The Headstone

There were those nights when he just couldn't sleep. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he prayed or teased his mind. Thoughts of childhood eluded him like mercury slipping through his fingers. He worried, the tormented silence pounded in his mind, and then the anxiety would set in. Memories of his stint in Vietnam came creeping in like a phantom smoke filled with the faces and the fires. It didn't happen very often, just when the stresses of the job and the farm work, the never ending cycle of the grueling hard work, the frustrations of never quite making ends meet, got to be too much. He had learned long ago that the bottle didn't really help, the pot just bored him, and his wife was usually too tired to administer any comfort, she just needed her sleep and rest, for four a.m. came earlier and earlier as each year crept through her soul. Their love for each other had not so much diminished, it just changed. They had a healthy respect for one another, but amorous thoughts had taken the route of less resistance.

His only salvation anymore during these tattered soul nights was outside, under the blazing crystalline shards of starfire, beneath the gray glow of the moon. He would walk quietly out to the barn and click his horse awake. The warm dusty earthy pungent odors of the barn were a welcome mat for his brain. Relámpago, his beautiful quarter horse (three quarters mule, as he would tease him) would whuffle and ripple through his nose, as if to say, "Always glad to see you, my friend. Did you bring me an apple or some cubes of sugar?" As soon as he touched the saddle which was hanging next to the stall, Relámpago would come alive, slumber would go the way of eohippus, for he loved the adventure that lay ahead and he would start his imitation of a steam engine being stoked, its boiler red hot.

The mesas behind and to the west of his house were the quintessential northern New Mexico ancients. They opened like loving hands to receive the fire in the horse's eyes and the man's mind. The arroyos would open and unfurl like a conquistador flag long forgotten but never gone. The moon cast the shadows of each juniper and piñon tree over the rumps of the plump chamisa bushes where scared little rabbits peeked out at the passing juggernaut, heaving breath, and raising silver grains of dust that glistened for just a few moments in their time of glory before they alighted to join once more the interminable galaxy within their dusty universe.

It was here that peace could finally seep into his mind. Slowly, with the glittering wheel of the heavens turning its magic flow over and over, the hypnotic trance-like procession of his thoughts would join the flow of the celestial river and go meandering--back to the childhood love of life, the open-eyed wonder, back to a time when no one disliked you, when all was happiness and love. A time when it wasn't necessary to pick up the mercury, it was much more fun to scoot it around, breaking the globules into smithereens, then pulling them back together again, the child's big bang theory, played with, just as God plays with the universe, and us, he thought.

From the top of the mesa he could see the whole valley. A few lights flickered in some of the houses and blue smoke drifted slowly, dancing upward till it dissipated somewhere just beneath the stars. How it has changed, he thought. He remembered when his grandmother's house was the only one at the top of the valley and his uncle's house was the only one by the river. Now there were more than eighty homes here and, to his great disgust, about as many trailers, scattered around like big ugly beer cans, filled with drug infested low lifes, crack and heroine dealers from Mexico and loud, drunken locals who had long ago given up and were content to live like a malignant virus infecting the beauty of the valley. And this is what I risked my life for and watched some of my friends get blown away for, he thought, turning his horse towards the north and the B.L.M. lands.

The B.L.M. Bureau of Land Management! What a joke! Bald, Lies, Mother fuckers is what they should call themselves. Millions of acres that the U.S. government just waltzed in and magically acquired. Never mind that the Spaniards who inhabited and lay claim to these lands were still living there, and most didn't even speak English, and were never represented legally, and were denied due process, and it didn't really matter that these families had been in these northern hills almost two hundred years before Plymouth Rock, they were just relieved of their lands! Just like that! No explanations, other than, we don't honor the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaties, or whatever shyster excuse they utilized, no monetary recompense, no apologies, just it's ours, immanent domain. To the victor belong the spoils! That's a hell of a way to run a railroad, except for the railroad owners! Well, fuck them all! That's why me and my cousins and nephews and everyone I know sneak up here and take as much rock and gravel and wood as we want, and I pity the fucking asshole, federal worker who tries to put a stop to us doing it! Be he Anglo, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese, Russian, Martian or whatever, his ass will be grass, and the whole local community will be a lawnmower!