Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

“Let’s try again, shall we?” he announced.

Nothing happened.

* * *

He sat on the hood, back to the windshield, reading Rilke. The heat of the dead engine felt good — Wyoming’s brisk wind was frisking his body. His nipples were as hard as his John Wesley Hardin pebble. Nobody came down the road. He sipped water from a bottle with French writing on the label. He ate peanut M&M’s. At least he had some protein.

Barbed wire twinkled like spiderwebs and dew. The sky went all the way up and over and down. He’d never seen so much sky. It looked like the little sage bushes on the horizon were buttons holding it to the ground.

He’d thought a rancher, a cowboy, somebody would drive by. So far, only crows. They seemed to be laughing at him.

Rilke said: You are not too old, and it is not too late ….

“Bullshit,” he said.

That circling crow was unimpressed.

A white plastic bag danced in the nearest fence like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

“Wonderful,” Hubbard noted.

* * *

Perhaps he would die out here. The Elements, he thought, as only a city boy would. But he was so betrayed, so alone. Suicide was not off the table, either. He pondered the amazing horror of his cold, cold body found here in the back of beyond. Pecked — pecked! — by crows. Rilke in his frozen hand.

Or starvation.

He was hungry.

He slid off the hood. Maybe she had some candy bars stashed in her glove compartment. She used to crack him up every time she announced that the best medication for PMS was chocolate. She called it her drug of choice. Twelve-stepper humor. Damn her.

The chairman of the Porter Square AA meeting had been coming around their apartment. Hubbard writhed a little every time he remembered making this bastard his famous turkey chili. That Cantabrigian had twelve-stepped right into Mrs. Hubbard’s bed. They called it a thirteenth step. He had taken a real inventory inside her knickers while Hubbard taught Beast Literature at Harvard Extension. Night school lectures in Apuleius and his use of the common ass in his fables.

Came home to find the Sting CDs gone. Odd. He thought she must have taken the boom box into the kitchen to wash the dishes. But the boom box was also gone. He looked in the bedroom — the bed was stripped. He said aloud, “If the tampons are gone, you have left me.” The medicine cabinet was bare.

A gesture was called for.

He skulked over to the AA pimp’s condo in Central Square and saw her Volvo parked outside. He had her spare key on his keychain. Popped the door and drove away, hit the ATM in Harvard Square, grabbed a duffel full of chinos and jeans and polo shirts and his Black Sabbath T at the apartment and headed down I-95 at an admirable clip.

“Grand theft auto!” he cried, half-giddy with himself.

New York: saw a biker with CHINGALING on his vest. Virginia: fog and a phantom roller-coaster beside the road. South Carolina: smokestack painted to look like a giant cigarette. Florida: he bought a cap with a gator on it that said FLORIDA YARD DOG.

In Alabama, he covered his wife’s EASY DOES IT/LIVE AND LET LIVE bumper stickers with new ones. One of them said KEEP HONKING, I’M RELOADING! He had a pair of her panties with him. All the way across the South, he had told himself he could throw them out at any time.

* * *

A lone cloud sailed out of Colorado and evaporated in the Wyoming sky.

Hubbard popped open her glove box. Papers and whatnot tumbled out. Receipts, maps, registration, tampons, matches, ChapStick. He held a tampon and remembered. How she had dared him to insert one in her during her period. “Go on,” she had taunted. “I won’t break.” How she’d stood with one foot on the toilet, and he had knelt there before her as if it were some ancient ritual, and he had tried to do it without somehow tearing secret woman-stuff in there. Thrilled and queasy in equal measure. It had seemed sacred at the time. He shook his head.

More clouds now, hanging above him as if they were pictures of clouds glued to a blue sheet of paper.

And that’s when he found it. Her stash. A baggie full of pills and capsules. Pink ones. Blue ones. Red ones. A black one. White tabs with X’s on them. AA, eh? Recovery, eh? Well, as the bluesmen said, well, well. Couples therapy. Sponsors. Al-Anon. And all the time she had this hidden in her car.

He fell back in the seat. He was done in. He laughed as he slapped the dash, his own head.

“Too much!” he cried.

After a while, it stopped being funny. Any of it. Cambridge. Harvard Extension. Who was he kidding? His day job was at a community college in Framingham. Harvard? One more ridiculous affectation. Everything in his life had ended up here, in the wasteland, with his engine burned to a crisp. How appropriate. This was the punch line of the cosmic joke. Hubbard the Absurd.

“To hell with it.”

He tipped the bagful of pills into his mouth and washed it down with tepid French water.

He arranged himself on the hood. Then hopped down and trotted to the back of the car and found a scarf. He wrapped it jauntily around his neck and got back on the hood.

The crows lost interest and flew away.

Come, death.

Come.

2. Serenity Contract

Don Her Many Horses was on his way from Pine Ridge to Boulder. The crazy dudes of the Oyate organization at the college were throwing their yearly party. He never missed it. The theme this year was “Dances with Nerds.” You were supposed to come as the biggest dweeb you could imagine.

Don had heard the term “big-time” in Rapid. A white biker had said it, and he liked it. He tried it now: I’m going as a nerd, big-time.

He was trying to quit smoking, and it wasn’t going all that well. But he worked that Doublemint gum and drummed his fingers on the wheel, listening to Skynyrd. He did his best to ignore the Marlboro Red hard pack tucked into the visor.

He spied a tan Volvo on the right shoulder. Slowed down to take a look. A white guy asleep on the hood. What’s the deal with white boys, anyway? Getting a tan out here?

Horses stared as he passed, his head clicking in small increments like the Terminator. About fifty yards down the road, he stopped. He watched in the rearview. That was just squirrely, that scene. Guy looked dead. His feet in high-tops splayed out, unmoving. His head slumped to the side, mouth open.

Horses told himself it wasn’t any of his business. If some wasichu decided to get out here and croak — well, more power to him. Nothing good was going to come of getting involved.

He pulled over and parked. Checked his cell phone. No signal. But he already knew that. He put it in reverse and slowly backed up. Came even with the man and hit the window button.

“Hey,” he said.

Nothing.

“Hey!”

Hubbard jumped, just a little.

“Hey! Wake up!”

Hubbard cracked his eyes open and cast around as if he were a scuba diver looking at a reef.

“Huh?” Hubbard said.

Don raised his hand.

“How,” he said.

He loved saying that to white boys.

Hubbard focused his eyes.

“Some truck,” he croaked.

“You all right?”

“Not exactly. All right. No.”

Don nodded. Now he’d tore it — had to pull over. Had to make sure. Now this clown was going to be on his hands.

Hubbard looked at the cottonwood in the field.

“Car broke,” he said.

Horses leaned over and stuck out his head to look at the Volvo. A thick braid tumbled down and hung there. “Let’s take a look,” Don said.

“Gee, could you?” Hubbard said.

Don Her Many Horses parked, put down his size-thirteen black cowboy boot.

Horses reached back into the truck and extracted a big black cavalry hat. It had a high crown and an ample brim, curved down over his eyebrows. Braided horsehair hatband, and a feather attached by some kind of thong.