7 – Just like Jesse James
Colorado? Was he insane? If there was any
place he didn't want to be was here, huddled under the shadows of a 50-foot
tall Big Boy statue in the parking lot of a rest area off route 25. The hubbub of
Trinidad traffic off and on the highway worse than downtown Denver-- rednecks
stomping the dust from the boots like so many cowboys, each pick-up truck
complete with a shotgun or two. Visions of Easy Rider floated uneasily into
Mike's head. All Coors beer and drunken laughter for as far as he could see.
Still, when the car had pulled over to pick
him and Marie up in Nebraska, he hadn't argued. Colorado? Hell, yeah! Sounds
fine! He hadn't thought beyond the long fields of the farm behind him and the
movement of cops through the planted stalks. Pot stalks. More rows of pot than
he'd ever dreamed of. Even in Mexico during his over-the-boarder runs had never
seemed so pretty. Or so dangerous.
Never
saw so many cops. Local. State. Federal. Like some sort of convention which
just happened to have picked his farm.
"Mikey?" Marie said, snuggling
tighter into his side. "Are you all right?"
He looked at her big glowing eyes and felt a
bit guilty. Even with the makeup and bright red hair, she looked young. Like a
little girl dressing up in her mother's clothing. And she was still peeved at
him for their quick retreat, angry over leaving most of her possessions behind,
her new clothing, her precious records—things from her fancy house in Detroit
which made life on the road bearable. Without them, she was just another silly
hippie chick floating from place to place.
Like he could have gone back for them, eh?
Please, officer! Just let me get my
girlfriend's things!
Handcuffs and a kick in the pants are what he
would have got, and a long, long time in a Federal jail. Not just for the pot,
but for the string of other things they would have found out once his finger
prints got ran.
Horrible things! Things he still didn't
believe himself, as if some other person had done them. Bank Bombings in
Detroit. Heroin deals in New York. Bitter, angry things he'd called revenge,
though now the need for such answers seemed foolish and petty. He was tired of
being angry. Tired of wanting to change the world. Tired of passing judgement
on people and places as if he was an Old Testament god, smiting down sinners.
"I'm scared," he said, shifting a
little, feeling her soft bra-less breasts shifting with him, drawing up the
urge in him. Here?
He
was crazy! But then, she always struck him that way, the smell and touch of her
like a drug he couldn't kick.
She didn't understand anything about their
running. About his need to get away. For her it was all a game, a delightful
bit of history relived with him as Jesse James.
Hadn't she said as much when he met her in
Detroit, a fifteen year old little rich kid slumming among the hippies, looking
him up and down from across the room, seeing something in him-- perhaps his face
from a warrant poster-- someone having told her some of the details of his
life, his run from the south where he'd escaped federal prosecution. The exact
details were worse. But she never asked for them.
Just like Jesse James, she'd said. Right?
Not exactly. But then it was what the Weather
Underground people had thought, bringing him up to show him off as if he was
Abbie Hoffman. A celebrity. A face through which to solicit contributions.
"My family hunted Jesse James, you
know," she'd said.
"What?" He hadn't understood. Too
stoned. Too startled by the jet- set bullshit of the new revolution.
He was cold and hated it. Hated stepping into
snow, a price he paid for growing up in the arid southwest, where one didn't
see snow except on the top of mountains and didn't understand cold except as
the brittle dessert nights and sudden gush of flood water during the Spring
time down pourings of rain.
"My father's a Tinkerton," she said,
obviously expecting him to know who or what a Tinkerton was. And he did.
"You mean as in the detective
agency?" he moaned, the pot-haze evaporating as he stared around the party
half expecting hired-cops to leap out of its shadows.
"Yes," she said with a smile that
pinned him against the wall, eyes swallowing him whole-- the haze of the
seduction more acute than any drug he could have taken. He seemed to wake up
with her naked body beside his, still contained. Vibrating. And scared. Only a
crazy man tempted fate, his grandfather said.
"I got to go," he said struggling
out from under the covers, waiting for the doors to kick in.
"No!" she said, only the way a
little rich girl could, as if there was no way for anyone to refuse her, as if
no one had a right to withhold from her anything she wanted.
"But I have to go,' Mike argued. "I
don't belong here."
"Then take me with you."
"With me?" he said in disbelief.
"But I'm going on the road."
"I know. Just like Jesse James."
And now, a thousand miles and a year later,
she was still with him and still as much in love with his image-- though now it
shimmered only in her eyes while it sagged around him.
"Scared?" she said. "Don't be
silly. What's there to be scared about?"
Broken bones. Jail cells. Tinkertons
underfoot.
"We've got to get out of here," he
said, ignoring her ignorance.
She
just didn't remember how people had killed Jesse James.
"Maybe we can ask somebody for a
ride," Marie suggested, glancing out over the sea of pickups and tourist
trailers, as if she would pick just anyone out of the crowd. Despite her
bloodline, she missed the point of being hunted-- a social creature to whom no
one was inaccessible. Like the sheriff's deputy in Wyoming where Mike's tourists
had stopped for a bite eat. She, ranting on to the bulging-bellied man as if
being pursued through the fields of a farm had been no more significant than a
flat tire or broken nail.
Fortunately
for them, the deputy had thought her joking.
Farm of pot! Ha! Ha!, the man said, picking
his teeth with the corner of a match book as he burped and stared at the Hawaiian-shirted
tourists, presuming Mike and Marie their children. Later, when the APB came in,
his face would redden-- embarrassed enough maybe to keep his fat trap shut. But
Mike doubted it.
And now, he didn't dare let her loose on any
of the rednecks who would be quicker to pick up on details such as those. This
was farther south, near where pot was less a rumor than a reality.
Drugs
went north and south here along route 25. People got busted.
But he had to ask someone! Another tourist,
maybe?
Likely as not they were heading west here, not
south, like the people who'd let them off, deep into mountain country to stare
at empty gold mines or photograph staged Indian dances.
Drunken, dusty, meaningless dances!
He closed his eyes-- his grandfather's
wrinkled face floating in the midst of such a scene, phony tee-pees and tourist
cameras, and women at his feet weaving baskets.
Something in his stomach retched, part of his
hatred for Indian country, part of the insane mixture of blood which pulled him
constantly back towards the reservation. Like the call of Coyote.
Where were the Goddamn hippies anyway-- the
hip community upon which he'd always been able to rely? Didn't anybody with
long hair travel this far south? Or was Colorado a dead zone, a forbidden planet
avoided by any but the most unhip?
"I'm
cold, Mikey," Marie announced, her whole frame shivering against him. Her
clothing was little suited for mountain country-- denim jacket and skirt and
high white boots.
"I have a spare shirt," he said, digging
through his bag and producing the mud-caked logger shirt he'd been wearing when
the cops came, covered with pot resin and the smell of mildew.
"You want me to wear that?" she
asked in disgust.
"You said you were cold."
"I want a ride, Mikey. Not some filthy
old shirt. Maybe we can go inside and get some coffee."
"I'll find a ride," he mumbled,
glancing only once at the building and the windows filled with cowboys, hunters
and early tourists.
Though
the last time he'd eaten had been the Wyoming cafe. That seemed like days ago.
"Wait here."
He rose out of the shadow and walked across
the gravel to the rim of the parking lot. Which car?
He heard the putting before he saw anything,
the unmistakable over-worked sound of a Volkswagen engine crawling in the long-curved
off-ramp from the highway.
A Volkswagen? In God's Country?
But there it was, a dented red, white and blue
hippie van, swaying out of the darkness as if in answer to unspoken chant, the
battered gold letters of LOVE still visible on its side.
"Marie!" he called. "Get out
here. I think our ride has arrived."
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