by Edward Abbey
Dere Henry your a nice man but a dumb jerk and I might come back someday but you got to learn to dance man you move like a wooden Indian love & kisses from your one & only
J. G.
Candy on the other hand was reliable, faithful in her fashion, always overbooked but available when properly bribed. An outdoors girl, she loved him in his ranger suit. Leave the Smokey Bear hat on, she said, but take off your socks please. They made love on the rocks at Grandview Point on the verge of a fifteen-hundred-foot vertical drop-off. A light rain was falling when she ran nude as a dryad, wearing nothing but sandals, among the junipers and pinyon pine at Anticline Overlook. Catch me, she hollered, catch me, as Henry lunged forward in mock pursuit. She laughed, springing away, he stopped and waited behind a tree until she came circling back like a rabbit, the prey in search of her predator. They rolled in the bunch grass and sand until Ranger Henry, always the gallant, brought her to a fixed position atop his long body. A pissant or two explored the sweating crevice of his buttocks. They always did. He ignored them until Candy, working hard in semiprivate delirium, came off like a firecracker—Henry meanwhile doing his best to recall the won-lost records compiled by Elroy Face, Vernon Law and Bob Friend of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates.
Good Lord but he wanted them all. Not all there were but—all the ones he wanted. Was that not fair?
What about—what was her name? Jill? Judy? Trudy? Ruby? Dixie? Trixie? The one he met at a party in Tucson the night the police ran amuck in Chicago. WELCOME TO PRAGUE, said a hand-painted poster in the gallery. WE LOVE MAYOR DALEY, said a flock of union-printed placards waved in the eyes of the TV cameras by a regiment of garbage collectors, aldermen, firemen, policemen, relatives and relations. Henry was drinking mescal, eyeing the worm in the bottom of the bottle, wishing he owned a machine gun. Then he met this chick and told her about his lonely post at a Forest Service Fire Lookout high on Bumblebee Peak in the Atascosa Range. She was lovely, cold, distant if mildly curious. He told her about the ten miles of rocky road, the bull in the pasture at the foot of the trail, the six-mile horse path up three thousand feet to the peak, the rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, the bark scorpions, the yellowjackets, the kissing bugs in the rocks. How interesting, she said, drifting away to refill her drink. Come up and see me sometime, he called as she faded beyond his ken. She glanced back at him once, shrugged, disappeared. Delayed fuse? Until two weeks later, sleeping on his bunk through an evening thunderstorm, he was awakened by a gentle tapping, a persistent rapping, on his cabin door. Yes, her name was Jill. She shivered in her rain-soaked blouse and jeans. He built a fire in the stove. She pulled a bottle of wine from her daypack and stayed for seven nights and days. Her home was in Washington, her father a senator’s chief aide. Henry never saw her again. But remembrance kept him warm for weeks.
How long could a man nourish himself on reminiscence alone? Henry sometimes feared that he was condemned to learn the answer.
He had other memories of Bumblebee Peak. He remembered the night he walked those six uphill miles after learning that another drugged and brain-retreaded crackpot had pulled a gun on another Kennedy. On to Chicago! shouted the jubilant Robert. Minutes later he was a goner, shot down in a Los Angeles hotel. Henry wept when he heard the news on his pickup radio and he wept for two hours more as he trudged up the mountain. Weeping, he climbed the stony trail with thirty pounds of booze and grub in the pack on his back, and wept for Robert Kennedy and Jack Kennedy, for Medgar Evers and Malcolm X and Ché Guevara, for the latest defeat in the hopeless attempt to stop a useless one-sided dishonorable war. He wept for himself, he wept for his country, he wept for the death of democracy. Long time dying, never fully born.
O Freunde! nix such tones!
He thought of Loralee. How about that Loralee kid now, that Loralee Croissant as he called her—the real name was something like Kressbacher or Krumpacker—who showed up one rare day in June, a year or two before—or was it after?—the Bumblebee affair. Henry worked as a river ranger that summer, pulling his hitch at a place called Lonely Dell on the banks of the Colorado River near the throat of Marble Gorge. She was from San Francisco, going down the river with a boating party of fifteen others, mostly men. He squeezed her lifejacket, checking for leaks, and slipped her a piece of paper with his name and mailing address as she climbed in her swimsuit over the silver-gray tubes into the wallowing rubber raft. Others helped her aboard. The boatman leaned back on his oars. The girl the boat the boatmen disappeared. But again he felt he had planted a little time bomb in a sensitive female heart. Three months later, in October near the end of his season, a letter of pastel blue arrived from San Francisco. Two weeks later he was walking the steep incline of Diamond Street between rows of white blue-trimmed happy houses when he saw the red-gold banner stretched between two second-story windows:
WELCOME, HENRY LIGHTCAP
He knocked on the door and she let him in. She was alone, cooking her specialty, lasagna con amore. She wore a minidress of the period, showing off short rounded tanned legs. Her chestnut hair hung straight and loose to the small of her back. Her eyes were dark, large, bright with play, augmented by a set of interesting crinkles at the outer corner of each. She was twenty-four years old, divorced twice, fond of the male animal and its principal member.
Henry needed a bath. (He usually did.) She ran hot water—adding shampoo—in a deep Victorian tub six feet long, its leonine feet painted gold with red toenails. She ran to the kitchen as he slid into the steaming and sudsy bath, then returned three minutes later, licking her lips, to scrub his back, massage his scalp and minister to his urgent erection. He took her and she took him in right there in the tub, Miss Yin and Mr. Yang in symbiotic synchromesh, splashing water all over the tiles, making one hell of a mess. Then came the lasagna (Loralee made her own pasta) and hot garlic bread and a bottle of Chianti and they were at it again like dogs forty minutes later, right there on the dining room rug, the woman on all fours as Lightcap, moaning like a hound, mounted from the rear. They collapsed. They half recovered. They went for a walk around the neighborhood. Peace signs and rainbow flags hung from windows. The flag of freedom, Loralee explained—symbol of sexual liberty. They returned to Diamond Street licking on cones of ice cream, vanilla for her, wild cherry for him. Back in the house she showed him her collection of R. Crumb Comix and before he knew what he was doing he was sunk again, eight inches deep in Loralee on the purple velour of the parlor sofa. Her roommates came in, two boys, a girl, greeted the pair on the couch with smiles and aplomb, with a peach, with a bunch of grapes, and scampered upstairs to their rooms.
Why are you so good to me?
Don’t ask, she said.
Exhausted, he sank back on the couch, the woman in his arms, and drifted down the river.
On the river. He lay in a leaky rowboat, motionless, drifting with the current down a wide bold river the color of brass. Above hung a fierce sun. Eyes shaded by the wide brim of a straw hat, he repacked his corncob pipe with Bull Durham from the pouch in his shirt pocket, struck a kitchen match on his teeth and relit the pipe. A puff of blue smoke strayed over the swirling silt-loaded water. The boat turned idly in the stream, pivoted off the end of a sandbar—oars dragging—and glided on. Small birds slipped through the thicket of willow on either shore. Behind the fringe of green a wall of sandstone five hundred feet high curved around the bend ahead. The wall was sheer, slick, unscalable, smooth and pink as the face of a sliced ham. He passed a nameless side canyon, a deep fissure in the monolithic rock where acid green cottonwoods trembled in the sunlight and a clear stream poured down a stairway of rosy polished overhanging ledges. He pressed a wad of oily cheese on the end of a fishhook, dropped a line over the side and waited for the first tug of channel catfish. For twelve days and one hundred and sixty miles of river he found nothing but primeval wildness, passed neither boat nor home nor any sign of man but the rusty boilers of a gold dredge half buried in the river bottom, a zigzag trace of toeholds and fingerholds—Mo
ki steps—leading up and over a dome of bare rock to the ruins of a village of mortared stone high in an alcove on the south-facing wall of a cliff. Miles away stood purple mesas and beyond the mesas blue mountains dappled with snow.
Down the river. Over the sea. He remembered a ship passing east by the rock called Gibraltar. And the ship passing north by the red cliffs and blue grottoes of Capri. And the ship as it entered the Bay of Naples, dark Vesuvio smoking against the sky. He remembered a girl named Brunetta who lived (with a dozen others) in a pastel-orange villa in a town called Amalfi. He remembered Napoli, the odor of burned olive oil, the trained expert whine of the child-beggars, the clashing gears of his motorcycle, the cry of the fish vendors, the smell and the texture of fried squid, the taste of cheese and tomato sauce on a circular crust of pizza hot from the tiled oven. And the red lamps on the rear of the one-horse carriages that patrolled the Via Roma at evening, the golden chandeliers of the San Carlo Opera, the pink shoes and pale tights and ruffled gauze tutus of the ballerinas. He remembered the rats that fled in hordes down the cobbled alleyways in the heart of the city late at night, his buddy Ken Wolfe at the wheel of the open Jeep, the windshield flat on the hood, the kick of the Colt .45 in his hand. My turn my turn, cried Wolfe, you drive now.
On with the river, endless river. He thought of the dank dark medieval quad of Edinburgh University on a dark dank misty day in September. Prince’s Street and the floodlit castle on the rock. The bloodthrilling bloodthirsty skirl of the bagpipes. He remembered a tawny mountain rising into clouds and a warning placard that read HERE LIE THE BONES OF DENNIS HUGHES / WHO CLIMBED BEN NEVIS IN TENNIS SHOES. He remembered a scowling poet named Hugh McDiarmid buttoned up in tweed and the flock of students around him, roaring with love. The Isle of Skye, as beautiful as its name. Bleak Inverness, cold Aberdeen, and a street in Edinburgh called Eden Lane that led into a bourgeois slum of identical red brick cottages, each with its plot of soot-black grass enclosed by a black iron picket fence. All doors closed tight, windows curtained, the street empty.
A channel crossing, gray Paris in its negligee of winter rain, a queer hotel on the Left Bank, the echoing caverns of the railway stations and the long journey south by rail to the sunlight and warmth and evil glamour of Franco Spain. He remembered that border crossing at Irún and the harsh masculine bellow of official Spanish voices blaring out of loudspeakers; he felt at once, after a week in Paris, that he had returned to a man’s country and dropped backward through time to the century before.
He remembered the mountains of Austria, the descent on skis from the Arlberg that lasted half a day. He remembered the boat to Bergen and the hills of Norway covered in snow and an early spring in Stockholm, splendid city of lakes and parks, and the student festival at Uppsala, the streets overrun by lanky drunken boys pursuing the most beautiful most golden girls in the world. In all eyes but their own. He remembered the return to Edinburgh and the news that he had failed every course. Easily.
So—Henry wandered south on bicycle to Cornwall, loafed for a week in the town of Bude, met a barmaid with perfect breasts and sweaty armpits and the violet-blue eyes of a Technicolor movie actress, walked her to the beach wrestled her into the sand pledged his eternal love and one week later walked up the gang-plank through the gangway (tourist class) of the Queen Elizabeth and steamed at once for New York City where he met, mated and married one Myra Mishkin, artist. A marriage that lasted, off and on but more off than on, for years and years. How many? Who’s counting?
Down the river. Down and down the lazy river, the mud-colored meandering lonesome river. El Río Bravo, the Green, the Dirty Devil, the Colorado. The Big Sandy. Crooked Creek. Stump Crick. He remembered the clouds in the sky, the wind on the hill as he rode on a high-built wagonload of timothy grass down the lane to the barn. He clutched at the handle of a pitchfork plunged deep in the hay, saving himself from a long slide to the ground, while Brother Will drove the team. Sunlight flashed on the brass knobs of the horsecollars, the doubletree jangled, the traces rattled, the hames jingled, the ironbound wooden wheels creaked and groaned as Will hauled back on the brake. They came to the ford where he stopped to let the horses drink, then lashed them hard for the haul uphill to the barn. The horses grunted, farted, haunches spread and straining as their iron-shod hooves struck sparks on the stone, and the wagon lurched forward, rolled through the muddied water—schools of minnows streaming up-current—and rocked through the mud and upward through pasture grass on the two bare ruts of the lane. He remembered the thunder of the team’s great feet when they cleared the entrance ramp and clattered onto the planks of the barn floor. And the choking dust that rose in clouds under the roof as he and Will pitched the loose dry sweet hay into the loft. And afterward the retreat to the springhouse in the side of the hill where steel milkcans beaded with dew stood in the flow of cold water down a cement trough, and they dipped a tin dipper in the water—he and his brother—and rinsed the jaggers from their parched throats and slaked their bottomless thirst.
Him and Will. Me and my brother.
19
Kansas to Missouri
On through rural Kansas, out of the high plains into the Midwest. The air is different here—no longer dry and thin, but soft, thick, humid, balmy with April. Lilacs in bloom, a sinful gorgeous purple. Dogwoods flowering here and there. Old gray farmhouses empty of life returning to earth within a protecting quadrangle of neglected woods, while round about, on all sides, back and forth, gigantic tractors with eight wheels and air-conditioned operator’s cabs pull gangplows and seed drills through the black soil. Sluggish little streams wind over the flat terrain. Surprise!—a great blue heron flaps across the highway. There must be a lake or pond nearby. A good omen, that bird, appearing to me now.
We stop for a while, a piss for me, a bowl of water for my dog, at a place named Cow Creek. Coronado also paused here, in 1541, before giving up his search for the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola and turning back toward Texas, New Spain and Old Mexico. Coronado recognized the potential of the Kansas plains, a region, he said, “capable of producing all the products of Spain.” He had his mounted soldiers with him, baking in their tin suits, and a priest named Juan de Padilla. Padilla returned to Cow Creek—then known as Quivira—a year later to christianize the Indians. As if they weren’t dangerous enough already. In return they martyrized him, thus pleasing both men and God. A monument to Padilla stands here, a twenty-foot white cross of cast concrete. “Jesus Christ, Victor” says the Latin symbol at the crux of the cross, commemorating the victory of faith and sacrifice and the delights of Christendom in the geographical center of the New World. Erected by the Knights of Columbus in 1950.
Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Motorist, pass by. We pass by, me and my dog, forging on into the leafy renascence of spring, the deep end of Kansas, the dense human drama of the American Midwest. But where are they, the people? I drive through a gentle time-eroded town called Marion and see rows of empty stores and boarded-up hotels. Main Street. One car and not a man, woman or child on the sidewalks. Is it Sunday? I stop for lunch in the Marion City Park, taking a table by the side of a barely moving stream called Cottonwood Creek. The afternoon seems perfect: soft vague clouds drift on a pale sky, the air is mellow with the fragrance of green grass and dandelions, a cluster of midges and a few dragon-flies play above the creek. But there’s nobody in the park except a couple of mothers with children and one teenage boy on a two-cycle motorbike. Where are the men? Where are the good male citizens of Marion, Kansas, on this sweet April day in the year of our Lord, Anno Domini 1980? I see neither hide nor hair of the rascals. Can they all be encysted in their stuffy fetid tract houses watching the National Lobotomy Machine? Or puttering about in golf carts over insipid greens in pursuit of little white balls? Fondling their niblicks, their spoons, their mashies and putters?
Approaching Emporia. Civilization once again. We dive beneath an overpass called Graphic Arts Road, passing a turnoff to Industrial Street, bypassing or
iginal Emporia neat and clean. Good old William Allen White would hardly recognize his hometown now. I latch on to the tail draft of a forty-ton Mayflower moving van and let it suck me like a bug through the near-continuous development—gas stations, boxfood joints, suburban box homes, condominiums, truck stops, shopping centers, redlight greenlight intersections, office buildings of pink cement and dark glass, assembly plants with walls of slump block and no windows at all, block-long warehouses and storage depots of bolted-together sheet metal—that walls in the four-lane superhighway from Emporia to Kansas City.
It don’t take long. Before sunset I’m one unit in the mass of wheeled helots streaming on elevated roadways between the towers of K.C. We cross the Big Muddy on a bridge so high and broad I scarcely notice the ancient river meandering below; we enter the state of Missouri.