Advent Calendar Day 5 - November 16
Excerpt from The Horse on the Sidewalk, a book of short stories by Baker H. Morrow
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On the Mesa
This guy’s name was Ray, and he had a BSA.
I think it was a 250cc, but it could have been bigger. It made a great sound, and you never saw him going anywhere without his girlfriend Leah on the back.
The sound of the pipes, of course, came from the fact that the BSA was a four-stroke. That kind of engine didn’t need the pint of oil that you had to pour into the gas tank every time you filled up, which was exactly what you had to do with a two-stroke like a Vespa or a Lambretta. Those motors were semi-cool—maybe not totally uncool. A bike was totally uncool.
But this guy Ray didn’t have to worry about that. He wore La Parot Pomade on his hair. He drove around in his big Buddy Holly bat-wing glasses with his girlfriend on the pillion and her long blonde hair streaming out behind and her arms around his waist and he didn’t have a care in the world.
He sat across from me in English.
“What are you reading?” he said.
“Now?” I said.
“No, man. Not now. For that report she wanted.”
“The Voyage of the Beagle,” I said.
“I haven’t looked yet. In the library. I don’t want to read anything about dogs.”
“It has to be something scientific. A book on the history of science.”
I thought we were talking pretty quietly, but no.
“Stop, boys,” said Mrs. Crook. “Come up here.”
When we got to the desk, she said, “It’s quiet time. As in ‘quiet.’”
“Yes, ma’am. We were talking about our assignment.”
“Less talking and more reading are what is called for, Gil,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What is your book?”
I showed her the Darwin.
“The lead-up to the theory,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Dailey?” she said.
“Nothing yet,” said Ray. “Maybe something about mechanics, or engines.”
“I’ve seen you on that motorcycle, Ray,” said Mrs. Crook, deadpan.
You never could read her. She was pretty stern, and she always kept you at arm’s length. We were ants, and she was a tarantula.
“… with that Leah Barnes.” She looked at Ray with her icy gray eyes. Then she looked at me.
“One more time,” she said, “and you fellows are off to see Mr. Greene.”
That, of course, was the principal.
“Why don’t you go to the library?” she said. “Gil, you might help Ray pick something. You have fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As we went down the hall, Ray said, “Jesus Christ. How are we supposed to figure this stuff out if we don’t talk? Jesus Christ.”
I didn’t want to go back to the principal’s office. In general, he wasn’t a bad guy. You could talk to him a little. But he had a big paddle and he would absolutely use it if he didn’t sense some kind of promise in you. A direction. Or contrition. It was always a good idea to show both.
I am contrite, I practiced in my head, and I’m going somewhere.
The Early Reciprocating Engine: Its Origins and Development in Automobiles and Two-wheeled Vehicles saved Ray. It was by Harlan C. Outs. Ray found it almost right away, after I pointed out the section to him. “This is good, man,” he said. “Thanks.”
Mrs. Crook looked up from her papers and frowned as we came back into class. Then she looked at her watch. “Ready by Monday, then?” she said. It was five days away.
“Ready,” said Ray.
***
Part of the problem was that I had been in a little trouble only a month or so earlier—a slight scrap after class with this kid who knocked a bunch of books out of my hand in front of some girls and then threw my class notebooks skidding down the hall near the lockers. I took a swing at his face but he pulled back and I missed. I only hit him on the shoulder. He punched me in the jaw and it was a pretty good one and my right foot slipped and I went down. My head hit the locker as I fell—the door catch, actually—and I had a gash just behind my ear.
“What the hell are you little bastards doing?” said Mr. Postlethwaite, the science teacher. He grabbed this kid, who was a little squirt named Bobby Hiller, and shoved him up against the lockers. The girls ran. “Get his books,” he said to Hiller. I got up and pressed a handkerchief against my ear.
Mr. Postlethwaite had a tight crewcut and a bow tie and he smelled like Aqua Velva. He had been in the Marines and you knew it was all he could do to keep from knocking our lights out.
“I just slipped,” I said. My voice was level.
“He slipped,” said that little crud Hiller. He was a little scared. It made me mad that this kid was so fast with his fists and he only came up to my shoulder.
“You should be an example,” said Mr. Greene in his office. “Both of you. Especially you, Wheeler.” He let us off with a warning. “One more time,” he said, shaking his head, and we slipped out the door. Hiller and I walked back toward the big open locker room, and he pulled a mashed pack of Luckies out of his hip pocket, palming them till he got outside.
“I’ll get you,” he said, and he walked off. The inside of my cheek was sore where I had bitten it when he punched me.
***
I was walking down a dirt road at the edge of the mesa when I heard a motorcycle coming up fast behind me. It was a nice, cool afternoon with cotton-ball clouds over the mountains just to the east and a couple of dogs running through the grass on the plain a quarter-mile away. They looked like coyotes.
“Hey, Wheeler,” said Ray, slowing down. He had Leah hanging on behind him. She spread her fingers out across his chest as he talked and she smiled at me. She had hazel eyes. She was trying pretty hard to look like she meant business.
“You want a ride on this thing?” he said. “Maybe drive it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“IGA at ten o’clock on Saturday. Don’t be late,” he said.
Two days later I walked up to the IGA grocery at about 9:45. It wasn’t very far—just up the block, really—and I liked the people who ran the place. The Griffins. They were polite to kids and sometimes friendly. The place was well stocked and they kept it clean. They acted like they knew what they were doing.
I liked the grocery business anyway, and the produce counters in particular. The Griffins kept their displays spotless, cold, and lit up, and the vegetables and fruits smelled good and were always crisp. Nothing soggy. There were drops of water on the heads of lettuce and the apples were shiny and cool when you touched them.
I thought with a lot of luck I could get on as a sacker sometime. Or maybe a stocker. I knew how to sweep floors and did it well from a lot of practice and maybe I could do that, too.
I bought a Coke from Mrs. Griffin, gave her a nickel deposit for the bottle, and sat down on the curb out front to drink it.
Dailey came up about ten minutes late. You could hear that beautiful BSA from two or three blocks away. The pipes were deep and rumbly.
“Gil,” he said.
“Where’s Leah?”
“Giving her mother a permanent in the sink,” he said. “Takes all morning.” He had chewed a toothpick down to a stub and he pitched it into the gutter. “Stinks like hell in that kitchen.”
“My grandmother does that sometimes,” I said.
“Hop on.”
We shot up wide dusty Candelaria Road and Ray got the motorcycle into fourth gear just as we came to the intersection at Eubank Boulevard. That was a quick two-lane route, mostly asphalt, that ran south four or five miles to U.S. 66. Ray clipped down Eubank and hit sixty with no trouble. He paused only for the stop sign at Lomas.
“Watch for cops, kid,” he said. “They know me here.”
Sure, Ray.
There wasn’t much traffic on Route 66, which was Central Avenue, unless you looked a few miles to the west, down toward Wyoming Boulevard. Just two or three curio shops scattered along the road, a bar, and, of course, the Terrace Drive-In. You could see it down there on the south side with the Lombardy poplars out front and lining the drives and the pretty Spanish dancer on the Central side of the screen. At night she kicked up her neon heels and lifted her elbow and a corner of her skirt.
Ray lit up a cigarette as we turned east toward Tijeras Canyon. There was just nothing out there. The city fell away behind us, and to the north the sand dropseed and sideoats grama ran across the mesa in waves stirred up by the wind as far as you could see. There were stands of cholla and snakeweed where the sheep had grazed too closely, and pink and white Apache plumes in the dry channels leading up to the base of the mountains. The foothills were a light brown and yellow, with little bits of green from the oaks and junipers, and you could see outcrops of granite everywhere. Above them the high Sandia Mountains were blue and, in the far distance, purple.
I didn’t want to hang on to Ray like Leah did, so I gripped the underside of the seat with my fingertips. He wasn’t particularly good with corners, taking them too fast and sometimes hitting patches of gravel, and he wouldn’t put out his boot on the inside of a curve as he turned. I did. I was ready to kick the ground to steady us if we started skidding, but he didn’t like that and he told me to knock it off.
Juan Tabo was a famous roller coaster road, up and down in continuous rolls, all dirt, and indifferently graded in all seasons. Ray turned onto it from Route and shot north with his head cocked back at an angle. He was trying to look like James Dean or Marlon Brando, down to his white tee shirt and black jacket with a bunch of zippers and his black engineer’s boots.
That English engine hummed and we just flew along, airborne as we came up over the ridges between the dry washes. Ray had his cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, being cool. The road was pretty straight and we did all right with the flying until a guy in a blue Ford pickup went by us going south at some speed and kicked up a lot of dust. The air got all thick with it and Ray couldn’t see a groove worn out by water flowing crosswise right in front of him. He hit it hard, and the wheels slid out from under the BSA and it bounced and laid over on its side.
I sailed off the back and landed in the sand in the bottom of the arroyo. Ray burned his leg on one of the hot exhaust pipes and scraped up one arm of his leather jacket. He had grit in his messed-up hair and the left lens of his glasses was cracked. A big star crack.
The motorcycle only had a bent rearview mirror. He jerked it upright and wiped it off with a rag he had in his jacket pocket.
“Goddammit,” he said.
I thought he looked a little shocked, but I had the wind knocked out of me, too, and I stood up and dusted off my pants. Then I sat down right away on a chunk of granite to get my breath.
Ray jiggled the carburetor buttons and fiddled with the screws and jumped on the starter. The motor caught after two or three kicks. He revved it.
“You walk, Wheeler,” he said. “You did this.”
“What the hell, Ray?”
“You walk. I’m a friend of Hiller’s, anyway, and I don’t like what you did to him.”
“He started it, Ray,” I said, but the guy was already over the hill and on to the next arroyo.
It took me two and a half hours to hike home across the mesa to the northwest. It was all downhill. Not too hard. I went cross-country, not following the roads, which were dusty and indirect, and as it was late October it wasn’t too hot. I came out of it with just a split lower lip.
“Aren’t you working today, Jim?” said my mother when I came in.
“Yeah,” I said. My first name is James, which I like well enough, so naturally she sometimes called me Jim. Everybody else called me Gil from my middle name, and she was starting to do that, too.
“Get off early, Mom?” I said. She worked in a little clothes shop, although she was really a music teacher. Women’s clothes.
“I’m going back,” she said.
I could hear her rustling around in the kitchen while I was cleaning up in the bathroom, and when I came out she had a baloney sandwich with Miracle Whip and lettuce and a cup of tea for me.
My brother Lenny had already eaten half his sandwich. He was sitting at the kitchen table. “Nice lip,” he said.
I was thinking about Dailey as I ate, and not very kindly, but mostly I didn’t want to have to handle him at the same time as that pissant Hiller.
I had to go. “See you, Mom,” I said. “Thanks.” I was gulping the tea.
“Wait just a minute,” she said. “I’ll give you a ride down to the center. What’s wrong with your mouth?”
***
Connie Francis had a new hit out that weekend. It was called “Fallin’.” I heard it on Sunday afternoon on kqeo, am. She was falling into something with a boyfriend, and guess whose fault that was?
I loved it the first time I heard it. I was writing my paper on FitzRoy’s ship, the Beagle, and its researches, which I finished even though I had to work that Sunday. I had the radio on the whole time, and Connie was a smash. They played that song again and again.
The corners of Mrs. Crook’s mouth went up just slightly when I gave her the paper on Monday. She dipped her chin at me. It was eight pages, in my best handwriting, with only one or two small smudges and a single crossed-out word. I used an Esterbrook fountain pen that I had borrowed from my dad and I added references and footnotes.
There were a good thirty kids in that class, and it took her a while to rake in all the scholarly essays. Ray, of course, hadn’t shown up that day.
“One salient fact,” she said, once she had them. “You’ll present them in one to two minutes each. I’ll go alphabetically.”
Salience.
By the time she got to me, the class period was almost gone.
“Mr. Wheeler,” she said.
“Darwin rowed ashore from FitzRoy’s ship all along the east coast of South America,” I said. “Maybe hundreds of times. Probably dozens, though. He collected plant and animal specimens and fossils. Then he rowed back to the Beagle and catalogued everything.”
Mrs. Crook looked closely at me. Then she glanced at the wall clock.
“He was always seasick,” I said. “He never got over it.”
The bell rang and I collected my stuff.
“It’s hard to see how he did it,” I said to her as everyone streamed out. “It was a wild place and he was massively uncomfortable.”
In the hallway I ran into Leah with the very long hair.
“Ray’s not here today,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“His brother’s mad about the BSA.”
“It was only the mirror.”
“It was the tank, too,” she said. “Scratches. And the frame is bent in the back.”
That beautiful red motorcycle with the black frame and flaring chrome pipes. I hated to think of it.
“I have to get to class,” I said.
“Me, too.”
“Ray told me that was his motor,” I said.
“Well, it’s not. How would he pay for it? He doesn’t have a job. His brother pounded the snot out of him.”
“Bye, Leah.”
“You have a job,” she said. “That’s what Jill told me.”
She was talking about Jill Summers, my friend.
She stepped up and straightened my collar with two fingers. She smelled really good, kind of flowery. Then she pushed back the hair over my left ear. She touched my broken lip.
“He’s not that cool,” she said.
Read more about the continuing adventures of Gil Wheeler and his friends in THE HORSE ON THE SIDEWALK, the New Mexico Book Award-finalist collection of connected short stories.
Get 16% off this title until midnight Mountain time tonight, Sunday, November 16.
About the Author
Baker H. Morrow, a third-generation New Mexican, was born in Albuquerque, where he has lived in both the valley and the heights. After a stint in the Peace Corps, he worked as a landscape architect in his own office and as a professor at the University of New Mexico for many years. He is the author of two other collections of short stories and of Best Plants for New Mexico Gardens and Landscapes and other works.