Scarecrow Gods Read Free Page B

breadth of the sky or the pollution-free colors that made him appreciate this particular beauty.
    He’d been raised in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up, his closest Big Sky sunset had come from watching Rawhide and Fury reruns on their one room apartment’s tiny television, cowboys and children cavorting through deserts and mountains, an environment totally alien from the gritty streets of his home. Even so, he was unable to appreciate the true artistry of his God on the black and white screen. As he grew older, moving from city to city as a day laborer, he caught glimpses of the true majesty, hints at the mosaic face of God, but was unable to fully realize the immensity of the sunset hemmed in by the city’s false concrete horizons and filtered through prisms of pollution.
    Truly, it wasn’t until his first journey to the Retreat House, a place for Alexian Brothers to rest and meditate before moving on to their next assignment, that he’d seen the entire sky each night brushed by the hand of the one Master, pastels intermixing with neon hues as the sun journeyed west to rest for the new day.
    From his perch on a rocky prominence jutting from Coronado Canyon, Brother Dominic examined his valley, watching the transformation from heated day to tepid night. To the south, barely ten miles away, was Mexico. He’d passed some tin cans and a few dirty blankets on his earlier hike, evidence of starving souls who were seeking the salvation of the American way. On the other side of the valley, within the clutches of the Mule Mountains, were the towns of Bisbee and Tombstone.
    Tombstone. Just thinking of this town of legend and childhood dreams made him smile as he remembered his games of cowboys and injuns and cowboys and cops and cowboys and gangsters. He remembered reading about Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday by flashlight. His young mind had easily tuned out the sounds of sirens and screams and the Manellis arguing upstairs, allowing him to descend into the dusky days of history when honor and loyalty were substantial things.
    He loved the OK Corral and on many occasions had envisioned himself as a witness, hiding behind a barn door, watching as the Sheriff and his deputies gunned down the terrible Clantons. He’d gone to the fabled town yesterday and paid his five dollars to watch the reenactment. Even with overweight businessmen playing dress-up, he could still imagine the Earps towering into history, and the bullets, each one a whisper of sacrifice and redemption, slicing the air in divine trajectories. He felt a kinship to those Wild West Lawmen in his own mission to save the world and had imagined more than once that he and Wyatt Earp had been cut from the same cloth.
    Behind him were the Huachucas, the Apache word meaning Thunder Mountain. The arm of the mountain was five miles south of Sierra Vista, the valley’s largest town, a veritable metropolis of dusty families who struggled at the alchemical dream, attempting to lift themselves from the long shadow of Fort Huachuca. The old fort had been spun into concrete and steel since its pioneer days, all vestiges of its original grandeur now encapsulated in a single monument of Buffalo Soldiers eternally scanning the horizon for the dread Apache.
    Within the bowl of the mountains lay a vast plain of hidden life, complicated interaction within the fragile desert. Too many people saw the scorpions, the spiders and the sharp spines of the cacti and perceived danger and death. They remembered paintings and pictures of the sun-bleached skulls of cattle lying on the hard crust of the desert floor and thought that if they were there, they might be next.
    Brother Dominic had thought the same when he’d first ventured to the Retreat House ten years ago. After three trips, however, he’d come to learn of the unique partnerships between the animals, the insects and the plants. He’d learned that beneath a hard and sometimes sharp exterior, there was a soft life that