The Same River Twice (9 page)

Buried beneath my sleeping bag lay dinosaur bones mixed with bison, antelope, and Sioux. The barometer of intelligence is the innate ability to adapt, to tame for the conqueror. Maybe wild and dead was better, like bison, Crazy Horse, and wolves. I watched the sky, wondering if I was living at the edge of adaptability, cherishing the residue of death.

I thought of Bill's belief that America's greatest contributions to world culture came from the West.

“The all-night diner,” he'd said. “And the billboard. You can get coffee and talk at any time you want. The billboard always tells you where you are.”

“Time and space. Cowboy science.”

“That's what I like about you, Chris. You're so damn dumb you don't know you're smart. Like Mr. Charles in the Nam.”

He turned his head slightly away, enough so that I knew to avert my gaze. The tears were coming down his face. His breathing was normal and he didn't sob. It was as if his head was so filled with sorrow that it had sprung a couple of leaks. When it passed he looked at me, his eyes hard and ancient as a trilobite's. “The West wasn't tamed,” he said. “It was corralled for slaughter.”

I woke early and on the move, despising Nebraskans for their cultural politesse. A man couldn't buy a pack of smokes without being offered a lighter, exhorted to have a good day, and in general made to feel inferior for not being aggressively cheerful enough. Nebraska was symmetric as an equation, the pathetic result of living on land emptied of buffalo. Prairie dog towns had been reduced to tourist attractions.

I tarried hard in the West, eager to find a home. American boys are raised knowing that a horse between your legs and a low-slung pistol are a guarantee of manhood. It worked for Billy the Kid, who shot seventeen men in the back before he reached legal age. Montana was a beautiful state, but lacked employment. I met a guy with a graduate degree who felt lucky to have work mending fence. A waitress told me that if I planned to settle there, I should bring a woman with me. I was unable to find work in Wyoming either, which made me want to stay, believing that the citizens shared my propensity for freedom. The difference was that they had places to sleep. The people were open to strangers, perhaps because they saw so few. Instead of viewing me with eastern scorn or southern suspicion, they recognized me for what I was, more or less a damn fool.

In Colorado I got a job chipping mortar from bricks with a hammer and chisel. I sat in the dirt beside a pile of brick, making a new pile in a primitive form of recycling. The wage was fourteen cents a brick. After two days of squatting in the sun, my hands ached from gripping the tools, and my fingers were scabbed from mislicks with the hammer.

I collected my pay and moved south, crisscrossing the Continental Divide, trying to find the actual border. Rivers run east on one side, west on the other. My goal was to straddle it. Since we are three-quarters water, I figured that the simultaneous tow of both oceans would rip a hole in my soul for something worthwhile to enter. Black Elk said the central mountain is everywhere. From my vantage alone in the Rockies, centrality always seemed elsewhere. More and more, I depended on my journal. It was organic, I believed, even sentient. I came to regard the process of recording a lived life as the only material fit for writing. Somewhere in the Rockies, this shifted into a belief that the journal was my life, and the rest of existence only a fiction.

After two days of walking south, I was lucky enough to catch a ride to Flagstaff, and from there found -a job washing dishes at the Grand Canyon. The administrative staff took my photograph and sent me to a lightless cabin with no water. Each morning I joined the other workers in public showers at the end of our dead-end lane. At night we drank in the employee bar.

Washing dishes was the ideal work of freedom, requiring no focus save the immediate cleaning of a mottled pot or plate. It also provided food. The occupation was of such wretched status that no one bothered me. Cooks labored in hundred-degree temperatures, while busboys staggered beneath enormous loads. The best waiters were able to change demeanor extremely fast. Seconds after battling a cook or debasing themselves before a tyrannical boss, they had to be sweetly sensitive to a customer. Bartenders enjoyed a slightly higher rank, but the job entailed steady recruitment and coddling of one's private circle of alcoholics. The dishwasher, in his perpetually soggy and food-flecked state, could remain true to himself.

The canyon gift shops employed Hopi women who sold copper-hued plastic dolls dressed in fringed felt. The hollow foot of each bore an inked stamp that read “Made in Japan.” A few yards away was a hole in the ground a mile deep and ten miles wide. Somebody jumped once a month. Every week, a foreign tourist clutching a camera raced through the pines with skunk stench trailing behind. Apparently the Old World has not a polecat to its name. They are cute, graceful creatures, ripe for a photograph. Sometimes an entire family received the spray.

After supper I watched the sunset from the canyon's rim, sitting on the narrowest lip of rock protruding over the hole. I wrote in my diary there, looking down on clouds, trying to understand the strange impulse to step into space. It was not death that pulled me, it was the canyon itself. A jump was an urge to fill the void. Just before dusk, I witnessed an electrical storm from above, actually seeing the ignition of lightning and smelling the discharge. A sudden lance of fire cracked into the canyon's bowels and disappeared. The air smelled of ozone. It cured me of the itch to jump.

Weekends, I walked to the bottom where the Colorado River continued to cut a path. The river has never actually sunk but remains in place, cutting the land as the earth rises against the water. My treks down were a passage backwards through time, descending through millennia layered in the geology of the canyon walls. Color marked each era. Red at the top faded to pink, brown, a delicate green, and finally the slates and violets of the bottom. Naturally there was a bar and restaurant beside the river. Every Sunday, I climbed out to my work.

I was the only dishwasher who was not black, Mexican, or Indian. We worked in teams posted at either end of a colossal automatic washer and rinser. One man fed the beast while two others stacked the clean plates. A fourth dried silverware. Since I was new, my chore was the worst—scraping food into plastic barrels. I saved the good parts to divide later among the crew. Willie, the head cook, offered me a job as short-order breakfast cook. I refused, preferring the simple world of water and dishes. Willie didn't quite understand this. Each day, he asked if I'd changed my mind yet. He eventually offered a higher wage, but I remained loyal to freedom.

A new manager was shifted to the restaurant, a sneering spud named Jackie Jr. Like many dwellers of the West, he pretended to be a cowboy, in hand-tooled boots, expensive hats, and tailored shirts with pearl snaps. Accustomed to calling all dishwashers “boy,” Jackie Jr. enjoyed referring to me as a “hillbilly,” a term that put me off my feed. Hillbilly was what the people in town called us at home; that and worse—hick, ridgerunner, redneck, inbred ingrate, and my personal favorite, pigfucker. My mother is my sixth cousin. My brother and sister are also my cousins but nobody in my family ever seduced a hog.

I decided to quit after a week beneath the rule of Jackie Jr. On my final shift, he sauntered through the kitchen, amused at our miserable condition. I turned off the dishwashing machine and told him it was broken.

“What's the matter, hillfuck?” he said. “Even Meskins know how to crank this sucker on.”

As he pushed the mechanized button, I opened the metal trapdoor that housed the soap jets. Jackie Jr. screeched like a kicked cat. Suds and water ruined his splendid clothes. I stepped past him and out the back door, where my pack waited beside a dumpster surrounded by skunks and ravens. Willie followed me. I turned with my arms spread and low, unsure what to expect. His face was lined as a washboard. He eyed the backpack strapped to my shoulders, opened his wallet, and handed me two twenty-dollar bills.

“Go while you can, kid. I'll slow him down some.”

“I don't need your money, Willie.”

“Don't be a fool, kid. You're too puny to back it up.” He shook his head, chuckling. “I was a goddam drifter once.”

He waited till I took the money, then stepped into the kitchen. I tried to imagine white-haired Willie being young. It was easier than seeing myself as old. I'd begun traveling with the vague belief that I sought something tangible. Now I wondered if I was actually running away, not toward. The legendary West, with its vast and empty spaces, had boiled down to just that—vast and empty, filled with people trying desperately to plug the gap with labor.

I carried my backpack to the single road that led away from the canyon's south rim. In another era, Bill might have been a Texas Ranger fighting the Comanche, or a mountain man scouting the Rockies. People of the West suffer from a historical malady similar to that of Appalachians. They are deprived of the old outlets, but stuck with the need to live up to their heritage.

While waiting for a ride out of the park, I resolved to live in the West—settle rather than pass through—but not yet. I was still an outrider of the self. If I stayed, I knew that I'd become a feral hermit, climbing like the end of a species to higher ground. I didn't want my bones discovered on a rocky ledge at thin altitude. There was still California to explore, the edge of the continent.

S
ummer has faded deep into autumn, the days collapsing into darkness at either end. Beneath the changing leaves, I split firewood and gather kindling. Rita's hair is lustrous, her nails strong. My winter beard is growing in. Come spring, I will shed it for another six months. Yesterday I watched a blue jay tamping weeds over a supply of acorns, hopping as if to flatten the earth above a grave. Today a squirrel has found the cache. The river is afloat with geese possessing the obstinacy of bison aiming their bodies into wind. Cattle die doing that.

I have read every pregnancy book in the library, all of which are naturally geared toward women. The most progressive include a short chapter on the man's role at the end of the book. There is invariably a photo of a virile-looking man with a mustache who is changing a diaper. A woman smiles in the background.

The mother bear will fight to the death for her cubs while her mate wanders the mountain. The female eagle is larger than the male, and in her passion can accidentally kill him during copulation. A buck deer thinks nothing of sending his harem forward as a decoy to ensure the safety of his travel. All this sounds good to me, but Rita and I are evolved. She is not a gatherer. I no longer hunt. The fact is, I'm home all the time, deep in my private cave, blowing red ochre onto blank pages.

Expectant fathers are encouraged to clean the house, cook meals, and tell their wives how lovely they look while carrying forty extra pounds. One book admonishes me not to rush Rita into sex after delivery. Another suggests that I refuse to sleep through the night until the baby does, a period that might last a year. This is to help me bond with my kid, implying that an infant born prior to this book was insufficiently connected to its daddy. Fathers are at fault in everything; even God let his son die.

Women of my mother's generation were drugged during labor. When Mom awakened, the doctor gave her the swaddled gift of me. Dad was kept isolated until a nurse came for him with that immortal phrase, “It's a boy.” His first view of me was through a pane of glass. Dad has since told me that I was bright red and screaming, and that he asked the nurse if maybe the quiet one wasn't his instead. Mom has said that she didn't remember much for a couple of days.

For Rita and me, choosing to have children in our mid-thirties requires Lamaze, a role reversal for each of us. I am to be sensitive and encouraging while Rita's goal is a terse machismo. Our Lamaze class meets in a hospital waiting room, which has so few chairs that pregnant women are forced to sit on the floor. Orderlies tramp in to buy drinks from a machine. The instructor's attitude suggests that we are part of a select birth cult and should be proud of inclusion. Again and again she emphasizes the pain of birth, saying it is similar to having your lips peeled over your head. She cannot demonstrate relaxation techniques because she's wearing a dress.

“In the old days in Iowa,” she tells us, “women rode off on horseback to have the baby alone. A few hours later they came home with the new baby. I can't imagine that ride back, can you?” She releases a smug giggle. “You'll understand after you give birth.”

She separates the couples and asks the men to make a list of negative qualities about their wives during pregnancy. We are leery and resentful of such a chore. Most of us are worried about money, and no one is willing to denounce his wife. Ten minutes later the instructor asks for a volunteer to read our inventory.

“Our wives,” begins our spokesman, “are grumpy, sleepy, dopey, happy, bashful, and sneezy.” He gestures to the husband of a neurologist. “His wife's doc.”

“Very good,” the instructor says. “After all the babies are born, we'll get together for a reunion.”

The instructor turns the lights off, plays a tape of whales' mating calls, and urges us to meditate.

On the drive home, Rita starts to cry. She feels terrorized by the instructor rather than soothed. She doesn't like having her body referred to as a building with ground floor, basement, boiler room, subcellar, and crawl space. Rita thinks Lamaze is a con job designed to prove how tough females should be. Women are encouraged to undergo tremendous pain, as if to earn their womanhood and deserve a baby. Lamaze focuses outwards, divorcing Rita from the event. She prefers to stay abreast of delivery. I go along with everything.

The next day Rita calls the hospital to change classes, but they're filled and we can't get a refund. Family life has taken its first economic toll. We borrow books and a videotape from the library. I make flashcards depicting the stages of labor and their attendant warning signs. The next morning I leave Rita to the video and go to the woods.