Traveler...blog novel...unedited..tell me what happens next

The river roils, red chile-tainted cafe con leche, around the great bends, each new cut created by the opposite offset of the previous...the cliffs hang above, sheer, silent walls set in talus slopes of sand, boulders, and rocks the size of ancient buildings. The only visible inhabitants are two ravens shadowing across the sandstone faces. At side canyons, where streams power endlessly through ruins of inhuman cities of fallen stone, the snow- topped peaks, blue with distance below the rio colorado, Navajo sandstone wilderness, can be glimpsed, their blanketed pure fields of white merging with dark, forested slopes and rolling clouds racing in with a new cold front.
The clouds thicken and lower until the draping tendrils of rain, grey- white contrasting with the black wall clouds of the storm cell, sweep down on the desert, obliterating the long view and closing the world down to a driving, midnight insular vortex of rain and hail. Lightning races from heaven to earth and back in quivering towers, the sound of the molecules of air exploding in symphonies of primordial power.
Then the world lightens and grows ever more still. The setting sun's rays streak beneath the lifting storm, firing the red spires against its purple retreat. A raven caws up the canyon. The voice of river and wind intone together, sparkled by tiny birdcalls. A coyote slips across the tip of a nameless mesa and drops ...with a last suspicious glance, into a wash.
Trav rides on, quiet and small.

It was after dark when he came to the Crossroads.



He tied up out back. Red dust swirled across the open area. A lizard ingesting the last warmth of a hunk of sandstone skittered away into an unruly patch of woody, dried out prickly pear. Buddy’s old school -cum tour bus with its broken-axle trailer, chrome strips peeling off, sagebrush growing up through the wheel wells, sagged along the barbed wire fencing. A rusty Bobcat, its bucket tipped up like the mouth of a hungry bulldog, leaned crazily over a half-dug hole, half- filled with Coor’s light cans. There were four rental cars with Utah and Arizona plates. German and Italian tourists.
Trav loosened Ginger’s cinch and fed her a handful of oats.
‘Hang in there, girl, I won’t be too long’.
Three hens went scrabbling away as walked up to the back door. The balcony of the motel above the joint rattled in the wind. Amazing it doesn’t just fall down, he said to himself. Buddy had patched the whole place together out of pieces of other buildings that had indeed long fallen down. The rusty railings came from the Sunset Motel way out by the Interstate. Pieces of plywood and corrugated sheet metal and plexiglass tacked and wired up to somehow stay in place in the unending winds. The lower walls were the old adobe of the way-station from God knows when. There were sections of painted and unpainted cinderblocks here and there where the mud bricks had rotted or been washed away. The stairs that teetered to the balcony were concrete slabs on wrought iron. It was a good thing the Euro tourists were generally in good shape. The average overweight, older American or solid Ute would bring the whole thing down.
Trav pulled the door open by its mini-steering-wheel door handle and went in. The bar was mostly empty, just two tables of tourists eating their famous Crossroads Lodge steaks. Buddy’s son Duck was tending bar. A single girl Trav didn’t know sat at the far end, near the lobby with a half-glass of dark Polygamist Porter next to her ashtray.
Trav pulled up to a stool, keeping his left leg on the floor, stretching out his sore ankle.
Duck stuck a couple of glasses on the rack and dried his hands. ‘What’d you do, ride over?”
‘Yeah, thought Ginger could use a little airing out’
‘Bullshit. Drink or beer?’
‘Both’. He shot the first and rolled the other around on the counter, leaving little swirls of moisture on the smooth, booze-worn wood. The girl slinked him a look on some pretense. She was dark haired, How old he couldn’t tell in the glow of the bar lights.
“They took off yesterday’ said Duck.
‘I know” he said. He tipped his glass and let some cold beer slide down. There was a short outburst of laughter from one of the tables. Two German-looking couples, pushed back from their too-expensive, crappy steaks. They were happy, tanned, and fit. One man clapped his hand on his female partner’s shoulder. She the butt of the joke. She fake –slapped back at him, blushing and laughing. He fended her off and said something else that caused them to laugh even louder.
Trav, who had turned to his left at the noise, shot the girl a glance and caught her doing the same. He held her eyes for a moment and then turned back to the bar and went back to his beer. They could see each other without pretending to look in the bar mirror.

Ginger was stamping and chuffing when he walked outside. ’Easy girl, we’re going’.
The hulking loom of Warrior Rock blocked the stars above the thundering river. Trav could hear stones being rolled along in the flood’s depths by the runoff, the never-ceasing whisper of current against buckbrush and cottonwood roots, the voice of the mountains and the canyons and the towering black storms. The wind had died down. He gripped Ginger’s mane and swung up easy, the way he’d learned to from the real horse riders. The beams of headlights swung around the back lot like a prison spotlight and he recognized the rumbling of Buddy’s pickup. He rode up to the front. Bugs zapped around under the two floodlights out on the road.
Buddy’s truck had stopped, leaving its fooled dust to go on a few more feet ahead of it towards the front door of the lodge lobby. He stepped out, groaning and holding his left hip. He looked up at Trav sitting on Ginger.
‘Howdy, Ginger”, he said, his eyes twinkling in the reflection of the Christmas tree lights that framed the long covered front of the building, ‘ ‘Yer too late. They took off last night’.
‘So I heard No biggie’.
‘Too late for a beer?” said the older man as he took a smoke from the front pocket of his blue-striped cowboy shirt.
‘I got to get back. He’ll be pissed off if I’m not up early enough.’
‘You should give up this fake cow crap and come play guitar for me’, said Buddy. He stopped and worked up a big wad of lung crap and hawked it into the dust.
“Play for a seventy-one- year old man who smokes two packs of camels a day. That’s a solid gig.’
‘Better’n playing cowboy for another old fart.’

A curl of smoke down at the end of the entryway, out in the edge of lights caught Trav’s eye. She was standing there, silent as a cougar.
‘Gotta get Ginger back.’
‘At least she knows how to get there. Gonna grab me a beer. See you later.’
Trav looked back into the shadows but the girl was gone.
Ginger followed her nose home along the canyon trails, picking her way back up to the top of second mesa. The moon finally rose, waning, but flooding the bare rock and open space with blue light. A gang of javelinas ran out from a wash and spooked the old mare for moment, but she quickly regained her pride and fell back into her routine. She knew the way, even if Trav didn’t.
Thacker was still up, sitting out on the porch. The light showed dim through the curtains. Trav dressed down Ginger and walked up. Thacker sat like a glowing coal on his rocker.
“Note for you. It’s in the kitchen.’
He went in and looked at the long, plain envelope. It was thin, maybe one sheet of paper inside. It bore his name in a nice schoolgirl script: Traveler Evans.

The Blazer
The little creek talked away in the background, just out of the range of being able to hear the conversation. Along the bank, asters and Indian paintbrush and little yellow and white mountain daisies vibrated in the breeze. Above them, the peaks rode out the wave of treeline, forever breaking shy of the tombstone-grey tops for all eternity. The first little cumulous puffed in the wide sky. Soon enough they would fester and boil into a strike-filled tempest rolling through the granite cliffs and watercolor glacier strips that terminated in tiny dead lakes ridden by black-faced, furious little whitecaps.
The flower- fired green meadows washed at the tree line itself, beargrass and sage tiding into the junipers which gave way to aspens and lodgepoles and a few lightning--struck ponderosas. A big bird circled, a speck in the cerule; she hoped it was an eagle, doesn’t everyone, but a hawk would do.
The creek fell down the basin to an open saddle that dropped off unseen into the broken mesa lands below. Haze and distance beyond reckoning, another dark blue snow-capped ridge maybe twenty or thirty miles to the west. She heard the horses snuffle contentedly in the grass. He lay propped up on his elbows, surveying the ridge across the basin.
‘Sheep’. He said. She looked. They were moving along in the sage and rock of the drier, south-facing slope, hard to pick out until she saw the first Bighorn. Then she could see them all. Maybe thirty, lambs and ewes, young rams; a summer group.
He touched her arm lightly with the tip of a stem of grass with the unfirm tenderness of a daddy long legs walking along quietly. She rolled to face him. She could see herself in his green eyes, her reflection. They looked so much alike, she thought. Brown hair, light eyes, full lips, nothing all that exceptional in either, yet both were grand and young and charged with the moisture of the Earth in its fullness.
She almost imperceptibly drew to his face, and he to hers; slowly, like the space between them was sacred and semi solid, alive, something to be respected and gently navigated and negotiated with care, though it must yield to them and would willingly, the space itself wanting the moment as much as they did. The skin of her lips tingled, her gut ached, her breasts engorged.
They rode down the saddle at sunset. She beat him down the mountain easily, laughing and whipping her horse, falling and scrabbling steeply through the washes and benches. They reached Thacker’s on Second Mesa by dusk. He drove her to the crossroads and they partied with Tia and some Australian climbers until too late. He stayed but Tia was there in the other bed. It was just a crash. He got up early.
‘I have to get to work’. She pulled at him and he fell into her for a moment, but then left. She lay there hurting with how good she felt.

She yanked the rearview down, rolled down the window, and pulled the side view mirror back against the door. Too many damn fucking headlights. Tia slept, her head, propped against her wadded jacket, occasionally knocking lightly on the shotgun side window. She murmured and sometimes stirred up enough to whisper an exasperated fuck. Blaze held the wheel with her left hand, her elbow resting on a rolled-up towel taken from room 7 at the Crossroads Lodge. Trucks pummeled by, making the Escape sheer to the side as they passed.
I hate this stretch, she said to herself. She passed the Fairfield exit and the traffic only increased.
Twenty-two hours. Five tanks. Twelve styrofoam cups and four bags of crumpled napkins, plastic forks, and dull, limp french fries on the floor. It was nine-thirty when she took the Embarcadero turnoff and dropped into the City and headed to Potrero. What’re you gonna do, she said to him in her mind. Stay out there. I can’t stay there. I love you, but you’re cutting yourself off and I can’t do that. You narcissistic motherfucker.
Her studio was a mess, the way she left it. Oh shit, she thought. She put down her duffel bag and poured out the two week- old moldy coffee, washed out the carafe in scalding water and started a fresh pot. A wave of weariness rolled over her. C’mon Blazer, she said to the room, paint and paper and frames and canvas and photos and coffee cups and empty wine bottles and unopened junk mail and bills and magazines and cardboard boxes hiding wolf spiders and old tubes of magenta and tinted oxides and brushes with the dried blood of creativity and drunkenness pressed and soaked irrevocably into them.
She went to the window. Her view was out onto the tracks and jumble of failing ruins and glorious, soul-breaking City rebuilds. A guy came out from a doorway and pissed in the street, Nice. The titanic rumble of the City permeated the walls, the trembling, buzzing window glass, the ceiling, the floor. Her unmade bed, the morning light trying to throw off the overcast.
She went to Mo’s and had coffee and read the various papers scattered around by students and artists and geeks. An Arab-looking guy screwed his fingers on his mouse pad, checking out god knows what. Terrorist porn, she snickered to herself. The place smelled of coffee and dough and idle scents of comers and goers. She leaned back into the window sill and watched the street go by in an endless procession of homeless, urbanites, old oriental beat types, Rasta drug addicts, mothers with children in expensive strollers, Tilda’s flowers across the street, the T&G market, Florentina, its door dark now but pulsating at the dinner hours. In the distance the ballpark and the City, the Bay Bridge, the Pyramid stuck into the low river of the fog. She was tired, that’s all. Trav was fuckin’ out of his goddamn mind. I ain’t goin’ back to that again, she said. She nodded to Mo as she left. The old man tipped his head back, like yeah, yeah, same old shit.
When she woke later in the afternoon she cleaned up. She made progress, wading through the unkempt stratum of chaos in a non-linear but productive way, each little job needing one done before it before it could be completed, slowly organizing her materials and throwing out crap. This’ll make me cold. She knew what a clean studio meant: no ideas. But one would come; they always did. Time for this, time for that. She glanced through the mail and saw a greeting-card sized envelope from Corinne. Sissy, she said. She opened it and pulled out the stiff, Hallmarky Card. For my sister, in a flowing, baby-pinkish script on flowers and clouds, maybe an angel hiding in the crappy print. Jesus, Corinne. But Blazer loved her. She pulled the fold apart and a photo fell out on the floor. Sissy, really, a photo. Ever heard of email? Of course not. She bent and picked it up carefully, just getting the edge of her nails under it. It was old enough to be half sepia, but how old could that be, twenty years? She knew it at once. She sat on her first mountain bike, a skinny eight year old, at the top of The Old Road grade. Her eyes were brilliant, satellites, ambassadors, of light thrown off from her inner, radiant smile and slightly buck teeth. Her helmet was back a little; brown waves of hair hung down, blowing in the hot Sonoma wind and sun. No fear. The note was short.
‘I could never catch you Blazey, love, your Sissy.’
She slumped on a stool and held the photo down between her legs, not looking at this world. She could see the road winding down from the ridge, grass golden and glassy in the wind, Oaks like giant cufflinks from God’s best shirt, the blue of the coast range, no one hardly on the road. Blazey she was. The Blazer.
She put the photo on her keeper counter space near the phone. She picked up three wine bottles with her fingertips in the throats and dropped them one by one, clashing like revolution, in her recycle bucket.
Blaze that, you shit, she said.

She walked down Market Street purposefully, ignoring the pop-up homeless with their endless query. Christ, don’t you know I’m broke, too? Get a frikkin’ life. She felt bad and gave a one-legged drunk a buck. Fuck it, she thought. In few minutes I’ll pouring eleven dollar cabs for shitheads and their high-price- pussy old ladies. The City was trying to put on a happy face of some never existent era, with cool old trolleys and kiosk bathrooms. But the trash in the streets and the clash of purpose and hopelessness clanged like trolley bells on acid.
She walked in and put on her apron.
‘Ok, happy bitch, time to shine!’
‘Hi, Julius’, she smiled. Julius was as gay as the day is long in Nebraska, whence he had fled twenty years ago to find sex and freedom in the Castro. His hair was up in that greasy new baby Mohawk, little spikes here and there in studied disarray. His face was round and soft, yet he had an intense five o’clock shadow, something his lovers found most incongruous.
‘How was your cowboy this time? Has he learned about sheep yet?’
‘Cows. No comment.’
‘He’ll be back, you know. Trav might think he wants to play that, but he’s a pinko, and I’m not talking about his little squid. How was that, anyway?”
‘Jesus, Ju, all you ever think about is sex.”
‘There’s something else?”
Julius squealed a welcome to a handsome couple as they entered and he swished off. Blaze waited on the patrons. Where’d they all come from, these rich, urbane, assholes? How did they make so much money? And their fucking wives. She took an order for the wild boar fajitas with German mustard beer sauce at a window table. Outside, a black kid, hat sideways, pants almost off, hand on crotch, picked his nose and looked bleary eyed, maybe at his own reflection. The valets, college kids from SF State, hustled the Mercedes and Priuses. Why come to a restaurant on shitty old Market Street? Even it was called Styr.
Julius dropped her off around midnight. She undid the locks and clopped up the stairs to the studio. At least it was clean. She had a glass of wine and read texts. Nothing. He doesn’t even have fucking email, she thought. Her heart was in a knot. She took her glass and went up the back stairs to the roof. The deathless roar of the undead city flooded over her, yet she felt at peace up here. Her own mesa. She sat on the edge of the rumbling air unit and stared the million lights down.


‘You need to get up the strays. I know there’re some up third.’
‘By myself?’ Trav said.
‘Ginger knows how to do it. Just shoo ‘em down here and call me on the two-way.’
‘Got it’
Trav and Ginger paced nicely up past the lower rim to the maze of side canyons and boxes that came off the big washes. It hadn’t rained in four days, and there wasn’t any surface runoff, just some convenient little pools in the bends. Good places for cows. The day was not too bad either. The air was a little cooler after the front that had pushed through. Ginger was sparking, ready for her work. Thacker would be working inoculating the main herd with Jesus and Juan, pushing them around into the pen with ATV’s. But this was a horse job. Trav felt a little bump of pride, which he tried to push down, at being picked to do the job. It wasn’t like he was real hand like Jesus. I’m trying, he said to the canyon wall. I guess it’s really a shit job, he reflected.
Anything’s better than doin’ the boogie, he thought. He had a flash of Tony and Rebo, a stage, lights, the fucking contacts, radio, publishing. Rebo. How could he have fucked him over like that? Shit.
Fuck it, Trav.
Aloud, he said .’C’mon Ginger, let’s get us some cows.’

He worked up the draws into third wash. He saw a cow with two calves in a small box and thought he’d come back and get them. Ginger picked her way through the fallen red boulders and thorny growth. His chaps actually working the way they were supposed to. By midday he had twelves stragglers headed down the wash. He radioed. Jesus came up to meet him at the base of Mortuary Rock. He left the ATV behind a stand of pinones and came out from a high ledge, waving his hat, shouting in Spanish at the chingada cows, and getting the group moving. Then he hopped on and fired the four-wheel back up and the two hands moved the cows down to Second Mesa and the pens. Thacker and Juan were driving the beeves in a line into the chute, locking them down, rotating them and giving them their shot and a check up. One hundred eighty. Not enough to run a place on.
That’s what Trav liked about it. It was a doomed proposition, an idealized quest, like a child making up his own baseball league with his buddies, knowing that the real little leaguers would kick their ass, but still making the gesture. Music was supposed to be that; it wasn’t supposed to have been about getting burned by your best friends.
Trav made up for his lack of knowledge by using his muscles and they got ‘er done. Jesus, forty -older, stout, all muscle, even his beer gut, scarred and leathery as a worn-out baseball glove, laughed his way through the dusty day. Juan was quiet, skinny, knowledgeable. Thacker and the two Mexicans got their share of laughs out of the rock star getting kicked and shit on by stupid, farting, pissing cows, but it made Trav feel a part of something, Something almost pointless, something fine and clean.


Harleys and Dancin’ with Bullets

Old Hank Thacker, last of the mesa cattlemen, walked into the Crossroads bar with Jesus, Juan, and Trav. Buddy scowled at them. Fuckin beaners, he thought. But he said, ’Hank, you old desert rat. Get tired of pushing cows?”
‘Buddy’, said Hank, ‘beers for my crew.”
‘Sure. Coronas for them two?” he gave a little I’m so funny snicker with his lip.
“Fat Tire,’ said Jesus.”Polygamist’, Juan said. ’I’ll have a Corona,’ said Hank, ‘Sierra’, said Trav.
Buddy scowled. He didn’t like having Mexicans in his bar any more than he liked Utes or Navajos, or worst of all, niggers. The Confederate paraphernalia hung around the walls discouraged most of the rare black tourists, anyway. Worst of all is that fuckin’ nigger President. Great Satan hisself. Goddam law that wouldn’t let him choose his own clientele.
They drank their beers. The bar was empty; it was early still. No Sylvie, a couple of honky tourists gnawing at their tough steaks, telling themselves how authentic it all was. Classic Country played on the old chrome and plastic and glass jukebox. ’Last place with a jukebox’ murmured Hank, remembering other days. Willie Nelson, On the Road Again. Marty Robbins, El Paso. Patsy Cline, makin’ money for Willie, Crazy.
Trav felt the weight of the folded letter in his inner pocket of his Levis jacket. It was crumpled up from being mushed around for a few days. Unopened. What could she say that would change anything?
After all the dust of the day, which had grown hot after all and then produced a wind storm that blew dust right up and down their shirts and jeans, in their ears, noses, up their butt cracks, and everywhere else, the hands were grateful for the cutting quality of the cold beers. They got to thirds before the bar heated up. A bunch of bikers, latter day make-believe outlaws with forty-thousand dollar hogs and gaudy tattoos showing off their biceps and necks and foreheads, and everywhere else that was only solid muscle, came in clanking and scuffling across the floorboards with their heavy boots, wearing shades and bandanas, black leather and denim, and all that phony biker crap, and rowed up at the bar: seven big, ugly dudes. They laughed and shot glances at Juan and Jesus and made jokes that didn’t have to be heard to be understood, Buddy, the ringmaster, polishing glasses and leaning forward to whisper to their cocked, shiny, shaved heads, each muscle-bound guy tilting forward to catch the nuances, then leaning back and tossing shots and downing tall bud lights.
Jesus said, ‘time for us to go pretty soon, maybe.’
Not that he was worried. Jesus had known a fight or fifty in his time around the Southwest. His muscles were the equal of any biker’s, and he also carried an extra-fine antler-handled folding knife in a leather sleeve inside his left boot. He had spent a long, cold ranch evening stitching it in there. He could retrieve the blade with either hand and open it one-handed if he had to: fast. Juan could handle himself as well. But why cause trouble? They knew, as did Hank and Trav, the sentiment running against Latinos right now. In the southwest towns, once made prosperous by mines and timber, businesses were boarded up, pools of aquamarine toxic liquid sat below played-out tailings as tall as six story buildings. Rusted ore conveyers and wind-blown, ruined processing plants sheltered rattlesnakes and used condoms, tossed beer cans. The streets were the domains of Latino gangs and their white and Indian counterparts. Colors, pickups and lowriders, visionless terrorists. Mean and cold-blooded. Turf warriors with little worldly perspective. No appreciation of Mozart or Gauguin, no love of arugula salads or white wines, No Thoreau, no Mark Twain, no PBS. Blood knowledge, hijos de La Malinche, scarred and tattooed pendejos, willing to kill for money or some twisted sense of personal or tribal honor. Chingones who beat their women and venerated their mothers, worshipped bastardized, dark-purposed images of Catholic/Aztec Santos and carried nine-millimeter automatics under the car seat. Old white couples, still dreaming of a Ronald Reagan West, locked the doors of their fake adobe houses, with tiny walled front yards studded with planted cactus and yuccas and fading lawns, pathways marked with grey gravel, and didn’t go out at night, with good reason. Their counterparts, these latter-day Hells’s Angels wannabes, were probably from Oklahoma or California, Arkansas, or somewhere else. Sales associates, mechanics, little-league coaches, unemployed loggers, truckers, sons of the Confederacy, accountants, axe-grinding, hate-talk devotees, with Rush Limbaugh or his even worse imitators in their headsets as they rode. some were out there simply to feel the freedom of the open, trooperless backways, the finest anywhere for a nice ‘sickle, but many were taking to the trappings of the old Wild Ones, who had somehow slewed into super-establishment guardians of the American way instead of outlaws, keepers of the white flame, racist and hard. Storm troopers, militia vigilantes, with tiny, shiny black safety-approved Nazi helmets bedecked with the Ironic Cross, the symbol of the Third Reich and the lost White God who once ruled the land.
One aspect of what they viewed as the golden days of the West was truly embodied in both groups of these brainless jerks: they glorified getting hammered and fighting, the legacy of the frontier.
Trav fingered the letter. He was just about buzzed enough to take a look at it. Two couples came in, standard issue thirty-something Germans, the most knowable tourists. They knew every road, every trail, had studied the canyons and peaks on GoogleEarth and read histories and books on ecology, geology, flora and fauna, weather, winds, water, and everything else the average American never bothered with. The Americans, those Interstate RV gypsies who consigned the West to Sedona and the South Rim, the balloon fest in Albuquerque, Aspen and Vail, Montana’s most famous trout streams, maybe a houseboat vacation watching DVD’s, water skiing, and drinking Jack Daniels and lite beer on Lake Powell, the abomination that drowned Glen Canyon, and mostly to Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, But the Euros were respectful of the land, in awe of it, and also generally in really good shape, with that Alpine background of long hikes, cold showers, and personal discipline.
Behind the Germans came Sylvie, wearing tight jeans and a cowgirl shirt, lookin’ like the best worst trouble that ever came through a Friday night door.
She looked over at Trav, who tipped his imaginary hat and shot her with his finger, then blew away the imaginary smoke. The letter could wait.
More people came in, a young crowd, mountain bikers and hikers, athletic, good looking, trim, some Rasta-haired, others clean-cut Mormon. Duck was burning the crap out of the rangy steaks, and Honey, cigarette dangling from her too-red lips, was ladling beans onto the paper plates. How Buddy got away with charging twenty eight bucks for this seared shoe leather and canned beans served on Wal-Mart paper plates was anyone’s guess. Modern times. Good press. The mention on the Food Channel.
Sylvie came and sat at the table with Trav and the others. He introduced her around. Jesus and Juan brightened up, especially when she spoke fairly fluent Spanish with them, making jokes. Even old Hank sat up a little straighter, remembering again, other times.
‘Cuidado, muchacho,’ Jesus said to Juan, ‘Ella sabe bien nuestro lengua’
‘Pues, ‘she said,’ solo un poquito.’
They clanked beers and smiled. The skinhead Bikers had taken the big round table nearby and were glowering at fact that the Latinos were talking and laughing with the pretty white girl.
It was eight o’clock and the Crossroad was jammed. Buddy came over and said, ’Trav’, how ‘bout a few tunes?
Trav shook his head, ‘You go get ’em, Buddy. I wrestled cows all day.’
‘Sylvie put her hand on Trav’s arm. It was the first time they had touched. ’C’mon Trav, please play one. For me?’
The others grinned at him. ’I’m stuck, Mr. Chivalry. Ok.’
Stacy and her sister Ronda came out from the lobby and tended bar as Buddy, Honey, Billy, and Trav got up on the stage. Everyone shifted out to the patio. It was a fine evening, not windy for once. They launched right into Swinging Doors and the night was on. People rarely danced anymore at the Crossroads. There had been a time, way back in the forties, fifties, and early sixties, when it was the wildest roadhouse in the Four Corners area, home of many a Big Dance and Fight on a Saturday Night. But the Euro tourists were far more reserved and respectful than had been their earlier cow and farm hands, miners, and drunken Indian crowds of yore. The tourists tended to sit back and just listen.
But a few of the Rasta-haired mountain bike group were in their second cups, and they got up and started doing some half-ass two stepping and jitterbugging, and after a while, almost everyone was up on the patio, bumping around. One German couple were jitterbugging experts, and had everyone watching and applauding. The band went through a bunch of classis. Love’s Gonna Live here, I Walk the Line, Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone’.
Sylvie sat along a stone wall bench at the edge of the patio near the stage, with Hank, Jesus, and Juan. She could see that Juan was fidgeting, tapping the beat in his hard-worn ropers.
‘Quieres bailar?”
He shook his head, shyly.
‘Baile, compadre!’ Jesus clapped the skinny Juan on the shoulder.”E l baila bien, ’he grinned at Sylvie.
She took him by the hand and he reluctantly followed her a couple of steps onto the patio and they started jitterbugging. Juan, indeed, could dance, and so could Sylvie, or at least she could follow his homegrown Sinaloa shuffle-jitterbug, and they were soon giving he German couple a run or their money. Others joined the informal competition. Beer flowed, the band played uptempos, and the bikers sat sullenly at a picnic table, nursing Bud Lites.
After eight or nine fast songs, Honey started warbling her out- of- tune version of Crazy. Trav put down his guitar and came over to the bench. Sylvie was standing, sweating a little, laughing and glowing. Juan, pleading exhaustion, was sitting with a fresh Polygamist Porter. Jesus was all smiles, a fixed grin as he spoke softly.
‘I think our biker amigos are pissed.’
Surely they were. They leaned back against the adobe wall from their table, or hunched over the Bud Lites. A couple had put shades on.
Sylvie took Trav’s hand. ’Dance with me?”
He tossed his head. They swayed out, no big moves, just lightly holding each other.
‘This is so much fun!’ She said. But her question was right behind her words.
‘But what am I doing here, right?”
‘Kind of.’
‘I’ll tell you that whole story another time. How’d I sound? ‘
‘You are great, You know that.” She slid her right arm a little further around his neck pulled him cheek to cheek .They did a couple of twirls.
‘I’m heading back to Flag day after tomorrow, Classes and papers.’ She whispered. ‘but I am doing some field work at Horse canyon next month.’ She left it out there. C’mon, hit back, man.
‘If Hank hasn’t fired me for incompetence I should be here.’
She lightened her hold and looked away.
‘Sorry, ‘ Trav said,”Did I say something wrong?”
‘No, Trav. You’re fine,’ she said softly, ‘you’re fine.’ She suddenly pulled him a little closer again so he couldn’t see her face and they danced until Honey had finished murdering the classic Patsy Cline vocal to a big round of applause. Sylvie sat down and grabbed her beer and threw some back. Trav looked at her, not knowing what to say. He liked her. The letter was in the inner pocket of his jacket onstage, forgotten for the moment. He reached over the take her hand, but right then Buddy said off microphone, ‘hey kid, get up here and do your nigger music.’
Trav met Sylvie’s eyes. She smiled, but he could see her tears. He squeezed her hand gently, let it slip out of his, and then stepped up next to Honey and shouldered his telecaster ,looked back at Billy and counted off, one-two- three- four, and fired into Johnny B. Goode.
Now everybody was up. Sylvie grabbed old Hank got him out there, Jesus stood tapping his toes. A hippie chick- mountain biker made Juan get up and dance with her. The Bikers stayed plunked at their table, until blonde, fat, busty Stacy came out from behind the bar and took two on them by the hand started dong a wild-girl dance, shaking her rather large money maker in a most obscene fashion. Most of the other bikers got up and stood. There were over thirty dancers whirling and bumping, and sweating away out there on the flagstones. Trav went into his solo. He started with the Classic Chuck Berry stuff, but soon morphed into all the wild guitar licks of all the succeeding generations from Hendrix to Metallica, to Linkin Park and back around to BB King and Jeff Beck. The dancers went wild, even the Germans, who abandoned their jitterbugging for nine- drinks –free-styling. The hippie chick was twirling with Juan when he bumped into Stacy by accident. The result was instant.
‘Hey you motherfucking spic, keep your hands off her!’ One of the bikers shoved Juan right across the patio, knocking down four or five dancers. The biggest biker, a mustachioed hulk with a leather vest on, came right out after Juan. But Jesus was there in his face.
‘Just try it, pendejo.’
‘Fuck you, beaner!’
Jesus took the big man down with a savage, lightning kick to the outside of his knee. All hell broke loose. Trav threw down his Tele and jumped right out off the stage onto a biker who was closing in on Jesus. Sylvie screamed but also kicked another biker in the balls. Trav took a ham-fist right across the left side of his face and went down. The Germans drew back, unsure of which side of this racial melee they should be, but the Rasta-hairs took chairs at the bikers, who were plainly outnumbered. Many were shouting for calm, but no one was listening. Some scrambled to get out of the patio.
One biker, who had stayed sitting the whole time, a skinny, man with long sideburns and wax-tipped moustache, black hair greased back, stood up and pulled out a black pistol from his leather jacket. Hank yelled. Right then, there was an enormous concussion as Buddy, still at his place on the stage, fired off both barrels from his twelve- gauge straight up into the starry, Utah night.
Everyone stepped back for a second, unsure of what had happened. Sylvie tried to drag Trav to the bench. Jesus stood between her and the bikers. The skinny man had put his pistol away.
In a half moment, Buddy had cracked his shotgun, reloaded, and cracked it back again with an authority no one was going to question. There’s something about the machinery of a shotgun that’ll do that.
‘Show’s over for tonight, ‘he said firmly, but evenly, like an old-time sheriff in a TV western, lowering the barrels to a level just over the heads of the fighters.’ Pay up your tabs, and let’s all play nice now.’He stared down the bikers and the Rasta-hippies and Jesus.
Jesus stood calmly on the flagstones, staring at the bikers, who glared back, but then slowly backed down, and like chastened little boys, paid their tabs and fired up and roared off on their choppers into the night, heading for the Four Corners motel down the street. Stacy went off with the little greasy guy, hanging onto him with her left arm and flipping the bird at the world in general with her right hand.
Hank said to Buddy, who had stepped off the stage, shotgun still cradled in his right arm,’Shit, old man, I didn’t know you kept a big ol’ gun like that up there.’
‘Hank, when you been doin’ this as long as I have, you know to have your stage set up.’ He lit another Camel and blew a long blue stream of smoke into the night. A zillion bugs had come out around the lights.’ Goddam bugs, ‘he said.

Jesus and Sylvie helped Trav up to her room. He was swollen out and bloody around his left eye and was stumbling a little.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
‘Let’s just wash it up for you.’ She said.
‘Big shiner’ laughed Jesus,’ he needs to learn how to dance better.’
‘Poor baby’, said Sylvie, who got a washcloth and dabbed away the blood.
‘Trav sipped a beer and winced as she cleaned him up.
Jesus tipped his hat to Sylvie and said, ‘I gotta hang with my compadre. Those bikers are just down the street.’
Trav leaned back on Sylvie’s bed.”Don’t fall asleep for a while’, she said, ‘I’m worried about a concussion.’
Rebo and Juan

He tossed his jumble of stuff on the edge of the console and flopped down into the big, high backed swivel chair. His phone, under his keys, alongside his Afrin and his Mentos, started vibrating. He picked it up.
‘yeah….yeah…don’t think so…yeah.’ He clicked it off and turned to Steve, the engineer, ’let’s get it over with.’
‘You got it, big guy,’ answered Steve.
Rebo went out in the booth and put on the headphones, adjusted the music stand. A loose pile of lyrics, marked up with innumerable hieroglyphics and scribbles in pencil, phone numbers, various lines and words, was on the stand. He pulled the stool up under his little butt and cleared his throat a few times, took a sip of mint tea, unscrewed the cap off a pint of Maker’s Mark and took a tiny swing of that.
His ears itched under his phones . ’Shit, Stev-o, the track’s killin’ me’
Steve turned it down; like lightning, these modern day engineers.
Rebo sang four takes.
‘We can put ‘er together from that, ‘Steve said in the talk-back.
‘Fuck it, I’m done, ‘said Rebo. He took a nice pull at the bourbon, popped a Mentos. Another day, another dollar.
His cell buzzed again. Whose number? It looked familiar. A 415, The City. He impulsively picked it up.
‘You got him, go!” his ha-ha- so funny line. He was so clever. Truly that’s an old one, but he’d taken to saying he had made it up.
‘Rebo, this is Blaze McCormick.’
‘Hi, Blaze.’ He paused. Fuck, why do I ever pick up?’What’s the haps?’
‘Trav left some stuff at the space. He wanted me to pick it up.’
‘Oh, crap, Blaze, it’s all shut down, we’re done until the tour’s over. I don’t even have a key.”
Liar Liar, pants on fire, it came to Blaze.
“Rebo. It’s Trav’s stuff. His Strats, his amps. He wants them.’
‘Oh, you mean Squeezer’s Strats and amps. Sorry. I can‘t let those go. He knows that.’
Blaze struggled to keep calm.’ You know those are his.’
‘My old buddy Traveler ought to have read the deal we drew up together. That stuff belongs to the band. I’m just letting him use the Tele and the Boogie ‘cause I’m such a nice guy. He’s the one who wanted out. That hurt our band. It hurt me personally, Blaze. After all those years of getting to where we were.’
Jesus Christ, she thought; this guy could really spout a line of shit like a firehose.
‘Rebo, you know Trav doesn’t give a shit about contracts. He trusted you. He just wants his old Strats more than anything.’
Rebo fiddled with his keychain, he fingered the key to the band rehearsal space.” Trav is a great player; he can earn his own shit from now on. He ain’t getting’ nothin’, unless you would personally like to meet me to try to talk me into it.’ He grinned, knowing the insult he had just conveyed to the proud girl of Potrero Hill.
‘Fuck you, Rebo.” She said. He voice was like a coiled rattler.
“Have it your way, the both of you.’ Rebo clicked off. He swiveled the chair around. His jowls felt heavy and old.
Steve, comp that down, I’m goin’ to have some lunch.’
‘Sure, no sweatskis.’


Blaze put down the phone. There it was again. Shit. She sat down at the kitchen table and felt the upwelling rising to the soft skin under her chin. She made it to the bathroom in time to puke, a little thin stream of yellowish bile. It didn’t make her feel any better. Thank God it wasn’t all the time. She had an appointment at the clinic at three. What would she do without insurance? Fucking take care of it, she thought. But she knew she didn’t have the will to do that. She wanted it. She just didn’t want it all alone. Blaze, you don’t panic. You simply don’t panic. But the puking made her sweat and go clammy. Tia was sympathetic up to a point, but it wasn’t her problem. Julius told to just take care of it or think pink or blue. She couldn’t call her mom, that was for sure. She checked her texts again. Tommy. Oh go away Tommy, please.
My bad, she said to herself. He was attractive. Trav was gone, Tommy with flowers and nice Pinots and his brilliant intellect, wit, knowledge of art and style. Why wasn’t he fucking gay, for Christ’s sake? It would be so much easier for both of them. Better for him for sure. Now he was obsessed. She should have never given into him. Wine: the enemy of reason. The flash of the recoiling memory of her touching him that night disgusted her.
She stared blankly at the whitewashed city out the kitchen window, church towers and the jumble of buildings, piled on top each other for miles, fog bank breaking up just a little. She rubbed her abdomen and just let her mind fall away.


Sylvie drove up the long, rising straightaway, the forested San Francisco Peaks on the right, past Grey Mountain trading post. Her bag was in the back seat, her laptop on the front seat. She drove in silence, savoring the relative lack of cars and the simplicity of the open, unflamboyant landscape. Flagstaff was only an hour further. She let herself drift on her feelings, let them flow over the edge of the bathtub and onto the floor, soaking wine-smelling rose petals and lazy soap bubbles of dreaminess.
It had happened near dawn, as he woke in her bed. He just reached for her and she took him in without question, without artifice. No words, but long silences and silent spaces that were set on fire.
Afterwards there was nervous laughter and then a tense silence. Then, in a few minutes he began to talk very quietly about his childhood, about his mom and dad, both gone so young, and of his salvation on the fretboard of a fender guitar, on the stage.
‘I was so shy, ‘he whispered, close to her face, ‘I could hardly speak to people. I only had a few nerdy friends, geeks like me who didn’t fit in. But I knew, I just knew the guitar, from the first time I played’ H e laid back, his eyes at the ceiling, or looking at some scene from long ago and far away, ‘People could tell right away. By the time I was fourteen, I was playing in bands with twenty year olds, doing Metallica, Zep, I loved U2. I wanted to combine Edge and Hendrix. So that’s what I tried to do.’
She played her fingertips on his arm.
‘When I hooked up with Rebo we knew we had something. He’s almost forty. I was the hot kid. He fucked me over with the deals. I didn’t realize. I was just so naïve and stupid. ‘He paused. “I’m glad I am that way. It doesn’t work well for me out there, but I wouldn’t want to be like him or the others. They’re so cold. It’s all money and winning. To me, music is not about winning, it’s about being there, about ripping apart the universe for a few minutes, talking straight to yourself and everyone else.’
‘Wow’, she said.’ That is so right and deep, Trav. So you gave it up to come out here. Do you think you’re a cowboy?’
“Shit, I know there ain’t no cowboys. There ain’t no Jedis. I just wanted to get some space. I love the land here. California must have been nice in the 1850’s bit it’s so fuckin’ abused now. It’s all used up. This can’t get too used up. There’s nothing here for humans except big rocks to look at it, and most people would rather watch TV. So that part works for me. For now.’
“I love it too,’ she said, ‘The ruins, the canyons, the big quiet. If you don’t get it, then you might as well sit on a crowded beach or go to the casino. I say this is where the old Gods went to wait out humans. When we’re gone, they’ll still be here.’
‘Yes.’
She was almost breathless at hearing him talk to her; she couldn’t explain it to herself.


He came back the next night. The bikers had left town it seemed. Deputy Bill Woollard had driven over from Canyon City and talked to Buddy about it.
‘Sounds like another typical night at the Crossroads,’ Deputy Woollard said.
‘Yep’ agreed Buddy.

They fell in to each other that night, letting flow some held- in waters; keeping some held back.
‘I’ll be back in Horse Canyon at NAU’s dig next month.’ She said
‘Shit, that’ll be one hot dig.’
‘She shrugged, ‘beats selling mortgages.’
I guess it does.’
When she got up to pee while he slept, she felt his jacket pocket. The letter was gone.
She didn’t push him. He didn’t offer. But it was all sweet. A long hug in the dawn gravel lot outside the lodge.

The car felt funny all day, but she couldn’t put her finger on what was different. It was a little bit slow up the grades. She felt the right rear tire losing life as she came up near the tree line just north of Flag. Oh crap. She pulled over in an open, grassy stretch where the wind had laid the fence permanently tilting to the east. A nondescript western slope with pinones. Nothing for miles in both directions, but her cell phone worked here. No need; she could change a tire. A fairly consistent stream of trucks and cars were passing along every few minutes. She worried a little about a car full of poor quality male yahoos: rednecks, Navajos, Mexicans, coming along and seeing a single girl broken down. She didn’t need any help like that. A Cop would be fine. She popped the trunk and walked back, ready to do battle with a greasy tire and hot lug nuts on an fried -egg-cooking highway. She lifted the lid. The smell hit her at once. A stiff hand stuck through the lumpy, green –plastic contractor bag. Dark, dried blood pooled beneath it. The hand was fine, long fingered, calloused, not dirty, but with permanent dark- tipped fingernails from working the land, from driving ATV’s, from holding reins, stringing wire, and picking up horse’s feet for cleaning. She knew at once. Juan.
He sat up. She clicked on the TV. He took the washcloth and held it over his left eye. She picked up his jacket, which had fallen on the floor. A letter fell out. She could see a woman’s handwriting on it: Traveler Evans. She held it for a moment, just feeling it, then folded it back up and put it back in his pocket.
Duck and the Troopers.

Duck stacked the glasses in the racks below the bar and wiped down the wood with his towel. He liked the mornings, before the early drinkers and then the lunch customers. The bar was quiet. He didn’t care for music. He had KUTA on softly. With no other noise to distract he could hear the call-in show clearly. Taxes, government, illegals, environmentalists, Obama, black helicopters, lack of precious freedoms, our way of life, guns, more freedom, socialists, Marxists, communists. All good stuff. He got good and riled, too.
But he kept it hidden, even from his father, Buddy. Buddy hardly paid him any mind at all. Just told him what to do. Honey was Buddy’s favorite. Duck and Billy? Well, if Billy didn’t play drums, he’d be out on his ass, what with his pot smokin’ and Indian girlfriends and all that shit. But Billy got away with things. He stood up to the old man as no one else did. Buddy respected that and Duck knew it, too. But that wasn’t his way.
Duck just liked to be left alone. He had a little shed out beyond the lot that was his kingdom. There, he ruled. Buddy never more than knocked on the door and yelled at him, ‘C’mon, kitchen’s late.’
Under the bed Duck had DVD’s. DVD’s of women doing nasty, fantastic things. Duck had little plywood shutters. No one could see it when he watched them and got himself off. He’d make runs to Junction Valley and pick ‘em up at the place off I-70. Lots of truckers in there. He’d drink a beer or two and watch the girls dance. He got talked into buying a lapdance by a fake blonde with saggy tits one afternoon. It made him real horny, but real nervous, plus he didn’t have enough money for lapdances. Truckers did. He’d wear shades and a beat-up straw cowpoke hat and sit back low and long in his booth, but he was no trucker. He chewed gum while he drank beer, which made both taste like shit, like mixing orange juice with toothpaste. There was a little shop in front where there was all the porn a man could ever want; stacked to the ceilin’, sticking in your face. He liked girls with big, big tittles. He liked other stuff, too. He’d buy it and put it under the seat of his old, primered and tore-up F-150 and drive home and slip the latches on his shutters and put on headphones and play little sections over and over on his DVD player until he was done.
The he’d go cook the Famous Crossroads Steak for tourists. It was his little joke. Wash your hands: it’s Utah State Law. Ha-ha.
Honey, who did the beans and salads back there in the kitchen, didn’t like Duck. He wasn’t part of the real family in her view. He was creepy even to her. And he had a different mother, the one no one talked about.

Junction Valley Sherriff’s office got the email and a call a few minutes later. Woollard noted it and told Irene he’d have to go out to Second Mesa and Crossroads. He pondered which would be best to do first. He chose Crossroads. Buddy Williams was a knowledgeable man and it happened there. But he didn’t want word of it getting out to Hank Thacker’s place before he could tell him in person and account for those two guys, the guitar player and the spic. Well, the troopers would be at Crossroads before him if he didn’t hustle his ass down there. He flipped on his lights and hit it as he came up out of the valley and onto the open country. Man, a cruiser could get after it out here. He was doin’ almost a hundred, just nice and easy, listening to the crackle of the two-way updates like it was country music.
Most likely those bikers, he thought. Nothing to new about that. Drinkin’ and fightin’ ; guns. One less mojado. But how the body end up in that woman’s trunk? Shit, he hated real work. Let me pull over speeders and bust up some fights; let people know who the law is. On the bigger shit, he’d just as soon see frontier justice done half the time. The fuckin’ courts let all the bad guys out. Pansy-ass liberals. A drunk kid speeding was one thing. Bad-asses ? Take ‘em out to Big Canyon and drop ‘em off. Oops. Dang; a tourist fell. Too bad. Hell, it happened every few months anyway for real. Then he’d have to go down in there by boat and write up the accident. He often pictured guys he didn’t like after an eight-hundred foot fall. He hated it when it was a kid who fell, or a young woman. One gal fell and was just a pile of gore on the rocks below Horseshoe Bends overlook. But by some twist of fate and aerodynamics, her face was untouched. She stared out as if she was hypnotized or something. She was so pretty. He bagged her up and they floated out to the take-out and hauled her off. He got real drunk that night.
The troopers had beaten him down there. Buddy and Honey were talking to them, seated at a patio table like they were having a beer, shootin’ the shit. Buddy with his customary camel, Honey with a Polygamist that left her slight mustache showing after each swig.
The troopers, both of whom Woollard knew a little, shook hands with him and he sat down, taking out his blackberry and hitting his radio to let Irene know where he was at and what was proceeding.
“I told Officer Woollard about the incident, ‘said Buddy, nodding at Woollard, ‘we were playing. This little Latino guy, Juan, ‘
‘Juan Concepcion’?’ said officer number one.
‘Yeah Juan Concepcion’, was dancin’ with that gal when he bumped into Stacy Jones, our old gal who works here, who was dancin’ with one of the bikers. I wasn’t really paying attention to that. I was tryin’ to remember the frikkin chords to the song we was playin’ at the time. Shoot, I mean, it ain’t like there’s never a fight here. Not too much anymore, but you know how it is.’
Officer one nodded tightly, unsmiling. Buddy didn’t know this guy. Buddy squinted a little and blew his smoke sideways to not inconvenience him. The officer was younger, maybe late twenties. By the book. These young guys just didn’t get it like the Sherriff’s deputies did.
‘Go on.’
‘So, there were bodies flyin’ around pretty good for a couple of minutes. That rock guitar player, Trav Evans, up and dived right of the stage on one of those bikers. Lotta balls, but not too smart. Another guy cold –cocked him good. ‘
‘So that’s when you discharged your firearm?” said number one
Buddy lit up another camel off his present one, raising a good cloud of smoke in the process. ’Yep, I let both barrels fly. Gets folk’s attention.’
“Where did you keep the shotgun?”
‘Behind my amplifier, officer. I’ve only had to use it a couple of times.’
‘We show twelve times in the last five years.”
‘That’s about right. Beats somebody getting hurt.’
Woollard had to stifle a laugh. The other officers weren’t smiling.
‘Did you see anyone else with a firearm?’
‘Yep, one of them bikers, a little guy with a mustache. He pulled a piece, looked like a smaller pistol, twenty-0five, thirty-two, something like that.’
‘Did you see you anyone with a firearm, miss?”
Honey said,’ I’m not sure. Maybe. It was dark back there where those bikers were sitting.’
Officer one looked back at Buddy. ‘And you haven’t heard from this Stacy Jones?”
Not a word. She rode off with the little guy on his chopper. They were booked down the road at my other motel.’
‘And they checked out?’
‘They were all gone in morning, Stacy, too. I got their names and licenses.’
‘We have them already.’
‘You got ‘em in custody?’
‘Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Williams, mam.’

They brought out Duck and Ronda and Billy and the others and grilled them. No one seemed to know anything beyond the fight, except Duck.
“That guitar player. He seemed pretty sweet on that girl Sylvie. But they had some trouble, I think’
‘Oh, how so?” asked number one. Woollard kept silent.
‘They was dancin’ real close, and she was cryin’ after.’
‘When was that?’
‘Right before the fight broke out.’
‘Where were you when you saw this?
‘Over at the end of the bar.’
‘Down there?” the officer pointed to where the bar let out on the patio.
‘Yessir.’
‘Thanks for your information.’
Duck went off to his shed and lifted up the floorboard under his bed and slid something into the hole.

Woollard followed the troopers up to Second Mesa Ranch and watched as the officers interviewed Hank, Trav, and Jesus.
Jesus was angry.
‘Thos pendejos will get what’s coming them!’ he sat forward in his chair in the ranch’s kitchen.
‘Pleas stay calm, Mr. Chacon’.
He sat back, ‘sure, sorry. Juan was my best friend.’
‘We understand. I’m sorry for your loss. We will bring whoever did this to justice.’
Jesus glared. Gringo justice. Not the real deal.
The officers got the same basic story out of the three men. When it was Trav’s turn, they asked him about the sequence of events. He thought they we done.
‘Mr. Evans, do you have romantic relationship with Sylvie Brighton?’
‘We had just met recently. She and Jesus’ brought me to her room at the lodge after the fight. She cleaned me up. Later on, we had a consensual sex.’
And the next night?”
‘Yes.’ He sat in his chair. ’Officer, can you tell me what’s going on? Where’s Sylvie? ‘
‘We are conducting a thorough investigation into the killing and transport across the State Lines of Juan Concepcion.’
‘Is she in jail?”
‘Mr. Evans. We ask that you stay in Canyon County until we tell you that you may leave.’
‘Am I under suspicion?’ He grew angry.
‘We need to treat every case of homicide carefully, Mr. Evans.’
Trav was tense, but he leaned back in his chair. These guys were for real, this was for real. ‘I understand. Can I work? Go into town?’
‘Please stay in Canyon County until further notified.’
‘Yes sir.’

He tried calling her again from the ranch phone. The tinny voice said, ’this is Sylvie Brighton. Please leave a detailed message after the beep…’
Receptionists at the NAU anthro department were cold and unhelpful except for one. ‘You didn’t hear this from me, but she’s in county.’
‘In jail?”
‘Yes, they found the gun in her car.’

Fire in the canyons.

They gave the horses their heads. No sense in trying to direct a horse in this country, not at least when it came to particulars. Horses aren’t fools, even if they think their riders are sometimes. Up on these rim rock ledges, a man can easily make a mistake, but a horse is likely to try and keep her footing.
Trav sat as relaxed as he could be and let his spine flow loose with Ginger’s bumpy steps. Jesus rode Nitro a few dozen paces back. Both men had their hats on. The sun was overhead and it was hotter than a barbecue grill. This way led to the top of Third Mesa.
‘I’d say they’re up there, ‘said Hank that morning. ‘There’s that tank and they’ll head for water.’
Two dozen head had wandered off further than Hank liked. The calves weren’t fully grown, and cattle will fall off heights. He wanted his hands to drive ‘em down the long way back around Third Mesa and down Dead Horse Canyon to the maze and then down further to Second Mesa.
‘Crazy chingada vacas, ‘said Jesus. He swatted away a deerfly. How the fuck did these chignon pendejo deerflies live out in the middle of nowhere? Them and the black houseflies. You see any houses out here? He’d say to Trav.
Trav looked up at the rim above. A tricky steep cut led up. The drop off here below it was at least four hundred feet. A stumble was real trouble. Death to the horse and to the rider too if he didn’t dismount at first fall. Trav held back his fear and leaned forward as Ginger made big steps on the boulders. She slipped every few paces, and when she rose up and humped her back to clamber over it like in that rhinoceros way horses climb, Trav didn’t know if he would toss his cookies or fall off backwards. He secretly held the horn with his hand, his body shielding that fact from Jesus, who sat on Nitro waiting for the lead horse to make the climb before following. No sense in taking a falling rock to Nitro’s legs or Jesus’ face. Trav’s toes barely held the stirrups. He had wanted Jesus to go first but went ahead anyway out of pride and anger. Angry about everything.
The bottom part of the cut was a boulder field, lots shelf rock, flat flags of sandstone, slippery and completely unstable. Above, the cut made a bowl about a hundred yards wide where a part of the rim had fallen thousands of years ago, though it looked like it had just happened, notching back from the jutting rim. There was a natural ledge trail that traversed the rim, gradually going upwards from left to right at Trav looked up; a hairy place to ride. They’d get off and lead the horses when they got up there. Above the rim, there were pinon trees and junipers, their roots slithered into the rim- rock ledges like leathery snakes, both holding on to the rock and holding it in place at the same time. Below, right where the boulder field ended and the bowl began, there were scattered huge rocks, house- sized pieces of the fallen rim, like fallen remnants of monumental statuary. The trail passed between them. An unsettling prospect, as the big rocks looked unstable, even if they had sat unmoving for millennia.
Trav sweated, wiping his brow with his sleeve, which was soaking wet anyway. The flies buzzed about his eyes. He was scared and miserable. Sylvie’s call hadn’t helped, well, maybe a little, but the whole thing made him feel like he wanted to puke and die.
‘They released me, ‘she had said, ‘but I can’t go anywhere.’
‘That’s what they told me, too, ‘he said.
‘Trav, I never saw that gun in my life, I don’t own a gun.’
‘I know; I only have this pistol and the rifle that Hank makes me take when we go way back in. For snakes and coyotes. I’ve never fired it. I don’t like killing things.’
‘Omigod, Trav, Poor Juan. What’d he do? Dance with me.”
‘I guess some people can’t stand the sight of a Mexican dancing with a white girl. It had to be those bikers.’
‘Have the police told you anything?’ she asked.
‘Only that they’re working on it. The local deputy up here is real good ol’ boy. He doesn’t like me, thinks I’m a fuckin’ liberal. He’s right, I am. So he’s not telling us anything. I’m just supposed to stay put.
‘Trav, I wish I could see you.’ He could hear the desperation in her voice
‘I want to see you too, Sylvie. But we can’t for now. Were your fingerprints on the gun or anything? Surely they’re not.’
“I never touched it. It was under my car seat.’
‘Your car was locked, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, I always lock it. I’m from Sacramento. It’s an old habit. I never leave it unlocked. Someone got it unlocked and popped the trunk from the inside.’
‘Anyone with a door tool like a triple A guy could do that. Even a coat hanger. Shit.’
Trav could hear her crying softly, trying to not let him hear.
‘I’m sorry baby, ‘He said, ‘I feel like it’s my fault.’
‘Oh, Trav, what am I going to do?”
‘If they really thought you did it they’d hold you. They’d hold me. There’s no reason for us to have…’ he cleared his throat, as if trying to get the very thought of the words out of his voice. ‘The truth will come out. They’ll get those bikers and figure it out. I’ll come and see you as soon as they let me.’
‘Trav, I hardly know you, but…’ She was quietly sobbing.
‘I know, baby, I know.’


Trav and Jesus halted and dismounted once they passed the big rocks.
‘I hate this chingada trail, said Jesus, squinting up at the rim. It was only about a hundred and fifty feet up to the rim, but the ledge trail cut across the face of the bowl, making the trail about two hundred yards, with one switchback away on the right, that doubled back and wound the trail to the rim.
‘I guess Hank thought this would get the other shit off our minds.’
‘Well, the old toro is right; I’ll be too busy shitting myself after we make that switchback. ‘
The fall from here was unthinkable, about six hundred feet of tumbling horse and rider, broken bones, broken necks, oblivion with one misstep.
‘Well, let’s get it.’
Jesus led the way, leading Nitro. The first fifty feet was easy and then the ledge got small. There was enough room, but not if a horse slipped on loose rock. Jesus sauntered ahead like he walking to the barn, humming some ranchero tune under his breath. Trav followed with Ginger.
Away to the west, the canyon lands stretched out farther than the eye could see, only distant snow-capped peaks floated like blue ships on a sea of light purple haze that shimmered with heat.
They were about halfway to the switchback when the shot rang out, The crack- pop of the rifle shattering the silence and echoing in the bowl. The bullet chicked off a section of the trail right between them, spattering small rock and a shooting star’s tail of dust as it skittered off into space.
‘Shit! ‘said Jesus.
‘Motherfucker!’ said Trav. There was no turning around here. Jesus unsheathed his rifle and crouched back under Nitro’s neck. Trav was under an overhanging shelf. He went to his knees and glued himself to the cliff face.
‘Where ‘d it come from?” said Jesus.
‘I don’t know,’ whispered Trav. He slid under Ginger’s belly and got the pistol from the saddlebag.
‘Fuck, I hate these things.” He said.
Thank God the horses hadn’t shied.
Silence.
‘Can you turn her around?” asked Jesus.
‘I don’t know. She might.’
‘We gotta go the fuck back down and get behind them rocks, compadre. Go on; get your ass down that trail. Men first, horses on their own.’
Trav squeezed past Ginger and ran back down the trail.
Another shot. Trav heard a soft plunk. Shit, they shot one of the horses. Or Jesus. He made it to the boulders and crouched own, taking that safety off the pistol. Fuck. He took off his white hat and edged out a couple of inches and peered back up the trail. Jesus had gotten back between the horses, where Trav had been, sheltered by the overhang from shots from directly above, but not from anything coming from the right. Jesus had his rifle pointed up and toward that direction. The horses stood quietly, with the patience of well trained cattle horses. Then Nitro just kind of stumbled and slipped off. To Trav it was like watching in slow motion. The horse fell, legs rolling around like branches on a rolling log; He could hear the leg bones snapping. Nitro screamed a horse scream, his death scream. The he was gone off the lower rim. They would find him on the high benches above second mesa when they found him.
He saw a glint on the rim, over to the right. He raised the pistol with both hands like they tell you to in class and fired in the general direction of the glint. The pistol almost kicked out of his hand, the report was fucking loud. Jesus had made it past Ginger and was running down the trail holding his rifle and his hat. Ginger managed to spin around and she followed. Another shot, and another. A bullet pinged off a boulder above Trav’s head. Jesus jumped between the boulders and grabbed Ginger’s reins and pulled her around to safety,
‘Madre de Dios!’ he said.
Silence fell.
‘We’re fuckin’ trapped here, ‘said Trav.
‘Until sundown.’
They waited. The sun passed westward and an after an hour they were in shadow for the rest of the afternoon. Ginger nuzzled canteen water out of Trav’s hand. No more shots came. The world was draped in hot silence, broken only by buzzing insects and the swishing of Ginger’s tail, the occasional fall of pebbles when one or the other of them shifted positions on the rocks.
Jesus lay down and poked his rifle around to where he could shoot up at the right side of the rim. Trav sat with his back to rock, looking up and to the left, where a small outcropping of rim peeked over the boulder. It was a tiny piece of rim, almost an island sticking off the main rim. He would see if anyone tried to climb out there. He moved every few minutes, straining his neck to keep his vision on the spot. There was a clump of junipers on the rim rock, so if someone got out there, they would have free shot at their position.
‘Seemed like only one rifle,’ said Jesus.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Either he was really a bad shot, or he was trying to scare us off. We were fuckin’ patos sentados, amigo.’
‘He hit Nitro.’
‘Might have been just another bad shot. Pobre caballo.’
‘This is fuckin’ nuts.’
Trav reached up and stoked Ginger’s soft muzzle. She grubbed gently at his empty hand.


They went up with Deputy Woollard and another deputy the next day on ATV’s, the long way up Dead Horse Canyon. Woollard had his rifle in a snap-lock on the front of his ATV, his Glock nine-millimeter loose in its holster. Hank Thacker rode up, too. They stopped well back from the rim, on the crest of a ridge near the water tank. Sure enough, the cattle were scattered around the tank. The sun blazed. Trav and Jesus pointed out the area from which the shots must have been coming. Woollard ordered them to stay put and went ahead with the other deputy. Trav and Jesus and Hank could hear the buzzing of the ATV’s as they made their way across the washes and the rough pinon and juniper studded mesa towards the rim. Then the sound faded away and all that was left was the wind moving through the dry branches and the occasional lowing or snorting of one of the cows or another. Clouds were building over the High ranges to the north, looking like a storm afternoon coming.
The ATV’s came back after a while, appearing and disappearing as they made their way through the mesa top country. They brought a wave of dust with them as they crunched up and stopped.
Woollard pulled off his wraparound shades and wiped his face with a handkerchief. ‘There is a camp out there. Been there a while. Looks like one guy, maybe two. Someone was here recently.’
Jesus kept a stoic face.
Trav thought, no shit, Sherlock.
‘One thing, said Woollard, ‘I know he drove one of these things up here. Looks like that’s been going on for a long time. I couldn’t find any spent shells along the rim anywhere. I took some pictures of the tracks. There’s a trail that leads down to the west.’
‘Sure, ‘said Hank. It’s a mosey, but town’s that way.’
Woollard looked grudgingly at Jesus and Trav. ’So, I can’t rule out your story.’
Trav said, ‘Can’t rule it out? What about our dead horse?’
‘Anyone that’d kill a human being would kill a horse. Maybe to cover up the truth.’
The clouds to the north had thickened and built up. A classic thunderhead was rising. A distant roll of thunder boomed across the open spaces.
‘Time to head down,’ said Woollard.
Trav looked at Jesus. They kept their mouths shut.


Blaze finds out...The Letter

Blaze saw the messages. Six from Tommy in a row. Jesus H, she said, can’t the guy leave me alone? Well, she would need to clear them or her box would be full.
‘I have to see you…’ she hit delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. She paused for a second before just deleting the last one.
‘Blaze. I must tell you. I can‘t leave this on a message.’ His voice, tiny and tinny, trembled.
Her finger poised above number three, the delete button. She pressed down lightly and it was gone. Then she hit his number.
‘Oh thank God!’ He said. He sounded like he was crying.” I’ve got to see you. I’m coming over.’
She made a big frown and felt her forehead tighten. She reached up and rubbed it unconsciously to relieve the pressure.
‘Not here, Tommy, I just can’t.’
‘Blaze,’ he said, ‘this is not what you think. It’s…. I can’t say it over the phone.’ He sounded so serious, she relented.
‘OK, at Mo’s. How soon can you get here?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Ok, I’ll see you.’
She hung up. She had a strange feeling, like something was seriously wrong. He’s not stupid. I’ve already told him no. I know he’s obsessed, but is he dangerous? His sexual repression, his inability to get it up sometimes, worried her. She let herself sit with the feeling. Not dangerous to her, but maybe to himself. Whatever this was, she had to stay focused on getting him off her case, out of her life. Life is too hard these days, she thought, you just can’t be sure.
She sat at Mo’s for over an hour. She tried his phone after a half-hour, then again four more times over the next forty minutes. Only a ‘not in service’ message. He was coming from The Hollow, but even if traffic was really bad he could have been there in forty minutes. She finally folded up the Chronicle and left and went home to get ready for work. Her whole body was tense; she realized she was hunched over like a peasant carrying a load of coal. It wasn’t like him to not show up, especially after all that drama. Sirens wailed in the distance. There are always sirens.
It was late in her shift that Peter came into the restaurant. She saw him at the door and recognized him from some party or other. She couldn’t place his name at first and then remembered meeting him at Elaine’s. He shook his head at the maitre’d and pushed through the tables to her.
“I’m Peter, ‘he said. His face was fallen. He was maybe forty, but looked like an old, broken man. ’You haven’t heard.’ he said; a question he already knew the answer to. ‘I’m sorry. Tommy was hit by a Muni car this afternoon.’
‘What!” She said, much louder than she thought. Heads swiveled around. Peter was crying.
‘They couldn’t save him. He died at four-fifteen.’
‘Oh My God.’ She said. She reached out and pulled Peter to her tight. She knew who he was now.
‘He called me today. He was…’
‘I know. He was crossing Market and slipped on the tracks. The car couldn’t stop.’ He pushed back from her gently. ’Tommy was…’
‘Your partner?’She said.
‘Well, he was my friend, yes, yes. He had just gotten the news. He needed to tell you in person.’
‘What news?”
‘Blaze, he had just learned he was HIV positive.’
It hit her like a sudden wave. She felt herself being carried away by it, spinning, tumbling, calculating her chances of escape from it. There was none.
‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered. She slumped onto a bar stool and put her hand on the wood. There was no comfort in it. There wouldn’t be until she knew for herself.
She looked at him. ‘Are you...do you…’
‘I don’t know. He just found out this morning. I am going in tomorrow.’
Tia had brought two glasses of cabernet. She slid them gravely across the bar and slowly let her arms draw back. She didn’t know what had happened, but she knew it was something big and bad.
You fucking moron, said Blaze to herself. You broke the rules. I need you, Trav. You must hear me somehow.
Peter sat and cried into his hands.


Trav sat in his little room in the loft of the barn. So simple; that how life was going to be. No more fucking Rebo, no managers, no more pressure of commitments, no city, no dirty clubs or god-knows-where hotel rooms, no stupid party girls, no mindless adoration for his worthless guitar playing. Just open space, real work, freedom. Now look. He felt like kicking the planks out of the walls. But he controlled his outer rage, if not his inner. Stupid idiot. Stupid fucking rednecks. It was no better here than anywhere else. Maybe worse. I can’t even leave. Shit! He kicked his dirty socks across the floor. Who the fuck was doing this shit? He had thought it was the bikers, but maybe it wasn’t. How many people were there in Crossroads, anyway? The crew at the lodge, Honey, Billy, Buddy, Duck, Ronda, and that meth tramp Stacy, who started the whole fucking thing and who was nowhere to be found, the people at the gas station, A few Utes and old hippies and other alcoholic end of the road down and outers. Mormon Lester at the other hotel and his wives and kids and their toddlers. Then there were the tourists. There was a steady stream of them, always changing. Mexicans? A dozen. Maybe eighty or ninety people total lived in Crossroads. Almost everyone had guns. You never even thought about people with guns; rifles are in every truck. A lot of guys carried sidearms openly along with big, antler- handled knives. The western thing. You heard shots all the times. Guys out blasting TVs or rocks. Coyotes, and jackrabbits, rattlers.
So who the fuck had been shooting at them? Whoever it was, it could have been Juan’s killer, or it could have been anyone with a mind to shoot at something. The bikers were long gone. Deputy Woollard had told Hank that they’d all checked in under one name, Luther Brooks, Texarkana, TX. A good place for redneck biker to be from. Good place to find yourself some racists as well. But there was nothing to tie Luther Brooks to the killing. He had given names of all the bikers. The handgun was unregistered, the serial number filed off: the kind of piece that a Mexican was more likely to own than a proud Texan. In any case, there were no prints. All Luther Brooks, greasy hair and legal pistol and all, was, was a person of interest, who also couldn’t leave his home county for the time being without getting clearance from the local Sherriff.
What Trav didn’t know, what Woollard hadn’t told Hank, is that Juan had been strangled and sodomized, then shot in the head after he was dead. So determined the coroner. Whether he had been sodomized before being strangled or after was unascertainable at this time. So read the report.
Woollard had said: fuckin’ queer- ass beaner.
Trav looked over at the upturned barrel that served as his nightstand. Shit, Blaze’s letter. He sat and looked at it, weary at what it might contain. More accusations, more heavy stuff about commitment. More pleading for another chance. You weren’t the reason I left, he thought. You were a reason, but not the reason. He put it in words to his own mind again, as if arguing the case in some internal courtroom. I needed to walk in my own footsteps for a while, Blazer. I’ve been doing what other people have told me to do all my life. Blaze, honey, you’re good, you’re a good person. But I need some time, some space. It’s too out of balance. You should have someone who loves you as much as you love. Shit, that’s a good song, he thought.
He picked up the letter and unfolded the single piece of Crossroads Lodge stationary. There were only two words right in the middle of the page, in her neat, schoolgirl handwriting.
He stared at it, like he had known already somehow, his stomach queasy. Then he crumpled it up, thought better of it, and smoothed it back out, refolded it, and slid it into his guitar bag pocket.
He went to the window and looked out, unseeing. The bug lump of Warrior Rock lay down the slope of the Mesa’s foot. Beyond that was Crossroads, beyond Crossroads was all of Utah, Nevada, The Sierras, the Central Valley, The East Bay Hills, Berkeley, the Bay Bridge, Potrero Hills, Blaze’s stairs, her door, Blaze.
Inside of Blaze was his unborn child.


Watershed

“You ain’t going nowhere, young man,’ said Deputy Woollard, wiping the sweat off his bald dome with a paisley Wal-Mart cholo handkerchief. Never mind the fact that he wasn’t any older than Trav. Trav stood in front of the untidy desk, arms folded. Hank stood alongside of Trav, his beat-up old cowpoke hands like a couple bags of peanuts loosely dangling from his wrangler pockets. The tiny window- unit air conditioner wasn’t cutting it against the early monsoon heat. It would rain today later on if they were lucky.
‘Now, Woollard,’ said Hank, ‘ you know damn well Trav didn’t kill that Mexican.’
‘I don’t know what I don’t know, ‘said the deputy, leaning back in his chair. ‘What I do know is what’s been handed down by the county. He is not allowed to leave the area until we get us some resolution on this. I don’t care if he’s got four women knocked up.’
Hank scowled. Trav just stood there with no visible sign of anything but observation in his countenance.
‘Look, ‘said Woollard,’ if it’s nay consolation, I’ll contact the Judge when he gets back in on Monday to Junction City.’ Mebbe he’ll feel a little warmer and fuzzier than I do about having an unsolved murder and a person of interest who is currently on hand, where he can be monitored. Or mebbe he’ll decide that our local accommodations might be a better place for this man to wait out events.’
Woollard got up and came out from behind his desk. A former offensive lineman for Weber State against a rock guitar player. Trav stared up hard at Woollard, who matched him with an oh yeah expression, try it, punk. Hank grabbed Trav’s elbow and turned him away and they went out into the heat.
Some clouds were beginning to gather over the Rifle Mountains to the southwest. The wind was picking up. Devils were twisting away across the dun slopes of the nearby mesa. Av had the keys. He put the hammer down and they rumbled away through the blowing dust in the old truck, silent as undertakers.
Woollard watched them roll away. The sky was already dark to the south. Gonna be a big one, he said to himself. He went to his desk, pulled out his keys and unlocked and slid open the third drawer down and lifted out a fifth of jack Daniels. He took a nice pull and sat down, one foot up on the side of the desk. The radio chattered away, interrupted by bursts of static from the distant, unseen or heard lightning strikes up in the Rifles. He took another solid swig and slowly screwed the cap on and slid the bottle noiselessly into the open drawer. The pistol poked its barrel out from under a copy of the Desert News. He locked the drawer and folded his arms across his big old tummy and closed his eyes for a minute.


‘Don’t go doin’ something fucking stupid, Traveler,’ said Hank as he let himself out of the truck. “this storm is going to blow but you know they always die down after sunset. Juts don’t get caught on the other side of bug wash if it really hits up on the rim.’
‘Thanks, Hank, I’m ok. I’m just goin down to have a beer at Lodge. Horses are all in anyway. Jesus ‘ll be here.’
‘Bring my truck back by night.’
‘Yessir.’
‘Wherever is that damn Jesus? He was supposed to be back here by now.”
‘I can’t say, hank. I haven’t seen him all day. He said he’d be back.’
‘He’s still upset about that horse.’ Said the old man.
‘Cobardes.’
‘What?”
Cobarde. It’s Spanish for coward.’ Trav scratched his head. He hadn’t shaved and his normally close cut dark brown hair was getting matted and semi-long as well,’ he might’ve gone up to the rim again.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’


Jesus was riding along almost as slow as walking on the ATV, stopping every few feet to examine the ground along the trail. Unless there was a washout from a storm, like the one building this afternoon, a footprint, a hoof print, or an ATV track would stay visible for weeks out here. Storms, though powerful and violent, usually didn’t dump much rain. Wind has slower effect on man-made marks in the country with a fair amount of grass, prickly pear, and scrub like up on the high mesa. The junipers and the pinones blocked the winds as well.
He tracked the obvious ATV road, originally a jeep track, but now narrower than the oldest ruts, as ATV’s replaced four wheel drive trucks for the most part up here. He stopped on a rim and looked down into the valley to the west, towards Crossroads. He could see the two motels and the Sinclair gas station, a couple of trucks outside the bar. In the dusk and the gathering storm it was hard to make out a lot of detail, he took out his binocs and scoped along the trail. It wound down the side of the long canyon to the river and crossed at the old bridge, a metal girder trestle from the 1940’s. No good for cars anymore, but could still handle a horse or ATV. Beyond the bridge was the jumble of shacks and trailers belonging to Billy and Duck, Honey, and the motel maids, some of them hookers, who came and went each season. He noted three float boats unloading their tourists on the sandbar behind the lodge. He scanned back up the trail, looking for anything that looked out of place. He found nothing, but thought he might as well head on down on his ATV to the lodge. It was going to rain and lightning.
He hopped on and pulled forward slowly, keeping his eyes on the track. About a quarter mile down, he saw it: a small pile of brush that didn’t belong where it was. Three or four uprooted sage bushes held down by a fallen juniper. It didn’t look right at all. He got off and walked around the pile and found some irregularities on the ground. Someone had scratched out a set of foot prints with a sage bush. He followed the faint track, hand on his piece. He lost the track for a moment, and then recovered it at a rim section, where there was a slight cleft. Here, the trail maker had been careless, and sneaker prints were visible going down the cleft into thick scrub that grew in the path of seasonal runoff. The brush was too thick to follow the tracks through. He tried to go around it, but cliffs walled off further descent into the next level of bench. He couldn’t see the trail beyond the brush in the gathering darkness. A few fat raindrops splattered and a roll of fairly close thunder rumbled across the canyon country. He carefully retreated up the hill and cleft and made his way back to the ATV. It began to rain hard. Well, he wouldn’t have to drag any sage bushes over his foot prints. This was going to be a gully washer.
Too bad, he thought. He noted the location of the brush pile and put his poncho on over his shoulders and guns and putted down to the Bridge. He stopped just as he made the far side of the bridge to note the most recent SATV tracks before the rain washed them away. Then he saw it: one clear footprint with the same sneaker pattern that he’d seen up above. It led to the shanty-town of trailers and shacks behind the lodge.


The t-storm was a big one. The black clouds of the base spread across the mesa lands and thundered almost without pause around the higher ridges of the ranges. The biker rode head down, peering up through his smoke colored bubble visor at the rain and hail and the long curves of the empty road. His leathers were getting soaked, but he didn’t want to stop with so much lightning everywhere. The road dropped down into grey wash canyon and he spotted a red-rock overhang, which was partly obscured by a runoff waterfall. He’d get his rain suit out there. He slowed and half swerved on the slick mud right into the shelter of the cut. The waterfall dropped like a curtain, not only water, but rocks the size of baseballs and even bigger, washed over by the first really good rain of the monsoon season. He pulled off his helmet and wiped his head and face with a hand towel from his side bag. Motels wouldn’t miss it, besides, he wouldn’t come back this way.
The rain really began to pour, hail mixing in. Some of the stones were nickel -sized. The waterfall and rain combined to come down in blinding sheets. He had to admire the raw power and scale of it, even if he just wanted to get this done and get the fuck out of here once and for all.
He saw the Sherriff’s car come down into the cut of the canyon. He just stood there, unmoving. It rolled by, wipers going double-time, and up the other side of the canyon and went on. He pulled his rain suit on and tidied up his saddlebags and the under seat compartment. Nothing to hide; everything was legal. He had a smoke and watched the storm roll on until almost dark, then headed out on the rainy road north, towards the Lodge.

Trav pulled the antler door handle. The lodge was mostly empty, just Duck doing hius usual glasses washing and Buddy smoking, nursing a beer at the bar, his black old Styetson tipped half back like and old film cowboy. Like Clark Gable if he had gotten ten years older than he did. He held his cigarette close by his face, his two hands together. The blue smoke rising like steam from his fingers, caressing his leather-lined face and the brim of his hat.
‘One and one?” asked Duck.
‘Sure’ Trav said. Duck drew a polygamist and a shot of what Buddy claimed was Jim Beam, though everyone knew it was some generic shit he got in Cortez and decanted.
The rain was pouring down. Thunder shook the lodge.
‘Real gusher, ‘ said Buddy, squinting sideways at Trav through the smoke.
‘Yeah, washes ‘ll be fuckin’ flooded out until morning. Can I crash here until it clears out a bit?”
‘By our guest. Couch in the lobby free for musicians.’ Buddy’s eye’s glinted with his little joke.
‘Side entrance to Heaven and a meal, right?” grinned Trav. They’d been through this before. Buddy had spent a lifetime being too cheap to pay for motel rooms as he played with his band across the southwest in his younger days. ’Gimmee a car, a cot, a tent, a trailer, a sleeping bag and a tarp. A couple shots and a pack of smokes and I’m your one-man band.’
The motel was mostly empty tonight. Four rooms of Euros. Duck had the grill going. Gotta sell them steaks.
The back door slammed open in a gust of dark wind. Jesus stepped into the bar and took of his hat and shook it over the piece of Astroturf that served as the back door mud room. He hung his hat and slicker of horseshoe racks near the door.
“Chingon’ rain, senores.”
‘Hey’, said Trav. The others stayed silent. Jesus came over to Trav, who nodded to Duck, who gave him a refill and doubled it for Jesus.
‘Get wet out there?” said Trav.’
“Shit ‘jes,’ said Jesus.” It was raining so hard I had to take shelter in the vagina of an old Ute woman.’ Dry as a chingada cave in there.’
This brought a chuckle from even the normally silent Duck, who kept drying glasses. What is he fuckin’ obsessed? thought Trav. Buddy snickered in spite of himself.
‘You make a fire and cook up some antelope while you were in there?” The old man said.
‘No, there was a full bar and a band in there. This old chick had been around.” Jesus shot the whiskey. He glanced down at the brass rail. Buddy was wearing his old cowboy boots. Trav had on his fairy San Francisco hiking shoes. Jesus tried to lean over the bar, pretending to grab for some peanuts, but couldn’t see what kind of shoes Duck was wearing.


Sylvie weed whacked around the edge of her little half of the duplex, knocking down some weeds and sweating under her rolled-up bandana. She cut the motor and stood, leaning on the shaft of the machine. A dry wind blew through the ponderosas. The hum of the peaks rose behind her. She could hear traffic on 89, heading north. She pictured Trav’s face, sunk her chin down in a frump on the handle of the whacker.
How could any of this have happened. It had to be the biker, the one with the pistol. She called the Sherriff’s office in Flagstaff every other day, but always got the same run around.’ We’re working on it’. She knew they could give shit about another dead Mexican, but what about her life? The team was off excavating in Dead Horse canyon, and she was tuck in Coconino County.
Then there was Trav. She didn’t want to, but she had a crush on the guy. Why wouldn’t she? She thought about the letter she had seen and wished she’d been bitch enough to sneak a look at it. He had called her, but he seemed distant, preoccupied. Of course he would be, as a person of interest in a horrible murder case. They’d been set up, and no one gave a shit about that.
So where was the killer? She’d had the landlord put some motion sensitive bear lights up around the duplex, and had two sets of deadbolts and a security bars on her windows. But she knew she was a sitting duck. A dead duck if the killer chose. She drove to the lab and the library every day. She wanted to go hiking, and even more, go do fieldwork, but with her colleagues out in the field she had basically no friends. There was the new German grad student, Sepp. He was younger than Sylvie, good looking enough and quiet, intense. He called her a couple of times. But she wanted to hear from Trav, not some grad student.
She got a beer out of her fridge and looked out across the trees at the mountain. The sun was a flare at this altitude; it burned the scene into her retinas: the red-barked ponderosas, the long, dull, dark-green needles. The wisps of dry grass, the wooden houses scattered up the long slope to the west, the stark white-blue sky and the clear air that made the high peaks seem only a few hundred yards away. Trucks pushing air and hot brakes moaned and ground on the highway. The beer bottle sweated cool tiny rivulets across her hands and wrists, like clear, cold blood.

He rode his bike through Crossroads around ten at night, in the last of the long summer twilight, without stopping. He glanced at the gaggle of trucks and rented cars in the lodge parking lot and went on. It was six hours to Flagstaff. By mid morning he’d be long gone.

Trav was already past Kayenta, heading south. He’d be in Flag by one AM.


Traveler:

into the great wide open

Blaze drove through her tears. Stop you, little shit, she said to herself. But she couldn’t. pregnant. Maybe HIV positive. Trav not communicating. The note she had left him was wadded up, under his bunk at Hank’s ranch. But she could not know that. The miles of the Valley crowded by her like the passing of ghosts. The traffic, the rising land as she headed up into the Sierras. All was nothing to her. Her IPod was on her seat, the radio silent. It was growing dark, and the headlights of the oncoming trucks across the median left blind streaks in her wet eyes.
But she didn’t care. She was driving. Reno, Fernley, then across 50 to Ely. She didn’t even remember where the road went after that. Glen Canyon and then Four Corners, Crossroads. She’d pull over somewhere and sleep for a while, but wouldn’t stop until she found him. She needed him now, no matter how he felt.
She felt herself nodding off about sixty miles past Ely and just pulled off the road into the nothingness and slept. She woke from her half sleep in the white dawn. A distant dark blueloaf of a mountain range rose above a salt pan valley. Over that and down through Capitol Reef. She pulled into a funky gas station in Delta and looked at her map and figured it all out, then hit the road again, a big styrofoam cup of bad coffee in the cup holder, her stomach in agony.
There was a huge thunderstorm as she drove down towards Crossroads. She had to stop and wait out the worst of the rain. By the time she pulled up to the lodge, it was eleven twenty. Only two cars, a silver rental Toyota and the Sherriff’s cruiser. She opened the door. Woollard sat at the bar, nursing a beer. Buddy was at the next stool, and Duck looked up.
‘hey’ he said. Woollard and Buddy swung their big, stubby heads around. She could see the red-rimmed beer eyes grading her. She’d been driving for thirty hours. The rain had soaked her hair in the just the dew minutes it had taken her to walk to the door from her car. Woollard looked at her sullenly.
“I’m looking for Traveler, “she said.
‘He went back the ranch about two hours ago, said the deputy. Shit, I got be able to drive to fuckin Junction City. Good thing I’m a cop, he thought. He’d had nine beers. ‘You won’t be able to see to get up there in this rain. That road‘ll be washed out half a dozen spots by now.’
Buddy said,’ We got rooms.’
She stood there, half swaying. ’Ok, I’d like one, please.’
‘Duck, run up front and get this lady a key to number seven.’
Duck ambled off, shuffling his feet. Blaze felt naked under the gaze of these men. The Sherriff was malevolent, the owner, just an old redneck. Duck came back with the key; an old-fashioned one with a diamond shaped key holder, dark red with a faded gold 7 on it.
‘I’ll show you to your room.’ Duck’s face was eager, grotesque in the blinking beer sign light.
‘Thanks, I’ll be ok.’
She collapsed on the bed in the poorly lit room. Overhead bulb, sagging mattress. No coffee maker