artie 2

        The Indian was dying. It gasped and wheezed like a TB patient in a New Mexico sanitarium. Artie had been determined to cross over the Sierras before snowfall. Like the Donner Party. Yet a mindful lethargy was slowing all progress.
        As the sun sank beyond the purple Divide he wheeled through a melange of juniper and pinion, climbing toward the Pleiades.
        He pitched camp upon a ledge several thousand feet above the sandy escarpment. As more stars appeared, the firmament pressed down upon him. Gazing into the Great Spiral he felt a mild vertigo. He feared the breaking of tether and whirling off into deep space.
        A wind imp stole a handful of sparks from his campfire.
        Artie watched them swirl away, just as an owl called out one of God's many names.


                                                                                       *

        In case of rain he had a neoprine igloo. For warmth he had a sleeping bag.
        For a while he subsisted on boxed raisons and canned nuts.
        He read his William Cullen Bryant. And Walt Whitman too.
        Two witchy days passed without a desire to move. The spell Endor had  put on him was stronger now. He had not fled far enough from that enchanted hollow and the thing that dwelled there.


                                                                             *


        Downhill, a stone chalice collected crystal water from an underground rill. This was Eden.
        First the booze and pills gave out. Then the food.
        Not to worry. I will fast for forty days and become purified.
        Each day as he went down to drink he felt increasingly light-headed. Strength ebbed as the sun rose to its zenith. Nights were spent howling into the bonfire. A vision grew lucid and he began seeing a woman tied to a stake amid a roaring holocaust. Her comely hair singed away. Blisters burst with blood. As her face blackened with char he recognized the archetype.
        Morning would find him curled like a fetus, his bluejeans greasy from slumber in ashes and dew.


                                                                                            *


        Voices were coming up the trail. Laughing like snow-melt streams.
        The first one had a soft furry rasp. "Oh, yes, in the desert air at night you can see for miles. I remember driving south toward the Chisos Mountains in Texas. A light began shining ahead like the Christmas Star on high. A half hour and ten or fifteen miles later, I arrived where the road had risen a thousand or more feet. Guess what I found."
        "A spacecraft from Area 51."  The second one had a lilting choir-girl giggle.
        "No, silly! It was a Coke machine."
        "You're kidding."
        "No, I'm not. That tiny fluorescent tube had shown me the way."
        Artie opened his eyes and saw two golden-haired angels in hiking boots.
        He heard the choir-girl say: Oh, look! There's a man on the ground."
        "Must be hurt," replied the one who was called Leah.
        "I'm all right," groaned Artie, smelling of starvation.