Elantu Baiat Veovode

Long Neck Ending to a Short Career

            Laris Cooper had his final encounter with the Denver Police a month before our fourth anniversary. Emmett was thirteen.  For once, Laris wasn't doing anything.  He was just being himself.  It was enough.
            Seems John Law was looking for a tall, well-built man with long, black hair and full leathers.  Swing a stick in Denver, eh.  Nothing in the description said to look for the guy walking down East Colfax with a redhead, but that didn't slow them down.  Three carloads of cops pulled up beside us and got out barking orders.  The first cop yelled, "Don't make a move!", and the second one said,  "Turn around slowly!"  Laris turned around quickly and they shot him twice in the heart.  I would've thought that once was enough. 
He was holding an empty, long-necked beer bottle.  He didn't know it was empty or he would've pitched it.  When he turned around, all the cops saw was a man who fit the description holding something dark with a barrel on the end of it.  They shot him dead.  In the meantime, about a mile down the road, the man who had murdered his wife and daughter made a clean getaway.
Me and Laris had been fighting before that young cop pulled the trigger on my husband.  Laris wanted to hit another bar where he had some friends he was looking forward to beating up. I wanted to go home.  He had been yelling at me and all I could think was, Stop Yelling at Me.  He did.  He was standing there, waiting for me to argue with him, but I didn't have the energy.  His ride was parked beside us.  We were that close to being gone.  The only thing stopping us was me.
We were just standing there when the cops started barking orders.  Laris turned around quick because he was mad at me.  He turned around because he didn't want anybody butting in when he was so close to winning one.  He turned around, there was an explosion - bright and loud - and then I opened my eyes and my husband was lying on the ground, dead.  There was blood all over the place and more arriving every second.  It was eleven thirty-seven, so they tell me.  All I knew at the time was that it was too late.
They tell me that I didn't utter a sound.  I remember screaming.  I remember screaming at Laris to yell at me again.  Please.  Please, husband, get up and yell at me.  I was still standing there, staring at Laris as his body began to blur when a cop rushed up and hand-cuffed me.
Captain Arthur McKay himself came to the house to apologize to me
"I'm so sorry, Sunny."  Big Mac said to me, as if his gesture meant anything one way or another.  Sorry was what I wanted before somebody pulled the trigger on my husband.  Sorry with my husband's blood on the sidewalk and his body in the ground just meant that somebody had figured out that they had fucked up.  Captain McKay told me that the boy who pulled the trigger thought he was looking at a man who had just killed his wife.  That's not what he saw.  Laris had his back to the man who killed him.  That cop was looking at me just before he killed my husband.  He saw a woman with a face that was tired of arguing.  He saw me hoping Laris would shut up and go away.  If I had been smiling at my husband, if me and Laris had been holding hands, that boy would not have pulled the trigger.  My face killed my husband.  The boy with the gun just pulled the trigger.
We buried Laris in full leathers, complete with the fatal bullet holes.  It was part of the package.  I wanted to cremate him so I could keep his ashes close, but his grandpa put a stop to it.  They cremated Laris' mom when she died of cancer.  Grandpa Kermit said Laris cried and cried over that bottle of ashes.  Kermit said that Laris was afraid of the fire.  We buried Laris is Durango, in the Cooper family plot.  They don't own much, those Coopers, but they've been in Durango long enough to own a big family plot.  There's so many of those Coopers in there.  Too many of them.
            When me and Emmett got home from the funeral, we started packing our things to move again.  I didn't know where we'd go, but I couldn't stand to look at the house.  Turns out I couldn't stand to leave it either.  Emmett inherited Laris' Harley, a garage full of parts, an ancient Gibson guitar, three knives, a pistol and a collection of furniture marked with whiskey stains and knife scars.  We packed my pine-cone collection and Emmett's sea shells and we settled into the house with our incomplete boxes around us. While we were at the funeral, Laris' friends cut the lock on the garage and helped themselves to the parts and some of his tools, but they left his bike alone and nobody wanted the furniture but me and Emmett.
            Cradled safely in my boxesI had those four letters Laris wrote me.  Four letters that made me so mad that I came back to Denver to marry him.  The first three were variations of, "Baby where are you.  Get yourself back here, damnit."  I didn't pay those three any mind.  Hadn't I been hearing that from him since the first time I took off after he broke my heart.  There was always some slut he was apologizing to me over.  I'd heard it so many times I could have written those letters myself.  Nobody but Laris could've written the letter that talked me into marrying him.  I almost buried that fourth letter with him so God would know to let my husband into heaven.  I settled on leaving his ring on his finger and writing a little note that I stuck in the pocket of his jacket.  Grandma Dyan says he's a shoe-in for heaven because of the way he died.  I wrote my little note so that God would see that nothing Laris ever did was so bad.  He was just fucked-up was all.  He was just the man that God and the Arapaho Country Jail had made of him and nobody else.
            A month passed before I stopped screaming at myself in the mirror.  Seemed appropriate.  I couldn't go to sleep until eleven thirty-seven had come and gone.  At eleven thirty-eight, I could scream at myself until I was hoarse and tired.  Then I could sleep.  Sometimes I would get to sleep.  I screamed at the face in the mirror that had killed my husband.  One night, a month after the funeral, I broke the glass with my fist.  I shattered the hated face so I wouldn't have to forgive her.  After that, I started sleeping again.
At eleven thirty-six, I didn't like my husband much.  I well and truly tried to love him, but the truth is, I never liked him.  By eleven thirty-eight, I never loved anybody more excepting Emmett.  Laris Cooper's wrongful death backed over my heart and the next day I threw away the glue.  I didn't want it fixed.  I didn't want it at all.
I had a small copy made of my favorite photo of Laris and put it into my wallet next to the one of Harper Rook that I had never managed to throw away.  I kept Harp in there to remind me that I wasn't worth loving, not yesterday and not today.
My old friend Emerald Harris read of Laris' death in the papers.  Seems he had a spread from coast to coast.  His few minutes of fame.  I got a letter post-marked Port Angeles.  She sent me her love and her prayers.  She was still trekking across the country looking for the peaceful ending.  And I was thinking, give it up, Babe, it's not out there.  It's not even in here, but of course she couldn't hear me.  She still believed in the dream whereas I believed in dreams, alright, I just didn't think they were worth chasing.  Not if you wanted to get a good night's sleep.
Me and Emmett spent a long winter clearing the house of things that hurt.  We both played Laris' guitar now and again, but we gathered up his oily shirts and jeans and burned them in the fire pit.  We threw a Mexican blanket over the sofa.  The stains Laris left on it were for us alone.  Nobody else should be looking at our furniture and asking questions.  Nobody did.  I considered going back to school long enough to get a degree in criminology.  I was in good shape and I figured that I could hire on at the police force easy enough.  With a legal gun, I could shoot a couple of people who were asking for it.  Emerald Harris's disapproving face visited me in my dreams and talked me out of it.  That's for the better I guess.  The folks I wanted to shoot were cops.  The phrase, "above it all" kept coming to me in my dreams, so I took up hang-gliding instead.
I met the hang-gliding crew on the cliffs called the Flatirons that brood on the edge of the mountains to the west of Boulder.  It's hard to get up there, but when you do, it's worth the work.  The cliffs come so nearly straight up that there's a prevailing current of air rushing up from the ground.  That rising plume of hot air climbs the cliffs quickly like its in a hurry to get somewhere else.  It's nearly impossible to fall over the edge.  The wind pushes you back.  The hang-gliders loved it because you could launch yourself with a run and fly for miles.  I loved it because there were voices in it.  Laris, my mom, even the fetus I never let get big enough to be a baby mixed their voices with the wind rushing up from the plains.  That wind is a conduit to heaven. Every voice that ever died to the folks on Earth rushes upward with the wind and the Flatirons is one place that you can hear them really well.  I liked standing there hearing them.  I wondered if I'd kept that first baby and married Laris if things would have turned out different.  If I'd married Laris when I was sixteen and raised our first child with him, then I wouldn't have left him for Morgan and I wouldn't have left Morgan for Santa Fe.  If I had married Laris when I was sixteen, then I wouldn't have met Harper Rook and my face wouldn't have killed my husband.  If I didn't know any better, would I have learned to love Laris Cooper?  I never loved Laris.  I was passionate about him.  Not the same thing.  I figured out that when passion is that strong, then there never is enough.  If it hurts so good as that, how can you ever get enough?
Passion, n. 1. Feelings or emotions as those common to all men: fear; hate; love; joy.  2. Boundless enthusiasm. An abandoned display of emotion.  3. Capacity of being affected by external forces.  4. The enduring of inflicted pain.  5. The sufferings of a martyr.  6.  An overwhelming feeling that one man can make a difference, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
He made a difference in the beginning and in the end, he made more of a difference than anyone, including me, would have thought.
At first, I stood or lay on the edge of the cliff and listened to the wind for hours without moving.  I wanted to get closer, but I didn't want to fall.  I figured that Morgan would look after Emmett if something happened to me, but I didn't want to cause any more hurt to my child.  It's bad enough to have Laris Cooper for your daddy without having to lose him to the cops.  I knew how Emmett would feel if he lost his Ma as well cause I know how I felt when it happened to me.  No way was I going to visit lost and desperate on my beautiful boy.  I started taking a rope with me so I could play with the wind and not put myself into any real danger.  With the rope tied around my waist, a big knot tied in the end that I held in my hands and the rope looped around a big tree behind me, I could lean over the edge, into the mouth of the wind itself, hang there until my arms began to tire and then pull myself upright again.  I got good at it.  I liked it that much.  With the wind in my face and all those voices rushing past my ears I could sing my song and nobody could hear me but the dead.  Two or three times a week, I added my prayers to the voices of the dead.  That's where it belonged and nowhere else.
The hang-gliders thought I was falling when they came over the crest and saw me dangling there.  They grabbed the rope and nearly pulled it out of my hands.  It's a good thing that I didn't really want to die that day, is all I can say about that.  They tell me that I called them a pack of ignorant slapnuts and threatened to throw them one and all into the wind, but I don't remember saying any of that.  Mostly, when they found out that I was playing a game, they wanted to try it.  I had found the "double-dog dare me" crew of the hang-glider community.  Good news.  I could use a few expendable friends.
The City of Boulder had a law against hang-gliding off the Flatirons, but nobody much paid any attention to it.  The law was just on the books to protect the city in the event that somebody launched and flew into the ten second interval that arrives once or twice a year to refresh the cycle of the wind.  For that brief moment, the wind rushes down with all the intensity that it was rushing up with a moment before.  The reversal doesn't last long, but its long enough for a flyer to make it to the ground hard.  The earth comes up quick when you have a helping hand.  When it happens, there's not much down there that can be picked up with anything but a shovel.  None of that ever stopped the "double-dog dare me crew" from launching.  I liked their attitude.  I learned the knack of listening to the wind building to a peak and then running into it, over the edge and out into space.  If the wind was high enough, you never made it to the edge before you were picked off in mid-stride and swept into the sky.  When I was up there, floating out of reach of the pain beneath my feet, I thought I might escape the knot in my heart.  The earth blurred, the grass with the trees with the fields with the houses and shops.  Nothing down there made any difference.  The money in the banks was less important than the dirty paper blowing in the gutters.  The cars and houses were just dead matter, doomed to rot, were rotting, were never part of the game, could never make a difference.  The people tossing away life and love like candy wrappers could die or go blind and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the wind.  The wind would blow out over the plains and leave them behind with no heartache, no regret.  No memory would sail away with it.  When I was flying, the world was my toilet and I could flush it away at will.  No loss and no lack of will.
I guess I was asking for it.  The universe never lets me turn my head without I get a good slap for my insolence.  The wind even helped.  What are friends for, eh.
August in the foothills roared in and heated up early that year.  We had streams that carried us halfway to Lafayette and reversals that came near to sucking us down.  We kept a watcher on the edge so warnings could be shouted, but more than once, a runner had to hit the deck at the last minute to save himself.  It was a raucous year for hang-gliding in the Flatirons.  On the tenth, I caught the breath of God and flew away with it.  Ten.  Ten for the strength of the divine.  Ten for the balance of light and dark.  Eight for August.  Eight for fate.  Eight for teaching uppity querists a lesson in manners.  I was up so high that Boulder floated beneath me, a memory of life.  The plains south of Longmont, yellow from late winter, tender green for spring, brown from the touch of the farmer's hand, blended their colors in the distance, ringing the changes.  I don't know where I came down, but the place I landed didn't have any semblance of the divine about it, unless it was the voice of divine resistance.  Certainly it resisted my attempts to land in one piece.  A sudden shear caught me about six yards off the ground and slammed me into it.  Done with me, it dashed away and left me lying there wondering what I ever saw in hang-gliding.  I managed to inflate my balloon and released it to dangle towards the sky on its tether.  After that, all I had to do was try to count my bones and wait for somebody to bring the truck and pick me up.  I found myself hoping that they didn't forget the shovel.  I watched the birds of the grasslands wing by over my head and I thought of Emmett and his drawings of birds.  Those drawings were beautiful and sensitive, like my boy.  I lost my interest in the voice of the wind while I was lying there.  I longed for Emmett's voice instead.  I wanted to hear him say that I was going to be alright.  I longed to hear him say that I would be around to see him grow into a man.  Just as I was nodding off, I heard the wind coming back.
"You sure fucked-up this time, Baby."  Laris' voice breezed past my ear.  His whispered love dappled my skin with grass seeds.
"Now you tell me."  I tried to reach for him, but my arm wouldn't work.
They tell me that I asked for a whiskey and my pistol as they were trying to slip the plywood under me and get me into the back of the truck.  I don't remember that.  I do remember telling them to get my boy from school for me.  It wouldn't do for Emmett to have to meet with some cold, official face when he heard that his mother was broken into about a hundred little bits.  He ought to hear it from somebody with a soul.
We celebrated Emmett's fourteenth birthday from my hospital bed.  I had a cracked hip, two broken legs and a dislocated shoulder, but I was otherwise doing pretty good for a woman who had died in a field south of Longmont.
"What were you thinking, Ma?"  Emmett always went for the good stuff when he asked a question.  Most times, my boy's surgical accuracy in question asking was way out of reach of his Ma's stumble and bump question answering.
"I don't think I was."  I answered truthfully.  "In fact I was seriously trying not to."
"I can believe that."  He took my fingers and squeezed when he said it so I would know that he was really saying, "I'm glad you're here, Ma." 
Thanks, Baby Boy.
 “I love your face.”  I told him.  “Keep talking to me.”