The Cards

On the other side of the bar, Buff wiped oily hands along his thighs. Pointmaster took a sly pick at his left nostril.

"Want another?" Buff asked.

"Nah, let’s go," Pointmaster answered.

"Well shit I only had two beers, and I need a third."

So Buff had his third and then they sallied forth under a jet-black sky; not a contrail in sight, but the Milky Way sure was pretty way back there behind everything else. They fired up the car and headed up Real Road, belching steam behind them.

***

"But Swiv!" Lester cried, "I mean, I’m me!"

"Well yeah, that’s plain to see, except, ya see, ya fergot the SEAM, it seems."

Lester fingered a Levi rivet. "SEAM? What the hell you talking about?"

Swivelhips shuffled backwards in mock surprise. "Ya mean ya don’t know about SEAMs? Ya been out on the range a-ridin them heifers so long, ya don’t know about SEAMs!" He pulled a battered wallet from his hip pocket, removed a greasy old card, and handed it to Lester: "Here, pardner. Read this. Then you’ll understand."

THE CARD SAID:

would i.e., However logical may be may be beand another to know what one should be doing,
in a general way, to think think their
in fact Logic is "being logical"
in its own terminology, which unfortunately
in its own terminology, which unfortunately

Lester started muttering under his breath.

"Whatcha thank?" Swivelhips asked.

"Shit!"

"Shee-ut?"

"Shit! What’s this crap got to do with SEAMs? I mean this is a pretty stupid arguments in the first place, anyhow, you know."

"Now just ya wait a gol-branged minute before ya go around talkin bout stupid, buddy!"

Just at that moment Pointmaster and Buff came chugging up Swivelhips’ driveway and stopped next to the front porch, safety valve hissing.

Swivelhips shoved the card into his wallet and walked to the door. He leaned out and yelled, "Mah mama had a old pressure cooker that used ta cut farts exactly like that car of yours, boys!"

Pointmaster grabbed the railing and swung himself onto the porch. "Nothing like the ones your mama used to cut, eh Swiv?

Swivelhips stepped out to the edge of the porch and admired the Milky Way briefly.

Pointmaster released a belch into his fist.

"Where ya boys been?" Swivelhips asked.

"To Sally’s. Got a nightcap and a handful of hair in the bargain."

Swivelhips’ ears picked up. "Hair? Ya ain’t talking bout a priori interfaces now, are ye?"

"Sure am, by Brangus!"

"Well don’t that jus beat all! Me an ole Lester here jus been talkin bout SEAMs, which is pretty much the same thang, don’t ya reckon?"

"Shit," Lester put in.

Pointmaster yawned and stretched, popping his vertebrae in sequence. "You boys TRANS’d tonight yet?"

Just then Buff cut loose with his 30-30, tracer ammo stitching the hillside with sparks.

After the echoes died away, Swivelhips straightened from his crouch, replaced his pistol in his holster, and yelled out into the darkness, "Buff! Ya ought ta give a lil warnin fore ya do that!"

Turning back to Pointmaster he asked, "How long’s he been TRANS’d tonight, anyhow?"

"Not too long. I think he TRANS’d over at Sally’s – it was the hair done it."

"Hair," Lester muttered.

Pointmaster glanced over. "Well what the hell’s wrong with you, Lester?"

"Well shit, I just came over for a friendly drink with Swiv, but all he wants to do is argue and then he shows me this stupid old card like it’s supposed to mean something, and I just got disgusted with his whole attitude, is all."

Right on cue, Swivelhips showed Pointmaster the card.

Pointmaster glanced at the card and yelled over the porch rail to Buff, "Buff! Swiv’s got one of those cards just like you got!"

Buff reached the porch in a flat frenzy. "What!"

Pointmaster handed the card to Buff, who read his way down the card, eyebrows twitching.

"Yeah, sure is! Where’d you get it, Swiv?"

"Git it? I always had it. Mah daddy give it ta me when he was fixin ta die, said, ‘Son, take this card, cherish it and live by it, and the sun will see ya through yer darkest noon’ or somethin like that, he was fevered there at the end and didn’t speak too plain."

"Did you ever see my card?"

"How the hell’d you ever git one?"

"I got it off a rustler once, the biggest jangliest ol rustler you ever did see, loaded down with silver and turquoise so he couldn’t hardly move, hell I sweat he even had a turquoise inlayed tooth! I got my card off that rustler and carried it in my wallet ever since."

"Lemme see it!"

So Buff dug out his wallet and showed Swivelhips the card.

THE CARD SAID:

in fact Logic is "being logical"
in its own terminology which unfortunately
would i.e., However logical may be may be
in a general way, to think to think
and another to know what one should be doing

"Shore nuff!" Swivelhips guffed. "Almost says the same thang! Same type of printin, too!" He held out the card to Lester. "Wanna see, ole buddy?"

"Shit," Lester said, and went home.

The Saltcedar Song

1. THE SECRET LIFE OF SALTCEDAR SAM

Saltcedar Sam doesn’t usually say too much. It ain’t his style. But sometimes he gets real drunk and then he’s got no choice. One night Sam and I were getting drunk together at St. Elmo’s Bar in Bisbee, Arizona when those words of his started slipping out, one after the other, like they were finally sneaking out of prison after a long sentence.

Seems he went out one evening at twilight to find the saltcedar trees SINGING to themselves.

“Wow, Sam, very strange, Sam, I mean, whattaya mean?” Or something like that — I was heavy with Coors myself at that point and couldn’t hardly understand nothing except that there were some mighty strange vibrations from the barperson sitting cattycorner over there behind the vermouth bottles, doing her knitting, pretending not to listen.

Sam wiped a fleck of foam off his week-old whiskers. “Yeah, in HARMONY, you know? The big one over here, the little one over there, and a whole damn chorus in the background, just singin’ their hearts out!”

The barperson fidgeted slightly.

I ordered another beer and excused myself. “I’ll be back in a minute, Sam.”

Sam just sat there.

When I returned to my barstool, Sam was still there, staring at the ashtray, but the barperson was gone. I had completely forgotten about the saltcedar song.

The next morning I could have kicked myself in the seat of my pants for not asking more questions. What a missed opportunity! I mean, at the very least I could have asked him if the lyrics were any good.



2. CREOSOTE AND FRIENDS

The hills and mesas around Dos Garcias, New Mexico are covered with olive-drab creosote bushes. They stand about 4 feet tall and are uniformly-spaced about 10 feet apart. They don’t so much sing as hum. This humming keeps other plants away, including other creosote bushes, which is why they’re spaced uniformly about 10 feet apart. (Actually, the bushes aren’t spaced all that evenly. This is because there are beat frequencies in the humming vibration, and other plants can grow in the nodes where the frequencies cancel each other out.)

Creosote forms a counterpoint to the mesquite, which prefers moister ground and gives a shrill shriek during blooming season, much like the sound of a frightened honeybee caught between a window and a screen. But usually the mesquite stays pretty quiet.

The grand old cottonwoods along the river, some of which stand 100 feet high, sing with deep bass notes, like pipe organs. Most of the cottonwoods are sapped by yellow-green clots of mistletoe. Many an ancient tree is so strangled by this parasite that it simply gives up and dies. So does its mantle of mistletoe, but no matter — that’s what seeds are for. The mistletoe doesn’t really sing. Instead, it sort of clatters like gray bones rubbing together.

You can stand on Garcias Peak and insert yourself into simultaneous time and see forests of cottonwood dying to mistletoe and springing up again and great tides of saltcedar surging up from the Gulf of Mexico and clumps of tarbush marching across the hills, always in the direction of the prevailing winds. The Juniper Belt oscillates up and down the north slopes in time to the Ice Ages. And always the grass, the ever-present grass, rippling like it’s on fire in a high wind.



3. A FURTHER EXPLANATION

Saltcedar trees sing softly to Cygnus, home to Milky Way star clouds which are 10,000 light years away and beckon us on, gravitationally speaking.

The trees start singing as soon as Cygnus clears the eastern horizon, and their chorus slowly swells until Cygnus tops the sky overhead. Then their song starts to fade. By the time Cygnus finally sets, everything’s quiet except for the gurgling of the river as it eddies around the snags, and the occasional short strangled screams of rabbits being picked to pieces by Great Horned Owls.

The coyote willows, on the other hand, sing only on the night of summer solstice, when they bend their tops together and howl quietly to each other.

Lone Jones the Water Rustler and His Daughter Lucy

Drawing by Judith Puthey

New Mexico is a desert land. Water is scarce. Scarcity means relative power to whoever gets it, so the ones who got it make sure they continue to get it. This means that every drop in the Rio Ancho is apportioned by historical precedent and force of law.

But there’s always a few who want more than their share. Lone Jones was one. He was a water rustler.

The Rio Ancho has ditchriders who ride up and down the ditches opening and closing sluice gates and generally making sure that everybody gets the share of water they paid for.

So Lone Jones used to irrigate at night by the furtive light of a moon which didn’t much care one way or the other about the water he stole, since half the moon is always looking the other way, after all. Old Lone always wore black so he’d blend in better.

Sometimes he’d send his daughter Lucy downstream to waylay the ditchrider while he stole a big old slug of water, sometimes several acre-feet or more, so he could irrigate hundreds of pecan trees, each of which would yield 100 pounds of pecans in the fall... not a bad trade at all, and Lucy didn’t mind one little bit. In fact, it was her idea to begin with — one evening she announced, “I’m going down to talk to Mr. Gomez while you steal you a big old slug of water, papa,” and every dark of the moon since then, she maintained her end of the family tradition.

Meanwhile, back at the orchard, Lone and his shovel would be working overtime. Building dikes and breaking dikes. Flooding thirsty dirt by sense of touch.

Lone Jones had it all figured out. Even if the ditchrider could escape from Lucy, all he’d see would be a black reflection in midnight ripples. And there was nothing to hear—just the sound of a spade slipping against adobe mud and the quiet slapping of stolen water against the ditch bank.

Which was a good thing. Lone knew the score, alright: If they caught him, he’d forfeit his irrigation rights for life, not to mention his heirs. But he knew the score, alright: Five more years of irrigating in the dark and he could retire to Santa Fe as a gentleman.

Of course his ace in the hole was Lucy. Good old Lucy. They should write a story about her some day.



The Drowning of Sundew (Mama Baca’s Little Daughter)

One afternoon Mama Baca’s little daughter fell into the Rio Ancho and was swept clean away. The boys formed a posse and probed the river with poles, but they couldn’t find anything. (Her last breath had risen alone.) For days afterwards you could hear Mona and Kid padding up and down the river path at twilight, calling softly. But Sundew never answered.

A week later, Lone Jones found Sundew’s bloated little body caught in the sluice gate of his irrigation ditch, so he trucked her up to Dos Garcias for a good simple burial into the Earth with sprinkled offerings.

The next spring Papa Baca planted a pecan tree over her grave as a memorial. "She always liked pecans," he said.

Every fall, Mama Baca would go up there and pick the nuts from the tree for a pecan pie to remember Sundew by. She always left a few pecans on the grave.

Mrs. Garcia's Surprise

drawing by Karen Bailey

Mrs. Garcia was a nice old lady. She was the baker for the little town of Dos Garcias, New Mexico. Sometimes she would bake more pretzels and pies than Dos Garcias could buy, so she’d have to eat them herself. Needless to say, her body was covered with rolls of bakery fat, and she had big tits that hung down like jello watermelons.

She had a big horno in her backyard—a large beehive-shaped oven made of adobe dirt. She’d fire up that mother every Tuesday morning, and every Tuesday afternoon, people would saunter over “to see Mrs. Garcia” and buy some baked goods. They’d gather around the oven and admire the aroma while she removed piles of pies, cookies, soda crackers, and rich loaves of whole-wheat bread with crackly butter crust.

But Mrs. Garcia was most famous for her surprise rolls. Every roll had a surprise in the center. During cherry season, you might find a cherry inside, or maybe a cherry pit. Come fall, maybe you’d find a pecan... shelled or unshelled, depending on her whim. Other rolls might contain pebbles or pennies or snail shells or tiny bones. You could never tell what Mrs. Garcia might put inside.

It got to be the custom that people who got married or decided to live together would buy one of Mrs. Garcia’s rolls and split it open to see what it had inside — like Chinese fortune cookies but more cryptic.

Once Buff bit into a roll that had a rimfire cartridge inside. “It’s a wonder it didn’t go off in the oven!” he said.



The Toad Mind

One evening, towards the end of Rainy Season, Rimfire Kid borrowed Pointmaster’s steam car and drove the 17 miles up Real Road to Lost Runt Canyon. He knew that there was a pool of water about a mile up the canyon, and that during the summer after heavy rains this pool was lined with spadefoot toads, who puffed out their throats like miniature balloons and chorused out their mating song. Kid wanted to be with the toads awhile.

There was lightning in the east and an occasional spatter of rain on the windshield as Kid fired up the car and headed up the highway, tires hissing on the wet pavement. It was almost like the old song:

My bags are packed at last.

My tank is full of gas.

It’s 4 a.m., I’m gonna drive real fast.

I’ll be long gone by dawn.

Graffiti Cliffs they cut like knives across the Milky Way.

The luminous sky is reflected in the bumper of my Chevrolet.

And I’m the only man alive

On Highway 85.

“What is a shev-ro-lay, anyway?” Kid wondered. He pulled over at the mouth of the canyon and released the pressure. Hiss of escaping steam, and then silence.

Kid started walking up the canyon in the darkness. The wet sand was firm under his feet and made walking easy. Desertwillow flowers perfumed the air. A lightning flash behind his back strobed against the canyon walls. Through the Keyhole, along the Narrows, and as he passed Black Knob he could first hear the toads singing far up the canyon.

Three deeps breaths and silence. Three deep breaths and silence. Yes.

The toad song got louder as he neared the pond. A couple hundred toads ringed the inch-deep water along the edge, singing their high-pitched ri-i-i-i-kkk. Several dozen on one side would cut loose simultaneously, and then a bunch on the other side would answer. Sometimes they’d all sing at once.

Kid circled halfway around the pond, found a comfortable spot and settled down. The toad mind was wet and warm and slow. A gibbous moon rose behind the hills and threw its track across the water.

The Adventures of Little Right Livelihood

One fine autumn day, Little Right Livelihood came flouncing down the road, petticoats crackling crisply along her thighs and hair billowing behind her like fiberglass insulation in the cool desert breeze.

She topped a rise and who did she see lounging against a saguaro stump? None other than her old arch enemy, Big Bad Wolf!

“Hiya baby,” he drawled, picking his teeth with a laminated credit card.

“You beast!” sputtered Little Right Livelihood. “I warned you once already! I said if I ever laid eyes on you again I’d smear your depraved carcass down Route 666 clear to Safford and back! Now get the hell outta here before I do something drastic!”

“Aw, c’mon baby, it’s not like that, I mean...”

“Not like that you mean!” Little Right Livelihood was getting pissed. Laser beams shot through her half-lidded eyes and raised little dust tracks along her scan lines. All the insect noises stopped and ants dropped their burdens and scurried underground. Up the road a dark cloud began to form, muttering to itself as it gathered air. She removed her Buster Brown shoes for better traction and started a little shuffle dance, causing small sections of the horizon arc to separate and disappear.

But Big Bad Wolf wasn’t scared one little bit. After all, he was one big bad mufucker and all he needed to do was put on his clogging shoes (which didn’t take long) and then he stood there facing Little Right Livelihood with his legs planted slightly apart, hands on hips, tail twitching behind him. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff!” he cried.

“Oh no you won’t!” cried Little Right Livelihood, reaching into her stash bag. She removed a jar and deftly flicked it open, releasing billions of special spores which floated over and popped moistly onto his skin like tiny soap bubbles.

Big Bad Wolf looked down at himself with silent horror. “Look at what you went and blew it for me!” he slobbered through toothless fangs as fur turned to fleece.

Soon the lamb was grazing peacefully alongside the other lambs, but Little Right Livelihood didn’t even notice, since she was busy rubbing the rust specks off her flute and shining it until it sparkled.

The Story of the Galactic Saint

Drawing by Judith Putney

Pointmaster liked to tell stories on winter evenings. He’d throw a couple of saltcedar logs into his rusty old wood heater, and then he’d lean back in his chair and start talking. (Rimfire Kid did the listening.)

There used to be a monastery up Buckle Bar Canyon, you know, about the time of the Third Mexican War, about a hundred years after the saltcedars came back. There was a bunch of monks up there in the canyon; they called themselves the Buckle Bar Boys. Actually they had about a 50-50 split between the sexes, but they called themselves the Buckle Bar Boys sort of as a private joke.

They had it fixed up pretty nice back up in there, sort of their own private Garden of Eden—they had weeping willows, adobe courtyards, hanging vines, pecan orchards, flower gardens, vineyards, they even had their irrigation system set up in a series of little waterfalls so they’d have a nice place to meditate during the cool of the evening. They even tuned those waterfalls with rocks so they’d gurgle in harmony with the crying of the mourning doves.

There was this local boy named David who’d always felt a call to be a monk, so when he was about 16 years old he told his father, “I’m going to join the Buckle Bar Boys, Dad.” His old man said, “Ask your mother,” so David asked her and she said, “Sure, son.” They tried to keep life uncomplicated in those days, you see.

So David packed his toothbrush and walked on over there—he only lived a couple of miles away, and had known all the monks for years anyhow. His favorite monk was an old geezer named Jed.

Now Jed was a funny old guy—he didn’t say much, and he spent all his time up on the hilltop watching the stars. He slept during the day and stayed awake all night. Jed had a job, of course. The Buckle Bar Boys had a pragmatic philosophy, since they remembered the Second Mexican War and the Great Chihuahua Famine, so they didn’t hold to no pussyfoot pie-in-the-sky routine.

So every Buckle Bar Boy had a job. Jed’s job was to watch the goats at night—a good job for a stargazer to have. They had a couple hundred goats, and they always locked them in a pen at night, but sometimes they had trouble with coyotes, especially during kidding season—those coyotes would worm their way right through the fence while everybody was asleep and kill them a kid or two. Well, the monks figured out that since Jed was going to stay up all night anyhow, then why not fix him up a spot on the little hill right next to the goat pen so he could scare off the coyotes when they got bothersome?

And that’s what they did—smoothed off a spot on the hilltop, built a little rock shelter to shield him from the wind and rain, they even built him a reclining chair so he could look straight up into the sky without getting a crick in his neck.

Now this boy David had been visiting Jed at night for years, learning the sky, learning the tricks of the trade, so to speak. In fact that’s why David decided to join the Buckle Bar Boys in the first place, because old Jed finally said to him one night, “Well, you’re 16 years old now, Dave, time to start full-time work if you’re serious.” David was serious, of course, so he joined.

Watchers of the Sky, that’s what they were, only these guys were no ordinary stargazers. For one, they spent every clear night out there watching the sky, a full-time job. They got to know the sky even better than the old-time Arabic shepherds—they knew every constellation, every kink in the Milky Way, almost every star by name, they knew it all. They even followed Uranus as it moved through the stars, even though it’s barely visible to the naked eye and takes 165 years to travel around the Sun. They knew it all. They even discovered a meteor shower that sends fireballs into the dawn—it was so close to the Sun that nobody had ever noticed it before. It took David several years of full-time study to learn the sky as well as Jed did.

After David had learned the sky real well, old Jed started in on the complicated stuff. He’d ask questions like, “Where’s Galactic Center now, David?” And even though it was 4 in the afternoon and the Galactic Center was below the horizon, David would point to the exact spot. It was as if the Earth had become transparent to his mind.

And then David started to experience space—he’d go out and feel the space surrounding the Earth, he’d feel the space between here and the Moon, between the Sun and the stars, maybe between the galaxies themselves, hell I don’t know.

There was a lot of stuff to learn, all right, since the Earth is constantly spinning like a marble and falling around the Sun at the same time. Everything’s always changing. You can see Orion rising in August right at dawn, and six months later you can see Orion rising in February after sunset, and you might say, “Yep, there’s Orion rising, all right.” But in fact everything is different. In August when you see Orion rising, the Earth is traveling upward around the Sun, and in February the Earth is falling downward, like an elevator. Orion looks the same, the mountains look the same, but everything else is backwards. And I’ll bet David had a devil of a time making sense of all this and getting his experience-patterns straightened out. But he was working full-time at it, after all, and Jed was helping him, so it probably didn’t take him more than five years or so.

David was starting to break free from his Earth-based reference system. Earth is our natural base, after all—we just naturally grow up that way. Old Jed could never quite break free, but he always figured it was because he hadn’t started young enough. David had started young, and he was making it.

Over the years he gradually learned all Jed had to offer. He experienced the seasons. What do the seasons mean to you? Mesquite blossoms in the spring? Dead leaves in the fall? What about the actual relationship between the Earth and the Sun? Do you have a little diagram of Earth’s orbit in your mind? North Pole points towards the Sun in summer, so it’s warm? What about going out on the hill and directly experiencing that stuff? Don’t look at me that way, Kid! Hell I’ve been trying half my life and feel sort of like old Jed—I just can’t quite seem to do it, except every now and then.

So night after night, David would sit on the hilltop, space would fill his mind, or maybe his mind would fill space, and he’d experience the North Pole gradually swinging into the sunlight as summer approached, stuff like that. Heady stuff. He also had some sort of relationship with the Galactic Center. I don’t know too much about it. All I know is that he ended up with quite some reputation.

He was I think about 28 years old when he caught the Divine Marshmallow. It was midsummer, about the middle of July, and the Buckle Bar Boys were celebrating Rainfire Dance, thanking the Matrix for the cool moistness and all that free irrigation water from the sky. Rainfire Dance was their favorite ceremony—they’d build bonfires and stay up all night, dancing and drumming, singing praises to the Matrix, eating sweet corn and catfish, visiting with the farmers who gathered from miles around, generally having a good old time.

I guess David’s cycles were all peaking out at once that night. Though of course anyone would feel good during Rainfire season.

What was probably most important was that he had just met Barbara the night before. She was in her early twenties, and was down from Santa Fe with her father. I guess it was quite a moosie-mother zap for him, you know, looking over at himself looking back at herself looking back at him looking back at her looking at himself... my tongue gets tangled there after awhile but I bet it reminds you of that night in Tucson you told me about, don’t it, Kid?

So anyway he was feeling pretty good. Walking on air. Radiating ripples. That evening he felt an urge like he was supposed to commune with the Galaxy so he carried his favorite cushion to a niche in a cliff that would swing him past the Milky Way around midnight. The niche was sort of like a focal-plane shutter—it would expose him to the Galaxy for about half an hour, and then carry him past into emptier regions. No sense overdoing it, after all.

He held Barbara’s hand for a couple of hours that evening, and then, about eleven o’clock, he headed up for his crack, settled on his cushion, and started looking at the sky. He was squirting those vibrations just like a 220-volt line.

Finally the edge of the Milky Way peeked around the edge of his niche, and in about 15 minutes the entire Galaxy was centered right over him.

There used to be this old song:

Somebody touched me

In the dark

Last night,

and I guess that’s what happened to David, because the next morning, old Jed went up there and found David sitting on his cushion in the niche, staring silently outward into the clear blue sky.

David never said another word after that. There was no need to. He just tended his grapes during the cool of the evening before going up to his hilltop, where he’d spend the night keeping track of the heavens. And he was one ace of a grape grower, let me tell you! Those vines responded to his touch like you wouldn’t hardly believe—Sultanas as big as plums, seedless Muscats, he even grew a wild grape that was sweet as honey.

Word got around, of course, it always does, and before long the local people started bringing him presents, they even brought him their babies to be blessed, because they thought David brought them good luck. And maybe he did.

Once they brought this little crippled girl up to him. He took her into his niche that night, and the next morning she came skipping down that mountain like she’d been jumping rope all her life.

David died fairly young, when he was about 40, I think, and they buried him on top of the hill there next to the goat pen. There used to be a shrine to him up there for many years, but when I was a young man I went up there once and didn’t find anything unusual... it just looked like an ordinary old hill to me, covered with Mormon Tea and Grama Grass.

So what’re you grinning about now, Kid?



Tall Tales

These stories have already been posted on the New Earth Times blog, and are available in the New Earth Times archives.  I thought they deserved a blog of their own.  I'll be posting a new one every now and then.