TAKING NOTES
by Ned Pendergast
The plastic cover on the couch is hot and sticky.
She says I can talk about anything and scribbles on a notepad when I say something important. Her fat legs are crossed, they look like a loaf of braided italian bread. As she writes, her eyes peek over the
top of her pink glasses. I tell her I'm going to jump out the window. She looks at me funny, interesting, pushes the glasses back on her nose and stops writing.
She waddles to the window, opens it, tells me I can
jump when I'm ready, writing as she talks.
I unstick from the plastic, walk to the window and
look down. People are fleas from up here. I lie
about a traffic mess below. She comes over for a
look see and leans out. I push mushy fat and watch as she takes a brody, head first to kiss the cement and fleas below. No noise when she splats. I return to the couch feeling much better but it doesn't last.
In a little while the office door opens. She's back. Her flat face looks like a cheap pizza. Black skirt and blouse are twisted, soiled and in shreds but the pink half-glasses are like new. Twisted sausages hold a new notebook and pen. I wave from the couch and start talking. She flops into the seat crosses her bloody legs and takes notes. One shoe off, one shoe on. She looks at her notes and tells me
I lied about the traffic mess.
Relentless.
MEAN LITTLE KID
by Dennis Upper
Douglas was the first kid
ever expelled from pre-school
for splitting open a little girl's scalp
with a sandbox shovel.
At age 7, he stole a BB-gun
to shoot everything in sight:
windows, pets, streetlights, birds,
his brother's left eye.
Teenaged, with a badass record--
petty theft, assault, truancy, dealing--
Dougie got a hard choice:
join up or face jail.
AWOL twice, held back once,
inches from a bad-conduct discharge,
he finally graduated from boot camp
directly to Vietnam.
As the chopper swooped into LZ X-ray,
on the banks of the Ia Drang River,
Doug was locked and loaded,
ready to rumble.
He jumped down into the waving grass,
and a steel-jacketed AK-47 round
hit him square in the forehead,
stamping his ticket forever.
In the shadows at the jungle's fringe,
twelve-year-old sniper Nguyen Loi,
proud owner of a new Chinese assault rifle,
grinned a black-toothed grin.
Nguyen Loi, who grew up early
on the back streets of Saigon,
eating from garbage cans and rolling GIs,
was a really mean little kid.
MY SUMMERS AS A HUMAN MULE
by Gary Every
"Where are we headed," I ask, interrupting my toils as part of a claimstaking and surveying crew, bent over from my bundle of sticks like a medieval peasant retrieving firewood.
"Over there, towards Black Butte," Brian answers.
The air around the volcanic mesa shimmers with reflected heat, looking as if the temperature rose any more it would return to molten lava. It is the southernmost peak of the Vulture Mountain chain. Vultures are the only birds ingenious enough to figure out how to stay perched atop the hot black crags. They piss on their feet.
It's hot. Too hot if you're rented out as a human mule. I am always thirsty, not just from a parched throat but as if the heat deprives. My shadow is etched concisely, burnt onto the sand like the chalk outlines police draw around fatalities. My responsibilities as a good employee mean trudging across the desert floor laden with poles, shovels, axes, saws, hammers, maps, waters, and little pill boxes filled with documents which claimstake the land we walk across in the name of whatever geological entity we are hired hands for; similar to Spanish conquistadors planting flags and crosses in these same southwestern deserts many centuries ago. In the middle of the Mohave, Chihuahua, Sonoran, and Nevada deserts, in corners so distant that even the wind gets lost; we triangulate and calculate. It is my personal epiphany of existential futility, using a geometric language whose abstract icons of angles and distances have little to do with the terrain and the precisely measuring out a series of rectangles. It is the kind of existence which makes a man contemplate buzzard urine.
This is not the hottest place I have ever worked, even if the black igneous rocks turn the mountains into giant solar panels. It is hotter than Nevada and that was pretty bad. Still, as deserts go I have seen bleaker and drier. Hell, Wickenburg, the closest town has a tradition of being an oasis resort. The arroyo in the center of town is flowing with water, the banks are lined with grasses, flowers, reeds, and other signs of year round water.
This waterway once carried tourists escaping Phoenix in the summer, riding steam powered paddle boats. To survive rocky stretches of river during the dry season the paddlewheel was retracted, wheels would drop from the underside and the boat would roll downstream. There was once a government sponsored exploration of the Missouri River by paddlewheeler with a huge Viking-style dragon carved on the front, nostrils connected to the steam engine vents to impress the Native Americans. It was not the paddle boat but the steam powered locomotive which colonized the West, winding serpentine across the continent; smokestacks puffing.
The hottest place I ever worked was near the Eagle Tail Mountains. The U.S.G.S. quadrangle maps identified the particular parcel we were graphing as 4th of July Peak, an inconsequential heap of volcanic black slag, too puny to even cast a cool shadow of sanctuary. It was beside 4th of July Wash, named so because of the Mormons who celebrated the patriotic holiday there with picnics and fireworks. The temperature there hits the high hundred and teens, occasionally breaking past one hundred and twenty degrees. We traveled in perfect rectangles across the strange multi-colored soils, measuring our progress with laser beams and minors as we strolled, noticing that the texture of the grains changed along with colors into yellows, tans, browns, clays, and sandstones. The landscape was covered with gnarled ironwood trees, badger holes, spiky Thorn of Christ cactus, and the only sign of human habitation was the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant on the far horizon. Blinking, my eyes stinging from the salt of my own sweat I could almost see Palo Verde exploding catastrophically, suddenly venting giant plumes of radioactive steam capable of melting entire mountains, and as the billows clear there stands the ghost of apocalyptic steamboat dragon; nostrils flaring.
Some of the two dimensional Euclidean shapes we are surveying make no sense at all for the terrain. One of our points is about 30 feet up a cliff and needs a tagged post hammered into it. We flip a coin and Lady Luck chooses me to scale the cliff. By the time I return Brian has discovered an eagle eye. An eagle eye is our name for any small cave in a cliff where one can attain an outstanding view. We put down our bundle of posts and take an exploration break only to discover that it is not a cave at all but a freestanding slab that has been wind carved from the sandstone cliff into a facade fronting a ledge barely wide enough to turn around on with an eagle eye carved into the center. As soon as we scramble up and fill the aperture two hawks screech, circling above and challenging.
The most magical thing I ever saw while working as a human mule involved horses, a small herd of mustangs in northern Nevada. Tiny, hippy ponies whose tails and manes hung to the ground, stirring in the breeze like fluttering flamenco guitar strings. This herd held three mares, a single foal, and a black stallion with white socks and a white stripe along his nose, symmetrical until it zagged towards an ear. As I climbed over the ridge, my scent was carried by the same breezes which the vultures were sailing; riding thermal updraft. The stallion responded to me as a rival. He reared, throwing up clouds of dust in an equine tantrum. I used my shovel to throw up clouds of my own into the air and he whinnied, racing between me and his mares; back and forth, back and forth. Suddenly, they vanished across the landscape, their shadows sailing along the prairie grass like kites.
Kneeling in the eagle eye reminds me of the precipice prose of John Muir and Yosemite Falls or the Nathaniel Hawthorne tale of climbing atop a church steeple and admiring the landscape while the local villagers scream about blasphemy. At Deazadash Lake in the Yukon I read from On Walden Pond while staring at the turquoise reflections on the glacial water's surface against a bleak landscape where the scattered pines grew twisted in the direction of the Arctic chill.
Sometimes the literature is not only about the earth but also a part of it; carved into the rocks themselves. While working in the Yellow Medicine Hills we used to stop and look at the petroglyphs by Gillespie Dam. Petroglyphs, Native American picture carvings on rock, were based on principle similar to Native American Sign Language, many of whose symbols were understood all across the North American continent. Petroglyphs recorded tales, myths, histories, and personal insights; some of which have been long forgotten except for the places where they have been etched onto the earth.
My favorite petroglyphs are the giant Nazeal lines of Peru. The huge stick drawings are decipherable only from the air and some anthropologist believe that the Inca had reed basket balloons to look down upon them. I saw the earth from a great height once and it was certainly a religious experience. I went skydiving, soaring above my native Sonoran Desert and after the chute opened I could feel myself traveling along the wind. It was as if I could fly, sailing across the valley, beyond all the mountains that I could see. Floating beneath the open canopy was exactly what I had imagined flying to be like but I wonder if birds ever imagine that they are us, willingly trading flight, coveting our opposable thumbs and all their accompanying technology.
The American West has been measured to death by everybody from Lewis and Clark to John Wesley Powell; digging up gardens, ruins, graves, bones, fossils, and rocks. The 1890 census declared the American frontier closed to the small independent farmer (and Jeffersonian democracy) but in 1868, at Antelope Pass, Nebraska, an anthropologist stopped to examine rumored fossils of primitive man. Those fossils turned out to be prehistoric horses, tiny pygmy ponies who had long been extinct. This discovery led a scientific wave on investigation whose immigrants were logists; anthro, hydro, bio, and geo. Once, I dug out trilobite fossils from stratified shale near Kadiz; 550 million years old and among the most ancient fingerprints on the planet. Now they sit in my waterless fossil fish tank; the brightly colored gravel bottom littered with geodes, crystals, and unpolished gemstones whose sparkling contrasts greatly with the shales and browns the fossils are imprinted in. The lives of these trilobites and fish have been etched into these fossil patterns, surviving millions of years only to become curiosities in my fossil fish tank.
While I gaze out from my eagle eye across the landscape I wonder what minerals my employers are prospecting for: gold? silver? uranium? The sandy colored soil makes me think otherwise, perhaps some clay which can be transformed into an industrial lubricant; keeping machines humming and running smoothly. I have been to plenty of mining boom towns turned into ghost towns. The Southwest is littered with dried up ghost towns, while the metropolises grow larger and larger sending pipelines and canals spreading across the drainages and basin ways like thirsting tentacles.
The ground beneath us in the eagle eye crunches and crackles beneath our feet as we shift around. The ledge is directly beneath the mated hawk pair, who litter the eagle eye dinner discards. Sun bleached bones cover the earth with a thin layer of squirrel skeletons and fragile rabbit skulls. The hawks screech again.
From the eagle eye we can see where the canyon boxes up, dead ending where cliff and chasm butt up against each other, revealing a large cavern. As we approach the entrance to the cave Brian stops, bends over, and shouts, "Feathers!", holding three brightly colored plumes aloft.
Those feathers glisten like jeweled keys. Brian's exclamation frightens three vultures from the cave. They swoop from the mouth, spiraling quickly above the angry hawks. We enter the cave, blasted by the damp cool wave of humidity that lingers there. The cave is cool, moisture clinging to the walls and before our eyes can adjust to the shadow there is a burst of white light, brighter than any lantern.
Caves come in two colors; shadow and total darkness. The farthest underground I have ever gone was on an environmental geology class field trip where we spent a day exploring the wastelands of Yucca Flats before riding mine cars down into the chill beating heart of the underground nuclear explosion test shaft. The most comforting cavern I ever sought shelter in had to be the Desert Rose Bar along the abandoned highway that provides the easiest access to the Yellow Medicine Hills. The beer was cheap, jukebox didn't work, and the pool tables were in tournament condition and for a quarter we made the colored balls bounce around like atoms chain reacting throughout the universe. Somewhere smack dab in the middle between the cool calculating horror of the nuclear tests shafts and the oasis refuge sanctuary of the Desert Rose Bar, was Gabbs, Nevada.
Gabbs consisted of only three buildings; their signs proclaiming GAS, STORE, and HOTEL. STORE doubles as the post office and HOTEL contains a house of ill repute, (Gabbs' largest industry). GAS sells only automotive needs but STORE had a flyer taped to it offering cash for captured lizards and so I discovered that Gabbs second leading industry, the reptilian slave trade, was also of questionable moral ethics.
I was in Gila Bend, eating dinner in the Space Age Lodge and Restaurant. The decor was garish 60's optimism with brightly colored plastic and glass baubles built into the walls and the lawn held scattered replicas of NASA paraphernalia. The food was bland and the coffee cold. A farmer and lawyer sat at the table behind me and discussed the farmer's bankruptcy proceedings, the rising cost of irrigation driving him out of the agribusiness. You could tell by his weathered hands that he had worked this land for a long time. I wondered if he had grown up on the farm that he was signing away.
The next job that summer offered quite a contrast to Gila Bend and the beauty of the Yellow Medicine Hills. Our crew changed from the flat lands where we could trace out our surveying rectangles rather quickly, covering vast amounts of territory in a single day to the stubborn Mule Mountains, whose steep terrain made progress arduous and whose deep gullies frequently eroded line of sight. Instead of Gila Bend and the Space Age Lodge with its Kennedy-era optimism it was now Douglas and the Red Barn Saloon. On a Tuesday afternoon the clientele had comprised of three unemployed men in their fifties, each wearing flannel shirts and crew cuts. Two of them had been career miners until the Lavender Pit was shut down but the years of exposure to heavy machinery had left them hard of hearing and they sat there swilling beer and watching programs like "The People's Court" or "Court TV" and felt free to comment on the judicial proceedings, needing to shout over each others deafness.
"Give her hell judge," one of the gentleman might declare, pausing to sip his fermented beverage while his compatriot furthered the consensus, "Anyone can see she is a lying little tart." At the end of every program and during most of the commercial breaks they would pause to offer a toast in celebration of the machinations of justice.
Originally when the Constitution was drawn up it was envisioned that the House of Representatives would be made up of farmers, butchers, tailors, merchants, teachers, engineers,... The idea was that the House of Representatives would be comprised of private citizens taking a few years away from their careers to serve their country. Instead, we have career politicians dressed in suits and ties, ponderously pontificating, sending their words echoing off the domed ceiling. Sometimes in a cave when you startle flocks of sleeping bats it makes them squeak all at once, cacophony echoing everywhere as they flutter and stumble, attempting to steer by panicked sonar. Then after the bats leave and the echoes have died down you realize you are crawling through great big piles of bat shit.
In the box canyon in the Vulture Mountains, that blast of white hurls itself at us as we cross the line from sunlight into the shadow of the cave. Barely in time, I duck, the wings and shoulders of whatever the white thing is almost touching me. Turning around I see a snowy white barn owl fling itself away from the mouth of the dark cavern directly into the face of the summer desert sun. It wobbles for just one instant, as if it can't see; blinded by a sun this nocturnal creature never deals with, and one of the screaming hawks drops from above.
Snaps the owl's neck in half.
Brian and I turn, not certain if we want to continue in our explorations. Then we see the other owl. Same size as the first, same snowy white feathers with brown speckles, and as it glares at us from the edge of the nest; three frightened chicks squeak beneath it. We have accidentally killed a parent, a mate. I wonder if the chicks will survive or if the terrain is too bleak to allow one parent to succeed at the difficult task of raising the young alone. Perhaps we have killed the chicks too, only more slowly.
The curiosity that led me to take an exploration break instead of a lunch on a hot, hard, work day is one of my favorite parts of myself. It is an attitude which I consciously cultivate. This day my curiosity is shockingly quenched in that instant when the hawk destroys the owl, reminding me of the cost of my own continuing existence: welcome to the food chain.
We leave the cave before we frighten the other owl so bad that she abandons her nest and children. The next ridge over Brian and I discover a beehive, built right into the mountain itself honey oozing out from the rock. Neither one of us are willing to risk the wrath of swarming bees for the golden treasure. Instead we have work to do, continuing our claimstaking employment of sketching out rectangles across the land.