We got a lot of strange looks,

the old Navajo and I. He didn’t fit in at Denny’s. The hostess wrinkled her nose at his eau de dumpsteur when she seated us. He cackled and coughed as she walked away, her double-wide hips swishing in their polyester casing. My eyes watered, and I wasn’t sure if it was from breathing last night’s Thunderbird or the broken heart seeing always gave me. Bearing witness. I wondered what Kit Carson would make of this, any of it. All of it.

He ordered the Grand Slam, over easy, and I drank a pot of coffee while I watched him eat, his fingertips emerging from their gloves of layered grime, grease running down his proud chin. He was old, and I wondered what had broken him. Then, recalling the two summers I’d spent on the Res working a landscaping and irrigation crew as a supervisor in my late teens, didn’t have to wonder at all. When you spend a lifetime searching for who you used to be, who you’re supposed to become, finding neither, it isn’t hard to slide into a bottle. Those curved walls offer the illusion of clarity while they warp the world, the way a smile warps a politician’s face. Two-hundred years of grief and loss creasing nut-brown faces deeper than twenty centuries of sun and wind.

He wasn’t getting a piece of the casino. Twin arrows had pierced his heart, and the hearts of his land and people. Their names were progress and profit.

The rumble of eighteen-wheelers passing on the interstate shook the air while overweight drivers waddled across the lot to the pizza buffet. Wal-Mart hustled and bustled next door. I needed to get going. It was a long way to Pomona, and the sun was setting the western sky afire. Somewhere out there the old man’s family might be sitting on a hill watching sheep graze, curl-horned rams nuzzling the ancient earth for sustenance. I could feel them, like ghosts sinking below the horizon, pulling wool blankets tighter around themselves as the digital age declared them obsolete and the cold deepened.

When he started licking his plate I ordered him another Grand Slam and drank another pot of coffee while he got himself around it. Later, after I was in the wind, he’d go in search of some liquid warmth, the sort of help I wouldn't offer. I hoped he would find it, and that was goddamn sad.

He’d scared the hell out of me when he popped up from the dumpster while I was tossing my bag of garbage. I’d probably beaned him in the head with it. He was applying his tongue to an empty Snickers wrapper in long slow strokes and never stopped, even as he did the jack-in-the-box.

His eyes settled on mine after a momentary effort, as if he had to concentrate to focus on me, as though I weren’t real, not part of the world. I guess I wasn’t, not for him.

“Hungry,” he said. No shame, just fact.

I stared at him, my heart subsiding into something like a normal beat, if there ever was such a thing. I could smell him from ten feet away, beneath the broiler smoke and fryer steam wafting on the breeze. A raven circled overhead, waiting its turn.

“Yeah?” I said.

He nodded, slow, eyes never leaving mine and some kind of dark amusement in them, as if he could at least find a minimal satisfaction in frightening the white boy skipping along the edge of his former range.

I thought about that, remembering the twenty guys we’d kept in beer money and gasoline back in ’91, how they’d amounted to something like two-hundred faces filtering through our three job sites, how a few had stuck for the whole gig, how we’d become friends, hitting the bootlegger’s for a buck a beer and foil-wrapped dimes of diesel-soaked weed. Peyote meetings and fishing at Tsaile Lake and a desperate groping toward companionship with a dusky beauty ten years my senior, fueled by lust and the Sweethearts of the Rodeo and Bud Light, and that searching for definition that I understood was actually our only real common ground.

“Yeah,” he said.

I thought about the looks we’d get, the whispers and behind the hand comments and maybe the manager coming over to tell us we had to go. The affront my new friend and I would hand them, the dare to show themselves. I recalled a stray bitch in a parking lot two-thousand miles away, teats heavy and sagging, ribs showing, eyes darting, a can of tuna and a small hunk of cheese and a whole lot of sorry for the human race. I wondered what it all said about me.

The old man took my measure, waist-deep in refuse. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just curious to see what I’d do.

I stared back for a moment. Then I gave a little upward nod and pointed over his shoulder at the Denny’s with my lips and said, “Come on then,” and turned my back while he scrambled over the side.


SR

***

Like most of these posts this little tale is more memory than story, and that's because it stuck with me, and that's because its not little at all. As the horizon of the past recedes into the distance, it looms above the other landmarks, a milepost casting a long shadow. 

What looms large in your rearview mirror?