Chapter 12

The Time Machine

Norma Jean sat quietly, as Lev continued, with this story.

“After a few days,” he said, “it did combust, externally.  The princess ran out of clean laundry and asked her prince to go to the house of her husband and child and pick up some of her clothes.  When the wild Mexican knocked on the screen-door, the husband shot him in an eye with a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, no peacemaker.  The bullet went through the Mexican’s head and out the back of his neck.

            “Of course the husband went to jail, but the wild Mexican didn’t die.  The husband was convicted of attempted murder, and the Mexican only lost an eye, and a lot of mobility.  The husband remained demobilized in a prison cell for years, but the Mexican was walking with a cane within a few months.  No, I’m not kidding.

            “The last time I was up there at the saloon, the princess was tending bar.  She wasn’t wearing the Stetson I’d seen her wear before, and her hair was cut in a pageboy haircut, a little like Jackie Fits used to wear, not a cowboy-cut at all.  But the wild Mexican was right there with her, sitting by the woodstove that heats the place.

            “His cane leaned in the corner, and his shot-out eye was loosely shut.  He didn’t recognize me, but the princess looked up and named my poison, although I hadn’t been there for more than a year.  The first time I’d seen the wild Mexican, he was standing next to the princess.  I’d bowed to kiss her cheek, but didn’t do it.  A glare from the prince stopped me dead.  Dead in my tracks in that ghost town.

            “Of course I was already dead.  But I didn’t see any point in making a point of it there, in that good-time-fiddling dancehall-Saturday-night.  Then there was no reason to pick a fight with anyone, with either of those miserable happy creatures.  I don’t know what happened to the husband, but I’m sure the others are together, happy as can be.

            “It’s a strange place, that ghost-town.  You’ll see more tonight, and you’ll see more tomorrow.  Sundays, the best musicians of this cattle county gather in the front room of the saloon and try each other happily, while Penrod and Mary brew up some road-kill stew on that potbelly stove.  Some things never get as dead as I.”

            The four of us tried not to look at Norma Jean.  We were afraid this story of Lev’s might turn her into a blubbering idiot.  But, after a few seconds, I didn’t hear any blubbering, and so I braved a look.  Norma was staring into the table as I had seen Lev stare into the river.  But I heard no sobs, saw no tears on her cheeks.

            Oliver and Slavey, looking also at the table, still didn’t look at her.  But Theresa was looking at her little blonde bowed head, and Theresa’s thumbs were resting ready on top of her index fingers, as her hands rested ready on the table.  She was ready at an instant to take Norma’s little blonde head into her hands and hold her.

            But Norma lifted her little blonde head and smiled around at all of us.

            “Bittersweet,” she said.  “Bittersweet.  That’s what I said.”

            Now Lev was looking sadly down, into the depths of his own river.

            But he perked to help perk Norma.

            “That guy I was talking to at the bar told me he’s a treasure-hunter,” said Lev, looking up, at Norma and then at me.  “He says there’s drug-money buried in these brown hills.  He told me that the newspaper here has reported a person who died in prison but never turned over any money, and he said there are other events like that, that never hit a newspaper.  He says he thinks some of the money might still be in the hills.”

            “What kind of treasure-hunter is that?” asked Norma.  “Aren’t treasure-hunters supposed to be looking for gold doubloons sunk to the bottom of the ocean?”

            “That’s what I wondered,” said Lev.  “I could understand someone wishing to do something like that, for the adventure.  I don’t understand why someone would want to hang around with a bunch of drug-dealers just to find out where to dig up some money.”

            “Neither do I,” said Oliver.  “It seems to me that people might wish to have some reason to live, some kind of productive purpose for their lives.”

            “Or just for beauty,” added Slavey, “as Norma said.”

            “Yes,” answered Theresa.  “It’s like religion.  People try to make religion into ritual or rules and totally ignore the sense of their own hearts that the only worthy reason to live is to make others happy, and that that’s the way to find happiness for oneself.  Bob told this world that in his second commandment, saying it’s like the first one.  But people ignore both commandments, by leaving out the second.  Anyway, being happy for one’s neighbor beats the hell out of drugs.  Does he have any kids?”

            “No,” said Lev.  “He said he just travels around with his wife in a camper-truck.”

            “Maybe,” suggested Theresa, “He just likes to be alone with his wife.”

            “He invited me to play golf with him tomorrow,” answered Lev.

            “And no one’s with him here,” I added.  “Are you going?”

            “Hell, no,” said Lev.  “We’ve got better things to do than beat a ball across some brown grass.  Tomorrow’s Sunday, the jam-session up at White Oaks, and we’d better get back to the motel and change, if we’re going to the dance tonight.”

            “I’m hungry,” said Norma Jean.  “Can we eat first?  I haven’t been hungry since I made that stupid choice in ’62.  I can hardly wait to see if a ghost can enjoy a meal like I did when I was alive on Earth every day.”

            “It wasn’t an entirely stupid choice,” said Theresa.  “It was time for you to find new friends.  So how do you like these other boys?”

            “Lev’s a little ghastly,” answered Norma.  “But I didn’t know boys could be so much like girls.  Do you guys know if I’ll ever see Jimmy again?”

            “You’ll see him again,” said Theresa.

            “Good,” replied Norma, smiling again.  “But I’m still hungry.  What do they have here?  Do they have a menu?  Is it any good, Lev?”

            “I know a better place,” said Lev, without a moment’s pause.  “Just up the street, a little Mexican diner, the only other restaurant in town.”

            “As long as I don’t have to wait tables,” said Norma Jean.

            So we made the trek across the street and piled into the pickup, the girls in front with lucky me driving again and the other boys in the back with a cooler Lev had filled with beer.  The pickup had no seatbelts!  But what had we to fear?

            The diner was just what a diner is, a long counter with stools, and booths opposite.  We sat in one of the booths and ate tacos and cheese and chopped lettuce and beans like any self-respecting Mexican, and Norma didn’t bother wiping her face until she was finished eating.  Then she looked around and grinned.

            “Boy that was good,” she said.

            Back at the motel, we duded up in cowboy clothes, to give the natives something to make fun of, and we headed up the hill.  Lev insisted on driving, and the girls insisted on riding in the back.  I insisted on riding in the back, with them.  They laughed more than the others.  Dead or immortal, girls.  Yes!

            I was sorry Beatrice wasn’t with us, but I didn’t know how to explain to her what we were about, and I didn’t think it would make her happier, since she was already happy, with her life.  So I thought of her and sent her little brain-mail pulses to make her think of me and smile.  We space-creatures can do that.

            Up at White Oaks, past the winding road bordered with barbed-wire fence and dry brown grass and cattle grazing, we piled out of the pickup in dusk.  The last horse was leaving, the last cowboy who had stopped there during the day for a beer and neglected to go back to work, anyway on that one day.

            Lev tipped his hat to the departing cowboy and swaggered into the saloon, his spurs jingling.  Penrod was sitting at the table nearest the stove, playing poker with some cowboys, using nickels as chips.

            “Uh oh,” said Penrod.  “Look what just blew into Dodge.”

            “Gi’ me a beer,” said Lev, sticking his thumbs in his belt-loops.

            “You know where it is,” said Penrod.  “Mary ain’t got time for you.”

            “I can’t see the cooler,” said Lev.  “Where’d you get that bar?”

            Lev had told me that the saloon didn’t have a bar, that it still had the old wooden drugstore counter like the one in the movie The Grapes of Wrath, from which the kids had gotten the candy through the kindness of the caretaker of the roadside grocery.

            “Oh, somewhere,” said Penrod.  “I stole it from one of these empty old buildings.  I got tired of having people sit on the bar instead of at the bar, and so I got a bar they could belly up to.  Who are those beautiful women you’ve got with you?”

            “Friends,” said Lev, turning back to look at his entourage, his thumbs still in his belt-loops.  “Norma and Theresa.  The guys are competition, but not much competition.  I think they’re city-slickers.  You know how that goes.  How are you, Mary?”

            By this time, beautiful little Mexican Mary had brought him a beer.

            “What do your friends want?” she asked.

            “The same,” said all of us in unison.

            “Easy to please,” said Mary.

            “Let me do it,” said Norma Jean.

            Norma walked around the end of the bar to the cooler and opened it.  With her two cool hands, she scooped four cans of Coors out of the ice and set them on the bar all at once, then popped the tops, two at a time.

            “There you go, boys,” she said.  “You too, Theresa.”

            She didn’t look around for glasses, as Mary had not given Lev a glass, and none were in sight, anyway.  Mary wiped her hands on a towel, as though she had done the work herself, and smiled at Norma and Lev.

            “How do we pay?” asked Norma, as we grabbed our beers from the bar.

            “If you do it yourself,” said little Mary, “just leave the money on the cooler, a buck a beer.  But Johnny’ll be here any minute to tend that for the dance.  Then we can relax and have a good time.”

            And we did.  The princess and the wild Mexican were not there, but the place was full of people young and old.  No one shot pool, because none of the sticks had tips on them, and no one felt like dealing with the challenge of that.  A cowboy named Curtis led a band of his own with his violin, and everybody danced.

            Lev invented a Russian version of a Mexican hat dance, and he and Norma took turns endangering their hats with the nonsense of it.  Lev started to tell someone how much at home he felt in pointed-toed boots, but he remembered just in time that his explanation would have required mentioning his experience with the hussars of the previous century.  Norma Jean felt no need to explain anything.

            Missing Beatrice, I didn’t dance much, but Slavey and Oliver danced with every woman and girl in the place.  They invaded the bandstand, the little plywood platform at the back of the dancehall, and sang a duet of Kris Kristofferson’s song “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”  After all, it was their wake.

            But, come midnight, Norma and Lev closed the festivities.  Lev borrowed Curtis’s fiddle and played “The Way We Were”, as Norma Jean sang it.  After that, everyone was ready to go home and go to sleep, for whatever reason.  Perchance to dream.

            Going back to the motel, I drove again.  And the girls sat up front with me again, as the other boys shivered in the back.  Of course immortals and ghosts don’t need to shiver, but they wished to show their respect, their chivalry anyway.  The girls rode cozy in the front, as the push-button radio played whatever they wished.

            In the morning, late as though we still needed dreams of our own, we rolled out and refilled at the little Mexican diner.  I drove again, with Slavey and Oliver in the front with me, as Lev and the girls sat in the back enjoying the reason the state of New Mexico pictures the sun on its flag.  Up the hill at White Oaks, we found no horses outside as it was Sunday, and inside we found people playing guitars and singing.

            Not many, a few in the front, not in the back in the dancehall, but this was a different sort of celebration.  Curtis wasn’t there, but his girlfriend was, and she was the only person there we’d seen the night before.  We nodded around and grabbed some beers and left the dollars on the cooler.  We listened, leaning at the bar, until a pause.

            “Who owns that big brick house?” I asked, referring to a mansion on the slope behind the saloon.  I had a hunch it was residue of the gold-boom days and so might have some residual stories the people there enjoyed.

            “Nobody knows,” said one of the women there.  “We just all live there.  Maybe a ghost owns it.  This is a ghost town, you know.  Maybe we own it.”

            “Where’s Penrod?” I asked.

            “Looking for gold,” said a young man sitting at the table between the stove and the musicians.  He wasn’t wearing a Stetson or cowboy boots, and his clothes clearly needed laundering.  He took a slurp from his can of beer.

            “Where’s Mary?” I asked.

            “Home, I guess,” said the woman who had reminded me that this was a ghost-town.  “Who knows?  They trust us!  What are you all doing up here on a Sunday afternoon?  Well, this guy’s a pretty good fiddler, I hear.”

            Until now, Curtis’s girlfriend’s guitar had remained in its case.  Now she took it out with some songs typed on paper with no musical staff but with chords noted here and there.  She laid the paper back in the guitar-case and began to strum and sing, looking down into the case at the paper.  She showed no certainty of anything.

            “What happened to what’s-his-name?” asked Lev, after the young woman ended the song.  “The guy from El Paso.”

            Lev had told me another story, about a rancher from El Paso who had come to Lincoln County hoping for the promise of the name of Carrizozo, with a young woman.  He had told me that the man seemed very angry and alone, while the woman seemed alone but not so angry, and wished with all her heart to make music.

            “The first time I talked with the man,” had said Lev, “was the first time I was up at White Oaks, and I told him I hadn’t ridden a horse in a while.  It was a weekday afternoon, and he told me that his was out front and that I could ride it all I wanted.

            “I had no intention of riding the man’s horse, but I went outside in the interest of politeness and curiosity to look at the horse, but no horse was in sight.  So I stood a moment in the setting sunlight and went inside and told him so.

            “’Are you calling me a liar?’ said the man.

            “I said simply that I was simply saying that I saw no horse outside, but the man continued in his profession that I had insulted him, and others there said I might do well not to hang around right then, and I’m too old for dueling now, anyway.  I hope I always was, and so I left, for then.  But I kept coming back.

            “I liked this crazy place, and I liked that crazy man with his senseless logic.  So, after a few weeks of tiptoeing around him, I walked straight up to him and apologized, although I didn’t know for what.  He took my offered hand, and we became regular conversationalists.  We drank one night at his home.

            “That was when I got the hint of what the trouble was.  He had suggested that I come to his little house-trailer on the rangeland he was hoping to develop, because he thought I was too drunk to drive down the hill.  On arrival, I asked him where his girlfriend was.  He told me she was out, no explanation.”

            Lev had told that story also without explanation, as he tells all his stories without explanation, letting narration stand on its own merit.  I considered the possibility that the man had invited Lev up because he was homosexual, and that his wife was with another man because she wasn’t.  But I let the narration stand on its merit.

            I mean in my mind, and now I was hearing Lev ask the woman where the man was, and Lev was letting the narration turn into its own narrative.  Lev was a master of narrative, and now I knew how he did it, by seeing it everywhere.

            “He went back to El Paso,” said the young woman.  “I’m with Curtis now.  Curtis is teaching me music.  Curtis loves me, and I’m writing a song about it.  I love it up here in this ghost town, and I’m happy here with my friends.  Everyone here understands me.”

            Norma didn’t say a word, and the saloon suddenly dimmed.  The door to the road was open, and the afternoon New Mexico sun had shined through it on everyone, until that moment.  The cloud that darkened the door was a man in a black hat, limping on a cane.  Behind him in the sunlight was a blonde woman in no hat, in sandals.

            “Hey, Lev,” said the man.

            He stopped his steps and replaced his right hand with his left hand on the cane and patted a shoulder of Lev’s.  Then he switched his hands again and limped on back to the stove, where he sat on a chair set alone beside it.

            “Penrod asked us to come by and keep an eye on the place,” said the blonde woman, now the only woman in the bar without a Stetson.  “Hey, Lev.  Nice to see you again.  Are these people friends of yours?”

            Lev answered neither of them but asked the wild Mexican how he was doing.

            “Good, thanks,” said the Mexican, “Gwen takes good care of me.”

            “Hey, Lev,” said a boy now coming in from the sunlight.

            “Hey,” said Lev, with a smile very bright for him.

            “Oh!” said Lev suddenly.  “How’s Harlan?”

            He looked at the Mexican and the blonde and the boy and at everyone else, and none of the musicians seemed to react, except the princess.  She smiled at the sudden brightness of Lev’s question, but as suddenly frowned, then smiled again.

            “He’s still up there,” she said.  “Why don’t you go get him.  I haven’t seen him in a couple of days.  Go get him away from those chickens.  Yes.  Go.”

            Lev hadn’t told me about anyone named Harlan, but we took the princess’s momentum and piled in the pickup and headed further up the hill, past the blacktop onto gravel and off up a one-lane dirt-road, as high as we could go on land there.  We stopped in front of a ramshackle ranch-house with chickens running all around, and Lev leaped out of the driver seat and stared around.

            “Maybe he’s in his shop,” he said, and walked into a shed a few yards from the house, while a man walked from the house with a big grin on his face but an aura of just having been awakened, and no indication of any surprise.

            “I hope they don’t kill any horses this year,” he said as Lev emerged from his unsuccessful foray into the shed.  “I know how you feel about that.  Who are your friends?”

            “And this is Harlan,” said Lev after introducing us, “the greatest saddle-maker on Earth.  Ask the chickens, but don’t ask the power-company.  He does alright without electricity.”

            “You’re showing us too many people too fast,” said Norma Jean.  “Maybe that’s why no one can remember the names of the characters in your books.  What’s that about killing horses?”

            “It’s a tourist-attraction here,” said Harlan.  “People care more about sports than they do about history.  So every year we replicate a pony-express run with a race to White Oaks from Capitan.”

            “And,” said Lev, “most years at least one horse is run to death.  I’ve seen my share of cavalry charges, and I always feel sadder for the horses than for the humans, because the humans think it up.”

            “But you make saddles to ride them,” said Norma Jean.

            “I think it’s more comfortable for them,” answered Harlan.

            “But why ride them?  Why dominate them?”

            “They’re my friends!  It’s playing together!”

            “Anyway,” added Harlan, “I like to make saddles, and I think of it as reincarnating the cattle, and I don’t ride much anymore.  My kids do, but I don’t.”

            “Where are your kids?” asked Theresa.  “They don’t live up here, do they?”

            “All over,” said Harlan.  “They’ve grown and gone their way.”

            “But they follow in their father’s footsteps,” said Lev.

            “Well,” said Harlan, “my son’s a trainer, and my daughter’s a jockey.”

            “The winningest woman jockey in the world,” said Lev.

            “Can we see some of your saddles?” asked Norma Jean.

            “Sure, if you’d like,” said Harlan.  “Come into my shop.”

            We followed him into the shed, and he showed us saddles of many shapes and styles and different kinds of leather.  Some were plain English, and some were intricately tooled American.  One, unfinished on a work-rack, was smaller than the rest.

            “It’s a gift for a friend’s daughter,” said Harlan as Norma noticed it.

            “Do you sell many?” asked Norma.

            “Not many,” said Harlan.  “But I get enough for one to last awhile.”

            “What’s that book?” asked Norma.

            Slavey and Oliver weren’t paying much attention, but they caught Lev’s look when Norma asked that question, and they caught Harlan’s pause.  No one spoke, but Harlan picked up the book, a large leather-bound photograph-album tooled like some of his saddles.  He moved it to the center of his workbench and opened it and began to turn the pages, pointing at the photographs and speaking as he did.

            The photographs, hundreds of them, were of him and Kim Novak, the beautiful blonde movie-star who had so well played a witch in the movie Bell, Book and Candle.  None of what he said made much sense to the rest of us, all being about him and her and what she liked, and he didn’t say they were friends.  None of the rest of us said a word until he closed the book and set it back aside, and we stepped from the shed.

            “What’s this stuff?” asked Theresa, peering into an earthenware pot on a bench beside the door to the shed.

            “It’s what I glue the saddles with,” said Harlan.  “I make it myself, out of sweet-potatoes.”

            We bade the chickens goodbye and took Harlan down to the saloon.  After he got a big hug from Gwen, we drank a few more beers and listened to the drug-addicts play some more music, and bade farewell to all of them.

            “Always a pleasure to see you again, sir,” said Harlan to Lev.

            With that, we immortals and ghosts left that ghost-town.  Lev returned to New Orleans, and Norma Jean returned to Heaven.  I flew Theresa back to Detroit and Oliver back to Atlanta, and Slavey on to Harlem for his grand finale.  I returned the gooney-bird to Gene in the city named for angels and took a commercial flight back to Houston.  I was very happy to see Beatrice again, and Quincy and Ben.

            At the motel, before we split for other parts, we asked each other why we had made that trip, and why people do drugs and drink alcohol.  We immortals got nothing from it, and Norma and Lev had no ready recollection, but we each had an answer ready.

            “Boredom,” said Oliver.

            “For fun,” said Slavey.

            “To be braver than usual,” said Lev.

            “To be kinder than usual,” said Norma.

            “To forgive ourselves our weaknesses,” said I.

            “To forgive others’ also,” said Theresa.

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