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| Route 60 Short-Story Journals March 13, 2004 Fool Hollow Show Low — After over a week bicycling the road, I rewarded myself a day off. The campground at Fool Hollow had all the amenities—showers, close to town, a good place to rest. The old fifties-era diner up on Route 60 was filled with pancake-eating fishermen heading out to Fool Hollow Lake on their off day. The small space filled with the smell of frying bacon and the noisy chatter of anticipation of a day-on-the-lake outing. In town I found the library, updating my web-site journals, up-loading a few pictures, and answering e-mail. Back at camp, I lazed on a grassy knoll overlooking the lake and passed the day reading William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, resting my legs, and watching the comings and goings in the boat-launch parking lot. Engrossed in the tragedy of Temple Drake, afternoon had slipped into dusk when I looked up from the book to see reality more comical than any novel honky-tonk brawl back in Faulkner’s Memphis. From the excited tête-à-tête, I gathered that the outrage-stressed man standing beside the late-model SUV with a smashed passenger-side window had been robbed of his wife’s purse and cell phone. She sat in the car sobbing. A local fisherman, probably on the lake since breakfast, was attempting to call the sheriff on his phone, though apparently not getting a signal, or possibly so dexterity-impaired by Budweiser that he couldn’t negotiate the tiny buttons. A local ranch couple, parked in an old pickup truck nearby, awaiting the sunset while watching the boat-takeout festivities, shambled out across the lot. He was a little man, accompanied by a ranchwoman of spacious Germanic form, who looked as though she might be taken to scoffing at authority. A big, timid, fluffy-white sheepdog like animal tagged along. The shrill man plowed in with gesturing arms and petulant advice. “You people that bring these high-dollar urban wagons out here, leave your valuables on the seat, are just asking for trouble. You are the trouble round here. Why don’t stay down in Phoenix where you belong.” “Ohhh!” Cried a newcomer to the group. A motor-homer, dressed in pleated shorts and white socks under loafers coming to the SUVers defense. “So you would tell the pretty woman that the rape was her fault for being attractive.” Attempting to slight the local rancher’s intelligence, he continued, “How much education do you have, anyway?” Immediately the ranchwife huffed to his defense, aimed her nose at the motor-home camper and replied “More than you do!” As discussions of intelligence and ancestry blended into one subtle mixing of damnation, illegitimacy, mother-love, impotence, and Jesus Christ, the group erupted into a swaying mass of inhumanity to man. In the fracas, they didn’t noticed the delicate cast of twinkling blue light wafting over their arena, ‘til the whole flailing, wrestling, whirling bunch lost their balance in unison and topple over onto the sheriff. Mercifully and finally, backup forces arrived and gradually the power of uniformed authority prevailed. The ranchwoman was arrested for breaking an earthenware dish over the sheriff’s head; though they had great difficulty prying the resisting woman into a patrol car, her sheepdog was delighted to get in the car and couldn’t be gotten out. Her husband was arrested for biting the camper’s ear. The camper split the seam of his too-tight shorts and retreated to doctor his wounds. The fisherman was arrested for drunk in public. The thief used the stolen phone to call his girlfriend Temple in Tucson and was arrested when the call was traced to her and she squealed. The owner of the SUV with the smashed window got a ticket for parking in the boat-launch lot without a valid Arizona fishing license. Using another cell phone she forgot was in the car pocket all this time, his wife told the story to her mother-in-law. And, thanks to the inspiration of William Faulkner and the fodder on the coastals.org message board, I got to write this short story. |
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