Roads From the Ashes

by Megan Edwards

  “What about ostriches?” asked Mark, in an effort to shift the topic away from movie stars and corpses. “We were looking for an ostrich ranch in California, but we never found it. Are there any around here?”

  A big grin spread over Tim’s face. “Do we got ostriches,” he said. “I have a friend who has a whole herd. Lemme call him up tomorrow and see when I can bring you over.”

  Tim sat down again. “Want a beer?” he said. “Or a toke?”

  We thanked him anyway and said we’d drop by in the morning.

  “Just before we blow this place,” I whispered to Mark as we walked back to the Phoenix.

  “Look at that,” said Mark, ignoring me. He was pointing at a large vehicle that looked like a horse trailer. “But it has windows,” said Mark. “I think it’s a bunkhouse. Look at the other trucks parked near it. There’s a story behind that setup, too.”

  Oh, God, I thought. Not another one. But Mark stayed with me. We ate some cold spaghetti and went to bed.

  In the morning, which arrived with typical desert abruptness, we had just sat down to coffee, when there was a knock on the door. It was Tim, accompanied by a man in denim overalls.

  “Hey, this is Ken,” he said. “He’s the ostrich farmer, and he says it’s okay if we go out there later. I told him two o’clock, if that’s okay with you.”

  “It’s great,” said Mark. “It’s fabulous,” I echoed. And they were gone.

  “And now you have time to check out the rolling bunkhouse,” I said.

  “You read my mind,” Mark replied. He was smiling, and I sighed.

  “We might as well sign up for another night here,” I said. “By the time we get through with the ostriches, we won’t want to drive anywhere else.” I was still nonplused at the thought of staying two nights in a five-minute burg. But I had to admit, Dullsville was growing more interesting by the minute, and the day was young.

  You know the rest. Gila Bend just sat there, but I couldn’t. I had to visit some ostriches, go for a ride in a combine as it cut wheat on a ranch once owned by John Wayne, and admire Tim’s project, a pickup truck made entirely out of parts scavenged from junk heaps.

  “My rule is that I can’t pay for anything,” he said as he ran his hand over the Ford fender and the Chevy hood. “My partners and I are willing to wait.” His partners, Brooks and Beanie, were both well into their eighties.

  Three days after we’d pulled into Gila Bend, we made preparations to depart. Tim came over to say good-bye.

  “This is for you,” he said, holding out a fat marijuana cigarette. “I made it this morning, and it’s all bud. No stems. No seeds.”

  Thanks anyway,” said Mark, “But . . .”

  “Thank you, Tim,” I said, interrupting. “It’s incredibly nice of you. Are you sure you want to part with it?”

  “I made it for you,” he said simply.

  I took the gift and thanked him again. We bade him farewell and said we’d stop by the next time we found ourselves in Gila Bend.

  “He would have been crushed if we hadn’t taken it,” I said as I put the joint in an envelope. Mark pushed it to the back of the small safe in which we kept passports and money. We forgot about it until a border guard searched the Phoenix at the Canadian border half a year later.

  He didn’t find it, but as we stood there waiting, I knew Gila Bend was laughing. “Call me boring, will you?” she called, and I answered, “Never again.”

  The Queen of the Starlight Theater

  And Texas isn’t boring, either, especially along its endless border with Mexico. Border zones are fascinating once you look beyond fond cartographic truth. On a map, Mexico’s orange, the U.S. is green, and a thin black line separates the two with knife- edge simplicity. On a map, no blurred edges are allowed.

  Maps are “Leave It To Beaver” optimists, jolly pictures of a world unsullied by real people. They don’t reflect the three- dimensional consequences of thin black lines. The penciled edges of man-made tectonic plates bump and chafe each other with tremors equal to any natural cataclysm. Even in their quieter moments, border zones are resting volcanoes. They bubble and boil with an energy irresistible to revolutionaries, iconoclasts, and people who don’t like rules.

  If Mexico’s orange and the U.S. is green, then Big Bend should be the brown you’d get from blending the two. Mix a little gunpowder into the pigment, and you’d get even closer to the three-dimensional truth. Big Bend’s a wild place, and black lines have yet to tame it.

  It’s a Janus-faced space with escape hatches in both directions and a strange calm in the middle where last names are optional and the only useful currency is cold, hard cash. Big Bend is the quintessence of interstitial frontier, right up there with the Conch Republic of Key West and the secret forests between Maine and New Brunswick, it’s one of the delightful blurry places cartographers don’t have symbols to represent, an unbridled place that laughs in the face of political boundaries.

  Part of the reason Big Bend stays unfettered is that it’s not on the way to anywhere else. Interstate 10 and the Rio Grande part company just east of El Paso, where the river takes a southerly route to the Gulf, and the highway makes a long straight beeline for San Antonio. To get back to the river on a paved surface, you have to choose one of the two-lane tentacles that run south from the Interstate. You have to keep driving for 150 miles. You’d have to be a persevering fool to get to Terlingua, Lajitas, or Study Butte by accident.

  Another factor that keeps this triangular appendix uniquely free from outside interference is that the entire place is unmitigated Chihuahuan desert, an arid expanse that sleeps during the day and buzzes with activity when the sun goes down.

  The action starts at dusk, as we discovered the afternoon we arrived. We climbed a low ridge to watch the sun set over the Chisos Mountains, and as the evening darkened, we heard sounds in the underbrush. We waited, and soon a platoon of slick-bristled peccaries marched out of a tamarisk grove. They trampled and rooted and chewed their way across the hillside on their cloven, high-heeled hooves. Even cactus wasn’t safe from their leathery snouts and tough little maws. Snuffling and grunting, they plundered a General Sherman swath through a dense stand of prickly pears and laid waste to a creosote grove.

  Wild peccaries are no bigger than barnyard shoats, but what they lack in size, they make up for in smell. A musky stench rushes ahead of them to announce their advent, travels with the pack, and leaves more than a memory when they’ve passed. Humans, eyes watering, reel at the pungency, but for dogs, it’s a siren call. Marvin threw himself against his collar, strangling and whining with the desperate infatuation I’d heretofore seen him display only in the presence of anchovy pizza. The peccaries, like prom queens walking past a Cub Scout, ignored him.

  I was enchanted but not surprised at the alarm clock effect that sundown had on the Rio Grande. Desert fauna are nocturnal by nature, as anyone who’s ever spent time in arid climes is well aware. It was the desert humanity that surprised me.

  Terlingua was a ghost town by day, a deserted settlement built in the late nineteenth century to support a quicksilver mining operation. A quiet gift store and a booking office for river guides were the only signs of life at high noon.

  At night, all that changed. The Starlight Theater opened its doors, and the gravelly hillside filled with trucks and Jeeps. The bar inside was jammed with tanned men in cowboy boots, river guides in canvas shorts, and an entourage I guessed were tourists who’d spent the day in the Mexican border town of Ojinaga. They were wearing bright new serapes and stiff unweathered leather hats. Dinner was being served by candlelight on wooden tables at one end of the room, and at the other, musicians were setting up equipment on a stage. Mark and I elbowed our way up to the bar, where we were flanked by a bronzed Adonis in a nylon mesh shirt and one of the serape-clad tourists.

  The god next to Mark had just returned from a kaya
k run, and my neighbor hailed from Los Angeles. The serape-clad retinue of which he was a member had just finished shooting a movie called “Streets of Laredo,” and tomorrow, they’d be heading home.

  In the meantime, they were in a mood to cause a tequila drought in Big Bend. Several were swigging straight from bottles, and Vince, the one I was standing next to, had already drunk himself into a state of blubbery pathos.

  As I stood there listening to Vince’s woes, tales of death by white water filtered in from the other side. Three Mexican caballeros were joking boisterously in Spanish nearby, and a city slicker in dude ranch duds kept nudging his way up to the bar for shots of peppermint schnapps. It was noisy and smoky and packed, and I half expected Matt Dillon to sidle up beside me.

  Forgive me, but I did. I found myself on a fringe where fiction and reality had moved in together, a remnant of a wild west so thoroughly represented in letters and film that it was impossible to tell where romantic invention gave way to actuality.

  The action filmed by the Hollywood movie makers might be staged fantasy, but the fight Vince was ripening for was all too real. The denizens of the Starlight Theater weren’t actors, at least not now that the movie was in the can.

  Vince’s whiny tears had turned to drunken belligerence, and the cowboy next to him was not amused. I was beginning to think it might be time to retire to the Phoenix when a woman appeared at Vince’s side. She was graceful and tall and wearing a low-cut knit top that advertised her breasts with understated flamboyance. She had steel gray curls and a proprietary air. My god, I thought. Maybe there’s no Marshall Dillon in these parts, but if that’s not Miss Kitty, I’m a wild peccary.

  Miss Kitty, whose name we found out later was Angie Dean, was indeed the owner of the Starlight Theater. As we discovered in subsequent visits to her establishment, she presided at the far side of the bar, keeping one eye on the till and the other on time bombs like Vince. The instant he moved from lugubrious to bellicose, she was at his side.

  She took the drink from his hand and whispered something in his ear. Immediately, his truculence dissolved into tears. “Come on, let’s dance,” said Angie, taking his hand. Vince followed obediently, his stiff serape encasing him with all the grace of a cardboard box.

  I watched them dance, Aphrodite and baby Eros. She was mother and madam, and her attentions meant that Vince’s nose, Angie’s bottles, and our evening remained unbroken by violence. I watched her resume her throne on the far side of the bar after depositing a semi-conscious Vince on a bench by the door. She reigned all evening with steely elegance, and it was easy to tell which patrons were regulars. Not a one ordered a drink without first paying homage to the queen of the Starlight Theater.

  Mañanaland

  We spent the next few days exploring the wild expanses and canyons of Big Bend. At night we mingled with the human wildlife, discovering such hideaways as the Kiva, an underground lair whose patrons seemed to have no names, need no passports, pay no taxes, and take no prisoners.

  One night we stopped at a well-lit house with a sign out front that said “Desert Opry.” Inside, we found an art gallery, a restaurant, and a family: Alice, Jack and Alice’s son Arjuna. Alice was a songwriter and painter. Jack, who cooked us dinner, was a guitarist, and Arjuna spent most of his time going to and from high school in Alpine. “It’s a hundred miles each way,” he said. “The longest school bus run in America. We get on the bus at five a.m., and they won’t let us bring blankets. They’re afraid something between the boys and girls might go on under them. But anyway, I’m going to finish high school by correspondence. I’ve only got one more year.”

  Alice told us how Big Bend’s population was largely regulated by water and who owned the rights. Land was plentiful, but a good well was hard to find. “That’s what the locals spend most of their time arguing about,” she said. “We’re pretty much self-governed. You don’t see a state trooper down this way more often than once a week, sometimes less.”

  “They don’t really think of this as Texas,” added Jack. “It’s not Mexico, though. Mexico’s definitely over there.” He gestured in a southerly direction. “This right here, well, we call it Mañanaland. We even wrote a song about it. Are you ready to hear it?”

  We’d finished eating, and it was time for the live music to begin. It didn’t matter that we were the only customers that evening, because Alice, Jack and Arjuna sang to us as though we were a full house. Suddenly I understood what had been behind crazy King Ludwig’s self-indulgence when he built his private theater at Linderhof in Bavaria. It’s an ersatz cave, complete with a huge lake and a stage grand enough for no-holds-barred Wagner. “And bitte look at zis,” the guide says. “Ze viewing balcony has chairs only for six.” Insane he may have been, but Ludwig wasn’t crazy in thinking that private concerts are wonderful things. Alice sang songs she’d written, and Jack and Arjuna played guitar and drums.

  As always, we were running out of money, and we’d even debated about eating in a restaurant when we had a perfectly good can of chili sitting in our cupboard. “I think we’ve got enough cash,” Mark had said, “If we have only one thing to drink.”

  We did have enough to cover the numbers on the check that Jack brought us before we left, but it wasn’t enough to pay for a priceless evening. It certainly wasn’t enough to nudge Alice’s Nashville hopes toward reality or relieve Arjuna of his 200-mile commute. We weren’t the only ones with dreams to fund.

  “Will you take a check?” Mark asked. “We’re running low on cash, and you don’t seem to have any banks in these parts. Nobody seems to like credit cards around here, either.”

  “A check’ll be fine,” said Jack. “But you’re right. Big Bend operates on a cash basis. All cash, no questions asked. That’s how it is in Mañanaland.”

  Mark pulled out a check, and I watched him fill in an amount that left enough in our account to buy one tank of gas. It was a heck of a tip.

  “The best things in life are free,” he said as we drove away, “Except for the ones that cost everything you’ve got.”

  “Dreams are cheap,” I replied. “It’s making them come true that eats up the bucks. And it’s a good thing we have that can of chili in the cupboard.”

  And so we found ourselves once again down to our penultimate nickel, our terminal dime. The next morning we searched our pockets for forgotten change. I found a twenty-dollar bill in my winter jacket, and we were flush again. We could spend our last evening in Mañanaland at the Starlight Theater.

  But Big Bend wouldn’t let us off the hook quite so easily. For starters, D-day arrived, and the D stood for deadline. I had a story to file, and cellular signals were rarer than high schools in Mañanaland. This was before website mania had swept the land, and the natives were as suspicious of electronic gadgets as they were of credit cards and people who used them. Even pay phones were scarce, but there was one at the ranger station in the national park. I decided that the situation called for intervention by Iguana.

  “Fat chance it’ll work,” I said to Mark as we stood in front of the telephone. “Big Bend Telephone Company” read the placard affixed to the front. It was a model so basic, I half expected an operator to greet me when I picked up the receiver.

  “Well, there’s a dial tone,” I said. “It’s a weird one, but I’m willing to give it a try.”

  It was broad daylight, which meant Mark had to hold an umbrella over my head as I balanced the notebook computer on my knees and squinted at the screen. With the Iguana lashed onto the receiver with its Velcro straps, I began the elaborate ritual of dialing the access number and entering my credit card account numbers with timing I hoped would appease the modem gods.

  Danged if it didn’t work the first time. My computer listened politely to the static issuing from the telephone and responded by transferring the file I had asked it to send. It even collected my new e-mail and logged off without expletive or violenc
e on my part. I smiled at Mark around the umbrella. “This may be Mañanaland, but I met my deadline with hours to spare.” One more time, the electronic express had gotten the mail through. Even among the peccaries, I hadn’t had to resort to a fax machine.

  The day was young, and my success with the Iguana made me want to seize it with alacrity. When we came to a crossroads and saw one sign that said “Hot Springs,” and another that said “Unsafe for Large Vehicles,” I was the one who said, “Oh, that’s just to warn wimps in Winnebagos. With four-wheel drive we’ll make it, no problem.” Mark, in a switch of roles, had initially balked but said at last, “Well, okay, what the heck?”

  By the time we sat down at the Starlight bar, we considered ourselves fortunate to be there. The road I’d been so cockily sure would accommodate our behemoth was no more than a rocky ledge along a deep ravine. Not only was it too narrow and unstable for large vehicles, it was no picnic for jeeps. A rock wall bulged alarmingly on one side, and the crevasse yawned on the other. I had an unbroken view out the cliff side window as eight tons of Phoenix leaned ominously over the edge.

  “But hey, we didn’t fall,” said Mark. “Let’s drink to the wonderfulness of ‘not quite.’” “You mean like running out of money?” I asked, clanking my margarita against his. “We haven’t yet. Not quite.”

  Not quite. Can you fathom the unbelievable power of those words? I’ve lived on them ever since, because after a week in Big Bend, I began to notice that the walls I’d been the most afraid of hitting weren’t the rocky ones on the edges of wild ravines. The ones I’d spent my life fearing were nothing more than a mime’s creation, an invisible surface traced out by convincing hands for a willing audience. When I stretched my own hands forth to feel the stones and know the limits of my universe, blow me down if I didn’t keep right on moving. Either the stones were made of smoke, or they weren’t there at all.