Jeff Posey

He flew into town still gripping the steering wheel in rage that had begun to subside after two days on the road. Where the tourists parked to page at the mineral mound of the hot spring and the cold, clear San Juan River, he pulled in and cut the engine. The old blue Dodge rattled to silence.

The sudden quiet deafened him and he sat in a slow-witted stupor trying to decide what to do next. He tried to make a mental list:

Find a room.

Find food.

Find a name.

A name. He didn’t need a new name for this place. He needed an old name. One these people, the older ones anyway, the ones who bothered knowing their own history, would recognize. The name he grew to loathe because of the people he shared it with. Baxter.

I’m JAB again, he thought. Why not? For the first time since high school, use his real name. JAB. He’d always liked that. Had carved it under desks and into playground equipment until he became someone else. When he stopped being JAB and simply started to live it. Punch, jab, kick, slap. That’s what she had told him two days ago. He grinned. It still felt like a falling scream into the heart-stopping cold water of the river below. Punch, jab, kick, slap. That’s what they’d done to him when he had been JAB. Then he became the one who did the punch, jab, kick, slap. Only he’d specialized in nonphysical ways. He used his brain, he thought, not his brawn. Mental martial art.

I’m starving, he thought, his stomach making an alarming high-pitched gurgle.

Across the highway that ran down from Wolf Creek Pass west to Durango, he saw a bar. An old-style bar, hidden like a dim spot of grime among the clean tourist-facing businesses. He smiled. Useful people could be found in places like that. Desperate people. Weak people. Like he used to be.

He got out and slammed the truck door and didn’t bother to lock it. His possessions consisted of so little, he could replace everything he owned, including the truck, for a few hundred. And he carried much more than that in his money belt. Lean, he thought. Live lean. Jab hard. And hide when you need to.

His knees and lower back ached and he limped like an old rodeo cowboy to the crosswalk with blinking amber lights embedded into the road surface, which stopped traffic in both directions. It gave him an odd sense of power. From the opposite side a family of four crossed, licking ice cream cones. The parents were pasty-white and overweight, with two willow-thin little girls as dark as tanned leather. They studiously avoided eye contact with him. Baxter nodded his assent. Perfect victims, he thought if he needed any.

The bar was dim and smoky, two pool tables, Johnny Cash crooning everywhere he’s been but not too loud to talk and hear.

He walked up and splayed his hand palm-down on the bar, feeling the cool of the ancient wood stained twice as dark as the two little sisters on the crosswalk. The bartender approached with the vacant question in his eyes, unspoken but clear. He wiped his hands on a dirty cloth. He had a thin frame with a bulging belly, clean bald up top with a rim of gray-streaked hair remaining grown long and twisted into a pigtail.

“What’s your best tequila?” Baxter asked.

“Patron,” the barkeep said in a low voice.

“Añejo?”

The barkeep looked up high on the shelves behind him. “Yeah, we got that.”

“Double shot, no salt. And pour pre-Prohibition if you got any balls.”

The barkeep nodded. “I got balls if you got bills.” He pulled out a stool, reached high, and slid a very generous double shot to Baxter, who smiled and nodded.

Baxter slid a $100 bill across the bar. “Bring me another like this in a few minutes, and we’ll be even, Mr. Big Balls.”

The barkeep grinned at him and nodded. He likely wouldn’t make that much again in tips all day.

“Anybody name of Baxter around here?” Baxter asked.

The barkeep creased his brow and nodded his head. “Used to be a family here by that name. Not no more. They up and left maybe twenty years ago.” The barkeep eyed him. “You ain’t here for the gold, are you?”

Baxter looked him in the eye and took a sip of the tequila. He held it in his mouth, swished it around, then let it trickle slowly down his throat. He winked at the barkeep and took another sip.

“Where can I get a burger without being surrounded by tourists?”

The barkeep nodded toward a man playing pool by himself. “Uno there will fetch if for you. Hey! Uno!”

Uno laid his cue stick carefully on the table, disturbing no balls, and Baxter realized the man had an arm missing. His right arm. He looked Mexican. Maybe Indian. His face showed no emotion. A neutral mask. A crust under which anything could boil. The kind of man, Baxter thought, who would make a loyal sidekick until he calmly stabbed you in the back.

“Go to Bear Creek and get this man a burger,” said the barkeep. “What else you want?” he asked, turning to Baxter.

Baxter kept his eyes on Uno. One. For one-arm? He wondered what the man’s real name was. As if names had anything to do with anything. “What do you suggest?” Baxter asked.

Uno turned his expressionless eyes to the barkeep.

“They got good curly fries. And a double-meat burger if you’re really hungry.”

Uno looked back to Baxter and a flicker of something ran through his eyes. Resentment at doing the menial bidding of the white man? Or momentary excitement for the drink or two he would earn from running the errand?

“You hungry, Uno? I’m buying.”

Blank Uno started to look at the barkeep for permission, but then something hardened in his eyes and he held them on Baxter. He nodded, for the first time giving evidence of the metal inside the man. Baxter held out another $100 bill.

“We’ll drink up the change,” said Baxter.

What might have passed for a glimmer of a smile flickered across Uno’s face, then he turned abruptly and went out the back door.

“Mister. You ain’t likely to see him again anytime soon,” said the barkeep.

Baxter nodded, feeling certain Uno would be back. He sat in a dark corner of the bar, sipped his tequila, and waited. Uno was just the kind of man he needed right now.

The middle-of-the-night cold didn’t numb his feet as Marshall Garvin had hoped, and slipping on his boots felt like shoving his feet into a barrel filled with shards of glass. His eyes watered and he wiped them with the backs of his hands. Twice. Then a third time when his nose also began to run. He swiped at that with his sleeve, and crept away to keep from waking the Elby and Baxter.

A hundred yards away, around a low prominence covered with young aspen a month away before they would burst into outrageous gold and red, he blew his nose loud and thoroughly, wiped his hands with a cold kerchief, and stepped up onto a rock to survey the world.

He loved this place with a passion that went far beyond logic or sense. Since he had been a young undergraduate in his twenties, he had come to these mountains in what became an annual pilgrimage, and finally his retirement home. Since before it had been declared an official wilderness area by politicians who had probably never even seen it. Since the time he hiked with heavy and smelly canvas, rubber, and leather equipment.

“Fifty-one,” he spoke in a whisper to the night that showed only the barest tint of growing light to the east. Fifty-one years he had been coming to these mountains. He had stomped them all, every trail, every drainage, every meadow, every cliff face. In his random but long day hikes from base camps he would set up at Upper Fourmile Lake, perhaps his favorite spot on the planet, he had explored these mountains as thoroughly as a wrasse cleans the gills and mouth of a grouper fish. He smiled. He had been like the dental floss working the gigantic teeth of these mountains.

The still air finally allowed him to relax in a bubble of self-generated warm air captured by his shell jacked over a down vest. He pulled the jacket’s hood over his head and felt the heat rise from his torso and begin the painful thaw of his ears.

Unles there were clouds, this place did not get truly dark. Starlight bathed the valley in a cold white light that clung like frost to everything not hidden in shadow. His eyes adjusted and he knew he could find his way flashlight-free across the meadow and up the short climb to stand above treeline if he wished. In a few minutes, he might do exactly that.

But not now. He simply stood in his increasingly comfortable bubble of warmth, only his toes now feeling the prickling pain of cold. The earth emanated a smell combined of rock dust and dry vegetation rotting slowly. Not a full earthy frontal assault like the moist leaf litter of the eastern forests, or the Southern swamps, but more of a light incense that lingers a day or two after the burning of the stick inside a closed house.

Home, he thought. This place felt like home. Not welcoming, exactly. No, this was a far too harsh environment to ever be welcoming like the comfort of a house. But familiar, it was. Yet still with that tang of excitement that comes from being in a place that could kill you from inattention. And of the constant possibility of seeing wildlife — the elk bulls who would soon begin their mad wanderings, ferrets that leapt through the tall grass and fallen trunks like ballerinas at the height of their abilities, or wolverines traveling in pairs that slipped into tumbling play every twenty or thirty yards.

Marshall breathed deeply, the cold air as moist as it would be for another twenty-four hours. Deadman Canyon. Someday he would research the name, find out who died here and why. But now, the name meant little, and he raised his hands and stood in a one-man embrace of this place he loved.

This post was inspired by the book Fire in Fiction, by Donald Maass, page 113, part of a “Connecting Character to Place” exercise.