One Day the Wind Changed (16 page)

Okay, I think: it ain't Dante, but it's eloquent enough to get a rise from these old loons. “What the fuck?” says the guy who'd touched my shirt. The Beatles sigh for all the lonely people.

I wait but the fellows don't stir. They won't do it, won't make a move for me. I drop some money on my table and stroll outside. This is how I waste my days, how I waste and waste my days.

I've left my sister-in-law's book inside the café, in tatters on a wet placemat. Maybe if I lose her poet,
she'll
kick my ass when she gets back, full of the wisdom of the Old World. Make me pay. Pull the books from her shelves and bloody my face with words.

I laugh. I walk down the street laughing, unable to stop. A young mother hurries her child past me and into the safety of a dime store. That's right, ma'am. Who
knows
who I am? Just another stranger in town.

“But what's he
laughing
at?” I hear the child plead, just inside the store.

I slip into an alley and slump against a Dumpster until I recover my senses. The sun hammers my face.

What just happened? I think.

Why am I here? Why am I still here, when the tongues of others could say so much more, so much better than I ever will?

I remember laughing with my brother when he first moved to Marfa-going off the highway, out into the desert, to see the ruins of the
Giant
movie set, the old, worn bones of the house where Liz and Rock Hudson played at bigger-than-life happiness. Broken windows. Steps leading nowhere. “
Giant
country will be a new start for Jenny and me,” Bo said. “A rescue.” And it was. The boy never gave up, chasing joy. I don't know how he does it. “The bad old times-Dad, the miscarriage, the jobs, losing Mom-well,” he said. “Hundreds of years ago. Long forgotten. We've been punished enough, little brother. And for what? For Christ's sake, what mistakes did we make?” We talked about car rides. Ice chips. We laughed like we laughed as kids, like we hadn't laughed since. I almost believed him when he talked about the future. Wind blew through the empty old house.

Now I wipe dusty tears from my face, brush the dirt from my pants. I feel my two good legs, the strength of my arms. The Border Patrol truck chugs past, kicking up more dust. The driver still wears his steel helmet. Through small glass panes in the truck's rear door I glimpse two frightened faces, boys ten or eleven years old.

A low growl. Faraway thunder. It won't amount to anything. Like yesterday, the day before, and the day before that. Tomorrow, the sun will do what it always does. In town, the buildings will stand firm against the wind, and it'll be easy to find some shade.

R
obert's father, a geologist, told him that West Texas was once underwater. A vast ocean resided here, he said. It receded over centuries, leaving behind the nutrients that feed the varieties of plant life we find today in the desert, and accounting for the flatness of the land.

“Maybe you're part fish,” Robert's father kidded him whenever Robert fell prey to an asthma attack, usually in the middle of the night, waking from sleep. “Maybe that explains your breathing trouble.”

Robert's mother, a heavy smoker who'd developed her nicotine habit early, had died of emphysema when he was a baby. On nights when he couldn't breathe, there was only his father to sit with him, rub his back, and hum a song until he fell asleep again.

“Sometimes,” his father would say, kneeling beside Robert's bed, “the world is less than splendid. But don't give up on it, okay?”

“Okay,” Robert answered. He wasn't sure what “splendid” meant, but the implication was that Robert's mother was one of the weak ones who had given up on life. All that was left of her was the chandelier she had bought for the dining room before he was born, its sharp glass diamonds yellowed from years of cigarette and candle smoke rising from the table.

Robert was twenty-two, and twelve credits shy of a bachelor's degree in American history, when his father passed away of congestive heart failure, a condition that caused excess fluid in the lungs. Saddened and distracted, Robert took a year off from college to travel in the desert, in memory of his father and his work. He'd familiarize himself with the region's contours and surprises: a way of keeping the old man's spirit with him a little longer. He washed and waxed his father's silver Pontiac, and tuned it up for the rigors of the trip.

He put the family house on the market, and left the details of the sale to a real estate agent. On his last day in town, Robert stood in the dining room with the woman, taking stock, making sure he'd packed everything he wanted. “That's a beautiful old chandelier,” said the agent, nodding at the ceiling. She was pretty and thin, like Robert's mother in scrapbook photographs.

“Yes,” Robert said. Here, as a child, on the dining room floor night after night, he'd sat looking up at his father as his father served supper, usually steak and sweet potatoes. Robert stared out the window, at a perfectly oval beehive just beneath the eave of the house (it hung there like a brittle chandelier). He'd played with his black and white Manx. Katia had never learned to retract her claws when she sparred with him. Robert still had cat-scars, whitened now, and hard, on his arms.

“It'll be here long after we're gone,” the agent said, admiring the cut glass.

“Yes,” Robert said. He turned to shake her hand.

“Nothing to worry about,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said again, taking one last look around, one last full breath in the house.

On his first day out, in a men's room in a roadside rest area just north of the Texas-Mexico border, Robert read a faded lyric on the wall:

Later that afternoon, tracing a route laid out on a tourist map, he saw the remnants of an outpost where Robert E. Lee had once trained to be an army general. He saw a glass and metal structure built in the late nineteenth century by a man named Will Pruett, whose goal, said the free informational literature, was to “aid sick humanity.” The structure, an “Inhalatorium,” had been designed for consumptives. They would stand inside it and breathe medicinal vapors. The Inhalatorium was an economic failure, said the brochures, and closed before its effectiveness as a health treatment could be determined.

As he studied the contraption-a tall glass tube in the middle of an old ravine-Robert fell into conversation with a fellow tourist who, it turned out, had suffered from asthma all his life. He laughed when Robert told him his father's old joke. “Well, maybe there's some truth to that fish business,” said the man.

Together, they marveled at the fact that a whole generation had vanished from the planet, wars had been won and lost, since Will Pruett had fashioned the lnhalatorium, yet here it stood. A fragile glass booth. “Like an empty aquarium,” the man remarked.

If Robert was really interested in the desert's history, he said, he should read a book titled
Commerce of the Prairies
. It had been published in 1844 by a consumptive named Josiah Gregg. “It's the most eye-opening account of this region I've ever found,” the man explained. “Gregg came to Texas because he thought the desert air would be good for his lungs. His book convinced hundreds of asthmatics, and people suffering from pleurisy and the like, to migrate here. Naturally, none of them ever got well.” The fellow laughed again. “So. It seems a flock of invalids shaped Texas's destiny as much as the battle of the Alamo.”

A few days later, Robert discovered a reprint of Josiah Gregg's book in a used bookstore and read it as he continued his travels through craggy moraines and dry fossil beds. In the West, it is “most usual to sleep out in the open air,” Gregg wrote, “for the serene sky affords the most agreeable and wholesome canopy” and “seems to affect the health rather favorably.”

In one of the textbooks Robert had tossed into the trunk of the car (next to his father's maps, which he no longer had the heart to look at), he read that Stephen F. Austin, one of Texas's early political leaders, had once proclaimed the “climate of Texas … to be decidedly superior in point of health and salubrity to any portion of North America in the same parallel.”

Like Austin and Gregg, Robert's father had been an enthusiast for the region. He had always encouraged Robert to look carefully and appreciate what he saw, so he'd know the character of the place that had shaped him. No doubt Robert's passion for history had sprung from his father's excitement.

Utopians, men like this. But paradise is not a fertile, forested place, Robert thought. Fertility breeds fevers and disease. Instead, perfection is a desiccated emptiness.

This notion troubled Robert's sleep, especially when his daily drive left him far from towns, and he was forced to bed down in the car or on the ground. When he did sleep he dreamed of dark and empty distances. No movement, sound, or air.

The world was perfect. It was paradise. We decided to change it
.

These words swam through Robert's mind just before sleep one night, after he had spent nearly an hour reading Josiah Gregg's book. Robert was staying in the Cactus Glory Motel, just off the Alpine highway. Tires hissed on the road outside his window. Coyotes called in the cooling night air.

After several minutes he drifted. The book fell to the floor. He startled awake, chasing his breath, which floated just out of reach. He coughed, choked, stumbled to the window and opened its latch. A mild wind flowed into the room. It filled Robert's lungs like water pouring into two tall jars.
Will this sustain me
, he thought,
or is this my last taste of the world?
He leaned as far as he could into the night.

The following morning, a warm wind blew in from Mexico, stirring dust devils in the road, coloring the air a thick, chalky brown. Radio weathermen predicted a rough week ahead. The scars on Robert's arms—Katia's old love-marks—itched as he drove (windows up or down, it didn't matter) through the hard and grainy heat.

Because of his weak lungs, Robert had always expected to die young. And yet, whenever breath left him, he was shocked. “Trauma,” a doctor said to him once. “The loss of a loved one. Disappointments. They seem to trigger asthma. We're not sure why.”

Well, Robert thought. When the world reveals itself as less than splendid, why keep taking it in?

“Often, people don't realize how serious asthma can be,” the doctor went on.

But don't give up, right?

He stood before a prickly pear cactus next to the highway. At its base, pink and blue flowers.

Robert was waiting for his car, which had overheated on the road, to stop steaming. He would have to find some water.

Meanwhile, he studied the cactus and the flowers: had they evolved from ocean plants? This was not the landscape people envisioned when they thought of the Garden of Eden. But isn't it true, he asked himself, that most of us picture a garden when we think of paradise?

In the last few days, he had been stopping at small-town libraries and reading old newspapers in the archives, continuing the story where Josiah Gregg left off: articles about hackers and coughers on a limping pilgrimage to the West. Over the decades, they had been accompanied by treasure hunters, railroad magnates, entrepreneurs, electricians, and oil workers. In 1999, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that Phoenix, Arizona, had become so swollen with people, doctors had coined a new term, “Valley Fever,” for illnesses caused by pathogens in the dirt stirred up by continuous human activity. Fatigue. Fungus in the bones and brain.

“Everybody who lives here has a health problem,” said one Phoenix resident.

Apparently, the snake had followed each fresh young Adam and Eve to every new garden. Paradise, no longer seductive.

The Pontiac sputtered and let out a sigh, the kind of rattle his father had made in the hospital in the last stages of his illness. Robert turned and looked at the car. Sweat stung the scars on his arms. He went for a jug of water.

The winds grew stronger. One afternoon, in a town called Salton, Robert stopped at a pharmacy. He had been wheezing so badly he couldn't hear the car radio. He had caught only parts of a newscast that said the dust in the air was thickened by smoke from a forest fire north of Oaxaca.

“Don't sound so good,” said the pharmacist, a bald man with wire-rimmed glasses pressed tightly to his face.

Fluids moved through Robert's chest. He scanned the shelves for inhalers.

“Strongest medicine's on the top shelf. Albuterol. Green box,” the man said.

Robert brought it to the counter, along with a bag of pretzels and a canned Coke.

“No sir, don't sound good at all,” the man said.

Just a taste of what's ahead
, Robert thought.

Above the cash register, a small glass chandelier cast weak light on the sales counter and the floor.

“Well, take care, young fellow. Awful nasty out there, with the wind and all.”

“I' m good,” Robert said. “Thanks.”

The light fixture sang three high notes as he opened the door and a breeze caught the swaying glass pendants.

That night, Robert unrolled his sleeping bag on a dirt patch several miles off the road. As the night darkened, the Milky Way spread like powdered glass above the land.

He remembered a camping trip he had taken with his father. He must have been six, maybe seven: one of his earliest rides into the desert with his dad. They had pitched their bedrolls at the bottom of a warm canyon. The air was still. Later that night, Robert shot to his feet, gasping. His father lifted him, pounding his back, toward anything he could suck for strength.

Afterward, his father had sat and showed him maps, to humor him and keep him calm. “Never give up,” his father said. “No matter what. There's always a road out, you understand?”