And here I am, hungrier not only for her but for food as I watch people eating fried chicken, mash potatoes, corn, grits and barbecue, forking up apple pie. These folks have a lot of money to spend on food. The criminal part of my brain kicks in: Okay, when the cook turns the other way, reach in, grab a bunch of those blood sausages in the stainless-steel container under the heat lamp. Then the other part of my brain responds: No, don’t do that. Remember you’ve gotta go straight. It urges me to control my impulses. This is not the DYA chow-hall line, fool.
Then it strikes me: this whole thing is a joke. For a fleeting moment, my mind is in awe of my hilarious and absurd coupling: Lila and me; two completely different human beings, she’s a white woman ten years older than me and I’m just a Chicano who has never traveled east of the Rio Grande. We’re okra and fried greens meets chili and tamales, surrendering to the ambivalent abyss of fate, free-falling into our ambitious cravings to attend our cosmic dinner. Holy crap, what am I getting myself into?!
The airport lobby is lined with display cases of Civil War soldier uniforms, muskets and old rifles, crusty Confederate journals, ammo belts, photos of battlefields, blood-spattered pants and hats. There are pictures of hog farms with what seem to be millions of hogs, pictures of docks with boats heaped with fish and boiled clams and crawfish, chafedcheeked men with nets, steaming shrimp in kettles with the water behind them gleaming. Then, pictures of tobacco farms, acres of tobacco plants as far as the horizon in every direction. And slaves. Lots of slave pictures that for a moment make me sick and angry. Statues of Confederate generals. Military men with swords on horses. I fight off a desire to spit at the pictures.
I tell myself if I’m going to make it, I have to get rid of my temper, my pride. I can’t flail against the current—flow, baby, flow. Dale gas, compa, déjate caer la greña. You can do it, vato, I tell myself. No self-righteous chest beating. I’ve got to listen to the voice in my head that often warned me in the past, but that I failed to listen to, distracted by more important things, like drugs and partying. Learn, you idiot, I tell myself, learn to be accountable for your mistakes. Be responsible. Ignore that troublesome urge in your heart to mess this up.
I walk down a long hallway clogged with travelers to the baggage claim. It’s a county fair: food carts with Dixie flags and cast-iron statuary depicting bird dogs and more Civil War heroes, fat cattlemen with manure-caked rubber boots, hickory-hard young men wearing patched overalls smelling of farm stalls. These are the descendants of slave owners, white men whose grandfathers bought slaves and worked, whipped, chained, starved and raped them to make their wealth and establish their power. Here I was, about to bed down one of their own, a crime that in the past would have warranted a lynching.
The terminal is no bigger than a high school football field with fake white pillars, scuffed linoleum floors and quaint knick-knack shops. Many of the faces are weathered, as if time was a laundry line and they’ve been on it a long time, in harsh weather.
Grandmas piddle out crumpled dollar bills from coin purses pinned to the inside of their bras to buy a snowcone or cotton candy from the cart. Husky boys chomp buttered corncobs. Sportsmen shoulder at the bar with frosty beer mugs foaming over and half-eaten pork chops on their plates, shouting at the TV showing a football game.
I take a deep breath, wind my way through the people to the luggage area, grab my box and head outside, where the humidity makes my clothes sticky.
In the orphanage on Friday night we used to watch Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and Steve McQueen movies. There this sort of humidity made swamp women unsnap their jeans and bras and drawl love down by the sultry magnolias. A slavering old escapee chased by slop-drooling mastiffs sniffing, shaking water off, as the prisoner waited for his bog-mistress to leash him up in her succulent sex—all us kids yelling and clapping and squealing.
I stand still. I wait. I hope.
The instant I see her driving up, all life condenses to the bulge at my crotch. A dragon that hunkered for years, grinds its fiery maw against my jeans, tired of biding its time, ready to dive between Lila’s beautiful, fairyland thighs and into the mythic island where many a Chicano kid has sunk his ship laden with enchiladas, tequila, mota, sopapillas, ristras y pozole and lost his soul.
For the second time in less than an hour, my paperweight heart cracks, startled wings shatter the crystal and fly translucent above people’s heads, each flutter of the wings sounding the word dreamtime, dreamtime. . .
I step off the sidewalk into the street, all ready for the BIG MEETING, and . . . and she drives right past me. The butterfly falls to the wet tarmac, gets run over by the muddy tires of a farm truck.
Standing there embarrassed, I immediately want to strike out at someone because of the disappointment. Men at the curb smirk at me. With my pride wounded, I feel ashamed, awkward, and step back onto the sidewalk.
Swarms of insects nibble on me. They think I’m some sort of free lunch wagon. They swarm, every kind of vermin that breeds in moist climates stings me. I slap at the air trying to wave away the flies and mosquitoes, but they attack with renewed ferocity, in my nostrils, mouth, ears. Sweat drips down my back, soaks the waistline of my boxers, and I’m standing there the whole time thinking: She’s changed her mind.
I glance at the bull-necked, wagon-shouldered crackers, look down at the pavement, conjuring a “Deliverance” movie scene. I’m kidnapped out to some dank, backwoods shack after being raped by cadaver-eating hicks. I’m skewered and marinated in white-lightning in a skillet and served up to hogs in an occult ritual these boys have been known to practice on Mexicans.
Ghost Boy wants to mad-dog back, but a voice in my head advises, Give it up, give it up.
Seconds later, as I’m watching her recede in the distance, I see the rear lights go bright red as she slams the brakes, stops, shifts in reverse and backs up. ¡Órale!
Sweet as an eight ball in the pocket break. Yeah!
3
I THINK BACK to that young man searching for a life, heart wide open, exploring, searching every option so that one day he might have a life like others; family, friends, respect. And I do have a family. Back then, I was a long way from New Mexico, but I knew one thing: my survival instincts were my real home. And my pride was based on how much danger I could carelessly subject myself to or how much self-denigration and neglect I could endure.
I learned to control my fear, ignore it in the heat of a challenge, swallow when I felt like I might throw up; swagger and glare someone down to signal my dangerous intent for violence, give mad-dog stares to convey my disregard for consequences, tilt my face back, push my chin out and nod, Y qué, puto, what ya gonna do, huh? I learned to move in a way that warned predators without words that my courage was dominant, my response blind, no matter the size or age or color. My don’t-mess-with-me attitude was the only place I felt safe; my getting it on on the spot if you mess with me was my calling card, my defiant silence my security.
All that changed with time. I learned new ways of dealing with people. I kissed Ghost Boy goodbye. If I was going to make it, I had to and did learn to take crap, put my head down, walk away. I didn’t confront bullies trying to incite me. I backed away, even if it meant I looked like a coward. It seemed the only way to make it out here.
That was back then. It’s now April 2018, and in a few days I plan on heading up to my cabin to write, hike, read, do some irrigation work, search the woods for flagstone and latillas to bring back, at my wife’s insistence, for our fence here in Albuquerque. (Our Italian Mastiff keeps chewing them to splinters, so I have to replace them frequently.)
I believe I got my love of nature as early as three or four years old through scent: I knew my whole world by smell. I remember when Mom left us in the care of Grandma Weaver in Santa Fe; lilac and sage intoxicated my sensibility—there, beyond the open windows with tattered curtains, the ripped screen door, paradise lay in the tumultuous vegetation and flowers.
It must have also been wh
en I was allowed to visit my paternal grandma, Petra. I inhaled a different type of fragrance, that of the high prairie desert, of things ancient and eternal: the dirt, the stones, the prairie winds, the chilled pines, snowmelt carried on the breeze that swept across our small village, mixed with horse manure, sheep, desert grass, old corrals, windmills, rusting cars, smoke from wood stoves and freshly made tortillas. The sunlight was overpowering. It touched all things, made them surrender their fragrance. Saddles, harnesses, field tools, all things exuded their souls in the arid heat. They offered their distinct, rich odor to the air, which I couldn’t help but inhale, since I was always outside. When I came in to the kitchen, drawn by the scent of fresh-made tortillas, beans and red chili, Grandma would scold me for always smelling like a goat.
Later, in the orphanage, its circular front drive trimmed with roses of all colors flavored the air with floral scents like no other heady perfume I have ever inhaled. It made me want to leap, take four steps at a time down the staircase, dash through the hallways, slam classroom doors and yelp like a young colt testing his legs, galloping for the first time.
It could have been all of that.
Or the times on certain holidays, when the nuns bussed us to Doc’s Long Picnic Area in the Sandias east of Albuquerque, or to the Jemez Mountains to Camp Shaver, where I offered in homage my soul to the towering pines, to the mesquite trees, to the creeks and to the bull-shouldered cliffs. My heart pounded for release, hammering my rib cage with urgency to leave my body, lose itself in the forest and in the ancient legacy of all things wild.
I went from one extreme to the other, from Nature in all her abundant living to being a hostage in urban environments, a captive of concrete and glass, school rooms, dorms. I took what meager joy I could on Sundays, when the nuns allowed us to watch “Bonanza,” “The Rifleman,” “Gun Smoke” and some Disney fairytales.
In the 1990s I find myself in an Albuquerque apartment not doing so well. I’m out of touch with time—days, weeks, months, even the year is a blur. I’m partying way too much, hardly writing because in my half-baked brain I’ve decided to give it up.
As a last resort to keep my sanity in these, my early forties, I find myself rising in the dark before sunrise to jog on a trail winding through the Rio Grande Bosque. I do it to clear my head and heart, to keep hope alive, to remind myself that I still can achieve the kind of life I want and the kind of sobriety I dream of.
I see mallards in the ditches, roadrunners, coyotes, Canadian geese overhead, blue herons stilting in the shallows, and the ever beautiful water of the Rio Grande flowing with the tranquility of a cooing mother’s hand on her infant’s cheek.
I find myself wishing many times to be more the river than myself. Be the river. I want to be like Geppetto’s Pinocchio: unscrew my legs from my hips and drop them, reach in, pull my lungs out, toss them away to hang like deflated vines in the treetops, cut whatever strings are binding me and holding me up and finally fling my bones into the river grass where decaying twigs and fallen bark welcome them. Then, I dash low and high, beneath low-hanging branches and bounding above fallen logs—in spirit form, flashing along the running path.
Be the river.
Sometimes, I’ll drive to West Mesa, where no one is around. I run the rattlesnake-infested desert path, head for the distant, dormant volcanoes. I inhale the fragrant dryness of the dust and rocks, the utterly tough ropes of nopal cacti. I jog around illegal dumping sites, where real estate signs and refrigerators, political placards, washing machines, tires, twisted bicycle frames, blood-stained mattresses, box springs, glimmering piles of beer bottles that snarl at me. No matter. I run on, get whatever’s in me out, purge this skin, this face, this life and merge with the ugliest scenes the desert presents— which is still far better than the best I have in any moment of any city day.
Then it’s 2004, my friend Ben, our family doctor for many years, calls to tell me he wants to show me something. A day later I ride with him two hours north of Albuquerque, to his cabin in the most beautiful setting I have ever seen; breathtaking cliffs, gorgeous green pastures, springs that run from rocks everywhere, threading their way into the main creek that feeds into Abiquiu Lake, the source of water for Santa Fe and Albuquerque and all the towns down south.
Ancient Anasazi pueblos top the mesa. Black bear, mountain lion, elk and white tail deer are spotted almost daily. The dirt road is festooned with green vines, is bordered by hefty, flowered fields. We bump and jolt down a dirt path that winds into hidden meadows. There are rock crevices as big as an auditoriums. We see eagles, turkey vultures, red-tailed hawks, turkeys, owls and hummingbirds. I’m blown away. I ask if he might know anyone I can rent a cabin from, so I can come up and write. He does.
A year later I buy ten acres and build a two-story cabin, completely off the grid, without applying for permits or using a blueprint. As soon as I can, I bring the lady (Stacy) of my life up, and my two kids (I have four) still living at home. We begin to live the happiest days of my life for the next three years. Unfortunately, we have to move back to the city for the kids’ education because the schools are terrible up there, the closest one is a three-hour bus ride down treacherous mountains roads.
It was heaven while it lasted. My whole soul was aroused with exhilarating hunger to hike a new trail every morning, and every trail conjured a delightful hypnosis, every bird call conjuring a soulful remedy in my bones.
Since then, I have rarely lived such meaningful days of being absorbed into the heart of the nature that nurtured me so greatly. I grew new mes, infinite mes, glorious and happy mes in that piece of wilderness.
I grew in strength, character, dreams, love. . . . I’m sure that nature has instilled in my cells a harmonious longevity borne of those field flowers and four-foot snow swells and sunshine, and the most delicate rain showers. In my blood still flow the daily-live particles of tribal peoples who lived on mesas and peaks I climbed. Flashing like fish scales are the microscopic life forms of creeks I fished and trails I hiked, breathing it all in as if it were my very sustenance, circulating now in my metabolism, as I write this.
With the exception of family, I went months without seeing another human being. It truly was the paradise I had dreamed of since childhood, packed with brilliant days as it was. There is only one other time that even remotely compares to this in joy and fulfillment and achievement: when I arrived in North Carolina to live with Lila and drive through the countryside to her house, my new home.
She is wearing a short blue skirt with a green blouse. Her hair is the color of a faded rose and her green eyes peer from behind large oval glasses, giving off the impression that she reads a lot. She is thirty-two, ten years older than me, her body voluptuous and lithe. Every aspect of her is beautiful. She is a white version of Celia Cruz.
“You’re here! Thank God, the waiting is over.” She hugs me.
At that moment, there is no one on earth luckier than me. I feel a pig-belly-deep-in-mud lucky feeling.
Still thawing out from DYA and unsure of how to be in the company of a woman, I am speechless, so nervous that I need to say something.
“Made it!” I blurt out, and I feel stupid the instant I announce it.
She laughs at my awkwardness. “You’re here. Yay, Orlando!”
She opens the door, shoves my box in the back seat and we drive off.
We pass dented roadside mailboxes, withering barns, wind-slapped houses and huge trees. Warehouses. Chicken farms. Pig farms.
I sneak a look at her breasts and her lips. Lust courses through every cell of my body as abundantly as the kudzu overflowing into the road shoulders. The breeze dances in thick tobacco leaves, taps a hoeing slave song and the late afternoon hums a sweet, succulent harmony that makes my mouth water.
She smiles, her hand trembling as she lights another Benson & Hedges cigarette. The air, the space, the sky, all of it a dream come true. Lila downshifts, speeds up past red-brick-and-clapboard flour mills and brick houses set in quie
t clearings.
I lean my head back, glad to be free, healthy and young. I stand up on the seat, raise my arms to the wind the way I’ve seen kids do in movies full of red-appled joy. As I am now, with Cat Stevens on the radio, we speed by meadows, Guernseys grazing, silos, strawberry, wheat and tobacco fields and clay-packed farm roads. She brakes, accelerates up and down through the Piedmont foothills, fingers clutching the steering wheel, racing down a long road bordered with pines.
The world is freshly created.
She makes a sharp turn at a grocery store called Green Mill, then we race down a blacktop through churned dirt fields. In the shade of plank barns warped from having been too long in hot and cold seasons, barn dogs snooze or scratch their ears. Harness-scarred mules mosey one step at a time and stop, then, after a bit, step again.
Finally, we slow, turn into a fenceless yard, where a small, red-brick house sits. A pump house stands next to it. She parks, turns off the ignition.
“Welcome.”
She kisses me, beveling her tongue inside my mouth. She sweeps it back down my throat, on the sides of my tongue, inside my cheeks, licking. Then sucks my bottom lip. The greatest kiss ever.
Her small red-brick house with its unkempt yard gives way to fields spreading out to the forest on three sides. It makes me think of The Ponderosa.
Once inside, I lift her Siamese cat from an armchair and set it on the floor. I sit down. It leaps up on my lap and bites me so quick I doubt it happened. Blood beads in neat rows of two up my left arm, wrist to elbow. Lila doesn’t see it—she’s at the table in the back of the big common room. I shoo the cat off, pretending nothing happened. But I’m a little freaked, composing myself, when her father putters in.
American Orphan Page 3