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摘要
摘要
A powerful novel set in the Southwest, by Colorado native Jim Davidson, a writer who knows the intricacies of the region, road by dusty road.
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《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
This is a literate and distinctive first novel of damaged lives in a mining town in the 1950s. Madero, CO, is a town that grinds up families along with the ore. When longtime resident Marcus Cottin loses younger brother Neal to suicide, he resolves, once and for all, to get to the bottom of the pervasive and dark family secrets to which he and Neal were never privy. The search takes him to his loner father's mountain perch, to the Navajo Reservation, and through a host of interviews with inductees into Madero's Hall of Shame. Along the way, he unravels a complex tale of race discrimination and exploitation of Navajo miners by the "company store"Äin which his own grandparents were key players. Relentless in his pursuit of the truth, Marcus encounters the best and the worst in human nature along the trail. Haunting and very highly recommended for all public libraries.ÄSusan A. Zappia, Paradise Valley Community Coll., Phoenix (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
摘录
摘录
Prologue Just north of the border between Colorado and New Mexico, the desert slashes in from the west, blunting the southern nose of the Rockies, cutting the mountains off and pushing the Continental Divide to the east. Change here is sharp and abrupt: in some places, little more than 30 miles separate glacier-fed headwaters from bone-dry arroyos, separate elk herds from scorpions. A red-tailed hawk can sail off a rocky and icy ridge above timberline, then glide south on the crown of thermals that surge up out of the steep canyons, and finally make the hot desert floor almost without a single movement of wing. Wild rivers spill out south and west, gouging canyons and cutting walls, laying open the plys and veins that tell the story of all the tides and volcanos that made the land. It's much harder to see now, but this confusion of layers carries silver and copper and zinc and lead. Even traces of gold nest in those rocks, although the gold runs mostly in flakes, buried in the river gravels. Those words--gold and silver--spoken a few times loudly, have always drawn anxious crowds. Particularly in the late 1800s. With outstretched hands and poorly focused eyes, swarms of the hopeful clawed their way into those rugged canyons. And near the sources of most of those furious rivers--the San Juan, the LaPlata, the Dolores, the San Miguel, the Uncompahgre--mining camps were cut into the meadows and hillsides, wherever the land would sit still for it. Ragged and wild, optimistic well beyond good sense, these towns and their people prospered during the early years, taking the easy stuff--deposits on the surface and veins that were simple to follow and scrape clean. But as the holes in the mountains grew deeper, and as the holes in the graveyards began to crowd the wrought-iron cemetery fences, bad luck dimmed the shining eyes. Markets collapsed and the mines played out. One by one, the mine buildings were boarded-up and the tunnels blasted closed. Always without fanfare, sometimes in the night, those people of the calloused hands and the patched coats slipped quietly away. Houses stood empty, falling apart. Some towns would survive, prosper even, when later generations of the rich came back to play. Others would simply vanish, leaving behind scraps of tin and boards, and ironic place names on old maps. Like Nirvana. Joyful. New Eden. Still others, like Madero on the Helado River, would just wait, feeding off the scant highway traffic, ignored. Always in decay. Always about to begone. Chapter One Neal 1 I'm glad I have water. The desert dust is boiling up behind me, spilling off into the sage and rabbit brush as I drive along. It hangs in the air for a long time, floating and drifting with the wind, before it settles down into a dull coat on the prickly pear and the red rock, before it softens the edges of my own tracks. I meet and pass nobody, nor do I see another car. It's a silent world, and empty, and I wonder, vaguely, how much distance and time separates me from another living soul. They're out there, and I know it. They're just hidden, distant, out of my sight. Each time I turn off of one road onto another, the trail gets smaller and rougher and less traveled. Toward the end, sagebrush growing up between the tracks scrapes and digs at the bottom of my truck, and forces ragged images of pieces being pulled apart. I know where I'm going. But I've already taken a wrong turn or two and ended up back on some road I've driven earlier in the day, confounded to come upon my own tracks. It's nothing new. I've been through this before. It's vast, endless, this old ocean floor. The redrock cliffs out in front of me don't seem to get any closer, no matter how long I drive, and sometimes I think I'm being toyed with and fooled. But that's just the way it seems. All deserts know that trick. These lesser roads were not built, but rather just worn into place by feet and wheels, with a little help from the wind. They go through nothing and around everything, so they twist and dive and climb and veer like a tangled rope thrown, in disgust and dismay, off into the brush and rock. Suddenly down. Into a dry, ragged arroyo, across the smooth bedrock, and up and back out again, up and over a sand bank where spinning wheels have cut the road into a trench. I've stopped looking at the buttes. Too many have passed me by, these massive, million-pound sandstone fists and fingers, gesturing toward the sky, towering over me. They're too high, too sheer and they throw up too many faces. From over there, one looked like a bishop's cap, but from here, it's a leaping fish. So what's its name? Each one is a puzzle, thus, and for me, now, puzzles are in long supply. He's not expecting me, not at any particular time. Or ever. But I drive on. It's not hot. This is February, early in the afternoon. But I've been here in August before, when breathing burns, and heat dancing up out of the earth makes the whole world waver and slide in and out of focus. No, it's not hot now, but it is dry. Dry like ground bone. Any rain, any falling snow sinks presto into the ground, and whatever springs might be running now won't run for long. Friction causes easy fire, but dead wood turns to rock out here, before it has time to soften and rot. A half dozen cows stare at me, big-eyed and dull. Ganged together alongside the trunks of a grove of bare cottonwood trees, down in a sandy creek bottom, they want something from me. I can see it. Water probably. I have some. But not enough to help us all. Finally, I'm up against the tip of one of the high mesas. Boulders, huge slabs of rock that have sloughed off the mesa walls flank me on one side, like blown-up grains of sand. Walls close in on me, but slowly, patiently. They mean no harm. And as I push back into the short, rough canyon, the road itself, my trail, begins to climb. Up, up, along the rough sidehill, toward the flattened top of piñon, juniper, and cedar trees. Through the cakelayers of old ocean floor--some red, some orange, some yellow and brown. Crumbling, always changing shape. The sun is bright, straight, yellow. Not so hot, but resting, waiting for the equinox. I know that. I've come to this place before. 2 The old man's nest is still here. The beat-up little trailer still sits on the edge of the cedars, backed up against the twisted trunks like an old tin can nailed to a stump. Its windows are held together with tape, and its skin is bleached the color of a cow's skull. I'm not surprised. No. But each time I come here and see it, I think: it's too naked, too flimsy, and someday a good desert wind will blow it over the edge of the canyon. It will disappear, and become little more than curious trash down below in the rocks. The wood skirting is all but gone, gnawed away in some spots, dryrotted in others, and the tire that is left uncovered has turned flat, cracked and grey. Tufts of dry grass reach out through the holes and cracks. Something under there makes a scurrying, scratching sound. Most everything else is junk. An old compressor with half its innards gone, buckets of salvaged pipe fittings, pieces of heavy chain, a stack of rails, the wheels and buckets pulled from old mine cars. Shovel blades and hammer heads and rotten hose. A copper miner's junk, pitted and bleached and rusted, some of it half-buried in wind-blown sand. A graveyard. The steps leading up to the trailer door are solid--two short chunks of tar-blackened pine, cut from mine timbers and wedged in between rocks--and they give me a footing, a reliable base that I need, as I stand there and knock. There's no answer. I knock again. Still nothing. Then I see him, topping a set of old stairs built down into a crack in the rock, little more than a ladder, bringing him up from a mine portal below the canyon rim. He sees me, and in that instant he tries to straighten up, to look taller and stronger. But he's a little stooped and a little slow, anyway, and he uses a round-pointed shovel like a cane. I walk toward him, and he stops and takes off his sweat-crusted straw hat and wipes his forehead with his sleeve, even though there's no real heat in the air. His mustache has grown longer, bushier, and is mostly grey and white. His skin is red and wrinkled from the sun. We stand there, four, maybe five, feet apart. "Thought I heard an ore truck up here," he finally says, his voice harsh and a little too loud, the way loners talk. "No truck," I say. "Just me." He nods. "What do you want?" Not it's good to see you, or it's been a long time, or even how the hell are you. Just what do you want. "I don't know," I say. And that's partly true. Or it's mostly true. "Maybe I just wanted to see if you were still here. If the buzzards had carried off the last of your bones." My father doesn't smile, nor do I. * * * "It's gettin' late," he says a short while later, after we've tried to talk, but haven't been able to say much of anything at all. "Damned near supper time. You stayin'?" He's surprised when I say I am. Nothing really shows in his quick grey eyes, but the slow way he turns around tells me. We both know: I've never been here after dark, never spent the night before. * * * He sits outside at a table made from an old cable spool, smoking and stating out into the space over the canyon, while I carry the dinner dishes back into the trailer and wash them off. I look around as I scrape and scrub. Like the outside, the inside is patched and bleached, and not much attention has been paid to the dirt and sand that must drift in and out with the seasons. But everything has a place--every plate, book, boot and spoon goes just so, allowing him room to reach the bed, sit at the table, stand at the stove. No space can be wasted. None is. It's not in perfect order. An old book lies on his unmade bed, its leather cover stained and worn around the edges. It's an 1880 government report, I see. Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah , by someone named Dutton. Several bookmarks peek out, as though he's chosen to subdivide and emphasize in his own particular way: how he would have done it had he written the book. That's the way he is. His old lever-action. 30-30 lies there, too, with the chamber open, the hammer let down. Once before when I came, he'd said he had trouble with coyotes. "Crazy bastards," he'd said. "Got to keep 'em back. Otherwise, they learn ya. Then you can't drive 'em off anymore." By now, I think, they should have made peace. How could he not have become part coyote? He could hear the same hard silences, the snapping of a twig, the rolling of a rock, the shifting of the wind. He knew when the moon was precisely full, and when it would be gone for a night or two. And the coyotes, how could they not have learned a sort of etiquette that allowed them to slide by him without friction? Stay out of his sight, and his firelight, and his garbage. Don't wake him up, or drink his water. That's all. * * * He said little during dinner, except that if we don't get done before dark, we'll have to use the lanterns. His generator is low on gas, he says, and he doesn't want to use it up before he can get back to town. He didn't fill the cans last time in, he says, because he bought a bottle of whiskey, and then he forgot. He lights another Camel, and I see a tremor in the hand that holds the match. Then he coughs, and it's with his whole body, and I wonder how much dust has gotten down in there by now, and what it's done. * * * There's a weathered old bench, high, right on the edge, and I sit with a cup of coffee, come to watch the evening drift and slide. I don't want to be comforted. I want to keep my edge, to stay tight with my skin stretched thin across the margins. I'm here to trade pain. But perched on this bench, looking down on the floor of this dried-up sea, looking down on the buttes like round-shouldered soldiers marching off into the haze, looking down on the mythical edge of the world, I can't quite keep my bile up. We're small, the two of us, like pissants in this hard, awesome place. And soft. The coyotes will get us in the end. I sit, sipping my coffee, hearing birds I can't see. Birds that sound like jays and crows. Raspy, talking tough. Their taunts bounce around in the rocks like hard rubber balls. I listen for other sounds. But there are none. And when the birds are gone, there is nothing. Silence, pressing down hard, holding the world dead solid still. I want a rock to fall. Or a leaf to rattle. Or the two-note song of a chickadee to slip out of the fading light. But the desert calls for a moment of silence. So I try not to breathe, try to stay mute and still and invisible. And for a quarter of an hour I can do that. Sit and watch and listen to nothing. * * * When he walks my way, I know it. He can't move without grating the sand, without rubbing against the air. I don't turn to look, barely look his way when he sits on the other end of the bench, holding his own cup. He squints for a minute, head bent toward the canyon. Then he points, but I can't tell at what. "Coyote," he says. "Can't see him now." "Your eyes must still be good," I say, but he doesn't answer, so we sit and watch. How long, I wonder, how many evenings, until you no longer see the desert at all, but instead just see the end of another in a string of numberless days? How long before you can barely fight back the urge to jump? "What's on your mind?" he asks, after several minutes have passed heavily. Blue-black shadows have started to lie down behind the boulders in the canyon, and long, thin shadows stretch out on the easternmost sides of the buttes. "You know that Neal is dead." His answers never come quickly. "I got your letter," he says finally. "I didn't know for sure. You never answered." "Meant to." "It doesn't matter," I say, and that's true. I never expected to hear from him. "I would have come for services, had you let me know in time." "Didn't make any difference," I say. "He didn't know whether you were there or not." My mother's sister, the one that had seen Neal and me through the second ten years of our lives, would not have wanted him there. No one from that side of the family would have wanted to see him standing there, beside the grave, hat in hand. Thirty years was a long time, and for much of it, he'd been holed up out here in one old mining claim or another. Who knows what he might have done? Or what they might have done to him? "Besides, that old truck of yours would never have made Tucson." He doesn't say anything for a while. "Am I supposed to do somethin'?" I'm making him uncomfortable, but that's all right. He knows that more than a month has passed since Neal died, and he wonders what we're really talking about, what is hanging unformed in the air. This is his life, his land, and he doesn't allow complications here. "No." I mean yes, but I can't start in with him that way. Can't ask him for much. "I just wanted to talk to you about something." He looks a little annoyed, as though I'm about to cause him trouble. Maybe I am. "What do you want?" "Time is running out for us," I say. "For the Cottins." He stares at me. Maybe I'm making no sense. "You and me. We're all that's left." Wrinkles roll up across his brow, and he spits on the ground. When it comes to talk like this, he wants to make it as hard for me as he can. "But I want to know something. Before we're both ..." I stumble here. This is a heavy rock to get rolling. "I want to know whether this name is worth saving before we just let it die out." He chews on that for a minute before he answers. "Just a name. What the hell's a name?" "Is it? That's all it is to me. A name. No faces. No tombstones. No stories." He just stares out across the canyon, like maybe he's gone deaf. Like maybe he's never going to answer again. "You want me to save it, you do something for me. You tell me who the hell you are. Who you were. Where you came from." "Why's that?" "So I can decide. If there's anything in this blood ..." It's hard to go on. "... that's decent. Or whether it's meant to end with me." He turns his head slowly, and looks at me. "That's a bunch of bullshit," he says. "Blood's blood." I don't really expect him to help me with this thick, heavy rock. I know I'll have to keep pushing by myself. "Okay," I say. And I unfold a single piece of paper out of my shirt pocket and hand it to him. "Just give me a little help, here. Tell me about little things like this." It's a bad photocopy of two small newspaper clippings. They tell how he's gone to jail for dynamiting the workings of a company called Cable Minerals. Twice. He reads, and I watch his face for a sign, and I see one. A little drop in the corner of his mouth. A deepening of his squint. He stares hard off across the canyon again, and I can see the muscles moving in the tops of his jaws as he clenches and releases his teeth. His fingers clamp tighter on each other. "Let me tell you somethin', mister," he says after a long while, his voice rough and flat. "This means nothin' to you. Nothin'. It was a long time ago." I wait on him for a change. "If this is the kind of crap you want to pry into, well, you can just pack your shit and head 'er right on down the road. When I figger you need to know somethin' like this, I'll tell you about it." "Neal and I, we waited a long time," I say. "Waited for anything from you. But it never came. So now I'm here. And I want to know what kind of a man does this. Runs. Hides out under rocks. Won't talk." I pause to catch my breath. "You've never told me shit." "Not gonna argue with you, boy. It's my business, and if I wanna bury the son of a bitch, that's just the way she goes." He stands up and dumps his cold coffee onto the rocks, and starts to walk away in the growing shadows. Then turns around and looks at me. For a few heartbeats, he says nothing. "Go home," he says finally, louder than before. "Go home and ask all those sunsabitches on the old lady's side of the family what kinda blood you got. They have all the answers, them suck-asses. They always did." He walks away into the junipers, breaking his way through the shadows, not waiting for an answer. * * * I sit for a while, feeling a cool breeze come up and sigh its way along the rim. The rustle of the needles. Silence broken. It would have to start this way, I think. Even if he wanted to talk to me, to tell me everything that had happened, it would have to start this way. That's just the way we are, the way we always are. Finally, I get to my feet and throw my own cold coffee over the edge. And as I do, the coyote down in the canyon starts up a sharp bark, a comment that I can't read. I walk down the rim fifty yards, then cut back through the dim junipers and pitons to my pickup. There, I dig around in the back, throwing boxes and tools around until I find my little pack and my sleeping bag, and I toss them out onto the sandy ground. I find a tarp and a pad and toss them out. As I lift my head, a glimmer catches in the corner of my eye. A match. A lighted lantern, and then it disappears as the trailer door closes with a thud. Just before the darkness closes in, the coyote signs off with one short, fading howl. A reminder, I think, about who owns what. 3 My brother shot himself in a motel room in Las Vegas. All alone, facing another round of drug charges he knew he couldn't run from and couldn't beat. Nobody heard the shot. The night was wet and miserable, and nobody heard much of anything over the hiss of the rain and the roll of the thunder. It could have been a hammer, or a slamming door. It could have been most anything. Two days passed before they found him, and they took another two days to figure it all out. Still, the call came in the night. Calls like that always do. Maybe the job always goes to somebody on the night shift, somebody low down on the sheriff's totem pole. I couldn't be surprised. In our few conversations over the past three years, he'd always seemed to be posing the question: what's the use? What's the fucking use? It was in his choice of words, in his tone of voice, in his long, heavy silences. And when he wrote, rarely, he always seemed to say, "One town's like another. The nights are all the same. Then I stop watching, and things turn bad. I don't know how it happens or when it's coming. I only know that it does. And when I wake up, things are worse than they were before." So what's the use? He'd been in jail twice before. Once for beating a woman he'd picked up in a bar. Another time for holding up a liquor store with a stolen gun. With coke in his pocket. No, I couldn't be surprised, but I could be hurt. Hurt in a way I could never explain. After our mother died, when he was ten and I was twelve, years after our father had faded and faded until he disappeared into the rocks, Neal and I stood together back to back, leaning hard against the tides and the winds and the blackish clouds. We propped each other up, and made promises to each other in bed at night. We talked about the day when we would have our go at the world. But even then, I could tell that he barely believed. He seemed to know that the storm dogs would always come back again. And eventually they would bring down the sky. And now, he was gone. It was a hard, confusing pain. * * * A week later, they left his belongings at my door. Five boxes. That was all. Maybe truck drivers for cowboy bands never do have much, I thought. Only what fits in the empty spaces, around the speakers and the mixing boards and the costumes. Life reduced. Defined by spaces in the back of a truck. Clothes mostly, and towels from everywhere. Chicago. Dallas. Calgary. And there was a box of books. Some serious reading, like Kerouac and Conrad. And some not, like L'Amour and MacDonald. Beyond that, not much. But there was a note. It simply said good-bye and sorry for the mess. He was tired, worn out, and things looked dark and bleak and every day it seemed to rain. He wished he could do something about the goddamned rain. But he couldn't, and he was getting out before the storms got worse. That's what he had to look forward to. Darker skies. Harder rain. More time in jail. And there was this: "You were always the hawk, Markus, and I was always the crow. I was born to be the crow. It's something you will probably never understand. Maybe about both of us." And this: "I found this stuff in mother's boxes a long time ago. I always wanted to show it to you and ask you what it meant. I've looked at it a thousand times. And I'm tired of it. My gift to you." His note was clipped to an old brown envelope, and on it, in her distinctive, floral style, our mother had written, "Save for the Boys." Inside, two short clippings from unidentified newspapers. One with the date Aug. 9, 1971 inked on the top, saying that Andrew Cottin had been found guilty of dynamiting a Cable Minerals mill in New Mexico and had been sentenced to six months in jail. Little more. The other, about the same length, was dated June 8, 1972, and said that Andrew Cottin had been found guilty of dynamiting a Cable Minerals mill in Colorado, and sentenced to two years in jail as a repeat offender. And there was a yellowed, brittle photograph that had been clipped out of a different newspaper. Old. Much older. In it, a thin, gaunt-faced man in handcuffs was being led up a set of stairs by a bigger man. Old halftone grains took away the eyes, but not the look of the lost. No date. No caption. No hope. It wasn't our father. But it was somebody we were supposed to know. Or, at least, know about. 4 The next day, I gave his clothes to the Salvation Army and left for the desert. Toward Dos Cabezas and the Chiricahuas, out there where I could slow it all down and sort through it and let it lie there in the dirt. A sleeping bag, a brand new bottle of tequila, and Neal's note. Some matches and a cup. I put it into a little bag and drove east, not seeing the traffic on the road, not hearing the white lines saying hello/ good-bye, hello/good-bye, hello/good-bye. Not smelling the rain that was trying to form in the sky. Just driving. Going east. * * * Maybe the little town I stopped in wasn't a town. It didn't have a name. At least I don't remember seeing one. But I stopped there anyway, at a run-down little store, because I was out of gas, and so it didn't matter where I was. After I'd pumped the gas, I bought a couple of cans of black-eyed peas and a loaf of bread, a package of wieners and a jar of orange juice. A jug of water. There wasn't much else on the dusty shelves, except for packages of hard dry rolls and boxes of candy bars, and I didn't want any of that. The old man behind the counter took my money and said thank you in a careful, practiced way that told me those might have been the only English words he knew. I was loading the stuff in the back end of my truck when I felt something touching my leg. A light touch, just barely there. When I looked down, I saw that it was a hand, a very small, very dirty hand, on the end of a very dirty arm that belonged to a big-eyed little girl. I guessed that she was four, maybe, or five. "Chewin' gum?" she asked, looking up at me with big round brown eyes and holding out a box that contained perhaps six little pieces of wrapped gum. "No thanks. Don't use it." She set the box carefully on the ground and dug into an old, wrinkled paper bag. "Buy my Bible?" she asked, holding out a book. "Please, señor." It was a Bible, all right. One of the hotel/motel type, with a red paperboard cover that was scuffed and partly torn. Something she'd found in a ditch along the highway, I guessed. "No thanks," I said. "Can't read." "Please, señor. Ees bery nice." I looked at her eyes. Looked at the dirty little dress she had on. Looked at hair that hadn't seen a comb in days. "How much?" "One dollars?" It was a question, not a price. As I drove away with my Bible, I could see her in the rear view mirror, dragging her sack and running on happy legs as fast as she could back toward the store. * * * The back roads grew smaller and rougher, in stages, just as I wanted. Finally, I'd gone far enough, and I stopped in the bottom of an arroyo crossing and backed my truck up next to a half-dozen cottonwood trees. Then it began to rain. Not a heavy rain, just a squall blowing through, but steady for a while. I jumped out, grabbed the tequila and the orange juice, and climbed back in. The drops pattered down in a rattle that killed all other sound, in a rhythm like life ticking away on a clock, only faster. I drank about that. Water running down the windshield played tricks with the shape of things. I drank about that. Storm dogs brought down the sky. I drank about that, too. * * * The clouds broke just as the sun was going down. For two minutes, maybe four, everything glistened and gleamed. The rocks. The slabs and barrels of cactus. The yucca leaves. And the air was sweet, and it could be felt and tasted. Then the sun dropped behind a hill, and the colors muddied and went flat. The red rocks turned brown, and all the greens faded off into a dull grey. The rain nectar left with the light. I stumbled and almost fell when I climbed out of the cab. My thoughts were clear enough, just fuzzed at the edges, but my gyro was off and my legs had lost their bones. I walked around, picking out the flat spots, sleeping places, fire sites, and as I did, the tracks I left stumbled off to the left, then the right, and back again. Random. Chaotic. Circular. By the time I'd gathered a pile of cottonwood branches and limbs off the ground, little remained of the day. Shadows had gone deep black, and even the high rocks had gone a dark reddish grey. Off somewhere, an owl warned the mice to move quickly and to stay close to home. Hoo-hoo. Hoo. Hoo-hoo. Hoo. I hooted back, and waved, but he didn't answer. I made a pile of twigs, but even in my semi-numb hands, they felt wet to the touch, and I knew they wouldn't light. I needed paper. First, I took the cellophane off my wieners and bread, wrapped the food in a spare tee shirt, and crammed that paper under the wood. One match, a whoosh, a couple of crackles, and it was gone. Too quickly burned to help the wood at all. Then I tried a couple of old envelopes that I found under the seat of my truck. This time, the paper burned longer, and I could blow on it and move the wood around. A little plume of smoke, an instant of flame, a fading spire of vapor, then nothing. Burned out. Gone. I took another pull out of the liquor bottle, straight, and thought about just crawling into my sleeping bag for the night. I was starting to feel chilled, lost, confused about the time and the place and why I was there. A half moon was up, but that looked cold, too. And the owl had gone away. Then I remembered my one-dollar Bible. I took the book, and couple of wieners, a few slices of bread, the tequila and the orange juice and sat down next to the small circle of rocks that I'd made. Then I dug out my pocket knife and began to slice my way into Genesis, and pile the paper on. Somewhere in Exodus, the fire took hold. The warmth, the food and the juice, and time cleared my head a little. I sat there, cross-legged, layering on wet wood and scripture, staring at the flame. Thinking about the day. About the year. About Neal and my father and all that I knew and didn't know. Leviticus. Numbers. Deuteronomy. Joshua. Judges. When ancient philosophy burns, where does it go? Does it just hang there in the air, waiting to be collected and organized again? Or does it blow away on the wind, a word here, a thought there, and take root somewhere else? Or is it just gone, gone, gone? Destroyed by a man with cold hands. Ruth. The Samuels. The Kings. We, three kings. The Kingston Trio. Threes. A handy, triangular way of looking at things. A pattern, like on an Indian rug. Everything tied to everything else. More wisdom for the fire. The Big Three: the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Capitalized. That stuck with me for awhile. What about the father with the small f ? The son with the small s? The holy ghost that had once been a brother, my brother, but who was now just ether, new heat on the inside of the earth? It was getting late. My mind was getting bigger than my head. But this was the stuff I'd come there for, my way of spreading life out on the ground, opening it up for a closer look. * * * We did have the father. A horse's ass, no matter what direction you sliced the bacon. Out of step on purpose, just to screw up the parade. Mad. A man who liked to stick his chin right in people's chests and spit and yell. Better left alone. "It wasn't unusual during those first years we were married for him to come home in the middle of the day with a black eye, or bleeding from the nose. After a while I just stopped asking. I knew." That was my mother's take, her little history. One of the few memories of him she ever provided to us. Fired again, or quit. The mining engineer who would be regularly undone, over and over and over again. By his stubbornness. By his anger. By his hatred of authority. "He could never tell me why. He wouldn't even try." Within five years after they were married, she'd told me one night as I dried dishes for her, he'd fought and argued his way out of every decent job opportunity he would ever have. Blackballed. Embargoed. Persona non grata . But he didn't starve. He could still work and make a day's pay. But as a miner, not a boss. As a laborer, not an engineer. They could handle his anger and his distrust so long as he hauled out the ore, so long as he was pounding away down there in the dark, out of sight and far enough away from their ears. They just didn't want to have to sit around a table with him. And every job seemed to take him further and further away from home. And then he was gone, too far removed to ever be coming back. And in that leaving, that slipping away from us, he left us to learn to change tires and carve turkeys and catch ground balls on our own. We didn't speak of him often. We had nothing kind to say. * * * By then, the wood would have probably burned well enough by itself. But I was caught up by that little ritual of burning up philosophies that I knew nothing about, playing with names. Getta Job. Jeremiah Johnson. Amos 'n Malachi. I continued to cut out the pages and toss them in. Evening mass, sung by St. José of Cuervo. And we did have the son. One now, where once there were two. And what of him? He wrote books on art and paid his bills. He had nightmares, but not always. He was average. He had lost his wife. "Frankly," that wife had said one night when we'd taken turns cursing the darkness we found in each other, "I hate poetry. I don't even like books." And I don't like you, I thought, staring into the fire. I wish there was a chapter named Allison in the New Testament. I'd rip it out carefully, ritually, and burn it page by page. "I didn't write poetry," I said to the owl, as though I had to explain, somehow. * * * I layered on more wood, and laid back down with my head on my sleeping bag, watching every star in the northern hemisphere wink on and off. I wanted to finish the conversation between myself and the owl before I ran out of Bible. About Neal. The third point on my triangle, the leg that once seemed to hold everything together. A holy ghost, now, in every sense that I cared about ... But I passed out. Somewhere between Peter and John. When I woke up, sometime in the early hours of the morning, the fire had burned out and I was stiff with the cold. The half moon was gone. I unrolled my bag in the darkness, pulled off my boots, and crawled in, helpless in my shivers, with a throbbing in my head. Then I began to warm up slowly, and just before I fell asleep again, I heard the owl one more time. He said that he'd once been a crow, too. But now he was in charge of the nighttime sky. Hoo. Hoo-hoo. Hoo. * * * I took a walk the next morning, up the dry wash, then higher, through the prickly pear and broken rocks, climbing the ridge. My head hurt some, and my arms and legs ached, and I was hoping to find a crumbled mission, maybe, or at least an old shack. Something old to sit on, some rotting board that proved that every plan gets changed, every glory finally fades away. Ashes to rise out of. Perspective. But I found nothing, so instead I walked until my legs gave out, and I sat down next to a big warm rock. The day was new, and my mind was raw from the scrubbing it had gotten. I felt a vague guilt, somehow, over my drunkard's Bible school, but I felt cleaner for it, too. So I sat there, letting the mysteries evaporate. Letting light shine in, brightly, until it hurt. Letting the meat of the matter dry a little, and shrink closer to the bone. * * * I pulled Neal's note out, and I read it again. Then again. I looked at the clippings and the old photograph. I held them out in front of me, and let them all sit in my hands. Waiting for something to leak out of the paper and through my skin. Waiting for a whisper that I knew was there. Waiting to hear. A little lizard crawled onto a rock next to me, and sat, turning just the right color against the rock, stalled in the warm morning sun. For five, maybe ten minutes, we watched each other watch each other. Barely blinking. Locked in and at rest. "It's something you'll probably never understand," Neal had said. But as I let myself go numb and still under the stare of the lizard, let myself fade out of my own focus, I thought I did. I thought I understood. I'd gone to see my father three times in the past ten years. It took some asking, some hunting, but I'd found him. Alone. Civil, but always a little on edge. Each time, we'd talked for an hour or two about little things. Each time, I'd lost my nerve, and could barely bring up the past. I'd gone there pulled by some sense of duty that I couldn't describe, and then I'd failed badly at it. We'd shake hands and turn away, and I'd promise myself never to pick at old scabs again. Even old scabs bleed. But Neal hadn't seen our father since the last time he walked out the family door. Never. And I'd wondered about that. Once, when I asked him about hunting our father up, his eyes clouded over, and he wouldn't answer. He just turned and walked away. There was anger in his steps. And now I thought I saw into it all. The package of his good-bye, the collage built around his note, was his final message to me. A picture, drawn to replace words he could never allow himself to form or write or say. Look hard. You have to see it, though the light is dim and going fast. After spending so many years chasing himself around in the dark, hiding and seeking both, Neal had finally escaped: he'd found someone, something else, to blame. It was our old man. And maybe all the Cottins who had ever lived before him. Guilt replaced by dirt in the blood. Poor crops sprung from bad seed. Destiny. Was he saying a touch of madness came with the Cottin name? Or was it a touch of evil? That much was not clear. Was he warning me, or just pleading his own case before some drugged-up dream of a final judge? That wasn't clear either. But as I pictured him there in his last hours, trying passionately to force little fragments into some kind of a whole, I saw a man who got it all mostly wrong. Neal's problems were his own. Unique to him. Coming from him. And it was not our father, or his father before him, who pulled the trigger in Las Vegas that night. But in a way, he got part of it, something of it, right, too. There was something in the darting, shifting greyness of the old man's eyes. A touch of madness? A touch of genius? Or was it just a touch of plain old dimestore fear? Copyright © 1999 James A. Davidson. All rights reserved.目录
Prologue | p. ix |
Neal | p. 1 |
Old Tom | p. 27 |
Arvo Belke | p. 65 |
Billy Yazzie | p. 109 |
Claire Sadler | p. 155 |
The Lady | p. 201 |
Andrew Cottin | p. 263 |
Old Pictures on Old Walls | p. 289 |