Picnic in the Ruins
Page 20
As Reinhardt parked, he noticed more dinosaurs printed on every sign and pump, and he thought how strange it was for people to cling to the fiction that our oil came from these creatures. Another gust buffeted the car, and across the way, an old man with a wispy white beard and no mustache labored outside in the turbulence to fuel his old camper. Reinhardt watched him carry a step stool, which he stood on to clean the windshield. As he began his work, the wind snatched the paper towels from his hand and carried them off.
Reinhardt got out of the car to throw his trash into the garbage, and the old man saw him. He climbed down from his stool, looked to where the towels had gone, then approached Reinhardt with a fury in his small eyes. “Supposed to rain again,” he said without preamble. “Like to be the monsoons.”
Reinhardt nodded and turned to scan the southward expanse where the dark and distant mountains lay derelict against the sky, which was blue at its zenith and populated by a dozen or more clouds heaped in bales that dwindled in size as they approached the tan haze of the horizon. “Rain? But it’s so clear now,” Reinhardt said.
The old man gestured to all sides, the wind blowing his hair and beard around. “Winds of change, son,” he said. “Winds of change.” Then the man walked back to his camper, a slight limp in his right leg. He stowed the stool in the back camper, then disappeared around the other side. When he reappeared, the man shouted, “Don’t fool with the rain.”
Reinhardt nodded and thanked him.
“It looks like a desert now,” the old man said, “but this whole place was created with water.”
“I will remember your advice,” Reinhardt called back.
“Not advice,” the man said. “It’s a warning.” Then he limped across the concrete to the convenience store, the wind picking up again so that he struggled to open the door. After several attempts, he pounded on the glass with his fist. The door opened slowly, and a teenage girl with long straight black hair pushed against it until the old man could enter, then she guided the door closed. It looked like she was used to the task.
Reinhardt began pumping his gas, and a burst of dust blasted him in the face, so he hunched behind the pump and looked past it toward the open desert. A wall of dust formed in the air and billowed across the open ground, targeting him. Inside the dark roller, debris lifted into the air and fell scattered behind. The wall cloud swelled as it approached and surged across the highway. Reinhardt ducked, pulling his face down into the neck of his shirt right as he and the gas station were engulfed. He squatted and waited until the roar of the wind had passed, then he stood.
A half-powered wind lingered, then the gas dispenser clicked off. Reinhardt replaced the nozzle and saw the gas station door opening slowly against the wind, the teenage girl turning her shoulder into it, pushing with everything she had, like someone in a silent movie. While she leaned against the glass, the old man limped past her and crossed to his camper, then the girl walked the door backward carefully so it wouldn’t slam.
Reinhardt walked past the camper as it drove off, noticing the Arkansas license plates and the bumper sticker that said I ♥ ATHENS. He pried open the gas station door and eased it shut. Inside, the girl sat on a stool behind the register, inspecting the tips of her hair. His breath caught in his chest as he recognized that she was an Indian. “Rote Indianer,” he whispered to himself, and she looked up.
“Can I help you?” she said.
He shook his head, embarrassed and surprised and a little confused by the girl’s red plastic hoop earrings and her black hoodie. Naturally, she wouldn’t be wearing eagle feathers or beadwork, but he was expecting something else. She returned to her hair, and Reinhardt continued to look at her, noticing the acne on her cheeks, and the dermatologist in him thought perhaps he might recommend a retinoid cream.
But he said nothing and continued on to the restroom. He used the toilet, then washed his hands and face. Out there was a real flesh-and-blood Indian, bored like any teenager with a bad job, surrounded by cigarettes and lottery tickets and a flimsy display of unsold LED flashlights. He was disappointed in himself for confusing her with his idea of Native people. She was not playing Indian like Wolf and his friends from the teepee camps back home.
He dried his face and returned to the store and saw her sitting in the same position but now playing a game on her phone. He picked up a few bottles of Cherry Coke, a few bottles of water, and set them on the counter, then went back down the aisles for potato chips, nuts, and candy. From different parts of the store, he watched her until the guilt of it overpowered him. He looked for a back door, but there wasn’t one, so he approached the register and set his purchases down. The girl rang him up and put everything into a plastic sack. He had so many questions he wanted to ask her, but he knew he would be clumsy and embarrass himself even more, so he settled for directions. “I’m looking for the road that leads to Antelope Flats,” he asked.
“Where?” she asked.
“Antelope Flats.”
“I don’t know where that is. Is it on the monument or something?”
“It is supposed to be near here, or out there,” Reinhardt said, pointing through the window. “Let me show you the map I—”
“Hey, Ronnie?” the girl called out.
After a second, “What?” The voice was quiet.
“Where’s a place called Antelope Flats?”
“Where’s what?”
“Antelope Flats, like somewhere on the monument.” The girl sighed, then a skinny kid came out of the back wearing a Limp Bizkit T-shirt and saggy gray jeans. His ears were gauged and he had a round face with square glasses. “Antelope what?” he said, still quiet.
“Flats,” she said.
“Is that a place?” They both looked at each other for a moment.
“He says it is,” she said, pointing to Reinhardt.
“Hello, yes,” Reinhardt said. “My map says the turnoff is close. I am supposed to find a road called Sundown.”
“Ah, okay,” Ronnie said. “Sundown is what my grandma calls . . .” The boy thought for a moment. “If you’ve got a map, how come you can’t find it?”
Reinhardt shrugged. “It’s not a very good one. And I am not from around here.”
The girl laughed.
“My grandma used to talk about Sundown. Maybe it’s just County Road 16. It’s like three miles that way,” he said, pointing east. “There’s a tiny little sign, but you won’t see it if you’re going fast.” Ronnie squinted out the window at Reinhardt’s Mustang. “No four-wheel drive?”
“This is my only transportation,” Reinhardt said.
“Okay, but Sundown is only graded for a few miles. Then it gets pretty bad.”
“Yeah,” the girl said. “And you should fill up first, though.”
“For reals. Get gas now. People run out of gas out there all the time. Tow truck will rip you off. Maybe you should get a better map.”
“He already paid,” the girl said.
Reinhardt held up the bags, then he thanked them and pushed against the door. The wind had dropped off enough that it worked easily.
He looked back at the windows of the store and saw Ronnie and the girl staring at him. After a few seconds the girl covered her mouth and turned away. He thought he could see Ronnie smiling. As Reinhardt took another step, his angle of view changed and the sun struck the glass, turning it into an opaque flare of white. When he left the tour group, he was hoping to find something real that hadn’t been staged, but now he knew that they’d only been shown what the tour company wanted them to see. He moved his two bags into one hand and opened the car door. An empty plastic sack blew past him like a ghost. Gazing into the vault of the sky, he saw himself as a creature given over to and divided by vanity; his cheeks burned with shame and anger for the tour and for believing Krause and Wolf and the web pages that planted these ideas in his head about what he’d find out here. He regretted having to pay so much for the truth. Then he corrected himself. Anyone with the truth, he tho
ught, should not be willing to sell it.
He sat behind the wheel and considered aborting the trip, then looked down at Mythstructures for Blockbusters and he thought about the call to adventure and how a refusal follows it. If the hero stays home, there is no story. He set the key fob into the ashtray and looked around, thinking of everything that had brought him here to this X on the map, and he made the choice to press on.
Before he left the gas station, he rolled down the window and snapped a picture of the glossy brontosaurus with a vast desert panorama stretching out behind it, and he posted it to Instagram and geotagged the image with PIPE SPRING GAS AND GROCERY, ARIZONA. The caption: INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN.
Reinhardt found County Road 16 after passing it twice. He wanted to drive with the top down, but the wind made it impossible. Enveloped in air conditioning, he opened one of his Cherry Cokes and drove on. His attention drifted outward to the mesas in the empty distance. The lack of green gave Reinhardt the impression of moving through a landscape drawn in chalk on a sheet of packing paper.
Eventually the wind died down, and being the only movement in such stillness made him question the passing of time. Every few miles he stopped and took more photographs with his phone. At some point there was no longer cell service. Eventually the road was blocked by three cows: two females and a calf. One of them swung her head and stared at him, white-faced, like somebody waiting their turn to speak. He took a photo of her through the dust-spotted windshield, then he honked, but it did not disperse them, so he got out and ran them off with shouts and waving arms.
He drove on, watching the steady unbroken, unchanging view, listening to the rumble of the tires and the hum of the engine. He noticed that his body had relaxed, so he rearranged his limbs. This was better than what he planned. Perhaps that was the mistake, thinking he could imagine this place from his apartment in Berlin after a few clicks on the internet. Even Sigmund F. Krause’s books didn’t have the full feeling of the space, and a map is never anything more than a finger pointing the way. Above all else, this mess of a trip made Reinhardt feel possibilities that had been veiled before.
He heard a horn and noticed a turquoise pickup bursting forth from the dust behind him. The truck pulled a trailer carrying a large yellow excavation machine with a blade on the front and a digging arm in the back. The English word for it escaped him, and as the truck zoomed past, leaving him in the wash of its dust, he thought of the German: Löffelbagger. After a few minutes, he drove clear of the cloud and saw the truck was gone. He was glad to be alone again.
The next photograph he stopped to take was of a derelict truck from the forties that lay a hundred feet from the road, swallowed by creosote bushes. As he approached the vehicle, he saw that it was riddled with bullet holes. Sunlight lanced the interior with slender white beams, each one filled with swirling dust. The inside was littered with broken bottles and old cans. As he returned to the car, he thought for a moment about the difference between Bryce Canyon, which was a national park, and this national monument. One was an amusement park full of noise and tourists, the other something frozen in its own time.
After a while, Reinhardt dug into his bag looking for the packets of pemmican he had brought from Germany. He’d tasted it for the first time sitting around a fire in buckskins at a hobby club encampment in the Black Forest. It was before he’d met Wolf, at the start of it all. Friends from college took him and a woman he thought he might marry—Greta; her Indian name was The Blue Sky Girl. He’d loved Krause’s books as a child, but so did everyone. The camps unlocked something in him, an escape from the anxieties of school and the mounting waves of digital connections. According to his friends, Indian people lived authentic lives, which he and his friends imitated, hoping to escape the modern world.
He opened the pemmican and took a bite, remembering the games and drum circles, the teepees and dances. He thought about how, much later, Wolf had taken him to other camps and introduced him to Germans who had transformed themselves completely into what they thought an Indian was. As he drove, he began to see how false those gatherings had been, how misguided and ill conceived. Taking the thinnest possible slice of the truth, they had concocted their own mythology from afar, using Native people as props and side characters. The Krause Museum was a sham. Their powwows and trinkets like so many cardboard cutouts. The kids in that gas station were real; he was fake. Wolf was fake, though he called himself a practical anthropologist. All of it was an idea of an idea of an idea.
Reinhardt set the unfinished pemmican down on the seat and drove on. He did not know how to have this conversation with Wolf when he returned to Germany, but he knew he must. It was overwhelming enough to have this dialogue with himself. Was this his quest? Was he to return home with this new knowledge?
Reinhardt took many photographs on the drive, saving them in his phone for uploading later. A single cloud separated from the others, casting a massive shadow across the expanse. A ramshackle homestead collapsed back into the crumbling hillside it was built into. He drove and snacked and looked for more things to photograph. Eventually he came to a section of the road where the high-voltage lines crossed overhead. The towers were massive, and as Reinhardt considered them, he tried to guide his thinking to something more Teutonic and less borrowed. He imagined them as golems given the task to guide power from the country to the city. He dreamed up a story where a boy was given magic metallic seeds and told not to plant them until there was a full moon. The boy, of course, rejected this counsel and that night these giants grew and wreaked havoc on the nearby village. A wizard gave them all magic rope to carry, which froze the golems in their tracks.
Reinhardt crested a rise to find a man standing alongside the road, next to a silver Sebring convertible. His clothes were not a hiker’s. He wore a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt, green pants, and white loafers with no socks, and he was waving Reinhardt down.
Reinhardt stopped, and a thick tan cloud of dust immediately engulfed the both of them. The man approached the car, motioning for him to roll down the window by cranking his hand. Reinhardt lowered the window with a button, then he turned off the car.
“It’s odd,” the man said, repeating his pantomime and looking at it. There was a tattoo of a dagger-pierced skull on his arm. “We do this gesture, even when there’s no crank to turn.”
“Excuse me?” Reinhardt said.
“Like how we say that we hang up the phone when there is just a button, and even then, often there is no button at all, just an image of a button.”
Reinhardt looked all around to see if there was anyone else. There wasn’t.
“But we didn’t come here to philosophize,” the man said. “I am looking for some business associates. One tall, the other short. They drive a turquoise Ford, I believe.”
“That truck passed me a while ago,” Reinhardt said.
“Which way?”
Reinhardt pointed backward with his thumb. “They passed me back there, then I didn’t see them again. It would be easy to get lost out here.”
“It is very easy. I’ve been beating myself up about losing these two.” The man noticed the snacks on his seat. “Is that pemmican?” he asked.
“It is,” Reinhardt said. “But I am embarrassed to say I bought it on the internet.”
“No shame in that. Using the internet is not really a choice anymore.”
“My friend Wolf makes his own. Mine is inauthentic. It has raisins and walnuts.”
“I stand corrected. Shame on you for raisins and walnuts.” The man stood and looked up the road and back again.
“Can I help you find them?” Reinhardt asked.
“You came in on 16, then. Not sure what road we’re on now.”
Reinhardt said he did. “I can show you my map,” he said, reaching for his phone.
“That isn’t necessary,” the man said.
“Do you think they are okay?”
“For now,” he said. “They know their way around here. I’m just follow
ing.”
“If I see them should I say that you are looking for them?”
“Ah, no. I’d like to surprise them,” the man said, looking at his wristwatch. “I appreciate your time.” He thumped the roof of the car and stepped back. Reinhardt looked over and saw that the man’s car was using its undersized spare tire. He thought about pointing out that such a small tire would cause problems on these roads, but instead he put the car in gear and drove on, with the man waving him past, like somebody guiding planes at the airport. Reinhardt watched the man in his rearview mirror. He crossed the road to his car and got in.
A hill rose in front of him, and after crossing it, he lost sight of the man completely.
He sped up, dropping down into another dry valley, then rose over another hill. In the near distance rose a fantastic palisade of orange rock that folded upon itself like the ruffle on a costume. The road carved through the sagebrush, toward the cliffs. He opened his phone and flipped to the map. By his best reckoning, he was close to a place called Las Casas Altas.
He drove on, stopping to take photos of each new thing. At one stop, he got out of the car to get a closer photograph of a cluster of small humanoid orange rocks, and bursting through the general buzz of insects, he heard the sudden blasting racket of a rattlesnake. Before he could think, he jumped back and saw the snake coiled under a bush, watching him, its black tongue whipping the air. Everything else was motionless.
When Reinhardt moved, the snake cautioned him with a quick burst of sound, then walked its looped body back over itself as it retreated farther into the vegetation. Soon, it was entirely gone.
Reinhardt took his own pulse at the neck. It was about 125, double his resting rate. A clammy feeling moved across his skin. He felt tired, then nauseous, then elated. He wanted, for some reason, to chase the snake, but he kept himself from it. Instead he looked to the sky. This, he thought, is what I came here for.
He returned to the car and emptied one of his water bottles. He tried to orient himself again on the photograph of the map and verified that Las Casas Altas was a cliff dwelling, and he was close by. He drove on, with the undulating cliff wall on his left. Soon he could make out a high row of small, dark squares on the cliff face, higher up than anyone could climb without help.