Blue Highways (26 page)

11. The Desert Den Bar in Hachita, New Mexico: Iva Sander, Virginia Been, and customer

“What’s the need for a fence?” I asked.

“People are runnin’ over cattle,” he said. “Miners drive it like a racetrack. Folks used to slow down for stock on the road, and we didn’t need no fences, but copper people don’t respect nothin’ smaller than a steamshovel. Always in a hurry. Afraid somethin’s gonna get them out here.”

“Those city boys don’t believe what can happen if they hit a steer, but school’s out when a half-ton of hamburger comes over the hood. That fence is for people, not cattle.”

“Government’s got things bassackwards again,” the little man said.

Mrs. Been turned to me, “He’s a real cowboy. Horse, lasso, branding iron.”

“Not many of us left except you count ones that tells you they’s cowboys. A lot them ones now. I been ridin’ since the war.”

“Weren’t you up around Alamogordo when they tested the bomb?” the high-mileage man said. “Think I heard you were.”

“Over west to Elephant Butte, up off the Rio Grande. Just a greenhorn, sleepin’ out where we was movin’ cattle. July of ’forty-five. They was a high wind that night and rain, and I didn’t get much sleep. Curled up against a big rock out of the wind. I was still in my bedroll at daybreak when come a god-terrible flash. I jumped up figurin’ one of the boys took a flashbulb pitcher of me sleepin’ on the job. Course nobody had a Kodak. Couple minutes later the ground started rumblin’. We heard plenty of TNT goin’ off to Almagordy before, but we never heard nothin’ like that noise. Sound just kept roarin’. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I says, ‘what’d they go and do now?’ Next month we saw wheres they bombed Heerosaykee, Japan. We never knowed what an A-tomic bomb was, but we knowed that one flash wasn’t no TNT blockbuster.”

“The day the sun rose in the wrong direction,” the other man said. “They’ve been testing soldiers stationed at Alamogordo in ’forty-five for radiation poisoning. You know, Herefords up there turned white.”

“Feelin’ fine. Doctor told me once it was a good thing I was behind that rock. He says the wind saved me, but the wife says the bomb musta been why we never had no kids. Says it burned out my genetics.”

“You never know.”

“Truth is, bad genetics runs in the family. Dad never had no kids.”

“Your dad didn’t have children?” I said.

“Not a one. That’s why he adopted me.” He drained his beer. “You know what Spaniards called the valley where the bomb got blowed off?”

High mileage looked up. “Don’t think I ever heard.”

“Journey of Death,” the little cowboy said. “That’s the English for it.”

T
HERE’S
something about the desert that doesn’t like man, something that mocks his nesting instinct and makes his constructions look feeble and temporary. Yet it’s just that inhospitableness that endears the arid rockiness, the places pointy and poisonous, to men looking for its discipline.

Up along blue road 9 in the Little Hatchet Mountains—just desert hills here—I stopped for a walk in the scrub. Every so often I paused to listen. Like a vacuum. Pascal should have tried these silences. I yelled my name, and the desert took the shout as if covetous of any issue from life.

Walking back to the highway, I saw a coil of sand loosen and bend itself into a grainy
S
and warp across the slope. I stood dead still. A sidewinder so matched to the grit only its undulating shadow gave it away. And that’s something else about the desert: deception. It can make heat look like water, living plants seem dead, mountains miles away appear close, and turn scaly tubes of venom into ropes of warm sand. So open, so concealed.

For the fourth time that day, I crossed the Continental Divide, which, at this point, was merely a crumpling of hills. The highway held so true that the mountains ahead seemed to come to me. Along the road were small glaring and dusty towns: Playas, a gathering of trailers and a one-room massage parlor ($3.00 for thirty-five minutes the sign said); and Animas, with a schoolyard of Indian children, their blue-black heads gleaming like gun barrels in the sun. Then the road turned and went directly for an immense wall of mountain that looked impossible to drive through and improbable to drive around. It was the Chiricahuas, named for the Apache tribe that held this land even before the conquistadors arrived.

I crossed into Arizona and followed a numberless, broken road. A small wooden sign with an arrow pointing west:

PORTAL

PARADISE

In the desert flatness, the road began twisting for no apparent reason, tacking toward the Chiricahuas. It had to be a dead end—there could be no opening in that sheer stone obtrusion, that invasion of mountain, looked as if it had stridden out of the Sierra Madres, had seen the New Mexican desert, and stopped cold in its Precambrian tracks.

The pavement made yet another right-angle turn, and a deep rift in the vertical face of the Chiricahuas opened, hidden until the last moment. How could this place be? The desert always seems to hold something aside. The constriction of canyon was just wide enough for the road and a stream bank to bank with alligator juniper, pine, sycamore, and white oak. Trees covered the water and roadway and cut the afternoon heat. Where the canopy opened, I could see canyon walls of yellow and orange pinnacles and turrets, fluted and twisted, everything rising hundreds of feet. More deception: in the midst of a flat, hot scarcity, a cool and wet forest between rock formations that might have come from the mind of Antonio Gaudi. I couldn’t have been more surprised had the last turn brought me into Jersey City. And that was the delight—I’d never heard of the Chiricahuas. I expected nothing.

Portal consisted of a few rock buildings and not a human anywhere. Three miles up the canyon I forded Cave Creek and pulled in under some big juniper and sycamore. Ghost Dancing sat so my bunk was at the edge of the stream; I wanted to hear water that night and wash away the highway wearies. I took an apple and went to the creek. The place drowsed. I was sitting in the northeast corner of the great Sonoran Desert, while at my feet a pair of water bugs swam in slow tandem as if shadows of each other. Evergreens resinated in the air, and bleached clouds moved high over three rhyolite monoliths cut from the spewings of an ancient volcano to which the Chiricahuas are a tombstone. Before any men, wind had come and inscribed the rock, and water had incised it, but who now could read those writs?

I was in one of the strangest pieces of topography I’d ever seen, a place, until now, completely beyond my imaginings. What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it’s like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.

S
UNDOWN
, taking color from the land, briefly spread it low over the western sky; then it was gone from there too. As the air cooled, I built a small fire and cooked some eggs and sausage, made coffee, and laced it with bourbon. Across the stream, a javelina sniffed and watched. The woods were full of small noises fusing with the purl of Cave Creek, and the fire loosed a thin column of blue, resinous smoke to curl around me before rising to the black sky; every so often an orange coal went cracking out into the stream, which extinguished it with a hiss.

Still looking for a pattern, a core, in what had been happening, I played a tape recording of the last few days and made notes. After a while I gave up on words and tried diagrams in hopes an image might shake free an idea. I cogitated, ergoed, and sumed, and got nothing.

A sudden movement in the darkness. A voice: “Writing a book?” I jumped and spilled coffee. I couldn’t see anything beyond the pale of the fire. “Sorry to scare you. Figured an old chief like you would hear me coming.”

A man, about forty, stepped into the light. He had a soft, kindly face, but it was terribly drawn, and he was bent slightly in the shoulders as if yoked to something. He wore flame-stitch bullhide boots and a Boss-of-the-Plains Stetson with an absurd seven-inch crown. He saw my notebook. “You into radio schematics?”

“That radio is my life.”

“Hunting answers?”

“Ideas.”

“I could write a book about my life,” he said. “I’d call it
Ten Thousand Mistakes
. I’ve made them all: wife, kids, job, education. I can’t even remember the first six thousand.”

“Done a pretty good job myself.” I was glad for the company, although I had thought I wanted to be alone. “How about a little coffee and bourbon?” His face moved around as if trying to come out of a fixed position of agony, but something was lacking, something of moment. Rather, he had the look of a man pulling on wet swimming trunks.

“I shouldn’t be drinking. Got out of the hospital this week. Went in for those ‘routine tests’ people die from. Doctors thought I had a cancerous colon. Then they tried ulcerative colitis. Finally settled on a rectal polyp.”

One minute after meeting me, he’d admitted to ten thousand failures and given a tour of his lower tract. I wondered where we’d be in half an hour.

“Sit down if you like.”

“Are you just moving through?”

I gave a précis to distract any further proctological talk. When I finished, he said, “Your little spree sounds nice until you go back.”

“Don’t have to go back who I was.”

“Can you get out of it?”

“I’ll find out. Maybe experience is like a globe—you can’t go the wrong way if you travel far enough.”

“You’ll end up where you started.”

“I’m working on who. Where can take care of himself. A ‘little spree’ can give people a chance to accept changes in a man.” I was sounding like some bioenergized group leader. I poured another coffee and bourbon. “Sure you won’t have a sip of Old Mr. Easy Life?”

“Could you put some milk in it?” We introduced ourselves. He was from Tucson and worked in the loan department of a bank. “What you were talking about sounds like marital problems,” he said.

“I guess, but my point was that what you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do—especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” I was doing it again.

He looked behind himself into the dark. “You have kids?” I said I didn’t, and he nodded as if that explained something. “I have two girls, twenty and eighteen. When I was buried I forgot—”

“When you were
buried?
”

“Married. When I was married I forgot my family. Now I’m divorced, and I can’t forget them. Wish I could. They’ve hurt me. I wish I’d bronzed the girls instead of their baby shoes.”

“More corn mash in your milk?” We sipped in the darkness and talked of little things. He’d rented a trailer that afternoon and driven to the Chiricahuas to put the hospital out of mind. His hobby was the Old West, and he regretted not becoming a history professor—his true calling.

“I like to come here to read history. Reading Plutarch this trip. Been driving up for years. Always alone. My wife and daughters wouldn’t ever join me. Their lives go as far as they can stretch their hair dryer cords.”

To steer him away from marriage, I asked about his work. He disliked it and had looked into other things but found employers distrustful of anyone changing jobs outside his field.

“Once you’re thirty, you’re permitted to go up in your specialty or maybe sideways if you can make it look like up. But if you want out altogether, that’s the same as going down. And after forty they think the bottom layers of your life have turned to coal.”

The job problems had strained the marriage. He and his wife simply grew tired of sharing each other’s struggles and losses, and when one had a success, the other became envious. And each feared aging—especially the other’s. Things finally broke when his elder daughter took a job modeling for an advertising agency and her face and bare shoulders began appearing on condom machines around the city.

“You know: ‘Ribbed Sensation! New Pleasure Delight!’ The picture didn’t really show anything. Actually, it looked like she was yawning instead of the other, but the condom—I mean the context—made it look like the other. My girls thought it was funny and went around telling people to go down to the Texaco and take a look. My wife and I argued over how to handle it. After that, we just fell apart as a family.”

I didn’t say anything. Questions led him back to the same topic, and I had nothing to say about marriage. He was starting to ruin Cave Creek. I poured another shot. Maybe he’d forget. “When you’re driving,” he said, “do you ever feel like swinging over in front of a semi that’s really moving?”

“I know the urge.”

He pulled off his Boss of the Plains and brushed it fastidiously with a sleeve. “I’d like to do what you’re doing, but I don’t have the guts for it right now—literally.” He put the Stetson on, setting it at just the right pitch. “Lately, I’ve even wished I’d go broke so I could go for broke. I wish I’d get truly desperate.” His words were coming as if strangling him.

Here’s a man, I thought, who would change his life if he could do it by changing his hat. Maybe a .22 long rifle in a shirt pocket would help.

“The other day,” he said, “I remembered something from when I was a little kid that I didn’t understand then. I was six or seven. My dad was stuffing me into a snowsuit like parents do—this arm, that arm. When he had me in, he looked at me so long it scared me. Whatever he saw made him shudder.” The boss cleared his throat. “Now I know what it meant.”

“What did it mean?”

“He knew what I was going to know.”

“Love can make fathers shudder.”

We had another round. That might have been a mistake. The conversation started slipping as he began wallowing in crises. He said things like, “The whole bag just seems more and more of the same,” and, “Other people make life so damned banal.”