Aerial Telegraphy

　

　

　

As is inevitably the case, many events, including several of consequence, must be omitted from the official report. This account chronicles occurrences arising during the Signal Corps’ deployment with General Nelson Miles in Arizona territory during the third, and final, campaign against the Apache rebel, Geronimo. I have written this narrative as an obiter dicta to my official report filed with the Department of the Army. Readers interested in that writing are directed to Aerial Telegraphy by Heliograph in the Campaign against Geronimo 1885 - 1886, a publication of the Department of the Army, U.S. Veteran Signal Corps Organization (1893).

In the Winter supervening between 1885 and 1886, I was dispatched to Arizona Territory to observe and evaluate heliograph communication supporting General Miles pursuit of the Apache warrior, Geronimo. Although never a chief in his tribe, Geronimo was respected as a wily and formidable leader of Chiricahua Apache raiding parties. Twice engaged in belligerent activity against pioneers in central Arizona territory, and twice defeated, in 1885, Geronimo was confined on a government reservation with elements of his tribe. For a third time, Geronimo led a band comprised of about 40 armed men from the confines of the San Carlos reservation. This war party raided along the border between the Arizona territory and Mexico, committing depredations as far west as Tucson and extending eastward across basin and range to Mesilla. Supporting themselves by the theft of cattle and other victuals seized from the settlers that they attacked, Geronimo’s party evaded federal cavalry pursuit and when close pressed, reverted to mountain bastions in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental as well as the Chiricahua range near the mining camp of Bisbee. Indeed, in these same Chiricahua mountains, a terrain well-known to the Apache tribe bearing that name, a lofty redoubt of escarpments and wild peaks formed the refuge known as Cochise Stronghold, a natural fortification from which the hostiles could launch their attacks with impunity.

Headquarters in the campaign against Geronimo were established at two points in this theater of operations – Fort Huachuca, southeast of Tucson, in the foothills of the mountain range of the same name and Fort Bowie, located 13 miles from the railhead at Bowie Station, an encampment occupying Apache Pass between Dos Cabezas mountains and the wilderness surrounding Cochise Stronghold. Dispatched west from Anapolis, I reached Bowie Station in mid-November 1885. Transported from the railhead by wagon with armed escort, I reported to the adjutant at Fort Bowie, announcing that I had been charged with documenting the use of heliograph telegraphy in the war effort against the renegade Geronimo. In the course of my arrival at Bowie Station and, indeed, during my transit to the Fort, I observed that the civilians in the region were much excited by the presence of the marauders in their midst and that a certain feverish fear commingled with a desire for retribution animated both the settlers and enlisted military that I encountered. Atrocities had been reported and the savages had seized women and children as hostages. All along the rail-line west of El Paso, similar temperament prevailed, exacerbated by the fact that the enemy war party was elusive, rumored to be everywhere poised for imminent attack, and, yet, never actually discovered by our forces. It was said that the Apaches came and went like ghosts.

Since the heliograph plays a notable role in this narrative, I think it necessary to describe this instrument and its use in a theater of war. The heliograph is a wireless solar telegraph designed to transmit messages by capturing a ray of sunlight and, then, reflecting that beam to its target. Transmittal apparatus consists of a mirror mounted on a tripod. Equipped with a gunsight, the mirror can be aimed with great accuracy toward the target of its transmission – generally, another heliograph operator occupying a mountain top fifteen to 25 miles distant. The gunsight relies upon an unsilvered central point in the mirror that facilitates target the light captured by the device. A sighting vane assists the operator in setting the heliograph’s target and the instruments alignment with its receptor is fixed by use of azimuth and lateral screws at the tripod head. Our command was outfitted with two different types of heliograph. The British Mance instrument is light and highly mobile. It’s keying device is mechanically linked to a pivot in the solar telegraph’s mirror. Morse code conveys messages, rhythmically interrupting the beam of light by key-strokes tilting the mirror up and out of alignment with its target. A pivot of 15 degrees is sufficient to interrupt the beam transmitted to the receiver, an almost imperceptible motion of the mirror, but, nonetheless, efficacious in producing the "dot" and "dash" signals characteristic of Morse code telegraphy. Our American-made Signal Corps. heliograph operated on a slightly different principle – in that case, the reflected sunbeam was broken by a shutter mechanism located on a separate tripod interposed between the mirror and its target. Our Signal Corps. heliograph requires the use of two tripod-mounted devices, the reflective mirror and shutter respectively, and is somewhat more cumbersome than the Mance instrument acquired from the British manufacturer. In practice, the Mance instrument was deployed at sites less readily accessible than those where we established heliograph stations using the Signal Corps. transmitter.

Arizona Territory is an ideal theater for aerial telegraphy. The climate is arid and warm. The sun shines unimpeded by clouds almost every day for several hours. The vast majority of the time, skies are entirely unblemished by clouds – army observers note that there are more than 300 days of unremitting sunshine in the desert and mountains near Cochise Stronghold and Fort Bowie. Also advantageous to heliograph deployment is the unique terrain in this theater of operations. The landscape of south-central Arizona Territory is comprised of numerous mountain ranges rising steeply from circumjacent desert and grassland. These ranges present steep slopes, wooded with pine and fir at higher elevations, rising to summits between 8,000 and 10,000 feet. The mountains are disconnected, interspersed with generally flat and treeless intermontane basins. In most instances, the ranges consist of a single ridge angling toward old Mexico, in longitudinal aspect rising as a dome across a distance of 10 to 20 miles, and, although these mountains may be steep and afford considerable inconvenience to travelers, they are nonetheless bisected by passes and their heights accessible by water-courses that are dry for most of the year. (The peaks retain snow above 7000 feet from November through April.) A half-days exertion will generally suffice for the climb from the desert or chaparral to the apex of these mountain ranges. And the summits afford favorable vantages for aerial telegraphy, heliographs placed so as to survey the intermontane basins and transmit messages between the peaks of these sky-island mountains. The air is south-central Arizona Territory has a peculiar quality of crystalline translucency and the absence of trees or other vegetation makes it possible for a scout perched atop one of the mountain summits to reconnoiter a vast expanse of desert landscape. Troops of men crossing the plains between the mountains will be readily visible to the mountain-based sentinel by reason of the dust cast upward into the clear air by their livestock. Therefore, heliograph operators placed on the mountainous heights of land may signal the presence and intentions of an advancing foe with the greatest alacrity.

During the third Geronimo uprising, heliograph stations were established on Mount Miller at the crest of the Huachuca range at the western bounday of the renegade’s range of operations. The heliograph technician located at Mount Miller could communicate readily with a heliograph station located on Whetstone peak in the Dragoon Mountain, the beam flashing across a distance of 15 miles. Twenty miles east of Whetstone Peak lies Rhodes Peak, the summit of the Galliuro Mountains. From that heliograph station it is approximately 20 miles to Mount Graham on the Graham Ridge also called the Pinalero Mountains. Graham Ridge represented the northwestern boundary of the territory wherein Geronimo’s raiding parties were active. It is 22 miles from the high point of Graham Ridge to Cochise Head where another heliograph station occupied a barren peak central to the Chiricahua Range – south of that range lies the Mexican border. Midway between Cochise Head and Mount Miller overlooking Fort Huachuca lies Swisshelm, an isolated peak roughly equidistant between those two summits. Swisshelm completed the ring of heliograph stations, capable of transmitting solar telegraphy messages either due east to Cochise Head or directly west to the operator on Mount Miller. A telegraph message transmitted on beams of sunlight from Mount Graham or Cochise Head down to the railhead at Bowie Junction could then be carried by wire to the Department of Army headquarters at El Paso about 300 miles to the East.

All of this is preliminary to the anecdote that I wish to tell in this highly unofficial chronicle. As previously related, the reader interested in additional details as to the military import of this system of heliographs may study my official account on file with the Department of the Army. In those pages, the reader will also find several figures including a map showing the disposition of the surveillance stations comprising the heliograph network used to corral the wily Geronimo within a ring of mountain peaks flashing lightning-like messages as to his movements. Photographs of the Mance V heliograph on use on Mount Miller in the Huachuca range and the other Signal Corps. instruments are also appended to the official report.

In early February, I made my way, escorted by division of cavalry, across the vast and barren deserts from Fort Bowie to Fort Huachuca at the western edge of the war-zone. We saw no Apaches during that three-day march. Itinerant Mexicans that we encountered said that Geronimo had withdrawn across the border and was making his winter camp in the fastness of the Sierra Madre Occidental, an inaccessible and, indeed, mostly unexplored and uncharted territory to the west of El Paso. We paused underway to visit the heliograph station on the stony summit of Swisshelm. At that place, the heliograph operator, a tubercular Polish lieutenant with a racking cough, was defended by a platoon of ten sharpshooters, occupying sniper positions encircling the rocky heights. The sun was relentless at the mountain peak and the lieutenant and his men were badly sun-burned. But the lieutenant averred that the dry climate was advantageous for him and had much arrested the progress of his disease.

Above Fort Huachuca, the ascent to Mount Miller was arduous. My party encountered several Mexican shepherds tending their flocks in the well-watered mountain meadows below the snowfields prevailing at higher elevations. Major Gregory commanded the heliograph atop the mountain. The instrument itself was perched atop a prominent spire of granite, a windy and exposed height where the cold wind almost immediately numbed my nose and fingers. Major Gregory’s telegraphy station was equipped with a Mance instrument – it would have been difficult to wrestle the more cumbersome and unwieldy Signal Corps equipment up the steep defile leading to the peak. A fissure in the granite capping the mountain led several hundred feet upward between sheer, gloomy walls of rock. At the upper end of the crevasse, the troops had built a wooden ladder, a lattice fashioned from the pine and fir growing in profusion below the peak, the rude and splintery rungs affixed to the rock by tenons pounded into cracks in the stone. On the summit, there were several campstools and the heliograph enclosed within a rough cairn of stones heaped breast-high around the instrument to protect it from the powerful, if erratic, winds. Major Gregory also had a fine German nautical telescope, a three-draw instrument with brass fittings mounted on a similarly brass tripod.

On the day that I made my ascent to heliograph station on Mount Miller, the sun blazed overhead and water melting from the snow accumulated under the summit made the passage upward muddy and treacherous. Twice, my boots, slimy from the mire on the lower paths, slipped on the rungs of the ladder climbing to the height occupied by Major Gregory and his small detail. Only my firm grip on the rungs above averted catastrophe. Atop the peak, I discovered Major Gregory and his assistants encamped under a makeshift canvas shelter intended to keep the worst of the wind from them.

Major Gregory was a handsome fellow, a cavalier with an ornate and sculpted moustache and flashing eyes under a dark brow. He did not stand as tall as he looked – Major Gregory was one of those men who imposing mien lent stature to him. When I asked him for a demonstration of his instrument, Major Gregory unveiled the mirror of his Mance heliograph, and, then, paused for a moment, awaiting the signal from the receptor station atop the Dragoon Mountains about 15 miles to the north and west. After a hiatus of five minutes, we descried a pinpoint of light blazing atop the blue ridge in that direction and, then, Major Gregory, using Morse telegraphy, flashed this message: TEST – LOVE ALTERS NOT WITH HIS BRIEF HOURS AND WEEKS – BUT BEARS IT OUT EVEN TO THE EDGE OF DOOM. I commended Major Gregory on his taste and learning, and, then, we reposed on the high, naked slab of rock to await the response as the message was flashed from station to station across this theater of operations. After a half hour, Major Gregory gestured to the serrated ridge of the Swisshelm, twenty to twenty-five miles remote across the treeless waste of chaparral. Another point of light, exceedingly tiny but so bright that its beam burned an imprint on the retina, began to flash against the sky. Major Gregory directed that his amanuensis transcribe the message into a ledger book installed within a small rocky niche and, thereby, prtected against the elements. The message read: TEST – LOVE’S ALTAR IS NOT BRIEFLY OURS AND WEAK – BUT BARE OUT EVEN TO THE LEDGE OF DOOM.

Major Gregory smiled at the distortion in his message. "The diction was complex and passed through a half-dozen heliograph stations before returning to this point of dispatch," he said. "Nonetheless, you will see that much of the message has survived." I nodded. "But is it enough?" I asked. "Indeed," Major Gregory told me, "messages required for the war effort in these basins are much simpler, more direct, and, therefore, less prone to deterioration by transmission." I passed several hours with Major Gregory and we discoursed upon a variety of topics. I found the Major to be a man of vibrant, if somewhat, melancholy imagination: his speech was vivid and adorned with many fantastical references to poetry that he know or books that he had read. And, although he was vivacious and purported to good humor, I sensed that he was harboring a very great and unspoken sorrow. At the end of our conversation, I expressed to him again my amusement at the way that the Morse signal had been altered by its transmission from mountaintop to mountaintop. "It is the fate of everything beautiful and intricate," Major Gregory told me, smiling pensively. "But do not doubt the efficacy of the instrument if the savages are actually afoot."

And, indeed, this was demonstrated to me on the next morning. After our colloquy on the heights, I withdrew from the peak, descending that same treacherous ladder, to the snowfields and, then, a lower encampment sheltered by a grove of aspen, all of them quite bare in this season. At that point, several cabins had been built from logs harvested in the forests covering the graceful flanks of the range and there was a spring affording sweet and voluminous waters as well as several corrals for pack animals. These accommodations were comfortable enough. Early, the next morning, a courier from the heliograph station came to our abode and advised that there was villainy underway: the Indians had been sighted and were in motion on the plains below.

On this morning, the wind was blowing a veritable gale atop the peak and I was much concerned to keep my hat in place by pressing it down firmly upon my skull. The cold ached in our bones and the men attending the heliograph were miserable, trembling in the wintry blast, their teeth chattering. Major Gregory was picturesquely clad, his shoulders draped in a malodorous mule blanket, and a kind of turban of scarves and bandanas tied about his temples. I took note that his fingers were raw and red as were the tips of his ears and his nose.

Major Gregory shouted in my ear against the tumult of the elements. "The station atop the Dragoon Mountains has sighted smoke or dust rising from the foothills to the range. It seems to be a sizeable encampment of savages." I asked if the Indians were mounting a raid. "This remains to be seen," Major Gregory replied. "But the force at the base has been alerted." And, indeed, even as we spoke, I saw a small detachment of men on horseback sallying forth across the desert waste. Although I am certain that to ride among those men would have been most exciting, and that there would have been furious motion with pennants and banners arrayed, weapons clanking against saddles, and the drumming of iron-shod hooves on the hard pavement of the desert, all seemed utterly remote from our mountain eyrie. The wind rampaged against us but we heard not a whisper from the cavalry proceeding across the flat and endless wasteland and their motions seemed minute, like an insect laboriously creeping across several yards of scuffed and grassless earth. After about an hour, we lost sight of the cavalry and there was nothing to do but wait. The sun’s approach toward the zenith stilled the winds and the rocks on the peak, hitherto, cold as ice began to bake in the immoderate rays pouring forth from the clear sky.

In the early afternoon, the heliographs lit up atop the mountains. Major Gregory spelled out the message: NO INDIANS – SMOKE WAS MIST FROM CAVE. We puzzled over this enigmatic communication a bit and, then, saw the battalion returning, moving more slowly now, horsemen dispersed at intervals across the plain. The next day I conferred with Adjutant at Fort Huachuca at the bottom of the mountain escarpment and he explained that the troop of cavalry, expecting to encounter the savage foe, instead discovered that a column of mist was rising from a depression in the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains. This mist was the product of warm and wet air emerging from some hidden, underground cavern, and, then, condensing in the morning air, a phenomenon simulating the campfires of an Apache raiding party. Several soldiers had climbed down into the depression and found there a blow-hole about the size of a baseball from which a great quantity of warm foggy air was expelled.

At the fort, I first learned of Major Gregory’s dilemma and source of sorrow, an affair about which everyone I encountered had some intelligence. This tale comprises an anecdote worthy of something found in a wild poem by Lord Byron or encountered in the prose of a Russian like Turgenieff. It seemed that Major Gregory was the scion of an old New England family, a clan that had distinguished itself as soldiers during the War of the Rebellion and from whom many sagacious lawyers and judges were descended. After attending Harvard, Major Gregory married an heiress of a family of similar repute. Unfortunately, the marriage was loveless and without issue and Major Gregory sought solace in a liaison with a beautiful young woman resident in his city. The young woman was the daughter of an industrialist who operated mills were many thousands were employed in weaving textiles. The maiden was betrothed to an older man, also of the commercial class, but on the eve of her wedding eloped with Major Gregory. The couple were soon embattled by relations on both sides and, ultimately, returned to their respective obligations. Major Gregory’s beloved, Emma, submitted to the marriage that had been plotted by her parents and the soldier, unable to endure the calumny and whispers in his native city, abandoned a lucrative law practice and enlisted in the Signal Corps, a branch of the service in which he had previously distinguished himself.

What followed seems as outlandish as the plot of an Italian opera. Emma disguised herself as a man and, also, enlisted in the Corps so as to be near the man that she esteemed as her true husband. She traveled west with Major Gregory and, indeed, reached the wilds of Arizona territory with him about a year before I made his acquaintance. Inevitably, the ruse was discovered and Emma’s gender was, as it were, unmasked. There being no other accommodation for her, Emma was consigned to work among the laundresses, many of them half-breed camp followers of the enlisted men. Her station was not a happy one and she found herself subjected to the undesired advances of some of our troops, including as well the civilian master of the laundresses, an Irishman named Mr. McCarthy. When Emma rejected, Mr. McCarthy’s endearments, Major Gregory beat the man with a buggy whip and, then, challenged him to a duel. Of course, a duel between a Major of the Corps and a mere civilian would have constituted a serious breach of protocol as well as something banned by regulation, although I don’t doubt that an affair of honor might have been condoned had the gentlemen involved been persons of equal rank. But this was not the case with respect to the surly Irishman and Major Gregory and, so, the duel was forbidden.

As you may imagine, I was quite keen to see Emma and, even, converse with her. But the troops to whom I directed inquiries about this woman were vague as to her appearance and, indeed, I received contradictory accounts as to the color of her eyes, the cut of her figure, and shade of her hair. Several women pointed out to me as candidates for the role of Major Gregory’s inamorata were clearly too old or too ugly or, even, half-castes, either part Apache or half-Mexican. One morning, I watched the laundresses plying their trade on the stony banks of the small river that came toppling down from the cold heights of the mountains. Although I looked very closely, I saw no one matching the description that I had formed in my imagination as to Major Gregory’s ill-fated lover. Some of the ladies were fetching and others winsome, but I detected none so self-possessed, haughty, and beautiful to conform to what I had been told about Emma.

And, then, after I had been in camp for about ten days, rumor reached our ears that Emma’s husband from East had arrived in Fort Bowie and that, even now, he was crossing the desolate basin to retrieve his erring wife. It seemed that Mr. McCarthy, the spurned lover, had somehow transmitted intelligence as to Emma’s whereabouts to her husband with the result that the man had come to the railhead, hired a phaeton, and set forth on the rough trails leading to Fort Huachuca. Everyone conceded that the wronged husband was a man of mettle, indeed, invested with courage even approaching recklessness, to set out alone across the wild desert when the Apaches were raiding along the frontier. At this time, I was much inconvenienced by a bloody flux of the bowels and, so, confined to quarters. Therefore, I recount events as they were narrated to me, without vouching, necessarily, for their accuracy.

As it happened, Emma’s husband reached the camp at twilight demanding that he be shown into the company of his wife. Mr. McCarthy made the mistake of casting aspersions on the lady and received another thrashing, this time with a buggy-whip. On this occasion, a duel ensued and Mr. McCarthy was shot dead by Emma’s husband. The weather had become frightfully cold with a blizzard blowing out of the Sierra Madre Occidental in old Mexico. Snow fell even in the foothills of the Huachucas where the fort was located and I felt the chill in my apartments despite the fire burning in my hearth. It was said that the corpse of Mr. McCarthy was found frozen rigid on the field of honor. A phaeton had departed from the military base and its wheel marks as well as the trample of it horses were seen inscribed in the snow on the slopes leading down from the fort to the desert badlands.

The Apache were on the march at that time and, although Major Gregory asked to be relieved of his frigid duties atop the mountain, his surveillance and heliograph could not be spared. Although an order was issued that no one was to tell Major Gregory of the contretemps at the fort, somehow, the news had reached him and, so, three times he solicited permission to depart from his station. The message flashed to the mountaintop from the camp was as severe as stern: "You will be courtmartialed if you abandon your post."

At nightfall, half-breeds advised that a sizeable Apache raiding party had been seen storming across the desert in the direction of Fort Bowie. The troops were told to stand to order and preparations were made to pursue the savages notwithstanding the inclement weather. After the sunset, the clouds attendant upon the blizzard cleared and the velvet blackness of the sky was illumined with the innumerable stars visible in the clear air of this climate. The cold was very great, as if the icy emptiness of outer space had dipped down to touch our earth.

A little before dawn, the high peak where Major Gregory was stationed flared with light. The heliograph station was equipped with a carbide or lime light for use after dark and, apparently, Major Gregory ignited that flame in order to flash a message across the vast and perilous darkness of the desert basins and ranges. At first, it was thought that Major Gregory may have lit the flare merely to afford himself some vestige of warmth against the deadly cold on the summit. But the heliograph flashed against the night and was intelligible: FOR I HAVE SWORN THEE FAIR AND THOUGHT THEE BRIGHT – WHO ARE BLACK AS HELL AND DUMB AS NIGHT.

The sun rose and the day was bright and cold. By midmorning the light-telegraphy had completed the circuit of the mountain and stations was observed at the Fort. The message as received was garbled and only a few words could be read: BLACK, HELL, and NIGHT.

Major Gregory’s mental state, of course, came under suspicion and several men were despatched from the Fort to communicate with him. The climb to the height was arduous for the paths were much obstructed with snow and the peak slick with accumulations of ice that glittered with menace in the afternoon sun. At the summit, the relief party found Major Gregory’s assistants befuddled by rum and huddled together in their tents near the base of the wooden espalier affixed to the rock crevasse. Two troopers, lashed together with cable, crept upward on the perilous assemblage, at least, reaching the heliograph station as the February sun was setting.

Major Gregory reclined against a boulder, frozen to death with eyes open and grey hoar-frost upon his whiskers. It seemed that he had been dead for many hours. Despite vigorous search, no trace was found of the lime light. It was thought that he had thrown the discarded flare from the precipice although there were others that averred that the pre-dawn message flashed across the wasteland had taken for its illumination the incineration of Major Gregory’s combustible heart. The inebriates at the base of the cliff recounted that the day before the heliograph message, word had reached them through a Mexican shepherd that Major Gregory’s beloved had been spirited away by her husband. When this intelligence was conveyed to Major Gregory, he was, at first, merely very silent, standing apart from the men and gazing across the barren basins below. Then, he said that he would search the landscape with the German nautical telescope for some sign of the refugees, ascending alone to the heliograph station with strict orders that he not be disturbed. (It was then that Major Gregory had signaled that he wished to relieved of his duties at the post.) The storm ensued and the peak became impossible to access. No one could have survived for long on that exposed summit and the men who had passed the night below in their tents were convinced that if Major Gregory’s heliograph had flashed signals before dawn, it was the aerial telegraphy of a dead man.

Later, I learned of another circumstance also exceedingly peculiar and, some might say, uncanny. The circuit of mountain peaks by which heliograph messages were transmitted included the stony height of the Swisshelm. On that mountain, a lieutenant of Polish birth was stationed. This man suffered from a tubercular constitution and, on the night that Major Gregory perished, was overcome by a fit of consumption. The Pole was borne from the mountaintop on a litter spitting blood. None of the other soldiers in this command were literate in Morse Code and, therefore, any message flashed across space to the Swisshelm would, perforce, have ended in that place – there was no one capable of transmitting the aerial telegraph to its next station. And, yet, it is indisputable that the heliograph operators downstream from that beacon-point detected a pulse of light emitted at the summit of the Swisshelm and, indeed, sufficiently intelligible to be transcribed and re-transmitted to the other stations comprising the circuit. This was the source of the garbled message returned to Fort Huachuca – BLACK, HELL, and NIGHT.

Superstitious minds maintained that the continuance of Major Gregory’s message beyond the vacant station at the peak of the Swisshelm was evidence that passion exceeds not only death, but optics, in its power. I am not so sure. Upon recovery from illness, I undertook a brief expedition to inspect the Swisshelm heliograph station. On that expedition, I discovered that there was an immense boulder immediately contiguous to the stone plinth on which the heliograph device was mounted. Upon closer inspection, I determined that the boulder was comprised, in part, of quartzite crystals and, indeed, one of its facets was prismatic with this mineral intermixed with pyrite, otherwise known as "Fool’s Gold." It is not beyond surmise that the message transmitted across the many aerial miles to the Swisshelm encountered this reflective surface and was, then, flashed to the next operator by this specular mineral, albeit in an attenuated and garbled form. Natural explanations for anomalous events are always to be preferred to the supernatural.

There is an appendix to this tale. Several years later, army officials intent upon writing a chronicle of the conflicts with Geronimo interviewed a number of Indians who admitted participation in raids led by that wily Caudillo. These interviews were transcribed where they occurred, at Fort Sill in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. Apache informants recalled that in late February 1886, they encountered a buggy racing across the chaparral alone and undefended. The Indians attacked this conveyance. A man and woman were aboard the phaeton. The man fired several shots from his revolver at the advancing Apaches and, indeed, injured one of the warriors slightly. He, then, turned his pistol upon the woman and dispatched her with a single shot through the brain. His revolver was, then, empty and the man fell into the hands of the savages. Although they did not recount what next occurred, one can imagine, only too readily, the torments that thereafter ensued.

Before dawn, the next morning, the Apache war party prepared to set forth. However, the keen eyes of the war chief observed that the White men were flashing messages made from bright light from peak to peak. The mountaintops surrounding the entire basin seem afire with the swift and intelligible beams of the heliographs. Geronimo determined that the presence of his troop had been discovered and that they could no longer rely upon stealth to mask their depredations. Conscious of being greatly outnumbered by the Federal troops in the vicinity, Geronimo ordered that his war party withdraw into the rugged mountains, abandoning their mission so that they could sally forth, undetected, at some future time. Thus, the message flashed from Fort Huachuca from summit to summit on that February morning dissuaded the Apaches from persisting in their attack, forced them to take refuge, and, indeed, may have led to their ultimate investment and surrender at Skeleton Canyon six months later.

Herostratus

　

　

1.

His name?

It should be consigned to darkness and oblivion. Damnatio memoriae.

I don’t know his real name. That name is concealed. The records of the Court are sealed.

But I can tell you what he called himself: Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe.

　

　

2.

Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe first went west, following the directions of the voice. Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe burned the lions wickedly guarding the throne of God and fled the fire. Then, Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe went east and met the Virgin Thing and took her child with him and the child told him to go to the Cochise Stronghold and seek refuge among the mountains. Then, he was lost in the wasteland and the ravens came but did not feed him. He prayed mightily. Then, the angels stood atop the mountains and they showed him the way and Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe was saved. He wrote a letter apologizing for the fire that burned the lions. That is the end of his story.

　

　

3.

He lived in Denver, in a mansion where a silver baron had lived, not in the whole house, but only a part of the house, three rooms without windows under the front porch. His daddy lived in the three rooms with him. Daddy slept in his big chair with the television always turned on. No one called him Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe at that time – Daddy called him by another name, although, of course, he knew he was the Special One and knew his real identity, keeping this to himself just as the Virgin Mary knew the truth about Her Son but did not tell anyone and, instead, "pondered this in her heart" or, as scripture also tells us "treasured all these things in her heart." (See Luke 2:19 and, also, Luke 2:51).

Daddy lost his license to drive on account of too much drink. So he paid a buddy to teach MAEJWM how to drive so that someone could go to the liquor store and buy the old man’s beer and booze. He was a good driver and a good son. He took care of his daddy, kept track of his bottles and cans, and returned them to the store for the deposit money. He swept the floor and kept the spiders and centipedes away from his father. There are brown recluse spiders in Eastern Colorado and they can make a mess of you.

One day, daddy said that he was ailing and that he had to go to the VA where he expected to die. MAEJWM drove him to the VA and helped him into the hospital. A couple hours later, Daddy came home in a taxi-cab and said that he wasn’t going to die this time and MAEJWM was very happy.

Then, a year passed and another and daddy was ailing again and he said that the time had come to die and that his son should drive him to the VA and this time let him off at the curb. But just in case, he didn’t die, Daddy told MAEJWM that he should return the next day at noon and go into the VA and check to see whether his father was dead and, if so, when he would be buried. So this is what he did and, in fact, the doctor took him to a room and told him that his daddy had not died and that he could take him home. And so this is what MAEJWM did because he was a good son.

But a couple weeks, later, daddy was ailing again and so weak that he couldn’t walk and so his son had to drag him up the brittle wooden steps and, then, yank and pull on him to slide the old man across the lawn to the car. He drove to the VA and some men came from inside the emergency room and took daddy away and this time, MAEJWM slept in the car or the corner of his daddy’s room or in the lobby of the hospital and, after a few days, daddy could sit up. He was thirsty for his beer and the booze and so he demanded that MAEJWM push him out to the parking lot in his wheelchair and they went home again to the silver baron’s mansion.

After another month, Daddy was ailing again. He was so sick that his eyes rolled back in his head and he made a loud, terrible noise with every breath that he took. Then, Daddy was quiet and the only sound in the basement was the TV set and MAEJWM felt very sad and lonely. He tried to wake Daddy but could not rouse him. Daddy didn’t call for the piss-pot or the bed pan. MAEJWM thought that it was wonderful that Daddy could go so long without having to use the toilet. After a couple days, MAEJWM decided to give Daddy a sponge bath. So he stripped off his shirt and saw that Daddy’s back was completely black as if he had been beaten with a baseball bat. MAEJWM was afraid that he would be blamed for Daddy’s injuries and so he decided that he would not tell anyone. He washed Daddy with warm water and felt that he was very cold. Then, he slipped Daddy’s pants off him and found that his buttocks were also completely black and blue and green, again as if the man had taken a terrible beating. – I will be blamed for this for sure, MAEJWM said to himself. – It is called elder abuse, MAEJWM warned himself. He found a small turd, completely black and dry, the size of a golf ball between Daddy’s butt-cheeks. The turd didn’t smell at all, but Daddy’s skin seemed to have a bad odor and when he scrubbed at his thighs, some of the skin fell off. – This is surely elder abuse, MAEJWM thought to himself. They will handcuff me and put me in jail.

So he locked the door to the basement rooms, leaving the TV on to comfort his old man, and, then, he went to the car, turned on the key and drove away. He hid the shoe box full of money under the passenger seat. Then, he drove for a long time.

　

4.

There were green mountain meadows, then, a bright plain where there were red rocks like the wings of scarlet birds buried in the earth, and, then, a grey canyon where the freeway dove downward and at the bottom of the canyon, there was another canyon, this one hotter and more barren than the one above and, at the bottom of the second canyon, there was a third that was like an fiery oven and, beneath that, a fourth, fifth, and sixth canyon each blacker and hotter than the next, and, at last, the seventh canyon wherein there was a lake of fire (Revelation 20). Messiah Alfred Einstein John Wayne Monroe saw the canyon before him, sheer cliffs blazing in the acetylene of the sun, and, then, the canyons were behind, in his rear view mirror, vast and Egyptian, filled with obsidian pinnacles and huge submerged mountains shaped like crumbling pyramids and he came across the desert to where Hell advertised itself and took the exit into Hell and to Hell Street where there were great multitudes, many thousands, shuffling through the inferno between casinos.

During the years that his mother lived with Daddy, she took him to the True Light Church sometimes two or three times a week – indeed, when Daddy was drinking heavily and a little agitated, MAEJWM stayed overnight at the Church for it was his sanctuary and the sanctuary of his mother as well. There he read the Bible and heard God’s holy scripture preached and learned the Word. MAEJWM knew that the Word was in the world but not a part of the world and that scripture mostly stood at an angle, as it were, to reality, informing people and things about the truth, but mostly not intervening to change anything but human hearts and minds, and, then, only sometimes and temporarily, and MAEJWM knew that the prayers that speak most truthfully of the heart and its yearnings are never answered – those prayers stand at a distance from desires that they can’t quite reach, just as God’s Holy Word, which is as close to you as your carotid artery is also distant and can’t be grasped because it is sealed away from your touch by its Glory and Beauty. When the Spirit came upon the congregation, there were some that bayed like dogs and others that hissed like serpents and there were turtledoves and cawing crows and many that spoke in Chaldean or ancient Sanskrit, but none who said anything that could be understood or anything that was instrumental or practical in any way – so this was the revelation, a great ongoing unfolding event in history that no one could really understand and that was of no use to anyone except to become saved and, what was the point of that?

And, so, it was in Hell where the sun set and the fire and brimstone (what is brimstone? See Rev. 14.10) were distilled into neon and the souls danced in the neon flames all afire. Then, the shambling men and women on the avenues walked from fiery sepulcher to fiery sepulcher and the sky vibrated with the flames of the ovens and the whores in feathers and silk finery went in procession among the hot lagoons filled with water as hot as a bathtub full of Epsom salts and there were galleries of pimps with cards that they shuffled endlessly and, then, thrust into your hands and, at last, MAEJWM came to a place where he could see two young men, each as handsome as the prophet Daniel, and they had fallen into the lion’s den and the sign showed that the young men were amidst white lions, two great white lions with white beards and white manes and the young men were also dressed in white in that lion’s den and their eyes glittered and their lips were poised to move so that they might speak and prophecy (Daniel 6:6).

MAEJWM walked up to the building – it was named the Mirage – where the sign showing the prophets in the den of lions covered the wall. Marble steps led to a fountain and the waters arched and foamed there. Daddy was standing next to the fountain, upright, still wearing his tee-shirt with the yellow armpits and his tattered boxer shorts through which you could see the grey-brown hair on his scrotum and he seemed to stand in the neon, trembling a little because he had come to the place where the worm gnaweth and does not die (Mark 9:48) . MAEJWM approached him and asked why he was not in heaven. Daddy said that they had stopped him. Who has stopped you? MAEJWM asked. Daddy began – "the two –" But, then, fear sealed his lips and he turned his face away from his son and MAEJWM saw how his back and flabby buttocks were all dark and bruised and he thought – these are injuries for which I will be blamed for sure – and so he fled that place.

He couldn’t recall where he had left this car. In the excitement of entering Hell and observing the processions of the damned, MAEJWM had failed to take note of the place where he had parked his car. He searched for a long time, but without any success, and, then, the sun rose and the neon flames subsided a little, extinguished by the water cannon of the fountains, and the heat made an oven of the streets. MAEJWM found a cool place underground, a storm sewer that went beneath the streets. A trickle of water flowed in the trough in the center of the tunnel. Some men were sitting against the concrete wall. They hooted at MAEJWM. He went deeper into the sewer’s darkness. At last, the ribbon of water flowing in the groove in the center of the floor no longer reflected any light at all but was as dark as blood. MAEJWM lay down in the dust and slept for awhile, awaking when some hoodlums rolled him over to loot his pockets, but he had next to nothing there, only twenty dollars – the rest was in the shoe-box in his lost car.

When the darkness began again and the neon fires burned in the sky, MAEJWM went outside and walked along the streets among the damned. He saw the young prophets in the lion’s den – two great white beasts stalking in circles around the beautiful Hebrew youths. Then, he met his father again, standing among the men shuffling the pimp-cards and Daddy called him a "dumb-ass" and said –"so you’ve lost the car. You’re such a dumb-ass." Then, Daddy pointed and MAEJWM saw the car, parked down a side street and he hurried to it. He had left the keys in the ignition but the door was not locked and inside there was the smell of baking money because the shoe box was still under the passenger seat and the car had become an oven during the day.

On the hell ramp, ascending to the freeway from Hell Street, MAEJWM saw Daddy’s old evil spirit hitchhiking along the side of the road and he cried out to him: "I will get you out of Hell, Daddy, I will get you out of Hell!" There was a crossroads. He could drive to Los Angeles or to some place called Flagstaff. He chose Flagstaff.

　

　

5.

At the rest stop, animals and people had turned to stone. The stone was grey and extruded from the desert. The sun was setting, but light remained in the sky and so MAEJWM could see the formations quite clearly with the scuffed trails that ran among them, several acres of creatures turned to rock and, then, abandoned in this mountain pass. Some of the outcroppings were formed from cottages or semi-trucks; some of them had been castles and clouds and indefinite half-built fortifications before the change came upon them. The stone figures were all washed and blasted by a torrential wind that poured through this trough in the mountain range and the flag on the pole at the rest stop bucked and kicked and its hardware clanked like the chains of a soul in hell and sand borne on the gale had smoothed the rock, abraded away its rough images and the portraits of the presidents made in granite and the prehistoric animals and the colossi on their thrones – all of them were blurred, more or less, some smoothed into shapes that were like pebbles washed up on the sea-shore, completely round and featureless.

The smell of the gasoline had seeped into MAEJWM’s clothes and cinder and ash smell also. He went up the concrete path to the toilets, walking between dinosaurs and mastodons and a giant sloth that hunched over him. Two women wearing turquoise-colored gloves were mopping the tile floor of the Men’s room. MAEJWM heard them gossiping in Spanish. He went to the other side of the kiosk, to the door marked with the female sign. A couple truckers wearing stained sweat pants were waiting outside the door. The truckers glared at him. The family use toilet was locked.

MAEJWM followed a dirt trail between the stone behemoths. The wind boomed among the big formations. Clouds overhead skidded eastward. Some teenage kids were playing hide-and-seek among the exposed rock on the hillside. A desert chipmunk danced down the trail, glancing up at MAEJWM – was he carrying food, a treat?

MAEJWM went behind a rock shaped like a reclining woman to urinate. He probably wasn’t safe to defecate in this area. From the overlook, he could see the last ribbons of orange tattered against the horizon serrated with mountain ranges. It was quite dark and the ridges of the mountains, each separate and distinct, hovered over the gloomy and vast expanse of desert.

He was confused about where to go and what to do and sorrow weighed him down – there is no good thing in the flesh and when you try to do good, evil results. It was sin working death in him – I do not understand my own actions. For I do not what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 7: 13, 15).

Far out on the plain, headlights cleaved darkness. The sight made him feel lonely. He would go back to the church that he had burned and confess, apologize to the priest and nuns.

But there was no cross-over to the west-bound lanes. His way had been made before him ages ago and so Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe started his car and took the ramp onto the east-bound freeway.

6.

In the early morning light, the white winged being rested under a conical green mountain. He had come through a big city full of railroad yards and trains, some glass boxes far from the freeway, windows tremulous with dawn. Hard-luck cafes and shuttered taverns crouched next to the freeway, abject, it seemed, and demoralized and an adobe church stood beside a concrete-lined gutter for averting flash floods and, then, the fields alongside the highway gaped open and there were big, raw gravel pits with battered yellow cranes in them, then, suburbs in a hollow place in the desert, then, fields irrigated to grow fruits and, on the road to Mexico, the white winged being that had alighted under the green conical mountain.

He exited the freeway and drove to the winged creature and saw that it was a great dove towering over a sun-baked plaza in the form of a church. He left his car in an unpaved parking lot and went to the dove and entered her.

When his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the church, MAEJWM found that he had come to heaven and entered through its pearly white gates and that he now stood among the blessed ones. Candles flickered on altars in niches and the adobe walls were painted in bright patterns like the designs woven into the Navajo rugs that he had seen for sale at the souvenir stands at the truck stops. Golden steps and bolts of lightning decorated the walls and, overhead, there were angels everywhere. Some of the angels were painted into thickets of vine and blossoming flower and they perched there like tropical birds of paradise. Several angels stood on pedestals and flexed their wings like Mexican masked wrestlers and those wings were shaped like flame and flame-colored as well. Other angels brandished swords and held scales of justice and their eyes were almond-shaped and inscrutable. There were small angels with wings like bumble bees or wings designed for hovering like those that you see on iridescent dragonflies. God and His Saints looked down from the soot-dimmed darkness of an overhead dome and life-sized martyrs twisted and contorted by their tortures aimed their eyes upward, anguished eyes, and Jesus spread open his bruised and beaten ribs to show his ruby red heart and he had been scourged so piteously that he seemed wounded even upon the sole of his foot, one foot raised ever so slightly above the wooden plinth on which he stood. The colors in the paint were different from the neon flames of hell, softer tones and more natural, like the hues you see in cactus flowers or ripening fruit or the colors of the desert where the veins of sulphur are exposed or the red of iron is rusting under the hot sun – the painted gardens were lush with water, pools of it shining in the darkness like a polished gemstone. All of this finery so complex as to tax the eye and make the mind weary, all these symmetries and carved wooden cloaks painted blue and red, all of these patterns on the walls like Navajo blankets or thatched like a basket woven from reeds, everything faded under soot, grease from the hundreds of candles that were trembling in their glass jars, and the floor also ashen, clad with cinders, and, in an open wooden coffin, an old, old man made from wood but resting under regal silk bed clothes reclining, his eyes closed as if he were sleeping and his beard pointed like the tip of a shovel.

The door had been left ajar and there were animals in the pews – a couple of yellow dogs curled-up on the olden wooden benches, cats patrolling the walls with wide, cruel eyes, several sparrows that flapped their wings naughtily as they bathed in the holy water, even, a small pink pig asleep in the church’s central aisle. A figure clad in black was kneeling in the place where the church’s wings intersected with the main, vaulted room. A crow perched on the pulpit.

MAEJWM sat down in one of the pews. He was terribly tired. But he felt safe. He had read some place that cops were forbidden to enter a church to make an arrest. So those pursuing him because of the bruises on his father’s back and buttocks could not come here to take him away. MAEJWM put his hands together palm to palm, and, then, reclined, resting his head on that pillow. No sooner had he closed his eyes than he was asleep.

A hand on his shoulder shook him awake. A short Indian man with grey braided hair stood over him.

"Amigo," the man said. "It’s time to wake up. There are tourists waiting outside and I have to sweep out the church before they can enter."

"There are –" MAEJWM looked around him. " – there were animals here."

"The church is sacred to St. Francis," the Indian said. "We leave the door open so that wayfarers can take shelter and so that animals may enter. Animals are always welcome here in this church."

The Indian helped MAEJWM arise. He held a battered-looking broom in his hand and a baseball cap was tucked into his waist-band. An arched door cut through the adobe wall led into a small garden where there were some flowers and a small dry fountain. The Indian directed him in that way. Two nuns with sunburned fat faces and merry eyes stood beyond the garden gate. The nuns asked MAEJWM if he was hungry. When he nodded his head, they ushered him into a steel shed with a concrete floor. A dozen small children were sitting on folding chairs and eating cheerios and milk in white plastic bowls. Some milk was spilled on the floor, dashes and dabs of it, and there were cheerios strewn on the concrete as well.

"It’s a Head Start program," the Indian man said, turning back to the sanctuary. The nuns beckoned to MAEJWM, handing him a bowl of cheerios floating in milk and a granola bar. A sort of stool sat in a corner of the shed and MAEJWM went to it and sat.

After he had eaten, the nuns took MAEJWM back behind the metal shed where there was a stack of iron-colored wood logs. They handed him a wood splitter and asked him if he would hew some wood for them. He nodded his head and, then, went to work. After an hour or so, MAEJWM was thirsty and so he set aside his maul and went back into the shed. The nuns gave him a carton of milk. The children were napping on blankets spread out for them on the concrete floor. MAEJWM said that he was tired and wanted to rest as well. One of the nuns brought him a blanket that smelled a little of wet dog and he took it into the corner by his stool, spread it on the ground, and rested there.

Later in the day, MAEJWM saw that there were tourists wearing shorts and with golf hats and berets on their heads against the blazing sun. The children were singing "Old McDonald had a Farm." Sometimes, the tourists forgot to remove their hats upon entering the church. They took pictures of the paintings half-concealed behind the soot on the walls and photographed the many wooden angels as well. A priest celebrated Mass in the church and an old woman went to the casket containing the regal sleeping king with his beard pointed like a shovel. She slid her hands under the wooden old man’s head – then, she tilted the old man’s head upward, lifting him three times while bowing herself as if seeking apology for her affront. A couple of Indian men wearing jeans and cowboy hats led MAEJWM behind the church were someone had been hand-digging a drainage ditch. They gave him a shovel and pointed to where the ditch was supposed to go. One of the men put a jug of water in the shadow of a cactus. Later, a nun brought him a ham sandwich with mayonnaise on white bread.

While he was digging, a fat young man with a bloated, sweat-greased face staggered up to him. The fat young man’s clothing was grey with caked dirt. He sat on a rock a dozen feet from where MAEJWM was scratching at the desert pavement with the tip of his shovel.

"Why do they let you work?" the fat young man. "You aren’t even native."

"I don’t know," MAEJWM said to the young man.

The young man snorted. "They don’t ask me to work.I suppose it’s ‘cause I’m just a drunk and junkie. But I’m God’s child too."

The young man who proclaimed himself a drunk and a junkie walked around MAEJWM as if to survey him from all sides. Then, he swore under his breath and walked away, feet spread wide as if to better grip the desert’s hard crust.

In the evening, there was a service in the church. Most of the Indians came in pick-up trucks but a half-dozen young men arrived on great, heavily-muscled horses. They tied the horses to the fence surrounding the big sun-baked plaza. A young man preached in Spanish with English words now and then. The fat junkie sat in the last pew in the church with his head dropped down on his chest, apparently, asleep.

MAEJWM sat in a pew near the front of the church beside a grinning wolf-like dog. The altar behind the pulpit was guarded by two wooden lions. The lions faced one another and they were carved in the shape of large house-cats. The lions had alert pointed ears and showed fangs white in their jaws and their tails were coiled behind them in a tight spiral. The lions were mostly bone-white but their eyes were black, almond-shaped and inscrutable. MAEWJM looked at the lions and, although they didn’t move, their house-cat-shaped heads seemed to acknowledge his gaze and it seemed that they were gazing at him out of the corner of their eyes. The wood in which they were gripped kept them from turning to confront him and he imagined their immense and terrible roar.

After the service, the priest came and shook his hand and, then, said that the congregation was very poor. The nuns were from Wisconsin and they were trained as teachers to run the Headstart and the reservation elementary school. "We don’t really have any money set aside for relief," the priest said apologetically.

"You can stay another night, if you will do odd jobs tomorrow," the priest said. "But then you will have to be moving on. I can give you ten dollars, but that is a lot for these people."

MAEJWM said that he had money and that he didn’t need any hand outs from the congregation. "I will pay for my breakfast and lunch," MAEJWM said. "No, we won’t accept that," the priest said.

The priest invited him to his trailer house. He had a VW Beetle parked next to it. Two Indian woman brought the priest and MAEJWM beer and a burrito made with corn and squash and beans. The burrito was the best thing that MAEJWM had ever eaten.

The priest said that MAEJWM could sleep on his cot. He told the young man that he was going to go back to the city, eight miles away, where he ordinarily lived.

"You will have to leave tomorrow," the priest said. MAEJWM nodded.

"Why do you have those white lions guarding the altar?" MAEJWM asked.

"They were carved many years ago in old Mexico," the priest said. "I don’t know what they mean. The altar is God’s throne on earth and so I suppose they are guarding it against evil influences."

The priest said goodnight. Then, he went outside and drove away in his little car. The night was black and the sky full of constellations.

　

　

7.

The pure one, the inconsolable and lost Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe drove through a pine forest. The top of a mountain covered with snow hung overhead in the sky like the harvest moon. A small city was hidden in the evergreens. Twice, he pulled in to gas stations, but each time suspicious unmarked cars frightened him away from the pumps. He had no doubt that the police were looking for him. A black tongue of shattered lava spilled down from a plateau that was spiked like the walls of a medieval castle. The forest parted respectfully for the lava-tongue. He saw another gas station, but the turn lane was blocked by the corpse of a deer sprawled across the asphalt – then, some lights shrieked at him and he veered into the fast lane and decided that he had no choice but to keep driving since the menace was all around him.

The pine trees marched like an army of identical soldiers to an escarpment and, then, fell away and he could see that this was the end of the earth, its last and final terraces, a great balcony overhanging the abyss. The road dropped and his gas tank went to zero and the engine, then, snuffed out but it didn’t matter because he was on a downgrade that continued for mile after mile, swooping down out of the sky – the power steering and brakes went out of the car and he had to fight to keep the vehicle on the freeway and, at times, it seemed that he would fall off into empty space and, then, be like Lucifer, nine days and nine nights falling through the crystalline void, cast down from paradise, stars above and stars below, an endless descent from the pine forests through the crooked lands to the desert. At first, he careened past the semi-tractor-trailers gearing down to keep their brakes from burning up, then, he slowed a little, and some of the cars that he had passed caught up with him and, then, he was rolling through the flat land and, even, coasting up and down the hills, dropping into the desert as if walking downward on a flight of steps, and the semi-tractor-trailers caught up with him and honked and blew their horns and, then, passed him and he twisted on his emergency flashers and, at last, on a slight upgrade under a sea of stars, his car would roll no farther, and so he made it glide onto the shoulder and stopped there, unrolling his window to inhale the hot updraft from the desert, a good twenty or thirty degrees warmer here, then, up, atop the plateau among the lava dikes and pine trees, with the snow-melt running as white water in basalt sluices and channels.

He got out of his car and paced around it and thought that this was the end of his adventure. The police would find the cast-off car but he would be long gone, hidden in the desert where the ravens would bring him manna and where he would drink from springs struck from stone. He opened the passenger door on his car and was about to pluck out the bundles of folding money wrapped in rubber bands when a light flashed against him and a siren wolf-whistled and, then, the big traffic cop in the big Stetson hat was walking slowly toward him, casting a great shadow in the beams of light spilling off his Highway Patrol Car and Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe was so terrified that he almost fell forward on his face in the gravel on the side of the road.

The officer said something to him. MAEJWM heard his own voice, high, like a flute answering. The officer spoke again and, although MAEJWM didn’t understand what he was saying, he complied nonetheless, responding to the cop’s commands as if they were phrased in a foreign language. He drew his wallet from his jeans and handed the big traffic cop his driver’s license, also the insurance cab card, everything proceeding now at lightning speed, more words spilling out of the cop, more words that he spoke without knowing exactly what they meant and, then, the cop stepped back, returned to his bright vehicle under the glare enveloping it, and MAEWJM saw that the big highway patrolman was speaking on his radio and, then, looking at a computer screen that was hidden from him but which cast an emerald reflection up on the cop’s chin and nose and eyes. – He will surely identify me as the father-murderer, MAEJWM thought and, then, time, previously racing, slowed to a stop. Between each heart beat whole drab empires intervened. The desert expanded away from him in all directions, blowing outward like an explosion.

"How do you feel?" the policeman asked him.

"Okay, I guess."

The big highway patrolman took him into custody. The cop led him to his patrol car and shoved him in the backseat and, then, they raced away, the dark desert rushing by, and MAEJWM thought that he would start crying, that he would burst into tears. But that fact that no one would hear his sobs kept him from crying.

The cop car surged up a ramp and swerved erratically for a moment, the car’s lane-change knocking MAEJWM to the side. Then, they were at a gas station. There was a steel awning crisp and well-lit like the wing of an airplane against the desert sky. The highway patrolman ushered him from the car into the gas station.

"Will you take him back?" the big cop said to the kid behind the counter.

"Sure when I get off," the kid said.

The cop made himself a hot dog with mustard and raw onion and pickles. The hot dogs were rotating on steel rollers under an orange-yellow heat lamp.

"It’s mile-marker 308," the highway patrolman said.

"I can use the turn-around?" the kid asked.

"Up at 310, you bet," the cop said.

The kid turned to MAEJWM: "We’ll get you up there when I go off duty at eleven."

"What do I owe?" MAEJWM asked.

"Give him twenty," the cop said.

"Get you two cans of 87 octane regular," the clerk said.

The highway patrolman said: "You need to watch your gas gage better, my friend."

He told the kid that he had business down at Sedona and that he had to hurry – it was an accident with something spilled all over the highway.

At eleven pm, a girl with tattoos on her forearm stood outside on the pavement smoking a cigarette. The clerk beckoned to her and she came inside. "Out of gas," the kid said, pointing at MAEJWM. "I’m helping out Trooper Suarez." "Good for you," the girl said, putting a lanyard over her neck and stepping up behind the cash register. The kid went to the pump and filled up two plastic jugs with gas. Then, he pointed to his pickup truck parked alongside the air compressor on the side of the building and MAEJWM climbed into the cab. He put the jerry-cans of gas on the floor in front of him.

"Don’t let that spill," the kid said. "It stinks."

The clerk turned on his radio and sang along with music. MAEJWM pointed to his car stalled on the side of the road and they drove another mile to a turn-around where the clerk made a u-turn. He dodged some traffic coming down from the plateau and they stopped at the stalled car.

The kid poured a jerry-can of gas into the tank. "That’ll get you to the gas station – it’s five miles," he said. "Stop there and fill it up. Then, you better fuckin’ check your gas gage, amigo. This is fuckin’ desert out here – nothing but gila monsters and rattle snakes all the way down to Phoenix."

MAEJWM nodded.

"What do I do with the other can of gas?" Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe asked.

Suddenly, the kid from the gas station was very tall. For a moment, the veil was torn so that the Being manifested itself in its spirit form. The kid towered over MAEJWM. His eyes flashed red fire and his enormous body swayed overhead. MAEJWM cowered between his legs.

"There are things in the world that must be purged by fire," the colossus said. His voice was deep and booming and it contained a multitude of voices.

"What do you mean?"

"You will understand," the kid said. Then, he collapsed like a balloon that had been popped and his tiny face looked up at MAEJWM as if from the bottom of deep well.

"Well, have a good night," a tiny voice said, softer than the chirp of a cricket. MAEJWM opened his trunk and put the can full of gas next to the spare tire.

Then, MAEJWM started his car and drove to the gas station and there he filled his tank, paying the girl with the tattoos on her forearm who was sulking behind the counter.



Then, he drove through the wasteland and he stopped to sleep at a rest stop. And, then, he drove some more....

Under a conical green mountain, he saw a winged being, white as a dove, and drove that way to investigate.



8.

The smell of the burning was in his nostrils. His clothes reeked of smoke. It was a righteous odor, the residue of an offering made to God. (Leviticus 1:1-17) He drove within the speed-limit without feeling the road under his tires. The road and the wasteland were merely evidence of things unseen.

The desert was full of pits and craters but the road had made straight the way. (Isaiah 40) The wings of night-flying insects made the billboard signs along the freeway flutter with their shadows. The Thing? He had seen those signs for a hundred miles, maybe more.

The Thing? The headlights of trucks on an upgrade, on the other side of ditch between east- and west-bound. The night sky overhead like the ceiling of a cave.

Bathed in a pool of tremulous light: The Thing?

The signs shrieked at him. He was uncertain whether the Thing? was his father, beaten blue and purple on his shoulders and buttocks in his recliner or the white tigers or the red plastic can of gas that he no longer had with him or the church in the desert like a white dove or his own body now melting into a spirit that was flying high and wide over his car like a kind of silken banner. The vast invisible world encircled him and guided his way.


The Thing?
The gas station was on a lonely mound of broken rocks and gnarled cactus. It must have been late in the night because the freeway was empty – nothing coming, nothing going – and the Thing?’s parking lot was empty, a couple minimum-wage cars parked remote from the ramshackle porches on the building, apparently the attendants’ vehicles, grim-visaged cars whose range was limited to no more than a county before breakdown, the western-style false-front of the gas station and arcade mounted atop the porch where there ran a row of red letters across a yellow-painted board: The Thing? Mystery of the Desert.

MAEWJM bought a half-tank of gas, pressing the button to "pay inside".

A grey man in grey overalls was pushing a grey mop. Grey water was spilled on the floor between the aisles of souvenirs. The man looked up at MAEWJM but failed to recognize him. His eyes were dull and slow in his head.

The souvenirs were Indian bows and arrows made for little tykes, polished agates and rose quartz, tomahawks, kachina dolls that had been made in China although this did not matter because the spirits that they represented were powerful and present and could be heard chattering together and cooing and hooting in the rafters overhead. There was wind outside, clotting like blood into little dust devils, and lightning flashed in the sky, momentarily illumining ranges of remote mountains like caterpillars crawling over the basins.

You might step in the mop-water and slip and fall, but MAEWJM was too majestic and noble to make that mistake and, so, he strode between the aisles of souvenirs and the racks where potato chips and nuts and candy bars were displayed and came to the high counter where a fat woman with whiskers on her jaw was reading a magazine and ignoring a half-dozen surveillance monitors that only she could see clearly. The monitors showed lonely corridors and blurred exhibits but they were turned at an angle from MAEWJM so that he could only see them if he concentrated in his mind on seeing them remotely but he was too tired to do this. He handed the fat woman some money and she asked him if he wanted to see The Thing?, the question mark dangling before his eyes and mind like a hook used by anglers to catch the curious or hungry fish.

"How much?"

"1 dollar," she said.

"Okay," MAEWJM said.

"Don’t wake it up," the fat woman said. "If its sleeping, don’t wake it up."

She showed the inside of her mouth and it was foul there.

He went through an entrance with batwing doors, hinged to open inward and, then, slap shut behind him. It was like going into an old-time Western saloon. Ahead of him, a pole-barn on a concrete slab stretched toward a far wall made from blue-green translucent panels. There was another narrow place and a turnstile that he had to push through that recorded something – he heard the gears turn and inscribe some sort of legend within the hidden apparatus. Old cars and tractors were parked along the walls of the pole-barn and it was very dim, so dark that he couldn’t read the plaques posted by the vehicles explaining their significance.

Huge clawed footprints marked the floor and they led him forward, glowing with faint greenish phosphorescence. The pathway went over some pallets arranged like a boardwalk, was momentarily between sheds, and, then, he was in a torture chamber where naked life-size figures were being twisted on the rack or pinched with red-hot pincers by hooded executioners. The martyred figures had open mouths through which they silently howled and their eyes drizzled blood down their ravaged cheeks and their faces, ecstatic with torture reminded him of saints that he had seen in painted church. More cars, grey and disheveled-looking sedans, flanked the walkway from the torture chamber into another long corridor with glass cases displaying various things – a two-headed calf fetus, the foot of a wooly mastodon, a flintlock rifle and a big World War One mortar. There were Jivaro shrunken heads and fragments of a meteor made of melted iron and bits of Trinitite from the place in New Mexico where the atomic bomb had melted the sands into glass – an old covered wagon was parked in a corner next to a horse-drawn hearse with black wheels and a black carriage.

The monstrous foot prints guided him into another shed with a steel roof and corrugated metal sides and a big sarcophagus eight feet long and as high as his waist. The sarcophagus was embedded in the concrete under a dusty wooden billboard that said: HERE IT IS: THE THING? – WHAT IS IT? THE MYSTERY OF THE DESERT. The letters were painted in a wriggling, writhing red against a bright yellow background, twisting and turning as if the person painting those words had been trembling with uncontrollable fright. The huge glowing foot prints led to the brink of the sarcophagus and stopped there.

A thick plastic hood covered the sarcophagus and it was gouged and nicked and people had used pen-knives to inscribe their initials in the window into the box. For a moment, MAEWJM focused his eyes on the marks inscribed on the clear plastic and couldn’t see through it, but, then, his vision adjusted and he could see the thing in the sarcophagus, a hoozie-goozie, a gaff, a kind of doll flattened out with bits of white bone showing through a wrapping of old yellow and brown bandages. The doll was man-sized, a bit of yellow femur-bone poking through the bandages on its thigh and part of the rib-cage exposed. Its head was a crushed orb with glass eyes leaking saw dust from its brain-pan, some bits of animal cranium, it seemed, glued onto its brow to make a smashed skeletal profile. No matter how hard he looked, the creature’s head and face remained blurred, incomprehensible, a riddle that could not be solved. The doll held a baby against it’s side, a bandaged wrist ripped open to show a grey, dusty bone. The baby was a duplicate of the bigger doll, but entirely swaddled in bandages from head to toe – a little rusty-red fur extruded from the criss-cross of dirty bindings around the baby’s skull. MAEWJM supposed that the thing in the sarcophagus was not that much different from the wooden and painted saint in his casket in the church and recalled a worshiper reaching into the box and lifting the effigy’s head up from the velvet pillow on which it was resting.

It was then that MAEJWM realized that his Daddy was dead and that the fire had purged his sins and driven away the white tigers that were keeping him in Hell. Now, he had ascended with the smoke of the burning lions into heaven and he was before God’s great White Throne and this was made manifest to him by the doll in the sarcophagus. It was all very clear that nothing remained of his Daddy within this mortal sphere but the hoozie-goozie in the sarcophagus and that this was not even his father, but the mere shadow of his father as effigy. He was the tiny infant held in the dead thing’s arms. This was Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe, confined in a box as a spectacle for tourists and truck-drivers. It was intolerable and Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe reached into the box, breaking apart the plastic window, so that he could smell the odor of moth-eaten fur and mud as he lifted out the baby-doll. It was without weight at all, as light as a feather.

Cradling the baby-doll in his arms, MAEJWM hustled past Hitler’s bullet-proof car, a loop of rope used to hang Saddam Hussein, and the pickled corpses of three aliens retrieved from the space-craft crash at Roswell, New Mexico. He emerged through a door that opened onto the parking lot, a hundred feet from where his car was sitting by the pumps.

The doll screamed at him: "Take me back to my mommy, take me back."

"You are with me now," MAEJWM said.

He ran to his car, threw the dead baby on the seat beside him, and drove down from the conical hill of broken stones and cactus toward the freeway.

"Take me back to my mommy," the baby shrieked again.

"You have no mommy," MAEJWM said.

The baby began to cry inconsolably.

"Quiet now," MAEJWM said. "Quiet now."

The baby cried for twenty miles and, then, fell asleep.

　

9.

He woke from unsettling dreams that had left their residue all around him. The priest’s trailer house was shadowy and humid, blurry with womb-light penetrating the chamber through pink curtains. A battery charger and some other gear were stored against a wall. A spider wove a web in the corner of the toilet behind the stool.

Most of the lines and angles in the world had been changed by his dream. The sky blazed with intent that had not yet discovered itself.

He ate cheerios again and a glazed donut with the little children. The apple-cheeked nuns were indifferent to him, as if he were an unexpected, and slightly disreputable, guest. This annoyed MAEJWM. When one of the nuns approached, he whispered to her: "Beware, for there are some that have entertained angels unaware." (Hebrews 13.2) She pretended to not hear him.

After breakfast, an older nun wearing a white apron came to where he was sitting. She asked him a few questions and, then, led him to a bench under a thorn and willow remuda next to the blazing open plaza in front of the church. After an hour or so, some Indians arrived in a couple of pickups labeled on their doors with the name of a construction company: Ramirez and Sons. Three young men wrestled a battered concrete mixer out of the back of a truck and dragged it through a side building into the courtyard behind the church. The older nun met them at the door into the side-building, spoke to them for a couple minutes and pointed to MAEJWM.

A few minutes later, the boss had finished his cigarette and he got out of the pickup and followed his crew to where they were talking to the nun. The boss wore a white cowboy hat and boots made of soft white leather. He went back to his pickup and got a zinc bucket. Then, the boss came to where MAEJWM was sitting: he said that he needed his help and handed him the bucket. A teenage boy from the school stood a few feet away nervously kicking at the gravel and dust under foot. The boss spoke to the boy in Spanish and, then, the boy led MAEJWM hundred feet to the side of an old adobe shed where there was green hose screwed onto a faucet embedded in the mud-brick wall. The boy turned on the flow of water and filled MAEJWM’s bucket. He pointed to the door leading through the modern side building into the back courtyard.

MAEJWM carried water to the mixer in the courtyard. The men made white stucco plaster in the mixer. Then, they they hauled stucco up onto a scaffolding where they were repairing an old cornice. Some pigeons lurking in niches in the tower cooed and hummed to them. At noon, the men went across the plaza in front of the church to the adobe cafe where women were cooking. They ate corn and squash burritos. Then, everyone went into the church, pushed the dogs and cats aside, and lay down for a siesta on the pews. MAEJWM noticed the Indians crossing themselves as they entered the painted church, bowing to the altar, and painting their foreheads with holy water.

Mid-afternoon, everyone got up, used the toilet in the stucco shed next to the garden, and, then, MAEJWM began hauling water again. They worked for another three hours. By this time, it was very hot and the sun shone like a welding torch on the sides of the zinc bucket and in the water that he carried there. The boss and his crew left and MAEJWM went to the priest’s trailer and tried to sleep but it was too warm.

He bought a couple of cokes from the women in the little café. Then, he sat in the shade of a wall by the cemetery. A small golden scorpion scuttled across the stones.

The carved and painted lions looked as if they belonged on an antique carousel in some pavilion on the coast. But they weren’t on a carousel. Instead, they were guarding the altar and the altar was the way that led to the throne of heaven. The lions stood as sentinels and they roared to keep people from entering heaven. They roared and growled and showed their fangs. MAEJWM had seen their rage and insolence in their carved and painted eyes. The lions kept Daddy from heaven. They threatened him with their paws and claws. The lions stood at the threshold of the Throne and kept away the unworthy but they had also frightened Daddy and kept him from entering into the Kingdom and so, now, he was trapped in the neon hell and this was wholly unacceptable.

Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe recalled that he had some gasoline in a red plastic jug in the back of his car. He thought that he would burn down the church and, in that way, force the lions from their guard duty and send them roaring and ferocious into the wasteland. A cat with three legs and two old dogs sat on the pews. Some chickens nudged their way into the sanctuary and stood gossiping in the back of the room. A crow sat on the pulpit and looked down suspiciously on him.

The animals needed the church and it wouldn’t do to destroy it. He watched the rib cage of an old yellow dog lying on its side under the casket containing the wooden saint. The dog’s rib cage rose and fell with its breathing.

It was dark. He didn’t know the hour. He had been lost in thought for a long time.

He went outside to where he had split the wood the day before. The maul was leaning against the adobe wall. He carried it into the church and smashed the lions free from the wooden piers on which they were mounted. The wood broke easily and, although the lions raged, he was able to knock them free from their mountings. He carried the first lion from the church. It was light and the burden was easy. (Matthew 13:2) Beyond the wall of the cemetery, there were some slabs of ragged granite, a sort of stone claw, protruding from the earth. He put the first lion in a place where the eroded rock formed a bowl. Then, MAEJWM returned to the church and carried the second wooden beast to the cavity in the rock.

The gas was at hand and he anointed the lions. But he could find nothing to ignite the blaze. At last, he drove his car, lurching and heaving, across the open desert until it was parked only ten or fifteen yards from the lions, now lying on their white-painted sides in the tub in the granite outcropping. He used the car’s cigarette lighter to set afire some strands of straw that he pulled from horse manure that he found on the trail by the cemetery. The straw glowed red and went out before he could apply the flame to the lions. He rooted in the manure until he found a dozen more pieces of straw and lit them like a torch. The lions were now meowing like kittens. The flame lit the gasoline fumes and an orange column of flame rose over the lions. Someone cried out from one of the buildings by the church. Bats flopped through the air.

Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe ran to his car, drove it to the pockmarked road, and, then, zigzagging around the deeper holes, reached the asphalt, then, the concrete ramp of the highway. He looked behind him and saw the bonfire burning as a tiny speck of fire in the great darkness.

　

　

10.

The dead baby woke up and called him every vile names there was.

"You are a fool and a loser," the dead baby said. "Turn here and go up to Cochise Stronghold."

He drove along a barren stretch of narrow two-lane county highway. It was open range here and he could smell cattle but couldn’t see them.

"You idiot-boy," the dead baby said. "You moron."

Where the road curved, a faint jeep track branched off onto the dark plain.

"Turn here, you loser," the dead baby said.

"Is this Cochise Stronghold?"

"How would I know? You think I’ve been out here before? I’ve been stuck with that fucking gaff for the last sixty years."

"So where does it go?"

"How should I know?"

The jeep track corkscrewed between stony hills and ended at a sandy wash that MAEJWM was afraid to cross. He parked next to the flood-way.

"Well?"

"What do you want?" He asked the dead baby.

"You make me sick," the dead baby said. "Just get out of the car and use some initiative for once in your life."

"Doing what?"

"You better find a place to hide or you’re going to jail for a long, long time."

He left the car and walked across the wash and sand filled his tennis shoes. He walked until he came to a boulder shaped like a throne. He sat there, emptying the sand from his shoes. After walking for another hour, he came to an arch of rock rising out of the desert. At the base of the rock, the wind had cut an overhang into the stone. It was now very cold and he was shivering. MAEJWM took refuge under rock shelter. A scorpion stung him on the hand when he tried to arrange some stones to make a pillow. He was surprised that the scorpion’s sting was not much worse than the sting of a hornet. He lay down in the dust. Yellow and green eyes watched him.

The sun rose. Light washed up on the shores of the day at first, tentative and grey and cool with dew, and little creatures darted across the desert pavement, sun-baked clay so hard that their claws didn’t leave marks. The sun moved higher in the white sky and the day bleached like a bone. The shadow protecting MAEJWM crept closer and closer to the edge of his body pressed up against the cool stone cavity of the rock shelter. Then, the sun groped at the rock overhead and turned it into an oven and the Messiah had to rise and, covering his eyes with his hands, stagger across the desert. He saw a hill , a crooked little pedestal pushed up into the blazing sky, and, atop the hill, there were several brown outcroppings like petrified dog shit, coils and twists of stone that radiated heat when he reached them. He had climbed the hill in the hope that he could see his car from that height but the desert didn’t show that to him – instead, he saw a featureless up and down choked with thorny cactus and grooved by flash floods. The flash flood channels were salt-white and zigzagged across the barren land, directed on their way, it seemed, by a lump of jagged blue mountain floating on a shimmering bed of mirage. There was no sign of a road or a path or, even, a trail that an antelope or mule deer might make.

The sun funneled down on the Messiah’s head. He covered his skull with his hands and squeezed his eyes half shut and walked back down from turd hill in the direction where he expected to find the rock shelter. But he was disoriented and the broiling stony trenches made by the floods seemed to lead in circles. He wished that the dead baby were with him to provide counsel. But he was entirely alone and, even the other voices in his head, had ceased to speak, cauterized on the lips, it seemed, so that they were silent.

MAEJWM thought that there was juice in the fruit of a prickly pear. He found a bulb-shaped purplish piece of fruit embedding in thorns. Tearing the fruit free from the cactus cut his fingers and they were pierced with spines. He found a ditch that was steep enough to keep a little of the sun away and sat in its bottom, prying the prickly needles from the fruit. It took a long time and his fingers were stabbed to the point that he could scarcely use them, and, then, in desperation, he plunged the fruit into his mouth and thought he could suck the spines out of it, but, instead, they merely migrated into his lips and tongue and studded the roof of him mouth. It didn’t matter – there was a tiny ooze of moisture in the fruit, just enough to coat the inside of his mouth. When a fly landed on his mouth, this set the needles in his flesh afire and he brushed it off and felt more spiny puncture wounds in his tongue and palate, innumerable tiny wounds. But this pain was nothing compared to his thirst and he resolved that he found another cactus bearing fruit, he would eat that as well regardless of the lacerations to his mouth.

He walked awhile, thought he saw the rock shelter showing some friendly shadow, and made for that place. Along the way, he grazed a thorn bush and an inch long spike embedded itself deeply in his left forearm and made the muscle ache.

The rock shelter might have been the place he spent the preceding night, although he wasn’t sure. He felt the need to urinate but nothing came out of him. Sitting under the rock overhang, he pried the thorn out of his arm. To do this he pinched his skin and, then, tweezered the spike out with his fingers still bristling with tiny spines. The Messiah was surprised to see that the pinched skin on his forearm did not revert to his arm’s ordinary contour. Instead, his skin remained welted as if molded from some soft, pliable substance that held the form that his fingers had made. He pressed his back against the rock where it was a little cooler and, after a while, his eyes didn’t work any more and he was blind and, then, unconscious.

A cool breeze nudged him awake. The desert was dark. Evidently, it was night. MAEWM felt a little stronger. His mouth was dry and his eyes tearless, but he thought that he could stand up. He clawed at the rock and got to his feet.

He looked around and decided that he was going to die at this place and that, if he had to die, he might as well drop dead while walking.

But which way to go?

Something caught his eye. He saw a flash overhead and, then, another. A bright light blinked several times in the sky – long, short, short, long. When the light had stopped flashing, he saw it had come from the top of a dark mountain, a great shadow hanging motionlessly over the desert. He walked in the direction of the mountain top that had flashed light at him.

Then, he saw another light, a sort of beacon atop a more distant range of hills. The beacon blinked at him and he changed course and went in that direction. After a few minutes, the beacon vanished. He stayed on course, clambering up and down gulches, aiming his forehead at the place where he had seen the flashes.

A coyote howled. Something rustled in the brush.

He turned in that direction and saw a blue-green light flashing atop another peak, signaling that he should go that direction, and so he altered his course, and walk in the direction of that flicker of light, faint as a firefly and mounted high atop a remote peak.

His car was under the ridge, parked in front of a sandy wash. Some white dunes seemed drifted under the car’s fender. He found the door and the keys still plugged into the ignition. The dead baby was gone but there was a bottle of water sitting on the seat where the mummy had been.

The water felt boiling and it inflamed the spines embedded in his tongue and gums, but he could feel the fluid , fattening his veins momentarily and sealing off his cells that had begun to leak through their membranes. The car’s headlights picked out a faint trail and he drove for awhile and, at last, found himself on blacktop.

A gas station overlooked the freeway. The place was closed. The air smelled spilt gas and his mouth was raw with the tequila taste of the cactus. He found some dollar bills and a few coins and bought three cans of pop from a vending machine. There was an ice machine on the porch of the gas station, near the locked door of the Men’s room. MAEJWM found a fist-sized stone and broke the padlock. Then, he chewed and swallowed ice until his belly was full of water. He vomited several times, but kept eating ice and, then, the sun began to rise again and he drove eastward on the freeway.



11.

Two gas stations later, he came to El Paso. There is a place where the freeway slices through the lunar mountains and landslides have cut up the canyon. The United States is a sliver of warehouses and old shacks and stockpiles of concrete and gravel tilted down to the muddy ribbon of the river. Beyond the river, Mexico is a shanty-town rising on stilts above the serpentine river plain. It looks as if you could throw a rock from the American side over into Mexico and, perhaps, shatter a window in one of the shacks there.

MAEJWM found an exit and drove among the bunker-like warehouses and industrial sites on the terrace above the river. He parked in a factory parking lot and made his way down the hill to a big fence running above the water. At intervals, there were places where the fence had been pushed aside and where foot paths burrowed down under the cyclone links. A couple of back packs had been dropped at the place where the Messiah stooped down and, crouching, slipped under the fence. A sweater was tangled in the wire. He skidded down the stony slope and began to wade across the river when he felt a hand on his wrist and another tugging at his other arm.

A man wearing a brown uniform shouted something at him. They were standing knee-deep in the water. He could see Mexico, all tattered and disheveled rising up as a cliff of cardboard and plywood shacks and the dogs on that side of the river were all barking at him.

Another man came down the river bank, kicking pebbles out from under his boots, and he helped the first guard. Handcuffs clicked behind Messiah Albert Einstein John Wayne Monroe’s back. His wrists were pinioned. The two men shoved him uphill to their jeep.

　

12.

Twenty years later, a letter came to the church, San Xavier el Bac, the so-called "white dove" of the desert a few miles south of Tucson.

The letter said:

I have had a hard time, but so have you, because I know everyone has a hard time in this old world of ours. I am so terribly sorry that took (sic) the wooden lions from your church and burned them. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of this and regret it and this was a long time ago.


I have been in mental hospitals and very ill for many years. But, now, with the help of my doctors, I feel that I found my right mind again and, if I am compliant with my medications, I think I will be okay.

And so I am writing to tell you that I should not have burned the lions and that this was a bad thing and that the only answer I can give to you as to why this happened was that I was mentally ill and not thinking clearly and very confused as well. Then I was under the law so that nothing good dwelled within me. Now I am in hope. (Romans 7:18; 8:24)

Here is what I have – which is not very much I know -- and I hope that the lions can be replaced or restored. All I can say is that I am sorry.
The letter was signed. There were five twenty dollar bills enclosed.

In fact, the lions had been restored a decade earlier. Fundraising began in 1989 to restore the interior of the Church. Tucson businesses and private persons donated money to the Patronato, the nonprofit corporation entrusted with maintaining the church. Between 1992 and 1997, teams of professional conservators worked restoring the frescos and wood sculptures in the structure. Most of these conservators were Italian and they worked with interns from the Tohono O’odham tribe at the reservation. One of the tribal interns, a troubled young man named Timothy Lewis, found his vocation working on the church and, later, married a Spanish woman who was on-site for the restoration. Lewis and his wife, Maria Rubio, now split their time between the reservation south of Tucson where San Xavier del Bac is located and Spain where they work on Gothic cathedrals and chapels along the ancient pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago.

Two carved lions guard the altar at a similar mission church in Santa Maria de Magdalena. This church also serves the Tohono O’odham people in Magdalena de Kino, a village in Sonora, Mexico. Mexican woodcarvers in the village were hired by the Patronato to duplicate the lions. The replacement lions were brought to San Xavier del Bac in 1999 and carefully painted by Timothy Lewis and Maria Rubio to match the church’s decor.

Timothy Lewis was a drug addict and alcoholic before he became involved restoring the old church. A tribal judge ordered him to work at the church after he had been involved in a domestic assault. He is now the supervisor for all restoration operations at San Xavier del Bac.

If you wish to donate to the Patronato:


Patronato San Xavier

P.O. Box 522

Tucson, Arizona 85702

Atrocious

　

　

College was a bore: the dorm smelled bad like pizza and stale socks and the kids were annoying. Dempkin had a car and he drove home every weekend to party with his friends. One night, Dempkin’s buddy was racing on the back roads drunk when he lost control and rolled the car. A passenger, another drunk kid was flung through the smashed back window and died in the ditch. Dempkin was driving on the gravel township road a couple hundred yards behind the vehicle that crashed, chasing him in a game of bumper tag. He saw the car’s headlights suddenly flip up to rake the sky, then, shoot sideways sending a beam searching the cornfields along the township road. Dempkin was inebriated himself and, so, he used his cell-phone to call 911 and, then, fled in the opposite direction so that he wouldn’t be arrested for drunk driving. He parked his car at a campground by the river a couple miles south of town and hoofed it home.

The crash was a warning to Dempkin. At the end of the semester, he dropped out of college and joined the Marine Corps. He successfully completed his Basic Training and, then, volunteered for two tours of duty in Iraq. After his service, Dempkin completed college and, then, was accepted for police officer training. A number of servicemen were seeking employment in law enforcement at that time and, at first, Dempkin couldn’t find a job. He worked as a jailer for half a year and, then, as a private security guard. A small town hired him as a patrol officer. The work was dull. But he did a good job and eighteen months later accepted a position with a police force in a mid-size city. This work was more exciting and Dempkins excelled. He took SWAT training and was assigned work on a team serving search warrants. Dempkins’ team specialized in "dynamic entry" – this meant that they busted down doors.

By statute, search warrrants have to be served during daylight hours and, so, Dempkins’ team favored

pre-dawn raids – the perpetrators were cuffed and hauled to the waiting squad cars just as the sun was peeping over the tops of the houses in the neighborhood. One morning, Dempkins’ captain had a search warrant for several bags of marijuana, guns, and money. The address was known to the cops – there had been calls to that home before involving domestic abuse and shots fired. With a four man team, Dempkins arrived in a white panel truck. The panel truck was armored and the men wore kevlar vests with visored helmets. A squad car with its lights turned off prowled the alley behind the target and rolled to a stop between garbage cans and garages: this was to block a possible escape route. The cops had shotguns and they stood next to their squad car waiting for the action to begin.

It was overcast and the Captain wasn’t sure as to sunrise. He checked his cell-phone and wrote down the official sunrise time on his pocket pad for his report. The darkness lifted a little and traffic on the nearby freeway made a moist sound like a river rushing over rocks and, then, it was light enough to read street addresses and some of the lawn signs posted for an upcoming election in the precinct. The panel truck was parked a block from the target and, when the Captain gave the signal, Dempkins and the other three men hustled down the sidewalk. Cars were parked along the road and lights shone in some of the windows. The curtains were drawn at the target house, but Dempkins could see a sliver of orange-yellow light shining through a rift in the fabric pulled over the window.

The team used a double handle tactical ram, a 35 pound Blackhawk, to breach the door. Dempkins and his partner counted down from three and smashed the front of the ram on the door’s sweet spot just beside the handle and latch. The door flew open and the team rushed inside. The house was cluttered but clean. There was no contraband in plain sight. Two little boys in pajamas were squatting in front of a TV set. Dempkins could hear another TV set playing in another room. A woman emerged from the kitchen in a bathrobe. The cops were all shouting and they proned everyone out, knocking the kids to the floor so that they were sprawled face-down in front of the TV. The woman screamed obscenities at them. A toilet flushed. Dempkins and his partner used the ram so knock down a second door – they didn’t check to see if the door was locked but just smashed it down. In the bedroom, a man wearing nothing but underpants was already lying face down on the floor shouting "Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!"

An ugly-looking white dog ambled toward Dempkins. He had dropped the monoshock ram on the floor and reached his service weapon. In another room, things were being flung about and Dempkins could hear glass breaking. A child began to squeal in a high-pitched monotonous tone. The dog opened its mouth and looked up at Dempkins and so he shot it. The animal fell on its side, kicking at the air. At that moment, Dempkins saw a small girl with her thumb in her mouth – she was only a few feet from the dead dog and Dempkins could see that she had a spray of blood from the animal on her shirt.

The search didn’t turn up anything. Dempkins used the tactical ram to smash the house’s thermostat and knock out the bathroom doors. The idea was to make the place uninhabitable. Some arrests were made, but, of course, there was nothing with which to charge the man and woman who were taken downtown. (The Department’s social worker took the children into custody.) The captain told Dempkins that he should surrender his service weapon and that he was on administrative leave until the discharge of the weapon could be fully investigated.

"Why did you shoot the dog?" the Captain asked him.

"It was a pit bull," Dempkins said. "He was lamping me."

"What do you mean ‘lamping’ you?"

"Looking me right in the eye," Dempkins said. "When a dog looks you right in the eye, it means he’s about to attack."

"No one else fired their weapon," the Captain said.

"The dog threatened me," Dempkins said.

"But no one else fired their weapon."

"Does that mean I was wrong?" Dempkins asked. "Or maybe it was others who weren’t aggressive enough."

One of the other cops took offense. "Are you saying I’m not aggressive enough?" the man bristled.

"I’m not saying anything," Dempkins said. "I want to talk to my union representative before I say anything more."

"That’s wise," the Captain said.

"That dog had his tail wagging," the other cop said.

"I saw dogs like that in Iraq all the time," Dempkins said. "Wagging their tail doesn’t mean they’re friendly. It just means that the critters excited."

Dempkins gave a statement to his union steward with a union lawyer present. He said that the dog had charged at him and, so, he had to discharge his service weapon to protect himself.

The dog wasn’t a pit bull. It was a pug and bulldog cross, an elderly animal almost 12 years old.

The shooting was determined to be justifiable. But there remained some lingering questions about use of force. Dempkins was suspended from the SWAT team pending his completion of additional training. He grieved the decision by the Chief of Police to require that he attend dynamic entry training. At a second-stage meeting, the grievance was settled – Dempkins would attend the training but documentation as to use of force issues would be removed from his file.

At the training, Dempkins was reprimanded for an argument with the instructor. During an exercise, Dempkins was assigned a secondary position, providing cover for a team breaching the door. In the hypothetical, someone fired a weapon from inside the house, through a kitchen window around the corner from the door.

Dempkins asked the instructor: "When do you teach us about laying down suppressive fire?"

"Suppressive fire?" the instructor asked.

"Yes, I would have deployed suppressive fire on the elevation of the house from which the shot came," Dempkins said. "That’s what we did in Iraq."

"That’s a military tactic," the instructor replied. "We’re cops. We don’t use ‘suppressive fire’?"

"Okay," Dempkins said. "It’s a terminology issue. I don’t care what you call it."

"No, no," the instructor said. "We don’t spray houses with bullets. There’s no circumstance where you’re authorized to use anything like ‘suppressive fire’."

They argued the point. Dempkins said that he thought the instructor was disrespecting him and his service in Iraq.

The Chief met with Dempkins and told him that he would be written-up for arguing with the instructor. The Chief also told Dempkins that he had to remain on administrative leave for ten more days.

"Why?"

The Chief said: "I want you to think about the difference between police work with civilians and combat."

Dempkins was angry. He spent several hours in the gymnasium at the LEC. He lifted weights, slamming down the equipment when he was done with it. At home, he quarreled with his wife. She told him that he should make an appointment to see his psychologist again and, perhaps, have his medications adjusted. This made him more angry, but he did call the Clinic and ask for an appointment.

On the weekend, he drove to his home town and looked up some old friends. They went to the bars and had some drinks. It wasn’t like old times – no one got drunk and crazy.

Jeremy was the man who had rolled the car years before. He worked at the Coop delivering propane and fuel oil. His wife was a schoolteacher and he had three small children. He sat across from Dempkins in a booth in the tavern. After eleven o’clock, the other men went home.

Jeremy ordered another pitcher of beer.

Dempkins said that he was in trouble over shooting a dog.

"You shot a dog? In Iraq?" Jeremy asked.

"That wasn’t the trouble, I meant," Dempkins said. "But, you know, I did once shoot a dog in Iraq."

"Really?"

"It was like this," Dempkins said. "We had been on patrol. Armored personnel carriers. It was a suburb of Baghdad. There was an IED, a car bomb. You know, I’ve never told anyone about this."

"Really?" Jeremy said. He filled his mug with beer.

"The bomb was huge, probably set off by a cell-phone when our foot patrol up ahead passed. But I was in the Humvee. Those big boys make a whoomph! Sound like to knock all the air right out of you, to compress your chest with that shock wave so you can’t breathe. There was this big deep whoomph – and the cars parked along the street just jumped up in the air, kicking about a foot off the ground. The humvee hopped on its chassis too and the driver said he had blood coming out of his ears from the concussion."

"Awful," Jeremy said.

"So we come out on the street ourselves to investigate and it was a god-awful mess. This was a part of town where you go to get your oil changed or to have a filter put in or, maybe, to buy transmission or brake fluid or gas additives, I don’t know. You see, in those cities, all the merchants or businesses that have the same kind of trade are located on the same street, right next to one another, side-by-side – I don’t know why they do it that way, but that’s how it’s organized... the neighborhood was just dozens of street-side garages and shacks where they were selling brake fluid and oil and transmission fluid, little cubby-holes that were always open except for iron bars or cages that they could pull down after work, barrels of fluids of different kinds everywhere and disabled cars and engine parts salvaged from old trucks and diesels, but, mostly, little dark garages, some of them with hydraulic lifts and barrels and barrels of oil and fluids. And the explosion had broken this all down and painted the concrete and mud walls black with oil and, also, red in places where transmission fluid had been blasted out of its drums and there was just a flood of the stuff on the street, huge pools of it, and running down the alleyways and, then, there were the casualties, mostly just little heaps of cloth and rag full of guts and burnt skin – I can still smell the stink of the burnt skin and the oil and fluid everywhere, this heavy, heavy stench of spilled hydrocarbons. It was really quite the sight to see..."

"I can’t imagine it," Jeremy replied.

"And there was this one casualty, this killed-in-action, a Marine, I guess, lying up at the street corner, at the outer radius of the blast. This guy was sort of recognizable, lying there in pieces, but the pieces were big enough that you could maybe have assembled them, you know, put together the jigsaw and have something like, I don’t know, half a man, half a torso and part of a face and some bits of bone with a foot or hand still attached. You know, the strange thing about a high-explosive blast is that its doesn’t dismember you, it doesn’t rip you apart like a cleaver or something, you don’t get blown apart at the joints – it’s weird, but the joints don’t come apart: instead, you’ll have a knee, let’s say, completely intact, pants burned away so can see the knee, but the leg is blown apart mid-thigh, let’s say, that’s where the explosion took the guy apart. So you might see a shoulder and the joint looks fine, but the shoulder is attached to part of the rib-cage and, so, you say – how is that possible? How did his body come apart like that? I’m telling you it makes no sense, no sense at all —"

"It’s horrible," Jeremy said.

"Then, the lieutenant comes up to me and says that I gotta stand watch over the dead Marine. The lieutenant says that he’s radioed for help and someone’s coming to gather up the parts of this guy, but that I should stand watch because you don’t leave a fallen comrade, you don’t desert a body particularly when you got these desert-rat dogs all around and they’ll drag off pieces of your buddy – I’ve seen ‘em do that."

"Jesus," Jeremy said. He poured some beer in Jeremy’s mug.

"So I’m standing there, really leaning on the wall in the shade, and a shopkeeper comes up to me and offers a little stool and they pull out an awning that’s hidden in mud-front of the shop to cast some shade and someone even brings me sweet-tea. And all around I can hear shouting in the alleys and rounds being fired. They’re dragging people out behind the shops, dragging them into the salvage yards, and shooting them down, but this isn’t my thing – I’m stationed next to the pieces of the corpse, sitting there on that stool with my M4 keeping watch."

"How long were you there?"

"I can’t tell you," Dempkins said. "It was a while. And, then, this dog comes up. This fuckin’ mangy dog, just like all the dogs you see over there, mutts with no breeds in them that I can recognize. The dog comes trotting down the street, panting, tongue out, tail wagging. And it gets a half-dozen yards away and stops and, you know what? the dog starts licking up the blood on the paving stones, the dog puts its muzzle down and is licking at the blood – so, then, you know what I do?"

"What do you do?"

"I shot that dog down right there in the street," Dempkins said. "I blew him away."

"Why did you do that?"

"The mutt was licking at my buddy’s blood and fixing to run off with a hand or ear or part of his face – I don’t know."

"But why did you have to shoot the dog?"

"The dog was going to steal parts of my buddy and eat them," Dempkins said.

"Couldn’t you have just shooed the dog away?" Jeremy asked.

"Are you taking the side of the dog?" Dempkins replied.

"No, of course not," Jeremy asked. "I’m just wondering why you had to kill the dog.""



"You heard what I said," Dempkins said.

"But couldn’t you have got up and just kicked the dog away?" Jeremy asked.

"I don’t know. Why would I kick the dog? I was carrying a fuckin’ M4."

"Well, could you have shot next to the dog or shot a round in the air?"

"Why would I do that?" Dempkin asked.

"To keep from killing the dog," Jeremy said. "You could have picked up some stones and pitched them at the mutt and the dog would have run away."

"But my buddy was lying right there on the street, blown to pieces," Dempkin said.

"Killing the dog didn’t bring him back, did it?"

Dempkins blinked at Jeremy: "Dude, I don’t understand what you’re saying."

Jeremy poured some more beer. "I just don’t see why you had to gun down the dog. The dog was just doing what a dog does. You’ve seen dogs pick up dead squirrels and other road kill and carry them in their mouth. I know you’ve seen that."

"So what, " Dempkins said.

"That’s what a dog’s wired to do. To pick up dead shit and eat it. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad dog or anything."

"And I’m wired to blow the motherfucker away."

Jeremy shook his head, "No, you’re not."

"I had to shoot that dog," Dempkins said.

"I don’t see how that helped anything. You could of just got up and kicked the goddamned dog away. You could have shot a round near his tail and the dog would have run off. I don’t know why you had to shoot to kill the dog."

"You civilians," Dempkins said. "You goddamn civilians. You just don’t understand."

"I guess not," Jeremy said.