Caminos

by Scott Walker

  The black furrows of freshly turned soil undulated off into the distance in the grey, dawn light of the Iowa morning. Jack was at the wheel of his midnight blue Saab. Robert gazed drowsily out the window at the slumbering farmland.

  “Oh, man, I need some coffee,” Jack groaned. “I knew it was a bad idea to open that second bottle of sake at eleven. Three came way too early.”

  “But it seemed like such an excellent proposal at the time,” Robert said, chuckling. “Plenty of time to sleep when we’re dead.”

  “That may come sooner than either of us wants if I don’t get some caffeine in me soon,” Jack said. “I suddenly snapped to about half an hour ago and had no idea how long I’d been sleep-driving.”

  “Thank God,” Robert said. He motioned toward a point of bright yellow light on the horizon.

  They tumbled out of the car, stretching their legs and backs, and meandered slowly toward the doors of the blazingly lit Shell station. “I am so fucking fatigued already,” Jack said as they entered. “And we still have at least 700 miles to go.”

  Jack had been posted to an army recruiting company in Des Moines. Robert flew out to spend an extended Easter weekend visiting him, and they decided to drive across the Great Plains to see the Little Bighorn Battlefield, where George Armstrong Custer met his end. They each had dreamed of such a trip since they were boys but never imagined they would get around to making it. The Greasy Grass, as the Lakota called the Little Bighorn River, always seemed impossibly remote from West Virginia.

  “Fuel,” Robert said, dragging the Pyrex pot full of sludge-black coffee from the warmer. He sniffed it and added: “This would make a corpse stand up and dance.”

  “Pour me the biggest cup they have,” Jack ordered.

  Sipping from thirty-two ounce Styrofoam cups of the bitter, scorched coffee, they raced through the rolling swells of the western Iowa landscape—seemingly as endless as the sea—and into Nebraska. Mile after mile of tilled, fertile earth awaiting another annual round of germination, growth, ripening, harvest, and winter sleep. Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits blared from the Saab’s CD player, then U2’s The Joshua Tree. Robert and Jack sang along enthusiastically, delighted to be on their little adventure.

  “So, how’s the wedding planning coming along?” Robert asked somewhere in eastern South Dakota, as a tumbleweed—the first he had ever seen—bounded across the highway ahead of them.

  Jack would marry in June. “Oh, hell, mostly as much aggravation as you can imagine. But Beth did agree to let me pick out the china and crystal. I love her, but I wouldn’t trust anybody—except you, of course—with that decision. Speaking of which, on the crystal: if you could only have three, would you get? A water glass, multi-purpose wine glass, and champagne flute? Or a white wine glass, red wine hock, and champagne flute?”

  The question consumed the next forty miles of South Dakota countryside. They debated the relative merits of each combination with an earnestness that most people would find absurd, including Jack’s fiancée, which is why she had gladly agreed to leave the decision to him. Robert and Jack could, and often did, go on like this for hours about obtuse topics, wheeling tangentially from one to another. Beth’s maid of honor had said just the weekend before—when Jack and Robert launched into a comparison of china patterns over dinner—that they should be the ones getting married. They had laughed it off and continued their conversation.

  The highway stretched westward, the sun crept higher in the vast expanse of blue sky, and Robert and Jack talked and talked and talked about things great and small. Robert had never in his life enjoyed someone’s company as much as he did Jack’s. He also fed off his friend’s strong self-confidence and buoyant personality, and Robert appreciated deeply that they engaged in so much frivolity. When Robert passed his time alone—as he was generally between his periodic disastrous romantic relationships, he tended to over-seriousness and dark thoughts.

  At the Kimball Motel and Liquor—a gas station and weatherbeaten line of welded-together mobile homes in a particularly desolate expanse of South Dakota—they sat in the car laughing until their sides ached. A dog that looked like a rabid wolf had chased them, snarling and barking, back across the parking lot when they had strolled over for photos with the establishment’s crudely hand-painted sign.

  They heeded 150 miles of roadside signs urging travelers to “See Wall Drug” and spent half an hour wandering around the rambling tourist trap, which sat alone in an equally desolate patch of South Dakota. Buying stamps for their postcards at the Wall Drug post office, Jack offended at least half the other patrons when he shouted to Robert at the other end of the counter: “Which do you prefer: the young, skinny Elvis, or the bloated, drugged-out Elvis? I tend to think the latter is more true to life.”

  Time felt suspended as the day wound on and they covered more territory in one drive than either of them had before. “Everybody should do this at least once,” Robert said as they left the interstate and turned onto a winding, two-lane road which cut across the northeast corner of Wyoming. “There’s no way to appreciate the enormity of the plains unless you drive across them.”

  A fierce storm rolled in from the west as they gained elevation and entered the Cheyenne Indian Reservation. The slate-grey skies and gusting sheets of sleet-laced rain deepened the grimness of the scenes they passed: household garbage strewn along the roadside; the rusting carcasses of thirty-year-old cars in one barren field; battered refrigerators and washing machines piled like blocks in another; rickety houses without windows and doors.

  “They strip the copper from the houses and anything else they can get their hands on, to sell for cash,” Jack said. “Mostly to buy booze. It’s ungodly what we’ve done to these people. I never fully realized it until I got posted out here. We recruit heavily on the reservations. What an irony: the best hope for most Indian kids, thanks to the shitty lives we condemned them to when we stuck them on the rez, is to get into the US Army.”

  When they descended from the mountains, the storm broke apart as if on cue, and a rosy, golden light bathed the low hills of eastern Montana. In the distance, Robert glimpsed the dark outline of a squat obelisk perched atop a bulbous, grassy swell in the terrain. “Look! Look!” He nearly shouted. “That must be Last Stand Hill.”

  Robert had long before discarded any illusions he once harbored about the nineteenth-century Indian Wars, and the drive across the Cheyenne Reservation only enhanced the reality of the injustice meted out to the Native Americans. Still, for a time in his boyhood, he had been enthralled by the stories of westward expansion and the Civil War—and the romanticized exploits and demise of General George Armstrong Custer in particular—and Robert could not help but feel giddy about seeing this iconic bit of American history first-hand.

  Ten minutes later they pulled up to the entrance of the Little Bighorn National Monument. The gate was closed. They climbed stiffly from the car and stared in disbelief at the chain and padlock.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Jack howled. “We drive a thousand miles, and it’s closed?”

  Robert looked at his watch. “It’s only a little after six. And it’s a hill. How can it be closed?”

  They had planned to stop and see the battlefield and then drive on to the Black Hills, two hours to the south. They paced around like tigers in a cage, looking at the gate and up the lane going into the park and back to the gate.

  “Look down there,” Jack said suddenly. He pointed into a gulley off to to the left of the road. About thirty yards away, the six-foot wire fence which ran in both directions from the gate was crunched down to the ground. “I don’t think Custer would’ve let closing time and a fence stand in his way, do you?”

  “Hell, no,” Robert said and sprinted down the steep hillside through the scrub brush to the breach.

  Feeling like conquerors, they strolled up the lane past the little museum and to the top of a rise. The ridge and its footpath ran away from them, gently downhill and up again for a couple h
undred yards to the knoll with the granite obelisk. The Little Bighorn River, not much more than a wide creek, wended sluggishly along below in the valley to the right, its banks lined with budding cottonwood trees.

  Robert silently recounted the details of the battle as they walked up the path past the white marble stones which marked where Custer’s troopers had fallen. Robert had enjoyed visiting historic sites for as long as he could remember, but this was the first time he actually felt the spirit of the place and the events which had unfolded there. He could sense the U.S. soldiers’ fear and the Lakota warriors’ triumph. He could hear the pounding of a thousand hooves, war cries, shouting cavalrymen, cracks of gunfire, fusillades of arrows slashing the air. The slaughter. The pyrrhic victory. And then, when he reached the top of Last Stand Hill, silence. The ghosts of the battle faded away, and Robert returned to April 1992.

  They felt no need to speak. Robert and Jack stood looking at the granite monument and the sweep of western landscape, the wind buffeting the burgeoning prairie grass. After a few minutes they sauntered toward the car, looking back every few yards to fix the image of the historic ridge in their minds.

  “What a gift,” Robert said as they drove away. “To see it like that, all alone.”

  “We couldn’t have asked for more,” Jack replied.

  Anticipation had energized them for eighteen hours and a thousand miles. Now the weariness and fatigue of the journey took their turn. “I say we postpone the drive to Deadwood until tomorrow,” Jack suggested, “and crash at the first place we see.”

  “That is an excellent plan, Lieutenant,” Robert said.

  The American Inn—thirty minutes from the battlefield in the scruffy Montana town of Hardin—was a relic from the 1960s. The worn out, two-storey motor lodge catered primarily to big-game hunters, and the reception desk was dominated by a moth-eaten mounted moose head with a rack the size of a loveseat. Robert and Jack checked in, plodded into their overly bright and tackily decorated room and collapsed on the hard beds.

  Jack sat up and unzipped his duffle bag. “I’m whipped, but this day deserves a final celebration.” He pulled a fifth of Jim Beam from the duffle. “Normally, neither of us would drink this shit on a bet. But I couldn’t think of anything that better shouts The Old West.”

  “That it does indeed,” Robert said. He dragged himself from the bed and fetched two plastic cups from the bathroom sink.

  Jack poured two inches of whiskey into each cup and raised his. “To George Armstrong Custer, Sitting Bull, and a fine, fine day.”

  “Hear, hear,” Robert said.

  They emptied their cups, and Jack refilled them. Animatedly recalling the day, they drained the bottle of Beam before they realized it. Robert and Jack crawled into their beds bleary-eyed from exhaustion and bourbon.

  Chapter 31

  Central Virginia

  June 1997

  Virginia would not have been more thrilled if Robert had taken her to Washington and introduced her to the president. Probably less so. The Waltons, the 1970s television program chronicling the life of a family in bucolic 1930s rural Virginia, was her all time favorite. She never missed a weekly episode during its original broadcast, and she still watched it nearly every day in reruns. Now she and Robert stood looking at the set of the program’s farmhouse kitchen, in which many of the title family’s joys and struggles had unfolded.

  “It looks just like it does on the show!” she said.

  “Well, yes,” Robert replied. He was delighted to see her enjoying the day so much. “It’s the set. They brought it here from California and reassembled it.” They were in Sharkey, a village strung along a forested ridge south of Charlottesville, Virginia. The family on which the program was based had lived there, and the old elementary school converted into a museum of the show.

  Surrounded by the gold, orange and red autumn foliage, Robert and Virginia strolled down the blacktop road to see the actual farmhouse. Virginia was a little disappointed that it did not look like the one on television, but she was excited to hear that descendants of the real family still lived there.

  At the general store / souvenir shop, Robert bought her a light blue “Walton’s Mountain” T-shirt. Virginia insisted on wearing it out of the store, and she was beaming as they got back into the car. “Thank you, Robby,” she said and squeezed his hand. Hers was plump, with crinkly skin like a lizard’s. Robert generally loathed when people called him the diminutive of his name, but he liked it when Virginia did.

  He was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, five years after that late afternoon in April on Last Stand Hill with Jack. Brenda and Tom had brought his grandmother to visit for three days. Over the years since his abrupt departure from their house, Robert and his parents had managed to establish a more or less manageable framework for a relationship. As long as they steered clear of any substantive issue, and did not spend too much time together, it worked. They avoided confrontation. No psychologist would call it particularly healthy, but it was the best they could cobble together on their own.

  “Why do you like The Waltons so much, Granny?” Robert asked her as they drove back to Charlottesville. He and his sister always called her “Mommaw” when they were children, a particularly Appalachian appellation. But Robert started calling her “Granny” as a joke a couple years before, and it had become their term of endearment.

  “I reckon because it reminds me a little of what it was like at home, before my mom died,” his grandmother said. “And what I wish it could’ve always been.”

  Her mother was killed in a car accident when Virginia was six. On one side of a black line in Virginia’s memory lived those idyllic times of her early childhood on the southern West Virginia farm when she chased butterflies and waded in the brook beside the rambling clapboard house and felt her mother’s love. On the other side stretched the wretched years after her father remarried to a woman who despised her stepdaughter’s presence.

  The clouds which accumulated over Virginia after her mother’s death rarely, and only briefly, dissipated over the decades that followed. Her life with Sam was so burdened that the moments of joy with Brenda and her grandchildren were like January sunlight in Lapland: merely a slight brightening on the horizon before the quick return to darkness.

  But Sam died the summer before this visit with Robert, and Virginia felt as if the hard lifetime between her mother’s death and Sam’s had been a long, bad dream. Every new day seemed a marvel to her, and the few people whom she knew well—Sam never permitted her much of a social life when he was alive—were astounded by how she blossomed.

  While Sam was alive, she rarely spoke unless spoken to. Now, Virginia volunteered opinions and observations about nearly everything. Her frequently dour and pained demeanor became expansive and cheerful. All her life, Virginia was gaunt. With each passing month now, she grew more jollily rotund. She felt guilty about feeling so well, but not overly so. Sam had reaped what he had sowed.

  “Why didn’t your dad do more to make your stepmother less difficult?” Robert asked. His grandmother never talked about her childhood, unless pressed, and even then she offered only crumbs. The older he got, the more he wanted to know her better. Robert felt closer to Virginia than any other person, but he knew little other than the surface details of her story and virtually nothing of her inner life.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Robby,” she said. Virginia looked distantly out the side window of the car. It was easier to pry open a live oyster than to loosen her tongue. “It’s just how he was,” she said without turning away from the window, “and how she was.” Virginia continued to gaze absently at the colorful passing trees. “I loved my dad, though. I still miss him.”

  Several years before, Robert had driven her down to the West Virginia coalfields where she grew up, to put flowers on her parents’ graves. Virginia had not been there for twenty years. After an hour of traversing gravel tracks barely wider than the car—out one to its dead end, back
to the two-lane blacktopped road, up the next, and back down again—they found the little cemetery on a bare hillside at the edge of the woods. It sat behind a cluster of the decaying former coal company houses that were scattered along the narrow, serpentine valley.

  The cemetery was typical of the extended-family graveyards in that part of the country, overgrown and abandoned. Several of the tombstones had tumbled prone. Decades of weather-erosion had rendered at least half unreadable. Still, the sunny patch of ground in the peace and quiet of the countryside was not a bad spot for one’s eternal rest.

  Virginia walked straight to her parents’ graves. Once they located the cemetery, she seemed to know every plot. Robert helped her jab the green metal legs of the plastic flower arrangements into the mossy ground, and then they stood in silence looking at the graves. As usual, his grandmother did not volunteer any of her thoughts. Robert did not inquire. “Okay, Robby. Let’s go,” she had said abruptly after two or three minutes, and they had returned to the car and driven the two hours north to Huntington.

  After Walton’s Mountain, Robert and Virginia visited Monticello— Thomas Jefferson’s neoclassical mountaintop manse overlooking Charlottesville—and then they ate dinner at his favorite restaurant in the town. She insisted on paying despite his protestations. They returned to his apartment, and Robert prepared the fold-out sofa bed for her. He had tried to talk Virginia into taking his bed, but she absolutely refused.

  “Do you need anything else, Granny?” Robert asked as she settled under the blanket.

  “Just a kiss goodnight,” Virginia said.

  He leaned over and kissed her dry cheek. It was slack with age. “I had a very nice day with you, Granny.”

  “Oh, me too, Robby. Thank you,” she said and patted his forearm.

  It is strange, Robert thought as he lay in bed recalling their day, that they were related only by law and love. He never longed for his biological grandmother, Julia Ribas, nor wondered how she might have been in Virginia’s place, had she kept Brenda and lived to old age. But he did often wish to know more about her and about their lost relatives in Spain.