by Edward Abbey
The fire blazes up, she rises, tugging down the tight dress, and stares me back, straight in the eye. “Well…?”
“Thank you,” I say. And pause. “Good night.”
She smiles at last—with relief, with gratitude. “You’re all right, Henry,” she says. “Not near as mean as you look.” She gives me a quick kiss on the nose and slips away, out the door and into the dark.
Not near as mean, I think, but one hell of a lot dumber. I stare at the fire for a while, then slowly painfully undress and stumble into the bathroom. The floor tiles feel warm to my feet. Radiant heating? Of course. I bang my shanks on the toilet, an old-fashioned W.C. with watertank mounted shoulder-high on the wall. A brass chain dangles from the tank, the figurine of a well-known eighteenth-century bewigged composer attached to the end. Pull Handel to flush. Small consolation for the ache in my groin. After a while I crawl into bed, gazing up at the mirror bolted to the ceiling. Taped to a corner of the mirror is a photo, the life-size face of Willem van Hoss, framed and matted, big smile, two fingers raised in papal blessing.
Morning comes. I stagger like a man recovering from delirium into the kitchen where van Hoss waits for me, patient and smiling. He pours me coffee. Has just returned, he says, from ten laps around the pool and a brisk walk to the Plaza and back.
“How’d you like Valerie?”
“A sweet girl. She left early.”
“She’s like that, sweet but flighty. Like the night-blooming cereus. Tender as a Venus flytrap and absolutely unreliable. What they used to call, in years of long ago, a crazy mixed-up kid. Don’t brood about it, Henry my friend. She’ll be back again tonight. Be patient with her.”
“She’s in love with you, Hoss.”
“This is her home. The only one she has. She wants me to be her father. I’m too old for the job. I’m content to be her painter. She makes a good model, if you can get her to lie still for an hour now and then. Lightcap, my friend, my very best friend, she needs a man like you, somebody strong and steady, sic, to take her in hand, help her grow up. Stick around, Henry.”
“Sure,” I say, “thank you, but it’s the old Bildad I have to visit one more time. Remember Morton Bildad? Morton the Mystic?”
“Sure I do. But he’s changed, Henry. India almost killed him. Amoebic dysentery. He’s a ninety-eight-pound guru now, with a beard down to his navel. He floats six inches off the ground, like a hovercraft. Keeps staring at something forty-seven light-years beyond the Horsehead Nebula.”
That, I think, is what I want to ask him about.
“He’s a dangerous man, Henry my friend. Worse than Roggoway by far. He’ll hypnotize you. He’ll tinkle windbells in your ear. He’ll make your umbilicus spin. He’ll extrude his lower intestine and hang it around your neck like a garland of Polish sausages. Best stay away from him, Henry.”
We were close friends once, I remind van Hoss. I only want to see him for an hour, touch his hand, say goodbye. Then back to Stump Creek, West Virginia. Then finally and at last I shall turn my nose to the East, bearing straight through the throbbing heart of America, home to the hills of Appalachia. Henry Lightcap, welcome back!
“Henry my friend, my very best friend, you make me want to cry.”
“Don’t cry, old Hoss.”
“Abrazo?”
“Por qué no, compañero?”
III
Time for country musick. One hand on the wheel, one eye on the highway, I fumble through a shoebox full of tapes searching for Beethoven’s Pastoral, for Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral. Can’t find neither. I slam Earl Scruggs & Lester Flatt into the slot: fiddle, banjo, steel guitars, that’s what I want now. Life! vitality! hope!
I stroke old Sollie’s hard head, slip her another Nizoral in a lump of longhorn cheese. Poor dog, she’s been leading a truckbound life lately. Once we get into the open again I’ll take her for a long walk through the sagebrush, under the cold sky and the frozen peaks of the Blood of Christ Mountains. She sits up at my side, staring ahead at the mesas and plateaus; a glint of interest in those solemn eyes. This high country is good for her; maybe she’ll whip that valley fever yet. That Tucson fungus.
Through Española and north, toward the valley then the gorge of the Rio Grande, El Río Bravo del Norte. Paul Horgan’s great river. Kit Carson country. Land of the chili pepper, the mountain man, the cutthroat trout and the land shark.
Time for my eight-course lunch: cheese, crackers, sixpack of beer. Not what the doctor ordered, precisely, but the customs of a lifetime may not lightly be discarded. “Dispose of Thoughtfully,” say the printed instructions on the sixpack. Thoughtfully I drop the first empty out the window two miles beyond Española. The can bounces along on the pavement before coasting onto the shoulder of the road. Some kid with a sack will pick it up. Recycle that aluminum. Give a hoot.
On my right, twenty miles away, stand the Truchas Peaks crowned with snow. Strange medieval little villages up in there—Peñasco, Las Trampas, Vadito, Truchas, Ojo Sarco, Llano. Grim spooky beautiful places full of people named Gallegos, Vigil, Velarde, Gonzales. They’ve been hiding in those remote valleys breeding and inbreeding since 1598. On my left is the river, lined with cotton-wood trees barely beginning to show a trace of spring green. Men on red tractors course up and down alfalfa fields, dragging disk harrows through the brown earth. Magpies fly above the pale stubble. The smoke of burning tumbleweed rises from the irrigation ditches. April. Planting time.
It was right here, along this stretch of highway, that things first went wrong between me and Myra. Myra Mishkin, artist. In the summer of—’54? ’55? We were hauling a load of her giant oil paintings—vague void muddled masterworks—from her summer studio in Taos to a gallery in Santa Fe. Stretched but unframed, they were stacked in the open bed of my second pickup truck, the 1949 Chevy with the rear end that did not exactly track in line with the front end. On wet pavement the tires left a four-tread trail. But that was not the problem. The problem was that I had forgotten to rope down the canvases. One by one as we raced along the wind picked them up and out they sailed, like wings, like hang gliders, before dropping to the highway behind us. By the time we realized what was happening, stopped, reversed and recovered the paintings, most had been run over by the traffic. Didn’t really hurt them much, seemed to me, they were all flat anyway, and the skid marks, I thought, actually improved the composition. But Myra never forgave me. Never forgot and never forgave.
Into the gorge. The rocky slopes rise on either side, pink as watermelon. Fishermen stand along the green rush of the river, casting for trout. A few ravens flap about overhead, going somewhere, getting nowhere, and one golden eagle—if I stopped to really look—would still be there, on its lime-spattered perch a thousand feet above, guarding the pass. As it was that day decades ago when love was young, doomed but indomitable.
I am weeping over my fourth beer when the truck tops out on the cold somber high plateau of Taos, New Mexico. Ahead stands the sacred mountain. On my left is the dark lava-rock cleft of the river’s canyon. Everywhere is sagebrush, a spacious silence, and the sweet exotic smell—like myrrh—of mysticism.
Finding my old pal Morton Bildad proves to be a problem. I have no address for him, we haven’t corresponded in years, and it turns out that he has no address for himself. His name does not appear in the Taos phonebook. Living on trust funds, incense and mountain air, he requires no gainful work and therefore has no place of employment, does not “hold” what the vulgar denote a “job.” Never did. Nor is he expecting my arrival: this is another surprise visit. Maybe I should let him alone anyhow, he’s probably got problems sufficient of his own, being a Hindu ascetic and saint and all, a guru with dysentery. But I want to see him. Once upon a time, at the University, years ago, we were nearly brothers, or closer than brothers. I owe him at least a farewell before our final parting. He to evanesce and reincarnate, I to decompose and rot, and which is the better God alone knows.
I park near the plaza, settle into a phone
booth and dial a few vaguely familiar names, seeking a lead. Old Bildad, says one, sure he’s around here somewhere but I can’t tell you where he lives, Henry, are you on the Path? On the what? On the Path? I’m on the road. What’s your sign? My what? Your sign? I was born under a chewing-tobacco sign. Mail Pouch. That’s a bad sign, Henry; what color is your aura? How do you mean? What color—red, orange, yellow, what? I think it’s black. Black? Black. I thought so, I can feel the vibes through the telephone, you need help, Henry. Then help me: where can I find Bildad? Read Be Here Now. What’s that? That’s a book by Baba Ram Dass. An address book? Be patient, Henry, he will find you. But he doesn’t even know I’m in town. He will find you. He’s not even looking for me. He does not have to look—he sees. I see. No, he sees. Who does? Baba. Baba—Baba who? Baba Ram Dass.
Time to hang up the phone. Can’t waste the whole afternoon babbling about some reamed-out Baba with another hash-smoking coke-sniffing coupon-clipping half-assed half-baked candy-assed sauterne-sipping floppy-necked quiche-eating trust funder. I am not a patient man. Life is short, particularly mine. But do try to be nice, Henry. Be generous, be kind, be large. Be yourself.
On the fifth attempt I find some assistance. Pete Dubray, an oldtime alcoholic piano tuner, poker player and drinking buddy, assures me that he knows how to find Bildad. Will even draw me a map.
We meet at Chuey Apodaca’s Cantina Contenta, amid the blare of off-key trumpets from the jukebox playing an old favorite of mine from the Revolution, “Adiós Muchachos, Compañeros de mi Vida.” Which revolution? The revolution. The incompleted revolution. Dubray looks terrible but so do I: we recognize each other at once, though we haven’t met for twenty years. He has become fat, florid, bald, his nose like a pomegranate, red with the broken veins of rhinophymosis. We absorb the shock of mutual and reflected disaster, then order the handiest therapy available—Wild Turkey with beer on the side. The ravages of alcohol are enough to drive any man to drink. I pay for the first round, take a sip of the whiskey. Weak. This Turkey has tap water in its arteries; some things never change, not at Eddie’s.
Dubray begins with the usual lamentations. Taos ain’t what it was in the fifties. Once a town of bohemians, artists, real Indians, Chicano cowboys, it has now been overrun with successive waves of uninvited immigrants: hippies, flower children, rock musicians, movie stars, Orientalist mystagogues, minimalist poets, rich idle Eurotrash with notarized patents of nobility, ski-resort developers, hard-driving entrepreneurs from Texas—and all of the above, each and every single one, with only one real passion in their hearts: real estate.
But I know this. This is the old story of the American West, how the West was won. Then lost. Paying for the second round (and the third) I steer Dubray gently toward the focus of my concern. Well, you mean Morton? he says, Morton Bildad, I tell you, Henry, nobody sees him anymore, he never comes into town and that seems like a good idea all right but how to find him? you really want to see him? what for? Old friend, eh?, okay, all I can tell you is he lives in a wigwam or something out west of the gorge, out there on that sagebrush flat near old Carson, him and his disciples, I guess they’re the ones keep him alive, and from what I hear, Henry, he’s got to be pretty weird and some of those diaper-head types that hang around with him can even be dangerous or so I’ve heard, Henry. Dangerous? says I; in what way? Why well they’re supposed to practice strange rites, there’s talk of missing tourists, disappeared babies, cows with mutilated udders and tails tied in square knots, people see funny blue lights out there at night, although I’ll tell you, Henry, I think it’s a lot of bullshit myself….
Conned again, but at least I’ve gained a clue to Bildad’s approximate location. I gas up my truck, drive south of town to the turnoff for Carson, take the dirt road along the Rio Pueblo to its junction with the Rio Grande and stop in the middle of the antiquated wooden suspension bridge to contemplate the great river for a while.
Twilight fills the canyon. Stars blink at me from beyond the purple-black rimrock. The cold mountain river flows beneath the bridge, as rivers tend to do, purling with hiss and gurgle about the basalt boulders that make up the shoreline. This was once a favorite fishing spot for friends and me, twenty-five years ago, before the town fathers of an ever-growing Taos allowed untreated sewage to flow into the river. The trout survived but never tasted quite the same as before; a certain flavor of babyshit and chlorine tainted the flesh of native brown, cutthroat and rainbow alike.
The fishermen, if any remaining, have left. No pickup trucks or cars in view, nothing on the footpath but the usual litter of pop bottles, beer cans, filter tips, toilet paper. However, one hundred yards upriver, on the right bank, is the dim form of something in white crouched on a shelf of rock at the water’s edge. World’s biggest snowy owl? An albino mountain lion? A woman in her nightie? Hard to tell in this deepening gloom. If that apparition holds a fly rod I cannot see it. And if man or woman, how did it get here? Taos lies ten miles away and Carson is a ghost town.
For a long time I sit on the hood of my truck, in the middle of the bridge, and listen to the river, the spotted toads, the bats, and keep an eye on the figure in white. It grows dimmer, dimmer, fading out, but never makes a move.
Masses of cold air come flowing down the canyon. Shivering, I get into my machine and cross the bridge, drive up the switchback road on the west slope of the canyon and reach the open country a thousand feet above. Too dark now to search for Bildad and his retreat, refuge, ashram, monastery, whatever it may be. I find a side road and make camp for the night within a circle of scrubby pinyon pines. I feed, water and pill the dog and take her for a looping walk through the sagebrush. We jump a few jackrabbits, startle a flock of doves, rouse one sleeping nighthawk from its nest on the ground. The coyotes, bound to be present, let us pass in silence.
Back to camp. I do not build a fire. Why spoil a clear starry night with the glare of burning wood? Why attract unwanted attention? Why send thermal signals into space where who knows what vast nitrogen-cooled brains—intergalactic WASPs, perhaps—may even now be scanning our planet for signs of edible life? I sleep in the truck with my .357 Magnum close at hand; Solstice sleeps on her pad beneath the open rear.
Awake to another lurid iridescent sunrise. A huge cloud like a hawk’s wing, underlit by flame, hangs above the eastern mountains from Colorado down to Little Texas. Storm front moving in from the central plains. Winter’s not finished yet.
Another long walk for the dog and me—she needs the workout—and then I return to base, build a fire of twigs and sticks, brew coffee, fry potatoes and eggs, season liberally with hot salsa and a splash of beer, and break the night’s fast. Despite my perpetual bellyache, my chronic melancholia, I retain an appetite for the fuels of life. You are what you eat? Only a gross billiard-ball materialist, even grosser than I, could subscribe to so reductive an absurdity. You are what you do, what you think, feel, love, hate, express and communicate to others, that is what you are. But it’s also true that in order to be you you have to eat. There’s a speck of truth in even the meanest of truisms.
I climb the nearest hill and survey the countryside with binoculars. One truck two miles off loaded with steers proceeds westward over the mesa, followed by a golden roostertail of dust. Three ravens circle above my head. One pale sun glimmers through the cloud cover. But I see no cluster of tepees, no ring of wickiups, no huddle of hogans anywhere. Where are you, Morton Bildad, O seer of visions, sagebrush sage, interpreter of dreams, extruder of entrails, dealer in magic and spells?
The stone ruins of the village of Carson dance across my lenses. I see movement there, human figures emerging from a Volkswagen microbus. They walk about, inspecting the empty buildings, regroup at their vehicle and confer. Like me, apparently, they are searching for something. Somebody. After a time they drive off toward the low hills in the west, following the dust cloud of the cattle truck. I return to my gray Dodge, trailed by my black dog, and drive on to the ruins myself. I too stop, get ou
t, look around and find an intersection, the main road going west, the others—dim tracks, rarely used—winding off to the north and south.
Bildad, where are you? I study the scene, groping for a clue. The stone huts nearby, roofless and crumbling, contain only the usual assortment of garbage, with piles of cow dung on the lee side. Nobody has lived here since Depression days, when a few hardy souls attempted to plow and dry-farm the surrounding desert. The remains of a windmill stand behind the buildings. The water tank is full of sand and tumbleweed. One lizard watches me from its sunny nook among the lava rocks. A skirl of wind carries a sun-bleached newspaper—the Santa Fe New Mexican—across what was once upon a time a sort of main street. A place for a showdown. A gun-fighter’s street. A stage where two middle-aging gurus might face each other and settle, once and for all, the fate of the world. No place for a nice Jewish boy from New York like Morton Bildad. Or for a cranky hillbilly from Stump Creek.
Far to the south a bird with ragged black wings hovers on the blue. I don’t need binoculars to recognize the red-necked turkey buzzard. A little early for the season, but—there he is. I take the jeep trail going that way.
I drive three miles over the stones, among the sagebrush and dwarf pinyon pines, grinding along in low gear. The road ends at a turnaround on the rim of a deep ravine. There are pools of water in the bottom and a few leafless, stunted cottonwood trees. A footpath leads across the slope of the ravine, traversing the chamiza, rocks and prickly pear toward a series of ledges at the upper end. On the topmost ledge two city blocks away, above flood line, half concealed by a pair of juniper trees, easy to miss at first glance, is an olive drab canvas wall tent. In front of the open flaps of the tent sits a man in lotus posture, facing the morning sun, motionless. Sunlight glints from the spectacles on his nose. He seems to be grinning at me, a large friendly gap-toothed smile of welcome. I lift one hand in a tentative wave, still not certain I’m looking at Bildad. There is no response but the grin remains fixed in place. Nobody else in view. There are some queer characters in these parts but I’ve got my .357 with me, stuck in my belt under my coat. I believe in my fellow man. I also believe in firepower.