The Nirvana Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

toppled into the hole. They settled slowly into a foreign bubbling substance, and disappeared.
    Puzzled, the men paced around the hole, squatted, and sniffed its odor, frowned concernedly, thoughtfully pinched their chins between thumb and forefinger, and stamped about on the ground at various distances from the cavity.
    Then, at an impasse, and also at the end of a working day, the disaster technicians decided to close up shop and tackle the problem afresh in the morning.
    That night, while Teresita Irribarren lay still listening to a babble of radio programs issuing from the light switch, the electric heater, and her electric blanket, the hole widened and her little cabin slid into it. Awake and alert, fully aware of what was happening, the old woman remained alive for several minutes at the heart of an historical darkness as profound and dismaying as that which must have captured many a dinosaur of yore. Then she was mercifully suffocated by the heavy, engulfing environment, joining eternity, becoming fossil; a slight, white memory of a different, more compassionate age.
    *   *   *
    A S THE SEVENTIES neared extinction, things calmed down in Chamisaville. The transition, so to speak, had completed itself. Only Eloy Irribarren, a stubborn old man, hung on to his tiny farm, which everybody but everybody wished to wrest from his grasp.
    Beyond that, Chamisaville’s agricultural heritage had finally gone the way of the dodo, and a new society reigned, teeming with adventures of a different mettle. Middle-class America ruled the picturesque valley: Progress had triumphed.

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    SATURDAY NIGHT
    Six at the top means:
    One falls into the pit.
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    It was a springtime Saturday night in Chamisaville. The moon over the Pueblo’s sacred peak, Hija Negrita, seemed as soft as the color of a newborn colt. Stars hovered like awed fireflies above the nervous little city. Honky-tonk music from dozens of funky bars danced among the valley’s myriad security lamps forever frozen at the foot of the mysterious mesa wave that unfurled from the base of the Midnight Mountains and extended its graceful, sage-flecked spume westward to the Rio Grande Gorge. North of town, the brightly lit lime-green bubble over Tennis Heaven’s indoor courts glowed silkily. Into the enchanted night faintly echoed a rhythmic thwock! caused by rackets leisurely pummeling high-altitude balls inside that rippling diaphanous gem. A tinkle of cocktail ice sounded at the nearby open-air restaurant. The sizzling odor of charcoal-broiled steaks wafted onto the mesa. Candlelight flickered; perfume pulsed; bare and milky white shoulders gleamed. The laughter of young, tanned, and healthy couples evoked reminiscences of a nostalgic yesteryear.
    A small executive jet, its green and red lights blinking lazily, landed at the airport. Greyhounds streaked around the Pueblo track: the glare of stadium lights was softened by the appleblossom- and chamisa-scented air. Echoes from the loudspeaker carried west beyond the Ya-Ta-Hey Hotel (on the shores of man-made Bonatelli Lake): they could be faintly heard west of the North-South Highway at the renovated hot-baths complex, where late-night diners finished off their Alaskan crabs, and several bathers still cavorted in the steaming mineral pools so seductively illuminated by underwater bulbs. And strains of old-fashioned mood music issued from an orchestra plying the geriatric pilgrim crowd shuffling about the mahogany floors of the King Cole Executive Room of the Dynamite Shrine Dining Salon, above which a peculiarly insistent star twinkled like a gem born of some less than radiant, but still highly provocative, foam.
    At first, that pearl-sized glow high above the hot springs seemed immobile. But then it moved, casually floating through the velvet obscurity, growing larger as it leisurely approached the earth a half-mile west of the Dynamite Shrine complex. A flying saucer? Chamisavillians