Philosophy Made Simple (6 page)

“What we’re telling people to do,” a woman’s voice was saying, when he found the station again, “is to stay home with their families, to read their Bibles, and to pray. That’s about all you
can
do at this point. Bob and I will be leaving the station at five a.m. to join
our
families. Until then, we’re here to take your calls.” She gave the number.

“Should we go down to the basement?” the next caller wanted to know.

“No, we think you should stay right in your living room. Going to the basements not what will save you.”

Rudy switched on the lamp and sat up in bed. Another missile crisis, or worse — only this time it would be LBJ climbing into the ring with Brezhnev. He’d seen something about it in the
McAllen Monitor
that had been lying open in the diner:

U Thant Predicts

WWIII if US Doesn’t

Leave Vietnam

But he hadn’t read past the header.
This could be it. My last night on earth. The missiles might be in the air already: Titans, Minuteman Is, Soviet SS-8s. NASA
headquarters in Houston would be a prime target. Mission Control.
He thought he heard a siren, but it was only the buzzing of the neon sign. That’s when he thought of Gary’s letter again:
“The Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon, in fact any minute … I wonder at God’s patience with humanity”
Could this be IT? Christ himself pushing the button, all she wrote, end of story?

Rudy was wide awake. He had to go to the bathroom, but he wanted to listen. It took him a while to figure out what the folks at the station were worried about: not a nuclear attack but the Second Coming.

Momentarily relieved, he slipped on the Italian silk robe that Helen had ordered for him from Marshall Field’s shortly before her death, sat down on the edge of the bed, and continued to listen. It turned out that a former computer scientist, while working as a janitor at NASA, had secretly programmed the big computer — the one that was keeping Gemini 9 on course — to
determine scientifically the date of the Second Coming, which was going to be tomorrow, at sunset in Jerusalem. Ten seventeen a.m. Texas time. He went outside and got a bottle of Dr Pepper from the pop machine.

Sitting at his kitchen table thumbing through the evening paper, Rudy would have laughed at this sort of stuff. But he was a thousand miles away from home and had three bowls of Texas chili from last night’s supper still sloshing around in his stomach
— nothing but shredded meat and jalapeño peppers, no beans, no tomato sauce — along with three or four bottles of Lone Star beer, and he’d been brought up as a Methodist, even though he hadn’t been to church in twenty years, except for weddings and funerals and a few times after Helen’s death, so it was pretty upsetting.

What was he supposed to do in the meantime? That’s what callers wanted to know. They wanted instructions. Practical advice.
Just the idea of it was unnerving. People shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast such nonsense. Rudy was annoyed. But he didn’t turn off the radio. He listened to a string of commercials and then the Bob and Helen Show came back on the air. Helen, Rudy’s wife’s name.

The next caller was a woman from Hidalgo named Marge, with a message for her husband: “Gene, please come home.” She was on the edge of tears. “I’m sorry. If you can hear me, come back.” Someone else wanted to know what Bible passages would be good to concentrate on. Helen suggested John 3:16-21, “For God so loved the world …” Bob voted for the parable of the vineyard,
Matthew 21:28-41. And then a mother from Weslaco followed Marge’s lead by trying to reach her daughter, who’d run off with a Mexican farmworker: “Debbie, this is your mom. Your dad and I been prayin’ for you every minute of every day and
every night. Won’t you please call us right away, before it’s too late. We love you so much.” Sobbing. There was a call from somewhere in Mexico. Bob and Helen spoke to the man in Spanish. Rudy knew enough Spanish to know that they were talking about betrayal and infidelity, and then the man started to sob too — masculine, Mexican sobbing that was different from anything Rudy’d ever heard, but easy enough to understand.

He finished his Dr Pepper. The calls kept coming in — husbands and wives, moms and dads, children too, all reaching out with the same message — Come home, or if you’re too far away, call us before it’s too late. We want to talk to you once more before the end. We want to tell you we love you, we just want you to hear it one more time; we just want to hear your voice.

Who were these people? What were they doing up at three thirty in the morning? Then it hit him. They were people just like him, listening to the radio because they couldn’t sleep, because they were lonely. Did they know something he didn’t know?

He got to thinking: What if it
was
the world’s last night? What would
he
do? If he called the station, who would be listening? His daughters? They were all too far away; and they wouldn’t be listening anyway. Besides, if he wanted to call them, he’d call them at home. At least he could reach Meg and Molly at home. But what about Helen, his wife?

It was a foolish impulse, but he yielded to it like a man yielding to a sudden and irresistible temptation. He picked up the phone, dialed 9 and the number of the station. It rang four times and then someone answered — not Helen or Bob but an operator who was taking the calls. There were three people ahead of him, she said, could he hang on? She took his name and put him on hold and he started to hear music, a song he hadn’t heard in years:

Dee-eee-ee-e-eep river,

my home lies o-o-ver Jor-do-uh-uhn.

Dee-eee-ee-e-eep river, Looord,

I want to cross over into campground.

It was a song the mens chorus used to sing at the campground in Berrien Springs, where he’d gone with his mom and his aunt Martha every summer when he was a kid. He was thinking about the campground — the wooden cabins, unpainted and sagging, and the white porcelain chamber pots, and the men’s deep voices — when the operator told him he was about to go on the air, and then he was on the air and Bob was saying, “Hello? Rudy? Hello? Rudy, are you there?” And suddenly finding himself short of breath, he said, “I’ve got a message for my wife, Helen. Helen, this is Rudy If you can hear me, please call me, I’m at the Starlight Motel in Mission, Texas, the number is” — he had to look closely at the phone to get the number. “I love you,” he said. “Good-bye.”

He hung up the phone immediately. He’d heard his own voice on the radio just a fraction of a second or so after he’d spoken the words, as if someone else in the room had been repeating the words right after him, and then Bob was thanking him and taking the next call.

He tied the belt of his robe around his waist and went out for another Dr Pepper, something to clear the cobwebs from his throat. He lay down on the bed and nursed the soda as he listened to the calls that kept coming in. He could hear the phones ringing in the studio, and a couple of times, just as he was drifting off to sleep, he woke up with a start, thinking that the phone beside the bed was ringing, that someone was trying to reach him. But when he picked up the receiver, all he got was a dial tone. By the time Bob and Helen signed off and went home to wait for the Second Coming with their families, Rudy was fast asleep.

C
reaky’s grove was halfway between Mission and Hidalgo, forty acres, twenty-nine and a half under cultivation. A man can raise a lot of avocados on twenty-nine and a half acres.

Rudy picked up the real estate agent at an office at the edge of town and they followed a farm-to-market road south till they came to a fork. The agent, whose name was Barney, indicated the right fork, pointing with his whole arm, his hand held flat, vertical, as if he were giving himself directions. Barney, whose car was in the shop, was too big for the little two-door Chevy Nova Rudy’d rented at the airport. His stomach rubbed against the dash, so that he had to spread out his knees and cross his feet over each other, and his head kept banging against the roof. He filled the silence with plans for golf courses, hospitals,
retirement communities, condominiums — all the things Rudy was trying to get away from. “Highway 83s the longest main street in the US,” Barney said. But what really bothered Rudy was that Barney seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what was driving Rudy himself: “It’s a great thing to live on the land,” Barney said.
“There’s times of heartache and weariness, but there’s times of great satisfaction too. Be your own man, your own boss, live your own life. See the sun come up in the morning, when everything’s still. Listen to the birds. Go out into the grove at night, hear the trees grow, hear the fruit ripen. It’s like you’re part of nature, part of God’s great plan of things.” He spoke without turning toward Rudy, who was looking, in the rearview mirror, at the trail of dust they were leaving behind them.

Rudy had in fact felt some of these things, but he hadn’t put them into words. The words made him uncomfortable. Made the whole thing seem sad and pathetic, like putting a panther in a dirty little cage. Pretty soon the poor thing gets dispirited and just lies there. Something like that had happened to Rudy. He was trying to recover the feeling that had led him to Texas in the first place, a feeling that he could only compare to the migratory bird business of Christmas Eve — spreading your wings, as if you
were
a bird preparing to take off and leave the world behind. His old life began to call out to him, to present itself to his imagination in warm, rich colors. Harry Becker had always treated him right. He’d miss the South Water Market with its big awnings, the fruit and vegetables piled up on the sloping sidewalks, the hum of the rollers, the chuffing of the big semis,
the clatter of dice in Neumann’s Market Bar. He’d miss his house too, the polished parquetry — scratched by the dogs but still beautiful — of the dining room floor, the porte cochere, the eyebrow windows, the balcony. And all the work he’d put into it: the new soil pipe, a downstairs bathroom, insulation, painting, the curved storm windows he’d framed himself for the bay window, and the bookcases he’d built in Helen’s study; the Purington paving bricks in the patio, which Helen called a terrazzo,
the grape arbor.
You’ll never escape,
his old life seemed to say.
You’re rooted in this house. It will shelter you and your children and your children’s children.
Love and work, that’s what’s here
—
your history, your past is embedded here. This is where you belong.

He was ready to turn around and head back when they came to a little trailer park — two rows of silver Airstreams, nestled together like cows in their stanchions.

“Winter Texans,” Barney explained.

The park was protected by an army of yard ornaments: concrete statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Francis, birdbaths, big round reflecting balls supported on little pillars, rear-view cutouts of women bending over to tend their gardens and of old guys in straw hats taking a leak, pink flamingos, deer, a grotto sparkling with bits of colored glass. Just beyond the trailer park Rudy saw an elephant — not a concrete one but a real one — standing in front of a small pole barn and painting at an easel.

“Barney,” he said. “Is that what I think it is?”

Barney nodded. “Norma Jean. Belongs to a Russian fellow. He brought it over from Mexico and taught it how to paint pictures.”

Rudy said, “That’s amazing, Barney That’s really astonishing.”

Barney shrugged. “You can buy yourself a painting for twenty or thirty bucks. Depends on what size.” He pointed to a stand by the side of the road, like a little vegetable stand. He looked at his watch. “Maybe on the way back. He sells postcards too, with a picture of Norma Jean painting. He used to take her over to the river market in Hidalgo on Saturdays and sell paintings there, but I don’t know if he’s still doing that.”

Plato says that philosophy begins in wonder. Aristotle too. Had they ever seen an elephant painting?

The property was a small part of one of the old Spanish land grants, or
porciones,
a strip of land about three thousand feet wide that had once extended twelve miles inland from the river. The
original
porciones,
which had been measured out on horseback by throwing a waxed rope, were narrow so that as many
rancheros
as possible could have access to the river. Creaky’d bought it from the Oblate Fathers, who’d raised cattle on it for a hundred and fifty years, and had laid out the grove himself.

Rudy had done business with Creaky for years and had talked to his wife, Maxine, dozens of times, before and after the accident that left Creaky a paraplegic, confined to the wheelchair that was still sitting in his study in the back of the house. An auto accident, ten years ago. A window in Creaky’s study opened onto the upper grove. Maxine had described the avocado trees as “mature,” and Rudy had been afraid he’d find that they were past their prime. But they were in good shape, topped off at twenty-five to thirty feet, nicely hedged. He sat at the dead man’s desk with a cup of coffee, going over the records — irrigation,
fertilization, crop production — that were kept in big cardboard boxes with orange backs. He’d seen boxes like that in lawyers’
offices. These were labeled according to the avocado calendar in Texas:
MARCH 1947-FEBRUARY
1948,
MARCH 1948-FEBRUARY
1949, and so on. They were stored on gray metal shelves, the kind you expect to see holding old paint cans in the basement or the garage.