I start walking. I sneak through sleeping Amarillo and swing north through ranch country. I hear freights clanking and barbed wire humming in the wind. I see cows asleep on their feet and families of lunatics living in overturned semis. By Clayton the apples are gone and I hurry through Mt. Dora and Grenville and Capulin with a growling stomach. I eat from Dumpsters, I gnaw flowers, I find a dead deer and stuff my pockets with what I can tear off. There are orange lights in ranch windows and bikes propped against willows. There are well-tended gardens and little dresses on clotheslines and once I hear a man on a ladder say Love me? and a woman in a tire swing answer Always. I wish I was Normal. I wish I lived here and could whistle my kids in from the yard as the rain made sweet homish clangings in my gutters. Instead I shiver behind a former diner and heave rocks at wild dogs and start bits of trash on fire so I can read my atlas. I limp through Raton and Cimarron and Ute Park and my mind starts to slip with hunger and the mountains speak to me in cowboy accents of the ore within them and one morning I straighten up from a gut cramp to find I’m standing in front of a sign, and the sign says: TAOS.
I eat what’s left of the deer, for strength, and start down.
I get directions from some Flaweds baling hay in a meadow. I start up a dirt path. There’s an orchard where they promised an orchard and a stream where they promised a stream. I crawl under some of Corbett’s barbed wire, then walk through his cows and ducks and goats, practicing a little speech as I go: I know you sold her, I’ll say, but I want you to know who it was that you sold. She was funny. She was thoughtful. She loved jigsaw puzzles and could do a one-arm pull-up and once saved a rabbit from a flooded culvert. She could have given you so much if you would’ve been man enough to accept her, but instead you deceived her and used her and turned her out for a lifetime of misery. And you’ll pay. You’re paying already. Because she could be here now, conferring grace on this place and on you, who could have been her savior but instead chose to be her executioner.
After that I don’t know what I’ll do.
The house is huge. I take a deep breath, then hop a redwood fence and land in a bed of tulips. All around my face are colored bobbing pods. There’s a wet bar near a satellite dish and a trampoline near a pool.
Sitting in a rattan chair is Connie, big as a house.
Pregnant.
I look at her. She looks at me. She leaps to her feet and we do a happy little dance around the yard and Corbett steps out from behind a shrub with a croquet mallet and says that what five grand in detective fees couldn’t deliver, destiny has.
Then we have lunch.
Over soup he asks if I want a job in Grounds. I say sure. Next morning he gives me a Walkman and some pruning shears. Soon I’m an old hand. I dust roses and trim shrubs and mow lawns. On my lunch breaks I read. The Bounty-Land library had a few Hardy Boys and a Bible with fallacious pro-slavery sayings of Christ pasted into the Sermon on the Mount, but Corbett’s got everything. I read Epictetus and Frederick Douglass and Bobbo Schmidt, a Flawed Louisiana poet thrown off the Pontchartrain bridge for impregnating his Normal lover. At night Connie and I have long talks, remembering Dad’s aftershave and Mom’s lasagna, the swell of the hill in our yard, the names of neighbors and the voices of friends.
One night I ask her what she sees in Corbett.
“He’s good to me,” she says, eyes down. “I’m safe. It’s not so bad.”
Who am I to judge? She’s here in front of me, not off suffering somewhere, not starving, not in agony, and for that I’m glad.
A week later she goes into labor in the rec room and what seems like years into the night something comes from her, something red and yowling and malleable, temporarily cross-eyed but ours, our girl, and Connie names her Anita, for our mother.
She has Corbett’s eyes and Connie’s vestigial tail.
That night I dream I’m standing barefoot before a crowd of hostile Normals with baseball bats. I tell them I’ve never loved anyone so much in my life. I describe the way the baby flinches when she passes gas, her tiny brown eyes, the smell of her head. I beg them to repeal the Slave Edict and grant her full citizenship. I ask them to consider their own children and honor that part of the eternal that resides within them. Then I stand there smiling feebly, hoping for the best, and the crowd surges forward and knocks the hell out of me with their bats until I’m dead.
I wake with a start and think: What am I doing here?
There’s a rebel cell recruiting down in Talpa. According to Corbett they’re a bunch of skinny passionate guys in a leaning barn, practicing hand-to-hand with broomsticks and eating vanilla wafers provided in bulk by a sympathetic grocer from Chimayó. After dinner I kiss Connie goodbye and the baby goodbye and shake Corbett’s hand and off I go.
The night’s cold. I see a bushel of snowfrosted apples and two black horses snorting at a frozen shirt on a fence-post and I’m lonely already.
There’s a half-moon above the rebel barn. I give a little knock.
“I’m here to help,” I whisper, and the door swings open.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1.
This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 1989 and 1996, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take to see that what was on the screen was not a technical report about groundwater contamination but a short story.
I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived.
We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): “Thanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.” And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager’s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book.
This book.
“Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,” wrote Terry Eagleton, and that was certainly true of my body at that time. It was being plundered of its sensuality every day. I had an engineering degree but was working as a tech writer. I had earned a reputation as the go-to guy where document covers were concerned. I was good at taping figures into place on frame sheets. I spent a lot of time at the photocopier, producing copies of the reports I had just edited, so we could send them to Kodak or the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, who, we suspected, often filed them without having read them. I was gaining weight, losing energy, had grown a consolation ponytail, would go home sore in my ankles and knees from walking what felt like miles on the thin carpeting that ran over our concrete floors.
There was a lot going on at home during those years, too. My wife, Paula, and I had gotten engaged after dating for three weeks. She became pregnant on the honeymoon, then went into labor at four months. She was put on total bed-rest and required to take a drug (since outlawed by the FDA) to suppress her contractions. This happened again during her second pregnancy. So, while I was writing this book, we had two baby daughters at home, each made doubly precious by how close we’d come to losing her. We didn’t have any money and were into our thirties and were (maybe, just a little) wondering how it was that we’d missed the boat in terms of this thing called upward mobility.