Christmas 2002

The old man sat at an angle to the table, his grizzled features scant inches from some sheets of paper that had a stranglehold on his attention. His face had avoided acquaintance with a razor for some time and the growth there was a light gray, almost white. His gaunt frame was rack to a coat, threadbare and dirty, that would prove only marginally useful against the cold outside. His oversized jeans had large stains in the crotch, evidence of a time when the effort to find a bathroom was more than just inconvenient. The cheap sneakers on his feet were long past the stage when people with incomes discard their footwear.

It was a combination gas station/convenience store/sandwich shop/ice cream parlor in southeastern Arizona, a building that even in this day and time starkly contrasted against its historic backdrop. Within sight of the building and less than a day’s ride on a good horse was Apache Pass, beyond it the remains of old Fort Bowie. The spring which the fort’s presence was to protect still flows, though its water is no longer drinkable. The remains of a dwelling used by Thomas Jeffords can still be seen near there; this remarkable man is known to relatively few today, though his name commanded much respect in his own time. The walls of the old Butterfield stage station still exist, though there is no longer any trace of the blood once spilled against them. It was here, in the shadow of the station, in 1861, that Lieutenant George Bascom gravely misjudged the character of a man and perpetrated the act that would trigger the Apache wars.

Bascom accused Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise and some of his band of capturing a white child in a raid. The child had in fact been abducted by a different band. Bascom had the Apaches detained. When Cochise escaped, Bascom had the remaining prisoners hanged. The tide of bloodletting that followed would not be stemmed until the final surrender of Geronimo in 1886.

It had been ten years since I had walked that ground. A decade since I had trod where the hard-bellied few, in the words of Western writer Louis L’Amour, had made it possible for the soft-bellied multitudes to follow. Due to time constraints on this holiday trip from Austin to Phoenix, the closest that I would get to this period of Arizona history was the shop where we sat eating lunch, at a table a few feet removed from the old man.

I watched as his fingers, writing instrument at the ready, worked furiously, paused, then scribbled again. Finally he sat up and surveyed his work. Satisfied, he clutched the sheets of paper in a fist and, leaning heavily on his cane, struggled shakily to his feet. As he tottered past the girl behind the ice cream counter he threw her a few words of conversation identifying the object of his frenzied work: lottery tickets. He had spent his last few dollars in a gamble against incredible odds. It was a gamble that would likely yield no more than scraps of worthless paper as a return on his investment, not even the glass bottle that would have been a byproduct of an easier route. But maybe, just maybe…

He moved off for a while but was soon back at his table, studying with care the selections he’d made in his search for the End of the Rainbow. The shop employees seemed familiar with him and accorded him an easy tolerance.

I looked at him as I finished my sandwich. Having been a member of the not-so-exclusive-club of the high tech unemployed since August, it occurred to me that the only thing separating us was time.

As we got up to continue our journey, I gave thought to slipping the old man a discrete offering. But he had asked for nothing, and I was not prepared to strip him of his pride with an act so easily misinterpreted as arrogance.

We pulled away from the stop sign and turned west. We had travelled but a few miles when I saw it: a billboard emblazoned with attention-arresting colors, silently shouting the amount of the lottery jackpot – $280 million.

We drove in silence now and left them behind, the ghosts of the past, the young workers, a building seemingly so out of place. And an old, homeless man, breathing a not-so-silent wish.

—
Dempsey 🌵