SADDLEBAG DISPATCHES
129
SCOTT M. BRENTS
THE GREEN GUARDIAN OF A YELLOW GOLD SUBMARINER A SHORT STORY “The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it’s a state of mind. It’s whatever you want it to be. It could be a scorpion dancing by the fire, or a stingray gliding through the depths.” —Tom Mix (paraphrased)
MR. GREENSKIN The cognitive dissonance between my early morning activities and those later that afternoon could not have been greater, though the cloudless blue sky was the same in both time frames. Earlier that day, I had been playing clock solitaire in a blissfully air-conditioned Amtrak train car while sipping a cold beverage, riding the metal equine along the countryside at a steady clip toward Benson, Arizona, where I would disembark, obtain a rental car, and then drive to a motor lodge in Sierra Vista. Once checked in, I would then drive to a nearby ghost town to hunt for treasure. Or barbwire. Or horseshoes. It didn’t really matter. It was adventure I sought. I have a list I’m going through. Which was where I now found myself, smack dab in the middle of adventure, just outside of the ghost town of Fairbank, facing an angry green Mojave rattlesnake I had accidentally bumped into with my metal detector. The Garrett Ace 400’s sensor coil had collided with an entirely different and extremely dangerous type of coil. Just as my Amtrak horse was not an actual horse, the pistol I was packing was by no means a Colt Peacemaker. It was a translucent white plastic spray bottle that I carried to quickly rinse off coins and items dug up or to sometimes mist myself on
the throat or face if it wasn’t too humid. Ninety percent of the time, evaporative cooling doesn’t work in Dallas, but if I am in an area where swamp coolers work, then God bless my water bottle. It’s like a portable AC. The narrow hammerhead face of the nozzle is yellow. The nozzle tip, the trigger, and the screw-on retention ring are blue. I had, in fact, just misted my forehead and closed eyes as I stepped up slightly onto a mostly flat rock before bumping into the rattler because I was paying way too much attention to my comfort than to the ground I was scanning. Startled, I dropped the detector from my right hand, still holding the water bottle in my left. I could have stepped back but might have tripped down the two inches off the rock, and then the snake could have been upon me. Or not. I didn’t know how it would react to my backing away and possibly falling. Instead, I froze. The warning electric buzzing was a promise of a nasty death—or at the very least an expensive and scary visit to the nearest emergency room, wherever that room might be. The term “crazy spirit rattle” popped into my brain as the snake’s tail kept vibrating with a blur, counting my life down in rattles per second under a postcard’s azure sky. The infamous dual toxins of a green Mojave guaranteed that there were no guarantees of what
