The last rays of the sun met too tall frances and the crippled bard on the shores of a reservoir, eating and gazing on the sun as it immersed itself behind a hill on the other side of the reservoir. Beyond the hill was only the sun and its glowing, neither man nor mountain nor field showed itself and the shoreline looked like a cay in the ocean, the lone solid thing between the pair, the sun and the depths of the ocean.

The food was good, night came quickly, and as the embers of the sun's passing cooled, the cripple hear a truck passing back and forth near carmen electric, its lights on and then off, t came and returned. A flashlight swept the trees at the side of the reservoir. Carmen was unattended and unlocked, her petticoats revealed and visible to whoever might happen by as she liked to say. So the cripple and francis gathered their belongings and returned to Carmen.

Soon the cripple found himself illuminated by the beam of a flashlight. Darknes had not yet drawn but the flashlight cut stark contrasts into the dusk; there was the beam and there was the shadow cast by it, shadows which grew by as the cripple's eyes became accustomed to the flashlight's beam.

Behind the flashlight stood the truck he had seen and a portly figure who said 'how's it going?' nervously, 'so what cha doin?' followed . The officer moved closer, exuding unease and a doddling attempt at comradely.

Hw made it clear that he was a game warden and that it was illegal to be at the reservoir after dark unless you were fishing. He said he'd been frightened byCarmed parked in the trees and that no one was around; "we have a lot of problems with drugs and drinking abd I thought..." problems, I'm sure, thought the cripple, thats why a game warden needs two guns, a knife and a doberman chained up in the back of his truck.

Frances hadn't arrives yet and the warden began to shine his light around nervously, well where is she then? He repeated while examining the cripple's drivers license.
"I said she's by the water, cleaning up from dinner."
"Well we better go find her mom", spitz dropped from the corners of the warden's mouth like sweat from an electioner's pores.
"Canada, hey. What do you do up there?"
"I go to university in Victoria."
"Hey where is she", he said again. flashlight bouncing around till it found francis with backpack and groceries from out of the dusk. Gathering their ID's, the warden began to calm down.
"Say, you havn't been drinking anything tonight have you?
No, no we havn't" they replied, empty vodka flask not withsanding, no, they hadn't been drinking, not as the warden would've understood it.

Then the warden, more spitz falling, turned to the cripple, coming closer and said, hey, you guys wern't smoking anything were you?, I thought I smelled something down there.
Police camp, disneyland and the great fearful american flag flashed in the cripple's head as he said, no, not at all".
Soon the warden was in hisgiant truck, headlights shining on the cripple amd Francis as they waited for their identity back, the warden inside was communioning with his laptop and the telephone. Sending their data into the network to the dispatcher who was communioning with the central intelligence file, some pan-american file that had all the data the police found relevant about the cripple and frances, from the cripple's lost passport to frances' recent citation at Zion Park.
But nothing, both were relatively clean in the gaze of the machine, of mammon, the bites and bytes revealing nothing incriminating, nothing sticky, in the eye of mammon they were clean and so they were saved, as unto jesus they waved shining, illuminated by the bright lights of the warden's truck back to carmen as we drove onwards, into the town of delores, into the night, the pervasive fear which the warden moved in slipping slowly away from Carmen as she drove in the darkness.

For fear, the warden's fear, had dominated the encounter, in the shadow s of his vision too tall and the cripple had been drug runners, drunks, convicts, a whole menagerie of vivacious, slavering hoodlums had visited his bald head, indeed such a host lived permanently, had been institutionalized, serialized by a government which outfitted its game wardens with pistols, attack dogs and mace on friday nights, institutions which believed its officers officers needed to be threatening, intimidating in order to bring the law into effect.

Here was where fear passed into France and the Cripple, here was where the Warden became an instrument, an implement, a complex that could pick out of the contours of their lives the outlines, by flashlight, in the dusk, the hoodlum, the whore, the alien, could outline an almost endless succession of of types in the fluidity of their selves, their presents and their pasts.

A government for whom power was force, stripped of all its mythic qualities, of respect, authenticity. Its proof was the gun and the law, the ability to enforce the law, sure, behind the law lay the myth of America, of a law which rose out of reason, out of the illumination of rational humanity. This myth speaks of the death of inheritance, the death of myth and so provides a dead-end for all that remains for myth is the ability to describe a power which is imminent in reason, in calculation, in the beam of the flashlight.

This is the gigantism of America that Rilke and Heidegger spoke of; the sorcery of the flashlight shining eternally from sea to sea, growing ever brighter, spreading across the light spectrum, the beam turning north and south, east and west, the anti-myth, a light ignited by the code of reason.

A culture that arms its game wardens with attack dogs and an arsenal of fears; of the dark, of Indians and birth, death, people in the bushes, making love, leg hair...too many to count, fear of the sun, of sharp edges...