Sloughing Off the Rot (5 page)

One morning, as the men walked, John noticed movement far off on a ridge. A lone figure stood, hand held above his brown eyes to block the sun, and gazed in John’s direction. Although John could not tell from the distance, the man on the ridge was tall and strong. His name was Three Tooth.

The lines ran deep and dark on Three Tooth’s face. His long black hair, held out of his face by a leather band with feathers tucked into it, flowed most of the way down his back. His thick arms and legs were intentionally branded with hieroglyphics, the raised burn scars telling the tale of his ancestors and their role as guardians of the red brick road. Three Tooth watched the men in the distance plod along the road. He saw the strange little bearded man jumping around and circling the taller man dressed in white. Santiago tossed bits of refuse along the roadside as he jumped about and his littering saddened Three Tooth, drawing one briny tear from the Indian’s eye.

Three Tooth gathered his rag-tag band of desert scurves and led them in a vector that aimed to intersect with the course of John and Santiago. Leading the pack was Three Tooth, bareback on his pale white horse named Morticia. Three Tooth, sitting as if there were a board strapped to his back and staring forward, his face tense, his mouth a slit and white lines where his lips should be. Following Morticia was Heap-o-Buffaloes, a stringy Chinese-looking man decked out in buckskins and fringed moccasin boots. Heap-o-Buffaloes, skipping dangerously close to the horse’s hind legs but never provoking her to kick backward at him. Trailing Heap-o-Buffaloes were two pale-skinned, toe-headed, glazed-eyed mamelukes – Crazy Talk and Throws-Like-Girl – walking side by side and passing a fuming clay pipe between them. Bringing up the rear, grinning like a village idiot, was the shovel-toothed, squat and swarthy Melungeon sluggard, Two-Dogs-Fucking. A scraggly, sparse beard failed in its efforts to camouflage the lack of a jaw line on Two-Dogs-Fucking and only served to draw attention to the flabby turkey neck beneath it that jiggled excitedly whenever he shook his head. Two-Dogs-Fucking, with his bare, floppy man-tits and his bottom-half wrapped only in a too-small bath towel that constantly threatened to fall off (but never did). In one hand Two-Dogs-Fucking gripped a cooked leg of turkey vulture that he intermittently gnawed upon; in the other he held a rope that led a battered and sickly donkey, Alf the Sacred Burro. In a nearby juniper skeleton, a roost of turkey vultures trailed Two-Dogs-Fucking with resentful eyes.

“And now is the time when we dance and draw upon the energy of the great spirit,” said Three Tooth, hopping on one foot and working up the momentum to switch back and forth from foot to foot. With his hips dropped low and his back arched up, Three Tooth jumped from foot to foot, throwing his head and hands toward the sky. And his slow, graceful movements, so unlike the crazed and flailing lunk-afflicted dancers, caught like a slow burn among the men. And all but Two-Dogs-Fucking mimicked Three Tooth’s movements and pranced in a circle around Alf the Sacred Burro and Two-Dogs-Fucking. The dancing men chanted in tongues unknown to Alf and slowly moved their party in the direction of John and Santiago.

“Come now, dance my round little friend,” said Three Tooth to Two-Dogs-Fucking, slapping him on the ass to infect the slothful slug with dance fever.

Ignoring Three Tooth’s call to the ghost dance, Two-Dogs-Fucking adjusted his towel, heaved his substantial gut in front of himself, and slowed the pace of his thick, bare, ham steak feet. “Sir,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking to Three Tooth, “I simply don’t feel motivated today. Perhaps instead of dancing I could sit a while and enjoy a mid-morning meal.”

Two-Dogs-Fucking’s seamless transition from sluggard to laggard saddened Three Tooth. A tear leaked from his eye because he found himself growing tired of Two-Dogs- Fucking’s lack of motivation and general malaise. The round man’s apathy was infectious. It tainted Three Tooth’s psyche, making him prone to bouts of melancholy. Three Tooth found that he had developed a sad, leaky eye that watered at the slightest provocation since taking Two-Dogs-Fucking into his circle. The sadness made Three Tooth want to drink chicha much more than he used to. This was a problem. And the tear that trickled down Three Tooth’s cheek strengthened his resolve to remedy the Two-Dogs-Fucking situation.

Alf the Sacred Burro and Two-Dogs-Fucking ambled at the most leisurely of paces and were circled by the slow-motion circular movement of the dancing men. Unlike Three Tooth and the others, Alf did not mind Two-Dogs-Fucking’s lack of motivation. Alf himself rarely felt the urge to do much besides sit on his haunches, munch at the desert grasses and flowers, and get his mangy head scritched by whomever might be so willing. Two-Dogs-Fucking was often the scritcher, and the scritching came at the expense of making any other contributions to the wellbeing of the crew. The dancing men moved their circle along, slowly, as if Alf and Two-Dogs-Fucking were an anchor they had to drag across the ground. Despite their burden, the men stomped about and threw their heads back and chanted in unison to the sky. Three Tooth and his gracefully prancing crew moved like a great sand-slug across the desert, eventually intersecting the course of John and Santiago on the red brick road. When the two groups met, Three Tooth’s eye dribbled a tear. And the sky commiserated with Three Tooth in a brief but heavy cloudburst.

Three Tooth dismounted Morticia and walked toward John, his hands held up, palms out in a greeting and as a show of the absence of aggression. Behind Three Tooth, his men stayed in one spot, chanting and circling Two-Dogs-Fucking and Alf the Sacred Burro (who both sat on the ground, recuperating from their walk). At the precise moment that Three Tooth set foot on the red brick road, the rain ceased. And a bolt from the blue gashed the sky and struck nearby, the lightning forking and striking both a juniper tree and a thorn bush. A loud snap of instant thunder slapped the men, making them cringe involuntarily and raising the hair on their necks. The smell of ozone filled the air. The super-heated juniper exploded into pieces and the sand on the ground around it turned to glass. The thorn bush caught fire and maintained a steady, fierce flame.

The tall, muscular scurve, with his hieroglyphic brands and leaky eye, held out his hand. “How,” he said in a deep, soft tone, and then cleared his throat.

“How,” answered John quickly, holding his hand up, palm out in what he guessed would pass for a proper greeting.

“You did not let me finish,” said Three Tooth, clearing his throat again. “How…do you do? My name is Three Tooth. I’ve been watching you. My men and I are here to help.”

“I’m John. And I guess I do just fine. We’ve seen you up on the ridges watching us. Haven’t we, Santiago?”

But Santiago did not answer. He was already settled Indian style in the middle of a dirt-rat colony, catching the rodents and snuffing them out. Consumed by his ever-present hunger, Santiago showed no interest in Three Tooth and his crew. John noticed a sneer on Santiago’s face that did not coincide with the pleasure he usually derived from killing dirt-rats. Santiago would not look over toward Three Tooth or his men. His concentration on the dirt-rats seemed more intense than usual and appeared to be intentional disregard of the newcomers.

Three Tooth stood with his arms crossed, waiting for John to say more. John studied Three Tooth and his men, not knowing exactly what to make of their strange appearance. His brain felt thick, slow, atrophied. All he had been doing was walking, and eating dirt-rats and pinyon nuts, and sleeping and walking some more for forty days and forty nights. And it was as if the repetitive, rhythmic thud of his feet on the ground had shut his brain down, making him only slightly more thoughtful than the mindless lunkheads that he and Santiago occasionally encountered. He had forgotten his journey and that he was a stranger in a strange land and that he had at some point lived some other life (about which he was still entirely clueless). Three Tooth’s appearance jabbed at a sensitive spot in John’s brain, shocking him back to complete consciousness. And John found himself once again wondering who he was, where he was, why he was, and what he used to be.

And Three Tooth stood, tall and stiff, waiting for something. In the distance, Two-Dogs-Fucking spread out on the desert floor and napped, his ragged inhalations hitching and signaling to his body that maybe he had done enough and it was time to call it quits. Alf the Sacred Burro sat on his haunches like a dog, flicking his ears at a large black munkle fly that flitted about and pestered him. Bald patches on the donkey’s hide – worn there by time and mistreatment and (sometimes) his own teeth – marked his many misfortunes and hardships. A bullet scar on Alf’s right hindquarter memorializes an old friendship. Ruminating on his life (a donkey lives a long time), Alf dredged up a foul shit-brown lump from his stomach and horked it onto the desert floor. Throws-Like-Girl, Crazy Talk, and Heap-o-Buffaloes, now tired from the ghost dance, settled on a downed tree. They passed their pipe, never having to light it, and bounced their-heads to a beat that only they could hear. Crazy Talk picked up Alf’s hairy, brown, charcoal-briquette-sized throat-lump, clicked a fingernail on it, and put it in his pocket. “Bezoar,” he said. “Sunny fish melon jelly balling the jack at the meat wagon now.” Throws-Like-Girl and Heap-o-Buffaloes nodded their heads and smiled.

A flurry of questions swirled around inside John’s head like a dust devil, picking up random debris and then violently casting it aside, only to pick up more of the wreckage of his psyche and toss it about. Gripped by a new yearning to learn about his situation, John resumed his conversation with Three Tooth. “So what’s the deal? Why are you here? Why me? What can you tell me?”

Three Tooth laughed gently and a tear leaked from his eye. He waved his hands in the air, beckoning his compadres. All of the men but Two-Dogs-Fucking slowly rose to their feet. With his big toe, Crazy Talk poked at Two-Dogs-Fucking’s ribs, waking him and eliciting a machine-gun-like burst of laughter from the fat man.

“Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha!” went Two-Dogs-Fucking’s grating guffaw. In response, Alf the Sacred Burro got to his feet and walked away with his usually-erect ears pinned back flat against his head, his irritated bray sounding not unlike the laughter that prompted him to move.

And Two-Dogs-Fucking’s friends echoed his laughter, “Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha,” finally breaking into their own genuine laughs, satisfied that they had sufficiently mocked their ridiculous companion. Throws-Like-Girl, Crazy Talk, and Heap-o-Buffaloes meandered over to Three Tooth and John. Alf stumbled along behind them, trying to keep his distance from Two-Dogs-Fucking lest the man should break out in laughter again. And, not yet on his feet, Two-Dogs-Fucking rolled around a bit, like a turtle flipped on his back. Flopping his arms ineffectually at the ground in an effort to sit up, Two-Dogs-Fucking eventually succeeded in getting all of the way to his feet and ambling over to the others.

The mongrel tribe of desert scurves standing before John was as motley a crew as he could expect to see: an Indian, a Chinaman, a Melungeon and two blond surfer-types. All of them but Two-Dogs-Fucking dressed like Native Americans. And the Melungeon, wrapped only in a too-small bath towel, reinforced the bizarre impression with a hearty greeting of “Halloooooo,” his voice starting out deep and rising to a ridiculously high warble.

“What is this? Who are you people?” asked John

The tears leaking from the tall Indian’s eye belied the three-toothed smile on his face. “We are the lies you have told, the promises you have broken. The helpless and weak and weary that you have ignored and abandoned. The children you have failed. We are the shame that you have suppressed. We are your low self esteem. We are your self-loathing. We are your sadness.” And the donkey stood next to him, nudging his head at Three Tooth’s hand for a scritching. The oily tear tracks running from Alf’s eyes gave him a look of sadness to match that of Three Tooth.