February 2002

Emma's Cafe 

Hunger propelled him towards the Formica counter wherefour Naugahyde stools screwed into a rolled-linoleum floor. It might have been an old beauty parlor or upholstery shop reworked into a roadhouse.

“How are you?” the waitress asked.

“Hungry. real hungry.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place. Wha’d’ya want?”

A plastic menu board hung at a slant above the cook’s slot as if hit by a mop or weighted down by a mouse that jumped beyond its bounds. Some of its alphabet sprung loose, went missing or was askew in a mixture of English and Spanish fragments. There were no prices posted as if such things belonged to the indecipherable nature of the unforetold. He looked at his watch: eight-thirty Sunday morning in a place on a dirt road near the rim of Diablo Missions Silver Strip Mine. She put a blue carbon-typed menu into his hands to get a grip on.

He had been on the road for five or six hours through Black Mountain Pass. No food since Truth Or Consequences, a hundred and fifty miles of long slow hairpin-turns ago. Weary and thirsty, he said, “I’ll have beer, a cold one.”

“We don’t serve beer. Anything else?”

The phone rang. Before she picked it up she said, “Try the Mexican Breakfast. It’s an omelet with all sorts of stuff. You want it?” He nodded yes.

Here was Mr. Ed Turrel. A thousand miles from home. A peek into his head revealed the mine loomed large. He drove along its perimeter at fifty miles an hour for over thirty minutes and still could not see its end nor bottom before he turned off to eat. An entire ocean of silver had been drained — deep and broad enough for all of Phoenix, Tucson and Santa Fe to float around in like squeaky little ducky toys, he reasoned.

An old Tecate beer calendar hung on a nail by a wretched wire, dog-eared, torn, and way out of date. It was all alone in the middle of a water stained sun-bleached orange wall. Plaster and lath gaped from the punched out corners where the rain got in. Nothing else to look at, no clock, shrines, signage, or ads … just sharp angled shafts of bright summer morning sun kaleidoscoping through the ill-fitting slats of the front window blinds. They made the walls move like the backwash of a ship against the whirl of its props. Ed turned away, didn’t want to trigger the reveries so apt to occur whenever hunger met visions on a bleeding wall — no demons loose on that bronze bottle blaze tableaux of the crucified beer.

He stared back at the slot for his food. He marveled how the splendidly beautiful and curvy Latina waitress could be so damn sexy at her matronly age in a one gas-pump town, that it may have something to do with the silver, with Incas, Aztecs, and the goddesses they adorn. Three old hombres sat at a table along the other wall, the one without the blinding glare of the sun-shafted beer. They had Sunday-best cowboy hats on, fresh shirts, and a shine on their boots. A gray, pale senior couple sat prim in their wash-and-wear at a mid-room table finishing up with a cup of coffee over a spread-out trailer park map. They may have gone to church when they rose up and left at the chime of the nine o’clock bells.

Five or six brown paper bags appeared lined up in the cook’s port that was cut through the Luann and drywall and framed off with inch wide strips of chrome that reminded him of a fifty-six Chevy Bel Air. There was something stealthy about those bags, as if their moment happened too quick for the scenery. The way they just arrived without history, without a trace of their maker, disengaged and anonymous, as sentinels of enigmas. They remained suspect until the waitress set them down close enough for his inspection.

Quick-step boot clops came through the door. “You’re right on time, Sally,” said the waitress. “Twenty-five dollars will do. … How’s the kids?” The lady folded her change into her cowgirl blouse pocket and buttoned it down with those white pearly snaps. “You’re not in my way honey,” she said to him as she shot fistfuls of blister pack salsa, ketchup and mustard into the sacks. But he moved over any way to get a look — blonde, vibrant, thirties, western jean attire with long loosely gathered hair in a bun. It was the nicest thing anyone that bonnie ever said to him since he never knew when. It made him homesick, in a swoon for a love he never had. He wondered what kind of men she liked and if he fit the bill.

A steaming plate of food slid into sight. The waitress served it quick with flair and a paper napkin wrapped around a knife and fork. “You want salsa?” He nodded and said, “Hot.”

“You want it hot, chico?” she teased. The three hombres stirred with slight laughter that encouraged him to say, “Si, por favor, caliente.” She took a bowl of it from the fridge and placed it before him with a fresh new spoon she polished on her apron. She stood ready for his reaction until it passed down his throat with a smile. But his eyes swelled red because he was running like Billy the Kid. He spoke in grim interior silence — the unspoken talk that speaks loudest of all in minds engaged in destiny. It suggested he ought to drop dead on the floor and save everybody, including himself from any more fugitive omelets — breathless, bedraggled, and hunkered down over a plate of chow a trillion miles from nowhere. He was unnerved by his own wit when he sniped, Is this anyway to subvert an ego?

Suddenly the place took on a horribly sodden yet pious atmosphere, a sacred scullery, an antechamber to a Counter Reformation crypt where the interred are given their last meal. He ate to show compliance, negotiating so they’ll not skimp on the heat and let him languish in the unredeemed vapors of hell. It was time for his last words when he surmised, It’s Sunday isn’t it? So why not rise up and announce that I’m no ordinary stranger but the biggest stranger that ever lived because I still don’t have a clue. All the meaning has been stripped from my language like that silver robbed from the earth. Say that I have no words to speak, none with meaning, none intact, none that open the seeds of magic used to grow the truth of things. I have no corn words, no rain words, no cock words, no heart or dream words to make my life real. Yeah, that’s it, he went, tell them I’m a sick son-of-a-bitch running from a hollow, empty world left desolate by the idiotic vanity of lunatics. That’ll clear things up.

But wait. These people don’t need to hear this. They still talk in tales of their parents, retelling what happened five hundred years ago with all the symmetry and perfection of well kept intemporal relations. Stories have combined with eyewitness accounts of arcane events that verify the exact intention and expressions of their forbearers who tramped through here with their shipwrecked madness and infectious fevers in quest of El Dorados, and the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. This entire hemisphere was conceived and concocted in a Viceroyal Spanish delirium, on malarial beds soaked in the syphilitic humidities of eternal youth and the hypnogogic promises of endless golden wealth — a chain that’s gone unbroken, even proliferates in the arithmetic cauldrons of Los Alamos where it is stirred into nightmares of chaos by the four-eyed priests of extinction.

He considered the last time he spoke with Lizette when she told him he had been erased. Like a blight, she said, of negativity that needed to go. Like the Redman, he parleyed, the way they needed to go too. Ok Liz, was his parting, may all the spiritually magnetized tantric emollients you use grease well the wings of your soul for the day they come in handy. But no, I don’t love you. I can’t. There is no you to love. Even you can’t keep track of who you’ve been or’d like to be if only I made the money. That was the last straw. She erased him because she’s got friends, she said, who think she’s just fabulous.

He fished for his wallet and muttered, “So do I, dear. Absolutely fabulous.” The waitress asked how he liked his breakfast.

“Good. Real Good. Better than Denny’s.”

“That’s good. Come back again.”

Ed walked out and sat in his truck. He stared at the place. Emma’s Café was on the door in yellow paint. “Me too,” he said. “Me, Cortez, and the whole damn lot of fate-struck men lost and hungry pushing toward some other place in some other tense of time that never was and always seems to be. He let the truck roll back and settle then spurred forward in first, graced to drive the starry night ahead in the truth of what was written when the ineluctable fate of Sir Eddy de Toyota would be called forth from the centuries to proclaim through all the new worlds that his Lady Emma, to whom he is pledged, is the fairest of them all.