Chapter Six
They made Colorado Springs by dawn.
The dark splotch of mountains grew
into a wall on the west, tipped in white like jagged teeth, a massive black
hand that had held back the advancement of pioneers, determined to seize the
land as their own, unaware of the curse that lay beyond it, a last warning
against the theft of Native American lands before they tumbled over the other
side into the dessert and the death awaiting them on the open lands beyond.
But lust for gold motivated them
more than fear of dying, and eventually, many survived the trek along the
traditional trails that led to California and Oregon.
Not all ached for riches. Many
sought a better life than they could find in the dirty gutters of eastern
cities, dreaming of a freer less crowded life, uncaring or perhaps unaware that
others had a previous claim on the lands they sought to settle in.
Lance, who sat in the passenger
seat as Dan drove, felt the chill air through the glass, feeling very much how
those early settlers must have as he glanced out over the carpet of green aspen
and blue spruce along the roadside, so startling different from the heated
jungle that haunted his dreams.
Although towns even cities existed
in the vast panorama of what he saw, they seemed insignificant, specks of dust
in a universe far too overwhelming for mortal man. Back east in New York, and
even in the far West of LA, hippies pretended to seek the simple life, adopting
rituals of natives and others, without real understanding of how much this
space, this vastness influences the original. They might have as easily been
changing clothing, so superficial was what they did.
Even Lance could not fully
comprehend, feeling like an outsider, too citified to even play the part of
cowboy, let alone the deeper and more meaningful culture of those who had
settled these places first.
Dan, smoking and coughing as he
drove, looked more the part than Lance did, his floppy cowboy hat hiding half
his face, the other half shrouded in smoke, bits of his thick moustache poking
out.
What did it take to survive here,
Lance wondered. How could a man raised with twice a week street sweeping hope
to understand the primitive mindset it took to survive in place such as this?
Does a man need to think like a
wolf or coyote, to become a vicious as the world around him, the necessity of
killing to satisfy this blood lust all humans had, the murderous intent that
comes from that small part of every man’s brain, from the cave, from instinct.
Two men had already died as a
result of Dan’s mountainside confrontation, the beginning of a new holocaust
perhaps like Vietnam, where dying men had cried for their mothers even as Lance
had tried to comfort them, or for those Gods of elsewhere who had abandoned
them in that heated hell.
The Navajo claim gods spread smoke
over the earth from which the first man sprang, carrying with him out of the
smoke his robes and other previous things, the white and yellow corn, the
various animals, the growing things, and out of this same smoke, the first
woman came, and planted the corn to feed their people. Out of the smoke, they
claim, came life, the first people, but it was not the same smoke Lance saw and
breathed, the smoke of bombs and machine guns, the fires of hell inflicted, the
spreading of flame that devoured not created, leaving men to call their mothers
and curse their gods.
The breeze through the
bullet-cracked window on the driver’s side made Dan’s floppy hat flutter,
revealing a bit more of Dan’s hard face.
Was he thinking of their death,
too?
Dan claimed he had not killed those
men back in Denver, but he had, Lance thought, as if he had pulled a trigger
the way countless grunts had in rice paddies, or in villages of suspected Cong
where media gave names like Mitchell, Torres, Medina and
Calley international fame.
In LA and elsewhere, hippies joined
radicals enraged over those things that had happened in My Lai, protesting,
too, the bombing in Cambodia, few knowing the even more outrageous atrocities
inflicted on those people by the CIA.
Lance could not fathom it. The Nazis
murdered women and children, not American boys, an illusion quickly debunked by
the blood-soaked landscape through which they now traveled, slaughtered natives
for every mile of highway, and every inch of settlement, the spirits of which
Lance could almost feel hovering over them.
Some of their blood and much of the
blood from his duty overseas stained his fingers as much as the deaths in
Denver did Dan’s
While Lance had kept his word to
save lives rather than take them, he had come home from the war changed,
feeling as if America had deserted him.
He had also returned to his family
house without a job or clear vision of what to do with his life, and ended up
on the streets of Paterson, where he hooked up a tough street urchin named
“Puck,” someone he had known growing up and largely managed to avoid.
The son of a mean drunk for a
father and a money hungry prostitute for a mother, Punk was raised on the
street, but mean as his father without the excuse of alcohol.
He liked to hurt things, and as a
kid, Lance had witnessed more than one atrocity, although the one with the baby
birds stuck in his mind the most, not because it was any more vicious than the
others, but because it had brought out something in Lance that Lance had not
previously realized he had inside him.
They were in a park off Carroll
Street when Puck showed him the nest full of baby birds.
“What are you going to do with them?'' Lance
asked.
“Kill them -- Slowly.''
“Why?''
“Because they're going to die
anyway. The mother bird won't take them
back now that they have my smell on them.''
And he did hurt them. Each in a different and more excruciating way,
each act stirring Lance until Puck came to the last one.
Lance landed on Puck’s chest,
beating him, at his face until cops pulled him off, a fire so hot in his chest
it singed him, as if it was someone else, some strange beast lurking inside,
choosing that moment to leap out.
Puck didn’t matter. There was
nobody else to blame but himself.
His fists covered with blood, his
and his victim, as the whole of him shook. He could have, would have beaten
Puck to death, something he thought as he sat in the back of the squad car
watching the ambulance taking Puck away to St. Joe’s.
He shook for days, for weeks,
maybe, longer, unable to put the evil genie back in the bottle. He knew where
it lurked and knew that it would explode out of him again and again if he could
not find some way to contain it other than good intentions.
The social worker at school could
not help him, nor the priest he confessed to, he was both Abel and Cain, so
deeply angry at the everything, especially himself.
He openly blamed Puck, and vowed
never to see the boy again, though carried away with him a raging fire that
lack of Puck would not extinguish.
When the draft notice came, he
enlisted, thinking perhaps a tour of duty might beat the devil out of him.
The army tried, especially the DI,
who seemed to sense the rage in him, and wanted to use it, shape it, make him
into the lethal weapon the Army needed to win the war, and he almost was,
feeling the beat of it in his head and chest grow faster and more intense the
more he trained.
He wanted it, needed it, if only to
get the beast out of him or at least aimed in a direction it would do more good
than harm.
Then, suddenly, in the middle of it
all, the rage ceased, not from anything he did or thought, but a slow potent
alternative force rose up and extinguished the fire while on the rifle range,
the M15 slumped, the barrel hitting the gravel at his feet. Around him, the
other recruits continued to fire, a wall of sound against which he seemed
immune.
The DI, who had adopted him from
the start, took notice and marched over.
“What the fuck is wrong?” the man
shouted.
“Nothing,” Lance said, almost numb.
“Then why aren’t you shooting?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“What the fuck are you talking
about?”
“I don’t want to kill anybody.”
“You’re in the fucking army, that’s
what you do in the army.”
“Then I don’t want to be in the
Army anymore.”
The DI went ballistic, his broad
sweaty black face exploding with an expression of disbelief and outrage.
“I suppose you’d like the
stockade?” he finally spurted out.
“No,” Lance said. “But there must
be some place in this man’s army where I won’t have to kill people.”
Within a day Lance got reassigned
to a medical training unit with the MOS of medic, the DI, who actually liked
him, advising him to keep his head down and his butt out of the line of fire.
Three years and two tours of Vietnam later,
Lance came home, wandering the streets of Paterson like a lost soul, buildings
gone from where he remembered them, strangers living in houses where friends
had once lived.
He found Puck standing on the corner of Main
Street and Crooks Avenue, a Kool cigarette dangling from his thick lips. He had
the look of a slimy Bogart, with deep set eyes too dark to read. Those eyes
flashed up at Lance's uniform, his teeth grinding as if sharpening for a kill.
But as Puck turned, the expression changed, and a slow smile spread across the
small man's face. In all the years since the killing of the birds, nothing
essential had changed about the small man
“Hey! Don't I know you?'' he asked.
This came suddenly for Lance to
avoid him. He was tired. He couldn't
find the strength to resist any more. Not the Army. Not Puck. But he felt
trapped, caught between two variations on the same theme, each more violent
than the other, each magnifying the other's passions, each seeming to need
Lance as witness to their brutality.
“Yeah, I guess you do,'' Lance said
“From high school, right?''
Lance nodded.
Yet like with the previous encounter, Puck
seemed to have forgotten the details of their previous life together, and he
seemed to manufacture a past in order to go on with the future.
“Where are you staying?'' Puck asked.
Lance told him.
“You're own place?''
“A room. It's all I can afford with the job
I've got.''
“You work? Where?''
Lance confessed that, too.
“Hard work, eh?''
“Excruciatingly,'' Lance said.
Puck grinned.
“Stick with me, pal, and we'll change all that.''
Puck it seems had made connections
during the intervening years. There were people in Paterson who liked his kind
of solum violence, who found a use for them among their own profit systems. He
had become a numbers runner and bill collector, getting a little extra bonus
for broken legs and heads and fingers. And like before, he needed a witness,
someone to document his grave crimes, calling on Lance on those occasions when
he knew such things would come up.
Lance knew better than to argue. He went
along, witnessing what he could, only allowing Puck to steal his eyes during
the hours before and after work. Meanwhile, another life had begun to grow
in-between. He had met a girl at work with whom he could talk. She seemed to
like him. She seemed to be happy when he was around. On occasion, Lance even
lied to Puck in order to find more time to see her, taking her on dates out of
town so as not to run into the boy by accident.
Then, one day she was gone.
The boss at work said she had quit.
“She said something about going to see her
sister out in Colorado,'' the man said, though was aggravatingly scarce on
details. He had only her old address
Sarah's parents acted cold, shaking their heads, saying they didn't know
anything about Lance or care much about what happened to Sarah.
“We thought was a good girl,'' the mother
said. “But now we're hearing talk.''
“What about her address?'' Lance
asked desperately. “Do you have an address for her?''
“We have an address for her sister,'' the
father said, and gave it, and closed the door on Lance.
Colorado? How was Lance supposed to follow her
there? His job barely paid enough for him to make rent and eat. He thought of
Puck, and wondered if he could work a deal with him.
“What kind of deal?'' Puck asked when Lance
approached him.
“I need money. I'm not particular how I get it
right now.''
“A loan?'' Puck asked, eyes shining with their
scheming cruelty.
“No, not a loan,'' Lance barked. “know
where that ends up. Some sort of-- operation.''
“I know of a safe,'' Puck said, thoughtfully.
“I don't know anything about safes,'' Lance
said. “Do you?''
“I know the combination to this safe,'' Puck
said, his eyes shimmering in a way that told Lance that this was all part of
some precalculated plan, one which needed an additional person to accomplish.
“Whose safe?''
“You don't need to know that.''
“Is it dangerous?''
“Knowing anything about these people is,'' he
said, his eyes still glowing. “But once it's done, they can't trace either of
us.''
Lance didn't believe him, but his thoughts
melded together into a mash of emotions the way they had during his whole two
tours in Nam, and like Nam he went with the flow, allowing Puck to pull him
deeper and deeper into the conspiracy. He became driver and equipment man,
though remembered few details of how he had gotten either privilege, or how on
that dark November night he and Puck had gotten to the downtown warehouse,
their faces greased, their heads covered in black knit hats, and their bodies
with black farmer-like overalls with dozens of pockets.
“Remember,'' Puck said before they
eased out of the woody sided station wagon and into the darkness. “If anything goes wrong, head for the falls.
There's another car on the other side. You have one key. I have another.''
“Wrong? I thought you said you had this all
planned out.''
“I do. But plans have gone sour before.
Here.''
He shoved a nine-millimeter pistol into his
hands. It horrified Lance. He stared at it, feeling its heaviness weigh down
his hands.
“I don't want it,'' he said, trying to push it
back into the small man's hands.
“You'll keep it,'” Puck said and glared. “And
use it if you need to.''
“No,” Lance said. “I wouldn’t carry
a gun in the Army, I won’t carry one in my home town.”
“You’re a fool,” Puck said. “This
isn’t Vietnam. But a person can get killed here nearly as easy.”
Puck stared hard, dark eyebrows
rising on his otherwise small face, a rage roaring deep inside his eyes as he
slowly licked his lips, waiting, watching, again with the sense of a hunter.
“Is that some kind of threat?”
Lance asked.
“No threat,” Puck assured him. “I’m
just giving you a reality check.”
They climbed into the building with
surprising ease: No guard. No bars. No sense of anything wrong. Lance did not
know enough to understand what occurred next, and Puck, puffed up with a sense
of invulnerability got careless and did not become aware of the silent alarm
until he saw a light flashing on one of the panels, and heard the slamming of
car doors outside, grey suited men piling out their doors like an invading
army. Not cops. Worse. Local mob. Boys whose money Puck had now in his hands,
the heavy black safe unable to resist him. It wasn't until the sound came from
the stairs, the thump of heavy feet striking metal.
The glow of his victory died in Puck’s
eyes, as the green from the pile of bills from the safe dribbled out into a fiery
red panic.
“Run!” he hissed, trying to thrust
the money back into the safe, most of it scattering onto the floor at his feet.
“Run, you bastard! The gig is up!”
Lance did not move, could not move,
a flash back to one of those sudden jungle attacks where no direction was safe.
And then, there was the money,
lying near the door to the safe, money he needed, money he had come here to
get.
He grabbed handfuls of the cash, stuffing
both pockets of his jacket, as Puck stood in the doorway to the dark office
staring out, two silver pistols clutched in his hands as footsteps sounded on
the stairs beyond the door.
Lance felt the shots as well as
heard them, one shot from each of the guns Puck held, followed by the all too familiar
thud of at least one falling body.
Again, Lance froze, caught between the
instinct to flee, and urgency from the war to go men the fallen, a stupid
notion he realized later, the fog of confusion and Puck’s screaming at him
finally forcing Lance to flee, out the open window, clinging to the rope they
had used to enter, the fibers burning his palms as he made his way down, two
more shots sounding from inside the building, his imagination painting two more
bodies falling in the stairwell.
He kept going, hearing the flatter,
slapping sound of automatic weapons returning fire, something akin to the sound
of the AK-47 firing in the jungle in Nam.
Lance didn’t need to see Puck’s
body to know he was dead.
He stuck to the original plan,
heading across the bridge of the falls towards the station wagon Puck had
stolen as their getaway car. The old dilapidated sports stadium hauntingly
silent, half lost in the mists rising from the water gap at its feet.
He got to the rusted gate, a gate
that had rusted away long ago, leading to the lawn and trees and stones and top
of the falls to any who dared to spend the night there.
Shadows moved in that darkness, like sharks
sensing blood, sniffing out the danger only when the grey suited men made the
entrance, too.
Their automatic pistols flashed in
the darkness, leaving pin holes in the tree trucks and cracks in the stone, stirring
up the old panic from the war, and reviving instincts that had allowed Lance to
survive.
He pushed open the gate to the
metal bridge, all the metal moist from the constant uprise of mist from the
falls.
Half way across to the other side,
he heard the voices, and realized the gray men had guessed his strategy and
approached him from ahead as well as behind, their voices full of threats and
curses, softened only slightly by the promises not to hurt him if he gave
himself up, a lie so obvious Lance knew he would end up like Puck if he
complied.
With voices approaching out of the
dark on both sides of the foot bridge, Lance halted.
The authorities long ago put up
wire with barbs to keep the terminally depressed from leaping off the bridge.
But rust and gangs had ripped this away, too, and Lance lifted himself into one
of the gaps, the voices and footsteps getting nearer to either end.
He climbed to the brail where he wavered
on the edge, not quite falling forward or back until the men made it impossible
for him to stay.
No leap had ever scared him as much
as that one, even those from the side of a chopper in Nam, a leap of faith into
the mouth of darkness, the bottom of which would either land him on the jagged
rocks or into the depths of the foaming water.
Down, down, into the cold back
water, plunging so deep that his lungs hurt and his ears pounded, and he felt
himself slow too late for him to survive to the next breath-- holding the air
in as he slowly rose again, pushing it out of his lungs when they felt ready to
burst, coming out of the water like a whale, gasping and sputtering, but alive
and downstream. High up, framed by the bridge and the hands of stone, small
black figures scurried against the night time sky, sending pointless flashes
down at him in the water, as the current raced away with him the way it did the
rest of the city's refuse.
Miles downstream, he climbed from
the river, soaked and frozen, but with most of the money intact. He never went
home. Instead, he found a cab and let him drive him to New York City, and from
the Port Authority hopped the first bus out of town, headed to Philadelphia,
and from Philadelphia to Colorado.
Now, thousands of miles away, the whole
thing still reverberated in him as Lance stared out at the road beneath him as the
van devoured white lines and clumps of ice, shitting them out behind them.
Sarah’s cold fingers on his arm
woke Lance from a dose he didn’t realize he had taken.
“Are you all right?” she asked,
leaning forward from just behind him where she perched on a makeshift seat. She
sounded almost as cold as her touch.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because you were groaning like a
stuffed pig,” Dan said, glancing over at Lance, smoldering cigarette once more
clouding most of his face. “I was going to kick you, but I can’t take my foot
off the gas.”
“Maybe next time, you should,”
Lance responded, only half joking, then looked back at the wall mountain peaks.
“Don’t get all wimpy about these
mountains like you did back in Denver,” Dan said. “There's nothing in those mountains
but stone and sheep."
"There might be a job."
Dan’s snort was half laugh, but mocking, as he
dark gaze studied to see if Lance was serious.
“So, you want to become a sheep
herder?” he asked, puffing on a cigarette that had apparently suddenly died.
“There must be something more than
that,” Lance said.
“Not many, unless you're a redneck
working for the government. The whole state's a bloody war machine. Half the
mountains are hollowed out with some secret base or another."
A chill rushed through Lance.
Even here? Was there no place safe
it? Had man’s need to kill perverted everything?
"You'd also have to cut your hair,"
Dan said. "They don't like hippies. Besides they roll up the sidewalks around
here at night. Who could live like that?"
"I could," Lance said.
Lance didn't mind rednecks, any more than he
hated Colorado. He understood both, and didn’t need Judy Collins to sell him on
its virtues or others to sing its history, how the place came to life after the
Civil War (War of Northern Aggression as Southerners call it), the glitter of
gold drawing them, the promise of land and opportunities bringing strings of
canvas-covered wagons, slogans such as
"San Juan or Bust" written on their sides, the way he had
written“ Battlewagon for Peace” on the side of the now-bullet-ridden van, the
bones of potential settlers littering each pass through the mountains, from disease,
accident, or murder, death and violence being the perpetual common denominator
in this quest to live up to America’s Manifest Destiny.
In the distance, Lance could just
make out the crumbling shaft houses and tracks for the mining trams, even piles
of mine slag or tailings left over from that time, like scars left on the
surface of a nearly perfect face. Old mine roads ran up and down and around,
twisted veins that once fed the frenzy, now dead, vacant, muddy.
A few working ranches still existed
in this part of the state, cowboys living up to the myth their fathers and
grandfathers had started, wearing much of the same gear, telling many of the
same tales.
They hated hippies like their
ancestors hated Native Americans, maybe a bit envious of both, the ability to
pick up and take off, when they could not yank themselves free of the land and
the heavy labor their lives required. In towns like Durango, they grumbled over
coffee or over a beer, indignant over the protests against a war too distant to
fully comprehend, many seeing sons and brothers shipped back in body bags from
a conflict that seemed to have no end. They even grumbled about the tourists
the state started to invite in, an invasion of flash cameras and wheeled
suitcases scraped across what many of them considered sacred soil.
They grumbled about the Indians,
too, and the local ruins of the Anasazi tribe that brought in the tourists, and
hippies, feeling more than a little betrayed by the sudden shift of fortune
they suffered as public opinion labelled their brave acts of the past as
genocide and turned the natives into victims, who had been exploited by white
settlers from the East.
It was an unfair assessment that
even the heroic Columbus had to endure, a man who had adopted vulnerable tribes
and protected them against cannibalistic tribes that sought to eat them.
While most of the hippies had grown
up on the Lone Ranger and his loyal Indian side kick, they began to emulate the
savage tribes, innocent, deluded children of Middle Class Amerca, who ached to
be something more than potential clerks, sales people, mechanics and typists.
Lance had seen only a handful of
Indians during his trip through the west. most propped up around the trading
post at Cortez, dressed in traditional garb, yet oddly out of touch, as if the
whole routine was but an act they had relearned from the movies. His
grandfather used to talk about the Indians that he had seen as a kid in the
east, and their sad parades down main streets in places like Bayonne, fading
into the dust in the same way Civil War vets had, while here, they still
lingered, living on reservations, popping up in shopping malls like ghosts.
Route 25 ran ahead of them like a
long ribbon, rising and falling as the van huffed and puffed to climb up one
side for a long rush down the other side only to do it all over again, Dan
making the most of the momentum, even as he grumbled about the weight the van
carried – all those precious knickknacks Sarah had refused to leave behind.
Plains Indians, before horses,
before wagons, carried their lives on their shoulders, just exactly what they
needed, down to the weaving stick that made the basket itself, always
practical, always aware of how hard the road would be and how their burden – no
matter how light at the start – would grow unbearably heavy by the time the
trek ended. The road seemed easier now, and yet still a burden as the huffing
and puffing van showed each time they ascended again, though their trek south
rather than west delayed their need to climb through the mountains again until
they reached New Mexico, but, the towering mountains of Southwest Colorado
loomed, so ragged and high they might have been the moon.
He closed his eyes. He did not want to leave, and
wondered what it would take for Sarah to come back north with him after they
had reached Alburquerque. Could he talk her into seeking the treasures of
Pinons and Juniper deeper in those mountains?
He would not hold
his breath.
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