The Missing Person

Twenty

The lamp swung back and forth, pushed into motion by the door Wylie had closed behind him. Sledge had gotten inside, and now started licking the backs of my calves, so I scolded him away to the far corner of the room. Angus and Gerald spread out maps and sank deep into private conversation. Closer to me, Stan and Berto were arguing with each other, muttering and shaking their heads like some old married couple with longstanding disagreements.

“You can’t go around shooting cows,” Stan was telling him.

“Why not?”

“Because what did they ever do to you?”

“Yeah, but it’s ranching, man,” Berto said. “It’s completely messing up the ecosystem.”

“That’s some crazy shit you’re talking.”

Angus clapped his hands and everybody snapped to attention — relieved, it seemed to me, to finally get started.

“We’re going to shut this city down,” he said.

Grinning, Stan and Berto nudged each other, and I went outside to find Wylie and Irina, following the trail of Psyche’s distant crying, stronger as I approached. I kept tripping in the dark, but I finally came upon Wylie and Irina walking in circles, his arm around her wide back, his voice soothing and calm.

“How is she?” I said.

“Oh, Lynn,” Irina said. “I think the baby is sick.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“Hey,” Wylie said sharply.

“Oh, come on,” I said. I didn’t like the idea of being on the same side of the fence as Gerald Lobachevski, but in this case I was. My voice seemed to boom in the empty mountain air. “When you have a baby, take care of it. I mean, if nothing else you should take care of your child.”

“Leave her alone,” Wylie said, grabbing me by the arm and shaking it, hard.

Irina sniffled — a sharp, anguished intake of breath — and I realized that I’d made her cry again. “I am always left out,” she said. “Not tonight.” She fumbled with the buttons on the front of her brown sack dress to offer her breast, but Psyche wouldn’t nurse. Then she began to rock the sling and pace back and forth across the road, constantly murmuring something, not quite words and not quite song, that sounded like “oh hasha hasha hasha oh.” Her voice filtered through the clear night, mournful as prayer and steady as grief. Wylie walked over to her and they leaned against the peeling, shadowy bark of a juniper tree. The baby’s cries were agonizing to hear. Wylie brushed some hair from Irina’s cheek, and Irina nodded at whatever he was whispering to her.

Angus came out, stepping lightly down the path, apparently having no problem whatsoever seeing where he was going, and again I was struck by how swiftly and easily he moved, seemingly unburdened by gravity or any other force. He put his hand on the small of my back. “We’re ready to go,” he said. “I want you to drive Irina and Psyche home.”

I nodded, but Irina stepped forward, and even in the dark I could see her flushed cheeks and wild eyes. “No,” she said. “I have come this far. I have been here for everything. I am not going to miss the most important action of the summer.”

“Irina, the baby,” I said.

“She is fine. She is fine.”

Angus smiled at her, gently. “The baby’s more important.”

She shook her head. “You always want to rid of me. It is like Lynn said before. I am always excluded from the boys’ club. You are like little boys playing in a fort in the wood.”

“Irina, be sensible.”

“Let her stay,” Wylie said, walking forward from the darkness. “If that’s what she wants.”

The two of them faced off again, my brother dark and scowling, Angus still smiling gently. I was starting to wonder if his smile was some sort of condition.

“We can’t have a crying baby in the middle of this,” Angus said. “I’m sorry, but that’s just common sense.”

Wylie sighed then, and I knew Angus and Gerald had won.

“I’ll drive them to the hospital,” I offered.

But when I turned the key, the Caprice gave a harsh, metallic rattle and wouldn’t turn over. I thought of how badly the car had been shuddering, and cursed myself for not having told Wylie about it earlier. He was sitting next to Irina in the back, the baby huddled between them, but I couldn’t see his face in the rearview mirror.

“Won’t start,” I said.

“I can hear that,” Wylie said immediately. “What have you been doing to my car?”

“Driving it.”

“Driving it how?”

“Wylie, it’s not my fault.”

“How can it not be?”

“This car is old. Old cars have problems. That’s just the way it goes.”

“This car will last indefinitely in an arid climate with proper maintenance.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“You broke my car!”

“Look, there’s Gerald’s car,” I said. “We could borrow that.”

“Absolutely fucking not.”

Angus and the others were standing at the back of the van, conferring. I thought of all the tools and fluids and aerosol cans he had in there, even the BB gun, and wondered what they needed for whatever they were about to do.

“Listen, you two,” Irina said. “Listen.” The baby had stopped crying. “Psyche,” she said, “we can stay.”

In the end, we squeezed into the Plumbarama van with Angus, our hips and shoulders pressed together as we drove over the bumpy terrain. The smells of the desert breezed through the open windows, the clean, spicy scent of night-flowering plants, the funkier aroma of animals, the acrid trace of something burning in the distance. I sat between Angus and Irina, who was in Wylie’s lap, and Stan and Berto were in the back. I had no idea what time it was, but instead of sleepy I felt almost preternaturally alert, rested and ready, as if I’d been sleeping my entire life up till now. Psyche was quiet, finally, asleep in her mother’s arms, and Wylie glanced down at her constantly, checking on her condition. Gerald was behind us in his own car, accompanied only by the dog.

“Where are we going?” I asked Angus, but he didn’t answer.

The van jolted and shook over the dirt road, the headlights bouncing through the blackness. A strange kind of elation came over me, to be driving through the night away from the city and everything else; it was an almost religious feeling, tranquility and excitement in equal measure.

Angus rummaged around beneath his seat and then handed something to me. Holding it up to my face, I saw it was a roll of duct tape.

“Run some around your shoes and pass it around,” he said. “It disguises treads.”

I nodded, ripped off a silvery swatch, and handed the roll to Stan in the back, then looked at Wylie. “Where are we going?” I said.

He frowned. “Are you going to start complaining again?” “No,” I said, and it was true. “I just want to know what we’re doing.”

Angus grinned and said, “Hold on,” then swerved off to the right, from the dirt road to no road at all, as I bounced between him and Irina. He turned the lights off and drove straight across desert, dirt and rocks rattling beneath the wheels. After a few minutes he stopped and we climbed out, so far as I could tell, in the middle of nowhere. When my eyes adjusted, I saw Gerald and the dog getting out of the sedan and, overhead, thick, horizontal lines that stretched out and disappeared into the horizon. Power lines.

“This is so weird,” I said.

Wylie came up beside me. “Its beauty is in its simplicity. We don’t need bolt cutters or submersible pumps or tunnels. We just need a match.”

“You’re going to burn down the lines?”

“It’s not the fire that does it,” he said. “Smoke particles conduct electricity. They short-circuit one line, then the next line gets overloaded, then the next one, then the next. One domino falls against another until the whole city goes dark. It isn’t the fire that does it. It’s the smoke.”

“You’re starting a wilderness fire?” I said.

“Fire suppression’s an ill-advised program to begin with,” he said. “If we allowed natural fires to burn, the brush wouldn’t accumulate to the point where a wilderness fire is devastating.”

“But what if it spreads?” I said. “What about people?”

“It won’t,” he said firmly. “Trust me.”

Shadows walked ahead of me as I stood there noticing everything: the stalks of desert grasses swaying in the night wind; the howl of coyotes, plaintive and distant; the black ash of night and the pinpricks of stars. In front of me the shadows melted into darkness and I couldn’t see them anymore. I breathed in and out. I was alone.

Then Psyche started crying again, in real pain, it seemed to me. This is ridiculous, I thought, she needs to go to the hospital. I ran until I caught up with Irina, who was kneeling by a boulder and frantically shushing the baby. Psyche’s face was splotched and yellow, a shade skin should never have. She was coughing hard between her cries, her head pressed to Irina’s chest, and it sounded like she was throwing up. Then, ahead of us, sparks exploded into the night in a small, brilliant spray: the fire was set. The flames reminded me of the sparklers Wylie and I used to run around with on the Fourth of July, and there stole into my mind an image of my father leaning against the back of the house, a cocktail in one hand, watching us chase each other, his face lit by the flicker of a dwindling sparkler. My mother, inside in the kitchen, was shaking her head and watching us, too, from the window over the sink. Remembering this moment, the unbridled simplicity of the holiday, our backyard, our family, I felt unmistakably happy and then, just as unmistakably, terrible. Which was worse, I wondered: enduring the wash of loss over your life, or surviving long enough to feel its ebb? Wylie thought I stayed away so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of it, but this wasn’t true. I hadn’t come home so I wouldn’t have to recover.

The fire flared and smoke rose in a loose gray column toward the power lines as Psyche’s sad aria carried into the night. I wanted to see her in the oasis of a hospital waiting room, bathed in the antiseptic brilliance of fluorescent lights, doctors in white coats dispensing pills, giving injections, and placing the medals of the stethoscopes, round and reassuring, over her tiny heart.

Angus materialized beside us. “Just wait,” he said. “Soon the real fun starts.”

“What’s that?” I said, looking at him.

“Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

“Angus,” I said, “I have to take the baby to the hospital. I’m taking the van.”

“No way. Just wait fifteen minutes until we’re done. We need the van.”

“Then I’ll take Gerald’s car. Get me the keys.”

“Yeah, right,” Angus said, and laughed. I felt like he would’ve laughed at anything I said. In the distant glow of the fire his smile looked wet.

“I mean it,” I said. Psyche sounded like she was gagging on her own vomit, then started crying again.

“She’s right,” Wylie said. I didn’t know where he’d come from.

“Gerald will never give her the keys.”

“He will if you ask him to,” Wylie said.

“I think you have a misguided sense of our dynamic,” Angus said.

“Oh, shut up,” Wylie said, walking right up to him and standing there, nose to nose.

I knew he wanted to punch him, and it seemed like a fine idea to me. There was a whispering sound behind me, buzzing in my ear like an unwelcome bug, and when I finally took a moment to listen it resolved into Irina’s voice. “Angus, she is right, we need to go now. Angus, Angus, Angus,” she kept saying, as if she’d forgotten most other English words. Then I smelled tobacco and cologne, and Gerald was standing beside me.

“Are you provoking all this noise,” he asked Angus, “or are you letting it happen?”

Angus didn’t answer.

“The baby’s really sick,” I said to Gerald. “We need your car.”

“No.”

“You’re not being reasonable,” I said, looking back and forth between him and Angus. “If you let us have the car, we’ll take the crying baby away and there’ll be less noise. It’s a win-win situation.”

“Win-win,” Angus repeated softly. “Gerald—”

“No.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Listen to her,” Wylie said urgently.

“You can’t have the car. But you do have to shut the baby up until this is done.”

“For God’s sake, why?” I said.

Gerald ignored me, looking at Angus. “You know we need the car.”

Wylie took a swing at Gerald. Somebody stepped on the dog’s tail, and he howled, along with the baby, and Irina started sobbing. Wylie and Gerald were truly fighting now, grappling and punching, grunting and heaving with breath. I’d never seen Wylie fight before and hadn’t known that he could. I sprinted back to the van and rummaged through the tools and trash until I found the crate I was looking for and pulled out the BB gun.

The thought of Angus firing it into the wall now seemed like years ago, and it aroused in me a strong, sexual sense of regret; then the wind delivered the sounds of Psyche crying, and I ran back to the tumult and pointed the BB gun at Gerald Lobachevski. “Give me the keys,” I said.

He ignored me completely. Wylie’d just hit him on the cheek, and Gerald had pushed him back, and they were sizing each other up in that strangely polite way men have when they’re trying to decide who’ll go on the attack next.

I could see Irina’s shadow and the shivering, sickly, wailing shadow that was her child. “Wylie,” I said, louder. “I’m going to shoot him. Stand back.”

“What?” Gerald said.

“Where’d you get that gun?” Wylie said.

“This is New Mexico,” I said. “Everybody has a gun.”

Angus’s eyes focused on me, and I knew he remembered the same day I did, the long afternoon in the motel, the soft sounds of television, our two selves slipping together on the sheets. “You better watch it, Gerald,” he said then. “That’s my gun.”

I was holding the gun out in front of me with my arms locked like they do in movies. My finger on the trigger was shaking. I thought this should feel like a dream, but it didn’t; it all felt gloriously real, each second defined, as it passed, in miniature splendor. “Pull the keys out of your pocket,” I said, “and hand them to Wylie.”

Gerald dropped his fists and looked at me with what I had to admit was considerable dignity for a man faced with a gun he didn’t know was loaded with BBs. “Don’t be stupid,” he said to me.

“Show me the keys,” I said.

He shrugged, and did.

Wylie stepped forward and grabbed them. “Let’s go,” he said.

Wylie drove. Psyche was quiet, a silence that now seemed ominous. Irina was quiet too, and when I asked how she was doing — she was sitting in the back — she didn’t answer. I asked her again.

“I am worrying,” she said tightly. Her shadowed face had an ugly red sheen; her breath was labored and her voice hoarse. She was sick, too.

“Wylie,” I said.

“I know,” he said. The car bounced and jostled on the dirt road, then turned velvet-smooth — it was an expensive sedan— as we sped onto the highway. After several minutes I could see the city’s loose beginnings ahead, farms and spread-out houses and the flow of gas stations. Beside the road the land sloped away to sheer nothing. Somewhere in that nothing, I knew, fire was catching in the desert grasses, a flower of spark blossoming into the air, the smoking particles fizzing and popping like a lightning storm. Ahead of the car the lights of the city stitched an uneven seam against the hem of the night sky. The world took on a funhouse cast, dense with terrible possibilities. We raced past a gas station, and inside the brilliantly lit interior of the Quick Mart a man stood behind the counter smoking and gazing out at the night.

Then, in front of us, the cluster of electricity and faint halo of neon around Albuquerque went dark, like a candle blown out in a single breath. The city vanished.

“Yes,” Irina said.

Never in my life had I seen so many stars.