The grass and cows and wind from the southwest—poem

This appeared in THE HAT (a great poetry journal) way back in 2005:

 

The grass and cows and wind from the southwest

The grass and cows and wind from the southwest

still cold around the hills blows plastic bags

from distant roads into barbed wire fence chest

high and a red tailed hawk flies low and lags

a bit to watch the windmill creak and shake

no longer pumping water its well dry

the metal trough with bullet holes

                                                      a snake

may live there or may not but there’s a thigh

bone of a cow or horse half buried in

the dirt

             a plane flies east the vapor trail

thin crossed with long thick clouds

                                                        that start to drift

cows eat and shit the windmill blades still spin

a wooden fence post falls with rusty nails

the cows look up the wind begins to shift

PERDIDO IN SANTA FE—novel excerpt

First 18 pages of my (as yet unpublished) novel PERDIDO IN SANTA FE:

 

I have no idea what I’m doing with my life after this last fire season, so I’ve headed down to Mexico again, Land of the Lost, taking cheap pollero buses, with nothing but what I can carry in my backpack. No real destination, except maybe to head south where it’s warm, but on the way I’ve ended up in Santa Fe, an old mining town up in the mountains, sitting in a restaurant called La Vaquera, with the most beautiful waitresses in the world, looking through the free weekly English newsletter for expatriates, El Gringo Seminal, where I come across an announcement for a seven day meditation retreat starting tomorrow, Sunday, at a Zen Center there. All of the books on Buddhism I read and left behind back in college and I’d never tried meditation. And, I don’t actually feel like another bus ride having to watch dubbed over Rambo movies. And I'm tired. I need a rest. So, why not?

I ask my waitress where ‘el templo budista’ is but she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Ditto with ‘El Centro De Zen.’ Fortunately, another customer, a fellow gringo sitting at a nearby table, hears and helps me out. Turns out the Zen Center isn’t that far, north up the canyon in the residential neighborhood. I grab my big backpack and follow the map the guy draws me, the paved roads twisting and turning to dirt, most of the buildings in that area adobe-looking, or maybe faux adobe, with coyote fences ringing the yards.

The road runs midway along one side of the canyon and loops around to the other side farther up, but I don’t get that far. The Center is on the down hill side of the road, towards the arroyo running down the center of the canyon, part of a compound of buildings in an open area, less trees and more buckhorn cactus. One two-story adobe house right near the road actually looks like somebody lives there, then a bigger, wider, one-story adobe ranch house off to the side and down hill a little, and furthest downhill, a bigger more imposing building, with a bell tower on top. Cars in the parking lot going from brand new SUVs to clunkers, most with American plates. I follow some people on a rock path back up to the second building with a long table set outside. A man and woman in black robes sit behind it, stacks of papers laying in front of them. The man’s head is shaved, but the woman’s isn’t, so I’m not sure what she is, a monk or pseudo monk. He seems Mexican, but speaks near perfect English. She’s americana all the way. Both very friendly. I ask about the retreat and whether there’s still time to sign up. The man, his nametag says Roberto, explains that this is more of an intermediate-level retreat. —There won’t be a lot of instruction on basics. Have you meditated before?

I hesitate, then fib. —A little. I think I can handle it. Please? I have money.

He smiles. —It’s not a question of money, but ok.

I give them what little information I have and pay cash in pesos and he shows me an overview map of the building and where I’ll be sleeping.

I walk into the building, into an inner courtyard, open to the sky, with a fountain and tiled floor and benches against each of the four walls, plus a tree growing in one corner that shades the area a little, though its roots seem to be pushing up some of the floor tiles. Doors line every wall of the courtyard, two each to my right and left, but the big one straight ahead goes into the zendo itself, mats and zafu meditation pillows inside. I look inside one of the open doors to my right. Two men, both older than me, one in his forties, the other maybe in his fifties, unpacking their things. The room small and spare, with a bed and three cots set up in a row. The older guy has claimed the bed and the other is putting his stuff out on one of the cots. They both turn when I poked my head in and, without saying anything, stand and bow, placing their palms together, smiling. I bow back and leave and go back outside. I’m not too keen on sharing a sleeping space with three other dudes for that whole time, knowing how that goes from being on a hotshot crew: the whole crew laying in sleeping bags at night in the woods somewhere, exhausted, but kept awake by someone snoring. Seems to defeat the purpose of meditation by cramming that many folks into one space. Beyond the newer building there’s an open field. Or, a fairly open field, with cactii and some brush and long grass. But a good acre down to the arroyo edge. I go back to Roberto and ask if I could possibly just throw up my tent up and sleep out there for the whole session. He looks surprised, considers it, then shrugs and laughs. —Sure, why not? Go ahead!

Sweet. A little path, not really walked on a lot, leads right by a relatively flat clear area big enough for the tent between two small brushy trees. I flip it out and assemble everything, just a little one-person deal, maybe one and a half in a pinch. I put up the rain fly, not so much because it seems like it’s going to rain, but because the nights can get chilly at this elevation and another layer will help hold the heat in. I have no idea what else I’ll need. I have a bunch of clothes, some toiletries, plus a flashlight and a notebook, even though Roberto said we shouldn’t do anything like that, writing or reading books either, when on retreat.

More people have been checking in. I’m not exactly sure where they’re all going to fit, but maybe some of them are friends dropping off friends. The retreat doesn’t start officially until that next morning, early (four-thirty!), and after that, we aren’t supposed to leave, even go to the cars. It’s still late afternoon, and there’s no introductory speech tonight or anything, so after checking with Roberto, I walk back into town, which feels great without my backpack, for one last big Mexican dinner with green chili, resisting the urge to see a movie, knowing I should just get back and try to go to bed early, even though by then I’m actually kind of nervous, which seems odd. Getting nervous about sitting? What could be easier than that?

When I get back to the temple, it’s already dusk. A couple of people talking quietly next to their cars, lights on in all the buildings, a few shadows walking around the grounds. I walk back out to the tent. The air already cool, I’m glad I brought my firefighting hoodie, since I’m going to need it in the morning, plus it makes a good pillow. The stars coming out, the sky dark behind them. From here I can also look south down-canyon at part of the town and houses and car lights. Quiet.

With the rain fly unzipped and the front flap tied off, I’ll still be able to look up at the stars, figuring if the weather really gets cold I can close it again, especially since I’m using my super warm sleeping bag. I just don’t want to mess around and find out in the middle of the night that I don’t have enough covering. Except that, basically I’ll be getting up in the middle of the night anyways. Though, as a wildland firefighter, I’m not unused to getting up early, nor to sleeping in tents. In fact, a tent is a luxury! Many was the time that me and my crew dragged ourselves out to some clear spot near fire camp and crash out in just our sleeping bags. No time for tents, since we’d be packing up the next morning and we never knew if we’d back to the same spot.

Plus I do a lot of camping and backpacking in my free time too. Fire season tends to last about five months, then most of us, the seasonal employees, get laid off “due to lack of work” at which point most guys went directly to other jobs, which has always seemed odd to me. After working basically more than 80 hours weeks, with almost no days off, why would anyone want to keep working? Me, I sign up for unemployment and head off for other adventures—camping, backpacking, and/or travel, to Mexico and/or some other country, though Mexico is the cheapest.

I’ve mostly worked on hotshot crews, twenty-person hand crews that do the heavy grunt work on bigger fires. We’re the ones that dig line in extreme conditions, on big and/or remote fires, ready at a moment’s notice to travel anywhere in the American west, wherever there are fires, from the Sonora desert, to California redwoods, even to the black spruce forests up in Alaska a couple times. I didn’t mean to even work so long at the job, not something I planned on doing. When I graduated from college with a philosophy degree, which is about as useful as basket weaving, less even, I had no idea what I wanted to do, or could do, or should do, which seems to be a recurring theme for me, so I bought a backpack and headed west, ending up in Arizona on a trail crew for a National Forest, where I got the firefighting classes I needed and suddenly I was fighting fires! Crazy! Back in Michigan I didn’t even know this job existed. Firefighters, for me, were those dudes in the big red engines. This was way different: there are still engines, but they’re green, and small enough to access dirt roads in forests and deserts. But hotshots hike into remote fires where some engines can’t go, who ‘digging line’ around fires, cutting out any vegetation with chainsaws and digging tool like pulaskis and chingaderas, sometimes right next to open flames. And once the fires are contained, we’ll stay on to ‘mop up,’ make sure the fires are out.

I like the physicalness of the job, working with my hands, the complete opposite of what I did in college, which was to sit and think, or pretend I was thinking. Plus, travel: I’d never left Michigan. From Arizona, I got on a California crew for a couple seasons, then a crew from Montana, then back down to Arizona. I jumped around because, however much I like travel and work and being on fires, I generally can not stand the people in charge. Fire knowledge does not transfer over to people skills, and since there are so many redneck type guys, and so few permanent positions on these crews, competition is fierce, and uppity college boys are not welcome. On each crew there have always a few good guys, whose company I enjoy, but they never last, generally getting out of fire and going on to other jobs where their skills were better appreciated, which is maybe what I should have done, but I like having my winters off too much. I just kept saying, well, one more year then maybe I’ll decide what to do with my life and grow up or something. Six years later, I found myself with a lot of experience, but not very far up the food chain. I never expected to have firefighting as a career, and, as I got older, taking orders from incompetent people became harder and harder, especially when it involved safety. I started to have too many incidents where I was being put in dangerous situations, with the crew half dead from fatigue, but refusing to admit they might not be up to the job. That plus having coworkers, and supervisors, embarrass themselves, and me, and our crew, with drunken binges on our off hours. Living 24/7 with people I didn’t even respect began to get tiring. Plus, the woman factor. As in, not a lot of them. Some crews had none at all, though a couple had one or two, which is where I met Maya last summer. Leaving me where? In my thirties, with a philosophy degree and no real marketable skills. I could talk about Existentialism or dig dirt. Not that I want to work in an office, but neither do I just want to go into landscaping.

domingo

I don't sleep well. New place, new sounds, new wind and coyote howls and occasional cars driving by on either side of the canyon. I dream I’m sleeping in the desert and being woken up by a bell and when I realize there really is a bell tinging, and that I’m awake in a strange place in the dark and I panic, wondering how long it’s been going. Am I late?! I throw on my hoodie and jeans and unzip the tent. Cold air rushes in and I twist around and stick my feet out, slipping on my moccasins and standing up. Cold cold cold! A dim light off to the east on the horizon, or maybe it’s my imagination, but still basically dark, so I grab my little Mag-Lite and make my way up to the temple, walking fast, still kind of groggy, hoping I don’t run into a cactus.

The grounds quiet except for the bell, now ringing frantically, which I hope isn’t just for my benefit. Roberto is the ringer, standing outside the main doors into the ranch house. In one hand he holds a metal ‘stick’ which he hits the bell with. His other hand, his left, he keeps raised and flat, palm to the right, in the prayer position, except without the other hand. Maybe to clap with? He sees me and stops ringing abruptly and bows, face expressionless. I put my hands together and bow back as I walk by, though I can’t help smiling and have to resist the urge to tell him buenos días.

I pass through the main door and hallway, through the courtyard, and through the open doors of the actual temple area. Everyone, the other meditator folks, are already inside, sitting on the zafus. Eep! I kick off my moccasins and go inside, completely forgetting, or at that point not even really knowing, to bow, though I stand a second, looking around trying to find an open pillow and mat. The room dark, the electric lights off, but with some candles on the altar the far side of the room lit. Incense fills the air and I almost sneeze.

People sit against the wall running around the L shaped room, going up to either side of an altar on the far side, with a huge metal statue on in, though it doesn’t seem to be the Buddha: It? She? Are those breasts? She’s certainly not fat, no Buddha belly there. I see an open zafu and force myself to walk slowly over to it and sit down. Once again I blow proper etiquette by not bowing to it, nor to the rest of the room, which I soon learn from some people who come in after me. Oops. Well, at least I wasn’t last!

Roberto comes in preceding a person who has to be the ‘roshi.’ She is also wearing a black robe, with a shaved head and glasses, holding her hands flat together in front of her face, elbows sticking up and straight out to the side. Roberto closes the door behind her, and follows her straight through the room to the altar, where they both kneel and bow and make three what I guess one would call prostrations: Kneeling, bowing, placing their foreheads on the floor then back up again. They stand and walk to the side of the altar to two empty spaces and first both bow to their spaces, turn, and then bow to the room. Everyone, and me a second later, bows back. They sit down cross-legged, and the roshi takes off her glasses and lays them next to her right knee on the mat. She opens her eyes and stares right at me and I realize I should have had my eyes closed by then, so I do, trying to adjust myself on my zafu without making too much noise, which is basically impossible since there is no other noise at that point. I’m making a terrible first impression.

BONG!

My eyes shoot open and I look up front. Roberto has taken a stick and hit a huge metal bowl sitting next to him, which I’d thought was only decorative. It continues to vibrate, the vibrations feeling like they’re in my bones and skull. I try to close my eyes again but then BONG! he hits it again, vibrating my head.

BONG!

Quiet. Or, faint breathing. Faint rustling of clothing. A muffled cough. A yawn. I sit on the zafu, just my butt on it, legs crossed in front of me, right knee and most of my left on the mat, making kind of a three point contact, though the left knee isn’t as easy: I don’t know where to put my right foot, so kind of tuck it under my left leg, which later gets uncomfortable. If I were a badass, I would pull my feet up onto the opposite thigh in a super full lotus cross-legged position, but I’m not feeling like a human pretzel. I’m sure everyone else is probably lotusing up, and silently sneering at my pathetic attempt. The shame!

And we sit.

And we sit.

I’m starting to get an inkling of what I’ve gotten myself into. Wow. I’m squirming already, trying to stay comfortable, my butt getting sore. More than once I find myself slouching, straightening my back, then a minute later back to slouching. I don’t know what to do with my hands. Putting them on my knees seems kind of pretentious somehow, not sure why. Just too Indian guru-ish maybe, so I keep them in my lap, one on top of the other, which I see others have done. Yes, I sneak looks. I can’t keep my eyes closed! I feel the room getting lighter, so kind of raise my eyelids slightly to check out the windows, and then can’t help checking out the other people, which actually makes me feel a little better, since I can see that no, nobody is in full lotus, maybe not even Roberto and the roshi, though it’s hard to tell since their big baggy robes. Also, there are other slouchers, and other sneakers of looks, we make eye contact quickly.

Ding! Roberto holds a small bell, tapping it with a small stick. Everyone raises their hands together, bows, and starts to get up. I follow, one step behind everybody. Once standing, we turn and bend over, wiping the mats. Of what I’m not sure, since mine is spotless, almost new I think. We turn back around, facing out to the room, hands in prayer position at our chests. Roberto takes out two flat sticks and slaps them together. Tack! He brings them together. We turn to our left, facing the person now in front of us. Tack! Nothing seems to happen. I sneak a look around. What’s going on? Oh: The person in front of me takes a very slooooowww step, seeming to almost stop after she has extended her foot. I imitate her and take a slow step of my own. She slooowwwly takes another one. I sloooowwwly follow.

Gradually, we circumnavigate the whole room. Which feels good actually. A good break for my butt and tail bone. I flex my leg muscles as I go, giving them as much exercise as possible, though I’m not sure if that’s legal. Feels like forever, but can’t be more than ten minutes. Time is flowing weird. Or, that is, I have no idea how fast time is flowing. Light coming bright through the windows, but that could make it seven, or eight, or noon. Speaking of that, my stomach grumbles, and I’m not the only one.

Tack!

Everyone speeds up, hauling Zen ass back to our zafus, and I’m glad the woman I was following recognizes hers, I might’ve walked right by, they all look the same. We stop, turn and face the room. Roberto dings the small bell. We bow, and turn and sit back down, adjusting our legs and butts.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

We sit.

And we sit.

For how relatively still my body is, my mind is racing, from wondering what’s going on in the room, to wondering if I’ve made a bad impression, to thinking about Fire, about ex-girlfriends, about Maya, about whether I’d remembered to zip up my tent before I left and if some buggy critters will get in, and if we are ever going to fucking eat, and what kind of food it will be (please God not oatmeal! Make it something of substance, not gruel!) and I try to calm myself down, to breathe slow, but that doesn’t seem to stop the thoughts at all, just gives me one more thing to think about.

Ding! Time to get up, stand up, and turn to the left for another walkabout, and at the balls out section, I almost run into the poor woman in front of me when we get back to our spots. Jesus, what time is it? Is it lunch time yet? I’m fucking thirsty too!

We sit back down, and sit some more. Holy Mother of God do we sit. And this is the first day! The first morning!

The roshi leaves as the rest of us return to sitting. She rings a bell in another room, I think next to this one. Someone bows, gets up, and leaves the zendo. Silence for a few minutes. I kind of forget until the bell rings again, and another person bows and stands, leaving as the first comes back in. This repeats throughout the session, and it’s actually not as distracting as I first think. The bell kind of serving as a signal to return and focus, drawing me back from my wandering thoughts.

More thinking. There’s just nothing else to do. About Santa Fe, and green chilies on a huge veggie burrito, about work again, and doubting myself: Maybe I shouldn’t quit? But no, yes, I should. Enough. Argh, don’t want to think about work again, but it won’t stop. Because in addition to work, there’s Maya, girlfriend and friend on my last hotshot crew, someone to talk to, vent to, have sex with. Someone who I thought might have wanted to transition into real life with me, maybe both of us leave Fire behind and try living together, until I found out she’d been sleeping with Eight Ball, her squad boss, all summer too. Found out. Meaning, walked into her trailer after the whole crew had gone out drinking, and found the two of them spooned together in her bed. So, yeah.

Or running, I haven’t run in a few days. A whole week’s going to be rough. Or my sore butt. Or Michigan, must be getting cold back there by now. Snow? Not yet? Why am I doing this? I have nothing to prove. I could leave. I could take off, just pick up my tent and go get a taco.

Creeeeaaaak, the door opens. I look up. Or, I open my eyes. I’m basically facing it, and there were people standing there, holding bowls of food. Could it be? The breaking of fast?

BONG!

We put our hands up in prayer position and together and bow, and stand. Yes! With a clack of the sticks, we turn to the left and walk out to the courtyard single file, going into a side room where bundles, bowls wrapped in cloth, line a table, with our names on a piece of paper in front of them. We each grab ours on the way by, cupping the bundle in both hands and holding it chest high, circling back out another door into the courtyard and back into the meditation hall. A ring of the small bell and we sit. I watch my neighbors: We untie the cloth, spreading it out in a big rectangle. Three bowls, in three sizes, lined up, big so small, left to right, on the cloth. In front we place, carefully and amazingly precisely, a pair of chopsticks, a wooden spoon, and a small plastic spatula. Another smaller cloth goes on our laps, as a napkin.

When everyone has their bowls lined up, the roshi recites some words about the importance of the food, kind of a call and response, with us meditators saying some words back. I try to mumble along as best I can. The people sitting next to the two groups of food dishes serve themselves, scooping out portions with a ladle. One with granola, one with some strawberries, and jugs of milk and apple juice. Anything would be good by now, but this is definitely good, the strawberries especially. And fortunately I don’t have to demonstrate how much I don’t know how to use chopsticks—we eat everything with the spoon. Well, actually, some hardcore show offs, eat the granola with the spoon, then carefully place it down and eat the strawberries with the chopsticks.

As we finish, the servers come around with a big pot of hot water and ladle some into our biggest bowl which, I soon see, is to clean the bowls before returning them, swirling the water around one bowl, then pouring it into the two others. The weird part is, to get rid of the water, we’re supposed to drink down the dregs. Ok, well, I’ve drank worse on the fireline I suppose, so down the hatch. I’m sure that the bowls will get a proper washing anyways. I mean, I hope so. I don’t do a very good job though, I think, not that I know what a good job is, but seems hopeless to make them perfectly clean, so what’s the point? Still, I didn’t want to be a slob. No, the only problem with the food is there isn’t enough. After I scarf it all down, I’m like, that’s it? Is there seconds? And I can see the leftovers sitting there in dishes at the end of each row. Right there. In a flash of Dickens Zen, I want to go up to the roshi and say, in a pathetic young British accent, —Please Ma’am, may I have some more?

And she’d turn to everyone and say, —He wants some more!

And then everyone would laugh.

But, we stack the bowls and tie them up in the cloth. There’s some trick to it, some positioning of the hand, to make it look like a lotus flower or something, but I can’t figure it out, so my bowls just looks like the way those old cartoon characters look when they have a toothache.

I assume that we’re to go back to sitting, but after standing and carrying the bowls back to the table in the other room, we stop and circle up around Roberto in the courtyard. He has a list of all our names, and with as little talking as possible, he assigns chores to do around the temple for an hour, as what he calls ‘work practice.’ For example, some help wash dishes in the kitchen, some clean bathrooms, and some people even get to go down to the new building to help get it ready. Since I was last to sign up, I’m last to get an assignment. Without saying anything, Roberto walks over to a utility closet, grabs an old broom, and hands it to me, pointing in a circle to the whole courtyard. Ok, I get it. I walk to one corner and start sweeping. And sweeping. But I don’t mind. I’m on my feet and somewhat active, and actually sweeping can be kind of meditative too.

After an hour or so, we meet back in a circle, bow to each other, and go back to sitting. By now I know I’m not alone: Some other folks are squirming around and experimenting with alternative sitting positions, like kneeling with no pillow, which I try, and like, especially when both my knees crack. But after a while of that, the circulation in my calves and feet start to go, so I try slipping the zafu under me sideways, essentially staying in kneeling position, but lifting my butt and body off my legs, which also feels good, until the zafu starts to feel like it’s jammed way up my crotch. Poor zafu: it’s going to get a workout with me. But, once I get over my guilt at actually moving and readjusting during quiet mediation time, I figure I can just keep rotating through these positions. Some people have even brought special wooden ‘kneeling seats,’ with wood panels raising the body off the legs. I hope I can try one of those out.

Meanwhile there are these human statues who just sit, cross-legged, perfectly still, not even twitching, not even a nose scratch, like the roshi, and Roberto, and a few others around the room. Not once do they slouch, not once do they even open their eyes. I imagine all the firefighting guys I’ve known, the really macho ones, who could cut fireline all night and hike miles and miles and I wonder how long they could sit perfectly still like that, if they could actually have been talked into trying it, which would be impossible. I particularly liked picturing these macho dudes sitting on a zafu in full lotus position.

And we sit.

My brother Sean. Basically he and I were feral even before my parents divorced. Neither of them was home much, and if they were, my father was glued to the television and my mother was either grading papers or writing one of her own papers. In our early teens, Sean and I would come home after school and actually break into our own house. We didn’t even have our own keys. We’d already figured out that we could take off screen off one of the front windows and push open one of the large sliding windows. As the youngest and smallest, I would hop in and go around to open the front door while Sean put the screen back on. And, because we never had homework, or if we did we didn’t do it, we’d either immediately start watching cartoons, or playing video games, or, and these were the best, we’d go for walks out back of our house with our dog Sammy, in the forest, and pretend we were commandoes.

As we got older, Sean started to keep busy with sports after school, something that interested me less. He’d sometimes come home even after our parents, and ironically, have to do homework in order to stay on school teams, so that his grades actually went up, whereas mine stayed at the B/C range, even though I was reading all kinds of books. He didn’t even like to read comics.

When my parents did divorce, that pattern didn’t change, we just continued it in two places instead of one. My mom would usually bring home pizza for dinner, and when Sean and I went to our dad’s, he’d ritually buy us pizza, then we’d go back this apartment and watch tv. Every other weekend we’d do that same thing. Sean didn’t mind this as much, since we usually watched sports. The only excitement I had visiting my dad was when I discovered his Penthouse magazine collection, which I never told Sean about, though surely he must have found them too. How hilarious: three males all secretly looking at the same porno mag collection.

My mom decided to earn her PhD back at her old college, the University of Florida, requiring her (or that’s what she told us) to spend large chunks of time down there, including two summers, and then a whole year. When she did this, my dad, strangely, moved back into our house to look after us. I say strangely, yet at the time I, and I think Sean too, took this all as normal. We had nothing to compare to. This must have been what all families did, right?

So by the time college rolled around, I was ready to go. I took the easiest school I could get into, Eastern Michigan, in Ypsilanti about an hour from Jackson, on the east side of Ann Arbor, and I never went back much. I just took summer classes and stayed there. Sean didn’t get any athletic scholarships, which I think devastated him, and went to Michigan State and had, as far as I can tell, a horrible time, though he never went back home much either, because as soon as he was gone, my mom sold the house and moved down to Florida for a teaching job at a community college.

And if it seems like my dad was a ghost through all this, he was, though he stayed in Jackson and even re-married, to Janet, a nice, if extremely catholic woman, with two children from a previous marriage. Yes, extremely catholic and extremely divorced. She actually got him to start going to church, something I never thought possible. Not that that was a good thing. To my dad’s credit, he 1) paid most of our tuition, and 2) always kept one room open for us if and when we did ever come back to Jackson for a visit, though when we did, one of the last things Sean and I talked and agreed about was that staying there felt like being a house guest.

And el luncho! Whew. Same procedure as breakfast, but this time with rice and fried veggies, and some kind of sweet dumpling things for dessert. Now my un-knowledge of chopstick use comes to the fore. Instead, I just hold my bowl up to my mouth and shovel it in, like I’ve seen in Chinese and Japanese movies. Fortunately I’m not the only one, but I am the only one who doesn’t seem to like broccoli. Yuck. And then a dilemma: what to do with the leftovers? Fortunately, one of the servers saves me, holding out a shallow bowl/plate when he comes around with the hot water. Whew. Still embarrassing, but better than the utter shame I could have felt.

Thankfully, after lunch we have a tea break. We must be doing some British form of Zen meditation. But, we get a half hour break to stand out in the still sunny courtyard with cups of hot green tea, which tastes, and feels, wonderful since, though sunny, the air is cool. Holding the warm cup in my hands, each little sip warming my stomach. We still can’t talk, which is fine, but we can wander around and a few of us kind of do laps around the fountain.

And more sitting. Getting a goddamn Beatles tune in my head. I don’t know why you say goodbye I say hello over and over again. Please God or Buddha, let me think of something else. I’d like a shower. I must stink. Good thing I’m wearing a hoodie. This room is going to reek after a week of us not showering. Surely we’ll get to shower? How come I didn’t ask? Argh. I wonder where I’ll go after this? South? Or back to the States? Oh, I wonder where Maya is right now. Still working? Her black panties. Her ass. Her sexy smile in the half-dark. God I want to have sex. There are a couple attractive women here. Are they thinking about sex? No, probably not. They’re probably thinking about good Buddhist things like how to be compassionate and relieve others’ suffering. I’m a sucky Buddhist.

BONG!

We all bow and get up, turning back around to clean our mats and fluff the zafus. I feel like I’ve just been cutting fireline with a chainsaw all day, like I’m about to have uncontrollable back spasms and start flopping around on the floor like a fish. Are we finally done? Is it finally la hora a cenar?

We shuffle outside, through the courtyard to, yes!, a kitchen, where we scoop out big bowls of chunky lentil soup from a big pot and grab some good bread and either eat at two small communal tables there inside, or we can go outside in the courtyard, which I do, to listen to the fountain, which has been going the whole time though I’ve never really registered the sound of water. I sit on one of the old wooden benches against the walls, joined shortly by another guy, I think one of my almost roommates, who bows. I bow back. We all bow. No words spoken by anybody. A bow is a question. A bow is an answer. A bow is a, Hello, mind if I eat with you out here? A bow is a, Not at all, dude.

And the lentil soup so so good. Slighty spicy, and rich. God, whoever is cooking this stuff knows what they’re doing! And good grainy bread to sop it up with. Wonderful.

The sun still out, though in the courtyard we’re already in the shadows. Great idea. If I ever buy a house out west, or anywhere really, I want a courtyard with a fountain and tree. But, the light looks like it’s fading, must be getting down behind the mountains to the west. I’m beat, the soup acting like a drug. My belly filled to bursting, to Buddha belly capacity, though if there were more I’d eat it just to have that spicy taste in my mouth.

People drifting back to rooms, looking as weary as I feel, and I see some of them heading to where the showers must be, so that question is answered, except I’m too beat and don’t want to go to sleep with wet hair, so I put off bathing for a while, though not sure when else would be a good time. I return my bowl to the kitchen and bow to the bowl bearers, because a bow also means thank you that was amazing, and I head out the front door.

SANTA FE WOMEN—novel excerpt

The first 20 pages of my novel SANTA FE WOMEN:

Try staying in a band after college while any non-musician friends go on to real jobs in other parts of the country. Try working at Zingerman’s Bakery part-time because, though it doesn’t pay well, it allows a flexible schedule, because this is what you want to do, play music, so try it. Try playing clubs like The Heidelburg and The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, branching out to places in Detroit (this may take years) and even down to Toledo, Cleveland, or over to Kalamazoo and down to Chicago, and putting out your own CD, which sells ok (that is, you make back the money you spent), and your band may even get an offer from an indie label, who pays for another CD (this will take years) but who never pays you a cent, though they may hook you up with a booking agent, who gets you on a circuit starting in Chicago but going down, way down, to Texas, then across west through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and back to Chicago.

And try living on the road like that, in the back of a rental van that you weren’t supposed to take out of state, with the same six guys 24/7 for weeks, staying in hotel rooms or (to save money) even sleeping on the floors of strange but generous fans in various cities, living on ten dollars a day for food, or more, since there are always credit cards to live on which you can always pay back, right?

And try leaving Austin one morning, heading north to Dallas, with your singer Rick talking non-stop and realizing, this is it, I can’t stand him. All the confidence and attitude that came off so well on stage just a façade for this insecure jabberjaw and you can’t take it anymore. You’ve heard about husbands or wives just leaving a relationship, just getting up and walking away, and this is how you feel: you could almost walk away right there at one of those truck stops, only your guitars and amplifiers keeping you there. You have no money, no way to get them home, so you spend the next two weeks with your headphones on, trying to drown out the world with Metallica and Johnny Cash.

And try having a relationship while on the road. Either you’re on your cellphone in a van, or at lunch or dinner breaks, or you’re at a club setting up, or you’re at a club and it’s too loud, or you’re playing, or it’s after the show, at the hotel room, which you’re sharing with one or two other guys, and it’s late, especially with the time difference the farther you go west, and your girlfriend Donna doesn’t stay up that late anyways, and then you’re each talking on cellphones which, no matter what anybody says, suck, sound quality-wise, so not conducive to long conversations, and try getting home and finding out your girlfriend wants to break up with you, and in fact already has in her head, so that all that’s left for her to do is go through the rehearsed lines and the already imagined emotions, so that you are being broken up with by an emotional robot.

And then when Rick, the one you’ve come to despise for his ego, or his seeming to feel that he is the leader of the band, after all the phone calls you made booking gigs, arranging rehearsals, making flyers, and all the songs you brought in, some of which you felt (admit it now, might as well) that he contributed some pretty cheeseball lyrics, of everyone in the band, he’s the one that calls to tell you that he and the other two guys have decided to kick you out, and he’s telling you this on his cellphone while he’s in a Burger King, and even though you were going to quit anyways (I mean, probably) you suddenly see in the future nothing but a black wall....

....except maybe that small path off to the side, the one that opened up when you were in the van leaving Santa Fe and you thought, I’d like to live here someday, and that path too goes in the black wall of the future, but it seems to keep going, past where you can see, but it’s something, which is more than what you currently have.

So you sell most of your equipment, your guitars and amps (except that Fender acoustic—that one you decide to keep, no matter what) and you throw what you have left in the back of your truck, and you head south and west, south and west, past the cornfields, the Mississippi, the Ozarks, into high desert plains, cow processing plants, Carhenge, mountains and reservations, until you’re there behind the black wall, and though you see another black wall way up ahead, where you’re at doesn’t seem that bad: it’s sunny. You’re alone, but it’s sunny and you’ve got some things to be doing, which will keep you busy for a while, and also there are women in Santa Fe so, you hope, they too will keep you busy....

I knew I wanted to live near el centro, the old town part of town, and not down south off of the Cerrillos Road strip mall part. Finding a place seemed to come down to luck more than anything. I checked CraigsList online and most places I called had already been rented out almost immediately, though I found a few, mostly what they called ‘casitas’ there, small houses out back of people’s houses, old garages maybe, that owners rented out, either officially or unofficially (I was finding that people made a living, had to make a living, creatively), but prices insane, and that’s coming from someone who lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so I kept holding out. Almost went with a woman who had a casita out back of her place, but she also kept goats and chickens in a pen in the rest of the backyard. In fact, the pen was bigger than the casita, and I kept imagining those chickens screeching at five in the morning.

But then I tried the old fashioned way and looked in the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper classifieds, and there was someone advertising a casita up in the canyon, just north of el centro. Sounded too good to be true, but I called and it was still available.

The landlady, Estrella, had a small adobe casita to the side of her house. She was from an old Spanish family that had been in the area forever, and was very proud of her heritage. She was the first, though not the last, person I met who became very offended at being called mexicans: They considered themselves Spanish first, then american. When I mentioned going to Mexico once, she made a face and snorted. —They smell.

The property belonged to her, she was a widow, but Pedro was either her boyfriend or second husband, I was never really clear on his official status. When I first got there he was lying on the kitchen floor because he said he back was hurting him, though he got up and shook my hand.

I tried some of my spanish on them and they were both impressed, especially when I said I thought spanish was a beautiful language (which it is). At that point I would’ve rented anything (except the chicken place), since I was spending a small fortune on what was considered a cheap hotel room, but their casita was nice. I mean, small—one room, with a kitchenette, and a small bathroom, but the price actually a little cheaper than some places farther out of town, so I took it and moved in that day.

I fell in love with many women in Santa Fe, I still fall in love with many women everywhere, but maybe the first was one who worked at my credit union. Tall and dark, with local spanish blood. Long straight black hair and, though I actually don’t necessarily like super skinny women, being that tall made up for it. Falling in love with women at credit unions or banks seems to involve how they dress, and she dressed well. Always with high heels and nylons. Business skirt, grey or tan, white blouse, gold cross necklace dipping down her chest. How many nights fantasizing about how that cross would shine between her breasts as she rode me....

For that reason, and guys are like this, I would skip the ATM machine and go inside for the chance to see her, trying to jockey my position in line to get her and her smile. Eventually I noticed the ring, but who really cares about things like that? It just made the gold cross fantasy that much naughtier.

Bank managers need to realize that should hire ugly people as their tellers, so people will use ATMs more and the banks won’t have to hire as many employees. But then, if I were the manager, I’d hire women like that too. Maybe the advantage of happy, in-lust customers outweighs the money they save. Así es la vida.

She also sometimes worked the reception desk which gave me the freedom to say hello to her and not have to jockey for position, and one time I even said, Cómo estás?, as I passed her and without hesitation she said bien back which confirmed that she was my dream girl.

And the next time I came in I saw her getting what looked like manager training, so I knew my time was limited, but the next time after that she was back at the reception desk, so I said hola and did my transaction, nervous, hoping the timing would be right, And it was, she was alone, so I went up to the desk and mumbled out in spanish that I just wanted to compliment her on how beautiful she was. Which took everything out of me. I had just poured my soul out to her.

And she smiled and said, —Gracias.

And I walked out the door, in shock. I didn’t say anything else to her. I hadn’t planned that far ahead. My plan being for the next time to ask her out.

And the next time she wasn’t there.

Or the next.

I asked one of the other tellers that had been there as long as I had been going, a perfectly nice young woman whose only fault was she wasn’t my dream girl, who said Graciela had taken a promotion up at the Los Alamos branch. So fuck.

Downtown Subscription was a café located on the edge of downtown where the canyon opened up, a short walk from Art Row, where many of the town’s art dealers had their shops, though a long enough walk, and a little bit hidden, to keep a lot of the tourists away. Most of the customers local, including every european in town because it was a place you could go to just hang out and talk, and study, and or write, for as long as you wanted. It also stocked magazines from all over the world, on any subject, from Cosmo (in German) to The String Theory Quarterly. It was a bout a mile and half down canyon from my casita, so on free days I liked to walk down and read or scribble while sipping a coffee. I actually liked the walk more than anything. It made me just think, or maybe allowed me the time to think, with no distractions, about my life and what the hell I was doing with it, so that by the time I had my coffee and was sitting at a table I might be scribbling down a first verse, and spend the rest of the afternoon working on it, with the background noise of people talking, their energy, and looking at the various beautiful women coming and going.

Did I ever talk to any of those women? Of course not. It was weird, but sometimes when I saw a woman who was not only beautiful, but intriguing-seeming, who might even be sitting by herself, those were the times when the words that needed to be written down came the easiest.

Plus I’d be scared to death to talk to a woman. What if she slapped me? What if she ran screaming from the cafe? What if she said no? Better to enjoy the thought, the possibility, than crush it with the reality of rejection. Though, better to be alone than to have tried and failed? Every man can talk himself into that logic. And meanwhile the women sit there alone, wishing a man would come talk to them (I mean, right?) but he never does, so the women get cats or dogs and read Jane Austin at home, eating chocolate.

Unless you come across a brazen whore who will actually talk to you, which is what happened to me one day when I was bent over my notebook.

—How’s the writing going today?

She was short, with straight blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Skinny, with jeans and sandals and a dark green sparkly shirt with long see-thru sleeves. Holding a cup of tea and smiling.

I started to go into male freeze-up, but managed to say, —It’s going alright today.

—Are you writing a novel?

I leaned back in my chair. —No, just...lyrics.

Her smiled got bigger. —Lyrics? Ahh, you’re a songwriter.

—Well, trying.

—Do you play guitar?

—Yeah, I do but...

—I’d love to hear you play sometime.

She kept standing there holding her tea. Expectantly.

—Uh, would you like to sit down?

She smiled and pulled up a seat. —Sure. I can’t stay long. I’m seeing my shrink in half an hour.

Which should have been my first warning, but being lonely makes us do these things. But talking came easy to her. She had lived in Santa Fe for five years. —That’s a record! Most people only last two!

Originally from Boston, Rachel had moved out to SF after she got divorced. —Haven’t you figured it out yet? Santa Fe is where divorced women come to heal.

Like everyone else, she was trying to figure out what to do with her life. And, like everyone else, she too was exploring her creative side, painting, but also contemplating going back to grad school to study psychology.

I took a sip of coffee. —A friend of mine back in college always said, if you’re ever at a party and you meet a beautiful girl, who seems very cool, and she tells you she’s psychology major, run away as fast as you can.

She laughed out loud, holding her stomach, people around us looking over. —That’s great! I’ll have to remember that one. It’s true of course. I’m crazier than a bedbug.

She got up to go. —I’ll tell my shrink that one. He’ll love it.

Other men know how to say those lines so they don’t come out like a cliché. Me, no. —So...would you like to get dinner sometime?

She smiled again. —You’re funny. Sure.

She wrote down her number and put a smiley face underneath, waving goodbye at the door.

I’d had this thought rolling around in the back of my brain, to start studying spanish again, I guess from being in Santa Fe, feeling like I was in old Mexico. Back in college, spanish had actually been one of my favorite classes, though it was a lot of hard work. I always seemed to have to study hours with flash cards while my classmates would look at the chapter vocabulary lists right before the tests and do better than me. I’d done the mandatory two years, then actually got permission from the department to take an upper level beginning literature class, and if it hadn’t been for a horrible bitter old lady from Venezuela, I might’ve even changed majors. But, that was also when the band was everything, so school was less than everything. I also took a literature in translation class, which I also didn’t do well in, though I knew there was something there: I liked the stories, and remembered Pablo Neruda’s odes to storms and french fries, and I always thought it would be cool to be bilingual, maybe just to seduce mexican girls, but maybe also because spanish seemed like the second language of America, at least down south, and again, if it hadn’t been for the band and music, I would have loved to live in Mexico and do the Jack Kerouac thing, meet a Tristessa of my own.

And one day at Downtown Subscription I was sitting next to a woman obviously giving a spanish lesson to a girl, explaining the verb gustar and how it’s reflexive:

—Yo gusto el café.

—No no no, it pleases you. Me gusta el café.

—But I like it.

—But in spanish, things are pleasing to us.

—Ok...me...gusta? El café?

—Sí. Así.

—That’s so weird.

So after they were done, I leaned over to her. —Disculpe.

She looked surprised. —Sí?

—Me encanta el español. Could I take lessons from you?

We would meet once a week, for an hour. María was in her late fifties, though looked younger, her short black hair frosted with grey. She had lived in Santa Fe for twenty years. Her ex had worked up a the Lab in Los Alamos and still lived in their house in Tesuque, east of town. She’d been divorced for a couple years and was living with a rich family as a nannie. She had a son, who was in prison on a car theft charge. I had only asked about her family for polite conversation, and felt bad when her eyes started tearing up as she was telling me about him.

She had divorced her ex not for any horrible bad thing but more, it sounded, out of exasperation. Though apparently a scientific genius, pulling in a good money from his own company contracting with the Lab, he was horrible at managing it, and had put even the lease on his home in jeopardy through simple lack of paying bills. That plus being uncommunicative and clueless, the usual with men.

My spanish was shaky, but María was good about not speaking in English, and with the lessons, and me practicing reading easy stuff in spanish, like MAXIM en español, just for the articles, I realized I still had it with me, locked away in some dusty part of my brain.

Hello?

Patrick?

...

It’s me, Donna. How are you?

I’m ok.

What are you doing in New Mexico?

Well, I’m not sure.

That’s crazy.

I guess. How did you get my number?

I called your mom. So what are you doing down there? Are you in a band?

No, no. Just hanging out.

Do you have a job?

Not yet.

I can’t believe you’re in New Mexico. You just took off.

Well....

Do you miss Michigan?

Um, no. Ann Arbor a little.

So like, you’re not playing music at all?

A little. For myself.

Wow...so like, it’s good hear your voice. I just wanted to, um, tell you....

Tell me what?

In case you found out from someone else.

What?

Just that, Rick and I are seeing each other.

....

I just didn’t want you to find out and think that I was, like planning it or something. Cause I wasn’t. It just kind of happened.

Ok.

So are you seeing anybody down there?

Um, nobody serious. Just here and there.

Well, ok. When are you coming back to Michigan?

Um, never, I think.

Never? Not even to visit?

I don’t know.

Well if you do, give me a call. I still have the same cellphone.

...Ok...

Are you angry or something?

No.

Well, you’re super quiet.

Sorry.

I don’t care, it’s just, I thought you might be angry. But I’d rather you hear it from me.

....

Ok, well, I’m gonna get going.

Alright.

It was good to talk to you.

Ok Donna.

Bye!

For our first date I took Rachel to dinner at Udon Noodles down on Cerrillos, where she seemed to know everyone. —They’re all in my yoga classes. It’s weird to see them. I never go out to eat unless I’m with a suitor.

—A suitor? Am I a suitor?

She grinned. —Hee hee. You’re cute. Yes, I suppose you are, aren’t you? We’re out to dinner.

—Ok but for the record I’m not looking for a wife.

She clapped her hands and people at other tables looked over. —Ha! That’s great! Good for you! Who needs it? Except women. We need it.

—Why?

—For security.

—Just get a good paying job.

—As if it were that easy. Especially in Santa Fe. And anyways, I meant it differently. Security in life. Security in love.

—Ba humbug.

She wagged a finger at me. —Oh, you say that, but you’re sad and lonely just like the rest of us.

—Yeah, well, marriage will solve all that? You’re the divorcée.

She laughed again, and our noodles arrived (the waitress wasn’t that attractive so I didn’t have to worry about staring at her ass or not) of which Rachel ate almost nothing, and ordered a box to go.

Afterwards she invited me to a club called SWIG, which I’d heard of but knew nothing about. We had to access it by an elevator, the doors opening right into the club and loud ambient techno. And here were all the young adults (late 20s to some older guys in their late 30s) from other more cultivated cities, like maybe LA or New York. No locals. No more cowboy hats, no more jeans, or hippies skirts, or pueblo design wool coats. Suddenly we were surrounded by people in black, men in ties and dress shirts, women with lots o’ make-up in mini-skirts. I felt a little annoyed that Rachel hadn’t filled me in, since I was in jeans and long-sleeved shirt, but she wasn’t much better in a simple white cotton dress, though she did have some high heel sandals, so maybe she just didn’t know, or care.

We went into one corner and sat at a couch. No dance floor, just two rooms connected by a hallway where the bathrooms were. Since the music was loud, I’m not sure what anybody was talking about: They seemed to just be standing around looking like they were going to be doing some coke soon.

A drop dead gorgeous young waitress in a tight mini-skirt came over and took our drink orders and I tried not to stare at her legs as she walked away. Rachel excused herself for a second, leaving me to people-watch and wonder what the hell we were doing there. When she came back she squeezed my hand. —You have to see the bathrooms here!

The men’s room walls were covered in astro-turf, even around the urinals, and it was huge, though nobody else came in while I was there. I kept expecting a posse of American Psycho types to pile in but I guess it was too early for that. Though it was Santa Fe: I couldn’t imagine the place being open past one o’clock.

When I got back and sat down next to Rachel, she slipped her sandals off and put her bare feet in my lap, so of course I started massaging them while we talked about her friends. She had gone to St. John’s College there, for a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts. —Which is as basically useless as it sounds.

But she hooked up with some girlfriends there, all with much more money than her: The kind that lived in houses their parents had bought for them. —So they kind of took me in and had pity on me. I’m the token poor girl they can all take care of. They like to come here.

And on cue, Ingrid arrived with a gaggle of friends. She was an art dealer in town, though I couldn’t figure out if she took that seriously (meaning she liked bad cowboy art) or not (meaning she was in it for the money). But she had shown some of Rachel’s paintings at one point. She kissed me European style when we were introduced and then I basically sat by myself while she and Rachel talked for awhile. So I looked at our waitress’ legs some more, which were nice, and I swear she even smiled at me, which is the weird thing about women: She wouldn’t have even looked at me if I’d been there by myself. Maybe since I was with a woman I wasn’t putting out pheromones of desperation.

But watching Rachel interact with Ingrid was...intriguing. Basically Ingrid spoke, and Rachel listened, which reminded me less of a friendship and more of how I used to schmooze with club owners, promoters, or other bands. And they kept talking, and none of Ingrid’s girlfriends were talking to me, so I got up and did a walk-around to the other room, where the music was even louder and there were more single guys in suits, so I just came back and told Rachel I was taking off. She got a concerned look on her face and put a hand on my cheek. —Oh you poor boy. I’m not paying attention to you, am I? Do you want to go someplace and talk?

—No, I’m done for the night.

—Well, call me. Ok?

I pulled up next to my casita and got out. Quiet. Crickets. Some lights on in some of the house in the neighborhood. The air cool. I stood there looking up at the stars filling the sky, with the Star River running through the middle. My breath drifting lonely as a cloud. My truck Ana clinking, cooling.

The Pueblo Indians have been in this area since the beginning of the tenth century, if not sooner. You can visit Bandalier National Monument, with examples of both their cliff dwellings and old adobe style buildings. Santa Fe became the first capital city in America in 1607 (or some sources say 1610), even though it actually belonged to Spain at the time (the whole area was called Nueva España). It’s also the only American city where a successful Indian uprising happened, against the Spanish, in 1680.

Santa Fe became the northern trade hub down to Mexico City, both for the Spanish, and then Mexico when it seceded in 1821. After the Mexican-American War, in 1821, the city changed hands to the United States, and that same year the famous Santa Fe Trail was opened up to connect the northeast states with the new southwest territories. This makes Santa Fe the only city in North America to be under four different national flags: Spain, Mexico, the Confederate States during the American Civil War (for like, a week), and The United States. It has been the capital city in the area, both as a territory and as a state, though nowadays it seems a little out of the way compared to Albuquerque, which grew huge from being at the crossroads of two interstate highways.

New Mexico became a state in 1912, but the freaks had already started to arrive: Painters like Georgia O’Keefe (who liked the light) and writers like DH Lawrence (who liked the freedom and wanted to found a creative anarchist commune). You can still visit the Lawrence Ranch north of Taos, about an hour north of Santa Fe, and see the Lawrence Tree, which O’Keefe made famous in her painting of that name, which, when I first saw it, looked, because of the weird perspective, like a giant squid squirting ink in space.

Santa Fe also seems to have been one of the first American cities (at least west of the Mississippi) to plan for tourism and a city identity, centering around the architectural ‘look’ of the western adobe flat top buildings, the traditional Mexican ‘pueblo’ look. By 1912, all buildings had to have this look, reinforced by a city ordinance in 1958, so that today when you walk around the streets, if you ignore the SUVs, you can almost picture yourself in an old Mexican town from 150 years ago. This ‘Santa Fe Look’ now includes interior decorating, and even clothing.

The other economy of Santa Fe was, and is, the Los Alamos Lab, run by the U.S. Department of Energy. Built during World War Two to research and construct the atomic bomb, it was picked originally for its location: Far away from most anything, up on a mesa thirty miles (as the crow flies) west of Santa Fe. ‘The Lab’ stayed in business after the war, bringing in leading scientists to continue nuclear research. Los Alamos is now its own town, and if you go up to visit, you feel like you’ve stepped back into a slice of the east coast: non-adobe trophy homes, grass lawns, and even more expensive rents than in Santa Fe. Not even the Cerro Gordo Fire of 2000, where the Park Service lost control of a prescribed burn in Bandalier and the escaped fire ended up burning dozens of homes, not even something like that could pull property values down, so that lots of scientists and their families live down in Santa Fe, or small villages out on the reservations like Tesuque or Pojaque and commute.

During the sixties and seventies, the hippies and alternative life-stylers started to arrive, for the good weather, the arts, and (again) (I think) the sense of Santa Fe being so far away from anything else. If you watch the original version of Lolita, which came out in 1962, directed by Stanley Kubrick, which I did in a theatre there, the pervert stalker guy (not Humbert, the other pervert, the really bad one) ends up taking Lolita to Santa Fe for a life of hedonism and porn. When the grown up Lol tells Humbert about her Santa Fe days, the whole theatre started to, knowingly, laugh and snicker. Santa Fe is called The City Different (I believe from the spanish way of putting adjectives after the nouns: La Ciudad Diferente) and people take great pride in being different. It’s actually one of the attractions: If you feel like a freak somewhere else, you’ll finally be normal in Santa Fe.

But there was no person called Santa Fe, even if nowadays you can find women with the name Fe. The original name of the city was “La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís,” which means, “The Royal Village of Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi.” San Francisco, or in english, Saint Francis, being the patron saint of poor people, animals, and (I guess) Italians (or anyway, they seem to love him).

Saint Francis had the strange anti-capitalist idea of devoting himself to poverty, and talking other people into doing the same. The poorer he made himself, the more money and property people donated to his cause. But he was born rich, which allowed him to get a good education, and would explain why he was able to think of embracing “lady poverty,” because surely no poor person would ever come up with that idea.

He was inspired by the section in Mathew 10:9 when Jesus tells his followers to go out in the world and tell about the kingdom of God. And not bring any money. Or even shoes. And although he may not sound like a fun guy to us Americans, he and his followers apparently could be found enjoying themselves up in mountain forests, singing and laughing. He was never actually ordained as a priest, but the Pope at the time granted him permission to found a new order of monks, which lives on to this day, and they bake good bread too, I visited one of their monasteries up in the UP, in Michigan.

According to legend, Francis was called to help a village whose sheep were being killed by a wolf. He went into the woods and the wolf appeared in front of him, growling, but as soon as Francis started talking to him, the wolf lay down and put it’s head on its paws. They talked and the wolf explained the situation, and Francis freaked everyone out by bringing the wolf down into the village plaza with him.

Francis explained the wolf’s point of view to the villagers, that the wolf was only killing because it was hungry, because (and I’m ass-uming this part) probably as the village grew and the farmers cut down forests for farmland, and as they hunted more and more deer, they took away the wolf’s normal livelihood.

So, again, according to the myth, once Francis explained the situation, the villagers agreed that, as long as the wolf stopped killing their sheep, they would agree to feed it. And everyone lives happily every after like good Christians, and we’re supposed to take the wolf as a metaphor for anything, or anybody, say for example, terrorists. That all violence comes down to misunderstandings, and if everyone could just sit down and talk, we could come to peaceable agreements. Except, what are the villagers going to feed the wolf? Bread? No, they’ve got to feed it sheep. So apparently they’re ok with giving away what the wolf would take anyways. So, the reasoning would go, if terrorists perform acts of terror to get the US to stop meddling in mid-east politics, in order to make them stop, you would presumably stop meddling in med-east politics. Which sounds good. But the reality is, the villagers are just going to kill the wolf. And as the village expands, they’ll kill the next one, and the next one (because there will always be other wolves) with the added benefit of more deer to hunt. Sorry Francis. It’s cool you can talk to wolves but, even though we say we’re good Christians, we can handle things our own way, the good ole American way.

You can find statues of Saint Francis all over Santa Fe, usually with little bird and squirrel statues gathered around him. He was also apparently the first person to suffer stigmata, though he never told anybody: One of his followers described them to people after he died, in 1226. In 1228, the Pope (a different one this time) made him a saint.

MASKED MAN—novel excerpt

The first 20 pages of my (as yet unpublished) novel, MASKED MAN. Enjoy.

Crow circles over South Mountain, in Phoenix, early morning, cawing occasionally, flying lower and lower until it lands on the branch of a palo verde tree outside a ranch house in Ahwatukee, side-stepping until he can see through the window, at the old man laying on the black pleather couch in the middle of the room, asleep with an empty bottle of scotch on the floor. Long-sleeved green shirt untucked, fly on his Wranglers unzipped, and snakeskin cowboy boots.

On the wall behind the couch, with the door on one corner, hangs a college diploma, a doctorate in literature from Wayne State University. Also pictures: The man a little younger, but not too much, smiling, with a thin woman his age next to him, a bit tired looking, though also smiling, wearing a bandanna, because she has no hair.

More: The man and woman, at different points in their younger lives, with a young woman/girl with them, hugging them. The young woman in graduation robes and hat standing on the University of Arizona campus. The three them standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The man and woman looking like frazzled graduate student parents, the man with dark hair and a beard, the woman with long brown hair, holding their baby.

Shelves of books on the next wall: Russian and American anarchists like Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Thoreau, Abbey, as well as novelists like Tolstoy, Cervantes, Hugo. One whole section filled with Louis L’amour and Zane Grey. A large screen tv against the third wall, with rows of DVDs on each side. The television on, sound down low, a woman on the screen. The bodies of two more young women were found buried in the desert on the mexican side of the border this weekend, yet more victims of drug-related violence that has been building for years in the city of Santa Teresa, in the state of Sonora.

Crow inches himself closer to the window, cawing again, the branch dipping down under his weight. He caws again, and lightly taps its beak against the glass. The old man inside moves slightly, putting his arm over his eyes. Crow tilts his head, waiting, then caws and again taps on the glass, harder this time.

The man snores once, loudly, jerks, and opens his eyes, looking around, not moving, then slowly closes his eyes again. A Taco Bell commercial. Head to the border!

Crow moves his head, looking at the man with its other eye, and caws again.

The man opens his eyes again, sighing. He sits up and rubs his face. Goddamn crow. Goddamn everything.

He looks out the window and sighs again. He stands up, accidentally knocking over the bottle. Looks at it. Leaves it. Walks around the couch to the pictures on the wall, looking at the newest one, the latest one. He kisses his pointing finger, then puts the finger against her mouth. Hello Jenny.

He leaves his Man Room, goes into the kitchen and starts a pot of coffee, leaning against the counter, staring out the window at the corral next to the house. The horses up and out and walking around. When the coffee is ready he pours a big cup, straight, and walks outside.

The air still cool. The old man holds the coffee cup in both hands walking out to the corral. The horses see him and trot over to the fence, lifting their heads. Morning Silver. Morning Sunshine. Morning Lady.

He strokes their snouts. Are we ready?

He goes into the barn and pours their oats. The horses come in and dip their heads in, munching while he runs some fresh water into their tank.

Back inside, he goes into the bathroom with a pair of scissors, looking at himself in the mirror as he trims his beard. With a razor, he shaves the rest off, splashing aftershave on and wincing.

He showers, puts on his Wranglers and boots, then a fresh, light-blue long-sleeve shirt that he buttons up all the way. In the bedroom, he finds his white hat and puts it on, looking at himself in the full-length mirror on the closet door.

He packs a travel bag with two extra shirts, some underwear, and toiletries. Back outside, he goes into the barn and saddles up Silver and Sunshine, with saddle-bags, and puts a packsaddle with bags on Lady, filled with oats. All three of the horses stand and wait patiently while he does this, excited. He ties a lead line between them and leads all three out into the driveway next to the house, tying Silver’s rein to the doorknob.

Back inside to get his travel bag. In the hallway he stops and looks down at the Navaho rug. You need a blanket Ed.

He stoops down and rolls up the rug, then takes it and his bag out, putting them on Silver.

For the next hour he goes in and out of the house, bringing food items, bread, almond butter, Grape-Nuts, raisins, some chocolate bars, coffee, along with a pan, a coffee pot, and some cups, all of which he tries to put in Sunshine’s bags, and if they don’t fit, he ties them on the outside with zipties and bungee cords.

When the horses’ bags are bulging, he tells them to hold on, and goes back inside, walking around the house, looking for something. He can’t find it. He stands in his study, looking around, thinking. He looks at his desk, goes over to it, and opens one of the side drawers, labeled “School Stuff.” Taking out a black marker and going back into the bathroom. Leaning in close to the mirror, he uncaps the marker and draws a large circle around each eye, up over his eyebrow and over the bridge of his nose, filling them in all black. He puts on his white hat. He smiles.

Leaving his keys on the kitchen counter, he goes outside, locking the door behind him. Untying the horses, he swings himself up into Silver’s saddle and sits, straight-backed, looking around one last time. With a soft flick of the reins, he says to his horse, Hi ho Silver, and heads south.

Gordon Lightfoot came out the front entrance of the Wildhorse Casino, rolling up his smock. His supervisor, Gus, right behind him. Hey college boy!

Gordon leaned up against one of the columns, searching with one hand in his jean jacket pockets.

Gus came up to him, pointing. No one talks to me that way, college boy.

You mean when I said stop talking to me like I’m an idiot?

I mean you disrespecting me.

Me disrespecting you? Gordon handed him his bunched up smock. You can find someone else to cook burgers.

Gus grabbed the smock. I can find anyone to cook burgers.

Exactly.

You can’t quit.

I just did.

You’ll never work on the Gila River Reservation again!

I think that’s ok.

Gus stared at him a second, then walked back inside. Gordon checked his pockets again and found a pack of cigarettes, American Spirit, and took one out and lit it. After he took his first drag, he looked out across the parking lot and saw a man with three horses riding towards the casino. They reached the parking lot and kept coming through the rows of cars, right up to the front step where Gordon was standing. The man said whoah softly and pulled on the reins, bringing all three horse to a stop. He looked at Gordon, pushing back his hat. Howdy.

Gordon did a double-take. What’d you do to your eyes?

Tonto, that’s my mask. You should know that.

Gordon took a last drag of his cigarette, and threw it to the ground, stepping on it. What did you call me?

Tonto.

That’s what I thought.

We’ve got a mission Tonto.

A what?

A mission. An adventure. A quest.

Man, are you fucking batshit crazy or what?

Two middle-aged white ladies walked past them, going in, looking at both of them, wide-eyed. Gordon heard one whisper to the other, Do they have wild west shows here? Gordon looked back through the doors and saw Gus inside, talking to two security guards. Shit.

Well Tonto, ready?

Let me get this straight. You want me to go with you? Where’re we going?

Mexico.

Mexico? Why?

To rescue a mexican señorita.

Why?

Because that’s what we do. We help people. We rescue them when they need rescuing. Like mexican señoritas. It’s our job. I need your Indian tracking skills.

Gordon shook his head. Oh shit. Look man, I never rode a horse in my life.

The man pulled out his wallet, which was bulging. I have wampum.

Gordon smiled, shrugging. Well why didn’t you say so?

He looked back at the casino doors, through which the two security guards were coming. He jumped up on Sunshine’s saddle and flipped them off, smiling. Adios muthafuckas!

The man flicked his reins, saying Hi ho Silver, and they started off through the parking lot.

They crossed the parking lot, south and a little west, out into the Reservation desert, until they were paralleling the freeway. Turkey buzzards circling overhead. Garbage scattered everywhere. Beer cans. Diapers. Somewhere up wind, a sewage treatment plant, its foul stench hitting them like a physical blow. They wrapped bandanas over their noses and mouths, but that did no good.

In the middle of tall scrub and palo verde trees, nearing an old deserted building, windows long smashed in and half the roof missing, they passed three big rectangular cement holes, with about a foot of green algae-filled water. Gordon almost jumped out of his saddle when something long and slimy, primordial, flopped in the deepest area. Jesus Christ what the fuck is that?!

They stopped the horses, covering their mouths in the crooks of their arms. In the murky water lay a huge mutant trout, the marks on its back like black eyes, or torture scars, or a prophecy thrown with ancient bones. The fish flopped its tail again, barely moving in what little water there was. What they looked more closely they saw two other fish just as large, barely moving their fins.

Gordon looked at the building. What is this place?

Ed McCarthy looked around. Trout farm?

A trout farm? In the middle of the desert? How? Why?

McCarthy shrugged.

Gordon shook his head. Fucking Indians. Only they would do something like that.

The first fish flopped again, like a death throe, but they saw that it was actually raising itself to catch one of the bugs, flies, mosquitoes, that had begun to buzz them and the horses, going straight for their eyes.

Come on, Tonto, let’s get out of here. Nothing but ghosts.

They passed some BIA houses, ten of them out in the middle of nowhere, all the same, faux-adobe squares, scrunched together on a few acres of land when there were acres of desert all around. Some children were playing outside one of the house and waved to them. They waved back.

They took a dirt road south from the BIA houses and got to a brand new complex of buildings, though no one seemed to be around. The sign out front at the paved road/highway proclaimed it an alcohol rehab center.

They looked up and down the road. Nothing to the west, though to the east in the distance they could see buildings and the sun shining cars on I-10. They nudged the horses across the pavement and into more garbage-strewn desert.

They rode until evening, then stopped in an old sandy wash. Ed took off his hat, wiping his brow on his sleeve, slightly smearing the marker, which had already been running down his cheeks like black tears. We’ll stop here and camp for the night.

Gordon looked around. Here?

Yep.

We’re not going to get a hotel or anything?

Nope.

Not even a motel?

Nope.

Alright.

Now Tonto, if you want to collect some wood, I’ll take care of the horses and then get out some food for us.

Ok boss.

There wasn’t much wood to get in a desert, but Gordon found some old palo verde branches and a dried out saguaro trunk. He dragged them back and piled on other smaller branches and some grass into a pile. Taking out a notebook from his inside jacket pocket, he tore off a page and stuck it in the bottom of the pile, lighting it with his lighter. The grass took, and soon flames spread to the branches. He stared at the flames for a while, then looked up at the sky. The stars had started to come out, bright and clear away from the city, though he could still see car lights from the freeway way off in the distance.

Ed put the coffee pot on the edge of the fire, and threw some beans in the frying pan. When they were warm, he poured half in a bowl and handed it to Gordon, along with some bread and cheese.

Gracias.

I didn’t know you spoke Spanish, Tonto.

A little. Couple years in college. For example, did you know that tonto means stupid?

I didn’t know that, Tonto. We’ll need your Spanish-speaking skills when we get down to Mexico. When we rescue María.

The mexican señorita?

Yep.

Do you actually know this mexican señorita?

Not actually, Tonto, but I’ve heard she’s in trouble. Mexican banditos.

Banditos?

Or maybe the federales. But probably banditos. Hard to tell nowadays.

Well, that’s probably true. Do you know where to find her?

That’s where your Indian tracking skills come in, Tonto.

Right.

They ate refried beans on tortillas, with slices of cheese, washed down with water, sitting over the fire, which had dwindled to some embers under the coffee pot. After he had washed out the pan with a little water, Ed McCarthy continued to throw small twigs and branches on, as they sipped coffee.

Gordon spat. Damn Ed, you could’ve brought some instant. These grounds are killing me.

That’s cowboy coffee, Tonto.

It’s like rock coffee. If rocks could float, which they can’t, so never mind.

Adding the cold water is supposed to make the grinds sink to the bottom.

Supposed to, huh?

Ed McCarthy shrugged. The life of a cowboy is rough.

Gordon spat out another ground. For an Indian too.

So Tonto, tell me about yourself. You’re always so stoic, never saying.

Gordon stared at him. Are you serious?

Your help is always appreciated, but we’ve ridden so long together I feel we should finally unburden ourselves.

As he said this, Ed McCarthy was staring into the glowing coals. Gordon took another sip of coffee and ate another piece of 82% cacao chocolate. Well, Ed, my father’s Apache, but my mother’s actually Crow. She and my dad met at a powwow up in Boseman, and she just came back down to Arizona, to Globe, with him and they got married. My dad was a firefighter for the BIA for a long time, he was already in his thirties when they had me. My mom, she was like eighteen. Bad mix. Also, they both drank. My dad not so much, but my mom, a little too much. She didn’t work cause she had me, and my dad was always gone on fires, so there she was stuck on a new reservation and basically stuck in the house taking care of me, so she did a lot of drinking. My dad would come back from being out of state on fires somewhere and sometimes just find me by myself in my crib. My mom would be down at the bar. I don’t remember any of this, you know. Anyway, this went on, I was oh, two or so, and then one time my dad came back home and she wasn’t there and she never came back.

They stared at the fire.

So I got raised by my dad when he was home, but mostly by my aunt, his sister. She already had five kids of her own, so she didn’t really mind. I guess.

Did you ever see your mother again?

Oh yeah. Later. Like when I was ten she got back in touch with me. She married this white guy up there. An oil driller, but like the owner of a company. Big christian. So he kind of cleaned her up. Or she cleaned herself up. Didn’t want to lose out on that money. She called, asked me if I wanted to come live with her. But I said no. I didn’t even know who she was. Like, who was this strange woman talking to me on the phone? She tried talking to my dad about it, but he wasn’t having any of it. And, she didn’t push it. Probably could’ve made me go up there if she really wanted. But she didn’t. I think she was just doing her christian duty, though I don’t think she ever really cared about all that. Later when I was a teenager I did go up and visit. Wanted to check it out, you know. Her husband, Jack, was a real winner. Nice house. Nice church. She never said nothing when he was around. Fucker tried to make me go to church when I was there. Like, any person under my roof goes to church, but I was like, no way. His face got beet red, you know the way palefaces get when they’re angry, which is all the time.

Later that night I heard them fighting in the kitchen. About me. Like, arguing, but then fighting. I was upstairs in the guest room and I heard him hit her and I was down there like a jackrabbit. She was sitting on the floor crying, holding her face, and he was standing over her and I didn’t even slow down, I just walked right up and hit him right in the nose. Knocked right to the ground. I think all three of us were surprised. I didn’t know what else to say, so I said something like, Don’t hit my mother or I’ll kill you! He just stared at me, then got up and went upstairs. Big guy too. I was just a scrawny Indian kid.

And what’d I get? My mother told me, You can’t stay here. You have to leave now. So I packed my stuff. Right before I left, she handed me an envelope with a thousand dollars in it. I don’t know how she got it, if she just stole it or had been saving it. But she told me, Gordon, you have to get off the Rez. You have to make money. This is what happens to us because we don’t have any money. I’ll always remember that. So I took the money and left. I didn’t know whether to say thank you or what.

You never saw her again?

No. Thing is, she stayed with the motherfucker. But, she had my address, and sometimes she would send me money. When I got in high school, every letter had some money, a check, and a short note, saying she was ok and that she hoped I was ok and that I needed to keep my grades up and get into college. Get off the Rez. Get off the Rez. And, she was right. I don’t know how she was right, since she was so fucked up, but there it is.

You should see her again.

And say what?

Just, hello.

Yeah, well. Gordon poured himself some more coffee. This isn’t decaf, I can tell. I’m gonna be up all night.

So how did you get off the Rez?

Well, somewhere, I started to like reading. Didn’t get it from my dad. Didn’t get it from my mom. And not from my aunt Mabel either, but her kids, my cousins, they were in school and bringing home their books, and as soon as I learned to read I was always poking around in them. Plus at school all the poor old white women who taught us were just so grateful that some of us ignorant Indians had any interest in reading they’d start giving us books every day. I didn’t fit in anyways, since I was the runt of the family I was already being picked on at home, by the time I got to school, being picked on was second nature. It was just the way it was. Books were just a way to escape, get away. Better to go to the library for lunch than hang around the cafeteria and get picked on. And the teachers and librarians let me, and some others. Like I said, old white ladies love Indians. Or at least the ones who want to read books about white people.

My daughter’s a schoolmarm too.

A what?

A schoolmarm.

Jesus Ed, I forgot, you’re crazy. Anyway, I shouldn’t make fun of those women. They saved my Indian ass. By junior high I moved back into my dad’s house and basically lived by myself, since he was gone a lot. I shouldn’t say that. In the winter he was around, and he took me hunting. Sometimes we’d just drive, go on all the old two tracks, listening to the radio if we could get something way out there. Fishing. He knew some good fishing spots too. So, suddenly I wasn’t an Indian nerd. I wasn’t overweight, didn’t have glasses. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there were plenty of other kids who were eating Coco Krispies every meal and just watching tv and getting beat and fucked by their fathers. Prime victims. Whereas I had actual real Indian skills like fishing and shooting guns. Kids stopped picking on me.

I never forgot what my mom told me. Whatever else she did, she was right. I looked around at the Rez and just saw that we couldn’t win. My dad was one of the lucky ones, with an actual real job, but firefighting doesn’t pay that much unless you’re on fires, unless you’re working overtime, unless you’re gone a lot. But those kinds of jobs are the ones all the guys want. Any other BIA jobs are just hard to get, and people who work them tend to get their family in on them. Other than that, nothing. So, you stay and have no work and are poor, or you leave the Rez and are just a little bit more than poor, but nobody ever does. Families don’t want their kids to leave. They say they don’t want us to lose our culture, our heritage, so we stay and end up like our parents, poor, overweight, living in shitty houses in shitty cities, like Globe.

Did your father want you to stay?

You know, I think maybe they only thing my parents had in common was to get me to college. Once I was sixteen, he got me into firefighting, on the BIA handcrews, during the summer, and sometimes even during school, for the money, but even if he wasn’t home a lot, he did always ask about my grades. I think his plan was for me to go off to college, but then come back.

Is that what you’re going to do?

Does it look like it?

Something happened.

I got up with the fire bug. Instead of heading to college right after high school, I just fought fires. Good money, lots of travel. Kept me in shape. I could drink all the beer I wanted and never get a gut. I started to be gone more than my dad. We hardly saw each other for two years.

I know why you stopped fighting fires.

Yeah? Why?

I saw that notebook you were scribbling in.

Gordon grinned. Ed, you guessed my secret! The reason those white ladies loved me so much in school was because I wasn’t just reading, I was writing.

Tonto, you are a poet.

He nodded. Yep, and after two years of fighting fires, I realized I hadn’t written anything, and hadn’t read much either. I could see that I was going to end up exactly like my dad. Which to most people, that’s not a bad thing. Most guys on the Rez would kill for my job.

You quit.

Yep. Cold turkey. Went back to my white lady angels from school and they helped me get my application for Mesa Community College together and then I left.

That’s where my daughter’s a schoolmarm.

Yeah? Small world. I didn’t even say goodbye to my dad, he was up in Idaho with his engine. With the fire money I had from that summer I headed to Phoenix and fell into the Indian curse.

The Indian curse?

Away from the Rez, surrounded by white folks. I started to understand why no one ever left. Every fucking day somebody calling me Chief, asking me where my bow and arrows were. Trying to go to classes, filled with white people, and work at a Safeway filled with white people. It’s hard bagging groceries knowing you could be on a fire out in the Chiracawas, getting paid three times what Safeway pays, and at least getting respected. Or at least just, you know, walking around on a mountain with a pulaski in my hand watching trees torch a hundred feet in the air. So, I did what any self-respecting Indian would do: I started drinking.

That’s the Indian Curse?

The whole thing’s the Indian Curse. The drinking’s just the final manifestation of it. Or, no, the final manifestation is waking up under a bush out back of my apartment complex.

Did you drop out of school?

Gordon smiled. Not at first. I made it to year two, and I never would’ve done it without another white woman helping me. She was my composition teacher my first semester and then my second. She didn’t give up on me, even when I would vanish for a week because I was drunk. I barely passed most of the other classes, and she did some talking to some of the other instructors too. I’m telling you, she went out of her way. I don’t know why. No, I know why. She liked my writing. She said I was a good writer. So I took her second writing class, and then the next year I took a creative writing class she taught. After that I didn’t have any more writing classes and things went downhill.  As long as I had writing classes, I could keep my GPA up. That, plus I did ok in the two lit classes I had, and ok in Spanish too. The rest? Math? Science? Not so good. Meanwhile I kept losing jobs. They’re not so understanding about vanishing for a week. My fire money ran out. I couldn’t get work. I just could not take going to another white guy and asking him for a job bagging groceries. I just couldn’t.

What was this teacher’s name?

Ms. McCormick. Hot too. And young, sort of.

Tonto, that’s my daughter you’re talking about.

Ed, are you serious? I’m sorry I said she’s hot.

It’s alright. Why didn’t you ask her for help?

Gordon hesitated. Well, she was always busy. I mean, she wasn’t my teacher anymore. I guess I was just ashamed.

He dumped the grounds at the bottom of his cup into the fire. I just didn’t want her to know how bad it was. How bad I was. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

Ok, go on.

Go on? I haven’t talked this much in my whole life! Nothing else to say. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t work in another fucking Safeway, so I went down to the Wildhorse Casino. I went to another Rez, just so I wouldn’t feel like a freak. Just so I could be around some more brownfaces. And you saw how that worked out. Not all brownfaces treat other brownfaces from other tribes very well. Plus, I’m an asshole.

Tonto, you’re a poet.

I’m an asshole poet.

But a poet nonetheless.

Ed McCarthy stood up, tossing the dregs of his coffee on the fire. Well Tonto, we have a long day tomorrow.

Ed, can we maybe stop at a WalMart or something tomorrow? Get some water? Or a Coke?

If you can use your tracking skills to get us to a trading post, Tonto, I’d be much obliged.

Ok Ed. Well, I’m going to turn in. You got a sleeping bag for me?

I’ve got this Navaho blanket for you.

You know Ed, nobody actually uses those anymore. Not even the Navahos. Look, this one was made in China.

The Navahos make great scouts, Tonto.

What’s that got to do with anything?

Ed McCarthy didn’t reply. Gordon stood up. Hey Ed?

Yes Tonto?

Did you pack any toilet paper?

Cowboys don’t use toilet paper Tonto.

They don’t? What do they use?

Leaves. Rocks.

Rocks?

River rocks work well because they’re smooth.

Ed, we’re in a desert.

Goodnight Tonto.

Ed lay down on his rug and wrapped himself up. Gordon stood looking at him for a second, then got out his notebook, tearing out a couple sheets. For once, his poetry notebook would be good for something.