Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

Julie was sitting up talking about the pure dream of land, her hair free and some pasted to her forehead with sweat. Julie was on her back working out the details of buying land. My American hard-on was soon standing up for itself, big and proud.

In that motel was the start of all things — I thought I could get away with living. I'd grown up in the woods peeing in little holes, stalking the trees and watching through soft vision for tan deer I did not see but saw in my mind. Seeing the road too the first time. Then I had taken the road alive a few years after. I had not kin like-minded for figuring life out. They were crazed in the home, in the oak and hickory, and I was in the motel with Julie Townlove as a young man and we had money and were near enough to the Pacific northern coastline, but not trapped against the ocean with nothing but sand and water to stare at or sleep to — alive and firing — just above the golden dream of the alabaster city on the hill in Northern California.

Sitting in the motel wingback, I could feel through the walls — the sun and sky. Pure peace and meditation. The sort of blue the sky was I was feeling out into the redwoods of the valley, sensing bridges trembling in traffic in the golden city, and the old veterans in bushes near the hill, like bears, like wildmen keeping the country going even still, maddogging the old city, growling, shouting around about remembering Fort Knox, live generals, field armies, air strikes, Marilyn Monroe, terrifying us all, and I could happily hear a tit or two harden in valleys between here to NYC, of Midwestern girls and their mothers, in training bras and big silk brassieres with hooks and straps and eyelets and lace trimming and big pads, as nothing was beyond me, I'm saying I could still feel and sense so far out I could let myself go all the way sitting in the wingback and letting the air move through my blood — I could hum, I say, loving all to the sun. (I used to meditate, transcendentally, and still do in the front of the RV. That light from the candles, from the sun, from Something a million thousand miles away and right here, that's still with old odd me. I sit up front near the engine hub in my 1988 RV and hum but it's all kind of broken.) Yes, I felt God inside me in the motel, Him agreeing with how agreeable I was to the easy law of Yes. I was like flat water moving through the valley of the yellow sun — or some such picture. Deep still water, like that old song describes and says things best as songs can and must do. Like happy plants with fine names.

Next, we are on a farm but not farming vegetables.

Harvest and I was a tall wreck of nerves and bandits came. We were dope farming. Dope. Do I have to spell it out to you? I fished out my pistola and got nervous and shot one bandit through the foot or it was a plant. Another escaped my.44 Vaquero shot, but twisted up his ankle and limped off the side of the hillside trotting and whining. I had one bad boy, all of 19 or 19½ or no more than 19¾ and I got mad and busted his mouth out with the butt of the revolver and sent him away, him bleeding with broken teeth and gums and his tongue twisted up like a dark small foot in his mouth.

First thing, Julie is set on spending our time on Reservations. She's had enough talk of my youthful Injun visions, and wants to see what was before white people such as us. What was woman to me but wanting more than the sham of self I created all alone with her growing pot plants the size of tubas on a hillside in the red California dirt?

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We were with the Indians drinking beers on the rez in a tin ranch. Then them to whiskey the two fat cousin braves and a pair of kissing girls, their sisters, in thick hair, making the boys snicker. What are we doing why? Julie has picked up a case of lice and I have a young beard growing crazy all over my neck and cheeks and ears. The darkness in the shack is growing and I'm drinking cola, waiting outside for us is the sun with the blinds drawn. I am still wearing the knife but their dog is growling, and they are skunked. We are having a good time, but it's a trap — like most things native, I speculate, from the little I've seen hotdogging around the planet in cuttoffs and something stupid looking as a banana yellow midriff. I don't trust the Indians when it comes to spending time together, and that's only a feeling I have for the shade they live in is/was from our terrible white doings and our openness in the time of our time on the earth. They are covered in their secret sitting and being calmly dark featured, and their history is a thing blood kept, but in their historical minds nothing but landscapes or bloodbaths, how can I know?

We stay like this a long time with a great clay pot on the table with four cacti of knowledge, their white heads crowned and humming with power. We gobble them through the long lip of unspooled night. We eat in ceremony, but I'm still terrified stupid. They chant and drum and you can hear only parts of their praying but understand it in its totality. Injuns! It is a great and evil sin what we did to them, but somehow we just forget it as part of the premise of our own minds? The peaceful Indians. Or they were always killers, or it varied tribe to tribe, I'd have no real way of knowing. My breathing is chopped and I have stepped into something I should not have. There is no airplane or helicopter door out and no time. Worlds warping, preying dark. Here is rebirth, horrid to watch I'll tell you. A coward in ceremony is no friend to anyone.

Then something's in my eyes and there's a blur over all I see and it feels false. The Injun spirits start crowding us. We're dripping, Julie and I, or it's just me. All across the wall's heat are savage demons of pretime's dawn dawning on me. Each bird is headless behind my closed eyelids for years after, but animals come to me in my open-eye time. A slant-eyed Fox, or a young Coyote, or Eagle or Hawk or Mountain Cat. My eyes can't see them right, though, so I am on the earth sucked into it and come back out ugly and the people are awful and death and walking dead with extended tongues. The knife is on my chest, weakly. We're both dripping in shadows and hell everywhere. For daylong to years passing it's grey flesh and the memory of better times with my spirit as it was like a chapel in the bone desert church of New Mexico now gone — but only a place of human hair voodoo relics and fear in my upper neck and back. Ever since, I am nervous and can't smoke dope right or drink.

Soon, Julie's mating with an Indian from across the dirt, and dogs growl at her heels, and her crotch is full of crud and curds and she's hiding a great sorrow or evilness, or I am wrong. She'd held me and then did not. I saw the sun on the path and the sun was not the sun but the memory of the sun. No horses to ride. We had no motel. I didn't like anyone. I got frantic.

The Injuns had taken it as theirs. Everything!!!… We had to sit and listen at their talks. I had dreams while awake. Then Julie took down with a guy from the rez for a spring term of rez community college and I find out — I mean she'd been fucking him after history. I take the chief's compound bow and arrow and am hunting the Ponderosa restaurants where her fat Indian likes to eat, feathers black hanging from the stave of the chief's bow, only my brain is trash and I might not be there at all. I got moments of rock and roll and rivers and delight, then back into blurry torment.

Julie Townlove's in this Ponderosa where I also am, with her brave Injun she's been fucking and they are at the salad bar loading up the chow. Her blonde hair and bent ears. Miniature corns and spinach meatloaf and broccoli dripping and cheese sauce in baked potatoes and metal canisters of soup. Salad tongs, and I am going to kill that Injun, or at least arrow one of his legs.