Shady Memories

For one whole week, after he was
captured by the white-eyed savages, Danny Apache, a last name invented
by an
Ellis Island official who tried to spell Pace accent and all in a
joking
way, hadn't realized he was in a mental institution; thinking instead,
he
was in the Saint Apartheid Orphanage where his mother had deposited
him
along with his two brothers and sister when they were between the ages
of
three and eight and only when his older brother Larry, with the dark
cold
eyes, riding in on his pinto shouting "Geronimo!" and when Larry, with
his
eyes of death shooting holes through him, yelled he was not in an
orphanage
of thirty years before but in a nuthouse - did Danny fully understand
how
encircled he was by all the John Waynes of the world.

"You hearing that fucking laugh again?" Larry said upset he had to
take
time away from making money; a thing he believed defined him. The thing
that
made him a true European-American. A true American god.

The laugh he was referring to that was ricocheting inside Danny's
head
was born the week after they returned from the orphanage when
Danny
witnessed one of their mother's "parties" that had seven drunken men
jumping
up; one by one like puppets to the word - "Next" - and then
disappearing
into their mother's bedroom; swallowed all up by a lilting laugh.

"Larry don't you ever feel like riding away from the past too.
Your
first wife like mine was cheating on you and remember when I was
sixteen and
you demanded my girlfriend. Christ you made me and Clara watch you
doing it
to her. You're Satan - that's who you are and now you're using
your
thirteen year old step-daughter"-
Larry looked deeply into Danny's eyes which made him stop, after
cringing, remembering how Larry had told him about the man he had
killed
when he was in the greatest army in the world because the guy had
talked to
a white woman and in that rural area where God-fearing folk lived, he
had
waited for two hours for the "sassy man" to come out and walk into
a
strangle - making his eyes become a frozen dawn. Larry felt somewhat
like
that day before they were being shipped to Nam and he had dreamt he
wasn't
going to return; that he was going to die in one of McNammara's bloody
rice
paddies that was filling the pockets of the anonymous super-elite
with
billions of sticky red-soaked dollars and so took the advice of his
medic
friend, Robert Lee Grant, shooting himself in the upper part of his
leg
where minimal damage would be done; never again having to jump out of
planes
to ride the sky.

"If you don't snap out of this crazy shit - I'll sign you in
this
fucking place for the rest of your meaningless life!"

"but Lar, the pain"-

"Forget the pain bullshit. Forget your wife. She was only a
Texas
whore. All fucking women are nothing but prostitutes!"

"Larry can we go riding? Did you see my appaloosa that I rode when
I
was a cattleman for the Mormons who took turns fornicating my first
wife
Dixie? All those heathen drinking swearing bastards want is their
six
wives, yours and their brother's too!"

Remember Mummy said inside the
orphanage were horses and ponies for us to ride to the sky?"

Those were the magic words that had begun their first hesitant
steps
toward the big iron door that was partially opened and then into the
shady
expressions of children who peered at them from locked barred
windows.
These very same expressions of desperation they too would be wearing
after a
few months.

Larry tried to swallow as he stared into Danny's eyes recalling the
many
hours confined in the hole for trying to escape so often wishing for
the
dawn to come into his little window to defeat the darkness engulfing
him.
It was getting harder each day to swallow his food and just as hard to
get
air into his lungs. At least as an eight year old he could strangle
the
dawn to become frozen eyes to stay with him all day.

"Can we Larry? Can we?"

The sound that seemed like a yes was entwined inside a gurgling
choke
that made the noise resemble that of horses galloping. END