“No,” he said. “Sometimes I sleep with a lady up the street. She’s okay, but she’s married. There’s a widow on the reservation.”
“You’re into older women.”
“The widow’s my age, twenty-seven.”
“That’s young to be called a widow.”
“She has four children.”
“I didn’t know that widowhood was a function of having children.”
“She’s not looking to get married.”
“And neither are you?”
“I wouldn’t be any good.”
“Why not?” I asked. Johnny pushed open the door to the motel, which wasn’t locked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, what do you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you do?”
“I work in a motel.”
“No one just works in a motel.”
“I,” he said, “just work in a motel.”
Johnny waited at the reception desk while I took a shower. He had a bottle of Wild Turkey in one of the drawers and I saw him pour himself a glass. I took a long time. I had three days of dirt and oil coating me. Also, the salty smell of that trucker was somewhere in my hair and at odd times, I’d get a whiff of it, as if his spirit had been disturbed. When I finally got out of the shower and reappeared in the paneled lobby, Johnny had fallen asleep with his head on the counter, his hand sprawled around a set of keys. I took the glass of bourbon to my room and was soon asleep myself.
The following morning Johnny and I set off together to find the Hidalgo Ranch. The landscape around Gallup was both calculated and unreal. Rocky outcrops interrupted the horizon here and there and sometimes I thought I could see the curvature of the earth, feel the car engine straining on the incline. To me, the whole thing looked surreal—denying the rational—demanding that I meld my subconscious onto the landscape in order to have it come together as a whole. Or maybe the sparseness just reminded me of Dali, a blank Iberian plain interrupted by a rotting carcass and crows, which, when viewed at high speed in one’s peripheral vision, acquired some suspicious details—a bust of Voltaire, pronged twigs, infamous wilting clocks.
I knew something of Dali from a modern art course I’d taken in college. I’d come up with a topic for the final paper that my professor, Consuela Smith, thought had much promise. I’d decided to compare Dali’s and Goya’s treatments of war. It would have been a good paper, but the course was taught in the spring and just as I was sitting down at the computer to compose my thoughts, the weather turned. The sun came out. The temperature nudged past eighty and I knew that my paper and I were both doomed. I could never work in good weather and so the paper was never actually written. But I had read some good books in its pursuit. Driving out in the desert, I remembered that I’d never given up writing the paper, even though I’d failed the course, and that “F” had been the final straw of the final semester of my college career.
My favorite Dali painting was Autumn Cannibalism. Dali painted Autumn Cannibalism at the end of 1936, at which point he had already alienated himself from the surrealist movement, although the break would not be complete until 1939. Dali’s embrace of traditional Spanish values—Catholicism, penitence, and classicism—put him at odds with the founders of the movement, Calas, Breton, and others, who in the late thirties were still passionately political and had little time for Dali’s frivolous nature or his pursuit of money, which earned him the anagrammatical nickname “Avida Dollars.” Dali was not political at all and did not view things through the revolutionary lens essential to surrealist values. Writing on Autumn Cannibalism, which is inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Dali states: “These Iberian beings eating each other in autumn, express the pathos of the Civil War considered (by me) as a phenomenon of natural history as opposed to Picasso who considered it as a political phenomenon.” In addition to acknowledging the legacy of Picasso, Dali also pays homage to Goya (Soft Construction with Boiled Beans of mid-1936 is undeniably indebted to Goya’s Colossus), whose Los Caprichos takes similar inspiration. Although where Picasso is political, Dali naturally cyclical, Goya goes person by person, grimace by grimace, pint of blood by shed pint of blood.
And there is no blood in Autumn Cannibalism.
Autumn Cannibalism depicts a plastic couple in intimate embrace in the act of eating each other. Although the features are not uniformly rendered—the hands detailed, the heads leavening into each other like rising bread—the anthropophagy is clearly a function of sexual intimacy. The man pinches a doughy inch from his lover’s waist while spooning cream from the breast region (although there is no breast here, only a white enameled flatness) while the woman’s left arm dangles about his neck, her hand languidly holding a knife. The knife cuts into the torso of the man, which presents itself as a loaf of bread. Although perhaps my description of the anatomy is lacking, the cyclical nature of love—one’s feeding and feeding, the plastic ability of the bodies to nourish as food, the constant flux of the forms, the flow of man into woman, their rendering as a single, spiraling form—should seem more familiar.
Or maybe it doesn’t, this elemental desire, the lovers reduced to ingredients and appetite.
15
My mother’s ranch was north of Gallup on Route 666. The property seemed marked off at random. To my untrained, unenlightened eye, there seemed no purpose to having claimed this particular chunk at all. There was a log cabin of the prefabricated, Sun Valley type. The rough-hewn logs and wraparound deck were calculatedly rustic, just as the gleaming steel, heavily applianced kitchen was calculatedly convenient. I sat on the porch swing, which offered an endless view of uninterrupted land.
“How much do you think this place is worth?” I asked the realtor. She was Indian, but more Mexican than Navajo.
“A lot, to the right buyer,” she smiled. “It may not seem like much to you, but there are some Anasazi ruins about a quarter-mile north of here.”
“On the property?”
“Just inside the property lines.”
“Are we going to have problems selling it?”
“What kind of problems?” asked the realtor.
“Legal problems,” I said.
“The Anasazi are all gone, and so far there hasn’t been any interest from the Navajo or Hopi, so we should be all right.”
The realtor went inside to check the condition of the bathrooms. Johnny was waiting by the car talking to the handyman, a huge Indian who could have been forty or a hundred years old. When he saw that the realtor was gone, he came up on the porch and sat with me.
“This place freaks me out,” he said.
“I thought you’d be all spiritual and one with this. I thought you’d bring out your drum, maybe set up a sweat lodge…”
“Here? No way. This is Anasazi. In Navajo, that means Ancient Enemy.”
“No. It means Ancient Ones. Your ancestors.”
“You’re going to tell me who my ancestors are?”
“I’m just teasing you,” I said. “So what’s so scary about the Anasazi?”
“Well, they left in a hurry and no one knows where they went or why.”
“A drought?”
“There was a drought, but there had been other droughts.”
“War?”
“Maybe. But the Anasazi were organized. They could have put up a good fight.”
“What do you think?”
“I’ve heard that the Anasazi ate their enemies. I think that’s a Hopi thing, but there’s been all kinds of digging around here, and I guess they think the same thing.”