The Horseman

The man on the horse was an odd one – I could tell that even as he angled his quarter horse into my beams like it was his turn in the center ring. An Easterner, which maybe 10 years earlier might’ve seemed even odder. Little dressier than the average rancher; handled his animal like he knew how but had learned it someplace else.

“Saw you from the rise,” the man said. Easterner, all right – kind of horse-faced fella with a government haircut and a big nose that reminded me of the Jew families that’d passed through the dust and winds and Pop’s tourist camp on their way to California. Not that I gave a damn – Pop hadn’t given a shit about God after He’d took Ma in ’32, and so he likewise didn’t give two shits about anybody’s private dealings with The Lord with or without Jesus.

No, it was the man’s eyes. Big, calm. Curious. “Do you need some assistance?”

My old Nash 400 was running like a top on four threadbare but plump tires, and the trunk was flung open with the jack still clamped into place. And then there was the Indian blanket I’d got in trade for some janitor work at the “last gas” before the next “last gas” on the way to my pot of gold that had turned into a cesspool about two hours ago. Oh, and the shovel lying next to the blanket rolled tight like a Tulsa oilman’s stogie on the dirt under the lip of the trunk.

Even without Jesus putting his two cents in, it wasn’t the way I’d been raised. But like I said – it was the eyes, unblinking even in my headlamps. And that slow smile he gave me as I pulled Pop’s old Colt out of my belt and made him a third eye. Like I’d done him the biggest favor in the world.

**  

I’d settled in Espanola a couple years after the Depression ended. Though or maybe cause I’d helped the town undertaker put a number of such folks under the shifting Oklahoma topsoil for a few pennies a body, I’d sought out someplace a little more off the path of men desperate or stupidly hopeful enough to drag their wives and young ones through the Valley of Death to a pot of gold that didn’t exist.

But everything shrinks as we grow, my pop once said, and it wasn’t too long until they started to trickle south off the California trail into the desert. College types -- engineers, they said. Easterners. Jews, I heard, and more than a few foreigners who weren’t fooling anybody with names like Henry Farmer and Nicholas Baker. Now, I’d never been out of Oklahoma before Pop’s lungs finally gave out and I dug one last grave this time for free, and I’d sure as shootin’ never met any Germans. As at the time we had an ax to grind with Mr. Hitler, I was a sight more than nervous about the funny voices with the funny names sidling up beside me at the local watering hole on a Saturday night.

Didn’t help that the government’d bought out the ranch school and put me out of the first steady work I’d had since sorting the dead from Pop’s barely paying guests. The school and its high-flown Eastern teachers and rich folks’ kids playing cowboy seemed a bit silly to me, but groundskeeper’s pay was decent, and the Pondses treated me right. Felt no desire to stick around afterwards, even with the new jobs the government and their “engineers” were bringing to the area. What the Easterners and foreigners specifically were doing may have been the best-kept secret in the Southwest, but the tighter you keep the lid on the pot, the bigger the mess when things boil over. All anybody could guess was it had to something to do with that aforementioned scrap with Der Fuhrer, but folks got rattled with the Army and the federal suits “cleverly” watching every move the locals made.

Bad enough they were keeping Nazi prisoners and Japanese folks from California on ice down south at Fort Stanton. Seemed passing strange we weren’t rounding up Germans and Italians who could blend right in at any military base or shipyard, but my two cents wasn’t going to buy me anything but trouble, especially these days.

The Denver and Rio Grande Western had ripped out the “Chili Line” and pulled the tracks from Espanola in ’42, but the town was hanging on between the nearby farms and the new government jobs 10 miles to the west. I was a handy sort with nowhere really to go, so I hung on, too, in what passed for the middle of nowhere.

**

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I think that’s in the Old Testament, or maybe some tourist dropped that pearl on me on their way to the New Promised Land. As I now headed the opposite direction, back through Espanola and north past Taos into the mountains near the Colorado border, I could feel God’s jeering presence. Poor time to get religion, with two bodies stuffed in the trunk and a ticket to Hell waiting at the station for me. When I think about it – and believe you me I have – maybe that’s precisely the time.

I put them deep in the Carson Forest. It was a skill I thought I’d put behind me, but even the dead can surprise you. I was in my bed a few hours before dawn, contemplating and shivering on the bare mattress. It was sheep country – I could get a new blanket in the morning, though at this moment, I wasn’t sure of the need.

Barring rattlers, the horse was the only one got off free that night.

**

Hitler willingly gave up his ghost in the spring of ’45, and his pal Mussolini got a date with a firing squad and a public showing strung up like the day’s catch outside a Milan filling station.

It took close to three more years to rein in Hirohito. After destroying the Japanese Navy and taking a string of Pacific islands, hemming the Empire in nice and neat, we rained fire down on Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Fukuyama. I say “we” although I spent most of my stint with the 124th Transportation Battalion in Luzon, up to my elbows in axle grease and sweat.

I’d signed up two months after that night in the forest, reasoning only more blood would wash away what was on my hands and my soul. I was pretty much nobody in the middle of nowhere, and when no GIs or Eastern-looking fellows in suits and badges showed up on what passed for my doorsteps, I figured Uncle Sam had chalked things up to Nazi spies or an unlucky turn on a dark plateau trail or maybe Junior, as I’d come to call him, just bugging out. It was those goddamned eyes. He seemed like a man looking for a back door out of Purgatory. Wonder if the sergeant at the Santa Fe recruiting office spotted anything like that in my bloodshot brown eyes.

See, thing with being nobody, having nobody in the middle of nowhere is the company you’re forced to keep. Nobody was ever likely to find the bodies, and nobody was likely ever going to spill a tear over the man who’d soiled my good blanket. But every time I listened to the bodies piling up on the radio, I wondered how many others I’d buried.

Just what was it that midnight horseman had been up to at the old ranch school, with his army of eggheads with phony names and their army keeping the whole town under wraps? And why did most of the lot just pull up stakes a few weeks after?

“Had t’be some kind of secret weapon, blow the krauts and the Japs off the map, my guess.” For one bleary moment, I thought my brain had contracted TB and an Irish brogue, but it was one of the Denver and Rio Grande Western’s gandy dancers who’d lost a knee and his toes and the works in between to a 3 p.m. coal car maybe 15 years ago. It hadn’t broke him of the whisky. He read too many of those cheap detective magazines with the gumshoes and masked crusaders and flying saucers and half-naked women about to be sawed up or worse, and I’d had my wits about me, I’d have heard him creaking down the planks and cleared my stool.

“And what makes you think that?” I asked, ‘cause it was the noise I needed.

“My sister’s boy, he does some plumbin’ and odd jobs for them mad scientists down the road,” the old man wheezed. “Seems like everybody’s in an uproar over the boss fella gone missin’ a few weeks back. Seem to think there’s spies all about – nazzis or commies or some-such. Young Danny happened down the wrong hall, and the soldier boys there grilled him near t’medium well.”

“Boss?” My voice went up a couple notches, but he was too stewed to notice.

“Some Jew scientist from California sposed to be grand muckamuck of the whole operation. Jingleheimer, Wisenheimer, sumpin’ like that. Summa the talk is, this Jew might be the spy.” He leaned in on the half-leg and grabbed my sleeve as a thick cloud of coffin varnish sent me reeling back. “Now, you think about it, boyo. Why you think every man-jack’s knickers are in such a knot, less somethin’ big was in the works? Y’ever hear of atoms? Y’know, the stuff what we’re all of us made of? Well, I hear tell Hitler and his boys have found a way to split them atoms, to just rip all a’ creation apart. Unless we get there first and blow the fella to Hell first. Little wonder them nazzis would wanna rub out Dr. Jingleheimer.”

He then toppled from his stool. I caught him halfway to the floor, jostled him back into place, and made for the door.

Crisp desert night outside, the moon too close and stars scattered across the black nothing like atoms torn asunder. I jumped in the Nash, somehow made it alive back to my shack, and packed for my penance.

**

“Recently leaked revelations allege the U.S. Defense and State Departments largely falsified published reports that Nazi Germany and Russia were on the verge of harnessing atomic fission as a potential weapon against America and its European allies, purportedly to spur allied physicists to escalate development of such an ‘atomic bomb’ to bring about a speedier surrender by Hitler’s forces.

“That effort, referred to as the ‘Manhattan Project,’ was conducted under a nearly impenetrable cloak of military security on the site of a former boy’s academy near Los Alamos under the auspices of preeminent theoretical physician J. Robert Oppenheimer. Without revealing the nature of his work, Oppenheimer’s mysterious disappearance late one night in 1944 sparked a massive manhunt and rumors the eccentric scientist had collaborated either with the Germans or the Russians, given his wife and brother’s ties to the American Communist Party. The case remains open to this day, and the Manhattan Project ended shortly after Adolf Hitler’s suicide and the effective fall of his Nazi regime. Amid the loss of one of its most brilliant minds and fears of further security breaches, the remaining physicists of Los Alamos declared the project a failure.

“Or so we thought. I talked this week with Isidor Isaac Rabi and David L. Hill, former Manhattan Project researcher. In a 60 Minutes exclusive, Rabi and Hill reveal for the first time that they and other project scientists concerned about the long-range implications of atomic warfare conspired to conceal their findings from the military.”

RABI: “Dr. Oppenheimer himself voiced doubts about the sanity of releasing such a force into the world. But he was under intense pressure to beat Hitler, beat Stalin to the punch. None of us knew we alone held the keys to a Pandora’s Box, but without Robert’s ‘zeal,’ we reached a hard but crucial decision. There are questions which illuminate, and there are those that destroy. I was always taught to ask the first kind. The only answer to the question of the day was destruction. If not merely the instantaneous vaporization of entire cities and the then-unquantified aftereffects of ambient radiation, then the geopolitical stranglehold an atomic arms race between the U.S., Russia, perhaps even the former People’s Republic of China would impose upon the human race. And imagine if such a weapon were deployed. There would be no defense, no deterrence – only annihilation.”

“Rabi was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance – a major breakthrough in medical imaging and diagnosis, and his work in microwave technology revolutionized military and commercial radar systems and led to the introduction of the home microwave oven in the mid-‘1950s. Meanwhile, following the dissolution of the Manhattan Project, project team member David Hill headed up the Federation of American Scientists, later to become the Global Federation of Responsible Scientists with the overthrow of Joseph Stalin and subsequent collapse of communism across Russia, Eastern Europe, and Northern China. Under Hill’s leadership, the Federation worked with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and other international agencies to design virtually failsafe atomic reactors which have all but replaced coal-fired power facilities and have been credited with greatly reducing air pollution around the planet. We reached Dr. Hill at his Santa Fe home. Hill continues to defend Oppenheimer’s patriotism and loyalty as he has since President Truman branded the missing physicist a traitor in league with communist factions.”

HILL: “The consensus was that the specter of atomic warfare and destruction would come to eclipse any prospect of science in the public interest. We’ve harnessed the power of the atom to save lives and provide clean, safe energy. I posit we’d never have put men and women on Mars nor developed a seamless worldwide web of satellite communications and technology had we created a world occupied solely with averting global apocalypse.”

WALLACE: “Not everyone concurs with your assessment. Ret. Major General Boris Pash, who headed up the investigation into Oppenheimer’s disappearance in 1944, argues you and your colleagues withheld vital scientific information that might have ended the war four to five years earlier, saving, in his words, ‘countless American and civilian Japanese lives.’ And to this day, Pash believes Oppenheimer was complicit either in your deception or acts of espionage. He’s pushing the Justice Department to bring formal charges against what he called ‘the Manhattan Conspirators.’ Your response?”

HILL: Mr. Wallace, I’d invite you to imagine a football stadium filled to the rafters with all those American, British, Australian, Russian, Japanese casualties. Then imagine dropping a bomb that would wipe out an area five, 10, 100 miles around that stadium. Then look ahead at the radioactive wastes that would linger in the air above that area for months, possibly years, that might carry across hundred, possibly thousands of miles. Multiply that by as many bombs as it might take to prove we mean business. As for Dr. Oppenheimer, you have to understand the exhaustion and stress we were all under. Robert’s way of dealing with that pressure, his doubts about the work and its consequences, was to ride the mountain trails around Los Alamos, through the Sangre de Cristo and the Jemez Mountain Ranges. He loved New Mexico, and he loved his horses. We were on the verge of a key breakthrough at that point, and he vanished shortly after supper. Most of us knew where he’d probably gone, and when they found his horse wandering around the plateau about three miles off, we figured he’d met up with some kind of misadventure. Dr. Oppenheimer would never have let that animal to languish in the wilds. That was something General Groves and his men would never understand.”

**

It was a small item on the Sunday news feed, but the Taos byline had caught my eye. A massive flash flood had uncovered and a trio of hikers had discovered what looked to be the skeletal remains of two adult males, one wrapped in the shreds of a decomposed wool blanket. A couple ribs shattered by one bullet, another bullet found rattling around in his companion’s punctured skull.

They’ll surprise you, all right. And with ‘em, the rest come surging back. The soldiers, the flyers, the privates and colonels and generals, the moms and dads and sons and daughters caught in the spitfire, the moms and dads and sons and daughters snared in limbo merely for being the face of the enemy or a fair enough approximation. The odd horseman with the tortured eyes who’d suffered such indignity and injustice for taking a midnight ride.

I’d taken a single souvenir that night in the forest. Secreted it away to the Pacific, on the second great California migration to find that golden pot in the airplane plants and the aeronautics trade. Tucked it in a bedroom drawer through a marriage, two sons, a funeral and two graduations. Buried it deep packing for that one final job far but not far enough away.

Now, it seemed, was the time. It’d been a tough week in the field, and I’d hoped to catch the satellite feed of 60 Minutes and maybe Columbo, but this finally seemed the time.

I set the yellowing badge – No. 76, I guessed how the brass kept track of their college boys – on top of the TV monitor, trying not to look in those damnably damned eyes this time. Bye, J.R.

Then I wrote this for you, whoever you wind up being. You can see the right people get it.

Then I think I’ll step out for a bit of air. The desert is beautiful at night, especially in the high beams of a double moon.