Fighting the sun, I grope along the sidewall to a patch of shade where I can retch. The hiss of hot grease comes through the screen door near me. I remember that Tubbs is gone; over to Texas to train quarter horses, he said. A Cambodian émigré mans the kitchen now. Ton Wat, a former architect, a designer of schools and custom bureaus, and the only member of his family left alive.
“It hurts him to have been spared,” Opatowski said the day he hired this man.
42
IGNOBLY, WITHOUT A WORD of explanation, I stole away from the Golconda like a cowardly vagrant father, leaving behind only a kachina doll Heidi had given me and, perhaps, a crucial piece of my integrity. Or possibly departure was the only way to save what little of it is left. But no more questions now; I’ve abandoned them as well.
I drove south, filling the car with cigarette smoke and the sound of my own tired voice as it spoke the injured contempt of everyone else for my flight. And like the vagrant father, I found solace in their accusations, snug proof of my independence. It was well past midnight when I finally stopped, pulling into a small, deserted rest area where a historic marker shaped like the state recalled the capture of Mexican outlaws. Moths careened and the air crackled with ozone. I nestled on the back seat and slept for several hours, or at least was not awake.
The Pronghorn Bungalow Court is east of the reservation, just north of the dry lake where hot-rod boys race and fight. I paid rent in advance to a man for whom ownership of the place seemed to be a thing inflicted on him.
“Got a beef with the state, don’t bring it along.” He spat into dead yellow stalks by the toolshed. “People expecting me to go to bat for them, I’m only the zookeeper here.”
He wore tooled boots, gray whipcord trousers, stiff denim jacket. There was something unpleasantly fastidious in his manner.
“Stay here long and it’s going to bring you down. That’s a warning and I don’t give it to everybody.”
I thanked him. He rubbed his jaw expressionlessly, gazing past me at the single line of cabins, muttering about their needing paint. I was going to take this as a cue to cut a little deal, but he was already walking away, sliding into his long white car. He went off slowly, as though part of a parade.
Norbert Padilla. His name appears on my rent receipt in jagged lowercase letters. According to the only neighbor who will speak to me, Padilla’s mother was a painter, a tubercular German who came for the dry air and stayed to marry an older man who sold tortillas from a wagon. Believing in cure by climate, the ill swarmed here in those days. Epidemics swept the southern counties every winter, until the hotel people got the idea of boiling their silverware.
Mind you, this informative neighbor is a dipsomaniac who claims to have served as adjutant to General Omar Bradley and to have played first base for the Washington Senators. When his government check arrives, he rides to the liquor store and back in a taxi. He favors white wine over red because then he can tell when he’s vomiting blood.
“Right away I tells ’em I got files of my own,” he says, bright-eyed and emphatic, with new ears for the limitless epic of Dag and the Veterans Administration. “Which I’ve lost the combination to the safe, but not to worry.”
On he goes and all I hear are the circular sounds, like gamelan music. I sit here patching screen, calmed by the thinness of the wire, by the smallness of the holes, and I think of my father’s law office, brimming with files, of the great desk glowing with lemon oil, and the framed motto of a man who never miscalculated a risk-to-benefit ratio: “Be satisfied with yourself and so thus will be others.” I think of the entirely measurable distance between here and Lake Success, congratulating myself on all the subtractions I have worked so hard in my life to make.
“And if I told what them big poohbahs took out of the Reichsbank that night? What then?”
Dag releases my arm, satisfied with the weight of this threat. And I have no good reason to doubt casual pillaging by colonels. No further questions, remember? So I walk Dag back to his cabin, last in line, “the caboose,” with its unlockable door and cardboard windows. He is reluctant to let me go, extracts a promise to return in the evening for something to drink and “the real story.”
Fed by the sewage line, there are cottonwoods near the road and in their shade the Pronghorn’s one and only family unit plays. The tiny wife with blonde hair out of a bottle buffs the chopper’s chrome pipes and sips orange pop through a straw. Her jeans are embroidered at the knee with mushrooms. The husband lifts their baby high, making her gurgle and kick. He is shirtless, a rippled scar under his navel like he’d once been cut open with a breadknife. The impending gleam on their mean faces stops me in midwave. Never mind.
Over the sink in my cabin a magazine picture has been pasted. A boy sits at a piano, eyes shut, head tilted back. He bites his lip. The effort of playing from memory. Vertically arranged above him on the white wall are three ceramic fish. They are like thoughts bubbling out of his head, distractions from the tempo and the tune. I can feel him struggling, his fingers slippery on the keys, and I have to scrape him off the wall with a razor blade. Whoever put him up must have been harking back, dangling a piece of regret where it couldn’t be missed. Something in Padilla’s warning? But I feel fresh and clean, free of any urge to review past decisions. Fuck integrity. I know, I know — you’ve heard it all before. You ask in exasperation: Won’t he ever get off the dime? Patience. I’m in a staging area right now. Formulations first.
A) Initiate!
B) Experience doesn’t count
C) Recall sexual extremities, then forget
D) First aid
E) Resource checking
F) Catalysts &; anodynes
G) Research: desert botany
H) Body disciplines
I) Quicksand Syndrome (strive hard, fail fast)
J) Don’t speculate — sane limits
K) Deductive vs. Reductive
L) Below sea level?
M) Sleeping exercise
N) Carla’s black tights
O) Stick to this list and you will be okay
I can set myself a rigorous program. I can do that, sharpening myself on the small grinders of Padilla’s toy town, moving beyond slogans. So then do I betray Ellen by way of these ambitions as I have, in other ways, betrayed Heidi, Chris Bruno, so many others? Who cares. Waste motion. I can discount experience. I can let thoughts bubble out of my head and burst harmlessly at the surface.
But no more chores for today. I would rather rub myself against the greasy mattress ticking. I would rather take another Reader’s Digest from the pile and read of another Most Embarrassing Moment.
43
“THIS IS A GREAT country,” says Norbert Padilla. “So big it can hold anything.”
Because I’ve given up on distinctions, I don’t get started on all the things it might want to let go of. Big country, mother country, underdeveloped country, Marlboro country — here or over there, it’s all just country. Fine tuning? What for?
Padilla looks into the distance. “Big enough to smile at trouble,” he says.
The air is cold and wet. We are standing at the mouth of the driveway where last night wind blew down the big metal sign. It is stippled with mud and more paint has flaked away, P ON HO N BUNG OW C UR is how it reads now. We blow on our hands. Padilla kicks a dent in the earth.