Putting Down Roots in Waldo

Bruno tried to shake off the dust from his black velvet slippers and beige silk pajama legs as he walked along the dirt road. But it was no use. The dirty grains stubbornly clung to his clothes no matter how hard he tried to shake them loose. He stopped and looked around at the unknown landscape, feeling like a prisoner who managed to escape, but from where and from whom he hadn’t a clue.

Maybe he was the victim of a car accident and lost his memory. But why would he be driving in his pajamas?

Maybe it was a competitor, hiring one of those clandestine firms to kidnap him and hold him for ransom in the middle of the desert. That would explain his night clothes. The last thing he recalled was sitting on his toilet listening to the bidet’s rhythmic spraying of fragrant water on his exposed anus when everything went blank.

He continued trudging along the road as it wound through a desert landscape that was as familiar to him as the surface of the moon. Mountains in the distance looked like cutouts pasted on a bright blue background. Cottony white clouds sat on top of them like afterthought decorations. Grassy patches in various stages of brown and faded green colors covered the adjacent ground like an irregular shag carpet.

He closed his eyes, hoping his nightmare would end, and he would be slipping between the silk sheets of his custom-made bed. But when he opened them, he found himself on the same road, a clearing bordered by railroad tracks a short distance ahead.

As he got closer, he saw a man sitting on a brown chair, the cane comprising the seat broken and sticking out below it like so many tiny fingers. His deeply tanned face and chiseled features made him look like someone had carved him out of wood and placed him on display. A white beard covered his cheeks, the only space discernible, the pink outline of where his lips should be. The chair he sat in tilted to the right, which he compensated for by crossing his legs and leaning to his left. He wore a gray Stetson hat, a denim shirt and matching jeans, the indigo dye on both practically bleached to an off-white color.

The man smiled and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Simon Wiley.”

Bruno looked down at Simon’s hand. “I’m Bruno DeLessio. Where the hell am I?”

#

Simon Wiley began showing Bruno around the place he called his “for now home.”

“This here tent has seen better days,” he said gesturing toward an old A frame tent, the top sagging between the posts. “A good rain and she leaks but, fortunately for me,” he let out a cackle, “we been havin’ a drought so, no worries.”

He showed Bruno an old steamer trunk, the blue leather cracked and peeling in places. “Here’s where I keep my food, canned goods, change of clothes, you know, all the necessities of life.” Bruno peered into the trunk, then pulled back after getting a whiff of what smelled like moldy food or ripe underwear.

Simon led Bruno back to his chair. Next to it, a large vertical rock stood like a sentinel, portions of it hollowed out to make shelves. “I keep my shaving equipment on this shelf,” he said pointing to the top tier, “and my reading material on this shelf.” He pointed to a stack of books, the worn spines rendering the titles illegible.

“And here,” he said pointing to the bottom shelf, “is what I call my treasure box.” He squinted as he leaned into Bruno. “Something very important is in there.”

Bruno held up his hand. “Mr. Wiley.”

“Please, call me Simon,”

Bruno grimaced as he nodded. “Fine. Simon. Back to my original question. Where exactly are we?”

“Why, you’re in Waldo.”

“You mean, like the game?” Bruno grimaced.

“No, no. The town.” Simon spread his arms wide as if to embrace the mountains in the distance. “Welcome to Waldo, New Mexico.”

Bruno put his hand on his hips as he looked around. “I don’t see any town.”

“Oh, it’s here all right. You see, my friend, Waldo is a ghost town. Has been for years.”

“Then why the hell am I here?”

Simon scratched the back of his neck. “Don’t know.” His smile revealed a top row of crooked teeth. “Could it be you been here before?”

“No, of course not.” Bruno rubbed the arms of his silk pajamas as he looked around. “Look, I got a business to run. DeLessio Holdings, you probably heard of me, I got enough money to buy a hundred jerk water towns like this. No matter, I have to get back I...” Bruno felt dizzy for a moment, leaning on a nearby tree for support. “My dad. I seem to remember driving with him to someplace that looked like this.”

“There you go.” Simon slapped his knee.” It’s what you might call a repressed memory.”

Bruno begam walking toward the railroad tracks. He looked back at the road. “We stopped here once. I remember now. The train whistle.”

#

“Is that a train,  Dad?”

Bruno Senior smiled as he put the car in park and turned off the engine. “Yup. Let’s go check it out.” He turned to his wife who sat in the front seat reading the classified ads. “Any luck with that?”

She shrugged. “Some interesting real estate, couple of businesses on the rocks we can snap up cheap. I’ll make a list.” She put down her paper and watched as Bruno charged out of the car.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” she said closing her eyes for a moment. “Better catch up to him,” she said, giving her husband a weak smile.

Bruno held his father’s hand as they watched the train snake trough the desert terrain, shaking the ground around them and spewing black smoke from its engine. It slowed as it approached the spot where they stood.

“Will it stop, Dad?”

“No, son. It used to. When there were people in Waldo.”

“That’s a funny name.” Bruno waved to the engineer. “Where did all the people go?”

“Left, I suppose.”

“Did they have to go?”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

“You find out soon enough things change. And when they do, you have to give up things.” His father looked around as though searching for something.

“Did they have businesses like us?”

“Most of them worked for businesses.”

“Were they like most employees like you say, always lookin’ for something for nothing.”

Bruno’s dad stood silent, staring at the last of the train cars as they glided by. He took Bruno’s hand. “C’mon, we have to get back to your mom.”

#

Bruno sat on Simon’s trunk, shaking his head. “I completely forgot about this place, the train, the town.”

“So. You’ve been here before.”

“We first came here when my mother got sick,” said Bruno.

“Was your father interested in the town, the people?”

“My old man?” Bruno looked down and brushed the dirt from one of his slippers. “Hell, no. He was a business guy, through and through. Ever since I was a little kid, he’d been buying and running businesses all over the southwest. If it wasn’t a cafe in San Diego, it was a small grocery store in Phoenix, or a liquor joint in Colorado. Mom did the books, and I helped Dad out in those places. I remember carrying out empty beer bottles when I was six years old from a bar he bought.”

“So where was home?”

“Home? Back seat of the family car was the one I remember. We were always on the move. Dad would go bust in one place, then we’d head out to another.”

Simon repositioned his Stetson on his head. “Must have been tough, no real home, no roots.”

Bruno shrugged. “Never gave it much thought. It was pretty exciting. If you call being woken up in the middle of the night and blowing out of town before the law or some disgruntled partner caught up to my dad.” Bruno stood up . “Enough of memory lane. I gotta get back.” He started walking toward the road, his steps becoming more tentative as he came closer to it. The stillness and sheer immensity of the place made him feel small, powerless. He came to a sudden stop at the road, paralyzed, like he was in a painting where the artist’s depiction of him had permanently rooted him in that spot. He felt disoriented, as he looked for a sign, a landmark that would lead him away from this place.

“Come back, join me,” called Simon. He patted the trunk next to him. “Have a seat. It’s okay, it’ll hold you.”

#

Bruno sat on the trunk, his back against the bough of a tree.

 Simon busied himself watching an ant crawl on a stick he held in front of him. “How come your daddy never settled down, got you a real home?” he asked.

“Never seemed to have enough money for that. What can I say? My father never could put it together. He was an entrepreneur alright, did okay but he never made it big. Besides, it never seemed to be a priority with him or Mom.”

“Why not?”

“Both their parents died when they were young, they got passed around to a lot of foster homes. They didn’t care about living in a neighborhood with a bunch of people like the ones they met in those homes.”

“But things were different for you.”

“Oh, yeah. I made up my mind I was gonna make it big. Investment banking, financial planning. I bought bigger companies, took them public, then moved on to the next big thing.”

“Like your Dad.”

“Only much better, more successful. Got condos in Phoenix, Los Angeles, a villa in Cabo San Luca and a private jet.”

“Sounds like you got it all.” Simon pointed the sick to the ground as the ant scurried to the desert floor, like a prisoner making an escape. “Why do you suppose your father liked to come here?”

“He used to joke. ‘For the people,’ he’d say. ‘I like the people here.’”

“But even back then when you came here, there were no people.”

Bruno brushed a twig off the sleeve of his silk pajamas. “I know. That’s what I didn’t get. To him, ordinary people were, well, ordinary. Wage slaves is what he called them.” He stared at the mountains in the distance as though trying to understand them, get an idea what they had to do with his exile in this place.

“Or, maybe he found something else here, something that caught his attention about the people who used to live her.” Simon looked over Bruno’s shoulder.

 Bruno followed Simon’s  gaze to a clearing not far from the railroad tracks and what looked like a pile of stones. He rose slowly as he pointed to the structure. “That looks familiar.”

“Maybe you better go check it out.” Simon folded his arms and put his head down like he had suddenly fallen asleep.

#

Bruno walked along the railroad tracks toward the structure. He approached it with a mixture of curiosity and dread. The closer he got to it, the more he felt like the 10-year-old accompanying his father on one of his many excursions here. His hands trembled as he slowed down and stood in front of an abandoned house.

The walls consisted of stones of all shapes and sizes piled on top of one another. Wood that once framed windows stood gray and rotted, the glass they once held nowhere in sight.

Logs lay across an opening where a roof had once been. Bruno looked into the open doorway and froze at what he saw. There, standing next to a table that had only two legs, he saw his father.

He turned toward him and waved as he came to the front door. “Bruno, there you are. I was looking all over for you.”

Bruno hesitated, not quite sure what to make of the figure in front of him, the image of his father from so long ago: his round, unshaven face, his gray eyes open wide conveying an excitement Bruno had rarely seen in him. His open collar, white shirt drenched in sweat and his brown trousers, streaked with dust and dirt.

He grabbed Bruno’s hand. “Come in, you got to see this.” Bruno ducked his head as he followed his father inside. “This...” He spread his arms out,”...this was the kitchen. The table, here, and here,” he turned around and pointed to the remains of a chimney, “...this is where the mom probably did all the cooking. And when everyone came home...” he walked toward the table and stopped at each place. “...they crowded around the table, the kids talking loudly about their day, how they horsed around at school and got in trouble with the teacher for bringing a snake inside to scare the girls.

“And...and...I can see it...the mom bringing the food to the table and her husband telling her about his day and how he and the other men worked hard and how glad he was to be home.

“And afterward, they’d sit here probably around the fire in winter and tell stories about the people who lived here and how they stretched back generations family after family, going to school, the church, work. Can’t you see it, Bruno, can’t you see them all here, in this house, this home?”

Bruno kicked at the debris on the floor. “Just seems like a bunch of stones to me, Dad.”

“Are you kidding?” His father placed the palm of his hand on the wall and spread his fingers wide. “It was a home. Your mother would have–”

“Mom would have what?” Bruno’s question sounded sharper than he intended.

“I just meant your mom would have liked to have a home, like this one.”

“No, she wouldn’t have. Her life was your life, making the next deal, turning profits, not winding up like these suckers.”

His father lowered his head and let his arms fall to his sides. To his son he seemed defeated, a stranger in his own skin. “I know,” he said.

“You’re just upset, Dad. You’ll get over it. Times are good, business confidence up. You get yourself back into the game, that’s what you’re missing.”

“No, son, that’s not what I’m missing.” His father walked to the doorway and shaded his eyes as he looked up at the sun.

Bruno eyed him curiously. “Dad. It’s this place. It’s messing you up. You got to get back to reality. Not hang around here with a bunch of ghosts.”

“You want to know what reality is?” His father walked backwards a few steps out the door as he hooked his thumbs in his pockets. His smile quickly faded. “When your mother got sick, you see, we had this agreement.”

“What agreement?”

His father took a deep breath. “That if one of us got sick, real sick, the other would, you know, do something to end it.”

“Do what?” Bruno stepped closer to his father.

“I knew a few shady characters. Let's just say I could get my hands on anything. Arsenic, strychnine, whatever I—”

“Poison? Did you poison my mother?”

“No, calm down, son.” He placed his hand on his son’s chest. “The day I got the stuff she slipped into a coma. I knew she wouldn’t last the night, so I...I didn’t.”

Bruno struggled with an uneasy silence, one on the verge of giving way to outrage at any moment. He turned away from his father and shook off some dust that had accumulated on his pajama sleeve. “I suppose you just wanted to end her suffering. I can understand that.”

“No, that would have been an act of love.” He forced a smile as he looked at his son.  “It was a practical matter for us. We wouldn’t let anything steal the resources we worked hard to accumulate, not the government, or a Ponzi scheme, or even a disease that would mean endless doctor and hospital bills.”

“Why are you here? Why are you telling me this?”

His father gestured at a row of structures on the other side of the train tracks, nature reclaiming what was once its own. “You remember those ovens over there, shaped like bee hives? They mined coal in a town nearby called Madrid. Then the folks here made coke out of it. Right here in those ovens. It was used to make steel.”

“I remember,” said Bruno.

He removed what looked to Bruno like a rock from his pocket. “See this?” he said. He tossed it in the air and caught it in front of him. “I’m keeping; it as a souvenir.”

#

“Hell of a souvenir.”

“What?” Bruno started at the sound of Simon’s voice. He looked around for his father but realized he was back with Simon. He must have been dreaming or hallucinating; he couldn’t decide between the two. He sat down on Simon’s trunk.

“Your father’s rock. Doesn’t sound like something he would have wanted.”

Bruno rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. “It was a lump of coke, what they made in those ovens. Carved his initials in it. He put it on his desk in front of the chair where my mother used to sit.” Bruno shook his head. “The thrill of chasing the next big thing, that drive in him suddenly disappeared. He must have lost his heart.”

“Or maybe he found something else.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bruno.

“The truth.” Simon stroked his chin as he narrowed his eyes at Bruno.

“What truth?”

“The absurdity of it all. Life's nothin’ more than turning one rock into another, then doing the whole thing over again.”

“Bull. My father thrived on the game, loved the push and pull of it. It energized him. Don’t know what he saw in this God forsaken place.”

“More truth. That the world could do without him. The world could do without all of us. But like the folks here, we can’t do without one another.” Simon winked at Bruno. “Or, we’d wind up in a desert, not knowing where we are.” The chair groaned as he shifted his weight.  “Must have meant a lot to him.”

“What?”

“That lump of coal.”

“I suppose,” said Bruno. “Funny. One day, it just disappeared. Never saw it again. Even after my father died and I went to clean out his stuff from the nursing home, no trace of it.”

The silence that followed seemed deafening to Bruno. But in the stillness, he felt curiously rooted in the moment, like time had stopped and his future didn’t seem to matter. Only the present demanding answers as to his father’s fascination with this place and why he suddenly wound up here. He wanted to bolt, leave Simon Wiley sitting on his crooked chair with all the other dusty relics of his life.

Simon stood  up. “If you don’t mind, I have to get at the trunk.” Bruno stood to the side as Simon opened it and pulled out an old camouflaged knapsack. He packed it with a number of items from the trunk, then slung it over his shoulder. “I’m all set. Ready to follow your father.”

“What? My father hasn’t been here for years.”

“Sure was,” said Simon, pulling on the straps of the backpack for a tighter fit.

“Nonsense. I don’t know what your game is, Wiley, but I never let anyone play me for a fool.”

“Suit yourself. But if you don’t believe me, have a look in that there treasure box.” Simon pointed to one of the shelves carved out of the rock.

Bruno turned around and walked toward the rock shelf. “What has that got to do with—”  He turned toward Simon, but he was gone.

He took the box from the shelf, sat on the chair and placed it in his lap. The clasp stuck and he pried it open with a flat rock he found on the ground. He gasped at what he saw inside.

His father’s souvenir lump of coke. He held it gingerly in his hand, his father’s initials as clear as the day he carved them into it with a pen knife. He rubbed it with his fingers as he imagined roots sprouting from the soles of his feet and burrowing into the ground, following the railroad tracks and wrapping themselves around the house, the bee hive ovens, the very soul of all that was once Waldo.

He opened the trunk and found some of Wiley’s discarded clothes, rummaging through them and wondering if they would be a decent fit for him.