There is an old, old story. Some say it is the only story, with all other yarns being a variant or commentary. Here is that basic story. A confused or anxious young man leaves home, wanders far, is rolled over by adventures, succumbs to temptations, overcomes challenges and in the end returns home an adult: wiser, perhaps sadder, to achieve peace and self-fulfilment. 

--In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero’s young son, Telemachus, accompanied and advised by the goddess Athena in the guise of a wise old man, Mentor, leaves a mother (Penelope) whom he is too young to protect from suitors for her hand and searches for his father long overdue home from the Trojan War. When both father and son have returned home to Ithaca they rescue Penelope from her insolent suitors. 

--A variant tale is told in Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. 

--In Goethe’s epic novel, Wilhelm Meister, worldwide wandering is portrayed as a joyous option for the entire human race. Along with wandering, Goethe also recommends the simple life and self-confidence from within.

Enter Asheville educator and writer John P. (“Pat”) McAfee and his oddly named 1997 novel, ON RIMS OF EMPTY MOONS. This is a tale which reminds of Telemachus, the Prodigal Son and Wilhelm Meister but which has wrinkles and twists of its own. The novel is a first person narrative by John (Johnny) McBride. It begins when Johnny is 14 years old near Van Horn in far West Texas. He lives with his slow-witted, sadistic older brother and an embittered father. There are flashbacks to the unexplained death when John was six of his mother, found drowned in a water tank wearing a wedding dress. Who killed the mother is a recurrent question which Johnny swore would be answered before he died (p. 37). And it was answered many years later. Meanwhile his father blamed Johnny (p. 50).

A pre-rodeo bull riding accident lands Johnny in bed recuperating in the ranch home of McBride family hereditary enemy Hide Eberhard and his luscious teenage daughter Sarah. Some time earlier Sarah had promised to love Johnny forever if he saved (and he did) a baby antelope trapped in deep mud surrounding the springs called Tudisishnhagoitsaye, Apache for “Black water, odor-rising, and smelt above” (p. 16).  Hide Eberhard had married into the family started by Colonel Sam Colby, a Georgian who had fought for the North in the Civil War and who had later come to West Texas near the Davis Mountains to Needle Peak. Colby made himself the dominant power in those parts. But a former Georgia neighbor also came uninvited, Winfield Roy McBride, a crack sniper in J.E.B. Stuart’s Confederate guerrillas. Their descendants continued to irritate one another, with the ostensibly weaker McBrides constantly cutting the wire of Colby-Eberhard fences surrounding their little spread.

After Johnny rescues Sarah Eberhard during a rodeo accident, hereditary enemy Hide Eberhard rewards Johnny by giving him work for the summer and paying his tuition to New Mexico Military Institute. This fits well with Johnny’s plans, since he had decided to run away from his bullying father and brother anyway. Hide sends Johnny off to a distant part of his ranch to understudy foreman Jose Navarrete breaking quarter horses for show and breeding.

Enter John’s male Athena-Mentor, the whippet-thin blond haired blue eyed Mexican legend from across the Rio Grande in Old Mexico. Jose required John to speak Spanish with him, a skill which would later help him when picked on by a Russian freighter after fleeing North Viet-Nam by sea. John learned to break horses Jose's way: an hour or two per horse. Navarette explained the ways of horses, of nature and mankind to his young charge, grooming him some day to take over as Hide Eberhard’s foreman. Navarette shared his greatest secret: where he had buried the head of his own mentor from his days with Pancho Villa: the great Doroteo Arango (p. 91). He prophesied that Johnny would one day share his hatred of the gringos and all the high and mighty who oppress the poor. Jose said that Johnny was a Mexican by virtue of being born in the part of Mexico stolen by the gringos of the USA.

One day Navarette convinced Johnny that humans “sit on the rim of an empty moon trying to decide the best use for it” (p.94). A moon’s use is simply “To be a moon. To raise the feeling of loneliness in the heart. The coyote howls at the loneliness of living when he sees moons. He knows that’s what moons are for” (p. 95).

At New Mexico Military Institute Johnny pursues learning and woos Sarah Eberhard who is in college two hours south in El Paso. One day both Jose and Johnny are rounded up by the U.S. border patrol, (John is taken for a Mexican and does not disabuse them) and sent across the Rio Grande. They visit Navarette’s “wife” Sofia and two girls in the village of Ojos Callientes. Jose makes a case for a Mexican way of life of taking things easy and living simply. In a week Jose and John ride back by horse to the Texas ranch, with a side visit to the burial place of the head of Doroteo Arango.

John’s second year in college is in the shadow of the growing war in Viet-Nam. Johnny gets Sarah pregnant. For revenge her father bribes a Border Patrol pilot to fly his small plane after Johnny and decapitate him with its wheel. But the pilot mistakes his man and kills Jose instead. Johhny brings Jose’s body home by horse to Mexico. Hide Eberhard has John expelled from college and drafted.

In Viet-Nam Johnny joins the poor of the United States in fighting against the poor of Asia (p. 156). He is in the Special Forces, and takes part in a raid into North Viet-Nam to rescue prisoners of war. The raiders and the rescued are trapped in a planned ambush. Alone, he rescues a Vietnamese woman and her children from a sadistic Chinese officer. In the process of killing the Chinese, Johnny' buried memory is unblocked. He relives the moment when he saw  t Hide Eberhard drown his mother. Together they float down the river on at sampan o the harbor of Nam Dinh, just in time for a U.S. B-52 air raid which kills the woman and leaves one wounded boy alive. The tide carries Johnny and the boy out to the South China Sea. Jose reappears.

After days adrift John is picked up by a Soviet freighter. Beaten by the ship’s captain, Johnny speaks Spanish. The Cuban cook tells the Captain that Juan Bizcocho, too, is  Cuban. In two or three weeks the ship will reach Panama and Johnny will then be turned over to the Cuban consul. Days later the freighter is moving down the coast of Baja California in Mexico. During a storm John steals a lifeboat and drifts to an island. He is befriended by a vacationing couple and goes with them in their rented boat to Baja California. Fearing they will turn him in to authorities, Johnny steals their dinghy and reaches the mainland. He travels by train and truck and bus to Ojos Calientes. Sonia becomes his woman and he and the daughters  live together for years. Sonia had received $25,000 in his GI life insurance. He is 24 when he arrives. She is 43.

They buy more land. Johnny discovers that his Mexican community is drinking polluted water, polluted by the new American cross border factories observing no environmental regulations. By chance he read  that his father had sold his water rights to the City of El Paso. But Eberhard Effluent Corporation was challenging this move. Johnny returned home. From brother Mac and ailing father he learns that geologists had found a huge aquifer under McBride land. But Eberhard Effluent Corporation was now flooding Eberhard land with the wastes of sewer districts in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, with New York, Chicago and Boston to follow. They made fertilizer for export to Japan, with Japanese partners.

Tipped off that Hide Eberhard had murdered his wife two decades earlier, the dying father plots a final revenge. Father and son capture Hide who admits his crimes. The brother kills himself and Hide during a fiery auto crash into the toxic waste.

Johnny rides back to Mexico but is picked up by the Border Patrol who once again take him for a Mexican. He is taken to Van Horn courthouse. There he is spared by Sarah Eberhard, now Mrs Taylor, wife of a Senator. She lied and he was released. She explained to Johnny that she had promised to love him forever. He revisits the old Villista’s buried head. 
 

War, Hide’s ranch, murder, love, betrayal: all just words trying to drown out the laughter from the million-year-old mountains looking down on the fools” (p. 267).

Author Pat McAfee has lived the past quarter century in Asheville. He is married to the painter Elizabeth McAfee and is an assistant principal at Reynolds High School. His novel draws on his experiences growing up in rural West Texas and with the Special Forces in Panama and Viet-Nam. He has published one previous novel, an acclaimed  1993 Viet-Nam War novel, SLOW WALK IN A SAD RAIN, and is working on a third, a detective story set in and near El Paso. 
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John P. McAfee. ON RIMS OF EMPTY MOONS. Lubbock. Texas Tech University Press.  1997. 267 pp. $24.95

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for ASHEVILLE TRIBUNE

(1998; touched up 04/15/2005; revisited 09/22/2009)