Me and the Chief

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

When I was a boy, about seven years old, my parents and I were making one of our annual summer drives from San Jose to Springfield, Missouri. That's where my mother's family lived. It was a two day drive, and typically we would spend the first night in a motel in Albuquerque. But this year, back in about '69, I guess, when we were fifty miles out of Kingman, Arizona, the right rear tire of the '66 Buick Electra suffered a blowout. Dad quickly replaced the tire, but against all odds, within ten miles the left rear tire also blew. Dad had to hitchhike on to Flagstaff to get a replacement, leaving Mom with Clarissa and me to wait in the hot, stranded vehicle on the side of the road. It was about three hours before Dad returned with the new tire and we were on our way again, but by now it was late afternoon. Mom wanted to stay in Flagstaff for the night, but Dad insisted we press on to make up for lost time. Impatience, do you see? That determination to make up for lost time turned out to have devastating implications for me, and for many others. If only we had spent the night in Flagstaff. If only. But the world doesn't work that way.

Nowadays this kind of cross-country family trip is a different experience. I look at you sitting there with your short hair and young skin and neat black ties and I see that I'll have to try to illustrate an era you never knew. Draw you a picture. Okay.

In the first place, while now there's always the option of taking a plane instead of driving, most people didn't think that way back in the late 60s. If you wanted to go cross-country, you drove. Road trips are also so much more comfortable now than they were back when. The cars these days are universally air-conditioned, and the air conditioning works to cool the whole car uniformly. That wasn't always the case, believe me. A family road trip used to be an ongoing quarrel about who got to sit in the front, and when, and for how long, and who had to be seated next to the window where the sun came in. We had no car stereo systems, no CDs, no personal mp3 players, and certainly no one could imagine anything like a personable DVD player. VHS didn't even come along until the 80s, or maybe the late, late 70s. I don't really remember. Or Betamax. But you wouldn't know about that. . . .

No such amenities back in the day. Dad in the front seat controlled the radio with absolute dictatorial authority, and for most families, including my own, that meant country-western: none of that West Coast hippy rock-and-roll on a family vacation. So we'd pile up pillows and blankets and whatever paperbacks and magazines we could find and settle down for extended sessions of utter mind-numbing boredom whose only reward was eventually going to be the arrival at an unfamiliar house in Springfield full of even stranger relatives whom you hardly knew.

I don't know what books I was reading. Maybe comic books, or The Hardy Boys, or one or two year old issues of Boys Life that I'd read time after time before. Just a normal boy like any other, you see? I remember Dad had some magazines about the old West that I sometimes read, so maybe they were there, too. Whatever, I usually kept my face embedded deep in reading material to try to avoid having to entertain Clarissa, who would have been about five years old when we made this trip. Poor little blonde kid, happy then, now twice-divorced and trying to raise three kids on her own. Mom spent the entire trip crocheting blankets with her big paper bag stuffed full of brightly colored balls of yarn up in the front seat, or trading places sometimes with me to keep Clarissa company, playing the usual car games, tic-tac-toe, or I-Spy.

Across the Arizona high country we drove as the sun plunged to the horizon behind us, past the turnoff to Meteor Crater where Dad had hoped to take us today before fate had upset his plans and contaminated my whole life. We were passing through Winslow as the pale aqua-blue Arizona sky deepened to shades of leafy green and soft violet. By the time we reached Holbrook the thin crescent of the new moon was itself almost finished setting below the horizon behind us. Evening gave way to a heavy black blanket of night that was blitzed with thousands of shimmering jewel stars. It was too dark to read. Clarissa's chatter was falling away in the back as the day wore down. Next to me I could see in the light from the instrument panel how Dad's fingers were tight on the wheel, his eyes set far ahead at the most remote extent of the headlights' reach. I knew he was frustrated by the delays. He wanted to go on. But it could not be.

Within ninety minutes we'd approached the outskirts of Gallup, New Mexico, and our speed dropped down precipitously as we got behind a flatbed truck on the back of which rode probably eight or nine Indians. I don't know if they were some kind of laborers or what. Probably not: probably they were just on the way in to town looking for something to do. The truck was creeping ahead. It couldn't have been making more than fifteen miles per hour. Between the curves of the road and oncoming traffic, Dad couldn't pass.

"I wish they'd just pull over and let us get around!" Dad growled.

"Take it easy, Harold," Mom soothed from the back seat. "We'll get there when we get there."

"Well, this is crazy! Do they think they own the whole road?"

It must have been another fifteen minutes before we finally crept into the city, although it seemed like a lifetime. By now Dad was extremely frustrated, naturally, and he declared his determination to rush ahead for Albuquerque despite the late hour. If only he had! But of course Mom squelched that idea immediately, and we all started watching for a motel.

Gallup didn't look too impressive, and yet I found myself staring out the window in wonder. In a way I can't explain, it seemed oddly familiar to me. Did you ever have the experience of arriving in a place you've never been before, but feeling like it was part of you, part of your past? It was like that. Odd. We'd been in the hot car all day gazing at the glaring asphalt unrolling steadily before us all the way to the horizon, and we were all sweaty and tired and beat, but something about this place struck a strange chord in me. Most of the streetlights seemed to be broken or buzzing and fizzling dimly, half burned out. The buildings were low and seedy, with a lot of antennas sticking up haphazardly at crazy angles wherever you looked, and low-slung power lines were sagging down everywhere, almost as though a whole soul-depleted, extraterrestrial city had fallen out of the sky to deteriorate impotently over the ensuing decades where it had struck the earth. The town appeared to be a loose network of shoddy shopping centers and liquor stores and decrepit gas stations and shattered cement sidewalks and dead, ghostly trees and bent basketball hoops without nets and dangerously leaning chain link fence and dusty, ancient cars on cinder blocks. And standing around outside, everywhere you looked, even though it was already rather late and very dark out, you saw the Indians.

The Indians. What can I say about them? I wouldn't learn so for years, but as you know, Gallup is sometimes referred to as the Indian capital of the world. That night the reason why was already evident to me. Great tribes of Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo are all situated in the surrounding desert regions, and their people seem to be inescapably drawn to Gallup like iron filings are pulled toward a magnet. God alone knows why. I mean, there's nothing compelling in Gallup. Nothing. And yet, already I knew there, already I could feel, that there was something enigmatically captivating about these ponderous and impenetrable Indians haunting the night streets of Gallup, these great bears of humanity whom I saw everywhere I looked as our car inched forward from one stoplight to the next. To my young mind it was like we'd accidentally stumbled into some kind of weird alternate reality. Obviously this strange world existed unto itself according to some mysterious rules that had no application to my own world. Here was a confused, isolated nation buried well within the borders of my own nation. Here were mystical creatures breathing the same air I breathed, beings like angels or devils, or both, incarnated in human form, mystical, magical, and mortal, all at the same time.

Dad was nervous. I could feel it. Mom was nervous too, but she was adamant. She was tired of being in the car, and although she usually didn't show these feelings directly, she remained in the aftermath of a bad temper from having had to wait on the roadside for so long. We drove for four or five blocks, I think, before finding a motel, all white plaster and pink and green neon. We waited in the car while Dad went inside to sign the register and get a key.

"Where are we?" Clarissa asked. She was stirring in the back seat, waking up from her sleep.

"It's okay, baby," Mom said. "We're going to get something to eat, and then you'll be in your bed soon."

"I don't want to eat."

"Hush, baby."

"What's that?" I said.

"What's what?"

"That. Across the street. Is that a restaurant?"

It was a large, glass-fronted building hugging the curbside, with blazing white fluorescent light bathing the surrounding dirty sidewalks in milky, surreal radiation from its jutting eaves. This intense and schlocky, brilliant luminance boiling out of the place spilled into the streets toward the savage darkness waiting beyond, that lurking, watchful desert darkness perched high over Gallup, surreptitiously sucking the life out of the rest of the city. The blinding glare had initially confused me, but as soon as I looked through the enormous glass panes I had my answer. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths plastic-wrapped over their tables were arranged down along the windows, and farther inside a long lunch counter fronted by a line of pivoting stainless steel stools with padded brown vinyl seats proved that it was indeed a café of some sort. Mom saw this as soon as I did and declared that here we would have our late dinner.

Dad came back and drove us around to the back of the motel. We quickly moved our minimal belongings in, packed separately from the rest of our luggage just to get us through this one night. Nothing unusual or interesting about the hotel. Within a few minutes we were on our way back to the front of the place and across the street, Dad carrying Clarissa and Mom clutching my hand. I now read the name of the place painted on the glass double doors facing the corner: The Chief's All-Night Diner.

Before we passed through the doors I felt a quick twinge of pressure pulse through Mom's grip on my hand. I turned to look up at her, but then I saw what had precipitated the spasm. There, less than three feet away on the sidewalk, an ancient Indian lay sprawling, his left shoulder slouched up against the wall. His right hand was lifted a few inches up from the ground and his fingers were outstretched, as if he were reaching toward us. But Dad very quickly herded us through the doors, and we were inside.

We all came to an abrupt stop just inside the doors and stood there blinking for a few seconds. The distracting bright lights outside had obscured the tableau awaiting us. The diner proved smaller than it had seemed. The windows were tinted and everything was in fact rather dim. A few people were hunched together down at the far end of the counter, and one or two other derelict-types were half-collapsed at a table, or rather, they almost seemed to have been poured into their seats and had been steadily melting in place ever since. But the lighting was the strangest aspect of the diner. The whole room seemed to be illuminated with weird fluorescence and neon, dying all interior surfaces in ghoulish shades of green. I could feel Dad hesitating beside me, but once again Mom's determination won out.

"Shall we get a table, Harold?"

We did get a table, and soon a heavyset Indian waitress came for our order. Sleepy Clarissa, toting around her spit-stained stuffed rabbit, was eye-level with the tabletop next to Mom, chanting lines from some nursery rhyme over and over. Dad kept surreptitiously grumbling his grumpy opinions about this dirty city and the freakish café with its drunks passed out on the sidewalk outside, but Mom was insistent on pretending that everything was normal and would have none of it. Eventually they brought our burgers, and any inclination to conversation fell away, although Clarissa alternated between biting the ends off fries and softly singing her nonsense song.

During the meal I myself remained fixated on the boozed up Indian outside, if he was indeed drunk as Dad claimed, although for some reason I was doubtful about that. In the fraction of a second I'd seen him, he'd definitely made an impression on my pliant young psyche, and to this day I can still picture him quite clearly. His clothing had seemed old and stiff and gray, buckram-coarse and more like glue-stiffened burlap than contour-flowing fabric, I thought, encrusted and thoroughly impregnated with the dust of the primordial desert. He was actually marvelously thin for an Indian, skinny and almost completely wasted away, ancient and withered, a filthy bandana tying back a thick mane of silky silver-gray hair that poured down over his bony shoulders. The years had melted most of the flesh from his face so that the resinous brown skin rode the bones like a thin shell of sun-tanned leather, only deeply furrowed by wrinkles resembling the intricate snaking of dry desert washes as seen from an airplane passing overhead. But it's the eyes I remember most clearly even now, impossibly clear and brilliant, like a pair of glowing blue-white crystal orbs lodged in his archaic skull and looking directly, unquestioningly into my own eyes as Dad shoved us through the café doors. Those bright eyes were full of light and life and perceptivity in a way that no old man's eyes should be. Even as the old relic had seemed to be suffering the pain of imminent death, his eyes were laughing. I don't know if the striking disparity of his eyes suggested to me good or evil. You can believe it or not, but we're all mixtures of both good and evil, you know? It's not as if they're isolated poles in the way the Judeo-Christian tradition would have us believe. They blend, those cosmic forces, and many others, too, and of course the experiences we have, and the random events that happen to us, that by accident are imposed on is, all those external forces, they also influence the roads we pass down. Well, I know this must sound like a stream of half-rationalizations to you. That's your job, and that's the mythology you must function under. I understand that, and I have no desire to try to persuade you, or anyone else, of anything. I couldn't change your minds even if I tried. No matter. I'm just trying to tell you my story the best way I know how, and you can take it or leave it. I've thought about it often enough in the long years since, and I have no better words to convey what I saw that night.

In the café, then. In The Chief's All-Night Diner. At some point Mom realized I wasn't eating my hamburger.

"Hurry up and eat, David. It's late."

"Something wrong with your burger, Son?" Dad asked.

"No. I don't feel very well."

"What," Dad asked, "are you still car-sick?"

Mom reached across the table and put her hand on my forehead. She jerked it back as if she'd been burned.

"Harold! He's burning up!"

That's when we all found out I was sick.

We didn't stay much longer at the diner. Mom and Dad rushed through their meals, and I sipped just a little bit of my soda. Then Dad paid and we hurried back across the street to the motel, where Mom dug through her overnight case and found some aspirin for me. Remember the bitterness of aspirin dissolved in a spoon of water? No? Of course not. Then we all tried to get some sleep, Dad and Clarissa ending up in one of the twin beds, Mom watching over me in the other all through the rest of the night.

One thing that was strange was that my temperature was so high during the night, and during the rest of our drive to Springfield the next day, that I was actually hallucinating. It was such a strange experience that I still remember it quite vividly. They were not really frightening hallucinations, but their reality was overwhelming. I mean, at the time I knew they were not real, but that did nothing to affect their extreme detail and apparent veracity. For the most part I found myself in an active volcanic landscape, as if I were present at the beginning of the world, these glassy black volcanic cinder cones surrounding me on all sides, bleeding fiery red lava everywhere, everywhere, and spewing it high up against the dark sky with its oppressive, hot clouds close to the ground throwing back the lambent red light with every new seething spew of lava. I remember distinctly at one point I tried to escape these towering volcanoes and I buried my face deep into my pillow and squeezed my eyes very tight and there I saw a teeny, tiny volcanic eruption. During the night, although not during the drive the next day, I also kept catching furtive glimpses of pterodactyls soaring overhead, hungrily searching for prey, I had no doubt. Every time I'd hear their shrill, bestial cry I'd try to hide, only my own body appeared to be absent from my hallucination, and there was no physical "me" who could seek cover.

Now, I could have told you this whole story and omitted the part about being sick that night, but that would be intellectually dishonest, and at this point what have I got left but my story? My old man died fifteen years ago, and I expect my dear old Mom, if you were so heartless as to hassle her about my problems, would never connect this particular summer vacation trip to everything that happened later. Even if you did harass her, and even if she did remember that night in Gallup, I doubt she'd remember to tell you about my fever. I wonder. . . .

See, I know what your shrinks are going to say about all this. Of course I do. Don't forget that I went on to become a psychologist myself, with, of course, my special interest in ethnobotany and Native American studies, as the politically-correct cynics like to call it. They're going to come up with some kind of fairytale about how the events that I'm reporting from The Chief's All-Night Diner were themselves part of my hallucinations, and all this somehow or other got folded into my sick mind in a way that would unfold with horrific results decades later. Don't you see? I'm a well-compensated expert, many times over, with plenty of experience making up such fairytales for various lawyers and judges and juries. Expert witnesses? That's what we're called. But no, really we're professional witchdoctors whose myths and fables help society see what society wants to see rather than what's really there.

What's really there? Well, I'm not going to tell you that. That would get me in real trouble with my colleagues. Professional secrets, you know? But I will tell you what else I saw when we came out of that diner that night, Dad holding me in his arms as we hurried across the street and back to the motel. What I saw over Dad's shoulder.

That old Indian was still there on the ground, but now there were a couple of cops standing over him. I knew the old man had died. I knew it as well as I ever knew anything; I mean, I knew it with absolutely no uncertainty or doubt. Or fear, I might add. Here I was, a little kid regarding a dead body for the first time, and it didn't bother me. It was funny because Mom and Dad were in such a hurry to get back to the motel that they never even looked back. But I did. I saw his body, and that's when I understood what had happened.

That old medicine man's soul had left his withered corpse and entered into my own body while we were in the restaurant.

No: I don't care if you laugh, or what you say or what you think. It doesn't matter to me. Think about it. I've got nothing to win or lose. I've already lost everything anyway. My wife. My own children. My whole life is over. I know that. I'll die in your brightly-lit, sanitized, stinking correctional facility. It's all over for me.

Am I sorry for the ones who died? Of course I am. I'm not the emotionless psychopath you think I am. If I thought it would make a bit of difference, I'd apologize to all their families. Sixteen murders? If you say so. Maybe more. Who knows? Certainly not me. I have no memory of any of it.

Don't you see? It wasn't me who killed them.

It was the Chief.

The End.