John Haskell - American Purgatorio

Inside the casino the air-conditioning was going full blast, and I sat down at a slot machine and since I had a few quarters I started to play. Each time I played I had hope. Each time I lost, a new hope took its place. My losing continued and it wasn’t even luck anymore, it was mathematics, probability, and because I had to be rewarded at some point I waited for the pictographs in the machine to come into a line. I said to myself I would leave when I won, and I was waiting for that to happen.

The casino was lit in a way that made it seem both dark and bright, and there was a lot of blinking and sounds, and I was slightly lost in my excitement, waiting to hit it big. And of course the big payoff never came. I walked back out to the parking lot, having lost some of my precious money, and feeling sick almost from my overindulgence, I got in the car. As I made the right turn out of the casino, on the way down the hill, the car engine stopped. It just stopping going. I felt it had something to do with that casino, or the corruption of the traditional Indian way of life, but it didn’t matter because the car was dead. I should say the engine was dead because the car itself hadn’t stopped moving. It was going down the hill and the wheels of the car didn’t know anything was wrong, they kept moving, and I coasted along, all the way down to a town at the bottom of the hill. As I turned a corner the car slowed and settled to a stop in front of a real estate office.

The car sounded, when I tried to start it, as if gas wasn’t getting to the engine. Pushing the pedal did nothing. A man coming out of the office directed me to an auto parts store and the man there told me to test the fuel filter by blowing through it to see if it was clear. And when I took off the old filter and couldn’t blow through it, I bought a new one. With a screwdriver and a pair of pliers I replaced the clogged fuel filter, but when I tried to start the car, it didn’t do any good.

A car-repair shop was visible at one end of the town, and when the traffic along the two-lane main street had passed, I pushed the car across the road and down to where the broken cars were parked. Fortunately for me, the Pulsar was a subcompact, and by standing at the open driver’s-side door, I could push and steer at the same time, which I did. A man in overalls told me it would take three days to fix, so I walked down the street to another place, where a guy named Larry suggested what might be the problem. Fuel pump, he said, which was a major repair, or major enough, because by this time I was beginning to be concerned about my dwindling supply of money. I still had credit cards, but because I wanted to conserve my resources, even though he told me it was imperative to repair the problem, I did something else.

I bought a Gatorade at a main-street market. I looked around at the pine-tree mountains, and after I drank my drink, the car, for some reason, started. I drove to Larry, who seemed like a compassionate mechanic. He found part of a broken vacuum tube that was causing the car to stall and he glued it together with epoxy, for free.

As I drove out of town, up through the switchback mountains, the landscape got prettier and greener, and I was hoping my car difficulties were over. I was tired of difficulties, tired of the stress on my system, and to relieve the stress, when I came upon a crater lake I pulled into the parking lot. It was a green lake with rock outcroppings around the edges, and I stood at the viewpoint and looked at the lake, and when I went back to the car it didn’t start. I was thinking I should have left it running, but my habit now was to wait a few minutes and try again, and after a few minutes of waiting, sure enough, it started.

Continuing along toward Flagstaff, I saw a congregation of people on the side of the road. The sun was setting and the people were watching, off in the distance, a herd of elk ranging in a green river meadow. People were looking through binoculars and so I pulled over, took out my worthless antique binoculars, and of course couldn’t see anything through the clouded glass, but as I was looking, the car stopped running. A man leaning against a pickup truck offered to help. He said he knew something about cars, and after reaching under the hood, he told me there was something clogging the fuel line, some particle of dirt or carbon, and he suggested I fix it immediately.

The man followed me along for a while but I was fine. I waved him on. Every time I was about to stall I would shift into neutral, and in this way I drove into Flagstaff, to the area where the automotive repair shops were. They were already closed for the day, so I spent the night in the car on a side street.

I spent the next day talking with mechanics in Flagstaff, starting with an Indian guy who was working at Bill’s on Route 66. Then the Nissan place, which was expensive. An old man in front of a discount store told me to put cleaning solvent in the gas tank and carburetor. Which I did. But as I drove up the hill leading out of town it stalled again, this time in the middle of a busy road, and so I found a long-haired kid mechanic who said something about a new air cleaner. I went to an educated mechanic, who sent me to a hairy mechanic, who sent me to a mad scientist mechanic. But because the trouble I was having was transitory, because when they looked at the car everything seemed to be functioning, none of them could help.

And the reason I didn’t leave the car with these mechanics had something to do with the price they’d be charging, and something to do with risk. There was a pleasure in pushing my luck. And it wasn’t that I was enjoying the car trouble, but I was becoming used to it, almost addicted to it. The car trouble was distracting me from something else, which had nothing to do with the car, but the car was what I was focusing on.

It was late afternoon when I drove out of Flagstaff, and when I turned off the road, I thought I was turning into the sacred Wupatki Pueblo National Monument, but I ended up instead turning into the Sunset Crater National Monument. Since it was getting close to sunset, instead of reading any informational literature, I decided to sit on a rock and have a picnic. I was eating an apple, looking at the slanting light hit the rocks, and the shadows of the rocks, and for the first time in a long time I felt a degree of peace. The twisted wood of the shrub conifers, and the wind-carved stone, and the warmth still emanating off the earth. Something about the warmth was melting something in me, and I ate the apple, relishing its crunch. I threw the core into a waste container and for a long time just stood, listening to the distant hum of traffic, and the birds, closer, and the wind on my face. The smell of the dry dirt, and the dry air, and the horizon, stretching my eyesight and stretching itself, into the distance.

When another car pulled into the overlook and several children jumped out I decided to get moving. There was a loop drive that wound through the park and I was going to drive along that until I found another spot where I could survey the scenery. As I drove, the sky was taking on the reddish glow of the beginning of sunset, and I was looking out at that, driving down the gentle grade, my body alive in the seat, and I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I was imagining myself as an early human inhabitant.

Then came a swoosh sound and the engine stopped running. The car continued to coast down the hill and I let it coast, the engine quiet, the valley in front of me. When I came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, I pulled off the road again, got out again, and opening the hood again, I felt, perhaps, that my car was telling me something. About where I was. And I didn’t mind being where I was. But I couldn’t stay there, not really, so I started the car, or tried to. I waited the requisite minutes and tried, but the car didn’t start. Not only that, but it didn’t have the familiar sound of trying to start. It was a lifeless wheezing, and it worried me a little. But I waited again and tried again, jiggling wires and trying over and over, removing and replacing the fuel filter and trying again, and every time I tried, nothing happened.