KING SNAKE
Descendants of Iniquity
by
Christopher Piper
Brighton Publishing LLC
501 W. Ray Road, Suite 4
Chandler, AZ 85225
www.BrightonPublishing.com
Copyright © 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936587-01-8
Smashwords Edition
Cover Design by Tom Rodriquez
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Prologue
Lore
The great rivers are conduits. They are the whoosh and bustle of a fast way into a secret and better place. When our country was young, the lust for money swept the multitudes into the big waterways, as if before a flash flood. Once floating, they believed themselves to be on a ribbon of opportunity, and looked upon all they encountered with bright, hungry eyes. Where there was a promontory, a redoubt, a fertile plain, or just a promising spot from which to force one’s dreams onto a new land, they stopped forever, erecting forts, churches, cities, and posts of commerce as proof of God’s favor.
The rivers carried all equally. The brave and honorable were washed westward in currents shared by the savage and predatory. For each noble agent of Manifest Destiny, there were a dozen desperate criminals in search of easy money and a dream of true lawlessness. For them, the frontier was filled with gold, and if you couldn’t claw it from the ground it could be pulled from the mouths of fellow, weaker pilgrims.
The cities, churches, and even a few reconstructed forts remain. They’re mostly like burned-out bulbs—dull shells with no record of past things lighted. Behind thick floodwalls, the descendants of the noble and the savage still lurk, their eyes made dim from disappointment, but still hungry. The frontier lives on in the thick, damp air of river towns and in the blood of those born of boatmen, pirates, gamblers, moonshiners, fugitives, and mountain men. The progeny of those intrepid early travelers inherited a hard view of life on the big water. Nature and nurture have cooperated in preserving the essence of the great spark that pushed their ancestors west. But there was no more West. The Great Opportunity seemed dried up, and those genetically programmed to seek it were left wanting.
If opportunity had officially gone away, then the sons and daughters of pioneers were forced to honor their atavistic instincts on the only path left—a search for adventure. It became an end unto itself. A life of adventure found would serve in lieu of fabled destinations. In the tiny, depressed river towns, character was often assembled from the results of this rambling search for the wild things left in life.
And there was wildness. Each day and night held wonderful chances for those so inclined. A trip to a public event or even a pretty Sunday at church could be the way forward for anyone truly programmed to find adventure. That way would undoubtedly be paved with violence, shouting, vengeance, or worse transgressions. But the nights were even better, as each gulp of beer or whiskey and every milligram of methamphetamine was one more strong paddle-stroke down the Big River.
I grew up on a huge and important bend of the Ohio River. The small town formed in the shadow of an ancient fort that had hosted odd bits of American history. The treacherous Aaron Burr stopped there to plot against the government. In my time, a statue of George Rogers Clark occupied a high vantage. Later I learned of his brutal ways and history of driving the natives before him like panicked deer. He was honored with a fine bronze statue and at least one elementary school named in his memory.
I am the son of pioneers, wild folk who landed here before the state was even a state. They were ultimately rewarded for service in the War of 1812 with a 650-acre section of prime wilderness land. They set about gambling and pissing this prime ground away until I live now, comfortable in the knowledge that I would most likely be shot dead if I stepped one foot on it.
My true inheritance from the brave and crazy souls who came before has been paid out in the same doomed reckless sense of adventure that flowed down the big waters, all the way over the Rockies and into the Pacific Ocean. I never felt I had a choice. My day-to-day decision-making process was terminally infected with the idea that this life must be truly special; that the blank spots on the map were not really gone; that I would find my 650-acre section and leave my own statue to overlook the Great Conduit.
And my life has been a wire stretched tight. I have howled and sweated, running before serious incarceration and violent early death. I have sought the impossible and found it to be something one gets used to. I feel lucky to have seen much of the worst, and some of the best, of the human spirit, and I am the last of many things.
From this place, far enough from the river country now to feel safer, I see my own desperate saga as part of a larger, writhing mass. So many lived hanging on similar tight wires that the resonant vibrations of each adventurer’s struggle rose to join a chorus of a single eerie note. The crazy river bends hummed with this symphony. You could (and still can) hear it on muggy summer nights. The collective moan of a thousand questing souls lives just under the cacophonous rattle of aquatic frogs.
***
Because of many things I lived always with an outsider’s view of the rich social structures around me. Even when I was eyeball-deep in participatory madness, a cooler angel floated above it all, observing. I was not susceptible to the same neuroses in the same ways as my fellow denizens. I was painfully aware of the truly peculiar and the dichotomous in our little world, and sometimes I felt like the only one in possession of this awareness.
The locals feared snakes, but I did not. I moved among them with the high, careful stride of the natural point man, relying on experience and instinct. I learned to recognize their habitats and behaviors, and became comfortable living in their midst. My adventures were to be found in lowland jungle and green, maze-like sandstone canyons. I felt most alive in the company of these environs’ native residents. Of these countless creatures that thrive in this Big River country, none is more satisfying to observe, and to occasionally interact with, than the noble serpent.
At the junction of biblical and sexual reason, the snake coils itself into a defensive posture. Like the citizens of the long-faded river towns, he endures an assault by his own genetics. 200,000 years of evading, defending, and existing below or outside of any imposed order have hardened his character. He will always be a snake, and despite wanting mostly to be left alone to do snake things, he will be misunderstood as a great and unpredictable threat. For the snake, this persecution is terribly frustrating and can lead to erratic behavior. Of this I am sure. I have known many.
Part One
Copperhead
My town was called Smoke Bend. The history of its name was torturous and malleable, but most agree it was at least loosely related to the billowing of early whiskey makers’ green-wood fires. Alcohol was the first thing made there in volume. It was not produced in brick factories owned by suited businessmen, but rather in shelters constructed of unskinned logs, tended to by grimy-faced men dressed in hides.
When the boats started to come regularly, and with them barrels of city whiskey, the more primitive merchants sheathed their Bowie knives and pressed on to the next promising bend and the next after that. By that time they’d traded the local garrison out of almost all their weapons and even a few uniforms. The whiskey-cookers were left with sixty or eighty angry, lonely men demanding alcohol for nothing, and no real business future in the area beyond naked piracy.
And for most, that was the logical choice. In both directions, the great riverway offered shelter to those with an interest in watching what flowed down it. Past the fort at Smoke Bend with its shaky, unarmed soldiers, a traveler would sense what felt like a thousand eyes on him. In the deep shade of any backwater might lurk a nightmarish flotilla of bearded men with fine weapons and fast, crude boats.
Many were killed and maimed, and the bandits enjoyed a long, glorious decade of lawless impunity. Their savagery was shocking, and on many wild nights even the frogs were shamed into silence by what had occurred amongst them. Ghoulish tales of near-cannibalism made it all the way back to Eastern newspapers, and many were not exaggerations. A popular method of body disposal was described, in which the victim was rent down the middle and gutted like a deer, before being stuffed with heavy rocks, sewn up, and cast into the deep gray waters. Dandy steamboat travelers in Louisville were given particular pause by these accounts.
The nominal leaders of these desperate inland pirates were a pair of gap-toothed Norsemen named Runkle. They were brothers, Jan and Wilhelm, descended from Prussian mercenaries who’d picked the wrong side in the Revolution. They’d marked the founding of our country by fleeing into the wilderness to mate with the locals and press westward. Their seed thrived in the new land, and within two generations was busy sewing rocks into gutted bodies and commanding a heathen navy of outliers.
But the fun had to end. Twelve years after the founding of my little town, the Runkle brothers were taken back to Smoke Bend, in chains, by the US Army. The soldiers made a show of protecting the murderous brothers from the angry town’s vengeance. They were escorted by twenty armed bluecoats and deposited safely behind the local fort’s high stockade walls. Here they fell to the judgment of the guards, who promptly hanged the fair-haired murderers from a cast-iron bell pivot set atop four log posts.
The story could have ended there except for the Runkle brothers’ own seed, sown prolifically among the women indentured to their cannibal camp. Much of their Prussian-pirate legacy was left to grow in the dank bottom lands, never filtering more than a few miles in either direction, forever in thrall to the Great River.
More than 130 years after Jan and Wilhelm had weighted and sunk their last corpse, I brushed heavily with the local remnants of their blood.
The surname had stayed whole, and his given name, as his father’s before him, was Leon. He was proudly the great-great-grandson of one of the Runkle brothers. The exuberance of life and celebration in the river pirate camp had promoted a free and easy exchange of breeding partners, so the matter of which bloodthirsty brother had sired Leon junior’s great-granddaddy was unclear.
He came into my life like a change of seasons. I’d just begun eighth grade, and the new school year brought a conspicuous new face. It was Leon, wide and strong all over, with eyes already like slits in very old leather. He’d been shipped from an even smaller town and school just upstream from Smoke Bend. The reasons for it were hazy, but the word “psychiatrist” was often mentioned around the tetherball court. I found young Leon to possess a magnetic charisma and a desire to befriend me almost immediately. He seemed a prudent choice of ally, as his unnaturally large and calloused hands and swarthy, pubescent appearance served to deter challenges or even stray looks from weaker kids.
The blood of murderers ran in his veins, but we knew only that he was realer than us and weirdly exciting. For me he was the first tentative bridge into small-town recreational-drug culture. In my family, this was a bit of risk-taking right up there with satanic sacrifice, or maybe forced sodomy. My older brother had dived into the peak of ’70’s drug life with the intensity and instinct of a Kamikaze pilot seeking the engine room of an aircraft carrier. He had a tendency to take things all the way, and his antics had ruined it all for me and my folks.
From the start, Leon operated under many incorrect assumptions about the realities around him. He seemed convinced that various authority figures would tolerate his shocks to their systems, if only because he was a fairly likeable and smart boy. He also misjudged the extent to which our young classmates would be impressed by our experimenting with ditchweed. This would have been the year Ronald Reagan was elected, and the country—and certainly our small town and junior high—were trending hard toward conformity. Leon’s bold bragging about our exploits caused a ripple of shock through the homeroom, followed immediately in many by an inborn urge to “narc.”
The clock was ticking, and it worried me almost to the point of illness. Every day was a sort of nightmare Christmas. I never knew what contraband Leon would pull from his bag. I felt a red-hot world of official sanction closing in around him, and I assumed I would be burned up in that same fire.
He was gone by Halloween. Expelled. The final straw had come in a pumpkin decorating contest. Leon’s entry was a mystery all morning, carefully covered as it was by his younger brother’s gray windbreaker. I had seen him dismount the bus that day with this cargo, and I had known no good could come out of it. When we assembled in the lunchroom for judging, I made a point to claim a spot far from Leon where I waited by my own uncontroversial entry. His was only the fourth or fifth pumpkin to be judged, and he put a stop to the whole business by proudly whisking aside the windbreaker to reveal his creation. It was a massive thing, painted jet black, with bloodshot eyes, sprouting dreadlocks that appeared to be made from old, filthy rope. Sticking from its mouth was an elaborate glass double-bubble pipe. The pipe’s rich brown color indicated that Leon had tested it thoroughly before committing it to his jack-o-lantern.
There was then a general cry of confusion and even disgust, and the kindly art teacher tasked with judging the madness began to weep. Her son, a bearded and ponytailed twenty-six-year-old, who lived in her basement, had a similar pipe.
Leon was removed bodily, and the outraged faculty and staff left the lunchroom with him. He was jerked from the side of his Rasta pumpkin so forcefully that the desk it sat on pivoted, causing the huge, frightening thing to totter wildly. For several tense seconds after we had become un-chaperoned, the crazy rocking continued, until momentum surpassed balance points and desk and pumpkin fell toward a small, blond cheerleader. She screamed primally as the offensive object, and even the drug pipe, landed intact and rolled toward her. We all seemed to panic to an inappropriate extent, deeply shaken by the whole affair.
Leon was chased, literally, out of state for his crimes. He found a more experimental learning environment across the river in Paducah, where he successfully completed the eighth grade. He was allowed back into our county to attend the new high school, but it was a big, consolidated affair, and we found different cliques that rarely mingled. I often heard rumors of his activities, such as when he turned his time in metal shop into a thriving cottage industry, manufacturing and distributing Ninja throwing stars and various other improvised weapons.
By then, I had eased into pothead culture at more or less my own pace. The breakneck fatalism of Leon’s junior-high influence on me had bought me an extra year or two of gun-shy resistance to the whole groovy scene. By the time my hair and my grades started coming down, Leon had joined up with a harder crowd of big boys. They ran in their own circle, an insulated brotherhood of future felons, loosely headquartered in the dark and foreboding territory known as the Black Bottoms.
There, the cypress groves were a thousand years old, with individual trees spanning six foot diameters. The area was a vast cemetery of former settlements; each failed and eventually swallowed by jungle. It was famous moonshiner country, as our tiny corner of the state had stayed dry well into the ’50s. In those days, the Bottoms were a checkerboard of dangerous fiefdoms, each watched over by wiry, unwashed men with ancient shotguns. Crude signage with skulls, bones, and misspelled warnings dotted this wild region, and the law could not even drive down the red-dirt roads without great numbers of federal officers involved.
Young Leon’s mentors were born and raised in the very middle of this madness. Their name was Hickham, and their forbearers had washed up the Ohio in the same general time and spirit as had the infamous Runkle brothers. These were people with only a loose grasp of their genealogy, so the historic connection to Leon’s own roots was probably a thing sensed, but not fully understood. He was drawn to them for obvious reasons, but they in turn welcomed him into the fold as they had few others.
I would see him with all three Hickham brothers driving far too slow down some rural highway, our routes briefly intersecting like birds migrating in different directions. They rolled a ’56 Chevy, which had faded uniformly from deep red to a very light pink. The shiniest thing on the vehicle was a ruler-straight line of seven blistered and dimpled punctures from AK-47 rounds, proud evidence of some recent tribal conflict. Leon was finally getting the respect for his dark side image he’d sought since first grade. But that ball was only beginning to roll, and he was then yet a glimmer of the hard man he would become.
If Leon was then only a glimmer, then I was a tiny wisp of bluish smoke. For all the AK fire and rough company and general outlaw image, he was still moving steadily toward becoming some kind of man and the transition seemed to be natural for him. He worked from an early age, stocking in grocery stores and developing a fixation on box-cutters which could have been trouble if it had been post 9-11.
But it wasn’t, and the world was still wide open for a young man with strong pirate blood. I had yet to derive much strength from my own blood and at eighteen years of age, I moved about much like an oak leaf borne on the waters of a brisk wilderness creek. In this manner, I found myself deep in the south side of Paducah, ambling into an ominous storefront called Denzmore’s Army Surplus.
Inside was a cave of drab green, brown, and black. Cammie nets hung from the ceiling, imparting an amorphous and organic vibe to comfort patrons. Gear and clothing overflowed from bins, shelves, racks, and even large free-standing piles. Amongst it all, I felt at once both safe and uprooted. In those days, it was not considered chic or even practical to frequent such a fringe establishment. Camouflage clothing or paraphernalia in any amount was strictly the concern of weirdos, pot growers, and young men overly obsessed with Russia.
And that day, a late Friday morning in September, all three groups were well represented at Denzmore’s. A knot of men in various degrees of military dress were gathered by a small counter, forced into unaccustomed physical proximity, by the confining nature of the overstocked inventory. They were armchair warriors, almost exclusively, and best personified by the sullen, 300-pound owner. His name was Pooch, and he was called this without irony. His days were spent in a high-backed folding camp chair centered under a display of disturbing bumper stickers on the wall behind him. In the center of the arrangement was a black and white pronouncement: “Sniper. You can run, but you’ll just die tired.”
Below it, Pooch looked as if he just might die tired any second, despite the lack of running. At his left and also behind the close counter, like store security, stood Leon. With his thick arms banded across the black Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt, and his eye-slits like pieces of knapped flint. He appeared to be the one man in the small crowd; the weirdo, pot grower, and Russia freak consolidated, who might actually get up out of his armchair once in a while. He was newly bearded, and the whiskers served to almost conceal his mouth when he spoke at me immediately.
“There he is,” he said naturally, already threading his way toward me around a pile of LC-2 rucksacks. “How the hell are you, man? I been thinkin’ about you… what brings you here buddy? What can we do for you?” His hand was reaching for mine, and our first shake in several years was an abrasive and crushing affair for me. I said, ‘Hey, good to see ya,’ and then I informed him that I had come for canteens. He seemed pleased and unsurprised, nodding his bushy head and motioning me to follow him. Through other piles and racks we twisted, and by the time we stopped in front of a deep metal shelf unit, Leon had made it clear that there would be many follow-up questions.
“Whatta you need it for?”
I said water.
“No, I mean for hikin’, campin’, bikin’, what?”
I said I guessed camping and hiking.
“You gonna carry it on a belt, shoulder-strap, or in your pack?”
I said I didn’t know, and he nodded again.
“One or two liter?”
I thought about this. Whatta you think, I asked him.
“If you’re goin’ out when it’s dry, like now, you’re gonna wanna take some two liters, probably…two or three at least.”
I told him OK, but he started shaking his head.
“But see… ” He presented his hand as if it held a small photograph, “water’s heavy. It weighs 8.337 pounds per gallon. Four liters to a gallon, just over two pounds per liter, two liters is four pounds. Just over. So you don’t wanna haul any more than you have to. Now if it’s been rainin’ enough, like in spring or winter, you can get water from the creeks if you got a filter. You got a filter?” His eyes were just black lines, but I knew they were full of calculations.
Twenty minutes later, I stood amongst the regulars at the crowded counter. I’d been warmly introduced and well-received, and now my large stack of intended purchases was being casually inspected as Leon rung them up on an old cash register, and announced each item as if issuing equipment to a new recruit.
“Canteens, one liter, three each. Canteens, two liter soft-side, three each.” He had informed me matter-of-factly that the soft-side canteen was quieter and therefore an asset if I were being chased or hunted for any reason. A twinge of my own pioneer heritage surged up as I realized this appealed to me.
“Poncho, woodland pattern, one each. Poncho liner, quilted. Groundpad. “E-tool… ”
This routine went on until the grand total reached almost $170. “Store discount,” Leon announced, “ten percent… call it $150, right Pooch?” Pooch nodded with eyes that had seen little of interest in years.
After money changed hands, he consolidated my new gear into the medium rucksack I’d purchased, even showing me how to attach canteens to various straps on the pack body. When it was fully loaded and cinched down tight, he threw the whole rig over one shoulder and nodded toward the exit and the world beyond. “I got it,” he said. “Let’s go.” The adventure seemed joined as we stepped through the sign-covered glass door and into the late-summer sun.
As he carefully placed the loaded gear into the hatch of my Mazda GLC, his movements slowed a bit, and suddenly lacked the aggressive purpose which had driven the last half-hour. I could tell he was thinking. He began to talk while half his body was still inside the car, tightening straps and shifting weight. “So, buddy,” his voice was lower and less public than it had been during the equipment lecture. “Where you goin’, anyway?” Still generally clouded and a little stunned from the whole experience, I struggled to grasp the scope of his question. I made a quiet creaking sound with my throat to tentatively indicate confusion. By now, he was out of the vehicle and reaching up to secure the hatch.
He stood facing me now, yet still squinting in all directions.
“I mean… where you goin’ campin’?”
“Oh, I… uh… up by Dixon Springs, probably.”
“Yeah? You ever been to Mill Spring?”
I knew the place he spoke of, but I’d never been there. It was far too close to the Bottoms for even a fool like me to wander into uninformed. I told him so, and he began to shake the bushy head again. “No,” he said, “you gotta get in there… you gotta.”
I nodded reflexively, but he continued. “No, you gotta see this place, I mean, there ain’t nowhere else like it around here, at least no place that ain’t crowded. I got a camp there in a little bluffline. It’s a cave, but you gotta climb to get up in it… There’s a springpool down below the bluff, and water bubbles right up outta the rocks… ’course… there’s no trail, so you gotta bushwhack…I’ll draw you a map. C’mon over to my vehicle.” Again he was moving, and I was following.
We stopped behind a large, navy-blue conversion van. It was covered with a light reddish dust, but otherwise unremarkable from the outside. He produced an enormous ring of keys from a camouflaged pocket and unlocked the rear double doors.
The inside was a microcosmic version of the establishment we’d just walked out of. It was mostly green and brown, and overstuffed with buckets, packs, and clear plastic tubs. I glimpsed a duct-tape label on one that indicated it held “batteries.” He was digging through a .50 caliber ammo can into which spiral notebooks had been filed. He removed one with a bright green cover, then set the can aside, still open. Its designated place seemed to be alongside a plastic milk crate filled with worn issues of Soldier of Fortune magazine.
He seated himself just inside the doors and began to sketch and talk. A lot of information was coming at me all at once. “This pen writes underwater,” he informed me. “This,” he said as he pointed at a bold line he’d drawn, “is the road to Devil’s Graveyard… you know that general area, don’t you? This is Iron Creek. This bridge is wooden, and it’s the only wooden one on that long stretch. Mill Spring Road is the second one past this mailbox.”
“When’re you goin’?” He raised his beard and squinted right at me.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said somewhat meekly, “I’m thinkin’ tomorrow… ”
“Perfect,” he nodded. “I work kinda late tomorrow, but I asked for Sunday and Monday off.” He nodded even more vigorously.
I motioned roughly towards Denzmore’s with my thumb, “This place open on Sunday?”
“Whatta you mean?”
“This place… you said you had Sunday off and I didn’t even think it was open…”
“Oh… I don’t work here… ”
I said the only thing I could think of, and it would turn out to be something I said frequently in the coming year, to Leon. “OK.”
His map was drawn exactly, and the next day I found the scale to be almost perfect; everything was where he said it would be. I pulled into the suggested parking area precisely twenty-three hours after receiving the intel. It was a tiny cul-de-sac of baked clay, weeds, and gravel at the end of a short run of old logging road. I was ill-prepared for and angered by the near-carpet of used condoms and other scatological litter that waited to welcome my new jungle boots. Local bored teens had apparently adopted the site as a convenient place to let off steam and other bodily fluids, and to do things they would later be mildly ashamed of.
As the residual hum of road noise faded in my head, it was replaced seamlessly with the throb and buzz of that forest place. I had stepped into a slow tornado of life, and stood somewhat intimidated by it. The overhead canopy was so thoroughly layered as to impart a dusk-like quality all day long. The land seemed to reach toward me from all directions. I felt as if I would be absorbed by the throb of one hundred thousand buzzing things.
My new gear was heavy, and the rucksack was pointedly not designed for civilian comfort. When everything was buckled, tightened, and lashed and I stood with the bulging weight pulling me backwards, I felt as green as the jungle around me. I was anxious to flee the fouled and public parking area, to find safety in the diminishing chance of being seen in my awkward new outfit by another human being. I pushed heavily into the tangle of thorn and vine that surrounded that disturbed place, Leon’s map clutched in my left hand, heading downhill.
I moved on uncertain ground, but with every step into that new country, I felt more secure and less green. The map was still uncannily accurate. Even large trees and rocks were marked copiously. When, after forty-five minutes of increasingly confident hiking, I stood before the ten-foot slab of sandstone that led upward to the ominous dark opening, I felt a tremendous surge of capability and mission that only increased as I negotiated the tricky climb up to the camp with little trouble.
Over the lip of the fabled cave waited an orderly world imposed by someone with patience and vision. The cave was deep and narrow, only about eight feet high at its edge and barley wider. A small fireplace sat, cold, near the center of the enclosure. There was various furniture – bunk, chairs with backrests, and a long counter. Everything was constructed of cedar poles, stone, and even a few pieces of scrap lumber. After dumping my gear, I began to explore in fascination. I found essential equipment stashed, like colored eggs, in every nook and niche I was brave enough to look into.
I picked a spot next to the fire pit and plopped down. Sitting cross-legged, I took in the view allowed by the dark stone edges of the small cave. Gradually, the subtle chuckling sound of the little spring reached through the eternal hum of summer. I felt a great power of calm and safety in that place to which I’d been directed. Looking down through the ragged stone frame of the cave-mouth to the springpool and the creek, a force not unsimilar to gravity took hold and threatened to pull me in either direction. It was a call to wander this country, this remnant thread to the world primeval. My old blood bubbled in me, a new and needed influence.
That afternoon is a memory undulled by one thousand greater adventures. I wandered up- and downstream, seeing every single thing with a knife-sharp clarity. Something about the general area, the well-equipped and orderly camp, the map, and Leon’s wild energy smacked of predestination and the start of important times.
By dusk I was again seated at the fire pit. The calm and confidence of the day was being edged out as I labored anxiously to build a small fire. Every stick of wood I could scrounge was punky and saturated from a long summer of ninety percent humidity and periodic fierce cloudbursts. I had stuffed a crumpled handful of staff paper from a music notebook into a pocket before departing the parking area, and was now dumbly discovering that it seemed to be infused with an almost fireproof coating. Any flame applied to it caused only a rapid smolder unable to even heat my kindling. I watched and blew and huffed and cursed as sheet after sheet was transformed, as if by alchemy, into so many intact leaves of ash with the lines of the great staff still visible, and useless to me.
The last sheet smoldered away impotently about the time that Venus became bright enough to shine on me. The sky above the treeline was a dark purple velvety affair, but in the small canyon, it was already full night. The insect chorus had changed shifts, and now the crickets were setting the long steady tone. I suddenly thought the fire to be an unnecessary indulgence. It was a warm night after a warm day, and I had plenty of food that could be enjoyed without cooking.
When the night fell fully on me, I resisted the strong instinct to beat it back. In those days, I’d just discovered Eastern concepts of existence. With the trust and confidence of the very young, I searched for an easy way beyond the cursed human shackle. As darkness came to everything else on that first night in the cave, I felt myself light up inside. From that stone pocket, I seemed to see a long way ahead and behind everything. I was sitting quietly, doing nothing, and letting life happen around me.
And life did happen. I must have sat there, almost motionless, for an hour. My eyes had adjusted so well to working un-aided that the entire world had stayed lit and defined, as if a weird, blue-white sun had risen. It was through this ethereal filter that a subtle, intermittent, orange flash became visible. It was upstream and in the trees, a ghost light flickering, each time closer to where I sat waiting.
I had almost forgotten he was coming. He’d ventured in, long past dark, off-trail in a large tract of wild country, needing only the occasional spark of a cheap cigarette lighter to stay on his bearing. I heard not a leaf or twig protest his passage. The last flash of the ghost light was at creek level, just twenty or so yards away. Then there was sound—a clear, chirping whistle that bounced off the roof and walls of my stone enclosure and cut through my monk-like calm. I struggled to answer the challenge through lips suddenly dry, and produced only a thin, reedy cry like a sick bat. His call was repeated and mine came stronger the second time. There was a slight rocky splash of a boot sole in water. I breathed deliberately, awaiting the visit of this crazed night bird.
“Anybody home?” His voice was a stage whisper from below the camp. I was squatting at the lip by then, and answered in a similar tone. He began passing on information when he was just one or two moves into the short climb up. “Sorry I’m late getting in here, man,” he climbed with only three limbs, his left arm cradling a small cooler. “A junkie came by and tried to sell me the first Elvis album. I ’bout had to put a shotgun on that motherfucker to get rid of him.”
I took the cooler, and then his hand, to help him up and in. He felt light, and I felt very strong and calm again. Even in the bluish dark I could see his black slit-eyes glimmer a little, and make out his beard, defining the wolfish grin. I felt like I’d arrived in a well-lit station after some all-night bus ride. My reality was changed. Leon had brought his Santa-bag of things to show me, and his insistent energy was an almost visible force. There was suddenly a feeling that the night was young and there was much to do.
Leon’s arrival was in short order, made wholly visible as he produced first a small candle lantern from a scary crevice, and then a handful of dried grasses. He hung the lantern from a big nail jammed into a stone flake on the ceiling. Its light cast the cave as an important place, a confluence, a place for meetings, funerals, witchery. There was a mythic quality in our being there. The weather seemed weirdly colder as he knelt by the little tipi of blackened but unburnt wood. Backlit by candlelight, his bearded, shaggy, and slightly-grinning head made me think of Navajo shape-shifter legends.