Out In The West Texas Town Of El Paso
Steve Ferry’s Tragic Death
Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
Chapter Fourteen: Out In The West Texas Town Of El Paso
Coming down from whatever the desert did to me. Heat exhaustion. Paranoia. The weight of concrete America. Geoff and Jason kept me moving when I wanted to dissolve into the Mojave. Now El Paso at dawn. The Lucky Tiger truck stop like an oasis after the night crossing.
Inside. Fluorescent harsh after darkness. Truckers everywhere. Big men with big attitudes.
Confederate flag belt buckles. NRA stickers. Every longhair's nightmare concentrated in one diner.
We take a corner booth. Try to shrink. Make ourselves invisible. Doesn't work. The stares follow us. The muttering.
“Fucking hippies."
“Get a job."
“What this country needs..."
Geoff tenses. Louisiana tough under his easy manner. Jason focuses on the menu like it's scripture. I'm still half-cooked from yesterday's sun. Seeing threats in peripheral vision that might be real or might be heat ghosts.
Order eggs, coffee, hash browns. Need grease and caffeine to push through to Austin. Just get through breakfast. Get back on the road. Get away from these eyes that want us gone.
TV in the corner. Sound low. Local news. Weather. Cattle prices. Then the anchor's face changes. That look.
"Turn it up," someone says. "Something's happening."
The waitress reaches for the volume.
"—disturbing footage from Northern California where a deadly confrontation has just ended—"
My coffee cup freezes midair. That sick knowing before knowing.
Helicopter shot. Shaky. That property. Old Redwood Highway. The massive redwood at the driveway's end.
"—began when twenty-one-year-old Steven Perry allegedly opened fire on the main residence from this converted chicken coop—"
No. Not Steve. Not possible.
The camera finds it. That ten-by-ten shack I know too well.
7:03 AM. Morning light through prune trees.
Steve at the coop's window. Morning ritual—checking the surveillance. Dan and Martha's kitchen window. Coffee cups visible. Their normal morning becoming his last morning.
The .38 heavy in his hand. That twitch in his jaw. The one that started at Penn and never stopped.
CRACK.
Kitchen window exploding. Martha's scream cutting through bird song.
CRACK.
Living room window shattering. The war finally here. Finally real.
Steve backing into darkness. Grabbing the film canisters. Murder. Insanity. Death. Stuffing them in his pockets like dog tags. Like ID for what's coming.
The screen flickers. Helicopter circling. But I'm not in El Paso anymore. I'm there. I'm watching him cross to the garage. That walk. Not running. Walking like a man who's already dead and knows it.
Inside the garage. The Plymouth waiting. Always ready. Keys always in it. The ritual of sitting. Lighting a cigarette. Listening to sirens grow louder. That smile starting. The one from when he told the shrink at Penn he'd crack under fire. The prophecy coming true.
"Steven Ferry! This is the police! Come out with your hands up!"
Through the dirty garage window—cops spreading out. A dozen uniforms between him and that redwood. Between him and the highway. Between him and whatever fiction of escape he's building.
Steve drops the cigarette. Turns the key. The Plymouth roars like judgment.
The doors explode.
Wood older than California shattering outward. Splinters catching sun like shrapnel from a war that followed him home.
The Plymouth emerges at 15 miles per hour. Funeral pace. Both windows down. Steve's left hand casual on the wheel. Right hand raising the .38 like he's conducting a symphony of endings.
First cop. Twenty yards. Behind his cruiser. Steve extends the gun. That thousand-yard stare finally finding its target.
CRACK.
Miss. Cop diving. Steve adjusting. Still rolling. Still smiling that terrible smile.
The gauntlet of uniforms. Each one a checkpoint he'll never pass. The Plymouth maintaining its crawl toward that redwood. Toward the road. Toward an escape that was never possible.
Halfway down the drive. Steve sees him. Young cop. Wedding ring catching morning light.
Standing half-exposed. Trying to get an angle. Trying to be the hero.
Steve leans out. Hair wild. Face calm as a saint's. Aims low. Professional. Like he's been practicing for this moment since birth.
CRACK.
The cop spinning. Clutching his thigh. Blood between fingers. Down.
The air turns to metal.
Every gun speaks at once. The Plymouth's windshield vanishes in a constellation of impacts.
Side windows gone. Bullets punching through metal like angry typing. Like God writing THE END over and over.
Dozen rounds. A dozen more. Crows fleeing trees a hundred yards away.
Steve's head snaps back. Red mist haloing in morning light. But still driving. Still breathing. Still crawling toward that redwood that's been waiting since before any of us were born.
His foot slipping off the gas. The Plymouth drifting right. Five miles per hour. Three. The tree filling everything.
Contact.
The horn's first note. Its only note. Forever note.
"Jesus Christ." Some trucker at the counter. "Look at that."
On the TV, smoke clearing. Camera pushing in. Finding Steve.
Slumped right. Temple against the window frame he used as a gun rest. One eye open. Staring at the highway he'll never reach. At the escape that was always a lie. Blood everywhere. On the wheel. The seat. That Grateful Dead shirt with the skull and roses—the one he wore at Penn when we thought we were immortal.
Those film canisters spilled on the floor. Labels visible in his blood.
Murder. Insanity. Death.
Not a joke anymore.
"—over 20 rounds fired in less than four seconds—"
They're showing it again. The whole sequence. The garage explosion. The slow roll. The deliberate shot. The annihilation. The tree.
That horn. Still screaming on the tape.
My eggs coming back up. Geoff saying something. Can't hear over the blood in my ears. Make it to the men's room. Barely.
Puking coffee and grease and three days of highway. In the mirror—my face white as Steve's.
Remembering that last encounter. The errant shot hitting his car. His rage. My instinct to leave.
He knew. Labeled his canisters like writing his own epitaph. The brilliant kid who convinced a shrink he'd go crazy in combat. Then spent four years making it true. The perfect soldier who never wore a uniform. Who fought his war against shadows until the shadows shot back.
Geoff's at the sink when I come out. "You okay, man?"
Can't speak. Just shake my head.
Back in the diner, they've moved on. Weather again. But I can still see it. Steve's eye that won't close. The horn that won't stop. Dan and Martha on their porch, destroyed.
"He was at Penn," she's sobbing on the screen. "So brilliant. But the drugs, the paranoia—"
Jason looks at me. "You knew him?"
"Yeah. I was just... I was just there. Last week."
"Shit."
The truckers keep eating. Keep muttering about hippies and what they deserve. Steve's death just confirming what they already believed. Another drugged-out dropout. Another casualty of the counterculture. Good riddance.
We pay. Get outside. The Texas sun already brutal. The asphalt soft. Everything too bright. Too real.
Pull out Mona. Need something familiar. Something that isn't death and diesel fumes. The Harmony warm from the car. Strings out of tune. Adjust them slow.
My fingers find the opening notes before I realize what I'm playing. That Marty Robbins tune the Dead covered. "El Paso." Steve and I used to play it in his dorm room, him on the Strat, me on the Harmony. Both of us singing along to that part where the cowboy feels the bullets hit, where he's dying in the arms of something he thought was love.
I stop. Can't play it. Not here in actual El Paso. Not with Steve's chest torn open by a score of rounds on TV. Can't sing about bullets going deep when I just watched them tear Steve apart.
"Jesus," Geoff says, watching me. "You okay?"
No. Because Steve died just like that cowboy in the song. Shot while running. Except there was no Felina to hold him. No loving arms. Just Dan and Martha's horrified faces. Just that redwood tree that caught him like God's own hand saying "enough."
Steve used to say the saddest part wasn't the dying - it was that the cowboy died for an illusion. “Felina didn't even love him back, she was a hooker, fer chrissakes," he'd said once, high in the chicken coop. "He invented the whole thing in his head."
Like Steve invented his war. His surveillance. His need to escape what was never chasing him until he made it real.
I start playing again. Different song. Can't do "El Paso." Not with Steve's prophecy fulfilled. Him feeling those bullets go deep. Him dying for his own delusion. No kiss goodbye. Just that horn screaming against the redwood.
The perfect soldier in the wrong war, dying in the wrong arms.
A trucker passes. Spits near my boots. "Get a job."
Geoff lights a cigarette. Protective. "Fucking cops, man."
But it wasn't the cops. Not really. It was the war that got Steve. Just took the long way around.
Through a shrink's office at Penn. Through film canisters labeled like prophecy. Through abchicken coop in California. Through paranoia that started as performance and became real as bullets.
"My cousin came back from Da Nang in '71," Geoff says quietly. "Terry. Good kid. Funny asbhell. Came back different. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't work. Couldn't stop seeing things."
I keep playing. Watching heat shimmer off the parking lot.
"Last year he drove his car into a bridge abutment. Hundred miles an hour. Left a note said he was sorry but the war wouldn't end."
Geoff drops his cigarette. Crushes it carefully.
"War don't end when you come home. Just changes location."
Steve's war was with himself. With the system. With shadows that became real because he believed in them hard enough. Died with over a hundred bullets in him and that same smile from Penn. Like the joke was on everyone who thought you could dodge your fate by getting a deferment. But Steve got his deferment by performing madness so well he became it.
The system he tried to game gamed him back. Those film canisters in his pocket—props that became prophecy. Murder. Insanity. Death. He'd written his own ending at eighteen and spent seven years making it come true.
"We should go," Jason says.
Pack up Mona. Stand on legs that don't want to work. The paranoia worse now. Every trucker could be watching. Every cop car a threat. Connected to Steve. To whatever story they're building about drug-crazed hippies.
Out by the highway. Thumb out in the brutal sun. An hour. Two. Finally an old Ford pickup.
Louisiana plates. Roughnecks heading home from the oil fields.
Climb in back with the tools and pipe. East across Texas. The biggest sky. The emptiest land.
Geoff and Jason talking about Austin. About music. About anything but Steve.
I watch the desert roll past. Think about those film canisters. How he labeled them at eighteen as a joke about government propaganda. How they became instructions. How the reefer didn't cause madness but the fear of war did. How trying to stay sane drove him crazy.
Murder . Insanity. Death.
He was right all along.
Just had the cause wrong.
The truck pulling into Fort Stockton as the sun drops. Another truck stop. Another attempt to keep moving. But Steve's there in every shadow. That eye that wouldn't close. That horn that wouldn't stop. That smile that said he'd won by losing.
The perfect soldier in the wrong war.
The anti-hero of his own movie.
Dead at twenty-one with his prophecy fulfilled.
And me still running. Still carrying Mona and a notebook full of songs. Still trying to understand how the smart ones, the sensitive ones, the ones who see through everything—how we're the ones who don't make it.
Unless we keep moving.
Unless we're lucky.
Unless we're cowards.
Time to find another ride. Time to get to Austin. Time to figure out what you do when your friend dies exactly the way he predicted, just three years late.
The war's over. But it's still killing us.
One by one.
Mile by mile.
All the way home.
→ Next Chapter: Chapter 15: The Descending Dark - "Processing Steve's death while crossing Texas toward Big Bend's revelatory canyons"
← Previous Chapter: Chapter 13: The Ocean Don't Lie - "Desert crossing with Vietnam vet sailor Wade - near-death tire blowout and hard-earned wisdom"
📖 Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
🎬 Steve's Prophecy: Film canisters labeled "Murder. Insanity. Death" become literal truth - the brilliant paranoid who predicted his own ending at Penn.