Free Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy Page B

glimpse a man in a rumpled apron, a pear-shaped man about two shifts away from incarceration. He flips yellowcakes on a sizzling grill. He resembles the cook in a film I once saw. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, the movie cook lined a large pan with a piecrust, plopped a handful of kittens into it, rolled out a top crust, and slapped it over the pie. Lumps of kittens rose and fell under the dough. The cook fired up what looked like a cremation oven. You noticed flour, catsup, and cigarette ash on his apron. From the pie could be heard tiny muffled mews.
    Under a slab of glass on the café tabletop lies unavoidable reading material, a collage of graphic antiabortion E-mails. The printouts swallow up faded remnants of Route 66 scenes— cartoon saguaro cactus, road signs, a red Corvette driven by a blonde in white-rimmed sunglasses.
    The eating area of the café is a small room with booths ofchipped plastic the color of cheap vampire lipstick. The bench seat is bumpy and uneven, stuffed with the bodies of former diners. Parked in the middle of the room is a 1955 Chevy—half of a Chevy, that is, cut with a blowtorch so that its rear window and boxy rear end stick out from a booth. The cab is cream-colored, the body a frosted gold lamé with chrome bumper and shiny red taillights. This is a clunky Chevy, built when cars had weight. A few models later, they elongated. You could throw your enemy against their sharky fins and impale him.
    My food arrives. Bits of canned chopped green chiles float in lukewarm chicken broth. Under my spoon lie the Corvette blonde and a paragraph about screaming fetuses. At the counter, cowboys stir sugar into their refills. They raise their cups and turn their heads as the café door opens.
    The last indigenous desert bighorn sheep in the Chihuahuan Desert lives on a long rib of rock beneath a storm-damp sky that shifts from thick slate to open tears of blue. I skirt the mountains’ east flank, the Tularosa Basin, but clearly envision its northwest flank, the Jornada del Muerto, a place I once visited. There, in the summer of 1945, the Manhattan Project wizards watched the fruit of their labors rise in a fireball from the Trinity site. Their invention remains loose in the world. No one can stuff it back into its box, and, sadly, no one with any power really tries.
    Eighty-five miles long, running north-south in a graceful narrow arc, the San Andres Mountains lie entirely within the 3,500-square-mile White Sands Missile Range. They are one of the West's accidental wildernesses, vast tracts of desert left “pristine” (not counting the waste dumps and bombed sectors) by the military's huge need for huge geography. The San Andres Mountains have been closed to mining and domestic grazing for half a century. Public access is prohibited.
    As often as twice a week, the missile range closes the highway across the mountains, from the Tularosa Basin on one side to Las Cruces and the Rio Grande on the other. The lockdowns last about an hour, while the army lobs scary devices across the New Mexico skies. Occasionally, the Border Patrol, also busy around here, throws up roadblocks, and agents check each car.
    For illegal aliens, civilians, and sheep, movement across this broad expanse is not easy. The wild bighorns in the Southwest's island ranges live in permanent lockdown. They can no longer easily trot off in a free exchange of populations. Studies have shown that fenced freeways, for example, are influencing gene-flow patterns.
    In the valleys between southwestern mountain ranges lies a maze of treacheries. Roads, bombing ranges, fences, cement-lined irrigation canals, four hundred acres of broccoli plants, shopping malls—how does a sheep tiptoe around a Home Depot?—ATV trails, golf courses, subdivisions, RV resorts full of thawing Min-nesotans. Entire cities. A few sheep negotiate barriers and cross the basins between mountains, turning up far from their asylums, surprising the hell out of