Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

When they reached Jemez Springs, a cluster of buildings stretched a few blocks along the road, they had already slowed to thirty, so he was startled to hear the short whoop of a siren behind them. A police car, its roof light now shining in the morning sun, had slid out of its hiding place to follow them, motioning the car over to the side. “Oh God,” Emma said, pulling to the curb in front of a white clapboard hotel with the wide rocking-chair porch of an old Adirondack resort. The policeman, in full uniform, took his time getting out of the car. On this sleepy street in a notch of mountains, there was never a reason to hurry.

“Ma’am,” he said in a cowboy drawl, “we got a twenty-mile speed limit in this town. It’s clearly posted. Can I see your license?”

Connolly could see Emma about to rise to the bait, could already hear her sharp answer, but her shoulders shrank in resignation and wordlessly she handed the cop her wallet.

“Oh, another one of these,” he said, glancing at the anonymous project license. “Well, I reckon we can write a ticket to a number just as well as a name.” He pulled out his ticket pad. “You from up that ranch school, huh? Funny thing, all you people with no names. Enough to make a person wonder. But that’s wartime-that’s what they tell me, anyways. You ought to slow down, though. Live longer.” Connolly recognized the tone, the mix of folksiness and swagger, as familiar as a blue uniform.

“How much is it?” Emma said.

“Ten dollars.”

“You’re joking.”

He looked at her sharply. “Well, no, ma’am. We don’t consider putting our children at risk a laughing matter.” The road was deserted.

“But ten dollars,” she repeated, injustice rising in her voice.

He smiled. “Well, you can mail it in. Lots of folks like to do that. Be sure you do, though. We’ll yank that license sure as shooting, name or no name.” He handed her the ticket, bending down to peer into the car. “You ought to get your wife here to slow down. Buy her a new dress. Cost you less in the long run.”

“I’ll do that,” he said, automatically polite. He was struck by the smooth assumption of it. How easy it was to become someone else. The policeman would probably swear to it.

“Bloody thieves,” she said after the cop had left. Connolly smiled. “It’s what we call a speed trap. It’s how they make their living.”

She had begun driving out of town with exaggerated slowness, creeping along the street.

“That’s one word for it.”

“Anyway, now we’ve been arrested together. You said this would be an adventure.” He noticed that she was trembling, clutching the wheel to hold herself steady. “You all right?”

“It just gave me a turn, that’s all. I must be mad to do this. I run off with a man and I’ve got the police onto me before I’m even down the mountain.”

He laughed.

“I suppose it is funny. But it’s not. The police. What if-?”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“It’s not the driving.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like being married off so fast. Maybe I’m not very good at this.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to buy you a dress.”

She smiled. “No, you wouldn’t.” She drove quietly for a minute. “I just don’t want anybody to get hurt,” she said softly.

“Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

“Yes they are,” she said, her voice distant. “We’re all going to get hurt.”

He waited, afraid now of easy reassurance. “Does it make any difference?” he said finally.

She didn’t answer, then slowly shook her head. “No. That’s what’s so awful. It doesn’t make any difference.” She shifted. “Oh, to hell with it,” she said suddenly, stepping on the gas. The car shot forward. “You never get two tickets in one day, do you? We might as well do as we like.”

The road continued twisting downward, its curves even narrower, bordered only by a margin of soft shoulder. Emma hugged the center line, letting the sloping grade make its own speed, trusting the road. Connolly felt his ears pop. Here and there he saw signs of settlement, the surprise of a few fruit trees blossoming after so many miles of dark pine. The views began to open out to a wider sky, until finally they were near the bottom and the hills disappeared entirely, like curtains pulled back to show an immense panorama of red sandstone buttes and mesas, a sky beyond measuring. It was the most spectacular landscape Connolly had ever seen.

On 44 they drove on a highway river, entering sandstone canyons dotted with slides of red rock and juniper whose walls grew higher and higher around them until they were completely surrounded by rock and then, a bend in the road, opening out again to a blue tent of sky. This was the West he had always imagined and never seen, not the cactus emptiness of the desert at Trinity, not even the greasewood and sage arroyo country of the Rio Grande, but land that seemed to exist at the beginning of time, monumental, so resistant to man that it found its beauty in geology, as if vegetation were a hapless afterthought. The mountains to the right seemed the border of the known world. Before them, the giant mesas rose up like islands from an old ocean floor, the distances between them whole seas of sandy earth. The walls were striated, discrete sediment layers of white and yellow and maroon and red, a color map of time, with slabs of rock broken or withered into shapes, statues of what might have been gods.

He felt her smiling beside him, enjoying his reaction. When they finally left the twists of canyon walls and headed straight across the empty flat plateau, the promised heat arrived in a bright glare that flooded the open country with light. They rolled down the windows now to catch the dry air, baked with dust and sage. Clouds were everywhere, darting back and forth making shadows, so that the tawny grass would turn gray for an instant, then gleam yellow again when they passed. He saw chollo cactus and thin bushes whose names he didn’t know, survivors. The sun burned through the windshield. They were alone on the road, nothing around them for miles but a desolate landscape alive with clouds and shadows and hot wind.

When they entered Chaco wash, they left the highway and bounced along a narrow dirt road, trailing dust behind them like smoke. Emma slowed down, dodging ruts and dry potholes with only a trace of moisture on their cracked muddy bottoms.

“You said it was remote,” Connolly said. “How much more of this?”

“Twenty miles or so.” She grinned. “It discourages the fainthearted.”

“God. Let’s not break down.”

“Think of the Anasazi. They walked.”

He looked out at the desert again, trying to imagine it filled with people. “Why here?”

“No one knows. Presumably it was wetter then, but not much. They’ve found logs that must have been carried over forty miles-so why not build where the trees were? But they didn’t. It’s one of the mysteries.”

“What are the others?”

“Mainly what happened to them. They disappeared about eight hundred years ago. Just like that. It all just stopped. There were settlements everywhere-there’s a big one near the Hill, in Frijoles Canyon-and then nothing.”

“They all died?”

“Well, the archaeological record did. Probably they became the Hopis. Pueblo architecture’s much the same-block dwelling, kivas, the lot. But no one really knows. It’s difficult without writing. Imagine the Egyptians without hieroglyphics.”

“Then how do we know their name?”

“We don’t know what they called themselves. Anasazi’s our name for them. Navajo. Park Service says it means ‘the ancient ones,’ but I read somewhere that it actually means ‘ancestors of my enemies.’ Quite a difference. Of course, that fits perfectly with the Hopi theory-they’re still fighting the Navajos. Here we are. Watch out for the park ranger. Nobody comes here anymore, since gas rationing, and he’ll talk your head off if you let him.”