Big Picture: Stories (12 page)

Camel Rock was a landmark because big rocks tend to be landmarks. It was a sign that he was closer to his country, but it was a sad sight, the dromedary outcropping crawling with camera-toting visitors and their oily-fingered offspring, nature’s new erosive element: people who were shaping land just like time and water and wind, but leaving no beauty, just marks. He noted the rock as he rolled by, but kept his eyes forward on the highway with its steady, mesmerizing, reassuring yellow line. Then he was waiting for the view, the view he would get when he was through the mountain pass and looking down on the Taos Valley, where the Rio Grande Gorge snaked through like gossip.

He reached the vista, stopped his truck, and got out to have a look. It was as he always remembered it, no larger than life, but the biggest life he knew. He was like the space between the walls of the gorge, being from a black father and a white mother. He was not Indian, not Mexican, but he looked like he could be either. The gorge was a vastness that couldn’t be ignored, but really couldn’t be defined. There were some black people in Santa Fe and certainly in Albuquerque, but not in Taos, save for the occasional counterculture, transplanted, California-style would-be artist passing through or settling to work in a gallery or boutique. A thunderhead formed over the hills to the west as he drove through Ranchos de Taos and he counted another five fast-food joints added to the awful strip that threatened to make even this place, so singular in setting, just another clone row of America, another burb of the interstatic. He drove through downtown Taos and its traffic of beat-up pickups and BMWs and rusty ’63 Impalas and Mercedes to El Prado and then down the dirt road that led to his mother’s house.

Lucien’s mother cried and hugged him and with her small body pulled him into the house. The place looked the same, but it appeared quieter. His mother was a strong woman, a fighter, so the house was still alive, she would never let the house die, but it was quiet. The house was special to Eva, and now it was hers, just hers; her husband was dead but she had her home. Lucien liked the way it felt. He was surprised that he could not feel the presence of his father and more surprised that he wanted to. He knew that if he raised the issue with his mother she would tell him in no uncertain terms that his father was everywhere, breathing in each room, stuck like cobwebs in each corner. So he didn’t mention it.

“Food, you need food, don’t you?”

“Actually, I’m starving.”

“It won’t take a minute.” She was off to the kitchen; her son trailed behind her. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.” Turning to see him again, she said, “You look well. Fit. You look fit.”

“I suppose I am fit. But look at you. You look terrific, Ma. Have you been working out, some aerobics or something? Playing a little basketball?”

“I walk. I walk everywhere these days. Except to the grocery store. That’s too far away, at least for carrying sacks.”

Lucien sat at the table and watched his mother gather food from the refrigerator and cupboards and drop pans on the stove with noise that wasn’t noise. “Pancakes, eggs, and sausage. I know it’s lunch time, but that’s what you need.” She hesitated for a moment, twisting her small face. “No eggs. There are eggs in the pancakes. We’ve got to watch our cholesterol.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He watched as she broke eggs into a bowl with flour and milk. “You do look really good, Ma.”

Without turning to face him, she said, “I feel good. I miss your father, but people die. You live with it.” Then quickly, “Tell me about Honduras.”

“Nothing to report really. It wasn’t much different from Espanola, to tell the truth. Mostly we just sat around the base.” He recalled the rocking motion of the soldiers he knew, leaning at sills while reading letters from home, rocking back and forth on their heels, just waiting, waiting to go home, waiting to be told to do something, waiting to be told not to wait any longer. “It was pretty boring. A lot of waiting.”

“Your room is all ready for you. It’s not exactly how you left it.”

“You mean it’s clean.”

“It’s very clean. And let’s try to keep it that way.” She poured batter onto the skillet.

Lucien listened to the hiss of the frying cakes as he thought about sleeping in the house. He didn’t want to stay there, didn’t want to shower where his father showered, sit on the same toilet. He realized for the first time that he was afraid of missing the man, afraid of finally facing the loss. Until now it had been convenient to blame his father for his own death, thinking that if he had taken better care, if he had slowed down, if.… “I’m not staying here.”

Spatula in hand, she turned. “What?”

“I need to find a place of my own,” was the best he could come up with.

“Well, I can understand that, but you just got here.”

“I’m going to find something as soon as I can. Today maybe.” He felt like a kid caught in a stupid lie that was snowballing.

There were no tears from Eva’s eyes, no sounds of crying. “That’s stupid. And mean.” She turned, examined the pancakes, and tossed one into the garbage.

She was right. He didn’t want to hurt his mother. “Ma, I’ve been sleeping in a bunk under a fat guy with gas for five months. I need room.”

“You’ll have the room to yourself.”

“I know.” He paused. “It was a long drive. Of course I’ll stay here.”

She stepped to him and touched his face.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” He looked about the kitchen. “I’m scared of missing Dad, I guess.”

She turned to the cooking and he knew that she was crying. His father was certainly dead. His tying room, the small room at the back of the house where he had fashioned his flies for fishing, was neat. All of his tools, his vise, his bobbins, bodkins, and scissors were there, but everything was orderly. The feathers that he used were packed away in clear plastic boxes with mothballs, as were the squares of fur: rabbit, deer, elk, bear, muskrat. Lucien sat at the desk, loosened and tightened the vise, and looked at the hooks sitting in plastic cups, smallest to largest, left to right. So much order would have driven his father crazy. When his father was alive, the desk was a mess. There were pieces of feathers floating and clinging to the sleeves of his sweater, the debris of trimmed deer hair everywhere, snippets of thread and floss and tinsel littering the floor. Now it was all neat, arranged as death must be because it is so simple.

He grew up confused by his father’s belief in simple and precise answers; one answer in particular, that one can move away and live without the world. Now, Lucien understood all too well why his father moved to the high desert. It was a matter of leaving the world and its problems with his race behind. So he left black people and hopefully white people as well, but “of course there was no escaping them.” Lucien resented his father protecting him from the world. He allowed himself to be herded off to college and directed toward his father’s profession until finally he “lost his mind” and joined the army. Lucien could not shake the look on his father’s face when he received the news of Lucien’s enlistment.

Lucien took the cover off of a box of hackle feathers and pulled out a cape of grizzly. He admired the dark and white pattern and imagined the wings of an Adams sticking straight up. It was a good cape, the feathers stiff, varying greatly in size. He put a size 14 hook into the vise and secured it. He threaded black thread through the tube of a bobbin, and made the first turns around the shank. He already felt the tension leaving him. He chose two small grizzly hackle feathers for the wings and tied them perpendicularly to the shank, the motions feeling easier than he imagined they would. It had been so long. He found some brown hackle in the box, tied in a feather of it and another feather of grizzly. He cut a few barbules of brown and grizzly for the tail and tied them down. With each step of building the fly he felt better and he could hear his father’s voice, the voice that he loved, not the voice that his aching heart had concocted. From a patch of muskrat hide he teased some hairs and rolled them onto the waxed thread, wrapped the hook, and formed the body. He remembered fighting with his fingers as a young boy trying to do this, these motions that now seemed so simple. He remembered his father behind him, watching, laughing, instructing. Finally he had the last hackle feather gripped in the pliers and was turning it round the fly; the feather was fanning out and pointing in every direction. The lure began to breathe. He had sweet memories of doing this through the winter in anticipation of spring fishing. When he did find a place to live he would take the things that had been his father’s and use them, keep them alive.

“Are you okay?” Eva leaned against the doorjamb.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I straightened up in here.”

“So I see.” Lucien pushed himself away from the desk and stood up, arching his back to loosen it. “It’s a lot easier to find things now.”

“Tired?”

“It was a long drive. That truck’s seat is like a board, too. To tell the truth, I was surprised it even started after sitting for so long.”

“At least you didn’t have to worry about anybody stealing it.”

Lucien laughed. “Yes, it’s a sorry-looking critter.”

“Why don’t you take a nap?”

Lucien nodded, walked to his mother, and embraced her.

“I’ll make a trip to the grocery store while you’re asleep.”

“I’ll go when I get up if you like.”

In his room, Lucien tossed his bags into the corner. The room was clean, but retained the smell of his childhood: it reminded him of jeans and frogs and board games. He stretched out on the mattress and felt his body give in to its firmness. When he was in high school he sneaked Sarah Begay into his room while his parents were away, but she never surrendered to the comfort of the mattress, nor to Lucien. He remembered her beautiful dark eyes saying no, and he always wanted to thank her because he wasn’t ready then either. He was pretty sure that even then she wasn’t a virgin. He believed that she had said no because she understood something about life. But apparently she didn’t understand enough, because she married out of high school, had three kids before she was nineteen, and looked all of forty at twenty. Still, thinking back, he would have liked to sleep with her.

He recalled the smell of drying chili peppers and the colors of the corn festival dances and he decided that being home felt good. It felt good even if he didn’t know how he fit into the landscape.

He remembered the stories his father had told him about finding the side of the pillow that held the good dreams. Even now a bad dream would cause him to turn his pillow over. Once he even exchanged his pillow surreptitiously for another soldier’s.

He heard either a raccoon or a coyote disturbing the garbage cans in the backyard. Lucien liked coyotes. They were perhaps the most adaptable of mammals, still roaming parts of Los Angeles. Coyotes were cunning and secretive and inquisitive and social. His father had liked coyotes. The old man had once sneaked back to a roadside zoo with him and released several caged coyotes. Lucien remembered asking, “What if they don’t know how to hunt?”

“Then they’ll die,” his father said as they climbed back into the truck. “But they won’t be caged. That’s why we live here, Lucien.” The weather of early fall was a reminder of how kind the high desert could be. Life up there was simply too easy, he recalled. It made the people lazy. The laziness was represented in the pots of the Indians from Taos Pueblo. Lucien remembered realizing this fact as a child of ten. He was in the Indian museum down in Albuquerque with his father and mother, standing before a glass case, and there were pots from Zuni, from Cochiti, from Acoma, all beautiful, well-formed, and full of power or love or something scary like that, and then there were the pots from Taos. “Loose,” was how his father described the lopsided vessels, but even as a child Lucien could see the disparity. He concluded then, and his growing up there substantiated his thinking, that the things which filled the pots came too easily, and so both, contents and containers, were taken for granted. He watched his friends, white, Mexican, and Indian learn that life was a slow climb up a greased pole with just enough of what you needed at hand to keep you going. The beauty of the place negated the desire to add to the beauty, to give back. Taos was a minefield of galleries, and the so-called artists seemed to be interested in underscoring their names and not in giving back. Canvas after canvas, the same, the same, the same. People came to ski and sun and pay a camera fee at the Pueblo. They came to kick up property values and see their fashionable friends at natural bakeries, came to buy silver and turquoise on the plaza, came to buy art: “Yes, this piece was done by a woman in Arizona. She’s interested in the Indian legends. She has a degree in anthropology.” But then you looked at the mountains, Lucien thought, and all of those people disappeared. It was where he grew up, this country fat with beauty.

The sun was beginning its decline as Lucien pulled into the lot of the small market just minutes from his mother’s house. He was glancing at the list as he entered, feeling for a cart, and was startled when he looked up to find his passage toward the produce section blocked by two men. Manny Archuleta and Rick Gillis stood smiling in front of the cart.

“Soldier boy,” Rick said.

“Not anymore.” Lucien reached out and shook their hands. “You guys in here for a couple cans of dog food or something?”

“Home for good?” Manny asked, his big face broken with the lopsided Elvis grin that he had cultivated in high school.

“Well, out of the army for good.”

“Shoot anybody?” Rick asked.

“Not yet.” Lucien pushed the cart past them and toward the produce. “You guys can walk with me, but I’ve got to get this stuff and get home.”

“Looking forward to some home cooking?” Rick plucked a grape from a bunch on a table, popped it into his mouth, and spat the seeds on the floor. A passing woman with a child stared at him.

“You’re a real beauty, you know that,” Lucien said.

“Sorry about your father,” Manny said.

“Thanks. That’s the way it goes, I guess.” Lucien grabbed a couple of onions.