Dark Riders

CHAPTER 1: A BACKPACKER

I thought about hiking the Rockies, the whole great chain, from the South up North into Canada, an eternal backpacker, until I found a quiet place of peace far beyond my restless anger. I didn’t want contemporary society to find Xavier Thorn again.

But I needed a parting blow to relieve my frustrations with all the hypocrisy and greed, to purge myself of wanting to strike out. I needed a target to channel my anger. I finally decided upon the Mafia.

There could be no more despicable adversary. For generations, they had operated with pompous impudence, squirming like vermin through a leaky judicial system that served to meet the monetary needs of the legal profession and keep society’s lowlifes moving through the court-prison system at a profitable pace. I knew I was too cynical about everything. And the Mafia had never done me harm. But after considerable thought I decided that the mob had no redeeming features, had made no contributions to American life. At least all the other professions were in there pitching, the government, business, doctors and repairmen. But the Mafia just deserved something like a hand grenade thrown into an executive board meeting, which was certainly an idea worth filing in my dark recesses.

I began to dismantle my life and make pre-natal preparations for another, watching my material comforts shrink away and re-shape into basic survival needs, a well-stocked mobile sanctuary in my van, a comforting stash of cash in the bank to fall back on. I spent thoughtful time with my backpack, stuffing it and arranging its every content in a proper place. A backpacker could walk eternally away from the system, never letting it make him phony and deceitful. In the mountains, he could sense the changing seasons; smell meadow flowers wafting in the summer breeze; glide gently past crisp, white snow, heaped in loving abundance on the pines; feel the majesty of sheer, hard rock splitting the blue sky; hear the rustling crunch of his boots plying through autumn leaves on the trail. I wanted to embrace these things and make them part of my life.

I dissipated my goods piecemeal, and as they disappeared, like the crumbling petals of a dry flower, I thought also of my life, piecemeal, and how I had become the way I was over thirty-nine years. If I am bound to tell this story of how I stung the Mafia—and myself—it seems to provide some shape to the bottom of it.

I was the only child of an auto mechanic and part time farmer. My mother held the family together in the glow of kerosene lamps and the softness of feather beds, and frequent dinners of cold milk and hot, greasy cornbread. She enjoyed simple pleasures like a dip of snuff and a rocking chair on the front porch summer evenings. My father seemed to always be washing up in a basin by the water bucket on the back porch, scrubbing with Lava soap at the hard black grease of the garage or the gritty brown dirt from two acres of corn.

I thought a lot about the bigotry of those days. There were people in those nineteen-fifties backwoods who loathed blacks as inferior and apelike. They were always known as niggers, of course, a black usually being a kind of a horse. And a white person would have to be courageous or impervious to ridicule to speak the work Negro in the presence of his bigoted peers. All the while striving to belong with those peers, to find a place somewhere above the hard place of poverty.

There were other groups for which our provincials had low regard. Jews, of course, and Yankees. And city slickers. And rich folks. And any foreigners they might chance to see. As well as the area’s Choctaw Indians and even selected white people of the county. If the truth were known, most didn’t like themselves, knowing secretly inside of their own inferiorities.

And I was among them, growing up with the peculiar name of my great-grandfather along with my father’s. Xavier was a Frenchman who traded furs in the new world and lived for a time in Jamaica.

I grew up to know both sides of the 1950s and 60s racial conflict in Mississippi. When the desegregation edicts were laid down, I was still much under the brainwashing influence of my family and friends. Most of them saw blacks as unwashed and immoral, stupid and lazy. If one accepted that dogma, which was instilled in the home from well before puberty, you would logically agree that they were unworthy to sit at a lunch counter or next to a white person on a bus. Much was made of the fact that they bathed irregularly, if at all, but I was able to reason, even at that uncomprehending teen age, that it would be hard for anyone to bathe regularly without benefit of running water. Not so many years earlier my own family had been in that unknowing disadvantage until we added the bathroom—a great day. I still remembered the indignity of bathing in a cramped little zinc washtub, knees under my chin, and mama pouring a bucket full of cold well water over my cringing head to wash out the P&G soap.

Disliking the looks of the blacks, their language, the seeming contemptuous squalor of some, I found it difficult to shuck the devious teachings of the fireside, that the blacks were tolerable okay, only in their place. But I rebelled anyway because I was an avid reader and a student of contemporary affairs—beyond Mississippi’s tangled honeysuckle society. It wasn’t right to pour fountain Cokes over the heads of those poor blacks at the Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson. It wasn’t right to dump sugar bowls over their heads while a crowd of gawking whites leered and laughed or stood bemused. It wasn’t right to turn the fire hoses and dogs on those people in Birmingham. My rebellion grew slowly and quietly and without exceptional courage. I bemoaned that memory. For I was still cursed with a striving to belong.

I was twenty-one by then, lean and long-haired, full of that smoldering fire of dissent that I had neither the intellect or courage to express, wrapped tightly in self-doubt. I wanted to be a great news photographer and I focused my every talent on that goal. But after growing up in the racial turmoil that split the state, having served in the National Guard during the milestone integration of the University of Mississippi, and, as a young news photographer for the Jackson Courier, photographing freedom riders, sit-in demonstrators and the marchers to Selma, Alabama with Martin Luther King, I wanted two things: I wanted to be a great photographer, and I wanted it to be somewhere else.

I just don’t fit in here. I just don’t want to live in Mississippi, I told my father that dark night on the porch. I’m a photographer, Dad. I’ve got to go someplace else to get a good job. And all the time I knew I shouldn’t go and might not go, for dad was widowed and lonely by then, and prone to cry more readily now, at the pain of a sharp memory that might appear without warning during his long days and nights. I stayed on in Jackson for a while.

I saw the seamy side of town on the police beat; disasters wrought by nature and man, including a plane crash that scattered the mangled bodies of men, women and children among shattered pine trees just a few hundred yards from the runway. I saw state capitol and city hall inefficiencies and underhandedness covered up by the newspaper’s family owners and their special interests. My cynicism deepened, and as my colleagues seemed willing to accept such a world, I became a critic of my own institution, and even of myself for having such an idealistic, naïve point of view about it in the first place.

There were other encounters with the institutions of life, and they often ended in an impasse.

Beady-eyed Sgt. Waldo, a chaw stretching his hard Army jaw, offered to promote me two stripes—to Sergeant First Class—if I would re-enlist in the National Guard.

No way, I told him. I’ve got better things to do than come down here and sit around the armory and watch some instructor scratch his head and try to speak English. This is a joke. If this were anything like a real army, we’d be training ourselves to do what armies do—kill people. We’re so busy picking up cigarette butts that our guys throw down and stomp in the first place that we don’t have time for decent training.

Hell, boy. Why don’t you lighten up a little? countered a bruised Waldo. You could be a damned good soldier if you’d get that chip off your shoulder. You got brains if you’d use ‘em. You coulda’ gone to O.C.S. like I tried to get you to do.

Why would anybody want to be a damned good soldier? I fired back. You just send them out to get shot down anyway without trying to win anything. The army didn’t do a damned thing in Korea except run up a record number of casualties. That’s what happened to the Dixie Division, and that’s why you need more warm bodies like mine to take their place. If we’re not going to win a war, there’s no damned excuse for being in it.

In the future, of course, there would be another miserable no-win war, in Viet Nam. And it would be even more frustrating. We don’t learn and make things better. We refuse to learn and make things worse.

I rarely succeeded in such arguments, very frustrating, and it was because I was always putting my adversary in a no-win situation too, which meant that, of course, he wouldn’t let me win either. Just like Korea, Viet Nam, or two children fighting over a bauble.

I married Delores March; a bookish young social worker that wore big glasses and smiled readily. Her even disposition calmed my stormy insides, and we settled into a social scene with a liberal set of do-gooders from the welfare agency and the nearby college and a friend or two from the Courier. My life seemed to be losing its momentum in these early 70s years. I had taken over as photo editor of the Courier, where I could get away from the grind of the streets. I was weary of crowded hallways and fast-moving photo subjects, people with handcuffs and covered heads, others with plaques and smiles, women in evening gowns and plaster-cast teeth, ballplayers flashing one finger and politicians waving two, victims of tragedy tear-streaked and broken, gloating lawyers, bitter lawyers, smug lawyers, politician lawyers oozing distorted generalities. They all filled our pages. It was easier to handle it from behind a desk.

For all my angry arrogance, though, I knew there was a kind man inside me, clamoring to get out, given to bringing home wounded birds that died anyway, petting and feeding stray dogs, remembering most of the special days of those I cared about, and expounding at length on mellow dark evenings about how love and related blessings could somehow change the world.

Delores was killed just outside her office. They thought she was standing there in curiosity at the madman waving the gun. In the course of his brief struggle with a security guard and a stray bullet, she fell dead and left me bent and broken. I regressed, and became alienated then even from the hapless parade of troubled humans whom I had pitied, who flowed through a welfare system that also seemed out of control.

A lot of these bums need jobs, not handouts, I told a scowling welfare administrator in the aftermath. There seems to be a philosophy in this country that money solves everything. It’s screwed up our welfare system, our foreign policy and our heads.

Where the hell was I supposed to come up with jobs for them? Price retorted. Most of them aren’t able to work, some of them don’t want to work and if they did they wouldn’t have sense enough to hold a job.

You don’t ask them what they want. You tell them what to do if they want the money. We ought to demonstrate to everybody that all work is honorable. You can give them jobs as easily as you can give them money. Give the real idiots clean-up jobs. We’ve got the filthiest cities and junkiest roadsides of any country in the civilized world and act like we’re too good to clean up after ourselves. And if we could weed out the bums, you could pay the old and disabled people enough to do them some good.

My acerbic opinions were okay with some people. I usually made reasonable, if not practical, sense. It was just that they didn’t want so much of it. A double-barrel blitz of Xavier Thorn was too much. Sometimes people wished I could be turned off like a spigot. I was a nice guy, okay, but too intense. I knew that, too.

In the year after Delores’ death, I cared less about conventions and camaraderie. I was less fastidious in my personal habits. I grew a beard and sometimes it was unkempt. I drank more and smoked marijuana. I sometimes took downers and a few lines of coke. I began to enjoy hiking and made frequent sojourns to national parks and forests where I grew to revere the purity and admire the beauty of the natural wilderness, especially the mountains, which I considered to be a citadel for all of nature. I read about the mythical god, Pan, an idea really, and equated this Godliness with nature, God’s creation, the only way to see the deity.

As I expanded my mind and body, my views of the contemporary scene mellowed into a resigned sense of peace without honor. I made a truce with demons that I once would have railed against. I created my own world within the grounds of the asylum, satisfied myself with the possible and pondered many thoughts that I hoped would lead me to a more hopeful and balanced view of reality. I edited photographs by day and my life by night—locked inside my apartment where I devoured a wide variety of books with a restless passion, or in a theatre where I studied the films that dared to comment on society. Within myself, there was an all-knowing but misunderstood feeling. My head became like a sponge for counterculture thought. I tempered my mind into quicksilver, my body into muscle, moving deliberately and steadfastly to balance mind and body, emotion and spirit, the essential four, which must advance together in balance. Finally it came together.

I stashed much of the money from dad’s house in the bonds, spent some of it on sophisticated weaponry for the Mafia, found with the help of a Cuban photographer whose brother knew a man who trafficked in guns for the South American trade. For two pay-offs and four thousand dollars, part of which was left to me by my dad, now dead too, I had enough firepower to create serious problems for the Cosa Nostra. I focused my thoughts on the pompous and evil cretins who had created their cancerous Sicilian society as a tumor within our own. Finally, I had a worthwhile goal in my life, one that would make a significant contribution to society, to make things better, far more than my telling but passive photographs ever did. And as I drove, I would have plenty of time to plot and scheme.

On a selected Monday morning, the van was serviced and ready. I awoke in my sleeping bag on the bare floor of my empty apartment. Everything was gone, down to the drapes and the empty pop bottles under the sink. I wanted it to be exactly like this, so I had planned it. At last I had begun planning my life, and not drifting aimlessly, like a clot of seaweed dipping in the waves, or a city full of daily laborers thinking endlessly about all the things they had to do. I would concern myself only with feeding my mind and body and spirit.

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, my gear packed neatly in the van, I looked at my confident countenance. My blonde beard was trimmed neatly, my close-cropped head appropriately tanned from the hours of devoted running up and down the neighborhood streets. My chin was appropriately lifted too, and I vowed to keep it that way while I first explored my dark side, then the other.

With my forefinger, I rubbed the wet remains of a bar of Ivory soap and scrawled three letters across the mirror.

XIT. My exit. My opening farewell.

CHAPTER 2: BORDERLINE

The bridge was broad at Vicksburg. I looked through the steel girders and down into the muddy water that flows from the farm belt. The Mississippi River used to flood the delta regularly, depositing rich midwestern soil to grow bountiful crops. The flood control projects prevent most of the flooding now, and the soil just washes down the river and out into the Gulf, or it piles up down in Louisiana and has to be dredged to keep the shipping channels open. All the while the delta soil loses fertility and requires heavier doses of chemical fertilizers, the run-off of which mixes with the myriad of pesticides used to fight grass, weeds and insects to flow together into the streams. Nature repeated befouled.

I crossed the bridge, but it only went to Louisiana—a bleak landscape of idle farmland and gray March sky. This year I wouldn’t see familiar fields of soybeans and cotton. There would be fresher, brighter images—flower-strewn mountain meadows, awash in yellow and sunshine, and snowy crowns of mountaintops growing larger before me on the road northwest out of Denver.

A pothole awakened me from my thoughts. I was a few miles out of Tallulah. Battered and besmirched clapboard houses sat in junk-littered yards, poverty sores on the side of my two-lane blacktop. As usual, I had avoided the Interstate, to feel the pulse of the people going about their tacky lives.

I could feel my own presence on the highway, while my green van droned easily onward, over creased and cracked asphalt. I held my eyes on the road ahead. I glared at a muddy pickup truck with a gun rack on back, coming on strong, and the khaki-clad denizen with a tobacco chaw large enough that I could recognize it on the fly. He whizzed by, and out of mind.

The van was clean and well oiled, filled with gas, and holding all the creature comforts that I considered necessary. And I knew it was necessary to draw the line on such contrivances, the other hand being soft decadence, the failure of self-reliance. I had a full ice chest, a fruit crate full of groceries, another with a modest selection of clothes and a gallon of water. My backpack hanging on the hook was fully stocked, with a hatchet and spade, sleeping bag and green sponge rubber ground pad positioned outside. Snowshoes hung nearby, and assorted tools. My weapons were in the two long crates, packed securely and nailed together, and meticulously stenciled by my own hand with a sign-making kit: Peatross Sound Company, Meridian, Mississippi. Clever disguise.

Single bunk beds were hooked up against either side, heavily braced by fold-up iron supports that fit snugly against the bottom. The other two sleeping bags were folded up with the cots, ready for each evening’s sleep. Space is tight in a van and you have to make it count.

The wind swirled all around me in my moving house, my fortress, and I sucked in the feeling of it like a man hungering for a revelation, feeling and tasting everything fiercely to make a good sense of well-being, even more so than I really was. I stretched. And felt. And it was just the beginning of the solitary control I was taking over my life. In Tallulah, it quickly changed. As if by cosmic decree I was thrown into intimate conflict with these … ordained people.

It was just a greasy truck stop, the kind that offers a half-acre of free parking for the truckers’ rigs, and waitresses who know the value of a truly fresh cup of coffee. I walked in with my long, confident stride, eyeing my reflection in the glass. In control. I ordered coffee and wished the waitress a Good morning with my usual wry smile. Then I watched the people and felt the scene. I always do. As if checking it all out from on high somewhere.

It was a little later. The cursing was from a woman, from the outside. I gazed intently out into the sun-washed gravel parking lot and saw it all.

She had tight blue jeans and a feisty temper. But a truck driver with a western shirt and an overhanging gut kept throwing things out of the cab anyway, pulling them out of the sleeper and tossing them with disdain out onto the dusty lot.

You redneck mother fucker! she shouted up. Come down here and I’ll kick your balls up your ass.

The man was through. He climbed down to confront. Don’t overload your ass now, he warned. Look, I picked up you and your friend. I try to do you a favor. An’ you smoke that shit in my rig and risk getting’ me in trouble with the law.

That ain’t the problem, hot shot.

Now this is where you’re getting’ off—

Where the hell you been for the last twenty years, man. This stuff ain’t nothin’ any more. You been locked up in a church somewhere? She was lean and hard, with small erect breasts outlined clearly through her tight black sweater, and tighter jeans wrapping her long legs. She had tousled black curls, falling around a narrow, suntanned face that was gritted just now in brazen anger. Her denim jacket lay at her feet."

It’s against the law. That’s all the hell I know or wanna know, said the driver. Now I ain’t messin’ with you no longer. You take your friend and get yourselves another ride an’ stay away from my truck. He pointed a large mangled mechanic’s finger at her. And if you make me mad, now, I’m gonna call the law.

Be real, man. She drawled. You’re just mad ‘cause I wouldn’t let you feel me up. Fuck you, okay! She slapped dust out of the