EYEHEARTZOMBIES

I took my bottle of booze and went and sat out in the desert edge of Amarillo. I stared at the hills and the plain in front of me. There’s not much to look at in an American desert. Just scrub and a few cacti. The sun sat not long after I came into town, so it was the tail-end of dusk when I went to watch the world. I don’t know why I was suddenly so interested in the life around me, but I was. Maybe I had some premonitions about what came up next. Maybe. Or maybe I just finally grew up and realized how interesting it all really is.

Either way, I sat on the dusty ground, sipping from the bottle wrapped in a brown paper sack. I heard coyotes howling off to the south. First one, then another would answer, then a third would join in. Then it would all fall silent. A few minutes later, it’d all start again. It was such a lonely sound; I almost wanted to join in. I didn’t, though. I sat there quietly and just listened. Some bird called after the third or fourth round of coyote singing and a dead silence fell on the world. The bird chirruped again and it seemed like everything came back to normal volume again. I heard a rustling in the grass near me and saw a rabbit running through the brush.

The stars were shining and the moon was still nearly fully. It was bright enough that night to read my watch by and I watched the world around me until my Rolex said it was ten o’clock. Then I picked up my sack and it’s half-empty bottle and drove back into the edge of town to my little motel room.

I capped the bottle and took a shower to wash off all of the desert dust I had picked up. After the shower, I dressed in a t-shirt and boxer shorts and lay down on the bed to thumb through a local newspaper I had picked up. The war in Korea was really getting started and things were iffy here in America. Doesn’t seem like that news ever really changes, no matter how many years go by or who the President is. I read the funnies in the back and then turned out the light and went to bed.

I woke up the next morning with the dawn. I was dressed, packed, fed, gassed, and out of town before nine o’clock and I had nothing but desert in my eyes. I drove for six hours straight, then stopped at one of the Pueblo villages for the night. It was only about four more hours to Vegas, and I had plenty of daytime left, but I had told Ray I wanted to take another day, so I decided to stay here for the night.

I had two choices. I could take the tourist route and stay in a teepee set up on the desert floor, with snakes and mice running around and only a campfire for water and warmth, or I could be a city slicker and stay in a nearby motel. I opted for comfort.

The motel was a converted Pueblo-type building, the whole thing made of mud. At least on the outside. There were wooden walls and floors on the inside, and glass in the windows. The water ran hot and cold and the toilet flushed. I guess I should have stayed in teepee, but I’m just not that adventurous. I like to play it safe when it comes to being bitten in the night.

I went to the Pueblo visitor center before it closed at five o’clock. There was a tour guide there that led a group of us around the site, telling us what the different buildings were for and how the Zuni’s had lived years and years ago. He didn’t have a lot of information, but I wasn’t really listening anyway. I just wanted to have something to do to take my mind off of the life of monotony that I felt was coming for me.

Why did I think Vegas would be monotonous? Well, look at it like this. I had been in New York for thirty years. It was the early 1950s at this point, and I hadn’t really known anything but New York City. I had busted thugs, pimps, hookers, crooked cops, straight cops, judges, drug dealers, drug users, gun runners. Everyone. It was a new case and new breed every time I went out.

Vegas was all going to be the same. Just dice-rollers and hookers. Guys that got too cooked up on cocaine to keep their heads about them at the table, so they end up betting their leg and I’d have to go and collect. I didn’t want to deal with the same coked-out, trashed-out people day in and day out. And that’s all you get in a casino, right?

At least there would be dames. More than I could shake a stick at, I was sure. A different girl every night. That would keep me entertained for a year or two, at least. Then maybe I could move on to somewhere else. Move to Los Angeles or San Francisco. Maybe down to San Diego and get more involved in the drug work. There was a lot of money coming up from Mexico and the countries down there, and San Diego was the main place to make it happen. San Diego or Miami, but it rains too much in Florida for me.

After the tour, the guide told us that there would be a fire ceremony that night and that we could all come to it, providing we had a room at the hotel or in the teepees. Luck was on my side, I guess. I decided to spend my evening watching people dance around a bonfire instead of staring at the girl at the bottom of my glass.

The tour ended around five-thirty and the ceremony didn’t start until the sun went down, around eight. I was getting hungry, so I went to the little restaurant that was in the crossroads they called a town. I had a nice chicken-fried steak and some fried potatoes. The kind of food that sticks to your bones. I also went to the general store and wasted some time and money buying “desert supplies.” I picked up a canteen, a folding shovel, a blanket, some flares, and a compass. I threw ‘em all in the trunk of the car, except the canteen, which I carried with me to the powwow that night. I filled it up with the last half of my bottle from the night before first. I figured I might as well enjoy myself.

I could never do justice to the ceremony that I watched that night. It was full of dancing and drums, a throbbing rhythm that made you forget about all that was going on around you. It was better than any movie I had ever seen, or ever seen since. I forgot about the canteen full of booze sitting next to me and I just sat and stared. It ended a few hours after it started and I went back to my room, my head still pumping with the beat of the drums.