L.A. Trippin’

The fastest way to get to Sproutville’s airport was straight through the Indian reservation. Although normally no one was allowed in, Louis and his bus had a special permission from the local chief. The Indian kids also took the bus to get to school, which was located just outside of the reservation. That’s why nobody paid any attention to us rolling in. Not that there’d be anyone watching …. All empty space with a scattered hut or teepee here and there. Apparently some of the souls the big Manitou had lost while riding the plains got stuck here in the sand.
There lies my duty; saving these fallen souls, was probably what Mr.Jones had been thinking when he opened his little church in the back room of the post office which shared a building with the saloon in the reservation’s only village. If one could call the four houses and the saloon, stuck together as if seeking shelter from bad spirits and the wind, a village.
Mr.Jones was the catholic priest, desperately trying to bring the Lord to the reservation.
“Jesus loves all sheep,” he had told the few curious Indians who’d paid him a visit on that first Sunday. But what is there to do when these people never met a sheep? Considering that, he might even think himself lucky; comparing these proud men to sheep might have ended Mr.Jones’ days a lot earlier than the Lord had planned.
The Indians just owned a few bony horses and some dogs. Occasionally a coyote, either blind or deaf, lost itself in the reservation in search of food, of which of course there wasn’t any. Most of them hadn’t even seen one of their sacred buffalo alive either. Needless to say, from that day on, Mr.Jones and Jesus had the church mostly to themselves.
So, as we entered the little so called village we did like all its god-loving inhabitants and headed straight for the saloon. Some of us needed to take a piss. Lucy probably because she had to let go part of the all the excitement that had so completely stirred up her insides, me just because Louis had shown me his cooled beer.
As I was about to enter the stinking hole, a strange sobbing sound squeezed out of the half open toilet door. My inner self told me that I was in for some trouble. Because I always ignore what wise guys tell me to do – whenever one was around - I went in anyway.
My screaming bladder didn’t leave me time for second thoughts anyway.
There was this sort of dressed up Indian boy of about ten sitting in his misery, sobbing away his sorrows. Jesus, why me? Why do I always get to meet these troubled souls? Sandy - those three other guys in class desperately trying to become my friends. They were the saddest characters, rejected by everybody, even their families. I’d just wanted to be left alone. But because I felt bad pushing them away, I sometimes invited them over to have a pizza or something. They practically fell on their knees to thank me.
It was as if an invisible force pushed those people over to me, knowing that I just couldn’t let them be. This one looked as if he might be one of Mr.Jones’ choir boys. When I asked what he was doing crying in the stinking toilet, he told me that Mr.Jones had just thrown him out of the church because he always tried to create a real lively laugh when he sang HaHaHaHa .
“I’m just doing my best. Those guys must have laughed, too! Also, these are the only words I understand in Jones’ Latin - why do we need to sing this crap anyway? Except for the laughs nobody understands anything!”
I must say that he definitely had a point there, but I also knew Mr.Jones had a mind of his own - or maybe Jesus himself had been whispering his orders into the attentive ears of his faithful servant.
“He doesn’t even want me back …”
That was a surprise to my ears: Didn’t this priest know anything about forgiveness?
“Hey, you crying your heart out in this stinking rat hole doesn’t better your chances in being allowed back in either, right?”
The flies that usually would have stuck to the toilet seat now took a easy walk on both his cheeks.
“I can’t imagine he doesn’t want to see you anymore. After all, he needs you, with only four other kids left in the choir.”
That he could understand and a little smile shook up the shocked flies.
I said: “You know what we’ll do? I’ll go with you and together we’ll fix things, o.k.?”
I told him that it might be better if he’d wash up a bit before reentering Mr.Jones’ temple of pure faith. But sometimes people simply cannot understand each other’s way of thinking. The boy just ripped off his sunday-choir clothes and stood there in front of me completely naked except for a little piece of torn cotton which once must have served as underwear. But that must have been a long long time ago.
“I’m clean!”
“Yeah well, clean you are; but how about something to put on, you know with Jesus hanging there from the cross and all. How about showing a little more respect to the man.”
“Jesus is naked, too!” he said proudly. “How can I show him more respect than appearing before him exactly the way he shows me to be? I could take over the role of Jesus in the songs we’re singing.”
Confronted with this kind of logic, I had nothing left to say.
“O.K. off we go then. By the way what’s your name?”
“Tiko, and I am the son of Wild Cloud who died bravely three years ago while hunting for buffalo.”
On the way over, he told me his father’s story. He was said to be a great great grandson of Manuelito, a brave and famous Navaho chief. In a desperate attempt to hunt down a lost and lonely buffalo, Wild Cloud had jumped from his galloping horse onto the animal’s back. That must have scared the shit out of the beast because it started to run so fast that his fellow hunters thought they both were flying. The others couldn’t hold the pace and stayed behind. They later informed Tiko of his father’s heroic deed. As far as they could tell, the beast had been heading straight for the canyon’s cliff. It must have sensed Wild Cloud wouldn’t give up - he was either too stubborn or thought the animal possessed some kind of intelligence which would stop it from killing itself. Well, it didn’t. They both went over. That was the end of both Wild Cloud and the buffalo. Tiko was alone.
Mr.Jones, probably all too happy about this God given find - his first on his search for fallen souls, had picked him up and taken care of him. He’d given him something to eat, a place to sleep and eventually even managed to send him to school.
Tiko stared down at himself and counted his ribs. He looked as if he hadn’t had any decent food for months - maybe Mr.Jones was on a diet. We left the bathroom and walked into the church. It smelled different there. It still did stink, just another kind of stench, less of a toilet smell; more foul, like mold. In the back, under a wooden statue of Jesus dangling from the cross a candle stood burning. The church was empty. Where had the choir gone?
Tiko walked up to the back of the room and disappeared through a little door I hadn’t remarked before. You know, the kind which is painted the way the walls are painted.
“Come on, follow me.”
A small staircase led us down into the saloon’s cellar where the booze was kept. It was cooler there and the air smelled like cold beer. In the back of the room under a tiny open window, Mr.Jones and his choir were desperately practicing some piece of choir music. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. A unique sound too horrible to describe. You know: no rythm, no melody, just noise coming out of four potbellied little Indian kids.
As soon as they saw Tiko and me entering the cellar they stopped their hopeless efforts. Mr.Jones pierced Tiko with his little eyeballs, but he tried to hold his temper as if guessing I could mean trouble. The way his overcooked potato-head stuck on his formless frame you could tell that he must have been good friends with the barkeeper.
Suddenly there was this huge crescendo coming from Mr.Jones’ watering mouth, as his held-in anger exploded: “I forbid ….”
Not that it impressed me much. I’d had such talk since birth. While shouting, he also presented us with an ear shattering banging fart, lost his balance and fell to the floor. It took quite a while for the dust to settle.

“Oh my God, what have you done?”
Lucy and Mark stood in the door. They’d overheard the strange noise coming from the cellar and wanted to see what was going on.
“We haven’t done nothing. We were just singing and Mr.Jones was singing too and then Tiko and this boy came in and Mr.Jones got very upset,” one of the other boys said, leaning against a tower of empty beer crates. “Maybe the potato chips he had been eating since the last service didn’t agree with him. They’ve been lying on the altar for about six months now. Nobody ever came to his services - even the mice preferred to dine out. Maybe he’d just had enough and decided to take his last supper today. He also emptied two open bottles of wine and after that finished the silver carafe which had been standing next to the chips. He did fart a lot after having emptied that one and also made me swear not to tell the barkeeper about those bottles. With Mr.Jones gone now, I’d be in big trouble if the tapster finds out.”
I remember thinking that this little guy would give a good detective one day, the way he was putting up plausible theories in the case.
We decided that it had been the mysterious contents of Mr.Jones’s decanter that had finished off his sad existence. Did he do it on purpose? Who knows. I don’t think it’s up to us to judge him for that.
“What do we do with the guy? We can’t let him just lie here,” Lucy asked, pointing at the body with outstretched arms.
Mark said: “It’s the only thing we can do. Or would you want to explain a dead priest in a cellar to the reservation patrol?”
“Well no, but can’t we bury him or something?”
“And then what? Sooner or later somebody is going to find out he’s missing. I don’t want to be responsible for all the unanswered questions the police will be throwing at the locals here. Imagine someone finding an unmarked grave with the priest’s bloated body in it. And from what I can tell, the ballooning phase is far from over. It’s not these people’s fault the guy’s dead. But it ain’t ours either, so let’s not make it that.”
“Ok, ok, you’re right,” Lucy said. She was bending over the body, studying Mr.Jones’ face, her boobs covering half of it, as she suddenly spoke up: “Hey Mark, did you see this thing here on the guy’s forehead? As if he was hit or something.” She was poking at a small reddish bump half hidden by a strand of hair.
“Probably just a fight over a bottle.”
“I think he was so drunk he even oversaw this solid pole here,” I said, slapping my hand against the one thing that was apparently holding the place together. “Maybe he panicked because of what he had going on in his belly. Or he simply lost his senses, freaked out and ran into the thing.”
“Poor guy. How horrible his end must have been,” Lucy said, embracing Mark.
„I don’t want to appear rude, Lucy, but I think we need to move on. Louis is waiting outside and there is nothing we can do for the poor fellow.”
“You four guys,” he said, addressing the church choir members, staring straight through their brain pans, “You go on home now and don’t tell anyone a word about what you saw or heard today.”
They all were like hypnotized.
“Just tell them that you’d been waiting in the church for a long time. Because nobody turned up you’d decided that it would be better to leave so you could do some work at home. Not many of your parents will believe that, knowing that you aren’t too keen on singing with Mr.Jones but they won’t care because they’d be needing your help more than anything else.”
Then he went up to Tiko, squatted in front of the little guy and said: “You can decide for yourself what you want to do: open up a new church choir or come with us.”
We all laughed because everyone knew the answer to that one.
Tiko, putting his hand on Mark’s shoulder, said: “Thank you for the offer. I think I’ll take it.”
We’d become one more for the road.