Burning Paradise

Leo switched off the radio. Thomas sat glumly at the window. “Wish I had something to read,” he said.

Cassie agreed. Even a magazine would have been better than nothing, but a search of Dowd’s premises had proved fruitlesss. “All we have,” she said, “is one of Uncle Ethan’s books, and Leo’s got dibs on that.”

“I could read it out loud,” he said.

Cassie had to stifle a laugh when she realized he was serious. It seemed comical to her, the idea of chain-smoking Leo Beck reading to them from a work of popular science. But it was a nice thought. (And, come to that, when was the last time she’d seen him smoking a cigarette? He must have finished his last pack, and he hadn’t asked Beth to pick up more.)

Thomas seemed intrigued. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Sure.” He flashed Thomas a smile, then opened the book to its first chapter. “Consider a fisherman—let’s say, a young man who owns his own boat and weaves his own nets….”

In Leo’s sonorous and surprisingly confident voice it sounded more like a story than an essay. Cassie watched Leo’s face as he read, the attention he paid to the text, the way he glanced up from the page to make eye contact with Thomas, who leaned forward with obvious interest. It was a charitable act, she thought. A nice thing to do. Apparently, somewhere inside Leo Beck was a man Cassie might be able to respect.

Dowd and Beth returned after midnight, both of them a little drunk. Dowd left a box of ca

Leo and Thomas and Cassie had already unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor of the office. “You’re closest to the switch,” Leo said. “Will you turn out the light?”

“Okay, but what if Beth comes in later?”

“She can find her way around.”

From downstairs, the sound of hectic laughter.

A few miles down that road—and it wasn’t much of a road, just gravel and dirt blown over with sand—me and Bastián realized we were doing something stupid.

Morning had dawned cold, with a few flakes of snow drifting from a thickly overcast sky. The air in the garage smelled of urethane and stale beer and motor oil. Dowd had stripped the car of its masking and now he had it up on a lift, inspecting the tires and undercarriage in case it became necessary to drive through bad weather. On their way to where, exactly, Dowd still hadn’t said.

Stupid because we didn’t know what we were getting into, and stupid because we’d almost for sure be fired. But it didn’t matter. It was one of those situations where you just say fuck it. Fuck the job, fuck management. The pay was decent but living in a bunk house the middle of the world’s driest desert, staring at the salares and the cordillera all day, makes you a certain kind of crazy. I don’t know about Bastián, but I was ready to go back where people actually lived. See something vertical for a change. Talk to a woman who wasn’t an overseer or a forklift driver.

So we drove on even after the Pisco ran out. Bastián started talking about copper mining. He said he had a cousin who had worked at Chuquicamata and Escondida. What ever these people were doing out here, he said, they weren’t mining copper. To mine copper you need water, but there was no river or aquifer. Big tanks of water had come through our compound, but not enough for serious ore extraction. And if they were doing heap-leaching there would have been bulk shipments of sulfuric acid and chemicals like that. Hell, we should have seen the tailing dams by now. Or at least smelled them. Because we were getting close.

What we did see was all kinds of garbage on the side of the road. That’s the thing about the desert, nothing rots or gets overgrown or sinks into the earth. You throw something away, it just sits there. We drove past these little piles of fractured aluminum tubing and cut metal and broken machine parts and colored glass and cracked ceramic insulators and shit like that. It was past midnight, there was a half-moon in the sky and all kinds of stars, so it looked pretty strange, sort of Martian, if you know what I mean—these trash piles with rebar and steel girders sticking out. Six feet high, some of them, then ten feet high, until we were driving down an alley made of trash, and Bastián slowed up and started to look worried. Eugene, he says, this is not a normal operation. No shit, I said.

I don’t want to be seen here, he says. What ever these people are doing, they don’t want company. Well, I say, and it was probably the Pisco talking, I came out here to see and I mean to see.

Okay, but on foot, Bastián says. Toyota makes too much noise.

Okay. So we get out and climb up an embankment that’s mostly industrial refuse. Slipping on sheet plastic and grabbing rebar like it was tree branches, all in all probably making more noise than we would have if we just kept driving. But it turns out Bastián picked a good place to stop, because from the top of that ridge we could see the whole installation.

If you want to call it that. The compound. What ever. That’s no mine, Bastián says. Yeah, I said, that’s pretty fuckin’ obvious.

It was a patch of desert the size of a small town, with this trash heap around it like the side of a bowl. Most of the buildings in it were long sheds, tin roofs, plywood or cinderblock walls, no marks on them. In the middle there was a tower, not very tall and kind of squat, holding up what looked like a ten or twelve big mirrors arranged like the petals of a flower. You could tell they were mirrors because they reflected the lights from the buildings and also the stars overhead. Real industrial-looking. Around it there was a bunch of pumps and pressure tanks full of god-knows-what and fat electrical cables, all told taking up about as much space as a regulation football field. That was where the light came from, the light we saw all the way back at the depot where we worked.

“How do you know that’s where it came from?” Thomas suddenly asked. Dowd gave him a shut-the-fuck-up look and paused. Cassie put a protective arm around her little brother.

We knew because it came on while we were watching. Nearly blew us back down the trash heap. I mean it wasn’t loud or anything, there wasn’t any noise at all except what might have been a compressor buried somewhere underground. But bright, oh, Jesus! Maybe thirty seconds before I could see anything but the glare. Bastián put his head down, but I couldn’t help sneaking looks. The beam of light went straight up, and it didn’t spread out like a spotlight, it was straight as a pencil all the way up to where it disappeared. The air started to smell electric, like hot metal and burning insulation.

Bastián said in a sick little voice he wanted to get back in the Toyota and go home. And I thought that was a good idea. Because with all that light we were pretty conspicuous, and worse… I could see things moving. Moving toward us. Look, I said.

People down there, he says. Anyway we guessed they were people. Between the glare and the shadows it was hard to tell. The way they moved, they might have been animals. Big ones. So. Come on, he says, let’s get the fuck out of here. So we scramble down the dark side of the trash heap, half-blind, tripping over shit. I cut myself on a piece of sheet metal and didn’t even feel it till later. Still got the scar—see?

Dowd lifted his T-shirt to expose his torso. The scar ran at right angles to the staves of his ribs, a pale irregular line.

Then Bastián says stop, I hear something. So we stand still. The wind had come up, so I could hear scraps of roofing paper and torn plastic rattling in the trash pile, plus industrial sounds from the compound, that compressor or what ever it was beating like a drum, and over that—this is what Bastián was talking about—a kind of scrabbling sound, like a dog might make digging through garbage. Getting louder. Bastián looks up at the ridgeline of the trash heap and kind of gasps, and I look where he’s looking, and there’s this, uh, thing up there—