Gladys, Kolob, Utah, August 20, 2014

If you are not going to sleep you may as well get up and make some progress. In this last hour —it is still dark— there has been only one vehicle go by on 144 —it was Handy: that truck has no muffler— so you can be out there making some progress without them seeing you. So you put on the light and see that it is only four. There is one hour before Ferral Young will be out, and two hours before Fielding gets to the jobsite to drink his coffee so you should get the box out from where you kicked it under the bed —the sight of it there, unopened, after you treated yourself to the $100 special Dr. Comfort orthopedic shoes you got special fitted up visiting your sisters in Provo, has been giving you guilt because you didn't wear them even once those first few weeks— so you reach the grabber and you get your whole big self off the bed and it makes that moan of relief that always you smile at. The wall is in the way of you getting far enough from the bed to see where the box is at so you poke around with the grabber til it hits something and you get the jaws over the edge and with a few tries you get the box slid out to where you can see it but the lid is taped shut, now you remember, so you can't use the grabber to get it open so there is no alternative but to sit back down on the bed. You back up to it and use the grabber and the bedside table —it feels dusty, you better get the dusting done— to lower back down and you chuckle again because the bed says —you imagine this— Oh my gosh! Not Again! Now that you are sitting the box is down there by your foot so you try to push it onto your feet with the grabber so maybe you can slide it up your shins, but that is pretty hard, so after trying  that for a while you just decide to go for it so you hoist your stomach and your breasts over to the right and hold them there with your thighs and you exhale as much as you can and hold to the bedpost with your right hand and reach down with your left leaning as far as your bulk allows and it goes better than you'd thought: your fingers go right under the boxtop so you can lift it one handed on the first try. So you have the box and you get the fingernail clippers out of the bedside and break the tape and get out the shoes —the new-shoe smell makes you so happy and you remember being a girl and the first day of school, and you have your first cry of the day— and you hold them up to the light. They are perfectly white. They are extra wide and padded and have the Velcro. You get a good hold of them and haul yourself back up to standing and take the two steps to the dresser and get out today's smock and you go around the soft spot in the floor and over the creaky threshold and into the bathroom.

You do your morning business. The grab-bars are so embarrassing. You think of Fielding in here —not commenting at all, of course, he is so polite— installing the grab-bars around the toilet and shower. He was so, what was that word? discreet! and kind as he put the big lag screws into the studs. He did not use the smaller screws that came in the grab-bar kit. Such a hardworking, polite man. You watched him there kneeling in the bathroom —you took half a day to scrub and disinfect and polish the bathroom before he arrived, though it was already perfectly clean— and you looked at his arms, but just in the mirror as you talked about the new house he is building for the weekenders. You saw how every muscle was its own separate thing and when he drove the screws you watched every tendon and muscle in his arm and neck and you saw his shirt untuck as he knelt there in front of your toilet and you went into your room to cry.

After you shower you wipe a small window in the mirror steam and you do your morning honesty, there under the fluorescent. It is Gladys, you say. For there you are. The merciful steam hides the worst, but there you are. You nose is almost gone in the cheeks but your eyes are still pretty. Prettiest eyes, said the yearbook, Youngville High School class of 1994. You do your eye makeup now at 4:30 AM. You are banking on nobody sees you, but if they do you will have your makeup on. You do your hair, too, big and soft and black —lustrous— it makes your face not so fat and accentuates your eyes. It covers your neck the way you do it. You reach your bra off the towel rack. You remember to hold it up to laugh or at least to smile about it. You hold it by one end in front of you and let the other end drop to the floor. You say to the mirror Gladys, you are five feet around at the chest, and you laugh —this you have to force yourself to do, but once you start the laugh it becomes a real laugh, this is the magic you do every time with your enormous bra —and then, laughing, your eyes almost lost in fat and your cheeks like apples, you get it over you and lift each breast into it and get it hooked. You have a secret you worry about, but it feels sexy: for years you have not been able to bend the right way to get your panties on, so you don't wear any, you just get your smock —it is the size of a tent— over your head and let it fall and get your arms into the armholes. No man has really looked at you since way back so you have this secret right in front of them that you are wearing only the bra and the smock and —here your heart beats a little faster— under the smock you can feel the air on you and right now you can feel those parts you can't reach cool and damp as you open the bathroom door and go out into the cool hall.

It is still dark. You clap the light on. Yes, you need to dust. This is a dusty house. You step down onto the porch and the yard light comes on. The yellow light above the gas pumps is in its swarm of moths. Motherfuckers are like paparazzi around a starlet, Handy said one night, and you smile at the thought. Their shadows like manta rays in the underwater dark of the yard. It is barely blue away to the east. You can just see the shape of the Tortugas. On the road you walk and you think of inventory so you don't think of your knees. You also think of when you were a girl walking just here to catch the bus, and of running when you were late, and of talking mornings early before the one-hour busride with Jere Benson and practicing your duets with him and how your breath showed in the headlights in the early morning as you sang and how that big boy —he was on the wrestling and football teams and was very strong— sometimes would just sit and stare at your breasts with his mouth hanging open like he was in some kind if trance. You used to wear a t-shirt you'd outgrown and hide it from your mom under a sweater, then take the sweater off when you sat with Jere on the bus and rock forward on your pelvis and jut your breasts against the shirt and turn toward him.

You feel your heart going. You are walking along the edge of the pavement. 144 is just a pale gray ribbon into the dark. Way up ahead on the side of the mountain you see a light, and then it splits into two and you know it is Old Man Ferral driving out from under his barn light to meet the men downvalley at the corral for sorting. It must be five to five. You walk and smile to notice your heartrate is up and that you haven't thought of your knees in several minutes. Right at five Ferral drives by slow, the way he does, in his showroom-perfect old pickup, and does the finger off the steering wheel wave, and this is when you cross the road and double back. In the light from the store your shoes flash white when they kick out in front of your stomach. You really like these shoes. Your feet feel pretty good. You also feel warm and —here you think through the books you've read waiting for customers, and find a word— exhilarated. You are alive and you feel good to be making some progress. One step in the right direction, you think. No, about one thousand steps, you correct yourself and you smile. You are breathing hard and you are sweating. Your creases have not yet dried from the shower and you slide pleasantly against yourself. Your thighs are a bit chafed, but it's okay.

You go to the back of the store and enter and turn on the lights. You go to your chart and look at the clock and record twenty minutes. You are hungry. You are not having a Coke or even a Gatorade. You get a cup of water and a tin of tuna from the shelf. No carbs for you, this will be a 100% day. You get out your Spanish disk. Fielding hung the speakers. He does all your man-work for trade. He was up on the stepladder, over by the Hostess rack, reaching high into the corner twisting on the wires and you just let yourself admire him for a while. It was a whole minute you sat behind the counter appreciating the shape of him and his competence and his balance —graceful, really, or, no, what do you call it that a man is who moves without waste and is strong and sure and not hesitant? you will call it grace— that feminine word makes you feel more comfortable with him, somehow. You sat and watched and felt warm, and your breasts propped up on the counter really felt exposed, but when he came down and turned around you kept them there, but he didn't look at them, he just looked you in the eye, he kept his professional, neighborly eye contact —nothing untoward, the books would say— and then that thought —that voice— came into your head: You big fat cow, you said  ̶ it said to you— and you straightened your back as he talked and your breasts slid off the counter and fell and you felt their enormous weight in your back and it was all a reminder that you are alone, so —when he left, when the door rang shut— you practiced your laugh. It was hard to start, but it caught on and you laughed at the sight of yourself. You thought of yourself then much older, as the fairy godmother, or maybe as Santa's wife, maybe no kids of your own, but rosy-cheeked and plump in an appealing and comforting way, with matronly breasts tidy behind Victorian buttons, and those little rectangular half-glasses and the gray bun on your head and the lace apron and the children coming 'round for gingerbread and an uncomplicated feeling of grandmotherliness.

And you cried, too, til a tourist came in and you composed yourself, got your breasts back up onto the counter and had your honesty-moment: that your back feels better when they're up there, supported. And the voice said: This tourist will probably go back to his Jeep and tell his hiking buddy about your enormous cowlike breasts —your udder— and they will laugh, and it will be at your expense or simply at the expense of poor country people in general but in any case you will never see him again. But then you —your mindful, intentional, positive voice— interjects: Or he will secretly look at them —at you— and will be filled with desire —maybe he is one of those men you learned about on the internet who prefer fat women with very, very large breasts— and he will say to himself Wow! Memorize those, brother, because back in California we don't often get to see breasts like those!, and he will keep and cherish the memory. It is even possible, you tell yourself, that he will mutter —under his breath but you will hear because of some trick of sound— Magnificent. And his eyes will linger, but only for as long as manners allow, for he is a polite and considerate man, this young tourist, a gentleman like Fielding. Maybe he gets his shopping —probably a bottle of water and a granola bar— and comes back to the counter and while you ring him up you know he's looking —let's say you're wearing that t-shirt you wore for Jere— and he is travelling alone after his girlfriend, who was too skinny anyway, dumped him, so he is in the middle of this beautiful nowhere and, Lo! here is what he has always desired, so he lingers for a moment after you hand him his receipt, and he makes small talk and laughs. He is wearing hiking boots and is sunburned and handsome, and he asks you where he can get lunch, so you tell him about the tables at the Be Merry, and he suggests that, since it's almost lunchtime, you go over and sit together and have a sandwich, and then you hear that voice —it comes to interrupt, you know now its cold level sound, how it hides its cruelty for a moment, how it speaks up loud and rude when things are going well— saying This will never happen as long as you sit on that big double-wide chair with your colossal breasts on the counter and your fat hand up to its creased wrist in that bag of Doritos, you fat disgusting cow, and you pull you hand out and you are alone, of course, in the store. It is now opening time. You sit and you want to cry. The clock is ticking loudly. You see that you still have your Spanish disk in your other hand, so you wipe the orange Dorito stuff on the towel and you pivot and put in the CD.

The sun is well up. The shadow of the store reaches away west across Lymans' alfalfa all the way to the cliff. You can see the shape of it there dropping down the cliffside.

            El niño está saltando, the CD says.

            El Niño está saltando, you say.

            La Niña está saltando.

            La Niña está saltando.

You are clicking through the lesson and saying what it is saying. You are trying hard to hear the hard r's and the soft d's. You are slow but you are getting better.

            La mujer está corriendo.

            La mujer está corriendo.

            Las niñas están corriendo.

            Las niñas están corriendo.

The bell rings and the boy Ezra pulls up to the pumps in Jere's —the Bishop's— stakeside truck. The heelers are up on a bale of hay barking at a long line of bikers that flash by in their colorful tights. The heelers stop barking and the boy Ezra gets down. He is dusty and looks already tired. He waves in to you and he looks like Jere did. You enter Benson into the logbook and record the amount and Ezra waves and drives off too hard, throwing gravel across the pull-in and against the pumps.

El muchacho lleva un sombrero, you say, though you are not at that part of the Spanish lesson.

You hear a truck downshift for the bend and the hill out of town. You try to hear this without judgment, but this is hard. You wonder why the sound of an unseen truck is so sad, and highway sounds of all kinds. You click out of the Spanish lesson to do inventory. You have been avoiding it. It is not adding up. You had left off with the freezer, with the Lynn Wilson. There are ten burritos going to expire tomorrow and you sell an average of one per day. Frozen burritos are not in your diet —38 grams carbohydrates, 390 mg sodium— but you can't just throw them away, can you? And waste the money? You'll put them in the walk-in. You will have to decide soon what to do with all that expired food. The inspector could come by and find it stored in there. Can you trade it for something? Can you give it to the Mexican without offending him? Do Mexicans even eat frozen Lynn Wilson burritos? He seems like such a proud and fastidious man, maybe the burritos would offend him.

You are thinking about food, you realize, and you return to doing inventory. You scroll down through the overstocked items —over $400 going to expire this week if traffic doesn't pick up. A tour bus. The Sheriff's wife with all those kids to feed. That big husband of hers. You get a blaze-orange poster board out from under the counter and sketch in some sale items lightly in pencil, then blacken them with a fat Sharpie. You go out and tape it to the window. Outside the crickets are chattering all up the embankment, the sky is blank blue, the mountain seems at arm's reach though it's miles away, and there is a stink of gasoline where Ezra must have spilled it. An RV slows and through the window a woman takes a picture of the store and they accelerate away. Tourists never wave. You picture yourself appearing in the family slideshow —do they still do slideshows?— standing by the blaze-orange sale sign in your tent-like denim smock with your hair a little flat from this morning's sweat and your bright white orthopedic Dr. Comforts, and you try for a moment to practice your laugh but you have low blood-sugar and you just don't want to right now. You go back in and take advantage of already being up and about to look through the expired low-carb options back in the walk-in. You find the box of cheese sticks, expired a week but they look fine, and a box of frozen broccoli, and a bag of almonds. You microwave the broccoli and you practice your smile while you eat it. To be honest, you have to choke it down and you want some butter, but you can't have the sodium and the butter doesn't expire for a few weeks, so you just try not to think about it. Every tenth almond you tithe to the trash. You are eating when the door rings open. You get the plate out of sight under the counter. It's Kade. He just about fills the door, almost hits his head as he comes in with his hat off like his mother taught him, and he uses the welcome mat, too, though it is a dry day, and if he were much wider across the shoulders he would have to turn sideways. He says hi to you, to the store, the way he does. He calls you Sister Gladys. He has bits of hay all over, but he is neat as always in the snap-pocket shirt and belted Wranglers his mother buys him.

            Hi Kade.

            It is a nice day, he says.

            Sure is. Gettin hot.

            I am loading hay over to Lymans'.

            I can see that.

            It is a good cutting we got lots of rain.

            Yes, we did. You come in for your Mountain Dew?

            Yeah I like it.

You have had pretty much this same conversation with Kade six days a week, varying only with the seasons, since he started working as a boy. He comes in and stands by the freezer and looks around. For Kade even the oldest habits are always fresh and new. He looks at the keychains and flashlights on their rotating stand. He has studied them for months. He looks at the souvenir mini license plates you never sell any of, and at the jackelope postcards. He likes those, always shakes with his silent laugh. You always watch because he seems so full of mirth at the sight of these stupid cards. He finally gets his Dew and you enter it in the log book.

            Can I hear the Spanish.

You click the mouse.

            Una niña.

            Un niño.

            Un perro.

You click on down.

            Un gato.

            Un hombre.

            Una mujer.

You decide to stop there. He does not know what it means. He stands and smiles with his Dew, looking up at the speaker Fielding hung, as though he sees an angel over your shoulder.

            The Mexican speaks Spanish.

            Yes he does, Kade.

            You are learning it.

            I am trying. I practice every day.

            Practice makes perfect Sister Gladys you have a good one.

And he walks out into the sun.

Handy Whitehead, Pierce County, Utah

1. October 2013, Grand Arch Ranch, Pierce County, Utah.

I am Handy Whitehead. This is my voice. The music in the background is von Karajan's recording of Sibelius' Swan of Tuonela and Tapiola, which how the fuck do you pronounce any of that shit? which are long-enough and pretty-enough pieces of music to accompany my story and which will play uninterrupted as I speak so that if you cut even one word from my version of events the music will be interrupted and all will know that you have failed to keep your promise to publish my story exactly as I've told it, not one word altered. A skip in the music means you've proven my thesis about the media, that they, you, are liars and for-profit cheats who do what you do to earn favors from those in power, and I know I have no power except that I have this story, and your people have the power of the government and their corporations, their drones, their garnishing of wages, their heartless enforcers, their credit scores, their poisonous products, their insidious murmurings in the ear of the stupid and gullible and uneducated American people. Their face-recognition software, their scanning of all cellular and internet communications in which every utterance, between man and wife, between father and daughter, is run sixty-four ways through the Facebook servers and they decide what are your intentions and they sell their conclusions to the NSA. I am a yellow-toothed bumpkin, but I'm no retard.

Fucks me right up that here I am thinking I'm off the radar and you just show up here like the Post Office and therefore the goddamned and illegal I.R.S. know my every sexual preference but pull up a stolen milk crate and button your real nice Gore-Tex trademark coat and make yourself right at homeless, but Lucifer help me if where I'm at gets public I'll start with your favorite dog and move on down the list and it will happen night, morning, work or unwinding, driving or walking, beef or beans, you have my word on that. But relax, for fuck's sake, it's just a story. Like to put a kid to bed with.

Guy like me would prefer that what I say be glued up out of letters cut from foreign journals while wearing latex gloves, but I'm going way out on a limb because I trust you. And believe you me if I didn't want to talk to you you wouldn't be here now.

  

Here is where I escape into from what is so bugging me out there. You cannot say one whole complete sentence out there without but some dickweed comes around and does his or her thing that is like the world's thickest penny on the track of my mind in which my thoughts are the train which then does a derailed backflip into some huddled winter blue-collar urban houses in the yellow sodium fug. Made-for-YouTube wreckage. You've seen it: locomotive in a furrow it plowed through the sleeping houses spewing that black greasy smoke, the emergency lights, the earnest and concerned and breathless TV announcer. Anyway, they derail my mind. Nobody benefits from this except my enemies. Not saying that I am paranoid or what have you but it is conceivable that they do not want me to get anything done because believe you me I make no small plans and heads will roll if ever I can really uninterruptedly say what's on my mind and speak this truth to power. So all I have to do is close the door and get all ensconced or whatever and put pen to paper and write my own personal Kublai Khan in Xanadu so to speak and some metaphorical salesman is banging at the door and there I am manifestoless and I can taste the adrenaline and after I've mollified him or her and got back to my desk there it is: gone. Forever. This is why I have put that pile of concrete blocks in front of my door around which this afternoon you yelled in to me some muffled questions about why was I stockpiling building materials of such unsightly nature and don't you know I was about to crystallize after weeks of factfinding the crucial theoretical underpinning of what would have been my magnum opus, but those will have to wait for some future person to formulate them, maybe in, as I imagine it, his remote cave or treetop perch or completely soundproof underground hermitage. I envy him in his hermetic enclosure free from sudden sounds and disruptions such as disease, friends, family, excellent aromas, and the media. I am not one to get all hypothetical by any means but I do imagine that with a sufficiently thick soundproof barrier and a secure perimeter I could generate many great works of intense beauty and unimaginable revolutionary aptness. I say hypothetical because so far I've managed to procure only approximately ninety concrete blocks, though even with these few I see some benefit and have enjoyed the mind game of: picturing what the I.R.S. will do when they come and try to extricate me as the requisite bulldozer would be such a bad p.r. move on their part, post Waco, post Ruby Ridge, that surely the media exposure would make donations come out of the woodwork and one of my major distractions from my life's work would be solved, pronto. This is indeed a pleasant thought to entertain while I burn my phone bills and type my last epistle before they cut the power and the mortar dries. You know I don't have a phone and I've never even seen a typewriter, but you catch my meaning, I can tell. But who am I kidding? There is no magnum opus, neither is there writing, nor manifesto. And the salesman is metaphorical. I got no money, no fungible assets but labor itself. Monopoly capital knows I exist but I don't have what they crave.

  

Only someone whose life has flowed downhill to the drain of a place like this, this hair-clogged p-trap of a place, not even near the Shih-Tsu smallest hamlet of the emptiest road-accessible corner of the brokest county in the dumbfuckest state of Utah, can understand the logistical shenanigans required to live here as a ghost to the government while maintaining a few key social connections. Easier by far, as I proved in my last Bush year, and my Obama years, is to sever all social connections entirely and live like a Piute in a pile of bark half froze when you're not half broiled, never full except before you vomit, never hungry except you're running out of firewood, never welcoming any sound manmade, knowing that if you burn on a still day they will see your smoke, and you burn on a cold night their satellites will see your infra-red emissions and if you owe them enough they will have you in their crosshairs, probably a night-flying drone that feels no compunction if your wikiup can't be repoed for back taxes. Some glossy-cheeked kid fresh off his mission with his faggotty white hand on his joystick nightvisioning down on your fire-signature in the frigid night thumbs the red button, not a feeling in his callow heart but the Holy Ghost whispering like a snapping flag in the dawn, it's morning in America. They have an operation to run, and you are in their way. One such cold night in my 2012, an Obama year, my wikiup caught on fire and I was warm for about a minute then went and slept under a juniper. Next afternoon I'm still there teeth chattering pretty well fucked without food and all the fuzz burned off my last warm pelts when I hear that grumbly sound that sure as death is B.L.M. Ford Bronco in four-low scrambling out to check on the smudge of smoke hanging there in the zero degrees, so I hightail out, risk the ice in Lower Pork-a-pine so they can't trace me, and then watch down on them that afternoon from a secret ledge while that ranger and then two more arrive and take photos and collect my personal detritus from the area and do their inscrutable unnecessary things with clipboards and radios and then they're gone. Missed my cache, but packrats was in it and I was sick to the marrow anyway. Anyway, the best two things to come out of that day of trickle-up economics, in which my desperation and suffering kept the government remoras employed, is:

One, the lady ranger with the admirable ass left her sandwich on my table-rock, on purpose, it turned out, and it contained lettuce and peppers that likely improved upon what Adam ate before Eve ever showed up and beguiled him in Adam-ondi-Aman before the Fall, before this entire human experiment in which if you have steak every day you get bored of even steak, and if you don't, all you want is steak.

And, two, that ledge was north-facing, so I had never spent much time on it, just a couple of summer naps, so I had never really looked around, but spending a whole day up there I looked a bit and followed the ledge around the corner and over a tumbled slab and found that the ledge had a south-facing part, too, which in this country and this far from town and this near water means one thing, usually: Anasazi cliff dwelling, which it was, and I found the most perfect pot I have ever seen, Ancestral Puebloan polychrome, quail and grasshopper motif, the finest brushstrokes like they'd just set it there to dry, no chips, just a little sandblasted on one side, but a keeper, a find for any pothunter or museum or other disrespecter of the past, which I was and now am not, the past being where every fucking thing of consequence ever happened as I like to say to the grex when we're drinking at the Small 'm', so I scratched around for other untouched old things and found just a few broken points and plenty of shards and the usual midden garbage, but that one pot I wrapped up as best I could in the rags that remained to me in my new life and I walked the five miles out to the Fifty Mile and 144 somehow, nearly dead and skinny as a spring deer etc. Long boring adventures ensued, which basically I can summarize as me getting back to town, a different town, and getting some clothes and doing my usual smooth talking until I got that pot to a collector who paid cash, and I was set. So set that transportation became my most pressing problem. I paid cash for a chainsaw and sharpening kit, new shoes, a sewing kit that I would have paid one billion dollars for back in the wickiup when I was trying to attach pelts with pine sap glue, which never worked, and some tough clothes, and some of the handsome dancing kind, and a nice new down bag and a truckload of other stuff but no truck and just like me no plans for how to move all my new belongings back south. The logistical shenanigans required to call up an old friend with a truck without your voice being tracked over the phone lines are best solved by playing deaf, which hardly any librarian anywhere can resists, so I shaped my hair up a bit looking in a shop window, left my stuff under a reesty old blanket so nobody would dare touch it, walked into the library, this is in Ditchfield, and made a pathetic show of writing out a letter to the librarian, who was watching, my request that she call a friend for me because I was deaf and couldn't do the phone calling. Despite long distance and probably all kinds of rules against it and rules against all kinds of kind behavior she dialed and talked with Old Man Ferral for me, who had the wits to not say that I am not deaf and she told me in that crazy-funny way people talk when they think you're deaf that Old Man Ferral would be up to Ditchfield the following afternoon, sooner if I really needed him, but he would prefer I made do for the next twenty-four hours because he had new puppies he needed to make arrangements for and trouble with his tractor and whatnot and after spending every night for the last five years sleeping in a pile of bark and grass freezing my ass off I just laughed and wrote I would wait for him in front of the Home Depot. I believe in the native goodness of human beings who have not yet been corrupted and two things I hue to unquestioningly as gospel truth as I wander around and do my business trying to be a righteous man is:

One, if you are deaf and ask for help, almost all people will turn sweet and go out of their way to excuse your general decrepitude and bad teeth and chimpanzee funk and the ridiculousness of your contrastingly bright white new basketball shoes and do you a favor, even some weird favors, and:

Two, librarians by nature are right up there with lady rangers next to Heavenly Mother for all-time righteous goodness. You just don't see the modern American criminal mind being much drawn to librarian or lady ranger jobs, seeing how the pay is bad, the passions are private, and the whole orthodoxy of both professions as presented in the allied media is that these jobs are for helpers, earnest do-gooders, and basically lousy opportunities for graft and corruption income of any kind, though I did once know a lady ranger who had a good side business growing grass but I think she did it more to relax than for the spending money, because she smoked most of what she didn't give away, and never repented giving me more than my fair share before I learned the Lord's sacrament and quit that shit, which was also poor for my lungs living in that smoky gosh-darned wikiup.

So the next day I stood out by the Home Depot with all the Mexicans like I was just another day laborer. I am no more documented than those boys, but I have blue eyes and I speak without an accent so my American bona fides are unquestionable and the cops can't touch me and I know my rights and I have no identification to speak of, hell I barely have an identity the way anyone these days can put a tape to it or shine a light on it or whatever. So pretty soon up eases that same immaculate Ford Old Man Ferral's been driving since before I was born. I haven't seen him since before my wikiup days, about five years, but up he pulls and I walk up to his window and smile my wretched gray smile which my tongue pokes through in a few places and he smiles back and says all neat and tidy: "Well I'll be darned if it ain't young Handy, back from the dead" in that winning old-timey rancher way he talks, and I have to admit but just to you that I just about cried not having thought all those years about how much I love that old man, but then he looks me over and says "Nice shoes", and then looks at his watch, the only rancher who wears one, and rattles it into first and otherwise makes it clear he needs to get back to his puppies and his little house and his orderly life. I pretty much filled the back of his truck carefully as I could not wanting to scratch it or anything because Old Man Ferral would just as soon leave me in Ditchfield as he would give a ride to someone who scratches that paint job and off we go, my first time in a motorized conveyance since I went down Fifty-Mile in the first place that day George W. Bush signed the 2008 Economic Report, February eleven, 2008, all lies I could not abide, his goshdamned smug moronic fucking monkeyface in that photo in the Oval Office, the line of Councilors behind him, Edward fucking Lazear's got the Ventriloquist Dummy in Chief on his lap, making his mouth move, making him yap and lie and got his prick up the Presidential asshole, and the American people sitting home flabby and insipid, the bovine dipshit voters, drooling at their TVs, and I had to leave America for a while. Old man Ferral drove. I must have been tired because though I was bursting with conversation and my head was banging on his same old well-oiled lever-action I fell asleep right away and stayed that way, maybe for all I know with my head on Old Man Ferral's lap, which I am just joking because that would never happen, until we rolled onto his just-graded gravel driveway a few hours later. That old cowdad never drove that truck over forty miles an hour and cussed out the tailgater the whole time I suppose, but I came back home dead asleep so first thing I remember back here under the mountain is the smell of juniper and cattle and the mewling of that heeler you know who's keeping an eye on you now as you don't let the front door hit you in the ass, my friend.

 * * *

2. December, 2014. Big Yellow Pine National Forest, Utah.

This place is called on the USGS quad Big House Canyon and the weekenders call it that though the old Kolob families call it Lost-a-Cow and in my family we knew a old Piute name for it was Headache-Because-of-Thunder and down at the bottom is a granary and two rooms the Anasazi built and cowboys rappelled into it years ago for relics. What happens is that every kind of people has a use for the place and pick a name that suits them. I just call it Big Headache, not that I ever said it to anyone but myself and now you. I never had a reason to speak of it, and a reason not to. 

Julys and Augusts the gunmetalest clouds come up Fifty Mile and get funneled in here and the lightning just hammers as it comes, every tall pine a nail, as if determined on countersinking every fucking one. Down here between the walls the blue clouds come up from the south with their lightnings hammering hundred-foot pines, see, til their smoking crowns cartwheel down the cliffs, and embers come parabolic ahead of the wind like tracers and at your back as you face the fire and the hail and the careening goddamn treetrunks with their white veins of sap afire, behind you you feel in your feet then hear the water berserk down the mountain a vomit of mud and boulders and old cottonwoods entire and this one time a 1989 Ford F-150 from God knows where maybe the highway a day's walk upslope, but more on that some other time. So Big Headache is a fine name, though most of the year it's a paradise of loneliness. Even five minutes after God tries to burn you out and drown you and stomp you to pulp and flush you out it is serene, meadowlarks and coy dripping and the pretty scent of pine and a cute little white cloud backing out over the clifftop like a flirt out a door. This place always panting after a pummeling and the whole great country cowering for another, never knows when He's going to come home reeling. 

What I did up there in the linehouse where I saw you last is hide from what happened to my old life in the wikiup. And what I am doing down here, out here, in Big Headache is hiding from what happened to the lady ranger. Takes a couple hours to walk there, where the wikiup was, from here. It's in the next canyon, now just a black circle on the ground, a mystery for anyone who ever goes out there, which is no one, hardly ever. That is where I seen her the first time. I have looked down on it from Big House Bench, but I don't go down. That pathetic fucking black circle out there in the junipers. 

After the wikiup burned and the rangers showed up to check on the smoke, and from my hiding place I admired the lady ranger's ass and she left me a sandwich on my table rock and I found the perfect Ancestral Puebloan ploychrome pot and sold it and went back to work for old man Ferral on his ranch is that I started to get all obsessed with that ranger. I had been so alone for so long and her ass was maybe objectively perfect, maybe just in my extreme ass-deprivation or only in those lovely flap-pocket green government pants, I can tell you understand what I'm saying, but anyway I was thinking about her all the time. I was moving lines and riding fences for old man Ferral. The pay wasn't much but he let me stay in the old linehouse and he let me add my groceries to his shopping so I was set and more comfortable than I'd been in years. I was even going into town Friday evenings. Hadn't seen my people in years, hadn't seen hardly anyone. Town was where I started getting the idea I could maybe return to society, at least the narrow, suspicious, backwards bumfuck, opinionated, paranoid, end-of-the-world kind of society you can find in Kolob. So I was going down every weekend to the Small 'm' to sit on the porch and pass the guitar and the bottle and bullshit about UFOs and the government and rain and and whether there is ever the right amount of it, and generally getting reacquainted with conversation, though who am I kidding I will never be good at that, mostly whatever I say ends conversation, doesn't add to it, I know that. But one Friday night that spring after the wikiup, last spring one thousand years ago, I hear that some archaeologists are working out at the mouth of Big Headache, found something interesting under the slabs of fallen cliffside and that the rangers are out there keeping an eye on things when the scientists are away because it's federal land and there's probably some valuable relics they've uncovered. So my ass-addled brain of course right away perks up at the mention of ranger and pictures the super-yummy filled-out shape of those green government flap-pocket workpants, and I dash back to the linehouse and fill my pockets with jerky and I head out in the moonlight, running, not going to wait for morning. It's just out along the east fence, a mile of easy going, then into the pinyons and junipers and out to the secret way between the rocks, the cattle trail that drops into Big Headache a short way above the dig. Near sunrise I saw her asleep by the dead fire. Her government [Bronco] down the wash and the archaeologists' tarps all along the base of the southfacing cliffwall. I sat til the sun reached her and just panted over my boner, you understand, just thinking about just her and me out here alone. When she stood out of her sleeping bag it was nearly too much for me: those legs I'd long imagined stout and brown, and the ass as good as I'd hoped, now just in underpants of the strictly civilian kind. I watched until I thought she'd see me back, behind my boulder, then I walked upstream to the pond, swam a little to rinse off, and found a warm spot in the sun and went to sleep with my clothes for a pillow. Sometime later a splash woke me up and I sat up out of the willows and there she was, floating on her back in the green water, her tits bobbing pure white, the between her legs plain to see. You get me? Just right there. She floated around with her eyes closed to the sun and I just stood there like the jackass I am with my unit getting heavy and when she finally noticed me and shrieked and started to tread away from me wide-eyed, my unit just came alive and stood away from me trying to get to her. The way units do. She crouched in the shallows, brown knees and arms in front of white tits, horse eyes, her clothes fifty feet down the sand, unwilling to stand up, and I just stood there with my unit pointing like a gun-dog, and me panting like one, too. Shameful. I know it. Took me a minute, then I tried to hide it, but nowhere to put it. Stood there shaking holding it, then went back down in the willows to get dressed. When I stood back up she was pulling on her government pants, tits bucking every which way. See? When she was dressed, as it were, she lit out back downstream, kept glancing back over her shoulder, running. I did not follow though of course I wanted to more than I've ever wanted anything.

I sat for a long time shaking. It is the sad truth I was over forty never been with a woman. Horny son of a bitch since I was little but such a goofy and ugly bastard I never did get any. And what with the gray teeth and living like John the Baptist or whatever I was not til that moment ever in a situation where I was ever going to get laid, even by a blind chick who happened to stumble upon me when I happened to be fresh-washed, such as after a rainstorm or something, and mistake me for someone else. I never did meet a blind chick. 

Anyway, I sat and sat, then ate. When the sun went behind the cliff I made a fire in the dry sand. I sat over it into the evening, just me and the pressure in my pants. Late I snuck downcanyon. She had no fire, but the [Bronco] was still there. I bet she slept inside. She was scared, poor thing. Next day I was napping in the willows again she calls out You still here? I sat up and she was on the other side of the pond with her holster on, wary but not wide-eyed now, hair every which way. In truth not a good-looking woman, but even just her brown arms and the shape of her shirt, and her badge and her gun and those everloving pocket flaps made my heart beat. I said Yes, I'm still here, though of course she could see me sitting there panting. 

What are you doing? she said. 

Just taking a nap is all. 

You come down from above? 

Yes, I said. 

What's your name? 

Handy. What's yours? 

Roberta. 

I'm sorry I scared you yesterday, I said. I just woke up to you there. I was asleep. 

You just stood there getting a good look, though, she said. 

I stood and blushed. Finally I just thought what the fuck? Might as well say it. It just isn't every day you wake up and there's a beautiful woman swimming naked right there, I said.

I thought it was private, she said, indignant. 

Well, me too, I said, defensive. We kept sort of yelling this kind of thing back and forth across the pond at each other, both of us embarrassed and wary. She relaxed a bit. Shifted on her feet. I was getting sunburned so I moved along the water's edge to the shade and sat on a rock. She came halfway to me and sat on her own rock. We talked that way half the afternoon. 

The next day, Sunday, she came up again. I was running out of jerky. I did most of the talking, which, no surprise there, right? She was quiet. She got comfortable. Then I told her I came here looking for her but too shy to walk into the camp. Told I was the one whose wikiup burned over to Pork-a-Pine canyon last winter. Then she looked and looked at me, long eye contact, really took my breath, that's not just what they write. I told how I'd been back in the rocks hid when she responded to the smoke and how I found the sandwich she left, and I let down my guard and told her how grateful I was for that food and how I had moved on to ranch work since the fire but that I had her on my mind every day. Disinhibited, like drinking wine, and dry-throated I told her that I very much liked the way she looked that day and could not get her out of my thoughts. I was talking looking at my loathsome feet in the green pond water and she stood and sloshed over to me and stood between my knees as I sat and she pulled my head to her.

This summer I was in the canyon as often as work allowed. We met at the pond when the archaeologists were gone. We were wild. We lay naked by a big fire and also in the sun. We were brown all over. Just waiting all the workweek then fucking like animals as many times as we could do it then lying in a stupor in the canyon. You could of stuck a pin in my eye those nights I was so wrung out I would not of flinched. 

Late August, the last Sunday of the month, with the workweek hanging over us, we were thus passed out in the sand when a great cloud turned the light and the birds went still and the hammering started away to the south we lay still in the sun and watched the towering purple rise from Arizona on its jackboots of lightning. Hammers or jackboots. The edge of rain came upcanyon and the ground shook. She lolled in the hot sand and the ground shook and I looked her unashamed right at her naked dry skin as it spotted with rain. I stood a rock and red mud flushing fresh-fractured stones replaced her as she lay. I stood out of the rush and the rain was a think curtain and the long stretch of cattails that had tented her clothes bent to the red and tore out soundless and bunched downstream and trees stripped of their leaves heaved against the cliff-face, now stripped of its skirt of garden. She was there and then not, and in her place the tantrum of upset mud and stone. The whole canyon stripped and flushed but me on my rock on a sandbar.

As the water fell I picked my way by bouldertops downcanyon calling her. Her [Bronco] stood sideways in red mud to the windows. I found her washed up in some trees at the confluence. It took a day for the wash to empty of flood. Then I carried her all afternoon upstream. Too much broken to fix it and no cloth to bind it. The two reds, the rust in rock and blood. And the red behind her teeth and the black crown she wore. This tourist picked us up on 144. We went up through the mountain to the clinic but she died on the way. That tourist I seen in the rearview with the two reds around his mouth from the lady ranger's mouth he tried to breathe her back alive though I tried that too so the three of us all got the mouth area red with red rockmud and blood. That's most of what I remember, and some bits of clinic, the farmers and hikers and kids in the waiting room as I laid her dead on the floor in the flaking dried mud me forgetting we got no clothes. Her jawbone. And the sheet on her like a dressup ghost. The sheriff with some questions as I vomit on his car. I standing in the parking lot in the blanket he lent me when he turned his back to talk with the tourist and the doctor and I walked out into the willows and up again onto the mountain where I stand on rocks in the flood of leaves where I am back in the shadows unsuspected to let the hikers by where now the nights are cold and half the nights I have no fire and I sleep in the sheriff's blanket in a heap of duff maybe there is still some red rockmud or her blood on me somewhere that hasn't wore off. 

And me in the sheriff's blanket and this Bryce Canyon National Park sweatshirt I stole, and these too-big boots left drying on a Jeep that I filched, the boots, not the Jeep, just outside the firelight watching you pass the bottle and the guitar at the Small 'm', and picking you out of the crowd to follow and speak to, you with your journal you always have, I imagine the song lyrics, the Morning Pages, the editing you must do to strike that perfect balance between forthcoming personal confession and the seemliness your young girls will need from you when they are old and you die and leave your scribblings you imagine they want from you. You set the record straight for them, the record your ex-wife has twisted, you need to tell them why you left and why Kolob, why you quit that job and waste your days here in the bottom of the world doing a pretty good job of recording what I so need to say and not grimacing at the reek of my breath, you are thinking of grad school you just paid off, and the quality books you read, and the life you had that now you don't and I can see even here in the dark under this tree with the winter night too cold on your writing hand and your future now just rawboned laid out before you has shed all its red just colorless now, into the white, my friend.