Fulton's Flaw

Simmering upward from the horizon, weaving and luminescent, it rose from the desert into an eventual and mysterious nothingness. Beneath the pattern, the barren plain was cast in motionless relief; brown, browner ... finally, a dirty bronze.

Perhaps it was 3:30. Probably it was in the afternoon and definitely it all transpired on the planet Earth. Something memorable and remarkable moved between the ground and the western sky. Something animate or something imagined. For Todd Fulton, it certainly didn't matter.

Fulton sat on a charcoal Mexican blanket, fifteen feet from a flawed juniperus sabina. Forcing chords from a fined stringed instrument, he took on the burden of memorizing the moment. It won't last, he thought. Nothing does. Even the melodies erode, along with the names and the faces and the things that were said.

Still, there was something different about these ascending patterns of light, or was it matter that rose against the mountains, out toward Yuma? For one thing, the forms were transparent, yet imbued with color and form. For another, they were unlike anything he had ever seen, in Michigan, in Europe or even in a dream. For God so loved the world, he gave Fulton as much time as necessary to see this sky ... to even be this sky.

This mystical passage of vertical heat gave truth to the notion that life continued, though, on its face, that seemed unlikely. Half-way around the world, half-men like Fulton were losing their lives in a crazy Asian war. Yet here it was, like a Stillness at Appomattox, even though it was actually Arizona and General Robert E. Lee was not ready to surrender to anyone, let alone some drifter yankee bearing the name of Abraham Lincoln's son.

Partially obsessed with Viet Nam yet safely situated in Pima County, Fulton sat against a stone precipace, drinking slowly from his last not-quite-cold can of beer ... and drinking in the celestial stirrings that played out against the upper atomosphere near the radical edge of America.

The beer can rested in a shady spot, between a rock and a lizard; the guitar was tuned in open G. Between the froth and the Martin, Fulton's focus swayed from the war to the poetic implications of the sky. The heavenly ceiling was portentious in image, and the earth below, languid and still, was a brown doorstep to whatever sanity he could wrestle back from the year 1970.

As was usually the case, the aesthetic in Fulton had come to watch the sunset. But first, the moralist in Fulton would see the light ... and a million other apparent manifestations.

"I can't get enough of this," his various personalities joined in thinking, even though Fulton as a composite person knew he soon would get all he could handle. "I needed this," he needed to say, and so, said it. "I dreamed of this," he dreamed he'd say again, which he did.

"It lives." It does.

In the Rincon Mountains, Fulton knew, insight came often, and just as frequently, it shuttered quickly out of focus -- not unlike the relationships of those who experienced these ephemeral and soon forgotten sensations of truth, in its subliminal form. Maybe it was the scope of the country. Maybe it was the scope of the problem. Or it might have been the mescaline from the weekend before. Were it not for the wispy curved forms rising out west of Tucson, nothing might have registered. "A couple of years ago this would have been unimaginable," Todd imagined himself saying, perhaps to a gathering of visiting Soviet Jaycees.

This much he knew: moving shadows meant time was passing. Where the sun had shone, shadows now covered the cactus pastures below. A steady succession of pickup trucks kicked up the dust in the valley, where minutes earlier only sagebrush blew and hawks swept the skies. A movie crew came through, headed for a phoney western tourist trap of a town with cardboard motifs, where fake cowboys exchanged fake bullets in a low energy pageant, every hour on the hour. Reality and showbiz get along unusually well out here, Fulton thought. The perpetual gunfight at the OK Corral keeps the local actors working ... and keeps me in touch with civilization. Even the shimmering heat patterns were gone. And so was Todd.

Back to town. Back to school. Back to the job, too. Hauling cement mixers and scaffolding, chasing auger bits and hard-to-fits, scraping a living out of scraps of building materials, sandblasting son-of-a-bitches, soldering guns, son-of-a-guns. To be a part of a construction crew, Fulton knew, was something akin to ... returning to the most basic considerations, such as thirst and an overall sense of longing. It wasn't easy. But, then again, neither was living back east.

If it was cold in New Hampshire, it was hot out on Ajo Way. At least that much you could say. Fulton wouldn't have it any other way. Not today. Some came to stay. Others came to say it anyway. Fulton came to nearly love the place.

I have come to somehow accept it, Fulton thought as he edged his ugly car out of the parking area in the roadside park near where he had spent the later and greater part of the afternoon. Heading the fading Falcon back toward the city, he chronicled the moment: the desert, the clouds, the way the earth tilts and turns. I love the open space, the open minds, the open-ended nature of everything about these valleys, he thought, using the part of his head that took thoughts and saved them prominently in easy access buckets.

The old Ford rushed down the mountain, surged across several arroyas, huffed up a hundred sandy hills, passed plenty of convenience stores and settled back into the driveway of the adobe house in the desert city that Fulton shared with a student friend who liked David Bowie and a bland, oddly ethereal couple named Carlisle who had moved "out west" from "back east."

The Martin came back out of the trunk; Fulton came back out of his reverie, just in time to learn that Richard Nixon was still president and that he had missed dinner. Rice and beans and watermellon. It would have been satisfying. But there are always tradeoffs, and to exchange what he had experienced with what he had missed would never have occurred to this borderline mournful soul, even in his underweight incarnation. You had to expect something would fall from the program when you blew off the afternoon in the mountains, he figured. If it had to be an evening meal with the neighbors, well, it wouldn't be the first time. That's why they invented keifer.

"You look like you could use some sleep," Bill from the back apartment commented.

"I'm always into it," Fulton answered.

"Are you guys working tomorrow?," the neighbor asked.

"Just in the morning. We're finishing up a hospital job and I've got to run out there and pick up some equipment. I should be home by noon. What are you guys going to be doing?"

Carlisle and his wife, Beth, often had friends over -- many of them folk musicians -- and Fulton hoped that would be the case this time. He was disapointed to learn it would not. "Don't you remember? " Carlisle asked. "We're flying home. I can't wait."

"It's not even spring back there," Fulton said. "What's your motivation?"

"Beth's brother is graduating from medical school. He's so bright, they're letting him out two months early. He's already signed a contract with the Mayo Clinic. He'll be in their Young Men's Division, playing the trumpet, I believe. The third one from the left. He and I get along great. We're both Scorpions."

"Scorpio," Fulton said, correcting Carlisle. God Carlisle was un-hip.

Fulton's mind slipped back into melancholia. First I'm up in the foothills, I can see almost half-way to California, I'm rockin' and rollin' on the mountains, the sky and the scenery and now I'm back down here with these people, playing muscial interns. This is too much. A bringdown. A point of confusion.

"You guys go ahead then. We'll keep an eye on the place. Just don't forget to come back." Fulton spoke without enthusiasm. You didn't want to exceed Carlisle's energy level, not if you wanted to get any sleep that night. As is often the case with allies, Beth was just the same: low-key to a fault, eager to make the big cultural shift and become a westerner, yet forever restricted by an eastern capacity for all things dull. Originality in any form lagged notably beyond her grasp -- a shortcoming that was fully manifest in her selection of a lifetime mate.

"We'll only be gone one week," Carlisle said. "You know I can't be away from the store any longer than that."

Of course. The store. Who else knew stereos and alarm systems like Carlisle? Not many in old Tucson. "I just hope they don't give it all away while we're gone," he said. "That always bothers me." If amnesia ever takes over, Fulton thought, this guy will be better off. He could get hit by a motorcycle and add three IQ points. Turn up his microphone, he's hot. Give him a tamborine.

Bill and Beth Carlisle brought baggage to the equation, and so did Fulton. Sarcastic thinking was one of those old-world mindsets that he knew would "have to go." It didn't lead anywhere, no where productive, at least. It showed you were petty, which is limiting. It proved you were still caught up in putting down instead of putting up. He didn't like thinking the way he did about the Carlisles. If they were a cliche -- which they were -- Fulton knew he too bore the mark of a common cultural experience. He didn't like it. And he wanted to do something about it. But first he had to say goodnight to Bill Carlisle.

"You guys go ahead and don't worry about anything," he said, firmly shaking the hand of his bland neighbor. It was totally dark and he strained his eyes to see Carlisle walk back across the yard, into the rear apartment. "Have a good trip," he called out, just before the door shut.

"Thanks, Todd," Carlisle replied. "Have a good week."

Have a good week. Have a nice day. Fulton loved the new age expressions. They showed people were truly into pumping each other up -- even the Carlisles, with all their lingering east coast mannerisms. There was still hope. And there was still time.