At work, his breathing got a bit worse. He sat in the supply building doling out globe valves and steam packing to the pipe fitters and welders until the day the company gave him an early retirement. He turned in his keys, hearing protectors, respirators, steel toes, and hard hat and went home to his wife. He was fifty-five and looked it, mostly gray, his skin sun crinkled, his hands plagued by minor benign tremors, and his arms showing strange little white warts. But his back was still straight.
At night Joe coughed a lot, and sometimes he’d feel his wife’s small hands on his back, which meant he should go sleep on the sofa. He didn’t think that was fair, but he’d drag a blanket through the dark house and prop himself on three pillows so he could breathe.
After he retired, things got worse. Twice he passed out right on the tile at the Piggly Wiggly. His pulmonary doctor told him on several visits that he ought to consider moving from Baton Rouge to a place where the air wasn’t a gumbo of acetone, methyl mercaptan, bug killer, hundred percent humidity, pollen thick as a dust storm, and aromatic plants steaming sweetly at night like vegetable whores named jasmine, honeysuckle, sweet olive, and magnolia. But his daughters, who loved the funny, easygoing man he was, still demanded that he stay and fix all the broken things in their households, because their husbands knew only how to press buttons and couldn’t manage an adjustable wrench to save their lives. One morning Joe sat huffing at his kitchen table, taking in the stink from the Exxon plant. He considered that his daughters were married and settled, that his wife wouldn’t leave the neighborhood if it caught fire. He couldn’t imagine living in a place alone, though. He would miss Lorena’s cooking and occasional hugs. But breathing was pretty important, too.
At Easter Sunday dinner he blacked out and tumbled from his chair. His daughters were hysterical, and the grandchildren wept and howled, running out into the yard shrieking, “Grandpa’s dead! Grandpa’s dead!” While dialing the ambulance, his wife complained that he’d ruined the big meal, but he could tell she was crying for him and frightened for them both. Joe lay on the floor like a beached fish, thinking that he was a drag on the whole family.
The next Saturday he got together with his daughters and told them that if they wanted him to stay alive, he had to find a place out west. But where? None of the families were wealthy, and even together they couldn’t just buy him a house. He heard his wife banging around in the kitchen, so he kissed the girls good-bye and padded toward the noise. Joe gasped to his wife that he loved her, and moving away would make things a hell of a lot easier for them all.
She slammed down the lid on a pot of green beans. “If you loved me,” she snapped, “you wouldn’t curse and fall asleep in church.” Then her eyes softened, and she put a balled fist to her mouth. “But I don’t want you to die just smothering.”
He gave her a hug from the side, which was sort of like hugging a manikin. He wondered what had happened to her softness. He guessed it had been worked out of her by living in a big family in a big house where everybody visits. He touched her hair and said, “All my life I been buying company stock in dribs and drabs through Cousin Albert. He told me when I laid off work that it’s gone up a lot over the years.”
“I know,” she said, “and you thought you were gonna buy a new car and boat with that. A nice boat the family can use.”
He turned her loose because she was beginning to arch her back like a cat ready to scratch. “Our boat days are over. I’ll get with Albert on his computer and see what I can buy or rent where it don’t never rain.”
He walked back to his recliner, feeling that she was sorry that he might leave, but not as sorry as he’d expected. He’d been around the house so many years he guessed she didn’t see him anymore. He was just something to fuss at, like the television. It wasn’t her fault. Happens to everybody. He didn’t exactly watch her like she was a parade, either.
So that’s how he wound up somewhere near the Chihuahuan Desert on one acre of leased land generally southwest of Water Tank, New Mexico, a remnant village where steam locomotives once stopped to fill their tenders. The first time he saw his place, he stopped his truck on an endless two-lane blacktop and stared past his mailbox down a mile-long graveled easement. In the middle of maybe five thousand acres, maybe a million, an azure single-wide trailer faced west, as out of place as a jewel on a corpse. Nowhere in that high, flat valley surrounded by red mountains was there another habitation. As he rattled down the driveway, he felt like an astronaut driving on the moon. His truck was a 1958 Apache classic he’d restored himself, even installing air-conditioning. The door to the trailer was unlocked, so he went in and turned on the AC, which seemed to work fine. Once a wayside shelter for government agents, it had been declared surplus. He went out and stood in the shade of the metal box, waiting for its insides to cool down a bit. He could see forty miles in each direction over empty desert, sandy hummocks, leathery plants, every one bearing thorns, and bordering it all to the north were bare mountains raising coppery ridges sharp as hatchets. He hardly knew where he was on the map, but in such empty land it didn’t matter. The air was dry as hot crystal, and clean, though it faintly stung his nose. In all that space he could see not a single other building. The mountains on all sides seemed to be nothing but naked rock, the range to the west white topped and unimaginably tall, the one to the east as rusty as old nails. Behind him, to the south, lay putty-colored foothills and then Mexico. In Louisiana he could never see more than a city block, or maybe three hundred yards if he was driving around outside town. Here he could shoot a cannon and the projectile would just run out of speed and skid to a stop, maybe bowling down a cactus ten miles away.
He sat on the aluminum steps and coughed for a while. He had new prescriptions from his Louisiana doctors and had contacted a pulmonary specialist in Grind, a copper mining town fifty miles away. It was September and not too hot, maybe ninety. It didn’t feel like ninety because he wasn’t sweating. Running his fingers along his bare arms, he heard his skin whisper that he ought to drink some water. The dry air was still as death. On one of the mountains someone had laid out a cross with white rocks that, judging from the distance, must have been two hundred feet tall. It should have been comforting, but the man who laid out the cross could have died over a hundred years ago. Or it might have been put there by Martians. Joe wondered if he could live here. He’d just have to take life as it came, he guessed, one day after another, like labored breaths.
After a month, he began to feel a little better. The doctor in Grind, an old bald man who smoked, told him he mainly suffered from bronchitis with the beginnings of emphysema. He didn’t seem to be allergic to anything, but they’d be able to tell in the spring.
“Are you walking?” the doc asked.
“Some.”
“Well, walk some more. You can do it.”
So every day except Sunday he walked that mile to his mailbox. There was no fence there or anywhere else that he could see, even with binoculars. Once or twice he saw some black cows on the horizon and imagined there should be a fence somewhere, but the country was too big for them to escape to wherever cows would want to go.
He wrote letters to his wife because his land line had not been installed yet and no cell phone on earth could get a signal here. She wrote back a long letter that began in clipped sentences, but toward the end her tone softened a bit, and the last sentence was “We been eating well, but the kids miss that chicken stew you make. Lorena.”
He began to walk toward Mexico, a mile out and a mile back. The going was rougher, with little mounds of cholla and prickly pear rising among a welter of other armed vegetation. Now and then a big rattlesnake crossed his path, and he began to step carefully. After seeing ten or twelve during one walk, he got used to them, but not to the jeweled gila monsters that rested in the mouths of their burrows and watched him like fate as he passed by.
Although he had mostly lost faith in God, he wanted something to do on Sundays, so he attended a small, sun-blasted chu
rch in Fuse. The Mass was in Navaho, and during the handshake of peace, no one looked at him. He was the only person in church who did not take communion.
In October, the winds picked up. His trailer was well anchored, but it still jiggled when a big roller of air slammed against it from across the open land. He wore a cap and light jacket on his walks and noted an increase of birds, both on the ground and high overhead, including the biggest geese he’d ever seen going somewhere he couldn’t imagine.
He got a phone line and could receive television over it. Even though he could talk to his wife whenever the mood struck him, they both continued to write letters, as they had when they were dating and he was in the army. In writing they could say what they meant and not just what sounded good. Joe looked forward to the long walk to the mailbox. His breathing got a little easier, and he began to sit outside once it was totally dark and study an amazing sky dusted with diamonds. The sky was half the world at night, and he understood how unimportant he was, the things he did, the thoughts he had. Especially what he thought. Maybe he was wrong about everything. He imagined the sun rose in his daughters’ eyes, but all their lives they were after him for money, which he gave them for cars, silly dresses. Not much practicality in their nearly pretty heads. His wife, he realized, had held the family together like an ugly glue job.
With his binoculars he could see wolves at a great distance, and now and then he could see Mexicans coming up from the border and laboring under backpacks three or four miles away, moving like ants to the north. Sometimes he wished one would wander close enough so he could call out to him, “Buenos días. Do you want some water?”
Every two weeks or so he would wake up to the sound of a cow nibbling at the conduit leading up to his electrical panel outside. He would shoo it off with a pebble and a few running steps. Also he would drive to Water Tank to shop at an adobe store that seemed abandoned until he stepped inside to study the sagging shelves of canned goods protected behind long counters. In the back were old peeling coolers holding milk and meat. The clerk had the complexion of schoolhouse brick and only nodded when Joe paid his bill. He tried to make small talk with him, and on one trip, exasperated and desperate for the sound of anyone’s voice, Joe said, “Why don’t you talk to me? Is it a tribal thing or something?”
The man’s eyes were two onyx stones. “You are a tourist.”
“Like hell I am,” Joe told him. “I own property here. I’ll die out here.”
The eyes didn’t move. “Then you’ll be a dead tourist,” the man said.
By November his walks were up to a mile and a half, and he managed to climb a hillock and could see holes in a red mountainside where native Americans had lived a thousand years before. In December the cold hurt his lungs, but a man at church told him it didn’t snow there much and the winters were not hard. Joe missed Louisiana’s food and missed his family, but he loved his breathing. He also loved writing letters, caressing the pages with a smooth-rolling ballpoint he’d bought at the adobe store. Touching the soft paper was like sliding his fingers over the clean hair of his grandchildren.
In February, his truck’s battery gave out and he was stranded for a long time, running low on provisions. One morning he woke up and looked out the window to see an old man, the adobe store owner, standing fifty feet away, still as a stone.
Joe pushed his door open. “Hey. Come on in before you freeze.”
The man looked around, puzzled. “Not cold.”
But he came in anyway, and Joe fixed him a cup of coffee. “I’m glad for some company. You know my name, it’s on my credit card.”
“My name’s Joe also.”
“Well, that’s confusing. Do you have a tribal-type name?”
He glanced down at the linoleum. “Snow in Face. I was born outdoors.”
“No kidding? What brings you way out here?”
“You didn’t come in for groceries.”
Joe’s eyes opened wide. “You were worried about me?”
Snow in Face shook his head. “I need your money.”
Joe looked out at the man’s pickup. “Let me get my jacket.” And the two of them rode to the store and later came back, sliding through the wind and spits of snow in the old man’s rusty Dodge with a large grocery order.
That evening before sundown, Joe fixed himself another pot of Community Coffee his daughters had mailed to him and watched through the little window by his dinette table as black cows and large deer pulled democratically at the tough grass coming up around his trailer. He thought of Snow in Face and the logic of his coming out to rescue him. In such a harsh land, such thinking prevailed. Things were done according to hard reason. Listening to local news on his radio, he noted that locals seldom died of unnatural causes, but that drug dealers stepped on rattlesnakes, hikers fell to their deaths when exploring cliff-dweller sites, off-roaders broke their necks by running their glossy machines over dunes into dry creek beds. Visitors who were there for no practical reason were the most vulnerable, more likely to die of thirst or a desert dope party. He developed a respect for the fact of his presence in New Mexico, where he could breathe.
When he opened the door, the deer took off, and the cows raised their heads to watch him. He sat on the steps, zipped his jacket, and looked up at the stars, which seemed to be a vast interpretation of a gila monster’s hide. He considered how such a sky could be formed, and why he was privileged to witness it. Was it just an accident, all of these things that bring a person delight, like a slice of cold watermelon on a hot Louisiana day when his lungs were on fire and the cold crush of juice runneling down the inside of his chest gave at least a moment of blissful relief, a moment pinned to his memory until death? He wondered if his trailer could be seen from outer space, from the moon or Mars or Saturn or from even beyond that, a distant tin rectangle glinting in the corner of God’s eye. The next day was Sunday and he decided to go to confession before Mass.
January and February were not harsh where his trailer was. He watched a great deal of television, read some used books Snow in Face had sold him, walked on an old thirdhand machine he bought at a church yard sale, and followed sports on television. And he wrote letters, many letters, until his ballpoint ran out of ink. After a call from a daughter he would sit down and finish the communication in two or three pages of small cursive with a pencil, the letters growing thicker as he wrote.
He dreaded spring and the desert flowers coming alive with pollen, and the first week he was coughing up mucus and had to see his doctor in Grind, who tested him at the little hospital in town and cocked his head at the results, gave him some antihistamines, and sent him home. In a few days he was better, but feeling as if he were walking the edge of a sheer cliff. Joe wasn’t sure how long he would live, and he never asked the doctor. He tried to look at each day as his lifetime.
The letters from his wife gradually changed in tone. The latest even confessed that she was sorry she had hassled him so much about every little matter, that she knew she’d grown cold even though she believed she was not a cold person. She wrote that she always thought he could have done better at some things and that was why she got angry with him, but since he’d been gone she realized he was at least good enough at everything.
One day in June he traveled to the adobe store and traded a few sentences with Snow in Face. He’d decided to cook up something special and tasty, a meal that started with a roux and continued with sautéed onions, diced celery, and garlic, and Snow in Face sold him some chicken meat he said came from pullets in his own yard that would be so tender over fluffy white rice. Joe invited him to come to supper, and the old man told him he couldn’t promise anything because he had to wait for the gasoline delivery for the pumps out front.
He made it back to his trailer earlier than he’d thought, so he decided to clean the battery terminals on his truck. He picked up the broad hood and cleaned the posts with a little wire brush, doped the positive one with grease, and was going to tighten it onto the battery when th
e phone rang. It was Snow in Face, who said the gas man had arrived and he might come over after all.
About five o’clock he put the skillet on the gas range and turned on the stove hood, which for some reason wouldn’t work. While trying to repair it, he heated the oil too much, so he threw in the chopped vegetables and chicken and dumped in the broth to lower the temperature, but the little kitchen nook was suddenly charged with flavor and steam and smoke, smothering him, and he started to cough, at once feeling a deep stiffening in his chest. In only a few seconds, he couldn’t catch his breath and had to sit on the floor. The smoke from the stove thickened throughout the trailer, and he was forced to turn off the burner and flee, stumbling out into the yard where five cows were gathered around the front of his truck with their heads in the open engine compartment, eating the wires off his motor. One raised his nose, a plug wire dangling from his mouth like a piece of black spaghetti. Joe sat in the sand, coughing up phlegm and sneezing over and over. With the truck, he could have made a try to reach Grind, but now, with little air coming in and almost none going out, he figured he had run out of chances. Sitting up against the steps, he stared at the cows, then at the empty road in the distance. He thought some revelation might be at hand, but all he felt was sleepy and dizzy, so he watched the cows nudge against his favorite old truck, and hoped it was all right to die. It was, after all, what he’d come out here to do.
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