The Nirvana Blues (48 page)

Joe waved: Eloy doffed his hat. The falling cottonwood fluff made the man resemble a sentimental figurine in an old-fashioned paperweight. Smitten by an intense yearning for the peace of mind guiding Eloy through his constructive days, Joe gulped. The ancient codger didn't have much, but he had dignity. Already I've blown it, Joe thought. “My chance for an honorable life,” he explained out loud.

Before approaching Eloy, Joe checked in at the tent. Diana had left a note—or, rather, a poem that (needless to say) caused yet another lurch in his arrhythmical style:

Even after you left

This morning

I could feel your presence
curled up like a cat around me.

I opened the flaps, and

Although it was 70 degrees out,

It was snowing:

White cotton …

   
… so soft …

      
… with Mercy.

You carve an ache in my heart.

I am afraid.

Please don't be cruel

And I won't hide from you.

Diana

“What about
me?
” Joe groaned petulantly. “Did it ever occur to you that
I
might want to hide from
you?
”

Then he wondered: Is everybody so lonely and paranoid that even a shmuck like me—because he stops short of outright murder—looks good? In his hand he held the verse as if it were a lost and hungry kitten, a literary waiflet, a ragamuffin Keane poem: a teardrop stained its painted prose. The moral being driven home, in spades, was that Nobody Is As They First Seem. Also that: Sooner, Rather Than Later, People Turn Out To Be Mordantly Human. All the unattainable cinematic glamor, that for years had catalyzed his yearnings, was nothing if not a royal Saturday Night Ripoff. Even so, as he folded the poem and slipped it into his wallet, Joe flashed briefly on Iréné Papadraxis in the Prince of Whales Café. Now
there
was a professional human being among all the amateurs crowding this town. A New York literary gun moll with a Greek moniker by way of Hungary, and maybe even a thirty-eight-inch chest? Jeepers, creepers! Nobody like that—not in those kinky boots, shiny black pants, and silky tight jersey—could be just another sniveler on the brink. In the middle of the party tomorrow night, she would catch his eye with a faint nod, and he would follow her upstairs and along a thickly carpeted hallway, to a luxurious guest bedroom. “One moment, Joseph.…” She slipped into the bathroom, and a short spell later reappeared wearing an ermine-chromed see-through silk lounging robe, and silver high-heeled slippers. “A trip around the world,” she murmured, “is not—contrary to popular belief—a vacation.” Joe swooned toward her crash course in aphrodisiacal shenanigans.

There you go again,
Heidi complained.
“Aphrodisiacal shenanigans.” What the hell does that mean?

“It means never having to say you're sorry,” Joe replied, and headed for Eloy Irribarren.

Leaning on his shovel, the old man looked very picturesque. He grinned toothlessly and shook Joe's hand. His wrinkled and sunburned face reeked of a sly good humor. “Did you get cold in the tent last night with your wife?”

“No, the weather was nice. But she isn't my wife, just a friend.”

“Everybody these days has ‘friends.'” He wagged his right hand, floppy at the wrist, back and forth. “I got married at eighteen, widowed at eighty-three, and that was it. What's the matter, your wife doesn't like this land?”

“Oh, no, she likes it fine.”

“But you had a fight?”

“I guess that's accurate.”

“These days, everybody fights.” Lazily, they stared across the back field. A pair of killdeer fussed noisily near the shallow ditch traversing the field. In a minute, Joe figured, one of us will squat, select a twig, and start scratching pictures in the dirt. Or perhaps they'd pick up a clod of earth and crush it while gazing soulfully eastward.

Instead, Eloy continued his analysis of modern society. “It used to be that everybody knew whose children belonged to who. Nowadays, if you know whose kid belongs to who they give you a medal and send you to the university.”

“Oh, it isn't that bad. I know my kids belong to me.”

Eloy shrugged and thrust in his shovel blade. “In the old days, people had respect for each other.” The dirt was chock-full of bright pink worms. Eloy slashed the clod apart, vivisecting a dozen squirmers. Such careless brutality toward members of the slug kingdom made Joe flinch. How typical of the gap between generations, that Eloy could excoriate today's loose morals while nonchalantly butchering worms, even as Joe, a flagrant example of modern immorality, grew queasy over the heartless dismemberment of fishbait.

On the other hand, where did this decrepit (and theoretically almost homeless) octogenarian get off even
insinuating
castigation of the middle-class moron who held his well-being in the palm of his (also) calloused hand?

I'll kick out him and his feeble dog and his one-eyed rabbit and his antique horse! Joe snarled. For sixty thousand dollars, I don't need some masculine reincarnation of Carrie Nation and Billy Graham speechifying pompously every time I commit some dinky sexual transgression! The second I own this place I'll strangle his turkeys, drown his chickens, and execute his goddam senile wolf!

Finally, what the hell was he talking about—the Old Days? In the Old Days the Spanish waltzed in and castrated the Indians: rebelling Indians then butchered the Spanish. Everybody raped, pillaged, and plundered to their heart's content. They kidnapped each other, selling the human booty into slavery. They boycotted witches, believed in the Evil Eye, condoned patrons, and died at thirty of malaria, syphilis, tuberculosis, and the common cold. To hell with the Old Days!

Thoughtfully, Joe drawled, “This is pretty durn good-looking earth.”

“That's because it
is
good earth. Not too much caliche. I take care of it, too. I feed it goat manure, horse dung, leaves. For years I have pampered this ground. My gardens are beautiful. You'll see.”

Joe closed his eyes, seeking to block out an image of himself as Hitler, ordering a final solution. Trying to make it sound offhand and innocuous, he queried: “Have you had any luck yet finding another place?”

Eloy grinned. “Qué va? Where would I look?”

Joe said, “Well, you'll have all that money. You could probably get into those low-income Operation Breakthrough houses they built last year.”

“And do what?”

Die. Lounge around. Water a geranium. Attend senior-citizen luncheons at the county HELP center. Sit in a chair in the driveway watching twenty-eight other decrepits slumped in rockers watching each other. So Joe backed off a trifle:

“Well, yeah, I suppose you're right. But those houses do have indoor toilets. And gas heat. And you must admit that's not bad come winter.”

“All my life I used an outhouse—why change now? And as for heat—if I couldn't chop wood I'd drop dead. My muscles would say, ‘Eloy, Eloy, why hast thou forsaken us?'”

Miserably, Joe said, “Yeah, I guess I see your point.” Guilt worked him over like a professional rubber-hose man. How could he, in all conscience, buy out this crusty old fart? Eloy was the only semi-noble human being left in the valley.

Eloy said, “Have you had any luck, yet, raising the money?”

“I'm working on it.”

“Yesterday afternoon I bought bullets for robbing the bank.”

“You'll just get killed,” Joe wanted to say, but held his tongue. The bottom was falling out of his hopes; even his anger had been defused. Although he knew that an individual should believe he could actively take charge of his personal destiny as well as the direction of history, right now he felt powerless, flustered, cynical, inept, incongruous, and hopeless.

So Joe gave up. “You got another shovel? I need the exercise.”

“In the shed.” Eloy stabbed in his own spade and grunted, turning over more earth.

They worked together, sweating under the high sun, chatting amiably even though Joe felt lousy. His biographers wouldn't believe this one. An all-American upper-class, college-educated, and lily-white boy tries to pull off a coke number in order to buy land from an itinerant gardener and sheep farmer with a second-grade education, and winds up dead, or in jail for life. Or he successfully dumps the coke, buys the land, and then can't move the sly old bird out. No house can go up because the analphabet's shack can't come down. In the end, our hallowed scion of the power structure winds up living in a tent and working as tenant labor for the doddering sheep herder, who survives to a hundred and nine.
Unless
he is killed in a bank robbery five minutes before Joe is to hand him the purchase price, in which case the banks, lawyers, probate courts, and creditors gobble up the estate before you can say “José Miniver!”

But the first sane physical moves he had made in three days soon worked their magic. Joe calmed down. Taking off his shirt, he reveled in the bright heat, and in the smell of damp earth, crushed leaves, old horse dung. Almost sexually, sunshine bruised his tingling shoulders. A peculiarly energetic laziness laid siege to his ulcer-oriented body, and triumphed. All his troubles seemed so far away. Reason returned, and he knew that Tribby was correct. If he could come out of it with his twelve Gs intact, he was way ahead of the game. Perish the greed that desired this land. Joe relaxed. And at the end of an hour, he was grateful to the old man for sharing this mundane endeavor.

They paused, contemplating their work. The symmetry and richness of that exposed terrain, freckled with white fluff, pleased them both. Joe asked, “What do you usually plant here?”

“Over there, where you see the old stalks, that's obviously corn. Those humps are where the squash—scallop, summer, zucchini—and the pumpkins go. Then I plant two rows of avas—horse peas, in your American lingo. And snow peas and regular peas. And ten rows of beans. Couple rows of carrots, beets, potatoes. Mustard greens, spinach—and over there, that green row already sprouting, that's my garlic. It comes up automatically every year. I have tomato plants in the house. And the chile grows back over there, in the corn.”

“It must be a lovely garden.”

“I dry many things in the autumn. Squash, apples, pears. I harvest enough beans for the winter, and chile, and corn. I make chicos and use them in posole. I pack some apples and pears in straw and eat them for months. Same with the beets and carrots, although, depending on what the cavañuelas say about the winter, sometimes I just mulch them in their rows and pull them when I need them. You can feed your family year-round from a little garden like this.”

Joe pictured the garden. A minute ago his greed had ebbed: now lust for ownership flooded back into his veins. Yet benign thoughts launched a glowing altruism. Eloy could stay on as caretaker of this land he had loved and nurtured much of his life. His deft hands would keep it healthy and productive, pruning the fruit trees, mulching rose bushes, mowing their new lawn, tying up suet balls for the chickadees at Christmastime. The old man would always be on call to cheer Joe up with a bit of Old Days doggerel, or a slew of pithy observations.…

For the next hour or two, they discussed land. Eloy demonstrated which dead apple-branches needed cutting and told why fruit saplings shouldn't be left to grow around the parent tree's roots. He explained what it meant to say that alfalfa was a “preataphyte,” and went down on his knees to caress a clover plant rising in the backfield brome. “Two autumns ago,” he recalled, “I saw these burnt brown clover seeds beside the La Ciénega road, stopped and picked a bagful, and sprinkled them in my field. Of their own accord, now, they are spreading.”

Some weeds were undesirable; Eloy cursed vehemently and tugged them out by hand. Each time they passed a clump of horseshit, he kicked it, saying: “You got to spread the wealth around. If I had a tractor I would drag this field. But I don't, and nobody else does either, these days, so I won't.”

In a corner of the back field had sprouted a small group of thistleburr plants. “For the last ten years I have dug out these leaves at least three times every summer,” Eloy grumbled, “but I never manage to kill every plant. I hate this weed. Its burrs destroy Geronimo's mane and his tail.”

For eleven summers sparrow hawks had nested in that particular dying cottonwood tree. Occasionally, Eloy opened his pocketknife and cut, and ate raw, a wild asparagus spear. He also pointed out a nondescript weed called calite. “You Americans would probably call it wild spinach. Prepared with onions, a little chile, and garlic, and fried in oil, it's delicious.”

At Wolfie's cage Eloy paused. He opened the door and attached a plaid leash to the alert, flea-bitten animal. Joe marveled at how the infirm beast seemed to glide over the ground on tiptoes, his paws an inch above the dirt, as if he were swimming through the air using an elegant, effortless stroke, never tugging at the leash. With them, now, he quartered the terrain silently, sniffing carefully, peeing wherever piss was called for, listening intently to Eloy's monologue, and from time to time, with an easy twitch of his head, snapping flies and grasshoppers out of midair, gulping them down in a single swallow.

So Eloy's random observations metamorphosed into a grand tour of the property. Joe got a first-hand look at the oystershell-scale disease attacking four fragile aspens along the garden's southern border. Each hand-cut fence post delineating the property boundaries had come from a special place in the Midnight Mountains. Two sagebrush plants along the eastern fence Eloy had brought in off the mesa about a decade ago: he loved the smell of chamiso after a rain. Each wooden headgate along the Lovatos Ditch had a story. Tiny lateral ditches leading to the garden, to the orchard, to the sweet-pea vines had a pertinent history. Soundly castigating a gopher hole, Eloy wondered aloud why one son of a bitch always survived his extermination efforts.