Marfa Lights

Marfa Lights

I was coming back to New Mexico on an Amtrak, from a family reunion near San Antonio, and I was bored. It was a hot summer day, but the cars were air-conditioned, and some people were playing cards in the club car. I asked if I could join them, and they welcomed me. They had only three and needed one more anyway, though they were just playing gin rummy, and not for money.

The guy that owned the cards, I’ll call him Dr. Bock, was a historian of some kind, and was going to Las Vegas. Perhaps we worked at a university or something; he was a little older, established-looking, with a well-trimmed beard and well dressed. His cards were “presidential” – each one had some American president on it, except that there were less than fifty-two presidents, so there were a few other people on there too, including Ben Franklin and Sacajawea, two I remember. It made a kind of bizarre game of gin rummy, having three aces, and having them be Washington, Lincoln, and perhaps Roosevelt, but history wasn’t my specialty; I’m an English teacher.

The young woman who was playing was very sharp. She introduced herself as Micaeya, or something like that; she had a kind of olive skin and very long, well-braided hair. As we talked it seemed perhaps she was a student in Tucson, going back from New Orleans. She was quite pretty but young, compared to the rest of us, even to Tony, who kind of had his eye on her.

Tony was the fourth guy in the game. He was tall and intense, and dark flashing eyes. As I said, he seemed to like Micaeya, but it turned out to be more complicated than that. It turned out he hadn’t wanted her in the game, and really wanted the game to be for money. And also, as it turned out, she was quite talented, and was winning; this made him steadily more uncomfortable. So the relationship was already complicated. But that’s the way these things are. And, he was considerably older, maybe thirty or more. I had no evidence from her, really, that she even considered him. She was smooth, friendly to everyone, and winning steadily, and she had plenty of time to look at the scenery, which was stunning, in its wide, empty, desert-like West Texas way.

When I told them I was from New Mexico, Micaeya told about how she’d gone to visit a roommate in Roswell, and it was full of alien signs: balloon alien at the car dealership, alien pictures on the windows of the café, alien dolls sold at the gift shop, that kind of thing. This is well known in New Mexico, where towns seek to be famous for something, just so they’ll get a few visitors in a year; this was working pretty well for Roswell, though the kind of visitors those alien museums attracted made folks wonder, of course.

Tony, in a kind of one-upping way, told about how he’d worked for Atari in El Paso at one point, and they decided to throw away a million ET video games in a landfill in New Mexico. It was generally considered to be the worst video game ever made; they’d been stuck with a million of them, and didn’t want them; and Tony himself was partly responsible for getting rid of them. This, he said, was back in the eighties, and he knew there was some interest in digging them up now, if only because they were so bad, or because they’d become a cult item in the intervening time. It was a bad game, though, he maintained. People kept getting stuck in various worlds, unable to get out. There was no way to win.

His story, for some reason, reminded me of a time I was in Iowa, and just off the interstate, I’d stumbled upon an Edsel graveyard. Some guy had collected maybe twenty of them, and left them in an apple orchard, and these apples were falling on them, and then rotting on the ground nearby (it was maybe November) – and the cars, too, were returning to the earth, beautiful in their own way. Edsels were rejected not for being bad, or not working, or trapping people, but because they were too good – their fins were too fancy, and they incorporated a space-ship kind of look before people were really ready for it. Similarly to the ET game, though, they were rejected – many of them had to simply sit somewhere, unused.

The Amtrak rolled into the tiny town of Alpine, which Texans know as the gateway to the whole wide, vast, dry Big Bend region, but which, from this train at this moment in the middle of the day, just seemed like the most remote, isolated place on earth. The town was almost deserted, but several people got off the train, and a few got on, and I’m sure the arrival of the train was itself a big deal in some quarters of the town. Micaeya made a snarky remark about the town, like, she wouldn’t want to get stuck in a town like this after dark, and that was understandable, given that she was black, and had long braided hair, and had plenty to fear. I maintained that you never know, because this is true; not wanting to make assumptions about Alpine, before I’d even met anyone in it. A better generalization about Texas is that in some of these towns they’d rather kill you than look at you, and will, but in most, they are friendlier than you can possibly imagine. But I kept my mouth shut. After all, I’m a white male, and they might treat people like me quite differently from others.

Tony, all this time, kept his eyes narrow and concentrated on the game, which he didn’t tend to win, no matter how much he tried. He knew the southwest quite well, I could tell; he knew, for example, that where there was White Sands, just north of El Paso, there was another White Sands, just like it only smaller, down south of Juarez, on the other side of the border. Yet he was not Mexican, not even a part Mexican; maybe something else, like part Indian, or part Arab perhaps; I couldn’t quite make it out. And I don’t ever ask, or make assumptions based on names like “Tony”. I can tell you that, while the game went pretty smoothly, he was the only person who truly cared whether he won or lost; the presidents, the scenery, the town, these meant little to him. He hated it, though, when Micaeya referred to the presidents as “dead white men” as if they were legion of ghosts, come back to haunt us.

Now it was the historian’s turn to tell his story, as now we were going over a wide river valley, and this seemed to get his attention. I use the term “river” loosely, in the West Texas fashion, because most of these rivers, even the Rio Grande, rarely have water that you can see, except in the rare cases when it rains; this one, however, had this enormous valley that followed it down to the Rio Grande, no doubt, and there was not a road in sight. The train crossed this huge bridge, and we could see nothing but wide West Texas valley on both sides. The memory sticks with me, though the name of the river, if it even had one, escapes me.

It turns out that Dr. Bock had been doing research on the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, who now live in nineteen villages outside of Albuquerque. He had stumbled across the idea that one whole family of these people, who comprised maybe seven or eight of the Pueblos, had actually come from the Caribbean. The person who had made this claim, a native of one of the other Pueblos, had language and other evidence to prove it, but, according to Dr. Bock, he hadn’t gotten very far with it. You could go all the way to the Caribbean, as he had, and you still wouldn’t find much that would really prove it.

But if they had, he said, one would have to make several assumptions. First was that they’d followed rivers like the Rio Grande, or this one, that presumably had real water at the time. Second, they’d come in large groups, as he’d mentioned that their language, like that in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus’ arrival, had separate features for men’s language and women’s language. And finally, he was talking about maybe 1200, or 1300, a time when travel wasn’t really so easy. Did they know where they were going? Did they have a sense of where these rivers led to? He was engrossed in this world of the ancient people, and seemed to know a lot about them. I knew nothing about them, though I was glad we were off the topic of ET video games.

Being from Vegas, he said, he was used to modern people leaving all kinds of stuff in the desert – old neon signs, fighter planes, ET videos – even nuclear waste. But he’d come to admire the people who came and went without a trace, mentioning, on the side, the petroglyphs, which could have been theirs – and he felt that that was wiser and more respectul.

I should mention that at some point this woman, about my age, came through the train, and stopped at our table, for some reason, to start talking about the Marfa Lights. Now we were near Marfa, but of course in West Texas, “near” can mean four, five, seven hours away – but what she wanted us to know was that at night, they swirled around and put out a show worth coming from miles to watch. It’s interesting, sometimes, that landscape that seems totally barren and empty, with miles and miles of rock and useless land, was actually home to interesting things. The Marfa Lights, she said, was among them, well worth your time.

I’d heard this, having spent time in Texas, but it was broad daylight; the sun was shining brightly; and I considered it a kind of distraction. I was interested in Dr. Bock’s apparent knowledge of the ancient people, whereas I had very little experience, or interest, in the supernatural. As the woman left, I’d made it clear, more or less, that she hadn’t sold the idea. Why should I go to Marfa? I had enough problems. One of those was transportation connections in El Paso.

At some point, while Dr. Bock was talking, he seemed to catch Tony cheating at cards. Now how you’d cheat at gin rummy, or even why, when there was no money involved, was a complete mystery to me. I never did figure out exactly how he’d been cheating, but there was no question; he’d won the last few hands, whereas, he’d lost most of the earlier ones. Perhaps he’d had aces in his sleeve (and in that case, it would have been Lincoln)? Alas I had been scanning the West Texas landscape, looking for a sign, any sign, of where we were; no luck. We were coming into El Paso, that’s all I knew.

Micaeya supported him, visibly and verbally; she too had seen it, or at least sensed that something was up with him winning all the time. Whatever it was, they had both seen it, or at least were sure it had happened. They were mad. Whereas neither seemed to mind losing a single hand or two, as I didn’t mind, they did mind losing them, especially losing several, because of cheating. It had spoiled their game. They demanded that he admit it and apologize. Dr. Bock took his cards back and counted them.

At this point I excused myself, having to gather my possessions to exit the train at El Paso. An argument about the winner of a card game seemed particularly pointless, like a terrible video game, and I just had no stomach for it. But as I came back through the train I saw Dr. Bock being escorted from the train. How they had concluded that he was at fault, I’m not sure; perhaps he’d said something suspicious. At this point, Tony and Micaeya were nowhere to be seen. I was getting off the train anyway.

Funny about the stuff I remember: the Lincoln card, with its bent kind of look, when they finally tracked it down; the jostling of the train at the very end there, as if slowing down made it unsteady; the woman who’d come along and told us the story about the Marfa Lights – and how they had never been successfully explained (thus, according to her, making Marfa right up with Roswell as a place that was likely to have experienced, or to be experiencing, extraterrestrial visits) – and finally, the complete and total disappearance of both Tony and Micaeya, right at the time poor Dr. Bock had to go off and explain himself at some police station. His fight was not my fight; whatever he’d done, I hadn’t even seen it, yet I at least felt a little guilty leaving him there alone trying to explain himself. There was a mystery there – some information that I didn’t get – but I wasn’t going to get it, and if you can read this and shine some light on what actually happened, I’d like to know. Something must have happened, I figured, right as I was leaving. Perhaps he had lost his temper and cast a blow, or maybe they had hauled Tony off separately, and needed him for questioning.

In any case, the Lincoln card was left there on the table, and I grabbed it. I was well aware that a deck of fifty-one is useless, as is a single card. But now I have this souvenir, and from that, I tell this story.

As for what actually happened, they do have cameras on these trains, especially in the club cars. But the movies those cameras make don’t show card cheating, or expressions on people’s faces, and besides, after a while, they erase them all, and start over fresh. El Paso is an interesting city, tucked up on the mountains facing Mexico as it is, but it’s way too busy for me, and I didn’t want to spend any more time there than I had to.

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