Stallion Gate (Hardcover)

John Row

The story opens at Los Alamos in December, 1944. U.S. Army Sergeant Joe Pena, a Pueblo Indian who had seen action in the Pacific, was specifically requested by the Project's lead physicist, Robert "Oppy" Oppenheimer, to join the select and top secret group, in New Mexico, as his personal driver and body guard. Oppy had known Joe in his boyhood, when he left New York, for health reasons, to spend the summer in New Mexico. It was one of the happiest times of his life. Young Joe taught him to ride...and years later had still retained Oppy's trust.

All the important historical characters are present at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty, scientist Klaus Fuchs, the Army general in charge of the project, Fermi, etc., are here. Anna Weiss, a fictional German Jewish mathematician, who had fled the Nazis, and been recruited by Oppy, is present. So is Joe's superior officer, Captain Augustino, an insane and bigoted intelligence officer with his own agenda. He believes Fuchs, Weiss and Openheimer are Soviet spies and has blackmailed Joe into informing on them...although Joe resists mightily and successfully, most of the time.

There is little suspense in this novel. After all, we know that the atomic bomb test was successful, as well as we know of the other bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Enola Gay. We know now who was a spy and who was unjustly accused. The storyline, is centered on Joe Pena, a complex, talented and very underestimated man. He disappointed his family, and had been disowned by his now deceased mother. Joe will never be a white man, nor a black man - although his ability to play jazz on the piano and understand the language of music like a native born to the country of chords and riffs, may have made his soul part Afro-American. He is really no longer a Native American either. He has seen and partaken of too much of the world to ever come home again. Pena fought like a hero on Baatan, and has fought heroically in the ring. Boxing was his sport and he was good. Throughout much of the book, he has no hopes for the future - no dreams. He observes everything and everyone, and comments occasionally with his sardonic humor. He thwarts Augustino's paranoid plots and assists a few renegade Indians, who try to work native magic to disrupt the explosion to come. He listens to Oppie who has lost weight and sleep with his anxiety over the Project. At one point Oppenheimer, while waiting for the rain to stop so he can meet the deadline for the test, says, "I am like the king of a rainy country, wealthy but helpless, young and ripe with death." Then, Joe, a lady's man - bedding officer's wives is forever getting him into trouble - falls in love with Anna Weiss. An opportunity to buy the Casa Manana, a nightclub in Santiago, NM, presents itself. Suddenly Pena dreams of owning the best jazz club outside of New York and Chicago...and the possibility of a future with Anna. The suspense does come Big Time, at the end of the novel, when all the forces at play, and the characters with their dillemas and choices, build toward their own personal climaxes - with an explosion that will impact the reader for some time to come.

If you are looking for an Arkady Renko thriller, this is probably not the book for you. There are pages, especially at the beginning, when the story plods along at an excruciating pace. I hung in there because I was caught up in the lyrical beauty of Cruz Smith's writing. His description of Joe on the piano, what and how he plays, is classic. "If blue skies were going to explode on them, they were ready, so he made the melody,'...bluebirds singin' a song' even as he brought the 'Moon' down a chromatic descent, a chord at a time. The tunes merged and split again, accelerating until keyboard and crowd swung between flight and plunge and he cued the horns, who stood and hit Charlie Parker riffs that settled the argument by demanding 'How High The Moon?' as if it were the sun." Can't help it. I'm a sucker for good prose. At one point Joe says, "Which is why I love music. You hit a C and it's a C and that's all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like being intelligent. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at the piano and picks out the undeniable truth."

Smith's descriptions of the desert's, (nature's), glory, is ironically juxtaposed with man's destruction and mutilation of the natural environment - so poignant and so gruesome. The radioactivity increasingly seeped into soil and water. Cows had to be checked with geiger counters before they could be slaughtered for consumption. At times, some of the animals' mutations were visible to the naked eye. Wild horses were machine-gunned from "B-29's." The author writes with a paintbrush. "The Hanging Garden got its name from the scarlet gillia, paintbrush and yarrow that had taken root and flourished in the turned soil of the hillside. The wildflowers were a brief, improbable splurge of colors - every shade of red, orange and madder - that turned and waved in any breeze crossing the dun drabness of the mesa."

Lastly, Joe Pena is as strong and developed a character as Arkady Renko. I enjoyed every minute I read about him, and he will stay in my mind as a wonderful anti-hero of his time. J. Kraus