1889

When she reckons that she’s just a hard days ride away from Los Rios, Sunday ditches the preacher.  His name is David and he has been a good traveling companion.  He’s not too handy with a gun or anything else, but he does make for an imposing figure on his dark horse, tall and slender, dressed head to toe in preacher black.

When she picked him, Sunday figured that riding with anybody was better than riding alone.  Over the last hundred some miles, she’d been proved right a number of times.

But he’s too damn good for what she has in mind.  So she slips off into the night and points her mount deeper into Mexico, towards the town her father founded and named.

She rides with the reins in her mouth.  Hissing his name.  “Arango.”

The Story So Far

1947

The Lawrences drove their brand new Lincoln Zephyr straight from the storefront window to Palm Springs, with only a quick stop in Bel Air to load their bags and pick up Richard’s nurse.

The car now sits just outside the desert town.  It’s covered in dust and muck.  Richard, who insisted on driving, lies on the hard ground.  His breathing is even more labored that usual.

Dora holds an umbrella, shielding Richard’s sallow face from the brutal sun.  An urgent whisper to the nurse.  “Get help.   Find a doctor.  Hurry.”

Lotus does hurry.  She pulls up her long skirt and sprints across the hot sand towards town.  She is not content to let the old man die out here.

She wants to kill him herself.

The Story So Far

1970

As he always does, the old man sits beneath the tent mounted on the back of his flat-bed truck.

He’s been talking for two days straight and his visitor has never looked tired.  In fact, the young guy leans toward him, hungry for more words.

The old man pulls two sketches from a journal on a shelf crowded with journals.  “These two are the last I seen with your sister.”   He arranges them among the two dozen other sketches that cover the metal flooring.  “This here is Jay James.  And this is his daughter, Josey.  She’s near twelve,  I would believe.”

The boy nods and nods and prods.  “More.”

The old man never thought he’d grow tired of sharing this information.  The honest fact is this: he’s been waiting for a long time for someone just like this eager and motivated fellow.  He’s been waiting for him to come along and take what he had gathered and do something with it.  Do anything with it.

But, now that he’s here, the old man finds it tiring.  Yet the words keep coming.

“Jay James is an interesting guy.  Ex-professor at Stanford, dropped out, dropped WAY the hell out, ended up on a work commune up in Alaska.  Baby Josey comes along, his wife loses her mind, splits on them both.  She starts making the scene, she’s traveling the circuit, looking for something, and he’s following right behind her, looking for her.  He and daughter got an orange VW bus and they sell a bunch of stuff from it at the Gatherings –- leather goods, pipes and such, other sundries — pays for the journey.”

“He ever find his wife?”

“I don’t know.  She turned up in a field not far from here.  Dead like your sister.”

The young man picks up Jay’s sketch, it shakes in his hands. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know that either.  Though you may have heard of his dad.  Lucas.”

“Lucas James?!”

“That’s him.”

“Everybody’s heard of Lucas James!”

The Story So Far

1888

Benton suffers from mental illness.  He tries to cover it with alcohol, but Sunday can smell the madness beneath the whiskey.

His rants fill their tent.  He brays.  He prays.  He elaborates on the matter that consumes him.  The Pressure he feels.  The Eyes that watch him.  The Pressure to be good.  The Eyes that judge him.

This time he tries to hurt her.  She’s ready, bashing his head with a pot then turning her father’s gun on him.  Benton is bleeding as he stumbles into the night, still braying, still praying.

She gathers her stuff.   It’s time to leave town.

A thought stops her.

——————————-

The preacher halts mid-sermon.  The congregation can hear it too.  Someone is shouting outside the gospel tent, bellowing like an injured animal.

With a sudden WHOOSH, the tent behind the preacher is streaked with fire.  Worshipers scramble and scream.  The altar erupts in flames.  The preacher is trapped.  He’s doomed.

But through the fiery wall rides Sunday Warring, bareback on a charging stallion.  She grabs the preacher at full gallop and lifts him into the saddle.

“Got a name, Padre?”

“David.”

“Yah!!”  Sunday gives her mount the spurs and horse and riders leap over believers.

The bellowing from outside takes form “Shut his Eyes!  Shut his Eyes!” as a burning hay wagon hits the tent and explodes in a enormous fireball.

This Ends the Fourth Cycle of  BURNT

The Story So Far

1970

Dad finishes his little  speech and his followers jump up, full of chatter.  They love the guy.

I watch Josey.  She is seeing her grandfather for the first time.  She stares.  I wonder what she sees.  I try to look with fresh eyes, but I see the same thing.  A man so used to intimidating people that he long ago stopped trying.

The great man raises his hand and everyone gets quiet.

“There is one more story I want to share with you.  It’s an old story, perhaps a familiar one.  About a father who lost his son.  A son who traveled to foreign lands and became lost.”

Across the room, his piercing eyes lock on mine.

“This is a story I’ve never told, because until now it didn’t have an ending.  But now it does.  The prodigal son has returned.  My own son, Lucas James Junior!”

A spotlight swings our way and the entire room turns as one to look at us.  Josey blinks in the harsh light.

The Story So Far

1970

Lucas James pauses to scan the crowd.  Of the Fortune 500, he’s got a good 100 of them here.  Their wardrobes are a near perfect blend of rustic and expensive, much like the lodge in which they sit.  Most of them have his book in their laps.   And he’s got them in the palm of his hand.

“After ten days of study, of work, we prepare to return, transformed, to the world.  It’s a world full of changing attitudes towards love, towards sexuality, towards monogamy, towards traditional family structures.  It’s a freer world.  Are we to be denied these freedoms because of our standing?  Our success?  Our wealth?  These will no longer be barriers to us.  We have learned the power of Self-Actualizing Narrative.  Using the Four Life Principles, we now know that every life is a story and that how we tell that story is up to us! Does the story of Icarus have to be about a man who flew too close to the sun? Or can it be about a man who dreamed the impossible, achieved the impossible, and gladly gave his life to do so.”

He lifts the book.  “My Story, Your Story.”

“Let’s look again at my life. My story. Age 24, full professor at Yale. Head of my department before I was 30. Awards, money, recognition as a man of knowledge and accomplishment. Life was going great. Coasting. Content.  And then my wife, my beloved Marie, became sick. And my money, and my titles, and my stature in my field couldn’t do a damn thing. I was trapped by societal expectations, I was emasculated, forced to play the prescribed roles.  The loyal husband.  The selfless father.  The grieving widow.  And then, one day, I realized what I had to do. I had to…”

The group speaks as one, “Get Over Myself!”

“Principle four.”

“Denying Joy is Denying Life.”

“Number three.”

“The Past is a Prison.”

“I retook possession of myself. I took a step back, and saw myself anew.  I understood myself not as a man who had lost his wife, but as a man who had survived his grief. You’ve all faced loss this week! Learned humility in the face of pain!”

“And climbed back out!”

“Dug your way out, tooth and nail, back to the light!  You’ve done this! You’ve read my book. You’ve adopted my principles. And now you have completed this program. You are over yourselves.”

Lucas summons something close to Grace.

“So go and enjoy your wealth!”

The Story So Far

1970

There’s a terrible argument going on in the parking lot.  Josey’s never seen her dad so angry.  It’s a sight.

But her eyes keep wandering up to the mountains.  It’s amazing how an imperceptible change of light down here signals an operatic drama of shifting shadow on the towering peaks.

A defeated shout!  Jay hands the VW’s keys to the old guy who calls himself Critter.  The tall young one is called Mr. Marks, and he just keeps saying “it is necessary, it is necessary” over and over.

She follows their van as Critter backs it into a large cinder-block structure.  Parked inside are dozens of expensive looking cars.  She recognizes BMWs and Mercedes.  Critter rattles shut a heavy metal gate and locks it.

She asks Critter, “fight over?”

He spits in his hands.  “Yep.”

————————————–

They’re all jammed in Critter’s old truck, bouncing over a mountain road, flanked by thick forest.  The radio plays loud static.  Jay is annoyed. “Why don’t you turn that shit off?”

“Can’t.”  Critter brushes at dirty hair with dirty fingers.  “It’s wired t’ on.”

“You ever get reception?”

“Only when I’m too far from home.”

The truck stops.  A cowboy greeting: the burnt wood banner swings softly above an electric fence.

“The Ranch”

Howdy to those ready for Positive Change

The Story So Far

1970

The high-altitude glare off the highway is so bright that Josey and I are mostly blind when we step into the dark bar.  She holds my hand tight.

Tired cowboys drink bottled beer.  Their necks are bent and the brims of their hats nearly touch the bar.  Only the bartender looks up.

“I’m looking for directions.  Up to the Lucas place.”

“Why you want to go up there?”

“I’m his son.”

A stool scrapes and I get a real close look at a face.  It’s red and getting redder.  I watch the cowboy’s hands.  Clenching.  Clenching.

My own hands move and Josey is behind me.

“Going out for some air.”  He stomps into the light.  More scraping.  The rest follow him out.

Now it’s just Josey and me and the bartender.

He picks up a phone and dials.

The Story So Far

1888

Benton blames that damn carnival for giving him the image.  Without it, his dreams could just go on being mean and angry without taking any specific form.

But now, every night, there is a shooting booth.  Targets rattle along, each the head of someone he knows.  He shoots and they pitch backwards.

Ka-DING!  Ka-DING!  Ka-DING!

All through the night.

————————————-

Sunday rides into the last town before the border.  She spends the last of Waring’s money on a fresh mount.  Now she only needs to find someone to trust.   It’s late so every suitable candidate is at the saloon.

She spots him right away.

A murderous bunch of cowhands are converging on a drunken and unlucky farmer.  He’s backing up the stairs, ranting through his fear.  He’s outnumbered and about to get clobbered.

There’s a whistle.  The big guy at the bar tosses him a stool.  The farmer catches it and goes to town.  He gets clobbered anyway, but, as these things go, he had a better shot with the stool.

Benton provides another stool for Sunday.  He smiles like an old friend.  Sunday quickly realizes that Benton is smarter than his size would suggest.  She watches his eyes as he listens, taking her words in, considering them.

This is the man she’s looking for.  Someone to trust.

Inside his head, he only hears one thing.   Ka-DING!

The Story So Far

1947

Richard Lawrence is a man with a firm grasp on the world and where he fits in it.  He is a man with ideas.  One day he plans to make a film which will elucidate those ideas and educate the people who see it.

If this were that film, and he were a character in it, he would look directly into the camera and say this to the audience:

“I am The Builder.  I look at a landscape dotted with scattered and randomly placed communities and I see a City Of The Future.

“This is how it works.  It starts with a vision.  Then I plan it.  And then I build it.

“We took the water we needed from the Owens Valley and brought it to Los Angeles.  My colleagues and I transformed a cow town into a city.  And then we saw a filthy slum, an opium den, a Chinatown.  I had a vision of a clean replica, a safe facsimile which tourists would travel to see, to shop and to spend money.  And then I planned it.  And then I built two of them, and I called them New Chinatown and China City.  I filled both with happy yellow people dressed in native garb selling exotic food and wares.  And in the place of that old slum, I built a train station, which I named Union Station, to bring more of those tourists to my city.  To bring them faster and fatter and full of money.

“I have a newspaper in our City Of The Future which reports only good news.  No murders or crimes or civil unrest happen here.  Nothing to frighten the people away.  The weather report is always on the front page and the weather is always good.

“I stand outside history.  History is on the wrong track.  The wrong people won the last two world wars.  I am The Builder.  I build things.”

The Story So Far