Where Have You Been, John Redhawk?

THE PLACE

For all the world, it looked almost like a South African squatter camp: a few rusted tin shacks blowing in the dust of the hot Autumn breeze.

Intermixed were a smattering of green, white, and even pink trailers baking beneath the moonlight. Some bore the evidence of th hustles offered within: painted mystics, bearded ladies, various sordid delights in the form of naive art. A bearded swami holding forth over a trio of tarot cards; large blazing letters that read "Fortunes," and "Horoscopes," and even "Palms Read Here."

"Someday," he said, looking up at the vast canopy of stars overhead. "I'll punch a hole in the sky. I'll fly on out, over the left shoulder of God. And then, I'll be free."

But that had been ten years ago, and nobody had seen him since.

"Where would you go, John Redhawk? Where?" she had asked. Her rawbone face stretched ugly and narrow and bleak with its own delighted look. Inside she was laughing at him.

"Here," she said, "Everybody dies. All the time. We all die. Just a little bit, more and more every day. I'm turning grey."

Actually, her splotchy, bug-stained and bug-bit legs were as white as cheese; Under the filmy, pale dress of soft, powder blue; pale because being washed and bleached and dried under the unforgiving rays of a godless sun.

"Some indian," she laughed. Hefted the bottle of hooch and passed it on to John, who was bald with red hair spilling out over the ears.

He hefted the bottle. He was leaving.

Her face was a bleary, laugh-and-tear-streaked mask ; spilling out in two feathered lumps of grease across the forehead, also the color of cheese. Her breasts were tiny lumps beneath the blouse, wound around like a snake sunning itself in the moonlight, revealing the bra strap of one shoulder.

Hussy.

But he did it anyway. And then disappeared.

THE FUNERAL

They buried Mitzy in back, in a place were people dumped old tires and tin cans, porno books and slick fuck mags and trash to burn. Fires blazing in rusted garbage cans flaking poison fragments like dead skin, into the soil.

There were no officiating padres to deliver imprecations to an uncaring G-d.

"We should put him on trial," someone suggested.

"Who?"

"G-d."

The clowns cavorted and the the mystics mystified.

A shovel full of earth thrown over the shoulder.

As

They lowered her down.

"And you know this is illegal dumping, right?"

Said someone In The Know, about such things.

"Yeah. But won't nobody care in a hundred years."

And a boy said, his shitty drawers drooping around his chalk-white ass,

"Where's John Redhawk. Weren't he and her?"

"What?" asked Spangles the Clown.

"Lovers?"

And Spangles, nearly aglow asked, "Where indeed?"

And Bobo, who remembered something John once told him said, "He's flown off. He's going to punch a hole in the sky."

"Someday," he forgot to add.

THE RETURN

The time is ticking swiftly by.

The night has blackened out the sky.

A lonely streetlight sees a man go by...

In the deep well of shadow he is painted head to toe, with knapsack thrown over his shoulder, his boots send up titan splashes of mud and earth as his steps eat up the gravel track of the midway, through the ugly little camp.

It's been raining, is still wet, and the drip-drip from tin is a counterpoint to his breathing,

As he knows that only sleep can cure the ills of his heart.

And he manages to make it to a cabin made of corrugated tin hammered together in the black heart of forgotten hopes and dreams.

Knock, knock...

Bobo comes to the door with a mouth full of beans. Opens. Does a double-take at the long, lean man in the dirty jacket,

With the dripping hair,

"Where have you been, John Redhawk?"

But the man stands there, on the threshold

Of a cheap trailer house, and he rears back his head to laugh,

But he is really looking in the dripping darkness,

Past the clown,

Into the years,

Back through the shadowed years.

He says, finally,

"We did this before, didn't we? A hundred years ago."

Bobo can't answer but asks,

"Did you?"

To which the man replies, "Sure. Finally. I punched that hole in the sky."