The Great Spring

  Our pace becomes more leisurely. In mileage it’s as long, but the ground is all level and we stay atop one mesa. What a hokey hike, I think, but don’t say anything.

  Robin first came to New Mexico on a Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship in 1978, when she was twenty-eight, and fell in love with Taos. After that she came almost every summer through the eighties. She’d finish her teaching job and hold her breath till she was on the plane to return to New Mexico. She’d always come back alone, jeopardizing relationships. Who was this third character—this land? Many of her lovers from Cambridge had no interest in the dry dirt. Where was the ocean? they wondered. She was an instructor in writing at MIT. Then she moved on to Penn State, eventually landing a full professorship, and came west less frequently.

  She stayed at my solar beer-can and tire house on the Taos mesa in the early nineties for two summers when I was on retreat. We used to have discussions about her giving it all up and moving out.

  “How will I make a living?” she asked. “I’m a poet.”

  I entreated her to take a chance. She could become a shortorder cook, a landscaper, a house painter. See what evolved. “Everyone in Taos makes up their life.”

  She always said she couldn’t.

  We reach the spot where we can see the Rio Grande winding green and slow four hundred feet below. Shallow in this part, sandbars appear in the middle.

  I’m a bit cheered. We perch on rocks and gaze down. “Let me see the map again.”

  I look closely. “Hey, look, we can hike down and walk along the river.” Halfway down the descent the black map line turns to brown. I look it up on the symbol chart.

  “Unmaintained.” I follow the brown line. “We can end at Frijoles Canyon and hike up through Big Falls. It’s gorgeous. I’ve done it tons of times.”

  “I don’t know. We could get lost. What if the trail gives out?”

  “No worry. We can follow the river. We can even walk in it if we need to. It’s not deep.” This was the wrong thing to say. I glance over at her and she’s aghast.

  Suddenly my aching feet and the small of my back where the weight of the backpack shifts don’t bother me. I’m hungry to get down there, excited. “C’mon let’s check it out.”

  The path gets rockier and is descending not the way the map says. But who cares?

  “Hey, Robin, have you ever read Stegner? He’s a Western writer, really good.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” she says.

  “He wrote this book Angle of Repose—it won the Pulitzer. It’s a thick book and halfway through you want to quit, but you keep going. It’s about easterners who move west—Idaho, I think—but they are always writing to friends and relatives back home, thinking they’ll return. And every time they go back, they feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t work. They don’t realize how they’ve changed—”

  “Nat, I want to go back. I don’t think this is right.”

  “C’mon, just to that curve. I know where we’re going. We can’t get lost.” I continue about Stegner: “They’ve become western without knowing it. They never go back, but they keep looking back.” I’m sailing along, high on adrenaline.

  “Nat, I want to go back. I don’t see a trail down there.”

  The ground has turned white and steep with loose shale, but it’s definitely negotiable. We can bushwhack down this arroyo.

  “I’m afraid I’ll twist my ankle. I don’t see the river. We’re in the wrong canyon.”

  “See that line of color? That’s salt cedar. It only grows along a river. The river’s down there. C’mon.” I can see rows of new green and pink. Now I’m like a horse sensing the water. My nostrils are flared, flanks ready to charge ahead.

  Robin digs in her heels way above me. I have never been hiking with anyone who doesn’t like an edge of the unknown, a little danger.

  “We won’t get back before dark.”

  Who cares? I think. I’ve never huddled in these canyons through the night, but it probably won’t drop below thirty-two degrees. I’m in my T-shirt now; I’ve shed my long-sleeve shirt, as well as my sweater. I can’t imagine being cold.

  She calls out again, “I can’t do it.”

  I close my eyes and gulp in a long breath. We could go our separate ways.

  I breathe out. I can’t leave her. I heave my pounding heart around and climb toward her.

  “You’ll never want to hike with me again,” she says.

  “Yes, I will. Nice safe hikes. Ones I’ve been on before.” I reach her.

  “You go first,” she says.

  “Afraid I’ll bolt?” All the wind is out of me. The climb is steep. My calves burn. We don’t speak.

  “You’re braver,” she says after a while. “I need more security.”

  “It hasn’t been easy,” I say. “I had to make my own way. I had no family, no support behind me.”

  “But when it was tough, you had grit.”

  “There’s a plucked chicken deep in me. The powerful one writes a book, and when it gets published, she’s on to something else. The plucked chicken is left to face the crowd.”

  The way back is longer than I thought. We get lost again and end up coming down a different switchback, with the sun resting on the rim. Eventually we reach the visitors’ center.

  “I’m low on gas,” I tell Robin. “Can you follow me out? There’s a station in White Rock.” But first I want to linger among the trees in this deep old canyon. Robin wants to hurry along before there’s no light.

  We drive up the long two-lane highway, away from the secret curve of ancient habitation, into familiar lights, toward a broken pizza sign up ahead.

  I pull into the corner station. “Wait one moment while I run to pee.”

  When I approach her car, she is listening to a CD course on classical music. It’s playing Brahms.

  “Listen to how beautiful this is.” She gets out of the car and we hug. “Let’s keep in touch,” she says, “and don’t forget to fill up.”

  After she pulls away, I feel a great longing to be in Taos again but turn my car toward the thousand lights of Santa Fe.

  On the radio, All Things Considered is interviewing a colonel in the army who gives legal counsel and defends military privates. Several people vouch for his supreme integrity. Then he speaks. He’s quitting after twenty years of service. “The legal system is a sham now,” he says, “especially Guantanamo.” He defended a fifteen-year-old who confessed to killing an American soldier only after they chained him into bent-over positions. Every time he fell over they lifted him up. After five or six hours he urinated on himself. They threw Lysol on the floor and used his body for a mop. Then they stood him up again and left him.

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I knew this stuff was possible. I’d just read Imperial Reckoning, about what the British did to the Mau Mau in Kenya, but this was my country. The announcer says he couldn’t find anyone who would confirm the torture.

  The colonel says that boys are returning from Iraq with PTSD and are discharged from the army as crazy. He says, “We did this to them. We need to help them, not reject them.”

  My beloved grandfather often repeated to me, “You don’t know how good it is here. There is nothing like America.” He was a Jew who ran from the Cossacks. I inherited his love of this land and was even learning to embrace all of it—the East and the West, which he did not know.

  I slid into town, making a left onto the night street, knowing that all of us are at a cliff edge and the trail is no longer in sight.

  7

  Archer City

  I

  On the two-and-a-half-hour drive north from Dallas, the ride gets continually more rural until you think you are lost, or certainly nuts to imagine finding something. Even the few cows are bored out of their minds. And the road narrows even more. My friend next to me wants to turn around—“There’s nothing here.”

  But I know there is. Archer City is where Larry McMurtry was brought up. The writer I admired most in my beginnin
g years of putting pen to paper. And that admiration stayed with me, held steady.

  I read Leaving Cheyenne for the first time in the early seventies, when I was living in a small adobe with an outhouse and no running water in Talpa, New Mexico; I gave it a second read four years later in the Bahamas, lying in bed with a terrible flu, while my new husband stalked the bare back of the beaches alone. My husband’s father and mother had both just died, within six months of each other, in their mid-fifties—one of a heart attack, one of cancer. While he was going mad with grief, I was transported through the book to the range, to a woman named Molly and the two men who loved her, Gil and Johnny—I still remember their names.

  McMurtry wrote this second book at twenty-one.

  My good friend Eddie Lewis got me to read All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, another early novel of McMurtry’s. At the time this one had a university-press publisher and was autobiographical—in feeling, anyway. The main character was in his early twenties and his first book made it big (which also happened to McMurtry), and the book showed the ensuing pain of success, the pressure, the alienation. In the end the young writer is in the river—the Rio Grande—trying to sink his next manuscript, and the pages keep rising to the surface all around him—hundreds of pages. He pounces on them, pushing them down, trying to drown them.

  Of his other books I read—The Desert Rose, Terms of Endearment, Cadillac Jack, Moving On, Buffalo Girls—some took place in Texas. Some were located in other places.

  Eddie’s mother, Alberta, had once met McMurtry at a rummage sale in Washington, DC, where she lived. McMurtry owned a rare books store in Georgetown and was always on the lookout for antique books.

  In the mideighties, as his hometown of Archer City, the setting for some of his novels, was slowly becoming a ghost town, McMurtry bought up the buildings and made each one a bookstore. One building held books of poetry, another history. He said that whenever an independent bookstore any place in the country went out of business, he bought up the stock and brought the books home. His family herded cattle; he was going to herd books.

  I don’t remember when I read The Last Picture Show, but it was soon after reading Leaving Cheyenne. I’d already seen the movie, and this time the film was damn near as good as the book. Empty time, an almost empty town, a football player, a coach, his wife, a billiard parlor, wind—and a terrible loneliness. Though McMurtry had Archer City in mind when he wrote, I had forgotten that it was also the actual stage set for the movie.

  By the time I drove to Archer City, I had been a successful writer for more than twenty years, but sitting there I still had stirrings of longing, gratitude, and homage.

  I barely close the car door, heading for some wooden steps on a raised platform in the center plaza. No traffic. No people passing on the sidewalks. Midday sun. Silent enough to hear the flap of a crow’s wing overhead. I am physically in the center of a novel I have loved.

  At the main office, a young woman, fresh out of majoring in English Lit, attends the desk. “You pick out your books, come back here and pay.” She hands us a map.

  “Does Larry McMurtry ever show up?” I ask.

  “You just missed him. He went home for lunch. He lives down the road.” She pointed to the left. “He’ll be back in an hour. You’ll see his white Cadillac pull up.”

  I am going to meet Larry McMurtry in the flesh?

  I try to act nonchalant. “Maybe I’ll pick up one of his books and have him sign it.”

  “His books are probably the only ones we don’t stock. We do that on purpose. He doesn’t want to sign.”

  The only other people browsing through the stores are a single book dealer from Oklahoma and a man, driving through, headed for Louisiana.

  I plant myself directly across the street from the office in the floor-to-ceiling poetry building. I run my finger along the book spines, too jumpy to settle into any one poem or poet. I glance frequently out the window across the broad street. No white Cadillac yet. Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones before he was Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Mark Strand, Anne Sexton. I don’t even know what McMurtry looks like. I’d never seen a photo of him—and he never showed up at writing conferences.

  A white Cadillac slips across the front door of the office and parks. I grab a book—I can’t walk into the office empty-handed.

  I cross the street.

  The doorknob turns easily. I feel its imprint on my hand. The office is empty but for books along the walls and a man in his sixties, maybe five feet eight inches, nondescript, wearing a white shirt.

  “Larry McMurtry?”

  He nods, indicating we could sit at the round table right there. The intern had called ahead. He knew there was a visitor who wanted to meet him. He had all afternoon. We are not in New York, not in LA.

  He gestures with his hand. What would I like to talk about?

  “I read your books,” I say.

  He waits.

  “I love them. They mean a lot to me.” His face is open, listening.

  I look down. I look up. “I live in New Mexico. I came here to see Archer City.” I can’t think. The old litany from childhood rises up in me: You are nobody, nothing.

  He bends his head to the left.

  “Well, I have to pay for this book.” I jump up abruptly and open the cover. Seven dollars, penciled on the used flap. I take out my wallet and lay down a five and two singles.

  “Thank you.” I glance at him across the table. My eyes dart to the chair next to him, the photo behind. “I have to go.”

  Clutching the book, I run out, find my friend. She has been ready for a while.

  “Could you drive?” I ask, and as the car speeds south I whip out my spiral notebook and pen Larry McMurtry a six-page letter—both sides—telling him how I feel about his work, the town, the sky, the trees by the road. I apologize for being unable to speak. My heart was in my throat, I tell him. I pour out everything I can think of, and I can’t wait to mail it, to get it out of my hands.

  “Why didn’t you just tell him you wrote books?” my friend asks.

  Maybe I should have, maybe I even did—I don’t know.

  I never received an answer to the letter. I didn’t expect one.

  So many years later, I still go over it in my head: I should have invited him to dinner. I should have told him all about my upbringing in Brooklyn—no books on our shelves either. Told him I once rode a horse named Thunder. I should have tried something subtle—handed him a tangerine.

  II

  Six years later, I return with a different friend, Bill, to Archer City. This time I notice more as we drive north. Through Denton—I love that name—along a long, flat stretch on Highway 380W; past Mr. Porky’s, a barbecue joint; past rows of rolled hay in brown winter fields—it is November—with low-hanging clouds. Past three horses, one lying down in the middle of the day, past Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Assembly of God, then an unlikely sign for a Muslim cemetery, then a line of quick signs, one after the other, for electronics, tires, pigs for sale, Prairie Estates, ending with a Phillips 66. A patch of suburban brick houses called Highland Hills, oddly displaced, nothing around them. A burned-out double wide, patches of low-growing cacti. Past Bridgeport, population 1,114.

  I’m alert, anticipating this visit.

  In Jacksboro, about forty miles before Archer City, we stop for lunch at Nana Lou’s Kitchen. My friend found this place in an issue of Texas Monthly, featuring an article about the state’s best small-town cafés.

  The waitress—with a thick Texas twang, wearing a pink Longhorns shirt—seats us near a window. Across the patterned curtains, cowboys lasso steers.

  I ask her, “Did you know the person from the magazine who did the review?”

  “No, only after he called to confirm that we had eight tables.” She holds a pad and pen in hand, ready to take an order.

  “Have you ever been to Archer City?” I ask her.

  “No.” She shakes her head.

  “Do you know Larry McMurt
ry?”

  She shakes her head again.

  “He wrote Lonesome Dove.”

  “Oh, yeah. I just had no idea who came in here.”

  I glance over at my friend across the table and we both take the exquisite leap—she thinks McMurtry wrote the restaurant review.

  Bill orders the chicken-fried steak and biscuits with gravy.

  “Oh, so that’s what it is,” I say when it’s placed in front of him. Often when I’ve seen it on a menu, I’ve played in my head: Is it chicken? Is it steak? The steak of a chicken? I never thought to ask anyone. Now I know: a steak deep-fried in batter like they fry chicken.

  And the gravy is white.

  I have a patty melt and it is good.

  We pass the sign for Archer City: population 1,848.

  The first thing we see is the Royal Theater, this time with fresh, sky-blue paint on the marquee. A box of pansies on the sidewalk with the Texas Star emblem on the outside of the box.

  We go into the first bookstore building nearest the movie theater. A huge warehouse of ARCHITECTURE, ART, CRITICISM. Bill finds an out-of-print southern cookbook he’s interested in, but it’s $120.

  I hadn’t quite noticed before how carefully categorized under subject every single book is, clearly lined up, shelved in order, but with no file catalog.

  We browse for a while and then walk down the block to an antique store, not part of the book complex.

  As soon as we walk in, the saleswoman, without our asking, says the McMurtry books are in the back. Obviously, she knows we are from out of town.

  We walk straight back and thumb through them. I select a copy of All My Friends.

  At the register I ask, “Does he mind that you sell his books?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Oh, sure. We went to school together.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Real smart.”

  “What’s he like now?”

  “Strange.”