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.