• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 292 0

dial to KVMR as they entered its frequency. In Nevada City, he turned out to be a pillar of the community, active with the local public radio station, and with helping transform an old forge into a community centre. At the same time, he remained obsessed with conspiracy theories that, like poker, had a disguised structure, revealed only by footnotes and glances. Dorn could always sense the contours of a setup or read a deceit. What frustrated him in his dealings with the Vegas Brethren, the born-agains, was that he hadn’t broken their code, couldn’t figure them out; he felt finessed by them. He was unsure whether Pounce Autry was a great poker player who hated to lose or whether he was always assisted by a mechanic or cardsharp who stacked or beagled every deck. Recently, during the buildup to the war, he kept seeing their lapel flags. Coop, disgusted by their adamant political self-righteousness, wanted to take them on.

Can’t be done.

I think I could.

Well, visit The Gentile first, if you want to go up against Autry’s crowd. The Gentile will teach you. He’s become a civilian, but he hates everything about Vegas. Also, he ran off with someone’s girl.

The one he won in the card game?

Yes.

So how do I get there?

First of all, you don’t ever call him The Gentile. His name is Axel. Get a bus to Bakersfield, then you can hire someone to drive you the seventy miles into the desert.

The no longer functional Jericho Army Base is where Axel and the woman have ended up, living in the 1980 Airstream they’ve hot-wired up to a transformer pole. They suggest that Cooper sleep in an old surveyor’s tent not too far from their silver dwelling. Lina shows him the well where they bathe. There are still traces of gold in the water, she says. They cook all meals outside, and a propane tank hisses away during breakfast and dinner. At night Cooper can see other lights in the far reaches of the abandoned base. Two horses that belong to Lina drift near the camp.

Mentioning Dorn to The Gentile breaks the ice.

God, I knew his mother so well, I could almost have fathered him.

He’s the smart one among us, Cooper says graciously.

The Gentile thinks, then mutters, And now they say he’s a hippie.

It looks that way.

Coop watches Lina walk over and mount her horse, supple as a scarf, and suddenly he thinks of Claire. The way she was always serene on an animal. Lina has, according to The Gentile, a price on her head, her first husband still unforgiving about her escape from his bullying. A woman in distress … Cooper remembers. There are mesas and horse trails and old gold mines to explore during the day. The fact that Cooper knows horses surprises Lina. ‘Hey, a gambler who rides!’ So the two of them trek into the desert. Cooper has to wait for night, in any case— Axel refuses to bring out cards until it is dark, and then he takes Cooper into the Airstream’s den and closes the door. They will emerge after three or four hours, at which point Cooper walks to his tent and crashes into sleep.

Some afternoons he wanders alone through the deserted cafeterias and abandoned barracks of the military base, which feels like a suburb of the moon. He meets no one, though at night he will sometimes hear a generator or see a fire. There are only Lina and Axel to talk to. It feels like a parody of guru–disciple teaching, except that The Gentile has a vociferous sexual life—he has even apologized for the noise, and his yells often sound like screams for help. Their sex takes place in the late afternoons, and shortly afterwards they emerge from the Airstream like humbled dormice. Cooper, in his tent forty yards away, has tied a thin cotton cloth over his eyes so he can nap in the three p.m. glare, but it’s tough to ignore the shouts of surrender or epiphany coming from the trailer.

After a week, The Gentile doubles the hours of card-playing. The games now last at least six hours. At midnight they pause, Axel goes into the kitchen, and returns with scotch and two glasses, and they begin again. ‘Beware the false ending,’ he says, as if the previous hours had