Click the link:   comstock-chronicle-oct-2.pdf

 

“If only those ‘others’ could understand what I know,” Miguel thought. He didn’t talk, he didn’t feel he had to.

He was slow to get dressed, he couldn’t stop shaking the small plastic globe, the fascination had become a full-blown idea, one he’d never be able to share, not that he really wanted too.

“A world,” he grunted as he slipped his pants on, “A globe, a dome, and we all live in it and under it.”

“Miguel!” he heard his Madre say, “Your desayanos getting cold. Prisa!”

His thought of the dome disappeared as he hurried towards the kitchen.

Not even one cloud could be seen for entertainment sake as I lay flat on my back, the cement pad as a bed, suffering back spasms. Usually I go inside and flop on the futon, which is laid out like a bed in the back room when my back says ‘Screw you, we’ve had enough.’
Couldn’t make to the futon, so I laid down after dragging the last box out of the garage and behind our gate. Been feeling the pain every since and not even three shots of whiskey has managed to mask the pain of my ‘four and five.’

Laughingly, both dogs came over to see what was going on. Yaeger gave me a sniff, then wandered off to piss in the yard, while Buddy felt it necessary to lay on me and lick my sweaty face.

We’re getting up early in the morning, so we can go buy glue and insulation. And as I sit here, tapping out these words, I realized that I’ve no idea how I’m going to insulate the ceiling other than hanging some drywall first.

Before I put up the insulation, I plan to hide a family picture and short note in an envelop so that one day, after my wife and I are gone, and our son has sold the place, a family doing some remodeling will find it and learn a brief history of their home. I’ve always wanted to do this and though my wife poo-poo’d the idea, I’m doing it anyway.

Think I’ll add a ‘Trump 2020’ sticker and a Comstock Chronicle too, so they’ll also have some dated memorabilia.

Miguel rolled over in his bed, pulling the twisted sheets out from under his body. He reached for the plastic snow globe and spun it back and forth.

The autistic boy smiled as the flakes of snow flitted and floated about the water and drifted to the blue base of the globe. Miguel didn’t realize it, but his dream was quickly fading from his thoughts.

“Simple minded,” he’d heard the others say, but Miguel knew different. He was more than ‘different,’ he was ‘especial’ and knew it, even if the others didn’t understand.

“Desayuno!” he heard his mother call out.

Even Covid-19 picked Trump over Biden.

With horror, she touched the gun tucked in her black sweat shirt’s pocket. It brought a glaze of sweaty moisture to her neck and back and she pushed the hood of her shirt from her head.

“God, it’s bright out here,” she complained.

Standing up, she walked to a nearby garbage can and dropped the gun into the trash. She felt a great weight lift from her shoulders and it felt good.

The city was quiet as she strolled back the way she’d first come. What had she come to the park for in the first place?

She couldn’t remember.

I’ll bet that giraffes don’t know what a fart smells like.

Twice now, I’ve sneezed and it feels like I’ve ripped something from the back of my smoke-parched throat. I do this after learning that the President and First Lady have tested positive for COVID-19.

“Well, folks, that there is the election,” my wife has pronounced.

Meanwhile, someplace in the back of my mind I hear an MSM talking-head gloat that the First Couple are with the disease.

My wife has gone to work, a ‘lunch lady’ we joke, but she’s good like that. Me? I wanna close my eyes, sleep and dream.

But there are sheets and towels to wash and later, beds to make. 12 minutes left in the cycle.

As I await their completion, I’ve turned on our sprinkler system. Section 5 hasn’t been working for the last couple of months and is finally fixed after replacing a burned out solenoid switch.

The poor grass is dry and dying, yet I allow myself to be hypnotized by the rotating sprinklers. Round and round they go, reminding me of playing in the water as a kid.

The image shifts and now I think of my favorite horror character; Cthulhu. But wait! There are no leather wings and then I think of a gigantic spider, a tarantula, one infused with radiation and on the hunt for human blood.

Better yet, I imagine the spinning spray of an Esther William’s movie. I visualize her, in all her fabulous technicolor glory, rising slowly from the center of the water-wheel and gracefully raising her arms above her head and plunging into the…

My poor grass, once so lush that I could lay in it, now dry and dying. Esther Williams has disappeared between the yellow-brown tufts of grass.

I cough.

My throat feels raw from sneezing and now I’ve begun coughing. Hell of a way to start the day as I burble a gulp of hot coffee all over the table.

The washing machine calls for my attention with it’s melodic tone, one I once mistook for my cellphone’s ringer. Answering ones cellphone doesn’t help get the wash into the drier, but it is worth a snicker.

Answering that other call, the sheets are in the drier and I’m sipping another mouthful of coffee. It occurs to me that I ought to go dance in the sprinklers before it gets too late.

Gosh, my coffee tastes great and Esther is such wonderful company.

She started to cry. Long, hard sobs that felt like she were emptying her soul down her face, down to her chin, snot draining from her nose.

Everything seemed to be falling out of her life and she couldn’t control it what was happening. The idea made her begin to laugh, first low and quiet, then loud and even more uncontrolled.

The man with the rosary, the beads, the ability to avoid death, stood and looked down at her but not with any demeaning intent. “Welcome to your new life and have a good one,” he smiled and walked away.

Why I should recall his face after so many years, I don’t know. Dale White Sun is his name and I met him at the Stumps.

A Shoshone, he had never lived on a reservation. No, he grew up a suburban child in Glendale, Arizona.

Once his service was up, he left the Corps and headed off to the desert. I’ve never seen him since, though I did look for him a couple of times, including once the same year my brother died.

“Enjoy the rest of your time in the Suck,” he said, “And look me up when you’re out.”

Final last words as we shook hands and he climbed in his beater ‘73 Chevy Nova. The old ‘No-Go,’ as he called it.

As I lay in bed last night, into morning, I thought of him. I also thought how he’d given me a very small crystal skull.

It was on a piece of leather and was actually made of glass. I thanked him and wore it when ever I had the chance, which was nearly every time I was out of uniform.

It’s stowed in a wooden box among a hundred trinkets collected over a life time. I have since removed the piece of leather after breaking it one afternoon.

Also on my dresser are my tennis shoes. I put them there because we’ve had a sudden infestation of brown scorpions.

As a man of habits, some OCD tendencies, I rap the heel of my sneaker on the carpeted floor in my bedroom and out pops one those bugs. I’m quick about grabbing the bastard by its pissed-off stinger and rushing it outside to set it free.

“I can’t kill it, don’t want to kill it,” I think.

Had I slipped my foot in that shoe, it is no doubt I would have been stung. It is a juvenile in this case, so it would have unloaded all of its poison and my foot would’ve been swollen to twice its size in minutes.

There’s been enough death.

Search as I might, I could never find Dale. I located a bunch of people who know him, directed me out to a place beside a mountain in the Arizona desert, where I found the stone hut he’d began constructing.

But no Dale.

The hut was nearly complete. The wood slats that served as a roof had begun to warp and bend as the sun cooked them, no window panes, only wood shudders and an old bed, blankets and sheets filled with the sand and dust of wind storms.

I returned three times, leaving my skull where he could find it should he suddenly reappear.

After my first trip out, 42 miles one way, go to the right at the fork, half mile passed the new water tank, I started hearing rumors. They were not good rumors.

One afternoon, when I still wore the skull around my neck, now strung on a piece of hemp twine, I was working for a moving company. I casually jumped from the loading dock, a distance of three, perhaps four feet, and the skull rose up and slapped me in the front teeth.

There was a very small chip in my left front tooth, so tiny only I could notice and only when I licked my tongue over the upper bridge. I removed it.

That was a year after my second sojourn into the vast Arizona desert, following the hints I had realized tucked in the many rumors I had heard.

By this time I was certain he was dead. Murdered, either by accident, during a gang beating or purposely during the same violent act.

“If you’re lucky, you might find a bleached bone,” I was told more than one time.

With it came the finger of accusation and who might have done Dale in and why.

“He was an Indian,” this one stated, “He found gold,” that one claimed, “Water,” another said. I could never figure it out and as I skirted closer and closer to the truth, the more I found myself feeling threatened.

No one said or did anything. It was the silence I encountered, a deafening lack of sound, that unless you’re on point , you never hear coming till it is too late.

Years before this, I was hiking by myself when I found a prosthetic leg. Seeing it hung up in the scrub left me chilled, believing there could be a body nearby.

I backed out the way I came and notified the law.

Questioning ensued, nine-hours worth. Then, it was over — after someone looked up the serial number etched in the aluminum shaft and learned the man it belonged to was alive and that the ‘peg’ had fallen from an airplane he’d been in.

How it came to fall from a plane passing over the desert, was never answered. I had to simply accept it and move on.

The third time I returned to the stone hut, I felt the eyes of malignancy on me and I knew I had to beat feet from the area. I grabbed the glass skull I had left for Dale to find, the one he would never return to find and I left.

I’m sure Dale lays buried in shallow grave out in that lonely and mostly empty desert.

Shortly after coming home, where once again I felt safe, I consulted a friend, a Shoshone medicine woman and she performed a ‘closing ceremony,’ at least that’s what I think she called it, and I said goodbye to Dale’s spirit. Tonight, I’m going to place the glass skull in one of my shoes before bedtime.

I have accepted these truths and have learned to move on.