This Red Rock by Louise Blaydon Page A

poetry
    joint where the air is sweet with weed, that"s what we"ve been
    since Grandfather Arzano stepped off the boat from Calabria:
    Southwesterners. I was born under the shadow of that red
    rock and, sitting there declaiming my T.S. Eliot, it was there
    where my ghost strode behind me, where my fear showed in
    a handful of dust. The Southwest is in me— is me—but it"s
    my past. I didn"t wantto be stalked by the shadow of my
    rural childhood.
    And so, I argued: “Mama, can"t I just stay here?”
    But she was adamant. “Alex, honey, Francesco is paying
    your fees. The least you can do is help him out a little over
    the summer. He doesn"t have any obligation to you, you
    know. Any time he liked, he could cut off your money at the
    source.”
    And boy, if that didn"t sober me up real quick. Leaving
    San Diego for a summer didn"t exactly appeal, but the idea of
    having to leave it forever, disconsolate and without a degree,
    was insupportable. If Magdalena for the summer meant San
    Diego for the next two years, then dammit, I would just have
    to trip out down to Magdalena. I"d seen the ranch a couple
    This Red Rock | Louise Blaydon
    5
    times before as a kid; I knew it smelled like cows and shit
    and was run almost entirely in Spanish. I was under no
    illusions about it being an easy ride—my Uncle Frank has
    never been the sort for that—but hell, it was still a better
    deal than the potential alternative.
    End of semester, I waved farewell to my buddies, slung
    my crap into the trunk of my little Fiesta, and filled her up,
    ready for a long, long drive.
    Coulda been worse. At least I didn"t look Anglo.

    TO MITIGATE my plight, I packed about half a trunk full of
    Dylan CDs, all sonorous nasals and sentences swallowing
    their own tails. “„Señor",” I crooned with him, into the wind,
    “„señor, can you tell me where we"re heading? Lincoln County
    Road or Armageddon?"” and I"d never quite seen the truth in
    that beauty, before. I didn"t anticipate much comfort, the
    way I was bound. I guess it made the long road just a little
    shorter; to feel that there was somebody on it with me,
    somebody who had been this way himself. Once, I even
    thought I caught him singing just for me—“and I"ll pray for
    Magdalena as we ride”—and the misconception warmed me
    for a whole turn around the CD, before the track came round
    again and I realized that Magdalena was only his girl, and he
    was playing for her all the way to Durango. Well, I wasn"t
    headed anywhere near Durango, and I sure as hell didn"t
    have a girl. I liked my mishearing a whole lot better. In my
    head, as I drove through the desert, the words were as I first
    heard them, hopeful and apposite. Pray for me, señor. Pray
    for us.
    This Red Rock | Louise Blaydon
    6

    In New Mexico, things fall away. The farther I struck
    toward the state line, the cleaner the roadside verges were,
    the fewer the billboards stark against the sky. I always forget
    just how much sky there is down there in the southwest,
    until I drive back out there again and it"s all I can see. You
    can go all day under its azure vastness, bright and fierce as
    some strange water-metal, and then in the evening it"s like
    it"s all erased and repainted, all massed red clouds gilt-edged
    on a purple plain. I"m getting a little lyrical here, I know, but
    New Mexico sky is something to be lyrical about. If I were
    really a poet, I"d paint that sky in words.
    It awed me, that great vista, as evening fell and my
    peppy little car chugged on across the sun-dried earth to the
    Magdalena Mountains. I guess I started to see some possible
    benefits, in those last few hours of my sticky three-day drive,
    of all this beauty for a hedonist like me. But as the ranch
    finally swam into view, its stiff-poled fences and its disparate
    cows amassed in sullen little clumps, I forgot whatever it was
    that had started to move me. This would be a summer of
    sweat and dirt and shit, resentment on my part