About the book
Newly released from a
mental institution, Simple’s first job is caring for Emmett, a crusty drunkard
dying of cancer on a ranch in Utah. Simple’s first fragile friendship is with
Emmett’s grandson Jude, a gay youth in Gothic drag who gets nothing but grief
from his grandfather. In an attempt to help both men, Simple, a Shoshone
Indian, decides to perform a ceremony that will save Emmett by transferring his
spirit into the body of a falcon.
Working to capture a
falcon will bring Emmett and Jude closer as Jude and Simple’s growing love for
each other blossoms, but all is not well. When the ranch, Jude’s future, and
Simple’s happiness are threatened, more than Emmett’s spirit faces a bleak
future.
An excerpt from
the book
Chapter One
IN THE faint flush of
predawn, a Kenworth sixteen-wheeler topped a ridge, forty miles east of Saint
George, Utah. With only a half load to hinder it, the rig barreled along the
interstate at twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. The driver hoped to
make Las Vegas in time for breakfast. The truck rumbled on, unrelenting.
Simple rode shotgun,
staring at a dusting of lights that looked like a pocketful of stars cast
across a vast and lonely mesa. The iridescent specks reminded him of flickering
candles at a funeral, although he had no memory of ever attending one, and he
wondered if that metaphor was some ominous sign of what lay waiting for him in
Saint George.
He had stayed awake all
night, too excited to sleep. His eyes burned, and his mouth felt parched. He
wanted a drink, but his water bottle was stashed deep in the backpack that
rested on the floorboard, between his feet. Outside, the crowns of cottonwoods,
tinged pink with the coming dawn, appeared to be pasted upon a gunmetal-gray
landscape. With his peripheral vision, he saw the rearview mirror reflect beams
of pale orange light that now chased him across the mesa.
The driver, Dale McNally,
a high-school dropout with rough manners and rougher speech, couldn’t keep his
eyes open any longer. His eyelids drifted toward his cheeks at about the same
rate as the Kenworth swerved off the highway. When the right front tire gouged
into the skim of gravel on the highway shoulder, Simple grabbed McNally’s thigh
and shook it. McNally’s eyes popped open, blinked. He eased the rig back onto
the blacktop.
McNally had his sleeves
rolled up to his elbows, showing the thick, ropy muscles of his forearms. He
wore a cowboy hat with a rattlesnake-skin band. The dashboard’s lights cast an
eerie glimmer across his face, and a thatch of dark hair spread out below his
hat, covering his ears and hanging over his frayed collar.
“Christ sakes,” McNally
barked, “I picked you up so’s you could keep me awake. Help me out here, boy.”
That happened often.
Simple was twenty-five years old—a stoic ranch-hand life had made him look
closer to thirty—but even men his own age, like McNally, called him boy, son,
or kid.
“How?” Simple asked,
suspiciously.
“I didn’t mean that. You
made yourself perfectly clear about that.”
Simple relaxed.
“Talk to me. Do
somersaults on the hood if you have to; just keep me awake.”
Simple cracked his
passenger window an inch, enough for a frosty breeze to whistle through the
cab. He stared out the windshield, silent as a stone, trying to think of
something to say.
“Someone should invent an
electrical device for drivers to wear under their hats,” Simple said, “to zap
their balls whenever they get drowsy. It could trigger from the change in blood
pressure at the temples when the eyelids start to fall.”
Dale snarled, “Don’t be
talkin’ about my balls if you ain’t goin’ to do anything ’bout ’em.”
Simple changed the
subject, babbling on about the city lights mirroring the stars on the horizon.
The hypnotic cadence of his voice made McNally yawn, a
mouth-stretched-wide-open yawn, that pulled his eyes off the road for a
dangerously long time. His eyelids became heavy again, drifted to half-mast,
then closed altogether. His head leaned forward, and the Kenworth wandered into
the oncoming lane.
Headlights from a tour bus
illuminated the cab like a prolonged flash of lightning. The light triggered a
memory in Simple’s head. Blinding light, someone grabs a handful of Simple’s
hair and yanks his head back while four men wearing white scrubs hold his arms
and legs. He fights with all his will, but they overpower him. A voice bellows
in his head, “Get his pants down.” Clothes are ripped away. The orderly holding
his hair positions himself between Simple’s naked legs. Simple hears the echo
of harsh laughter.
Simple shook the image
from his head. He grabbed McNally’s thigh again and barked, not really a word,
but rather a harsh warning.
McNally’s eyes flew open
and he jerked the wheel to the right. The Kenworth swerved back into its lane,
and McNally struggled to keep it from careening out of control. “I’m telling
you, boy, you got to help me. Talk to me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what an Indian
boy like you is runnin’ from.”
“I ain’t running from; I’m
running to.” One of Simple’s clearest childhood memories was constantly
sneaking away from home with a library book under his arm. He felt the need to
read alone, so that his family and the other kids wouldn’t tease him. Reading
was not what boys did on the reservation. But he did. He had a favorite
hideaway, in the cool shade of cottonwoods near the creek, where he would read
the days away in the company of Twain, Hemingway, London, and Melville. But
late in the afternoons, he would hear a door slam, and his mother’s voice
calling the family to dinner. Then he would run, lickety-split, back to the
house. All too often, by the time Simple had rushed to the kitchen, his
grandfather was slathering the last ear of corn with butter, saying, “Too late,
bookworm.” Simple would stare forlornly at the empty serving dish. Although
Simple had few memories left, he suspected that he had been running all his
life, that he was still running, as fast as possible, trying to claim that last
ear of sweet corn.
“Shit,” Dale spat. “Even a
knuckle scraper like me can see that you’re fresh out of prison. All your
clothes still have the K-Mart tags.”
Simple lifted his arm and
saw a price tag dangling from his cuff. He ripped it away and searched for a
place to trash it.
Dale said, “Toss it out
the window.”
Simple stuffed the tag in
his shirt pocket. “I don’t remember much, only that they had me locked up. Not
prison, some kind of clinic, but I have a job waiting for me in Saint George—”
Simple pulled a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and read by
the light of the dashboard, “—working for Lance Bishop.”
“Why do they call you
Simple?”
“My grandfather named me
that to always remind me that a warrior’s life is filled with simple
treasures.”
“Could be worse,” Dale
scoffed. “Be thankful he didn’t name you after Buttface Canyon, Nevada.”
“Sing me a song,” Simple
said. “That will keep you awake.”
“I only know hymns, from
when my mama took me to church.”
“Works for me.”
Nodding, McNally cleared
his throat and bellowed, “‘Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood
was shed for me.’”
Dale’s whiskey-tenor voice
soared over the engine’s growl. The tune was uncomplicated, with trilling and
mournful notes, resembling both music and a sorrowful cry. It reminded Simple
of a Shoshone death chant that his grandfather sang the day Simple’s parents
died. He loved the way the long, flowing vowels tumbled from McNally’s lips,
like a river meandering through a forest. Simple heard each tone and also the
slices of silence separating the notes. It sounded stark and sometimes
discordant, yet staggeringly beautiful.
IN THE gritty bedroom of a
rundown trailer house, an alarm clock buzzed. Jude Elder’s head swiveled on a
pillow, his body folded into a fetal position. He came awake and looked around
the room, confused. He cleared his congested throat and banged the alarm off.
He flipped on a bedside
lamp, squinted. Rings adorned his lower lip, nose, eyebrow, and a half-dozen
crawled up one ear. His mascara was ghoulishly smudged. He rolled off the bed,
stepped over a pile of laundry, and staggered to the doorway. As he opened the
door, light from the hallway lamp revealed dozens of angry red scars
crisscrossing Jude’s torso and belly.
His head hurt too much to
think. He focused all his attention on not falling over.
He tottered to the shower
and turned on the water. As steam rose, he stepped in, grabbed his dick, and
began to masturbate—eyes closed, mouth ajar. Soon his hips bucked and his mouth
twisted into a look of quasi-sexual pain. He opened his eyes and they rolled
back. He groaned.
Moments later, with both
his hands covering his face, he began to sob.
He lifted a razor blade
from the soap dish and sliced two lines across his chest. Blood trickled over
his pasty torso as tears streamed down his cheeks.
A few minutes later, Jude
ambled down the hallway into his choky little kitchen. He had wrapped a towel
around his waist, bandages covering his fresh wounds. He opened the
refrigerator and snatched a Budweiser longneck, twisting the cap off and
downing half. He seized a prescription bottle and shook the few remaining pills
into his palm, knocking them back and washing them down with more beer. He
tossed the two empty bottles into a sink filled with dirty dishes.
Jude grabbed another Bud
from the fridge and cracked it open.
In the bedroom, Jude
sifted through the pile of soiled clothes. He stepped into a pair of boxer
shorts, his only pair of jeans, socks, and cowboy boots. He lifted a white
shirt from the pile, sniffed the underarms, and tossed it aside. He picked up
another, sniffed, tossed it. The third and last he didn’t bother to sniff. He
laced his arms into the sleeves and buttoned it up.
He jerked a roach from an
ashtray beside the bed, fired it up, inhaled, and downed more beer. He took
another hit, then strolled back to the bathroom to reapply his eye makeup. In
the mirror, he only looked at his eyes as he painted his mask. He couldn’t bear
to see the rest of his face or the scars at the base of his neck.
On his way to the front
door, Jude lifted a ring of keys off a plate on the kitchen table, then he
stopped in front of a mynah bird chained to a perch beside the door. He
snatched a food carton and shoveled seeds into the bird’s bowl.
“Loser! Loser!” the bird
cawed.
“Now you sound like my dad,
shithead,” Jude said.
“Loser!”
Alan Chin
Novels:
Island Song, The Lonely War, Match Maker, Butterfly's Child
Short
Works: Haji's Exile, Simple Treasures
Screenplays:
Daddy’s Money, Simple Treasures, Flying Solo
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