May 1

The afternoon is melting and along with it I disappear into the landscape slowly climbing up the incline to the ridge where Joaquin once rode at midnight with Ana Benitez dressed as a man and Three Fingered Jack, his longtime associate and partner in crime, to Tulare Lake and the gambling tents and the Maramos, which were the rope jumping competitions. I’m getting closer, I can feel it. Ranger Tom has assured me that if my car should get stuck he would be along in a day or two and I have my eyes peeled on the road for all the pointy rocks which takes considerable concentration which is fine except I keep seeing photographs everywhere and stopping and then I’m thinking about goldfish and the hermetic arts and Murrieta and the Monte tables, which is a card game – a different deck than the Tarot, but he dealt his fate all the same, I look out across the Allcades, a dead mountain range that not even horse thieves would venture, and try and make a connection, and there it is right in front of me, only you can’t see it any more. Once you could see it from here, the largest lake in all of California, except maybe Lake Tahoe. It’s where he took Ana Benitiz, dressed like a vaquero to the rambla or maybe just to watch him win at gambling in the tent village with the colorful ribbons, sticking on the poles and the whores and the guitarras, and the travelers in wagons who just came in from Ohio and were headed for them thar hills with a Yankee Doodle Dandy You could see it from here, Lake Tullare , back in his day, And it isn’t because I only had a couple hours of sleep at Oak Flat campground last night, or the puff of weed Ranger Tom busted me for, it’s the light, it seeps in everywhere, the corners of my eyes, a scintilla, a demon, a voice from antiquity.