"It is time for him to tell a story.
He could tell a story if he wants,
but he doesn't have to explain what he's doing here
if he doesn't want to.
Instead, it does about being in Afghanistan as a hippie.
It was a long time ago he says, and I believe him.
His hair was that long, he says.
He says he had plenty of it then.
It hung in clumps, the blue and pink dust of the cliffs
that they passed clotted with the grease that
was part of having that hair.
Why am I telling you this?
He asks.
You said you don't like things hanging, I point with my pinky
at the twist of straw and feather dangling over us.
Someone hung it there.
The Valkyrie who was away was coming back any minute.
Who has just gone right now.
Oh yes, he says.
Velu is afraid of the tupuqa.
You know ghosts?
This is supposed to catch them.
I touch my hair the way a woman does
was born brunette who remembers she's blonde.
Ghost?
There she's called a ghost earlier.
I start playing with something soft with long tiddly
fingers, something that would scare boys in the bush.
She was hung, the woman I was with.
He says.
Good grief.
I stopped playing and sip with a scotch from the coconuts rim.
Hung how?
She drove the truck.
I was a hitchhiker, the hippie.
She was going somewhere she was told to
and she was sad because in the same mail is the assignment,
the man she wanted wrote that he wanted someone else.
She drove the truck fast through all that pink and blue.
She was a cloud with wheels when she picked me up.
We camped when she came to a stop and a cloud of blue
and pink settled in our hair, our teeth, and our necks.
We zipped our bags together.
We wormed our way over the cinders
of the fire I built from blowing around bushes burning
the bags a little and we laughed about it.
About that kind of love.
That was the only time I heard her laugh.
I'm looking out his window where the moonlight is too bright.
I want to interrupt but I can't get the words arranged.
He stops talking.
And what am I supposed to say?
I sit up and watch the shadows the twist of straw and feathers
make against the moon.
She could drive fast over those rutted washed out tracks.
She drove as if she could drive out the bad letter
she carried as if driving away drove him away.
She drove hard into a herd of goats.
Goats were always on or off the road.
She drove in and hit one or so she
thought the dust of the goats, the dust of the her truck
slowed down, who could tell?
When she saw what it was, she was out of the car.
When they bore him away, she followed them.
I followed her.
I wasn't going to sit-in the truck and wait around.
I wasn't going to drive away with a truck
either though I did later.
What I remember most about following
is the women who rose up out of the big clumps of dirt
and wailed over the boy.
The blue and pink walls of the cliffs wailed.
We waited a day.
It was decent of us, decent of them to bring us food.
They unrolled mats and let us lie in a warm room all night.
Lie without sleeping.
The room had a hole in the roof that children and birds
passed over.
Only those who brought food came down
the ladder that was left for us against that hole.
I used it only once in the night to pee off the roof.
She didn't talk about how much she loved that man that night,
she didn't even talk about the boy who he could have been.
I didn't make hippy talk, I showed her my flute.
Did you have a flute in those days or just a piano?
I had a flute.
Well then, you know how I could try
to sound Afghani with my flute there in the dark,
but I also did Yankee Doodle, high-ho silver.
She wanted me to play anything.
I didn't know her.
She was an older woman with a man who didn't want her
and a job waiting for her at the end of her drive.
She dug latrines because she was a woman.
That's what women did then to be a woman,
to show they could be men if they wanted.
She was helping the people and she
had another job at the end of the drive
to show she could help though she hadn't been helping long.
She knew about as much of their language as I did.
After I put down the flute, I smoked what I had.
She was asleep by then and I listened to the wailing.
We climbed out in the morning.
Goats were swarming all over the place as noisy
and jammed up as they had been the day before on the road,
but now no one was straightening them out.
More people than lived in these places had come to wail.
Men to one side of the clearing, wailing women on the other.
The boy was carried between them on a litter, wrapped tightly
and blue and pink cloth.
You could believe cocoons made butterflies.
I remember thinking then.
I wasn't so stoned that I couldn't get the ladder out
of the hole and over the side of the wall.
She made a big deal out of helping me and almost fell off.
The men met us at the bottom.
They were all weeping now not wailing.
I'd never seen so many men crying before.
One of them put out his hand and she took it.
That was dumb, I say.
She said, it is raining and pointed at their eyes
full of tears and they smiled.
She lived with them or with people like them
where she came from.
I don't think it was dumb.
So they hung her?
He doesn't look up at the pleading that
hangs from the ceiling, the only thing hanging, the thing that
makes shadows out of the moonlight, the place here.
They ignored me.
I waited around for her to come back but she didn't.
So I walked back to the truck thinking
I would drive it over, pick her up, and get going.
But once I swung myself up into the driver's seat,
there was still blood on the windshield.
I realized she had the keys.
I had to walk back to the village over all
that humped Earth the women seemed to come out of the day
before.
And yes shit, there she was.
I was so set in the keys in her pockets
in that weird way you get when you're
stoned that I remember panicking because she was nude
not because she was dead.
Then I tried to run away, nobody would let me.
Not even the goats that came swirling around
the first corner of my running.
Who can get away in the middle of a bunch of goats?
But it turned out that all they wanted was to give me the body.
They didn't want a body that wasn't theirs.
They didn't want to bury a body that had buried one of theirs.
It was up to me to cut her down to wrap her in her clothes.
Her arms and legs already with no good to move and carry
her now wood heavy body over all those dirt
clods back to the truck and to drive her away.
And the moral of the story, he looks around.
Is someone listening?
He says, don't think you can help.