The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani

Author:Chris Abani [Abani, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery & Crime, Thriller
ISBN: 9780143124955
Amazon: 0143124951
Barnesnoble: 0143124951
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Thirty-one

Telephone poles lined the road like a girder of wood and wire. It seemed like they were all that kept the road in a near-straight line, desert falling away on each side. Salazar drove so fast the poles blurred alternately into one, then back into a row like a serial crucifixion, becoming more presence than fact, more blur than thing, lurking always at the edge of consciousness, but then quickly and conveniently forgotten. With each slight turn or sway in the black thread of road, the sun shifted, alternately blinding, alternately bathing everything in a halo. Rocks and hills rose out of the brown scrubland like ancestors birthed from myth. Sunil could see why deserts inspired both the belief in God and the call to seek Him here. Wasn’t Jesus tempted in a desert such as this, forty days into a fast? And didn’t the jinn inhabit the dark caverns of caves and sand dunes? And who wouldn’t believe—especially lost or camped out here, in the time before this road and electric and telephone wires everywhere and cell phones and the noise of it all—that things were supernatural? He knew it made no rational sense, but he did believe in ghosts. Who wouldn’t after what he had seen in the death camp at Vlakplaas?

All the nuclear explosions held in underground aquifers here pointed to how hollow the desert really was. Even before the bombs, there had been the endless mining expeditions during the gold rush. It was easy to see the traces on the surface—ghost towns littered the desert—but it seemed that subterranean Nevada was left to legend. These legends, of an earth populated by spirits, were so rampant that even Herbert Hoover, thirty-ninth U.S. president, himself a onetime Nevada hard-rock miner, had written about them.

Did you know that this place is rife with myth and history, Sunil said to Salazar, who was stuffing a handful of orange Cheetos into his mouth.

Nope, he said, spitting crumbs everywhere.

Dusting the shower of orange crumbs from his arm, Sunil continued. The moon landing is believed to have been faked somewhere here, he said.

Bullshit.

Well, you know it won’t be the first hoax involving science and the moon, Sunil said. In 1835, Sir John Herschel, on the front page of the New York Sun, claimed to have found intelligent life on the moon. He described vast forests, seas, and lilac-colored pyramids, even herds of bison and blue unicorns.

Sounds like he could have a job out here designing hotels and themed attractions, Salazar said.

You see these telephone poles? They are only here because of lynching, Sunil said.

That’s fucked up.

People usually are. When they were first introduced into neighborhoods, Americans hated the poles so much they chopped them down. Made the landscape ugly, they said. But when someone discovered they could lynch blacks in the middle of town using the poles, they really caught on. Doesn’t hurt that they are shaped like crosses.

Do you think anyone was lynched on one of these poles?

Hard to say, although I doubt it.

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