Rocket City. Cathryn Alpert
What was next indeed? The night before, in the motel pool with Enoch, she'd felt her life transformed as though she had been in some land of enchantment and not some blighted state with dirty toilets, greasy cafes, and state troopers who got off on badgering women and the deformed. Floating in cool water, she'd felt her life detour down a strange and dangerous road, with potholes and curves and dark cracks a person could fall into. It was Enoch's road, lonely and seductive as a two-lane desert highway.
For an hour they'd floated, staring up into the endless sky. They'd said nothing to one another, just taken in the strange silence of the desert night. In starlight, Enoch's face had seemed less awkward: intelligent, kind, and oddly familiar. But now, in the glare of morning, Marilee found herself squinting into the thick, artless features of a dwarf.
A dwarf ! She had spent the night in her car with a dwarf. A little man with stubby legs that stuck out over his seat like the stiff plastic legs of a doll. She had picked him up on the side of the highway. Swum naked with him in some seedy motel pool. Driven with him to an isolated road out in the middle of nowhere. Slept with him in her car. She must have been crazy.
And yet, it had all been so innocent. They had traveled south on Highway 54, following the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad toward El Paso. They'd turned east onto a narrow road, crossed over the railroad tracks, and driven a few miles to a turnaround. They'd locked their doors, cracked open their windows, switched off the lights, and said goodnight to one another like an old married couple, grown tired and too familiar.
She had listened to Enoch's steady breathing, aware of the exact mo
ment that sleep had overtaken him like a wave washing him out to sea. And she had listened to him dream— dwarf dreams, she imagined, of tall women, taller men, and Goliath dogs who could topple you with their exuberance. She'd listened to his noises, his muffled sputters and sudden snorts, the soft clicking of his uvula, and she'd wondered what her life would be like with a man such as Enoch.
Now, she was wondering still. Part of her wanted to run away with him, to take him as her lover and lose herself in the desolate Southwest. To travel without direction, swim naked in motel pools, have reckless sex with a man half her size, and sleep out under the stars. Yet, how could she? She was Marilee Levitay, an art teacher from Sherman Oaks coming to New Mexico to get married. Nothing in her twenty-five years had prepared her for such insanity.
Enoch watched as she traced concentric circles in the sand. "I don't know what's next," she said. "What exactly did you have in mind?"
"Well, we zip into Alamogordo. Clean up. Gas up. Get some food for the road. Then head up north, toward Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Do some pueblos. See the Jemez. Camp in the Sangre de Cristos."
He had her life all planned. "I don't know," she said, looking out into the desert. "I just don't know." He offered her his spare shirt. She took it and wiped the juice from her hands and forearms. "How are we going to live?" she asked. "What do we do for money? I don't have very much. I was planning to get a job."
"I have money," said Enoch.
He didn't look as though he had money.
"I get a check once a month."
She'd heard about these things: the government paying the disabled when they couldn't work— or didn't want to. She wondered if there wasn't something Enoch could do for a living—advertising, maybe, or phone sales. "I need to think," she said. "Let's drive up to Alamogordo. I want to change my clothes and brush my teeth."
"Yo!" said Enoch. "Alamogordo!"
At first glance, the town was not unusual. Clusters of fast-food restaurants lined White Sands Boulevard, the main drag through the western end of the city. Downtown, drab, blocky storefronts merged one into the next, their facades weathered by years of sun and sandstorms. Women in big American cars sported hairdos from the previous decade. Men strode by in ten-gallon hats, boots, and jeans— the business suit of the Southwest.
The town looked like any other she'd seen in the high desert plains, with one startling exception: Everywhere there were rockets. Rockets on top of buildings, rockets mounted on trucks, a whole configuration of rockets on the lawn in front of the Chamber of Commerce. They passed the Rocket Lounge on White Sands Boulevard, the Rocket Motel, Rocket Mobile Village, and Rockette Hair Styling. They passed a sign for Rocket Van and Storage, and a rocket on top of a sign having nothing to do with rockets. Like icons of some techno-god of the twentieth century, images of rockets dominated the city. They rose up from grass and stone; sprouted heavenward from storefront walls, restaurant doors, and the streets of Alamogordo.
"Check it out," said Enoch. "This place doesn't have soil, it has erectile tissue."
"What's that white thing?" Marilee pointed to a wing-like projection in the distance rising up from behind a mountain. It, too, looked like a rocket.
"Sunspot. Solar research lab."
"And those temple-like buildings out in the desert?"
"Haven't a clue."
There was something strange about this city, something not quite right. It was more than just the omnipresence of rockets. It was something larger and intangible. At first glance, the town had looked quite ordinary. Upon closer scrutiny, however, one saw that things were different. Odd. It was almost as though, having lived so near the first atomic test site, the town itself had mutated and grown things.
Off in the west, two fighter jets from Holloman Air Force Base wove their silvery trails high above the Tularosa Basin. They were too far away to be heard, too dramatic not to be noticed as they swung back and forth, in and out, like twin pendulums suspended from opposite points high above the cumulonimbus.
"Something's going on out here," said Marilee. "Something weird."
"Bingo," said Enoch. "You win the prize."
"And what might that be?"
He thumped his chest with his stubby hand. "Me."
They pulled into a gas station on White Sands Boulevard, where they took turns using the bathroom. Marilee washed her face in the sink and brushed her teeth, then changed into clean underwear, a blouse, and a pair of shorts. She returned to her car to put on makeup because there had been no light in the bathroom. When she opened her compact, she saw that her powder had a groove in it where the cop had run his finger. From her car, she watched through the open door to the men's room as Enoch stood on top of an overturned trashcan to shave at the sink. He looked like a five-year-old playing grownup with his father's razor.
When he'd finished cleaning up, Enoch filled her car with gas. Fumes rose from the nozzle as he pumped, wafting in through Marilee's open window. She'd always loved the smell of gasoline. As a child, sitting in the backseat of her mother's pink Buick, she would roll down her window to inhale deeply whenever the attendant pumped gas. The fumes made her dizzy, eliciting in her an indefinable yearning she later identified as sexual.
Larry's ROTC photo was still on the dashboard, faded and curled from the morning sun. His face smiled up at her, a sweet face the way his eyes squinted when he smiled and one incisor overlapped the other as though his two front teeth were bashful. She had always gone for blondes. Or maybe they had gone for her— she wasn't sure. Across the street, a rocket pointed skyward in front of an outdoor car lot. Where in this strange town did Larry live? So far, the houses all looked alike: stucco tract homes from the post-war building boom and cottages from the thirties. Where were the apartments? The condos? Where was Tomahawk Trail?
Marilee smoothed Larry's photo as best she could and slipped it back into her wallet. Leaning back against her headrest, she closed her eyes and drew in the heady odor of gasoline. She'd missed sleeping with Larry; in the seven months since he'd left L.A., Marilee had slept with no one.
She'd first met Larry Johnston when she was seventeen. Theirs had been a large high school in the San Fernando Valley in which a student could easily remain anonymous. But not Larry Johnston. Even before he turned up in her German class, Marilee knew of him as a loner, an odd boy who occasionally exhibited unconventional