The Uphill Confluence

For Dennis

A ragged man on a horse, stopped at a switchback on the Tassajara road, sun shining through madrone trees. The rider cups his hand to his mouth and shouts Yo-Da-Lay-De-Hoo! The horse puts her ears back on her head, is used to such outbursts. Nick Reardon removes a brimmed hat from his head and speaks to the sky:

Oh Lord,

Four score and several horses before this one I got drunk. Really drunk, and yes that was my wife fucking that shit head Billy right in our bed. And I took a machete, yes a machete, and I cut that bastard a new crack. Two cracks he is called now.

Oh Lord I don't regret it one bit. So if you want to come get me, if you think you are ready, come on. I'm going to cut you a new asshole too.

Amen.

Nick recites the speech nearly every time he reaches the bend on the way into Jamesburg, often after finishing off a pint bottle of Jim Beam which, speech completed, he flings into the gully across the road. But today he has not had a drop to drink and when finishes stares into the sky afterward, awaiting a reply. Before, he spoke in rehearsal, to himself. Today he means every word.

The sign he has been awaiting has appeared, his hands tremble on the reigns.

“God damn it!” he shouts, “I'm ready for you and the devil both.” He sits straight on his saddle and spurs his horse down the road. In his pocket is the key to everything to come.

Her long red hair falls in a wave down her back, almost to her waist and in the morning sun glints flashes of copper. Radiant, unsettling, a color that lands softly on the eye but evokes the red of poison oak, nightshade berries, forest fires at night. It seduces and repels, attracts and inspires flight in equal measure.

Cassiopeia snaps her fingers, sways from foot to foot on the tiles of the porch. She could dance all day, across the meadow and down over Tassajara road, to wherever. The sun is so warm, her husband Dennis has gone to town and she has been up nearly three days freebasing coke.

The smell lingers on the porch, an acrid odor of bleach and burnt oak chips that scorches her sinuses and makes her itch for more. But they ran out of base and Dennis has driven to town for more. He did not notice when she pocketed the remaining bag of powder.

Cassy sticks a finger in her mouth and draws a circle in the air:

Mine. This day is mine to have and to hold. I am not selfish; it is mine because I will take it. Hah! Stand back. Until you come home, this is my day to run out into the mistletoe and stick daisies in my hair. I will pull this dress off and run up to the pond and jump in swim across and dry in the hot sun like a rock. Like a rock! And then I will climb the oak trees and shake down the mistletoe.

When you come home you won't see where I have stuck it in the rafters. You will want to kiss and kiss me anyway. But the mistletoe blesses me, only me, and I will kiss you back harder, suck everything out of your mouth that I can. It is all mine if I can take it. And I will.

The monk removes his jeans and chamois shirt and pulls on his robes. The same wall of redwood planks as always awaits him. The gradations of black and red, the wide lines of wood grain are memorized each day to be forgotten anew. He sets his zafu upon the floor, on a red cotton rug he bought long ago in Mexico. He folds his legs underneath him and starts his daily struggle to just be, to liberate himself and all creation from the suffering of living. Before he folds his hands upon his lap he says to the wall:

East of Blom spring, the dry hills rise toward the Salinas valley like hands folding over one another, yellow and bare in the late summer, punctuated here and there by valley oaks and sycamores along the folds of the canyons. I imagine they have always looked that way.

It is an illusion; were I to be transported across the valley the hills would be rutted with cow trails, the grasses come from other continents, the ghost of predators long gone, the mortar and pestles of the acorn grinders pilfered.

To the west, the mountains rise up over Jamesburg to Chew's Ridge. It is no wonder such a rise, like a wave of dark night hiding anything beyond, scared anyone looking for a place to plant crops, to harvest the light in all its forms.

The fires are long gone and the shrubs have taken over. Chamise and coyotebrush, warty-leaf ceanothus and sticky monkey flower. Underneath the choked, itchy layer that grows ever thicker, nothing on two legs moves easily anymore. Even in midday, shade prevails in the interior, home to rodents and birds, snakes and the hardiest of the larger mammals....bobcats and mountain lions, the feral boar.

Yet which is more disturbed, the land which undulates gently and shines yellow in the sun, as if posing to be photographed for a postcard? Or the combustible expanses of dark oily undergrowth awaiting one lightning strike, stray cigarette, to burn everything in sight to ash?

Either way, believes the monk, there is no such thing as a landscape. Not really—a vista is just a snapshot, a mirror reflecting the aesthetic of a single, limited eye.

Humming along in the old Mercedes, bouncing when the worn out air suspension bottoms, Dennis' high dies a hard death. His bones start to ache and his teeth chatter. He knows he can get a hit in town but will have to rush around to find it.

Life was much slower before Cassy; he had needed less and little that he could not trade a pound of weed for. Sometimes, he did not see the lights of town for a week or two between trips to town in his old Power Wagon. Dewey, the truck, lumbered and shook at speeds above 40 mph, and when Cassy had shown up with the Mercedes he had at first reacted the same way.

He tells himself that it was all worth it though, and more. You don't have to wonder what you are doing with a woman like Cassy, you just watch her move across the floor in the evening and you know. You know you have done something right. Otherwise, why would such a perfect creature, such a butterfly, have come to land upon your hand?

Sure it's worth it. He turns the radio up loud to drown out the road noise.

Today is the day. That's what he says, the voice up above the trees that only I can hear. He told me long ago to ride my horse until this day, never get in a car or an airplane or anything else that would make the signal hard to understand. He told me not to soil my loins until this day, that women would know the power in me and want to be near it but that I should not let them. It's for their own sake. When he comes there will be hell to pay and he will separate the good from the evil. A good horse will be the only way to run. It might come to that.

God says don't tell anyone else. They will not understand. But I don't trust him so I have to tell others now and then. I don't trust god because he tells me these things I should do and not do but he has not proven himself yet. I have done everything he asks but he has not shown his face and he could really be a devil. There will be no way to tell until I have unravelled the sign that came today. The whole thing, it could be an illusion a trap to get me to reveal myself. But today is the day, I will know soon.

Five foot three. And a half. Yeah I'm short. So what? I'm tall enough to ride and rope and that's all that matters. Tall enough to get a whiskey at the Stirrup Cup and if you call me a midget I'l kick your ass. I'm not a midget. Five foot two inches, that's a midget.

I was born on this ranch, all 30,000 acres of it, and I won't ever leave. At least not unless Markham sells it and someone who buys it doesn't want to run cows. It doesn't make Markham any money, he just does it for taxes or something. Shit he never even finished the house he started on up at the top. He's got like twenty five others and he only comes here to swim with his kids and play tennis. He comes in his own plane and has a BMW just to drive from the village airport out to the ranch. That's all the BMW does, go there and back.

Can you imagine, he built a clay tennis court out in the middle of the lower pasture? Wonder where they got the clay, it can't be from around here.

People say, there's no cowboys left in California, at least not in Carmel Valley. But that ain't true, there's my uncle Clyde. He was born on the ranch long before Markham owned it and never left. I mean he's never been out of the county except for Mule Days over in Bishop. Oh, one time Markham flew his ass to Aspen for a vacation. He said they had this hot tub that was behind a wall that Markham opened with a remote control. Clyde, in a hot tub? Give me a fuckin break. Cowboy in a hot tub, where's that at?

I'd probably leave the valley if Markham ever gets rid of us. Anything out here, it's worth a million dollars. A million dollars for one house. Property? Forget it. Property with water and pasture enough to run my own cows? It don't work like that here anymore. Markham's place is one of the last big chunks. Christ the taxes on it are probably a million a year.

Wait a minute, I did leave once. They flew us cowboys in a little bitty plane up to Burns, Oregon. We had to show the cowboys there about some cows we sold them. The kind we breed here, they don't need much water. Good thing too, there wasn't a drop for miles in Burns. It was so damn cold too, colder than a witch's tit in an iron bra.

The monk finished his morning sitting and stretched his legs. If it were winter he would be out at Tassajara and the sun would not have risen yet. He would be wearing his robes and walking to the kitchen for morning meal. His stomach would be rumbling as soon as the smell of warm granola met his nose. The air would be still, the smell of sulfur from the bathhouses.

But the way of the householder was not so clear. The Buddha himself had said the rewards were greater, the illusion of existence more distracting than what a thousand monks faced. It was an act of compassion to leave the solitary pursuit of Samadhi behind and take on the pain of the domestic world. Without a morning routine to order his day, restless and worried thoughts multiplied with every possibility for keeping himself busy. Too many choices, too few duties.

He let the morning dilemma go and struck a match on the gas stove. He pulled a slab of bacon from the little refrigerator and cut it in long strips. Bacon! He had to admit he loved it and the kharma of eating his neighbor's pigs, raised in a sunny meadow and killed with care sat well with him. Better than a bag of organic brown rice raised somewhere else in some unknown way.

He laughed at himself and tossed a fatty white-marbled strip in the frying pan, inhaled the smell. The life of the householder did have its pleasures, and a joy in the little paradoxes of survival.

The spring box was built by Johannes Blomgren, a long-bearded German who had wandered aimlessly over North America before settling in Carmel Valley. He had taken a look at the property and known he would die there; he was given to a belief in omen and heedless rigidity.

Most spring boxes were simple affairs built to gather water and eventually water cows, hodgepodged, maybe improvised from an old bathtub. But Blomgren had built his carefully intending it to outlast himself. He had hauled rounded river cobbles from the gully below his cabin

and chinked them with concrete.

It was a wild, frivolous act for a man who wasted little time on anything unessential. But the spring was a source of reverence, his Oracle of Delphi, his extravagance. In its presence he was docile, passive, looked upon the cold water and forgot himself. When oak leaves fell into the box and turned the water brownish with tannins, he would reach in and throw them out by the fistful.

Had it been possible, Blom would not have ever piped the spring but his austerity had limits. After a year of hauling water down the hill in tin buckets he gave in and ran the spring flow in a pipe to his cabin below. It took him several days of hard digging to bury the pipe, which he understood as another extravagance, and he was careful to hide the pipe inlet at the bottom of the rock trough. When he was done, the spring box was as unmolested as he could make it.

He fancied himself a mystic; others saw a typical German taciturnity and niggardliness.

He saw no need to raise cattle if he did not eat meat. No need to own a car if he did not go anywhere. No need to have a wife if he enjoyed his own company. He never ran electricity to his cabin nor owned a telephone. Who did he need to call? What good was a refrigerator to a man who mostly ate grains and vegetables, cans of soup? When he went to others' homes, which was not often, he wondered aloud how they could sleep with the humming of all the electricity.

In the solitude of his redwood plank cabin, filthy with wood smoke and pipe tobacco, he polished his point of view, nourished a patch of opinions that grew and never expressed themselves to others.

Rocking away the years in a handmade old rocking chair, a wrought iron and soft leather throne that reminded him of home, he grew old both happy and unhappy, mumbling to himself

in broken English. It was only when he sat at the spring that he admitted to himself the truth, that he was a fraud.

The monk scrubbed the bacon grease from the cast iron pan and wiped it dry with a dish towel. He put his jeans back on and laced his work boots, folded his zafu into the Mexican blanket and tucked it under his bed. He filled his canteen with the last of the kitchen water in the plastic cooler, stuck a bread roll in his shirt pocket.

Though he had no wood to chop, the monk did have water to carry.

The water from the tap was brownish and tasted of iron, betrayed its cool, sweet source. So the monk had abandoned it. Instead, he would load a blue water jug into the wheel barrow and push it up the steep jeep road to the spring. Sometimes he took loppers and cut the thick chamise that overhung the road while the spring filled the barrel. It was a process he did not rush, savoring the tinkling of the spring water, the rustle of oak leaves under the sheltering trees. Returning down the hill was a haphazard task, one he depended entirely upon his leg muscles for. One so joyful in its pointlessness that he smiled as he slipped back down the hill, levering a flat board on top of the front wheel for a brake.

His reward for the effort was to roll the barrel onto a raised platform he had constructed and jump under the cold, gravity fed spray. He would then stretch out upon on the platform, and when dried by the sun the day would unfold before him.

Lake Brompton was a private joke, a name Cassy and Dennis had given to the dug out lake behind their house, a reference to a cocktail of vodka, morphine, and cocaine given to the terminally ill. Cassy stretched out upon the shore, removing her dress to lie upon. She had snorted some more of the coke but was nearly sleepy, tried to close her eyes but found she just watched the clouds, a growing sense that Dennis had been gone too long rising within her.

She was getting tired of him, with his mopey eyes and lame blues tunes. She had kicked him out the door this morning to go and get more coke otherwise he would have spent the day coming down, snoring in the hammock on the porch.

The clouds passed, the sun grew warmer on her skin, Cassy's mood grew uglier. There was no good reason Dennis could not be home by now. Perhaps it had reached his thick brain that she was preparing to leave. A very small fear formed within her, like an itch. One thing Dennis would not do was give her up easily. Why had he been gone so long? Something was wrong.

She folded her fingers over her belly and wondered where she would go next. It was always her body's decision, it drew hungry little boys to her and she knew how to pick the right one. It was an instinct, a discipline; the trick was to keep poised, ignore her own hunger, keep looking ahead. But it would not do let Dennis get out ahead of her. Why had he been gone so long?

Every other month, Blom went into town to collect a check from his father. It was always the same amount, exchanged into dollars and the envelope never contained any sort of correspondence. His father was a heavily jowled patriarch who had dug the family fortune out of the coal mines of Svalbard, Norway, wrestling a fortune out of the unsuspecting socialist government. His approach to his dreamy, wayward son was entirely pragmatic: better to spend a little to keep him away than a lot to make him go away.

Blom's hands shook each time he opened another check, ashamed of what it said about his own notions of himself. But he went to the bank and deposited it anyway, consoled by leaving half in the account each time as a small act of penance. Afterward, he would stop for one glass of Akvavit at the Stirrup Cup. They kept the bottle for him under the bar. No one else had any idea what it was.

One time my uncle was driving his jeep up the ranch road in the dark. Looked out and saw a pair of eyes and stopped, thinking it was a lost calf. The eyes got bigger and bigger and then–bam!–this fucking boar crashes into the side of the jeep. Clyde looks out the window and the boar is dead. Broke his neck and you can still see the dent from his tusks in the side of the jeep. Goddamn, now that's a mean animal.

There's been more around lately, I saw one running away from the Blom spring the other day. It was a small one with no tusks, but it scared my horse and I think I might start carrying something bigger than a .22. Good for pot-shotting squirrels but nothing against a mad pig.

The monk was loading his barrel into the wheelbarrow when Nick Reardon rode into the yard and dismounted from his horse. “Hey zennie!” he shouted.

There was a look of shock on Nick's face, the whites of his eyes visible all around the pupil and his wide mouth opening to his bashed teeth.

Nick was inherited by each caretaker along with the cabin and the rattlesnakes that nested under the porch steps. He came each month for a check that arrived in the Blom mailbox. Usually he took the check over to the bar where they cashed it and he spent most of it there before leaving for the woods.

When the monk had come down the road to caretake the Blom property, he had already known Nick, unmistakeable from any distance on his plodding horse. Nick liked the monks, sometimes rode out to the monastery to soak in the baths, eat a bowl of rice.

“Good morning Nick. Please come have some tea,” asked the monk.

“Don't mind if I do.”

The monk kept a bottle of Jim Beam stashed in his cupboard and poured some in a cup while he heated water for himself. “I haven't seen your check yet,” said the monk. “Is there some other reason you have come to town?”

Nick took a long sip. “I need to warn you about something, zennie. You're a pure soul and I want you to have enough warning about what is to come.”

The monk frowned.

“There was a problem with my last check. Not a problem really though that's what I thought at first.”

“Perhaps Nick it might be a better idea to cash your check somewhere other than the bar. I think they are probably taking advantage of you.”

“Of course they do, they are sellers of liquor. What's wrong is the number on my check. The government always sends $500 even. Always have, it's their way of keeping me quiet, letting me know they have an eye on me. But this check was for $494.76. Do you know what this means?”

“Your cup is already empty, Nick, and you are worrying me.” The monk poured some more bourbon. He did not know what else to do for Nick but listen and let him come down a little. Bourbon was probably not the best medicine but it did stem the flow of hard, strange words.

“They know zennie, and I am telling you first because you are pure. You are a pure man zennie, and you need to run. You have my word of honor you won't be hurt when the sky opens up. But you won't see it and I will have to do some bad things to fight god back off. The key is in this check.” Nick patted his pocket.

“He is going to make me fight the devil for him. Only I don't know how the devil will appear and whether I can trust god about it. He can be wrong you know, god. He could also be the devil in disguise.”

Nick was rubbing the table hard with his palms, ignoring his bourbon. The monk pulled the kettle off of the stove and poured hot water into his cup.

“I need a shovel zennie. Just lend me a shovel if you're not going to run.”

The monk went out behind the cabin and returned with a shovel, Nick nodded at the sight of it. “Thank you zennie. I won't forget this.”

“Of course, Nick. It's just a shovel. Please, though, get some rest. Come back and lie in the cabin for awhile if you need to but get some sleep.”

“No time zennie, no time.”

The numbers on the check were the final clue. Old man Blom, before he died and his sisters moved in with all those cats had tried to tell me what it was. He said it was buried by the spring but that I would not know where until the exact right time.

49476 is the sign, a code for how to get from the spring to where old man Blom buried whatever I need to know. The zennie was the sign before that, his ears. Old man Blom had earlobes like those, really long. There were others but this is the last. Do you see? The government, they cannot let me find the sign and have it all to myself. There is some connection to the thing Blom buried, it's not clear but I am the middle of the whole thing.

Cassy felt the rush from the last big snort of the coke. It tore through her body, sent her thoughts racing and then obliterated them into pure energy. The energy shot down her spine, out her toes. She could hear the slightest lapping of water, the crickets crawling in the grass, the mistletoe growing in the trees. Her legs picked her up and threw her into the meadow, twitching and blinking, the sunlight running all through her. She felt that she was running, moving faster than anything around her. LIke a lion, she could run any living thing down and bite it upon the neck before it even knew she was there. Her dress was a crumpled ball beside the lake, forgotten.

It had come to her with a start, that Dennis had not returned because he was up to something. It would be clumsy and easy to spot, but he had gotten the drop on her. She crouched on the hillside, looking for him to show himself.

Nick reached the spring and left his horse to wander on the jeep road. He pulled the check out and smoothed it on the corner of the spring box. It was all there, 49476, the signature of someone from the government, the note at the bottom Settlement: Nick Reardon. Settlement, settle, keep quiet. Not any longer.

He was not sure yet how to interpret the numbers, so looked upward into the dappled canopy of live oak above. The sun was high, only came through in little pinpoints. Nick said:

Tell me what you want now. I've done everything you wanted and I have the sign. It won't be long before whoever sends the checks comes to stop me. Now goddamn it. Now is the time.

And finally he heard the voice again. It was a small breeze rippling through his mind, blowing the scattered signs into an order that he had not seen before. It had no words itself but like a magnet pulled the signs in his mind together and left the picture plain.

The numbers had a very simple meaning, he must pace each one off in the cardinal directions. It was like a pirate treasure but that he had to follow the number of steps exactly. He could feel the energy under his feet, neutrinos and sun rays bolting through him into the earth. He heard his horse stamping down below—she could feel it too. Now all he had to do was walk and dig.

But at that moment the devil showed his face.

Cassy drew her shoulders up and tossed her hair back. Her thoughts were slowing, sticking like brown snow in the trees. A muffled noise came from the woods, like a horse stamping around. It would be Dennis come home catch her. Of course he would, would try and stop her. She clinched her fist and found a rock on the trail. It could be worse than Dennis—the monk next door had not fooled her, had tried to conceal his real purpose but had failed. Only cops paid that much attention to everything; he was there to set her up. It could also be the shuffling of a pig, a wild boar come to run her down.

Her heart raced. She was crouching naked in the trees with nothing but a rock to protect her. Whatever was up above was there for her.

Nick was ready for the devil, but had not expected his appearance so soon. He stood naked in the form of a woman, red haired and smiling, holding the .44 from his saddlebags. Even his nails were red, and had not Nick been told by god to distrust women, he would have hesitated to stare at the red patch between her legs. “You must be looking for me,” he said.

“No, you are looking for me.”

“I guess we have found each other.”

“You can't hide I knew you'd be here.

They looked into each other's eyes unsure of who was saying what. Nick moved first, crumpling the check in his hand and demanding, “Are you the devil or did god send you?”

Cassy shrugged, “Who cares?”

“Tell me the number on this piece of paper. If you know it you are god and maybe I'll let you live. You don't look like the government.”

Cassy laughed. “What in the fuck are you talking about old man? I'm the one holding the gun.”

He ran at her with shovel held across his chest. It was comical really, his hideous broken teeth and dirty hair, flailing toward someone not moving. Nothing was that fast. When he was a few steps away, Cassy pulled the trigger.

Nick could see the bullet leave the gun, could see it spinning around itself moving through the air. It was the final test, the final sign. He could stop it if he wished, or he could let it pass right through him. That was the lesson god was trying to tell him, that it did not matter where the bullet came from if he was ready for it. The bullet was going to pass right through him and then he would grab the devil by the throat and would know the answer, whether she was god, devil, or woman. He would know by the feel of the soft white flesh around her neck.

He was wrong about the bullet. It passed through his face, but only after shattering it into a thousand pieces.

The monk heard the gunshots and knew that Nick was dead. The why and how bothered him only a minute later. Running up the jeep road, he saw the horse first. He wondered who would shoot a horse before it bothered him to realize that Nick would not. A moment later he was there, and Nick's face was a dandelion flower blown from off his body, the shovel several feet behind him, the metal blade covered with a spray of blood.

It did not take long for Cassy to be found. She ran the big Mercedes into a parked car in Seaside and was taken to jail. She told the police that Dennis had shot Nick Reardon and they were both being held while the story was sorted out.

The sheriff came and took Nick's body, snapped a few photographs and wrote up the monk's statement. He said very little and asked only a few questions. When he was done, he nodded at the horse and told the monk, “That unfortunately is your responsibility.”

The monk had brought two fresh loaves of bread to Cassy when he took up the Blom cabin. She had not said thanks, instead had promised him a recipe for French onion soup. A look around the kitchen told the monk that no one cooked anything there. She asked him several times why he was in the cabin next door and served him a plate of Brie cheese and stale crackers, forgot about the soup recipe. It was awkward until her two Rhodesian Ridgebacks ran through the door and rolled at his feet. Bo and Arrow.

To his delight, they were both covered with ticks. The monk thereafter looked forward to their appearance every morning on his doorstep. He knew that he should use a heated needle, back the parasite back out so as not to lose the head in the skin. But instead he pinched them off, dug out the heads with a fingernail. On the porch he set out a handkerchief and wiped the remains of the ticks upon it.

Such a patient little creature, the deer tick. He had watched one once, teetering on the end of a piece of fox grass, its future dependent on what might pass by. He had read that they sensed heat only, risked everything in one jump at any source of warmth.

The foreman of the Markham ranch and his little nephew arrived a few days later on the doorstep. The loud banging of their entrance turned out to be a backhoe being trailered behind their truck. The little cowboy came to he monk and said, “We need to bury that horse. The smell is bothering the calves and pretty soon the coyotes will come around.” His uncle said nothing, started unchaining the backhoe from the trailer. The little cowboy stuck his head in the cabin and asked, “Do you still get big rattlesnakes under here?”

The monk said yes and pointed to a skin on his wall, a huge flat bull pinned above his sink. “We have an understanding but,” shrugged the monk, “sometimes they forget.”

The nephew laughed. “You're not like the other zennies. You're alright; I like you monk.”

“I like you too.”

Clyde drove the backhoe up the old jeep road toward the spring. By the time the little cowboy and the monk were halfway to the spring he had already turned around was creeping down the hill, the stiff legs of the horse quivering like aspen trees above the edge of the bucket.

The little cowboy pointed at them and laughed. So did the monk. When the hoe reached the lower meadow the Rhodesians came barking into the meadow and stopped frozen in front of the backhoe, sniffing dead horse.

They all watched Clyde dig a grave in the meadow and the cowboy asked the monk, ”Did you ever hear how Nick got like that?”

“He never said, no.”

Clyde scooped the horse into the fresh hole and backed up to push dirt over it. He could not fathom the stupidity of someone who would shoot a perfectly good horse so he did not try. Clyde turned off the hoe and stood in front of the grave. As he did so the monk, his nephew, the slobbery red dogs joined him. He spoke to the grave:

He was an okay cowboy. Grew up here and when young we would ride the hills together and when old man Blom sickened he sat by his bed and wiped his brow, cleaned the vomit from his bedside. He was not crazy then, a little different but not crazy.

He made a wife of one of the relatives who came to care for Blom and she had been raised somewhere in coldest Germany, opened like a sunflower when she got here. But then something got to her and she was a thing unraveling before everyone's eyes. Nick found her, laughing, in his bed naked beside Billy and so grabbed his machete and now Billy is called Two Crack. His wife, no one knows where she went.

Nick was a hurt animal, yelling and riding his horse fast upon the hills and trails, shooting his blunderbuss .44 at trees and cars. When finally the sheriff caught him, he removed a whip and smashed in each and every of the patrol lights atop the cruiser. Set the whip across his saddle and climbed down before the sheriff could come at him.

They drove him to jail and by the time he got there his skull had been flattened on the right side, his teeth broken. A lawyer found out about this and when Nick got out of jail, the settlement checks began and continued. But he was never the same.

The trailer disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust and the monk found a metal rake and smoothed the grave. His life was going to be more complicated now; the Rhodesians would need a home and at first he would feed them the rest of the bacon mixed with rice.

They would probably scare away the deer and maybe even the rattlesnakes, maybe even the boar. He would miss the wilder creatures but would enjoy mornings on the porch pulling ticks from the dogs' ears.

Down across the pasture and past the road was a dry gully full of granite boulders come to rest. This reminded the monk of hist first task at Tassajara.

He had been given the job of building a new garden wall with rocks from the creek below. The smaller ones he and others carried by hand, reciting passages of the Diamond Sutra to themselves. The larger ones they had been taught to roll, working them together back up the hill.

As they pushed the stones up toward the wall, the monks would first rock the boulder into motion and then heave it just a little bit up the hill. In this way they had moved stones which had looked at first formidable. As he worked he came to feel in his muscles everything that he liked about the contemplative life. He saw the lesson; with careful attention and gumption, even the most static of objects, boulders that appeared to be solidly at rest, could be put into motion.

But when the wall had been finished, he looked back toward Tassajara creek and decided he had been off in his understanding. They had not put anything in motion because little by little even boulders were never static, at rest. If not manifest to the human eye, the motion was within the boulder. Nothing rested.

He would build such an undertaking for the buried horse, pile boulders on the new grave. It would take him several months at least, working by himself, but he would build a pyramid, a cairn, to mark the horse and its rider. It would fill his mornings and when finished he would let the spring pipe flood back down into the meadow and in the freshly turned earth he would plant a patch of sunflowers. Great big ones, with black seeds that would attract the birds. It was something he could do.