Chapter 4 To Indian Country

The Run to Farmington

It was about four hundred miles for the run to Farmington.  They fitted out three pickups with a trailer; one carried a gas tanker with about seventy gallons, and another truck was a diesel - they could pick up diesel on the way; and a nice new rough-country auto.

One truck was a beaut, a rancher's pride - a brand-new Ram Pickup, top-shelf, 6.2 liter.  A present from Captain Trips, through the dealership down in Denver.

They took a summer route down by Pagosa Springs, up across Del Norte and South Fork.  The drive was beautiful late Spring in the Rockies; the flatlanders kept wanting to rubberneck, and lookie-loo on the way.  There was time for that on the return.

They had five Westerners along - Montanan and Wyoming fellas, who were joyful to get out of the frying-pan flatlands - Jack Sokoloff and Walsh; three Coloradans - Wayne Sandoval and Seth Locklear, two who lived in the mountains, and a flatland medic from Fort Collins, Tony Westerfield, who could keep his mouth from running most of the time; Judy, of course, she was the organizer of the little expedition, and a quiet older fella out of Jemez Springs.  He still went up for elk with his grandsons; not young enough for heavy lifting, but he would be fine.  His name was Martinez.

They hauled out by six AM, "to beat the traffic," said Westerfield, and then prudently shut up for the rest of the trip, to everyone's approbation.  Still, Westerfield was banished to drive the car solo for the first part of the trip - the fear of a Chatty Cathy on a seven-hour trip filled everyone with dismay.

The car was for the nice things, the gifts and such.  The heavy gifts and other stuff went in one of the pickups.  Ten thousand rounds of .30-06 and a thousand each of shotgun, bird in various gauges.  A thousand .308 for the odd long-gun round.  Plenty of medicines, especially antibiotics, bandages and dressings, scrubs and gloves and disinfectant.  Folks who live in a part of the country where the Plague still exists, do appreciate their disinfectant.

Plague, actually, beats down quite well with tetracycline.  Get it at the horse and cattle supply; it's no different than the people stuff.  Of course, the FDA and CDC would scream and holler if they thought people were using horse drugs.  In sad irony, there WAS no FDA or CDC anymore, they'd been wiped out by a plague that was their own damn fault, sort of.

Hard candies, stuff that would do well out in the truck; some sugar and flower, and nice spices here and there. Cumin and oregano are always welcome.  A couple bags of pinto beans and some rice, and dried corn.  A little masa harina, a little nice cooking oil, some canned goods here and there.

Into Center, Colorado

They rolled down the valley into Center near Alamosa in late morning; stopped for a piss, gas and nibble, and a well-deserved stretch, and a little shopping.  Not much there, but it was the produce aisle, sure.

If you were the only people left in the world, which they damn near were, and had never seen the Alamosa basin and the San Luis valley, you might suspect that you were in the middle of the world, ringed by high mountains still bonneted with snow.

Taters weren't up yet, but some carrots were fine, and some tomatoes.  Twenty, thirty pounds in the back of the car, which was cool enough with the windows down to bring vegetables.  Sidestepped Durango, and made it down to Aztec by three.  They picked up the gorgeous Animas that ran down out of Durango and followed into town.

Into Aztec, NM

They stopped in town for a pee and a stretch.  The town, like everyplace, was utterly vacant and without a hint of life; the tumbleweeds blew marvelously through the hot streets.  They drew the trucks into a circle up at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Aztec, and heated up some canned black beans and carrots over a small campfire in a grassy island.  No chance of a fire going anywhere, surrounded by a dozen acres of asphalt.

Jack had rode down with Judy all the way, and when she went off for a girl pee, he muttered - "You know, that gal don't say three, four words all the way down.  It's unusual, but I been looking forward for some one to talk to."

They all had ten years on her, Mr. Martinez thirty; but she was the purpose of this whole trip, and had an air of command that was surprisingly smooth and effective for an expedition of rugged and independent men.

She come back, and Tony , Doc - he wasn't a real doc, but he had been a combat medic, and all the company called him Doc - anyhow, Doc/Tony whispered,  "Something's making me feel kinda funny."

Walsh roared at that.  "Something's making you look kinda funny, too, but you should blame your parents."

Doc flipped him the bird, friendly-like, and said - "You gettin' a feel - how empty Aztec is here now?"

Sandoval looked at him all straight, and said, "We've been meaning to tell you, son.  There's been a real bad epidemic called Captain Trips...Are you just picking up on that, 'migo?  Walsh snorted a bean out his nose, and rolled back, grabbing for his bandanna and laughing.

"No, I mean - fuck you - I mean, kinda TOO empty - like we're being watched?"

Judy spoke up.  "Mr. Westerfield's right.  We are being watched."  She always called them Mister Somebody - a blend of Western manners and commander's protocol.

"We come in to Navajo lands, and we best be on our good behavior.  I haven't talked to an Indian since the epidemic, and they've gotta be twice as jumpy as we are.  Whatever we come across, we have to back down, turn the other cheek, be nonviolent no matter what.  If something goes down, that will keep us alive."

They all nodded, solemnly. If you didn't look at her, or pay attention to the pitch of her voice, she was damned good at command.  That's for sure.

Farmington, NM.

They all pulled over on the side of the road just before the "Welcome to Farmington!" sign, a puff of hot dust marking their arrival.

Judy hopped out and faced north, and they all assembled in front of her.  A few dropped to parade rest, not really thinking about it.  They waited for her to start out.

"As you know, we're here to get to know our neighbors, or establish diplomatic relations for the Free Zone, or whatever you want to call it."

"We go into Farmington, and get towards the west side of town on Main Street.  We look around for a good hotel that's worth using - they're all pretty near downtown."

"If you've been riding with a holster or sidearm, disarm and put everything in the car, if there's room.  Don't wear a duster, nothing but a denim jacket.  People will be watching you, and they will want to know if you're armed.  From now on, all weapons stay in the hotel.  If a firearm is discharged in town, we turn around and go back home, if we make it that far."

"If you see anyone watching you, ignore them.  Don't wave, and don't react if you hear any noises after dark.  We are in a reasonably safe place.  React to nothing - and you won't get hurt."

She paused, as the men started looking around at each other, uneasily.  She was asking them to place all their safety, all their trust in her hands.  And when it all boiled down to the beans, she was a twenty-year-old girl.  But there wasn't a damn thing else to do.

"Okay?" and she waited for any questions.  There were none.


"We settle in to the hotel a bit, unpack our personal belongings.  The Ram's loaded up with gifts and presents, and tarped down nicely, thankya, gentlemen.  None of the perishables are in it - no medicine or fresh produce.  We run down main street, fill it up and gas up the car - we can do that with the other trucks, but maybe later." 

"Mr. Sandoval, Mr. Martinez, clear your stuff from the Ram at the hotel.  About one hour after we arrive, take the Ram west on the 64 out of town.  Watch for a sign that says "Welcome to the Navajo Reservation.  Stop the truck on pavement, off-road if you can find it.  Don't cross the border - stop in the road if you have to.  I'll be following in the car.  That's where we leave the truck."

 "Do we need a detail to unload?"

"No.  We just leave the whole thing there, including the truck."

"You're giving them THE TRUCK, too?"  Ben Martinez pissed off.  They had picked out the best truck that they could find from the new stock in Denver.  It had just turned 500 miles.  It still had the new truck smell.  Wayne Sandoval turned and began woefully wiping the bugs off the windshield where the wipers hadn't got.  They looked like mourners wiping down a hearse.  That was a nice truck.

"Leave the truck, engine off and keys clipped on the door with a carabiner.  Unlocked."

"Is it going to be safe?" asked Tom Westerfield, always a flatlander.  "What if somebody steals it?"

Jack Sokoloff chuckled.  "Tom, IT'S gonna be fine.  IT'S gonna be around next week.  Your little pink ass, though, can't say for sure."

Jack went on.  "We're in Indian Country now, Tom.  Don't you get it?  We're at their home, and our safety is entirely dependent on our hosts.  We've rolled in unexpectedly.  Let them do what they do, on their time."

Judy nodded, as Tom offered, "Is it really proper to call it Indian Country?  I mean, shouldn't we be saying..."

Ben Martinez chimed in, "Dammit, leave all that Boulder PC horseshit at home.  Indians call Indians 'Indians' out this way, and call it 'Indian Country' or 'the Big Rez' or whatever they damn well want.  They're not on notice for our political correctness.  They're asking whether or not to let us leave alive.  White folks have been nimble with the fucking words for hundreds of years.  Where'd that get the Indian folk?  Don't call them Indians - don't call them Native Americans.  In fact, just shut up and speak when you're spoken to.  Friendly tip from a Hispano-American.  Don't be a gabacho."

Walsh, just for mostly to shake off the boredom and the aches of the road, put to boot in a little, too.  He hadn't been asked to be on his best behavior since last time he went to church.  That had been a while.

"Do you know anything about the real history of the Indians in the Southwest?  I hope to God you don't.  Captain Trips has called for closin' time and pay up, and it's the Anglo folks that pretty much gone broke and walked away.  White folks means Europeans too, ain't no difference.  Ain't no sympathy gonna that get you, anyhow.  We've walked in, and we're at their disposal.  So dummy up."

Now, nobody disliked Tom, don't get me wrong.  They were all nervous, and tired and grouchy, and needed to shake off a bit of the trail.  They'd be up sitting around, having a small nip of the fine stuff, just fine.  Except Judy. She looked like the kind of gal that didn't drink, and to tell the truth, they were all a little in awe of her.  She slid into the role of Commanding Officer, god-knows-how and hallelujah!  did it fit her fine.  Every day's a jump ball, in the New Way of Things.

Plus, she seemed to want to get rid of the Walkin' Talkin' Hardcase more than anybody; that fit just fine.  Mother Abagail seemed to like her.  That made everything copacetic, coupé septique, Mamaw might say.

So it was done.  And the evening and the morning were the first day in the Land of the Diné.

Chapter 3 Plans

Le hogan est la maison traditionnelle des Indiens Navajos. Reconstruction moderne pour touristes (musée en plein air). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(@P950)
Before it was the Free Zone, before it was in the days the meetings, they would round up and talk, like a school assembly.

Judy asked - when do you discuss the reports from Farmington?   Weekly?

Everyone was there, and most folks stared at her like she was speaking in tongues.

 - How often do you go to Farmington for the watch?

They sat there, mystified.

 - What about Grand Junction, maybe?

Not a word.  Even from Tom.

Now, wait - that was before Tom Cullen came.  It wasn't Tom there.  There was a fella up from Costilla County with his brother, and he was awful slow, too, brother not a whole lot better.  Him and Tom got on well after Tom come up from the East - but he was Warren, War'n Baca, the name, Chew was the epithet, he was pretty tall and hairy, like that one in the movie.  War'n and Tom was smart enough to bait a hook, between the two of them, and they'd go fishing.  But I'm way off the topic, again.

Judy sat there, bedazzled, like she had come onto the Annual Baca Family Reunion, and discovered that ol' War'n was the Rocket Scientist of the clan.

Some folks didn't like her, for talking over them, like she was snobby-smart.  She just couldn't help it. She tried to deal the deck out slow, speeding up a little when they looked frustrated, slowing it down a little when the Baca Family Face started to spread across the crowd.

- Who's heard of Farmington?  A few hands raised.

 - Navajos.  You hear of Navajos?  Most of the hands went up, and the puzzlement began to clear.

 - Navajo land's out there by Farmington, that's the eastern corner, and a lot of the land from here to Las Vegas Nevada's on the Big Rez - the Navajo land.

 - They's thousands of Navajos who lived there before Captain Trips, and they didn't live big and fancy like the people on the Front Range.  Anyone following me?

A few hands.

 - Navajos live in the Center of the World, according to them.  Ain't nothing, ain't no plague or Captain Trips is going to coerce a Navajo to leave the Center of the World, especially no plague.  They hate illness, more so than most.  It's a thing with them.

 - Anyone know the world between western New Mexico and the Grand Canyon, ask a Navajo.  The western portal into Navajo land's down around Farmington.  So we ought to be going to Farmington now and again to know what them bastards are doing over in Las Vegas.  You with me?

Light dawns on Marble Head.  We'll leave Grand Junction for another time.  That one's too much.

Chew sat there, mouthing "NAVAJO"to himself, like he won a prize at the fair. 

Chapter 2. Judy, Judy, Judy.

 Hernandez, I seem to recall was her name, and in New Mexico, a blue-eyed Hernandez will not draw a second glimpse; Santa Fé being a melting pot for a half-century whilst Manhattan was an "Indians-only" club.  Some thought her folk came out of Hernandez the town down south.

"Indian" is the word I'll use directly here, as I hear folks who are Indians talking that way to each other.  Back in the day, there was a Gathering of Nations Powwow down south every year before Captain Trips made the big time.  He sure was a one-hit wonder, but he was on everyone's lips...

Harold was terrified of her.  That gave untold pleasure to more than one citizen of the Free Zone.  Now, she seemed to be fairly meek and forgettable, when in a group.  You couldn't get two words out of her for small talk.  She seemed impatient sometimes in little groups, and she got the reputation, among the snippy and small-minded, that she was stuck up.  But I'm kinda getting ahead of myself, Harold Lauter wasn't shown up yet in the Free Zone.

What Judy was, was whip-smart, the term fey-smart not being around much then.  She had a plainness of speech in being straightforward when she knew something; she didn't have to ease it around in conversation when she knew her stuff.  And she knew a lot of stuff, especially for a 20-year old girl.  And grim as an undertaker, that girl.  Never smiled.

Her first Chatauqua she held over at the Library.  The next they started holding up on the grounds of the Colorado Chatauqua Society digs just south of 9th and Baseline.  They didn't know what to call them, until they found the auditorium, and she read up on the movement, and got a name for those half-formed thoughts about what the Free Zone a'borning needed.

She presented about the history of the West, as she knew it - off the cuff, and with plenty of help from the locals; many of the newcomers being strangers, and even before Mother Abagail came to town.

Harold got started adding on some ornamental facts to what Judy was talking about, I don't recall what exactly, but he came in with some facts that were exactly wrong, and found out so.  He made the lethal mistake of proposing that she and he had a difference of opinion.  She showed him patiently that his words were empty; he turned tail and ran.  After that, he loathed her.

If he saw her.  Unlike everyone else in Harold's bailiwick, he seemed to bear her no malice - he seemed like he couldn't quite see her, exactly.  It looked like he was snubbing her - but that was a social maneuver a bit above Harold's pay grade.  He just couldn't see her clearly, like a wisp of fog or a face in the clouds.

To look back, things can be clear in retrospect, it was the start of one of the fey things that would characterize Eliza Blue, 'Lizablue her name wore down to, her name....after.

For blackhearts like Harold, 'Lizablue bent the lines of evil, much like, as Einstein showed, gravity bends the spacetime continuum.  Black holes don't show up as a dot in the sky; their immense mass bends the light around them going in the shape like a wheat kernel or sunflower seed, driving them together downstream, making a gravitational lens.  Evil couldn't see 'Lizablue, especially not great evil; what it saw is a shimmer, a bubble in the light, a wavy horizon, something like that.

She had a something to her, let's call it fey, that if it were actual physical thing with mass, would be greater than the planets, the Sun.  That fey was part of her; that's all I can tell you.  Imagine some great dark unseen mass, more than all the visible universe combined, that only was known by its gravity, bending light here and there, imagine that, although it's crazy talk and falling off into nonsense.  But not dark like - the Hard Man, not that sort of bad dark.  Just dark.

I'm getting things out of turn, some, but I had to speak of how Judy was even before Mother Abagail's voortrekkers made it to Colorado.

[To be continued]

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Ending, the Stand. A Fan Fiction of the Novel by Stephen King. Chapter 1

Eliza Blue

Eliza Blue, to  the Free Zone had come.

If this story was told in the long-ago languages, that sing that she cameth, hit cymþ, áhefean styrung, áhebban andan, áhrisian brégnes, ástýrian egesa, áþweran þracu.  This is not an ancient song.

Eliza Blue - it seems she was here in the Free Zone always.  Although she's not from Colorado, we knew that, she said she wasn't.  'Course she wasn't Eliza Blue then, nor was there much to say of the Free Zone itself, mind.  I forget her real name, and most things about her back then.  Not spooky li'l gal, but not much notable.  Nothing really to see.

Captain Trips had lain waste America barely a week or two before, when she came up in the rosy-fingered dawn, up out of the morgue that was Denver; wind blew up the high prairie from Oklahoma; the charnel smell, people put bandannas across their faces so peppermint oil cleaves the smell, not to vomit.  Upriver she had cometh, we knew that, from Santa Fé to Alamosa; thence up by Colorado Springs.  

Of the Jornada del Muerto del Norte, the days of journey of the dead before Alamosa, she wouldn't tell.  She was a Western girl, laconic.  She would get on well with a girl from Vermont some; they was just some very young women that was pals, and it was the only time you would see __, still can't recall her name, but you would see her smile, or even laugh, which was all girly and tinkly and joyful.  They were just two folks who bonded and lay spirit into the new Boulder, some foundation, and a good thing.  Two folks.

She called it the Texas Plague back then.  It started around Juneteenth where she lived.  And yes, she did dream, and dreamed like the others did dream, of Mother coming who was not yet there, and the Dark One, which set her face grim, and she would speak nothing of him, other than "I will fight him.  I will break him," such as many who were angry and frightened would say.  But she was not angry or frightened.

She had come up through, it being summer, and stocked up remarkable, like a mountaineer or woodsman.  In a big Dooley pickup, with jump tanks for gas, and dragging on a shorty covered trailer, what was made up for a Move Out To Nowhere, which was what her run to Boulder was, not knowing any more than the rest.

She was right jealous about that trailer, as it was nobody's business.  She did allow that she hauled about 10,000 rounds of .22 for needs be, and later on, an elk gun that she could use smartly.  I only recall hearing that gun twice, and both times, there was a fine elk roast that evening down at the campground that was the old park before there was the Free Zone.

Otherwise, the trailer sat on the north side of her house, and walk on through her house anytime of the day, or night if she wasn't there - the door wasn't locked, ever, as she was a mountain girl.  But don't go nosin' around the north side.  You'd get a scolding, and that from a girl who drops elk at 600 yards, it makes you think.

Except for one or two pals, she pretty much kept to herself, just not much of nothin' - plain.  Plain not the kind the mean girls say, not pretty or big nose or such.  Plain like the Old Order, don't use anything unless it's needed, don't use it unless you use it up, some such.

The Dooley, she lent free out to anyone who was making a haul up out of Denver, but not the trailer.  And the next thing to get going was a truck shop, because woe on ye who damaged the Dooley, not a fender or something, but put the winch back with mud on it, and you'd get a scolding, and I mentioned about her scoldings.  She wasn't shrieky or petulant, but the blue eyes, Judy blue eyes - that's it, her name was Judy, they just bored through you like a drill bit in sandstone, and you were sorrier than sorry could be for what you done, and that was about it.  You hopped to fixing it, right away, no fuss, no threats.  Judy blue eyes, just like the song.  Yep.

[To be continued]

Ending, the Stand. A Fan Fiction of the Novel by Stephen King. Why.

I have enjoyed Stephen King's work for a long time.  I seemed to have dropped off reading some just before The Stand, and I avoided it - not like the plague, just avoided it - for some time.

I just picked it up and very much enjoyed it.  I had a set of chapters come to mind, leading to a very cool ending, and I was sure this was how the book was going to end.  By about Page 800, I was getting dubious that the plot could develop quickly enough to end this way.

And it did not.

I was born in Henderson, Nevada, which was near the scene of the explosive ending of The Stand, and also was the scene of a real explosive ending of a rocket fuel plant, quite the piece of video art.

And I couldn't leave off such a great ending.

So, here's some chapters that start interleaving into the book, from late June to the end of the tale.

I hope you like it.  It's fun.

The Story Begins

I hope to update this deranged pile of a blog soon.  The general topic is modern American psychosis.

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