Prologue

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"Sing to me of the man, muse, the man of twists and turns..." the Father intoned from the driver's seat of the automobile.

Although he could have taken his time on this empty, desolate stretch of road, he was a responsible driver that liked to keep his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel. So his eyes strayed but quickly into the back seat, where he expected to find his daughters snickering and making mock expressions of horror. Oh God, he's going to recite the entire Odyssey by heart again!

Alas, the girls were not there. He felt lonely. He would have to recite the epic to himself, to stay awake. Oh well, better than coffee.

It had been a long and exhausting road trip, from San Diego to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania then back again after two miserable weeks in his aunt's non airconditioned house.  His aunt was on the blink and he felt obligated to see her one last time, but his girls were now of the age of volition and declined to accompany him, making excuses that sounded legitimate but were, of course, contrived. Enduring the sweltering abode of their stuffy, humorless old aunt was understandably not their thing.

So it was that the Father found himself alone now on a mind-numbing stretch of Interstate 10 (UTEP 0, some football-frustrated hack had painted on a freeway sign), deeply embedded in West Texas, preparing himself mentally for the even more mind-numbing submersion into the Gadsden Purchase, still some hours ahead. In the suffocating summer heat the thinly clad, skeletal scrub outside, so frighteningly hostile it appeared indigenous to another planet, shimmered in the sun like melting Dali watches.  He was only 800 miles from home, but some kind of sun-melted wrinkle in the space time continuum always stretched this leg of the voyage to near infinity.

Before continuing his recitation, the Father turned to his phantom daughters in the back seat and said "You are seething with jealousy over my supreme rhetorical skills and astounding powers of recall.”

No, it's just that if I hear the words 'bright eyed Athena, thoughtful Telemachus or wily Odysseus again I'll puke in the car, one of the ghosts laughed, and the other high-fived her.

The Father hunched over a bit in the front seat, hunkering under this imaginary hailstorm of mockery and filial ingratitude.  Then he espied something along the otherwise dreary, featureless road that elevated his level of alertness, pumped up his morale, and recharged his mojo.

A man in a faded green foul weather jacket, strangely out of place in this July heat, probably lifted off of some sailor, but where the hell was the navy in this waterless waste, was leaning against an old sign post that marked the Highway 90 path to Marfa, a relic from before the time before they installed the 14 foot freeway marker above. The Father posited that the man had taken his garment from a member of the Interstellar Fleet that famously docked in yonder ghost-light burg. The drifter was Latino, he could have been a footsore illegal immigrant who had traversed the rugged Big Bend canyons between here and the border, but something in the wideness of his eyes, as expansive as the Great American Desert between here and San Diego, advertised unbroken honesty and innocence. Even though the weary traveler did not have a thumb in the air to announce hitchhiking intentions, the Father stopped his car by the sign post.

This was not typical behavior for him. Since leaving Pittsburgh, he had encountered 29 hitchhikers with fully extended thumbs (to stave off road weariness he had actually counted), and zoomed past all without a second glance. Perhaps it was the look of serene indifference as to whether anyone would give him a ride or not, displayed on the face of this particular interstate vagabond, that prompted the Father to offer a lift.

“Where you going?” the Father announced through his rolled-down window.

“Nogales,” the man answered in the lazy English pronunciation of the word.

“What a coincidence, me too,” lied the Father. He wasn't going anywhere near Nogales. Tuscon to Nogales then back again would take him 130 miles out of his way.

The footbound man lowered his duffel bag gently into the back seat, seeming to be respectful of the upholstery, then settled softly into the front. He did not have to be reminded to put his seatbelt on. The Father stole a furtive glance at his passenger, thinking that if he was going to haul this unknown cargo all the way to Nogales he better size him up a little. In the periphery of his cone of sight he saw the blurred image of a young man, probably only in his late twenties, but having a look of somber earnestness that belied his age, signifying that he had been around the block a couple of times and had learned a thing or two in his limited span of years. The young man sported a layer of stubble where a beard could grow if left unchecked, but other than that he was well groomed. There was no air of menace about this youth, no bad vibes that would foretell his eventually repenting having picked him up.

The pair cruised quietly a couple of miles, each adapting to the presence of the other. Then, to break the silence that was not awkward but more annoying to the Father, who had been planning to cycle through a complete litany of Homeric epics out loud, he said to the passenger “Where are you coming from?”

“Down South,” the young man replied. “Alabama way. Picking cotton, if you can believe that. It turned out to be just a little too degrading for my taste. I don’t mind working with peaches or peanuts, but I just can’t swing low enough to work on a cotton farm.”

The Father laughed. His passenger was obviously intelligent. Thinking the ride to Nogales might not be such a dull one, after all, he ventured a more sensitive question. “Do you mind if I ask where you are going to – I mean, once we get to Nogales. Or is that your home?”

The Father feared he had struck a nerve, already typecasting this man as an illegal alien though they had barely met, but the youth was surprisingly candid in his reply. “Not at all, sir. I’m going back to Mexico. I’ve been back and forth across this country the past year and a half. I’ve met a lot of nice people, more than bad ones, but overall I don’t think it’s for me. No matter how hard I work, no matter how I try to convince them I have the brainpower to rise above the herd, I still get those looks. You know, those Hey kid, the crop is in the barn, why are you still hanging around looks.

“Unfortunate,” said the Father.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said the young man. The conversation seemed cathartic to him, so he continued without prompting. “Before I headed down South, I spent a lot of time in the Gila River Valley, Arizona. Working on cotton farms too, but because it wasn’t the deep South, it didn’t have the same kind of depressing connotations. I stayed in this little wide spot in the road, there in the Antelope Valley. You’ve probably never heard of it. A little town you could spit across, name of Cornudo.”

The Father’s eyes went wide. He strayed a little into the opposite lane, then steadied the car.

“Whoa,” said the passenger. “I guess you have heard of it.”

“Did you say Cornudo?” asked the Father, by way of clarification.

“Yes sir,” answered the passenger, “that’s the place.”

“And you say you left a year and a half ago?”

“Approximately. More or less.”

The car passed an abandoned roadside motel, its peeling paint, boarded windows, and the accumulation of tumbleweeds swallowing its facade seeming to signify an extended period of decay. In front there stood a tall, rusting metal sign that resembled a middle finger pointed heavenward, either in false hope or as a big eff you to anyone who was stupid enough to stay there. In reality, despite the dreary condition of the place, the motel had only been shuttered about a year and a half. It was a monument to the truth that once man washes his hands of his temporal creations, nature takes them back really fucking fast.

The Father glanced at the dilapidated inn, then gripped the wheel tighter. His absent, phantom daughters would have recognized this as an indication that the wheels of his brain were turning and he was about to go off on one of his extended rants.

“Are you familiar with Cornudo, sir?” the passenger said with a touch of disbelief.

“Cornudo - ha! Am I familiar with it? You betcha.”

The Father grew quiet for a moment, then took a deep breath for dramatic pause. “You know, young man, a lot of interesting things have happened in Cornudo, Arizona, that sleepy little town embedded deep in the Gadsden Purchase, since you left a year and a half ago. Are you up for a story?”

The passenger shrugged. “Sure, why not?” It was still a long way to Nogales, what else were they going to do? In his travels, the youth had realized you could learn a lot from these old farts, if you just listened.

The Father forgot all about Homer. He eased off the accelerator a bit, synchronizing the speed of the car to the predicted pace of his narrative, then began his tale. There was this young man of twists and turns, a kid named Mike Gasden, name sounding like but spelled differently from the vastness of the Gadsden Purchase we shall shortly enter into, who...

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Image from John Margolies Roadside America collection, Library of Congress, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, altered by author into black and white.