The Fool's Progress
Downstairs, in the gloom of his dusty cluttered shop, among rugs and saddles and silverfish, rare books, Kachina dolls and high-altitude cockroaches—only the weapons are kept perfectly cleaned, lightly oiled, in their locked gun racks—he holds my near-antique .25-.35 Winchester by its balance point, puts on his glasses and peers at the markings on the receiver. No bluing left, the surface wears a silvery sheen. Someone long ago had engraved the image of a pony on the steel. Don opens the breech and holds the carbine up to the light, taking a good look into the barrel. “Clean bore. No pits. Lands look good.”
“I never fired it much. It’s an oddball caliber, hard to find ammo for it.”
“Load your own.”
“I’m too lazy for that.”
He works the action: loose but smooth. “This is a rare artifact, Henry. I could get five to six hundred for it in Dallas. Maybe a thousand.”
“I won’t take a penny over two hundred dollars. I don’t want any handouts from you, Williams.”
“You always said you were part Indian.”
“My grandmother was half Shawnee. We’re a proud, independent and self-reliant people. I’ll take three hundred dollars.”
“Done.” He reaches high on a shelf and brings down a thick square leatherbound book. He blows the dust off the top, opens the book and removes two C-notes.
I look them over, count again: one, two. “Seem to be a bit short here, Don.”
He puts Log of a Cowboy back in its place and pulls out a first-edition copy of Commerce of the Prairies, Vol. I, by an early nineteenth-century bore named Josiah Gregg. He opens the book, leafs through it. Nothing there. He scratches his gnarly chin whiskers and studies his library for a minute, replaces Gregg and takes down Parkman, The Oregon Trail, withdrawing two fifties from.
I tuck the welcome bills into my pocket. Into my front pocket, not in the wallet in my hip pocket where thieves do tend to break in and steal. “You always do your banking in books?”
“It’s the safest place to hide money I know. Especially in Gallup. I don’t trust the banks and I’m not real intimate with the IRS. I could pay you off with a side of beef or a couple of rugs or how about a good book?”
“The money will do.”
He says, “I hope you’re not headed east without arms.” I reassure him, mention the revolver, the shotgun, etc., the two-shot Derringer in the ashtray. “Good,” he says; “hard to feel sympathy with any man goes around without a weapon these days. Especially on the road. What kind of handgun did you say?” It’s a .357 Magnum, I tell him, double action and so on. “That’s okay,” he says, “but the .41 is best. Better range and more knockdown power than the .357, less recoil and more accuracy than the .44 or a .45. The .41 is the optimum personal antipersonnel weapon. I recommend it.”
“I’ll try to remember that.” Now that I have his money I am itching to be off.
“In fact I’ve got three of them on hand. Maybe we could cut another deal. What else do you have in that truck of yours? And what year is that truck?”
“Maybe next time.” The mad sick restlessness is seeping into my nerves again, rising by capillary action up my limbs, through my groin, into my entrails, toward my heart. A fatal embolism of the soul. Indian Country depresses me. But in my condition everything depresses. How to leave here gracefully, how to begin…? “Don,” I say.
“Hold your horses,” he says. “Keep your shirt on. Jenny’s fixing you a snack for the road.”
I leave soon after, scot-free, with three huge elk-steak sandwiches—no mayonnaise, please—in a paper sack, and the cool three hundred dollars in cash in my pocket. Mayonnaise, I explain to Jenny, like hollandaise, was invented by the French to cover up the flavor of spoiled flesh, stale vegetables, rotten fish. Beware the sauce! Where food comes beslobbered with an elegant slime you may well suspect the integrity of the basic ingredients.
What a pig, she says, and gives me a kiss. Don and I embrace. Come home soon, compañero; you’ll die of claustrophobia back there in the East. I was born among those hills, Don, I can take it; if you can live in the East you can live anywhere. But if you can live anywhere, says Don, why live in the East?
How true. If only I could make that point clear to Brother Will.
Alone with my elk-steak sandwiches, my money and my renewed flow of tears—oh the sweet luxury of private weeping—I grope through the Gallup streets toward the Interstate. I stop at a telephone booth to warn Van Hoss in Santa Fe that I’m headed his way. Calling collect, of course. Any party who won’t take a collect call is not worth talking to. Furthermore Van Hoss is rich, the swine, he can afford it. But instead of old Van himself I hear the voice of a suavely seductive young female prerecorded on his filthy answering machine:
Helloooo. You have reached the studios of Willem van Hoss, New Mexico’s foremost painter of Western American landscapes, Native American horsemen and All-American exotic nudes. This month’s special, Valerie Emerging from the Bath, is priced at only $14,495. At the sound of the tone you will have thirty seconds in which to leave a message. Valerie speaking, thank you.
Beep.
The operator, a little slow, wakes up and says, “I theenk ees no wan there, Robert Raidford sir, weel you please place your call later please?”
“Thank you, operator.” Just as well. I refuse to talk to answering machines. A man’s got to draw the line somewhere. I’ll try again when I reach Albuquerque and if he still doesn’t answer I’ll be forced to drop in unannounced. Santa Fe is only sixty miles north of Albuquerque. Van Hoss won’t mind, he’ll be glad to see me, the scum.
“Ain’t that right, Sollie?” I rub the dog’s head as we swing forth onto the Interstate to join the roaring race of iron into the Mystic East. We’re running full and fairly cool, 2,875 miles to go, on a four-lane superhighway gashed by violence through a sandstone hogback five hundred feet high. The speedometer reads 65 mph, tachometer 3300 rpm, ammeter dead center, oil pressure gauge 35 psi, the compass ESE as we bear toward Church Rock, Thoreau and Albuquerque. Altimeter says 7600 feet and rising as we climb toward the Continental Divide.
On the wind, with the odor of burning juniper, the fragrance of sagebrush, the smell of mud and horses, comes the image of my enchanted youth….
8
1945-46:
Henry’s War
I
During the summer of ’44 when Will and his squad were fooling around in northern Italy, Henry took his thumb and a small canvas satchel and hitchhiked around the USA. From Stump Creek to Chicago to Seattle, from Seattle down the coast to L.A. and from there back home through the desert Southwest to Stump Creek again. A simple three-month grand tour. But the damage was done; that boy was lost: it was love at first sight with the slabs of the sunburned West. Never again could he be content, he thought, with the little blue fuzzy hills of Appalachia. So he thought.
His motive for doing the trip was simple. If I’m supposed to fight for my country, he told himself, wading ashore on Honshu Island in a year or two, then maybe I ought to at least see the homeland before I risk my neck for it. Make sure it’s a legitimate proposition.
“Paw,” he says, “I think I’ll run away from home this summer. See the country. Maybe come back around Labor Day.”
“Here’s twenty dollars,” the old man says, digging out a wad of worn and greasy greenbacks. He stuffed the roll into the bib pocket of Henry’s overalls. (“Overhauls,” we called them.) “That should get you to Minnesota.” Grinning, he handed the boy his straw hat. “Here’s your hat. There’s the door. What’s your hurry?” Henry looked hurt. “Hey now, I’m only kidding. You got your bindle ready?” The boy nodded. “Good. Now here’s my advice: Don’t let any man take you for a punk. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Don’t play cards with strangers. And if you do, watch out for the cross-lift and them second-card mechanics. Listen for a swishy sound. And if anybody named Doc you don’t know deals you a pat hand in straight draw, play it cautious. One of them other strangers will l
ikely be holdin’ four of a kind. You got that?” Henry nodded. “Now go say goodbye to your mother.”
Yes, the old man was glad to see him go. With Will in Italy, that gave Joe Lightcap a good excuse to practically give up farming that year. He never did much like farming anyhow. He was a logger, he liked to say, and a sawyer, not a damned serf. With money he earned from part-time work in the coal mines, he was already paying off a little one-man sawmill near the Big Woods. That’s what Paw wanted, a one-man business. He no more liked being an employer than an employee. Both, he’d say, were forms of slavery. He’d rather do everything himself: cruise the timber, fell it, buck it, skid it to the wagon, haul it to the mill, fire up the engine, saw the logs, even stack the slabs—all by his lone self.
Mother and the kids could handle the chores on the farm. Only one milk cow left now (Paw had sold the other a week after Will went overseas), and the pigs, chickens, ducks, garden, potato patch, cornfield, hayfield, easy enough for a woman and three kids to manage. The old man even sold one of the pair of draft horses, keeping the other for snaking logs out of the woods. Unwise to break up a good team like that: Will would be unhappy when he heard about it.
“Will would?” The old man rolls another Bugler. “What’s Will got to do with it?”
The old man drove Henry to the highway at dawn one morning in late May. Henry’s plan was to hitchhike from Shawnee to Wheeling and from there through Ohio toward Chicago. Paw did not approve of hitchhiking; to him it seemed like a form of begging. But Mother had exacted a promise from Henry that he would not hop a freight, ride the rails, become a hobo. The idea terrified her.
A cool and misty morning, sun barely up. Robins twittering in the sumac, one mourning dove cooing in the woods, a rooster crowing from the roof of somebody’s hen coop. No traffic on the road yet. Waiting at the junction, the old man and Henry took their breakfast from Paw’s big metal oval-shaped coal miner’s lunch bucket: fried-egg sandwiches, deep-fried doughnuts, lukewarm coffee from a jar. A dog barked from somewhere beyond the fence rows.
“Your mother’s upset, ain’t she?”
“Yes sir.”
“Cried a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“She’ll get over it, Henry. She’ll be all right. She knows you got to do this. I did it myself, run off from home. About twenty-seven years ago. Only I stayed away two years. You’ll be back in September, that right?”
“Got one more year of school, Paw. Then the Army.”
The old man rolled another cigarette. He was forty-four that spring, in his prime, a tall strong broad-shouldered man with the black hair and dark eyes of an Indian, a nose like an eagle’s beak. He cocked one leg, struck a match on the seat of his britches and lit the cigarette. “All right,” he said, “guess I’ll be going.” They heard a car coming west on the road. “Here comes your ride. You got that twenty I loaned you?”
“Yes sir.”
“You remember everything I told you about?”
“Sure, Paw.”
“Okay. Shake hands.” They shook. The old man squeezed the boy’s skinny shoulder. “You’re on your own now, Henry. Now get out there, stop that car and see the West.”
The car was coming over the hill, advancing rapidly. Henry grabbed his bundle, his little canvas satchel, and stepped to the edge of the pavement, thumb outstretched. The car shot by without even slowing down. A four-door Buick sedan with Pennsylvania license plates. No one but the driver inside, either.
Paw shook his fist after the departing automobile. “You come back here and give my son a lift, you cheap Republican dog turd.” That didn’t do any good. The car kept going. The old man looked at Henry. “Maybe I scared him off. Maybe he thought I wanted a ride too.” Father and son avoided each other’s eyes, both made awkward by the necessity for saying goodbye all over again.
They were saved by the approach of another vehicle, an antique Ford truck with two farmers in the cab and an empty bed in back. Henry stuck out his thumb. The truck stopped, slowly, with much creaking of brakes, directly abreast of Henry. The old men inside stared at the boy. Both were gray of whisker and leaky-eyed, each with a thread of brown tobacco juice dribbling down the chin. They looked like twin brothers. The nearer one said to Henry, “How far you a-goin’, boy?”
Henry gulped. “Pacific Ocean, sir.”
The old geezer took that in and considered for a while. “We hain’t a-goin’ that fer. But we’ll take you as fer as we’re a-goin’. Throw your traps in the bed and climb on.”
Paw had retreated to the door of his 1933 Willys-Overland coupe. Now, as Henry bent to pick up his gear, the old man stepped quickly forward and peered into the cab of the truck. “This is my boy Henry,” he says, placing a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “And he’s a damn good boy, not very handy but bright as a bug. Where you fellas headed for?”
The old men looked at each other, then at Paw. They chewed their chaws. The one on the near side spoke again. “We’uns is bound for that Stump Crick. We’re lookin’ fer a fella name of Joe Lightcap.”
“I’m Joe Lightcap and you passed Stump Creek turnoff three miles back.”
That startled them into silence for another minute. Henry fidgeted with his baggage; he thought he heard another car coming. “You Joe Lightcap?” says the first old man.
“That’s right.”
“You the fella has them beech logs fer sale?”
“That’s right, boys.”
They stared at each other, then suspiciously at Paw. “Iffin you’re Joe Lightcap, how come you hain’t in Stump Crick?”
Lightcap grinned. “If you ain’t been there yet how do you know I ain’t?”
Another pause for thought. In the silence Henry heard, then saw, the next car racing over the eastern hill, bearing down on them. He moved onto the blacktop, thrust out his arm and waved his thumb up and down like a semaphore.
The car roared past in a rush of wind, moving so fast he barely identified it as a 1937 La Salle with Virginia plates, barely glimpsed two uniformed men in the front seat. Soldiers. He watched the car fly on, then weave suddenly from side to side with agonized screech of brake drums. The driver made a hasty stop.
“Goodbye, Paw,” Henry shouted. He started to run after the car but it was now backing up at full throttle, engine howling. Henry halted. The car came roaring backward with savage torque, jerked to a violent stop beside him, bouncing on its springs. A foxtail fluttered on the radio antenna. The two men inside looked at the boy. Holding the wheel was a master sergeant, at his side a captain; both had an array of hash marks on their sleeves and rows of pretty ribbons above the left breast pocket. They looked flushed in the face, excited, happy—the fumes of whiskey poured from the open windows. The driver grinned at Henry. The captain stuck his face out in the morning air—a big man with a brave mustache curled at the ends, shaggy black eyebrows bunched above the imperial red nose of a hero—and shouted at Henry:
“Son! We’re drunk as owls and we’re crazy as pelicans but we ain’t queer—can you drive?”
So long, Paw.
Twenty-four hours later Henry stood on the southwest outskirts of Madison, Wisconsin, thumb out and forty dollars in his pocket, bound for the Rocky Mountains. Two weeks later and he stood on a sand dune in Oregon, looking at the Pacific. Captain Meriwether Lewis said it for him in the summer of 1805: Ocian in view O joy!
II
“No.”
“What else, Paw? What else can I do?”
“No!” he says. And “No!” he roars. “You’re not gonna fight in their rotten war. Hitler’s whipped. What do they need you for? They already got Will.”
“We still got Japan to lick.”
“Japan is whipped. Churchill’s got his empire back. MacArthur’s got his Philippines back. Roosevelt owns the Pacific. What more do they want?”
“Japan still ain’t surrendered.”
“But they’re whipped. They got nothin’ left.”
“We still have to invade the home isl
ands.”
“Why?”
“Because—” He had me there. “I don’t know. Because that’s the plan. Unconditional surrender.”
“Unconditional bullshit. You stay away from those home islands. Them Japs’ll fight like badgers if we invade their home islands.”
“What am I supposed to do, Paw?”
“Hide in the woods.”
Henry looked at Mother. She was bent over her sewing, crying silently, saying nothing. The kids watched in awe: Paul, Marcie, Jim—big eyes, gaping mouths. “Paw,” Henry said, “I have to go too.”
“Why?”
“Because the rest are going. Everybody I know—Junior Fetterman, Ken Wolfe, Tommy Marlin, the McGee boys. Even Leroy Ginter, they’re drafting him. Right down to the bottom of the barrel.”
“That’s not the bottom of the barrel, that’s under the barrel. They must be losing their goddamn war.”
“I’m going, Paw.”
“Everything is going to Hell,” the old man said. But he was the only one who said it and not to any strangers either. Joe Lightcap thought he was the only Wobbly east of the Mississippi River. The only freethinker in West Virginia. The only isolationist left in Shawnee County—a Republican county at that. Nobody paid him any attention and he knew it and the knowledge made him angry and lonely and sick in his heart. Joe Lightcap was not a philosopher; he took ideas seriously.
“Ideas can hurt people,” he would say. “Ideas are dangerous. I’d rather have a man come at me with an ax than a Big Idea.”
Most people avoided Lightcap when they saw him in a thinking mood. But not Jeffrey Holyoak the bank clerk. Uncle Jeff had graduated from high school, even gone to college for a year, and had some ideas about things himself. He was not afraid to stand up to the old man when they faced each other over a tub of iced beer and soda pop at the family Labor Day picnic in 1944.
“How’s Will, Joe?” A dangerous question and Uncle Jeff knew it.