CHAPTER TWO
"Groovin"
They splurged and spent the night at Vern's Motel, $29 for the double. They showered in the morning. They began to sweat as soon as they stepped outside. By eight a.m. it was already in the eighties.
Curt conducted an inspection of his beloved micro-bus which he had bought from a used car dealer in Midlothian, IL six thousand miles ago for $1500. It only had eighty-eight thousand miles on the clock, a relative youngster. Curt pulled out the old metal toolbox and removed the air gauge. He worked his way around the car with a hand pump making sure the tires were inflated to 33 lbs. per square inch. He'd studied the USGA plat maps and determined there were enough old mining trails laid out on the rock-hard sand that they should be able to drive a couple hundred miles without difficulty. Tread was good. He'd brought a sturdy jack, two spares, and shovels.
He opened the side passenger door with a skin-rippling screech. A little WD-40 was in order. He removed the blue can from his tool box, attached the short straw, and spritzed the running tracks and hinges. He worked the door back and forth. Ahhh. Better. Inside he had extra air and oil filters just in case. Two five-gallon picnic thermoses. Curt used his plastic ice bucket from the room to deliver loads of ice from the outside ice machine to each of the thermoses. He used the bathtub faucet to fill four half-gallon canteens swathed in canvas he'd purchased at an army surplus store.
He checked his copious supply of dehydrated meals, cheese and cold cuts in an ice chest that was half melted. He would have liked to replenish the ice, but the old machine had barely filled the two buckets before grinding to a halt. Ronnie emerged from the room into bright morning light, bare-chested and toweling off his mop of auburn hair. Catnip. Catnip to the girls. Curt had always envied Ronnie's easy way with women but Ronnie wasn't stuck-up or greedy and Curt did all right on the leftovers.
He'd been Ronnie's wingman since freshman year.
Ronnie placed his hand over his eyes and squinted east into the sun looking past Vern's Hardware at the distant, hazy mountains. The landscape was unrelieved by plant or water. Nothing stirred, nothing moved except for a pair of turkey buzzards hovering in the middle distance. He smacked his hands together and inhaled.
"Smell that desert air!" He looked up and down Main Street. "Jesus. They never heard of McDonald's?"
"We'll eat on the road. Come on. I want to find some shade before we stop for the night."
The VW's 20 gallon gas tank had a range of 350 miles. Curt also carried two steel five gallon gas tanks on the roof next to their camping gear. They'd topped off when they hit town last night. They did not plan to roam the plateau, but rather to seek out an interesting site and camp there. It was Ronnie's idea. It was he who first came across the Azuma in an obscure conquistador's diary in Seville, when he and Curt had back-packed across Europe the previous summer.
He'd been studying maps of the area and Anasazi texts the whole semester and thought he had the site narrowed down to a ten square mile area. The Spanish breached the Azuma stronghold in 1542. Ronnie had a thousand dollar Nikon his parents gave him for his birthday and had been putting in long hours at the dark room in the Student Union. Dreams of National Geographic danced in his head.
Aside from fantasies of fame and riches which every young man possessed he was driven by a burning desire to know. Ronnie had been hooked when his parents took him to Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park when he was twelve years old.
The sight of the ancient cliff dwellings enraptured him. A deep bell rang in his heart. As a boy he had always played the Indian in cowboys and Indians. Between high school and college he'd spent a summer volunteering on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The Indians he met were not the Indians of his imagination. The Pine Ridge Indians seemed enervated, passive, and inured to subsistence living. They drank and did drugs. They were a sharp contrast to the warriors of his imagination and perhaps it was this desire to uncover those warriors of old that drove him.
For Curt, it was all about dropping acid in the desert. He'd always had that mystic bent. His drawings were getting spacier.
They saddled up and headed out, the microbus making its characteristic grinding noise. Five miles out of town on County Highway BB the pavement ended and they rode on the hard flat surface of the desert consisting of silicon, crushed pyrites, sand and gravel. Vegetation was sparse and hardy. It had been a dry year and the desert stretched before them sere and forbidding.
Curt plugged the Kinks into the 8-track and cranked it to drown out the engine noise, which sounded like a cement mixer filled with metal. "You Really Got Me." They rode without speaking, each lost in thought, chewing beef jerky, sunflower seeds and quaffing water. The old microbus had no air conditioning and they rode with the windows open. It was like sitting near a blast furnace. The air was sweet and dry with a hint of mesquite.
Ronnie rolled a joint on a copy of Rolling Stone and they lit up. Suddenly they were loquacious.
"This is gonna be so cool," Curt said.
"What about rattlesnakes, man?" Ronnie said. "We got to be wary of those suckers."
"Just watch where you step. We'll sleep in the bus. Shouldn't be a problem."
"And scorpions. You heard what the man said."
"Scorpions are generally afraid of humans and their stings are rarely fatal."
"They give me the creeps," Ronnie said, turning around and digging through his backpack for the snakebite kit he'd purchased at a sporting goods shop in Denver.
Within an hour they'd left all traces of civilization behind save for the ruts and grooves of the road itself. The microbus jounced across broad stretches of washtub surface. Ronnie pulled out his Zeiss binocs and sighted in on the distant mountains. He thought he saw a communications tower but he couldn't be sure. The distance was clouded in heat haze.
The Kinks finished with "Sunny Afternoon." Ronnie popped them out and replaced them with New Riders of the Purple Sage.
It was just past noon. When they saw the old woman.
***