by Edward Abbey
Well, he began—
And another question, Lightcap: Do you really want to be a professor of philosophy?
What? He looked up sharply from his clasped hands, which were resting on his lap in an attitude of thoughtful introspection. Sir?
You heard me, Lightcap. Do you really want to be a professor of philosophy?
I certainly want to be a philosopher, sir, and live la vie philosophique, goddamnit.
Answer my question.
Henry reflected. A fork in his road of life had most suddenly appeared dead ahead. To the right, the right way, a broad and shining highway led upward beyond the master of arts toward the Ph.D.—the tenured leisurely life of overpaid underworked professorhood. A respectable life. Anyone who is paid much for doing little is regarded with obligatory admiration. To the left a dingy path littered with beer cans and used toilet paper led downward in darkness to a life of shame, of part-time and seasonal work and unemployment compensation, of domestic strife, jug wine, uncertainty, shady deals, naïve realism, stud poker, furtive philanderings, skeptical nominalism, pickup trucks, a gross and unalembicated nineteenth-century eight-ball materialism. He called his shot. I will not tell a lie. Looking at his three Inquisitors looking at him, he answered them collectively:
Not really, he said.
IV
You what? Got a new job. What do you mean you got a new job? I mean I got a new job. What about the old job—the assistantship? Sank it; I quit. What do you mean you quit? I mean I got fired. Fired—what do you mean? I flunked the orals. You flunked the orals? Yep. You’ve got to be kidding. Nope. Henry, your whole career depends on getting that M.A. this semester. Not now it don’t. What do you mean—and stop talking like a peasant. I mean I got a new career. What do you mean you’ve got a new career? I mean a new career. Like what? State Highway Department. What? New Mexico State Highway Department; we’re paving the road from here to Albuquerque. We? Yep, we, me and the boys. And that’s your new job? Yes’m. You’re going to shovel asphalt out of a truck? No, I’m gonna inspect asphalt. You’ll what? I’ll be workin’ for the state, not the contractor; we inspect the stuff, keep them up to standards. So you’re going to inspect asphalt? my husband is going to be an inspector of asphalt? Well, someday; right now I’m only an asphalt inspector trainee. Henry, I don’t believe this. Sorry, Myra. I can’t believe it. I know, honey, but goddamnit you should’ve seen those smug bastards sitting there in that office staring at me. But you’ve ruined your life. I know. Don’t you care? I suppose. Do you really want to be an asphalt inspector? Not really. And what about our married life—suppose I’m pregnant? What kind of a life can we give our baby? I don’t know. I thought you knew everything. I know. I hate know-it-alls. I know it.
V
He also filed job applications with the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service. What he really wanted, perhaps, was to ride a horse through the primeval forest while composing poetry—a verse in the wilderness!—or guide timid but willing young lady tourists up mountain trails toward the giddy summit of their mutual desires. He knew or had heard that such pleasant work was available on a seasonal basis from time to time, at one place or another, and that his college diploma (B.A., thirty-third percentile) made him eligible and his not dishonorable discharge from the wartime Army of the United States gave him a five-point veteran’s preference over other applicants. He mailed off the official forms, with covering letter, to three different national parks and forgot about them. Meanwhile he inspected the asphalt.
Eight hours a day five days a week Henry dug circular core samples from hot asphalt paving before the steamrollers reached it, lugged his samples into the NM Hwy Dept’s mobile housetrailer laboratory and subjected them to a series of tests and analyses. The procedures were simple and routine, the mathematical formulas cut, dried and preestablished, the quality standards highly adaptable, depending on the mood of the supervisor, the amount of the payoff, the political influence of the contractor.
Every day he saw the chief inspector and the construction company foreman engaged in private discussion at the far end of the trailer lab. The thundering and continual boom of the asphalt plant twenty yards up the road drowned out their words. Black smoke billowed over the trailer, infiltrated the ventilation system. He worked in a world of pitch, tar, gravel, sand, smoke, oil, bombinating uproar, blatant corruption and the rich gentlemanly smell of bitumen. He drove his pickup home in the evening with face and hands and neck blackened as a coal miner’s. He might as well have been back in West Virginia.
Henry built up the fire in the kitchen stove and carried in six buckets of water, half filling the galvanized tub. When the water became hot he climbed in and scrubbed himself, using a rough brush and a cake of gray gritty Lava soap. Splashing soapy water everywhere, stove lids sizzling.
Myra stood in the doorway in her paint-smeared artist’s smock, a spatter of paint on her nose and eyebrows. (Highly arched, distinguished brows, he thought, above intelligent and mocking eyes.) She watched him, her man her husband (good God!) wiping the dried sweat and smeared soot from his face upon a clean rag and said, Happy now? Satisfied?
It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m okay. He got out of the tub, swabbed himself vigorously with a big towel. It’s them other folks are in bad shape.
Stop talking like a fool. You threw away four years of graduate study to become an asphalt inspector.
Trainee. It’s only temporary. He pulled on his jeans. No underwear.
Trainee. And now look at you. How am I supposed to explain this to my family? How can I explain it to myself?
Henry smiled, putting on a clean shirt. Remember what your father said. “Sleep over with him, liff around with him but for the luff of Gott marry him? Him for a husband you twist the knife in my heart.”
He never said any such thing.
That’s what you told me.
And don’t you make fun of my poor old father either. He’s dying, you know.
Everybody dies. He’s almost sixty years old. He makes too much fuss about it.
Her eyes grew narrow. You cruel bastard. You cruel heartless pig. He’s a better man than you’ll ever be. He worked all his life. He provided for his family. He never cheated on his wife. He’s a good man, a good kind honest man…. The tears welled up in her eyes.
Henry stopped buttoning the shirt. Sorry, Myra. I’m sorry I said that. He reached for her, tried to embrace her. She struck his arms away, turned her back to him. Honest, honey, I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.
How would you feel if you had to go through heart surgery over and over?
I don’t know. But he thought: Men who know how to live know how to die.
Maybe you wouldn’t be so brave either.
I know. Although…The devil whispered in his ear. I guess I wouldn’t have to clip my toenails anymore.
What a bastard you are. How can you be such a rotten, cheap bastard.
It’s hard. He embraced her from behind, spoke softly in her ear. I’m sorry. He’ll be all right. They’ll fix him up, it happens all the time. People live with it. They go on.
She stood sobbing in his arms, her back against him. He bent and kissed the delicate skin of her neck, the tender flesh below the ears, and murmured in her hair. Please, honey, let’s not talk about it. Think about Sunday. He unbuttoned his jeans, letting them fall to his shanks.
What about Sunday?
The party, beautiful, the party. Our grand opening. Roast goat. Cabrito. Champagne punch, wine, Ritz crackers, four different kinds of surplus commodity cheese. (What a friend we have in cheeses.) The housewarming, honey. All your friends are gonna be here. We have forty people pledged to show up. The social event of the season. We might even, who knows, sell a couple of—paintings? He lifted her big globed breasts in his hands. Hey? Whatta you say? He nudged her against the kitchen table, bending her forward over the edge. He lifted the stiff smock and tugged down on her baggy dungarees.
No, she said, no
t now. She rolled from beneath him and stalked out of the room, hoisting her pants high around her waist.
Her husband gaped after her with outspread pleading arms—useless. Hobbled by the copper-riveted jeans around his ankles, he made no attempt to pursue. With breaking heart, his rejected aching hard-on twitching high in the air, he whined like a sick hound, Myra…my Myra…my only Myra….
The sound of one door slamming.
Pause.
He looked at his good right hand. Still couldn’t see, after all these years, any hairs growing out of the palm. Nor was he any crazier than before. Masturbation is a lonely art, he reflected, but there’s this to be said in its favor: you do build a good relationship with yourself.
VI
Undismayed and undeterred, Henry Lightcap made his preparations. Saturday morning he bought a young he-goat from a neighbor, one Cipriano Peralta Santiago Morales; after forty-five minutes of friendly haggling he got the price down from $20 to $6.50 with a lead rope thrown in for free. He led the frisky little fella home and tethered him to a dead tree in the orchard. The goat began at once to graze on the dry stubble, the tumbleweed, the-old yellowed newspapers and the bark of the tree. It was not a fat goat but big for its age; the little horns were twice the size of Henry’s thumbs.
Taking his spade, Henry dug a knee-deep pit in the soft dirt of what had once been a garden. The goat watched through the slotted pupils of its eyes, perturbed by some image from its racial unconscious, then returned to feeding. Henry lined his pit with stones and filled it with well-cured applewood, stacked log-cabin style to form a well-drawing pyre. He cut and piled more dead applewood nearby. Almost noon by the sun. Henry pulled a whetstone from its sheath and began to sharpen his knife.
The goat heard, looked and bolted, breaking off the rope at the base of the tree. Henry ran, trapped it between a corner of the house and the barbed-wire fence and caught it with a diving tackle. Should hang him up first by the hind feet, he thought, alive, then slit the throat. But that wouldn’t be easy now. Sitting on the goat’s back, he drew his pocketknife and flipped it open, yanked the hard head up and backward—the calm yellow-green eyes stared into his. O Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind. Henry could feel the violent beating of the animal’s heart, the surging lift and fall of lungs and rib case beneath his own 180 pounds of human weight, human power, human domination, human greed. Good God, he thought, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. Cursing, he sliced the keen edge of the blade across the goat’s throat and did it.
There was no further struggle; the beast died quietly. Henry hung it by the pasterns to a tree near the fire pit.
Feeling sick and hollow, he let the goat complete its bleeding, catching the blood in a pail, then gutted it—dropping the steaming viscera on spread-out newspapers—and skinned the animal clean. Flayed, the young goat looked pale as a dead baby. A few flies gathered but not many; the air was chill, silent clouds floating across the face of the sun. Henry lit his fire, pausing to watch the flames rise and dance.
Myra stepped out on the back porch of the store to drop rags and papers into the trash barrel. She stopped and stared. Her husband, with blood-smeared hands, forearms, face, knelt at the side of a blazing pit. Behind him, a naked child hung upside-down from a dead tree.
Henry. Good God.
He stared back, grinned: Cabrito, Myra. Goat. We got to feed our guests. Got to get things ready.
She stared at him, the goat, the fire. Disgusting, she muttered, but he thought he saw a sneaking admiration in her eyes. Hell, she was a carnivore too; hadn’t Henry felt her sharp teeth often enough? Disgusting, she repeated, returning to her studio.
He wrapped the unwanted organs and guts in several layers of newspaper—setting aside heart, liver, kidneys—and stashed them for the time being on the roof of the tool shed, shady side, beyond reach of the village dogs. He weighted the package down with rocks. Later he’d bury it in the pit in the garden; would make good fertilizer. He stretched the hide on the same roof, tacking it down flesh-side up toward the winter sun, and scraped off the remaining tallow. Goatskin gloves, men. Handbags, ladies.
He took down the goat and laid it in a tub filled with his secret marinade: six bottles of beer plus honey, garlic, red chili and oregano. He soaked it through the afternoon and into the night, meanwhile keeping a fire going in the pit. Near midnight, Myra sleeping, Henry wrapped the goat in marinated cheesecloth and layers of wet burlap and carried it into the dark backyard.
The fire had died to a shimmering bed of red-hot coals. He shoveled most of the coals from the pit, exposing the glowing stones. He lowered his bundle into the opening, covered it with wet alfalfa, replaced the hot coals, covered the coals with dirt and tamped the dirt firm with the back of the shovel. He put his hand on the bare dirt and felt no warmth. The heat stayed buried below, doing its work.
Meantime, during the afternoon, Henry had engaged the village band for Sunday. The band consisted of old man Apodaca, accordianist; old man Vigil, guitarist; and old man Peralta, fiddler. None were under sixty-five; the young men of El Culito, busy melting down the springs of their Chevies, played only radios.
After hiring the band, five dollars per player, he drove his truck to La Cantina Contenta, Eddie Vigil, Prop., and bought the essential ingredients for a proper art-salon soiree: ten gallons of Gallo Brothers Dago Red, a keg of beer, a magnum of La Corona Superlativa champagne (hecho en Mexico), universally acknowledged to be the world’s worst but cheapest champagne. Myra had insisted on champagne punch for her gallery opening. He also bought a gallon of Gallo’s fine Oakland Bay Chablis to fill out the champagne.
On the way home Henry paused at Mama Vigil’s little one-stop general store for a dollar’s worth of gasoline—empty the hose, por favor—and a large economy bottle of Alka-Seltzer tablets.
This party was costing him a pretty peso, a full week’s pay to be precise, and Myra, when she figured it out, would throw a conniption fit. But really, what else is money good for? And would there be enough to drink? Naturally he’d invited everyone in the village to come, as well as his gringo friends to the north, and if only a tenth of the locals showed up the beer and wine might drain away fast. But Henry’s friends, the wiser heads among them, would bring booze of their own.
He looked forward with confidence to the consummation of his plans and hopes.
VII
Willem van Hoss, that enormous excessive fellow, arrives in the early afternoon, driving up in clouds of dust and a cold blue wind from the north. Great belly sagging over his bull rider’s buckle, red beard draped over his chest, black hat clamped on his balding head, he stomps in boots across the planking of the veranda and bursts into La Galerie, shouting—
“Chinga los cosmos!” He seizes Myra in his arms and crushes her to his broad frame, kissing her sloppily on mouth and eyes. “You sullen sexy little slut, what’s a girl like you doing in this slum? Let me take you away, away forever, into the romance and the wonder of Albuquerque.” She submits briefly, helpless but smiling, then slips from his grasp as van Hoss spots Henry stirring the champagne punch. “Hah, there he is, the lean skulking hillbilly himself.” He strides to Henry and lifts him off his feet with a bear hug, then drops him, takes the ladle from Henry’s fingers and samples the punch. He makes a face.
“I know,” says Henry. “Flat, ain’t it.” Glancing toward Myra, he sees her going to the door to greet van Hoss’s latest girlfriend, still outside in the car repainting her face with the aid of a rearview mirror. Henry opens the bottle of Alka-Seltzer tablets and empties the entire contents into the punch. A jubilant fizzing begins at once in the murky depths of the bowl. He adds a chunk of dry ice. Billows of vapor rise whirling in the air.
“Lightcap, my friend, my very best friend, you’re a scoundrel.” Van Hoss draws a pint of bourbon from his pocket, offers the bottle. “Drink this, Henry, and let’s have a look at this palacio of yours.”
Henry drinks, returns the bottle, wiping his mouth on b
ack of hand. “First I want to meet your new lady there.”
The girl approaches the table, staring with exaggerated awe at Myra’s huge paintings hung on the walls, then at the red-hot stove in the center of the gallery, then at the paintings again. She wears a fur coat, black cocktail dress, high heels; a mane of golden hair spills across her shoulders. She stares boldly at Henry and he remembers her instantly, a painful twinge of recognition. The yellow-haired chickadee….
“You like Camus?” he says.
“I love him.” Her eyes glow. “How did you know that?”
“We must talk.”
“How did you know?”
Henry smiles wisely. “I’m a philosopher too.”
Myra butts in, bringing new arrivals to the punch bowl: art students, models, dancers, a couple of young art-history professors—her crowd. Politely they taste the champagne, toast her new studio, before moving on to the warm red wine displayed on the table, the keg of beer in the corner.
And now more guests come crowding in as the winter sun goes down, bringing with them the smell of fresh cold air and windblown dust. Dodging his primary responsibilities as host, Henry takes van Hoss on a tour of the property, out the back door and into the garden.
You said her name is Melissa? That’s right. And she lives in Papaya Hall? I didn’t say, Henry, but that’s a good guess; who’d you bury here? El cabrito. They kneel to touch the raw mound. Slightly warm, a little heat seeping through, the goat should be ready. She’s only a sophomore, Henry, much too young and innocent for the likes of a dog like you; and besides, you’re a married man. I’m married but I ain’t dead. Henry, Henry, you shock me; you disappoint me; you’re in for a life of trouble, young man. I like trouble. Yes you do, Henry, and you’ll get it; but in the meantime—. Yeah? Willy’s big paw squeezes his shoulder—You’ll have to wait your turn.
They take shelter from the wind in the doorway of the farthest room, drawing out the bottle again. Van Hoss throws the cap away. They watch the yellow grit of El Culito swirl in moaning minitornados through the dead trees. Kill it. You kill it. Okay. Henry kills it, tossing the bottle away, and leads his guest back to the studio-gallery by way of the boarded-up, dungeonlike rooms of the north wing, stumbling over loose boards, old bottles, bound stacks of antique magazines—Woman’s Home Companion, Arizona Highways, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New Mexico Stockman.