Summer Solstice Fiction: Let them eat Blake's

An adapted excerpt from Behind the Slickrock Curtain

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Note: Since tomorrow (June 21) is the summer solstice, I figured I’d give y’all a bit of a break from the usual news and run some summertime fiction, instead. This is actually an excerpt from Behind the Slickrock Curtain, altered and adapted for this space. It is purely fiction, and any resemblance to real places or people is mere coincidence.

The ragged silhouette of Tsé Bit’a’í, or Shiprock, rose up ahead of Brautigan, obscured by the brown-yellow gauze of smog and dust and wildfire smoke. After passing a carnival on the fringe of the town of Shiprock, he turned eastward and followed the San Juan River through the borderland, where the northeastern edge of the Navajo Nation melds with the non-Indian world in an economic and cultural mishmash. Brautigan passed by a little stand selling tamales and kneel down bread; a one-stop-exploitation-economy strip mall with an OmnyEZLoan joint, a pawn shop, and a liquor store; a sprawling automobile graveyard; a slaughterhouse selling mutton; a barn with a big sign peddling chickens and Avon products; and a bright pink SEX SUPERSTORE shadowed by a huge billboard warning the superstore patrons: JESUS IS WATCHING YOU.

And in the spaces between were junk stores, big and small, from the sprawling salvage yard where Brautigan had once coveted a commercial airliner fuselage, to Hal Fox’s tiny hovel, located just feet from the highway, piled floor to ceiling with hoarded treasures. Malcolm and Peter used to come down here on the weekends to go shopping, Peter for objects to use in his artworks, Malcolm for old bikes that he could fix up and sell at a whopping profit to Durango yuppies. The ritual usually concluded with a visit to Mister Fox, a small, weathered, energetic, overall-wearing man of indeterminate age who specialized in bicycle parts. Invariably Malcolm would try to lowball Mister Fox on a wheel, a sprocket, or a pair of handlebars, and Mister Fox would respond with an indignant tirade: “Golly blarmit! I was on an aircraft carrier in World War Two! If it weren’t for me, you’d all be speaking Deutsch! And you want to give me five dollars for that thing!?” Fox would then threaten to shoot the two young men if they didn’t get off his property, pronto. Despite the hostility, the encounter always ended genially, more or less, with Malcolm giving Mister Fox his asking price and then some.

Shiprock carnival.

As he approached Mister Fox’s place, Brautigan slowed down. He needed to stretch his legs, and he had long hankered for an old typewriter. Fox was surely dead, but maybe one of his heirs had kept the family business going, and had an old Olivetti lying under a pile of Cabbage Patch Kids, View Masters, and Walkmen. Brautigan pulled the car onto the side of the road beside a row of old oil barrels and a couch and tentatively walked toward the shop. A man sat in a tattered La-Z Boy just outside the front door, taking sips out of a large, plastic cup. He looked remarkably like Mister Fox, was even wearing what looked like the same pair of overalls, only now the grooves cut into his tan face were deeper, the age spots bigger, and his once lean-frame had seemingly shrunk.

“Uh, hi,” Brautigan said. “I, ummm, was wondering if you had any old typewriters?”

The man peered intently back, as if measuring Brautigan’s worthiness to own an old typewriter. “What the hell you want an old typewriter for? Is that what the hipsters up in Durango are buying these days?”

“No, I just thought, maybe … Hey, I used to come in here a lot to buy bike parts. From Mister Fox. Are, ummm, are you his son?”

“Son? Son!? I am Mister Hal Fox, and I ain’t got no sons.”

“Oh. Jeez. I’m sorry. It’s just that when we used to come here, you said you were in World War Two, and so, you know, that was like eighty years ago or something? And so…”

“And so what?! Spit it out.”

“Uhhh, nothing. I’ll just go in and look around, if that’s okay?”

“Suit yourself.”

Brautigan walked tentatively into the little structure, which was less antique store than a museum of obsolescence and entropy. In one corner several reel-to-reel tape machines leaned against a wall, collecting dust. An oil barrel was filled with old film cameras: Nikons, Canons, Pentax, and a bunch of Kodak Hawkeye Instamatic R4s — the same model as Brautigan’s very first camera, a seventh birthday gift from his grandmother, that produced washed out four-by-four inch photos.

“I had a real nice typewriter in here,” said Mister Fox, who somehow had managed to extract himself from the recliner and position himself directly behind Brautigan. The old man exuded a sour odor. “A Hermes 3000. A sixty four. I got it new for my eighteenth birthday.”

“A sixty four? Like 1964?”

“Precisely.”

“But wait. If you were eighteen…?”

“How could I have been on an aircraft carrier in the Second World War? I wasn’t, you little dumbshit. How old do you think I am?” His guffaw turned into a juicy cough. He chased the phlegm down with whatever was in the plastic cup. “Hell, I remember you, and your buddy, the tall, quiet one. I told you that story because if I told you I was in ‘Nam you’d just give me the finger and spit on me.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

“No. What makes you think that?”

“You just said,” Brautigan blurted, his frustration building. “Wait. So that whole World War Two thing was made up? Just to make us pay more for bike parts?”

“Not entirely made up. My pop was in the war. On an aircraft carrier, even. But he was a conscientious objector so they made him be a barber. After the war he opened his own barber shop in Muskogie, where I was born. But then my momma died, and my pop signed on to help build the El Paso gas pipeline and moved us out here and stayed on working as a foreman on the rigs. It’s been one hell of a ride.”

Another round of very moist coughs erupted from the old man’s chest and throat. Brautigan held his breath and sidled as far away as the tight quarters would allow, feigning interest in the contents of a box on top of another stack of boxes. The boxes were coated with thick, greasy dust. Absentmindedly, Brautigan opened the one on top. It was filled with little white objects that, in the dim light, looked like irregularly shaped pearls, or perhaps deformed marbles or even sugar candies of some sort. He picked one up, held it up to the light. “Oh Jesus!” Brautigan said, tossing it to the ground. “What the hell?! Are those human teeth?”

“Ha. Damned right they are. All those boxes. The ones that say AEC? They’re all full of teeth. Baby teeth.”

Brautigan wanted to get away from them, and the place, and Mister Fox and his tuberculosis and creepy dental fetish, but Fox stood in the only pathway between Brautigan and the front door, and there was no back door.

“Yup, those are the fruits of my labor. My first ever job, that is. When they moved the Atomic Energy Commission offices they hired me and my buddy to clean out all the crap that had piled up there, those boxes of teeth included. I used the proceeds to buy that typewriter for my own birthday.”

“Oh. Nice. But what’s the deal with the teeth?”

“Back in the day the AEC went around to the schools around here and collected the kids’ baby teeth and gave them a little sticker in return. They were supposed to test the teeth to see if they had been affected by the uranium in the water, or by the nuclear testing over in Nevada.”

“Uranium in the water?”

“Sure. Everyone in Farmington and Aztec and Shiprock got their drinking water out of the Animas River, and all during the war and for years afterward the uranium mill up in Durango was dumping tailings into the river. They were watering their crops with that stuff, their cows were drinking it. Hell, our whole food supply was radioactive. Anyway, in fifty-eight the public health folks caught wind of it and decided to do a bunch of tests. Teeth remember these things.”

“Remember?”

“Sure, uranium’s daughters —radium, polonium, thorium. They seek out the bones and teeth and get stuck in there, zapping the blood and marrow and flesh with radiation. Anyway, a couple of years later they came out with the results of the study. Made a big hoedown out of it, in fact. Said the studies definitively showed that the uranium tailings had done no harm, whatsoever.”

“That’s good. Right?”

“Good? What the hell is wrong with you? Look in the boxes. Obviously they never tested the teeth. They just collected them and threw them in boxes and hid them in a closet in the office. It was all a sham. A coverup! And who paid the price? We all did, Goddamnit. I knew that as soon as I found the teeth, even though I was a dumbass kid.”

“You reported it to someone, didn’t you?”

“Who was I supposed to tell? The government? A lotta good that woulda done. Look, I was saving up to go to college so I could get a good government job. There’s no damned way I was gonna throw it all away. No one woulda believed me anyway.”

“But what about the truth?”

“Truth? Truth? You’re gonna lecture me about truth? What does that even mean? No one gives a shit about the truth. It's just like asking Patty Hearst's mother what happened...all you get is a bunch of excuses. These are some nasty sons-a-bitches we’re talking about. It's all about profit and power. They don't care about anything or anyone, they just care about their profits.”

Mister Fox breathed deeply, as if trying to calm himself down. “So, no, I didn’t tell anyone. But I held onto the Geiger counter I found in the office. And the teeth …”

“… because you never know who might want to buy them, right?”

“Laugh all you want, kid, but I sold a box of ‘em a few weeks ago. Same folks bought the Hermes and the Geiger counter. Five hundred clams I made on that sale. You wanna box of teeth?”

“No thanks. I got all I need. Well, it looks like you don’t have any more typewriters, and I need an eight-track tape deck like I need a box of radioactive teeth, so I’d better be heading down the road.”

Mister Fox stepped aside and Brautigan shimmied past him and walked out the door. As he was climbing into the car, he turned back to see Hal Fox looking at him in the same way that he would two decades prior when Brautigan offered him five bucks for a pair of handlebars.

***

Farmington is a city oft-maligned for its strip malls and chain restaurants and bland mid-century energy boom architecture, and for being no more than a sprawling desert suburb with the gas field as its urban core. Brautigan, though, had a certain contrarian fondness for the place. Sure, its economy was built upon the extraction of fossilized sea creatures and sixty-million-year-old peat bogs. But then, the rest of society was built on the combustion of the same. This place was just more open about it, not bothering to hide the pumpjacks or the benzene-oozing wells cozied up against ballfields, or the mountains of coal ash that leak arsenic and selenium and other toxic crap into the water.

Farmington was simply more brazen about the tradeoffs that are made daily by every participant in the combustion culture. For every pound of mercury spewed from the coal-plant smokestacks that gets lodged in folks’ flesh and brains, Farmington gets another high-wage job. For every billion tons of carbon spewed into the atmosphere, the place gets a spiffed up library, a nice river trail, and relatively high teacher pay. And for every year that the river is reduced to a trickle and the ozone levels shoot up and the forests burn, the place gets a Starbucks, a Fuddruckers, a Captain D’s, and not one, but five, five Blake’s Lotaburgers. And Malcolm Brautigan was going to take advantage of the Blake’s bounty by steering his fossil fuel-burning machine toward the nearest such establishment.

When he saw the little white building surrounded by a sea of asphalt, he swerved out of traffic, parked, pulled his shirt onto his sweat-sticky torso, strolled into the brightly lit store, reveled in the blast of cold air redolent with that characteristic fast-food scent of cleaning chemicals and grease and ketchup, and sauntered up to the counter. Standing there against the white tiled wall, in the glow of a battery of fluorescent lights, wearing a red Blake’s polo shirt with astounding panache, stood an astonishingly attractive person. Brautigan tried to decipher whether the person was a he or a she, and then remembered Melissa berating him for his binary view of gender, and decided it really didn’t matter. They had shiny black hair, umber skin, dark eyes, full lips, a little feather dangling from one ear. After regaining his composure, Brautigan ordered a green-chile cheeseburger, a milkshake, and fries.

No more than three minutes later they called out his number and plopped the tray down in front of him, the burger wrapped in red, white, and blue paper, the fries sprawling enticingly hot and salty from their container. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the only bill he had and looked around for the appropriate receptacle for his cash. “Tips aren’t allowed here, mister,” they said, in a soft voice. Brautigan stood dumbly for a moment, then dropped the bill on the counter, took his food, and sat down in the window seat. The air-conditioning chilled his sweaty skin as he meditated on the world outside, which was all pavement, concrete, and cars.

Escalades and Camrys and Navigators and Cayennes passed by at a rate of about a million bucks per minute, he figured. And then, in the slim space between the curb and the cars, a man on an old clunker bike mucked up the flow. He wore a blue work shirt and dark blue or black pants, like a janitor’s or a mechanic’s uniform. His bike appeared to be on the edge of disintegration, but the man and his dark, furrowed skin powered up the little hill anyway, turning way too big a gear. Splotches of sweat darkened the fabric of his shirt, as cars passed far too closely, some of them honking loudly, causing the man to jerk a bit but not falter.

Brautigan saw the street as a riverbed and all the cars on it as a river—a river of wealth pouring out of the oil wells and coal mines and flowing through the city before being siphoned out to Houston, Denver, or London. The fancy-car drivers, the chosen few, had managed to harness the current and divert it into their bank accounts and their multitude of belongings. Meanwhile, the guy on the bike or the person flipping the burgers back there in the incessant heat of Blake’s Lotaburger’s kitchen were able to catch just a few drops. And still others missed out on the bounty entirely, getting pummeled by it, instead. The current picked them up, emptied their pockets and their souls, then tossed them back in, where they fell prey to the undertow, only finding relief when they ended up dead in the gutter after a long February night, or shot down by a frightened cop in one of the poor neighborhoods. They were the ones who go missing, really go missing, until they are accidentally found, bruised and battered and buried in a shallow grave out at the end of a gas patch service road.

“Let them eat Blake’s,” Brautigan said a little too loudly as his fist clenched around his burger, squeezing a blob of mayonnaise-grease-mustard juice onto the red plastic tray.

He felt people looking at him. He had overstayed the ten minutes or so it takes to choke down a burger, talking to himself all the while, thereby morphing from paying customer into a vagrant or a squatter or a maniac who would soon start screaming about the mind-reading powers of microwave ovens.

Reluctantly he got up and headed back out into the blast-furnace parking lot and the stagnant air of his car and settled himself gingerly onto the searing seat, fired up the engine, and pulled out onto the busy boulevard. He took the next right turn, not knowing where it would lead, then turned again, passing through residential neighborhoods, meandering along curvy streets, checking out cul-de-sacs, ignoring the looks his old car drew.

He passed a woman smoothly pedaling a nice road bike, decked out in lycra and a pollution mask, her tanned skin shimmering with perspiration. He passed kids playing in sprinklers in green yards and slowed down almost to a stop as he drifted by a front-yard get-together. Three women sat in lawn chairs, drinking cocktails or wine. The men gathered conspiratorially around the grill, taking long draws off of beers and talking and laughing. The smell of charred meat wafted through the hot air. A Kenny Chesney country song about getting along played loud. Brautigan felt a stab of covetousness, a sudden longing for the comfort of domesticity, for financial and emotional security, for the carefree air they all wore so loosely.

Of course it was a lie. There is no security anymore, maybe there never was. Brautigan's envy turned to exasperation. He wanted to warn them, wanted to shake them out of their serenity. “Don’t you see?” he said, under his breath. “You should be the anxious ones. You have so much to lose.” Less than a mile away fish lay rotting upon dry and dusty rocks where once ran a river. The sprinklers would sputter out soon, too, the lush lawns becoming brittle and hard and lifeless. The hydrocarbon reservoirs were waning. The big oil companies that once lorded over the community, sponsoring everything from the symphony to the school of energy, had collapsed under their own weight, the executives scurrying off quietly, taking the high-paying jobs, the workers’ pensions, the health benefits with them, following the old cycles of colonization, exploitation, and abandonment. The foreclosures and financial instruments would soon descend like a swarm of locusts, laying waste to the suburban scene. Even the Applebees would one day deliquesce to dust.

As the planet dies, as the insects and the birds and the beasts give way to extinction, perhaps a new species of scavenger will rise up in their wake. A terrible conglomeration of the detritus of the extraction society—pumpjacks and distillation towers and mud pumps and suction lines—a monster that emerges from the ruins of the refineries, resides in the abandoned shells of big box stores, that stomps across the charred landscape respiring hydrogen sulfide, guzzling fracking fluid, and gobbling up pipelines and transmission lines as it goes.

“I guess we all get what we deserve,” Brautigan told his bug-spattered windshield, knowing it wasn’t true, that a mass comeuppance would never come.

As the waxy blob of the sun dipped below the horizon, Brautigan pulled onto the highway, joining the flow of traffic heading northward. Suburban sprawl gave way to rural sprawl and he turned onto an undulating back road. His little car passed dusty yards and late-model modulars, their vinyl siding already warping from the recalcitrant heat, and dropped down into a miniature valley shaded by river-bank cottonwoods that were just then dropping their fluffy seeds. For a brief moment Brautigan sped through a summer whiteout, the cotton swirling chaotically in his car’s slipstream. Off to his right, the Animas, the River of Lost Souls, was little more than a warm and stagnant trickle, its once abundant flows pilfered by the heat and the meagre winters and the ditches that spilled onto fields.

He cursed the irrigators for pilfering the waters. Then he praised them for creating this little oasis, this reminder of what once was. He inhaled the aroma of verdant alfalfa, of fresh-cut hay, baled and stacked in grid-like rows. The ephemeral fragrance of early summer wafted through the car, triggering, as always, a sad kind of hope that the long days to come will somehow heal all the wounds, will lift us up and carry us back to that one, brief, fugacious moment in our lives when we were whole, when everything was possible, when we ran heedlessly through fields on dusky lavender-hued evenings, when we kissed under the whispering leaves of the old weeping willow, the nighttime grass cool against our skin, and we lay on our backs in the warm dirt between corn rows at dusk, marveling at the tassels blowing against the star-studded bowl of the June sky.