Suzanne opens the door to her house, her house surrounded by drought yellow fields and two horses at the gate, both of them staring at me, one of them jerking its head up and back as if to beckon me or to push away the flies buzzing around him landing in his big blue horse eyes blue as the Roswell sky and I’m saddle sore from all day riding my motorcycle a 1987 Suzuki Intruder burgundy and hot as a stove top burner red, my stomach empty, and Suzanne says, “Hello! Welcome! Nice to meet you, my husband is away at work all weekend, take your shoes off I’ll show you to your room,” and I wonder why she mentions right away her husband being away all weekend and she leads me upstairs to the room I’ve rented for the night, the room with the big bed and the shower and the washer and drier. I chose this room over every other because of the big bed and the shower and the washer and drier, even paid more to be here over anywhere else because I haven’t showered in a week, not through Ohio, not through Louisiana, I swam in a lake my sweat like oil stains rainbow coloured floating on the skin of the water of east Texas and a thunderstorm hit and I watched it from under an awning at the dock with a young Mexican family who smiled at me but didn’t seem to speak any English save the husband who turned to me after a big bolt of lightning crack and we all went “oooh!” and he said, “Big storm!” and I nodded yes and I smiled and they smiled back, the husband and wife smiling and their son who stared at me unsmiling, me smelling like the musk of an animal, some gasoline mammal and lake water and all my clothes were sweat stained too.
I hear Suzanne downstairs making herself dinner in the kitchen surrounded by photos of her now adult children and her husband away, listening to tell me lies / tell me sweet little lies / tell me tell me lies, I shower off all the sweat and the gasoline and the flies and I wipe the steam off the mirror and I look at myself and I can’t recognize myself, I only still know who I was before this.
In the morning Suzanne has coffee brewed and everything smells clean like lavender clean like coffee. I tell Suzanne about an accident I’d seen coming through southern New Mexico, through the two lane oil field road, through the desert surrounded by stacks shooting live fire up into the sky and there was a long line of cars that had stopped all jammed on the road and I stopped behind them, a helicopter flew so low up over my head and down into the highway of that desert not three hundred meters away, just beyond as far as the hill ahead of us rose and it landed there on the road. People were standing on the shoulder talking in small groups, shaking hands, a man with leather for skin and a cowboy hat of the same colour leather came to me with a bottle of water, said, “You’re gonna need this, son,” and I thanked him as he continued, “Ah used to ride one-a them back in mah day, how far ya comin?” I told him Canada and he laughed and when I asked him what happened he said, “Well I’ll tell ya, I dunno but mah best guess’s some oil boy worked a double overtime shift, drove ten miles of ‘is hundred mile ride home, closed ‘is eyes fer a second just to see how good it might feel. Now he won’t be openin them eyes again.” He told me this happens all the time, “Get settled in, could be til sunset to clean that mess up.” I walked up ahead to see what happened and what I saw was a large white man in a large white truck and the hood of the truck was torn in half and there was a semi truck not far off with its hood a little banged up too and a paramedic was talking with the large man in shock but alive, bits of truck scattered over the road, the desert shining now with treasures of chrome like jewels and people watching as another paramedic used the jaws of life to tear the entire front half of the large man’s truck clean off and they were able to pull the large man out so careful, lay him out on a bright orange board and six men carried him, still alive mind you but like pall bearers to the helicopter and they were off into the sky and away and cars stopped on both sides of the accident as far through the desert as you could see, straight to the stacks shooting fire skyline. I walked back to where my bike and the leather skinned man stood and he said “That man dead?” and I said no, he’s alive, who knows how much alive though and the leather skinned man said, “God bless ‘im, I’ll pray for ‘im tonight y’all better do the same,” and I said I would and I told Suzanne all this and she said that happens all the time out here, bad crashes on that road, too much, and she worries about her husband working there in the oil fields too and she wishes she were back in Houston, “This is my home but that’s where my heart is,” she says and she looks outside at the horse as she says this, the horse who’d beckoned me just one day before, now looking to the horizon himself, myself brand new now.
I’m not sure if I’ll go back to Taos.
Santa Fe is a great brown beautiful spinning plate in the dancing gyroscope New Mexico and just beyond to the north are hills and mountains and a stream leads you up and up past Danger: Falling Rocks signs and they guide you sixty minutes to the dark side of a rocky gate like climbing a rollercoaster and when you reach the top the Taos valley opens up like outstretched arms and the sun is setting and everything is lit like the setting sun through quartz, through crystal, everything misty and warm and the dot of Taos there in the valley like a bullseye. Looking into it, driving into the valley, I pull over to the shoulder of the road because I can’t see through the feeling in my chest that expands through my body like a blooming yucca and causes me to cry there in my motorcycle helmet moving 100. I drive down into the valley through the bullseye, the sky growing dark, and move on into Arroyo Seco, a village just past downtown Taos, up in the Taos ski valley.
It’s dark now and I pull into the farm where I’m staying, brush off the dust, I walk inside into the kitchen of the farm and it’s all woofers and healers and people looking to be healed and it’s noisy with breath and the dozen people sitting at the table all of them handsome and dirty most of them women they all stop and they stare at me walking in and I say hello and one of them, a woman who introduces herself to me as Kate, says “You’re just in time for dinner, can I give you some food?” and I say yes but I’d like to sign in first if I can, to put my bags away, can I stay two nights? Kate leads me by the hand to a room, the hem of her long desert dress brushing my legs, she says with a softness and an ease, “You’re welcome here, I’m your friend now.”
I’m eating a meal of spinach and rice and spices, summer squash and sweet potato and it’s the first good meal I’ve had in the days stretched out like months motorcycled on this road, the man sitting next to me a tall man strangely sad and handsome his name is Jerome, he says, “How long you staying? We could use another man around the farm to help us with the man things,” and he laughs and I say sorry, I’d love to but I’m here two nights, I’m passing through on my way to California, I’ve dreamt of riding my motorcycle up highway 1 up the Pacific, my bike breaking down and pushing it into the ocean. “Well you’re welcome here anyway,” he says.
The next day we, all of us, Kate and Jerome and me and everyone else go to the Rio Grande and we sit in a hot spring pool warm and silent and Kate sits next to me and she puts me at ease as charming as a slow dance and three nude men nearby sing peyote songs and a sleeping dog there with them, Jerome singing too and when we leave, driving a dirt road late summer, a black dog from the bushes comes and runs at my moving motorcycle, head on and barking, and I swerve to avoid him and my bike falls and the dog runs off. The next day, what’s meant to be my last day here, I bring my bike to a mechanic who says the damage will take a week to fix.
I stay in Taos, New Mexico.
Luna owns the farm and she’s a healer and she’s in her seventies, her cabin hidden behind the farm sunlight stained brown decorated with tinctures and powders and scattered drying mushrooms and every morning she conducts classes with us all where she teaches us how to make toothpaste or how the lungs work or the origin of the universe, some people are scared of her, she’s powerful and she’s very sweet to me and she lets me stay as long as I need, as long as I’m willing, I ask for a week and she touches my face and says, “we’re all so happy you’re here.” In the afternoon Jerome and I mow her great green lawn shirtless drinking beer, our shirts wrapped around our heads, it’s good to feel the sun on my chest, to breathe the dog air of fading summer.
We smell like cut grass and like beer and we’ve accomplished something notable, something like men might want to accomplish, and we go to the only bar in town, the bar lined with old men each of them like the man I met on the road full of leather and there’s an old woman behind the bar and a ten year old boy and the ten year old boy takes our money as the woman opens us beers and we sit outside in the sun still sun drunk, Jerome says, “Hey so you’re a hippie right? How am I doing?” and I say just fine, what do you mean?
And Jerome tells me, “I used to work for this big company as a stage manager, I travelled all over the country,” he says, “then I quit, got burnt out from all the drinking and the moving and a different woman in every city. I got stuck in Santa Fe on my motorcycle, kinda like you, and I worked in this bar and Cormac McCarthy was a regular there, I served him a scotch every damn day. And do you believe it but he told me ‘you should go to Taos for a weekend’ and I did, I came here and I didn’t go back, didn’t tell Cormac McCarthy I quit my job even, let someone else serve him his scotch, you know? He’ll be fine,” and he leans back in his chair and he takes a big breath like a big man and he says, “I don’t need no more money no more.” He chugs his beer and he admires the empty bottle and gets up from the table and I’m alone now, I’m grateful and I’m drunk and Jerome comes back with another two beers and two shots of whiskey and we drink them fast, me and this brand new hippie man, hippie feather in his hippie hair. And there’s a field full of horses near and when it’s dark we wander into it, drunker than the leather men at the bar have ever been, him ahead of me laughing and falling into bushes stumbling after the horses who trot away and then I can’t hear him laughing anymore and I hear coyotes howling like light snow falling on Christmas Eve night and I’m on my back laying in the dust and once there was a woman who told me about this place and I loved her then and once I came here with a different woman I loved and I loved her then too and I’m wearing a sweater that another woman I loved once loved and the horses buck and they bray around me spinning and dancing with the stars spinning over us. When I wake up it’s darker still and I’m shivering, my entire body cold, my bones cold and it’s hard to stand on my shaking legs and I stumble like a newborn horse feeling blind through the silence and the dust and the spinning, whispering, “Jerome...”
I find the farm and it’s asleep, everyone, Jerome’s there asleep splayed out like a starfish and I sit fetal on the couch in the main room near the fireplace and I’m humming like an engine that won’t start, the largest blanket wrapped around me and the shaking slows, slowly the cold rises, I hear sock foot footsteps and Kate is there in pajamas and she says in a whisper, “Hey, what are you doing?” I hum and I beckon her with my head, toward me, and I open the blanket and she sits there with me in the blanket and says, “Oh god you’re so cold!” and she doesn’t ask me what happened and she holds me there and the shaking stops.
In a few days I’ll be driving through Arizona alone again and tired and a storm will surround me the entire eight hours like a grey gold ring in the sky, threatening, me in the hole in the middle, thunder crashing on every side, either chasing the rain or being chased and I’ll suffer every minute of it, every healer in my heart. I tell Jerome about the man I saw when I was here a few years ago, he was a former stuntman and he was shirtless in a cowboy hat, jeans, he was throwing a football and thunder crashed on the horizon behind him and that image stayed with me ever since, it’s so strange to be back here where that man stood more art than man. We’re dissolving bits of peyote under our tongues and he says, “Maybe I’m that same guy now, maybe you’re him for me.” There’s a blanket of anxiety lining the insides of my body, the back end mostly, the back of my skull all down my spine and it’s coming down, it’s dissolving like peyote under our tongues and I breathe in deep. We sit watching the grass which is a wonder and the dogs of Arroyo Seco that wander free are coming to us, we wave to them and we tell them and each other our stories about everything, we become the same person and the dogs become us too and Kate finds us there and she has a dog with her and she says, “Hey, I found this dog in the street and she was really nervous, I asked around and no one has seen her here before,” and there’s a tag on her collar that says Daisy and a California phone number too and we try to call the number but nobody answers and now Daisy is with us, the four of us here together. I tell Daisy, “You’re welcome here, I’m your friend now,” and her eyes are cataract old and they’re kind and she’s following me like a duckling. We find her a leash and we give her some water and we walk her down the street and we pass a funeral procession, locals holding photos of a teenage boy wearing dark Oakley sunglasses, shirtless and track pants, the photos held to the sky, twenty men and women silent walking down this road and none of them are crying, faces like the sand and the stone, they don’t look at us. We make room, we move aside.
At the cemetery Kate takes out candles and she and Jerome sit in the grass chatting in whispers, her chanting and I walk with Daisy between the graves, I show her the colourful sad beauty of New Mexico, every tomb a piece of art, every body artful, piles of fresh dirt and ribbons and red and gold and lavender like a birthday, no darkness, there’s no sadness here. A pickup driving past slows down to a stop, it drives in and through the graveyard and it stops before me and a man gets out and he says, “Daisy!” and Daisy smiles and she walks to him. He picks her up and he holds her and he says, “You found Daisy! Thank you! Where was she?” I tell him, everything that happened, how Kate found her, how Daisy followed like a duckling after me, how we’re friends now, he has tears in his eyes and he says, “She’s getting old, she keeps wandering away. I’m scared I’m going to lose her.”
That night Kate and I watch Casablanca together in the house in the movie room, we watch it on an old VHS tape and we eat toast with peanut butter and honey and she falls asleep on me and I think I could be happy doing this for the rest of my life and the next day she’s gone and Jerome leaves a few days later too because we’re all here to give and to go and before I leave Luna tells me to close my eyes and she says, “I’m sending 10,000 rays of light through your body,” and I feel something like magic like warmth flowing through my blood.
My motorcycle breaks down again. I’m one mile into California, just beyond the Colorado River. I get a tow to the nearest town and in the nearest town I get a motel room and the town has no name and there is no grocery store here, everyone is buying food at the 99 cent store, everything is plastic and I call every mechanic within 50 miles and no mechanic will help me and it’s a long weekend now, it’s coming on Columbus Day, and the town is empty. I walk my bike into the desert behind the motel, I push it up a hill, up a dune, and the other side of the dune is desolate and there’s one lush aloe plant and when I push my motorcycle in neutral down the hill, gone forever now, it lands in front of the only aloe plant prostrate like a believer. This is the end of the world and everything here is poison, the only person I meet is an old man in the parking lot of the motel and his stomach hangs so far out that he waddles and his stomach is half way in his pants, his belt holding his pants at his belly button his shirt tucked in and he’s pale white and I can’t see his eyes behind his dark sunglasses and the cowboy hat that looks fresh as a daisy in Spring and he has a gun at his hip and he asks me, “You stayin’ here too?” and I say yes and he says, “Which room you in?” and I’m naive and I’m nervous because he has a gun and I tell him 207 and he says, “hmph,” and he walks off and he goes into his room, 107, directly beneath me, flies buzzing around my head, particles of sand and stone like every star in the California sky and I don’t sleep that night, I don’t sleep and I rent a car and I drive to Las Vegas my body full of light and shaking like a sun that won’t set.
Brad Casey's first book of poetry, The Idiot on Fire, was published by Metatron. His writing has been featured in The Puritan, glitterMOB, VICE, The 4 Poets and more. This story comes from his first novel, She Passed Through, as yet unpublished. He is a Canadian writer currently living in Berlin.