The Heat of the Sun (28 page)

He licked a finger, turned a page.

‘Did you know, Sharpless, that Howard Hughes designed a special brassiere for Jane Russell in
The Outlaw
? Remarkable. All his skills in aerodynamics, all that engineering genius
that designed revolutionary aircraft, bent now to this task: lift up, push out.’ He held up her picture in the magazine. ‘Talented girl.’

Wearily, I sat on the cell’s only chair.

‘I’ve been AWOL,’ I said.

‘Back now, by the looks. And nobody cared?’

‘You and me, we’re not real soldiers, are we? We answer to the senator. Quite a privilege, all told. I never thanked you for getting me my job in Los Alamos. Smoke?’ I held out
my pack.

‘Time can hang heavy on a fellow’s hands, can’t it? And sometimes a tattered
Photoplay
can’t quite do the trick. I suppose you know Mama tried to visit me. I
refused to see her. Made quite a scene, she did.’ He sounded unconcerned, as if he were talking about a bit of bad weather, since passed. I lit his cigarette and he said, exhaling smoke,
‘I already knew that about Jane’s brassiere, didn’t you? Christ, everyone knew that. That news is years old.’

I could abide his flippancy for only so long. ‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ I said.

He stood and stretched, reaching towards the ceiling. His shirt pulled free from his trousers and I glimpsed his bare torso, still boyishly taut. ‘Well, I’d guess the senator and
Truman are clustered around the conference table right about now, debating what to do with the ultimate weapon. Kyoto? Yokohama? Or straight to Moscow and cut out the middleman?’

‘Truman’s in Potsdam. Or on his way home.’

‘Oh? I’m so out of touch. On the run, you know.’

‘Damn you, Trouble! What have you done?’

He had gone to the window and stood there, looking out, smoke curling above his head in an airy blue river. ‘I never meant what happened to happen,’ he said, his voice thick.
‘You can’t believe I meant it, can you?’

I perched uncomfortably on the grey metal chair.

‘I suppose Yamadori put you up to it,’ I said. ‘Or Isamu. Everything was all a front. Senator Pinkerton’s right-hand man! All just a distraction from what Trouble was
really doing. But why run now?’

‘Remember the sniper? Things were getting tough in Los Alamos.’ He stood against the sunlight from the window. Darkness gathered in his eyes, and it came to me that he was a ghost
already: flickering, vanishing.

‘Kate said I’d let you down. She was right. I could have saved you.’

‘You, save me? You can’t even save yourself.’

I pushed back the chair. ‘All I’ve ever wanted is to bring you back from the brink.’

He laughed. ‘Is that what you honestly believe?’

‘You’re American, whether you like it or not: your father’s son. And for the sake of some fantasy you abandon everything that matters and everyone who loves you. How can you
betray your country, your father, your friends? This is wartime – life and death! Did you succeed? Come on, tell me all about it. Did you sell our secrets to the enemy?’

‘Sell?’ He shrugged. ‘I gave them for free.’

‘Traitor!’ What happened next happened so fast I barely believed it was real. How, when, had I raised my arm? How, when, had my ashplant battered down? One moment I stood close to
Trouble, close enough to have kissed him; another, and my ashplant cracked against his head.

He lay on the floor, face down.

Time stopped. A sob escaped my throat.

As he fell, he had struck the side of the sink. Blood pooled in his hair, while the captain rattled at the door (‘Sir, sir!’) and would have burst in, had I not shouted savagely that
it was all right, everything was all right. I lowered myself to the floor. There was no way to sit that was easy for me, so I stretched beside Trouble as if he were my lover.

I touched his hair. I felt the blood and winced. Carefully, I turned his face towards mine.

His eyelids flickered. ‘They’ll be waiting for me, you know.’

‘Waiting?’ I said.

‘I was almost there. The message had come and I was on my way. But you don’t think they’d leave without me, do you? Isamu would kill them if they left without me.’

I thought I understood. ‘A plane? A boat?’

‘I’ve stayed too long here. I miss Nagasaki.’

‘And they’re over the border, these friends of yours?’

He smiled dreamily. ‘Now you’re just trying to get information out of me.’ From the window, thick rectangles of light fell over us, honeyed and warm, patterned like the bars.
‘Got your number, don’t I? Kiss and tell.’

‘Me, tell?’ I kissed him, and his lips returned the pressure of mine. The moment seemed at once unreal and more real than any other I had experienced before. I felt myself sinking
into a warm darkness, and all I wanted to do was sink and sink, never rising again.

What did I care if he was a traitor?

‘But am I really a traitor?’ he said, as if he had read my thoughts. ‘What does that mean, anyway? I’ve been two things all my life. Be this, be that – always these
voices in my head, pushing me this way, pulling me that. Believe me, if I could make everything all right, I would. But I never will, will I? I never will.’

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘And I love you. Don’t think I don’t.’

‘But there was always something else. Or someone. Isamu. Do you think you can stand?’ I added after a moment. ‘Senator’s orders – I have a van outside and two
guards, ready to take you.’

‘They’re going to kill me, I suppose. Oh, I don’t mean right away. This is America. There’ll be a trial, and witnesses, even a few caring liberal types – maybe you,
Sharpless – who’ll do all they can. But it’ll be no good. I’m a dead man. You know what they say about golden lads.’

‘Oh, Trouble!’ There were tears in my eyes: ‘
Golden lads and girls all must
...’

He finished it for me: ‘...
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust
.’

We helped each other stand. I crossed to the door, thumped on it, and we heard the captain clatter with his keys. Trouble leaned towards the mirror over the sink. He dabbed his hair with a
handkerchief. He splashed his face. As the door opened he took more movie magazines from the bookcase and cried, ‘Did I ever tell you I
adore
Jane Russell?’

The captain advanced with a set of handcuffs.

‘I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?’ I said, but regulations were regulations.

I tucked Trouble’s magazines under my arm and we made our way out to the van, where my guards, squashing out their cigarettes, assumed a military demeanour. Both were large, thickset
fellows, but one, called McPherson, was freckled and fair, while the other, Mendoza, was Latin-dark. Trouble eyed them appraisingly as we approached.

‘Not a particularly
armoured
van,’ he complained, climbing into the back. ‘Aren’t I more dangerous than this? Where are we going, anyway – Alcatraz, like the
Birdman? If only this thing had windows, I could look out at the coast of Big Sur on the way. De-lovely.’

‘Look at Jane.’ I handed him his magazines.

McPherson, revolver at the ready, climbed in beside Trouble; Mendoza gestured to me to sit in front with him. I was not pleased; he was surly, and my efforts at conversation met with little
success.

San Diego, I observed as we moved off, was surprisingly pretty. His face remained stony. Lovely day, I tried again –
de
-lovely, even. You’re from Mendoza, Mexico – I
mean Mexico, Mendoza? Ha-ha. Silly me. Funny, to think it’s just a few miles away.

Only when I offered Mendoza a cigarette did I get more than a grunt out of him. Smoothly, we swung around the curving coast; the wheel spun through his dextrous, dark hands and I grew sleepy.
The cabin was stifling. My shirt stuck to the seat. A fly buzzed between dashboard and windshield, stopped for a while, crawled, and buzzed again. Through the panel behind us, Trouble and McPherson
murmured, sometimes exclaimed. I think they were playing cards.

I woke suddenly, as if someone had jolted me. No one had. The sun glared blindingly through the windshield. We had stopped. Still the fly buzzed, but the driver’s seat was empty and the
door was ajar.

‘Mendoza?’ I said.

He stood by the roadside, pissing; the thick stream gurgled into the sand. Casually, he buttoned his fly, then mooched around the hood to the passenger side, yanked open my door, and jerked his
head for me to get out.

The revolver flashed as he jabbed it towards me. ‘Mendoza, what is this?’

‘Hands up.’ He waved me away from the van. ‘Further; that’s right.’

I had failed to retrieve my ashplant and lurched, stumbled. Sand, rocks, and scrubby desert plants stretched in all directions. Mendoza must have veered some way from our route. Buzzards hovered
in the cloudless sky.

‘Are we over the border, Mendoza? What do you want?’

He thumped the side of the van. ‘McPherson!’

A lazy bellowing came from within.

‘Radiator’s blown!’ Mendoza called. ‘Wake up!’

Perhaps I should have warned McPherson, but I did not understand what was happening until it was too late. I assumed that the pair of them were in on this. I was wrong. Curses sounded from
within; the van rocked on its springs; McPherson stepped out, scratching his head—

The shot cracked against the bright day. Buzzards scattered.

‘Sorry, friend. Had to be done.’ Mendoza tucked the revolver into his belt, crossed himself, then dragged McPherson from the road. Nearby rose a shelf of rock with green-blue scrubby
vegetation sprouting up behind: a convenient place to conceal a corpse. I eyed the buzzards. After taking McPherson’s gun and the money from his wallet, Mendoza returned to the van and
ushered a bewildered Trouble, blinking, into the sun.

‘Mendoza, why?’ I said.

He gave no answer, only digging into his pocket, producing a key and releasing Trouble’s cuffs. Blankly, I watched as he told the astonished Trouble that the van was now his. ‘The
keys are in the ignition. And those friends of yours must be getting impatient.’

‘Sharpless, did you plan this?’ Trouble said.

I shook my head. ‘Who are you, Mendoza? Tell us!’

He spat in the dust. ‘You don’t know me,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen you both before. I’ve done a bit of work for Senator Pinkerton over the years.’ He
mimed the action of a man with a rifle, lining up a target in his sights. ‘Damned uncomfortable, crouching among those rocks.’

‘You’re the sniper?’ said Trouble. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to, my friend.’ He clapped Trouble on the back. ‘Go. You’re free.’

‘What? We’re way out in the desert! I’m just supposed to drive off? Which way?’

Mendoza waved a hand along the road. ‘The border. Quickly. Don’t worry about us. This gentleman and I will be quite safe.’

I swallowed hard. ‘Do as he says, Trouble – senator’s orders.’

Senator’s orders.
The thought was startling: Mendoza, the murderer, was only obeying orders. Trouble would have his freedom. And suddenly I realized how much his father loved him:
loved him, with a love that humbled me. I tried to tell Trouble this, but my voice cracked.

He squinted into the sun. ‘Sharpless, I—’

‘Go!’ I shouted.

The words shook my frame; I thought I would collapse, but Trouble, stepping forward, gripped me tightly. I clutched him, balled my hands into fists, and dug my knuckles into his back, hard
enough to hurt. We had been through so much together. Now everything was over.

‘Nagasaki,’ I said. ‘Think of Nagasaki.’

‘I’m sorry, Sharpless.’

He climbed into the cabin, turned the key, and I stood with Mendoza, watching as Trouble disappeared in clouds of dust. Only when it was too late did I realize I had left my ashplant in the van.
It would go where Trouble was going, and I could not call it back.

Just off the roadside the buzzards had descended, shrieking and scrabbling around the shelf of rock.

‘Now what?’ I looked at Mendoza.

He stuck out a thumb. ‘What do you think?’

Hours passed before a shabby truck rattled to a halt beside us. In the back were chickens, squawking and flurrying in teetering crates. The driver blinked down at us: a chubby, incurious Mexican
with an unruly grey moustache. Mendoza spoke to him in Spanish, and the fellow grinned and nodded, holding up a bottle of tequila. The chickens stank abominably.

As I limped after Mendoza to the passenger door, I half feared he would push me away and drive off, laughing, with his new friend. But Mendoza was honourable; his behaviour to me, indeed, was
remarkably solicitous all the way back to San Diego, where he slipped away near the market where the Mexican left us. One minute Mendoza was there, then he was gone.

A cab crawled by and I hailed it. I had drunk too much tequila. By the time I made it downtown, the sun was setting. I checked in to the first hotel I could find and flopped on to the bed.

I slept. I had no dreams.

What time could it be? Pain, worse than I had felt for years, throbbed in my damaged leg. How long had I stood, how far had I walked, without my ashplant? I looked at my
watch. It had stopped. I had not drawn the blind, but the light was dim, seeping down a well between window and wall. I heaved myself from the bed. The room was dirty: cracked linoleum, cracked
plaster, cracked glass in the window. I pissed in the sink.

Downstairs, I asked the desk clerk the way to the railroad station. I’d go back to Aunt Toolie’s: that was it, go home and wait. Should I consider myself a wanted man? Had I aided
and abetted Trouble’s escape? Perhaps this was part of the senator’s plan: Woodley Sharpless, scapegoat. My head ached, and sadness clenched in my chest like a newspaper crumpled
tightly, all its words in zigzag disarray. I would accept my fate.

The station lobby was crowded. Heat rose like marsh gas, and there was noise all around: automobile horns, dogs barking, a train whistle, a newsboy’s reedy cry. What was he saying? Japan:
something about Japan. I snatched a paper from him as I passed, but not until I was on the eight-fifteen to Los Angeles, sinking into my upholstered seat, did I dare unfold it.