Fistful of Reefer

Fistful of Reefer: scene 64, 65, 66 & 67

Chancho begged the horizon to swallow him, but with each rise it retreated further into the distance, refusing to bend to his will. So his life lengthened rise after rise by no doing of his own. He held the throttle as open as the rutted roads allowed, working his way southward like a dog dumped hundreds of miles from home—the scent etched into his awareness.

No where else to go, burning feelings of betrayal and loss unraveled the edges of his conscious thought. Only instinct remained. Something in him, despite the sting of self-loathing coating his soul like tar, demanded that life continue. The rhythm of the road jarring beneath him and mesquite blurring past him kept him breathing.

But not truly alive, not dreaming. He’d given up dreaming two years ago. Despite recent efforts to think otherwise, he’d always believed a man without dreams was walking only. Living without being alive. As a youth his dreams had been enough for twenty men. Yet they had dug the chasm that swallowed him. Even now his past dreams devoured him as he rode beneath a September sun. Hadn’t all of this been his fault?

Voices gradually returned, those he had known, those who had known him. But they accused him of lacking love, lacking understanding. He agreed with them all, and one by one he detached his umbilical cord from their nourishing. He separated himself from human relationship in his mind, removing his parasitic existence from the lives of those he’d bled dry until no one remained.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he turned onto a paved state highway—no more tedious bumps hindering him. Shifting gears he accelerated the Harley to 80 mph. The wind rustled his hair, and for several miles he wondered where his lost sombrero had ended up. But it didn’t matter. One less burden to remove, one less receptacle for collecting shattered dreams.

Eventually the highway veered off course and instincts drew him away from its smooth surface back onto rutted paths—heading south, heading home. The jarring left him without peace. With no one else left to frustrate his thoughts, he had only himself. In a thunderclap of discovery Chancho realized the person with which he had grown most tired was himself.

In a panic he remembered what Muddy had said outside of Brackettville. “As long as the three of us are together the present guards you from the past.” Now nothing could protect him.

His balance on the bike began to waver, forcing him to pull over. He lowered the kickstand and stumbled onto hands and knees. A sudden quavering overtook him. Rolling in the dirt like a dog inflicted by a skunk, he clenched every muscle against the sting and the stench. But nothing would remove it. No amount of self-debasement, no simple crust of earth, no scouring rock. 

He shook from head to foot until cramps shot his legs and arms out straight, causing his back to arch and lift from the ground. For a full minute his body rolled with a rigid physical pain, racking his muscles with cramps. Finally the process finished with him, leaving him limp and exhausted. As the sun crept low in the west he lifted his head from its wallow, forcing his mind to assess its surroundings. Instincts true, he’d reached the Catholic Hills.

He cut cross-country toward their last campsite, stopping for a drink along the way. Unconscious of his expectations, he simply had to be there again, to stand in the last place he’d know as home. When he finally did, disappointment crushed him. Somehow he’d hoped it would rekindle him, restore what he had lost the moment he’d lost Nena and Muddy.

With utter finality his broken heart burst, spilling its grief into the soil of the Catholic Hills. Not wanting to die anywhere else, its fraying strings had drawn him to its last remembered place of joy. Now that his heart was free to grieve its loss, all the distance Chancho had put between himself and those he loved recoiled into a suffocating proximity. And he cried. Finally he cried. Eventually he cried, not for himself or his loss, but for his friends.