A
friend of mine who is as taken with the other-worldly beauty of Bisti/De-Na-Zin
as I am recently asked my permission to post something about The Bisti Business. I agreed and understand he posted yesterday. Check out donaldtmorgan.com to see what he had to say.
This
got me to thinking about BISTI, so I decided
to excerpt something out of the book as the subject of this post. As I’ve
already shared with regular readers, Jazz Penrod is one of my favorite
characters in the novel. He’s sassy, saucy, and meets life head on. If being
gay puts him at a disadvantage in society, he doesn’t seem to know it.
Let’s
visit Jasper Penrod once again as he helps BJ look for Lando Alfano and his
traveling companion. But don’t’ call him Jasper. He considers Jazz as much
cooler. The scene below comes at the beginning of Chapter 17 and needs no explanation.
*****
Jazz Penrod
phoned early the next morning asking for a meet. When I picked him up on the
sidewalk in front of his mom’s house, he was dressed in denim cut-offs so tight
he’d had to split the seam up the outside of the thigh in order to sit down. A
thin T-shirt with straps—what my mom had called an undershirt—exposed his
broad, red-brown shoulders and sheathed his torso like original skin. He wore open
sandals, more like shower clogs than shoes, without socks. He grinned and
shoved a black-billed cap with a red Captain Morgan logo back on his head.
“Mr. Vinson,”
he said.
I popped the
lock, and he flowed into the passenger’s seat like liquid mercury. “Morning,
Jazz. What can I do for you?”
“Maybe it’s
what I can do for you,” he countered, and then laughed aloud at my quick frown.
“No, not that. I picked up a rumor. Thought you’d want to know.”
“Fine. How
about some breakfast?”
“Okay by me.”
After we gave
our order to a waiter in a nearby café, Jazz threw a long arm over the back of
the chair next to him. As a trained investigator, I believe I notice things
others do not, but I would have erroneously described him as skinny. Not so. He
was slender, yes, but buffed with defined muscles—corded muscles. That thin
shirt stretching over his torso clearly outlined a six-pack.
“Okay, now
tell me about that rumor.”
“My
brother—you know, Henry Secatero—he called me last night. He was over at the
Chapter House to meet this girl. I’d told him about those missing guys, so when
he heard there’d been outsiders on the rez where they didn’t have any business,
he thought of Lando and Dana.”
“Did he get
any details?”
“Well, there’s
a car, somebody said. Supposed to have been parked out on the rim of Black Hole
Canyon. Been there a few days.”
“Where is
Black Hole Canyon?”
“Sort of a
rugged area not too far off the highway. It’s not really a canyon, just a
big-assed arroyo. But Henry
said the car’s not in it, just pulled up under an overhang where it’s kinda out
of sight.”
My coffee and
French toast and Jazz’s bacon and eggs and hash browns with a side of ham
arrived. He stopped talking and dug in, eating rapidly while I munched and
mulled over what he had told me. I was tempted to dismiss the incident; there
was nothing to directly tie this to Lando, but I was looking for a car, and
Henry had found one. It was worth checking out.
Jazz put down
his knife and fork after his last bite of ham and drained his glass of orange
juice. “You wanna go take a look?”
“Jazz, you’re
not out to put your mark on me, are you?” I felt like a fool; there were more
attractive fish in the ocean than me, but every look, every gesture seemed to
be bait—chum for the sharks.
“I wouldn’t
mind,” he admitted, “but I heard you when you said you were taken. Look, I
liked Dana and respected Lando. If I can help them out, I’d like to do it.”
“Fair enough.
If you’re finished, let’s go.”
“Let’s rumble,
but first I gotta go home and change. I’d burn up out there in the sun dressed
like this.”
*****
Thanks
for reading. Look around the site while you’re here, and give me some feedback
on Jazz Penrod.
Don
New Posts are
published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
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