The Myth of Wile E

That's Why They Call It "Land of Enchantment"

Maybe you're saying, Why New Mexico? Of all the places the old radicals could have moved, what's so great about New Mexico? And why did the drunken, temporarily-unconscious hunter believe that his "aliens," which had never come in the first place, would definitely come to New Mexico when they returned? Why would aliens want to land there, of all the possible destinations on the face of the Earth? Why not Bali or New Zealand or Disneyland?

Maybe you're not wondering anything of the sort. In that case you can skip this part; there are no answers here. If you are wondering Why New Mexico? then you might as well keep on reading, although there are still no answers here.

Me, I was only in New Mexico once. I was four (almost five) years old. Dougie and Gladys and Mama and I were moving to California, so Gladys could get famous. On the way to California, our Impala broke down somewhere in the middle of New Mexico, just outside of an Indian reservation.

Mama was annoyed by the delay, because Gladys was already nine years old and the clock was ticking in terms of her getting famous. You see, Mama wanted Gladys to be a modern-day Shirley Temple, and as soon as Gladys got breasts the whole plan would be doomed. So we had to get to California and get Gladys discovered and famous before then. The way Mama kept talking about "hurrying up before the breasts come," I was always afraid to stand too close to Gladys because I thought the breasts would just pop out at any second, like air bags. As I said, I was only four years old, and I came up to about chest-height on Gladys, so I thought if I wasn't careful I might get socked in the head by a suddenly-inflating breast and that could hurt.

For a while we sat in the broken-down Impala as Mama wrung the steering wheel and pondered what to do. She inhaled and exhaled real slow, like when she had a cigarette after "really needing" one. We looked all around at the alien landscape. Way off in the distance were these weird hills that seemed kind of like chunks of toffee stuck in Silly Putty. The only clouds in the sky were dust. All around us, the grass was as yellow as a patch of lawn trapped under a kiddie pool too long. There were hardly any other plants, and they all had their hackles up.

It was getting very hot in the car, but none of us wanted to get out because Dougie had just been telling us everything he thought he knew about scorpions and tarantulas and rattlesnakes.

Plus, some birds that looked a lot like vultures were circling overhead.

Mama decided we had no choice but to walk to an Indian souvenir stand we'd passed a couple miles back, and see if they had a phone. She didn't want us kids to stay in the car by ourselves because she thought coyotes might eat us while she was gone. Dougie said he'd protect Gladys and me, but we all thought that was pretty funny since Dougie was afraid of everything. Once when a large brown moth got in the house, Dougie ran outside flailing his arms and screaming so loudly ("It has eyes on its wings!") that our good-intentioned next-door neighbors called 911. Then there was the time he begged his way onto an after-school baseball team, but whenever the ball came at him he shrieked and covered his face with both hands. At the time of the car trip, he was thirteen years old and still having nightmares about The Blob, which we'd seen recently on late-night TV. Also, by unfortunate coincidence, there had been a Smucker's commercial during the telecast, and somehow by association Dougie had become paranoid of jam, and could no longer bring himself to eat it.

Mama asked Dougie what he planned to do to the coyotes: Stick them to death with his stickers? Doodle them to death with his crayons?

"They're stamps," Dougie grumbled. "And oil pastels."

We all got out of the car, with Mama grabbing Dougie by the wrist and telling Gladys to take my hand. "Straighten out The Baby's pajamas; they're bunched in a wedgie," Mama said. (The Baby was me.) And: "Don't let The Baby wander into the road." And: "Don't let The Baby touch any bugs or pick up any rocks or soda cans or dead things."

The car trip had begun two days earlier, in Kentucky, with Mama sneaking us out of the house before dawn. By the time the car broke down, we'd spent two whole days and two whole nights in the car, but I was still wearing the pajamas that I'd begun the trip in. They were tomato-red one-piece pajamas, the kind with feet. As I waddled on the edge of the desert highway, the vinyl pajama-feet began to get tacky and stick to the road. It got hard to walk; I kept tripping and the soles of my feet were so hot I had to cool them by hopping up and down like Yosemite Sam. Mama said if I couldn't walk one foot in front of the other like a normal person then she'd have Gladys carry me.

I looked at Gladys. She was wearing her usual patent leather Mary Janes with no socks. Her shoes were too small on purpose; they were supposed to keep her feet from "spreading." Mama said it was very important for Gladys not to have big feet if she was going to be a dancer. But any time Gladys did too much walking or dancing in her tight shoes she'd get these big gross blisters on her feet. She'd lance them and then make me help her put Band-Aids on them. No way did I want to go through that ordeal if it could possibly be avoided. Carrying me would surely make her feet worse, so I said that I could walk like a normal person just fine, thank you very much.

Besides, I wanted to keep a safe distance from Gladys's imminent developments.

(Those of you who opted to skip the part about New Mexico should probably regroup and come back now. Otherwise you might get lost, or touch something you oughtn't.)

(Don't forget to count heads.)