Underworld

supernatural underside of the arms race. Miracles and visions. The final wishful weapon is a middle-aged lady from Decatur who can pinpoint the location of Soviet submarines off the East Coast.

Unreal. This is what disturbed him. It was one of the things he wanted to talk about with Janet.

There were ship ridges, great ship rocks with prows thrust upward, and there were hills that resembled rubble heaps. The land seemed to be in open formation, harsh and scarred, and you could almost read upheaval and convergence. It looked like dinosaur country. They saw white mountains and flesh mountains and slags of glassy matter that turned out to be mountains when they drew near.

It took a long time to get anywhere. There was only the one road, one track, and sections were deep sand and other parts were ruts and gulleys. The sun beat down with a swarming sort of density. They came to flooded stretches where they had to leave the track and maneuver the jeep tenderly around the palo verde and cholla.

He looked up the words. He consulted the books all the time. He drove with a book or two in his lap, or asked Janet to look things up, or asked her to drive so he could read.

The dust powdered the hood and windshield and the sun seemed nearly upon them, burning down so squarely and vastly he wanted to laugh in shitface fear.

'I know you can't tell me about your job.'

'I can tell you some things. I work with safing mechanisms, they're called. Timers, batteries, switches, actuators. Electromechanical locks. I run endless computer tests. I drink instant coffee and look at cross-section details of great finned weapons on my screen. Then a bunch of guys in California or Nevada or someplace will take a warhead and rocket-launch it into a hardened target at fifteen hundred miles an hour.'

'To test your calculations.'

'Splat. Not just mine of course. But, yes, that's the idea.'

'You make weapons safer. Safer to handle and use.'

'That's right.'

'Then what's the problem? It's not exactly criminal activity.'

'No but it's weapons work. It's what I wanted. I wanted this and more. But now I'm feeling unsure about it.'

'It's important work, Matthew. We need the best people to do this work.'

They were camped just yards from the track. He made a charcoal fire and they emptied cans of pork and beans into a pan. They put on sweaters and sat on a blanket.

She said, 'What would you do if you left?'

'I'm not sure. Get a doctorate maybe. I know some people who work in think tanks. I'd want to talk to them. Sound them out.'

She gave him a sour look. The term made her unhappy-think tank-and he didn't blame her. Passive, mild, middle-aged, ivory-towerish. People rustling papers in redoubts of social strategy. Situation reports, policy alternatives, statistical surveys.

He got the flashlight and led her to a spot where she might pee. The moon was nearly full. He waited while she lowered her jeans and squatted, more or less in one motion, and she looked at him and smiled, a dirty sort of smirk, a dirty-face girl with mucky drawers-didn't we do this once before, in another life? He played the light around them and softly sang the names of bushes and shrubs to the sound of Janet piddling. She laughed and peed in spurts. They thought they heard a coyote and she struggled into her jeans laughing.

They set up the dome tent and got into their mummy-shaped camp bags, nicely lined with flannel, and they realized the coyote was Wolfman Jack on the transistor radio, a howling disc jockey vectored into the desert from some bandit station below the border.

Don't put no badmouth on me, baby, we gon rock tonight. Da Wolfman sending Little Richard to climb in your face from out of the glory days of the marcel pompadour and the glass suit. Richard don't need no dry cleaner. He got his Windex wid him.

The sleeping bag had stretch straps that made it possible for you to roll over on your side, if that was your preference, and when Little Richard started bending notes in his primal falsetto, Matty thought he was in bed in the Bronx, a fifteen-year-old capable of trading his brother's old fielder's glove for three or four raunchy rock-and-roll singles, which he played when his mother was out.

Janet called him Matthew This was her way of separating him from family history, the whole dense endeavor of Mattiness, the little brother and abandoned son and chessboard whiz and whatever else was in the homemade soup.

He'd told Janet the story, how Nick believed their father was taken out to the marshes and shot, and how this became the one plot, the only conspiracy that big brother could believe in. Nick could not afford to succumb to a general distrust. He had to protect his conviction about what happened to Jimmy. Jimmy's murder was isolated and pure, uncorrupted by other secret alliances and criminal acts, other suspicions. Let the culture indulge in cheap conspiracy theories. Nick had the enduring stuff of narrative, the thing that doesn't have to be filled in with speculation and hearsay

Of course Matt thought his brother was guilty of emotional delusion. But when Janet agreed too readily, dismissing Nick's version, he cut her off quick. He defended Nick. He told her how he himself had thought their father was dead, originally. Not a runaway, a dropout, the grievously weak man who takes a powder. Dead somewhere in untranslated space. And even if he was a little kid at the time. Even if he did the sad-funny fruitcake thing of going to the Loew's Paradise to see the soul of his faithful departed father drift across the starry ceiling. Even if he was unable to make a studied judgment, he told her, consider the episode itself, the journey he'd made to a movie house through strange neighborhoods, alone, at the age of six. The power of an event can flow from its unresolvable heart, all the cruel and elusive elements that don't add up, and it makes you do odd things, and tell stories to yourself, and build believable worlds. Who the hell was Janet to ridicule his brother?

There were scar lines in the distance, deep arroyos, and stands of tall saguaro on the south slopes of mountains.

The track was white sand and then red dirt, it was cracked playa, drained and baked, and then it turned abruptly to mineral green dust and then again to sand and finally stony rubble.

Janet liked to drive aggressively whatever the surface. The jeep bucked and jumped, leaning badly at times, and when the track went narrow in thick bush she had to tell him to get his dangling arm back inside before the thorny acacia cut him up.

'I don't think you should leave your job out of conscience. Conscience works both ways,' she said. 'You have duties and obligations. If you're not willing to do this work, the next person may be less qualified.'

'How hot do you think it is?'

'Never mind how hot. Too hot to be here. You have special training and a certain kind of skill.'

'At some point we have to decide whether to turn around and go back out the way we came in.'

'Or what?'

'Or keep going into bighorn country and exit the refuge somewhere in the northwest sector before the exercises start.'

Ten minutes after he said this, they saw objects in the distance and he put the binoculars on them. They appeared to be tanks and jeeps, some trucks as well, but they were flimsy somehow, unbulky and perfunctory, showing squared-off contours and a cheap gleam-simulated tactical targets.

'I want us to be together,' she said. 'You know how much I want a home and family. I want to have a child. I've always wanted these things. I want to be safe, Matthew.'

He reached over and fingered some loose hair at the nape of her neck.

'You want to be safe. This is the woman who works half the night treating injured people,' he said. 'Shocks to the body. One emergency after another.'

'There's nothing unsafe about that. That's completely safe to me. It's the thing I do best and I want to keep on doing it. And you should do the thing you do best. That's what safe is.'

'If I keep this job, how do we live together?'