Tag Archives: Pagosa Springs

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

Lydia Roth protected her daughter Annie like a worried mother bear. Lydia’s looks alone, when revealed, were enough to silence most people. The lower-left third, including half her mouth to her left eye, were melted as if by a wind-blown flame. Her good eye, the right one, had no eyelashes, though not from the effects of fire.

The irony in life weighed heavily on Lydia. Her first daughter’s face had been similarly burned by Lydia’s first husband. Then she died alone on a mountaintop named for the Ute word for “hot water.” Shortly thereafter, Lydia’s face burned in a fire set by her former first husband to kill her, and she embraced her disfigurement as if she enjoyed the stunned reaction of others upon seeing her.

Lydia liked to categorize people by how they looked when she revealed the remains of her visage. At home and in the office, she did nothing to conceal it. In public and meetings outside her office, she wore a tasteful and expensive black-and-orange silk scarf folded into a triangle tied across half her face. At first glance, most saw a beautiful but oddly veiled woman. When she spoke for the first time, she would remove the scarf. That’s when she diagnosed the viewers’ categories:

1. Childlike. Open curiosity and awe followed by empathy and grief…the more of this the younger emotional age of the child. Adults who reacted this way often exhibited almost unbearable grief as if paying penance for their own flaws consumed by less-visible flames.
2. Blank. Meaning no reaction. Complete self-control. Eyes would lock with her good eye or perhaps her good forehead when the person looked her direction, denying themselves even the flicker of a glance at her hideous side. Strong believers of any faith and high-powered professionals, such as attorneys and physicians, exhibited such polished reactions. About a third of the people she met in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, fell into this category. After she moved to Fort Worth, Texas, eighty percent or more struck her as Blanks. An amazing change due to locale alone.
3. Peepers. They did not have the unveiled honesty of the Childlike or the shiny steal exterior of the Blanks, and they cheated and stole glances, sometimes open stares, at the bad part of her face. She suspected most of the professional Blanks possessed exceptional peripheral vision that effectively turned them into secret Peepers.

Very rarely there would be a fourth. Once an autistic child crawled from her mother’s lap into Lydia’s and began stroking her face. The only other, an old woman, called to her on the street in Durango, Colorado. She approached, her face like weathered pillow lava, black scarf over her pulled-back pewter hair. She stared into Lydia’s bad eye, touched her arm, and then took a thumb-sized metal crucifix from around her neck and offered it to Lydia, who shook her head and refused, but the old woman put it into her hand and curled her fingers tightly over it. She grinned and nodded, and then turned away without a work. Lydia still carried that crucifix, though not around her neck. She kept it in a small clutch bag that doubled as briefcase and purse. And the memory of the touch of the autistic child never fled far from her mind. The caress meant more to her than that of her husband.

Of these types of people, she least trusted the Blanks who betrayed themselves as religious zealots or fundamentalist capitalists, who she knew in her heart were repressed Peepers. People of such unnatural willpower were unworthy of her largesse or attention.

The only reason she would ever agree to meet Reagan Newcastle a second time was because of the implied threat to Annie. A classic case of born-again businessman who grated on Lydia’s nerves like the combination Blank Peeper she deemed him to be. Yet Lydia paid Reagan Newcastle’s company, 2G Inc., half her monthly profit in the business she inherited from her rich uncle, the recently renamed Annie’s Liquor Emporium, headquartered out of Fort Worth. In return, she bought time. To think and to plan. For her husband, Tucker, and his accomplice, Samuel Langhorne Serles, to be able to figure out how to overcome the vise grip that 2G Inc. gradually placed over most of Texas and the Old South with the full support of the voting majority.

Meanwhile, she protected Annie like a mother bear, baring her face as necessary to back people away, while Tucker and Serles crept around like wolves looking for ways to kill the beast before the beast killed them all, before she lost another daughter on a mountain of man-made scalding water.

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock. Serles is the ancestor of the character by the same name in The Pump Jack Potion.

A flash fiction piece in preparation for my novel tentatively titled Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, scheduled for publication in 2013. Sign up for notification by email here.

The first time he saw her, he thought she was a child. Pre-teen. Thin, no body shape, short. By Serles’s standards, though, short meant anything less than six feet. He stood three inches taller than that, so he rarely looked up to anyone in a literal sense.

But he soon learned the error of his assumption. When he saw her with her hair down and not wearing baggy street clothes, his body shook as if from an earthquake. An arc of charged plasma all but literally leaped between them. The way her eyes flashed told him he had her attention. His heart felt catapulted upward even as he toppled out of balance, dizzy, tongue-tied.

“Samuel Langhorne Searls?” she asked, extending her hand. He had a super-human awareness of her bare arm and shoulders, the swell of her breasts, the curve of her ear obscured by sun-bronzed blond hair tied somewhere behind her back. “Annie Roth,” she said, taking his hand for a firm shake. It was cool and soft but pulsed with power. “Tucker Roth was my father,” she said.

Serles smiled and nodded to give himself time to recover his ability to speak. “I think I remember you,” he said. “He had a little girl.”

She pulled her hand away and smiled with a nod. “That was me.”

“Your father….” How did he say such a thing? She raised her eyebrows and he felt encouraged to continue. “He took an interest in me when nobody else did.”

“He said you were the brightest student he ever had.”

“Well. He was the brightest teacher I ever had.”

Awkward silence. How does one go about talking to the most attractive woman he ever met? He felt an inner particle-level force to stay within her orbit. Regardless of anything his brain might have to say about it.

“He left a note for me to find you after his,” stammered Annie, “after he….”

“I’m sorry to hear of his death,” said Serles, wondering if he should take her arm. Or pat her on the back? He didn’t know, so he did nothing.

“He was murdered. By Reagan Newcastle. My mother too.”

“I remember her.”

“Probably her burned face.”

“She was legendary in Pagosa Springs.”

“I think that’s one reason we moved.”

Over the months before the war, they learned how to work together. She had people smarts. He belonged in a laboratory. They made a good team and grew close. After the war, they went to the the Chaco Canyon ruins, risking radiation overexposure. The ghosts of surviving mushroom-shaped structures looming, the people gone. People they knew. And the laboratories, gone as well. When she reached her hand to him, he gripped it hard.

“Annie,” he said.

He felt her tune herself to him.

“I don’t want to live without you.”

He felt her hand move. A recoil? Physical expression of emotion? Good or bad? “Is there a question here?” she asked.

He cleared his throat but couldn’t make his voice as clear and baritone as he wished. “Will you become Annie Roth Serles?”

She turned to him and smiled. “Proudly.”

Over the years he came to know several Annies. The glamor girl, the stuff of billboards and talk shows, the sexy persona of rebel power, an avenging angel. And the country-girl wholesome she strived for but never quite achieved. And the one-on-one lover and counselor and best friend. He loved them all, every Annie.

The night he died, she still looked like a beauty queen to him in her sixties. She lay beside him and didn’t speak but looked at him with eyes magnified by tears. He felt her lips brush his and her warm breath, then he floated and just before he knew nothing, he realized he knew everything he needed to know.

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock.

A flash fiction piece in preparation for my novel tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, scheduled for publication in late 2012 or early 2013. Sign up for notification by email here.

At age ninety-two, Annie Roth Serles held a final series of interviews with Jesse Theodore, her biographer. In this segment, Annie discusses her husband, Samuel Langhorne Serles. This is a transcript of the recorded interview, edited for clarity. A video is available for a small contribution to the Leave-Behind Project. This interview took place in Miss Annie’s home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in February 2114. The ticking sound in the background is the drip of irrigation water in her home’s garden room. Miss Annie’s voice is a bit hoarse from talking at this point. But she still has the spirit that made her famous.

Question: How’d Serles get his start, Annie?

Answer: It’s funny even you call him that, Jesse. Everybody called him Serles. Just Serles.

Q: And his first and middle name were so interesting.

A: Samuel Langhorne. He used to say, let’s see, I can get it just the way he said it. “I’ve got the MarkT but not the wain.” He had a way of seeing the world that most others found unintelligible, but everything he thought and said made sense if you could bring yourself to see it from his perspective, which was kind of this whole-world-view of formulas that seemed to just float in the air about him like the scent of meadow flowers on a warm, still day.

Q: That’s poetic. And unintelligible. You’d better explain that “MarkT” business.

A: That’s right. It’s the way he thought and he forgot that most mortals couldn’t leap around with him. It took me quite a while before I could understand him, and, of course, I couldn’t even begin to like him until I understood him. But let’s see. When he said that about “MarkT,” I made him explain it to me. Mark Twain wrote the book, Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. My Serles’s full name was Samuel Langhorne Serles, after the writer. So, in his mind, that gave him two-thirds of the given name of Mark Twain, leaving him with a “MarkT,” leaving him without the “wain.” So, hell, Jesse, you got me off trying to explain a science nerd. That’s all Serles was and wanted to be. A science guy.

Q: How’d he get his start?

A: That’s a funny story.

Q: I always found it hard to pull stories out of him.

A: Oh, you didn’t. You chipped them out, piece by piece, then figured out the story for yourself.

Q: Okay, I got you off track. Keep talking about his start.

A: It was an accident. He screwed up. It’s one of the funniest things about him. He loved the irony. But as a graduate student in the lab, the nancarbon production facility at Los Alamos National Laboratories, which is where the United States developed the nuclear bombs used in World War II, his job was to prepare samples to send into the — what’s that machine they used to use?

Q: Jesso, they called it. I remember because it’s almost my first name.

A: See, there’s something strange with the names of the men in my life.

Q: Men? Do we need to turn this recorder off?

A: Calm yourself, Jesse. Where was I?

Q: He made a funny, ironic accident with a Jesso machine.

A: Right. So he prepared these samples, each slightly different, you know, so they could study how to get a higher production of that nanocarbon stuff. Well, he’d been out to Chaco Canyon over the weekend, and he cleaned his boots the morning before he ran the tests. One of the samples fell partly out of the tray and he caught it, put it back. But he knew he’d not washed his hands yet from cleaning his boots, so he made a mental note about the contaminated sample number. Of course, the whole world knows what happened then.

Q: How many times did that increase production?

A: I don’t think they were able to calculate it for quite a long time. And it depended on the availability of carbon in the air column.

Q: They’ve since estimated it in the trillions, I think.

A: So those Los Alamos people went crazy. They had Serles run test after test after test, ignoring his suggestions to try a little Chaco Dust, as he called it.

Q: And they finally did.

A: Yes, and set him up in a research lab there in Chaco Canyon, where he worked for two years until the First Outage.

Q: That was in 2037. What happened to him during all that?

A: He thought the world had ended. That they were the only humans left. Can you imagine?

Q: How did they find out?

A: Antone. He stumbled into the canyon more dead than alive. He told them.

Q: I want to know more about Antone. And what you were doing during the First Outage.

A: Oh, sure, but not anymore tonight. My talker is all talked out.

Q: Yes, yes, of course. Until tomorrow then. Good night, Miss Annie.

Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock.

A flash fiction piece in preparation for my upcoming novel The G.O.D. Journal, scheduled for release in summer 2012. Sign up for notification by email here.

Gerald Oliver Dodge watched the lights in the mirrors, the pulsations of a living beast. He felt it like an external nervous system. If he reacted to every impulse with a buy-sell decision, he could easily make tens of millions in profit every day. For nearly twenty years he learned to master the world’s financial system. He became the new darling of Wall Street without even being aware of it. He knew it as a fact. But one he ignored.

Clear thinking eluded him for a few years; his financial returns became more erratic, but still breathtaking. Then he met his new men. Stoddard and Haymer, then Keemo. Haymer convinced them all to go on an elk-hunting expedition in Colorado, and that attracted Dodge like the market used to. The next year he spent from snowmelt to first snowdrift horse camping in the mountains north of Pagosa Springs. That healed him enough to go back.

He began making a couple of trades a month. He stopped reacting to ripples and waited for waves. His senses had changed living out in the wilderness. When he felt a tidal wave, he jumped in. He lost his shirt, then made it back in two months. Returns were astronomical, along with risk. Most of his investors couldn’t take the heat, and only a core of hardened billionaires remained.

While watching the market, Dodge took double shots of Patron añejo tequila. Sat in a new recliner, specially designed for him. An idea he got from watching Professor Marshall Garvin sit in that camp chair contraption of his. He stared blurry-eyed at the moving images on the computer screens and the mirrors that reflected them, and let his mind wander. His meditation. His mental discipline.

Ruthless, he thought out of nowhere. Ruthlessness. The tendency to persistently cut down everyone around you for your own profit. Slave-trader. No better than that. The enemy. The ones a just God must punish. Making money on trades is too easy; meting out justice is far more tricky. That’s where his boys, his hunting buddies, came in. They brought in the evidence. Dodge basked in the glory of being judge. And jury. No checks and balances for those at the very top. Far better than mere fortune-making. Day-trading was checkers compared to the chess of rendering a verdict about a human being’s innocence or guilt.

But more ruthless than Dodge on his heaviest tequila days? Trevor Williams. Imagine demanding the head of his former son-in-law as some kind of payment due. A monster, the man is. Thought himself a medieval king. Owner of all the land and its vassals to do with as he pleased, like property, like inanimate property.

No. That kind of behavior must be discouraged. Strangled at its financial sources. Dodge had to set a trap. For one of his biggest remaining clients. One of the richest men in the world. Trevor Williams. It would take the hand of G.O.D.

“Haymer!” he yelled. “Stoddard! More tequila! I need more tequila!”

The G.O.D. Journal is about a man named Baxter who looks guilty of murdering his wife, and when he runs away he stumbles upon a family journal with clues to a hidden treasure of gold in the mountains of southern Colorado. The clues mention an Anasazi rock art marker, and Baxter gets the help of an old geologist and his niece to find the treasure, all while encountering more justice than the legal system would ever have meted out to him.

A flash fiction piece in preparation for my upcoming novel The G.O.D. Journal, scheduled for release in late spring 2012. Sign up for notification by email here.

“Why are you following me?” Baxter asked. Reeves snarled and didn’t answer. Baxter raised a stone the size of a double fist and threatened to crash it onto Reeves’s head.

“You going to bash my head in? Like you bashed her head in?”

I didn’t, Baxter thought. She just fell. But he didn’t want to explain himself to Reeves. No, Reeves had to be the one explaining.

“Maybe it was you who did it, not me,” Baxter said. He knew that wasn’t true factually. But he knew Pam had something planned. Probably with this guy.

“That’s what the stupid police think,” said Reeves.

Baxter lowered the stone.

“You were supposed to be the dead one,” Reeves said, his upper lip bunching under his nose, exposing his teeth.

“How?”

“The ladder. You were supposed to fall. She was going to watch and push you. Hold your feet.”

Baxter imagined that. He’d fallen off a ladder the year before and broke his arm. He didn’t like ladders. If it had worked, he could see people nodding their heads when they heard. Oh, a ladder again. Then they’d shake their heads.

But Pam pushing him. Could she really do that? Would she? Did she hate him so much?

“What then?” They must have had a plan. He wanted to hear it.

“Then we had insurance money.”

Baxter nodded. Pam had pressed him to take out a big one. Five million. It had taken a lot of effort to get one that big. Lots of tests, lots of hurdles. But that couldn’t be all of it. And it didn’t explain why Reeves followed him with such determination.

“What else?”

Reeves closed his eyes and turned his face away. “Your will.”

“What about it?”

“You remember who the executer is?”

No. He didn’t. Pam had worked with an attorney her father knew to prepare it. Baxter had looked it over, signed it. Everything seemed in order. Lots of legalese.

“Me,” said Reeves.

“You!” Baxter didn’t recall seeing that. He would have remembered.

“Yeah, me. Pam slipped it in there. Her father loved it.”

Baxter shrugged. Being an executor is a pain in the ass, not a motivation to chase him down in the wild. He still missed something big in the equation.

“That doesn’t explain why you’re here following me. Executors don’t do that. Especially when there’s no will to execute because I’m not dead.”

“Exactly,” said Reeves. “You had to be dead to make it all work.”

“Make what work?”

Reeves sat up and ran his hands over his forehead. Baxter readied the rock to pound him if he tried anything.

“You don’t see anything, do you?” asked Reeves. “Just your own little imaginary Tom Oley world. Pam didn’t love you anymore. Never did, I think.”

Baxter had known that from almost the beginning, shortly after he married her. But hearing it so bluntly still cut him. “I suppose you’re going to say she loved you instead.”

“She did. She was pregnant. Did you even know that? With my child.”

Baxter nodded. He should’ve known. She’d been sick in the mornings. Had become more secretive. And it certainly couldn’t have been him. They hadn’t had sex since after almost the first six months of their marriage. She clearly detested it, and he’d rather be celibate than make love to a woman who detested it. Much better to find a willing vixen in a bar, which Baxter had done a few times. But even that hadn’t been much fun, and he pretty much gave up on having a sexual life.

“I suppose now you’re going to tell me you’re here out of revenge. You think I killed your lover and unborn baby and now you’re bent on killing me, all other consequences and possible outcomes be damned.”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t strike me as that kind of guy, Reeves. John Wayne you’re not.”

“Think about it, numb nuts.”

He did. If he’d died instead of Pam, there would be five million dollars in insurance money, plus all the assets of his estate that would go to Pam, most of it tied up as collateral for the big deep well project he had just about kicked off in far northeast Texas. The idiot Reeves probably didn’t even know about that. If that well fails, they would all be paupers, even Pam’s rich father. If she patiently unwound all his assets, she might end up with a few million more.

Baxter still didn’t get it. Unless Reeves had gotten into some kind of trouble. And somehow Pam was on the hook to save him.

“You in some kind of trouble? Pam bailing you out?”

“Getting warm, genius.”

“Just tell me, you moron.”

“Right up your anus.”

“What is it, Reeves? Gambling? Drugs? Mafia? You make some stupid business decisions? What?”

“You think you’re so well-hidden. So smug. Nothing bad ever happens to you, does it? You and your charmed life. Oh, I know. Pam tells me. Her rich father adores you. All your investments turn to gold. He says so. So he gives you his gorgeous daughter to be your gorgeous wife. All of you should have your heads smashed in.”

Baxter resisted the temptation to laugh. Reeves didn’t know anything about his real situation. He lived in a fantasy world.

“Jealously?” Baxter asked. “You’re jealous and that’s why you’re chasing me like a deranged killer?” He didn’t buy it. “Nobody’s life is charmed, Reeves. Anybody who reaches maturity knows the world tries to stunt everybody. Are you trying to tell me you’re like a junior high kid who thinks the whole world has it better than him and that makes you want to blow up everybody else? Load of bull, Mr. Reeves. Load of bull.”

“I’m not who you think I am,” said Reeves. “My name is not Reeves.”

Baxter narrowed his eyes and looked at Reeves. Did he somehow know about his own identity switch, from Tom Oley to Baxter? Was this Reeves’s way of unmasking him?

“A few years ago,” Reeves said, “I witnessed a murder. And the guy who did it. I saw him good. Real good. Then I made the biggest mistake of my life. I testified against him. Sent him away for life.”

“And now he’s out and after you,” said Baxter. Sounded like a bad B movie.

“Something like that. You may have heard about it. Involved the Senator from New Jersey?”

“That guy?” Baxter had indeed heart about it. Sorry deal all around. Smelled of political favors and payoffs and stupid men with guns. The kind of thing that would make and break the careers of dozens of people any way you cut it.

“Yeah, that guy.”

“So?”

“So Pam and I were going to take the money and run.”

“So screw the money. Just run.”

“You know as well as I do you can’t run and hide without money. Unless you’re willing to live like a homeless person. I’m not.”

Baxter looked at his ragged clothes, his weeping wounds. “You don’t look any better than a homeless man right now. And I still don’t see what that’s got to do with your chasing me all the way out here.”

Reeves shook his head. “If you’d died like you were supposed to, I’d be squeezing your trophy wife and shaking the hand of your former father-in-law right now.”

“With a baby on the way.”

“Pam’s father, the happy grandfather. It’s not me who’s chasing you. It’s Pam’s father. He wants you dead. Made me quite an offer. With Pam out of the way, it’s not a bad deal.”

“He hired you to kill me.”

“Your head. On a platter.”

“That’s rich, Reeves, that’s rich. You couldn’t put a chipmunk’s head on a platter.”

“Yeah, well, you just let me go. And then see if you can sleep at night.”

Baxter nodded. He would do just that. Leave the guy. He poured out all his water and scattered his food. Kicked a small Styrofoam container wrapped in duct tape down the mountain. “You’ll die out here, Reeves, if you keep following me. And I’ll sleep like a baby. A baby.” With that, he walked up the trail and left Reeves sitting like a cursed man.

The G.O.D. Journal is about a man named Baxter who looks guilty of murdering his wife, and when he runs away he stumbles upon a family journal with clues to a hidden treasure of gold in the mountains of southern Colorado. The clues mention an Anasazi rock art marker, and Baxter gets the help of an old geologist and his niece to find the treasure, all while encountering more justice than the legal system would ever have meted out to him.

A flash fiction piece in preparation for my novel tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, scheduled for publication in late 2012. Sign up for notification by email here.

Annie appeared out of the sudden madhouse of Fort Worth and asked Theo to take her west. New Mexico. Colorado. She didn’t care. Even El Paso or Amarillo.

“Going to Albuquerque,” said Theo, his voice emotionless and gruff.

“How much?” she asked.

He stopped greasing the wheels on his Centipede Train section and looked at her. That affected his decision. Pretty face. Dirty, but not yet beaten by sun and wind and life. She wore good street clothes that hid her shape. Her fingernails looked manicured as recently as a month or so. She seemed like someone trying to appear to be normal, which is to say desperate. “I ain’t selling tickets, little girl,” he said. Good-looking young women were magnets for trouble. He didn’t need that. But he sure did like her face. For a white girl.

“Ten thousand,” she said.

He ignored her and continued working. The train would leave in an hour or so when the sun angled high enough.

“Twenty-five thousand,” Annie said.

Theo sat up. He pointed at a box wedged into a narrow strip of the carriage platform suspended with wires between the solar canopy and the bicycle wheel rims that rolled on the rail. A heavy bank of batteries rode beneath the carriage platform and gears and bicycle chains ran to an electric motor. Like most Centipede sections it had been home-built and re-built, jerry-rigged and repaired until no two sections looked alike. Each owner, mostly men, maintained and lived on them. The only commonality were their grips fore and aft that allowed them to join into long Centipede Trains that were the slowest way to travel long distances. Three hooped metal bars bulged from one side so two men, or one strong one, could roll the section off the track if a government train came at them.

“Girlie,” Theo said, still pointing, “see that little box riding in the carriage there?”

Annie nodded.

“I get ten grand just for getting that to Abilene.”

Annie grimaced. She knew about prices. Just last month she authorized raising the price of a liter of Patron añejo tequila to more than a thousand dollars. She didn’t understand how people would afford to pay, but plenty did.

“A hundred grand,” she said. She had almost five million stuffed into her worn rucksack beneath dirty clothes and a false bottom.

Theo looked at her a few moments, then shook his head and winked. “Girlie, how about for a quarter-million, I’ll clear the whole damned platform for you all the way to Albuquerque, and I’ll even feed you. They call me the Centipede gourmet. We’ll fatten you up a bit before we get there.” He laughed, sure he had over-priced her, and went back to greasing his wheels.

A few minutes later, Annie stood beside his section again. “Excuse me,” she said.

Theo sniffed and crawled out from underneath. Annie handed him a stack of bills, crisp and banded. He wiped his hands on a filthy rag and took the money, counted it, then looked at her.

“It’s almost everything I have,” she lied.

“Why the hell you want to get to Albuquerque so bad, Lady?”

She looked left and right, shrugged. “It’s not good here anymore.”

“It ain’t any better in Albuquerque. Whole world’s going to hell.”

“But I have to find somebody.”

“Ah. Boyfriend? Mamma?”

“I don’t know him. My father knew him. Told me to find him.”

He eyed her, scratched under his arms, finally nodded. “He’s in Albuquerque?”

“Pagosa Springs. That’s in ….”

“Colorado. I know it. Grew up there.”

“You did?”

He nodded. “What’s your man’s name?”

She looked down. Turned her head.

“Secret, eh? Well then, who’s your Daddy?”

“Roth. Tucker Roth.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Science teacher there in Pagosa. Best teacher I ever had. About everybody liked him. Married a woman with a burned face.” He looked at her a moment. “That wouldn’t be your mother, would it?”

She nodded.

“Well I’m damned. I remember Mr. Roth had a daughter. Angela?”

“Annie.”

“That’s right, Annie. You’re Annie? Ha!” He reached out his hand and shook hers.

“So who’s this guy your father knew?”

She looked aside again.

“Maybe I know him.”

She sighed. “Serles. Samuel Langhorne Serles.”

“Well I’m damned again. I graduated a year ahead of him. Smartest son-bitch Pagosa probably ever had. I remember your father liked him a lot.”

“Do you know where he is? Is he still in Pagosa?”

“That I don’t know, Little Lady. But I expect you can find something about him there. People will remember Mr. Roth, and they’ll tell you.”

“So would my father know you?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. He would. Nobody forgets this Eskimo face in Pagosa.”

“Are you? Are you the son of that Anasazi Runner guy?”

He nodded again. “Theo,” he said. “Theo O’Brien.”

“Do your parents still live there?”

“Nope. Burbank, California.”

“You ever go back?”

“No reason.”

“But you’ll take me?”

“Albuquerque, lady, Albuquerque. No Centipede line goes to Pagosa.” He looked at the money in his hand and shook his head. “This is too much. Just give me a hundred.”

“But we agreed.”

“Nope. Didn’t.”

“But ….”

“Food’s on you. Can you cook?”

“Well, not really.”

“Then you’ll just have to learn, won’t you?” He dropped to his hands and knees and rolled back beneath his section.

This is exploratory flash fiction for my work-in-progress, tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South.

Note that Samuel Langhorne Serles is the inventor of the Serles Sheet mentioned in The Pump Jack Potion, and the backpacker in Walk, Not Stay. Also, Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock.

A flash fiction exercise in preparation for my novel The G.O.D. Journal (formerly Baxter’s Gold and the Anasazi Marker), available in late spring. Sign up for notification by email here.

Elizabeth Elder. Her parents tried for “Libby,” but the entire family turned against them and morphed it into “Elby” before the girl had taken her first step. Her mother was a Garvin, youngest sister to Marshall. By the time her mother had her first step, Marshall had already moved away. But each time he returned, Elby’s mother stayed by his side in rapt worship of her older brother.

Now, her parents dead within two months of each other, Elby spent school breaks with Uncle Marsh in Pagosa Springs. As she had for the last dozen years, half of her life. She had only a half-summer break this year, then it would be back for her second year of graduate school.

“God I like this better than Texas,” Elby said. She’d just arrived from having spent the first half of summer on-campus at Texas A&M University. “When I left it was a hundred and seven degrees.”

“Well. I know you women and horses don’t like Texas, but except for the climate, the geography, and the city folk, I kind of did.” Marshall had spent thirty-five years on the geology department at Texas A&M. He knew it well. That’s why he’d moved away as soon as his retirement would support him.

“At least Himmelbach has a decent research project,” she said. She’d begun to relax. Her cheeks loosened a bit. She felt comfortable coming home to Uncle Marsh. He’s the only adult still in her life from childhood.

“That’s Doctor Himmelbach to you, young lady, until you get that Piled Higher and Deeper after your name. Even then. We must always try to show the lowly masses the superiority of over-education.” Marshall stamped his feet trying to make his knees stop hurting. He wanted to get dinner on the table. He’d bought a particularly good wine for the occasion. He liked having Elby around, even if it was for only a few weeks.

“So what’s going on around here?” she asked. “Tell me the drama of Pagosa Springs.” She sat on the couch and slouched, her legs out straight.

“Oh, there’s always drama, you know this place. Let’s see. Little Prissy got pregnant from a pit bull.”

“No way.” Little Prissy was a Pomeranian.

“Oh yes, way. Way way. I saw them stuck together. Poor Little Prissy just hanging there. And that pit bull looking around like he realized his mistake.”

“What did the babies look like? A Pitmeranian.” She snorted a laugh.

“She couldn’t have them. Too big for her to carry. The vet had to abort them.”

Elby shook her head. “Once again, the children pay the price for the sins of their parents.”

“See? We’re surrounded by the highest of morality stories. Victor Hugo should have lived in Pagosa.” She gave him a puzzled look and he flapped his hand for her to ignore the remark. “And we’ve got this guy who came to town claiming to be descended from the most important town founder back in the late eighteen hundreds.”

“Which one?” She’d been a quick study of Pagosa Springs after Uncle Marsh moved there.

“Baxter.”

“Oooo. Did he mention the gold?” Her eyes had that same mischievous look they had back when she fancied herself a sleuth as a teenager. She used to sneak around the graveyards and make up stories about all the people. And she learned all the stories that people already knew.

“In fact, he did.” Elby hooted. “And you sound like a damned Texas Aggie.”

“I am a damned Texas Aggie and so are you.”

“Only by paperwork.”

“So what’s this guy Baxter up to? And is he cute?”

Marshall shook his head like he’d put something distasteful into his mouth. “I don’t know, and I don’t care whether he’s cute or not. I’m not the kind of man who makes proclamations of that nature unless I’ve had too much of the Guinness, which only rarely happens, if then.”

“So. Baxter. Tell.” Elby wiggled her fingers in impatience.

“So. Baxter’s been going up into the backcountry over into Deadman Canyon, over from Upper Fourmile Lake.”

“My favorite place in the whole world,” said Elby.

“Yeah,” said Marshall, chuckling. “Mine too. More beautiful spot there’s not. That I’ve ever found anyway.”

“What’s he doing up there?”

“Looks like he’s walking around measuring his steps, even using a trusty old Brunton compass.”

“Really. Like he’s trying to find something.”

“Keeps notes in a little yellow surveyor’s fieldbook. Like I used to do.”

“Think he knows something?”

He looked at her. She looked darker than when he’d seen her last. “You been spending time outside.”

“Yeah, it’s that project Himmelbach’s got I was going to tell you about.” She stood up and stared at him, a smile growing on his face.

“What?” he asked.

“If Victor Hugo had lived in Pagosa, he would have been less miserable.” She smiled a crooked smile.

“Exactly. I’m surprised it took you so long. Doctor Himmelbach is obviously making you over-use your brain.” Marshall smiled, and Elby walked into his open arms for her first hug.

Garvin didn’t believe him.

“You don’t believe me,” Baxter said.

Garvin hated that. Was he so easy to read? He stood and took two steps toward Baxter, who recoiled. His face lost its unreadable mask infuriatingly like that of a Navajo elder but without the serenity, and his true face showed through — eyes too close together, prominent nose over a slightly receding chin. Ratlike. Without regard for anything other than himself.

At times like these, Garvin appreciated his size. He towered a good three inches over Baxter and outweighed him a good twenty pounds. Garvin put on his own mask, the one that say, “Don’t Mess with Me.” He snatched the paper out of Baxter’s hand and glanced at it. A photocopy of a hand-drawn map in a journal of some sort.

“That’s only part of it,” Baxter said, taking a step back and running his left hand through his thick black hair. “I have the original.”

Garvin studied the map. It showed an arrangement of mountain peaks with streams. Two waterfalls at the head of a broad canyon. Two lakes, the highest embraced by a ridge. It looked familiar. Garvin peered at Baxter over the map. His salesman face had returned. Oily. Arrogant. Liar.

“You recognize it?” Baxter asked.

“Why are you showing this to me?” Garvin asked. When Baxter had asked to meet, he said he wanted to find some particular types of rock formations up in the wilderness. Garvin assumed the articles he occasionally wrote for the newspaper as The Back Country Geologist had drawn him. And, of course, he knew the legend of the Baxter gold like everybody in the county. So now they stood in Garvin’s living room, the air thick with the unspoken.

“Because you recognize it,” Baxter said. “Because people say you know about rocks. And petroglyphs.”

“Petroglyphs!” Garvin puffed himself up again to exaggerate his size. He still gripped the map in his hand, but he let it fall to his side. “And what people are saying that about me?”

Baxter grinned and laughed. Like a casual friend, but still wrapped in salesman plastic. “At Chimney Rock,” he said. “They said you know more about petroglyphs around here than anybody. That you found one all the archaeologists had missed.”

That much was true. Garven kept looking around at the low cliffs around Chimeny Rock every time he worked as a volunteer guide to the Anasazi ruins there, and he began to methodically scour the area. He found it in direct alignment with the rising un on the summer solstice. Exactly where it should have been.

“Who’d you talk to?”

“Two women at the visitor’s hut there. I didn’t get their names.”

Garvin didn’t believe him again. Why would he lie about that? Baxter’s eyes seemed to be amused by Garvin’s discomfort.

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” Baxter asked. “I’m willing to make a deal. If you help me find it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Garvin. Actually, maybe he did. Up in the area beyond the twin waterfalls, over the divide above them north of Pagosa Peak into Deadman Canyon, he had seen something once. Looked like a fragment of an Anasazi petroglyph. Most of it broken away. Flaked off the cliff. But it could have been natural. So he’d told no one.

“Sure you do,” said Baxter. “I have the field book from my great-great-grandfather. You know who I mean. If I can find that petroglyph, I can find where he hid something.” Baxter’s eyes danced over Garvin, but they seemed to focus on something far away. Something of value.

Garvin exhaled and shrank back to his neutral size. What Baxter had said seemed beyond belief. People had looked for the Baxter Gold for more than a hundred years. Every couple of decades, some treasure-hunter would come through thinking they had a new angle on how to find it, but no one, to Garvin’s knowledge, had ever found so much as a genuine clue.

“I don’t talk business with anybody who won’t drink a little tequila with me,” Garvin said, stalling for time to think. He cocked his right eyebrow into an offer.

Baxter nodded.

“What makes you think there’s anything there?” Garvin asked, pouring to pre-Depression double shots of Patron Añejo, his drug of choice. He sat one on the coffee table closest to Baxter, then Garvin sat on the couch, his legs crossed like intertwined snakes, holding his shot glass up to the light by its bottom. He loved the color of Patron Añejo.

Baxter picked up his glass and shot it back in one swallow. Sat it too hard back on the coffee table, then stifled a shudder.

Fool, Garvin thought. Waste of good sipping tequila. He wished he’d poured bottom-shelf stuff for the guy.

“I don’t,” said Baxter.

Garvin sipped his tequila. He held it in his mouth, coated his cheeks and gums and teeth, then swallowed. He could never trust a man who slammed shots of Patron Añejo. For the first time in his life he felt the need for a gun. If he made any kind of deal with Baxter, he would have to have a handgun.

“So what have you got in mind?” Garvin asked.

“You know how much is up there?” Baxter asked.

“I know the rumors,” said Garvin. As much as two mules can carry What was that? Maybe four hundred pounds? How many Troy ounces did that make? How much would that be worth? He didn’t know the numbers well enough to calculate it in his head.

“You take me to the Anasazi marker and help me find it,” he hesitated. Too dramatic, Baxter thought. “Ten percent,” Baxter proclaimed.

Garvin took another slow sip of his wonderful tequila. Heck, he didn’t need any treasure at all. Not even ten percent of one. He lived like a rich man as it was, b white trash standards, which suited him fine. But he wouldn’t let a tinhorn like Baxter screw him over.

“Nope,” he said. “One mule’s worth or nothing. I wasn’t just born yesterday. And I know how to drink sipping tequila.”

Baxter’s face darkened, then he shrugged He held out his hand. Garvin slowly stood and shook it, pressing firmly web-to-web, but squeezing no tight than Baxter. He had a wimpy handshake, Garvin thought. Then he thought about how much gold a mule could carry. And where he could get a handgun.

Nine times out of ten, nothing at all happens. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Even more rare than that, maybe. But then there’s that one time when the ordinary becomes extraordinary and nothing is ever the same again.

In his memory it began with the horned toads. He emerged from the hillside cloaked with mature aspen, their leaves clacking together in jets of mountain wind that slid down-slope, and walked onto a steep open meadow where the trail turned sharply away from Fourmile Creek toward Pagosa Peak. There, in the sunlight, all over the rocky trail and the thin grass on either side were dozens, hundreds maybe, of baby horned toads the size of his thumbnail. He caught a half-dozen and held them in his hand, surprised that the things could survive much less reproduce at above nine thousand feet, and that’s when he heard it … a woman’s voice followed by a thud and two men laughing.

“No,” she said. Not a scream. Not even hysterical or insistent. More of a casual request. Cream with your coffee? No? That ordinary.

Followed by a thud with a liquid-hollow sound. Like if you dropped a cantaloupe but it didn’t burst. A surprising sound with a kind of musical resonance to it that would logically be followed by relief that the floor wasn’t covered in sticky melon pulp. And then two men laughing as if dropping melons amused them.

Jesse craned his neck, the skin of his face and chest suddenly prickly hot, and saw where the grass had been flattened, making it reflect more silvery in the midday light, where more than one person had left the trail and dropped toward the creek. Then he saw movement through the trees. A glimpse of white flesh.

He dropped into a squat, his knees stabbing pains of protest, and scattered the baby horned toads. Logic told him, begged him, demanded even, that he go back to the trailhead and find the sheriff. But, of course, he wouldn’t. Unthinkable. He’d retained his childhood sense of justice, and when his indignation spiked, he would run headlong into a brick wall if that seemed necessary.

In his mind’s eye, he located them along the creek, saw where the aspen sloped to the thick undergrowth of the streamside, and he duck-walked back the way he had come, then thumped quickly through the aspen trees down to the nearly impenetrable brambles along the creek, and crept upstream toward them. The rushing water masked the sound of his approach. It had become all visual now. The rushing water masked their sound, too. Movement would give him away before anything else.

He saw a softball-sized river stone and lifted it, the heft feeling good in his hand. He found another. One in each hand. Balanced.

When he saw them, he became a cat. A stalker. Patient. Careful. Slow.

Close and sudden he saw a raven-haired woman, her arms tied with a cord and looped over a tree limb above her, her pants down exposing a shiny mass of pubic hair against cream-colored flesh, her shirt ripped to expose firm breasts with small, dark nipples.

Jesse swallowed. Rape. Bastards.

Two men stood beside the woman, both unbuckling their pants. The woman, he realized, looked glassy eyed. Blood ran from her nose. She did not struggle. She had already done her struggling. Now, he imagined, she just waited for it to be over.

In a heap to the side he saw another man lying still. His head was misshapen. His eyes staring open. Flies on the wound, and his nostrils, and his eyes. Dead, Jesse thought. Dead. Who were these men? At least they seemed unarmed. Nothing in their hands at the moment anyway. One of them pawed the woman’s breasts.

If I rush in, Jesse thought, and crash a rock into one’s head, then I can focus on the other. They’ll be paralyzed by surprise. He would just walk up, he decided, and slam the rock in his right hand into the face of the first man to look at him. Then take care of the other with the rock in his left hand. He realized how shaky and weak he felt. He forced himself to breath. Deep. Over and over. Hit them hard, he said as he breathed. Don’t miss. Don’t hold back. Bastard rapists deserve to die.

He stepped forward and something hit him on the back of the head, hard and big, vicious. His body rang like a tuning fork, his vision narrowed to a pinpoint, and sound rushed as if he’d been swept into the roaring creek. Coherent thought floated away from him and he marveled that it was so easy to die.

When his vision returned, he thought there must have been a third man, even before he thought I’m alive. A sob came from his mouth. He felt shaky, on the verge of uncontrollable tears, then he retched and coughed and spat. His hands seemed to float on their own, they shook so badly. He lay back and breathed, just concentrate on breathing, he thought, and his mind cleared as suddenly as the baby horned toads had appeared.

He looked around. The dead man lay there. It’s real, then, he thought. He remembered the girl. The men. The third unseen man. They’d gone. The girl with them.

With the balance of a drunken man, he stood, his hand on a tree trunk, his brain burning from blunt force trauma and his mind churning. They took the girl. This man is dead. He thought in simple declaratives.

The back of his head ached and it felt as if it had something thick and numb over it, covering the ache. Swelling, he thought. He touched it. No blood. But no feeling in it either.

He released the tree trunk and stood on his own. Their tracks clearly showed. He followed them up to the trail, where he stopped. They’d fled toward Pagosa Peak, deeper into the wilderness.

And that was the moment. Not the ones before. Those were merely inciting events. And thoughtless reaction on his part. But at this moment, he had a choice. Left to the trailhead and civilization, to the police, to his own bed. Or right to pursue bastard rapists and the girl.

There was no decision, really. He knew what he had to do. What any man should do.

Turn right. He did. Toward Pagosa Peak. He scanned the trail for sign. Broke into a slow jog. He became what he had never been. A role he had always managed to avoid. One that his logical brain rejected.

He became a hunter of men.

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.