Friday, January 22, 2016

Days 15 and 14, The Last Life of Joe Simpson


LYNCHING AT SKIDOO
 
Joe Simpson, who deliberately murdered James Arnold at Skidoo Sunday of last week, was taken from the guard on Wednesday night and hanged to a pole. There was a strong sentiment in favor of lynching Simpson the night of the murder, but the plotters were dissuaded from the plan. Arnold was a prominent and respected citizen of the camp, and his killing was an unprovoked and cold-blooded affair. Simpson was a gambler, hailing from Reno, but a resident of the desert camp for some time. He seems to have been a bad character, a number of offenses being charged against him. The opinion of the Skidoo people appears to be that the lynchers did a justifiable piece of business.

He slept poorly, the sounds of the desert mice serving to wake him, that he might recall just a flash of a bad dream. When finally resigned to full consciousness, he noticed it was cold in the cabin, and he looked to the light leaking in from the walls for a warmth that was not provided.

Looking back at his former lives and all the effort to erase any trace of them, he could never erase the feeling of shame, of ridicule, which would hover over the obliterated life like a bruise. There was the son who was never good enough for the father, the young boy whose exclamations not welcome, and wonder not shared by his classmates. Then there was the husband whose wife would exclude from her social gatherings, ashamed of his position as a petty cook in a filthy restaurant. He left those lives behind to pursue what he felt might be dignity in the Panamint Mountains.

Yet for each of his successes, for each purchase, a feeling of fraud would overcome him, as if such a quality thing was not his due. This he made up for by clothes sent from San Francisco, fine weapons and a taste for drink. It was small enough a town that he was able buy a saloon and have interests in the mining company with only a modicum of effort and capital. He enjoyed this as if he was living another's life, and for a brief time, came to believe the life was his own.

James Arnold was a man who saw weakness in a person before he would notice a smile, or the color of a person's eyes. These weaknesses would trigger a hunger in him. When Joe first arrived in Skidoo, James saw all the falter beneath Joe's swagger, he caught the fear residing under Joe's laughs and jokes. Whereas in some folk who had this gift of seeing and feeling what lies beneath what appears are moved to compassion for the weak, the estranged or alienated, in James this gift made him feel like one of the predators of the desert below, and he allowed Joe's reinvention to unfold that his fall might be greater.

It was in James' travels where he learned of Joe's past lives. He learned that Joe's wife did not die, but had left him in favor of his boss. He learned that Joe held no interests in the gambling establishments of Reno, but had fled that place with stolen money. As well he learned that Joe was generally thought of as naturally slow and shy of mind and spirit.

It was in Joe's affection for a local prostitute that James Arnold saw his chance, for this blonde was a thing which Joe seemed to really love. Taking away Joe's status, his holdings in the mining company were after all, simple to aquire and simple to lose. But the love a person in these hard lands was a thing rare, and the subtle nature of negotiating a place of warmth in a human heart had odds worse than striking gold. James had a little talk with this woman whose business was her body.

Joe remembered that his life was not his own, and as his spirit woke that cold morning, a thought occurred to him that all lives belong to their surroundings, and that his own had been revoked by the good people of Skidoo. The last picture of him was taken by his own doctor, who had dug his body up, and hung it again once more in a tent before removing the head, which the doctor took as a keepsake.


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