Preston Allen - Las Vegas Noir

“ Christie movie,” Marcus says. “Agatha Christie.”

“He was all, Agatha —”

“Shut up, Sandra.”

The kids rally around Marcus. What’s wrong with Mr. Marcus? Look, he took off his glasses. Leave him alone, he’s upset .

Marcus looks out the window, dusted with desert debris, at a small cabin on the road ahead. A tall, broad-shouldered guard points a machine gun toward him. But when he looks closer, Marcus realizes the figure is two-dimensional, just a cardboard cut-out meant to scare off wandering activists and moon-landing denialists who might manage to make it past the cages and the warning signs and the punishing landscape.

“There is only twenty-six!” Stanley pumps an arm in victory. “Somebody’s missing like in the movie!”

“Awesome,” someone says.

The students take off their ear buds and look around. Marcus watches as some of them wrap the ear bud cords around their iPods and stroke the sterile white rectangles affectionately, like babies with their blankies. In the rearview mirror, he sees that the driver’s eyebrows have lifted. Marcus can tell he is counting. He flips through the clipboard on his lap, does a second count. Then he turns off the ignition and the bus hushes slowly to rest. He walks to the back of the vehicle. All eyes follow him down the aisle, where he stops and knocks on the bathroom door. When there is no answer, he jiggles the handle and finds it locked. “Hey!” He pounds. “Come on out of there, please.” There is no answer. He works the handle again and then grips it like a nine iron and jerks it. “All right,” he says. “If this is a joke, it won’t be tolerated.” He looks sternly at Marcus’s students, who shift in their seats. He sits down with the Pinkertons and flips through his clipboard again. “When I call your name, I want you to say...” He pauses.

“Say present,” Marcus suggests.

“Okay,” the driver begins. “Barry Marcus?”

Marcus raises his hand. “Present.”

The driver goes down the list of Marcus’s students.

Present, here, over here , they drawl, just as they do in the classroom.

“James and Robert Bitterroot?”

The two Indians don’t say present — it’s obvious. The driver marks them on his list.

“Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson?”

“We’re here.”

The driver calls off a group of women’s names and all the Pinkertons answer present.

“Mr. Lancet.”

The bus is quiet.

“Mr. Lancet?”

The driver flips through his clipboard again. He covers the page with his hands, reading something carefully. His face blanches a little and he looks up at the two Shoshones.

The bus’s radio crackles. “Bird-Dog Operations calling. Your escort’s got your twenty. He’s coming up on you now.”

A Black Hawk helicopter flies into view, and for a moment Marcus thinks it’s coming for them, but it heads toward Bald Mountain. Stanley gives a play-by-play as a jeep rolls across the lakebed and pulls alongside the bus. A soldier hops out and heads toward the figure on the road. Then the doors swing open and another boards the bus. “You are supposed to do a count at every stop,” he says on the way up the three little stairs. He walks past the driver, tosses a few pink boas into the laps of the Pinkertons in the rear seats, and yanks hard on the bathroom door. Then he pulls out a complicated-looking tool from one of several pockets on his fatigues, clamps it between the door knob and the frame, and yanks hard, releasing the door. It flaps against one of the young Pinkertons, who was leaning in to see. She rubs her head. A stench fills the bus, chemically treated urine and feces soaking in the heat. Watery bits trail down the ridges of the bus. No one inside.

The soldier makes a whirling motion with one hand. “Turn it around, back to Mercury.” He scans the rows as he walks back to the front of the bus. “Everyone remain calm.” Then he steps outside for a moment and talks on a primitive-looking CB that hangs from a box. When he gets back on the bus, he says to Bird-Dog, “Cleared and on our way.” The driver puts the bus into gear so quickly that the standing students bob around the interior like wobbly bowling pins.

As the bus turns around and drives slowly past, an MP draws yellow tape around the figure and a few gasps bounce around the vehicle. Another MP holds the man’s wrist, as if checking for a pulse.

“Maybe he passed out from the heat,” one of the Pinker-tons says. “He looks old.”

“Maybe you Coalition Pinkertons did it!” Stanley stands up and does an elaborate Boo-ya! victory dance that ends with Spock fingers and a bird call. The students press their faces against the bus window. I don’t remember him. Wait, was he that guy who brought the water in from the cafeteria? No, stupid, that guy had red hair.

“Who was he?” Sandra asks Marcus.

“I don’t know, Sandy.”

A Nalgene water bottle hangs around the body’s neck, evidence against heatstroke. The corpse wears comfortable-looking Tevas, but one of the legs is bent inward at an unnatural angle. The soldier collects things from the man’s pockets and lays them out on some hospital-blue tissue paper on the ground. There is a roll of Mentos, a bookmarked paperback, and what Marcus recognizes as a desert first-aid kit.

Back at Mercury, the military escort hustles them all off the bus and into the canteen. A group of scientists in a line shovel macaroni-beef and Salisbury steak out of steam trays and onto paper plates. They notice, but don’t seem surprised by the tour group.

Two men in weird outfits — not military fatigues, but not quite suits — ask if anyone saw the man acting strange. Did he seem dehydrated; was he talking funny, slurred? Nobody remembers him. So they corral the tourists around two sets of cafeteria tables, and begin to take each of them, individually, into the kitchen. They start with Mr. Stevenson, whose wife has to remind him to adjust his hearing aid.

While he waits, Marcus watches Stanley create a paper football out of a napkin and shoot it through a goal post Sandra makes with her thumbs and pointer fingers.

“Know what?” Stanley says to her, “We in that murder movie, baby.”

“Stop saying that,” she tells him. But he keeps at it. He stands up and points at various people sitting at the tables. “Check it out, everybody’s got a motive for killing somebody around here.” He points to the girls. “Them Pinkertons are trying to get them to stop testing.” He points to the two Indians. “And they was here first, right? They just want their crib back.”

“Stop it,” Sandra says.

“Naw, serious-up, we from Henderson, right?” He swoops his hand along the tables, referring to Marcus and his students. “We all downwinders.”

“I see you’ve been paying attention to this unit, Mr. Mathews,” Marcus says. “Well done. Now, please. Sit down and be quiet.”

Stanley whispers to Sandra: “Why’s your finger bandaged?”

Sandra looks incredulous. “My tips got infected! See,” she shows him her nails, “the rest are acrylic. Anyways, it was like that when I got on the bus.”

“In the movie, everybody stabs the guy one time.”

“But he wasn’t even stabbed.”

“I’m just saying, is all.” Stanley leans across the table and mimes the Psycho shower scene.

“What about those two?” one of the Bitterroots asks Stanley. “They in on it too?” He points to the elderly woman, and his brother laughs.

When the men in the weird outfits take Marcus into the kitchen, they ask him what he saw.

A body .

Why was he on the tour?

Nevada State Lesson Plans.