The accents began to change in the filling stations and the truck stops, and then in the early dawn I saw the first mesa in the Panhandle. It rose out of the flat country like a geological accident, its edges lighted with a pink glow, the eroded gullies filled with purple shadow. The cotton and cornfields were behind me now, and also the patent medicine and MARTHA WHITE’S SELF RISING FLOUR SIGNS, the vegetables and watermelons sold off the backs of trucks along the roadsides, the revival tents set back in empty pastures, the South itself. It simply slipped past me over some invisible boundary that had nothing to do with geographical designation, and then it was Dalhart and Texline, where the grain silos stood gray against the hot sky and clouds of dust, and finally Raton, New Mexico.
I was in a stupor from the No-Doze and case of beer that I had drunk in the last twenty-four hours, and my eyes burned with the shimmer of heat off the blacktop. I put my head under a filling-station hose and let the water sluice down my neck and face and then ate a steak in the cafe. But I was finished. My hands, lined with the black imprint of the steering wheel, were shaking, my back ached when I walked, and I could still feel the truck’s engine vibrating up through my legs.
The filling-station operator said I could park my truck behind the building overnight, and I unrolled my sleeping bag in the bed and used the tarpaulin and my shirt as a pillow. For a while in the softness of the sleeping bag I was aware of the semis hissing air on the highway and shifting down for the long pull up Raton Pass; then I felt myself drop down into the smell of the canvas and the cool air against my face and a quietness inside me.
The next morning was like an infusion into the soul, a feeling that you can only have after you dissipate all the mental and physical energy in yourself, to the point that you know you will never return from it. And on this morning it was really the West. The town lay flat against the mountains, which climbed steadily out of brown hills into the high, green timber of the Rocky Mountain range. The broken streets of the town were lined with stucco and adobe houses, outbuildings, chicken yards, and junker cars with weeds growing up through the frames. Mexican kids roared along the sidewalks in roller-skate wagons, Indians with creased faces like withered apples waited in front of the state labor office for the doors to open, and the sky was alive with a green-blue magic that was so hard and beautiful that I had to blink a little when I looked at it.
But it was the mountains and the early light in the pines more than anything else. As I shifted down to second for the two-mile grade up Raton Pass, the mountains seemed to tumble one upon another ahead of me, bluer in the distance, spread across the sky in a broken monolith that should have cracked the earth’s edges. The needle on the temperature gauge was almost beyond the dash, and the gearshift was knocking in my palm when I crossed the Colorado state line at the top and rolled into the old town of Trinidad.
I bought two six-packs of Coors and pushed the cans deep into a sack of crushed ice on the floor, and highballed down the four-lane through Pueblo, a decaying, soot-covered town with plumes of ugly smoke rising from tin buildings, on up the steady incline toward Denver, with the mountains always blue and tumbling higher into the clouds on my left. Denver looked wonderful, filled with fir and spruce trees, green lawns and parks with tulip gardens. I ate Mexican food in a cafe north of town. Then it was Fort Collins and Cheyenne and a straight roll into the late red sun across the cinnamon-colored land of Wyoming toward the Montana line.
Deer grazed in the sparse grass, their summer coats almost indistinguishable in the fading purple light, and after dark I almost hit a doe and fawn that stood transfixed in my headlights by the side of the road. I picked up two drunk Indian hitchhikers, who both wore blue-jean jackets with two shirts underneath and sat pressed together in the cab in some type of isolation from me, passing a bottle of dago red back and forth. After we had driven fifty miles, they bothered to ask me how far I was going, and I told them I hoped to make it to Billings before I stopped. I saw their wine-stained teeth grin in the dashboard light.
“You better stay at my place tonight. You ain’t going to make it to Billings,” one of them said, and he took a cigarette off the dash without asking.
“Why can’t I make it to Billings?”
“Because you can?
?t. You ought to know that, man,” he said.
I looked at him, but he had already lost attention and was staring into the cigarette smoke with his flat, obsidian eyes.
The sound of the engine hummed in my head, and the headlights briefly illuminated the names chiseled into the concrete faces of the bridges over dried-out riverbeds, MEDICINE BOW, PLATTE, SHOSHONI, each a part of something old and thundering with war ponies.
I stayed at the Indian man’s place that night, on the edge of the Big Horn Mountains. He had ten acres on the reservation and a Montgomery Ward brick house with a chicken yard and a few dozen rabbit hutches and the most beautiful Indian wife I had ever seen. They put blankets on the sofa for me and went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. The highway was spinning in my head, and I couldn’t close my hands. I walked across the chicken yard to the outhouse and then sat on the edge of the sofa and smoked cigarettes in the dark. The solitary electric bulb screwed into the ceiling clicked on, and the Indian stood above me in his socks and jockey shorts, with a line of black hair running up out of the elastic over his metallic stomach.
“You can’t sleep good, man?” he said.
“I just need to wind it down a little bit. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“We’ll go to the tavern and find you a girlfriend. Then we’ll drink some beer together and you’ll be all right.”
“I wouldn’t be good company for anybody right now.”
“You got some snakes crawling around? That ain’t no big thing. Lots of people on the reservation is like that. Come down to the tavern. You’ll see.”
“I’d better pass. But I appreciate it. I really do.”
“You got a race thing about Indian girls?”
“No, I’m not like that.”
“You’re a nice-looking guy. You ain’t a queer, either. You shouldn’t be traveling around without no woman.”
Then I didn’t know what to say. I put out my cigarette in an empty beer can and pushed my hand back through my hair, hoping that he would turn off the light and let it end there.
“I ain’t one to poke in your business, but I think your in-sides is all stove in,” he said. “I recognize it. Indians get like that before they kill themselves.”
“I was in the Louisiana pen. I guess I haven’t gotten used to rolling around loose yet. They say it takes a while.”
“Get up, Irene,” he said through the curtain that hung from the bedroom door.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“No, it’s all right, man. We’ll drink together and then you can sleep. I was in jail over in Deer Lodge. I got myself put in the hole so’s I could sleep. People was always yelling and banging iron doors all night.”
His wife came out in a robe and sat silently at the table while he pulled out the beer from the icebox. Her eyes were brown and quiet, the dark skin of one cheek still lined with the creases of the pillow, and I could see the tops of her olive breasts below the V of her robe. While we drank beer and rolled cigarettes out of a large Half and Half can, she looked flatly through the back window as though she were at the table as a feminine duty. On the third six-pack I began to perspire, and the control in my conversation and mind started to slip away in the yellow electric light, the match blisters on my fingers, and the confused sentences and beer cans covered with cigarette stubs.