by Gregory Hill
My priority is The Blad. Having said that, I did steal twenty bucks from a kid in a Japanese economy car that had been modified to resemble an oversized remote-control toy. One of those little hatchbacks with a giant exhaust pipe and a custom red-and-orange paint job. The kid’s baseball cap was on backwards, he was chewing on a lollipop, and his dashboard was decorated with plastic ponies. And he had Kansas plates. All of that adds up to the subtraction of twenty dollars from his wallet, which was covered with scratch ’n’ sniff stickers. I intend to redistribute the money as soon as I find someone who deserves it.
Eight miles later, I came to one of those signs that cartoon characters happen upon in cartoon deserts. It pointed south: Keaton 2 Miles. Unlike the other side roads I’d encountered, the road to Keaton was paved, although crumbly and sunbleached. Yonder, a hawk was suspended above the landscape, eyes open for whatever it is hawks eat.
My legs were tired so I slouched against the sign, James Dean style, for several beatings of my heart. Narwhal Slotterfield is a loner, a rebel, and he does as he pleases.
I kinda wanted to go to Keaton. For kicks, you know. What mysteries might lay off the beaten path that’s already off the beaten path? Tumbleweeds and broken down pickup trucks and half-mad chickens.
When you put it that way.
I’ll save Keaton for later, after I’ve had my word with The Blad. Revenge is a dish and I’m famished.
14
The town of Dorsey is a corpse that someone forgot to unplug from life support. There’s just one street, Route 36, flanked by numerous decaying structures. Amongst those are two windowless motels, a windowless gas station, a weed-grown mini-golf course, a church full of tumbleweeds. There are a few actual surviving businesses of the sort that are required for modern human existence: a post office, a phone company, and a liquor store. Rounding out the tour are a dozen or so decaying houses, any one of which could serve as the communal residence for a tribe of heavily armed Christian isolationist hillbillies. And if this planet is home to a living creature other than me, we all know it’s going to be Christian isolationist hillbillies.
Dorsey has no grocery stores or restaurants. I eat a bottle of water from my backpack and I move on.
Remember the hellfire storm? It looked big back in Holliday. Here, it’s a looming monster. Straight ahead, the sun remains visible as it peeks under the clouds. To the north, there are streaks of rain. Above, the clouds pile upon one another like madmen attempting to claw their way out of one of those pits that CIA-trained South American death squads make a town of peasants dig before they shoot them all.
Given my already dark mood, I am not thrilled with the prospect of crossing underneath that thing.
15
Two miles west of Dorsey, I start to grow hungry. Three miles west of Dorsey, I’m ravenous. Luckily, there’s a house on the right side of the highway, just beneath the leading edge of the storm. The streaks of rain to the north have white smears to them. Above, the clouds are a cauldron. Any minute, the harpies will descend.
The house is redbrick, ranch style. Inside, the house’s decorations strongly suggest I’m in a cattleman’s home: there are a dozen pairs of worn cowboy boots scattered under the furniture, several copies of Modern Rancher magazine next to the toilet, and the house smells like cowshit.
The fireplace mantel is adorned with a musket with a flared barrel, the sort Puritans used to brandish at curious Indians. Above that hangs the decapitated head of a pronghorn. I know the animal is a pronghorn because PRONGHORN is expertly engraved on the brass plate screwed at the base of the wooden head mount. A pronghorn looks like a deer, except it has a black streak of fur on its nose. And it has prongs instead of antlers.
The lady of the house has prepared a repast of pot roast and soggy carrots. Places are set, garnishes are being placed upon butter sticks. I reckon the man of the house will be home just as soon as he finishes castrating the cattle, or whatever.
I eat until I’m satisfied, but not full. I must save a portion for my return trip, in the event that I should decide to come back after I’ve given The Blad the what-for.
There’s a gun case in the living room. It’s like a trophy case, but full of firearms. At least twenty guns, all types. Pistols, rifles with sniper scopes, Elmer Fudd double-barrel shotguns. The case is unlocked so, one by one, I bring the guns outside and point them at the sky, hovering. One by one I pull the triggers and leave them there to do nothing. There’s twenty-one all told. Silent pickets, salute.
16
Once you get used to it, walking against this atmosphere is quite invigorating. I made twenty miles today, all the way to Abila, yet another of these towns that clings to the highway like a withered plant growing out of a crack in a sidewalk.
Already, my muscles grow stout, especially my legs. I’m suffering from the opposite of atrophy. When I really get going, marching down the center of the road like some anti-astronaut version of a cross-country cancer-awareness fund-raising obsessive, I can close my eyes and walk over a hundred steps before I veer into the rumble strips at the shoulder of the blacktop.
My legs are pendula on a clock. Leftright, leftright, leftright. As a resident of the altitudinous Denver, I am reminded every day that there are 5280 feet in a mile. Each of my strides spans roughly three feet. A leftright spans six feet. Six goes into 5280 880 times. 880 divided by sixty (seconds) is 14.6666666666666666666666666667. Conclusion: Assuming I’m walking four miles per hour—a brisk but manageable pace—each mile should take approximately fifteen minutes and each left-right therefore comprises one second.
If I concentrate on math, I can keep myself from thinking about you-know-who. I’m a jerk, Veronica. I understand that. But you’re not a jerk, so you shouldn’t have hurt me.
My mood is in a state of decline. If nothing else, my entry into this suspended state/country/universe would have, I thought, liberated me from the oppressive expectations of society. I was wrong. I have become not only my own master, but the overseer of a world that can no longer wipe its own ass.
Meanwhile, fifty miles to the east, my darling duplicitous Veronica remains seated en milleu d’aire with Sandy pointing a gun at her from across the room. And here I am, eating stolen meal after stolen meal, in search of redemption, or revenge, or simply an excuse to kill some time in a timeless land.
I make my way underneath the storm. It’s a cumulonimbus affair, a hellfire storm. Just massive. I can’t overstate this. Every summer afternoon, from time immemorial, the sweltering wind has blown over the Rockies, creating the perfect condition for thunderstorms. We see them in Denver regularly and, according to Channel Nine weatherhuman Rainey Highs, they can get brutal on the plains. Colonies of tornados, hail the size of footballs, winds that remove flesh from cattle, and bolts of lightning as thick as a tree trunk, bright as the sun, and squiggly as one of those teeny appendages attached to those bugs you see when you focus a microscope on a drop of pond water.
I walk beneath that hovering pile of hostile water vapor with my shoulders slumped and my eyes mostly shut, making pointless calculations based on my heartbeats.
At mile marker 153, I encounter an eastbound minivan with Missouri plates and a University of Colorado sticker on the back window. The occupants are Caucasian. The mom and the dad are in front, the dad in his traditional role at the wheel. In the back is their eighteen-year son, wearing a turquoise polo shirt with a popped collar, ear buds in, pawing away at his pocket phone. The van is filled with all the stuff a kid would need for life in a dormitory: minifridge, plastic drawer units, Salvador Dali posters.
Likeliest scenario: Within a month of beginning his freshman year of college, young Brock has been expelled from Dear Old CU. Except you can’t flunk out in a month. He hasn’t even gotten his first report card yet. No, our friend has clearly demonstrated some incredibly untoward behavior. A smoke bomb in the dorms, repeated plagiarism, sex trafficking. Not weed, though. I’ve worked my share of intramural games in Boulder. I as
sure you that CU does not expel anyone for marijuana infractions.
There are few joys greater than officiating an intermural game of ten stoned basketball players. Stoners do not give a shit how I officiate the game. They frequently stop mid-court to shake my hand and compliment my fashionable zebra skin shirt. Sometimes they even let me shoot free throws, because why the hell not? Let’s upend authority, ’k? They love it when I offer fatherly advice, like, “Play a two-three zone and you’ll totally neutralize their big man.” Sometimes I even get to be the default scorekeeper. I did one game where nobody made a basket and the final score was three hundred fifty to twenty-six zillion. Players from both teams wept with joy.
It’s when a team of stoners goes against a team of frat-boys that I really spread my wings. I do this by Creating Chaos and Giving Hope to the Underdog.
The Kappa Gamma gang are notoriously competitive, so loathsome they have to do three lines of coke and chew a handful of Adderall before they can stand to be around each other. Even then, being the post-pubescent, pre-enlightened, narcoticized alpha apes that they are, they argue with everyone, especially each other. And they never, ever pass the ball. Snag the rebound, sprint down the floor, dodge the opposing team of high-as-a-kite daisy-picking hippies, ignore your four randomly-placed teammates who are all clapping their hands and screaming, “I’m wide-open, brah!” and attempt a free-throw line slam dunk even though your vertical leap is thirteen inches, you’re five-and-a-half-feet tall, and you couldn’t palm a mandarin orange.
Imagine a basketball game between the Grateful Dead and the members of Motörhead. Imagine a sloth subletting a room from a beehive. Imagine Mad Max’s wife and toddler running away from an anarchic Australian motorcycle mob. Then bring me in to clear things up. I invent new infractions, like Over-Dribbling or Failure to Use a Pivot Foot.
The fratsters never buck my authority. I’m more than a decade older than them. At their core they’re just a bunch of compliant father-pleasing soon-to-be-failed investment bankers. On my court, the stoners win every time.
I removed Axel Buster’s half-smoked joint from my shirt pocket and wedged it between young Brock’s lips and marched on. The act of generosity improved my mood considerably.
But it was not enough to overcome the fact that I was standing underneath the Super Star Destroyer of super clouds. Over my last hundred steps, the air had grown cooler by at least ten degrees, a welcome change after all this time in ninety-plus Fahrenheit.
With chicken flesh on my arms and my eyes closed, I continued west. I imagined I was someplace more pleasant, less stormy. The bottom of the ocean, maybe.
Sometime before lunch break, I took five hundred steps without opening my eyes. And even then I only opened them because I couldn’t believe that I’d traveled over half a mile without veering more than twenty feet to the left or right. Indeed, I was still smack dab on the centerline of this unerring highway. I’m not that amazing. The sun keeps me oriented. I feel it on my face, see a little glow behind my eyelids behind my dark glasses.
I encountered no rain as I continued this mostly-blind promenade, only silent oppression. After an extraordinarily long stretch, I opened my eyes and, glory on high, I saw that there was an end to the hellfire storm. Up ahead, the gap between the clouds and the horizon had grown taller. The storm was a cell, not a legion. It was a thing to be traversed, like adolescence. I’d be under blue skies in, oh, just another mile.
I jumped up and down and shouted inner ear exhortations of joy. I’m coming for you, The Blad.
That’s all it takes. Put the storm behind you. The sky before me is blue, dotted with bunny clouds. The flatness of the land has begun to break. No mountains yet, but the plains are now rippling into a series of long, gentle hills. Easy up, easy down.
It’ll be a grand moment when the good ol’ Rockies poke their heads over the horizon. Until then, the horizontal seam between the sky and the land just screams peaceful.
At mile marker 165, fifty yards off the road, I spotted a herd of pronghorn. I recognized them from the decapitated head of their cousin above the mantle at the redbrick farmhouse with the guns, to which I shall henceforth refer as the House of Pronghorn.
I jumped a barbed-wire fence and crossed into the pasture and petted the animals. Up close, they’re shorter than they seem when viewed from the road; their heads only come up to my armpit. They’re surprisingly mangy, with bloody scabs on their ears and flies hovering around their heads. And yet, in spite of this, the animals retain a natural elegance.
Seeing them, I was reminded of a playoff game I officiated last year between the Aurora Christian Academy and Hochley High. Hochley’s boosters were assholes. Every time I sent an Academy player to the foul-line, the Hochley crowd chanted “Ev-o-lu-tion!” over and over until the shot went up. If it missed, they’d shout, “God’s will be done!”
The players on both teams ignored the off-court nonsense and stuck to basketball. Once you alight upon the court, once the game begins, the whole world disappears. Alas, the world didn’t disappear so easily for the Aurora Christian Academy cheerleaders, as they were burdened with the task of being cheerful.
In their blue pleated skirts and puffy-shouldered dresses, they did their splits and made their pyramids. As the taunting continued, the girls stretched their innocent smiles wider and wider while their pretty Christian eyes grew more and more glassy. Not to be beaten down by the blasphemers of Hochley, they tried the old standby, “We’ve got spirit, yes we do. We’ve got spirit, how ’bout you?”
Traditionally, when one set of cheerleaders initiates this chant, the opposing cheerleaders repeat it back at them. The squads go back and forth with this, growing more passionate with each iteration, until concluding as an ensemble with “WE ALL DO!” Happens at least once per game. It’s intended to remind everyone that this is a friendly competition.
The Academy’s cheerleaders initiated the Spirit Chant at the third quarter break, score tied at 56 to 56. Hochley’s entire crowd, parents, cheerleaders, everyone, replied with: “Who cares?!?” We’re talking about probably five hundred people. The Christian girls just stood there. Skinny, ponytails, knobby knees, pompons dangling like dead jellyfish.
Well, shit. These kids didn’t send themselves to their private Christian Academy. School sucks enough without tossing in mandatory bible classes. They’re kids. They want to listen to hip-hop, smoke cigarettes, and explore backseat underwear gropings on the bus ride home from the game, just like the bastards at Hochley.
But now, being humiliated in their attempt to spread goodwill, it was clear that these girls were doomed to abandon any hope of worldly teenage rebellion and instead retreat into uncomplicated lives of chastity, judgment, and missionary trips to third world countries, just as their parents had always dreamed. I couldn’t let that happen.
A few phantom fouls here, overlooks of some traveling violations there. When the buzzer sounded, I saw to it that they had something to cheer about.
*
In honor of the cheerleading squad at the Aurora Christian Academy, I stacked the pronghorns into a pyramid. A deeramid, if you will. First, I lined up four of them side by side. Then I placed three more on the shoulders of the bottom row. It was easier than you’d think. I didn’t have to worry about dropping them; I’d heave one up partway and then release it to hover in midair, at which point I could readjust my grip, get underneath it better and then push it into place. Then I’d spread the legs and place the feet firmly on the backs of the animals below. Getting two of them to the third row was a little more difficult, as I had to stage them multiple times to lift them to the appropriate altitude. But I’m tall and I managed. I saved the smallest one for the fourth-level peak. I climbed on the backs of the two lowest layers and placed the little critter atop, poised upright on his hind legs with his arms reaching for the sky.
I stood back to admire my work. It was clever, but it didn’t pop. After much chin-rubbing, inspiration appeared in the mass of tum
bleweeds that were piled against the barbed wire fence adjacent to the road. I took two of the well-shaped tumblers and balanced them on the forepaws of the prime pronghorn. Now the little guy has pompons. I wish I could take a picture and show it to those Aurora Christian Academy cheerleaders as an expression of solidarity.
17
I’m seated at the front step of the Abila grocery store—quaint like a country store should be—and I’m making my way thru a six-pack of miniature powdered donuts. I should avoid sugar on account of there not being any dentists, but I walked a long ways today and I deserve a reward.
Boy, am I going to give it to The Blad. First, I need to get to Denver. But, boy, when I get there. I fantasize about the various ways I could punish him. If I could figure out how to do so, I’d tattoo his entire face green. Or I could stuff a scorpion down his pants, or haul him to the roof of his office and toss him over the edge. I should try that. I could stand on him and float like the Silver Surfer. No matter what, I’ll begin by shaving all the hair off his body.
Speaking of hair, mine is growing back at an incredible rate. By my calculations, it should be 1/20th of an inch long four days after shaving it all off. But it’s at least 1/10th of an inch long. I’m probably just sleeping a lot longer than I think I am. Fuck it. I’m well-rested.
Good night.
18
I have come across my first proper lunatic compound. Some crazy motherfucker has taken control of a cluster of buildings that must have once been a teeny tiny town. The compound consists of all the typical town buildings: a mid-century-modern ghost-motel, collapsing frame houses, something that may have been a general store, various shed-like buildings, and a gas station whose parking lot includes gaping holes where the underground fuel tanks used to be buried.
