The Strip trolley picks Curtis up at Harrah’s, four hundred yards south of his own hotel. He pays his two bucks, takes a seat near the front, and scans the sidewalks as they roll along: Slots A Fun, the Crazy Girls billboard, the fat blue tentacles of the Wet ’n Wild waterslides. Stooped yellow cranes tend the grave of the Desert Inn, swinging steel girders over pale mounds of earth. Guys with firehoses spray everything in sight, trying to cut down on the dust, but it isn’t working: the ground just drinks it up, and the still air is hung all around with wisps of silica.
The trolley is nearly empty at this hour, silent but for the diesel’s lulling chug, and Curtis finds himself twisted in his seat, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Mount Charleston through the rain-washed morning air. Lots of snow still left at the peak. Even at this distance it’s fiercely white in the blinding sun, a gap at the horizon, a space intentionally left blank.
The mountain vanishes behind the three-legged tower of the Stratosphere, and Curtis turns forward again. The big casinos are all behind them now, the streets lined with motels, wedding chapels, lingerie shops. The Boulevard between here and downtown always reminds Curtis of Subic, the bridge into Olongapo, minus the shit-smelling river, the moneychanger booths, the boys begging for centavos. A few hard-eyed and ragged leafleteers have already reported for duty, sipping coffee from paper cups, satchels bulging at their feet. Last night’s handbills and magazines blow across the sidewalks: ads for sex clubs, escort services, brothels in Pahrump. The palmtrees are thinning out, replaced by billboards: the city advertising itself to itself. Curtis is surprised by a quick tremor of glee; he catches his breath, fights back a smile. What happens here stays here. He’s alone, at risk, alive in his own skin for the first time in years.
The trolley unloads him near Fremont Street, the main downtown drag, lately closed to vehicular traffic and spanned by a steel canopy studded with concert speakers and tiny colored lights. The lights are off now, the speakers silent. A few earlybird dayshifters drift in from the sidestreets: waiters and dancers and dealers in streetclothes, uniforms stuffed into backpacks or duffelbags. Curtis is still operating on Philly time; he feels foolish for starting so early. Wherever Stanley is now, he’s asleep.
Curtis walks up Fourth to the restaurant at the Gold Spike, amused and a little disappointed to find that the price of a two-egg breakfast has more than doubled since his last visit: they now ask a buck ninety-nine. He places his order at the counter, sits in a booth by the window, watches as delivery trucks and taxis and armored cars move across the dust-flecked glass.
Nearly three years gone by. In the summer of 2000, coming off his first Balkan tour, Curtis got TDY’d to Twentynine Palms to help with combined-arms exercises: six months of grit in his molars, charred rock and crucible sun. The way the Corps saw it, Curtis was a combat veteran who’d been in the Gulf in ’91, who’d done counterinsurgency in Kosovo and Somalia, and they wanted him to share his experience with their green recruits. Curtis had been a terrible teacher, reluctant to revisit operations he felt he’d done a halfassed job on in the first place, unable to come up with anything that felt like wisdom in his mouth. He tried to pass along what he’d learned—battlefield circulation control, rear-area security, processing EPWs—but it all came out as textbook stuff, the same standard-ssue post-Vietnam bromides he’d scoffed at himself at his first CAX back in ’84, and he could tell the boots weren’t hearing it. And anyway, nobody really wanted to think about how to handle fifty Iraqi soldiers surrendering to a four-man scout team, or to a water truck. People are always ready to prepare for the worst, not so much the ridiculous. How many of those fresh-minted marines are in the Sandbox now? Curtis wonders. In Kuwait and Saudi. Waiting for the whistle to blow, for the second half to start.