IX

Out of the Land of Bondage

Another family recipe: take one chronic drunk tangled in sheets, funked in stale smoke, spiked on a hangover, rolled in grit, drenched in daylight and dipped in pain. Add a dash of consciousness and fry live.

Tony Drury dreams he moved to Mexico and changed his name to Jimmy Chonga and got deep-fried and everyone wants to eat him with salsa and frijoles.

One eye opens. A cat toys with a mouse in the corner, waiting for a twitch, a stretch, a run for it. The mouse moves. The cat stomps. The mouse squeals. The kill is quick. The cat works the head back into the molars and crunches. Then she chews.

“Oh,” says someone old, someone beat, someone who once loved but now suffers the action. The legs go first, then the rest, over the falls. From the floor he gasps like a fish out of water. It sounds like a laugh but isn’t. He begins the journey on instinct, beseeching the mighty one—is his name Joe Young? Or is it Lester? Tony Drury has a vision then, that he cheats death daily to gain clarity; prone on the shoals, he can see his needs and failures.

He feels the presence of others. One wears a hooded robe and casts a sickle shadow. The other stares in disbelief. Tony Drury sheds tears because he’s not ready for the one; to the other he insists, “I’m not dead. I’m not crying. We struggle … upstream … by instinct. It’s our destiny. We cry to keep the sand out of our eyes.” Juanita holds her broom defensively. “That was a joke.” She doesn’t laugh. “What year is it?” One of them trembles. He can’t tell which. She’s scared. He doesn’t want to die, not before a decent piss, a few aspirin and a nap. “No, I mean, I wondered what year I would … you know …” The lamp falls out of nowhere with a crash because some fool grabbed the nightstand. She flees. “I know what year it is,” he mumbles, wondering if she’s the reaper.

An old man hurries up the hall with a pitchfork like a villager after the monster with the bolted neck and stitched up brain seam. “You shouldn’t judge people on appearance,” Tony says, but neither Juanita nor Pedro saw the movie. “I only grabbed the … you know … table. The lamp fell.” The old guy stares. “What year is this?” Pedro walks away, Dios mio.

Tony knows the drill: the shower, the piss, rehydration, six aspirin, naps, beer, solid food. But automatic pilot gets stuck on the shower floor, hot to cold. He can’t make the next tier, much less the spawn. He feels too late, like an old cutthroat run aground, good-as-gone, flopping in the shallows. He reaches the handles and pulls himself up.

He drips awhile, dabs wet spots with the towel awhile and wanders down a corridor, looking for the stairway to heaven. Stale air wafts through the hacienda. Some survived, some died, some waver. Heidi reads on the sofa. Cisco snores on the floor. Whippet sleeps on a love seat. Suey sits in a chair. Kensho brews coffee, shags bottles, washes dishes, his movement crisp and harsh as sunlight.

Tony sits at Heidi’s feet. Kensho sets cups before those who can nod. He pours. Then he prepares solid food and serves it on the table. The aroma is more inviting than the concept. Those who can, move themselves and eat. In a few minutes, Tony laughs. Some look at him. Cisco grunts when a foot hits him. Tony says, “Imagine an old folks home where you have to be forty to get in and you get shit-ass drunk every night and then you have a nice brunch with your cronies.” He laughs again. “Make it forty-five.”

Kensho clears and pours more coffee. “I sat. I breathed,” he says.

“I laid down and kept my heart beating.” Tony says. “I feel like shit.”

“Heartbeat is automatic. I sat. I controlled my breathing. Slowly, one hour.”

Tony inhales and coughs. “You mean like that?”

Kensho watches like a puppy watching trivial movement. “You need practice.”

The little group adjusts to life after death, hovering in the ether of their own wake.

“I’m serious,” Suey says. “Charles knew about things going bad. He said it drove him crazy. He said it went away, but it comes back.”

“You mean depression?” Tony asks.

“No! I mean the reason for being depressed.”

“Fecal plaque,” Kensho says. “Three days fasting with chlorophyll concentrate. Then nothing is wrong, because it goes away every morning.”

“Charles is different,” Heidi says. “He thinks life is great if he gets laid, but it’s not the sex that does it for him. He gets high on the consent. He needs approval.”

“You mean like he likes the conquest,” Cisco rasps under the table.

“No, not the conquest,” Heidi says. “The approval. If a woman agrees to have sex with him, it’s her way of saying he’s all right. If she says no, he thinks she’s smart, because she knows what’s wrong with him. He wants the smart ones most of all.”

“That’s funny.” Cisco joins the undead. “I thought he was in it for the pussy.”

“I don’t think so,” Heidi says. “He measures success by resistance.”

Cisco looks thoughtful. “Yeah, well, still.”

“Why are we talking about Charles and pussy and Charles’ approach to pussy and whether Charles is really horny or only mental?” Tony asks.

“Charles is a failure,” Whippet says.

“He thinks he’s a failure,” Heidi says.

“You mean he’s a decent lay?” Tony asks.

“Better than some,” Heidi says.

“Damn,” Cisco shakes his head.

“He compares himself to an ideal instead of to everybody else,” Heidi says. “That’s all I mean. So why shouldn’t we talk about Charles and failure this morning?”

“Is it still morning?” Tony asks. No one answers. “I like that. Everyone is a failure, but Charles is the only one who knows it. Except for me. I’m catching on.”

A wave crests and breaks with failure. Suey sobs into her hands. “He only wants to fall in love. Don’t you?”

Whippet stares. “Did you have sexual intercourse with Charles?”

“You think I’d fuck these cowboys and say no to Charles?” The cowboys look down. “I like Charles. Yeah, I fucked him—my idea. Men don’t come on to me so much. Shit, these guys don’t count.” The emotional wave passes. “He didn’t mind helping a friend out.” Suey sniffles. Tony plays with his food. Heidi gazes.

Cisco comes to the cup for a slurp, his wild three minutes down to an iffy thirty seconds. “So?”

“So that’s what I’m talking about,” Suey says. “No matter what you do. Things get worse.”

“Worse than what?” Tony asks. He wants the hit, the point, the next step on the road to nowhere. “You think we’re failures?”

“You know who we are,” Suey says.

“I know who I am,” Whippet says.

“Road bums, stuck where it’s easy,” Tony says.

“It’s still fresh for some people,” Whippet replies.

“Yeah. Because they just got here,” Suey says.

Whippet sits up—“You can get bored anywhere. Some people discover new things. You have to re-invent.”

“No place stays new. They all go stale.”

“So go away for awhile.” Whippet sits back. “Or stay here and change. We could change.”

“Go where?” Suey says.

“I don’t know. A city.”

“Fuck the city.”

“Amen,” Tony says. “Fuck the city.”

“Fuck,” Cisco grumbles.

“Fuck the city,” Whippet mimics. “Fuck. Fuck the city.” She scrunches her face behind her frail, high voice like a mongoose about to sneeze.

Tony says, “The Indians lost first. We lost second. Over and out.”

“You need a rest,” Whippet says. “We’re supposed to rethink our lives because a lazy drunk blames it on the firewater. You and Cochise, one with the land. Jesus.”

Suey winces at Tony—“You do. You look awful.”

Tony stands—he needs something, but not a bunch of fucking losers telling him he looks bad and doesn’t know about nature. Who are these fools? Not a thought in the crowd past what to drink and who to hump, and they think he looks bad. Standing isn’t easy. Poised for drama isn’t easier. Maybe he’ll faint. That’ll teach them, as if they care. They don’t or can’t—Suey suddenly remembers: the stores will be closed tomorrow, and she simply must get new pantyhose.

Tony glowers, reminding his friends they insulted him. “Maybe on the way to the pantyhose store you’ll meet a colorful fellow named Estaban. You can ask him nice for a fuck. He’ll say sure thing, and afterwards you can be sad until you take a dump. Love is tough for a woman, but such grist for your complex fucking mill.”

Suey gazes in disbelief. Tony sits, equally surprised at his bitterness and willingness to share. He feels no better when Suey’s face twists downward, and she cries. He considers an apology but sits dumbfounded, because a friend spewed shit in the bathroom and the dining room, then turned on him, then forgot about him in favor of pantyhose. He stands again with no poise and walks out the door into daylight.

He can’t go far. Not today. Today is already past morning, nosing into afternoon, drifting toward tonight. Toxin ebbs more slowly than it floods; he needs time. He turns left at the corners, eyes down, watching pebbles in the pavement pass fast or slow, in and out of focus, like time, around the last corner and into the stretch. Another left at the front door puts him back inside. He feels like a rock in wet cement sinking into the sofa, wishing it could close over him.

Half asleep he hears the traffic drifting, mumbling, then going still. They doze or read. They groan. They go out. They come back and wait. Some feel better in a few hours and better yet with a cocktail, just a nip. Some go out again, socially. Some stand in the door. By twilight the troops drift from the scene of the crime. Aftermath vanishes like vapor with no trace but the twinkling stars, witness to the massacre one night and the next.

No sleep seems the best preservation of consciousness gained. Meaning is felt somewhere in the numbness, until the curious wonder if it’s there at all. Can we pickle our gizzards like this and get nothing but drunk?

The night after the all-nighter is allowed a single slug o’ the hair, because more would be ridiculous. A few beers and a reefer dull the edge. Dialogue and sharing are significant to some as solid food is to others. Some avoid sleep, until lying down and passing out make the sweetest victory, the most stunning defeat.

Suey slumps in a chair gazing at her former friend. In time, she slides to his end of the sofa. “You’re one of the most messed up people I ever met.” He nods. “I loved you.” He stares. Her eyes swell and she lays her head on his shoulder. She breathes softly and slowly. Then she snores. His eyes also close, and they prop each other up, sawing logs in the north country of their dreams. They could go to bed, but sleep is best taken where it comes.

In the morning, wondering where to begin the productive day so long anticipated, Tony finds a book on a table. He passed it many times but never looked. He sits and lets it fall open to Jack Kerouac’s description of delirium tremens. Jack couldn’t get happy swilling Port and Manhattans because the demons showed up. Jack wanted to be happy; that’s why he drank so much.—It always makes me proud to love the world somehow—Hate’s so easy compared … Jack also missed the world he wanted to love but could only guzzle for. He searches the fringe where God spoke from a saxophone, while the world went ranch-style. He loved the bongo boys when they went to sixteenth notes or thirty-seconds for a goof and a groove in stratospheric syncopation. The world looked good from a distance, all blue and neatly fitted into twelve bars. Riffs explained the secret of life then, if you could get far enough out there to lose the noise and hear the music.

Tony can’t read this without feeling the loss, without missing those groovy, crazy times. All the stones got turned over. How can you be happy, seeing what you see? You get down on it, with it, in it, and your gizzard pops from the sauce. Jack’s did. Jack suspected happiness was everywhere, if you could find it like Céline found it at the end of a night of drinking.

Céline walked down a rocky path to a stream, dropped his fly and flopped his hog at sunrise for a piss, and that was it. Sunrise is cleaner than the rest of the day. With the demons played out, the bladder freed and less clutter in your head, you can see forever.

Things clear if you get up and move, just flow out the door and down Canal Street, down past the bus station and tiendas selling sugar pop in plastic bags, down past the glue factory and the swayback nags in front and on down, past the wasteland of trash and dirt and chickenshit, past the scrap metal and barbed wire that make Canal Street look like the Pork Chop Hill of the Mexican Campaign and on down the hill and off the road. And on down that embankment around a few boulders flows a stream called Shit Creek by some, but that’s so easy compared to … How about the Shenandoah River? Standing creekside not much past first light at the end of a long piss, you can look back up the hill and know it’s gone with the piss. The hill is gone and so is the world, the dream, the refuge, whatever the fuck you thought it was, all gone. You can turn back east, but the why and wherefore can taint the new day with simple questions: So? Now what?

The difficulty demands a cure, but Tony knows the remedy and where it leads, so he stands still and allows for happiness by a gully on a morning, brain and bladder empty. Then he heads back up to see where happiness will take him.

Everyone is talking about a chic new bistro with Cuisine Mexicali and fabulous tamales. Maybe this will work. But staring at the menu as a woman from the past steps up, he goes deep for the fundamentals of speech, thought, reality. She is dreamlike, from a dream, and he is too, and they tumble through the years and the menu. She stares at the symptoms of a brutal life but says it’s wonderful to see him. She doesn’t say he looks terrific but hugs him and wants to know: “Is this fabulous or what?”

Tony Drury feels nonreality turning in on itself; like atoms in a cyclotron, we hurl to our center, back toward Ylam at maximum density, terminal velocity, fabulous cuisine. Another big bang shines in his eyes. She looks away and asks if he’s eaten.

Eaten what? Eaten whom? She feels his happy energy or madness and specifies, “Have you had brunch? Let’s. Why not here?” She shrugs with a strange little shimmy. He watches for meaning in case she has one. It’s been years since she discovered her self and what was missing, since her commitment to change in our society.

She leads. He follows. They sit. She scans the menu. “Oh,” she says reading the rhapsody aloud with relish for the outrageous effort in tamale preparation. She orders.

He nods like a dummy and says, “Me too.” It’s easy. He must take the initiative on the wine though, because she forgot, must have, and a nice light white seems so refreshing and certain to smooth a few wrinkles. She rambles and titters, waxes nostalgic and remembers when. He listens, eats what he can of the monumental load before him. He senses a potential record breaker, and wishes Suey here to eat it. She could firm it up with some tortillas or sawdust or something.

He watches his old friend speak and recalls the reefer days, watching television with no sound. He blinks. Nothing moves but her mouth, each word a pinch of the clay for another still; run them at speed and presto: real life. She covers the lost years up to current troubles with the comedy genius getting a blow job from a sixteen-year old girl. She holds up the paper: FUNNY MAN SCORES ORAL FROM TEEN NYMPH. “On the set,” she says. He can’t remember her name. “The set!” she insists.

“The altar of disbelief suspended,” he says.

“Troubling times,” she says, “when the last hope for American manhood, up and … and …”

“Sticks his dick in the pudding,” he says.

“That’s disgusting,” she says.

“Incorrigible,” he says.

“Mm,” she says, dabbing her tapioca while condemning the crimes of machismo. “The thing is, it goes so much deeper than this.” She’s appalled and dismayed at the bizarre turnaround in the dating, sexual thing underscored by this event. “Mm. This is delicious.” She knows several women her age now dating boys in their twenties. That’s wrong, but it’s purely sexual, plain and simple. But she sees many men her age attaching to women barely twenty. “And that’s pure ego. All our progress gets so undermined by these assholes.”

“Fie,” he says. “Death to ego.”

“Oh, Christ,” she says. “What happened to you?”

“You don’t think he liked the blow job?”

“Oh, Christ, not you too.”

“Lookahere,” he says, sliding his plate aside to clear the way for a sip of wine. “Suppose the sky was a man, and the sky said, ‘I’m a man, and I hereby decree to all women that half of each turn of the earth will be daytime, and half of each turn of the earth will be nighttime.’ And so the women lived with this authoritarian bullshit for thousands of years, until they got together and agreed that they were women and didn’t have to put up with it anymore, so they all went out to the front yard and shook their fists at the sky and said, ‘You chauvinist pig, we don’t have to put up with your shit anymore and we won’t. From now on we want daytime anytime we want it. And when we’re good and goddamn ready, we want nighttime, and we’ll let you know when that is, and it’s got nothing to do with you being tired or you needing a poke, or any of your self-centered needs, so fuck off!’”

The waiter begins clearing. “Not now,” she says.

Tony doesn’t care. “So the sky hangs his head and drops his tail between his legs and says, ‘Well … okay.’ The end, right?” The waiter bows and backs down. Her face screws toward certain anger, possible rage. She tenses, scanning his aura for the off-color. He smiles. “Wrong. Because the sky is not a man but is part of a universal scheme of planets and comets and stars and light years, and a bunch of women shaking their fists at nature make less noise than a mosquito on Uranus.”

He hones in and tells her what a man feels with a young woman in front of him, say a classic beauty in the buff, a young one with strong legs leading to the ultimate Caesar salad. “A man will want to feel, sniff and …” He flicks his tongue here through the crotch of two fingers, “… taste, which may be ego in the final analysis but is pure animal sexuality here and now.”

He tops her off, though she isn’t drinking, and pours himself another. But she’s up in a huff and out. Did the last twenty years lead to this moment? The phone hadn’t rung again. He just picked it up and there she was, unless she wasn’t, unless delirium tremens for him is peopled by the ghost of women past. If she’s a ghost she’s good, conjuring a tangible check for twenty-eight bucks before her ethereal political exit. Who cares? The wine is unobtrusive, the bottle half-full.

He drinks some. Too bad. She was looking better, and who knows? Maybe they’ll meet again by chance in Timbuktu pushing seventy; she’ll make fabulous discoveries there. He’ll be on the wagon and they’ll laaaugh over the old days in Mexico. Or maybe she’ll be stark staring nuts and he’ll be dead in a bog, muddy wet and whiskey smelling.

Well, hell. She wasn’t bad company and he blew it with arrogance, telling her why men like muff dives on the young ones best of all. He finishes the bottle, glug glug glug, as if the bottle has its needs, too. Fuck it. Sassy bitch and her hormonal commandments.

So he sits alone in a brunch bistro on a lazy day, moderately hung over yolks, frijoles and crusting guac. He looks up to Bobby and Earl in a corner. “Ohwa tagoo siam,” he calls.

They laugh. Maybe they’re homos from the old corps who just luuuv a fabulous brunch after a nice buttfuck. Tony doesn’t think so. Tony thinks they got tangled in moral fiber, enlisting, fighting, then coming home, then hightailing it south ahead of the untruth. But it’s only another foxhole before another retreat, before pulling back for some new anonymity and maybe a few pesos for two over easy instead of five bucks for the fa fa fa.

Bobby and Earl know the score. Earl lights up. Bobby groans, “Well. Hell. Can’t live with’um …” He trails off, resigned to a life on the run. Earl says the man who invents a substitute for pussy will be as revered as the guy who invented beer or football, and all the boys laugh again in self-defense.

It’s a day of no faith. He considers going home but this is it. The hacienda overpopulates with convalescents. “Adios, boys,” he says, humping it up and out again, farther up the hill, then west again. It’s all past, all gone; you only get more of the same, unless you change. You play it out, or it plays out around you. Maybe this is the moment of knowing at last. It’s a long one. The funk feels like in-laws whose weekend won’t end. He needs a vacation from his vacation. Well, the gears still work. What if they didn’t? A guy on the dish-fed tube last week asked, What’s worse than dying? The answer was outliving your money. The guy was selling another pile of paper to keep you from dying broke.

But Tony Drury knows what’s worse than dying broke or otherwise; getting over a hump doesn’t make the humps go away. He doesn’t mind dying one day, so long as it’s not thirsty. Life is a dead end with nothing in the middle except for a loving feeling. It flows where you find it, if you know where to look. Besides, if life is a delusion, what’s to lose?

Nothing is what becomes of renegades and middle-agers in need of nothing but a drink. A voltage on the street feels visible. A dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty looks him over as if she sees it. He wants to explain, because nobody knows the trouble he’s seen, but she’s on her way.

The sun pours over the rooftops with new truth; Tony knows where Charles went because the light shows the way. Anyone can see it if they care to; the untruth thrives here and everybody believes it; just look.

Standing on the spot Charles left from, Tony knows it’s time for farewell and sundown. Departure is a formality. Isn’t it? When you get down to it, exits are a high point in life. Aren’t they? He will go. He is gone. But he won’t go right away—I mean, I’ll go today, but not just yet, because I honestly and truly need a drink. I won’t say only one, because it might run to a few, but I’m being honest this time and for once I know what I know.

And in another event that feels like chaos in a pattern, blending itself with the light and the knowing, a tall, aging delinquent walks by without looking up and says, “No bus today.” Tony Drury laughs at the irony of the reality of the thing—no bus is exactly what there is today. It’s like … like … There never has been a bus and never will be a bus. We all go on foot, sooner or later. Cisco knows these things. Tony follows him to La Mexa, sits at the bar and nods to whatever Cisco orders. “You not helping?” Cisco asks. Tony nods again; yes, he is helping. The day is rough on the edges but workable at the core. With luck and diligence regrets will taper by eleven, solid food should stay down by noon. He orders up and looks for a clock. He has time. The Centenario works its charm and leads nicely to a cold beer and black coffee for the wake-up, with some of that sweet Mexican shit they put in there. That should smooth some edges for the new future. “She kick your ass out?” Cisco asks, because sometimes Cisco knows nothing.

Tony sips his drink and breathes deep. “Did you say something?” Cisco gets up and leaves. It’s perfect. Tony will buy him a drink later. Cisco got up and left, that was all. One isn’t pissed anymore than the other. They understand each other, or they don’t. Cisco talked gibberish and split. So what? Besides, it’s The Day of the Dead, a good day for leaving.

And Cisco has his rounds, so he ambles out and into the parade of the living dead droning down the street in death masks, war paint, ghoulish rags, caked dirt, body paint and bones. These faithful will be in church on Sunday. The Day of the Dead is Indian, not Christian. But the clergy won’t relent. Officious Christians bring up the rear with incense, icons and hosanna for final reverence, as if he who prays last prays best.

Cisco walks through the procession of the dead. The big Christian in back makes the sign of the cross over him, but he keeps walking and wags a finger and yells that he went to Catholic school, so don’t start up on me. The big Christian nods over another sign of the cross.

Tony wonders what makes Cisco and big Christians so foreign to their surroundings. Jorge the beggar sputters to life curbside on a gob that rolls over his lip too slow to clear his shirts, where it blends in. Tony wonders if slipping him a few grand is good for luck, but Jorge hobbles off in a hurry on rounds of his own.

The President of the United States of America begs for votes on the dish-fed tube. He gets switched to Terminator II, in which an actor with a thick accent plays an android with a thick accent, saying he understands why children cry. The actor and the President read similar scripts. Nevermind. The pagans shuffle down the street instinctively happy, arrows and spears dangling from their rags.

A couple more beers and another coffee level a man nicely up to siesta time. Suey comes in and bellies up. “New pantyhose?” he asks. She hikes her tutu and turns a circle. “You must feel better.”

“I’m about to feel better,” she says, ordering a gin on ice. “You not helping?” she asks. He says yes, he is helping himself to a new day and eases out wondering why nobody tells him anything.

Movers file in an out. The truth hangs by rusty wires on Heidi’s door. It flutters in the breeze and says Tony on the front. Inside is a map with a star, some arrows, a U R Here and two lines leading to an X. Underneath it reads:

Come out if you want to. H.

He stands in the traffic of morbid art and Inquisition furniture as it’s carried out piece by piece like cockroach parts carried away by ants. Going, going, gone, and everyone knew it but me. But a man with nothing to lose can console himself that nothing is lost.

Map in hand, he wanders out, drawn like a fading comet to iffy gravity. He knows she can take it or leave it. He decides nothing and clomps again down Canal Street past the bus station. He has some dough—plenty enough for Mexico. A ride to the city is under twenty bucks and seems easier. He could hole up urban and see what comes up. But you can’t breathe in Mexico City.

So maybe not.

No.

Not.

He passes the tiendas selling sugar pop in plastic bags and buys one for the sugar. Down again past the glue factory he stops to ask the nags if they have any idea what’s up. But he doesn’t ask for fear of the reciprocal question, What do you know? So he and the nags ruminate over pleasantries. “How do you do? How you do be? Evening, evening.” He knows what they see, a shabby gringo headed out, headed down. He wonders if they suspect the glue for him too. Dropping his sugar pop bag on the ground according to custom he wads the map in an act of something or other, call it pride for now, because a man with nothing to lose clings to something or other. He pridefully drops his wad with the nags and walks down past the trash-dirt-chickenshit-scrub-scrap, down, down, down to the flats, where he rock-hops Shit Creek, also known as the Shenandoah River.

That was a long time ago, the dawn of life, that new day starting with some silly moment or something—Céline was a Nazi, and we can’t have that. “Boy. Nazis,” Tony Drury says aloud on the other side and stops to look back up at the smell of the land of carnage.

Turning full circle and following sundown feels correct. The road looks promising to the glowing horizon. The countryside beckons peacefully, clean, unpopulated. Yes, I’ll take some of that. The rocky plain looks forever with a veer to the south that surely shortcuts to Heidi’s new spread. If it doesn’t, well then, just how lost can a man get? Nothing to lose gains complexion with sundown. Golden light brings on what real buckaroos long for, the real nothing of nothing to lose. Anyone could know where Charles went—Charles got the hell out, gave in to symptoms and vamoosed. The problem remains of where a man could vamoose to, but if this isn’t it, then what?

He walks and walks but nothing changes except the growing shadows like angels along the road.

What comes to a pretty good clip slows when the angels clock out and the shadows merge to a single darkness. Picking around the rocks carefully now, he follows the light within. Ah, moonrise; he stops to watch the void delineate and to wonder when this too will become a real nice place to raise a family. When will the prayer of the righteous be answered?

He picks up the pace, hurrying from what ails him until he stops and wonders what. He breathes hard, chilling quickly. The night flows over, cold and colorless, numb and forgetful, still and immense, like death. He doesn’t know how far he’s come but figures ten o’clock or maybe two. Accepting total loss in the dark on the plains is not good but not bad for a man in poetic context. Tony Drury understands loss and its needs; everyone goes and sooner isn’t much different than later. The place feels good, a certain center of the universe. So he gathers sage and sticks into a pile and lights it. It flares with terrific heat but only for a minute, until the sage burns out, so he shags some more. Because you can’t relax if you’re freezing, but a man willing to die shouldn’t have to work so hard. The embers pop and fade.

He sits. He settles in and breathes deep and lets the cold go as Kensho would counsel. He wishes upon a star for a pint of the good stuff that would sip so well on a night like this by the dying embers under the stars. He asks God for a pint. “Just one, God, a last one, please, God, and for that pint, I promise to be good until forever or sunrise, whichever comes first.”

He pulls a pint of the good stuff from his jacket. “I might be crazy, but I ain’t stupid,” he tells the night. He doesn’t believe it, sitting in the dark and cold like a fool—but a fool with a pint. “Here’s to you.” He toasts a billion stars, glugging for the spirits, finding God within, the one who hears the prayer of the righteous. Oh, Tony D is smart enough to play the prayer and the prayee, and he vows that vengeance will be his. In great draughts he takes warmth unto him and says, “Let there be light.” And so it is.

“You know I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good be out … of the rain …” If a man can’t find a tone on a desert all alone, is he really tone deaf? “On the desert, you can remember your name … ba daa daa da-da-daa daa … something something …”

What a night, what a night. He drinks and has the best smoke of his life and doesn’t care what time it is or the year. He drinks and laughs and doesn’t care if he sleeps, which he can’t do anyway with a big rock holding him up, poking a shoulder blade, until he drinks a great long guzzle and settles in with a belch and a nod. He dreams of the fire everlasting.

At dawn a gang of boys passes by on their way to their trees and their cows. He wandered fifty yards off the road. The sun warms him as he lay in the dirt beside the rock. The boys see him and come over for a look and giggle when he sits up with a “Mmuhh” and a mud-caked face. These gringos; what they won’t do next. Cute little guys, they stare at another freak of nature come south. “Hey, where’s Heidi’s place?” One boy points down the road to a speck on the rise, making the desert a magical place indeed. “Muchas gracias, little buddy.” The little muchachos giggle some more. Well, they’ll remember Tony Drury anyway.

The new day looks harmless, clear as the night before. He sits there while the boys finish staring and giggling. He feels something on his face, something clinging. He waits for it to move but it doesn’t so he comes up slowly and slaps himself like the Aqua Velva man. “Ah, I needed that,” he tells them, peeling the dirt and drool hardened like adobe mud on his bottom jowl. He joins in the laugh until his little pals go up the road to another day of existence. Maybe he’s on his way too.

But he sits another minute hoping the future will be like this, crisp, hungry and clean. Life was best on the trail, with a world waiting when you weren’t even twenty-five and folded your bedroll wet if you wanted to. Well, that was a long time ago and God forgot the coffee, but a couple inches of the good stuff is better than no wake up at all, because the future is a frame of mind when you get right down to it.

But please don’t mention attitude, not now, not on a crisp, radiant morning with the warmth flowing as if life is on again. No, it isn’t good to drink at sunrise. Any fool knows that, but sometimes you make do. Sauce isn’t the same as coffee, but it’s something. He stands, old bones crunching into gear. He never thought it would come to this, but once standing, he laughs again at how light a man can travel. No pack-up or clean-up here, just another long piss on another new outlook and a left right left where yesterday left off but with a difference, not exactly a zippety-do-dah but with a spec just yonder to march to. He stretches his stride, feeling angels in the ether.

“There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile, who had a crooked sixpence and a crooked fucking smile,” he sings to the vast mesa of his potential until two burros sing back. He turns their way up the side road to the rancho.

She bought the burros when she leased the place, for atmosphere and authenticity. “They’re so cute,” she will say later. She’s pissed earlier when he bangs on the door. He wakes her up.

She brought Taco too, a ne’er-do-well mutt who works the circuit for handouts. On the lam from a local boy who wants to fight him in a ring against other dogs, Taco fits in with the gringo crowd, feisty, fearless and sensitive. Fighting in a ring for macho idiots isn’t his cup of tea. He has more spirit than the mean and ugly boy who cut his ears off with a straight razor so other dogs couldn’t grab them and for a meaner look, though the boy looks mean enough for both of them.

Tony can’t imagine Taco being that cruel to another dog or a person. His ugly pug-face with scar tissue where his ears got stanched make him look like Spanky’s dog Petey after a shot at the title. An off-center eye-patch and a wary disposition make him fit in. Taco never whines and won’t walk on a leash. He begs with his eyes, like Charles used to do, and he stays by you, thick or thin. He slipped under a table when the local boy came looking. Taco knew whose legs to squeeze between and when to stay still. It got to be an honor, recognition by Mother Nature or something, if Taco chose you to protect him, to look up as stupidly as a mean and stupid boy and say No se and keep the secret. When the coast was clear the dog got tacos under the table. He knew like the gringos knew: home at last, for awhile.

Taco jumped onto the rich gringa’s lap one day and timed his little smooch just right because a ranch needs a dog. Taco the dog and Tony Drury became colleagues, roommates, Heidi’s tenants. Taco rode out in the truck, sitting on the front seat for all Tony knows. Tony got a note hardly hung on the door. But Taco isn’t up by much. She’s pissed at him too, because he didn’t bark when a stranger walked up to the door.

“Hey, ease up,” Tony says. “Some people don’t consider me a stranger. He’s a friend of mine.” She grunts and goes back to her beauty rest. It’ll only be another few hours. Tony makes coffee and fries four eggs. Taco watches but doesn’t beg. He puts on the look lucky dogs learn for getting ahead in a gringo world. His eyes are despondent, hungry, commiserating—We’re in this together, aren’t we? They sparkle, ready for action or a couple over easy. And that’s it. Life has changed, kind of.