MARK   P L I MSOLL, LLC's "The Plimsoll Line"

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Pages updated on June 29, 2006

ZONE of SILENCE

by

M A R K       P L I M S O L L

June 19, Saturday
              Up at 7:00, probably made love again. She still says she loves me, talked about having a baby, and motherhood. I get nowhere trying to convince her to share responsibility. Probably should have took that as a warning.
      She talks some more about her past, her friends and her crazy family, certifiably insane, her greenhouse built in Pennsylvania, a thousand dog stories about her Dobermans, Luna and ??? the gay guy John she was living with, and his Hairdresser slut transvestite lover Jonny who was finally kicked out of the house and resented and blamed Grace for it.
      She lived for a time in a kind of collective rental ranch in Texas when she was with Texas Rural Legal Aid. One time they were surrounded by DEA agents that dragged one of her friends away. Later the members of the compound found his stash, a couple of kilos of grass, and to get rid of it they all decided to split it up and flush it down their respective toilets individually, so as to not clog up one toilet (They were actually more creative about making it disappear.)


June twentieth, Sunday morning
              Another clear Torreón sky, a blue that will soon turn China-white with heat, a spinning circus plate balanced on the thin rods of brown dust devils, twenty stories high, twisting and bending under the weight of the heavens.
      Grace is anxious to get back to the relative cool of Parras, where Daisy can run around the Estanques and lust after her narcotic wild sunflowers sprouting along the lanes. We throw my pack and the bike in the trunk, neighbors furtively watching the crazy gringos through Catholic lace curtained windows just beyond the tiny fenced yards across the street. She's my wife, they made me say, smiling their evil knowing smiles because they had proven another stereotype about gringos, which doesn't seem true to us gringos in spite of the fact we prove the stereotype over and over, just as Grace and I are promiscuously proving it again. We're liberated. And guilt is the true evil, as all of us 'artists' have been indoctrinated to believe, and inoculated against feeling it, our individual guilt. We are here to live. Not to feel regret for having experienced what was previously taboo, even if we have to re-discover the reasons, the primal causes of discord at eventually force society into developing patterns of allowable behavior. These 'a priori' of human relations, the social purpose that creates boundaries for behavior and reinforces the social taboos that we Americanos are clearly above and beyond, these principal boundaries we stretch and explore, and don't care if everybody knows. We are the blessed Americans, for Chrissakes.
      After we've cleaned out he refrigerator of all the beer and made sure to have left behind a last bottle of rum for Quixote's entertainment, we slip into the large seats of her ancient '68 Lincoln Continental, Daisy curls into sleep position on the back seat. Say good-bye to the black-walled kitchen without a stove, make sure the door is bolted with the medieval key. We got our sunglasses on, our white skin blushed with the sun, our hair clean and loose. We are 'cool'. Gringos on the road in Mexico, not just travelers, but actually being there in the Yogic sense of becoming a part of the landscape, part of international relations, part of the ongoing struggle to impress 'our' Mexicans with just how cool we Americans are.
      The driveway out, just a short, pot-holed, listing crawl in her rust-bucket boat to the Fraccionamiento's entrance, then we roll onto one of Torreón's wide, empty boulevards and headed east, already on the fringe of the city, past the country club where Quixote pretends to be a rich man, past the new luxury housing where Tuli pretends, which is almost the Spanish for 'to try', to be a great artist and singer-guitarrista. We roll at 80 Kilometers per hour past the smoldering piles of garbage and weeds where the poor 'pretend' or try to eke out a living on someone else's real estate.
      The desert changes from molten sand, partly fused and warped, cracked apart, gathered into mounds that replicate among the creosote bushes to become mountains that again split, lose entire faces that have mysteriously disappeared in ancient landslides. Or through a road-cut which exposes the bent layer cake of the sediments inside the mountains, centuries of undersea deposits baking in a desert deep in the middle of a continent.
      Grace has heard of a site to quarry rocks filled with fossils, just up the road, and near a small dam. We think the location should be easy to find, there aren't many roads and certainly few dams in the desert, but when we stop and ask the locals, they look at us as if we're not speaking Spanish. "Dam? Around here? No, well I've heard of a dam but its far away. Rocks? With bones of animals?" and they put their woven and painted cowboy hats back on and worm their way out of the conversation, looking at us with suspicion. Something to mention to the others at sunset, when the world becomes a mystery.
      We give up, for the early part of the drive. Trucks have been trying to pass us on the narrow two-lane highway, sometimes sandwiching us between two speeding walls of sheet metal, impairing our enjoyment of these desert vistas. "Maybe your source under-estimated the distance from Torreón, or maybe there is another road to Parras. They keep straightening these highways, it's a major truck route to Saltillo."
              "Don't I know it." she grumbles, checking the rear view mirror for another Mach Monster overtaking us from behind. "Daisy, Get Down! Now! Down, Daisy! Could you get that dog back in the seat? I can't see a damn thing! I need a beer."
      So we pop a couple of beers. The mountains loom close too the road on our right, the south side, but not high enough or steep enough to ever give shade. It seems to be a law of the desert, give no shade. Or maybe the temperature differences between a shady side and a sunlit side create the shattered cliff faces that leer at us with the profiles of Indigenous noses and high cheekbones.
      "Up ahead on the right, just past that dome-shaped mountain, there's a small dam. It's on the wrong side of the road, but I've been curious about it for a while now. Jesus, you realize I've been down this road now, what is it,, must be my seventh time! What do you say we get out and stretch our legs?"
      "Why? What's there?"
      "I don't know. That's the whole point. Maybe it's the dam with the fossil rocks."
      "No. It was supposed to be much closer to Torreón."
      "Right. Well maybe they were wrong. All I know is, anytime there's a dam in the desert, it is something extraordinary. It's worth a look, just to see if there's any water there. Maybe some cow skulls and a sign with a skull and crossbones, some old graves marked with wooden crosses ..."
      "Yeah right."
      "Well, I would like to get out, stretch my legs, take a whiz. Sound good?"
      "I'm really not in the mood for playing cowboys and Indians." she bitches, the third beer not taken effect yet.
      "I have to go to the bathroom. See the clearing beyond the round mountain? It's a turn off. There's a little shack there, looks like it used to be a house, a tiny store, maybe it still is. Pull over and at least let me pee."
      She reluctantly and with great labor slows the Continental and hauls the wheel to the right. We bang over the lip of the asphalt, almost airborne, to finish our de-acceleration slaloming through the dry mud holes, simultaneously rolling up the windows as the wheels spew great clouds of dust that envelope us when we stop. We wait, in a yellow glare of swirling coffee and milk, she is growing prickly pear needles of irritation.
      The dust settles. She briskly turns around and reaches behind her seat, deftly fending off the amorous advances of the greyhound. "Damn it. Where's that bottle of rum? I need a shot."
      "I'll go out and reconnoiter the area."
      There is a man and a boy in the back of the shack, breaking up pieces of wood scavenged from natural and unnatural sources. A small trickle of filthy water runs from under the rear of the shack to disappear in the gravel parking lot, effluence from washing and cooking. I wave hello, they smile and return the greeting.
      After chatting briefly, getting permission to walk back to the dam, just to take a look (but it wasn't theirs anyway), I took one glance at the car and she had loosed the greyhound, who had assumed its gargoyle squat to answer the call of nature. She was ignoring me, leaning against the hot rood of the car, too pissed to notice. I quickly melted into the underbrush of sparse grasses and scraggly Palo Verde which offers less cover than a giant asparagus fern. No Marker, I ran and soon there were enough of them between us to render me invisible.
              The dam was about twelve feet tall, poured concrete, and was actually impounding some water, but there could have been twelve more feet of water impounded. Things were moving under the film of green scum, pollywogs or minnows, or shrimpish insects that feed on dead mosquitoes. I jogged along on top of the embankment that was bulldozed up around both sides of the dam. The twin arms of the embankment led back between the mountains into a green carpet of grass, and I ran to reconnoiter the area in as little time as possible. She was already in a bad mood.
      Running down into the enclosure when it appeared the ground was solid gave me the impression of being alone on a fresh new planet where the grasses and trees are still timid and the stony ground unyielding to the soft, wet biosphere. The carpet of green was more like a failed hair transplant, seen from on-edge it looked thick enough, but standing in it revealed the bare ground and a couple of struggling green follicles in your immediate vicinity. The valley of green Palo Verde trees continued winding between the high desert walls and finally became the remnants of a stream channel, many channels, that still bore the chocolate color of wet earth in its sunken trenches. The chalky ground around these channels was cracked into an interlocking jigsaw puzzle of septehedrons, a cobble work of Italian irregulars, that rode upon a deviously slimy layer of boot-sucking mud. I had to get Grace to come back here. The Greyhound would love it.
      I run back to the car, and to my surprise Grace was smiling and waving. The alcohol had driven out her demon.
      "Grace! Has Daisy had her run yet? It's beautiful back there!" which was only true for true desert rats. "There's water and grass, trees, a little stream ..." I slowed down to a panting, dusty walk crunching across the gravel.
      "Yeah right. And these rocks are full of Gold!" She called out to the dog as it explored a little too near the highway. "We had better get moving. It's getting hot."
      "It's been hot for hours. We're in the desert. Let's take a walk, we'll be in Parras in an hour or so, and we'll go swimming. Trust me. You'll like it."
      "There's snakes."
      "Snakes? I've been hiking in the desert for years, and almost never seen a snake. I've smelled 'em though. No need to worry about snakes."
      "I'm worried about Daisy."
      "Daisy!" I laughed. "A Greyhound? It's not as if she was a poodle. Snakes don't go around biting everything that moves. There's not that much food or water, it's quite an investment for a snake to lose its venom. Besides, most snakes aren't poisonous anyway. We won't see any snakes, I promise."
      "How can you promise? What makes you think you can promise?"
      "It's like 'Wanna bet?' I am so sure that we won't see a snake I'd put money on it. It is almost noon, most animals with any sense would be caught dead out on the desert at noon. It's like a city person could say, 'We won't have a car accident,' or maybe they would be certain a Taxi would pass by with in fifteen minutes. Trust me, we won't see a snake."
      "I'll walk with you a little ways, but if there's a snake I'll never trust you again."
      She obviously trusted me. We walked up on top of the dam, then a little ways along the embankment, but she was constantly pulling back, hesitant and fearful. It too constant cajoling to get her moving up the valley, to keep her headed to what I considered a truly unique and beautiful desert vista.
      Daisy was truly having a field day, running back and forth, nostrils to the ground, probably having an olfactory parallel experience to our visual one, the exotic greens of spindly desert plants mixing with prickly pear and quiet, sly cacti that hunkered down in the protection of the trees or a stump, just off any path a reasonable animal might tread.
      I wanted to go the distance, to completely circumnavigate this anomaly of water collection in the parched Coahuila desert. Grace seemed oblivious to the natural splendor, the other-worldliness of this micro climate of heat and moisture amid the furnace of dry dusty air. The tough grasses rasped and clattered when the wind blew, their short blond stems firmly anchoring the timid green leaves that vibrated and flickered.
      We had to walk a long ways, much longer than I had reconnoitered the first time, to find a way across the main channel. What I had seen the first walk was just a tiny tributary, one of probably a hundred that drained this flat valley floor. To think that under this floor, perhaps a thousand feet deep, was the original mountain valley that had since filled with sand and dust, yet was somehow blocked from draining, and leaked so little, either by rock walls or layers of clay percolating down to seal off the fissures, that it held water enough to maintain this glade and grove of trees. How many years had these trees been growing here? There were stumps of large trees that had died long ago, and some of the living trees had trunks a foot in diameter which was a good size for a desert Palo Verde. The dam itself was probably useless and incapable of holding water. This micro climate had been here, had provoked the creation of the dam.
      The ground was muddy under the caked and broken surface, the dog was bounding back and forth and Grace tried to cross but risked losing her shoes as the dry earth broke and mud threatened to eat her feet.
      "Let's go back the way we came."
      "It's probably shorter to cross this little ditch, the way the canyon is curving. Aren't you curious to see what's over there? Maybe there's something worth writing about. We haven't looked for fossils yet." Daisy is loping across the ditch, back and forth, her feet just barely sinking under her light stride.
      "Yeah, well you're welcome to wash her feet off when we get to Parras."
      "It'll dry and fall off by the time we get back to the car. Trust me."
      "Fossils. We're going to BE fossils if we don't get back to the car. I need a drink, I'm getting a headache."
      On the other side of the wash we followed an old road, two tire tracks of bare earth. at one point I stopped by a large bush that Daisy had taken notice of. "Do you smell that?"
      "Yeah. So what?"
      "That's what a snake smells like. At least some of the ones in Michigan smell like that. They poop on you when they get stressed, or scared, or maybe it's like a skunk, but that's what it smells like."
      "Lovely. Thank you so much for sharing." Se said sarcastically.
      Here I was, trying to reassure her with my woodland skills to make our camping adventure comfortable, maybe even educational for her, and she's not appreciating it. Suddenly I find myself thinking about the things she had told me about her life, the insanity in her family, the criminal elements of running drugs and murder, even her traveling into the Mexican interior with a battered car and a dog.
      And she's afraid of a walk in the desert?
      We're in the Estanque de la Luz, I'm swimming with my mask and snorkel, and she's kind of swimming with her goggles on. I'm a little disappointed in her lack of playfulness in the water, she doesn't seem to be oriented towards exercise either, but we do swim together and touch a little bit. She's pretty tired today also. Then she challenges me to a race to the wall. I cruise ahead of her quite easily, with the snorkel I don't have to turn my head to breath, and about fifteen feet from the wall I roll over and do a backstroke, watching her. Near the wall she's almost caught up to me, puts her head up and is genuinely surprised that I'm on my back.
      "How long have you been swimming on your back?"
      "Oh, for about twenty-five feet." I lied a little, laughing. "I pulled ahead of you so easily, I wanted to see what was wrong with your stroke."
      "Yeah right." she gasps and goes underwater briefly, surfacing and wiping her exhausted, possibly exasperated face.
June 22, Tuesday
              Grace talks to Fridrick, the German engineer arranging machinery in the Fabrica la Estrella. He is lonely and sad. His wife of 8 months has returned to her family in Puebla because she was bored in Parras, spending her time on German paint-by-number oils. She's possibly pregnant. They were together for a year before marriage and her parents and some of the siblings wouldn't even talk to him, but now he's their darling German. Grace is determinedly working on a Tequila bottle, she's very happy and chatty. Since the conversation is in Spanish, the American and the German produce a broken babble, Grace's Spanish is filled with interjections like "Bueno, así, pues, o sea, me explico" which helps give the illusion she's conversant when she's not saying much. We are supposed to eat at another restaurant, research for her book, but she enjoys torturing Friedhiem about how wonderful his wife is. He even says at one point "You are English teacher, and m t speak perfect Spanish, much better than I, but I can understand my wife, when we talk, much better than you. I don't understand this."
      This is extremely boring to me, the day's dying glows with beauty over the garden courtyard, between the high trees and white walls of the hotel. I am not drinking. I would like to bike ride or go swimming tonight. I leave to watch the sunset, find a place not so giddy, and go to the back of the hotel, to an unused, unfinished convention hall with a gaping hole in the roof, an assault from airplane ice? The sidewalk ends in a cul-de-sac where a ladder stretches up to provide access to the roofs of the hotel rooms.
      Silhouetted against the clouds at the top of the ladder is the young lad who hangs out at the hotel doing car washes. He's flying a ribbon from a typewriter like a kite. We say hello, he invites me up the tall ladder gets in the way at the top, making it a little awkwardly unsafe.
              I peek over the wall down into the neighbors' courtyard. There are cats and chickens among the bushes and small trees, suddenly a huge Aztec turkey startles out from under hanging laundry. He was his perched on a 50 gallon oil drum. Now he walks around eyeing me and calling alarm.
              The long streamer of cassette tape flutters softly, held aloft by the wind, playing out horizontally in two flickering iron oxide railroads in the sky for thirty feet or more. The boy is silent and seems to be amused and satisfied by his invention of the cassette-tape kite. We talk and watch the sunset as distant clouds discharging streaks of rain, rain that dries before reaching the ground.
              He says the wind tore the hole in the sheet metal roof, but it still looks like airplane ice damage to me.
      Backing down the ladder I look up to see him silouhetted against the purple twilight, grinning, the tape flying and fluttering over my head. I return to the table, she's still drinking the Tequila and Friedheim's ordering beer after beer even though you never see him drink. He must gulp them down.
              Can't talk Grace into watching the sunset so I go for a walk around town, to look at the other restaurants and even check out the flea bag Hotel Parras where they are adding more cement rooms above, all without ventilation, without windows, without a water-cooler air conditioner, not even a fan. Two crazy old men in lawn chairs are talking under the huge avocado trees clotting the courtyard. They absently pull at their filthy stained T-shirts stretched tight around expanding bellies.
      Back with Grace and Friedhiem, they've ordered some Tacos and Guacamole with chips, Grace offers me some of her Tacos and the mozos (waiters) totally ignore me. If they'd have asked I would have ordered a beer at least. After Friedhiem goes to his lonely bed, Grace weaves across the courtyard to the font desk and asks Francisco the night guy to dial a number for her. She calls David, her brother, but he's not home and she passes the phone to me so I can talk to Lorna or 'Forlorn-a' as the family calls her behind her back. A sad-voiced woman answers and she's reading an autobiography by Lauren Bacall "you know she was married to Humphrey Bogart". Hal is in New Mexico or someplace with Uncle Maynor.
      So Grace calls Uncle Maynor, he answers the phone, and in just a few sentences, after Grace explains how well the book she is writing is coming along, she gets into this "Uncle Maynor, you've never liked me" whining like only a practiced drunk can pull off without embarrassment. Then she brightens up as her beloved brother Hal comes on the line.
      "Hal, there's somebody here I'd like you to talk to. His name is Lawrence Orleans. Here..." and she hands the phone to me.
      "Hello? I'm Lance, I guess I'm taking care of your sister tonight."
      "Sounds to me like she's doing all right."
      "You know I've been wondering" and Grace is sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette, smiling and staring at me with something akin to an evil interested bliss. "She's been doing the Tequila thing tonight, and I've been wondering is this a common occurrence for your sister?"
      "Oh she's been known to tip a bottle or two." he said with a noncommittal chuckle, maybe even relishing my confusion and concern.
      "You know, we've only known each other about a week or so, and is your sister kind of, you know, bossy and has to have her own way?"
      "My sister and I have been getting into it for a long time now. We've been known to go at it pretty hard! We can't be together very long without something starting up."
      "Yeah, I'm just beginning to notice a few things like that myself. Well, it's been nice talking to you, here's Grace."
      And Grace asks him what he thought about me. Later she tells me he answered "He seems worried."