DESERT ENCOUNTER

Daniel Corcoran Finney

Preparing to leave my room in the rundown, Fifties, off-highway motel, I opened a can of caffeinated liquid with a fancy name and carried it out to the worn-out deck chairs against the front wall.  Someone else was already there.  Archetype of a ruined old loner, he slouched in his chair, so his cowboy hat brim shaded his eyes, dangling a cigarette expertly with his left hand.  I guess it was a cigarette.  I'm pretty much an innocent.

The sun was barely up but already warm.  Mine was the only car, so I guess he must be traveling on the motorcycle.  I don't know much about those machines or I would describe it.  All I know was that it was big and dark, so probably powerful.

"Getting an early start?" he suggested.

I nodded.  I don't talk much first thing in the day.  If I had to preach at dawn, I would be handicapped, but usually the services across America are a little later.  I suppose when they were first organized, people needed time to travel in from the country in wagons.  Now they have big cars and drive miles so they don't have to sit with people who aren't like them.

He offered me one of those little smoke-sticks, or whatever it was, but I'm a purist about some things and both weed and nicotine were on my no-list.  Smoking will make your face wrinkle -- he was living proof of that.  Creased and toughened by sun and wind.  There was a helmet on the back of his bike, but I suspected he didn't wear it except when there were laws that would cause a person to be arrested.  A person's no-list is always crashing into society's different no-list.  They have the idea that a helmet will save a driver when he or she crashes.  

Yesterday I passed a bike with a sidecar that had a dog riding in it.  The dog was not wearing a helmet but he was very happy.  Going fast is an animal pleasure, located in the limbic system of the brain.  It has to be severely punished to be repressed.  The same goes for the comradeship of traveling with someone.  Even just sitting with someone passively while the sun slowly moves above the ragged horizon clouds can be a pleasure.  Pink for a few moments, but not pastel.  Intensely pink.  We both saw it.

He gave me the side-eye and I knew he was trying to figure out why a single woman was out alone this early in a dubious place.  The truth was that I stopped last night because I was looking for a cheap room on my way to the small town where I was doing pulpit supply and I didn't really "get it" that the low cost was meant to be hourly, not overnight.  But the desk clerk --  no doubt one of the peripheral Patel relatives -- played it straight and so did I.  Where the form to fill out said occupation, I boldly put "clergy."

"You are a priest?"  The young man gazed at me in amazement, almost disbelief.  Then he became very respectful.  I took the key and left.  Never explain too much.  I wished I could perform some magic flourish as I went out: a burst of light, a bird flying away.

So when Daniel Corcoran Finney  (I didn't know his name then.) tried to figure me out, I just told him.  "I'm clergy.  Doing summer pulpit supply so the regular preacher gets a holiday."

"I see," he said and it seemed as though he really did.

"My reputation is not big or glamorous, but people know about me and can find me."

"The same with me."

"Getting close to people.  Finding out where they live, deep in their guts.  Having an impact."

We sat in silence except for the smoke-inhaling and beverage-swigging.  Small biological sounds of self-maintenance.  Then he volunteered, "I do sexwork."

Laughing to have a suspicion confirmed.  "Formally?"

Laughing himself, he really looked at me.  "No, strictly free-lance.  I'm an opportunist."

"I'm not a customer."

"Don't worry.  I'm gay: you're female."

"That doesn't really mean anything.  It's like saying you're Christian when that only means your mother said she was and she made you think the same at first."

He stubbed out his cigarette on the underside of the chair leg and dropped the remains into his cuff.  It's a sign of a person who doesn't want his DNA traced from his trash.  "I'm a PK, you know."

"Preacher's kid.  Yeah.  Not easy."

"You a PK?  You got kids?"

"No and no.  Coming out of Canada where you're allowed to be Socialist as long as you don't rock the boat.  Don't want to bring any kids into this world."

The rising sun had gone pale and left the broken clouds behind, but the air kept a rosy tint because of the summer wildfires.

"What do you say to people who are dying?  If you can't talk about souls and heaven?"

"I say that you are a thread in a magnificent tissue of life that was produced by the efforts of every living thing that has gone before, not just humans.  I say that even if you are small and unknown, your essence and code will be put into everything that comes next.  And everyone dies.  The end is just what it looks like to us.  What's hard to understand is how we came to be living in the first place."  

"Does that comfort anyone?"

"A few."  We were honest because we were anonymous --  at the time.

"I'm dying of cancer.  It's maybe a consequence of my life.  Maybe HIV."  He did seem unusually lean, but a lot of people of his kind are like that.  He was expressionless but watching for my own expression.  I tried to mask.

He added, "Don't worry.  I don't fuck anyone unless my score shows non-contagion."

It took me a while to absorb all this.  It took me much longer to know that he wasn't going to die soon.  The advances in treatment were barely a hair ahead of the progress of the virus, but enough to keep him alive.  I said to him,  "It's just code.  A virus is the code without a host, looking for a host."

"People like you and I will never find a host."  He shook out a new cigarette and offered me one.  Why not?  No to no-itself.  I took it and we produced smudges of smoke in a parched and battered world.

(to be continued)