Part 12 (1/2)

”At least we don't glory in it. Not yet, at any rate.”

It's the middle of the afternoon, New Year's Day, and Merilyn has ordered a margarita. She's been reading about margaritas in the brochures. There's also a brochure about the artwork hanging in the lobby, one of which is a reproduction (surely) of Augustus John's portrait of James Joyce.

”Did you know the margarita was invented in Juarez?” she says. I tell her I did not. I thought it had been invented by Hemingway in Key West. ”That was the daiquiri,” Merilyn replies.

”Apparently,” she goes on, ”Pancho Morales was working as a bartender at Tommy's Place, a bar in Juarez, in 1942, when a woman came in and ordered a drink he'd never heard of.”

”Probably a b.l.o.o.d.y Caesar,” I say.

”So Morales mixed her some tequila, Cointreau, lime juice, and a lot of ice, and named it after his wife. Isn't that nice?”

”Inspiring,” I say. ”I once invented a drink. Did I tell you? We were in the Gobi Desert, it was hot, and all we had was a bottle of gin and a case of canned peaches, for some reason, so I mixed the gin with peach syrup from the cans. We didn't have any ice. We drank it, but I don't think you'd want it to be known as a merilyn.”

”No, probably not.”

”What happened to Pancho?” I ask.

”He immigrated to the United States and spent the next twenty-five years working as a milkman.”

We raise our gla.s.ses. ”Sic transit gloria mundi,” I say.

Another customer walks into the bar. The waitress shows him to the table next to ours. He has long hair, gla.s.ses, and a beard and is wearing a battered brown fedora, a baggy sports jacket, and cargo pants. He orders a beer, then opens a book and, without taking off his hat, proceeds to mind his own business. The book is called Luxury Hotels. He's a second-storey man, I surmise, a diamond thief, although he looks a bit hefty for a cat burglar. A second book lies on the table beside the beer: Theories of Perception. Okay, he might be harmless enough, but he could be a demonic cult leader with a taste for high living. Billy the Kid looked harmless, too. Best to let him be.

”Hi there,” Merilyn calls across to him. ”Are you an environmental refugee, like us?”

The man closes his book, keeping his index finger between the pages, and looks at us. ”I was in Was.h.i.+ngton trying to get home to Santa Fe,” he says, ”but the plane couldn't land in Albuquerque because of the snow, so we were diverted to this G.o.dforsaken place. Nice hotel, scary city.”

”Was.h.i.+ngton?” I say. Plenty of weird cults in Was.h.i.+ngton.

”Visiting my mother,” he says.

Right. ”Is this one of the luxury hotels in your book?” I ask him.

”No,” he says, looking around. ”It would have been when it was built, though, which was just after the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Pancho Villa is supposed to have ridden his horse right into this lobby.”

”It's a good thing he didn't fire off his six-shooter,” Merilyn says, and we all look up at the Tiffany dome.

”I don't think it was there then,” says the stranger.

After a bit more chatting, we introduce ourselves. Our new friend's name is Mike Fischer: he's not a cult leader, after all, but a designer-builder from Santa Fe. He pa.s.ses us his card: Santa Fe Adobe Design. ”I build houses.” He's stranded in El Paso until the Albuquerque airport reopens; then he'll have to fly from here to Albuquerque and take the airport shuttle to Santa Fe. Merilyn tells him we're driving back to Albuquerque in the morning, and he's welcome to come with us.

He looks dubious. ”Are you sure?”

”Plenty of room,” I say. ”You could be stuck here for days.”

The next morning we have our first pa.s.senger, not counting the deer. When I bring the car up from the underground garage and park in front of the hotel, Mike climbs in without commenting on the condition of the Echo's hood and headlight.

”What kind of houses do you build?” Merilyn asks him as we thread our way out of El Paso back onto the I-25.

”I use a lot of adobe,” he says.

He studied architecture at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, in his home state, but felt a growing disaffection for the international, box-style, Brutalist designs of the 1960s that grew out of Le Corbusier's obsession with poured concrete. When he moved to Santa Fe thirty years ago, he worked in construction in order to gain a hands-on appreciation for building techniques and local materials. He became intrigued by adobe. ”It's a lot more forgiving than other building materials,” he says. ”You can shape it, and slight imperfections actually make it look better. A house made from adobe is more sculpture than architecture. And more authentic: in New Mexico, you can't get much more authentic than adobe.”

It strikes me as odd, I tell him, that a desert people would adopt a building style that requires so much water. Adobe is clay mixed with water and pressed into a form to make a brick, which is then taken out of the form and baked for three days in the sun.

”Each brick,” Mike says, ”required a gallon of water, and a typical New Mexican pueblo would have used tens of thousands of bricks.”

Although most of the ancient pueblos in the Southwest, he tells us, were made from stones and mortar, many were located near springs that provided year-round water or on arroyos that concentrated water during the brief rainy seasons. The bricks in some of these pueblos are often slumped and misshapen, as though they were used before they were completely dried, suggesting haste to build while the arroyo was still running.

”This was true of San Marcos, one of the largest pueblo villages in the Southwest,” Mike says. ”At one time it housed more than seven thousand people.”

”Is it still around?” Merilyn asks.

”No, it was abandoned in the late 1600s, shortly after the Pueblo Revolt.”

Sparked by the Spaniards' brutal suppression of native religions, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 pushed the Spanish out of Santa Fe all the way back to the Rio Grande. The Puebloans then set about erasing every vestige of European culture they could find: they burned Christian churches (and a few friars), repurified baptized natives by was.h.i.+ng them with yucca soap, nullified Christian marriages, renamed Spanish settlements and missions. In an excess of purity, they even destroyed Spanish crop seeds and tore up introduced plant species such as fruit trees. This final symbolic gesture might have been one too many, for eight years later the Puebloan leader Luis Tupatu sent an emissary to El Paso del Norte asking the Spanish governor to return: his people, he said, were starving.

About halfway between El Paso and Albuquerque, we stop at the Bosque del Apache again to stretch our legs and look at birds. The Apache and the Navajo eventually replaced the Puebloans, who had been in decline in the lowland deserts since the horrendous twenty-five-year drought that lasted from 1276 to about 1300. Drought meant no rainy season, and no rainy season meant no food and no adobe. The Puebloans of the highlands, along the San Juan River in Chaco Canyon, in Mesa Verde, and around Santa Fe and Taos (where there was water), managed to hang on, but by the end of the seventeenth century the Apache had the fertile bosques along the Rio Grande pretty much to themselves. These bosques, bright green strips of cottonwood, Russian olive, and tamarisk, provided summer camps for the Apache, who spent the season stocking up on fish, ducks, and geese. And not only Apaches; while we train our binoculars on a flotilla of sandhill cranes, a coyote trots out onto the causeway and gives us a long, territorial look.

”Time for lunch,” I say, thinking about the coyote heading toward the cranes, but Mike takes my comment more personally.

”We're close to San Antonio,” he says, looking at his watch. ”We could have a burger at the Owl Cafe.”

I recognize the sign for the Owl Cafe, a low, windowless building not far from the I-25. Without knowing it, Merilyn and I had parked nearby on our way down to El Paso to look at a gray flycatcher, a small tyrant the colour of sky in a Dutch painting. Mike fills us in on the cafe's history. The cafe's first owner was Conrad Hilton's father, but the place is mainly famous for having been the favoured haunt of scientists working on the Manhattan Project in nearby Los Alamos, in 1945. Apparently, they would take a break from splitting atoms to come down here to drink beer and eat Jose Miera's fiery green-chili cheeseburgers. They must have felt that their chemistry and Miera's were fairly closely related.

The cafe is noisy, dark, and crowded; the tables and the long bar in the first room are full, and a waitress leads us through two more dining areas before finding an empty booth. Of course we order the chili cheeseburgers. Mike and Merilyn order root beers, and I ask for a pint of draft. Merilyn wonders aloud what happened to all the people in the area who were exposed to radiation during the bomb testing.

”Maybe they mutated into little emaciated bald people with big eyes,” I say. ”They could have been the so-called aliens that were sent to Roswell.”

Mike laughs. ”What a cover-up,” he says.

I was joking, but now when I look around the crowded room I'm not so sure. Why is it so dark in here? Why do all the men leave their ball caps on? What kind of fuel fires the grill?

”How do they get these burgers so hot?” I ask, chugging half my beer.

”Hot?” says Mike. ”This isn't hot.”

I look at him suspiciously. Is he one of them?

MY son, when I talk to him from the pay phone outside the cafe, says it is so warm back home that he's not yet wearing his winter coat. ”s.h.i.+p it here,” I tell him. ”I'm freezing.”

”Odd time to be making a trip like this,” Mike muses from the back seat as we near snow-covered Albuquerque. It didn't seem odd to us. We think of ourselves as travellers, not tourists: we prefer the off-season. But as we head back into a landscape that looks more like Nunavik than New Mexico, I wonder if maybe Mike doesn't have a point.

When we drop him off at the airport, he says if we're ever in his city we should look him up. We tell him we will.

”Let's go this afternoon,” Wayne says as we drive back into Albuquerque.

”We have to rent a car anyway,” I say. ”And the I-25 seems to be open going north. Let's do it.” Spontaneous planning: the best of both our worlds.

It is mid-morning when we pull in under the sedate porte cochere of Jess Munos Auto Body shop. No wrecks, no grease monkeys in sight. This might be a computer repair business or the front office of a genteel moving company. A friendly, clean-cut man named John takes the keys to our crumpled Echo. He is an enthusiastic local booster. When he hears we might be going to Santa Fe, he tells us not to miss the San Miguel Mission, the oldest church in North America.