The Water Museum Read online

  Next door, his gal in the T-shirt was crying, “Kurt! Kurt! Oh my God, Kurt!”

  Hubbard’s ex had never once cried Oh my God.

  * * *

  At Las Cruces, he turned north. I-25. Big land, big sky, big spirits. Canned Heat on the deck. He rolled down the window and sang along: “I’m on the road again!” North! Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Pueblo, Denver. That’s where he was going, by God.

  He’d been eating his breakfast in El Paso, reading a paper with little transparent grease windows stained in the pages. He’d been in the old cemetery to gawk at John Wesley Hardin’s grave. Murdering son of a bitch. He’d picked up a pebble from the pistoleer’s grave and pocketed it. More hoodoo. And then he’d hopped over the wall and clocked on into the diner and it was chorizo and huevos and papitas and tortillas and Cholula and coffee, coffee, coffee. So what if she thought he was fat. He’d show her some fatness right here.

  The paper had said there was a trailer park serial killer who slaughtered the innocent near Elephant Butte, around Truth or Consequences. And the killing fields were not far from the springs Cochise liked to bathe in. Why, hell—he was deep into some kind of strange Italian western. There were patterns moving across the sky, high, where small scallops of cloud shimmered like mother-of-pearl. He felt a part of the great becoming, the revelation of the West.

  Up! To Billy the Kid’s New Mexico. Up! To Colorado’s Buffalo Bill and his grave! Boulder, where Tom Horn moldered beneath the grass! North—to the land of the Cheyenne and the Sioux and the Arapaho and the Crow! He was a killer on the road, he told himself, and when he got in the car to peel out of El Paso, he shoved The Doors into the CD slot and felt the power of the great silence.

  Elephant Butte reflected red serial killer light onto its somnolent reservoir.

  He took a detour out of Burque and headed west again, where the mesas were black and red and the rivers lay dead as bones under the sun. On the way to Rio Puerco he stopped in a cowboy bar. He thought he’d get drunk. He thought he’d get beat up. It would feel good. Indians looked at him when he walked in and laughed. He sat at a stool and sipped a Bud. A Navajo woman stepped up to him and asked him to dance on account of her old man’s feet hurt too much from diabetes to get up off his chair. She came up to his chest, and she grinned at him the whole time. His dancing was apparently hilarious.

  “You don’t dance too much,” she said.

  “Not really.”

  “Pretty good,” she said. “Don’t feel bad.” She laughed.

  When they stepped outside to let the sweat dry, she said, “What are you?”

  “Just a white boy.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought you was a Leo.”

  * * *

  Up the Raton Pass, Hubbard was assaulted by Colorado. It was like some Maxfield Parrish painting, all electric blues and impossible neon clouds, ridiculous snowy peaks and bright yellow prairies. He pulled over and stared at it. By God, the world was full of color after all.

  Then he cried.

  * * *

  The car died in Wyoming.

  Hubbard was angling northeast toward Fort Laramie. Not Laramie the town, which was a brief mirage on brown plains. But the old historical fort where the great chiefs and the great cavalrymen had parlayed. As far away from his stupid abandoned apartment in Cambridge as he could get. No goddamned tofu sausages in Fort Laramie!

  The car got a little rough, then shouted at him and unleashed a stench not unlike the stinkbugs of far Texas. Then it shuddered and died. Hubbard wrestled the wheel as momentum rolled the Volvo into the weeds and a plume of smoke arose. Wind made its low song around him.

  The key made the engine crunch and howl and whimper. Then nothing at all.

  “Okay,” he said, informing the universe he was ready for decisive action.

  Got out. Walked around the car. Looked underneath. Didn’t she take care of her car? It wasn’t cheap. Used, yes—but not cheap. Cars were not his thing.

  He got back in. Nothing. Graveyard dead, as cowboys said in books he’d read. He stared at the dials as if they would offer him an explanation.

  The radio still worked, though. He turned the dial until he found Dr. Laura. She was of the opinion that a caller who fed his toddler Beano to keep her from farting was a weakling. He turned the radio off.

  “Let’s try again, shall we?” he announced.

  Nothing happened.

  * * *

  He sat on the hood, back to the windshield, reading Rilke. The heat of the dead engine felt good—Wyoming’s brisk wind was frisking his body. His nipples were as hard as his John Wesley Hardin pebble. Nobody came down the road. He sipped water from a bottle with French writing on the label. He ate peanut M&M’s. At least he had some protein.

  Barbed wire twinkled like spiderwebs and dew. The sky went all the way up and over and down. He’d never seen so much sky. It looked like the little sage bushes on the horizon were buttons holding it to the ground.

  He’d thought a rancher, a cowboy, somebody would drive by. So far, only crows. They seemed to be laughing at him.

  Rilke said: You are not too old, and it is not too late ….

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  That circling crow was unimpressed.

  A white plastic bag danced in the nearest fence like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

  “Wonderful,” Hubbard noted.

  * * *

  Perhaps he would die out here. The Elements, he thought, as only a city boy would. But he was so betrayed, so alone. Suicide was not off the table, either. He pondered the amazing horror of his cold, cold body found here in the back of beyond. Pecked—pecked!—by crows. Rilke in his frozen hand.

  Or starvation.

  He was hungry.

  He slid off the hood. Maybe she had some candy bars stashed in her glove compartment. She used to crack him up every time she announced that the best medication for PMS was chocolate. She called it her drug of choice. Twelve-stepper humor. Damn her.

  The chairman of the Porter Square AA meeting had been coming around their apartment. Hubbard writhed a little every time he remembered making this bastard his famous turkey chili. That Cantabrigian had twelve-stepped right into Mrs. Hubbard’s bed. They called it a thirteenth step. He had taken a real inventory inside her knickers while Hubbard taught Beast Literature at Harvard Extension. Night school lectures in Apuleius and his use of the common ass in his fables.

  Came home to find the Sting CDs gone. Odd. He thought she must have taken the boom box into the kitchen to wash the dishes. But the boom box was also gone. He looked in the bedroom—the bed was stripped. He said aloud, “If the tampons are gone, you have left me.” The medicine cabinet was bare.

  A gesture was called for.

  He skulked over to the AA pimp’s condo in Central Square and saw her Volvo parked outside. He had her spare key on his keychain. Popped the door and drove away, hit the ATM in Harvard Square, grabbed a duffel full of chinos and jeans and polo shirts and his Black Sabbath T at the apartment and headed down I-95 at an admirable clip.

  “Grand theft auto!” he cried, half-giddy with himself.

  New York: saw a biker with CHINGALING on his vest. Virginia: fog and a phantom roller-coaster beside the road. South Carolina: smokestack painted to look like a giant cigarette. Florida: he bought a cap with a gator on it that said FLORIDA YARD DOG.

  In Alabama, he covered his wife’s EASY DOES IT/LIVE AND LET LIVE bumper stickers with new ones. One of them said KEEP HONKING, I’M RELOADING! He had a pair of her panties with him. All the way across the South, he had told himself he could throw them out at any time.

  * * *

  A lone cloud sailed out of Colorado and evaporated in the Wyoming sky.

  Hubbard popped open her glove box. Papers and whatnot tumbled out. Receipts, maps, registration, tampons, matches, ChapStick. He held a tampon and remembered. How she had dared him to insert one in her during her period. “Go on,” she had taunted. “I won’t break.” How she’d stoo
d with one foot on the toilet, and he had knelt there before her as if it were some ancient ritual, and he had tried to do it without somehow tearing secret woman-stuff in there. Thrilled and queasy in equal measure. It had seemed sacred at the time. He shook his head.

  More clouds now, hanging above him as if they were pictures of clouds glued to a blue sheet of paper.

  And that’s when he found it. Her stash. A baggie full of pills and capsules. Pink ones. Blue ones. Red ones. A black one. White tabs with X’s on them. AA, eh? Recovery, eh? Well, as the bluesmen said, well, well. Couples therapy. Sponsors. Al-Anon. And all the time she had this hidden in her car.

  He fell back in the seat. He was done in. He laughed as he slapped the dash, his own head.

  “Too much!” he cried.

  After a while, it stopped being funny. Any of it. Cambridge. Harvard Extension. Who was he kidding? His day job was at a community college in Framingham. Harvard? One more ridiculous affectation. Everything in his life had ended up here, in the wasteland, with his engine burned to a crisp. How appropriate. This was the punch line of the cosmic joke. Hubbard the Absurd.

  “To hell with it.”

  He tipped the bagful of pills into his mouth and washed it down with tepid French water.

  He arranged himself on the hood. Then hopped down and trotted to the back of the car and found a scarf. He wrapped it jauntily around his neck and got back on the hood.

  The crows lost interest and flew away.

  Come, death.

  Come.

  2. Serenity Contract

  Don Her Many Horses was on his way from Pine Ridge to Boulder. The crazy dudes of the Oyate organization at the college were throwing their yearly party. He never missed it. The theme this year was “Dances with Nerds.” You were supposed to come as the biggest dweeb you could imagine.

  Don had heard the term “big-time” in Rapid. A white biker had said it, and he liked it. He tried it now: I’m going as a nerd, big-time.

  He was trying to quit smoking, and it wasn’t going all that well. But he worked that Doublemint gum and drummed his fingers on the wheel, listening to Skynyrd. He did his best to ignore the Marlboro Red hard pack tucked into the visor.

  He spied a tan Volvo on the right shoulder. Slowed down to take a look. A white guy asleep on the hood. What’s the deal with white boys, anyway? Getting a tan out here?

  Horses stared as he passed, his head clicking in small increments like the Terminator. About fifty yards down the road, he stopped. He watched in the rearview. That was just squirrely, that scene. Guy looked dead. His feet in high-tops splayed out, unmoving. His head slumped to the side, mouth open.

  Horses told himself it wasn’t any of his business. If some wasichu decided to get out here and croak—well, more power to him. Nothing good was going to come of getting involved.

  He pulled over and parked. Checked his cell phone. No signal. But he already knew that. He put it in reverse and slowly backed up. Came even with the man and hit the window button.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Nothing.

  “Hey!”

  Hubbard jumped, just a little.

  “Hey! Wake up!”

  Hubbard cracked his eyes open and cast around as if he were a scuba diver looking at a reef.

  “Huh?” Hubbard said.

  Don raised his hand.

  “How,” he said.

  He loved saying that to white boys.

  Hubbard focused his eyes.

  “Some truck,” he croaked.

  “You all right?”

  “Not exactly. All right. No.”

  Don nodded. Now he’d tore it—had to pull over. Had to make sure. Now this clown was going to be on his hands.

  Hubbard looked at the cottonwood in the field.

  “Car broke,” he said.

  Horses leaned over and stuck out his head to look at the Volvo. A thick braid tumbled down and hung there. “Let’s take a look,” Don said.

  “Gee, could you?” Hubbard said.

  Don Her Many Horses parked, put down his size-thirteen black cowboy boot.

  Horses reached back into the truck and extracted a big black cavalry hat. It had a high crown and an ample brim, curved down over his eyebrows. Braided horsehair hatband, and a feather attached by some kind of thong.

  “Nice hat,” Hubbard said.

  Horses walked past, saying nothing.

  He rested his fists on his hips and observed the landscape. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to rescue Hubbard. “Pronghorn,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” he shouted, barely maintaining.

  “Pronghorn. Antelope. Right over there.”

  Hubbard squinted.

  “I mean. Really! For Christ’s sake!” he declared.

  “What?” said Horses, thinking: Oh, wonderful—white boy’s crazy.

  Hubbard waved his hand as if to show Horses it was nothing.

  “He’s watching us,” Horses said.

  “As we are watching him.” Hubbard smiled.

  “You stretch out on the grass over there,” Horses said, pointing with his chin. “He won’t be able to stay away. He’ll be so curious, he’ll walk over to take a look.”

  “Do tell!” Hubbard enthused.

  Horses said, “Watch this.”

  He took off his hat, waved it above his head. Suddenly, like a tawny ICBM, the little antelope sprang straight into the air. He pogoed away, bouncing along and casting disapproving glances back at them.

  “Hey!” Hubbard cried.

  “Yeah,” Horses said. “Wish I had my rifle out.”

  “Pronghorn steak,” said Horses. “Marinated in wild blueberries. That’s good eatin’.”

  Screw it. He reached into the cab. Grabbed out his red pack. Tapped out a smoke and hung it on his lip. “Smoke too much,” he said, lighting up. “That’s my Indian name.” He rasped out a laugh, blew a stream of smoke at Hubbard. “Is that a bear claw?” he said.

  Hubbard fingered his Chittimacha hoodoo on its thong.

  “Gaaatorrr. Tooothhh.”

  Horses fished out a chain from under his shirt.

  “Grizzly,” he said. “Clawwww.”

  Hubbard started weeping.

  “What about the carrr?” he asked.

  “The car?” said Horses. “It’s a Volvo.”

  Hubbard just stared at him, eyes wet.

  White guys, Horses thought. They’re just not that funny.

  * * *

  While Don Her Many Horses tried the ignition and listened to its screech, Hubbard’s pills kicked off like cheap Fourth of July fireworks. Pop! Pow! He flew off the hood and bounced around on the blacktop. Holy SHIT! The SUN! It was SO BRIGHT! He hopped around like a pronghorn at a rave. He was WHOLE. He was fully REALIZED. His high-tops were full of freakin’ Flubber.

  He pointed at Horses.

  “Hey, Smoke Too Much!” he said. “They call you boo in Louisiana!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Cajun guys say Poo-Yi before they kick your ass!”

  “That right.”

  “Boo!”

  “Don’t call me boo.”

  “Right!” Hubbard agreed. “Right, right, right? Who, me? Never. Not once. Never said boo in my life. I’m so amped.”

  “How’s about that,” muttered Horses, fiddling with knobs and the ignition. He got out. He stretched his back. “Your car’s broke, for sure,” he said.

  “Not my car. Not really. I mean, I paid for it, sure. But it’s hers. Still, I forked over the cash. Every cent! So it should be mine. Right? Did you see that crow? I own it now, I guess.” He patted the Volvo. “My war pony!”

  Horses crossed his arms and leaned against the car. Butt on the fender.

  “You done paid every cent,” he prodded.

  “Right! Right-right. Every goddamned cent. Put her through grad school. How do you like that? Took her five years to get a stinking M.A.! Not to mention five years of couples therapy. Out of my pocket.”

&nbs
p; Horses listened as the whole sad story fell out.

  “Smoke. Can I call you Smoke? Or do you prefer Mr. Too Much? Have you ever been in therapy? Did I ask you that? Whatever. Probably not. What do you do? Sweat lodge, am I right? Can we do a sweat lodge? As I was saying: therapy. That was the key, you see. The key to everything. Second only to recovery. Recover this!” he cried, grabbing his crotch.

  “Whoa, now. You’re getting skittish.”

  Hubbard sadly noted, “We’d even made out our serenity contract right before she left.”

  Horses looked bored with this happy horseshit.

  Horses said, “Pop the hood latch.”

  Hubbard reached in and yanked the handle.

  “Oh,” he sighed, starting his long descent. “I suppose it was all inner-child-related.”

  Horses, bent into the maw of the car, said, “Inner child? You got an inner child?” He backed away. “What are you, pregnant?”

  Then he laughed: HAW!

  He walked around in a circle. Shook his head. HAW!

  He raised his hands as if warding off a blow.

  “Just funnin’,” he said.

  He reached into the engine compartment and pulled out the oil dipstick.

  “Got a rag?” he said.

  Hubbard reached in his pocket and pulled out his wife’s panties.

  Horses said, “Jesus Christ! Get rid of that!”

  But Horses didn’t need a rag after all. The dipstick was clean. Shiny. Devoid of oil. He whirled upon Hubbard and brandished it like a fencer approaching with a foil.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  “What.”

  “No oil.”

  “So?”

  “So—no oil.”

  “So what?”

  “How far did you drive this rig?”

  “I don’t know. Boston to Florida. Texas. Here.”

  “Five thousand miles?” Horses cried. “Six? Are you kiddin’ me?”

  “It was a long journey,” Hubbard declaimed. “Perhaps epic in scope. Still, it had to encompass my grief and sense of…”