The Book of Resting Places by Thomas Mira y Lopez

Author:Thomas Mira y Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

The Rock Shop

Roger sets his sixty-four-ounce Polar Pop down on a case of Hohokam axes and says he wants to be preserved in amber when he dies. He throws his head back and shivers his limbs out to mimic a fly. His eyes flutter and neck strains, his expression stuck somewhere between ecstasy and grimace.

Roger mentions how humans have been preserving each other for centuries. The “tar people,” murdered bodies found in bogs, kept in tannic acid. Vampires with stakes stuck through their throats. A frozen iceman in Scandinavia discovered with his penis stolen.

Beads of cola sweat down from the rim of Roger’s Styrofoam cup. The axe heads are made of stone, willow branches boiled and wrapped around them for the handle, rawhide strapped around that for the grip. A rancher and his sons found them while grazing their cattle. Roger picks up his Pop and describes the kiva houses where the Hohokam held weddings. He leans in. Elders would take peyote and psilocybin, he whispers, and then ceremonially rape the child-bride.

As for the amber, Roger straightens up. “I decided I wanted to look out on all my belongings forever.” He gestures around the room, sips his soda, laughs. “Naked,” he adds.

The belongings Roger refers to sit twenty miles outside Tucson on Kinney Road, the lonely two-laner where you gas up before hitting the interstate south to Mexico. Nearby is a rifle and pistol range, a saguaro forest, and Old Tucson, a studio town of saloon doors and replica hitching posts that Hollywood built in the 1950s to film Westerns. A big canvas teepee stands in a gravel lot off Kinney where Geronimo’s grandson, or so he claimed, held court, charging tourists a dollar to take his picture until the day he was found in the mountains outside Oracle, slumped over in the van he was forbidden to drive since he was over one hundred years old.

Next to this teepee, tucked slightly off the road, you’ll find a storefront. Its wood will be weathered the color of root beer, its facade as if built for an Old Tucson shoot and then never taken down.

This is Roger’s shop. Rocks of all shapes and sizes fill its yard. Rocks in old wheelbarrows and mine trolleys. Rocks on a foldout table, in baskets and wire mesh cages. Rocks in a shallow ditch with wood trim where a garden was once planned then thought better of. Geodes, two dollars a pound. Banded Onyx, one dollar. A green pickup in the gravel parking lot. On the glass of the store windows, stenciled-out cowboys ride over hills. A sign, handwritten in white paint, says, “We have a large selection of quartz crystals inside.” Another: “Proud To Be An American.” A third: “Open 9–5, Every Day of the Year.”

I first entered Roger’s shop three years ago, when my mother flew out to visit me in Tucson. I’d driven past the storefront before she landed and thought this just the place to take her, the woman who never stopped reminding me to send copper and quartz crystal back to her in New York.

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