Are there more of those in here?
Natural arches? This is the biggest.
This place should be a national park.
He put a finger to his lips and looked around. The walls have ears.
And eyes. She smiled. Are we being selfish?
You’re damn right. Let them others find this place like we did. By looking for it. By dreaming of it.
They lingered in the canyons for two weeks, exploring pockets and corners in a maze of wonders. They slept under the stars, swam in the pools beneath waterfalls, climbed the strange monoliths.
Henry, I’m frightened.
Why?
Because I’m so happy; I’ve never been so happy in my life; it’s frightening.
He held her in his arms, stroked her flowing hair, caressed the supple rondure of her breasts, arms, hips. He said nothing. He understood her fear and had no answer for it.
They camped for three days and nights on a point of naked stone two thousand five hundred feet above the Colorado River. The place had no name on the maps. Henry broke a bottle of wine on the rock and christened it Cape Claire. They were eighty miles by burro path, jeep trail and dirt track from the nearest county highway—a gravel-surfaced road connecting a place called Pipe Spring (pop. 10) to a place called Wolf Hole (pop. 0). They watched five small pretty boats—dories—pass beneath them on the river, pitching and yawing through whitewater rapids, bound for the stagnant cesspool of Lake Mead sixty miles downstream. They saw bighorn sheep scrambling from ledge to ledge on the cliffs below, on the crags above. Golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, black vultures and raucous blue-black ravens circled in the air above and below. Lean stalks of agave grew by the side of sandy basins in the stone, seedpods rattling in the wind. A squall of rain passed through one night transforming each basin into a shallow tiger’s eye of water. They refilled their water cans cup by cup. The sun emerged from a range of clouds, the wind blew and by evening the pools were dry. They walked in twilight on a path through a silent village of basaltic boulders set on pedestals of mudstone. A coiled and excited rattlesnake challenged their advance. Henry squatted on his heels, spoke to the snake, stroked the underside of its neck with his stick until the snake became quiet, then lifted it draped on the stick to the side of the trail and set it safely down. They walked on, climbed a ridge, circled back to camp and watched the red sun sink beneath a quilted ceiling of clouds, a grand excessive baroque display of color and fire that overspread the entire sky for an hour and lingered in the west for three hours more.
They worked their way off Cape Claire, driving the unreliable two-wheel-drive pickup down stony ravines and across sand-filled washes and onto the deep-rutted jeep trail that meandered in various directions around numerous obstacles but kept bearing north. Henry stopped frequently to get out his shovel and bevel off cut-banks, remove rocks and circle ahead on foot in search of the route when it disappeared on acres of bare hardpan. They found a shortcut through the Grand Wash Cliffs, camped under the Virgin Mountains and by noon of the second day reached a town named Mesquite and the paved highway that led to Las Vegas. By late afternoon they were lying together in a tub of hot soapy water in a room on the tenth floor of the Mint Hotel. They stayed there for two nights, saw Woody Allen at Caesar’s Palace, ate the bargain meals at the Stardust, admired the Las Vegas architecture, won seventy dollars at the blackjack tables in the Fremont Casino and left town quickly.
I don’t like this, she said.
Why not?
We’re too lucky.
Don’t worry, said Henry. We deserve it.
They drove the pickup, refueled, retuned and repaired, across the basins and over the ranges of the Amargosa Desert, the Grapevine Mountains, Death Valley, the Panamint Range, Saline Valley, Eureka Valley, the Inyo Mountains and down into Lone Pine on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas, left their signatures in the hikers’ register on the summit of Mount Whitney (14,494 feet above sea level), drove south to Mojave, Santa Monica, Laguna Beach, Oceanside, dipped their feet and immersed their bodies together in the green waves and white surf of the western sea. Unable to afford a hotel room, they drove eastward to the crest of the Vallecito Mountains and made camp on a high good place from which they could see west to the Pacific, east to Arizona. They counted their money. Four dollars and two cents.
We’re broke, she said, delighted by the novelty of the sensation.
You want to go back to Denver?
And live with Mother? You’re kidding of course. No thanks. Anywhere but there. Let’s go someplace different.
Different from what?
Different from Denver.
They drove east next day across the desert, past the Salton Sea, the Chocolate Mountains, the Sand Hills, across the Colorado through Yuma and deep into the Sonoran Desert, refueling at Gila Bend, Fan Belt Capital of southern Arizona, soon after dark. Claire disapproved, as Henry knew she would, but finally agreed out of necessity to stand guard while Henry dipped his siphon hose into the tank of a city car behind City Hall. They drove on to Tucson that night and camped in the saguaro forest west of the city. Tucson, they decided, would do for the winter. In the morning Claire found a job as a waitress at the Arizona Inn near the University; she placed an ad in the school paper offering tutorial instruction in music theory, history, piano, flute and violin. Henry stood in line for two hours at the State Department of Employment Security, downtown, made formal application for a position as professor of philosophy, park ranger, fire lookout or social worker, and filed a claim against Utah and the National Park Service for unemployment compensation. Such gall, such brass, such insolence—but was he not “entitled,” by custom and by law? He was. But he knew what his old man would have said about such beggary and he dared not even imagine what his brother Will would think. The economic honeymoon was over.
To soothe his conscience and appease Claire, Henry took a part-time job (for a time) as plongeur or pearl diver in the kitchen of Mother Hooper’s Café, a dark den for transients, winos, welfare recipients and other derelicts such as himself. Within two weeks he and Claire had accrued enough cash and credit to rent a three-room “studio” apartment in the student ghetto of the University. They took the mattress from the bed of the pickup, beat the dust out of it, laid it on their parlor floor. They bought four gallons of latex enamel and repainted the walls. They improvised bookcases, repaired a salvaged sofa, reglued a pair of chairs, equipped the kitchen with toaster and new table from the Goodwill store and bullied the landlord into fixing the plumbing. Claire rented an upright piano, had it tuned and trundled into the apartment. She picked volunteer snapdragons from the weedy yards in the neighborhood and set them in beer cans and jelly jars on top of the piano, in the kitchen, in the bath. When her students (some of them boys) began to appear, one by one, Henry would sneak off surly to the University library for study or to the bar downtown known as the Dirty Shame Saloon where he began to acquire a circle of cronies, possibly friends, with names like Lacey, Harrington, Richard “Rick” Arriaga and Daniel K. “Decay” Hooligan. The isolate honeymoon was over.
The basic honeymoon was over but Claire and Henry remained lovers nonetheless. He loved her for her brisk energy, her calm courage, her cheerful determination to make a functional marriage of this bizarre connection with an elderly academic bum and liberated libertine like Henry H. Lightcap. What was the point of him? He posed the question often enough himself:
What are you going to do with your life, Henry?
My life? Do with my life? Why should I do anything with my life? I live my life. Or—is it mine? Or am I merely the temporal instrument of my life? A reed in the wind, a seed passing through the bowels of a cactus wren, a swirl of dust rising from an alkaline playa in the heart of the Black Rock Desert, a ripple of motion across the surface of a pond, an ephemeral downward shift of sand on the slipface of a dune? Eh? Speak, O vocalissimus.
Claire never charged him with idleness. But there was a kind of wonder in her eyes sometimes
when she asked him, How can you spend so much time reading books?
He smiled. I’d rather be on a horse. Then we’ll get you a horse. We’ll need a one-horse ranch to keep it on. We’ll get you a ranch. Sure. A wedding gift from your mother, I suppose. Henry remembered the gleam of hatred in Mrs. Mellon’s eyes when she’d embraced him, smiling, after the modest ceremony at Point Imperial.
My mother would do anything for us if I asked her; but I don’t intend to ask her. Good, said Henry; I’m sure glad to hear that. But I will come into a trust fund when I’m twenty-five. We won’t need it, he said. (“Come into”? he thought.) It’s not much; about twenty thousand a year. (Henry’s heart skipped a beat. That was twice what he’d ever earned in a single year.) But we could buy a piece of land somewhere, build a house on it. Make a home, raise a garden, keep a pair of horses if you wish.
And a pair of children, I suppose?
Yes.
All right. But I’m not living on your money. I’m a working man. I believe in working for my bread—six months a year. That’s the way we’re going to live. In honest poverty. Voluntary simplicity, like Thoreau said. The pederast? Yeah—him.
X
They would settle for the time being on Tucson, Arizona, a resort town for trust funders and rednecks both, with a symphony orchestra for ambitious violinists. In January Claire enrolled at the University, beginning her senior year as a student of higher leaning. Henry complained when he discovered that she had borrowed money from her mother in order to pay the high tuition fees required of nonresidents.
Nonresident? he said; we live here.
We have to live here for a year to qualify as residents.
Lie.
I’d rather not, Henry; and you’ve still got Utah plates on that truck of yours.
Well, goddamnit I’m your husband; I pay the bills around here, not your mother.
Then you’d better get a job, earn some money.
All right, I’ll earn some money. While she was at school he disassembled, cleaned and reassembled his revolver and his deer rifle and went off into the desert with D. K. Hooligan for target practice. Borrowing his friend’s ear protectors, he fired five rounds out of six into a beer can at fifty feet with the .357 and seven out of seven at a hundred feet with the .30-.30. Satisfied, Hooligan hired him for a one-night job at a nameless dirt airstrip on the Papago Indian Reservation fifty miles southwest of Tucson. The plane came in at twilight from the south, circled twice, put down and taxied to a stop. The pilot did not shut off the motor. There was an exchange of light signals between the airplane and Hooligan. Hooligan put away his flashlight, unchained the huge wallet from the hip pocket of his jeans and walked to the side of the plane, under the wing. Henry waited fifty feet away under the branches of a mesquite tree, rifle in his hands, revolver in his belt. He watched the door of the plane open, heard a quiet exchange of words, saw a dozen squarish bundles in white sacking tumble out, saw Hooligan pay and shake hands with the man inside. The engine roared, the pilot released the brakes, the airplane rolled then raced down the remainder of the strip, bouncing over bursage and panic grass and took off, wings waggling, into the flamboyant Papago sunset.
Henry and D. K. loaded the odd-size bales of what looked and felt like alfalfa into Hooligan’s van and started off for Tucson.
Friends of yours? Henry asked.
We’ve been doing business for a while.
Why’d you need me?
Hooligan smiled his rich and satisfied smile. That’s the kind of business it is, he said. Friendly but not too friendly.
They knew I was there? Under the tree?
You bet. That’s the first thing I told them. About my friend Dogmeat the Green Beret. They could see you. They trust my judgment.
Three hours later they reached the Dirty Shame. Hooligan paid Henry five hundred dollars in cash for the evening’s work and bought them each a drink. Arriaga and Lacey appeared and joined them for a second round. Sometime after midnight Hooligan drove Henry to his apartment house. Henry entered to find Claire sitting up in her nightgown, wide awake, waiting for him. She said nothing as he stood the rifle in the corner, sat down beside her on the rehabilitated sofa and slipped an arm around her bare shoulders.
I’m home, Honeydew. She said nothing. He felt his sheepish, guilty grin slipping away. I’ve been working, he said. Earning money. Dinero. Moola. Frogskins. She said nothing. He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket, placed it in her palm and folded her fingers over it. Give that to your mother, he said.
She looked at the four century notes, the three or four twenties, the fives and ones. She crushed the bills into a ball and put them in the big ceramic ashtray on the apple-box coffee table before them. Two of Henry’s cigar butts rested in the ashtray, together with matchbooks labeled Pandora’s Box and the Dirty Shame.
Say something, he demanded.
She struck a match and applied the clear yellow flame to the crinkled pile of paper money. The finely engraved, labor-ennobled, leathery-textured legal tender began to burn, slow but willing. Henry watched.
I risked my life for that money.
She made no immediate reply except to strike a second match and encourage the fire. She said, I know what Hooligan’s business is. You don’t have to tell me.
They watched the flames creep over the noble faces of Washington, Lincoln, Jackson, Franklin.
It’s only marijuana, he pleaded. No proof yet it does anybody any harm. Good placebo anyhow. He pulled a plastic Baggie from his jacket. Brought a sample home for you. For you, Honeydew. You like the stuff don’t you? Seems like I see you smoke it now and then.
She said nothing. They watched the flames continue their patient consumption of his earnings.
That’s more than I get in four weeks of unemployment compensation, he complained. Finally she looked at him. Henry, are you really as stupid as you pretend? How stupid is that? You really don’t understand what I’m angry about? I guess not. You don’t like Hooligan? The stink of burning money passed his nose, floated on. Is that it? I don’t care about Hooligan, I care about you. You mean—? Keep trying. You mean that if something happens to me, if I got killed so to speak, you’d never speak to me again?
She lifted her arms and hung her interlocked hands around his red skinny vulturine neck. From a distance of six inches she peered into his eyes: soft gray-blue the color of smoked sapphire peering into squinty bloodshot gooseberry green. Looking very serious, she touched his lips with her lips. She licked the lobe of his left ear with her tongue, veiling his face with the fall of her hair. Her pink-tipped breasts within the filmy stuff of her gown pressed upon his white chest.
She said, Take a shower Henry and brush your teeth and come to bed. I’ll explain everything to you in terms that you can understand.
XI
Through the winter he filed his applications. In March the offers began to arrive: seasonal ranger jobs at Arches, Isle Royale, Grand Canyon, Gila Wilderness, Glen Canyon; fire lookouts at North Rim, Glacier Park, Tonto National Forest…. Nixon still in office, the war yet smoldering on, prosperity burgeoning, Henry Lightcap the permanent part-time career anarchist enjoyed a wide choice of attractive low-paying untenured futureless upwardly immobile temporary jobs. The only kind he wanted. The only type he thought he needed.
In April he made his selection and on May Day (Law Day in the US, Workers’ Day in the SU, Fertility Day in pagan Europe, Home-coming Day in Henry’s heart) he started work as a five-month fire lookout on a mountaintop near Globe, Arizona, one hundred miles by road from Tucson. He might have preferred other places but by this choice he remained within easy driving distance of his young wife, who had three weeks of school remaining in May and would return to school in early September. They would sublet the apartment through the summer.
In mid-June they celebrated their first conjugal anniversary with caviar (red), champagne, wild flowers and commemorative love on the lookout’s chair (mounted on insulators) inside the cabin of the fire
lookout tower. Love at timberline again, seven thousand nine hundred ninety-two feet above sea level.
That same day, in the evening by a ceremonial fire on a rim of rock overlooking five separate mountain ranges, the canyons of the Salt River and a gran finale of a sunset beyond Four Peaks and the Superstitions, Claire informed Henry that she wanted a baby. That she wanted to become a mother. That she was out of b.c. pills and ready to begin ovulating most any time. Like right now.
Anatomy is destiny, agreed Henry, but what about your musical career? Lightning crackled nearby—the smell of ozone blended with his wife’s Shalimar by Guerlain Inc., New York. His choice, not hers.
Fuck my musical career, she said, leaning toward him in the firelight. Her eyes shone like a tiger’s eyes. No, blue-gray but fiery, like the eyes of an ocelot. Fuck me.
Goodness gracious. Such language from my child bride. Honeydew Mellon, I’m shocked, really.
Thunder rumbled through the woods.
Shut up and kiss me you fool. She sprawled upon him, flattening him to the stone. Her tongue probed his mouth, her knees clutched him by the rib cage. Defenseless, overwhelmed, he lay on his back with his pants down, his prick up and one hand hanging idly, helpless, over the edge of a fifty-foot drop-off straight down to a nest of timber rattlers sleeping in a bed of stiletto-bladed yuccas. Raindrops splashed on his face, dribbled through his hair, soaked the shirt on Claire’s slender back and ran in rivulets down the sweet cleft perfection of her bottom, trickling from there onto his balls. The rain increased but failed to quench or even dampen the fire of their reciprocating lust. They came when they came—her phrase—like overlapping fumaroles spouting molten magma in the night. His image. Coiled together they lay in the falling rain, drenched, besotted, gasping for air, searching for their scattered wits.