The Book of Skulls

chapter seventeen Ned

Albuquerque. A dreary city, miles of suourbs, an endless string of gaudy motels along Route 66, a pathetic schlocky touristy Old Town down at the far end of things. If I have to have tourist-west, let me have Santa Fe, at least, with its adobe shops, its pretty hilltop streets, its few genuine remnants of the Spanish colonial past. But we aren’t going that way. Here we part from U.S. 66, finally, and roll southward on 85 and 25 almost to the Mexican border, down to Las Cruces, where we pick up Route 70 that shoots us toward Phoenix. How long have we been driving now? Two days, three, four? I’ve lost all track of time. I sit here hour after hour watching Oliver drive, and occasionally I do some of the driving myself, or Timothy does, and the wheels impinge on my soul, the carburetor fires in my gut, the interface between passenger and vehicle dissolves. We are all parts of this snorting monster rolling westward. America lies sprawling, gassed, behind us. Chicago is only a memory now. St. Louis is only a bad dream. Joplin, Springfield, Tulsa, Amarillo — unreal, lacking in substance. A continent of pinched faces and small souls back there. Fifty million cases of severe menstrual cramps erupt to the east, and we couldn’t care less. A plague of premature ejaculation spreads through the great urban metropolises. All heterosexual males over the age of seventeen in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Tennessee have been smitten by an outbreak of hemorrhaging hemorrhoids, and Oliver drives on, giving no damns.

I like this part of the country. It’s open, uncluttered, vaguely Wagnerian, with a good campy westernness about it: you see the men in their string ties and ten-gallon hats, you see the Indians sleeping in the doorways, you see the sagebrush swarming up the hillsides, and you know it’s right, it’s all the way it’s supposed to be. I was here the summer I was eighteen, mostly in Sante Fe, bunking with an agreeable weather-beaten suntanned fortyish dealer in Indian artifacts. A member of the Homintern, he. A card-carrying official of the International Pervo-Devo Conspiracy. They say it takes one to tell one, but in his case it took no great amount of telling: he did the lisp thing, the accent thing, he was plainly a squaw. He taught me, among much else, how to drive a car. All during August I made his collecting rounds for him, visiting his suppliers; he buys old pots for five bucks, sells them to antiquity-minded tourists for fifty. Low overhead, quick turnover. I undertook solitary terrifying voyages, hardly knowing my clutch from my elbow, driving down to Bernalillo, up to Farm-ington, over to the Rio Puerco country, even making a vast expedition out to Hopi, going to all sorts of places where, in violation of local archaeological ordinances, the farmers raid unexcavated ruined pueblos and winkle out salable merchandise. Also I met a number of Indians, many of them (surprise!) gay. I remember fondly a certain groovy Navaho. And a swaggering buck from Taos who, once he was sure of my credentials, took me down into a kiva and initiated me into some of the tribal mysteries, giving me access to ethnographical data for which many scholars no doubt would sell their foreskins. A profound experience. A mind-blower. I mean to tell the world that it’s not just your asshole that gets broadened, when you’re gay.

Trouble with Oliver this afternoon. I was driving, rocketing down 25 somewhere between Belen and Socorro, feeling ballsy and light, for once the master of the car and not just something caught in the machinery. Half a mile ahead I spotted a figure, walking on our side of the road, evidently a hitchhiker. On impulse, I slowed. A hitcher, right: more than that, a hippie, the genuine 1967 article, long scruffy hair, sheepskin vest over bare chest, stars-and-stripes patch on the seat of his tie-dyed jeans, knapsack, no shoes. I suppose heading toward one of the desert communes, trudging alone from nowhere to nowhere. Well, in a sense we were heading toward a commune, too, and I felt we could accommodate him. I braked the car almost to a halt. He looked up, maybe flashing quickly on paranoia, saw Easy Rider once too often and was expecting a blast of good Amurrican gunfire, but the fear went out of his face when he saw we were kids. He grinned, gap-toothed, and I could almost hear the mumbled little courtesies, like I mean, wow, sure is cool of you to pick me up, man, like I mean, you know, it’s a long walk, the straights around here won’t help you nohow, man, when Oliver said, simply, “No.”

“No?”

“Keep on driving.”

“We’ve got room in the car,” I said.

“I don’t want to take the time.”

“Christ, Oliver, the guy’s harmless! And he gets maybe one car an hour out here. If you were in his position—”

“How do you know he’s harmless?” Oliver asked. By now the hippie was less than a hundred feet to the rear of where I’d stopped. “Maybe he’s part of Charles Manson’s family,” Oliver went on quietly. “Maybe his thing is knifing guys who sentimentalize hippies.”

“Oh, wow! How sick can you get, Oliver?”

“Start the car,” he said, in his ominous flat prairie voice, his tornado’s-a-comin‘ voice, his out-of-this-town-by-nightfall-nigger voice. “I don’t like him. I can smell him from here. I don’t want him in the car.”

“I’m driving now,” I answered. “I’ll make the decisions about—”

“Start the car,” Timothy said.

“You, too?”

“Oliver doesnt want him, Ned. You aren’t going to impose him on Oliver against his wishes, are you?”

“Jesus, Timothy—”

“Besides, it’s my car, and I don’t want him either. Put the foot on the gas, Ned.”

Out of the back came Eli’s voice, soft, perplexed. “Wait a second, guys, I think we have a moral issue to consider here. If Ned wants—”

“Will you drive?” Oliver said, in as close to a shout as I’ve ever heard from him. I glanced at him in my rear-view mirror. His face was red and sweat-beaded, and a vein stood out terrifyingly on his forehead. A manic face, a psychotic face. He might do anything. I couldn’t risk a blowup over one hitchhiking hippie. Shaking my head sadly, I put my foot to the accelerator, and, just as the hippie was reaching to open the door on Oliver’s side in back, we blasted off with a roar, leaving him standing alone and astonished in a cloud of exhaust fumes. To his credit, he didn’t shake his fist at us, he didn’t even spit at us, he just let his shoulders slump and-went on walking. Maybe he was expecting a rip-off all the time. When I could no longer see the hippie, I looked at Oliver again. His face was more calm now; the vein had receded, the color had ebbed. But there was still a weird chilling fixity about it. Rigid eyes, a muscle flickering in his pretty-boy cheek. We were twenty miles down the highway before the electricity had stopped crackling in the car.

Finally I said, “Why’d you do that, Oliver?”

“Do what?”

“Force me to screw that hippie.”

“I want to get where I’m going,” Oliver said. “Have you seen me pick up any hitchhikers so far? Hitchhikers mean trouble. They mean delay. You would have taken him down some side road to his commune, an hour, two hours off the schedule.”

“I wouldn’t have. Besides, you complained about his smell. You worried about getting knifed. What was that all about, Oliver? Haven’t you picked up enough paranoid shit yourself on account of your long hair?”

“Perhaps I wasn’t thinking clearly,” said Oliver, who had never thought any other way but clearly in his life. “Perhaps I’m in such a rush to get a move on that I say things I don’t mean,” said Oliver, who never spoke except from a prepared script. “I don’t know. I just had this gut feeling that we shouldn’t pick him up,” said Oliver, who last gave way to a gut feeling when he was being toilet-trained. “I’m sorry I leaned on you, Ned,” said Oliver.

Ten minutes of silence later he said, “I think we ought to agree on one thing, though. From here to the end of the trip, no hitchhikers. Okay? No hitchhikers.”