So I sold the car. In the process of selling it, what with papers of transfer and registration fees, I ended up having to pay Cecil (with my credit card) about fifty dollars, but it was worth it. I felt a lightness. I’d lost this thing which had meant so much to me and now, without it, I felt a weight had been lifted. Instead of feeling the loss I thought I would feel, I felt renewed.
I took the cactus out of the car, carried it to a suitable location in the desert sand, dug a shallow hole with my fingers, and planted it. I left the antique binoculars in the glove compartment, and I took out of the car my box of books and the envelope of photographs, including the one which had fallen off the dashboard. I took my laptop computer, the plastic sack of cassette tapes, the mandolin, a backpack filled with my clothes and sleeping bag, and a small red shoulder bag. I stood in the sun, in front of the building’s Fort Apache architectural façade, and once again I was waiting. This time for a ride into town where I would catch a bus, somewhere.
After a while of waiting, a man in a large mobile home who’d stopped at the trading post gave me a ride. He was a retiree who told me that “Anasazi” was no longer a correct term for the ancient people who lived there. He said that “Anasazi” meant “enemy” in Navajo, and that the Hopi, who also lived in the area, naturally thought the word was an incorrect description. People had lived with the word for a long time, but now, according to the man, quoting a Visitor Center brochure, they were changing it.
The man let me off at a main intersection in the northern part of Flagstaff, near the railroad depot. I was going to do what people do in the movies, take the first train out of town, but a railroad employee behind a booth told me no train was leaving anywhere until the next day, and since it was already getting into the afternoon, I started walking to one of the bars the man recommended, walking with my box of books in my arms, the backpack and haversack and mandolin on my shoulders, and the bag of cassettes in my fingers, until my fingers gave out, then stopping, setting down the load, resting, then walking some and then resting, then walking and resting, and I carried my possessions into an older, seedier quarter where I happened to see the El Rancho Grande, a bar I’d noticed the day before. It was an old bar, an old-style bar, almost empty, and I went to the bar and took the money I had left and had a beer. I was leaning against the bar in a typical way when an older woman who looked a little ragged took the stool next to me, said “Hi,” and then asked me to buy her a drink. Which I did. She introduced herself as Conchita, which was fine, but then from somewhere in the shadows of the bar another woman, a younger woman, joined me on the other side. This was Conchita’s niece, named Cheyenne, and she also wanted a drink.
I said I really didn’t have enough money, which was mostly true, but I also wanted to start on my new life and I wasn’t sure this was it. I wanted to be rid of unnecessary appurtenances, but money was not, at this point, unnecessary. I said I couldn’t buy them a drink but I offered to go in on a pitcher of beer, but by then they were already kneeling on the floor, examining the plastic bag filled with cassette tapes.
I offered them my books. I said, “Check out some of these,” but they were too busy checking out the tapes. I’d spent years recording the songs on those tapes but I was ready to let them go. My new friends weren’t impressed with my taste in music but they wanted the tapes, and were reaching into the plastic sack, indiscriminately taking every tape that touched their hands, not that they intended to listen to them, but because these things existed. I told them to take the whole bag, which they did, too far gone, or too lost in their own wanting, to notice when I left.
Although my load was somewhat lighter, I still had the other articles of my life, and I carried these up the street to a coffee shop. The train depot worker had mentioned a “hangout” place, and this was it. An imitation New York beatnik coffeehouse. I noted the college students sitting at various secondhand tables, and I was going to order something warm and comforting, but realized that I was extremely low on money. So I just sat at the wooden bar. Someone sat down next to me, a student probably, and this person started talking to me. She looked like a student and I talked to her, and oddly, I didn’t want to sleep with her, which would have also meant a place to stay. Instead, I asked her if she liked to read books.
She said she did and I showed her the ones in my box and she picked out a couple that interested her. I pointed out the mandolin case and she opened it, took out the instrument, and although she said she couldn’t play, she held it as if she was about to play. I told her it was my father’s mandolin and that I couldn’t play it.
“You can have it,” I said, but she said she didn’t need it. “I would like you to have it,” I said, and she took it and thanked me. She held it flat in her arms. I showed her the computer in my backpack. “Are you kidding?” she said. “It’s old,” I said, and I set it on top of the mandolin case. She stood there. “I don’t know,” she said, and I told her, “I’m not using it anymore.”
I wanted to give away the ache in my heart, and I was hoping that if I unburdened myself of my possessions the ache would go away. She agreed to take the computer and the mandolin, and I ended up leaving the box of books on the floor, in front of a glass display of muffins and scones.
She led me to a table where her friends were sitting. She had me take a seat and offered me a cigarette from one of the packs on the table. A half dozen people were sitting around the table, talking about a potato gun someone had made that shot potatoes into the air, and they were laughing about this, and all the time the talk was going on I could hear them, and I could see them, but a veil was placed between me and them. It seemed. I was in the circle, at the table, but at the same time I was removed from the circle. I was receding even as they spoke to me. Even as I answered their questions and commented and laughed, I was fading, and I could feel myself fade, and I didn’t like it. Partly I did like it. Partly, I felt serene in this state. Serene and numb.
But I was only numb and serene on the outside. Inside, in with my organs of memory, I was in another state, and it was in this state that I thought about what had happened at the gas station in New Jersey. The people at the table were talking away, happy and convivial, and it wasn’t that I wanted to think about a time in the past. I wanted to be done with the past, but I could hear the dark car and the brakes of the dark car right before it collided with our little maroon car.
Anne had stopped to pick me up from the convenience store entrance. I was just getting into our car, just opening the door, and that’s when I heard the brakes, and in a split second I looked up, saw the outline of darkness. And I felt the impact. Anne was hurt. They had collided with her side of the car and I was all right but Anne was knocked forward into the window and the steering column and she wasn’t speaking. She was unconscious. The dark car sped off and I tried to look at the license plates but I was more concerned with Anne. I went to her, held her head in my hands, and something was wrong. I told someone to call an ambulance and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to slap her and there was no doctor. I asked for a doctor but it was just the gas attendants and they didn’t know anything. No one knew anything and I didn’t either. She was dying. I didn’t know. What it meant. She was breathing. I felt a pulse but I couldn’t wake her up. When finally the ambulance came I was yelling at them, why it took so long, and they didn’t want me in the back. I wanted to be in the back with Anne but they wouldn’t let me and so I had to find them later, had to find the hospital, they took her to a hospital in New Jersey. I didn’t know New Jersey. I knew Mount Sinai but that wasn’t in New Jersey and they told me which one but I didn’t know where it was and the car wasn’t working and I wanted to be with Anne. I wanted to be with Anne. I kept telling them that I wanted to be with my wife.