I will add one last thing, and then I’ll close. Two weeks or so after that night, I received by mail an envelope containing a clipping from the Providence Journal. There was no return address, and I have no idea who sent it, but there was a Boston postmark. On November 5th, a week after Marquardt’s gathering, a body was found floating in the Seekonk River, not so far from the yellow house. The nude body of a young man. His tongue had been cut out, as had his eyes.
As I said, I’ll post this from Grand Junction. Be safe, dear Ruth. Please stay away from that woman.
Yours Truly,
Ysabeau
7.: Black Ops Alt (#friendlyskies)
(Over Monument Valley, Utah, January 18, 2018)
Thirty-five thousand feet up, Ellison Nicodemo wakes from a dream of drowning. She opens her eyes and squints and blinks painfully at the pale blue sky, at the white stratus and cumulus clouds, and at all the shades of terra-cotta red and brown, ochre yellow and sage green that are the desert laid out far below. The cabin of the Beechcraft King Air B200 is drenched with cold, bright morning sunlight spilling in through twelve circular portholes. Kitty Wells is singing and there’s the smell of coffee and leather upholstery. Ellison’s throat and mouth are parched, her eyes gummy from the pressurized, recirculated air of the plane, and her tongue feels like the bins of whole dried fish at the Korean market a few doors down from her shithole apartment back in Los Angeles. Her sinuses ache, and there’s a vague, unfamiliar sort of nausea stirring in her belly, a touch of airsickness; she hasn’t flown in years.
She sits up and stares at her reflection in the window, superimposed on the western sky. She’s wearing the new clothes they gave her back at LAAFB, more or less standard-issue agency threads—a black leather blazer, white dress shirt and black slacks, and a pair of inexpensive-looking black block-heel pumps. After she was dressed, the Signalman gave her a silver-and-turquoise bolo tie, and she’s wearing that, too. There’s a chunky Timex digital watch on her right wrist, so she knows that it’s 8:24 a.m., and there’s a Glock 17M 9mm tucked snug inside a shoulder holster—just like the bad old days, and never mind that she hasn’t fired a gun since 2011.
All around her, the airplane thrums like a gigantic insect that’s eaten her alive. It’s not a pleasant thought, and she pushes it away.
“I need something to drink,” she mutters, her voice hardly more than a raw, hoarse whisper, and then she sees the bottle of National Bohemian waiting obligingly in her cup holder.
“Well, will you look at that,” says the Signalman. “Sleeping Beauty awakes. And here I figured you’d be sawing logs all the way to Omaha.” He’s sitting across the narrow aisle from Ellison and two rows forward, his back to the cockpit doors, facing the female agent who watched on while Ellison endured a rushed medical evaluation and a round of inoculations, Mackenzie something or another Irish—Rourke. O’Riordan, Reilly . . .
Mackenzie Regan, she remembers.
Yeah, that’s right.
She’s too pretty, that one, too young and fresh-faced, entirely too sober and unscarred, someone who would look more at home teaching elementary school than running with the likes of the Signalman. Then again, Ellison Nicodemo learned a long time ago just exactly how deceiving looks can truly be. Best to withhold judgment. Always best to wait and see. For all Ellison knows, Mackenzie Regan might be the meanest motherfucker alive, a regular intergalactic samurai badass, facing the death sentence in twelve star systems, yada, yada, yada.
Ellison twists the cap off the bottle of beer and takes a long swallow, clears her throat, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, and belches. Mackenzie Regan turns her head, looking over her shoulder and sparing half a forced, distasteful smile before focusing her attention once more on the documents and photographs and maps spread out on the little table between herself and the Signalman.
“We just crossed the Arizona-Utah border,” he says to Ellison and nods at his window. “Look down there, kiddo, and you’ll see the patch of buttes and dust and rattlesnakes that John Ford made famous. If the Duke has a ghost, I’d wager green folding money that’s where you’d find it.” And then he winks at her and lights a cigarette, which saves Ellison the trouble of having to ask if she can smoke on the flight.
“I thought you fucking hated planes,” she says, then clears her throat again. “I thought with you it was railways and highways or no ways at all. I thought you’d rather eat the peanuts out of a pile of pig shit than get on an airplane.”
The Signalman watches her and rubs his salt-and-pepper stubbled chin. It doesn’t look as if he’s shaved since the day before. Or maybe the day before that.
“And I thought I’d find you healthy and clean, living it up on the banks of the Vltava,” he replies. “You wanna tell me again why it is I didn’t?” And then to Mackenzie Regan, he says, “That’s in Prague, the River Vltava,” and she sighs and tells him she knew that already.
Ellison frowns and lets the matter drop. She finds a shiny new Zippo and a half-empty pack of Chesterfields in the breast pocket of the blazer. She lights one and stares at the sky for almost a whole minute before asking, “How long was I out?”
“Not too long,” the Signalman replies. “Since just before takeoff. An hour and a half, more or less. I warned you that was some potent shit, not like that nickel-and-dime skag you’ve been shooting.”
“Yeah,” she mutters around the filter of her cigarette. “You warned me.”
Kitty Wells is replaced by Connie Francis, “Who’s Sorry Now.” The plane might belong to Albany, but it’s sure as shit the Signalman’s mixtape.
Ellison finishes the beer and sets the empty bottle back into the cup holder. She wants to ask if she can get another and is debating whether or not that’s a bad idea, trying to guess just how deep the Signalman’s indulgence runs, when he holds up a manila folder so she can see, then taps it with an index finger. There’s an identical folder lying on the otherwise empty seat next to her, and she nods at him, picks up the folder, and opens it. Inside, there’s a thin sheaf of typed pages held together with a red plastic paper clip. Typed, she notes (and on onionskin), not a computer printout, because Albany has never trusted computers for these sorts of things and likely never will. The cover sheet is stamped with green ink, COSMIC TOP SECRET and EYES ONLY and so on and so forth. Ellison takes a drag on her Chesterfield, then turns to the second page. And here, assembled in a terse, itemized list, are all the many reasons that the agency has sent the Signalman to yank her back into the fold, all the horrors and unlikelihoods that add up to this moment, to her sitting in this seat on this plane, racing through the sky above a cowboy-movie landscape of towering sandstone buttes and cowboy-movie phantoms.
“I’m going to need another beer for this,” Ellison says, because, really, the worst he can do is say no. She shuts her eyes, trying to scrape together a few stingy shreds of courage and summon some measure of backbone from the heroin’s deceitful, warm embrace. When she opens her eyes again, the empty bottle’s gone and there’s a fresh Natty Boh in the cup holder. Its already been opened for her. The Signalman is standing now, stooped slightly so he can gaze out one of the circular windows.