The Colonel, elegant, almost, in his controlled composure, shakes his head, as if to shake the question.
“He was in the house when I got home from school. What a great thing, for a boy. To have his father home, I have to tell you. Pop worked for the railroad on the coast-to-coast service, kept him away from home, on the job, sometimes, two, three, four weeks at a time. But those were great, great days, the ones when he was home. Nothing like it. He didn’t have to do a thing—he could be sleeping in the hammock—the house was lit when he was there. Mother was all lighted up. But that day—something was wrong about it, not the same. He gave me my present and we ate my birthday cake but there was a thing unspoken, some thing I couldn’t understand. I remember I stayed up late, working on this model. And I knew he was sitting in the kitchen, all alone. That night, and then the next. I could hear him. Two days later he was gone.”
We stare at each other.
“I was a kid,” he says, “I thought he had gone back to work. On the rails.” He makes a pyramid with his hands and leans back in his chair. “When I figured out he wasn’t coming back I gave my mother a hard time, went on for years. God bless her.”
“I did the same. These dads who disappear get away with—”
“She died in 1982.”
“I’m sorry.”
“—saw me graduate. I brought her out to the Academy. That’s when we finally had the Talk.”
He looks at me again with something urgent in his eyes that makes me hold my breath.
“Do you know—can you imagine—what it must have been like for a black man of my father’s generation to be driving home one morning on a lonely road down South and find somebody hanging from a tree?”
I feel the room grow small around me.
“That is a black man’s nightmare. Lynching,” he enunciates.
I hold his gaze.
“She told me Pop came home that day and told her what he’d seen. How he’d seen a car parked on the road and stopped to see if someone needed help. Got out of his car. And saw…”
Please don’t say this, I am thinking.
“…a man. Hanging there. And…”
Shut up. Stop speaking now.
“…his legs were kicking.”
I close my eyes.
“…his legs were kicking and my father told my mother that he only stood there. He couldn’t move. He stood there. Couldn’t save him…and he didn’t know how he could live with that.”
We sit together for a while in silence.
“Our fathers…” I begin to say, but stop. “He left you for thirty years.”
“—and your father didn’t?”
“How did you…what reason did you give for him?”
“What reason did you give?”
We wait the question out in silence.
“Didn’t you ever ask yourself…why?” I finally ask. “I mean: he left. Your father left. You and your mother. Weren’t you tempted to wonder if they were ever happy?—your parents?”
“—what does it matter?”
“I think it matters.”
“I think if you think it matters: then, sure. What choice do you have, but to convince yourself that they were happy?”
“Your father still wears his wedding band.”
The Colonel holds his eyes closed a few seconds, then he opens them.
“What was he doing there?”
“—my father?”
“—from Pennsylvania. What was he doing there? In Virginia. In the Park.”
He liked to drive, I try to explain. It helped him think. “He went there once. With my mother. They went there on their honeymoon.”
When they were happy, I almost add.
He stares at the model helicopter.
“Will you go to see him?”
“Pop—?”
Imperceptibly, he nods.
“I drew a map, in case.”
I hand it to him.
“—you drew me a map.”
“To the hospital. To show which entrance you should take.”
“—but you drew me a map,” he repeats and, for whatever reason, my drawing makes him smile, and that smile, I see, is dazzling.
I get there before him to find that Lester isn’t waiting in the hall, so I slip inside the room where Curtis Edwards lies, not so much to see him or to commune with him in any way, but to see if Lester’s with him.
But once inside the room I’m captured by the silent reverence, a sanctity around his body. How small he is. I hadn’t noticed his frailty when I first looked at him a day ago—perhaps because I hadn’t seen the pictures of his former self, robust and smiling for the camera, the shadow of his son’s smile, I recollect. But now the man who made his son light up seems but a shadow, too, a frost of white beard, dusting of fresh snow, across his chin, his blood blue beneath his skin, his lips and fingers fringed in indigo. He is barely breathing and it takes a conscious effort on my part to convince myself that beneath his eyelids there is life. I stand and gaze at him awhile before I realize someone’s watching me from across the room and turn to see Lester in a chair beside the windows on the far side of the second, vacant, bed, so still he’s almost invisible. I go to stand beside him.
“Have you been here all night?”
He nods.
I touch his shoulder.
“You’ve done a good thing.”
“So have you,” he says and inclines his head to point in the direction of the door.
The Colonel has come in.
I had not intended to be present at the moment when the Colonel sees his father but now Lester and I are trapped by the choreography of circumstance and we both freeze, stop breathing, as the Colonel’s gaze barely acknowledges us before focusing on the body of his father.
The Colonel has put on a jacket since our meeting in his office, he’s in full dress uniform, and I can’t help noticing his shoes, those military-issue shoes that always look too shiny for normal use. At over six feet tall he seems to take up all the space beside the bed and he stands at what I have to call ATTENTION for what seems like several minutes until, slowly, I see his edges blur, his sharpness soften like an image in a camera lens deliquescing out of focus.
“Pop—?” he carefully whispers.
Leaning in to look at him, he places both his hands on his father’s legs beneath the blanket.
“Pop, what did you do?”
He waits, as if for an answer.
“What did you do with your life?”
He drops his head as if in search of something in himself and then he goes and gently takes his father’s hand in his and I have to close my eyes. Because this is the moment, in the nation where I live, where we’ve become conditioned to expect the unrealistic ending, the Happy one, where, if this were a movie that my nation routinely makes, the father would return to life, respond, squeeze his son’s hand in his, wake up and reconcile their shattered past, but when I open my eyes again the Colonel is still there, his hand around his father’s unresponsive one, his act of touch a one-way communication, like a prayer, or like looking at a photograph, as empty or as full as visiting a grave. There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it’s the same—fleeting and unknowable—for every one of us.
I lived.
the shadow catcher
Before the Train, the grasslands teemed with herds of buffalo so thick and mythic in their numbers it was said that when they ran they ran as thunder raining on the earth. The men who hunted them could hear them coming miles away, could feel the ground around them shake and rumble with their roar as they barreled past, and maybe that’s the sound I think I hear inside a train, the sound of animals, a sound the living earth once made, a plaint, the sound of history’s demand to be remembered.
Or maybe I just love the sound the whistle makes, that twisted chord, rooted in C major or B minor but ranging, concordantly, some nights, to the uncharted note of the undiluted wanderlust that springs from sadness.<
br />
This is, singularly, a North American note, a U.S. of A. site-specific sound.
European trains sound like audible Twinkies, air-infused and artificial.
But an American, running like an unchained herd of half-a-ton horned animals across a plain, well, my friend, that’s show biz, rock ’n’ roll and jazz and ska and rap and Beat and MGM all tied into one:
The sound my nation makes.
And I can tell that Lester is trying to keep me from the road because he keeps bringing up new subjects for discussion.
“My daughter’s coming home tomorrow.”
“Lucky you,” I say. “I’d like to meet her.”
I’m already in the driver seat and he’s standing by the passenger side, in the hospital parking lot. He hands me a business card from his daughter’s craft cooperative through the open sunroof.
“I’ll take her to Clarita’s. Catalogue what’s there. She can give Clarita good advice.” He looks off to the horizon, then continues: “I was supposed to go out to the Paiute reservation this afternoon. See some craft people there. But I’ll go see Clarita, too. She’s upset there won’t be any funeral.”
“Colonel’s decision, Lester.”
“I know…”
He hands me another card on which he’s written his mailing address and phone number.
“You should come and visit. Maybe in the spring. At shearing.”
I blush because I realize I’ve never asked him what he does, how he makes a living, I had committed the classic Anglo thing, consigning Lester to the job of being Indian, as if his race were his profession.
“I farm sheep.”
“—of course you do.” What better shepherd do I know? “I’m great with sheep,” I lie.
He sees right through me, I can tell, because next he says, “You’ll have to change the book.”
I’m not sure what he means until he adds, “The truth about your Mr. Curtis.”
“‘Print the legend.’” I recite.
“Truth is better.”
“—whose?”
He nods in recognition and then tells me, “Some things are not open to interpretation.”
“A person’s life, Lester.”
“What were these fellows looking for, do you think?”
By “fellows” I guess he means Curtis and Edwards.
But he may also mean my father.
“I don’t know. Are you going to try to tell me they were searching for the Truth?”
He shakes his head.
“I think it’s impossible to know another person’s motives. Practically impossible to really know our own,” I tell him.
“Maybe,” he concedes. “When you come to my place I’ll take you to see the Lands. And then you’ll make a Vision Quest.”
“That is something that I promise we will do,” I pledge.
He sets a bundle wrapped in newsprint on the seat beside me.
“Medicine smoke. Branches from the land I live on. Find some place on your journey home and stop. And set these leaves on fire. Some place where you can be reminded of your friend. And of our friendship.”
The packet has already perfumed my car with piñon, sage and mesquite, and as I head out for the road I’m enveloped in an incense that evokes a certain kind of West, high desert, the West made famous by the movies—Red Rock, Monument Valley—Navajo Land.
It’s a land best wedded to the buffalo, not cattle, where sheep and goats can scratch a bare subsistence from the scrappy brush but where man’s soul is better fed than his stomach. In parts, the wind can rip a person into shreds and finding shelter from one element can only leave you open to another—lightning, hail, snake, bear, sun, vulture, cougar. The Navajo named their clans for what could kill them.
And the only terrorists they knew wore hats, rode horses.
Safety was in numbers, the Navajo larger than the populations of the tribes around them, but safety came with ritual, as well, in knowing one was part of a cohering pattern, part of something greater than oneself. A renegade was truly that, a broken thread, an anomaly outside the unifying fabric. Each man would leave the tribe on his vision quest at the beginning of adulthood, only to return, again, as part of the tribe, once he had experienced the vision, specific to himself, of his spiritual identity. Armed with nothing but his wits and pride and a crude weapon, a boy began the journey that could last a week, a month or half a year. When he returned, he was a man. Or so Legend has it, because whether you were living before 1492 or after the atomic bomb, if you’re going to understand your part in the fabric of Earth’s life, then you have to take your quest for understanding to the source and live on earth as if your life depended on it—on its air, its water, its futurity.
CURTIS EDWARDS DIED THIS MORNING IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS SON.
That’s why Lester gave these branches to me—to perform a ritual, the ritual of cleansing fire, the spirit medicine of smoke.
And there are plenty of places on this route out of Nevada—there’s nothing here but place—where I could pull off down a dusty road to find a quiet spot, but as I head West for California on the highway running next to the Union Pacific tracks, it occurs to me that, for a good portion of his life, before that fateful morning in the Shenandoah National Park, Curtis Edwards was a porter, working for The Road, riding rails. He was a train man.
Head for Barstow, I tell myself.
If he had been working the transcontinental passenger line, chances are he would have passed through Barstow one way or another, it would have been a place he would have known.
I don’t stop at Baker, don’t stop at The Mad Greek, press on another hundred miles and exit I-15 at Route 66. The sun has just passed its apogee, tilting toward the West and there are hardly any shadows on the desolate Main Street to soften its appearance of stark and blasted bankruptcy.
A couple bars and resale stores are open but most buildings are vacant, either out of business or going and the feeling on this stretch of 66 down to the railroad yard is one of failure and foreclosure.
A trainyard without moving trains is certainly a sad and haunting place and I realize as I park the car that what thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places. A train at rest is just another big machine but a train moving through a landscape is a process, and it carries with it all the mystery of journey, like a promise.
There are a couple stranded engines on the sidings, but instead of moving trains what the Barstow station has this afternoon are buses, two of them with Mojave Sun Country Tours written on their sides, disgorging tourists of the most obsessive kind, the ones who’ll go to any length to photograph a Harvey House or a red caboose.
There are too many people here for me to carry out a ritual so I leave the packet on the seat and make my way around the tourists on the platform, down, onto the tracks.
When I’m out in the Dakotas or in places like Marathon, Texas, where the main streets of the towns have only one side and the train tracks run like a parallel street past the buildings, my favorite two games to play are Fry the Penny and Catch the Vanishing. I don’t know whether it’s the heat, the weight or the speed of the passing train that fries the penny I put down on the track but that damn coin comes out looking like it’s been to hell and back. Catch the Vanishing is an exercise of hide and seek, and one I can do anywhere with a flat unbroken view of the horizon, but it’s at its best on a train track because of the illusion that the vanishing point—toward which one can walk forever but never catch—is the point of union where two lines come together, join, as if the past might unite, somewhere, with the future. I look West down the long rail now to a point where it seems to disappear and think of Curtis Edwards, and of Edward Curtis, too. Edward Curtis thought the Indians were vanishing—he called them The Vanishing Race. He based most of his conclusions on that error of fact and photographed them with a false solemnity appropriate to his belief that they were expiri
ng in front of him. That’s part of why he made them look so beautiful—it was his funerary legacy to them. We think today that his accomplishment was to have captured all their faces in the midst of life, but, really, he believed that he was making images of people on the brink of their extinction, capturing them in death, at a moment when they were passing from one way of being to non-.
As the Colonel watched his father pass this morning.
For reasons that only a bureaucratic mind could understand, both he and I, as the deputed closest living relative on record, had to sign the hospital paperwork after Curtis Edwards died.
We waited in the corridor together.
“Can I ask you something—?” I began. “Do you ever dream you’re flying?”
“—doesn’t everybody?”
“—no, I mean: you really fly. So I wonder if your dreams are different from, say, someone else’s. Your father, for instance. Do you think your father ever dreamed that he was flying?”
He stared at me.
“That’s not what you want to know.”
“—it is. Because sometimes I dream I’m flying in across the whole United States…”
“That’s not what you want to know,” he said again. “You don’t want to know if I dream of flying.”
“—no, I really do, I—”
“Your father hung himself. You want to know what he was dreaming, when he jumped.”
When the papers came for us to sign I watched the Colonel tick the box for CREMATION on the form that designated where the hospital should send the body.
“I think that’s best, under the circumstances, don’t you?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer.
“I don’t see him lying in the ground beside my mother for eternity.”
“What are you going to—What will you do with the ashes?”
“I figured I would take him up.”
He pointed.
“—in a small plane. Or a chopper. Like the one he gave me.”
“Where will you—?”
“I was thinking over railroad tracks. Or maybe over here, over Las Vegas. We lived here, fifteen years, within miles of each another, and never knew it. I guess I will decide when I get up there. Want to come?”
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