Trouble with Oliver this afternoon. I was driving, rocketing down 25 somewhere between Belen and Socorro, feeling ballsy and light, for once the master of the car and not just something caught in the machinery. Half a mile ahead I spotted a figure, walking on our side of the road, evidently a hitchhiker. On impulse, I slowed. A hitcher, right: more than that, a hippie, the genuine 1967 article, long scruffy hair, sheepskin vest over bare chest, stars-and-stripes patch on the seat of his tie-dyed jeans, knapsack, no shoes. I suppose heading toward one of the desert communes, trudging alone from nowhere to nowhere. Well, in a sense we were heading toward a commune, too, and I felt we could accommodate him. I braked the car almost to a halt. He looked up, maybe flashing quickly on paranoia, saw Easy Rider once too often and was expecting a blast of good Amurrican gunfire, but the fear went out of his face when he saw we were kids. He grinned, gap-toothed, and I could almost hear the mumbled little courtesies, like I mean, wow, sure is cool of you to pick me up, man, like I mean, you know, it’s a long walk, the straights around here won’t help you nohow, man, when Oliver said, simply, “No.”

“No?”

“Keep on driving.”

“We’ve got room in the car,” I said.

“I don’t want to take the time.”

“Christ, Oliver, the guy’s harmless! And he gets maybe one car an hour out here. If you were in his position—”

“How do you know he’s harmless?” Oliver asked. By now the hippie was less than a hundred feet to the rear of where I’d stopped. “Maybe he’s part of Charles Manson’s family,” Oliver went on quietly. “Maybe his thing is knifing guys who sentimentalize hippies.”

“Oh, wow! How sick can you get, Oliver?”

“Start the car,” he said, in his ominous flat prairie voice, his tornado’s-a-comin‘ voice, his out-of-this-town-by-nightfall-nigger voice. “I don’t like him. I can smell him from here. I don’t want him in the car.”

“I’m driving now,” I answered. “I’ll make the decisions about—”

“Start the car,” Timothy said.

“You, too?”

“Oliver doesnt want him, Ned. You aren’t going to impose him on Oliver against his wishes, are you?”

“Jesus, Timothy—”

“Besides, it’s my car, and I don’t want him either. Put the foot on the gas, Ned.”

Out of the back came Eli’s voice, soft, perplexed. “Wait a second, guys, I think we have a moral issue to consider here. If Ned wants—”

“Will you drive?” Oliver said, in as close to a shout as I’ve ever heard from him. I glanced at him in my rear-view mirror. His face was red and sweat-beaded, and a vein stood out terrifyingly on his forehead. A manic face, a psychotic face. He might do anything. I couldn’t risk a blowup over one hitchhiking hippie. Shaking my head sadly, I put my foot to the accelerator, and, just as the hippie was reaching to open the door on Oliver’s side in back, we blasted off with a roar, leaving him standing alone and astonished in a cloud of exhaust fumes. To his credit, he didn’t shake his fist at us, he didn’t even spit at us, he just let his shoulders slump and-went on walking. Maybe he was expecting a rip-off all the time. When I could no longer see the hippie, I looked at Oliver again. His face was more calm now; the vein had receded, the color had ebbed. But there was still a weird chilling fixity about it. Rigid eyes, a muscle flickering in his pretty-boy cheek. We were twenty miles down the highway before the electricity had stopped crackling in the car.

Finally I said, “Why’d you do that, Oliver?”

“Do what?”

“Force me to screw that hippie.”

“I want to get where I’m going,” Oliver said. “Have you seen me pick up any hitchhikers so far? Hitchhikers mean trouble. They mean delay. You would have taken him down some side road to his commune, an hour, two hours off the schedule.”

“I wouldn’t have. Besides, you complained about his smell. You worried about getting knifed. What was that all about, Oliver? Haven’t you picked up enough paranoid shit yourself on account of your long hair?”

“Perhaps I wasn’t thinking clearly,” said Oliver, who had never thought any other way but clearly in his life. “Perhaps I’m in such a rush to get a move on that I say things I don’t mean,” said Oliver, who never spoke except from a prepared script. “I don’t know. I just had this gut feeling that we shouldn’t pick him up,” said Oliver, who last gave way to a gut feeling when he was being toilet-trained. “I’m sorry I leaned on you, Ned,” said Oliver.

Ten minutes of silence later he said, “I think we ought to agree on one thing, though. From here to the end of the trip, no hitchhikers. Okay? No hitchhikers.”

They were right to choose this cruel and shriveled terrain as the site of the skullhouse. Ancient cults need a setting of mystery and romantic remoteness if they are to maintain themselves against the clashing, twanging resonances of the skeptical, materialistic twentieth century. A desert is ideal. Here the air is painfully blue, the soil is a thin burnt crust over a rocky shield, the plants and trees are twisted, thorny, bizarre. Time stands still in a place like this. The modern world can neither intrude nor defile. The old gods can thrive. The old chants rise skyward, undamped by the roar of traffic and the clatter of machines. When I told this to Ned he disagreed; the desert is stagy and obvious, he said, even a little campy, and the proper place for such survivors of antiquity as the Keepers of the Skulls is the heart of a busy city, where the contrast between their texture and ours would be greatest. Say, a brownstone on East 63rd Street, where the priests could go complacently about their rites cheek by jowl with art galleries and poodle parlors. Another possibility, he suggested, would be a one-story brick-and-plate-glass factory building in a suburban industrial park devoted to the manufacture of air-conditioners and office equipment. Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art? But I think Ned was putting me on, as usual. In any case I can’t buy his theories of contrast and juxtaposition. This desert, this dry wasteland, is the perfect place for the headquarters of those who will not die.

Crossing from New Mexico into southern Arizona we left the last traces of winter behind. Up by Albuquerque the air had been cool, even cold, but the elevation is greater there. The land dipped as we drove toward the Mexican border and made our Phoenixward turn. The temperature rose sharply, from the fifties into the seventies, or even higher. The mountains were lower and seemed to be made of particles of reddish-brown soil compressed into molds and sprayed with glue; I imagined I could rub a deep hole in such rock with a fingertip. Soft, vulnerable, sloping hills, practically naked. Martian-looking. Different vegetation here, too. Instead of dark sweeps of sagebrush and gnarled little pines, we now traveled through forests of widely spaced giant cacti surging ithyphallically out of the brown,‘ scaly earth. Ned botanized for us. Those are saguaros, he said, those big-armed cacti taller than telephone poles, and these, the shrubby spiky-branched blue-green leafless trees that might have been native to some other planet, these are palo verde, and those, the knobby upthrust clusters of jointed woody branches, they call that ocotillo. Ned knows the Southwest well. Feels quite at home here, having spent some time in New Mexico a couple of summers ago. Feels quite at home everywhere, Ned. Likes to speak of the international fraternity of the gay; wherever he goes, he’s sure of finding lodging and companionship among His Own Kind. I envy him sometimes. It might be worth all the peripheral traumas of being gay in a straight society to know that there are places where you’re always welcome, for no other reason than that you’re a child of the tribe. My own tribe isn’t quite as hospitable.