by Edward Abbey
I top off my tank, making sure to drain the hose by holding it high above the pump. Approaching the sullen high school dropout in the cashier’s glass box, I pull the MasterCard® from my wallet. Might as well use that discredited credit card as long as I can get away with it. Although I’ve now got cash in my britches I am well aware that penury and hardship loom in the future. And thirty-one hundred miles to go—a thousand leagues. “Poverty,” said Samuel Johnson, “is the enemy of happiness….”
The kid in the box notes the number on my plastic shim, then checks it against his list of stolen credit cards. I find no need to tell him the account is overdrawn. Valley National Bank will get the word around soon enough.
“That’s a good card,” I tell him. “Don’t expire till August.” He grunts. I show him my backup I.D., the business card that identifies me as “Henry H. Lightcap, Special Project Consultant.” He is not impressed. I turn it over, show him the formal printed notation on the back: “Your criticism is greatly appreciated. But fuck you all the same.” He doesn’t even smile.
The boy runs my card through his imprinting machine and hands it back to me along with the sales slip. “Sign there,” he says, his dirty finger on the red X.
I take up the ball-point pen on the windowsill but before signing I point to the refrigerated display case inside the cubicle. “I also want a sixpack of Michelob,” I tell him, “and a package of that jerky.” Like many of these new-style gas stations, the place offers food and drink for sale. Plastic food, industrial drink.
He hands me the beer and jerky. “Four eighty-five.”
I push the credit slip back to him. “Charge it.”
“You can’t buy beer with a credit card.”
“No? Then I won’t sign the slip.”
“You got to, you bought eleven point four gallons of gas.”
“You can take the gas back.”
“It’s already in your truck.”
“It’s in the tank. Get a hose and suck it out.”
He stares at me, his acne-studded face suddenly inflamed.
“I’ll even lend you the hose.” (My leetle robber hose, José. My good old Chicano credit card.)
“Jesus…” the kid mutters. “Meet more nuts on this job.” He repeats procedures, adding the beer and jerky to the bill, and again shoves the credit slip under my chin. “Sign there,” he says as before.
Pen in hand, I look him in the eye. “Sign there, please.”
“Sign there, please.”
“Please, sir.”
“Please sir for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s better.”
No manners anywhere anymore. Time to bring back the horsewhip. The epée. The duel. The garrote and the rack.
I give a stick of jerky to my dog and drive on into the radioactive slum of Grants, New Mexico. Kerr-McGee country. Maybe I’d better have a couple of cups of coffee before resuming my steady transfusion of beer. Still seventy miles to Albuquerque then another sixty to Santa Fe. Entering a little Mexican café, I pick up a disheveled copy of the Albuquerque Daily Journal on the counter beside the cash register—disregarding the cold stare from the red-beaked matron perched behind it—and take my place in a window booth. Where I can keep my truck and dog under surveillance. The knife slashes in the vinyl upholstery of my booth have been bandaged with silver-gray duct tape—a homey touch. I open the newspaper. The waitress comes shuffling forward, followed by a few of her favorite flies. She is an Indian girl brown as a bun, fat as a burrito, pretty as a sopapilla. Her name tag says “Gloria.”
“Gloria,” says I, “bring me coffee, por favor, and a bowl of chili stew with blue-corn tortillas like they make in El Rapido Tortilla Factory in Tucson, Arizona.”
She grins bashfully. “We only got the white flour kind.”
“Okay, honey, whatever.” I open the newspaper. Routine frontpage stuff: the perpetual Mideast crisis, some movie actor running for the U.S. presidency, more murder and massacre in Afghanistan, Guatemala, Cambodia, Chile, El Salvador, etc.—same old ancient news. I turn to the inside pages, the human interest material: “Man Knifed on South Bean St.”…“Mother Convicted of Drowning Deformed Baby; Right-to-Lifers Demand Death Penalty”…“Man Riddles Giant Saguaro with Shotgun Blast, Is Fatally Injured When 5-Ton Cactus Falls on Him”…
There is a God.
I read on. “Chief Engineer on Dam Project Killed by Lightning; Same Storm Washes Out Coffer Dam”…
And a Just God he is.
And here’s a blurry Telephoto of a solemn little Hispanic couple standing beside what appears to be a bell jar or cloche; inside the bell jar is a flat round pallid wrinkled object. The caption explains: “AP Photo—Rubio Martinez and wife Maria of Las Cruces New Mexico stand beside a shrine encasing a tortilla Mrs. Martinez was frying when a pattern of skillet marks formed an image that she says looks like the face of Jesus Christ. More than 10,000 people have visited their home since October 1977 to view the miraculous tortilla….”
(Support Your Border Patrol.)
Tortillas. I am lapping up my chile stew when I notice a pair of beaded and hairy turistas at a nearby table. They look like dope dealers. One has unfolded his huge pale tortilla, staring at it in mock amazement. The thing is big as a cowpoke’s bandana, so thin it’s nearly translucent. He gets an idea, grins at his buddy, wipes his mouth and blows his nose on the tortilla. Sniggering, he refolds the tortilla with care, just as it was, and replaces it on its saucer. In this humble little eatery the tortilla will undoubtedly be warmed up and served again to a later customer.
Back to the paper. After Reston, Buckley, Royko, Safire, I turn to my favorite girls’ column, “Ask Beth”:
Dear Beth:
Every guy I start dating wants to jump in bed with me. My girlfriends have the same problem. Girls want to build strong relationships but guys seem to have just one thing on their minds. How can we deal with this?—N.D.
Dear N.D.:
Puberty causes both boys and girls to have sex on their minds a lot, but boys seem to have a more specific and insistent interest. Also our culture teaches boys to be more aggressive than girls. Accept that boys feel this way but remember that it does not mean that sexual activity is required of them or of you. It’s your right to say “No thanks!”
Some things never change. One million years ago the Pleistocene cave women were telling their nubile daughters the same story, both as bewildered then as their descendants are today.
It all reads so familiar, from front page to back. What can be older than the news? I refold the paper. And note the date. This here Albuquerque Journal is three weeks old. I’ve been conned and swindled once again.
I leave the waitress a good 25 percent tip—I can’t afford it but I’m in love with her, that soft brown body, that ivory smile; I envy the man who sleeps with her tonight—and pay my bill at the cash register near the door. The red-beaked hatchet-faced henna-haired witch on the stool never looks at me as she reads the check and rings up the charge. I lay the refolded newspaper on the counter at her elbow. “That paper,” I say, “is three weeks old.”
Lips moving, she makes no reply until she has counted out my change. Then says, still not looking up, “Today’s papers are in those vendor boxes outside.”
“Then why’d you leave this old paper on your counter?”
I see the hint of a malicious smile on her thin lips. “New paper costs twenty-five cents. Some people don’t like to pay the twenty-five cents. So we save this old paper for people like them.”
For chiselers and cheapskates like me. Temper temper. Watch it, Henry, don’t do anything violent. Calmly I say, “What’s that awful smell in the air?”
Alarm on her face. “What awful smell?”
“The awful smell in the air.”
She sniffs. “I don’t smell anything.”
“Smells like some kind of poison gas. Hydrogen sulfide, maybe. Or sulfur dioxide. Is there a uranium mill in this town, ma’am?”
“Th
is is the Uranium Capital of America, mister. We’re proud of that smell. That smell means money.”
“You like the smell of money?”
She scowls. “I’m busy,” she says, tapping on the glass of the counter. Fingernails like claws. The prim concave mouth clamped tight as a suture.
“Sorry,” I say. “Just one more question.”
“Yes?” She stares out the window.
“How much of a commission do you get on the sale of those newspapers in the vending machines?”
“We get five cents a copy.”
I look at the coins in my hand. I take a nickel and slap it hard on the counter. The sudden noise makes her jump. “Radioactive nickel,” I say. “Stick that in your dentures and suck on it.”
She reaches for the telephone. “I’m calling the police.”
My heart sinks. Three thousand miles to go. At least thirty more coffee stops. Running the gauntlet of merchant America: can I take it? “Listen, you old buzzard,” I mutter, “if the local cops got their sphincters as puckered up as yours they’ll never get their asses out of compound low.” I leave peacefully but not before blowing a kiss toward the waitress. “Venga, Señorita Gloria, vamos a Santa Fe.” She smiles shyly, shaking her head. I hope she pockets my tip before the witch spots it.
Back to the truck. Solstice the dog is glad to see me. Somebody loves me. We clear out of Grants, ugliest town in New Mexico, a town with no socially redeeming features whatsoever. It’s not even obscene. The Brain Damage Capital of the Southwest. All that radon gas. I pop the top from a can of Michelob and step on the pedal. DANGEROUS CROSSWINDS, says a highway sign. Jamming good old Merle into the tape deck. “I don’t worry,” he sings, “’cause it makes no difference now….” Quite so. Far out over the red mesas veils of rain hang halfway to earth, evaporating in the winds and arid air, tantalizing the range cows, the dry grass, the dust that wishes to become mud.
We pass the village of Acoma: neat little stucco houses with blue (good luck) window frames, each with a garland of ripe red chili peppers hanging on a wall, each with its woodpile and ax driven into chopping block. Saddle horses beneath the cottonwoods. Junked autos upside down give the town that contemporary high-tech look.
We top a ridge and real mountains reveal themselves on the eastern horizon, towering beyond red mesas and purple buttes and blue plateaus—country so beautiful it makes a grown man weep. Weeping, I pull off at an exit called Scenic Overlook; time to liberate some beer. As others have done before me; I can smell the urine deposits from half a mile away, crystallizing on the litter and garbage that always form an integral part of official Scenic Overlooks.
Onward, on the road again. I flip Merle Haggard over and he starts singing about his own troubles, always a consolation to hear. Don’t just lie there, he says, like cold granite stone; we’re too close to be alone….
Albuquerque, forty miles. Thirty miles. Bat-eared microwave relay towers—grotesque aliens from another world—stand on the higher ridgetops to survey our land, the scouts and sentinels of an invading army.
A giant ore truck thunders past at 85 mph, mud flaps flapping, twin stacks belching diesel smoke, streaking the clear air with a plume of sooty hydrocarbons. Scum. Swine. If only I had a pair of heat-seeking rockets mounted on each front fender of my Dodge and a red button on the gearshift knob—! I long for the day when I shall never again have to read the name Fruehauf on the asphalt trail before me.
Never mind.
Across the high plains of tawny, lion-colored grass, sweet and serene in the golden light. Under the splendid silent sun. Down to the valley of another Rio Puerco.
Albuquerque twenty miles.
Pinto ponies lounge along the fence, grazing on cheatgrass and green tumbleweed. A pillar of dust leans in the middle distance, whirling like a toy tornado. I pass Stuckey’s Pecan Shoppe: GENUINE MEXICAN ONYX $2.98. HOTDOG 89¢. BREAKFAST $1.98. We seem to be nearing Western Civilization.
Albuquerque ten miles. We top another ridge. Below lies the valley of the Rio Grande and the vast flat dirty gray gridiron of the city. On my left, a few miles to the north, stand the wartlike craters of three volcanic but dormant cinder cones where once upon a time and long ago, in the largest crater, a pair of college boys set fire to a truckload of used auto tires, sending a broccoli-shaped tower of black smoke four hundred feet into the sky, creating an hour of panic in the streets of Albuquerque.
Good old Van Hoss and me, we done it. On Bastille Day, 1952. And got clean away too, before the police arrived, and the fire department, and the university volcanologists. Most satisfying celebration I ever had a hand in, for sure, until the great night of my masterpiece, my housewarming party at Hacienda Lightcap in El Culito de San Pedro Mártir in Chingadero County, old New Mexico.
Now that was a party….
10
March 1956:
The Housewarming Party
I
Village plaza, El Culito. Founded by the sons of Coronado in the sixteenth century, the town is four hundred years old and looks it. There is one street, unpaved, lined by a row of mud huts and cottonwood trees. The houses are made of adobe bricks baked hard by the sun, eroded by the rains. Chains of red chili peppers hang by each blue doorway, geraniums bloom on deep windowsills, green and fuzzy hollyhocks stand along the brown walls.
On the west side of the broad dusty plaza stands an adobe church—San Pedro Mártir—with wooden bell towers, each tower surmounted by a gilded cross. Snuggled against the crosses are lightning rods. Two nuns in black habit walk briskly toward the doors; a hum of busy prayer resonates from within.
East of the plaza, facing the church, is a long rambling structure of mud and wood and sheet-metal roofing, a house with many doorways, many rooms. But the windows are boarded up, the doors padlocked. Attached to the house at its southern end is what appears to be a country store, also closed. Sheets of plywood, hastily tacked in place, guard the plate-glass window of the store’s business side. A message on the plywood says,
FOR SALE OR LEASE
CALL MATHER REALTY
327-4459
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.
The afternoon sun glares down from the bold bare New Mexican sky. A couple of ravens flap across the blue void. The open plaza remains empty, lifeless, forgotten. No traffic appears on the dirt roadway. Or not yet. But one mile north, beyond the flat-roof town, beyond the apricot orchards, alfalfa fields, irrigated pastures and corn patches, a rooster tail of fine dust ascends the air, catching the sunlight, coming closer moment by moment.
Despite the bright sun, the air is cold with a chill wind from the north. Mid-January. A crust of frozen snow glares like frosting on the cakelike strata of the Manzano Mountains, ten miles eastward and a mile high across the golden desert.
Action. Two empty beer cans clatter into the plaza before the stiff wind, followed by an old, once-red, sun-bleached pickup truck. The pickup swerves to avoid a panicked chicken, curves at unsafe speed around the vacant plaza and stops with a sliding flourish, a four-wheel drift, to face the rambling adobe house with its attached general store.
Switched off, the pickup motor dies. Something drops from beneath the engine, hitting the hard ground with a metallic clank. In sudden silence the two inside the cab of the truck—a young woman and a youngish man—sit and stare at the eroded mud walls of the house, the blank boarded windows, the sagging false front of the store.
“Well?” says Henry. Smug smile on his face, he looks from the corners of his eyes toward the handsome, large-eyed but frowning woman at his side. Tentatively, cautiously, he slides his right arm across her shoulders. “What do you think?”
“I wish you wouldn’t drive that way.”
“I know. Sorry. But what do you think about this place?”
“What is this?”
He lets his gaze rest with satisfaction on the deep fissured brown walls, the dilapidated storefront. “This? This is it, honey.”
“Impossible.”
�
�Our new home, Myra.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
He pulls two keys with tag from his jacket pocket. “Come on, I’ll show it to you.”
“Take me back to the train station.”
“Myra….”
“I’m going home.”
“Honey….” He tugs her close, browses with his lips on the sweet fragrance of her neck, the dense dark curls of her hair, the delicate and vulnerable ears. “Honey lamb, honey pie, honey baby, this is home. Forget New Rochelle for a minute.”
“I don’t mean New Rochelle. I mean New York.”
“Same thing. Come on now, Myra, please.”
“I heard something fall out of the motor.”
“Just a bolt. Mounts are loose.”
“Sounded a lot bigger than a bolt.”
“Maybe the battery. Or the muffler. Clamps are rusted.”
She pulls herself away from him, readjusts the fur collar of her coat. “Henry, if this truck won’t run….”
“Don’t worry, I’ll fix it.” He gestures toward the street, some parked and dismembered automobiles, a few swarthy natives who have emerged from their adobe huts to stare. “This place is full of Chevrolet experts, tools, spare parts.” Happily he waves at the silent bystanders, the yapping curs. Nobody waves back. “Chili peppers, friendly faces, an ancient community rich in deep Christian traditions.”
“Like the stake, maybe? Maybe thumbscrews and racks?” She looks over her shoulder at the shadowed church looming before the sun, cutting off the light, and shudders. “Henry, I don’t like it here. We don’t know anybody here. We’re too far from the city. It’s cold and it’s bleak and that house is a ruin.”
“It’s a hacienda. We’re only twenty miles from town. Wait’ll you see the inside. Come on.” He opens his door, gets out, the dogs back off. He takes a quick look under the truck, then opens the door on Myra’s side, takes her hand and gallantly helps her out. “Really, sweetheart, you’ll love it. The walls are two feet thick.” He tugs her gently but firmly toward the wooden veranda; she totters beside him on high heels, half hobbled by a tight sheath skirt that comes below her knees; her legs are encased in nylon stockings.