[ Who is John Bancroft? ]

[ Listen to the author read
 Prologue: Rebecca. ]

"The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful."
Colette

"I want love and suffering and revenge,
flowers and blood and jaguars."
Jim Harrison

"I want to be seduced."
Leon Redbone

Chapter 1: Badwater, Texas

A late winter afternoon's dusk had fallen while I reminisced and the bar was dark, but I could see the woman perfectly. She might as well have been an actor picked out of a moody stage set by a blade of theatrical light.

Chapter 2: West With The Night

We sailed past El Paso and crossed the Rio Grande at at least a hundred and twenty. We passed the hay farms and orchards of the floodplain in a heartbeat and climbed to higher ground. The moon rose huge and orange and cratered in Lily's rearview mirror.

Chapter 3: Welcome To Tucson

I awoke in what seemed no more than a minute, refreshed and amazingly clearheaded. Silky sheets soothed my bare backside and covered me to my chin. At this second waking I felt as if nothing could possibly be beyond my strength.

Chapter 4: Crime Scene

BADWATER -- A bizarre scene greeted Hudspeth County sheriff's deputies who responded last night to a telephone report of "a dead guy" at Cowboy's Place, a bar at the center of this tiny crossroads town some 50 miles east of El Paso.

Chapter 5: Frim Fram Sauce

It was a long descent. I counted sixty-three steps, which, if my count was accurate, put us three stories underground. The stairs ended in a sharp left turn along a low passage that brought us into a cavernous domed space in which I soon learned it is always night, a handy thing if you're nocturnal.

Chapter 6: Meg

Meg loved sex. It was her sacred calling. That's why she chose to be a whore. Her ancillary roles as licensed massage therapist and unlicensed midwife rounded out her three-cornered ministry to a troubled world. Lily was her main squeeze and mentor.

Chapter 7: The Bat

Only the Bacardi mascot suspended above the front door identified the place, but nobody whose head was right for The Bat had any trouble finding it.

Chapter 8: Josefina

First thing in the morning Josefina would drive the sixty miles north from Gallup to sell the last of her work before heading her Power Wagon toward Sonora. She knew the rugs would fetch a good price because the trader was an honest man. That he occasionally was permitted to lift the weaver's velvet skirt had nothing at all to do with it.

Chapter 9: Friday's Mackerel

"You're the spit and image of him. All you'd have to do is go down south of the line somewhere, get yourself declared dead, which don't cost much, and get your picture took in a pine box. He'd be legal dead a long way from here and we'd be in the clear."

Chapter 10: Ejido Libido

She pulled the plain door open and stepped into a dimly lighted vestibule. Ahead of her was a red leather door branded in Spanish and English: Welcome to Ejido Libido, An Independent Woman-Owned Collective. "We plow a different furrow."

Chapter 11: Slim

That way out was too easy for a son of a bitch like him and that bastard Lightfoot. It had been stupid to think he could get rid of Jack so easily. The only way to rub Jack out was to rub Slim out. And they both deserved to suffer some before they crossed the last divide.

Chapter 12: Gifts

As we drank we rose, just a few slow dreamy inches at first, then a little faster and higher. We rose above the elf owl and the courtyard wall, above the Catalinas' snowy crest. We rose, drinking, turning slowly on some invisible horizontal axis.

Chapter 13: Magdalena, Sonora

Blue breasts and a yellow vulva greeted us. From the woman's basket we were obliged to take and eat six tufted, bitter cactus buttons. I was a peyote virgin but Meg knew all about eating it to get visions and Peyote ate Lily when the little goddess inside wanted to get high.

Epilogue: Ranger

Now I know better about a lot of things. Lily, for example, doesn't need to sleep at all. Like the tin bat over her bar's front door, it tickles her to pretend to fall comatose and powerless at daybreak. The truth is she sleeps because she likes to dream.

Elsewhere on
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An excerpt from
Magdalena
A Novel by John Bancroft

Magdalena is the story of young Charlie Lightfoot, who was born as sexless as a body can be and live, and what happens after he is abducted, unmade and remade by a libidinous cowgirl named Lily ("There never was but one vampire in this old world and you're lookin' at her, kid."). A troupe of happy, healthy, holy whores plays a major supporting role, as does the beautiful cruel country on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border.

Prologue: Rebecca

How a sexual curio came to be.

     The pre-war pickup loped along a lonely stretch of sunstruck blacktop. A hot wind stoked the furnace heat inside the cab. Outside the open windows endless scrubby acres of cow-scorched Texas range rolled by. Now and then a scud of parched soil skittered across the road like dry snow. Above an island of low brown mountains to the east a solitary thundercloud trailed a horsetail of rain that evaporated before it hit the ground. The water shimmering on the road ahead was nothing but mirage.
     At the wheel was a good-looking drifter named Jack Lightfoot. At the other end of the bench seat sat Rebecca Lightfoot, his wife of less than half a year. She was young and pretty but her face was mottled red and white with heat and her expression was grim. In her lap she clutched an open fifth of Irish whiskey, all that was left of last night's prize money. She stared straight ahead, her jaw set hard.
     "Are you gonna hand over that bottle Rebecca or am I gonna have to stop the goddamn truck and break your goddamn arm?"
     Lightfoot's tone was reasonable. His red-rimmed eyes were steady on the unwinding straightaway. His right arm was draped along the seatback and ended in a loose threat of a fist just short of Rebecca's shoulder.
     "You've drunk half already," she said, her eyes straight ahead like his. She was wishing for the millionth time she'd listened to her papa. "I'd like to get where we're headed just once without havin' to have this truck hauled out of the ditch."
     "Goddamnit," Lightfoot said.
     He was mad then and no doubt about it. He ripped his arm from the seatback and brought it down hard in a real fist on the sun-faded metal of the dash. He jammed the brake pedal to the floor with both feet, to hell with the clutch. The truck came to a dead rocking stop broadside in the road. Lightfoot yanked his door handle up and pushed the door so hard he nearly snapped the hinges. He walked deliberately around the front of the truck, muscled Rebecca's door open before she thought to lock it and pulled her roughly off the seat by her elbow, dislocating her shoulder and sending her skidding on bare knees a good six feet across the asphalt. The whiskey bottle shot out of the hand she extended to break her fall and rocketed into a clump of tumbleweed.
     Rebecca, dazed and hurting but not surprised, expected the usual beating, followed by a sullen ride to the next fleabag motel on the rodeo circuit. In the morning Jack would wake up hung over and sorry and he'd make love to her so sweet and slow it took all the hurt away and everything was sunny side up until the next time.
     That's what she expected, but she was wrong. Jack hit her, all right, but not before he'd dragged her to her feet by her ponytail and bent her backward over the scorching black metal of the front fender. He laid his right arm across her throat, pinning her. With his left hand he hiked her cotton skirt up and ripped her panties from her hips. She bucked and tried to roll away but he had forty pounds on her and his blood was up.
     He forced her bloodied knees apart with one of his and her feet slid out from under her. He managed to unzip and force himself inside her. With every violent cockthrust the rapist struck the face before him, a face not so long ago she'd thought he loved. Her fair head snapped right and left. A fine spray of blood atomized on the bone-dry air with every blow.
     "Now you high 'n mighty little bitch how do you like that?" He was screeching, spittle flying. "How do you fuckin' like that you lousy cunt?"
     She tried again to push him away. He nearly broke her back with a whole-body slam centered, like what passed with him for brains, in the unremarkable prick he habitually was led around by. If what he imagined in that moment as a mighty weapon had been bigger it might have split his wife wide open, which would have suited him just fine.
     "Well fuck you Miss Fuckin' Mary Rebecca On Her Fuckin' High Horse and fuck your candy ass old man and your whole fuckin' better than everbody else family. If they still want you after what I just done to you they can have you 'cause I sure as fuck don't."
     His hateful semen sputtered one last time into her womb. Who could have predicted it would find its mark after so many misfires?
     When he finished with his suddenly pregnant wife he dropped her, bleeding, burned and unconscious, in the dust at the side of the road and drove away.
     She lay there without stirring for the better part of two hours before a cowboy in a brand new Buick came along. Without a thought for his showroom perfect upholstery he picked her up and laid her, blood and all, on his back seat and drove as fast as the heavy car would go to a roadhouse down the way. The deputy who got the call decided he couldn't wait for an ambulance to make the long haul out back of nowhere, so he drove her himself, red light spinning and siren bawling, straight up the middle of the empty highway to the hospital in El Paso.
     Barely eight months later an imperfect miniature of a baby would be decanted after long labor into a pink Texas dawn, feet first, blue and as nearly sexless as a human being can be and live, which this one would, despite its shaky start. The sight of Baby Lightfoot down there would shock and bewilder Rebecca's elderly Mexican midwife, despite all the wonders she'd witnessed in her life, but she said nothing, just crossed herself and stayed on the job until the medic she called from a neighbor's house arrived. He would be plenty puzzled by the sexually amorphous infant, too, but not Rebecca. She would insist it was a boy. She would name it Charlie.
     Rebecca never saw Jack Lightfoot again after that bad day on a lonesome road and the cops never caught him. He was just a rodeo bum like a thousand others, after all, and could disappear pretty easy. In fact, he did it all the time. It didn't help that Rebecca stayed out cold behind black and swollen eyes for four full nights and days and couldn't tell the law who to look for.
     When Rebecca finally woke up and the doctors gave the nurse the okay to raise her head a little, which a cast, a back brace, yards of stiff bandages and head-to-toe bruises and abrasions prevented her from doing for herself, she discovered she had visitors.
     Her parents were older than you'd think. Rebecca was barely twenty, but the only live child God gave Josiah and Elizabeth McIntosh came late to them. The two stood side by side by the hospital bed and looked sadly down at their only daughter. Josiah stood tall and straight in a waxed handlebar moustache and shined black boots. His hair was as white as his starched shirt. His suit was fine black wool and fit him like a glove. He held a black Stetson waist-high in both hands. Elizabeth wore her iron-gray hair in a bun. Her face was as deeply lined as his. Her slim hands were covered in skin so thin you could clearly see the bones. She was half a head taller than her husband, despite his high-heeled boots. Her black dress was subtly tailored, plain except for the hand-faceted jet buttons up the front. They didn't intend it but they had the look of mourners.
     "Mama, Papa," Rebecca managed to choke out around the sobs fattening in her throat, "I am so sorry."
     She cried full out and for a long time, making the iron bedframe squeak with each gasping breath she took. She cried it all out while her sad silent parents watched and then she never cried again, not ever. She'd rather die than give that bastard Lightfoot the satisfaction.
     Nobody spoke for a long time.
     "Do you need anything Mary?" her mama eventually asked. She always called her daughter Mary even though everybody else honored her preference for Rebecca. Her mama's eyes were dry but they mirrored a fractured soul.
     Her papa turned his spotless hat in big rough hands. The muscles in his throat worked.
     Rebecca shook her throbbing head and closed her eyes. She wished her parents would go away. They were the ones who truly loved her, weren't they, and she'd turned her back on them, hadn't she, and for what? A few giddy months of barreling, mostly drunk and horizontal, all over the Southwest on the rodeo circuit with a no-good handsome cowboy, that's what. She was ashamed of herself deep in her bones and more miserable than she ever imagined a living body could be.
     "Mary?" her mother said.
     "Rebecca?" her father said.
     She didn't answer and after a while the nurse came in to tell them they had to leave because their daughter was very sick and needed rest more than anything. The nurse promised to call them when Rebecca was strong enough to visit and said she'd surely be all right.
     Her parents nodded and departed. When they were gone Rebecca told the nurse that nobody was to call her parents under any circumstances, unless she died. Rebecca would call them herself when she was ready, a time that never came. Rebecca didn't die, of course, but her father did and within the year. Her mother survived numbly for another bitter decade.
     Rebecca raised Charlie singlehanded, taking whatever work there was no matter what it was, but her real job, first, last and always, was to love her son and to defend him against all the bullies, halfwits and plain malicious shitheads who hated the unnatural child on sight. She managed it all with surprising good humor, considering the difficulty of the task and how scarce money was around the cramped tin can of a trailer they shared out in the middle of downtown nowhere. Rebecca sometimes missed the pleasure of sex but she had lost her taste for men and never sought out that kind of company. Once, on a rare weekend of abandon among the cantinas and street stalls of Juarez with a couple of temporary girlfriends -- Nobody who didn't have to stayed long in Badwater. -- she came upon a curio that pretty much summed up her experience of men in just ten words. It was a pillow and embroidered above the stitched name Dorothy Parker was this: Sometimes the fucking you get isn't worth the fucking you get.
     "Amen," she said and bought it.
     She stashed the scandalous prize in the top of a closet. A few years later she added to the shelf the contents of a box that arrived on Charlie's fifteenth birthday. It was addressed to "Misses Lightfoot" care of Badwater General Delivery and in it were a hat with a hole in its crown and an unsigned letter on yellow notebook paper.

You dont know me but I knowed your ex off and on over the years when we was both on the rodeo. I never like him much but we was both bronc riders and was fond of whisky. I met up with him agin last week over at the horse races at Ruidoso and we had a couple beers for old times you know how it is. Any way he was pretty far gone and he started to brag about how he just uses women up and tosses em off his truck like a empty beer can when he gets done with em. I heard it all befor and when he sees I am not bolled over he tells me about how he left this one gal had actually married him beat up aside the road some lonesome place down on the border and how he never even looked in his rearview to see was she alive or dead. I dont hold with talk like that and I put my money on the bar and started to go but he grabbed my arm and told me the rest his story in words I will never say. Any way he trailed me to the parking lot still talking and tells me I want to see for myself the woman lives over to Badwater with some kid maybe his maybe not. When I got to my pickup I fetched my revolver out under the seat and shot him in the head. He is dead. Here is his hat so you know this is the truth.

     The pillow, the hat and the letter stayed out of sight until she gave them to Charlie when he turned eighteen. They were parting gifts.
     Rebecca knew her time was close because she'd decided to see to it herself. She was still young in years but she was old in her imperfectly mended bones. Some malignancy, which she decided early on to call arthritis, had her body in its grip and was twisting hard. It had been crippling her by slow degrees ever since her release from the hospital in El Paso and now its pace was accelerating. If there was one thing Rebecca couldn't face it was being helpless. She wasn't about to let things run their humiliating "natural" course, so she ended her growing misery with pills she got from the local large animal vet, who was sort of paternally fond of her. Truth is, everybody she ever met liked her and admired her spunk. Tough enough for a woman alone to raise a normal child, let alone that queer duck Charlie.
     Rebecca didn't leave much behind, except the trailer and a note for Charlie. She'd written it out on both sides of a stiff card about the right size to carry in a wallet.

Dearest Charlie, never doubt that I'll always love you. You're a good son and you know I have to do this because I just can't swing it any more. It's not your fault, I'm just worn out and I can't face being a cripple. I'm sorry and I hope you'll forgive me for it. Now, here's my prayer for you:
"The Lord make His face to shine upon thee
and be gracious unto thee,
The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee
and give thee peace."
Good bye my heart.

     Rebecca hated Badwater and was determined she wouldn't be stuck there for eternity. Before she took the pills she bought herself a plot in the churchyard at St. Cecilia's in El Paso, where she sometimes took Charlie to hear the choir sing, and she made her buddy Marge promise to get her body buried there when the time came, come hell or high water. No mass though, just dust to dust at graveside, nobody there but Marge and Charlie and a priest, no flowers except one yellow rose for her coffin.
     "Get it," she said when Marge failed to laugh, "Yellow Rose of Texas?"
     Rebecca laughed hard enough for both of them. She'd always been fond of jokes, especially the bad ones.

[ © 2008 John Bancroft ~ Author Bio ~ Prologue: Audio. ~ Comments? Drop me a line. ]