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.

Kade Goes Dancing at the Barn Dance

This is the barn dance up ahead. They are parking on the road in the dark in the pickup Ezra borrowed from the Bishop. There is three up front and there is four in the back. They picked up Lauro and this new hippy named Fox and this girl from down at the yurts. Lauro and them are smoking grass not Kade he does not smoke that shit. Kade is drinking beers and stomping them on the truckbed, You better sit down in here says the girl they are down in the truckbed in the hay and fencetools and the twine and the trash the Bishop's truck is full of. Kade is more happy sitting on the stakes up in the wind. You're going to lose your hat Kade says Lauro. He is smiling he flicks his jay into the night. Kade gives the girl a beer she taps the can on his and they drink and he stomps the cans and they get out on the dirt. Ez cuts the engine and they hear the music it is the band from Youngville they are playing the Kolob song the girl is dancing so he swings her in a circle Jesus Kade put me down she says so he is laughing. They are walking by the parked cars to the barn at the end. This is where he moved the handlines this morning on the Christiansens' alfalfa. The handlines are straight that is how he places them. There is some in a truck in lawnchairs drinking he seen them same boys over to Cannonville he sneaks up to their bumper in the dark and bounces the truck hard and they yell Jesus and Fox says Everyone is praying tonight. Ez and his buddies pass a bottle it smells strong. In the light of the barn there are the people in their good jeans and their dresses, some are dancing. This is the barn where the Christiansen boy shot hisself he was Kade's Mom's age they was in school. Also he hung hisself. The way he done it was that he put the gambrel rope about his neck stood on the rail pulled the trigger fell and the gambrel caught him and he rolled out on the rail trolley to the middle they thought he hung hisself til they saw his sunday jacket bloody and most of his head up there in the roof he was dressed for Sunday they never did know why he done it. These are the Christmas lights and the music is loud that is how these boys play it. Those are the cigarette and jay lights here and there in the dark away from the light. Here is Ted he has a flask he hands to Kade it is strong Hi Mr May he says he says Come to dance with the pretty girls? Yes of course. He tries to get Ted to take a beer but he does not he says No thank you Kade how's your mother. She is okay she is not coming That's what I figured says Ted I'll see you round he says and sits on a tailgate with the new cowboy Tomasz who Kade gives a beer and says Hello how are you he says Pretty good thanks Kade and he taps his can on his and on Ted's flask. This is the stansion he welded the hinge on and burned his arm pretty bad. He is looking up to see if the Christiansen boy's head is still up in the roof he knows it's not but he always looks. They cleaned it up but the gambrel is there still they still hang a buck or a elk on there if the weather is cool. This is the sand they put in here for dancing and the stage that is wood from the old church basketball court the basketball lines do not line up now. He is dancing now and Crazy Billy in the band is smiling at him he has beads in his beard he is a crazy son of a gun playing them drums in his work Levi's and just a undershirt. He is looking for Kandace she said she would dance with him. He sees the girls from Youngville but he does not see Kandace. He is doing some spins and kicks and they are playing Twist and Shout the dancers made a circle around him to clap and holler they are passing this bag of wine with the little plastic spigot. This girl from Youngville comes out and does this move that he seen on TV with one hand up and head turned then the other hand up and head turned the other way the tops of her tits is shiny and bouncing so he does his horse-riding move and tips his hat at her and the dancers all yell and laugh and this guy he did saltcedar work with in the canyon hands him the bag of wine and he drinks it. Then he sees Kandace come in so he runs to her and picks her up and spins her and she is yelling something he can't hear it is too loud he just spins her til he almost falls over a chair and then she goes somewhere he don't know where so pretty soon he goes out to a old Mustang in the dark and drinks some Gatorade. It is true he can circle almost her whole waist with his hands she is that small and he is this big. He asks some cowboys do they want to armwrestle he has his elbow on the trunk of the Mustang they say no thanks nobody hardly ever will armwrestle he is that big. Now it is later and he walks back to the truck but it is gone so now he is walking home in the dark along 144 he can still hear the band back there there are eighteen lights in Kolob. Here is the Nelson boy's new pivotline twelve heads it is the biggest in Kolob. Those are some mulies going over the fence. This is the driveway and there are the heelers not barking they know him. There is his Mom's light on she is up waiting for him reading.  He lets the screendoor slap he needs to put on a new closer Hi love she says from her room How was it? It was fun Are you drinking? Yes more than you said she says nothing he goes in and kisses her she is reading she is wearing her reading glasses she is very old and pretty. Now he is upstairs he got axle grease on his good Wranglers he don't know how he remembers to turn out the light it is a long day now it is time to sleep he thinks of Kandace.

Kade and His Mom Go to the Small 'm' market

This is his mom saying Let's go to the Small 'm' market I just need this one piece of glass I don't need to go all the way up to the store. The dogs can go so he gets their ropes. This is the driveway fresh graded and all the weeds drying in the burn-pit. Here is the back way. When he was small he stopped here to watch a snake go down a gopher hole and a cat also stopped to watch under that bush and the cat went in the grass to another hole and waited and the gopher came out and the cat caught it and took it and then the snake came out they was hunting the same gopher. Here is the new foundation for the city people Fielding is building. It is right in the middle of the back way where the Larsons used to throw their bottles. This is the Larson house that has no windows just boards when he was small he played in there he could fit through a gap in the window boards. It was before the roof caved and it was still dry. It is broke now the chimney that one time had smoke and two men was sleeping in there in sleeping bags on the floor and his Mom told him stay away from that place we don't know nothing about them hippies. Here is where they go through the church fence it is down where the ditch washed out a post and they walk through to the back of the Small 'm'. This is the Mexican throwing trash in the dumpster and his Mom waves and so does he and the Mexican touches his hat and finishes his cigarette he is always in a hurry. Here is the porch and it has Kandace, and Charlie and some tourists and so he stops to see Kandace. She has a book. He stops and his Mom goes in. He puts the heelers on their ropes. They don't need ropes but that is the rule at the Small 'm'. Kandace is so pretty he likes to be her friend. Kandace was reading her legs are long and in the sun her hair is up and it is yellow. Kandace waves her way with her fingers she always waves this way. Hi Kandace he says You are pretty and the girl Kandace smiles and says You're sweet Kade. These are the tourists taking phone pictures of theirselves in front of the Small 'm' they have on black chaps and they have new Harleys lined up, the 1200s and he takes out his bandana and wipes the dust off the chrome on the gastank of one and the tourist says You don't have to do that and Kade says It is dusty this will make it pretty and Kandace puts down her book and smiles at him and pats the bench next to her so he goes over and sits down. What are you doing Kade. Going to the Small 'm' he says. My Mom is getting glass cut the brushhog throwed a rock when I did the driveway right through the kitchen window right in the sink. Kandace laughs. Her shorts are very small so the pockets poke out on her legs that are brown. He puts his hand there on her leg and she pushes it away and laughs Oh Kade you are too funny so he puts his hand in his pocket and he has dollars he forgot so he goes inside and gets a popsicle and he goes outside and gives it to Kandace but she doesn't take it. She always eats popsicles but she doesn't want this one so he eats it and gives the sticks to the dogs. The tourists start the Harleys and it is loud and the dogs get riled and Kandace covers her ears. It is hot the sky is blue the cloud has sat there downvalley all day not coming up. Are you going to the barn dance says Kandace Yes he says I will dance with you are you wearing a dress Yes she says What one he says It is blue. This is the one she wore that day at the cemetery for Old Man Nelson's funeral It is very pretty he says. Here is Charlie now coming over Hi Kade, Kandace he says. He is now standing there because Kade's Mom is coming out with the glass it has blue tape on the edges. Window broke? Yes she says From a rock. Kade he says I have some chainsaw work you can do and stacking cordwood and Kade says he will do it tomorrow today he has the Nelson boy's handlines it is going to rain later so he will see him tomorrow.  Let's go honey says Kade's Mom How's your mother Kandace? Kandace says Okay she picks up her book and stands the benchslats marked her legs pink Kade says Kandace I can see those screwheads on your legs from the bench. Oh Kade she says and his Mom says Let's go honey and he looses the dogs and they go into the willows with that piece of glass.

Three Looks at Ted May.

1. Ted May, the Bishop, Tomasz, and the Girl Kandace. August.

The yellow parallelogram moved up the wall. He could see it move. He fell back into sleep then woke again. The room became very hot and he was thirsty. His pillow was soaked and his mouth tasted of sulphur. After some time he reached for his glass but found it dry. With real effort he rolled his legs off the bed and used the railing to get downstairs. He gulped water.

This is my bed and I'm lying in it, he thought. The bed I made.

The afternoon sun poured brass on the faded carpet and the window sash ticked like a furnace. The light lensed through the neat row of Jameson bottles and he thought of church and then of his wife and the ranch and his mind followed the deep singletrack of failure and loss.

The water revived him. He resolved to go out. He knew he needed his friends at this guttering end of two days drunk. He showered and shaved and put on a fresh shirt and his good hat and boots then drove the two blocks to the sawmill. They were just shutting down. The jointer still spun and thrummed a low note. The late light projected the opening of the overhead door into the drifting pine dust.

I am a wreck, he thought. Hi, Tomasz, he said.

Evening, Ted, said the younger man.

The houselike bulk of the Bishop straightened and turned and came forward out of the gloom. Brother Ted, he said, his voice full of outsize delight.

Good to see you, Bishop, said Ted, and smiled though it cost him some effort in his bleary discomfort.

Ted took a broom off the wall and started moving sawdust toward the truck. The mill men did, too, and they swept for a while in near silence, til the Bishop started to whistle.

You have a spirit of gladness, Bishop, said Ted, and the Bishop laughed.

Yes I do, Brother Ted. I was born happy. It is the gift The Lord hath given me.

Tomasz was new here, just arrived a few days ago from out of state, looking for ranch work. He wondered at the Bishop's language, that he could be an old rancher one moment and a jovial Old-Testament prophet the next. He expected a deep and frightening cultic certainty in the big man but so far had seen nothing but good humor and moments of silliness. The Bishop seemed genuinely elated to run a decrepit sawmill and a good-size ranch and to return home spent every evening to his round wife and several children.

Ted was thorough with his sweeping. He ran the broom around and under every obstacle he could lift as he went. The mill men were tired and the Bishop was sloppy but Ted left his area nearly spotless. Got to floss the shop, he said. I got to do something, can't just lie around watching the houseflies.

You can work here any time I got work, Brother Ted, said the Bishop.

You know I don't work for pay, Bishop.

Along the road, in the gravel, the girl walked by, her posture erect, her head canted to keep her hair in place. She thumbed her cell phone intently, proclaiming with her body and her absorption that she did not notice the sudden stillness in the shop. The lowering sun came to the men through her yellow hair and through her yellow skirt and she and the sun and the pine dust that hung in the air seemed to them all of a piece, contrived for their benefit, a silent golden tableau in the sudden silence at the end of a loud and punishing workday.

The Bishop returned to his broom. Tomasz glanced at Ted. Ted smiled and shook his head. You see that Tomasz?

Yessir, said Tomasz.

What's that? said the Bishop.

The girl Kandace, is what, said Ted, with laughter in his voice.

I tried not to, said the Bishop, and then looked down as though the pile of sawdust contained an admonition, or a cure.

Well, I saw her, said Ted. And she is the sweetest thing I maybe ever seen. At least in recent decades, he added, after a moment of thought.

She doesn't even know we saw her, said Tomasz.

Ted said: She don't wear that tight little getup for no other purpose. She knows something. About being looked at.

They went back to sweeping and the sun reached deep into the shop a downangled wedge of light and bats dropped out of the high rafters.

I am getting old, thought Ted. It is unseemly to say such things of a girl at my age. I guess I got to learn to keep my mouth shut, he said. Carrying on like a boy. He thought, Sometimes you don't mark the passing time and make adjustments to your behavior.

They swept the three piles of sawdust into one at the tailgate of the truck.

Civilization and its discontents, Ted said. And Tomasz looked uncertain.

2. Ted May at Church, of All Places, and the Bishop. September.

"And, so, brothers and sisters, that's it for the temple trip and so let's get that put together and get the youth to commit to that and there's gonna be lessons this month on the various temple work: the baptism of the dead and what's it called? Endowments. And one of you counselors need to remind me," here the Bishop grinned in self-deprecation and the congregation tittered as he looked back over his shoulder at his two counselors, and he continued "to get them donations set up and the bus is," his heavy breath was too close to the microphone as he looked down his nose through his crooked reading glasses at a scrap of paper "thirty-five dollars each person over to St. George."

He paused. "Okay, and then we got the storehouse project which this month is peaches and," he looked out over his glasses at the congregation. "Sister Christiansen?"

"It's huckleberry jam."

"That's my favorite. Good on a sandwich." They laughed. "Ok, so we got the peaches and the jam and we need to represent the ward over to Youngville gettin all that canning done, and it's not just the sisters need to get this job done, brothers. There is boxes to haul and when they got a bulging can, why, some brother's got to step up and taste it and see it's not got the botulism." The congregation laughed again.

"You can't say it's anyone's fault," Ted thought. "She could say I was a drinker and she would not be wrong, but who did not want sex and drove me to drink?"

"Okay, then. I think we got a announcement from the Relief Society." He looked through some scraps of paper, one of which fluttered down from the pulpit into the first row of folding chairs, where someone caught it and handed it back up. The Bishop took it absentmindedly while he read from a scrap. "Sister Smith? C'mon up." He turned and lowered himself heavy between his counselors.

"And who is a scrawny and bony son of a bitch with a temper that she didn't want to have sex with? You can't say it's her fault."

Sister Smith strode to the pulpit and seized the microphone with an abrupt wrenching grasp, setting off feedback that she alone seemed not to hear. "Brothers and sisters, it's that time of year again. The annual Gold and Green Ball will be October first. Brothers, you need to dust off your good suits and get your wives, your wife some red roses, which they are four-ninety-nine the dozen at the Ditchfield Walmart, and set the date aside. Every couple should be there. It's pot luck and the decorations will be the loveliest thing you ever seen. October one. And we got to get the punchbowl back from who took it home last year. And we need volunteers to stay after and put up the chairs and tables, so brothers each and every one of you got to sign up on the sheet going around in Elders' Quorum today. Thanks and see you there." She strode off the stage, her heels beating the floor.

The Bishop heaved himself up to the pulpit again and raised his eyebrows and grinned for a couple seconds, for no reason other than to show his affability in contrast to Sister Smith's officious brusqueness. "I wish someone would make a best-of video of me up here," he thought. "I am a entertaining son of a gun."

"Course, she knew who she was marrying. It's not like I was unknown to her. She knew I'm a angry man. If I didn't have the ranch back then she would of married a man who did." He pictured her sitting up there at the organ the way she used to do, with her bony back too straight and her hair too young streaked with gray. He pictured her sitting on the other side of the cold woodstove in the kitchen wearing her coat, and in his mind he held his hand palm-up, in a simple gesture as if to say "Light a goddamn fire if you're so cold," but when he looked up the Bishop was talking:

"...gonna be your last chance in September, so let me know or talk to the ward clerk and we'll be sure to meet, long as I'm home before my dear wife's got the roast out of the oven."

"You always take blame all the way back to Adam. Or Eve," he thought. "Goddamn her. For taking my youth. For her cold self and for taking everything." He thought of the ranch as it had been when they got married. The wide and neat hayfields. The new Ford. The house painted. He pictured her at the woodstove looking up and seeing him gesture, and saw her turn back down to her book with a sour expression on her face. Not a word between them. Both just bones and sinew and silent resentment still in their twenties. "If that lawyer walked in here..." he looked around the chapel and at his neighbors and lifetime friends, the long row of yellow crewcuts where the Bishop's boys flanked their roundshouldered mother, "...I would shoot him in the head," he thought.

The Bishop eased himself back down into the chair. It creaked loudly as the organist played the first moaning notes of the sacrament hymn.

"...shoot him and be justified," he thought. "Come into my life, don't even talk, don't cook good enough to get a hog to eat it, the sour looks, the avoiding me, the never once showing me gratitude or appreciation."

The Bishop looked out over the congregation as they sang. He looked at his boys, all broad and yellowhaired and dressed in the white shirt and blue clip-on. He could hear Gladys sing. "What a lovely voice," he thought, "she still has got after all these years." He thought back to when he was a boy and they sang with Gladys at the talent show and won, and that everybody laughed as they took the stage, both of them big and chubby and apple-cheeked and dressed to match in clothes his mother had made special, not counting on the comical effect of the bold plaid. He thought "This is the life I have got." He looked at his wife, not singing but staring forward with her thick arms folded high across her bosom. He looked at Ted out there at the back of the room, scowling and holding his hat. Ted smiled up. The Bishop felt okay about being the Bishop, right then. He thought ahead to his funeral. They would say that he had always been a kind and decent man, raised his boys right, been a hardworking rancher and mill-man and a valiant defender of his faith.

"Then leaving and taking the ranch and I pay both lawyers. That dried-up lying thief."

The middle-C was sticking again, producing a slightly warbling drone. The room was too hot and smelled of deodorant and diapers and mothballs. He could smell the storebought white bread all the way back here.

"Makes a man drink and drink bad," thought Ted. "Shit on them." He found himself up and walking to the door. Outside he smelled woodsmoke, and the yellow cottonwood leaves ticked across the parking lot. He loosened his tie and got in the old Ford and found his Waylon Jennings cassette, and drove the few blocks home. The mountain was in clouds. He pulled his handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped dust from the dashboard.

He removed his Sunday hat and put it atop the coat-tree. In his hurry to be on time this morning he had left his plate in the sink. Now he washed it and placed it in the rack. He fired the stove. The same one. Her rocker sat there still all these years later. A lightweight ladderbacked chair his mother had also used. He slid it 'til the runners were under the iron stove, then wrenched it hard forward and the old dry wood splintered almost without his effort. The legs came out of their mortises, then the spindles and armrests. The back took some work. He finally removed the kettle from the stove, raised the chair above his head, and brought it down. Then again with vehemence and it broke to sticks. These he swept into a pile in front of the stove. Sitting in his own chair now, he fed the stove the shambles of the chair. The old maple caught and a surge of heat filled the room. "A winter in here," he thought, and reached for the Jameson.

3. The Kolob Tabernacle Gets Under His Skin. December.

By fiat the prophet seer and revelator had it built at the crossroads, not at the corner of one quadrant but at the geometric centerpoint at the very intersection of the centerlines of the two roads in the perfect as-drawn crosshaired bullseye of what would have been a roundabout had more urbane planners had their way but which evolved in fact to become a rough rutted swerve of trafficked bare hardpan and later a merely expedient sweep of asphalt in the midst of which the Tabernacle now stood autonomous, alone and to appearance arbitrary so that what began as fiat ended up as apparent mistake, the certainty of the prophet seer and revelator coming finally to light as hamfistedness, the way what is white and bloated and fishbitten finally slips its chains and surfaces to indict.  He thought: this is a likeness of our discomfort with the social order: that the Tabernacle, meeting place for the propagation of edicts, the leveling of censure, the knitting of the congregation, the buttressing of values and family and general cohesion, should so whelm the townplan that all roads must needs finally go their near-heedless way around it lest it govern overmuch the hurried passage of the people who no matter their allegiances must get where they are going.  And that in delaying them every day by looming there omnipresent, unaware of its architectural solecism, a shadowing reminder of their oaths and contracts, it so chafe and irk that they tire of the order it was placed there to keep and become wild.  Thus the rough expedient looping of the blacktop where the prophet had designed a neat-compassed circle did for him, for this modern man this century later, symbolize the accommodations people, individuals all, make to live with each other else the social contract so irk and chafe that at some personal culmination one of the overregulated citizens mix fertilizer with diesel and bring down the Tabernacle.  In this vast country, at least, it is in no one's nature to be so overseen, stared-down on and disapproved of, by this kind of unblinking panoptic presence of distant authority.  It loomed there and he imagined it circled with a wind-rippled God-sustained red banner declaring Non Annuit Coeptis under an unblinking eye.  One may love the church and resent its nagging.

Then one moonless night in the deadwinter the man ran off the expedient asphalt, well into his fifth of Jameson, and came up in the ditch in the deep snow, tires frictionless, and the headlights bore an upangled wedge of light through the snowfall directly at the facade of the Tabernacle.  For a long few minutes as he reeled behind the wheel it glowed alone and faceless in all the night and as the man noted how its fine old stone was now nearly hidden in the aluminum and vinyl of the expedient costeffective tithebought recent remodel and the whiskey sidled up his esophagus in unctuous laminar flow then he became convinced of his night's work.  He offed the headlights, lurched the two blocks home, and returned with paint and roller.  In the near-complete dark he overturned a trashcan, chinned the gutter over the new modular aluminum entry, made the roof, and considered his canvas: an uninterrupted upper wall of squared blocks of red sandstone maybe forty feet across and taller than he could reach.  He marked the very axial center of the wall, the spot bisected by the cardo of Kolob Town, and drafted in white oil housepaint a vast eyewhite, almond, symmetrical, and stylized.  Then an arm-compassed iris of barnred, then a pupil in stoveblack, which he drew smallish because he imagined it would seem to squint its contempt.  He stood back woozy in the cold and disordered by the gusting of the snow.  The eye was plain even in this moonless solstice, fairly done, clear and simple, iconic.  He threw the paint buckets down into the snow and jumped after.  He worried briefly about the footprints in the snow between his truck and the road.  He left the paint to freeze, fetched a shovel from the truckbed and began to dig and some time later, with the whiskey wearing off, he drove home.

Gone Away Backward

And here is Lady Soleil, recently of River Hills, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Until a month ago known to her suburban friends as Linda Schlitz, mother of two insolent daughters, now estranged. Until a year ago married to Big Dave Schlitz, also of Milwaukee, who left her with debts she hadn't suspected and a mortgage payment she could not carry. Now sleeping in the back seat of her ten-year-old minivan in a trailhead parking lot off of Utah State Route 144 in the Big Yellow Pine National Forest, a place she can scarcely imagine despite watching it from her lawnchair several hours a day since she pulled into this overlook a week ago. She sits in the shade and watches. The mountain above her, green, yellow, and black, impassive like an animal, giving nothing. The palisade of red rock denying any passage west, almost denying even thought of what might lie beyond. To the south, rolling elk meadows and almost beyond sight the crossing at Kolob Town where 144 reaches into the desert like an arm, laden with the gaudy costume bangles of irrigated alfalfa fields, alien green in all the unmoved desert. And east the canyonlands, so inscrutable not even the rain can touch them, a hundred miles or more, for all she knew, of sandstone so contorted she imagined it seething at a violent boil and motionless only because her time here is so brief that her patient watching, for days, is but a shutter-click, a moment so brief that God's great cooking of the world can only be guessed at or suspected but not known. Below her seat at the edge of the overlook parking lot there is a strip of rattling grass, a pair of leaning pines, and then a precipice. She took a day to approach that edge, her toes curled to grip the gravel. She underhanded a stone over the edge and some time later the report of its impact returned to her, a sound flat and honest, followed by the lies of its echoes. The wind hissed in the pines. Cliff swallows preceded the sound of their passage. Far below a chaos of fractured boulders.

As abrupt as this edge, midlife had come upon her. Until Big Dave's disappearance she had filled her golden skin perfectly: her strong legs, her wide and muscled rump, her high and global breasts, her pleasant and pretty face, all had been in a flawless, tight wrapper of golden shiny skin. Men had always looked, in the summer, and though she was modest and unassuming in all ways, she did enjoy their approving glances and dressed to bare her legs, always shaved and moisturized. And then they stopped looking. She noticed one day. It was right about when Big Dave left, and, though she never said so aloud, she considered her sudden aging to be his fault. She felt broken and discarded, or used up. She imagined he looked at her one day when she was forty-five and saw the softening of her waist and neck, the slackening and spotting of her skin, and the sagging of her breasts and left for someone younger. She had never been beautiful, but she had come, in some ways, to rely on her ripeness and gleaming health, and then it was gone. Her smooth-cheeked cuteness had passed into a moment of handsomeness, and now she looked to herself, in the rearview mirrors, simply exhausted and slack.

But through all this loss and sadness she felt an almost continual new hope. It surprised her every day, this surge of new life in her. It got her through selling the stuff of her marriage, the furniture and the house. Her daughters' piano. Almost everything. In fact, as the house emptied her hope grew. She joined a women's group, mostly middle-aged divorcees, and hired a therapist, something she had never considered and that Big Dave would have scorned. Her new friends and new ability to confess and unburden herself brought her into contact with a world of new ideas. She began mindfulness meditation. She let her hair grow and stopped coloring it. In a giddy shopping spree she replaced her old beige, white, and navy wardrobe with new bold colors and flowing fabrics. She changed to comfortable shoes. She had her chart done, and her cards read. She covered the old ________ High School Honor Role bumper sticker with a quote exhorting lovingkindness. With the money from the sales she went on a meditation retreat and hired a diet consultant. She gained weight and thought little of it. All in a year. The transformation had felt effortless, even ecstatic, as though she were simply relaxing into a true identity that had hibernated through her long years as wife and mother. She was happy.

And then she met Sunflower at an energy-work retreat. Sunflower latched onto her immediately. Tiny, vibrant, and talkative, Sunflower took Linda in, almost as a student. She had been attending the retreat for years and had acquired a kind of seniority. She knew the ropes. They received cabin assignments and Sunflower, without asking Linda, traded her cabin number with Linda's assigned roommate, and they spent the week together. The first night they stayed up laughing and gossiping, unloading about their exes. The second night Sunflower produced a bottle of chilled rose' and they drank it from mugs and Sunflower whispered in Linda's ear and they fell back on the bed snorting in hilarity and they became lovers.

And then at the end of the week Sunflower left without a word and Linda was free. She went back to the empty house to vacuum, quit after one room, left the vacuum standing there, got into the minivan still packed from the retreat, and drove west. She followed the energy. She got on I-80 and followed it until the Rockies loomed, then south to Colorado Springs, then west again, on smaller and smaller roads she let a delicate warmth guide her to this spot, where a back spasm led her to pull over in the night and in the morning the sun rose like a great fierce eye over over the canyonlands and the purple shadows drew back and the world opened up to her alone on all the vast mountain and she sat under the pines and wept for all she had lost and all she would lose and that her daughters, too, would lose everything, and that the future would keep opening up like this, some vast inscrutable conspiracy of a universe of canyons now white, then yellow, then orange and pink and red and purple and black then pale blue and white again for all time no matter what. And the warmth in her chest roused her from the lawnchair and took her down the mountain, her minivan coughing its last miles into the green, the chugging wheel-lines, the ferment of corrals, the dusty lots, the tight hunkered houses, and into the gravel lot beside the Trading Post where the dust of her arrival drifted into a small crowd of Saturday farmers' market shoppers and the smell of coffee confirmed that she had arrived.

Conversations in the Ambulance

I’ll leave the outcome till the end, though a short story that takes place almost entirely inside a travelling ambulance will have plenty of narrative direction without withholding the outcome.

I was avoiding anxiety by trying to nap on Blaise’s couch, with the dogs, of course, when Anna, my middle daughter, came up the walk rather white-faced and out of breath and told me that her friend Sal had just gone over the handlebars and had hit the street headfirst and was currently lying in the ditch not moving. Bleary, I grabbed the keys and my boots and we drove out the driveway. Sal was only a hundred yards up the road, lying in a circle of locals. One was supporting her neck, and another was probing her all over in a sort of informed-looking way. Accidents alter people’s behavior. Most people shift toward brusque officiousness, like they’ve suddenly been deputized as crossing guards. Their speech becomes clipped and executive, their faces become stern and a bit pinched, and long-latent procedural wisdom surfaces. The first thing I heard as I approached from the truck was a young, normally soft-spoken woman bark, at one of the self-appointed EMTs, “Do NOT let her neck twist. Severe spinal injury could result”. Even in my somewhat disoriented and concerned state, the instruction-manual diction and first-responder tone of her voice struck me as amusing, even worthy of later mockery. But I’m not writing this to mock. I’m trying to be a good reporter. Besides, I am grateful that my neighbors responded as carefully and selflessly as they did.

Kolob is a very small town. There is no doctor, and we are lucky to have a second-hand ambulance and a couple of certified EMTs. Turns out that someone had called 911, and in a couple of minutes the ambulance showed up. Looking at Sal, I was fairly sure she was going to be ok. No blood, good color, coherent, strong pulse, no acute pain beyond what you’d expect after landing on the pavement without a helmet. My laissez-faire parenting style has always suggested that accidents are good for kids. As long as they’re not permanently harmed, they learn valuable things about pain and suffering and toughness and the importance of protecting the head. So I stood there looking at Sal and thinking things would turn out ok, and then I approached Handy Weiskopf, one of the EMTs, and I asked him quietly and respectfully, taking care to remove all crisis-talk from my voice, what he thought. His rather curt reply, as he shouldered around me, was “Take her to Ditchfield”. Ditchfield has the nearest proper hospital, and is over 100 miles away over twisting mountain roads. I groaned. Over his shoulder, as he began his ministrations and they unloaded the gurney, I asked about other options. He explained that only the child’s parent could overrule the mandatory ambulance ride, and Sal’s parents were in Salt Lake and we were out of cell range and running out of time.

They rolled Sal onto the gurney. Anna and I loaded into the ambulance to go with her. Anna sat in back to hold Sal’s hand. The EMTs sat with Sal, and began their tests and put her in an oxygen mask and strapped her down. I sat up front with the driver, Denny Mussolino, a Bronx transplant of notorious temperament, who was fuming at the delay, muttering about everyone’s incompetence. I plugged in my phone and settled in for what I figured would be a long and unpleasant ride. I tried to clear my head and gear up for Denny’s crushing negativity and what I imagined would be a night under fluorescent lights in a hospital waiting room with a tired and hungry and worried daughter. I began to worry about Sal’s parents’ reaction and my liability as the adult in charge.

We drove off slowly into one of our outrageous Kolob sunsets. The spinning red and white lights reflected off the shot-up signs. We twisted up into the mountains, keeping watch for deer and elk. I fiddled with my phone, trying to get reception, though I knew it would be another 25 miles before I could place a call.

Denny spoke up: “It’s always at night we get these calls. Lucky I was right there. We have the best response time in the County.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard.” I had heard no such thing, but I was determined to be agreeable.

“It’s always the two-wheeled conveyances: your bikes and your motorcycles.”

“Yeah. Two-wheeled conveyances at night. Bad recipe”, I agreed.

“Always some dumbass taking a corner too sharp, hitting the patch of gravel and donating his middle-aged organs.”

“Like that one last year up at the summit.” I really didn’t want to talk about this, but I always feel shamefully eager to please when older men want to talk. I even felt my thoroughly westernized accent revert to the blue-collar Boston accent I sometimes do to try to hide my academic background. I felt an urge to seek solidarity with Denny.

“That one was particularly messy”, Denny continued. “Guy was completely wrapped around this yoodge pine, and when we finally get him unwrapped, we find half his fairing in his lap. Not a pretty sight.”

“Jeez”.

“Don’t know how he survived. Took him as far as Lesbian Ledge and Life Flight got him. Sent me a postcard a month later and was doing ok, about to get out of the wheelchair. Miracle.”

“Jeez”.

We talked a while like this. I hoped Sal and Anna couldn’t hear us. I kept feeling an urge to pitch in with some comparable story, to establish my working-class bona fides, but I resisted. I worried that Denny would find me aloof or arrogant for not really engaging him. Then I got cell reception and started making my calls.

After several tries, I got through to Sal’s mother, who did a good job of remaining calm, and who actually thanked me for taking the conservative approach of going along with the ambulance ride. She was grateful Anna and I had gone with Sal, to keep her company.

About this time the EMTs’ phones got reception, too, and they spoke with a doctor, who advised them to go to a smaller clinic in a much closer town. Things were looking up. I wrote some notes in my journal about what had happened, along with times, and asked Denny to corroborate the times, so that if the insurance company asked questions we would have some basis for agreement. I couldn’t stand any more trouble in my life.

At the small clinic, Sal saw the same doctor who had stitched the end back on my finger a couple of summers ago. A good, warm, quiet man who had been a combat surgeon in Viet Nam, I think. He quickly ruled out concussion and spinal injury. I felt my shoulders unhunch. I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been. But he also said he could not rule out internal injuries, and noted that Sal felt sharp pain around her spleen and the clinic isn’t equipped with diagnostics for such an injury, so he ordered her to Ditchfield. We got back in the ambulance for another two hours’ winding through the hills.

Denny started in again: “Lucky I never ended up in the back of one of these” he patted the dashboard “when I was that age”.

“Wild kid?” I asked.

“That understates it.”

“Back in New Yok?”

“The Bronx.”

I was silent. He has a habit of correcting everything with his tone. People always say you can never say anything right around Denny.

“Racing cars. I drove a ’64 Chevelle. Offset quads, barely legal.”

“Fast car”, I said, hoping to sound impressed.

“Fast don’t start to describe it. It was dangerous, that car. 427, posi, 4-speed. Over 400 horses. Get the front end off the ground in second.”

“Jeez.”

“Anyways, we used to race all over. Two cars on the freeway up front side by side, then the rest of us blocked traffic, one car in each lane behind, so those two had space to race. Coppers couldn’t do anything about it because it’s a divided highway and on our side it was all traffic jam at maybe 30 mph where we were holding them back like a dam so two could race.”

“Wow. Cops must’ve hated that.”

“Couldn’t do shit about it.”

“Jeez.”

“Anyway, so later I rebuilt a ’55 Bel Air. Bored, blown, and polished. Was gonna do nitro, but I ran out of money when I went to school.”

I jumped on this possible change of topic: “What’d you study?”

“Got certified as a phone and radio operator. Worked for the transit authority doing security cameras. Worked on the Narrows Bridge for a year, and up on the towers. All union. Good money. And when I worked the towers I got high time.”

I wished I knew what high time was. It sounded so uniony and blue-collar. “What’s high time?”

“It’s like overtime, but based on risk of a serious fall instead of on working too many hours.”

“So, like, you climbed these towers and got more pay for the risk?”

“Exactly. We used to buy spots on the high-time list from the supervisor. Later he worked for Spitzer, probably taking kickbacks from the girls for all I know. Every supervisor in NYC is a crook. That’s just how business gets transacted in the city.”

“Yeah”, I agreed, more out of exhaustion than from any first-hand familiarity with the workings of big city graft.

“Anyway, so, we would buy high time at about ten cents on the dollar, go up the towers, make as much as a doctor, and spend it on booze and girls and cars.”

What else? I imagined all these burly, literally blue-collared young men carousing and talking about cars and drinking in bars watching Mets games.

“I had a ’67 Nova SuperSport”, I volunteered, truthfully. “In high school.”

“That’s a cherry ride”, he actually said. “350?”

“327.”

“What’d you do to it?”

“Not as much as I wanted”, I said, again telling the truth. I had, indeed, had dreams of having the fastest car in Tucson High School. “Glass packs, headers, opened up the air filter.”

“Four on the floor?”

“Yep.”

“So how come you drive that piece of shit now?” This said aggressively, with no hint of humor.

“Money.”

“I hear ya.”

“Yeah.”

Silence for a while, and then:

“After the Bel Air I was drinking too much and stopped getting high time so I drove just stock for maybe ten years. Hard to get laid driving stock, being a drunk, and having no money, as well as a shitty basement apartment.”

“Yeah.”

“You been there?”

“Nah. I been lucky.” Hearing myself I felt ashamed, but I couldn’t stop this charade. What would someone else do? I always want to be liked.

“Well, anyway, then I said ‘Fuck this’, and I sobered up and saved some money and then opened a furniture restoration shop. Had thirty, forty employees. Drove a nice old Camaro, a ’69, clean and restored, to the clubs on weekends and had a couple of real nice lady-friends.”

“Turned it around?”

“That’s an understatement. One hundred and eighty fuckin degree turnaround.”

“Wow.”

We went on and on like this for two hours, interrupted only by a phone call from Sal’s mom, who was rushing to Ditchfield from Salt Lake to spend the night with Sal. I reported this to Sal in the back, and she cheered up. Handy, the EMT in charge, then said, flatly, “There’s motels all around the hospital. Should be easy to find a room.”

“You’re not driving back to Kolob tonight?” I asked.

“WE are. But you’re not allowed to ride the ambulance back to town. Only to the hospital. County policy.”

“Shit.”

I called Blaise, back in Kolob, and asked if she could come and get us, but it was too late. She was tired. I resigned myself to a long night and ruined plans.

Denny spoke again: “Liability. Common decency says you ride home with us, lawyers say no. This is all about the insurance companies and the lawyers and the regulators. I left the city to be in this paradise and next thing I know the lawyers are here, too, fuck everything up.” He swerved around a ghostly buck, standing dumbly at the white stripe.

“Yeah.” Silence for a minute. “The deer look like hell this spring.”

“Hard winter”, said Denny. “You’d think they’d look pretty glossy after all the hay they ate in Kolob this winter.” He has a way of adding bitterness to things. He doesn’t farm, but the deer eating hay in Kolob he takes as an injustice committed against him and against decency. The deer and the lawyers seem to be wrecking everything.

“You getting your buck this fall?”, I asked, again wincing at my self-conscious everyman phraseology.

“Nah. Don’t hunt. On account of the cruelty.”

This surprised me. Hot rods and booze and broads and blue-collar credentials are usually part of a parcel that includes hunting, or at least an attitude amenable to hunting.

“Can’t stand to shoot an animal and watch it bleed”, he continued. “I’m a softy, maybe ever since Bambi.” He guffawed, sort of a hoarse bark, like he wasn’t used to mirth. “I eat meat, though.”

I took all this as a confession of some kind, or maybe as an attempt to meet me halfway between his staunch working-class milieu and my thinly-disguised educated liberalism, or whatever it is. “How do you square that?”, I ventured, and noted my heartbeat speed up. I felt nervous to be challenging him like this.

”Square it? I’ll tell you how I square it. Basically, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you have an idea of complicity that says that if you believe something is wrong, like I believe hunting is wrong, then you believe you should avoid it altogether and that if you, say, eat meat while believing that hunting is wrong you are guilty of complicity because you are depending on someone else’s sin, the hunting being the sin in this case. But I believe in something like karma, so that a person who hunts is acting according to his own conscience and is not really sinning if he feels ok about what he’s doing, etcetera. So if I buy and eat meat from a happy hunter, I am not forcing him to do anything bad, I am not complicit in any sin because he is not sinning, because he believes hunting is ok, because that is his karma. So I eat meat, but I don’t feel guilty about it the way I’d feel guilty if I personally pulled the trigger. I just don’t buy the Judeo-Christian concept of complicity, is why I eat meat with no qualms.”

I was a bit taken aback by this explanation, coming from Denny. I had maybe underestimated him, or mis-categorized him as a more or less unreflective brute. The good thing is that the didactic tone of his lecture, even given in that Bronx accent and with its problematic conflation of the Buddhist notion of karma with what I took to be an ethnic Italian Catholic understanding of sin and guilt, somehow gave me permission to ease back into my natural way of talking. I slipped out of my blue-collar guise, and ventured: “So, how do you understand economic ethics? I mean, if everyone acts according to his karma, and those who abhor hunting eat meat, then aren’t we creating a system in which great harm is done that we, the consumers, feel no responsibility for? Aren’t we complicit in a worldwide system of harm, even if we believe that individual people, like your hunter, for example, are blameless?”

“No fuckin way. That’s your educated liberalism or whatever showing. You can’t spend your whole life all stressed out about where everything comes from and how much suffering and shit is involved in everything you buy and consume. I refuse to live my life that way. What? Like I’m supposed to every time I want to buy a fuckin can of tomatoes hold it in my hand a weigh all the harm and suffering involved in getting it to my pantry or my plate or whatever? No fuckin way.”

“But people less enlightened than you do real harm to each other and to the world all the time so they can put food on the table and when we buy their stuff we are aiding and abetting their crimes, or unethical actions, don’t you think?”

“Of course we are, but we don’t need to wreck our lives about that, worrying about everything. That can of tomatoes I bought that paid some small part of, say, some mafia hit in Bayonne or whatever? That doesn’t change the fact that the tomatoes are delicious and nutritious.”

“No, but wouldn’t the world be a better place, especially for poor people, if we bought only from people who practice something like our own values?”

“Sure, but this misses the point, which is that what would really make the world a better place for poor people is if there were fewer of them. I mean six point five billion of us is wrecking the world no matter how much we stress about the route a can of tomatoes took from the third world to our plate.”

“Overpopulation.”

“For sure. Absolutely.”

“Should I even ask what the solution is to overpopulation?” I asked.

That mirthless hacking bark of a laugh again. “No. You better not.”

We finally arrived in Ditchfield, unloaded Sal, and stood in the emergency-room hall. A fastidiously-groomed, unsmiling doctor said he’d run some tests to check for internal injuries. I called Sal’s mother again. She was only minutes away. She must have driven over 100 miles per hour to get there that fast. Handy, the EMT, came up and said we could ride back to Boulder with then in the ambulance, rules and lawyers be damned. I was grateful. It was after 1:00 in the morning, and I was exhausted. Sal’s mother arrived, barely acknowledged me as she ran past, and we left.

This time I sat in the back so the junior EMT could have a more comfortable seat up front. I sat in the side-facing bench with Handy. Anna buckled in on the gurney and soon fell asleep.

I tried to get back into endurance mode. Handy has a reputation for craziness. I barely knew him, and was a bit scared that he’d say something crazy and my natural affability with strangers would rope me into seeing things his way, or appearing to. I hoped he’d go to sleep, but he swung one leg up onto the bench to face me, and started talking right off.

“She’ll probably get released tomorrow. Didn’t look more than bruised to me, but we always need to play it safe and be all conservative and shit and follow the freakin checklist and above all else not use our judgment because that is what this system is designed to do is relegate us the non-lawyers to the role of robot to serve and perpetuate the system, so, me, I just keep my food-hole shut and do my job and hope I never end up taking a ride in this thing on that gurney.” He pulled off his Nascar hat and aggressively scratched his thinning mullet.

I sat there nodding, finding myself agreeing with the content, if not the sort of free-associative tone of Handy’s diatribe.

“Furthermore”, he continued after a couple of quick breaths, “the global socio-economics of this kind of situation are totally beyond the pale in which we have those Chilean miners or what have you or any other third-world sad sack getting what is basically zero medical attention of any kind and eating the same freakin thing every meal until they die young while here we have little suburban missy fall off her bike and get driven by five people in a $100,000-dollar ambulance over 100 miles each way so she can get her ibuprofen and whatever during which we are guzzling like 20 gallons of diesel, which, as old Denny would say is complicit in who knows what kind of damage worldwide.”

“Yeah”, I said, feeling the inevitable tug of wanting to appear agreeable, of wanting to be liked.

After some silence, in which I had taken out my journal to appear to be busy and Handy had fidgeted and scratched and stretched and drummed his fingers, he spoke up again: “Ok, so here’s the scoop: people like me move to a place like Kolob to escape what we, they, perceive as the tiresome and intrusive meddling of the government and neighbors and what have you, to a place that is supposedly free of such things in the middle of nowhere, where you can just mind your business and grow your food and do what you want without all their cameras looking and disapproving all the time. And then they show up wanting their pound of flesh as they say: the IRS, the FBI, the ATF and freak knows what else acronymized agencies of government coercion, not to mention the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints of which I used to be a tithe-paying member. The only way to escape their long arm of regulation is to be a total hermit, preferably in the deepest canyon in Mexico, because believe-you-me they will track you down and make you life a living hell.”

“They are everywhere”, I agreed. This felt like an acceptable and anodyne kind of agreement, one unlikely to get me roped into paranoid delusion.

“You believe so?” he asked, looking at me intensely.

“Well, I mean, they do seem to be able to track you down. I mean, as long as you have an address and pay taxes I guess they know where you are and…”

“I don’t care if you’re homeless and dealing strictly in barter, they own you.” This said with a kind of vehemence and pointedness that I started feeling trapped there in the back of the ambulance.

As it happens, I’ve recently had some unpleasant and surprisingly intrusive dealings with the IRS, and I felt a moment of kinship with Handy. I started nodding.

He continued: “Check this out: so I owned a bookstore in San Jorge, right? I specialized in rare and out-of-print stuff on Mormonism and Utah and the west as it was before the interstates and television, and this didn’t pay so good so I rented the space next door too and rented videos out of there and never threw out anything so we had 15, 20 thousand titles of videos and got listed as like one of the best video stores in the country and this was when San Jorge was, what? maybe 10,000 people? I mean, we were like bigger than any other store between the coasts, more titles, I mean like the entire oeuvre of the French New Wavers, all the great Italians and shit years before the Criterion Collection and what have you, and we were like mail-order filling orders from San Francisco and even New York for titles you just could not find anywhere else. Also, I had another shop with hard-to-find ammo, which I sold to people all over the intermountain because we are a gun-shooting culture, no doubt, and sometimes you cannot walk into Cabela’s or whatever up in Provo, and find, say .257 Roberts in soft point or .17 Hornaday, or .338 Lapua or even good old .222 Hornet for that matter, so I was making money hand over fist while I sat there in my first shop with old moldy Mormoniana which I sold to basically mostly the crowd you’d expect: old clean-cut Mormons who were looking to nourish their faith, or, as it were, confirm their biases, as well as some so-called scholars from BYU, which is not by any stretch a place of actual scholarship unless also madrassas count as universities or what have you. So, there I was running my little businesses when up shows a suit with papers and I am getting summoned, which is a deceptively gentle term for the coercion it really is, to Federal Court in Salt Lake to answer charges, a more accurate word, for what turned out to be tax evasion and running guns and what have you, which was about 90% not at all freakin true. Do you know what happens to a small business when its owner is in court for a month? It goes to shit. And the ATF took all my ammo and stored it in what must have been a swimming pool because when they finally allowed me to collect it a year later it was ruined and all the Lapua was missing, and that shit is like five bucks a round wholesale. I mean, you have to sell like ten shelf-feet of Mormoniana to pay for one case of Lapua wholesale, even if you can find someone in Finland who will sell it direct. Well, when I got out, I was thinking I should sell what remained of my businesses, which I should have said now included two other video stores in the state and one in Vegas, so I was actually raking in the currency, which they will always print more of, so I put everything up for sale and long story short I sold it for what I was asking and retired at the age of 30, but that was later, because when I first got out of federal custody I was home one night and the bishop and the ward clerk or some such come by midweek mind you in ties and coats which was a warning right then and handed my another summons, ecclesiastical this time, to a church court for charges of conduct unbecoming of a Mormon or some such shit, which I refused to attend, and so they excommunicated me in absentia, which means they must have been pretty sure I was guilty of what the feds were not able to prove I was guilty of, because I never had anything to do with weapons, just with ammo, all of which was legal until you load it into 30-round clips and start doing violence. I did not ever sell any assault weapons of any kind, regulated or no. And certainly didn’t cross any state lines to do it. Anyway, the church thought otherwise and excommunicated me, which in Mormonism basically means you are damned unless you express enough contrition to get let back in, which I was not going to do and humiliate myself in front of the church court which was basically made up of guys like me who I used to go boating with and hunting and stuff, so no way was I going in there and shedding the obligatory tears and besides, like I said I didn’t even do what they accused me of, so no way.”

“Wow.”

“Anyway, that barely scratches the surface of my beef against the church and the government. I am basically a cliché, I know: Western uneducated provincial type who mistrusts the government and wants to maintain his ostensible independence and whatever.”

“I was Mormon for a while. Joined back in high school.”

“I thought you was from Boston.” He said this like it’s some sophisticated, highbrow place, which in some ways it is.

“I am. I needed some structure in high school, and the missionaries showed up and baptized me.”

“Sounds pretty freakin passive of you just to get baptized by these Elders like that.”

I chuckled agreeably, while feeling sort of grumpy that he could take these liberties with me in our first conversation.

As we climbed up out of the green May valley above Brickdale, finally heading over the mountain to Kolob, it started snowing. We slowed more and more as deer and elk moved out of the woods and onto the pavement. They seemed mesmerized by the blinking lights. Diesel fumes started wafting into the ambulance, and the tires hissed on the pavement, a sound that always fills me with nausea and dread, for reasons I can’t remember. It took considerable effort to stay engaged with Handy’s near-monologue. I just wanted to lie down in fresh air and sleep.

“You serve a mission?”

“Um, yes, I did. I was in Mexico.”

“Serious? Shit! I had no idea.”

“How ‘bout you?”

“Yup. South side of Chicago and Urbana.” He smiled, apparently at the fond memory. “I loved it. Best two years of my life, as most of us veterans say.” He smiled again. “You?”

“I loved it and hated it. I mean, I felt like I was doing the right thing, and I felt that more clearly than I ever have since, but I was tired and hungry all the time, and bored, honestly, and I missed girls and my buddies back in the states.”

“Bingo.”

We were easing down off the last fold of mountainside, into the valley of Kolob. The air was stale. Denny flipped on the harsh overhead lights. I felt sallow and greasy and my back spasms were starting. Handy yelled up to Denny: “Hey, Denzel, man! I got a new best friend and compadre back here!”

Denny yelled back: “He seemed pretty normal to me. What criminal secrets do you two have in common?”

“Mormonism!”

“No shit?”

“No shit!”

We pulled into the town garage. Anna and I stumbled out. It was freezing. I thanked everyone for their help. We felt a kind of solidarity after being forced together for all these hours around an unfortunate event. Denny gave us a ride home, in his ancient truck full of cans of paint stripper and inscrutable tools. Anna and I made French toast and she went up to bed. I went out and sat in the yard with a glass of wine for a while, looking at the stars. The next morning Sal called Anna, and reported a stiff neck and some bruises, but nothing too bad. We took it easy that day.