Mel had bought a bad car from a man who’d claimed to be his father. The man had arrived at Mel’s place of business, a fake Indian trading post just outside of Clovis, New Mexico, on a Friday afternoon that threatened rain. The guy drove a 1986 Honda Accord hatchback, silver with rust spots on the hood and doors, two missing hubcaps, and a hole in the dash where the radio had long since disappeared. A foreign jobbie, laughably small next to all the Hummers and 4x4s on the highways hereabouts: the perversity of the vehicle appealed to Mel’s sense of the West as a radically untethered place-a hit he’d gotten from the Sam Shepard books he’d read in college and three or four films that had once made waves at Sundance. After two years or so, these movies came and languished for a week at the cutrate theater east of town whose owner hoped to cater to the don’t-tread-on-me art house types, the Becketts of the desert who’d gone to school, read history and literature, and come out skeptical of the so-called American Dream (they always said “the so-called American Dream,” never just “American Dream”). Their skepticism took the exact form of the thing it repudiated-so, postmodernism hadn’t died on 9/11, some young Lyotard from Santa Cruz or Colorado State always argued downtown in Buck’s Java Stop. You had your ranchers with urban sensibilities, most of whose limited ranching skills led to foreclosures and auctions of their malnourished animals within six or seven months, your avant-garde cowboys whose pose said, “Out here, a man’s a man, but he’s in touch with his inner Annie Oakley.” Trouble was, not as many of these dropping-in drop-outs managed to make a go of it as the census forecasts had predicted ten years ago: you either dropped in or you didn’t-thats your American Dream, jack; don’t tell me you’re a post-Freudian Marxist while you’re down at the credit union taking out a loan on your mortgage. So the Redford mystique just wasn’t cutting it here, and the theater was a flop. Still, Mel held the indie film/ Motel Chronicles West close to his heart. He took twisted delight in being a “local” with a quietly ironic “global” view. Right away, he warmed to the Honda. It was beat to shit, which was right for this place, but its sensibly restrained thirst for petroleum products marked it as an anomaly in the oil-fattened, Po Mo West. The Land(s) of (Dis-)Enchantment.
The man who’d claimed to be his father had hell’s own sunburn. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, one ashen disaster after the other, and apparently never shaved, though apparently he didn’t produce much facial hair either. Mel didn’t believe the guy was his dad, though he could have been. He came from Midland and he knew a thing or two about Mel’s mom. A thing or two is all there was to know: Grey Goose martinis, very dry, three olives, starting at seven every evening. Perpetual runs in her knee-highs. What else? A genuinely sweet old gal.
“I’ll take two hundred for it,” the man told Mel just before the rain started up that Friday afternoon.
Mel looked at the car in the cloudy, dust-filled light. “Title and registration?”
“Don’t even make hatchbacks no more,” the man muttered.
Of course all the paper had been tossed. “Hundred fifty,” Mel said.
“Shit.” The man held out his hand.
Mel pulled the cash straight from his shirt pocket: two days’ take at the trading post. “How you going to get where you’re going now?” he asked the man.
The man locked eyes on the ground. “I’m sorry I run out on you,” he said. “And I’m shamed your Mama’d passed by the time I got around to missing her.” He tugged a black matchbook from the back pocket of his jeans. The cover said “Dog House Lounge, Midland, Texas.” “You ever … you know … this is where you’ll find me.” He scribbled “Jerry K. Hibbings, Pop” inside the matchbook cover and handed it to Mel. He slapped the cash against the palm of his free hand. “You done your old man a favor here today. And I’m happy to help my boy get a few miles down the road.”
Nope. That last line crossed the bounds, Mel thought. Until then, the old fellow had played it pretty well. Avoiding the saccharine, avoiding details. Gliding on the sheer boldness of the approach. Hooks, simple scams-they’re never as easy as they look. You ride whatever moves. After all, Mel was a fake Indian. He could accept, even appreciate, a fake dad. Give us this day our daily cornmeal, and forgive us our price-scalping as we forgive those who scalp us. Oh yes, the desert was full of these folks, drifters and grifters and truckers and service station vending machine suppliers with a little black market on the side, lost souls hoping to fuck up other lost souls by the most obvious and sentimental means—methods that usually worked because even a screw-job was interesting, something to talk about over tequila at the end of another sun-numbed day.
The man pocketed the cash and started walking. It wasn’t for another six hours, while he lay in bed with Wilma listening to the force of the rain whip dogwood leaves against the back of the house, that Mel was tempted to go after him. Not for the dad-stuff—or to find out how the fellow had figured him for a mark, knowing Mel would tumble to the “long-lost” bit—but because he’d realized, during the evening, without thinking much about it, what throwaways they were, he and the other self-employed, high desert hipsters who met at the roadhouse after work to polish each other’s detachment. They were children of alcoholics or addicts-straight from the loins of Loathing and Fear—and most of them were on their way to replicating the inebriated exploits of the missing and the dead. This, he had cottoned to tonight, as the radio warned of flash flooding and he pictured the man walking down the road, away from the trading post, was the real reason they’d dropped out in the middle of the wasteland, pretending to long for stability (whatever the hell that is, some drunken Baudrillard would shout).
The desert-huddle didn’t cradle him, didn’t distract him from his debts anymore. Besides—something interesting had happened to him this afternoon! He’d purchased a junker from a stranger who’d shown up out of the blue, out of the summer’s first dirty blue thunderheads (and the shadows they cast on the land), a codger with an outlandish story that had as much chance of being true as a douser’s willow stick, and they’d played it casual with each other, like they both had something to lose if the transaction hadn’t reached a satisfactory conclusion.
He left Wilma asleep in the bed and walked to the dark kitchen for a glass of tap water. Rain licked the window hard, now soft the way Wilma used to run her tongue up and down his chest. He laughed at himself for imagining this. Things were finished with Wilma, just as they were over with the trading post. He’d been aware of these seismic shifts for eight or nine months now: the last time it really rained. Funny, how heavy the sun could sit on your skin. And the moon. Hot and cold, gripping you tight.
Wilma knew this parting would come. Mel felt sure of that. She had once been married to a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives who, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, decided (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly—who could predict the American electorate?) that her Kiowa blood would be a career-killer. Wilma was a creature who could scissor-kick her way through any damn flood.
Mel spent the rest of the night watching her sleep, the curve of her back like the curve of a scallop shell: an object, a shape you couldn’t find for hundreds of miles in any direction on this parched plain. He knew what he was leaving. But something interesting had happened this afternoon, and it made him acknowledge that nothing much had happened to him in a long time. The false, knowing apathy that was the currency of his compatriots had become real and flinty and killing. He couldn’t fake it anymore: fake indifference, fake horniness. Fake Indian (that had been Wilma’s idea, not a bad one, just another idea in a world full of the fool things, canceling each other out). The falseness had hardened on him, and he’d have to pay for letting that happen—how had he let that old man walk away?—by shedding the externals, finding his soft skin again and admitting he was just an infant, ready to bawl his guts out.
Buck’s Java Stop opened at dawn and Mel was there for a tall one, Guatemalan, Room for Cream. The place was tricked up like a Starbucks, with abstract bur vaguely happy sun-faces painted on the menu board, green tabletops and chairs. Buck sold the New York Times (always two days late because of delivery problems) and music CDs (local artists, mostly), but from the look of things, the merchandise wasn’t moving. Buck needed a fresh gimmick. An old poster for the cheap-seat theater hung, torn and curling, by the door.
At an ARCO station on the cast side of Clovis, Mel filled the Honda’s tank. Less than twenty bucks! Perverse. Moderation in Oil Country, in the Republic of Natural Gas? It wasn’t right! ARCO didn’t even exist anymore. Mel had read this in an old edition of the Times. British Petroleum had bought the company out. West is east. Po Mo, man. Shifting sands.
Yesterday’s rain was just a rumor now. The desert had regained its crusty surface. More than once, as he headed for the Texas state line, tattooed men in semis crowded Mel, like they wanted to run him off the road. What was this hatch backed rust-bucket doing on the good and true path?
He shook his head. He still saw things with a cynic’s hard brain. But what was he feeling? Yes, what was that, stirring in his belly? “Buck’s coffee,” he said aloud. “That’s all.” Then he called himself a shallow, sodden prick. He was practicing, practicing finding the pained, soft skin.
The car sputtered and chugged. The clutch was hit and miss. It wasn’t until he’d reached southeast Midland—rows and rows of refinery tanks and an electrical power station—that it dawned on Mel: the old man couldn’t have walked here by now. Not that he’d remained on foot, necessarily. Or headed back here. Why would he turn around and make himself a mark, a target for those he’d wronged?
Mel looked at his face in the rearview. “What are you after?” he asked his reflection.
He found the address on the matchbook cover, stopped and asked directions at a 7-Eleven. The lounge turned out to be a boxy cinder-block building, painted pink, squeezed between two billboards: “Country the Way Country Should Sound” and “Pregnant? Call—” The lounge had no sign, only, in black paint on the front wall, DOG HOUSE, CLOSED MONDAYS.
The car didn’t want to die when Mel turned the key and pulled it out of the ignition. It choked and rattled a few times, then sighed and gave up the ghost. Mel felt pretty sure it wouldn’t start again, but he didn’t want to know. He got out, stretched, listened to the sound of gravel under his boots, and shut the door. The air smelled of refineries, tortillas from a nearby café. The sky was a faded, norain purple, illuminated now and then by flash-lightning.
The Dog House was every lounge that Mel had ever entered. At the end of the bar sat his mother. Not his mother, of course, but it might as well have been her. Straight scotch, no rocks, instead of a three-olive martini. If she’d worn hose, the runs would have resembled interstates on an out-of-register service station map. As it was, her varicose veins did the trick.
On the far wall, behind an unused stage, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders poster, at least ten years old. Guy Clark on the box.
An avuncular man sat at a table, a “Mama’s friend” character, the kind that had fattened “Mama’s little kitty” over the years, which along with his athletic scholarship had helped Mel get to college.
Behind the bar, a pasty man with a big head hunched over a wet blue rag. Mel opened the matchbook in front of the man’s face. “Seen him?” he said. If nothing else, he figured, he’d learn something about the fellow who’d ditched the car until the fellow turned up. If he turned up.
“Jerry Hibbings?” the bartender said. He squinted at Mel in the dim blue light that came from somewhere above and to the right of the bar. “Jerry Hibbings died. Long time ago. Three, four years.”
Mel blinked a few times, lowered the matchbook to the bar. He ordered a beer to cover whatever he was feeling. Well, hell. Fake Indians, fake faked fathers.
Almost certainly, the Honda was stolen. But he’d known that. All along, he’d known that the most interesting thing that had happened to him was the car itself, the precarious question of how far it would take him before it conked out or got him in trouble, or both.
He turned to his mother. She nodded, half-asleep over her scotch. He thought of Wilma in their bed—her bed—waking up without him. Always in the mornings, before their anger flared, before either of them had come fully awake, she’d reach for him under the covers just for the warmth of his body. The only real moments he knew.
Like this. This is what I came for, he thought, watching the woman shake herself awake. He also thought: all my life I’ve been weeping, without sound and without tears. She smiled at him. Then her attention drifted to a silver television set on a shelf behind the bar. The screen was blank. “Now, that’s some scary shit,” she said. “Look at that.”
Mel left his beer untouched. He dropped some change on the bar. Without thinking about it, he crossed out the word “Pop” on the inside of the matchbook cover, said, “Here you go, honey,” and slid the matchbook next to the woman’s drink and a soggy yellow napkin. “Jerry K. Hibbings. Just ask for me. I’ll be around. I’ll take care of anything you need.”
“Thank you, sweetie,” she said. She gave him the warmest smile.
He turned and left the lounge. In the gravel parking lot he opened the car door and left the key inside. A half-moon poked up, low in the west. Little tongues of flame rose from the intricate tubing and steel pipes of the refinery across the road, whose sign said, without irony, “Working hard, to bring you a Golden Tomorrow.” Mel walked.