About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  Afterward I sat in the shade underneath the eucalyptus, a space emptied by the absence of the dog, looking at the spot in the road where we had been. I did not find him. No one I asked said. I did not know where the dog was. Ever.

  I THOUGHT IT WAS a shirt in the water wrapping itself around my legs in the bubbling surf, languid as wash in a bucket, until the punctures began. I lost my balance, fell over shrieking in the wavelets on a flat beach in inches of water. A stinging like nettles closed on my calves and ankles, my hands still moving toward it curiously as I fell, the bursts like a lash of hot pins up one thigh and across my back. I fell into the cool water shrieking, the clouds spinning away and away. I curled up like a shrimp in the wet sand until someone came, shrieking.

  Portuguese man-of-war they told my mother, who could not be consoled, who mashed my hair with her stroking. Weeping, cradling, possessing me until the ambulance came. I remember lying down inside, relief in the purity of the refrigerated sheets, crying in the humiliation of my vomit.

  PACKARD’S PARENTS were away. We pelted the trunks of peach trees in the orchard with fallen fruit, ground the peaches in each other’s face, smeared each other’s hair with the slime, then kicking and beating each other’s temples with our fists we fought in earnest, wrenching buttons off, one taunting, the other charging the taunter, a flailing outcry at the misshapen stupidity that now made our friendship.

  I lay still on my back, redolent of peaches, bruised, not interested now in the pursuit of anger, forgetting what it had been about—a touch in the wrong place, spitting the pulp at each other, so funny at first. I heard thwack, a while, then thwack again. Then thwack. Packard, throwing pitches hard in the driveway. A space opened up, a room to step into, the possibility of an apology. We would be the same again. The misunderstanding, so dumb.

  Packard held a kitten by its tail, winding it overhead like a stone in a sling before firing it at the garage door, where it struck the planks above another crawling slowly in a circle.

  INTO THE BAG I put one pair of socks, my collection of bird feathers wrapped in toilet paper, two candy bars, and five of the white checks from the box. In my wallet I had only the one check, written out after many tries in imitation of my mother’s hand with her fountain pen, my name and the money. I tied the bag to the handlebars of the bicycle with string and rode away down the street under the eucalyptus trees. Tomorrow, my mother had said, we would get another dog.

  15

  MURDER

  IN JUNE OF 1965 I left a friend’s home in Santa Fe at dawn, drove north through Abiquiu, where Georgia O’Keeffe was then living, passed slowly through a lovely valley high in the San Juans that holds the town of Chama, and turned west for Durango. I crossed the Utah border west of Dove Creek, and ate lunch in the Mormon stillness of Monticello.

  I was twenty, headed for Wyoming to work the summer on a friend’s ranch, wrangling horses. And I was innocently in love, as perhaps you can only be at that age. The young woman lived in Salt Lake City. Anticipating each encounter—with her, beginning that night in Salt Lake, and the months afterward working with horses in Jackson Hole—made the sense of covering miles quickly in good weather an exquisite pleasure.

  The highway north from Monticello runs ribbon-smooth through bleak, wild country. When I left the cafe I fell back into a rhythm with it. The performance of the car, the torque curves through all four gears and so the right moment to shift, was well-known to me. Flying down U.S. 191 and double-clutching out of the turns eased the irritation that had grown in me in Monticello, under the stares of cafe patrons. “No, sir, we don’t serve any coffee,” the waitress had said. And, “No, sir, we don’t have any ashtrays. We don’t smoke here.”

  I rifled over the road course, holding a steady seventy through the turns and rises. The only traffic was a pickup or a car, sometimes a tractor-trailer rig, every six or eight minutes. I had a Ruger Single-Six .22 magnum pistol under the seat. In a leather case in the trunk was a rifle. In those days in that country a young man traveled with guns as a matter of course, with no criminal intent.

  The two-lane highway passed clean beneath the hiss of new tires. Wind coming through the windows vibrated softly in the interior of the car. I remember the sight of the chrome tachometer, fitted to the steering column, gleaming in the sunshine, the spotless black nap of the floor carpets. I can recall the feel of the rolled seat covers under my thighs. In the seat opposite me sat my dog, a mongrel coyote I’d caught in the woods of southern Michigan as a pup. We’d driven the country for days at a time together, trips to New York City, to Helena, to Louisiana, the wind roaring at the windows, the tires whispering and thudding over rain-slicked concrete roads, the V-8 engine with its four-barrel carburetor, guttering through straight exhaust pipes.

  A small, nondescript hill rises just south of Moab. The road climbs its gentle southern slope for several hundred yards and then falls off so abruptly a driver headed north confronts for a moment a blind spot. I hit the hill at probably eighty, imagining details of the evening ahead with Jan in Salt Lake. I saw a police car making a K-turn in the road a hundred yards in front of me as I came over the rise. The steering wheel seemed to stiffen, to resist in that moment, but that is likely a false memory. I never touched the horn, there was no time, no point. I focused on missing him, as he continued to back up slowly across the midstripe. I hurtled past on the left, going off the road in a spray of sand and dirt and whacking sagebrush with the rear fender as I tried to pull the car back on the road. It being the police, I thought it best just to keep going. His barn-size stupidity was a flat trade-off, I figured, with my speeding. I got the skidding car back up on the road and drove on to Moab at a touch under the legal sixty, with the police cruiser right behind me.

  I slowed to the designated thirty-five at the city limit and a few blocks into town turned in to an A & W Root Beer stand. The police car went by. I tried to detect from the corner of my eye without turning my head whether he was turning his and staring at me through his sunglasses. He was. I continued to study the hand-scripted legend on the menu board in front of me. When the waitress came over I ordered a hamburger and what many people then called a black cow, a root beer float.

  The air beneath the awning where I was parked was still and cool. I could feel the sweat drying on the back of my thighs. I got out and took the dog without a leash to a patch of dry grass and weeds in the harsh light at the edge of the parking lot. I noticed two young women there while I waited, sitting in a black 1960 Thunderbird backed up against a fence.

  I ate my lunch slowly, scanning my Utah map and scrutinizing its detailed diagram of the streets of Salt Lake. I had the radio on. From time to time I glanced over at the two women in the Thunderbird. They had a child with them, a boy just a few years old. The women and I made eye contact once or twice. I smiled.

  It occurred to me the cop would have had a tough time trying to force a ticket on me for speeding.

  The sound of a door closing made me look up. One of the women in the Thunderbird, the one on the passenger side, had gotten out and was walking over. She looked seventeen or eighteen. She was very pregnant. My dog sat still in her seat as the woman approached the window. She leaned down and looked in, but didn’t say anything. I reached for the dog and at my touch she turned and stepped nimbly into the backseat. Without a word the woman opened the door and got in.

  “Hi,” I said, conscious of being very casual.

  “You live around here?” she asked.

  “No. I’m coming from Indiana, from school there.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Wyoming.”

  She stared ahead in silence. I remember seeing the sweat beaded up on her small hands, her stout fingers, the maternity blouse billowing in a pink-and-white pattern over her lap.

  “What do you think you might do for a woman?”

  “What’s that?”

  “For a woman that might be in trouble, might have lots of trouble.”

  In th
e cool air under the metal awning, out of the glaring desert light, her language seemed dreary, detached.

  “What kind of trouble is that?”

  “Family trouble.”

  “You need money?”

  “Would you kill my husband?”

  The ebb of my nonchalance in this conversation was now complete. I sensed a border I did not know.

  “I’ve got a gun over there in that car. He’s in a garage outside of town, working on his car. All you have to do is walk in there, walk right up to him, and shoot him. He won’t know you. There’s no one else there. No one could hear.”

  I stared at her, her pallid cheeks, her full breasts.

  “I’m not a liar. He’s there. And I want to kill him.”

  She turned halfway to me, for the first time, no longer speaking to the windshield. Her milky blue eyes were both desperate and distant.

  “He’s working on his car. He doesn’t care.” She inclined her head. “That woman over there? Her sister’s gonna have his kid too. I’d kill him myself, but I can’t. I’d screw up. He’d beat me up so bad, I’d lose the baby.”

  I was afraid to say anything, make any movement. Her voice edged on hysteria, on laughter.

  After a few moments of my silence her hand went to the door handle. “If you want to do it, no one would know. You could throw the gun away. I wouldn’t say anything. I don’t even know your name.”

  When the stillness hung on she said, “Well, forget it. Just forget it. Forget I even got in here.” She got out, closed the door firmly, and walked away, reaching across to her right temple with her left hand in a prolonged, deliberate movement to sweep her blonde hair off her face, a movement that carried her across the sunlit lot to the Thunderbird. She sat there sullen and tight-lipped. When the boy came to her from the backseat she shoved him away, as if he were a younger brother she had to baby-sit.

  I paid for my lunch and left. The peculiar tone of muscle in my young body, the quickness of my hand reflexes that made driving seem so natural, so complete a skill, was gone. I drove slowly north through town. The same officer sat austerely in the same car, parked just past the bridge over the Colorado River at the edge of town. I drove under the speed limit for more than an hour. I passed one or two buildings that could have been garages, but there was no sign of life.

  I crossed the Green River and turned north for Price on U.S. 6. After a bit I pulled over and let the dog out. She bounded with exuberance through the sage and, a time or two, stood poised, looking back at me. I leaned against the car, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t remember if I’d loaded the pistol the night before when I was putting things in my car in Santa Fe. I thought of being with Jan that night and, suddenly impatient, whistled for the dog with exasperation.

  16

  SPEED

  THE AIR WRITHED in scarfs of heat. I felt the heat of the engine on my bare feet through the fire wall, the sun beating on my head, the heat-helmet of my black hair. The tar-slurry patches in the road broadcast heat against the door, against the left side of my face. The streets, this far into an August afternoon, sagged in potholes at the intersection. The breath I drew was the heat of the sun, heat-glare of enamel, heat of motor block, fetid exhaust of the engine.

  The light changed. I eased the clutch and moving air began to strip the heat. My head cooled until only my eyes still burned behind sunglasses. Second gear and a vacuum began to develop around the car, sucking heat out of the pool of heat and noise we’d been sitting in. I shifted to third at just under sixty in a forty-mile-per-hour zone between lights, downshifting to second to meet the broken stagger of red lights, then to first, engine braking up to the yellow crosswalk, the back hammer of the dual exhaust system one more anger in the anger of heat. Idling on the red. The car fills again with heat.

  We surge and lay up like this from light to light, through metal and pavement and glass corridors that heat the heat. We cross burning gangs of steel rail, factory sidings, the road widening as it enters the old industrial core, a battalion of brick buildings disgorging steel bearings and brake drums into yards stacked with pig iron and volcanic slag, ranks of channel iron on rusty flatbeds.

  A half mile. Two more lights. The insouciance of cows. Pasture and white board fences break down the brick flanks. At eighty I ease into fourth and the manic heat, ripped silk now, tatters away as if caught on the fences, the concertina wire around town.

  Behind us, that’s what we’re thinking. Women in open sandals and damp shorts slumped on their arms at sorting tables in airless Laundromats. People pushing carts from air-conditioned malls raising an arm to ward off the incessant light which glints from mica chips in the griddle sidewalk. Their hands jump back from the door handles of their cars. They recoil from the sting of Naugahyde upholstery and gasp for air in these broilers.

  Summer in northern Indiana, the pale light of the dog days, the smolder of towns like South Bend. We were pulling away at over a hundred.

  I’d borrowed my younger brother’s car, a two-seat convertible. The open country roads between South Bend and Shipshewana, fifty miles to the east, held some promise of relief in the rush of wind. I drove south on Indiana 331 for Wakarusa, way out of the way, so we wouldn’t have to go through Elkhart, stagger through its impertinent traffic lights in lines of soft-boiled sedans and irritated drivers, not in this car.

  We turned east on Indiana 4 and hurtled toward Wakarusa at an illegal and dangerous speed. We could not hear ourselves talk over the wind blast unless we shouted. We smiled at each other. My brother’s taste in those days ran to Corvettes, and this was the most powerful one he had ever purchased. Chevrolet made no bigger stock engine and its Corvette assembly line squeezed no more dynamic force out of a motor block: 430 horsepower at 5200 rpm. “Four hundred and thirty-five pounds of torque at forty-four grand,” in the argot of our youth.

  My brother and I had grown up in southern California, where in the 1950s Detroit’s production automobiles were reinvented. What Detroit lifted from all the retooling and fabrication done by teenagers and young men in home garages in the fifties and sixties in California, and what it later borrowed from Europe in the way of steering and suspension systems, became Detroit’s “new” production cars of the late sixties and early seventies. Or we thought that. The Corvette, we maintained, came of age in California, inspired by our fathers and older brothers reboring, tinkering, and improvising with Detroit’s timid creations. It was America’s sole production sports car. What it lacked in finesse (suspension, steering, cornering ability) it made up for in raw power. The car grew out of a drag-strip, not a road-racing mentality. Models like the one I was driving carried even more of that California heritage in a Detroit chassis and body: its standard carburetion system and its shift linkage were designed by California outfits, Holly and Hurst.

  California loomed big for us in Indiana in August because we could forget Indiana’s long brutal winters during those flaccid, mercurial days. We could almost imagine California freeways, not Indiana toll roads, and a night run to Barstow holding a steady hundred over the Mojave, not these short six-mile runs between towns. Young men in Indiana pitied the basketball skill and acumen of players from California. So did we with California history shake our heads at what passed for a hot automobile with Indiana men.

  Highway 331 rolled past broad-field farmsteads bounded by oak and maple and sycamore copses. The Corvette, set up on wide-tread racing tires, handled smoothly here and the two of us shared a sense of abandon. We had no way then, of course, 1968, to appreciate how little gas cost: thirty-one cents a gallon. But the rip of the wind made us forget the heat and we knew that out here the police rarely turned up. The radar traps were on the Indiana Toll Road and on the main highways west for Gary and south to Indianapolis. I drove with impunity. Our hair vibrated in the slipstream that boiled over the windshield like river rapids.

  My father had some experience with race cars, roadsters like a K-2 Allard that he owned when he met my mother, and which
he claimed once to have driven from Montclair, New Jersey, to Los Angeles in three days. When I came of age he took me out on back roads in Ocean County, New Jersey, and showed me how to drive, how to pull out of a skid, how to shift, how to use a tachometer. I gained confidence from these lessons, though I didn’t know how deeply ingrained they were, if they were down there in my unconscious solid as a shovel, ready to serve in an emergency. I drove with enthusiasm but not recklessly, a distinction corroborated for me in the detachment and ease apparent in my companion sitting buckled in the other seat. In those days, on the verge of adulthood, courting such danger was a source of our vigor. We were pressed by few responsibilities. We drove aggressively and affected a languid attitude at the steering wheel. Except for the racket from the tuned exhaust system hammering the air as I downshifted into turns, we seemed to draw no one’s attention. Two boys in white T-shirts driving a black convertible very fast on a dry road on a blistering day.

  In Wakarusa the face of the law sat in a patrol car at the single light. He nodded his approval as I came to a proper stop and waited calmly on the red, then, glancing both ways for errant traffic, departed slowly at the green, radiating a sense of responsibility and shifting into second gear at about fifteen. I nodded to the cop. Who was fooled?

  From Wakarusa we dropped down to Indiana 119, for Goshen, and then headed east and north toward Shipshewana. Shipshe-wana stood at the center of a Mennonite community. My friend, a filmmaker, wanted to find out about a stock auction that took place there regularly. So we said, asking directions. What he really wanted was to scout locations and to discover how the Amish here might take to his desire to document their auction.