Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  The females are larger than the males and give just a bit more meat and hide, but one too many times George has cut open a female and paused at the unchewed yellow petals of fiddleneck or groundsel flowering out of her gut around a fetus. Now he’s got a game, to make it more like hunting, to avoid the babies and the flowers: he looks for just one set of mangled ears popping up out of the grass. Ears is where males get bit in fights over ladies. Jagged ears means a loser, a loner, one that will not be missed. He tears the skin down from the hanging leg to the belly and rips back up the other leg. Nobody will notice but he takes pride knowing his tree is hung with nothing but jagged ears, even if it is poor business sense.

  Back in the seventies there’d been some trouble with George’s brother in Mississippi. Jesse was a gospel preacher. Jesse died. Something was amiss in the death and a sort of war started up in the Baptist rags, some defending Jesse and others printing that he “shot himself through the heart with a pocket pistol, while in bed with his wife—a terrible end to a perverted wrecked life.” That’s the exact horseshit the papers printed. The first part is totally true. The second part is just plain mean-spirited. What makes a man pull back the sheets, put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, cock a peashooter, and back himself into the arms of darkness? Did the ears of Jesse’s wife peek up over the grass of life when that bullet hit his heart? How much did it kill her too?

  George rips at rabbit skin.

  Jesse’s defenders claim insanity led to the unfortunate deed. Insanity caused by sunstroke. And here is George in a desert chasing rabbits all day in the sun, wondering when he will lie by his wife again.

  Jesse hated Baptists because they didn’t interpret the Bible literally. The word is the word and there is nothing else, Jesse would say. This is the doctrine of the Church of Christ and George’s progeny will all more or less fall in line with that doctrine. But George knows how words only mix things up. Back in Roswell there was a miner who liked to drunkenly spin his gun on the bar and holler, Come down, ye bald-headed Jesus Christ with your Waterbury clock and your buckeye mower, and get on with getting me back to darkness! The old miner had Jesus Christ crossed with the grim reaper but George never said nothing because it was one of them drunken blunders with the air of truth.

  Jesse’s tombstone says HE LOVED THE BIBLE. The inscription goes on about FAITH LOVE PRAYER and TRUTH but doesn’t mention any god, or son of god, for that matter. This love for the Book was the main thing. The perfect Book. This is what has been in the family from way back. The divine word. The binding of all them words into a thing you can hold. A Book. Make the Book disappear and there you are holding your hands out in front of you, just slightly open like begging any god for anything.

  So then George avoids churches mostly. Avoids most reading too, except for the rags. He does not want to go insane like his brother. He does not all that much believe in sunstroke. He can spell Mister Oliver just fine and that’s plenty to write and the rags is all he needs to read. He saves the clippings about jackrabbits. He’s not making a scrapbook. Just a trunk of scraps to have something to show for all his pondering, a trunk of dreams into which his progeny will throw all their scraps of aspirations and accomplishments and angers and fears, the trunk filling up through the generations until it overflows on the lap of George’s great-great-great-grandson, who will never get even a sliver of all that experience into his book. But this is 1899 and books are on their way out anyway. Everyone loves the big stage plays and right now Ben-Hur is sweeping the nation with its live-action chariot races. Everyone loves the photograph and these days there is even the moving image. These days there’s one moving image sweeping the nation, a Western, a fifty-second joint from the Edison Company being shown in Mister Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope parlors but your eyes can only gander at its grandeur if you subject yourself to the highway robbery of five whole cents. The moving image was captured up north in this territory at the Isleta Indian School, shows Pueblo children paraded out of a school building. They bound down the steps and then circle around right back up the steps and into the school again, not a single one of them holding a book.

  The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha just wrapped up in November 1898—an exhibition to showcase the development of the West. Geronimo was there after many decades of warring, capture, escape, and recapture. The rags bill him as the most murderous man in American history but he was not in Omaha as a murderer: “He sells the buttons off his coat and the hat off his head—he has brought a good supply of each and sews new buttons during rest breaks. He sells autographs and photographs of himself. He is the famous Mister Geronimo.” Everyone’s a businessman now. Everyone’s got their photographs. What will Mister Oliver ever sign? There’s a whole cottage industry in the Southwest of altering photographs of jackrabbits, making hares look like giant game or showing them saddled for roundups or bucking off a cowboy. Postcards. He will buy one and send it to his family and sign it with great big swoops of ink like vines. He will let them know he is truly a part of the mythmaking out here in the West. He will send them some of his scraps from the rags for proof.

  The Rustler (Cerrillos, NM) 11 DEC 1891

  One of yesterday’s hunters killed a jackrabbit so large that he would not bring it home, as he had to carry it about three miles before the camp was reached. Hereafter fish stories must stand aside when rabbit stories come on the carpet.

  At Belen within the past year, it is on record that a tenderfoot huntsman arrived there and sallied forth to see and kill his first jackrabbit, and actually shot and killed a burro, thinking that it was the game for which he had been looking. After killing the slow going little beast he rushed to town greatly excited and asked for help to bring in his game, stating that he had killed a jackrabbit bigger than two could carry.

  The jackrabbit is dark meat and will cook like beef and is perfect for a stew because stew is just fire and water and general refuse. Or maybe potpie. George wishes he had the flour for potpie. What he doesn’t sell, he’ll eat burned on a stick. Inside the fancy hotel a table is set and the people seated. At the head: the mayor of El Paso. At the foot: the proprietor of Hotel Alamogordo. This is a wedding feast. The railroad has married these great cities. The menu:

  Cream of Celery Soup

  Broiled Salmon

  Roast Turkey, New England Style

  Filet de Boeuf, a la Champignons

  Salami of Game, a la Chasseur

  Macaroni and Cheese, Bechamel

  Roman Punch, Alamogordo

  Lobster Salad

  Mince and Pumpkin Pie

  George bites at another leg. Rips. Some hunters will just cut into the back of the hide and rip in both directions like a strongman contest. But George likes the show of doing it without a knife, biting through the hide at the legs, then ripping and rolling the hide into a little handhold around the midsection, like a ring of fur around the rabbit’s belly. He gets them all like this, half skinned from their feet to their bellies, their top halves still like regular rabbits except for being strung up. And this is why he hangs them: to grab the handhold of fur at eye level and get momentum. One by one he grabs the ring of hide and hops a little and holds on as he’s coming down, lands on his knees, and the violent pull tears the rest of the hide from the rabbit. The violent pull even brings the head off with it. And the violent pull—if the rabbit was put together right—rips out all the guts too and George ends up on his knees holding over his head a dripping bag of inverted hide full of hare insides. This impresses the kids and they yell, Grisly, grisly Wabbitman. Ye rabbits so grisly, Wabbitman. Some of the older kids beg for the trick of squeezing the guts out through the ass but the Wabbitman does not take requests. And his method, however brute, preserves the hides.

  White Oaks Eagle (White Oaks, NM) 30 DEC 1897

  To Be Rounded Up for Their Fur, Used in Making Fine Hats

  New York parties have advertisements in many western-Kansas newspapers offering three cents each for cured jack
rabbit skins, culls and pieces three cents a pound, and common cottontail skins five and a half cents per pound. The New York parties want the fur for making hats, and as they represent European hatmakers, it is stated that the traffic in rabbit furs has been transferred from Australia to the United States. Skilled rabbit hunters in western Kansas can make good wages killing jackrabbits, and in the vicinity of Dodge City sportsmen are preparing for several grand roundups. Frequently the people of western Kansas have surrounded a large section of country, driven the rabbits to the center, and slaughtered them by the thousand. The only disposition made of the pests was to ship them to Chicago and New York for food for the poor. The hunters did not realize that rabbit hair entered largely into the manufacture of fine hats.

  * * *

  In a day or two the fancy people at the wedding feast will take the train up the mountain to Cloudcroft, the shiny new Baldwin Engine 101 and the winding rail built on trestles circling the mountain hundreds of feet off the ground, “one of the greatest pieces of engineering skill in railroad annals,” say the rags. Cloudcroft already has snow and the fancy people will surely want a decent hat. Fifty good jackrabbits will make a blanket. Their hide is an inch thicker than wool. Three or four will make a decent hat, depending on the bloat of the head. George sizes up the bloats of the heads through the window of the hotel.

  His pile of hides grows.

  The feast ends and a Mexican orchestra tightens their strings, warms up with a bunch of plucking. George cracks the sinewy front arms at their joints and tosses the feet to the kids for luck. The cerise gowns float. George cuts along the spine, deep and quick, and like a stick along a picket fence his knife plays the little ribs. The men hit the veranda with more tobacco smoke. The bloat of their heads grows and George quickens his skinning pace.

  The pelvic bone is a puzzle best not pondered too much. It is too difficult to cut around, so as soon as he sees the ball joint of the hip, he grabs high on the leg and breaks it from the torso. He leaves the tiny calf muscle on as he cuts off the rear feet. The meat of the hind legs is the meat that matters. These are the big legs, the ones used to run.

  The gentlemen and their ladies, done feasting, done dancing, walk out of Hotel Alamogordo and past George and glance at his tree but just barely. His rabbits are now all reduced to piles, front quarters and hindquarters and backstraps and inverted hides full of heads and guts. Piles of scraps like the trunk of dreams torn from the rags but these will not last.

  The first photograph George ever saw: a man standing next to a pile of bison skulls collected to be ground down for fertilizer. Not a pile but a mountain, the skulls towering twenty, thirty feet above the man’s hat, and the base of the mountain of skulls stretching some hundreds of feet, beyond the bounds of the photograph. Dead bison. Dead Indians. And the photograph means something else too but George can’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe he’s killing things out of lonesomeness.

  George’s piles of rabbit will never grow into even the tiniest hill. Well, alright. He pulls a lucky foot from the pile, feels one good string of cards coming on. He will go on being called George and never have a floor of white sand. All the jackrabbits will disappear. A century from now the landscape won’t have them. The grass will be gnawed to nothing by thousands of cattle. Then will come the creosote, tarbush, yucca, mesquite, and juniper, all rough and thorny and unappetizing to a rabbit. Then will come George’s family, not on the backs of jackrabbits but on the one good string of cards he’s about to play. And all the other families will come too, ranchers and miners and soldiers. George feels it all coming on as he walks to the Club House Saloon. Just a few drinks and one good string of cards. All the jackrabbit screams and the train steam and the whir-hack of the sawmill and the Mexican band serenading the wedding party to a close. When you’re feeling lucky, everything always sounds like a prelude. Scientists will come and a bomb will come. All the soldiers will come. There will come a Border Patrol, their ATVs will come and their SUVs will come to roam the roads and trails all night, hunting more people who are trying to come with their own trunks of dreams. There will be such feverish patrolling, so much pointless driving back and forth and all around trying to make an imaginary boundary real. The roadkill will pile up, will attain the mountainous proportions George saw in that photograph of bison skulls. In a hundred years the tires of the Border Patrol will have all but wiped out the white-sided jackrabbit. They will go the way of the bison and it will mean something else too. George grips the lucky foot like it’s the last one on earth. The thirst rises inside him, the hope that chance is a real antidote to fate. He steps into the Club House Saloon and throws back the first whiskey and throws his coins onto the table and thinks no more of the rabbits, their blood soaking into the dust and soaking to the roots of the little tree, Alamogordo born finally for good.

  LIVING ROOM

  THE INSTANTANEOUS ART OF NEVER FORGETTING

  •

  In the Year of Our Lord 2010

  Spectral Glow

  Kate got crashed-up in an eastbound Toyota Camry. Johnny overdosed on drugs in the bathtub of his trailer. She was on her way to kill herself by driving her car off the steep face of a cliff near Cloudcroft when she lost control of her vehicle on the sinuous road and veered into an oncoming SUV. Johnny took a heap of pills when she never returned from speeding furiously up the mountain on account of their most recent lovers’ quarrel. They were engaged to be married.

  I’m not sure I ever met Kate or Johnny, though we all lived in Alamogordo. Johnny was much older, already out of the Army and divorced and into a second career as a mental health technician, but Kate was just twenty-one and maybe still naïve about life’s knack for fracturing our narrative of it—the belief, at that hell-bent age, that we will never have the need to break and begin again. She was my age, a high school classmate of mine, but I have no memory of her.

  A few months after the deaths, when I was home again after college failed to make me immediately rich or even employable, Kate’s mother arranged for me to have Kate’s old television. She’d heard through the grapevine that I was poor and back in town and she invited me to her home. Pictures of Kate in fancy frames were on the dresser where the TV had been. I didn’t recognize her as anyone I’d known, but I smiled and accepted hugs and carried the heavy TV from the girl’s bedroom as her mother walked after me, apologizing for having lost the remote control.

  Now the TV takes up an entire corner of my living room, an older set with imposing bulk that generates thick gravity—crashed-up Kate’s TV with my furniture in its orbit, every piece arranged to accommodate its spectral glow, the terrible chill of twinkle-twinkle when you’re old enough to know the facts: despite the light, that little star is long since dead.

  I think of Kate most every day. I think of how I must have seen her in the halls, at the dances, sitting on the hoods and gates of beat-up Fords at the Sonic Drive-In. I think of her stretched out on her bed, clicking the remote control at her dresser, wondering why these days she can only ever see old pictures of herself in fancy frames.

  Your TV is in my living room, Kate.

  Bodies in the Rubble

  Mark Twain invented a board game, a means of memory improvement he patented in 1885—Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates. Unfortunately, the game’s rules proved too convoluted for people to follow—too in-depth to memorize or learn. The game never sold.

  Twain had a lifelong fascination with memory: “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this…”

  In 1887, in the midst of a funk born of his board game’s unequivocal flop, Twain enrolled as a student at Magnificent Professor Loisette’s School of Memory in New York, lured to the shyster’s conservatory by a promise scrawled on the sign above the door: THE INSTANTANEOUS ART OF NEVER
FORGETTING. Twain had not been in a proper school since age eleven. He was fifty-two when he became a student at that back-alley brick house on the griftier side of New York City. He must have swallowed oceans of pride to sit again, as the legend he’d become, in the cramped desks of another man’s classroom—a wonky board game and now the pupil of a charlatan.

  In the fifth century B.C.E., Greek poet Simonides of Ceos jump-started the art of memory by devising a technique, eventually dubbed the Memory Palace, in which things to be recalled are placed in an orderly way throughout a familiar physical space, the mind’s instinctive map of that space, so that knowing a list of words or numbers becomes as effortless as knowing your route home from work or the floor plan of your home—the arrangement of a living room. Simonides figured this out, Cicero tells us, while digging for the crushed bodies of friends in the rubble of a collapsed dining hall (faulty architecture, too much aesthetic grandeur); the mangled flesh was unidentifiable but Simonides had given a lecture at the banquet just before the collapse and found himself able to identify every corpse because he recalled exactly where everyone had been seated. He’d stared out at the gathered faces of friends and effortlessly—unconsciously—memorized on account of organization within a physical space. A groundbreaking but endlessly unsettling discovery: human engagement with memory is, at its origins, about death—so many bodies in the rubble.

  Twain’s own memory game relied on the Memory Palace, the spatial philosophy of memorization, but instead of buried bodies, Twain used a series of pegs spread throughout his front yard in unique patterns, each peg marked to represent something to be cemented in the head. “In this way,” he says, “knowledge could be situated in space and compartmentalized so that the steps in learning would be actual paces.” Originally, the game was intended to help his daughters memorize the dates of ascension for European monarchs, but Twain became obsessed and the game expanded to include awarding points for recalling even miscellaneous facts. From the official rulebook: “Miscellaneous Facts are facts which do not depend upon dates for their value … anything that is worth remembering, is admissible, and you can score for it.”