The look-out was crowded with young Australians, expensive
cars and midsized bottles of Rum.
Billy Bob "looked-out" and mused about his friend who had lived and worked in Palm Springs with Merv Griffin for a time.
Cletis looked toward Palm Springs, "looked-in" and felt lonely. He wanted to be home, away from the heat (heat which had substantially subsided on top of the hill) walking near cool if murkey ponds and listening for the primal songs he knew. He thought of crying but couldn't or wouldn't. He remembered the darkness of Brett Ellis's Christmas in Palm Springs - the horror in the silence surrounding a flambeed Toyota and the hot night wind.
Five days of steady drinking had brought on the inevitable depression and Cletis wasn't sure what to do with it.
Cletis and Billy Bob sat on a bench overlooking the heat and night lights of the valley. They lit their 43rd and 37th cigarettes of the day, and forced down the remainder of the Old Crow they had picked up in Baker.
Billy Bob was the first to speak. "Well, we're here. We should get out the instruments and play to Graham Parson's ghost."
"Hmmm" Cletis nodded in his exhaustion. "This is the perfect spot. Let's go somewhere else."
"Ya, Okay."
They walked back down the path, past the partying Australians. Billy Bob flashed an evil smile which was responded to by a happy "G'day" from one of the prettier young boys.
They drove back toward town, stopped at a natural ampitheater and pulled
out the lawn chairs, fiddle, mandolin and banjo. They set up in front of a
series of boulders under the night stars and a full moon that had aged a day and a half.
After three "songs" and thirty minutes, Cletis smiled upon accepting that they had not played anything in tune. His depression was lifting faster than it had arrived and half way through The Streets of Baltimore the wind picked up to an eerie level and Billy Bob stopped. Behind Cletis, amongst the Joshua Trees, cactus and scorpions, Billy Bob saw the faint white light of what at first looked to be a very large, headless horse. He reached slowly for his camera and by the time Cletis turned around the figure had approached near enough for Billy Bob to discern that it was not a horse, but three men and a woman carrying a casket at shoulder height. None of the bearers was straining under the weight and the group seemed to float up to our minstrels.
"Hi there." Cletis ventured tentatively. "What's up?"
"Changed his mind." the woman spoke.
"Oh?" said Billy Bob
"Fuckin bastard" added Phil Kaufman "I risk my ass draggin his enlightened soul and body up here, have a screamin match with that bitch Gretchen Burrell, am sure to get thrown in jail when I get back, and he changes his fuckin mind!"
"Well - what does he want then?" Billy Bob asked clueing into the fact that this
was the Gram Parson's funeral parade. The procession of four ghosts and a box had
reportedly been wandering around Joshua Tree since 1973, even though the original
members of the procession were alive and well and living in New Orleans, Sacramento
and Natchez.
"He wants to go to Utah." the woman piped in respectfully.
"We're probably goin to Utah" Billy Bob offered under Cletis's surprised stare. "We ain't got a lot of room but we could strap him to the roof."
"If you could, that would be much appreciated. I want to be back full time with my family in Natchez, without dealing with the empty part of my brain which still walks these hills" a third member of the troop blurted out "...this year after year thing is really a drag."
"I thought you'd already burnt him?" Cletis ventured with a little accusation in his voice, as if to suggest that the quad with the box were trying to pull something over on a couple of tourists.
"We did. But it just didn't stick. Burnt the bastard to the ground and as we were walking back down the hill into town, enjoying the effects of some mighty fine VW micro dot, this flamin ghost casket comes along and parks itself on our shoulders with instructions to take him to Utah - no specific place in Utah, no explanation, just instructions."
"We even tried walking to Utah but we can't get out of the park."
"Can't get out of the park?"
"White wall jumps up in front of us every time we get close to the park boundary."
"Do you think you can put him on the truck?"
"Just about had him hanging out the back of a ninety five Explorer two years ago but
the family got spooked and took off before we had him cinched down."
"That's all you've been able to do except walk around here for the past 16, 17 years?"
"Yup"
"Well...give it a try. We've got some more music to play before we head into town but we're willing to try and drag him out of here when we go."
Cletis was thinking "It's your truck, Billy Bob, but what if this ghost of a ghost changes his mind again, or what if the white wall jumps us at the park entrance?"
"Don't worry about it" Billy Bob said quietly having heard Cletis's internal mutterings "With that nutso crow following us, we've gotten so far removed from the turth we're invincible."
"Raven." Cletis corrected and sat down to play We'll Sweep Out the Ashes with a whole new interpretive force.
Under his breath Cletis was thinking, "goddamn Carlos Castaneda gonna be jumpin in the cooler any second now."
They played a couple more Graham Parsons tunes that Parsons never would have recognised, while the horse legs of the apocalypse loaded the casket on top of the canopy and secured it with flippin moonbeams.
There was no white wall blocking their exit when they rolled silently out of the park 47 minutes later.
While thinking about whether to be "shaken or stirred" by the experience, the boys agreed that stopping at the Palm Tree Twenty-Three Bar and Grill was the thing to do.