Weavers Needle Vista
Dusk, Good Friday
The whiskey flowed down his gullet to his distended gut, burning, numbing, dumbing. He looked longingly across the table into her emerald eyes, her soft smooth hands caressing his gnarled, arthritic, meat claws.
Time slowed.
A snake slithered across their path.
Yet they sat, walked no path, holding each two hands, not swinging one-hand-in-one side-by-side.
“My Jon, I have missed you so.”
“I miss you, miss you still, ah, uh, Mary. I can feel it, feel it’s true. You are so beautiful. I feel like such a big…” his eyes fell down to his gut and she scolded him easily, with a soft coo, “Jon, you don’t have to look young for me. I was born to love you. I need you, and you have come.”
He sighed, began to reach for another sip of the whiskey, but did not wish to let go her hands.
“Jon, how did you get here?”
He shrugged his shoulders, defeated in memory, “I’m going soft in the head—can’t remember things, feel like I’ve lost my way.”
Her hands released his and caressed his softly feathered head, feeling the bone under the fey hair, “My Jon, please be careful. I would be crushed if you were taken away. If you must go, please let me know. I should be there to care for you. You are a great man, the greatest living hunter. You should be borne by six African kings on a litter.”
She was savagely measuring his skull between her two soft hands, “The shape of your head is perfect. I was glad when your hair thinned, to see such a fine form of phrenological grace. Jon, if it is time, let me know. If you were to pass before I could recover and adore your skull—if THEY should have your head—I would be devastated.”
“Yes, Angel—I agree.”
“My Jon—I have so many things to say to you. Yet when we are together I go mute. You are the only person who listens to me, who cares. I love my people—I am good to them, as you are yours. But they see right through me, like I am furniture. Only you hear me—I was near to death from the silent tears before you came into my life.”
Her blouse was growing taught from the livening of her breasts, which joined with her sultry voice to entrance him. He shook his head, to clear the spell. She giggled like all of Elysium’s brazen bells.
“Jon, I feel forever young in your presence. You always touch me as if I were the age I was when we met. Your hands seem to feel me anew. Your eyes, I am no robot in the dreadful tinker’s hurtshop, when I stand in your eyes.”
He was about to fall into mist, and shook himself awake, gulped the rest of the shot, looked up to see Celina coming his way, reluctantly pulled his hands from Mary, and peeled off another one of those hateful bills.
“A triple, Doll,” he eased as his confidence returned in the empty maze stare of that evil man pictured there.
“Doll again, aye?” she grinned through her weary blue eyes, still possessed with grace. “Please, do not set me up to be bested again by Madam Imbolden.”
They were both in on the joke, giggling about him, and he smiled with resignation, fettered at their dainty table, like some better hunter hung from a tree. The weeping branches hung sadly across the waterfall of his mind.
“Of course, keep the change, Doll. We’re cashing out.”
“I will bring it right up.” Then checking with the real boss, she looked into Mary’s engaging eyes and asked, “If, it pleases your better half?”
Mary batted her eyes in a flutter of feigned modesty, as if every woman in the room did not desperately wish that if only she were so fair and bright that their troubled little world might for once spin right.
Mary looked into his eyes and he held hers but barely as she grinned, “Really, Jon, it is so hard for you to keep from looking at her, on the off chance that she turns her head and casts an approving eye? Whatever am I going to do with you?”
He shrugged, looked over her shoulder, and returned the smile of Celina, granting the little woman a temporary luster to her faded charm.
“Jon, you are too kind, far too kind to my scheming kind. That was sweet, though—why I miss you so. Please, tell me, how does your endless hunt go?”
His eyes flashed taut above his ruin of a nose, “You ran the faɡɡots off. Something is in the air. I think the mountains above us here, are a roost. They have risen in my dreams for some time now, a long time…”
“And here you are, with me.”
Celina returned with the triple shot of whatever nice it was. He took the glass from her weathered hand, still cute, did her a salute, and knocked it back, “Thank ye, Doll.”
She smiled as he rose, feeling like a knew man, holding Mary’s hand, and said, reaching within for the dream threads so haunting him, “This fine lady, has offered to accompany me, beyond something called Lost Dutchman’s Park, to a place where, ‘tis said, God’s finger points to the sky.”
Celina, fully owning Doll, with her fresh smile, regained control of her work space, “Weaver’s Needle Vista, not ten minutes down the road on your right—unless, of course, you walked…”
Mary giggled, “Oh, we have a ride,” and hugged her new ally, “Thanks, DOLL.” And the two doves fluttered before him.
…
The fast back ran well, the clatter of the old car not as much of a racket as he had recalled. She drove confidently in her white lace blouse, her silver bracelets brushing the black wheel in a sensuous contrast he did keenly feel.
“Jon, dear, please, eyes on the rode. You cannot drive on a Social Security card, even in Arizona. We would not want to break one of your precious laws. You do know how to flatter a girl, you do,” flashed her knowing grin.
Without taking his eyes off of her pretty form, he edited the rolling images in his mind, looking west as they rolled north, and saw it there, behind him. “Across this little bridge, up over the rise, and pull off. There will be two small green pavilions. A bait station.”
‘What a fine form of a woman,’ he mused, sliding his right hand to her denim covered hip, using his left to draw back her thick red hair which threatened to obscure the sway of that soft breast.
“Jon, there are people about!”
He came from a trance, drool on his stubble chin, her breast in his hand. “Oh,” groaned he groggily, and slid her plentiful portion back within the offended garment.
She gasped, “They cannot think we are shanty trash come to rut in there forget-me-plight pass!”
“You wore it woman—here, this is it,” he drooled. “No time to miss. They are over the shoulder—block them in.”
“Who, Jon,” she asked as a young couple, with a baby in a pack and a toy dog on a leash, waved to them, the woman saying, “There are clouds gathering over the needle.”
Jon was out, animated, before Mary had finished parking along the back tires of the four rice burning crotch rockets. The man seemed stunned at this bit of rudeness, to which Mary instructed, “Thank you, we came to warn our friends.”
The couple and dog, seemingly more afraid now that a possible flash flood might catch them, opened their toy-like smart car, and smiling, waved with a troubled smile, the woman, no longer shaped well at 30, looking at them with gape-mouthed wonder—Jon supposed, at the contrast in age between he and the beautiful Mary, who he could not imagine he had ever done without.
May grinned at him and tossed him the single key and he caught it as if young again.
“That’s it, you bad thing. If these are your biker fags—they are the last ones up the trail.”
He took her hand in his left, slipped the key into the jacket pocket and lead her up the trail.
Clouds gathered in the distant heights. Her hand was so soft and felt like lovely night.
They passed the paved trail head and set off up the lava trace, between purple and yellow blooms of cactus, as if the flowers were opening to drink what heaven was yet to drop.
On the second rise a green snake slithered across their path.
“It’s time, Baby,” he commanded.
“Here, now?”she objected, then huskily added, “Like some shanty lass?”
He tugged her hair gently with his left hand and tore that blouse away with his right. She did not object, and surrendered a long baited kiss, wrapping her arms about his neck. In the delight of her scent, he saw them there, hunched in the twisted postures of famished hate, over the next ridge, awaiting his ascent.
…
The man wore long streaked hair that bespoke 50 worried winters, yet his stride and build whispered 30 spry summers.
“Don’t fright me now, spirits,” prayed Dan. “I left salt and water on the mountain, and you drove me out regardless.”
He heard only the crunching of his sneakers on the broken lava path. Behind him rushed the cool air, descending from the building thunderheads above The Suppers. Before him he could see clearly the chunk of distant stone that told of his nearness to Apache Trail Highway. Turning left on the two-lane highway, away from the distant lake, he would make Apache Junction by dark and activate his phone, calling an Uber. His intent had been a Thursday night to Sunday dusk hike over Easter weekend. But the Superstition Mountains were not having it. Walking up on that Hopi medicine ritual at Winter Solstice should have given him a clue that he would not be welcome for a view of Christ’s star.
His drone was packed away, the controlling phone off. The strange PVC pipes inserted in the ground along a surveyed line he could not figure, did not investigate, as he hiked easily down. Four turkey vulture shadows swooped down above him, making him wish he had his drone up. Then he looked up, and there were no turkey vultures soaring down on the cold rush of air. No, there were just the shadows, shadows in the sunlight, about 30 feet up, and shadows cast on the ground by the light of the falling sun, describing elongated streaks of gray flight before him.
‘What the heck!’ he mused and trotted off down the trail, wondering if this were a prodigy of the sort he sometimes sought in the wild places.
Dan, having worked a three day week landscaping, in his not yet famous Danscape truck, cultivating authentic local shrubbery for snow birds, good Catholic that he was, could not shake the thought that he was a short jog from a person in need of Christian relief.
‘This is why I had that urge to kick off for the weekend—don’t trip, Dan.’
Up and over the last rise, bringing the green pavilions within sight, Dan jogged. Below him in the draw was an odd sight—an old man fight, a full-on, weird-ass brawl.
An old beer-bellied man in tattered blue suit and a black beret was standing among some fallen biker fags, tanned, lean, older middle-aged, bleach blond men, strangling a fourth fag. The old physical wreck had done well. But, four other, larger, taller, less dressed fags were closing in on him from behind. These four men were wearing pink jockstraps, pink head bands and sandals, and, unlike the others, were pale.
One punched the old man in the kidney, another karate chopped him in the neck—and the old grunt in the terrible suit kept strangling that pencil neck!
Dan was there in thirty strides, right behind the four nearly naked homos. He was close enough to smell the jasmine wafting off of them, to see how pale they were, and that the fallen fags were painted tan with makeup, which had been smeared and ruined where they had been hit, or had bled.
Two of the faɡɡots turned on him with an empty hiss, a hiss that came from both throats at the same instant. Dan hit the nearest one, to his right with a stiff jab, and the jaw came off, just split from the face. The thing was gurgling and lurching as the other reached out with dirty finger nails sharpened to points. Dan kicked it in the pelvis with an inside stomp kick and it collapsed, its hips waggling about, its teeth rattling out.
A snarl escaped Dan’s grinding teeth as he sank a right hand into the spine of the fag that was beating the back of the fat man. The fag back snapped in half and the thing pissed its pink jock strap. Dan dipped for a fireman’s carry on the last fag, who was crying in a clucking rage, tittering and scissoring its finger nails. As much as the feeling of that cadaverous groin hitting his shoulder made him shudder, he was thrilled by the feeling that the bones were hollow, and this six foot man felt like 85 pounds—up and over, and on its dead head ghost hair. The neck snapped.
Dan turned and saw the fat man tearing off the head of his antagonist. The old fellow had a Confederate military symbol on his beret, and a Saint George Cross on the back.
Their eyes met and the old fellow, slightly shorter than Dan’s six feet, drawled, “Thanks, young man.”
“I should not call the cops, should I?”
The man grinned, looked at the storm coming down from The Supers, looked at Dan’s light hiking rig, red the situation like an old Indian, and advised, “Back to my car—on the double!”
The fat man then shock off the quickly congealing fag blood, which was almost like beaded glass on his hands, produced an antique car key from his shirt pocket, and handed it to him, “I can’t drive. In case I stroke out on the way down, the Pinto is yours—don’t come back for my carcasse. The Watcher is on his way, they rise on dusk Good Friday.”
Dan took the key from the serious old man, turned and looked up towards The Needle, and saw there a terrible black nimbus above that distinctive stony digit. Something took hold of him and he smiled, hoisted the fat man, who weighed in at about 230, and jogged on down the ocherish lava trail. The man groaned in some humiliation, tinged with a weary resignation. Dan, a fitness fanatic since childhood, could not withhold a helping word, “Might I suggest some dietary reform, Sir.”
The old man groaned and passed out, snoring before Dan made another 20 paces.
