[6] Rumors from the Bardo

PIckin’s were a bit slim that night in terms of entheogenic material, but Uncle Dave got ahold of some mescaline microdots from some skater kids down in Cortez. We ate a couple as early as we could, since they take a good long while to start comin’ up. We brought the Ouija board, the planchette and a coupla forties out to the edge of the cemetery, kickin’ up dust like mad as we walked around the graves of folks we knew and folks we’d heard a lotta tales about. There’s ‘ol Mac Dorfer’s grave. Honest, hard workin’ guy, but dumb as hell and then some. He lived south off the sixes, on one of them hard to find turn-offs, so he put up a four-by-eight piece of plywood on the corner and painted, “Dofer”, on it in bright red three foot letters. Funny thing was people all told him he’d made a typo, and he was like, “Whaddya mean?”. And so it stayed there for the next twenty-some-odd years..

There’s Joe Gonzales. He was before our time, but we all heard the stories about him growin’ up. Used to walk around the town just screamin’ to himself. Sometimes he’d play guitar while he walked, and word has it he was pretty good. But he also had a habit of dropping his trousers in front of the ladies, and shootin’ people with one of them little lever-action Daisy BB guns if people tried to give him any shit about it. Uncle Dave’s Grandpa Fleck had a BB in his thigh that he used to let us feel when we was little kids. A souvenir from Crazy Joe. I remember you could stick a fridge magnet to it and move it around a little under the skin. Fleck was out here somewhere too. This place is a real who’s-who of Mud Creek history, and someday Uncle Fred and I would be here too, probably with a coupla fuckups wanderin’ around on top of us. We splashed a bit of them Mickey’s on Joe’s grave as we passed by and found our way out to the perimeter. Beans got harvested back in late September, but the new crop was comin’ in fine, delineatin’ the field from the plots of the dead folk they were gettin’ fertilized with. Dust to dust to more gawdamned dust, and then into pinto beans. Circle of life, right there.

That mescaline was takin’ its sweet time, but you could feel it once we’d killed them forties. Kinda speedy, and more auditory than visual. I was definitely startin’ to get the wee-wonks deep in my ears, almost like nitrous oxide. It was like the stars were makin’ this sound as their luminosities changed ever so slightly; Wee wee WEE wee…WONK WONK wonk wonk…Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Time to break out that board and call this here meeting to order.

We both agreed we weren’t gonna get all freaked out this time when them boys arrived, and that we were gonna ask them a few pertinent questions. If they were skinwalkers then I’d of been real sick, if not dead by now, what with two encounters beneath my belt. You ain’t down with some real Navajo you got no business messin’ around with them critters. But we both deemed it safe enough to make proper contact this time. The anticipation mixed with them microdots was causing the air to shake and refract everything, like we was all sittin’ on top of a July highway down in Arizona. I was poppin’ my jaw pretty loud when Uncle Dave laid that planchette down.

And then we waited. The mesc kept comin’ up, but them fields were dead quiet. The wee wonks metamorphosed into a sound that was just a wall of amplifiers left on after a show. Still no movement out there. Uncle Dave whistled, kicked the planchette with his toe. Still nothin’. Way off in the distance we could hear a car driven by someone who apparently didn’t know how to use a clutch. They were racin’ that engine and grindin’ them gears like they wanted to punish that car for some evils it had done them in a past life. Or they were fucked outta their gourd and probably gonna wind up in the arroyo. It got closer and closer until finally we could see the sweep of its headlights swingin’ arcs of photons through the graveyard as it navigated the last few turns to the main gate. I was thinkin’ it might be the fuzz, that maybe they knew we had slashed all them tires back at school. But then again, cops know how to drive stick-shifts around here, so that didn’t make any sense. They made it to the gate, cut the engine and killed the lights. Then they just flat out laid on their horn. It was so damn loud and jarring that the air changed color.

“Who the fuck are these assmonkeys then?”, Uncle Dave asked with fingers stuffed in his ears. We started walking back across the cemetery towards the gate, wavin’ our arms above our heads and lettin’ loose with a stream of swears that only farm boys know how to conjure. It was some right awful stuff, but that horn was makin’ the plates of our skulls shift around all tectonic like.

When we got in direct eyesight of the car, they laid off the horn. But them echoes kept bouncin’ round inside our heads like racquetballs in an empty cathedral. It was fuckin’ up our equilibrium all right, and we were both swaying like a coupla drunks trying to navigate all them tombstones. When we made it to the gate, we were greeted by a man and his dog, both standing in front of an old rattletrap Datsun with an Oklahoma license plate that read, “GLUMLY73”.

“Boys ain’t comin’”, he says to us, before anyone even says hello, or what’n the hell you think you’re doin’ layin’ on that horn this time of night when folks are out trippin’ in the cemetery? Uncle Dave manages to respond with, “Whuh?”

“Them boys ain’t comin’ tonight. You gotta wait.”

I was in a state, and struggling to make sense of the words comin’ outta this boy’s mouth, but Uncle Dave seemed to be in better control of his faculties, and was able to kinda converse with this stranger.

“Whaddya mean? How long we gotta wait? Why we gotta wait?”

“Forty days. Bardo time. Then maybe they gonna come back. Maybe. But not before then so you oughtta just put that board away before you call up somethin’ you don’t really want to be talkin’ to. No sir. Now come on, Paco. Let’s git.”

And with that, he and his dog got back in their Datsun, and ground the fuck outta them gears as they made their way back down the road towards six-sixty-six.