Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

Joe had for some time assumed that Roberto wouldn't pull the trigger, so he was caught flat on his seat when Roberto's finger squeezed the shotgun trigger shut. The spurred hammer rose and snapped, sending a metallic click the length of the empty barrel and into Fuchs. The physicist's face went green and puttyish and his next breath came as a moan.

"Fascinating," Anna said.

Fuchs moaned more deeply, like a cello. Roberto broke the shotgun open. The first barrel was empty, but in the second barrel was the brass eye of an unfired shell. Roberto pulled the shell out, fumbled for Fuchs' shirt and dropped the shell inside it.

"Roberto." Joe shook his head.

"This will make him more religious or more polite, I think," Roberto said.

Joe considered throwing the shotgun down off the shelf, but a new one would cost its owner twelve, thirteen dollars from Wards.

"Got any more shells?" he asked Roberto.

"No."

"They coming back for you?"

"Sure." Roberto was cheerful, as if he were hosting a social event. "You better be going before they get here."

"Yeah."

"It was good meeting you," Roberto told Anna. "I'll see you and Joe again."

"Anything seems to be possible."

"Good." Roberto pointed in Fuchs' general direction. "But don't bring him."

Joe had to carry Fuchs fireman-style off the canyon wall. When they finally got to the floor, Fuchs sped behind the pines, wrenching his belt open while he ran. Anna watched Fuchs disappear.

"This is another planet."

"New Mexico." Joe felt for cigarettes and remembered he'd smoked the last on the shelf.

"If he'd pulled the other trigger, he would have killed Klaus."

"If he wanted to kill Klaus, he would have done it before we got there."

"I thought so, then…" She smiled. "Was Roberto crazy or not? Were we humouring him or was he humouring us?"

"Roberto knows what he's doing." Joe took a deep breath and looked straight up at the far-off, converging tips of the ponderosas. Up in the sky, a squirrel swayed on the highest tip. Maybe he was blind. Maybe the other squirrels were coming back.

"They say you are so violent, Joe. You don't seem so."

He liked the way she ran her words together; the accent was sinuous in her mouth, alive and warm under the cool surface. It was the first time she'd said his name. He liked the explosion of the "J".

"I don't shoot blind men."

"Your aura of violence must attract some women, though."

"Yeah, first I fuck them, then I scalp them." He signed. "Sometimes, the other way round."

She clapped her hands together and laughed.

"Wild, wild, Joe!"

Juniper boughs nodded under mistletoe. Fuchs, shirt stained and reeking, lagged far behind.

"Oppy studied under my father in Gottingen. In Germany," Anna said. "He seemed to live in our house. We thought he would marry my older sister, Emma. My father was very worried because everyone believed Oppy would leave physics for poetry. He was very German in Germany, except when he talked about New Mexico."

"About New Mexico in Germany?" Joe was surprised.

"With my father, he discussed physics. With Emma, he discussed poetry, philosophy, psychology. With me, he talked about wild Indians. I think I had the best bargain."

"Oppy loves to talk."

"Roberto is a medicine man?"

"A priest."

"You believe in Indian medicine?"

"Crazy stuff like that? No, I believe Christ died and rose again in three days and ascended like a B-19. But Indian stuff is all around here. Like Roberto today, like the kiva I told you about."

"I used to believe that if I ate a shrimp, I was an unclean girl and a shame in God's eyes. Once I ate a lobster and was positive that I would die in the night."

He couldn't imagine Anna scared. He had been scared with Roberto; she wasn't.

"What do you suppose Oppy believes in?" she asked.

"Well, he's not a very orthodox Jew. He sort of gets around the whole religious issue by going Hindu. What he really believes in, I think, is science. He thinks science can save the world. If every scientist were as good a man as Oppy, I might agree."

"How good is that?"

"The best."

They had reached the head of the ski slope that looked over Los Alamos. Dark spruce bordered a steep meadow of aspen that ran down the side of the mountain like a shaft of light.

"Enough Indians, enough guides." Fuchs caught up. "What I want to know, Sergeant, is what you're going to do about the madman who tried to kill me."

"Who threatened you, you mean."

"Tried to kill me while you did nothing." Fuchs rose to his toes, levitating on anger and humiliation.

"There's no reason to stir things up with the pueblo. Why don't we just forget about it?"

"Forget about it? I want him reported. You know who he was, you said his name. And he knew you."

"If you report him -" Joe began.

"No. You report him, Sergeant," Fuchs said. "You."

Joe had decided not to report Anna Weiss and to avoid Augustino as long as he could. Now, he had to see Augustino about a medicine man?

"Would you?" Anna Weiss said.

"If Dr Fuchs insists, I have to report the incident."

"And put your friend in jail?" she asked.

"That's not up to me." Joe felt like he was backing into a corner. Roberto wasn't his friend; he hadn't known him until two days ago.

"Who is it up to?" she asked.

"The officer in charge of security."

"Captain Augustino?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Ah." Fuchs re-set his glasses. "After all your talk, we see what kind of Indian you really are."

"It's Army business as soon as I see Augustino," Joe tried to explain to her. "I'm a sergeant, I don't have a choice, I don't have the power to make that decision."

"I told you," Fuchs turned to Anna Weiss. "I warned you he was Captain Augustino's man. Good, Sergeant, you do as you're told." Fuchs backed away and then started downhill, stumbling through the dry grass.

"I was hoping for irrationality." Anna Weiss squinted as if she were trying to see something in the distance, on the other side of the mountains. Gray eyes with black edges, as if charred. "The world is full of people who take orders. For a moment, I thought you might be different."

"It's an Army post, it's as simple as that."

"You're right. I was foolish to think anything else."

"And I'm a sergeant on it."

"Captain Augustino's man. And Mrs Augustino's man. Many things, but not very Indian." She looked up at Joe. "The answer to your question is, no, I'm not interested."

She went after Fuchs. Watching her descend, a white figure swinging from aspen to aspen, Joe wanted to call, as if words could reach out and stop her. But he had no words on his mountaintop, he was as dumb as a yearning brute.

Augustino wasn't at headquarters or the Tech Area. In the commissary, Joe heard the captain had been seen driving on Bathtub Row. Bathtub Row had nothing but long afternoon shadows. No maids hanging clothes or walking babies. There were no sounds except for jays and drifting shouts of a softball game on the playing field. Walking past Fermi's cottage and Jaworski's stone house, he remembered that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the early movie. Everyone with kids, even Kitty Oppenheimer, was at Snow White .

At the end of Bathtub Row a garden of poplars and spruces lent privacy to the Oppenheimer cottage. Augustino was coming out of the kitchen door and there was something about the way he moved that made Joe silently stop and watch. Augustino carried a small reel of white wire finer than the electrical wire used on the Hill. He let himself out of the back garden gate and slipped into the trees.

The boy's scooter still sat in the flower bed. It looked rusted to the spot and the flowers lay flat and dead. Joe knocked softly at the door. It was unlocked. The living room's casement windows afforded sunlight that reflected off a hardwood floor and whitewashed stone walls. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan, an easy chair with a laurel pattern, stand-up ashtrays, scrapes on the sofa, bookcases, Santiago pottery on the mantelpiece. Nothing apparently out of the ordinary.