I am pleased to say that I am one of the few people in the world who has lived some small portion of his life in Vaughan, New Mexico. So now had the woman sitting next to me.

It was my tenth or twelfth visit, and I told her about Vaughan about five miles before we arrived, but she seemed more interested in searching out the jeep for tumbleweeds. She was visiting from the East Coast, her first venture west, and I somehow convinced her that tumbleweeds might not be what they seem, that they were actually live creatures that used the wind to propel them across the desert in their search for food. They especially loved tarantulas.

We stopped in Vaughan so I could eat a homemade donut at a favorite cafe, the only such establishment in town, and so she could look for a postcard of a tumbleweed to show friends back in Rochester. I had already given her one picturing the jackalope, that beautiful cross of jack rabbit and antelope, and since she now knew something of the biology of tumbleweeds, she felt almost like an expert on wildlife of the Southwest.

Pulling into the cafe’s lot, I saw old Sam, one of my favorite heroes of the West. He was sleeping in his usual place on the porch—a cool, shady corner, a horsefly using his nose as a landing pad.

“Old Sam is twenty years old,” I said. “That’s a hundred and forty in dog years, but his greater claim to fame is that he was raised by the very wild javelinas that ate his mother.”

“What kind of dog is that?” my friend asked, not so concerned by Sam’s traumatic childhood.

“A Western Red Hound Dog,” I said. “A very rare species.”

“I’ll have to take his picture,” she said.

We opened the screen door which harbored the remains of ten thousand swatted flies. Inside, Ma Baker, the old donut woman, was alone and behind the counter smoking an unfiltered Camel and sipping Miller High Life.

“Welcome,” she said. “Make yourself at home.” As usual, that was like an invitation to loll within a giant dust bunny, which we did. We each drank a Miller, all that Ma B. really had, after she explained that donuts weren’t yet in season: “Next winter. Maybe.”

“Do you have any postcards?” my friend asked.

“Nope, got stole,” Ma B. said.

“Cowboy bikers again?” I inquired.

“You bet,” she replied with a wink. “Slimy and unscrupulous as Texas politicians.”

“Whatever happened with those poisonous horned toads that killed Jake Roper’s pygmy goat last year?”I asked.

“Got run off by another infestation of scorpions not long after, thank god.”

My friend made a New Jersey kind of face, then said, “I’m ready to see some more sights.”

We paid for the beers and went out, where I checked the jeep’s engine while my friend surveyed the road of Vaughan, New Mexico. Two guys whistled at her from the gas station across the way. She waved back and yelled, “Have you seen any tumbleweeds today?”

“Naw,” one hollered back, “but a herd of ‘em should be comin’ through soon.”

I slammed down the hood. She looked at me and said, “The West is so interesting.”

I smiled—and knowing the highway out of Vaughan stretched like cactus taffy—I felt good as a coyote with new territory to roam.

Steven Kunert grew up on the Texas-Mexico border and got literary "training" in the vast nowhereness of the desert and intense somewhereness of back streets in El Paso/Juarez. His prose and poetry have appeared in various publications for over 30 years.

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