Omaha. Cheyenne. Denver. Reno. San Francisco. Always the best hotels, the finest restaurants, and the fastest action in town. Daniel watched as Bad Bobby played. He loved Bobby’s style, a balance of discipline and impulse, imbued with an aesthetic that fell neatly between plantation manners and swamp-rat savvy. He heard hundreds of Bad Bobby stories from players and spectators alike.

The most frequent story concerned Bobby’s youth. He was already making a good living playing cards from town to town by the time he was sixteen, but he was illiterate. So Bobby took a cut of his winnings and hired tutors to travel with him, paying them wages and expenses in exchange for teaching him reading and writing, and, later on, arithmetic, geography, and history. It took Bobby nine years to read and write at a college level. He attracted tutors who liked the thrill of an occasional wager, whether it might be on the turn of a card or how many road-killed armadillos they’d see between Lubbock and Galveston, and thus Bobby was able to complete his college education at a modest profit.

Daniel learned that Bad Bobby’s nickname had been given him by Barbwire Bill Eaton when he’d beaten Barbwire’s set of aces with a low straight in a Texas Hold-’Em game, causing the usually unflappable Barbwire to bang his head on the table and babble, ‘Goddamn, lots of players beat me, but you beat me like an ugly stepchild. Gettin’ so when I see you come through the door, I say to myself, “Fasten yr asshole, Bill, cause here comes Bad-Beats Bobby.”’ The name was soon shortened to Bad Bobby.

When the game was over and they were back on the road, alternating at the wheel of Bad Bobby’s perfectly restored ’49 Cadillac, Bobby shared his poker wisdom and general card sense with Daniel, explaining rules, odds, strategies, how to properly shuffle and deal cards, and the small niceties of etiquette, like playing quickly and in turn. Daniel learned, if only theoretically, how to play position and manage money, when to raise, call, or fold, how to quickly assess the strengths and weaknesses of other players, the best times to bluff, how to calculate pot odds, how to spot tells, and cheaters, and marks. They reviewed recent hands as Bobby explained why he’d played them that way and what he might have done in different circumstances. He constructed practice hands for Daniel, questioning him on his decisions. He illustrated the lessons with copious stories and lore picked up in forty years on the road and at the tables.

‘I tell ya, Daniel, there’s no sure thing. Why, I was in a big-stakes Five-Card Draw game in Waco – we were playing with the joker – and I saw a hand with five aces get beat for everything the guy had.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Daniel said, ‘nothing can beat five aces. What’d the other guy have in his hand?’

‘A Smith and Wesson. A thirty-eight, I believe.’

* * *