Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and Me
My mysterious customer ordered eleven bottles of Avon Bug Guard and three fancy Avon Anew skin-care items. I set the bags shotgun, and the contents rattled as I gunned the engine. My camera fell from the dashboard to the floor as I crossed the highway overpass and I cursed under my breath.
The Great Plains outside my town spread around decaying homes, old rotting cars and washing machines, past lean stray dogs and brown men in cowboy hats and torn jeans walking, walking, walking long pinto miles to the fields where they drive horses and cattle. I see no other cars on these roads most afternoons, just me and my Avon, gray jackrabbits spotted with fat ticks and skeletal tumbleweed floating past overgrown irrigation ditches. The ranch women are grateful for my delivery of bubble bath and perfume. They feed me biscochitos and tea made from gathered herbs, and we discuss town politics under the watchful eyes of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Sometimes the cost of my gas is higher than my sales commission.
The winter rains forgot to visit this year, and I thought about those ranch women sweeping wind-driven dust from their porches.
The Scientologists don't light prayer candles to the Virgin, I thought. They can buy a pregnant cloud with their millions. They walk on the same mesa lands but they don't know years of uncertain hunger.
I tried to wipe those thoughts from my mind. I don't know what stress the Scientologists choose in this life.
I wondered whether my customer was a Scientologist or a ranch woman with a hundred fifty dollars to spare on Avon. I wondered when the rains might come. I clicked on my CD player and Neil Young filled the car with his prairie warble.
The road bent before me, turned from gentle mound to razorback mountain at a grouping of three ranches. My camera banked with the car, hit the seat mount with a scary crunch. The road steadied and I glanced down to see if I could reach the camera with my right hand, pull it into my lap. I could see the blue canvas of its strap peeking out from under the passenger seat. I tried to grab it, my head touching the stick shift, but my index finger barely reached. I lifted my head, put my eyes on the road, on the simple state road, to see three running cows directly in my path!
I slammed the brakes, drove off the right side of the road, my car skidded and slid out of control with a screech of black rubber. I tried to correct my trajectory before I rolled down the steep embankment. I remember it in slow motion now, the way my heart froze, skipped one beat, then two, my left hand tight on the wheel, my right hand shifting down with force, six thousand pounds of moving cow scattering just one foot from my plowing car!
To Be Continued...
11:39:06 AM 
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