Blue Highways (25 page)

On the north, the mountains were worn pillows; but in the other direction, the Floridas (Flo-RYE-duhs) were treacherous jags tearing into the soft bellies of clouds. That barren inheritance of hostility, belonging to something other than man, would have nothing to do with him: no roads, no high-tension powerlines, no parabolic dish antennas, no concrete initials of desert towns. Mountains to put man in his place. By the time I got to Deming, New Mexico, the Floridas were covering themselves with long night shadows, the only thing that can embrace them entirely.

F
LOORS
, walls, counter, employees’ uniforms—everything but the faces—were white at the Manhattan Cafe in Deming. From some place I recognized the beauty of the waitress, but I couldn’t recall where. Later I realized she had the severe priestess beauty of high-bridged nose, full lips, and oblique eyes that one might see on a Mayan temple wall at Palenque.

She served a stack of unheated flour tortillas, butter, and a bowl of green, watery fire that would have put a light in the eyes of Quetzalcoatl. Texans can talk, but nowhere is there an American chile hot sauce, green or red, like the New Mexican versions, with no two recipes the same except for the pyrotechnical display they blow off under the nose. New Mexican
salsas
are mouth-watering, eye-watering, nose-watering; they clean the pipes, ducts, tracts, tubes; and like spider venom, they can turn innards to liquid.

I’d finished the tortillas when she set down
huevos rancheros
with chopped
nopales
(prickly pear), rice, and a gringo glass of milk to extinguish the combustibles. Solid cafe food without pretense. Maybe the time is coming, but as yet the great variety and subtlety of fine Mexican cuisine have not much reached the United States. Ten thousand taco stands peddle concoctions cooked by some guy who pronounces the
l’s
in
tortilla,
and, in the Southwest, cafes like the Manhattan serve a good but basic fare; yet, only a few places turn out the dishes that put a
cocinero
in a class with the chef: squash blossom enchilada, chicken in green pumpkin-seed sauce, tortilla soup, drunken octopus, sweet tamales, shrimp marinated in jalapeños, lime soup, chicken breast pudding, chicken-in-a-shirt.

Gritty as a lizard, I went looking for a bath and found a room (the first since I’d taken to the blue highways) for eight dollars at the edge of town. I showered and watched the last of a Gary Cooper movie on television. In fluent, dubbed Spanish, Cooper made his way through a romance:

She:
Eres tú libre?

He:
Libre como el viento.

Free as the wind indeed. A brave hope.

After dark, I walked into town for a beer. A choice of two bars: the Central where English was the language or the Western where it was Spanish. On the street outside the Chicano saloon—in living memory—a rustler was hanged, and in a basement next door was once an opium den. Now the Western got by on beer and eight ball. Until the game began, none of the seventeen customers spoke to me. I got the message, but I stayed anyway.

Five young workers for the highway department and their grizzled foreman, Ruquito (“Pops”), shot pool. The best player was the only person speaking some English: loud and cocky, he cried out, “AttabayBEE!” or “Holy
cojones!
” or “Dirty
bruja!
” He was a clever shooter who shepherded his stripes or solids in tight little flocks, and his friends didn’t mind losing to him. At the bar, older and beefier men stood talking about work and women, but they kept an eye on the game. Then, from somewhere, someone laid a wager. Señor AttabayBEE! would play a gristly, angry man in his fifties. The older man took a few smashing warm-up shots and made them. A worker unplugged the jukebox, another adjusted the light over the table, and El Señor talked rapidly but only in Spanish. Ruquito took him aside to rub his shoulders and arms, all the while whispering fiercely to him. Two old compadres limped quickly out, tumbleweed blowing at their heels.

A man with three or four silvery incisors that gave his mouth the appearance of a steel trap said to me: “How much you bettin’?” I told him I was too poor to gamble. He sneered a laugh. “You come in just to watch us
mojados
?”

“Okay. I’ve got two bucks. Two on the young señor.”

“You are a fool.”

Ruquito pushed everyone away from the area except the two contestants, and the place went quiet but for the sharp click of the balls on the felt. With the precision of little howitzer shots, the balls found their marks and dropped from the table. El Señor won easily.

“Now you gonna bet good, Sir Gringo?” steel mouth said.

“Let it all ride. Haven’t got any more.” I pulled my pockets inside out.

He sneered again. P
OOL
G
AME
W
AGER
E
NDS IN
D
EATH
. Either I got fished in or Señor AttabayBEE! forgot to herd his stripes. He lost five straight. I would have done better guessing the number of spots on a Dalmatian.

T
HAT
a handcrank coffee mill helped kill off the Old West has not been widely appreciated. For five thousand miles I’d driven between fences, but along New Mexico 81, for the first time, there was none. At last I’d come to open range, a thing disappearing faster than the condor.

In 1874, an Illinoisan, Joseph Glidden, received the first patent for a barbed fencing wire he made on a converted coffee mill. Ranchers called the stuff “the Devil’s hatband,” but they saw their economic future in it: the new fence gave means to control breeding and thereby upgrade stock, and it allowed a single well to water an entire herd. Before barbed wire, the West had few long fences because there wasn’t wood enough to build them, and cattle trampled wooden fences anyway. No alternative to open range and cowhands existed. But a barbed wire fence was cheap to buy, erect, and maintain over the big acreages required in the West, and cattle shied from it once they ran against it. In the 1870s some animals cut themselves to death on it, and one rancher said that at first he could hardly drive a cow between two posts.

But Glidden’s invention offered something even more important: a means of staking property claims, particularly on plats belonging nominally to the federal government. Ranchers fenced claims to establish ownership, and entire towns ended up encircled or cut off from access to public land. Neighbors tore out each other’s fences, and President Cleveland ordered the Army to take down illegal ones. It was too late. What began as “range privilege” became an unlawful seizure that was the basis for many of the great cattle empires.

And so, from the prototype off the coffee mill, came the successors that partitioned the West and changed it forever: Glidden’s Twisted Oval, Briggs’ Obvious, Allis’ Sawtooth, Scutt’s Arrow Plate, Brinkerhoff’s Riveted Splicer. Staples and pliers became more important than bullets and pistols, and the cowboy went from riding the range to riding fence and greasing the bearings on a windmill. No longer was there need to drive range cattle to pasturage and water or to sort out herds; the cowboy was on his way to becoming a feedlot attendant, and a piece of American history turned to legend. With the transport of cattle to market by truck, the shift was complete.

After fifteen miles of open range along state 81, I saw, lying along the roadside, threads gleaming like trails of mercury. Barbed wire. In a week, this piece of open range would be gone too.

Eastward, a dusty spume of wind created by thermal pressures spun wildly about the sage and thistle. People of the Old Testament heard the voice of God in desert whirlwinds, but Southwestern Indians saw evil spirits in the spumes and sang aloud if one crossed their path; that’s why, in New Mexico and Arizona today, the little thermals are “dust devils.”

Off to the south lay the Big Hatchet Mountains, their backs against the deserts of Mexico; under them, tiny Hachita sat almost squarely on the Continental Divide where it bends east and west. Before the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, this newest piece of the contiguous states belonged to Spain and Mexico for three centuries. The sight of Hachita’s tin roofs simmering in the early sun gave me ease; although I’d filled the tank in Deming an hour earlier, I couldn’t keep from continually checking the gauge, couldn’t stop hearing the soft
knock-knock
of the waterpump.

Hachita, facing an abandoned railroad trackbed and locomotive water tower, turned out to be a conglomerate of clay bricks and wood and aluminum. In sandy lots between faded trailers and adobe houses, old cars mummified in the dry air. There were two businesses: a small grocery and the Desert Den Bar & Filling Station.

Here was a genuine Western saloon primeval, a place where cattlemen once transacted affairs of commerce and of the passions. The ichthyologist who first found the “fossil fish” coelacanth still swimming the seas could have had no finer pleasure than I did in coming across a buttressed adobe saloon that by all right should have been extinct.

It was a long room with a pool table, a circular poker table, and a nine-stool L-shaped bar. Claptrap hung on the east wall, antlers and inept oil paintings on the west, while calendars, beer signs, an old license plate, and stacks of things covered the backbar mirror. The countertop was pocked with shallow cavities where silver dollars once had been embedded and with deeper holes that had held turquoise nuggets. Now only a few worn pesos and pieces of malachite remained.

Virginia Been owned the saloon. Born in Oklahoma, she grew up within a hundred miles of Hachita. Her husband, George, worked “dirt construction” and left her to run the Desert Den most of the time. Each week she drove sixty miles into Deming to bank and pick up supplies. Her mother, Iva, sat at the poker table with a bag of tortilla chips by her elbow and stared into the glare of empty road. She said nothing.

“I’d have a beer,” I said, “but I guess it’s too early.”

“Not in the desert.” Mrs. Been set out a bottle.

“You have a fine old place.”

“One time a
National Geographic
photographer came in and took pictures, but I never saw them in the magazine.”

“How old is the bar?”

“Older than statehood. Late eighteen nineties. We’ve got liquor license number twenty-seven. One of the oldest in the state. We were here before Pancho Villa raided the county. We’ve always guaranteed one thing—this is the best bar in town. Anybody doesn’t like it can drive fifty miles to the next one.”

“I think I’ve been looking for it since my first Western.”

She whistled at a sparrow that hopped through the doorway to peck about the sandy wooden floor. “Nothing wasted out here if you can eat or drink it. We’ve got a nice town—what’s left. That’s not much. You could put us all in a cattle truck now, but we used to be a thousand of us.”

“Where?”

“Right here. Southern Pacific had a roundhouse across the road fifty years ago. That’s the truth. We were on the route between El Paso and the mines at Douglas, Arizona. A roundhouse! But the railroad closed the line and came out and pulled up the tracks, ties, everything. The locomotive water tower and the cattlepens, that’s all that’s left of SP. I guess they didn’t even want to be reminded of us down here on the border.”

“How far’s the border?”

“About ten miles by the crow, but fifty miles by car. I think the railroad hurried out too soon. Six years ago a copper smelter went in over west where it can smoke down the border. When they were building it, our place jumped again—people to the gills.” She laid out a photograph of her at a phony teller’s window she had built next to the bar. “We cashed paychecks. The Den was the town bank. Money poured in like wind. Copper money.”

“Do smelter workers live here now?”

“Company built a new town by the smelter. We don’t get good TV reception and people won’t move in. I’m never home to watch so I don’t care. To tell the truth, I’m glad they didn’t settle. Don’t want to see Hachita get any bigger because I like it this way. Wouldn’t live anywhere else. And I don’t mind if there isn’t much to do except work.”

“I’ve got the feeling I’m in the farthest corner of the United States. The word for your town is
remote
.”

“We’re the end of things down this way. This is where she stops.”

A fellow with a face he’d gotten a lot of mileage out of sat down and drank off a beer like ice water and started complaining the electric company had billed him forty-eight dollars for an unoccupied house he owned. “Hell,” he said, “place has been boarded up ten years. May have to clean your ceiling.”

Dollar bills, folded to the size of postage stamps, clung like spiders to the ten-foot Celotex ceilings. “Why is money up there?” I asked.

“Road salesman in here years ago,” Mrs. Been said, “started betting he could throw a dollar bill against the ceiling and make it stay. Got some takers—like everybody. So he pulls out a couple of quarters, heavy silver ones, and a thumbtack. Folds the bill around the coins and tack so the tack stuck through the paper. He tosses it up and it sticks like a dart. He made some money that night. So’d the ceiling. Don’t ever bet a man against his own tricks. Every now and then, a dollar comes down. One stuck in a fella’s boot couple years ago. Money from heaven.”

A small man, tightly and neatly put together, his muscles wound around his bones like copper wire on an armature, his eyes faded turquoise, sauntered in. “Highway department’s stringin’ fence down eighty-one,” he said.