They go on through floating dust into the master bedroom, where a fire smolders in the big fireplace. The high winds outside are creating a downdraft; wisps of smoke lick over the mantel. Henry adds wood to the flames and as he does so something heavy rattles down the chimney, ricocheting from side to side, and crashes into the ashes. Another fragment of brick. They stoop and attempt to peer up inside the flue but can see only soot, the turbulent smoke. Should check out that chimney, Henry. First thing in the morning, Henry says.
From beyond the door leading to the gallery comes the sound of the El Culito string band and a labored wheezing of accordion—Vigil, Peralta and Apodaca at work.
You should buy this place, Henry, it’s a ruin but you should buy it. Why?—I’m the caretaker. How many acres go with it? Fifteen, I think. What’s the asking price? $12,000. And how far from town? Twenty miles. Buy it, Henry; ten years from now this place will be worth a cool million; in twenty years three million. Who cares? Albuquerque’s growing, my friend, this will become a ritzy suburb; that old mission church across the plaza will make this place a big draw someday—you’ll have millionaire trust-funder R. C. Bohemes from Boston, Chicago, New York genuflecting to your dog for a chance to live here. Ain’t got a dog, ain’t got the $12,000, and anyhow I’m a fucking anti-reductionist natural empiric pancreatic philosopher not a fucking real estate developer. What’s the difference, Henry? Outlook and insight, that’s the difference. Insight maybe, but not much foresight; if you don’t buy it I will. You’re kidding, Henry says.
They rejoin the party. The dancing has begun. Myra and her friends are waltzing around the room to the creaky but jaunty strains of “La Varsuviana”:
Put your little foot
Put your little foot
Put your little foot right out…
Straight from the sixteenth-century ballrooms of Old Castile. The existential blonde, aloof and amused, stands alone by the table, so beautiful she intimidates the boys. Van Hoss and Henry bear down upon her but van Hoss gets there first and sweeps her into the ragged quadrille. Henry and old friends Morton Bildad and Jack Roggoway go into the backyard to dig up the goat: time to eat.
Another party, offshoot of the first, is under way outside. Somebody has set fire to Henry’s shithouse by dropping a cigarette into the bumhole. A circle of drunken savages, encouraged by bongo drums, prances around the pillar of flames. The blazing shack subsides into its fiery cavity. The dancers leap through the flames, howling with joy. Chaos and old night descend on El Culito.
By the glare of the fire Henry and friends excavate the scapegoat, knock off the hot earth and bear the offering, too hot to touch, on a platter into the hall. They set it on the table among the half-empty wine jugs, the near-empty but still fizzing punch bowl.
Proudly, licking his burned fingers, Henry peels off the singed burlap, then the smoking cheesecloth, to unveil the sacrifice. The hard little head with its horns and blank broasted eyeballs stares at the guests. A woman screams. Only the gourmets of tongue and brain find the head appealing but elsewhere, below the neck, the flesh is a tasty light brown, like breast of turkey, and falls easily from the bones. Bildad, a vegetarian, turns away, chanting his mantra in horror.
Lacking enough flatware, Henry serves the meat buffet-style on paper picnic plates. A few of the women hesitate at first (Good God Henry did you have to leave the head on?) but not for long. He manages to get fair portions to the members of the orchestra and to some of his shyer, soberer village neighbors before the goat is reduced to skull and bones, a rack of ribs, tibia, femur, vertebrae and feet—the mute cloven lightfoot hooves of Pan.
Success. The orchestra, fed and lubricated, resumes its music, the fire rumbles in the stove, the wind fumbles and mumbles under the eaves outside, through the loft, into and out of the attic; sheet metal rattles on the roof. One of the dancers peels down to a black leotard; another leaps onto the table and strips off her dress, revealing her artist-model’s figure clothed in nothing but blue and yellow body paint. Inspired, Willem van Hoss advances to the table, bellowing like a bull, unbuttons his fly and lays his great rubicund cock, semierect, upon the boards. He challenges any female in the hall to have a crack at that. Myra picks up a carving knife, van Hoss retreats. Some of the neighbors depart, crossing themselves. Henry delivers his set speech on the joys of voluntary poverty. The dance goes on, the party rages forward, upward, outward, in all directions. Everything that rises must diverge—like a fountain, like the universe, like the branches of the tree of life itself.
VIII
He dreamed, a downward dream. He dreamed of Hell. He smelled the odor of burning brains, heard the sound of falling iron. Something like a ball peen hammer kept rapping, gently tapping, on his skull. He sensed deep trouble in his entrails, smelled death on his breath.
Henry opened leaden eyelids in the gray miasma of his bedroom. A bare-shouldered woman lay across his right arm, her nose in his armpit, snoring through open mouth. Not his wife. Not Myra. Nor was it the girl with the bell of golden hair. This was a stranger, a complete stranger, someone he could swear he’d never seen before, a sad worn-out woman with bad breath, bad teeth, skinny wrinkled neck and a little purple pouch of flesh under each eye. He felt sorry for her, his heart went out to her, but he knew at once that more than anything else in the world he wanted to get out of that bed without waking her up. Had to. But how? He thought of a fox in a steel trap, patiently at work on itself: yes, he would gnaw his arm off.
Meanwhile the rapping on and in his head continued unrelenting, increasing in tempo, accompanied by what seemed to be the clapperclaw of crows. He turned to the window. The blanket had fallen. Two desperate nuns in black, with spectacles, were scratching on the broken glass, screaming at him through the fog of his bleared vision, the cataracts on his intelligence. Screaming what? He couldn’t make out the words. Something like—fway-go? fway-ho? They pointed upward straight at Heaven with extended forefingers. Way to go? Yes, ma’am, the Way. The One Way.
He nodded. Yes, sister, I understand, I understand. He crossed himself, turning his sick head away, and saw a brown stain on the ceiling directly over the bed, a stain that grew and spread and darkened even as he watched. A busy noise, like a hurlyburly of rats, rustled through the attic. The stain broke open and fragments of plaster and burning wood dropped to the floor. Orange flames, bright as sprites, flickered around the edge of the opening.
Fuego.
Henry leaped up naked, pulled the woman off the bed—the nuns fled—and draped the double sleeping bag around her nudity. Groggily awake, she stared in panic at the burning hole in the ceiling. Henry grabbed his pants, shirt, boots. A section of the roof caved in, blocking their escape through the front door.
This way…. He clutched her wrist and led her through the south door into the gallery, Myra’s studio, the barnlike interior of the old store. Things fell, streaming with flame. Two bodies lay on the floor under the trestle table. Henry kicked them awake. They stumbled up and followed him and the woman through smoke and fire out the back door and into the clean breathable air of the yard. Some neighbors had gathered to watch. Blue woolly smoke with happy flames gushed from the roof. The whole house from end to end, throughout the attic, appeared to be on fire.
It’s all right, adobe can’t burn, the woman said.
Right, said Henry, yanking on his pants, his boots. He looked wildly around for assistance, saw a bucket hanging to the spout of the pump. He ran to it but the bucket was empty. Someone had kicked over the can of priming water. He jerked the pump handle up and down. Nothing came forth but the croak of dry air. He tied his bandana across nose and mouth and ran back into the studio. The smoke was so dense he could barely see.
Myra! he shouted, Myra!
No answer. Her easel stood in a corner near the empty and overturned beer keg, her latest and half-completed painting resting on its crossarm. Embers fell on his hair, his shirtless shoulders. He seized a painting from the wall, snatched up the easel and
its canvas and blundered out the narrow doorway in back, stumbling with his awkward load.
Where’s Myra? he hollered. Anybody see Myra?
His friend Roggoway, the shivering girl in the body paint, the woman wrapped in the sleeping bags stared at him in wonder. Six stunned and fear-struck eyes. She left last night, the girl said. Went back to town with the others. God but its cold. She huddled in the arms of Roggoway, seeking warmth. Bildad, like van Hoss, was nowhere to be seen.
Put her in your car, Henry said. She’s naked as a snake, take her home.
Can’t, Roggoway said. He pointed to his Chevy convertible crouching nose-down in the weeds, both its front wheels stolen. The ragtop smoked with fire.
Yeah…well…. Henry checked his pickup truck. It too seemed incomplete. Both rear wheels were gone. They got us, he thought. La Raza strikes again. He unzipped the twin sleeping bags, gave one to the painted girl. There seemed nothing more to do. He and his friends backed off a piece and sat down to enjoy the fire.
Church bells rang for early mass.
The Los Lunas Fire Department arrived sometime after sunrise—around eleven o’clock—and hosed the contents of their pumper unit over the flaming store, the smoking wreckage of the house. The local population watched with interest. The water created dazzling clouds of steam but did little to discourage the fire. When their 250-gallon tank ran dry the crew turned the truck around and raced back to the Rio Grande, five miles off at the nearest access point, to refill.
There were no fire hydrants in El Culito de San Pedro Mártir. There was no public water system. The fire continued as the peaked roof and attic of the building, supporting beams burned through, collapsed with a spectacular turmoil, like a sinking ship, into the inferno within the adobe walls. A sigh of satisfaction mingled with awe and pleasure rose en masse from the spectators.
The fire department—el cuerpo de los bomberos—returned and again plied the conflagration with jets of water, futile but earnest, dampening but scarcely slowing the consummation of Henry Lightcap’s new home. Grinning happily, the men returned the shouts of the crowd.
An insurance adjuster, investigating a claim from the Mather Realty Company, arrived at two P.M. He found Henry and Roggoway trying to mount the two remaining wheels from the Chevy convertible onto the rear of Henry’s pickup.
What’s your name again, young man? Henry H. Lightcap, sir. And what were you doing here? I’m the caretaker of this property; Mrs. Mather hired me herself. I see, I see—you didn’t quite do the job, did you, Lightcap? I did my best, sir. Your best is none too good. Well sir, it won’t happen again. No it won’t—the building is a total loss, Lightcap, as any fool can plainly see. Well you see it plainer than I do, mister. I beg your pardon? Them walls are solid adobe brick, mister, two feet thick—they’ll last for five hundred years.
But Henry was wrong about that too. With the lintels burned out above every window and doorway, ridgepole, frames, sills, rafters and crossbeams gone, no roof for shelter, the massive walls began to crumble like cookies. Within a year, vulnerable to frost and snow, wind and rain, they would be no more than eroded remnants of their former selves, silent and dwindling monuments to the vanity of human aspiration.
Henry Lightcap revised and refined his old plans, made new plans. He conceded nothing to fate.
11
The Comforters
I
Albuquerque.
I take the Central Avenue exit, the old road, the traditional thoroughfare through what was once—long ago—the heart of the city. Trying hard to work up a twinge of nostalgia. Hard work, for the city that I loved has disappeared. Like the America of my boyhood and youth it’s been blasted, obliterated, buried beneath the new America of black gummy asphalt and tinted glass and brushed sleek cool aluminum. What Edmund Wilson called, with prescient despair, “The United States of Hiroshima.”
Ah well. Who cares. Why fret. Where to now. When was it ever otherwise, from Egypt, Babylon, Carthage and Rome and on till here. What next.
I pass through slums, by sheet-iron shops, the Far West Nite Club, steel fences and junkyards, Jerry Unser’s Complex, Truck City, the Pow Wow Country Club, the S. D. Wrecking Yard. Well, the west side always was the poor folks’ sector. Wrong side of the tracks, wrong side of the river, more like Old Mexico than the New. Even the billboards come in espanñol: TOMÉ BUDWEISER: LA CERVEZA POR USTED. I’ll drink to that, amigo, and I do, with the last of my Michelob. One sixpack from Grants to Duke City.
Across the river and under the arc lights. The Rio Grande rolls southward in a broad silt-colored stream, fifty yards wide and a foot deep, quivering with quicksand. Beyond the bridge I enter the old central city—the dank and dingy bars, pawnshops, porn shops, basement poolrooms, skid-row hotels, newsstands, cigar stores, even a barbershop—with a male barber! and a shoeshine boy! (eighty years old) sitting on his high throne reading—yes!—The Sporting News. The vista cheers my heart. The best part of the city still survives. Not all has been lost, not yet.
Now come the banks, the office buildings, the blank brutal facades of steel and Plexiglas, the necrosis at the core of the spreading metastasis. Space-age sleaze. High-tech slums. Nothing new. But the streets and sidewalks are full of people, during business hours, and that too, like the poolrooms and cigar shops, is a pleasing sight. Here where the streets remain narrow (out of necessity) and the sidewalks wide, the human beings retain some rights, and I am happy to pause at the first red light (something I don’t always do), to contemplate the natives. Fungible, yes, perfectly fungible people, but human all the same: young secretaries from the suburbs—slim, blond and rosy-cheeked; middle-aged laborers from the south side of town—short wide dark and oily-haired; the entire spectrum of the white, pink, brown, high yellow and mulatto beige, navy blue and Congolese black. They’re all here, the beautiful and handsome, the cretinous, ugly and horrible, the deformed, the hungry, the hairy, the bald, the mad, the cunning and the idiot. Scum of the earth. Salt of the world. Glory and disgrace of the animal kingdom. (Horns blowing…) The beast that came down from the trees, loped across the savanna and bashed the brains out of the first kudu it could catch. The anthropoid that later gave us Socrates’ speech to the Athenian assembly, the Gregorian chants, the Upanishads and the Tao, discovered the tomato and the baking of bread, invented the vacuum cleaner and the internal combustion engine, the music of Hungary and the Sublime French Revolution—!
All pleasure consists in variety, said Dr. Johnson.
Say it again, Sam.
(Horns bellowing…)
I drive east toward the University. Rush-hour traffic rushes by. Fewer pedestrians now. I pass the site of the former Alvarado Hotel at the railroad station. (Myra!) A first-class hotel in the old days, jewel of Albuquerque, but now reduced, like most such places, to a sterile mat of black bitumen—another parking lot. Long ago, in the summer of ’52, I’d had a martini on the rocks in the bar of that grand Fred Harvey hotel, then climbed aboard the Santa Fe line’s Super Chief for another journey east, to Chicago and New York and thence by Cunard’s Queen Mary for the sea voyage to Southampton, London and the dank dark medieval quad of Edinburgh University.
Up the hill past the Presbyterian Hospital, past Mama Cardita’s palmistry parlor, the Scientology workshop, the karate gym. Enclosing everything is the smog, stench and clamor of the motor traffic; how grateful we of the Southwest are for Sunday, when the Indians are mostly in jail, the Mexicans can’t get their cars started, and the poor white trash (my kind) shut themselves up in the Holy Burning Bush Baptist Church.
Near the edge of the University campus I reach an old bar known as Okie Joe’s. Nostalgia breaks upon me like a wave. I must I shall I will have one more collegiate beer. I park, water the dog, lock up and approach the door of the bar.
Which bursts open from within, emitting a pair of coeds in fuzzy sweaters and little kilts. Short skirts are back again. Thank God for all things young and sweet and round and succulent, for all that’s br
ief and beautiful, the glory and the power of the female race. Pausing, I watch them jaywalk the street, climb the steep grassy slope toward Hodgkins Hall, flaunting their fluff, flashing a glimpse of pink thigh and rosy cheek and lacy froufrou. Jesus! Mercy! If I were forced to choose right now, this very instant, between a platter of hot-buttered sorority girls and/or saving the entire Northern Hemisphere, including a billion or so innocent Chinamen, which would I choose? It’s a tough question.
And a good question.
Enough. I leave the sunshine and slip through the portal of Okie Joe’s, into the smoky gloom of the interior. Frat boys, jocks and sophomore intellectuals jostle me as I force my way to the bar. Why, this place is full of nothing but kids. Half of them girls: I note a hundred squeaky voices—it’s a bat cave in here—against a howling background of teenybopper jukebox noise. War chant of the Ubangi. The Jungle Bunnies’ jerkoff dance. Could that be the Rolling Stones I hear? Afraid so. This used to be a man’s bar; Hank Williams was our music; Bob Wills; Eddy Arnold; Marty Robbins; Bill Monroe…
For relief I turn to a baby-faced blonde beside me at the bar. She seems unattended. She clutches a rum-Coke in one hand and stares into the wall mirror behind the shelves of amber bottles. She looks as lonely as I feel. And some 180 degrees prettier. As the bartender brings me my shot of bourbon and bottle of beer, I catch the girl’s eye in the mirror and venture a friendly remark. “Here’s to you.” I down the shooter and give her my winsomest grin.