Dinner with Buddha (24 page)

Twenty-eight

If you are a road trip person like I am, a map person, a person who loves to be behind the wheel, especially in new territory, then there will be interesting drives and fascinating drives and certain drives that stand above all adjectives and that will remain imprinted on your mind for as long as you have one. Route 18 in eastern Washington state is like that for me. Parts of Route 100 in central Vermont. An unnumbered byway through Alabama farmland near the city of Eutaw.

The road Rinpoche and I took as we headed west from Chama will now be added to that list. I'm tempted to suggest that the intensity and clarity with which it has engraved itself on my memory had something to do with what happened to me during the stupa meditation, that the beauty of the drive was just another aspect of seeing the world as if it had been washed, as if the disguise had been yanked away. But I think I would have remembered this particular drive even with the most cluttered mind in all of America.

We were headed for the city of Dulce (which means “sweet” in Spanish, and was meant as a pairing with Amargo, which means “bitter,” and which lies some forty miles down the road). Shortly after leaving Chama we entered a deserted paradise of thousand-foot buttes standing at various distances from the rolling grazing land near the road. Rinpoche began to tell me how the buttes had been formed, how millions of years of erosion had weathered away the softer rock surrounding them, leaving these royal structures standing their ground, as it were, looking like red-faced kings and queens, or great Indian chiefs, staring out over their dry plains.

Route 64 ran like a snake among these magnificent plateaus, offering different angles on their majesty, the flat tops, the eroded faces, the scree in slanted piles at their feet. It was the highway from heaven. In the midst of it we crossed the Continental Divide, which I explained to Rinpoche, and which he insisted on calling the “Continental Decide.” He went off on a riff of his own then, rather unlike him, musing on the big “Decide” we all had to make, whether to pursue distraction and superficiality or dig deeper into the mysterious interior world. “Once the water go this way and not the other way it keep going that way, yes? Same with practice. Once you go to a level, once you touch that place, you always keep going now. You can't go back.”

There were
ELK CROSSING
signs in abundance and high fences beside the road to keep the elk from playing in traffic.

I told Rinpoche about reports, over a series of years, of dozens of UFO sightings right in this area, and rumors of an underground base, operated by the U.S. government, where captured aliens were interrogated and studied. I harbor a secret affection for these kinds of crazy notions, but Rinpoche seemed unmoved, unimpressed, bereft of UFO curiosity.

For miles and miles we barely saw another vehicle, and then, as quickly as it had turned marvelous, the roadside landscape went flat and poor, not featureless exactly, but plain, dry, uninspiring. It didn't surprise me to see a sign telling us we were entering the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, because everywhere we went it seemed the Indians had been given the least fertile, least remarkable land. Maybe they disagreed, these Apaches. Maybe they found this land spiritually essential, holy, fine. I hoped so.

But soon we came upon the same array of poor trailers we'd seen at Pine Ridge, not quite as old, the scenes not quite as desolate. Another few miles and we saw a sign for a hotel/casino, Indian run:
THE WILD HORSE.
The idea of stopping at another casino didn't appeal to me. But it was getting late, the hotel looked new, and I thought, as did Rinpoche, that it would be only right to spend a little money in that local economy, to begin to compensate, in the smallest of ways, for all the lies, deceit, and slaughter.

“Tell me something,” I asked him as we pulled into the parking lot. “If we stay here can you control yourself, gambling-wise?”

He laughed.

Twenty-nine

First impressions can deceive, of course, but it seemed to me that the American Indians we saw on the Jicarilla reservation were happier than those at Pine Ridge. They were tiny people, dark-skinned, dark-haired, nothing at all like the TV cliché of the Apache warrior. In fact, if they had, at one time, been warriors, most of the people we saw in the Wild Horse were too old for that now. Elderly men and women perched, bird-like, in the lobby chairs. When I peeked into the casino I saw more of them sitting in a similar posture on stools in front of the machines, a contented quietness surrounding them as they played the penny slots.

Rinpoche and I checked into a clean, comfortable, standard-issue second-floor room with very weak Wi-Fi. There was an hour or so of daylight still available to us. I suggested a walk but he said no, thank you, Otto, he was going to “stick here a little” as he put it. A wisp of bad feeling trailed me as I went out the door. It seemed natural enough for him to want some alone time, to meditate or just sit quietly without having another person around; time to call his wife and daughter and have some privacy in speaking with them. But for whatever reason I had the sense he was going to gamble and didn't want me to know about it. Old worries awoke, like ravenous wolves, stretched, yawned, swung their heads this way and that, surveying the territory. I told myself he was a competent adult. He had money. He spent hours each day in meditation and had endured the difficulties of my company for nearly a week. Surely he had the right to gamble if he wanted to. Surely I could count on him not to lose the farm, as the expression goes. Still, the wolves trotted after me as I walked.

On the opposite side of the street spread a small, treeless neighborhood, trailers and a few exceedingly modest homes. I decided to take my walk there. Most of the houses had tiny yards in front of them, most of the yards were surrounded by chain-link fences, and most of them were guarded by a dog or two of various sizes and breeds. Some of these looked fierce, some not, but I felt no threat as I walked along—dogs have always loved me and I have always loved dogs. I'd gone less than a mile when this mutual attraction manifested itself yet again: A pooch started following me. He was a scruffy, cream-colored mixed breed with curly hair and a confident, officious manner, as if he might be the neighborhood census officer come to see if I was only passing through or applying for residence. When I crouched down and made ticking noises with my tongue, he hesitated only a second then hustled over, stubby tail flipping this way and that, and accepted some ear scratching. No nametag, not even a collar. I decided, for whatever reason, to call him Mister Big, a name of which he seemed to approve.

Mister Big and I went along the gravel road in tandem. He sniffed. I looked. The larger local dogs stirred, watched him; one or two let out listless barks, as if to say hello to an old friend, or as if to acknowledge, for the sake of any undocumented schnauzers or Dalmatians who might be living nearby, that Mister Big was in the neighborhood, accompanied by a two-legged foreigner who looked like he might be the type to give painful vaccinations. The fences seemed secure enough, but at one point Mister Big spotted a hole beneath one of them, and, for reasons known only to him, clawed his way into the yard, which turned out to be the province of a German Shepherd with his own small house. The shepherd stuck his face out into the air, laid eyes on Mister Big, paused one second, and came charging out across the dust. “Mister Big! Mister Big!” I yelled, idiot that I am. “Come here! Hustle!” Mister Big did not need my prompting. Realizing his mistake, he made a U-turn and sprinted back toward the hole beneath the fence. However, getting out proved more difficult than getting in. I ran over and pulled him out by the shoulders and he came within a portion of a second of losing the rest of his tail. The shepherd, having been roused from a pleasant sleep by the white intruders, leapt up against the fence again and again, barking furiously. A tiny Apache woman appeared at the door, observing the show. I sent her the most innocent wave imaginable. She watched, expressionless. Her dog snapped and growled and slammed itself against the chain-link until he reached the corner. There, he put his forepaws back on the dirt and showed his teeth. “What's the lesson here, Mister Big?” I asked my companion when we'd put a safe distance between us and the German fellow. “The lesson here is that not every place on earth is hospitable to the well meaning, the kind, the unaggressive.”

I gave him another minute of ear scratching and then he trotted off along a road that led over a dry, defoliated hillside, into the sunset. As I waited to cross the two-lane highway back in the direction of the hotel parking lot, those words rang in my inner ear. I was thinking of Natasha, of Seese and Shelsa, of the inaccurate mosque references, of the anti-Muslim rants on talk radio, of the phrase “Bakken creeps.” I took out my phone and tried to call my daughter but the service there was spotty and the call did not go through.

As I had feared, Rinpoche wasn't in the room. I decided I wouldn't worry about his gambling problem, but, still full from my oversized helping of posole, I washed and lay in bed worrying. Since the stupa meditation, I felt, more than I'd ever felt, that I was allowing him to lead me someplace. It was an interior place, surely enough, but I had an intuition that it would lead to exterior places, too. Natasha had mentioned some big trip, some grand plan. Rinpoche had hinted about leaving and had been saying for years that I was about to enter a period of great change. So, I didn't want him to have a gambling problem. I wanted him to be the man he seemed to be—secure, beyond doubt, a confident guide to a dimension of life that transcended things like addiction, worry, fear of death, and so on.

For some reason then, maybe because it had been an almost perfect birthday and some twisted part of me wanted to spoil it, I fished around in my computer bag and pulled out Alton's folder. Inside were seven or eight pages, printouts from websites, mostly, that detailed what the Chinese had done to the Tibetans. Mass arrests, torture, forced sterilization and abortion, the slaughter of close to one million people, many of them monks and nuns. Possession of the Dalai Lama's photograph was punishable by a prison term. And on and on. I closed the folder and decided to take one last look at my computer mail program. There was a message from Cecelia and when I opened it I saw that it was a photograph of her and Shelsa, their faces pushed close together, a single candle burning in front of them. Each of them was holding up a piece of cardboard, but they'd gotten it a bit mixed up:
BIRTHDAY HAPPY
it read from left to right. I tapped out a note of greeting, gazed at the photograph for a few extra seconds, sent up another word of thanks for my life, then fell into such a deep sleep that I didn't even hear my traveling companion when he finally returned.

Thirty

I awoke just after seven the next morning and saw that Rinpoche was sound asleep in the other bed. This was unusual, unprecedented in fact. I took a shower, had a short meditation, and found an e-mail on my machine from Anthony, apologizing for missing the big day and promising to make it up to me with tickets to a Yankees playoff game that October. “We can hope, right, Dad?” Rinpoche slept on, snoring peacefully. I left him a note saying I'd be downstairs having breakfast and I closed the door quietly behind me.

A series of large-format photographs adorned the walls of the hotel dining room: remarkable images of American Indian men on horseback and of American Indian women on their knees, grinding what looked like corn kernels into flour. It was a glimpse into another universe, one that bore next to no resemblance to either the casino hotel or the neighborhood through which I'd walked with Mister Big. Somehow, strolling around the perimeter of the room, studying those photos as I waited for my huevos rancheros to be served, I had the visceral sense of what had been lost in our 150-year accumulation of creature comforts. I wondered how one went about finding it again.

Just as the food was served, my brother-in-law came striding into the dining room, fresh from a shower. He sat down across from me in the booth and offered one of his massive smiles. “How could you makin' out?”

“Fine. You? Order something. The huevos are perfect.”

He gave the waitress a similarly enormous smile, clasped her right hand in both of his, and ordered the usual: a pot of green tea and oatmeal with butter on top. She looked at me as if to say,
Is he serious?
I indicated that he was and she left us in peace.

“I think this is the first time in any of our trips that I woke up before you did.”

The waitress brought his tea. Rinpoche sipped. Nodded vigorously, happily.

“Were you in the casino?”

“Sure,” he said. “Nice machines. I sat a long time next to the Apache man and his wife. Long time. Many things they told me about this place.”

A woman about my own age shuffled past and took a seat at the next table. She had an oxygen tube attached to the bottom of her nostrils and was accompanied by a very young boy and girl, her grandchildren I supposed. The girl reached up and slid a lock of hair off her grandmother's forehead. The boy put her water glass where she could more easily reach it. She was smiling, touching their arms, speaking to them in another language. The phrase that came to mind was: the gift of grandchildren.

“How'd you do?”

“Big money,” Rinpoche said.

“Won big money or lost big money?”

“Won. Wery big. The bells, the lights. The man come over and take me to get the money. Papers I had to sign.”

“How big are we talking?”

Rinpoche fluffed a hand beneath his robe and brought out a thick wad of cash. I spotted a hundred-dollar bill on top.

“You'll bankrupt the tribe,” I said. “How much is that?”

“Wery much. I give a lot to my friends. The rest I will give now to the, how you say, people they clean the room. Little surprise.”

And that's what he did. I finished my excellent rancheros, Rinpoche went contemplatively through the oatmeal, recounting the stories of the elderly Apache couple, whose forebears, it turned out, had suffered grievously at the hands of the Spanish. And then, as we were back in the room packing away toothbrushes and taking a last turn in the bathroom, he brought the roll out of his robe pocket and set it on the writing desk, using a coffee mug for a paperweight. Even flattened, the bills stood an inch high. In the man of opinions, judgments, and worry, this one act spawned another flood of thoughts of which he is not particularly proud: Would the cleaning person manage it well? Keep it all? Share it? Shouldn't Rinpoche have saved some for himself? Wouldn't the money have been better used if he'd given it to the tribal clinic or school? Wouldn't it be more satisfying to hand it to her in person and watch her reaction? But for Rinpoche, as had been the case in Edie's kitchen, it was as simple and natural as the act of piling our used towels in one corner of the bathroom so they'd be easier to collect. There was no fuss, no show. No big deal, man! When I asked him again, he told me he'd won seven thousand dollars the night before and given “maybe about half” to the couple at the next machine. The rest was on the writing desk.

I closed the door behind us and nodded to the woman with her cart of cleansers and sheets. She was about to walk in on probably three months' pay. For her and for Ethan the Bad Dad, Rinpoche was Robin Hood, which made me, I suppose, a smaller-sized Little John. Once, I wanted to tell him, was enough. But just as I was about to open my mouth I realized it was another lesson. All my adult life I'd orbited around a money sun. Earning it, spending it, investing it, watching over it, parceling it out to children and charities with a guarded generosity, but always, always, thinking about it. With two acts of crazy giving, Rinpoche had shown me a different star.