American Purgatorio (17 page)

Around midday I found a monument marker indicating an Indian cliff-dwelling site. I'd already driven past several Indian information centers, but something about the layout of the parking lot, convinced me to stop. I immediately noticed the dry quiet air. The sandstone walls rising up on either side of the canyon were streaked with red. I began hiking down the steps made of railroad ties, into a riverbed with cottonwood and chaparral and piñon pine. I wanted to see no people (meaning no white people) because I wanted to see and hear only what the ancient people who lived here had to tell me. This was their place and I didn't know how they would speak to me but I was listening. To the birds flitting from branch to branch and the slow-moving stream. Even the delicate clouds, evaporating in the heat of the sun, seemed to be speaking.

Keet Seel is one of the more out-of-the-way cliff dwellings in northern Arizona, and I was alone when I got to the actual cliff, to the city that once existed in that cliff. The dwellings were made from the same red stone, built in the hollow where the cliff had fallen away, and now they were part of the cliff. I could see the actual mud mortar holding the buildings together, and I imagined the life of this village as it was when it was still alive, the women getting water, the men in their leather moccasins, not taking more than they needed, living with scarcity rather that constantly filling themselves with stuff. I was trying to make these dwellings in the desert stand for civilization or the effects of greed on civilization, but these people weren't greedy. And yet at some point in the middle of their history they disappeared, and now even the remains of that history were crumbling back into the earth.

As I walked up a slope of fallen stone and adobe, I saw at the bottom of the talus, mixed in with the rubble, a small flat piece of something in the dirt. I picked it up. It was a piece of pottery, some part of a clay vessel with black and dark red markings, mostly worn away. I looked at the markings, just a couple of dark lines and a part of a triangle shape, and I held this clue like a talisman. With it I began searching for other shards that might fit together with my shard and make some sense. I was down on my hands and knees sifting through the rough red sand, holding my shard in one hand, digging with the other.

And then I heard a voice coming from somewhere in the dwelling above me. I followed the sound of the voice up into the first level of the building. I entered a miniature doorway at the base of the structure. I could see pieces of wood sticking out of the adobe walls; there was a ladder made of well-worn tree limbs. I climbed that and emerged in an open area. A round uncovered kiva was to my right and I didn't climb any farther because I didn't want to wear away the adobe. But I listened and as I listened I heard the voice, this time behind me. I turned, and the ranger, a woman ranger, was standing there.

“What's that?” she said.

She was referring to the shard in my hand, the shard I'd found, and having found it, I wanted to keep it. I didn't want to let go of it. I thought about running, that I could probably outrun the ranger, but then what? I'd have my piece of pottery but then what?

The ranger was tan, wearing sunglasses. I stepped forward and presented her with my piece of pottery.

And that was that. Until later, when I walked back to my car. I stopped at the trailhead, near some cottonwoods, and as I stood on the sand by the barely moving stream, I imagined that no more shards would ever be found, that my shard was the last shard and now it was gone and I'd never see it again. I wished I had looked at it more carefully. If only I'd had a little more time with the shard, maybe I could have deciphered what it meant, and what it might have meant to me if it were still mine.

3.

I was traveling on the small roads now, meandering as much as I could so as to miss as little as possible. The hills of central Arizona aren't treacherous, but some of them are steep, and I was winding my way up one of the steeper ones when I noticed the car starting to stall. Maybe it was the high altitude, or I was low on gas, or the engine was hot. Whatever it was, although it was sputtering, it didn't die, and I made it to the top of the hill, to an Indian casino, and pulled into the parking area.

Inside the casino the air-conditioning was going full blast, and I sat down at a slot machine and since I had a few quarters I started to play. Each time I played I had hope. Each time I lost, a new hope took its place. My losing continued and it wasn't even luck anymore, it was mathematics, probability, and because I had to be rewarded at some point I waited for the pictographs in the machine to come into a line. I said to myself I would leave when I won, and I was waiting for that to happen.

The casino was lit in a way that made it seem both dark and bright, and there was a lot of blinking and sounds, and I was slightly lost in my excitement, waiting to hit it big. And of course the big payoff never came. I walked back out to the parking lot, having lost some of my precious money, and feeling sick almost from my overindulgence, I got in the car. As I made the right turn out of the casino, on the way down the hill, the car engine stopped. It just stopping going. I felt it had something to do with that casino, or the corruption of the traditional Indian way of life, but it didn't matter because the car was dead. I should say the engine was dead because the car itself hadn't stopped moving. It was going down the hill and the wheels of the car didn't know anything was wrong, they kept moving, and I coasted along, all the way down to a town at the bottom of the hill. As I turned a corner the car slowed and settled to a stop in front of a real estate office.

The car sounded, when I tried to start it, as if gas wasn't getting to the engine. Pushing the pedal did nothing. A man coming out of the office directed me to an auto parts store and the man there told me to test the fuel filter by blowing through it to see if it was clear. And when I took off the old filter and couldn't blow through it, I bought a new one. With a screwdriver and a pair of pliers I replaced the clogged fuel filter, but when I tried to start the car, it didn't do any good.

A car-repair shop was visible at one end of the town, and when the traffic along the two-lane main street had passed, I pushed the car across the road and down to where the broken cars were parked. Fortunately for me, the Pulsar was a subcompact, and by standing at the open driver's-side door, I could push and steer at the same time, which I did. A man in overalls told me it would take three days to fix, so I walked down the street to another place, where a guy named Larry suggested what might be the problem. Fuel pump, he said, which was a major repair, or major enough, because by this time I was beginning to be concerned about my dwindling supply of money. I still had credit cards, but because I wanted to conserve my resources, even though he told me it was imperative to repair the problem, I did something else.

I bought a Gatorade at a main-street market. I looked around at the pine-tree mountains, and after I drank my drink, the car, for some reason, started. I drove to Larry, who seemed like a compassionate mechanic. He found part of a broken vacuum tube that was causing the car to stall and he glued it together with epoxy, for free.

As I drove out of town, up through the switchback mountains, the landscape got prettier and greener, and I was hoping my car difficulties were over. I was tired of difficulties, tired of the stress on my system, and to relieve the stress, when I came upon a crater lake I pulled into the parking lot. It was a green lake with rock outcroppings around the edges, and I stood at the viewpoint and looked at the lake, and when I went back to the car it didn't start. I was thinking I should have left it running, but my habit now was to wait a few minutes and try again, and after a few minutes of waiting, sure enough, it started.

Continuing along toward Flagstaff, I saw a congregation of people on the side of the road. The sun was setting and the people were watching, off in the distance, a herd of elk ranging in a green river meadow. People were looking through binoculars and so I pulled over, took out my worthless antique binoculars, and of course couldn't see anything through the clouded glass, but as I was looking, the car stopped running. A man leaning against a pickup truck offered to help. He said he knew something about cars, and after reaching under the hood, he told me there was something clogging the fuel line, some particle of dirt or carbon, and he suggested I fix it immediately.

The man followed me along for a while but I was fine. I waved him on. Every time I was about to stall I would shift into neutral, and in this way I drove into Flagstaff, to the area where the automotive repair shops were. They were already closed for the day, so I spent the night in the car on a side street.

I spent the next day talking with mechanics in Flagstaff, starting with an Indian guy who was working at Bill's on Route 66. Then the Nissan place, which was expensive. An old man in front of a discount store told me to put cleaning solvent in the gas tank and carburetor. Which I did. But as I drove up the hill leading out of town it stalled again, this time in the middle of a busy road, and so I found a long-haired kid mechanic who said something about a new air cleaner. I went to an educated mechanic, who sent me to a hairy mechanic, who sent me to a mad scientist mechanic. But because the trouble I was having was transitory, because when they looked at the car everything seemed to be functioning, none of them could help.

And the reason I didn't leave the car with these mechanics had something to do with the price they'd be charging, and something to do with risk. There was a pleasure in pushing my luck. And it wasn't that I was enjoying the car trouble, but I was becoming used to it, almost addicted to it. The car trouble was distracting me from something else, which had nothing to do with the car, but the car was what I was focusing on.

4.

It was late afternoon when I drove out of Flagstaff, and when I turned off the road, I thought I was turning into the sacred Wupatki Pueblo National Monument, but I ended up instead turning into the Sunset Crater National Monument. Since it was getting close to sunset, instead of reading any informational literature, I decided to sit on a rock and have a picnic. I was eating an apple, looking at the slanting light hit the rocks, and the shadows of the rocks, and for the first time in a long time I felt a degree of peace. The twisted wood of the shrub conifers, and the wind-carved stone, and the warmth still emanating off the earth. Something about the warmth was melting something in me, and I ate the apple, relishing its crunch. I threw the core into a waste container and for a long time just stood, listening to the distant hum of traffic, and the birds, closer, and the wind on my face. The smell of the dry dirt, and the dry air, and the horizon, stretching my eyesight and stretching itself, into the distance.

When another car pulled into the overlook and several children jumped out I decided to get moving. There was a loop drive that wound through the park and I was going to drive along that until I found another spot where I could survey the scenery. As I drove, the sky was taking on the reddish glow of the beginning of sunset, and I was looking out at that, driving down the gentle grade, my body alive in the seat, and I wouldn't have admitted it, but I was imagining myself as an early human inhabitant.

Then came a swoosh sound and the engine stopped running. The car continued to coast down the hill and I let it coast, the engine quiet, the valley in front of me. When I came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, I pulled off the road again, got out again, and opening the hood again, I felt, perhaps, that my car was telling me something. About where I was. And I didn't mind being where I was. But I couldn't stay there, not really, so I started the car, or tried to. I waited the requisite minutes and tried, but the car didn't start. Not only that, but it didn't have the familiar sound of
trying
to start. It was a lifeless wheezing, and it worried me a little. But I waited again and tried again, jiggling wires and trying over and over, removing and replacing the fuel filter and trying again, and every time I tried, nothing happened.

The sky, which had been becoming dark, now
was
dark, and there I was, on the side of the road, and just about when I was thinking of spending the night where I was a car drove by. I flagged it down and the man who was driving came over and looked at the Pulsar. He had a flashlight and he shined it at an area to the side of the engine block. He said it was the timing belt, or timing chain—he said it was known by both—and that it wasn't turning. This was serious, he said.

And as this man, a photographer, was pronouncing the car in big trouble, a truck drove up with men in the back, Hopi men, who lived near there and worked for the park and were going home. They looked at the car too, and they agreed that the timing chain was a serious problem. If it
was
the problem. The photographer reminded me that you never knew how bad it was until the engine was taken apart. They all helped push the car back onto a small dirt road, and since it was night by now and where to go was an issue, Gilbert, the Hopi man driving the truck, told me I'd better come with him.

When he said this, and when he had earlier agreed to the timing chain theory, he didn't use many words. He said what he had to say and then he was quiet. The photographer drove off and I got in the back of the truck with three other Indian men, all wearing cowboy boots, and during the drive I didn't talk. Once I asked one of the men if it was dangerous in the desert at night, but all the man did was nod. We drove on an old rutty road for about twenty minutes, the men in the back getting off at various roads in the dirt until at the end it was just Gilbert and me when we pulled into a kind of compound.

There were several dogs barking and some children near the house. It was a small house and modern, or fairly modern, built in a conventional way. Not far off was another building, a six-sided hogan with a sod roof. Gilbert went into the regular house and I started to follow. First I looked up into the night sky, which was black except for the stars, and then I followed Gilbert inside.