The Fool's Progress

by Edward Abbey

  I come to the residence of Willem van Hoss. What you see from the street is a massive adobe wall, seven feet high, Lombardy poplars, Fremont cottonwoods, Englemann spruce standing within. I smell juniper smoke. Still chilly here, in April, at seven thousand feet above sea level, the sun buried behind clouds; of course there’d be fires burning in his many and various fireplaces. With his antique santos in their niches in the wall, the candles in silver candlesticks, the oxblood floors, the Navajo rugs, the Fritz Scholders paintings, the entire dreck and kitsch of smart New Mexican interiors.

  I bend down to peer through the hand-carved grille in the massive hand-carved wooden gate. A stone walkway winds between bird-baths and fountains to the white portal with its hand-carved wooden columns and the even more massive, even more hand-carved mighty front door. Some slim aesthete from The Architectural Digest would enjoy describing this dump; I don’t. I think of the Roggoways and their stucco bungalow.

  I unlatch the gate, enter and rap on the front door with the attached brass gargoyle. Silence. Again I clap the door knocker. Footsteps. The door swings partly open, a dark little Mexican girl, pretty as a picture postcard, looks up at me. “You are Señor Leaky-cup?” I nod. The pronunciation of my name sounds like something van Hoss must have taught her. “Come wiss me.”

  She leads me through a hallway past antique armoires, several side passages with closed doors, nineteenth-century oil paintings aged to the color of gravy. The plank ceiling four feet above my head is supported by square ax-hewn beams of oak resting on walls of adobe brick that must be three feet thick. We walk on unglazed Mexican tile, each square with a unique design.

  Sickening.

  The maid swings open another heavy door, revealing the grassy lawn, the tiled swimming pool, the elephantine trunks of old cottonwood trees. This is an inner courtyard, enclosed on three sides by the wings of the main house and on the fourth side by an adobe wall ten feet high. The maid gestures toward an enclosure on the roof of the south wing, above the pool, accessible by an open stairway. I see the head and naked shoulders of a man looming through a cloud of steam. Tufts of wet hair stand over his ears; he looks at first glance like a great horned owl. The owl pulls a fat cigar from his lips.

  “Henry!” bellows van Hoss. “Henry my friend—take your pants off and get up here.” A woman’s face appears at his side, smiling at me. White teeth, large eyes, dark streaming frame of hair—beautiful. Valerie? Or one of his others? They sink, disappear.

  I skirt the pool, climb the weathered planks of the stairway—the railing braced by Victorian spindles—and join the couple inside the chest-high windscreen. Van Hoss and the woman, grinning at me, sit in a redwood tub up to their necks in steaming water. On a sideboard within easy reach are the wine and liquor, drinking glasses, olives, onions, a broad array of biscuits and cheeses, an insulated silver bucket full of ice.

  Van Hoss rises, stands in the tub with water streaming from his mighty shoulders, his broad red-haired chest, his ample belly, and thrusts out a hand. We shake. But he wants more—abrazo! abrazo! he cries. We embrace. He nearly drags me into the tub. I withdraw, strip down.

  “This Henry,” he says to the woman, “he always did dress like a night watchman. Like a school-bus driver. Look at that flannel shirt; I’ll bet his mother made it thirty years ago. Those green twill pants—part of his ranger suit, purchased with taxpayers’ money back in the late fifties. And now, the underwear. Well, of course, no underwear, no underwear at all and my God, Henry, you’re thin as a rake handle, what’s happened to you? Get in here quick my friend, my very best friend, before you freeze yourself to death. What’d I tell you, sweetheart, the man is built like Ichabod Crane; Christ, Lightcap, when’s the last time you ate a square meal?”

  The woman’s name is Penelope Duval-Lloyd and she looks almost as good close up as she did from a distance. Van Hoss, I learn, abducted her from a London art gallery two years earlier; now she manages a gallery of her own in the booming resort town of Taos. Like van Hoss I too have a fondness for those English girls with their hyphenated last names. How could I ever forget Miss Virginia Rhys-Jones? Melissa Bright-Holmes? (Papaya Hall!) Valencia Smith-Davies?

  I drink my first martini on the rocks and relate the latest perhaps final episodes of my tragical history. A few snowflakes drift from the clouded sky as we soak in hot water up to our chins. And then the sun, blazing forth from an opening beneath the cloud cover far on the west, creates the paradoxical spectacle of a snow flurry superimposed on a lurid southwestern sunset.

  “Only in the Southwest,” explains van Hoss to his lady friend. “Nowhere else. That’s why we live here. Ain’t that right, my friend?” He turns his pale eyes, his blond eyelashes, his white goatee, his plump rosy intricately fissured face my way. “And now you say you’re leaving us? going east? for good? I can’t believe that, Henry. I cannot accept that.”

  “Tell me your story, Hoss.”

  “Real estate,” he says. “And cowboy art.”

  “In that order?”

  “They go together, my good friend.” He flips his cigar butt, streaming sparks, over the outer wall and into the dark alleyway below. We hear a yelp of pain, a string of Spanish curses—some innocent passerby, more likely another lurking rapist, has just caught a burning cigar down his shirt collar. We hear the hurried patter of feet, the fading sputter of receding but explicit ill wishes: fuck your mother oh son of a whore…(Chinga tu madre, hijo de puta.) When the silence is restored, van Hoss observes, “There you have it, compañeros. What is life? A shout in the street. Galloping shoes in the twilight. Asì es la vida.”

  A pause for reflection before he tells me how he bullied and bribed his way into membership in the Cowboy Artists Association a few years before, thus guaranteeing that none of his romantic but photorealistic paintings—Stepping Across My Zebra Dun, e.g., or Sundown on the Brazos, etc.—will ever again sell for less than $35,000. Each. “Why horseshit, pardner,” he says, lapsing into an affected drawl, “even that ol’ Scholders don’t get no more’n $15,000. And he’s a artist, a genu-wine fuckin’ whiskey-drinkin’ redskin genius.”

  I ask him if he actually bought that piece of property down in El Culito, the site of my housewarming party. “Just curious….”

  “Did I buy it, Henry? Henry my friend, my very best friend, I did not buy it I stole it. Right after you burned down the house I went to see that Mrs. Mather with cold cash in my hand and she was glad to take $5,000 for it. $5,000 for fifteen acres only twenty miles south of Albuquerque. Only twelve south of the airport. That was, when?—about 1956? 1957? So I just sat on that little parcel for ten years, let the neighbors clean it up, plow it, irrigate it, raise alfalfa on it for free. The property tax was about ten bucks a year. Then I leased an acre of it to a Circle K store for $1,500.”

  “$1,500?”

  “Yeah, $1,500. Per month. That helped pay the property tax, which kept inching up every year, you know. You know how those little saddle-colored fellas are in the county courthouse, my friend. Always expanding their schools. Too many kids. About five years ago I leased the rest of it to something called an investment development group out of Denver by way of Mexico City, Miami and Chicago for about $22,000. They’re building something they call an ‘industrial park’ in there, whatever that is.”

  “That’s $22,000 a year?”

  “No Henry.” He smiles and passes me a cigar. “Per month.” His girlfriend grins.

  “That’s obscene.”

  “Sure is.”

  “And they’re building it right across from the old mission church?”

  “The Bishop has already blessed it. The place will employ a hundred locals. It’s Mexican money.”

  “Mexican?”

  “Well, your money actually. Yours and the other taxpayers. The money comes from the World Bank and the IMF, through the Mexican government through some building contractors in Mexico City through a Miami Laundromat through—I don’t know, it gets complicated, not sure I fol
low the whole procedure myself. Anyway, part of it ends up in my account, no-account schemer that I am, and that’s what I care mainly about. When feeling blue, I contemplate my bankbook for spiritual refreshment.”

  “Ends up in Zurich, you mean?”

  Van Hoss smiles again, lighting my cigar for me. “Lightcap, old friend, my very best old buddy, you don’t understand. I’m just a little itsy-bitsy silicon neuron in this money machine. No self-respecting Swiss financial institute would bother with my bag of marbles. I keep my pennies in a piggy bank.”

  “Obscene.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “Roggoway is right.” I gaze at the lingering, forlorn flare of the sunset. More snow is falling but we three stay warm as fish in soup. “We should load our guns and shoot you bastards. The whole filthy crew.”

  Van Hoss stirs in the tub, probably wrapping his girlfriend’s hand around his cock, under the water. Anyway he looks pleased. He lights his own cigar and like me stares at the fading western light. “So old Roggoway is still playing revolutionary? I do see his name in the papers now and then. Good for him. Good to know some of the old crowd’s keeping the pinko flame alive. Maybe I’ll send him a contribution. You saw him?”

  “He offered me a job, Hoss. Maybe I should take it.”

  “I’ll give you a job, Henry, if that’s what you want. We’ll even get you some underwear. Stick with me, young fella, and you’ll be farting through silk. And frisking with the best.”

  Spontaneously, naively, his words make me think of the voice on the van Hoss answering machine. At once I feel a restless itching in my genital parts. Valerie Emerging from the Bath…. Pavlov’s dog. For shame. Biting my tongue, I say, “Roggoway offers me honest work, Hoss. No pay but honest work.”

  “Life is always better in the chief’s hut, Henry.”

  “For the chief maybe. Doing what?”

  “Oh, hang around. Keep me honest. You used to like guns. Want to be a bodyguard? I can get you a pistol permit, make it legal for you to carry a concealed weapon. Or how about night watchman here—you already got the uniform. No? Want to be a real-estate broker? I can get you the license within forty-eight hours. This is New Mexico.”

  The bite. The bribe. The New Mexican ethic, where anything official turns out to be crooked as a dog’s hind leg. The best petty bureaucrats money can buy. Patrón politics. Bilingual nepotism. Corruption not merely as a way of life but as the end of life. But look who’s thinking. Henry the Rat.

  “He looks so serious,” says Penelope, smiling at me over her glass of what Hoss had called “a tiny little Bordeaux.” “I think he’s weighing your offer.”

  “No he’s not,” says old Hoss, “he’s trying to come up with a crushing rejoinder. But young Lightcap here is a country intellectual, slow of wit. Though his heart’s in the right place: between his legs. We’ll find a way to civilize him yet.”

  “I’m sure you will.” Penelope rises from the tub, wrapping a huge purple bath towel about herself as she does so. But not before allowing me time to admire her long smooth back, her sleek haunches in skin as pink as an English rose. No bikini shadow on her. One tiny pimple and a few strategic moles accentuate the general effect. “I’d better see how Maria and her man are coming with dinner.” Barefoot, she trips away.

  Van Hoss allows me a minute or two for thought, then says, “I know what you’re thinking, my friend. But consider this: Christ died on the cross to save the world. And he failed. And this: we now have a life expectancy of fifteen minutes or the time it takes an ICBM to rocket from Kamchatka to Los Alamos. Home of the Fat Boy, only twenty airline miles from here. Why not enjoy those final fifteen minutes?”

  Why not, I think. The image of Penelope’s buttocks, each with its own sweet dimple, lies emblazoned on my retina like the afterglow of sunset.

  “Not that I expect any ICBMs to come our way,” the Hoss goes on. “Except maybe by accident. The people on top have too much to lose—power, prestige, profit, all the pleasures that come with it. Starlets, for example. Ballerinas. Air Force One and a private helicopter in the Rose Garden. A ranch in the West or a villa on the Black Sea. We should get down on our knees every night and thank God our leaders are such shameless hypocrites. Ideology? What is ideology? A flag. A holy book. The color of your team’s jersey. There’s about as much difference between their side and our side as between the Chicago Bears and the Washington Redskins. What we really have to worry about Lightcap my friend are not the Russkies but the Southerners. I mean Latin America, Asia, Africa. Those people are breeding like fruit flies. They are starving and they are desperate. Their boat is overloaded, sinking. They are already climbing into our boat by the millions. And they don’t stop breeding when they get here. Soon enough, maybe by the year 2000, life in America will be degraded to the level of life in Mexico. Assuming present trends continue. And who, my friend, my very best friend, is making any effort to change those trends?”

  I stare at the lingering sunset.

  Van Hoss smiles and refills our drinks. “Maybe I’ve got the timetable wrong. Maybe we’ve got forty good years left instead of only twenty. But the thing is coming, old buddy. The deluge.”

  “I’m not sure I believe all that.”

  “Then you should go back to Roggoway and his little team of twelve. Only Roggoway doesn’t understand what’s going on either. He’s still got his head buried in politics. But our troubles are not political, they are biological. Logic alone is not enough; you’ve got to look at the bio-logic.”

  The telephone rings on the sideboard. Van Hoss picks it up, speaks a word, listens, smiles, puts it down. Turns his beaming billy goat’s face to me. “Dinner is ready, good buddy. And I have a surprise for you.” He winks. “Let us descend.”

  There are four of us at table under the ten-foot-high beamed ceiling. Candles flickering here and there like immobilized fireflies. Pinyon pine burning in the corner fireplace. The maid Maria in a black dress and a dark young man in vest, open shirt and democratic blue jeans wait on us, taking their orders from van Hoss in his discreet, soft-spoken español. He sits at the head of the majestic table, looking baronial in a rich but modest blue woollen robe, fresh white pajama shirt, silk ascot folded loosely around his fat pink neck. No doubt before this evening’s over he’ll be standing up and laying his dong on the table for all to see, putting the big salami on display. Or perhaps he’s outgrown that sort of frivolity.

  Penelope, at the foot of the table, wears a skin-tight red gown—stunning. Yes indeed.

  But it’s the young woman across from me who turns my bowels weak with desire. Nor am I for a moment put off by the silver cross that rests, lies cuddled, between those twin mounds of French vanilla. I know a Christian whore when I see one. I believe. I can read the meaning in her smoky sullen hazel-green eyes: a cannibal docility with unappeasable appetite. I think. She barely glances at me from time to time, never smiles, opening her lips only to accept a bit of teriyaki chicken from a fortunate fork. She says nothing. Me neither. Van Hoss with gentle resonant voice dominates the room. Let him. Talking about—wild rice? Rabelais? White burgundy? I forget.

  Almighty God, I think, why hast thou done this to me again. Nerveless, numb, I force myself to eat. I’m going to need all the strength I can muster before this night is over. I hope. God supplies guidance but I must find the strength.

  Mozart in the background. Where he belongs.

  Her name is Valerie. Naturally. Her last name I didn’t catch. Butterfingers Lightcap, don’t drop the ball this time. More wine, I tell myself, and madder Mozart—but not too much. Deft hands appear and disappear before me, refilling my glass, plates and cups and saucers come and go. I find myself staring down at the two halves of a pear afloat on a thin golden sauce. Fruit, pale and female, ivory ovaries of an idealized sweetness.

  Penelope has slipped from the room. I become dimly aware, through the miasma of alcohol and my dreams, that the Hoss is smiling at Valerie from an immense distance. S
he nods, sullen and silent. Then van Hoss is gone. The help has returned to the kitchen. Silence. Or almost—the fire crackles in the womb-shaped fireplace.

  “Henry?”

  “Call me Hank.”

  “You’re kidding. Nobody calls anybody Hank anymore.”

  “They don’t?”

  “No they don’t.” She rises. “Come on, I’ll show you where you’re sleepin’ tonight.”

  I stumble to my feet, trying not to stare as she moves before me. “Where’re you from, Valerie?”

  “Alabama, I guess. Come on.” She leads me through the central hallway, as Maria had done before, out the back and down the pillared gallery along the inside of the north wing. Van Hoss and his plutocrat’s palacio. Rich swine. Bloated porcine hog of a man. The riffraff scum that always rise to the top of the social stew. Good wine, though. And nice hired help.

  Valerie opens a door, steps inside. Here too a fire has been laid in one of those little adobe fireplaces, ready for the match. A king-size double bed, coverlet turned down. A half-open door reveals the adjoining bath. Leatherbound books on shelves built into the wall. Recessed lights. Cowhide basket chairs from Mexico. The usual santo in a niche. The inevitable two-thousand-dollar Navajo rug on the floor. The banalities of the Santa Fe (Holy Faith!) rich. How I despise them—I believe. “I been poor, I been rich,” said Billie Holiday (I think); “rich is better.”

  Valerie kneels at the fireplace, lighting a stick of Georgia pitchpine from L. L. Bean in Maine, her lovely face concealed by the fall of glossy, honey-colored hair. I smell the fragrance of Eau de Joi. The maroon silk dress clings to her slender waist, the swell of her hips. Speechless, I can only stand and stare.