The Fool's Progress

  The footing is rough on the narrow trail but I keep my eyes on the man waiting for me. He is bareheaded, bald as an egg, wearing what appears to be a white robe, not very clean. No sign of action in his vicinity, not even a fire despite the cold chill of the morning. I pause, sniff the air, smell nothing. But hear the thin chimes of the windbell that dangles from one of the trees beside the tent. I go on. Bildad—if it is Bildad—makes no move. Grinning at the sun, he seems immobile as a statue.

  I stop again, a hundred feet away. “Morton…is that you?” No answer. Not a twitch of recognition. He must be in a trance. Perhaps I should let him be, leave him alone. The dog at my heel stares straight at the man, growls deep in her throat. An uneasy, interrogative growl. “Quiet, Sollie.” I stroke her head. We advance. Bildad always was a little strange—but not this strange.

  I stop in front of him only four feet away, blocking his sunshine. If this were Diogenes he’d complain about that. But Bildad says nothing, makes not the slightest move, continues to stare through and past me with the frigid grin of a man in a state of frozen ecstasy.

  “Bildad?” I say. No reply. The windbells chime. I squat before him as you would in order to talk to a child and snap my fingers in his face. “Morton?”

  He grins over my shoulder at something beyond. Far beyond. I reach forward and delicately remove his thick-lensed glasses. The blank eyes, the jaundice yellow eyeballs, stare into space. The face remains stiff as parchment. I half expect to hear a husky rattle in his throat, an effort at speech, the croak of a remote and hollow voice.

  “Bildad, look at me; this is Henry. Henry Lightcap for godsake. You remember me?”

  He says nothing. He seems shrunken, empty, the dehydrated shell of a human being. Odorless—a husk. The face is gaunt, a mass of wrinkles. The grin displays a few crooked yellow teeth coated with plaque. The arms and legs are thin as sticks. If I touched him he would fall over. Or crumble to dust.

  I pass my hand before his eyes. He does not blink. I touch the gray beard, dirty and matted, that hangs from his chin to the middle of his chest. If he has a chest. The loose robe draped from his narrow shoulders suggests a yawning concavity beneath. I tug at the beard, a gentle pull, and his head and body rock forward slightly. I release the beard; he settles back into his former position with a faint crackling noise. His face and eyes betray no hint that he is conscious of my presence.

  “Come on, Bildad, wake up. This is Henry. I’ve come five hundred miles to see you. There’s a question I want to ask you. A very simple question, Mort, the oldest question of them all. Okay?”

  No answer. I stare at his grinning mouth, his long Semitic sunburned nose, the close-set eyes. I notice the hairs in his nostrils, the fringe of white hair above his ears, the peeling skin on his sun-baked and hairless dome. And something more peculiar: a neat tidy round hole, about the caliber of a .32, set in the very center, on the exact summit of that mesocephalic skull. Odder still, there is no trace of blood around the opening, no sign of violence from within or without. Nor any weapons at hand. It’s as if he had popped a cork from his cranium and launched his brains, together with the cork, directly into the sky. Into space. Quite some time ago. I look up. Nothing above but the blue vaulting firmament of New Mexico, streaked with scuds of vapor, and a lonely indifferent soaring black bird.

  “Bildad…what’s the matter with you?”

  No reaction.

  His small, bony hands are draped over his bony knees. I grasp his wrist but feel no warmth, no pulse. I feel the carotid artery of his neck. No vital sign. Though his mouth and nostrils are open, I can detect no symptom of breathing.

  “Bildad, you fool, what have you done to yourself?”

  No reply. I reach out again, reluctant to believe the evidence of my senses, and give him a cautious poke on the shoulder. Not hard. But firm. He tips over like a wooden doll—the robe falling away—and lies on his back still fixed in the lotus position, folded legs and bare feet in the air, hands on knees, eyes staring at the sky, the whole body rigid as a construction of papier-mâché. Half inverted, he confronts me with his wasted thighs, his hairy and withered bottom, the puckered asshole. Not a pleasant or inspiring view. Nor is there any extrusion of intestines, neatly coiled like a boat’s bowline where he’s been sitting, to add a touch of the picturesque.

  Curious. Leaving him on his back for the moment, I rise, step around him and check out the camp. Here is a wooden bowl, empty, and a wooden spoon. Here is a fire pit and the ashes of his last fire, cold to my touch. A battered tin bucket, half full of water and drowned ants, hangs from a nail in a tree, under the wind chimes. Inside the tent I find an open suitcase containing a few items of clothing, a sleeping bag on a Styrofoam pad, a little G.I. folding shovel with a roll of toilet paper jammed on the haft, a one-gallon glass storage jar labeled RICE and another labeled BEANS. Both empty. I see the stub of a candle on a tin plate, a few joss sticks in a balsawood box, a pair of Birkenstock sandals worn down to the threads. Nothing much else. No books, no letters, no battery-powered radio or solar-powered TV. Ascetic? Old Bildad has become pure spirit.

  I glance at him from inside the tent. He remains as I left him, on his back, limbs elevated, eyes wide open, absolutely static. I return, tilt him back to the upright posture, like a bookend, and resume our conversation.

  “Morton,” I say, “I don’t think you’re dead. I think you’re floating about somewhere in the neighborhood, tethered to your astral cord, waiting for me to leave. But goddamn it, Mort, remember all those nights down at the U when you did all the talking and never let me get a word in edgeways? Now by God I’m going to talk, I’m going to say something, and you are going to listen. You hear me, Bildad?”

  No answer. The gap-toothed grin, the hallucinated eyes, the Levantine nose stay as they were, rigidly directed at some point far beyond my left shoulder. The Horsehead Nebula? I shift to the side to obstruct his view but that accomplishes nothing; he stares through me. I continue. “All right, Bildad, you ugly little creep, here’s the story: my third wife left me for good a few days ago, my second wife is gone forever, the first never answers my letters, my only child lives with her rich grandmother in Virginia, I lost my job, I’m down to my last two hundred dollars, the inflation rate on pigmeat is 12 percent, gas is a dollar twenty a gallon, my dog is dying of lung fungus, I’m three thousand miles from home, my truck is burning oil, clutch is slipping, engine misses on the upgrades and I’ve got a little secret in my guts I don’t have to tell you about because being a savant and Wu Li master and mystic voyeur and all that you’re perfectly cognizant (you always liked that repellant Latinate fucking terminology, remember?) of my internal troubles, aren’t you you supercilious grinning metaphysical bastard, and so it appears that fate has got me by the testicles with a downhill pull and what I want to know, O shriveled mahatma of human destiny, is precisely this: If the world, as you always proclaimed, is merely maya, nothing but illusion, why does it seem so bloody real? Eh? Why does it hurt so much?”

  I pause to allow him to slip in a word or two. He says nothing. I go on: “I’m not complaining, you understand. I’ve read the Bhagavad-Gita too, parts of the Ramayana, the Wit and Wisdom of Edgar Cayce, Seth Speaks, Lost Horizon, The Razor’s Edge, the Tao Te Ching, the Eee Ching, Gurdjieff, Steiner, bits of the Rig-Veda and even such primary sources as the classic Please Wipe Your Mouth You Just Swallowed My Soul by young Mr. Hugh Prather, and I quite understand the value of disinterested detachment, yogic discipline, meditation on the eternal and keeping the nasal passages clean. But even so, there are times, I tell you, when discontent descends upon me. When peace escapes me. When the cursed melancholy envelopes me in a sepia cloud of neo-Platonic squid ink. Are you listening? You follow me?”

  Grinning, eyes glazed with delight, Bildad remains mute. I proceed: “You’ll note I say nothing of the general state of human affairs. My current wife sleeping with a computer science professor—a computer fucking science professor!—my friends mired in mort
gages and indoor jobs and medical insurance, the hellhole of Africa, the black hole of Asia, the torture rack of Latin America, the glut and gloom and gluttony of North America, the grimy Weltschmerz of Europe, the despair of the whales in Oceania, the ghost dance of the grizzly bears, the death march of the elephants, the Doomsday machines above our heads—I tell you, Bildad, I realize now why the universe, as the astronomers have discovered, is receding from us in all directions at near the speed of light. Why? Red shift? No! Because of fear, that’s why. Fear, Bildad. The universe is afraid. We are the plague of the cosmos. The stars are not merely flying away, they are fleeing away, tripping away on little starfeet at a hundred and eighty thousand miles per second, running for their lives.”

  My dog whines.

  Bildad grins, saying nothing.

  I stand erect now, raving at the noonday sun, shaking my fist at that pallid holy wafer beyond the overcast. “My curse upon you, little star. Twinkle twinkle and to hell with you. I never want to see your light again. Go away. Expand and expire, become a red giant, a white dwarf, a supernova, what do I care.” I pause, I hesitate, I glance down at Morton Bildad. “What do you say to that, Mort?”

  No comment.

  I squat down again, peer into his unseeing face, his rapture-blind eyes. “Want a beer, Bildad?”

  Silent as a sphinx, cold as stone, dry as parchment, he says nothing but only stares beyond me, bare feet and legs interlocked, hands pressed together palm to palm, in blessing or prayer, wide mouth ajar in the grimace of a cheerful idiot.

  I pat his shoulder. Rising again, I kiss the top of his bald dome, near the little aperture with the pink membrane inside. “So long, Mort. Maybe I’ll come back someday. If you’re still here we’ll have a good talk.”

  No reply.

  I walk away, followed by Solstice. I climb the path. I halt for a moment at the edge of the ravine to look back. Bildad has not moved. His windbell tinkles. His pale robe stirs a bit with the breeze. His tent flaps shift. But Bildad himself stays fixed, unmoved, immobile, silent. The lonely vulture circles above, black as the angel of death against the sky. I go on, get into truck, arouse engine, turn and drive away, back to the ghost town and into the shadowy gorge of the Rio Grande, across the gray and somber flats of what is called the Taos Valley, enter and leave the town without stopping and climb ENE through the pass in the mountains toward Eagle Nest, Cimarron, Maxwell, the everlasting hills of Oklahoma. I am ten miles east of Taos, popping the top from my last canister of Bud, before I remember something. Bildad’s hands. His hands.

  Sollie sleeps on the seat at my side. Dying but content. I peer into the rearview mirror to see if we are being followed, pursued, summoned. I look for ghosts. Nobody there. Not yet. What I see in the mirror is only the empty evening highway, the dark pines of Carson National Forest and the big goofy grin of one more dazzled idiot.

  Rain then sleet fall toward us. The pavement glistens. I turn on lights, then the wipers, then the heater. Climbing, climbing, laboring upward, we strive, my old steel horse and I, toward the summit of the pass.

  12

  1957:

  How Henry Found his Niche

  I

  What did Henry Lightcap want? He wanted everything. (What else is there?)

  He wanted simplicity—a life of order, ceremony, frugality, beauty, passion and generosity. Of clean frugality, hard beauty, fierce passion and abundant—munificent—overwhelming—generosity. The GOOD LIFE.

  When their new home collapsed at the great housewarming party in El Culito de San Pedro Mártir, and Professor Beale informed Henry that he had no future in professional philosophy (You have no future here, Henry; and even less of a past—no Latin, less Greek, and you flunked symbolic logic once, linguistic analysis twice, and arts & crafts three times, and I suggest, frankly, that you seek a career outside the world of Academe, in sanitation engineering, perhaps, or shoe repair) and Myra his wife went back to Tenth Street (Will I hear from you again, Myra? and she said, You’ll hear from my attorney…), why then Henry concluded that it was time to cast about for other means of survival. On the first of April a year later—All Fools’ Day—he began work as a seasonal park ranger at an obscure and very small federal park in the bleakest loneliest corner of the state once known as Deseret. He was the only ranger in the field, sole custodian of thirty-three thousand acres of stone and silence. The boss lived thirty miles off, behind a desk.

  I’ve found my niche, thought Henry Lightcap.

  “You’ve found your niche, Henry,” the superintendent said.

  Quite. He refused to work at any job for more than half the year. If as Henry Thoreau claimed a man could get by on six weeks’ work a year, then Henry Lightcap—with the occasional odd wife and maybe a kid to support—should be able to manage on six months’ work a year. With a wee bit of the unemployment compensation, now and then, on the side, to help tide them over the winter months. And why not? And why the hell not? He earned it, didn’t he? Was not as if he were accepting relief money.

  “Of course,” continued the superintendent—his name was Gibbs, Gibbs Pratt—“your job only lasts about six months. You’ll be terminated in October. Depending on the funds.”

  “Terminated, sir?”

  “Laid off. Furloughed without pay.” He laughed. “Not exterminated. But if you do your job and keep your nose clean—you will have to shave every day, Henry—why we’ll hire you back in the spring for another season. And so on, year by year. And then if you pass the civil-service exam you can become a full-time career man, like me, when and if an opening pops up.”

  Gawd forbid, thought Henry. But the old man did serve pretty good whiskey. These Park Service types were noted for their serious drinking—remote duty stations, frequent transferrals, hazardous rescue operations under extreme conditions, etc. Understandable. And I can be hired back every year? he thought. Ad infinitum, maybe?

  “Yes. What’s more…” And here the super paused to refill Henry’s tumbler with another liberal slashing of Old Grand-Dad straight from the quart, hard on his melted rocks. The super refilled his own glass. “…And what’s more, if you like the work and we like you, there’s always room for bright young men in Washington. You’re only a GS-3 now. But someday, maybe twenty years from now, you could be a GS-17.” The super, a thoughtful and sensitive man, gazed above Henry’s head at the wall beyond, where a bull elk, painted on black velvet, trumpeted his mating call into the Rocky Mountain wilds. “Not that I’d necessarily wish that on any man. But the service does have this policy: upward or out. You’ll see.”

  Gibbs appeared to have forgotten that Henry was already twenty-nine and a half years old. But Henry knew. Where, he wondered, had all those years gone? He’d begun college in—1948? Nine years later he still lacked the M.A. degree, or most of it. And still lacked anything that could be said to resemble a career. Lightcap was one of the few veterans of World War II who never did find full-time work. He also lacked, for the present, a wife. Even a dog. Owned little, in fact, but his ’49 Chevy pickup truck, a few apple crates full of books, a tarnished secondhand Haines flute and one shabby leather trunk of shirts, pants, overalls. He’d outgrown his only three-piece suit.

  Failure….

  But what kind of work did he want? Did he want to be a smalltime, independent, hard-scrabbling farmer like Brother Will? No. What Henry really wanted, he wanted to be—a lover. A philosopher. A hunter, warrior and tamer of wild horses. But employment counselors never mentioned such jobs.

  “The national park system is expanding,” the super went on. ‘State park systems also. The American public is demanding more recreational facilities.” He belched from deep in the belly, a profound organical carbonated eructation. “We’re adding new units to the system every year. Upgrading the monuments to park status. Improving the facilities—new visitor centers, new and better roads, flush toilets in the comfort stations, cement picnic tables, paved nature trails, push-button recorded natural-history lectures. All of which me
ans we’ll need more public rangers, more naturalists, and most of all”—belch—“more administrators. Opportunity beckons. The future lies before us.”

  I don’t want to be an administrator, he thought. Why not? Henry Lightcap, you can’t be a young man all your life. Why not? It’s a logical and chronological impossibility. Says who? I think I will be a young man all my life. If you live that long. If I live that long.

  The super’s wife appeared in the kitchen doorway. Henry politely stood up. The super looked around. “Gibbsie,” she said, “you haven’t washed the dishes yet.”

  Gibbsie? thought Henry. Wash the dishes?

  The superintendent blushed. “Yes dear, I’ll get to them.” Embarrassed, he heaved himself from his easy chair. Wobbling somewhat. Put a hand on the fireplace mantel for support. “Get right to it,” he said.

  “I’m going to bed,” the wife said. “Try not to make too much noise when you put away the pans.”

  The super nodded. The woman shuffled off. This marriage will not last, Henry thought. No more than mine. No matter how hard they work at it. And what’s the point of marriage if you have to work at it? Does every fucking thing in our fucking culture have to be a fucking job? This marriage cannot be saved.

  And what of it? “I’ll help you, Gibbs,” he said. He helped himself to more of the bourbon, then followed the boss into the neat little kitchen. The super washed, Henry rinsed and stacked.

  “My wife and I have this deal,” the super explained. “She cooks, I clean up.”

  Backwards, said Henry silently; get rid of her. “My wife and I had a similar arrangement,” Henry said. The room turned around him for a moment. For a moment he thought he was going to be peculiarly ill, thought he was going to vomit on top of the nice clean dishes in the rinse water. Steady as she goes, partner. He kept it down. “That is, we had what, strictly speaking, you might call an analogous arrangement. That is, she cooked, cleaned, did the laundry, made the bed, paid the bills, and I ate, read the paper and slept on the bed. Symmetry, you’ll notice.”