“A Pause in the Desert” by Oliver La Farge

 

The Indian said, “No Sioux round here. They live up in Dakota. I’m ’Pache.”

The lean man looked down at him affectionately. “A murderin’, scalpin’ Apache.”

Huggins glanced at his wife, then at the man they called Steve. Apache was a word full of connotations and wonder. He felt the same discomfort he had known at Grand Canyon when he had been caught out identifying some Hopis as Navajos. It was important for him to be master of this wild country, and that was not easy when before he had always driven straight through, stopping only to eat and sleep.

Anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize Winning author, La Farge offered a book of short stories in 1957 titled “A Pause in the Desert.” The featured story from that collection is, in fact, the story “A Pause in the Desert.”

Editor and anthologist par excellence, Jon Lewis selected this story as one of his 100 Best Western Short Stories. If one is expecting horses, six-guns, steely-eyed men and other such tropes, you won’t find that here.

What you do find is a brief tale of a husband and wife driving across the rural southwest [perhaps Route 66 nearish Seligman]. The action is minimal, a stop at a ramshackle filling station for minor repairs and an encounter with locals.

Lest one think, “Ah, here we go, the encounter leads to confrontation?” Nope.

This is an interior tale, one made up of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the faces we wish to present to the world, the impressions we hope to make versus the realities when wishes abrade and suffer against men and women who actually live in the midst.

Have I made this story sound boring? Trite? Good lord, I hope not.

This brief tale is a Masterpiece—yes, I capitalized that M. I have thought about this story every day since I read it a week or so ago. I see so much of the husband in those around me, the yearning to be more but no impetus to go beyond the yearning.

I hear echoes in conversation of the two-meanings presented in almost all dialogue and encounters, the comforting bolsters offered spouse-to-spouse and the “necessary” [perhaps] “white lies” we tell the other and perhaps the self to preserve, “I made the right choice, didn’t I?”

A story written by a Man who Sees, for adults who also See.

A Masterpiece, plain and simple.