Part 11 (1/2)

This is the kind of planning I like.

MORNING on the last day of the year. I finally reach Paul.

”I was right about the kilometres. The insurance company will fix the car!” I exclaim, hanging up. ”They want us to bring it in Monday.”

”All right!” Wayne says. ”Let's. .h.i.t the road.”

It has been snowing for hours. At breakfast we watch announcers on the big-screen TV in the restaurant warn the worried a.s.sembled that once again the I-40 is closed, that hundreds have spent the night in their cars, that fog and ice are making driving treacherous, that it is twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in Albuquerque and fifty-two in El Paso. I turn to Wayne with tears in my eyes, not from the news but from the sight of two parents tenderly feeding their small daughters. I miss the kids, but I don't want to call them. I don't want them to worry. I don't want to listen to them telling us that we should be careful.

We drive slowly around the city's uncleared streets. Wayne stops at a hardware store and buys a length of heavy plastic and some duct tape to cover the wonky headlight. The temperature has dropped sharply, freezing the slush into shards that crunch under our tires as we creep out of the city through the icy mist. There are almost no other cars on the road.

The day seems surreal. It started just after breakfast, when I spoke to a couple who were trying to get home from New Orleans to Denver. They'd decided to rent a car and drive to Phoenix to see if they could get a flight there. All weekend we've been trading stories and everyone agrees: our mad dash across the mountains in a wrecked car with the storm at our backs tops them all. I feel a strange kind of pride: we've become reckless, like Americans. And everything is turning out fine.

We point the car south. The I-25 is slushy, but nothing to worry about. Within an hour, the snow is gone and the desert surrounds us under a burning sun. We stop at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where a vast wetlands adjacent to the Rio Grande is alive with cranes-sandhill, common, one or two whoopers, some snow geese, and even a few rare Ross's geese. The marsh is white with their bodies glowing in the sun. We find a secondary road and drive in closer, taking care not to disturb them.

I think of the poor birds stuck in Albuquerque, pecking through the snow for bugs and seeds. ”Do you think these birds knew enough to fly ahead of the storm? Or to keep going a few miles south to where they'd find something to eat?”

”Anything that's lived here for 125 million years would have figured that much out,” Wayne says.

We are leaning against the hood of the Echo, watching through our binoculars, when a truck drives up a narrow dike between two of the major wetland areas. When it comes to a halt, the driver's window goes down and a shotgun barrel appears. A shot blasts out, and a thousand cranes and geese startle into the air. One of the geese plummets into the water. A dog bounds out of the back of the truck, splashes through the shallow water and retrieves the kill. We watch in horror, our binoculars pointed indignantly toward the couple-a man and a woman, both in khaki uniforms-who lazily get out of the truck, which is near enough that we can read the words printed on the side: ”Park Ranger.”

The dog returns with a wild goose in its mouth. The woman pats the dog and flings the bird into the back of the truck.

”What the h.e.l.l are you doing?” I yell. They're almost close enough to hear.

”Let's go,” Wayne says nervously, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of confronting two poachers carrying rifles.

”Why on earth would they do that? Research?”

”More likely New Year's dinner,” Wayne says.

The incident pulls a pall over our mood. That, and the realization that we can't possibly make it to El Paso before nightfall.

”How about Las Cruces?”

The City of the Crosses is the second largest in New Mexico. The origin of the name is lost: locals insist it refers to some ma.s.sacre or other. A cheery thought, after witnessing the murder of the goose. The town is an army brat, of sorts, laid out in 1848 by soldiers when the surrounding area was ceded to the United States after American troops invaded Mexico. Settlers who wanted to stay on the Mexican side of the border-a Mexican version of Canada's United Empire Loyalist refugees from the Revolutionary War-created the village of Mesilla, ”little tableland,” on the opposite bank of the Rio Grande, a vain hope, since a few years later that was absorbed by the United States, too, in its relentless land grab in the name of Manifest Destiny.

When Mesilla was founded, the Rio Grande flowed between Mesilla and Las Cruces: travellers had to take a barge from one village to the other. But the banks of the Rio Grande are low here: the river changes course at will. In 1863, it broadened, isolating Mesilla on an island; then, in the 1870s, the area became a swamp rich in yellow fever and malaria that killed dozens of Mesillans. A hundred years ago, the river repositioned itself again to where it flows now, west of both towns.

In Las Cruces we find a Best Western overlooking a busy road. It offers two New Year's Eve events: a mariachi band with dinner or an evening with Carroll Welch and her band. We accept these as our default celebrations.

If it were up to me, I'd stay in tonight. I'm a fifth-generation Canadian, with the usual WASP braid of English, Irish, and Scots, a slender thread of French thrown in for colour. At heart, though, I am a Scot, the blood of my mother's father's people pounding most palpably in my veins. It is the la.s.s in me that every year, in these last days between Christmas and New Year's, feels driven to clean the cupboards, straighten the underwear in my drawers, and bring my files up to date for fear of the Scottish curse that whatever is left undone by Hogmanay will haunt me throughout the year.

My idea of a perfect New Year's Eve is a gla.s.s of the Widow Clicquot by the fire, reminiscing about where we've been and where we're likely to go. Markers appeal to me. I like to make plans; Wayne likes to party.

Since the Irish in me also likes a good s.h.i.+ndig, we wander over to Mesilla, a small adobe village that seems unchanged since the Rio Grande jumped its banks. ”As wild as the wild west gets,” the brochure says, though this seems like wishful thinking. The plaza is empty, the lovely old adobe church, too; only a few tourists straggle through the historic buildings that rim the square, most of them now tourist shops filled with knick-knacks and anti-Bush paraphernalia.

On one side of the plaza we come upon a restaurant, the Double Eagle, which is what the American twenty-dollar gold coin used to be called. We go in to see if we can have dinner there, but the place is fully booked-”It's New Year's Eve!” the hostess exclaims in a harried voice that says, ”Where have you been?”

”Can we sit at the bar?” we ask. ”We've come all the way from Canada.”

”We'll find you a spot,” Michael, the bartender, says. ”All the servers are busy, but I'll look after you myself.”

The restaurant is in an old colonial house, each of its rooms now a private dining area for a family or group of friends. Michael finds us a table in the courtyard by the fountain; it's not cleared yet, so he suggests we wait in the lounge, a pillared and mirrored affair that the bartender tells us once graced the luxurious Drake Hotel in Chicago, where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe carved their initials into one of the hotel's ornate well-polished bars, unfortunately not this one. Above us hang chandeliers as long as a tall Texan, a thousand hand-carved crystals refracting the light. To Wayne's amazement, Michael makes him a proper b.l.o.o.d.y Caesar, complete with Clamato juice and a slug of beef bouillon. Wayne is in tippler's heaven.

”This is the first time I've ever met anyone outside Canada who knows what a b.l.o.o.d.y Caesar is,” he says happily, ”and even at home, they don't use beef bouillon anymore.” He sighs with the wonder of it all.

”Another, sir?” asks Michael.

But Wayne's eye is wandering along the tequila bottles. ”Is that reposado?” he says.

If we had been offered a hundred places to spend New Year's Eve, this is the one we would have chosen, this old adobe house fitted with midwestern elegance, a fountain splas.h.i.+ng in the courtyard beside our small table in Little Tableland, luminarias lighting our way in the starlit desert night, a place we've stumbled into not by design, not by good planning, but by accident.

”To luck,” Wayne says, raising his pony of golden Spanish liquor.

I raise my gla.s.s of sparkling Perrier. ”To our very good luck.”

9 / EL CAMINO REAL.

WE thought we would get up in the morning, pack the car (a tedious operation, as we always seem to need everything we've brought with us and so haul it into the motel room like a pair of suspicious tramps), have some breakfast, and continue down the I-25 to El Paso. But there is something about Mesilla I want to see again.

”I don't know what,” I say when Merilyn asks for specifics.

”Suffering a little from tequila brain this morning?” she says. I like having a permanent designated driver, but I pay in the coinage of smug grins.

We drive back under an overpa.s.s and over an underpa.s.s, past the plaza with the giant, lit-up statue of a roadrunner, and park in one of the narrow streets of the old town. As soon as we get out of the car and walk out onto the public square, I know what it is I was after. The Old West. This is our first foray into America's outlaw culture.

Canada doesn't have an outlaw culture. In Canada, the wild west was tamed and surveyed and policed before settlers were allowed in. We didn't have a frontier, we had concessions and side roads. You don't get an outlaw culture by making concessions. Government surveyors marked out the land for farms and fences and even towns, and then the North West Mounted Police made it safe for settlers by establis.h.i.+ng laws. And when you have grids and laws, you don't get outlaws; you get criminals.

An outlaw isn't a criminal; an outlaw is a person who inhabits a place where there is no law (or thinks he does). In frontier America, one of those places was the desert territory south and east of Santa Fe. During the Civil War, La Mesilla was the capital of the Confederate Territory of Arizona, an area that included most of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, which is no doubt why it had a courthouse. (The ”La” has since been dropped, though town boosters are lobbying to bring it back.) Even after the war, La Mesilla was an important centre until the railway was built through Las Cruces in 1881. Since then, Mesilla has existed mainly for tourists, while Las Cruces has swollen into a metropolis of almost a hundred thousand people. La Mesilla is hanging on for dear life. Except for the occasional gift shop, it hasn't even put a lot of effort into tarting itself up for tourists. We like that.

Walking along the boardwalk that circles the small bandstand in the Mesilla plaza, we pa.s.s a pink adobe building on the southeast corner called the Billy the Kid Gift Shop. The sign is a reproduction of the only known portrait of Henry McCarty, also known as Henry Antrim, William H. Bonney, and, most famously, Billy the Kid-a young, bucktoothed, inoffensive-looking fellow reputed to have killed twenty-one men, one for every year of his life. He was certainly responsible for the deaths of at least four men during the Lincoln County Cattle War, a kind of Hatfield-and-McCoy feud over grazing rights in which, because there were no lawmen yet, both sides hired professional gunslingers to protect them while they rustled each other's cattle. It may be true that Bonney killed people with a little more enthusiasm than most, but he was far from unique. He was simply the one who was caught rather than shot.

At his trial, which was held in La Mesilla in 1881, Bonney was found guilty of murdering a man named Brady and sentenced to hang. He was moved from here to Lincoln but escaped by killing his two guards and riding off, still handcuffed, into the desert. The relentless Pat Garrett rode after him and two months later found him and shot him in Fort Sumner, at the home of their mutual friend Pedro Maxwell.

Garrett was also a gunman and a murderer, but he'd been appointed deputy sheriff of Lincoln County, and Bonney had a price on his head. Except for the star, there wasn't much to distinguish the two. I think of Garrett as the original gumshoe, the character in American detective novels who, although nominally on the side of the law, resorts to methods of pursuit and capture barely distinguishable from those of the criminals he is supposed to be saving us from. In fact, the word ”gumshoe” originally meant ”thief,” because thieves wore rubber-soled shoes in order to sneak around more effectively, which is why Americans call running shoes ”sneakers.” Eventually, lawmen took to wearing gumshoes so that they could sneak around after the thieves and ended up becoming gumshoes themselves. Pat Garrett was a gumshoe in cowboy boots, which would make him, I suppose, a gumboot.

Merilyn and I browse through the Billy the Kid Gift Shop, but I am more interested in the building than I am in owning the head of Wile E. Coyote on the end of a pencil. The structure itself doesn't seem to have changed much since Bonney's day: thick adobe walls, round posts holding up a low, flat roof. If this is really the courthouse in which the trial took place, it was a good choice. A bullet from a six-gun could never whistle through these walls. I remember all those television shows and westerns, in which shopkeepers wearing suspenders (you could always tell the shopkeepers by their suspenders) huddled behind their thin walls as bullets splintered patterns of daylight into the boards above their heads. Even as a kid I wondered why Hollywood didn't build thicker walls.

Between 1920 and 1950, Hollywood made five hundred movies set in Canada, every one of them filmed in California. The sets presented an imaginary Canada-vast unpopulated snowfields, lonely Mounties, scores of lakes hemmed in by st.u.r.dy pines. Perhaps those Hollywood westerns depicted a fake Wild West, too. I do remember reading that very few outlaws wore handguns in leather holsters. Handguns were hard to keep in a holster when riding a horse, impossible to aim accurately, and no good at all for distance. The favoured weapon of the outlaw was the Winchester rifle. And yet we see all these gunslingers in the movies slapping leather in dusty plazas like the one we're circling in La Mesilla.

There is a bookstore on the square, the Mesilla Book Center, one of the best we've seen in days. It was closed the night before, but now its door is wide open. That's the other reason I wanted to come back. The shelves have books from years ago, still at their original prices. I come across a first edition of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which I haven't read since it was published in 1970. The book is a montage of prose and poetry, an a.s.semblage of perspectives on the life of William Bonney, fragmented and isolated, and mostly taking place in the desert between his trial here in Mesilla and his death in Fort Sumner. Hollywood may be comfortable with the notion that you can always tell the good guys from the bad guys by the colour of their hats, but Ondaatje isn't so sure: There was good mixed with the bad in Billy the Kid and bad mixed with the good in Pat Garrett.

It seems a very Canadian thing to say.

MESILLA behind us, we stop for a walk in the Chihuahuan, our third desert on this trip and the largest in North America. One of the books Wayne bought in the bookstore was A Natural State: Essays on Texas, by Stephen Harrigan, a naturalist and an inveterate desert walker.