by Bella Pollen
These days I never agree to a theatre expedition without checking whether it’s possible instead to watch the box set of the TV series derived from the hit movie loosely based on—or better yet, vaguely inspired by—the original play in question.
Thankfully, I married a man cut from the same philistine cloth. I’d go as far as saying that the lack of appreciation Mac and I share for this art form is part of the glue that keeps our odd-shaped marriage together. But this play, our would-be friends assured us, oh, yes, this play, ne paniquez-pas, was different.
Written by Sam Shepard, about whom I’ve had lurid sexual fantasies ever since his turn as wry veterinarian in the romantic comedy Baby Boom, if Buried Child was not quite what I’d first hoped—i.e., the heartbreaking sequel to Baby Boom—it had, according to the program, scored a Pulitzer Prize.
“Marvellous,” I said. “What’s it about?”
“Really fucked-up people,” Mac whispered, slipping a box of sweeties into my pocket.
Our friend leaned over. “I hope you won’t find yourself too unsettled by the author’s deconstruction of the grand narrative.”
I nodded sagely.
“And then the material encompasses so many postmodern elements . . .”
Uh-huh, uh-uh. I slammed a fruit pastille into my mouth wishing Mac had invested in the jumbo-size box. I looked around. If our fellow theatregoers belonged to a cultured, bon vivant London that we had once vaguely recognized, perhaps our lean towards the West had now fatally blunted our critical aesthetic. But then the play’s tag line jumped out at me: The breakdown of the American dream in a context of violence, disillusionment, and disappointment. I perked up. Violence, disillusionment, and disappointment had recently become my three preferred landscapes. “Disappointment, you know,” I boasted to our new friends, “is the actual name of a valley not far from our barn in America.”
“Oh, that’s right,” the husband said. “You sort of live out there these days, don’t you?”
“Well, not really live—”
“Ah, a holiday home,” he said dismissively. “Of course, Shepard’s work covers less, er . . . shall we say ‘bourgeois’ territory.”
“Of course,” I said, chastened.
“Shepard is a master of the visceral as a metaphor for family discourse.” The wife slid a hand onto her husband’s knee. “But if you two don’t have the stomach for it, we can always leave.”
“Yes, we don’t mind at all,” her husband agreed affably. “We’ve seen eight productions of Buried Child already—three of them,” he added, as a hush descended on the room, “Steppenwolf.”
Under the cover of darkness, Mac rolled his eyes.
Clump, clump, boots onstage. Curtain up. Lights down. The play began.
I can’t find a thing wrong with Shepard’s work. I hope more than ever that we will one day meet and become lovers. Buried Child is very brilliant without a doubt, and I feel certain that it must be very postmodern too, but after twenty minutes I exchanged perplexed glances with Mac. The so-called visceral material? There was nothing to it really—a bit of murder, a dab of incest. And as for the dreadful secret at the play’s end—well, you could say the title was something of a spoiler.
As the final curtain fell and the actors were clapped back onstage, I decided I was, after all, shocked by Buried Child. Shocked that Sam Shepard appeared so intimately acquainted with the domestic landscape of our own southwestern terrain. Shocked, too, that having decided to write a play about it, he’d chosen such a mundane incident as its subject matter.
“Only one measly buried child,” I muttered, still rankled by the holiday home dig, “and am I right in thinking it was barely even mutilated?”
When we’d told our friends that we’d built a house in Colorado, I guess they were thinking après-ski boots and chunky knits patterned with snowflake intarsia. It’s possible they were picturing some crazy stone mansion filled with bald eagle sculptures and freshly ironed real-estate magazines, and perhaps up in the north, in Vail or Aspen, that’s the way it rolls. OK, so maybe we are ghastly holiday homers, but we’re still a long way from that kind of life.
Fly with the crow through mountain passes dotted with the bones of settlers, wade down rivers flowing with the sweat of long-forgotten miners, scramble along rocky overhangs still owned by coyote and mountain lion, and you will eventually drop down into a valley of golden forests where the wilderness blows right through you. Here, in places, is the residue of an older era, one trading in a different currency, speaking another language, and upholding its own moral code. Insular, self-governing, and survivalist. Its combination of wide-open space and suffocating isolation breeds an alternative kind of horror to inner-city deprivation. For all the West’s spectacular scenery, there’s something damaged about this part of the country. There are no metaphors out here, no subtexts. This is the breakdown of the American dream, and you can pick pieces of it off the ground and carry them around in your pocket.
And my theatre friends were wrong: I couldn’t have more of a stomach for it.
At the foot of our mountain lies the high desert and in the high desert lives John, a Welshman who has become a gateway to this, our West. A maverick with an intellect sharp as a tungsten blade and a babyish sense of humour to rival that of my five-year-old, instead of shaking my hand the first time we met, he picked me up and threw me into the back of his truck. When I giggled, he said, “You’ll do, girl,” and I’ve been half in love with him ever since. Stocky, with a barrel chest and a cleft hacked deep into his chin, John too is a figure from an earlier era. A man whose Evelyn Waugh mannerisms and pristine use of the Queen’s English form an entirely accurate representation of who he is while at the same time masking something wholly other.
John may not be representative of the American dream in a context of violence, disillusionment, and disappointment, but down in the desert he’s surrounded by it.
Up at the barn we have the best of neighbours—homesteaders and oddbods who, say our property is being overrun by varmints, waste no time rushing to our assistance with a friendly smirk and a wide selection of weaponry. Our neighbours dance with us, drink with us, and willingly haul us out of ditches, day or night. These are the kind of people who don’t care where you come from or who you are. They either like you or don’t. Their friendship burns slow, but once you have it, it’s yours for good.
Nature, though, is engaged in a continual war of opposites, and between our mountain and John’s canyon lives a different kind of neighbour, the kind tucked into gulches, hidden dents, and depressions, where the sign for Lee’s Spare Parts Shop leads to the tinkle of wind chimes hung from a trailer saturated in the piss of thirty cats; the kind who lives beyond the mailbox that receives no mail, the mailbox whose address—9 THE WOODS—is daubed on its side in some smeary red ooze that could be paint but almost certainly is not.
Duck under the rope strung between trees. Creep past the bullet-ridden sign marked PRIVATE. Ignore the hairs on your arm, raised and trembling, and follow the whispering leaves along a track rutted with wildflowers and jagged with mining debris. Down you go, down to the bitter end, where the very air feels disturbed and nature’s sanctity plundered. Here, in a clearing of weeds, semi-circled by neat monuments of animal bones, sits a solitary cabin, adorned with hummingbirds, their jeweled wings stretched obscenely wide and nailed to the wall above a half-hinged door it would be a mistake to open. These are not the kind of people from whom you borrow a cup of sugar.
In London “don’t diss your neighbours” means don’t let your dog poop on their front step or don’t wake them early on a Sunday morning with an ear-splitting rendering of “Boogie Wonderland” from the shower. Common-sense rules based on the urban proximity of matchbox living—because in a city of matchboxes, nobody should be thinking about lighting a fire. John’s tip for our West? Diss no one. When some stranger in a pickup overtakes you on a perilous bend, remember one thing: You’re not flipping off an individual. You’re fli
pping off an entire clan.
Behind one of these half-hinged doors live the McKinneys, four siblings known by everyone, seen by few. The eldest brother, Garrett, bedded his sister as well as his middle brother’s thirteen-year-old daughter. A year or two later Gideon, the youngest, tried to kill Garrett, throttling him to unconsciousness, then floating his body down the creek. As it happened, this scuffle was not about the incest but a niggardly piece of land amid the brothers’ various properties. When details of the sexual molestation and attempted murder finally surfaced, there was a distinct lack of outrage in the community. The brothers come from a revered, if crazy, clan, and there’s the sense that a little fingering can go on within any family, especially one as isolated and deliberately old-fashioned as theirs.
Abe, their father, lives further down the same road and brews crystal meth, which he bootlegs to the Navajo on the rez. The first time John told me Abe had two bodies buried in his backyard, I did a quick ghoulish drive-by, looking for signs of displaced earth or a little sun-dried pinky budding up through the wild onions. Then I discovered that “having a body in your backyard” was a euphemism for having killed a man without serving jail time.
Abe’s first victim was his wife’s lover, whom, in the time-honoured fashion, he found in the sack with his wife. Execution was clearly called for. Mrs. Abe knew the risk involved—as did her lover—and Abe knew no other response. After all, a man has to satisfy not only himself but also the expectations of his peers. The few days he ended up in custody for this first murder were essentially to give the sheriff enough time to file the paperwork. Abe spared his wife because men like Abe like to believe that a woman’s infidelity is about weakness not wickedness. The second body in Abe’s backyard belonged to a Navajo boy who had come looking for him for some perceived slight or other. They fired at each other simultaneously. Shame for the boy that he was holding a little .22 while Abe was in possession of a .357 Magnum. The boy died. Abe didn’t even go to the doctor, and this time the sheriff couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork.
The first time I met Ulysses, one of John’s neighbours down the canyon, he was standing by John’s pickup truck wearing a butcher’s coat smeared with dried blood. He looked like a human splatter painting. When he said he’d been trying to pull a breached lamb from its mother’s womb, I saw a flash of something in his eye, as though he were enjoying a private joke. Later John’s wife, Emily, the local ob-gyn, told me that Ulysses had got so impatient with the birthing process, he’d truncated it by chopping sheep and lamb to death.
John shares this American stage with these characters. He drinks with them, rides with them, and understands the ethics that govern them. They, in turn, have got used to his uniquely English brand of genial aggression. “My dear boy,” he might say, while wrestling a man into the ditch for calling his Mexican foreman a beaner. “Back down, old chap,” I’ve heard him suggest cordially, chest-bumping a machete-wielding rancher who had taken issue with him over water rights. “This is not how we do things, mate,” he once remarked to a three-hundred-pound Ute Indian, before breaking the man’s nose over his brutal treatment of a dog. Prior to settling in southwestern Colorado, John was a restaurateur in New York, a professional polo player in Charleston, a buckaroo in Nevada, and a scholar at Reed College in Oregon. If he’s anything, though, with his scars and dirty clothes and blackened nails, he’s still the British SAS officer he was before. John holds other men to his own standards of fairness, and they in turn, recognise him as their opposite and their equal. If they didn’t, he’d be dead by now.
Mac, who loves much about the West, is not so taken with this seamier side. He does not like broken or dirty, whereas I can be careless. He likes organised but I don’t mind the tumbleweed of uncertainty. I tend to forget that, like John, I too am split between cultures, while Mac is the most English of Englishmen, and sometimes that makes us more foreign to each other than we care to admit. If Mac hoards his darkness inside, I seek mine out in shadowy places. And thus, almost without noticing, he and I have begun to sketch out lines of divide.
That first day John threw me into the truck, I saw something in his eyes—an irrepressible spark, a smudge of wild as marked as a coloboma of the iris. John intuitively knows what I’m looking for, because he’s out there looking for it too—strange people and new ideas and a surrealist’s road full of unexpected twists. I like warming my fingers on the edge of danger, and the more I seek it out, the more I tell myself that I too can become its opposite and its equal. As I dusted down my jeans, John put out his hand. “C’mon, girl,” he said and I looked back at Mac, because I knew that if I took it, John could pull me down a hole so deep that Mac would find it hard to follow.
It was the summer of Buried Child that I took a quick road trip to New Mexico with my father. Our truck was in the garage, so we rented a car from the airport—situated, as it happens, close to Abe’s backyard and next to Lee’s urine-saturated Spare Parts Shop. At the Venture booth, we negotiated a contract with a perfectly delightful sales agent who, for reasons of personal safety, I’ve decided to call Peta Thorn. On our returning the car sometime later, it turned out Ms. Thorn was made not of apple pie as billed but of something infinitely sourer. There isn’t a driver in the world unfamiliar with the small print of car-rental crookery. Even Mac advised me to shrug off the $160, but turns out I’m petty that way. Besides, Peta Thorn’s rip-off smacked of opportunism. Nobody likes to be treated as a gullible tourist when beginning to fancy themselves as a local. When Peta refused to back down, I drove home and fumed through six hours of Lonesome Dove, from which I drew the following conclusions: Institutional rot runs deep. You can’t rely on justice, better to take care of things yourself.
While I appreciate that if everyone took the Hammurabian eye, the world would go blind, who said anything about Peta’s eye? A refund on Dad’s credit card was all I was after.
Vengeance requires planning. A trajectory. In the weeks that followed, whenever I found myself close to the airport—and hey, no big deal, it was only a ninety-minute drive away—I’d hunker down in my truck and wait for the moment when Ms. Thorn tripped out to the rental bay with keys and a client. As soon as she clack-clacked round the corner I moved with the stealth of a Sioux tracker. Out of the truck, across the car park. A deft right hook to the swing-door button, and I was in. Snatch a fistful of business cards from the Venture counter, foolishly left unattended by Peta, and across them I’d scribble:
I AM A CRIMINAL
Or:
I BELONG IN JAIL
Or even this one, of which I was particularly proud:
I WISH I WERE TRUSTWORTHY BUT I’M NOT!
Sometimes, depending on my mood, I underlined these statements, sometimes not.
At first there was no reaction. The cards were kept in a help-yourself container, and I worried Peta hadn’t noticed or, worse, had decided to adopt a hateful Christian cheek-turning approach. After several weeks, though, I was rewarded by the sight of her clients blundering out to their rentals unaccompanied. Nice try, Peta, but hardly a deterrent! After all, everyone has to pee sometime, and she was, I’d observed, a big fan of the soda machine. Occasionally, lurking in the ladies’ room myself, I’d head off her potential customers at the hand dryer. Tiny though our local airport is, two competing rental companies had managed to squeeze in their booths. Word in your ear, girlfriend, I’d whisper, helpfully punching the dryer’s on button for some alarmed bank teller from Albuquerque. Do yourself a favour. Forget Venture. Try Kestrel! Though surprised by this new British meet-and-greet directive, visitors to the area paid attention. I like to think that business at Venture tanked while Kestrel profits soared, and in the months that followed, I swear Peta must have aged a thousand years. Not since the hounding of Les Misérables’ Jean Valjean by police inspector Javert has justice been so diligently pursued. It never occurred to me that my retribution far outweighed Peta’s original crime—or that her crime might have been carried out unwillingly in t
he first place. Don’t matter who it is, head office might have instructed in the gathering gloom of her job interview. When the customer returns that vehicle, you stick it to ’em, girl! And poor Peta, hideously aware of the paucity of jobs in the region, had seen her life’s abiding principle of honesty bite the dust. No, Peta’s guilt was never in doubt, and with the power of my pen, I thought, gleefully defacing another dozen cards, I would bring her down.
“Attribute it to what you like,” John once told me. “The West lends itself beautifully to the genre of revenge.”
Every time I flew back to my comfy West London life, it seemed flat. How to pass those leaden months until my return? Silver lining? Back in Colorado, Peta never knew when I was coming. Lying in my oversize bed, head cradled by goose-down pillows, I’d fall asleep imagining the crank and twist of her intestines every time a flight touched down. Though mental maths isn’t my thing, it wasn’t hard to work out three planes a day, times eighteen passengers apiece. I seriously doubted her adrenal gland would cope for much longer.
One July, after this vendetta had been rolling along nicely for a while, my Great Lakes flight dropped onto the runway with its usual fanfare of emergency brakes and passenger prayers. Through the greasy laminate of the window, I could just make out Peta’s skirted backside hoofing it to the toilets. Once inside the airport, though jet-lagged and travel-cranky, I still found the time to personalize a few more of her cards:
THERE IS NO PLACE IN HEAVEN FOR SINNERS LIKE ME.
Done. I headed outside to reclaim my luggage. Clack clack clack. I turned. To my surprise, there was Peta, looking, well, simply awful.
“Whoa,” I said.
Once Peta had been a pleasant-looking woman with a waist and hips soft enough to be squeezed into curves by tight clothes. She’d lost pounds. Her eyes looked itchy and red, as though she’d swiped their lids with paprika, and from the way she was hunched sideways, something was definitely up with her sciatica.
