Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 11

This is the kind of planning I like.

MORNING on the last day of the year. I finally reach Paul.

"I was right about the kilometres. The insurance company will fix the car!" I exclaim, hanging up. "They want us to bring it in Monday."

"All right!" Wayne says. "Let's. .h.i.t the road."

It has been snowing for hours. At breakfast we watch announcers on the big-screen TV in the restaurant warn the worried a.s.sembled that once again the I-40 is closed, that hundreds have spent the night in their cars, that fog and ice are making driving treacherous, that it is twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in Albuquerque and fifty-two in El Paso. I turn to Wayne with tears in my eyes, not from the news but from the sight of two parents tenderly feeding their small daughters. I miss the kids, but I don't want to call them. I don't want them to worry. I don't want to listen to them telling us that we should be careful.

We drive slowly around the city's uncleared streets. Wayne stops at a hardware store and buys a length of heavy plastic and some duct tape to cover the wonky headlight. The temperature has dropped sharply, freezing the slush into shards that crunch under our tires as we creep out of the city through the icy mist. There are almost no other cars on the road.

The day seems surreal. It started just after breakfast, when I spoke to a couple who were trying to get home from New Orleans to Denver. They'd decided to rent a car and drive to Phoenix to see if they could get a flight there. All weekend we've been trading stories and everyone agrees: our mad dash across the mountains in a wrecked car with the storm at our backs tops them all. I feel a strange kind of pride: we've become reckless, like Americans. And everything is turning out fine.

We point the car south. The I-25 is slushy, but nothing to worry about. Within an hour, the snow is gone and the desert surrounds us under a burning sun. We stop at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where a vast wetlands adjacent to the Rio Grande is alive with cranes-sandhill, common, one or two whoopers, some snow geese, and even a few rare Ross's geese. The marsh is white with their bodies glowing in the sun. We find a secondary road and drive in closer, taking care not to disturb them.

I think of the poor birds stuck in Albuquerque, pecking through the snow for bugs and seeds. "Do you think these birds knew enough to fly ahead of the storm? Or to keep going a few miles south to where they'd find something to eat?"

"Anything that's lived here for 125 million years would have figured that much out," Wayne says.

We are leaning against the hood of the Echo, watching through our binoculars, when a truck drives up a narrow dike between two of the major wetland areas. When it comes to a halt, the driver's window goes down and a shotgun barrel appears. A shot blasts out, and a thousand cranes and geese startle into the air. One of the geese plummets into the water. A dog bounds out of the back of the truck, splashes through the shallow water and retrieves the kill. We watch in horror, our binoculars pointed indignantly toward the couple-a man and a woman, both in khaki uniforms-who lazily get out of the truck, which is near enough that we can read the words printed on the side: "Park Ranger."

The dog returns with a wild goose in its mouth. The woman pats the dog and flings the bird into the back of the truck.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" I yell. They're almost close enough to hear.

"Let's go," Wayne says nervously, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of confronting two poachers carrying rifles.

"Why on earth would they do that? Research?"

"More likely New Year's dinner," Wayne says.

The incident pulls a pall over our mood. That, and the realization that we can't possibly make it to El Paso before nightfall.

"How about Las Cruces?"

The City of the Crosses is the second largest in New Mexico. The origin of the name is lost: locals insist it refers to some ma.s.sacre or other. A cheery thought, after witnessing the murder of the goose. The town is an army brat, of sorts, laid out in 1848 by soldiers when the surrounding area was ceded to the United States after American troops invaded Mexico. Settlers who wanted to stay on the Mexican side of the border-a Mexican version of Canada's United Empire Loyalist refugees from the Revolutionary War-created the village of Mesilla, "little tableland," on the opposite bank of the Rio Grande, a vain hope, since a few years later that was absorbed by the United States, too, in its relentless land grab in the name of Manifest Destiny.

When Mesilla was founded, the Rio Grande flowed between Mesilla and Las Cruces: travellers had to take a barge from one village to the other. But the banks of the Rio Grande are low here: the river changes course at will. In 1863, it broadened, isolating Mesilla on an island; then, in the 1870s, the area became a swamp rich in yellow fever and malaria that killed dozens of Mesillans. A hundred years ago, the river repositioned itself again to where it flows now, west of both towns.

In Las Cruces we find a Best Western overlooking a busy road. It offers two New Year's Eve events: a mariachi band with dinner or an evening with Carroll Welch and her band. We accept these as our default celebrations.

If it were up to me, I'd stay in tonight. I'm a fifth-generation Canadian, with the usual WASP braid of English, Irish, and Scots, a slender thread of French thrown in for colour. At heart, though, I am a Scot, the blood of my mother's father's people pounding most palpably in my veins. It is the la.s.s in me that every year, in these last days between Christmas and New Year's, feels driven to clean the cupboards, straighten the underwear in my drawers, and bring my files up to date for fear of the Scottish curse that whatever is left undone by Hogmanay will haunt me throughout the year.

My idea of a perfect New Year's Eve is a gla.s.s of the Widow Clicquot by the fire, reminiscing about where we've been and where we're likely to go. Markers appeal to me. I like to make plans; Wayne likes to party.

Since the Irish in me also likes a good s.h.i.+ndig, we wander over to Mesilla, a small adobe village that seems unchanged since the Rio Grande jumped its banks. "As wild as the wild west gets," the brochure says, though this seems like wishful thinking. The plaza is empty, the lovely old adobe church, too; only a few tourists straggle through the historic buildings that rim the square, most of them now tourist shops filled with knick-knacks and anti-Bush paraphernalia.

On one side of the plaza we come upon a restaurant, the Double Eagle, which is what the American twenty-dollar gold coin used to be called. We go in to see if we can have dinner there, but the place is fully booked-"It's New Year's Eve!" the hostess exclaims in a harried voice that says, "Where have you been?"

"Can we sit at the bar?" we ask. "We've come all the way from Canada."

"We'll find you a spot," Michael, the bartender, says. "All the servers are busy, but I'll look after you myself."

The restaurant is in an old colonial house, each of its rooms now a private dining area for a family or group of friends. Michael finds us a table in the courtyard by the fountain; it's not cleared yet, so he suggests we wait in the lounge, a pillared and mirrored affair that the bartender tells us once graced the luxurious Drake Hotel in Chicago, where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe carved their initials into one of the hotel's ornate well-polished bars, unfortunately not this one. Above us hang chandeliers as long as a tall Texan, a thousand hand-carved crystals refracting the light. To Wayne's amazement, Michael makes him a proper b.l.o.o.d.y Caesar, complete with Clamato juice and a slug of beef bouillon. Wayne is in tippler's heaven.

"This is the first time I've ever met anyone outside Canada who knows what a b.l.o.o.d.y Caesar is," he says happily, "and even at home, they don't use beef bouillon anymore." He sighs with the wonder of it all.

"Another, sir?" asks Michael.

But Wayne's eye is wandering along the tequila bottles. "Is that reposado?" he says.

If we had been offered a hundred places to spend New Year's Eve, this is the one we would have chosen, this old adobe house fitted with midwestern elegance, a fountain splas.h.i.+ng in the courtyard beside our small table in Little Tableland, luminarias lighting our way in the starlit desert night, a place we've stumbled into not by design, not by good planning, but by accident.

"To luck," Wayne says, raising his pony of golden Spanish liquor.

I raise my gla.s.s of sparkling Perrier. "To our very good luck."

9 / EL CAMINO REAL.

WE thought we would get up in the morning, pack the car (a tedious operation, as we always seem to need everything we've brought with us and so haul it into the motel room like a pair of suspicious tramps), have some breakfast, and continue down the I-25 to El Paso. But there is something about Mesilla I want to see again.

"I don't know what," I say when Merilyn asks for specifics.

"Suffering a little from tequila brain this morning?" she says. I like having a permanent designated driver, but I pay in the coinage of smug grins.

We drive back under an overpa.s.s and over an underpa.s.s, past the plaza with the giant, lit-up statue of a roadrunner, and park in one of the narrow streets of the old town. As soon as we get out of the car and walk out onto the public square, I know what it is I was after. The Old West. This is our first foray into America's outlaw culture.

Canada doesn't have an outlaw culture. In Canada, the wild west was tamed and surveyed and policed before settlers were allowed in. We didn't have a frontier, we had concessions and side roads. You don't get an outlaw culture by making concessions. Government surveyors marked out the land for farms and fences and even towns, and then the North West Mounted Police made it safe for settlers by establis.h.i.+ng laws. And when you have grids and laws, you don't get outlaws; you get criminals.

An outlaw isn't a criminal; an outlaw is a person who inhabits a place where there is no law (or thinks he does). In frontier America, one of those places was the desert territory south and east of Santa Fe. During the Civil War, La Mesilla was the capital of the Confederate Territory of Arizona, an area that included most of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, which is no doubt why it had a courthouse. (The "La" has since been dropped, though town boosters are lobbying to bring it back.) Even after the war, La Mesilla was an important centre until the railway was built through Las Cruces in 1881. Since then, Mesilla has existed mainly for tourists, while Las Cruces has swollen into a metropolis of almost a hundred thousand people. La Mesilla is hanging on for dear life. Except for the occasional gift shop, it hasn't even put a lot of effort into tarting itself up for tourists. We like that.

Walking along the boardwalk that circles the small bandstand in the Mesilla plaza, we pa.s.s a pink adobe building on the southeast corner called the Billy the Kid Gift Shop. The sign is a reproduction of the only known portrait of Henry McCarty, also known as Henry Antrim, William H. Bonney, and, most famously, Billy the Kid-a young, bucktoothed, inoffensive-looking fellow reputed to have killed twenty-one men, one for every year of his life. He was certainly responsible for the deaths of at least four men during the Lincoln County Cattle War, a kind of Hatfield-and-McCoy feud over grazing rights in which, because there were no lawmen yet, both sides hired professional gunslingers to protect them while they rustled each other's cattle. It may be true that Bonney killed people with a little more enthusiasm than most, but he was far from unique. He was simply the one who was caught rather than shot.

At his trial, which was held in La Mesilla in 1881, Bonney was found guilty of murdering a man named Brady and sentenced to hang. He was moved from here to Lincoln but escaped by killing his two guards and riding off, still handcuffed, into the desert. The relentless Pat Garrett rode after him and two months later found him and shot him in Fort Sumner, at the home of their mutual friend Pedro Maxwell.

Garrett was also a gunman and a murderer, but he'd been appointed deputy sheriff of Lincoln County, and Bonney had a price on his head. Except for the star, there wasn't much to distinguish the two. I think of Garrett as the original gumshoe, the character in American detective novels who, although nominally on the side of the law, resorts to methods of pursuit and capture barely distinguishable from those of the criminals he is supposed to be saving us from. In fact, the word "gumshoe" originally meant "thief," because thieves wore rubber-soled shoes in order to sneak around more effectively, which is why Americans call running shoes "sneakers." Eventually, lawmen took to wearing gumshoes so that they could sneak around after the thieves and ended up becoming gumshoes themselves. Pat Garrett was a gumshoe in cowboy boots, which would make him, I suppose, a gumboot.

Merilyn and I browse through the Billy the Kid Gift Shop, but I am more interested in the building than I am in owning the head of Wile E. Coyote on the end of a pencil. The structure itself doesn't seem to have changed much since Bonney's day: thick adobe walls, round posts holding up a low, flat roof. If this is really the courthouse in which the trial took place, it was a good choice. A bullet from a six-gun could never whistle through these walls. I remember all those television shows and westerns, in which shopkeepers wearing suspenders (you could always tell the shopkeepers by their suspenders) huddled behind their thin walls as bullets splintered patterns of daylight into the boards above their heads. Even as a kid I wondered why Hollywood didn't build thicker walls.

Between 1920 and 1950, Hollywood made five hundred movies set in Canada, every one of them filmed in California. The sets presented an imaginary Canada-vast unpopulated snowfields, lonely Mounties, scores of lakes hemmed in by st.u.r.dy pines. Perhaps those Hollywood westerns depicted a fake Wild West, too. I do remember reading that very few outlaws wore handguns in leather holsters. Handguns were hard to keep in a holster when riding a horse, impossible to aim accurately, and no good at all for distance. The favoured weapon of the outlaw was the Winchester rifle. And yet we see all these gunslingers in the movies slapping leather in dusty plazas like the one we're circling in La Mesilla.

There is a bookstore on the square, the Mesilla Book Center, one of the best we've seen in days. It was closed the night before, but now its door is wide open. That's the other reason I wanted to come back. The shelves have books from years ago, still at their original prices. I come across a first edition of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which I haven't read since it was published in 1970. The book is a montage of prose and poetry, an a.s.semblage of perspectives on the life of William Bonney, fragmented and isolated, and mostly taking place in the desert between his trial here in Mesilla and his death in Fort Sumner. Hollywood may be comfortable with the notion that you can always tell the good guys from the bad guys by the colour of their hats, but Ondaatje isn't so sure: There was good mixed with the bad in Billy the Kid and bad mixed with the good in Pat Garrett.

It seems a very Canadian thing to say.

MESILLA behind us, we stop for a walk in the Chihuahuan, our third desert on this trip and the largest in North America. One of the books Wayne bought in the bookstore was A Natural State: Essays on Texas, by Stephen Harrigan, a naturalist and an inveterate desert walker.

"Listen to this," I say to Wayne, reading as we walk. "'There are two ways to look at the desert. You can see it contriving to extinguish life or straining to support it.'"

"I guess I've always seen it as contriving to extinguish life."

"You would," I say. "It's all that work with buried dinosaur skeletons."

We top a rise and look out over a sea of low, round hills covered in creosote bush, Larrea tridentata, a scraggly, thigh-high evergreen shrub that the Spanish call hediondilla, "little stinker," because of the peculiar smell of its yellow flowers. It's January, so the air just smells dry.

"I've never seen anything like it. The plants are s.p.a.ced as if somebody planted them."

"It's just that they suck up so much water that nothing else can survive within that radius," Wayne says.

Deserts seem like mountains, almost impervious to the influence of humans. But, according to Harrigan, much of this desert is manmade. Ranchers overburdened their land with livestock, and complex gra.s.slands degenerated into simple desert scrub. Harrigan quotes an early homesteader who returned decades later to his ranch: "Where once I'd thought there was more gra.s.s than could ever be eaten off, I found no gra.s.s at all. Just the bare, rain-eroded ground . . . Somehow, the brightness seemed gone from the land."

We return to the car and drive on. Soon the desert on either side of the highway disappears, replaced with sprawling acres of cattle pens, tens of thousands of black-and-white Holsteins, flicking their tails in the sun. Dung heaps rise like small mountains. Here and there, a heifer curls contentedly on top; the rest stand in a stupor between the milking sheds. The scene reminds me of a contest I entered when I was twelve: count the cows and win a prize from Nestle's Quik. I spent a week methodically ticking off the animals, then sent in my tally, convinced no one else would have the stick-to-it-iveness to complete the task. They must have, though, for I never heard from Nestle.

We are heading into new territory. Not only are there cows everywhere- this part of the country produces 5 percent of America's milk-but the lovely turquoise-and-terracotta overpa.s.ses of New Mexico are gone, replaced by dark Texas concrete and a pillar topped with a giant metal star that looks like the weapon of an ancient race of giant ninjas. There seems no change in the physical, natural landscape, but once again the vernacular of the road signs s.h.i.+fts. In Was.h.i.+ngton, they were whimsical: Click-It or Ticket. Oregon was terse: Ice. Slides. California was conversational: Watch for Falling Rocks. Texas pulls no punches: Don't Mess with Texas. Drink Drive Go to Jail. I can't help but note the contrast with the downright homey signs we see in Canada: Please Drive Carefully, Children Being Children.

At the exit for downtown El Paso, we see a red circle with a slash through it, the international image for "no," as in No Smoking or No Pa.s.sing. The icon at the centre of this sign is a gun.

"Does that mean what I think it means?" I say to Wayne.

"Yep," he says. "Don't shoot and drive."

In town, the same black pistol is suspended in its slashed red circle on the sides of buses, at the entrances to buildings. We ask the clerk checking us into the Camino Real hotel what it means.

"Oh, y'all just have to leave your gun at home if you want to ride on the bus or come into the bar," she says pleasantly. I want to ask if hers is pearl-handled, but think better of it. She'd probably show it to me, and then what would I say? "Nice gun?" I'm Canadian: guns aren't part of my conversational repertoire. Even pictures of them make me uneasy. A few years ago I wrote an essay for Canadian Geographic magazine on the difference between how Canadian and American settlers viewed their guns. I read hundreds of letters, diaries, and recollections: Canadians rarely mentioned their guns except in a list of tools, along with their axe, their adze, and their hoe. American guns were always in evidence, a weapon propped by the door. If the Madonna of the Trail were sculpted in Canada, I'm fairly certain she wouldn't be carrying a rifle. She'd be holding a sheaf of grain.

It's still early afternoon, so we go for a walk through the streets of El Paso. In a park decorated for Christmas, there are red ribbons on the trees and stars traced in LED lights over signs that read Alcoholic Beverages Not Permitted and Feeding the Birds Is Prohibited.

"If you want to know what people usually do in a place, look at what's not allowed," Wayne muses. I imagine a bunch of gun-toting, wine-sipping renegades defiantly tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons.

We are trying to follow a self-guided tour to the historic downtown, but we aren't sure we've found it. Signs point to Historic Downtown, Historic Rio Grande District, Historic Heights, as if tacking on the word "historic" makes the place seem interesting instead of deserted and slightly decrepit. The buildings we pa.s.s show architectural signs of former glory, but as often as not the upper storeys are boarded up, doors removed and stacked against the windows, the facades dark and crumbling.

El Paso was a sleepy border town before the excitement of the Civil War, when it was occupied by Union troops from California. Then the coming of the railroad-the same Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line that boosted Las Cruces-turned El Paso into a boom town. Bootlegging and prost.i.tution saw it through the Prohibition days, but when the ban on booze was lifted and the Depression era hit, the city went back to being a poor cousin of Juarez, its sister city across the Rio Grande.

"My G.o.d," Wayne says. "El Paso is Windsor, and Juarez is Detroit. No wonder I find it so depressing."

It was here in El Paso, in 1947, that Jack Kerouac, dead broke, went looking for someone to pay for his gas the rest of the way to California. "We tried everything," he writes in On the Road. "We buzzed the travel bureau, but no one was going west that night. The travel bureau is where you go for share-the-gas rides, legal in the West. s.h.i.+fty characters wait with battered suitcases. We went to the Greyhound bus station to try to persuade somebody to give us the money instead of taking a bus for the Coast. We were too bashful to approach anyone. We wandered around sadly. It was cold outside . . . Across the river were the jewel lights of Juarez and the sad dry land and the jewel stars of Chihuahua."

"Interesting that he says 'across the river,'" Wayne muses. "I would have said 'across the border.'"

We've been following the Rio Grande south through New Mexico, from Albuquerque to El Paso. From here it drifts east, drawing the boundary between the United States and Mexico since the treaty that ended the Mexican War in 1848.

Names are everything and nothing. What is the Rio Grande to Americans is to Mexicans the Rio Bravo del Norte: wild, restless river of the north. And what the Mexicans call the American Invasion of Mexico, Americans call the Mexican War, as if they had nothing to do with it, even though the battle was provoked in 1845 when the United States annexed the state of Texas, which had declared itself an independent republic almost a decade before.

That year, the journalist John O'Sullivan, in urging his country into war with Mexico, wrote that America should a.s.sert "the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent." He compared the right of the United States to all of North America "to that of the tree to the s.p.a.ce of air and the earth suitable for the full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth." Andrew Jackson picked up the phrase "Manifest Destiny" and used it to promote not only war with Mexico but also the annexation of California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico-hundreds of thousands of square miles of land that stretched from where we stand now to where we started this journey. I can't help wondering if the war would have been as popular without the catchphrase that turned aggression into some sort of G.o.dly fate.

The Mexican War was one of dozens the United States has instigated in its relatively short history to either expand its territory or exert its influence. Wayne and I are travelling through a country that, over the past 150 years, has invaded Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Grenada, the Philippines, Panama, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, not to mention countless covert interventions by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is easy to forget that not all Americans supported these wars. In the case of the Mexican War, American devotees of Manifest Destiny and southerners hoping for new slave states to balance the ledger were in favour of the invasion, but the newly elected congressman Abraham Lincoln was against it. So were John Quincy Adams and Henry David Th.o.r.eau, who was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to support the war, thus inspiring his famous essay "Civil Disobedience," written in 1849: "The government itself, which is the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool."

American soldiers deserted in droves from the Mexican War. Nine thousand left the army during the fighting, among them the seven hundred Irish Catholics who formed the St. Patrick's Battalion and fought on the side of the Mexicans. When the Americans finally hoisted the Stars and Stripes over Mexico City, the soldiers of the Battalon de San Patricio were court-martialled: forty-eight were hanged, the rest were branded with a "D," for deserter. The Mexicans, who called them Los Colorados because of their ruddy, sunburned complexions and their Irish red hair, hailed the survivors as heroes and gave them land on the Pacific coast, where they founded the village of San Patricio, a lovely, quiet, fis.h.i.+ng community where I wintered for several years.

I feel a great affection for Mexicans, in part because their country reminds me of Brazil, where I spent my childhood, in part also because Mexicans and Canadians are the thin bread on either side of the bulging meat that is America in this continental sandwich. We've both been invaded: the United States marched on Canada twice, once in the autumn of 1775 and again in 1812. Both times, the invaders a.s.sumed (as they did in Iraq) that they would be welcomed as liberators. Instead, Canadian settlers fought back, choosing British laws and inst.i.tutions over those of the new republic. In fact, Canada and Cuba stand as the only two countries in the world to successfully repel an American invasion.

But the threat isn't over yet. Just last year, the Was.h.i.+ngton Post revealed an American plan to invade Canada, formulated in the late 1920s, approved by the United States War Department in 1930, updated in 1934 and 1935, withdrawn in 1939, and finally decla.s.sified in 1974, long before this over-consuming country began to run out of water.

"Don't worry, they won't invade us," Wayne says. "They already think they own us."

After 9/11, George W. Bush, a son of Texas, said, "Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." His father had said before him, "The world trusts us with power and the world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right."

Do they? Do I? I trust Uncle Russ and Blanche Russell and Bay Bridge Betty. I trust Officer Jared and Paul the insurance adjuster. But America? What does it mean to trust a country?

RUDYARD KIPLING, the great British imperialist, travelled across America at the end of the nineteenth century. At one of his stops, he overhead an American say, "We kin feed all the earth, just as easily as we kin whip all the earth." The land was the key to both-to nurturing and sheltering themselves against reprisals.

Wayne and I walk down Santa Fe Street toward the Paso del Norte International Bridge. Some of the buildings are being renovated; most are barricaded by metal grilles over their windows and doors. Cars are lined up at the border, old, dented Dodges and mangled pickup trucks waiting to cross over to Juarez, and we walk along a chain-link fence until we get as close to the Rio Grande as Wayne dares. The river has been hemmed in by a ten-foot fence, lit up by floodlights, and reduced to a tiny trickle of water flowing over concrete. It looks like an open sewer running through a playground. It's hard to believe it's the same river that we've been following since Albuquerque.

"This rio doesn't look so grand anymore," Wayne says.

"'Behold now the glorious condition of this Republic,'" I say softly, quoting Kipling, "'which has no fear.'"

WELL, I should warn you, ma'am," says the man at the bar, wearing a string tie and a white Stetson, "that I'm from Texas and I agree with everything George Bush ever said."

If this were the 1940s, the woman sitting next to him, a young, nervous brunette in a silky dress, would, at this point, blow smoke in the man's face and call for the check. In this more enlightened age she merely looks bored and sips at her drink. She's evidently thinking of one or two things George Bush has said that only a dribbling moron could agree with.

"I just mean," she says, "when you think of what war has done all over the world and all . . ."

We're sitting at a corner table in the Camino Real's immense Dome Bar, a vast, pillared room, originally the hotel's lobby, with cherry stone walls, gold fixtures, and a circular bar in the centre under the largest and most beautiful stained-gla.s.s dome I have ever seen. It must be fifty feet across, arching up into the afternoon sky pouring coloured light down into the room without, however, alleviating the gloom. The hotel's brochure informs us that the dome was made by Tiffany in 1912.

"I wonder if they s.h.i.+pped it here in one piece," I say to Merilyn.

"It boggles the mind," she says.

Apart from us and the couple at the bar-who, it turns out, are not a couple, as the Bush enthusiast now stomps off and is almost immediately replaced by a young soldier wearing desert camouflage in six shades of beige and brown-the room is echoingly empty, and the eerie, greenish-red light from the dome, along with the soldier's uniform, makes us feel as though we're in a tropical forest. The soldier dumps a kit bag beside his bar stool. He has apparently returned from somewhere far away, as he and the woman are now engaging in protracted reunion activities that would seem to be more appropriately conducted in a room upstairs, which, when she has finished the last of her drink, is where they appear to be headed.

"Did I ever tell you the story about the soldier and my friend Susan?"

I start a lot of stories that way. Merilyn never says, "Yes, several times." It is one of the things I love about her.

"It was the early 1970s. Susan and two of her girlfriends were on a bus trip through the United States. There were three of them, so they took turns sitting two together and one alone. When it was Susan's turn to sit alone, a young man in uniform sat beside her, a soldier on his way to Vietnam. They got to talking, and after a few hours he asked her to marry him. He told her that knowing someone was waiting for him back home would help him survive the war, give him a reason to stay alive. Susan turned him down, of course, but you know her: she did it gently, almost guiltily. After a while she fell asleep, and when she woke up, the man was gone. She was sorry she hadn't said goodbye, but then she looked down at her hand. He'd slipped an engagement ring on her finger."

"That's so sad," Merilyn says. "But I guess that's what you get in a country at war."

"We're at war," I remind her. "Canada has three thousand soldiers in Afghanistan."