Oblation at mothers pass. Ol’ Applegut’s Hollers
We spend the day with Apple. From when he wakes up, to his bath in the river, has lunch, hikes to a hot spring, encounters two hikers, and finally returns to his cave.
A literal caveman who lives in the Gila wilderness. He’s mad, a mad man, who only has sense enough to keep himself eating and moving.
He’s telling himself stories out loud , babbling, ranting, muttering, screaming, and whispering. Nothing he says makes much sense but I can fill in the gaps for the reader.
He’s been alive, surviving, in and out of the Gila wilderness and mountaintop villages for decades. Life, he’s learned, just happens to happen to him. It has an organization all to its own. For Ol’ Applegut, all he has to do is take what it has for him. Somedays its nothing, nothing at all, and he’ll spend the entire day staring slack-jawed into the brush and sage. An audience of hares and jack rabbits have the front row.
Having been so alone, for so many years now, the mind means something much different to him than to people like us. Apple may have already forgotten all about having such a thing as “the mind.”
He may not even be in there at all, what we hear him saying, spouting all day, his verbal ejaculations are akin to a broken radio antenna.
What walks, and bathes, and hunts and scraps together, is just a creature we all can know as simply that Ol’ Applegut. If that man ever had a legal Christian name and, if ever there was time when he, as a boy, answered to his mama’s hollers to that name, he don’t know it now. And no one will ever know it, not now, not ever. Hell Applegut probably don’t know it anymore!
He’s feral, a mad man, with only enough wits about him to fend for himself enough to keep himself warm and with a belly half full of food. At least a quarter full some days and other days not much full with anything but icy cold water from a mountain stream.
If he ever wrote on a page with a pencil or read a word ever in his life, no one will know, not now anyway. If anyone would know such a thing! Regarding Apple’s past as barely half tame, miles from ever civilized nor domesticated, but at the very least a human man? No, not what he is today. An animal, a beast like any, but a beast with a rifle and a buck knife.A naked roamer wandering the Gila Hills and mountains pulling a peach cart. Nothing on him but a chunk of cheese in a cinched buck hide pouch hanging on his old rifle. The letters LBP carved into the stock. BP in large letters, L smaller between the two.
Ol’ Apple spent most time in the caves found 10 miles north and after the two windmills on the old road to Pie Town New Mexico, probably living on desiccated deer and bushels of peaches from the Navajo canyon groves. The rusty peach cart he keeps hidden underbrush, he found by the old witches cabin. A small shack, sunken in a valley of enormous boulders. Where in the winter she stays with the children she snatches up, when she finds them roaming around the old Indian school grounds .
Ol’ Apple yammers into a dimming neon orange fire pit.
“I just got chills, like something left my body!”
Numb places on my body is where they hide.
Speaking to them, writing to them, for once.
Moving into you I take your space.
So long have I let you hide in me! that I strain to hold my own space!
Apple screams through his silver cotton beard.
Behind my neck, in the curves and shallows of my vertebrae, your home for too long, is now mine again!!
ITS MY HOME!
I blame you for all the extra words in my sentences.
My passive voice comes from a lifetime of being passive to your attachments.
More than two, maybe more than eight, you all live to have me at your command.
I know what your food is, I dish it out by the spoonful, sometimes the ladle, onto your plate-like yawing mouths.
Even now, you tell me in whispers what to write, not my voice, mine has been — there !
— mine silent.
In the affirmative, I.
I, in the affirmative.
All the questions you have me ask will go unanswered.
They mean their subject.
I feed you no longer.
Another hides in my bladder, above my sex organs, the oldest of all of you.
Four and thirty-three more days you will go without your food.
Tied into me like a vine, my trunk is fed by this earthly power, I will gather and absorb it without CEASE!!!
I will be fed a — there
— I am fed, I feed.
I eat.
This is my power now — there
— My power now, you’re hunger.
Poke and prod, I command now,
nor longer do I obey.
Take my hands, my eyes, my asshole, my neck,
soon weak.
Seven days from now, weak and weakening.
A week, no longer!
my power… *whispers*
Pulse in my muscles, my power is my own. *cries*
The way I do, I move into you, my numb areas.
