Skorpio (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

"Groovin"

They splurged and spent the night at Vern's Motel, $29 for the double. They showered in the morning. They began to sweat as soon as they stepped outside. By eight a.m. it was already in the eighties.

Curt conducted an inspection of his beloved micro-bus which he had bought from a used car dealer in Midlothian, IL six thousand miles ago for $1500. It only had eighty-eight thousand miles on the clock, a relative youngster. Curt pulled out the old metal toolbox and removed the air gauge. He worked his way around the car with a hand pump making sure the tires were inflated to 33 lbs. per square inch. He'd studied the USGA plat maps and determined there were enough old mining trails laid out on the rock-hard sand that they should be able to drive a couple hundred miles without difficulty. Tread was good. He'd brought a sturdy jack, two spares, and shovels.

He opened the side passenger door with a skin-rippling screech. A little WD-40 was in order. He removed the blue can from his tool box, attached the short straw, and spritzed the running tracks and hinges. He worked the door back and forth. Ahhh. Better. Inside he had extra air and oil filters just in case. Two five-gallon picnic thermoses. Curt used his plastic ice bucket from the room to deliver loads of ice from the outside ice machine to each of the thermoses. He used the bathtub faucet to fill four half-gallon canteens swathed in canvas he'd purchased at an army surplus store.

He checked his copious supply of dehydrated meals, cheese and cold cuts in an ice chest that was half melted. He would have liked to replenish the ice, but the old machine had barely filled the two buckets before grinding to a halt. Ronnie emerged from the room into bright morning light, bare-chested and toweling off his mop of auburn hair. Catnip. Catnip to the girls. Curt had always envied Ronnie's easy way with women but Ronnie wasn't stuck-up or greedy and Curt did all right on the leftovers.

He'd been Ronnie's wingman since freshman year.

Ronnie placed his hand over his eyes and squinted east into the sun looking past Vern's Hardware at the distant, hazy mountains. The landscape was unrelieved by plant or water. Nothing stirred, nothing moved except for a pair of turkey buzzards hovering in the middle distance. He smacked his hands together and inhaled.

"Smell that desert air!" He looked up and down Main Street. "Jesus. They never heard of McDonald's?"

"We'll eat on the road. Come on. I want to find some shade before we stop for the night."

The VW's 20 gallon gas tank had a range of 350 miles. Curt also carried two steel five gallon gas tanks on the roof next to their camping gear. They'd topped off when they hit town last night. They did not plan to roam the plateau, but rather to seek out an interesting site and camp there. It was Ronnie's idea. It was he who first came across the Azuma in an obscure conquistador's diary in Seville, when he and Curt had back-packed across Europe the previous summer.

He'd been studying maps of the area and Anasazi texts the whole semester and thought he had the site narrowed down to a ten square mile area. The Spanish breached the Azuma stronghold in 1542. Ronnie had a thousand dollar Nikon his parents gave him for his birthday and had been putting in long hours at the dark room in the Student Union. Dreams of
National Geographic
danced in his head.

Aside from fantasies of fame and riches which every young man possessed he was driven by a burning desire to know. Ronnie had been hooked when his parents took him to Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park when he was twelve years old.

The sight of the ancient cliff dwellings enraptured him. A deep bell rang in his heart. As a boy he had always played the Indian in cowboys and Indians. Between high school and college he'd spent a summer volunteering on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The Indians he met were not the Indians of his imagination. The Pine Ridge Indians seemed enervated, passive, and inured to subsistence living. They drank and did drugs. They were a sharp contrast to the warriors of his imagination and perhaps it was this desire to uncover those warriors of old that drove him.

For Curt, it was all about dropping acid in the desert. He'd always had that mystic bent. His drawings were getting spacier.

They saddled up and headed out, the microbus making its characteristic grinding noise. Five miles out of town on County Highway BB the pavement ended and they rode on the hard flat surface of the desert consisting of silicon, crushed pyrites, sand and gravel. Vegetation was sparse and hardy. It had been a dry year and the desert stretched before them sere and forbidding.

Curt plugged the Kinks into the 8-track and cranked it to drown out the engine noise, which sounded like a cement mixer filled with metal. "You Really Got Me." They rode without speaking, each lost in thought, chewing beef jerky, sunflower seeds and quaffing water. The old microbus had no air conditioning and they rode with the windows open. It was like sitting near a blast furnace. The air was sweet and dry with a hint of mesquite.

Ronnie rolled a joint on a copy of
Rolling Stone
and they lit up. Suddenly they were loquacious.

"This is gonna be so cool," Curt said.

"What about rattlesnakes, man?" Ronnie said. "We got to be wary of those suckers."

"Just watch where you step. We'll sleep in the bus. Shouldn't be a problem."

"And scorpions. You heard what the man said."

"Scorpions are generally afraid of humans and their stings are rarely fatal."

"They give me the creeps," Ronnie said, turning around and digging through his backpack for the snakebite kit he'd purchased at a sporting goods shop in Denver.

Within an hour they'd left all traces of civilization behind save for the ruts and grooves of the road itself. The microbus jounced across broad stretches of washtub surface. Ronnie pulled out his Zeiss binocs and sighted in on the distant mountains. He thought he saw a communications tower but he couldn't be sure. The distance was clouded in heat haze.

The Kinks finished with "Sunny Afternoon." Ronnie popped them out and replaced them with New Riders of the Purple Sage.

It was just past noon. When they saw the old woman.

***

CHAPTER THREE

"Clarity"

Curt couldn't believe his eyes. How did she get there? They were miles from nowhere in a desolate wilderness yet there she stood by the side of the road as if waiting for a bus. He looked at Ronnie.

"I see her," Ronnie said, quickly closing the ashtray to hide the joint. As if an old woman standing in the desert had any interest. He felt anxious, foolish and absurd all at once. He laughed at himself.

"Maybe she's lost," Curt said.

"How did she get out here?" No car. No bike. No horse. She stood next to the road with her wizened face turned expectantly toward them.

"Maybe we should ignore her," Curt said.

"No, man. We can't just leave her standing there. She might need help."

"We are not heading back into town," Curt said with finality.

"No, man. Let's just ask her if she's all right. She looks like she's waiting for us."

Curt stopped the microbus by the side of the road. The pale cloud of dust they'd been trailing slowly overwhelmed them pouring in through the windows and covering them with grit. The old woman stood on the right, or south side of the road. She was about five two, wore a shapeless potato sack dress and her head was covered in a beaded shawl. Ronnie didn't see how she could stand it.

Up close it was obvious she was Native American from her coppery skin and bulbous nose. She could have been anywhere from fifty to a hundred.

"Are you all right, ma'am?" Ronnie said through the open window.

She came close and peered in through the window, standing on her toes to glance in the back. She had mis-matched eyes; one brown, one silver. Like a Malamute.

"Have you seen my son?" she said.

Ronnie and Curt exchanged a glance.

"No ma'am," Ronnie said. "You're the first person we've seen since leaving Last Chance this morning. How did you get out here? Did you come with your son?"

"I warned him. I warned him about that woman."

"How did you get out here, ma'am? Did somebody drop you off?"

"He is very tall. His father was a shaman too."

The old woman was obviously touched.

"Give her one of the canteens," Curt said. "We've got plenty."

Ronnie leaned back and snagged one of the sweating canteens, covered in canvas. He held it out through the window. "Here take this. Are you sure you're all right?"

The old woman took the canteen and looped it over her shoulder. She shrugged, turned and walked into the blazing heat.

The boys stared.

"Maybe we should go after her," Ronnie said.

"And do what? Forcibly restrain her? I don't think that's a good idea. Listen. If she's still here when we come back we'll take her into town with us."

They watched for a few minutes as she receded into the sandy landscape. Curt put the VW in gear and they headed east toward the mountains.

Two hours later they found themselves running parallel to a gash in the earth when the road forked. The left turn laid a beeline for the horizon. The right veered toward the chasm.

"Take the right," Ronnie said.

"You sure?"

"Take it."

Five minutes later they came to the chasm and a precarious-looking wooden bridge that spanned a ten foot gap to a free-standing butte. And from there, another ten-foot bridge to undulating desert. They got out of the bus.

The chasm was twenty feet deep at that point but they could see where it dropped lower up ahead.

"I don't know, man," Curt said.

Ronnie walked out on the bridge. "Feels solid." He jumped up and down in the middle causing pebbles, gravel and dust to gyrate. "It's good. Let's take it."

The bridge creaked ominously as they traversed it. Ronnie relit the joint and passed it to Curt. The land descended toward a series of buttes and crevices in the distance. They drove down a switchbacked slope and their ears popped. It felt as if they were below sea level. A half hour later they spotted an odd rock formation off to their right. Ronnie got out the binocs. "Looks like a decent spot to lay up."

The microbus jounced and jittered over the rock and sand. The formation, which looked like a mushroom, was further than it first appeared and it took them forty-five minutes to finally pull up beneath the overhang of a sandstone ledge that jutted from the earth like a natural stonehenge. It was a little after four.

The boys got out to stretch their legs and walk around the odd formation. It was bigger than it looked, with several jagged routes up and into the crown. Ball cap pulled low over his forehead Ronnie boosted himself up onto a boulder to climb inside the crown.

"Careful of rattlers, hoss," Curt reminded him.

Ronnie hesitated. "It's hot and sunny. Hopefully they're all sleeping."

"No man. They lay up at night. They like the heat."

Ronnie wore over the ankle hiking boots. They wouldn't do much good if a rattler lunged for the calf or thigh and he paused before each step. There were numerous cubby holes in the rock, dark places where snakes could hole up. He wished he'd boned up more on rattlesnakes.

"Wait a minute," Curt said from the ground. "I'll get the snakebite kit." He returned to the bus and located the plastic, lozenge-shaped capsule. Carrying a backpack and canteen he followed Ronnie into the crown. It only took a few minutes to reach the summit, an uneven confluence of two rounded boulders leaning together and surrounded by jagged shards of granite and sandstone that formed a natural parapet.

They scanned their surroundings. No snakes. Curt reached into the backpack and removed an aluminum foil bindle. He unwrapped it revealing two beige capsules.

"Ready to launch?"

Ronnie reached out and took one of the caps. "Let's do it."

The boys swallowed the acid. Ronnie took out the Zeiss and leaned against the waist-high stone, slowly examining the horizon. Curt sat in the shade cast by a broad shingle, took a fat doobie from his shirt pocket and lit it with a Zippo emblazoned with the Grateful Dead symbol.

Soon they were mellow. They waited for the acid to kick in. Ronnie took long swigs from his canteen, got up again and resumed his watch. Afternoon sun lit the desert like the Radio City stage, the crown of rocks casting a long shadow to the east. Pale cumulus hung on the horizon glowing gold in the lowering sun. It was October and the desert would grow cold at night but they had plenty of sleeping bags in the bus.

Curt's gaze focused in on a half inch crack in a roundish boulder and he saw a large black spider with gold markings industriously wrapping a beetle in silk. He knew the acid had kicked in. Here was life in all its horror and glory. He reached for his backpack and withdrew his sketch pad and a mechanical pencil.

They grooved in a timeless space. A tendril of chill insinuated itself up Curt's shirt like the breath of a waking ice giant.

"Curt."

"What?"

"Curt."

"What?!"

"Come look at this, man! Look at this fucking butte, man! It looks like that drawing you made!"

It took Curt a couple seconds to remember how to move as he shifted first to one hip, then to his feet. He joined Ronnie at the rail looking east at the distant violet mountains.

"What?"

Ronnie handed him the Zeiss. "Five after twelve, man. Doesn't that look just like that butte you drew?"

Curt took the glasses. His wavering grip found the rock at his waist, the sand, the horizon. The butte escaped him.

"Can't see jack shit, man."

"Here," Ronnie said, taking the binocs and laying them on a flat shelf, a giant chipped tooth. He crouched and carefully adjusted the binocs. "All right. Don't touch 'em. Just carefully get down here and look?"

Curt did as he was told. As usual, he saw nothing at first but he kept looking and the flickering trick mirror coalesced--a minor distortion revealing the tiny, quavering chimney-like rock of his dreams.

"Whoah."

"Yeah. Let me see that sketch."

"I gave it to the bartender."

Ronnie did a double-take. "What?"

"Yeah. She asked for it. I didn't have tip money anyway."

A dark blue crept behind the mountains indicating the night to come.

"That's where we're going, man," Ronnie said.

"Bullshit, Ronnie. Look at these canyons."

Ronnie turned toward him with feverish eyes. "Don't you see? There's a reason you drew that place! It's too similar to be a coincidence. Someone or something is telling you to go there!"

"Oh. Wow," Curt said as revelation dawned. He stood and stretched. His up thrust arms topped the long shadow of the crown like horns. "The only place we're going is back to the bus. Aren't scorpions nocturnal?"

"We been out here all afternoon and ain't seen diddly. I say we build a fire and camp up here, man."

All they had was a small camp stove. It would take hours to gather enough scrub brush from the desert floor to build a fire that would last minutes. There was nothing resembling a branch much less a log.

"No fire. It would make the stars more difficult to see."

Ronnie nodded. "That's right, man."

Curt seemed to have modified his earlier policy. As the sun settled into the west they climbed down to the bus, retrieved their sleeping pads and bags and returned to the crown. They set the camp stove up in the center of the crown on a flat spot but now the acid raced through their veins and neither was hungry.

As twilight gave way to night they lay back with their heads on their rolled up bags and gazed at the celestial display. Back in college, they may as well have been in a tent when the stars came out. Light and air pollution had dimmed the heavens to a faint backgrounds glimmer.

Out here, miles from the ubiquitous neon and spotlights, the stars spanned the heavens to infinity. Millions of them. The whole Milky Way, a carpet of diamonds. Far to the east a meteor fell to earth leaving a blazing trail.

"Wow," Ronnie said.

"Yeah," Curt said. "Clarity."

Ronnie looked down. A pale scorpion hustled across his ankle. It tickled.

Far out, he thought.

Eventually they fell asleep.

***