Author's Note: Todd Brendan Fahey is the author of Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel; his collection of short stories, Dogshit Park & other Atrocities, will be published in 2003.

Marnie kissed me on the cheek and moved closer.

Jean Laroue shut his eyes, grabbed hold of the microphone stand, and tipped it off balance, pressing his stiff, gray-flecked goatee against the wire mesh. "When the 41st Army Cavalry picked up the arrows the next morning, they said the ground looked like clay / I awaken in red each night, slick with the fluids of George Custer / I know the cry of the seductress, how puissant the ride into battle / Before the arrows fly. . ."

When he had finished, the audience reacted with a fairly even quotient of jeering and partisan applause. Marnie nudged me, then stood up. A circle of largely young, female admirers surrounded the strange man they called "Black Jack," but Marnie bulled her way through.

"Jackie?" she said, adopting a curious fawning tone, "this is the journalist I was telling you about. He'll understand."

Laroue stepped forward, sliding the Ray-Bans down on his long, pitted nose. "He'll be the only one," he said. Then he let out a laugh that sounded like coarse-grain sandpaper against a steel door. "You know how to swim, don't you?"

"Sure," I nodded.

"You'll need to. Now, let's fuck off," he said, snapping his fingers loudly. A small group of older men rose from separate tables, and followed close behind me until we reached a cluster of all-terrain vehicles in the crowded lot. "You'll ride with me," Laroue said, unlocking the driver's door of a mustard Range Rover. The other men squeezed into two trucks.

Laroue drove silently for several minutes, then began fumbling with a stack of CDs that lay in the space between the two front seats. He finally decided on Bitches Brew, which he played at the volume at which Miles probably thought it was intended. Then he pulled a huge joint from the ashtray. He toked on it several times before cutting the headlights on the Rover, and I saw in the darkness that he was passing it to me. "You say no, you walk home. That's the one moral imperative this evening."

I took the spliff from his fingers and dragged deeply. Miles would have had it this way, as well. In fact, the two would probably have gotten along famously. Or they would have killed each other. What I did know, suddenly, as the cannabis indica released my innate ability to read another's DNA chain, was that I was sharing a doobie with the human equivalent of Semtex. And if I lived until morning, I knew I would deliver a black pearl for Salt Lake City magazine.

Ten minutes after leaving the Bar-J, Laroue pulled the Rover nearly to the bank of the Red River. He reached into the glove compartment and took out a plastic sign that read "Police Auxiliary - Do Not Ticket or Tow," placing it plainly on the dashboard. Before leaving the vehicle, he took off his fur and draped it gently over the front seat, slid a Club theft-disabler through the steering wheel and, after one last drag, flicked the joint into the river.

There was no moon out this night, but through the ecliptic blackness I could see the outline of a pontoon rolling on the water. Laroue stood on the cliff and waved what I counted to be six men past a tree and down a steep embankment.

"You're next," he said to me. "Keep most of your weight on your back leg. You want to slide, not tumble."

And slid I did - most of the way down, in fact. I couldn't see a fucking thing, and even if I could have, with 20-20 infrared night goggles, my equilibrium was so disrupted by the high-grade marijuana that it would hardly have mattered. I wiped the dirt from my pants and joined the other men on a tall, inflated raft built for a dozen. They muttered vague hellos but otherwise paid no attention to me. Laroue was the last onto the raft, and he basically swam to it, after untying the Kevlar rope that held it moored to a weathered jack pine.

Two of the older men steered the motor-less vessel by stabbing a pair of long poles occasionally at some unruly brush-piles along the river; but mostly the flotilla moved effortlessly with the lazy current. From the general conversation - which ran of "odds" and the "heavy favorite" whom they unanimously agreed to be a creature named Buster - and by the level of their enthusiasm, I gathered that a fight was being staged upon our arrival at Laroue's ranch, and I began to shudder violently. I would be forced to bear witness to some animal form being cannibalized this night, and the thought of it filled me with horror.

A brilliant, azure bug-zapper in the near distance told the men to steer forcefully toward the river's edge. Laroue jumped off first and tied the raft to a thick metal post. I followed him up a steep set of hand-laid wooden stairs, the aged sextet following close behind. The pungent odor of ripe sinsemilla pods hung heavy in the still night air, and I had a sense that peace was an unknown caller to this hidden grange.

After we had scaled the hill, Jack Laroue swung open his unlocked front door and waved us all inside. I had been to Barry Goldwater's mountain estate once while living in Phoenix, but Laroue's cache of Indian art made the Senator's fabled collection look ridiculous. What stood out most conspicuously amongst the shelves of kachinas and storyteller dolls, the painted earthen pots, the walls full of ancient arrows and weapons of death, were what appeared to be a corpus of genuine headdresses of all shades and dimensions, hanging on a bare wall, apparently in order of tribal rank; it looked as if he had procured a complete set. I had never seen such an exhibit, not even in Arizona's Heard Museum. I started to make a friendly inquiry, but the other guests had business on their minds.

"Well, goddammit, let's quit standin' around," griped one codger. "I gotta get back before they find out I'm gone." The others nodded in assent.

Laroue looked into the air for a long moment before his face split open in a fiendish grin. "If Buster actually loses tonight, I'll return five-hundred-to-one odds. Anyone feel brave?"