TWO MEN DEAD

I walked into the bar of a Western town on the outskirts of a mining operation. The tales of the miners that were buried during their unnatural search for freedom was entire atmospheres high. They don’t like drifters like me around these parts, they want us strangers out in a hurry. I was passing by just stopping to pick up Eretea, just like her name she didn’t belong in this place.

Eretea was from, I think Bombay India, she had left that country after enduring the virus of much human ambitious greed. I say I think that she was from India, though I am almost certain that she was, because so much of my memory is only about the events rather than the specifics, the movements and feelings rather than facts, I don’t know. It really did not matter that Eretea was from Indian, she was not Indian, she had abandon her culture and place at birth in heart. There are souls that are just born out of their locality and family, once born they immediately migrate with mind and later with body to their intended ancestral homestead. Hers was in America, near the cowboys that would stay at her Bed and Breakfast Inn.

It was a wayward point for us wild cowboys because she was so different, not never one of us, or of any, she was simply the hostess, making sure that everyone felt like they were home, eating a nice saucy bacon and egg breakfast, and that was so as long as our money was good, and up front. Some times them cowboys would get all out of hand and refuse to pay their pence, and dance on her nice tables, and try to pick her up and call her a Mexican. Eretea would swiftly slap the fellow while disclaiming her blackness: “I ain’t not Mexican I am from India you ignorant!” Of course she now wasn’t from India anymore than you and I are from India but she still looked Indian and to the cowboys she looked Mexican but she had no place.

The difficulty for Eretea was that she did not have herself a man to defend her, so she had to play tough with the boys all-the-while allowing their molestations so as to guarantee their return to the Inn which was her livelihood. She would often talk about selling the place and moving to Texas. She loved Texas. I was always very curious about what she found so attractive about Texas, it’s not like back then the rest of the country wasn’t some how or other like Texas; but I never got around to asking her why she liked Texas so damn much. Regardless, because of her desire to move, to Texas the Inn had been for sale for the last two decades long. And every time that someone so much as hinted that they liked her place of business Eretea would jump on them with enlarged gleeful eyes popping out and tell them good how good the Inn business was, and how easy it was to run, and she would herself keep this Inn only she did not have enough money for two, but as soon as she would move to Texas she was going to open an Inn there too. And to entice the offering plea even further she would rest no words on telling the captured ear about all the peoples of the world that she had met, all without traveling a bit, all from the comfort of her Inn; famous doctors, politicians, musicians the list was endless and she was friend with all of them; why she corresponded with many, I suppose.

You don’t get any more obligated to the world of Lords than when you have to host their patience, often short; and Eretea had it in her to calm all with the gentle meanness of an Owl, I am a bird, I am light and feathery and I sleep a lot and move much less, but a bird of prey none the less and more so when you gun touting cowboys come around. And so it was that she managed handsomely though lonesomely to empty up their wallets. Its hard for a hard woman to survive in this world, its just as hard as for a fragile woman I would say, maybe harder; Eretea was a hard woman, she was never going to get a man, or sleep with one, she was not from her country of birth and she belonged not to any man, and this she did not see as odd because she was trying to correct it and she never saw what she did wrong in her corrections.

There had been a man in her life, I have to tell you I mean no humor by telling you that he was distinctively from India, he lived here in the States for I like to think six years, that is what Eretea told me, and he would travel business wide. He was a smart man, very proper in his manner and suit, round top hat and a cigar, an intellectual in manner and high-minded in his ambitions; and he stayed at the Inn every time his travels brought him to the area. He and Eretea would talk long into the night, swinging in the balcony chair, like a couple of serious kids, talking about the world and how they would change it all, and about the proper ways that people ought behave, and how it all made sense to them and to no one else. Oh those precious moments Eretea was Nirvana joyful with his presence, all alone her heart felt feelings, but when he was around her loneliness all a gone. Mind you that he would still keep a separate room, and never did he wander to her room, nor from what I think I felt did he ever want to sleep with her, but rather kept a rigorous and voluntary distance; though I imagine truly, from seeing her sparkling eyes and beaming face in his presence, that Eretea would have been pleased if her longings for his body next to hers would have been answered. Oh I may have forgotten to mention that his room stays were always on the house.

But then one day he came and told her he was moving back to India, she got serious with those eyes and cold with her face; more closer they had never been and only now for him to announce a denouncement of the States, he would go back to India. She pleaded with him but not with sobbing cries, not with mournful scorn, she simply said to him: “You go back to India but you will never be able to close your eyes to what you’ve seen here.” Perhaps she was hoping that the new world would offer more than she could offer him or to increase doubts in his certainties. They were both so isolated in their mutual regard. Both travelers in the distinguished world of uniqueness. Her mother India stealing her man. Eretea continued “You might end up with many regrets.” But what regrets are there for a man that is going home to his India, a place that has cuddled him, that has more of his existence in its spices and memories that say six years? Eretea was matter of fact about it to me: “I told him he better think it hard because there might be no way to come back to America if he pressed a return.” I did not say it but I thought: “America’s thirst for migrant labor would soon capsize?” I think he knew the truth but I don’t think he told it to himself, he did not waver in his certainty, he was going back to India, he went back.

Eretea got really serious about selling the Inn, removed the swing chair to make room for pretty plants, she started prospecting for buyers, Crows were substantially capable of hosting an Inn, her sales pitch a line of hope, to all and any that would hear her; “Business is good, really good! I just want to move to Texas, I love Texas.” The Indian fellow was probably announcing himself to a dowry, “…handsome fellow been to America, never tarnished by its luckless values,…”

Eretea was not a woman to ever drink or to believe in surrender, she was a mountain of certainty and capacity, the world moved, and she accommodated the world in its movements but she herself was manifest destiny.

I had slept long that morning, past the breakfast hour, and when I awoke there stood for me the afternoon. On the table there was no buttered muffin bread just a note: “I am having a drink at the bar.” She was having a drink, I zipped my jeans, did my buckle, and went there like a dart to hit some spot on the board, just some spot sure to be near the center but never really. I liked the woman, I liked her coldness, I liked her indifferences, I liked her love affair with that Indian man.

I got to the bar and was the case that some drunkards were tittering away her flower, I told them to step aside and let her be! She brusquely persisted and hasten away from them, I watched her run outside; only now these two miners felt that I had broken the gentleman’s code of honor, you don’t mess around with the men when they are hanging from their woman. Molested they stood there no drink in hand, more efficiency to be had, no drink in hand I either, and I just decided to follow Eretea out the double doors.

The desert sun a shone quite bright against the sand; paying no resistance to neither stance, I saw Eretea jump on her horse, seeing me, she reigned beastly horse to a halt of love and stared me rattler dark eyes; I held myself but by a string of luck; then them miners blasted out them easy doors, both full of body fat and alcoholic armor, told me to be ready to cure their strung-out pride. I jumped my gun and shot them both while it was still safe to do so in good light. Two men dead.

So that I could escape from the strong arm of the law we went to Texas.