Facing Facts

I awoke when the gray light of dawn filtered through the spaces between the bamboo-slat curtains in Indira's bedroom and found myself lying flat on my back staring up at the mirror image of myself staring down from the mirror on the ceiling.  Instantly a feeling of disgust welled inside of me, threatening to damper the titillating memory of the tantric dance Indira and I had choreographed last night.  Her mirror image was lying beside mine, the very vision of an Indian goddess in deep, peaceful sleep.  The only thing detracting from the perfect picture was the sight of her opened mouth, a black cave from which a small stream of drool trickled out onto her right cheek.  Left cheek.  I was looking at her reflection in the ceiling mirror.

As I slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb her, I accidentally tripped the switch on the remote control for the mattress vibrator, and quickly fumbled with it trying to find the off position before she was shaken awake.  Fortunately, I succeeded before she stirred.

Thinking it wise to get back to Felicia's guesthut I quickly dressed and exited Indira's home, retracing my steps from last night.  But before I'd traveled even twenty yards, I heard Jesus call from behind:  "Hola, Lee.  Un momento, por favor."

I wasn't anxious to talk to him, but when he caught up, I said, "Buenas dias."

"Ah, hablas español," he said.

"Un poquito."

I was happy to see he wasn't wearing his outfit from yesterday.  Instead, he was dressed for business, a bone-white Newhru jacket over shiny, polar-bear-skin trousers, and Gray Wolf leather boots.

Walking with me toward Felica's place, he said, "Mira, Lee, it's none of my business what you and Indira did last night--after all, you're both adults--but I must tell you, hombre, that Zen Monk is a fiercely jealous man, and those three keep no secrets from each other.  So you can assume that not long after their return Zen and his daughter will find out what you've been up to.  It's something you should know in considering your next move."

"I appreciate you telling me that, Jesus, but I'm not really certain what my next move should be.  If I head back to Creel I'm likely to get nabbed by BookForce marshals.  And if I try to make it through the forest on my own I just might run into a gang of bandidos in the mountains."

"With all due respect, Lee," he said, "I think the proper term is 'band' of bandidos, not 'gang' as you have suggested."

"Whatever.  You get my point."

"Oh, por cierto.  For sure.  It's just I think it would be a buen idea if you hightailed it out of here."

"Good idea, perhaps, but how?"

"I think I have a good solution for you," he said.  "Get your things together and come to my place.  I will show you a way out."

I considered what he said for only a moment before agreeing.

While I packed my meager belongings into a spare rucksack--a few Jungle Rat shirts, two pair of l'Eagle briefs, a spare pair of cargo shorts (all ordered from Felicia's clothes computer)--I understood how foolish it would be for me to linger.  Felicia would be crazy jealous of my night with Indira, and Zen would be enraged.  The two women would probably become instant antagonists, and I would be caught in the middle.  Eventually the wrath of all three individuals would be directed at me.

As I quickly headed for Jesus's hut I thought about Felicia.  She was a sweet kid who honestly cared for me.  But I could never saddle myself to a woman who snored like that.  And Indira--undoubtedly the most beautiful woman I'd ever met--was just too intense.  And how long would it take for me to learn to hate her--especially her accent?  How many times could I listen to her giving tech assistance to clueless computer customers in English that bordered on linguistic gibberish?  No, it was best for me to get out, and to get out now.

Jesus was waiting for me outside his place, and when I got there he took me around to the rear where there was a huge hut with hangar-like doors.  He gestured for me to help him, and together we slid the doors apart.  Inside was an antique helicopter that looked as if it had been sitting for decades.

When my jaw dropped at the sight of it, Jesus said, "Mira, amigo, your way out."

"I can't fly a helicopter."

"No te preocupes.  Not to worry, friend.  I am an expert pilot.  I'm heading for the City of the Angels this morning, but I can take you as far as Tucson."

"Tucson?  Why Tucson?"

"I'll explain on the way," he said.  "What do you say--esta listo para salir?  Ready to go?"

"When's the last time you had this thing in the air?"

"It's been a while, but she's a true bird.  Una paloma blanca."

He called it a "white dove," but the color of the fuselage was a badly-faded camo.

Mexican jumping beans were doing somersaults in my stomach when I said, "Let's do it."

After we busted our asses rolling the damned thing out of the hangar hut, we climbed inside, throwing our luggage in back. The way Jesus sat in the pilot's seat looking around at the controls as if re-familiarizing himself with them made me nervous.  Then he took a yellowed paper note out of a pocket in the console and began reading over it.  Touching a control to his left, he mumbled, "The collective.  The throttle."  Fondling the stick between his legs, he said, "The cyclic."  Then looking down over the top edge of the note to where his feet rested on two floor pedals, he said, "Rudder."

I found all of this so deeply disconcerting, I said, "Jesus Christ, Jesus, are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"It's been awhile, amigo, but don't fret.  I'll have us on our way in no time."

He depressed a button and the rotor blade began to turn overhead.  The old turbine engine sputtered a few times before the blade started rotating faster.  He was obviously opening the throttle.  But he wore a perplexed look on his face, saying in a whisper that was barely audible, "Is it fifteen hundred, two thousand, or twenty-five hundred?"

"What?"

"Que?"

"Is what fifteen hundred, two thousand, or twenty-five hundred."

"Oh--the RPM needed to get us off the ground."

I was about to jump out of the damned machine when it began hesitantly tilting into the air.

Jesus wore a huge smile.  "I knew it would all come back to me," he said.

I pushed my feet into the floorboard as if I were trying to keep my feet on the ground, but the damned flying machine just kept rising higher and higher.  As I looked down through the passenger door I saw her--Indira standing beside her hut, which appeared to be the size of a large matchbox, waving wildly at us.

Jesus saw her, too, and he said, "She probably wants to go with you."

That simple statement made me feel so sad.  There was still so much I had to learn from her.  She had talked about "enlightenment," and I never had the chance to ask if she meant the kind espoused by the ancient seer Confucius, that is, gradual accumulation of insights until the individual experienced a sudden, and lasting, epiphany; or did she refer to the kind of enlightenment the sage Lao Tzu spoke about, a series of cyclic enlightenments that grew more profound over time.

To Jesus, I said, "I'm a real cad."

"Cad?"

"Cabrón."

"Ah--asshole," he said.  "Don't sweat it, amigo, you're doing the right thing.  She and Zen are made for each other."

"But what about Felicia?  I feel like a real heel leaving her like this."

"Heel?"

"Bastard."

"Ah--hijo de perra."

"No," I said, "not 'son of bitch.'  A bastard."

"Eh.  Six of one, half a dozen of another."

I watched as the figure of Indira shrunk to ant-sized proportions before Jesus leveled the helicopter.  When he started the flying machine forward the fuselage shuddered violently, making me think we were going down.

Jesus laughed at my anxiety.  "Chill out, hombre, that happens every time," he said.  "It's called ETL--but for the life of me I can't remember what the letters stand for."

I said, "Which route do we take to Tucson."

"North along the spine of the Sierra Madre Occidental," he said.  "We'll be there in two-and-one-half hours, God willing."

There wasn't one thing Jesus had said or done so far that gave me any confidence in his ability to get us to our destination in one piece.  Tucson.  Why were we going to Tucson, a city where I'd spent eight years of my life as a younger man.

When I asked him about it, Jesus said, "I have a friend there who may be able to help you."  He began searching through the pockets of his Newhru jacket, taking his hands off of the joystick and lifting his feet off the foot pedals, the latter movement causing the helicopter to begin to spin.  Recognizing his distraction he quickly put his feet back in place, stopping the rotation.

"Maldita sea," he said, "where'd I put that damned card?'

As soon as he said that he found it in the outside breast pocket of his jacket.  Looking at the card momentarily he passed it to me.

It was a professional card for the Sonora Autonomous University, Department of English and Foreign Languages.  The name jumped out at me at once:  Professor Lenora Hedge, Creative Writing Director, MFARTS.  When I'd last seen her she'd still been Lenora Hedge-Rowe.  #1.

"Number One," I said.

Jesus said, "¿Perdón?"

"My first wife."

"You're kidding?"

"Look at my face, Jesus.  Do I look like I'm kidding?"

He looked at me, saying, "You still look like you're shitting yourself about this flight, hombre."

"Yeah--well now I've got two things to shit myself about."

"It wasn't an amiable divorce, I take it?"

"Did you talk to her about me?"

"Por cierto.  Sure I did."

"And you mentioned my name?"

"Sí, por supuesto.  Of course I did."

"And what did she say?"

"She said she knows you.  She didn't mention you two had been hitched."

We flew in silence after that, and for a while I just stared out at the spectacular mountains passing below us, marveling at the beauty of this area which had been wrested from Mexico years earlier.  This was only the second time I'd flown in a helicopter, the first being when I had been highlined off a U.S. guided-missile hydrofoil on the gunline in Lake Superior during the Canadian-American War.

Then my mind rolled back to #1.  She had risen like a rocket in academe to become the director of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at SAU, a program that had once been described as "the epicenter of cutting-edge fiction in the Western Hemisphere."  The last I'd heard of her she was about to marry the nenowned ePistomologist Keanu Fundt.  I saw from her card that she'd apparently opted out of yet another hyphenated last name.


As we approached Tucson from the east, banking south of the Rincon Mountains, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  The city I had lived in years ago was now a massive, sprawling metroplex that had spilled out of its valley, sloshing over the Santa Catalina Mountains to the north and washing all the way to the Santa Ritas to the south.  More amazing still was the complete absence of the magnificent saguaro forests for which the area had been famous.

"Where are all the saguaros?" I said.

Jesus said, "Ah--a sad reality, mi amigo.  About a decade ago it was discovered that the pulp of the giant cactus contained a substance that could be made into an aphrodisiac.  As soon as the news got out the corporations hired cactusjacks to cut them all down.  An industry sprung up to provide the new sex-enhancing drug to consumers around the world, a drug dubbed Saguarodisiac, which later jokingly became known as Soredicksiac because users could not refrain from constant intercourse.  People stopped using the drug after a terrible incident in Japan where thousands of people screwed themselves to death on the island of Honshu.  Sadly, by then, all the saguaros were gone, and nobody bothered trying to grow more."

I said, "And what about the national park--Saguaro East and West--I read a few years back that they were in jeopardy."

"They are no more," Jesus said.  "During the TakeBackOurCountry movement the land-grabbers homesteaded the park, made a fortune selling the saguaros, then sold off the land to some fricking hydraulic fracking company, and you can guess the rest of the story."

By then he had flown around the eastern edge of the Catalinas, saying he was headed for a spot north of Oracle to set the helicopter down.  "It's the only place I can refuel," he said.

When we came in for the landing--in what looked to be an old corral on an abandoned ranch--a huge dust devil suddenly blew up, a sandy vortex of tumbleweeds and ancient trash that spun around like a small twister.  The flying machine rocked back and forth as Jesus tried to put it down, and I could see him struggling with the controls.  Perhaps thinking that we'd already touched ground when we were still about five feet in the air he cut power, and we thudded down hard on the landing skids.

"Ay, chingada!" Jesus said.  "Man, I got to fly this thing more often."

There was absolutely nobody around when we stepped out of the helicopter, and as I strapped the rucksack onto my back I was thinking that from here I could make my way up the north face of the Catalinas, disappear into the forest near the resort community of Summerhaven, take my time figuring out what to do.  I was just about to thank Jesus for the lift when we heard a vehicle coming around the front of the property.  A second later a jet black Thunderbird rolled to a stop ten feet away.

"The guys with the fuel?" I said to him.

"No, hombre," he said, "that would be Lenora."