by John Barnes
Now, a funny thing—every cattle mutilation has a reasonable explanation, which you can usually hear from the rancher next door. It’s only the mutilations that an individual rancher encounters personally that mystify them. The guy over the next hill will be able to tell you just how a teenage thrill killer, or rustling by organized crime, or a coyote, or a freak accident with barbed wire or glass in the windows of an abandoned building, could have led to that weird feature of the death. The guy who saw it is never convinced by that.
And of course, since there’s such an abundance of saucer sightings and so forth in the San Luis Valley (or the La Veta Military Operations Area), there are plenty of people ready to tell you that aliens, or the armed forces, or aliens working for the armed forces, are doing it for reasons all their own.
Now, confronted by constant weirdness, people eventually just shrug and live with it, which explains Manhattan, New Orleans, Silicon Valley, and Kalispell, Montana, just to mention the examples with which I’m most familiar. The Colorado ranch population might have been a little freaked at first, but “at first” was back in the 1940s or earlier. We’ve got third-generation abductees out here. So the men and women in cowboy hats, stopping in the cafés of the tiny crossroads towns that are such a long way apart and surrounded by so much empty land, are not exactly superstitious, terrified peasants, clutching pitchforks and torches to storm the house full of queer folk on the hill and put things back to the way that the Lord intended. They get used to pretty much everything, and once it’s been there for a while, it becomes part of what’s always been, and then they get proud of it. Alferd Packer, the Colorado cannibal, could probably run for governor if he were still alive (he’d be around 150 years old, of course), just because gawdammit, he’s our cannibal. The Mutilated Cow is just one of dozens of businesses named after the weird goings-on in the valley, and while nobody likes finding a cattle mutilation, at least when you find one, you know you’re at home.
Up in the mountains “cultural attractions” get cheap; nobody will pay much to be entertained. The cover was just three bucks and that included a little orange ticket for half off on my first beer. Which was a Coors Light because the other beer they usually had was Coors, and they were out.
The place was basically a big room with a bar at one end, rest rooms at the other, some four-by-eight platforms legged up to make a stage in front of the rest rooms, and a few busted-up old formica tables huddling back against the bar as if they were afraid of the music. (If so, I was shortly to hear, they had a point.) The place stank of old cigarettes and beer-soaked plywood and the thousand kinds of oil and grit that get onto people who mostly work outside all day in all weather.
There were dozens of photos, some glossies and some ripped out of magazines or newspapers, framed on the walls, the glass in front of them smeared yellow-gray with old smoke. Posters covered most of the wall, anything with an alien theme—a couple old posters for E.T., some variations on The Truth Is Out There, a couple of the old UFO Map of Colorado, a big chart labeled The Truth on one side and The Cover Up on the other with the standard alien face in the center, that sort of thing. Several inflatable aliens hung from the rafters by ropes under their armpits, and over the rest rooms hung a fairly crude painting, which made up for its artistic execution by being nine feet wide and five high, of aliens squatting on toilets, with the caption THE PORTAL POTTY.
“We get all that stuff from Judy Messoline’s ranch, down by Hooper,” the bartender told me. “You’re Doctor Barnes, aren’t you?”
“I am.” I squinted at her and said, “Western student?”
“For three terms. I wasn’t going to take no classes from no hard cases, I was there to party, it’s a party school, that’s the point, you know?” She held up a hand for a high five, so I stuck mine up and she slapped it. “I mean, party, that’s what it’s about. So I bailed out after Christmas of my sophomore year, moved up to the Butte to ride my board and smoke the rasta, got pregnant, the guy was from here, moved down here with his folks, he took off and joined the Army, but I get along real good with his mom, and she owns this place, so now I tend bar here. You probably didn’t recognize me because my freshman year, when you saw me a lot, I was like all Christian girl and stuff. I grew my dreads since.”
“Oh, right. You used to come by because your roommate worked in the scene shop.”
“Yeah. She said you were okay but she was afraid of you. She said you were like a nice hardcase, like you were always all ‘build to plan’ but then you’d have everyone over at your house for dinner. She got real Christian and now she’s got two kids and sends me pamphlets about it. For joining her church, I mean. Not for having two kids. I got one and he’s plenty.” She held up her hand, so I slapped it. There is no polite way to decline a high five.
“This was—Molly?”
“No, I’m Molly. She was Jennifer.”
The band was setting up by the time-honored method of several people standing around watching one person wrestle with some small artifact and swear at it. I recognized Esau and waved, but he was locked in a life or death struggle with a mike stand. I figured that the plump, thirty-something blonde woman in the black silk blouse, black leather mini, narrow wraparound sunglasses, and stilettos had to be Jenapha Lee, basing this on the fact that she kept pacing over to tell Esau something or other. He seemed to be ignoring her, but then Travis would ask her something about it, and she’d give him a very long explanation.
The costumer in me figured she was wearing between seven and nine hundred dollars, not counting jewelry, which meant the total cost of the clothes on her must be about equal to the total cost of the clothes on the other twenty people in the room, combined.
“Have you heard them, Molly?” I asked the bartender.
“Naw, but I hear they suck.”
“That’s what I hear too.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Friends of a friend—that skinny guy in the denim jacket is the friend. And actually he’s more friends with their manager.”
“I hope it ain’t nothing big to say this but she’s a real bitch. If that’s okay to say, Doctor Barnes.”
“More than okay with me. ‘Real bitch’ tends to be what Travis likes.”
“Another Coors Light?”
“Sure.” I knew the rhythm of mountain roadhouses. My next beer wouldn’t be getting to me any time soon—she’d have to visit with everyone at the bar, going both ways, and spend a certain amount of time just staring into space and chilling before getting around to the stressful job of opening a bottle and collecting my money.
The band started up then, and it was every bit as bad as Travis had threatened. Esau was as close to a musician as they had, and as a musician, he was an adequate engineer. He’d rigged up a system through MIDI and a couple old computers so that it picked up pitches coming off Kermit’s guitar and produced thirds, fourths, or fifths, above or below, actuated by Esau’s drumsticks on the oddly mixed drum set (looked like one snare and two cymbals too many to me) or on the vibes. The drums and vibes themselves were amplified, so what you got were these weird chords in time with the pounding drums, and Kermit’s three chords and some slides up and down the frets, all backing up Jake, in mirrorshades, tight tee, and black jeans (a bad combination on a guy who was already turning to pudge), who was yelling something or other into the microphone, whenever he remembered to hold it near his face. I wasn’t able to follow the exact text but the basic message was that he was Indian, we stole his land, and he was pissed off.
Everybody at the bar (except me, Molly, and three old-timers who sat with each other and never moved) got up and sort of jumped around to it. At least Esau gave them enough of a beat to jump consistently. In the middle of it all I could see Travis and Jenapha Lee dancing sort of with each other; that is, he had his hands on her waist and was bumping back and forth, and she was simultaneously grinding on him and looking around the room. She looked incredibly bored, like she was looking around to see if
there was anything to do while she danced. Well, every time I’d known Travis to fall hard, it had been for someone who ignored him, and I had to admit this was the most thorough job of ignoring him I’d ever seen.
After about half an hour Molly came by with my beer, and I paid her. “I’d promise to give Jake his land back if he’d skip the rest of his sets,” I shouted into her ear.
“Dude!” She high-fived me.
At last the set ended, and everyone piled off the dance floor and up along the bar to grab drinks. They all seemed to be white kids who felt like they were having a major spiritual experience, though the ones who had seen the band before were complaining because they didn’t have that “real totally spiritual guy, that shaman, with them this time. He’s awesome.”
“Hey,” the girl next to me said, pointing with her cigarette, “that one there. That one.”
She was pointing at Travis.
“Yeah,” the guy beside her asked.
“Dude, you got to look at his eyes when you get a chance. Alien for sure. At least three quarter blood alien. I can smell it on them but the eyes are like the total giveaway. Fuck, he’s like coming this way. Don’t look at him. They can smell fear.”
“John, I’d like you to come on over and join us at the band table, and get acquainted,” Travis said. I followed him.
Seen up close, Jenapha Lee was a recognizable type; the mountains are full of people who live there because it’s nice, and can afford to because their money comes from somewhere else. Very often the somewhere else is a trust fund or a supportive family. It’s not unusual to meet someone who is waiting tables but living in a paid-for half-million-dollar house, whose pocket money comes out of that part-time job but who flies to ski and sun areas, all over North America and Europe, a few times a year, and who can’t touch the principal but has a few hundred grand in the bank. Some of them turn into the peculiar lifetime potheads known as trustifarians, some become perpetual imitators of venture capitalists who are forever on the brink of a good deal but don’t have the capital (because their parents won’t let them play with the real money), a few become activists for the more radical environmental groups or the more dedicated Christian rightists, but most just sort of drift, year to year, from one pointless activity to another, unable to forget that finally what they do isn’t going to matter.
Jenapha Lee had a number of gifts as far as I could see. She could smoke with an air of deep thought. She wore expensive clothes very well. And she could talk artsy, though not art theory. She was explaining Skin2Skin to me. “The thing is, that even though Skin2Skin totally sucks, it totally sucks in a way that’s really important, so we gotta keep playing, especially because there’s no reason to.”
“Why?” I asked, feeling sillier than usual.
“I just told you. Because there’s no reason. Like, people are always doing things for reasons, and if they weigh out the pros and cons and all those, then the reasons will add up to doing just one thing, and they don’t have any choice, they have to do that one thing, so not having choice, they’re not free. I mean, I know all this stuff. I had a second major in philosophy for a while and I know it, and the instructor said my final paper in this one class was really good. So I know that I know what I’m talking about, and it’s just as plain as it gets, you know, that when people let their reason run their lives, they aren’t free. See, like, why are people of the First Nations free, you know like they are so free that they are symbols of freedom?”
I glanced sideways at Kermit. Coors Light and having a reasonably sane, ordinary conversation with Molly had mellowed me, so I didn’t want to start pointing out just what kind of “freedom” the native/Indian/First Nations people had, which would merely have been a case of spitefully picking a fight with Travis’s girlfriend, but on the other hand, I didn’t want an educated person of color to think I bought into this kind of bullshit, because I’m an academic and most of us would rather die than know that anyone with darker skin than us thinks we’re full of shit. Kermit shrugged, like a man who did not want to be an example but couldn’t get out of the room. While I was still thinking about whether or not to interrupt her, Jenapha Lee went on. “They’re free because there’s no reason for them to be here, see, it’s the same thing as no place in the modern world, only they’re really free, because with no reason, they can’t be controlled by the reason, see?”
“We’re fucking lucky to get invited to a fucking UN Conference on fucking genocide,” Jake put in. He hadn’t taken his mirrorshades off yet. Travis was right; he did look like an angry bug. “If we go white and learn to fit in we vanish, and if we don’t we just fold up and die. We’re about the most unnecessary people on the Earth. We’re the victims of a crime so big that all the law is inside the crime.”
“I’ll buy that much,” I said.
“You’re white. You’ll steal that much.”
“So,” Jenapha Lee said, “the thing that makes Skin2Skin so necessary, so totally necessary, is okay, maybe, like musically, they suck, suck bigtime, you know? That makes them a band without a reason, which is a comment on a people without a reason, which means that it’s about free people. So it’s all about freedom.”
By now I was seriously considering arguing. I didn’t want to get along too well with her and let Travis think I approved of his taste, and having him think that might mean I would have this conversation repeatedly for the next several years, because he was acting and talking pretty smitten. So I needed to establish a boundary or twelve—
Melody Wallace walked in.
Feeling a deep evil impulse, I waved at her to get her over to our table. She came over, grinning to find me here, and her eyes lit up to see Travis.
Glances bounced around between Travis, Melody, and Jenapha Lee, about as fast and about as numerous as photons around three charged balls, but the interactions were more complex. It did have one beneficial effect; Jenapha Lee stopped looking bored and started to get lively. Introductions zoomed around the table, and I generously scooted sideways to let Melody in between me and Travis. He had the patient expression of a man who has broken a tooth on a Friday at three in the afternoon, cannot get down to town before six, and knows that the local dentist is due back on a late Tuesday flight.
I went to take a leak, and as I was standing at the middle urinal in the Portal Potty, someone huge stood next to me. I looked up to see a big, ragged hippie type, who I could smell even over the stench of a roadhouse bathroom, and then realized. “Brown Pierre,” I said.
“Hey, John, Travis said you were up here in this part of the country now.”
Well, one of the strangest things about the Ivy Plus Fifty, that circuit of hyper-endowed colleges that much of the American ruling class goes to, is that no matter who you were in school, or who you are now, if you run into someone from the same place, or especially a classmate, you can hardly stop comparing notes and establishing that you’re both part of the group. We went up and had a beer at the bar, and then shouted stuff in each other’s ears during the next Skin2Skin set. It was kind of like having a casual beer with the Unabomber, except that as far as I knew Brown hadn’t actually blown anyone up, and kind of like old home week on Mars, exchanging information about “ … what happened to that girl who used to whirl around every dance floor all by herself and never talked? Did she really marry a senator?” and “ … so did those two get married and have their optimal three little tax deductions, a boy athlete, a girl scientist, and a troubled but talented gay composer, and retire at forty-five like they planned, or by any chance did something mess up the plan?” and the perennially popular “no shit, Billy the Goon is a federal judge now.”
He had to leave early—turned out that he lived up in Crestone, about thirty miles away, and had things to do in the morning, so Brown only stayed for one set. He and Molly and I decided we had bonded by agreeing that Skin2Skin were really terrible but it was very wrong of us to notice.
So I shook Brown’s hand and we laughed and said we
should step up the frequency of our meetings, to maybe once every ten years, and he took off at the band break. I went back to rejoin Melody, Travis, and Jenapha at the band table.
The tension could have been cut with an ax, barely. It was one more thing for me to not like about Jenapha—she was the sort who acts indifferent until someone else wants what she has, and then really switches up the bright-and-charming girl act, which I think is about as tacky a way to treat someone you care about as there is. Melody was making sure we all knew which one was the Ph.D., which was equally tacky, really, but I’m more used to it. Travis was trying not to look spineless or like a jackass and was failing in all directions at once.
The Irwin brothers peed, drank some cold water, and decided to do the sensible thing, chicken out, and start their next set ASAP. Jenapha more or less grabbed Travis and dragged him onto the dance floor. The white kids in dreads followed immediately and soon they were all hopping around in the same sort of controlled spasm as before.
“Not much like dancing, is it?” Melody bellowed in my ear.
“Is that what they’re doing?”
