Fred Ferraris

Jesaru and Señor Arbusto 

Carnival

A number of extinct personae, known only from fossil remains, arrive in Barnumville to toast the coronation of Señor Arbusto. Decorum is enforced by a tap-dancing snake in a black velvet Elvis mask. At midnight the band leader, Ricky Ricardo, strikes his conga and sings, “¡ịAy yi yi yi!,” while the enigmatic Mr. Big and his Minister of Mayhem, Bobo Rumbullion, drape tinsel across Ar-busto’s throne.

A few days later you stop by the Lonesome Lizard Saloon where Jesaru Durango is lying on the floor, using a bottle of tequila to nail down a table. “Gravity’s on the fritz,” he explains.

While you wait for the Señor to delegate new toadies, Jesaru shows you what it takes to keep his coffee mill carbide in tip-top condition. He makes it plain how large in his legend the coffee mill carbide looms. He seems unsurprised when you tell him his coffee mill carbide could be the coot skin cap that will make him the man of the day.

Ballast Dump

    In a slate gray November sky a vulture circled on two right wings. Standing outside the gate, what did Jesaru hear? There was only the wind to clue him, no whis-pering goddess anymore, nerve music only playing in his head. Low black clouds moving swiftly. His will cross-bitten, an ember thrown into doubt, a mendicant caught in a chill dusty wind. Cut off from the sunny soda foun-tain life he might have imagined he remembered. Unhitched from his watcher, his coffee mill carbide cankered by sand. The synaptic connections gone cata-wampus, baroque abstractions struck down without warning. White sand he pretended not to see. His heart an overcrowded clanky can. One thing he believed another delivered. His burdened heart the central ques-tion exposed to drying wind. Drowning as a natural act, contrary to convention. My why your who both won-dering what’s what. Dead meat seeking the scavenger’s eye. Snake as messenger as sentry as angel. Angel who strikes with stainless fangs. Morning greeted him morning grieved for him. The desert with smudge pots the desert with ice storms. Poison as cure, contrary to expectation. Fairy tales forgotten, myths reassembled. 
The present abandoned for a questionable later. “Your past is all used up anyway,” the snake explained. The pop tarts he left as trailside markers, the stewpacks he abandoned at river’s edge. The whirlspool approached as an exit strategy, the gate understood as a symbol of confinement. A statement in the form of a question to be questioned by another in the form of an answer to be answered by another in the form of. All while he waited for the nausea to pass.
    Jesaru staggered  toward the open gate. Close to collapse when a shiny green snake coiled on a rock caught his attention. Maybe dead, maybe not. Here were the dunes the prickly pear and the scorpion, bitter leaves and taloned plants, foams of anxiety and expectation. Here the path the panicked earth the walls cracked and crumbled, a desert city pounded into fragments. A com-pany of soldiers garrisoned inside, nerve music thrumming in their mummified ears. Jesaru shaded his brow. The tooth he saw in the mouth of the snake was the thorn he carried in his thigh.
    Jesaru asked the snake if he knew the way to the un-likely or improbable house of Señor Arbusto. “I think I’ve lost my way.”
    “Then let me help you get your bearings,” the snake said. He looked Jesaru up and down. After a long pause he said, “At the moment you appear to be precisely where you are. And as far as I can see that’s precisely where you ought to be. Where else could you be, since you aren’t precisely anywhere else?” The snake produced a hiss that Jesaru heard as a sneer. “But what do you expect when you come waltzing into this wasteland without even a compass? Were you hoping by chance to run across a magical helper?” The snake winked at Jesaru and said, “Cheer up, my friend, things could be worse. You could have stumbled into the path of Arbusto himself. As the situation stands, there’s no need for tension. Take a breath. Relax. You look too  much like a man who’s been pickled in dread.”
    “I don’t know what you’re going on about, snake, but I’ve got an appointment with Señor Arbusto.”
    “I love the way you dream, Durango.”
    “What do you know about my nights?”
    “Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence. You are the dreamer and I am the dream. Or vice versa, as the case may be.”
    “Ah shit. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? Excuse me, but right now I don’t have the patience for psycho-ceramic guessing games. How about water? You know where I can find some water?”
    “Sure sure I do. Or at least the illusion of water.”
    Jesaru bugged out his eyes, a look that would have alarmed a serpent less erudite in the ways of man, and said, “You don’t even try to make a rat’s ass worth of sense, do you?”
    “I’ve never claimed to,” said Fang. “Je suis seul, un esclave un peu coureur qui vous néglige.” He gave Jesaru a sly glance. “You wouldn’t happen to have a rat’s ass to spare, would you?”
    “Sadly, no.”
    The snake sighed. “No, of course you don’t. I knew that. I dreamed it last night.”
    Jesaru adrift, Jesaru unwound, Jesaru’s brainpan a basket of salt. Jesaru said, “Take me to the river.”
    “First I want to give you this gift.” The snake presented Jesaru with a six-foot loop of frayed rope.
    “What the hell is this?” Jesaru asked. He wondered if the snake might be mocking him.
    “My magic lariat. Sooner or later you may need to eat. This lariat never fails to snare its prey.”
    “Looks like a goddam worthless piece of hemp to me. My friend the Sweetheart of the Rodeo has a real lariat ––green polypropylene, with a jewel-encrusted handle.”
    “What would you expect? She is Arbusto’s concubine,” the snake said with a sniff.

    From an unclouded sky snow was falling. From the half-frozen river, Jesaru drank. Jesaru a man with a thorn in his thigh. Jesaru a man with a snake in his chest. He counted the hours, tallied the minutes. He tossed his timepiece into a whirlpool.
    “You’ve traveled this far without proper gear,” the snake said. “About time you lightened your load. Your past is all used up anyway.”
    A fire burning behind ruined walls. Stars like embers on dry black sand. Jesaru and the snake camped by a river, surrounded by baskets of spoiled farce. Empty faith false apprehensions innocent acts catalogued as crimes. The snake tweezed a tooth from Jesaru’s thigh. “I can see by your expression that you recognize your watcher. Good.” He moved closer to the fire. As far as it was possible for the snake’s dull eyes to sparkle, they were sparkling now. “Seul, un poème un peu niais qu’on jette au feu,” he said. “But I hope you won’t mind if I try on a few of your ragged beliefs. You’re grown so lean, they don’t fit you anymore.”

Manicured Area

Jesaru Durango is something like a fireplace in Arbusto’s house of rage and ruse. An armored truck hauls the Señor’s ashes. Insurgents in the crawl-space are hard-ly rattled by Arbusto’s pyrrhic fiddling, while bedbugs armed with palette knives boldly attack the mall. Big booted oil sheiks are no strangers to honky barons – even if Arbusto’s mask should crack, they’ll never forget its mulish grin. And if the products he promotes give off rank odors, who gives a toot? He’ll unload them at a profit in Barnumville! I have heard his crazed rim-shots have been puffed up and freeze-dried, but no such pro-visions do I find in Jesaru’s rucksack. In Arbusto’s kitchen cabinet  there’s  enough pulled wool to  muffle as much malarkey as any foil believes in. You may be baffled by imperial blowback, because you know that elevated rimrockers deliver more bone meal than bedouins do, but disloyal bums who tell Arbusto so must be hacked at and uprooted. I shudder when I smell burned offerings belching. Arbusto himself grunts and groans, his tongue as limber as a dismembered hand that snaps its fingers, impatient to be gone, even as it lingers in your lap.

Fred Ferraris is a former ranch hand/carpenter/commercial fisherman. His work has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Heaven Bone Magazine, Mad Blood, and elsewhere. His books include The Durango Chronicles: Book One and Older Than Rain: Early and Recent Poems. He lives in Colorado.