From Chicago through Tucumcari

In the summer of 1993 I found myself in a motel room In Fayetteville, AK. I wanted to check the place out - thought it might be a place to live. It wasn't.

I had a list of towns I wanted to look at - but the process was a little vague and I wasn't sure where to go next except I needed to head West as I was eventually meeting up with a friend who would be vacationing in New Mexico.

I'd been reading through a list of writers' colonies and I noticed one in Vallecitos, New Mexico so I gave them a call. A woman answered the phone and said, Sure, come on out. When were you thinking of coming?

In two days, I told her, thinking I'd drive straight through . She paused for a second, but then she said, fine. They'd have room. You're a writer? she asked, sounding not at all convinced. I am, I told her because at that moment I wasn't anything else.

I headed west. I was driving a 1989 Nissan pick-up with a camper shell on the back and I was listening to Eleventh Dream Day's El Moodio. I was listening to it very loud and I was drinking a lot of coffee and when I saw the sign for Tucumcari I tried not to think of Little Feet.

The woman on the phone told me I should stop for groceries in Espanola as that was the last town with a store. I spent a night in Santa Fe and in the morning I headed north up 285 past Tesuque and Pojoaque and into the Espanola valley where it felt like I'd come some distance from Chicago.

I continued north, driving through small villages and for miles where there weren't any villages at all. In Vallecitos there was a post office and past it I turned down a dirt road where there were four or five houses and dogs in the road and children in the road and in the yards there were horses and goats and chickens. The dogs chased behind my truck and the children stared and the older folks looked up and I turned down El Moodio.

At the end of the road was a driveway that ran along an irrigation ditch that I later learned to call an acequia. The house was two story and there was a porch on the ground floor and one on the second. A woman was outside working on a truck and when she saw me drive up she waved and walked over.

The woman was friendly but seemed a little nervous. There's something I should have mentioned on the phone, she said. Oh, I said. What's that?

Usually we don't have men here.

How come?

Well, most of the women who come here don't like men. But you seem nice. I'm sure it will be fine.

She showed me to my room which was set off from the rest of the house. The room was large with a big bed and a desk and a chair and in the corner a fireplace with wood stacked alongside. Windows looked out across a meadow and soft shaped hills rose behind it. I ate a sandwich and drank a beer and then another and then I sat down at the desk and listened to all the quiet and tried to write.

But I had things on my mind. Chickens and dogs and dirt roads and a house full of women who didn't like men. I took another beer and went outside to have a cigarette. There were things chirping and there were stars in the sky and the stars looked closer than I had ever seen them. The air smelled sweet. I wasn't alone. A woman was standing off to the side of the porch and she said, hello. You must be the guy, she said.

She told me that she had been coming there for years. She didn't write or paint or do anything like that, but she once had a partner who did and it was the partner who had brought her the first time. I wish I could stay forever, she said.

I heard a noise coming from across the way - near where the hills began to rise. What's that? I asked.

Wild horses, she said.

I like it here, I told her.

You know, she said. This might sound a little new-agey, but New Mexico is a special place. If it likes you, it lets you stay.

I told her that I wanted to check out Bozeman, but who knows, maybe I'd come back.

Come back, she said. I think you should.

It took me another month of driving around and getting very cold in Montana and Colorado and then I headed back south. For a year I lived in Albuquerque and then I moved to Santa Fe. The place opened itself up and I walked in.

All a-glitter, all aglow

Back then we went to parties. On Fridays and Saturdays there were parties to go to. Not every weekend, but often enough so there was always something on the horizon. At the parties there were couples and those looking to form one or recover from one. Just below the surface noise of the parties - the animated conversations, the laughter, the always-present, carefully chosen music, there was a hum or a buzz and for me the hum was the chords of the future.

I like to watch. I've always been a watcher. I don't recommend it as a way to live but there it is. And so at these parties I observed. At one of these parties I sat off to the side engaged in a conversation with a woman I knew and liked. I liked her because she was smart and sexy and interesting to talk to. She was always one beat ahead of me. But we weren't that way and that made the talking even easier.

What I want to say is that as we talked I watched her, though it felt more like absorption. It felt as if I was seeing everything she wasn't saying. And what she wasn't saying was this: more than anything she wanted to be married, and she had him picked out and it was only a matter of time. And it was.

In dreams begin responsibilities pt. ?

I met Eddie when he was a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. A school, some said, where Indians learn how to be Indians. Eddie was a good student.

He learned fast.

He was older, as many of the students were. He'd been a small-town sportswriter in Oklahoma. He dreamed of something more. He got it.

Schools need stars.

Indians have dreams.

Eddie hit the jackpot. He got a Stegner - at Stanford, which in the writing world is currency. Like Iowa, like the New Yorker. There were faculty connections - as there often are, and he was Indian which didn't hurt either. But he could write. It came together.

I wrote then, too. I knew the writers in town. It was a town for writers. A town for Indians. Eddie and I became friends. The way writers become friends. What they have in common. What sets them apart. The guest sitting alone at the party.

He found an apartment in San Francisco. The Tenderloin. Took the train down to campus. Where the writers were.

The rest I can only imagine. I imagine he felt he was in two worlds. The Tenderloin that seemed more like home. And the California-rich campus he'd been called to. He told me he spent most of his time in the city. He liked riding Bart out to Oakland to the see the A's play. The Giants weren't his kind of team. But he liked having two pro teams so close by.

He completed his first year at Stanford and returned to New Mexico to spend the summer. In that small world he returned a star. IAIA had him back to talk to a writing class - maybe he even taught a class, I don't recall, exactly. But I remember him coming back and hanging out at campus and going to the bars with the writing students. How they listened to him talk. How he liked to talk.

Then one Sunday morning I got a phone call from Eddie. He was at a motel on Cerrillos. He and his friend needed a ride. To Dulce. Dulce is a long way from Santa Fe. It's near the Colorado border. It's not a distance I'd ask someone to give me a ride. I gave them the ride.

When I picked them up they were somewhere between still-drunk and hungover. Eddie's friend climbed in the back and Eddie sat up front with me. Three or four hours later we were on the rez outside of Dulce waiting outside a trailer where dogs were lying about and a little girl stuck her head out the trailer's door to get a look - at me, I guess. Eddie's friend was inside getting money and when he came back out he gave me fifty dollars for the ride and I was on my way.

I don't remember one thing we talked about that day and I never saw Eddie again. Months later, a mutual friend told me Eddie never made it back to Stanford. He'd gotten arrested in Jemez for fighting with a girlfriend. A fight, it was said, where Eddie bit off a piece of her ear. A judge ordered probation as well as anger and alcohol counseling - but instead Eddie took off. Disappeared.

Maybe he went back to Oklahoma - where he was from. When I think of him, I wonder if he still writes - or if that is all over for him. But if he writes, does he ever write about that fight with the girl that cost him so much. I used it in a story once, a version of it. I don't think he'd mind.

Unfaithful?

The fall I moved back to New Mexico, 2002, Susan's husband shot her multiple times and then he shot himself. These events aren't related, except they could have been. Their bodies were discovered by a friend.

I met Susan when I moved to New Mexico the first time. I thought I wanted to be a writer and went looking for others suffering the same affliction. I attended a meeting of aspiring writers - and Susan struck up a conversation. Not long after, she invited me to join a workshop that met in Corrales, a village along the Rio Grande where she lived. These were good people and good writers and I enjoyed being with them.

We fast became friends. We met for coffee, we went to a movie, we drove to Santa Fe. I proof-read her first novel, and we talked it through. Susan loved to talk. She called me most every weekday morning. She'd call from the small office she rented and where she wrote. I'd still be asleep when she called but I'd pretend otherwise and we'd talk. Mostly she talked.

Susan talked about her two daughters. They made her proud. She talked about her husband and her marriage. Some mornings she cried. There was intimacy. It became uncomfortable. I wanted to stop. I didn't want to stop. I stopped it like this: I sent her a card, or I left it in her car - I don't remember anymore, except that I did it in writing. A coward's way.

We never really talked again. I ran into her at a PEN Christmas party and we said hello. I saw her at another party and again hello. Later I moved to California. When I moved back to New Mexico, I moved to Corrales. The town where our writer's group had met, and where Susan still lived. A mutual friend mentioned to her that I was back and living in Corrales. She asked him to tell me to call. She'd like to say hello.

I never called and I never saw her around town. And then she was dead.