July 2011 Archives

Steve is a Union Pacific train engineer living in Marfa. He both looks and acts a lot like Santa Claus, minus the seasonally determined relevance.

Steve is hard to miss. He's downright chatty. The kind of guy who hugs you after you sneeze: ebullient incarnate. His white beard is quick to tremble with laughter, the unkempt hairs all the jollier against red apple cheeks. His tall lace-up boots are usually covered in what appears to be soot. His whole comportment suggests a person completely satisfied with a predestined occupation.

In fact it’s Steve’s undying love for his job that puts him in Santa territory, more so than his twinkling blue eyes, button nose and rotund figure, though those don’t hurt the picture.

My casting is not totally original here. Steve usually plays Santa at the Chamber of Commerce’s annual tree lighting / lap sitting affair.  I’m surprised when he mentions with casual bitterness that his own children hate him. I suspect coal was involved, though I don’t pry.

Steve said he drove a train for the first time in grade school. He pestered a conductor stopped in town and convinced him to let a 10-year-old pilot the freighter as far as the city limits.

“From that point on,” Steve said, “I knew exactly what I wanted to do in life”. And he never wavered. 

Steve petitioned the railroad at age 17 to let him come on as a rail switcher, even though the requisite age was 18. (This was before they had automated switches to control the tracks).

“What is that like?” I wondered, “To know at age 10 exactly what you wanted to be when you grew up and never change your mind?”

I wanted to be either Kristi Yamaguchi or Madame President at that point, hopefully both. Unfortunately neither my flexibility nor resolve was anything to write home about.

But here’s Steve, living the dream.

If you start to type “the devil lives in” on Google's search bar the most popular finisher is “hot springs,” right after “my husband’s body” and “the details”. After a Saturday night at Chinati Hot Springs, this struck me as more than coincidental.

Granted, The Devil Lives in Hot Springs is a 2008 movie with an estimated budget of $1500 and a trailer that opens, “If you want to see one of the most thought provoking movies of all time, see another damn movie,” followed by a fast-paced montage of guns, beige cars, and women being gagged with duct tape.

But still. If I was the devil, where would I be? Its certainly prime pickens in these parts: the wind whips through the trees but rustles little save a man of 19 going on 50… a $50 hooker in Ojinaga drapes herself on a boy of 8 going on forever... a body turned up that evening, a man cooked to death, forever documented as undocumented. It made sense - this devil in hot springs. I shivered in spite of the heat.

According to the folklore collected in Elton Miles' Tales of the Big Bend, the devil lived it up as a man until about 200 years ago. He trolled the border towns of Presidio and Ojinaga, leading the citizens astray and killing loose young women until a plucky priest banished him to a cave and sealed up the entrance.

And while Satan’s human form is trapped behind 2 tons of rock, he still leaks. Often in the shape of deformed animals.

I stepped out of the cabin around midnight, thinking a moonlit stroll along the lush (by local standards, anyway) creek bank was all I needed to wipe away the image of a rabbit without forepaws raping its own progeny. The dog accompanied, as he tends to do, but only a few steps from the modest water’s edge, he lit off in to the night and started barking up a storm.

Across the bank I saw a black, four- (or was it three?)-legged figure dash through the darkness, aggressively retreating. Or was he re-positioning? Sort of canine, sort of swine, all devil. No doubt.

I panicked and scuttled back to the cabin, anxious to start the next chapter of the book, Christ in the Big Bend.