“I’ll let you know if I hear anything. I paid your bail. I also left an envelope with your wages and a little extra in it.”
“I don’t work for you anymore?”
“We’re selling the farm. Your friends Spud and Maisie and Cotton have already moved on. They’re starting up a poultry farm in New Mexico or Arizona, I think.”
“Good for them,” I said.
Mrs. Lowry got up to go. I was handcuffed to a chair by one wrist. She stroked my cheek with the ends of her fingers. I kept waiting for her to give up the ruse, but she didn’t. “The door will always be open for you,” she said, and winked. Then she bent over and blew her breath into my hair. “Sweet boy,” she said. “Good enough to eat, that’s what you are.”
* * *
WHEN I GOT out of the can the second time, I thumbed a ride to the Lowry farm, put my clothes and Smith Corona in a duffel bag and picked up my Gibson guitar and said goodbye to Chen Jen, then headed for the train yard outside Trinidad, hoping to grab a sidedoor Pullman that would take me to Albuquerque and on to a winter job working date palms around Calexico.
I might seem cavalier in my attitude toward the events I have described. However, I see it this way. I’ve acquired little knowledge and even less wisdom in my life, but early on, I learned not to argue with the world. I believed Jo Anne had chosen her father over me, and the two of them had gone on to a better life than the one I could have given her. I think her paintings went with her, too, and I believed that one day I would see them in a gallery or a museum.
I also learned that madness is madness, and we should not question its presence in the majority of the human race. And I learned, as George Orwell once said, that people are always better than we think they are. I was never a criminal, but I was in a southern prison when I was eighteen. A psychiatrist told me I suffered dissociative personality disorder; there were three different people sheltering inside my skin. I have had nonchemically induced blackouts all my life, and I have written and published forty books that I have trouble remembering, as though someone else wrote them. The characters in them are strangers and seem to have no origins; the words are like a rush of wind inside a cottonwood tree.
I do not dream any longer about the events in the box canyon. Even before I started to swing on a freight car for the screeching grind down Ratón Pass, I had almost convinced myself I’d experienced a psychotic break and imagined the monstrous creatures and the murders inside the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But the word is “almost.” I’ll explain why.
I saw the train coming and began running with it, pacing my speed so I could throw my duffel and guitar inside an open car, when a yard bull grabbed me from behind and pulled me away from the tracks.
“I’ll be out of the state in ten minutes, boss,” I said. “How about some slack?”
“Sorry, bud,” he replied. “It’s your misfortune and none of my own.”
“We’re talking about six months on the hard road, boss.”
“Life’s a bitch, then we die,” he said.
He walked me to the freight depot and called the cops. Guess who pulled in?
“How you doin’, Wade?” I said.
“I hear you’ve been busy,” he said.
“I got drunk and let my imagination run away.”
“Where you going?”
“Down on the Cal-Mex line.”
“Stay here a minute.”
Wade walked out of earshot with the yard bull, then shook hands with him and rejoined me. “There’s a highballer leaving out in ten minutes. I’ll stay with you until you climb aboard. Want some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
He reached for his thermos through the driver’s window of his car. “What happened in that box canyon?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Sure about that?”
“Sure as there are no witches except in Joseph McCarthy’s sick mind.”
“Need any money?”
“No, sir. It’s been an honor to know you.”