I opened us each another beer—he kept it so hot in the trailer it was easy to put away a few fast—and asked, “How was your Fourth?”
Mel made a
voilà
gesture across the trailer, his fingertips charred to nubs from stoking all the fires he stoked, smoking all the pot he smoked. “Same old, same old.” He started to roll a joint.
Going to Mel was a little like church for me. There was ritual, there were parables, and of course we shared the sacrament. And there was something else Mel and I shared, a disease that infected men like us, making us waste ourselves, our talents, our days, on tired schemes and cheap tricks, burning ourselves up inside, meanwhile tarring up our lungs and pickling our livers, putting the brain slowly to sleep. Maybe I did it with a little more style: imported whiskey and bottled beer with the gold foil on the neck instead of Milwaukee’s Best; the expensive house and the moping trophy-wife instead of hippie whores and a bent-up trailer with centerfolds above the sofa. Otherwise, the only thing that made us different was that, in the midst of all the dissipation, I kept paying taxes.
“How ’bout you,” Mel said, “what’d you do?”
“Went camping in Ledoux.”
Mel licked the fresh spliff. “Morphy Lake?”
“Yeah. You been there?”
“First place I came back in ’69.”
“No shit?”
“Would I shit you? All kinds of hippies lived out there. Used to crash at a big adobe above the lake.”
“An L-shaped place?”
“Yep. Part of it was actually a log cabin.” Mel shook his head and lit the joint. He puffed and passed.
“What brought you out there?” I hit the joint.
“There was no more room at the Hog Farm. One night smoking around a campfire in Llano, a hippie told me,
Go to Mora. There’s a big house that always has room up there.
I found this one whore I liked a little more than the rest, and that place in Ledoux is where we ended up shacking up, the Johnson ranch.”
“Johnson?”
“Johnson—old man who built the place, long time before the hippies got hold of it.”
When I passed the joint back our fingers touched, and I somehow understood that this relationship was now no longer just about replenishing my pot supply. It was about a particular abandoned house one hundred miles, as the crow flies, from here, almost two hundred over the roads.
In the clarity of the moment, I found that I no longer felt patronizing toward Mel. On the contrary, I envied something of him: his story.
Mel seemed to take note of this shift in my estimation, and for the first time I noticed a sly smile forming in the corners of his crusty eyes.
“It was nice out there at the Johnson ranch: big house, lots of rooms, people cutting wood, trying to make something happen. We had chickens, horses, gardening in the summer. It was just after Woodstuck—’scuze me:
stock
—and we were still going strong, even when Wavy and all the Hog Farmers flew back to Frisco. We were the true believers. Little Joe, Crazy Jane, Sunshine, and Ritchie Motherfucker all made that scene …”
I threw two twenties on the table. “Are any of them still around?”
“You mean alive, right? Ritchie’s dead, Little Joe’s in the lock-up for dealing, and Crazy Jane got institutionalized. Sunshine I haven’t seen in thirty years. Last time was at a no-nukes rally in Albuquerque.”
Mel stood and picked up the money nonchalantly. He shuffled to the kitchen, bellowing over the radio, “His real name is Shorn Anderson. It was Shawn, but he legally changed it on paper and everything on account of he once survived almost getting scalped by a mountain lion. Anyway, he always went by Sunshine.”
Mel came back from the kitchen and tossed me a little baggie full of buds. “Never really wanted to go back to that place. A lot of weird shit happened there.”
“What kind of weird shit?”
“When the hippies went to cremate Ritchie Motherfucker, they found out it isn’t so easy to burn a body.”
“Shit …”
We had worked down the joint, and now Mel pinched what was left in a pair of forceps, his roach clip.
“Ritchie fell off a horse and died of complications. It was Sunshine who came up with the idea for cremating him. I told him I wasn’t having any part of it. I knew he was too fucked up to do it right. Ritchie was my friend. I thought we should have a rent party and get a collection together, at least get Ritchie a pine box. But Sunshine had a college textbook on religions of Southeast Asia that diagramed how the Sufis build a funeral pyre, and Little Joe and Crazy Jane went along with it.”
I shuddered, hit the roach. “Fuck …”
“My bitch and me cleared the hell out of there and never went back, but I heard about it later from Little Joe. Sunshine built the pyre right—except for the height: it was supposed to be three meters, not three feet. There wasn’t enough draft underneath to feed the fire. They just singed Ritchie’s hair and sort of cooked him for a while. The stink must have been awful.” Mel took one last puff, smudged the forceps in the ashtray, and added the roach to his pile on the bench. “Bad shit happened there. A lot worse shit than that. When you walk up to a house like that, walk away.”
I
got back in the car with my weed and a want for that story. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains loomed darkly in the east. On the other side of those peaks was the Johnson house. The story of Ritchie Motherfucker made me want to take a closer look at the place, see if I could incorporate more detail into a magazine feature. I repeated the names to myself:
Sunshine, Little Joe, Ritchie Motherfucker.
Bad shit happened there.
On the outskirts of Española I thought about which turn to take. It wasn’t so far from here to 68, then a short drive to 75, and then just twenty miles or so through Dixon and Peñasco to get to 76. From there the Spider could make it out to Mora in a little over an hour, then another hour up to Ledoux. I could stop at Walgreens and pick up some PowerBars to tide me over.
As I drove back through the badlands at twilight, the low sun illuminating the weather-baked chimineas outside Santa Clara and radiating heat at me through the bug-spattered windshield of the Spider, I decided if I wanted to get a better look at the house that I should visit during daytime. I got back on 502 and wound up the Hill to Los Alamos.
Kitty was asleep but Oppie greeted me excitedly before heading back to bed. I went into my study and put the dead laptop on the shelf. I rolled a joint and poured myself a scotch.
***
In bed Kitty was as good as dead to me. I lay there and let my mind’s eye rise above Los Alamos and the mesa. I soared across the Española valley like a bird, flying over the Sangre de Cristo to look down on the other side of the mountain range. I saw the country around Ledoux. There was a round, cold lake. There was a high valley. There was a house.
I looked over at the numbers: 4:17. My hand was still sore and I knew I wouldn’t get to sleep.
I remembered the photo that had fried my laptop. Was it still on the camera? I got out of bed and went down to my study.
When I tried to turn on the camera a bad feeling shot through me. It made a little noise,
peew
, and then the display went blank. It did not say,
CARD EMPTY
. It did not say anything. I tried a new set of batteries. Still nothing. Shit. Now both the camera and the laptop were fried.
I tried to get my mind off my string of bad luck by doing some research. Maybe I could learn more about Ritchie Motherfucker or Sunshine.
I woke up the PC and tried a Hail Mary by Googling
Ledoux
plus
Ritchie Motherfucker.
Zero hits.
I checked on Facebook, but there was no Shorn Anderson.
On a hunch I got on Yahoo! People Search and typed
Shorn Anderson
and
New Mexico
. Interesting: one record, no street address, in Pojoaque.
I got back on Google, typed
Sunshine
and
Pojoaque
, and found some crappy copy:
There’s plenty o’ sunshine to be found in the northern New Mexico town of Pojoaque …
I tried
hippie Sunshine Pojoaque
and got a recent newsletter from the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce with the headline:
Local Chef’s Cooking Is Hallucinatory Hot!
Pojoaque, NM. At the Roadrunner Diner on the main highway here, the short-order cook, who goes by the name “Sunshine,” says he came way back with the hippies but stayed when he tried the chile.
Looked like a hit.
I went into the dining room and flipped on the back flood lamps, and then I remembered that Oppie had stayed up in bed with Kitty. I checked the latch on the slider and pulled the curtain all the way to the edge of the glass. Then I rolled a couple of joints and put the Altoids tin in my shirt pocket.
I went into the garage, backed the Spider out of the driveway, and wound downhill to the valley below, combing my hair in the rearview mirror.
T
he Roadrunner was open twenty-four hours and served breakfast every one of them. I would normally inquire of the waitress, just to be sure, whether there was an egg whites–only option for one of the scrambles, but I didn’t want her asking (and annoying) the cook before I got a chance to meet him, and anyway a restaurant with a hand-decorated sign advertising a half-pound hamburger with pastrami did not seem like the kind of place that offered heart-healthy substitution.
I couldn’t order nothing, either. That would be really annoying. I considered the grapefruit even though I hate grapefruit. I should get steak and eggs, right? The most deadly thing on the menu, just to broadcast to the cook that I am a regular guy: strong, tough, hungry.
I settled on black coffee and a bowl of oatmeal—bland, hearty, nonthreatening, like a Quaker. I didn’t count on getting it with a hunk of margarine on top swimming in its own melt, reminding me of the cube of pork fat on the label of baked beans. I fished out what hadn’t liquefied with my spoon and, lacking a saucer on which to put the goop, plopped it into my water glass.
I knew immediately that this had been a mistake, as I was thirsty and the glass was full. If I asked for more water, I would expose my bizarre behavior to the waitress and it might be relayed to the cook. Better to just sit here thirsty and get whatever information I could until the glass got bussed back to the kitchen. Let the dishwasher figure it out.
I put away half the porridge and could eat no more, so I asked the waitress if I could please speak to the cook for a moment. I thought I would go into it like an interview for a profile. J-school and editorial work had trained me not to pry, but instead to subtly suggest my own importance and allow the subject to volunteer information.
“Harold,” she called, “someone out here wants to see you.”
Harold? At first I thought I had the wrong day, the wrong guy. But even before I caught my first glimpse of my man, I remembered that this was America: so long as he had a Social Security number, a person could call himself whatever he wanted and change his name as often as he liked. In the land of payday stores and checkscashed huts, you didn’t even need ID that matched.
Through the order window to the kitchen, all I could see were his narrowed, bloodshot eyes and his hook nose marbled with ruptured vessels. He was not happy to be summoned. I knew he had to be my Sunshine.
When he came out to the counter and I got a good look at his face, the forehead and mouth didn’t do much to improve the overall impression: bushy eyebrows, big scowl. He looked down at the counter and recognized me right away as Bowl of Oatmeal.
“Something wrong with your breakfast?” said Harold-Shorn-Sunshine.
“Not at all. In fact, it’s excellent. Best oatmeal I ever had.”
I forced another spoonful in my mouth and chewed quickly without swallowing. His eyes went to my water glass and he saw the glob of margarine congealed amidst the ice.
“What’s the problem, pal?”
“No problem at all, really. My name is James.”
I put out my hand, wrapped in gauze from the injury. He didn’t shake it. He didn’t even look at it. Some stranger comes up and asks for you at the Roadrunner Diner in Pojoaque, it could only be bad news, right? No news is good news: that’s what makes us happy. News out of the blue is never good unless it’s about an inheritance.
I could have mentioned the name Mel Woburn, but that might be someone Sunshine no longer considered a friend. When you don’t know someone in this world, there is always the chance that you might meet one day and become friends; but once you did know a person, the likelihood was that you weren’t going to stay friends forever, and then you’d have a history, and then you’d rather not hear about them.
I figured I would lay it out straight. “I wanted to ask you about this place in Ledoux called the Johnson house.”
“Jesus Christ …” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “How’d you find me?”
“Yahoo! People Search.”
“What the fuck you call me?”
“No, Yahoo! the web portal—it’s just the name of a site on the Internet.”
“I don’t care what it is. How do I get off it?”
This was going poorly. I should have taken the alternate approach: come into the Roadrunner for several days in a row, allow him to approach me with some nicety—
Back five days in a row, you sure must like my cooking—
then make up something about a new job nearby, turn the conversation to weekends, and let drop that I recently went camping at a place called Morphy Lake. I would have kept the upper hand, and Sunshine would have told me whatever he knew about the Johnson house. But now I was on the wrong end of this interview, and for all I knew I was asking the wrong guy the wrong questions.
“Well, you don’t really get off the Internet …” All of a sudden I saw an opportunity. Find the entrée by accident, figure out what the down-and-out informant wants, and get a foot in the door, make it into a fraternal exchange: this guy didn’t know anything about the web. If I offer him an hour of computer consulting in exchange for the story of the house, maybe we would become pals after all. “Unless you create a decoy. I could take care of that for you.”