The real Southwest is drunk with the history of destitution. Roswell could be its capital. It’s wasted. There’s still that old gunslinger mentality, reckless and violent, but depression and drought has sucked the romance out. Now the crime is real, the deaths and the drugs hit hard. A quarter of the town lives below the poverty line, the rest sit at its edge, waiting for the rug to be pulled out. This is all, of course, not to mention the ever-present fifth quarter; the generally law-abiding, but poorest of all, illegal Mexicans. Roswell stands on the Eastern shore of the Jornada del Muerto desert, the journey of death. It’s a city of those who are dying, and most have accepted that. There’s no leaving or moving, just dying.
Yeah, every storefront in Roswell has a little green man in the window and there’s a flying saucer sticking out of the top of the alien museum, but that’s one street, right down the middle of town. It’s the same street the hotels are on. It’s the highway. The space men don’t help anyone who lives off Route 70. The people in Roswell don’t need aliens. They need doctors, and caseworkers. They need jobs. Unemployment is 11%. On my first day in Roswell, I saw aliens. By the second day, I begin to see a world that I didn’t know existed, a world far from my own. And that’s all I have to say about outer space.
Roswell is really a land of things underground, caves, military bunkers, and aquifers. Its lifeblood is a river 50 feet below the surface. After a five year drought, its trickle was a constant concern. There was a ration on drinkable tap water.
It rained for Matt and me though, not very hard, but almost every day. On our first day there, camped a few miles outside of town a weak looking middle-aged Indian woman asked us jokingly if Matt and I had brought the rain with us from New York. The next night she took us home. When it kept raining, she said we couldn’t leave.
Mary Ann lived in the garage at her nephew’s house. His name was T.J., he was sturdy and young, both his Indian and German heritages were visible in his face. Without a thought, he welcomed us into his home. He had two teenage stepdaughters, a toddler named Jaden, an aunt living it the garage, and a pregnant wife who drove 80 miles every day to clean a nursing home even though she had a heart condition and was supposed to be on bed rest. The house was small and poorly constructed. It sat on a street, on a block, in a city where all the houses were that exact same house. It used to be T.J.’s mother’s house. He was born and raised there.
Covered in dust and grease, he greeted us warmly with a hand like a vise. Two young travelers from the East, we were a novelty, a needed distraction from reality. Over a fine diner of chicken, beans and cornbread, we became close very fast.
Every one was in a good mood because of the rain. After dinner, all of Roswell was standing on their front porch with their hands outstretched, watching children in grassless yards try to catch raindrops on their tongues.
“I always laugh at how everyone comes outside to watch when it rains,” said Monica, T.J.’s wife, leaning against the door frame. “But here I am. I always do it too.”
Monica was a broad-shouldered Hispanic with a pretty face, but despite her pregnant fullness, she looked pale, drained and tired. She caught me looking at the cigarette in her hand. “I only smoke a half every now and then,” she said. “I didn’t smoke in the beginning, but nine months is a long time.” T.J. took it away from her without saying anything and finished it.
It rained for about an hour, big drops that disappeared into the sand. It rained just hard enough to turn the dirt and gravel that coated our bus (parked in the yard) into streak patterns that rolled down around oil stains and rust spots. Looking at that thing I had bought off the side of the road back home, I thought maybe it did bring the rain. Our baby was an old school bus, one of the small ones, just a Ford Econoline van with a jacked up roof. Its body was painted sky blue with lusterless house paint, the traditional domed top was silver spray paint to reflect the heat. Maybe it brought the rain.
“Stay ‘til tomorrow night and I’ll take you down into a missile silo,” T.J. said after Monica had gone inside to lie down.
We slept on the floor of the one car garage T.J. had turned into a little apartment for Mary Ann. It was suppose to be his retreat, a place he could get away from the kids and be alone. But when his aunt fell on hard times, he put a bed in for her without hesitation.
The next morning T.J. woke us up at eight. Mary Ann was in the kitchen making eggs and Monica had left for work at five. “You guys wanna get some weed today?” he said. “Fifty dollar ounces. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either. We’re so close to the border, there’s no middle man.” Who was going to argue with that?
On the short drive through the grid of Roswell’s streets, T.J. told us what happened to Mary Ann. I think it was in that car ride that I realized at once that these people weren’t figments or trivial visions floating through an experience where only I existed. They were real. That was hardest of all. The story started a year before: Mary Ann’s 16-year old daughter Erica was hanging out with the wrong crowd of girls. The newspaper called them a gang. One night these girls, juveniles, broke into the mansion of the richest man in Roswell. He was a livestock tycoon who lived on a ranch deep outside of the city. As they stole or smashed every thing in sight, 10 of them went upstairs into the bedroom where the elderly man and his wife huddled in fear. At knifepoint they made the wife watch as they striped the old man naked, forced him to get an erection, and raped him. Afterwards, they beat the couple nearly to death.
Kids like those were at a party in Mary Ann’s home the night it, and the jewelry store she ran downstairs, burned to the ground. Two days later, she came back from a camping trip to find her life in ashes and her daughter gone. The state had taken Erica because she told them her mother had supplied the drugs. Mary Ann had a stroke. After waking up three days later in the hospital unable to speak. An agent from child protective services came to her bedside and said, “So help me God, you’ll never see your daughter again.” Before he could leave the room she began to shake violently and her mouth foamed as she suffered a second stroke. While she was unconscious, they removed half the thickness of the traditional Indian braid that hung from the back of her head, the rest of which she kept in a crew cut, to test for the drugs Erica was on. There were none. None of the meth, crack, or prescriptions that Erica was on the night of the fire were present in Marry Ann’s hair. I know because she showed me the toxicology report. I looked to be polite. Despite all of this her mood was always, always sunny. She had recovered from her strokes with only a small limp, and her speech was back. If you have eyes to see them, she would tell me, there are always things to be thankful for.
T.J. parked his bumperless minivan outside a duplex. Matt and I were speechless. What could you say? I looked out the passenger window. There was a Toyota on the sidewalk. I’d never seen a car with that many bullet holes in it. I’d never seen a car with one bullet hole in it. T.J. ducked his head back in the door. “That’s not his. He does body work on the side.” Oh, okay. A half hour later, T.J. emerged holding two large bags of pot over his head triumphantly. We spent the rest of the day getting high in the backyard, watching Jaden play in the rain.
That night around 1 a.m., we pushed T.J.’s car out of the driveway so Monica wouldn’t notice us leave. On our way out of town, we got pulled over because T.J. wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. His license was suspended. Luckily, the cop said I could drive us home. Even though I had learned to drive on a manual transition, I stalled twice. The officer asked me if I was high. T.J. told him it was a tricky clutch. I gave it some gas and peeled out. I could see the cop with his hands on his hips, shaking his head in the rear-view mirror. When I turned off onto a dirt road, T.J. got back in the driver’s seat. We tore across the desert with the headlights off at high speed, then stopped. A tiny concrete shed appeared in front of us, no bigger then an outhouse. It was the old abandoned missile silo.
The New Mexico desert has an eradiated history. Fifty miles away and 60 years ago, when my grandfather was in the Air Force, he was blown out of his bunk by the first Atom bomb. There are 36 known silos around Roswell alone. This one had been deactivated in the seventies. Kids turned it into a hang out. The entrance was a small hole someone had cut in the heavy metal door with a blowtorch. Its upper rooms were used for keg parties.
We went all the way to the bottom, climbing 15 stories down a rusty ladder with nothing around us but blackness and a 15-story drop. Thank God it was dark. We worked our way down, T.J. going first to warn us if a rung was loose, or missing. By the time I reached the bottom, my hands were shaking. T.J. took our picture, two smiling boys against a concrete wall, it could have been taken in an ally. I took a deep breath and climbed back up.
We stayed with T.J. and Mary Ann for two weeks. We went to visit Erica in her boarding house, we went spelunking, drank a lot, and generally existed in their world. We listened to them and they told us everything. Eventually we left, promising to return. I can remember the feeling as we headed West into Arizona. I felt fear. The wheel in my hand felt different, it felt like the rung of a ladder. West was down. East was up. Both were deadly. I pulled over and asked Matt to drive.
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