The Story of that 1997 O.B.S. F-250 Powerstroke Diesel

Okay, so I already told you one big thing that happened in Big Headache that turned out poorly, and, so, here's another:

So, late summer 2007 I quit down at Diamond right as soon after we covered the hay because Wilsons had sold it that spring to the goddamned Silversteins from L.A. and they were a fucking nightmare to work for all summer. They come in and fired my uncle Spence Lyman, who was the manager, when he told them he wouldn't dig their illegal wells nor oversee whoever was going to do it and they wanted to change from whiteface beef to Angus stud bulls and it was all summer pulling out all that new fence we just finished to of put in to replace it with that picturesque but useless lodgepole-rail shit hobby ranchers like, working chainsawing all day every day for minimum. I said fuck that shit and saw the hay put up then quit and only a couple hard-up locals stayed on, Ez the Bishop's boy the whiner and Kade of course always doing the work of any three men for the price of one half a man and too retarded to go on strike, and the rest of us replaced with Mexicans they hauled up from Arizona in a stakeside truck. So I was pretty fucking pissed. The Wilsons having been my family's employer since Brigham Young traded them that sick ranchland for a teenage girl or two and my family farming sand. Anyways, Wilsons' own kids went away for careers and whatnot and the land down there wedged between Black Bear and Cedar, those greenest pastures in Kolob with the whiterock cliffs all around and Navajo Mountain just perfect framed away south, just looks like a postcard, like if Kolob had a Chamber of Commerce that is what they would put on the website, no Photoshop required. So Wilsons put it up to sell and got a couple local bids, like from Old Man Ferral and this weekender who owns the dealerships wherever who is buying up ranches, and these bids were all under Wilsons' asking price so Wilsons listed it on the internet on this one site with ads for Bugatti or some such vehicle with these like chiseled fags in tuxes getting out in a urban nighttime all squarejawed and these Photoshopped perfect-ten vixens in tight dresses backlit looking wetly at the fag in that lordotic model-vixen posture like they're on the trembly edge of orgasm, not the kind of ad that's aimed at for-real ranchers. And so the Silversteins saw the ad and put in their last-minute bid at asking and got it and right away the changes. Their whole plan relied on a huge new well a hundred feet from Lower Cat Creek, illegal as the IRS, and they run that pump just one week and the water table dropped so much Cat went underground and not a drop makes it to the canyon anymore and it was just dead trout in the sand all the way down. Anyway, so: like I said I quit right after putting up the hay and hadn't saved for winter so I went out to the rockfall at the bottom of Big Headache to find some income. Way the fuck out there. I was pretty sure there were pots out there. When my father was a boy some men of Kolob had rappelled down onto the granary ledge to get to the Big House and found it pretty much intact, as it had been stranded up there for all those years after the cows ate down all the canyon grass in the '30s and the floods washed out like forty feet of sand. They got one of the great pothunter finds of all time, thirty intact pots, corn still sealed in the granary, even some stick figures and dolls and baskets. That find paid off some tractors in Kolob, tell you what. Anyways, with the new rockfall I was reminded of how many ledges remained out there and there was one place I had been looking at for years where old dry juniper roots stuck out of the cliffwall way up high above the ground, and I figured, because I'm that kind of genius, that those roots had been in dirt once upon a time and probably indicated that the ledge had been right above ground level before the erosion in the '30s, so I went out there to mark the spot and I roped down to the ledge. Sure enough, there was an old fireplace and a mano and some broken points and I eventually made a few dollars, but it was there I had a windfall, I guess you could call it.

When I roped down to the ledge it was afternoon and I had my eye on a big cloud sitting on the mountain. I was high enough above the wash to be safe, but I didn't want to get wet. It started raining while I was still on the ledge, so I moved back under the overhang and got comfortable. Lit a fire on the old spot. The first fire there for a thousand years, probably. Sitting warm and dry in a desert storm is the sweetest thing. Ravens hissing by. The facing cliffside turning dark as it soaks, then the hail bouncing everywhere and the thunder doing that special migraine crash it does, why they named it Headache, as well as the light that is purple and yellow both, which what the fuck? Where can you see purpleyellow that's not the desert in a rainstorm? Pretty soon the canyon starts flowing. Just some red in the water, then with some rocks in it, then a tree or two, then it really got wound up with a big swell of everything from upcanyon that wasn't nailed down. The rain wasn't much where I was, but upmountain it must of dumped because the stream come up to a mad rapid. You could see the cottonwoods shake when rocks got tumbled against them. Those big rafts of floaters, all grass and cattails, get hung up crosswise in the willows. The water red with rock looks like tomato soup some big willow-mustached motherfucker is slurping at. I love that shit, watching a desert rainstorm. So there I sat watching God TV, when I see this white thing coming down. I kept hearing this like drumming sound and then this white thing, some big bucking heaving rectangle spinning downcanyon. It keeps getting hung up in the trees and damming the flood, going slower than the water so if you sorta squint it looks like it's going upstream. Anyway, but pretty soon it gets to below me and I will be goddamned if it wasn't a 1997 F-250 Powerstroke, so O.B.S., 7.3-liter diesel of course, just doing a fucking lovely pirouette down the canyon. You understand this is out of context in the extreme. Not a road for miles. Not even a driveable surface of any kind upstream til you get to 144 near where it summits. That's I guess 2,000 feet up and five, six miles north. Imagine my surprise and how fucking entertained I was. Just laughed my ass off, got a new story to tell drinking at the Small 'm'. I watched it out of sight bobbing down to the confluence. Slept on the ledge that night and roped out the next morning with my bag of illegal injun goodies, and decided to walk around down to the confluence to see if that truck had washed up. Sure enough, it was there in the mud where the flood broadened out, up to its doors in red muck. It had a bunch of dents, of course, and no mirrors, and a cracked windshield, but it looked pretty much like any goddamned ranch truck, except no heeler standing on a bale in the back. Walking back to 144 up the wash I come up with a plan.

Phase one of my plan was: haul it out. Trusting that nobody would find the truck, first I hitchhiked up to Old Man Ferral's to do some fence work for him. I waited a couple days for the water to sink away and the mud to dry out, then I borrowed his camera, his 4WD Massey-Ferguson, some chain, and a tow-bar. I drove the tractor half the night down from the ranch, down to where the main wash crosses 144, and down the sand those miles to the confluence. It is bumpy but drivable. No pouroffs or nothing. I took a picture of myself by the truck, taking care to capture some Utah postcard in the background. I had to do some digging to break the mud suction, but I did get the truck out and towed it all the way back to the shed behind Ferral's linehouse where I've been living at. Very slow going. I got the tractor all clean and put-away like Ferral likes it. Then I started hosing off the pickup. The mud was in everything. That truck was just one big fucking blob of red stucco, I shit you not. I kept at it til the truck stood there all bashed and gleaming in a big puddle of red mud. All day jetting that hose into everything. Old Man Ferral rode out to see but didn't even want to know what the Sam Hell I was doing, just shook his head and spit and kept riding. I kept at that truck all fall. Cleaned everything. Took a close look at it all.

Phase two of my plan was: fix it. I pulled the strarter, alternator, distributer, [carb?], and cleaned and dried it all. Flushed the fuel line. Took off the manifold and got the sand out of there. Anyway, long story short is I just about rebuilt that truck til it was dry, oiled, and tight. I bet I spent 500 hours on it. I banged out and pulled most of the dents and gave it some Bondo and spray primer. And before Christmas I got the fucker running. Ran pretty good, too. I celebrated by driving down to the Small 'm'. Never owned a vehicle before. So up I chugged in that big diesel and all the boys come over to see it. Of course I was noteworthily afoot for years, hitched ever damned place when I couldn't borrow a ranch truck. Always had. So they wanted to know where I got it. I said over to Youngville. Kade knows all the specs, that goddamned retard will surprise you with what he knows. Anyway, a O.B.S. Ford is an admired rig in Kolob. Fielding, who knows diesels from his daddy's shop was there and he said Even though it looks like it falled off the mountain it sounds like it's running good, and that got me a wee bit paranoid thinking Fielding knew something about its provenance, but maybe that was all the grass I was was smoking that day.

I moved onto phase three of my plan: get paid for all that work I did on it. I went to the Town Hall and logged onto the internet and found some Ford truck forums, and posted my before and after pictures and my story of the truck getting washed away and still running great, and I called the dealerships and told them, and pretty much spread the word and finally --long story-- reached the ad agency that does all the Ford Truck ads and they were interested in doing an ad. Got my before picture and they sent out a photographer and she special-lit the scenic overlook up at the top of Strike Valley with the Tortugas all pink in the sunset back there and they buffed up the remaining paint and the primer and the Bondo and they took a picture of me sitting in there with my elbow out the window and a nice new hat, that one I had on at the dance the other night, and then Photoshopped the fuck out of my teeth and made me look halfway to Robert Redford, and they gave me five grand and they ran the ad. That comes out to $10 per hour, which not bad considering I got the truck, too. Who gets paid $10 per hour to work on his own truck, I ask? Yours truly, motherfucker. Yours truly. It was one of my harebrained schemes that pays off better than work. Then, so maybe May of oh-eight I got pretty fucked up out at Spade's bonfire and I was driving Fox and Lauro out to the canyon after, like twothree in the AM, and fucking Sheriff Shumway is lying in wait and we blow by at like 85 without no mirrors to speak of and the muffler still not staying attached right and no headlights pointing at the road so he goes and pulls us over. To his credit he hardly never pulls over a local, only tourists, but this he just could not countenance nor condone, so he pulls me over, asks for licence and registration, which of course I don't have either of, and he puts the VIN in his laptop and it comes up stole. In retrospective hindsight, I do not know what I expected would happen with the truck with the Sheriff, but it had not recurred to me that it would of been reported stole. I figured washed away, act of God. Not stole. Anyway that prick the Sheriff I guess he had no choice. He arrested me, had to drive me clear to Sandwichville that same night, and him with ranch chores he had to call and get his wife to do while I sat in the back drunk off my ass listening and him not allowed as a Mormon to drink coffee, just Diet Coke, so not at all happy with yours truly Handy Whitehead. Plus the whole two-hour ride there I did not hardly shut up I was so drunk but he never put alcohol in the police report and I did not get the DUI I deserved, bless his heart.

As it turns out, this one guy from Loa had been up on the mountain spotting deer in the windup to the archery season when the rain took the whole paved pulloff his truck was parked on right off the mountainside into this swale and the truck just floated from there all the way down Big Headache. How it went over those pouroffs I do not fucking know. It was a miracle. Anyways, of course he got his truck back in very fine mechanical condition thanks to yours truly, Handy Whitehead, and my meticulous, not to say downright fanatical attention to mechanical detail and my turbocharged need to make all machines run like fine German automobiles and I got to sit in jail three days then tell the judge more or less the truth, that I found it in the canyon and fixed it up, but not about the pothunting you can bet your ass, and he threw out the auto-theft charge and fined me $nnn for driving with no license and no registration and no mirrors and he told me I needed to write a letter of this story to help the truck's real owner get his insurance figured out. Anyways, as you now know, this is why I walk everywhere and it is why I insist I am not paranoid, that every interaction I have with the government ends up with them taking from me what I have earned and leaving me to fend for myself in a world not made for walking or for hitchhiking with bad gray teeth and clothes that look like I stole them from a halfway-house mop closet.

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.

Ferral Young, Kolob, Utah, October 14, 2014

You maybe believe that it was always the way it is today in Kolob, with the old Mormon ranchers on the one side and the newcomers on the other. This is untrue. When the hippies first come, even when the uranium prospectors come through here the years I was in France in the war, the Kolob people was well acquainted with fighting and backbiting. Of course, we was all of our own minds and as spooky and cranky as anyone else anywhere, but I think you can say we was in two groups: there was the few of us that had land and cattle and buildings paid off and the best grass for winter feed, water uphill of us, and so on. Then there was the rest who drew poor land or it was overworked and so did not have cattle or buildings to speak of, and poor water shares and debts, so they worked for us. Those of us who run the place, my family foremost, had our share of hardship. Our boys died of horses and ranching as much as the others. Our wives died of babies the same as the others. But when the droughts come we had the better water. In nineteen fifty-four our ponds dried to chalk and we had to drive our cattle over the mountain to auction. We lost half on the drive and sold the rest at a loss. But the creek this high never run out completely. We got two lean cuttings off the top pastures and kept our breeding stock. But the other group I mention, the poor-land group, they mostly pack up and move away in fifty-four and fifty-five til Kolob was mostly empty, only two children in school. Some of them come back in sixty or thereabouts to claim their land, but most we never seen again. They just didn't have the water or the grass to hold it. Now, these two groups, we had the resentments and suspectings and gossiping you'd expect, but we also had different personalities that got differenter during the drought and after. I am one of the blessed ones to of come from the water and grass families, so of course I have a perspective on this you can suspect of preferring my own people. But the water and grass families, the big ranchers, we was more educated and polite, valued a gentleness and dignity in our business and had debts of gratitude amongst us that cinched us together. Our clothes was storebought and clean. We did not wear skins and our hats was summer straw and winter felt. We had the better horses and gear and the cars and trucks and we went from time to time to the city and our wives had silver and china. The poor-land families just never did prosper. They was just wore-out. And their manners did show just how wore-out they was: they was a loud, fighting, foul-mouthed people who wore the same dirty clothes all year, patched til they fell apart. Just rags. And pelts, even. They was still deerhide shirts and pants common in Kolob before the drought. They was I think a reckless people, without respect for the tender feelings, no love or kindness or sweetness amongst them. You should suspect me of preferring my own people when I say this, but in them days a boy from a good ranching family would be a young gentleman, and a poor boy would be a reckless and careless scoundrel. They was rascals. I suppose they had nothing to lose, and I and my people we had everything to lose, so we had a code of good behavior we held, while them poor families was just wild. I have not missed more than a few meals except fasting in my life and I don't pretend I know what hunger and desperation will do to a person, but same way my horses are fat and shiny on their pasture, on green grass, with a barn and alfalfa hay in the winters, and wont run or kick when you approach them, them poor boys was like a wild, bony mare you run up a canyon gone to give you heck you try to rope her and will never ride proper.

One time my father was down to Larsons' to sign some paper to take Johnny Jepson's top pasture for non-payment. He owed my father for a loan to purchase water shares. This was the Jepsons the grandfather of Shirl, Kade's mother, down across from the Larson's that is now boarded up. So, my father was down there at the old Post Office in Larsons' porch and Joe Nelson's father was witness. Nelsons was and still is owners of the best grassland inside Kolob and in the draw, and the finest ranchers and upstanding in the Ward. So, my father and Joe Nelson's father and Sister Larson was waiting to take Johnny Jepson's deed to that pasture and he didn't show. So they ride over to Jepsons', just a sorry house of raw boards in a patch of sand and a sorry starved mule out back and Jepson come out yelling and lets his two dogs off their chains. So my father and Joe Nelson's father whistled their four dogs from the road and of course there's a dogfight, but four against Jepson's two, so Jepson goes and starts kicking my father's dogs. So my father and Joe Nelson's father get down and chase Johnny Jepson around and he, Jepson, turn on my father and bite him on the arm and on the hand and on the stomach and I think on the knee before they knock him down and tie him in the dirt. This was not just nipping, it was biting to take a bite of. My father had a strip of meat hanging off his arm and Jepson had blood on his chin and shirt. Anyways, this is what I mean saying the poor families was wild: the yelling, the settin the dogs on them, the kicking and biting, the not paying their debts. This was a reckless people, and no tender feelings in them. I guess Jepson had a pasture to lose, but he knew it was already lost and he was cornered. Desperate.

Anyways, so, back to Handy Whitehead. You want to understand that boy you got to understand the temperament of the poor people. They are a wild and fighty people, even the ones who come back after the drought. Some got their houses back, but no good land or water attached. Most just pulled in a trailer and lived in that, or in anything weathertight they had. Same as always, they work for the ranchers. Handy's family, the Whiteheads, always worked for my family, the Youngs, here on the ranch and cowboying on our leases. Handy's father worked for my father. He was as wild as any, but we was friends of a sort. When Whiteheads was losing their land during the drought, I think in fifty-six, my father made him a deal: that Whiteheads could stay in their house on a acre if they deeded the pasture to my father, and he would forgive their debts. My father had more water than he needed and trenched a new ditch to Whitehead's land, now ours, and watered it and then had Whiteheads work it.  At my father's orders they planted it in winter rye and watered heavy and disked the rye under and planted again and ran just a few dairy cows, and within a few years that pasture was pretty good again. I think Handy's father was shamed. He lost his land, then worked it for my father, and it greened up only when my father owned it. Of course, it was the water. That land was just blowsand without water, and my father owned the water. But before the drought Whitehead had a few head of his own and had some pride. After, the pasture was almost ready for corn, but Whitehead owned nothing and my father owned more than ever. There was a a few years Handy's father would not look me in the eye or speak to me more than necessary. He still cowboyed with me, but I can't honestly say we was friends. His clothes got shabbier and his horse died one winter all underfed, out there between his house and the road with its ribs showing, a shame on that family. With no horse they cut no heating wood that year, and maybe would of froze in that plank house if my father hadn't sent down a truckload of wood. So my father, with the notes and deeds, the water, the work, even the stovewood, you could say he owned the Whiteheads. Handy grew up in that. Just a skinny, running-nose, yellowhaired boy in poverty. I felt terrible about that. I could hardly look at Whiteheads in them days. But Handy didn't want to live like that, in that sorry house on that little square of sand and goatsheads. One thing you need to understand about Handy is he is much smarter that you and me. I suppose that hunger and cold and humiliation put a pang in his mind. Not that he was good in school. Hardly went. But when they paved 144 in sixty-eight the bookmobile came down from Salt Lake. It was a big event, like the circus come to town. That old schoolbus full of books and the pretty lady that checked out the books. Handy checked out the limit every three months, and he read every word. And when he ran out of his books, he borrowed others and read and re-read every one. It didn't matter hardly what. Adventures, Huckleberry Finn, recipes, how to wire a house, romances, he read all of them. He got several of them committed to memory. Handy is the biggest reader I ever met. You might think he's crazy, but he's just halfbroke. Goes on about every darn thing and you can't half understand him the way he talks wild. But there is not a better-read man in Kolob. When he was I think twelve, still little and ragged and wild, we was at the chapel for the talent show, it was always the good families sent their children up to say a poem or part of the Gettysburg or a Article of Faith or what have you. Sing a song. So, Handy goes up out of turn, unannounced, wearing his gray patched poor clothes, and started reciting. Just looked up and started in with that wild squawking voice you heard, and he had us just spellbound. Ten minutes he said this wonderful poem about black ships and the heroes, and the war between the Trojans and the Greeks. We was thrilled. I can still remember. We was all just gone from the room in our imaginings. That boy would of gone on to the end but my father stopped him to let the other kids have a chance.