"Who all is coming?" I asked.
"A number of people said they were coming, but the only ones that I believed were Friar Marvin, Ruby, and Herbie. I'm not so sure about Herbie."
I frowned. Ruby and Herbie were both Unitarians. That meant nothing in Ruby's case, since her real religious commitment is to action, but it was difficult to imagine Herbie pouring ashes over his head. Still, I mused aloud, Herbie's never backed out of commitments before.
"That's true," said Twain. "We just got into that big fight about the appropriate level of structure for a peace group, and he kind of disappeared."
"But he didn't say he was going to do something, and then flake out, like some people have," I said. "He just didn't like the group and didn't come back. Mostly, I'm wondering how he hooked up with this business in the first place. I assume all this is Friar Marvin's idea."
"Oh, Herbie's been coming to peace group meetings lately," said Twain.
"Ah." I hadn't.
"Is Herbie gay?"
I was startled, not by the question, but by my reaction. "I honestly have never thought about it."
"He doesn't strike me as a very sexual creature."
"Twain, I've honestly never thought about it. I have never thought about it, at all. Do you know how few mammals on the planet there are that I've never thought about their sexuality?"
"Yeah. Not a very sexual creature. Amorphous. Is he Jewish?"
"No. People have asked me that before, but I'm pretty sure he's not. He just comes across like a Yankee, and hasn't adopted any Southwestern effects, though I gather he's been here for a while. But the actual Jews who move here do start to act a little Texican, you know?"
At that point, both Herbie's and Friar Marvin's pickups arrived in the parking lot. I had never seen Herbie's vehicle before, and was feeling a little stupid to talk about him being a Yankee, then see his battered pickup. We had arrived in Twain's van, which was given to him by his sister-in-law, and still had her Colorado plates. He had covered it in layers of filth since then, and decorated the back with various leftist bumper-stickers. Still, we would stand out less than we did while driving east through Dixie.
"I think this is it," said Marvin, after hugs were exchanged. "The others decided to go early." I winced. "They wanted to go to the nonviolence training seminar. Me, I said I was already nonviolent, and didn't need a seminar to make me that way." I remembered the last nonviolence class I attended, held by Ruby, the rage flashing in the back of her eyes.
There were four of us, then. Very comfortable in Twain's van, even after Marvin and Herbie packed in their overnight stuff. As they did so, Herbie commented that he'd never been here before, and marveled at the Temple's unusual layout and lot.
"It's very easy to find," I said. "Just think of the place you'd most like to be if the city was under siege, and that's where you'll find the Temple."
"I've noticed that," said Marvin. Herbie was utterly surprised, and looked around, seeing the city in his mind from a defensive perspective for the first time. Well, that answered one question. It was certainly possible to be of Jewish heritage and never go to Temple, but the fact that a siege had never occurred to Herbie meant there wasn't a drop of Yid blood in his body.
We are all male, all caucasian, what the locals call "Anglo" with various degrees of accuracy, and Twain was the only native Texican. When among Chicanos of his generation, Twain says he forgets that he is white, though I suspect the confusion is not mutual. Friar Marvin has the best Spanish. For reasons I don't quite grasp, he's also the only one of us who will attempt to speak to an English-only Chicano in Spanish; the rest of us have a better intuitive understanding of a Texican's native language. Perhaps he notices class less.
From Texas to California, U.S. Interstate 10 runs, by and large, parallel to the US/Mexican border. So in West Texas, I-10 "West" goes mostly north, and I-10 "East" goes mostly south, towards San Antonio. With Twain at the wheel, we therefore drove north on I-10W to Las Cruces, New Mexico, a charming university town. When I-10 started to veer west towards L.A., we switched to I-25 North, which runs parallel to the Rio Grande, up towards the often-freezing peaks of northern New Mexico. We drove north through Truth or Consequences, a town with several natural hot springs that grew to resent tourists enough that it renamed itself from Hot Springs, New Mexico to the title of a game show. We drove through Hatch, a town which claims to grow the best chiles in the world. We drove past the future site of the New Mexico Spaceport. We drove through Socorro, a delightful town near the Very Large Array where we stopped for food. As we approached Albuquerque, the small metropolis that marks the northern edge of the cultural and topographical Southwest, Marvin became a bit agitated.
"'Santa Fake,' the other friars call it. Or 'Fanta Se.'"
"Fanta Se?" I asked.
"Fantasy," all three replied in unison, properly embarrassing me into silence.
"We were up here for a while," Marvin continued, meaning his friary. "We hated it. So yuppie. It's not like we were accomplishing anything, anyway. The commission of St. Francis belongs in southern New Mexico, in west Texas. Santa Fe is just a place where people go to forget who and what they are."
We stopped for gas in Albuquerque, and Marvin took the wheel. It was 5pm and we were moving slowly through what seemed to me a very mild Friday-evening rush hour. Once we got through it, Santa Fe would be an hour away.
"Friar Marvin, if you become a character in the space opera I'm writing, what sort of alien would you like to be?" Twain asked.
"Well, I would hope a benevolent one," said Marvin.
"Oh, yes yes yes, of course," Twain replied. "The species in the United States of the Milky Way are going to be just like the human races, see. There aren't any really evil or good species. Your character won't be changed much. I just mean, what kind of body would you like to have?"
Marvin didn't answer. He seemed confused.
"He asked me a few days ago," I said. "But he didn't tell me he was writing a book. He asked me if I was satisfied with being a yeti raised by extraterrestrials, or if I would prefer to be a member of another species. It took me a little while, but I answered the question literally and told him I had no preference."
"The scenery is changing," said Marvin.
Indeed it was. Before, we had been surrounded by hardy scrubs growing up through what seemed to be an endless expanse of golden sand. New Mexico is rarely flat, and we drove at all times with low-slung mountains within eyesight. I-25 frequently seemed cut out of layers of sediment and rock; we often drove under visually exciting cliffs. But the rocks surrounding us were now black and volcanic; gleaming eerily in the sunlight, whereas the southern rocks simply and colorfully sat. In the south, the vegetation seemed to grow up around the rocks. Here, although I knew it was an illusion, the rocks seemed to yield to the vegetation, which was much larger and lusher. We were encountering plants that could properly be called "trees," and around them were patches of deep volcanic blackness, punctuated by harder, brown rocks.
"It's beautiful up here," Marvin conceded, still clearly resenting the thought of Santa Fe.
To me, it looked like we were driving towards Hell.
