Nathan W. Ferree
Fiction Writing Workshop
Story #1

We leave Bucara and head west.  The old chevy bounces over pot holes as we drive out 24th street past the sprawling new nursing home and the cinema three.  The cold grey asphalt turns to light brown gravel, sandy and moist.  The sun creeps down slowly and bursts through a thin blanket of clouds.  Leo flips down the dusty visor and his leopard sunglasses fall on his lap.  He unfolds them and places them on his face.     I bring my arm in from the window and push the chrome button on the glove box.  I reach in for the silver pack of Harley Davidson's sitting beside the flashlight on the greasy shop manual.  
     We don't talk for a while, just roll down the road lost in our separate thoughts.  The sun floats down and fills the clouds with reds and crisp orange and reflects in Leo's glasses brilliantly.  The mid-Kansas roadway takes us across green muddy fields, past lonely silos, and over old stone bridges.  We move into destiny adrift, floating in the current.
     Checking the scene out the windows I pull out a cigarette, "Nice sky this eavnin' I say gazing at a group of pinkish fat clouds.  
     "It is," he says his wooly face smiling. "The day is ripe for the journey," he says turning to me still grinning.
     I dig into my pocket for a lighter.  I light my smoke and ask, "how far do you thing we'll get tonight?"
     "Dunno," he says, "I'm feeling strong, could be we get six or seven hundred miles behind us by morning, but it doesn't matter.  I suppose it would be good to just truck on through western Kansas and eastern Colorado.  We could be in the mountains before sunrise."
     "That would be nice," I reply, desperately trying to form the image of a mountain in my mind.
     "Yeah, we'll see. You just chill and enjoy the ride. I'm drivin' through the night," he says and presses the gas pedal down.  The faded red pickup rocks and rattles, shooting down the dead straight road.  We drift back to our separate thoughts and I wonder what he has to think about.  I watch him drive for a while.
     He concentrates entirely on the road but there seems to be some tremendous action inside his head.  It is very interesting to watch, sometimes his jaw clenches and unclenches as he thinks bristling out his greying beard like some sort of large rodent stretching itself.  He doesn't resemble a rodent in any other way than that, more of a bear though not so ponderous as a bear may seem.  He is not thin and not fat but somewhere in the realm of average.  I can not guess his age maybe 38 or 42 shit 57 the man looks ageless.  He wears these greasy blue coveralls that are faded and torn in places, some tears stitched and patched others just ragged gashes.  He wears them all the time and as we are driving in the truck practically all the time they smell like the truck, he smells like the truck.  That is rust and grease and gasoline and dust and time and sweat and some other smell that I just really can't figure out.  I must smell like it too, I don't know.  I really don't know anything, can't remember starting this 'journey' as Leo calls it and I don't really know who he is as a matter of fact but he seems kind.  What else am I going to do but go along blindly with this man.
     As night comes on this vagueness in my mind grows.  The overwhelming weight of things unknown pushes me to an uncomfortable state of consciousness.  I know the road and I know the sky and this truck.  'How did I get here?' falls heavily, tumbling through my brain and scatters the fortress of road, sky, truck.  'Who am I?' crashes down on top of 'how did I get here?'. They form a mass.  It feels acutely unnatural yet I cannot grab onto anything in my memory.  So the night hurts.  In the daytime I can occupy myself with visual information, images, scenes. They fill up the void inside me but are soon lost faded out into colorless formless wisps of smoke in the vast night.  At night with the sameness of the roads we travel rushing by I have nowhere to turn but into the abyss of my mind.  I feel hollow at night.  So Leo drives and I try to sleep.  
     I know I have dreams.  Leo tells me that I toss and mumble but I never remember.  My whole past is like those dreams.  I know its there, that it happened but it fades.  
     My memory goes back to last week sometime.  I remember pulling off the interstate and driving around until we found a nice little dribble of a  creek.  It was a slow sandy stream with Cottonwoods on its eroding banks.  We stayed there and camped like we usually do and I remember it began snowing one night.  We ended up finding a weathered shack just up stream with enough of the substance of its roof left to shelter us.  We stayed several days maybe as long as a week.  I don't know I just can't tell, all I know is we left with the snow and that was just now.  Back much further than the immediate past I can conjure faint images at best, like the pattern of wall paper at a place we stayed or a color. I can remember what baking bread smells like but I can't see it.  I cannot form the image in my mind.  The shack and the creek will fade too so that I might remember the feeling of cold snow in my hand but won't remember the snow-ball and it splattering against the tree.
     I do not know how I got here.  I know we drive from place to place in a vehicle propelled by the combustion of a volatile fluid but I can't imagine where we came from.  Where was the last town we stayed at before Bucara?  What was the name of the last truck stop that we ate at and then filled the truck with more volatile fluid?  Where did the truck come from?  Where did Leo come from?  They are constants like my questions but solid, physical.  The steel and rubber and fluids of the vehicle lend no insight and Leo is always oracularly vague when I ask questions.  I will say something simple like 'Who am I' and I just want some clue as to how I got here, where I'm from, anything but he just says 'you must learn that yourself I cannot tell you'.
     I know at least that he is here to help me.  He has been here for as long as I can remember, which doesn't mean jack but I feel comfortable with him.  I have asked him who he is.  He'll only answer something like he is my guardian and that we are on a journey together.  So this doesn't help.  It gets me nowhere.  There is some great mystery to him as large perhaps as the mystery of myself.  What trauma took away my mind?  What destiny has brought me here?  I am able to think and wonder but I have no base of memory out of which to form any type of answer.
     I open my eyes from these unsettling thoughts and look out into the unpenetrable dark. "Can't sleep," I say to Leo reaching for the box of cigarettes.  I hand one to him and he lights it the grey smoke floating up through his charcoal beard and curly dark hair.  He lifts the lever and pushes the window vent out.  The chill night whistles in.  I turn on the heater fan and light my own cigarette.
     "You seem perplexed, even more than normal," he says offering the words as a starting
point for discussion.
     "You're damn right I'm perplexed. I'm confused, lost, hollow, empty, naked.  I have no memory.  I don't know who the fuck I am.
     "Yes you do, you know.  It is perhaps lost from your immediate self the self you currently reside in but you have not lost anything."
     "This is what you say every time. Why won't you just help me? I am missing parts of myself and you answer me in riddles. Do you know who I am?"
     "Yes, but I cannot tell you. Stop asking," His eyes focus on the road "I think perhaps you should concentrate on your dreams, the answers are there."
     "What if they are? I never remember anything from my dreams."
     "Of course you don't because you always go on like that.  You are blessed and carry a great destiny but you don't know it because you've lost your past.  You feel you cannot watch it unfold so you are confused and have lost your center.  You must be able to center your being as it is now or you will be forever lost as you are now."
     "Don't give me that 'center my being shit'," sometimes Leo's spiritualist 'insight' is too much for me and I can hardly contain my frustration, "I don't have anything to center."  I blow out a stream of smoke and turn my gaze to the grassy roadside.
     "You must relax," he says, turning his grey-green eyes to look at the side of my head. "You will not get anywhere if you don't."  He turns back to the road his hands shifting to the top of the big wheel.  "You must concentrate on what is at the center of your spirit, even if it seems as insignificant as a color or a light.  Your energy is scattered throughout the cosmos.  You must start at the center and pull it back in.  That is all I can say.  Stop thinking about what you think
you've lost and instead concentrate on what you have.  The events of your past, they do not matter now.  If you let this feeling stay and encompass your being you will forever be in this same state."
     'What the state of Kansas?' I think to myself but I can kind of understand what he means. 'What caused this state?' I think the words but don't say them.  I take the last drag off my Harley and flick it out the window.  It sparks on the road in the night.  Concentrate on what you are instead of what you feel you've lost.
     Through the flat glass of my window an owl takes flight from a grey fence post.  His form blocks a portion of the silvery moonlight and projects its image on the ground. Moonshadow moves across the field.  He flaps silently.  Though I cannot hear anything but the hum of the hot engine in the cool night the grace of his movement emanates silence.  He coasts, then swoops, and dives.  The truck barrels by and I look out the back glass to see the owl fly back up and toward a hedge row distant.  What does he know?  But I shouldn't think in questions now.  Perhaps I should not think.  How do I shut off my mind so that I only feel?       I bring my mind in from the field and the stars and moonlit owl.  Owl light.  I look around at the inside of the cab, the smooth painted metal dash, the black knobs with white letters.  The smell of old grease and gasoline fill my nose.  The old AM radio with cracked buttons plays whatever, kind of the luck of the draw out here.  I turn it off and the gentle rhythm of the straight six rumbles in my head and the soft squeak of the bench seat joins in harmony with the rattle of loose sheet-metal.
     I close my eyes and I picture the owl again.  I try to connect him to myself but I have no control of him.  He is perched like an ornament on the nose of the hood.  His eyes peer in at me
and in their glossy blackness I see myself, my wild dirty hair and my torn flannel shirt.  As I look the images swirl.  Owl eyes spin. I spin and find myself on the side of a dirt road at dusk.  I am urinating in the ditch.  The grass faded green and yellow, greyed by dust.  The ground steams before my feet.  The sun settles to the horizon behind a thundercloud rumbling.  The trees in the distance swaying, the same shade of dark as the rusted barbed wire in front of me.  The air boils with friction.  Lightning sparks in the looming cloud miles distant but the air is blue above me and no rain spills on my peace.  The peace is shattered instead with an intense white flash engulfing my entire person.  Like the ground beneath my feet has suddenly burst into pure energy and a  blunt force rocks my body sending me reeling into blackness.  All I know is spinning tumbling, vertigo.  I force my eyes to open and I am sitting the rumble rolling through the cloud is now the rumble of the engine and I am in the truck again.  The owl is gone and we are driving into the moon.
     I am just about to utter some gasp of astonishment but my eye is drawn to the roadside by an incredible light.  Its intensity so great I wonder why I am not blinded by it.  
     My eyes strain instinctively to focus on the figure in the center and I cannot tell if he gives off this energy or if he is being consumed by it.  The pure white light jumps and vibrates, pulsing, exploding in every direction.  The hair on my the back of my neck and arms stands out. I pull on the door handle but it doesn't move so I try the window crank.  It moves!  But sticks after half a turn.  
     "That's...," I burst out but as I turn to Leo he's not there and "me" comes out a scared whisper.  Frantically I look back to myself out there in the ditch glowing.  I remember this feeling.  I slide across the seat and grab at Leo's handle and knock my head on the steering
wheel.  The handle gives though and the door swings open.  Forehead throbbing, I push myself out of the cab but my foot catches on the gear shift.  I trip tumbling out onto the sandy road my shoulder hitting hard.  Dragging my feet out of the cab I pick myself up and look over the hood at the spectacle but I don't get past the truck.  A multitude of colors dance on its surface, rainbows swirl in its doors.  Colors grow and spread spinning shifting over the entire vehicle. The truck becomes color I touch it.  My hand is red and violet and it felt nothing like steel, felt like nothing physical.  I put the tips of my fingers at the edge of color and press in no resistance in fact I feel pulled in.  I step through it tingling and turning color.  I am color.  The truck fades back to solid, physical red.  My image notices me and straightens raising his arms.  I do the same.  So we face each other he spewing white energy into the sky and I a body of swirling color.  I feel the energy from him coming closer and I can feel my own energy being drawn out from the deepest chasms of my body.  The field of light around him begins to take on faint colors.  Somewhere in the middle between us our energies meld, an embrace of life power.  A surge, a flood, a hum, and breathing calm, rapid.  The rush and hum surges faster, building and all my hair stands out, clothing steams.  He is naked and growing faint, turning, swirling, twisting.  Somewhere in myself I realize that this is not some dual image of me.  The hum crescendos and warbles vibrating like the color we now share.  He erupts in a spiral tornado trailing color into the cloudy sky.  He arcs out and away spilling streams of silvery blue and living greens and every imaginable color into the dark clouds.  He climbs high and grows faint in the heavy clouds.  He circles the moon and descends the hum fading, changing to a whistle.  He is no longer a body shrouded in color energy but now pure energy, no body, and I stare into it.  I prepare instinctively for its force to rip me apart.  I am dazzled.  Growing rush, color descending
quickly.  I face it, hands clenched and hair whipping in the color storm.  It strikes me.  The whistle now a scream in my ears and all I can see is bright spiraling color.  This spiral energy flows out of the ground and into the ground around me, and through me at the same time.  I close my eyes to avoid vertigo.  I feel warmth and power and tension, life's rhythm fills my body, my mind, soul, spirit, whatever.  
     "Hello Leo," I say and in the deafening vibrating squeal can hear my own words.