The Great Northern Express (13 page)

With an anticlimactic jerk, as I was telling the West Texas Jesus the next morning somewhere between Tucumcari and Albuquerque, the chairlift started again. Up the mountain I went, too numb to feel anything more than relief. Ahead, on a jagged outcropping of granite above the treeline, perched the operator's booth. Uncertain whether I could even stand up, I motioned for the attendant to slow down the lift. Maybe I could warm up in his booth, then catch a ride down to the lodge in the groomer. I called out for the guy to stop the chairs. He was bent over a paperback book and didn't seem to hear me. At the far end of the landing, the empty chairs were whipping around an elevated bull wheel before starting back down the mountainside. Perhaps I could just stay aboard, ride back to the lodge, have a cup of coffee, and reconnoiter. But to judge from the way the chairs
were snapping past that wheel, at the very least I'd get whiplash and be out of commission for weeks. “Whiplash?” said the counsel for the ski resort, all but winking at the jury of frowning Vermont working men and working women, all twelve of whom would know better than to get on a chairlift in the first place. This was how young teachers and would-be writers spent their time? Paying cash money to ride uphill in order to slide back down again? Damages of $0 awarded. Court costs assigned to the plaintiff.

Touchdown was now scant seconds away. I flipped up the bar, stood, and let the seat shove me along over the snowy landing by the backs of my half-frozen legs—which promptly gave way beneath me. Down I went, ass over teakettle. Luckily, the chair passed harmlessly above me, but before I could crawdad my way to safety, the next one whanged hard, really hard, into my back and shoulders. Still wearing my skis, I rolled straight into the path of the next chair. I tried to fend it off with my left ski pole, which snapped neatly in two. What if one of those eighty-pound conveyances whapped me a good one in the head? How many novels would I write then? And why didn't the kid in the booth shut down the lift? They hadn't hesitated to stop it when I was dangling thirty-five feet up in the air in a whiteout.

“Turn it off!” I bellowed.

The operator looked up from his book. Instead of shutting off the lift, he rushed out of the booth and screamed, “What are you doing, you dumb son of a bitch?”

His response was of a piece with everything else that had happened to me in the last twenty minutes. After all, I wasn't supposed to be flopping around on the mountaintop dodging chairs. I was supposed to be dead, frozen stiff as a human icicle, from my little airing-out high above the mountainside. The next chair cracked into my right ski as I tried again to flip out of
the way. I felt like a snapping turtle on its back in the middle of a busy freeway. What if my collar or belt got caught on a bar and drew me into the bull wheel to be pulled limb from limb like a victim of the Inquisition? Would that satisfy them?

“Turn it off!” I brayed.

The operator stood glaring down at me. I had assumed a semifetal position with my arms protecting my head. “Why didn't you say you didn't know how to dismount properly?” he shouted.

Apparently we were to debate the issue while I was being mauled to death by chairs. At that point, my survival instincts kicked in.

“I'll get you!” I yelled insanely, lashing out at him with the stump of my broken ski pole.

Miraculously, I managed to scuttle out of the way of the chairs. I staggered to my feet and made a last, ineffectual lunge at the operator with my good pole as he fled into his booth. Where, at last, he saw fit to press the shut-off button.

Not one thing that had happened after the lift stopped, stranding me halfway up the mountain, made a particle of sense to me. What I did next, however, did. Without further ado, I hobbled over to one of the trails, shoved off with my unbroken pole, and started down the mountainside.

The trackless new snow was as light and fine as confectioner's sugar. The lift overhead was running smoothly. A middle-aged couple riding up the mountain in identical red parkas waved, a ski bum dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt gave me a thumbs-up. In the freshly groomed snow, I turned sharply in little upflung flurries, sped grandly around sweeping curves, traversed long, steep pitches as if I were a truly expert skier. Even with just one functional pole, it was the most glorious downhill run of my life. And the last.

At the bottom of the hill I executed a neat turn-stop. I unbuckled my bindings, shouldered my battered skis, and made straight for the ski shop in the basement of the lodge. “I'd like to trade these in on a new pair of cross-country skis,” I told the guy at the counter. “Don't ask me why.”

The American Southwest is a geography of bright colors. Red sandstone outcroppings. Irrigated green fields of alfalfa. The desert in blossom. And wide, blue rivers.

I could not seem to stay away from rivers. Here I was at five in the afternoon in Albuquerque, moseying along on foot through the big cottonwoods lining the fabled Rio Grande, for the love of Pete. The breeze off the water sifted through the rustling gray-green cottonwood leaves overhead—fleetingly, I imagined they were saying “Keep the kids out of the mill.” I thought of Rangers McCrae and Call of
Lonesome Dove
crossing this river on the eve of their great American odyssey to steal back their horses from the old Mexican bandit Pedro Flores, and I thought of the borderlands ballads of Marty Robbins, and I will be damned if it didn't occur to me, right out of the cobalt New
Mexican sky, that I was taking this trip in part
to see if I could
. A little 20,000-mile, 100-city, 190-store confidence course
to prove to myself that I could still see the U. S. of A. on less than one hundred dollars a day in a 1980s Chevy beater with 291,000—no, make that 294,480 miles—on the odometer
.

“Listen,” I said to the West Texas Jesus as we walked along the riverbank together, killing time before my evening event at Albuquerque's excellent independent, Bookworks. “Can I tell you something?”

“I don't know,” he said, flinging his just-drained empty into the river and opening a fresh one. “Can you?”

“I want to tell you a story,” I persisted. “About some unfinished business with my deceased uncle.”

“If this involves money, I don't want to hear it,” the Jesus said. “You know I'm not interested in money. Never have been.”

“What about your yarn of the good and faithful servant who increased his master's talents? That involves money.”

“What about it? The money wasn't the point. The point, Mr. Writer Man, is how are
you
going to use your talents over the next while. ‘Bring forth that which is within,' so to speak. In the meantime, I know all about your unfinished business with your uncle. That's between you two to work out.”

“Do you know about the legacy?” I said. “Since you seem to know so damn much?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “And I know that you need to put all that behind you. You need to think about what you want
your
legacy to be. You're the writer here.”

He reached into his hip pocket and magically produced another ice-cold Corona. “Here,” he said. “Drink this, Harold, and lighten up.”

The place sat alone in the desert, a concrete-block, bunkerlike affair with a single rusted gas pump and not another building in sight in any direction. I was somewhere between Albuquerque and Phoenix, and the air was as hot as the smelting room of a steel mill. An outdoor thermometer in the shape of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle hung at a cockeyed slant beside the store's screen door: 112 degrees.

As I pumped my gas, a woman pushing a shopping cart resolved out of the heat waves. She was dark-complected, with long black hair. She might have been thirty, she might have been fifty. I couldn't guess because, in the shimmering heat rays, she looked absolutely apparitional.

She began sorting through the trash barrel beside the pump, came up empty, and went into the store a minute ahead of me. I arrived at the counter just in time to witness the following transaction. The shopping-cart woman was holding a pint of milk, which the clerk had just rung up. On the far end of the counter sat a small black-and-white television set tuned to the Arizona Diamondbacks' game.

“You're eight cents short,” the clerk said, pointing at the coins on the counter.

And right then, I made my worst mistake of the trip. Waiting for the clerk to say
No problem
or
Close enough
or
Catch you next time
and hand over the bottle of milk to the woman, I hesitated. Distracted by my own petty thoughts and by the baseball game on the snowy TV, I failed to act. Not for long. Maybe a second or two. But that was all it took.

By the time I reached for my wallet and, like Martina McBride in her song “Love's the Only House,” said “I'll cover
that,” the shopping-cart woman was out the door. The pint of milk sat on the counter, stark as a guilty verdict.

“Wetback,” the clerk said. “She came in here with three kids last night at rush hour wanting to redeem bottles they'd picked up along the road.”

Not waiting for my change, I rushed outside with the milk, into the blasting heat. The parking lot was empty. How could this be? Not fifteen seconds had passed since the woman had left the store. I could see for hundreds of feet in every direction. There was no place to hide, and no vehicle had stopped or even passed by since I'd pulled up to the pump. But she'd vanished, along with her cart, as mysteriously as she'd appeared. My opportunity to be of some help to somebody other than my sorry self had vanished with her.

The former president of the American Booksellers Association, bookseller nonpareil Gayle Shanks, had drummed up a great audience for me that evening at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, on the south edge of Phoenix. Gayle told me that when the store was struggling through its early years and on the brink of failure, a network of local women, all avid readers, had formed several book groups expressly designed to keep the store afloat.
They
certainly hadn't failed to act and let an opportunity to help their community slip away.

When I settled into my sleazy motel on the outskirts of Phoenix that night, I was still angry with myself. My father
never
would have hesitated, back in that convenience store in the desert, before reaching for his thin schoolteacher's wallet. My storytelling uncle Reg would have made the good Samaritan himself look mingy-spirited. Phillis would have taken the woman and her kids home and befriended them.

“
You'd
have helped that Mexican lady,” I said to the West Texas Jesus. “The one with the shopping cart. Wetback or no.”

“I hope so, señor,” he said with a slight south-of-the-border accent I hadn't really noticed before. “How do you think
I
got here?”

It is widely held that as members of our dubious species grow older, they require less sleep. I have never been much of a sleeper. I've always been afraid I'd miss something important I might want to write about. What might I be missing at 4:30 a.m. on a foggy summer morn in the vicinity of my Motel 6 in Oakland? I had no idea. But as usual, I was already up and doing, with all of the unswerving, slightly crazed purposefulness of a small-town busybody.

So in the early light of this Bay Area dawn, nothing would suffice but that I jog the mile or so along the water to Jack London Square and its famous open market to see what I could see. En route I reflected on what I had accomplished in sunny California over the past week. I'd visited a couple dozen of the best independent bookstores in the country, including Vroman's in Pasadena and Village Books in Pacific Palisades. And yes, I'd
walked the sweltering streets of downtown LA with Uncle Reg, in the footsteps of Raymond Chandler's detective hero, Philip Marlowe. And I had prowled the hills and waterfront of San Francisco with an eye out for that short, fat human Gatling gun of a private eye, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op. Finding him at last right where I had found Faulkner's people back in Mississippi—in the city's great independent bookstores. And, oh my, how proud my uncle would have been—how proud, and humbled
I
was—to discover a few of my own novels not far from Chandler's and Hammett's in City Lights' great fiction section, just a few short steps away from the famous sign, hand-lettered by the store's poet-owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
NO SHIRT NO SHOES FULL SERVICE
. It brought tears to my eyes. (Or was it the signed but still unsold copy of my novel
A Stranger in the Kingdom
, which I had inscribed on a swing through San Francisco some twenty years ago, that did that?)

Across the bay in Jack London Square this morning, the refrigerated Southern Pacific railway cars and eighteen-wheel semis were unloading broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, oranges and grapefruit, vast red slabs of beef marbled with white fat, sides of pork, lamb, chickens plucked and clean, twenty kinds of Chinese vegetables, tropical fruits I could and couldn't identify, Oregon blackberries and Washington raspberries, fifty varieties of cut flowers, Idaho potatoes. Clickety-clack, people were talking up a storm in English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese, and here on shaved ice in metal bins were a dozen kinds of ocean fish, their big, glazed eyes gazing at stalls stacked high with colorful melons of every size from a softball to a beach ball. I ducked into a breakfast café no bigger than our kitchen back in Vermont. Out came my notebook. Steinbeck could have pulled a short story out of Jack London Square before ten o'clock this morning. Likewise Jack himself.