Jesus the Mexican Boy

The turn off on Interstate 40 right before the state line should have warned them of the inhabitants. The way that the sign, intended to display bountiful amenities, instead featured a winking pig dated somewhere in the middle of the 1930s if Amos was correct.

He’d pull off anyway. He needed a piss and rest and figured this was a good enough stop. A temporary stop over, to stretch his legs.

He found solace in the back of empty highway exits, and felt freedom in the lack of personal objects and the sheer amount of high desert sprawl, a spidery concoction of thorns placed just so against the empty tapestry of beach sand.

It was like the dead days of Hollywood out here, like things had never changed. He was born in Portland, but spent the most of his life trying to get out, living behind the flaws in a roadside diner, squeezing out the state’s dying past.

He had a Masters degree in History, yet to look at him Amos look like he just walked in off of the train yard. His beard was more of a permanent stain than stubble, and he foraged around in the dust left by fifteen years of scouting.

At night in the solace of hotels in which he was the sole inhabitant, he wrote what was an ongoing series of treacherous tales. His characters were drifters like the one he tried to be, yet with a more authentic background.

Sons of dude ranchers, lost in a search for a big city life of fidelity, and gamblers on the run from the local chain gang were his royal subjects.

If given the right amount of time between speeches at local community colleges, he could make a run last anywhere between two and six weeks, for he was capable and often did teach history to various schools, both as substitute and visiting expert to those who didn’t know any better. An unlike many of his fellow educators, he didn’t get into education for the kids sake, but as a way to keep his lifestyle going.

Always driving –the search of an anonymous life kept him alive and moving through shanty towns and scuttlebutt towns that were once bordellos, brothels and diamond mines, but now sat dusty, sacred and alone-- always in search of the perfect backdrop in which he could place his characters in front of.

His father passed just last year, but he didn’t attend the funeral. To go back would be to realign his present self with the history of flagrant disregard of his family. He couldn’t just go back, not the way he was right now. There’d be too much to get in the way before he could honestly grieve.

So he kept it up until he reached Miskaowie. It lay clear on the other side of a dirt road off of a feeder road to I40, right by the Idaho border. After the dirt road drifted out of existence like an old memory of prep school, he came upon a church, after wandering for hours looking at the distant shadow of a steeple.

1902. That was the last time someone was here. There weren’t any footprints and sign of any kind until he saw the candles.

Lit up like a Catholic Birth it was, as the interior of the church was vaguely Mexican. Incantations were written in Latin and Spanish.

At the back of the church, by the last pew he overturned the last Bible, intrigued by the gold leaf propped out of the spine. Exhausted from the drive and the news from back home that came via his post office box in La Grande, he sat down, took off his dusty cap and read the faded inscription on the gold leaf inlay.

Marylou,

I’m real sorry I couldn’t speak to you in person. Yer ma said you’d gone for the day, feeding the men at the mine. The cavalry came out to our Miskie, saying if we was going to join up now we’d best do it. We talked about this day when it happened, but I never thought. I didn’t want it this way.

Maybe I’m too late and you’ve fallen in love with a guy who leaves, and that’s the way it will be.

I’ll try to make it back someday, to visit you. Grammie’s got little Nathan and she’s real sorry you couldn’tve been there to see for yerself how proud she was of me, with a metal lapel pin to wear and the pony they’ve got me on. It’s a real opportunity to provide for you and the baby. I’ll be stationed in La Grande, getting the word out about the cause. Maybe someday I'll come back.

Love Always,

Daryl

Amos closed the book cautiously, slid it underneath the pew, stretched out on it, and fell asleep.

When he awoke hours later, most of the candles had gone out, and in their places the sullen faces of a hundred Mexican boys. As he staggered up and off of the pew, the boys’ hands reached out to Amos, who was now visibly weeping.

One of their own had died, and the boys, whose whereabouts were still uncertain, took Amos to a burial ceremony two hundred meters from the church. He drank something out of a hollowed out cactus, as the leader, who wore a coyote skin cloth around his torso, twirled around with a bloody spear.

The corpse of the coyote lay in the center of the pit, surrounded by what looked like one hundred tea lights.

The second in command (he had blood tracks on his face, and wore the blood of the animal across his face, covering one half like a crescent moon.) came from behind, and hoisted up the carcass revealing a series of wood planks, which must have contained the remnants of their leader.

The chants warped Amos's head, the swirling lights becoming blurs and the cacophony of voices were difficult to discern from the chanting, which filled his head, ringing out, growing in stature with each successive round of cactus water and singing.

By the morning the boys were gone, the pit covered, and the gold leaf still tucked inside the last bible in the final pew, in the abandoned, dark church.