Dragoon Delirium Keith Allen Dennis

Ever wipe your ass with a hot rock? I did once. Once. It must have been 140 degrees. Tried in vain to get all the sand off by hand. I had no spit left to help me. I squat in the middle of a hot dirt road on the West side of the Dragoon Mountains in Southeast Arizona, with a shimmering view of Tombstone, many miles away. My friend, Roadkill Bill, who got me into this mess, had graciously walked down around the bend. The sky was a blank canvas of stark blue against a 7,000-foot-high pile of wind-worn, orange megaliths. The merciless sun was all the heavens could hold. It was the middle of a bone-dry May — no shade, no sign of the monsoon clouds still to come, and hot as holy hell. Roadkill Bill is a filmmaker, engineer, drummer, and an all- around mad scientist. You can find some of his work online, awful movies like the Bisbee Cannibal Club, Bisbee Cuisine, and the one from which he got his name, A Roadkill Cautionary Tale. The cast of the latter were roadkill Muppets which Bill scraped off the pavement himself and stuck in a freezer until he had a full cast of rabbits, squirrels, and a coyote. No living animals were harmed in the making of this disturbing piece of asphalt camp. In addition to delightfully bad filmmaking, Roadkill Bill also makes what one might call animatronic sculpture. Like Daisy, forged from a found and mostly complete cow skeleton, which dispensed cheap wine through remote-controlled, five-liter Franzia “udders.” Or Guero, a remote-controlled skeleton that pedals a bicycle up and down the street on special occasions like Day of the Dead. He’s a weird cat. Bill drove an olive drab green Jeep CJ-4 from the mid-80s. “Bite Me” spelled out in chicken bones wired to the front grill. We had already taken a jeep run or three up into the Mule Mountains above Bisbee. “But we really gotta go up in the Dragoons, up to China Peak,” he said. “It’ll be fun,” he said.

He picked me up at my house in Old Bisbee and we headed out, blasting the Butthole Surfers on Bill’s iPod. We drove down through Banning Canyon out of the magic Mule Pass tunnel that separates Bisbee from the rest of the universe. Then onto the town of Tombstone, past the men and women in period garb, six shooters and chaps, and Victorian dresses. The town is a set-piece of living history, a monument to the Old West served to order out of hot iron. Actors relive the famous gunfight at the OK Corral every weekend, and all day in saloons televisions play the 1993 movie that made Tombstone famous. Past Tombstone on Highway 80, we turned east on Middlemarch Road towards the Dragoons, just shy of the Border Patrol checkpoint that stops all northbound travelers. Middlemarch is a good forty feet wide, all dirt and wash crossings and cattle guards. When we got close enough, we headed north towards the radiant orange granite face of the Dragoons and started a gradual climb. The Dragoon Mountains are home to the Cochise Stronghold, a labyrinthine fortress of cyclopean granite boulders. In these mountains the Apache leader Cochise lived, made war, made peace and eventually died of old age — under an expansive house arrest. China Camp was an abandoned mine from the 1880s on the south side of this small range, and China Peak, at just over 7,000 feet, got its name from the camp. That was our aim. “I haven’t been up here in years!” Roadkill yelled over the music. “Never been at all!” I shot back. The road ascended and ascended some more. We stopped at a spot where huge vertical stacks of boulders shot up on either side, with a pass between just narrow enough for the road. Flanking the path were enormous piles and pillars of smooth igneous rock. We passed through a narrow passage, just wide enough to run my hand along the sandpaper stones guarding the pass. They looked like giants from ages past, petrified in place, proud faces blasted away by eons of relentless wind. The tight passage opened up to a grassy meadow surrounded on all sides by cliffs. Fire rings from old campsites were scattered here and there.

The road ascended and ascended some more, turning into increasingly tight switchbacks on the approach to China Peak. Scrubby pin oaks and pinion pines no more than eight feet clung desperately to the mountainside, above and below the cliff formed by a one-lane jeep trail. On a tight switchback high up towards China Peak, Roadkill’s Jeep spun out on loose rock. He backed the Jeep down and tried again twice with no luck. The road was too steep. “I really need some new tires,” he said. I stuck my head out and looked at the passenger side rear tire. It was bald as a bureaucrat. No tread. Bill decided to give up on going any higher and tried a reverse, twopoint turn to get us facing downhill again. We were going to just go back to the meadow. But the Jeep, and the loose dirt and rock underneath, had other plans. We got stuck with the Jeep facing the edge of the road and the cliff beyond it. The front driver’s side tire was maybe 18 inches from the edge, and the rear tires were in a rut that deepened when he gunned the engine. We got loose boards and junk out of the back of the Jeep, gathered sticks and rocks and stuck them under the tire. He took out an old army surplus folding shovel and we dug out soil to pack into the rut for traction. We worked at this for a good half hour, but with each push, the Jeep got closer to the edge of the cliff. By the time we gave up, the Jeep was blocking the road entirely, and that tire was right there, right on the edge, ready to take the whole thing down the mountain if you kicked it hard enough. We sat pondering the odds that the small pinion pines and oak trees might break its fall before it got out of hand. We figured it would probably fall some fifteen feet before these stunted clingers broke its fall — if it didn’t roll right over everything. But neither one of us wanted that, least of all Roadkill. He loves his Jeep, loves taking crazy roads out in God knows where, and now his baby was literally pointing right at a cliff with one wheel cartoonishly close to just hanging out in the air over a cliff.

We didn’t want to leave the Jeep. But the sun already had us about medium rare. We had to get out of there. Bill reached in his toolbox and brought out a bright yellow nylon tow-cable with black metal hooks on either end. He tied one end to the rear bumper and tied the other end to the only thing within reach: a stunted oak growing out of the roadside, the trunk not five inches thick. It was more placebo than a guarantee. If the Jeep went over this twig was going with it. And…we walked. The road descended and descended some more. I looked up at the sun and let out a long, high screech, in imitation of old westerns where a quick shot at a screeching sun set the scene for men stumbling sun-drunk through pitiless deserts. It would do no good to leave the road for the trees, for the trees were glorified shrubs that would spare us no shade. The stubby pinion needles were no help, and the largest oak leaves were maybe the size of a thumb – too small, as it happened, to serve as toilet paper in case of emergency. Hence the hot rock. I mustered what little spit I could and tried to get the sand off, but sure enough I didn’t get it all. And so there I was, in a compromising position in the middle of a dirt road watching Tombstone, some twenty miles away. The orange boulders up and down the mountain were starting to look, and feel, like great burning coals. “This is ridiculous,” I said aloud to the little patch of civilization in the distance, quaking through layers of high desert heat. The road descended and descended some more. Later, I would retrace our steps with a map and estimate our hike back to Middlemarch Road at around thirteen miles. We were out of water, had no sunscreen, just sunglasses and short sleeves, Roadkill’s .45, and a pack of smokes. Making it back to Middlemarch boosted our spirits. But not by much. We were probably one third the way to Tombstone. There was nothing to do but to keep on walking, so we did. A few minutes into this second act a Border Patrol truck approached from the East, as the backroads of this region are fairly crawling with them. A smuggler looking to dodge the Highway 80 checkpoint

by heading east on Middlemarch would have to contend with these roving patrols. We’d hoped to see one, and we didn’t have to wait long. We laughed and stuck out our thumbs. The green-clad Federale in the passenger seat rolled down his window and looked at us through rainbow-tinted sunglasses. “You gentlemen alright?” Roadkill did the talking. “My Jeep got stuck up by China Camp. We had to hike down out of the mountains. Can you give us a ride to the Circle K in Tombstone? We don’t have a phone and we need to find a ride back to Bisbee.” The officer took on that bureaucratic “it is what it is” wince and shook his head. “Unfortunately, sir, we’re not allowed to give rides. But we can give you some water, though.” “OK!” I broke my silence at the offer of water. He produced two 12 ounce plastic bottles and two red apples. I emptied mine in one long pull and got to work on the apple, stem and all, leaving naught but seeds. “Sorry we can’t be more help. Good luck, guys.” He went back towards his truck, and, just then, I stumbled and fell back, landing right on my sand-blasted ass. I think I must have had sunstroke. They had already noticed I was talking funny, but when I hit the ground I won them over. The officer got on his radio as he walked back towards his truck. A moment later he approached us again. His partner got out of the driver’s seat. “Alright, we got the go ahead to give you guys a ride. We can drop you off at the Circle K. Do you have any weapons?” “I have a pistol on me,” Roadkill said. “We are going to ask that you let us hold it in the cab while you two ride in the back. We’ll give it back when we’re done.” Roadkill Bill handed it over and the officer stashed it. They gave us each another bottle of water and opened the back of their “paddy wagon.” The backs of most BP trucks have a compartment that from the outside looks a bit like a dog catcher’s truck.

There is a nice, air-conditioned stainless steel compartment in the back with a bench above each wheel well. It felt great in there. We sucked our second water bottles down as the men closed the door. There were no windows, just vents, but it was obvious we were moving pretty fast over this loose dirt road. The truck rattled as we passed over the tight washboard pattern left by last year’s rains. I bounced off the seat and hit my head on the ceiling a couple times before taking cover on the floor. Roadkill talked about getting a tow truck with a winch to rescue his Jeep, while I marveled at the fact that we had managed to hitchhike our way into a ride in the back of a Border Patrol truck. We joked about being the only Americans to ever sit on those seats. Twenty minutes later the door opened and the villainous sun again smiled on us, drowning the steel compartment and slamming our eyes shut. Across the road we could see the white painted stones in the shape of a “T” on Tombstone’s low-slung “T Hill.” We spilled out into the Circle K parking lot, in the gunfighter capitol of the USA. A cowboy in a ten-gallon hat, six gun on his hip, opened the door for a couple of bikers as we staggered to the payphone. Roadkill made a call and an hour later a friend arrived in a beat up white Ford Probe. We stuffed ourselves in and soon we were back in Bisbee. She dropped us off at the Grand Saloon on Main Street, where we got ourselves a round of Agwa, a neon green Bolivian coca leaf liqueur shaken with ice and lime — Roadkill’s beverage of choice in those days. We deliriously told all takers our adventure, and the agua and the Agwa kept coming. Mostly we just stared off into space. The next day, an anxious Roadkill Bill made his way back to his Jeep, and to his great relief, it was still there. Still hanging by its placebo-thread stretched taut over the road, tied to a mangled oak sapling too close to the road for its own good. He hitched a ride on the late, great David Rogers’ tow truck. They set it right, and Bill drove it back to town. Me, I had a raccoon-sunburn from wearing sunglasses on a 13mile hike, eye to eye with the sun. Face and arms blistered and

peeled. A week of dandruff from a blistered scalp. Lips flaked like bark from a dead oak. Long past medium rare, I felt more like beef jerky for the next few days. And for its trouble, Roadkill Bill’s “Bite Me” Jeep got a new set of tires that very week. And all was well.