SECONDS LATER I HEARD THE ROAR OF AN AUTOMOBILE engine and then saw a state police cruiser blast past the window, lights flashing but siren off. The presence of this second official vehicle on an emergency call was enough to draw the cowboy pool players outside, where they gathered in a semicircle, bouncing the rubber heels of their pool cues against the wooden sidewalk and watching the disappearing cars twist up the road and into the hills.
By the time I got to the front of the café and stood there with them, only the glow of the emergency lights was visible, still stabbing the night, pools of red-and-blue exploding across the countryside.
“Must be heading up to Reserve,” one of the cowboys said.
“Nope. Apache Creek.” The woman had come from the café, wiping her hands on her apron. “Somebody’s been shot. Heard it on the scanner.”
The night was still. The prodromes had come and gone like a paper cut, slicing through the serenity in a second, holding everyone’s attention for a second, and would be forgotten in a second, except as a mild nuisance. Up and down the street of the small town, people standing in the doorways and on the side of the road dismissed the two heralds of calamity with a shake of their heads and went about their business.
Except for me. All I could think about was Neffie and her safety. My stomach clenched inside me.
“Probably Mexicans,” another cowboy offered. The others nodded and grunted in agreement as they all shambled back inside the Blue Front.
I heard another sound, approaching from the direction the ambulance had taken. It was a low roar at a steady pace, then louder and louder until it was a low roar with the high crackling clatter that could only be the sound of a Harley-Davidson. Coming around the bend in the road at the edge of town, I saw a single headlight. Before the café, the rider slowed and made a left turn and drove up a small paved road. I could see by the glow of the streetlight it was Neffie, her long hair in a braid behind her.
I started to call out but I knew she wouldn’t hear me, so I ran to my car and drove after her.
The road she had taken led back into the hills behind Glenwood, winding along the edge of a tortuous creek lined with gnarled trees. I could see the flare of her lights against the cottonwoods as I raced to catch her, and after a few moments I saw the bike itself. I flashed my lights to signal her to stop. Instead she picked up speed.
I had known she was a seasoned rider from watching her before. You can tell by little things when someone has an easy familiarity with riding. With Neffie, it was the way she dismounted, the way she turned the bike around in the parking lot, the way she put her feet on the pegs instantly as the bike started to roll; all the habits of confidence. But none of that prepared me for what I saw now. She was a brilliant rider, a gifted rider, almost a supernatural rider.
She flung the bike from corner to corner and picked up
speed with every turn. Big Harleys are clumsy and cannot respond quickly to rider input, yet it seemed as if she was on the most nimble of sport motorcycles. She leaned so far into the corners that the foot pegs scraped the asphalt, leaving long trails of golden sparks. Even though I began to drive as fast as I could, little by little she pulled away until she was out of sight. I had no intention of abandoning the chase, but I slowed and decided to wait out the trip, to see where it might take me. The roads out here are long but usually go only one place.
After a mile or so I saw a sign announcing the entrance to Catwalk National Park and the road narrowed a bit. Up ahead I saw Neffie’s Harley parked next to a grove of cactus. A chain was across the road farther up. I stopped beside the bike and got out. All was quiet. Neffie was not there.
The Catwalk, as the locals call it, runs along the side of Whitewater Canyon, a deep-box canyon that was a hideout for Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, and Geronimo, but that is not why it is famous. It is famous because of a water pipe. In the 1800s the canyon was the site of the Graham silver mine. A creek that ran down the middle of the canyon was the source of power for this mine. After the mine was in operation for a few years it was decided to tap this creek and run a four-inch pipe down the canyon to bring drinking water to the town. The construction of the pipe turned out to be a huge project, since the canyon walls were steep, in some cases rising a hundred feet above the creek bed, with sheer rock facings and nowhere to walk. After much trouble the pipe was finally built, but to maintain it, the crews had to walk like tightwire walkers up this pipeline. Not only was there no net, the shards of boulders littered the canyon floor
like so many knives awaiting the hapless fall. The pipeline was increased in size to eighteen inches as the town grew, and finally a catwalk was built high along the sides of the canyon walls for the service of this last pipe. The mine was closed in the early 1900s, but the catwalk was shored up by the park service and is now a stop for tourists.
Of course I didn’t know any of this as I stood in the night air by the motorcycle, listening to silence, staring up at the shadows of the creek’s canyon.
Then, a flash. Neffie’s necklace of silver and turquoise and the silver conches on her moccasins shone in the moonlight as she ran up the catwalk, visible only for a second until she turned a corner. I called out but she didn’t hear me.
I jumped over the chain across the road, raced to the catwalk and sped up it, calling out her name. The catwalk runs for about a mile into the canyon, up a steady climb of several hundred feet in elevation, and then comes to a stop at a landing that hovers fifty feet above the canyon floor. From there I could see the plains above, but the path that went beyond the catwalk ran out in a few feet, dead-ending into a cliff face.
Again I saw a flash in the moonlight and Neffie far ahead, a small figure on the plains. She was running at an incredible speed, her long hair bouncing behind her like the mane of a show horse. I called again and this time she slowed but did not stop. She seemed uncertain whether she had heard a call or not, then began to run again, fast.
Once more I called and once more she slowed, looked behind her and almost came to a stop, slowing to a calculated walk. I gave the loudest yell I could muster as she disappeared
over the horizon. I waited, hoping I would see her silhouette reappear over the rim, but she did not return.
I looked for any kind of path she might have followed but saw nothing. I didn’t want to lose her but I was puffing, in a sweat from the run, every muscle aching from exertion. I rested for a second or two then crawled over the edge of the railing at the end of the catwalk and followed the path to the end. Up above and ahead I could see a ledge jutting out from the cliff facing. It looked navigable if I could climb to it.
I am not a climber and did not like the prospect of getting up this face, but it was only ten or twelve feet to the ledge. The cliffside leaned away from me a few degrees so it was not a vertical ascent. I stuffed my fingers into a crack in the wall, lifted myself up and secured a toehold. From there, at the limit of my reach, I was able to get a grip along the side of the ledge and pull myself up the rest of the way. Once I was on the ledge I had barely enough room to stand if I kept my back to the wall. I stood up.
This was a mistake. I looked out and down. I was seventy-five feet up but it felt like a thousand. Below me the water slammed onto a boulder and sprayed plumes into the air in great arcs. Then it fell down into a pool made by other boulders, rushed through the cracks between them and continued its journey. The force of the water was inconceivable, the roar an awful groan from the rocks beneath the foment. This was no little creek. I felt as if I was on the side of a blender, looking down at the blades.
My head spun and I squatted down. It was then I realized I could not retreat. The way up would not work as a way down. I turned in tiny shifts to face the cliff, then began a
slow sideways shuffle along the ledge. The path got a bit wider as I sidled along and after a few feet was wide enough for me to walk facing forward. I took a few more steps, then this path came to an end. Above it, another ledge.
The next climb was not so steep. The cliff leaned away from me now at an angle great enough for me to get a purchase with my feet. There was a plant, a little bush, growing from the rocks, so I grabbed it and hauled myself up. I needed one more step to get onto the ledge. I swung my foot up, placed it on top of the bush, grabbed the ledge above and gave a great heave.
In one terrifying split second my foot slid off the bush and instead of hoisting me up, left me hanging by my fingertips. I clung with all my strength, but the effort was not enough. I did not have the grip to sustain the weight of my body, and as I pulled, my fingers slipped and I began to fall. I reached out in a frantic dive to stop at the lower ledge but there was nothing to grab and I bounced off the ledge and began to tumble, faster and faster, down the cliffside.
A tree was growing out of the cliff and in desperation I lunged at it but only caught a few branches, which broke off in my hand with the force of the fall. It slowed—but could not halt—the downward plunge. I hit a small uneven crevice in the rock with my shoulder and the jolt shook through me with a numbing, buzzing sensation. Upside down now I careened into the wall, its surface a razor-sharp abrasive, tearing the skin away from my arm and elbows. I reached out, my arms over my head toward the platform of rock rushing up at me, but my attempt to soften the impact was hopeless and I smashed onto the rock, my head curling under my body, my chin driving into my chest as the shock
of the fall pushed through me. My legs arched over the top of my head and I landed on my back, feeling the small rocks below me crack ribs as they punctured the skin.
I lay still, dazed, barely conscious, only aware I could not breathe. A howl came out of my mouth, a cry from the traumatized lungs and I lay there wailing, until slowly, in short inspirations, the breath returned.
I looked at the night sky and for a moment could not remember where or who I was. I tried to get myself to a sitting position but my forearm was fractured and would not brace me, so I rolled over on my side and put the other arm under me and lifted myself up. I felt a trickle of blood down my back at the same time as blood dripped into my eyes, partially blinding me.
I was lying on a small platform made by an intersection of boulders, still twenty feet above the creek. I could not raise myself all the way up with my arm so I tried to slide my feet under me. As I pulled one foot toward my body, my arm began shaking, then gave way. To my horror I rolled off the platform and fell again, this time with no ability to resist.
I struck the side of the huge boulders as I went headlong, a blow to the side of my head flipping me over and tearing the skin from my cheek before I arrowed feet first into the fierce creek, where my legs buckled and snapped like toothpicks.
Consciousness was ebbing. Crippled with pain, blind from the blood in my eyes, limbs broken and useless, I had no way left to fight. The pull of the stream came as a great deliverance from the enormity of the fall. I sank into the water after my broken legs and felt the bubbles and the
foam in my shredded ears and mouth, covering me in darkness, holding me down, down where there was no life, no breath, only a gaping void, a maw.
I felt my shirt tug around me, hung on something, pulling me. Then another pull around my broken collarbone. Then my arm was seized, held by some power, and I felt sure the shoulder was going to come out of its socket. Another somersault under the crush of the water as I rolled over and felt a pressure across my chest, a band of power underneath me, lifting, pressing on the shattered rib cage. I was coming out of the water, I was above the water. I could breathe. I was lifted up into the sky, the clear night dusted with stars. Higher into the stars and the sky and the great rocks on each side of the canyon walls, up, up, until I was still. I was held still, gently, on the quiet shore of the creek on a small patch of sandy earth that smelled of patchouli and rain and sandalwood.
More blood ran into my eyes and her hand wiped it away and brushed my hair from my face. I looked up into Neffie’s eyes, she looked down at me. I saw the muscles flex in her powerful arms and hands as she cradled me for a moment before laying me down onto the sand. She had heard me and returned to me and saved me; embraced me, in her might as much as her mansuetude.
In the quiet, I hear “Telstar” by the Tornadoes. A satellite, Sputnik, whizzes by, dangling from an invisible string, like something out of an old Flash Gordon serial—no wait, like Captain Video or maybe it was Buck Rogers. The embers from the rocket fire fall down and out of frame in the gravity of the times, the sparks rise with the smoke like fireflies and wander back and forth, serpentine, like the patterns
on the entrance to a Parisian subway, and “Telstar” seizes the drifting, rising smoke and shimmers a little inside a Fender Super Reverb guitar amp, inside the Mississippi magic of the blues guitar, but it is not inside, it is outside, in outer space, and the chords are changing and changing and changing, not the usual one four five four five. There is a guitar, it is four in the morning, a maroon plastic flip-top Admiral radio (with a handle so they can call it a portable) leans up against the wall and plays the top 40 on a humid Saturday on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas; hot, so hot there is no escape. “Telstar” swings by and disappears into space again going the other way across the frame and my little universe, the universe of my house, my mom, my dog Buttercup, stumbles into the open and I see the background of their being, the ocean and the sequence of waves, incident, reflection, coincident. I hear a theremin and Xavier Cugat. I hear “Frenesi.”
I am in a shopping center next to the Country Club Pharmacy where they pound the hamburgers so thin they cook in five or six seconds and the broccoli turns olive-gray from being on the steam table for so long. I’m outside the CCP and walk down the sidewalk in front of the grilles of the artfully parked cars with the 1957 chrome smiles, chrome bullets, chrome rockets, targets, handles, mirrors, portholes, twin antennae, and there is a music store with records and pianos and organs. He is in the window.
The moths dot the glass, shuddering, wriggling in ecstasy and misery, trying to get through the plate glass, and I am with them. He is in the window playing the organ, the big Hammond or Conn or Wurlitzer, sitting on the bench that juts out from the console like a military jaw, sitting over a
bank of pedals arrayed like a row of teeth, playing them with his feet. “Perfidia.” Latin sounds. He rocks back and forth, shaking his shoulders, Cugat in big puffy sleeves. Two rows of keyboards and his staggered hands cross and uncross to find the keys and there is a warble from the Leslie speaker cabinet because inside the Leslie the speakers are mounted on rotating platforms so they spin when he switches them on and the sound warbles, like a bird. “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” I can’t believe it. Hands and feet dance around the big grin of the organ and this, this … sound comes out. I stand there as the neon comes over the night and turns us red. I see my reflection. There is a hole in my pants. As I walked towards the music I dragged the hand shoved in my pocket along the Arizona flagstone walls to feel the buzz through the material, the rub; sensuous, like a vibrator, too young and stupid to know it would wear a hole in my pants. I feel foolish.
He is playing and I see his thinking and know he is thinking this up somehow but cannot imagine how he is doing it, turning his thinking into these sounds. “Telstar” comes around again and the sounds are the same. Then, from far away, the blues. Then Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Hank Williams and Jerry Lee and Chuck. The Mighty Chuck who takes all the rhythm and pounds it into the lyric pound for pound for Ezra Pound. “Poetry is language charged with meaning.” I can’t move. There is pain.
Both my legs and my arm are in splints. The walls are white adobe walls and Neffie is sitting over me. Next to her is a man with long, sandy hair like hers but thick with gray. He is old, very old. They look at each other and Neffie lays her hand across my forehead, looks at me, says something I
can’t understand, something to comfort me. Only the spirit of the remark cools her hand and my head. A light comes through the doorway and outside I can see the sky, cerise and cyan, see the brighter stars of last night, a line of vermilion etched along the top of distant verdure giving way to the yellow of a morning sun, then “Telstar” plays and Sputnik flashes by again.
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
I thought for a moment. I nodded yes.
The old man came to the bedside and stood beside Neffie.
“You will be well soon. This will pass quickly,” he said.
She is blond and blue-eyed and we are kissing in the front seat of the car, on the brown-wool seat covers, and I can feel myself getting hotter and hotter, so hot there is no escape, until she pushes me away. She is walking home and carrying her schoolbooks across her chest, her arms wrapped around them. Why does she carry her books that way? She giggles. I rest them on the bone, she says, on the natural shelf I have down there. She is not embarrassed but curious about my reaction. My reaction is “what bone?” but I say nothing. The Corvette is red-and-white and I’m shaking so bad because I know if she can just see me in it, see me just once, she will think it is all okay, that I am all okay, and she won’t push me away again. I know it’s the car. The old car with the terrible-sounding motor and the brown seat covers that are wool and so hot in the summer, so hot there’s no escape, so hot. She is carrying her books and I come to a stop and offer her a ride but she must know I have gotten it from a car lot, that I have lied to the salesman and taken it for a test ride. She knows it will always be the
hot wool seats and the musty smell of the old car, the torn headliner. She walks on and I see the smiling grilles of the new cars beaming in the lot outside the store where the man plays the organ and fills the night air with the sounds of “Telstar.”
“Telstar” by the Tornadoes. A slap and a swish, the sound rushes by, Sputnik, beep, beep, beep, RKO Radio Pictures lightning bolts in the black-and-white silver nitrate void of space with gravity, the gravity of the times. Got me run, hide, hide, run, anyway you want me, to roll. Yeah, yeah, yea-u-h-h.
Anything for a convertible. I know it’s the car. A turquoise-and-white ’57 Chevy convertible with fender skirts and a lowering kit because my friend’s mom and my friend can see the fire in the belly and let me have my way and I like him and he likes me. The root beer that comes in a frozen mug from the drive-in wipes off of the Naugahyde interior with a simple sweep of the rag. In the brown wool of the old green two-door it sinks down and stays wet and gets sticky until it dries in a hard encrustation, testifying to the lurching out-of-control idiotic transmission. The Chevy has Powerglide and the root beer just wipes up with a rag while the twin exhaust pipes make a little thunder with the Mighty Chuck as the road rolls underneath the car. It is his convertible and there is nothing I can do but take pictures and send them to the girls on American Bandstand and tell them I will give them a ride in my car when they come to town, nothing I can do but ride in the passenger seat and wave at her, inviting, offering her a ride in a car without the sticky-sweet stains of the root beer because it wipes off so easily. But it is his car. It is not my car.
Old Spice and Vitalis with V7 in the white two-door Bel Air hardtop with the small block, with the big boys. Drinking and counting the hours till the day comes when school is over. Blue jeans rolled up above the loafers or pulled down over the boots bounce on the twill loops of turquoise cotton carpets over the transmission hump. I want to paint the wheels white. If we could only afford whitewalls. If I could just buy good wheels. I know it’s the car. It must be the car.
As I looked down across the bed I saw two aspen posts and the splints on both legs. The light was either half-up or half-down but I could see about the room. A chair in the corner made of aspen limbs, tile floor, an electric lamp on a table, a window to the outside. I couldn’t move but did not feel much pain. Then a popping sound coming from within. The bones in my legs and arm and chest were shifting, popping into place. I was uncomfortable but the relief was greater as each bone seemed to set itself. I saw Neffie walk in the room. The old man was with her. They stopped at the doorway and watched for a moment. Neffie looked at the old man, who nodded his affirmation as she walked toward me.
The natural light faded, leaving only the lamp. Neffie and the old man left the room and stood outside the door. I could see past them to other houses set along a cliff wall, adobes, lit from inside with the same electric glow the lamp in my room was giving off, a faint yellow with a slight tint of pink. The houses, six stories of them, stretched away, beyond my view. Neffie and the old man embraced lightly and went separate ways. From somewhere far away I heard music, the sound of an electric blues guitar played by a
master. The sound wafted in and out of the room like a breeze, sometimes louder, then softer.
I tried to move my arm but could not. None of the fingers on my right hand would articulate.
A radio sits in the fake-wood dashboard inches away from the brown wool and I’m sitting on the floor and feel the brittle bark of the old carpet like jute against my legs. The bass is pounding and there’s a vibration like the vibration of my hand moving along the Arizona flagstone outside of the Country Club Pharmacy on the way to the smiling organ and the man who would be Cugat. And the vibration is new, exciting, sexy, and it is thunder and power from the center of the earth to the center of the heavens. I listen louder as Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee and the Mighty Chuck thump and crash and scream along, blowing down the back wall at light speed across the South. From the Delta it is a shout and a holler and a threat that encircles me and casts me about like a cork on the ocean, bobbing and bouncing, twitching and turning into the blues. A thump with no reprieve but a simple command from the Mighty Chuck. A mandate. Johnny B. Goode!
Now there are snakes tied in a ball and rolling around on the bed with me and they are one body and one head but many minds and they are biting me on the legs and my arms and neck, then they are smoke, diaphanous, transmuting into the swell of strings and Mantovani on a stereo in the store window, into the cafeteria, into the line, into me standing next to the cutest girl in school—hell, the cutest girl in the world. She is in the line waiting for the food, wondering how she looks, waiting and hoping to be a cheerleader so she can get all the attention she deserves and I can
smell her dress and the starch in her petticoats and her hair pulled straight back off her tan scalp into blond blue-eyed perfect Aryan twinkles as she takes out her barrette from the ponytail and scratches her name in the hood of my car. Her name on the hood of my car as an insult, the poor old paint on the tired old car that would be a convertible for me but has nothing to use, nothing left to do it with. She is there sitting next to me on the passenger seat and as we round the corner I reach over and open the door and the centrifugal force makes her slide out and tumble along the gravel on the side of the road where her petticoats mash and twist and slide and crush under her while the barrette falls out of her hair onto the road, skittering into the ditch, lost. She won’t be scratching her name with that any more. She stands up and yells at me, and me and the Mighty Chuck laugh and laugh and listen to the rhythm of the lyric as it pounds out the last word. “You done started back doin’ the things you use to do.”
In the South, in the Delta, the songs are free and they rise up and take me with them. But I am not the South. I am the Texas blues, brown-wool seat covers that soak up the root beer and leave a sticky stain. I am white and poor and hot and humid. I cannot make a fist now. I cannot make a fist so I listen to the band and the band closes each finger down around the brass knuckle, around the roll of quarters, and thumps the big speaker next to my ear as I lie pounding out the rhythm with my new fist on the floorboard of the car until my mother can come out of the house where she has gone to deliver the artwork. The artwork for layout. The layout for the advertisement. The advertisement for the bank. The bank where there is no credit for a single woman.
Not for new tires. Not for whitewalls. Not for anything. The thumping pulsing Arizona flagstone buzzing bass lines lie against the side of the wall outside the organ store. I smile back at the great chrome car gods in their stalls, at their diamond teeth and whitewalls, and hear the smear of the Mighty Chuck and Hooker’s Boogie Chillun and I know I will have the car. I will have the smell of the dress. I will fold it all into the downtown punch and tumble and trouble of the fifties and sixties and rock and roll as “Telstar” flashes by, as the Tornadoes play, as the organ warbles. The man in the window is me. The man in the window is calling, singing Texas blues. Texas country. Cugat pudding. You got to trust the pilot when you get on the plane. I feel my legs and arms; the music from far away does not fade but gets louder. There is more light. I am falling down, slipping from sultry sleep, suddenly awake, down to earth, here, now.
I tried to sit up and to my surprise found I could raise myself up on my elbows although my legs still seemed immobile. I wiggled my fingers a little and rolled my head around my shoulders, relieving the pain in my neck. Then I felt a slight trembling in the bed and a low and distant hum came into the room. I looked out through the doorway and thought I saw the sky move, like looking out of a moving train. No. More like looking out of a great airship as it lifted into the sky.