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men, making them cringe involuntarily and raising the hair on their necks. The smell of ozone filled the air. The super-heated juniper exploded into pieces and the sand on the ground around it turned to glass. The thorn bush caught fire and maintained a steady, fierce flame.
    The tall, muscular scurve, with his hieroglyphic brands and leaky eye, held out his hand. “How,” he said in a deep, soft tone, and then cleared his throat.
    “How,” answered John quickly, holding his hand up, palm out in what he guessed would pass for a proper greeting.
    “You did not let me finish,” said Three Tooth, clearing his throat again. “How…do you do? My name is Three Tooth. I’ve been watching you. My men and I are here to help.”
    “I’m John. And I guess I do just fine. We’ve seen you up on the ridges watching us. Haven’t we, Santiago?”
    But Santiago did not answer. He was already settled Indian style in the middle of a dirt-rat colony, catching the rodents and snuffing them out. Consumed by his ever-present hunger, Santiago showed no interest in Three Tooth and his crew. John noticed a sneer on Santiago’s face that did not coincide with the pleasure he usually derived from killing dirt-rats. Santiago would not look over toward Three Tooth or his men. His concentration on the dirt-rats seemed more intense than usual and appeared to be intentional disregard of the newcomers.
    Three Tooth stood with his arms crossed, waiting for John to say more. John studied Three Tooth and his men, not knowing exactly what to make of their strange appearance. His brain felt thick, slow, atrophied. All he had been doing was walking, and eating dirt-rats and pinyon nuts, and sleeping and walking some more for forty days and forty nights. And it was as if the repetitive, rhythmic thud of his feet on the ground had shut his brain down, making him only slightly more thoughtful than the mindless lunkheads that he and Santiago occasionally encountered. He had forgotten his journey and that he was a stranger in a strange land and that he had at some point lived some other life (about which he was still entirely clueless). Three Tooth’s appearance jabbed at a sensitive spot in John’s brain, shocking him back to complete consciousness. And John found himself once again wondering who he was, where he was, why he was, and what he used to be.
    And Three Tooth stood, tall and stiff, waiting for something. In the distance, Two-Dogs-Fucking spread out on the desert floor and napped, his ragged inhalations hitching and signaling to his body that maybe he had done enough and it was time to call it quits. Alf the Sacred Burro sat on his haunches like a dog, flicking his ears at a large black munkle fly that flitted about and pestered him. Bald patches on the donkey’s hide – worn there by time and mistreatment and (sometimes) his own teeth – marked his many misfortunes and hardships. A bullet scar on Alf’s right hindquarter memorializes an old friendship. Ruminating on his life (a donkey lives a long time), Alf dredged up a foul shit-brown lump from his stomach and horked it onto the desert floor. Throws-Like-Girl, Crazy Talk, and Heap-o-Buffaloes, now tired from the ghost dance, settled on a downed tree. They passed their pipe, never having to light it, and bounced their-heads to a beat that only they could hear. Crazy Talk picked up Alf’s hairy, brown, charcoal-briquette-sized throat-lump, clicked a fingernail on it, and put it in his pocket. “Bezoar,” he said. “Sunny fish melon jelly balling the jack at the meat wagon now.” Throws-Like-Girl and Heap-o-Buffaloes nodded their heads and smiled.
    A flurry of questions swirled around inside John’s head like a dust devil, picking up random debris and then violently casting it aside, only to pick up more of the wreckage of his psyche and toss it about. Gripped by a new yearning to learn about his situation, John resumed his conversation with Three Tooth. “So what’s the deal? Why