ROAD TRIP (31) 1925 While they were sitting at the window table drinking their coffee Sam asked Belle about Alfie. “He’s a strange one,” Belle said, “not that I see much of him. His folks don’t like him coming in here, because they thinks it’s a sinful place—not that they’re religious folk. When folk with religion comes to Pueblo Flats they always let go of them notions. We nod when we pass each other outside, and Alfie said ‘hello’ to me once. . . then seemed embarrassed and turned his face away. Ever’thin’ else what I knows about him comes second-hand from Clem and others. There ain’t no more kids here, so that boy got no one his age to be with.” Sam was amused at Belle’s reference to Alfie as ‘that boy’, it was difficult to reconcile the outward appearance of a seventeen year old with the true age Alfie declared himself to be. “I didn’t realise there were no more youngsters here,” he sipped his coffee and looked at Belle’s handsome, middle-aged, care worn face. “It ain’t exactly ’fficial policy that we don’t have kids here, it just sorta happened. Folk soon realise that it ain’t natural for a newborn to be a newborn forever. If’n they wants kids they leave. We tell them to come back here when their kids is old enough to decide for themselves, but they never does.” “Alfie says he was seventeen when he came here.” “And that’s where he still is, give or take. . . Sometimes I wonders if he ever wants to go out into the world for a few years, get a bit older,” Belle mused, “but Clem says the boy’s parents won’t let go. . . even though he could return any time.” “Maybe I’ll take him with me when I go.” “You can try Sam, but I think that maybe he likes being seventeen, deep down. He’s been to Albuquerque on the supply trips a few times, he coulda stayed there but chose not to.” “I guess he knew no one, had no money, nowhere to go. . . all he knows is Pueblo Flats and not much more.” Outside, the afternoon breeze was picking up. Miniature dust devils sprang into existence on the street, casting indistinct, dancing shadows, and then collapsed into showers of sparkling particles as they fell back to the ground. A few balls of tumbleweed jounced around, excited by the gentle movement of the air. Slowly but surely shadows were lengthening. There was no one to be seen, none of the noise that a real town should have, none of the activity. Heat haze shivered upwards from the scorching paintwork of Sam’s Oldsmobile, distorting everything he could see through it. Sam’s attention returned to Belle. She was silent now, just as he was. There was nothing else to say about Alfie. As Sam looked at Belle she emerged from her brief reverie. Their eyes met for a second or two and then both quickly looked away. Sam was embarrassed. He felt that he had trespassed in a space that was reserved only for this mysterious, private woman. As their eyes met he had seen in Belle a dark pool of emptiness and regret, and something had passed between them, a tacit communication the meaning of which he didn’t yet know. “I think I’ll maybe go and talk to Clem for a while,” he said to cover his embarrassment. Belle was slow in replying as she gazed at Sam. “You’re so much like my Zeke,” she whispered, “so much like my Zeke.” Sam smiled, he could think of nothing else to do or say. Even his mother said he was the image of Zeke, but he couldn’t see it himself. Perhaps it’s more than just the way I look, he thought. “Clem’s stable is just along a-ways, he will like talking to you.” Belle’s words were almost brusque, she was herself again—or at least the self she wanted the world to see, Sam realized. ******** Walking in the direction Belle had indicated meant that Sam was blinded by the sun as it slipped down the afternoon sky. He squinted and used his left hand as a visor in order to see where he was going. It wasn’t that it was possible to get lost in Pueblo Flats, he just wanted to see where he was going. That was normal, he thought. He walked past the skeleton of the hotel and wondered whose bright idea that had been. A few large timbers were still semi-erect, but most of the planking had been stripped. Among the wreckage of the interior he could see humps and bumps that were covered with desert dust and wondered what was beneath them—things for which no one in Pueblo Flats had yet found a new use, to be sure. In barely ninety seconds he came to Clem’s barn-like building with its tall, wide doors. “Clem,” he yelled out as he approached, “Clem.” ******** [From the notebooks of Ezekiel Carter] Let me tell you about Clem. After Ben, and Belle of course, Clem was the nearest thing to a friend I had in Pueblo Flats. All the other people in town, all fourteen or fifteen of them, were little known to me, but Clem was someone I talked with. He would talk about almost anything but himself, and delivered his ill-informed opinions as if they were wisdom from on high. In his down-home way he amused me, and brought a lightness to my time in Pueblo Flats that for all that I loved the neither Belle or Ben ever managed to do. Often, when he saw me chuckling at something he’d said, he would ask: “Whar’re you laughing at young feller? I ain’t said nothin’funny.” Then his wrinkled face smile would evolve into a wide, gap-toothed smile and he’d continue pronouncing on whatever subject was fretting him at that moment. “This country won’t never be great like where them English comes from,” he said one day. “We got a big country, but we doesn’t have the wit to do anythin’ with it.” In a way he was right, but he wasn’t aware of the great changes happening in the world. I once asked Clem how old he was, not in Pueblo Flats time, but in regular outside time. He wouldn’t tell me. Nor would he tell me how he’d ended up here. “I knowed Belle from before,” he said, “ an’ she said this place were a good idea. So I comed here.” Perhaps that’s all he wanted to remember. Perhaps that’s all he could remember. I guessed Clem’s Pueblo Flats age to be about seventy years, but age plays tricks and he could have been ten years either way of that. By my reckoning that meant his real age must have been close to one hundred and he’d been born in the 1790s. When I left Pueblo Flats, Clem was, after Belle, the only one who shed a tear at my leaving. He hugged me for the first and last time, he said kind things in his rough-and-ready way, and I thought he was bursting to tell me something important but couldn’t let the words out. I miss Clem.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:21:57 +0000
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