His fleeting experiences of beauty — and there were a lot of them — were so intense that they were painful rather than pleasurable. He couldn’t figure out what to make of them. The birds, like Socrates’ bird, reminded him of the soul, gazing upward and caring nothing for the world below. Norma Jean’s paintings — there was one in every room now — opened like windows onto an uncharted inland sea. The Michelangelesque curves along the top of the bookcases stirred up an ache in him, like an old war wound, every time he took a book down off a shelf. Instead of becoming happy he became irritable and impatient. He lost his temper at material objects, as if he suspected that the universe was conspiring against him, playing tricks on him. He bumped into things in the dark, tripped over his shoes; he dropped things in the kitchen; he spilled his wine at dinner; the plastic garbage sacks tore when he tried to pull them out of the trash container he’d bought for the kitchen.
He was mildly depressed in the evening, not hungry at all, but he fixed a small panfried steak with a sauce made with garlic and balsamic vinegar. Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end. He ate a Bosc pear for dessert and did the dishes. When the dishes were done, he sat at the kitchen table with a glass of Chi-anti and looked through his Petersons Guide. According to the guide, the whooping cranes, or “whoopers” — there were only ninety-six of them left — would have departed in March on their annual migration to the Arctic Circle, so he’d probably been mistaken. But he browsed through the Guide anyway. None of the other birds in the valley made a “trumpetlike call.” He was still looking through the guide when Meg called from Chicago. She’d just taken some flowers to Helen’s grave in the southeast corner of Graceland Cemetery, far from the Fields and the Pullmans and the Potter Palmers, and was weepy as she remembered how her mother had mended her favorite dress after she’d torn it on a nail on the back porch, and how she’d never really thanked her properly, and so on. She’d been seeing a shrink, she said, who was helping her understand some things about her family. She didn’t say what they were, and Rudy didn’t ask. You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child, he thought. And the pain he felt for his oldest daughter was like the longing he’d felt that morning when he’d heard the whooping crane, if it had been a whooping crane. He didn’t know what to make of it.
He poured another glass of wine and sat for a while in the dark, and then he went into his study. What he wanted to do now, he thought, was just lie low, “live unknown,” as Epicurus advised. He’d wanted to make enough money to leave something for the girls, but maybe that wasn’t important. He’d wanted answers to the big questions, but maybe that wasn’t important either. Maybe what was important was just to live simply, to acknowledge one’s insignificance in the larger scheme of things, to acknowledge no authority higher than reason and to subject one’s emotions to this authority without complaining.
But he couldn’t do it. You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.
He sat at Helen’s desk and tried to sort out his thoughts. Live unknown, he wrote. He filled an entire page of the journal he’d bought to keep track of his progress. The ink flowed smoothly from Helen’s eighteen-karat-gold nib: Live unknown, Live unknown, Live unknown. Then he put his head down on the desk for a minute, and when he woke with a start, the pen was gone. He felt a familiar sinking feeling, an athlete sensing defeat. He looked on the desk, examined every square inch of the sloping surface. He looked on the floor. He did a grid search of the floor, starting in the back corner under the desk and moving outward, past the wide door that opened into the bathroom, all the way to the opposite wall. He listened in his imagination for the sound of the pen rolling down the sloping surface of the desk and then hitting the floor. But he heard nothing. The pen was gone.
He looked everywhere. In his pockets. In the desk drawers. But he was very tired. The pen was gone. If Helen had been there, he could have called to her, and she’d have been able to tell him where to look without even coming into the room. She’d have known right where the pen was. But Helen wasn’t there, and the sense that the universe was conspiring against him returned more strongly than ever. He experienced a surge of anger. Why do you do this to me? he shouted inwardly. Why?
And in his imagination a voice responded, No one is doing anything to you. He recognized the voice of Epicurus, the voice of reason. You’ve misplaced the pen, that’s all.
I haven’t misplaced it, it’s just gone. I’ve looked everywhere.
You’re too tired to think straight. There’s no point in getting angry.
1 searched every square inch of the floor. I did a grid search. Do you know what a grid search is?
Well then, what do you think happened? Do you think the atoms that constitute the pen suddenly dissolved into other forms? That will happen eventually, hut do you think it happened in the jew minutes that you dozed off?
Rudy was reluctant to say it, but he really had no choice: No.
Very well, then, now go to bed.
Rudy acknowledged defeat, but he was too upset to go to bed. In the kitchen he poured himself a small glass of wine which he carried up the tractor path between two rows of trees.
The trees were in full bloom, so the grove was dark. It was a cloudless night and the moon was full and once he got to the top of the hill he had no trouble finding his way down to the little backwater or inlet — it looked like the head of an upside-down duck on the plat map he’d taped up on the wall in his study — where Creaky and Maxine used to swim, before the accident. There was only a trace now of the opening that Creaky had once cut in the dense chaparral that bordered the river. Helen would have loved to swim here. She loved to swim at night. The girls too. Rudy took off his shoes and shirt and pants and went down the bank. The chaparral was tough, tangled and thorny, but he managed to squeeze between two skeleton bushes and ease himself carefully into the cool water, water that had traveled all the way from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. He was still holding his wineglass. “If J was a headlight,” he sang, softly, “on some northbound train, Yd shine my light, on cool Colorado Springs.” He tossed the rest of the wine into the river and set the glass down on the bank. The drop-off was less than two feet. He walked out toward the main channel till he could feel the current, stronger than he’d expected, tugging at him. He started to turn around, but an inner voice — not the voice he’d heard earlier, the voice of reason, but a different voice — encouraged him to let go, and he did let go, leaned backward till he was floating. He could steer himself with his hands, and by raising his head from time to time — he was floating feetfirst — he could see where he was going, but he didn’t care where he was going, and most of the time he looked up at the sky On his left the North Star was a little lower than it was at home, and he couldn’t locate Cassiopeia, which must have dipped below the horizon. The mesquite trees on the bank behind him were black shadows twisting in the moonlight. A barn owl coasted overhead. Silent. Something stirred in the brush, a bobcat or a peccary or a night heron. Mosquitoes hummed and bit his arms and neck, but the humming and biting didn’t bother him. Had it been like this for Helen at the end? Being bitten by mosquitoes as you floated down a river? Is this what she’d wanted to tell him? But she hadn’t wanted anyone to listen to the tapes she’d recorded, not while she was still alive.
It took him half an hour to reach the little mission chapel. From his position on his back in the river he could see just the tip of the steeple, but for the most part he gazed upward at the constellations. Rudy knew his constellations, because each one of his daughters had done a science project on them and they’d spent hours lying on their backs in the middle of the Edgar Lee Masters campus looking up at the sky. As the river bent to the south, he could see Virgo and Centaurus coming into view. At first they reminded him of true beauty, and he was overwhelmed. He knew that this heart-piercing ache, however painful, was the central experience of his life and that he would have to come to terms with it. No one
— not Aristotle, not Epicurus, not Siva Singh — would ever convince him otherwise. But then it occurred to him that Virgo and Centaurus were just as arbitrary as the rudimentary classification system he’d used for his books — Helen’s books. There were a lot of stars left out of the constellations, and nothing to stop you from drawing the lines in different ways to create different pictures. He wanted to lift his wings and fly, but he didn’t have the power. He could only let the river carry him along.
In another half hour he reached Pepe’s tavern, just before An-zalduas Park. He could hear the noise of drunken laughter before he could see the lights. Aristotle’s appetitive men, he thought. Appetitive women too, Plato’s beasts, butting each other and feeding at a trough. He remained quiet, afraid that someone might take a potshot at him if he made any noise. He rounded a bend, floated past the tables and lights on a small dock that stuck out into the river. The lights disappeared; the sounds of laughter grew fainter.
If he’d done nothing to stop himself, would he have floated all the way to the international bridge at Hidalgo? Or all the way to Brownsville and out into the Gulf? Probably not, but he didn’t find out because he started to experience pains in his chest, as if someone had placed a weight on it and was twisting his left arm at the same time. He called out, no longer worried about getting shot, but he didn’t think anyone could hear him. He turned over and tried to swim back to Pepe’s, using an easy crawl, but the river, instead of holding him up, now seemed to be trying to pull him down. He could see the lights of the tavern, but he couldn’t make any headway. After about five minutes the pain eased up and he was able to swim a little faster than the current that was carrying him downstream. As he approached the dock he called out “Help, help” and then “Hello, hello.”
A handful of patrons gathered at the end of the dock, which bobbed up and down.
“Are you okay?” a woman shouted drunkenly “Where are you? I can’t see you.”
“I don’t have any clothes on,” Rudy shouted back. “Would somebody bring me some clothes or a towel, please.”
“This ain’t a haberdashery.” Laughter.
“I’m not armed,” Rudy shouted.
“What are you doing in the river?”
“I lost my fountain pen,” he shouted. “It belonged to my wife. She brought it back from Italy”
“Oh. You’d better come up on the dock,” the voice said; “the ladder’s over here, on the side.”
Rudy swam up to the dock, which was strung with lights that looked like little red chili peppers. Hands reached out to help him, pulling him up. A towel appeared and then a glass of tequila.
“Say,” someone said, “aren’t you the guy that bought Creaky Wilson’s place?”
“Did you find your pen?” someone else asked — a man dressed like a priest.
“Yes,” Rudy said, taking the small glass of tequila, “I’m the guy. And no, I didn’t, but it’s all right. It’ll turn up.”
They helped him to a chair. Someone put some money in the jukebox and a mariachi band began to play a soulful rendition of “Viva el Amor.”
Rudy finished his tequila and chased it with sangrita, and then the man dressed like a priest drove him home.
“You want me to take you to the hospital?” the man said.
“No,” Rudy said, “I’m all right now.”
Irrigation
The idea that he might be dreaming when he thought he was awake had occurred to Rudy before — its probably occurred to everyone — but he couldn’t get too worked up about it personally. The possibility that the glass of red wine he’d drunk with his spaghetti the night before had been an illusion put into his head by an evil demon seemed equally remote, but the more he thought about it, the more he began to see that the French philosopher Rene Descartes might be right — at least about his “glimpses,” as he’d started calling his visions. The front window on the house on Chambers Street wasn’t a mysterious triptych; he wasn’t a migratory bird; the river wasn’t the river of Jordan. What had made him so sure it was time to move on and leave his old life behind? Besides, in the spring, migratory birds migrate back north.
It was the last week in April and already the temperature was in the eighties. You couldn’t see any fruits yet — not till June — but the trees were covered with beautiful blossoms and seemed to be fully committed to producing an excellent crop. It was time to irrigate. Medardo stopped by on Monday morning to say that he’d talked to the canal rider and that their water would be ready on Thursday. Rudy was glad to have something concrete to do. He’d been embarrassed about floating down the river, but in fact this little escapade had raised him in Medardo’s estimation, and Medardo suggested that they drop the formal usted and address each other as tú. After Medardo left, Rudy went into town to buy a water permit.
On Thursday morning he waited for Medardo on the veranda, drinking coffee and doodling another sketch of Plato’s cave with Helens fountain pen, which he’d found folded into Philosophy Made Simple. It was seven o’clock. It would take almost twenty-four hours to irrigate the entire grove.
“Señor Filósofo,” Medardo called to him from the drive to the veranda. “Any words of wisdom this morning before we go to work?”
Rudy smiled. “No,” he said, “but I’m looking forward to getting my hands dirty. Finally.” He didn’t want to sound too excited as they walked down the drive to the lateral canal, but he didn’t want to conceal his excitement either.
The water was lifted out of the Rio Grande at a series of pumping stations, like the one in Hidalgo, which he had visited. From the pumping stations it was released into the network of canals that irrigate the valley, which was not really a valley but a delta. The main canals carried the water as far as Alton and Edinburg, ten miles to the north, and the lateral canals, like the one that ran along the farm-to-market road at the north end of Rudy’s property, carried the water east all the way to the Gulf.
It was seven thirty when they opened the gate at the lateral canal, but one of the seals on the pump that lifted the water to the upper grove was leaking and they had to close the gate and go into town to find a new seal. By the time they’d replaced the seal and opened the first two valves, at the edge of the grove, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. They opened the gate again and walked along the rows of trees to check the microsprinklers that were located under the canopy of each tree, and then Rudy fixed sandwiches and they drank beer on the veranda.
There were 110 avocado trees on an acre. Twenty-nine and a half acres times 110 equals 3,245 trees. Minus the skips, of course — trees that had died or stopped producing. One valve could irrigate 110 trees in an hour and a half in the upper grove, where the water was forced through a series of microsprinklers. One valve could irrigate two hundred trees in the same amount of time in the lower grove, which used a gravity system. You could open two valves at a time. Rudy couldn’t figure it out in his head, but it took them five hours to irrigate the upper grove. Rudy fixed more sandwiches and they drank more beer on the veranda before going back to work.
They worked through the night opening and closing the individual valves that fed each row of trees. Each valve had its own personality, its own quirks. Medardo was familiar with them all. Some yielded to slow steady pressure, some to the tap of a rubber mallet. Some required a special wrench. A couple of the oldest valves (which should have been replaced long ago) turned clockwise, instead of counterclockwise, to open. They walked the rows of trees to check the aluminum irrigation pipes for leaks.
As they came up to the last valve, Medardo had to take a leak. Rudy fitted the wrench over the spoke of the valve wheel and struggled to open the valve by himself, but it was stubborn. Rudy strained too hard — he didn’t want Medardo to think he couldn’t manage it — and suddenly he felt as if he were being strangled. His chest tightened up like a fist, tighter than it had been when the river had taken hold of him, and he had to hang on to the valve so he wouldn’t fall down. He could hear Medardo peei
ng in the dark, heard him zip up, like someone striking a match.
In spite of the pain, Rudy tried once more to open the valve, but it wouldn’t budge.
“You’re turning it the wrong way,” Medardo said, shining his flashlight on the valve. “This is one of the old ones I was telling you about. You have to turn it clockwise.”
Rudy let go of the wrench and lowered himself to the ground.
“You all right, Rudy?”
“Just short of breath.”
Medardo turned the valve clockwise, and it opened easily
“Medardo,” Rudy said, “maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along, trying to turn the valves the wrong way.”
“All along since when?”
“I don’t know. Maybe since my wife died.”
“Rudy,” Medardo said, “you want to know what I think?”
Rudy nodded.
“I think you spend too much time worrying about what things mean, about the meaning of life. It’s not good for a person. Now I’m going to speak to you as a friend.”
“Of course.”
“You asked me about the viernes culturales, do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And I invited you to join me. Now I invite you again. Next Friday, what do you say?”
“To a whorehouse in Reynosa?”
“A whorehouse? No no no. Not the Lipstick or the Tropicana, where I send the boys. Of course not. A man like you doesn’t go to a whorehouse and pick a woman out of a lineup. No no no, nothing like that. I’m talking about a private club. At Estrella Princesa there is no lineup. At Estrella Princesa a man will always meet someone he knows — an uncle, a cousin, a friend. He can sit in a comfortable chair and have a drink and talk politics like a gentleman with a little amiguita at his side. Its all very civilized. And the women … These are not hardened professionals, señor; they’re serious young women, very beautiful too, who wish to become dental hygienists or secretaries or even assist at the university. They are especially trained, of course, by Estrella herself. She teaches them how to shop, what clothes to wear, what books to read. They’ll know how to help you out of your cave. And as the sun comes up, we’ll sip tequila and weep at the sad songs sung by the mariachis who come over from the Plaza Morelos. What do you say?”