El Paso Days 9781609403447, 9781609403416

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El Paso Days

Elroy Bode

Introduction by Roberto Bonazzi After word by Marcia Hatfield Daudistel

San Antonio, Texas 2014

Other works by Elroy Bode Texas Sketchbook Sketchbook II Alone: In the World: Looking Home and Other Moments To Be Alive This Favored Place Commonplace Mysteries Home Country In a Special Light

El Paso Days

El Paso Days © 2014 by Wings Press, for Elroy Bode Cover and internal photographs © 2013 by Bryce Milligan

First Wings Press Edition Printed Edition ISBN: 978-1-60940-341-6 Ebook editions: ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-342-3 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-60940-343-0 Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-344-7 Wings Press 627 E. Guenther San Antonio, Texas 78210 Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805 On-line catalogue and ordering:www.wingspress.com All Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group www.ipgbook.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bode, Elroy, 1931[Short stories. Selections] El Paso days / Elroy Bode ; Introduction by Roberto Bonazzi ; Afterword by Marcia Daudistel. -- First Wings Press Edition. page cm. ISBN 978-1-60940-341-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-342-3 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-343-0 -- ISBN 978-1-60940-344-7 1. Short stories, American. I. Title. PS3552.O3E57 2014 813’.54--dc23 2013025743

Contents Introduction ix Author’s Note xvii Spring

1

Summer 33 Fall 63 Winter 91 Looking for Byron: The Complete Account

109

Afterword 137 About the Author 139

For Roberto Bonazzi, my wife Phoebe, my daughter Deborah, and in memory of my son Byron

“We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought.” —Vladimir Nabokov

Introduction

E

lroy Bode’s tenth book, El Paso Days, which he characterizes as a “journal of thoughts, scenes, happenings”—although “not a record of a specific year but a kind of recent generic year”—may also be his final book. “It will be obvious to a reader,” Bode says in his brief note, “that these pages are occasional offerings of a person with a rather bleak state of mind; mainly a series of personal moanings and groanings dealing with the end-of-things interspersed from time to time with presentations of certain beauties and delights and daily satisfactions of the hereand-now.” Fair enough, since we find a balance throughout his journal between “the end of things” and “certain beauties and delights” discoverable in lovely homages to nature, wonderful memories of family (especially of his mother as avid book reader), and many succinct remarks on writing. The book opens with a cosmic view and a touch of humor. Today the Earth is, as usual, solidly in place: meaning, revolving in air in the middle of nowhere. My life on Earth is equally solidly in place: meaning, suspended for a while between my origin out of nowhere as a dot-sized sperm-and-egg and my end into nowhere as a decaying mass of flesh. So it goes in the life of a sentient being. But despite it all—the uncertainties, the unknowns—what a remarkable interlude it is, this strange human sojourn….We just keep moving about in our daily routines, accepting as normal—as ordinary—the infinite and incomprehensible orchestrations of the natural world.

• ix •

This award-winning writer and former teacher, now in his 80s, faces what we must all face: “It should be so simple—to do what I have never done: accept my own mortality.” Yet it is not just his mortality but also the suicide of son Byron (at age 30) that makes acceptance so difficult. Bode tries to recapture that “father-son space” in a final piece (Addendum: “Looking for Byron: The Complete Account”) and in this heart-breaking passage: I still try to reach him as I drive country roads. Sometimes I stop and get out of my car and yell out to the sky, “Byron, where are you?” It is still hard to accept that he is gone. I carried him around on my shoulders across the living room when he was a child. He stood beside me at night on a lighted pier at Port Aransas and we looked together into the dark waters of the Gulf. We fished. We went camping. He sat beside me in the car, and each year that he grew older we were still father and son. But now there is no son; there is no father of a son. Father, son—such words are meaningless. His death cancelled out much that was me, and the house of my life sits on a bedrock of bleakness.

Often we turn to books for “meaning”—but in Bode’s journal we discover an ongoing argument against meaning. “Traditions give people meaning, making them feel comfortable in a world without meaning,” but he finds none in cultural traditions. Many people believe that the Bible contains the Word of God. I find that impossible to accept…. For the Word I go to the Earth itself—that constant, visible testament to the beauties and truths of creation—and to me it is better than any Bible, any organized religion. I go where there can be no

• x •

human distortion, where the wonders of the world are constantly on display…I am able to read them in their awesome original script.

Since there was never meaning for Bode in traditions— even before the loss of Byron—was there ever meaning? “I think my despair is just the flipside of my passion for life— the inverted other half.” But that “despair is really a wild cry into the silence of the universe, protesting the loss of all that is good and remarkable and beautiful.” Teaching held a central place in Bode’s life for decades, and he admits to missing it. “There was a kind of glory in teaching nine months of every year—seeing them come in, semester after semester for 30-plus years, all of them, those sons and daughters from the modest homes of central El Paso. . . . Could there be a better place to spend one’s time and energy. . . .” There is a disclaimer to Bode’s teaching reminiscences. “But such a classroom is probably not possible anymore.” Yet in counterpoint to his disclaimer, he later writes that “I believed in teaching. I believed in writing. Those two.” Are these beliefs gone now? “I don’t teach anymore, and I don’t really write anymore.” If teaching had not conferred meaning, perhaps writing did. “I do not believe I would have lasted this long if I had not begun writing words on paper. I had nowhere else to go except the page. Words were my salvation. They recorded the passage of my life: In essence, words were my life.” In one passage he reveals his secret aesthetic: “Write as if you are simply describing the ordinary things of life to someone who has never seen them: how a day is, what the streets look like. That’s the key: getting the everyday down on paper— but in such a way that the writing has the specialness and the timelessness of life itself.” • xi •

But how to make the commonplace radiate for those who have not encountered it? In another entry he claims to be unable to follow this advice: “I cannot create any of what I see, and I have no words that will do the scene justice. I am inadequate for the job of reporting on paradise. All I can do is stand and look, paralyzed with awe.” In yet another strophe, he declares that “I am alone, museless. I simply wander around, fascinated by the sights of the already created world and wanting to put down words commensurate with its wonders.” Among several other paradoxical notes on writing, these two stand out. I don’t want to describe—write about—the natural world. I want to capture it precisely and place it on the page as it actually is in reality and I don’t want my words to get in the way. It is strange: Sometimes I will make halfhearted, uninspired notes—pretty much just a straight description of a few observed things: notes lacking point, focus, grace. . . .But once they are down—actually there on white paper—they begin to perk up with a kind of unexpected significance. The mere fact that they exist, these barest wiggles of life—that they are now tangible instead of unrealized, unthought—makes them begin to hint at the specialness of the moment I first had in mind. Such notes are like organisms of a culture in a petri dish which, with time, with nurturing can perhaps grow into proper shape—can gain their weight and meaning.

On one hand “nature is beyond the reach of words” but on the other he suspects that some of his notes “can gain their weight and meaning.” Yet he asserts that “Sometimes I • xii •

think a few of my unfinished, fragmented bits and pieces cut closer to the bone than the more polished ones. They give the jagged edge of essence.” These surface contradictions create a deeper paradox, since he observes ongoing existence with a double focus. In every ordinary, daily act—cutting an apple in half, closing the refrigerator door, answering the phone—we are in the middle of life. We will never be more in the middle. If we do not know this, if we ignore the importance of the passing moment, we are lost…. Life is in every unheralded space. Every bit of it is at our elbow—our constant, patient companion even as we scan beyond it for signs of Drama, some astounding aurora borealis that will illumine us, overwhelm us, make us glow with rich significance.

Elsewhere Bode concludes that “Humans and the natural world are in parallel universes.” Yet he keeps confronting what most ignore and such observations have been the staple of his autobiographical prose. He carries this same double focus into his backyard, sitting with wife Phoebe and observing their cats and turtles interacting with natural visitors, especially birds. These vignettes become a resonant microcosm of nature during all the seasons. When not at home or driving in the country, he is a walking paradox in the city. “I was in a bad way. A really bad way.” I picked up half a dozen of the acorns, put them in the pocket of my overcoat, then took one out and looked at it. What a remarkable, pleasing thing it was, this single acorn, smooth and symmetrical, taken from the scattered hundreds: its light-brown middle fading to tan fading to white at the top, with its nipple point at the other end: an acorn as its own completed

• xiii •

universe, just one among the many identical to it, all of them destined to rot on the ground or be crushed beneath the wheels of the pediatric patients’ wheels: wonderful little unnoticed beauties.

Life hidden in the perfection of an acorn! Vintage Bode. He is not the first to reveal such naturalness. He credits several authors who have done so. But the horde of humanity moving without noticing fuels his disappointment and despair. Simultaneously he insists: “I long ago understood that I was not a Me, a special someone, but an Everyman. In all I have written I have tried to show that my concerns, no matter how personal, were not about me but about any human alive on the Earth.” Readers may find this contradictory—for not only does Bode record what others overlook, he claims to be just like everyone else. How can one be both Author and Everyman? When writers are self-critical, realizing that we are all humbled by life and death, there must be a way to reconcile what seems contradictory on the surface with what remains inherently paradoxical. Or even absurd—a word he does not use, although hinting at it. “I have long had a sense of the ‘greater context’ that surrounds our lives, that makes everything we do seem vaguely unsubstantial, incomplete, unreal. Thus reality has never quite been real enough. Something is always missing.” What is missing is meaning—and meaninglessness is often at the root of the absurd. It is, of course, the riddle of existence that haunts me, that blurs reality, that casts the shadow of mortality over each given moment: For what can be comfortably solid and real if it is always in the process of dying, gradually disappearing?

• xiv •

Other notes inscribe his double focus in worldweary laments: “I do not know where to stand. I have no center, no equilibrium, no balance. I have one foot beside the pomegranate bush in the backyard and the other in a galaxy.” He believes in “human greatness but it is meaningless to the universe.” Without common traditions, without teaching, and perhaps even without writing, he faces his son’s premature death and his own mortality with a sense of meaninglessness. That time of just being himself— now without work—arrives in El Paso Days. “I am an ant; I thrive on industry; I lack the butterfly’s philosophic grace,” he writes, but the moments of simple wonder and lucid awareness dart like a butterfly in these pages. I happen to look down at my hand. It is a fortunate glance. As I look at it—this suddenly focused-on part of my body—I think, “This hand of mine: I have not created a single cell of it—not a wrinkle or callus or shiny nail or knuckle or vein. It, and the rest of me— every bone and organ and sinew—is wrapped inside a skin called Me, and it is not of my doing. I have made no part of the Me that is sitting in this chair.” It is a freeing kind of experience. Hereafter I will have my hand handy just to glance at from time to time—a constant reminder of the moment in the chair when I realized, once again, that my hand, my life—all of me—is a gift.

This “gift” of the hand and that “fortunate glance” are the essence of Bode’s perceptions for readers. While many may not share his world-weariness and disconnection, it is difficult not to appreciate his sense of awe, and the clarifying images of the commonplace afloat in the mysteries he writes about. Bode finds that “Mysteries occur in hidden places.” Walking in the valley beside the Gila River in New Mexico, • xv •

Bode discovers “a perfect place” as he eats an apple while waiting out a rainstorm: After a while the rain passes on, and I stand outside my car watching the junipers drip and smelling the wet fields. The sky has turned a wintry gray, and a cool aftermath remains. The hawk still sits in his tree. Standing there, I have no answers to any of my basic questions. All I know is that I am very lucky. I continue to have the land in my life—to walk on, to be next to. The Gila is not an answer, but it is the next best thing.

As long as he is alive—despite both bitter and tender losses—Bode will view existence with a double vision that sees humanity adrift in the inexplicable universe and a writer searching for meaning in it. Bode’s search in this journal of wise bones (“Words have carried the weight of my life; they are the bones of it.”) connects us with the bones and heart and tributaries of our own search. “A writer must give the ordinary, the everyday a good shake—to get rid of the dust that has settled on them—then set down on the page again the ordinary and everyday,” he writes, “so that they now seem to a reader to be something fresh and unique, deserving of close attention, even curiosity and wonder.” For Elroy Bode this mysterious search can create “curiosity and wonder,” good signs that he remains on watch for these moments. For others the search itself is the meaning, and readers will find their own meaning in this heart-rending book. Robert Bonazzi San Antonio, Texas 2013 • xvi •

Author’s Note:

E

l Paso Days is a journal of thoughts, scenes, happenings, sort of month by month: not a record of a specific year but a kind of recent generic year. It will be obvious to a reader that these pages are occasional offerings of a person with a rather bleak state of mind; mainly a series of personal moanings and groanings dealing with the end-of-things interspersed from time to time with presentations of certain beauties and delights and daily satisfactions of the here-and-now. El Paso Days is sort of equivalent to the word-shavings gathered on the front porch as an old guy sits there, alone, whittling on his stick day after day, staring out at the fading afternoon. In addition, I am including an expanded description of my son Byron’s six-months’ disappearance, “Looking for Byron: The Complete Account.”

• xvii •

Spring

T

s

oday the Earth is, as usual, solidly in place: meaning, revolving in air in the middle of nowhere. My life on Earth is equally solidly in place: meaning, suspended for a while between my origin out of nowhere as a dot-sized sperm-and-egg and my end into nowhere as a decaying mass of flesh. So it goes in the life of a sentient being. But despite it all—the uncertainties, the unknowns— what a remarkable interlude it is, this strange human sojourn. For example, consider the subtle transitions we are a part of: each hour sliding into the next, a day passing to another and a year passing to another, from childhood to the middle years to old age. These unnoticeable mechanics of change, of movement, never reveal themselves to us. They work their mysteries with an amazing sleight-of-hand, and we seldom take time to focus on how it happens: how shadows lengthen; how we breathe in and out—so rhythmically, so unconsciously; how cells grow and then degenerate; even how at 5:30 in the afternoon the summer sun, billions of miles away, lays the whitened imprint of itself inches away from the same spot of bark on the same trunk of the same tree that it had touched the day before. The process is forever hidden from human understanding. We never really know what is going on nor how it happens. We just keep moving about in our daily routines, accepting as normal—as ordinary—the infinite and incomprehensible orchestrations of the natural world.

s

Words keep chaos away. They build a wall around me— like a protective medieval barrier around a castle, keeping at • 3 •

bay the Vandals who are roaming the countryside but are capable at any time of breaching the turrets and sweeping into the stronghold.

s

I once saw a high-tech scan of sperm attempting to penetrate the surface of a human egg, and it was as if the Great Magician’s Hand had pulled back the cosmic curtains and, lo, there it was: life: revealed at its source. In the beginning we are nothing—existing in the gap between sperm and egg. We are without form or intention, unpersonalized, unrealized. We are pure space and possibility. Then, if one of the swarming sperm succeeds in burrowing into an egg, the nothing of us becomes the single dot that enlarges and ultimately becomes a Something: a shape—the you, the me that we are, have been, will be: by the millions.

s

“…the experience that demands expression” –Whitman This identification is important. You cannot think about it enough if you want to do any good writing. Not just experience for experience’s sake, and not just expression for expression’s sake, but the experience that demands expression, that won’t let you alone until you have found the words to lift it out of life and allow it to live on paper without it being “just words.” Some experiences don’t demand expression; others do. Understanding this distinction is the key to good writing.

s • 4 •

Lillie, the white cat, lies stretched out on her back. She is motionless in the grass, and the pink edges of her ears gleam in the warm sun. Her right front leg is high above her head with the paw slightly curved inward, as if she is holding a pose in a yoga class. She is luxuriating at mid-morning. Her eyes closed into slits, she watches us as we watch her: Lillie, our Isadora Duncan of backyard indolence and ease.

s

I don’t know if it is a matter of temperament, or a personality flaw, or just ordinary human awareness, but I cannot manage to keep the world at bay for any length of time. I whistle a tune—and, before long, images of Third World children with bloated bellies float before my eyes. My mind will not stay put. I cannot simply cultivate my own garden, enjoy my own spring, if I know that a bleak winter is covering the lives of others.

s

Doves in the backyard suddenly decide to leave so they take off from the grass or the trees and fly directly into one of the kitchen windows. We hear the whomp, and look, and see the white smudge of feathers left against the windowpane by the impact. Amazingly, the doves are never killed. They simply recoil, nursing their monumental headaches, and continue to fly on past the house. Phoebe was told that if she would cut out a construction-paper outline of a bird—wings facing up, not down, for some reason—and attach it to a window the doves would be spooked and would not bash into the panes again. It works. • 5 •

At 7:30 I came outside the house and looked east and the yellowish full moon in its sky of early nighttime blue nearly knocked me over. There, in the familiar neighborhood of familiar streets and homes, was, once again, the reminder of constant beyondness—a beyondness that should bring all of us to our knees. After another day of routines and personal concerns we look up and there it is again: that ever-circling, evernumbing reminder of a truth that humans apparently can’t or won’t stay focused on: We live our lives in total mystery. I have never understood how people deal with this situation so easily, so indifferently: living, incredibly, on a rotating ball in the middle of space and continuing to act as if such a reality didn’t exist or at least didn’t matter very much.

s

How many could immediately identify the “it” in the statements below: • You cannot see it, taste it, feel it, hear it—yet without it you could not exist on the Earth. • It affects everyone regardless of race or nationality. • It has been here before human life began and will be here even if all human life ends. • It is vital to us, a matter of life-and-death, yet among the billions of people who are alive, or who have ever lived, hardly anyone has bothered to pay it any mind.

• 6 •

The memory of that moment keeps returning: It was a Saturday morning in San Antonio and I was driving on Loop 410. The sun was shining, the sky was clear, the buildings, the cars, the trees were vividly where they belonged in the day. There was much in the world…. But there was no single place I wanted to go or needed to go. I had nothing, really, to do. I didn’t plug in anywhere on life’s gigantic switchboard.

s

John Fowles mentions the hard-to-grasp—hard to accept—perceptions from modern physics in The Tree: 1) the observer of an electron, by the act of observing, changes the electron; 2) the shadow of a falling leaf is really not separate from the leaf itself. Could it be said, then, that writing about something gives a life to that something it otherwise would not have? We grow tired of hearing about the falling tree that makes no noise unless someone is around to hear it, but is it possibly true that nothing is special until it is remarked upon, focused on, by a human mind?

s

In writing if you strive too hard for purity, for artistic excellence, you run the risk of taking the blood out of the words.

s • 7 •

Memory: When I was a freshman in high school Stephen Hoenig and I would go downtown after school to solicit ads for the yearbook. When we reached Water Street we would turn the corner by Mrs. Orchard’s old photography studio—looking in to see if Numsen, her gray-haired bachelor son, would be sitting like a wooden Indian in his dusty studio cave among the shelves and picture frames and hidden whiskey bottles— and then we would swing on past other familiar doorways, other familiar stores, seeing the same mild faces of salesmen we had seen all our growing-up days. Usually we stopped at the Nook, an L-shaped diner on a side street near the courthouse, and Stephen and I would each buy a small Goldbrick candy bar. We would peel back the crisp wrapper and go stand outside beneath the awning—chewing, looking at everyone passing by in the fading moments of the afternoon….Four-thirty, school out, shadows softening, ordinary townspeople doing ordinary townspeople things: It was pleasant being there outside the Nook, knowing we had a necessary school job to do, feeling competent, almost grown. Life on those easy-going afternoons was as comfortable to me as breathing. But then there was Stephen, my best friend, who was already involved with the uncertainties of Things-to-come. His mother was an alcoholic, his father a violent-tempered wool salesman who had finally left home. I would stand next to Stephen, eating my Goldbrick, and I would sneak a glance at him and try to think about it: None of my other friends had divorced parents; nobody else’s mother stayed drunk all day. Yet despite these handicaps Stephen was outshining us all: class president, science whiz, everybody’s favorite something-or-other at school. And even as a freshman he was absorbing and concealing adult realities, • 8 •

handling adult problems…. Each afternoon after we parted ways at the Rio Theater, I would buy a package of Lifesavers and sometimes a 25-cent pocketbook at Pampell’s Drug Store before walking home. But Stephen: I knew he would be going into that somber, two-story house over-looking the Guadalupe River where his mother padded around through dark, closed-off rooms. Stephen had eaten the same gold-wrapped candy bar and had idled along the same unthreatening downtown streets—had walked beside me through the same pleasant slants of hill country sun—but just two blocks away a thin woman with ill-fitting false teeth and a towel wrapped around her head was listening for the front door to open— waiting to call out irritably to him, “Sonny…Sonny…now answer me, Goddamit—is that you?”

s

It is almost impossible, it seems, for a person to be in the center of the public eye—talented, famous—without at some point falling into very deep quicksand. And what is the motor driving this human vehicle that finally goes off the cliff? Childhood. Pressures of society play their part along with inherited predispositions, but the emotionally tangled circumstances of childhood create acids and poisons that keep bubbling up like indelible inks to stain adult behavior.

s

We will never appreciate nor understand life until we know how to stop a single moment of it. The flow of life keeps passing and we try to break that flow by calling a part of it “day” or “afternoon” or “night,” and because we live • 9 •

through so many of these familiar “days” and “afternoons” and “nights” we think we know what they are simply because we have names for them. But merely naming them does not solve their mystery. I keep trying to stop the flow—the chaos—by picking out moments, isolating them, and putting them on a page— like specimens pinned to a board—in hope that I can then finally discover the essence of them, bared and revealed.

s

I have enjoyed the world around me; I have been highly responsive to it. But I have not enjoyed just being me. I must be in relation to. I can’t just be as, say, children can; I must do. Simply existing—having the world flow in to me without my “flowing back,” giving back, responding—is not enough. As I get older, as I edge toward becoming less and less of whoever or whatever I have been—as I get less productive—my sense of self-esteem grows less and less. I don’t look forward to the days when I just am.

s

On this Saturday afternoon a neighborhood girl—I’d guess she is about twelve or thirteen—stands in a pink birthday-party dress with a large bow in back. She is talking to a younger girl, friend or sister, beside an elm tree in her front yard. She idly rubs her hand across the bark of the tree, then looks across at a patch of sunlight on the sidewalk across the street. A breeze occasionally ruffles her hair. A car drives by. The girl keeps talking, but as her mouth moves her eyes follow the white collar of the young man in • 10 •

the car. He is driving slowly, his arm jutting out of the open window, a baseball game on the radio. The young man’s car makes a painfully slow turn at the corner—suggesting, I imagine, everything the girl thinks she wants to know about life, especially the tantalizing, languorous ecstasies that will be coming her way when she finally falls in love. The younger girl also watches the car pass, but only briefly. She is more interested in picking at the scab on her knee. At age ten or so she doesn’t care about boys and their white collars.

s

Consider, if you will, the universe: the humanly unimaginable vastness of it: galaxies upon galaxies. Then consider this speck of rock called Earth—infinitely small in relation to the all that is. And it is on this grain of matter that the human effort takes place.

s

“Suicide”—I read recently—“is the final act of defiant despair.” I think of my son’s body lying in the cab of his truck— gradually rotting beneath hill country cedars and oaks from February to September—and I wish I could have been there, somehow, someway, to comfort him. He died too desperate, too alone. I still try to reach him as I drive country roads. Sometimes I stop and get out of my car and yell out to the sky, “Byron, where are you?” It is still hard to accept that he is gone. I carried him around on my shoulders across the living room when he was a child. He stood beside me at night on a • 11 •

lighted pier at Port Aransas and we looked together into the dark waters of the Gulf. We fished. We went camping. He sat beside me in the car, and each year that he grew older we were still father and son. But now there is no son; there is no father of a son. Father, son—such words are meaningless. His death cancelled out much that was me, and the house of my life sits on a bedrock of bleakness.

s

I miss teaching my classes and my classroom, the blackboards and desks and aisles, the tall windows facing the Franklin Mountains, the bookcases filled with books beneath the windows. There was a kind of glory in teaching nine months of every year—seeing them come in, semester after semester for 30-plus years, all of them, those sons and daughters from the modest homes of central El Paso. A school: Could there be a better place to spend one’s time and energy…. Memories: Recently seeing again the movie Dead Poets Society and remembering when I had students read the play, in an abbreviated form, aloud in class: when—like a Robin Williams—I took the part of Mr. Keating and stood on my desk the way he stood on his. As I loomed above them I invited them to come up and see how it was to have a different viewpoint of a familiar setting by just standing on a desk in a classroom instead of sitting in a chair…. A teacher, standing on his desk: They had never seen such a thing before so at first no one moved. They looked across the aisles at each other, lift• 12 •

ing eyebrows, shrugging, waiting, not knowing how to react and not wanting to commit to anything that would make them look foolish. Finally Juan Cisneros slouched up the aisle with a little shrug and a grin, then Armando Prieto, and before long half the class tried it: one by one stepping on my chair first, then the desk, standing there, self-conscious as all get out but doing it: looking across a room of laughing faces, experiencing something different. Repeatedly I see a movie or read an interview in which a teacher, or former teacher—usually a woman—is asked to comment on her experiences in the classroom. Invariably the woman-English-teacher will say with a kind of bravely martyred air, “Oh, I can certainly say teaching was a challenge” and then will get to the burden of her tale: It was worth the effort if she managed to have just one student show a (love of learning), (love of poetry), (spark of enthusiasm). If she could see that little gleam of understanding in the eyes of just one student, then it was all worthwhile. I want to yell at her through a megaphone: “Damn, lady, ‘one student’? You show up day after day and feel satisfied focusing all your sense of accomplishment on the reaction of one student? You’re supposed to be in there every day for everybody in class—busting your butt for all of them, whether or not you see any “light” in the eyes of any of them. The light, the fire, the enthusiasm, the love of learning, the “gleam” should be in you regardless of whether any of the others had it or not.” Oh, my, A Separate Peace. I would pass out the novel and book markers to those honors sophomore classes and then go over the photocopied sheet with the background information on it about the main character Finny— • 13 •

athletic, good-natured but not a good student academically; Gene, his roommate, who wanted top grades and had a tangled relationship with Finny; Devon, the prep school they attended. I made a chalk drawing on the blackboard—a simplified outline of a tree with the words arcing around it: “World War II, the 1940’s, Devon, rivalry, misunderstandings.” I told them that one certain tree on the bank of the Devon River was the central image in the novel and the plot revolved around an incident that happened in the tree. I taught the novel year after year, but after Byron took his life I had to keep a good grip on myself as I went through it—especially after we finished reading it and I showed the movie. There were similarities between Finny and Byron: Both displayed a lot of physical exuberance; there was also a physical similarity between Byron and the blond actor who played Finny. During the movie I sat at the back of the room in the semi-dark, and at the end, when Finny died, I had to be sure to master the tears that would always well up so that after I turned the lights back on I would be, to the class, the same familiar, self-possessed Mr. Bode they were accustomed to.

s

A little girl and her older companion are seated in the swings at the side of the park. They are talking more than swinging. Rather, the little girl asks questions and the older girl gives answers. The little girl is barefooted. She leans forward from her swing, drags her feet around in the dirt, finally brings up a stick with her toes. She removes it, breaks it against the chain of her swing, begins to beat a rhythmless rhythm against the metal seat. Her companion continues to make • 14 •

her lazy, going-nowhere half-circles, keeping one foot constant in the dirt. The little girl looks over at me as I read on a nearby bench. She beats her stick some more, watches the boys playing soccer across the way, squints up through the elms at the late morning sun. Then she looks back at me and calls out: “Why haven’t you left yet?”

s

On the outside looking in: I had stopped by Subway to get a ham-on-wheat when I saw him. He was standing next to Subway, looking through a partly opened curtain of the adjacent hair styling salon and periodically reaching back to pull at the seat of his pants. He was 12 or 13, with blond-brown hair that stuck up here and there. Every now and then he turned, looking backward toward the sidewalk and the parked cars, his mouth open, his Down syndrome bottom lip hanging loose, his face vacant—like a blank sheet of paper on which little, perhaps nothing, would ever be written. I could not move. I kept looking at him—this pudgy, unfinished human-child, alone in the universe, born to live out his life in a limited, minimal way. He was not depressed—I was depressed: at the sight of him….no, at the sense of him, the consideration of his genetically flawed fate—left this afternoon in the cheerless March cold to stand in his forlorn isolation and keep pressing his face against the hair salon glass, trying to see his mother or sister inside: always to be someone trailing obediently behind the arm of his mother or another family member along the aisles of a supermarket or clothing store, always an open-mouthed lesser-than destined to do nothing • 15 •

more vital than pull constantly at the seat of his pants.

s

I sit in darkness on the back porch. Cars are in the distance and on nearby streets. Yells come from games in the nearby park. There are periodic yaps from neighborhood dogs. Lillie, the cat, is poised by the honeysuckle vine, watching for movements in the grass. City night has taken over from city day. A pale-white star shines inside a configuration of small branches and leaves within an almond tree. It is like a display for a school bulletin board: a tree-limb framework ten yards away that encloses a white dot from millions of light years ago. The universe is closer, intimate. Life is on hold. A breeze comes by, a mockingbird sings. All is familiar; everything is strange. The trees, the rock walls, the flower planters hanging from the patio porch, the birdbath, the sides of neighbors’ houses—all seem more solid and enduring, more timeless, here in darkness than during daylight hours, as if they are carved into the night: immobilized by darkness. At nine o’clock—Earth-time—a gradually emerging April moon begins to appear over the rooftops in the east. It rises—full and yellow: an impossible sight, like eternity materializing slowly out of the El Paso desert wearing a round yellow face.

s

The house in Clint puzzles me. I have passed by it a number of times, and it always gives me pleasure just to look at it. The touch of the country• 16 •

side is on it—an air of stability and permanence that spans generations. It is the kind of genuine home-place where children once grew up, then moved away, and over the years keep returning to bring their own children to Grandma’s for the holidays and Sundays. Surely—I think each time I go by—there is an old gray head somewhere inside. But I have never seen a face at a window or a humped figure feeding a cat out the back door. Three huge arbor vitaes loom up about the front yard, reaching above the top of the house. The gray-shingled roof slants down past the attic windows to the neat front porch with its slender white columns. Cottonwoods and elms are about, and pampas grass, and roses growing up a trellis. Behind the house—beyond the trumpet vines and purple sage—are the outbuildings and a long back lot where a white horse grazes. The front yard is always mowed, no litter is about, there is no sign of neglect. The house is perfectly, properly maintained as it sits in its deep setting of green. Everything about it is still in place—ready for grandchildren to run and laugh and roll across the grass while the adults watch indulgently from their wicker chairs on the screened-in side porch. Yet I never see anyone in the house or near it. Doves perch on the telephone wires each afternoon; the roses are in bloom. Water hydrants are always kept wrapped against winter freezes, and a washtub leans against the back porch bricks. The house continues to sit there, as if waiting for the day when Life will walk up the front sidewalk again and open the front door.

s • 17 •

I would like to be the Dad of a Boy again. I saw such a dad, with his boy, in an aisle at Albertson’s last night. A smiling boy, 13 or so, in a Packers’ jacket, he pushed a shopping cart and listened with genuine attention to what his dad was saying. They pushed and they walked, the two of them, past the shelves of crackers and bread. Dad was leaning over, checking the price of Cheezbits; his son had stopped and was turned toward him, waiting. At 6:45 on a Tuesday night the boy was at his dad’s side, attentive to what the tall man with the loose shock of hair was saying about an experience of his in Nicaragua. They walked on down the aisle, comfortable with each other, the boy slightly behind, still listening closely, the man half-turned, his head lowered toward his son, almost touching the boy’s shoulder as he kept on with his tale of military intrigue. Other customers passed by, maneuvering their carts around them. The boy and his dad walked on, isolated within their father-son space.

s

It is as if I am a building and I am made up entirely of elevators. Each one is loaded with sadness, and they are all going down. As they start to descend, I feel their terrible slow sinking. They are gradually emptying me of all the memorable moments of my life, taking them for storage in the Basement of Permanent Loss.

s

Unfinished things…. Those of us who have tried to write want a shapeliness in our work. We want completeness. • 18 •

But much of the time—perhaps most of the time—we simply start and stop, stop and start, muddle along. We sit with a pencil poised or a typewriter key left unstruck as we stare off into space. We can’t corral those loose, just-beyondour-grasp notions that drift around in our heads. That’s why we have files and folders labeled “Incomplete.” On the first go-around we could not achieve the impact or the effect we wanted so instead of wadding up the mess and chucking it into the waste basket—as I used to do, often to my later regret—we developed the fileaway ploy…. Maybe if those half-realized paragraphs, pages, sentences are allowed to simmer quietly out of sight on the shelf, they will somehow—magically—achieve on their own the meaning, the depth, the point that we were unable to bring to them in the initial draft. Usually, of course, nothing happens. They were DOA the first time around and they tend to stay that way. They simply refuse to unfold hidden wings and soar off the page into glorious flight. They remain in their manila-folder hospital beds, unable to hobble and limp around, still lacking robust literary health.

s

There we were, Phoebe and I, on our trip to St. Paul to visit family and the new baby, and one afternoon before we left I stood at the back kitchen window of the Goodrich Avenue home, grabbed a pencil and paper, and put it down: As I look out the window at the world of towering trees and chipmunks and birds and every kind of growing thing—grasses, plants—I feel that they hold within them special, unknowable, fundamental truths. Humans have truths, yes, but the green world, in spring, in Minnesota, is so incomprehensibly, dramatically green and multi-leafed, • 19 •

multi-branched, that it overwhelms anything I might care to know of human words, human experiences. It is wordless but not silent: It contains the entire green past of the Earth; it displays itself with a beauty and vitality beyond understanding. A human is useless on such an afternoon. The bursting greenery pays no mind to what people might be doing or thinking. Humans and the natural world are in parallel universes.

s

I have become lost in the uncharted land of “I.”

s

I have survived this long because of written words—my own and the words of others. I would hate to say which have been more important to me.

s

Words have carried the weight of my life; they are the bones of it.

s I. Our Janway backyard in late spring is not of Babylonian splendor: no latter-day Nebuchadnezzar is sitting in a lawn chair in the shade, being fanned by one of his slaves; no tributary of the Euphrates is flowing out of a neighbor’s yard • 20 •

into ours. But in May the yard is nevertheless a comfortable place of greenery and smallish, living creatures. It’s Phoebe, not a fabled king or queen, who is responsible for the yard’s success. Her skill in tending growing plants and blossoming flowers is what gives the yard its appeal. I am more the handyman, there as needed and dutiful in doing chores. A visitor pushing open the sliding glass door of the den, walking onto the covered patio, and taking in the yard with a long, encompassing look would see, from east to west, the following: ever-spreading Miguelito vines climbing the rock wall next to the street; the hugely luxuriating Banks’ rose bush that hides the old storage shed; the narrow bed of lantana and the sprawling grape vine against the south rock wall; then the honeysuckle vine and the empty wood-slatted pen that was home for a long while to our departed rabbit, Pepperoni; finally, the two struggling rose bushes beside the west rock wall. The visitor would also see, to his left, a slender pomegranate tree in front of the lantana bed, a small peach tree, then an almond tree, and an Arizona ash. If it is early-to-midmorning and the visitor takes a seat on the patio to rest a while, he can take in even more of what the yard has to offer. And if he does not happen to dote on fellow-creatures other than human ones, he can at least get an idea of what some of them mean to Phoebe and me: partners in Creature Caretakers, Inc. Mojo, the black cat with white feet (age16 and interested these days in not much more than food and naps and occasional head-rubs), will be curled within her white lamb’s-wool pad on top of the small table next to the house—near the purple sage. Lillie, the white cat (age 4 and interested in everything that moves, including small white butterflies dancing in the air, bugs in a pool of water, • 21 •

any white-winged dove that might be foolish enough to keep on eating beneath the trees when she is near) is lying in the damp indented space beneath the honeysuckle, temporarily at rest, temporarily tolerant of birds and bugs and even Mojo, whom she irritates several times a day out of boredom. The doves are scattered about underneath the trees, eating the grain I have thrown out to them earlier. Sparrows, too, are all about but hidden within the branches, talking like crazy in fussing sparrow-talk. The visitor might find it pleasurable to keep on sitting, feeling he has no pressing needs and no better place to be at the moment. He might look outward past the yard to the neighbors’ oleanders and Italian cypresses that rise above the top of the rock walls. Time does take its time there in the backyard, seeming to encourage humans to stay where they are. II. “Has Wilson eaten yet?” Phoebe’s question would need to be explained to a visitor. Wilson is a smallish box turtle Phoebe found three summers ago in the neighborhood while she was out on a morning walk. We had just seen Cast Away, the movie with Tom Hanks. A scene toward the end shows a ball with the Wilson sports logo on it drifting away from hero Hanks, who is alone in the Pacific on his small, makeshift craft. When Phoebe brought the turtle home we named him Wilson because of some now-forgotten connection we made to the ball fading out of sight. Somehow the name seemed to fit. We fed him; he began to make himself at home in the backyard. In October he disappeared from sight for the • 22 •

next six months, then resurfaced after his hibernation and rejoined us. The next summer Phoebe got several other turtles from a friend: two pretty large dudes—kind of prehistoric-looking and bigger than Wilson—and a little one, with hardly more size than a silver dollar. Phoebe read up on the care of such turtles, got the suggested turtle food, but they ended up liking slices of Alpo canned dog food best of all. They ate, waddled around the yard—the two big ones, that is, the little guy disappeared beneath the Banks’ rose bush and stayed disappeared during the fall and winter months. Names again: We decided to call the more aggressive one Ernie (after bullyish Ernest Hemingway); the more civilized one, so to speak, we named Quindlen (after the writer Anna Quindlen). The elusive tad-of-a-turtle was named Herbert (in honor of The New York Times columnist we liked, Bob Herbert). Last month Wilson, Ernie, and Quindlen reappeared— sluggish-to-downright-comatose at first, sort of leaning against any nearby rock wall and not moving, day after day. Finally they recovered their vitality and began making trips here and there in the yard. We put out the Alpo bits. They gobbled them down—except for Herbert, who had grown his/her/its widow’s mite of circumference during the offseason but still didn’t particularly go for Alpo and stayed alive on little bites of unknown somethings. About the business of his/her/its: Here was another learning experience for Creature Caretakers, Inc. One day we looked out the sliding glass door and discovered Nature in full sway: Ernie had cornered Quindlen on the patio and was having his way with her from the rear (for identification Phoebe had painted them that first summer with red dots: four dots on Quindlen’s shell, three on Ernie’s). We went • 23 •

outside and sort of walked uncertainly around the hookedup couple, not sure of how to deal with Sex in Action on the patio cement: Did the modest Quindlen actually want or enjoy the wham-bam attention of Eager Ernie? (We felt a bit like parents coming across their teenager coupling in a backseat in the family driveway.) We waited. Finally Ernie fell backward but was still “engaged.” We waited some more. (I remembered stories from my growing-up days of people aiming water hoses at dogs in the neighborhood who couldn’t get unlocked on their own…. Should I reach for the nearby faucet?) We kept on waiting. Quindlen was trying to crawl away but it was no-go: Ernie was firmly fixed. We waited. After a while Ernie came loose and ‘twas a sight to behold: His sexual apparatus (“Our First View Ever!”) sort of resembled a purplish mushroom. So that was that. Male-turtle and female-turtle obeying the Call—at least the nudging, lunging, biting, not-to-bedenied Ernie was obeying it. The next day there was another surprise in store for the Caretakers as we kept learning more about the birds-andbees and all the other reproducing folks in our backyard. This time it involved good old Wilson, our first and favored turtle friend—who had come wobbling every day across the grass the previous summer to eat from my extended hand his daily bread or piece of apple. He was now cornered next to the dog house by the on-the-rampage Ernie and…. Ernie coupled with him. That is, with her. Wilson—whom we had named Wilson because the books said he was a male due to the color of his eyes—was not Wilson, but Wilsona. We made our way back inside the house and sat for a while. What next? • 24 •

III. “Morning, Mojo.” I am sitting on the patio in the green plastic chair. Mojo is on the nearby table, curled on her white pad. I think of various poems that celebrate the grace and elegance and mysteriousness of cats, telling how they “walk slim” or “move with a feline effortlessness” or “gaze at the world through ancient eyes,” and so on. Mojo is not a suitable subject for that kind of fine writing. She more aptly suggests “a mass of black inertia,” or perhaps she might bring to mind an alliteration such as “a study in summer somnolence.” Of course, if one of the doves happened to wing boldly onto the patio and light on Mojo’s head, that union might suggest a painting: Unresisting Object Tolerates Movable Force. When I had come outside earlier Mojo, rising up, had returned my greeting by fixing her stare instantly on me and waiting for me to dump the expected portion of Purina Chow into the nearby bowl. That was exercise enough: her combination of salutation and morning aerobics. After breakfast it’s back to the mat and a resumption of her deep investigation of dozing. But I can’t fault her. She’s seriously tuned out. And sitting in my chair, looking at the yard, in May, I’m very much tuned in. Such is the way of some cats and some people…. So what if she misses out on the goings-on a few feet in front of her—for example, the way the small Mexican doves do their walking across the grass looking for food. With every step forward there is a constant, fast countermotion of the head-and-neck: back and forth, back and forth…head forward, head back. I don’t understand why they are not all lined up on a limb taking Tylenol and nurs• 25 •

ing terrific little migraines. IV. Twelve o’clock: Resting time has begun. Doves are sitting on the rock wall. A mockingbird has established itself at the top of an Italian cypress and is serenading the neighborhood. The breeze is making its way through the trees, moving the leaves, keeping the afternoon heat away for a while longer. I stand at the screen door, looking out, wondering: Is it to be counted as something real, this suspended backyard moment? Is it truly part of nature—so un-red in tooth and claw? It is completely out of the flow of everyday human affairs. There is not the slightest indication that it is in the same world as interstates, shopping malls, business deals, traffic, construction. It is its own private island. The words people use to describe life as they know it do not apply to this small place of green and shaded ground. There is no violence here: no war, no horror, no stress nor pain; no tragedies, no despair; no tortures, no starvation; no massacres, no devastation. It is like a noon out of childhood—one of the countless stretches of seemingly endless time: unobtrusive, unremarkable, to be remembered only because nothing in particular happens: just there, a noon hanging forever in summer air. V. By 10:30 in the morning Mojo has usually settled for the day into her white-mat retirement home. But this morning, for some reason, she is in a rare and spirited old-lady mood. As usual she has been fed, her head and ears rubbed. Lillie, her once-or twice-a-day pain-in-the-butt, is lying • 26 •

with deep, sleepy unconcern on the wooden patio bench. Phoebe and I, Mojo’s taken-for-granted caretakers, are seated nearby, giving Mojo an even greater feeling of springtime social security. (The plants have been watered, the air is still cool, and we have taken to our chairs for a quarter-hour to enjoy the patio pleasures.) So what does the old lady in her mat-retirement-home choose to do today? She decides to combine a rare bit of pseudo-exercise with the distraction of playing with her tail—something she has probably never done before in her life. Phoebe and I are not sure she even knows that the tail is hers. It wafts lazily about, and just as lazily Mojo gives it an indolent, white-pawed little swipe, then a bit of fake lunge without rising more than an inch from her mat…. Another swipe, and another. It’s obviously flat-out entertainment for her—like a grandma in a rocking chair flapping her hands and feet toward a hanging balloon. It goes on and on, this geriatric gymnastics, with the tail waving back and forth and a paw feinting in half-pursuit. Finally Mojo’s little fit of hyperthyroidism plays out and she returns to a normal lassitude. But she looks as if she feels pretty smug about it all. Instead of collapsing into her normal semicircle she extends into an exaggerated stretch. With her head and one foot resting casually over the edge of the mat, she gazes out at Phoebe and me as if wanting to be sure we had understood the point of it all: “I’ve still got some of the prime-time stuff in me, you know.” Lillie, on the bench, ignores her.

s

Life and death: That’s what I think about.

• 27 •

On Lombardy Lane white-winged doves sail into the tall trees and call to one another. I walk beneath them in the last light of day—beneath their constant, peaceable calling—and I find it hard to reconcile their serene, smoothbellied, elegant bodies with my brooding about mortality. My son, dead: my parents and grandparents, dead: friends and acquaintances, former students, former classmates—also dead. I walk along this familiar and pleasant street in West El Paso, with a light breeze bringing in the late-afternoon smell of alfalfa fields—and I try, without success, to balance the irreconcilables.

s

I remember my first attempt, in my early twenties, to anticipate the future. I wrote about it in “The Ranch: An Ending.” As I was sitting on the ranch front porch one Sunday morning, watching my grandparents drive off to church, I began to consider the end of the ranch and the end of my grandparents’ lives: “You had better get ready,” I wrote, “Someday there will be no gray heads framed in a Buick window—no gray heads, and no more reason for the ranch. Someday this corner of the Earth will heave in an invisible little spasm, surrendering its old folks and its claim to glory.” I sat there and strove to find a little wisdom: “All right,” I continued, “mourn this unhappened thing now…. Break the big dose into smaller ones and make it easier to swallow…. But I knew that was foolishness. I could not mourn on the installment plan; I could not get the jump on future sorrows.” That was the only time I had felt a need to prepare, emotionally, for a future event. • 28 •

After college I did my best to look ahead, plan ahead, but basically I just went along with the day-to-day. One decade ended; another began. The years went by. I accepted the idea that a person always had his work to do, duties to carry out, family happenings to deal with, world events to react to. The “story” of Life, like the “story” of my own life, would just keep unfolding to me chapter by chapter. The passing of the years was, in a sense, seamless, as the wheel of time kept moving. …. Until I reached my 70’s—until I retired and no longer had a daily goal; until I realized that the familiar wheel of predictable events had, for me, suddenly become motionless. I was not prepared for this new stage. The future had become Now, and I did not know how to handle it. The shift from daily job to no-job was not seamless. The flow of my “story” stopped abruptly, and so did I.

s

On this late May afternoon I am outside on the front steps. A woman passes, walking her dog. The sun, after the intermittent rains of the past week, is once again visible in all its incredible solar self: blazingwhite, low in the west above the trees. Small weeds, given encouragement by the rains, poke up here and there among the front yard rocks. A dog barks in a backyard. Cars pass. Doves call, unseen. Houses along the street sit passively. No one from them is outside. I have this moment to myself, and it is tearing me apart.

s • 29 •

Memory, Austin High: First I passed out Of Mice and Men to the juniors and then gave them book markers. (I would buy packets of colored construction paper at Albertson’s, then after school cut the colored pages into strips and put them into envelopes to use whenever we started a new novel.) I walked down each aisle, distributing them, telling students that the markers had been made especially for our class by.…—and I would make up some unlikely group: Eskimo astronauts, military police skateboarders, and so on. I felt that if they had a book marker stuck in the novel it might tempt them to open the book, maybe actually read some of it. A few students invariably asked for a favorite color: If I had put a red strip on Angela’s desk, for example, as I walked by she would look up and ask if she could have a (blue) (orange) one instead. A big deal over a book marker.… Boys immediately bent over and started to decorate theirs. Fashioning gang identities or Gothic letters would be the most interest some of them would show in the book. I would read selected pages in Mice during the week that we studied it. I tried to draw reluctant readers into the novel, if possible, and I felt this was the best possible way: my voice, Steinbeck’s words, their compelled attention. I would read for fifteen minutes or so, then they continued silently. (I would read a passage in which Lennie was talking to George, and I would try to become Lennie—stuttering a little, opening my mouth wide to form his words, exaggerating his slow-wittedness…. I attempted to make Curley’s wife sound seductive when she talked to George or the ranch hand Slim. I wanted the class to feel sympathy for Old Candy—who would be lost and even more alone if Carlson shot his dog—and tried to have the African-American Crooks sound hard-edged and bitter as he taunted Lennie • 30 •

and drove home his case about being isolated at night in his bunkhouse.) We went through our first days with the novel—their assigned nighttime reading, the short daily quizzes, the daily reading in class—and then we would finally get to those last chapters: Lennie alone in the barn mourning his dead pup; Curley’s wife wandering in and beginning to complain to him about her messed-up life; then the moment when Lennie strangled her (—I could always tell at that point who had not been keeping up with the nightly reading: They had not known what to expect and began to lean forward onto their desks, riveted by the words); the vigilante hunt for Lennie, and then at the end Lennie pleading with George on the bank of the river to “get to that little place” they had talked so much about and George pulling out Carlson’s Luger and pointing it at the back of Lennie’s head as he told him to look across into the distance and try to see that dream place he had longed to go to…. We closed the book and talked about the choices George had other than to kill Lennie. If George were put on trial for murder, would they—as a jury—find him guilty of murder or would they find him innocent because shooting Lennie was an act of mercy killing. For some, it was a waste of time—going through the motions of being asked to read words in a book when they were not interested in reading, in books, in school, in possibilities beyond the realities they knew waited for them beyond the classroom door. But for the others Of Mice and Men was a brief detour into a word-world they had not planned on entering, and I hoped they would look back on that week-long trip into Steinbeck Country and find it memorable.

• 31 •

Summer

S

chool was finally out, grades were finished, I was tired. Phoebe was going on a church retreat at a place near Clint. So I decided to do it: On a Friday afternoon I tossed a few weekend essentials into the car and headed out to Silver City. I slid into the I-10 traffic, feeling kind of smug about cutting loose—just once—from customary weekly rhythms. I’d made an extra thermos of coffee and I sipped from the plastic cup on the seat beside me—the travel thermos, the travel cup. I put a travel tape into the cassette player, and the pulsing sounds of Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” filled the car as the green interstate signs began to slide by: Canutillo, Vinton, Anthony, Mesquite. As I turned truly west at Las Cruces it was nice to see the Deming sign along the highway. The trip was for real now; I had broken free from the “gravity” of El Paso. Deming is a traveler’s town, a highway-map town, a town to pass through when you’re on the road to distant places…. I looked out the window to the mountain ranges pale and hazy in the distance: Cookes Peak to the north, Florida Peak to the south. Already they offered the satisfying lure of things-on-the-horizon, things unknown. I took Highway 180 north out of Deming. The sun was low; I had gone through the tapes of Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Peggy Lee; the coffee was still a worthy companion. I slowed down, trying to decide: Should I swing off the main road and check out the City of Rocks—that strange cluster of rusty-orange, hill-sized boulders dumped into the middle of nowhere as if they had fallen from Mars?.... I decided against it, kept on climbing toward Hurley and the sprawling, open-pit copper mine. In Bayard I parked, got out, stretched my legs on a walk through the darkening side streets. Nice little upland, hillside community, Bayard. • 35 •

(Too bad the drugstore had closed for the day; it was one of my favorite stopping places: a small-town drugstore left over from the 1940’s: wooden floors, narrow aisles, chockfull of every possible item from copper plates to packets of yerba buena; with a long-time clerk named Irene or Wilma at the front cash register buffing her nails and a smiling man in spectacles, a Gene or Lewis, visible in his small, arched pharmacist’s window at the back.) In Silver City—just “Silver” to the locals—I got a room at the Drifter Motel and drove on downtown. I ordered a Chimichanga at the long-tunneled Mexicanfood restaurant that was probably a dry goods store in the early 1900’s. Once again, I was the only customer, and once again I wondered how the restaurant managed to stay in business. It’s as if the owners kept it open as a service to friends and family, not to make a profit…. I ate; the middle-aged waitress gazed into some private reverie; the grandmotherly gray head of the cook was barely visible above the back partition. No one talked or moved; no dishes rattled. It was like dining out in a private club: dim light, high ceiling, unobtrusive movements and sounds. I felt this was a fitting way to end a Friday. On Saturday morning I gassed up and headed out toward Glenwood and Mogollon. It was desert and ranch country I began driving through: the far western edge of New Mexico. I passed over the Continental Divide, I crossed the pebbly bed of the Gila River that winds its way into Arizona, I kept in sight the distant outlines of the Gila National Forest looming everywhere. In Glenwood I paused at the sign, “Catwalk,” and considered the time it takes not only to walk out to the Catwalk bridge but to dally along the creek…. Next time I’d do it; next time I’d spend the entire afternoon just poking along the trail among the cottonwoods and aspens. • 36 •

At Alma I took the road to Mogollon. It goes across the open, serene highlands for a while, then begins the winding climb and precipitous descent with its hairpin turns. I glanced across the valley toward the site of the old Fanny mine, then finally I was down: in Mogollon, once the pearl of the mining region and now a “ghost town” preserved in pine-scented historical amber. A dozen or so people moved about: Some were tourists, some were residents. I walked past restored miner shacks and adobes as breezes flowed through the canyon. Back in Glenwood I treated myself to a steak in an oak-paneled little cafe. It had red-and-white checkered table cloths, sensationally cold bottles of Coors, and an adjoining room where blue-jeaned men in western hats leisurely shot games of pool in shafts of Saturday afternoon sunlight. I sat at the table—tired, relaxed, content: thinking that I had just as soon not move again for perhaps the next month or so. On Saturday night Silver City has a tradition—a local spin-off from the more widespread teenage ritual of driving mindlessly around a neighborhood Dairy Queen. In Silver teenagers and college students and whoever else wants to join in the procession drive almost bumper to bumper down the main street and keep on driving in a slow, continuous ebb and flow until—who knows, maybe midnight: I’d never stayed up to observe the spectacle from beginning to end. I watched from my parked car and at ten o’clock it was rather a sight to see: one line of trucks and cars meeting the other line of trucks and cars that was returning from the turnaround spot: everyone driving calmly, almost sedately; everyone friendly and relaxed: an amiable young folks’ parade past the dark storefronts. On Sunday morning I drove to Pinos Altos, another historic mining community a few miles north of Silver. • 37 •

Pinos Altos: High Pines: each time I went there I wanted to rent a cabin, pitch a tent—whatever—and spend a summer there. I walked and walked; I felt I could go on walking down one of the dirt roads, past another of the apple orchards, on up through the pines, and then sit down for a long time and just consider life and the world. I checked out of the Drifter at noon and began the return trip home: along the upper route past Hanover and San Lorenzo (a heart-breaking little river town drowsing in the sun); through the Mimbres Mountains and the Black Range of the Gila Forest…. I had the thermos at my side and sweeping vistas out my window, and my-oh-my, the land was still strong stuff…. Great looping ascents through the mountain passes and long, snaking declines above occasional streams brought me at one point to an observation site where I looked out on the horizon-to-horizon desert land sprawled from Alamogordo to Las Cruces: a godly, sobering view…. At Kingston I stood in its quiet Sunday isolation, trying to imagine—to feel—how it was in the boom-town days of the 1880’s when 10,000 gold miners camped there among the junipers. Finally I was just about through with soaking up mountain byways and ready to call it quits. I took one brief look-about in Hillsboro (mighty interesting little town…. I needed to spend a few days there sometime) and then, like a rider letting the reins go slack and allowing his horse to set the pace, I aimed my car toward Caballo Lake and I-25 South. I still had a couple of hours to go on the interstate so I put a Duke Ellington tape in the cassette player and let the remaining good times roll.

s • 38 •

Memory: I am fifteen, maybe, and I am seated by the front yard picket fence. It is summertime and I have a bucket of white paint beside me on the ground and I am repainting the fence. That’s all, really, just that moment with Gilmer Street behind me and the yard and oak trees and the house in front of me. But there is much more. The painting of the fence is incidental. It simply focuses the time and place. To be fanciful: It’s as if in everyone’s life there is a stamping machine that prints out, in raised letters, a person’s identity card and the machine had stamped out mine: E B – GILMER STREET HOME – KERRVILLE, TEXAS – 1930’s. That was my unquestionable essence; everything else flowed from it, was secondary. Every acorn on the ground, dropped from the big oaks, was part of me. The back lots, the wooden garage with the fishing poles lying on the top rafters, the hens on their nests at noon, the woodpile, the set of World Books in the built-in shelf in the living room, the fireplace: all shaped me. I had been an innocent, living within the dimension of Home, and that innocence made me. For the first 17 years of my life I could have valued no home more had I been living in Caesar’s Rome.

s

I read about creative people who, responsive to their inner creative powers, finally sense certain subconscious stirrings bursting forth and lo, they proceed energetically to begin their novel or poem or symphony. I also read about novelists who hear the voices of their characters “taking over,” chattering away in their heads—the • 39 •

way religious people say they talk to God and God talks back, telling them what to do. I have never heard a word from a character talking in my head (and never a word from God). I have never felt the urgent purrings of an inner creative motor or any luring melodies from some distant muse. I am alone, museless. I simply wander around, fascinated by the sights of the already created world and wanting to put down words commensurate with its wonders.

s

As I walk along the sidewalk I think: If at this moment I died and disappeared—if I vanished into the air—the universe would not miss a stroke in its moving and turning. The sun rays that have been shining against my arms would keep coming down uninterruptedly against the cars, the houses, the land. The scene I have been a part of would continue— minus me. The grass would keep waving mildly in the vacant lot across the way, and the truck paused at the stop sign would lunge forward into traffic. Not a single cricket would stop its singing from a shaded ditch—as if suddenly alert, suddenly aware of a new death and a new dimension to life.

s

I drive the back roads of the Upper Valley, looking out the window, shaking my head, saying my God, my God, until finally I cannot stand it any more. West of Canutillo I park my car and stand beside a cotton field, the midmorning sun coming down, the mountains etched in the distance, the cottonwoods stirring in a breeze. I think: “I don’t know what to do except stand here. I cannot plant rows of cotton; I cannot shape a curving farm• 40 •

land road. I cannot cause the trucks to pass so soundlessly, smoothly on the distant interstate—like toys pulled on a string. I cannot create the sparrow noises that come from beneath the eaves of St. Luke’s church, or those scissortails sitting in a row on the telephone wire, or that blackbird flying up the canal, or the white butterfly drifting across the smooth roadside dirt, or the salt cedars, or the pecan groves…. “I cannot create any of what I see, and I have no words that will do the scene justice. I am inadequate for the job of reporting on paradise. All I can do is stand and look, paralyzed with awe.” I begin to walk, drawn closer to the field, the cotton rows, the bordering canals. I want to see my shadow following along beside me on the ground; I want to look across acres of green plants. I want to hear the familiar drone of summer flies. I want to stop, and turn, and turn again, keep on turning and see it, in a continuous sweep, stretched around me: the sky, blazing blue. I want to stand here by the canal in a hugely personal way—with the sun shining on uncountable, separate surfaces—and see every dirt clod and culvert, every blade of Johnson grass: see each clear and perfect thing that is, radiant and timeless in its moment under the sun. I get into my car and drive back to town, sobered a bit after a morning in the fields. I park and take a hike to the hill above UT-El Paso and sit on a pile of rocks. It is good here, too, alone, with the greasewood and the sage. I start watching the sky and become cloud-struck. I look—and the clouds become a shifting, expanding, sun-crafted fantasia. They are Himalayas and archipelagos…. then huge fetuses swelling, dying within amorphous white mothers. They are brains and viscera exploding, changing into furnaces of white lava, then drifting into layers of gray-white • 41 •

thoughts, wordless and powerful. They become waterfalls and strange African trees, corpses of dead, ancient heroes, revolving slowly on their backs in satin coffins. They are beautiful women, faces slowly wheeling, mouths opening, distorted, toward the sun. The clouds continue to shift, masses of them: They have come from far places and loom now above the desert— awesome, interplanetary. They are what humans have thought gods are, whatever creation is: silent in their blue crucible of heat and light.

s

I long ago understood that I was not a Me, a special someone, but an Everyman. In all that I have written I have tried to show that my concerns, no matter how personal, were not about me but about any human being alive on the Earth.

s

Memory:

Mother: a smiling, big-boned rancher’s daughter who loved to read. In her younger years she rode her horse Dolly through the live oaks and cedars of my grandparents’ ranch to the Klein Branch Community School, then later graduated from Harper High up the road from Kerrville. Grandpa sent her 70 miles away to Thomas School for Girls in San Antonio (Katherine Anne Porter went there too, I learned recently) but ran short of money after her first year there, and that was that for mother’s higher education. But she was a genuine reader. I remember summer afternoons on Gilmer Street when she had finished cleaning • 42 •

the house and it was the slow stretch of time between three o’clock and five thirty. She would take off her shoes and pull the oscillating floor fan up close and she would lie on the front room sofa and read. Sometimes it was the Ladies’ Home Journal or Good Housekeeping but more frequently it was a book from the Book of the Month Club or from the downtown Kerrville library or maybe a book that Miss Mitchell—the high school math teacher next door—had brought over and recommended. She read Thurber and Louis Bromfield and Winston Churchill and Pearl Buck and Somerset Maugham. Kipling and The Red Pony. Herman Wouk. Although I never paid much attention to when she started or finished a book, I believe she was a fast reader, probably even a remarkably fast one because she read constantly and she read a lot. Across the years she read her way out of the frustrations of her marriage—not a particularly fulfilling one—and beyond the confines of her small-town Kerrville life. She read Dag Hammarskjold and Norman Vincent Peale and Hemingway and J. Frank Dobie. She read Fred Gipson and Thomas Mann. She was a clipper of quotes, an underliner of wise or pithy sayings, a collector of newspaper articles and columns. After I went off to college there was usually a bonus of some kind in each of her weekly letters to me: a ringing proclamation by General Douglas MacArthur, some piece of wit by Dorothy Parker, part of a speech given by Adlai Stevenson— she was a fan of “ol’ Adlai,” as she called him. I’m not sure when the bulletin board went up in the bathroom. (Actually, it was just a piece of cardboard with clippings stuck on it with straight pins.) I think it first appeared during my senior year in college. I remember I had come home for the Christmas holidays and gone into the bathroom. Ours was notably small and constricting. As I • 43 •

stood, ready to commence, there at eye level was the Nobel Prize speech by William Faulkner, cut out from an old Life magazine; an even older wartime column by Ernie Pyle; and a bit of current inspiration from Billy Graham. For years afterwards we family—and guest—bathroom users were my mother’s captive audience: mainly the males, of course, because what choice did we have? We stood, somewhat at attention, and we read. A number of times I vowed I would resist. I went in, flipped up the lid, and proceeded to take a leak with my eyes closed. But usually I weakened and sneaked a glance or two before I left—perhaps a quick read of an Art Buchwald interview, a quote from Shakespeare. The bulletin board was probably my mother’s way of passing the reader’s torch—of contributing her modest bit to the uplift of others, particularly her family. She was not “preachy”; she was simply a wide-ranging reader who wanted to share the fruits of her casual harvesting—feeling, I guess, it was the least a mother could do.

s

L. T., my friend, has blown apart that marvelously intricate brain of his. He could no longer bear to live. L. T., doctor, man of talents, a genius surely, cancelled his life this morning at daybreak in his hill country home and that was that. “That was that”: Is that how it always goes? The deed is done, as all deeds are finally done. He lived his life and then it was over. He just did the death deed before it was done to him.

s • 44 •

I happen to look down at my hand. It is a fortunate glance. As I look at it—this suddenly focused-on part of my body—I think, “This hand of mine: I have not created a single cell of it—not a wrinkle or callus or shiny nail or knuckle or vein. It, and the rest of me—every bone and organ and sinew—is wrapped inside a skin called Me, and it is not of my doing. I have made no part of the Me that is sitting in this chair.” It is a freeing kind of experience. Hereafter I will have my hand handy just to glance at from time to time—a constant reminder of the moment in the chair when I realized, once again, that my hand, my life—all of me—is a gift.

s

I sit in the den with a late-afternoon drink. The cats have been fed and night is near. My mind is wheeling about, as usual, trying to find a place to become settled. I could look out at the backyard, quiet and serene, while I wait for supper, but my focus is elsewhere: on Life: how it started and why it keeps going. I read yesterday that scientists in Western Australia are studying microbes that established themselves in mounds of dirt billions of years ago: the Earth’s first settlers, apparently; our oldest fossils. They busied themselves in those Australian dirt piles and we have come, willy-nilly, out of them. On this June afternoon I am just another of the microbe descendants, flush with Jim Beam, not having the foggiest notion of what anything means. The cats know as much as I ever will. • 45 •

s

According to a poll, 85% of Americans in 2008 believed in God and Heaven. What’s new? If we were Greeks back in 5th Century B. C., 85% of us would believe in Zeus.

s

Our backyard: just a little personal island full of unexceptional, everyday pleasures. Standing under the trees I watch the new, two-monthold Australian shepherd squatting and peeing in the grass. I watch Ernie, the turtle, as he inches his slow way across the grass. His neck stretches—like a periscope rising from a surfacing submarine. He is surveying his world. The morning breeze is blowing, the yellow peach tree leaves are falling, the Miguelito blossoms are spread along the top of the wall like a bright pink-and-green mural. …. Every living thing, every sight and sound: They are my friends. How else to say it? A bird is perched on the edge of the birdbath, constantly looking about, not committing itself to the water yet, just dipping its beak—flinging the water with each dip, not really drinking: a nervous Nellie, waiting, alert. Then bingo: Into the water it goes, splashing, fluttering water inside its wings, luxuriating in its bird-boudoir bath. Maria, the baby turtle, has come to the patio to be given her twice-a-day bits of Alpo. She doesn’t have a hollow leg but has, in effect, a hollow shell—taking only little nips at a time but staying at it, for long minutes, and nips add up. She just settles in and chows down.

s • 46 •

I don’t want to describe—write about—the natural world. I want to capture it precisely and place it on the page as it actually is in reality and I don’t want my words to get in the way. Over the years I have stubbornly tried to make words do the impossible and recreate a scene in its “perfect state.” Occasionally, though, I have accepted the fact that nature is beyond the reach of words. Last week I parked my car on a dirt road near Alma, New Mexico, and walked along the San Francisco River. It was almost noon and the sun was high and bright. The air was clear. The trees along the river towered up in a solid mass of greenery into the vivid blue of the sky. That’s all it was: a river bottom under the summer sun. A commonplace sight. Yet the moment was so intense for me that I wanted to take a pencil and re-create on paper every inch of that quarter of the Earth and sky, every molecule of the silent white infernos within the clouds. It was the kind of scene that would make a Van Gogh cut off his ear in a rage if he could not put it all down onto a canvas, but after a while I turned and walked back to my car. I was not crazed, just saddened. I knew that anything I might try to write would be a pale facsimile of the blazing original.

s

I am without ease in the situation of living and have no sense of being at home in the world. I do not know how to occupy a calm human space.

s

When I am in a room, moving among people I know— people I care about and who care about me—I am still only • 47 •

there in part. The other part of me is elsewhere, and that elsewhere defines me.

s

I have long had a sense of the “greater context” that surrounds our lives, that makes everything we do seem vaguely unsubstantial, incomplete, unreal. Thus reality has never quite been real enough. Something is always missing.

s

…. pigeon on the grass, alas. On a hot Sunday afternoon when Phoebe and I were reading in the den I looked up and saw it, a stranger in the backyard—a biggish black bird that had never visited us before. Doves and grackles and mockingbirds and sparrows and finches and robins, yes, but never a pigeon. (Maybe it wasn’t a pigeon. It was a bit larger than pigeon-size, with feathers on its feet. I’ll call the bird Ismaela.) It seemed almost meditative as it walked near the birdbath and on through the shadows of the almond tree—lacking the hurried air of a crumb-scavenging pigeon. Finally it flew onto the patio and perched on one of the white rocking chairs. It sat there for a while, as though considering the chair to be friendly territory, a kind of home base; then it flew out of the patio and straight into the clear kitchen window with a loud thump. Phoebe heard the sound, looked up from her book, yelled as she saw Bella, our Australian shepherd, running across the yard with Ismaela in her mouth. We both hurried outside, chasing Bella, yelling at her. After Phoebe got her to let go we put Bella in her crate in • 48 •

the den and went back outside to check on the pigeon. It was alive, moving slowly. I herded it toward a corner of the rock wall. It didn’t try to fly—just waited until I picked it up. It was probably hurt but also seemed curiously tame—as if it was someone’s pet. I held it. What to do…. We took it to the front yard and put it down under the Arizona ash. It just looked at us with its round red eyes. I went to the garage, got a cardboard box, put Ismaela in it, and closed the top. Phoebe and I had decided the bird would have the best chance for survival if I took it to Trawood Park three blocks away. With Ismaela in the back seat I drove to the park, put the pigeon on the grass beneath the mesquite trees. It didn’t move. I drove back home. Phoebe and I continued to read for a while, then I thought I would go see how the pigeon was adjusting to its new location. I drove to the park, and there was Ismaela in the middle of the street—run over by a car. Speeding along, the driver had probably seen it but didn’t slow down—waiting for it to fly up at the last minute. Ismaela didn’t fly. I parked, got out, looked at the mangled body. Beneath one of the flattened wings I could see a round eye. It seemed to be looking at me.

s

It is, of course, the riddle of existence that haunts me, that blurs reality, that casts the shadow of mortality over each given moment: For what can be comfortably solid and real if it is always in the process of dying, gradually disappearing?

s • 49 •

I stood on the sidewalk in the late afternoon and watched very small ants moving in a single line at an incredible, constant speed along the sidewalk’s edge, the line of them stretching for several yards. They had a single purpose in mind and paid no attention to anything that was above and beyond them. A human observer of such a scene might stand there a while, bemused, perhaps, by one of nature’s little sideshows that was far removed from everything significant in his life, then move on his way, leaving the ants to their frantic, single-minded work, and think no more about them—certainly drawing no grand philosophic conclusion from their activity. But in fact humans and the sidewalk ants share a similarity. In the process of living our daily lives humans filter out—exclude—much of what is going on in the universe just as ants do. ...The ants beside my shoe: They paid it no mind, nor the houses on the block, the cars passing by, the clouds overhead. They cared only about the intense, singular business they were attending to. Humans? Sure, unlike ants we can be aware of cars, houses, clouds, and a multitude of other objects and daily happenings, but we are oblivious of the presence—and the staggering importance—of DNA, cells, chromosomes, enzymes, nerve endings in our bodies. The electromagnetic field in the atmosphere is invisible to us; we never see or care about the gravity that roots us to the Earth; we do not know how we go about the moment-to-moment of thinking or even understand what consciousness is. Cocooned in our lives by the familiar, we remain—antlike—indifferent to the larger realities around us.

s • 50 •

This afternoon I walked into the den and idly turned on the TV. I flicked through a few channels—ready to flick back off again—when I started watching a black-and-white documentary about World War II. It was one of those programs which switch back and forth from interviews with clear-minded old men, survivors of the war, to actual footage described by a dispassionate-voiced narrator. This particular documentary was about preparations for D-day and how a group of English paratroopers was given the next-to-impossible task of knocking out German artillery units on the French coast. I was standing there in the comfortable den on a casually unfolding Saturday afternoon, eating part of a Snickers bar—birds singing outside, cars passing—and before me, in a smallish square, in black-and-white, was War: the faces of men in helmets and uniforms sitting side by side in gliders; men being asked to parachute out of these gliders on a June night and make their way to German gun installations and destroy them. I watched as an old British commander told of the odds against success that the paratroopers faced. I watched as the documentary showed how the Germans—in preparation against possible attack—had secretly flooded the fields around the installations. I looked at those fields and listened as the narrator described how glider after glider, hit by artillery fire, had crashed and burned with all their troops aboard; how other gliders had landed in the flooded fields and the men on board had drowned; how some of the paratroopers had jumped and drifted into the same flooded fields and drowned there, tangled in their parachutes, one by one. A few paratroopers survived the landing and actually made their way to the German bunkers—just enough of them to accomplish what they had been asked to do, and the guns that would have made the Normandy landing more • 51 •

difficult and bloody than it actually was were silenced. I turned off the TV and walked outside (holding my Snickers bar, not a grenade). I could not blend together, of course, the sparrows in the backyard and the images on the small screen: those flooded fields, waiting there, and men obediently jumping into them, drowning in them, miles from home, lives swallowed by water and darkness. War on a Saturday afternoon….

s

It’s been perfect in its own way—this mid-July afternoon during the rainy weeks of summer. I’m in the car, driving along neighborhood streets, listening to old Steve Miller and Aretha Franklin tapes. Clouds are all around— white-blazed and towering in the west, rain-filled and dark in the east. I stop, roll down the front windows. A breeze comes through, thunder rolls and rumbles, white-winged doves shoot above the trees. Lawns along the street are intensely summer-green. …. By 6:00 it’s storm time. The sky has turned dark gray, the winds are coming hard from the west, bending and whipping tree limbs in the backyard, causing the birds to disappear and Mojo to hide in the igloo dog house and Lillie to get beneath the car in the front driveway. Lightning flashes, the air is wild, the sky is a threat: It is like the onset of an apocalypse.

s

I remember one early morning when I was trying to walk off my despairs—trying to get my head straight enough so that I could pick up again with some writing • 52 •

I was trying to do. I needed a sense of detachment, a cool inner self to balance the hot, outside realities. As I neared the Cotton Street overpass a short young man in a greasy, dipped-brim hat crossed the street, cautiously offering me a book of stamps. “Say, now, mister,” he said softly, “you like to buy a nice booka stamps? They all here; you can count ‘em.” I stopped, nodded, asked what he wanted for them. “Well, now, sir,”—and the young man began to bob around and shift his feet gently—“I sure would ‘preciate just what you thinks they is worth. You can sure use ‘em; ain’t no doubt ‘bout that, ‘cause they is ever one here. See, you can count ‘em.” The packet of stamps was dirty and much handled, but as I flipped through it I saw that all the stamps were indeed still there. I fished around until I found two dollars and a half, then thanked the young man as I put the stamps in my pocket. He backed away slowly, his nodding, bobbing head indicating that as far as he was concerned this little street corner transaction had gone off quite nicely. He went quickly down the street and after crossing into the yard of an old red-brick house he stood in the bare flower bed, shouting through a window and waving the money. As I walked down the block I began to curse myself— not because of the money but because I had let guilt feelings and pity make me lose my early-morning stance…. There I was again, already beginning to worry a stranger around in my head: this greasy-hat-and-yellow-tie man who had been waiting there on the corner to find someone he could hawk his book of stamps to—his breath fogging the air as he rubbed his hands together, his blood-shot eyes waiting; a young man in a wide-lapel, dirty blue coat and black shoes that curled up at the toes; a man reduced to stealing from an aunt or cousin or sister before breakfast and then going out • 53 •

to hold a tentative hand in front of the first person he saw and taking whatever money he was offered: all so he could run back to his buddy—hung over in a dark bedroom—and yell at him to get up, they were fixed for wine. . . . I remember walking a while down the street and then throwing the stamps into a patch of weeds. It had happened again. I had become, once again—partly—my brother’s keeper. All those people out there and their problems: What was I to do about them? I couldn’t write, couldn’t think. I went on to the public library and tried to read Proust.

s

At seven o’clock the sun is still an incredible furnace blazing away in the west. I stand on the sidewalk in front of my house and give it a glance, but I soon turn away from its intensity. The sun: I think about the first humans who had also looked up at it, so commandingly there each day. It was surely a god to them, all-powerful, its whitened fire from the mega-beyond keeping life alive on Earth. Those first humans could not know, of course, that the incredible eyein-the-sky was blind and deaf and speechless. It did not know what it sustained with is ceaseless energy. Some present-day Earth-beings may still look upward at it hoping to find a sign that will tell them, once and for all, why they are here on our ever-turning globe.

s

In Canutillo I drive down an unpaved, rocky street and park for a while in a run-down neighborhood of flaking • 54 •

adobe houses and vacant lots. I feel, somehow, that I am in my proper place—as if I have an abiding kinship with small, unfenced yards, stacks of old tires, discarded Gatorade bottles, weeds, fragments of broken glass. I look at a black dog sleeping next to a sagging sofa underneath a chinaberry tree, a wash tub sitting on a stump, a bantam hen scratching in the sand, and I feel at home, at peace.

s

Lillie, white, on a lawn of green, just before dark. A self-possessed cat, as always, she sits, the daily focal point in our backyard painting. There is a background of spacious greenery: pomegranate tree, peach tree, Banks’ rose, almond tree, and—like a textured rug—the spread of well-watered grass. She has eaten her late-afternoon meal on the patio, and now she waits like a calm marauder on the Janway veldt, alert to the small insect movements in the bushes and grass.

s

In every ordinary, daily act—cutting an apple in half, closing the refrigerator door, answering the phone—we are in the middle of life. We will never be more in the middle. If we do not know this, if we ignore the importance of the passing moment, we are lost. Life will always seem to be the momentous something out there—waiting for us—that we keep hoping to find, some radiant grandeur rather than the obvious that is always before us: the blinking of our eyes, walking across a room, sitting in a chair. Life is in every unheralded space. Every bit of it is at our elbow—our constant, patient companion even as we • 55 •

scan beyond it for signs of Drama, some astounding aurora borealis that will illumine us, overwhelm us, make us glow with rich significance. Life—we might say at some future time, regretfully: It was here all the while, right next door, and we never quite fully looked its way.

s

Write as if you are simply describing the ordinary things of life to someone who has never seen them: how a day is, what the streets look like. That’s the key: getting the everyday down on paper—but in such a way that the writing has the specialness and the timelessness of life itself. (….Coming across this later by a critic discussing Sherwood Anderson: “All of Anderson is in …the telling of some little incident, in a curiously illuminating way.” And Anderson’s response: “…it being my contention that the illuminating touch is all of painting, music…prose. How silly is this idea that life can be thought out clearly. Who can do that?”) Yes, the illuminating touch: that is the trick, the hard part: being able to give to ordinary-seeming words an illuminating touch that will make them no longer ordinary but something curiously, elusively special.

s

It is strange: Sometimes I will make half-hearted, uninspired notes—pretty much just a straight description of a few observed things: notes lacking point, focus, grace…. But once they are down—actually there on white paper—they begin to perk up with a kind of unexpected significance. The mere fact that they exist, these barest wiggles of life—that • 56 •

they are now tangible instead of unrealized, unthought— makes them begin to hint at the specialness of the moment I first had in mind. Such notes are like organisms of a culture in a petri dish which, with time, with nurturing can perhaps grow into proper shape—can gain their weight and meaning.

s

I do not know who he is. I don’t think he has a job. I think he has a need. All I have learned about him over the past few months is that he walks. Whenever I see him in the late afternoon he is walking north from the downtown plaza toward his destination far out on Mesa Street. In his blue coat and tie, with his right hand held out somewhat rigidly at an angle and his left hand carrying a folded newspaper, his lower lip jutting out stiffly—a fish’s mouth—he walks relentlessly, tirelessly, head and body moving in a steady pumping rhythm, as if moving ahead one stride after another is his life’s work. He reins in at each downtown street corner and brings up his newspaper quickly, pretending to scan the columns. He waits patiently, his lips shaping something akin to words as he holds his folded paper face high. A casual observer might assume he is simply a solid citizen on his way home after spending another long day in one of the nearby office buildings. If he sees a pleasant-looking girl coming toward him he nods to her in an almost courtly fashion. He forms a kind of smile and keeps on nodding even after the girl has crossed the street. He keeps walking, obedient to his fierce urgency— gripping his paper in front of him as if it is an antenna, a • 57 •

weapon, a protective shield. He has blocks to cover each afternoon, blocks that add up to miles. Once I drove past him far out Mesa, beyond UT-El Paso, and I was determined to satisfy my curiosity: Where did his journey end? But the rush hour traffic was heavy; I had to wait at long red lights. When I tried to locate his lone dogged figure again he had disappeared. But he is always back. I see him along the downtown plaza streets from time to time, walking with his same pumping rhythm in his same blue tie and blue coat, his newspaper folded in his hand, his lower lip still jutting in defiance of whatever private demon might get in his way.

s

The incredible disconnect between the lives people live, day by day, and the Other Possibilities they do not focus on or do not know about: the intersecting of the ordinary, daily, predictable, taken-for-granted human activities with the unknowable unknowns of the universe. They calmly say to a neighbor, “Morning, Joe,” instead of “My God, man, do you realize we’re on a huge ball revolving in space? Do you understand that we’re standing here on this sidewalk only because of gravity which we can’t see or touch or smell? Do you ever think about the fact that without gravity we would just drift off into space? People go bowling, eat hamburgers, watch TV and do not give a thought to the makeup of matter—the cells and bones in their bodies, the chemical process which nightly brings about sleep.

s

I drive into New Mexico.

• 58 •

In the summer heat I walk down a roadside in the Gila River valley beside dry horehound and roadside grasses. I hear unseen insects clicking like miniature sawmills within the weeds and roosters crowing from nearby farms. Yellow leaves of walnut trees drift along in the acequia running beside the road. I stop at a fence that stretches beside a pasture and feel, with pleasure, the smooth, twisted wire. The solid corner fencepost, with its weathered wood, shines in the sun like gray gun metal. The valley of the Gila is, to me, a perfect place. A brood of quail, following their leader into the road, peer about before they disappear again into the nearby weeds. In an alfalfa field cows eat white-blossomed prickly poppies. A hawk sits on the top branch of a juniper tree: unmoving, uninvolved. I keep watching the sky. At four-o’clock it is still clear and bright toward the west, but above the eastern mountains thunder has begun to rumble and clouds are darkening into swatches of purplish rain. Roadside flies fuss about in the quiet and heat, and along the Gila the cottonwoods, their leaves looking like green explosions in the air, are beginning to move about lazily in the breeze of the approaching rain. The first drops are falling when I return to my car. Within minutes the rain is pouring down and hard claps of thunder roll overhead. I sit in the car and read, eat an apple, look around from time to time at the heavy sheets of water coming down. After a while the rain passes on, and I stand outside my car watching the junipers drip and smelling the wet fields. The sky has turned a wintry gray, and a cool aftermath remains. The hawk still sits in his tree. Standing there, I have no answers to any of my basic questions. All I know is that I am very lucky. I continue to • 59 •

have the land in my life—to walk on, to be next to. The Gila is not an answer, but it is the next best thing.

s

Mysteries occur in hidden places. Just as animals in the wild seek out secluded places when they give birth, nature goes about its most innocuous affairs in secret, unnoticeable ways. An undramatic example: When a man shaves in the morning he scrapes away the facial hair, rubs a hand across his smooth skin, and is satisfied: beard gone, shaving done. Yet even as he turns away from the mirror tireless nature is already at work—actually, it never stopped working. Out-of-sight hair follicles are developing more hair-bits to push forward through the skin—constantly. The shaver never thinks about the ongoing process, only the end results. So it is, always, with humans and their daily lives: the relentless hair follicles, an ever-beating heart, the unending secretion of glands, the constant bathing of brain cells by chemical solutions—all busy within the silent envelope of a person’s skin.

s

Could anyone arrive at a belief—religious belief—simply by living: living, somehow, without contact with those who already have beliefs? Millions of humans have believed, yes, but they came to their beliefs because they grew up surrounded by people who already believed: people in families, countries, and cultures filled with belief. • 60 •

There were one-time events long ago—the birth of a Jesus or Mohammed—and that single event and the resultant accumulation of followers, of believers, set the pattern for continued belief. Early man had no beliefs beyond what he could see and hear, eat and drink, observe and perhaps fear. The world around him was dangerous and inexplicable, but gradually he accepted certain (concepts, beliefs) about it. (How could he possibly understand or explain birth and death, the sun and the moon, rain and earthquakes? Shamans and priests— those who professed abilities to read significance into signs and omens—said, “We know about the world. We can explain it to you.” And they set the stage for belief.) What would I know if I walked the Earth for a lifetime and had no contact with books, teachings, discoveries of others? What would I decide, on my own, about birth and death, night and day, the stars and the passage of time and spectacle of space? What could I know beyond what my own experiences showed me? …. To break away from the web—the cocoon—of dogma, of belief, is difficult, even impossible for most. How many people today would be Jews and Christians and Muslims if they had started out afresh, each one innocent of the past—without knowledge of Bibles and Korans, churches and synagogues and mosques?

s

• 61 •

Fall

T

he teaching years: They won’t let me alone. To be there again, in room 169, at Austin High, would be a life for me once more, bringing words and ideas into the room and helping to give significance to those words and ideas so that the 15-16-17-year-olds from Tularosa and Copia and Altura Streets, just kids of the neighborhood who might never have cared for books, would find a significance in them in that room. They would be exposed to characters in novels and plays who were people as alive and believable as they were but in places and circumstances far beyond El Paso: Marius and Jean Val Jean in Les Miserables, Madame Defarge and Lucie Manette and Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, George and Emily in Our Town, Snowball and Napoleon in Animal Farm, Boo Radley and Tom Robinson and Atticus and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and….and…. The list is almost endless. The Copia and Altura kids would continue to meet them, know them, perhaps come to care about them in that room—my room and theirs—each semester, each year, each decade. I had brought books into their lives for a while, those sons and daughters who came from houses and apartments near Austin High and went through the motions of signing up for yet another English class because they had to: There was no other choice if they wanted to graduate. But as they filed into the room with their notebooks and pens they found the larger world waiting for them: a world created and sustained by words. But such a classroom is probably not possible anymore. Technology has replaced the long reliance on the printed word, and novels are now stored on bookroom shelves. Computers and laptops fill the classrooms, adorn desks and tables because it is the New Age. My age, the old one, has been superseded by the current fascinations to be found on the screen, not a page. There is no place now for The Old • 65 •

Man and The Sea or The Bad Seed or Antigone or A Raisin in the Sun—or William Saroyan or Thoreau or Richard Wright. If necessary, they can be Googled.

s

I am scattered. I am sensibility-on-a-hot-tin-roof. I have no focus. My attention careens from one book, one thought, one interest to another. I no longer have a framework to dominate my life. I do not get up each morning and see before me—solid, reassuring, familiar—a Work, a Commitment, a Belief. The days offer possibilities that I can think about, maybe devote my energies to. I can pick up from the side table another of the dozen or so books that are waiting for me. (—Or not.) I can reopen The Family Medical Guide and continue to read in its 900-plus pages about the human body and its wonders—its cells, bones, synapses, ailments, organs—and every sentence, every paragraph will be, as usual, amazing, enlightening. (—Or not.) I can drive to a homeless shelter and donate hours helping the down-andout with their many needs. (—Or not.) I can sit in a chair and think about how I am wasting the remaining hours of my life. (—Or not.) My values system is in a shambles (if I ever had such a system), and everything I consider seems of equal value—or of no value. To take a step in any direction is to establish a priority of concerns. But where to step—and why?

s

I move along on my own two good feet down an Upper Valley road, the sun mildly shining after an early morning • 66 •

rain, the air a bit muggy but full of the smells of grass and weeds and wet dirt, the sound of water tumbling in a nearby canal. As it happens from time to time when my inner psychological coffee pot is perking nicely, I begin to sing. At first I just tootle snatches of a song to the roadside—a bit of “Till There Was You” from The Music Man—but before long I am in full throttle, letting rip a Robert Preston, strawhat-and-striped-coat tribute to the pleasures of being alive: a thanks for still being able to walk my personal glory roads. I walk, whistling, past a yard where speckled shade lies beneath a cottonwood. The yard has a vacant, solitary air—just the sun about, and weeds, and a worn tennis ball—but it’s my kind of place, my Sunday morning church-of-the-Earth. And I am still whistling as I pass a cluster of small white butterflies. They are moving about like wobbling, white-frilled children trying to find their way back home inside the maternal expanses of sweet-smelling bushes along the road. Across the road, in an alfalfa field, I see a man and a little girl standing together, trying to catch the butterflies with their nets. They look as if they have gone into the ocean to wade in the blue-and-purple surf. Then—as it always happens—my buoyancy begins to fade, my steps slow, my song dies, and I am staring ahead, grim-faced, thinking I can never leave them alone—moments of beauty, scenes of bliss. I always end up wanting to do something with them—preserve them, celebrate them, get them down on paper. But I’m never equal to the task. Bliss cannot be transferred to a page.

s • 67 •

My cousin David: I never knew him well. His life among well-to-do sons of South American families was always a curiously veiled affair. He came through El Paso only once. I remember him standing that afternoon in the hall doorway after his shower, carefully drying his hair and chest with a towel. He had his pants on, but no shirt or shoes. David’s two young anthropology-major friends from Berkeley, Hector and Guillermo, were in the living room playing records and drinking iced tea. I was looking through my collection of old LP’s. David watched and listened as we talked, not joining in, not wanting to intrude into the mood of the living room. He rubbed and re-rubbed his long blond hair and made careful swipes across his chest with the towel. Recent sunburns on his almost plaster-white skin looked painful and extended in a deep V below his neck. Since he wasn’t wearing his thick horn-rimmed glasses he seemed to look almost bewildered as he peered in at us from the hallway. After a record had stopped playing he finally asked, in that careful, resonating voice of his: “Tell me something. Why is it that when a cartoonist draws an outhouse he always has a crescent-shaped moon on the side of it? Why not round or square or triangular?” He was smiling, and we laughed and shrugged. I put on a record by Virginia Lopez and David went on to the bedroom to get dressed. Years have passed. David moved to Guatemala, and all my Virginia Lopez records are scratched or lost. David’s whimsical question—still unanswered—lingers above my memory of him like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

s • 68 •

Memory: I was 25, and I roamed around during the late afternoons and nights hungry for experience. One Saturday night I went to a western-style dance hall outside Fredericksburg, bought a Pearl, sat at a table against the wall. Once again I needed to touch a woman, to put my arms around her waist, to feel our bodies press together. I needed woman-flesh. I would get up from the table and prowl around until I found an acceptable dancing partner. We would dance one dance, I would then walk her back to her table, and I would prowl some more. Then, as it was getting on toward midnight, I found a woman whose touch seemed right: whose skin seemed attuned to the chemistry of my blood. She was thin, rather wide-eyed, quiet-acting: a woman in her 30’s with brown, close-cut hair. She had been sitting at a table in a far corner of the dance floor with her two women friends. We danced one song, then two—feeling the pleasure of one another, feeling through the sweat and body heat the growing sexual need. When the band finished a number we barely moved apart; we kept our arms around each other’s waist, squeezing hands, looking together toward the band to ease the awkwardness of the time of waiting. We did not speak. At the beginning of the next tune we came together and moved in our tight embrace through the other dancers. That was all. We had danced half a dozen times before she finally said she had to leave. She smiled and squeezed my hand and thanked me for the dances, then got her purse from her table and left with her two friends. It wasn’t much in the way of Saturday night excitement. But afterwards, as the parking lot began to empty, I stood by my car door and found myself smiling in a kind • 69 •

of wonder, thinking, “I’ll be damned…. I’ll be damned.” I wasn’t sure what I meant, exactly, except that I felt at first a welcomed relief followed by a sense of reverence, somehow, at how human contact—even between strangers, even for just a short while—was so vital and good and necessary and satisfying…. Just that: pressing against someone else’s skin, moving together to the rhythm of songs, feeling the presence, the heat of the other’s body and life. It was as though this sudden strange pleasure was a secret that everyone else knew about but I had just learned— something very simple that had nothing to do with sex-asthe-sexual-act but involved everything that sex and contentment and companionship had ever meant: a release from self, a flowing out, a melting into another.

s

There are mild afternoons in El Paso filled with pale sunshine. As I look out the window at the sunlight laying its touch on the bare tree limbs and on the brown faces of fallen leaves, I wonder what it would say if it could speak. Imagine: the everyday afternoon sun bringing us, instead of its usual light, a voice from the far reaches of space. It would give us the daily news of the universe—letting us know that we were not alone, that we were part of the ongoing cosmic conversation. Each day words would be available in the language of light—a visual braille of sorts, easily decipherable by all who paid close attention, who were quiet enough, receptive enough. In every El Paso backyard one could read, hour after hour, the illumined language of life.

s • 70 •

The turtles have gone underground, yellow leaves from the peach tree lie on the still-green grass, the air at noon has taken on the soft touch of early fall. In the almond tree small birds stay on the move: almost invisible, quiet and quick, constantly here and there within the leaves. If they were larger, and dangerous, they would be supreme assassins, bent on their secret work, undetectable, lethal, carrying out their assignments unnoticeably.

s

Moments: They are the esthetic DNA of life: just moments. They carry it all, the mystery, the ineffability, the here-and-thengone: the sense that timelessness is right there before you, within the innocent and familiar frame of the backyard seen from the kitchen window: the six-o’clock-late-afternoonmixture of yard-greenery and flowers and the last rays of the sun and the deeply spread shadows on the grass….the extended moment of another day that is ending, as always, but in the last long light from the sky and before the certainty of the coming darkness there is the essence of time passing, and if the moment could last it would, of course, be the dreamed-of heaven-on-Earth, the Eden-moment of Bible myth. But the sun will set and the yard will become memory, leaving the imprint of life gone once again.

s

It is a September Sunday and I drift through the afternoon with the same aimless motions of the willow limbs lifting about in the front yard: fluid, reacting to slight • 71 •

breezes but undemonstrative, restrained; just moving a bit here and there through the long hours. The world of the Big Bang is expanding exponentially toward some final end, and I am staring out the window toward the mailbox. There is no news from space and no letters on Sunday. It is a quiet time on Janway Drive, and an emptiness builds inside me.

s

Our old cat Blotchett, who has been living the past year in the garage, has finally died. I put her in a cardboard box, get a shovel, and with Blotchett and the shovel in the trunk of my car I drive east to the edge of town. I turn off onto a deserted sandy area of low mesquites, huisache bushes, cacti, and greasewood. I take the box and the shovel out among the mesquites and dig a hole about a foot and a half deep. I put Blotchett into the hole, on her side, and then refill it. I shape the sand on top into a mound, break off a piece of yucca stalk and plant it at the foot of the grave. I find a reddish, granitelooking rock about the size of a bowling ball in a nearby wash and place it on top as a headstone. A grave for a cat. I stand for a while, looking at the mountains that lie in a morning haze far to the south in Mexico. I listen to the faint hum of the I-10 traffic. Small black ants are busy in the shade of a nearby broomweed. I start thinking about my funeral that one day will have to be dealt with, that family members will have to endure: a typical human funeral with all its sadness and pain. I have no idea where I should ask to be buried. I have not pushed that far ahead, do not really care. Ground is • 72 •

ground, death is death. If I had my way about it, I think—picking up the box and the shovel—right here next to Blotchett, next to the ants and broomweed and mesquite, with mountains nearby, would be just fine.

s

Willis the barber tends to business in his small barbershop downtown next to the Gardner Hotel. Nothing fancy in the shop: just clean linoleum on the floor, four metal chairs against the wall, a few magazines on a table. His hair is close-cropped and his face is as smooth as an egg. He’s low-key, a pleasant black face, and he cuts a customer’s hair with a seemly decorum. He talks, if talk is what the customer wants, or he remains silent, almost courtly behind the barber chair. He jars no nerves. He moves about the customer’s head without any flourishes: clipping, snipping, deftly touching scissors against hair. He never forces conversation but is amenable to any topic the customer offers. Football? Sure. He watches those Sunday games on TV just like anyone else. He shakes his head, gives a short laugh, shares the customer’s dismay over the Cowboys’ continuing fall from grace. He offers grudging admiration for the Steelers. When he finishes he gives the customer a hand mirror to inspect the haircut. The customer turns his head a bit from side to side, nods, is satisfied. Willis removes the white cloth and the customer reaches for his wallet. He pays, leaves a tip, moves toward the door with his hand raised in farewell—“See you next time, Willis”—and leaves. Willis stands a while by his barber chair, looking out the front window toward the shadows gathering on the sidewalk. Another day, another dollar. • 73 •

He likes what he’s doing and where he is. He’s in El Paso; he’s not in East Texas. His parents still live there in the deep piney woods, and he goes back to see them once a year. It’s home territory for them and they will never leave, but it’s no longer home for him…. Stay there among them crackers? No sir.

s

I am an ant; I thrive on industry; I lack the butterfly’s philosophic grace.

s

We want our lives to read like novels—purposeful dramas going somewhere. We yearn for shapeliness, for coherence. We want to use the hard-won alphabet of our experiences to create a personal, lasting language that gives our existence meaning.

s

There is human greatness but it is meaningless to the universe.

s

How many years has it been since I have seen a woman in an apron standing behind the shadowed screen of her front door at noon, calling to her son to come in and eat?

s • 74 •

My life has been a continuous, imperfect ebb and flow between the need for personal freedom—freedom to experience on my own, to be and do and feel on my own—and the need for human closeness, sharing, interaction, security, love.

s

I would look out at the students in class—their faces, their shoulders bent in work—and they were so damn nice they gave me chills.

s

Sam, the white-winged dove, has been around for a long time in the backyard and apparently considers himself a member of the family. He thinks it is his right to join in when I feed the cats each morning and afternoon. For a long while I just routinely waved him away from the patio when the cats were eating on the patio table, assuming he would one day take the hint that he really wasn’t “family” and that he should get it straight once and for all that birds ate bird food and cats ate cat food and so, in effect, to cool it. But Sam is not a typical dove—content to restrict himself to the normal delights and gratifications of the bird world. Sometimes when I am in the house I see him walking around on the patio, looking in toward the den—as if waiting for me to open the sliding glass door so he can walk on inside, amble across the carpet, and glance around as if to say, “What’s for lunch?” The little dude is that bold, that un-bird-like. Now over the years Lillie has caught birds. She often lies by the pomegranate bush, waiting for a foolish sparrow • 75 •

or finch to get too close, and then she makes her lunge at it. (She usually brings the bird-corpse to the patio and leaves it as a gift for us on the doormat.) And she has also caught a few white-winged doves when she feels in the mood to show them who is backyard boss. But it’s as if Lillie has curiously given Sam a pass, accepted him on his own terms—as part of the family—and when he sails in to the patio Lillie finishes what she wants of her cat food, jumps off the table, licks herself a while, then strolls away. And Mojo? It’s hard to say if she just pretends Sam isn’t there or is actually intimidated by him. At any rate when she finishes eating she leaves the remains of her Purina meal in her dish, curls up nearby on her lamb’s wool mat, and closes her eyes. So yesterday I had to take my stand. I’m not proud of my decision, but enough was enough. I remembered the box of toys in the garage—Target toys Phoebe had bought several years ago for the children of her visiting nieces and nephews. I got the small plastic water pistol from the box and took my position on the patio—pistol loaded and firmly in hand. When Sam came twisting up on his skinny red legs I shot him a quick, thin stream. He dodged around a bit and circled back onto the grass, but he came on toward the patio and the remaining cat food in the two bowls. I sent him another little burst, and he jumped about—more offended, it seemed, than deterred, giving me a battle-ready look out of those little round red eyes of his—and kept moving forward. I shot him another Wyatt Earp volley; he fluttered a wing, almost dismissively—as if it were beneath his dignity to show any signs of genuine alarm—then made a wider circle and kept on coming…. This is what having too much time on your hands in your retirement years can lead to: defending family honor • 76 •

and dining protocol by waging war against an arrogant, stubborn, bowlegged dove.

s

The older we get the more the familiar becomes like an added part of us. We come to rely on it and are reluctant to exchange it for something new or different—anything unfamiliar. We like what we have become used to, and since some of us never find the answers to our most important questions the familiar becomes a substitute for those answers we never found: a reassurance, like the reassurance others find in their belief in God.

s

“True solitude is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens to a kind of agreed peace.” —Gerald Hanley I have not reached such a solitude. I am still trying to learn how to die.

s

The world is in my head, and I don’t know what to do with it.

s

Life: the familiar home that was never mine.

s • 77 •

Traditions give people meaning, making them feel comfortable in a world without meaning. .

s

I do not believe I would have lasted this long if I had not begun writing words on paper. I had nowhere else to go except the page. Words were my salvation. They recorded the passage of my life: In essence, words were my life.

s

As I sit in the living room drinking a five-thirty Coors Lite I think of the time twenty years ago when having a beer was more than just having a beer: It represented the emotional interaction of a time and place when I was divorced, living alone, and barely tolerating my life. Monday through Friday I drove from Bandera back to Kerrville in the late afternoon. At five o’clock, my teaching day over, I headed down the rural road past house trailers and hay fields and cedar trees that covered the low green hills. It should have been an enjoyable-enough drive, but I took no pleasure from the bright shafts of sunlight sliding in and out of the trees, and I didn’t have a sense of earned tiredness after a long teaching day. For the past year I had taken no pleasure in my life at all. I drove the twenty miles back to Kerrville like an automaton, without any desire to enter the empty house that waited for me behind the broken yard fence: the family home place that no longer had a family in it and that I would simply endure until the following morning. At the edge of Kerrville, on the crest of the last hill, I sometimes stopped at a Circle K convenience store, and after buying a can of beer and a bag of peanuts I drove on • 78 •

to a nearby road turnout beneath a cluster of oak trees. I would sit in my car a while, looking past the Guadalupe River toward the center of town, drinking slowly from the Budweiser can, letting the afternoon die down. It is curious how such a simple beer-moment works: how, at the end of the day, beer-and-peanuts become a substitute for wife and children and friends and all the other human comforts. Yet in that five-to-six o’clock space something is needed to give solitary people a brief sense of equilibrium, a temporary bridge from the productive work hours to the coming vacancy of the night. A beer—and sometimes several more—provided me with the necessary blur to smooth the edges of emptiness: to soften the unappealing realities of my loner’s life.

s

I do not know where to stand. I have no center, no equilibrium, no balance. I have one foot beside the pomegranate bush in the backyard and the other in a galaxy.

s

I think my despair is just the flipside of my passion for life—the inverted other half. The despair is really a wild cry into the silence of the universe, protesting the loss of all that is good and remarkable and beautiful.

s

A writer must give the ordinary, the everyday a good shake—to get rid of the dust that has settled on them— then set down on the page again the ordinary and everyday so that they now seem to a reader to be something fresh • 79 •

and unique, deserving of close attention, even curiosity and wonder.

s

The Case of the Mysterious Marks: It was September when Phoebe and I first began to notice them. We would walk up the sidewalk toward the front door of the house and—if the angle of the sun was right—we saw a network of thin, shiny white lines going every which-way across the concrete steps and walk. Strange. We had never noticed them being there before. They had not been there before. We would have noticed them. But they were there now, and it was like a scene from a science-fiction movie: Bill and Martha return home from visiting their children in Duluth, and looking out the window of their airplane they see, far below, in the vacant field beside their home, shining crystalline roadways built overnight by…. alien invaders. Except there were no invaders in sight on our Janway front sidewalk. Every day we would go outside expecting to find a colony of ants or some kind of slow-moving bug marking his territory with curious, shining trails. Nothing. Just the same familiar sidewalk and the same gleaming little lines. When I would go for a walk in the neighborhood I kept looking at people’s sidewalks and driveways, checking to see if there were any of the same telltale, glistening marks. I never saw any anywhere. At night, if Phoebe and I went out to eat, we would leave the porch light on, and when we returned we peered • 80 •

closely, foot by foot, from the steps to the door. Empty, as usual: no creatures stirring. So it went, week after week. Then one night, about a week ago, we solved the case. We had not turned the porch light on, as we usually did, so the front of the house had remained in darkness for several hours. At ten o’clock I got a flashlight, walked outside, and there they were: the interlopers. I went back inside, announced to Phoebe: “There’s something you ought to see!” and we went out to stare at them scattered about on the sidewalk. Slugs. Not repulsive-looking—not puffed-out, cigarshaped adult monstrosities suddenly risen from a nether world—but rather harmless-seeming little guys whose appearance belied the crude sound of their name: slim, light-brown, cylindrical, soft-bodied invaders about two inches long…. (Later I looked them up in the encyclopedia: “The slug is a kind of snail…a pest because it has a huge appetite for plants. It leaves a trail of slime to lubricate sliding.”) We scooped up a dozen or so that first night, putting them into an empty 31 Flavors carton and sprinkling salt over them: a slug euthanasia. Each night thereafter we left the porch light off, went out with the flashlight at ten o’clock, and scooped up another batch of ten or more. There seemed to be an inexhaustible number of them. (…. So it had been night after night: Our slender secretors had slipped from the dirt of the front flower bed, through the holes and cracks in the brick retaining wall, then hither and thither across walks and walls in order to feast on Phoebe’s morning glory vines and petunias and Old Maids and what-have-you other flowers and then smooth • 81 •

themselves back into their moist caves before their nemesis, daylight, came upon them.) How had they got there? We think they probably come to our front flower garden as eggs—courtesy of plants Phoebe had brought home at various times during the spring and summer from nurseries in town. They had had their agenda—to devour—and we came upon them late in their game. They had left us their signals, their shiny signatures—almost, it seemed, with a sightless wink: Catch us if you can.

s

Many people believe that the Bible contains the Word of God. I find that impossible to accept. I believe, instead, that the Bible was written by humans—as all other books have been written—and contains human words, human thoughts, human beliefs, and explanations. For the Word I go to the Earth itself—that constant, visible testament to the beauties and truths of creation—and to me it is better than any Bible, any organized religion. I go where there can be no human distortion, where the wonders of the world are constantly on display: the place where not only humans but also birds and rocks and trees and mountains and rivers present themselves. If they also happen to be messages from a Creator, then I am able to read them in their awesome original script.

s

I am having coffee on Friday afternoon at Elmer’s Restaurant—a big shadowy kind of place that serves familysized meals and draws a senior-citizen kind of clientele. A bent-over, gray-haired man and a younger man in a T-shirt • 82 •

and walking shorts have sat down at the table in front of me. The older man takes his time in pulling out his chair, then settling himself. Once he is seated he begins to make little random movements—patting a bit here and there on the tabletop, hitching his pants, adjusting and readjusting the silverware. The waitress, who had been putting water glasses on a cart, comes over to their table. “The usual?” she asks. Both men—father and son, I decide—nod. The waitress returns with two glasses of iced tea. The son puts a half-spoon of sugar in his glass and begins to stir. The father puts in three heaping spoonfuls in his own glass and stirs. Neither speaks; both keep stirring. The bent-over man gives his full attention to his tea, as if the stirring and the close looking at the glass are going to be the last major acts of his life and he wants to get them done right. Time passes. The cashier, seated near the restaurant entrance, has the long, four-o’clock stares. Her hand resting on the cash register, she gazes through the front window at the traffic and picks her teeth with a toothpick. Two men drinking coffee at the counter have turned toward each other, legs crossed, murmuring, tapping cigarettes against their coffee saucers. The father and son finally complete their long and careful stirring. Both lift their glasses and drink from them, then set them down. Neither has looked directly at the other. They just keep sitting in their long, unhurried silence. More time passes. I finish my coffee and am ready to leave. But I keep stalling. I want to hear one of them begin a conversation of some kind—about sports, something in the news, a health problem, maybe about a family member: anything. I wonder if they can just keep on sitting there for another half hour without speaking. I wonder if “the usual” not only means two iced teas but also two interminable silences. • 83 •

I lay a dollar tip by my cup and am headed toward the cash register when the older man straightens his napkin a little, moves his spoon to a new place, then leans forward toward the young man’s face. “Ever thought that your dog maybe needs to change to Purina?” I don’t catch the son’s reply.

s

At one o’clock in the afternoon nothing seems to move. The backyard air and the backyard cats drift by so unnoticeably you would think there had been no movement at all. Birds sit on limbs within the trees looking like pictures of themselves. They believe they are hidden. The yellowed leaves of the peach tree hang down. A thistle floats by. I sit in a chair on the patio. I breathe, and my breathing seems to be the only activity going on—as if it alone sustains life in the yard. I look about and wonder if one of the doves might suddenly fall from its limb: simply swoon, headfirst, through the leaves, succumbing to the overwhelming inertia of the yard, as if the stillness, added to gravity, proved to be too much for it.

s

I am raw. Others seem to walk around within the familiar and protective cocoon of their—what? dailiness? self? satisfaction? contentment? I remain without, unsettled, lacking a proper enfolding and protective skin. • 84 •

s

Babies—pleasing, photogenic, vulnerable—keep being born into the welcoming parental embrace while the Old Ones—the gasping, wasted, barely recognizable flesh-onskeletons—keep on dying. We try to sustain a proper perspective: We gladly greet the new life, smile at What Has Been Wrought; and we bid adieu with tears and sadness to the faded and worn-out. We mourn a while, then bury the dead. We give it a name, this process. We call it life. It is not something one is supposed to say or even think, of course, but I will go ahead and think and say it: I wonder if life is overrated. We have it, yes, and gladly so, and then—hello: Time’s up. It’s over—all is lost—for each of us. (Sorry, I don’t subscribe to the notion of an afterlife.) So why bother with it, this awesome yet monstrously booby-trapped intercession between eternities? Something-just-for-a-while that we lose is better than Nothing Forever? We have it for a moment and then it’s gone? Ice cream and jelly beans today, but, ultimately, blacknight-all-around.

s

In the late 1800’s a volcano erupted on the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia, and for over a year volcanic dust filled the atmosphere. A child living in the area had to breathe in that dust-and-smoke-laden air: It was the only air around. Similarly, the culture that a person grows up in and the teachings he receives there—especially the religious • 85 •

beliefs—contain the air he breathes. It has been this way for thousands of years. Such an invisible ash of Belief, rising from every religion, is longer-lasting than the volcanic smoke of Krakatoa and is nearly impossible for most people to ever stop inhaling. It becomes too much a part of them, of their every breath. When I was young I did not know that there was a monumental task waiting for me—one that would take me almost the rest of my life to accomplish: I would have to learn, somehow, that the air of Religion was not the only air the Earth had to offer.

s

Memory: I drove to San Antonio. I needed to see daughter Deborah. I needed contact with the vibrancy of her life. She teaches third grade. As in each previous year the children in her class have become her extended family…. and so have various animals. It may not be accurate to say that she loves animals, but she definitely likes having them around. She takes an obvious delight in watching them, caring for them. When I got to her house I reestablished my acquaintance with her various friends. First, there was the featherweight kingpin and official greeter, Barney (brown-and-gold Yorkie; weight, about six pounds after a substantial meal). Little ears flared up, he had wedged himself in between the front room curtain and the picture window—making his high-pitched Yorkie yaps and alerting all within to the approach of an outsider. The door opened, and I was prepared to embrace my • 86 •

slim and trim daughter, but instead I was greeted by her two not-quite-backyard-dogs, Oso and Abo (Oso: big, sleek, glossy-black, a Labrador retriever; Abo: part-Australian shepherd and part Rottweiler, large and still growing). If a visitor wasn’t familiar with the locale he would probably have a moment of deep, sustained heart spasms—being confronted by large paws being raised toward his chest. But not to worry. After the initial head rubs and Deborah’s sharp commands, the dogs went amiably about their business in the house. (Yep, in the house: Not having any pressing reason to leave through their rubber-flapper dog door and go into the backyard, they lounge about in the hallway, in one of the living room chairs, or on the rug in front of the television set. I don’t believe they actually bother to watch TV, but in Deborah’s house who knows….) After stopping in the small dining room to admire the aquarium—the silver Tetras with their black stripes, the black mollies—I moved on to the kitchen area and Cat Territory. It’s been obvious to me in past years that Deborah doesn’t subscribe to the belief that Animals are Animals and Should Know Their Place. Her house—invariably neat, well-ordered, inviting—is also her animals’ house. She shares it with them and their “place” is with her. Deborah draws no fine line between human and animal freedoms—especially when it comes to her other extended family: the cats who roam at will across counters, stove, refrigerator. Deborah never set out to be an animal person. In the beginning there was only Barney, the little Prince. But she’s always been empathetic to the plight of castoffs and strays. She rescues a cat in need, a dog in bad shape. Black-andwhite Neptune—who, I learned, likes to sit outside in the cool bed of elephant ears or lie on a broad limb of the big front yard oak tree, watching traffic—was once a home• 87 •

less sack of bones scrounging garbage in the alley behind Deborah’s house. Smokey—intensely gray and at one time scared of its shadow and everything else that moved—was brought to Deborah (“Miss Bode! Miss Bode!”) by a group of her students, who had found this small, terrified cat behind an incinerator on the school playground. Nowadays Smokey walks serenely about Deborah’s house through the legs of various humans and dogs. Sundance, an orange, bobtailed Manx, was destined as a kitten for the San Antonio pound until Deborah saw her and gave her a ride home. The latest addition is Fortunata. Deborah was on her way to work early one morning when she saw a cat limp onto Loop 410 and disappear beneath a speeding truck. Miraculously, the cat was merely grazed by the truck’s chassis. Bruised, emaciated, caked with mud, Fortunata—as she was later named—bore no resemblance to the lean white queen who now sleeps on Deborah’s stereo. I learned about another dimension to my daughter’s interest in animals: She incorporates living, breathing examples of the natural world into her classroom. An ant farm in a glass case, cocoons-turning-into-butterflies in a “breathing box,” tadpoles growing up to be super-pollywogs: Deborah gets them set up for her science units along with the two hamsters, the two white mice, the three pocket mice who soon became just one (Sam ate his two brothers), and fertile eggs that lay there, day after day, as the wide-eyed third graders watched and waited and then finally saw it happen (“Miss Bode! Miss Bode! Come quick.”): the first sounds of pecking, then the next, then the shell cracking open and the beak, the head, the wobbly, feathered chick. I visited her classroom where the current star is April, a mini lop-eared black rabbit. April (who was given his feminine name before the discovery was made that he wasn’t female) is litter-box trained and periodically is allowed his • 88 •

freedom in the room. He spends much of his time sprawled on all fours beneath Deborah’s desk, facing the class. If he needs a bit of a stroll, he goes down the rows. He doesn’t distract the children: They simply reach down and stroke him as he hops by. Deborah says that if April gets to feeling neglected, he will run around and around her in circles until she bends over to pet him. The night before I left to return to El Paso each pet in the house was in its accustomed place, lying about like Egyptian statuary. Abo was sprawled on his back, front paws hanging limply as if he were ready to be handcuffed and hauled off to jail—guilty of Flagrant Flatulence. Oso—who, it turns out, is a most knowing and gentlemanly fellow—had curled his sinuous black body into the confines of his favorite chair. At midnight I bent over close to him—eye to eye. If dogs could talk, Oso would, I think, have spoken a few quiet and appropriate words of farewell to me. I stroked his smooth head for a while, looked at those unblinking, accepting Labrador eyes—and then, as I would have done when saying goodnight to any well-loved family member—I hung an arm around him and—well—he is the only dog I have ever kissed. I guess it’s just possible that Deborah’s susceptibility to “all creatures great and small” is inherited. Just possible.

s

• 89 •

Winter

I

n mid-afternoon I stand in the kitchen looking out the window at the backyard. I do this often. The sun is shining on the yellow grass. Shadows stretch over the yard. I am waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. I don’t bother to think, “Tomorrow I will ….” or “I wonder if ….” I fix my coffee and try to accept the fact that the shrunken dimensions of my life seem about the same size of the coffee cup. I carry my coffee about the house, trying to keep my composure. What I need is not coffee but work. I have always needed work. I am a worker. I thrive on having work to do that I believe in doing. I believed in teaching. I believed in writing. Those two. I don’t teach anymore, and I don’t really write anymore. Instead I look out the window frequently. I take walks. I drink coffee. And I read—oh, I read like a monster. But that’s not work. Reading is Taking In. I need Giving Out. To those I come in contact with from time to time I seem, I’m sure, very much the same person they knew before. Little do they know. Little have they ever known.

s

“A review of life is not an orderly account from conception to death. Rather it’s fragments from here and there.” William Burroughs I keep going back, without a guide or a goal, to my past—those childhood years, that, in actuality, are dead and gone except they are not. They are still there if I want them. • 93 •

They constitute the shadowed—but perhaps the most significant—part of me: that enormity of afternoons, yards, streets, rooms, vacant lots, animals, neighbors, relatives, radio programs, school days: the first, formative realities of my life before they gave way to the subsequent adult realities that were important, yes, but, as I think about them, have left fewer impressions, fewer memories. ….the faded watermarks on the bedroom wallpaper in the Gilmer Street home, the narrow shape of closets, the cracked enamel of bureau drawers, the row of curtainless windows on the back sleeping porch, the afternoon shadows in the front room. ….horrible to say, perhaps, but the physical surroundings may have been as important to me as the people. Can that be true? the backyard under oak trees as significant as my mother? the cow lot and chicken yard as memorable as my father? Surely not, of course, but the point is clear: It was all one: the family, the homeplace, the days all blurred together, on occasion captured by a Kodak—photographs placed in albums: me in my Boy Scout uniform bending over one of my pet lambs in a back pen, ready to take her to the 4-H show; my brother by the front fence, smiling widely into the camera, holding his tennis racket in front of his chest like a trophy before walking up to the high school courts to play a game or two with Patsy Ross, his first love; grandparents and uncles at Easter or Christmas, sitting during the afternoon in the front porch chairs beside the trellis of morning glory vines. …. Mr. Albe, who walked each morning around the corner of Gilmer and 2nd Street from his house looking straight ahead, his back straight, hat square on his head, going—I never knew where. Maybe downtown to the post office, maybe to a job, maybe just to get out of the house. I never saw him again for the rest of the day. His daughter, • 94 •

Louise, with her slightly curly brown hair and neat dresses, was in my class at school. She played volleyball. Mrs. Albe took in ironing, my mother said. I can’t remember ever talking to Mr. or Mrs. Albe. …. Gilmer Street: unpaved, a lower-middle-class street as I would later come to understand; a street with small frame houses set back behind small yards beneath oak and hackberry trees. I think our house was the only one with a fence around it—a picket fence across the front yard and a wire fence going along the side past the backyard and pens. A street where the women worked for others in houses in town and the men were painters and carpenters and mechanics. …. (After I had married I would be visiting the folks at Christmas time and maybe go on a Christmas-morning drive. Once I parked at the corner of North and Everette near our house. I got out and stood near the wooded ravine of Quinlan Creek. The sky was a gray mist left over from the night’s rain, and winter grass grew smoothly, like the green grass in a park, among the dark wet leaves at the side of the street. Except for a few bird calls and the faint splash of water in the street as a car went by, the morning was silent…. Winter mist, winter stillness—that’s what I remember. And the deep privateness of the modest homes and empty driveways. A bicycle was leaning against the side of an open garage. Christmas stockings hung on a front porch. There was chimney smoke and the sound of the creek down in the ravine.)

s

“Clint”: I say the name of that small Lower Valley town, and it is like a mantra. • 95 •

“Clint”: It is my altar, my relief and my fulfillment, my simplicity. I come here because I am wounded and Clint can heal. But on this late afternoon, as I walk along a neighborhood street that wanders north out of town, everything is winter-bleak: dusty and done in. The sky is overcast, with the sun just a vague focus of white behind a layer of dark clouds. Birds are moving fast over the landscape as if they are distraught: as if it is too early for them to settle in for the night, and nothing below them looks good to eat, so they are forced to race mindlessly through the currents of wind. On the edge of the street a dove is hunkered down and feathers are scattered about. It had probably flown into a car and now it waits, unable to move, unable to die. A beagle stares at me from its yard as I walk past. Only half-interested, barely managing a single bark, he just stands with his ears hanging down. Yards give way to lots and fields. A goat regards me from within his pen, and I stop and look at him across the fence. We share a moment. He snorts and I walk on. At the next enclosure a rooster and his hen interrupt their afternoon walkabout to register my passing with head-raised stares. I look back at these side-of-the-road folks: It would be good to take several of them home with me. They would be better than television. I sit for a long while on a log by the side of an irrigation canal. A cricket has begun its early night song on the shadowed slope within the weeds. In the leafless cottonwoods of a horse pasture small birds appear, disappear—drifting wraith-like, almost like butterflies, through the branches. At five o’clock doves and blackbirds reappear in the sky, dipping, circling fast, coming in waves to find their places for the night in the bare trees. By five-fifteen they are settled in, • 96 •

a dozen in one tree, a dozen in another: all facing the dim glow on the western skyline. They become neat, dark ornaments silhouetted against the fading light. Above me, on a telephone wire, a single dove huddles like a cold Napoleon on Elba looking forlornly across the sea. I walk back to my car and drive to the Good Time Store on the highway. I buy a Coke, add a shot of Ancient Age to it from my backseat bottle. I pull out my pocket notebook and write a few lines in it. Night comes, and I continue to sit just beyond the glare of the convenience store lights. The front seat of the car is now my checkered table at a Paris sidewalk café, and Clint, once again, the comfortable outpost of my expatriate world.

s

Sometimes I think a few of my unfinished, fragmented bits and pieces cut closer to the bone than the more polished ones. They give the jagged edge of essence.

s

I have read books about depression. They do not apply to me. I am not depressed. Instead, I “suffer” from an overwhelming sense of Meaninglessness. Life has no “meaning”: It just is. Depressives, if they receive proper counseling or medication, can recover. One does not recover from facing the meaninglessness of life. (“Life is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all.” T. Coraghessan Boyle) I know no one, personally, who shares my view. Many people are simply indifferent to the horrors or catastrophes that are far removed from their daily lives. Others have answers for all human tragedies, and the • 97 •

answers are generally based on religious beliefs: “It’s God’s will”…or “Allah be praised.” Yet my daily despair is paradoxically rooted, of course, in the intensity of the love of life: my family and friends, the phenomena of every leaf and rock, every absorbing written word and piece of music. The capacity for love is right beneath “the surface” and comes flowing out whenever I begin to hear certain songs or musicians (music can turn me into an emotional dishrag). I love every inch of the world I have intimately known. Yet it will be gone, all of it, and I will never know of it again. It is not me that I will be losing; it is life. I cannot accept that it is all to be over—soon, and forever.

s

Solemn-faced, I walk around in the vacuum left by the people in my life who have died.

s

The duties of teaching provided me with the necessary distraction to keep me sane. They allowed me to keep my gaze turned away from the meaninglessness of life.

s

“Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.” Antonio Machado A reasonable translation is, I assume: There is no intrinsic meaning to life. You make meaning; you don’t find it. • 98 •

Okay, fair enough; it is perhaps even true. But I’m still up the creek trying to do just that: to make my meaning. If a person has an enormous ego or lacks a self-critical eye, he can probably believe in what he is doing simply because he is doing it. Let’s say he constructs a gigantic pyramid out of kitchen matches. It takes him most of the productive years of his life to create it, and it is, indeed, monumental in size. It represents his attempt to “walk his path,” to make his path. But who else could possibly care about such a path, about his Pyramid of Matches? The problem still remains: How can anyone make meaning and believe in it if he is never confident that the path he is walking is worth the trip?

s

Memory: James D. James D. died today. I think of him and his too-long fingernails as he lay in the hospital bed and awkwardly reached his hand behind his head, pulling at the skin on his neck as he talked. James D. lay dying, and in the 5:30 December dark I would walk up the hospital path and enter the hospital door and stand for a few moments in the self-service elevator, going up to see James on the third floor. He was dying and mainly knew it, but he kept on talking as if he were just being sick for a while—as if he would soon be up and well and out there on the Austin High tennis courts once more. He lay there in room 337—hair growing back on his skull after another chemotherapy treatment, bony hands and arms reaching above the white bedclothes—and he • 99 •

would talk about his days in intensive care: Once, he said, he had freaked out on Demerol and had almost jumped out the window during the night…. An 18-year-old sick with cancer, up there among the dying; he had been scared and being scared had troubled him. James, who had once smiled at just about everything, lay there in his death bed, talking to the hospital-quiet, 5:30room, and he did not smile—did no more than hold on worriedly to the skin of his neck with his too-long fingernails and look out with hollow, frowning eyes. James D., student and friend—a normal guy who wanted normal things: who wanted to play tennis and ride around in his car and live out his life—died today in room 337, cradled in his father’s arms.

s

There are times when I leave the house for three or four hours on a Sunday afternoon and go for a drive down long back roads, stopping, perhaps, to eat a late lunch at a Mexican café: just taking a break from weekly routines to look at cotton and alfalfa fields and the Organ Mountains on the horizon and the small side-of-the-road homes in rural New Mexico communities. At five o’clock or so I come back home down familiar El Paso streets. Ordinary drives, ordinary returns…. But yesterday—after having been away on just such a revisiting of the countryside—I went out to the backyard as I sometimes do, and everything seemed different and strange. It was the remainder of a cool day in November, the last hour before sundown with the sun bright and just above the trees in the west, but the silence of the yard, the stillness—the absolute stillness—was unsettling. Although I had only been away for a few hours, somehow the fallen • 100 •

yellow leaves from the peach tree, the slam of a neighbor’s back door seemed disassociated, at a far remove, from the old reality. It was as though, during my afternoon absence, the yard had regained its separate life—was no longer property, something owned. The immobile trees, the birds, the very air—all had returned to where they always belonged: to their place of mysteries-beyond-knowing.

s

I’ve tried to do this before and now I am trying to do it again: I am sitting here, attempting to listen to my own thoughts. I am trying to (hear myself?) (overhear myself?) think. (Maybe “think about myself ” thinking?) How can a person ever do it: step to one side and observe a process when he is the process? I write down these words as I try to describe what I’m up to, but the words on paper, appearing one by one as I (write them) (think them), do not help me. The usual vocabulary of description, of analysis simply falls apart here. This is an old human problem, of course: wanting to understand what goes on when the brain does what it does. We will continue to walk around—the billions of us, bodies with heads on top, filled with tissues and electrical firings—and out of these heads will emerge the continuous surges of energy and words we call thoughts. We will continue to say that We think so-and-so about this-and-that. But it will merely be a bluff. We won’t have a clue about what we’re doing.

s • 101 •

I was in a bad way. A really bad way. I walked it, this mood; took it onto the neighborhood streets on this late, cold, Sunday afternoon with the wind making it colder. I had on a wool cap, jacket, overcoat. Hands in my pockets, I moved along the sidewalks. The Sunday cars kept passing in their Sunday isolation. I kept walking. I went behind a row of apartments and a hair-andnails spa to the neighborhood shopping strip: empty parking spots, a graffitied dumpster, a chain-link fence that had never served any noticeable purpose, open areas of asphalt and cement. Behind the corner building—suites for dentists and pediatricians—I stopped on impulse at two medium-sized pin oak trees that had been planted there, along with several shrubs, to give the area a touch of life and greenery. I stood there, the traffic moving past, the 7-11 across the street doing good business, and then I gravitated toward the nearer tree and stood beneath it. Why did I do that? Why did I move forward and stand beneath a tree? I didn’t know. But at that moment it was exactly the right thing to do. I had found a place I didn’t know I needed: a tree as alone as I was: a tree out of place, stuck in concrete in the pale winter light. I had a nice moment, just standing there. The limbs and green oak leaves were above; acorns were scattered around me in the parking spaces. I picked up half a dozen of the acorns, put them in the pocket of my overcoat, then took one out and looked at it. What a remarkable, pleasing thing it was, this single acorn, smooth and symmetrical, taken from the scattered hundreds: its light-brown middle fading to tan fading to white at the top, with its nipple point at the other end: an acorn as its own completed universe, just one among the many iden• 102 •

tical to it, all of them destined to rot on the ground or be crushed beneath the wheels of the pediatric patients’ wheels: wonderful little unnoticed beauties. I walked back home, pleased to have reestablished, accidentally, a hill country kinship: to stand beneath an oak tree in winter and be comforted by its green-leafed branches.

s I know little, believe less, no longer really care about what I “believe” since “believing” carries only the vague shape of something hoped for, of wishful thinking.

s

I’ve been like an old farmer-guy sitting alone on his front porch, whittling on his piece of pinewood day after day and staring out into the fading afternoons. The days pass, and the shavings from his whittled stick accumulate by his cane-bottomed chair. My own word-shavings, produced in about the same aimless fashion, have gradually heaped themselves into a modest little pile. I wonder, of course, if they have any greater significance than the actual pine shavings of the farmer on his porch.

s

It was after dark, and cars with their headlights properly dimmed crept in long, solemn lines block after block. They were not mourners paying last respects to a deceased rock star. They were just ordinary folks gazing at what Electricity Had Wrought: a stunning exhibition of holiday • 103 •

lighting spread across East El Paso yards and houses. In recent years this well-appointed neighborhood has expanded the traditional custom of placing Christmas wreaths on front doors and colored lights along roofs. The homeowners have gone all-out—challenging the aurora borealis in their electrical extravaganzas. The guiding principle seems to be: How many strings of lights can be stretched across the greatest number of surfaces? How many shrubs, flower beds, doorways, window ledges, front yard fences, and water faucets can be beaded with bulbs? A good idea can always be pushed too far. A million of anything—diamonds, gophers, hamburgers—is either a suitable number or a gigantic overkill. A million Christmas lights can be a dazzling wonder or an immoderate indulgence—making the viewer yearn for the modest delight of a single candle burning elegantly in a darkened room. As I drove by this bothersome display of homeowner technology, I could not help wondering: Do people in such a neighborhood start planning their Christmas early in July—getting the bulbs tested, laying out the master circuitry, freshening the paint on the plywood Nativity scenes, overhauling the plaster of Paris reindeer…. It struck me that no one actually seemed to be there inside the houses. The half-drawn drapes revealed tastefully decorated living rooms—but no human figures. No children were out playing, there was no casual coming and going, no carrying in of groceries, no one tinkering with his car in an open garage, no one watching television. It was like a stage set readied for viewing but with the producers, actors, directors discreetly out of sight. I wondered if there had been a tacit agreement in the neighborhood to suspend ordinary family routines during the Drive-by. To be glimpsed by the gawking citizenry might be unseemly. • 104 •

s

There gradually came upon me in early adolescence a monstrous feeling of being alive and not knowing what to do about it. It was a feeling of impotence, I suppose, an inability to do a valuable, meaningful act when faced with the hugeness of the world. I began saying to myself, in effect: All right, here is the day, and here you are in the day; now what are you going to do with the two of you? I wanted to join myself to the day, to the world, yet I could not find a direct way to do so. I had come to feel I was no longer just me, an isolated individual; I was clearly a me-in-a-relation-to. Yet I could not complete that relationship because I did not know how. Gradually, in my 20’s, writing began to offer me a way to drive little personal stakes into the shapeless world—a way to establish, finally, a sense of belonging to the things around me.

s

I leave the house—the decorated tree, the scattered remains of wrapping paper, the presents jumbled here and there on the newly carpeted floors, the chips and dips, the lingering smells of late-afternoon dinner—and drive to Clint. I leave pleasantries and family-ness and gifts and holiday good spirits in order to seek out, like a crazed pilgrim, railroad cars along a siding and broken tractors and pickup trucks pulled into a highway Good Time Store because I need them—rather desperately. I have to reestablish contact with an essential part of me in the brown-and-yellows of December fields and countryside. I have to be among the anhydrous ammonia tanks • 105 •

rusting behind barns, the tin warehouses and stacks of old tires in oil-stained back lots, the flights of blackbirds and crows overhead. I need to escape from security and food and laughter in order to regain my equilibrium. Christmas is simply too much. It is a surfeit and makes me want its opposite: the bracing reality of the workaday, the spare, the unadorned. I need the simple reassurance of an adobe farmhouse along a canal, not the plushness of an Easy Recliner in front of a television set. Death and loss are too much with me, and I cannot smile them away even in a holiday gathering. So I come to Clint and sit in my car and try to reclaim myself: to find in the winter landscape a corresponding bleakness that matches my barren self. The afternoon winds from the west have turned the sky into a brown fog of dust and sand, and the leafless trees and buildings loom almost spectrally on the horizon. When night comes I will continue to sit for a while in my healing, dust-shrouded, private place. Then I will point my car homeward and return—released, purged—to fruitcake and blinking colored lights.

s

There may be, conceivably, a term in psychology textbooks called “distancing,” referring to what people do when they gradually lose emotional connection with events and view them more and more “at a distance”—an emotional distance. “Distancing”—that’s my word, at least, for my current way of seeing, hearing, interacting. Events keep their same significance for others but not for me. I should still “care,” but I don’t very much. • 106 •

I look at possessions—that is, books I have bought, read, and reread over the years; stacks of boxes filled with papers, magazines, manuscripts, photograph albums, school lesson plans and student papers, various collections of memorabilia I have saved like a dutiful archivist over the years—and find that death renders them meaningless. ….the sculpted words on the pedestal of a disintegrated statue in Shelley’s poem: “…My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” After his death his statue crumbled, a “colossal wreck.” I am no Ozymandias, but during my lifetime I have gathered my own little pile of rocks—my mementos. And after my death? They will remain just as abandoned on a “boundless and bare” desert land.

s

It should be so simple—to do what I have never done: accept my own mortality.

s

• 107 •

Looking for Byron: The Complete Account

Note: Some names have been changed.

I. August, 1999

On January 26, 1999, my son Byron, 30, drove away from his mother’s house in East San Antonio in his green pickup truck, headed for a halfway house in downtown San Antonio. But he did not go there. He disappeared. Over six months have passed, and no one in his family has seen him since that January afternoon. Until his mid-twenties Byron was simply Byron, the pleasant-featured son that I loved. His mother, Judy, and I had divorced when he was eleven, and yes, that had been painful and disturbing to him. But he seemed to handle the situation well enough. He graduated from high school, went on to college—even considered entering medical school and perhaps becoming an emergency room physician. Then, one night in 1995 in San Marcos, a hit-and-run driver purposely ran into him while he was walking with friends. He suffered a closed-head injury, which caused him to lose certain memory functions as well as his sense of smell. To add a classic insult to injury, he was shortly thereafter diagnosed as having a bipolar—manic-depressive—disorder. Suddenly the whole trajectory of his life changed. He was unable to function alone so he moved from his San Marcos apartment to his mother’s house in San Antonio. He suffered dizzy spells; he had double-vision problems. He went regularly to psychiatrists and psychotherapists for treatment and was placed on a number of medications to treat his obsessive-compulsive behavior and depression: Tegretol, Depakote, Klonopin, lithium. He became a recluse in his bedroom, staying in bed for long stretches of time, his • 111 •

mother’s Boston terrier asleep beside him. He lost interest in his song writing and his guitar playing—for which he had an undeniable talent. To self-medicate his despair, he began to take cocaine. Lots of it. He became an addict. In June 1998, Judy and I entered him into Laurel Ridge, a private rehabilitation hospital in San Antonio. He stayed there for a month, and when he left he seemed positive again about his future. However, we were told by his therapist that the relapse rate for cocaine addicts was almost 90%. He worked around the yards at Judy’s house, enjoyed the dogs and his music. But by the end of the year old patterns reasserted themselves: he started forging checks and stealing money from Judy in order to buy cocaine. By mid-January, 1999, Judy felt she was at her wit’s end—exhausted and depressed herself from dealing with Byron. With the help of JoAnn McFarling, Byron’s psychotherapist, she located a halfway house run by Jim Priddy. Byron would go to the old two-story, five-bedroom house near Cypress and San Pedro Streets, live with others who had had similarly difficult struggles with addiction, and try to put some pieces of his life together again…. I called him from El Paso the night before he was to move. He said Oxford House was a democratically run place, with each person having certain duties—president, comptroller, etc. He said he thought he would end up “flexing his leadership muscles.” He was also supposed to look for work, possibly as a night stocker at the nearby HEB supermarket. But he didn’t really want to go—despite his somewhat self-confident, even self-aggrandizing pose he assumed on the phone. In later conversations with me Judy said there had been an emotional scene on the afternoon of the 26th: she had told him that if he didn’t leave he would end up being 50 years old still lying on the bed and she would be • 112 •

penniless because of his stealing from her—a bag lady living on the streets. He had to try to live on his own with people who might help him. Visibly depressed, Judy said, he put canned goods from the kitchen in a cardboard box, carried the box to his truck— which needed repairs and no longer worked in reverse—and took off down the street. He had $14.00 in his wallet. Jim Priddy called Judy the following afternoon, asking why Byron had not come over as planned. Judy called me in El Paso. We talked. We tried to make sense out of what had happened: Where had he gone, how would he live, what would he do when he ran out of his medications—which he carried with him in a strap-on pouch. She felt he might be suicidal. We waited, hoping that in a few days he would call. He didn’t. Should we make contact with the San Antonio police and list him as missing? Where was he spending the nights, which had turned cold? He had not called Deborah, his sister, an elementary schoolteacher, who also lived in San Antonio with her husband John and small son Connor. I called Joe Esquell, a hill country rancher who leased ranchland from me near Kerrville. I explained to him that Byron had disappeared and might drive up from San Antonio to our ranch property and—well, I explained, he was very depressed. (I had told the Esquells previously about Byron’s head injury and other problems.) Would he please drive down and check to see if Byron was there, then call me back. (Byron had talked about suicide the previous year with JoAnn McFarling—had said that his way of killing himself would be to drive to the ranch property, go to the hill where he had always wanted to build his “dream cabin,” set fire to his truck and then shoot himself.) • 113 •

Mr. Esquell, who is in his 70’s, called back that night. He said that he and his wife Julia had driven all around in the pastures before dark but did not see any sign of Byron’s truck. I thanked him for his trouble and told him I would let him know if I had any news of Byron. Judy called the police and an officer went to her house. She explained the situation to him. He said he would keep a lookout as he patrolled along Austin Highway, which was nearby. After a week passed we called the San Antonio police department again and officially listed Byron as a missing person. A Detective Casas would handle the case: #9906-31-90. Byron would be put on NCIC (National Crime Information Center), a nation-wide computer search. He would also be listed with the Texas Department of Public Safety Missing Persons. From El Paso I called the Bexar County sheriff ’s department and reported Byron missing. Judy and I—telephoning back and forth during that first week—managed to come up with only three current friends of Byron whom we could contact: Darryl and David, twin brothers who lived in San Antonio; and Rich, his once best buddy, his “brother” who had been with him on the night he had been struck by the pickup truck. Rich was married now and lived in San Angelo. I called him…. No, Byron was not there…. He’d call me if he learned anything. Darryl, in his 20’s, was a semi-recluse like Byron: an Injured Person. He had also been in some kind of accident when he was in the service—I didn’t know the details and had never met him—but he suffered from a head injury and also an arm injury that made it useless. He had had a number of operations and couldn’t drive a car anymore. He had been a student in one of Judy’s Child Development classes at San Antonio Community College and, I understood, caught • 114 •

a bus each day to go teach first grade at a Presbyterian Church school. Judy had thought Darryl and Byron might be good for one another and brought them together. They had hung out over a period of months—Byron driving over to Darryl’s house to get him, taking him to Judy’s house, then driving him home. Judy, of course, did not know that both Byron and Darryl were using cocaine. Darryl and David—sons of a Hispanic mother and an African-American father—lived off and on, depending on their economic circumstances, with their mother on Arbor Street in West San Antonio: the heart of the barrio. (To San Antonians “the West Side” means the poor side, the Mexican side of town.) Judy discovered in January—before he left—that once again Byron was not only stealing from her but also forging checks. One check was made out to a Frank T. for $100—as payment for cocaine, she later assumed. Frank T. apparently lived next door to the twins’ house—and was a bad apple in the drug scene. He was going to trial on drug charges in July. Judy called Darryl. No, he said, he didn’t know where Byron was. David, his brother: No, he didn’t know either. Judy made up a missing person’s flier with a side-view picture of Byron on it—smooth shaven, hair pulled sleekly back in a ponytail, a pleasing profile view. It gave pertinent information and also stated: “$1000.00 reward for specific information resulting in his safe return.” She made a number of copies at Kinkos and began to distribute some of them on streets near her home. The following day, as Judy was placing more fliers by mailboxes, a woman came up to her and said, “Yesterday I was working in my flowerbed here in the yard. The people next door were unloading some things from their U-Haul—stuff from storage, I guess—and this person—he looked like your son’s picture—came walking up the sidewalk and asked if they needed any help in unloading. • 115 •

He was, well, wild looking, so they just thanked him, said they could manage, and he just walked on past.” On February 3, from El Paso, I called a San Antonio agency that typically looks only for missing children and missing elderly people: the Heidi Search Center. But Bob Walcutt at the Center agreed to put Byron in their listing. That night I faxed Mr. Walcutt information. On February 11 I flew to San Antonio and stayed with Deborah and her family for four days while looking for Byron. Borrowing her car, I went first to the Heidi Search Center and put together a second flier: MISSING: Byron Bode: Last seen on January 26, 1999, on Sabyan Street near Eisenhauer Road in San Antonio, Texas. DOB: 8-24-68 – Age: 30 – Height: 5’11” – Weight: 220 lbs. – Hair: Brown – Eyes: Blue. Byron may have a ponytail, beard, and mustache. He has an abstract tattoo of a dragon on his left upper arm. Was last seen driving a 1989 Ford F-150 pickup, Texas license plate #XZ 7869. If you know his whereabouts please contact the San Antonio police or the Heidi Search Center.” It listed their telephone numbers. Judy and I took copies of both types of fliers and went across town to Arbor Street to distribute them. Since Byron had visited Darryl and David’s house, maybe neighbors would remember him and be tempted enough by the reward to contact us. We left fliers throughout the neighborhood. Next I took a staple gun and the fliers and spent an afternoon attaching them to telephone poles on streets near Judy’s house. I left them at stop-and-shop convenience stores, and the clerks in charge almost without exception were willing to tape the flier to the entrance doors. I telephoned the twins’ house and talked to Darryl. No, he still hadn’t seen Byron but “somebody” had mentioned—he couldn’t be pressed to be more specific—that Byron might be staying with friends at a house on a street • 116 •

beginning with “S” near Walzem Road…. A street beginning with “S” …. I bought a San Antonio map, poured over it: Walzem was in the general vicinity of Judy’s house. It made sense Byron might want to stay within familiar territory. There were only two streets beginning with “S” near Walzem: Serna Park Dr. in a lower-income area; Sun Haven in the upscale Windcrest subdivision near Windsor Mall. Serna Park Dr. was my target. I drove through the Serna Park neighborhood, again and again, up and down all the adjacent streets—looking into driveways and backyards for green trucks, returning, driving the same streets once more. I would stop where I saw a man pulling weeds at his front sidewalk, get out, show him the flier with Byron’s picture, tell him I was looking for my son who had a head injury and had disappeared from home and might not have access to his medication. The man would give the flier a long look, slowly shake his head—No, he hadn’t seen him. I would drive some more, stop where a man was playing street football with a few kids, lean out the window and show the flier. Nope, didn’t recognize him. Without any enthusiasm I went to the Windcrest subdivision and drove down winding, tree-shaded Sun Haven and its adjoining streets. No green Ford truck. I drove up and down Walzem, a main thoroughfare, looking at every down-and-outer lurching along—and there were a good many of them: bearded, in cast-off shirts and pants, vacant eyed. I looked for Byron in every slouching figure. No luck. I flew back to El Paso. I called Detective Casas a few days later. She told me there had been a “sighting.” The rodeo was in town at the downtown coliseum, and a police officer working traffic had reported that a truck with Byron’s license plate on it • 117 •

was parked in a No Parking zone. The officer had asked the driver to move on before he got a ticket, and the driver had complied. (Later, when asked, the officer came down to Detective Casas’ office and made a positive identification of Byron as the person driving the green pickup.) If the officer was correct, Byron was still alive one month after he had disappeared. That was surely the situation. But where was he staying; how did he get money to eat; was he still wearing the same clothes he was wearing on January 26th? Was he dealing—as well as using—cocaine in order to survive? Why had he not called Judy, or me, or Deborah—just once—to say, “I’m okay. I’ve just got to do this. I’ve got to go my own way.” On Friday, February 26, there was another possible sighting. Bob Walcutt from Heidi Search Center called me in El Paso, saying a woman had contacted him. She had seen the flier about Byron that I had taped in the front area of a Walmart, then she later noticed someone resembling him at the Eisenhauer Road flea market. She said she just couldn’t help noticing the intense stare out of his blue eyes. That night I sat on the living room couch—bone tired from teaching. Should I fly back down to San Antonio just on the basis of that—a woman noticing a resemblance? I kept agonizing out loud, and Phoebe listened and supported my final decision: I had to go. I couldn’t not go. (It made a kind of sense—Byron maybe needing to buy some cheap used clothes; or maybe just needing a place to hang out inconspicuously among crowds of people drifting about, looking at bargains.) I flew to San Antonio Saturday morning. Deborah met me, and I borrowed her car again. I circled the flea market parking lot, looking for Byron’s truck, then I walked for a couple of hours in the huge flea market itself and tacked up a few fliers on bulletin boards and in the lunchroom place. I • 118 •

went again through the neighborhoods along Walzem Road, looking until dark at the same familiar yards I had driven past just two weeks before. Before going back to Deborah’s house I thought: Maybe if I just get out and stand on a street corner; maybe if I just yell out as loud as I can: “BY-RON!” Maybe that is all that is left to do. Maybe somewhere, wherever he is, he will hear me, and he’ll know I am out there, in the night, looking for him, and it will break the spell of silence that has settled around him…. (It was six months later that it flashed through me: that the “street beginning with ‘S’,” the street someone had thought might be where Byron was staying with friends, the street I had kept searching for in my foolish, dogged way, the street some cocaine-high friend of Darryl’s had dredged up in a vague attempt to be helpful—maybe that street, all along, had simply been the hard-to-spell, hard-topronounce Sabyan: Byron’s home address.) In March I thought about trying to do a San Antonio newspaper or TV release—perhaps adding to the basic information of the fliers the fact that Byron bore a marked resemblance to Brad Pitt. From El Paso I contacted a reporter in San Antonio. She seemed interested in the situation and took down more background material in case there was a “human interest” angle she could develop. I waited for several days, then called her back…. No, sorry: her editor didn’t think Byron’s disappearance merited, at this stage, a news story. There were a lot of missing persons these days…. What to do next? My periodic calls to Darryl and sometimes David at their house—Any word about Byron?—kept being met by the same, monotonous reply: No, Mr. Bode…. nothing—and had become, finally, pointless. If they were lying, protecting Byron—at his request—from family inquiries, I could not force them to change their story. • 119 •

My calls to Detective Casas: Nothing new. I felt that Byron was dead. Maybe he had overdosed or mixed his medications, if he still had any, in a fatal combination with the cocaine, or had been bludgeoned in a drug encounter gone wrong…. Did he still even have any of his medications; could he function without them? (I had called the Eckerd Pharmacy where he always had prescriptions filled. No, they had not seen him since—the pharmacist looked it up—“since January.”) Each day in March, each day in April. Nothing. The San Antonio morgue still had no unidentified bodies. In May Judy and I decided to go ahead and do it: Our last resort was to hire a private investigator. She called Antonio Dzierzanowski, a retired police officer and the father of Darla—the pretty, smiling little Darla that Byron had dated for several years (Mr. and Mrs. D. had a special liking for Byron and were, I believe, rather disappointed that Darla and Byron had not gotten married.) Mr. D. gave Judy the name of an investigator in San Antonio that he could recommend, Sergio Ramos. Judy went to his office downtown, described Byron’s disappearance, and paid Mr. Ramos $2,500.00 in advance. He seemed to be the right man for the job. He lived on the West Side—not far, actually, from the twins’ house; he worked with people who had contacts with the local drug scene. He told Judy he felt sure that Byron was still alive and that he could find him. I wrote Mr. Ramos a letter—to show him I was actively involved in searching for Byron. I ended the letter, “I hope you will be able to come up with some definite information about my son. It has been an agonizing four months not knowing if he is alive or dead.” In June Phoebe and I drove to San Antonio. With Judy, we arranged to have a meeting with Mr. Ramos. JoAnn • 120 •

McFarling was to meet with us also. On the afternoon of June 9 we met inside the office of Sergio Ramos at 325 South Main and listened—stunned and silent, for the most part—as he proceeded to tell us what he had found out in his investigation so far: Byron had turned gay. He was doing both cocaine and heroin. One night in April he had been seen by neighbors in the yard of Darryl’s house at a wild party with loud music blaring. The neighbors in the adjacent house had complained. The following afternoon an old red pickup truck came down the street and the occupants executed a drive-by. The neighbor’s house was set on fire—in obvious retaliation against the next-door neighbors for complaining. Darryl, his brother Eugene (a brother I didn’t know about), and Byron were seen by neighbors leaving the area in the red pickup truck— a 1978 Chevy, License #SN3487. Ramos said he had traced the truck to Dallas, then to Houston. Darryl, Eugene, and Byron were staying in the Houston apartment of Roderick H. on Stratford Street. Darryl and Eugene were wanted for arson by the San Antonio police; Byron was not listed on a warrant but had been seen by neighbors as he stood in the yard of the burning house. He would be wanted for questioning as a material witness. And, of course, Darryl and his brothers might, when caught, give testimony implicating Byron as one who also took part in the arson. Ramos sat behind his desk in a swivel chair, a computer nearby. His manner was forthright, to the point. The four of us in front of him sat looking back at him, trying to absorb this incredible turn of events. What to do now, how to proceed? I had questions, but I didn’t know which ones to ask, which ones even mattered given the enormity of this new situation…. Apparently Ramos had some kind of computer set-up which had allowed him to do his truck-tracking and to learn • 121 •

what the San Antonio police had not yet found out: that the persons and the truck they were looking for were at the Houston location. He, as a private investigator, did not have to divulge to the police all he knew about the case—at least, not yet. We finally agreed on one procedure: Ramos would go to Houston and get Byron, bring him back to San Antonio, and enter him—again—at Laurel Ridge for treatment. Ramos said he had already talked to a judge, had described Byron’s emotional and physical condition, and the judge had agreed Ramos could use enough force in order to “capture” Byron and get him back into rehabilitation. (In effect— given Byron’s bipolar disorder, his head injury, his cocaine addiction—Ramos was to kidnap Byron—like pirating someone away from the clutches of a religious cult.) Ramos would wait for him, trick him, handcuff him if necessary. He would have his two other guys, his informants, with him in the van to add extra muscle if it was needed. I agreed to the plan. I mainly wanted to keep Byron from going to prison as, I assumed, Darryl and his brothers would ultimately be going, for arson. It would be better for Byron, I reasoned, to get him into a medical facility in San Antonio—obviously getting treatment—before the San Antonio police finally tumbled to the Houston lair, arrested the occupants, and went to Laurel Ridge to question Byron. …. He had turned gay? Certainly there were more questions to ask Ramos about that…. But if it were true, just more reason to keep Byron out of jail, if possible. We left Ramos’ office solemn and subdued. Phoebe and I came back to El Paso and waited for phone calls. Ramos was to call me when he had done the Houston pick-up, and I would fly down on the next flight to San Antonio to meet them at Laurel Ridge. • 122 •

But how was Ramos to make contact with Byron? Byron was now worse off than before. Zonked on both cocaine and heroin, he might stay holed up in that apartment for days—just as he had done at Judy’s house when he was a recluse. Ramos did not have a search warrant to enter the apartment. He had said he would just go to Houston, wait near the apartment, intercept Byron at some time or other…. Then I remembered: Ramos had a daughter—he showed us her photograph in his office: petite and pretty—who had just graduated from Rice and was teaching a summer course there. The Stratford Street apartment was just five minutes away from the campus, he had said. He could alternate visiting his daughter with his off-andon surveillance. The days dragged by. The end of June came…. Phoebe and I waited, went through the dull motions of the days…. I called Ramos at his office; got his answering machine…. I called again: He said he had talked to the woman who was the Stratford Street apartment manager, had showed her Byron’s photograph on the flier…. Yes, she told him, she had seen Byron a couple of times in and out of the apartment, but not recently. July. I had asked Ramos to call me every few days, even if there was nothing to report: just make the contact and keep me posted on how things were going. But he did not call. I would wait three or four days, then call his office again, trying not to sound exasperated. He said—on a day when he answered his phone—that he would probably be going to Houston and use the ploy of being the exterminator for the apartment building—he would get permission from the manager—and gain entrance to the apartment that way. This trick had been used in San Antonio, he said…. I asked him: Hasn’t the manager gotten alarmed at having suspicious characters staying in the apartment? No, Ramos said; • 123 •

he told her he had been hired to find Byron because he was a dead-beat dad. And so it went, each day dragging past through the summer. I had a new concern: that Byron and his buddies, if they were making their living selling drugs, might make an exchange some night with an undercover Houston cop and get arrested and then here would come the San Antonio police with their warrant…. Got to get Byron out of there, got to get him into Laurel Ridge before it’s too late…. And those guys in the apartment don’t even realize their time is running out. Finally, in the last week of July, my patience was at an end. I decided to call the Houston apartment—Ramos had given me the number—ask to speak to Byron and run the risk of their getting suspicious. Eugene answered the phone, wanting to know—as I knew he would—how I had got hold of their number. I told him that we, Byron’s family, had hired an investigator to find Byron because there was a serious illness in the family (which, of course, was true in its own way—Byron himself being the person who was ill). Eugene went through his protestation: “Byron Bode? There’s nobody here….” He called out to another in the apartment: “Do we know anyone named Byron Bode?” The answer was no. (And all the while I am wondering: Is Byron, right there in the room, on the bed maybe, giving hard and fast negative hand signals, indicating Don’t-say-anything-about-me). Eugene kept denying any knowledge of Byron. I went on: “Well, the investigator has been there and showed Byron’s picture to your apartment manager and she said she had seen him.” Eugene gave a semi-tolerant sigh of exasperation: “The apartment manager is 80 years old. He’s gay, man!” We talked a bit more. I tried to be insistent that all I wanted was to make contact with my son. Eugene was equally insistent that they had never heard of him. • 124 •

Eugene had to be lying, of course, but his intonation, his manner, rang true to me. And there couldn’t be two apartment managers…. Nagging doubts about Sergio Ramos—not only about his productivity but his credibility—had been building in my mind in recent days…. That crucial matter of the apartment manager had to be cleared up. I had to go to Houston. And I would not tell Ramos I was going. I flew to San Antonio, borrowed Deborah’s car, drove a pleasureless three hours down I-10 to Houston. I found the Stratford Street apartments. A printed sign above the grated, individual garage spaces said that the apartment manager was located around the corner. I rang the doorbell. A middle-aged man, who said his name was Cliff, came to the door. I explained to him my mission of looking for my missing son. He was, I said, supposed to be staying with the people in apartment #11. I said the investigator we had hired to find my son had showed Byron’s picture to the woman manager. Cliff had an easy, helpful manner. He said there was no woman manager—and gave a bit of a smile. He said he was just helping out for a few weeks; the manager and owner of the whole block of apartments was 80 years old and on a vacation trip to Canada. He would certainly not hire a woman manager: he was gay. Cliff was sympathetic to my mission and was sorry he couldn’t be of more help. Bingo. There it was. Sergio Ramos had lied. He had never talked to “a woman manager.” Had he made any trips at all to Houston—staking out the apartment building, waiting to intercept, to handcuff, to return Byron to Laurel Ridge? What else had he lied about? How much of what he had told us was a movie scenario based on a few computer printouts? • 125 •

Back in San Antonio the next day I went to the city fire department’s records office and also to the arson division of the police department. I found out that yes, on June 4 (not in April, as Sergio Ramos had said), there had been a fire at Darryl’s neighbor’s house, which almost totally destroyed it. The arson inspector told me he had listed the fire as “an arson” but had also put down as cause of the fire: “undetermined.” I asked if anyone was currently charged with arson on a warrant issued by the San Antonio police. He said no. As a matter of fact the police had not even been called to the scene of the fire. In the course of our talk it came out that he had not questioned anyone at Darryl’s house. He did not know the names of the persons who lived there. I thanked him for his time, and he wished me good luck in my search for my son. So there it was: another bingo: Ramos sitting in his swivel chair, telling us in his confident manner the story about nighttime drugged-up dancers in the yard, hugging one another like gay lovers and shocking the neighbors; Darryl, Eugene, and Byron driving away in a red truck, Darryl and Eugene wanted by the police: all lies. Sergio Ramos—I took his card out of my wallet and stared at it: “Criminal Investigations, Specializing in Missing Persons—Detective and Security San Antonio—Owned and Operated by Texas Peace Officers”—had been taking us for a ride, playing us along, week after week. A con artist. I drove over to Darryl’s house. A slender, brownskinned young man in cut-offs was standing in the narrow yard beneath a shade tree. His head was shaved, and I could see a scar that looped across the top. His left arm seemed to dangle. I saw the remains of the charred house next door. I got out, told Darryl who I was, and he asked me into the yard. At first I simply repeated my telephone routine— • 126 •

“I’m still looking for Byron; I guess you haven’t seen him.” Then I went ahead and told him all: about hiring Sergio Ramos, going to Houston, talking to Eugene; I told him about the drive-by story, the red pickup—I told him all the Ramos fantasies. He listened—this quiet, subdued, bare-legged and bare-footed young man standing in his yard on a hot July afternoon, drinking a glass of orange juice—and he said, “I think you better hire yourself another investigator, Mr. Bode.” Back in El Paso I called Roderick H. and apologized for invading his privacy. He seemed to be a pleasant, wellspoken young man who had been genuinely puzzled at what appeared to be an insane intrusion into the quiet life he had been living with Eugene. I called the apartment manager’s number; the manager, back from his vacation, answered. I said I just wanted to thank Cliff for his courtesies when I had been there. The manager was affable, outgoing. When I brought up the “woman manager” matter he said he hadn’t had a woman working for him in 18 years. I called Detective Casas and explained about some “misstatements” by the criminal investigator we had hired. I asked her to check out the information about the “red Chevy truck, License #SN3478.” Her finding: License #SN3478 was for a ’96 Ford truck belonging to an air-conditioning business in Port Arthur. I have tried to work up a righteous vindictive spirit against Ramos, but I just can’t swing it. As long as he had been our hope for finding Byron—for saving him—he was significant. When he ceased being that hope, he no longer mattered…. I have called his office half a dozen times but each time I get his answering machine. His pager is out of • 127 •

order. We know no more about Byron’s whereabouts now in August than we did in January. I once again have the feeling that he is dead—has been dead since some fateful moment in late February or March. All my looking, all my driving up and down streets, the whole Ramos episode—all has been wasted effort. We continue to wait, but I feel we might never know what happened to Byron after he drove away from his mother’s house with $14.00 and his box of canned goods.

• 128 •

II. August-September, 1999 But what if Byron is not dead and is in need of help? I should sell the family ranch property. I would be needing money to pay for Byron’s hospitalization whenever he was found—or perhaps provide for his long-term rehabilitation. Or I might want to set up a trust fund for him if it turned out he would never be self-supporting. I contacted a broker in Kerrville representing a San Antonio doctor who was interested in buying my land. We agreed on a price and I signed papers completing the sale. On the afternoon of September 3 the new owner was taking a walk in the far back part of what had been my property and came across Byron’s green truck with Byron’s body—what was left of it—inside. Byron had evidently driven it into a kind of brush cave down below a bluff—making it practically undetectable. He had jammed a black plastic hose into the exhaust pipe, running it into the side of the cab, and committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide. The key to the engine was still turned on. He was wrapped in several blankets, apparently against the February cold. His strap-on pouch contained his driver’s license and prescriptions. The medication bottles scattered about were empty. The box for groceries was still in the truck. The autopsy indicated he had been dead for at least six months. I was not with him. I do not know what he thought about, where he went, how much of his medication—or how much cocaine—he took from his pouch. I don’t know where he bought the PCP hose. I don’t know when he decided he would make no phone call, would not contact anyone in his • 129 •

family after January 26. I can only imagine them: those final last days, his last hours…. His truck was his home now. He lived in it night and day. He drove the San Antonio streets, not yet sure what he was going to do. He drove past familiar places—down San Pedro Street, past Tiffany’s Billiards, past Walmart where he would go late at night to wander down the aisles. Around the blocks, down the streets, slowly…. The February nights were getting colder, and in the darkness along Cibolo Creek he lay in the cab, wrapped in his two blankets. When he knew what he was going to do he got on I-10 and started north. He drove past Boerne and Comfort and Kerrville without slowing down. He turned off I-10 at the farm-to-market road, drove the next two miles, and there was the gate to the ranch property. He unlocked the chain, went along the rocky, caliche road—passing the small valley area where he and I had cooked our camp-out meals years before. He drove on through the cabin lot without stopping—past the windmill and the stock tank, the salt blocks—turned left, followed the dry bed of the arroyo. He drove deep into the pasture—veering around oaks and sycamores, bouncing over washouts and flint rocks— until he found the spot he was headed for. He swung the truck around, aimed alongside an embankment through tall grass into a heavy stand of cedars. The truck was hidden now. He got the PCP hose and inserted it into the exhaust pipe. He stuffed in rags to make it airtight. He ran the hose into the window wing on the driver’s side. He pulled off his shoes, wrapped up in his blankets against the cold, turned on the engine, and lay down across the seat of the cab. I think of the deer that came along the fenceline the next morning, seeing the truck within the cedar cave, stop• 130 •

ping still as they considered it, moving on. I see the armadillos beginning to rustle in the leaves nearby. A hawk sails overhead. The sun arcs across to the west; doves call from the surrounding oaks at sundown. Nighttime comes, settles over the land, the truck, his body. I see the repeated cycle of each morning, each day through the spring and summer months: the ranchland accepting, absorbing the secret of his return: Byron, hidden, becoming less and less my son and becoming more and more a corruption of exploding gases and decaying flesh. He had returned to the countryside to die. He chose what was for him a home place. He drove through familiar gates and down pasture roads, and there he buried himself: his childhood, his dreams, his final, desperate hopelessness. Beneath his two blankets, as alone as anyone can be, he curled himself into the final shape of his life. Each night for months I went to bed and I thought my stark thoughts of him. Each morning I got up, my thoughts unchanged. I did not know it would be this way: that on one side would be Byron’s death and on the other side everything else: that his death would so completely out-balance the rest of life. Daily routines lost their resonance. Objects, people, events no longer had shading or shadow. I stopped listening to music. Music seemed irrelevant, an extravagance. I preferred the blank emptiness of silence. Since my early adult life I had looked steadily about me, valuing the sights of Nature. But I could no longer see them, such sights, with my own eyes. I found myself looking into the afternoon fields with the eyes of a father • 131 •

whose son did not want to live anymore. For thirty years I was his father; I assumed I would be his father for the rest of my life. Suddenly I was not, and I lost the sense of who I was. I loved him—uninterruptedly, constantly. I took pleasure in the serene knowledge of that love. But death shrivels memory, and it gradually began to take his reality away. He had a need to die, and he did not ask me—or anyone—to try to save his life.

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III. October, 1999 – December, 2000 After Byron’s funeral I was finally able to focus on Sergio Ramos and the incredible immorality of what he had done. I wanted to stop him from preying on desperate clients who came to him for help. I wanted him out of the private investigation business. I filed a complaint form on behalf of Judy and me to the Texas Commission on Private Security, describing his unethical behavior. On December 11, 2000, at the “2000 Commission of Individual Cases” in Austin, S____ A. R_____ had his license revoked for “Practicing Fraud, Deceit and/or Misrepresentation.”

s

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Afterword In 1967, Elroy Bode found his book publisher for the next several decades in Carl Hertzog, director of Texas Western Press, the publishing division of Texas Western College, now the University of Texas at El Paso, with his first book Texas Sketchbook. His reason for choosing the Press was simple: it was in El Paso. He was unaware that since 1952, Hertzog had built an international reputation for typography and design, by publishing what would become Texas classics, not only under his own distinctive colophon, but in collaboration with such authors as J. Frank Dobie and Tom Lea for Alfred Knopf and Little, Brown. Ronnie Dugger, editor of the Texas Observer, had already recognized the quality of Bode’s writing and had published several of his observations. Elroy remembers he had a collection of half-sheets of paper with his writing to bring to Dugger. He was certain he would not be published, and equally sure that, whether he ever was or not, he would never write for any reason but that he was compelled to chronicle those moments that “would not leave him alone.” And he never has. When I came to work at Texas Western Press in 1988, with a brand-new degree in English and American Literature, it was my mission to read the books published by the Press. Since Texas Sketchbook, the Press had published Elroy’s Texas Sketchbook II in 1972, Alone: In the World: Looking in 1973, and Home and Other Moments in 1975. Fresh from the academic pursuit of defining and classifying literary genres, his work was, for me, hard to define; there was no easy classification. The phrase that fit his collections of keen, sometimes wry, but always thought-provoking writing was “word sketches.” In his first two books, it was clear that he wrote with the sort of heightened senses that people describe after surviving

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dangerous or near-death experiences, which then prove to be temporary. This heightened sensitivity was his constant state of mind. The reader was guided to look—really look—at the wonders of everyday life. It was in his third book Alone: In the World: Looking that Elroy stepped out of the observer role and offered glimpses of his life as a man: father, husband and teacher. He became an integral character within his sketches. In his subsequent books Home and Other Moments and To Be Alive, with a few exceptions, he was once again the observer. When he brought the manuscript of Commonplace Mysteries to the Press, the final story “Anais: A Story,” put him firmly center stage in this account of a passionate love affair and his reluctant capitulation to love after his divorce. His internal landscape proved to be as rich and vibrant as his surroundings had been. In El Paso Days, we are once again held in thrall by his word sketches, but his wonder at the world is now tempered by his internal inventory in his eightieth decade. Appropriately, this book is ordered seasonally, with “Winter” offering now sometimes bleak reflections. The last story in the book perhaps gives the reason for that bleakness: the death of his son Byron ane the false hopes offered and deliberate misinformation given to desperate parents by an unscrupulous private investigator. While he has written of the moments that would not leave him alone, his writing does not leave us alone. Readers come back again and again to re-read these moments. If, in fact, there is a formal “canon” of great Texas Literature, Elroy Bode holds a permanent place in it. —Marcia Hatfield Daudistel El Paso, Texas 2013

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About the Author

Elroy Bode is the author of nine books, including Texas Sketchbook (Texas Western Press, 1967), Sketchbook II (Texas Western Press, 1972), Alone: In the World: Looking (Texas Western Press, 1973), Home and Other Moments (Texas Western Press, 1975), To Be Alive (Texas Western Press, 1979), This Favored Place: The Texas Hill Country (Shearer Press, 1983), Commonplace Mysteries (Texas Western Press, 1991), Home Country: An Elroy Bode Reader (Texas Western Press, 1997) and In a Special Light (Trinity University Press, 2006). He has been a contributing editor for the Texas Observer and has twice received the Stanley Walker Award for Journalism from the Texas Institute of Letters. Bode taught English and creative writing in the public high schools of El Paso for nearly fifty years. Bode is known for his sharp observation of West Texas and its inhabitants, including himself. His exquisite writing speaks for itself.

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W

ings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas, without commercial considerations clouding the decision to publish or not to publish. Wings Press intends to produce multicultural books, chapbooks, ebooks, recordings and broadsides that enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. Everyone ever associated with Wings has been or is a writer, and we know well that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other’s souls. We believe that good writing is innovative, insightful, and interesting. But most of all it is honest. Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Thus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped. As Robert Dana wrote in Against the Grain, “Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it’s a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.

Colophon This first edition of El Paso Days, by Elroy Bode, has been printed on 55 pound Edwards Brothers Natural Paper containing a percentage of recycled fiber. Titles have been set in Papyrus type, the text in Adobe Caslon type. All Wings Press books are designed and produced by Bryce Milligan.

On-line catalogue and ordering: www.wingspress.com Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by the Independent Publishers Group www.ipgbook.com and in Europe by www.gazellebookservices.co.uk Also available as an ebook.