David Barbour - Shadows Bend

NEW MEXICO. HIGH BLUFFS, mesas in the distance, clapboard shacks, adobe trading posts with Indian head logos, abandoned hulks-all westbound-on the roadside. They passed within a dozen miles of the ancient pueblo of Acoma, then the old trading town of Santa Maria de Acoma, where they saw the new mission church, which seemed to grow out of the side of the rocky mesa just above the settlement. For the next twenty miles they found themselves in the bad lands, where they wove through the malpais, a bizarre landscape of hardened black lava flows, millions of years old, that encroached upon them from either side of the road. Had they known that the Navajo said these knife-sharp jags of volcanic rock were the clotted blood of ancient monsters slain by the great Twins, they would have found it easy to believe after Imanito’s story. In the distance they were tracked by the snowcap of Mt. Taylor, the highest peak in the San Mateo range. A few miles west of Thoreau they finally reached the Continental Divide. ‘

“Well, here we are,” said Howard, pulling over as if he were at the end of their trip. “We’re sittin’ smack on the backbone of America. If it was rainin’ and a drop hit some sharp rock and split in two, half of it would go down to the Gulf and the other half would go down to the Pacific. What do ya say we celebrate with a drink of somethin’?”

Lovecraft gave in to Howard’s enthusiasm, and they stopped at the Great Divide Trading Post, where they bought three ice-cold sodas and ritually downed them with Glory. To amuse Howard, Lovecraft and Glory each sprinkled drops both east and west before getting back in the car. They continued downhill now, passing Fort Wingate and a sign for Kit Carson Cave, which Howard was loath to miss; they passed red-sandstone cliffs, and then they could see the lights of Gallup in the near distance across the flat land before they climbed into the Arizona high country.

Howard pulled over for gas at a Phillips 66 in Kingman; he parked, and while the gas jockey filled the tank, he did his best to wash and wipe the cracked and pockmarked windshield himself, griping under his breath about the broken suspension, which had made for quite a rough ride since they had left Imanito’s hogan. “Hey, y’all,” he said through the window, “how about some food? That Injun stew ain’t holdin’ me much longer.”

They stopped to eat breakfast at a nearby diner, a wood-framed building with a false adobe facade. Howard, ever the Texas loyalist, once again ordered his native soft drink. “I’ll have a cold Dr Pepper,” he called to the waitress. “Got some trail dust that needs washin’ down.”

Glory lit a cigarette despite Lovecraft’s disapproving look. “What a good idea,” she said. “I’ll have an omelet, Miss, and a Dr Pepper hot.” The waitress raised her eyebrows. “That’s right,” said Glory. “Hot. Nice and hot, but make sure you don’t bring it to a boil or you’ll kill the flavor. And add a wedge of lemon if you’ve got any,”

Howard screwed up his face in a look of disgust. “What possessed you to do that? Dr Pepper ain’t meant to be drunk hot. That’s just damn stupid.”

Glory was getting fed up with Howard’s holier than thou attitudes; she decided to provoke him. “Well, Bob, there’s a lot of things I’ve done that ‘ain’t’ meant to be done. You know, sleeping with men I’m not married to…”

Lovecraft was looking around at the neighboring tables; he visibly winced when he saw the disapproving look of the elderly couple sitting just behind them. He gave them a sheepish smile before he turned back to his company.

“…getting knocked up in the middle of a fancy college education I was supposed to have so I wouldn’t have to spend my life cleaning up after some man…” Glory took a long, manly drag of her cigarette and playfully blew a plume of smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “…and smoking.” She pulled the cigarette out of her mouth and held it in front of Lovecraft’s face. “Twenty years ago, a woman would have been thrown in jail for this.” She put the cigarette back in the corner of her mouth and went on in a purposely stilted mumble. “Kind of stupid when you really think about it, ain’t it, Bob?”

Howard was momentarily speechless at Glory’s tirade. Lovecraft made a note to himself not to raise her ire.

“Besides,” she said, “maybe drinking it hot will catch on one day.” Howard shrugged. “The hell it will,” he said under his breath. Glory looked at him, trying to figure out what it was he had just said.

Howard repeated himself more loudly for her benefit. “I said the hell it will. No soda pop invented in Texas is ever gonna be drunk hot.”

Glory gave a melodious laugh at Howard’s misguided bullish Texan patriotism. “Hey, why don’t we make a short detour and go up to get a look at Boulder Dam?”

“What for?” said Howard.

“I’ve always wanted to see it. It’s supposed to be one of the most spectacular pieces of engineering of all time. How about it, boys?”

Howard couldn’t agree, probably out of principle. “I say we keep our pace. We can’t afford to diddle around out here. Whattya say, HP?”

Lovecraft looked thoughtful, as if he were weighing options. He was eager to get to Smith’s place, to be sure, but he had always had the tourist’s itch in him. “Well, my understanding is that the project is nearly finished. And the stop is actually right along our route, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. So what?” said Howard.

“It is also my understanding that Texans enjoy things that are large, or vast, or massive, given all the jokes I’ve heard. Let’s go, Bob.”

Howard just grumbled contemptuously and blew bubbles in his Dr Pepper when it came, watching Glory take dainty sips from hers.

THEY TOOK HIGHWAY 466, turning north off of Route 66. Just before noon they pulled over to look down at the nearly completed dam and the partially inundated valley that would soon be called Lake Mead.

“Don’t look like no wonder of the world from up here,” said Howard. “Looks like something a school kid would make in a shoe box. ”

Glory had to admit that the scene wasn’t quite as awesome as she had expected. Driving through the desert landscape did something to your sense of scale-you couldn’t tell after a while in that flatness if something was massive and distant or modest and, close; you had no sense of how far away the mountains were because they always seemed the same distance away on the horizon. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go down and see what it’s like from up close. I bet it’s different.”

“Uh-huh.” But Howard was pleasant about it. He parked on top of the dam and they got out to look over the edge, and this time it was an entirely new place.

“Incredible,” said Lovecraft, the wind from below blowing back his short hair and causing him to squint involuntarily. “Incredible , indeed.”

Even Howard couldn’t hide his awe. He leaned forward as far as he could, holding one hand over his hat to keep it from blowing off, and gazed down into the slope of concrete that arched downward like a half parabola that seemed to go on for miles. “This must be bigger than the pyramids,” he said. “All these trucks fulla concrete are like ants dragging crumbs to build a mountain. Makes you proud to be a man, huh, HP?”

Lovecraft gave Howard a sideways look and smiled.

But Glory was more interested in the water-so many millions of gallons it would be measured in acre feet-trapped behind the monolith of concrete, inundating the features of the valley in which it was trapped. She wondered what was there. Animals? Vegetation? People and their homes? All of it would be drowned in the clear water of the Colorado River as it came out of the Grand Canyon. It would sit there, those millions and millions of gallons, seeping slowly into the rock faces of the valley walls, pushing at the single smooth barrier of man-made stone except where it would be channeled out in the spill ways. She imagined what it might be like to live in that valley, where the air would be water; if she didn’t breathe, if no bubbles came from her nose and mouth, the clear water would be indistinguishable from air, only colder and thicker, more shimmery and beautiful the way the light rippled in it.