New Mexico Mercury

Editor's note: This short story is from the book McKelligon Canyon: Short stories by Baker H. Morrow in which the author states:

This new book of connected stories is set in southern New Mexico and El Paso in the early 1970s.  "If you’re an American, all you know is motion," says Spencer MacInnes, a key figure, and the people in these tales flicker in profile across a dry landscape, the shadows in their lives a contrast to the bright sun.

“Years ago I was at that Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque,” said Henry Kelley.  “You know it?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, Enver Ponderet was the zoo director in those days.  In those cottonwoods, down along the big ditch by the river.  In Barelas.  Smelled strong, from the animals always in the same places day after day.  Walking back and forth.  Same pens.”

Henry wiped his mouth.

“Guess what he was doing?—it was late fall, see, late in the afternoon, very quiet.  Nobody there.

You could hear a peacock or two.  You could hear your own footsteps in the cottonwood leaves.

“He was shooting crows up in the trees with a .22 rifle.  A little Winchester pump.  Those crows begin to nest along the river by the zoo when it gets cold and some of them had strayed over to the trees near the cages.

“Enver was pickin’ ‘em off.  I don’t know how he did it.  Crows’ll fly at the first sign of anything.  But he had a stack of five or six of them.  Big black heap.  He took a couple over and threw them into the alligator pool.

“I thought the zoo must have been broke and that’s why he was doing it.  So I asked him.”

Henry stopped to take a sip from his glass.

“What did he say?”

“I can’t remember,” said Henry.  “I’ve tried once or twice, too.  I can still see Enver standing there putting more cartridges into his rifle, getting mad because he was running out of daylight.  I don’t know if he was broke or hated crows or what.  How did he get away with firing that gun in the city?”

I knew Henry’s house was right by the water at Elephant Butte Reservoir, on the west bank, but it wasn’t easy to find.

I knew all the houses along that bank and his would be the white frame stucco down by the shore that you saw from the Blue Desert Inn.

Wrong.  I had to go south of the stucco house a half-mile or so and ask directions from a couple of guys fishing for bass and then wander around a string of sandy hills before I found it.  It was egg-shell colored with green shutters, clapboard, with salt cedars and sand all around it and one cottonwood for shade.

Henry more or less sat in the house or out against the tree and drank beer.  There were empty bottles of vodka in his garbage can but he never drank that while I was around.

“Will,” he said, “do you know what they did up at that inn?”

“What inn?”

“Blue Desert.  They shut down the golf course.  Nobody’ll keep it up anymore.  Mismanagement.  Some turkey from Carolina or D.C. or somewhere owns it, anyway.  He won’t water it.  He probably thinks this place is Mexico.”

Henry told me the zoo story.  “I just can’t remember why that guy shot those birds,” he said.  “He told me, too.  Something like ‘They give the gazelles no peace.’  You just come straight down from Albuquerque?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Left about four hours ago.  I stopped in Socorro for some chile, though.  It was terrible.”

“You haven’t seen Mary, have you?” he said.  “She was supposed to write me something about the kids.”

“I haven’t seen her, Henry.”

“Well, they haven’t, either.  They hate her guts, you know.  Won’t even talk to her.

“But it doesn’t make any difference—not really.  They’re grown now.  Susie’s married.  The guy’s a carpenter.  Mary didn’t come to the wedding.”

“Did Susie invite her?”

“Well, no.  She didn’t.  You know how those kids feel.

“I sure like my cats, though.  You see this one?”  Henry stuck a big thick Persian on my lap.  He was a friendly cat, gray in the moonlight and maybe tan by day.  He purred when you knuckled his ears.  “His name’s Elfego Baca.”

Henry looked back at the lake, stood up, and skipped a stone.  Two hops.  He was a very scrawny guy, pulled tight.  “Wouldn’t do her any good to write me, anyway,” he said, looking back over his shoulder.  “I can’t do anything about her and those two kids.

“She was always bigger than me.  It bugged me.

“She couldn’t stand cats, you know.  Thought they were some kind of vermin.  She liked those little dogs:  Pekingese, shelties—cruddy little dogs like that.  Dog hair on the couch all the time.  You’d lie down for a nap and get up with it on your collar.

“She wasn’t like that during the war, though.  She never talked about dogs.  I never even saw her pet one.  She had big honey-colored eyes and sparkles in ‘em and she liked to dance.  That was the old Mary.  Sip beer and talk.  Starting to cool off out here, isn’t it?”  He took the cat back.

“I just didn’t bargain for a woman like she turned out to be.  She wasn’t nice to the kids.  I’m glad that’s over.”

“Been over for a while, hasn’t it?”

“Oh, sure,” said Henry.  “August makes about four years now, I guess.”

“You got any tea or coffee or something like that to drink?”

“Sure, sure.  Come on up to the house.”

We walked back to his kitchen through a couple of sandy banks.

“I just wasn’t suited to that marriage,” he said.  “I got into it kind of like Harold Holt in Australia going in for that swim off Bondi Beach or wherever it was.  It’s a good thing it’s over.”

The next day I left late.  Henry had produced a late breakfast of slow, bubbly omelette with bacon and bell peppers in it and we sat over the plates with a pot of coffee until noon.

It was very hot on the freeway to El Paso.  A little north of Derry I watched a thunderhead come across the sky and stop along the hills west of Radium Springs.  It began to pour rain in long billows on the valley floor, lightning in them.  I turned off the freeway at Garfield and went down the road through the cotton farms to the old highway along the river.  I drove fast to catch that storm.  Even if you were too late to get wet in it you could smell the puddles and the clean coyote willows and put your arm out into the fine cool air.