C^{rucifixion Rock
by Nels Hanson}

“You know,” Tug said, “I never liked Oregon.”

For a hundred miles we’d played Dead tapes until Tug slumped in the seat, half asleep.

I came out of a long shady turn, past horsetail ferns and a granite wall of green velvet
moss. The sun came down in dusty shafts that spread in gold pools across the forest floor
and lit up the red trunks of the redwoods and cedars.

“What’s wrong with it?” I said.

Bushes with blooming flowers, maybe late pink and purple rhododendrons, glowed from the
shadows. We’d left the coast and the farms, the apple orchards and leaning barns and wood
fences overgrown with blackberry vines. The road curled down the aisle of big trees, the
air hotter and drier, smelling of dark earth and incense cedar and fir instead of salt.
When the climate changed I felt like I was really leaving a place. I’d got a pink slip
from a salmon boat, the Blue Fin.

“Too schizoid.”

Tug had a joint out and was lighting it with a wooden match.

“Schizoid?”

Tug frowned and inhaled.

“Split personality. Everybody’s either a redneck or a hippie. I never felt right in
either camp. You know?”

“Join the club,” I said.

“Of course, I’m an Indian, not a cowboy. I was always with the heads. Here, take
a hit of this.”

“Maybe later.”

Deep shadow alternated with sudden dazzling sun that reflected in swarming prisms off
the windshield and hood. I’d been driving along dreamily—trying to forget that Jenny said
her sister Holly had died two years ago, remembering Jenny’s voice and face and the scent
of her brown hair—breathing the earthy ferny breeze at the window and the sweet sharp
tartness of the flickering conifers, letting the road take the truck through the turns,
the grade of the country choose the speed, lift and lower my foot on the gas. I wasn’t
steering so much as guiding Tug’s heavy truck through the changing light.

“Come on, the woods ain’t that dark and deep. We got miles to go before we sleep.
All the way to Montana.”

“If you put it that way,” I said. “Quoting poetry—”

I knew this road, soon we’d climb to a crest as the trees thinned out and then
drop down the eastern slope, through dry pine mountains to the plain and Grass Valley. I
forgot my ex-wife I’d seen yesterday after six years, she’d come to get a box of lost
dishes, and took the joint from Tug.

“I read up, you know. I got books too. Confessions of an English Opium Eater.”

“I believe you.” I held the smoke in, handing the cigarette back to Tug.

“Doors of Perception. Book of Dreams. I got a signed copy of The Teachings of
Don Juan.”

“Which Don Juan?”

Tug grinned.

“The one that never met Dixie.”

Just then I realized that Tug must have packed Rick Speaks’ Requiem for the Earth and
now it was stored in Paul’s shed with my stuff, behind his house and the aquarium where
the strange fish from the Blue Fin was swimming. Somehow that seemed fitting. Then I
remembered I hadn’t told Rick goodbye. Anyway, he’d be all right, he was probably with
Liz at the secret lake.

“You can see it in the music.”

“What’s that?”

“The long slide. Here you go.”

Again Tug gave me the smoke.

“Hell, punk and rap make the Beatles look religious. ‘Let It Be’ was like ‘Ave Maria.’
Not to mention the Youngbloods, ‘Get Together.’ Van Morrison and ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’? How
about Jackie Wilson and Otis Redding? ‘Try a Little Tenderness’? ‘These Arms of Mine.’”

“They were good,” I agreed. Red cedars filed by between sudden columns of swirling,
dust-moted light.
“‘Be here now.’ That’s what Huxley said. You know, he had cancer of the tongue and went
out on Osmond acid, the same morning as JFK. Jack hid weed under his pillow at the White
House.”

I looked at him and he shook his head.

“Shouldn’t have done all the babes, though, cheated on Jackie.”

I gave Tug the smoke.

“I read all those books,” he said. “One November. Bummed me out. You know, there was
another Civil War. Our side lost.”

“No veterans’ benefits,” I said.

“No benefits,” Tug said, tapping the ash. “Just your daily ration.”

I joked but I knew that feeling too though I never mentioned it to anyone. Watching the
straight trees pass in scattered ranks I imagined a silent invisible army gone into
hiding, the ghosts of long-haired kids who carried a weight of guilt and disappointment.
Tug was right, it was as if the Union had lost and like aging defeated soldiers in
fading tunics and caps with peace signs in place of crossed sabers we’d broken our hearts
and minds over a good lost cause, the bad ten-year war no one could stop that had ruined
everything else.

I knew it wasn’t just the marijuana or the angle of the light through the second growth
or the stumps of the ancient grove the pioneers had clear cut. The peaceful green
revolution hadn’t come, and its death combined with your personal setbacks as you lived
in the old world you had thought was going to change and tried to figure where you’d lost
your way.

Each time a new thing fell through you couldn’t be certain if you’d been unlucky with
History or sentimental and naïve or simply wrong from the start, a born loser afraid to
grow up.

The Pepsi Generation had blown away, dropped their muskets sprouting flowers, and
dispersed—become lawyers and realtors and drug runners, taken up aerobics or coke, EST,
found a pottery commune or a guru in Nepal. Learned kundalini, brought the snake from the
loins up the chakras past the heart to the head, opened the Third Eye to take in from
another perspective Rick Speaks’ dying Earth.

Some tried Scientology, open marriage, went into therapy to reenact the primal scream,
moved to Costa Rica to grow organic coffee.

Friends of a friend from Corvallis were driving through Yucatan when they saw a puff of smoke up the hillside and a second later the VW bus divided perfectly in two. Bandits
with sombreros and bandoleers and a little cannon on wheels rode down and robbed them to
their underwear before disappearing into the jungle.

“No,” I said, gliding over a bridge in a shadowed curve, “it didn’t work out.”

“But there were times,” Tug said wistfully. “Jesus Christ, there were moments.”

He exhaled his ten-thousandth toke, a mustached bushy-haired veteran with an earring
recalling past glories and defeats and elusive victory that was part surrender and had
once seemed within reach, already arrived, then put the joint in his mouth and relit it.

“Neither are they.”

“Who’s that?”

I shrugged. “All the winners.”

Tug laughed, offering me the weed again, but I shook my head. I’d already analyzed the
waning final third of the 20th century.

“‘All the losers in the best bars,’ Tug sang, ‘All the winners in the dives.’”

“You care if we go through Grassdale?” I asked. “I’d like to stop off and say hello to
my folks.”

“Whatever you say,” Tug said. “You’re the captain.”

I let it all go and watched the shadowed and sun-splashed road and after a while the
ferns and redwoods slipped away as the sky opened up and the land changed again.
For an hour and a half we cut back and forth across the rocky pine-scattered mountains.
The hot air blew at the open windows, all the creeks red rock and white sand, the few
stunted cottonwoods gone yellow. Only the jack pines showed a smoky green. Now and then a
ground squirrel darted across the pavement and dived down a hole. Tug pointed once at a
hit doe lying on the shoulder. I saw single hawks and buzzards floating high. Then we climbed the last steep rise and at the ridge saw the bread-colored hills and the blonde grassland spread out in a heat haze toward the dim mountains.

“Look at that,” Tug said. “It’s like a desert ocean.”

Grass Valley shimmered and wavered like water, like the clear fumes above a gas can.

“Mirage,” Tug said. “Fata Morgana. That’s what the sailors called it. Sent by a witch.
Morgan le Fay—”
The landscape lay outside but inside me too and I felt a pang that we’d come this road.
I didn’t know then I was lucky, that I was supposed to visit Grassdale and the ranch.
Everything that was to happen at Sleeping Child Lake, everything I’d tell Joyce ten
months later in the Arizona motel before dawn, the true story and not what she’d read in
the paper or seen on TV, depended on my seeing my father—just as much as on saving the
yellow fish from Roper’s gaff and taking it to Paul’s where Tug was ready to go to
Montana.

“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” Tug said. “This country makes me
thirsty.”

“My dad’ll give you a drink.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes and no.”

Past rangeland we drove up the string of little towns, through Sycamore and Brewster and
Redmond. I’d worked in Redmond one fall and winter, in one of my Uncle Ernie’s grocery
stores where a deer I’d shot hung in the meat locker. The store was a Save-Mart now, with
a new façade. My uncle had made a lot of money, the first of his millions, when the chain
bought him out.

I’d gone hunting the last time outside Redmond with Rex Schmidt and Tom Pierce, who
worked with me at the store. I’d walked up to the big buck gasping on its side, its mouth
and chest fur and front legs soaked red. I watched its open black eye rimmed with dark
lashes as Tom and Rex came up, congratulating me on the running long shot. I put the
muzzle to the base of the buck’s skull and fired.

I paid the butcher in the store to dress it out, then gave Rex and Tom the meat and the
hide and antlers. They were grateful and surprised, I was the only one of us who got a
deer that year. I sold my .270 Remington rifle to Tom for twenty dollars as a Christmas
present for his wife.

North along the valley I began to recognize the gravel country roads that turned to
pavement 30 yards before they hit the highway. Every two or three miles was a road and a
white sign on a pole: Grouse. Bucktail. Jack Pine.

To the west I saw the three pillars of Crucifixion Rock rise from the crescent mesa and
felt the old hole at the pit of my stomach. The rock like a ship made me remember last
night’s bad dream, Tug and Paul and I cuffed to the masts. To save on fuel Thomas
Fisheries was using us for sails as the rock began to move—“Seems to work,” Roper said,
“So far, so good,” said Thomas as Rick Speaks shouted, “You’ll kill ’em! The spine’s not
built that way!”

I got off on Sand Creek and drove five miles along the gravel past fenced dry land, then
took the dirt road that ran back toward the rock and the line of mountains.

“Jesus, I’m thirsty,” Tug said. “It’s out here, ain’t it?”

“Don’t worry. We’re there.”

“Where?” He looked out at the bleached grass.

“This is the ranch,” I said, nodding out the window. “Both sides of the road.”

We passed an empty tank trough and a windmill. Light in pinhole speckles showed through
the rusty vanes and I thought of Rick Speaks and alternate energy, how his new idea was
an old good idea thrown away.

“‘Eclipse,’” Tug said, reading the faded red trademark on the rudder. He glanced up,
squinting. “There’s your rock. You ever climb it?”

“The sides are too steep.”

“‘Crucifixion Rock,’” Tug said. “I don’t like it.”

“‘The Three Kings.’ That’s another name.”

“Yeah,” Tug said, looking. “That’s better. Like the Wise Men.”

We came up on a corral full of Hereford cattle. Pink-rimmed eyes in white faces watched
us.

“We ought to take a side of beef with us,” Tug said.

“They aren’t ours.”

“I thought you said this was your place.”

“Belongs to the renter. My dad’s retired.”

“Oh,” Tug said. “Well—”

“There it is.” Past the line of poplars I saw the shingle roof and the stone fireplace
against the dark barn. “There’s his truck.”

“You’re famous.” Tug nodded at the leaning cedar uprights and the unpainted wrought iron
hanging from the crosspiece.

Ryder Ranch

“The old Double R,” Tug said.

My folks had never been great gardeners, but someone had let the lawn die. The roses
withered on either side of the front door.

I pulled up next to my dad’s new GMC pickup. The tailgate and bumper bent inward in a
sharp V and the rear fender and passenger door showed a long sideswipe. A strip of chrome
trim with rubber backing dangled toward the ground.

“Hope nobody was hurt,” Tug said.

I looked up at the empty barn where I’d played on the hay below the bluebirds in the
high rafters. Later I’d swung the grappled bales on the truck’s long boom as my father
built the stack until it showed gold through the loft door.

I smelled again the iodine smell of the straw high up in my nose, felt the prickly rash
on the skin between my shirt cuff and leather glove.

The deserted corral and empty trough looked odd. If I blinked, I’d see Buck and Jerry,
my part-quarter horse my dad had raised from a colt, standing between the two buckskins
and Ginger, my mother’s chestnut mare. As a kid, for hours I tried to catch the silver
mosquito fish darting away from my white hands through the murky water until Tom the
peacock called and flew up to balance on the fence’s top rail and his plumes hung down
with their row of eyes.

I heard a bark, like the bark of a ghost, and two dogs—Willy, the big sandy German
shepherd, and Chance, the orange Queensland blue heeler—ran around the corner of the
barn. I expected to see a kid rushing after them in boots and a flannel shirt, a hawk
feather in his hair.

But the dogs weren’t that old. There’d been three generations before them. The spirits
of all the other animals were gone.

“Look out,” Tug said. He rolled up his window part way.

Chance yelped and jumped up with four feet in the air, but Willy got up on his hind legs
and put his head through my window. He licked my hand, then leaned up to sniff my face
while Chance stood off, barking.

“Come on.” I opened the door and stepped down and Willy jumped up on me, putting his
paws on my chest. Chance ran around the front of Tug’s pickup.
“This one going to bite me?”

“No, he just acts like it.”

Tug got out and we walked across the barnyard where the circling red-tail had cried and
dropped the feather at my feet, Willy bumping at my thigh, then doubling back to say
hello to Tug.

“We’re friends.” Tug patted the dog’s head. “You don’t need to hug me.”

Chance kept barking at me, then at Tug, standing back with his ears up and his front
feet out, as if we were cows that had wandered from the herd.

“Chance!” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”

He quit and dipped his nose, his ears going back, like he was embarrassed, and sidled up
and let me pat his head.

We crossed the dead lawn with the dogs and I knocked at the door, then glanced over at
the dry rosebushes. The leaves were yellow, the papery blooms like faded red velvet. Only
the green thorns looked alive, emerald as the waters at Sleeping Child Lake, where I’d
help Emma hunt for the child she was sure was her own, the boy Charles Two Hats saw when
he left his body with a fever and found the village where the lake becomes a stream.