Rosette, Utah settled for a tie. They all blamed a savage hailstorm conjured by the furies and shoved into town by colliding forces out over the Pacific.
They agreed things would turn out different next time. All they needed was an opportunity.
In Grossmont California, the oilman cantered along on his mescalito horse, oblivious to the departure of rational thought. Even in his most lucid moments, shards of insight were fleeting and false.
Swirling in the rosy clasp of mescaline, he was lost while convinced he was found. His thoughts spiraled through the morning haze and dripped onto a tilted sidewalk.
All morning he wandered around Grossmont, California. He wasn’t trying to sing anymore. When he tried to speak, nothing happened.
But this failure didn’t register. He had no inkling of his incoherence, his muffled mumbles and the ominous way his facial features had been recast at an improbable angle.
He strayed off the busy street, passed tidy homes and wound around wide curves up into the hills. In a city park he leaned into a water fountain and drank deep.
Then he sat at a picnic table and stared at a palm tree. The trunk fascinated him more than the fronds. He was consumed by the long, languid bend of the old Mexican Fan Palm, exotic in ways so potent he felt them sink into his soul.
For three hours he considered nothing other than how he and the old palm could melt into one another. Fused together they could stand for eternity at the center of the universe.
Then the sun set quickly, slipping behind a nearby hill and suddenly the oilman was in darkness. The slender silhouette of the palm tree was fading now and he felt left behind, as when he was a boy in Rosette, Utah.
A vague memory whistled through of his mother taking down the Christmas tree. When she packed up the strings of lights he felt everything turn empty and dull.
