Weekend At Willies Walkin Killings Pt 14 Drown In The Desert

I Know What I Am, by Band Of Skulls

I wandered around outside in the night, lost in the black emptiness of eternity.

The oil lamp flickering through the busted-out kitchen window was my only beacon. 

This stumbling about took a while, and there is nothing I can tell you about it, because it would cheapen it to use mere words.  Sorry about that, my friend.  Ya know.

Something in the desert dust grabbed my foot and I fell to the ground.  I rolled over and dug mud from my eyes. Somehow, the desert dust had become wet on my face.

In my fury, I grabbed it and tugged and tugged.  I wanted to kill this thing that had brought me down.  Everything was all fucked up.

I had lost my Star.  I kept telling myself that it wasn’t true.

This thing buried in the desert had brought me down to the ground, and I fucking hated it.

I pulled and pulled, from each of the four directions, circling about it, and it began to release.

It came up, and I ran towards the cottage with it, hollering at the top of my lungs in my rage.

I headed to the pool.

I was going to baptize the fucking thing by drowning it.

The thing was, it belonged to someone who had drowned in the desert.  I just didn’t know it yet.

It belonged to one of the kids at the explosions of the ranch, when Fat Jerry had destroyed that place.  The young man had pulled it off because it was on fire, and he ran off into the night, and the police found him half buried face down in the silt of the desert dust, drowned in a flood from an arroyo.

An arroyo is a desert river that only appears when there is a heavy rain, and you can indeed drown in the desert, if it courses over you while you are in a panicked state in the blackness of night. An Arroyo river is water filled with liquid sand.  How horrible, to die in such a manner.

You may not find your way back to where you should be.

Then again, odd things were beginning to happen in the high desert river valley.

The door opened and Joey and Tellesco ran out when they heard me screaming so loud it hurt my throat.

Joey spotted me with his flashlight and shined it on me as I ran towards the pool.

I misjudged my speed and destination. I went into the pool with the fucking thing I’d dug out of the desert.  I didn’t care.  I wrestled with the thing under the surface of the water, and it was now quite heavy.  

An angel at the bottom of the sea would welcome it and show it to hell.  I wasn't in my right mind.

Just as I ran out of air, a pair of strong hands grabbed me by my leather and pulled me up, and pushed me to the edge of the pool.

Tellesco had saved me.

How many times had Tellesco saved me? 

He stood on the roof of the drowned hearse with which I’d tried to drown us both, and he pushed me up onto the concrete.

I coughed out water and algae, and Joey yanked the sodden thing I’d dug out of the desert from my grasping hands.

He shined his flashlight on it.

He said, “Leather.  Always mind your leather.”

It was a leather jacket.

It was a leather jacket that belonged to someone who had died at Tellesco’s home.

It seemed fitting that Tellesco should wear it.  Hell, he didn't have anything else to wear but that knitted afghan.


Tellesco would have to wear a knitted skirt around his bottom half, and a leather jacket with charred spots here and there, and a cloth flag that had been sewn onto the back, but it was all burned away.

He looked like a Scottish punk, with his kilt and leather.


He was barefoot.


We didn't quite know what to make of his new look, but neither Joey nor I laughed at him.


At least, on the outside.



.