By the time he was thirteen or fourteen, Harlan already looked like someone to be avoided in certain situations. His size contributed to the effect and he fell into the habit of hiding behind it, watching silently as boys he’d never even met gave him a wide berth. He wouldn’t have known how to defend himself if he’d had to, but he discovered that just looking straight ahead and emptying all expression from his face did the trick. As he grew older, he knew that people talked about him and that they tried to avoid talking to him if they came across him in the grocery store or the post office. And yet he never left town, never seemed to think about leaving, even after Bill Ray was gone. He was one of the most alone people I ever knew, even when I was living with him. And then I left.
In the end this is what you need to know about Harlan, my younger brother:
On a Saturday morning in January of 1943 he woke up at dawn, before anyone else, and got out of his bed quietly.
He could have come across anything shiny and metallic and picked it up to play with it—a pocketknife or a money clip or a silver dollar. He was a three-year-old boy. But that morning he saw a Zippo sitting where Bill Ray had left it on the coffee table, next to a half-empty pack of cigarettes. Harlan took the lighter into the coat closet in the front hall and pulled the door closed to hide with it. He probably flipped up the top and ran his thumb over the flint wheel the way he had seen Bill Ray do, to watch it spark out into the darkness. Then, as little boys do, he grew bored and left the lighter on the closet floor and went to play with the knobs on the radio before anyone was up to stop him.
The winter coats acted as wicks, conveying the flames into the attic, where they snaked along the joists and into the paper insulation and dropped through the thin sheetrock ceilings into the rooms. Through the heavy smoke Bill Ray carried me out of bed in his bathrobe and put me in the neighbor’s yard and then he went back in and found Harlan, hiding in the bathtub. He went back a third time screaming for Ruby and I saw him emerge without her from the smoke billowing through the front door, gasping for breath, his face blackened around his mouth and nose. He turned to go in again but two neighbor men grabbed him and held him back and he fought them and they had to take him to the ground and drag him across the street because the heat became too much to bear.
The volunteer fire department truck came, mostly just to contain the fire so that it didn’t spread and to get Ruby’s remains out. Most of the roof came down and when we went back the next day to see if there was anything we could salvage, it was so cold that the water from the fire hoses had frozen into solid ice over the blackness of the charred wall studs and the furniture and the exposed bedsprings. Everything glistened like crystal in the sun. People I knew and people I had never seen before came by and walked through the wreckage as if it hadn’t just been somebody’s home and Bill Ray watched them with empty eyes and let them. After an hour or so of picking through things, he put his arm around me and we left empty-handed to go to a house where someone was keeping my brother.
Harlan’s life from that time forward was grounded in guilt he felt for a sin he couldn’t remember, a sin of neither omission nor commission. As much as Bill Ray tried to shield him from it, he grew up a boy whose earliest memory was that he had killed his mother. He couldn’t mourn her because he barely remembered her. He didn’t remember her because he had killed her. And so on and so on, down to the bottom of his soul.
*
Aron woke before dawn, quietly pushed up the screen from the window next to his bed, and climbed out of it fully dressed onto a patch of grassless yard behind the boardinghouse.
Beneath his jacket was a buttoned leather holster with a shoulder strap he had stolen during the night from an American down the hall.
He looked up and down the street, presided over by one city streetlight on a telephone pole. He walked past houses fronted with ornate, white-painted metal fencing, behind which identical white metalwork covered the lower windows and the upper windows. It was unclear whether all this trellising existed to deter thieves—a job it looked poorly suited for—or whether it stood for some colonial architectural tradition. One of the houses appeared to be a makeshift clothing store; the metalwork was festooned with dozens of cheap American sports T-shirts and pajama tops, pinned side by side, above and below, undulating in the breeze like headless, legless bodies, a sight that momentarily spooked Aron in the clear moonlight. A few houses down was an abarrotes that sold milk and beer, next door to a narrow pulquería with an adobe front painted turquoise. On the curb in front of the pulquería a very old man sat hunched beneath an umbrella, though it wasn’t raining. The man looked up, frightened, and then smiled as Aron walked past without seeming to notice him.
Aron walked to the end of the block and turned right onto a small, darkened side street and glanced behind him and then walked to the nearest parked car and checked its driver’s-side door. It opened. He got in but got back out, leaving the door open. He went to the next car and then the next two, all unlocked, before coming to a beaten, unpainted Chevy Apache pickup that rested too low on its suspension. He got in and this time found the key in the ignition. He shut the door and started the pickup and put it into gear and pulled out, heading toward Calle Arroyo de las Víboras and the bridge over the river into Texas.
Nov. 17, 1972
I’m headed back now, driving east out of Fort Sumner, back up onto the llano. I’ve stopped in Clovis, N.M., at this little café to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich, to gather my thoughts and prepare myself.
It’s been more than three years since I’ve been anywhere close to town, three more since the last time I was back at the house. I’d hoped to be wearing a better suit, but the suit comes with the room and the room comes with the car and I needed one that wouldn’t attract attention. I open the wallet in the jacket pocket and look at the face and the name on the driver’s license: Baldwin “Buster” Parker, Jr., 54, of Cache, Oklahoma. Southwestern Livestock Association membership card: Senior Judge—Equine—Since 1952. Every man I’d ever known with a connection to horses drove a pickup. The fact that Buster Parker was making the circuit in a car, a Nova no less, made me wonder if he had run into some problems.
The car was in such bad shape I had to pull off at a wrecking yard outside of Portales for a new fan belt. Some years before, I had passed this yard and made a mental note. It sat off a county road that ran by a small New Mexico state park called Oasis, named for a small seasonal pond that RV people frequented and tried to fish in, mostly for the novelty of it, catching nothing but an occasional ghost-white carp.
The wrecking yard, in a shallow caliche pit, lay only a few hundred feet down the road but it was completely hidden from the campers by rolling sand dunes and low cottonwoods. Over the gate hung a weathered wooden sign that said COWBOY GRAVEYARD. I didn’t know whether this was the legal name or a joke or maybe both. I was frankly surprised to find the yard still there, a spread of maybe a hundred smashed, twisted, rusted, burned, gutted, gunshot, sun-bleached, wheel-less automobiles—cars, pickups, trucks—manufactured over the last half century, never to be driven again.
A couple of miles on the other side of the pit stretched a different kind of graveyard, a place called Blackwater Draw, a gravel quarry in a dry streambed where a group of archaeologists in the twenties had come across evidence of prehistoric human habitation on the plains. They called the kind of human who lived there—the earliest known human in North America—Clovis Man. This had always sounded funny to me, having once known a man from Clovis, this small New Mexico town where I was now, a town without much to recommend it, least of all the man I knew. The archaeologists dug up spear points, stone hammers, various other caveman things. They also found fossils of the big animals that the cavemen hunted, or maybe the animals that had hunted them—mammoths, saber-toothed tigers. I’d never been able to comprehend what this land must have looked like when animals like tigers and elephants roamed it. Could this flat, dry, treeless part of the earth have been that diff
erent? Jungle and swamp? Did actual bona fide bodies of water cover it? Driving by the draw always reminded me how little I really knew about anything, even the things I thought I knew best.
In the scrap heap the sun shot rays in every direction off splintered windshields. The wind sounded mournful through the open chassis of door-less cars. Some of the vehicles were flattened whole, piled on top of each other into high, multicolored cliffs of faded blues, greens, pinks. Some were hacked up, grouped into pieces—rear ends, trunks, and tailfins in a heap; front axles, hoods, and grilles in another. Hundreds of old tires, cut in half, laced inside with spiderwebs, grinned black grins into the bright daylight.
I looked to see if anyone was around, but there never is in such places—when a part is needed someone drives out from town to find it, and if parts walk off by themselves nobody much cares. There will always be more wrecks.
I stepped through the shadows, watching for rattlers and copperheads, and went to the corner where the mostly intact vehicles sat, lined up nose to tail. The stripped ones piled two high looked funny, like skeletons humping. Seeing the damage to each of the cars it was impossible to keep from imagining what had happened to the people riding in them at the time of the calamity. With some wrecks, there was no denying that death had come, decades before or maybe just a few months. In others, the passengers might have survived, but they didn’t walk away and they were never going to be the same again.
I took off my jacket and put it on the roof of the cleanest car. I found a belt that seemed pliable enough but I hunted down a spare in case. Then I walked around looking at the least damaged cars, admiring the gracious lines of the older models, lines that seemed to go on and on for no other reason than beauty.
On my way out, I passed one that stopped me, a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible, midnight-blue four-door. It had once been a magnificent automobile but now rested on its axles, sun-blasted, the body partially severed between the doors as if someone had tried to cut it in half with a band saw. Before I was working for myself I stole a car like this south of Dallas, a big score. But the reason the car stuck in my mind was what we found in the trunk when we opened it, the strangest thing I ever came across in a car: a library. Or what looked for all the world like one, dozens of hardback books almost completely filling the width of the trunk, arranged in five rows of wooden racks, spines up, alphabetized by title. At first we theorized that the man who owned the car might be a teacher or librarian, though the books had no markings. Maybe he was some kind of eccentric, we thought, and just got off on driving around with a trunkful of bookshelves.
My partner, a man named Dale, always on the lookout for an extra score, said: “Maybe he’s a goddamned rare book dealer, did you ever think of that?”
He extracted some books from the shelves and examined them, thumbing intently through the first few pages as if he had some actual expertise. But he took two of the oldest-looking books to a dealer and it turned out that he was right: The man looked the volumes over carefully and then looked Dale over carefully and offered him a hundred on the spot.
I sold my half except for three I kept for a while, mostly because I found them so beautiful, bound in tan polished calf hide with gilt cords across the spine. They were a trilogy of Westerns from the twenties by a writer I’d never heard of, named Thornton Woods, and the title of the first book, The World Beneath the Moon, had such a nice ring that I started to read it. It told the story of a Tennessee fur trapper named Daniel T. L. Geary who ends up in Texas after the Civil War, wounded and lost, and makes his way through a hellish landscape of Indians, mercenaries, and carpetbaggers. Relying more on his wits than his guns he builds a cattle business and starts a family that comes to control most of the Texas Panhandle. The second book, Place of Passage, about the patriarch’s only son, Durant, picks up the story as the cattle empire comes under siege from settlers and a range war breaks out and the son’s loyalties are divided after he falls in love with the daughter of a cotton farmer trying to fence off the ranchland. The books were pretty good, written by a man who clearly knew the territory and the time. But the last volume, The Unsullied Country, was something altogether different and strange, so unlike its predecessors it was hard to understand how it ever got published. The story took place almost entirely in the mind of Durant, now an old man living on the little that remained of his family land, in a Texas he barely recognized anymore. Through the whole book Durant never leaves the bed where doctors have confined him, his memory the only part of him still able to wander, spooling out over the years he spent with his wife, Vie, the woman for whom he had given up everything. The main part of the story concerns a journey the two take together by wagon as newlyweds, from Amarillo to Austin, to spend their honeymoon in the Driskill Hotel. At first it all seems like a believable enough memory. But the further along you go the more you suspect it’s just a dream Durant is having, about a trip he wished he had taken with Vie, who was frail and unable to bear him children, ending the family line. As the two ride down off the plains and into the greenness of the Hill Country, the landscape gradually becomes more unreal. Durant develops the ability to speak the language of the Indians he comes across—Apaches and Tonkawas, hostile Comanches—and to converse with birds and his own horses. The newlyweds find that they no longer need to eat or drink. When they arrive at the state capital, the city is described as a paradise vision of the future, with domed alabaster buildings and dirigibles crisscrossing the sky, a place so magnificent they decide to stay for good. But once they do, the story more or less peters out because they’re perfectly happy, and paradise ends up being an uneventful place.
It was the craziest damned book I’d ever read, but for the longest time I couldn’t get it out of my head. I felt I knew Durant as well I’d known anyone in my life, and there were times when I fantasized he was an ancestor of mine. The fact that he was a character in an obscure Western novel didn’t make thinking about this any less pleasing. If anything, it made it seem like a world existed where it could be possible. Just because a story isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
The black canvas top on the Lincoln convertible was up. The windows were so dirt-caked I couldn’t see inside. I put the fan belts on my shoulder and reached out with both hands and grabbed the front and back handles—these were the first Lincolns with suicide doors. They came open with surprising ease, parting like castle gates. The pent-up heat inside boiled over me and I peered into the dim interior, which looked oddly preserved: all the seats intact, covered with a thin layer of dust, dash and steering wheel untouched, even the radio still in place. At the risk of getting my suit dirty, I climbed in and sat on the broad rear seat and stretched out my arms. I thought about closing the doors and staying inside for a while, hiding out, shutting out the world. But it was too hot, and I had to get the car fixed if I was going to make town by nightfall. So I got out and closed the doors and walked back to the road.
NINE
When Troy returned to the rest stop it was not in the Biscayne but another car, an apple-red Plymouth Valiant four-door that looked to be only a few years old, well kept. From a distance Harlan and Martha saw the car slowing alongside the shoulder and had no idea Troy was inside. Standing up, Harlan took Martha by the arm and the two began to walk slowly together up the road in the opposite direction, hunched against the rain, a mismatched pair against the immense landscape melting into the gray sky.
Troy eased the car beside them and rolled down his window.
“Hurry up and get in before somebody drives by and sees you,” he said.
Harlan didn’t stop immediately but slowed his pace and let go of Martha’s arm and looked over at Troy in the driver’s seat.
“You scared the hell out of us. Where’d this come from?”
“The same place they all come from. Parked somewhere and nobody paying attention. We can’t risk keeping one too long now. We’re almost there.”
Martha’s wet hair was plastered to her head like gauze. Be
fore she walked around the wide square front of the car and got into the backseat she squeezed her ponytail with both hands over her shoulder. Harlan continued to stand in the rain looking at the car with water sluicing off the brim of his hat. “It’s an improvement, I’d say.”
“It’s as red as a monkey’s ass, and it’s another cop make,” Troy said. “But it’ll get us the rest of the way. Get in. I got us food.”
Harlan beat his hat against his knee and rounded the front and got in and Troy turned around in the middle of the road back toward Presidio. Three Styrofoam containers sat in the middle of the bench seat between Troy and Harlan. Troy handed the top one back to Martha.
“I got you a burrito this time, since you’re from Mexico,” he said. “I don’t really know what Mennonites like to eat.”
Martha took the still-warm container and put it on her lap and opened it but didn’t begin to eat, waiting for Harlan and Troy.
“Thank you.”
Harlan took one of the containers and opened it and said nothing.
“What?” said Troy, taking his eyes off the road and glancing over to see what was wrong with the food.
“You know I don’t like eggs. And you get me bacon and eggs.”
Troy looked back down the road, which had become hilly and sinuous, twisting along the course of the Rio Grande’s ragged line.
“You used to eat eggs. What’s the matter with eggs?”
“Chickens are dirty animals, and stupid. I raised and sold chickens for ten years. I drove around with ’em cooped up behind me, shitloads of chickens and their shit for me to smell. So I don’t like to eat their embryos, which is what you damn well might be eating when you eat an egg—the embryo of a dirty animal.”
“Did you ever think what would happen if we let all those eggs become chickens?” Troy asked. “There’d be so many chickens we wouldn’t be able to walk for stepping on them or drive for running them over. It would be terrible. A daily slaughter. In fact, Harlan, it’s our moral duty to eat eggs to prevent so much needless chicken suffering.”
Presidio Page 23
