the trip, no hitchhikers. Okay? No hitchhikers.”
chapter eighteen
Eli
They were right to choose this cruel and shriveled terrain as the site of the skullhouse. Ancient cults need a setting of mystery and romantic remoteness if they are to maintain themselves against the clashing, twanging resonances of the skeptical, materialistic twentieth century. A desert is ideal. Here the air is painfully blue, the soil is a thin burnt crust over a rocky shield, the plants and trees are twisted, thorny, bizarre. Time stands still in a place like this. The modern world can neither intrude nor defile. The old gods can thrive. The old chants rise skyward, undamped by the roar of traffic and the clatter of machines. When I told this to Ned he disagreed; the desert is stagy and obvious, he said, even a little campy, and the proper place for such survivors of antiquity as the Keepers of the Skulls is the heart of a busy city, where the contrast between their texture and ours would be greatest. Say, a brownstone on East 63rd Street, where the priests could go complacently about their rites cheek by jowl with art galleries and poodle parlors. Another possibility, he suggested, would be a one-story brick-and-plate-glass factory building in a suburban industrial park devoted to the manufacture of air-conditioners and office equipment. Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art? But I think Ned was putting me on, as usual. In any case I can’t buy his theories of contrast and juxtaposition. This desert, this dry wasteland, is the perfect place for the headquarters of those who will not die.
Crossing from New Mexico into southern Arizona we left the last traces of winter behind. Up by Albuquerque the air had been cool, even cold, but the elevation is greater there. The land dipped as we drove toward the Mexican border and made our Phoenixward turn. The temperature rose sharply, from the fifties into the seventies, or even higher. The mountains were lower and seemed to be made of particles of reddish-brown soil compressed into molds and sprayed with glue; I imagined I could rub a deep hole in such rock with a fingertip. Soft, vulnerable, sloping hills, practically naked. Martian-looking. Different vegetation here, too. Instead of dark sweeps of sagebrush and gnarled little pines, we now traveled through forests of widely spaced giant cacti surging ithyphallically out of the brown,‘ scaly earth. Ned botanized for us. Those are saguaros, he said, those big-armed cacti taller than telephone poles, and these, the shrubby spiky-branched blue-green leafless trees that might have been native to some other planet, these are palo verde, and those, the knobby upthrust clusters of jointed woody branches, they call that ocotillo. Ned knows the Southwest well. Feels quite at home here, having spent some time in New Mexico a couple of summers ago. Feels quite at home everywhere, Ned. Likes to speak of the international fraternity of the gay; wherever he goes, he’s sure of finding lodging and companionship among His Own Kind. I envy him sometimes. It might be worth all the peripheral traumas of being gay in a straight society to know that there are places where you’re always welcome, for no other reason than that you’re a child of the tribe. My own tribe isn’t quite as hospitable.
We crossed the state border and zoomed westward toward Pheonix, the land becoming more mountainous again for a while, the terrain less forbidding. Indian country here — Pimas. We caught a glimpse of Coolidge Dam: memories of third-grade geography lessons. When we were still a hundred miles east of Phoenix, we began to see billboards inviting, no, commanding, us to stay at a downtown motel: “Have a Happy Holiday in the Valley of the Sun.” The sun already impinged on us, here in late afternoon, hanging suspended over the windshield and hurling bolts of red-gold fire into our eyes. Oliver, driving like a robot, produced glittering silvered wraparound sunglasses and kept right on going. We shot through a town called Miami. No beaches, no matrons in mink. The air was purple and pink from the fumes belching out of smokestacks; the odor of the atmosphere was sheer Auschwitz. What were they cremating here? Just before the central part of the town we saw the huge gray battleship-shaped mound of a copper mine’s discards, the great heap of tailings flung up across many years. A gaudy giant motel was right across the highway from it, I suppose for the benefit of those who dig close-up views of environmental rape. What they cremate here is Mother Nature. Sickened, we hurried on, into uninhabited territory. Saguaro, palo verde, ocotillo. We swooped through a long mountain tunnel. Forlorn townless countryside. Lengthening shadows. Heat, heat, heat. And then, abruptly, the tentacles of urban life reaching out from still-distant Phoenix: suburbs, shopping centers, gas stations, trading posts selling Indian souvenirs, motels, neon lights, fast-food stands offering tacos, custard, hot dogs, fried chicken, roast beef sandwiches. Oliver was persuaded to stop and we had tacos under eerie yellow streetlamps. And onward. The gray slabs of immense windowless department stores flanking the road. This was money country, the home of the affluent. I was a stranger in a strange land, poor disorientated alienated Yidling from the Upper West Side whizzing through the cactus and the palm trees. So very far from home. These flat towns, these glistening one-story bank buildings of green glass with psychedelic plastic signs. Pastel houses, pink and green stucco. Land that has never known snow. American flags aflutter. Love it or leave it, Mac! Main Street, Mesa, Arizona. The University of Arizona Experimental Farm right up against the highway. Far-off mountains glooming in the blue dusk. Now we are on Apache Boulevard in the town of Tempe. Wheels screeching; road turns. And suddenly we are in the desert. No streets, no billboards, nothing: no-man’s-land. Dark lumpy shapes on our left: hills, mountains. Headlights visible, far away. A few minutes more and the desolation ends; we have crossed from Tempe into Phoenix and now are on Van Buren Street. Shops, houses, motels. “Keep going till we’re downtown,” Timothy says. His family, it seems, has a major financial stake in one of the inner-city motels; well stay there. Ten minutes more, through a district of secondhand bookshops and five-dollar-a-night motor lodges, and we are downtown. Skyscrapers here, ten or twelve stories: bank buildings, a newspaper office, large hotels. The heat is fantastic, close to ninety degrees. This is late March; what is the weather like in August? Here is our motel. Statue of a camel out front. Big palm tree. Cramped, ungenerous lobby. Timothy registers. We’ll have a suite. Second floor, in back. A swimming pool. “Who’s for a swim?” Ned asks. “And then a Mexican dinner,” says Oliver. Our spirits bubble. This is Phoenix, after all. We’re actually here. We’ve almost reached our goal. Tomorrow we set out to the north in quest of the retreat of the Keepers of the Skulls.
It seems like years since all this began. That passing reference, offhand, casual, in the Sunday newspaper. A “monastery” in the desert, not far north of Phoenix, where twelve or fifteen “monks” practice some private brand of so-called Christianity. “They came up from Mexico about twenty years ago, and are believed to have gone to Mexico from Spain about the time of Cortes. Economically self-sufficient, they keep to themselves and do not encourage visitors, though they are cordial and civil to anyone who stumbles into ‘their isolated, cactus-encircled retreat. The decor is strange, a combination of medieval Christian style and what seems to be Aztec motifs. A predominant symbol that gives the monastery a stark, even grotesque, appearance is the human skull. Skulls are everywhere, grinning, somber, in high relief or in three-dimensional representation. One long frieze of skull images seems patterned after designs to be seen at Chichen Itza, Yucatan. The monks are lean, intense men, their skins tanned and toughened by exposure to desert sun and wind. They seem, oddly enough, both old and young at once. The one I spoke to, who declined to give his name, might have been thirty years old or three hundred, it was impossible to tell…”
Only an accident that I happened to notice that as I glanced randomly through the newspaper’s travel supplement. Only an accident that bits of strange imagery — that frieze of skulls, those old-young faces — lodged in my mind. Only an accident that I should, a few days later, come upon the manuscript of the Book of Skulls in the university library.
Our library has a
