Abertees is eleven miles northwest of the Minot Air Force Base. More precisely, the gravel road to Abertees runs for eleven miles from the where the black-top ends at the westernmost gate to the AFB. A rancher talking too loudly in a cowboy-bar in Minot said that there were some folk gathered out there, doomsday types, plotting sabotage against the base. This kind of thinking could corrupt airman at the base. A report was made and Jordan was told to take an MP vehicle and drive out there for some low-level recon. In the last month, the western fence had been breached in a couple of locations, the chain-links sheared apart, and there was suspicion that anti-federal cells were active in the area. The commanding officer told Jordan: “We want to head off mischief of that sort.”
Jordan thought that he should pack a lunch. There were probably no cafes or fast food places where he was going. He thought that he would stop at his quarters and make himself a sandwich. But, then, someone called him on his cell-phone, however, and he was distracted.
The AFB’s footprint is a little irregular on its western flank and the road crossed fenced government land, tracts extending out beyond the principal perimeter. There were no checkpoints, just cattle guards made of metal bars crossing the gravel and tall fences so that Jordan drove onto AFB land for a thousand yards, passing the perimeter fence, and, then, off again. The terrain was grey under grey skies, dry-land wheat growing on the barren hills that had once been sand-dunes, it seemed, hidden under the vegetation rippling out to the horizon like the waves of a choppy sea. Marshes hid between the knuckles of hill with a little open water that the wind was stirring like soup in a pot. The slopes too steep for machine cultivation were planted in hay and Jordan saw some cattle in the distance. A braided creek ran along the side of the gravel road, no trees growing along its switchbacks and, so, open and exposed to the enormous skies. At one point, Jordan passed a seamed concrete pad with a Christmas tree of pipes and meters – it was a capped-off oil well from which the pumping equipment had been removed.
Heavy trucks had broken the asphalt into a mosaic of black chips. The road followed a draw into the hills, running beside the twisting stream that was naked to the sky, dark water flowing among reefs of gravel and undercut banks where the creek had eroded a black channel under the sod. Unlike the stream, the two-lane blacktop ran arrow-straight, seeking out the highest point on the highest treeless ridge. An oculus had opened in the eastern sky and some silvery rays of light shot down to sweep across the grasslands, tinting the crumpled hills blonde where the beams came to earth.
From the hilltop, Jordan could see Abertees below, the place displayed like a diagram on the wrinkled winter-wheat and hay fields. Some trees wrapped around the side of an oval pond that looked icy with slate-grey waters. In the trees, Jordan glimpsed a few houses, rusting harrows and other implements, farm wreckage abandoned in wooded ravines fanning down the side of a barren bluff that stood behind the town. The sphinx-shaped hill seemed to nudge the village with its pale tic-tac-toe grid of streets into the cold lake. A column of tempest-shredded utility poles marched in single file down to the hamlet. Across the lake, a gravel pit was scored into the hillside with a rickety-looking tower with conveyor drags like spider-legs set in the center of the crater. A rich man’s house with beige towers and a separate pole-barn for cars overlooked the town from a hilltop beside the gravel pit. The edges of the lake were bare – the sheet of water just tucked itself under the neighboring hillsides. A green patch of flame-shaped cypresses marked a small cemetery stuck like a band aid on the side of the crouching-beast bluff.
Abertees didn’t look like much of anything and, strangely, the closer he approached, the less there was to see. An obelisk-shaped grain elevator along the road leading down to the town was abandoned, leaking rotting corn from its sagging walls. Several of the houses in the village were also deserted, half-hidden behind thickets of unruly brush. Where the road crossed the grid in the center of the hamlet, a couple of brick commercial buildings were boarded shut. The coop gas station ran on credit card only, just an island of pumps in vacant lot. Next to a couple of burned out houses, Jordan saw ramshackle trailers, scarcely fit for camping. An elementary school occupying a block near the intersection was pierced by trees growing up through the broken roof. Beyond the intersection, the two-land highway turned to gravel and became an undisciplined scrawl across the grasslands.
No one was around, although several of the derelict houses had old pickup trucks near them. At the end of a dirt lane, a bar with a curved brick facade and opaque glass bricks for windows seemed to be open and three trucks stood next to it. If the place was full of dooms-day preppers or militia men, Jordan didn’t see any evidence of them. He turned onto another side-street that led to a Catholic church were the lawn had been mown recently, a brick nave topped by a squat bell-tower where a fissure cleft in the mortar was green with crawling ivy. The church stood in front of a hollow in the hillside where Jordan saw a path and some big urns overflowing with livid roses. A figure in black was walking in the garden. This was as good a place as any to nose around. Jordan parked the MP vehicle near the walk leading to the church’s front door.
The door gave a little when he pulled, as if chained somehow inside, but it didn’t open. He walked around the building, passing a couple of graves with low granite markers in the shadow of the walls. A few split logs had been pounded into the gentle sloping hillside to make some rustic steps leading to a cobblestone path. A metal arch over the path was marked with iron letters that said WAY OF THE CROSS. On a tree, just beyond the archway, someone had nailed a yellow sign lettered with the words: “You’re on camera – smile!” next to single staring eye. Pots of roses stood at intervals along the path.
Jordan thought he would catch up with the person walking in the woods. The trail went slightly uphilling zigzagging between old trees that drooped as if in exhaustion over the path. At each angle in the cobblestone path, a small hut made from greenish fieldstone hunched over a shadowy niche. A pane of plexi-glass sheltered terra-cotta statues lodged in the alcove and painted pink and red and green and robin’s egg blue. The window opening into the first station was wet with condensation and blurred the figures behind. Some Gothic letters spelled out words that Jordan couldn’t read – it was a foreign language although he saw the name JESU among the unintelligible words. In the niche, Jesus was led like a donkey on a tether away from a man in a red toga seated on a throne. In the background, a column was shown in bas relief next to a pale dome.
The path led slightly uphill between glades of cottonwood trees with charred-looking bark like crocodile leather. Jordan didn’t see anyone on the trail ahead of him. The stations on the way of the cross were surrounded by disheveled-looking box-elder trees grouped around the stone shelters. Cold winds had already sheared off the leaves the treetops and they lay withered and brittle on the path. But lower branches, protected by the hollow, were still green.
Each hut was marked with a cross embedded in the mortar above the window shielding the figures. Jesus wore a white robe and his pink feet were barefoot and vulnerable. His beard was camel-colored, an incongruous shadow on his soft jaw. Although several of the stations showed him falling, the drapery of his sculpted white robe was inviolate, unbesmirched. In one display, the savior encountered several women whose faces were strangely white and inert. Each station bore words in barbarous-looking letters that Jordan couldn’t decipher. The savior’s torturers had sharp profiles like mallets or axes and their eyes were dark gashes in the terra cotta. They tore Christ’s clothing from his torso that was stained by little curlicue rivulets of scarlet. The savior’s breast, torn and bleeding, hung like a shield from the cross and his girlish face was turned aside, mouth contorted with suffering. When mourners peeled Jesus from the place where he had been nailed, his body seemed unnaturally elongated and boneless, a ribbon of pale flesh hanging like a limp banner from the splintery wood. The background was now black and riven with a painted bolt of lightning and pillow-soft skull rested at the base of the cross. The story ended with shadowy niche in which Jesus rested on his back on a grey slab, a frieze of grief-stricken women caressing his naked body.
The trail made a dog-leg from Christ’s entombment to a small chapel built like a kiln from yellow brick. Narrow stained glass windows opened into the structure just below its small bronze cupola. Perhaps, the figure that he had glimpsed on the trail had entered the chapel. Jordan tried the door and it yielded inward into a dark octagonal space. The air smelled of mildew and there was an altar against one of the walls above which Jesus was being killed again. Some women stood under his corpse, featureless like half-melted candles. There was no one in the dark, evil-smelling chamber.
Outside, Jordan heard a faint trickle of running water. A few yards uphill, another fieldstone shed stone amidst bright red sumac. Next to the shed, water was gathering in a tub-shaped trough and, then, flowing down a brick-lined channel next to the path. Jordan walked to the shed and looked into it.
The cross on its ceramic plaque embedded in the mortar above the case’s window had slipped sideways so that it showed as an X. Someone had fired a bullet through the plexi-glass and there was a round wound in that material, big enough to inspect with your finger. Below the display, hooked and barbed letters spelled out the words HIMMEL AUF ERDE. Jordan said this to himself, slowly sounding out the letters.
Behind the plexi-glass, the tableaux seemed to show a grotto far underground. A mass of stalactites dangled down from the arch over the figures. Looking more closely, Jordan saw that the protuberant formations were in fact angels like tumors with vestigial fins falling toward the earth like a hail of bombs. A mighty oxen and a great lion were both tamed to the yoke and hitched together to pull a sort of chariot. On the chariot, a figure stood with hands upraised like pale tentacles. The bullet shot through the glass must have hit the figure because it was headless. On the brawny shoulder of the bullock, an eagle perched, bearing in its talons a pale swath of banner, also inscribed with illegible words. A raven perched on the lion’s mane with its beak partly open as if about to speak.
Except for the trickle of water flowing from the battered-looking stone sarcophagus, it was very still. Even the wind had ceased its whisper in the trees.
Far away, a dull concussion sounded.
Then, something honked in the air. At first, Jordan thought it was geese flying overhead and squeaking above like a rusty hinge. But the sound, twisting through a convolute of some kind, became a sky-trumpet. The blare sounded overhead like scarlet plumage blown through the sky.
***
Across the waters of the cold lake at Abertees (a ghost town for all intents and purposes), within the crater of the gravel pit, Jerome sat in the cab of a two-ton truck and wondered whether the battery would fire the engine and, so, he muttered something under his breath, an incantation for good luck as he gazed across the hood of the big vehicle to the snowplow mounted there like the tusk of a mighty beast, a heavy iron blade forged like a weapon. The truck was parked on a slab of concrete next to the crusher machine with its web of conveyors all rising to a pinnacle overhead and there were conical piles of stone sorted according to dimension (pea-size, river-rock stones, heaps of cobbles as big as loaves of bread) next to the vehicle that Jerome was attempting to start. The engine turned over slowly at first, but, then, caught and the hydraulics engaged, suddenly completing the gesture that the machine had been implementing when the truck was shut down a month before, dropping the heavy snow plow’s iron blade onto the concrete with a loud bang, a sound like thunder that spread away from the two-ton truck and ricocheted off the steep walls of the quarry and, then, rolled across the grey waters of the lake into Abertees (almost a ghost town). Jerome put the truck in gear, forgetting for a moment about the heavy iron blade and, as the truck lurched forward, the metal plow scraped against the cement, striking up a flare of flying orange sparks at the same time that the metal squealed, at first, a raw squawking sound, and, then, a high pitched note, a tone a little like a trumpet sounding a fanfare and this noise whirled again around the quarry and echoed from its sheer walls, and, then, because it had nowhere else to go, swept across the still waters of the tarn into Abertees (more or less a ghost town) and, then, Jerome stopped the vehicle, engaging the hydraulics to lift the blade, and climbed out of the two-ton truck, the engine still running (he was worried that if he shut it off, the truck wouldn’t start), and walked a dozen yards to the utility trailer near the crusher machine. Inside the trailer, Jerome poured himself a cup of hot coffee from his thermos, its insulated metal sides decorated with a red and black tartan pattern and it seemed to him that his sense of smell, in recent years impaired by sinus infections and allergies, revived, then, in the most extraordinary way, because the smell of his coffee was rich and dark and altogether delicious, a wonderful aroma that lingered even as he left the utility trailer and walked with a spring in his step (no longer feeling any trace of his rheumatism) back to the truck into which he climbed, not noticing that the snow plow was no longer there because when something vanishes, when something simply goes away there is nothing at all to notice and, then, Jerome put the vehicle in gear again and looked to his side, over the cold lake and toward the village where he saw several people clad in white garments standing next to the slate-grey water bearing in their arms banners of some sort, a sight that surprised him because Abertees, after all, was deserted and, indeed, really nothing more than a ghost town.
***
Jordan walked past the stone stations crouched along the crooked path and, then, down the timber steps to his van. He had forgotten the mission that had brought him to Abertees. Whatever it was, he had apparently accomplished. The sky had cleared and the sun was now shining brightly.
The road seemed less battered and smoother than he recalled from his trip into town. Jordan drove to the top of the high ridge. At the crest of the hill, he could see for many miles. The empty prairie rolled to the horizon, a wilderness of brown and blonde hills. He gazed into the distance but couldn’t see the Air Force Base. Apparently, it was too far away to be visible from this hilltop.
On the windy ridge, the gravel shoulder widened so that he could pull the MP van off the asphalt. He veered to the right to park. Jordan was slightly hungry and he wondered about the time. He glanced at his watch but saw that it had stopped. On the passenger seat next to him, Jordan saw his lunchbox, decorated with a red and white tartan pattern. He must have packed a lunch before leaving on this assignment.
In the lunch pail, Jordan found a ham sandwich made with just the right amount of mayonnaise and meat on wheat bread. There were even four pickle slices tucked into the ham. An apple was also in the tartan-colored box, big and red and so bright that it seemed to glow from within. Jordan rolled down his window and shut off the van.
Something white was moving on a knoll about a mile away. Some people in pale robes were walking in a procession in the tall, bleached grass. Normally, the sky above the military base was scribbled with crisscrossed contrails. But this afternoon, the sky was unblemished, a blue crystal vault. The heavens were unmarked and so blue that it made Jordan dizzy to look up into them.
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