Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

“Heart function,” he attempts to fathom as he speaks: “They’re saying that he doesn’t have enough.”

“Where’s Clarita?”

“She’s here. I’m going to take her home. Then I’ll come back and stay with him again tonight.”

I tell him that I think I’ve found the son.

“That would be the miracle. To see the two united. I’ll go tell the old one not to die just yet.”

I call the general number for Nellis Air Force Base again and ask for Colonel Curtis Edwards. I get an answering machine with a female secretary’s voice and this time the message I leave is a winner for its clarity and precision — I identify myself and say the Colonel’s father is dying in cardiac intensive care at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas and leave that number.

Done.

Tomorrow I’ll go home.

I walk up to the Strip and lose myself in the crowd, trek all the way to the Venetian for the kitsch pleasure of prosecco by the fake canal, then wander back down to the not-so-hip Mon Ami Gabi at the Paris for an early dinner of moules frites where I can sit street-side on the Strip and watch the crowd and catch the water show at the Bellagio across the street.

By ten o’clock I’m back in bed at the Alexis, sound asleep, too exhausted to even dream, because that’s just the kind of Vegas party animal I am.

At six forty-five a.m. my cell phone rings. CALLER I.D. BLOCKED. A resonant male voice. Am I speaking to Miss Wiggins?

“You are.”

“This is Colonel Edwards of the United States Air Force.”

And I guess I did dream, I dreamed the speech that I would make to him if he called back because I find myself sitting up in bed and reciting a coherent argument for him to meet with me.

I tell him that two days ago I had received an unexpected call, myself, from Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas claiming that my father had suffered a possibly fatal heart attack.

“My father died on April 28, 1970, in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. A date and place you might remember,” I say.

In the absence of a response I tell him the hospital representative had told me that the man in Sunrise Hospital had convincing documents to identify him as my father so I had driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to see him for myself.

“Events have proven that the man is, in fact, your father and that he adopted my father’s name after finding his body in the Park that April morning.” On his continued silence I ask, “Have you called the hospital yet, sir, as I previously suggested?”

I wait through another silence and then say, “I found your father’s Bible at his residence, sir, with your boyhood picture and I’d like to hand these over to you if you—”

“Am I to understand from this that you’re still in Las Vegas?”

“Yes, sir. If you’d like to meet I—”

“—in my office.”

“I could be there in an hour.”

“I’ll instruct the Gate.”

For a civilian, the combined terrain of Nellis Air Force Base and Range is as frightening a place as an orphaned foreign country under military occupation, or as segregated from the mainstream nation as the Sioux, Arapahoe or Apache were meant to be, on reservations. Maybe all our military bases are as tightly sealed as this one, but I doubt it, because with her multiple locations around Vegas, Nellie holds a record in land size as well as the questionable honor of having surrounded the nation’s official Atomic Testing Site throughout the 50s and into the next decade, and if you approach the Bombing and Gunnery Range from Tonopah, from the north, on Nevada Route 95, you begin to see the twisted logic of our government’s program of enlightened land use: there is just plain nothing else that could have been done with this godawful land so why not bomb the hell out of it and strafe it all to kingdom come.

When we were still marketing aboveground nuclear testing as NOT DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH and a dandy source of pyrotechnic entertainment for your neighborhood, the flyboys out at Nellis used to post the bombing schedule in the local papers so Vegas denizens could power up the briquettes in their backyard barbecues and get out the lawn chairs for a little bit of awesome fireworks courtesy of uncle sam. The last time we blew something up at Nellie, albeit underground, was 1991 and I suppose there may be some conspiracy theorists out here who might notice that that was around the time the Vegas Strip started going pyro-and hydrotechnic in its own way with crowd-pleasing sidewalk shows.

The Gunnery Range is still a hotbed of half-life particles and conspiracy speculation but the Base, where Nellie’s personnel are quartered, is tucked behind Sunrise Mountain, a twenty minute drive from the Strip, straight up Las Vegas Boulevard — and its entry regimen in these days of heightened Homeland Security is no laughing matter.

A smile will get you nowhere in this atmosphere.

Granted, I’m used to looser “secure” venues — even on the Sony lot or at Universal I have to show a photo I.D. to get through the gate and when I went for jury duty last month at the Van Nuys Court House in the San Fernando Valley I had to show two pieces of identification and have my bag X-rayed and walk through a microwave (just kidding). Rather than increasing my assurance in my safety these procedures make me feel the opposite of safe , they make me feel more vulnerable, less saved from what , exactly? From what exactly are these procedures designed to save me? Pull over to the side and step out of your vehicle, ma’am, please, I’m told at Nellie’s super-fortified Gate. I smile and say I’m here to see the Colonel. A German shepherd on a tight rein has some olfactory fun around my Michelins and two guys in white helmets and combat gear go over every inch of my car’s interior while another guy in a bulletproof vest investigates the undercarriage of my PT Cruiser with a tilted mirror on a stick. That makes me feel safe. A mirror . A device I use in my own bathroom. To tweeze my eyebrows.

A rectangular piece of plastic with the letter F is placed on my dashboard, the letter showing through the windshield, and I’m told to drive to the next checkpoint, several hundred feet away, and hand the piece of plastic to the MP there. He gives me another piece of plastic with the letter G on it and directs me to turn right, toward a parking lot about a quarter of a mile away down a well-patrolled thoroughfare, where I’m asked to show my photo I.D. again and then instructed where to park and where to enter the nondescript cement building straight ahead.

After a bag X-ray, a body screening followed by a full bag search in which every item in my bag is scrutinized, including the Bible, I’m directed toward a reception desk and then a woman in an Air Force blouse and skirt comes to get me and leads me down a gray-carpeted hallway to a closed door. She knocks, discreetly, twice, opens the door and I find myself in a large office, tastefully appointed in the Spartan manner, face to face with a tall fit man in his mid-forties who I can only conclude must be the Colonel.

My experience with military men above a certain rank is that they are very clean , almost impeccably clean in their comportment, as if training for the possibility that they might have to kill someone or at least order others to that duty, has had a compensatory effect of demanding of them unwarranted but perfect manners so before the Colonel can begin to charm me with his sugared brass I draw out the picture of him in elementary school and hand it to him with the Bible. This is how I found you , I explain. He takes these from me and points me toward a chair facing his desk. There’s a sofa and two armchairs in the near corner of his office but he directs me, instead, to a place where his large desk will be between us. I slide the Polaroids of his father with Ann-Margret and Dean Martin across the surface and tell him, “There are more like these.” I watch him read the newspaper clipping in the Bible and look at the photographs. I watch him as he starts to piece years and this new knowledge together and at a certain point, through his ensuing silence, I begin to feel that watching him invades the privacy he needs at such a moment so I look away. I let my gaze travel over the things he’s chosen to display: Maps . There are maps on all four walls, framed topographical projections of the Earth, three dozen of them, with detailed isometrical pictographs and color washes defining rising elevations, mountains, ridges, canyons, flats in smooth concentric circles — maps drawn looking down on earth from somewhere high up in the air — and I’m reminded that this man across from me, by the very nature of his job, has seen the Earth in ways, at heights and speeds, that Da Vinci only dreamed of.