Connie Willis
Nonstop To Portales
Every town's got a claim to fame. No town is too little and dried out to have some kind of tourist attraction. John Garfield's grave, Willa Gather's house, the dahlia capital of America. And if they don't have a house or a grave or a Pony Express station, they make something up. Sasquatch footprints in Oregon. The Martha lights in Texas. Elvis sightings. Something. Except, apparently, Portales, New Mexico.
"Sights?" the cute Hispanic girl at the desk of the Portales Inn said when I asked what there was to see. "There's Billy the Kid's grave over in Fort Sumner. It's about seventy miles."
I'd just driven all the way from Bisbee, Arizona. The last thing I wanted to do was get back in a car and drive a hundred and sixty miles round trip to see a crooked wooden tombstone with the name worn off.
"Isn't there anything famous to see in town?"
"In Portales?" she said, and it was obvious from her tone there wasn't.
"There's Blackwater Draw Museum on the way up to Clovis," she said finally. "You take Highway 70 north about eight miles and it's on your right. It's an archaeological dig. Or you could drive out west of town and see the peanut fields."
Great. Bones and dirt.
"Thanks," I said and went back up to my room.
It was my own fault. Cross wasn't going to be back till tomorrow, but I'd decided to come to Portales a day early to "take a look around" before I talked to him, but that was no excuse. I'd been in little towns all over the west for the last five years. I knew how long it took to look around. About fifteen minutes. And five to see it had dead end written all over it. So here I was in Sightless Portales on a Sunday with nothing to do for a whole day but think about Cross's offer and try to come up with a reason not to take it.
"It's a good, steady job," my friend Denny'd said when he called to tell me Cross needed somebody. "Portales is a nice town. And it's got to be better than spending your life in a car. Driving all over kingdom come trying to sell inventions to people who don't want them. What kind of future is there in that?"
No future at all. The farmers weren't interested in solar-powered irrigation equipment or water conservation devices. And lately Hammond, the guy I worked for, hadn't seemed very interested in them either.
My room didn't have air-conditioning. I cranked the window open and turned the TV on. It didn't have cable either. I watched five minutes of a sermon and then called Hammond.
"It's Carter Stewart," I said as if I were in the habit of calling him on Sundays. "I'm in Portales. I got here earlier than I thought, and the guy I'm supposed to see isn't here till tomorrow. You got any other customers you want me to look up?"
"In Portales?" he said, sounding barely interested. "Who were you supposed to see there?"
"Hudd at Southwest Agricultural Supply. I've got an appointment with him at eleven." And an appointment with Cross at ten, I thought. "I got in last night. Bisbee didn't take as long as I thought it would."
"Hudd's our only contact in Portales," he said.
"Anybody in Clovis? Or Tucumcari?"
"No," he said, too fast to have looked them up. "There's nobody much in that part of the state."
"They're big into peanuts here. You want me to try and talk to some peanut farmers?"
"Why don't you just take the day off?" he said.
"Yeah, thanks," I said, and hung up and went back downstairs.
There was a dried-up old guy at the desk now, but the word must have spread. "You wanna see something really interesting?" he said. "Down in Roswell's where the Air Force has got that space alien they won't let anybody see. You take Highway 70 south—"
"Didn't anybody famous ever live here in Portales?" I asked. "A vice-president? Billy the Kid's cousin?" He shook his head.
"What about buildings? A railroad station? A courthouse?"
"There's a courthouse, but it's closed on Sundays. The Air Force claims it wasn't a spaceship, that it was some kind of spy plane, but I know a guy who saw it coming down. He said it was shaped like a big long cigar and had lights all over it."
"Highway 70?" I said, to get away from him. "Thanks," and went out into the parking lot.
I could see the top of the courthouse over the dry-looking treetops, only a couple of blocks away. It was closed on Sundays, but it was better than sitting in my room watching Falwell and thinking about the job I was going to have to take unless something happened between now and tomorrow morning. And better than getting back in the car to go see something Roswell had made up so it'd have a tourist attraction. And maybe I'd get lucky, and the courthouse would turn out to be the site of the last hanging in New Mexico. Or the first peace march. I walked downtown.
The streets around the courthouse looked like your typical small-town post-WalMart business district. No drugstore, no grocery store, no dimestore. There was an Anthony's standing empty, and a restaurant that would be in another six months, a Western clothing store with a dusty denim shirt and two concho belts in the window, a bank with a sign in the window saying new location.
The courthouse was red brick and looked like every other courthouse from Nelson, Nebraska, to Tyler, Texas. It stood in a square of grass and trees. I walked around it twice, looking at the war memorial and the flagpole and trying not to think about Hammond and Bisbee. It hadn't taken as long as I'd thought because I hadn't even been able to get in to see the buyer, and Hammond hadn't cared enough to even ask how it had gone. Or to bother to look up his contacts in Tucumcari. And it wasn't just that it was Sunday. He'd sounded that way the last two times I'd called him. Like a man getting ready to give up, to pull out.
Which meant I should take Cross's job offer and be grateful. "It's a forty-hour week," he'd said. "You'll have time to work on your inventions."
Right. Or else settle into a routine and forget about them. Five years ago when I'd taken the job with Hammond, Denny'd said, "You'll be able to see the sights. The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone." Yeah, well, I'd seen them. Cave of the Winds, Amazing Mystery House, Indian curios, Genuine Live Jackalope.
I walked around the courthouse square again and then went down to the railroad tracks to look at the grain elevator and walked back to the courthouse again. The whole thing took ten minutes. I thought about walking over to the university, but it was getting hot. In another half hour the grass would start browning and the streets would start getting soft, and it would be even hotter out here than in my room. I started back to the Portales Inn.
The street I was on was shady, with white wooden houses, the kind I'd probably live in if I took Cross's job, the kind I'd work on my inventions in. If I could get the parts for them at Southwest Agricultural Supply. Or WalMart. If I really did work on them. If I didn't just give up after a while.
I turned down a side street. And ran into a dead end. Which was pretty appropriate, under the circumstances. "At least this would be a real job, not a dead end like the one you're in now," Cross'd said. "You've got to think about the future."
Yeah, well, I was the only one. Nobody else was doing it. They kept on using oil like it was water, kept on using water like the Ogalala Aquifer was going to last forever, kept planting and polluting and populating. I'd already thought about the future, and I knew what it was going to be. Another dead end. Another Dust Bowl. The land used up, the oil wells and the water table pumped dry, Bisbee and Clovis and Tucumcari turned into ghost towns. The Great American Desert all over again, with nobody but a few Indians left on it, waiting in their casinos for customers who weren't going to come. And me, sitting in Portales, working a forty-hour-a-week job.
I backtracked and went the other way. I didn't run into any other dead ends, or any sights either, and by 10:15 I was back at the Portales Inn, with only twenty-four hours to kill and Billy the Kid's grave looking better by the minute.