—Shakespeare,
The mind is a full moon rising in a warm spring rain.
Daniel felt lighter and lighter and lighter, despite the rain soaking his buckskins, despite the Diamond in his sack that seemed to be gaining an ounce every fifteen minutes, lighter and lighter until he thought he might actually rise with the moon. He stood where his ride from the Reno Shell Station had left him. The old guy had apologized for not being able to invite him for the night, but space was cramped what with the granddaughter and all, and Ma wasn’t much on strangers.
Daniel had been sorry, too. The granddaughter was no toddler but a drop-you-to-your-knees smoldering redhead about nineteen years old. Daniel had gathered from the old guy’s brief conversation while waiting for the women to return from the restroom that she had been sent to her grandparents’ desolate ranch because she’d gone boy-crazy in Santa Rosa. Twice in the course of the ride he’d pressed his hand against the cab’s rain-streaked rear window in an unconscious attempt to touch her hair. He’d been sorely tempted to vanish, go sit on the dashboard, and just watch her. He’d resisted, cursing his strength.
Now, as he watched the moon rise, he tried to imagine what she was feeling miles away, and he received a sensation of alien pleasure, the friction between pressed thighs as the old truck seat vibrated down the dirt road. The sensation made him feel lighter yet.
Blinking against the rain, he watched the blurred moon rise with a majestic inevitability so erotic he wanted to vanish. He sensed a powerful and mutual receptivity slowly opening in the warm, moonlit rain, a rain so warm for a Nevada April the old guy had said he damn near couldn’t believe it. Daniel believed it. Daniel believed if he vanished he could rise with the moon, float up through the top of his skull and join the moon’s constancy, its fastness, its light. He was gathering himself to vanish when a low sexual growl snapped his focus.
The cardinal Porsche shot past in a blink, but one blink was sufficient for a glimpse of the striking woman at the wheel.
When the car was almost out of sight, he caught the sudden brightness of brake lights. Daniel ran toward the car, hoping his glimpse of her hadn’t been some rain-blurred moonlight mirage.
The mind is a mirage with real water.
When he reached the passenger door and bent to look inside, her loveliness took his breath away. The door was locked.
She leaned across the seat – to unlock it, he hoped – but only rolled the window down a crack.
She examined him a moment then said, ‘Are you Jim Bridger?’
She might as well have said,
‘No ma’am, I’m not,’ Daniel said with the drawl of an old beaver- trapper, ‘but I knew the Bridger boy when he was greener’n a mountain meadow. Fact is, he an’ that worthless John Fitzpatrick left me in the mountains to die. I’d gotten chawed on somethin’ pitiful by a she-grizzly. The Mountain Code is to stay till you’re sure, but the Bridger boy and that Fitzpatrick fool was in a tizzy about some marauding Indians nearby, so they left me for dead. That wasn’t so bad, but they took my rifle and my possibles with ’em. Had to live on what the wolves left on buffler carcasses, and had to fight the damn buzzards for that. Had a broken leg and back tore raw, so I had to go it on my hands and knees. Made pads out of dried buffler hide. Two hundred fifty miles to Fort Kiowa and the only thing that kept me going was revenge. You shoulda seen that Bridger boy’s face when he spied me crawling through the gates, like I was nightmare turned real, come to collect.’
The woman bent closer to the crack in the window. ‘Did you kill him?’
Daniel, bending close to hear the question, caught the scent of cinnamon on her breath. ‘No, ma’am, I didn’t. Revenge is a powerful lure till it’s time to pull the trigger. Then it’s thin justice, weak murder. Don’t get me wrong, now. I didn’t kill ’em, but I didn’t forgive ’em either. Well actually, I forgave the Bridger boy some. He was a tenderfoot, hadn’t grasped the fine points of the Code. He went on to be a genuine mountain man. Ol’ Gabe – that’s what he come to be called. Fitzpatrick, though, he stayed worthless, and unforgiven.’
The woman said, ‘When was this?’
Daniel squinted up at the moon. ‘Musta been eighteen forty-five, forty-six – sometime close.’
‘That was a hundred and forty years ago.’
Daniel smiled at her. ‘Only if you keep track real close.’
‘But you couldn’t have been alive then.’
Daniel squatted so they were at eye level. He said, with careless conviction, ‘Ma’am, I can be whoever I want to be as long as I know who I am.’
‘Get in,’ Jenny said, unlocking the door.
Daniel obliged.
Jenny watched him as he slid in and settled, then asked, ‘Do you know the DJ? Guy on the radio?’
‘Ain’t much for this modern stuff, but I did hear a guy named David Janus on a program called “Moment of Truth,” all about the mind, and this David Janus sounds like he lost his oars in some swift water, if you follow my drift.’
‘What did he say about the mind?’
Daniel, taken aback, was slow to reply. ‘Lots of things, but I guess the nut of it would be that the mind is everything you can think about it.’
Jenny nodded. ‘The DJ. When did you hear him?’
‘Let’s see. Two nights back, comin’ into Reno.’
‘I knew he was around,’ Jenny smiled. ‘I’m supposed to meet him at Jim Bridger’s grave in eastern
