JANISSARY
By Eric Olguín Conroe
I WAS TRYING to convince the old Marine that he should tell me his name. We were standing in a loose circle completed by one of the other guys, Josh, who also parked and lived in his vehicle at the lake’s lower lot when the gate wasn’t closed for the season. Watching our dogs figure out their order in this parking lot, we took the energy and primacy of dogs, their speed and facility as they sprinted half-snarling across the packed gravel and into the tree line and back, and applied it to the logic of the woods around us. New in the spring. The measure of expansion one is responsible for, witness to. The absolute miracle of blank contentment one moment, blank-eyed aggression the next. And applied it too against the failings of those we knew to be corrupt, unfit to set forth laws. Dead in the Fall. The essence of a dishonest snarl.
The November heat was making us feel giddy, alert and boyish in the desperate sunlight one last time before the creeping Winter closed the mouth of creation for a few blessed months of stasis.
The Marine’s little Rotty boy, although already huge, was just a puppy, and helplessly in love with Corazón, my female Malinois. Josh had a frantic Aussie/Pit mix who yelped from inside his camper.
‘My girl’s not spayed,’ he said, angling the air with his hand. ‘You never know. Little guy might be old enough. When do dogs’ nuts drop?’
He vibrated his way over to his camper, stuck his head in the door, and screamed at his dog to shut the fuck up.
The Marine hooked his thumbs into the molle straps on his chest harness and looked to the side, showing me his jugular. The universal sign of recalcitrance.
‘Man, I went in to vote the other day.’
I knew better than to ask for who. What I cared about was his name. Last name, street name, grunt name, whatever. Josh started walking back over to us, looking down at the gravel.
‘Had my camera on on my GoPro, strapped right here. So I could record the proceedings accordingly. Didn’t even make it a few steps into the firehouse there in West Hurley before I got stopped. They said Sir, you can’t record in here. I was all what the fuck? Like I can’t document my right to free speech?’
‘Insane,’ Josh said, pulling out a lumpy joint as he re-inserted himself into the circle.
‘How is that shit even legal. You guys wanna hit this?’
Cora drove her snout into the fulcrum point behind the Rottweiler’s shoulder blade like a killer whale, sending him tumbling cartoonishly end over end across the gravel, yipping submissively. Hackles up, she followed and then towered above him like Ali over Liston.
‘Cora! What the hell! Sorry about that, man.’
‘Naw, let that little fucker learn,’ the Marine laughed. ‘He needs to see what a dominant female can look like. Your dog is beautiful, bro. Too bad you got her spayed. Their colors are perfect opposite. Them puppies would be hella gorgeous.’
Someone at this lake proposed that their dog fuck mine at least once a month during the high season. I considered a houseful of Malinois/Rottweiler puppies. ‘Do you guys know Patrick? He stays here too sometimes. Camps up on the ridge trail there.’
I pointed behind The Marine and Josh to the steep rise in the hill just beyond the parking lot. Poured concrete steps hunkered in the dirt and leaves in a few surviving runs, broken branches on a huge fallen tree providing the last series of handholds to the ridge’s summit. Expecting a baby in the summer, I’d started sprinting up this hill whenever I came to the lake with Cora, challenging myself to use the remaining steps and broken branches to ascend the hill with maximum efficiency and speed, convinced that excellence in this would somehow equate to excellence in being a father, since I’d started a family so late in life.
The Marine looked at me flatly and shook his head no.
‘Don’t know him either,’ Josh said, passing the joint to The Marine.
‘Thought you might,’ I mumbled. ‘Oh but he doesn’t have a car. He’s been tenting it.’
I thought about adding that Patrick had been an organizer for the Occupy protests in 2011, at the very start, living in a tent in Zuccotti Park; that he’d been arrested with a bag full of hammers and done some real time on trumped-up domestic terrorism charges. The furthest we’d ventured as a trio, politically, was casting vague disdain at government overreach, both State and Federal. It was a thrilling little dance, but valorizing Occupy, or seeming to, might have brought the music to a halt.
‘He was really involved with this Ayahuasca church over in Olivebridge, too. Regular peeker behind the curtain. Like every weekend for at least three years there.’
‘You peek behind the curtain too many times,’ said the Marine, ‘You just become a fuckin’ stage manager. Cleaning up after Oz when he’s done tricking Dorothy and her friends with his bullshit. Easy to suck the magic out of that with too many reps.’
‘Never tried that stuff. But I’m sure you’re right. I hired him to help me demo this house out in Margaretville,’ I said, and pulled on the joint. ‘Nice guy, terrible music, not the best worker in the world.’
The Marine laughed and then grimaced.
‘Yeah, you’ll get that with a lot of the guys around here. Pick-up work in construction is where you’ll get all types. Not usually the most stable ones.’
‘That might be good, though. Not for the work — fuck the work — but for the mission. For what really needs to be done. Not everybody is going to lead, you know?’
The Marine spat and looked across the lot at his house, parked next to Josh’s.
SO I HAVE three tools. Transience. Gratitude. And music. All the other ones have been lost or have lost their edge. They might still be in Zuccotti. My life is hourly. I am full of ekeing people. I come from an ekeing people. I seek no reward from the world. I am expected in the woods. I have my petty dogmas, Percy! But I am not an idea centered around the self. I seek fecundity. I seek more booze. Do you remember what I told you about Don Juan? Are we still working out in the Cats tomorrow? Find me. My phone ran out of minutes.
I SQUATTED IN Patrick’s camp, staring down at the handwritten note. Josh and the Marine never really left the down lot. I was up on the ridge trail, where Patrick’s camp was. The piece of paper was secured by a pack of Newports filled with grey rocks and little black feathers.
‘Oh shit,’ I said to Cora as she snffed hungrily around his tent. ‘This is his little shrine.’
There were larger black feathers, a dry-stacked ring of bluestone shards, a single sacred turquoise stone, and a hand-carved shillelagh laid across it all like a blessing.
His camp was just a few meters off the trail, entirely visible from it. He had a pretty nice kit. Tent with no holes, hiking backpack, a deerskin drum.
‘Where could he have gotten off to,’ I asked the dog. She whined, broke a branch off of a dead tree, and sprinted into the woods, shaking the branch violently like she was trying to break its spine.
Probably at the deli, which was walking distance from the lake and his camp, right on the side of the road that was the gateway to the Catskill mountains. Something to really look at a few hundred million years ago. Now reduced to seething little hills.
The trails at the lake kissed the bottom of this expanse; you could definitely get lost and die in there if you really wanted to. Or live, and pitch a complaint against all that was wrong with co-habitation and taxes in your life. I walked the trails with Cora every day, especially now that I was trying to keep tabs on Patrick and keep him alive, at least until the demolition phase was over. I didn’t see any nips or flasks anywhere. He was the cleanest no-shit alcoholic I’d ever met.
THERE WAS A liquor store directly next to the deli.
‘What’s the difference between a drunk and a real fucking alcoholic?’, he’d asked me over the wind as we drove west into the Catskills for our first day on site. Like every single other one, this client was an up and downer — apartment in the city, house upstate they had no clue how to work on. Patrick had been, impressively, awake and outside, red-eyed, coffee in one hand and sprite bottle full of vodka in the other when I pulled up to his friend Chewy’s house at 7:30 that morning to pick him up.
After about six shots of vodka in the coffee and a violent coughing/hawking attack, he’d become downright chipper, bouncing around in the passenger seat as we hit the 55mph zone and I slowly pushed the needle to 63.
I looked over at him in reply and then back at the road.
‘The drunk knows what time the liquor store closes. The alcoholic knows what time it opens.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Percy, Percy, Purse. I’m good at being both. But you’re only one at the beginning of the day. Today I’m an alcoholic, of course, but good god am I fucking ready to work.
Let’s do this. Can we pay out at the end of day? You speak Spanish right? Tu vampiro está pinché listo, man.’
BYPASSING THE PARKING LOT completely, Cora and I took the hobo trail to the deli. I tied her leash to a bollard, told her to sit, then stepped through the glass doors and their friendly little chime. The owner, Shah, looked up and tipped his head towardthe booths by the windows. Patrick was sucking on a vape and attending to his phone, charging it and drinking a huge coffee.
He looked up and grinned like the cheshire cat. His head was at least two times the size of mine. I was taller than most of my friends. Patrick towered above me.
Friendly fractured drunken ginger giant.
‘Yoo-hoo, Boss. You saw my note?’
‘I saw your note. Took the hobo trail here you showed me. Loved that writing. You should lay down some poems and put out a little chapbook. I’d print it for you at Staples,’ I said, suddenly becoming a publisher of alcoholic tent-dwellers. ‘It’d be like samizdat. We can leave a copy at every gas station and liquor store between here and New Kingston.’
‘I mean dude. My very existence is samizdat. I am distributed underground and I will fade away after I incite the working class to revolt.’
He laughed. A deep, weary, Irish sound.
‘We’re a dying breed, brother. Dying breed. That would be sick. I got to go see my kids later. Think we can be back here at the deli by five for the bus? My ex won’t fucking pick me up, she’s pissed about something. Said I showed up drunk last time the kids were at her place.’
For half a second, he sneered. Then his hands twitched and the smile returned to his face.
‘Our old place. But my hands weren’t shaking. I wasn’t screaming. I was actually there.’
‘Of course.’
He knew my wife was pregnant. And that I liked to drink. And I knew I had no idea what having a kid — or kids — was really like.
‘We can end at four today. Of course. And I remember what you told me about Don Juan. You said that Castañeda hallucinated him, that Don Juan was just anotherproduct of Little Smoke. Never would have occurred to me. Kind of blew my fucking mind, honestly.’
‘Do you write ever? You’re always listening to me rant. I think I could write something like Journey To Ixtlan if I got the chance to really hunker down. I have some fucking stories, bro. And I have seen things with my third eye.’
‘I mean. I’ve tried. Who hasn’t, if they’ve tried their hand at some kind of art? Bugs me how still you have to sit. Wouldn’t it be nice to put some of these pages out into the world, though, in a real way.’
Patrick and the Marine would probably get along. Having served and survived, having revolted and failed, they were both janissaries without an empire worth fighting for, thinkers without a system worth a shit to pour anger and purpose into. I was born from a lineage of Officers and Chiefs, Matrons and Protectors, whose message was clear: lead a group of men like this and die. I went to art school instead, but that was all over now. It was time to gather the men of the lake. Even Josh, because someone had to cook the food. We could all fit into The Marine’s van. Patrick and him could figure out their differences around the Gadsden Flag on the road. What I understood about all of us was that some rivers of betrayal will cut a canyon through a mind so deep that it may never be filled in no matter the landslides, storms or earthquakes that happen around it. Our expedition would be punitive and open-hearted. We could make it to Albany before they even knew we were coming.
5/22/26
BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM
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Damn, got lost in that. Thank you.