The Ghost Lights

As it turned out, I had seen the Marfa Lights, way back on wife #2 when we were tooling through the Big Bend country, staying at a rinky-dink motel in Alpine, from where we had driven over to Marfa at sunset to find out for ourselves what those mystery lights were all about.  We parked in the lot near the viewing area, where about ten other people had already gathered for the spectacle.  In truth, I didn't expect to see any lights, but just after the sun disappeared north of the Chinati Mountains, there they were, the damnedest things I'd ever seen, looking like distant car headlights, but red and blue and pale yellow, and sometimes moving in concert with one another, but at other times turning white and shooting into the air like some kind of jet-propelled flood lamps.

Turns out some people were sure they were reflections of car lights, but records predating the invention of the automobile detailed accounts of the phenomenon, which folks back then called the "ghost lights."  Some people said they must be reflections of campfires, but if you ever saw campfires moving around like that I'd have to say you were on some kind of hallucinogen.  Some people thought the lights were nothing more than static electricity or swamp gas, both theories failing to take into account the erratic movements.  #2 and I left the area the next morning, confounded about those damned mystery lights.  Over the years I'd simply forgot about them.

Oddly enough, I didn't really get a chance to see them again this time.  That's because Dolly, my new waitress friend, did something that purely distracted me.  Just as soon as we had parked at the far side of the viewing area lot, she said, "I been aching all day to get my hands on you."  She grabbed my ears like they were protruding handles on a jug and jammed my face smack dab into the middle of her ample cleavage, shimmying her shoulders as if she were being electrocuted, nearly slapping me silly with her heaving breasts.  Immediately afterward she went deep-sea fishing, doing things to me that no woman had done before, things that literally caused my eyes to cross, making any chance of seeing the Marfa Lights impossible.  As if that weren't bad enough, she climbed on me like a cowgirl mounting a mechanical bull, a ride that lasted long after the last group of mystery lights viewers had driven out of there.

When it was over, I passed out, waking later when the truck stopped in front of an old adobe house that looked blue in the light of a full moon.

"This is my friend Mindy's house," Dolly said.

I trailed her to the front, and after she knocked we waited two whole minutes before the door opened a crack.  Mindy shrieked.  "Well, I'll be goddamned," she said.  "What are you doing down here, Dolly Girl?"

"My friend and I are on the lam, looking for a place to spend the night."

"You two get your asses in here right now."

As soon as we were in, and Mindy had shut the door behind us, she turned to me, cocked her head, furrowed her brow, and said, "Now where have I seen that dark handsome face before?"

There were beers all around, but I couldn't keep my eyes open, so Mindy showed me into a spare room and told me to get some shuteye.  I laid down on the bed right away.  For one brief moment I could hear them catching up, and there was something reassuring about listening to their voices.  Then I crashed.