“The air’s so dry out here, my fingertips are cracking open,” Mike was saying. “Never seen anything like it.”
“Mine aren’t,” Clay said.
“I guess that makes you a desert rat. You like the heat too, I guess.”
“I don’t mind it. That’s what deserts are supposed to have. The good part is how it cools off every night. Every morning you’re starting over.”
“Yeah, the nights are okay.”
Mike’s nose was peeling pretty bad too, but Clay wasn’t going to point it out. His brother sure burned easily with his sandy hair and fair skin. And new freckles were showing up on his forearms.
Clay took a look over his shoulder through the cab window into the bed of the pickup. Every time he glanced back it still seemed strange to see somebody there, but Hubcap Willie and the burro sure made a picture. The burro’s knees were folded underneath and those long ears were standing straight up and alert. Her huge eyes, those delicate eyelashes, and that expression around her mouth and whiskers seemed to say, “I sure put up with a lot.” That brushy switch of a tail was beating a rhythm almost like Pal was counting the time of this latest trial in her life.
It hadn’t been as easy to get the burro into the truck as Hubcap Willie had indicated, and Mike hadn’t made it any easier saying with his eyes “I told you so” a half-dozen times at least, and then saying it out of the corner of his mouth for good measure. But now that they were rolling, if “rolling” could describe the motion of their bucking horse of a truck, you’d have to agree that hauling a load this colorful sure seemed like the kind of thing to be doing on a Big Wander. Well, Mike wouldn’t agree, but that’s because he was just being disagreeable this morning.
They asked around about his uncle in Mexican Hat, a tiny town perched by a suspension bridge over the San Juan River where it narrowed and entered a canyon. Upstream, lots of cottonwoods; downstream, all slickrock. At the store, the café, the gas station, nobody had ever laid eyes on the man in the photograph with the chipped tooth and the three-day beard.
Nobody here wore sombreros after all, Clay noticed. They wore cowboy hats, some straw and some felt like the Stetson his uncle favored. He’d like to get one of those himself, black with that deep middle crease.
Mexican Hat, it turned out, was named after a formation balanced high above the river on a skinny rock pedestal. He’d seen it himself on the way into town but had thought it looked exactly like a flying saucer. He hadn’t mentioned the resemblance to Mike because Mike was stewing, and Mike kind of let you know when he wasn’t in the mood to be jollied up with commentary like “Flying Saucer, Utah, would have made an even better postmark.” Clay had seen plenty of weird town names as he scoured the map for Restaurant Hay. Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, struck him as one of the weirdest.
They were back on the road and still carrying that unusual pair of hitchhikers in the back. It was awful quiet in the cab. Back at Mexican Hat, the old-timer said he’d be pleased to ride with them just a little farther. Mike couldn’t refuse him, but now he was even grouchier than before. Mike finally broke the silence, grumbling, “He said all he wanted was a ride to Mexican Hat.”
A flat tire fit right into the way things were going. As Mike leaned all his weight into the tire iron, Clay reported, “We’re almost back into Arizona.” Mike didn’t have a hat on. His forehead was burning up and dropping sweat into his eyes. “Lemme help,” Clay suggested.
“Lug nuts are too tight,” his brother grunted, meaning “too tight for you, but not for me,” which may have been the case, but maybe not. Clay was tall, nearly as tall as Mike, and almost as strong. He could see drops of blood squeezing out of a couple of Mike’s dried-out fingers. Mentioning it wouldn’t change anything. Sometimes Mike just liked to suffer. Feeling worse made him feel better.
“Lucky you’ve gotten this far with this truck,” Willie chimed in from the back of the pickup as he hovered over Pal, ready to keep the burro from standing up.
For once Mike saw things the old-timer’s way. “We’ve got a dead dog for a motor. We might have a better chance of getting back home with your burro.”
“Want to swap?” Clay suggested playfully. Then, looking around at the tall buttes and slender towers of red sandstone showing up in the desert ahead, he mused, “It feels like I’ve been here before.”
He surveyed again the expanses of red desert studded with stranded buttes and mesas, pinnacles, towers of solid rock. “I know I’ve been here before,” Clay said aloud, “but that can’t be.”
“Nope,” Mike grunted, lifting the spare onto the bolts, “can’t be.”
“Monument Valley!” Clay declared. “It’s Monument Valley.”
“Last time anybody checked,” Hubcap Willie agreed.
“Oh, man! Stagecoach, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers … John Wayne country!”
“Maybe you’ll get into a movie,” Mike groused. He pitched the flat tire onto the burro’s pack boxes and turned to inspecting his fingertips again. Clay climbed back in the cab. He wished Mike didn’t feel so bad.
“No clues,” Mike said as they got under way again. He was biting on his bottom lip, and that was never a good sign.
“How do you mean?”
“Uncle Clay. No leads, and you haven’t located Restaurant Hay. So what are we doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Just looking around I guess. Somebody will have seen him. Maybe in Monument Valley. Can you believe this! It’s even more spectacular than in the movies!”
“We’ll ask in Monument Valley. But you know, he really could be in Canada. I’m not sure you’re being very realistic.”
“But we have to try, Mike. We’ll find him. I know we will.”
“Our money’s not holding out too good, you know.”
“Mine is. I’ve got one hundred and seventy-six dollars. I could start paying for the gas—why don’t you let me?”
“Yeah, and that’s your life savings. I doubt if Mom would be too happy about you spending it all. And I should be making some money this summer, not spending it, even if I do have a scholarship.”
“We could get jobs. Work for a while, travel for a while …”
Mike was working his lower lip again, even pulling on his left earlobe, the one their mother always said he was going to pull off as he was solving his most difficult math problems. “We don’t know much, Clay. Maybe that wasn’t even right, about him being seen in Mexican Hat.”
“Sounded right to me.”
“I mean, what’s he to us, really. Why are we even looking for him.”
Clay couldn’t believe Mike had said something like that. His breath caught in his throat. Suddenly he felt like he had a fever.
“Now don’t get upset,” Mike said. “I want you to think about it. Let’s look at the facts. How often does he call or write?”
“You know Mom says that doesn’t mean anything. He just doesn’t like to write letters. He’s not that kind of person.”
“What kind of person is he? Do we even know? Look, Clay, I don’t think you see him the way he really is. How could you? You haven’t even seen him since you were eleven.”
“I was twelve. He took me out salmon fishing three days straight. I spent a lot of time with him—at least I used to.”
“It’s because you’re named after him, isn’t it?” Mike said. “That’s what it’s all about. You’ve built him into this larger-than-life—”
“That’s not true,” Clay interrupted. Why was Mike doing this? What good was it going to do?
“Maybe he’s more of a misfit than a hero. Just because he was a rodeo star…. You know he never made much money.”
“Money isn’t everything. He is something special, Mike. I’ve always known it. Mom knows it. You used to.”
“What I’m talking about is you and your heroes. John Wayne, for example. Life isn’t a Western, Clay, with good guys and bad guys.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Yeah, well I’ll be fifteen in December. And I like Westerns just as much because of the adventure, and the places—like Monument Valley here.”
“Maybe it’s because you can’t remember our father. Uncle Clay isn’t our father, you know. He’s not even like him.”
Clay’s head swam. What was Mike getting at? “I’ve tried to remember him. How could I? I was only three when he got killed.”
“He’s your original hero. Shot down trying to cover some foot soldiers in a war …”
“I know all that. You’ve got people you look up to too, Mike, like President Kennedy and the astronauts—Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom … you think our father was a hero. I know you do. So what are you saying?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Clay. It seemed like I had a point there somewhere. I think you’re fine. I don’t think you’re … well, you’re just kind of starry-eyed I guess, but that’s all right. We didn’t grow up like everybody else, that’s all, with both a mother and a father….”
Clay broke into a grin. He didn’t know why, but he felt better than he thought he might, the way things were going. “For being so smart you can be kinda dumb yourself, Mike. Sure I’d like to have a father, but I wasn’t going to nominate Mom’s brother.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s a good idea to have heroes. Like President Kennedy, like John Wayne …”
“Like Marilyn Monroe,” Clay said, and laughed. It felt good to be laughing.
Clay lingered at one of the many empty tables in the dining room at Goulding’s Trading Post and looked out the windows and across to Monument Valley. The late light was bathing the monuments in a glowing golden aura like the world was ending. He was writing a letter to his mother.
There was only Mrs. Whitmore to clean up all the mess the tourists had left behind, and he sure felt sorry for her. She had a long way to go. “Mind if I write a few letters here?” he asked. About his mother’s age, Mrs. Whitmore wore her hair tied back under a blue bandanna. “Sure,” she told him. “Make yourself at home.”
He could see Hubcap Willie down by the big cottonwood where Mike had parked the truck. The old-timer had a little campfire going down there, probably was cooking supper. The burro was standing by waiting for whatever came next.
Clay was telling his mother about the trading post, how different it was from the tourist traps on Route 66. How it must be a hundred years old, built out of rocks shaped one at a time into blocks—you could still see the chisel marks in them. How the ceilings were made out of logs crisscrossed by hundreds of sticks, how this very room he was writing in was where the casts of the John Ford Westerns ate their dinner every night while they were shooting the movies.
The walls of this dining room are covered with photographs from the movies they filmed here. I’m writing under the eyes of John Wayne and Henry Fonda and Indian chiefs. I’m seeing some Navajos around the trading post. They don’t look like Indians in the movies—no feathers! The men wear the same kind of stuff as Uncle Clay—it’s the women who are really striking. Full skirts, long-sleeved blouses of shiny green or blue velvet, silver and turquoise jewelry all over—rings, bracelets, silver squash blossom necklaces …”
He set aside his pen. It didn’t feel right to be writing letters when this woman was working all by herself. He was going to write to Marilyn next and send along the shark’s tooth, but he could do that in the morning.
“Thanks,” Mrs. Whitmore said, “I could really use the help.”
He bused the dishes while she loaded the dishwasher and cleaned up in the kitchen. He’d cleaned the tables and had that letter started for Marilyn when Mrs. Whitmore came out of the kitchen offering a bowl of ice cream topped with chocolate sauce. “Never heard of a kid who didn’t like ice cream,” she said, and sat down across from him.
Like her husband in the trading post store, Mrs. Whitmore didn’t know anything about Uncle Clay. “So you’re going to travel and work your way around the West,” she said, after he’d told her his whole story. She paused and said, “How’d you like to work for a while right here? We’re shorthanded.”
“At the trading post?”
“Right here in the dining room. Three meals a day. I already know you’ll do a good job.”
Clay took another look around the walls, at the photographs. Right here in this room! “What about my brother?” he asked quickly.
“We need a hand at the gas station. Fifty cents an hour for you, a dollar him. Not much, but room and board won’t cost you anything.”
He found Mike at the truck, gathering up their bedrolls and ground cloth. To Clay’s surprise Hubcap Willie was lying down inside the cab. “I was listening to the radio and cleaning up the bed of the truck,” Mike said. “He just kind of moved in to the cab. He said it was the closest thing to a bed he’d seen in a long time.”
“You’re going to let him sleep in there tonight? Inside the truck?”
“Yeah, I guess. He’ll turn off the radio after a little while—he said he wouldn’t run the battery down.”
Clay smirked but he didn’t say anything. His brother wasn’t such a tough guy after all.
There weren’t many good sleeping spots. They found one about a hundred yards away under some box elder trees and away from the glare of the trading post’s night-light. Clay thought he’d kept his big news to himself about as long as he could, and spilled it. Mike wasn’t as excited as he should have been. “Well, I can see you’re all fired up about staying here,” he said slowly, and he thought about it a long while.
“I’ll try it a few days,” Mike concluded guardedly. “Make back a few bucks.”
Clay woke with the first desert light. He liked the time between first light and sunrise, and besides, he was too excited to go back to sleep.
A coyote trotting by with its long tail hung low stopped to look at him, cocked its head as if to wonder at him being up so early, and trotted off among the yuccas. The first streams of the sun were lighting up the monuments of Monument Valley, and the towers looked more orange than red in that early light.
Mike would sleep awhile. Clay dressed quietly and slipped away, down to the cottonwood at the edge of the arroyo where they’d left the truck and Hubcap Willie. Pal always seemed to be on her feet, and he’d been wondering if burros slept lying down or standing up. Maybe he’d find out.
It took a moment for Clay to realize as the cottonwood tree came into sight that something was missing. The burro was still there, tied to the tree and standing up. It was the rusty Studebaker that was gone. Their backpacks and their other things lay heaped in a pile, but the pickup was gone.
Hubcap Willie had left behind, for them apparently, every bit of his gear that went with the burro. Clay found the note on Pal’s pack saddle:
Dear Boys,
Hubcap Willie decided to take you up on your offer and has hereby swapped his faithful burro Pal and all of Pal’s gear for your Studebaker which is ailing. Hubcap is sure you boys have got the better of the bargain but will not complain. You’ll have need of hoofs to find your uncle if he really is a prospector, and Hubcap Willie will have need of wheels where he’s headed. Your search for your lost uncle has reminded him of a loved one who lives far away that he has not seen for many years. Don’t be concerned that you have sold an old man a bum motor because he is a crack mechanic among other things and knows his way around a wrecking yard. Be good to Pal and she will be good to you, and by all means never strike her for she is a noble soul.
Truly,
“Hubcap”
P.S. This is hereby considered a lawful bill of sale.
Clay looked around to share his amazement with someone, but there was only the burro switching her tail and looking at him with those huge, liquid brown eyes. The burro wrinkled her nose, bared her teeth, and began to bray like a lonesome freight.
“Hee-haw to you too, Pal,” Clay said, and ran back with the note in his hand to tell his brother.