Two
The tires popped on the gravel outside and the
weak van engine putted to a stop-- the sound of death or dying in its
staggering cough.
"About time he got back," Sarah
said, still seated in the chair beside the dresser. Hours had passed. She and
Lance had sat largely in silence. Waiting. Listening.
"His business probably took longer than
expected," Lance said and rose from bed. His joints stiff. What time was
it? Ten? Eleven? The motel supplied no clock and he couldn't tell from the sky.
"Or found some cowgirl on the way,"
Sarah mumbled as she stared down at the foot of the bed.
"You sound jealous."
"I feel bored."
Dan's heavy boots thudded on the walkway, his
hacking cough sounding worse than ever, but gave no hint to his truly horrid
expression when it appeared at the door, long, brown
"Light up a joint," he said, and
fell onto the bed.
"What happened?" Lance asked,
fumbling for the pre-rolled joint in his Marlboro box.
"They tried to kill me."
"They what?" Sarah said. She sat
forward in the chair, squinting. Dan shook his head and pinching the lighted
joint as Lance passed it to him, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs.
"The drug company's boys," Dan said
after a long time holding the smoke in. "Bobo screwed them; they followed
me up from the city."
Lance looked towards the door, his face
twisting into a mask of panic.
"Oh, don't worry. They didn't follow me
this far."
"Are you sure?" Lance asked,
doubtfully.
"Damn straight. They're dead."
"Dead? You killed them?"
"Don't start in with your pacifist
bullshit," Dan barked. "I'm not in the mood for it. They killed
themselves. They slid off a cliff into someone's back yard. But there's bound
to me more once the big bosses hear about it."
"Which means what?" Sarah asked from
across the room.
"Which means we'd better get the hell out
of here before they do."
"Leave?" Lance said, staggering away
from the bed, his gaze locked on the blank spot outside where the invisible
mountain filled in the stars. "But I was figuring on settling down around
here."
"A grave is a pretty permanent way to
settle down," Dan said, passing the joint to Lance.
Sarah shifted to the edge of the chair, her
blue eyes dilated with interest. "And where should be go?" she asked.
"The farther away from here the
better," Dan said.
"One of the canyons wouldn't do?"
asked Lance.
"Not unless you want to get trapped
there."
"But why?" Lance protested. "Me
and Sarah aren't involved in this."
"Your van is," Dan said. "And
they saw it. They won't ask for details."
"Where do you suggest we go?" Sarah
asked.
"I'm not suggesting anything. I'm headed
back to
"What else could they want?"
"Silence," Dan said, sagging a
little more, his head propped up with the pillows as he sucked again on the
joint. "I think they're trying to erase everything about this
operation."
"
"No," Lance said. "We're not
going back there."
"No one said you had to," Dan said.
"That's where I'm going."
"Without the van?"
Dan's gaze flickered towards Lance, the stoned
eyes still dark with fear. "I could use a favor," he said. "It
would be suicide for me to take a bus or plane. But if you could drive me
someplace else, I could take off from there."
"Where did you have in mind?"
"I know a little house in
***********
They made
Lance leaned against the passenger side glass,
staring at the carpet of green aspen and blue spruce along the roadside, aching
to wander into them and not come back. Not see another city or clump of
civilization. Lose himself in the primitive mind set of survival. Like a wolf.
Or Coyote. Their need to kill, he could understand. It was the human blood lust
which confused him.
Two men had died in Dan's mountainside
confrontation. An echo of
The flap of Dan's hat hid the man's hard face.
Was he thinking of their death, too? Or did they mean nothing in this callous
era where the news broadcast names like Mitchell, Torres,
It made no sense. Nazis murdered women and
children, not American boys. The black hat didn't fit well on his head. And
while he detested violence, he'd volunteered for
He blamed it on culture shock;
Yet, he and the uncle he had robbed back east,
had that much in common. Neither could fully accept the change, despite
their verbal battles. Both loved solid things beneath their feet: a house, a
job, a mountain. Both found themselves confused by the generation of free love
into which they'd been thrust. His uncle as part of the establishment. Lance as
a participant.
It seemed reckless. And though he still
admired some of its message for peace and love, the rock-throwing craziness of
Sarah touched his shoulder and he looked up.
"Don't look so sad," she said in a
soft voice meant to be kind. "You're not missing as much as you think.
There's nothing in those mountains but stone and sheep."
"There might be a job."
Dan snorted and coughed, then reached into his
shirt pocket for a cigarette. "Not many of those in these parts unless
you're a redneck working for the government. The whole state's a bloody war
machine. Half the mountains are hollowed out with some secret base or
another."
"There must be something," Lance
mumbled, staring up at the white topped mountains.
"You'd have to cut your hair," Dan
said. "They don't like hippies."
Lance's reflection in the side mirror startled
him. The long tangled hair, contradiction with the way he saw himself, though
he recognized the familiar high cheek bones and stern eyes-- a near duplicate
of his uncle's.
"Besides they roll up the sidewalks
around here at night. Who could live like that?"
"I could," Lance said.
"Not me. Give me
"Me, too," added Sarah.
***********
Still, when the car had pulled over to pick
him and Marie up in
"Mikey?" Marie said, snuggling
tighter into his side. "Are you all right?"
He looked at her big glowing eyes and felt a
bit guilty. Even with the make up and bright red hair, she looked young. Like a
little girl dressing up in her mother's clothing. And she was still peeved at
him for their quick retreat, angry over leaving most of her possessions behind,
her new clothing, her precious records-- things from her fancy house in
Like he could have gone back for them, eh?
Please, officer! Just let me get my
girlfriend's things!
Hang cuffs and a kick in the pants is what he
would have got, and a long, long time in a Federal jail. Not just for the pot,
but for the string of other things they would have found out once his finger
prints got ran.
Horrible things! Things he still didn't
believe himself, as if some other person had done them. Bank Bombings in
"I'm scared," he said, shifting a
little, feeling her soft bra-less breasts shifting with him, drawing up the
urge in him. Here? He was crazy! But then, she always struck him that
way, the smell and touch of her like a drug he couldn't kick.
She didn't understand anything about their
running. About his need to get away. For her it was all a game, a delightful
bit of history relived with him as Jesse James.
Hadn't she said as much when he met her in
Detroit, a fifteen year old little rich kid slumming among the hippies, looking
him up and down from across the room, seeing something in him-- perhaps his
face from a warrant poster-- someone having told her some of the details of his
life, his run from the south where he'd escaped federal prosecution. The exact
details were worse. But she never asked for them.
Just like Jesse James, she'd said. Right?
Not exactly. But then it was what the Weather
Underground people had thought, bringing him up to show him off as if he was
Abbie Hoffman. A celebrity. A face through which to solicit contributions.
"My family hunted Jesse James, you
know," she'd said.
"What?" He hadn't understood. Too
stoned. Too startled by the jet-set bullshit of the new revolution.
He was cold and hated it. Hated stepping into
snow, a price he paid for growing up in the arid southwest, where one didn't
see snow except on the top of mountains, and didn't understand cold except as
the brittle dessert nights and sudden gush of flood water during the Spring
time down pourings of rain.
"My father's a Tinkerton," she said,
obviously expecting him to know who or what a Tinkerton was. And he did.
"You mean as in the detective
agency?" he moaned, the pot-haze evaporating as he stared around the party
half expecting hired-cops to leap out of its shadows.
"Yes," she said with a smile that pinned
him against the wall, eyes swallowing him whole-- the haze of the seduction
more acute than any drug he could have taken. He seemed to wake up with her
naked body beside his, still contained. Vibrating. And scared. Only a crazy man
tempted fate, his grandfather said.
"I got to go," he said struggling
out from under the covers, waiting for the doors to kick in.
"No!" she said, only the way a
little rich girl could, as if there was no way for anyone to refuse her, as if
no one had a right to withhold from her anything she wanted.
"But I have to go,' Mike argued. "I
don't belong here."
"Then take me with you."
"With me?" he said in disbelief.
"But I'm going on the road."
"I know. Just like Jesse James."
And now, a thousand miles and a year later,
she was still with him and still as much in love with his image-- though now it
shimmered only in her eyes while it sagged around him.
"Scared?" she said. "Don't be
silly. What's there to be scared about?"
Broken bones. Jail cells. Tinkerton's
underfoot.
"We've got to get out of here," he
said, ignoring her ignorance. She just didn't remember how people had killed
Jesse James.
"Maybe we can ask somebody for a
ride," Marie suggested, glancing out over the sea of pickups and tourist
trailers, as if she would pick just anyone out of the crowd. Despite her
bloodline, she missed the point of being hunted-- a social creature to whom no
one was inaccessible. Like the sheriff's deputy in
Fortunately for
them, the deputy had thought her joking.
Farm of pot! Ha! Ha!, the
man said, picking his teeth with the corner of a match book as he burped and
stared at the hawaiian-shirted tourists, presuming Mike and Marie their
children. Later, when the APB came in, his face would redden-- embarrassed
enough maybe to keep his fat trap shut. But Mike doubted it.
And now, he didn't dare let her loose on any
of the rednecks who would be quicker to pick up on details such as those. This
was farther south, near where pot was less a rumor than a reality. Drugs went
north and south here along route 25. People got busted.
But he had to ask someone! Another
tourists, maybe?
Likely as not they were heading west here, not
south, like the people who'd let them off, deep into mountain country to stare
at empty gold mines or photograph staged Indian dances.
Drunken, dusty, meaningless dances!
He closed his eyes-- his grandfather's
wrinkled face floating in the midst of such a scene, phoney tee-pees and
tourist cameras, and women at his feet weaving baskets.
Something in his stomach retched, part of his
hatred for Indian country, part of the insane mixture of blood which pulled him
constantly back towards the reservation. Like the call of Coyote.
Where were the Goddamn hippies anyway-- the
hip community upon which he'd always been able to rely? Didn't anybody with
long hair travel this far south? Or was
"I'm cold, Mikey," Marie announced,
her whole frame shivering against him. Her clothing was little suited for
mountain country-- denim jacket and skirt and high white boots.
"I have a spare shirt," he said,
digging through his bag and producing the mud-caked logger shirt he'd been
wearing when the cops came, covered with pot resin and the smell of mildew.
"You want me to wear that?" she
asked in disgust.
"You said you were cold."
"I want a ride, Mikey. Not some filthy
old shirt. Maybe we can go inside and get some coffee."
"I'll find a ride," he mumbled,
glancing only once at the building and the windows filled with cowboys, hunters
and early tourists. Though the last time he'd eaten had been the Wyoming cafe.
That seemed like days ago. "Wait here."
He rose out of the shadow and walked across
the gravel to the rim of the parking lot. Which car?
He heard the putting before he saw anything,
the unmistakable over-worked sound of a Voltswagon engine crawling in the long
curved off-ramp from the highway.
A Voltswagon? In God's Country?
But there it was, a dented red, white and blue
hippie van, swaying out of the darkness as if in answer to unspoken chant, the
battered gold letters of LOVE still visible on its side.
"Marie!" he called. "Get out
here. I think our ride has arrived."
***********
"Never trust a white man, Lost Dog,"
his mother once said, hands gripping her death bed as if heavy with child not
tumor. It was only time she'd given advice. The whole time living in Tucson
she'd played dutiful wife, serving her drunken husband as if he never beat her
for "having those goddamn eyes." Guilt over alcohol and other women
made him beat her, Mike figured later. Or maybe because he got away with it,
neighbors saying nothing over the black and blue marks left on her face and
shoulders. They rated an indian woman one full step below chicano in Tucson.
Her husband, a white man, probably had good cause.
The man beat her the day she announced her
pregnancy, as if the he was too cheap to pay the white crosstown butchers the
price of an abortion, trying to educe it himself. When she got back from the
emergency room with a still-living child, he gave up, figuring the child too
tough to kill.
But some racial memory remained; Mike hated
his father from birth, and the company of redneck-pickup-truck drunkards around
whom his father congregated, a pack of coyotes devouring the redlight district
in weekly raids, coming home, smelling of other women, covered with other men's
blood.
Fate and age beat Mike to killing the man, a
stroke knocking him down during a gay-bashing party downtown. A few drinking
buddies showed for the funeral, giggling through the brief ceremony. His mother
died two years later, strung out on welfare and bad doctors, who treated
symptoms of a growing tumor with aspirin and bedrest, saying only after the
death it had likely been caused by the beatings.
The state claimed the thirteen year old Mike
as its ward, acceptably white enough for a foster home; but wild and indian
enough not to stay there, avoiding the trap of her mother's tribal reservation.
Any place so bad as to make her marry a bastard, wasn't a place for him.
He stayed on in Tucson, hooking up with one of
the chicano gangs, a not too wild bunch of spat-on hoodlums, too young for
serious crimes, stealing baseball cards, free meals, and occasional drugs from
the better established thieves markets downtown. A local restauranteur
supplemented slumping sales with drug and alien smuggling, and high class
prostitution. As the gang grew older, it slipped into transporting pot across
the boarder for the man and made a decent living in exchange.
Decent enough to get married on. To a Hopi
chick who'd eyed him for years. A brown-clay lady as tough and skilled in this
import business as Mike was. Both seemed to have the same inner sense,
perceiving things others could not.
But neither saw the black narc or the line of
police cars waiting at the Mexican boarder until too late-- riding full speed
towards them in a truck full of bailed pot. Cops waiting as if expecting Mike.
As if this one little smuggling job for himself had offended the local
establishment so much as to turn him in on it.
Don't want any bad examples, Mr. Dundee
had said during the trial. I let you moonlight then everybody'll want to.
It all came out in court, where his appointed
lawyer begged the judge and jury for mercy. Saying how the new born child would
turn his life around. How he had committed this last crime only as a means of
escaping the corruption. He had intended on splitting Tucson for some other
town to start fresh. Straight. With a house and lawn like every other white
man.
But the court saw his red skin and threw the
book at him. Twenty years without parole. The prosecutor protested. The
American Indian representative from Washington said it was too harsh. Even the
arresting officer objected.
The court went further, and had the child made
a ward of the state. Can't have a woman like that raise a child, his
honor had said. Drug dealers are drug dealers, and she's one, too.
Court officers dragged the screaming Mike from
court, he vowing between his curses to get his kid back. It took him two days
to break out of jail, and two more to find his kid and steal him away-- no one
knowing anything until he, Chris and the kid were a thousand miles away,
setting up a new life in Detroit, under new names, with a new dream: an
auto-plant job paying the bills.
But kidnapping was kidnapping and the Feds
asked Demetre to hunt him down, tracing the faint trail to the house and lawn.
Mike felt the tingle on his way home from work, and eased into the run-down
neighborhood in time to see the black cars pulling away from his door-- Chris
and his son securely stashed in the back seat.
It was the day Lost Dog declared war on the
white man.