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| Route 60 Short-Story Journals March 12, 2004 Tourist Trap Payson to Show Low — In the dry heat of a southwestern afternoon, I moved slowly up the forested road, knowing from my topo-map planning of last winter that what stood before me was a tortuous climb up the rim rock to the high plateau above. From my training climb up Mt. Mitchell, I knew too that this day would be spent leaning into the seat and pushing the bicycle, with its heavy touring load, most of the way. Like the mule-drawn wagon mounting a hill in William Faulkner’s Light in August, I pushed tediously on. The slight clatter of bicycle parts and muffled shuffling of shoes was slow and constant: a series of dry clatters of the impotent, dangling chains echoed across the warm, still piney silence. Waiting, she heard it for some time. Though the pusher “plods in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much so is this that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread rewound on to a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape.” I rounded a curve and saw her sitting on the ditch bank. She was not even watching the pushed bicycle now. She was young and beautiful, with long black hair flowing over a ceremonial costume. Her back was propped against the splintered post of a weathered sign inviting all tourists to visit a gift shop on the reservation. She watched me from a dark, sharp-cut eye and held out a commercial offering scrawled in red crayon on gray cardboard, “Take My Picture $5.” When I approached to within a few yards she jumped to her feet, bounding around the post taking a defensive stance, with her cardboard held out like a crucifix warding off the devil himself. I spoke first. “OK.” As I opened a yellow stuff sack and shuffled about for the camera, she put down the message board and readied herself by swinging out from the post with one arm and lifting out her skirt with another, holding a motionless pose but looking as if moving, like a schoolgirl swinging round a playground pole. I took the picture and handed out the $5 bill, which she snatched from my hand like a wild animal accepting food and ran headlong, not down the dusty, desolate reservation road, but off into the sparse pines, probably to hide and await the rumble of the next passerby’s vehicle mounting the hill. As if it had been sucked void of oxygen, the warm, scented breath of the pungent, piney wilderness began to suffocate me. I returned to the bicycle and prepared to move on. “Twenty dollars for a real picture of a real woman?” The voice was prophetic, but the witch chill of it is what startled me into a slow motion turn about. She was wearing no Native American regalia, but a conventional southwestern-decorated, flowing skirt and white, puffy, short blouse, exposing her round, brown belly. In one motion she lifted her blouse and snapped the gathering above her bare breast, then grabbed the pole, swinging out her colorful skirt just as her sister before her. “Is my picture not worth twenty bucks?” My mind rebounded terrifically, lake a hapless pinball caroming repeatedly between equally powerful bumpers. “What to do? What not to do?” Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding... |