Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (8 page)

Actually, I'm very excited because we are driving into the little town of Thoreau, New Mexico, to see if Highway 56 is open to Chaco Canyon. We want to see the Indian ruins there.

The ground is covered with snow so heavy that it looks as if it has just received its Government pension and is looking forward to a long and cheerful retirement.

We see a cafe resting in the snow's leisure. I get out of the Jeep and leave the girl sitting there while I go into the cafe to find out about the road.

The waitress is middle-aged. She looks at me as if I am a foreign movie that has just come in out of the snow starring
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. The cafe smells like a fifty-foot-long breakfast. Two Indians are sitting at it, eating ham and eggs.

They are quiet and curious about me. They look at me sideways. I ask the waitress about the road and she tells me that it's closed. She says it in one quick final sentence. Well, that takes care of that.

I start out the door but one of the Indians turns and says sideways to me, "The road's open. I went over it this morning."

"Is it open all the way to Highway 44: the road over to Cuba?" I ask him.

"Yes."

The waitress suddenly turns her attention to the coffee. The coffee needs taking care of right now and that is what she is doing for the benefit of all the generations of coffee drinkers to come. Without her dedication, coffee might become extinct in Thoreau, New Mexico.

W
HEN
I knew Cameron he was a very old man and wore carpet slippers all the time and didn't talk any more. He smoked cigars and occasionally listened to Burl Ives' records. He lived with one of his sons who was now a middle-aged man himself and starting to complain about growing old.

"God-damn it, there's no getting around the fact that I'm not as young as I used to be."

Cameron had his own easy chair in the front room. It was covered with a wool blanket. Nobody else ever sat in that chair, but it was always as if he were sitting there, anyway. His spirit had taken command of that chair. Old people have a way of doing that with the furniture they end their lives sitting in.

He didn't go outside any more during the winter, but he would sit out on the front porch sometimes in the summer and stare past the rose bushes in the front yard to the street beyond where life calendared its days without him as if he had never existed out there at all.

That wasn't true, though. He used to be a great dancer and would dance all night long in the 1890s. He was famous for his dancing. He sent many a fiddler to an early grave and when the girls danced with him, they always danced better and they loved him for it and just the mention of his name in that county made the girls feel good and would get them blushing and giggling. Even the "serious" girls would get excited by his name or the sight of him.

There were a lot of broken hearts when he married the youngest of the Singleton girls in 1900.

"She's not that pretty," refrained the sore losers and they all cried at the wedding.

He was also a hell-of-a good poker player in a county where people played very serious poker for high stakes. Once a man sitting next to him was caught cheating during a game.

There was a lot of money on the table and a piece of paper that represented twelve head of cattle, two horses and a wagon. That was part of a bet.

The man's cheating was made public by one of the other men at the table reaching swiftly across without saying a word and cutting the man's throat.

Cameron automatically reached over and put his thumb on the man's jugular vein to keep the blood from getting all over the table and held him upright, though he was dying until the hand was finished and the ownership of the twelve head of cattle, two horses and a wagon was settled.

Though Cameron didn't talk any more, you could see events like that in his eyes. His hands lad been made vegetable-like by rheumatism but there was an enormous dignity to their repose. The way he lit a cigar was like an act of history.

Once he had spent a winter as a sheepherder in 1889. He was a young man, not yet out of his teens. It was a long lonely winter job in God-forsaken country, but he needed the money
to pay off a debt that he owed his father. It was one of those complicated family debts that it's best not to go into detail about.

There was very little exciting to do that winter except look at sheep but Cameron found something to keep his spirits up.

Ducks and geese flew up and down the river all winter and the man who owned the sheep had given him and the other sheepherders a lot, an almost surrealistic amount, of 44:40 Winchester ammunition to keep the wolves away, though there weren't any wolves in that country.

The owner of the sheep had a tremendous fear of wolves getting to his flock. It bordered on being ridiculous if you were to go by all the 44:40 ammunition he supplied his sheepherders.

Cameron heavily favored this ammunition with his rifle that winter by shooting at the ducks and geese from a hillside about two hundred yards from the river. A 44:40 isn't exactly the greatest bird gun in the world. It lets go with a huge slow-moving bullet like a fat man opening a door. Cameron wanted those kind of odds.

The long months of that family-debted-exile winter passed slowly day after day, shot after shot until it was finally spring and he had maybe fired a few thousand shots at those ducks and geese without hitting a single one of them.

Cameron loved to tell that story and thought it was very funny and always laughed during the telling. Cameron told that story just about as many times as he had fired at those birds years in front of and across the bridge of 1900 and up the decades of this century until he stopped talking.

I was walking down the railroad tracks outside of Monterey on Labor Day in 1965, watching the Sierra shoreline of the Pacific Ocean. It has always been a constant marvel to me how much the ocean along there is like a high Sierra river with a granite shore and fiercely-clear water and turns of green and blue with chandelier loam shining in and out of the rocks like the currents of a river high in the mountains.

It's hard to believe that it's the ocean along there if you don't look up. Sometimes I like to think of that shore as a small river and carefully forget that it's 11,000 miles to the other bank.

I went around a bend in the river and there were a dozen or so frog people having a picnic on a sandy little beach surrounded by granite rocks. They were all in black rubber suits. They were standing in a circle eating big slices of watermelon. Two of them were pretty girls who wore soft felt hats on top of their suits.

The frog people were of course all talking frog people talk.
Often they were child-like and a summer of tadpole dialogue went by in the wind. Some of them had weird blue markings on the shoulders and down the arms of their suits like a brand-new blood system.

There were two German police dogs playing around the frog people. The dogs were not wearing black rubber suits and I did not see any suits lying on the beach for them. Perhaps their suits were behind a rock.

A frog man was floating on his back in the surf, eating a slice of watermelon. He swirled and eddied with the tide.

A lot of their equipment was leaning against a large theater-like rock that would have given Prometheus a run for his money. There were some yellow oxygen tanks lying next to the rock. They looked like flowers.

The frog people changed into a half-circle and then two of them ran into the sea and turned back to throw pieces of watermelon at the others and two of them started wrestling on the shore in the sand and the dogs were barking around them.

The girls were very pretty in their poured-on black rubber suits and gentle clowning hats. Eating watermelon, they sparkled like jewels in the crown of California.

D
RIVING
along in Eastern Oregon: autumn and the guns in the back seat and the shells in the jockey box or glove compartment, whatever you elect to call it.

I was just another kid going deer hunting in this land of mountains. We had come a long ways, leaving before it was dark. Then all night.

Now the sun was shining inside the car, hot like an insect, a bee or something, trapped and buzzing against the windshield.

I was very sleepy and asking Uncle Jarv, who was stuffed beside me in the front seat, about the country and the animals. I looked over at Uncle Jarv. He was driving and the steering wheel was awkwardly close in front of him. He weighed well over two hundred pounds. The car was barely enough room for him.

There in the half-light of sleep was Uncle Jarv, some Copenhagen in his mouth. It was always there. People used to like Copenhagen. There were signs all around telling you to buy some. You don't see those signs any more.

Uncle Jarv had once been, a locally famous high school
athlete and later on, a legendary honky-tonker. He once had four hotel rooms at the same time and a bottle of whiskey in each room, but they had all left him. He had grown older.

Uncle Jarv lived quietly, reflectively now, reading Western novels and listening to opera on the radio every Saturday morning. He always had some Copenhagen in his mouth. The four hotel rooms and the four bottles of whiskey had vanished. Copenhagen had become his fate and his eternal condition.

I was just another kid pleasantly thinking about the two boxes of 30:30 shells in the jockey box. "Are there any mountain lions?" I asked.

"You mean cougars?" Uncle Jarv said.

"Yeah, cougars."

"Sure," Uncle Jarv said. His face was red and his hair was thin. He had never been a good-looking man but that had never stopped women from liking him. We kept crossing the same creek over and over again.

We crossed it at least a dozen times, and it was always a surprise to see the creek again because it was kind of pleasant, the water low with long months of heat, going through country that had been partially logged off.

"Are there any wolves?"

"A few. We're getting close to town now," Uncle Jarv said. We saw a farm house. Nobody lived there. It was abandoned like a musical instrument.

There was a good pile of wood beside the house. Do ghosts burn wood? I guess it's up to them, but the wood was the color of years.

"How about wildcats? There's a bounty on them, isn't there?"

We passed by a sawmill. There was a little log pond dammed up behind the creek. Two guys were standing on the logs. One of them had a lunch bucket in his hand.

"A few dollars," Uncle Jarv said.

We were now coming into the town. It was a small place. The houses and stores were rinky-tinky, and looked as if a lot of weather had been upon them.

"How about bears?" I said, just as we went around a bend in the road, and right in front of us was a pickup truck and there were two guys standing beside the truck, taking bears out of it.

"The country's filled with bears," Uncle Jarv said. "There are a couple of them right over there."

And sure enough ... as if it were a plan, the guys were lifting the bears out, handling the bears as if they were huge pumpkins covered with long black hair. We stopped the car by the bears and got out.

There were people standing around looking at the bears. They were all old friends of Uncle Jarv's. They all said hello to Uncle Jarv, and where you been?

I had never heard so many people saying hello at once. Uncle Jarv had left the town many years before. "Hello, Jarv, hello." I expected the bears to say hello.

"Hello, Jarv, you old bad penny. What's that you're wearing around there for a belt? One of them Goodyears?"

"Ho-ho, let's take a look at the bears."

They were both cubs, weighing about fifty or sixty pounds. They had been shot up on Old Man Summers' Creek. The mother had gotten away. After the cubs were dead, she ran into a thicket, and hid in close with the ticks.

Old Man Summers' Creek! That's where we were going hunting. Up Old Man Summers' Creek! I'd never been there before. Bears!

"She'll be mean," one of the guys standing there said. We were going to stay at his house. He was the guy who shot the
bears. He was a good friend of Uncle Jarv's. They had played together on the high school football team during the Depression.

A woman came by. She had a sack of groceries in her arms. She stopped and looked at the bears. She got up very close, leaning over toward the bears, shoving celery tops in their faces.

They took the bears and put them on the front porch of an old two-story house. The house had wooden frosting all around the edges. It was a birthday cake from a previous century. Like candles we were going to stay there for the night.

The trellis around the porch had some kind of strange-looking vines growing on it, with even stranger-looking flowers. I'd seen those vines and the flowers before, but never on a house. They were hops.

It was the first time that I had ever seen hops growing on a house. That was an interesting taste in flowers. But it took a little while to get used to them.

The sun was shining out front and the shadow of the hops lay across the bears as if they were two glasses of dark beer. They were sitting there, backs against the wall.

"
Hello, gentlemen. What would you like to drink?
"

"
A couple of bears.
"

"
I'll check the icebox and see if they're cold. I put some
in there a
little while ago ... yeah, they're cold.
"

The guy who shot the bears decided that he didn't want them, so somebody said, "Why don't you give them to the mayor? He likes bears." The town had a population of three hundred and fifty-two, including the mayor and the bears.

"I'll go tell the mayor there are some bears over here for him," somebody said and went to find the mayor.

Oh, how good those bears would taste: roasted, fried, boiled or made into spaghetti, bear spaghetti just like the Italians make.

Somebody had seen him over at the sheriff's. That was about an hour ago. He might still be there. Uncle Jarv and I went over and had lunch at a little restaurant. The screen door was badly in need of repair, and opened like a rusty bicycle. The waitress asked us what we wanted. There were some slot machines by the door. The county was wide open.