Charles Bowden - Desierto: Memories of the Future

Bowden, Charles, 1945

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DESIERTO

Killing the Hidden Waters

Street Signs Chicago (with Lewis Kreinberg)

Blue Desert

Frog Mountain Blues

(with photographs by Jack W. Dykinga) Mezcal Red Line

MEMORIES Of THE FUTURE

Pir^K&OKOUGt \ wimiaRIG

W-W-NORTON & COMPANY New York London

PROPER 1V OF

S PEAK library district

P.O. BOX 1579

COLOR AOO SPRINGS, CO 30901

Copyright 1991 by Charles Bowden All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

The text of this book is composed in Palatino, with the display set in Neuland Inline and Gill Sans Condensed. Composition and manufacturing by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group.

Book design by Jack Meserole

First Edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bowden, Charles.

Desierto : memories of the future / Charles Bowden, p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3552.0844D4 1991

813'.54dc20 90-48521

ISBN 0-393-02935-2

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 W.W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WCiA 1PU

1234567890

Excerpt from Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey. Copyright 1971, 1976, 1977, 1979/ 1984 by Edward Abbey. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Excerpt from Narratives of the Coronado Expedition 1540-1542 edited by George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey reprinted by permission of the University of New Mexico Press. Copyright 1940. Excerpts from Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke copyright 1988 reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Excerpt from Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey copyright 1970 reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Book Company. Excerpt from Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. 1968. Excerpt from "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", J. F. Coots & H. Gillespie Copyright 1934 (Renewed 1962) LEO FEIST, INC. Rights assigned to EMI CATALOGUE PARTNERSHIP All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI FEIST CATALOG, INC. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved.

R.I.P.

But I doubt it.

Sometimes the people and places in this book have been given fictitious names. This has been done to protect the privacy of individuals and the peace and calm of places or because of the hazards of the drug world. The facts have not been altered.

The Yaqui songs quoted in Chapter 4 are from Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina, Yaqui Deer Songs, Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 1987). Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have appeared in Smart, City Magazine, Buzzworm, Witness, and Phoenix.

DESIERTO

I turn the pages of the transcript and hear the singsong voice of an old Indian woman. The date is so exact, all the words passing before my eyes were spoken into a tape recorder just two months ago and then carefully written out in longhand by another Indian woman on white sheets of paper. I have a file case full of such interviews, all part of a desire on my part to locate some kind of heartbeat beneath the modern world I live in. Behind my head a piano solo seeps from the speakers, a mesquite log smolders in the fireplace, now and then a quiet flame licking the wood. In an hour or two, it will be dawn. This is a favorite time for me, a pause when the clocks cease to convince me and the fantasies come easily. The old woman in the transcript remembers a morning, a sunrise with no date given, that occurred perhaps eighty or a hundred years ago. She is not seeking fantasy. A child is lost and the people go and search for him in the desert. He is found safe. With the deer. This happened west of me, somewhere a hundred miles off in the desierto.

Then, it is later, sometime later, and two Indian women are making tortillas. One says she is hungry, and the other tells the man to kill something for meat. The man whose boy was lost gets up and takes his gun and goes off into the desert. Soon, the women hear a shot, and they think, good, we will have meat. The man returns, sits down, and does not speak. He looks sad. Finally an old man, a gnarled figure who has been buried in silence in some corner of the hut, gets up and goes to him. He asks if he shot something for meat. The man who went out with