Anaideia 18

I could barely hold a coffee cup to my lips due to trembling hands. There was a blanket draped over my shoulders as I recovered from intense shock from the night’s events. I sat only in my underwear while clothes dried from washing in the intense desert heat after I shat and pissed them. The Madam sat on the other end of the table with a disapproving expression. She held a cigarette between her fingertips.

“You are a stupid, stupid man,” she told me.

“True,” I said as I slowly sipped.

Old Jim finished packing tobacco into his half bent pipe and lit a match. With the tobacco alit, a plume of smoke exited his nostrils and he nodded his head. “You know, old folks used to say you should flush quarters down the toilet for good luck,” he said. “But when I clogged the toilet, the plumber found $276.50 in the drain. That was a good day.”

The rays of morning sun gleamed through the wavy vintage glass and lit up the saloon. It was an hour past sunup and patrons were shuffling out of the whore quarters and to the bar where Burl would serve beers like an oafish and silent brute. I was somewhat despondent. Jim, the Madam, and myself sat around the old square table quietly lost in our own worlds. My world, of course, was shattered by the appearance of a fiendish ghoul who guarded a mountain pass like Cerberus of Hades. I realized then that this was the reality of folks like Old Jim and the Madam; they were trapped in this barren basin as prisoners.

Randy stepped in through the front door of the saloon and approached the bar. He was wearing a bluish grey suit with a yellow tie and a straw boater hat and he looked like a depression era Bible salesman. Burl mixed what appeared to be a tequila sunrise and handed to Randy. We might’ve been friends for a long time. But today I felt like I might swallow a bullet. He sipped on the cocktail and slowly crept towards our table while he jingled change in his pocket. He placed his hand gently on my shoulder.

“Jim, how are ya?” he asked.

“Fair,” said Jim.

“Madam Joelle, I don’t suspect much has changed since last night?”

“That’s a fair assessment,” said the Madam.

“Young chili pepper,” Randy said, referring to me, “can I speak to you outside?”

I swallowed hard and followed him outside. We stood underneath the shotily put together awning that counted as a porch in the front while my blanket swayed in the wind. The skies were clear. Randy pointed to that far off mountain range I failed to traverse the night before. “Do you know how far away that range is?” he asks.

“No sir. I do not.”

“It’s 5.62 miles away,” he explained. “Far enough away to feel safe from life’s uncertainties but close enough to look out the window and wonder. Now what you saw last night might not be of this world. But the terror it brings is no different than what any man faces when he walks the streets. Every two minutes a man is shot dead in Los Angeles County and that’s your home. Just minutes away from where you eat and drink and make love is an unspeakable tragedy.”

“What are you getting at Randy?”

Randy takes a bigger drink from his cocktail and continues. “My point is, why tempt fate? You have all the niceties that a young chili pepper should kill for. You are surrounded by beautiful women from all around the world while unbridled from the laws of government. This is paradise compared to the godless land you used to dwell in. So why escape?”

“But it seems pretty godless out here.”

“Yet that’s where you’re wrong!” he exclaimed. He grew more animated with each breath. “Soon this whole lake bed will be filled with commerce and industry. People from miles around will come and find their wildest fantasies come to life. It will be a hedonistic dream!”

“That’s what Las Vegas is for,” I said.

“I’m trying to tell you that you’re on the frontier of a new world! I was halfway to Riverside County when I heard you tried to leave this place! I want you to be a part of this dream! That’s how important you are to me!”

Randy threw his arms around me with drink in hand and slightly spilling the cocktail onto my blanket. “Don’t leave,” he said. “You’re too important to this operation.”

“Randy, I just want to make sure I can leave whenever I want.”

Randy removed the boater hat and placed it to his chest. “I understand,” he said. “But that thing, out there,” he explained, referring to Penelope, “I just don’t know if she can permit that.”

He placed the hat back on his head and poured the nearly a full glass of tequila sunrises onto the dry ground and waltzed back to his Cadillac. As he opened the driver’s side door he shot me one last glance. “You’re not the first to try to escape,” he said, “and you probably won’t be the last. But those mountains are littered with the bones of curious kittens. I don’t feel the need to warn you again.”

TO BE CONTINUED…