He almost took advantage of this remark. It was an old habit. He put on a wounded look, the phrase he wanted was on his lips, but he saw a tear start out of an old ruined eye and he held back.
“You miss Dad a lot,” he said.
“I do,” she said. “I really do.”
When he went back to his room, Renata was sitting on his bed. “I want to bum down this house,” she said.
“You can’t,” he said. “It’s made out of clay. Adobe.”
“Then I’ll turn the hose on it and dissolve it. Ashes to ashes, mud to mud.”
She was actually smiling. She smiled so seldom these days it almost broke his heart. “Brat,” he said, slapping her lightly on the thigh.
“I want to go home, Daddy,” she said, her voice small, like a remnant of childhood.
“So do I, baby,” he said.
He sat next to her on the bed. Renata put her arm around his shoulder. “Daddy,” she said. “You’re out of your envelope, you know that, don’t you?”
“What?” It was hard to keep up with teenage jargon. He wasn’t even sure it was jargon, since Rennie tended to invent her own.
“You’re over the edge, out of your element,” she translated. “You’re red-lining, Pop.”
“Look, Rennie—”
“I heard you talking to Grandpa yesterday. You were in the bathroom, shaving. I think you’re weirding out. Daddy, I want to go home for your sake, too.”
“I am surrounded by Wise Women,” he wrote later that morning in the cemetery. “I guess I’m either lucky or cursed.” He started to cross that sentence out but dropped the pen. Sara had been after him lately to “rethink his situation.” He was in a dead-end job, but it was secure and he liked it. He’d been a technical editor for Boeing for twelve years and he’d reached the ceiling as far as promotions and big salary jumps were concerned. He didn’t mind—he liked the job well enough to excuse himself from the lures of ambition. He had no desire to climb the corporate ladder. He was paid decently, he got an annual cost-of-liv-ing raise, he was well liked, and he had managed to make himself as indispensable to his unit as the man he worked for, maybe more so. He had what all reasonable men wanted: job security—and this long leave of absence bothered him. Sara thought the time off would make his boss realize just how important he was to his unit, but Fred was uneasy. His work would pile up or be done poorly by someone else. But more than that, he missed the job itself. He actually relished cleaning up the strangled prose of engineers, who, left to their own narrative devices, could make the operation of a pencil sharpener seem as arcane and as potentially dangerous as the operation of a breeder reactor. His was a small job in the great world of jobs, but it was what he wanted. He was content. At forty-two, life had become pleasantly fixed and unchanging for Fred Ocean.
“You’re an old man already,” he heard his father say. He could see how his father must have appeared to the other retirees of Casa del Sol: the big, sturdy, peasant features, battered but unhurtable. Ivan Ocean: even the name was strong, suggesting both the Russian masses and the sea. Ocean was a retooling of a difficult Russian name, Ozhogin, which was a bit too slushy for the parochial phonetics of American rust-belt English. Ivan Ozhogin, son of Vladimir. Bom in the U.S.A., in postfrontier North Dakota, moved out of his home after knocking his father and older brother down a flight of stairs, rode the rods to Escanaba, buried himself in the red rock of iron country, emerged as a man with a slashing, take-no-prisoners vision of America. He was a happy man, but not a content one. Never content. The content do not contend. The happy people of this earth are the fighters, the conquerors, the risk-takers. Fred, lovingly, put a Mexican wedding shirt on his father, white slacks to match, huaraches on his big wide feet. He saw him tanned Apache brown, saw his white teeth flashing as he shouted, “You think you’ve got it made. Let me tell you, you don’t deserve what you have. You don’t deserve Rennie or a wife like Sara who only wants you to do your best. You’re going to lose all of it. You’d let the world go to hell and not blink an eye as long as you were content. Men like you, my boy, can’t hold on to anything except by luck.” Even in death his father was full of instructions and warnings. The trouble with such advice was that it only made sense to those who gave it. Crazy mustangs did not travel with dollar-a-ride ponies. Advice from his father, he always believed, was like clothes handed down: you could wear them only if they fit. His father’s instructions fit him like a shroud. “Back off, Dad,” he said gently. He watched his father, as if on a freight elevator, sink down into the hard ground to resume his reminiscing chats with Henry Phelps, a man more to his liking. Fred picked up his pen and pocketed it. He drove into Tucson, ostensibly to make reservations for weekend tickets to Seattle. But he didn’t drive out to the airport. Instead, he stopped at the Conch, where Germaine Folger would be waiting for him.
“Well, gracious,” she said. “Look at you, tiger.”
He glanced at himself in the smoky mirror behind the bar. He’d driven in at high speed with the top of the Caddy down. His hair was wild and his eyes were spooky—wide and wind-whipped red. His heart was tripping along at highway speed, and he was very thirsty.
“What’s been chasing you, honey?” Germaine said. “A ghost?”
Judging from her cozy slur, Fred knew that she’d been here for a couple of hours already. Germaine was older than he was by at least ten years. She was a tall woman with a doughy but still pretty face. She had a small mouth. Her lips were thin and pouty, like the lips of a child. He liked her looks. He liked the wet brown eyes that seemed to have been evolved specifically for barroom light. And he liked the way an old torch song would send her gaze into the middle distance as if she were revisiting scenes from a bittersweet past. He’d never seen her in sunlight, and he could not imagine her squinting her way across a sun-bright parking lot. She was a barfly. He smiled at the old-fashioned word. She was half ruined but not destitute. She dressed well, her credit was good enough to allow her to run a tab, and the stones in her rings looked genuine. Her husband sold real estate in Scottsdale. He’d made a fine art of keeping his distance from her.
“It’s been a hard week, Germaine,” he said.
“Could be a trend, baby,” she said, patting his hand.
Fred ordered a bourbon and soda. The jukebox in the Conch specialized in ballads from the 1940s. Dick Haymes was singing “All or Nothing at All,” saturating the dim air with a dangerous nostalgia. Everyone in the Conch looked on the verge of making a serious, life-upsetting error.
“Maybe you ought to start thinking about heading back to Seattle,” Germaine said. “This country can be tough on you webfeet.”
“That’s for sure,” he said. “In fact, that’s why I’m in town. To make reservations.”
“But you came here first.
“I didn’t say I was in a hurry,” he said, clinking her glass with his.
She smiled—bravely, he thought, because her eyes seemed resigned to a future measured in hours. She still had the power of her former beauty, and though the reason he was attracted to her was not that simple, he didn’t try to find a deeper motive. He’d wanted her strictly as a drinking partner. That was safe; anything beyond that could be avoided.
“Hell, webfoot,” she said, recklessly. “Maybe we should say good-bye in style.”
He sipped his drink, as if thinking it over.
“I’ve got to get to the airport,” he said.
“The airport isn’t going anywhere,” she said. “Besides, there’s a travel agency around the comer from me.” She put her hand on his, a proprietary gesture that took away his right of withdrawal. “Listen, Freddie,” she said. “We’re friends, aren’t we? My apartment’s a minute away. I think I know what you like.”
Fred believed her. He believed that she possibly knew what he liked better than he did himself. She was a student of the small variations that made one man different from another. It accounted for her wrecked life.
“My dad says what I like isn’t good for me,�
�� he said.
“Then it’s time your dad minded his own business, I’d say.”
They went outside, where the sunlight instantly betrayed her face. Her eyes tightened to leaky slits, and her chalky skin, blasted by the desert sun, became mottled and rough. In the darkness of the bar she had seemed melancholy and wise, but out here in the harsh light she only looked mournful and perplexed, as if the pain of old abuses was still alive.
He walked her to the parking lot. “I’ll follow you,” he said, and he did—for five blocks, where they were separated by a traffic light. He saw her pull over on the other side of the intersection to wait for him, but when the light turned green he made a hard right and headed for the airport.
“Well, say it, Pop,” he said as he eased the Cadillac onto the freeway.
“There’s nothing to say, Freddie. I would have done the same thing. You have to weigh the consequences of your actions, since only you can be responsible for them.”
He gave his father a diction and vocabulary in death that he hadn’t had in life. It was easier to talk to him that way. The blunt homilies and warnings needed a good technical editor if they were to be taken seriously.
“Did you ever play around, Pop? Did you ever find a woman who knew what you liked?”
It was the sort of personal question ghosts can’t answer. Fred found one of Renata’s tapes in the glove compartment and plugged it into the deck. The flogging beat, the tortured guitars, and the brainless lyrics eliminated the possibility of further conversation.
At the cemetery the next morning, Fred added a paragraph to the letter he’d been working on the last few days. “You’ll probably get this after we’re home,” he wrote. “But these communiques from desert places are habit-forming. I’ll probably continue writing to you twice a week for the rest of my life. Proximity is our most deceptive enemy, I think. Distance is more than simple geography. Ask Rennie. I’m closer to Dad now than I’ve ever been, and he’s somewhere across the universe. He thinks I’m incorrigible. It’s true. But so is he. So is Rennie. We all are. Just like the tarantulas. We’ve got them, you know, big across as tortillas. Early this morning I escorted one off the premises. He’d done an incorrigibly tarantula thing. You know that nest of cute swallow chicks Rennie’s been monitoring? Well, Nature’s got no use for cute. The tarantula got them. I found him, after noticing the empty nest, sitting fat as a cat among a litter of darling little feathers. I eased him out of the entryway with a broom. He was so bloated on infant swallow meat he could barely waddle out of there. Then I dutifully swept up all the feathers. I pinned a cute note to the nest: ‘Bye-bye, Rennie. We’ve flown away to become rock-star swallows. Thanks for everything. Wish us luck.’ Dad would say, ‘No one was ever hurt by a light dose of reality.’ My answer to that would make him slap his forehead in disgust. Reality, Dad, is public enemy number one, truth be known.”
When Fred got back to the house, it was still early. Rennie was asleep and his mother was sipping warm gin in the bathtub—her arthritis was acting up again—and his father was whispering sharp warnings in his ear. As a concession to all of them, he took the note off the empty swallow’s nest and threw it away.
Paraiso: An Elegy
Hart is dead. Cancer got him. He died well. What I mean is, he died pretty much as he lived, without fear or dread, and he died without the sort of high-torque pain or mind-gumming drugs that would have blunted his ability to find interest in the process of dying. We still talk about him in the present tense. “Hart has presence of mind,” we say, and “Hart can’t tolerate French movies,” and “Hart likes his beer freezer-cold.” His gray stare, somewhat quizzical due to the tumors thriving near the occipital region of his brain, asks you to be honest: Never say what you don’t mean. If in doubt, remember, silence is incorruptible. You can spend half a day with Hart and maybe trade three opinions. But he likes his jokes. He likes the sharp observation that punctures the gassy balloons of hypocrisy, pomp, and self-importance. As a photographer and poet, that’s what he’s about. And so he can get you in trouble. He’s a little guy with a proud chest.
His camera bag, always slung on his shoulder, makes him list ten degrees to port. It makes him walk with a limp. It began with an omen. We were in Juarez, Christmas 1988, fending off a gang of seasonal pickpockets who had moved into the border town from somewhere in the interior. They circled us like a half-dozen bantamweight boxers, nodding and shrugging, feinting in and dancing back, bumping us, confusing us with large, friendly smiles. Hart pulled out his little Zeiss and started to spend film while our wives, Rocky and Joyce, dealt with the footloose thieves. These wives are tough, friendly women from the bedrock towns of Butte and Anaconda, Montana, respectively. When a quick brown hand slipped into the throat of Rocky’s purse, she slapped it away, brisk as a frontier schoolmarm, and my tall, strong-jawed Joyce yanked her purse clear with enough force to start a chain saw. The thieves tap-danced away from the white-knuckled determination of these good-looking gűeras, with no hard feelings, no need to get righteous. The phrase No me chinguen, pendejos was ready on my lips, and I whispered it in rehearsal since I am fluent with set phrases only. And Joyce, who is fluent, hissed, “Don’t you ever say that in this town unless you want to take your gringo whizzer back across the bridge in segments.”
Joyce works in a Juarez industrial park, teaching idiomatic, rust-belt American to executives of the maquiladora industry who need to travel north. Her company assembles computer components for GM, and pays its workers an average of five dollars a day, which is a full dollar above the Mexican minimum wage. Joyce gets eighteen dollars an hour because she insists on being paid what the job’s worth, having come from Anaconda, a town so unionized you can’t pour tar on your leaky shed without getting hard stares from the organized roofers. It troubles her that the Tarahumara Indian beggar women on Avenida Diez y Seis de Septiembre can make twice as much on a good day as a worker in a maquiladora. That’s why she didn’t get hysterical over the pickpockets. Their mostly seasonal earnings are on a puny scale compared to what the for-eign-owned maquiladoras siphon into their profit margins. If anyone was close to hysteria, it was me (the gringo instinct to protect and prevail knocking at my heart), not the iron-willed women from Montana. My fists were balled up, and my mind was knotted, too, with such off-the-subject irrelevancies as my honor, my male pride. !Lárguense a la chingada! I felt like saying, but I also knew that if I did, things would get serious in a hurry because these thieves from Chihuahua or wherever have a more commanding sense of honor than I do. We gringos might have a more commanding sense of fair play, but honor is too abstract to touch off instantaneous grass fires in our blood. It applies to flag and parents and, at one time, to a young man’s conduct in the vicinity of decent girls, but it has never functioned as a duty, uncompromising as the survival instinct, to oneself.
And if I did get lucky and scatter them with a few wild punches, then what? The streets were dense with locals who do not think the world of these pale, camera-toting, wisecracking, uninhibited laughers from a thousand miles north of the RÍ o Bravo. And when a nearby tránsito—a black-and-tan-uniformed traffic cop, the local version of the guardia civil—strolled by to see what was what, speaking the same street Spanish as the purse-snatchers, whose story did I think would be heard? Who did I think would go to jail? This was before Hart’s diagnosis, when we were all planning a succession of trips starting with the thrill-a-minute train ride from Ciudad Chihuahua to Creel and on to the Barranca de Cobre, and later in the year, to Puebla and Vera Cruz. “Que le vaya bien,” Joyce called to the retreating pickpockets. And a smiling thief replied, his Spanish courtly and dignified, “And may it also go equally well for you, lady,” Rocky, a former parachute journalist who now teaches Bullshit Detection 101, rolled her black Irish eyes and muttered, “Jesus. Joyce must be campaigning for sainthood. The Bleeding Virgin of the Cutpurse. They wanted to take your MasterCard, honey, not test your Spanish.”
We stopped in the Kentucky C
lub on Avenida Juarez for a round of self-congratulatory margaritas, then crossed back into Texas, purses and wallets intact. We felt generally upbeat. But in the river, on the north bank, we saw a decapitated mule. We hung over the rail, staring at the mud-colored carcass bloating in the silty river, as if this had been the planned high point and ultimate purpose of our tour. Hart said, “Omen, troops.” We looked at him. This was one of those moments in life when things get too slippery to catch in a net of words. We looked at each other. An innocence rising up from childhood struck us dumb as Hart attached a long lens to his Zeiss and photographed the headless mule.
2
Joyce and I are on this trip with Hart and Rocky, looking for something in the desert. A kind of comradely spitefulness has made us rowdy and solemnly amused by turns. I guess it is Death we are spiting, though no one comes out and says so. We like each other because we know we are misfits who have found our niche in the friendly halls of universities.
We are western by chance, and remain so by choice. We love cars and rock and roll more than we love fine art and baroque music. We wear this preference on our pearl-buttoned sleeves. We’ve been antsy from birth: The verb “to go” was the first one we learned to conjugate. We’ve got Cowboy Junkies in the tape deck and a six-pack of Lone Star balanced on the console between the seats. Drinking and driving is a western birthright. This is Texas, where it’s legal to have opened containers in a moving car. This law (known affectionately as the Bubba Law) may be repealed soon, but we’re not in a mood to worry about it: the lab report on the biopsies is in and now we all know the worst. Hart has six months, if he’s lucky—six months, that is, if the tumors crowding his vertebrae don’t break in and vandalize the spinal cord tomorrow or the next day.
Hart has the perfect vehicle for this type of travel. A1972 Chevy Blazer with the big 350 long-block V-8 throbbing under the hood. The Blazer is a two-ton intimidator. Hart is not into intimidation, but the slender Celicas, Maximas, and Integras that pull into our slipstream don’t know that. They tend to keep their distance from the big, rust-brown, generously dented Chevy. Hart and I sit up front, Rocky and Joyce sit in back—a western arrangement not meant to signify the relative status of the sexes. A traveler from New Haven, say, might look into the Blazer and see Hart and me up front in straw hats with beer cans on the dash, and the women eating coffee chews in back, perhaps catch a strain of the Cowboy Junkies’ visionary wailing, and think highway buckaroos and the little women, tsk, tsk. This is unfair to the Yankees, of course. You might find the same arrangement in a dented Blazer in New Haven. Only in New Haven, I suspect, the highway-buckaroo remark might be justified. Two couples riding this way back there would be making a statement, whether they wanted to or not. Turning ourselves into an illustrated idea is the last thing in the world the four of us would do.
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