THE ZEPHYR/JUNE-JULY 2005 DEPUY STUDIOs PO BOX 441 | From "MY FRIEND DEBRIS’ We are visiting a bar in the town of Garlic (a.k.a. Ajo), Arizona. The bar is full of locals, mostly citizens of the Mexican and Papago Indian preference. My friend is dancing. John has approached several of the Papago ladies—short stout barrel-shaped women with cheerful brown faces and long rich lovely hair so black it looks blue—but they have all turned him down, laughing. Even the fattest of them, who looks like the Venus of Willendorf, has declined his courteous invitation. Therefore my friend Debris, untroubled, dances alone. e dances like Zorba the Greek, like Anthony Quinn, in the middle of the empty floor, hands clasped behind his back, old pipe smoking in his mouth, the decayed and rotten slouch hat on his head. The jukebox is playing Mi Corazén es su Corazén by Gabriel Cruz y sus Conjuntos. Ranchero music—guitars and violins and trumpets. A barbarous racket. Debris dances solemnly forward, then back, twirls, spreads his arms like wings and turns his face to the ceiling. Eyes closed, dancing, he flies, he soars, he sails like an eagle across the empyrean of his soul. Alone in the universe, .he makes it all his own. No one but me pays him any heed. Just another gringo drunk. But what a beautiful, happy, ontological gringo drunk. Only one pitcher of beer—and God entered his soul. We drive into the desert beyond Garlic, beyond Why, beyond the ghost town of Pourquoi Non, beyond the far western borders of Hedgehog Cactus National Park where I had once been employed, for three elegant winters, as a patrol ranger. Under the moon we pass Kino Peak, the Bates Range, the Growler Range, past warning signs lettered in red on white, riddled with bullet holes where we enter the Air Force Gunnery Range. This is the bleakest wasteland east or west of the Empty Quarter. A gaunt and spectral landscape littered with .50-caliber machine-gun shells, 88-mm "My Friend Debris,” from Down the River. by Edward Abbey, copywrite 1982. permission to re-print from Clarke Abbey OJO CALIENTE, NEW MEXICO 905.690.3662 87549 By Edward Abbey cannon shells, unexploded rockets, and aerial tow targets stuck nose-down in the sand like twelve-foot arrowheads. Nobody lives here but the diamondback, the fatal coral snake, the Gila monster, the tarantula and the scorpion, and us, from time to time. Debris and I love the place. God loves it. The Air Force loves it. And nobody else I know of but a Green Beret named Douglas Heiduk, who discovered it years ago. The dirt road becomes impassable, a torture track of sand traps and volcanic rocks with flint-sharp edges, petering out in prehistoric Indian paths. A tribe called the Sand Papagos haunted the region until a century ago, lurking about the few known waterholes, ambushing bighorn sheep, Spanish missionaries, gold seekers, and other pioneers, and eating them. The one road through this desert, long since abandoned, was called El Camino del Diablo—the Devil’s Highway. nd what became of the Sand Papagos? Historians say they were wiped out by the Mexican military, or by disease, or by a change in the climate. But John De Puy and I know better. We stop the truck, shut off the motor, get out, and vomit. Feeling better we open another jug. My friend Debris hurls an empty bottle at the stars and bellows through the silence, Chinga los cosmos! Nobody answers. Far to the north we can see flares, bright as molten magnesium, floating down across the sky. We hear the and out. He walks witha long and loping stride, uphill and downhill, through brush and over rocks, like aman accustomed to exploring, prospecting, searching. He expects to live for about 140 years—“indefinitely.” to be continued... PAGE 25