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Owen woke with the
sun and left the town before anyone moved about on the streets. It was
still chilly in the mornings, the May dew hanging all over the road and
freshly sprouting landscapes. Fog hung in patches, rising above the marshes
and waterways like ghosts in a hallway. He felt more confident this morning.
Much better. He could make it, yes; and if not, there was work. Always,
there was labor. "When you're a big man, it's easy to find someone to test
your back," he said to the fog, and honked his horn as he passed a large
herd of cows waking up to a new spring morning.
"Moo," he yelled to the cattle as he passed. The greeting, as usual, was
instantly shredded by the wind. The wind makes many speeches, but shreds
the evidence, just in case anyone tries to sue. Where suing is concerned,
nothing is sacred these days, not even the gods.
* * *
Rocinante enjoyed the colder dry air all the way through Oklahoma. She
ran like a politician on a quest for funds. The fog was burning off, the
cloud cover clearing and Owen noticed the temperature change almost instantaneously.
He was cold, then hot. Kind of like his life.
For months it was all there. You sat in the chair and wrote correspondence
to people who were worried and needed advice and you sat at that keyboard
and talked like you had the plan laid out there in front of you on the
table and could read it like a blueprint and there were no questions left
unanswered. Who the hell was you kidding? Yourself. And now you get out
here only to realize the plan you saw was a mirage, was a glistening-water-dappled-sunshine-mirage'
to a dying man. How the hell could you be so stupid as to think that when
you got back out here people were going to line the streets and see you
on your way. Did you think the press was going to show or something? No
one cares, here, and no one gives a shit if you live or die now so you
might just as well get used to it, and stop treating yourself like some
prima donna, because you're not. You're just a man.
Just one man.
And who gives a flying fuck if what you said about one man being able to
change the world was a much a pile of shit as the rest of those cathartic
ramblings you used to coax people in to taking care of you. It doesn't
mean squat out here now, because you've got no reputation. But what's a
reputation anyway without someone who can live up to it? Isn't that the
way it begins? With intensity and duration and always completing each feat
one by one, and always coming back smiling and with more than you left
with. Haven't you done that before? Yes, but it feels different this time.
It feels forced and out of synchronization. It feels like I'm leading myself
to a slaughter.
Owen swerved suddenly to avoid the carcass of a cow laying in his path,
the swiftness of the action causing his bedroll to shift off the back of
the rack and hang on the side of the bike, rubbing against the asphalt.
The pack sounded dry against the coarse pavement. He slowed the bike, pulled
off, stowed the fallen gear.
It's the
little things that worry me -- the little omens. The loose gear, the weather
yesterday morning, the prophecy of best friend, Dug, that old bastard.
Yes, that's the one tearing a hole in your craw. Dug couldn't keep his
mouth shut. He had to say it, to cast out the incantation no long-term
traveler needs to hear: "You're going to crash." He'd said it damn it.
Not you. You said nothing. You didn't need to. You'd had the dreams. Always
have before you left. And you certainly did this time though they depicted
some unpleasant situations. All that violence -- the dark side you thought
you vanquished . You were sure you had that sucker beat. How did it get
away again and trick you into coming out. Guess it wants to settle-up an
old gambling debt. You gave up the backpack in Alaska, traveled for several
thousand miles without it, trying to pay Fate back for the first two years.
The bill must have been some whopper. You should have looked at the amount
before you signed the contract, but that wouldn't have been very interesting,
and you sure wouldn't be where you are now. And so now it's pay back time.
Time to see if the mighty traveler proves worth his weight in Fate. Well,
we'll see about it.
It was
warm now as the bike and rider cut across the nearly moot panhandle of
Oklahoma into Texas. The Oklahoma panhandle is only thirty miles wide.
So don't
blink, or you'll miss it.
* * *
Owen crossed
the panhandle in a blink, cut across the edge of Northern Texas to New
Mexico, and pulled into Tucumcari. It was still before noon and Owen felt
the fatigue setting in. He wondered why he tired so easily these days.
He didn't remember always being tired when he'd traveled the first couple
times. In fact, it appeared just the opposite. Traveling always produced
a charge rather than extracted one. He could feel the sore spots on his
hind side and he knew what the cowboys must have felt like, riding for
days and days across the same land he'd covered in four hours. "Technology
pulls off some remarkable feats," he thought, "but your ass still gets
sore when you sit in the saddle too long."
* * *
Tucumcari was no big deal. Another wide space in the road immortalized
via pop-country lyrics.
I been from Tucson to Tucumcari
living the life I'd made.
I've driven every kind of rig that's made.
Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed . . .
Owen pulled the bike into an abandoned A&W restaurant, drove up underneath
the faded orange and brown aluminum car port. He parked in the shade of
the port and took a loaf of bread and a tin of tuna and sat on the curb,
opening the tuna, humming a tune in a town he'd waited all his life to
see. Tucumcari. He liked the meter of the word, the way it bounced about
between his lips and tongue. And when you finished saying it you were smiling
because of the sharp 'i' sound. The town, however, was largely unpolluted
and severely recessed. Not many people found Tucumcari as romantic as when
it'd been on the charts.
Such is show business, Owen thought.
He picked the fish out of the tin with a fork from his pack and made two
sandwiches, stood up and threw away the container. He hated litter. Hated
it with a passion. It was a trait he'd picked up from his father. He thought
about his father overtime he threw something away. It was one of the good
things he remembered.
Taking the black water bottle from its holster on the handle bars, he sat
down underneath the shade again, leaning back against an old drive up microphone,
still with the thick brushed steel ribs and button right in the middle.
He thought about the desert.
The days were warm there in January, in Organ Pipe, be hot as a fucking
bullet there now. You'd made it there hitch-hiking four years before. Four
years. So much has happened since then. Enough for several lifetimes. And
when you first went there you were just getting started. Just a pup. You
were so stupid that you set off into the desert at sunset, with little
water, and through sheer luck you found a place to camp before dark. Hiking
in the desert in the dark without water. Some genius. Fuck what the professor
said. You had a lot to learn. And higher education only works for so long.
If you hang around, read a lot, and listen carefully, very carefully to
their lectures you can turn the tide on them. You can back them into a
wall with their own logic and thrash them and make them stop the lecture
and take you on mano-a-mano. Mostly for show business. So you blew that
off and went to the desert right after San Francisco to get your head straight.
And that's when you had the first vision. It had been coming for a long
time -- several thousand ideas mashing around, seemingly incoherent, then
wham:
WHAM! Instant Avatar. Just add a desert.
They'd all gone to the desert at one time or another. Buddha, Allah, Jehovah,
Sun Yung Moon, Christ, Confucius, Einstein, they'd all 'gone to the desert'
to seek visions. To meditate on the green and golden serenity of the prickly
pear cactus, to breathe the dry air that cleared out your lungs, to listen
to the wind shred speeches at night. It seemed like a proper place to practice
the austerities. To become luminant and focused, that was the idea. The
rest would be taken care of.
Or
so you thought. Well it's sure taking care of things right now.
He stood,
stowed the water bottle and the bread, remembered what he'd come all the
way here to buy: a flashlight.
"You're certainly
not acting too bright so far," he said out loud. "Leaving without a fucking
flashlight. Some traveler."
He rode off down the main drag of Tucumcari towards Interstate 40, looking
for a place to buy a flashlight.
* * *
A message
from your sponsor:
At this
point, I was nothing more than a twinkle of recognition in Owen's eye,
nothing more than a strange wisp wailing over the left shoulder near the
ear. Nothing more than a steady rain, nothing less than a game show host.
Gods grow from
ignoble beginnings. It's one of the things that makes them gods.
Coincidentally, they often fall to grisly ends. It comes with the territory,
like a gold mine or an oil field. And it's always the mineral rights that
brings them to the ground, so to speak.
* * *
Rocinante
rode along smooth over the well surfaced roads of the interstate. It was
much easier than driving on the smaller highways, though not nearly as
grand. Cars and trucks all over the place, clogging things up, as usual.
He drove the sixty miles to Santa Rosa, picked up highway 54 again.
It's not as fast, but who the hell cares about speed. That's something
you've plenty of right now. Speed. Motion. Inertia broken all to hell and
falling around you before your eyes. That's what you wanted though. Broken
inertia. So stop bitching and try to enjoy the countryside. And keep your
eye out for that damned Buddha.
The road wound
around the foothills and bluffs. The surface looked old and uncared for
and there were large potholes that appeared out of nowhere. And then there
was the wind. It was a strong headwind blowing from the southwest at about
forty miles an hour and sometimes the gusts were strong enough to blow
him from one side of the road to another. He had no choice. He would be
moving along and suddenly WHAM, a strong gust pushed him for the opposite
ditch. All it would take would be a proper gust of wind at the right moment,
with a semi truck coming across the other way.
And that
would be the end of that.
Would it
be so bad? Get it all over with. Spare yourself the agony. What agony?
Aren't you going to have fun on this one? Isn't this journey going to produce
an interesting learning experience? Like working maintenance at that camp
when you were fourteen. That was good, wasn't it? It was hell, sure, but
you got a lot out if it. When you're young you can work eighteen hours
a day on three hours of sleep for many days because your full of testosterone
and it runs you like a pit bull in heat. Heat. Yes, there was heat there
in the heart of learning that time, for sure. Carol was there -- the first
love. Shit. That was when you were an optimist. You would take her to the
rifle range and show her how you could shoot. You were a good shot back
then and you took pride in that, but college took care of those prideful
feelings, didn't it. You could shoot well all the way through high school
and then college got to your brain and filled your head with a different
set of tools. You still love her today, Carol. Quiet, intelligent, sensitive
soft, brown-eyed Carol. The two of you used to steal horses from the corral
at night and take them with only a bridle on through the dutch elm, hickory
ash forest down to the sandpit lakes. In mid-summer the water feels warm
on the surface but grows colder as you dive down into them and the pits
run deep and you would use the back path less traveled and move on down
across the stream to the sandpit lakes.
And you would show
her how you shot. . .
But that was all gone
now, she was a pediatrician, married, brain dead and very far away. And
you're a cynic now, unemployed with no degree and too much higher learning
rattling around in you skull and a huge backpack and an old black motorcycle
named Rocinante and a strong desire to meet the Buddha on the roadside
WHOOSH --
Owen pulled the bike back
across the road only a few feet from from the station wagon in the other
lane. It had been the wind coming in hard from around a pass. The driver
of the station wagon's mouth hung wide open and if Owen hadn't taken evasive
action he would be eating the radiator of that wagon queen full of family
on vacation.
So, you're close,
you sonofabitch. Well, you're not going to take it that easy.
Owen pulled off to the side
of the road to check his maps. He put the kick stand down, got off the
bike. He looked out over the barren valley to the bluffs beyond. He saw
a mountain range off to the southwest and he thought he could see Gallinas
Peak, but couldn't be sure. It was warm here, now, and without the speed
of Rocinante the wind seemed a friend again. Owen sat and listened to the
wind. He saw no cars approaching from either side, there were no road signs
or farm structures. Nothing. So he sat in the silence listening for the
voices in the wind. He heard only the wind, no voices. He looked at his
map.
Las Cruces,
he thought, that's not so far. I can make it by sundown. A twelve-hour
ride for the day. Not so bad.
Owen rubbed his sore
posterior and climbed back aboard Rocinante. He pulled the woven cotton
blanket from his bed roll and made a saddle blanket for the bike which
helped considerably. It also completed the horse and rider motif for which
he strove. Rocinante, after all, was the name of Don Quixote's horse.
Chasing Buddhas in
the desert.
* * *
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by fix this! a division of the Pure Pulp Press