by Edward Abbey
She stares me straight in the eyes with a gaze as cold as a snake’s: “Look, dad,” she says; “how many children you got, huh man?”
Touché. I essay another smile but no more words. I crouch over my bottle of beer and consider the next move. Shoot myself? Drink the beer? But then what? Where to? (And I think of my own little girl. Ellie—she’s seven years old now. And still locked up in East Virginia with that witch of a grandmother. The Snag. The Claw. Well, we’ll take care of that. Soon. Maybe.)
To the pissoir, certainly. Into the rancid yellow light, the puddled floor, the pungency of ammonia, where I do my best to keep in touch, to put my finger on the pulse of Young America by reading, once again, The Writing on the Wall:
—mene mene tekel…
—this aint no wigwam dont beat your tomtom here
—players with short bats please stand close to plate
—dont piss on the floor; be a man, piss on the wall
—be a hero: piss on the ceiling
Where to now for godsake? Get out of here. The racket from those speakers is destroying your inner ear. Must be 140 decibels of sheer assembly-line adolescent uproar. The Rolling Clones. The Almond Brothers. The Pimples, The Mumps, The Measles. Imitation-Afro-urban-industrial-freeway culture: music to hammer out fenders by in Yokum’s Paint & Body Shop. Feeling my way through the dark and the throng, checking the buttons of my fly, I grope toward the street recalling an ancient Shawnee medicine song:
Let us see, is this real,
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
You gods who dwell everywhere,
Is it real, is it real,
This life I am living?
Of course not. I stumble up the sidewalk into evening light, the sun of April hovering close above my favorite volcano on the western horizon. There’s the fragrance of blooming oleanders on the springtime air and I am reminded, with a pang, of Napoli, of Amalfi, of Tucson, Arizona, of Elaine—! (My third final wife.) Of Claire…
Ah no, not that. Find something to eat. Grab a newspaper, find a coffee shop, eat some soup, drink some coffee, read the daily noose and drown your sorrows in laughter and pity. There is no pain, Camus said, which cannot be surmounted by scorn. How true. I turn into a fast-food franchise, one of those large airy clean well-lighted places with only a muted murmur of Muzak in the background, scrounge about for an abandoned newspaper, find one (current) and slump with pleasure into a corner booth by the window. Yes, I like to read the newspapers but I refuse to support a noxious habit by paying for the damned things. The newspaper is the book of life. But one must maintain standards.
A face I know confronts me through the glass. A man stands on the sidewalk outside, grinning at me through the window. A short stout fellow wearing a tweed cap, tweedy coat, mustache, glasses and skinny necktie. He looks like a professor. He is a professor. I know this man. But who is he? Brain damage, brain damage—I cannot recall his bloody name. I wave him inside. Followed by two of his students, a Mexican or Indian and some variety of Oriental, he joins me in the booth. Who goes here?
Smiling at me with his yellow teeth. His weary eyes in a wreath of wrinkles. The same old permanent frown marks between the eyebrows. “Henry,” he says joyfully. “Henry—don’t you remember me?”
It was years ago. Decades ago. Another age, a former life: 1952? 1956? College days….
“Henry—we used to integrate restaurants together.” Grinning at me with expectant delight.
Yes! There were four of us sitting at a table in a sleazy off-campus bistro called the Dixie Diner. Opposite me was the large well-mannered smartly dressed black man from Alabama, a professional outside agitator named—Hobson? Right. The waitress, refusing to serve him, has just asked us to leave. We refuse. Then a giant cook comes rumbling out of the kitchen, rag in hands, a sweaty red-faced bald-headed man trembling with anger. He towers over Hobson, orders him out. Politely, Hobson requests a menu. The cook grabs a bottle of ketchup from our table, breaks it over Hobson’s head. Blood and ketchup pour down the black man’s face. Politely Hobson repeats his request. The cook snags Hobson by the collar, starts to drag him from his chair. Out of here, nigger. There’s a scream of rage at my side and this little guy, this fat short future professor, leaps at the cook, clawing at his neck, bearing him down to the floor.
“Roggoway….” We clasp hands, soul-brother style.
“That’s me. How’ve you been, Henry.”
“Roggoway the Giant Killer.”
“Henry Lightcap, caretaker.”
“That cook—he nearly killed you.”
Roggoway’s smile grows broader, deeper, sunnier. Infected by his smile, the two kids at his side, a boy and a girl, smile in tandem. “That’s right, Henry,” says Roggoway, “but guess what, I kept tabs on that guy: he died eleven years ago. An aneurysm. A stroke. Each year I celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday by pissing on that lousy bigot’s grave.”
We gabble on; food and drink, of a sort, arrive on table. Roggoway’s students, downing their coffee and cake, pick up massive textbooks and leave, reluctantly. Our conversation takes on overtones of serious intent, undertones of insidious import.
I tell him my story. The breakup, the smashup, the crackup, my molehill of petty personal disasters. He gazes intently into my face as I go on. I see a chink of authentic sympathy in his black Irish eyes, the twitch of genuine co-misery on the lip. Naturally I withhold certain details. No need to burden the poor fellow with all my troubles. He ain’t a priest; nor am I supplicant for absolution.
“Well,” he says, when I conclude, “where to?”
“Home. See old Will, give him a hand. Help my mother—she’s close to eighty now.”
He keeps looking into my head. “What else?”
I break down into song:
Gonna build me a cabin
on the mountain so high,
that the blackbirds cain’t find me,
nor hear my sad cry…
“Henry, I want you to stay with me and Helen tonight. You’ll like her. She’s a good woman. And then tomorrow I’m going to introduce you to another lady I know.”
“What’s wrong with Helen?”
“Helen’s my wife. This other one’s an oral surgeon named Madge. Handsome woman.”
“I don’t need any oral surgeon.”
“Not for your gums, you fool. For your heart.”
“How old is she?”
“Not as old as you are.”
My attention falters. I can visualize this woman already: an equine face, faded hair, long thin arms, brisk and understanding conversationalist, nervous tics in one cheek, that desperate loneliness in the eyes. Would be like looking in a mirror. In my heart I weep for her.
“Now now, Henry, don’t cry. From what I’ve heard, you never had any trouble finding a woman.”
“Only when I needed one.”
“I have other projects for you. I’ll keep you busy.”
“I’m headed home, Roggoway.”
“We need you here.”
“Nobody needs anybody anymore. There’s so many humans now we’re all redundant.”
“I don’t need that Malthusian crap, Henry. I’m talking about real work. We can use you right here in New Mexico. We need somebody who can talk, who can mingle, who can organize, who can lead.”
I look to one side, then the other, then behind me.
“Yes you,” he goes on. “Listen, Henry, I know you’re in pain. I went through a divorce once myself, I remember what it’s like. Like an amputation without anesthesia. So what you really need is to get involved. Be active. Take part in life again, get into the struggle. Like you used to do.”
“Struggle struggle struggle.”
“Right. Don’t sneer. Look, the DOE wants to set up a nuclear waste dump down near Carlsbad. We’re going to stop that. But it won’t be easy. We want to get a nuclear freeze petition on the ballot. We want a comprehensive test ban treaty. We want the CIA
to stop meddling in Central America, let those people have their revolutions. We want to get an underground railroad going for political refugees—a sanctuary movement. We need a stronger affirmative action program at the University; especially for Native Americans—too many of those kids are dropping out. We want—”
“Anyone born in this country is a native American. How about some affirmative action for poor white Appalachian hillbilly trash, Professor Roggoway?”
Roggoway smiles. “You too, Henry. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do here. Get you on your feet.”
“What’s my starting salary?”
“Now you’re talking sense.” Roggoway pauses, signals the waitress for his fifth cup of coffee—I see ulcers, embolisms, thrombotic clots, various kinds of internal varices in his future—and turns back to me. Maybe I can get a bottle of beer in this place. But what I need is a sensible serious structuralist drink. A double shot of bourbon in a glass, with the bottle handy.
“I’m glad you asked that question,” Roggoway resumes. “It shows you’re paying attention. And the answer is your salary will be nominal, naturally.”
“What’s natural about nominal?”
I can hear the tumblers clicking in his brain as he looks at me. The do-gooder, the bleeding heart, the concerned citizen, the militant reformer: what a pain in the neck they are: always making us feel guilty about something. We admire them, we need them, we can’t stand them.
“Henry,” says old Rogg, “Helen and I live in a big house. The children are grown up and gone, we’ve got lots of room. For the time being you can stay with us, we’d love to have you. When you meet the right woman—knowing you that’ll take about a week—you’ll probably want to move in with her. As to salary, you’ll get basic expenses, enough for meals, first aid, gasoline—you’ve got a car I suppose? Money for postage, correspondence, maybe some secretarial help when we get rolling, what else would you need?”
“A drink?”
“Certainly. Although to tell the truth, Henry, I’ve laid off the juice myself. And I don’t miss it.”
As I tinker with my cup and saucer, watching the waitress bounce about—I’ve got this weakness for girls in uniform: cocktail waitresses, cheerleaders, majorettes, go-go dancers, meter maids, marine gunnery sergeants, prison matrons—I am aware of Roggoway’s eyes boring into the slimy catacombs of my soul.
“Henry,” he says, and his voice drops a tone or two, “you have got to change your life.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I think it over. I heard him all right. I know what he means. Transcend self-obsession. Find happiness through service to a noble cause, peace for example. Justice, e.g., a clean environment, etc. Live not for thyself alone but for others. Why not? It seems simple enough. Very hard, but clear. But—how become a saint without becoming obnoxious? I don’t know about Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Francis of Assisi but I can see that Henry Lightcap, with halo, would be an insufferable prick. He’s bad enough as is. “Old Rogg,” I reply, “I want to see my brother.”
“I’m your brother. All men are brothers.”
Now he’s lapsing into banalities. Time to nail him to his cross. “If all men are brothers, I’ve got no brother. I mean Will. My brother.”
A pause for reconsideration on all sides. “You’re so damned contentious, Lightcap.”
“Look who’s talkin’. I’m not the one gets into fights during non-violent civil-rights demonstrations.”
He smiles. “I know. I’m not perfect either. But I try. Henry”—I can feel the final pitch coming now—“stay around anyway, for a few days. Helen hates housework, we can always use another cook and dishwasher in the house.”
“I can bake a good loaf of bread.”
“There you go. Wash dishes, bake the bread, give us a dose of your opinions at the dinner table. You’ll earn your keep. Mi casa es su casa, as we Anglos say.”
“I thank you, Rogg.” I can feel the tears welling up behind my eyeballs. Two sentimental fools on a dead limb, out west in Limbo, New Mexico. This world, these friends, what more could a body want?
We walk to Roggoway’s house; he lives only a mile from the campus. We walk and we talk. Of housewarming parties. Of Santa Fe and Duke City and Taos and New Mexico in the fifties, before the jet-set androids took over. When there was still a rough magic in the smell of pinyon smoke, the sound of ranchero music, a garland of peppers dangling from a yellow-pine viga against the mudstraw texture of an adobe wall. Now there’s nothing but chic boutiques staffed with androgynous jerks selling superfluous junk to trust-fund trash. Stuff that nobody needs for people with more money than anybody needs.
“Henry,” says Roggoway, “what’s going to become of you?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“I’ve got politics. Helen has her Sierra Club, her whales and mountain lions, our boys are grown up and into making money, but what about you, Henry? What the devil are you doing with your life?”
“I’m not doing anything with it. Do I have to do something with it? I just live it. It lives me.”
“Too easy, Henry.”
I meet his wife, the plain plump placid Helen. But there’s a fierce light in the eye there: that woman’s a fighter. No wonder the beef ranchers and strip miners and clear-cutters and their flunky politicians fear this dumpy little, quiet little, homely little woman.
“Now you just stick around some,” Helen says in her west Texas manner. “I been hearin’ about you, Henry Lightcap. Seems like all my life.”
Roggoway winks at me over his wife’s shoulder.
The house is full of maps, charts, magazines, books, with huge inflammatory posters mounted on the walls. Viva la causa! Viva la huelga! Viva la revolución! We sit around a glass-topped table in the kitchen. Helen makes cocoa. To my surprise, Roggoway the reformed drunk produces a quart of cognac. I drink my cocoa, then fill the cup with Courvoisier when the telephone draws Helen away for a minute. Roggoway stares.
“God, Henry, you need all that to get to sleep?”
“No.” I empty the cup, refill it. “But it helps.”
We talk. About midnight Rogg shows me to a room upstairs. It’s his boy’s room: star charts and UNM football schedules hang on the wall; three brass tennis trophies stand on the bookshelf. I look through the kid’s books—mostly how-to-do-it manuals on auto mechanics, deer hunting, body building—and find a Bible. I take it to bed with me, thinking I can always numb myself into narcosis with a few chapters from Leviticus or Deuteronomy. But first, only for fun, I let the Good Book fall open at random, seeking a sign, and this is what I read:
Enter into the rock and hide thee in the desert…
Oh please no. I close the book, shut my eyes, and try again:
He will cut me off with pining sickness;
From day even unto night wilt thou make an end of me…
No! Once more:
God setteth the solitary in families.
That’s better.
He bringeth out those which are bound with chains…
Yes!
But [oh-oh!] the rebellious dwell in a dry land…
O my Lord, I think, unready for such words, spare me the exile of thy wrath. For I too have been rebellious. A rebel against love.
I stay with the Roggoways one night and a morning, recover my dog and my truck and sneak northward via the back roads, frontage roads and dirt roads to Santa Fe. Yes, I am Ithaca-bound. But it’s never too late for one more visit, one final visit, one more final farewell visit to old Willem van Hoss.
II
Entering the city of Santa Fe, pop. 50,000, my course is obstructed by a caravan of military trucks manned by triumphant, happy Mexicans in combat suits. Is this the long-expected reconquest of the Southwest by Mexico? No, it’s only the New Mexico National Guard returning from maneuvers. Troop carriers stand parked near McDonald’s (“42 Billion Sold”) and Burger King (“Home of the Whopper”); in front of a Taco Bell franch
ise an important-looking artillery piece rests on its carriage, muzzle directed at the oncoming traffic (Taco Bell’s cannon); while here, there, everywhere, columns of steel-encrusted tourists coming out of nowhere converge upon the adobe heart of America’s oldest city.
Waiting for the metallic impasse to loosen up, I find among my tapes an old fifteenth-century rondeau by Delahaye:
Mort, j’appelle de ta rigueur,
Qui m’as ma mistresse ravie,
Et n’est pas encore assouvie
Se tu ne me tiens en languer…
(lyrics by F. Villon)
You said it, brother.
No progress ahead, despite the swelling clamor of auto horns. I shift my truck into compound low, climb the curb on my right and drive down the sidewalk into a back alley. Somebody shouts—a yell of rage. I turn the corner and cruise through the alley, reach the next side street and turn east toward Canyon Road and Camino del Monte Sol. If they don’t like the way I drive they can stay off the sidewalks.
Eventually I thread the maze, emerge onto Monte Sol—old Hoss’s street. He’s expecting me; I finally got past the answering machine, “Valerie” and the commercial message. No place to park, of course; the street is barely wide enough for an oxcart. The ancient double wooden gate to Hoss’s private driveway is padlocked. The insolence of the rich. I am forced to leave my machine in a commercial lot half a mile off: PARKING FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY; ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED AWAY. Santa Fe the City Different. Different from what? Well, I suppose it’s different from Pittsburgh or Detroit: the burglars habla español and the enchiladas come in seven shades of green.
My soul is weary of my life. I will give free course to my complaint. I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. (For I am not a patient man.) What is my strength, that I should wait? What is my end, that I should be patient? Eh?
Speak up, God. Put up or shut up. Put out or get out, nobody rides for free.
The only response I get is the bleat and bray of salsa music pouring from a caravan of low riders on recon patrol in this, the white man’s part of town. Larcenous hearts bent on window-shopping and who can blame them? How would we feel if our hometown was overwhelmed by an alien race with different ways, sharper eyes, a different language, longer legs, an attitude toward us of benign contempt based on means, methods, wealth and power that lend them an incomprehensible, apparently insurmountable, bland blond blasé superiority?