Mark Weber

 

Butterfly Mesa

Fuck it, we were through, no matter what, and Dave's last emphatic hammersmack that drove the last nail home punctuated our resolve at about 2:00 pm. The corral was finished, built sturdily according to the crude specs the fat Navajo rancher had drawn, re-drawn and re-drawn again in the dirt with the heel of his cowboy boot. All we had to do now was wait for him to come tooling across the New Mexico landscape in his baby blue pickup and pay us.

"Yep," said the old Navajo sheepherder patting his stomach and regarding our work with warm admiration, a mirthful sparkle in his dark eyes. They were eyes that became engraved with deep wrinkles at the corners when he was pleased about something and now he looked pleased and sincere when he said, "You boys did a fine job. A fine job."

It was our fourth day out there in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Red earth beneath our feet, a few cottonwood trees growing nearby, mesquite…I wasn't really sure what mesquite was but I liked the sound of the word so much that I attributed it to everything shrub-like. It was supposed to have only been a two-day job and that's exactly what it had been but the rancher had some major modifications to his original design and we were in no position to argue, being broke, without a vehicle and over 20 miles into the heart of the Navajo Reservation.

As the three of us stood there smoking and small talking I became filled with an urgency to run to the top of a nearby mesa, so I told them I needed to clear my head and took off without waiting for a response. I started off slowly, arms swinging loosely at my sides as it loomed red and mighty in the foreground like a billion year old tree stump. I moved with fluid joy, as if all my senses had been wiped clean and I was experiencing everything for the first time.

I made it only a small part of the way up the side of the mesa before my lungs gave out and I had to pick my way slowly the rest of the way up over the flinty blue rock that spilled down one side. Finally there I was standing on the flattened top overlooking the two corrals and two trailers, absurdly small in the distance. It was a ghostly place, with the wind making soft moaning sounds through the many stacks of flat stones arranged haphazardly around the top. It was instantly clear that they had been stacked by human hands a long, long time ago but their purpose was unclear.

As I stood there on the lip facing the sun and wind and watching distant clouds and their shadow shapes move across the earth, I breathed in deep and closed my eyes and imagined taking a big step forward. I remembered hearing that you invariably lose consciousness before you hit the ground if you fall or jump from any great height and I registered that it was oddly similar to a falling dream where you wake up right before you hit, except for the obvious fact that in one scenario you would be dead. I opened my eyes and looked over the edge. With an ill giddiness and tingling toes I stepped back and sat down. I took out my pouch of Bull Durham tobacco and rolled a cigarette. I smoked it thinking about a friend back in Ann Arbor Michigan who had taken too much acid and jumped from the top of a building, certain that he could fly. And just before he stepped into his delusion, in the midst of a massive acid rush, he told me somebody in an apartment across the street had set a stereo speaker in their window and blasted Van Halen's song Jump. I was very moved to hear him say he held no hate or anger toward whoever had done it, but I never thought to ask my friend if he lost consciousness or not.

After years of therapy he could get around with a sort of painful looking crab walk. Jim Beefheart was his name and in his soft laughter you sensed that he had come through the other side of some pretty serious pain. It seemed to me that he had attained a kind of bird-like enlightenment. He was a peaceful guy who grew his hair in dreadlocks, played the bass, followed the Dead around and talked of cosmic love and the exotic species' of talking bird indiginous to South America and Africa. I imagined him in the future carrying one around on his shoulder while he hobbled around laughing and sharing his soft-spoken thoughts with anyone who would listen.

After smoking another cigarette I let some tobacco scatter in the breeze out of respect for my surroundings and then began a slow jogging descent. I veered away from the loose rock spillway to where the ground was steeper but firmer and about halfway down I nearly brushed against a large rattlesnake. It had been sunning itself on a flat boulder and I zagged hard left, having heard it first before seeing a shard vision of its opaque rattle vibrating in the sunlight. It was the first such snake I had seen in the wild and its thick, tawny, geometrically tattooed body, compared with the TV versions I'd seen, hit me as beautiful at the same time as it lifted my hair. I watched repulsed and fascinated as it poured itself into a crevice under the boulder. I poked at it with a stick for some moments but dropped it like a hot piece of steel when I imagined its relatives were watching me from somewhere nearby. Unhappily I was just beginning to accept the fact that I was a tenderfoot when it came to the ways of the wild west and this really bothered me on a visceral level. This I attributed to a resentment my inner mind must have felt in not having osmotically developed a cowboy acumen via a lifetime of accumulated western watching.

I'd really found this out the night before when I had wandered a short distance away from the camp trailers to better view the landscape and came upon two young horses and what appeared to be a feral burro. They eyed me curiously at first, then malevolently and then one of the horses started snorting and flipping its oversized head at me while it pawed the earth and the feral burro bared its enormous teeth and flattened its ears and then the other horse joined in with a blowing sound and some head shakes. I forced a laugh at them and smoked a cigarette, studying a far off mesa, blue in the pale twilight. Earlier the old sheepherder had pointed to it from the mess trailer saying the Indians called it "Butterfly Mesa" because "every year millions of butterfly's gather there."

While studying the Butterfly Mesa I noticed the three animals had moved off somewhere, but when I looked again I realized they were surreptitiously trying to flank me, to cut off my route back to the trailers. And they almost succeeded, but I made it back to camp sprinting the last twenty yards with them in hot pursuit. I threw a rock at them by the sheep pen but it missed wildly and I walked shaken and ashamed back to the mess trailer hoping no one had seen me. Luckily nobody had but the sheep, chewing and bleating. It was embarrassing to look at them.

I noticed Dave sitting on top of our new corral smoking a cigarette as I neared the makeshift ranch at a casual jog. He appeared to be studying some horses in the adjacent, badly built corral but even from a distance I could tell he was very angry. He was seven years my elder at 32, with short blonde hair and he was of medium height with a wiry build. His anger was a common and compounded side effect among drinkers without drink and workers without wage.

"See me up there?" I said jogging up.

"For a while...then I lost you."

I told him about the rattler and he wanted to know where I'd seen it so I pointed and told him it was at the giant boulder halfway down the mesa that was partially hidden in mesquite.

"Are you sure that's mesquite? "

"Huh?"

"Are you sure that that's mesquite?"

"Pretty sure…yeah."

"The reason I ask is that you seem to be calling a lot of things mesquite. I think you even called that tree over there mesquite the other day."

"No, no," I laughed. "That's a cottonwood. I was referring to that bush behind it there."

Dave squinted at the bush then shook away some thought he was having. After a short silence he flicked his cigarette down into the corral and addressed the space in front of him.

"I'm starting to wonder if this asshole is even going to pay us at all."

In my periphery I noticed the two young horses that had chased me watching us from the shade of another cottonwood behind us. The burro was missing.

"Me too," I said, eyeing the ground for rocks. "I guess all we can do is be firm and tell him we need our money 'cause we gotta go." I had turned my attention fully to the two horses now, nudging each other playfully under the trees. Unable to locate any rocks I threw dirt clods at them but they just stared at me. Then out of nowhere a full grown, jet-black stallion trotted up to them.

"Look," I said and Dave craned his head around.

The young male began messing with the older stallion, nudging his shoulder and shaking his oversized head and baring his teeth. A raw display of youth. The stallion studied him curiously for a moment, then spun 180 degrees in a flash and delivered a kick full in the face of the other with both hind legs. Then again. They were massive blows, like sledge hammers hitting a chunk of wood and the younger horse wobbled around like it might fall. Then it just stood there with its ears moving back and forth in an unsynchronized manner while the black stallion nudged the female's flanks with his nose and made a motion to mount her. She ran off with the young male in punch drunk pursuit.

I saw a faint smile form on Dave's face but then he went back to his gloomy thoughts, no doubt fixated on the real possibility that we were going to get burned. The rancher had already extracted far more work out of us than was agreed upon and he only sneered at what we had so far accomplished. Dave may have also been a little angry at me for getting us into the situation since it was I who suggested we interrupt our hitchhike west by getting off highway 40 at a little side road that had advertised "cold beer". The skinny blacktop road threaded through some high blunt cliffs of red sandstone and came to a little tumbledown grocery store across from barb wired fenced land that was clearly marked as Native controlled.

We were pleased to find that there were still some ethics left in advertising and the beer was icy cold. While we stood in front of the store sharing the 40 oz, taking great thirst quenching and soul soothing gulps of the stuff and smoking our rollies, purchased with the last of our combined change, our boss to be drove up and asked if we were cowboys - undoubtedly because of the ten gallon cowboy hat I had propped on my head, with a sock stuffed under the band so that it fit me. The cowboy hat had been a going away present from and uncle, along with a couple Macdonald's hamburgers and a ride to the homeless shelter. "Eeyup," I said to the Indian with sullen exaggeration, figuring he was setting me up to say something smart-ass, but then he offered us the job of building the corral out on his ranch. I told him we'd discuss it while he was inside. Dave had been totally against it but I had talked him into it.

I figured it was better to leave him alone for a while longer. There was nothing I could say that would help our cause anyway so I turned my attentions to better purpose. If we were going to be ripped off at least I was going to have a full belly. I walked up to the mess trailer with an eye on the lookout for Andy, the camp cook and resident cowboy, a tall wiry Hopi with none of the good-humored nature of the old Navajo. It was obvious he mistrusted and barely tolerated us.

I stepped into the mess trailer expecting to see him but happily discovered it empty. He had something simmering in a big pot and I knew what it was. Cowboy food. Beans and pork hocks in a salty brine. It was the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday, but it was good. I poked a wooden spoon down in them and came up with a few beans and tested them. They weren't completely soft but they were done enough to eat so I scooped out a bowl and sat down at the battered card table. On it were some homemade tortillas in a bowl left over from breakfast. They were unlike any tortillas I'd ever seen or tasted. They looked like round white stones and were made by taking plain white store bought bread, removing the crusts and mashing slices together to form patties that were then lightly fried. They were delicious and they held their shape when you dipped them in the bean and pork hock juice. I had myself a little feast, humming along with George Jones then Patsy Cline then Johnny Cash, periodically smacking the top of the little radio with the tinfoil antenna as it fazed in and out while I casually flipped through a copy of Leatherneck magazine (the old Navajo was an ex-Marine). Life wasn't so bad. I had two cups of camp coffee laced with sweet condensed milk out of a can. Camp coffee was my favorite kind of coffee, made by boiling the grounds and then letting them settle, but it was only good if you were away from civilization. I had shown the two Native men a way to speed up the process by tossing in a few drops of ice-cold water. Previously they had waited ten minutes for the grounds to settle on their own. The old Navajo had seemed impressed but he was probably just being polite.

When I finished eating I brought Dave out a cup. It seemed to cheer him up a little but he clearly wanted to be alone so I returned to the mess trailer and poured out some more of the rich red-black coffee and rolled some Bull Durhams. I looked out the window and smoked. Dave had moved from his spot and was re-checking the sturdiness of the corral's railroad tie abutments. I was glad I had met him. He was a good friend to have on the road and although I had hitchhiked quite a bit, Dave was far more experienced at it.

We had met in Knoxville Tennessee where I had hitchhiked down from Ann Arbor Michigan. My inability to cope with minimum wage employment, the expensive housing situation combined with my drinking habits and approaching winter had beaten me again and forced me back out onto the road. I ended up broke in the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee with my green canvas Duluth pack. I set up camp in a small wooded area behind a trailer park and there felt my first real, suicidal sadness, the kind of alienated depression that follows the societal outcast around like a shadow. I seriously contemplated killing myself my first night there, lying with the upper half of my body tucked inside a natural cave formed by the intricately gnarled root system of a large sprawling tree. To make matters even more pathetic, a small boy had wandered to the perimeter of my campsite earlier that day and asked if I was The Hitchhiker. Although I rarely watched television anymore (or had the chance to) I had seen just enough at laundromats to know about the program he was referring to, and after I nodded weightily and shooed him gently home I imagined the fate that might befall me once his parents found out there was a strange man living behind their trailer park telling their little boy he was a TV star.

When night fell I was barely treading water in a sea of self pity, contemplating the knife that lay by my side, when I was electrified stiff by a chattering, spitting noise, like an amplified rattle, that sounded all around me. In one motion I shot from the root cave with my flashlight and knife and stood shivering with revulsion and fear as I shined the light back into the root cave. Dozens of red slits peered out at me and I saw a small grey form wriggle up a root. The tree was infested with rats. I felt nauseous but it had actually frightened me out of my depressive funk and soon had me laughing at my own shitty luck. I moved my camp that night, to a much less populated patch of woods, and vowed to pull myself together.

The next morning I got a job about a half-mile away at a car wash and I could barely contain my joy as I walked back to my new campsite. I can measure the weight of my experiences on a coffee scale. The better the cup of coffee, the more dire the circumstances that led up to it. I will always remember that first day when the line of cars would let up and I could drink as much coffee as I wanted. I had been bone chilled the night before so it was the best coffee in the world, laden with sugar and real cream. After a few days of hard work and a small advance I began to feel human again. With my first paycheck I got a room at a nearby motel for 100 bucks a week and I actually wept out of a strange mixture of self-pity and joy at my reflection in the full-length mirror propped next to the bed. On my day off I wandered into a Subway restaurant and asked if they needed someone to pass out coupons for a small fee, one of my survival tricks, and that was how I met Dave. I got in a conversation with the owner who told me he had an employee who was looking for a place to live so I offered to meet with him and that night over a twelve pack Dave told me he his story. He was fresh out of the Navy, had hitched up from Florida, had a hundred bucks saved, no family worth mentioning and he was in search of a girl who had left him for reasons he would not disclose. I could tell it hurt him to talk about so I suggested we head out for another sixer to kill the pain. After more talking and drinking he slit-eye inspected me and said, "I think we'll get along okay." So we decided to split the rent.

But as the night burned on and the second and then third sixer of tall boys disappeared, we figured since rent was due the following day and neither of us cared much for our respective jobs and since winter was near…why not hit the road while we each had a little money and still had our road legs.

I pulled out my chewed up road atlas and we decided to pick a tentative destination. I came up with Colorado where we could possibly get jobs at a ski resort and Dave came up with Big Bear California. He said it was a little town just outside of L.A. where his ex might be staying with some family. He said he also knew some people there who could put us to work hanging drywall. It was apparent that he had high hopes of winning her back.

A frosty gray Tennessee morning marked our departure. We had packed the night before and were ready to go. Dave had created an interesting looking pack out of a pea coat turned upside down and some strips of sheets and I had my Duluth pack neatly ordered. I sat on the bed for awhile meditating, listening to the pop of green walnuts being run over by people leaving for work. A nice sound if you're reasonably safe. Dave was still asleep on the couch in the living room area so I left quietly to go pick up my last paycheck at the car wash.

About a hundred yards down the road from the motel I heard a desperate sound coming from some bushes along the side of the road. It sounded like a kitten being eaten alive by ants. I frantically searched the scrubby area until I parted a bush and saw the tiny terrified thing mewing its head off. With every cry its body shuddered. I picked it up and put it inside my jean jacket with its bawling head sticking out where it shivered mightily against my chest. I took it back to our room and gently tossed it inside then headed back out.

My boss took the news surprisingly well, cheerful as ever in his easy Alabama accent saying he'd like to pack his 9 millimeter and come along. We'd hit some liquor stores along the way. He made it clear that he couldn't cash me out though so I gave him an address to send my check. I really believed he would send it.

When I got back Dave was up feeding the kitten some milk and a little piece of chicken. It was so small it looked like it was barely able to eat solid food. It was doing one hell of a job trying though, looking up at us curiously every so often and licking its tiny chops.

"I found it by the side of the road," I told him.

"I figured something like that. I almost stepped on it when I woke up." Dave picked the kitten up and turned it over. "Her."

"What should we do with her?" I said with careful unconcern.

He shrugged. "Let's bring her with."

Dave was all right.

So with the sun barely up and our packs on our backs and a small gray kitten riding on top of Dave's pack that we had rigged with a small leash, we hit west 40, destination Big Bear California where a job hanging drywall beckoned with chalky promise.

When I finished my third cup of coffee I poured another and carried it to the adjacent trailer where I stretched out on my bunk and opened my paperback copy of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karazamov.

I had been trying to read this book over the past few months but kept putting it down, picking it back up, losing the story line and character development, reading further, putting it down again only to have to start all over. Something about the translation always had me yawning. It was no different now and I sighed at a five syllable name and put it down. I picked up the Louis L'Amour Dave had brought and read the first few pages. The setting I found myself in, lying on a bunk in a cowboy trailer surrounded by leather straps and chaps and spurs in the middle of the desert must have lent itself to the new found appreciation of his prose, for I found myself thinking, this Louis Love guy can really write.

After a few chapters, wherein the bad and good guys had been comfortably delineated by a spare and pleasant prose style, I fell asleep. When I woke up I went out to see how Dave was doing. He was making minor adjustments to the corral. He was really trying to look busy for the sake of Andy who was tarring the chewed up places on the adjacent corral. The old shepherd was a great guy but we knew the cook/cowboy had been reporting our every move to the main fat dude.

"I wonder what that Andy guy will rat on us about today?" said Dave, eyeing him and pulling at one of the upright ties.

"Who knows, but I'm sure he'll find something." I spat disgustedly to keep in form but I was really happy for some reason. "You get something to eat?"

"While you were in the trailer."

We heard the distant sound of a vehicle approaching and looked at each other. I took a deep breath to stave off the anxiety of having to deal with him again. Sure enough it was our boss, weaving his dusty way up the bumpy dirt road in his baby blue pick-up. He pulled up to the mess trailer to unload some supplies. Andy had gone up to help him and we watched helplessly as he jerked his head at us after the cook said something to him. Then he jumped in his truck and drove over to us. He got out and began shaking his head.

"No no no. That is wrong. You guys weren't listening. I wanted the gate to match up with this part of the other corral." He went and pointed. He looked at Dave who was looking at the ground. He looked at me and said, "You went up there didn't you?"

"What?"

"You went up onto that mesa didn't you?"

"I didn't hurt anything."

He digested this with his eyes askance. He seemed to be smiling a little. "You still shouldn't have done it."

"I promise I won't do it again," I said.

He shrugged and took up degrading our work where he had left off. "But this is all wrong here...don't you see…

"Look," I said. "You showed us the measurements yesterday. See?" I pointed angrily to where his foot had drawn some lines in the dirt. I had made sure and keep them from getting erased this time.

"But that is wrong. You guys weren't listening. I wanted…"

"Look," I said. "Here's the deal. We worked our asses off for three whole days and part of today for you and you always find something to complain about. But we did a great job and you know it. Now we have to go. So we need our money."

"Well it ain't finished. See…"

He went on to repeat himself and I repeated myself and finally got it across that we were finished. He looked at me strangely, almost hurt, as if we had shunned his hospitality.

"Okay," he said throwing his hands up a little. We went and got our stuff.

I grabbed an old blue stoneware coffee pot that was in our trailer as partial payment and stuffed it in my Duluth pack and then said goodbye to the sheepherder. He looked sad to see us go and he shot his boss a dirty look while he shook my hand.

Before I could say anything Dave got in the front seat. Since it was a small pickup I hopped in back. As we bumped up the red dirt road I hoped Dave was doing some tough negotiating but I knew it just wasn't in his quiet nature.

A half hour later, still meandering along the sandy two-track, evening was full upon us and the stars blinked awake in the deepening blue. I sang some of Hank Williams Ramblin' Man, forgot some verses, made up others, the haunting melody a fitting elegiac farewell to this strange and beautiful land.

After over an hour more of driving we reached a community of plain square cement structures that covered a hillside. He pulled his pick-up into one of them, got out and went inside. Outside was a powerful looking Native man in his late twenties tending a barbeque in front of the garage. Obviously his son, I registered, obviously intelligent, at least smart enough to know better than to work for his father. I jumped out of the bed and Dave got out of the cab and right away I could tell by his crestfallen expression that we were going to get reamed.

"Well?"

"He's only going to give us 40."

"40 apiece? Hell it's better than nothing," I was thinking of dripping cold beer and how much 40 bucks would buy.

"20 apiece."

"Oh man!" I kicked the gravel. My mind quickly rolodexed through some revenge scenarios, the most satisfying one having to do with a corral lighting up the New Mexico night, but it was a good 30 or more miles out there. I looked in the direction of the Indian at the barbecue and he looked up at us with the purest hatred I have ever seen.

We waited for a while under the floodlight of his garage until the asshole came out the door waving something. Of course it was a check.

And of course we had no way of cashing the thing, especially at that time of night, so after much talking -- I made sure and get in the front with them this time -- he agreed to cash it for us and drop us off near highway 40. When we got out he told us with complete innocence and a sincere expression to look him up if we were ever in the area again and wanted work. We just stared at him blankly as he drove away.

And there we were, standing outside a party store just outside of Gallup in the New Mexico night. I bought a pint of cheap whisky and Dave bought a bottle of purple Mad Dog 20-20. We each took a bracer sip from the paint thinner and washed it down with the purple shoe polish and began walking toward Gallup. Once we were away from the party store the frosty stars shone brilliant and although it was cool the booze worked its warm magic. Life once again held promise. As we walked I reflected on my life as the drifter I had become. It was a life at once lonely, euphoric, mysterious, frightening. The screaming insanity of being out there on the road left your soul in a negative space most of the time and you became tiny and the world became this huge nightmarish thing...Who the hell am I? Who are they? Where the fuck am I going? All that paranoid shit crossed my mind of course but with it too came a sense of freedom that few would ever know. Not sharing in the dead dream of those shooting past me on the highway was exciting and empowering. I had my good strong legs, a face darkened not by a sun lamp but by the wind and sun and my arms were wiry and strong. And there was a song in my throat, metaphorically and literally. Dave was a great road companion and he knew the good old country tunes like Dang Me and All My Exes Live in Texas so we sang while we drank and walked. After awhile we stopped and sat drinking and smoking our rollies in the cool sand hidden among some mesquite -- Dave even agreed that it was probably mesquite this time -- watching the cars and semi's rush by in the darkness, the stars brilliant overhead.

When the wine was gone we walked some more until we reached the outskirts of Gallup where we hopped a fence marked Restricted Area, built a small fire, finished the whisky and went to sleep. I felt a little guilty since I had a warm sleeping bag while Dave only had some wool blankets. And it was getting cold out.

I woke up in the morning from a delicious sleep with a light powder of snow covering my sleeping bag and I looked over at Dave. He was up smoking a cigarette with his pea coat on and his wool blanket wrapped around him monk style. He looked miserable. We organized our gear quietly and hopped the fence and hiked toward Gallup. On the way he reached over and pulled my ten-gallon cowboy hat off and skimmed it under the wheels of a passing semi.

"What the fuck Dave?"

"That hat got us ripped off and it makes you look like a fucking idiot."

"Man, that hat was a gift from my uncle."

"Oh, sure, now there's a guy who cares about you Mike. I think we would have starved if it wasn't for those shriveled up McDonald's hamburgers he bought us. And that homeless shelter. What a thoughtful place for him to drop us off at."

I knew he was right as I looked at the ruined hat, squashed and soaked by the slushy wheels of the semi and I was glad he had thrown it away. My uncle wouldn't even let us sleep in his garage for a night. It was hard blow to have family treat you like that. The homeless shelter was a nasty prisonesque experience and I was glad Dave was with me when five big guys in their underwear came and stood in the doorway of our room, smirking and pointing at me under the covers. From an adjacent bunk Dave sat up and said, "Somebody's gonna be really sorry if they fuck with us." They left but I slept with my hand on my open knife, stuck into the mattress so I wouldn't cut myself.

Once in Gallup we made our way into a coffee shop filled with Natives and enjoyed cup after cup of the hot bitter stuff, laced with sugar and cream.

"Maybe we should try and get some work here?" I said, looking at a pretty Native girl in a booth kitty corner to us who appeared to be checking me out.

"That's funny Mike…You're a really funny guy…Get work here…"

I smiled at the girl and she looked away. I could see her saying something to her girlfriend who turned and looked at me.

Dave turned and looked just as the girlfriend was looking over at me and he blushed. She was at least 300 pounds. "There you go," he said. "At least you won't freeze."

"I think she's yours Dave."

Dave blushed. "I don't think so," he said and he turned back around. "Maybe though…"

Carmen, Dave's girl, was a real talker and she kept us entertained with stories about stolen police cars driven by drunken relatives, strange men in suits driving big shiny sedans around the rez looking for alien body parts and sundry other local lore. Eventually we all piled into her little red Subaru and got some booze, visited a few of my girl Dorothy's relatives and finally went to get a couple hotel rooms, courtesy of Carmen. We waited in her car while she went in. She came out a minute later with an angry look and a middle finger sailing over her shoulder.

"Crap," said Dorothy.

"What's wrong?" We asked at the same time.

"Aw, these Indians. They hate us Indians."

Carmen got in. "Those fucking curry smelling bastards wouldn't give me a room!"

"Why not?" I asked.

"They think all us Indians are drunks and they're afraid we're going to wreck their shitty little rooms." Carmen's eyes were flashing but Dorothy calmed her down in their Dene language and we drove up to another hotel. This time we had Dave go in and get us the rooms. He had no trouble, which intensified the absurdity in my mind, since we were both pretty much bums and Carmen had a good job.

We all gathered in Carmen and Dave's room and drank for a while and shared stories. I could tell Dave really liked her and I liked Dorothy. He told us stories about the Navy -- one of him getting lost in Hong Kong and waking up in a zoo next to a giant Panda had the girls shrieking with laughter. We partied until well after dark, laughing and really enjoying each other's company and then Carmen said something to Dorothy in Dene and she grabbed me by the hand and led me out. In our room she barely had the door closed when she pulled me to her and kissed me hard. I told her I needed a shower first. She joined me and both slippery with soap, naturally ended up hotter than hell and I made love to her over the sink while we looked at ourselves in the mirror, a fantastic experience.

In the main room Dorothy got under the covers while I dressed and went out for some ice. When I got back I fixed us each a drink and set the bottle of cheap red in the sink that I had filled with the ice.

"So what kinds of things do you write about?" she asked as I handed her a drink.

"How'd you know…?"

"Dave told us when you were in the john."

"Oh, okay, well, I write about life…I guess…is the best way to put it."

"Read me something. I love stories."

I had left my writing in the care of my friend Joey Prawn back in Ann Arbor but I had brought a few of my favorite pieces with me and I eagerly got one out of my pack. I was really excited to have an audience and I took a drink to calm my nerves then spread the papers open on the desk and started to read but stopped myself. It needed some set-up. I told her that this was a bit of experimental, stream of consciousness writing and the setting was in Ann Arbor Michigan.

Her eyes got big and shiny and she sat up. "Is that near Detroit?"

"Yeah it is. Why?"

"I knew someone who went there. Boy, that's one wicked scary place huh?"

"No doubt. Parts of it are. But Ann Arbor isn't scary at all."

She made a face like she didn't believe me. I went ahead and started reading.

"Perhaps you can imagine a person like me stuck here in a college town with no idea where to go or what to do. I am susceptible to fits of understanding and passion and high spirited dreams because in my blood are cool blue cedar swamps and shady streams that wind through where my thoughts go stealthy as a red deer. Often I am walking down a busy street and I feel I might evaporate because of boredom and I am pale with only enough energy to keep walking or sit down with coffee and stare. I was born on January 19 the same as Edgar Allen Poe and I can sympathize with him because he too was a dreamer with no idea where to go so he just stayed where he was and wrote. Fabulous tales emerged from the places he went in his mind. But I really have no idea where I will go today and I suppose where I end up that has some finality or meaning will be the end of this Fall story.

Across from me sits Joey Prawn. He has been my friend for some time now, since trading in his business sense for bhudda wings. A dear friend who never would let me down and in fact would go out of his way to help me in need. Yet there is something amiss in the tangle of overgrowth my confusion has -- something lurking there I can't quite place and I feel distant and awfully alone, even our conversation is empty and forcedly funny. I slurp black coffee, nerves ajangle from previous night's alcohol -- and soon 'I gotta get outta here, I'm going crazy!' and he with 'Yeah, me too' and we have to rush out into the street…sunny happy day with all the new students milling and passing outside.

Outside the Afternoon Delight we part. He heading for the lab to research bacteria growth through his huge ice cube glasses, me down to 4th ave. to see if I can get coupons from Sottini's Sub Shop to deliver. I am carrying my coffee but have no use for it. I gaze at my degree of decay in a storefront window and am surprised to see I look okay, walk on a little confidence boost and see John, a regular around the watering holes of A squared who ducks behind a wall to scare me but sees I see him so comes out to greet me. John amazes me because he looks so shot and haggard from excess drink yet is really a coherent and nice guy, always having something cheerful to say. We chat a bit and he says he needs some coffee so give him mine and feel glad I didn't waste it. But no coupons as I dart around corner from Sottini's. Oh well I still have the 3 dollars and change I earned this morning from picking up bottles, I think fingering the money greedily. I know I will need and want a beer pretty soon.

Pretty soon rolls around faster than a little later and this happens after I grump away from Blimpy Burgers where the cook squashed my hamburger patties into smithereens and I said 'I hope it holds together because I ordered a hamburger not ground round' (whatever that meant) and she turns with a look of surprise and says 'smile! okay?' which I don't because I'm pissed and I'm sick of smiling people and I need a beer and this bitch has purposely and needlessly squashed my hamburger into a sloppy joe and who needs her anyway... But I pay for it, the man behind the cash commiserates it and consecrates it saying his burgers are guaranteed…with a goddamned warranty no doubt! So I steal a few glasses of lemonade out of vengeance and slide down the burger which is a useless mess held together only by the cheese welded over it and then I leave like a hopeless misanthrope loping away.

Ah but now the skies have grown black and gloomy and a breeze shakes the trees leaves loose, the weather understands I think and am happy the fucker's beautiful day is about to be spoiled unforgiveably. I cackle and laugh inside as I hurry along the sidewalk inside and out feeling in tune with the storm ahead. Triumph and joy arcs the angels from their heliotrope in the sky and heavy drops start as I hit the Blue Front and get a cold Q of Colt then a deluge starts and I sit sipping among others under the canopy feeling especially cool in my new cowboy boots I found when "Roxanne" comes on the outside speakers. I smoke cigarettes feeling exultantly blue and write down thoughts.

So I drank my beer in the rain and was quite happy watching the waters flood the gutter rush and roll and collide on the corner gutter grate and roll around the curb---kept watching for money to float by or even a cow but none and then the rain stopped and the river dried up and I wandered further up the road to meet Pancho at 3:00 on the steps of the Michigan Union whereupon we, in the process of taking care of some ticket scalping business -- he having to buy 2 books from someone on the West side -- get a beer at Tices which turned out to be a good idea but a bad brew not to mention not nearly cold enough. I want cold beer and enough to fill me up proper -- must be the German blood singing up within me a chorus of corpuscles swinging in high raised mug frothing to Mozart. The beer wasn't the best but on the way I found a box with a fat stoneware vase in it with a spigot in the bottom and I can see it from where I sit with the sunflower that I plucked outside from a broken stem where it lay face down in the driveway. Such a sad wondrous sunflower the petals the waxy mad yellow sun color melting the leaves on the stalk dripping and wilting making it even more sad and beautiful. And ahh some tormented wonderful Dostoevskian classical strings on the radio. Well if I can't have beer in the jug a sunflowers melting joy will have to do.

So Pancho bought me another beer and got his tickets and we walked around for awhile but the day degenerated into not enough money -- well I bought you this and that -- shit no cigarettes -- the highlight being when arriving back here talking to Jim Beefheart in the kitchen asking him how was his 3 day woodflower jaunt -- hearing his high bird laugh right now out on the porch -- tripping probably -- just feeling the first real rushes now -- with a knockout sweet Japanese older woman who when she came in I felt this powerful moon like attraction for her body which was built slightly but firm and nice in the right places. Hello saying and the subsequent oooh inside of wanting to smother her in kisses right there because of her sexy. So I listen as is my place as a friend and find out they have had a falling out. It seems Jim -- who shifts around on his broken feet before me with a recent Mowhawk and short build looking like a white Sammy Davis Jr. -- though he never steals -- decided to steal a pack of rubbers but they happened to be jumbo rubbers enough to cover a Colt 45 40 ounce…and we share a good laugh as I end this falling Fall daydream."

She was laying on the bed with a bedazzled, thoroughly-ready-for-sex expression.

"You can definitely see the Kerouac influence here," I said, nervously shuffling the papers.

"Who?"

"Never mind." I joined her on the bed and we dissolved into each other's loneliness.

When we finished I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling.

"I know why you were sent here to me," she whispered in my ear.

I smiled. "Mmmm hmmm…huh?"

"I know why you were sent here."

"Why's that?"

"The ghost of my dead husband sent you to me…so I wouldn't have to suffer too much."

I sat up and fingered a cigarette out of the crumpled pack on the nightstand and shakily straightened it out a bit before I lit it. "Your dead husband?"

"He hung himself a few weeks ago."

Now I was really spooked and I said, "That's bullshit Dorothy." I watched her eyes fill with tears. "But maybe it's not that much bullshit! I mean, something did draw me to you."

This seemed to cheer her up and I got up and took the wine out of the ice filled sink and poured us each a plastic glassful. I got back under the covers and we sipped our poison. Two creatures huddled away from the kind of world that drives people to take a rope and strangle themselves to death with it. And when I felt her breathing evenly against my shoulder I got up and poured myself a drink and sat naked by the open window in the darkness, watching the lights of vehicles going by in the deep blue distance through a light falling snow, thinking about the Butterfly Mesa and all those butterflys that gathered there from thousands of miles away, and how lucky I had been to meet Dorothy and Dave and Carmen and the old Navajo sheepherder, and how lucky I was to be alive right here and now in this craphole dive motel room in Gallup New Mexico, 1989…And then I thought about the kitten that I had found nearly frozen to death on the roadside back in Tennessee. We had met some nice young girls working at a party store on our way through Arkansas and they had promised to take care of her for us. And just then, in that instant, I knew I had done something extraordinary with my life.

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