Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  The house was dark, cool and had been around a long time. Its rooms were around 14-foot square with heavy rafters supporting the flat roof. Simple clothes hung under the beams to dry. The plaster walls betrayed no roof leaks and the atmosphere inside was fresh. The only ornaments, apart from colourful pottery, were the Indian-design rugs on the stone floor. A gas cooker stood in a corner and the furnishings were completed by a television, a table and a couple of hard chairs. The single window, with its staggering view across America, looked in need of a handyman.

  Frances was a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara in New Mexico, where she had lived until five years previously when she met her husband at her grandfather’s wake. She had dated him as a teenager but had not seen him in twenty-seven years. He was an active member of the Hopi tribe and the house on the mesa belonged to his family. He was so heavily involved in Indian festivals and the work of the tribal council that they found it hard to achieve anything as a couple, so she had reverted to her former trade as a potter. Her vases were beautifully painted with symbolic figures, black for rain, white for earth, four directions and four winds.

  We sipped coffee from heavy earthen mugs and swapped life stories. Frances was amazed at the motorcycles and the length of our journey, but unlike the men from the Last Chance Saloon who had never travelled anywhere, she was fully aware of world geography through her pottery exhibitions which had taken her as far as Washington. She was undoubtedly in closer touch with the mainstream activities of the nation than some of the Indians we had met further north. Even her features were more European, but whether this was due to ancient intermingling with the Spanish, or just because she was native to a different part of North America and from a very different tribe, was unknowable. Unlike the natives of the plains, the Pueblo Indians, so called by the in-comers because they lived in villages with permanent dwellings, were not nomads.

  The sun had marched around into the early evening by the time Roz and Frances exchanged addresses and we walked out into the glare. Bucking down off the mesa in second gear, our chum the dog followed us, picking up a couple of his mates as he ran. Anywhere else on Earth we’d have been accelerating frantically to leave them behind before they took a nip out of us. We liked what we’d seen of the Hopi and the Pueblo peoples, and we loved their pets.

  A day later we had crossed into New Mexico and the transformation from the USA to something more like rural Spain was complete. Small, pink adobe houses turned their flat roofs to a sun tempered by altitude. Ancient mission churches with twin towers open to single iron bells nestled in green valleys. At Chimayo, eighth-generation Navajo weavers clicked away next door to a ‘sanctuario’ which outdated everything we had seen in Nevada and Arizona by several centuries. Inside, its ageless shade was illuminated by the flickering light of a thousand candles burning for joy, for gratitude, for thankfulness, for grief, or just in hope of better times. They might have been shining for the diversity of the American people.

  Winding our way onwards, we were still less than 100 miles due east of the wide spaces of the reservation when we parked outside the Cowgirls bar in the old city of Santa Fe. Clumping across the scrubbed boards in my heavy boots, I ordered two Lone Star beers. We each took a pull and sank down gratefully on high stools beside a blond man in his late thirties who looked like a refugee from a Beach Boys’ album sleeve. He was drinking with an Indian woman.

  ‘Hi, I’m Billy,’ said the surfer. ‘This is Nez. You come from far?’

  ‘From England via San Francisco.’

  ‘Oh, Sweet Jeeesus! You hear that, Nez?’

  Billy grabbed half a handful of what I hoped was salt from an ashtray, stuffed it in his mouth and washed it down from his Lone Star bottle. Then he started talking so fast his words couldn’t keep up with his mouth, but there was no hot air in him. Within five minutes he seemed to have introduced us to the whole bar, many of whom were lesbians. Hence, I presumed, the ‘Cowgirls’.

  One of Billy’s cronies was a dark-haired young man with a fine-cut profile whose grandfather had been, he assured us, the Earl of Shrewsbury.

  ‘Coulda had the title for myself when he died, but I was born here in the United States and this is my country. We don’t have no m’lords here, so I turned ’em down. You guys ever hear of some king called George?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Jeez, I dunno. Third, would it be? My old man reckoned we were descended from him. Wrong side of the sheets, he said. Something to do with a girlfriend. Otherwise I might be King of England. Waddaya think of that?’

  There was no denying he had the sort of fine-drawn features often seen on the British peerage, and George had certainly ennobled more than one illegitimate son. Graciously, the non-Earl bought us more beer and made way for another man it was impossible to ignore. The writer had grey hair, a small moustache, a black-and-white shirt with a psychedelic pattern and was, he said, a great friend of Jack Kerouac’s daughter. I didn’t even know that Kerouac, America’s most famous beatnik, had a daughter, but before we could find out about this relationship the conversation was rudely interrupted by a bore from Florida. The writer melted away with a resigned expression while Billy, our sponsor, led Roz off to meet a tall, thin gent wearing the highest cowboy hat in the place. My eyes began to close as the man from Miami described the intricacies of his remarkable patio, but through half an ear I was listening to Roz’s cowboy. He was bringing her up to date on how he once worked as a rodeo rider but had since gone straight and become a cattle auctioneer. She asked him what his patter sounded like and he called the price of calves over the top of his beer. His earsplitting chant sounded straight from a Nebraska cow sale and it brought the house down. The uproar gave me a chance to give the house-proud Floridian the slip.

  We drank too many more beers before Billy kissed Nez goodbye and led us out to his jeep. Roz and I mounted up. Struggling to ride in a straight line, we followed him into the foothills of the Santa Fe Mountains for twenty minutes. At the end of God knows where, he swung into a driveway and stopped at the warm, brown adobe house he rented with yet another well brought up dog.

  The views across the Santa Fe valley with its surrounding mountains were uplifting, and everything about the place spoke more of Latin America than the USA. The raised beds in the garden grew long red peppers and even the hills somehow had a look of Brazil or Venezuela about them. Billy organised us a shakedown beside a floor-to-ceiling window and, while the dog made friends with Roz, he rolled a joint of the sort of gravitas rarely seen nowadays. We smoked this with more beers on the side, both assuming that this was the evening winding down peacefully. Just as I was fully relaxed after an extremely long day, Billy clicked his empty beer bottle on to the kitchen counter with dramatic finality and announced that as it was Friday night, we’d better go back to town and check out the action.

  Resignedly, we clambered into the battered four-track and were whisked away to the fleshpots. We needn’t have worried. Billy, who really had been a Californian surfer, knew all there was to know about a large night out. Now a builder of custom furniture, he was very much part of the arts and crafts community. He also liked to dance and he appreciated good music.

  It was fiesta time, and although we drove into town too late for the coincidental annual burning of an effigy of ‘Gloom’ in the main square, we never did find out what it was all about. The tree-lined streets were still thronged with revellers of all ages and we elbowed our way around, with Billy running into a friend on every corner. Eventually we settled on a bar where I would be happy to spend every weekend until they nail me up in my box. We each should have paid a $5 cover on the door, but Billy somehow ‘blagged’ us all in. Most of the Cowgirls’ crowd were already there, mixing with a wide variety of drinkers. The ready, high quality conversation inside was more like being in Ireland than in the US, the wine was of an unusual standard for selling by the glass and the burritos, which arrived to quell what by now was a raging appetite, were the best ever served.

&n
bsp; The lights dimmed and the band started. A mix of Latin and easy-going jazz, the music was pure class and shortly we were up on the floor bopping with Billy’s pals. Nez was there, and the writer gave me a wave. No sign of the Bore. Next to us, a Navajo with a serene face and braided hair to his waist was dancing with a beautiful woman of fifty in a Stetson and a long skirt with a striking silver-buckled belt. One raven-haired girl wore a scarlet, off-the-shoulder, flouncy Catalan dress, while a much younger girl in a ra-ra skirt gyrated like a professional with a different partner for every number. The best technical performers were a cowboy in a white waistcoat and immaculate blue jeans over gold-trimmed high-heeled boots, paired up with an Indian girl in a black sheath that revealed her warm colouring.

  As things livened up and the dancing grew wilder, I banged hard into something extremely solid behind me. Turning around I found myself face to face with a man with a huge moustache who was as tall as me and even wider. He wore a full motorcycling jacket and an expression that announced, ‘Lookin’ for trouble? Yuh come to the right place…’

  For a moment he stared me down. I couldn’t hear the music anymore and was preparing to try and parry a massive blow as he raised his right hand. Instead of targeting my front teeth, however, he opened it in the classic bikers’ upside-down handshake.

  ‘You those guys pitched up at the Cowgirls from England?’

  ‘Sure are,’ I said, with a cool I did not feel.

  ‘I gotta buy you a beer,’ he said, and abandoning the voluptuous lady at his side, dragged me off to the bar. Later in the evening, Roz whispered that she had dubbed him ‘Buster the Biker’ amazed that he could possibly survive the nightclub atmosphere in his riding leather. ‘Probably takes it off on the road…’ she said, moving out on to the floor to leap around with her chum the auctioneer.

  For a few minutes I sat alone, then a young woman from out of state arrived at my table. I listened with a despair that soon changed to annoyance as she started to fill me in on what a great country America is. This obviously wasn’t the right time for politics, and the phrase ‘great country’ gave me a bad turn. A few years earlier, Roz had been subjected to exactly the same words towards the end of a formal dinner. They came from a lawyer who ten minutes before had infuriated her by announcing that blacks were physically unsuited for professional careers. She had laid straight into him on how his country was responsible for giving the world the litigious society, then she moved on to the question of civil rights. Veins were standing out on his forehead and all other conversation had stopped. The rest of the diners were right behind her, but there was no future in the exchange of views so I had broken up the party and taken Roz home.

  The tempo of the music stepped up a notch as I submitted to the girl’s eulogy on a curious mixture of passport-free travel, national parks and the interstate system. I could handle that much, but she soon worked around to a solid view on freedom and justice for all that was either naïve or mischievous. Inner cities, foreign policy and the vital issue of the growing underclass didn’t feature in her fantasy. I finally managed to ask her about the journeys she had made to form her opinion. She mentioned half a dozen states of the Union but nowhere else. She hadn’t even visited Mexico or Canada.

  It was late, I was full of drink and unfit for any sort of intelligent argument. All I could see was the unworthy face America so often turns to an outside world that imagines it to be typical. I was about to let rip and spoil a wonderful evening when Billy appeared out of the throng. His social antennae had picked up the waves of anger and he was having none of it. Taking the woman firmly by the arm, he removed her to Buster the Biker’s table.

  ‘There you are, Honey,’ I heard him say amiably, ‘this here’s a man who’ll appreciate your opinion.’

  I saw her look at Buster. It wasn’t hard for her to realise that the mountainous biker’s idea of a great country might not coincide with hers. She didn’t stop long. Buster winked at me and I bought him a beer with a whiskey chaser.

  Looking over to Billy from Buster’s rip-roaring reminiscences of riding with the outlaw gangs of the sixties, I saw him listening intently to another life story. The booze was really biting now and he seemed more than human. He was a saint from heaven. Sensitive, strong and endowed with a superhuman ability to make things come right. Through the bar-room smoke, his face looked almost holy in a devilish sort of way. Billy, the misplaced beach boy, was serving up good vibrations with a large ladle.

  20

  TICKETS IN TEXAS

  AND LOVE BUGS

  IN LOUISIANA

  Roz slept deeply by my side under Billy’s window while I lay suspended between dreamtime and morning. First light silhouetted the sierra, the moon had long set and the seven stars of the dipper wheeled low above the deeper black of the mountains. Refracted by the atmosphere, the constellation was expanded far beyond any semblance of normality. It reflected the state of my mind as my thoughts wandered into the West Texas Panhandle, now so close.

  This was Cactus Jack’s country, the border lands of El Paso where the lonesome cowboy in a Marty Robbins’ ballad fell in love with a Mexican saloon girl, lost his reason in the gunsmoke of jealousy and shot his rival dead. He ran to the Badlands but in the end was drawn back to his lover, only to be cut down by the posse. According to country music legend, even today, sad-faced barmaids refuse virile young cowboys, preferring instead to walk home with hard, grey-haired men from the rodeo. Such people are so far from Washington DC they might as well be on the moon.

  North of West Texas lies the New Mexico Line; southwards, the Rio Grande. Now, comparing distances and motivation, the words of Hurricane John Pournaras, a Greek seaman, came back to me.

  ‘You can’t do everything in this life,’ John said as we slumped together in a bar facing a multi-choice immediate future.

  He’d been right then, and I was beginning to think he still might be.

  For the first time, I realised that I was near saturation point with new experiences. Part of me yearned to see the Rio Grande, to drink in the West Texas dancehalls on pay night and follow my luck to the card tables. But the more I yearned for it, the clearer I saw how close I was approaching blow-out point. The big river wasn’t about to dry up and there would be other trips. We’d ground through some long days in the saddle since Nevada and I doubted Roz would be sorry that something in my head had shifted gear. Without seeing it coming, I had contracted what sailors call ‘Channel fever’. I knew the symptoms. It is the concentrated desire to drive the ship home as fast as the winds will blow her, the final phase of ‘long voyage syndrome’.

  After the sun rose, Roz and I sat at Billy’s table with the morning light streaming in, sharing a simple breakfast with the dog. Billy had left for his workshop. It was a good time for a policy discussion.

  ‘You mean, just go straight from here to Annapolis?’ Roz asked, as I began to untangle my thoughts. ‘That’ll mean Oklahoma, then back through Arkansas and Tennessee again. I can’t face any more prairie and I hated Tennessee.

  ‘I don’t mind riding less far, but I do want to see New Orleans. And what about the Deep South?’

  ‘I thought we could still do most of that, but just step up the pace a bit. You know. Really get stuck in. We don’t have to hit the interstates, but the roads south from here look fine, and Texas has a 70-mph limit. I bet the highways are smooth. I can’t imagine Texans creeping round on crummy tracks.’

  ‘So what would that mean in terms of daily runs?’

  She twirled her fork on the edge of her scrambled eggs and I knew what she was thinking.

  ‘It’ll be a major dogleg to hack all the way down to El Paso,’ I said. ‘If we miss that out, go south-east from here instead, then make a straight dive across Texas towards Baton Rouge, we’ll be back East before we know it.’

  ‘It would suit me fine to miss out West Texas,’ she said slowly. Her fantasies and mine do not always coincide. ‘But what’s the new deal on daily distance?’

>   ‘Three-fifty, maybe 400, perhaps more some days. Take it in stages. We’ll be running 60 or 70 mph. It won’t be so bad.’

  I looked closely at her expression. It did not change. Just to make sure we were going to be of one mind I asked, ‘How long since you had pain across the shoulders?’

  She shrugged. The fact was that we had both hardened up beyond what would have seemed possible when we had worked our careful way across the tight civilisation of Maryland in another life two months before.

  ‘But if you really want to go to West Texas,’ Roz said with genuine sympathy. ‘I won’t stand in the way. Don’t miss it for me.’

  ‘I do,’ I replied, ‘but I’ve no interest in tearing through it like a man in a video game. I’ll come back another day. You never know. Maybe I’ll find an easier poker game and clean up. Nothing by chance!’

  We spread out the map on the breakfast table. The state line was a short day away, then Texas stretched over the hump of the coffee pot and clear across to the toaster. The place looked huge, but the bikes were full of miles, so I changed their oil and set up their belts. Then we packed the saddlebags, left Billy a ‘Thanks, Mate’ note and let the Harleys rip.

  Steadily losing altitude towards the Texas line, the impact of the country receded from the haunting beauties of northern New Mexico. The mountains fell away behind us and featureless seas of silver grass stretched ahead, but instead of the impression of vastness we experienced on the high plains, some odd feature of this country contracted the views to a minimalist scale. The land was the antithesis of Montana, where the traveller felt almost crushed by the sheer size of the vista. Here, the margins of the grassy world fell away to some unknown dimension beyond the edge so that although the road was as straight as a bullet’s flight, nothing seemed to exist beyond the next few fields.