We walked to Old Town, where I gathered supplies and put them in the back of the Bronco. We crossed the Rio Grande on the Alameda Bridge into the suburban wasteland on the west side of the river, passing a Sam’s Club, then the big Intel plant before veering westward on Southern Boulevard until we passed the last of the homes.
Beyond the homes, a grid of roads has already been graded out for the next building boom.
I recalled Abbey writing, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
When scientific studies in the early ’90s showed that Albuquerque’s aquifer was not being replenished as fast as it was being pumped, no one suggested limiting growth. Instead, Albuquerque turned to the Bureau of Reclamation.
A misnomer. The Bureau of Reclamation doesn’t reclaim things. It destroys them. In this case, the San Juan River that flows through northwestern New Mexico. The San Juan passes less than a mile from Four Corners and used to feed clear, cool water into the Colorado River. Their confluence is now a waterfall because the level of the Colorado is so low. And the water falling from the San Juan is no longer cold and clear. It’s warm and muddy. Like Mark Twain said about the Mississippi, it’s too thin to plow and too thick to drink.
Why has the San Juan been reduced in places from a mighty river to a muddy stream? Because much of its water is now diverted into tunnels that carry it to the Rio Grande so that the desert city of Albuquerque can continue to grow beyond what its natural water supply will support.
The San Juan–Chama Project takes water out of the San Juan River and pumps it into the Chama River, which flows into the Rio Grande. An impressive engineering feat when you consider that the San Juan and the Chama are on opposite sides of the continental divide.
Who says water doesn’t run uphill?
In fact, it runs toward money, something that Albuquerque and the Bureau of Reckless Reclamation have a lot more of than the small villages that depended on the San Juan for drinking water, agriculture and fly-fishing.
Albuquerque’s suburbs across the Rio Grande creep like a fungus, eventually covering everything. The only thing standing in the way of farther westward expansion is the Tohajiilee Indian Reservation, a small noncontiguous section of the Navajo Nation, which is now only ten miles away. It’s less than 1 percent of total Navajo land, and the sixteen hundred people who live there are less than 1 percent of the Navajo population. Let’s hope some backroom deal doesn’t result in the redrawing of boundaries.
I’ve never set foot on Tohajiilee, but I like knowing it’s there. The Navajo phrase tó hajiileehé means “where people draw up water by means of a rope one pot after another.”
No wonder the Japanese could never decode the Navajo language during WWII.
Sharice and I were looking at Tohajiilee from the west side of Mesa Prieto, which is home to hundreds of petroglyphs. Efforts are under way to protect the entire area, so I resisted the temptation to climb and get a closer look.
But even from a respectful distance, we could see images from the Archaic period, some as old as 5000 BCE.
One was a six-point star. One was a single-pole ladder. Wood is scarce in the desert, so why have a pole on both sides when one in the middle will do?
There are more images from the Ancestral Pueblo period, which runs up until the arrival of the Spaniards.
“You see the armadillo playing the flute?”
She turned her head and located it. “Amazing.”
“It’s one of a series of fifteen animal flute players. The animal next to the armadillo must be mythical.”
“If not, then it must be extinct,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Or maybe it’s actually just a rabbit, but the painter took lessons from the Gnome.”
She laughed. “Why are you and Susannah so down on her?”
“Susannah said Jollo is so jealous of Harte Hockley that she gives bad grades to any student who likes him.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t happen often, because they’re smart enough never to praise him in her presence. For my part, I don’t like her because she started quizzing me about him before even introducing herself, and her behavior as parliamentarian is the academic version of the reign of terror.”
“Without the beheadings, I hope.”
“So far.”
We spread an old blanket in the shade of a slab of igneous rock protruding like an awning between two layers of coral-colored sandstone. I fired up my propane-fueled mini-grill and placed a cast-iron skillet over the fire. When it started smoking, I poured in some corn oil and seared two trout filets. I slid those onto plates and dumped the New Mexico trinity—chopped green chiles, onions and garlic—into the still-smoking skillet. When they began so soften, I cracked in four eggs, did a five-stir scramble and dumped the results over the trout.
“Why is it that food cooked outside tastes so good?” Sharice asked after mopping her plate with a corn tortilla.
“Maybe it’s an evolutionary thing—some part of our brain recalls when all eating was outside.”
“And it’s special to us because you never knew each morning whether you would have anything to eat that day. Especially in the desert.”
“Food is plentiful in the desert. You just have to know how to find it.”
“This from a guy who found our food in a picnic basket.”
“I could forage if I had to.”
“Uh-huh. Your last attempt at foraging ended with you in a dental chair and me helping Dr. Batres repair the tooth you chipped trying to open piñon nuts.”
I reflexively slid my tongue across the tooth in question.
We lie silent on the blanket.
The air is cool, still and dry. Asters are blooming between the rocks, their yellow centers like small suns in the blue sky of their petals. The popcorn scent of chamisa wafts from a clump in a wash. In the Jemez Mountains to the north, I see patches of gold. The aspen are beginning to turn.
Sharice is sleeping.
I hear the brt-brt call of a scaled quail, followed by his second call, a short screech. I scan the area and find him under a juniper. He repeats the calls several times and then begins foraging. I don’t think they eat juniper berries, but they do like tumbleweeds, several of which are tangled against the juniper.
A red-tailed hawk circles above. Maybe he’s spotted the quail. Or maybe he’s just enjoying the freedom to soar up where the air is clean and cool.
I could live here. Build a one-room adobe house. Get water from the spring at the head of the wash. Dig clay for pots. Go to town once a month to sell pottery and buy victuals. Come home to find Sharice arranging wildflowers.
The desert is clean, open and honest. No concrete and glass buildings. No bureaucratic university. No weird faculty artists.
No cancer, I think.
I say a prayer to that effect, dispatching it to the Great Spirit at the heavenly GPO address rather than attaching any of the many names we humans have tried to pin on the deity.
Sharice awakes. “Sorry I fell asleep.”
“I’m glad you did. You didn’t get much sleep last night.”
She is silent for a moment. “I was worrying.”
“I know.”
“If it turns out to be—”
I place a finger on her lips. “Don’t speculate.”
“You’re right. I’ll see if I can get in to see Dr. Rao on Monday. Can you go with me?”
“Of course.”
She cants her head. “What’s making that sound?”
I point. “There’s a quail under that juniper.”
“He’s so cute.”
“Tastes good too.”
She pokes my arm. “You hunt those?”
“I don’t hunt. But I used to eat them before we started dating.
”
“You don’t have to change your diet because of me.”
“I didn’t change it because of you. I changed it because of us. I like that we eat the same things.”
“You always say the sweetest—eeeek!”
She jumps up and grabs my arm.
I look down to see a whiptail lizard leaving the edge of our blanket and heading down into the wash in the frenetic style of her breed, tail lashing and legs wheeling. Then just as suddenly as she appeared, she is gone.
I don’t mean out of sight. I mean dead. Speared by the beak of a roadrunner who, deftly using claw and beak, turns the lizard laterally so that she can be swallowed.
“What was that thing?” Clarice asks as she tightens her death grip on my arm and shudders.
“Just a whiptail lizard. They’re harmless and sort of cute.”
“Yuck. They are not cute. He looked like a baby alligator on meth.”
“She.”
“How do you know it was a she?”
“All the babies are clones of their mothers. Whiptails reproduce asexually.”
She releases her grip on my bicep, places her arms around my waist and says, “I feel sorry for them. They miss all the fun.” She kisses me.
After she releases me from her embrace, I glance down at our blanket. She follows my eyes and says, “Forget about it. No way I’m taking my clothes off with those little devils scurrying around.”
On the way back to the Bronco, we saw more recent rock art made during what is called the historic period—after the arrival of the Spaniards.
As if the natives had no history before then.
I ask her if she can guess when they were made.
“Must be after the Spanish came. There’s a man on a horse. Who is the other guy with the feathers?”
“Some people thinks it’s Po’pay, the leader of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.”
“What caused the revolt?”
“The Spanish priests tried to prevent the tribes from practicing their traditional rites. After the revolt, the priests stopped interfering with pueblo religious ceremonies provided that the puebloans observed the outward forms of Catholicism. That’s still pretty much the case today. Many of the Pueblo residents practice both Catholicism and traditional rites.”
“Can’t hurt to cover your bases,” she said.
That’s why I prayed to the nameless Great Spirit about your cancer, I thought.
God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Jesus, Mohammed, Gautama, Mary Baker Eddy, Confucius, Joseph Smith, the Dalai Lama. There’s a lot of holiness swirling around the universe.
And not a few charlatans.
23
Weekends in Sharice’s condo usually pass too quickly. A good woman, an exotic cat, a weird dog and a view of the Sandias are things worth holding on to.
But when you discover a small lump on a Friday night, Monday seems a year away.
The picnic filled most of Saturday. We took Geronimo and Benz for a long walk on Sunday and laughed as people stared at the mixed couple with what looks like a cheetah on a lead and another animal of indeterminate species plodding behind. We played Scrabble. We read.
But mostly we vacillated between saying there was no reason to talk about it before seeing the doctor and talking about it anyway because even though it was a very tiny lump, it was the elephant in the room.
We showed up at the doctor’s office Monday morning at eight with no appointment. When Sharice told the receptionist the reason for the visit, she said she was sure Dr. Rao could squeeze us in, but it might be a long wait.
To pass the time, Sharice taught me a new game called, for no evident reason, Ghosts. “One of us chooses a letter,” she explained. “The other one adds a letter before or after. We take turns adding letters before or after so that the string of letters gets longer. The first person to spell a word loses.”
“That’s too easy. All you have to do is keep adding q or x and you’ll never spell a word.”
“You haven’t heard the rule.”
“I should have known there’s a rule. Just one?”
“Two actually. The first one is you must have a word in mind every time you add a letter. If I think you don’t have a word in mind, I can challenge you. If you don’t have a word, you lose. If you do have a word, I lose for challenging you. The second rule is that not spelling a word only applies after the third letter.”
“Because otherwise, we’d spend all our time avoiding ‘it,’ ‘at,’ ‘on,’ et cetera.”
“Exactly. Let’s try a game.”
After she won the first five games, I was trying to decide if I should challenge her after only two letters into the sixth one. It seemed like my first chance at a victory. I had gone first and chosen z to give myself what I hoped would be a competitive advantage. I once spent a full day at Spirits in Clay—not a customer in sight—reading the z section of the unabridged edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Tristan tells me everyone looks up words on their phones now and paper dictionaries are obsolete. But I love my Oxford English Dictionary. All thirty-five pounds of it. In addition to its primary function, it makes a great doorstop when the New Mexico winds are howling.
There are almost two thousand words that start with z, from zabaglione (an Italian custard) to zyzzyvas (a tropical beetle often found in palms). Zyzzyvas would score a zillion points in Scrabble, but there’s only one z tile, so it’s not possible.
Sharice appended a v behind my z.
Zv?
Surely, no word contains those two consonants back to back. “Ozvoi”? “Azvight”? “Uzvacate”?
She was bluffing. Trying to get me to add a letter so she could challenge. And she would win because I had no word in mind.
So I took my only option. “I challenge you. What word do you have in mind?”
“Rendezvous.”
Oops. Tripped up by the silent z.
“That doesn’t count,” I said. “It’s French.”
“Its origin is French, but it’s been adopted into English.”
“Adopted words don’t count.” I was grasping at straws.
She laughed. “In that case we can’t play this game in English, because all your words are adopted.”
“My words?”
“Well? You’re the native speaker here.”
“Then why can’t I win at least one game?”
“You’re new at it. I’ve been playing for years. Let’s try another round.”
We didn’t because a nurse arrived and led us to an examination room, where she pulled one of those one-size-fits-none gowns out of a drawer. It was a shade of blue you can get only after a hundred launderings. One of the ties was missing.
The nurse thrust the gown toward Sharice.
I took it instead. “I can’t let her wear this.”
The nurse frowned. “The doctor will need to examine her.”
“I know that. But she can open her blouse as easily as this gown.”
“She will have to remove her bra.”
“She isn’t wearing one.”
The nurse stared at me.
“Trust me,” I said. “The blouse won’t be an issue.”
She shook her head at my idiocy and left.
Sharice hugged me. “Thanks.”
“I love your sense of style. You are not wearing one of these until Vera Wang starts designing them.”
Dr. Rao showed up a couple of minutes later. She said hello to Sharice, then turned to me.
“Hubie?”
“Hi, Linda.” I turned to Sharice. “We graduated from Albuquerque High School the same year. She was the valedictorian.”
“Are you here in some official capacity?” asked Linda. “Counselor? Case worker?”
“Fashion consultant,” I said, and held the gown al
oft. “I saved her from the indignity of wearing this.”
While she and Sharice were laughing, I put the gown on and did a pirouette. “Good thing I have my pants on. Otherwise you two would be looking at my backside. Now you know why you hear ‘ICU’ so often in hospitals.”
Linda laughed some more. “So you’re here as a comedian?”
“Actually, we’re a couple.”
Her laugh stopped in mid ha. “Oh.” She covered her surprise more deftly than most people do and said, “Good. Having a partner present during a visit helps put the patient at ease. It can also help afterward, since she has someone to talk to who saw and heard what was going on—sort of like a second set of eyes.”
Sharice took my hand and looked at me. “Just like what Charles said I could do for you.”
Dr. Rao asked Sharice if she was ready. Sharice nodded, unbuttoned her blouse and touched her right breast. “Right about here.”
The doctor felt around for the lump. Then she poked around in Sharice’s right armpit.
The doc relocated the lump with her hand. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“What about when I press on it?”
“Nothing. All I feel is the pressing.”
“Okay. You can button up. The lump is very small, and I couldn’t find any other abnormality. About ninety percent of all lumps located solely in the breast with no other indications are benign. Normally, I’d just give you a date to come back and see if it’s changed. But given your history, we need to err on the side of caution.”
Sharice nodded again.
“I’m going to give you a diagnostic mammogram. We can do it now, here in the office. Unlike a screening mammogram, a diagnostic mammogram gives us views from different angles and at a higher level of magnification. Which is good because with a lump this small, it’s sometimes hard to see enough to make a judgment. Since it isn’t painful, I’m surprised you found it.”
“I didn’t. Hubie …” Her hand went to her mouth.
I blushed.
The doctor laughed. “See? Contrary to popular belief, it is sometimes useful to have a man around. The radiologist will be here in a few minutes to take you to the radiology lab.” She turned to me. “It’s good to see you after all these years. I think I’ve read about you in the paper a few times. Are you in some newsworthy profession?”
The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey Page 12
