The Last Dance of the Jackalope
This Jackalope's first serious attempt at getting published in this lifetime. Never published.
The Last Dance of the Jackalope
2004 All Rights Reserved - Christopher Wagoner
Cole watched through the tiny bar window as the searing wind outside howled and tore at the scorched earth. Entire hills of grit flew into the air as the wind ripped huge gashes into the uneven, blasted terrain, as if Father Sky sensed the end was near, and in his last desperate throes clawed at Mother Earth. The late August sun lay low to the west, and painted the thick, gritty air with red and orange hues. It too, heated the airborne earth with its last dying rays; its full fury had been exhausted on the parched earth only hours before. The falling sun disappeared behind the sandstorm and left only the desperate howl of Father Sky.
In the distance, small clouds of earth rolled over Highway 85, and beyond that stretched the desolate outskirts of the badlands. Cole seemed engrossed in the small piles of sand and loose dirt that began to accumulate on the outside of the window sill. A buzzing neon 'open' sign with the Budweiser logo sat inside the sill, flickering as the fierce gale rattled it once every few moments. The disharmonious rattle and shake of 1970's Midwestern country music boomed within the bar, distorted as it bounced around the cobbled interior of the tiny building. The clatter of pool balls and glass bottles clashed with the music. The weathered and sun bleached wooden walls shook with each muffled shriek of the wind.
Oblivious to the chaos around him, Cole turned to the bar counter, a small collection of empty beer bottles already amassed in front of him. The bartender, a huge bald man who wore black slacks and a matching button up XXL dress shirt, moved over and placed another beer in front of Cole. Cole reached first into his well worn duster, and then groped at the back pocket of his faded and ripped blue jeans. The bartender leaned in close to Cole and mouthed that the drink was again, on the house, before the bartender left Cole alone at his corner of the counter. Like most small town rumors, the unexplained disappearance of Cole's only friend and companion had already reached the keen ears of the bartender. Cole took a large gulp of beer as he thought about how he would never see her again.
Cole turned back to the view outside and was filled with a sudden stab of self pity as he listened to Father Sky's tormented cries. His anguish seemed eternal. When would Mother Earth allow him to die?
According to the grimy newspaper nailed to the wall, the year was 1977, and mankind to the verge of a new age. The front page announced that the first CRAY 1 supercomputer had been shipped to Los Alamos Labs, New Mexico, and the launches of the Space Shuttle Enterprise and the Voyager II space probe would take place later this year.
As Cole began to remember his life in retrospect, he realized that none of these things meant anything to him. Cole had never been a part of anything larger than himself since the day he tore out of his mother's womb twenty eight years ago. He was conceived in the back seat of a 1942 Buick Roadmaster one night after work, the hedonistic union between a drunken and out of work Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge reservation across the state border in South Dakota, and a burned out part time WASP waitress.
Things had been tough in those first few years after Cole's mother had been thrown out of the house for birthing a half breed bastard, but she worked odd jobs and double shifts where she could. Five years later her misery ended when a man high on Angel Dust came into the local Pump and Serve and shot her, the only part time gas attendant on duty, between the eyes with a .44 Magnum. Cole's misery, on the other hand, had just began.
For the next ten years Cole remembered being bounced around from distant relative to friend of the family, at random, for what seemed like back breaking, salary free, manual labor. Cole's broken and piecemeal education was the result of home schooling. Often the assignments of dodge the backhand and roll with the boot were left unfinished, to be completed at a later date. He had few lasting friends, those that were diligent to write after Cole had moved once again soon lost interest, as children sometimes do.
When Cole turned sixteen he found work doing odds and ends at the same gas station that claimed his mother's life. The station's owner (the very one who placed his mother on that fateful shift and had taken off early that day to meet his gay lover at one of the fancy stores in Douglas) out of guilt gave Cole his old tool shack out back in the badlands as a semi permanent home, and even loaned him money when the station's bottom line could allow. Cole received a lot of undeserved pity from the people of this town, but they, like the bartender and his drinks, never allowed Cole to repay them. Cole didn't seek their misplaced sympathy, only their acknowledgment.
Cole's attention snapped into focus as a howl of wind breached the front door, accompanied by the rush of scorching air and the screech of a rusty door spring. He turned to the open doorway as three young men entered the packed bar, the screen door banging shut behind them. They were dressed in typical ranch hand clothes, and moved to join the current pool game with little disruption. Cole sat the beer bottle back on the counter in an attempt to steady his trembling hands, and forced himself to stare at the mirror behind the bar. His wispy, raven black hair looked matted and shaggy. Volatile cobalt blue eyes swam in the dark recesses of his darkly tanned and weathered face.
The youngest ranch hand moved to the bartender, and out of the corner of his eye, Cole witnessed in outrage as the boy laid a thick wad of twenty dollar bills on the counter. Cole's eyes narrowed in unbridled fury, and his hand clenched in reflex. A split second later the beer bottle broke, sending shards of razor sharp glass into his right hand. The bright hot flash of pain was lost to Cole as he leapt up from his stool and stormed over to the other end of the bar. His steel toed work boots thundered across the dirty floor, even over the loud music, causing the patrons to look up from their drinks and games. Innocent bystanders scrambled for cover as Cole grabbed the boy and sent the young man hurling though a flimsy inner wall with inhuman force. A sharp crack shot through the bar as the boy's back snapped with the impact. The ranch hand's two friends advanced on Cole with pole cues, and Cole snarled at them, his crazed face dark and feral.
A minute later the front door shot open as four bouncers hurled Cole out of the bar like a Frisbee. The brutal east wind caught the screen door and it slammed into the wall with a resonating bang. Cole spat out a mouthful of blood, picked himself up, and then stumbled toward the parking lot. The bartender took up residence in the unoccupied doorway, flanked by the shadows of the bouncers behind him. The large jowls of fat shook with rage as two ham sized fists pumped a shogun once, the audible ca-chunk of the shells entering their firing chambers was snatched away on the wind.
"You're not welcome here anymore, Cole!" screamed the fat man over the screeching gale.
Those simple words were good enough for Cole, who with little trouble, found his 1965 Chevrolet C10 pickup. The driver's side door groaned in rusty protest as it was forced open, and sand had found its way through the broken side windows to rest in the dry rotten upholstery. Cole paid no attention as he climbed in and slammed the door shut. He took his non responsive digits and fumbled for the makeshift ignition button hidden underneath the steering column. The engine coughed twice and sputtered to life seconds before Cole slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The rear wheels spun for a few brief moments and tried to find purchase on the loose topsoil. The back wheels threw twin plumes of earth toward the bar before smoke announced the contact of bedrock with old dry rubber, and the truck lurched forward in a beeline for the highway. Several judicial turns of the wheel brought the unwieldy C10 careening into several parked pickup trucks as it smashed its way out of the parking lot.
The C10 screamed onto Highway 85 headed south at well over the speed limit, and Cole checked out his cracked rear view mirror. He was satisfied to see the large sign for Shit Kickers Hideaway recede into the distance. He also noticed a large gash over his right eye, covered in dried blood and crusted red sand. Soon the wound faded away, much like the bloodthirsty butchers in his rear view mirror. He spat out a broken tooth and it rattled around the dashboard before it came to rest somewhere on the passenger side floorboard. A new tooth slid down into the empty, bloody socket as the gum line mended and the ruptured blood vessels sealed themselves with inexplicable speed.
Even though as a child Cole found it odd that he was never seriously injured, the first change took him by surprise. Living alone in the barrens of the badlands during that sixteenth year suited Cole, as he had learned that he could only depend on himself when times were bad. A certain wanderlust took hold of him, and he often found himself among the barren bones of Mother Earth late at night. Cole's only companion during those times was the moon, which washed the badlands of all its vibrant color. One night as the gentle breeze ruffled the patches of grass and stirred his soft fine black hair, the sounds of crickets accompanying the symphony of a typical Wyoming night, he felt the full and bright moon above wash over his flesh, and he changed. Frightened at first, unable to comprehend or sort out the explosion of sound and scent, he ran back and forth across the endless hills as the dry earth crumbled underneath his pads, until he awoke, naked as the day he was born, to the broken pink sky of dawn.
Cole soon realized that his change was like the stunning metamorphosis of the early summer gossamer winged butterfly, equally mysterious, but just as breathtaking. The locals called Cole an eccentric recluse in those next few years, but to Cole it was a period of self discovery, and a realization of just how irreconcilable he was from the world that would not acknowledge him.
For a brief time Cole found refuge with his father and his people at the reservation, but the symbolic allegorical teachings of his dead ancestors held no answers for him. The radical political and social views of his father also led to dissention between the two, and soon Cole found himself back in the remote reaches of the badlands, now more isolated than ever before. It seemed that no culture or crèche would have him, and he wandered the wastes without design or purpose.
A few years later in 1973, Cole's father, along with 200 armed AIM activists, seized the small town of Wounded Knee. During the seventy one day stand off with the FBI, US Marshal's shot and killed him and two other men, wounding several others.
Cole was not known as a political activist, but when four college students were shot on the campus lawn at Kent State in 1970 as they protested an unpopular war, Cole wondered why those students would choose to stand at gunpoint against the status quo, to risk expulsion from a safe majority of acceptance at the very least, and at the worst, an unjust death at the hands of an oppressive and wayward government. Still, when his ticket came up in the 1974 draft, he left home to fight his Uncle's war, not because of some errant sense of duty, but in a vain attempt to belong to something greater than himself.
After Cole took shrapnel in the fall of Saigon he came home not to cheers and parades, but to an impassive and disillusioned county. Cole's veteran status and racial background helped him little in everyday needs and dealings. After a few weeks, even Veteran Services began a long and bitter revocation of his disabled status on the grounds that there was no physical evidence that he had even been injured on that historic eve in 1975. Cole's attempts to make his county, his hometown, even his few neighbors, accept him seemed in vain.
The shrill sound of an approaching siren pulled Cole from his thoughts. Traffic was non existent on Highway 85 at dusk, so the sheriff's patrol car with a pair of flashing red and white lights that barreled toward the bar at ninety was easy to spot. Cole pictured Sheriff Roland's hunting rifle sitting in the patrol car's gun rack behind the sheriff's head, and Cole crushed the C10's accelerator to the floorboard. Roland was oblivious to the grief that his gun triggered in Cole, and had no clue about his involvement in Cole's abrupt lunacy and sudden distain for human life. This fact mattered little to Cole, who yanked the wheel left and swerved into the oncoming patrol car, intent on a head on collision at an estimated 180 miles per hour.
Maybe it was the alcohol, or the several contusions to the head, but Cole had no idea how he missed the patrol car. It was there, one second in front of him, and the next the car disappeared in squeal of tires and a cloud of dust off the shoulder to the left. Cole shot a glance at his rear view and watched as the back end of the patrol car flipped over the front. With a terrific crunch of metal, the car smashed into an embankment and rolled several times before it settled on its side, now nothing more than a ruined mess of scrap.
Had Sheriff Roland survived the crash? Perhaps Roland experienced some of the pain Cole felt now. Roland might be lucky, he might be able to walk again someday, unlike the three monsters Cole left crippled inside the bar. As Cole watched the broken undercarriage of the sheriff's car smolder, a plume of thick, oily smoke poured from the C10's exhaust and caught Cole's attention. Rolls of barbed wire rolled back and forth among makeshift hand tools in the rusted out bed of the Chevy. The faint grinding noise underneath him came from a blown transmission. This would be the C10's, as well as his, last day. The high pitched bee hum of the C10's balding tires on hot and broken asphalt lulled Cole into a hypnotic trance, one where he felt his rage boil up in a dark, ugly place. He had only one person left to kill tonight, the only one who deserved death. As Cole thought about this, he noticed the eyes that looked back at him in that cracked rear view mirror turned from a cold blue to a bright yellow.
In truth Cole did belong to something greater, but only once, and only then for a very brief time. Cole could not cope with this fact on a rational level, and in every tormented moment vehemently denied this simple truth. Sometimes the simplest truth, or the memory of that truth, can hurt far more than the most convoluted lie. The truth is that one fateful spring night, only a month ago, Cole fell in love. It was greater than love to be honest, more beautiful that acceptance, more desirable than lust itself. There, under the twinkling nights of the shimmering Wyoming sky, under the silver rays of the moon, she found him. Reluctant at first to accept this new turn of events, Cole imagined that he had dreamed the whole thing when he had awoke that morning, as he sometimes did. That was until she turned up at Pam's County Dinner that morning for steak and eggs. It was then as he saw her in the center of Lusk, in broad daylight, among this different world, with its cars, buildings, and the quiet musings of small town people doing small town things, that he realized that she was real. She wasn't a plains phantom that had appeared to him, and then was blown away like so much smoke on the unrelenting wind. She instead was there, then, and had asked Cole his name.
Her name was Amelia, and she was a senorita from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Like him, she had been born to mixed heritage, with poor prospects for a decent living. Her golden face seemed to radiate the sun when it touched her dark skin, and her hands had calluses in all the right places, which proved that they knew an honest day's work. Her hair was the color of the hills, faceted and with vibrant colors, and her soft curves defined his opposite. Her eyes, soft and brown, with just a hint of amber, seemed forever lost in sorrow, and reflected a dark and tragic past. Her status as an illegal alien hampered any futile attempts to find decent work in this country, and she held no love loss for the gringos or their nelgas backwards la cagada laws.
Still, she was hesitant to talk about the reasons why she left Las Cruces, but this mattered little to Cole, who spent the days talking to her of the White Sands area and how different they seemed from the Badlands. During the nights he danced with her among the sage under a windswept sky filled with white lightning, with only the ubiquitous prairie dog to witness their courtship.
Cole struggled to convince himself that the last month had been nothing more than a lie, a lie that he could at least accept. Lies, it seems, are born from other lies. When three ranch hands lost several cows over the next few weeks, blame fell to the pair of wolves that roamed the local countryside. The Fish and Wildlife Service never questioned the motives of the ranch hands, or the fact that a large surplus of meat had just entered the local beef market, or the fact that several area butcher shops deposited large sums of money in the ranch hands bank accounts. The reimbursement from the Department of the Interior for the lost cattle had just been icing on the cake. A few nights later Sheriff Roland placed a .207 slug from his Winchester Model 70 rifle, with expert marksmanship, through the right eye of the only thing in this world that gave Cole a purpose. The bullet had splattered her brain across Mother Earth, and without it, Amelia's body could not mend.
Cole now sat in the driver's seat of the C10 and felt the dying motor rumble through the shake of the steering column. He had pulled off Highway 85 onto one of the more scenic side roads, where the cliff offered the best view of the last sunset Cole would ever see, its fiery circle sank below the horizon one last time. Cole had pulled out the bottle of Jose Cuervo he kept in the glove box for special occasions, and none seemed more fitting than now. The bottle now half empty, Cole began to cry. Not for himself, not for his mother or father, but for the fact that yesterday he found his soul mate not dead in a hospital bed, not laid cold in some mortuary, but instead found her pelt strung up on a wall in a taxidermist shop next to a mounted Jackalope, her fur still as soft, warm, and as red as the night he had first touched it.
The Jackalope, the mythic cross between a jack rabbit and an antelope, that jumble of chimerical parts, the aberrant creature that defies classification, inclusion, began as a joke by taxidermist Douglas Herrick in the late 1930's. Others claim that the original Jackalope was displayed in 1829 by the owner of a Douglas hotel, LeRoy Ball. The Oglala Sioux had many legends about the Jackalope, which Cole believed came before all of them, but to the validity of those legends Cole could only guess. The legend goes so far back as the 1500's, where medieval manuscripts from Europe depicted rabbits with horn like growths on their heads. The original Douglas Jackalope disappeared only a few months ago this year from the wall of the Bonte Hotel in Douglas, Wyoming.
There had been far worse in this region this year than simple thieves and liars, and Cole had seen to them. Cole could have killed the butchers and all those in the bar around them for their actions, but the last ultimate lesson Cole's father taught him was that excessive displays of force, no matter the best of intentions, only lead to increasing amounts of suffering and death. There had already been enough of those things here.
And now, as the rising moon began to spill silver light over the C10, the unrelenting gale threw a thin layer of sparkling diamonds over the crumbled hood. Cole decided that the last bit of suffering had to be dealt with. He took a while to ponder where his bones should come to rest. For a moment he considered Wounded Knee, where his father, and his grandfather before him, had died, but decided that if he did not belong with his ancestors in life, he could not belong with them in death. He considered the paleontological dig site near Glenrock, where his bones could lay to rest next to the bones of those gigantic beasts from that primordial time, but once again he decided that he had always existed outside the natural order.
Without warning he threw the C10 in reverse in a squeal of tires and dust. The C10 roared backwards for a few seconds before a screech of the brakes brought the truck to a skidding stop a couple hundred feet from the cliff edge. With an shrill grind of gears, Cole jammed the shifter back into first gear. The truck's battered frame shuddered when the broken drive train caught. Cole emptied the bottle of Jose in one long mouthful, the taste of Tequila mingled with dust, dry blood, and drying tears. He threw the bottle out the window, which shattered on some rocks, before Cole slammed his foot down on the accelerator for the final time. In retrospect of his life, this place was as good as any for Cole to die.
The C10 didn't hesitate this time, as it thundered to life and hit 80mph before it reached the edge of the cliff. The mortally wounded Chevrolet, pale in the moonlight, seemed to sprout the wings of an angel as it sailed off the cliff in a shroud of dust and small stones. At some point the freefall went into slow motion, and Cole watched as the long forgotten tooth began to float in midair in the cab next to him. As the C10's nose began to point to the earth, Cole noticed a slight yaw and rotation in the truck's graceful flight, and the ground, two hundred feet below, seemed to rush forward with amazing speed.
The nose of the truck hit first, and the momentum of the bed tore it away from the engine block in a deafening screech of metal. The reminder of the truck flipped twice, a back wheel flying skywards to the heavens. The cab of the C10, crushed beyond recognition, rolled several times before it came to rest upside down. For a few minutes, the only thing heard was the cry of the wind, which began to bury parts of the dismembered C10 in shallow, unmarked graves.
All of the sudden a dull thud reverberated within the heap of scrap, the sound almost inaudible above the windstorm. A louder, more instant thud came from within a second later, and then the crumbled passenger door tore away from its hinges in a loud bang as it flew through the air and landed thirty feet away. Cole's steel toed work boots appeared at once, the legs straightened from the titanic blow. His blue jeans, now pierced with shards of broken metal, were soaked through with dark blood. Soon the upper half of Cole emerged from the ruins of the truck, and neither were recognizable. Several fingers from his right hand were gone, and the left arm, covered in blood, hung limp at his side, now nothing more than a fleshy holster for pulverized bone. One of Cole's eyes had ruptured; its contents splattered over his broken left cheek. He fell forward clear of the truck with a sickening squish, and he vomited blood and tequila. A loud, inhuman roar of pain and betrayal echoed from the canyon, heard for miles away, even over Father Sky's own anguish, as Cole turned up his shattered face to the silent, full moon above.
Despite his ruined body, Cole crawled away from his steel coffin, and left a trail of blood that saturated the parched earth. Within minutes the trail disappeared, and soon Cole stumbled forward on both feet as he groped the sandy air in front of him. His broken ribs returned to their proper place and sealed his punctured lung. As his treasonous body mended itself, Cole roared toward the sky in defiance and betrayal. His clothes ripped away as the moon funneled his rage into something misshapen, aberrant, that had the head of a wolf, but walked on two legs. He had become a Jackalope.
The thing tore at the earth, even the sky, and howled in unfathomable despair as it sensed death had been taken from it, the last refuge from the misery of this life. Finally, Mother Earth had mercy on him, and an answering howl drifted on the back of the wind. Stunned, the Jackalope turned toward the merciful cry. From out of the swirling sands of the storm came a pale phantom, taking the same gargantuan shape.
For a brief second, the doppelganger and its twin looked at each other, the space between them almost like a mirror in the sand. Without warning, the agile, fierce beasts lurched forward and slashed and snapped at each other, circling one another in one last final, graceful dance. Father Sky gave one last long howl, and then died.