Hungry, I followed the path across the field and over the hill to the main cabin, where Mike meditated on the porch. He seemed unaware of my arrival. Inside, Archie banged about in the kitchen, busy with breakfast. When it was ready, Mike came in, and we ate in silence. Steel-cut Irish oatmeal, butter, and maple syrup. Best meal in weeks. My spirits lifted with every bite. Fed, clothed, and rested, for the moment nothing could harm me. Everything was going to be all right. Afterward, Archie and I cleaned up while Mike vanished without a word.
“Let them hands heal for a few days before you get to doing chores around here,” Archie said when he changed my bandages. “I usually come around in the mornings to help with the cooking. Look around if you like. I’ll return tomorrow.”
With that, he bounced off in his truck, Albert in the back. His ears flopped to the rhythm of the road.
I took to daily hikes and soon discovered a small overgrown orchard protected by a ring of Colorado spruce. Pears, apples, and plums grew in haphazard rows amongst sunflowers and wild roses. The fruit trees were full of broken branches. Thorny weeds and tall grass choked the flowers. In the middle of the grove there was a wooden bench where I sometimes passed the entire day unaware of time.
After several visits to the place, a rake and pruning shears appeared propped up against one of the gnarled apple trees. There were no instructions pinned to them, and neither Archie nor Mike mentioned anything. It seemed like an invitation by the orchard itself to restore order. So, I passed a few hours every day with the rake and the clippers for as long as my hands could stand it. I found an unexpected satisfaction in the twang of the metal rake over the dry earth, raking little mounds of twigs and leaves that I’d periodically burn. The sweet blue smoke curled into the sky as the fire released the old, the dead, and the decomposed. My new vocation.
“Persistence and initiative get you there,” said Mike, who materialized one day to watch me work. No greeting or idle chat. Just bare feet. Orange robes. I grinned at him over a small pile of rotten apples.
“More like boredom drives me to it.”
“Good. You keep being bored. The orchard will transform into a better place. Negative into positive. That’s how it should be.”
From the satchel over his shoulder he produced a brushed aluminum Zippo embossed with an eagle holding a clutch of swords in its talons.
“Are your goals compelling now?” He lit a cigarette. “Or are they ordinary, like the ones you used to have?”
I paused to admire the liberated sunflowers craning toward the light. Mike settled on the bench, content to blow smoke rings, a vague smile on his face. Goals? My goals were to avoid getting killed by Eagle Creek. Not something I wanted to discuss with Mike.
“I never had goals,” I said. “I pushed on. Blind. Went with it.” Which was true once, before my goal of not getting killed eclipsed my goal of getting by.
“So, the goal of an orderly orchard is a step up for you,” Mike said. He flipped ash off his lap. “You can get through anything if you set a goal. Goals are important. The army taught me that.”
“What was your goal?”
“The recruiter said for twenty bucks I could get laid in the Philippines. I was an eighteen-year-old virgin. I’d have done anything for that. I was in.”
“Some goal,” I said.
Mike nodded. “It changed.”
He fell silent, the smile fading to a blank stare at the trees. The wind whispered something to him in the leaves. After a while, he cleared his throat.
“They made us hard,” he said, his voice hushed. “They abused us. Exposed us to unspeakable cruelty. Made us break our ties with the world. Fed us red meat, porn, and booze. Told us we were invincible. Then they armed us with the best weapons in the world and sent us to liberate Kuwait. Liberate. Kill or be killed. Stay alive. That was the goal. It was spectacular.”
Kill or be killed. We had some common ground, after all. The fear of being killed. A diet of red meat and porn might’ve made me more prepared to defend myself.
“Kill or be killed?” I said. “And what was that like?”
He looked at me sidelong.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
I shrugged. Let it go. Didn’t want to be the one responsible for dredging up the violence he’d sought to leave behind. Best to disengage before Buddhist turned back into rabid dog.
Mike flicked another ash and offered me a mint from a tin in his bag. “It doesn’t matter. We’re talking about something else now, aren’t we?”
“Goals,” I said through a mouthful of mint. “Mine’s to prune fruit trees and liberate sunflowers.”
Mike nodded, his mind at war.
“We liberated, all right. Behind enemy lines one night on recon we came across a burnt truck filled with dead Iraqi soldiers.” He drew in the smoke and rolled the Zippo around in his hand. “They were a caramelized lump about the size of a dining-room table. The only way to tell they were once human was by the white teeth. Teeth don’t burn so well. The next day I was granted leave to Thailand.”
“Did you get laid?”
Mike didn’t smile. He shook his head. “I went north. Up near Laos in the forest. Someone told me about magic temple tattoos with powers of protection. I wanted protection. I wanted to live.”
“That’s a good goal.”
“When they learned I was a soldier, the monks blessed me with amulets. They chanted prayers and over three days, they carved spells into my flesh with smouldering hot bamboo pens. At times, I couldn’t feel a thing. Other times, the pain was so great I wanted out of my skin to get away from it. I realized if I hadn’t been moved by desire, I wouldn’t have joined the army. And if I hadn’t joined the army, I wouldn’t have found myself in such danger and such pain. That’s how I came to understand about desire as the root of suffering.”
He rubbed a hand over his chest.
“Later, back in Bangkok, I learned my squad was killed by friendly fire. I was listed MIA. Taking advantage of this clerical error, I took the bus back up north to that temple and stayed for three years.”
“Did your goals change?”
“Yes, and I’m no longer certain I’ll achieve them in this lifetime,” he said. “Do you believe in anything yet?”
“I believe in the all-knowing dog,” I said.
He looked blank, like he didn’t get jokes or light conversation because he had to concentrate on whatever he needed to accomplish out here on the fringes of the world. Transcend, or whatever these people did.
He said, “Here’s what I’ve learned: a serious life begins when there’s an element of illusion in reality and something real in our fantasies.”
The warmth of the sun on my face made me glad to be alive. That much was certain. The rest was up for grabs.
“Sure,” I said.
“Look around you.” He waved his arms at the mountains. “It’s real. It’s imagined. It’s potential. It’s actual. Beautiful, vibrant, all in flux with us, changing and vibrating right along with it. We’re all part of the grand unfolding. The eternal ebb and flow. The only meaningful question is, how do you conduct yourself through it?”
He tucked his feet up cross-legged on the bench.
“Most people are consumed by the details of finding their worth and their happiness in others. In worldly business. They don’t see that happiness and meaning grow from within. From right conduct. You have to fulfill yourself. The rest comes by itself.”
He pointed to the sky, where two prairie hawks flew circles around each other in what might’ve been an elaborate mating ritual. Or maybe they were locked in aerial combat.
“That’s what most of us concern ourselves with: eating, sleeping, fucking, fighting, and surviving.” He grinned and touched my hand. “Their concerns are simple, predictable, and desperate. We can do better than that.”
I sure wanted to do better than that. This living business was wearing me down. I laughed out loud at how unlikely my life had become. How
simple, predictable, and desperate it seemed to be these days. How lost I felt. Mike nodded and smiled like he knew.
“Okay,” he said.
That evening, I sat on the porch with the mountains. A murky sky boiled out thunderbolts in a prelude to rain. A warm gust whipped up in growing violence. The trees bent and swayed like a troupe of anguished dancers. Across the field, a lone black crow fought frantically against the wind.
My recovery was steady. My hands scabbed over. At night, the bandages came off, and in time, they stayed off altogether. The rest of me healed as well. No great surprise. There wasn’t any dope to smoke. No coke to snort. No J&B, no Oban, no espresso. No sugar. No hot dogs. No Doritos. Not even a generic tablet of ASA. My regular intake had been replaced with a single organic meal every morning, washed down by a cup of lemon grass tea and all the well water a person could drink.
At first, the new regime created dull pain. Not only my hands hurt. Everything hurt. Everywhere. From the detox. For days, crushed glass scratched through my veins. My head felt like someone had used a hard rubber mallet on the base of my skull. For a while, my watery calves couldn’t even take the weight of my body. Sounds startled me. The patterns in the clouds made me sad. At night, I curled in a tight fetal ball. Breath uneven. Sweating till the sheets were soaked. Until, after about ten days, I finally slept through the night and I started to feel better in my skin. For the first time since my arrival, I turned to the notion of what to do next. What would drive me out? For that matter, why would I ever leave?
For now, the rain drummed me off the porch. Inside, the cabin had no lights, and there weren’t any matches for the oil lamp on the bedside table. Instead, I contorted around the chair and the cold stove through darkness into bed.
Before the current of sleep slipped me away, biblical thunder exploded overhead. For a moment, the night filled with white electrical light. The outside door crashed open to batter the wall. Furious water lashed across the threshold. Lightning tore through the sky to reveal the mountains through sheets of rain.
I clambered out of bed to shut the door when a figure appeared in the entrance. More jagged lightning flared up behind him. He poured himself into the hut, a slight stagger to his movements. A waterfall flowed from his stetson when he removed it. With a free hand, he wrung the water from his beard and smiled at me. Even in the dark, Hornsmith’s ghost was unmistakable.
For fear he’d bamboozle me, I held up my hands before he could say a word, and over the thunder said, “Leave me alone. Go to where you’re trying to get. You have no business here.”
Hornsmith clutched his hat in his hands. The storm flashed in the whites of his eyes. He said, “I can’t stay out there. There’s still so much to do.”
In the tight quarters of the hut, he smelled of vinegar and sweet, damp lilies. If I could’ve caught him by surprise, I would’ve thrown him back into the storm, forgetting he was dead and impossible to throw out of anywhere.
I said, “I’m trying to look at life from another angle. These days, I’d be happy to make an honest wage. Cook an honest meal. Wash my own socks and stick to my own counsel. I’m not going your way.”
Hornsmith coughed. He looked around. “Any water?”
“I’ll pour you a glass,” I said, “and put it outside on the porch for you. Then, you must go.”
The lines on his face were deeper than before. His back slumped. His belly extended. His white hair stuck out in all directions. He gulped a few times like a hooked fish flopping on a dock.
“You’re right, Latour,” he said at last. “You should find your way, and I should find mine. I shouldn’t have come.”
He turned toward the door, stopped, and looked at the floor. He straightened the hat back on his head.
“Beware of your complacency,” he said. “There’s unfinished business, whether you like it or not. Guard yourself. Your enemies seek a resolution. Contend with them.”
“Your water,” I said and reached around for the pitcher. The door hammered in the wind. I was alone. He’d eluded me again.
Afterward, the rain outside rapped on the window. Sleep wouldn’t come. Hornsmith troubled me out there in the netherworld, doggedly engaging me. I wasn’t sure if he was a chimera out of my mind or if there was something else to it. He’d made good in Las Vegas, like he said he would. Not how I’d imagined, but it still remained a good and real result. Now, this new message resonated. It was true, in the passing weeks the feeling of danger had subsided. A sense of safety had settled in. At the ranch, it seemed no one could ever find me. In time, I expected my past would be of no consequence, perishable and at last invisible. Lying in bed that night, I was no longer so sure.
At sunrise the next morning, troubled by Hornsmith’s warning and still trying to make sense of Mike’s lectures, instead of going to the main house for breakfast, I followed one of the cow paths through the grasslands into the hills. The storm had passed, with only the wet field as evidence of the previous night’s violence. The cold air felt crisp in my lungs. The hush of the dripping grass and the distant murmur of the river were the only sounds.
After about half an hour, the trail became so steep I needed my hands to steady myself over the rocks until things levelled on a small plateau overlooking the rocky desert plain. Winded, I rested on a boulder like some solitary Navajo warrior who might have sat on this exact spot and reported the same arid vista, unchanged in a thousand years. From this spot, the desert was without the grandeur of the mountains or the mystery of the ocean. In the desert, nothing grew. Nothing moved. Nothing shimmered or shined. Nothing was revealed. Nothing was promised. Like some flat, soulless primordial monster, the desert lay in wait to kill hope. Boulders. Buttes. Stone arches. Patches of dead grass and dirt. I surveyed this forsaken place and listened for a signal in the wind. Nothing came. The reassuring resistance of warm rock against my leg was the only certainty. My relationships out here were few and intimate, peppered with ghosts and unseen threats.
Once my breath settled, I scuttled down the other side of the hill onto the plain for a closer look. My eyes adjusted to details unseen from up high. Occasional pools of brackish red water cradled in rocky crevices sparkled white highlights under the brilliant sky. Pink cacti the size of my thumb hid amongst tufts of emerald grass that poked through unlikely bits of cracked earth. Shiny purple beetles crawled through the sand while tiny yellow butterflies flitted inches above the ground. Then, unexpectedly, I came across a bright copper rattlesnake coiled asleep in the sun. Aroused by my footsteps, it raised its head to look me over. Curious, it flicked its red tongue a couple of times and smiled. Careful not to startle it, I sat down a few paces away and smiled back.
Life in all its teeming mystery, the whole cosmological unfolding of nothing into this rambling, expanding, heart-thumping something exploded behind my eyes in a riot of pinks and reds and blues. Bugs, birds, bushes, and rock swirled. Circles of light haloed the landscape. The intoxicating smell of sage and red dust filled my head. The sun boiled sweat out of every pore from my scalp to my feet. It all was beyond my understanding. The snake’s little bumpy brown head nodded as if it understood how overwhelmed I felt.
Through the silence, its thoughts drifted on the wind into my own. Don’t be alarmed, it seemed to say. Stop looking for meaning. In all these thousands of years, you’re no closer to a resolution.
The snake had the words to soothe the chaos. Consider this, it said. The only meaning is of your own making. With that, it flicked its tongue a couple more times and settled back to sunbathing. And I started to consider a new course. Maybe I should do like everyone always says: set goals, confront fears, create meaning, and carry on. Even if it felt a bit like a yoga class I wanted out of.
Then, after almost twenty minutes of silence, a small metallic reflection on the horizon glanced off the sun. A shadowy figure moved amongst the boulders before vanishing behind a scruff of bush.
TWENTY-FOUR
Town
A WHITE ATV
with monstrous knobby tires gleamed outside the main house. I stopped to admire the beast before heading inside for breakfast. Oversized black fenders swept back like dragon wings. Raptor 700 blazed in gold Gothic letters across the fuel tank. Its chrome exhaust the width of a cannon barrel glistened in the sun. Next to Archie’s ancient pickup, the rig was otherworldly. Because we hadn’t seen any visitors since my arrival, I figured Mike or Archie had a new ride, even if it was hard to picture either one of them on the thing.
In the kitchen, Archie dished up Irish stew. Mike was already into a bowl when I settled at the table.
“New Raptor outside? You guys going to ride the range with that?”
“Nope. It belongs to a birdwatcher,” Mike said through a mouthful of stew. “I found him on the property. Says he’s from Rochester, New York. He’s hoping for a glimpse of a Fulvous Whistling-Duck.”
A wide-brimmed hat with brown camo patterns lay on the table next to a pair of binoculars with some kind of compass device in the top of one of the lenses. Down the hall, the toilet flushed. A door creaked. Someone else was in the house. The extraterrestrial Raptor rider.
“What’s that?” I said.
Archie handed me a bowl of stew and a spoon. “A duck that usually nests in Texas or California,” he said. “They don’t often come ’round here.”
Mike said, “Apparently, our pond is perfect. Dense. Cattails. Marshy. Shallow water. He wants to place decoys and see what happens. How about that, Arch?”
Archie clanged the empty stewpot under the tap. He shook his head in silent awe or disbelief. Hard to say which.
“That’s right,” someone said from the hall, “the Fulvous Whistling-Duck has only been spotted in Utah three or four times since 1908.”
In the doorway was Simon Trang, decked out in a lightweight mesh hunting vest and beige desert-camo pants. He grinned when he saw me.
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