Chapter 11
Remembrance of Times Past
We, of course, with our alien powers, could have stopped Mr. Goober, but we had our reasons to let him go ahead, as you know. So we delayed his perverted process just long enough to let Oliver make his peace speech in Oslo and for us to have a little going-away party, which Lev offered to cater.
I told Lev about the transitional emphasis we were planning, as he and I played a little teeter-totter on a west Texas oil-well pump. Lev had become a James Dean fan, and he wanted to ride one as Dean had in the movie Giant, rocking away against the sky. Lev had a thing about anything giant, and west Texas reminded him of the Russian steppes. So I asked him out to Houston, and we took a little drive. I mean little by Texas standards. We drove west.
“A going-away party,” offered Lev. “And I know just the place.”
“No ballet,” I begged. “And nothing intellectual, if you please.”
“No problem,” said Lev. “I found this great little bar in New Mexico. It’s in a ghost-town I visited a few years ago, while I was looking around to find some interesting ghosts to hang out with. A lot of interesting ghosts hang out in New Orleans, but I was trying to widen my horizons.”
The creaking and clunking of the oil-pump made more sense to me than Lev, but I listened to this old dead sage of Russia, as fairly as I could.
“It’s a gold-mining ghost-town, but it’s in cattle country. And it’s famous because Billy the Kid used to hang out there, or hide out there, whatever. Some guy from Michigan named Penrod owns it. It used to be a drugstore.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, while the well-pump waited for nothing. “Now it’s a saloon, but it used to be a drugstore? What’s up with that?”
“I already explained,” said Lev. “It’s a ghost town. Nothing there is the same as it was. This Penrod guy came out from Michigan because he was tired of being an electrical-contractor but had made enough money at it to buy the drugstore, which wasn’t even a drugstore by that time, and he turned it into a saloon. He calls it the White Oaks Saloon, because the name of the ghost-town is White Oaks, and it used to have a pretty happy-go-lucky saloon named that, before the town went bust. It was a fancy establishment, even had a sign out front saying ‘no scum allowed’. But that didn’t stop Billy the Kid from going in there. It was also a whorehouse.”
I looked across the Texas plain and thought of Slavey’s desert.
“Okay,” I agreed. “New Mexico. Volcano cores. What else?”
“The grass is brown, like here,” said Lev. “But it isn’t as flat. It’s cattle country, and the name of the county seat is Carrizozo. That’s Spanish for great grass, but the cattle have to do a little hill-climbing to get to all that great grass, and there’s a plain of burnt dirt, called the valley of fires, just outside Carrizozo. I thought some of you people might have done that in some sort of invasion. But White Oaks is up in the hills.”
“Is it near Roswell?” I asked. “We have conventions there from time to time.”
“About eighty miles,” answered Lev. “But that’s not why I think it’d be a great place for a party for us. That Penrod character moved out there because he wanted to be a gold-miner, but he still goes back to Michigan for fruit-harvests, to work with the illegal aliens. Yeah, I thought you’d find that funny, but he has a Mexican wife named Mary. Together they throw a great party, and the drugstore has a big backroom.”
“A big backroom?” I asked. “What do they do there, deal drugs?”
“Maybe sometimes,” said Lev. “But mostly, except for the pool-table they put there, they don’t use it other than for Saturday nights. Saturday nights, they have a big ball, with the best musicians from all around the county. They call it a dance, but it reminds me a lot of old times in Petrograd. Except that they wear Stetsons instead of plumes. Their boots are almost as pointed.”
I looked across the pump-axle at Lev, rising and falling with the brown grass behind him alternating with the bright blue sky, in my view then and there. He was homesick, and I could tell it, and there was no way I could refuse him this party. And a good time with friends is a good time anywhere. But he interrupted my musing.
“Besides,” he said, “the county’s named for Abraham Lincoln.”
So it was on. I took the proposal to Theresa and Slavey in Detroit and to Oliver in Atlanta. They all loved the thought, although they ordinarily found our conventions in Roswell boring. Theresa loved to ride horses, if the horses seemed to like giving her a ride, and Oliver and Slavey had teamed their spirits with horses at Roncesvalles, a lot of them dying with them there. It promised to be a good and reminiscent time.
“You know,” said Theresa, “I bet Norma Jean would like to come.”
“Yeah!” whooped Oliver. “How about James Dean? He’s dead, too!”
When I took Oliver’s suggestion back to Theresa, she and Slavey demurred.
“He’d be hitting on Norma or Lev,” said Theresa. “Not the right focus.”
“Yeah,” agreed Slavey. “She’s waiting for that sailor Jimmy.”
“And Lev's going back to his wife,” agreed Oliver.
So we limited our guest-list to just the four of us and Lev and Norma. We thought about inviting Billy the Kid, but none of us knew where in hell he was. Bob was still trying to make up his mind whether to forgive the killing for the statement he made for the little ranchers of the county. Meanwhile, Billy was just wandering hither and yon.
So I borrowed a gooney-bird, a Douglas DC-3 from another friend, from Gene Autry. Gene owned the Angels, a baseball team in the city of angels, and he may be the only human who regrets my not taking my baseball-playing into the major leagues after Yale. For me, Gene was king of the cowboys, not that Roy Rogers guy who stuffed his horse and put the poor creature in a museum. So Gene and I were friends, and he loaned me his plane for our party. And I love the friendly flying. It beats bombing.
“How can you own a baseball team?” I asked Gene once.
“We pay the players very well,” he answered, shrugging.
I didn’t quite understand the logic of that, but I understood the logic of the wild blue yonder, as I and Theresa and Slavey and Oliver flew out of Atlanta for Carrizozo, in the aircraft I’d borrowed from the composer of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer”. Lev was going to pick up Norma, however dead people travel, and meet us there. For the four of us, it was a long flight, and so we sang. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, “All the Way”, whatever. We were loosening up a little. It was a vacation.
We landed lurching on the one runway of the Lincoln County Airport, or the Carrizozo Municipal Airport, as the name was in dispute. The lurching was partly from my rustiness, having flown nothing physical since bailing out twenty years earlier, and partly from the gravel of the strip. The county’s main airport was in Ruidoso, forty miles away in ski-country, beyond the old county-seat. Hardly anyone landed here.
Ruidoso had not only skiing but also a thoroughbred horseracing-track, and an Apache reservation with gambling in a 400-room luxury-hotel called the Inn of the Mountain Gods. Carrizozo had a railhead, which is how it became the county seat, instead of Lincoln up in the Capitan Mountains. Billy the Kid had escaped from the county courthouse and jail in Lincoln. Now things were different.
A coughing guy met us on the runway and told us where to park the plane. He gave us coffee in paper cups in the little building that served as the terminal. He told us his name, but I’ve forgotten it somehow, while remembering that he told us he was a retired United States Marine lieutenant-colonel and had emphysema.
“How’s business?” I asked him. “Who flies in here?”
“I’m not sure you want to know,” said the colonel.
“I guest you must have flown in the Marines.”
“Fighters,” he answered.
“Bombers,” I said.
The colonel politely answered nothing, and I felt a little ashamed of not having been a fighter-pilot, in such close combat with those little Earthling planes.
“I was only in the Army Air Corps in World War II,” I told him.
“I was in Korea,” he answered. “Had to leave because of this.”
He hit his chest with his right fist and coughed. He took a deep breath.
“I’m not sure we planned this trip very well,” I said, thinking I knew why he wasn’t asking us anything. “It doesn’t look like you have a rental-car agency here. I feel stupid mentioning it. Any suggestions?”
The coughing colonel looked me eye to eye. He looked at my darker companions and offered a smile of kindness to Theresa, and nodded to her understanding eyes. He started to scratch his belly but stopped in embarrassment, and then he scratched his head instead. He straightened his face and looked out the big windows to the airstrip and the rolling grass. Plate-glass windows on that side made the building enough of a terminal.
“That pickup over there,” he said, indicating to his right with a thumb, while still looking forward across the airfield, toward nothing but the flat strip and the rolling beyond. “I don’t use it much, because I’ve got the van out front. Fifty bucks a week, if you want it. Sorry I can’t do better. Or . . . .”
Whatever he was going to offer as an alternative, he stopped speaking when I pulled pocket-cash and handed him a hundred. One thing I’d learned from all that time in Texas was how to be polite there. New Mexico seemed to have the same values.
“Appreciate it,” I said. “That’ll do fine. We’ll bring it back in a few days.”
The coughing colonel nodded, took the hundred-dollar-bill from my hand, handed me a couple of keys, and walked us to the truck. We retrieved a little luggage from Gene’s gooney-bird and tossed it into the back of the truck, and we turned our faces to the sky a moment. Then, at last, the coughing colonel asked us something, submitted a query to these strangers landed in his airport in a gooney-bird.
“Real estate?” he asked. “Looking around? Thinking of staying?”
I wondered what exactly might be cranking in his emphasymic brain. I wondered what an emphasymic former Marine fighter-pilot might think of a white-man and a black woman and two black men flying into a nearly abandoned airstrip in a perfectly-maintained antique aircraft. But I could see in his eyes that he meant no ill will, that instead he was welcoming us. Succinctness is very nice sometimes.
“Nah,” I said. “Just a party with some friends. But I love the view.”
“Yeah,” said the coughing colonel. “Forever is a nice way to look.”
I jumped into the driver seat of the F100 pickup, and Theresa leaped more spryly onto the passenger end of the vinyl bench-seat. Slavey and Oliver piled into the bed, and Slavey parked his butt in the wheel of a spare tire lying flat back there, while Oliver sat on the bed-bottom and leaned his back on a side, crossing the ankles of his legs stretched out. If you’ve ever felt the freedom of a pickup truck, you know what I mean.
The coughing colonel bade us have fun. And we headed up the straight highway, past the valley of the fires, into Carrizozo. At the crossroads giving that tiny town its reason to exist, we pulled into its only motel, the Four Seasons. The clerk had no questions for us wayfarers, and she checked us into two double-doubles, rooms with two double-beds in each. Theresa and I took one, and Slavey and Oliver took the other.
I always loved the balance we found, the four of us. Theresa was the best of us and I the least, and so whenever any fork in the road required our temporarily parting in two, Theresa and I took one path and Slavey and Oliver the other, and I know why and love the reason. Theresa was the best of us and I the least, and so we joined for the outside, while Slavey and Oliver took the middle. Because Lev had known a lot of generals, I asked him once about that strategy.
“First,” he answered. “You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t work best together in that pairing. Second, I could point out that it spreads the sharing best, which is your essential question. Third, I could call it an appropriate military analogy. Most, remember that best is first. Do they ever let you drive?”
“All the time,” I answered.
“You have good friends,” he said.
“What about Lev and Norma Jean?” I asked as we opened our adjoining rooms.
“Oh, yeah,” said Slavey.
“Go ask,” added Oliver.
So I threw my bag into the room and walked back to the motel office, where I found the clerk or owner or whatever looking down at paper as she stood at the desk. With the chimes tacked to the door still ringing in my human ears, I walked to the desk and put my human hands on it. The clerk, who may have been the mayor, looked up.
“I wonder,” I said. “if some friends of ours have checked in.”
“Some people are in the room next to yours,” she said, shrugging.
With my human reason, I discerned that this motel had few guests, none except the four of us and whoever was in the room on the opposite side of mine and Theresa’s from Slavey’s and Oliver’s. But I didn’t assume that those other folks were Lev and Norma Jean. I waited for more answer, no talk needed.
“Mm,” said the proprietor or whatever, “They said that, if anyone asked about them, I should tell you they’re in the bar across the street. I don’t know why they called it a bar. It’s a very nice restaurant.”
“Yah hah!” I said. “Thank you very much!”
The person nodded and grinned and returned to her paperwork. I returned to my friends, who were all now gathered in Theresa’s and my room wondering what to do next in this vast vista of tourism. Theresa was standing on the dresser, reciting Slavey’s Renaissance convention-center speech, as Slavey and Oliver applauded and laughed. It set the right tone for this internal outing.
“They’re at the bar across the street,” I said.
Theresa jumped down from the dresser, and Slavey and Oliver went next door and looked into mirrors and grabbed their wallets and shut the door and came back. Theresa just waited, leaning with her butt on the dresser.
“Yubba dubba doo!” said Oliver. “It’s party time!”
You can’t blame a freedom fighter for having fun once in a while. So we all locked up and walked across the street to another place called the Four Seasons, this one a restaurant and bar with a drive-up take-out window. Inside, Norma looked like she’d lived there all her life, chitchatting with a half-dozen natives at the same time, while Lev sat sulkily talking to one. Norma stood at the jukebox, while Lev sat at the bar.
Theresa and Slavey and Oliver sat in a booth, while I went to the bar to get us something to drink. The place was quite crowded this late afternoon, and I had to squeeze between Lev and one of the many men there wearing cowboy hats. I put a hand on Lev’s shoulder, as I waited for the Mexican bartender.
“No problem,” said Lev’s conversation-partner, as Lev turned to me.
“Oh, ho!” said Lev. “You finally made it. Where in hell have you been?”
“Not in hell,” I answered. “We’ve been flying from Atlanta in a gooney-bird.”
I grabbed some beers, went to the jukebox and got a hug and a tearful smile from Norma Jean, and returned to the booth where the rest were still trying to catch up on details of their movement here this time until now. Not feeling like sitting, I leaned against one of the bench-backs and looked around. Quickly I became a little angry at Lev. I knew too many people in this place.
One after another, as I scanned the faces of those Latino and Indian native Americans and white cowboys of this still wild west, I saw shaved white faces beneath white hats, faces I’d seen before. By this time, in this trip here, I had nearly a score of years of experience with CIA operatives, and I’d taken training courses in intelligence with operatives of other agencies. This looked like a class-reunion.
Now I knew why the coughing colonel had expressed uncertainty that I wished to know about the airport traffic. I had never seen so many agents of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency in one place at the same time, except in classrooms. I was as appalled as a spaceperson can get, wondering what all these agents for enforcement could be doing here. I walked back to the bar, past the people nodding at me.
“No problem,” again said the man on Lev’s right.
“Long time, no see,” said the man on his left, to me.
“What in hell is going on here?” asked I of Lev.
“Oh,” said Lev. “I thought you might want to know about this. This little bar or restaurant, or whatever the local Chamber of Commerce or chapter of the Masons wants to call it, is the main world club of DEA defectors. When they wish to make more money, a mighty mess of them come traipsing here. Opportunities abound you know, and this is a funnel. Didn’t your Skull and Bones pals tell you that?”
“It isn’t my specialty,” I answered. “And I was hoping for a vacation.”
“Well,” said Lev, suddenly seeming as angry as I was. “It should be your specialty. Nothing is more disruptive of your mission here on Earth than the drugs these salivating suckers conjure up. Anyway, these salivating suckers don’t like music. So we won’t see them up the hill. Russia was never as bad as this.”
I knew he was right about the salivating suckers and their threat to our mission, and I saw no reason to try to explain to him that elimination of bigotry and hypocrisy would also eliminate that, because I knew he wouldn’t see the simplicity of original approach, because he was an Earthling, ghost or not. So I nodded and smiled, patted his old Slavic back, and returned to Theresa. Lev was a good man.
Later I looked further into the situation there, and learned much from it. That little airfield with its one gravel strip was an international airport. Most of the traffic about which the coughing colonel said he didn’t think I wanted to know came from Mexico, and much of it came from Columbia. The colonel flagged off no flights and asked no question, and I also learned of a body-shop in that little town, for changing the colors of cars coming in from Mexico, before sending them back.
Later that knowledge gave me an idea, of how to use double agents to fight fire with fire in my own way. For example, I drew in Manuel Noriega so congenially that he gave me a cigarette boat, one of the speedboats smugglers use for running cigars and worse from Cuba to the United States, but that didn’t keep me from locking him low beneath the Miami federal courthouse. I did that as I’d used my oil connections to end the OPEC crisis in the seventies, while people said I was in cahoots.
I also enjoyed that cigarette boat on later vacations, but now I was on a different kind of vacation, and I never gave a drug-dealer a ride in that boat. In other efforts, more toward my personal mission, I did give some OPEC sheiks rides in it, but I didn’t tell them who gave me the boat or how I got it. After setting Noriega as an example for the general public and for any subterfuge-agents to see, I left policing the DEA mostly to my friends in the CIA. But those are other stories.
By now, Norma had joined the others in the booth, and she was laughing and joking as if she were alive. Theresa and Oliver and Slavey were joking with her and laughing with tears in their human eyes, and soon Lev followed the cheer. He left his conversation and joined us in the booth.
“Any room for an old Slav,” he asked.
“You’re a pain in the butt,” I answered.
“Let me tell you a story,” he replied.
“I don’t know about that,” I had to answer. “The only story of yours I know about is more than a thousand pages long in fine print, in any language. We’re here for a vacation, not to listen to some old Russian ghost sob about his sense of purgatory.”
“This story isn’t about purgatory,” Lev answered. “Or maybe it is, but it’s about here, about the little ghost-town where we’re going, and I’ll try to keep it short.”
“I like stories,” said Norma Jean, “although they all seem bittersweet.”
“Tell your story,” said Theresa. “I love your stories, long or short.”
“Story, story, story!” chanted Slavey and Oliver grinning around.
“Okay, okay,” said Lev, and we focused out the noise around.
“Once upon a time,” Lev began, “in a place not far away or long ago, lived a beautiful princess. She was beautiful as the sun, but she didn’t know how beautiful she was, and so she wished to be a cowgirl. So, the first handsome cowboy who came along and saw her beauty easily swept her off her feet and took her for his bride.
“Soon, however, she learned that being a cowgirl was not the same as being a cowboy, and quite quickly she found herself nursing a child and washing dishes and otherwise doing what any other human wife is maybe-too-often required to do to maintain her tolerance in society. This while her cowboy rode the range as she wished to.
“Her cowboy husband rode the range only to care for the cattle and to fix the fences, and he loved his cowgirl as much as any man loves a woman, but she could never return the favor, in her despair. Her despair was that she had realized too late that it was not a cowgirl that she wished to be. She wished much more to be a cowboy.
“She wanted the freedom of the range, the pride of work that came with wiping sweat from her brow with her bandanna, the power of destiny to make her own way. So, while she loved her child and had no antipathy toward her husband, she seized every opportunity to be out of her house, to be out in commerce, move up in society.
“Commerce and society, in the town nearest their ranch, the small ghost-town of White Oaks, New Mexico, was sparse. The county seat was but a few miles down the winding road from White Oaks and several-times the size of White Oaks, but even it had but one grocery-store. The princess didn’t wish for Saks Fifth Avenue, but she wanted something. She could hardly name it, but she sought it.
“So, besides taking her son to buy groceries, a visit she always enjoyed with great smiles, her freedom was most at the White Oaks Saloon. Of all her desires she could name, she found her way to satisfy but two, and both were with her neighbors. One was by the commerce of her grocery-shopping, the other at the saloon. One was sharing monetary wealth, the other just plain fun. The second was more for herself.
“Or so she may have felt. At one of the weekly dances there, the blonde princess met a wild Mexican she felt to be more princely than her husband. She and the Mexican danced that night, and they danced every Saturday night for weeks after, and the cowgirl’s husband thought little of it, because he loved his princess, and they could afford groceries, and had a lovely child. Life was right and easy.
“So, while the neighbors were not surprised when the cowgirl left her husband and her son to ride fences like a cowboy with the wild Mexican, the husband was devastated. He sat moping at home, staring out the screen-door of their little house, wondering what to do. So the moping turned to smoldering that threatened to combust.”
Fear now lurked in our alien hearts, as Lev looked around, at us.