Chapter One

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1

   "You spelled it wrong," growled a voice down below, and Michael Gasden nearly fell off the ladder.

     His eyes tilted earthward to spy a grizzled, medium height, somewhat stocky güero of Hispanic descent looking up at him from the gravel parking lot, pointing toward the sign reading “GASDEN MOTEL."

     "What do you mean?" Mike asked.   As yet,  he didn't know anyone out here and felt isolated and alone in the immense, unbroken nothingness. He had arrived just last night, using a cool September evening to traverse the scorched earth between here and San Diego. Like Columbus on San Salvador, this was the first native contact he had.

     "It's Gadsden, G-A-D-S-D-E-N," the man on the ground said.  The observer was smiling smugly because he knew it was going to be a pain in the ass to get the money back on the misspelled sign.  "If you really have to embarrass people around here about their Mexican history, at least spell the word right."

     It occurred to Michael that this man's sudden appearance was nothing short of a miracle, even by the strict Vatican guidelines.  The closest human structure was a gas station about 100 yards down the road.  Both of this old dude's knees were wrapped in thick braces, so there was no way he had stumbled across the street that fast.  Furthermore, Mike had been high up on the ladder, facing this only possible approach.  In the other direction lay empty dirt between here and Mexico, and nothing this clean hobbled in on two legs from there.  This vision had materialized from the desert dust.

     Then Mike noticed that the door for room 20, the last occupancy at the end of one of two squat, one story brick buildings of a dusty tan that blended into the desert, had been left ajar.

     "Where did you come from?" Mike asked.

     "I'm the caretaker, Tony," he said with a proprietary air, as if he could be no more easily moved from this property than the cracked pavement beneath him.

     "How did you get in?" Mike asked as he connected a wire through a hole in the side of the sign.  Inevitably there were going to be unexpected encounters like this with the locals, but he wished they would wait for coffee.

     "I didn't, " said Tony unapologetically.  "I was already inside.  Josef must have forgotten to give me the key when he left.  I've been hanging around here three days.  I'm a little hungry."

     Michael gestured to the open door.  "You're letting the air conditioning out." That was something his Dad would say, one of many things he swore he would never say but had now already said, due to the exigencies of adulthood.

     Tony shuffled uncertainly on his two bad knees.  "Well, like I said, I don't have the key and I didn't want to lock myself out by accident."

     Michael descended slowly from the ladder.  "Mr. Mueller didn't tell me I had employees."

     Tony grinned broadly.  He had large, blanched, unblemished teeth, as if the desert wind and sun had scoured them.   "I'm part of the package.  I'm not really an employee, I'm the caretaker."

     "Well, I can't pay you Mr..."

      "Antonio Vargas at your service." He tipped his green ball cap with a red M in the middle by way of a bow.  He didn't know what the M meant and didn't care.  He had bought it cheap. "That's all right.  You don't have to pay me if you can’t right away. I got railroad retirement and social security."

     "Well, what happens if I need to rent your room to a customer?"

      Tony kept grinning.  "Don't worry, that will never happen. Now about your sign."

     Tony didn't seem to make the remark about the business prospects in Cornudo out of pessimism, but as a truism. No matter how many bold, flashy signs were staked into it the desert did not change.  No chilly seabreeze summer evenings, and no hope for prosperity.  But Tony seemed okay with the unshifting reality of having to eke out a precarious existence. It appeared to make him happy.

     "You're definitely going .to have to change your sign," Tony continued.  "Not only do you need to fix your spelling, but I would pick another name altogether.  That word is a fucking thorn in the side for people around here.  We got enough fucking thorns, believe me."

     "What are you talking about?" Michael said in the somewhat effeminate manner men from the Bay area effect because they are forced to subdue their masculinity in the interests of political correctness. Alongside Tony, he looked out of place in the Gadsden Purchase, like a verdant vine growing on a sand dune.  Not exactly thin, there was a hint of suppressed pudginess about his belly that could have definitely turned to fat without a trendy diet, whereas Tony unabashedly stretched his Hooters T-shirt to the point of popping rivets.  Tony's white hair was the same shade as a sun-bleached cow skull, whereas Michael's dark coif was straightened and soft like country club grass.  For facial hair, Tony's beard was as grizzled and unkempt as a creosote patch, whereas Mike's face was groomed and plucked like a Japanese tea garden. The two did not have much in common now yet, standing side by side on a gravel parking lot,  it was clear that one could have easily become the other.

     Mike gestured upward.  "That's my name," he said.  "Gasden is my last name.  I went to school in California, but I think I know how to spell at least that.”

     Tony looked hard at Michael, then looked at the sign.  Then suddenly he exploded in a laugh that was half Daffy Duck, half Beavis without Butthead.  With no reciprocated mirth he cut it short and stroked spittle out of his beard. "That - " he pointed, "is your name?" He laughed again, slapped Mike on the shoulder and added "You're going to fit in good around here, kid."

     Michael stood stoic and immobile.  He was suddenly wondering what insanity had possessed him to abandon the ocean kissed climes of Northern California and move to this desert shithole.  "I'm sorry, but I don't get what you mean."

     Tony looked nervous. The job interview wasn't getting off to a good start.  "Well, you see kid," he said, making a sweeping gesture toward the south.  “This whole area is called the Gadsden Purchase.  Pretty much sounds the same as your name, but spelled G-A-D-S-D-E-N.  You never heard of the Gadsden Purchase?"

     Michael shook his head.

     "You ain't too bright, are you kid?" Tony said with another playful laugh, then realized he had fucked up double because the blank look on the kid's face meant he had no sense of fucking humor.  These politically correct asswipes from out of town took themselves way too seriously.

     Michael Gasden was more humbled than angry for being accused of not being bright, since it had been a while since such an attack on his brainpower.  He was only 28 years old and considered a wunderkind,  having already sold off a successful tech company for millions. This motel was his retirement, 40 years before most people do it. Yet it could be said that his choice of retirement locales wasn't turning out to be so bright.

     "I'm sorry kid," Tony said, lowering his head.  "Shit just comes out of my mouth sometimes.  You get old and the fucking filters on your mouth get clogged by all the bullshit you said in your life."  He looked for sympathy, or at least understanding in Michael's face, but didn't get it.  "Anyhow, in 1853 the United States bought all this land from here South from Meh-heeko, I mean Mexico."

     Michael nodded rapidly.  He wanted the history lesson to be over.  He didn't like history.  He didn’t much like this fat fuck in his parking lot, either.

     "You ask why the fuck would they do that? The answer is the railroad.  Too many mountains North of the Gila River to cut through, so they bought everything south of it.  In those days Mexican politicians were willing to sell off chunks of their country.  The guy who bought it was named Gadsden, I guess, so they called it the Gadsden Purchase.  Just think kid, I came this close to being a Mexican."  Imagine me a beaner, of all people!"  He laughed again, and the fact that he was the only one laughing didn't bother him at all this time.

      Michael furrowed his eyebrows. "I have heard of that.  I think my Grandpa wrote his Master's thesis on it.  I always thought it was in Texas."

     Tony laughed again.  "Kids today think everything is in Texas.  They don't teach geography too fucking good, these days.  Well I got news for you kid, there's this place called Arizona and it ain't part of Texas."  He grew somber again.  "At least, not anymore."

      Tony lowered his head for a moment, as if praying, then looked up at Mike “Did your Grandpa really write his thesaurus on this place?"

     Michael wriggled his face in a way that communicated it wasn't his fault.

     "No offense," said Tony, "but you got some strange fucking people in your family."

     Michael went back up on the ladder to make a few more adjustments, while Tony supervised down below.  From there, Mike could see his newly acquired lodging establishment in all of its eroded glory.

     Although the famous and brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright had designed buildings in Arizona, the Gasden Motel, formerly known as the Roadrunner Inn, was obviously not one of them.  If the structure had anything that could be called architecture, it would be of the Dadaist school, where vague, disconnected ideas are pieced together as a slap dash solution to previous fuck ups. Two buildings stretched out in rows that looked straight on the ground but were slightly askew from the top of the ladder.  There were ten habitations in each building, one of which was the combined office/proprietor's living quarters, with another unrentable room at the end of the back building being the one where Tony was squatting. All the rooms faced east, as if Bedouin caravans had been expected to roll through here and the accommodations had been set up for easy praying to Mecca, not an entirely preposterous prospect in view of the surrounding landscape.   All rooms but the office were numbered starting at two,  the number one being assiduously avoided.  This labeling system had been done on purpose by the former owner Herr Mueller, who interpreted his complimentary Gideon's Bible with proper humility, sincerely believing when it said the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

     Along the motel roof, a sloping overhang was haphazardly nailed together to provide shade for the rooms, more to reduce the air conditioning bill than to please the customers, whose pleasure was not a priority because nearly all of them had been forced to stay here of last resort because of a broken radiator, or unbearable desert fatigue. The shingled roof was frayed and dry rotting, so much so that from a distance it gave the impression of being thatched.  Taken with the towering palm trees above, if the desert could be removed from the background and replaced with turquoise ocean. the overall effect would be of a row of huts on a Fiji beach.

     “Do me a favor,” Michael said from atop the ladder.  “Go in the office and flip the switch for the sign.  You know where that is, right?”

     Tony stood there a little shakily, wobbling back and forth on his knees, like an old clunker that couldn’t quite crank over.

     “That’s all right,” said Michael.  He was only 28, but he could see the direction this relationship was going.  He scampered back down the ladder again.

      “Did it light?” Mike asked Tony, standing side by side with him in the lot, squinting upward. It was hard for him to tell in the desert glare.

     “Fuckin A,” said Tony admiringly.  His eyes were adjusted since birth for desert life, so he could readily discern the dim glow from the bulbs.  “You wire things real fucking good.  Who taught you, your Dad?”

     “You Tube,” said Mike.

      “Who is You Tube?”

      “You guys don’t have the Internet out here?”

      Tony seesawed a hand in the air.  “About half,” he said.  “On good days.  Good enough for porn, but only the pictures.  Not the videos.”

     “Good,” said Mike.  He wasn't disappointed.

      “Tell me something, kid. You look smart, even if you don’t know no fucking history. Why the hell did you decide to move out here?”

     Mike returned a dizzy, bewildered look, as if he was snapping out of a heat stroke episode. “I like the desert,” he said.  “I’ve always liked the desert.  There’s something spiritual about it.”

     Tony winced.  He looked like he had stepped in a puddle of puke. He even wiped his feet symbolically on the faded asphalt.

“Do me a favor kid,” he said.  “Don’t say that too fucking loud around here.”

     “Why not?”

     “Because it’s bullshit,” Tony said.  “Nobody likes this fucking desert.  If you’re living here, it’s because you hit bottom and you got nowhere else to go.”  He pointed south.  “The next step down the ladder of life from here is Mexico, and it’s a short trip.  I get the feeling you’re here because you’re hiding.  What else could it be?  This is a great place to hide, because who the hell wants to come to this stinking shithole and look for you?”

     Michael appeared unsettled.  “Why would I be hiding?” he asked, but only rhetorically, because only he knew the answer to that.   “I’m not hiding.”

     “Okay, okay, you’re not hiding.  Maybe you’re not hiding.  I’m just saying, just don’t go around thinking you’re going to impress the locals by saying stupid shit like, Oh, I just love the desert…” Tony did a limp wrist hand motion for emphasis,  “because it won’t work.  They’ll think you’re fucking crazy and stay away from you.  Just let them assume you’re hiding.  It’s better if they think you’re hiding.  That’s normal around here.”

     Tony snorted a couple of times. then stamped his feet like a rhino.  Michael nervously brushed the dust off his skinny jeans.  Finally, Tony put a gentle hand on Michael’s shoulder.  “Don’t worry about it, kid.  Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.  You got a car?”

     Mike’s response was muffled by the low frequency buzz of two unmarked helicopters that whipped out from behind the mountain intervening between there and Yuma, then whirred south, framed by the signposts of Mike's motel marquee.

      “What’s that all about?” asked Mike.  “Where are they going in such a hurry?”

      “Hmm?” said Tony, who had not seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. “Oh.  Probably just more dead bodies in the desert.  You’ll get used to it.”


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Image of Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.
http://salvadordalimuseum.org/collection/classic/discovery_of_america.php