An Old Song, a New Song

ONE

Ajo, Arizona.

Spanish for “garlic.”

I never loved a place more.

About twenty-five years or so ago I lived there for three-and-a-half weeks.

I went there to rewrite my Magnum Opus. To get away from the distractions of city life and my involvement in the lives of friends. I no longer wanted to write the book; now I just wanted to write a book.

I left Ajo to solve a problem, to get away from my involvement in the lives of some people I had come to love. I left to write this book.

◊

I was guided to the desert by a dream and a friend’s husband. All summer long I had fantasies about going to the desert, but I wouldn’t listen to them because I was afraid to go there alone. Then I had a dream in which I saw some white adobe churches, a desert landscape, and a brilliant blue sky. Still dreaming, I said, “I can write here!”

It was then that I took my fantasy seriously.

The following day, after hiking with an old friend, I visited with her husband.

“What are you doing now?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve been writing for the past three years,” I answered, “but I’m having trouble concentrating on my work here, so I’m thinking about going to the desert.” Nothing like talking to make one’s fantasies concrete.

“Where to?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered helplessly. “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

“Why don’t you go to Ajo?” he said. “I spent some time there before I married Ruth. I worked for the Catholic Diocese.”

“Tell me about it.”

Jim told me that Ajo was a small town, with a population of about six thousand people, fifty miles from the Mexican border and near the Papago Indian Reservation. “It's a mining town,” he concluded.

“What do they mine?”

“Cooper.”

I wanted to know if it had some elevation. I was living then in a tiny studio apartment in the flats of Berkeley that felt claustrophobic. I was hungry to see wide, open spaces. A writer needs a view.

I was happy to learn that Ajo was built on a hillside.

Then I received what I call confirmation.

“I can show you some photographs of it, if I can find this magazine I used to have,” Jim told me. He began rummaging through a pile of old magazines. He found a magazine that had been published by the diocese. As he turned the pages, a photograph caught my eye—pictured were several white adobe churches, a town center, and a blue sky. It looked like what I had seen in my dream!

That cinched it. I would go to Ajo.

◊

Two or three weeks later, Alice, my cat and traveling companion, and I were on our way to Ajo.

From the scant bit of information I had about it, I constructed a visual image. I feared I would be disappointed. Instead, Ajo exceeded my every expectation.

At Deeming, I turned off Interstate 10 onto Highway 11 and drove the remaining forty miles. My eye took delight in the beauty of the desert landscape. For a while any new place is a new beginning.

Small white clouds waltzed across a blue sky, buzzards soared, and the land swept around me in a glorious panorama. I feel freest when I can see for miles.

The road cut through Black Gap, two black hills, and continued through an area where the hills looked like hairy chocolate drops. The land on both sides of the road was fenced off, as it was a United States Air Force training ground.

Beyond, the land opened unto a wide desert valley, skirted with mountains that reminded me of how overcooked pudding stands up when lifted with a spoon. The vegetation was primarily cacti, shrubs, and spindly trees. Small rodents, desert squirrels, hopped along the sides of the road.

The distant town of Ajo was flanked by a white terrace, as though the first level of a wide pyramid. The first homes I passed were flat-roofed rectangular boxes, wide apart, with acres of desert in between. Occasional gasoline stations and sundry businesses marked the way into town.

Entering Ajo, the road turned east and descended to the town center, marked by a well-tended plaza. The verdant grass of the plaza was more brilliant because of the subdued surrounding landscape. Elegant palms, whose slender trunks towered aristocratically above their thicker bodied sisters, fringed the plaza. Cement steps rose to a fountain at the southern end, while the northern end was crossed by walkways.

Surrounding plaza was a tube of adobe buildings and a portico. They housed the library, a movie theater and a post office facing east; the railroad station facing south; and a mercantile, coffee shop and drug store facing west.

Across the street to the south stood two white adobe churches (reminiscent of my dream) one Catholic and the other Protestant. Up the street between the churches was an gray building, which was the school.

In a day and age when many towns have become sprawling conglomerations devoid of any sense of design and lacking a town center, it pleased me to find that Ajo had such a carefully considered layout.

At the single stoplight on the southeast corner of the plaza, I turned right and spotted a substantial gray stone building that bore a sign on its roof, advertising The St. Francis Hotel. Jim had said there was a hotel in Ajo, and I planned to stay there until I could find a suitable apartment.

I parked in front of the hotel and for a minute sat in my car. I had driven to the place of my dream and now here I was.

“Well, here goes,” I said to myself as I got out and walked past a brick patio, a new addition to the hotel, up a few steps and into the lobby. I was to learn that in the desert people keep their interiors dark during the day because then they are cooler.

The hotel bore the grandeur of another era, eroded by time. The furniture in the lobby was massive, sedate and in need of a dusting.

The lobby was empty except for a small, gray-haired man who was seated in a lit office behind a desk. Seeing me, he rose and came out. His face bore a kindly, if ironic, expression and a hint of interest.

“Can I help you?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I answered boldly. “I’m a writer. I’ve come here to do some work. What is the price for a single per night?”

“Singles are $12.50 per night plus tax,” he answered seriously, but I could tell he was amused. “Our weekly rates are lower and lower yet by the month.”

“I thought I’d stay until I can find an apartment. May I see a room?”

He handed me a key and said I would have to climb the stairs–the elevator hadn’t work in years. I climbed the stairs and walked to a doorway along a dark corridor on the second floor. I opened the door to a room that faced the inner well of the hotel. Though cool and comfortably furnished, it was too dark for my taste and had no view.

Returning the key, I asked whether he had room with a view.

“I have one on the south side but it hasn’t been made up yet. That side is hotter during the day.”

“That’s okay. Can I see it?”

With a second key I climbed the stairs again and found the room. When I opened the door, I knew in a glance that this room was mine. It was much lighter than the first. An iron bedstead with tousled white sheets from a previous occupant, a dark wood dresser and mirror, a small desk, and a chair with a tapestry cushion were its furnishings. I touched a pillow on the bed and found that it was down. I liked the sparseness of the room.

The windows faced south and were curtained by stained drapes that hadn’t been washed in some time. I pulled them back so I could see the view. The windows were large, paned with small rectangles of glass in wrought iron castings.

The view was of the hillside mantled with houses and desert fauna. Clouds lingered in the blue sky. This room would do.

I paid for a week and was told my room would be ready in a half-hour, so I went outside to sit on the patio and thought about the man who had helped me. He had an aura of substantiality, common sense, trustworthiness. His eyes were like burning coals, indicating intelligence. I thought he would be my friend.

◊

After spending the afternoon getting settled, I showered in lukewarm water, changed clothes, and lay down for a nap. When I rose, I noted there was still an hour or so before the sun would set. Famished, I decided to walk to the coffee shop on the plaza for dinner.

Along the way I decided to stop in at the library to see whether it had a copy of a book I had been wanting to read, Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer. I was pleased to find that Ajo was enough a part of the modern world to have it on its shelves. Adding an Ajo library card to my collection, I checked it out and crossed the plaza to dine with my mentor.

Sitting in the coffee shop, munching on a plate of soggy fried chicken, enough for a lumberjack, and reading, I was struck by several sentences in the first chapter:

I tell you these things about myself to legitimize my voice. We are uneasy about a story until we know who is telling it. In no other sense does it matter who “I” am; the “the narrator” play no motive role in this narrative, nor would I want to.

I acknowledged that in my present state as a writer I was most likely to play a primary role in any narrative I might tell—a case, I feared, of extreme narcissism, justified only by my desire to tell the truth of my experience as accurately as I could.

As far as telling the reader who “I” am, suffice it to say, I was then a single woman with literary aspirations and a small inheritance to facilitate them. Well-read and well educated, I considered myself a bit of an intellectual.

While I was finding the chicken unpalatable, I looked up from my book and saw an thin, gray-haired Indian woman, dressed in a pair of Bermuda shorts, a white T shirt and red tennis shoes and clutching a red nylon purse, stride into the shop and to a stool in the corner. Even as she sat with her back to me, she made me feel uncomfortable. I paid for my dinner and left.

Dusk is the most pleasant time of day in Ajo, when the sun loses its intensity and creatures stir and leave their shelters. Walking back to the hotel, I noticed several ragamuffins playing on the sidewalk. I had seen them earlier in the lobby and wondered why they weren’t in school.

Once I was back in my room, the sating of one appetite gave rise to another. Now I was hungry for companionship, so I went to the cocktail lounge for a drink. It amused me that a hotel named after a great saint would sport a bar called “Hot Lips.”

The lounge was a new addition. It was furnished with a pool table, a jute box, tables and chairs. A clock running in reverse hung over the mirror behind the bar.

Several people were there, including the man that had helped me earlier. Soon he came over to sit beside me. He was easy to talk to.

“I take it you own this hotel,” I said.

“Yes, I bought it about five years ago. This is one of only places in town not owned by the copper company. This is a mining town, you know.”

I said I did and asked if the white terrace I saw on the hill had something to do with the mine. He told me the copper ore was extracted from an open pit that I could see. The white material were the “tailings,” a waste product in the smelter process.

He said the mine was carrying on minimal operations because there had been an accident several months ago. A man driving a train loaded with ore had either fallen asleep or had a heart attack. The train derailed, and he was killed. Outside construction crews had been called in to repair the damage. Some of the workers were staying at the hotel. Having so informed me, he asked he could buy me a drink.

“Thank you,” I replied. “Do you mind if I ask who’s buying?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I thought you already knew my name. It’s Walt. Walt Burger. Some people call me ‘the big W.’”

I could see why. He seemed like a nice man, someone others could rely on in time of need.

“Those children I saw here today—do they live here?”

Walt said they belonged to a couple who was staying at the hotel. The husband was on one the repair crew.

“They came with only a couple of dollars in their pockets. I said they could pay when he makes some money.”

I thought this probably wasn’t the first time he had bailed someone out.

“You know, you’re a minority around here,” Walt told me. “There’s more Indians and Mexicans here than whites. You're a gringo.”

“I don’t mind. I like Mexicans and Indians.”

“Then you're even more of a minority.”

A short, squarely-built man, wearing thick glasses, entered the bar. He came over and sat on the other side of Walt. He was tidily dressed in pressed shirt and trousers. His well-scrubbed face beamed, and his jaw was firmly set.

“How are you doing, Dad?” he addressed Walt, though obviously his senior.

“Not bad,” Walt replied. “Let me introduce you to our new guest. Leo, this is Susan, Susan Rasmussen. Susan, this Leo Oddo. Susan’s a writer.”

“A writer, huh?” said Leo, extending his hand. “Well, you’ll find plenty to write about here, won’t she, Walt.”

I didn’t say that I had come to Ajo to write about something else.

“Leo here is the Godfather of Ajo,” Walt told me.

We conversed a bit more and then, heartened by Walt and Leo’s friendliness, I excused myself, went to my room and directly to bed.

TWO

THE ST. FRANCIS HOTEL

Dogs, cats and kids,

Cowboys and construction workers,

Old Mr. Sweeny and

A lady writer–

All live at

The St. Francis Hotel,

100 Sonora Street,

Ajo, Arizona.

Walt and Sophie

Own the hotel.

If the telephone doesn’t work,

If the bathtubs are slow to drain,

If a pane of glass

Has fallen from the windows,

What do we care?

The pillows are down,

You can pay your bill late,

If you need a loan, ask Walt.

If you need a meal, ask Sophie.

We all share in the knowledge

That Walt and Sophie love us.

I was pleased, amazed really, that I could have struck out on my own for the middle of nowhere and ended living in such a delightful place as the St. Francis Hotel, in as pleasant a town as Ajo, a town where there was still some semblance of fellowship among the residents, where, to my way of thinking, the quality of life made it worth living.

I liked living at the hotel so much that I didn’t look for an apartment. I decided to stay on, as I knew I wouldn’t be lonely there. The artist’s paradox is that she must be alone to create but be with people to live; each must find her balance.

It was as though I had fallen through a roof of a theater onto the stage where a play was about to start. Actually, it had begun as soon as I drove into town, and I was one of the characters.

Having put out the word that I was a writer, I was meeting with the appropriate response—the wistful admiration most people pay anyone courageous enough to take up such a foolhardy occupation.

Because it’s what I did, it’s what I called myself. I had been calling myself one for long enough to know that nearly everyone has a book inside them that he would like to write someday. Since most people know they will never sit down long enough to go through the trials and tribulations of writing, when they meet someone proclaiming such a title, they want to tell her their story. They hope that she will be interested enough to write it for them. If people know you are writer, they are eager to tell you their story.

Thus, it is satisfying to a writer’s ego to tell others, I am a writer. What interested me in Ajo was that everyone said the same thing: “You’ll find plenty to write about here!”

“Are you on vacation?” the mother of the three children living at the hotel asked me when we encountered each other in the hallway.

“Well, not exactly,” I answered. “I’m a writer.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said, smiling. “You’ll find plenty to write about here. You could write a book about this hotel.” Her smile twisted knowingly as she added, “We’re all a little crazy here.”

“Well, then,” I answered. “I should fit right in.”

When she saw my typewriter and paper on my desk, the maid, a long-legged young woman, looked at me with something short of adoration.

When I said I was a writer, she raised an eyebrow and said, “There’s a lot you could write about here!”

Her name was Connie. She was separating from her husband because of his drinking and violence. Their child had a learning disability….

What with the suggestion being repeated often and the fact I could see there was a lot I could write about Ajo, I decided to oblige. At the beginning of each chapter of the Magnum Opus, maybe I could tell the reader something about Ajo, something light, as a counterpoint to the dirge the Magnum Opus had become. I began to observe my environment with more interest, to take notes.

◊

On the afternoon of my second day I saw Sophie for the first time. I was bounding down the stairs to fetch yet another item from my car when I saw her slight figure, dressed in an oversized light blue shirt and dungarees. She was standing at the desk, a pack of cigarettes in one hand, while the other drummed her fingers on the counter impatiently, and she shook her head back and forth. I knew without being told that she was Sophie, Walt’s wife.

She was wisp of woman–ninety pounds, maybe. Though middle-aged, she seemed still a child. Her movements were jerky because she lacked the bulk for grace.

            It hadn’t occurred to me before that Walt was married. I should have known that he wouldn’t be running a hotel single-handed. Nevertheless, I was a bit disappointed.

Maybe I should make my position in life clearer. I may have come to Ajo to work on the Magnum Opus, but I was also a single woman in search of romance.

I got a closer look at Sophie that evening when I went into the bar for a drink and Walt introduced her.

“I could tell you a lot of stories about this hotel,” Sophie said in a friendly fashion. “When you run a hotel like this, you can’t help but see a lot!”

She dragged out the words she wanted to emphasize. Her voice was low, hoarse and loud, projected sufficiently so that anyone in the bar could hear her. Beneath her cap of dark hair was a still pretty face, albeit, pale and strained. Her dark eyes were her most attractive feature. Sometimes they laughed but other times they were tense, alert, and watchful.

Sitting alongside Sophie was a middle-aged Mexican, whom Walt introduced as Jose. We all talked for several minutes. Then one conversation became two, as Sophie confided in Jose and Walt talked with me.

“God damn it, Jose!” Sophie bellowed, slapping his arm. “You do too know her. She’s the one...”

Jose smiled, patted her arm and said, “Okay, Sophie. Okay. I know who you mean.”

I got the impression of a crow flapping its wings next to a benign scarecrow.

I was glad to talk to Walt alone. The situation wasn’t that unusual. When people live together day in, day out, year after year, they run out things to say.

Walt was a skilled conversationalist. We laughed at each other’s witticisms and enjoyed the art of repartee. His wisdom came from having come through the school of hard knocks and putting two and two together. He seemed so stable, so sound, like a rock in the middle of a rushing stream.

“I’d like to read what you’re writing,” Walt said. I didn’t know how to answer, but

when I went to bed that night, I was happy because of the interest he was showing in me.

◊

On my third day in Ajo I took a walk to the visitor lookout. The Anaconda Company had constructed a shaded lookout overlooking the open pit. As I sat, eating my remaining piece of chicken and a pear, I looked at the diagram on one of the walls.

A large, yellow ocher square indicated the “Total Material Mined.” Two arrows pointed to squares, the large bottom “Mined Waste,” the smaller, “Ore.” Two smaller squares yet came from the “Ore” square, the larger “Milled Waste,” the smaller “Concentrates.” A square coming from the “Concentrates” was for “Smelter Waste” or “slag.” An inch-and-half cube of glistening cooper was attached to the wall, representing the amount of pure cooper that can be extracted from a huge sum of mined material. At the top of the board was the following statement: “99.7% of all material mined is discarded in the production of copper.”

I thought it was like writing, likening a book to the small cube of copper, extracted from the huge phantasmagoria of life. Could I now refine the essence of anything worthwhile that I had learned about life into a book?

Continuing along this philosophical bent, I reflected that in the smelting process of writing one is forced to separate slag from pure ore, saving only what is essential for the narrative.

◊

On my fourth day in Ajo, I learned that Walt had left early in the morning to go to Las Cruces for several days. Ostensibly to get supplies for the hotel. I was sorry he was gone and wondered if he had a lady friend there.

Late that afternoon, after I had finished working, I was standing in the hallway outside my room, holding my cat Alice in my arms, when I heard footsteps. I had been aware of the comings and goings of the boisterous construction workers who lived there, aware that they enlivened things considerably, but I hadn’t met any of them yet.

Coming down the hall now was the handsome Mexican worker I had seen in the bar the previous evening. He was wearing a black cowboy hat, a red shirt, Levi’s and  black boots. His smile reminded me of the sun shining.

“That sure is a big cat you’ve got there,” he said in passing.

“She got fat after I had her spayed,” I answered.

“That’s what happens to women when they don’t get any,” he observed and let himself into a room several doors down.

When I went back into my room, I was frustrated. I had not been in Ajo for four days when a restless yearning started again, the yearning that makes it impossible to spend the night alone, quietly reading in my room, the desire for life, conversation and action—the yearning of a woman alone.

Being single for as long as I had, I had learned the ropes. I reminded myself that Walt was married and pulled out my adage concerning married men: they will flirt but will rarely leave their wives.

When I went into the bar that night the handsome Mexican was sitting with three of his cohorts, all wearing cowboy hats except for the one with thick glasses, who was wearing a baseball cap.

The Mexican indicated an interest in me by leaning forward and asking, “Did you feed your cat tonight?”

In order to talk we had to lean forward so we could see each other around his buddy, a beanpole of a man named Dennis. Soon the group readied themselves to go out for dinner. Damn, I thought, there goes my fun.

Then the Mexican said, “Hey! Why don’t you come along?”

THREE

I knew that Sophie and Tex, the woman who tended bar, took note of it when the lady writer left that evening with the gaggle of construction workers. I worried some about the impression I might be making, but, on the whole, I was happy for the diversion. I may have come to Ajo to work on my Magnum Opus but that didn't mean I had to die on the vine.

“What's your name?” I asked the handsome Mexican as five of us got into his dusty Impala.

“Sonny,” he said, smiling. Our eyes met momentarily across and I knew he had sex on his mind. Though I knew it was absurd, I kind of fell in love with him then, but I suppose I fall in love rather easily, or used to…

“You know, like the sun,” he added, flirting. His smile was irresistible.

“What's yers?” he asked.

“Susan,” I said, sliding next to him. Little Jim, so called because there was an even bigger Jim living at the hotel. This Jim was tall and lanky with a sorrowful, little-boy face. I could see in his eyes he wanted a woman.

I was straddling a warm six-pack of beer on the floor. It felt as though I had returned to high school, when a gang of us might “burn the point,” drinking beer. With a whoop and a holler, we were on our way to Wasp Ernie’s for dinner.

It may be of greater significance if I tell what I didn’t say that night as well as what I did.

This breed of men was not unfamiliar to me, so I knew what to expect, though, for the time being, I chose to suspend judgment. I knew, for instance, that single men who travel around working on construction crews tend to make and spend good money. One of their implicit rules is that if you work hard all day, you drink hard and party at night, dropping bills like confetti. For every line of work, there seems to be a way of life.

They were chauvinists but generous and entertaining ones. Sonny and I shared a mutual interest, however carnal. Little Jim, cut out from the action, became sadder as the evening progressed.

My attraction to Sonny was clearly physical. Intellectually we had about as much in common as Clare Booth Luce and Charles Atlas.

“There's nothing I haven’t done,” he told me with a bravado I found touching. “I’ve been everywhere there is to go, seen everything there is to see, done everything there is to do.”

“Surely there’s some places you haven’t been to, some things you haven’t seen. You haven't done everything there is to do,” I said reasonably, like a teacher reasoning with a pupil.

“You name it. I’ve done it,” he maintained levelly.

“Have you ever watched the seals on Seal Rock in San Francisco?” I ventured.

“Sure have.”

“Have you ever swum two lengths of a 75-foot swimming pool underwater?”

“Sure have.”

“Have you chewed peyote and watched the sun set?”

“Sure have. I even have a T-shirt with ‘Peyote’ on it.”

“Well, then,” I said, searching for something that would totally out of character for someone like him to do. “Have you ever played bridge?”

“Sure have, but I didn’t like it much.”

I suspected he hadn’t but let it go unchallenged.

“Have you ever been to the top of the Empire State building?”

I had him there. “You said you had done everything there is to do.”

I censored the next thing on my list. Have you ever been to bed with a lady writer? Instead I said, “Have you ever eaten Rocky Mountain oysters?”

“Shit!” Sonny replied. “I’ve spent days cutting ’em off those critters. I used to have a whole freezer full of ’em. I love to eat them things.”

I imagined him proudly leaning against a freezer of calves’ testes.

They ate huge platters of thick, juicy steaks, baked potatoes, generously topped with sour cream, salad and rolls with gusto while I daintily nibbled my fries. When we finished, they wanted to go to bar down the road. Once in this bar, the four of them began a game of pool, so I went over to the jute-box to play a few songs.

Little Jim saw this as his opportunity to make an advance and came over to ask me to dance.

“Sure,” I said, “if you’ll put down your cue stick.”

It was awkward dancing with him. As soon as the record stopped and another began, Sonny cut in. I tried to indicate my preference by saying, “You’re easier to follow than Jim.”

“Shit,” said Sonny. “Can’t dance unless I’m drunk.”

Little Jim grew restless and wanted to go back to the hotel. I suppose he hoped there would be some women there. I felt sorry for him and said, “I know how you feel.” He expressed his gratitude by trying to hold my hand as we drove back.

I felt sheepish walking back into the hotel with my escorts. Sophie was sitting on her usual stool next to Jose. The bar was quiet and devoid of available women. Soon Little Jim was nodding off.

I got up to play the jute-box and selecting “Amazing Grace” by Willie Nelson.

As the first strands of it filtered into the air, Sophie roared, “I knew I liked you!” striking a hand in my direction. She got down from her stool, came down to where I was sitting, put a thin arm around me, and began singing. I joined in. Sophie sang tenor as I changed from soprano to alto and back. Sonny watched us as though we were crazed.

I enjoyed the unabashed warmth of her gesture. “We should go on the road together,” I told her when she returned to seat.

By this time Little Jim was slumped over the bar. “Why don’t you help him to his room,” I suggested.

“Aw, he can get himself to bed,” Sonny replied.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “He seems gone. Come on. I’ll help you.”

“Don’t you go!” Sophie bellowed from across the way at me. “Sonny, put ’em to bed.” she ordered.

I was surprised by her protectiveness and confused, so I went to the bathroom. When I returned, Jim had departed.

Sonny and I kept downing drinks and talking. We had managed to find a topic in common—our mutual love of animals—and were telling each other about the various pets we had had, each story getting sloppier than its predecessor. I could see he was drunk and knew I was too. I feared if we left this topic, we would have trouble finding another. Finally, I said, “Let’s go.”

There was no question but that I would sleep with him that night. We both knew it. If we were an unlikely combination, such is the spice of life.

“Your room or mine?” I asked.

“My room is next to yers,” he said. “Do ya want ta see it?”

“Okay,” I answered.

He opened the door to his room, which in comparison to mine was dark and cluttered.

“Let’s go to my room,” I said.

Without a word, we took our clothes off and fell into each other’s arms to consummate the purpose of the evening.

At 5:30 a.m. the next morning Sonny got up to go to work.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked, throwing a robe on and following him to the door.

He kissed me lightly on the lips and said, “Hell, I’m never tired!”

FOUR

I slept for a few more hours after Sonny left and then rose with the sense of contentment one feels when the universe seems to be smiling on one. If my adventure to Ajo weren’t enough, now I also had a lover. As unlikely a pair as Sonny and I made, it would save me from a stronger attraction, to Walt, a married man. It was my first Friday in Ajo.

Besides, I had something to look forward to that evening. Sonny had asked if I wanted to go to Las Cruces with his friends and him—Don’s girlfriend was coming to spend the weekend with him, and her plane would land there.

After having had sex, I felt good, my energies balanced, like a recharged battery, but now that I had gone to bed with Sonny, certain expectations had arisen. Now I expected I would be with him almost every night until he finished his work and left town. I had been single long enough to know that if I was foolish enough to jump into bed with a man right away, complications were likely to develop. Things always are more sober in the light of day, but in meantime, I intended to float along in my fantasy.

Four-thirty p.m. became a significant time of day. That was when the construction workers stopped working and came roaring back to the hotel, ready for a shower, a cold beer and the evening’s fun.

That evening I timed my entry into the bar at 4:45 p.m. Sonny was there, still in his work clothes, noisily talking with the crew.

“Hi,” he said, acknowledging me with his big smile, and then he continued talking with his friend. I sat next to him. The group that night included another couple, a man who looked as though he might play in blue-grass band and a plain, subservient woman, the girlfriend who had come in on the bus that day. She patiently rubbed his shoulder while he gestured to the boys.

The men discussed the perils of the day. I should be reasonable. Whatever one experiences must be processed in some way. This was their way of processing the day’s events.

After a while I touched Sonny’s arm and asked, “Are we going to Las Cruces tonight?”

“Oh,” he replied, as though he had quite forgotten his invitation. “We’re not going. Don’s girl changed her mind.”

“Oh,” I said, not now knowing whether I was included in his plans for the evening or not.

“We’re going to Mama Cita’s for dinner,” Sonny said. “Do you want to come along?”

“Sure, I guess so,” I answered, vaguely disappointed. The most he was offering that I be an appendage to the group.

Mama Cita’s was a gaudy Mexican restaurant on Highway #9 to the north of Ajo. The jukebox was playing Mexican music, and the atmosphere was charged with Friday night’s hilarity. At dinner the men were still engrossed in their ubiquitous job talk and the women said little. Out of boredom I asked the woman who had come in on the bus that day whether she was here for the weekend or was going to stay.

“I just stay with Steven on the weekend,” she said somberly.

She was so lackluster that I could see having a conversation with her would be work. Then she said she had spent the day reading a book.

“Oh,” I asked. “What did you read?”

“The Bell Jar.”

Remembering how chilled I had been by Sylvia Plath’s description of her breakdown, I asked, “What did you think of it?”

“Oh, it was all right,” she answered absently.

I decided not to suggest that she read Ms. Plath’s poems nor deemed it wise to discuss the nature of her suicide, so I dropped my attempt to converse with her and resigned myself that my second night out with the boys might not be as much fun as the first.

◊

When we returned to hotel, the bar was jumping with life. While the men played pool, the plain woman and I sat there. I felt ignored until Sonny asked if I wanted to play. Never good, I was especially poor at pool that night. I tried to ignore the sinking feeling I had.

When Sonny had enough of pool, he said, “Let’s have a drink.”

We sat in a booth against the wall. At the table next to us another construction worker, a man, both handsome and strange, sat with a simply beautiful Mexican woman. His strange look was compounded by the fact that his hair was in a duck tail, twenty years after they had been popular.

The woman had long brown hair that snaked along her proud face and cascaded to her waist. Her dark eyes flashed flirtatiously, indicating she understood her power. She was dressed in a western shirt, tight Levi’s that were tucked into cowboy boots. A wide leather belt cinched her small waist with a buckle studded with turquoise.

Whenever a woman notes the attire of another woman it is because she appreciates a good looking, well-dressed woman and because she knows she is competition. A woman can quickly size up another woman as quickly as men can.

I knew Sonny saw her, and I knew he was saying to himself, “That’s the one I want.” I felt a stab of jealousy.

“Can I buy you a drink?” the man sitting across from her asked us. He was feeling expansive and wanted to draw attention to his being with a beautiful woman, to say, “Look what I have!”

We sat with them and had a drink. The man asked her to dance. As they danced, he held her close, his hand against her head.

“What’s his name?” I asked Sonny.

“That’s Johnny,” he told me.

◊

Later that night, as Sonny and I lay sleeping side by side in my bed, we were awakened by sounds of a disturbance. Shouts floated through my open window from below (as if to prove that there would be plenty to write about at the St. Francis Hotel.)

I sat up, straining to hear what was being yelled. Periodic groans and roars came from an unidentified party, as though from a lion resisting confinement. After an interval of screams, there was silence, then more screaming, accompanied by the sounds of scuffling feet and a choir of other voices, one of which I could identify.

“Johnny, calm down! We’re your friends!” and “Johnny, if you don’t calm down, I’m going to call the poleece!”

The voice was that of little toothpick Sophie, now loudly threatening, “Johnny, if you don’t calm down, I’m going to knock your block off!”

I couldn’t imagine Sophie knocking anyone’s block off. Walt, I thought, where are you?

Johnny’s friends sounded more sympathetic than angry. Maybe by breaking taboo and screaming in public, he reminded them of the screams they suppressed.

“What’s going on?” Sonny asked groggily.

“It sounds like your friend Johnny is acting out,” I told him.

“Oh, him. He’s nuts,” said Sonny and fell back asleep.

I waited until the sounds subsided before I lay down again, wondering why Johnny was so upset.

◊

“Johnny went berserk,” is how people summed it up the next day in low conversations that rippled through the town. The day was as quiet as the previous night had been noisy.

“How’s Sophie?” I asked the maid when she knocked at my door to see if I needed anything. I wanted to hear what she had to say about last night.

“She’s not feeling very well today,” Connie confided. “Johnny hit her on the arm and in the stomach.”

“What’s his problem?”

“I think he’s on drugs,” she replied, lifting her eyebrows, then sighing. “He was in Viet Nam, you know. A lot of ’em came back screwed up.”

I nodded and likewise sighed.

“Is Walt back yet?” I asked.

I had wondered if Sophie had wished Walt were home last night to quell Johnny or if she enjoyed handling it herself, at the expense of becoming slightly wounded. I also wondered if getting supplies was all he was doing in Las Cruces.

“He’s coming back today,” Connie said. “Should be getting back this afternoon.”

I knew without being told the Johnny of the outburst was the same Johnny we had a drink with and wondered what the dark-haired beauty had done then.

That afternoon I did Sonny’s and my laundry, finding the tacky little laundromat behind the post office. While I was there, two older men, locales, came in. One held out a bedspread that he wanted to wash. He complained to me that he didn’t have his glasses on and asked how many quarters the machine took.

“Four,” I told him and began emptying the clothes in the dryer onto a table so I could fold them. While I was folding clothes, he came over and put his arm over my shoulder in a familiar fashion. I could smell alcohol on his breath and knew he was drunk and that he wanted to share the gossip. I supposed it was also general information around Ajo that the slight, short-haired, blonde lady living at the hotel was a writer.

“I heard there was a fight at the hotel last night,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered, shrugging his arm off my shoulder.

“How do ya like living in an air-conditioned room at the St. Francis?” he persisted.

“I like it fine,” I answered, resenting his insinuating tone. “Walt and Sophie are very nice.”

“Things get a little wild over there now and then,” he went. “That Sophie—she has her flings.”

“I guess that’s her business,” I replied, stuffing my clothes into a pillowcase. “Goodbye,” I said and walked out.

Rumors, I thought, on my way back to the hotel. Everyone know everybody else’s business here, and truth is often mixed up with speculation and misinterpretation. I was insulted by his reference to Sophie and felt protective towards her. Dirty old man, I called him. I’ll remember to stay away from you.

Then it occurred to me that since both of the men were residents of Ajo, surely they knew how many quarters the machines at the laundromat took…

Sophie was beginning to interest me. She had such a low, hoarse voice for such a little woman, and she asserted her opinions with the force of someone twice her size. She was a chain smoker with an emphysema cough, and she seemed always to have a drink nearby. For all her loudness, she seemed genuinely loving and frightfully vulnerable. On the whole I liked her.

Later that day I was sitting in the bar talking with Sophie and Tex, the bartender. Apparently, Sophie had also developed a similar interest in me. She talked a lot about her children, representing herself as grounded in a conservative, Christian ethics.

“We taught them honor, respect and politeness. I don’t know if they got it but we sure drummed into their heads.”

My ethics were the same as hers, added to by a layman’s understanding of psychology and experience outside this confine.

“I’m sure they got it,” I answered sardonically.

Sophie and Tex began discussing Kitty’s children. Kitty, Tim and their three kids were the family at the hotel. Sophie had taken it upon herself to see that kids got into school, and Friday had been their first day. One of the boys had been diagnosed as “hyper.”

“They’d diagnose me as hyper too,” Sophie said.

“What surprises me,” I said, “is not that so many children these days are hyper, but that more aren’t. Look at the world they live in.”

FIVE

I didn’t do much that Saturday night other than take stock of my situation—in short, I had been flung back on my own resources.

With a startling absence of words, Sonny made it clear that the only aspect of our “relationship” to which he wanted to commit himself was knocking on my door at night when he wanted to come to bed. This was a far cry from my fantasy of the way it should be, but I didn’t want to give him up as my lover. The compromises life forces into—I'd rather have something than nothing.

This meant I couldn’t depend on him to help me while away my free time. I would have fend for myself. When I came to Ajo, I planned to go exploring in the desert on weekends when I wasn’t working. Seeing the necessity of harkening back to this plan, I decided on Sunday I would go to church and then take a drive to the Saguaro National Monument.

I finished reading Ms. Didion’s novel that night, impressed if not intimidated by the subtle character study Ms. Didion had drawn of Charlotte, a woman who, having spending her life hoping everything would turn out all right, in the end, resigns herself to defeat and death.

Damn, she’s good, I said of Ms. Didion before turning out my light and climbing into bed.

About 2 a.m. Sonny knocked at my door. I opened it and scowled into his face.

“Hi, sweetie,” he said. “Want some company?”

“I’m asleep.”

He laughed. “You don’t look like yer sleeping to me.”

“You’re so drunk you probably can’t get it up.”

“Wanna bet?”

“How much?”

“I’ll betcha a quarter.”

“Okay.”

He collected his quarter before he left in the morning. His crew worked ten hours day, seven days a week, so after three-and-a-half hours of sleep, he got up and went to work.

“You know, you really should rest more,” I told him. “Your system can only take so much before something’ll give.”

“I don’t need any more damn rest,” he asserted before he marched out the door.

His resistance told he didn’t appreciate my mothering. Doubt had been cast in his mind—he didn’t much appreciate me.

That morning I took the day off from writing, went to mass at the Catholic church across from the plaza. I liked the calm and simple charm of the mission style church but was disappointed with the service. The air conditioning was so loud I couldn’t hear what the priest and lector were saying, and there was no music. To hear music is one of the reasons why I go to church.

Then I took my drive to the Saguaro National Monument. The drive, however, was lovely. I’m sure I’ll always be hooked on the open spaces of warm, arid climates. In coming to the desert, I was nurturing my soul.

Though I would have liked to park the car somewhere along the road and hike over the terrain, I was afraid of encountering a rattlesnake or a hila monster so was compelled to play the part of the timid tourist. I parked at the visitor center and thoroughly studied the displays there. I purchased a book from the shop—Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. If I lacked the verve to take off into the desert alone, I could at least read the account of someone who had.

“You’ll enjoy it,” the park man said, handing me my change.

“Good,” I replied. “By the way, do you see any rattlesnakes around here?”

“Sure,” he said, “but they don’t usually come out until the day cools off more.”

Not finding his answer very reassuring, I walked several times around the outside court until I had memorized the names of the major species of fauna, sat at picnic table under the armada and at my pomegranate, throwing pieces to a ground squirrel, before I began to walk along a marked path. I hoped any rattlesnakes in the area were advised that the path was off limits to them and would remain asleep in their dark hovels until at least I got back to my car.

I practiced my new-found knowledge, calling out the names for plants as I encountered them.

The Saguaro dominated the landscape. Your basic, cartoon-style cactus, it resembled a ballooned pitchfork, stuck up-side-down into the earth.

The Organ Pipe cactus was obviously named for its similarity to the pipes of an organ—clusters of stems rising from the base.

The gentle palo verde trees seemed ethereal, shimmering slivers of lemon-lime sherbet waving in the breeze, as though the wand of a fairy princess.

The teddy bear cholla was named because of its spiny arms cuddled over one another in a tender embrace.

The small barrel, pin cushion and fishhook cacti crouched low, hugging the earth, nestled under the protective mounds of creosote or “grease bush.” The mounds were riveted with tunnels made by kangaroo mice and ground squirrels.

Studying the far landscape, I saw that hills that rose and fell in gentle swoops, bordered by orange and mauve mountains.

“I love you,” my heart sang out in response. “Do you belong to me? Will you be my home?”

I listened for its reply and heard the wind rustling, a rattling, then nothing.

◊

That evening I had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, Dos Hombres, on the road to Deming north of Ajo. I ordered a green chili burro, enchilada style, a side of refried beans, and a beer.

The sun was setting as I drove back to the hotel. The brilliant pastels of the sky muted the land, promising a gentle night and a rest from the heat of day. I luxuriated in a feeling of satisfaction—in a week’s time I had found a place I loved, had met and become more than superficially acquainted with some people whom I enjoyed, and if my “relationship” with Sonny fell short of my expectations, I still had a man with whom to share my bed at night. All things considered, I wasn’t doing too bad in gentle Ajo.

◊

With the dawn of the new week, my life had fallen into a routine. Since Sonny got up and went to work at 5:30 a.m., I woke then too. Once he left, I slept for another hour or two, then got up, dressed and walked to the coffee shop at the plaza for some coffee and a light breakfast. Then I worked for a couple of hours, writing several pages, more often about Ajo rather than on the magnum opus. In the afternoon I walked back to plaza to see whether any mail had come for me at the post office, then crossed the plaza to the bookstore to buy the Las Cruces or Ajo Star newspaper. When I returned to my room, I would eat some fruit and cheese while I read the paper, then returned to work—the idyllic life of a writer.

The worst part of the day was from mid-afternoon, when the sun was at its hottest, until 4:30, when, with the approach of evening, the construction workers returned to the hotel. Once I could no longer work, time weighed heavily on my hands and I would wait, doing a little this, a little that—a cool shower, a little reading, a little mending—waiting for the men to return to drive the slow hours of day into the past.

I felt little like Kitty and Delores, who lived with men on the crews and spent the middle of each day in front of the television in the lobby, watching the soaps and game shows, eating snacks, and waiting for their children to return from school, for their men to return, so life could begin again. I was only slightly above them when I was working, busy with my occupation of being a writer.

“How come you never come and sit and talk with us,” Kitty complained on afternoon when I was hurrying through the lobby. I apologized, saying I tried to get my work done during the day and reserved the evening for socializing. To make amends I asked whether I could buy her a drink.

“I’ll only have a coke,” she smiled. “I get funny when I drink. The last time I had a drink, I followed Walt around like a lost puppy.”

I could understand how someone might want to do this.

Kitty, I realized, was eager to tell me her story, the story of how she and Tim got together.

“We were childhood sweethearts,” she began. “He threw a rock that hit me in the head, and my father chased him for a mile. When we grew up, we each married someone else. I had the children with my first husband, the bastard. I was with him for seven years. We broke up in Oklahoma, and there I was with three kids and no family, so I went back to Colorado; that’s where I'm from. I stayed with my mother, but she hardly had room for all of us. One day she came home and said he had heard that Tim was back in Springs too. His marriage had fallen apart too. Well, I went to see ’im and didn’t come home for a day and a half.

“As soon as our divorces were final, we got married. Now the kids and I go wherever he goes. It isn’t an easy life, living in hotel rooms—I can’t even cook much—but we’re happy. The kids are happy too.”

“Wouldn’t you like to settle down?”

“I suppose. We like Ajo. Maybe we can stay here. Tim’s tryin’ to get on permanent at the mine.”

Hearing her story pleased me. I knew why she wanted to tell it to me.

“I suppose I should write it up and send it to one of those true romance magazines,” she added, looking at me to ascertain my interest. I hadn’t the heart to tell her it was a sweet story, but probably not racy enough for publication.

“It’s a good story,” I told her.

“Well, it’s been nice talkin’ to ya. Thanks for the coke. I’d better see after the kids’ supper. See ya later.” She pushed off her stool and went back into the lobby.

◊

On Tuesday evening I was sitting in the bar, having a drink, and waiting for the second segment of Shogun to begin on TV. I had missed the first segment the night before because Kitty and Tim wanted to watch a football game. Now it was my intention to claim the television before anyone else had a chance. Leo had come in and was sitting several stools from me.

“The next time you go to Las Cruces,” he called to Walt, who was passing through the bar, “Would you bring me back some pippin apples?”

“Why pippin?” I asked idly, there being no one else with whom I could strike up a conversation.

“I want to make a pie,” Leo beamed. “I have to have pippin apples to make a pie. They’re the best.”

I had been told that it had been hard for Leo when the mining company forced him into an early retirement because of his failing eyesight. He lived with his grown son and did all the housework and cooking for them.

I don’t know an Italian who doesn’t like to cook, and Leo was no exception. Further, he liked to share his recipes.

“I use this never-fail pie crust,” he told me and recited its ingredients. “Two cups flour, a pinch of salt, one half cup margarine, one whole egg, and a teaspoon of vinegar.”

“Do you like to eat your pie with ice cream or cheese?” I asked.

“Oh, cheese!” said Leo. “Sharp cheddar cheese—that’s the best.”

He also liked to experiment. “One time I decided, why not put the cheese right into the pie, along with the apples, and do you know what I got?”

“What?” I asked.

“Two crusts!” he declared. “It was all right while it was hot, but when it cooled off, the cheese came to the top. Then I had two crusts, one cheese and one pastry.”

Leo shared with me the recipe for the special dish he prepares on New Year's Eve, Buena calda

“Place one tablespoon of Weston oil in an electric fry pan on low. Then melt one pound of high-quality margarine or butter. Then dice six or seven cloves of garlic and add them to the butter. Add one pound of button mushrooms and one can of anchovies, diced. Then cut several stalks of celery and lay them on a platter, along with two pounds of half-inch thick strips of round steak. Everyone eats from the frying pan. You take a stalk of celery and dip into the butter, take a bite, then a bite of French bread, a bite of steak, and damn, if it isn’t good!”

“It sounds good!” I told him, then excused myself as Shogun was about to begin. While I was watching the program, Cricket, the other woman who tended bar for Walt, brought me a glass of wine.

“Leo sent this to you,” she told me.

“Tell him thanks for his thoughtfulness,” I said.

Soon Kitty and Tim’s kids joined me. Kitty brought their dinner to them on paper plates. Then she returned with a plate for me—chicken, beans and rice.

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s sweet of you.”

“Now, you kids have to be quiet so Susan can watch her program,” she told them. “You have to do your homework.”

They waited until she was gone to ask me their questions.

“Do you have a daddy?” Lisa the youngest wanted to know. I knew what she meant was, did I have a husband?

“No,” I told her.

“Don’t you have any kids?”

“No, all I have is a cat.”

“Just a cat!” She looked at me. “You should have a daddy and some kids.”

The voice of wisdom, the heart of a child. She looked as though she wished she could give them to me.

Our conversation was putting me on the defensive.

“Well, I’m a God-mother,” I told her.

“What’s a God-mother?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain. I’m an extra mother for some children, in case their real mother dies.”

She accepted this gravely and returned to her homework.

Then the middle child, a boy, spoke up.

“Are you writing a book?”

“Yes,” I said.

“About this hotel?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Will I be in it?”

“I tell you what. If I write a book about this hotel, I’ll put you, you, your sister and brother in it, okay?”

He drummed his fingers on the table.

“Shhh!” I said. I was having trouble hearing, what with the noise of the air conditioner and them talking.

He looked hurt so I relinquished. “I heard you got into the school band as a drummer,” I told him.

“I did! Will you put that in your book?”

“Sure,” I said, sure that it was such an important book I was writing.

Only the older boy shared my interest in the program. “Do you think that one is going to kill himself,” he asked.

“No, that’s Blackthorn,” I answered. “He has to last until the program is over on Friday.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s the star.”

“Are they bothering you?” Kitty wanted to know, having come out to pick up our plates.

“No,” I told her. “They’re very nice kids.”

“Eat your beans,” she told the middle child.

SIX

By Wednesday my mood was not benign. In fact, my psyche was jarred. My red-covered Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary lists as its second definition of “jar” as “to undergo severe vibration, as a: to affect disagreeably, b: to make unstable.” This then is precisely the word I want.

Why would the would-be author’s psyche be jarred in such an idyllic setting?

It was, in a word, because of Sonny.

I disagree with those pompous therapists who maintain other people don’t do thing to us; we do things to ourselves, though, I suppose, in a wider interpretation, they might be right. As far as I’m concerned, it only takes watching closely to see that people do things to one another all the time.

I thought Sonny was doing something to me. Instinctually, I knew he was pulling away. It didn't take a college degree to see that. Though, intellectually, I understood the reason, that didn’t stop it from bothering me.

I had been on his case about how little sleep he got, and all my talk about needing sleep seemed to have made him tired. That morning he overslept by several hours, and I had a dream which was soon be prophetic.

I had dreamt I was sitting across a table from him when a pretty young woman came up to him and said, “I need you.” Whereupon, he got up and left me.

Since his car was on the blink, I got up and drove him to work that morning. I knew he thought it was my fault that he had overslept. As we sat in the coffee shop and I watched him eat his breakfast, I thought, he’s running. He’s running away from himself and me.

“What about your kids?” I asked.

“What about ’em?” he asked with hostility, chewing on a piece of bacon.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen them?” I asked, stirring my coffee with a spoon.

“I don’t know, maybe a coupla years.”

“But, why?” I asked.

“If ya must know, because it hurts less not to see ’em than to see ’em for a day or two and then leave.”

“But they need you,” I protested.

“They don’t need me,” he scoffed. “Their mother takes good care of ’em.”

Instead of buttoning my big mouth, I said, “They do too need you. Children need both their mothers and their fathers.”

As we stood at the cash register while Sonny paid the bill, I said, “Now I understand you better.”

What I thought I understood was that he was a man in flight from a situation he found too painful to bear.

“You do?” he answered as thought to indicate that he wasn’t particularly interested in what I understood.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I can’t help but psychoanalyze everyone I meet.”

It was plain that our relationship was rapidly rolling downhill and whatever I did to salvage it was only making matters worse. The fastest way to drive a man away is to psychoanalyze him, especially if he is running away from himself.

We had a distinct communication problem and had opposing views. He was trying to tell me that he was tired of me and wanted to play the field.

“Just let me know what's going on, huh?” I said tersely.

◊

During the day my uneasiness mounted. I condensed my complaint in a single sentence: he isn't treating me with very much respect.

That night the men on construction crew decided to have a barbecue on the patio at the front of the hotel.

“We bought a steak for you,” Little Jim told me.

Not wanting to seem a free-loader I ran to the store and bought baking potatoes and sour cream to contribute.

“Can I wash these in your sink?” I asked Sophie.

“Sure,” she said and took the opportunity to show me Walt and her apartment on the hotel’s first floor. It was spacious. The large rooms were furnished with good quality South-western furniture. There were finely woven, Navaho rugs hanging from the walls.

The dining room once had been used as the hotel dining room. It dwarfed the dining room table in the middle of floor. China cabinets lined a wall, filled with white porcelain pitchers.

“They were in the rooms when we bought the hotel. I took them and replaced them with plastic ones.”

“I can see why,” I told her. “They’re lovely.”

The kitchen had been remodeled. “Would you believe we’ve been here for four years, and I still don’t have a dish washer,” Sophie said in exasperation. “There’s not enough water pressure here for one.”

“Can I borrow some of your tin foil?” I asked. Once I had seen that the price of the potatoes and sour cream would equal the price of a steak, I had been too cheap to buy my own—like the rest of the residents at the hotel, I had gotten the idea it was okay to sponge things from Walt and Sophie.

Sophie got me some foil and left me to my task of wrapping the potatoes in piece of it.

Out on the patio since Don insisted that the brochettes become ashes before he put the steaks on, the party was lagging.

Outwardly I respected Sonny’s need for distance. I sat at one of the tables with some people I didn’t find very interesting and gazed at the new moon rising in the sky. A joint was being passed around. Though I didn’t want Walt to see me smoking, I wanted some to help me sort out the feelings I was having.

Sitting across from me was a hippie, a 1980’s version of one with long, golden locks—hoarding the joint.

“Pass it on,” I said without grace.

He looked offended.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not looking for trouble.” It wasn’t true. I was.

Noting my ascorbic tone, I checked myself and for a few minutes tried to engage him in friendly conversation. I noted that the men present excluded him from their talk and pretended he wasn’t there.

“Do you work on the crew?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied in a what-of-it? tone of voice.

I could no longer suppress myself. “Well,” I said, “maybe they would accept you if you cut your hair.”

“I like my hair this way,” he said scornfully.

“It’s pretty, but this is 1980,” I answered.

“What does that have to do with it?” he asked.

“Well, I think anyone who still looks like a hippie is a little out-of-step with the times.”

“Why do you wear your hair the way you do?” he countered.

“Not because I’m trying to prove anything. It just happens to look good on me this way.” I answered. “And besides, it’s convenient.”

Blood-thirsty, I added, “Your hair makes you look older than you probably are.”

“How old do you think I am?” the angry young man wanted to know.

“Well, if you want the truth,” I replied. “I think you’re probably 25 or 26, but you look and act as though you’re 70.”

“And you look and act as though you are an old-maid schoolteacher.”

Touché.

At this point I borrowed a phrase from and old-maid English teacher in my home town when commenting on the attire of a friend of mine. “Well, there’s nothing worse than an aging hippie.”

Wisely, I took my leave of Rip Van Winkle and went to look for Sonny. I was appalled at my own vehemence, at how I had shot this poor young man out of the saddle with my rage. To be sure, he reminded me of my bright young nephew who still wore his hair long and lived up in the mountains in a cabin with his dog and guitar, and who, at 26, looked and acted like a prematurely old hermit, which, if I could be allowed my bigotry, I found something of a waste. Nevertheless, this guileless young man shouldn’t have been the butt of my anger.

Anger accumulates in me from time to time like balloon blown up with hot air until it explodes.

The rightful object of my anger was standing with pool cue in his hand in the bar. I wanted to say, please help me, but instead said I tersely, “Sonny, I have to talk to you.”

“’Bout what?” he asked absently.

“’Bout us!” I replied. I knew he was becoming embarrassed because his friends were watching.

“Look,” I said. “You’ve shared my bed every night for the last week. Now, the least you can do is to talk to me.”

“Okay,” he said, gently pushing me aside to go to the pool table. “Later, huh?”

I didn’t push. By the time the steaks were ready I no longer cared whether I ate or not. I was drinking my supper that night. After a while I went and sat that table where Sonny was sitting and ate a few bites from his steak.

Then I noted the dark-haired beauty was present, dressed in tight Levi’s and lavish turquoise jewelry. Sonny got up and crossed the patio to greet her, his handsome face smiling broadly.

This sent me directly into the lobby where I slunk into a chair and tried to fasten my attention on Shogun—to no avail. Maybe you should go to bed before you get into any more trouble, I suggested to myself.

I went upstairs to my room but at the door I said, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to bed now!” turned and marched back downstairs.

Having shot Goldie Locks from the saddle, this time I was gunning for Sonny. When he wasn’t on the patio, I entered the bar with the deliberateness of Clint Eastwood and walked straight towards two men who were talking, Sonny and Walt.

My choice, as I saw it, was between confronting Sonny and making a fool of myself or talking to Walt. I chose Walt.

“I need to talk to you,” I told him while Sonny meandered back to his pool game, probably relieved.

“Sit down, honey,” Walt told me with a smile. “What’s on your mind?”

“I need your advice,” I told him. “Please lay your best shot on me, Dad.”

I was necessarily blunt. “Don’t you think if a man shares a woman’s bed, he owes her something?”

I detected amusement in Walt’s kindly manner. “You know, honey,” he answered. “It’s okay to fall in love, but just make sure your head is on in morning.”

“I know, I know, but if it’s for more than a night or two, I can’t seem to do that. Then I start caring.”

“Is it that you care or that your pride is wounded? Sometimes a bitch in heat doesn’t care who her partner is.” I knew he said this because that’s the way I must be coming off, stalking around the hotel the way I was.

“It’s now I feel,” I admitted glumly.

Walt bought my drinks, soothed my ruffled feathers and talked to me until I was no longer angry.

“What do you think I should do,” I asked him, just like a child who needed help with her homework.

“Do you know the story about the smart pitcher? Well, he was standing on the mound, trying to out-psyche this batter. Maybe, he told himself, if I throw a high ball, he’ll think I'm trying to walk ’em. So, he threw a high ball and the batter hit a home run. Do you know what the moral of the story is?”

“No, what?” I asked.

“There’s no use in trying to out-think someone who isn’t thinking.”

I laughed and watched Sonny dance past us, the dark-haired beauty in his arms. I wasn’t sure that I gave a damn. They did seem well suited to each other. When Sophie walked by though, I felt conspicuous, engrossed as I was in conversation with her husband.

“I’d better go to bed,” I told Walt, patting his hand. “Thanks, Dad, thanks for saving my life tonight.”

“You own me one,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

About 1 a.m. Sonny knocked on my door.

I opened it.

“Come to bed,” I told him.

SEVEN

I was calm the next day. Getting drunk, talking to Walt, and being understood by him was the catharsis I needed to draw the venom from my system, for the time being.

Sonny had overslept by a few minutes and I had driven him to work, but I had no need to press him concerning our relationship. After all, men who had more on the ball than he liked me a lot.

I liked being up at that early hour, when Ajo was at it freshest, as though it had been washed clean by the night. Sonny and I had little to say to each other.

“Catch you later,” he said when he got out of my car.

“Okay,” I said and drove away. Water seeks its own level, I thought.

About 10 a.m., as I was walking to the post office, the thought came to me, I bet he’s going to have an accident today.

I put in my hours writing that day, resolving that when I did see Sonny again, I would tell him he could no longer share my bed. It wasn’t something I wanted to do but was something I felt compelled to do to for my pride’s sake.

About 6 p.m. I walked into the bar for a few drinks before Shogun started, and there was Sonny, big as life, sitting next to the dark-haired beauty. Seeing this rekindled my anger. I pretended I was oblivious to him—at times it’s one’s only defense—and sat with Walt, Sophie and a foreman from the mine. While I carried on a pleasant conversion with them, I burned inside.

“Why do the crosses I see along the road have those little circles of stones in front of them?” I asked.

“They mark the place where someone was killed in a car accident,” Sophie replied.

“I know that,” I said, “But, what do the circles mean?”

She told me those crosses with circles indicated that Indians had been killed there, that when the dead person’s family visited, each member would place a stone in the circle to indicate his presence.

“That’s nice custom,” I said. When I mentioned that loved cemeteries and found them ascetically pleased, Sophie said, “I’ll show the Indian cemetery behind the hill, if you like.”

“I’d like that,” I responded, stealing a sideways glance towards Sonny and beauty and affirming if he ever came to my room again, I would tell him to go to hell. Then I excused myself for the evening’s episode of Shogun.

When the program was nearly over Little Jim sauntered over and asked, “Whatchudoin’, purdy lady?”

“Watchin’ Shogun.”

“Yaareareya?” he replied, picking his teeth.

“YeahIam.”

Sonny came into the lobby on his way upstairs. Seeing Little Jim and I were having such an interesting conversation, he came over. He looked as though he expected me to send him directly to the doghouse. Lo and behold, his left wrist was bandaged.

“What happened to you?” I asked, mingling pity with disdain.

He said he had fall at work that day about 10 a.m. He had torn the cartilage in his wrist. We looked at each other, and I touched his wrist in sympathy.

“I’m going to bed early tonight,” he told me. The key to my room lay on the table in front of me. I didn’t offer it to him.

After they both left, I went for a walk, and that night I slept alone.

***

I was nervous about Friday, as my only plan that Friday night was to watch the last segment of Shogun. I wished Sony would think things over and ask me to join him in whatever he was doing. By mid-afternoon when I had grown restless, I asked Sophie if we could take the ride to the Indian cemetery that she promised.

We left in about an hour. Sophie drove a little red Spider Fiat. Her windshields were covered with dust, which, soon enough, covered every car in Ajo, because the wind blew the tailings from the mine. I couldn’t see out of them very well.

I had trouble relaxing with Sophie. Her nervousness made me nervous too. I nevertheless appreciated her generosity. As we drove around the mountain, I showed an interest in the landscape. The saguaro seemed even larger than usual when viewed from the window of her sports car. She had trouble finding the turnoff and was happy when she found the right one.

The cemetery wasn’t much but what there was of it was a feast of sights. Nature and man’s hand left alone in time often fashion the greatest beauty. Most of the graves, mounds really, rose several inches above the ground, except some of them had collapsed. All of them bore crosses facing eastward covered with wreaths of plastic flowers. Alongside the crosses were glass jars, containing burnt candles and water.

“When they come to visit their loved ones,” Sophie told me, “they bring some of the dead person’s favorite things–his favorite foods or a pack of his favorite cigarettes. Then people come later and steal the things they’ve left.”

When I die, I wondered, will my friends bring Marlboro Lights to my grave.

On our way back, to make our outing a bit longer, Sophie drove around the enormous sawed-off mountain of tailings next to the mine.

“People think mountains are gray and colorless,” she commented, waving her thin hand “but look at all the colors you can see in that.” We were listening to a Willie Nelson tape of old hymns. “There’s pinks, oranges, purples, blues….”

“Chartreuses,” I added helpfully.

We drove from the sunlight into the shadow cast by the pile and watched the shifting of the colors. We were establishing common ground between us. Sophie was telling me in so many words that she too was an artist. She planned to take me to another bar for a drink, but when we found it was closed, we came back to the hotel.

“Thanks,” I told her when I got out of her car. “I enjoyed that.”

“We’ll go again some time,” she answered.

***

When I went into the bar that night, Sonny came up, poked me in the ribs, and held up his arm, showing me the cast he had put on it that day.

“Well, I guess it will keep you from injuring it further,” I commented dryly.

I want to ask what he was going to do that night but thought it would be out-of-place to do so. Sonny seemed more interested now in talking to Don, so I got up to go and take a shower.

“Hey!” said Sonny, “where are you going?”

“To take a shower,” I answered. I waited to see whether he would issue an invitation.

“Well, see you later,” he said. “We’re going to Las Cruces to buy Don here a hat.”

That was it. No invitation. Nothing.

I was furious. I went to my room and stood in the middle of the floor, clenching my fists, then marched next door to Sonny’s room. I’m going to have a word with that man, I told myself. I knocked on his door.

When Sonny had started sharing my bed, he had moved himself out of his private room and in with Little Jim, to save money. Little Jim who answered my knock.

“Come on in, purdy lady,” Little Jim as though glad to see me.

“You can tell your friend that I’m through with him,” I announced. “It’s over between him and me, like, like a flash flood!” I added for emphasis. I had been reading Desert Solitaire about the blood colored mud that rolls about in the desert after a sudden rain.

“Sayhey,” Little Jim said, his eyes betraying his amusement. “What’s the matter? What’sSonnydun?”

“That’s just it,” I sputtered. “He hasn’t dun anything, but he doesn’t show me any respect!”

I was too angry to be detained. I went back into my room and wrote Sonny one of the vituperative letters for which I am famous, accusing him of everything I could think to accuse him of. It wasn’t one of my best. The only line that merits telling here was a haughty pronouncement: “It takes a boy to fuck a woman. It takes a man to love one.”

By the time I returned to deliver my letter, Little Jim was gone, so I stuck it in door’s crack, and unhappily went downstairs to watch Shogun.

Some Friday night! Sonny was messing with my sense of wellbeing, my ability to function as a writer—the least he could have done was to stay with me until he left town.

Now, do you really want Sonny to come back and read your nasty letter that isn’t even very well written? I asked myself. He wouldn’t know whether it was well written or not, I answered. Furthermore, he isn’t worth the time it took to write it. With that, I marched back up to his room, removed my epistle from the door, and tore it into pieces. If only I could end the hurt I felt inside as easily. Writing such letters failed to give me the satisfactions they once did.

Resigning myself to watching the final segment of Shogun as my sole entertainment that night, I returned to the lobby and slouched into the chair.

Little Jim came in the doorway and seeing me there, saw his opportunity to make time with the lady his friend was discarding.

“Whatchadoin’, purdylady?” he asked.

“Whatchin’ Shogun,” I answered calmly, as though the outburst he had been privy to earlier must have come from some other person. I could tell he was drunk.

“HowssaboutifIbuyya’lladrink?”

“Okay with me,” I answered, actually glad for the invitation.

I was attracted not to Little Jim but by doing something to get back at Sonny. Try as I may to turn the other cheek, I find a little retaliation in such situations helps to even the score. Why not, I asked myself.

I followed Little Jim into the bar. Since the heroine of Shogun had been cremated on the funeral pyre, I had lost interest in the program anyway.

“Hey, Cricket, fixadrinkferthelady. Wadayawant?”

“I don’t know, scotch and water, I suppose.”

We stood at the end of the bar, holding our drinks. “Where do you want to sit?” I asked.

“Whydon’twegoonupstairs,” Little Jim suggested. “Wecuntalkbetterthere.”

Why not, I asked myself. Though I knew talking wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, I followed him upstairs.

“Let’s go in my room,” I said, thinking I could control the situation better in my our territory.”

“Whateveryelike,” said Little Jim, the perfect gentleman.

Little Jim sat on my bed, and I sat on the chair at the desk. I wanted to talk and couldn’t decided whether I wanted to do anything other than talk.

“Do you want to smoke some dope?” I asked, stalling.

“Somewhackywhacky?” Little Jim asked.

“Some what?”

“Whakywhaky, you know, marijuana.”

“Well, do you want some?”

He looked as though he didn’t, but he said he did, so I rolled us a joint.

I intended to subject him to conversation while I could decide whether I could bear for him to touch me.

“Whydon’tchacomeere’nsitnextame?” Little Jim asked. “ThenIcunputm’armaroun’ya.”

“I thinking it over,” I told him honestly.

I gave him my lecture on consideration intended for Sonny. Consideration: You can do what you want but at least have the decency and concern for the feelings of others to let them know what’s happening. I recited the time I had gone to be with a man I found attractive. Several days later I received a letter from him saying that though he enjoyed himself, he was involved with another woman so did not want to pursue a relationship with me at that time.

“Now, that’s consideration,” I lectured him. “I could have kissed that man for his honesty and his consideration of my feelings. We would all save ourselves and other a lot of grief if we just have the balls to be honest.”

“Whydon’tchacomeere’nsitnextame, purdylady?” Little Jim responded.

Smart men know ladies have a weakness for compliments and even smart ladies have trouble resisting being told they are pretty, but I wasn’t going to be so easily moved.

“Do you know what I mean?” I asked Jim.

“Ahthinkyamighthaveapointthere,” Little Jim granted. “Now, whydon’tchacomeere’nsitnextame?”

Seduction, any style, is pleasant. Why not, I asked myself. As I was beginning to acquiesce to Little Jim’s advances, admitting it was nice having someone touch me, and Little Jim was inching closer to achieving his intent, he abruptly got up, excused himself, went into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. From the sounds that issued forth, I knew he was throwing up his entire dinner and liquid intake.

This gave me time to reconsider my position. I didn’t really want to go bed with Little Jim, so I got up, reassembled my clothing, and knocked on the door.

“How are you doing?” I asked, pushing the door open and seeing him with head over the toilet bowl. “Here, let me get you a wet washcloth.”

I took the cloth, rinsed it in cold water, and handed it to him. I could hardly keep from laughing. Then I stood outside the door and waited for him to freshen up.

“It’s the whackywhacky,” he called out to me. When he emerged from the bathroom, he looked at me and said, “Ya’lllooksasthoughyaaregoin’somewhere.”

“Yeah, I thought I would go down to the bar for a while,” I replied. “You’d better get some sleep now.” I didn’t want to seem totally uncharitable. “You can sleep in my bed, if you want.”

“Areyacomin’back?” he asked, dutifully climbing into my bed.

“Well, I either will or I won’t,” I said, covering both possibilities. I had the keys to both his room and mine in my pocket.

Once in the bar, I laughed out loud. I couldn’t have done better had I planned it. If Little Jim was going to sleep the night in my room, as I suspected he would, then my choice of beds for the night was either in my own room with him or in Sonny’s room. You’re a fool if you don’t make use of such an opportunity, I told myself.

When I retired, I took Alice my cat and went to sleep in Little Jim’s bed and wait for Sonny’s return.

I woke up about 3 a.m. when Sonny announced his return by opening the door. He turned the light on, yawned, dropped his pants and scratched his belly. He went into the bathroom, came back, switched off the light, and climbed into bed.

What? I asked myself. Did I look so much like Little Jim that he did not notice me sleeping in his bed? Did he think I was asleep? Well, sleep wasn’t the only think he was going to catch.

I sat up in bed and threw my pillow as hard as I could at him, scoring a direct hit.

“Uhhh!” he yelled, jumping. “You scared me.”

“I’m mad at you,” I said.

“I didn’t know you were mad at me,” he said innocently.

“Then you’re dumb.”

“Why are you mad at me?”

“Because you don’t show me any respect.”

“Come on,” he pleaded. “I have to work tomorrow. I need some sleep.”

“I’m not sympathetic. Don’t you know any better than to go off and leave a lady alone by herself on a Friday night?” I hissed.

“I’m tired,” Sonny appealed. “Let me sleep, huh?”

In answer, I threw the pillow again.

“Look,” he said, this time hanging onto the pillow, “Let’s talk tomorrow, huh?”

“Give me back my pillow, please.”

He threw it back.

“No, we won’t talk tomorrow, because we never talk,” I declared, like a little kid whose feeling have been hurt. “Come sun up, I’m never talking to you again.”

“Okay,” he said, “go to sleep now.”

So, I rolled over and did just that.

EIGHT

“Only love can break your heart.

  Only love can mend it again.”

On Saturday I woke at 5:30 a.m. when Don knocked on the door and told Sonny to get up for work. I watched him dress, keeping the covers over me so only my eyes and upper head showed. The belligerence I had the night before was gone. Being amused had likewise vanished. I judged my antics of the previous night foolishness—now, I was sober, sad and wise.

I said not a word to Sonny but followed his movements as he opened the upper drawer of bureau, removed a knife, sat on his bed, and deftly cut the left sleeve from shirt so it would accommodate his cast.

He looked at me. I must have looked forlorn, as he said, “Feelin’ better?” I shrugged but did not reply.

When Little Jim came into the room, wearing his cowboy hat and carrying some of his clothing, he and Sonny looked at each other and said nothing. Don came back down the hall and stood outside the room waiting for Sonny. Little Jim kindly stood in the doorway to prevent Don from seeing who was in his bed. When Sonny and Don left, Little Jim, who didn’t work on weekend, sat on the edge of the bed, and I asked him, “How are you feeling?”

“Purtygood, considerin’,” he said, rubbing his head.

The night before he had asked if I wanted to go to Palomas today, one of the places the boys went to when they wanted to horse around. I hadn’t given him an answer. When he resumed his amorous of advance, I gently pushed him away and said, “I’m still tired. I’m going to sleep in my own bed. When I get up, I’ll tell you if I want to go to Palomas.”

Later, it was Little Jim who changed his mind. About 10 a.m. when I encountered him in the hall, he said he’d better work on his truck today. I wasn’t disappointed because I didn’t know what we would find to talk about if we spent a day together.

He did buy me breakfast. As he talked about himself, I saw his life was very much like Sonny’s. Both were divorced and angered with their ex-wives. Both had left children to travel with the crew. Both thought their children were better off without them. Both had determined they had fathered enough children and had vasectomies. Both maintained their lives suited them just fine. Why argue with a man who likes his life, I thought.

◊

By this time I realized that Leo was coming to the hotel every night with the hope of talking with me and buying me a drink. Usually, I enjoyed talking with him. Leo was like a box of sugar that wanted to give its sweetness to everyone he met. His self-appointed mission was to look after God’s creatures, and he had his own unique way of doing so. In his heart he was still young and romantic, a gentleman from a bygone era. If Walt was becoming something of a father to me, Leo was like a grandfather, and I had affection for him.

That night when I came into the bar about 8:30 to have a drink before going to TJ’s for the evening, Cricket said, “Leo was in here looking for you. I told him you had gone to TJ’s so he went out there.”

“Oh,” I said, “I hope he’s still there,” and left immediately. If Leo was at TJ’s I could sit with him, which would save me the embarrassment of sitting by myself.

“Hi, Leo,” I said when I found him at the bar and slid onto the stool next to his.

“Well, hello, sweet pea,” he answered smiling broadly. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“The first one,” I answered. “Then I’ll buy you one.”

I knew what he was going to say: “A lady isn’t supposed to buy her own drinks.”

We had another of our discussions about gentlemen and ladies. I agreed with him, that gentlemen should take care of ladies. Certainly, being with an old-fashioned gentleman made me feel like a lady. But I knew he lived off his pension from mine and social security, and he also supported a son who was unable to work. I probably had more money than he did but it would wound his pride to accept my buying him a drink.

“Don’t deprive me of the pleasure it gives me to buy your drinks, babe,” he said.

“Let’s compromise,” I said. “You can buy two rounds and then it will be my turn.”

TJ’s was filling with people, and the band was readying to play. Leo gave me the rundown of those present. He was neither disapproving nor approving.

Cataract surgery had limited his sight, and he was legally blind. “I see what I’m not supposed to see,” he commented.

Ajo’s citizens regarded Leo with affection. Various people came over to slap him on the shoulder and ask, “How ya doing, Leo?”

“What were you doing last weekend, John?” Leo might ask. “Your candle was jumping up and down.”

Leo took it upon himself to light candles at the mission for many of Ajo’s citizens. He believed that by watching the way a candle burned he could get an indication of the condition of the person’s spiritual state-of-being. If a candle burned erratically, he thought the people was in some kind of trouble.

When Sonny and the dark-haired beauty arrived with Don and a woman who was quite fat, I was surrounded by people who were talking with Leo.

Click! How dumb of me. When I had thrown the pillow at Sonny the night before, I hadn’t put it together that he and Don hadn’t gone to Las Cruces alone. Sonny had taken the dark-haired beauty. My rage returned and I prayed, help me, God.

My revenge that night was to show off, to have such a good time that Sonny couldn’t possibly think I cared that he was with someone other than me. Leo helped. He loved to dance and was an excellent dancer, so that night we showed them how to do it. Leo was wise to the situation. “I don’t know,” he said, “that guy in the corner, the one with the black cowboy hat on, he keeps looking at you.”

“Oh, he doesn’t care,” I told him.

When Sonny and his new lady danced past us, I resisted the temptation to gouge him in the back.

“Listen, sweet pea,” Leo said. “If you want to dance with other men, you go right ahead. You don’t have to stick with an old man like me.” I did dance with a few other men, but mostly that night I danced with my Godfather. It was late when we went back to the hotel for a nightcap. Sonny and his new lady followed suit.

“We sure showed them how to dance tonight,” I told Walt and wondered why he didn’t look happier.

That night I was escorted to my door on the arm of a gentleman.

NINE

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher

   Vanity of vanities: All is vanity.”

–Ecclesiastes 1:2

Sunday

Life evolves, as it has for millions of years, with the world turning on its axis on its yearly orbit around sun as the sun itself moves through space. We live in a floating universe in which everything, including the sun, moves, a dynamic rather than a static universe with everything in motion, constantly changing, day in, day out, even when they appear to remain the same. We are safe as long as the sun holds the world in its orbit and continues to bestow its goodness upon it. How does the sun regard the multitudinous dealings of human beings so far away from it? If the sun regards us at all it is probably with amusement. Every day countless soap box operas are being played out.

I got up early on Sunday and, with a heart full of joy and an ego that had been properly stroked, I dressed, left the hotel and drove east through the Utana Indian

Reservation to the Desert Museum in Alamogordo. I was sticking to my plan to investigate the wonders of the universe in this part of the world on Sundays. I left the hotel in such a hurry that a little ways down the road I realized I had only ten dollars in my purse and a half a tank of gas in the car.

I was driving through an Indian reservation where the land was one of gentle ground swells, red-rock mountains studded with muted tans, shrubs, trees and cacti cloaked in tints of green, ranging from soft chartreuse to blue. Rodents and wolves inhabited this land that hinted of mysteries. The sun’s light that day bore a chiffon-like radiance, challenged only by the towering black buzzards that were looking for dead kill along the roadside to devour.

Sophie had admonished me before I left to get back before dark lest I have a flat tire, get run down by a drunk Indian, or worse. I appreciate her concern but felt should any of these things happened, I would be quite safe. Indians are not known rapists.

At Bisbee, the seat of the reservation, I saw that a new school was being built, near a large development of cinder-block houses. Brightly-colored clothes hung from clotheslines, swaying in the breeze. New trucks were parked near the houses and children played nearby while their dogs lay asleep in the sunlight. The development had to be a recent one as some of the houses stood empty, awaiting occupants.

The drive allowed me to reflect further on my love life. All the goodies that had been dumped on me the night before helped to restore a positive outlook but didn’t entirely make up for the hurt I felt about Sonny’s desertion. I observed the greed and vanity of my own heart–I still wanted to insult him in some way to even the score.

There were three things at the museum that were of particular interest to me: a plaque that bore the following inscription: “To human beings who are tired, worried or discouraged, I bequeath the silence, majesty, and peace of our great American desert.” The quote was ascribed to one George L. Mountain Lion. At first, I thought he may have been a wise, old Indian, until I noted that the dates of his birth and death were three years apart and realized it was spoof. It reminded me of the plaque on the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Certainly the desert beckoned me as it had beckoned countless tired, worried and discouraged individuals, as if saying, come to me and I will give you peace. It had not disappointed me. Maybe my life wasn’t altogether peaceful, but the beauty, the silence of the great desert, and my stimulating life in Ajo had restored my joy in living.

The second thing of interest was a walkway leading from an underground desert cave. On the floor was line, 53 feet long, which was marked by notches indicating the various stages of life on earth. The half inch on it marked the amount of time the human species has inhabited the earth. It’s fact I like to keep in mind when I consider the history of civilization.

The third thing of interest were some diagrams showing the various postures of wolves along with an interpretation of what each posture meant. When a wolf’s head is erect, his tail is raised and his body poised, he is alert, confident, ready for action, and happy. When, however, his head is lowered, his ears drawn back, his tail droops, and his body slouches, he is subdued, cowardly, and read to submit.

The leader of a pack of wolves, the alpha male, dominates the females and other males alike. They respond to the leader as they would to a human master.

This got me thinking about Sonny and boys and why Little Jim had changed his mind about taking me to Palomas. If my perception was correct, Sonny was the leader of the pack of men who traveled with him. He was the one who decided whether one night they stayed at the hotel and played pool and another night they went to Las Cruces. Unless a member was ready to break with the pack by taking up with a women and settling down, something for which they professes scorn however much they might inwardly long for it, his greatest loyalty was to the pack and particularly to its leader.

It was, then, no small wonder that one Little Jim had scored, so to speak, with one of the leader’s women, he would reverse himself–he was not willing to incur Sonny’s wrath.

I was struck with a new appreciation for Sonny’s talent in controlling his friends and his cunning. Had he not dumped me silently with the deftness of a master?

I felt like going up to Don, another member of Sonny’s pack and saying, “If Sonny told you to climb a flagpole and piss, you wouldn’t even ask why.”

Such thoughts gave me pleasure on my way back to Ajo, but my breakfast and museum admission had eaten up most of my ten dollars and I was keeping my eye on the drooping fuel gauge, hoping I wouldn’t run out of gasoline before I got back. If so, I would call Walt and ask him to please come and help me. It comforted me knowing I could call him if I were in trouble and he would come. Certainly, I couldn’t call Sonny.

As luck would have it, I made it back to the hotel, feeling about as thirsty for a drink as my car was for gasoline. Walt was standing by the desk when I came into the hotel. The bar was usually closed on Sunday night, but when I clutched my throat and said, “I need a beer,” he opened it so we could have a drink together and talk. I was eager to share my new-found knowledge with him. I even told him my thoughts concerning the construction workers, concluding with, “They all believe the same bullshit–work all day, party all night, sleep as little as possible, make good money, spend good money, spend as fast they make it, and keep on trucking. I think it’s a pace and way of life only the relatively young can endure.”

“I tried it for a while,” Walt acknowledged, “until I saw there was no future in it. Big Jim now–he’s trying to break away. He’s trying to get on at the mine permanently.”

I didn’t mention their love-‘em-and-leave-‘em attitude towards women or that a woman’s place is only as she may or may not fit as an appendage to all this. If she is willing to follow along after them, hoping that sooner or later her guy will feel like settling down, she might eventually succeed. They’re the sailors of the desert, I concluded.

My analysis of the construction workers gave me some satisfaction. Meanwhile, I was still asking myself why Sonny preferred the dark-haired beauty to me. Probably because she was gorgeous whereas I was merely attractive. Probably because she too was Hispanic and thus from his own culture. Probably because ladies like me scared him.

TEN

“More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us.”

—Roman 5: 3 & 4

This was not the end of my suffering on account of Sonny. When anything stings me I get over it in stages, until the thing that caused me grief gradually fades into the past, only to be resurrected when other things are bothering me.

It was also in my Leonine nature then, perhaps in most women’s nature, to overreact to whatever wounds me, crying loudly and holding my paw in which a sliver is embedded as though I am mortally wounded. Even though I knew in the greater scheme of things Sonny rejection was an insignificant matter, I still couldn’t let go of it and achieve a rational balance concerning it until it arrived.

I was suffering from a constant-diet phenomenon, having had that kind of thing happen before. Needless to say, this kind of treatment was a far cry from my romantic ideal. At this point in my forlorn life I was yet to come to the recognition that if I expected to be treated like a lady then I would have to act more like one. My queenly heart was then still sorely wounded.

There was yet another barbecue on the patio that Monday night. Once again, I offered to contribute baking potatoes and sour cream. But, when I got to thinking things over, I realized that if I joined the crowd, I would only be subjecting myself to viewing the further progress of Sonny’s romance with the dark-haired beauty. So, I decided not to go.

I was sitting at the bar drinking the first of my liquid supper when Sonny came in. “Hey,” he said, “Aren’t you going to get the potatoes? Don’s ready to put them on.”

Since I had promised I would contribute them, I said, “I’ll go get them.” I would contribute my share to the dinner of which I would not partake. It was 5:30 p.m. and the grocery store closed at 6, so I quickly drove to get my offering—baking potatoes, sour cream and, this time, my own foil. Once I had washed and wrapped them, I took them over to barbecue pit to drop them onto the hot brochettes.

“Say, Don,” I said, trying to sound casual, “That dark-haired girl, you know the one I mean, is she coming tonight?”

“You mean Charlie. Yeah, she’s coming over later but probably won’t get here in time for dinner.”

“Well, then,” I said, “here are your potatoes, but I won’t be eating dinner with you guys tonight.”

He pretended he didn’t understand and maybe he didn’t, so I said, “Look, if you were seeing some girl and she dumped you for someone else, would you go and eat dinner with them?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said as though he would have to think the matter over at length.

Having made my point, I returned to the bar. Leo was there, and though I tried to sustain an interest in our conversation, I was in truth bored and unhappy.  It occurred to me that I’d better eat something or soon I would be neither sitting nor standing.

“I’d better go and get myself something to eat,” I told Leo, went out to the patio and helped myself to a steak and baked potato. Sonny was sitting with the other men. Charlie had not arrived yet. One of the men he was sitting with was a little Mexican with a meek frame and a sad face. He looked as though he didn’t quite belong. Sonny’s protectiveness of him suggested he was looking after a brother.

When I joined them to eat, I learned the man was from Mexico and that his English was limited. I entertained them trying to converse with man with my equally limited Spanish. Being euphoric, I was trying to convey with words and gestures that it’s what’s in your heart that is important, when Sonny abandoned the table to greet Charlie.

There was a full moon that night, as bright as molten gold, so bright that it dazzled my eyes and touched my core as though by a burnished poke. As I sat spellbound by the moon, I could not help but behold the romantic scene beneath it. Charlie was sitting on the low ledge at the edge of patio with Sonny close beside her. They were holding hands!

A single glance of this tender scene sent me directly to bed.

At 4 a.m. I woke up. The moonlight was flooding into my room. I felt such a heart-wrenching despair that I wondered why I hadn’t killed myself years ago and spared myself all the trouble my life would be, with one damn man after another hurting me. I did what I do when I have no other recourse–I threw myself on the Lord, and with tears that felt like the gold of moon streaming down face, I gave my heart and all it contained to God, telling him for millionth time how much I wanted a man and how much better off I would be when I finally got one.

In reminding myself that God promises to answers prayers I couldn’t help but add, “And please don’t wait so long that I’ll be too old to enjoy him when he comes.” Thus, I was able to restore my peace of mind and ease the pain.

I reread the passage in Romans in which Paul encourages not to lose hope: “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us.”

Certainly, all the suffering I had experienced in life had produces an endurance in me, a kind of resiliency whereby I could roll with the punches. This endurance had produced a measure of patience, which I supposed was akin to character, and the character I had developed had produced hope, if for no other reason than I would consider it a loss if all this hard-earned character went to waste. But, so far my hopes continued to disappoint me.

I looked up the verse from Corinthians which begins, “Let love be your aim,” and thought myself as an archer, aiming my arrows towards love, not romantic love which was my desire, but towards love of my fellow man and the whole of creation, which I saw as my requirement.

By then I was redeemed but not sleepy, so I dressed, went downstairs, and took an early morning walk around Ajo. The plaza with its silent palms and noisy birds, the white stucco churches standing in somber dignity, the soft mauve hills spotted with houses in which the town’s populace slept, the early morning sky of a pale rose, lavender, and blue, now fading, embraced the new day. Refreshed, I went to the coffee shop for a cup of coffee and some French toast.

◊

About this time during my stay in Ajo I realized that Sophie was an alcoholic, in fact, was a pretty much over-the-hill one. Even when I saw her in the morning, she would have a drink in her hand. One night, for no discernable reason, she fell off her stool. Another night she appeared in the bar wearing a gray sweatshirt with hood—when she pulled the hood over her head, she looked like a little monk in a drunken stupor.

When she was sober, she was tense and nervous and seemed to be as frail as a mayfly. Her conversation was cogent, and she behaved in a civilized fashion, but when she was drunk she became loud and sometimes abusive. The world and all its pressures seemed to be too grim and unwieldy for her, so she took refuge in alcohol and then she would laugh, cry, and tell everyone just how stupid she thought they were.

Several times I saw her approach a table of people, immersed in conversation, stick her face into the middle of them and say, “Oh, boo, hoo, boo, hoo!”—as if to say, “everything you think is so important is nonsense.” Then she would turn and walk away.

Initially this realization filled me with pity for Walt, whom I saw as patient and long-suffering as Job. Because of my growing feeling for Walt and because emotionally I was coming to rely on him, I wanted to like Sophie less than I did.

Walt was now undergoing the ordeal of having his teeth pulled and adjusting to wearing false teeth. Remembering how my own father had suffered when his teeth were pulled, I felt for Walt. I tried to ease his sense of foreboding by teasing him.

“It’s just another of the stages of man, Dad,” I said. “Now, you have just a few more to go.”

“And what are they?” he asked reluctantly.

“Well, now you just have walking with a cane, becoming senile and dying left.”

I could see he was finding none of this amusing, and I regretted having said it. Though my intent might have been to humor him, my words contained a bit of anger I didn’t fully understand. The next morning, worried that I had hurt his feelings, I looked for him to apologize. He was standing in the doorway to his office, wearing an apprehensive look.

“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings last night,” I said.

“Yeah,” He replied gruffly. “I cried all night.”

I had heard others in Ajo use this expression so assumed it was his way of saying it was nothing. The incident was a minor one, to be sure, but even small incidents between people, when studied, can be pregnant with meaning. Part of my bond with Walt was our shared witticisms, but mine had been too sharp and I had injured him. Yet, when I apologized, something you don’t do if you don’t care about a person’s feelings, he said it was nothing. Was it nothing or was he just saying it was? Or, was it nothing to begin with and I was silly coming to apologize over nothing? Maybe it meant something that I apologized. Maybe, because I apologize for it, something that was something became nothing. These are things we never know when we relate to others.

I didn’t see Walt again until later that day after all his teeth had been extracted and a single look told me he was suffering intensely. He got himself a coke and retired into their apartment.

There was a party in the bar that night. Sophie and Texas had taken it upon themselves to provide chili and cornbread for the customers. The occasion was a farewell dinner for the construction workers. Come Friday their work would done and most of them would be leaving to work elsewhere.

I had been living at the St. Francis hotel for several weeks, and all of us who lived there had taken on the configuration of an extended family, so the leave-taking of a large chunk of our members caused us the pain of separation. I regretted that those who were leaving, not so much because Sonny was among them, but because I had grown fond of the group. I was glad that he was leaving because I would then stop obsessing over him. I feared once they left, Mr. Sweeny, the old retired man who lived on the first floor and I would be Sophie and Walt’s only guests. And, Mr. Sweeny, who shuffled across the lobby at regular intervals every day, didn’t seem to count.

I admired Sophie for her open hospitality. She had spent the day making a big pot of chili, which Walt carried out to the hot plate so everyone could help himself. Now she sat talking with the customers, while Walt lay suffering in their apartment. Did she care? I searched her for an answer.

I thought she probably did care, though nursing himself through this period of adjustment would be something he would largely do himself. As worthy a task as nursing others is, it is not one that many people have much talent for. Sophie talked about Walt having his teeth pulled as though she was talking about a horse.

I wanted to ease his pain and felt frustrated that it was inappropriate for me to do so.

Part of the general conversation concerned Little Jim. No one had seen him since last Saturday night at TJ’s. We were worried as to what had happened to him.

When Sonny walked into the bar alone, I asked him if he knew where Little Jim was. My resolve never to talk to him seemed absurd, and I had begun talking to him a little.

“Don’t worry about Jim,” Sonny aid. “He’s okay.” He smiled such a way that I knew Little Jim had finally found himself a woman.

I looked for an excuse to go and see how Walt was doing. Finding none, I retired to my room. There I felt frustrated. The man I didn’t want was with someone else but so was the one I wanted.

I couldn’t rightly fault Sonny for what he had done. I consider it a person’s right to go after the person he or she wants. I could only fault him his method. It would have been nice were he more enlightened and had handled my feelings in a little more caring fashion. In retrospect I can see I was the like a dog who wouldn’t give up a bone until it was licked dry. I still wanted to throw a drink in his face, jump on his precious hat or smack him in the kisser. Being so tempted provided me with the excuse for which was looking to go and see Walt.

Feeling like a thief in the night, I stole downstairs and silently let myself into their apartment. I found Walt in the living room lounging in front of the TV and nursing his sore mouth.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Dad,” I said, “but I need to talk to you. If I don’t, I might do something I would regret.”

“Sit down, honey,” Walt said, patting the couch beside him. “What’s the trouble?”

“I know I should be over it by now,” I said, sitting down beside him, “but I’m not, not yet.” I explained my urge to destroy something of Sonny’s.

“It’s your pride, honey,” Walt said, naming the devil, as he gently rubbed the back of my neck.

Of course, he was right, but I stoutly maintained, “It’s more than my pride.”

Having Walt see my wounded feminine pride remind me that I didn’t really want Sonny. I was like a little girl who had skinned her knee and had come to her daddy to kiss it and make it better. Walt mollified my anger.

“You know, we’re all dirty old men at heart,” he said, and I wasn’t too sure what he meant by that. When I felt better, I looked at him and said, “I just thought I would come and tell you my troubles to take your attention off your own.”

He laughed at this, and it pained him to laugh.

“You shouldn’t laugh, Dad,” I admonished him. “It will make your mouth hurt all the more.”

“Don’t call me that!” Walk objected.

I didn’t tell him why “Dad” was my obvious nickname for him. I was getting nervous about sitting with him on the couch of their apartment, afraid that at any minute Sophie would walk in and I would be found out.

“I’d better get back to the party,” I told Walt. “I’m afraid Sophie will come in.”

“Don’t worry, honey. I know at least two men who are in love with you.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Leo and me,” he answered.

I put my head on his shoulder. “I love you,” I told him. We kissed, though, under the circumstances, it wasn’t a very passionate kiss.

“I’d better go. I hope you’ll be feeling better soon. Thanks for saving my life, again.”

“That’s twice,” Walt replied, lifting two fingers.

ELEVEN

“Beware the ointment that soothes the burn.”

—cross-cultural adage

It’s a bit embarrassing, dear reader, to let you learn how this authoress’s barometer jumps up and down, according to whether she feels loved or not and was happy whenever she approximated that glorious state of being loved. On Thursday I was happy because of Walt’s confession of love the night before, which contributed to my feeling of happiness. I don’t know if there’s the name of a syndrome for someone who has an extreme need to be appreciated and loved, but if there is, that’s me.

Me, the incurable romantic, forever in love with love. So insatiable am I when it comes to being loved, that rather than to satisfy myself that, if the man I didn’t want didn’t appreciate me, at least the man I did want, did, I harbored yet another romantic fantasy. The following scene issued forth unabated from the soap-box opera of my mind. I imagined I am in the bar one night when Sonny comes up, grabs me, and demands, “What’s the matter with you?” to which I reply, “Please take your hands off of me!” Then I paste him one hard, right in the kisser, a punch, not a slap. Then, the thing that only seems to happen in the Gothic romance’s housewives trade among themselves, happens.

“Momentarily taken aback by the force of Susan’s blow, which had indeed crushed his lip against his pearly, white teeth, and with the taste of his own blood in his mouth, Sonny grabs Susan angrily, and pressing her body against his, feeling the yearning in his groin and heart, draws her closer to him, and presses his bloody lips to hers.”

“He claims her with a force that denies opposition, and she melts into him like butter in the blazing, hot sun.”

It’s called passion, the red orchid of the night, for which every romantic heart longs. I may have missed my calling and should have spent my days penning such romantic trash, which would be easier to publish than an honest account of one’s real experiences. Then, if I lacked romantic fulfillment, I would have enough money in the bank not to particularly care….

Pride and sexual jealousy—where had they ever gotten me? I still hadn’t gotten over that Sonny preferred the Charlie to me. Women like me, who would have loved to be Mary Martin in South Pacific, seem to be doomed in modern time to languish in such fantasies while most men are the oblivious to the roles they were to play. It’s terrible thing to see that you’re like Queen Elizabeth and would just soon behead any man who spurns you.

As long as I am making these confessions, I might as well tell the symbolic game I play concerning any man whom I might be interested in, whereby I consult his horoscope on a daily basis, to glean clues as to what’s happening with him and our relationship. This habit, I know, belies a reluctance on my part to analyze situations on their own merit and the need to seek the universe’s help.

At this time during my stay in Ajo I realized that the man I was really interested in was Walt—I may have been hanging onto my attachment to Sonny because, since Walt was married, I didn’t want to go down that road. I could at least entertain myself by checking the horoscopes of both them both.

Sonny was an Aquarius and had the typical emotional remoteness of that sign—they make great humanitarians but are deadly when it comes to relating to a fire sign female like me. Walt, on the other hand, was a Taurus, with all the reliability of the Taurus man. Since I have not an ounce of earth in my horoscope, I am attracted to those who do for their ability to bring me back down to earth when my emotions are getting out-of-control.

Based on another Taurus man I once knew, I also feared them. After a survey of one, I had concluded that Taurus men aren’t very forgiving. You can push a Taurus to great extremes, as a friend of mine did her Taurus husband, but once he has enough of it, he rejected her, once and for all. And when he was gone, he was gone for good, and no amount of cajoling could alter that fact. I think Rhett Bulter in Gone with the Wind must have been a Taurus—had he not told Scarlett at the end, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”?

Of course, I found it of interest that Sophie was an Aries with all the innocent energy of her sign. If she berated Walt with fury from time to time and screeched obscenities at him, if she sought attention from other men, still he was the rock to which she clung, the one she could not do without, and she was devoted to him and the one she truly loved.

I had the feeling, though, from observing them that many years had passed since they last made love.

◊

Leo had told me earlier in the week that on Friday he would be 70 years old. I had grown so fond of him that I wanted to help make the day special for him. The 70th birthday of Ajo’s God father ought to be celebrated in style, I thought. Since Sophie had made chili for the departing construction workers, maybe she would let me make a cake for Leo.

“Hey, Sophie,” I said late on Thursday morning when I saw her going into the bar, “It’s Leo’s birthday on Friday. Do you think we could do something for him?”

My timing was decidedly off. She had not had time to attain the necessary lubrication to make the day palatable. “Oh, talk to me about it later,” she said, slapping her hand down past her in a gesture that said she did not want to be bothered, but she brought the matter up with me that evening when I went into the bar to get a coke before doing my laundry. She had enough drink by then to be comfortable with the day. Jose was sitting beside her, and his presence invariably had a calming effect on her.

We decided that I would help her make the family’s all-time favorite chocolate cake on Friday morning and we would give it to Leo when he came into the bar that night. We asked Matt, Leo’s son who happened to in the bar, to get the word out that there would be party for Leo and to see that his father came to the hotel around 8 p.m.

Once these plans were made, I left and walked over to the laundromat, only to find the little Mexican with whom I had tried to communicate at our barbecue–he was sitting on bench on the plaza. When I indicated I was going to do my laundry by holding up my bag of soiled clothes, he wanted to give me a ride. I shook my head no, and, when he looked crestfallen by my refusal, I asked if he would like to walk with me. Then he smiled and gallantly carried my bag.

He waited while I put my clothes into a machine and added the requisite amount of change to start the machine. Then we walked back across the plaza to the coffee shop for a soft drink while my clothes were being washed. He waited again when I put them into the dryer, and we sat on a bench waiting for them to be dried. Then he waited while I removed them, folded them into a neat pile, and put them into the bag once again.

We walked back to the hotel. Conversing with him was easier than it had been the first time, when Sonny had to translate everything I said, until he tired of this and commented, “Just say what you want. He’ll understand you.” Several times during our excursion he had tried to take my hand or put his arm around me. The poor little guy was seeking female companionship to ease his loneliness.

“No romance,” I said stoutly, withdrawing my hand or shrugging off his arm and shaking my head.

Would I go dancing with him that weekend? No, I said, “If you want to find a lady with whom you can be romantic, you had better go alone.”

Would I have dinner with him tomorrow night? No, I said, I was busy. I didn’t want to give him any encouragement.

Would I go to bed with him? “No,” I said, “and good night!”

Having repulsed this creature, I went upstairs and put my clothes away, before returning to bar for another coke before retiring. I had been drinking too much myself and needed to lay off the booze for a few days. Walt was sitting at the bar, looking a little better than he had the night before.

“Hi, honey,” he said, patting the stool beside him.” You seem much happier tonight,” he said after we had talked for a while.

“I am,” I replied but couldn’t tell him the reason for my happiness was him.

TWELVE

“The heart is deceitful above all things,

  and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?”

–Jeremiah 17:9

Those nights in Ajo were as in a mid-summer’s night dream, nights in which I slept with my windows open to their splendor, nights in which my psyche was stimulated by the drama taking place in which I was playing my part. Often, I would waken at 4 or 5 a.m., before the sun began rise, casting a soft light across the hills and the town. I would lie awake for several hours, in an almost dream state, pulling the threads of my intuition and tying knots where I found connections.

So, it was on that Friday morning of the day we planned to celebrate Leo’s birthday, a day or two after Walt had professed that he was in love with me. I felt a physical desire for Walt and wanted to rush headlong into an affair with him, but I was pestered by a genuine liking of Sophie. I knew it was already obvious to others, including Sophie, that Walt and I were attracted. So far, she had maintained a friendly attitude towards me. I wondered whether it would be possible to satisfy my longing for him without it disturbing the status quo between them. In truth I wanted to be Walt’s mistress.

Previous experiences warned me against this. I had already learned that the woman who opts for an affair with a married man most often will find herself at the bottom of his shopping list, so to speak. When she needs something from him, he is often with his wife and family. I didn’t want to listen to the warning, cautioning me against taking such action.

I was soon to learn just how Sophie had spent her night. About 7 a.m. I rose, dressed and walked down to the coffee shop for breakfast. I was surprised to find Walt sitting at the counter, looking tired and miserable, as though he had not slept a wink. He seemed to have more on his mind than his sore mouth.

“Did you hear the racket last night?” he asked.

“I slept like a baby, didn’t a hear a thing,” I answered. “What happened?”

Walt said that after the bar had closed, Sophie had gone back into it, and screaming insults at him, had plastered a number of glass ashtrays against the walls. Walt had retreated to his private hideaway in the basement for the duration of the night, and Sophie had slept in a booth in the bar.

It wasn’t Walt’s habit to come to the coffee shop, so I presumed he was there because he wanted to talk with me. We left the shop, took a drive around Ajo in his truck, and continued to talk about Sophie.

Walt said that twice he had taken her to a clinic to treat her alcoholism, but that she resisted treatment and resumed drinking as soon as he brought her home.

“Maybe she won’t ever recover,” I said, as I had come to believe that in the battle of addiction, sometimes the addiction wins.

He blamed himself for her condition. “Her life with me hasn’t always been easy. We’re okay now, but there have been some pretty lean times. Now all our kids are doing okay, but we had some rough times raising them too.”

“There’s a limit to our responsibility for others,” I said, trying to comfort him.

“I don’t really think she knows just how abusive she is,” he sighed. “Another man might have left her, but I can’t do that. She’s the mother of my children, and she’s stuck with me through the bad times. She’s loyal—I can say that for her.”

I told Walt I understood, and I did. He was far too responsible a man to ever leave Sophie. I wasn’t sure she could get along if he did. He was the sort of man I wanted.

“If you were free,” I told him, “I would run after you.”

After we shared these things, he drove back to the hotel. I was embarrassed to see that Sophie was in the lobby when we walked in the door. She had a broom in one hand, the bin in the other. She was sweeping up the glass shattered during her fury the night before.

“Here,” said Walt, taking the broom and bin from her. “I’ll do that.”

On our agenda that morning was to make Leo’s birthday cake. I felt a little deceitful, playing Mother’s little helper to the woman whose husband I wanted, but I pulled it off with a certain aplomb.

While we worked, Sophie talked about their children and the house they used to have when they lived in Texas. I could hardly believe the woman who was telling me these things hours earlier had stood in the bar, plastering ashtrays against the walls. While the cake was baking in the oven, Sophie showed me the paintings she had done in an art class. I was not being false when I told her she had real talent. For an amateur, she showed an unusual sensitivity to color and light.

Suddenly, while the cake was cooling, Sophie jumped up and told me to frost the cake myself. She said she had to go and help Walt clean up the bar.

After I had frosted and put 70 candles on it, I went into the bar for a coke and found Walt and Sophie, husband and wife, cooperating to clean up the mess. I pretended I didn’t notice the glass shards on the floor.

I couldn’t write that day. I was too agitated by all that was taking place and lacked the concentration needed for writing. Was it worth it to get mixed up in the lives of this middle-aged couple, I asked myself. As enticing as having a relationship with Walt was, I had better take a closer look at what I would be getting into.

I saw the handwriting on the wall and knew that maybe I would have to leave Ajo sooner than I planned—maybe when Sophie had plastered the ashtrays against the wall, the wall was a substitute for Walt, what she hated in herself, and me. I had seen this kind of thing before–middle-aged couples, opposite sides of the same coin, hinged together by bonds of thirty years’ duration. Perhaps my involvement in their lives wasn’t necessarily a bad thing if were of a short duration. Damn! Every time I was on the verge of falling in love, indeed, had fallen in love, circumstances seemed to say no.

I spent an apprehensive afternoon worrying, fearing my frame-of-mind might taint Leo’s party. I wanted his party to be special for him.

Not yet to the age where I can content myself with my memories, I felt guilty in the knowledge that in giving Leo a special party, I probably would not be in Ajo much longer, that soon I would be preparing myself to tell him goodbye. Our world seems to allow us only an occasional taste of heaven.

Leo was in heaven that night, and his party was a success. He shined and seemed to savor every minute of it, from the time he walked into the bar at 8 p.m. sharp, dressed a little more natty than usual in his finest clothes, looking expectant, until our nightcap, when he walked me to my door. His face had beamed when we presented him with Sophie’s special chocolate cake, ablaze with 72 candles. I had used up three entire boxes of candles to write, “Leo–70” across the cake. Leo took the two extra candles to mean he had two more years to live, making me wonder if this would indeed be prophetic.

Jose brought home-made Mexican popovers to the party. After cake and popovers, Leo and I had dinner at Wapp Joe’s. Kitty, Tim and the kids were there—they were planning to leave Ajo in the morning and invited us to sit with them. The owner contributed a bottle of cold duck, and Leo entertained us with anecdotes. When we stopped by TJ’s and the American Legion for drinks, many people came over to wish Leo a happy birthday. Walking back to the hotel, Leo held my hand and confided his worries about his son Matt. Due to a back injury he couldn’t work—Leo helped all he could but worried about what would happen to him when he was no longer around.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “Matt’s a Pisces, and Pisces men often take a long time before they find their place in the world—they’re such dreamers.”

When Leo walked me to my door that night, I gave the Godfather a birthday kiss lightly on the lips.

◊

That Saturday was depressing. The hotel was losing most of its guests. I was sorry that Kitty, Tim, the kids, and most of the construction workers were leaving. Having lived together for several weeks, it was like having a family break apart. I probably would never see any of them again. Walt and I stood out on the patio as Tim finished loading their truck. We hugged Kitty and the kids goodbye.

“I’ll miss you,” I told Lisa. She had attached herself to me on several occasions, and I had let her use my typewriter, though, of course, she didn’t know how to type.

“I’m going to miss you too,” she said with a child endearing seriousness. I gave her a kiss before they drove off.

“It must be hard,” I said, turning to Walt, “getting attached to people who stay here and then having them leave.”

“It is,” he said. “Before they left, Sophie gave each of the kids five dollars.”

The departure of most of the hotel’s occupants accentuated my feeling of awkwardness, involved as I was in a triangle, but I was reluctant to face the dilemma, because I knew what it would require of me—that I too would have to leave my beloved Ajo. This wasn’t something I wanted to do. If I stayed, I would probably become involved in an affair with Walt. It was one thing to have carried on with Sonny, but if I had an affair with Walt, we would be adulterers. My need to resolve things drove to me to look for Walt later that morning.

“I need to talk to you, Dad,” I said when I found him at his desk.

We took another ride in his truck. Walt listened as I told him I knew he would never leave Sophie, nor would I want him to, that I had given consideration to being his mistress but knew that wouldn’t work either, so I was thinking about leaving Ajo—I had probably interfered with their lives too much already.

I’m not sure I know why I possess this hard thing that requires I do what I think is right rather than necessarily what I want. Conditioning, maybe.

Walt said he was sorry for having led me on, but he didn’t want me to leave. “We’ll just be friends,” he suggested.

“Then I don’t think I should stay at the hotel much longer,” I told him.

Walt showed me a little house on the edge of town that belonged to a friend of his, a dance instructor who lived mostly in the East where he managed a studio. I was charmed by its exterior, a small stucco house with a garden in back and the desert sweep around it. I knew I would be happy if I lived there. “Do you think you could call this man and asked him if I could rent his house for a while?”

He said he would. By the time we returned to the hotel, my feelings of well-being had been restored. If I could move to his friend’s house, I would be away from temptation. I thought we deserved medals for having chosen the better course.

Yet, in my fantasy of living in this desert house, of course I imaged Walt coming to see me, and I wasn’t sure I would be escaping the present situation or merely making it more convenient.

At noon Leo appeared at my door, still basking in the glow of his birthday celebration. He brought me a hot Mexican popover and a chocolate shake for lunch. We agreed to going dancing again that night.

At TJ’s that night we saw Little Jim in the company of a voluptuous Mexican woman—the reason for his absence from the hotel.

“That’s Pilar,” Leo told me. “She was the wife of the man who was killed when the train at the mine derailed last spring. She almost lost her mind with grief over it.”

Leo also told me that Pilar ran her own beauty shop. She was a good business-woman and now was a wealthy woman because of the settlement the mine made to her because of her husband’s death. Little Jim no longer had a sad, hungry look, and I was happy for him.

But I was a dud that night, tired and feeling a bit sorry for myself. Current events had taxed my emotional resources. Seeing Little Jim content accentuated my sense of loss—I had no sooner reconciled myself to the loss of Sonny when I was also having to give up Walt.

I escaped from Leo as soon as I could without hurting his feelings, went upstairs to bed and cried myself to sleep.

THIRTEEN

“All of life is but photosynthesis.”

–an old Buddhist proverb

Each day has its own configuration—no two are ever completely the same. Some are more special than others. If asked to draw a graph of that Sunday, it would start low and end high, as it was a day in which I started off logy and depressed, but as the day wore on steadily climbed to the pinnacle of joy.

It was another Sunday in Ajo. I didn’t wake up until 7:30 or 8 a.m. Since I had gone bed early the night before, sleeping this long heralded that I was depressed. When I did get up, I felt as though I had been drugged, as though my consciousness was refusing the wake up. Had I drunk a portion of some strange concoction, a nectar, an ambrosia that makes me forget—forget my past, close my eyes to the present and have no cognizance as to my future, moving in slow motion from one moment to the next? Was I one of Ulysses’ men who had succumbed to the lotus flower and now only wanted to smell orchids and dip my fingers into perfumed oil?

Had the desert overcome me and was it subjecting me to the changes it forces upon one, whereby I was moving not according to my timetable but its? They had names for this condition in Ajo—they called it “manana-” or “valley-fever,” when you find yourself doing as the Indians and Mexicans, who have inhabited the desert longer than white people, do: nothing today that you can’t put off until tomorrow.

In the desert the pace of life is dictated by the sun—you move slowest when it’s at its zenith and pick up your pace as it descends into evening. The heat of the day had gotten to me. The hotel air conditioning was on the blink. Having so few guests, Walt wasn’t planning to fix it until next spring. The cheap, large Sears fan in my room made such a racket that most of the time I turned it off. The day felt hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk.

If you really come down with a bad case of “valley fever,” you can, I was told, fall into such a psychological malaise that all you want to do is sleep. Sleep to escape the heat and the light, the austerity that sucks the moisture from everything so that what is left stands in pale, stark relief. The desert contains its furies.

One seeks to escape from unkind voices, as the desert can be devoid of compassion and ruthless in its honesty. Though I saw the handwriting on the wall, I wanted to say, don’t bother me, let me reckon with all this at another time. Let me enjoy my holiday a bit longer, drink pina coladas and swim in cool waters.

My lethargy advised that I not exert myself any more than was necessary, but since I had no plans other than to drive to Las Cruces, I prepared to leave.

The landscape that day failed to give me the boost it usually did, nor had I any enthusiasm for the broadcast on my radio. I was too weary to argue with Sunday morning evangelists, exhorting sinners to shun the temptations of life, citing statistics concerning the rise of fornication in this country. I was disenchanted by the popular singers, singing of love and heartbreak; their lyrics seemed tiresome and redundant. I flicked the radio off, leaving me in the sole company of my sluggish thoughts.

My body ached. Every muscle needed exercise. After passing through Deming, I pulled over to a rest stop, got out, and did calisthenics while the occupants of passing cars and trucks gazed in mild curiosity. When you are anonymous, who cares if you look funny.

The exercise helped shake out my mind as well.  I knew but one thing: I didn’t want to go to Las Cruces, so why was I forcing myself there? Asserting this small degree of free will, I turned my car around and headed back to Ajo.

Walt was cleaning up the lobby when I walked back into the hotel. I allowed myself to do what I wanted to do, which was to go up and put my arms around him and draw a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket.

He was becoming important to me and I didn’t want to give him up—I was nervous every day until I saw him.

Now that the hotel was almost empty, it was time to clean it up. Sophie and Walt intended to get some of the things done that they had let slide when they were busy. When Sophie appeared, she had a look of weary determination as she surveyed the dusty lobby.

Both wanted to dispense of the work as quickly as possible so they could turn to more appealing occupations, Sophie to her drinks and Walt to his hobby—working on the desert race car he drove in races. He had shown me a photograph of himself in his car. The car looked like a mechanical green grasshopper with its nose poised towards the ground.

“I’m just a little boy,” he said with a sly grin, “and this is my toy.”

A race was coming up in a few weeks in Santa Cruz, Mexico, so that Sunday Walt wanted to spend the afternoon at the Car Clinic working on his car.

Feeling an urge to help with the cleanup I asked what I could do to help.

“You don’t need to do anything, honey,” Walt said. “Just sit and read your newspaper.”

I noted that Sophie was the first to abandon the cleanup. By the time I had finished reading the Sunday paper, I could hear her and a man’s voices coming from the bar. The male voice was rich in resonance, and I wondered who he might be. I stuck my head in the doorway, and he said, “Hi, lady, how are you today?”

He was Big Jim, the construction worker who was trying to get on at the mine permanently so he could settle down in Ajo. He hadn’t been at the hotel much lately because, according to Walt, he had fallen in love with the daughter of the people who owned the Ajo Star, the local newspaper. They were planning to be married in a few weeks.

I spent a couple of hours drinking and talking with Sophie and Big Jim, definitely a more pleasant way to spend a hot Sunday afternoon than working. Big Jim was a hunk of man—tall, well-proportioned, with light turquoise eyes. He possessed the charming manner of a man who feels comfortable with ladies. He was interested in talking with me because he too was a writer. He wrote cowboy songs, inspired by his experiences, which he sang whenever he could get a gig.

He said that he written a song about an explosive fight with his wife, now his ex-wife. He had threatened to shoot her and drove his truck into an arroyo. When sheriff came to quell the disturbance, he was so drunk that the sheriff patted him on the shoulder and told him to dry out. I said I would like to hear the song.

Sophie had her own stories to tell, things that had happened since she and Walt bought the hotel. She told us about some Mexican aliens who had slipped over the border and were hiding out in the hotel. “They were afraid to go out and get themselves something to eat, so, they went into another guest’s room and ate all his food. When the man discovered the theft, he came to Walt and said, ‘They ate everything—my cheese, my baloney and my fruit. They ate the whole thing.’

“So, Walt looked at him and said, ‘Just like Goldie Locks.’”

As, whenever she told a story she thought was particularly funny, she repeated the tale, laughing harder than ever when she got to the punch line, “Just like Goldie Locks,” slapping the counter and laughing until she was almost crying.

She told us about a love affair between two elderly residents. “Bonnie and Alfred were always together. They lived down the hall on the first floor in separate rooms, across from each other. They did everything together, shopped, ate and watched TV. One day Bonnie got sick, so Walter took her to the hospital. Nobody thought it was serious, but she died. After that Alfred lost interest in life–he moved away from the hotel so he wouldn’t be reminded of her. He died too a couple of months later. I hate to talk about it,” Sophie said. “It still makes me too sad. I can’t go into either of their rooms.”

“My Mom was the same way,” I commented. “After my Dad died, she lived on for another ten years, but she really had no interest in life. I wasn’t sad for her when she died, because I knew that’s what she wanted. Not everyone can survive the death of their mate—even animals sometimes die when they lose their mate.”

Big Jim nodded his head in agreement and said that his father’s zest for life had disappeared after his mother had died.

I knew why Sophie was telling us these stories—they were from the book she wished she would one day write. If she didn’t write them, maybe I would do it for her. Sophie’s condition seemed to have improved over the last few days. Her conversation was more cogent, and she wasn’t as loud as she had been. Maybe her feminine instinct was aroused, and she was rallying on behalf of her man.

Big Jim talked about his decision to settle down in Ajo. “I’ve been in a lot of places, but none better than this one.”

“I feel the same way,” I said. I felt his eyes on me, and the pressure of his foot against mine sent a pleasurable sensation through my body.

“Of course, this place is a little bit like Peyton Place,” he said with his eyes twinkling. “Everyone sleeps with everyone else.”

“The smaller the place, the more everyone knows everyone else’s business,” I commented.

I didn’t mind his foot against mine, but I couldn’t help wondering why a newly engaged man was giving me a come-on.

Walt came into the bar to get himself a coke. “I’m watching the football game,” he said.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The one in here,” he said and adjourned to the lobby.

When our party broke up, I asked Sophie what I could do to help.

“Why don’t you get a broom and sweep the patio,” she said.

I went to my room and changed into a pair of shorts and a cool, cotton blouse. Then I found the broom and dustpan and was applying myself to the task, when Big Jim came out to go his truck. We talked for a few minutes while I stood holding the broom. Again, those pale turquoise eyes were on me. What does he want from me, I wondered?

“I’d rather be hiking, but I’m afraid of running into a rattlesnake, and I don’t have a snake-bite kit.”

Jim said they don’t use snake-bite kits anymore, that usually the venom from a rattlesnake isn’t enough to kill an adult. I was not particularly cheered by this news. I was beginning to feel nervous talking with him and was glad when he finally left. Walt came over and said, “Is the game over or is it half-time?”

I thought Walt was a bit jealous but considered the question he was asking, consulting my storehouse of knowledge concerning such situations. Usually, a man who is attached will feel a bit guilty for have flirted with another woman. If he runs into her again, it’s a cool hello. Regretting that this is generally so doesn’t alter the fact of it, so I found it less painful to anticipate it rather than cultivate fantasies to the contrary.

“It’s over,” I told Walt, feeling irrevocably fickle.

“I’m going to work on my car for a couple of hours,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

I felt duty found to complete sweeping the patio, so I said, “When I’m done, maybe I can stop by.”

Walt said he was thinking about going out for a few drinks by himself tonight.

“Can I join you?” I asked.

He smiled as though it was just what he wanted me to say.

FOURTEEN

I put in less than a half hour’s more work before departing for the Car Clinic, where Walt would be working on his race car. It was located on the strip towards Deming—I knew where it was because he had already pointed it out to me.

The day had gotten off to a bad start but was turning into a pretty nice day after all. I thought of the pleasure of Big Jim’s foot against mine. If his interest was more than fleeting, I knew he would probably show up at the hotel again in couple of days. I had become a little bit like Jimmy the Greek—I would lay odds that he would not show up for a while. Making negative predictions helped spare my feelings from further trammel.

As I pulled into the yard of the Car Clinic, I saw Walt bending over his grass-hopper-like car, which was parked in the hot sun. When I got out of my car and came closer, I could see beads of perspiration on his face, neck and arms. “Must be a labor of love,” I commented.

He looked up. “Hi, honey, get your sweeping done?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t earn any merit for hard work.”

Walt’s attention was faceted on a metal plate he was holding, next to a hole through which the gas pedal protruded. “What are you doing, Dad?” I asked, peering into the car. Walt was making marks on the plate with a pencil.

“I’m making a new plate for my foot to rest against,” he said.

“You mean if you don’t have a certain part, you make it?”

“Sure do,” he said, straightened up. “Do you know what I love about this car? It’s that I know every bolt and screw in it. Some of its parts, I made myself.”

I didn’t say what was on the tip of my tongue, that the car was his mistress. Would that men knew and understood their women to the extent that they knew and understood their cars, but then a machine is more understandable than the machinations of a woman’s mind.

I followed Walt into the garage where three men were working and kibitzing. It delighted me to be entering this male world. The Car Clinic had the kind of random disarray—conglomerations of cars in various states of repair, parts, tools, machinery, a cooler, a radio, and these gasoline alley guys, who were spending their Sunday afternoon at the shop. It had the sounds of jesting voices, a radio blasting cowboy music, and clanking tools, and the smells of oil, metal and sweat.

Walt introduced me to the men. Dan, who owned the shop, was on a coaster on his back repairing the underside of a Volkswagen; John and Joe were keeping him company. Walt informed me that both Dan and John had race cars, that they too were readying for the race in Mexico in a few weeks.

The men seemed amused to be in the presence of a lady. I suppose they mediated their language some to accommodate me. Walt had begun drilling some holes in the plate. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“I took up this sport,” he announced, “so I could get away from Sophie, but now she insists on coming along to all the races.”

His comment made me feel awkward. Though I knew it de rigor to berate one’s wife in such settings, I didn’t think Sophie would similarly berate him.

I was thirsty. Maybe they were too. I could make myself useful by going for some beer. When I started to walk away, Walt called, “Where are you going?”

“I thought I would go get a six-pack of beer for us,” I told him.

“Here,” he said, pulling a ten-dollar bill from his pocket. “Go down to Ted’s and get a case of Bud.”

When I returned, I handed each of the guys an opened beer, and Walt took the case and put it into the cooler.

The scene appealed to my nostalgie de lo boue, a delight in an environment where men habitually work where a kind of comradery arises. I liked the chaos of the clinic. If someone needed a part, he rummaged through the most likely pile of clutter. My attraction to such places is perhaps by way of compensation for years spent in more sterile environments, the eventual weariness of intellectualism, book-learning and all things cerebral. As William Styron says of himself, I felt “deprived a certain depravity.” I couldn’t think of a move lovely place to spend a Sunday afternoon in Ajo.

“How do you like it here in Ajo?” Dan asked, a bit shyly. Walt had told me that he would often work on the cars of friends and then refuse any payment.

“I love it here,” I answered. “The people are so friendly.”

“I like it here too,” the small man named Joe said, “but I was awfully lonely until I met these guys.” He said he had come to Ajo after his wife died and lived in a mobile home across the way.

Joe was Italian, a Sicilian, whose greatest desire was to find another woman whom he could marry. “I haven’t met many women here yet,” he said.

“Maybe you should come down to the hotel bar then,” I said. “Either that or move to one of those snowbird parks—they usually have lots of widows, more women than men.”

He misinterpreted my friendliness—sometimes a lonely person wants to eat up anyone who is sympathetic. He asked if I would have dinner with him.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” I said, embarrassed. “I’ve got other things to do.”

Our conversation became abbreviated by my refusal, so I went over to Walt and said, “I think I’ll be going now. I’ll see you later, huh?” I was anticipating having a few drinks with him later.

“See you later, honey,” Walt said.

◊

That night I went to the Mexican restaurant on the edge of town and ordered by usual green burrito, enchilada style, with a side of refried beans, and a glass of beer.

A sunset worthy of the brush of Charles Russell graced the end of this hot Sunday, its clouds colored pink, orange, and lavender. The sun was setting earlier each day, and there were predictions that soon the heat wave would break.

When I got back to the hotel, I found Sophie and Jose in the bar, so I had a drink with them. When Walt returned from the Car Clinic, he joined us. I mentioned that my room had been hot since the air conditioning had broken down.

“Close your windows and the curtains first thing in the morning,” he said. “Aren’t you using your fan?”

“I tried it, but it makes so much noise when I’m working that I turned it off,” I replied.

“I’ll get you another fan,” he said, getting up from his stool.

“You don’t have to do that,” I protested, trailing after him. “I can just use the one I have.” Nevertheless, he went upstairs, with me following him, and opened one door after another until he found the old fan he was looking for.

“You know I have the key to your room,” he said, dangling his keys.

I ignored this comment. “I love these rooms,” I told him. “Every one is different; each has its own character. But I like my room best because it has the best view of hills beyond.”

Walt unplugged an ancient, dusty fan from its socket and carried it down to my room. There he set it on the night stand and turned it on. From it came a pleasant hum instead of the disturbing clatter the previous one emitted.

“That’s the modern age for you,” I said. “The things they used to make work better, last longer, and are cheaper than the newer models.”

As he was leaving, I said, “I guess you’re not going to be able to get away for some drinks tonight, are you?”

As usual, he was more bound to his duties than to his desires. When he looked embarrassed, I gave him a hug and said, “That’s okay, Dad. I understand. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

When he left, my mental lethargy returned. It’s one thing to feel a physical inertia, another when your mind is functioning below par. To cure my condition, I decided to smoke some pot—to get the gears moving again.

Sonny hadn’t left the hotel yet. I could hear his and other voices coming from the room next door. Since their work was done, they were partying before leaving in the morning. Sophie had told me Charlie was going with Sonny to his next job.

I was no longer angry with him, as I knew Charlie suited him better than I did. Now I even approved of their union. There was no point, however, in even telling him goodbye.

A little later there was a knock at my door. I opened it to find Walt standing there, showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes. He was holding two drinks in his hands.

“I brought you a night cap,” he said, handing me one of the drinks. “I’m going to go sit on the balcony. Would you care to join me?”

“That would be lovely,” I said. “Just let me get my robe.”

I remember that evening as being an especially romantic time, the time when I felt closest to Walt. I was wearing a sexy maroon nightgown, a gift from a friend, and my flowered Japanese robe with cascades of flowers in various colors on a lavender background. I felt pretty that night.

We sat in two low wooden chairs overlooking the street facing east. Our talk was sweet and candid.

“I think Sophie has gotten better the past few days,” I told him.

“She’s in competition with you,” he replied.

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing—she’s fighting for her man.”

“Oh, she likes Jose,” Walt said, as though he thought Sophie no longer loved him.

“Don’t be thick-headed,” I told him. “Of course, she likes Jose. He’s good to her, but the one she is fighting for is you. I’ve been around—I understand these things.”

There was a silence between us. Then Walt said, “I don’t think you see me for what I am. You see me as being more ideal than I am.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s called projection.”

Though an amateur, I considered my knowledge of psychology considerable and went on to explain. “We all carry inside us an image of the ideal lover. When we meet someone who corresponds to some of the facets of our interior image, we tend to project the entire thing onto them.

“In my case, an ideal lover is a friend, lover and father. Do you know why I call you ‘Dad’?”

“Why?” he said, taking my hand.

“It’s because my own father never paid much attention to me. It created a void in me and so I look for men who will pay me the kind of attention that my own father never paid. It’s like having a hole in you that you can’t seem to fill. You’ve given me the kind of attention I wanted from my father—that’s why I’m drawn to you. It’s helped fill the void, and for that I’m grateful.

“We’re all crazy, I think, in one way or another. This is part of the way that I’m crazy. We’re all motivated by reasons, good reasons that we may not even understand.”

I terminated my lecture when I saw Sonny and Charlie meandering up to the hotel, arm in arm. They both looked up and saw Walt and me sitting there, which I hoped was an equally romantic sight. “Good,” I told Walt. “Living well is the best revenge.”

The marijuana I had smoked had activated my mind so that it was no longer dull, yet I sensed its confusion. Intellectually, I could see the preposterousness of my situation, but emotionally, I wanted Walt and would have liked to hold on to him forever.

“I’m going to ask my psyche for a dream tonight,” I told him.

“A dream?” he asked, looking puzzled.

“Yes,” I said. “I feel so confused by all of this. Whenever I’m not sure what to do, I ask my psyche to give me some advice in the form of a dream. My dreams give me advice unsolicited, but tonight I’m making a special request. Sometimes they tell me things that I don’t want to hear, but they are always useful and I trust them.”

Walt looked as though he was merely indulging all this talk about the psychic world, that he liked me just the same.

When our conversation ended, he walked me to my door and kissed me goodnight. Our kiss was bit awkward because I was taller than he.

“Sweet dreams, honey,” he said before walking down the hall.

FIFTEEN

“Don’t piss in the bread dough.” —the lesson from “Gimpel, the Fool”

The dream my psyche issued me that Sunday night both shocked and frightened me. I wished I hadn’t dreamt it. It was a dream that altered my perception of Walt and signaled the guilt I felt about interfering with his marriage. Nevertheless, it was a helpful dream.

I tend to trust my psyche more than I trust myself, because it’s less inclined to lie than I am. My psyche has more independence than I do and is therefore impartial and rational. I experience things and select that which I want to acknowledge, often to justify my position or to fortify my emotional needs. My psyche accepts all the data and then issues it back to me in symbolic form—it doesn’t filter out what I might filter. If I can interpret its messages, I can find guidance.

I dreamt that I had solved a murder mystery. I did so by comparing two gold medallions, on belonging to my father and the other to Walt. When I turned the medals over, one in each hand, I saw a burrs on both surfaces. I understood these burrs were caused by the pain in each man’s heart, the pain they bore within. With this evidence I somehow knew who the murderer was, and it was Walt. I was going to have to present this evidence in court when I woke up.

The dream shook me and I wished I could forget it, but it was too vivid to forget, so I felt compelled to try to understand it.

So far during my stay in Ajo I had chosen to see Walt as a long-suffering Job, who had for years born the embarrassment and abuse wrought on him by an alcoholic wife. My father and Walt were alike in that each of them seemed to lead an exemplary life, taking care of his family and duties—each deserved a medal for honorable conduct. Yet, each carried a similar angry hurt, which was represented in my dream by the burr on the underside of his medal.

Though I liked Sophie I had wanted to think she was getting what she deserved if Walt was attracted to me. Now my Cassandra seemed to be saying that perhaps he wasn’t as innocent as I might like to believe. For the first time I wondered what part he might have played in causing her to turn to alcohol. For the first time I sensed his anger. Experience had taught me not to minimize the anger some men might feel towards women. Now it occurred to me that maybe Walt was using me to punish Sophie, that my Job had the anger of Zeus.

Of course, Walt was no murderer, any more than the average guy walking down the street. The world is full of physical violence, but I believed it was nothing compared to the emotional violence perpetrated on one another because of hatefulness and spite.

◊

At 6:30 a.m. that morning Sophie knocked on my door and invited me on an early morning ride through the desert. Joyfully, I accepted and in a few minutes we were whizzing along in her little red Fiat.

We had a splendid time that morning. She went down a dirt road in search of a corral and windmill she had once seen on a drive with Jose. Again, she worried that she had taken the wrong road. We crossed several arroyos where the sand was so soft that she had maintain a certain speed to prevent from getting stuck. She played her favorite tapes for me, and we agreed that Willie Nelson was the best Western singer.

“His voice is like ear candy,” I said.

On our way out-of-town we had seen the same thin Indian woman I saw on my first day in Ajo, striding, ramrod straight, across the plaza, dressed in striped Bermuda shorts and a bright pink blouse. I asked Sophie about her.

“She’s quite a good artist,” Sophie said. “But, after an unhappy love affair, she had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for a while in the state mental institution. When she was released, she lived at the hotel for a while. The state paid the bill. After a while Walt asked her to leave, because of her chain smoking. He was afraid she would set the hotel on fire.”

“So, where does she live now?” I asked. I was concerned for her because I identified with her—my doppelganger.

“Oh, I guess she just sleeps wherever she can find a soft place for the night,” Sophie said.

Society is threatened by those who refuse to live by its rules and so relegates them to the fringe. So, the misfit endures frightful isolation. I wondered whether if it was true that in the final accounting that the first will be last and last, first—then all the gentle downtrodden who had said no to corruption, would be riding through heaven, singing a lovely chorus, while the rest of us would be cloaked in our shame?

This conversation soon evaporated into the wind as Sophie and I rolled down the window and enjoyed the early morning air and the wonders of the scene. She was pleased when she spotted the corral and windmill. We parked and walked around. Determining that this deserted corral was still used periodically when the ranchers drove their herds down from the hills, we imaged what it was like when it was in use. Sophie found a rusted metal frame that she thought might be suitable for a painting, and I helped her carry it back to the car.

On our way back, with Neil Diamond serenading us, Sophie gunned the arroyos at a near reckless speed and laughed with abandonment. I laughed too and told her maybe she should race the desert car instead of Walt.

◊

Later that morning I was in the bar when Sonny was carrying his boxes to his car. A satchel of his clothes that he had left in the lobby next the phone had disappeared.

“Sonny had to go out and buy himself some new clothes,” Sophie said. She and Walt were sitting alongside me. They both looked at me as though maybe I was the one who had taken his satchel.

“I didn’t take them,” I said, “but, do you blame me for being a little glad that it happened?”

Sonny came into the bar to settle his account with Walt. He thanked Sophie and Walt for their kindness. They told to come back anytime, to come and see them.

“I will,” he promised.

What good would it do for me to be silent, continuing a cold war with a man I would never see again, a man, whom, in spite of everything, I liked.

“Well, good luck,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he said. “Good luck to you too.”

◊

As might be expected, my internal turmoil with the situation at hand was impairing my ability to concentrate on my Magnum Opus. It was stalled on the tracks–days had passed since I had last worked on it. I knew that I had to make a decision about what I was going to do and had better make it soon. I still didn’t want to leave Ajo.

That afternoon I went to the library to look for a short story I wanted to give to Walt to read. The story, I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel, the Fool,” would tell him what I wanted to tell him.

When it was not to be found at the library, I tried to recall what I could of it. All his life Gimpel, a good man, had been thought of as a fool by the people who lived in his Jewish village in Poland. He was the brunt of many a joke. He was tricked into marrying the village prostitute and took his husbandly duties seriously, even when she repeatedly cuckolded him, presenting him with one child after another that were, in fact, not his. When she refused to let him sleep in his own house, Gimpel remained devoted to her and treated the children tenderly, as though they were his own. Gimpel was a baker, so he made his bed on the flour sacks in the bakery. One night he was awakened by voices that urged him to recognize that he was a fool and encouraged him to take revenge. “Gimpel,” the voices said to him, “why don’t you piss into the bread dough which is rising for tomorrow’s loaves?” Gimpel was sorely tempted until he heeded their command and alleviated himself into the dough. Who could have blamed him? But then Gimpel regretted what he had done and took the dough and buried in the back yard of the bakery so no one would eat the defiled bread. When his wife died, she reappeared to him. Now she was charred and blacken from her life of deceit and now she regretted her treatment of the man who had been good to her. Gimpel lived a long life. When he was an old man, he was no longer thought of as a fool—he was revered as a wise man by all who knew him.

That night I got drunk. The pressure of my situation had gotten to me. Sophie and I argued over politics in the bar. She was for Reagan, I, for Carter. When I finally admitted that I didn’t know that much about Reagan, she waved her finger at me and said, “Well, see! How can you know then what kind of a president he’d make?”

I lived in Ajo during the time that Americans were being held hostage in Iran, so inevitably our conversation concerned it. Sophie said, if she were the president, she would not have stood still for such a thing. She would have gone to Iran herself and personally demanded our boys back, and, had the Iranians refused, she would have struck them hard and fast. I wondered how the Ayatollah Khomeni and the Islamic militants might have fared if faced with a fervent, irate Sophie. These declarations had followed my comment that I thought Carter had exercised remarkable restraint in the matter.

Soon, I fell away from my chair, conceding victory to Sophie. I had decided one thing. If anyone was to be hurt, I would rather it be me.

I was drunk and probably incoherent by the time I tried to talk to Walt that night, giving him a slurred, half-account of the story of Gimpel. He probably had little idea what I was trying to say to him when I said, “Don’t piss in the bread dough, Dad.”

SIXTEEN

“All’s well that ends well.” –William Shakespeare

The phrase came to mind on that nondescript Tuesday, on which I remember little. The only event I had to look forward to that day was watching the controversial showing of Vanessa Redgrave in “Playing for Time,” on TV that night. So struck had I been by the photograph of her with her head shaved on the cover of Newsweek that I purchased the magazine and devoured the article. I read of her sympathies for the Palestine Liberation Front, which made her role in this program an affront to the Jews.

At the coffee shop that morning I saw the same Johnny who had gone berserk sitting there. After that incident, Walt had told him that he could continue staying at the hotel, but he couldn’t come into the bar, so he had moved to a motel on the outskirts of town.

Curious about how he was doing, I casually asked, “How’re doing?” as I passed his table, and he invited me to sit down. Our conversation, however, was disappointing. The way his hair seemed to grow in a misplaced fashion with a widow’s peak on the side of his forehead, bothered me. As he voiced his opinions, I saw that he was a man who was full of resentments towards the clique of men for whom he had worked.

“No fuckin’ Mexican’s gonna tell me what to do,” he proclaimed. Johnny was from Alabama and full of racial prejudice. To my way of thinking, only inferior people think they are superior because of the color of their skin, but I didn’t want to argue the point, so thanked him for my coffee and left.

That evening, before Walt took Sophie out to dinner, he had a word with me. “Someone came to the hotel last night to see you, but you had already gone to bed.”

“Who?” I asked, immediately thinking of Big Jim.

“Joe,” Walt said. “He was all dressed up. Now I think there’s three of us who are in love with you.”

“Joe!” I protested. “I was just trying to be nice to him.”

I was glad to get out of the bar that night, to have something on television I was interested in seeing. I had invited Leo to come and watch the program with me.

Leo’s eyesight was such that he had trouble seeing the program and what with the air conditioning back on since Walt had fixed it, I suppose he couldn’t hear it either. Periodically he fell asleep, snoring softly, his head leaning against the chair.

As for me, I was enthralled with the stunning presentation, the strength of the actors’ performances, and the tragic irony of many of their statements. I am not one who asks why God had permitted such an atrocity as letting six million Jews be killed, and uses his lack interference as proof of His non-existence. My argument is premised on the fact that human beings have free will. If you give someone free will that means that you will not interfere with his decisions. You may try to persuade, but as soon as you interfere, his will is no longer free. Therefore, man has perpetuated the most atrocious acts on his fellow man without interference from God.

When Miss Redgrave and her companions were rescued by the Allied Forces, tears of joy and relief wet my face.

Having come from dinner, Walt and Sophie entered the lobby. Were I honest, I would admit that I wanted Walt to see the tears on my cheeks and that I wanted him to do what he did, which was to come over and wipe them away with his finger.

◊

On Wednesday Walt went to Las Cruces again, where I suspected he got more than just supplies for the hotel, leaving Sophie and me at the hotel.

That morning my psyche, as though realizing I needed another push, had issued another dream to rouse me from my malaise. In this dream I was standing in a kitchen of a two-story house, talking with some people. A man was playing with the kitchen knife on the table. It thought it harmless until he raised the knife and plunged into the face of a woman. I wasted no time in getting out the back door and down the stairs. I bounded as fast as jack rabbit, lickety split.

◊

Sophie was on the rampage that day. She had asked Connie to clean the windows in the lobby. When I returned from the store, she was standing by them. “Look at these!” she demanded.

They were streaked and still dirty. “Don’t look too good, do they?” I replied.

“They look terrible! I could have done better in my sleep. Where’s Connie?”

“I think she went to pick up her daughter from school,” I said. “She told me a half an hour ago that she would be right back.”

“She’s doing these windows again when she gets back. And, if she doesn’t clean them right this time, she’s fired.”

Knowing that if Sophie fired Connie, she might have trouble finding a replacement, and feeling sorry for Connie, whose daughter was retarded, I sought to defend her.

“You know,” I told Sophie, “she been working hard to clean up the rooms Kitty and kids were in.”

“Do you call taking three days to clean two rooms working hard?” Sophie retorted. “Just wait ‘til she gets back here.”

I left Connie to her fate and want upstairs, wondering how I would like it if Sophie turned her angry accusations on me. Throughout the afternoon, whenever I went downstairs, I saw or heard Sophie walking around the hotel, her glass in her hand, the ice cubes tinkling—on the rag. For such a little thing, she didn’t walk lightly; she stomped.

She really can’t get along without Walt, I told myself. I was becoming dependent on him too, but I could still get along without him. Both of us were waiting for him to come back.

I was agitated because of my dream. By that evening I had made up my mind. I would leave the hotel and wouldn’t take much time in doing it. My trouble was that I didn’t know where I would go. Would it solve things if I moved out to that desert house Walt had shown me? I doubted it. It looked as though I would have to leave Ajo all together.

I realized that I could not use Walt as my confidante in this. How could I tell him that I was no longer seeing him in quite the same light, that I no longer was putting him on a pedestal.

It was one of those rare times when my horoscope from that day’s Ajo Star seemed deadly accurate: “The situation in which you find yourself is less than desirable. You must take step to change your situation to a more favorable one.”

The only word it lacked was, “immediately.” I felt a sense of urgency. The message seemed to be saying leave at once. I decided to obey.

Now, lacking Walt’s support, I walked down to the plaza to use the phone and called an old friend, so that I could talk in privacy without unwanted ears listening. I wanted someone to know what my situation was and what I had decided to do about it. I wanted my friend to pat me on the head, so to speak, and tell I was a good girl and that I was doing the right thing. Instead, she commented dryly, “You know you should really take more time getting to know a man before you go to bed with him.”

“But I haven’t gone to bed with him,” I protested, adding, “but I probably will if I don’t get myself out of here soon.”

I hung up, supposing that I was expecting at bit much from my friend for her to participate in the high drama of the moment that I was experiencing. I was nevertheless disappointed that I hadn’t received the endorsement I sought. Even my friends think I’m a fuck-up, I thought, and sadly walked back to the hotel.

My next plan was to get good and drunk. Lord knew I deserved to do that for what it had taken to make this decision and would take to execute it: to deny myself in order that all might end well.

SEVENTEEN

“. . . to live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory.”

That night the bar was occupied by a gang of men who were part of bomb detonation squad from the Air Force training ground a short ways from Ajo.

Walking back to the hotel after this disappointing phone call, I had an inspiration. I was interested in writing a few lines down before I forgot them. Instead of driving yourself crazy trying to tell a little about Ajo as you work on the Magnum Opus, why not simply write the story you are experiencing, I thought. Excited about the idea because I knew this story would be much more manageable than the Magnum Opus had become, I also happy because knew that I would be able to complete it in a relatively short period of time. The opening lines of my new book began coming to me. I sat at the bar and wrote them down on a napkin.

“Ajo, New Mexico. Spanish for ‘garlic.’ I never loved a place more. I was there recently for several weeks.”

It was Wednesday, and I had decided that I would leave on Friday. As I sat there counting up the days I had already spent in Ajo, the man next to me said, “Are you writing a book?”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” I answered in my haughty manner.

He was a large, good looking man with a moustache and a confident swagger. He introduced himself as Master Sergeant Dick Newman and said that he was in charge of the bomb detonating squad. My conversation with the Sergeant started out pleasantly; it ended unpleasantly.

“Did your crew work on the bomb that was recently detonated at Harvey’s in Lake Tahoe?” I asked. As a matter of fact, it had.

“I guess you weren’t too successful,” I commented dryly. “It went off.”

“That’s because we wanted it to. It was too heavy to move. We cleared the hotel and set it off so that no one would be hurt.”

“Well, you accomplished that,” I answered. “I guess you like danger.”

“How do you get that?”

“You wouldn’t be working with a bomb detonating crew if you didn’t. It’s probably a variation of a death wish.”

“I don’t want to die,” he protested. “I enjoy living too much.”

“So do I,” I told him, “but, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a death wish. I guess I’d rather kill myself with cigarettes and booze than by hanging off cliffs or hanging around bombs. I’ll probably, what is it they say, live fast, love hard, and die young.”

“It’s to live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory,” the Master Sergeant informed me.

“I would like to leave a beautiful memory,” I said.  I was downing one drink after another, as fast as they were being set before me. I was drinking too much, and I was being fresh with the sergeant. My honesty might be refreshing and was eliciting his, but he was also growing annoyed.

“I like women who have brains,” he said. “How about having dinner with me tomorrow night?”

I wasn’t at all sure, after all the episodes I already had in Ajo, that I wanted to take on this one man, whom, in truth, I didn’t like. The words of my friend stuck in my mind: Why don’t you find out what a man is all about before going to bed with him? As far as the master sergeant was concerned, he was sinking his own ship.

“We’re in pretty sad shape in this country in terms of defense,” I said. “Look at what happened with the rescue squad we sent to Iran. I know the weather was bad, but it was a fiasco.”

“That wouldn’t have happened if they had sent me over there,” he boasted.

“Oh,” I said, probably raising my eyebrow, “what would you have done?”

“I would have brought our hostages back if I had to kill 800 Iranians to do it, 10 for every hostage.”

“You probably wouldn’t have brought them back alive then. And what makes you think that 80 Iranians equals eight Americans?”

His attitude was making me angry, but he persisted in it sincerely. “Well, aren’t they?”

“Maybe you think so, but I don’t. I think they might be a little mad, and I don’t understand their crazy religion, but I still believe in the eyes of God every person is of equal value. Even our Declaration of Independence says, all men are created equal, not just Americans.”

“You know, I like you,” the master sergeant replied. “How about having dinner with me tomorrow night?”

I decided to put him to test. “Let me ask you some questions before I give you my answer. Are you married, living with someone, or do you have a regular girl friend?”

“What does that have to do with it?” he demanded.

“Quite a bit, from my perspective,” I answered.

He confided that, when he was training his crew, he lived with lady in Las Cruces. She was a GS13 and was so fond of him that she had bought him a sports car. They had an “understanding,” that whenever he was out of town, she would not question him concerning his affairs. She had the same privilege.

“What a fantastic understanding,” I said sarcastically.

“It works out pretty well for both of us,” he said with undue modesty.

“Well, bully for both of you!” I erupted. “What the kind of deal can you offer another woman then?”

“I can off her one hell of a good time in bed for a night or two. What’s the matter with that?”

“It all depends on what the lady’s looking for,” I replied icily.

He went on to describe his abilities as a lover. “Do you know how long I can go for?” he asked.

“Forever,” I answered, knowing my meaning would be lost on him.

“For four hours!”

That’s how much the master sergeant loved sex.

“For four hours?” I replied incredulously. “No kidding?” I felt like saying I had never met a man with such remarkable endurance. The thought of a four-hour marathon with him made me tired.

“I’m looking for someone who can go forever,” I told him.

In the meantime, Walt had come into the bar. Seeing that I was talking with the sergeant, he had positioned himself a couple of stools away from us. Rather than perpetuate this volatile conversation with the sergeant, I said, “Excuse me, I see someone I want to talk to.”

I went over to Walt, who pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

“I didn’t come here for a cigarette,” I told him.

“Oh, you want me to see you home safely,” he said.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Would come and talk to me? Things are getting a little bit hairy.”

Walt came and sat on one side of me while the master sergeant now stood on the other side. He was not enjoying my rebuttal of him—I could see that. He let out a stream of obscenities at me.

“Either clean up your language or get out of here,” Walt flared sharply at him.

At this, the sergeant walked away.

“I suppose it’s my fault,” I told Walt. I was, no doubt about it, quite drunk. “He thinks one American is equal to 10 Iranians. If this country went to war tomorrow, I’m afraid we’d be caught with our pants down.”

“I shouldn’t have humiliated him like that,” Walt said. “I don’t like to humiliate another man. Usually, I take someone outside so that he won’t be embarrassed.”

Pretty soon the sergeant came back and apologized to Walt. When Walt left, he came back again, still wanting to know about dinner tomorrow night.

“Why don’t you come here tomorrow night,” I said, hedging, “and if I want to go to dinner with you, I’ll be here. If I don’t, I won’t.” I was still being snide, but I thought he deserved no better.

“Do you want to know something, bitch,” he said, bending his head near my ear. “Do you see all these men in here? They’re all part of my team. And if I get up and walk out of here, they’ll all follow.”

As far as I was concerned it was just another instance of the wolf pack syndrome. “Too bad they can’t all think for themselves,” I retorted.

Walt was standing at the door, indicating that there was a phone call for me. When I went to get the phone, he said that he had made it up to get me out of there. “I think it’s time I walked you home,” he said.

“I think so too, Dad. If I stay in there much longer, the sergeant and I might kill each other.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him when we got to my door. “Sorry I got so drunk and caused you this trouble, but I have a good reason.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going leave the hotel,” I answered.

“When?” he asked.

“On Friday.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I’m not sure yet. I just made up my mind tonight.”

Walt led me to room other than own. He opened the door and took me inside.

“I couldn’t stand to see you go off with another man,” he said. “Not in the state you’re in tonight.” He sat me down on the bed and sat beside me.

“You needn’t have worried,” I told him. “There’s no way I would have gone with him.” I wanted to say that the master sergeant wasn’t offering me anything, but I knew, for that matter, neither was Walt.

He leaned over and unbuttoned my blouse and pushing it off my shoulders, kissed my nipples.

“You’d better not be gone for very long, Dad,” I told him. “It will look suspicious.”

“I know,” he said stopping. “I have to close the bar. I’ll take you to your room and come back later.”

My resistance was nonexistent. If I was going to leave, why couldn’t I have a little bit more of Walt? He took me to my room and kissed me.

“That’s three,” I told him.

I went inside, undressed, fell into bed and was almost immediately fell asleep.

EIGHTEEN

“Behold, the former things have come to pass,

  And new things I now declare; before they spring forth

  I tell you of them.”             –Isaiah 42:9

Thursday–I remember it as “black Thursday.”

My decision was made. Now I had to muster the energy to execute it. Mental ambivalence and inertia plagued me to the extent that I half wondered if I had made the whole thing up. What if I thought was going on was not really going on at all? If so, wasn’t I choosing a rather extreme manner to solve it? I still didn’t know in which direction to point the car on my way out of Ajo. I still didn’t want to leave. Maybe I could move to the little desert shack on the edge town, with the beautiful, panorama surrounding it. I imagined myself there, living in a state of bliss, making friends with rabbits, road runners and other forms of wildlife. Once I could conquer my fear of rattlesnakes or purchased high boots and a snake bit kit, I could take long desert walks on which I would ponder the mysteries of life. The hitch was I knew that I would probably sit out there, waiting for Walt to come and see me. I wondered why he hadn’t said anything about the place since he first showed it to me.

Since Walt hadn’t knocked on door the previous night, I assumed his responsibilities had superseded his desires. Though I thought it was about time women spur men offering lousy deals, I deemed my own behavior reprehensible.

My task that day was to finish up business so that on Friday all I would have to do would be to pack and leave. One item of business was to go over and see Leo to tell him that I was leaving Ajo the next day and ask if he would help me load my car. Since I wasn’t entirely sure that Walt was the friend he said he was, I had come to view Leo as my one true friend in Ajo. I would also ask him about going with him when he went to feed his horses, something he had been asking to me to do for some time.

That morning, Walt and I went for coffee at the 7-11 on the edge of town and for another short drive.

“You didn’t come back to my room last night,” I said.

“I did come upstairs,” he replied. “I stood outside your door for ten minutes before I decided that I didn’t want to take advantage of your condition.”

“I was that bad, huh?”

“You were flying,” Walt said. “Sergeant Newman just about got into a fight after I took you to your room.”

“Oh, oh,” I said. “I hope you don’t lose any business because of me. I’m really sorry. I just couldn’t help myself—he made me so mad. He thinks one American is worth ten Iranians. I get so sick at people’s pompous prejudices.”

I had to spit out the words at this triple alliteration. “I bet it will be a while before Sergeant Newman and his boys come to the hotel again.”

“It’s my fault that you are leaving,” Walt said. “I can’t help but think that you must resent me.”

“I don’t resent you,” I said, but it wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I was beginning to resent him a little. “I could say that you were leading me on, but that’s just what I wanted you to do.”

“Where are you going to go now,” Walt asked.

“I don’t know—what about the shack?” I finally asked.

“Sophie doesn’t want you to stay there,” Walt admitted, looking a bit sheepish. “She got upset when she heard you were interested in it.”

This said a lot. It told me that Walt might complain bitterly about Sophie, but his foremost loyalty was to her.

“I know I give in to her too much,” Walt apologized, “but, it’s easier than doing battle.”

“That’s okay,” I said, wiping my fantasy of living there from my mind. “It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. It would just make it easier to have an affair without others knowing. Even if we agreed just to be friends, neither of us would want to leave it at that.”

I was feeling scared. Where would I go now? Walt helped me consider possibilities. I didn’t want to return to California. Going into Mexico was out, as I wouldn’t feel safe living there alone.

“You’d better go to Las Cruces,” Walt said. “I can help you find a nice apartment there for about $250 a month.”

“If I go there, will you check on me every now and then to see if I’m okay?” I asked.

“You know that I will,” he promised.

“Will you keep being my friend?”

“You know my motto,” he said. “There is no friend who is not always a friend.”

“You know what bothers me?” I said. “It’s that I don’t seem capable of achieving emotional independence. That’s why I’m hanging on to you.”

“You’ll be okay,” he promised.

“I guess the Lord’s just going to have to take care of me,” I said. “He’s done it before.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes—we were parked at the 7-11, drinking paper cups full of hot coffee. Then I said, “Do you know what?”

“What?” he asked.

“If I use up all my money and have nothing to show for it, I still won’t be sorry. Do you know why?”

“Why?” he said.

“Because I had one hell of a good time.”

Walt laughed. “Look, what do you think of that?”

He was referring to a dusty car full of Indians parked alongside of his truck; coming from the car’s tape recorder were Indian chants.

“It’s a good commentary on the modern age,” I laughed.

◊

Thursday was hot, unbearably so. Around noon when I walked over to Leo’s duplex to tell him the news, I felt like an ant crawling along a hot, sandy hill. The sun was merciless.

Leo lived about a block uphill below the hospital. He might have been embarrassed for me to see his house because he had never invited me over. I let myself in his gate, climbed a few stairs and knocked on the door. I could hear sounds of a television, so, I assumed he was home.

Leo sat in his chair, perhaps thinking if he didn’t stir, the caller would go away. When I didn’t leave, he finally got up and came to the door.

“I came to talk to you, Leo,” I said.

“Come in,” he said, smiling broadly.

“Don’t worry about your house,” I told him. “I know how you old bachelors live.”

The small quarters Leo shared with his son looked as though a few months had passed since anyone had applied a dust rag to anything. Leo was probably embarrassed for me to learn that he spent his days watching television. The chair in which he sat was tattered with some of the stuffing sticking out. There were piles of various kinds of clutter around room. Photographs of his dead wife and other family members graced the shelves. The house bore little of the spanky cleanliness Leo bespoke whenever he went out.

“Would you like some iced tea?” he asked.

“I’d love some,” I told him.

Over tea I told him the reason for my mission, ending with, “I just think it would be better for all concerned if I left Ajo.”

“I sure hate to see you go, Babe,” he said. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow,” I answered. “Now that my mind is made up, there’s no sense in hanging around.”

I asked Leo if he would help me load my car. “I’ll do anything I can to help,” he said.

“Can I go with you when you go to feed your horses today?” I asked.

“Do you want to?” Leo asked, brightening.

“Sure I do. Why don’t you stop at the hotel on your way. Then we can go out to dinner, if you like.”

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Anywhere’s fine with me,” I told him. “Thanks a lot, Leo. I appreciate your friendship.”

“See you at 4 o’clock, doll,” he said, standing on his steps and waving.

I felt better walking back to the hotel after I had seen Leo. Putting things into motion was making my plans concrete. Sophie bustled past me when I entered the hotel. Was it my imagination or was she angry with me?

That afternoon Walt came to my room wearing a belt full of tool around his waist. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m going up to the roof to take a look at the air conditioning,” he said, shutting the door behind him.

“I told Leo I’m leaving,” I said.

“Did it break his heart?” Walt asked.

“Walt!” I protested. “Leo’s a good friend.”

“I know,” he conceded. “Come here.”

I went to him, put my arms around him, and kissed him. “I’m going to miss you a lot,” I said.

“Just a minute,” Walt said. “These tools are in my way.” He reached to release the belt.

“Are you going to use one of them on me?” I teased.

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

I can’t say making love on that hot afternoon in the hotel with the air conditioning off was as romantic as the starlit night we had shared. Everything that afternoon seemed to stand out in stark relief.

Both of us undressed, and I folded back the bedding. I had wondered whether I would find Walt’s body attractive. Perhaps he had similar doubts about mine. My memory is of a hodgepodge of sensations. Walt’s skin was soft and white, and I was surprised that he had such a large penis for such a small man.

Expectations had increased his desire and he came soon—once the physical yearning for another starts, it builds until it is either satisfied or aborted.  I felt satisfied, but my sense of guilt was immediate. “I hope this doesn’t make both of us bad,” I told him. “I’ve lain in bed and wanted you for some time now.”

“I dreamt you were lying next to me nude last night,” he answered.

“Well, I hope the Lord can forgive us this then,” I said. “I’ll get you a clean washcloth.”

Feeling a bit playful, I handed it to him and said, “This is for my little man with the big cock.”

I was sitting on chair dressing when he came over and embraced me. As I gazed up into his face, what struck me most were his blue eyes staring at me through bifocals.

We were both more comfortable once we were dressed. He put his belt of tools back on.

“I guess you can say you fixed Susan’s plumbing this afternoon,” I said.

“You just let me know if it gets plugged again,” he returned the jest, “and I’ll give you another service call.”

“Don’t work too hard on the roof now,” I cautioned before he left.

◊

Leo was at the hotel in his soaped-up, copper-colored Chevy by 3:30. Since he shared the car with his son, it had mag tires and a tape deck. I had avoided riding with him before because I knew how poor his eyesight was.

“Are you afraid to ride with me?” he asked on our way.

“No,” I said. “Especially since I see that any cars we meet just pull off to the side of the road when they see your car and let you pass.”

In truth, I felt as safe as an egg in a nest riding with Ajo’s Godfather that day, as though as long as I was with Leo, I was impervious to harm, safe because he was looking after me.

Leo told me about going to Palomas in Mexico with some men from town. Their intent was to visit the whore house there.

“I don’t say anything,” he said. “I just sit in the bar and wait for them. Some of the girls come and want me to buy them drinks or give them cigarettes. So, I buy them drinks and give them cigarettes. Then they want to know if I want to go with them, but I tell them, ‘What if the Lord returned today and saw a godfather like me doing a thing like that?’ They seem to appreciate that I am nice to them without wanting anything else.”

“I’m sure they appreciate being treated like human beings,” I told him.

“Yeah, they sit there and tell me about themselves. I understand Spanish, you know. But, do you know what I don’t understand? It’s that some of those men have nice wives and families, so why do they want to do a thing like that?”

“I supposed they’re just being macho. Besides, some married people don’t get along and hardly ever make love. “I was thinking of Walt and Sophie and of how Walt had reached for me that afternoon.

“I don’t know,” Leo said. “I don’t say anything, but I wonder why if they have no respect for themselves, they don’t at least respect their families.”

“It’s complicated,” I said weakly.

Leo turned off the highway, and we traveled west along some pastures where there were horses grazing. The day had begun to cool off, a slight breeze pushing the once still air. He parked at his pasture, and I followed him across it to where there were stalls for the horses, who were waiting for him there. He and his son owned four horses—a stud colt, its grandmother, a fine quarter horse, her daughter, and the grandchild, a three-month old filly, whom he called, “Sweet pea.”

“Matt says that I’m feeding them too much and they’re too fat,” said Leo. “But, darn, I don’t want them to go hungry.”

As Leo busied himself with his chores, talking sweetly to the horses, I studied them and the landscape. When I hear him call his stud colt “she,” I said, “He’s not a girl.” I was looking at its penis and felt as though I wanted to be back in bed with Walt.

“I guess I just like the ladies,” Leo said.

Even the attraction between humans and animals tends to be heterosexual. If I owned a horse, I would probably want a male.

I wanted to draw all the warmth of this beautiful desert evening in early autumn and hold it to me forever—the caressing breeze, the smells of the grass and horses, the shadows lengthening across the pasture, and sunlight turning from white to gold.

In the shed, where Leo kept his feed, tools, equipment, and medications for the horses, everything was in apple-pie order. “Guess what, Leo?” I said.

“What,” he said, turning his kindly face towards me.

“You keep your shed more tidy than you keep your house.”

“Housekeeping’s a woman’s work,” he kidded.

“Chauvinist,” I retorted.

We drove back to town by a different way than we had come, and Leo pointed out the homes of some of friends.

“I’m going to miss you, babe,” he said. “I wish you could come with me every afternoon to feed the horses.”

“I know,” I replied. “It’s the pits making friends and then leaving them—I just don’t see any other way.”

We ate dinner at the Chinese restaurant and drove back to the hotel for nightcap. I was exhausted and wanted to some sleep to prepare for tomorrow.

“Give me something that will put me to sleep,” I said to Cricket, who was tending bar.

She poured me three inches of Pero.

“Walt won’t make much money if you pour drinks like that,” I told her.

“No one has had a drink from this bottle for years,” she said. “I’m just trying to use it up.”

That night the Pero worked its magic, and, though I dreamt my fear, that Sophie confronted me with her anger, I nevertheless slept like the dead.

NINETEEN

praying mantis–(noun from Greek literature, diviner, prophet; akin to Greek mainesthai, to be mad–more at Mania): an insect (order Manteodea and especially genus Mantis) that feeds on other insects and clasps its prey in forelimbs head as if in prayer.

–Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary

I woke at dawn on my last day in Ajo, went to the windows, and looked out. The lingering night clung like a sleepy child to its mother’s bosom. A pale blue-violet cloaked the hillside. The sky was a soft pink and lavender wash. Little sparrows, whose favorite perch was in the tree only feet from my window, chirped brightly—the greeters of the new day.

The joyous sight failed to alleviate the fist of fear I felt in my stomach and accentuated my sadness to be leaving this place that I loved. I remembered the first time I had pulled back the curtains and seen this view—how small cotton ball clouds had skirted across the sky, as though playing tag in slow motion. Some of the small panes of my window were gone, probably blown in during a storm.

During the three-and-half weeks I had lived this enchanted room, every day I had gazed at the hillside and sky from these windows. Now I must say goodbye to it. Reminding myself that life holds many treasured views, saying goodbye to this one still made me sad. 

My rest that night had served me well. I felt energetic and ready to plunge into the task at hand. At least, I was no longer the victim of ambivalence. The decision was made and it was more work than the physical execution of packing did. With the determination of que sera, sera, I forged ahead and brought my cardboard boxes from the basement and began packing. I was afraid if I didn’t leave Ajo soon, something bad would happen. So efficient was I, despite the fact it was another extremely hot day, by 12:30 p.m. I had finished.

I feared a verbal attack from Sophie, which, if she issued one, would reduce me to tears of humiliation. I thought I was doing the honorable thing by leaving—I was in essence giving Sophie her man back. The thought emboldened me, and when I found Sophie and Walt cleaning up the bar from the previous night, I asked if she minded if I took Walt out for coffee. Surely, she must have known by then that I was leaving.  I wanted private goodbyes with the people I loved most in Ajo.

Fearing she might not understand, I amended my invitation with, “I’ll take Walt for coffee and then I’ll take you. I just want to be able to say goodbye to each of you alone.”

Sophie was wearing one of Walt’s work shirts over a flowered bikini, from which her skinny white legs distended like those of a flamingo. When she said it was okay, Walt and I dove out to the Burger Master. Emotionally I was retreating from him, so I felt awkward, and our conversation didn’t flow as it normally did. I resented that I could not have more of him and that he was not more kindly disposed towards Sophie.

“You’ll check on me every once in a while when I’m in Las Cruces, won’t you?” I asked.

“You know I will,” he answered.

“You’re my friend, aren’t you?” I asked.

“You know I am,” he answered. “When I’m someone’s friend, I’m their friend for life.”

Sophie was stewing in the bar when we returned.

“How are you doing?” I asked, sensing something was amiss.

“Oh, go stand in the corner,” she said to me.

She greeted Walt with the same order. It could hardly be called a confrontation, but I felt a stab of guilt and hoped she would say no more.

“What’s the matter, Sophie?” I asked, fearing she might be honest.

“Oh,” she said, brushing her hand across her, “That Texas–she called and said she was sick and wouldn’t be able to come to work tonight.” She and Walt had planned to go to a football game in Rawhide, and now one of them would have to stay and tend bar.

“I can’t leave Cricket alone to handle the bar on a Friday night,” Walt said.

I left them to solve their problems.

The afternoon dragged along like no other during my stay in Ajo, and I felt nervous as a cat, suspended in time. I was waiting for 4 p.m., when the shadow from the hotel would cover my car and I could load it. I made repeated, inconsequential trips to the plaza to help fill the time. The temperature that day rose to 112°.

Returning from the plaza on one such trips I saw that Sophie was sunbathing, of all things, baking in the hot sun on a beach towel on the patio. She was lying prone on her back and was listless. “Sophie,” I called, “Are you asleep? Do you want to go and have some coffee?”

It embarrassed me to be standing over her like that. The sunlight was uncomplimentary to her frail form, he tiny breasts and skinny hips. Her flesh was translucent and formed a slight padding over skeletal body. She seemed exceedingly vulnerable and frail.

“I can’t go anywhere until I know about tonight,” she answered with irritation.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll check with you again later.”

Rapidly I departed and went to my room where I still had a few things to do. One of them was to remove the iris-patterned paper lantern I had hung from the light fixture in the center of my room. I liked it too well to leave it there for the room’s next occupant.

Needing a ladder, I found Walt and asked him for one. He carried an aluminum ladder to my room and removed the lantern for me. From his quizzical expression, I knew he was asking whether we could repeat making love as we had the day before, but I was afraid to say yes, so he left.

On my way to the drug store on the plaza for yet another item I thought I needed, I encountered a pale green insect on the stairs. When I looked more closely, I saw it was a praying mantis in a state of agitation.

“Walt,” I called, “come and see this insect, but promise you won’t kill it.”

Walt came to see the treasure I had found.

“It’s a praying mantis, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, it is,” he answered bending down to capture the creature in the palm of his hand. “I’ll put it outside.”

“They’re fighters,” he said. Indeed, the chartreuse creature was prancing on its hind legs, its upper arms extended, alternately making praying and flailing gestures, like an insect Muhammad Ali.

Walt had almost raised it to the windowsill before an open window when it jumped down to the floor and repeated its dance. Under its fluttering, impotent wings, I could see orange, brown and white concentric circles.

After this aborted rescue attempt, we left the creature. I had forgotten about it until I swooped down the hall and stairs on yet another errand and almost stepped on it. I went back to Walt and got a dirty glass jar into which I intended to place this freakish creature. I bent down and gently pushed the mantis into the jar, carried it downstairs and dumped into a shaded corner of the patio.

Spell-bound I watched as it repeated its staggering dance, alternating between beseeching the high heavens for mercy, then falling over and gasping as though breathing its last breath, then jumping up again, hopping to a new location, and performing another version of the same.

If this was the poor creature’s death dance, it deserves to die in peace without me peering down on it. Instead of going to the plaza I took a walk around Ajo. Because of the heat I didn’t go as far as I had intended and returned instead to the hotel. I checked again on the mantis and found that it was still alive in the vicinity where I had left it. “You’ve got too much fight in you to die yet,” I told it.

Several times that afternoon I crept into Walt and Sophie’s apartment and called to Sophie. If she was there, she did not answer. I was relieved and did not persist. What would I have said if we had gone out for coffee? I’ve fallen in love with your husband and that’s why I’m leaving.

Besides, I was scared, scared she might suddenly fly in my face and tell me what she really thought of the whole “deal,” and, if so, I would have only been able to hang my head in shame.

I spent the rest of the afternoon, alone in my room, waiting for quarto de la tarde, when Leo would come and help me load my car. At 3:30 I went to the bar, where Walt was sitting. We drank cokes and held hands across the counter. We had been there for a couple of minutes when we heard a loud boom. There had been sonic blasts coming from the mine several times each day lately, but I jumped when I heard this one. My paranoia was such that I feared that Sophie had shot off a gun in their apartment.

“You’d better go and check,” I said to Walt in alarm.

Had anyone said boo to me on that afternoon, I would have risen three feet into the air.

“It’s nothing,” he said when he same back, and I sighed.

I wanted to tell him something, but it came out all wrong. “You can help things, you know, by loving what you’re stuck with, I mean, what you have to love.” I felt embarrassed and my cheeks were burning.

Big Jim picked this afternoon to come back to the bar. As predicted, he was cool towards me. “Well, we’ve picked the wedding date,” he said.

“That’s great,” said Walt without enthusiasm.

Finally, the backward running clock, the clock that had been reversed as a practical joke, the clock that had consistently defied my ability to tell time from it, said it was 8 o’clock, the beginning of the fifth hour of the afternoon.

TWENTY

Sing to the Lord a new song

His praise from the ends of the earth!

Let the sea roar and all that fills it,

The coast-lands and their inhabitants,

Let the desert and its cities lift up

Their voice . . . .

–Isaiah 42: 10 & 11

That hardest part of writing this is telling of the goodbye. All my previous attempts have been fraught with failure and I have grown anxious over properly ending my story. I share this with you so that you will know that writing a story does not always flow effortlessly from the author’s pen.

It has taken me weeks to say it was a sweet, dumb goodbye.

Most of us find goodbye’s embarrassing and don’t execute them well. I never feel comfortable when telling someone goodbye. I feel like a puppet going through the motions. Everything I would like to say gets stuck in my throat and my words come out stilted and contrived. I wish I could learn to say a proper goodbye.

A proper goodbye would have been to say all that was in my heart to say, something few of us seem capable of doing. Perhaps we should measure the quality of a goodbye by its awkwardness.

I don’t usually cry when I tell someone I love goodbye. I’m of too Nordic a descent for that. I cried only a little when I said goodbye to the folk in Ajo. This is how I remember it.

Leo was late coming to the hotel that afternoon. When he did come, I could see he was struggling with his feelings. He and Walt looked at each other, and Walt said, “I tried to tie her up, but she bit the rope in two.”

Leo smiled and said, “I’d like to chain her here.”

I was touched that they found such a delicate way of acknowledging that they didn’t want me to go.

“Let’s have a drink before we start working,” I said. Leo’s arrival had signaled the end of my hottest afternoon in Ajo and a return of relative sanity and even gaiety—cocktail hour. But, Leo sat quietly alongside of me in the bar, sipping a coke.

“Don’t you want a drink?” I asked.

He looked at me, his eyes clouded by cataracts and shielded with thick glasses, placed his hands on the counter to signal he was going to say something, and announced, “I’m afraid if I drink, I might break down.”

“Oh, don’t break down, Leo,” I said, putting my arms around him. “If you don’t break down, then neither will I.”

So, Leo had a drink and then we went to work. Leo was seventy years old, and so I doubt loading my considerable collection of boxes into my car was no easy task for him. I tried to pace our work.

I remember Leo sitting in my chair in my room when we were almost done—there nothing to say about it except than he was particularly dear to me at that moment. On our way back down to the car, I quipped, “See what I’d put you through if I was around all the time.”

“I’d be in better shape then,” he answered with the utmost seriousness.

When we finished packing, all I had to do was to find my cat Alice, who had taken to hiding in the basement of the hotel. Then I closed the hatch on the back of the car and said, “Let’s get a beer to cool our throats.”

“All right,” said Leo in a manner that indicated the Godfather was taking charge, “but I’m going to see that you get out of town before it gets dark.”

It wouldn’t have taken too much persuasion at the point for me to stay another night and leave in the morning. Once in the bar, I realized it was getting late.

“Don’t you think your horses are getting mad at you that you haven’t come to feed them yet?” I asked.

“Say, honey,” said Leo, his face brightening. “I don’t want to cause you to get out-of-town too late, but would you like to come with me?”

“Sure,” I said.

I sought to console Leo while we drove again to feed his horses. “I just don’t see any other way,” I told him.

Silence.

“You are my friend, and I don’t forget my friends. We’ll see each other again. When I get settled, you can come and see me. We’ll go out to dinner and dancing.”

Leo was not deceived. He knew that in leaving I would be withdrawing from his life. There might be an occasional get-together’s in the future, but it would not be the same. He was losing someone who had become a part of his life. But the Godfather rose to the occasion. “I want to know how you are,” he said. “If you don’t write to me, you know, I’m the Godfather—I’ll put a contract out on you.”

“And will you light a candle for me in church?” I asked.

“I already have,” he answered, turning to me and approximating a wink.

“Both eyes on the road, please, sir,” I said.

I was thinking of the three men with whom I had become involved in Ajo–one 40, one 50, and one 70–it was my 70 year old Leo who most considered it the role of man to treat a lady with respect.

When we arrived at his pasture, Leo got out of the car and opened the gate. We parked, and I followed him across the pasture to the corral the way a filly might follow her master. Leo gift to women was to make them feel safe, cared for by thethir faithful Godfather.

While he busied himself with feeding his horses, again I breathed in the desert landscape. Sundown in the desert is the time when the colors are their most vibrant, as though rewarding those who had endured the heat of day, with a carnival before the curtain of night falls. Elongated bonfires of pink clouds stretched to fringe the blue-lavender mantel of the sky, and day-glow pastels sang their vespers.

Was the retake of this scene to help fix it all more firmly in my mind, so that in years to come, now and then, I would remember what it was like to accompany Leo to feed his horses. The gold clasp of the sun’s rays that evening were as the ties that bind.

On our way back I thought again of Sophie and wondered whether her refusal to answer my calls that afternoon meant she did not wish to tell me goodbye. If this were choice, I could understand and respect it.

I wanted one last drink before I found Alice and drove into the unknown.

“Now, I’m going to see that you don’t stay too long,” Leo warned me. “You’ve got to get on your way before it gets too dark out.”

Sophie and Walt were sitting next to each other in the bar. I slid onto the stool beside Sophie. She said that she and Walt weren’t going to the football game after all. Cricket was just getting to work. It was almost like any other Friday night in Ajo.

Cricket thanked Leo for the apple pie and chocolate ice cream he had brought her.

“Chocolate ice cream with apple pie?” I said.

“That’s all I had,” he answered.

I didn’t say anything to Sophie, as I still didn’t know whether she wanted to tell me goodbye. “I didn’t realize you were leaving today,” she finally said soberly. “When you do something, you don’t mess around.”

“If I didn’t,” I told her honestly, “I’d be six months in leaving.”

Her cordiality pleased me, as it seemed to indicate she wishes to send me off in peace. Had our positions been reversed, I’m not sure that I would have been that generous.

She had even brought some Christmas cards to show me. They were the work of an artist friend of hers. One had painting of the virgin and Christ-child on its front, with, “Aren’t you glad the Lord picked such a fine day on which to be born?”

My enthusiasm may have been more than they warranted—it was the gesture that counted. I could have kissed Sophie for it. She had been intellectually lonely in Ajo and had been glad to have someone with whom she could share her love of art.

When someone played “Amazing Grace” on the jukebox, we sang along. “Maybe we should go on the road together,” I kidded. Twice had made it a ritual of sorts.

Clumsily, I thanked her for all that she and Walt had done for me and told her that I would miss her. Had I looked closer, I would seen that she was crying. “Oh, Sophie,” I said, hugging her, “Don’t break down. I’m not going to.”

When I hugged Walt, he looked nearly as forlorn as Sophie did, so I repeated the adage. “Don’t break down, Walt. I’m not going to.”

Don’t cry, I was telling them. If we all start crying now, I’m afraid we might melt into a puddle of tears, as surely as Little Black Sambo’s tigers turned into butter.

Not knowing what to do next, I said, “Well, I’d better go and find Alice, and then we’ll be off.”

“She probably doesn’t want to go,” Walt said.

“I don’t suppose so,” I answered.

“Alice,” I called into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. “Come on, now. We’re leaving.” I envisioned spending the next hour looking for her, but my whither-thou-goest cat, meowed and appeared, as if to say, “I really don’t want to go, but neither do I want you to leave me, so I will come now.”

After putting Alice into the car, I went back into the bar and said, “Well, I found her. Bye, now. Take care.”

Despite my admonitions not to break down, there were tears in my eyes as Leo walked me to my car.

“Thanks for everything, Leo,” I said. “Take care. I love you.”

“Same here,” he answered, his voice husky.

Walt had followed us outside. When I was inside my car, he came over and gently wiped away the tears on my cheek with his finger. Then he kissed me gently on the mouth.

“You be good,” he said.

“You be good too,” I answered.

As I drove into the fast-falling darkness, my heart was full, full of the sense that what had happened to me in Ajo was love. When I was almost out of town, I pulled over and looked back at the town. I could see the palm trees silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky, the bluish shadows on the white adobe churches, the gray terrace of slag from the mine, and the dark green of the hills. I felt a little bit like the Lone Ranger, sitting on Silver, trusty Tonto nearby, looking at the wide desert valley and the town, where I had made something wrong but had tried to make it right again.

The End