JM

And then there was this woman I picked up on the way to El Paso. She was jumpy from too many hours waiting by the side of the road. Right away she starts in about tarot cards and UFOs. She knew a man who had been in the People’s Temple up in Redwood Valley and was supposed to follow Jim Jones down to Guyana but didn’t at the last second because of a dream. They met in a commune outside of Yreka where they were trying to grow mushrooms in hydroponic tanks. One time they shot a bear and butchered the carcass according to the ancient rites of the Wintu Indians. It went rancid before they got a chance to eat it and they had to feed it to the dogs. She asked me if I had an opinion about the Nazca lines. There are ley-lines that run underneath all of North America, ferrying cosmic energy around like some kind of Celtic interstate. After six months in Bakersfield she was ready for a change. You have to water the tree of doubt she would say over and over. Water the tree of doubt. That’s what was waiting for her in New Orleans. That and a man named Carl. ### Eventually we got on the subject of ball lightning. I did know something about that. I told her how it can appear out of nowhere and skitter along the surface of the ground like a skipping stone. If it entered the human body it would leave a mark in the shape of a living tree. We were in New Mexico at this point. It was dusk and big black clouds hung low over the Organ Mountains. Static electricity was in the air. I told her this was the part of the country where ball lightning was most frequently seen. This was a lie but since I didn’t know whether it was true or not it didn’t feel like one. She wanted to see it. I said we should pull over somewhere and see what we could see. She said yes. ### I filled the thermos at a gas station and pulled over onto a dirt road. We spent the night drinking coffee and watching the sky through the windshield. It was too cold to leave the car. By this time we were mostly silent. I wanted to tell her something. But what was I supposed to tell her, that electricity already surrounded her, that it was shooting out of her hair into the stars?