The Book of Drome Chapter 18: The Salt of The Earth

The eighteen bus was crowded and pungent once again. A fentanyl scented junky nodded off and spilled a soda on the floor and a trashy gaptoothed white lady yelled at him and everyone could hear a baby crying but nobody could see where the baby was until someone explained. Dusty wondered about whether his world was made of words. Whose words? Who weaves the winds and waves of the world in the waters of time with their words?

Everyone on the bus had a name. Everyone contained carbon and breathed oxygen, were products of stellar nucleosynthesis. And millions of years of physocal development culminating in a life form capable of higher intelligence with the rare and precious species property of secreting Drome while dreaming.

He wondered about the aliens. The Mugwumps and the Slor. The Mugwumps were known to be time-traveling shapeshifters. He wondered if they contained carbon and breathed oxygen. Maybe not. Maybe it depended on the specific physiology of whatever particular body they were in. They were powerful enough that they could effectively avoid being studied scientifically by the other less powerful creatures.

He’d heard rumors that aliens wore hyper realistic full human body suits when they left the Tatooine Interzone District but he didn’t know if they were true. He was used to talking to eccentrics, street hustlers, people out of their minds on drugs, and the seriously mentally ill, and he was used to hearing things he had to take with a grain of salt. Maybe I do live in a book, he thought to himself in the dreamy ruminative way that he often did.

He got off the 18 bus at the stop after the South Tucson Library and made his way across a vacant lot that had just been cleaned up so that the homeless camps and trash were gone. They’d been replaced by tread tracks of heavy machinery, piles of pushed dirt and a big dumpster. Cops and public works guys had been clearing out camps in Tucson and South Tucson and even out in The Perimeter, though out in The Perimeter it was the Sheriff’s Deputies and the Park Rangers. The people who said that the aliens wore human skin suits also said that the cops, politicians, real estate developers were all cooperating with The Slor and The Mugwumps and selling them homeless people, drug addicts, and petty criminals to be used as slaves, gladiators, livestock, reproductive hosts, whatever.

At the back corner of the lot he entered a dirt road alley between walls with bright beautiful murals. He moved carefully over broken liquor bottles, discarded syringes, little halves of blue straws and discarded aluminum foil covered in black squiggles, various kinds of turds, a bird with its head bitten off. A pile of dead scorpions. He hurried to Casa Maria, known to most people in the area as simply Guadalupe, a Catholic Worker house where they served hot soup and had free food and practice mercy toward those in need.

He got on line among the other homeless types. A few of his acquaintances said hi and asked how he was doing and said God bless and stay hydrated watch out for cops and cartels and aliens. The usual stuff. An old man named Charlie recognized him from the old days. Charlie used to live out in The Perimeter and work smuggling drugs guns and people from Mexico. It had been years since he’d seen Charlie. Charlie called him by his old nickname, The Guero Pistolero.

“Buenos dias,” Charlie said

“Hola Charlie,” Dusty said. “Como esta, bien?”

“Bien bien,” Charlie said, nodding amiably. “Man I ain’t seen you in a minute. I figured they finally got you. Nice hat!” By “they” he’d meant the police, the cartels, the aliens, germs, bad vibes, bikers, whoever. The They. As they say.

“The Guero Pistolero,” a small old man with a crooked nose wearing a stained soccer jersey and an eyepatch said in awed tones to a beautiful young woman who looked like she’d been sent to bring hope to all who gazed upon her and she seemed impressed. Dusty blushed bashfully..Somewhere in the distance a car drove by blasting Santana playing Soul Sacrifice at Woodstock.

“I got out of that life,” Dusty said. “I had an epiphany and decided to walk the earth and do good deeds like Caine from Kung Fu.”

“You know who else walked the earth doing good deeds?” Someone nearby chimed in. “Carlos Santana!” Some people dressed in rags over at a picnic table across the yard cheered for the great Carlos Santana. Even among those who suffer most there are countless little things in a day that can bring us joy if we keep our hearts open and listen to Santana.

“I’m The Guero Goin nowhere-o now,”  Dusty said sighed wistfully, earning a few laughs and nods from his audience.

“He’s some kind of OG,” a woman at a picnic table told her friend with a kind of hushed solemnity and reverence. “He helped my niece pay bills and buy things for her kids after her husband got killed by the Sonora cartel.”

Everyone was friendly except for one vaguely hostile man who seemed potentially violent. A begrimed and scabby white meth dude with knobby elbows, knuckles and knees. He accused Dusty of being in the Polish Intelligence Agency and Dusty replied that he didn’t think that such a thing actually existed.

“That’s just what they want you to think. You can’t be this dumb… and neither can the beautiful and much maligned people of Poland.” Then he accused Dusty of being a Mugwump. He said he could smell a shapeshifter with his mind.

“Hey man I walk the earth and do good deeds like Caine from Kung Fu.”

“What kind of good deeds do you do?” The man asked him incredulously, or suspiciously even, twisting his face up and eyeing him warily. The man was completely distrustful of Dusty’s appearance and persona and felt that some kind of intrigue must be afoot. As if his ostensible appearance was a mere Fat Larry exo from inside which the real Dusty Rhoads, whose real name was not even Dusty Rhoads, carried out the Machiavellian machinations necessary to his mission with the Polish Intelligence Agency and/or the Catholic Church. That’s meth people for you.

The man’s eyes widened and he appeared to become both afraid to look at Dusty and (perhaps even more) afraid to look away. Now people were gathered around them in a circle making humorous commentary. Dusty smiled to himself and backed away from the man, who appeared to feel threatened and even potentially violent.

He asked, wild eyed, his voice quavering with aroused paranoia: “Can you raise the dead? Are you the antichrist?!?”

Dusty made no effort to respond in any way.

“Wait,” the man said urgently. “Don’t answer.” And he ran off out the front gate into the street and hooting and hollering ran down past the stray cat food dishes and the fent tents outside the power station.

Dusty laughed loudly. “I got to keep moving and tend to my flock,” he said, and waved in a broad sweeping gesture meant to reach everyone he’d spoken to out in the yard. “I’ll catch y’all next time. Be safe.”

He left with his cup of hot soup and his sack lunch containing two bologna sandwiches on wheat with mustard, one peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white, one hardboiled egg, one apple, one banana, three Oreo cookies and a bottle of water. He ate as he walked back to the bus stop to catch the 18 to Ronstadt Transit Center, the big bus station downtown.

He found it funny that people still called him The Guero Pistolero because that nickname had never been accurate. It was the product of rumor, gossip and innuendo involving a case of mistaken identity and another guy who’d resembled him —six one, middle aged, fair haired, athletic build, cheerful demeanor— who’d long since been sent to prison for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon and whatever else. Explaining that did little to dissuade them from believing that he was indeed the person in question and was simply denying it as a matter of form according to the common etiquette of violent felons in the criminal underground. It didn’t occur to him until he could no longer do anything about it that if he’d embraced the name and gone around bragging about it he might’ve easily convinced people that it wasn’t him. If he’d dishonestly embraced his role he could have convinced people of the truth; in being honest he’d only succeeded in reinforcing their belief in a falsehood. This kind of thing had happened before. When a boyfriend he’d been very attached to had accused him of cheating he’d been so surprised by the accusation that he’d ended up crying and acting very dramatic, begging and pleading with the boyfriend not to leave, but his ardent display of fear and desire and the emphatic nature of his denials gave him the appearance of protesting too much. The more he cried and begged the less believable he’d become and his denials of the accusations rang hollow. His lover left him believing a lie because Dusty had spoken the truth in the wrong way. That was back when he still had breakdowns and outbursts regularly during that crazy phase that had lasted most of his life.

The 18 bus was once again crowded but he found a seat and sat down. He was going to put his headphones in and listen to some Thelonious Monk but he decided to listen to the conversation between some people whom he could hear but not see on the upper level in the back. They were talking about the recent mass shootings in the news.

“If they were gonna catch him they would have by now,” a man with a deep deep growly voice said. “He’s like a top secret human superweapon gone rogue like Jason Bourne. But he’s more evil. He’s just going to keep killing until he finds the ultimate opponent. It’s the alpha male way, I have a podcast about it. I eat nothing by raw elk liver.”

“Can you take it down a notch there big fellla?” A tall handsome Mexican cowboy with a twangy voice asked jovially from the lower seats. This man had the kind of easy confidence that made you think he could probably rip a Chevy in half with his bare hands over his head, or punch a hole in steel reinforced concrete. But only if he really had to.

“I’m sorry, but no, I cannot.”

“Well can you add a few light hearted jokes to provide comic relief?”

“Son I already did,” the deep voiced man said, and then they both had a good laugh and loosened up. It was like a beer commercial.

“I bet he did those shootings in Oklahoma too,” a slow speaking high voiced woman said unseen in the upper seats. She sounded very interested and drugged out. “It’s the same guy.”

Dusty recognized that they were talking about the shootings that people had been talking about on the shuttle into town earlier. He was unaware that he was sitting across from the very mass shooter to whom the voices were referring and that this man had been following him. The nameless one. Nobody knew. Now that he (the nameless one) had made it into The Zone for a full body transplant and made it back out alive he was basically in the clear. He listened attentively to what people said about him but did not react in any way.

“He killed cops!” Another woman said. She had a thick accent and a scratchy phlegmy voice. She sounded old and broken. A face like the Grand Canyon.

“He probably went into hiding in the T.I.,” the deep voiced man said. “I hear you can get a full body transplant there. They say that’s what Fat Larry did to get so big. They had to splice DNA from feral hogs into Larry’s DNA and clone him and then feed him grain with shovels.

“My boyfriend said the T.I. is fake and the government and big businesses just want us to freak out about aliens to scare us,” the first woman said. “But he thinks a lot of things are fake. He thinks it’s all brainwashing.”

“What freedom?” Another male voice asked cynically, speaking slowly, slurring his words slightly. He sounded drunk. Nobody had mentioned freedom. He’d been responding to something from his own tequila tinged daydream delirium. At this point there was a real risk of a bad vibe outbreak but then someonw way in the back of the bus farted really loudly and it broke the tension and everyone on the bus had a good laugh.