The Nirvana Blues

by John Nichols

  “If you would let me stay on a little longer after you buy the land, I could help you build the adobes,” Eloy said.

  “Uh, I’m not sure, that is, I mean, I don’t know yet, well, if we’re actually, you know, going to build with adobe.”

  Eloy shrugged. “Nobody builds with adobe anymore. They build with tin cans, they build with bottles, they build with plastic, they build with old tires. They build with peacock feathers. They even build with flyshit and Elmer’s Glue.”

  Joe said, “We haven’t exactly decided not to build with adobe. None of our plans have firmed up yet. I mean, after Heidi comes over to really inspect the land, the first thing we’ll do is decide where to put the house. Then we’ll make up our minds on what kinds of materials to use. Naturally, we’d have to price the various construction methods and play around with all that information.…”

  Sadly, yet without real bitterness this time, Eloy said, “I built so many houses in my time. In the old days, nobody had cash—we helped each other. It was a community thing. We traded labor and knowhow with our neighbors. You could put your cows in my pasture for free—in return, I picked apples from your orchard. My wife Teresita was an enjarradora—she mudded a thousand houses, built fireplaces, plastered the inside walls with tierra blanca. In return, they gave us a side of beef, two lambs, sacks of freshly ground flour. When I visited Filadelfio’s house, I could feel my labor in his walls. When I got drunk and fell over backwards in Tranquilino’s kitchen, I was proud to see my handiwork in his ceiling vigas and latias.”

  He shook his head ruefully. “A bunch of us rode into the hills to cut timbers for Rudolfo Gurule’s roof … and we raised it together … in a single day. Every year, Pablo Tafoya and Pancho Cruz and Jacobal Esquibel helped me to cut and stack my fields: Cipriano Martínez had a team of horses we all used for plowing. I even built the adobes for my daughter Maria’s house when she got married. Six months after we plastered the outside, she sold it for a five-figure killing and moved to Califas. Now, when I drive around the valley, the ghosts of our togetherness sing to me mournfully from the fields going fallow, the dying apple trees nobody has cared to prune in a decade, the simple adobes that have been elaborately renovated by stockbrokers and hot-tub salesmen.…”

  Ashamed (and angry and resentful), Joe wound up awkwardly fleeing with Michael. Facing Eloy, he had realized how much he hated being cast as yet another little gear in the machine steam-rollering the valley. Guilt foamed from his nose, mouth, and ears. At this rate, instead of one day aiding the Third World’s starving billions by jousting against exploitative economic systems, he’d wind up tiptoeing through the carnage in Posturepedic brothel-creepers, karate pants, and soybean love beads, ordering kwashiorkored Biafrans to manifest themselves by becoming At One with The One while also, incidentally, sending their last dollars to the est Hunger Enrollment Project, which would, in return, send a pamphlet telling them how to feel good about dying.

  Racing ahead on his bicycle as Michael called “Hey, wait up!,” Joe wished he had never set any of this in motion. They should have moved to Wilton, Connecticut, or Barton, Vermont, where they could have displaced their own kind.

  Instead, he was slated to go down in the record books as the son of a bitch who heartlessly ousted The Last Chicano.

  Like miniature Hounds of the Baskervilles, Mimsy and Tuckums leaped shrieking and snapping from their gorgon’s lair near the deserted Ranchitos Cantina.

  “Bite me,” Joe begged as they hassled his feet. Their hot breaths burned against the blue rubber Adidas stickers on his heels. “Go ahead, you creeps, sink those pearly choppers into my ankle, make this day complete!”

  But although their spit sprinkled against his pantcuffs, Joe’s theory of ignoring them proved correct. Raising a god-awful spine-chilling racket, their teeth clicking like castanets, the dogs followed them to the invisible frontier without taking even one teeny-weeny nip.

  * * *

  MICHAEL WENT HOME: Joe pedaled out to the airport. Tribby and Ralph and Rimpoche had already arrived. They awaited him beside Tribby’s pink-and-green Corvath 190. An exotic-looking barefoot woman with heavily mascaraed eyes, wearing a plum-purple gold-brocaded vest and filthy lemon-yellow harem pants, clung to Ralph’s arm—another of his instant, sexual weirdos? Tribby leaned against one of the plane’s wing struts in a lackadaisical, strung-out fashion suggesting a complete lack of bones. He wore a motorcycle helmet and a bluejean jacket, and had a black eye from last night’s Cinema Bar rumble with Ephraim Bonatelli.

  My friends, Joe thought sarcastically as he approached them. Upon whom I can count in my time of need: a shabby mouthpiece, a corpulent letch, a whacked-out teenybopper, and a filthy, chickenshit, bullying sheepdog!

  Ralph said, “Joe, I want you to meet my good friend Gloria Halbouty.”

  “Hello, Gloria. Hi, Tribby. Ralph … guess what?”

  “Your friend didn’t arrive, but the dope’s sitting in a plaid suitcase in the bus station under the all too watchful protection of Egon Braithwhite, who won’t release it without a claim check,” Tribby said.

  “How in hell did you know that?”

  “Rachel went jogging with Suki Terrell after she left Scott Harrison’s place at six this morning, and Suki explained that she’d heard through Natalie, who called Scott, that Rama Unfug let drop you were shacked up with Nancy Ryan last night.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how you know about the suitcase.”

  “Ralph told me.”

  “How did he know?”

  “Your window was open when you screamed at your friend Roth on the telephone an hour and a half ago.”

  “That’s the sign of a Type-A personality,” Gloria said. “Really, Joe, you should augment your diet with a lot of Vitamin E.”

  Tribby said, “So we can’t launch Operation Bald Eagle until you retrieve that suitcase from the bus station.”

  Joe said, “Wait a minute, I was screaming on the telephone before I went to the bus station.”

  “Must be a time warp somewhere.” Ralph gave a genial shrug. “This has been a weird spring.”

  “Let’s hit the clouds anyway,” Tribby suggested. “The plane’s full of gas. And we’ll have more privacy up there.”

  Joe closed his eyes, terrified of dying. They were all squunched in together, packed like plump sardines. The dog sat a third in Joe’s, a third in Gloria’s, and a third in Ralph’s lap. The light plane wobbled and bounced; struts and stays groaned, the engine whirred, clucked, spat, and chugged, lifting them off. Their wheels brushed sagebrush at the end of the runway. Rimpoche began whining. Ralph said, “My my.” Gloria cooed, “Oh, I love it. I get so high in airplanes. It’s a combined religious and sexual thing with me. I always feel closer to God.…”

  “Gloria’s a member of Women Aglow,” Ralph explained.

  “What exactly is that?” Joe’s teeth chattered, and he dared not open his eyes.

  “A Women’s International Christian Fellowship organization.”

  “Meaning—?”

  “She’s a Jesus freak.”

  Caught in a wind gust, the lightweight plane shuddered and veered: Joe squeaked, “Oh help!” Rimpoche also yelped.

  “No problem,” Tribby said laconically. “I’m in total control.”

  “Let’s talk fast, then. And return to earth as soon as is humanly possible.”

  “What’s to talk about?” Ralph wanted to know. “You haven’t got the suitcase. We can’t cut the coke or package it. The scam is stalemated.”

  “Okay, how do I obtain the suitcase, then?”

  “Walk in and snatch it,” Ralph said. “Don’t be such a Casper Milquetoast.”

  “If I do that, Egon might call the cops.”

  “So let him call.”

  “There’s cocaine in that suitcase, Ralph.”

  “Remove it before the gendarmes arrive.”

  “Suppose they’ve got a dog that sniffs it?”

  “There are no narc hound
s in Chamisaville.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Tribby said. “If Joe takes the suitcase and Egon calls the cops, Joe’s under suspicion. We don’t want any of us to fall under their surveillance.”

  Ralph said, “Call your friend, have him send the claim check.”

  “He said he lost it.”

  “Then what we must do, of course, is steal the contents of the suitcase, without removing it from the bus station.”

  Tribby lit a cigarette. “Let’s cut a hole in the roof. You guys can lower me with a rope. I’ll make the snatch dangling in midair. There won’t even be a footprint.”

  “Just a hole as big as the moon in the roof!”

  Tribby said, “We could file a writ of a certiori, or habeas corpus, present it to Egon, and walk out with the bag.”

  “What do either of those have to do with impounding property?” Joe asked.

  “Nothing. We merely flash some legal papers to Egon, impound the valise, and split. He’ll never know the difference.”

  “Sounds pretty lame to me.”

  “We could divert his attention,” Ralph said.

  “How?”

  “Lemme see. I could crash my car into the back of that old pickup he always parks out front whenever he’s on duty. For good measure, I’ll stumble outside and start blasting at his rig with a deer rifle, chastising it for getting in my way.” While speaking, Ralph had rolled a joint and now offered it around.

  Joe said, “That’s absurd.”

  “Life is absurd.”

  Tribby had another plan. “We all don ski masks, waltz into the joint, and rob it. We make it look like a straight heist, grab a whole conglomeration of goodies, including the suitcase in question, then dump all the stuff in an arroyo after we remove the dope.”

  “So if they catch us they’ve got us not only for the coke, but for armed robbery as well? Brilliant!”

  “It’s the TV mentality,” Ralph said. “The tubular method of problem-solving.”

  “We sound like a bunch of kids playing at cops and robbers.”

  Gloria added her two bits. “Maybe if I simply went in and asked him real nice for the suitcase. Usually you can solve just about any problem by being nice to people. The trouble with you boys is the roots of your solutions are belligerent.”

  “‘The roots of our solutions are belligerent.’ Nice phrase,” Ralph said. “I like it.”

  Shrilly, Joe said, “Egon’s an idiot. He won’t even talk English. He’s the belligerent one in this affair.”

  Tribby said, “Maybe we should forget the suitcase for a minute, and try instead to zap the opposition.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “We squeal to the State Corporation Commission and the attorney general about Skipper Nuzum’s plan to let Cobey Dallas embezzle himself into a corner through Roger Petrie’s sleight of hand. The package includes Cobey’s deal to pay Roger off in the water rights. Then we dig up Xeroxes of the documents and back records pertaining to Scott Harrison’s escrow account with Roger for those water rights, and mail them to the state bar association.”

  Ralph said, “Not to be a killjoy, but when has the state bar ever stomped on one of their own?”

  “Granted. But lemme complete the scenario, at least. Harrison panics, grabs his dough to protect his ass, queers the arrangement with Petrie, and, out of spite, tips off Cobey that Roger is a bum. When Cobey tumbles to Roger’s double-agenthood, he fires the little son of a bitch, gets drunk, and ineptly tries to kill him—thereby winding up in the state pen on assault-and-battery charges. Roger’s so pissed off Skipper Nuzum suddenly never heard of him that he turns state’s evidence on Skipper when the feds start auditing the convoluted shebang. Naturally, since it’s really his wife, Natalie, and the Simian Foundation that Skipper’s courting the land for, Nikita Smatterling is implicated, and before you can say ‘Yogananda,’ the Simians have lost their tax-exempt status. Whereupon, their whole pious Chamisaville act collapses.”

  “Very funny.” Joe grimaced. “During the seventeen years it takes this mess to unravel on the dockets, Eloy Irribarren croaks, Ray Verboten heists my suitcase and makes a quarter-million dollars from the stash inside, and the Tarantula of Chamisaville and his flunkies at the First State People’s Jug foreclose on the land and carve it up into the Joe Bonatelli Memorial Condos for Christian Athletes!”

  Ralph exclaimed, “Eureka, I’ve got it!”

  “So talk.”

  “We purchase a suitcase exactly like the one Peter Roth sent. Then one of us travels down to the capital, buys a ticket for Chamisaville, checks the bag, rides the bus here, gets off, switches the claim-check stubs, and walks out with the wrong bag, which is actually the right one.”

  “Brilliant, except for one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “How you gonna switch the claim-ticket stubs?”

  “Egon will be helping the driver unload or something.”

  Tribby said, “Even if it doesn’t work, at least there’ll be two suitcases that look alike in the baggage area, so that if anybody else gets wind of the loot to be had in that bag, they won’t know which one to steal.”

  Ralph said, “How about this—we start a fire.”

  “Where?”

  “In the bus station. Fortunately, all of us will suddenly arrive on the scene and help fight it. In the confusion we can grab the bag and head for the hills.”

  “That makes some sense, I guess.…”

  But Tribby favored the second valise trick. “I even think I know how we could switch the claim-check tickets. One of us dresses up in some kind of official-looking uniform, enters the depot, lays a rap on Egon that he’s such and such a baggage inspector for Trailways International, and putters around in the baggage area, putting stickers and little chalk marks on some of the suitcases, making the switch in the process, and we’re home free.”

  “He knows all of us. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “He doesn’t know me,” Gloria said.

  “Brilliant!” Ralph hugged her.

  “Brilliant?” Joe couldn’t believe he was trapped in an airplane with this gathering of terminal cases.

  “Is what I would be doing considered illegal?” Gloria asked.

  “Illegal, shmeagal—so what? It’s what has to be done,” Ralph said.

  “But I couldn’t do anything illegal. What would Christ think?”

  “Christ has been dead for almost two thousand years.”

  Gloria rolled her eyes. “That shows how much you know.”

  “Wait a minute.” Joe was perplexed. “You just took three tokes off a joint. That’s illegal.”

  “Jesus says marijuana is okay.”

  Hollering “Oh shit!,” Tribby lurched them sideways, trying to avoid a collision with a buzzard which had suddenly appeared dead center in front of them. Too late, however. The enormous bird smashed into the plane, was cut in half by a steel bar dividing the windshield, and, in a gory explosion of glass, feathers, and intestinal gore, slammed back through the compartment just above head-height, clipping all the passengers with assorted bits of offal, yet miraculously killing, or even wounding seriously, no one.

  Ralph cried, “God dammit!” Joe bellowed, “NO!” and Tribby yelped, “Oh dear!” as the plane wallowed in an airless trough, threatening to roll. Gloria said, “Oh the poor bird!” Rimpoche uncorked an eerie, petrified howl, pissed on everyone, and struggled to leap clear of the plane. They held him down like zoo keepers wrestling a mammoth python.

  Wind whipped at their hair; ears popped painfully. Papers flapped around, cudgeling them like madly beating wings. Buttons popped as their shirts were torn open. The blasting currents made it impossible to open their eyes—all except Tribby: he clanged down the visor on his motorcycle helmet, and said, “Hang tight, everybody, here we go.”

  “Are we going to die?” Ralph asked politely.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “God won’t let us die.” Gloria smiled reassur
ingly.

  “God my ass!”

  “I don’t believe this is happening,” Joe whimpered. “What did I step in last night? This is insane! I’ve had more bad luck in the last twenty-four hours than in the past thirty-eight years put together.”

  BIRD TO BLAME AS DRUG KINGPIN PERISHES IN PLANE CRASH! DOG IS ONLY SURVIVOR!

  Will Rogers, Buddy Holly, Rocky Marciano, and Joe Miniver.…

  Joe who?

  “Are we gonna crash?”

  Tribby said, “I’m not sure. Everybody hang tight. Where did that bird come from anyway?”

  Gloria started pouting. “It’s not the bird’s fault. It didn’t ask for airplanes to be in the sky.”

  “Shuttup, Gloria.” Ralph clapped one hand over her mouth.

  “What kind of bird was it?” she asked, her words muffled and indistinct.

  “Who cares?” What a dingbat! “How can you ask a question like that at a time like this?” Joe added. The hair battering his forehead and cheeks stung like thousands of tiny sadistic rubber whips. Rimpoche ceased to struggle and merely wailed in anguish like a dying wolf.

  Ralph thought “It looked eagleish.”

  “My guess is a buzzard,” Tribby opined.

  Joe babbled, “As it went by me it resembled a chocolate pudding with feathers!”

  “Is everybody okay?” Tribby asked. They were positively zooming down toward the mesa. “Is anybody decapitated back there? Is the dog hurt?”

  “Incredibly, I think we’re all right. Rimpoche is scared stiff, that’s all.”

  “Well, keep on hanging tight. We’ll be landing in half a minute.”

  “A crash landing?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “What does that mean?” Ralph asked.

  “It means there’s the airport … here’s the runway … looks like duck soup … grit your teeth, comrades, here we go … nice and easy … theeeeeerrrreee.…”

  Wheels touched, they bounced a little, veered slightly, settled, sped smoothly along the runway for a bit, slowed down, drifted to a stop.

  Ralph said, “Whew.”

  Gloria giggled nervously. “God saved us. Hallelujah!”

  “What did God send the bird for in the first place?” Joe glowered malevolently. He actually pinched himself, astounded to be alive. Blood, gore, and bits of feathers covered them all.