The Heat of the Sun

my friend.’ He clapped Trouble on the back. ‘Go. You’re free.’
    ‘What? We’re way out in the desert! I’m just supposed to drive off? Which way?’
    Mendoza waved a hand along the road. ‘The border. Quickly. Don’t worry about us. This gentleman and I will be quite safe.’
    I swallowed hard. ‘Do as he says, Trouble – senator’s orders.’
    Senator’s orders. The thought was startling: Mendoza, the murderer, was only obeying orders. Trouble would have his freedom. And suddenly I realized how much his father loved him:
loved him, with a love that humbled me. I tried to tell Trouble this, but my voice cracked.
    He squinted into the sun. ‘Sharpless, I—’
    ‘Go!’ I shouted.
    The words shook my frame; I thought I would collapse, but Trouble, stepping forward, gripped me tightly. I clutched him, balled my hands into fists, and dug my knuckles into his back, hard
enough to hurt. We had been through so much together. Now everything was over.
    ‘Nagasaki,’ I said. ‘Think of Nagasaki.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Sharpless.’
    He climbed into the cabin, turned the key, and I stood with Mendoza, watching as Trouble disappeared in clouds of dust. Only when it was too late did I realize I had left my ashplant in the van.
It would go where Trouble was going, and I could not call it back.
    Just off the roadside the buzzards had descended, shrieking and scrabbling around the shelf of rock.
    ‘Now what?’ I looked at Mendoza.
    He stuck out a thumb. ‘What do you think?’
    Hours passed before a shabby truck rattled to a halt beside us. In the back were chickens, squawking and flurrying in teetering crates. The driver blinked down at us: a chubby, incurious Mexican
with an unruly grey moustache. Mendoza spoke to him in Spanish, and the fellow grinned and nodded, holding up a bottle of tequila. The chickens stank abominably.
    As I limped after Mendoza to the passenger door, I half feared he would push me away and drive off, laughing, with his new friend. But Mendoza was honourable; his behaviour to me, indeed, was
remarkably solicitous all the way back to San Diego, where he slipped away near the market where the Mexican left us. One minute Mendoza was there, then he was gone.
    A cab crawled by and I hailed it. I had drunk too much tequila. By the time I made it downtown, the sun was setting. I checked in to the first hotel I could find and flopped on to the bed.
    I slept. I had no dreams.
    What time could it be? Pain, worse than I had felt for years, throbbed in my damaged leg. How long had I stood, how far had I walked, without my ashplant? I looked at my
watch. It had stopped. I had not drawn the blind, but the light was dim, seeping down a well between window and wall. I heaved myself from the bed. The room was dirty: cracked linoleum, cracked
plaster, cracked glass in the window. I pissed in the sink.
    Downstairs, I asked the desk clerk the way to the railroad station. I’d go back to Aunt Toolie’s: that was it, go home and wait. Should I consider myself a wanted man? Had I aided
and abetted Trouble’s escape? Perhaps this was part of the senator’s plan: Woodley Sharpless, scapegoat. My head ached, and sadness clenched in my chest like a newspaper crumpled
tightly, all its words in zigzag disarray. I would accept my fate.
    The station lobby was crowded. Heat rose like marsh gas, and there was noise all around: automobile horns, dogs barking, a train whistle, a newsboy’s reedy cry. What was he saying? Japan:
something about Japan. I snatched a paper from him as I passed, but not until I was on the eight-fifteen to Los Angeles, sinking into my upholstered seat, did I dare unfold it.
    They had dropped the bomb the day before: eight-fifteen in the morning, Hiroshima time. Later, every detail would be branded on my brain: the predawn takeoff from Tinian Island, just north of
Guam, sixteen hundred miles from Hiroshima; the crew of twelve men; the B-29 called Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother. Over Iwo Jima, two other B-29s joined the first, their tasks to
take photographs and make scientific records. On and on they flew through the gathering dawn. When they reached Hiroshima, no sirens sounded, no anti-aircraft fire boomed out, no Japanese fighter
planes took to the air. The bomb, code-named Little Boy, had been scrawled on by playful crew-members, with messages for the enemy that the enemy would never read: obscenities, taunts, curses.
    Gravity had done its work. Down dropped Little