Arches, Utah, 2005. John Saponara. Part of the series: Person, Place & Thing: Images from the American Road.
The Saga of Side Meat, Neck Bone, and A. Ben D’Geaux
William Dunlap
The three rode into the town of South Fork from the east. Side Meat said he knew the west and volunteered to be their guide. “All the way to California,” he assured. And they agreed, as they did on most things.
Their origin stories were hardly unique, but intriguing just the same. Neck Bone was from Arkansas and got his nickname the old-fashioned way. His neck stretched from clavicle to chin some eleven inches. He looked for all the world like a member of the Hapsburg royal family, which he claimed to be. (Think Philip the Handsome of Spain, who was anything but—handsome that is.)
A. Ben D’Geaux was another story. He came up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, where he had run out of luck and options. He hooked a left at the Red River and went as far as it could take him. He weighed 370 pounds. Horses hated to see him coming. Side Meat, born in Minneapolis, was extremely short and self-conscious about it. Neck Bone was 6’10” standing up straight, which he almost never did. When A. Ben D’Geaux hooked up with Side Meat and Neck Bone, they made the strangest looking threesome on the frontier.
These three pistoleros were greatly informed by literature. Neck Bone read a little French and some Spanish and was a big fan of Andre Dumas, especially his Three Musketeers. He saw himself and his companions as a modern day version—rambunctious, romantic and revolutionary.
Side Meat embraced Cervantes and was drawn to jousting at windmills when he could find one, but no one was bothered or paid much attention, sobriety being a condition seldom experienced thereabouts. Many a windmill was conjured up under the influence of corn whiskey.
A. Ben D’Geaux and the other two bought into this notion, saw themselves very much in the romantic tradition, and behaved accordingly. Fellow travelers thought them ditzy and to be avoided. Hostile Indians thought them enchanted and not to be confronted. A. Ben D’Geaux always had a bottle; no one knew how he managed it, but he did.
On they went, along the Chisholm Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, they even participated in the Oklahoma Land Rush. Always dependent on the kindness of strangers. Everyone they met was a stranger and chose to remain so out of self-preservation.
Side Meat’s actual name was Sydney Markham Meltoid, but he came to embrace and even look like a piece of side meat thanks to the sun, wind, and sand, in combination with all the other elements.
Neck Bone’s real name, as stated on the many legal papers served on him over the years, was Rollo Pell Milton, but everyone unfailingly called him Neck Bone upon their first encounter.
A. Ben D’Geaux spoke no known language but was gracious, well-mannered and highly entertaining. And there was that bottle … a friend-maker under most circumstances, to be sure.
The days, weeks, months, even years went by. Rain, hail, sleet, snow, dust storms, tornadoes, whirlwinds, floods, and famine were all suffered, among countless other natural disasters. Yet nothing deterred this threesome from their appointed rounds, which were circular thanks to Side Meat’s misguidance.
They encountered the same strangers time and time again. They saw children born, christened, raised, and married off as they continued their circuitous route. California and the much heralded Pacific Ocean were but a dream, yet often discussed and yearned for.
Side Meat, Neck Bone, and A. Ben D’Geaux were camped under the lee of a hillock out of the wind, which was blowing from the north and pushing a prairie fire (started three days earlier by lightning) in their general direction. The sky grew dark and they got a whiff of smoke lifting from the grass fire, slithering like a snake and coming their way. Our three adventurers saddled up and piled their gear on the backs of a pack mule, a donkey and an old ox, all of which had seen better days but added considerably to the uniqueness of their appearance on the plains.
The wind shifted abruptly from north to south. The flames could find no fuel and began to peter out. Side Meat, Neck Bone, and A. Ben D’Geaux rode behind the sputtering fire until they could see a patch of blue and made for it. Theirs must have been a metaphysical sight emerging from the fire and smoke of a prairie hell, right into the path of the True Cross Full Gospel and Evangelical Wagon of the Right Reverend Malcolm Leroy Pitts.
Pitts was a spirit-filled man of God who favored the Old Testament’s savagery and vengeance over the New Testament’s message of love and forgiveness. He wandered to and fro, preaching to those who would listen, damning those to Hell who didn’t.
“Praise God!” he ejaculated. “Out from the fiery furnace they come! The modern Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego! It’s a miracle!” Or so declared the Reverend Pitts.
The fire not only disrupted the atmosphere, but the ecosystem as well. Jack rabbits, prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and deer scurried about confused, singed and frightened. They were easy prey for our hungry threesome, who prepared a feast of wild game for their supper. Their new spiritual guide, the Reverend Malcolm Leroy Pitts, took a bit longer than they thought necessary to bless the repast, but they all ate and drank their fill. The Lord be praised for he did provide. Then began a steady soaking rain that drove the three men into the Holy Wagon of Reverend Pitts and left the horses, mules, donkey, and ox, to stand and just take it.
Come morning, A. Ben D’Geaux found his whiskey bottle empty. First time that had ever happened. The three were to learn that Reverend Pitts had not only had an insatiable appetite for the afterlife, but an unquenchable thirst in this life for liquor as well. So off they rode, dry if not sober for the first time in living memory.
The rain had stopped but dark clouds gathered all around, especially to their rear as they loped west (they hoped) at a steady gait. The ox and donkey held them back and the Evangelic Wagon and its High Priest took the lead, heading in the same direction as the prairie creatures. To their left they saw the occasional Blackfoot warrior all wrapped in buffalo hide, a peculiar sight given it was late summer. Then everything sped up and they were travelling at a trot, then a gallop! Several Blackfeet waved at them to stop, but the animals would have none of it. They were running at full tilt as if caught up in some primal impulse and not to be denied.
Neck Bone, Side Meat, and A. Ben D’Geaux could see the Reverend Pitts lashing his tired old horse. His wagon was far ahead until it disappeared, seeming to fall off the edge of the earth. At a high rate of speed they were approaching an ancient buffalo jump where, for thousands of years, well before the horse arrived in North America, ancient peoples used stealth, fire and buffalo disguises to lure these dumb creatures to their death in a mass stampede over a predesignated cliff. Much meat, hide, sinew and bone would be harvested, enough to get these indigenous persons through the long winter.
Neck Bone and Side Meat felt themselves rising along with their horses. A. Ben D’Geaux looked over his shoulder at the funnel clouds bearing down on them. There were three. One for each pistolero. Manned flight was little known, but now our three adventurers were aloft and looking down at a peculiar sight. The broken bodies of buffalo, the Reverend Pitts, and his wagon at the bottom of the ravine. All smashed to bits. Side Meat thought to himself how smooth the airborne ride was when everything went dark and he no longer sat his horse.
The saga of Neck Bone, Side Meat, and A. Ben D’Geaux was over, but thanks to the Blackfoot praise singers they lived on and on, in legend. Many a child, whether Kiowa or Sioux, Scots-Irish or German, would swear they saw the triumvirate riding from cloud to cloud as storms came in and out on the Great Western Plains, which were fast becoming settled, fenced, and tamed—except where the weather was concerned, which would always prove a blessing or a curse.
William Dunlap is a painter, writer, arts advocate, and commenter. Additional information can be found on his website, http://williamdunlap.com/.